We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC186: Fiat Food & Bitcoin w/ Matthew Lysiak (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, we have investigative journalist Matthew Leashack, and he's known for his work with the New York Daily News. Matthew discusses his latest book on the history of Fiat food policies and corporate interests. Honestly, guys, this one was wild. This is something that I haven't covered in the past, and incorporating food and nutrition with Fiat monetary policy and inflation. This was mind-blowing for me personally. We'll cover influential

Starting point is 00:00:36 figures, the evolution of food policies, and the impact of inflation on our health. All right. So with all of that, let's jump to the interview with the insightful and knowledgeable Mr. Matthew Leashack. Celebrating 10 years. You are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here with Matthew Leishak. And I am really, really excited to cover this because this book was so good, Matthew. So, so good. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Preston. I appreciate it. So this topic, I think everybody in America is looking around and they're saying there's something in the food. There's something happening. The joke was always there's something in the water. But I think I think I think, I think, I think you could ask 10 people off the street and eight or not of them and be like, yeah, there's definitely something in this food that's causing the whole nation to just be overweight

Starting point is 00:01:45 and it's like an epidemic, right, of just people that are out of shape and there's just something wrong. And, you know, I read a lot of books here and there. I've read books on fitness and health and whatnot. But what was really missing and for me, why I love this book was the history and everything kind of leading up to where we are now going back. multiple decades and some of these stories that you're telling are just amazing, amazing. So what I want to do is start off telling the audience about your background because you're

Starting point is 00:02:17 an investigative journalist. Tell people about that background and how it assisted you in this research that you did for the book. Yeah, I've been an investigative reporter for about two decades now. I spent most of my years at the New York Daily News, which when I was there was the fifth biggest paper in a country. Specifically, my role was to parachute into any breaking news story across the country. So I spent about half my year on the road chasing down some of the biggest stories of the past two decades that I'm sure your audience has heard of. I began seeing that the newspaper industry was going to hell. Pretty early on, it was evident. And I transitioned into book writing. My first book was about the mass shooting in Newtown.

Starting point is 00:03:02 committed by a young man named Adam Lanzah. I published that with Simon & Schuster. And I've done work with Harper Collins, Scholastic, Ben Bella. So I've worked for a wide range of publishing houses. Investigative reporting is really my passion. I'm not a nutritionist. I'm not an economist. But I'm a data dork.

Starting point is 00:03:23 I love doing deep dives into, in particular, government corruption. So I've interviewed former presidents and senators and governors. I've become very used to corruption in government and how it's hidden and ways to find documents to uncover that corruption. Yeah, I love it. And I think I would argue that's why I think you were able to look at it with the lens that you were, is because this wasn't necessarily your, you know, sometimes people are too close to a particular area that they can't view it from an outsider's perspective, and boy, did it shine through. So what inspired, like, what was the moment that you were like, I have to write a book about

Starting point is 00:04:07 this? Like, I have to, like, dedicate, I don't know how much time you spent writing this. I would imagine a ton with the amount of end notes and research that I see throughout the book. But what was the thing that inspired you to take this on? I mean, this is huge. I think about that a lot because I've written so much. I've written over 10 books and I've written plays that have been produced.

Starting point is 00:04:28 I have a movie coming out, my first screenplay I wrote recently. Of all my work, this is what I'm most proud of, Fiafoo. Really? Yeah. It is. And I have four daughters. And this is the book that I want them to read when they're a little bit older and can understand a bit about the world around them from more of a cynical viewpoint.

Starting point is 00:04:48 But going back into my personal history, I grew up in the 90s. And at that time, I great parents, they were pushing something they being in society. nutritional health authorities, we're pushing the dietary food pyramid, which instructed us to eat between 8 to 11 helpings of grains a day, and to limit your saturated fat found in meat to very, very minuscule amounts. So I was raised on that, and I became fat. I was a fat little kid. I got cancer at the age of 15.

Starting point is 00:05:22 Oh, my. I had osteogenic sarcoma, so I was pretty much hospitalized for the better part of two years. I remember asking one of my doctors from my hospital bed, what did I do? Why do I have this? And he said, oh, it's not your fault. We don't know why people get cancer. Something is genetic. There's a lot of different beliefs. I intuitively realized I'd done something wrong. I wasn't eating a moderate amount of garbage. I was eating tons of the food. But it was also the food that was recommended by the government. I was eating a lot of grains. At this time, saturated fat was replaced mainly by seed oils. You find like Crisco and all these other atrocities of science. And I had, so going back to my teenage years, I always had something in me that made me think, man, I had done something wrong. I abused my body as well.

Starting point is 00:06:16 Health, even though I went on to as a career, as an investigative reporter, health and my personal health was always on my mind. Like, what had I done wrong? And I'm still in remission for cancer. I don't want that back. Cancer is really bad. It's awful to have. You don't want it.

Starting point is 00:06:31 And I also like, I think I'm naturally attuned to thinking that I'm responsible for things that happened to me. I think that's something that's been installed in me from my parents. And I just take responsibility for the good and the bad in my life. That was a bad. And I never was able to shake it. So when I began my career as a journalist, I did, my focus was mainly on mass shootings and government corruption.

Starting point is 00:06:56 but I always took like a side interest in health. In 2021, with COVID, it became very clear to me early on that this was a scale of government corruption I had never encountered. There was some truth to this, a lot of the pandemic, but there are also a lot of lies, which is what you find with government. They don't generally make things up whole cloth, but they weaponize real events in ways that are often dishonest. and I found that to be apparent with the COVID pandemic.

Starting point is 00:07:29 And it led me to Safeedina Moose. I don't know if your audience is familiar with him. Yes. I love economics and I read the Bitcoin Standard, but it was the Fiat Standard, his second book that really caught me, particularly a chapter he wrote called Fiat Food. I respect Safe. I think he's probably one of the top five economic minds in the world right now.

Starting point is 00:07:50 I don't think that's hyperbole. But the chapter sounded insane. It was this very short chapter, just alleging this conspiracy that manipulated our food supply. So I'm like, look at this. Wow, this guy's brilliant, but what is this? This is wacky. This is off the deep end. So I began fact checking it like a reporter does.

Starting point is 00:08:12 And to my shock, he had understated the case. And when I began pulling this sheet back a little bit, what it revealed was what I would argue to be the most kind of. consequential conspiracy of the past 60 years in terms of its effect on the human health of our nation, on the health of our nation. So I reached out to safe and I'm like, hey, man, here's who I am. This, if it is what I think it is, deserves a book, not seven pages that you did. I also understood that although I'd worked for all these major publishing houses, none of them were going to accept this premise.

Starting point is 00:08:49 It was too far out there. So I said, look, man, you should start your own podcast. publishing house. And I should be your first author. I was pretty bold. He agreed. And I didn't realize this at the time. He had already been considering launching his own publishing house called the safe house. So I worked with him. And that's been great. And we launched Fiat food. Yes. So what you're talking about. So I've read the book, the Fiat standard that you're talking about. I went through this section. And when I was reading the section, I didn't have the exact same reaction as you, you did, which was, there's no way, like, let me dig into all the resource. I was kind of just like,

Starting point is 00:09:29 yeah, yeah, I agree with you, save. I was just like all in, right? And so when I saw this book, I've been meaning to read this book for quite a while, and I knew you really took like a wirebrush comb to like all these ideas. I couldn't wait to plow into it. And when I did, this Ansel Keyes actor or character or, I mean, real person was mind-blowing to. It was mind-blowing to. me, like the analysis that you did and like the history on like and how instrumental this person was into these debauchery that we have today in modern nutrition. Can you give the audience just a little taste of like who this person is, how they impacted all of this and why it's important?

Starting point is 00:10:16 Thank you. Ansel Keys was very pivotal in how our food supply in America. has been degradated. Yeah. It's hard to understate his role because he in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, so late 40s, early 50s, he was the leading nutritionist in America. So what he said really went. And he was in bed with industry.

Starting point is 00:10:47 So he was getting funding from all kinds of conflicts. He was getting funding from the sugar industry. New York Times did some great work in 2016. I hate to give them credit because of what they've become. But in 2016, they uncovered one of the leading studies on sugar that we have had come from a study where essentially the scientists, including the researchers, including Ansel Keys, was bribed. And these are studies that we still rely on today. These are studies that are still commonly cited. It was what you have to understand, I think, what your audience should understand about a lot of these nutritional studies is that they're not science.

Starting point is 00:11:22 It's more like marketing. Yeah. It's PR. Yes. And once you understand that it all kind of falls into line much easier, and you have, I don't want to get into the weeds too much on science, on studies, because your audience is going to get bored. But brief overview is you have these observational studies which can't establish causal relationships.

Starting point is 00:11:42 They can only establish association. These are almost exclusively all the studies that you're seeing in nutrition science, not clinical double-blind gold standard studies which control variables and can control and can establish causal relationships. For example, I can cite you that I took a poll of people who have cancer and 97% of them have had meat. That's an example of an observational study. And then from that you have a headline that will say, 97 or meat linked to cancer.

Starting point is 00:12:16 And I spoke to so many scientists in research for this book, and they would explain to me kind of humorously how these studies aren't really meant for other scientists or for the scientific community. They're meant to garner media attention where normal Americans are working. They're not going to go look at the actual study, but they see the headline and they might read the first graph. And then that establishes a narrative. Especially today. Especially today with social media. It's like they read the headline and like that's all. They don't even open the article.

Starting point is 00:12:49 They're sharing it. One thing on the Ansel Keys thing, he wasn't a nutritionist. He didn't go to school for any of this, right? No, he was like a fish doctor. He studied eels. That's how he got his gravitas. But he was a really great personality. He was strong and determined.

Starting point is 00:13:07 And he had a theory that saturated fat found in meat clogged arteries, which caused heart ailments. And this was a big deal because in the early 50s, the president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, had a heart attack and everybody was very afraid of heart attacks. Where are these heart attacks coming from? What is the cause?

Starting point is 00:13:28 There's a race in science to figure out what was happening here. And a few theories emerged. One of them was a type A personality, people very stressed out. Some people thought it might be the increase in car exhaust and fumes. Other people thought it was sugar. Ansel Keece thought it was saturated found in me. And what you find is that he begins through a structure of what appeared to be motivated

Starting point is 00:13:52 reasoning to try to find science to validate his conviction. And that's where the observational studies come in, because you can really manipulate data to say anything in an observational studies where there's no real controls over variables. And he initially got a lot of flack for this theory because other. scientists kept saying, well, you're presenting this diet heart hypothesis linking saturated fat found in meat to heart ailments, but where's your evidence? He could never present evidence. So finally in 1967, he got a huge government grant. And he's like, you know what? I realize all my studies are observational. This time we're going to do a clinical double-blind placebo

Starting point is 00:14:37 gold standard study that will establish causal relationship between saturated fat. and heart health called the Minnesota Coronary Survey, established in 1967. Four-year survey done over a few thousand patients in nursing homes in Minnesota where all the food could be controlled because you can really do good science when you have these situations where you know everything these patients are eating and everything they're not eating and you could chronicle it. For four years, they did this. And it was by all counts a really great study. 1971 rolls around,

Starting point is 00:15:17 studies over. There's Preston, there's no word of this study. Nobody's discussing the study. This is crazy. We begin to formulate, we assume that Anselkies is correct, although there's no evidence, and the American dietary guidelines move forward based on his

Starting point is 00:15:33 premise. In the, I think it was 2014, it became revealed. How many decades is that? It's a long time. Finally, somebody from, once again, I hate to give credit to the Times, but truthfully, they did great work on this. Somebody from the Times was like, what happened to that study?

Starting point is 00:15:52 I remember hearing about it when I was a kid, and it was a huge deal, and nobody ever said anything about the study. So we was able to get a hold of one of the researcher's sons. Ansel Kies was one of the late lead researchers. Another researcher's son who said, you know, their father had died, but they had all the boxes in her basement. and they went through the boxes. And it revealed that not only did the study not validate Anselkies's diet heart hypothesis,

Starting point is 00:16:20 it actually indicated that the opposite was true, that lower cholesterol was associated with poorer health outcomes. And higher cholesterol was associated with better outcomes and lower mortality rates. So how could this be? It was the exact opposite. of what Ansel Keys and the Diethard hypothesis had hypothesized. That's why it was called a hypothesis, right? It was an educated guess.

Starting point is 00:16:47 They didn't know. Now they knew. And one of the researchers, Gary Taubbs, who is a fantastic science journalist, asked, well, why didn't you release this data earlier? And his response was very telling. He said, there was nothing wrong with the study. In fact, the study was great, but, quote, we were just so disappointed in the results.

Starting point is 00:17:10 And you got to understand that these scientists had their entire reputations built on this hypothesis. There was an infrastructure. But what happens is when I chronicle in the book is industry, science, and this religious group, they all had this interest in removing meat from the American diet. But still, in 1970, Americans ate meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So they heard these arguments. But the diet that for thousands of years, humans have eaten, they continue to eat and it hadn't been swayed. 1971 rolls around and a very powerful player emerges into this debate.

Starting point is 00:17:50 And it's the federal government. I mean, this is, I think, where a lot of your audience is going to find it intriguing. And this is where I found it most intriguing was the government's motivation in altering our food supply. What you'll discover when you look at governments historically is that governments can survive endless war. You see it all the time. Like we keep electing these people in America. We've been in war every year, but five since 1971. Governments or the people accept corruption.

Starting point is 00:18:21 But what you don't accept, what people won't accept is rising food prices. This is when governments get overthrown. You saw in 2022, according to American University, there are 12,000. 500 food and energy related riots in Europe alone, just in 2022. Same year in Sri Lanka, riots over primarily attributed to the rising cost of animal-based products escalated to such an extent that hundreds of thousands of people went into the Sri Lankan government and the leaders had to flee. So governments are very, very aware of the link between government instability and

Starting point is 00:19:02 rising food prices. So when Nixon decoupled from gold, so I want your audience to stay with me. I know I'm throwing a lot out. I know, no, no, this is great. In 1971, Nixon decoupled from gold. Up until that point, the American people weren't able to redeem their promissory notes for gold,

Starting point is 00:19:19 but foreign banks could. So this provided a powerful restraint on the ability for the government to just keep printing money, which kept inflation relatively modest. But when Nixon decoupled, completely in 1971 on August 15th in a speech known as the Nixon shock. He knew, and all government leaders knew, and I have this from, several FOIA requests that came through. They were very aware that food prices were going to rise extensively. So they began a campaign. What amounted to a 55-year

Starting point is 00:19:50 gaslighting campaign, not to come clean with the American people on the consequences of decoupling and monetary inflation that would ensue, but to change the entire trajectory of the food supply. so that Americans don't really notice the rising costs of food. Yes. This man named, gosh, I can't think of his name right now. Nixon appointed to the head of the Department of Agriculture, Earl Butts. He was tasked with, now that the Fiat money printer could print money, printing a bazillion dollars in subsidies to the corn, soy, and sugar industries.

Starting point is 00:20:28 with the goal of consolidating American farmland so that we could really lower the cost of the American food supply for the consumer as an increase in the money supply was going to change the price of the real foods that you can't print. So, for instance, if you're eating nothing but a diet of Doritos and grains, you don't really notice monetary inflation. Nope. Right? Like, I mean, today, you can look around and I could feed my entire family, I have four daughters.

Starting point is 00:20:56 I could feed them all with three boxes of cereal in a day. That's pretty cheap. But if you're talking about nutrients, the nutrients for humans to thrive, what you find is it's become remarkably cost prohibitive to the point where red meat is increasingly becoming a food of the upper classes. Yes. I know that's a lot. No, no, no, no. It was amazing. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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Starting point is 00:25:39 So you were talking about it a little bit there at the end. But let's say we go back five decades or six decades. And let's say Americans are 20% of their food budget is red meat. or this really high density nutrient food. But then as the money's getting debased, now all of a sudden they can't necessarily afford 20% of their budget going to that really nutrient dense food. And it's 18% or it's 15%. And so then it has this recursive impact on what's actually in the CPI bucket because

Starting point is 00:26:12 instead of buying the red meat or whatever it was, they're now buying Lucky Charms or whatever food is now going into the... And so it just further compounds. And so it's like this moving target that you're not able to ever really fully understand because it keeps moving. I'm curious if you have any other points. I'd love that. It was like a quote in the way.

Starting point is 00:26:32 I can't remember which chapter that was. It was by safety in a movie. He explains it brilliantly. Yes. It was so good. Yeah. So your audience is like pretty educated in economics. Yes.

Starting point is 00:26:42 Yes. Yeah. So I'm not going to go too into weeds on it because they already understand it all. But it's interesting was I'm not an economics guy. But what? I understood was that it's a statistical tautology, right? Because it's like these food studies. It's just marketing. Yeah. Where when CPI was first brought into the picture in America during World War I, it was a pretty good reliable barometer because it covered stable goods that people bought. It'd be

Starting point is 00:27:10 like steel, meat, and they didn't change. You could see what the price of a pound of beef was one year ago and what it is today, a price of beef, one year ago, a price of coffee, one year ago, and then today, and you can measure it. The problem with CPI initially as constructed was that it was a reliable barometer and that people could then see the rise in prices, and that was problematic for governments. It wasn't as problematic when we were on a hard currency. We were on a gold standard up until around 1917, and then it was a partial gold standard because we no longer allowed the Americans, our own people, to redeem their gold, but foreign nations still could. But after 1971, what you see with Arthur Burns, who was the head of the treasury under Nixon,

Starting point is 00:27:57 was he talked about it. He just had to keep taking and substituting things out of the CPI that revealed the actual consequence. You want to know a real CPI. Look at a McDonald's billboard. There's pictures of it. They haven't been able to Orwellian pigeonhole it yet from 1986 and look at it today. That's a decent barometer. Candy bars, decent barometer. CPI in its current iteration is nothing more than marketing. So if you're relying on this CPI, which uses dollars, which the amount of dollars

Starting point is 00:28:31 it costs to buy a rib-eye, you substitute the rib-eye out for some kind of chemical storm soy burger patty, then they don't adjust the CPI. They just say, oh, you're $100. rib eye, you're now buying a $10 dollar soy burger. They just, they just And it's an equivalent, yeah, and it's not even close. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:52 So I would encourage your audience to not even waste time. Like, yeah. I wasted way too much time trying to understand this API. And when I did, I was like, oh, I felt like I just took a community college course from a Keynesian professor. Yeah. Where you come out dumber. You're like, wait, I ran a lemonade stand as a kid and I thought I understood it.

Starting point is 00:29:11 But now I, the Keynesian economic multiplier effect is to telling me that if I just give all my money to the government and not to the lemonade stand, it multiplies me. No, no, no, just don't go to the classroom. Amen to that. Amen to that. Oh, I love that quote. One of the things that I think is a really popular thing, at least in Bitcoin, it's a

Starting point is 00:29:30 really popular topic for discussion, is seed oils. You cover some of this from the very early days, back to 1884, with the national food policy where I think it was in New York. Was that where it originally started in 1884, where they were trying to, the cotton seed producers were trying to push these polysaturated butters on the populace and they weren't having it. They were passing laws and then they were being overturned because of the corporate interest. So talk to us a little bit about seed oils and also talk to us about this corporate interest and how some of this just like tentacles like figures out its way to like, sorry this question's so long.

Starting point is 00:30:11 I like to try to make the question short, but like it's weird to me how the corporate interests almost perfectly align with the government interest and how they're able to put their tentacles into all of this so that it's just lost on everybody. That's the thing that I think I walked away from the book probably most blown away with. It doesn't seem like it's one person. It just seems like it's this blob of people that were all incentivized to act in this kind of way. and we all just kind of got roped doped along the way. But back to the original question, seed oils and corporate interests. I think you put it really well, and I appreciate long questions. I also appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:30:50 I do a lot of podcasts and a lot of media, and rarely does somebody actually read my book. So I can tell when somebody has, and I find it refreshing. Usually they sketched my book and they've seen me on another podcast and then they have me on, which is fine. I appreciate it, but kudos to you. I love the book. I love the book. It's really good. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:31:07 So what I found, what really astounded me was that about the seed oils was how historically Americans were accustomed to eating real food. So this is how I broke this up in my mind. And then corporations, in particular with seed oils, it was Procter & Gamble, had all this cotton seed waste because we had transitioned after the Industrial Revolution and all this cot. Nobody was buying candles anymore. We had electricity. What do we do with all this cotton waste? So one of the largest corporations in America decided to launch a campaign to try to convince people for the first time to eat things that weren't food. I mean, that's really

Starting point is 00:31:52 simply what it is. Like, cotton seed is not, like, that's not food. And it's not even vegetable. Like, I don't know how, somehow along the ways it got defined as a vegetable. But what you have pre-1971 is you have these corporations constantly trying to convince us to eat things that aren't real foods and that's where the seed oils came in that was lubricant that was industrial waste when it no longer became viable through industry suddenly they tried to market it as food they weren't going to let go of the product and that began a huge marketing campaign war that's where you find a lot of nutrition health people like so a lot of these industries began investing in something called into something called the Nutrition Foundation, which was industry sponsor to come

Starting point is 00:32:39 up with studies that validated reasons why we shouldn't be eating real food, why we should be eating industrial waste, why it was better for us. And then we're always available to the media, as the New York Times will quote an expert from the Nutrition Foundation, which wouldn't mention the conflicts of interest. They'd say, actually, you should be drinking seed oils instead of breast milk. It's healthier. And as it for babies. All this, all this. All this. All this. this nonsense. But you were talking about these incentives and you're spot on with that. I think that's something that's really important. I kind of want to take a step back and talk about how you have, one thing we haven't mentioned yet is the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which is extremely

Starting point is 00:33:17 powerful in my story. And a little background on the church, it started by a woman named Ellen G. White, who went to these services by the Millerite movements in the late 1800s, which preached the end of the world and was coming. And the head of the Millerite movement made the mistake that most cult leaders have learned from, which is you don't give a date. You're vague about the end of the world. You don't give the date. He gave the date.

Starting point is 00:33:48 And everybody waited for the end of the world. And it became known in history as the great disappointment when the world did not end. All these people sold all their things. They waited for the moment to come and it didn't come. Ellen White believed that it did come and it was coming. We just didn't see it clearly. So she thought the apocalypse was coming. She had brain damage, right?

Starting point is 00:34:12 Like she... Correct. She was walking home from school one day. According to her, got hit in the face with a rock. Fell into a coma and woke up with visions from God. And God basically said to Ellen, we need to purify mind and body for the next world. It's coming soon. The apocalypse is coming.

Starting point is 00:34:30 So we need to purify the soul and the body. And at the time, this is where your audience is just, this is going to sound crazy. At the time, nearly every medical problem associated with, especially young men, came from the belief that masturbation caused these health maladies. And that meat caused the carnal desires that caused the masturbation, which resulted in health maladies. So a huge part of this church's energy came into being. trying to change the food supply, trying to alter it so that people weren't eating as much meat. And they were doing this, unlike industry, they were doing this really out of sincere

Starting point is 00:35:08 religious conviction. They really believed it was in the best interest of individuals to not eat meat. She hired, Ellen hired a young man called John Harvey Kellogg, tasked him with a job of coming up with a food that would in particular replace meat for breakfast. Everybody was eating meat for breakfast. This was terrible, she thought. He came up with Kellogg's cornflakes as an anti-mastidatorial drug, essentially to lower to sex drive of young men. A little about John Harvey Kellogg. He was... This research on this is totally nuts. People hearing you say that are going to say, oh, there's no way. But I mean, it is, it is there. Well, I know how I sound. Yeah. But I bring the receipts. Like, I have over 212 citations in my book. And this is according to John Harvey Kellogg.

Starting point is 00:35:55 I went through his writings, which were terrifying. It's hard to overstate John Harvey Kellogg's influence. He was the celebrity doctor of the day. He gave speeches. He wrote books. He advocated putting carbolic acid on the quatoruses of young females. Cages. Surgery without anesthesia.

Starting point is 00:36:14 Real torture. He was kind of a masochist of many. Extreme enemas. All to purify people from sex drive. And Corn Flakes was one of like, By eating more grains and eating less meat, and sciences later vindicated this, you can lower people a sector. I'd argue he's been pretty successful.

Starting point is 00:36:35 But to kind of get back, I'm trying to stay streamlined because this is a lot, after John Harvey Kellogg, you had somebody named Leanna Cooper step in, and she started the American Dietetic Association, which became, over time, the institutionalized government arm of nutrition. All that said, come 1970, you had the same. Seventh-day Adventist church growing, but still most people ate meat for breakfast and lunch and dinner. Despite all the corporate push to have us eat these fake non-foods, people still ate meat for breakfast and lunch and dinner. But in 1971, when we shifted our money from a gold-based currency to Fiat,

Starting point is 00:37:17 meaning now the government prints as much as they want, they began an incentive structure through Fiat to conduct a gaslighting campaign that actually saw the food supply shift, not the shift that we saw from 1910 to 1970 with corporate influence and the influence of this religious group. It really shifted notably then. And where in 1970, the average person ate around 155 pounds, you might want to fact check this, it's all the top of them. I had pounds of red meat a year. That got more than that. then cut in half by 2010. And what you saw was it replaced by all these grains.

Starting point is 00:37:59 Americans were remarkably compliant. And through Fiat, what you saw was they directed to Fiat money printer towards the university, for instance, called Global Indian University, which was an arm of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and their job was not to do science, but to come up with studies that validated, not science, but religious convictions. So most of the studies that your audience is reading today that say red meat is bad, red meat causes X. There are observational studies conducted from Global League University just in a few years in between

Starting point is 00:38:35 2012 to 2015. They got over $155 million in Fiat grants because you have all these motions moving in the same direction suddenly. And then you have nutrition science, Tufts Food Compass. I'm not sure if your audience understands what this is. The leading, it went from 1980 nutritionary guidelines to first of its kind. Government used to not tell us what to eat. In 1980, they began.

Starting point is 00:39:01 They said, oh, eat more grains, eat less, eat less meat. 1992, which we discussed briefly was the dietary food pyramid. That was far more invasive because that told us exact portions, eight to eleven portions of grains. Posted in every single school across the country. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. Like, that's a huge thing.

Starting point is 00:39:21 because as a kid growing up in the 90s, I grew up metabolically compromised because by law, my cafeteria was no longer allowed to sell whole milk. It was shifted to low-fat milk, which nobody drank because it tasted horrible. So they had to infuse it with chocolate and sugar. So essentially, I was like a Diet Coke and grains by the time I got out of high school. It was gross. The seed oils replaced the lard that fried my chicken nuggets. The whole cheese that used to be on my pizza boat, I don't know if you had that,

Starting point is 00:39:51 where you grew up pizza boat. Yes. It was some kind of weird substance. So by the time a normal kid comes out of high school today, you're already metabolically compromised. That in 2021 got replaced by, I think about this a lot. I think about the nutritionists at Tufts University because they've spent years. They've spent their whole lives pressed and studied nutrition. They released something in 2021 called the Tufts Food Compass, which told us that Lucky Charms

Starting point is 00:40:20 were healthier than meat. Come on. Chocolate soy milk. In 2020, yeah. No, no, I'm sorry. I correction,

Starting point is 00:40:27 2023. What? January of 2023. This came out. And it's sponsored all by the same industry, but masquerading as science. So industry sponsored these studies,

Starting point is 00:40:42 colluded with government grants, years of study, and these geniuses come up with the Tufts Food Compass, this bleeding nutrition of the day that tells us that fruit loops, honeynut Cheerios are healthier than the food our ancestors of Eden for thousands of years, including eggs. Same month, January of 2023, an episode of 60 Minutes comes out, hosted by Leslie Stahl, a renowned journalist, and she has on a doctor in a white coat named Dr. Fatima Stanford, a real terrible human being

Starting point is 00:41:17 by any standard. If words have meanings and the word terrible has a meaning, she's a horrible person. Because she went on this episode and she talked about how people no longer have control over obesity through lifestyle choice.

Starting point is 00:41:31 That's out. That obesity is a genetic brain disease. It wasn't mentioned very much that the episode was sponsored by OZemPEC and that she herself was a paid consultant by OZemPEC. Or that the only other expert on the show to talk about obesity was also a paid consultant by OZempec. But fortunately, she explained there's a solution now, and that's OZempec and these weight-loss

Starting point is 00:41:58 drugs. That same month, Food Compass comes out. This show airs, which was an advertisement, and once in a new show, was an advertisement. The American Pediatrics Association for the first time changes their standards for what doctors should say the treatment for obesity in children should be. Now they're saying that treatment should be weight loss drugs. OZempec. All happens in the same month.

Starting point is 00:42:22 I couldn't in my research find a smoky room, right? I couldn't find that they had all gathered. I couldn't find emails. I looked. I couldn't find any of that. However, I'd be naive to think that there wasn't some sort of coordination. Of course there was coordination. Of course.

Starting point is 00:42:37 Of course, right? And I guess why I'm hard on Dr. Fatima Stanford in her beautiful white coat is because I think there's not much more. There's few things more evil you can do than tell somebody that they're not in control of the most, one of the most fundamental aspects of being a human, which is the control of your own health. Yes. Right. Like, she's undermining that.

Starting point is 00:42:57 And that's something that I found throughout. You're supposed to ignore your common sense. You're supposed to ignore what your ancestors need advice of your great grandparents have done. And you're supposed to rely on credentialed experts. And one of the blessings I think of COVID was that got broken. Yes, it did. A lot of people, including myself, who I grew up trusting these American institutions. I didn't think they were perfect.

Starting point is 00:43:24 I uncovered a lot of corruption in my time as an investigative reporter, but I'd always assume that they had the best interest at heart as long as it didn't conflict with their own agenda. This changed me and watching these people like these doctors get on. And during COVID, you saw a lot of fat, overweight obese doctors. giving health advice. And I could not, like, then you look at something like Dr. Sean Baker, who's a heretic in health.

Starting point is 00:43:50 Wait, so Dr. Sean Baker is telling me not to get a weight loss drug. And he looks like Zeus, you know, as he's talking. Meanwhile, I go to my doctor and I run every day. I play a basketball. I feel like him in pretty good health. I eat tons of meat. And he's telling me, I'm eating too much meat. And he's wheezing.

Starting point is 00:44:06 He can't really talk because he's so big. He's wheeze. And he's a good guy. Yeah. But he's wheezing. And he's the one giving him. me advice. So I think that there's been a movement to and towards self-autonomy, and I find that to be beautiful. I know that was long-winded.

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Starting point is 00:47:53 or you're eating a lot of meat. There's a lot of cholesterol in that. You know what I found really interesting? So I've been using this GPT-40 for a lot of the nutrition things that I've been doing lately. What is that? I'm sorry. The chat GPT transformer.

Starting point is 00:48:09 And so I'm literally taking picture. I'll get a plate of food, most of its meat. I'll take a picture of it and I'll say, how many grams of carbs and how many grams of protein are in this? How many calories is it? And it's doing an estimate like right there on the spot just from the picture. But I was told recently because I eat eggs before I go to the gym in the morning. And I had a person say, oh, there's so much cholesterol in that.

Starting point is 00:48:35 So I, you know, I hit the AI. And I was like, I've been told there's a lot. a lot of cholesterol in this, but all the people that look like they're literally in perfect health are telling me that it's extremely healthy for me to have eggs in the morning. I'm sorry, like you, I look at the people and I say, that person knows what they're talking about and that person's wheezing and they have no clue what they're talking about and I'm going to take advice from this person over here. So I asked the AI.

Starting point is 00:49:01 And it came back with all of these studies and like all of this information on how if there's a lot of cholesterol in the food that doesn't necessarily translate over to you then having high cholesterol and your blood in your veins and all these other things. And it may be something else. And I was like, hmm, I wonder what that is. And I'm sure it's a lot of the seed oils and things that we were talking about earlier. But this stigmatism of just saying the word cholesterol and its association with meat and eggs is, in my opinion, just looking at just looking at the the people that are saying it versus the ones that are eating it, that are saying it's bad versus the ones eating it, it's just so obvious. Like, it doesn't take hard work or for me to read

Starting point is 00:49:47 some Harvard produced or Tufts produced document to convince me that they're right versus the person who's walking around and looks like Zeus. So where's the question in that, Matthew? I guess I'm just venting and frustrated, but like, from your point of view, how does this become overcome from the branding, from the decades of branding that has happened and plagued our country? Like, how do we overcome this? It's a great question because we're fighting. It's only getting worse on their end. They're becoming better at their propaganda and their gaslighting. I saw Mayor Eric Adams of New York City recently was talking about how now we can't eat meat because we have to change the thermostat of the earth, right? You have to, my consumption of meat.

Starting point is 00:50:32 You're not even joking. That's the, that's the sad part. Go ahead. No, I'm not. I mean, it sounds like I'm joking. I realize I sound like

Starting point is 00:50:40 I'm in some kind of skit. It's true. So they're going to take it out on our children, though. They're going to do meatless. They already have meatless Mondays in the public school systems

Starting point is 00:50:48 in New York, but they're going to expand for the good of the temperature of the earth. In 1970, it was a different argument. The crisis was overpopulation. And there was a book

Starting point is 00:51:01 called the population bomb written by one of history's largest morons, a guy named Paul Ehrlich, who, if he tells you not to invest in a stock, invest in that stock, because he's like the reverse Nostradamus predictions. And he posited that we're all going to run out of food by like 1986 because we're eating too much meat and meat's resource intensive. So that was why we shouldn't eat the meat. In the 1940s, we shouldn't eat meat because we acknowledged that meat was really healthy

Starting point is 00:51:29 and we needed to save it for the troops fighting abroad. So plant your victory gardens. Today, we're convinced in virtue signaling while eating peasants from the 1400s. And it's always never in our best interest of the people. It's always to the engrandisement of our leaders. Because as I mentioned, if you're only eating cereal, you don't notice the consequences of inflation. But there's a deeper issue, which I found when I began my personal journey. So I eat animal based about 90%.

Starting point is 00:51:59 I start my morning. If you could see over there, I have a rib eye. I start my morning with a steak. And I'm fortunate that I can afford these things. So I know not everybody can. But my mental clarity's increased a lot. And I think a lot about the societal gifts that future generations and our generation are missing out on because you have like the Wright brothers. Right.

Starting point is 00:52:19 And the courage it took when you could go through the New York Times time machine and see how nobody thought it was agreed consensus that nobody could fly back then. and they pushed forward. Henry T. Ford, these brave entrepreneurs who fought for their ideas, would they be able to have done on a public school diet of lucky charms and grains with their fat, flabby bodies, like the kids today? I notice when I eat pure carnivore,

Starting point is 00:52:49 my mind is on hyperdrive. It's a life act. And I want to shout it to everybody I know, like little things too I'll notice. So I'm working on my next book now and I'm trying to move notes from one thing to another. It's like, wow, I can remember three sentences right now to move over instead of one. My mind just on a completely different level when I'm not eating industrial waste and grains. I mean, it's kind of shocking, right?

Starting point is 00:53:12 Like, wow, I'm not poisoning myself and I feel better. Just ignore the noise. And essentially, your great, great grandmother was right. No? Like, I have cooked for part of my research, I bought tons of cookbooks from the 1800s. And it's interesting how everything was based on meat. And plants were eaten, but basically if you were kind of starving or couldn't afford other food, I mean, we weren't eating fruit in Arizona here in January.

Starting point is 00:53:40 That wasn't how it was. And you weren't eating berries in the Northeast then. You might find some berries in Pennsylvania for a few weeks out of the year if it hadn't been mulled by bears and stuff, you know? But the amount of sugar we're eating has made us metabolically compromised to the point that we can't think straight. And I think that's to the advantage of authority because we're compliant. Oh, you want me to wear the mask for two more years.

Starting point is 00:54:03 Okay, I'll wear the mask for two years. The new pharmaceutical product comes out. I won't question it. You have a white coat. I'll just obey authority. I think there's a movement of people like yourself. And look, you look like you're in booming health. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:54:16 You look very healthy. You probably feel good by eating eggs. Yeah. But a lot of that egg stuff comes from a press release. that came out under Lyndon Johnson. So under Lyndon Johnson, even though we had a gold standard, inflation had begun because of the great society. So America was already committing a fraud at the time because we had issued so many more

Starting point is 00:54:38 paper notes than we had gold in our treasury. All would have taken was a few countries at the same time to come and try to redeem to expose this as a fraud. So while Nixon's a bad guy, he wasn't totally culpable. The fraud that was happening had been happening by prior presidents. And Lyndon Johnson at the time was considering re-election and eggs were going up in price to come back to eggs. Eggs were skyrocketing in price. And Lyndon Johnson, this is a true story recounted by Samuelson who worked in that administration in one of his books.

Starting point is 00:55:08 He called his surgeon general into his office and was like, everybody's angry. Eggs are going up in price. We can't have this. And the surgeon general was like, look, it's supply and demand. I can't do anything. You know, it's Lyndon Johnson instructed his surgeon general. to write a phony press release saying that eggs are unhealthy. Distributed to the media, the media pushed it,

Starting point is 00:55:30 the demand for eggs went down as a result, the supply stayed the same, so the price lowered. And to this day, people think that that idiotic press release, which was nothing more than a sci-op to lower the price of eggs for political reasons, is legitimate science. So they're like, oh, you can't eat eggs. Eggs are one of the most nutritionally dense foods you could have. Eggs are amazing.

Starting point is 00:55:54 The only issue I had with Carnivore was that my weight went down too much. I play a lot of competitive basketball with people much younger and much bigger and much more skilled than myself. You see my pinky, like, I'm all bruised. I got poked in the eye a half Saturday. I mean, it's the mess. So I drink a lot of raw milk to like keep my weight up. Yeah, yeah, for some carbs, yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:15 Let's close this out with a discussion around Bitcoin. So in the last part of your book, you talk about how Bitcoin solves this. And I think very simply, it's incentives. The incentives are changing. But talk to us about from your perspective, if you were going to kind of wrap up our whole conversation and a person who's hearing this and then knowing that we're Bitcoiners and like how this all kind of fits together, give them a rundown from your point of view. I want to preface this point.

Starting point is 00:56:42 I'm not a Bitcoin expert. I'm a novice. I've gotten late in the game. I love economic. Safe Fidina Moose has been my mentor. You're early. Matthew, you're early. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:56:53 you. I think I am. I think you're right. I would recommend the Bitcoin standard and Fiat standard and Principle of Economics, three of his books that are just instrumental in really breaking it down. Also, gradually, but suddenly, is a really great book by Parker Lewis. Do you know Parker? Yes. That's a really good. Yeah, I got to meet him in Austin. I did an event in Austin and just remarkable in breaking it down. But short end of this, how does Bitcoin solve diet? Right? Sounds nuts. Well, I would argue that any hard currency implemented would solve this crisis because what it does is it undermines the incentive for the federal government to obfuscate our money, our food supply. So there's no reason for the government to want to alter the food supply to obscure

Starting point is 00:57:47 the rising consequences, cost of food through the rising consequences of money printing, when there's no more money printing. It puts a spoke in the tire of this whole gaslighting campaign by removing any incentive to do it. So I really think Bitcoin is self-evident that is better than gold because gold historically goes into banks where it can be centralized. Like, government always confiscates gold. There's never been a time where the government hasn't come in in in confidence. Even in America under Roosevelt, we confiscated the gold.

Starting point is 00:58:21 Bitcoin is a decentralized way. And every time you buy a little bit of Bitcoin, it's the most charitable act you could commit when you're transitioning your Fiat to Bitcoin because you're taking a little jab at the Fiat money printer and you're hurting its ability to distort markets in our food supply, health, architecture, every aspect. I would argue most consequentially in the food supply. And that's beautiful. So you don't need to pick it.

Starting point is 00:58:53 And I would recommend go find a local farmer. Like I'm fortunate enough in Sierra Vista, White Barn Farms is my local rancher. And they supply me with all the meat I need. There's no shots in my cows. They're not getting vaccinated. I try to buy with Bitcoin. And every time I do that instead of fiat, I end the distortion by just a lot. little bit. Yes. Yes. Amen. You couldn't have said it any better. Matthew, I could talk with you

Starting point is 00:59:22 all day on this particular topic because I am very interested in just nutrition and just, I think it just like you had a point earlier. It was like you feel like you can just think differently. Like you can operate differently. And amen to that. You're exactly right. I think if people really kind of give it a try and really kind of focus on the food that they're putting into their system, I think that they might be actually really surprised at the change that they're getting. Yeah, forget all the studies. Don't even buy my book. Just go 30 days, eating nothing but animal-based products.

Starting point is 00:59:54 Just 30. Just give it 30 days and just see what your body tells you. Just give that a try. And you'll find yourself more free because if you're not healthy, you're not free. And your self-autonomy begins with personal health. Yeah. Amen. But thank you so much for coming on.

Starting point is 01:00:11 Thank you for the incredible book. I can't tell people enough. This is something totally worth reading. And very, for a nutrition book, it was very entertaining, especially the historical part of it. The first half was very entertaining for me personally, at least. But thank you for making time and thank you for coming on the show. We'll have links to the book in the show notes. Did you have anything else that you wanted to highlight or for us to put in the show notes?

Starting point is 01:00:35 Oh, Preston. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. I was kind of shocked. You tweeted something out about my book. I didn't know you. And suddenly, you're following so huge. you have such a devoted listenership that I got flooded.

Starting point is 01:00:45 I'm horrible at social media. I got flooded. I was like, Bridget, look, people like me. They're following me on Twitter and I'm horrible at Twitter or X, whatever it is. So I appreciated the shoutout. And thanks, man. Thanks for giving me a platform to address this. Yes, sir.

Starting point is 01:00:59 Yeah, thank you for your time today. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday. day, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to

Starting point is 01:01:28 help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Bitcoin Fundamentals on your favorite podcast app and never miss out of your time. on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, before making any decision consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC186: Fiat Food & Bitcoin w/ Matthew Lysiak (Bitcoin Podcast)

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