Decoding the Gurus - Mikhaila Peterson: The Marvelous World of Meat

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

The hosts are certainly in no position to criticise someone for what they eat, with Matt unable to resist a Fosters and shrimps on a barbie, and Chris subsisting entirely on potatoes and Guinness. But... neither host have yet attempted to live on an all meat diet.Which is a shame, because according to Mikhaila Peterson and many others, meat and only meat is what you need. Sure, it's on the edgier part of the fad diet spectrum. But according to proponents: inflammation, depression, chronic Lyme disease - you name it, meat cures it. In this episode you'll learn about the surprising diversity of customised, bespoke, and finely-tuned all-meat diets that are out there. You'll also learn more about Chris' two mortal enemies, the British and the Fish, and how Matt's snacking proclivities mean he is in perilous danger of becoming a fungus zombie. More substantively, Mikhaila provides an interesting entry point to dig a little deeper into the psychological, psychosomatic, and physical problems that lead people into adopting this kind of restrictive practice. Just as Jordan Peterson discussed the truly horrific and destructive powers unleashed by sipping apple cider, there seems to be a common theme of attributing HUGE and dramatic powers to dietary choices. All of which is connected to existential concerns about what we put into our body, magical thinking about health and wellness, heuristics about purity, and anxieties about personal control. Get ready for lots of anecdotal reasoning and emotional testimonies of those with meat based lived experience.Could an all meat diet be for you? Tune in, and find out!LinksTop Carnivore Diet Doctor Tips | Ken Berry - MP Podcast #117Carnivore Anecdotes | Mikhaila Peterson Podcast #69Mikhaila Peterson Q and A 100th Podcast EpisodeRecent Times Article on Peterson that is highly critical of MikhailaNolan Investigates... Stonewall PodcastUnofficial Discord Thread on the SubredditMedium Article by Matthew Remski on The New Age / Medieval Mortifications of Jordan PetersonThis Week's SponsorCheck out the sponsor of this week's episode, Ground News, and get the app at ground.news/gurus.

Hello and welcome to Decoded the Gurus, the podcast where anthropologists and psychologists listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown, and with me is the Gimli to my Legolas, Chris Kavanagh. G'day, Chris. I think you come off better in that comparison, but I'll accept that. Gimli's a lovable little codger. Yeah, he's a skit.

I mean, I feel like we're this best of friends duo. We're out there where we're collecting scalps, guru scalps. Killing orcs. We're slaughtering them, destroying their reputations and competing for who can take down the most in the shortest amount of time, right? Yep. Yep. Saving middle earth, saving the world as we do it.

That's, that's us. Wow, racist Matt. Don't, you know saving the world as we do it. That's us, Matt. There's bigger places than Europe. Well, I'm feeling ready to podcast today because I've been good. I've been sticking to my swimming regime and I swam my laps this morning. It makes me feel brighter. You look radiant. Thank you. You almost glow.

It's like you've got a preternatural luminescence about you after you swim or when you don't swim, just generally. Oh, that's nice. That's nice. It is very good. It's psychologically good, physically good. Just to check, Matt, because I want to make sure your safety is important to me as a cash guy.

I want to make sure, you know, your safety is important to me as a cash cow. You did swim in a swimming pool and not the sea or various bodies of water in Australia. No, it was a swimming pool. Do you guys have swimming pools? In Japan? No, they don't. They haven't invented. I was thinking Belfast. Belfast just doesn't, I just can't imagine seeing a public pool in Belfast.

It doesn't look like a place that would have public pools. It does have them. And not only that, but if a bomb goes off, Matt, a pool is a good place to be in because you can dive under the water. You know, you just have to avoid the crumbling parts of the building heading. Actually, the reason that comes up, because I remember I was at the swimming pool and there was a bomb scare. It's a bomb scare. Is that a term that people know?

Like bomb scare? Yeah. Okay. That's the thing. Yeah. It's not like a scary bomb. There may be a bomb in the building. We do actually have those in Australia too.

Like when I was at primary school, every now and again, they'd get this prank call where somebody is saying that there's a bomb in the building. We do actually have those in Australia too. Like when I was at primary school, every now and again, they'd get this prank call where somebody is saying that there's a bomb in the school. I think the difference between Australia and Belfast is that in Australia, there's never a bomb. It's always a prank. No, that actually, it very often, at least in my experience growing up in Belfast, there wasn't a bomb or there was a bomb that was exploded outside somewhere. Generally, there were a lot more bomb scares than there were bombs.

Yeah. I was at a swimming pool once and we had to be evacuated. It was cold while various people checked things in that. And I also, I was working in an electric goods store once. It was really good because it was a bomb scare. And that meant that the whole road got closed. So there were no customers able to come to the shop. So that was just like an enjoyable day.

I don't know if this was like at the instruction of the manager of the shop. I hope it wasn't anyone actually official. We had to go around and check the washing machines to make sure nobody had hidden a bomb inside them. But that seems like we shouldn't be the ones doing that. And also that seems like really unlikely that somebody would have come. It's like, it's the kind of thing that you would imagine like TNT with the wrapping around it and a fuse. Oh shit, the bomb is like, it's here.

Quick. I'm still, I'm still stuck trying to imagine you working in like electrical appliance store. I'm imagining you, a customer, not wanting to buy a Hi-Fi and you're going, what? What? What's wrong with you? It's good. It's good. I really enjoyed that.

The company is completely collapsed now in the world. It's gone. It doesn't exist. But I had all these quite amusing experiences because, you know, we talked off air about the differences between service culture in the US and Australia and the UK, right. And the kind of crucial difference to know is that a lot of people hate their jobs or that they don't have like a full enjoyment in their

job in the UK and Australia, and they don't mind letting a full enjoyment in their job in the UK and Australia. And they don't mind letting you know that, right? Yeah. Working in an electronic goods shop for close to minimum wage, myself and the other workers would often do things to like amuse ourselves. Including we find this big pole in the back in the storage room. And then we had a competition one day to see who could hold on to the pole for the longest amount of time before our manager took it off us. So, you know, serving customers.

And I'm pretty sure I won like two hours, 10 minutes or something like that. It's true about the Australian and UK culture where if you're in the service industry, it doesn't mean you have to be nice to people. You can just be yourself. Whereas in the United States, it's like, first of all, the customers seem like they've got a license to be dickheads. Then the service staff are sort of obliged to act as though they're on MDMA or something constantly. But it's not like that in Australia. And a good example of that is my brother who used to work in a cafe. And there was one customer who was a bit drunk and just being really, really, you know, annoying and bad.

So my brother punched him in the face. What? He punched him. It's like crocodile dundee. They come to life. They just, hey, you, you play McGlar? Bam. It was great too, because this place was run by these slightly

dodgy Italian Australians, right? And they were stereotypes. The Australian mafia. Well, let's just say that the police ain't there for free. Right. And so the guy went to the police, the police came up and he gave his name. And they wrote down a gave his name and they wrote down a totally fake name and wrote down completely fine.

Okay, great. We've got your details. We'll be in touch. So the problem went away. It's good. Taking care of Chris, the system works. It's too early in the morning. I can't follow who is in that story. Who is engaged in something dodgy?

Everyone. I think everyone. Who's benefiting. There are no heroes in that story, Chris. Violent assault goes unreported. There's some links between Italian Australians, which I didn't even, I happen to imagine there's a category of people until now and police. I know they're there, but i've just never considered that particular ethnic grouping and links to the mafia like they know i haven't like crocodile mafias people that are skinning crocodiles and fashioning clothes on the black market that's my image of australia matt

not like not a real country mafia is too grandiose to do for it that's um yeah no. Not a real country. My fear is too grandiose to tell for it. It's just, yeah. No, it's a real country. It's a real country. We have lots of swimming in the oceans, in pools. But you don't like swimming in natural places.

You can swim though, can't you? But you choose not to swim. This is the basic approach. I can swim like a glorious dolphin just gliding along the surface. That is a beautiful sight to behold, but you're correct. I don't like being in the ocean or I should say, I don't like being in deep water where there might be unknown creatures

circulating beneath me or dark water or like anywhere where some fish can get the jump on me, right? I don't like that. And I know it's unlikely. I know statistically I'm more likely to be hit by a car or all those kind of things. But I just, we're in their element, Matt. They live there. We're just visitors.

Look, statistically, you're very unlikely to be savaged by a fish. That's the bit about your phobia that I don't quite understand. I understand the fear of sharks. What about stung by a jellyfish? What about obscured by a poisonous puffer fish? Okay. These, these things are more common, at least the jellyfish one. The puffer fish is quite rare.

But fair enough. Well, when you come and visit Australia, we'll keep you well away from the ocean. Just as the water's clear and I can keep an eye on what's there. And if the fish that I'm in the water with are like the size that I could probably take them, then all right. But that's probably not the way to look at it in a country full of extremely poisonous small things. But that's how my mind works, Matt. All right. Shall we talk about some of our introduction topics?

We've got some strong opinions about Scott Adams, who just seems terrible in so many ways. But he's interesting because I've noticed for some time on the topic of COVID and vaccines and alternative treatments and all that stuff, he's actually pretty good as far as I can see. Impeccable, right? He's not impeccable. Bear with me. There's a point to this. For example, he tweeted recently,

for the few people who don't know this, VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, is not a database of verified vaccine injuries. It's a database of reported and possible injuries. In a pandemic, VAERS morphs into a database of mass hysteria sprinkled with credible data. So that's just an example. And that kind of tweet of his, and he's made quite a bunch of these, all the replies are hate replies. He gets ratioed every single time. Now he must know this, right? That his audience is not the kind of audience that is going to give him any credit for that kind of take. The incentives are completely in the other direction. So if you are our Chris, that's something we might tweet,

but it costs us absolutely nothing. So yeah, Scott Adams, as well as some of these other gurus, most of our gurus have jumped on that COVID conspiracy train and get led around by the audience incentives like idiots. But there are exceptions, and the exceptions are interesting, I think. So I do, I got to hand it. I'm going on record. I got to hand it to Scott Adams.

He done good. You do not need to hand it to that man. Like two things I have to take issue with, Matt. One, the notion that we have a tribe, what nonsense. We are the alpha and omega for tribalist centrists. We're completely devoid of any bias or ingrouped things. So just remember that. That's one thing.

And then the second thing is Scott Adams fundamentally is a narcissistic twat. So his takes are just about showing his grandiose brain. And occasionally he has a take on an issue which goes against his particular political bias. But if you went back and you checked what he was saying previously, you would find him probably willing to cast doubt on VAERS whenever it suits his purposes. So I agree that it is kind of refreshing, but I refuse to participate in your rehabilitation of his image because he's just not a reliable person in this regard.

I know there's a couple of people I follow who Scott Adams retreats and they're good on data sciencey kind of stuff. But he's a snake, Matt. And he's still a snake now. I'm not saying he's not a snake. I'd say it's all the more impressive when a snake doesn't. Snake. This is the correct thing.

Look, let me put it in another context. We said something similar about Nassim Taleb, right? Now, Nassim Taleb clearly just doesn't. D-G-A-F. Yeah. He's got thataleb, right? Now, Nassim Taleb clearly just doesn't. D-G-A-F. Yeah. He's got that energy, right? Where he just says whatever he wants and thinks. And yes, he's a narcissistic idiot,

but he doesn't seem to care too much about putting people offside or alienating his audience. He sort of goes his own way. You could give a modicum of respect for that. Yeah, it's kind of their modus operandum. So yeah, they get some credit for being willing to annoy their audience. I suppose I'll give them a slow clap for that. Yeah.

But it's just because they're narcissistic people, Matt. So they're fundamentally just about themselves. The audience are just along for the ride. Look at what you're doing. You're just immediately looking for a bad motivation for them doing something good. No, no. Like, well, yeah. Like in Scott Adams case, he's a bad person.

His motivation is just how brilliant he is. And on some occasions he's very right because he's not a stupid guy. He does have good takes, but if you want to understand the man, understand how everything is, how brilliant he is. And it's the same for both of them in that respect and lots of the gurus. Hmm. Maybe I'm feeling negative, Matt. I might just be in a dark mood, but I just, yeah.

It's cause we were talking about fish before and it's, it's thrown you into it. Yeah, my mortal enemies, my nemesis. You've got me on edge. You don't have to hand it to the sharks, man. You don't have to hand it. They're all bad. Yeah, they investigate by biting.

What kind of creature does that? Imagine a human that did that. Nice to meet you, child. Well, okay. I do have something before we turn to the guru of the hour. So one thing is that we interviewed Stuart Neill and I thank him for bestowing his wisdom on us. And it was a well-received episode

and we got very good feedback, but we also got the inevitable criticisms from lab-like people. I'm okay with all that. And actually, Yuri and Stuart are going to, I believe, have it to be on Rebel Wisdom, which is probably better than me because Stuart is much more technically informed

and they can go back and forth on the technical details. So I don't mind not being there. But I will say that because of that, I've complained about this enough. So I'm only going to do it for one minute. You can mentally time me. I'm tied in again, Matt, to end this fucking lab leak, Fred, from people addressing Stuart and they tag us because of something that he said in the episode or whatever. And then I get hundreds of notifications and I see Stuart's heroic willingness to go with the

endless depth with people. And I'm just noticing it's not even that the people are all bad. Some of them, they make interesting points and stuff, but there's so much of it, which is the exact same kind of reasoning as conspiracy theories that I've seen endlessly. And it's so frustrating. Every piece of evidence, there's a way that you can interpret it, which it doesn't undermine the theory. And people are just so strongly engaged in motivated reasoning. And they see the other side as doing that.

But those discussions are kind of frustrating to observe. So I just full power to Stuart. He's a man with a lot of patience. Yeah, I'm glad we did the episode and I'll be

continuing to mute Fred's about it. That's a good policy. But Matt, there was one other thing just quickly, a recommendation

for you. There is a series out and now this is combining two distinct spheres of my life, which is kind of why I enjoy it.

So one is the cutting edge of the culture war as it revolves around trans issues. And the other is Belfast and like growing up in Belfast and Belfast people. And what's happened recently is Nolan, who's a talk show host and journalist in Northern Ireland, has produced a 10-part series, which is a critical examination of the relationship between Stonewall, the gay, lesbian, trans rights activist group, and the BBC, and whether it has undue influence. Now, the series itself has proved very controversial.

How shocking. People think it's transphobic or other people are lauded for being willing to ask hard questions about a topic. And I'm not addressing it from that point of view. I haven't listened to the whole thing yet, so I'm not sure. But the bits that I have listened to, Matt, and why it's kind of an amazing thing for me is that it combines this really quite broad Belfast accents and also kind head of a gay rights newspaper and saying,

so what's this two spirit thing anyway? Can you have three spirits or one? And then it's just like a weird collision of worlds. So I recommend if anybody wants to experience this weird, jarring experience to go listen to it. I think it's going to be talked about in the culture war anyway, because it's dealing with trans issue stuff. Yeah, it does sound like a jarring collision. It's an old combination and they've included all these slice of life snippets, which are like half authentic and half cringe worthy Belfast comedy. Like somebody calling when they're running on a treadmill because they're trying to lose

weight and they're both hooking fun at each other. They had to decide to do that. I did hear the first episode and I enjoyed the accents. It's not just me. I'm not the only one putting on this voice. And they have a slightly different version of the accent than I do. All right. Well, one more thing from me before we get into our little

advertisement segment, which is just to say that our friends on subreddit have made a new channel of social media with which to discuss Guru related stuff on Discord. So there's people chatting on Discord and popped in and said hello and stuff. So that's nice. It's an unofficial Discord server, Matt. Make sure you get that. It's unofficial.

Whatever they do, whatever Dan Gilbert says about Eric's family, that's not us. And if any of you fuckers are trying to hunt down my family... There were some anonymous accounts on here, and I think somebody was accusing someone else of being Eric Weidstein's... Eric? Eric?

Yeah. Eric's in our our discord the tables have turned i'm gonna go on there and start lecturing people about how they need to protect us more and if they don't ferret out the non-believers in the community i'll have to redraw the podcast and access access to me on social media. So this is great. We can go in there now, Matt. We can wield our parasocial power to direct hate campaigns. That's what we're about. That's right. We get unquestioning obedience from each and every one of them.

I'm sure that's definitely the sense I get from... We'll create little meaningless titles that will allocate the people and then we'll play them off against each other. Dividing rule. It was done to my people, Matt. I'm going to learn the lessons of my enemy, the fish and the British. I'll apply them to our discord. Survival of the fittest.

I don't know. I'm throwing it all in there, Matt. Evolutionary. It's game theory is coming today as well. You throw too many high-level ideas at me all at once, Chris. I'm overwhelmed. You need to recover. You're going to need to be in recovery mode after this.

So yeah, our Discord is there. You can find the link on the subreddit. And Discords are what they are. They're interesting places. You can go and check it out and see what you think. Yeah. So let's talk about this thing called ground news. What we talked about.

What? What's that Matt? I haven't heard of, of this. It sounds like an interesting topic that's just come out of the, but what's that in the background I hear it's a, wow. It's almost like some kind of indication that something's happened. So continue on. So yeah, what is ground news? I just heard you ask and I'll answer. Well, it's aimed to be a bit of a cure for clickbait, sensationalism,

polarization, because all those things are driven by this demand for our attention. And I'm often saying that. And as we all know, social media is terrible. That's why we all use it incessantly. And it intensifies the problem with these algorithms that show us more of the kind of stuff that we like and keep us in our bubbles. Is there a solution, Matt? Is there some, this sounds terrible. What are we going to do? Well, Chris, I'm glad you asked because this thing called Grand News is a place for people across the spectrum, moderates, conservatives, liberals, whoever, who are interested in just poking their head outside of their bubble occasionally before withdrawing it back in there like a frightened turtle to see how stories get covered from other parts of the spectrum. So what it does is it lets

you compare how a single story gets covered across the political spectrum. And you can also see how different media outlets have their own particular slants their own particular biases they're not like us basically these other media outlets chris they no they don't have the view from nowhere they have this ideological slant i wouldn't know so yeah you can use it to see how they're framing an issue compared to other news organizations so there you go do you have any well-considered comments about that? Despite only having heard of this, I just have this inspiration that this site and this app will allow you to see every site of every news story.

And by going to at ground.news forward slash gurus or clicking the link that'll be in the little podcast note thing, you can download the app or you can find the website and break out of the matrix. Do it, Matt. See, when you're listening to one news outlet, you're feeling one part of the elephant. You could be fondling its leg

or alternatively, you might be stroking its trunk. And with Ground News, you get this perspective from all sides at once and you can see the whole elephant in all its glory. Isn't the elephant the symbol of the Republican Party? Strange you would choose that animal, Matt. But anyway, agreed. And I'm also glad you talked about fondling those body parts

and not a load that you could have reached for. So, yes, check it out. See the full elephant. Fondle it to your content. Grind.news forward slash gurus. Go for it. Enjoy. Enjoy.

Right. So today, Matt, we're on to a behemoth, the white wheel of gurus. Somebody that it's hard to comprehend how we haven't covered yet. When you think of guru, you think Michaela Peterson. And it was you that proposed Michaela Peterson. So all complaints that she's not a real guru. Nobody will complain. Well, okay.

Look, of course people will complain. People always complain. That's what they do in Linemath. That's what they do. But I am not the person that initially proposed this because we received quite a lot of suggestions and recommendations, which we're always grateful for. So you're blaming the listeners. The listeners. You're blaming the listeners.

Yeah. I am. I'm flabbergasted. And she was someone that lots of people have strongly requested that we cover. And who she is to mention is that she is the daughter of the well-known psychology guru, Jordan Peterson. And she's rose to prominence, obviously, with the rise of her follower. But she has her own YouTube channel.

She has a podcast. She mainly works around and promotes a particular diet that we'll get into, but maybe would be more in line with the kind of lifestyle wellness gurus that we've covered before when looking at goo, that's where I would place her. Although it's interesting though, isn't it? This particular diet seems one that's tailored to appeal to people that are right of center, because a lot of people taking photographs of their food on the right-hand side, making a point. A specific kind of food, Mark. Specific kind of center. There's a lot of people taking photographs of their food on the right hand side.

A specific kind of food, Matt. Specific kind of food. Meat, meat, bouncing around there. You know, it's meat. The elephant in the room. Yeah. Yeah. That elephant is back again. And this time it's going to be consumed.

Although I wouldn't put it past them. I've seen what the Trump family like to hunt. It's probably good that we haven't yet spent that much time on meat because we're going to be talking a lot about meat in the coming time. Like we chose some episodes of Michaela's content that we thought would be relevant. So we did a Q&A that she did for her 100 episode. But more than that, we also did the carnivore diet that Dr. Tips with Ken Berry. This is episode number 117. And carnivore anecdotes, an interview with four other carnivore diet people. And this was episode 69. So we thought we'd focus on her carnivore diet business, because this

is really what's unique to her. Whereas a lot of the other stuff is she's really in IDW interview space, but she branches out more into the health and wellness and maybe conspirituality spheres more than is typical of the gurus that we've looked at so that's where i see her in the landscape of gurudom and that makes sense given her diet focus that's generally a yeah health and wellness thing there's maybe a disclaimer to get out at the start that is worth mentioning that she's a relatively young woman who went through a whole series of difficult medical issues in her childhood.

They're detailed in Peterson's 12 Rules for Life book. And it sounds genuinely traumatic, like having to go through operations on hips or I can remember, I think. In any case, she's had genuine health issues and then also had her father become famous and undergo his health issues although some of them she may not be entirely involved in what happened there but she's famous essentially because she is the daughter of Jordan Peterson and she very much is riding on the audience coattails that come with that. She's got, I think, 300,000 or so followers on YouTube. So it's not like she's completely out there just waffling into the ether.

But I think it is fair to say that she's someone that probably we wouldn't be paying attention to. Most people wouldn't be paying attention to were it not for her follower and the attention that it's drawn her. So what you're trying to say is that we couldn't land enough punches on the big man himself. So now we're going after his family, this innocent young woman. Yeah. Well, that we, I think it's right to look at her as a guru in our own right, but she really is only capable of being a guru because of her family connection. Because as we'll see in our content, I think she doesn't

have the kind of charisma that Jordan Peterson does, that if she was building an audience from scratch, it would be hard to distinguish yourself in this area from all of the other people peddling this content. Well, the one thing I'll say is that, yeah, I was a bit reluctant to cover Michaela for various reasons and will be gentle, but I think it did turn out to be pretty interesting because it does provide a little bit of a window into this world of alternative diets and people with health problems and potentially psychosomatic issues that we'll hear about and finding a solution in their personal lives through these rather unusual health behaviors. So I think it could be a useful and interesting little peek

into that sort of world because I think it's interesting that the stories that people tell, not just Michaela, but the people she interviews and the sorts of backstories they have and the kinds of things about the diets that feels convincing to them, it'll be good to get into. And we're not focusing so much, you know, people have asked us to, we don't do this in general, but Michaela is kind of infamous because it seems like a lot of the health trials that Jordan Peterson underwent and particularly seeking out therapy in Russia and engaging in various experimental ways to deal with his drug dependency. A lot of it seems to relate to Michaela's views on mainstream medicine. And there's been various profiles detailing her involvement in that. And also the kind of bizarre lifestyle of running around with pickup artists

and all sorts of weird dynamics. It'll come up a little bit in the content that we're looking at, but we're not doing a deep dive on her like that. We're looking at her content. We'll maybe stick a couple of articles in the show notes for people that want to look into that element. And I think there's a lot there. The family dynamic is just, it's a very bizarre thing in the Peterson household. But that isn't primarily what we're going to focus.

We're going to focus on her content. So take us through it, Chris. Shall we get started with let's get straight to the me let's not yeah oh god oh god all right well let's see a clip to start things off where she's introducing one of her guests and i think it gives a good indication of the framing around these kind of issues that she puts in the kind of anti-mainstream medicine position. So here we go. We talk about lies we've been told about health and how to transition to a healthy lifestyle.

This guy's the best-selling author of Lies My Doctor Told Me, and I support what he does. I'm also slowly convincing him to try the lion diet. If you want to learn about how to get healthier in a way that actually works, check this episode out. So you get in that clip, both the kind of the modern medical establishment that's lying to you. And the solution is this lion diet. And then there's a guest being introduced who's going to peddle slightly

different, but very similar talking points. The guest is David Berry. Is that right? Ken Berry. Yeah. As you mentioned his name there, Matt, there's, you know, there's a little bit mean, but there are people sometimes when humor doesn't land, it's hard not to notice it and the fact that he is a man with a surname Berry and that he's

promoting all meatmeat diet. It's ironic, right? It's funny. Like, do you need me to explain, Matt? God's sad, like, what the joke is there? Well, just in case you do, let me, let Michaela explain that joke to you. Do you find it funny that your last name is Barry? It is funny. And, you know, somebody made a graphic of me, Dr. Barry, and then Dr.

Sean Baker, and then Dr. Paul Salad Eno. And they're like, it's funny that the three carnivore doctors all have carbs in their name. And I think that's also funny, but probably. That's very funny. I find that very funny. It is. It's very funny, find that very funny it is it's very funny matt i find that it's hilarious i was laughing on the inside yet it's an interesting character and an interesting book because a lot of the claims in it will remind you chris of other gurus for instance he's not a fan of sunscreen he thinks we need to start soaking up the sun. He thinks we need to get a lot more vitamin D. He claims the medical community is responsible for all kinds of lives, of course, right into the microbiome. And a lot of other takes that are based on the

idea that natural is good. For instance, you shouldn't be drinking milk or having dairy because most animals don't do that. Yeah. There's a whole genre of this kind of thing, and it has a very specific kind of cadence to it. You can hear it in like sovereign accent flavored variety or in kind of bouncy young woman variety from Makayla. So the themes that they're hitting on are not new, but I will say, Matt, that it is also the key is that sometimes when you're listening to this, you just are kind of like, well, what's

the point? These are just people talking guff about meat, but they're both quite popular. And actually the guest, Ken Barry, so listen to this, It illustrates the reach that this kind of messaging has. Okay, Dr. Barry, you've kind of downplayed the size of your YouTube channel. How many subscribers do you have right now? I think I have 1.6 million YouTube subscribers on my channel, which I'm very thankful for and very grateful for. It's comparable to the Coding the Guru's success of 1.6 million in the same ballpark like that doesn't surprise me the audience for people that are you know concerned about their diet aren't feeling great having feeling like they've got low levels of energy

or whatever or to lose weight there's a lot of people looking for answers in that space so there's a whole industry based on this stuff it It doesn't surprise me. No, it doesn't. There's probably communities with like 1 million people who like to smell socks on YouTube and talk about it. There's subgroups for everything, but it is sometimes

just important to remember that the part that we struggled with, that this is endless hours of people talking about eating meat and like, why, why? But there's an audience for this and there are people who produce this week in and week out about meat and we'll see, and we'll see always look at the content that, you know, they have their own spins.

One of them likes pork and one of them likes pulled beef or someone that only eats chicken. It's a whole ecosystem of meat diet people. Sometimes the internet delivers wonders, Matt. We need to play some more clips, but this very much gels with what I've learned about complementary and alternative medicine generally, which is that it's like a crystal. It's like just extraordinarily complex. It's like a fractal. It's very difficult to study for that reason because you can make some broad categories,

but every category will have endless diversification and variation within it and then splintering off within those and so on. So that doesn't surprise me with these diets. It's the same. There's a broad category of these paleo diets or ketogenic diets or whatever. And then within that, there's just an infinite amount of diversity. So these all meat diets are probably on the edgier side of it. Edgier side of the diet industry. Jesus Christ. What have we come to?

But yes, I agree. Anybody that's advocating that people subsist entirely on meat, it shouldn't be hard to work out why that would be a fringe claim that somebody would advocate. Even if you want to go like hunter gallerist societies and paleo diet stuff, very few people are under the impression that most humans throughout most of history have been subsisting on pure meat diets, right? I don't care. I'd maybe like the best hunter in the tribe or that kind of thing, but have been subsisting on pure meat diets, right? I don't care.

Maybe like the best hunter in the tribe or that kind of thing. Actually, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the structure of our gut, I mean, different animals have different guts and intestines and so on based on their diet, right? This is the scientific insight people come to this podcast for. Yeah, this is not rocket science. This is me just guessing. But yeah, like dogs have a very short gut, for instance, right? And that's why you don't see them eating salad.

Oh, interesting. This is science. This is why I'm here. Tell me more. It's true. It's true. I've studied this. Dogs do not prefer salad.

On the other hand, rabbits, for instance, would enjoy a good salad. And I think they have the gut that's suited to that. Now people- Is your argument that rabbits have much longer guts than dogs? Because I'm going to dispute this, Matt. That's true. It doesn't seem like it would fit in a rabbit. Like a rabbit's quite-

You know, in many ways, we are like biologists, tree biologists. Mike, do you know some animals, they have stones in their stomach? I think that's true. They eat stones and then they grumble up the leaves and grass and then they mix up. So that's another interesting animal fact there for you. So I think people have guts that are clearly omnivorous, right? Like there's their guts that are designed to process vegetable matter. And you can tell if an animal basically has a gut that's designed to process only meat.

I like this idea that we look at the human gut and we intuitively judge, yep, you should be an omnivore. No, I know. I'm just poking fun. I think you are fundamentally correct and I'm just teasing you. But let's return to Mikaela and Ken telling us about what it is that modern medicine does instead of helping people. They say, yeah, basically you're chronically ill and there's nothing you can do about it. And here's some pills. You're just unlucky. Bye. Screw it. You come in, you've got a chronic illness. The doctor just looks at you and says

well sorry you're screwed like do you want some pills that's obviously a big draw card to alternative medicines and interesting diets because people do have chronic illnesses or people do have illnesses real or imagined for which there doesn't seem to be an easy fix. And that is usually the doorway that leads them into looking for other solutions. Yeah. And it is true that basically doctors don't have much time with individual patients. They can't be that indulgent because of stretch resources and whatnot. So you come in with unspecific maladies or a general feeling of woe. There is not that much a doctor can do for you and they have a limited amount of time. Alternatively,

go to Michaela or a crystal therapist, pay them enough money, and they can sit down for you and discuss your personal issues and give you a personalized crystal treatment or all-meat diet tailored to your specific personality, but that takes your concerns seriously. Yeah, it's easy to understand the appeal. Nobody really enjoys interacting with the medical system that much these days. But you hit the nail on the head when you said that it's like a bespoke individualized therapy. That's the major drawcard. People hate the feeling that they've got a generic problem and just being given a generic kind of treatment, treated like a slab of meat. That's not what complementary and alternative medicine does. It's a bespoke thing. There's a lot of time spent understanding your personal

journey and the things that brought you here, the amazing individual that is you, and generally crafting a treatment regime that is just for you. And I think it speaks deeply to psychological or cultural values or something. I can see the attraction. And that's the case with these diets too, right? As we'll hear later on in these clips, they don't just have one meat diet that suits everybody. There's like a thousand variations and there's a constant process that they talk about of tailoring the diet, adding bacon or taking away the bacon and seeing how you go with that to sort of optimize it for your own personal journey.

Yeah. Let me play a clip to illustrate some of these points. Just a short one discussing about health and what we don't recognize. don't recognize. You might be able to limp along without these vitamins and minerals and fatty acids, but never will you realize your best health, your most optimal function. It's just not accessible to you because you're being restricted from these necessary nutrients. Yeah. I think a lot of people also have been sick for so long that they don't understand what it feels like to be healthy. I absolutely agree. So the thing I want to highlight there is this tendency, and you see it in this content,

you see all over this kind of content, where they are pathologizing a sense of dissatisfaction or unease, right? It could be physical, but it could just be the sense that you're not your best self and what's causing that and maybe it's your diet i think in a kind of sincere but quite predatory way they're weaponizing people's sense of dissatisfaction with their feelings or concerns about things and then saying well that means that fundamentally there's something wrong and you need to address that and you've been ignoring that. It just is a way to encourage people to interpret the dissatisfactions that come with being a human and modern life as being something fundamentally pathological when in reality,

I don't think this is something that is specific to modern consumer societies. I don't like the implicit pathology of the majority of people in the world. That's very true. And the theme that you see a lot and much more broadly than these fad diets is the raising of the bar in terms of what it means to be healthy and well. in terms of what it means to be healthy and well. So it goes beyond curing a disease and going more into optimizing yourself and being the best self that you can be. And there's a way in which that's a positive thing.

But also in raising that bar, we increase our expectations for ourselves. And it's a bit like a first world problem in that we're not suffering from hunger or polio or whatever. So our Overton window, if you like, of what's acceptable tends to shift up and we can develop a greater sensitivity to these sort of first world problems. So one of these fundamental psychological theories is that we have a baseline setting for happiness and feeling good. And if you win the lottery or something great happens, you'll feel happy for a

little while and then you'll kind of return to baseline and sand goes for bad things. So when you have a first world society where things are generally pretty good, you're going to naturally shift your window and have higher standards or start feeling more sensitive, I guess, to the ways in which you don't feel great. Yeah. In addition to pathologizing the common state of being, they also do this thing, which we see for IDW and the anti-establishment groups all over the internet, where they demonize

mainstream bodies or institutions issuing health recommendations. So one example of this is when they talk about the American Heart Association and allegedly changing advice on cholesterol intake. And they go into some detail about this, but I'm just going to play the part where after they've talked about this claim that now the American Heart Association doesn't have any recommendations about cholesterol intake and it's quietly done this. I want to highlight the similar way Brett and Heller, for example, characterize the institutions that they talk about. The world authority on all things heart-related

has stopped that recommendation. They don't even recommend that you limit cholesterol intake or limit saturated fat intake any longer, but they didn't have a press conference, so no one knows. What's that saying? The road to hell is paved with good intentions? Yeah, in this case, I think that's very applicable.

Yeah, no, that's completely criminal in my opinion. I agree. It kind of echoes to me the grand conspiracy claims. And Matt, just to say, I did a little bit of fact checking on this and I very quickly found

that the American Heart Association does indeed still recommend that you limit your saturated fat cholesterol intake. So there are always things that do change in diet recommendations, and there are gray areas. But the notion that anyone is still saying, it's completely fine for you to just eat fatty fried bacon five days a week, and there's no issue with that.

No, that's not true. Or that cholesterol is not related to risk factors for heart attacks. As far as I could see, and it wasn't hard to detect the information, there are still recommendations about limitations and that. So it just, it doesn't seem true. It doesn't surprise me to hear that they're overstating the negligence of the health authorities. The other thing to be aware of, of course, is that diet recommendations from anyone, whether it's the AMA or NHS or whatever, are always difficult to come by because evidence in this area is really difficult to gather. So you can quite straightforwardly evaluate the effectiveness of a

particular operation, say, or a particular drug via your standard RCTs, randomized control trials, much more difficult to evaluate something that requires adherence over a long period of time, even years, like diet and seeing whether or not that there's systematic effects. And when they do try to do that stuff with diets, it's generally very difficult to show detectable effects. So the upshot of that is to the degree to which diet does matter, and I'm always open to the null hypothesis that it really fricking doesn't matter that much because we're like rats that can basically get by on virtually anything. But to the extent that it does matter, it's difficult to gather evidence and that creates ambiguity and this great big space for fad diets and self-help health books of all kinds. Yeah.

Operating in the gaps of knowledge or areas where, like you say, data is just hard to come by that is definitive for various questions. It's a kind of sweet spot for guru types in whatever the topic so my i'm i know i'm kind of dancing around getting into the in-depth descriptions of carnivore diets it's been light on the meat so far i was expecting us to do that on purpose because i just it's well so i'm going to do just there's one more before we dive into those steaks and burgers and slices of raw meat in the full glory. You remember in our Gwyneth Paltrow episode that particularly, I forget the name of the doctor that you were speaking to, but they talked a lot about fungus and the potential influence that fungus may have over minds, right? Mind control.

Oh, yeah. Fungus. So there's a slight echo of those kinds of narratives here. I've got two clips. So here's the first one where the topic is introduced. And the second one is Makila riffing on it. So let's see what they have to say about mind control fungus. And a lot of people don't understand the power that fungus can have over your actual mental activity.

If no one's seen the video of the zombie ants where a fungus literally makes this ant ignore all of its instinct in its tree, climb to a top of a leaf, attach to a certain kind of leaf on a certain tree on a certain side of the tree, and then die and then fall to the ground so that the fungus can replicate in the ant's blood. Just search YouTube for fungus ants. I'm going to link that below. It's screwed up. It is, but that's the power that fungi can have over seemingly sentient beings and make you literally become a zombie. And you're going to the fridge and looking for the carbs.

It's completely against your will. There's a slight leap there. I don't know if you detected that, but. At the end, going up the leaf and you heading to the fridge to get the calves. It's the exact same. You know, there's very little difference there. A fungus, you would be surprised to know, Mark, that you look at a mushroom and you think a TSD snack. That's what the mushroom is thinking when it looks at you.

Now, I did read something about the effects of, I mean, it wasn't like mushrooms or something. It was, I did read something about fungus in the gut and biome and effects on mood or something that was really slightly. No, this is the same problem, Matt. There's, of course, there's some basis of what they're talking about, but there are ants that their behavior is influenced by fungus. And it's not just ants. There's a whole area of study about these kind of relationships in nature. But then the equivalent notion, what they're describing is not this notion that you have some infection or whatever, and you feel a bit different because of what it's doing to your body chemistry. They're talking about a fungus mind controlling you and like inserting thoughts that are not

your own. And if there was any doubt about that, just listen to the second clip. When I first went to paleo, that's when the cravings were the worst. And I could tell, I knew because I've been doing research on the microbiome, even though there's not a lot to read out there that's like legitimate exactly because it's so new. But I could tell that the cravings weren't mine. Like I'd be like, no, I'm on this diet. And they'd just be like angel food cake would just appear in my head. And I'd be like, what is that? What is that? And I'd be hungry, but I wouldn't be hungry for the food that was healthy. I'd just be hungry for the food that wasn't healthy and be like well then I'm not hungry

if like if I only want to eat one food but I don't want a steak that's not actual hunger so I just got angry at it I was like how dare you whatever is in me trying to control me how dare you starve and that was very unpleasant absolutely, this has been happening to me. This has been happening to me. I know I shouldn't be eating the Pringles. Like I know I shouldn't, but I find myself reaching for them and eating them. I don't know why. I don't know why.

Is it the fungus? It is the fungus. You are walking. You're the ant. Any day now, you're just going to keel over beside your fridge and there'll be a big bloom of mushroom spores and people will say, well, what happened? Like that voice is in your head telling you to eat crap. That's not you.

That's not your lack. You know, that's not willpower faltering. That is the spores Matt, like crawling up into your brain tubes and trying to take over the wheel. Like they're going to find me dead, covered in fungus, clutching a tin of Pringles. So that's how I'm going to be. Michaela and him, they are right, Matt.

They're talking about telling the fungus or the gut biome or whatever. No, no, you want the bad food. I am in control here. You will not rule me. It's so pseudoscientific, it's almost painful. But you can imagine them retreating to, are you just saying the microbiome doesn't have any influence over how people health?

But no, their little dialogue reveals that their model of how the body works, it's cartoonish. And it's pseudoscientific. So yeah, if that's the depth of the research they're talking about doing, you do have to wonder, should you be trusting any of their other claims about health and science and complex interactions in the body? My answer is no. Okay.

Okay. All right. You do have to wonder. I agree. Now, can we, can we get into the meat? I want to let's okay. Okay. All right.

We've done enough. We've established that McKayla is a fungus zombie or she was in danger of becoming one. And you know, you brought up crisps, Matt. Here's like a doorway, just opening the door a little bit into the meat world. Here's one of the advertisers that Michaela had on her show. These are carnivore crisps and the ingredients are literally meat and salt and they taste like chips coming from someone who hasn't had chips since 2016.

Seriously, though, these are awesome. Go to carnivorecrisps.com and enter code MP for 10% off. I'm sorry. I just, I have to speak to the horror of this existence, right? What they're talking about is crisps made out of meat that are designed to taste like crisps, kind of, but like, I just imagine, you know, this dried meat that you go to the fridge after your months on the carnivore diet and you're like, I have meat for breakfast, meat for lunch, meat for dinner. What will I have for a snack? My meaty crisps.

It does sound like a hard way to live. I remember Jordan Peterson talking about, like in a very emotional voice, how hard it was to eat steak for breakfast. And I really felt for him. I was thinking, yes, it would be. I'm so sorry. Why? Who is doing this to you? Who is doing this to you?

So, yeah, let's get into it. Here is an example. We'll get more, Matt, but here's one example of the depth of description that people can go into about their meat diets. What does your diet look like specifically? What's animal-based look like for you? What's like a daily meals? What does that look like?

So there's always a large serving of some meat routinely. I can eat eggs just fine. Some people on carnivore, depending on why they're doing it, may or may not be able to include eggs. I found that many people think they're allergic to eggs. It's actually the egg whites. If they'll just stick to the yolk, they don't have any inflammatory symptoms at all. And so I typically don't break my fast until 1 or 2 or 3 p.m. every day. I'm just not hungry. I don't think about it. I've got stuff to do. I've got lots of farm chores outside. I've got the people to reach, people to help. And so somewhere between 1 and 4 p.m., I'll be like, oh, I haven't eaten today. And so I'll go have maybe a 12-ounce ribeye with seven or eight egg yolks scrambled, and that'll be my breakfast for that day.

I can include some dairy, always full-fat, real good-quality dairy. If I get too far off into the dairy, I'll start to notice some inflammation in different parts of my body. So a tiny bit of cheese, a tiny bit of heavy cream. But the vast majority of my diet is meat and eggs. Matt, this is just breakfast, right? This goes on. I've stopped it there because it's another two minutes before he gets to the end of what he eats. And I know they're talking about diets.

I know what the subject is. But for the love of God, Matt, for the love of God. He's not very hardcore if he's having some eggs because the serious ones just eat meat. I remember one of the other people were being interviewed. For a while there, he was doing the bacon and the mince and then cut out the bacon and just eat meat. I remember one of the other people were being interviewed. For a while there, he was doing the bacon and the mints and then cut out the bacon and just to focus 100% on the mints. Notice they mentioned inflammation. And inflammation is one of these things that they're really keen on.

It just seems to be one of the things that trouble people who go on these diets. They also talk about a lot of mood disorders and things like that, but I guess we'll come to that a bit later. Yeah. So let's hear another variation of a diet. Here's another one, Matt. This one, a little bit about pork. It's a different person because there's different diets available. Well, initially the first five months, it was a variety of meats, but I always made sure to have at least two meats with every meal because in my research on how to do this way of eating the reasons why people who failed they they kept saying they got would get tired of just eating meat and i could intellectually

understand that and after thinking about it a while i realized I'd never had a meal in my life that bacon was on the plate that I didn't enjoy in some fashion. Now, it wasn't like bacon was always my favorite meat, but I just came to that realization. And so I made it a point I would always have two types of meat with every meal, and one of those would always be bacon. So the first five months, it was a variety of meats with bacon, a lot of steak, eggs and bacon, um, pork shoulder roast and bacon and on and on. Yeah. Look, listeners, you just cannot overstate how much they talk about me in these recordings. Now, Chris has been quite selective in the clipping because it can get

kind of repetitive. The continual, incessant discussion of the different types of meat that they eat at different times of the day. And we had pity on you and we've cut a little bit of this content, but you only need to hear a bit of it and just extrapolate yourself. There's more. There's hours, hours of people talking about me. And when Matt and me were discussing this, we were noting that an interesting aspect of these people is that it's almost like Pokemon where there's a, there's a type of carnivore who will only pork, right? And then there's another one that will only white meat and another one

that only eats ste steak on Wednesdays. And they all like, they all have these very specific things that they will only eat. It's like they're carving out their carving out their niche in the, the meat ecosystem. This is true. There's a lot of talk of ruminant beasts. So like that's a category of meat. I'm those beasts that think about themselves a lot. Asking them, what am I doing? Like why?

What's the point? Yeah. So that's an important category. Some of them will just restrict themselves to ruminant meat and others will branch out it to other kinds but yeah well matt there's also a description maybe this is a little bit mean but i i cut it out because i was you know just visualizing people's lives as i listen to these things and just listen to this it's another it's surprisingly it's more about a meat diet. Fatty lamb, I did better.

I still do better with fatty lamb than beef. I couldn't eat steak for like five months. It was too filling and spiked my blood sugar. But yeah, I ate egg fields, bone marrow, beef suet, fatty lamb. I was making broth with chicken feet and pig ears. I was making air fried fish skins, which are really good, but they do stink up your house if you don't like the smell of fish. And yeah, that's it for the most part. I was making carnivore cheesecake and I allowed myself to eat dairy for the first two months

because I needed hyper palatable things. I needed to keep gaining weight. And it was so hard for me to eat more than a fourth of a steak. I'm kind of frightened to know what carnivore cheesecake is. Imagine coming over to the house for that. I'm kind of grateful. She talked about dried fish skins because you don't hear fish mentioned as a potential source of nutrition

often in these takes. So at least there's that, even if it is making the house stink up or whatever. But yeah, just meat cheesecake. And again, the surprising cornucopia of meaty products that you can mention in your diet. Matt, we're going to get on, there was a little bit in that clip that you heard reference to health issues and needing the game way, and there's a part in this where there's a very serious thing where a lot of these people, it sounds a lot like they've got both psychological issues, serious ones, and that taking these diets may have been beneficial to them in helping them to gain control over some of that, which I don't begr food and which food's okay and which ones

aren't that lends itself really easily to severe eating disorders. And we hear various things about that. And I don't want to make fun of people who have those concerns. It's not what I'm reasoning for for but i'm reasoning for how that possibility that there's a psychological origin for a lot of the reactions that people are having it's kind of purported as that's a dismissive view of the medical industry and i don't think it is no it's what i'm saying no i mean i agree with you i heard the same backstories and i don't think it's being mean to say that many of them had very they had problems of psychological problems

psychosomatic problems and problems that often had some connection to eating disorders as you said and the thing with eating disorders is that the behavior can give one a feeling of control over whatever the sources of angst are. And when some improvement is perceived, and it could be real improvement, it could just be like a return to the mean or some sort of random thing,

that it can be a helpful crutch, if you like, to deal with those issues. Yeah, there's certainly a pattern there. We'll hear more about it, I guess. Yeah. Before we go there, some sort of random thing that it can be a helpful crutch if you like to deal with those issues yeah there's certainly a pattern there we'll hear more about it i guess yeah before we go there one thing i think it's kind of good matt that you talked about our pack rat ability to consume things because there is one description where they talk about what they've been feeding their infant since birth and there's lots of that dads available over the world. I'm sure there's one that resembles this, but it is quite hard paid. Let me just play it for you.

So you start a baby out like we did Beckett with beef ribs and ground beef. That was the first foods that went in his mouth. And so he's loved meat from day one. Any children don't get that opportunity. They're raised on the little rice crispy things and the little wheat crackers. And so they never develop a true broad human palate that can enjoy lots of different subtlety. I think part of my concern now is that the broad human palate is then going to be restricted just to meat. Yeah. They're describing feeding a baby as its first food, ribs.

That doesn't seem right. That doesn't seem right. I'm not saying that a baby couldn't get nutrition from that, but there's a reason those surf piece, you know, like kind of mushed up vegetables and stuff early in life, right? Is there though? It could just be a social convention, Chris. Look at me. We must be careful not to do the argument from incredulity here because, and I've said

this to you before, in line with my people are rats thesis that you can basically survive on anything if once again you do it. You're the modern version of Slipknot. People equals shit. Yeah, yeah. What about the Inuit people that live in the arctic they basically were living on an all-meat diet and they did all right yeah but babies are mainly subsisting on milk in the first at the early stages of life and I also think curious, Matt, are they feeding the ribs of seals to the young infants? I doubt that. I'm not saying you can't persist on meaty products, but I just, I have this image.

It's like, it's almost like treating a baby to be a vampire or something, especially outside of that context. We're not talking about societies where there are ecological reasons for why you might have a restrictive diet. You might even have the possibility for genetic propensities associated with communities that have subsisted on specific diets for generations. I'm not really now, but I don't think that's what's being described here. And I can't help imagining image of a small baby sucking on a rib, stepping rib and looking longingly at the milk sitting on the couch. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a bit disconcerting that image, but you know. Each to their own, each to their own.

You can do what you want. There's, there's a bit disconcerting, that image. But, you know. Each to their own. Each to their own. You can do what you want. There's options available. One thing, Matt, before we get into the more depressing ground about the mental health issue stuff, I think part of this whole material, this whole oeuvre that we're talking about, it might have a lot to do with what are the predominant diets in North America. And I'm not saying the British diet is much better. So we can extend it to Britain, maybe Australia as well, if you want. But Western diets seem to be a feature here.

Listen to what they described as what they're putting as the comparison to their diets. There are so many people in the US.S. especially who only know breaded chicken strips and ketchup and Coke or Pepsi. And that's literally all the taste they can taste. They cannot taste the... That was me. Yeah. I swear that was me. 100%.

It's very common, but people aren't aware of this, so they don't know this happens. And so they'll initially say, no, I don't like meat. And I'm like, oh no i don't like meat and i'm like oh you 100 like me you just don't know it yet because you're used to your breaded chicken strips with sugar-free ketchup and a coca-cola yeah now i hear what you're saying these chicken strips that's meat but maybe it doesn't count but anyway put that aside yeah I hear what you're saying, which is that, look, it's true. In large segments in populations in the United States and UK and Australia, some people who don't do any fad diets don't eat very well. They eat a lot of processed food, fast food, this sort of deep fried food or whatever.

I know people like that and that's not healthy either. And they obviously get far too much sugar. So that's an interesting thought actually like if you're comparing this all meat diet with mcdonald's sugary drink type diet it could well be better because just by cutting out ridiculous amounts of processed calories and sugars without any vitamins and minerals or fiber in it. So yeah, makes sense. Yeah, there is a lot of healthy aspects about Western diets or maybe diets in developed societies, but it's not always the case. Like the country I live in is a good example of a wealthy country with generally very good

diets. Japan, by the way, for anybody that just joined the podcast on this episode. Okay. So turning to some of the points that we made about the possibility for illnesses, um, psychological or physical, to be playing a major issue here. Let's look at a couple of clips where people are describing that. Here's one of the guests talking about the issues they had when they were a child. I have been malnourished since sixth grade was the first sign of malnourishment when I was

diagnosed with osteoporosis. Came down, I had very severe mood disorders in seventh grade. I was constantly getting sick, failure to thrive. I was diagnosed with multiple doctors with failure to thrive, which is really alarming. Just throwing antibiotics at me all the time. And in seventh grade, I had narcolepsy, In seventh grade, I had narcolepsy, ADHD, OCD, insomnia, depression. And I wasn't just diagnosed with these. I was seriously suffering, big time. So it doesn't sound good, does it, Mark? No, no.

Pretty serious medical backstory with that person. Yeah. So turning to Makayla, for example, as we mentioned, she also had childhood illnesses, right? And listen to the way that she described some of those experiences. How many doctors did you turn out to pastor personally when you discovered, oh my God, diet really matters a lot? discovered, oh my God, diet really matters a lot. A lot. I had a lot of doctors. I had a lot of doctors. I had a rheumatologist and a psychiatrist and a family doctor. That was three at least. And then I was going to see an immunologist for allergies. So that's four. Oh, and a dermatologist for skin. So that's five. I bet you there was more, but there were definitely five. It speaks to the legacy of interaction with the medical system, right?

Yeah, there's generally a lot of interaction with the medical system and also both psychiatric or psychological issues as well as physical ones. Yes, one of the other guests, the one who was describing the symptoms that they had as a child, hears them discussing what they enjoyed as an adult.

In 2017, my central nervous system crashed. I think that it was the last straw of my gut because I had just finished wisdom teeth removal surgery and I took the opioids and antibiotics that they give you. And I think it just broke my gut. And I was literally having crippling suffocation and anxiety attacks.

Yep. There's a lot of linking. You can see them basically saying, I was experiencing this and maybe this was related to the diet that I had or because i was eating that kind of food and like i can't help i think probably not but if you think that if you change your diet it could actually potentially help with managing the symptoms yeah several guests mentioned not only psychological problems, but also issues with potentially addictive drugs. And as you say, directly linking those issues with the diet. I guess that gels with the Jordan Peterson story as well. Yeah, you've got this whole constellation of physical dependence and mental issues. David Pérez- There's a clear parallel map with the way that Jordan Peterson, for example, attributed this huge reaction to drinking apple cider.

He famously told this story where he was up for 30 days after daring to drink an apple cider. And it's clear that like Mikaela, he attributes almost unbelievable power to the food that you consume. He's now on that. And there's, to me, a certain question over attribution to diet, like the powers that are attributed to it comes from. Is it that Jordan got this from Michaela's interest? Because she's clearly the person who is now driving on these dietary things or and I mean we don't know right we don't know about the family dynamics or that kind of thing but it's really notable the parallels between the level of agency

they're almost attributing to just eat a specific food and then weeks of horror, months of horror. Yeah. I don't want to over-psychologize it, but food is one of those existential concerns that people have. People develop angst and anxieties about existential issues, intimacy, death, health, and illness there's a reason why diets can attract and what people eat and what they don't eat can attract that obsessive concern because it is just one of those core issues that are prone to that so it's a natural cognitive error to make assuming they are making a cognitive error but yeah matthew ramski wrote an article actually after our episode on Brett and Jordan, where he looked at Jordan's description of his aesthetic lifestyle at the minute,

right, the restrictions on diet, but also the kind of daily routine that he goes through and from his analysis of it, he saw a lot of parallels with these kind of purification practices that you see in New Age and alternative wellness communities and a kind of bodily asceticism, which is attached to... Avoiding contamination and stuff.

Exactly. Yeah, that kind of spiritual purity attached to your ability to resist foods and to engage in bodily ascetic practices. Yeah, it can be a big strategy because the external world is wild and uncontrollable and full of things you cannot control. So there is an intrinsic appeal to focusing on, especially at points where the world might impinge on you or impinge on you physically. If you can control that and control yourself, then that can give just a strong sense of

psychological security. Yeah, you can hear this when Michaela is discussing her diets and various restrictions that she's placing on herself and how she responds when she can overcome them and these kinds of things. I've got two clips that are related. This is the first one. And from my experience, like I couldn't drink tea for a long time and I can drink tea now and it doesn't bother me. And I mean, it took me a number of years to have, of having no depression to even risk that but I have wanted to do some testing out to see if this is these are things you can heal from plus in order to get more

people interested in trying it's more of an encouraging story to say you know what I did only eat beef for two years and then I had beef and fish and then I had beef and fish and chicken and now I have tea as well. So this isn't necessarily for the rest of your life because it can turn people off. Although once, if you are chronically ill and then you heal, generally people don't care once they're at that point, right? Yeah. So this is a bit tangential to that clip, but what you'll hear there is not only Michaela mentioning depression, which the diet cured, but also it reminded me of just the wide variety of ailments that the various characters here have claimed that has been cured by their diet.

It's quite staggering. It covers the gamut from psychological stuff to inflammation to serious autoimmune disorders. There's just a wide range of stuff. So that's the thing that should trigger people's skeptical antenna, that it is just inherently highly implausible that any one thing is going to cure whatever ails you. That sounds like snake oil. It's all reliant on anecdote and personal experience. Listen to this.

This is a clip of Makila introducing and kind of heading off skepticism when she did the episode interviewing the four people who were going to explain how the kind of road that has changed her life. And it's clear that she is aware that this would be a possible critique, but just listen to the way it's framed. In this episode, I interviewed four people who have had experiences with the carnivore diet. This episode makes me quite nervous because these stories don't sound believable. Even coming from someone who's spoken about my lion diet and the carnivore diet, I straight up would not believe these stories if I hadn't lived an experience that was also unbelievable. Part of me wants to drop the whole diet thing and just

stick with my podcast, the other types of episodes. I include this tip because I also want to point out that she does at various points hint that, but she is also bored from talking about meat. It's nice humanizing because whatever you think of all the things that they're doing and promoting and claiming, they're fundamentally restricting themselves, right? They're putting themselves through hell. Yeah. Chris, I really feel for them. If eating only meat is half as monotonous to listening to people talk only about meat, then my heart goes out to them. Yeah.

Yeah. Like we say, this might be beating a dead horse, but I have two clips where they're talking about the health issues. So one is withdrawal from antidepressants, which is a serious thing. Here's Makila talking about that. I mean, at one point I took OxyContin. And even then I came off of it too quickly. But the OxyContin was for pain. And at least people are aware that that causes withdrawal.

So when it happens, you're like, oh, I'm in opiate withdrawal. And you know of that. But I had absolutely no idea that you had to titrate down psych meds. Like I thought, well, if the depression isn't there, then you can just stop taking it. But that is not true. Anti-depressant withdrawal syndrome is a very real thing. I mentioned that clip because the thing that surprises me is despite the level of familiarity with so much medicalization so much involvement there's things which are just surprising that

she expresses that she didn't know you can not just cold turkey off antidepressant medication I'm like what like I know that and I've never taken an antidepressant, especially if it's a strong one. Well, an opioid in particular. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it is beating a dead horse, but just listen to the amount of medications referenced here.

When I was on opiates, then I had opiate withdrawal, and I went off way too fast, and that was definitely uncomfortable um but Adderall was no issue um actually I I got off of it once I was healthier so I didn't even have any rebound fatigue and I've been taking it like pretty solidly but um for not for years but maybe a year and a half. And I'd grown a tolerance too. Getting off of it was easy. SSRIs completely screwed me over. Dirty grill from somebody else's steak would set me off from SSRI withdrawal symptoms, which were just horrifying. Yeah. The pattern you see across all of the narratives and as he said it it very much follows the pattern of this is my story this is what happened to me i had a terrible life

it was really bad all these medications nothing was working i moved on to the meat diet and now i feel fantastic that's the story you'll hear again and again and again but what stands out to me is that these people have a hyper concern with their health it may well be justified that may well have had just genuine pre-existing conditions that had nothing to do with psychological issues at all but they all definitely do have this really really strong concerns with their health and when they talk about seeing half a dozen doctors or more and just continual, continual problems, this one and that one and that one, a whole bunch of unconnected things like Lyme disease and so on, they believe that they are providing the backstory for the

magical curative properties of me. But what I'm hearing is that they've got psychosomatic issues likely. I should make a disclaimer about not being a medical expert diagnosing people, but it's hard to avoid that conclusion, isn't it? Yeah. You mentioned, Matt, right, about the level of engagement with medical systems and all these different issues which are cropping up. And there are people that can have chronic health problems. These are real things. But at the same time, there's just a sense that in a lot of the cases that there's a very precarious grasp over the notion of being healthy. It's unclear the extent to which that is related to the causes that they're attributing to it.

Listen to Michaela discuss. She herself is recognizing she's kind of celebrating being able to add spices to her diet, but listen to the precarious nature that she describes that development with. Plus it's new, like the diet's so new that we're not, we don't really know about what, what the human body is capable of. Like there's things I know that I can, I'm not going to be able to eat because I'm really sensitive, psychologically, autoimmune wise, I'm super sensitive. And unless I can solve

the underlying problem, there are things I'm not going to be able to eat. But I don't know that in a number of years, I won't be able to eat a more varied diet, given the fact I can now, I can have some spices i usually keep it pretty simple because i feel best with like lamb and beef um but if i have chicken with spices now i can do that without going insane which is a huge being able to do anything and not go insane is a big thumbs up dear i i appreciate that so much, what you just said. Hmm. Yeah.

It's good to do things without going insane. Yes. That is good. The fact that the guest as well reacts with just a complete awareness of how easy it is for people to lose stability and not be able to eat spices, right? Yeah. It is precarious. And we haven't played his backstory but it's quite similar would you agree chris like all of these guests do have this similar pat traumatic yeah like a traumatic and precarious and this feeling that there's something deeply

wrong with them and that they do that i don't think that they necessarily think that the all-meat diet has necessarily cures the underlying issue. I think, I'm guessing here a little bit, but I think that their view is that there is something deeply wrong with them, which is unknown. But the all-meat diet can provide the support or allow them to get by. It's presented as a coping strategy. port or allow them to get by. It's presented as a coping strategy. Yeah. And we're telling the people that were in some cases involuntarily hospitalized for eating disorders.

Yes. There's serious issues. One thing that I kind of, I would just reiterate is that if this is how they are managing the issues, even if they are psychosomatic, I'm not a health professional, so I don't know how reliable that is. But if it gives people relief, I don't condemn them, but I can understand why they might see that as they were completely unstable. They were spinning out. They were having all these health issues.

They did something which they tried, and then they find that their life improves. And maybe it improves their mental stability and improves their feeling. And it could do that. But there's so many things that could do that it doesn't actually mean that the underlying medical claims are correct or that yeah it applies remotely yeah when we talk about things being psychosomatic it's not to diminish them as being imaginary they can be extraordinarily traumatic. And when they're very serious and leading people to be involuntarily confined and hospitalized and being fed with the tube, then at that point, as you say, whatever works is a good idea.

So I just wanted to underline your point there, which is that it's their body. They should eat what they want. They're not hurting anyone by having an all-meat diet and if it's helping them, then I would say all power to them. But I think other people that are listening to it and feeling that they've got some difficult to pin down malaise, something that doesn't feel quite right, I think those people should probably think twice before jumping into this or any other miracle cure as a panacea. Okay. We've talked about meat, Matt.

I think we've delved into the meaty world of meat aficionados. I'm going to move now to a couple of things to round off the Makila coverage. And one is Makila describing what she does. We talked about, is it fair to cover her as a guru? And I think this clip illustrates a couple of points about why it is and how it reflects what she is trying to do. Hopefully my ads will be better than that, but I'm hoping it'll be able to increase people's resilience. There's a lot of neuroscience behind it. My dad's into it. Victor's super smart and I'm building it to help myself sort out my own life and increase my resilience. So I'm really excited for that. That's called AIM. That's probably going to take another

four months at least, realistically. I am almost done my electrolytes. Maybe that's for September. There's a tart cherry flavor, salted caramel. They have very pure ingredients because I'm a sensitive human being. I've worked on them for two years. Turns out making pure electrolytes was really tricky. Those are coming out. Lion electrolytes. I really want to make a hangover pill. There's this compound called dihydromyricetin that fixes my hangovers. I'd really like to do something with that. So maybe there's that in the future. The pouting Barbie merch is coming at some point. Merch is coming.

I'll get your response, but this is her outlining what she's working on. This clip was telling to me because she's talking about making some electrolytes product and thinking about making a hangover pill and an app that she's working on with her dad and her husband and someone but none of these are things that she has knowledge right she's not a chemical engineer or something like that so it's just yeah it's just this kind of confidence that so i'm gonna design this and i'm interested in this chemical that would cure hangovers and you're kind of like i think this is a common thing amongst this kind of goopy set where you hear people coming out with these products with they just are celebrities or whatever and they have these ideas and make products and then they're including all

these claims in it and yeah just this willingness to produce things to sell right to market about topics which it sounds very much like there's no reason that she has any expertise or expectation of expertise to produce pharmaceutical products. Well, it would probably take the form of a product endorsement, a partnership with some company that makes something and it would be branded Michaela Peterson Lion anti-hangover pill or whatever and get sold on the site. I get, I know that, but that's what,

it's just the way that they're approaching things. It's almost like I'm imagining a witch at a cauldron just throwing in ingredients, right? I'm not saying that to be mean to her as a woman, but more as just this cartoonish view of how medicine and stuff works, where it's just intuitions and you just think this chemical is good. And do you maybe make a product out of that? Or there's an app that you've had difficulty, so you can maybe make an app with lots of neuroscience behind your app.

Yeah. I think what you're describing is the supplement industry, which is, it is what it is, Chris. It's not for me, Matt. It's not for me, Matt. It's not for me. And also, I guess this is part of my issue is this is in the Jordan Peterson ecosphere. And it's an illustration of how that kind of area, it makes reference to science and research and psychology studies and neuroscience and chemistry and that. But a lot of that is just superficial over these fairly intuitive, well-worn tropes in

health and wellness or conspiracy theorizing and that kind of stuff. And she's not as good as her dad. She doesn't have the depth of expertise that he actually has in areas, but you can definitely see the kind of earping of that. Or is that just me? Am I projecting? It could be just you because when I hear that, it sounds like bulk standard supplement promotions.

It's such a huge industry and you know it's sold in chemists there's a whole range of buzzwordy good sounding things like you know probably have electrolyte in the title somewhere with no evidence behind it and it's an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars so to me it's just not very surprising that an entrepreneurial podcaster would get into that. We should get into it. Yeah. Forget it.

Grind news. We're looking for offers. What can we sell? Decoding the Guru is power, energy, penis enhancer. Melon pants. That sounds on our brand sorry yeah yeah and bell and pants japanese baked greens oh yeah we're very specific uh spells and incantations done over them before you hate them they meet the difference my sarc. Sarcasm inserted as the final secret ingredient.

But look, the reason I'm drawing those parallels, and she doesn't do this all the time, but she does reference her upbringing, having Jordan Peterson as a follower and how this has prepared her, or also give her insights that other people wouldn't. And this is a little bit unfair because this is her responding to a specific question in her AMA about what it was like to grow up with Jordan Peterson as your dad. But take a listen. What was it like growing up with Jordan as your dad? My dad is really a lot like he is on YouTube.

If you've seen any of his lectures or looked at his old courses, that was kind of what dinner table conversation was like. So I learned a lot about psychology, way more than I knew I knew, I guess. I know a lot about personality. I did sit on some of his courses when I was in high school, though. Skipping high school for university personality courses. What was it like? I didn't know it was weird until I was like 24 or until he got famous. And then I realized it was weird. And it was weird. Our house was filled with Soviet art. Filled. I once had a Lenin painting fall on me while I was sleeping. We had 37 different colors of paint in our house,

over a hundred paintings. All the walls were completely covered in Soviet art, some native carvings, and there was other art in there. So what was it like? It was, I learned a ton. He's weird. I'm weird. I'm not sure what it was like. Imagine if your entire childhood, you spent watching Jordan Pearson YouTube videos. Jordan Piersen

I do that. That's a kind of down, you fade down, Don. But, um, but in particular, Matt, I'm thinking about, there's this, you could view it as a far away comment, but the notion about sitting in on university level courses when you were at high school and this kind of implication that by osmosis, she's picked up a lot of knowledge about psychological theories that she didn't know that she had until she's maybe started talking about these things and doing that, and not so much talking about the just interesting color of being surrounded by Soviet art, but

more her audience dynamics mean that she has been invited to view herself as having been given a special education. And I think whatever the directional influences that has played into her content. Well, you could be reading too much into a question in the AMA. That seems like a pretty predictable question that someone would ask. You know, David Pérez- It is, but I, okay. I'll agree.

That clip is kind of useful, right? To make that point. It's a sense that I get more broadly from her content. So it's more that this was support for an inference that I have. I'm going to defend the take a little bit because here's an interaction where Makayla is talking about her childcare arrangements. Just listen to the description here. What my day looks like now is Scarlett's in school.

She goes to a Montessori daycare. My audience is probably going to be like, meh, daycare, meh. But she really likes daycare. She's a very social child. She wants to see friends. So she goes to Montessori and she likes it. So fuck you guys. I liked the kind of sparky response there at the end, but I want to highlight, Matt, why would a person who has an only diet and the kind of thing that you're talking about, that just being a normal member of the alternative wellness ecosystem, why would they have any concern that their audience would react badly to the mentioning daycare? I don't think that's a normal concern for people in that area. I think it is more a concern

because of some of the origins that she's inherited from Jordan and or potentially the waters that she swims in, which is more right wing skewed towards things. But isn't that like the trad parenting expectations? Like she should be looking after her kid and anticipating a negative reaction to that. Yeah, I guess that's probably right. Yeah, I guess it is the trad. That daycare is just terrible. And yeah, I guess you're right. But I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

What I'm saying is just that while you probably have a valid point about the specific clip that I'm including, there is elements that come from the killer being Jordan Peterson's daughter. It bleeds into her content, both in audience composition, but also I think in the way that she has earned a kind of guru spot.

I don't know. I just, I see some influence. I'm going both ways because like I said, I'm not, whenever you see Jordan talking about food and the carnivore diet and stuff, it's clear. Yeah. I think the influence is probably primarily traveling from her to him. So, and not possibly like a simple one way relationship, but just there's influence and there's kind of shared insight and that sense that she shares some of the insight because she's been around that unusual environment.

David Pérez- I guess so. Yeah. Look, I guess you can say pretty safely that she's part of that constellation of thought and yeah, there'd be a fair bit of overlap in the audience as well. David Pérez- There is a kind of defensiveness, like she shares a lot about her daily life and these kinds of things or in some of the content I've seen. And I think that's part of this kind of content in general.

But there's a defensive note to a lot of it. I don't know if it's a traditional audience. I don't know if it's because of the criticisms about her lifestyle and so on, but just listen to this extended clip where she's talking about a little bit about parenting and she also drops in the myth about sugar and overactive children. Here you go. And then they play.

If we drop her off at daycare, walk her to daycare, she gets an apricot before she goes inside, takes her apricot, leaves. She'll do hugs sometimes, but it's not, and it's not lack of love. She's just happy to be going wherever she's going. And I think a lot of that has to do with not feeding her. Like she doesn't eat any sugar, none ever. She had sugar one time. It was in a sausage my mom bought and she screamed afterwards, like one of those toddlers in an airport where you kind of want to kill their parents. And so I was like, never, never again. She has honey. That doesn't seem to matter, but she doesn't have any cane sugar. We don't do dairy.

She basically eats meat and fruit and vegetables, which people might be like, oh, what about, you know, but I don't care about those people because I have a perfect child. I mean, God, she's not restricting her daughter to the all meat diet seemingly. That's a positive note. Yeah, I guess that was indicative of the kind of audience that you cultivate with this kind of thing and there's going to be some pretty interesting people in it who would be critical of her for not being pure and hardline enough. Yeah.

It's just, you know, just this thing, like I have a perfect child, so screw you or whatever, you know, like this is why, like, why not just describing what you're doing, there's like this sense that she'll get that reaction. Yeah, no, I hear, I hear you saying, I just don't know whether it's indicative of something deep or whether that's just her, you know, bouncy style, as you called it before, just that maybe it's a millennial thing. I don't know. Well, that's true.

That's true. It could be that. I kind of appreciate the element of defiance, at least to a certain extent. I think that's not necessarily a bad quality to have. So just an observation. Okay, Matt. So we, we try to finish on some positive things. So what have you got for me?

I want positive ticks. Stuff that I like about Michaela Peterson and the all meat diet. Yes. Well, the positive things I can say, I've already said them really, which is that yeah, to a large degree, you can get away with eating a lot of different things and you're not going to die. And if people want to eat meat and talk about their experiences with meat with one another, then I say all going to die. And if people want to eat meat and talk about their experiences with meat,

with one another, then I say all power to them. I'm not convinced in the slightest. I think there might be some side effects that are healthy and good, like eliminating sugar, because, you know, most people get far too much processed sugar, of course. Well, you can eat honey though, Matt. That's not sugar. Yeah, well, you know, you can eat. Obviously, in a healthy diet, you're getting sugars in a wide variety of ways, but I'm talking about the- No, no, no, Matt. There's no sugar. There's no sugar in honey.

I'm just telling you. She just, you know, she said- Oh, there's no sugar. I'm sorry. Sorry, yeah. Yeah. There's probably no sugars in juices either, I suppose. So that's all fine.

And like we talked about, when you've got psychological issues or dependence issues or psychosomatic issues or whatever kind you know a lot of the time these physical malaises can be pretty mysterious as well and a lot of people do all kinds of random stuff and for whatever reason it's almost certainly not the reason they think, or it's not the mechanism they think. They start feeling better, and so therefore they keep doing that thing. And that's understandable and nothing too terrible. Michaela doesn't seem to do very many guru-esque maneuvers, not consciously, certainly. She seems pretty straight down the line in that she's, look, I'm sure she's keen to have a successful podcast. I'm sure she's keen to develop entrepreneurial businesses where she's

selling some supplement or anti-hangover cure or whatever. That's not a crime either. So she seems to be straight down the line. She's clearly enthusiastic about meat. So she seems to be straight down the line. She's clearly enthusiastic about meat. Her personal life and her treatment of her father shows that. So she's talking about meat on her podcast and leveraging that opportunity to turn to different things. So I'm not seeing anything too terribly pernicious here. But as we talked about, I think they're suffering from some illnesses that are not related to their diet.

And that's my diagnosis. Yeah, I guess I maybe have a little bit more of a negative view. I'm trying to focus on positive things. Such a surprise. Such a surprise, Chris. Yeah, I think there's elements of it that are more manipulative than that and i admit that there are limit she doesn't have some of the guru s qualities of the kind of superstars that we look at but i don't see that so much as a conscious decision not to engage in those but

rather a lack of ability to do that and it might be related to her personality type, but I don't think she's beyond using the rhetorical techniques that other gurus would. I just think it might be a limitation of either her style or her capability to do so. What I'm talking about, Matt, for example, is she really fell in on demonization of mainstream health information and the authorities and so on. And she'll leap into kind of culture war issues at times, just like side points to infer kind of nefarious motives or to imply that the reason that she would get criticism, for example, related to what's happened with her father is because it's all a conspiracy to take them down and that kind of thing.

So I have some negative view about that, but I will agree that I think a lot of this stems from her working for her own issues in public and reaching conclusions, which she sincerely believes in and genuinely trying to help people with that. Right. And she's also relatively young. People can change their minds on things over time. I don't mean this in a patronizing way, but more just like there's room for things to change in time.

I don't think it will. I'm not optimistic it will, but I'm trying to be positive. And who knows? But I do have two clips that I think are funny. They're not really positive things, but they're funny, at least. So one is apparently, Matt, you might not need showers if you eat an all-meat diet. I don't think if you knew that, but here's one benefit of taking an all-meat diet. I don't think if you knew that, but here's one benefit of taking an all-meat diet. So humans are supposed to have odors, but we're not supposed to smell like a dead cat

if we don't take a bath every six hours, right? But many people notice, I've got to take two showers a day or I smell like an asshole. And the reason is, is your diet is not right you're selecting for the wrong skin bacteria that are very uh malodorous and that that's why you stink my brother or my sister it's not because just you stink it's because you're eating a diet that's proper yeah i found i also think it's your body trying to get rid of food so when i tried to to reintroduce soy and I had like no body odor, totally fine on paleo. And I tried to reintroduce soy. And during the reaction, when like my arthritis came back, my skin broke out. I like horrifying doom. My digestion was upset. I had terrible body odor. And I noticed if I got in a sauna and kind of sweated it out, then it would

get a little bit better. So I think it's also your body being like, get this out of me, whatever you're eating. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that speaks to a few things, doesn't it? One, the, the way in which the diet just fixes everything, including the fact that you smell bad. Two, it's this, it gets into that detoxification idea. Yeah. A lot of these, a lot of people who are into detox talk about the the toxins coming out through the skin which is just physically impossible obviously there's some truth in the the mix of skin bacteria and all that all that if you consume a diet of pure garlic for months it will affect your odor that's true that's true yeah yeah that's interesting but you know it's it's also

connected with what we're talking about which is that idea of purity and the i think for them the soul meat diet is a pure diet that keeps the body like a temple and so on and that is indicated by in their minds of the fact that you smell purer too. It's a natural consequence of being pure, Chris. Yeah. Well, so that's true, Matt. I've got nothing to say to that. That's exactly, that's science.

And here's more science. This is the final clip with Keila dropping some science based on a DNA test that she'd done. This blew my mind, Matt. Let's see how your mind survives collision with this idea. We did 23andMe, and I am actually more related to my dad than I am to my mom. Isn't that weird? My brother is more related to my mom and looks like my mom. You know, I guess it's not weird when you say it that way.

I just didn't realize that you could have, it's like a good portion more DNA towards one parent than another parent. Although to be honest, Scarlett looks like Andre. It's really annoying. Although at least she got blue eyes, but still I birthed you. That's not fair. Anyway, I'm more personality wise, like my dad, but I'm open like my mom. So all that like hippie woo woo stuff, my dad would never, ever, ever, ever even close to believe any of that, even the stuff that he should be more inclined to believe. So I've got the openness from my mom, but I've got the extreme skepticism from my dad, which gives me a strange personality. The volatility comes from my dad. The industriousness comes from my dad. Orderliness is mom. Compassion is dad.

Super, super compassionate. Zero politeness. That's my mom. That's so cool. I like the kind of essentialist view that it's just tick, tick, tick. I mean, lots of people engage in that. Yeah. The view of that Jordan Peterson is not open to woo was a surprise for me

when she was like, you know, he wouldn't have any interest in like, you know, woo-woo kind of stuff. I was like, you know, he wouldn't have any interest in like, you know, woo woo kind of stuff. And I was like, what? Yeah. Well, actually the thing that stuck out to me is, is how she presented herself as her father's daughter. Her mom might've carried her, but really she's like Jordan

Peterson reincarnate, isn't she? Like that's so, so that's kind of backing up your claim before, which was that she sort of promotes herself a bit as i kept it to here ma just at the end the vindicate yeah yeah um okay but what about this 23 and me testing we have to we have to get okay now i'm gonna have to fact check, but according to my muddled understanding of how genetics works is that you're pretty much going to get a roughly equal contribution of material from your mother and your father. Well, but don't you have to because of the way the genes work that you get 50% of your genes? Yeah, of course. Yeah, that's right. The helix disconnects and then it recombines and then some of them, but

there is recombination and stuff. So I'd have to check its textbook. I'm pretty sure that you end up with a 50-50 split, but what is expressed is different, right? Yeah, but that's what I'm talking about. The expression is kind of random on a gene by gene basis or whatever nucleotide basis but there's so many pairings that that's why it has to be almost exactly 50 50 i think well i also i don't think 23andme gives you a list of like you are 80 percent you're muller right like and so it means that what she's drawing from i would guess this has been speculating but

she's taking that they trace jordan's lineage facts to some locations and his mom's to yolo so they're they're probably doing like that but isn't 23 and me anyway like i i think the sample it's as far as i know the limitation is that it's tracing through the matrilineal line. Right. Oh, I didn't, I didn't know that. I don't know much about 23andMe, but I think you're right. Which is, I do know what those things give you, which is that sort of pie chart with 30%, whatever Scandinavian 45%, this and so on.

So I think what's happened is she's looked at her pie chart and she's compared it to a parent's pie charts. And she's seen that it's looks much more similar to her dad's one, therefore she's concluded this. But of course, what this reflects more than anything is the limitations of this categorization quantification system that those genetic tests do. So I think it says more about that than anything else. Yeah. I just was listening to it says more about that than anything else. Yeah. I just was listening to it thinking,

huh, something seems off. Something's still right there. Yeah. We'll fact check that. We'll get back to you. Yeah. We'll cut out all our mistakes anyway. All right.

So that's it. I think we've done the overall summaries of her. Unless you have something you want to add. We kind of did it when we were talking about positive points, but I. Yeah. I didn't really have positive points. I had more innocuous points. No, your points were quite pretty positive.

You said nice things. More than I did. More than you did. Yeah. That's not sad. That's a low bar, Chris. A low bar. I sometimes have nice things to say

about people people make me laugh but um like yeah so like the it's you know meat diet guru it is what it is so like don't don't restrict yourself to a single meat unless you really have to yeah and if you do maybe don't podcast about it i guess my final thought is that even though i don't have much to say about nicole i don't think there's much of great interest for garometers there it has been an interesting little case study into this particular kind of diet. But a lot of the things that are true here, like the way people reason about this, these sort of lived experience narratives, this is what works for me,

the customizable, bespoke, individualized thing, the way it's like a spiritual journey to sort of figure out exactly the kind of thing that works for you, which may well not work for other people, et cetera. The way that something like your diet is sort of linked to everything else that's going on, like every other malady, every other sign of psychological distress, the backstories of the people that are drawn to those sorts of things, they're not well people,

naturally. They're people that are searching for answers and searching for solutions. So I think in all those respects, it presented a useful case study of a phenomenon that's very common across the entire health and wellness and complementary and alternative medicine sphere. I concur. So that is Matt's summary. I endorse it. And that's you, Don McKayla.

I will say that we restrained ourselves because we considered going into the wider Peterson universe. His wife has released some materials and the way Dave Rubin speaks about him and stuff. There's a kind of interesting thing to look at, at the ecosystems that surround gurus from their families and kind of hang around. But I think that would be a different podcast than the one that we've just produced. And I will also say that in the case of his wife,

a lot of the material is focused on her close call with a terminal illness and the subsequent level of spirituality that she's developed or religiosity really and i think there probably is stuff about peterson family dynamics there if anybody wanted to dig into it but i also don't have any strong inclination to she's not a big figure and people reaching religiosity after terminal illness, fair play to them. Do what you will. Yeah. I do feel sorry for anyone who's eating steak for breakfast, fried bacon and mince for lunch and then another steak for dinner with nothing else except for water and salt that's you

know that's got to be hard i i can't get grumpy with them i just feel sorry for them it sounds okay for like a day but then you imagine like no it's not a day that's the problem that's a problem there's actually a couple of good articles of investigative journalists who have had a go at doing the all-meat diet and they suffered, Chris. It's not pretty, digestively speaking, it's not pretty, the transitioning onto it. It seems hard, but I guess it gets better. This one, not the final comment, it's more of a question I'm going to put out to people that are listening. One of the things that Dr. Berry, that she interviewed there, one of his points is that one's weight

is not determined by calories in. This kind of idea of an energy budget, calories go in, calories go out. We're basically carbon-based life forms. The nitrogen and stuff doesn't really matter that very much in terms of determining one's weight. The water obviously doesn't either. It's really the carbon, which comes in the form of carbohydrates and proteins and those macronutrients. So this is what I understand to be the orthodox view that you exhale the carbon and that's how you lose weight. So all that matters really is the energy budget and all of the fad diets, all of the various complicated ways where you eliminate this and don't eat that or go for a week where you only drink juice or any of these complications is completely irrelevant. Now, Barry and I presume Michaela and everyone in this sphere would completely disagree with that and say that

what matters is the quality of the nutrition and the body's got all these complex ways of relating with food. Now, that's a pretty common perception. It's not just people that are into fad diets that believe that. I think a lot of people that you would speak to would believe that. And I'm pretty sure, like I'm 95% sure that the energy budget view is essentially correct, but I could be wrong about that. Well, the question I'm just asking myself, is that you talking or is that your fungus? I don't know which one is trying to, is trying to convince me of this one. That's what the funguses want us to think that it's okay. It doesn't matter.

Eat the Pringles, eat the Pringles, Matt. Yeah, it's uh, that's easy. Am I talking to Matt or am I talking to a small mushroom that is controlling Matt? It's hard to tell, but I can't, I'm just asking questions. I'm just asking questions. Excuse me. I have to go climb a leaf.

Yeah. I'm also relatively proud of ourselves that we didn't focus on Makila's, Rollerabia's appearance. Cause this comes up in a lot of coverage of her, that she's a young woman of attractive disposition. I think to some people, she doesn't do it for me, but this is just my personal subjective thing, but an attractive character, I guess, or, and, and some people analyze a lot of what she's doing for that lens or the audience dynamics

or kind of like a simping influencer culture where people are preening after an unattainable beautiful guru or influencer i don't know maybe some of that is there i haven't seen enough material to judge either way but in the content we looked at i didn't detect a huge amount of pandering to that or i honestly don't know if that's a component of it but yeah, I didn't notice it in the stuff that we were looking at. Not in the conversations. Somebody directed me to Google an image of her wearing a lobster suit because of

the Jordan Peterson connection and the Google image search showed me a lot of other pictures of her, so she clearly does post a lot of, I guess, what do they call it, thirst, something? Yeah, thirst traps. Thirst traps post a lot of, I guess, what do they call it? Thirst? Yeah, thirst traps. Thirst traps. Yeah. Thirst traps. But that kind of makes sense, I guess,

given that she's a health and wellness guru, you know? I mean, I post thirst traps as well. So it's... People have asked us about when we're going to start the OnlyFans, Chris. And I'm swimming. I'm swimming every morning. I'm developing my OnlyFans bod. And I think we can release a calendar soon. This is what people are looking for.

Nobody says they want to see a calendar of naked middle-aged men. But we know that's what they want. Is that? Well, in my preparation for that, I'm not sleeping well, subsisting on coffee and developing my palm complexion through it. It's zen of pure white. So people have that to look forward to. You have to put on sunglasses.

When you turn to June, it's going to be, yeah, put on the sunglasses before you turn to that month because you could get blinded. That's right. You thought that twilight, that was all coloring and that's not. No, there are people like that. Not in terms of their attractiveness. There are people like all coloring and that's not. No, there are people like that. Not in terms of their attractiveness. There are people like that, but that's not me. But in terms of their skin complexion, they do exist and they're called Irish people. But I know there are people of different truths in Ireland, I'm glad to say.

But not that many of them, unfortunately. The majority of us are so piecey white. So it's a cross we bear. Well, yeah. I mean, we'll find out once we see the calendar, but I, I just assumed that you've got this, I'm imagining a sort of a potato diet driven, pasty, flabby, pudgy. Is this what people can expect? I don't know.

You should be thinking more Greek alabaster statue. You would see it at the Colosseum. As it comes out of marble. Exactly. That's it. Like this. No, no. More like, what's that guy from Watchmen?

The blue naked guy. Very much like him, but a white version. Nice, nice. Well, you've got that look for it too, but that's going to be top tier, top patron tier. That's right. It's a level beyond Galaxy Brain that you don't hear about. So Matt, we're done with Makayla.

We're done with our OnlyFans teasing segment. And now we are turning to the second last segment, the review of reviewers. I can't believe I fucked up saying that. It's the easiest thing to say, the review of reviewers. It's not that easy to say. Not that easy. Well, okay. So, you know, what I do, Matt, I get a positive review.

I bring it to you. I make you dissect it. And then I bring you a negative review. And I always spend some time and say, well, follow points made and different opinions are available. So the first positive one is a bit long. So I'll try to read it quickly or I'll think. But it's five stars gurus decoding all our gurus. And it's by Ben Mitch 95 says I have an insatiable thirst for gurus.

I need people to tell me what to think. I could go to medical school or get a PhD, but why spend the money when the internet is full of experts providing free content. That is what the gurus pod does for me. They are gurus telling me what to think about all our gurus, second order gurus or gurus within gurus, does for me. They are gurus telling me what to think about other gurus, second order gurus or gurus within gurus, if you will. I used to love Jordan Peterson and the Weinstein brothers. They're revelry geniuses who seem to be experts on almost everything.

Unfortunately, I can no longer listen to them because Matt and Chris told me not to. That's okay. Because now I have Matt and Chris who are far more galaxy grained and know way more stuff. While I used to listen to Peterson, The Wine Stands, and God's Sad for my education, now I only listen to Guru's Pod. And I've separated myself from all my friends and family to boot.

All hail Matt and Chris. That is great. That's right. We are the only gurus you need. We are cutting down the rest of them like stalks of wheat, falling beneath our critical scythe. And we're meta gurus. You're right.

You've got us pinned. Once you listen to enough of our content, you'll know how to be a guru yourself. Then you'll have achieved the kind of enlightenment and be happy finally. You'll be a third order guru. A guru derived from people talking about other gurus. Yeah, that's yeah. It'll be like inception. Now that's, that's a good review.

Sorry. What was the name again? I want to think that was Ben Mitch. Ben Mitch. Thank you for taking the time to write that. Ben Mitch, 85. Yeah, that was good. But this one is ours. I mean, obviously it was tongue in cheek, but I wonder how much. Ben was 85. Yeah, that was good. 94 hours, but this one is ours.

I mean, obviously it was tongue-in-cheek, but I wonder how much of that was true. Like, have we spoiled people's fun? People that were just enjoying life, Chris, listening to podcasts,

listening to Jordan Peterson, listening to Eric Weinstein, just being diverted, being entertained, being stimulated, and we ruined it for them. The answer to that is yes, we have done that path. I'll answer that for you.

But you know, there's good opinions and some people have bad opinions, Matt. There's a spectrum on the internet and here's someone with a bad opinion. Now he's from Norway. And I don't know, you know, we have, we actually chart sometimes in Norway. So, you know, most of the people that are reasonable, but this guy's name is Aggie. He beats 80, 80. Hey,

that is literal violence. It's a good thing. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to get, sorry. Oh, sorry. No, I'm not. I've just tried. I've just tried. So he titles the one-star review, rubbish, rubbish. A total waste of rubbish is the next, that is how he opens things. So it's not just rubbish. It's even the waste of rubbish. Can you even waste rubbish? That's, that's, that's. We manage it. We manage it. We've done that's we manage it we manage it we've done

that we've we've achieved that level of rubbishness so these so-called experts claim that you can categorize people based on clips from the internet if you clip a footballer's actions on the field you can make eric jimba jemba as good as Pele. Sword of Fuffermuckers. This is like motherfuckers, but with the consonants rearranged. So, but the problem here, Matt, is that I don't know modern football. All my football references are like 90s era, Eric Cantona, Man United, you know, the Premier League. So, I'm gallering, Eric, I think it's flying Jemba Jemba.

It's not as good as Pele, but like the analogy that, you know, you could take a shit footballer, selectively show some clip of him and make him look as good as Pele. Coochie? Could have had a lucky shot, but is that what we're doing? We're not taking shots of bad players. People aren't making them look as good. And making them look good. But I think he's saying you could do that. So, like, we are taking, I guess what we are doing is taking,

we are taking peles and we're showing, like, you shouldn't use the opposite way, right? We take these good people and we take their worst takes their most uncharitable points where they just make a slip of the tongue they just accidentally imply something just for a second and then we say this is them and how i wish that were true how i wish that were true if it only only wasn't the case, that actually what we clip is extremely representative of their content. And look to that, I would say this.

Are we a waste of rubbish or are we taking out the trash? I would, I would argue. Now that's, I think we, people know what we're doing here. You put agi-heavis. think we people know what we're doing here you put aggie heavis i i would have done this if it had to be that name for a positive review i just i'm just saying and i and the fault lies entirely with my inability to parse the various symbols above the letters in his name so look i think that's totally unfair. And I think that review reflects badly on all of Norway. I mean, it's a silly place, you know, like what's the deal with fjords?

Like, why do you have such a complicated coastline? There's no need for it. It's unnecessary. This is the kind of take that I expect from a place like that. Yeah. Well, someone's going to clip you saying that, and then they're going to say that you're an anti-Norwegian extremist, and that will be us suffering the taste of our own medicine. So, yeah.

I mean, we're not saying, anyway, it's not like categorizing people based on the clips. He's got it slightly wrong. He's got it slightly wrong. The analogy breaks down. It all falls apart. But yes, anyway. No, no. I take it all back.

Food for thought. We'll reflect on that. You know, we'll see what we'll see with a true bit and do better. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. That's what we'll do. Okay.

So Matt, before we finish, we usually announce who the next guru is, and we also give a shout out to our lovely patrons. So which should we do first? Uh, shout out to patrons. Okay. You asked for it. You got it. They're coming back. This is proof proof. Full blast.

P.A.T. It looks like, it looks like Chris is running the show, but actually I'm in charge, I get to choose what happened next. That's right. You did. You did that. My congratulations. next.

That's right. You did. You did that, Mike. Congratulations. And now we've got a couple of conspiracy hypothesis to find. We've got Rebecca Murphy, Lawrence Nagel,

Tyson Swartner, and Paul McCool. They're all conspiracy hypothesis, except I've done it again, Matt. One of them is not one of them is not

let's just pretend that they are is it a promotion maybe we could promote one of them

no no it's not so I'm gonna just say their name again

and the next group of people so they are your conspiracy hypothesizers for no light but one of you will be

promoted to a revolutionary thinker shortly, so thank you all very much. And good name, Tom McCool. Tom McCool, Yes. Very good. If that is your name. Tom McCool, Yeah. Well, notice Chris could pronounce all those names correctly, which is what happens when you pay us money.

Chris Brennan, Correct. Tom McCool, That's all you need to do. Correct. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Okay. Now I'm at revolutionary geniuses.

Some people call them revolutionary geniuses. Some call them revolutionary thinkers. Depends on which file you look. But they are for this week Kevin O'Rourke, Lawrence Neagle, and Kyle Dirksen. Oh, also

Dee. Let's put Dee. Dee is also a revolutionary thinker. So for all of them, thank you so much, you revolutionary thinkers. But I just want to ask, is D like D-E-E or is it just like the letter D, like a symbol? Just the letter. It's a symbol, like Prince.

Like Prince. That's minimalist. Giving us the D. Thank you. The big D. Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know. Let's mention some galaxy green gurus.

Is this the top tier? Is that the top tier? Is that the good tier? It is the top tier. It's the best people. It's the best people in the inner circle. So we're going to be shining out. Let me see.

I'm just using my wisdom here. Okay. Here's two that I'm going to have problems with. One is called DG in PDX. What's that? Get that. DG in PDX. By the way, that's the name. Say something nice, Chris.

Say something nice. Yeah, I like it. I like it. I don't know. I've just worked out because I can see his email. So that's related to his name. So I don't know what PDX is, but DG is there. And Hoski Dote.

So I don't know what PDX is, but DG is there. And Hoski Dote. There we go. There we have it. This sounds like more HG Sky and Today VN stuff. Well, at least it shows that you'll make fun of it. You don't care whether people play as funny or not. I'm not making fun.

I'm pronouncing it. Hoski Dote. Oh, God. That was me being. I'm the problematic one by thinking that you were joking. Oh God. Take it back, Matt. That's the name.

But they're galaxy brain gurus. So thank you. Thank you both. Please don't cancel your subscription. Yes. Don't do that. Don't do that. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard.

And you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? I can't do that. Don't do that. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. And you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? Can't do that. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. That's the mind you wanted to help rehabilitate, Matt. I take back everything I said.

It's all canceled out by the chuckle. Well, so speaking of chuckles, our next episodes. So we're going to release soon, maybe in the matter of a week. We'll see how the turnaround goes with this. But we have a special series of surprise episodes coming out, which will drop into your feed and these are not announced episodes, so this is just. Just to let you know, there's, there's a surprise episode hitting, which I suspect people will have opinions on. So, so that, that feeling of tingling you have in your extremities, that's

anticipation, that's what's happening right now, or the fungus trying to control you, it's one or the other. It's anticipation. That's what's happening right now. Or the fungus trying to control you. It's one or the other. Yeah, so something is happening in the gurusphere. Something has happened. And it's going to emerge and people will react. And we look forward to hearing that. There's been a happening in the gurusphere. So it's a happening.

Yeah. Well, we'll have more to say about it after we release it. So just as a surprise coming, there's a crystalline structure beginning to emerge from beneath the Guru C. And we're also going to look at Brené Brown. That's our next season of Self Help Guru to look at, so you can expect that to come soon. self-help guru to look at so that you can expect that to come soon.

Um, and there are long overdue crossover episode with Aaron Rabinowitz on James O. Lindsay and Michael O'Fallon. We have to finally get around to rerecording that because we, we have a lost recording kind of situation now, but that, that is coming and also a long overdue conversation with Julian Walker of Conspiratuality. So these are all things that will be coming soon. Right? Yes. That'll be good.

So I want to have more seasons. So we're having this season of self-help. We need a summer of sensemaking. Oh fuck. Sorry. Sensemaking and just get triggered. Sorry. Sorry. Anyway. Summer of Sandsmeeting, Winter of Weinsteins. We can go Winter of Weinsteins at some point. Oh God.

I'm sorry I brought it up. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to Brené Brown because I don't think there's a huge political valence to this. I think it's pure, pure garometry, getting back to our roots. And maybe she's not all bad. Maybe there's a mix of good and bad, stuff we like, stuff we don't. So I think that's healthy for us, Chris.

I think that's healthy. Yeah, I don't know anything about it. It doesn't start with the W, which is also healthy for us. Yeah. So lots of content to think about it. It doesn't stop. Doesn't start with the W, which is also healthy for us. Yeah. So lots of content to look forward to. You're also an interview. We've already recorded with Andy Kelly from QAnon anonymous and the pandemic. What the heck was that called?

Vaccine, the human story that that's a podcast that she produced. So, so that will come out too. So you'll be driving in content. Thanks for everyone for listening. You can see us online, C underscore Kavanaugh on the Twitters for me and R4C Dent for Matt. GurusPod is the podcast and decodingthegurus at gmail.com for email correspondence, which we occasionally look at. I promise I'll respond to all the people that I haven't yet.

What else have we got, Matt? We've got Facebook. We've got Instagram. We've got a Discord. We've got a Reddit. You get a social media. You get a social media. We're across all distribution channels, aren't we?

The community is spreading. We're going to take over the world. It's amazing well last thing Matt you know you know what I normally say to you at this point I'm quivering

I'm quivering with anticipation can't wait to hear you say it you're vibrating to the Twittersphere IDW I can see you're humming up and that's because you need to go

and grovel at the feet of your muscle master aye aye you need to go and gravel at the feet of your muscle master. Aye, aye. All right. Oh yeah. And I meant to slip in the Northern Irish idiom. So I just want to say no.

Banjax. Banjax. That's it. Pure nonsense. We don't need to know this, Chris. Yeah. It's a word that means broken or drunk. So there you go.

Secret knowledge that will be behind the put on the end of the podcast. Maybe I'll do this, Matt. I'll put in Northern Irish knowledge for people that stay to the very, very end. After the, after the music banjacks. Yeah. Yeah. And text to you. What's happening. Okay.

I just told you, listen better. Now you know. Was that me or Matt? Who said that? Yeah. All right. Bye-bye. Bye. See ya.