The Pomp Podcast - #1131 Dr. Shawn Baker On The Carnivore Diet

Starting point is 00:00:00 what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off dr sean baker is a physician a former orthopedic surgeon and a co-founder of rivero health in this conversation we talk about the carnivore diet the potential health impact how he's changed his life how he's able to compete at such a high level late into his life and also exactly what he thinks individuals can do when it comes to caffeine, water, salt, light exposure, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Sean Baker, and I hope that you all enjoyed as well. Once you get done listening, jump onto Twitter and let us know what you liked, what you didn't

Starting point is 00:00:42 like, what you agreed with, and what you disagreed with. The feedback is always welcomed, and it helps us improve these conversations. Here is my conversation with Dr. Sean Baker. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Dr. Sean Baker here with me. I thought a great place to start would be most people know the food system

Starting point is 00:01:21 is broken and they also know the healthcare system is broken, but I think you've really you kind of focused on like food may be the solution to two of those problems, not just either or. How did you become so interested in food being a solution, given that you have this medical career where like they're more focused on Band-Aids maybe than on actual like first principle solutions? Yeah, well, I mean, just like most people, it was very personal to me. You know, when I was, like I said, I'm in my mid-50s now, sometime early 40s, I started to realized that my health was not going where I wanted it to. And I was looking at, you know, what are the possible solutions? As a physician, I, you know, supposedly know how to take care of

Starting point is 00:02:02 health, but I realized that we're ill-equipped to do so with a healthcare system that we have. And so I started just playing with different sort of nutritional strategies. I was already an athlete. I was already kind of maximized that part of the equation, which I think is an important part of it. But as I, you know, started to experiment on myself, I found what worked for me which I thought was great that's great but then I started to have the audacity to try this out on patients and and that's where I really saw a really interesting thing as I started to shift the patient's nutrition the ones that would do it not not everybody wants to do it but the ones that did I started to see people that I had scheduled for surgery like people lining up for

Starting point is 00:02:42 knee replacements you know I had horrible x-rays horrible pain and we would change their nutrition And all of a sudden their pain would go away, which I thought was quite, quite shocking, even in absence of weight loss, you know, people that they would lose just a few pounds and yet their knee pain, which was, you know, nine out of 10 is now minimal to none. So we would end up canceling surgeries for these people. And I, you know, I, I, I persisted doing that for a couple of years and I realized that there has to be a better way. You know, our, our healthcare system is so bloated.

Starting point is 00:03:11 It is, you know, we spend way too much money on that and the results we get are, are quite frankly awful. So there's a lot of people who I've had on talk about different diet and food and all this stuff. The two people who I've been most interested, I had a heart surgeon come on and he was like, hey, here's the way to not have to have the heart disease, heart surgeries, all that stuff. You as an orthopedic surgeon, you've tried this stuff on yourself, but also you have a bunch of data points. I don't know how many surgeries or patients you've had over the years, but a lot. Let's kind of drill into this idea of the knee surgeries. Usually, what were you

Starting point is 00:03:46 going to operate on? And like, why did a change in diet have an impact on the knee, right? And pain and kind of all those aspects? I don't think people would connect what you're eating with maybe literally knee pain. Yeah, so the way I was trained, and most orthopedic surgeons today are still taught this, it's all about mechanics, biomechanical forces. As we gain weight, we, you know, we magnify how much load is put through the knee joint and the biomechanics are true. And so the assumption is, you know, you got somebody who's overweight, they're going to have arthritis. It's a consequence of them carrying too much weight. And the typical progression would be, you know, somebody coming with knee pain, say they're in their thirties and you say, well,

Starting point is 00:04:22 you know, maybe lose a few pounds, do some physical therapy, strengthen things. Maybe you, maybe you hand them some sort of pill or medication, an anti-inflammatory drug that goes on for a few years. Maybe they come back five years later and none of that's really helped that much because they haven't fundamentally changed their their nutrition and so now they are maybe they've got an arthroscopy you do so you put a little camera in their knee you'll clean out some of the some of the rough cartilage torn meniscus and then you know that maybe they'll do two or three of those maybe they get into their mid 40s early 50s and now you're you're injecting them with steroid injections corticosteroids there's injections called viscous supplementation where

Starting point is 00:05:02 you put in a lubricant in there. And then once that fails, you go on and eventually you replace their knee. And so that's, that's a, that's a typical progression. And so what we fail to realize, and some of the new research is showing this is much more is biologically dependent. So our biology, not just our mechanics, but our biology actually has a huge impact on progression of arthritis. And so we have these so-called inflammatory cytokines, which are released inside the joint and they damage, and they basically damage the joint. They destroy the cartilage if that continues over time we end up with arthritis it's one of the reasons you know you know the question for me was always why do people get arthritis in their fingers why would

Starting point is 00:05:40 why would being overweight affect your fingers why would you get arthritis or your neck you know it's not like people are gaining a lot of weight in their head i mean some people call them fat heads but realistically there's not you're not really changing that i mean most of the weight we see is across the weight-bearing joints but the non-weight-bearing joints also would develop arthritis and the reason for this is biology and so we have these like i said these cascades of inflammatory cytokines. We know, for instance, there was a study, I think in 2019 or 2018, I blank on the exact year, but they looked at insulin levels. High insulin levels were correlated with inflammatory cytokines. And so as we start to get to diets that start to lower

Starting point is 00:06:14 overall exposure to insulin, insulin is not bad in itself. We have to have some type one diabetic who has no insulin, insulin will die, right? So insulin has to be there. But when we start seeing these excessive levels we start to see that affects these inflammatory cytokines which speed up the arthritic process and that causes pain and so we're seeing you know that's one mechanism there's multiple going on here but one mechanism i see is when i get people change their nutrition to a point where they lower their exposure to hyperinsulinemia and bring down to a more normal level their knee pain goes away to the point where like i said i was canceling surgeries which i thought was great uh the health care system doesn't think it's that great that's not their

Starting point is 00:06:54 business model their business model is throughput more more sick people the more problems we have the more money we make which you know at the end of the day that's what businesses want unfortunately you and i and everybody we love and our loved ones are in the middle of that and we're you know it's it's more beneficial for for people to be sick at least as far as the health care model goes if i was to take uh all of the food in the world and i was going to draw a line in terms of uh food that would potentially bring down knee pain versus food that would uh uh inflame or or activate more knee pain, where do you draw that line? Is it just as simple as meat and everything else, or is there somewhere else?

Starting point is 00:07:30 Well, I mean, you certainly can draw the line there, and as you probably know, I'm an advocate of a meat-based diet, but I think you start with the ultra-processed food. You know, all the packaged carbs, all the stuff that we didn't eat 100 years ago, all that stuff is contributing to disease of various types. You know, it's the thickeners, the preservatives, the emulsifiers, the stabilizers, the flavoring, the preservatives, You know, all the artificial colors and flavors, all the foods that have all that stuff in there, we think they're probably causing problems.

Starting point is 00:07:58 So if you can just go to a whole food diet, whether it's, you know, I almost hesitate to say this, but a whole food plant-based diet or a whole food diet of some sort, you're generally going to see significant improvement. Now, the problem is that stuff tastes pretty damn good. You know, it's tough. I mean, you've got this stuff everywhere. It's ubiquitous. It's cheap. It tastes good. We're constantly told to reward ourselves, treat ourselves.

Starting point is 00:08:19 You know, why not? You know, your life is tough. Why not have it? Why not have a donut? That's the sort of society we live in this point. And so it's really challenging to say, I'm just going to eat, you know, you know, just pure carrots and lettuce and, you know, some of these things that people will talk about. And so people struggle with that. They really do. Now, my approach is I don't think meat is bad for you. I think I think in fact, I think it's a superfood. And, you know, a recent study just out of Washington University just came out like two weeks ago, saying that almost all of the data showing that red meat is bad for you is just basically shoddy

Starting point is 00:08:54 research. Why did they say it's shoddy research? Because this is interesting in that like a lot of people will point to previous studies that say meat is bad for you. What is the thought process? Well, the problem with that is most of it is what we call epidemiologic studies, where they just take a large population and they ask them, hey, what did you guys eat for the last 10 years? And nobody really knows. I mean, nobody really keeps accurate records. So at best, it's a guess. So you've got really poor data coming in at the beginning and then it's horribly confounded. So it's like, well, what else were you eating with that meat? Were you eating fast food at McDonald's? Is it shakes and fries and, you know, and, and, you know, seed oil or, you know,

Starting point is 00:09:27 French fries cooked in soybean oil? Is it, are there other factors that go on with this? You know, we see meat eaters have higher rates of auto accidents. Why would that be? Why would that make sense? It's just a, it's just a confounder that we know these people tend to engage in less healthy behavior. So if you get someone like me who takes care of himself, exercises regularly, you know, doesn't, you know, sleep gets good sleep, and we can talk about all these other factors, and happens to eat a lot of meat, my health is generally pretty good. In fact, my health is generally better than by far the average American. And so, so the research, you know, again, has been that over and over again. And the problem is researchers say, well, that's,

Starting point is 00:10:04 that's the best we can do, because we can't do an ethical study, we can't do a, you know, 20, 30 year study, just feeding people this and randomizing them, you know, it's just, it's just technically, you know, impractical to do and it costs too much money. So they're saying like, well, that's the best we have. So we have to deal with the data and we just, you know, we'll look where the trends lie. And to me, it's like, you know, if you were to get on a plane here at, you know, Miami international airport, and you kind of got in there and you looked in the door was wouldn't shut all the way. And you looked in the cockpit and one of the pilots was drunk and, And, you know, one of the landing gear is broken and one of the wings is kind of wobbly.

Starting point is 00:10:39 You're like, I'm not getting on that. There's no way. But this is what we accept for nutritional science. And so it's really about science in general. It's just not a hard science. You can't take all your subjects and, you know, sacrifice them and cut them open and see what happens. That's just not what you can do with humans because it's unethical to do so. So we've got this huge, huge, you know, 50, 60, 70 years of nutritional information, which largely is just not very good science.

Starting point is 00:11:05 How much of that is ignorance and like just like bad science, best we have type argument versus there's malice where it's food companies saying, hey, we know what we're pushing. We understand. We've engineered the food to be more addictive. And like that's actually the problem, not so much just like, hey, scientists are doing the best they can. I think there's – yeah, I think certainly both of those things exist. I think there's people just trying to do the best they can just like most physicians are trying to do the best they can. But they're in a limited system. But you would have to be incredibly naive to not realize that there is a lot of financial interest in what goes into these studies.

Starting point is 00:11:37 And a lot of these companies, like, for instance, there is this company called Beyond Meat who makes this, you know, I like to call it human pet food burger, right? It's ground up pea protein and canola oil and 57 other ingredients or something like that. And so they've partnered with the American Cancer Society to show that their burgers are going to lessen rates of cancer. Now, they're basically paying for that outcome. I mean, and we know that we know that when corporations pay for studies about 90 percent of the time or 85 percent of the time, the outcome agrees with whoever's funding them. So they know they can they can they can pay for the science and they can they can measure what they want to measure and they can spin it. You know, of course, we have the media that's being also paid for to spin the story the way they want to. So a lot of it is manufactured. And the problem I mean, the nice thing around health, you know, when people tell me like the climate is getting warmer, I have really no way to personally verify that.

Starting point is 00:12:28 I can't go outside and say, well, it was hot today, it must be, or it was cold today, it must not be. I can't confirm that. What I can do is I can look in the mirror and say, am I healthier or am I less healthy? I mean, that's pretty easy for all of us can verify that. So whatever you're doing intervention-wise, you should be able to know that my energy is better, my joints don't hurt as much, I sleep better, my mood is better, my libido is better, my body composition is better. That's something you can independently verify.

Starting point is 00:12:52 So this is the nice thing about that. It's hard to gaslight people, although they're trying. You know, they're trying to try to normalize obesity and say, oh, it's healthy and everybody should be this way. And we're promoting that there. And the problem with that is we're accommodating that. We're normalizing it and we're creating more of it. And those people, guess what? Guess who makes a lot of money on those people when everybody's sick and overweight? They require more medication. They require more services. Companies that benefit that are, you know, those are the recipients of that.

Starting point is 00:13:21 When you started to experiment on yourself, because I think that's a really good point of like their studies and people can read them. and some people agree with them. Some people disagree with them. There's studies that contradict each other, whatever, but like, you do know whether you feel better or you feel worse. You do know whether your own vitals are getting better or worse. You said that you experimented with a bunch of different things. You were trying to figure out your specific solution. Was that like a, the scientific method where you like were very regimented and like actually running experiments or was it more so like, Hey, I'm going to try to eat this way. Okay. I don't feel so much better. Let me try a different way. And it's more kind of, uh, uh, lackadaisical, but you eventually

Starting point is 00:13:55 came to the conclusion that meat was a was a key component yeah i mean kind of a little of both and so i'm an athlete and i've competed at a number of sports and i'm very sort of meticulous when i compete i know what i'm doing better at subjective performance and so in the beginning it was like hey i'm you know i'm 42 years old i have sleep apnea my blood pressure's getting up there i'm probably pre-diabetic i'm heavier than i want to be those things either get better or they get worse and so i noticed that you know first of all just cutting my calories dramatically and exercising think that did work. And that's what we hear a lot of people say, just eat less, exercise more. And that's been the mantra forever. That did work. However, for me, it wasn't sustainable because I

Starting point is 00:14:31 was, I mean, I was literally, I was, I was a practicing surgeon. I was getting up at four or five o'clock in the morning, jump rope 3000 times, you know, on my lunch hour, I'd go get a workout and then before I go, I get home, put my kids to sleep, jump rope another couple of 3000 times. I did that. I dropped 50 pounds in a period in about three, three months, got lean. I went from 290 down to about 235. And I was lean and I was miserable. I mean, all the nurses at the hospital said, Hey, Dr. Baker, we like the fat Dr. Baker a lot better than you are now. Cause I was kind of becoming an ass, you know, I was just like grouchy and hungry all the time. So then I, you know, then I just kind of experiment with different diets. I said, I can't do this. I can't

Starting point is 00:15:07 do this low fat, you know, mostly SAS lean meat all the time. It's just, it's just not, I don't enjoy it. And so I experiment with all these different things. I eventually ended up on this crazy you know eating you know basically all meat and did you try to become a vegetarian at all i never no i never i was never i was never that brain damaged enough to do that no i i i you know i was i was eating a lot of vegetables and lean meats and stuff a lot of fiber and i did that but i just was like i can't give it up i'm just you know i i'll be truth be told i never really liked vegetables that much anyway even as a kid i never liked them i still don't so which which worked out well for me but as i you know as i got towards you know as i'm getting

Starting point is 00:15:46 closer and closer to 50 i'm starting you still compete as an athlete and i started to take up this competitive rowing sport it's concept two machine crossfit runs on the u.s you know the olympic rowers have these competitions on there you can kind of see what your physiology is doing so i got on there and i was able to set several american records on that and then then i switched over to this fully carnivorous diet and i literally blew all the records i'd already set out of the water so you hold on a second you're uh nonchalantly mentioning this but you at almost 50 years old showed up to basically a brand new sport that you had never competed in before. And you started to break the American records for them. Was it age specific or this

Starting point is 00:16:25 is American records overall? Yeah. So when I was 49, I broke the 40 plus age record, which was about a second or two slower than the 20 plus. So I was pretty much compete. Like I, I routinely over the distance I was competing could, could beat, could beat Olympic athletes in their 20s over those distances. And I still can even at 56. But when I turned 50, about six months after switching to this all-meat diet, I fully increased my performance. I looked at the power-up by 8%, which is significant. When you already have the American record and you increase by 8%, that's a big performance difference. And I noticed a lot of other things. I had chronic tendonitis in my right knee that had bothered me for about a decade. As an orthopedic surgeon,

Starting point is 00:17:04 I know all the tricks that you're supposed to do therapeutically and none of it really worked. I just, I just kind of resigned myself that I'm going to live the rest of my life with this knee pain and I'm getting older and slowing down and you know, the stuff that we all tend to tend to accept. And literally within two months it was like it was gone and it just disappeared. It was gone. It's been gone for six years now. So when you switch to the all meat diet, is it literally all meat or is it like all meat plus some vegetables or like, how do you think about like what you eat right so my day-to-day diet and people think this is totally crazy it's basically steak and eggs every day all day every day three four pounds of steak a day 12 18 eggs a day

Starting point is 00:17:40 something like that depending on how big i want to be at the time like right now i'm kind of bulking up a little bit i'm close to 260 but um so that's pretty much what it's been more or less for six years i've gone periods of two years where i eat nothing but red meat nothing i mean steaks every day i got i probably cooked six or seven thousand steaks in the last six five six years i'm not kidding i'm not exaggerating this i mean every day two or three are you good at cooking them by now i'm good at cooking them right now i've got a little bit of practice i've had a lot of practice i've fortunately not ruined too many steaks but uh i mean sometimes you know like sometimes i'll throw a little dairy in there i mean i'll have some seafood in there from sometimes

Starting point is 00:18:17 sometimes i'll eat chicken fish uh things like that every once in a while i'll have like for instance we we were here visiting florida we went down to the florida keys i had a bite of key lime pie because i was like okay i'm in key west i'm going to try a piece it was just one bite just one bite it was kermit's kermit's something like that if you've ever been down there it's supposed to be a good one so i mean so i you know every once in a while i'll go off off track but i mean generally 98 99 of the time i'm i'm pretty i pretty stick to this and the reason is not because i believe in it or anything i just feel better that way it's just like i like feeling better You know, after a certain point, you're like, I could eat that and I'll taste good for like three minutes, but then I'll feel like garbage for, you know, the next six hours or the next day or two.

Starting point is 00:18:56 Is it worth it to me? At this point in my life, it's really not. I have a lot of fun just living and doing stuff and being able to enjoy life. I don't get my entertainment from what I put on my plate. Yeah. What about during the day? Are you eating three times a day, five times a day, one time a day? Like if you're just eating mostly meat or meat and eggs, how many times a day?

Starting point is 00:19:19 So this is the interesting thing about this diet. You know, like I said, I don't care what people eat. I'm happy for anybody, but they can find something that makes them healthy, good for them. The unique thing about this is it's extremely satiating. And so there's this concept of satiation and satiety. Satiety is how long you can go between meals. Like if I eat a big old meal, if I sit down and eat, you know, two pounds of ribeye steak and six eggs, I'm good for eight, ten hours. I don't have to eat again, right?

Starting point is 00:19:43 And again, I'm also a big person, so that's a lot of food it sounds like. But say for the average person, they go and they eat a pound of hamburger, four eggs. They're usually good for about eight, 10 hours. And so you have this long period of satiety. But also you have this satiation where you eat enough and you're like, I'm good. I don't need anything else. So typically my pattern has been, and that's been the pattern of the tens of thousands of people that I've now seen do this.

Starting point is 00:20:07 It's about twice a day for most people. Some people can do one meal a day. Some people eat more frequently. But I mean, it's honestly, you just don't need it. You're just not hungry. You know, I had I had two ribeye steaks for breakfast and I'm good until till dinner tonight. So I don't feel any need. I don't think about food. I'm not always obsessing about it. I'm not shopping all the time planning. So it's convenient. but the other thing is because it drives cravings away so well for so many people we have so many people we mentioned this problem everybody's addicted to all this processed garbage it's everywhere and so it's tough to to overcome that with you know you can go on a diet you know you're on a diet you can feel it because you're just you're you're sacrificing your your I'm just

Starting point is 00:20:46 gonna be good and then on the weekend I'm gonna go I'm gonna blow it out or whatever but with this I mean ask me about what are my cheat meals I'm like I eat a freaking ribeye steak every day I have a cheat meal every single day. Every meal is a cheat meal for me. So I don't feel like I'm, I'm sacrificing, nor do most people that do this over, over the time or a long period. It's interesting. You eat in the morning, you eat at night. There's a lot of people who do, um, uh, intermittent fasting and those types of, uh, of diets. And they'll try to pack a bunch of food into a very short window of, uh, of time. Uh, any credence to, uh, the intermittent fasting stuff or is it, you actually look at like the 10, 12 hours that you're not

Starting point is 00:21:22 eating as part of, you know, that type of diet? Yeah, well, I mean, certainly, I mean, there is some benefit to a fasting window or, you know, feeding window. And I think certainly some of the circadian biology would point to that. Now, ultimately, most people will argue that that basically cuts down the amount of time you can eat, so then you eat less. And I think there's pretty good literature to support that, you know, but it's a convenient way to restrict calories. Now, what I find particularly is that my sleep is better if I don't eat late. So if I'm eating at 8, 9 p.m., I'm going to have a less restful night of sleep than if I eat earlier in the day. So I think there is, and I think the circadian biology studies seem to support that. I think part of it

Starting point is 00:22:00 has to do with protein metabolism. If you're eating a big, huge bulk bolus of protein before you get to bed, your body has to deal with that nitrogen. And so usually what happens is you end up having to go pee. You know, you get up to go, you know, urinate in the middle of the night. You get up at three o'clock in the morning and do it, then you just don't sleep as well. So I try to, like I'm on vacation now, but at home when I'm, when I have more control over what I've, i'll usually have my last meal usually before 5 p.m oh interesting so you try to eat before 5 p.m somewhere in that time frame yeah when you began the all meat diet did you measure blood did you kind of uh track the changes to your body or was it just going off your intuition and kind of how

Starting point is 00:22:40 you felt well you know that's a good question because when i was on so when i was on joe rogan's podcast several years ago and i said what labs and i said joe i'm not sure what labs are are going to tell me the most information. I still have that sort of thought. I mean, I think the things that we really want to pay attention to are what's actually going on with regard to disease. And so can we look at our blood vessels? Can we look at our heart? Can we look at our body composition? Can we look at our performance? To me, those things are more indicative of what's going on chronically with health. Now, I can check my blood cholesterol today and I can check it tomorrow. I'm going to get a different number. So which number is the

Starting point is 00:23:14 right number i don't know and they can they can they can vary quite dramatically you know you can look at your your blood glucose is varying every five minutes quite honestly if you're wearing a cgm you'll see it can go up and down uh so what number is the right number and so i i i think these labs can be useful and helpful and you know some people use them as a risk factor particularly lipids but at the end of the day it's like you know what is your what is going on with your body composition what is going on with your blood pressure if you look at your arteries i've had a heart scan where I've looked at my arteries, perfectly clean, zero evidence of any calcification, which again, generally, I mean, there's a lot of things. There are a lot of ways to assess

Starting point is 00:23:49 cardiac risk, but this is generally accepted as very, very low cardiovascular risk, which is a major concern with red meat and heart disease. Now, again, we just talked about this new study that came out that said all that's bunk anyway. And this is what I'm seeing. I get a lot of people that are clearly sick, and we'll talk about autoimmune disease because I think it's uniquely interesting you know they're overweight they're diabetic they have high blood pressure they don't feel good and they go on an all-meat diet and all that stuff gets better i mean they're literally blood pressure normalized their diabetes goes away they lose all this weight they get leaner they they put on muscle their libido goes through the roof that to me is indicative of getting

Starting point is 00:24:29 healthier i don't care what anyone else says say about this or that lab marker you know we really want to assess is how we're feeling and if you ask people what they care about you know like Do I really care if my LDL cholesterol is 97 or 116? Does it really matter to me? Or do I care about I don't have depression every day, that I don't hurt all the time? And I think those things are what we should really be focusing on. So if you had a patient come to you and say, hey, I'm going to try this, is there a protocol of what you would say is like, okay, write down how you feel.

Starting point is 00:25:01 Go get a lab. Go get your blood pressure taken. What would you tell them as to kind of put a snapshot in time? and then how often would you have them look at that yeah so that's a good that's a great question and so i'll mention you know we have a company rivero health which that is exactly what we'll be doing i mean not everybody will go on a carnivore diet for those that will need it i think certain autoimmune diseases certain gut issues and things like that but at the end of the day um what we want to do is you know first of all you have to know who you're dealing with

Starting point is 00:25:28 so if you've got a patient that's on a lot of medications you've got to be a little bit careful with that because if you take a diabetic and you take them off a significant amount of carbohydrates it's their blood glucose may bottom out unless you taper down their diabetic meds particularly things like insulin same thing with with blood pressure you know somebody's got really high blood pressure and they're on all these meds and then all of a sudden you take away that inflammatory component now they've got hypotension and they're you know at risk of falling down passing out things like that so we have to know who you're dealing with um i you know as i've done this sort of in the non-medical space for years just telling people about you know how do you how

Starting point is 00:26:01 to deal with diet, most people you have to deal with some level of addictive behavior. There's always a psychological aspect. And so I tell people at the beginning, just eat enough to stay full, to stay content. And if you do that over a long enough period of time, then all of a sudden those other trigger foods, whatever they might be, chocolate cake or candy or potato chips or pizza or whatever it might be that you really, really like to eat, all of a sudden becomes less appealing to you and you don't really need that and at that point and that's usually somewhere two three months in then you're able to start let's start tapering things you know maybe you can maybe you can adjust how much you eat when you eat the fat to protein ratios things like that and then and then that

Starting point is 00:26:41 usually you know steds them on for quite a while but we see that you know we we collect a date on about 12 000 people doing the diet but the three month point was when we saw a big inflection point for for when these diseases started to resolve pretty consistently some people within days i I mean, literally within two or three days, their blood glucose will normalize, particularly these diabetics. So it really depends on who you're dealing with. So there is some degree of personalization. So I can't just say, everybody do this, because some people, you're going to have problems

Starting point is 00:27:08 with that. What about on the steaks themselves? One of the things I see people do is they'll be like, hey, I'm eating healthy. And they'll go and they'll get something that's supposed to be healthy, and then they put a bunch of bullshit on it, right? And all of a sudden, it's not healthy because of all the additives, all of the sauces, all that type of stuff. do you just eat steak that you've cooked with nothing on it? How do you cook it? What do you

Starting point is 00:27:29 kind of do to ensure that you're actually getting as many nutrients as possible and not screwing up the quote unquote healthy food? Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I guess, you know, if you go to the grocery store and you've got this prepackaged, you know, meat dish, which comes in soybean oil and wheat gluten and barbecue sauce with 75 grams of sugar. Yeah. You're probably, you're probably diminishing the overall healthfulness of that. Again, staying with whole foods that single ingredient foods is always a good answer for me i mean i've gotten to where you know in the beginning and i tell people in the beginning hey if you need some seasoning on there go for it you know it's going to help you to transition over but most people myself included over a period of time

Starting point is 00:28:03 we really get to where we really appreciate the flavor of a good cut of meat you know you get a really high-end quality steak it shouldn't need much you know a lot of these sauces and seasonings because you're eating you know low quality food or food that needs that to taste palatable a really well, you know, well marbled steak, a little bit of salt, a little bit of fire, and that's basically all I need. And I'm a happy man, you know. You mentioned salt. And how do you think about salt intake? How do you think about making sure you have enough? Or what do you just kind of do there? Well, you know, we've seen a lot of literature that says sodium is a problem. You know, salt is a problem in society. Well, I think the real issue with that is because it's really

Starting point is 00:28:42 salty food. And what is salty food? It's all this processed stuff, potato chips, pretzels, you know, biscuits you know breads you know things like that they all come with a lot of salt in there so when we cut all that out of our diet our sodium intake dramatically drops i still think we we tend to need some or many people do meat has some sodium and it has some potassium in it but i tend to and i think this is a simple feedback message it's salt to taste you know you what tastes good to you and there's a reason why it tastes good to you when you over salt something you clearly know it's like oh my god i can't eat that it's too salty that is your body's way of regulating your sodium and your body does a very good job of protecting that you know for if we've

Starting point is 00:29:18 got intact kidneys and an intact functioning you know metabolic system then it's pretty well regulated but most people just salting to taste is all you need to do now if you're living you know if you're exercising a lot like i i'm you know i do a lot of exercise i'm sweating a lot i sometimes have to add a little bit to that so i'll take an electrolyte drink or just increase my salt intake a little bit for that yeah what about liquids like water uh gatorades electrolyte drinks? Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm pretty much mostly just water. I mean, I'll, I'll, uh, you know, sometimes I'll add an electrolyte powder to that, but, uh, you know, every other animal on the planet drinks water, right? I mean, that's, that's what they do. And that's, that's what we're

Starting point is 00:29:52 supposed to drink. So water works pretty well. Um, I, you know, as far as like dairy and things like that, I tend to stay away from drinking calories in general, just because I think one of, this is one of the problems, one of the reasons we have such a problem with obesity is that it's, you know, like I will knock on Gatorade, it's a Gatorade Zero, so not so bad. But, you know, if you're drinking pure sugar, like the soft drinks, we know are awful for us. I don't think anybody out there would say that soft drinks aren't a problem. It's liquid calories. It's very easy for us to assimilate that. But the same thing with these powders, you know, one of the things, if you and I were to run around in the wild, you know, I don't, maybe not on the beach

Starting point is 00:30:28 here, but let's say we're out in the woods in North Carolina, right? We're going to go looking for food, we may find some, you know, some squirrels or whatever. We might find a deer or something like that. We may find some berries. What we're not going to find are powders. We're not going to find flour. We're not going to find refined sugar. We're not going to find protein powder. We're not going to find Gatorades. We're not going to find even butter. So all these highly processed, refined, highly increased surface area foods, that's not what our digestive system is designed to do. So when we challenge it with that, we get all these gut problems. We get these weird, you know, so our gut is supposed to work in a very sequential fashion

Starting point is 00:31:09 and there's a time frame which is supposed to happen and like our GI empty time is supposed to be about three or four hours and then food is supposed to slowly wind its way through our small intestines. When you hack that with liquid sugar or protein powder or flour, you know, or all the foods made out of flour, you know, there's this high surface area. It overwhelms the system in a lot of ways and we have this sort of differential impact on something called the creatine hormones, and that leads to metabolic dysregulation in some way, too much insulin, too much glucagon, you know, you know, different signaling. And over time, you know, that tends to, to harm us, not to mention the fact that a lot of the ingredients in there, uh, cause problems

Starting point is 00:31:48 with our gut health in general. There's something called, uh, increased gut permeability or, or, uh, yeah, or, uh, the leaky guts phenomenon, which I think is very real and it does impact us. This episode is brought to you by Masari. Your days of spending hours scouring the internet for quality crypto insights are over. Masari is your one-stop shop for all your crypto data and research needs. With Masari Pro, you gain access

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Starting point is 00:34:02 8sleep currently ships with the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and select countries in the EU and Australia. Go check them out, 8sleep.com slash POMP today. So when people hear that you're an athlete, I think that they expect you to be taking a pre-workout, maybe some creatine, protein powder, a multivitamin, fish oil. You just go down the line, basically just walk around like a GNC store, if you will. you take none of it or? No, I did. I mean, I did, I did that all for years. It was probably, I probably made some very expensive urine over the years, but yeah, I, you know, literally I eat a bunch of steak and eggs and drink water and have some, some salt and that's, that's it. I mean, I've literally broken world records on that with that, with that sort of a regimen.

Starting point is 00:34:47 and for the individuals who say hey i can't put on weight i can't you know do xyz thing that i want to accomplish with my body uh just through food that's why i take the protein powder that's why i take the creatine that's why i take whatever are they are they full of shit do they not understand something is it no actually if you want unrealistic human goals then you're gonna have to take something like how do you think about those individuals well i mean you know if you look at the average bodybuilder this is not a normal human physique i mean particularly once you're taking all the drugs. I mean, in fact, you know, me being at six, five to two 60 is kind of a little weird anyway, but, um, you know, so you're, you're pushing the, the, the bounds of physiology to be

Starting point is 00:35:25 a super big athlete, right? A lot of muscle. It's just not, you know, if you go out and look at these, you know, indigenous tribes, there's nobody jacked running around there, you know, they're lean and they're not too fat, but they're not running around like they're, you know, uh, you know, on a bodybuilding stage. And so to get there, you have to sort of hack your physiology. And so sometimes you've got to eat to a point where it's not fun anymore. You know, I mean, if you look at these big, giant strongman guys, I mean, they're eating eight, nine, ten thousand calories. They don't like it. It's not fun for them. You think, oh, I could eat as much as I want.

Starting point is 00:35:56 But they're literally struggling to constantly eat is one of the is just as hard for them as training is. And so constantly having to eat when you're not hungry, you know, it's fun for about a day or two. And then it then it then it kind of grinds on you. The other thing is, you know, like with my diet, in fact, that's why so many people have success losing weight, it's hard to eat six, seven, eight pounds of steak a day. I mean, this is hard. I mean, I've done it, and it's really, really challenging. I mean, I top out around four pounds, and I'm like, I'm good.

Starting point is 00:36:23 I don't need anything else. How many calories is that? For me, it's about 4,000 calories, which is pretty much on par if you put my stats into a, you know, a metal block rate calculator, that's about what I'm supposed to use. So, it works out pretty well. The average person is probably like 2,000 calories or so. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, the average, you know, like somebody, you'd probably like 2,800, something like that. So you're looking at about two and a half pounds of steak a day, which is, you know, you'd think of that and you're like, well, that's a lot of food.

Starting point is 00:36:46 But it's not really. I mean, it's not that many calories, but you'd feel very satisfied with that. Yeah. You mentioned water. Do you drink out of water bottles? Are you worried about plastics? Like, as you think about health, what is, what's kind of view there? I mean, I think there's something to it.

Starting point is 00:37:00 I mean, I think, you know, we are being exposed to plastic. Is that the big picture piece? I think that's a minor player, quite honestly. I think, you know, would I rather eat steak and drink out of a plastic water bottle or would I rather eat, you know, Oreos and drink out of a glass container? You know, clearly, I think the steak one would be make more sense. So there's some things that I think are clearly there. I don't think that's the biggest play. I don't think these plastics, while we should, you know, if it's no difference just to drink out of a glass container, then that's a minor sacrifice to you.

Starting point is 00:37:30 Right. So why not? Makes sense. but to sit there and think that all your problems are related because you ate drink out of a plastic bottle to me doesn't make sense yeah it's uh kind of one of these things that like hey uh i don't eat healthy uh i don't work out right but i took this vitamin right right right right you know that's the thing it's like people don't want to do the basics you know it's like there's no pill i don't care if it's a pharmaceutical drug or a supplement that is going to make you a healthy

Starting point is 00:37:55 person if you don't have all these other healthy basic behaviors in place when you go to a restaurant, I'm assuming you order steak, any special instructions or anything that you ask them to do so that you feel like it's healthier? You know, generally not. I mean, if I'm going out a restaurant, I accept that one is going to cost more than I'd spend at home. Two, it's not going to be probably as good as what I can make at home in many cases, depending where it is. And so I don't worry. I'm not like hyper, hyper sensitive about all this stuff. I'm pretty, you know, it's like, Hey, you just do the best you can. And don't, you know, like I said, it's, it's not for me a religion. It's not, you know, like I said, well, you know, a lot of people say it's just

Starting point is 00:38:32 like veganism, but the opposite spectrum is not, it's not really because we're not really out there. There's no ideology attached to this, at least in my view. So if, you know, if, if the steak comes with a little, you know, uh, herb butter on there or something like that, it's fine. I'm no big deal. I'll have that. And it's not a, not a big issue. Like I said, I think it's what you do the vast majority of time. They're going to, going to have all the, the impact. Now there's some people, you know, if you've got this horrible autoimmune disease, you've got Crohn's disease or something, you know, that's multiple sclerosis or something like, and you have to be super tight about this, you know, then you're going to have to be more cautious about that. But, you know,

Starting point is 00:39:04 for the general person that just wants to be healthy, you know, I think generally I go order a steak at a restaurant. I know they're going to probably cook it, you know, they probably got it in, you know, canola oil and they probably got some sugar on the, you know, that's, that's how they do to make it taste good. Right. That's what they do. So I know I'll be getting that to a little degree and I don't need out that much, to be honest. You know, it's kind of, I've gotten to the point where, you know, is it, is it worth it? You know, like, like I said, we're, we're here on vacation. The first thing I do is I hit the grocery store, load up on a bunch of steaks. I've got a, I've got a grill in the backyard. We rented a little Airbnb and that works well.

Starting point is 00:39:37 Yeah. Um, when you go to the grocery store, grass fed, not certain cuts, like what, what are you maybe more worried about and trying to say, Hey, if I get the big decisions, right. Obviously just getting steak sounds like that's a big decision. Are there other things that, uh, you try to focus Yeah, that's a great question. And so I really focus on if I'm going to like it or not. I mean, honestly, I mean, I'm going to eat it. I want it to taste good. So I think that's number one. I mean, and that's really what drives most of our decision making. You think about what people think about when they pick food. It's like, how much does it cost? What does it taste like? I mean, that's what's driving 95% of the food decisions in this country. And I think that's

Starting point is 00:40:10 still a very important thing. And so I will eat both grass finish and grain finish. I think the differences on those on human health are minusculely different. There's not much difference. in fact, the literature. And I've looked into this tremendously. And I'm a huge proponent of regenerative agriculture. And I'm always promoting those guys and support your local ranchers. And I think that's a great message. But when we're talking to the general population, eat what you can afford, eat what tastes good to you. Steak is 100 times better than Cheerios. I mean, that's just the bottom line. It doesn't matter if it comes from Walmart, from a feedlot, it's still a health food. And the data I've collected from Harvard University all supports that.

Starting point is 00:40:49 And until some definitive studies are done showing that that's not the case, that's what I'm going to tell people. I'd like it. There's a researcher out in Utah State, Stephan von Vliet, who's doing this research trying to see if there's a difference between the two. Thus far, there's been about two or three studies have done. So far, they haven't been able to show any significant differences between the two types. What about eggs? Anything there that you pay attention to? You know, I will.

Starting point is 00:41:13 I mean, I think the one uniqueness about a ruminant animal, so a cow that has, you know, four stomachs or four chambers and goats and deer and sheep, they uniquely are able to really detoxify what they eat. So even things like glyphosate, which is on everything right now, mammals in particular are able to metabolize it. So it doesn't really show up in their product. So if you're worried about pesticide exposure like glyphosate, then don't eat grains, don't eat legumes, all the things they're telling you to eat because they're pretty much covered in them at a much higher rate. Whether or not that's truly a problem or not, that's debatable. some people say it destroys your gut microbiome you know on and on some people say it's not an

Starting point is 00:41:52 issue but um yeah so when i uh you know when i uh buy buy the food in the store i just look for something that looks good i think fat content is important i'm not eating carbohydrates so i have to uh i have to get my energy from somewhere right so so fat content becomes important that's why grain finish tends to have a little more fat in there and it tends to be a little more monounsaturated fat than saturated fat for people that care about that. And then like, uh, on the eggs, uh, front, like cage, not cage. Yeah. I mean, that's the point of the rumor thing. So a chicken, a pig, they're monogastric animals are like us. They got one stomach. They tend to maybe accumulate more problematic issues from what they eat. So it probably makes more sense if you're going to

Starting point is 00:42:37 spend an extra two bucks on, on grass finished steak versus cage or organic eggs, I'd spend it on the eggs. Interesting. And when you go, when you, uh, are cooking this, is there anything to the finish of the steak in terms of like heat, uh, uh, medium, medium rare and anything there that has like a health impact? Uh, well, so it's interesting. So there's been, there's actually a study out there on pigs eating ribeye steaks, believe it or not, you look it up, pigs eating ribeye steaks and they cooked in various different temperatures and they wanted to see what the protein absorption was like. And they found, I think, a medium ribeye steak had the most absorption. And there was some other thing. For some reason, bologna was absorbed pretty well.

Starting point is 00:43:17 And I think rare ground beef actually showed quite a bit of absorption. So it's kind of all over the place. I think a well-done steak is a tragedy. I think you're dishonoring the animal for that. And I live with someone who likes her steaks well done. It always pains me when I have to cook her steaks well done. I'm always just like, you know. So she doesn't, I hope she's not listening. I won't give her my hot and high end stuff. I'll give, you're just going to have a well done list to cook one of these cheap steaks. Um, I, you know, but I mean, there are some, there is some evidence that maybe some of the nutrients are a little better preserved if they're not, you know, turned into leather. Right. So medium rare. I mean, that's what most

Starting point is 00:43:55 chefs will prefer, you know, like au point in French or el punto in Spanish, you know, that's because that's supposed to be, it's supposed to be prepared that way. I like a nice sear on the steak. I mean, like probably most of us do, it just tastes good. Human beings have been cooking steaks over fires for arguably hundreds of thousands of years if not millions of years depending on your your particular bias um so yeah i'll i mean the way i cook my steaks i sous vide them at about 125 degrees and then i put them in an oven that goes to 1500 degrees i've got this 1500 degree oven at home that a nice sear and a little bit of salt and that's that's it that's good for me like eight minutes ten minutes total well i mean if you don't count the sous vide time

Starting point is 00:44:33 It's, you know, because I'll often throw it in the sous vide and go do something, you know, whatever. And I leave it in there until I'm ready to cook the steak. And it takes about three minutes to heat up the grill, and it takes about a minute per side. So, you know, it's five minutes prep time, and then I'm eating, yeah. Pretty simple. You mentioned a couple times now kind of ancestors, early humans. I think a lot of people look at the carnivore diet, and they try to make some sort of connection there. Right.

Starting point is 00:44:59 You buy that, don't buy that. Do you think it matters what our ancestors ate? Well, I mean, I think that, you know, it can inform us a little bit. I mean, you wouldn't take zebras and bring them to the zoo and say, let's go grocery shopping with the zebra. You're going to look at what they're eating and you would say this is what they're supposed to eat, right? So the problem is we don't have a time machine. So we can't definitively go back and say humans were eating this or that.

Starting point is 00:45:21 And there's always a debate about that. I mean, there's pretty good evidence we were clearly meat eaters. I mean, there's cave paintings, there's cut marks on bones, there's radioisotope status, you know, data on and on it shows that humans consume a lot of meat. But at the end of the day, like I live in 2022, I got to do what works for me today. And so this, you know, like I said, it doesn't really matter so much what they ate back then as far as how it affects me today. But, you know, what they ate back then can inform me what we might be eating. What it can show you is what we weren't eating.

Starting point is 00:45:50 I mean, clearly, none of us were eating canola oil 50,000 years, even 500 years ago. We know those. No one was eating Twinkies. No one was eating Doritos. No one was eating, you know, you know, honey bunches of O's or whatever, whatever you pick your food. I mean, none of that stuff existed, right? So if we know that, then we can say, well, you know, maybe they're eating meat.

Starting point is 00:46:10 Maybe they're eating berries. Maybe they're eating some tubers. If you limit your diet to just that, gosh, you know, you're going to be at least more in line with your species. You know, like the only obese creatures on the planet are human beings and our pets, right? These are the only obese animals that exist. Why is that?

Starting point is 00:46:25 Well, it's because we feed them stuff they're not supposed to eat. it's crazy to think it's that simple um we talked about how to prepare and and cook a steak what about the eggs anything there that matters or anything you prefer uh i end up drinking half of them i mean honestly i throw them in a blender and i throw it i'll throw a little bit of flavor in there i'll throw a little like uh vanilla in that you know and i'll drink them down so you hold on rewind you'll take six eight ten eggs whatever you'll crack them just throw throw in turn the blender on for a few seconds yeah and i'll usually add water to that just give a little more volume just to kind of fill me up a little more but um if i just drink it yeah i just drink

Starting point is 00:47:01 it i mean if i'm in a hurry you know if i feel like cooking it sometimes i'll do that but i've gotten to where i'm i've just gotten more and more lazy as time has gone by around cooking i'm just like so it's basically raw egg it is yeah yeah and and it's fine i mean it's well i mean the risk of you catching a an issue like salmonella is a concern about one out of every 20,000 eggs will have a contamination with salmonella a lot of times you can detect it so odds are pretty low i mean i even though i probably eat you know a thousand eggs a year or if not more i've not even had enough opportunity to run into that issue so it's not it's not really a big concern okay uh if you do prepare the egg what do you do i'll i'll either uh scramble it you know or i

Starting point is 00:47:44 might just kind of fry it up so what whatever the fastest way to yeah whatever i'm in the mood for you know like i said i eat what i like you know it's not i'm not i'm i don't you know i don't sit there and you know there's some people their life is so dictated by trying to live forever you know i'm gonna first thing i'm gonna get up in the morning and i'm gonna then i'm gonna i'm gonna meditate and then i'm gonna ground and then i'm gonna face whatever direction and i'm gonna walk in the sun and then i'm gonna spend 15 minutes of red light there and i'm gonna jump in my cold plunge and my song you know you see these people that are and it's like when do you have time to do anything you know it's just kind of like so i i'm kind of like hey if i feel like it i'll do it

Starting point is 00:48:18 you know and it's it's the nice thing about it so simple it's a simplicity just kind of simplifies things to where i don't have to constantly worry about all these other other extraneous things so we talked about uh what you're putting in your body which is not much um but very simple uh what about in the gym what are you doing there and why do you do it well i mean i think this is uh you know when we talk about longevity and health and whatever you want to talk about i think quality life has to come into effect there and functional lean mass is incredibly important as we get older You know, I'm, you know, like I said, I'm closer to 60 than I am 50. It's very important for my quality of life to be able to do things and to do things like I could when I was in my 20s. And so part of that equation is, you know, obviously eating right, getting adequate sleep. But, you know, resistance training is incredibly important. And so I focus on, you know, getting stronger, basic heavy compound movements.

Starting point is 00:49:10 I focus on being able to move well. It's a lot of jumping and sprinting and throwing. I do some conditioning stuff. So it's mostly I prefer to do what's called sprint interval training or high intensity interval training because just from a time time management standpoint rather than and then I'll go for a walk. I'll take my dogs for a walk. And we live out in the woods out in Washington state. So we'll go for a couple times a day. I'll go for a couple mile hike with the doggos if I can.

Starting point is 00:49:32 and that's usually my my my routine in general now um you know if i'm competing like right now i took up jujitsu so i'm you know i'm kind of focusing some of the training uh to hopefully benefit benefit me in that if i'm rowing if i'm competing and rowing there'll be a lot of rowing thrown on top of that and so but i like to uh be able to uh not only be strong but able to move well i think that's important how many hours a day you think you're doing physical activity Well, I mean, that's a great question. So I think sedentary activity, like sitting here like we're doing now, is detrimental. Like when I'm at home, usually I'm standing when I do these types of things.

Starting point is 00:50:07 But as far as actual like working out type stuff. Dr. Baker just said I'm killing him. We'll make up for it later. No, I mean, I spend probably actually like working out, working out less than an hour a day. Sometimes only 15 minutes, depending on what I'm doing. But I try to minimize the sedentary behavior. And I think if most people would do that, you know, if you can, like I said, instead of sitting, standing, if you can, you know, instead of standing, walking, like if you're

Starting point is 00:50:36 on a business call, if you can take the phone and go for a walk, that's going to, that's going to stead you. Most of your caloric expenditure is with this non-exercise activity thermogenesis, the so-called NEAT. That's where probably, you know, 40, 50% of your calorie expenditure is going to come from. So whatever you're doing in the gym, unless you're, you know, unless you're four or five, six hours a day in the gym which is not practical for you know anybody but a professional athlete

Starting point is 00:50:59 you know then it's just minimizing your sedation or your sorry sedentary behavior yeah uh standing desk uh you just try to stand there all day do you have like a walking uh treadmill thing yeah people have like yeah i mean no i just stand i'll stand and if i want to go for a walk like i said i i have this wonderful exercise piece of exercise equipment called a dog and you know that that works pretty well you know take for a walk a couple times a day so that's that works out pretty well for me. Yeah. Um, in the gym, you mentioned, uh, the compound movements, uh, is it high rep compound movements or are you just trying to put as much weight on the bar and do it, you know, two, three times? Like, how do you think about like your philosophy? Yeah. So

Starting point is 00:51:37 like I said, I'm, you know, like I said, I'm 56 years old and I have gotten away from really, really heavy, heavy repetitions. Like when I was powerlifting, like back in my thirties, I was dead lifting close to 800 pounds. I was, and I was a drug-free athlete as well, just to put that aside, that, that, that, that in there, I don't do those super heavy lifts now, but I'll still, I'll still put, you know, 400, 450, 500 pounds in the bar and do eight, 10 reps with that. Um, I tend to stay in a little bit higher rep range right now, but I mean, the, you know, the data on this shows that, um, as long as you're able to, you know, produce close to momentary muscular failure, or, you know, you're doing reps until you start to struggle

Starting point is 00:52:15 or you're, you know, you're getting close to failing. That's, that's all you gotta do. It doesn't matter how much weight's on the bar for most things. I mean, this is an average, you know, if you're tailored for strength training versus bodybuilding, there's some nuances there. But in general, I just try to push myself pretty hard. And usually I pick kind of a moderate weight for that. You mentioned sprinting earlier. I don't think a lot of people would say, hey, a guy who's almost 60 years old or closing in on 60 is still doing sprints, is still doing some of the things that they would assign to younger athletic people who are trying to compete for actual sports. sprinting just kind of sucks like i think a lot of people just like i just don't enjoy it um

Starting point is 00:52:52 talk a little bit about the cardio component is sprinting the main component or the other things you'll do well i first of all i think older people should be doing some form of sprinting i mean i think that's that's incredibly important uh you know it's from just from a time management standpoint but yeah the the you know if we look at sort of vo2 max which is a measure of our cardiorespiratory fitness we know that short sprint intervals are very effective at developing that. And so there's like, you know, just even on a bike, it doesn't, you don't have to go out and run hill sprints. And I do that too, but I'll get on a bike and I'll just crank, you know, five, 10 seconds sprints as hard as I possibly can. I, I call them chainsaw sprints. I pretend,

Starting point is 00:53:29 you know, the Texas chainsaw master dudes chasing me and I, you know, go as fast as I can for, you know, five or 10 seconds. Cause we can only truly sprint for about 10 seconds. This is when we change from different energy systems. You know, if you try to sprint on a bike, you know, more than about 20 seconds, you just start slowing down. There's no way you can maintain that because we switch from this pure sort of ATP creatine phosphate system over to anaerobic glycolysis or, you know, or mostly that way. And, you know, you just, you just don't have the power output. So I like to keep, when we talk about this term, high intensity interval training, the intensity has to be high. And the only way the intensity can be high is if it's short,

Starting point is 00:54:04 because you can't, I don't care who you are, you're going to run out of gas soon. You know, you get in a fight and you run, somebody runs out of gas after about 15 seconds of, you know, uh you know swinging and stuff like that so um that is you know the way our body is designed there's no changing that in the human species and so i try to capitalize on that so it's sprint adequate recovery and that's the other thing that people run into they fail to give themselves adequate recovery so if you're doing a 10 second sprint you probably need five times as much recovery time 50 seconds so 10 seconds on 50 second sauce every minute on the minute that works out pretty well you can do that five rounds you're done in five minutes so that's a that's a

Starting point is 00:54:42 that's an effective way to do that. Uh, on the topic of recovery, you've mentioned sleep a couple of times. It sounds like that's pretty important. What do you do there? Uh, well, if I can remember, yeah, well, I can try, if I try to, you know, keep, keep the damn phone out of my, my hands and that type of stuff, I get a pretty good night's sleep. Uh, like I mentioned earlier, uh, not eating real late helps me quite a bit. Um, you know, having just kind of a, you know, just a general routine, you know, we sleep hygiene. If you don't know, cool room, dark room, electronics off you know uh not engaging any kind of stressful activities over a period of time you know it's like uh you know going out and running sprints before you go to bed it's not going to

Starting point is 00:55:19 work very well right so you're kind of trying to have this sort of routine where you kind of slow things down um i find that you know at this point about seven hours is adequate for me and this is interesting thing about this diet is most people will find their sleep is much higher quality the volume is a little bit less and i know most of the studies out there show eight hours plus seems to be ideal for longevity. But interestingly, I sleep really well. I sleep extremely well generally. And when I wake up, I feel I've got plenty of energy. Why do you think the diet has that impact where you still get really high quality sleep, you feel energized, so kind of sleep did its job, but it's actually a shorter period of time. Right, right. So if we look at,

Starting point is 00:56:02 and there are some studies on, for instance, very low carb diets, and look at the phases of sleep, We've got these different phases, REM sleep and non-REM sleep and deep sleep. They show that low-carbohydrate diets, more people spend time in the deep sleep range. And so that's arguably more restorative. The other thing is if we look at why are we sleeping, and there's a lot of reasons why we do that. But some of the reasons are it's kind of repair. It's kind of this repair process that's going on. So we're basically dealing with all these reactive oxygen species that have kind of developed through the day.

Starting point is 00:56:30 So we've got these antioxidant systems kind of revved up and taking care of that stuff. well on the diet we tend to like a lower carb diet tends to produce less of these reactive oxygen species and so you have less just damage to deal with um the other thing is uh like if i like about one to two percent of our muscle mass is turning over every day and then our you know our skin's turning over our gut lining's turning over all these tissues are constantly turning over and what do they need to rebuild those things well i mean the simplest way to look at this is you know you and i are basically animals we have animal cells and our animal cells you know if we look at the individual components of that where do we get the building blocks from

Starting point is 00:57:08 well if you provide other animal cells and there you're going to have the actual ratios and the amounts that you need so i'm probably doing less damage and i'm providing myself higher quality nutrition to help repair the damage so probably i need a little bit less sleep with that regard you know like i said if you're trying to build a brick house and you know you have a big pile of bricks here. And you're like, well, that's pretty good. Or you got straw and mud. You're like, well, I got to make the straw and mud. It's going to be less efficient to do it this way. And so this is why, you know, a carnivorous approach tends to be more efficient. In fact, if we look at the history of planet earth and all the animals that have ever existed, all the things have swam, crawled,

Starting point is 00:57:46 or flown on earth, something like 80% of them are carnivorous, you know, through all the time they're there because it's more efficient. It's easier. Yeah. When you think about sleep, there's a lot of people who have all kinds of crazy sleep routines. They drink teas, they use melatonin, CBD, they got all these things that some people swear by. Some people say, Hey, I'll dabble when I need it, whatever. What's your general read after having so many different patients and kind of even testing on yourself, all these different protocols? Well, I think that honestly, most of them probably you can't extract, you can't, you can't generalize it to the population. I mean, I'm not going to say somebody says, Hey, I do this and I sleep better. I'm not going to

Starting point is 00:58:24 you know, disagree with that person. But I don't think there's any really great data that you can say, this is definitely going to lead to a better night's sleep. There's a lot of things we know that disrupt sleep. We know for like, for instance, alcohol, we know it's a sleep disruptor. We know that intense exercise, you know, you know, stress, all those things are going to disrupt sleep. And so as far as can I take this magic pill and sleep, I mean, obviously there's a whole bunch of people that are taking Ambien and, you know, Zoloft and all these other, why not Zoloft, but Ambien and all these other sleep meds that initially work and then over time they stop working. And then over time you become where you're dependent upon those things. And so

Starting point is 00:59:00 I think that, you know, sleep is a product of needing sleep and you need sleep by, you know, using your body to where it's supposed to be. So if you're sedentary all day, laying on the couch all day, you wonder why you can't fall asleep because you haven't done anything. In 2020, money like most people life gets disrupted and I started paying a lot more attention to what am I eating what am I drinking what am I doing whatever and that was one of the dumbest yet most profound breakthroughs for me was like you will sleep better if you are tired and it's so simple but even when you talk to people who are focused on exercise or diet or whatever it's just never like just do enough physical exercise so you actually want to go to sleep and what I found for me

Starting point is 00:59:43 personally is like if i'm tired around 8 p.m i won't go to sleep at 8 right i just it's hard for me to do that uh but i know like hey i moved enough today and you and then you have the better night's sleep you wake up and so is there anything to this kind of like uh the rhythms of sleep the time of day you go to sleep the time of day you wake up how do you think about all that and what do you do well i mean there there's clearly uh science on this topic you know we know we know that melatonin production increases, you know, as the sun's going down. And so we know that light plays a role in this. Some people say, well, look, people like to watch the sunset. You know, this is, well, you got the sunrise on this side of the coast, but if you lived on, you lived in

Starting point is 01:00:21 Tampa, you could go out there and watch the sunset. Light has an impact on this. And so if we're in there and we're staring at TVs or looking at our phones, that's going to, that's going to impact our melatonin production. So there is definitely a circadian biology, circadian rhythm that's associated with this and so you know you see that you know it's like eight o'clock you're kind of sleepy but then if you go screw around on your on the internet for two hours and all of a sudden you're wide awake again because the light light rhythm has disrupted that and then you know then you don't go to sleep till one o'clock in the morning or something like that so you know you start to get that that natural sundown effect and then if you just kind of if you just say hey this

Starting point is 01:00:56 means i'm supposed to be getting ready for bed and if you actually stick to that you're probably going to sleep better but if instead you say okay let me go watch a movie or go play a video game or yell at somebody on the internet you know you've disrupted that yeah uh you mentioned earlier you're waking up at four or five o'clock in the morning uh is that something you still do how do you think about waking up super early in the morning versus if you woke up at you know yeah i i never need an alarm clock anymore so i i think for some reason you know maybe it's a general lifestyle in the lifestyle in general or perhaps the nutrition has a rule on this but i am very much tied to the sun you know i mean when the sun is starting to come up i just feel it you know we

Starting point is 01:01:31 have this natural biology where we have a surge of cortisone and a cortisol in the morning we have our testosterone increases our production of glucose increases that's you know because we go from this very very placid state of sleep to all of a sudden arousal and there's hormones that are that are that are just hardwired into you know every mammal's physiology that you know every every uh non uh you know uh nocturnal animal uh is going to start experiencing that and that's you just kind of suddenly wake up so i literally i wake up probably within 30 minutes plus or minus the sunrise either before or after pretty much regularly this episode is brought to you by valor which represents what's next in the digital economy they provide simplified trusted access in

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Starting point is 01:03:45 snag world-class customer service is available 24 7 more of your favorite chains are on the way so run don't walk over to exodus.com slash pump to download the exodus web3 wallet right now again exodus.com slash pump go check them out today you mentioned earlier autoimmune disease there's a bunch of research and also reasons as to why people develop these or have them what are the ones that you would put the most weight on are there genetic arguments are there lifestyle arguments are there uh well clearly autoimmune diseases are increasing in frequency that's not a genetic shift i mean you can just like we look at obesity you know you're looking at well it's my genes well people in the 1920s had the same genes as you but they weren't you

Starting point is 01:04:28 know 50 of the population wasn't obese at that time so what we're seeing is a dramatic increase in autoimmune diseases. They tend to favor females for some reason. It is increasing dramatically. I think it's very likely that most of that is caused by something external. Probably it originates in the gut. We see this so-called gut dysfunction, which is very closely tied with autoimmune disease. Many people that have one autoimmune disease will have two or three because they have the same underlying biology. And so what we see and what I've seen with our company and another group that's done some similar work is that if you can fix the gut physiology, the autoimmune diseases often will remit, will go away. The inflammatory markers

Starting point is 01:05:12 will drive down and they'll become symptom free. You mentioned gut, uh, explain for people a little bit more detail. Uh, what is it exactly that's off on the gut and why is the gut what's driving? So if we look at, you know, like our, uh, relationship to the environment, like what is the biggest interface we have with the environment? Well, most of us say our skin, right our skin's an organ it's the biggest organ we have we're touching the environment but the skin is designed to keep things out right we're we don't want you know if we have a cut in our skin then we have problems we get an infection our gut is the opposite our gut is designed to bring things in that's what we you know most people don't know this but between between our

Starting point is 01:05:44 mouth and our in our butt that's all external to our environment that's outside of our body technically the way our body perform you know forms it you know from an embryo is basically circles around this this empty tube and that's still external to our body so most of our immune system is our gut and the gut is designed like i said to absorb everything and so whatever we're exposed to environmentally is going to come to us through the gut largely and so any problems within our external environment uh the gut will mediate what's going through there and so the gut has a selective barrier so it can say these things come in these things stay out right unfortunately over time exposure probably to the modern you know modern junk food diet that barrier starts to

Starting point is 01:06:27 break down. And we have this selective hyperpermeability, aka leaky gut. So now we're absorbing things we're not supposed to absorb. And so that leads to an inflammatory response, an immune response. A lot of times autoimmunity is associated with that. There's a researcher out of Boston Children's Hospital by the name of Alessio Faisano, who has published fairly extensively on the relationship between gut dysfunction and autoimmunity. It seems to hold up. And that's what we see all the time as far as if you restore gut permeability to its normal situation, the markers of autoimmune disease tend to go down as do the symptoms. And I see people reversing Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis,

Starting point is 01:07:08 certain asthma, you know, eczema, on and on and on, all kinds of things improve. How does somebody know that their gut's messed up? Is there a test that they can take? Is there something that they can do? Is it something they feel that like, hey, that's probably a gut problem? Well, I mean, you know, honestly, you know, we, and I didn't notice for, for 50 years, you know, when you would eat something, you know, Sam, I got, it kind of swells up a little bit. You get discomfort. You think that's normal.

Starting point is 01:07:32 That's like, that's just eating where you were experiencing your gas, you know, you're belching, you're farting, all this stuff. You think, well, that's just kind of normal physiology. It's actually not, um, that either indicates you the food you're eating is wrong or your gut is messed up. So that's, that's a pretty clear sign. If you've got, you know, if you've got chronic diarrhea and all those things, you, you're going to know it already.

Starting point is 01:07:50 Um, there are, you know, like I said, there's a group in Europe that does something called a PEG 400, which is a polyethylene glycol glycol test where you drink this and they can see what appears in your urine. And that's, that's a way to assess gut permeability. But, um, generally your digestion, like, you know, I had two and a half pounds of ribeye steak became before I came here. I literally don't, don't even know I ate. I mean, I literally don't feel anything. And that, that was, that was one of the biggest shocks to me is when I went from, you know, years of, you know, you'd eat something and two hours later, you're like, ah, you know, my stomach's a little sore or, you know, I got to go to the bathroom. When you go from that chronically to, it's like nothing. It's like,

Starting point is 01:08:28 it's like, you know, if you, uh, you know, if you get some of these noise canceling headphones, the first time you put them on, you're like, wow, it's really quiet in here. That's the same sort of sensation you get. So your gut is not, it shouldn't feel like it's problematic. Like it, like I said, if you were walking down the street and all of a sudden your lungs hurt or your heart hurt or your knees hurt, you would say that's a problem. That's not healthy. But people accept the fact that you've got a sore stomach, you're bloated, you're gassy. We accept that as normal and it's actually not. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:58 When you see people make this change, is it just food or the other things? I've seen probiotics. I've seen all sorts of kumbacha. You can imagine the kind of closer to the hippie places of town, you get crazier and crazier things from my opinion. Does any of that stuff work or is it just literally just eat the right foods? Well, I think it's like if you have – this is a funny thing. Somebody would come in and they'd have arthritis in their knee and you give them an anti-inflammatory, right? And it helps, right?

Starting point is 01:09:28 The question you ask is why are you inflamed in the first place? Well, no one ever asks that. You never ask your doctor. It's like, oh, well, here, take this pill and that's as far as it goes. Most physicians aren't even curious about that. But I think a lot of these things where there's turmeric or whatever, whatever, whatever, elderberry sauce or they've got all these things you can do. all that probably is used to mitigate problems that are being caused by the foods you're consuming in the first place so if you're not you know it's like i've got a headache well stop hitting your

Starting point is 01:09:57 head against the wall right that's simple advice but no people just rather take the take the pill or the supplement so we are constantly trying to plug holes in a leaky diet you know we're eating a diet that is you know really not well suited to us i mean certainly the modern diet you know certainly all this high quality high not quality high calorie nutrient poor food where you're constantly trying to plug holes in because you're just always nutrient deficient so i think and you're always inflamed so you're taking an anti-inflammatory and you're trying to mask these symptoms so why not remove all the inflammatory stuff the the uh and improve the quality of nutrition and you don't need all these things yeah are there things that people

Starting point is 01:10:35 would consider healthy uh fruits vegetables things like that that also are creating inflammation like I think I read one time Tom Brady and the whole like TB12, there's a big thing around like tomatoes. And supposedly he's not eating that stuff because he thinks it could inflame. Yeah, I mean these so-called nightshade vegetables have had a bad rap. And in fact, there was a period in time where tomatoes were considered like deadly. I mean there was a period like 300, 400 years ago where there was a big pushback against tomatoes. And so I think for certainly for some people, I'm not here to say that all fruits and vegetables are bad and poison. I know there's people out there within this community that say that.

Starting point is 01:11:09 I always cringe when I hear that because I'm trying to say, look, this is for selective people. But I think that, one, I think we have this phenomenon of everybody's gut is being destroyed by the modern food system. You know, 20% of us have IBS, clinically diagnosed IBS, and probably irritable bowel syndrome, and probably more have that subclinically that have not been diagnosed. So we've got all this underlying gut pathology. And so we're already in a situation where guts are broken, and then you add these foods in there that maybe 100 years ago we would have tolerated fine, but now people aren't tolerating that, and it's causing issues because all the plants that do have some toxic, you know, that's not even controversial to say that, you know, apple seeds have cyanide in it. We know that. We know that tannins and glycoalkaloids and lectins and, you know, phytic acid, all those things have a potential for negative issues.

Starting point is 01:12:03 issues. Now, generally, it's low dose, such a small thing. It's not an issue for most people. But as the gut gets more and more destroyed with the modern diet, then these things become, I think we have less resilience to deal with those things. And so what I see is there's people that'll go on a whole food diet, you know, and it might be just clean, no junk food, no sugar, no processed food. They're eating, you know, seafood, a little bit of meat, you know, fruits and vegetables and you think that's a great diet you know and i think for many people it would be but they still have issues and then they eliminate all the fruits and vegetables they just eat just meat and they do better and i'm like well that's it is what it is i'm not there to say that's bad

Starting point is 01:12:43 or good it just is what it is and so for some people that's clearly an issue now what i like to see is you know if somebody goes three six months they do this elimination diet and they solve all those issues hopefully they can add those things back in because you know i think everybody should be able to eat food they enjoy um as you talk about the modern diet one of the things that jumps to mind is uh the invention of the toilet may actually be uh screwing over uh health and so uh somebody sent me an article once and they were like oh yeah we're all pooping wrong and i was like wait hold on a second what do you mean and basically what they were like well if you look at other cultures you know take india or whatever uh literally the position in which

Starting point is 01:13:26 someone takes a shit is completely different than here in America where they're sitting, you know, kind of perpendicular, uh, their thighs to the ground. And so I've seen, I think maybe even on shark tank, uh, I've seen articles written about things that, uh, people will put their feet on as they're pooping in the toilet to lift their legs. Cause it's supposed to put them in a different position. I've had friends who live in other countries be like, what are you Americans doing? What is the, uh, the view maybe that you have in terms of like, is it something with the gut is it could be like the way that we're pooping or is it all bullshit and people just want something to talk about on the internet i think it's mostly bullshit i mean honestly i mean yeah i mean i

Starting point is 01:14:00 think the toilet is actually i mean sewage systems you know it's pretty good greatly improved the quality health for humanity i mean you know the big the biggest impacts for life expectancy have been sanitation and access to to fresh water um you know i mean you know the same thing people talk about how we birth kids you know it used to be they would birth them sitting up you know I've seen some guys give a lecture on that. So I think there may be some slight validity to that. Do I think that's the root cause of all of our problems, why we're all obese and have chronic disease and cancer because we're not pooping right? No, I don't think that's it. I think, you know, maybe you can make a slight argument. You know, it may be nice that you can, you know,

Starting point is 01:14:37 I mean, the one thing is, you know, I made a post on Twitter the other day about this. As we accommodate illness and obesity, we create more of it. And so the fact that I can go to the bathroom and not have to get into a full squat, then I never have to squat down all the way. Then I never need to do that. And then all that happens to my knee health over, over the 10, 20 years, I lose some of that cartilage in the back of my knee, never see stress. And so it probably starts to flake off. Uh, so I think indirectly, you know, people that sit in a full squat all the time are going to have generally better fitness. I mean, it's hard to do that when you're 200 pounds overweight. I mean, it just doesn't happen. So if all the toilets were

Starting point is 01:15:12 turned into like little holes like they have in China, there'd be a lot less happy obese people. Now, I'm not saying we should we should antagonize them. But I mean, the reality of the situation is it would be really hard to live life in that situation. Whereas right now we've got mobility scooters. We've got people handing you medications. We've got you know, we've got Uber Eats. We've got we make it so easy to be basically disabled, which is, I think, facilitating that. Yeah, it's interesting that in some way, if you had to do basic physical functions without society, which has been amazing and we live in this great civilization, accommodating you not doing it, that you actually may just be in better health from your day-to-day life and you wouldn't have to put such a big focus on your diet or your exercise or whatever because you're just moving around. Yeah, no, I think that's, that's, that's completely valid. And I think we've gotten to a point where, I mean, I know there's this transhumanist movement and some people saying it's, you know, we're all going to be these supercomputer people, but really we're going to be like these dependent, you know, I don't know, integrated blobs that, you know, just sit there and I don't know, maybe our brains are harvested for some, for some purpose. Yeah. Founders Fund has a quote. They say, you know, we were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters. A similar thing, right? We're promised like the singularity, but instead we're all just fat and dying. Talk a little bit about quality of life over time as well. It's a topic I really didn't think that much about. I'm a relatively young guy, healthy, but I read a book, Being Mortal by Atun Gawande. and he talks about how, you know, here in America, our experience with old age is basically you go to an assisted living, then you go to a retirement home. The death experience is inside of a hospital, right? You're hooked up to all this stuff. We're trying to preserve how long can we make your life,

Starting point is 01:16:54 not how good can we make it. Other countries, some of them are similar to us, some of them aren't. How do you think about with some of your patients who maybe are on the older end, do their diets change over time? Do you think it's like not one size fits all of the patient, but like one size fits an entire life and whatever works for you at 30 or 40 should still help you persist later in life. How does that work? Well, I mean, the question about does diet change over time as we get older? I mean, in many cases it does. I mean, you know, we see a lot of old people, they start losing their teeth and they can't chew harder food.

Starting point is 01:17:24 And so they end up with a more soft diet. We see people with dementia where, you know, it's interesting. There's a lot of thought that Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia are really just a form of insulin resistance of the brain. So the brain cannot access energy. It can't get glucose. And so I saw this happen to my grandmother, in fact. And a lot of people that are listening to this, no-demanded people will attest to this.

Starting point is 01:17:47 As they get older and older, they just want to continue to eat high-sugar foods because they're having such a hard time getting nutrition to their brains. All they want to use is grandma. All she wants to eat is cake and cookies all the time. We see that occurring. We see that the protein, our ability to digest and absorb protein goes down as we get older. Now, I don't know that's a direct consequence of getting older, but more so a consequence of becoming more and more diseased. And I think if you you look at the way we age versus just becoming more diseased, if you think about death as the ultimate disease, we're all finally we succumb to, you know, an overwhelming amount of disease state. So it does change.

Starting point is 01:18:25 Um, and I think unfortunately we are, we are, uh, you know, if you go, if you go to, if you ever have the, you know, the misfortune of spending a lot of time in a nursing home, cause I don't think they're very nice places in general. It's dismal when you see what's going on, you know, everybody's in there, you know, they're, they're, they're zombied out. They're just kind of sitting by themselves. They're serving them low quality food. It's very low in protein.

Starting point is 01:18:46 It's high in refined, uh, refined foods, carbohydrates, fats, and things like that. And they just circle the drain until they finally succumb. And so I think the best thing we can do as we get older, like I said, you're, I think you're in your thirties, right? Right. Yeah. So, I mean, it's, this is a time you put on a lean mask, you focus on that and that will stead you into your 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. And then, you know, if you get anything beyond 80, I think it's, you know, I think that's a blessing, you know, assuming the quality of life is good. I mean, I've met at several hundred, most of the hundred year old people I've met, unfortunately, have all been literally old ladies that are demented in diapers with a broken hip. I mean, that's where those 100 years old people I would run into. And rarely did I ever see any that were vital and fit or something I'd want to emulate. So you look at this, and you're like, I don't want to spend 10 years of my life just in this absolute, you know, abysmal existence. And so you've got to be mindful about what you're doing now. Because, you know, some people, you know, you start talking to 70 year olds and talk to them about 70 year olds, you'd like, hey, wouldn't it be great to live to 100? And many of them are saying, hell no, because they're miserable. I mean, they literally are. And it shouldn't be the case. You should be, in my view, robust, productive, vigorous, enjoying life. And then you drop dead at whatever, 92 or something like that. One of the things that I took away from that book was there's a bunch of studies that show like the more that you try to prolong or prevent death, the faster it may come to some degree. Like if you're in the hospital and you're constantly pumping yourself with drugs and this and there's knock on effects of that versus in many cases, the doctor would say, hey, you got three weeks.

Starting point is 01:20:22 Somebody goes home six months, a year later, they're still living. Now, why, how, who was the doctor wrong? There's a bunch of questions. But in some ways, just like literally go live your life, be healthy, go outside, do these – what some people would just assume are simple things and that may be enough. And so you don't ever want to say that that is the solution and you shouldn't go to the hospital. Right. But at the same time, it's interesting to look at two different approaches of one being very medicinal and another just saying, listen, you know, it's up to you to just live your life. Yeah, I mean, if you spend your whole, all of your waking hours trying not to die, you're not really living. And so that's the whole point here. And so we, like I said, we get one of these and I prefer to do that in a healthy body that allows me to experience the things.

Starting point is 01:21:05 You know, at some point, like I said, you've eaten enough cupcakes and you've had enough, you know, chocolate brownies that you said, I know what that tastes like. I don't need to constantly do that. And, you know, if you're willing to sort of dissociate yourself from that part of it, you get so much more in return. what about sunlight i've seen some studies recently in some conversation that uh actually people aren't getting enough sun some people say hey uh i think like in china uh the whiter your skin is means the less that you've been in the sun which is supposed to um uh go ahead and share that you're wealthy or you have a high status in society like how do you think about sun for health purposes well i mean as a species we evolved under the sun we weren't hiding in you know

Starting point is 01:21:44 air-conditioned building our whole time so i mean we are designed to get sunlight i mean sunlight is crucial for vitamin production. You know, vitamin D obviously is associated with sunlight exposure. We are, you know, a species that is tied to the sun. So I think it does make sense to get out there and be in the sun to agree. Now, you know, the caveat to that is don't get sunburned. You know, if you're not getting sunburned, then you're going to have issues with skin cancer and other things. Now, the interesting thing, and this is a very controversial topic, we see a lot of people when they clean up their diet, their sun tolerance improves. They don't get sunburned as easily it's not just you can't you know i noticed like years ago i'd spend

Starting point is 01:22:20 an hour out in the sun i'd have a pretty good burn and now i can spend three four hours out and i don't get burned and so i think the diet has does have a a modified modifying effect on our sun tolerance uh you say it's controversial so uh what is your best guess right now what the connection between the diet and the sun tolerances is there something specific to point to that you think it could well i mean one of the one of the persons that has done a lot of sort of look into this is a guy he's a guy's name uh tucker goodrich and he really posit that it is some of the oils we're exposed to you know these soybean oils canola oils things like that uh corn oils that we've been included in our human diet has changed the nature of our you know of our of our tissue

Starting point is 01:23:03 of our of our fats and so you can actually do biopsies on humans i was interesting when i used to operate on people, I would do either knee or hip surgery and you cut them open, you get these obese people. And it was, it was, it was something that I observed, but I didn't know why, but I would see some people and they would have a lot of times they'd have this very sort of bright yellow fat, you know, you'd, you'd cut into people and it's kind of weird talking about humans. And then you cut into some people and it'd be really, it would be, it would be a really white and almost like a, like a little, um, almost like rice krispies in there. And it's really kind of granulated fat tissue and it's probably based on their diet and what's going on there and we know

Starting point is 01:23:38 that like for instance we look at animals an animal has been finished on grass tends to have a yellower fat and a grain finished animal has more white fat it's probably the same thing we're seeing in humans what do you think is causing the difference in color well i think it's it's uh some of it's the carotenoids that are in there some of the some of the nutrients that are in there is what's causing that and uh why is yellow healthier is there anything well i mean again it depends on who you talk to and whether it's healthier or not. We know it's different. Whether it's healthy or not, I think it's still controversial.

Starting point is 01:24:07 Most people would say it is. The belief is that this is a natural native diet for whatever the species is, whether human beings or cows or pigs or chickens or whatever. If I venture into meat Twitter and I see people talking about meat, you're smirking. So there's positives, negatives, and everything in between. great memes uh which uh definitely is true um sunning your balls i've seen it over and over and over again i've seen the mainstream media laugh at it i've seen them try to say it's real

Starting point is 01:24:42 sunlight the human body and just like the private parts is there any uh seriousness to this or you know i think it's mostly goofy i mean i mean you know as crazy as i may seem from a nutritional standpoint here's this guy that's bucking the system and going to his all-meat diet i just don't get into some of that stuff i think it's kind of goofy i mean it's like goofy because it's goofy like uh from a social standpoint well i mean that it's just like i don't think it has any real significant physiologic you know effect i mean is sunny your you know is sunny your butt any better than standing out and getting sun sun on your face i don't know i don't know that it is i and if the difference is probably small and me and largely meaningless you know i can think of about

Starting point is 01:25:22 a thousand things i'd rather do for my health and and you know laying out so it might be fun you You know, it might be fun to go out there and lay out naked, but, you know. I always wonder those people who talk about it, how often they do it, right? Some of them probably do it every day. Some of them probably don't ever do it. You've mentioned a lot of academic studies, but I also see you tweeting on Twitter as how I think I started following some stuff you're putting out. How do you think about like the traditional academic world and like traditional studies

Starting point is 01:25:51 versus like, hey, Joe Blow down the street, you know, posted something and it works for me. Right, right. The world is maybe not blurring to the degree where people are confusing a Twitter account for an academic study, but definitely it feels like people are getting information from just more than their doctor. Yeah, sure, sure. And I think it's fair. It's a fair question. I think that there is a value to the scientific method in doing rigorous studies and to exclude confounders.

Starting point is 01:26:17 But we shouldn't ignore these other observations. This is how science starts. And so if you start seeing one or two people that say, hey, I did this and this happened, you're like, oh, that's kind of interesting. Then all of a sudden that one or two starts turning into thousands and thousands of people. Then you have to start to take notice of that. And that's where we're at with this crazy all-meat diet and, say, autoimmune disease. I cannot tell you how many people now who have not only said, hey, look, my ulcerative colitis went away, but I've got an endoscopy to prove it. I've got before and after.

Starting point is 01:26:44 So that's coming on. And so this is how you have to start to pay attention to these things and to stifle that. to say, dismiss it, dismiss it, dismiss it. We're only going to pay attention to the status quo of the science because, you know, we have this sort of belief that, you know, well, you might have been aware of this sort of stuff with this pandemic. We have this censorship to where we have a consensus, but the consensus is produced through censorship. That's not a consensus. That's just basically a religion, basically, at that point. And so, you know, we're seeing, you know, these, you know, N equals one, N equals 10, N equals a thousand bits of information coming out

Starting point is 01:27:22 there. And, you know, I've been a big champion of that because I think that's something people need to share their stories. Because as physicians, if you're not paying attention to your patients, you know, all your information is coming from, you know, drug companies. They don't care. I mean, they're, they're, they're about there, they're back, you know, they're, you know, they're, they're there for their shareholders. And, and so we have to get information from where we can where we can obtain it and so if enough people are seeing this result it's hard to deny that you know somebody's supposed to picture them at 300 pounds now they're 150 pounds that's pretty realistic that that actually really happened they did really something did something did happen

Starting point is 01:27:57 um obviously there's a lot of emotion tied into this you know i as you know i by constantly battling against the forces of evil from the vegan empire no i'm just kidding i mean you know i'll say this i think most vegans are probably nice people but there are some that are very, very aggressive and annoying and, you know, calling you a murderer and a rapist and a, you know, a cow molester and stuff like that. It's like, that's just, that's just silly, you know? But yeah, it's, it's, you know, like, like for instance, next week, two weeks, I go to Nashville, Tennessee. I'm meeting with researchers from Harvard and the U.S. Cattlemen's Association to set up a study on autoimmune disease, a bona fide interventional trial, a high quality study

Starting point is 01:28:37 to look at this stuff. And I think both of these things are important. You know, what I think about what impacts you like if I read a study does that really change my behavior or what if I see somebody that looks just like me and has the exact same issues to me and does this you're just as likely to do that as you are from a study so what's going to actually change people's behavior and I think you know having all these things together helps but you can't discount you know I mean how many things have you done because somebody else did that I mean a lot of us we a lot of us do that I mean it may not be scientific but we at least are willing to entertain that. And if the good thing happens to me too, then I have a little bit more, uh, you

Starting point is 01:29:11 know, that, that thing becomes a little bit more accurate. Yeah. Um, one of the things that I see a lot of guys, uh, as they get older, start talking about, um, testosterone, uh, various hormones, uh, different deficiencies that aren't necessarily just tied to, uh, their diet. Uh, it would make sense. I think just anecdotally, as you get older, things change, you don't have as much uh testosterone or whatever how do you think about diet as a way to to supplement that right and kind of combat what i think most people just say hey like that's what happens when you get older well i mean and there is this sort of belief and i was i was certainly in that you know that camp you know 15 years ago i will you know like i said i will you know i will just say i was a

Starting point is 01:29:53 religious zealot anti-drug guy as an athlete when i was power lifting i always used to yell at the guys who were taking drugs i thought they were cheating i was always anti this i never personally ever did. I still don't do that. I don't take testosterone. There's a lot of men on testosterone. There's a lot of men in their 20s and 30s now, which is really kind of shocking to me. I think for most of them, it is a consequence of poor lifestyle choices. And this becomes a metabolic bandaid. You know, the testosterone industry is like a $3 billion industry right now. That is basically you're putting band-aids on people. And if you were to legitimately really, really clean up the diet and lifestyle and get good sleep, most of us won't do it because

Starting point is 01:30:32 a lot of hard work. It's easier to take a pill. This is a, this is a society we're in. So I think it's, it's, it's a, for many men, it is beneficial. I see a lot of guys on testosterone. I saw as a doctor, a lot of guys on testosterone, they're still fat. They're still out of shape. They're still miserable. I'm like, the testosterone is not doing anything for you because in a lot of cases it gets converted to estrogen anyway, because you just kind of maintain this horrible environment. We've seen that overall men's testosterone has declined pretty dramatically over the last four or five decades. And I think that's just as much has to do with our diet, our environment in general. And so I don't think that decline is inevitable. I don't even think

Starting point is 01:31:16 age-related decline is necessarily an inevitability for most men up to a certain point, maybe at 90 or 75, but I think 30, 40, 50, 60, you should be able to maintain high levels of testosterone function. And I want to be specific about that. Testosterone function is what does testosterone do for me? Maintains lean mass, keeps my fat mass down, sexual function, libido, cognitive. So those things should continue to work well. Now, there is a concept of testosterone resistance. There's a receptor, just like there's an insulin receptor, there's an insulin molecule, there's a testosterone molecule and there's an androgen receptor and we know that the receptor sensitivity modulates how much testosterone we need so as long as your testosterone is within

Starting point is 01:32:00 normal range and your function is good then you should be fine you shouldn't need to supplement that a lot of people will go in there and say well you know i'm 40 let me get my testosterone checked and some people will actually you know tell you how to lower it natural how to how to trick your doctor into you come in there with a low testosterone so you can get the script so you can sit there no way no yeah of course yeah of course they do yeah so they will artificially drive their testosterone down so they'll get a prescription so they can just sit there and you know shoot up and you know get stronger because i've seen guys on testosterone and they're just beasts in the gym i mean they're like you know i mean literally i mean testosterone is a steroid

Starting point is 01:32:33 just like any other steroid hormone and so they'll use it just so they can you know maybe boost their ego or something like that whereas uh it's not a legitimate um health issue for the most people. I think most people don't have primary hypogonadism. I think they have, you know, secondary low testosterone, second to prediabetes, obesity, crappy lifestyle. And again, if you'd address this, because you think about it, why would you want to take an injection or whatever, whatever form you're going to get it when you don't need it? You know, I think most of us would rather not need it. But again, that requires getting good sleep, eating well, training, you know, most people don't want to do that, unfortunately.

Starting point is 01:33:10 What are some of the other things that you think people maybe are looking at as band-aids, They don't realize they're Band-Aids and just they clean up the diet. So like all of this kind of external supplementation, protein powders, all that, obviously the testosterone. Are there anything else that kind of just jump off the page to you? I mean, most of our modern medicines, I mean, almost every medication out there is a Band-Aid. I mean, I'm amazed to see, you know, like I said, our company is focusing initially at autoimmune diseases. And I was just looking the other day, I was going to add for a multiple sclerosis drug, which I've seen, by the way, multiple sclerosis improved dramatically on this diet. Um, it's two injections a year.

Starting point is 01:33:46 Each injection costs $16,000, which is $32,000 a year for these injectables. Uh, you look at things like Humira and all these other, Stelar and all these, you know, also colitis drugs and rheumatoid arthritis. You're looking at people paying, you know, upwards of 50,000, 60,000, a hundred thousand dollars a year for these medications, which are simply band-aids. All they do is blunt the immune response so that you have a tamped down immune system. You're more susceptible to infection, more susceptible to cancer, just so you can mitigate some of these uh disease symptoms uh those are all band-aids you know what i did as an orthopedic

Starting point is 01:34:18 surgeon was putting band-aids up i could replace somebody's knee but i didn't really take the arthritis out of their body i mean i you know this is the thing that used to really i changed my perspectives i would go in and technically i'd do a really nice knee replacement for somebody and they would feel better the knee would feel better it was it was crooked not straight they can walk better their quality of life improved in that knee they'd come back to me a year later with their other knee like hey doc my other knee's ready for one too when we're going to do this one and they dread because they know the surgeries you know it's a tough surgery and they're going to get through it and i was thinking i was you know patting myself on the back good job dr baker you

Starting point is 01:34:51 this person likes you because you did such a good job with this first knee really what i was doing was letting that person down because had i known hey you can probably avoid ever needing another knee surgery if you just do these things with your lifestyle and your diet but i didn't know i didn't know i didn't know to do that back then yeah one of the things we haven't talked about is caffeine you mentioned earlier that you drink water pretty much maybe a little bit electrolyzed you drink caffeine i don't i just don't like coffee this is kind of funny when i was 14 years old my first like official job i worked as a dishwasher i'd come to the hilton hotel cleaning dish i had to be there like four o'clock in the morning to mop the floors and he has a 14 year old kid getting

Starting point is 01:35:27 in at four o'clock in the morning is you know it's kind of tough as a teenager so i'm in there and i roll in there and i'm looking like crap i'm just tired you know it might have been a weekend or something like that and the cook goes hey kid here have some of this and he hands me this cup of coffee. I think it was straight black. I think it was a day old. I think I'm not mistaken. I drink it. I was like, Oh my God, this is like the worst stuff in the world. So it put me off coffee. Uh, I dated a gal for a while. She was a school teacher up in, up in Wyoming. And when I lived up there and she was into the flavor cup, I tried one. I was like, I just never liked the stuff. I like the smell of it. I just, I just don't like, it's too bitter for me for whatever

Starting point is 01:35:59 reason. And so I'm one of these weirdos that doesn't drink coffee. So 11, 12 years old, i think that i like took a cup from one of my parents and it was steaming hot black coffee and i tried to drink it because i saw them drinking it and i burnt my tongue and i'd be like holy shit and so i didn't drink coffee till i was like 27 28 uh but then i started to drink a lot of coffee right and uh i've thought about getting off maybe maybe not whatever and then i read studies to say caffeine's good for you is it is it actually good for you is it not good for you like how do you think about the health impact yeah i mean here's a this is a problem with nutrition research in general you can find studies say it's good for you so it's bad for you what

Starting point is 01:36:36 what the hell is the difference i got an orthopedic surgeon here who's gonna tell me the answer obviously well right no i mean i think and this has been my experience because this is this is a very common question there's a lot of coffee drinkers out there and a lot of people try this diet and they ask me about coffee and i said i wouldn't give it up initially to start with you know because you got all these changes dropping carbohydrates dropping fiber out of your diet and increasing your protein there's a lot of stress on the body to initially do that and then to go through caffeine withdrawal at the same time is not a good thing so what happens is most people they'll transition to the diet they'll do it for three or four months and then they'll say hey i'm

Starting point is 01:37:06 going to try giving up caffeine now interestingly this is interesting because there's a new drug on the market it's called a glp-1 agonist and so there's a gluconolike peptide incretin hormone which we talked about earlier that people are taking this medication was initially prescribed for diabetes and they're losing a lot a lot of weight uh which is great and they're you know it's a drug and of course the pharmaceutical companies are going to make billions of dollars and they're all happy about that but one of the side effects a lot of physicians have been reporting is a lot of people are noticing that they're suddenly losing cravings for things like alcohol coffee you know drug addiction so it may have a role there i see the exact same thing with

Starting point is 01:37:40 the diet that that we see here is that people suddenly lose the urge to drink alcohol suddenly they lose the urge to smoke cigarettes or to abuse whatever drugs are on so or drink coffee in many cases so there's something going on physiologically that commonly that affects the brain i'm sure But as far as, you know, my experience has been about 50% of the people that quit coffee notice a definite health benefit. The other 50%, no difference at all. So I was like, yeah, maybe it helps, maybe it's not. I mean, caffeine, if we look at technically why do plants make caffeine, why does a coffee plant make caffeine? It is a neurotoxin for insects.

Starting point is 01:38:18 That's exactly what it's designed for. just to dissuade whatever things eat their leaves grasshoppers or caterpillars or ants when they congest that it literally is a neurotoxin so they die so that's what caffeine's function is now what does it do to humans obviously it's a stimulant obviously it impacts our appetite in a way um you know it can it can block mineral absorption so there's pros and cons to it so it's kind of one of those things where you know if you're not drinking you know if you're drinking six cups a day then it's a problem you're one or two in the morning for most people it's not that big of a deal last thing i want to talk to you about is bitcoin there's a uh a crossover between

Starting point is 01:38:54 meat and bitcoin and uh i would have said if i wasn't so informed that it was the meat people who found bitcoin i think in some ways uh the bitcoin people found meat it seems like like i see people come into bitcoin they all of a sudden start eating more meat um take away all the memes all the the craziness and the fun stuff uh what do you think is it about these two communities that kind of come together and maybe talk a little bit about your interest or non-interest in bitcoin yeah yeah so i am a bitcoin hodler just just for for reference and the guys that got me to safety you know safety who wrote the bitcoin standard a guy named mike goldstein who i don't know if you know either of those guys but uh they're obviously big in the bitcoin community

Starting point is 01:39:35 and they are both carnivores and they've been doing it for longer than i have i think both them. I've been doing it probably a year or two longer than me. I think that, you know, obviously when we talk about a lot of people in crypto, I know the Bitcoin guys will be mad to say Bitcoin is crypto. It's different, right? That's the thing. And I know we just had that, what was it, the SBF guy and the FTX blow up. He was vegan, by the way, which I think, or he was proposably a vegan. I almost was willing to bet that you were going to bring that up. Well, I think you should. It's appropriate. So anyway, you can't trust, I don't trust people that don't eat meat. I'll just put it that way. But anyway, so I think that with regard to why do

Starting point is 01:40:15 we have this crossover? I mean, a lot of us, you know, we've sort of been jaded about what we've been told about the system. You know, it's like, you know, we don't necessarily trust the people telling us what to eat. We don't trust some of these major healthcare entities. You know, some people don't trust the central banks. You know, you've got the same sort of level of this trust and so there's that just general willingness to to to to take the road less traveled i think that's where a lot of the relationship is and you know i know we talk about fiat food and fiat money and there's there's a commonalities there but i think um i know i know with the with the fdx collapse a lot of people talking about self-custody everybody's

Starting point is 01:40:52 pulling everything off the exchanges now because they don't trust you know what's going on there if they even have what they say they have they're like are they you know they holding only five percent of what they think they have and they're going to lose out. So I think, I think the concept of self custody of your health is important too, because you know, if you, if you outsource your health to even your physician, I can tell you as a physician, not to be callous or anything, most physicians don't really care that much. I mean, they're, they don't have the skin in the game that you do personally. And yeah, they can be a consultant, but they're not going to lose sleep at night because your elbow hurts. I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's just, it doesn't impact

Starting point is 01:41:24 you that way so you have to really um you know make it your mission to take care of yourself and you can't outsource it to someone else i like the idea of self-custody of your assets self-custody of your health um but also you're mentioning basically like a first principles approach or like a willingness and a courage to think for yourself when it comes to your health um talk a little bit the bitcoin community obviously gets immense pushback from the legacy finance people, the mainstream media, uh, their mothers and fathers and cousins and people who just think they're crazy or whatever health also, like, I'm sure you get tons of pushback. I see them tweeting at you. Right. Um, how do you one deal with it, but also to like, are there arguments

Starting point is 01:42:06 that the critics have that you're like, you know, this would be the best argument that the critic has against an all meat diet or something like that? Well, I mean, it's funny. I mean, I've watched it evolve over the years. You know, the initial argument was you're going to die. I mean, clearly you're just going to die. I mean, you're going to get scurvy within three months. You're going to drop dead. All your teeth are going to fall out. So that doesn't happen. So then it becomes, well, uh, it's, you know, you're not going to die, but you're going to get, you're going to develop some sort of health issue within three years. So that doesn't happen. Then it's like, well, some people may get healthier with this, but, but it's not sustainable. And then

Starting point is 01:42:38 you're like, well, there's people doing this for 25 years. Okay. Well, so, so they just keep the, the, the, the counter argument keeps getting reduced in significance. And so, you know, the longer you exist, the longer you sort of, you know, walk the walk, it's harder to contest that. And that's what we're seeing. You know, this is one of those things that we're like, I guess with Bitcoin, it's how many times it was supposed to be dead, right? It's been, it's been going, supposed to be dead since 2013. Every year it's going to die. And then it keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. So again, no one knows what's going to happen in the long term. I don't, I mean, I don't know if I'm going to stay on this diet for 20 years. I'm just saying, I'm going to,

Starting point is 01:43:11 I'm going to live every day, day by day, you know, make adjustments as I need to. And so far, I haven't had to, I've had to just, you know, continue doing what I'm doing, which makes it quite easy. Um, what would change your mind? Like, like what would be something that you'd say, Hey, I would reconsider. Uh, yeah. If I, if I, if I saw my health significantly faltering, you know, I think that's, I think that's a reasonable approach. You know, you know, when I talked to some vegans about this, I say, look, what would happen if, uh, you know, your health significantly was compromised. Would you, would you eat meat if you had to? And the answer usually for them, most of them, they refuse to answer the question.

Starting point is 01:43:45 So that would never happen. I said, well, I see it happen every day. Quite honestly, I literally take care of ex-vegans all the time. So I don't, you know, like I said, I'm not crazy to the point where I'm on it. I have a death wish or anything like I don't want to have heart disease. I don't have cancer. I want to have a good quality of life. So if I see that where I'm convinced that what I'm doing is significantly harming myself, I'll be happy to switch. we've talked a lot about steak and and uh meat chicken fish other things you mentioned a couple times but just uh before i let you go like how do you view the balance between steak versus these other uh well steak's the best no i mean i mean you think about it well you know i wanted to you know if you were to sit down and have a ribeye steak here and a grilled chicken breast and a piece of salmon right here, 99 times out of 100, I'm going to pick the steak. And I mean this because it tastes better. I want it.

Starting point is 01:44:41 It's viscerally satisfying. But if you think about just from, again, we'll go back to we talked about our ancient, our ancestor people. I know that's kind of a goofy topic. But when we looked at how we acquired calories and what the technology they had, they clearly, you know, before 100,000 years ago, So before range weapons came into technology around 80,000 years ago, the bow and arrow and the addle addle, that occurred as sort of these megafauna animals died off. But prior to that, I mean, you had a spear.

Starting point is 01:45:10 That's what you have to hunt for your food. Now, if you can take down a big elephant with a spear, which they clearly could, versus a chicken, right, how much effort is it going to get to get a million calories worth of chicken versus a mammoth? You can track a mammoth, kill it in two or three hours. I mean, this is routinely what we see even today in Africa where they kill elephants. It doesn't take long. So you've got that option. So you get this big, giant hunk of ruminant meat that has, you know, an elephant probably provides 6 million calories. And then you've got a chicken where you're going to get, you know, a few thousand calories.

Starting point is 01:45:42 How many chickens are you going to chase with your spear? So I think that's what we're hardwired to do. I mean, most of us, you know, if we're honest about it, are going to say that steak was much more satisfying to me than that chicken, that little piece of chicken. so i mean i still eat those things occasionally but i just don't you know again i eat what i like and what i what i feel like eating so it's you know nine times out of ten it's just like i want a steak um my last question for you is if somebody wants to kind of go down this path and and do some personal experimentation uh what is your suggestion as to how they get started is it really go to the grocery store buy some steak uh go home start eating and like try not to eat other stuff or

Starting point is 01:46:20 or is there other? Well, I mean, I'll tell you how I did it. I mean, I, I lurked on social media for about a year watching these crazy freaking freak people eat nothing but meat for a year going, this is so frigging stupid and crazy. Right. I just watched them. And then I kind of like, you know, I was like, well, shit, I'm going to try it. And so I did literally, I did one meal. I had steak and eggs for one meal and I was like, Hey, that was pretty good. I enjoyed it. I didn't miss the potatoes or the toast or anything like that. So then I did a day and then I did two days and I did three days and I did a week and I did two weeks. And then back in 2016, I did a full month of it. And I was like, shit, this is the best I felt in 20 years. And so that's how I

Starting point is 01:46:56 progressed to this. Now, again, like I said, if you've got a lot of health issues and you're on medications, you're probably going to need some assistance. You know, we've, we've got like at carnivore.diet, which is our website where we have a lot of people we can train. We've got the communities and coaching and all that stuff. So that's one way to do it. But I mean, in general, just, you know, start with a, start with a meal, find something you like. I think you gotta, to enjoy what you do. Don't just sit there and eat plain ground beef, you know, and just stare at that and go, God, I got to eat this for the rest of my life. That's not the right way to do it. Just find something you like, make it exciting. I think I should comment on this because

Starting point is 01:47:28 there's a lot of people out there within this carnivore space, you know, these guys are eating raw testicles and all this stuff. And you look at that stuff and you're like, that's gross. I don't want to do that. That's not necessary. I don't care how much primal ancestor crap. That's not what the data shows data shows you can do fine eat steak by itself steak and eggs it's all you got to do you'll be healthy you'll lose weight you'll feel better you don't need to be eating raw brains and monkey penises and you know you know i mean i just gotta ask you're talking about testicles and raw brains and ancestral uh primals uh liver king right right what's your take well i mean he's doing a good job of marketing himself i mean it's a lot of marketing obviously and he's

Starting point is 01:48:07 you know obviously he's conflicted he's selling a line of liver supplements which again i think they're unnecessary. I think they're overpriced. I don't think you need to do those things. But I mean, you can't, you know, I mean, you give the guy credit. I mean, he's, he's, he's obviously putting himself out there and he's impacting a lot of people probably quite positively. So I'll give him, I'll, you know, take my hat off him for that. But again, I don't think a lot of that stuff is necessary. That's not what the data shows. And, you know, like I said, you know, if your goal is to cure autoimmune disease or something like that, you don't need to do that. You don't, you don't have to go to that extreme to, to, uh, to, to do those things.

Starting point is 01:48:40 And I think when you make it with that approach, you turn a lot of people off, you know, that otherwise would perhaps try it. You can literally go to a Walmart and buy ground beef and regular eggs and you can get really healthy doing it. And I think those people need to understand that. If you want to do all this other stuff and get goofy and put yourself on Instagram, eating, you know, pounds of raw liver every week, that's fine. It's fun, but it's unnecessary.

Starting point is 01:49:03 sonning your balls and eating liver is unnecessary all right uh where can we send people to find you on the internet uh both on twitter and then i think you've got a couple lipses yeah so twitter is actually nice now that we don't get so much censorship there so s baker md on on twitter uh on instagram which i'm still being shadow man on i'm so pissed because i made fun of the world economic forum so they're shadow batting me about that which is stupid they probably deserve it They do. They do. So, SeanBaker1967, Instagram, and then SeanBakerMD, YouTube, and also, God forbid, TikTok, which is, you know. Are you on?

Starting point is 01:49:38 I'm on, but, you know, kind of, eh. I'm not putting a big effort in there yet. Maybe later. All right. Awesome. And then carnivore.diet? Carnivore.diet is a good place, or rivero.com. So, carnivore.diet, if you just want to do the diet, you don't need any actual medical care from a physician, we'll start accepting patients at Revero.com probably this spring, which we should have a physician's license in all 50 states by the spring. And then, then if you need help, if you need somebody to help you taper down medications or change medications, that's where you'll go. Okay. How do you spell that? R-E-V-E-R-O, Revero. Okay. Awesome. So Revero.com. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:50:14 Awesome. Well, listen, thank you so much for doing this. I learned a lot and I think a lot of other people will as well. And we'll definitely do it again in the future. Sounds good. Awesome. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one make sure you're subscribed on apple spotify or your favorite podcast player and if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the bitcoin or crypto industry we've got you covered head over to the crypto academy.io my team and i have been working with the top hr teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events we teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry including live

Starting point is 01:50:46 interview prep and resume review our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies, go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends and I'll see you all for the next episode.

The Pomp Podcast - #1131 Dr. Shawn Baker On The Carnivore Diet

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