The Sevan Podcast - #650 - Chris Wark

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Bam, we're live. Those are the first words out of my mouth this morning. Chris and I have never exchanged words.

Just a little bit of eye contact, maybe three seconds before you guys came on. You guys are seeing the whole relationship unfold before your eyes. It was a beautiful moment of eye contact. Yes, it was. Thank you. I was looking at you going, is my camera angle weird? No, just mine. Maybe we'll be alright.

Intimacy between human beings is my kind of favorite thing in life. I appreciate you recognizing the beautiful moment, Chris, uh, work. Am I pronouncing it right?

Yeah. Work rhymes with, uh, work fork for, Oh, I like that. Okay. Chris work.

My name's seven on kind of like seven, but seven on, uh, Chris, the people who I'm making this up to take this with a grain of salt. The people who listen to this show are super-duper into personal responsibility and personal accountability to the most extreme. That's why I'm excited to be here. I would argue that there's no group gathered anywhere on the internet more so than this group who believe in that.

They know what science is they understand that science is not truth and it's just for whatever offers the greatest predictive value and and they and they really understand that that it is not truth it's just a guiding light it just offers predictive value they are not versed as well as uh nearly as well as you um and things like the Amgen study, which is absolutely fascinating, but they've heard all about it because they were all followers of, or are followers of CrossFit and Greg Glassman, who has, knows, is on a very similar path to you. Talking about broken science and the replication crisis, And they're familiar with a lot of these things. Um, they are, they are acutely, uh, aware that the body can heal itself. Uh, they are open to experimentation on themselves. They recognize that they are

their own personal doctors and that they are lab rats and they should experiment on themselves. They are God, uh, fearing, god uh fearing is it fearing fearing fearing folk uh even though um i don't believe in god i think these guys all follow me because they're waiting for jesus to save me and uh then that they watch the show and they like uh the openness i have towards um towards god and finally i would guess that they're almost all they really believe in the carnivore diet. They've sit here, they've been on the show and they've watched me eat a pound of raw meat. They watched me eat raw meat on my Instagram. They've seen me really kind of lean that way,

had Paul Saladino on several times. We had the liver king on, which I would say is the best interview he's ever done. And many people agree with that. And so we've really gone down that path. That being said, I think this group would experiment with a one week vegetable diet. Some of the ones that you're espousing. And then if your book is absolutely remarkable, Chris Beats Cancer,

Chris Beat Cancer, no S, Chris Beat Cancer. And they're so open to that. is absolutely remarkable. Chris beats cancer, Chris beat cancer, no S Chris beat cancer. And they're so open to that. And so, uh, here we are guys, I'm going to ask Chris a series of questions. So you get to know him now, but I wanted Chris to know that, um, he's home. That's good. He's home. I appreciate the context and I love the CrossFit community and the, and the cross training, uh, functional fitness community, because he has personal responsibility is huge. Right. And we understand that your choices matter and that your choices can affect your future and they can change your life and that you're not a victim. Right. You become a free person to manage and direct your own life as opposed to a victim of circumstance. And victimhood is sort of paralysis. Right.

Unfortunately, today, victimhood is is sort of like a badge of honor among certain people. And and it's tragic when I see, you know, just to see that attitude, because it really does prevent you from growth and from change and from success. So, yeah, man, I'm excited to be here. Congratulations on maintaining your YouTube channel and not losing your blue checkmark like me. I don't know. I lost my whole account. They booted me. I think you do have a blue checkmark.

How did you lose your account? Did you say something controversial and got spanked or what? Yeah, I just don't. I have no – from day one when the original study started coming out from China that 65% of – or sorry, sorry. 95% of all the people dying in China from COVID were 65 or older or 30-year smokers. And the second largest cohort was their wives. I knew, and I knew right away that I hadn't seen anything yet. You had smokers die. Like you've told me nothing about COVID. Of course, people over 65 who've been smoking for 30 years, um, die. And then when they started saying it's old, it hurts old people more than young people. I said said age is just a correlate.

Now, of course, maybe your immune system and your NK cells and whatnot wane as you get older, but there's no proof of that. And I've had many scientists on here who agree with me on everything, and they say, yeah, it's dangerous for old people. And I go, has there been a study on that? And they're like, no. So – and I think this group gets that. They don't want to play, they don't want to play the victim. And because I said that, I say that kind of stuff on my Instagram account. I don't think one child, I don't think you could administer 650 million injections, even if it was just saline and not kill someone. There'll be some sort of accident that will kill someone. And because of that, I can't save people. I can't save a hundred million people over the age of 82 who are 30 years complicit in their demise and kill one child. I'd rather save that one child

because I say shit like that. They tossed me. Yeah, it's controversial. And I, and by the way, I said many, many things. It's weird because to me, it's not controversial. It just shows my love for kids. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I, it's not controversial to me either, but I, I said many, many things. It's weird because to me, it's not controversial. It just shows my love for kids. Yeah, yeah. No, it's not controversial to me either. But I get, I'm saying, I'm acknowledging the controversy that people would be horrified by, you know, common sense and logic. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's, we saw those early studies coming out. We saw who was at risk.

And it wasn't the average person. People that were extremely unwell. and it wasn't the average person it was people that were extremely unwell well it's the average unfortunately it is the average person but go on yeah yeah touche but i know what you mean i know yeah it's not the healthy person that's right that's right young people and healthy people who take care of themselves. You know, you have resilience when you take care of yourself against chronic disease and infectious disease. And there's a cascading effect that happens when you go for years and years and years of not taking care of yourself and you develop chronic disease and what always comes as chronic disease is inflammation and immunosuppression and those two factors are are absolutely key to cancer progression and also to chronic disease i'm excuse me infectious disease vulnerability so the the good news there it's not i'm not trying to blame anyone but the good news there, I'm not trying to blame anyone, but the good news is you can reverse chronic disease and strengthen your body against infectious disease just by changing your daily routine, by changing your daily choices.

That was the big eye-opener for me with cancer. I like the way you say, we always hear about inflammation, but you nailed it. Maybe we should, I'm going to start saying that more. Immunosuppression. Hey, guys, if you eat that Snicker bar, I'm not going to say you're going to get inflammation. I'm going to say you're going to get immunosuppression. I like it because it hits home more, right? So what?

I get a little inflammation. I'll walk it off. Immunosuppression you do not want. It's basically walking around with your pants down. You're just so vulnerable. Well, if we're talking about, since we're on the controversial topics thread here, what most people don't know, well, most people know this. Number one cause of cancer. Can you guess it?

It's an obvious one. It's not a secret. Smoking? Yes. this. Number one cause of cancer. Can you guess it? It's an obvious. It's not a secret. Smoking? Yes. Okay. Number one cause. Number two cause. Diet, nutrition.

It's close. It's obesity. Obesity. Okay, yeah. I'm going to give myself a point for that. Sorry. Yeah, we'll give you a point because that is related to your diet, right? Thank you.

And being sedentary. Yes, yes. Obesity is the second leading cause of cancer. This is not something I made up. Yeah, we'll give you a point because that is related to your diet, right? Thank you. And being sedentary. So yes, yes. Obesity is the second leading cause of cancer. This is not something I made up. It's well established, but it's not talked about because obesity has become a taboo topic. Being overweight or obese today is to be celebrated. And you can get on the cover of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue or whatever. and you can get on the cover of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue or whatever.

And the truth is, when you're overweight or obese, it's a burden on the entire system. And those fat cells, those excess fat cells, are doing multiple things that are working against you. Number one is they release inflammatory molecules into your bloodstream. So that promotes chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation promotes all kinds of systemic diseases. Number two, they produce excess hormones like estrogen. Estrogen fuels cancer growth. That's not good. And the third thing is, and this really blew my mind because this study, research is not very old it's just a few years old but um a team of scientists were studying uh immune cells in an obese environment what they discovered was that immune cells in an obese environment are themselves obese so they realized that immune cells were absorbing the free-floating fatty acids and becoming bloated and slow and sluggish and ineffective. So if you think about your immune system as an army, right, that's

supposed to fight off viruses, bacteria, pathogens, and cancer cells, well, what do you want? Do you want a young, healthy, strong army, or do you want an army that's obese? And so that's, that's really the, the key to understanding why obesity not only suppresses your immune system and makes you vulnerable to cancer because your immune cells are just not good at their job, right? Cancer cells are invading them. You're talking about NK cells, natural killer cells, T cells, B cells, natural killer cells. Yeah. And no one talked about those as the first line of defense against the infection ever. You never heard about it during the pandemic. No one ever taught, well, the so-called pandemic, no one ever talked about that.

Right. And this is also why the obese were among the highest risk group for severe disease and death during the pandemic, right? It's the same mechanism, right? It's immunosuppression, chronic inflammation, immunosuppression, a poorly functioning cardiovascular system, poorly functioning nervous system. All of those systems are interconnected. And when you're overweight or obese, they are taxed, they're overworked, they're overloaded, and you are vulnerable. So the good news is I've never met a person who can't lose weight if they decide to lose weight. Right.

So this is not about fat shaming. It's just about about we got to lay out the truth here and let people know. Listen, if you want optimal health, if you want to prevent chronic disease, which sucks, or life-threatening infectious disease, then you just have to take your health seriously and start making different choices. Chris, how old are you? 45. You're looking at a 45-year- uh who has uh amazing eyes perfect skin and uh more or less you're vegan right you you you blend up 64 ounces of vegetables every morning and and that's kind of your base throughout the day right that's your go-to food throughout the day i eat a whole food plant-based diet i don't identify as a insert the blanketarian okay okay fair because i just don't see the value

in that but yeah i eat predominantly fruits and vegetables uh nuts and seeds whole grains herbs and spices and legumes i eat all all the plant food and i'm about 98 plant-based so what what that to produce what animals do you swerve into occasionally? What animals do you occasionally? I might eat a piece of fish. Okay. You know, I mean, there's no, there's no animal food that's really off limits, although I don't eat scavengers. So, I mean, I never, I never eat. Like what?

Like a squirrel? Like pigs or shellfish. Yeah. Or rodents. Good. All right. I like that. On December 2003, at 26 years old, Chris got the news that probably the scariest thing when I was reading the book or listening to the book. Thank you for the audio book. He was diagnosed or told that he had stage three, even a little further than stage three, right? Like 3.6 or something.

Stage 3C. Okay, 3C. Colon cancer. And of course, he completely freaked out. He went to the doctor. He started going down the path, the traditional route. He had the cancer removed, and then they wanted to start the medication, chemo and whatnot. And at that point, Chris turned to the heavens and you began really praying on a different path. Is that correct? Yeah, that's basically the way it went down. I got this diagnosis after having pain for the better part of a year, abdominal pain.

And it was just a weird kind of pain that would come and go. So most of the day I felt fine. And then occasionally I would get these twinges of pain. And I break out in sweat too, right? Yeah. Occasionally it would, there would be a sharp pain. Sometimes it would be more of a dull aching kind of pain with twinges of sharp pain. And then sometimes it would, I don't know if it was fear or, you know, it was an, an automatic, an autonomic nervous response or whatever, but yeah, sometimes I'd kind of break out in a sweat. Um, and, uh, yeah, I ignored it. You know, I just thought, well, I don't know. I'm too busy to deal with this. And it, and every morning when I woke up, I would feel pretty good, you know, just feel fine. But then

throughout the day I would get these pains. So eventually I had a colonoscopy because the pain got worse. And when I woke up from that procedure, they told me I had a golf ball-sized tumor in my colon, which is maybe colon cancer. They biopsied it and called me a couple days later and said, yeah, you've got colon cancer. So we need to get you into surgery right away and get this thing out of you before it spreads and kills you. And this is a very typical experience for a cancer patient. As soon as you get the diagnosis, you're rushed into treatment before you have any time to read or research or learn or understand your disease or understand the treatments, right? It's just, we got to get you on the conveyor belt quickly. And because there's no

time to spare, this is urgent, your life's at stake. And so patients just like me quickly agree, okay, just whatever you got to do, you know, and we surrender our power really to, to, uh, the medical industry and to doctors and hope that they're going to save our lives. And, um, the reality is most cancer patients, when they're diagnosed, they're not in a life threatening situation. They have time. They have a lot of time, especially women with breast cancer. I mean, they'll get a tiny lump. I mean, there's, they don't even have pain. They don't even know there's anything there. Um, and they're rushed into getting their breast cut off and radiation treatments and chemo. So, um, so I, I was able to postpone, they wanted me in surgery within just a couple of days. I mean, that's how fast this thing moves. Patients are put on

radiation within a couple of days. Chemo starts within a couple of days of diagnosis. I mean, it's really pretty insane how fast the train moves. And, uh, but I postponed the surgery about 10 days cause it was right before Christmas. And I was like, I don't want to be in the hospital on Christmas. You know, cause they're already like horrible. You know, my life had just come to a grinding halt and I'm just like, can we, can we just please do this after Christmas? So anyway, I go in on December 30th, they took out a third of my large intestine. That's where the tumor was. When I woke up, they said, it's worse than we thought your stage three C stage two means at that time, uh, you have surgery, you go home, you're done. There's no more treatment. Uh, but stage three C meant nine to 12 months of chemotherapy. And what is the distinction between stage 2 and stage 3?

Do you know? Yeah. Stage 2 means the tumor is basically encapsulated. Stage 3 means it has spread to your lymph nodes, the cancer. But another misunderstanding about cancer is that, and you might remember this from my book, but this idea of a tumor or cancer being fully encapsulated is actually wrong. Because circulating tumor cells and circulating stem cells leave a primary tumor site before it's even big enough to detect. So you can have a tiny microscopic lesion that's already spitting

out cancer cells that are circulating in your body now the reason those cancer cells don't set up camp and form new tumors is because of your immune system ah ah yes your immune system your immune cells are designed their job is to identify and eliminate cancer cells. That's why people say, hey, everyone's living with cancer. Like to this day, you could have a cancer factory in you, Chris, but because you're so healthy, your NK cells have quarantined it that anytime it comes out that they're aware of the enemy and they're just whacking them.

And you, right? We all produce cancer cells. Cells mutate. I appreciate that. And you. Not to scare you cells, cells mutate. I appreciate that. And you not scare you, but cells mutate, uh, all the time and, uh, for different reasons and become cancerous and your immune system is designed to identify and eliminate them. So the real difference between a person with tumors and the person with no tumors is the strength of their immune system.

And this is why immunotherapy is the next frontier of cancer drugs. Because, you know, a hundred years after William Coley, who's the father of immunotherapy, who discovered he was curing cancer patients by giving them fevers. So he was inducing fevers because he discovered that fevers ramped up the immune system and then patients were getting well because their immune cells just attacked everything. Hence the sweats. I actually thought that when you said you would break out in sweats, I said, oh, that's his immune system firing up. Yeah. And it could have been for sure. For sure. So, but anyway, it's taken again, a hundred years plus for, for the medical industry to finally figure out, oh, we could monetize immunotherapies and we could harness the immune system to fight cancer.

Cause ultimately that's what keeps you well, right? You can poison away cancer cells temporarily right you can burn them off you can cut them off but if your immune system is not strong your body keeps making cancer and you have to change the internal terrain right that's on you right and patients are not told this but you have to change your internal terrain you have to make it a place place that is inhospitable to cancer, right? Where cancer cells cannot thrive. That means you got to deal with your inflammation problem and your immunosuppression problem and overdose on nutrition, which is what I did. Pump your body full of nutrients that it can use to repair, regenerate, detoxify, and heal,

right? That's the ultimate goal is healing. regenerate detoxify and heal right that's the ultimate goal is healing and by the way there's a medical industry term called spontaneous remission that's when the cancer goes away and they don't know why right and the word that we know is is called healing right right right it's called healing but they don't want to call it healing. They call it spontaneous remission. And there's a huge project, the spontaneous remission project. And then, uh, sort of, uh, an offshoot of that is the radical remission project. My friend, Dr. Kelly Turner wrote a book called radical remission, which is all about this. Um, so, uh, so back to my story, right? I had surgery. They told me I needed nine to 12 months of chemotherapy while I was in the hospital. They served me some horrific food. The first of which

was a sloppy Joe right after my surgery, you know, and it's like, you had a third of your large intestine taken out and then they hand you a sloppy Joe. That's correct. Yeah. That's insanity. That's exactly what happens. It's like they hate you. It's like they hate you. Yes. And the sloppy Joe, I know there's not, it isn't just junk food. I mean, it's like they hate you it's like they hate you yes and the sloppy joe i know this not below it isn't just junk food i mean it's like the worst cafeteria food possible right the only place you get sloppy joe's in that i thought you would get a sloppy joe would be like summer camp right or the military or prison right prison sounds good yeah this is prison food. Oh, surprise. Also, we're giving this same food to sick people in the hospital. So, yeah, that was a bit of an eye opener.

And then the day I was told I could go home, my surgeon came in to check on me. And I just happened to ask him, hey, is there any food I need to avoid? Because I knew they just cut out a third of my large intestine. Everything you eat is going through there, right? It's all going down the tube. And I didn't know if like hot sauce was going to, you know, dissolve the stitches or something. Right. So, and his answer was, no, just don't lift anything heavier than a beer. It's amazing that he said that too, because in there, there's the implication or the insinuation

that drinking a beer is okay a drinking a beer is okay b anything you eat is okay right it's like no it doesn't matter what you eat including drinking alcohol doesn't matter and so that again was to me was like this i don't believe that, right? At that time, I wasn't a healthy guy. I was super busy. I was living on fast food, junk food, processed food. What was your go-to fast food? Oh, man. I mean, every day it was different.

I was a junk food connoisseur. I mean, it was Wendy's, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell. Just go through the drive-thru and get it. Yeah, because I was a young guy. Diet Coke? not never diet never diet stuff because i was always thin so i was no give me the dr pepper or coke or whatever supersized it always um and i was just a young entrepreneur i was in real estate and i was building a business and i was just going 90 miles an hour and just eating on the run. What city? And that didn't help. Memphis.

Memphis. Yeah. I wasn't really exercising. I didn't, yeah, I wasn't exercising. And I was actually really excited about my life. You know, things were going great. But anyway, I got sick. So I get home from the hospital and I did, I prayed about it.

I was just, I'm a Christian. I was like, God, if there's another way besides chemotherapy, please show me, you know, like help. Because I didn't have peace about chemo. I had this internal resistance to doing chemotherapy because I had seen chemo patients, right? And I don't mean to insult anyone that's on chemo, but it's just, it's alarming when you see someone who is an advanced cancer patient who's clearly been through years of chemotherapy treatments, right? And so I just thought that's going to be me. And, and that was, it was terrifying. I was more, I was more concerned about that than I was about the cancer killing me. And, um, and, and, and let me just say, I, this was purely instinctual.

I didn't have close personal experience with a friend or family member going through chemo. All right. I had just seen people like from afar, observed people from afar, like in my, you know, people that went to church with me or whatever. So yeah, I prayed about it. And it's just like, if there's another way to just show me, please show me. And two days later, I got a book that was sent to me from a friend of my dad's who lived in Alaska. Again, I'm in Memphis, Tennessee, sends me this book and it was written by a guy named George Malcomus. And George found out he had colon cancer back in the 1970s.

And he had, his mother had gone through cancer treatment and died. And he just decided, you know, he didn't want to do chemo because he just felt like it was going to kill him and not work. And he happened to have a health nut buddy who said, you need to get on a raw food diet and start juicing. That's what you need to do. You need to go back to the garden of Eden and just eat fruits and vegetables, organic fruits and vegetables, raw, and get a juicer and start juicing carrots. So that's what he did. And a year later, no tumor, didn't have surgery, didn't have chemo, didn't have radiation, his body healed. And so as I'm reading his story, I was like,

this is amazing. Like, and sometimes it just takes one person's story to change your life, right? To completely change the course of your life. Is this the guy, is this the guy called the Hallelujah Diet? Yeah, yeah. George Malcomus, the Hallelujah Diet. The book that I read was a different book. It's called God's Way to Ultimate Health, but it's the same message. He's written a few books. And it just resonated. So he knew his audience.

What was this guy's name in Alaska? Al Strawn. He's just a business friend of my dad. Al. Well, he sounds like a lifesaver to me. Sounds like an angel. Al was a lifesaver. So Al knew you're bent for Christianity and chose the right book for you.

I guess he did. I guess he did. My dad was. I mean, he knew my dad was a believer. And yeah, we've never talked about that specifically, but he just made a bold move and sent me a controversial book. He just made a bold move and sent me a controversial book. But as I read it, I just realized, I mean, George made a really great case for nutrition and a great case for the reason that we have so many problems with chronic disease is because of our diet and lifestyle choices.

And that made a lot of sense to me. And he also, you know, spent a little time talking about the risks of chemotherapy and, and opened my eyes to some of those things. So, you know, that was the first book that got me started on the journey. And then I just started devouring every book I could find on natural health and healing alternative cancer therapies. And this, it was, it was miraculous really, because my mom had a ton of those books. She had amassed a library of books. And some of them are behind me, like The Grape Cure, Hulda Clark, The Cure for All Cancers, Cancer Battle Plan. She had just collected all these books for no reason.

She never had cancer. She just is like, you know, just like to read health and wellness books. And so that was like a pretty amazing, she had the first book on rebound exercise by Al, oh gosh, what was his name? I'm blanking on his last name, but anyway, Al Carter. Anyway, so like just things fell into place really quickly. And as soon as I started to go down that path, it's just like the whole, the whole thing illuminated. Right. It's. And so, uh, I knew it was an answer to prayer. I mean, it was just like, I prayed this showed up, I'm doing it. Like, you know, like I didn't second guess it. It just felt so perfectly orchestrated. And, um, and I was excited about it. Like it gave

me my power back when I realized, wait a second, maybe the way I'm living is killing me. And if the way I'm living is killing me, then that means that I can change what I'm doing and possibly heal, right? If I'm contributing to my illness, maybe I can contribute to my wellness. And, uh, so that was the first time I'd really ever taken, well, there was, there was a time in college when I was really hardcore about, uh, what I ate and was taking tons of bodybuilding supplements and crap like that,

you know? Uh, so this was kind of like that, except without, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't bodybuilding. I was bodybuilding in a different way, right. Trying to rebuild. I wasn't bodybuilding. I was bodybuilding in a different way. Right. Trying to rebuild. And, uh, and so I went to whole foods, I loaded up the cart, all vegetables, uh, and I've bought a juicer and got a 25 pound bag of carrots, organic juicing carrots. And then, I mean, I was on, on my way, like, and the thing is like, you can, you don't juice, sorry, just to be clear, you don't juice now. Now you blend right now you eat the whole, when you use the Vitamix? I do both. Yeah, absolutely.

You do both, okay, okay. Yeah. Anyone can change their diet overnight. Anyone, like any person can change their diet immediately. Almost any person can start exercising immediately. And those are the two most powerful things you can do for your health is what you put in your mouth and moving your body. And, uh, the, there are other components to health and healing, which is the mental,

emotional, and spiritual stuff that takes time for sure. And I'd love to get into that dealing with stress and forgiveness, but we're on the physical, you know, topic at the moment. So I loaded up the cart. I went home and I was like, I'm doing this. I'm just going to eat raw fruits and vegetables. I'm going to stuff myself with broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, onions, mushrooms, peppers, berries, you know, anything that came from the earth. I believe God made it for us and it's good. And I'm just going to overdose on this food and see what happens.

So this goes back to the end of one, you know, experiment on yourself, see what happens. And I was excited to do it. And the first few days of doing that, I didn't feel good. I felt bad. And that's very typical when you eat a raw food diet it's a very aggressive detoxification diet and you start with withdrawals from the other food do you think plus the withdrawals absolutely you will withdraw from caffeine of course but also from a diet that's very high in protein and fat and and sugar and salt so like the typical american diet and so when you stop eating those foods your body's kind of like

like what are you doing plus you're eating all that fiber and you have you know in the short term your um your gut microbiome is oriented toward the foods that you typically eat and so when you're eating a low fiber diet you have very different bacterial population than you eat a high fiber diet and so yeah so you'll have all kinds of weird, you know, reactions and distress, but it's very short term. Usually it's just low energy, but some people have much more profound reactions to a raw food diet. Like they will run a fever, right? They'll be nauseous. They have diarrhea, to throw up. I mean, the, the detox reaction can be profound for me. It was just, I was just lethargic for a couple days. It was just low energy and foggy headed. And then I turned a corner, you know, around day

three or four and I was like, well, I feel great. I feel really good. And then, and that persisted. And, uh, and so that helped. And you stopped answering calls from the hospital. The hospital was like, hey, you got to get in here and start your pretreatment. And you weren't answering the call. Yeah. I mean, well, so what happened is if you're diagnosed with cancer and you tell your family members you're thinking about not doing chemotherapy, and then you tell them you're only going to eat organic fruits and vegetables, then they start to get really concerned that you have

lost your way. And so I had a lot of pressure from people who love me to go see the oncologist. And so I did reluctantly. And we had this meeting with an oncologist that went badly. And I talk about it in my book in more detail. But the gist it was like you know he just sort of treated us like cattle and i asked a couple questions you know i said asked him about the raw food diet he said no you can't do that it'll fight the chemo and i said well there any alternative therapies available fight the chemo that's what he said that's exactly what he said uh and then i asked him about if are there any alternative therapies and he said no if you don't do chemotherapy you're insane he used that word insane exactly my yeah look me in the dead in the eyes man and then he just kept then then it was

like something like a switch flipped and he just started just talking and talking and talking and he was just doing using every tactic he had in his arsenal to convince me to do chemo. And the message was basically, if you don't do this, you're going to die. Right. And, uh, and it just, the pressure just kept ratcheting up in this conversation and it became very stressful, you know, I mean, the fear and the stress, and this is very common in oncology clinics. I mean, doctors use fear to intimidate patients into saying yes to treatments they don't understand or that they don't want to do or they're not ready for. And so I basically said yes to treatment. I left that little cubicle and went to the front desk and made an appointment to

get a port put in to start chemotherapy. And that was going to be in like three or four weeks. And then my wife and I walked out to her car and just sat in her car and just cried, man. I mean, it was just such a terrible experience. I mean, I went into that appointment feeling good. I'd been on the raw food diet for a week. I was, I was feeling confident. I was optimistic. I was hopeful. And I just walked out of there just totally. Hey, was the pain subsiding, Chris? Yeah, it was. Okay. Yeah. I was recovering from surgery. So I still had a little bit of that, but generally I was feeling pretty good. This is only just a couple of weeks after, after the surgery, but I was recovering well and I was off the pain meds. And, um, and so, yeah, I mean, it was just such a, just a horrible day and I felt so defeated and discouraged. And this is, again, this is what cancer patients, this is what happens to them.

They're just completely there. They are, this is how it goes. The patient goes to the, the, the doctor and they say, why did I get cancer? And the doctor says, well, we don't know. You know, we don't know why you got cancer, but you know, it may be hereditary, maybe genetic, or, you know, it may just be bad luck. And what that does, that messaging, which is so common, basically they're telling the patient you're a powerless victim of disease. There's nothing you did that contributed to your disease. Therefore, there's nothing you can do to help yourself other than show up for treatment. You can do that. And you must do that. It makes me so angry, as angry as I as i can get yeah and you should be right when you when i

hear that it's it's infuriating and you know what i call that chris i i i've said this on the show many times i think the most vile thing you can do as a human being besides you know hurt them physically is to argue someone else's limitations for them we should never be our we we should never argue our own limitations it's pretty bad bad. There's a Taoist saying, argue your limitations in their years. But to argue another man's limitations for him, to partake in this group victim arguing, it's pathetic.

It's so sad. It's so aggressive. That's a great point. And this is what's happening. This is exactly what's happening. And so patients, they're made into powerless victims of disease, right? You're a powerless victim. And not only that, there's, there's this coddling that starts,

right? Oh, we're so sorry that you have cancer. We know this is so hard for you. No, you don't need to change your diet. You just go home and you just eat your favorite foods and you just be comfortable. And, and don't worry, we have really comfy chairs for your chemo and they, they're recliners. They're like lazy boys and we have blankets, we have really comfy chairs for your chemo and they were, they're recliners. They're like lazy boys and we have blankets and we'll bring you little goodies and snacks and diet Cokes and Snickers bars while you're getting your chemo. I mean, it, it is gross. I know you're not joking too.

I had a friend, I went to a dialysis center and he said a third of the people in there were sipping a big gulps. Yeah. Right. I'm like, what? Yeah. Yeah, so there's, yeah, that's exactly how it goes. I'm just telling you, people in your community

who have seen their relatives go through it, please feel free to comment because they'll back me up on this. I call them docents of death, by the way. It's unfair, and I know you give doctors a lot of credit for trauma injury, and they're marvelous for that. But the ones who are just walking you to your grave, they're just docents of death. Oh, you're sick here. We'll slowly, we'll walk you to your grave. Trauma care has never been better, right?

If you're shot, stabbed, car wrecked, whatever, like doctors can save your life. It's absolutely miraculous. Like what, what we have developed with medical technology, but in terms of chronic disease, I mean, doctors are trained to prescribe drugs for chronic disease. The drugs don't cure people. They just manage the symptoms. Your community knows this. I'm not the first person to talk about it. I'm sure they just manage the symptoms and they community knows this. I'm not the first person to talk about it, I'm sure. They just manage the symptoms and they just keep you vertically ill, right? Horizontally ill is a problem, right? But vertically ill, you just got to be able to get out of bed. And if we can give you X, Y, and Z drugs so you can get out of bed and function and you become a customer for life that that is the end

goal of pharmaceutical companies they just want lifetime customers right it's not a prison system it's the prison system once you're in you just you're in and out in and out yeah yeah and and doctors benefit too because once they put you on a even one pharmaceutical then you have to come back for checkups right you have to come back for checkups, right? You have to come back. If a doctor helps you completely heal and reverse your disease, you don't have to go back. Right? So I love doctors. I mean, I have so many dear friends that are doctors. I've interviewed tons of doctors that are amazing. Like, so I don't want anybody to think I'm anti-doctor. I think they're great, but it's, it's the, it's the med school curriculum and

the industry, which is, which really the whole thing is set up to serve the pharmaceutical companies and the medical device companies. It's all designed to funnel as much money as possible up to those giant corporations. And they really don't, you know, the oxymoron of healthcare, they don't care about your health. They don't, they really don't. They care about treating your disease and making as much money possible treating that disease. And you look at the amount of money that

pharmaceutical companies spend on advertising, and it's way more than they spend on R&D. Way more. And they spend more on lobbying and advertising on television and advertising to doctors, which a lot of people don't realize. Pharmaceutical companies spend more money advertising to doctors, marketing to doctors than they do on TV ads. And the TV ads are everywhere. And as soon as a drug goes off patent, they stop marketing. So they don't care if the drug's good or not. At the end of the day, once the patent expires, they've already got a replacement lined up and now they're marketing that thing. Even if the new drug is maybe not as good as the one that's off patent.

Doesn't matter, right? It's like, where's the money? So there's this mythology that was created by the pharmaceutical industry. It's called science-based medicine. It's mythology. Evidence-based medicine. It's mythology. Because they're not really looking at all of science.

And they're not looking at all of the evidence. They're only interested in science and evidence that will lead to a highly profitable patentable drug compound so diet and lifestyle medicine that's they don't look at that at all they don't care about that right they don't care about food or fitness right or stress reduction the things that you cannot really monetize to help a person restore their health. And that's why our healthcare system's broken. That's the crazy business model of CrossFit too. I had the CEO on here the other day. Obviously,

I worked there for 15 years at the highest level, but it's a trip because it's very difficult to monetize personal responsibility and personal accountability and the truth. It's very difficult to monetize, but it can accountability and the truth. It's very difficult to monetize. But it can be. It can be. But if you come if you're a Stanford MBA, they're not going to teach you how to do it there. It's the exact opposite. They're just selling M&Ms and widgets and tennis shoes.

Yes. And you certainly can make a living as a doctor who is practicing lifestyle medicine. Right. Absolutely. And there's a lot of doctors doing it. And there's there's there's a shift, you know who is practicing lifestyle medicine. Right. Absolutely. And there's a lot of doctors doing it and there's, there's, there's a shift, you know, and look at you, you're, you're doing your, you're, you're making a living, a living, uh, with your passion. Yes. Telling your story. Yeah. And that was a surprise. I mean, it's as much of a surprise to me as anyone. I mean, I started-

Thank God you did it. Thank God you did it. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, spoiler, I didn't die. I found a naturopathic doctor. I found an integrated- 18 years now, right? Sorry, 19 years. 19 in December. Okay. But I found, and I really do hope people will read my book if you buy my book on amazon i make three dollars okay right you can buy it used and i make no dollars that's okay too

but i really hope you'll read my book because there's so much there's several chapter chapters in the book that are an expose on the pharmaceutical and cancer industry and then of course i tell my story and everything i did and and there's tons i mean hundreds and hundreds of scientific references you know to help you understand how nutrition enables your body to fight cancer and to heal but you'd be crazy first of all not to try in my opinion someone like me who just lives off of meat i i people are making fun of me savon sold i will 100 percent um uh immediately probably in the next 48 hours go on a raw vegetable diet for for seven days absolutely absolutely this book um affected me i think that's great absolutely i want to try it i also have like a steel gut i used to wake up every morning, eat a whole bag of broccoli and drink a cup of coffee and walk three miles and listen to audio books. I mean, I can do any, I can put anything in there, but you'd be crazy not to experiment with this crazy. Paul Saldino was on here, Chris. And he's like, and I love Paul. Do you know who that is? The carnivore MD. Okay. And Paul was like, Hey, but it gives you gas and my thing is is like well first of all it

doesn't give me gas but i have no problem with gas like i'm like i'm like i don't care i like a good fart now and again like what are you talking about uh who cares yeah uh i mean did you ever experiment with raw meat did you have you seen any studies on raw meat i haven't as opposed to cook meat is there anything about you that goes, oh, shit, maybe raw meat's okay? Years ago, I came across this guy named Agenis von der Planitz. Do you know who that is? No, but it's an incredible name. Yeah.

He wrote a book. I saw him speak at a cancer conference, and he had claimed that he had healed his cancer with raw meat, with the primal diet. And he wrote this book called We Want to Live, which is a pretty crazy book. And I read it. Liver King stuff, like organ, the organs and the whole animal? Yeah. He influenced a lot of people. But he died mysteriously.

And he was like 60 years old. So I think he lost some credibility with me when he died so young, which was not that long ago. And he was big into raw milk. And in California, he was involved with the raw milk dairy farm and all kinds of stuff. Look how expensive his book is. $1,200 for the hardcover.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, no. I my gosh. Oh no. I think I threw it away. Are you serious? I think I threw this book away. I'm not kidding. Oh, dang.

Anyway, point is, yeah, that was the only guy that I really had ever heard of that claimed to heal with the raw food diet. And I, and I get it. Maybe it's possible with the raw meat diet.

It may be, it's possible, but what I found was over and over and over the people who were healing advanced cancers terminal cancers they were doing it with a plant-based diet and it was predominantly raw and juicing was almost always a part of their dietary protocol like over and over and over and so to me it's not fruit though like, right. Not juicing fruit. Yeah. Minimal fruit. It was, yeah. Mainly juicing vegetables. I mean, you know, like for example, like you could do, um, beets, carrot, celery, cucumber, you can throw a green apple in there and a lemon in there. It's all right. You know, it gives a little flavor. Um,

and there's certainly, uh, anti-cancer nutrients in apples and lemons, especially lemons. Um, and there's certainly, uh, anti-cancer nutrients in apples and lemons, especially lemons. Um, but, um, but generally I just kept seeing over and over and over in, in the books I was reading and the testimonials I was finding that they were all following the same path. And so it was kind of like, well, look, if, if healing cancer is like climbing Mount Everest, right. I want to take the path that everybody is taken to get to the top. Right. right i want to take the path that everybody is taken to get to the top right i i don't want to experiment so much that i have no you know it's already experimental enough not doing chemotherapy

and and uh taking a holistic nutritional approach but i do want to follow some examples so that's that was my thinking and it still is today like after 18 years i mean i've lost count of the number of people i've met who've mean i've lost count of the number of people i've met who've healed i've interviewed a bunch on chrisbeatcancer.com on the podcast and youtube and stuff and i keep interviewing people who've healed because their stories are just as important and in some cases i just i think they're even better than mine because i've interviewed people who've healed uh you know stage four cancers with no surgery, no medical intervention. So it's, it just goes to show, right, that the body is capable of more than we realize, right? Healing is possible. The body

creates cancer, the body can heal it. And if you want to be successful in life, in any endeavor, you need to, to study and learn from successful people, right? Like if I wanted to get, get to the CrossFit games, you know, I'm going to mayhem, right? Like I'm going to be like, Rich, help me, you know, what do I need to do? Uh, I'm not going to just try to make up my own routine. Right. And, um, and, and this actually is full circle here on this, on this idea of cancer patients being unlucky and people have called me, well, he's just lucky, right? He's just one of the lucky ones, which is pretty insane. If you think about it, because there's nothing scientific about luck.

A well, it's misleading to at most they should, could, should say, I don't understand it. Sure. Great. That would be, that would be the fair thing to say. i don't understand it sure great that that would be that would be the fair thing to say i don't understand it i get it but unlucky is basically what you're doing is uh dismissive well it's dismissive and it's it's a it's a subtle form of ad hominem they're drawing you into the argument and staying focused on the subject which is diet right and nutrition right and so it's a very subtle way of attacking you it's wrong it ends the conversation yeah and it's basically a person saying like i'm not

interested in learning any more about nutrition for a can i'm not interested in that you're just you're just lucky um but that's the same logic if i was if i was speaking of rich phoning right if i was gonna say well rich phoning he only won the CrossFit games because he was lucky. Right. You know, it's like, no, there's so much hard work that goes into, you know, even just getting to the games. Right. And same thing with healing.

There's a lot of hard work that I had to do on myself to get well, like, and so, yeah, to diminish the, the, the incredible self-discipline and hard work and, and mindset change and attitude change and forgiveness that goes into the healing process that so many people have done, not just me, like, yeah, it just makes me sad. Like, I just feel like, you know, I wouldn't want to treat someone that way that it works so hard. But, um, the stress thing, I want to talk about stress before we run out of time. Because I really. Do you have a time limit?

No, we can. No, I don't. Oh, okay. Yeah, we're cool. I really, I believe that stress is the root cause of most chronic disease. Wow. And I'm going to lay this out. And this is pretty cool because this is coming from the food guy. Yeah. So take this, this part's going to be serious. Okay. Let's go. Okay. So what is stress? Okay. There's, there's good stress and bad stress.

We're just talking about bad stress, which is distress. Stress is negative emotion, right? Negative thoughts produce negative emotions, right? Okay, so what are negative emotions? All this is under the distress umbrella. So negative thoughts is going to be anger, bitterness, resentment, right? That's toward people in your past. It's jealousy, envy, insecurity. These are thoughts and emotions in your present. And it's fear, worry, and anxiety. Those are future-based. And so many people are just bouncing back and forth from worry about the future to insecurity about their present or jealousy of somebody on Facebook to bitterness and resentment towards people who've hurt them in the past, right? They're just bouncing back and forth between past, present, and future, and they're all negative thoughts and emotions. And when you're in a state of bitterness or anger or envy, your body responds, right?

Like that thought and that emotion, it's not just in your skull. Your body responds to stress by producing cortisol and adrenaline. Those are your stress hormones. Those hormones are really helpful if you are, let's say, in a CrossFit competition and you're trying to win, right? Or you're trying to escape a tiger or a bear. Those are really helpful if you're trying to fight off someone

who's trying to kill you. But it's this low-grade stress, the day-in, day-out grinding stress, which they call- Of the boogeyman, too. 99%. The CrossFit games at the starting line and a bear are real. This other shit's the fucking boogeyman. The guy under your bed.

He's not even real. That's right. That's fear, anxiety, and worries. Most of the time are about something that you imagine, right? There's a great quote. Worry is a misuse of the imagination. Oh, I love it. Right? worry is a misuse of the imagination oh i love it right it's a misuse of the imagination and so uh and so so many of us have these bad thought habits

right these are bad habits where we're worrying right or we're we're letting feelings of envy and jealousy and insecurity consume us or we're ruminating on the past and people who've hurt us. Okay. So when you're doing that, your body's responding with adrenaline and cortisol and those hormones suppress your immune system and they promote inflammation. Whoa. Didn't we talk about this at the beginning of the interview? They set you up to be in the same physical condition that promotes chronic disease and cancer. Okay, but it's not just a week of stress, right? This is something that persists usually for many years, many, many years.

And how do we cope with stress? Well, usually... Sociopaths just live forever. That's right. Yeah, they don't care. They don't give a shit. Yeah, they don't care about anything but themselves. I bet you there's some truth to that, unfortunately, Chris.

I bet you there's some- Yeah, I'm with you. I get it. I see where you're going. But here's the thing, like, how do we cope with stress, right? Because we are going to self-medicate if we're in stress right and the way we self-medicate is with food it's with drugs and alcohol exercise we can self-medicate with exercise which is one of the best ways to

self-medicate actually right you know as long as you're not overtraining and like just destroying yourself but um that is one of the best ways but it's usually not the way people do it they become a workaholic they spend more money than they have they become a they get addicted to gambling or pornography like so there's so many ways that we self-medicate that are actually destructive so then you end up in the vicious cycle right and stress is the root cause so you have a person who's obese. Well, you show me someone who's obese and I will show you someone who has unresolved emotional conflict, right? Right. They're, they're hurt. I'll show you a person who is, who is deeply hurt and, and food is their medication. And the reason that weight loss

programs fail is it's not because people, um, you know, we all know the crash diet thing, right? You do a crash diet, you lose some weight, Hey, it worked, but then you go back to your old ways, right? Because what happens is the crash diet left a hole right you remove that person's medication for their pain and they they can fight and you know for a little while but eventually they're going back to their to their preferred medication right if it's food right or if it's drugs or if it's alcohol so like well and you also you see it in the in the ultra marathon community right uh you're addicted to meth and now you've been the last you're not on meth anymore but you every weekend you see it in the, in the ultra marathon community, right? You're addicted to meth. And now you've been the last, you're not on meth anymore, but you, every weekend you do a hundred miler.

Yeah. Right. They've just remedicated. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. And they got 25, they get a tattoo instead of doing a fucking line now. And they're covered in tattoos and they got a hole in their nose and they start doing

that stuff. Yeah. The body modification thing. Right. That's another way. and they start doing that stuff. Yeah, the body modification thing, right? That's another way.

And so what I realized for myself, and I've seen this over and over and over, because I mean, I've been counseling cancer patients for a very long time, is if you don't help a person get to the root cause of their pain and their stress, then it's gonna be really hard for them to stick with any diet and lifestyle change. What was your stress at 26 then? So I had, okay, how much time we got?

A lot, a lot. I was insecure. You're fascinating. This is so good. I was incredibly insecure. I had- And what does that mean? And what does that mean? I had, and what does that mean? And what does that mean? For me, insecurity meant I was, I, I could not be happy for anyone else. I was jealous and envious and competitive toward anyone else. Like I could not be happy for anyone else's success. If anyone had, if a person was better looking, if they had a better job prospects, if they had a better looking girlfriend, if they had a nicer car, it didn't matter. You know, like I was, I was jealous. I was envious. Right. And I would resent that person. Okay. That's, that's how insecurity typically manifests. So that was me

sharing that. That's amazing. I've never heard that. I was also, you know, and this is all tied together. I was critical, right. It was critical of other people and I was judgmental towards other people. Right. And again, this is all, these are related. These are all manifestations of insecurity. And, uh, and I was prideful and it's, again, this is all goes together. And so that didn't help. And then I was in real estate and I was buying a bunch of rental properties and trying to learn how to run this business. And there was a ton of stress there,

work stress and money stress. So, so I just, yeah, I had a lot of stress on me. And, but that was, that was sort of new stress because that was a new business, but the insecurities and stuff, I mean, that had gone back to junior high, you know, that stuff kind of started in junior high and had just, by the time I was, you know, a decade later, like I hadn't gotten any better, you know, I'm sure I would, I imagine I was worse, you know, more insecure, more competitive, even though I had, you know, things to be proud of and I was successful and it didn't matter. Like no amount of success fixes your insecurity until you really look at, look at yourself in the mirror and admit your flaws and your fears and your failures, and then decide to start thinking differently about others and yourself. you know, as I'm reading books by other survivors and doctors and holistic healers, you know, the mind, body, spirit connection stuff, I realized, okay, it's not just the diet. It's not just

exercise. It's not just supplements and, and alternative therapies. Like I've got to deal with my inner self, my emotions, and I've got to just take a hard look at the person that I am. Is the Bible talk around that? Is that what covet is? Like, does the Bible talk about that anywhere about, um, about being insecure or what? One of the 10 commandments is do not covet. Right. Okay. Yeah. And that kind of that, and that's all of those things in one, right? Sort of the envy, the jealousy, the hyper competitive is not being able to have be happy for other people. Okay. competitive is not being able to have be happy for other people okay the cardinal sin really i mean the the number one sin biblically is pride it is it's the chief of all sins is pride because pride

leads you down a road of bad behavior um to to some just to summarize it quickly but so yeah i i was definitely not in a good state mentally and emotionally and even spiritually. So I just had to stop and go, OK, I had to start catching myself when I would think negatively and interrupt it. Right. They call it mindfulness, which was a term I hadn't heard of back then. But mindfulness is just being aware of your thoughts, like catching yourself thinking, like, you know, when you see someone that you feel jealous of and you start to feel that jealousy, be like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute.

I'm feeling jealous and I'm feeling resentful right now. And I'm going to choose not to. By the way, he also just defined meditation. That's why true people who meditate are always in meditation they always have one eye watching they don't give they give they give a small percentage of their of their heart their their their drive their horsepower their chip whatever you want to call it to always be watching themselves that's a this this thing with this this misunderstanding of meditation where you need to sit it doesn't hurt to sit in a dark room and breathe and not react. That's a great way to cultivate it,

but you should always be in meditation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That's why I tell you guys, I never tried to go to sleep. I lie down and just start watching myself. Of course I, I always do fall asleep, but I wish I didn't. I want to watch myself. That's, that's, that's where, that's where that's where it's at okay i apologize no it's my is my superpower because it's really about it's thinking about your thoughts right so you start catching yourself you so you would have negative thoughts like fuck that guy he has a lamborghini i deserve that and you'd be like whoa put the brakes on that exactly like why like okay i'm i'm being envious right now and i don't have to be i and here's this is

the real antidote right that i discovered and cancer taught me this the antidote to unhappiness to negativity jealousy envy resentment is gratitude so i realized in the most difficult season of my life when i had every reason to be pissed off. Right. And, and by the way, I was, I was envious and jealous of anybody walking around who didn't have cancer. Wow. You know, right. I mean, why do I have it? I don't deserve it. Exactly. I mean, for a hundred percent, I'm like, there's, there's child molesters walking around. Why do I have the cancer? Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I had a lot of those angry, um, resent, you know,

kind of resentful and bitter feelings just about my own situation. I was feeling sorry for myself. So I had to get a handle on that real quick. Cause I just realized I can't keep going down this road. Cancer's either going to change you for the better or for the worse. This is what happens. You either become more grateful, more thankful, more joyful, right? More appreciative of life and the good things in your life. Or you become more angry and negative and cynical and bitter and unhappy. Like this is what happens. This is what cancer does to people. And a lot of circumstances, right? Hardships, right? Not just cancer. It's the same you and you have to choose what is this going to

do to me, right? Is this going to make me worse or better? And I talk about in one of my books that cancer is going to change you whether you like it or not. So you might as well decide that to, to, to let it change you for the better. Don't you need the shit scared out of you in the same way that the doctors use? Did someone just give a hundred dollars? Sorry. Hold on a second. Jiggy Josh found out about this dude in 2016.

Chris really helped me continue being plant-based. That's awesome. Jiggy. What what's going on down here? Holy shit. Here we go. A hundred dollars. Someone sent me some info and literature in 2021

when i had a family member fighting cancer i don't remember that this was before the sponsorship him taking time out of his day to do that was one of the reasons i will always support the podcast wow gabe wow nice that's awesome thank you so much gabe insane sponsor by the way a guy takes such good care of me that's okay um you were saying that doctors use fear to sell medicine and and kudos to them for doing that because literally you had to be so scared to open up to make these huge changes not in the two part probably hardest things anyone could ever change their emotional relationship with the universe and, uh, and their, and their nutritional, um, relationship. That's right. And I always say, man, the fear of death is huge. I, I,

yeah, it's a big motivator. Sometimes I get scared. Sometimes I get worried that I think that there might not be any other way to change. I get nervous for people. You know, you hope, I hope that there's only two ways you learn. You learn from your mistakes or you learn from other people's mistakes. Right. And you know, the reason I do everything I do, right. Everything that I say is to one end, right. And that's hopefully that people will learn from my experience and my mistakes and my successes. Right. And they don't have to, it doesn't have to be as hard for them or they can beat cancer by never getting it, right? They can avoid it with their choices today, right? Because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure as Ben Franklin says. So, but okay, so back on the

stress thing, because I want to make sure I close this. So I realized, okay, I've got to start practicing gratitude. So anytime I would start to feel negative or, or fearful about cancer, because guess what? I had, I didn't have any anxiety, much anxiety or fear. And then I got the cancer diagnosis. Now I got a whole nother level of fear in my life. And every day that fear is creeping in, it's trying to take control of my mind and my heart. You know, you can get busy working and forget you have cancer, right? But then you remember, right?

Something reminds you that you have cancer and it's like, oh my gosh, I have cancer, you know? And so there's the wave of fear. And so in any of those moments, I would just stop and I would say, okay, God, I'm giving you my fear. I trust you, right? I'm not going to be afraid. I trust you. This is just my simple act of faith. I'm going to trust you to provide for me and supply all my needs and lead me in the direction that I need to go. And then I would also practice gratitude, which goes like this. Okay, I've got a lot to be unhappy about, but let me just take stock of what I have

to be happy about. What's good in my life? I have a wife who loves me. I have a roof over my head. I have food. Um, I can see, I can hear I'm physically able to, to work. Um, I've got a child on the way. We got pregnant right after my diagnosis. I have enough money to pay my next set of bills. I have parents who love me. And I can do this all day, right? I can go on and on and on. And as soon as I start just taking stock of the good things in my life,

then my attitude changes and the negativity evaporates. Is that a fake it till you make it? I don't think so. No? I don't. I just think it's a, it's a mental discipline, right? But I mean, you have to, okay. Okay. Right. You just have to, you just have to literally stop and start counting your blessings, right? You just start taking inventory. What's good in my life. And I promise if you, yeah, you don't have to fake it. If you just start really thinking about what is good, what do I have that's good and really dig in, you realize, man, I, my life is really good. Yeah. So there's some bad stuff, but

I've got so much to be thankful for. Like, and so I would just continually take my focus off the negative stuff and to the positive stuff. And that's, this is huge. It is incredibly powerful, but you have to do it. Like you just have to mentally stop and do it. So I started retraining my brain to focus on positive and not the negative to catch myself thinking negatively and break those bad habits. And then I made a decision to forgive every person who'd ever hurt me. I love this. Yeah. This is what is forgiving. I get a little triggered by that word because I'm like, who am I to forgive them? Like I should have never held anything against them. Like, like I feel like there should be like a deeper word than forgive.

I understand what you're saying. You know, it's just human nature. When people hurt us, we hold on to bitterness and resentment. When they betray our trust, when they hurt our feelings, when they abuse us, when they lie, cheat, steal, right? When they're rude, when people hurt us, hurt our feelings, we tend to hold on to that resentment. And we've, because I think we're wired for justice, right? I think we are ingrained and wired and created for justice. And so when we see injustice in the world or in our own personal experience, we crave, right? Justice, which justice means like getting even, right? Or that person getting what they deserve for what they did to you. And so when there's no justice, then you have this sort of unfulfilled need.

Right. And that unfulfilled need leads to resentment. Right. And bitterness and and so and anger. And those are toxic emotions. So I realize like and by the way christianity i mean it's all about forgiveness i mean it's the entire message of jesus christ is forgiveness over and over and over it's all he talks about and one of the last things he says on the cross is father forgive them for they know not what they do like he's forgiving the people who put him on the cross while he's suffering. Like it's so huge. And what a great line to say.

Yeah, right. I mean, and he did that to show us, right? It's like, if I can forgive from a cross while I'm being crucified, executed, you can forgive anyone who's hurt you, right? If I can do it from this, do it from this position, you can do it. And so that was a challenge to me. So, and I, and I'd also kept, you know, as I was reading and learning from cancer survivors and holistic doctors, I mean, they're saying, listen, bitterness and envy and resentment, anger. I mean,

these are root causes of cancer. You have to forgive. So I was like, okay, I'm going to do it. so i was like okay i'm gonna do it and so the way you do it uh is is pretty simple you just have to sit down like in a meditative or a prayerful state and start thinking through your life and you have to open up the filing cabinet in your mind where you've stored all the painful memories right they're in a special way that sounds fun chris yeah oh it's real fun yeah it's real fun um but you have to revisit the painful memories right and and chronological is a good way to do it you know just think back as far as you can remember like first grade on the playground when some you know kids spit on you or threw a rock at you or something right and if you remember it you know then there's a chance that it's probably

still causing you a little bit of tiny little bit of distress. And, um, and, and here's the thing that's so crazy about stress. You know, you've got your conscious mind and your subconscious mind, right? So your conscious mind is like, what's on the computer screen right now, what you're looking at, what you're focused on, that's your conscious mind. But your subconscious mind is like all the programs running in the background, right? The spyware. The spyware. And your conscious mind, this is what's so wild, your conscious mind is aware of all of your problems, all of your worries, your concerns, problems, all of your worries, your concerns, your resentments all the time. Your conscious mind is aware of them all the time. So we can distract, I'm sorry, your subconscious is aware all the time. So we can distract our conscious mind and that's what we do, right? We want to

distract ourselves because we don't want to think about the stuff that's eating us alive. And so when you, when you make a decision to revisit painful memories and forgive, then you're, you're just basically clearing those things out and you're relieving that pressure. This is why people have panic attacks, right? Because they have so much unresolved stuff in their mind, right? The fear is they got the spin wheel going. Yeah. They've got the fears and anxiety and the worries. They've got the insecurities and the jealousy, and then they've got the anger and the bitterness and the resentments. It's all piled up, right? All of these problems that seem isolated, right? Because I got a problem with this person over here and a problem

with that person over there. But the reality is there's one thing all those problems have in common. They're all your problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're all on your shoulders. They're all in, you know, I like to use this analogy. It's like a backpack full of bricks, right? That guy may be an asshole, but the fact that you think he's an asshole is your problem. And he may be one.

Right, but it is still your problem. If you make that judgment, now it's your problem. That thought is now yours. Right. So what I did was I would think of an incident, and I would just say, okay, God, you know what this person did? You know how I feel about it? I'm still upset. I'm still angry.

It still hurts. I still resent them for that. But I'm choosing to forgive them, and I'm letting it go. I'm giving upset. I'm still angry. I still hurt. It's like, I still resent them for that. Um, but I'm choosing to forgive them and I'm letting it go. Right. I'm giving it to you. This is the forgiveness prayer, right? I'm giving it to you. They're all yours. You can deal with them. I'm releasing my desire for justice, right? I'm just letting them go. And, um, and so one by one, I just did that with every person I could think of in my life. And you can't do it in one sitting, you know, you just kind of just keep doing it. Uh, and eventually you just do it until you run out of people. Like, I was like, I can't, who do I need to forgive today? Like, I can't think of anybody.

I think I've forgiven everybody, you know, and then new people show up, right. And, and I cut you off in traffic and then you got to be quick to forgive. And what about asking, what about asking other people to forgive you? Absolutely. It's very, very therapeutic, very healing. So the cool thing about forgiveness and you have to be prepared because they might be like, no. That's right. All right. So forgiveness happens in three ways. One is you forgive people that hurt you. And you don't ever have to see them again, and you don't have to tell them you forgave them. Right? This is just you and God, you and your heart.

You just do it, and it's fine. But then there may be people that your conscience is telling you you need to make right. Right? You need to resolve a relationship. And so there are people that you may need, and this is like part of the, you know, one of the reasons it's part of the 12-step program is because it really is so therapeutic and healing to make amends. So you go to the people that you've hurt and you say, you know what? I screwed up. I was wrong. I am so sorry.

You know, what can I do to make it right? And they may accept you and love you and hug you and you cry and hug and it's great. Or they may say, I hate you. I don't care. I never want to see you again. Either way, you've done the right thing, right? You've done the right thing. You've humbled yourself.

You've asked for forgiveness. And then it's from there, it's up to them whether they choose to, but you've done your part. The most important thing is that you don't like get angry and then fight back when they, if they're rude to you, you just have to humbly and graciously say, I understand why you feel that way. I just wanted you to know, right. I just wanted you to hear it from me that I really am sorry. And then just try to, try to, you know, end the conversation peacefully and not it turn into some other fight or something. Don't have an expectation. Yeah.

And then the third way is I think, you know, as, as a believer, I think forgiveness, just asking for forgiveness from God, you know, just forgive me for X, Y, and Z for the things that it's maybe you didn't do it to a person or whatever, but things that are on your heart that are weighing you down that you feel conviction, you feel guilt about, you know, I forgive myself. I messed up. And, you know, it's really freeing when you have secret, when you keep secrets, like if you have things that you're secretly ashamed of, and shame is another one of those really toxic emotions I didn't even mention, guilt and shame, that's also rooted in your past. When you keep, you know, secret shame, it does eat you alive and it creates distress. And one of the most powerful things you can do to alleviate yourself of those feelings of shame is actually to go public, right? With your failures, with your mistakes, and use that as a way to hopefully help other people not make those mistakes. So you take your failures and you kind of hold them up like a banner, right? You say, look at me, I really screwed up. It was

horrible, but I'm telling you this because hopefully you won't do what I did, right? You won't kill a guy and go to jail, you know, as a part of a gang initiation or whatever. or whatever. So this is, you know, this is the hard work. To me, the food and exercise, that was easy, right? The real hard work is getting control of your thoughts and your emotions and forgiving people who've hurt you and letting them go. And by the way, when those resentment, those feelings of resentment start to creep back in, you just have to interrupt that and say, no, I forgave them. Right? Like, I'm not going to let the resentment creep back in. And healing really happens.

I like to say, if you have a sick heart, you're going to have a sick body. And anger and guilt and shame and bitterness that produces a sick heart. You know, there's a lot of people walking around with that are really hurt, right? They've really been beat up. Their hearts are hard, right? They're battered and bruised and they've been broken. And you know, there's, you know, there are a lot of people that are in a lot of pain and they're really hurt. And when you have a sick heart, eventually you're going to have a sick body and forgiveness heals your heart. It really does. And it's, and the, the, the misunderstanding I think around forgiveness is that people think, uh, I'll forgive when they're sorry. Right. Or I'll forgive them when I feel like it. Right. Well, they may never be sorry. And you may never feel like it until you're on your deathbed. And in the meantime, you have a lifetime of suffering. Right. Because unforgiveness really traps you in a prison of pain.

Hey, this reminds me of when they tell you when people will say smoking's bad and I'll be like, hey, you know, you should really tell people is like, hey, if you take a hit off this cigarette, there's two. This ends two ways. You have to quit, which will be the hardest thing you do in your entire life, or it's going to kill you. Those are the two options. Anger is the exact same way. If you get angry at someone and you start feeding the resentment, this will end in two ways. You will either have to forgive them or it will kill you. It will grow inside of you like a cancer and it will kill you. And it's very interesting how many people argue with reality so let's say um you and i had

this podcast scheduled and um yesterday last night you would have said to me at nine o'clock hey i can't come on i'm sorry i canceled and i started to get upset at you fuck he canceled last minute but then at 9 30 you wrote me back and be like oh i'm sorry i looked at the calendar wrong i can go on i just wasted 30 minutes of my life being mad at you for something that wasn't even real yet. Right. And I have no idea. Maybe tomorrow morning something even better was going to happen to me. I was going to go to the skate park and find a suitcase full of cash.

I mean, it's just crazy that we all know this, and yet we keep falling for the same tricks over and over and over. over and over and over. I had a mentor at church I went to back when I was in college who really ingrained something into me, and it's helped me a lot in my life, and that is choose to believe the best about people. Ah. Right? Dear Dr. Fauci, I want to tell you, I bet you're a great grandfather. Yeah. But, but that example that you gave is the perfect example, right? Where something happens, somebody doesn't show up or whatever, and you just jump to a conclusion about that person. And then that fosters this anger and resentment and all this kind of stuff. And instead just be like, you know what? I'm sure there was a perfectly good reason. And I'm certainly not perfect. I've had to cancel before right it'll be fine right so that's that's the alternative right to handling that kind of a

situation and we have those situations constantly in life where people people don't meet our expectations or our expectations are unrealistic or people are um they are thoughtless, you know, deliberately or unintentionally or whatever, or they're just having a horrible day and they're rude to us or whatever. It's like, you know, it just takes a moment to not react and to choose how to read how you're going to react. And, and that's, you know, I'm not, I haven't perfected it, but right. You have to always be watching. You have to be in a meditative state at all times to catch those things. Like you were saying, Chris, I got a question when you were 26 and

you were diagnosed, were you married? Yeah. I'd been married for two years. Um, I know people, the general rule is don't let the people around you change. Like she married this guy who was a certain way, right? And then you had to change – you changed – she obviously loved you for what she was experiencing. And you've gone through a complete metamorphosis emotionally, physically, the way you eat, the way you move, the way you talk. Was that hard for her? Did she try to hold on to things that were even bad things that she knew she shouldn't be holding? Like even fights you have with your wife are hard to stop because we hold on to everything, right? We hold on to everything. Was that, I can't believe your marriage survived, to be honest.

Thanks for bringing that up because it's really something worth talking about. You know, first I have to give- Even obese people, everyone around you says they want you to lose weight. They don't fucking want you to lose weight. Right, right, right. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but they're holding on to who you are. No one wants change. Yeah.

Holding on to who you are. No one wants change. Yeah. So a similar thing happened to me first, which is after we got married, but before I was diagnosed with cancer, my wife decided she really liked country music and started listening to country music all the time. And I'm like, who are you? Like, who are you? Why do you like country music now?

Right? It wasn't enough to end our marriage, obviously, but, but so she did it to me first and then it, but it turned out to be a phase and then she doesn't really listen to country music anymore. But, but no, when I, when I changed my diet, I mean, I, I did become a bit of a crazy person, you know, and I was still trying to, uh, I wasn't emotionally mature, uh i wasn't emotionally mature right to to to net to manage our relationship in the right way and so what happened was i had that what i call the just add water instant expert mentality that we see with so many people nowadays right they learn one thing and now they're an expert right they read one book and now they're an expert, right? They read one book and

now they're an expert, that kind of thing. And so I, I totally believed in the raw food diet and, and what I was doing, but I, but I became an instant evangelist, right? And I was trying to drag my wife along with me and she, she wasn't having it and she dug her heels in and she didn't, you know, didn't understand it. And she was frustrated because she really thought I needed to do chemotherapy and thought I was making a huge mistake. So she was not happy about that. And at one point, you know, it definitely came to a head at one point where I don't know even what I was saying, but she said to me, I don't like the person you're becoming. the person you're becoming. And that was really hard. It was really hard to hear because I was trying so hard to save my own life and she didn't understand, but I also was not handling our

relationship in the right way. I should have just been focused on me instead of just trying to drag her along. And, but I think that was probably a pivotal moment when I just realized, okay, I just need to let her be. And I just got to take care of myself. And this is the advice I give to patients. Now, I'm like, don't try to change your spouse. Don't try to change your family, your friend, just focus on you, right? You need to get well. Eventually, if you get well, and when you get well, then people will come and ask, how'd you do it? Then you can evangelize. Right. And so, so yeah, that was pretty, it was a pretty rough go there in the beginning. But, but you know, what helped us is when she saw how, you know, the doctors treated us, you know, like that was an eye opener for her when she saw how callous and cold so many people, you know, just some of the people in the medical industry were that we had interactions with like that first oncologist. So, um, it was rough but man we got we got through it we're still married we have

two beautiful girls now and one of them is a senior in high school crazy insane because she was born the year out you know the the 12 in 12 months 12 months after i was diagnosed is when are you homeschooling or are they in school they're in school yeah i'm surprised you did that well we actually love their school it's it's a classical christian school so they teach them logic and reason rhetoric oh all right yeah now i see why yeah they they teach them how to think they teach them how to um they teach them how to uh well they teach a rhetoric which is persuasive speech it's it's a pretty cool the classical curriculum is pretty cool because like ninth through 12th grade, they have to give a dissertation to their class

every year. And by the time they get to become a senior, the dissertation, I think is 20 minutes long. And then they have to defend it. Wow. They have to give it, you know, pick a topic, give a speech and then be challenged and defend their position. And so what state is this school in? This is in Memphis, Tennessee. It's called Westminster Academy. Wow. So it's pretty cool, but it's, there's a larger association of schools that are called classical schools where they, they kind of are going back to this, you know, Socratic Greek method

of, of teaching and learning where, um, you know, they're, they're, they're really focused on teaching kids how to think, right. Not just memorize this and spit it back out on the test, right. Like they're, they're, they're teaching them how to think creatively and, and solve problems and use, yeah. Um, use their brains, you know? So it's, it's been, it's been a great experience, but point is, yeah, it's like, I had, you know, no children going into this. And then my wife did the most courageous thing of any person I know. I mean, she, I wanted to start a family because like when you get a cancer diagnosis, it's like, I've got a time limit on my life.

I don't know how much time I have. And you know what cancer does is it just cuts this dividing line between everything that you thought mattered and everything that really matters. And what you realize is everything you thought mattered is like this much and everything that really matters is like this much, right? It's like all I really care about, well, the old expression is the healthy person cares about everything. The sick person only cares about one thing. Right, right, right right i had a urinary tract infection once i know exactly what you're talking about yeah i rushed to the fucking hospital i'm like anything do anything yeah do anything my priority shifted obviously have you

ever had one of those have you ever had one of those no no you don't want one of those i i i agree it's like peeing glass like peeing broken glass yeah i've never had you doctor that helped me because they help you so quick they give you a shot and that shit goes away but i would go to the hospital for that no problem yeah yeah yeah i i had crabs too but that was totally as those i – Someone else reminding you too. Thank you. That was enough. That's funny. That was enough. Well, the thing – Do you think you had kids maybe to give yourself a reason to live? Like when I read that in the book that you had a daughter, I was like, oh, shit.

He's bringing a child into this world so he has the ultimate reason to live. And maybe even if you didn't do it, it had to have had that net effect, right? Well, before I answer that, I got to finish singing my wife's praises because she made this courageous decision. I said, I think I want to start a family. And she said, yes. Like she said yes to start a family, not knowing if I was going to be alive to help raise my daughter or raise the kid whatever the kid was you know like that to me i mean at the time i didn't realize the gravity of it at the time like i do now because then she's not going to be with another guy either really now that's if you had died you left a woman with a baby in the short term definitely yeah and um so she loved me that much. I mean, it was just an incredibly sacrificial look. Oh my

gosh, that picture. Uh, that was probably five years ago. Um, so anyway, and it gets me, uh, yeah, it gets me a little emotional thinking about it, but, uh, but yeah. So when I was diagnosed, this is okay. So there, there's a thing that i call the beat cancer mindset and this is what i had and what i found is over and over and over and every patient every survivor i've ever interviewed that got well against the odds they all had the same mindset and there's there's several components to it but number one thing is you have to believe you can get well that's the first thing you have to believe that healing is possible. Because if you don't, you're really not going to take action. You're not going to change your life.

It's just not going to, you're not going to accomplish anything if you don't believe it's possible. Right? It's like, if you don't believe you can get to the CrossFit Games, you're not going to train. So you have to believe it's possible. And then you have to be willing to take responsibility for your life and your health. You have to be willing to change your whole life. And you have to have a strong will to live. You have to want to live. And I had a practitioner ask me, do you want to live? And it was actually terrifying. That's a scary question because I already had cancer, right? I had this life-threatening disease. I don't know. Do I want to live?

Do I have a secret death wish? Is that why I'm sick, right? Have I been manifesting this disease with all of my just swirling negativity and stress? But I also realized in that moment that even if that was true, that I had a choice and I could choose to live. And so I was like, yes, I'm choosing, right? I'm choosing to live. I'm deciding, yes, I want to live. Up to this point, maybe I didn't, you know, but now I do. And I got very clear about why I wanted to live. What are my reasons to live? And this is the question I ask every cancer patient. Do you want to live and why? And my why

was my mom and dad, because I'm an only child and my wife. And I couldn't bear the thought of those three people standing graveside, putting me in the ground. That, I mean, that was just, I'm a pretty big deal to three people. You know what I mean? And so my wife and I dated for six years and we'd be married for two. So we'd been together eight years. You know, it's like a third of our life at that point we'd been together um so i got very clear i have to live for these people and then when she got pregnant as you astutely uh inferred i had another reason to live and a year after i was diagnosed i was back in the hospital holding this beautiful baby girl a year after you were diagnosed with cancer, you had a kid in your

hands. That's in the book too. I can't even believe that. And it was, yeah. And it just was more fuel to the fire. It's like, I have to live for these people, right? I have to live for my mom and dad. I have to live for my wife. I have to live for this little baby girl. And so yeah, it helped. It helped with the motivation for sure. Yeah, it did add a layer. I mean, you know, in some sense, maybe it added a layer of stress, but it didn't, it just didn't feel that way at the time. It just added joy, you know? Right. It just added a whole new dimension. I mean, do you have kids? I do. I have three kids yeah then

you get two five-year-olds and an eight-year-old and they're like they're everything to me yeah becoming a parent is like the most wonderful life experience it's just the best it just you can't understand it until you have a kid and then you're like wow like what was my life like before this it was so empty right right so uh and i'm not diminishing anyone out there who doesn't have kids i'm just saying i am i am this is not but i am it really does change you and you won't regret it uh but um yeah so that man that was just you know i i have no regrets about that and we had another daughter about three and a half years later and so i have two girls and they're both in high school and one's about to go to college

next year. And like, I just can't believe this much time has gone by. And the one thing that I did, you know, I waited six and a half years before I even started talking about my cancer story. I wasn't thinking about blogging. I wasn't doing interviews. I wasn't thinking about a book. I, that was so far off my radar. The only thing I cared about was getting well, right. Getting well paying my bills, taking care of my little family. That was it. And I was a musician too. So I was playing, playing music on the side and doing that stuff. That was kind of my fun, you know, just my extracurricular,

but is that band still together? You guys released two albums, right? Yeah, that band was called Arma Secreta, which is Portuguese for secret weapon. No, no, because what happened is in 2010, I started the Crispy Cancer blog. And it was just kind of crazy. I mean, as soon as I started writing articles and making videos, I mean, just people were just coming at me from everywhere. Like I didn't expect there would be that much demand just for encouragement, you know, and practical information on cancer survival and

nutrition for cancer. And, and so it, it, you know, it just started getting a lot of traction. I realized, well, I can't do this and music. Right. And this really feels like what I'm supposed to do with my life. Like this really feels like important. And so it became my part-time passion that after over the course of about five years consumed my whole life and, and I quit real estate and in 2015 basically. And so, yeah. And then I wrote my first book which came out in 2018 so yeah you know it just you know you you brought this up earlier i i just wanted to put my story out there because i thought it would be helpful like i knew how scary cancer was i'd lived through it i felt like i could give people hope and encouragement and practical,

actionable information that they could use to increase their odds of survival and healing the same things that I did. And so like, yeah, I'll just, I don't know, I guess I'll just put it out there and just start telling my story. And, uh, yeah, here I am on this, you know, on your podcast. And I mean, I'm doing interviews almost every day. Yeah, it's crazy. People want to talk to me. I'm so glad. Chris, do you ever get concerned?

I sincerely believe that there's people out there who believe, including myself, that, hey, this is the path. And I'll talk about it on here. And I'll have guests, really smart guests who come on and be like, this is the path. Let's use diet, for instance. You should be eating meats, vegetables, nuts and seeds, no sugar. And this is the path you should be going down. And it's OK to eat as much animal products as you want. Just stay away from the refined carbohydrates and ultra processed foods. just stay away from the refined carbohydrates and ultra processed foods. And in this, in they're saying this, knowing that there's, or maybe they don't know, but there's ramifications to people saying that stuff. There's ramifications to me coming on my podcast and showing people, Hey,

look, I just opened a package of raw ground beef and I'm just eating it right in front of you. And I'm espousing that it's healthy. And I felt great that day. Like, like amazing. It was actually one of the few times that I actually got full in my life without feeling full. When I eat raw meat, I actually feel full with no feeling of full zero, absolutely zero bloating. Uh, like you might feel with vegetables and, and, and, or nuts or just that other stuff that you actually feel in your body. So, but you, on the other hand, have a, uh, three or four, you have four books you have three books tons of speaking engagements um a profound story do you ever get concerned that do you ever second guess yourself like maybe i'm misleading people i did more in the beginning okay in the beginning when i first

started sharing my story, I thought, and not intentionally, of course, I mean, not intentionally, but it's like, what if I'm wrong? And by the way, that's a very healthy thought to, to just hold onto. Right. What if I'm wrong? Check yourself. Maybe I'm wrong. Right.

And I've never, I've never not, you know, been willing. And I'm open to that too, by the way. I'm completely open to that too by the way i'm completely open to that i'm so glad yeah it's it's healthy to just be always willing to say maybe i'm wrong because then otherwise you're just in dogma and that's what we have in science and a lot of science it's like right everybody's so convinced they're right and they're not even willing to consider that they may not be right um which makes it not science makes it not science. It's completely unscientific, right. To be, to be convinced of that something is scientifically true when science is constantly

changing, as you said, in the very beginning of this interview. But, um, in the beginning, yeah, I was kind of like, well, I got, well, I, I totally got, well, I know exactly what I did. I, I made this massive action in my life and I'm sharing my story to, to hopefully encourage others that they can take control of their life and their health and they can impact their survival with their choices. But, but I didn't know anything about nutritional science. So I definitely had a lot of, uh, insecurity and reservations about, well, maybe, I don't know, maybe, okay, maybe I am just lucky, right? Maybe I'm just a fluke. And then I started digging into nutritional science and I realized, oh my gosh,

there's so much literature on anti-cancer nutrition. I mean, there's this awesome study on the most potent anti-cancer foods, vegetables. And what they do is they dripped vegetable extracts, basically vegetable juices on cancer cells, eight different cell lines. I talk about it in the book, but the most powerful anti-cancer food on earth known is garlic. Number two is onions. Number three is leeks. So those are all in the same vegetable family, the allium family. And then rounding out the top 10 is the cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, kale brussels sprouts bok choy and

so it's like man if these if these just the juice from these foods can completely eradicate kill cancer cells in the lab like what are they doing in your body you know and so that they're not doing nothing so there's so many awesome studies like that, right? On the, on the anti-cancer, um, value of Allison and garlic or anthocyanins and berries or sulforaphane in cruciferous vegetables, Indole, Indole three carbonyl, like all these, whatever, like, I don't want to sound too nerdy about it, but too late. What? Yeah. Once I started down that path, it, it just opened up to me and I realized, oh my gosh, there's so much science here. There's so much evidence. There's so much research.

Nobody's talking about it, but it's real. And it helped me understand how I got well. And that is why it took me so long to write the book. Again, I was diagnosed in 03. The book came out in 2018. So it was 15 years of learning, living it, right? And then learning more and understanding the science. And so I could explain it and articulate it in a way that made sense to people that wasn't. And you do in the book. Thank you. Crispy cancer. You guys, it's so dense with information.

Yeah. And to use a cliche, look, there's more than one way to skin a cat. And can someone get well, um, you know, eating tree bark and drinking their own urine? Maybe. Right. Right. Uh, but like that Everest analogy, we know what has worked for the vast majority of people who are taking a nutritional approach

and that's the raw food diet. And, and so again, it's, it's not just the diet, right? But I think that's the best anti-cancer diet, but then it's exercise and forgiveness and stress reduction, right? It's radical life change for sure. Some people can get well just from forgiveness. I really believe that. Well, that is the biggest barrier to healing. If you're eating shit, if you go to McDonald's every day and get a Big Mac, a shake and a large french fries, and then all of a sudden you switch to the carnivore diet, eating meats that are from your local farmer, of course, you're going to have a dramatic shift. Greg, last time you said this, the founder of CrossFit, get on,

basically experiment and make changes. Like, I don't even care. Like, go vegan, go carnivore, but start making changes. And you will start seeing change. I mean, it's pretty clear on that level. I just have been so – what's interesting is when I came across you, I didn't know that that was your – I just knew about your story, Chris Beat Cancer, and I didn't know about your eating protocol. But when I got into it, I'm like, oh, this is going to be great because my show is always pushed the other way. my show is always pushed the other way, but I am, I am, uh, I've all, there's been times in my life where I've been vegan and I love vegetables and sort of this community that I've fallen into doesn't eat vegetables. I love vegetables. I could just sit down with a pound of broccoli and eat it and watch a movie. Like no problem. Just raw. I've always been like that. And I'm glad to hear you say that about garlic. What about asparagus? Yeah about asparagus yeah you know asparagus is fine it's you know it's a vegetable it's fine it's healthy um i i don't particularly find it particularly

find it to be extra special it's fun because you eat it and then a few minutes later you pee and you like you know you ate it that's why i like it yeah it does give you that it's like yeah like fenugreek have you ever taken that. It makes your armpits smell like maple syrup. No, wow. Yeah. And it actually, fenugreek is an athletic performance enhancer, too, that herb. Can you find that, Caleb? Caleb, can you find fenugreek?

Yeah, fenugreek. It's easy to find. What is it? It's a pill? You can get, yeah. Well, it's an herb, right? But you can get it in pill form yeah wow um so there's no room for dietary dogma when you're sick that that's the important message

i think you know it's fine and and we've really that's weird coming from you i mean not really but but aren't you if I told you I had cancer and you said to me, Sevan, do you want to live? And I would say, yeah, you'd be like, okay, get this book and follow this. Isn't that dogma? No. Okay. No, that's just a strategy, right? The dogma is believing that your diet is the best and being unwilling to change your diet because you believe it's the best. being unwilling to change your diet because you believe it's the best. And even though you're sick, right? That's where the dogma becomes dangerous, right? Where someone's like, I'm keto, I'm carnivore, I'm paleo, I'm whatever,

right? And they get sick and they're like, well, it's not my diet. Maybe it is, you know, like, maybe it is like, you have to be willing to, which is what I did is kind of put everything on the table, right. And, and sort through what in your life is actually promoting health and what's promoting disease and put on your little, you know, Sherlock Holmes investigator cap. And, and you know, all your assumptions just have to go out the window when you're sick, right. You're assuming you're eating healthy and then you get sick and it's like, okay, maybe

I wasn't. I thought I was. I was convinced I was. I read these books and I followed these people on the internet and they all told me I was. But yeah, sickness has a way of sort of, you know, hopefully resetting your belief system and taking you back to zero in a way. And at least it did for me. And, and I think it should, but yeah, so, you know, it's like, there's people that love to argue about what's the healthiest diet and all that kind of stuff. And at the end of the day, you

know, we've just seen so many people get well, overdosing on fruits and vegetables, eating tons of raw food and juicing and changing their life. That's what we encourage people to do if they're sick, you know, it's like, okay, if it doesn't work for you, you can always eat something else. But 90 days are the protocol that we encourage is 90 days, hardcore, all raw. Where is that protocol? Is it one of the books? Yeah, it's in Chris beat cancer. And then we have a private coaching community called square one. Um, that's, uh, yeah, the people that, you know, just, it's a community for people that are really serious about changing their health and healing and, um, but it's the same information.

And so it's like 90 days, hardcore of, uh, raw fruits and vegetables and fresh juices and, um, an exercise and forgiveness. And I mean, we just see miraculous things happen. I mean, they get their blood work done, they start this thing and somewhere between 30 and 90 days, they get another scan or another more blood work, another checkup. And I mean, just things are better, right? Tumors are shrinking, cancer markers are down, cholesterol's improved, blood are shrinking. Cancer markers are down. Cholesterol's improved. Blood sugar's improved. C-reactive protein, that's inflammation, is way, way down. I mean, basically approaching zero. You know, we just see all this cool stuff happening that's measurable.

And at the end of the day, you know, I just want to help people get well and i get it some people can take a different path and hey i'm all for it and and the one thing i should say in case anyone's jumping to conclusions i we never tell anyone not to do chemotherapy i've never told anyone don't do chemo uh i have i have i'm very very deliberate about explaining the risks of chemotherapy because there are many, they are numerous and life-threatening, but every person has to make their own decision. And we have a lot of folks in our community that are doing chemotherapy and doing everything the doctor says and more, right? And that's my role as a patient advocate is like to help a patient understand, you know, you can do treatment or not do treatment.

But if you do treatment, you have to understand that healing happens at home. And what you're doing in between treatments can mean the difference between survival and death. So that's the food you're putting in your mouth, exercising, dealing with stress, reorganizing your life. Those are the things that you can do that will only help, right? They will only help. They will not harm. So we just love everybody, you know, it's like, we just love them and encourage them.

And, and, um, that's why I keep interviewing cancer survivors and doctors and experts. It's just to spark that tiny little bit of hope so that a person believes healing is possible. Right. That's where it all starts. And when you watch interview after interview after interview that I've done with people who've healed cancer, advanced cancers, you start to get the hope right you start to believe it's possible and then and then you're on your way right so yeah i mean but i'm always i have you strongly held beliefs right but they're held loosely yeah yeah they're strong beliefs i said that wrong but it's strong beliefs held loosely. So I'm, I'm constantly learning. And, uh, if something better came along, if, if I, you know, if the evidence presented

that convinced me that the carnivore diet was the optimal diet for healing cancer, I, I would be open to it. Right. Right. Uh, some stuff like that. And this book is full of research that, that, that, that backs up what Chris is saying, by the way, full, endless, tons. There's a lot of research in there. Yeah. And there's a lot more that I couldn't cram in there.

I mean, it's just, there's just so much, so much research out there and it's exciting. That's the thing is when you start to learn, it's one thing to be like, I should eat healthier. And cause I feel like I should, and it's good. But when you start just like learning a little bit about nutritional science, then to me, it just, it gets me excited about eating healthy. And that's the difference between, oh, I can't eat those foods because they're bad, right?

That's one mindset. And the other mindset is I want to eat these foods because they're so good. You know what I mean? So it's like, there's this sort of like fear base, like, Ooh, these are bad. Don't eat them. And that's valuable to understand that food's unhealthy. But, and I think there's a lasting impact if you can help someone under help someone

get excited about healthy food. And, uh, that worked for me and I've seen it help a lot of people stay the course when they just really dig in and start, they just realize like, oh, what I'm eating right now isn't just a piece of green broccoli. It's sulforaphane and indole-3-carbinol. Are you a fan of these ideas around autophagy and fasting? Are you a fan of these ideas around autophagy and fasting? Oh, yeah. Fasting was a huge part of my cancer protocol.

I mean, we talk about it all the time. We encourage patients to do it. You know, when you fast, juice fasting is wonderful, and I did a lot of that, and water fasting too. But yeah, when you're fasting, your body goes into internal house cleaning mode. Cancer cells are weakened and some die and then all, and you know, old and damaged cells die off. And then your body ramps up production of new healthy immune cells. I mean, and, and other cells, but the exciting thing is that you get this immune cell regeneration. And I've interviewed Dr. Walter Longo a couple of times and, you know, and several other fasting experts, Frank Sabatino, Dr. Alan Goldhammer, who runs True North Fasting Center in California.

So, yeah. Bad guys die, good guys get invigorated. That's basically what happens and when the bad cells when the old and damaged cells die off like you know these cells are called senescent cells which is a fancy word for senile so we've got these old immune cells floating around they're just old right and old cells don't do a great job right it's like it's like the obese army And well, they also have an old army. So if your immune system is a mix of old and obese cells, you've got a crappy immune system. And I think the big lie, this is kind of rabbit trailing, but one of the big lies during the

pandemic was that we all somehow have the same immune system, right? That everybody walking around has the same functioning immune system. And that's just completely false. Like some people have really weak immune systems and it's because of their diet and lifestyle choices and partly can also be due to age, you know, being elderly and vitamin D status. That was sort of the common denominator

between the most vulnerable populations. The acronym SODA, S-O-D-A, senior, obese, diabetic, and African-American, but really dark skin, all had, chronically, have extremely low vitamin D. And vitamin D is one of the most important immune system, anti-cancer, antiviral, uh, hormone slash vitamins in the body. Why black people? Because their body's designed, their skin's designed to live closer to the equator where they wouldn't need to retain more vitamin D where they would get it naturally from the sun? So not exactly. It's more like, yes, the darker your skin, the more sunlight it takes to produce vitamin D. And since originally darker people were from closer to the equator, they had just

evolved that way. Yeah. The right. Yeah. So like if you live close to the equator, you have dark skin and that's protective and you can you can endure more sunshine but if you live in you know in a modern society like we do and you spend most of your time indoors and you're not getting real sunshine so a white a light-skinned person produces more vitamin d per minute than a dark-skinned person in the same sunlight exposure so yeah that's why okay okay i i hear you but it's an it's an adaptation because of of their i mean if you're if you're a healthy person white or black and you're spending adequate time outside it probably wouldn't have been an issue that's right oh yeah yeah and we just don't get enough sunshine right we're indoors all the time not me

i get plenty we're not yeah we you know what i mean the collective we yes yes but i do too i mean i just like to show off the sun's amazing you know sunshine's incredible vitamin d is incredible and not to mention that but also the the um infrared light from the sun is is incredible produces melatonin inside your cells uh dark-skinned people lived in europe for ages and thrived yeah outside yeah that's the key right outside outside but there's a there's a cool app called d minder uh and it it's a vitamin d tracking app where you put you know you put in your location and the time you spend in the sun and it, and it has all these, you know, it sort of pulls all this data together to tell

you how much vitamin D you'll produce, uh, based on how much sunshine you get in any region and, and based on your age and your skin tone and all this stuff. It's pretty cool. D minder. Caleb, is this true? This is the first time, uh, I've spoken. Come this true this is the first time uh i've spoken come on this is the first time i've spoken less than the guest is that true no i don't think so there was a show like last week or something it was oh shit there's only one other show i outtalked you? Wow. You're out-gone. You're gone, Caleb. That's funny. Birth control. No bueno if you want to, like, mitigate your cancer risks. Oral birth controls.

You know, man, there are so many drugs that increase cancer risk. Birth control is one. But look, if you ever watch television every drug ad almost at the end they give you all the disclosures you know why they got like two people riding a bicycle built for two you know or like on a swing set or like paddling across a pond they're telling you these like horrific side effects hoping you'll be distracted by like this idyllic life that they think you will be leading when you're on the drug uh they want you to believe you'll be distracted by like this idyllic life that they think you will be leading when you're on the drug uh they want you to believe you'll be leading and yeah it may increase risk

of certain types of cancer i mean that is in the in the drug disclosure so many drugs and uh you know they have to tell you by law because it's true, right? Believe me, they wouldn't say that on the commercial if they did not have to say it. So any, any pharmaceutical, I mean, that's a generalization, but many, many, many pharmaceuticals increase cancer risk and taking multiple pharmaceuticals can compound that risk. And so, you know, something I did, I don't think I said earlier, but this is important. Up to 90% of cancers are caused by our diet, our lifestyle choices, and our environment. Up to 90%. Only 5% or so are genetic. And even epigenetics has proven that you can influence the expression of genes based on your diet and lifestyle and environment. So that really does

bring it back to personal responsibility. What are you eating? That's your diet. Your lifestyle is, are you drinking and smoking? Are you taking pharmaceuticals? Are you taking illegal drugs? Are you not sleeping? Are you staying up too late? Are you getting sunshine or not? Are you exercising? So that lifestyle umbrella is pretty big. And then the environmental factor, which we didn't even get into, but it's pretty obvious. It's not worth spending a whole lot of time on, but there's a lot of environmental pollution. There's a lot of toxic stuff in our environment produced by mostly by humans, um, and spewed into the air, you know, like mercury from coal plants or, uh, all these chemicals from manufacturing and plastics and all this kind of stuff, uh, in body care products,

makeup, you know, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoos on and and on and on and so those things are definitely increasing cancer risk not to mention pesticides herbicides fungicides roundup you know so um tied do you use tied tied yeah no no no i mean in 2004 i clean i, we cleaned house. My wife hates the fact that I use detergent still to wash our clothes. What do you use to wash your clothes? My wife won't let me wash her clothes. Well, there are a lot of non-toxic detergents out there now, which is great. Like there's brands at Whole Foods, like Seventh Generation. We like a brand called Truly Free, and they ship like refills to our house once a month.

Does it smell like patchouli? No, it smells amazing. I'm telling you, this is the best, this is the best smelling laundry detergent. My wife and I have ever smelled like we're in love with it. Truly free is a great, great company. And I actually know the owner and they're just fantastic. But, um, yeah, they ship you a bottle and then once a month they ship you just the refills and you just you know so it's uh they don't produce a whole lot of plastic waste and

stuff like the typical tide or whoever um but i appreciate the bottle because that my wife has all these hippie bottles and it's like brown and shit and just when i see them all like i need the bottle to still look like tide and i like this like this. It still looks like Tide. Yeah. It's a normal looking bottle. Yeah. Yeah. But we cleaned house. I mean, we just got rid of all the toxic. Look, this week, this week, let me just read you this headline.

Okay. This week, just days ago, Unilever, you know who Unilever is? Yes. Okay. who Unilever is? Yes. Okay. Has recalled certain Dove, Nexus, Suave, Tigi, and Trace-Same aerosol dry shampoos because of the potential presence of benzene, a chemical that can cause cancer. Oh, I love Dove soap. It lathers so great. Okay. What bar soap do you use? Do you ever use bar soap? Bronners. Bronners. Yeah. There's tons of hippie soaps out there, so that's a pretty easy one. But yeah, but Bronners is great. I love Bronners. Love the liquid soap, love the bar soap.

You can get it anywhere. I mean, I think they sell it at Target. They've gotten really big. But we just cleaned house. We just got rid of all the toxic giant corporate made chemical cleaning products and body care products and all that kind of stuff. Because at the end of the day, is that the reason I got cancer? I don't know, probably not. But the goal, my goal is to reduce my toxic load as much as possible. And if you think about about how many how much toxic stuff you're exposed to on a daily basis you have control over a lot of it and so it just makes sense to reduce the burden on your body reduce the burden on your liver and your kidneys and the impact that these toxic chemical compounds can have at the cellular level like why not you know so um i agree i i agree i couldn't agree more yeah so we just made like

if you're gonna buy soap why not buy soap that doesn't cause you cancer right or soap that's just made from like real basic soap ingredients castile and lye or whatever and doesn't have a bunch of weird additives and uh chemical compounds you know at the end of the day there's there's tons of companies they just want to make money they don't care about you they, you know, at the end of the day, there's, there's tons of companies. They just want to make money. They don't care about you. They just, you know, want to sell you stuff. And, uh, that includes pharmaceutical companies and, um, and they have really no liability and that's the real tragedy. Uh, and by the time a drug is rushed to market, just, you know, or, or between the time a drug is rushed to market, which they are frequently, and the time they figure out it's horrible, hundreds of thousands of people have been impacted, typically. Because years have gone by.

And whenever a drug hits the market, I mean, the marketing campaign is huge. And so the doctors are prescribing it because they're bombarded with all this literature and calls from the pharmaceutical reps and all this kind of stuff. And so you look at the story of Vioxx or there's so many stories now um but uh bextra is another one um drugs that were recalled because they were safe and effective and brought to market and then you know hundreds of thousands of people are injured or die or whatever. Right. You can't expect, this is another full circle because you brought this up at the very beginning. You just can't expect the pharmaceutical industry to operate with your best interest in mind. They don't. Oh, for sure.

They never will. For sure. They don't. They don't. You know, their goal is to get a drug to market. And many pharmaceutical companies are convicted criminal organizations. Right. They've been convicted.

Right. Of felony behavior and fined billions of dollars. Like Pfizer and Merck. Merck's crazy. I can't define. I mean, it's like I interviewed interviewed john abramson who's dr john abramson who wrote a book called sickening this might be a fun interview for you too but he's an expert on pharmaceutical and healthcare industry fraud and has testified in the big cases against pfizer and

merc and um yeah i mean it's it's just just kind of mind blowing how corrupt they are and, you know, they'll make $10 billion and they'll look on a drug that gets recalled and then they get fined a billion dollars. You know what I mean? They're like, well, let's do that again. Right. We still cleared 9 billion bucks. Right. Yeah. There's the book sickening. Um, you know, uh, there's another one by Dr. Vinay Prasad, uh, called, uh, um, malignant and malignant is about just all the corruption in the cancer industry. And, um, but you know, we just need to be aware. You need to be aware. You cannot assume that these industries are operating for your benefit because they are not. Or that the doctors know. They don't know either. They're being duped. They're being duped by the pharma companies. Yeah. They are indoctrinated in med school to believe that all drugs are good and all drugs are beneficial and all drugs are science-based and evidence-based and that these are the best cutting edge state-of-the-art therapies available. And they're puffed up, right. They're puffed up with all this knowledge.

So they come out with this extreme level of really overconfidence straight out of med school, arrogance and overconfidence that they just know everything and that drugs are amazing and that it's science, you know, and, uh, they're, they're like, you know, these sort of like torchbearers for science or whatever. But, but yeah, it takes some time for a doctor, it really takes 20 years for a doctor to really become established, you know, in their profession with all the schooling and the training and the internships and the residency and all this kind of stuff. It's almost two decades to, to become a doctor. And by that point, you know, if we're talking about oncology, really any, any aspect of chronic disease care, I mean, it, then it takes years of prescribing

drugs to patients and not seeing them get better and seeing them just get worse and worse over time. It's pretty demoralizing. And by that time, I have great empathy for doctors because most of them are just trapped in a system that pays them really well, but they have no job satisfaction. Their patients aren't getting well. They're just staying sick and they're just adding more and more medications to that person's life and body. And physicians have one of the highest rates of suicide of any profession. Because it's, A, very difficult. It's like a meat grinder. They can only spend 10 or 15 minutes with each patient.

You can't give quality care in 15 minutes. And the insurance and liability costs are astronomical. Their overhead's astronomical. There's so much stress. And then they get such little job satisfaction. So it's like, it's a really rough profession and it's glamorized on, you know, like Grey's anatomy or whatever this doctor shows. Like there was a period where my eldest daughter was obsessed with Grey's anatomy and she wanted to be a doctor. And I kept trying to tell her, I kept trying to talk her out of it. I'm like, no, you don't. Like, you don't trust me. You don't. She finally kind of got over that because she realized how

much work it's going to take to get through med school. But I'm saying all that to say I have great empathy for physicians. It's so tough. My friend, Dr. Pamela Weibel, her entire mission is just to prevent physician suicides. Wow. This is what she does. She has a giant wall in her house that has pictures of every doctor that's committed suicide. Wow. It's like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of doctors. And she, yeah, she went from a, basically a primary care family practice physician. She's, her story is amazing. She worked in a hospital for years and realized it was awful and hated it. Then she became a primary care physician, and she was riding her bicycle and doing house calls as a medical doctor in Portland, I think.

I'm sorry. Huh? You said Portland. I said I'm sorry. Yeah. Portland's kind of rough now. I think it wasn't so I said, you said Portland. I said, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Portland's kind of rough. Now, I think it wasn't so bad back in the nineties, but, and now, yeah, her, her, her focus has shifted almost completely to, to preventing physician suicides because it's,

it's a real big problem, especially even in med school. So yeah, rabbit trail. But at the end of the day, the big point here is like, you have to be responsible for your own health. You have to be your own doctor. Doctors can be helpful. They can be a helpful part of your team. But at the end of the day, nobody's going to take better care of you than you if you decide to do it. Right? Like, you can't abdicate your power. You can't put all your faith, hope, and trust in the medical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, in a doctor who sees 60 patients a day and isn't going to remember your name if you see them in the grocery store. Unless you've seen them five or ten times, then they might remember your name. Right. But that's what

we're doing, right? We're putting all our faith, hope, and trust in this person that's totally overworked, that isn't educated on nutrition and healing, right? They're just taught how to prescribe drugs. You talk about menstruation and donating blood. and i thought i'd never heard this before but that one of the one of the thoughts or beliefs is that when women menstruate they dump excess iron uh through the menstruation process and so when they stop menstruating when they go through menopause they're not losing that blood regularly and therefore their cancer rates uh increase or their cancer risk increases but but but then on the other side you said donating blood there are some studies that show that donating blood regularly will also reduce

uh cancer rates is that true did i did i understand that right yeah it's in the book it's it's well documented you can google it it's pretty fascinating mineral, but it is also, uh, very toxic when you consume too much. And, um, so, you know, red meat is very high in iron and the body doesn't have a way to get rid of iron. You only get rid of it if you bleed, basically you'll use it eventually. But if you're consuming more than you use, then your iron toxicity just ratchets up. And yeah, what they found is that women, menstruation, every month, you're losing blood and you're reducing your iron, which is good. If you lose too much, then you're anemic. But for most women, that's not happening. But also, then when researchers

figured this part out they're like well what about people who donate blood wouldn't they just have the same effect and reducing the risk of cancer and heart disease and different things and it turns out it's true so donating blood also is a way to reduce your iron also not eating so much iron is the way to reduce your iron which is found in red meat red meat's the highest source yeah basically yeah what what of heme iron now all tons of plant food uh has iron but it's bound to an amino acid so it's a chelated form of iron that's a slow it's slowly slow absorbing and it's limited absorption are you also are you self-taught this is all just through just your own personal research in the

last 19 years yes yeah yeah so if you think about everyone everyone is self-taught right i mean yours i mean i didn't go yeah i didn't go to yours is good university you had a good teacher yeah but i've just read and read and read and read and read and all the most of the books that i've read were written by doctors and researchers and scientists. So it's like, it's the same thing as taking a class at a university. You read books by the smartest people you can find and try to assimilate that knowledge and make sense of it. Another topic I bring up on the show a lot that you mentioned in the book is you talk about Richard Horton from The Lancet. You talk about Marsha Engel from the New England Journal of Medicine. I didn't hear you mention this guy's name, but I'll throw him in the bunch too, Richard Smith from the British Medical Journal. These are all people who were like editors or high-level people at these journals, and they all have agreed that like, hey, you're better off believing that everything in here is wrong than right. all have agreed that like, Hey, you're better off believing that everything in here is wrong than right. That, that we've crossed the 50% mark and possibly the replication crisis,

that 50% of the stuff in medical journals is not replicatable. It's garbage, which is nuts, especially from the Lancet. I didn't know that about Richard Horton. Actually, when I read that in your book, I was like, wow. Yeah. I mean, there, there are, there are many, many, many whistleblowers inside the pharmaceutical and medical industry who've been saying for years and years and years, most of these studies are completely fraud. You mentioned the Amgen study. That one's crazy.

Yeah. Bayer did another very similar study where they tried to replicate a bunch of, a bunch of drug studies, right? So they could develop their own drugs. And what they found is that most of the studies they tried to replicate, they couldn't replicate, which means the studies were fraud. They were fakes or flukes.

And this is what pharmaceutical companies do. They will, they know how to engineer a study to get a positive result to, to prove quote unquote prove efficacy for a drug so they can get approval because there's billions of dollars at stake like if you can get the drug approved it's worth billions of dollars of revenue and it's just completely naive to assume that they're all honest and that they 47 of 53 studies could not be replicated of the 53 kind of foundational studies around uh cancer yeah that's nuts yeah 47 of 53 right yeah and that's amgen who did that

they're a fucking pharmaceutical company right and so is bayer right i mean and so, and Horton and Marsha, Angel, yeah, I mean, they're editors of huge medical journals, and they're saying the same thing. Like, look, these, the pharmaceutical companies pay for ads in the medical journals, you know, they fund the medical journals. So the journals aren't, they're not independent anymore. journals aren't they're not independent anymore i mean dr peter gochi who was one of the rich sort of founders major major guy over at the cochran collaboration which was for a long time the only that well the world's foremost independent research collaboration of scientists to do meta-analysis peer-reviewed studies to really get to the truth. You know, that's not, it wasn't influenced by pharmaceutical companies.

He left Cochran because it started to get corrupted. And he wrote a book called Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime. Put that on the reading list if you want to go down the rabbit hole. A lot of these guys like begley and and and uh gochie who just mentioned uh greg glassman the founder of crossfit would bring them to our headquarters and they would speak to us so i got to meet a lot of these guys

firsthand yeah it was it's nuts he that's a wild man that this the second man you mentioned gochie he's a wild have you met him he's amazing no oh he's a while you got to meet him he's a wild cat i'd like to interview him huge respect for the guy huge respect yeah but you know can we talk about the pandemic for a second because this is all i would love to i would love to this is what's so insane about everything that went down and and i was i was i mean you can scroll back on my you know two years ago on my facebook feed i mean it pretty much from day one i was like this is there's a lot of fear-mongering going on this I was, I mean, you can scroll back on my, you know, two years ago on my Facebook feed. I mean, pretty much from day one, I was like, this is, there's a lot of fear mongering going on. This is not healthy. Uh, we shouldn't be doing this. Even looking at the early data coming out of Italy. I'm like, okay, the people that are dying, like we said earlier, they're very old. They have

two or three comorbidities, you know, I don't smoking rate of any European country, Italy. Yeah. High smokers. Like, I don't think we all need toan country italy yeah high smokers like i don't think we all need to panic right i get it that some people are dying but i don't think we all need to panic here well anyway what was so insane about about all that and i you know i think we're on the same page your listeners i may be just repeating stuff you've been saying anyway but every step of the way it was like they did the opposite of what common sense would tell you to do. Like if you were in charge, if you were the big boss man, uh, at the CDC and there was a, uh, a big, scary, dangerous germ that was brand new,

uh, that came from nature. Uh, the first thing that I think you would do as a rational person, is I think you would say, okay, well, there's a germ. It appears to be a problem. So we need all the physicians on the front lines of the hospitals to do your best.

Use the medicines you have available. Try to save lives, tell us what's working. That's what I would do, right? Let's get together, right? Let's communicate. Let's try to save lives. Let's try to solve this problem. We don't have a peer-reviewed study. This is a new germ. And so we just got to do our best to to save lives and reduce the impact and but that's not what happened what happened was physicians started doing that uh and they started reporting hey we're using this drug and that drug and another drug in combination um we're reducing inflammation we're um we're preventing the blood clots. And we're using some antivirals, whatever, antibiotics. We're trying some different things.

And our patients aren't dying. And as soon as doctors started reporting that, they were deleted off social media. They were censored. They were accused of quackery. They were accused of not practicing evidence-based medicine. Hit pieces were published. not practicing evidence-based medicine hit pieces were published and then and right around that time too the fda and cdc basically come out and they keep repeating this message there are no approved treatments you remember this there are no that instagram post the fda made making fun of people

taking instagram uh taking ivermectin they They said it was for horses. Do you remember that Instagram? Yeah, for sure. Fucking FDA is getting in the mean game. Yeah, they definitely, they definitely did. I know they said, you know, it's, it's for cows and horses y'all or something like that. Um, but even before that, cause that came a little later, you know, it was a deliberate effort to intimidate doctors to do nothing. And so when patients got sick, when people got sick, they go to the hospital and the doctor says, yeah, well, you tested positive, but we can't do anything for you. So you just need to go home. And if you get hypoxic and you start turning blue, then you can come back and we'll admit you.

And then when we admit you, we'll give you aspirin and oxygen and maybe remdesivir, which is a junk drug anyway. And then we'll put you on a ventilator. It actually kills people, I believe. Yeah. Kidney failure. It's not a good drug. So, I mean, it was the most egregious, I mean, it was the most egregious, deliberate attempt to suppress available medicines in order to create an opportunity to a drug rushed to market in an emergency is if you demonstrate there are no other drugs to treat X disease or X germ. And they were effective. They did it. I mean, they pulled it off for sure.

They demonized every drug on the market. They demonized every doctor who was using available medicines off-label, which doctors have done forever. They've always had the freedom to do that until 2020. It's called practicing emergency-based medicine, right? And experience-based medicine, right? They're using their expertise and their experience in an emergency to save lives. That's what doctors do in the hospital all the time.

When someone comes in with weird infections and weird symptoms, they're doing this every day, but all of a sudden it was illegal, essentially illegal, or they risk losing their license to do this when a pandemic was declared. So yeah, I mean, it just takes a little bit of common sense to think about the way everything went down to realize that it wasn't incompetence. I mean, it just takes a little bit of common sense to think about the way everything went down to realize that it wasn't incompetence. I mean, it was clearly a very well orchestrated campaign to reap billions and billions in profit. I don't know if I know as many doctors as you, but I know a lot. And I'd say 20% of them are aware and 80% are still, still defending the idiocy. We've been doing the CrossFit Games have been going on for 16 years. We had two athletes go down with clotting this year.

It's never happened before. Both from Canada. Yep. And they had to get it. And they're telling me that one of the girls who got the clotting, it was from acupuncture because they had fucking hidden artery. And it's like, dude, I just want to be like, stop, stop. Even if you're right, stop.

16 years of athletes performing at the highest level at this games and a 26 year old girl has clotting in her arm. They were both arterial clotting, which is completely fucking unheard of in healthy people. I mean, it's a. There's so many doctors that are still towing the line. I just wish they would stop. And the 20% of you that aren't, you're saints. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, well, but let's also not forget the insanity of 2021 when they forced this experimental drug gene therapy rush to market

with no long-term safety testing, when they forced hospital workers to get it and then fired them if they didn't get it which i'm and i and i again i i wrote a post about this back then i'm like so the health care workers that worked all the way through the pandemic and didn't die. Wow. Right. This is the A team we're talking about. Yeah.

Right. They, they bathed in it. They bathed in it. They were courageous. They showed up and they didn't die and you're going to fire them now. Really? That seems like really poor leadership.

And, um, and of course, Chris, do you have more time? Yeah. Um, uh, I need to take,

I have to go pee. Do you have to go to the bathroom? Nope. No. Is that because you eat vegetables? Yep. Were you thinking that right away? You're like,

Oh, this guy's got, I just haven't had that much to drink this morning. So I'm actually just, yeah, I'm good. And you, and you don't drink coffee. No. I'm sure they, they said they made a commercial for me to run so I could go pee, but I don't see it. Oh, there it is. Okay. Let's see if I can go and come back in one minute and five seconds. That's how long this commercial is. I believe in you. Okay, thank you.

You don't even have to want to do CrossFit. You don't have to want to be a coach. You don't have to want to be a trainer. If you just want the operating manual to your body, it's not just Forging Elite Fitness. It's the operating manual to the human genome. You'll take this CrossFit Level 1 seminar, and you will walk away inspired. From the second you leave, your entire life will change. You will make significant changes to your life because you

are excited. You will start tweaking with your diet. You'll start tweaking with your movement. You'll start tweaking with who you hang out with. Everything will take a shift. For some people, everything will take a shift for some people it'll be massive for some people it'll be a little bit no matter what you'll move towards a better life everyone is going to sense it in you that you are more accountable more personally responsible happier more helpful more thoughtful human being And you'll be nicer to look at. You might talk too much shit about CrossFit, but... Wow, I made it. That was a good commercial. I liked it.

And you know, that company fired me. They don't pay me to run that. That's just because I believe so much in their product. After 15 years there, they fired me. I'm still probably their number one driving force for... forgive let me yes i i do i i forgive them yeah i i'm i'm i totally forgive them i'm a cry baby at heart and i just yeah can i can we say one more thing about the forgiveness thing yes you know what's helped me a lot is um this belief that when people wrong you they set you up for blessing.

Explain more. You know, I think it's short-sighted. When people do you wrong, you just assume, they did me wrong and that's it, and I'm wronged. But we don't realize, you can look back at the things in your life where people wronged you, they fired you, they did whatever, and then it put you on a different path, and that ended up being a better path right you wouldn't have been on it had that person not betrayed your trust or whatever whatever i mean i've just seen it over and over and over again when people do me wrong they just set me

up for blessings so i just believe like there's something good's coming out of this like this sucks but something's something good's coming i of this. Like this sucks, but something's good. Something good's coming. I mean, shit, look at your cancer diagnosis. Of course. Right. Right. And no one did that to me, but yeah, that was a, that was an awful, scary time in my life that I would not like to repeat, but it completely set me up and set me on a different

path. And so like, you know, the stoic sort of philosophy on that, that obstacles, right. Have a purpose in your life. And to me, it's like obstacles are there for one or two of one of two reasons, either to overcome or to completely divert you onto a new path, right? You have this insurmountable obstacle. It's like, I can't go this way anymore, but new path. And if you just take a little bit broader perspective on your life and your future, it's, it just helps to not

get bogged down when things don't go your way. Right. Then you just realize, you know what, there's, there's a good reason for this. I don't know what it is, but I'm just going to expect that, that something good is going to come out of it. And I think it just helps you. It just helps, it helps you stay content, you know, and, and happy in general. If you have that, like, you know, your flight's delayed, right. Or you're put on a different plane or something. Well, Hey, you know, that plane I was on my, it could crash, you know, or who knows what could happen, but this delay, I'm just going to I'm just going to choose to believe that this delay is a good thing instead of a bad thing. You could meet your wife in the airport. Yeah, it's there's so many possibilities that could that could happen.

But but if you get fixated on the bad thing, let me OK, let me tell you, this is a hold on one second. Well, I guess no, I would not still be woke if I hadn't been fired. I was already on the, no, no, not true. So here's a quick story. This is a, I was at a conference one time and I was still kind of insecure and I was still learning how to sort of, I'd been in a bubble for so long

that I wasn't good at meeting new people. And it's when I first kind of became a public figure and I was at a conference and, uh, and people, but people didn't know who I was, you know, I wasn't like, it wasn't like that. Um, but I was at a conference to learn more. And, um, I knew a couple people and they had tried, you know, kind of included me in their little friend group and, and which I really appreciated because I didn't know anybody. And they're like, Hey, we're going to go have dinner. Do you want to go? I'm like, yeah, that's great. So then we go and there was a pretty long table set up and people were just kind of filling in and I sat

down and dah, dah, dah. And then someone was like, Hey, would you mind scooting down a seat? Uh, to, you know, cause for somebody I'm like, yeah, sure. And I said, let's scoot down a seat. And then like a minute later, they're like, Hey, would you mind scooting down another seat? scoot down a seat. And then like a minute later, they're like, Hey, would you mind scooting down another seat? And I'm like, okay. Right. And so, and, and, and the insecurity really started to manifest, you know, I'm like, they're just going to basically just bounce me off the end of the table, you know, like making room for their friends. And I'm just like, who am I? And so, and it really started to eat at me. And so I just decided like, I'm just going to go. And I didn't make a scene. I just like kind of left, you know, I was like, and, um, I left,

I walked back to my room, I ordered some room service or something. And then I realized I'd left my sunglasses on the table. Serves you right. I left my sunglasses. No, I know this is classic, right? I left my sunglasses on the table. So I'm sitting there in my room and I'm going, oh man, like, what am I going to do? Am I going to sacrifice this pair of sunglasses? Right.

Or am I going to go back and get them? Because now it's about your pride, right? Now you got to go back down there and face that you dined and you you ditched about my pride yeah it absolutely was yeah and i was like you know what this just sucks but i'm not gonna lose it put my sunglasses over it i'm gonna go back and get my sunglasses so i walked back over there the restaurant was like on the the property the hotel property walk back over there walk up to the table and what i noticed that the table had filled up right more people had come filled up the table and sitting across from the seat that i left was the one person at the entire event that i wanted to meet the most oh that's amazing isn't that doesn't that suck yeah well it's good it's awesome you went down there and got to see

that yeah yeah and so i quickly just like and i actually did this really stupid thing like i was on the phone i think i called my wife on purpose so i'd be like on the phone so it just could be like i'm on the phone i'm busy i'm doing something like grab my sunglasses and just like left, you know? But I mean, I learned the lesson, right? I learned the lesson. Those people bumped me down a couple of seats and maybe it was a little bit like, you know, it's not like they did it to be mean, but it was kind of like, whatever. It didn't make me feel great. Maybe it was a little bit inconsiderate, but I overreacted. I took it personally because it was insecure. I was insecure.

And because of my overreaction leaving, I missed this incredible opportunity to sit right across from this dude that I wanted to connect with that I thought was really awesome. And I didn't connect with him because of that. And on the other hand, too, maybe you were being pushed down because there's someone down there who needed to hear your message. For sure. So you could save their life, right? For sure. Yeah. For sure.

Yeah. And it's not even about me. Maybe I was pushed down because someone really did need, you know, to be seated down there and that would have been an important conversation or moment for them. Right. Yeah. All the reasons, right? That I made the wrong choice, but I learned the lesson and I

tell the story and it's embarrassing, but I tell the story, right? Because it really is, it proves, it just makes my point, right? That when people wrong you, they set you up for blessing. You just need to not, don't take it personal. Think that, you know, just decide something good is going to come out of this when things go wrong. Did you know that there's, you could go to Berkeley, California now and still like, if you, if you're in Memphis and you miss the pandemic, you could go to Berkeley, California and they're still doing it. They're still be in it. Yeah. Do you know, they're still doing it in places. Isn't it still participate? Yeah. It's like, Hey kids, 20 years ago, there was a pandemic. Do you want to go back to

berkeley and they still have it set up exactly the same way oh my gosh it's like those characters on an island who's still 20 years after vietnam's over they still are world war ii's over they think the war is still going right right didn't they find some people in russia like that too that that thought world war ii was still going and they'd been living in the woods like decades later i just thought that that was folklore maybe it was i don't know maybe it was just maybe it's just a movie i saw it was fiction this thing that you were just talking about about the pandemic about um how doctors were you know how they behaved and how what they were told what to do and how

the patients were treated it's now been codified by that law that Gavin Newsom signed. Right. I know. No second opinions from doctors on COVID. Doctors have to basically read from the script, and if they don't, they can lose their license. I cannot believe this is real. Yeah. The best medical innovation happens at the bottom and works its way up. It doesn't come from the way up it doesn't come from

the top doesn't come from a you know a bureaucrat uh in an in a cubicle you know or whatever or a corner office saying this is how doctors need to practice medicine right it comes from doctors treating patients and learning as they go that's why it's called practicing right they're learning as they go and obviously they're taught a lot in med school and a lot of that stuff works obviously but especially in emergency care but yeah i know it's it's everything was turned upside down uh and fear the fear-mongering the biggest thing that i spoke out in the beginning was the fear-mongering because cancer taught me that fear suppresses your immune system right like my cancer

experience taught me that and so i'm like we can't we can't put all these people in a state of fear and panic and anxiety that's just going to cause more immunosuppression and make them even more vulnerable and then they're going to start behaving irrationally which is exactly what we saw people when you're in a state of fear you cannot think clearly this is what happens to cancer patients it's so there's a parallel i even i even wrote publicly like now the world knows how cancer patients feel dealing with fear every day right unfortunately because the normal person shouldn't have those feelings of fear and anxiety every time they leave their house like this is insane when every person is a potential threat to you like what are we back in the stone ages you know like hunter-gatherer every stranger is a threat but um but yeah so

that was in before all the emergency emergency drug approval stuff before all that when it was just the early days, I'm like, this is this fear mongering. This is really bad. This is really unhealthy. This is not good for our population. Psychologically, it's not good for anyone to be just doused with so much fear where every single day there's a ticker on the screen. How many people have are, are infected? How many people are dying? You remember that? Dude, I I'm, I'm'm in california and i'm telling you i'm surrounded by people who are still scared like i can i mean i'm not in the in the in

the hive i'm not in berkeley i'm south of berkeley 70 miles but i can go outside i can go outside and and meet the scared people just like right now it's crazy yeah i've seen the damage i see it every day i get my kids aren't in school but I get notes from the public school all the time telling me what's going on. You can't even believe there's people still living like this. Yeah, and the irrational stuff really manifested too quickly

because, I mean, it just shows you how vulnerable we are as humans to fear, right? Fear is the most powerful manipulator. It's how cancer patients are rushed into treatment. And it's why people are walking down the street with a mask on alone, right? You're alone. Is it hiding in the bushes? Do you think it's just floating down the street? Like, what are you thinking? Or are you not thinking, right? But that's- No, no, they are. They did i i like your other i i think that they they what did you call that they got a fear story going in their subconscious going back

to what you said earlier they have some spyware back there that's running the you should be scared loop or you're going to kill your grandmother or you're going to bring it home they have it going fear programming right i have to i'm in danger at all times, right? I'm always in danger. I'm always at risk. I have to protect myself. And news, news channel told me the mask would protect me or a new, a brand new experimental drug or protect me. And yeah, it's, I'm not judging.

I'm just saying it's like, it really, uh, I, I feel so much, um, it's like it really uh i i feel so much um it's really almost like grief you know it grieves me to see people in that state of fear how about your loved ones do you have any loved ones participating i have loved ones who participated a few but most of my you know in it in the south for whatever reason in tenn I, the sentiment was not as hardcore, especially in Florida. Like we went down to Florida and everybody's just like acting like there's no pandemic at all. It was great. Um, but yeah, most of my loved ones and friends are of the same mindset. And so, uh, we had a nice, we had a nice little bubble support system here of people who just kind of thought, heck, even at my gym, most of the folks were showing up at the gym, working out, no mask.

I mean, all through the pandemic, right? We're at our gym. You know how it is. You're huffing and puffing. You're sweating on each other. I mean, you're exhausted. I mean, you're all breathing the same air. And we had maybe a couple coaches tested positive, maybe got a little something, but no one died and no one got severely ill. And we were, you know, I mean, you know, we're just all in there doing our thing,

throwing, throwing the weights around, right. Doing the pull-ups and the kettlebells and the, you know, cleaning jerks and whatever. Are you at a CrossFit gym? I'm at a gym called Iron Tribe, which is kind of like a CrossFit type, uh, functional fitness gym. But I started back at CrossFit memphis with uh doug larson and mike bledsoe the uh barbell they were my trainers wow i had no idea it's crazy how many i had no idea that you had any background like that isn't that funny yeah in 2010 or 11 i started it at crossfit CrossFit Memphis and Doug and Mike were the, were the coaches. And, uh, and then about six months later, uh, they, they started barbell shrugged.

They started getting that thing going. And, uh, they interviewed me back. I was probably like episode six or something. Wow. No shit. Yeah. Yeah. Like way back. And then they moved to California and blah, blah. I, you know, we've kind of lost touch, but, um, but yeah, that, those guys, I'm so thankful for those guys. Cause they really, you know, they, they kicked my butt and got me in really good shape and way back in 2011. And I've just continued to do the same kind of stuff. Uh, yeah, for, it's been 10 years I've been doing CrossFit, basically functional fitness, cross-training.

What blender do you have that you mash the vegetables in? Vitamix. If I pull it up, will you show me which one you have? I have the 5200, which they've got a bunch of different models, but I think they've kind of replaced it with something newer.

I mean, I've had that for 10 years. It won't die. I had one, and it wasn't big enough for me. Oh, it has a small carafe? Maybe. Do you like how big it is? Is it big enough for you? It's big.

Oh, yeah. I mean, that thing holds like 60 ounces maybe a little more yeah and if you make the daily supply of it um sorry for falling so far into the weeds but if you make the daily supply of it when you go back to drink it later do you re-blend it no no you just kind of shake it up and let the... Yeah. And this is what I eat. So I know people are like, what exactly do you eat? So for me, like breakfast is usually an oatmeal. Have you eaten yet today?

No. Oh, how come? Oats with flax, hemp, and chia seeds. I'll use blackstrap molasses because it's really high in iron, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. So I just put that in there and then I'll put some fruit. Like it's either fresh fruit, like blueberries, or it'll be dried fruit. So it might be goji berries, mulberries, uh, chopped apricots, black currants, raisins, uh, and raisins, really raisins okay and then uh i'll put um like a teaspoon of turmeric powder in there i mean and um and that's it i mean you know so it's it's i call it supercharged oatmeal because

it really i mean you're just packing a bunch of really great stuff in there and then like cinnamon and allspice put a little bit some spices on there and it's a it's a full it's a full cup of oats dry so it's a big bowl so that's typical breakfast and it's about a thousand calories uh if i put almond butter in it it's about a thousand calories and then lunch will be a giant smoothie so that would be three to four cups of frozen berries blueberries blackberries raspberries strawberries several really big handfuls of spinach or kale um almonds walnuts um and then water you know why walnuts i like walnuts but why walnuts i never heard anyone say that well that's yeah walnuts are just arguably the world's healthiest nut oh they just are just terrific tree nuts have uh demonstrated

reduction in in cancer mortality for people that consume the most tree nuts and that'd be like almonds and walnuts especially macadamia nuts macadamia yeah macadamia nuts brazil nuts so um so yeah so i love you know i put those in there for the calories for the good healthy fats and for the anti-cancer compounds and then um and then like maybe some dates or banana and blend it all up and that's lunch so that's about 50 ounces that That's a big smoothie. And you could do a green version where you have a lot more veggies in it and less fruit, you know, a lot more spinach or kale or broccoli, cauliflower. Cauliflower is nice because it blends up with fruit really well and it doesn't really affect the taste. And then dinner, giant salad,

or just a big plate of just vegetables like cooked vegetables like black beans sweet potatoes red red rice black rice collard greens how about bell peppers tomatoes yeah onions you don't you don't onion yeah you're not part of you don't freak out none of the nightshades scare you no they don't bother me at all yeah just go go and i don't bother me either but people they get a bad in the crossing community they kind of got a bad yeah you know i just feel like there's been a lot of food fear that's been promoted from you know from the phytates to the nightshades to gluten i mean there's there's been a lot of unnecessary fear-mongering around these foods and when i i was thinking about gluten i glutens uh i was listening to someone the other day and they

said they cut out gluten and their whole life changed oh that's great it was that it was the blind lady i had on it was the this blind crossfit lady she had an autoimmune disease she cut gluten out and it fucking went away and she got off all her meds that's terrific that's great what do you think about that dude are you i think it's good okay yeah i mean but i don't think every person's gonna have their life change when they if they don't eat gluten okay okay fair and i was thinking about our interview coming up and i was like i know we're gonna probably talk about diet stuff and you know some you know some of the dietary debate type of stuff. But the one thing that I thought about was the fact that I've never met a person who was extremely unhealthy, right?

That was obese, that had autoimmune, chronic disease, like all these problems. And when I looked at their diet, they were eating, you know, too many beans, right? And too much, too many beans right and too much too many oats right like no they're eating fast food processed food junk food like sugary drinks tons of animal food it's so like the foods that have been demonized like by some hardcore nutrition kind of people it's like yeah but those are not the foods that sick people are eating a lot of, right? We're not eating tons of beans in America. In fact, we eat less beans than most continents. And so to me, I said that to Paul too, by the way, I'm like, you've gone so far down the, the, the, the end of refining the diet that I'm afraid we're going to lose you. I said that

to Paul Saladino. I'm so concerned because he's trying to look at just the tiniest little bad, oh, that piece of lettuce is bad for you, that I'm afraid we're going to lose him because he has so much still to contribute. I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen. People get so locked up in this perfectionist approach to diet. And it happens in the raw food community too, on the other end of the spectrum where people, they, they start eating raw foods and then, and they start thinking, oh, well, I can't eat all raw foods. I only need to eat these. And they get, get narrower and narrower and narrower. And it, it basically just becomes like orthorexic, right? And it, it becomes, uh, you know, it just becomes, uh, an eating disorder. Orthorexic.

I saw Caleb attack the keyboard. Thank you, Caleb. Orthorexic is a clinical, you know, obsession of healthy eating. So yeah, this definition, an unhealthy focus on eating in a healthy way. Okay. But anyway, and it's kind of a loose term where they could claim anybody who's focused on healthy eating is orthorexic right but it's that extreme where you just take it to this extreme where you have you have limited right and you're scared of everything like i've just seen this they just become every food is a threat and it's like all i can eat now are organic sprouts that i grew myself right this

is all the only food that i that i that i'm 100 certain is healthy for me and and yeah i don't want to i don't want to put anyone in a dietary dogma where they become a prison of a belief system right that um because that is not healthy psychologically. It is not healthy. So, uh, we have a lot of leeway. I mean, you know, you can eat all kinds of food and the human body's miraculous that it can turn all kinds of things you eat into energy for fuel. Are you thin? Are you very thin? I'm thin. I've always been thin. So I'm six to one 65. Oh, okay. That is thin.

Yeah. So you don't have excess fat on you? No. Nope. But I never have. And how much did you weigh when you were 26 and you were diagnosed? When I was diagnosed, I was about 150 and I got down to about 130. Oh my goodness.

Yeah. That was pretty scary because I had, I lost a bunch of weight, you know, well, I lost some weight because I wasn't eating very much because I was, I lost a bunch of weight, you know, well, I lost some weight because I wasn't eating very much because I was having these pains. Then I had surgery and I lost weight, not eating in the hospital, right? The sloppy Joe didn't help very much. And then after that, and I, then I got on a raw food diet and I was juicing and doing juice fast and fasting. So then I lost more weight. So yeah, I mean, at my low point, right, I was right about 130 pounds. I don't think I ever got below 130. But I didn't even know the scale. I just I was 130. Because I went to a doctor's appointment, they weighed me one time at one point in that

process, but I wasn't weighing myself. But yeah, I looked in the mirror. And I mean, I just I was really, really, really skinny, scary, skinny, underweight, clinically underweight, but, uh, but it came back, you know, the weight came back on and, and it was just a, it's just a short season of life where I was, I looked pretty bad and I was, my skin was orange. It was yellow, orange from all the carrot juice. Oh, so I looked jaundiced on top of that. oh so i looked jaundiced on top of that yeah but it all resolved you know um and uh sometimes you have to get a little worse before you get better yeah that's just what happens but back to the food fear thing yeah i mean there's just so much healthy and wonderful nutritious food and and i don't think there's

any reason to restrict your diet necessarily if you're already healthy like why subject yourself to restrictions if you're if you're healthy anyway if you're sick that really is a time to get to really start experimenting with diet to see what can help you resolve that illness you know it makes sense to do an elimination diet um to me i mean i think it makes sense like there an elimination diet. To me, I mean, I think it makes sense. Like there's a great book called The Blue Zones. And they, you know, they study the longest living people around the world. And they found that they eat about 95% plants on average. And I think that's a great model.

You know, the Seventh Day Adventist study, which has been going for decades and decades. They're the longest living Americans in Loma Linda. Wow. They've been studied for decades and decades and decades, decades. It's called the Adventist health study and the longest living Adventists, you know, living past a hundred are, uh, predominantly vegetarian, maybe eat a little fish, you know, but they're very, very high plant food consumers, right? They're, they, again, about 95% whole plant foods, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, legumes, whole grains. And again, I think there's no way you can do a randomized placebo controlled clinical trial on diet over a lifetime of people. It's just not possible, right? So the best we have are these kind of observational studies. We'll never have better studies than observational studies on diet because you can't do a different

kind of study. You can't give somebody an apple and another person a fake apple, right? Right, right. So it's just kind of obvious like hey let's imitate the people let's study the people that have the longest lifespans let's try to imitate the way they live you know so blue the blue zones which is a national geographic project uh headed by dan butener is it's a great it's just a great book great example a lot of great lessons in there it's not just about the diet. They're getting lots of exercise naturally and fresh air and sunshine.

And they have strong social support and family relationships. All of those things play into health. You know, isolation leads to depression and disease, you know, and that was the other part of the pandemic that was so destructive. I'm like,'re fear-mongering b now we're making everyone isolate and and at no point in history have we ever have we ever isolated healthy people never healthy people hey it's again it's against cdc policy it's in their own guidelines do not quarantine the healthy and yet they did it. They did it. Yeah.

For no, you know, with no basis, no, no evidence base. I mean, it's, it's just like. That was the opposite of science. Yeah. It's just such a gross contradiction of what you think is scientific when you, when you're doing things that have no evidence base and calling it evidence-based medicine, right? Or you're doing things that are completely unscientific and calling and saying evidence-based medicine, right? Or you're doing things that are completely unscientific and calling and saying, follow the science, right? There's no,

it, you can't follow science. What you should do is you should consider science, right? Don't follow it. Consider it, consider the science and then make a decision from there, right? We consider there right we consider move at the speed of follow it how about move at the speed of science yeah the speed of science is such nonsense because science moves really slow right that's such a that's it's a hey i i kudos for the great like propaganda type marketing slogan the speed of science. It's a great slogan. Sounds really good, but science, good science takes a long time. It's very slow, especially if you're talking about vaccine development, which is typically 10 years has been for almost every vaccine on the market. It's about 10 years. Are you watching that closely?

I was. Yeah. I mean, there's not a whole lot to see now. Now it's just boosters. You know, there's another booster is another booster. But I mean, are you watching are you in any groups or watching athletes drop dead? And and are you watching what's coming out of the I had the guy who is the former head of national statistics for the United Kingdom come on the show and he's like, yeah, something's going on here in the UK. Like we are seeing, we are seeing more deaths. More people are dying. Something's up. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

I've seen the clips. I mean, over and over and over just athletes dropping dead. All, all sports. It doesn't matter what sport they're just dropping dead. I've been, yeah.

And in private groups where people are reporting all their stories of effects, ill effects and death from the emergency drug rush to market. Yeah, I mean, I've definitely paid attention. I've got a little burned out because I feel like, well, you know, I did as much as I could at the time when I felt like speaking out was beneficial. And now the damage is done. And I feel like there, there are some silver linings, which is one never in history. Have we had more physicians oppose a pharmaceutical drug, right? Even though there's still a ton that support it, as you said, still, we've never had this many oppose it before. Good. Like the 20, like you said, if it was 80, 20, 20% of doctors opposing a drug, that's,

that's unprecedented. Right. If that's the number, right? Yeah. And I made that up. I know, but I'm just, yeah, I'm going along with, you know, it's encouraging. It's very encouraging to see. And there've been a lot of wake up, you know, wake up call scenarios where doctors have just stepped out of their comfort zone and said, Hey, we're, I'm, we're not comfortable

with this. This doesn't make sense. Where's the evidence we're seeing harms in our patients. Dr. Ryan Cole was great. I don't know if you followed him. He was, is that the guy, the YouTube guy who's huge, who recently he was two years kind of pro vaccine and now he's just flipped the script. Is that, no, no, that's a some, or that's a different guy, but Ryan Cole, uh, he ran the,

he runs the largest pathology clinic in Idaho and state great state within two months of the rollout. He went public and gave a talk about the clotting and this increase in cancers that they're seeing come through their pathology lab and how dangerous this new drug was he's like we're just seeing it in our lab it's dangerous like we've never seen this before in our you know pathology's blood work so they're seeing all this crazy blood work coming through their lab and uh and he's been speaking about it talking about it for a long time yeah and he's been under just merciless attacks merciless for they're trying to take his license from him oh yeah oh yeah it's cost him a ton of

money he and i were on a speaking tour together in Florida for five cities. And he's just the most selfless, brilliant, caring physician you could ever want to know. Like he has no agenda. He's not making money saying this, he's losing money, like a lot of money. And but he, he's passionate about telling the truth and about what they saw and are seeing in their pathology labs. And so those are the courageous guys. Those are the heroes. And it's funny, you watch so many movies where there's this big evil corporation, and then the one person speaking out and fighting against it's the hero. But then in real life, there's this big evil corporation and everybody's like, yay, the big evil corporation. And the person saying, no, this is, they're doing horrible stuff. Like, no, you're terrible.

We got to get rid of you. It's like the exact opposite of what, you know, the plot of every movie, you know, the hero is the villain. But it's our real life. Yeah. In real life, we have taken these villains and elevated them to hero status. And the people who are courageous enough to speak out, we've demonized. It's messed up. It is messed up. I'm optimistic, though. Are you optimistic? I think it ends well. I am. The other silver lining, I hope, and it's hard to gauge. We won't know until the next go round, although it's kind of happening right now. I think the public, most of the public is

kind of over it, A, right? At least in a lot of pockets, maybe not where you are. I think they're over it, but I just don't think that they've woken up. I don't think that they're like, holy shit, I was duped. Yeah, I don't know. The level, I think there's degrees, right? There's the, I'm over it. Because they say this to me, Chris. They say, but no one knew in the beginning.

And I'm like, I did. You never saw me put shoes on my kids. You never saw me stop going to the park. You never saw me put shoes on my kids. You never saw me stop going to the park. You never saw me like wear a mask. Like, yeah, I think some of us instinctively, I mean,

I think it's awesome that you had this opinion in the beginning because my opinion was formed by all my research on the cancer industry and the drug industry. So I, I mean, I came into this with, it was great Glassman, by the way,

he told all of us, he told everyone who is a crowd, any CrossFitter who you saw wear a mask, obviously did not listen to Greg. He told us from 2007, 2006, when I came on the scene, the tsunami of chronic disease is coming. So we thought it was going to be, we, and we were expecting it to be diabetes. We didn't know that they would trick us and slide this thing in called covid to kill all the people with chronic disease but any of us who could do simple math were like oh it's just chronic disease killing people this was just

the fucking straw that broke the camel's back but we knew he told us on the website every fucking day that's good i know it's crazy it's good i mean he did a good thing for sure. Um, but I, yeah, I'd done my own research and wrote, you know, wrote my first book and there was a deep dive into that stuff. So I just knew, I know it's crazy. You found it by yourself, by the way, it's crazy that you made that journey by yourself with no family, like with, with people pushing against you. Absolutely insane. It did feel kind of insane. Um at the end of the day, man, I just wanted to live. And I, I had this strong conviction and faith, you know, that that was the path I had to take. You know, it's just like the analogy I use at that time was I had two options. One was like

the brightly lit paved road that takes you to the chemo train, you know, and everybody's cheering you on. They made little t-shirts team Chris, and they baked the cupcakes and the cookies. And they're like, we're going to run a race for you. Right. And then you get on the chemo train and like, we got these comfy seats and all these little goodies and snacks and, and off you go. And the suffering starts immediately. And you have no idea when the train's going to stop, when they're going to tell you to get off. And when you get off, are you well, are you sick? You know, are they going to say, that's all we've done, go home and die. So that's scary. And then the other option is like the path basically into the woods,

into the jungle that you have to hack your way through. It's like that show alone. You ever watched alone? No, but I'm familiar with it. Yeah. It's a survival show. It's like that. You're just like, you're alone trying to survive and, and trying to get through this with no help and no support. Nobody's cheering you on. If you go that way, you are on your own buddy and the risk is not only dying but it's dying a fool right right legacy is the fool who didn't do what his doctor said right died wow that's scary it was it wasn't a good feeling so both options were scary right i was like i got scary option A and scary option

B, but I just, you know, like I said earlier in my story, like I prayed, I got an answer, you know, and I just knew, I was like, this is the way I have to go. I have to go this way. And I just trusted that if God really did provide that path for me, that He would see me through, right? That's where I put my faith and my trust, that he would see me through, right? That's where, that's where I put my faith and my trust that he would see me through it. And I had a small sense that maybe I could help, you know, maybe I can help other people navigate it or something, but it wasn't, it wasn't a fully formed idea. You know, again, there was no thought of writing a book about it, but, um, but that's, yeah, it didn't feel, it didn't feel brave. Didn't feel courageous. It just felt scary. And that's what I tell people now it's like fear. There's no such thing. There's no such thing as feeling

brave, right? The feeling is fear. Courage is moving forward in spite of your fear that's a great that's great that's courage right yeah as soon as you said that i'm like yeah i can't ever remember feeling brave but i can remember having courage but but but fear came before it it was the precursor yep and then people tell you you were brave later yeah right but you're like yeah no didn't feel brave. Okay. If you feel bravery is the mitigation of fear with courage. Yeah. If you feel brave, you're probably just foolish and naive and ignorant. You know, if you feel brave, you're on Coke. Yeah. Or there's no real threat, you know, but if there's a real threat, you have fear. And then in that moment, what are you going to do? You go forward or you retreat,

right? That's it. There's two options there. And so I was just like, I'm going, like, I'm doing this. I'm going to change my life. I'm going to do everything in my power to help myself get well. Like I could always do chemo. It wasn't like I said, I'd never ever do it, but I just really was excited about transforming my life and building my body up. You know, I mean, I wanted to build myself up. I didn't want to tear it down further and then try to rebuild after that. And the paradox, which we didn't get even get into, but I'm glad we got to talk for, you know, an extended interview because I have a lot to say, but the big paradox with chemo is that yes, it kills rapidly dividing cells. It kills cancer cells, some types of cancer cells. There's hundreds of different types of cancer and there's hundreds of drugs, but

I'm generalizing. Um, but the paradox is when you kill cancer cells or shrink tumors with chemotherapy, what's happening in the body is collateral damage head to toe. So you're causing brain damage, liver damage, lung damage, heart damage, damage to your digestive tract, most importantly, damage to your immune system. And you're wiping out your white and red blood cells. And so when the treatments are over, patients are usually given some type of good news like, oh, your tumor shrunk 30% or 50% or maybe 90%, right? And they and they're like yay let's go to olive garden uh but you know ring the bell ding-a-ling-ding you know you're done with your

chemo for now uh but the the real paradox is that that chemo those chemotherapy drugs often make cancer stem cells more aggressive. And now your immune system's gone. It's wiped out, decimated. And you have more aggressive cancer cells that start multiplying and spreading in the body. This is all in the book, by the way, people. It's all in the book. And you don't even have to read my book to know this, because if you know anybody who's gone through cancer treatment, this is often the story, right?

They get the treatment, they get a good report, everybody's celebrating and happy and feels this big sense of relief. And then a short time later, they get another follow-up scan and they got new spots in new places. Oh, now you got spots in your lungs and your bones and your brain and your liver, right? And well, how did that happen? I thought the chemo, I thought the chemo cured me or whatever. oh now you got spots in your lungs and your bones and your brain and your liver right and well how did that happen i thought the chemo i thought the chemo cured me or whatever and no it it just temporarily knocked it back and it and then it wiped out your immune system in the meantime and

it made the cancer more aggressive and so now we've got to hit you with a whole new set of drugs that are even worse and more terrible and more toxic than the first batch we gave you because it didn't work right and um and you're on the end cycle like you were saying yeah then then you're just yeah you're on the conveyor belt man yeah you know and it's one of the most tragic things i heard a cancer patient say to me uh, she kept asking me for advice, you know, reaching out and she was a mutual friend in Memphis. And, um, she would, she was going through all the treatments and she would just have these moments where of clarity, where it's like she would, her head, she would kind of get out of the weeds and have a moment of clarity and reach out to me and say, can we talk, you know, can we talk? I know I need to,

I need to do something different. I'm like, sure. Call me. Here's my number. And then she would never call. But at one point she said, um, I'm just so afraid to stop chemo. Right. She was afraid to stop. Yep. It's like, I'm, it's like, I'm afraid not to get the vaccine. That was the other one. I'm afraid. Yeah. You think about it. It's like, you it's like i'm afraid not to get the vaccine that was the other one i'm afraid yeah you think about it's like you're on a runaway train right and you're afraid to jump off it's yeah scary to jump off the train for sure but it's a runaway train like it's gonna crash it's not gonna end well and uh and for her it didn't end well she did she died and she was like breast cancer early 30s oh damn yeah this is the this is the guy, by the way, this,

this guy kind of flipped the script right here. Dr. John Campbell. Yeah. Campbell's he's great. Just straight up on YouTube in the beginning. I was watching him. I'm like, Oh God, I don't know if this dude gets it. And then recently in the last couple of months, I'm like, Oh shit. He's, he's, he's, he's piecing it together this this this this one excess young deaths in uk and the usa he's starting to get and he's getting he's got a couple videos where he's getting angry actually right yeah he didn't get it in the beginning i watched some of the stuff in the beginning i was like yeah yeah but

then all of a sudden he saw saw some data that changed his opinion. Yeah, I appreciate his journey. I'm surprised they haven't kicked him off YouTube yet. He's getting too close to the sun. I do too. But there's a lot of guys that have been pretty bold. See, the thing is, I don't have anything to lose. I can't be fired.

I don't have a boss. I can't. So it's not like these doctors, I mean, they have a lot to lose, for speaking. Right. A lot. I don't have a boss. I can't. So it's not like these doctors, I mean, they have a lot to lose for speaking. A lot. I don't have anything. Well, I think you're being too humble. I mean, I didn't make money off my Instagram account, but I had 100,000 followers and a blue checkmark.

And it sucked that I lost it just because the fact that's how I trolled people to get them to come on my podcast. because the fact that's how I trolled people to get them to come on my podcast. But if you lose your YouTube channel and you lose your social media, it is a loss for you to express your art, your story. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's your passion. I was very cautious about...

At the time when the sensitivity was at its highest let's just say yeah uh for dissent yeah i was very cryptic oh you were okay i deliberately would you know use language that would not get me censored or flagged but that most of my listeners understood what i was talking about. You know, I can say experimental drugs rush to market and they know what I'm talking about. Right. So, yeah, I was definitely cautious because I was like, I would prefer to not lose my 200-something thousand Facebook followers

and whatever. And, you know, so, yeah. But at the end of the day, man, yeah, it's just, you know, I have to believe and I do believe that good things will come out of it. It's tragic, the way it's unfolded for sure. And I tried my best to use whatever platform I have to, to warn people and so they can make an educated decision, a rational informed decision. That's not a fear-based decision because fear-based decisions are almost always the wrong decision. You got to make decisions based on facts and faith, not fear. But when you're in a state of fear, you don't think rationally, right? You're in a panic. Everything's urgent. It's a rush, right? You're in a rush situation

and you just cannot think logically or rationally or reason through. And that has been my message as a patient advocate to cancer patients. So it translated very well into the pandemic. So I'm like, Hey, this is the same thing. Don't get rushed into this out of fear. Like you don't need to be afraid. Just look at the statistics. Who's actually dying. What's your risk of death. It's really low. Your risk of dying is so very low. And isn't that what everybody really cares about is not dying. Like who cares if you get sick as long as you don't die. So God, that's been a huge thing in me too. Who cares if you get sick? Yeah, you get sick. I mean,

gosh, I, I did get COVID and I've had the flu also. And the flu was worse for me than COVID was me too. You know, that doesn't mean it's not worse for some people. I get it. But I'm just saying, like, it played out exactly the way I thought it would in my own body, right? It just, I decided to not be concerned and not be afraid of it. And, you know, I, and it wasn't that I wasn't informed because I'd been reading the studies and looked at all the statistics, everything I could find, you know, especially the stuff that was not in the mainstream media.

You know, just going straight to the data, straight to the studies, straight to our world and data, you know, that kind of stuff, worldometer, you know. My favorite one is that cruise ship. In the very beginning? Yeah, the cruise ship was the perfect perfect it was like the perfect petri dish right because that's how it all started i remember the off the coast of japan or something yeah i don't remember where it was but it's yeah it's kept everyone on there it was on our world and data for a long time it still may be on there but it had like every single country and all their statistics but then had the cruise ship yeah and and the statistics of death from the cruise ship.

And it was almost all elderly people and the death rate was extremely low. And it was like, yeah, I mean, here you go, right? You got a perfect little encapsulated study. Right. And they were all quarantined on the ship and all that. Everywhere I turned, when I looked at the data i was like there's nothing scary here cheers to that chris uh i really appreciate you coming on i got another guest in 18 minutes i'm gonna um freshen up it's been fun yeah thanks for thanks for going long it

was it was really fun completely 100 my pleasure i i'm always nervous that I'm not going to be able to keep a guest as long. And, and I, I really appreciate you staying on here. I'm looking at the comments and people are so excited to have you on. I know this is going to be really popular with the community. And, uh,

thanks for hanging with us, folks. Thanks for hanging. If there's three books that I could, that I could recommend, it would definitely be Chris beats, uh, Chris beat cancer.

You have to, you will, you will not be disappointed. There's it's, um, it would definitely be Chris Beat Cancer. You have to, you will not be disappointed. It's packed full of information from beginning to end. Don't forget about Travis Christopherson's Tripping Over the Truth, and the Otto Warburg story written by Sam Apple. And Chris,

if you haven't read that book, Otto Warburg's story. I'm familiar with his story, but I haven't read the book about it. Yeah, Sam Apples, the author. I think you would love it. Cool, thank you. It's a great story. All right, I will, you have my phone number.

I have your phone number. I hope we can do it again sometime. Love to. And let me know how the plant-based experiment goes. Text me if you want some feedback or tips or whatever. Okay, I'm going to order the Vitamix today. Good. I'll be inspired by that.

I'll be like, damn, this cost me $600. That'll motivate me to stick with it for at least six days. Definitely use it. Yeah. All right, brother. Talk to you later. Cheers. Thanks.

Bye. Bye. later cheers thanks hi uh wow three hours and 13 minutes god i got you guys were tearing me up uh uh uh seven a couple of john's videos have been yeah um you said that i talk too much you said that i talk too much. That hurts. Really? I'm looking for the comment that really, oh, I can't go back that far. That really cut me to my, cut me to my anus.

Cut me, is that what it's called? My anus? Anyway, how dare you? Even Caleb had to cut out. That show was so long. I thought you were at your best here. Oh, you do? All right.

I'm always great. Eat a dick at this time. Eat a dick. I don't accept your compliment if that's what that is. Thank you, Gabe. They're all amazing. Even when I talk, I always talk the perfect amount. Thank you, Adam. Thank you. That's what I

wanted to hear. On that note, I'm out of here. I'll see you guys in 16 minutes. Adam, you demand from making me walk away with a smile on my face. I'll see you guys in 16 minutes with Ricky Garrett. Bye-bye. for making me walk away with a smile on my face. I'll see you guys in 16 minutes with Ricky Garrid. Bye-bye.