3:11 - The Decline and Desperation of the Oscar's and American film industry
16:07 - Will Smith slaps Chris Rock and launches a million unnecessary culture war takes; also - Will Smith...the male Taylor Swift????
28:04 - Interview with Max Lugavere: Top 100 podcaster takes us on his unique journey through the world of health and wellness, and some insight into the narrative battles within it.
Calvary Audio. Ladies and Gentlemen, March thirty one, two thousand and twenty two. Your weekly dose of sanity is always the prevailing narrative. Okay, what insanity are we going to be talking about this week? So all anybody can talk about the slap heard round the world, Will Smith, Chris Rock the Oscars though, don't you worry, I'm gonna be getting into that in just a minute or two. But also this episode, I'm interviewing a good friend of mine named Max Luga Viery. He's one of the top names in wellness and nutrition. He's got a new book coming out called The Genius Kitchen. It's also got a podcast that just recently, i believe as of this week, entered the top one of all podcasts and Apple podcasts, called The Genius Life. And aside from being just an incredibly informed source on wellness, nutrition, fitness, and the way to live a healthier and more energetic life, Max also has a really interesting story about how he got to the place that he is um one with with Essentially, you know, he was not a new autritionist, a doctor, had no background or training in this in response to his mother being diagnosed with a form of Parkinson's and degenerative disorder. He dived headfirst into researching everything about nutrition and inputs on the body and their function on brain operation and how it would impact his mother's illness, and out of that came his career and his new status as as a wellness and fitness influencer and New York Times best selling book and like I said, a top rated podcast. Some acts a fascinating guy and it's really interesting to hear his learnings that come out of such as an experience and also he uh he was involved in an interesting experiment in the two thousands regarding news content and a thing a broadcast experiment that really kind of predicted a lot of what we've seen in changes in media and news consumption over the past ten fifteen years with a company called Current TV that was financed and backed by Al Gore, which was an experiment and kind of user generated content early on before the Internet and social media had really taken off. And while that venture failed, Max has a lot of interesting stories from it and things that really inform what we've seen, like I said, over the past decade. Aside from that, you know, much as we talk about on the prevailing narrative. It's not just about what happens, it's about how people react. Because how people react in the public, narratives and conversations in the social media and digital media age are as important than the unfortunately for better for wars, as important, if not more important, than the actual facts. So we're gonna talk with Max about the discourses, narratives, and narrative battles going on in the fitness and wellness world. Everything from how for decades the American public and the fitness world, um and every nutrition had been informed by government and public health narratives around the food pyramid and just complete nonsense as to what the government and the public health officials that were an extension of the government we're informing us and instructing us to eat, to the battles between veganism and what's the body positivity movement and what it's okay or supposedly not okay to say in the health and wellness world these days. So that's gonna be coming up in just a little while, but we'll get to it a couple of topics first, Okay, So the slap Will Smith, Chris Rock, the oscars, scientology, toxic masculinity, misogyny, Ken you joke about women going bald? What's the role of comedy? God knows what. We're all going to talk about that in a second. But this also, this incident also informs a conversation about the American film industry at large, because obviously, I mean that this occurred at the OSCAR. Is the reason that there's so much attention being given to it is because of where it happened. Um, And there's a lot of really interesting story to tell her at least perspective to try and and distill about the American film industry, because I mean, this was for years America's kind of touched on its cultural touchdown and it's vessel for cultural import I mean, who were the big stars in society. It was all a matter of who was in movies. And it seems like some of the luster has come off of that. It start is not shy, quite as bright, and it's something that was really typified by the descent and relevancy and viewership of the oscars. And it's this incident that seems to have revived interest in it is kind of interesting timing. Um, So Ross doubt that one of my favorite columnists. He wrote a piece before the Oscars, before the slap titled we aren't just watching the decline of the Oscars, were watching the end of the movies. And I find I find it hard to dispute that it feels like the American film industry as we knew it from let's call it the mid to late nineteen sixties, or maybe even a little bit longer, it was. You know, it occupied what was the most important story in pop culture, which was being told by whatever movies were popular in which stars were popular in those movies, right, And I think that slowly, but surelier, maybe quickly over the past decade, at least, since the the kind of proliferation of social media and the streaming world, that's no longer the case. So um, how doubt it put it in describing why the movies were so signal again, this big screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop culture church with its own icons and scriptures and writes of adult initiation. I think that's a great description of what the American film industry was during its heyday, which I believe lasted quite you know, quite a while. It was at least forty forty to fifty years. And this is in almost no other aspect of of commerce or culture at all. Was any one nation this dominance in anything, just the worldwide. I mean, what America pumped out in terms of film and in terms of movie stars just dominated the cultural landscape across the very least the Western world and for most of the world in general through most of the late the you know, the end of the twentieth century, in the beginning of the twenty one century. But once again, as I think, I don't necessarily think that still rings true as doubt that you know, went on that pieces. I'm going to break down some of the some of the snippets from so how what does that pretend? You know? How did that get expressed? With the Oscars? Right? The Oscars are the celebration of all this, the celebration of that central American popular art form as I just described it. So for through the eighties, the nineties and kind of into the early two thousand's, the viewership of the Oscars always hovered around forty million viewers. And I think that at a height it was probably the most watched shows, maybe forty seven, but it was always around forty million um beginning end of the two thousand's, I believe it was to actually two thousand eleven, there's still forty one million people watching the oscars. That started to be chipped the audience, which was chipped away and continued to incrementally decrease over the two thousand tens. Court of the audience had already been chopped off by two thousand nineteen. We were already under thirty million viewers by two thousand nineteen. Two thousand twenty, which people forget was before the pandemic, was twenty three million. So you haven't almost cut in half from it's it's height, from its all time high viewership by two thousand twenty, and this event, which was once again one of America's annual cultural touchstones, this was losing relevance and losing relevance quickly. Then you've got two thousand twenty one, which is still during pandemic conditions, and it was just it might as well have not happened, right, and ten million viewers, and you could maybe excuse it away, right, You could maybe excuse it away as because of the pandemic conditions, but it seemed like the lack of interest and quality of the product was also impacting things here for better for worse, um so disaster in one this year, the ratings were tracking pre poorly through the first hour or so of the show, I mean, maybe hovering aroundtourteen million. Then, of course, all of a sudden, this slap happens and things just shoot through the roof, which, in my listen, we can speculate on whether or not this was stage. I believe there's no shortage of evidence suggesting that it might have been. Although hey, we we don't have there's no there's no way to prove it, um And so I'm only gonna you know, speculate more for the purposes of this conversation. It happened, right, or it was genuine right? Um. So. The oscars are written as a as a manifestation of the lack of interest in the film industry. Despite strong box office numbers, which to a certain extent are generated you know, our result of increased prices, they sell far less tickets than they did years ago. Um Yeah, like I said, that's an expression of declining interest in the film industry. So what is driving this declining interest? To a certain extent, it's in the movie industry has been a victim of technology and globalization. Um. And also it's just led to it's expressed in the redundancy of our culture. You could even start to see it. Some of my friends that worked in the film industry end of the two thousands and the beginning of the two thousands, tens of like Jesus Christ, how are we doing nothing but sequels and reboots. We don't do anything that's original. We have to take some legacy property, whether it's something that was television, consumer products, or god knows what, and try to make a new movie out of it, reinvented for the modern era. And there was it was spoofed. And uh, there is a great spoof video if you get a chance to check it out on YouTube called pink Berry the Movie. It's got Miles Fisher, who's hilarious. Um, he was involved in it, and it's kind of spoofing how everything has to be based on some sort of uh, pre existing intellectual property. And it's just a spoof, a satire in an agency about trying to put together a movie about Pinkberry and it's just it's hilarious, but it's also very telling about the film industry. UM so doubt it's piece goes into all of the speculation and explanation of, you know, what has gone wrong in the American film industry. UM And obviously a big piece of it is China and globalization and movies having to try to appeal to the Chinese audience into foreign audiences. That really kind of that that really sink creativity because you've got to communicate in a way that translates across cultures that lacks the nuances that might be awesome to an American audience, or if you're creating it just for Chinese audiences, might really hit home amongst you know, that kind of cultural milieu. But you know, and trying to put this one size fits all UH plan into place, it creates really bland content. UM. So. You know, starting in about the late two thousands, at at movie student the big studios, there's a green light committee. You know, any movie that gets greenlit essentially for production, has to be okayed by the committee, and at least one member on that committee at every studio. By the late two thousands, UM was focused on China that if it didn't pass Mustard for the Chinese market, you couldn't get the movie made. So as doubt it puts it globalization wide in the market for Hollywood productions, but the global audience pushed the business towards a simpler style of storytelling that translated more easily across languages and cultures, with lex complex complexity and idiosyncrasy and fewer cultural specifics. So obviously he put it more articulately than me. But as you said, it translates better across languages and cultures, but it's simpler, and it has fewer cultural specifics, and it's really you know, it's not to me. I don't find it nearly as interesting. And the great manifestation of this would of course be the Marvel movies, superhero movies and stuff that seems really repetitive and it's very you know, graphics heavy and action heavy, but seems to be telling very similar stories over and over again. Um Martin Scorsese, he took a ton of heat. Um Martin Scorsese being you know, a filmmaker who's much more focused on the more you know, slice of life, nuanced um storytelling and character heavy stories. Of you know, America's Golden Age and film in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and he took some heat with Colin you know, essentially saying the superhero movies warrant movies a couple of years ago. And here's how he explained it. For me, the filmmakers I came to love and respect and from my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did. Cinemas about revelation, aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about the characters, the complexity of the people in their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical nature. So it was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it was, and in the life how it was dramatized and interpreted and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form. Their sequels and names, but their remakes in spirit and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can't really be any other way. That's the nature of modern film franchises, market researched, audience tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they're ready for consumption. Right. So the you know, Big Mac, the the the super sizification. The McDonald's to say it just the assembly line standardizing, making movies way too much based on data compiled from market research that would translate in this case market research across different regions and nations as opposed to just the domestic domestic market and once again coming up with really unexciting, redundant product. And what other impact does this have? These the superhero movies, the story or the property or the superheroes are the stars. There aren't stars in the way. The doubt that put it, the possibility of a movie star as a transcendenter iconic figure two seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. Yeah, these actors are all disposable. I think about who the new movie stars are over the past five years, ten years, and Timothy Challam, who like these are not These are not exciting people right even the decade before, I mean you pumped out like the Rock and Vin Diesel and people that could be shoved into a fast and furious movie or you know, offshoots of that. But I mean even this century for American movie stars, things have been It's been kind of a fallow period because these movies just don't serve, they don't exist to highlight the people in it. And the notion of the movie star was very glamorous. It was something that gave American culture a little bit more of a seun and that's now dead. So these types of dynamics that have kind of squelkes the American film industry recently, and as was typified in the declining OSCAR ratings. Of course, also there's the case of streaming. A lot of movies are now being made not for theaters, not they're making being made for streaming services, and the amount of product like there is an arms race that has gone on over the past five six years in in creating content. Right, there's a famous comment by Read Hastings of Netflix that said that we Netflix has to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix. And so what he meant by that was that HBO has been in you know, the the uh and the studios that were funneling movies to HBO have been making content for decades. They have large libraries. So for Netflix to create to compete with hbos, HBO and these other entertainment companies move into streaming, they had to create in within the span of a few years, decades worth of a library of content. They had to create so many movies. So they took just all their money from the stream from streaming activities, or Amazon took all their money from what Amazon does, which is sell CpG and get products to you really quick for a cheap price. And they used to finance just a plethora of movies, just an insane volume of movies over a short amount of time. So what does that do That increases the volume, decreases the quality, um so the impact. And another friend of mine who's a manager in the film industry said, also, because you can't judge the performance of movies on the streaming services as easily as you used to be able to judge box office right, if you wanted to figure out whether or not a movie was successful before the Netflix and the Amazon prim era or the Hulu era, you just saw the box office. You saw how many people fucking bought a ticket to go see the movie in the theaters, and you knew what worked and what didn't. In the era of streaming, when a lot of the consumer activity and revenue has been shifted to the streaming services or two iTunes. It's harder to tell because they don't the Netflix doesn't release its numbers. Some of these other services are little cloudy, and so it's more difficult for the people making movies or deciding which movies are going to be made to tell what's successful and what's not. So it's kind of broken the model. There's another piece in the New York Times before the Oscars this week that discussed this called streaming took over Hollywood? Will it Take Best Picture Too? It's this discussion over whether, uh whether you know the movies that are just done specifically for streaming services are actually movies or TV movies. I mean, even Steven Spielberg seems to have said, once you commit to a television format, your TV movie, you certainly if it's a good show, deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar. So all these things have kind of added up to really scramble, you know, uh, scrambled the American film industry, and I think made it a lot less interesting. Um and once the only it took this freaking incident with will sm It then Chris Rock to revive interest in Hollywood. So let's talk about that for a second. Okay, so the slap, everybody's got to have a take. You can't not have a take on this lap, Will Smith, Chris Rock, scientology, toxic masculinity, the whole she bank. You gotta have a take on this lab. Okay, So what's going on here? Um? First off, like I said, I think there's definitely it's curious coincidental timing that everybody's talking about how the oscars in the American film industry are irrelevant, dismissing it, and all of a sudden, this incident happens. That's the you know, the most high profile incident the oscars, and god knows how long. I mean, we could see it in the numbers on the ratings. The ratings were circling the freaking drain for the first hour of this this broadcast with something around thirteen million, and it just doubles for the second half after this lap, all of a sudden, the oscars are interesting again. Um, And it was by this just ridiculous incident. Um. So I think you know, listen, I can't prove that it was stage, but you sure as I'll see a lot of uh as coincidental time. I'm in here this single handedly is breathed life back into the Oscars. But for a second, we will assume that this was a real incident, that Will Smith really thought that this was he got so piste off and needed to defend the honor of his wife, who is you know, really impaired his honor and really disrespected him publicly so much recently that he decided to go up in front of the world and slap Chris Rock in the face. Um So, Frank Oz Hollywood legend you as one of the brains behind the Muppets was the operator of the Yoda doll in Star Wars. I believe he had an interesting comment about the Oscars in general. After being a member of the Academy for thirty years, I'm embarrassed to be associated with the OSCARS telecast, not because of this lap, but because the phoniness of the show. All that sense is a desperate attempt to get more viewers by any means possible, not a show about the love of making movies. And and it doesn't seem like everything about this was summed up by what Frank just said, that that's just a desperate attempt for attention everywhere. It's pretty pitiful on Will Smith's part. I mean, if it is genuine, I mean, what did you think he was a pushing I mean, this is ridiculous. You're grown man, This is a joke. And and everything about this Oscars broadcast, including the thing, is that you know, it seemed it gathered so much attention because it seemed like an uh an unorthodox situation, but it was an orthodox incident that was also reflective of the rest of the show. It's all one big desperate attempt for attention, but not even one that's interesting, right, It's kind of pathetic, right, Um. And so looking at you know, Will Smith here for a second, man, I mean, in terms of star movie stars who no longer shine so brightly, I mean, he has a very engaging and friendly personas what has become one of the more beloved public figures in American life. In this big movie star etcetera, etcetera. You start peeking under the hood a little bit and it doesn't look so pretty. Um, first off, this dude, he's heavily involved in scientology. I mean, the word in the industry is that he never officially joined, but um, he was definitely tiptoeing around it. In the two thousands, he was hanging out Tom Cruise a lot, you know, never speaking a Cruise in this on this podcast, but it definitely is a data point that Will Smith was getting involved in Scientology. I worked. I was exposed to an individual who worked on the production of Them I Am Legend movie who said that Will Smith bought all of the cast and crew on that movie free audits at the Church of Scientology. And Will Smith and Jada Pinkett they have a kind of charter school here in l A that definitely is informed by some solid scientology principles. So you've got that, then you've got the revelation of you know, Will and Jada's relationship as an open relationship, and um, you know, I know that. Hoh. If you believe there's any taboos, if there's anything that should be looked down upon in terms of you know, sexual peccadillos there, you're some raging, freaking proud from the nineteen forties. But I'm sorry, Like, I think open relationships, for you know, married people in their fifties are a little freaking weird, and if you got one, okay, I could see how that could work out within some kind of prescribed rules and if you find the right balance, but why don't you keep it quiet? Right? Will and Jada, you're not the first people to have an open relationship. Meanwhile, just feels like and very much expressed through you know, their son. Is this notion that uh, being unorthodox means you're enlightened. Look how enlightened we are that we have this open relationship. Well, you know that you're not enlightened. Will, You just got a SoundCloud rapper, some SoundCloud R and B singer talking about plugging your wife and one of his songs earlier this year, and you just have to sit there and take it. So I don't I think we're um, we're really you know a lot of the peculiarities of Will Smith have been exposed and it's not It doesn't look so pretty at all. So he's one of these guys who was just obsessed with being famous. To get his famous, as Will Smith is, you gotta have a bit of a screw loose, right. It's something that a lot of people noticed with that Taylor Swift documentary a couple of years ago, where everyone's watching and you know, everyone considered is this very you know, kind of pristine loving slice of Americana, innocent young girl with a guitar, and they're like, oh my god, she's a rabid, ruthless, cutthroat lunatic who just wants nothing more than to be the most famous person in the world. And Will Smith has got a little bit of that in him too. There's an interview if you dig back through old interviews, there's an interview with Will Smith at the you know, towards the earlier part of his career, when he mentions that after The Fresh Prince, when he was embarking on his film career, he had a discussion with his agent and they looked at the top ten highest box office grossing movies of all time, and eight out of ten were sci fi movies involving aliens. And that's what informed his decision to be an Independence Day and Men in Black and said, Okay, if that's what people want to if those are the highest grossing films, those, that's how what's gonna guide my career. And it all points back to him being a bit of a synthetic, performative guy and really, you know, not being not haven't not being his soulful and as genuine as a lot of people might see him. So some weird stuff about you know very much a desperate a desperately performing uh former movie star for a desperate you know attention whrring Oscars telecast for an industry that's seen its better days. Beyond that, everybody had to do the culture war thing. You had to try to jam the in this incident and it's implications into whatever your position was invalidating your views on society and race, gender, comedy, speech, God knows what. Oh my god, this will give you a headache. Go google Will Smith toxic masculinity. It is just it's a parade of results. Deadline Hollywood. Second thoughts on the Oscars and toxic masculinity. Another one, anatomy of a slap. Seven sexist elements of Will Smith and Chris Rock's incident the Hill. Will Smith's slap of Chris Rock was display of toxic masculinity. Jesus Christ, this will give you a headache. Um. They did the racial essential is um thing. So racial essentialism is when you make any incident about the race and the ethnicity and the skin color of the people involved, regardless of the relevance of race to the essentially saying that race is essential to every incident, no matter what that people instead of interactions, experiences, um and dynamics being human experiences, human incidents, that we are individuals and human's first, No, we are we are defined by our skin color. So every incident, in every event must be defined by race and skin color as well. Racial essentialism. Remember that one, folks, um, So what do we see their CBS News all Will Smith slap on Chris Rock runs the risk of inspiring racist tropes when it should raise questions about its toxicity. Oh god, they just can't help themselves. It's insane. They gotta go there every time. It's not helping anyone. BuzzFeed News are personal thoughts on the morality of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock aren't all that relevant, But the slap reinforced the ways in which public expressions of black anger gets Americans America's attention. Like that the response to this incident if it would have been a white assailant and a white recipient of the slab, nobody would have cared that the response would have been different, Like it boggles the mind. They think that they they're so obsessed with race, and they think everybody else is that obsessed with race was like, no, believe it or not, the vast majority of people out there actually see people as humans first and want to interpret things through the human experience, as opposed to the as a as a white person, as a black male, as a gauge transgender Eskimore or whatnot. That that's what defines the experience. But they just can't help themselves, Connor Friedsdorff. He commented on the CBS newspiece this take boils down to don't invoke this incident to pejoratively generalize on the basis of race, invoke it to pejority of lee generalize on the basis of gender. How about neither? So, like, why don't we not generalize sex, gender, anything from these incidents? Why don't we look at it based on the context and the specifics of the incident, the people involved as humans, not members of a demographic category. As he goes on, this is this is after all wildly anomalous, Like it's so ridiculous to take these really strange, odd peculiar incidents and try to glean larger lessons about like the you know, the cultural war incidents of the day. I mean, another very stupid one is that words words mean violence. Another one of these ridiculous manifest state cultural manifestations of America over the past decade. That you know, up until sticks and stones may break my bones, words can ever hurt mean We tossed that one out the window and all. But you know, you would get aft out of a room for saying that words are actual violence. Words equal violence up until about two thousand fourteen. But now it's actually a prevailing view of quite a few people in power that you know that mocking someone in this case, a lot of people referencing mocking uh Jada Pinkett because she had a condition and she was going, you know, she's lost her hair, that this is violence? Right. This is a patently absurd and ridiculous assertion, yet tons of people make it. And look at what leads from that. Lulu Chang messer Vy, who's a head of communications for sub Stack a great Twitter follow Uh, seems like people getting assaulted for telling jokes is the logical and obvious outcome of conflating words with actual violence. There's an interesting point. If we keep on claiming that words are violence, then that essentially justifies violence against anyone based on words and as we've seen that will lead to some really embarrassing and demeaning situations because Will Smith took that one a little too seriously. Um. So the slap oh my god, the Oscars were on life support single handedly brought them back from the dead, further shown a light on the weirdo and and kind of betrayed the myth of Will Smith is one of America's last great movie stars. Men we were dwindling in number there um and certainly and not in a good way. Seems to really sync up with with the direction of the the American film industry these days. Um, so, you know, step off the right racial essential is um trying not to do these takes about what lessons we can glean from this lab and who knows, I don't know, maybe one of these days will get a little Oscar Oscar whistleblower, who you know kind of explains why it's so curious that this incident happened just as the Oscars were completely losing relevance. Um. And also Chris Rock is the best He's one of you know. If we are looking for people who have not betrayed their legacy in recent American life, Chris Rock is one of them. So he uh, he's going out on tour. I don't. I don't know where he's going on too. I hopefully, I hope it's in the States. I think it's in Australia this week this year. But man would love to get catch him on that one. So up to Chris Rock Team Chris, will you gotta get your head straight? Bro? Everybody. This is Matt Polinski. This is the prevailing narratives some coming up in just a second and interview with my good friend and wellness expert Max Lugavie. It's a New York Times best selling author with a number of books in the wellness space. He's releasing a new one called Genius Kitchen today, which is over a hundred easy and delicious recipes to make your brain sharp, body strong, and taste buds happy. Um. This is a master class on all things health and wellness, but also the type of stuff that we like to discuss on the prevailing narrative, how the conversation affects the facts right that that we'd like to think that health and wellness and and medicine is just about the science and the data, but no, Unfortunately, in our modern era, at the way that people communicate on social media starts to impact how people respond and where where the uh, what people's habits are, where the where the public conversation goes really informs behavior, and so we also get into how that's been influenced in the trajectory of that. So coming up in a minute, me and Max Lugavier. Hope you guys enjoyed it, and we'll have more of the Prevailing narrative after the break, Ladies and gentlemen, Tuesday, March and twenty two. This is the Prevailing Narrative. And this week I have a very special guest, my good friend Max Lugavier. He is a health and science journalist in New York Times, bestselling author podcast Extraordinary with this podcast The Genius, The Genius Life, and most importantly a New Balance evangelist. Max, thank you so much for joining us here this week. Matt Blinsky, what an honor it is to be here. It is quite a moment in time. I love to have witnessed your your rise to social media stardom. I mean, and you're just at the at the at the very cusp, at the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. But it's been it's been so wonderful and so gratifying to watch, because you know, We've been friends for such a long time, and I've always admired your intellectual prowess, thank you, and you've created this amazing platform for yourself. So Mozeltov, I appreciate that anyone who you know admires my intellectual prowess is a friend of mine. So, you know, we were always already buddies, but you're really endearing yourself right now. And of course I got to watch your rise as an interesting story of your professional evolution as we kind of met when you were you were kind of in the trenches on news and current events a few years back with al Gore's with an experiment in broadcast television and broadcast news in particular with a company called current TV, which is funded by al Gore back in the mid two thousand's. Maybe tell us a little bit about that, and then we can kind of get into your your very unique backstory as to how you be. You started focusing on health and wellness, and now I've become one of the go to sources in that realm. Yeah, so I um, I started college on a premed track. I'd always been passionate about UM, fitness science I was. I became interested in I feel like you're gonna laugh at this, but bodybuilding when I was in high school. It makes sense nex surprise here. I became really interested in fitness science and UM and nutrition and that led to me starting college on a premed track. But I realized halfway through my college career that I was also creative and a storyteller. And I stumbled into a class that was an introduction to motion pictures at University of Miami, which is where I went to school, and I was kind of seduced by the idea of studying film UM as a major, and so I ended up studying film and psychology a double majored and UH, and that led to me getting this incredible job as a journalist working for Current TV for al Gowers TV network from two thousand five to I guess about two thousand eleven. And UM, it wasn't a political network. It really sought to empower young storytellers with UM with the sort of megaphone that traditional media allowed. And so just to interject, because I think you'll find this interesting. You may not know this. I remember being at U c l A law school and seeing a um A lecture from it was an al but one of the other executives at Current about how the process of creating television and broadcast content was broken and how Current was starting to use then burgeoning technologies which were, you know, the kind of foundation for the technologies we now use, but in a completely different form and not nearly as useful or as quick and as effective. But UM and the thesis of Current TV was that the broadcast model was outdated and this was kind of the the new the new methodology, right, So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what that thesis was that was supposed to be different and unique about Current Yeah, you probably saw the same lecture that I saw at my com school at University of Miami by the two guys who were sort of on the road recruiting college. It was actually was one guy. He he had glasses, He was a bit of an intellectual type, and he just said, Hey, the way that we create TV is so ridiculous. Everybody has the capacity to create it. People didn't have smartphones in their hands yet, but he kind of suggested that we still had the tools. UM, whether it was just personal personal recording, equipment to go out and create great content, and that nothing should that the the gatekeepers of broadcast television and media should not be stopping anyone from doing so. Yeah, I mean point and shoot cameras. I remember I had one in college when which is when around the time that we're talking about, we're able to create really epic video and and have really high sound quality for the price it was like two for one of these cameras and you'll be able to like shoot almost cinema quality video. And then cam quarters had gotten cheap enough, and computing technology had gotten cheap enough and power and also powerful enough where your average person could then like edit. Um, you know sees the reins of really capable editing software at that point. Um. So to me, it sounded like a dream job when I stumbled into that same lecture. At the time, it wasn't even called current TV. They had yet to name. It was called indie TV and um, and so I jumped on that idea and I created this film as as an independent thesis as an undergraduate as part of my film major that I then sent to the powers that were at the network, and based on that film, they hired me to to basically anchor the network. Um, almost twenty four hours a day, I was on TV sort of like the Anderson Cooper for the network. And it wasn't like a political platform. It was really just they gave the people that worked there, who were buying large young, you know, up and coming uh talent in the world of media, the ability to create programming for this for this network that reached a hundred million homes and um, would you say that current events and human interest stories would be more the the label or the meta tag for that network necessarily than news and politics? Correct? Yeah, it was like current events. It was like it was it was a lot of evergreen content. We would occasionally do the more topical breaking news stuff, but um, but it was largely evergreen culture stuff. Um. Lots of fashion pieces, lots of technology stock content. Yeah, exactly. But what I think it is like really interesting about the Current TV models that it launched almost in tandem at the exact same time as YouTube launched. And um obviously YouTube you know, eclipsed Current TV by multiple orders of magnitude. But um, but it was an interesting concept at that time. And then something that that really uh piqued my interest because I was a young, passionate storyteller, and so they they basically saw in me the archetype that they were ultimately seeking to empower, and so they gave me a full time job. They moved me out to Hollywood, they gave me a small salary, and I did that for about six years. Wow, I actually didn't know your tenure over there was. It was quite that long. Yeah, it was a long time. I mean, never made a lot of money, but learned a ton and and got a good amount of notoriety from it. I left the job as being sort of and I wasn't famous by any stretch of the imagination, but I was like quasi public figure. I had gotten a decent amount of press that point. I was verified on Twitter, which came with certain perks and I had and I and I ended the job getting signed with one of these like major talent agencies UM, which put me up, you know, made me eligible for a number of interesting um post current jobs, none of which panned out, which I think is for the better, which you know, in retrospect, so I think that's interest. That's an interesting period in digital media, or let's call it alternative media and content. To look back upon because everyone forgets that's still two thousand five to two tho eleven was once again in tandem with the launch of YouTube, so a platform for people to create their own videos and put them out there into the universe and perhaps gather following notoriety, create create an alternative to what you know, to to the legacy and the prestige networks. Um, but it was before Instagram, and it was before the internet, you know, before high speed internet, so it's still difficult to consume video. And it was kind of looking back on it, you've had this generation of the first that first wave of let's call it, you know, influencers or digital creators and what form were they? And they were some bloggers. There are some bloggers who hit escape velocity, became you know, semi pseudo famous during that period, and then have turned that into some sort of some some turned that into uh new you know digital news entities, the the you know, the people behind Buzzfeeder, Huffington Posters, some of those publications. Um, what else were you seeing at that time? That kind of that, you see, if not a straight line from that, seems to have been the foundation of things that had some continuity to our current era where everything is niche fragmented and we have a completely democratized information and content environment. Well, I think the problem with Current was that it was unable to cater to that that that that ultimate fragmentation that the media escape is ultimately going to undergo, and that that's what led to currents ultimate demise. Um. The fact that like this idea of millennials watching mass media, uh is sort of like an oxymoron. It just doesn't that doesn't really happen anymore. I mean like there's no like ratings for these like big you know, appointment viewing television events are at all time lows, right, and millennials are certainly one of the last where I think one of the have been one of the first demographics to jump ship. Um. But at that time Current was revolutionary because as I mentioned, YouTube was was brand new. UM, we didn't really know where that was going because as you mentioned, WiFi wasn't something that was like super fast and totally ubiquit. As yet, people still forget the the experience of consuming content, whether video or even photographs. Even it kind of forgod knows what reason, tripped and fell into some old photos on a friends account on Facebook this past week, and you look at the photos from two thousand eight to two thousand eleven or so, I mean they look from truly another area. I thought they look fifty years old, right, and people really do you know, have memory hold a little bit just how um how how crude and rudimentary the content experience was even through the early two thousand tents. And also nobody saw at that point like that the iPhone was going to become the dominant smartphone among younger people, right, like we would have been the BlackBerry. It could have been the BlackBerry. We were still using black I loved having my black Bear at the time before I obviously before I experienced the iPhone. But um but those were not video capable devices, right, so it was really hard to see where where everything was going. Um But that being said, Current was revolutionary in the sense that younger people, citizen journalists what have you would submit content to the network and within a week it would be on TV. Like that was an amazing to be on TV at that point, Like it's still had all the clout that um that it had had for decades prior to you know, prior to like recent times. Um So that it was an incredible opportunity for anybody looking to like build an for themselves. Uh, you know, have a little bit of like getting a little bit of credibility under their hat as a filmmaker. Um And so yeah, I love the role and it it was again like amazing exposure for me. No, absolutely, it seems that Current was ahead, was was very prescient about video and content creation, not so much about distribution and consumption, but a lot of interesting lessons to take from that experience, I'm sure, both both from yourself for for anyone who's kind of observing and studying media and information. So um, onto your current iteration, which is once again as a health and science journalist and specialist in the wellness space. And this is also a very you know, unique and personal journey that you took and how you became interested, gained a proficiency, and became an expert in and a notable source in this world. Yeah. So it was about two thousand and eleven. I had just come off of that run of Current TV. I felt like my mileage I had gotten, you know, all of the mileage possible from that job. Um and uh, the viewership there had plateau, so they they sort of they were they they had kind of hit ah, I guess a plateau themselves as a network, and we're starting there. They're slow and inevitable decline and current TV doesn't exist anymore. So I jumped ship, I think at the appropriate time where I had, you know, sucked whatever sort of marrow I could from it and and was onto hopefully greener pastures. I had signed with this like talent agency and they put me up for a number of really big shows UM, but none of them really panned out. And uh. The issue is that, like I I had gotten really used to UM creating content on my own terms and and creating content ultimately that UM had sort of a deeper mission of impacting the world in a in a positive way UM. And uh, and you know, my passions were, as I mentioned, health, fitness, nutrition, UM technology, how technology is augmenting health. I became really interested in UM these Curswelian ideas of how the singularity and and technology the rise of nanotech is going to ultimately UM halt or at least mitigate biological aging and all those ideas were sort of I was I was marinating in like a bunch of those sort of ideas and trying to figure out where I wanted to go next. And meanwhile this agency was putting me up for these big like music shows, and and I just there was no way that that I was going to be able to compete with like the Nick Cannons of the world and all the other like actual celebrities who ended up getting those jobs right. So ultimately my agency dropped me and UM, and I was in a bit of a UH. I was at a point of career despair, and at that exact moment in my personal life, I started spending more and more time because I had the leisure the ability to do so, because I was in between gigs UM at home in New York City, which is where I'm from, and around my mother and UH. I come from a very small Jewish family and the oldest in a family of three UM and UH and very close to my mom. And it was then, it was about two thousand and eleven two thousand twelve that she started to complain of brain fog and and problems with her memory and her ability to express herself. And in tandem with that, there were changes to her gate, which is so a person walks. Now, I had no, I was. I was a lay person at the time, and I had no prior family history of any kind of neuro degenerative disease. I also harbored I think a lot of misconceptions that many people harbor about neurodegenerative conditions like dementia, that it's genetic, that it's an old person's disease, UM, that it's you know, if it's in your family tree, it's something that um that you will ultimately have to succumb to at some point UM. So, so I started going with my mom to different doctors appointments UM around the city. She lived across the street from n y U, so we started there, not being able to find answers, ultimately went to Columbia uptown couldn't find answers. Oftentimes a doctor would run a battery of esoteric tests, write a few prescriptions down and send us on our way. One one physician actually thought it was depression, so put my mom on searcher Lene, which is zoloft a common UM S s R I, anti US and drug. But it wasn't until the Cleveland Clinic UH in Ohio. We booked a trip. They're known for taking on very complex medical cases, assembling a team around the patient. In one room, you'll have an endochronologist, a cardiologist, a PCP. And it was there for the first time that she was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition, that the neurologists prescribed drugs for both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease at the same time. And I did at that point what any millennial with the data plan would do. I consulted Dr Google. I went to the Wikipedia page for the drugs that my mom was prescribed, and these phrases stood out to me like no disease modifying effect terminal. You know, nobody's ever recovered from Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease, progressive, incurable. And it was that point in my life that I, for the first time ever remember have her having a panic attack. UM. I felt the walls of the room that I was in, the hot the holiday and hotel closing in on me, and it was Uh. It marked a point of no return for me where I became fixated on trying to understand why this happened to my mom, the woman who I cared most about. UM of any of any other person on the planet, and at such a young age, no less, is there anything out there in terms of a medical literature literature with regard to a diet or lifestyle intervention that might have a disease modifying effect. And finally, what could be done to prevent this from ever happening to to myself? Because I now have a risk factor, I could very easily I realized at that point I had the fortitude to know, even though I wasn't a medical doctor, that you know, if you have a family member that that develops one of these chronic um types of conditions, that you're very much at risk. And so that was about a decade ago, um and uh, and it took a long time to to turn all of this into a career That wasn't that certainly wasn't my intent um when I when I first got started. What were your discoveries from this research? There were some very specific discoveries about the the impact the connection between nutrition and in these degenerative diseases and in particular brain health. And you came to some very specific conclusions here from your research. Yeah, So the first um insight that I gleaned was that dementia often begins in the brain years if not decades before the first symptom, so to me, by by some estimates, thirty to forty years. So if you take my mom's age at the time, which was fifty eight, and you subtract thirty, which is a conservative estimate, um, you got my age. And and so I was I realized that this is definitely not an old person's condition. This is something that we all need to be talking about, and especially at that point with the oldest millennial approaching the age of forty. I mean now at this point, the oldest millennial is I believe forty or forty one or or something like that. Um. I realized that this is very much millennial topic, and mollennials are not talking about this, you know, Like I was just like shocked that that nobody amongst my generation was was talking about this. UM. I was interested in it only because I was in the in the sort of throes of coming terms with the fact that a loved one had this condition. But I realized that I needed to get younger people talking about it. And I also realized as a storyteller, as a professional storyteller, that facts tell stories sell that if I was going to sell this notion of dementia prevention. UM, that it was going to be with the fact that my mother was very relatable, that I was very relatable and a good communicator and um, and that I had this incredible opportunity to really move the needle on this on this condition. And there were a few other insights that I cleaned along the way. For one, I mean this might shock some listeners, but that it takes seventeen years on average for what's discovered in in in research to be enacted in day to day clinical care. So seventeen years, like we have loved ones on the line, right, we have our own cognitive health on the line like that, that's unacceptable, um. And there were there were a number of of other sort of insights that I had that I had gleaned upon. But ultimately what it comes down to is that these are multi These are complex, multifactorial conditions like cardiovascort disease, like cancer, They don't develop overnight. They take years, if not decades to manifest and for that time we have a degree of agency. We don't have all the answers, UM, but we certainly have enough so as not to feel like sitting idly on our hands is the only option. Um. There are certain risk factors that are not modifiable. For example, age not modifiable, gender not modifiable, genes not modifiable. Right, but your diet is modifiable. Whether or not you smoke, that's a modifiable risk factor. Your overall activity levels, your UH tendency to exercise or not. Those are all variables which fall under your control. And there are others. Um. So for me, it was about it was about becoming a walking meta analysis, understanding front and back all of the sort of uh modifiable aspects of one's life um that that we might choose to um interact with and uh and spreading the good the good word about about those variables. And so okay, so you understood that there are behavior, behavioral and atmospherical and environmental conditions that do lead to this. It's not just all fixed immutable characteristics of your genetics, your background, or your age. Right. So, in particularly, you found out a link between processed and modified foods and in particular carbohydrates which do not serve your brain, regardless of the dietary The dietary components are impact do not serve your brain, and your brain's function very well. Yeah, So, I mean my views have evolved over the past six years, and I think today the way that I would characterize my dietary views most succinctly would be too minimize to the best of one's ability, UH, one's consumption of ultra processed foods. And we can we can define those UM in a few as best as one can. UM, You're not gonna be able to minimum to completely eliminate your consumption of those foods because they're that we're in constant proximity to them. UM. In the modern food environment, right, it would be to focus on minimally processed UM. Animal and plant products, so animal proteins uh, grass fed, grass finish, beef, paltry, wild fatty fish, for example, eggs, all wonderful options. And we can unpack why you know why I've made those recommendations and whole plants, dark leafy greens, crucifers, vegetables, low sugar, fruits, nuts, seeds, you name it. UM. To me, it's it's about getting back to a diet that is less processed. Today, six of the calories that your average American consumes comes from ultra processed foods. These are the foods that um hang out in the center of the supermarket. All supermarkets are designed in the same way. A few people realize this, but it's the perimeter of the supermarket that holds all of the fresh, perishable foods. It's the aisles where the ultra process shelf stable foods tend to be. And it's those foods which really characterize the standard American diet. And the standard American diet is uh, make no mistake, it's an obesogenic diet. It's a diet that has caused UM the I think one of the most pressing epidemics UM and it's not COVID nineteen. It's the obesity epidemic, whereby they one and two adults are gonna be not just over weight, but obese. That is scary. That is a disturbing, disturbing fact. And then it starts to make a lot more sense and become even more disturbing when you start tracing that back specifically to the instructions given to us by public health and the government, and as you look into a lot of people who maybe let's call it above the ages of thirty two to thirty five, I think the the kind of keto um or or Atkins diet, or the discovery of the harmful nature of carbohydrates and the potential of a heavy protein or all protein diet and ketogenic diet kind of came around early mid two thousand. So. But if you're above the age of thirty two to thirty five, you remember as a kid you were getting the the health advice and instruction you were getting from public health officials, from someone who other than you know, a personal doctor. What you're told to that was based on something called the food pyramid, and the food pyramid essentially essentially advocated for the heaviest part of your the most significant part of your diet, to be bread, cereal, rice in pasta six to eleven servings a day. So they specifically, the government for decades was specifically telling us to eat the things that would be most likely to make us fat. And while the the you know, the food pyramid has now been delegitimized, certainly in your circles, I'm sure that there's a lot of the American population that you know this, this information has not filtered to necessarily yet, but there are people who, for one of a variety of reasons, um just unfortunately gravitate towards really unhealthy habits and and food sources to begin with. But I mean this was the stated advice of the United States government and the public Health official speaking on its behalf for decades. I mean that feels. I mean it's kind of like you want to talk about like an alien society or god knows what universe we were living in. I mean, that's just mind boggling and had to really be disturbing after you were making your discoveries as to the impact that that type of diet and those inputs were having on people in their brain function. Well, that's why I think the precautionary principle is so important, because you're right, I mean, that was the that was the dietary advice that was drilled into the hearts and minds of the American people for deck aids, right, eat seven to eleven servings of grains every single day. I mean, I don't eat that that quantity of grains in a month um. And it just, you know, it reminds you of the fact that it was legal to use lead and paint right up until the seventies. The fact that philidamide was used as a as a viable drug and lead to all kinds of birth defects. The fact that um b p A, for example, which was originally UM designated as an estrogen replacement drug, and it's now in in any number of plastic products UH most I think pernicious lee in the in the in in plastic products that we store our food in. So there's there, there's there are mistakes constantly being made, and it's our health that's paying the price. UM. And so that's interesting in terms of equipment, cooking equipment and storage equipment, because these get bandied about a lot, particularly when you start talking about the UH drop in you know, the the median testosterone or the mean testosterone levels of the American male. Right that there are testosterone inhibiting or herd you know, her harmful to your testosterone levels um uh ingredients or elements or chemicals in all types of plastic or non stick pans and things of that nature. I mean, to what extent are those you know? Are that is that a myth? Are these concerns valid? And to what extent? No, there has been a slow decline of testosterone over the past few decades. And I don't UM, I don't have any exact numbers to to share, but um, I know that this is the case anecdotally. I have a lot of friends who UM have low testosterone for their age when compared to age matched controls UM. And it seems to be it seems to be a silent epidemic for men. And I think that I think that there are probably a few reasons for it. I think it's um over indulgence in on on these like ultraprocessed foods. I think the added the epidemic of of added sugar is a big problem. There have been studies that have shown that one high sugar bulus can reduce testosterone UM acutely for two hours. That's crazy and uh yeah, and we can whom about seventy of added sugar every single day, And that seems to be one of the beyond just the kind of categorical you know, uh kind of dissuade their disabusing us of the categorical myth about carbohydrates versus meats, fats and whatnot. Okay, we figure that out right, but I don't think people quite understand just how much sugar they're consuming. If people understood where sugar is hiding in in non sweets and non desserts and items that they don't not naturally think of as sugar infused. I mean it's crazy, uh, condiments, catch up, sauces, salad, dressing, everything sugar. Sugar is literally all over the place except in just pure organic lean meats, I guess, yeah, yeah, and and and whole fruits and fresh produce. But yeah, the insidious nature of it is what makes it so treacherous, right that it's just it's everywhere. Um. And again, we've shown that one single high sugar bolus is enough to drop testosterone and this this effect has been shown to persist for hours, for two hours post ingestion UM. It can cause an elevation of systolic blood pressure. We know that having a healthy blood pressure is crucial for having a healthy brain, and just one single high sugar bolus can cause a significant elevation of your of your blood pressure by stimulating your body's fight or flight UM response. So I think that I think that the sugar is playing a role in the fact that you know, our testosterone levels are are collectively um out of whack. But I think it's also going back to these xeno estrogen compounds. These plasticizing chemicals, whether it's poarabins or thalates or bisphenols um, they all they present a big problem. How can we ad the average consumer out there combat that? Well, I think the easiest way, and the and the and the lowest hanging fruit is to minimize your exposure to plastic and particularly in the kitchen environment. Um, stop eating food out of that common plastic containers. If it's dry food, it's fine, right, But if it's if it's hot food, if it's moist, if it's salty, acidic. Um, is it kind of peeling off some of the plastic and you're consuming it? Yeah, it essentially does. It's like these these ions are able to enter your food and and you're it's I mean, think about suvied. You're like boiling food in plastic in hot water. It's like the perfect way of adding plastic to your body. They have found, um actually that there have been very recently discovered microplastics for the first time in human serum. So this is a it's a it's a huge problem. It's also you know, in our furniture, dust gets sleft off. We end up inhaling it or ingesting it. UM there's a significant amount of BPA used to create heat sensitive store registers receipts. Um. So when you touch receipts, and then humans have a we have a lot of hand to mouth behavior, whether or not we like to admit it, it ends up in circulation. Um. So it's a big problem. These are these are these are compounds that act like estrogen in the body there and they're called endocrine disruptors um. And so yeah, big big problem. Another one if you're if you're the the discovery of the max Luke of your villains, the villains of the American lifestyle and diet um. And also with their kind of counterpoint, their contra point of one that you're a heavy advocate for is in terms of oils, and particularly the villainous constructs of seed oils as contrasted with the innumerable health benefits of olive oil, particularly organic virgin olive oil, extra virgin oil. Love that, let's hear about that. Yeah, So I think that the it's like the cheap and easily digested refined carbohydrates that play a big problem. The added sugar plays a big problem. Um. And then these grain and seed oils, I think also play a big problem. Now, we don't have all the evidence required to say that these are toxic to the brain, but because they're made of polyunsaturated fats, these are the exact same kinds of facts that your brain is constituted with. And we know that these fats are delicate, damage prone. They're prone to a form of chemical disfigurement called oxidation um and normally, when found in the context of the whole food matrix, they're bound with antioxidants, powerful antioxidants devised by Mother Nature, riding in tandem with these fats so as to protect them. Right. The problem is when we extract these oils, sometimes using harsh chemical solvents like hexane, other times not, they go They undergo innumerable industrial processes that harm the oil. They're exposed to light, they're exposed to heat um and so these oils oxidized, and they also undergo other forms of chemical damage like the generation of man made trans fats. So all of these grain and seed oils um undergo. It's sort of like the food industries equivalent of the witness protection program. It's the same. It's the reason why you can use the same oil to saute food in and a restaurant. You can use it to fry nuts in and call them quote unquote roasted nuts. They're the same oils that you can use in children's cereal and granola bars, in salad dressings and mayos. They have no taste, they have no flavor profile, right, so they to to make to get these oils um, to ring them free of any notable characteristics, they undergo a process called deodorization, and that process creates a small but significant amount of trans fats. Trans Fats in there were most abundantly found in the human food supply up until a couple of decades ago, in the form of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. So margin's. I grew up consuming margarine um instead of butter because it was the quote unquote heart healthy alternative to saturated fat dominant butter and other animal fats I had. I remember having corn oil and a big plastic tub by the stove. UM. But the issue is that these oils, they all they have, these these trans fats now um without having undergone this this partial hydrogenation process and transfats, there's no safe level of trans fat consumption. Their poisonous to your cardiovascular system. Their consumption is associated even among young and healthy people with worse memory function. They do put you had increased risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. Uh. They also further degrade when we cook with them, so this is another problem. You can buy them, you can pluck them quote unquote fresh off the store shelves, and they already this process of oxidation has already been set into motion. But when you cook with them, when you apply heat, UM, and also when you reheat them, which is often the case in restaurant fryers, certain compounds called aldehydes are generated, many of which are are directly toxic mutagenic cancer causing damaging to your mitochondria, which are the energy producing organ alles of your cells. UM. So they're definitely not fats that you want to have that you want to over over indulge on. Studies have shown that UM adiposite concentration, So your adiposites are your are your fat cells. UM, your adipose tissue is is your white fat, and adiposites are fat cells. Your fat cells literally store the facts that you consume. So that's saying you are what you eat. It's a it's a truism with scientific backing, and studies have shown that adiposi concentration of linoleic acid, which is the dominant fatty acid found in these grain and seed oils, has increased more than twofold over the past fifty years alone. And that's due to the fact that that the primary fat, the primary oil now you consumed in the standard American diet is soybean oil, which is this dirt cheap commodity, you know, crop subsidized by the US government um rich in Omega six fats more more worse worse than that though, it's that they're these fats are highly delicate, damage prone. They're not protected by the ant by the antioxidants that they would perhaps be found that would be found in soy in whole soybeans. Right and at the end of the day, a damaged fat damages you. And so the bad fats, how about the good fats? Because you seem to be quite an advocate of healthy fats in particular, you know, I don't want to call you a full blown carnivore, but or maybe at certain junctures over the past five six years since you've been on this journey, you have been but you're very much a a proponent of a meat heavy diet. It is it, it codes it, and it maps to the human experience. Um. Evolutionary wise, our ancestors were meeting were eating animal fats and animal proteins constantly, and you know, just based on common sense, why would we currently be fearful of such? Maybe you could give us a little bit of background on your philosophy there and what the types of things we should be eating are. Yeah, so I don't. Actually it's funny because like when you said meat heavy, I don't think of myself as eating a meat heavy diet. But I guess, to the to the woke nutritional orthodoxy, I do eat a meat. We'll get to them in just a second, don't you. Don't you worry we're not there yet. We'll get there. Yeah. Um. But I actually I advocate for I think a very balanced diet of of like half the plate being constituted with properly raised animal proteins and then the other half whole plants. Um. But I do think that meat is uh. I mean, I do think that it's essential in an in an optimized diet. I think that you can optimize a diet that is meat free diet, but is it optimal for the human animal? Is it a biologically appropriate diet? Um? I don't think so. The the issue with meat is that you get certain minerals, you get certain compounds and meat that are highly bioavailable to us because we were meat, right, Like, make no mistake, we're animals, right, and so carna nutrients, nutrients that are found in animal products are plug in play. UM with regard to our own biology. We can look to omega three fatty acids, which in their preformed state I cosa penta enoic acid or ep a fat or da cosa hexing inoic acid or d h a fat. D H fat is one of the most important structural building blocks for the human brain. It's found in animal products. It's found in fish, it's found to to a small degree and grasped beef. It's found in eggs. Plant based forms of Omega threees have to go undergo complex biochemical transformation before they can be properly utilized in our bodies, and that that process differs in terms of efficacy and efficiency from person to person, gender to gender, genetic background to genetic background. So you're leaving a lot to chance if you're relying on plants for your omega threes for example, and that's not the only nutrient where this is the case. You can look at vitamin A or retinal. When you eat uh animal product like liver for example, or egg yolks or I mean, we'll even say grass fed butter, you're getting vitamin A and its preformed state retinal. It's plug and play to your biology. A lot of people consider beta carotene vitamin A, that's how we refer to it, but it's actually not vitamin a. It's pro vitamin a. It has to be converted to retinal in your body um, which it does for the most part. But the ability to do that is different person to person, and some people, um I believe their ability to convert beta caroten to vitamin A is reduced by about if not more. UM So you're leaving a lot of chance, and depending on where you're from your ancestry. UH. It's clear that many of these nutrients are in their most bioavailable form um in animal products. I guess the most classic example is hem iron. So for anybody suffering from iron deficiency anemia, anemia affects one in four people globally, So it's a major problem. About half of those cases are due to iron deficiency. Red meat is the ultimate iron supplement, um and so so there's that, there's fish. I mean, you can't really have a conversation about dementia prevention and not bring up the value of wild fatty fish. That the properties of fish, in the nutrition and nutritional properties do seem to have a uniquely powerful benefit to brain health and brain function. Am I correct? You're correct, And I'll explain why. It's actually really really kind of interesting. So if you were to take animal fat, like like like a land animal, like a cow for example, and take its fat and put in the fridge, what would happen to the fat? It would get it hardened, right, become really solid, whereas if you left it out at room temperature, would become really soft. Right. Fish inhabit really cold water, the equivalent of the Earth's refrigerator, right, being like down at deep sea levels, and so they need their their flesh, right, and their and their cell membranes to not become rigid at those temperatures. So fish fat. One of the reasons why fish fat is so precious, it's because they're comprised of these polyunsaturated fatty acids. They're very fluid. They have this incredible characteristic of fluidity, and that is in fact the exact reason why our brains are constituted of these fats. Because our brains, you know, we have neurons that are firing off trillions of messages a minute um, they have to possess this characteristic known as fluidity membrane fluidity. It's crucially important for having an optimally functioning brain. And d H A fat which fish, fatty fish contain an abundance is one of the most important structural building blocks of the of the brain. So that's why fish are just so we have this like incredible symbiosis with with fish and the facts that they contain. That is a fascinating explanation. It's one of those dynamics that's bubbling just below the surface of everyone's consciousness. They know it to be true, but they don't quite know why. And so that's that we love bringing those people those those in depth explanation of these phenomenon that they kind of know to be ture, but they don't quite understand the blood and guts. And I'm sure that a lot of this informs your most recent work, which is released today, believe it or not, The Genius Kitchen, which is captured over a hundred easy and delicious recipes to make your brain sharp, your body strong, and taste Bud's happy. Maybe if you could tell us a little bit about this book, how it relates to your other previous release texts, which have all reached the New York Times bestseller's list. Um, would love to hear more about it. Yeah, So, Genius Kitchen is a it's a two in one book. It's a cookbook. So we've got over a hundred amazing recipes using low costs, easy to access ingredients. Um, nothing too convoluted in the book. They range in terms of their complexity to prepare. But UM, we've got something for everybody in the book. But it's also a wellness guide and kitchen guide, so it breaks apart each food component and it UM use the term blood and guts. It sort of gives you the blood and guts of my recommendations, UM in a way that makes it really under easy to understand why I recommend certain foods and why I may recommend him staining or at least minimizing. UM. Your exposure to certain food. But in general, I think why I've been so quote unquote successful in in this sort of wellness world is that my approaches is very balanced. It's dogma free. Um. Like, I'm a big advocate, for example, of grass finished beef right. Coming living in l A and having attained, thankfully a certain level of financial independence, I can easily access and afford grass finished beef right. But that doesn't mean that that grain finished beef, for example, which is the predominant form of beef sold um and consumed in the United States, is bad. Right. It's still one of the most nutrient dense foods in the supermarket. And if that's all that you have access to, then I want to I want to get rid of the stigma that sometimes is cast upon upon that kind of food. It. You know, there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance, I'll admit, because I don't like promoting the factory form system. I think it's like it's cruel to the animals, it's abhorrant in terms of its uh, you know, what it's doing to local and global ecosystems. But um, my bias is towards human health and UH, and I think you just can't get around the fact that, for example, even conventionally raised beef is still is a much better option for dinner than box mac and cheese. Even farm raised salmon um. You know, I prefer to eat wild salmon um when I'm in restaurants. I'm sure I eat farmed on occasion, but it's still gonna be a better option. And and the and the observational data suggests that, um, the benefits still outweigh the risks with regard to eating farm raised fish. So um, so I kind of yeah, I kind of lay it all out in my book, from dairy to plants, to meet two fish, to eggs, to salt to water. You know, what to sort of prioritize and and sort of optimize for what to what to attempt to minimize. And then we've got the recipes and so um. Yeah, it's a really sort of practical book. It's where the rubber hits the road in terms of nutrition, right, delicious meals and um, and I'm on the cover, so look at that. There you go. Most importantly, Max is on the cover. Um. Kind of to the these this this book would be the practical manifestations of a lot of the knowledge that you're dispensing on in this chat right now, which is you know, obviously very informed by god knows how many you know, studies and and understanding of the diseases that that affect us, the nutrients that we consume and whatnot. UM, And you know, on this podcast, I always harp on kind of how cultural hostilities and dogmas you mentioned start to disrupt the hard science or the hard facts and hard data around a variety of topics. And unfortunately it turns out that health and wellness and nutrition have not been immune to this this poison over the last you know, the this great era where everyone is able to create content and become an information source and build their own career around you know, around being um a digital source or digital creator has unfortunately been impacted by the fact that, like I said, cultural hostilities seem to contaminate so many different conversations they have in the wellness community as well. UM, you've bumped up against it in particular, i'd say, and two manifestations one the vegan community in two body positivity movement. So what what what has been going on in terms of let's call it the prevailing narratives Both literal and figurative and tongue in cheek in the wellness community, and where's the conversation at and where people bumping up against each other? Yeah, so I mean you you you totally nailed it. It's it's really those two areas. One would be the Health of Any Size Movement UM, which claims that there is no relationship between obesity, for example, and long term health. UM. There's there are a lot of straw and fallacies to come out of that. Out of that uh sort of sect online UM. You know, they'll argue against the b m I as an as an obesity screening tool. It's actually a very valuable obesity screening tool. It's not a good diagnostic tool, but they'll often conflate those two UM facts. The b m I is basically, uh, it's the body mass index. So it basically uses a very simple calculation. UM, it's your it's it involves your weight in your height. I forget the exact formula, but it basically UM characterizes you based on your body size. And if you're a bodybuilder, it's not going to be the most reliable for you because it does not distinguish between fat mass and lean mass. Um. It also becomes more inaccurate at certain with with height outliers. But by and large most people are average by by definition, right there, not these like by you know, bodybuilders or height outliers. And so when looking at the population level, b m I is actually a fantastic screening tool to to look for obesity. No physician is going to diagnose you with obesity based on your b m I. They're gonna look at your body composition, maybe that your body fat percentage UM. But that's just one of the areas where they where they love to uh you know, they love to pick on the b m I because b M I might have a certain flaw not accounting for body composition. So they throw the baby out with the bathwater, and they say they demonize b m I despite the fact that it can it's predictive to a pretty sizeable extent of whether or not you're obese, and it might might you might just need to account for edge cases. Yeah, I would say that most people who complain about the b m I probably we are have a large one, yes, exactly exactly. Unfortunately, uh we I mean, we know that having a healthy body composition is an important aspect of good health. Now there are there is a minority of people that are overweight UM and metabolically healthy, but you know that is should not be expected to persist throughout one's lifespan, right, Um, And of course there is a there's a proportion of people who are normal weight and metabolically obese, but again these are these are outliers. The norm is that if you are UM overweight, and especially very overweight, you are going to have some other component of metabolic syndrome. Right. We already know that having an oversized wasteline is associated with worse UM cardiovascular health because you're your visceral fat secretes, inflammatory hormones UM and and and messenger messenger signals like cytokinds um which can play a role in the ideology of of innumerable chronic conditions. So it's not good to to store fat um on your you know, an excessive amount of fat um on the on the waist. And this isn't to say that you need to be like shredded or in fitness competition form, but um, but I think we can't, you know, I think it's just it's a fallacy at this point to say that you that that you can be healthy at any size, And it seems so evident of all these other just ridiculous battles were having in the public sphere, these days of people trying to demonize or or intimidate people away from positions that we've known to be true for thousands and thousands of years, out of some sense of moral obligation to the moral appeal that anything is okay, or just because in the past we might have promoted or or the advertising world in the entertainment world might have promoted unrealistic goals or or visions of beauty, and that the people that were most in the public eye were those outliers at the top of the heap in terms of health, fitness, or attractiveness. And the solution, apparently to these people is to throw out every basic understanding and notion that we have about physical fitness or health and promote just the opposite as the ideal, just to I guess, shove it in the face of the traditionalists. Yeah, but the but you know, these industries are also complicit in the ideology of of conditions like obesity, which is a disease, you know, like the junk food of the mantra of the junk food industry and the dietetics industry, I'll add, for for a long time has been that calories really are are all that matter. And calories certainly matter, but um, you know, the junk food industry really wants people to believe that all foods fit and that it's really not. It's it's not their fault, it's your fault that you're overweight. All you need to do to to write the ship, so to speak, is to eat less and move more. Right. But it's the food products that they create. They have this there's this characteristic of that they that they all sort of have called hyper palatability. Um, they're also minimally satiating. So it's that it's the confluence of those two features that putting this in Layman's terms, they taste really good and don't feel up. They taste really good, they don't fee you up, and they're Those are the foods that are at the at the foundation of the obesity epidemic. And the reason for that is that they by the time you filled yourself up on them, you've already over consumed them. The same can't be said for minimally process whole foods kinds of foods that you would perhaps you know, create for yourself. Um. And so for most people struggling with overweight they look when given that advice to just eat less, move more, they look at the food that they're already eating, right, the obesegenic food that got them into this position to begin with, and they they try to minimize, they try to moderate their consumption of those foods. But those foods are not designed to be consumed in moderation. And will power is a finite resource. So you've already lost the battle. Um if that's really what you're what what your approach is. Um. So I wouldn't I wouldn't put all the blame on these people. And I do think that we need to stop. Like I think fat shaming is a problem. I think that you can, You certainly can and should love yourself at any size. Right. But but but getting yourself to a healthy body composition should be an expression of the love you have for yourself at the end of the day, no doubt, I see you here with with the kind of boyfriend looking away at meme and you've got the the aggrieved girlfriend is canceled culture. The boyfriend looking away as you and uh, and the the attractive woman walking down the street of science based nutrition. And uh I, I guess what you were just describing is the cancel culture manifestation in the health and wellness community. And it seems to be doing a lot of damage here. And I mean, how how prevalent is this dynamic? It seems that the health and wellness world, because it is it is scientifically, it's scientifically grounded, it's it's in a good position to combat these people trying to insert new ideologies that might be so nonsensical that it just assumes that people will gravitate to them because they sound avant garde. I don't know how bad is the the discourse going in that world. Well nutrition is sort of a unique field because people tend to make their diets their identity. Um, and so people feel very strongly, they strongly guard their their dietary pattern, whether they are nivars or vegans or pscytarians or gluten free or what have you. I mean, it's like there's a joke right somewhere that, um, how you tell, how can you tell if somebody's vegan or are on a gluten free diet? They let you know within the first five minutes of meeting them and argue, yeah, So, I mean that's that's kind of like the unique thing about nutrition. And also nutrition is much more difficult to study than drugs, and yet it's much less well funded. Um. And so there are all these sort of unanswered questions that has that has left a lot of room for interpretation. UM. It's one of the reasons why the quote unquote diet wars, which is a real thing, are are are constantly happening and show no sign of abating anytime soon. Right. Um. The discourse about plant versus animal proteins and and plant exclusive diets compared to I'm more omnivorous diets. So that's where a lot of this sort of conflict um arises, uh and um. And there are there are efforts underway to to at least minimize think the the um you know, the conflict what with disclosures and nutritional papers about the researchers primary diets of choice, because I think that's a disclosure disclosure worth making. Right if you're like publishing a research paper and you yourself happened to be a vegan, I think that's something you know normally in research you have to disclose where your financial funding is from. But now there's this sort of call to get nutrition researchers to reveal their diets, right because that could certainly taint your assessment of of everybody's got a motive. Everybody's got an angle exactly, and it's to validate something else going on, either you know, a personal habit or a preference or something in their career, something monetarily. Um. So yeah, I would say it's the it's the health of any size movement. Um that that has been a bit problematic. H And but you know, it's like diet culture. I feel like in some ways it's a pushback to diet culture. And there is a lot of toxicity and diet culture, but the anti diet culture has now become just as toxic. And I think that sort of mirrors a lot of what we're seeing elsewhere in society, right Like at at at at the extremes of any sort of movement, Um, you're gonna you're gonna find toxic viewpoints and toxic personalities, right And Um that that also that pretty much all societal dynamics instead of kind of looking at them as natural outgrowths of human nature or the society that we've built and kind of tweaking it around the margins, you're trying to address some of of where it goes too far. We've decided to just flip them all on their head instead of Okay, you can only be healthier, attractive with a size nineteen, waste and looking like Kate Moss. Know, all of a sudden, we will put people with you know, females with a body mass index through the roof on the cover of Ogue. And this is what is beautiful now And and I'm not so sure that the it seems a little performative. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing, Like, because I've thought a lot about this, I think that that that that breaking open the sort of beauty, the stereotypes of what it means to be beauty, because there is there shouldn't really be one one female sort of like ideal for what beauty is, right, and you nailed it, Like it's like that it's been for decades, like the sort of Cape Moss ideal beauty is subjective. I think we have to we have to embrace that. But health is not as subjective, right, Health is something that we can ascertain with Like I guess what I'm saying is that the movement to overturn accepted truths on health grows out of it is motivated by a desire to overturn accepted preferences on beauty, fair, fair, and But it shouldn't because that's not conflating two things, right, it shouldn't be conflated. Yeah. Absolutely, And we'll have more of the prevailing narrative after the break. Um. So also, we're just coming off the mode in terms of health and public health in particular, as we we discussed a little bit earlier with you know, public health. Once again, the the arm of the government or public institutions advising the public on health and nutrition were completely wrong for decades on what we should be eating. Okay, we just went through the most significant public health event of modern times last hundred years with the pandemic and hopefully of the most significant of of our lives going forward. Um. And public health during the pandemic really did bump up against the nutrition and wellness community. I can't tell you how I I gained a lot of followers amongst the world of fitness professionals, nutritionists and whatnot because I was kind of opposing some of the more broad based, one size fits all approaches and solutions on COVID, because there are a lot of people who said, wait a second, we're taking care of our health. And there really is such a a um, a massive gap between the risk for COVID too people who were of poor health regardless of age, as opposed to people who were even of normal health. But it seems someone made a very interesting point that in one of the reasons that the pandemic was so um destructive in the States is because the United States had underlying health issues to begin with, broad based and that, you know, and and it's like we were soaking uh um, you know, soaking affused and kerosene, and then it COVID came along, and you know, it was the match um and it just blew up so much of it just accentuated so many of the underlying health conditions that we were having kind of across society. Um, how did you see that, you know, from the inside of the wellness world, what what were you seeing during the pandemic in particular about the the successes or failures of public health? Well we live in we live in an unwell society today. Nine intent adults have at least some component of the metabolic syndrome. Six six percent of adults are either overweight to Roby's half of adults have either type two diabetes or pre diabetes. So it's a it's a pretty sad state of affairs with regard to our health, and and COVID came along and just completely pulled the rug out from beneath our feet. We were just not We're not a population that was that was prepared for this degree of pathogenic threat. Um. But you're absolutely right in that the wellness community, I mean, these are people who have made health and wellness their their their vocation right, their life's purpose um in many ways, I myself being one of them. And so that there were these sort of umbrella mandates um uh doled out oftentimes arbitrary, completely arbitrarily to the public that didn't make the distinction. You know. It was it was such a there was such a lack of targeting with regard to the pen dates and the messaging. UM. It was it made no sense. And it also, um it was just anti science. You know, like somebody like like me or or you know, people sort of in the millennial demographic, people who are fit um very low risk. I mean, this is something that that we've known since day one of the pandemic. Right. Um, there was that study that came out about a year ago showing that you know, most of the people about people in the hospital were what overweight or obese or something like that. He was closer to eight Yeah, so um so yeah. I mean it was just it was upsetting, and it was it was a lot to contend with, and I tried not to go to you know, hard into into that world. I mean, there are a lot of people in the in the wellness world, you know, colleagues of mine who who really kind of went in and and started putting out really great content um on it, but but very aggressively against the public health measures and restrictions enacted in response to it. Yeah yeah, yeah, um yeah. I mean like and they were in that it and man in trying to in trying to put the reality and the science up against the public response. I mean, they subjected themselves to public censure and potential you know, consequence socially and professionally by trying to advocate for more tailored solutions and policies. But that at first glance would seem because it didn't. It did not prioritize the interests at the the the far edge of the health spectrum where we really had to protect people. But because it did not prioritize the the interests of that far spectrum as much as some other people felt, was the indicator of UM being an empathetic and selfless person. And they you know, they risk demonization. Yeah, some of them got it well. The but the issue is that people who are at risk for COVID are not at the far edge of the of the risk spectrum. Right. It's like most people, most people in this country are unwell. So I tried to I tried to see UM. I tried to see the the issue from both sides. UM, you know, because again most people are unwell. Age is still the number one that was the number one risk factor. UM. But yeah, I mean there were there were There's just so many missteps, whether it was the you know, the the the complete ignoring of of natural immunity, UM, the fact that like you know, for for years we were wearing cloth masks, but oops, cloth masks that was acknowledged by the CDC didn't work. So thanks for making me have to suffer through that for two years, and I'm gonna be thinking about environmentally because I wasn't really thinking about this early on in the pandemic. Holy Christ, the amount of waste we created with the amount of masks that were created and used over the past twenty four months. I mean, at that scale, there's got to be some environmental manifestation of all this, Like, how do you even process that that amount of waste? It's it's an ocean's full. It's crazy. Yeah. Well, those blue and white medical masks are made using compounds that are known endocrine disruptors. I believe um p fast substances are used to create those masks. They are the substances that make um that essentially make the cloth waterproof, um, so to speak. That's why they don't it's so that they don't absorb. It felt like almost a wax glazed masks, right, imagine that's it. Yeah. Yeah, And so you're you're with your breath, You're you're making your you're heating up and moistening those compounds, you're inhaling them. UM. I don't think that we fully understand the health consequences that um that that that's that Having gone through two years of breathing in that stuff is gonna is going to Um. Yeah, a lot of kind of unique circumstances and environmental impacts and inputs that we have not fully been studied that may have at first glance only very incremental or nominal impacts on public health, but probably over the course, I mean, much like the mental health impact of of you know, shutting most youths and most children off from you know, once again, we kind of accepted this is how we raise children in America. Obviously in a variety of different of different formats depending on where you live, if you're civics, uh, you know, costropolitan, suburban, or rural. But generally okay, we know that children are best raised or are we We know what society looks like when we keep kids generally in school in this environment during their youth, etcetera, etcetera. We don't know what society looks like when we take kids out of I mean, a six year old child has lived for a third of their life pretty much you know, under these conditions, and we we will have to see what the impact of that is. Um. You have a very interesting quote here that I think, you know, you probably relates to a lot of what you discussed so far. I would love to hear your take very specifically on this fitting an ancient brain into a modern environment, maybe like fitting a square peg into a round hole. So interesting. Love to hear you what what you meant by that in terms of um um, how conducive or not conducive modern environments are for our brains. That are the results of evolution, that most millions of years of evolution that mostly occurred without the types of environmental factors or technologies that we now focus on. Yeah, I mean the modern world has has mutated and it's left our brains um as as victims. You know, in the in the opening chapter of Genius Foods, I say, the modern rules like the Hunger Games in your brain is thrust into battle as an unwitting combatant, weaponless and defenseless and um And I think you know, our brains are suffering in many ways, whether it's exposure to chronic stress, to um being under slept too, environmental toxic ins um like these ender constructors which we were talking about two over indulgence on UH sweets and unhealthy industrial industrially refined oils. UM. I think in many ways we're suffering as a result of this sort of era of specialization. You know, if you think about it, a hunter gatherer had to be self sufficient. UM. You had to know how to fight off a predator, catch food, clean your food, cook your food, UM, build a tent light of fire, that which I mean. You had to really be um self sufficient as a as a hunter gather. And then we transitioned about ten thousand years ago to this new paradigm with regard to human life where uh, suddenly the settler, the the specialist rather was in vogue. UM. You had somebody to you know, plant the wheat, somebody to pick it, somebody to millet, somebody to bake it, somebody to sell it. UM. And I think that that has UM. I think that's been to the detriment of mental health in many ways, but certainly for people with brains that are more prone to UM. For for entrepreneurship, people who are entrepreneurs. There tends to be a disproportionate amount of people with a d H d UM in that cohort um. And those are people that might have been the ultimate hunter gatherers, people that UM that don't like to just focus on one thing for nine hours a day, you know, to to like this this notion of sort of the one size fits all, nine hour a day desk job. Um, it's something that we've somehow come to accept as normal, right, as like par for the course of being a human being today. But I mean it's it's it's it's really like it does not sync with our evolution. It does not sync with our evolution. Yeah, and so I think that's one of the reasons why we see so many people struggling with issues related to mental health today, whether it's anxiety or depression. I mean, rates of of either of these two conditions are are off the charts. I mean, the depression is on track to become the number one UH cause of disability around the world. And so I think it's I think it's it's beviously multifactorial, but I think our our lifestyles have become are are definitely like a key suspect in this. And so there's been a movement, particularly over the past decade and a lot that they've kind of flooded the zone, right we see now where people might eat other than the true fitness junkies. Up until about twelve fifteen years ago, they might add a couple home fitness products, they had a gym membership, they might have tried to eat organic or even tiptoed around veganism. Now there is no shortage of of informational products and and nutritional supplements and fitness products that are available to people to try to take the next step in combating all these environmental toxins and whatnot. Whether it's red light treatment, UM, you know, alternative forms of health and wellness, wellness tech UM or the variety you know it's got. How eighty percent of the commercials I don't know if it's customed to me, but percent of the commercials to see on YouTube are some sort of health or fitness supplement, right, UM. So people are trying to look back to ancient wisdom and some of the tactics that our ancestors used in in kind of interacting with the physical environment to try to regain some of that that wellness that we lost. UM one. And you obviously, hey, we talk about it as the psychedelic bro profile, let's call it. But we gravitate towards some of this stuff, particularly with one hot and cold treatment that a lot of people have been gravitating towards UM and then some people starting to play around with some psychedelics. Um. In terms of uh, you know what, the thesis being that there were some uh, there were some things that were kind of labeled as narcotics when narcotic used kind of sprung up back up in the middle of the twenty century that might have been unfairly labeled, and that in its most natural form and a controlled environment are used properly, might actually be a health benefit. So UM. Psilocybin treatment has been one of those love to your thoughts on kind of the hot and cold therapy and psilocybin as as you know, as a part of the wellness plan. Yeah, I love this. So you and I are big fans of how and called immersion conscious therapy as it's called. Um. I'm a I'm a massive fan of sauna use, so sauna use. Um. There's a lot of good research now coming out of the University of Eastern Finland, which I think is notable because you know, a lot of these sort of healing self care modalities. Um, we we would see we here in the United States, we might see a benefit associated with with their utility. However, epidemiology with regard to healthy nutrition practice is usually confounded by what's called healthy user bias. Right, So somebody who has access to a sauna here in the United States might have resources, right, they might be affluent, UM, they might be investing a significant portion of their of their leisure time on self care. So healthy user bias is always sort of like an issue with UM with the studying of these modalities. But in Finland, Finland is the sna capital of the world. They have one sauna on average per household UM in filth Finns who knew, who knew? Yeah, So taking a sauna is like taking a shower, so it's it's it's it's much less likely to be associated with this sort of healthy user UM effect over there. And what they're showing is that regular sauna use about three to five times a week is associated with robust risk reduction for developing dementia, with developing hypertension, with developing stroke, and cardiovasco disease. So it seems to be doing all these really impressive things with regard to one's health. And then mechanistically, I think there are many things that play here. So for one, when you sit in a sauna, you're basically applying a hot compressed to her entire body. And what that does boost nitric oxide all throughout the body, which helps normalize blood pressure, reduce inflammation, UM, increased blood flow. UM. You also are sweating, so you're purging toxins. Various environmental pollutants come out in your sweat UM that aren't otherwise excreted, whether it's through um, you know, urine or or feces. So you're doing lots of really good things by sitting in a in a in a sauna. Cold immersion is is good From a different stand point, it's really good for I think bolstering mental acuity, mental health. To me, it's uh, it's a very significant state change when I get into a cold, cold plunger, door cryotherapy, or even take a cold shower. UM. It's been shown to boost levels of nora epinephrin, which are a neurotransmitter involved in focus and attention UM and UH. And also you get this really interesting effect when you do both back to back. UM. You're essentially with with the heat, you're causing the blood to go up to the surface of your skin, right, which is why you get read, you get flushed, you start sweating, and then when you go into the cold water, you're causing sort of a reverse effect where the blood leaves your extremities and and goes, you know, to protect your vital organs so that you don't freeze to death. And so by doing that back and forth, you're basically you're working all of this like this micromusculature in your vasculature that doesn't otherwise get worked out. UM. We also know that sitting in a sauna act as a sort of mild aerobic exercise medic. So you'll notice you if you put your two fingers on the UH on the radio artery on your in your risk, you'll see that your pulse UM can get to about twenty at least it does for me, which is sort of indicative of a of an aerobic effect that's occurring. UM. So there are all these like really good health promotive UM effects UH due to UM due to regular sna use, regular cold water immersion UM. And that's just sort of like surface and you feel incredible, Yeah, you feel incredible. There's like a lot of research now looking at the mental health effects UM of these two modalities. So yeah, it's it's you know, we're just now I think scratching the surface. But um, but there's been a lot of really good, sort of robust research that's been done already. UM, it's definitely something that I recommend people try to integrate as best they can. Awesome, awesome into that point, um, psilocybin. Yeah, a lot of people looking into this right now. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I was actually UM, there's been a number of of cool studies looking at psilocybin's ability to foster creative thinking, which I think can be useful for people trying to think around various traumas or even out of the box thinking with regard to problem solving just in their in their professional or even personal life. UM. There's really good research on using psilocybin as a way to fight depression, um in a in an enduring way, uh, just after one or two doses. This work is being done out of Johns Hopkins and in y U. UM uh, really interesting stuff as a way to UM. I think actually m d M A is being used to fight alcoholism. They've been they've shown that that. Um, there's a lot of promise there. Uh. And most recently I stumbled upon a study that found that psilocybin um low dose psilocybin was effective for treating migraine, which is really useful because most people that that have that suffer from migraines, they have to take drugs, right, they have to like take drugs as needed. But these drugs are really um can have serious side effects, you know, whether it's very strong and said drugs or tripped end drugs. UM. They I believe the study involved a single fairly low dose, almost a micro dose of psilocybin and over the course of a month, dramatically reduced UM migraine occurrence as well as um uh severity of the of the migraines. So yeah, I'm a fan. I think it's a it's a really cool UM world that we're in now. I'm like super grateful that they're doing this research. A lot of it's being done. As I mentioned Hopkins and y U Imperial College in London, UM is sort of an epicenter for this work. Yeah, it's ironic but maybe fitting that during an era of such generalized low like low public health and so much you know, widespread disease and infirmary, simultaneously we're attaining new heights in in our access to knowledge and ways to live better. UM, and maybe you know, I've always thought it's kind of cause and effect. It's the environment became so toxic we had to start paying attention to it. That the reason that you're seeing another fitness studio in every corner in the see an equinox is all over the place, and a gym membership is now a staple ATEM as opposed to a luxury item. UM and and all these products because we got so out of shape. Is that you know, you go watch any go watch any American film before maybe you know, the late nineties, and look at the phenotypes, look at the body types. It is shocking. It's it's like another species. UM. But interesting to see us kind of elevate our knowledge profile. UM. In response, UM, one last thing and I'll let you go. You all send another interesting dynamic and look, you know, kind of analyzing what what new? What new in the economy, what new commercially occurs? Now that people can become kind of their their own celebrities or or well known broadcasters within a specific niche based on social media, is that you know, being someone who's notable on these topics and has a following brands. The burgeoning you know, CpG and wellness and fitness tech brands want to speak to you earlier, and so you you know, you at this point are somewhat of a venture capitalist in the space and investing in in wellness and tech, uh, wellness tech and nutrition and whatnot. UM. You know how I love a macro view of that of how this new composition of part influencer, part venture capitalist because it makes all the sense in the world. It's why you see so many more It's it's not that you know, athletes and celebrities and entertainers always had money. Okay, they weren't always investing in early stage companies, but it just makes a lot more sense in this arrow. It's just why you see so many releases of early you know, announcements of early stage funding rounds these days, whether it's in the wellness space or otherwise with influencers of celebrities um listed on the cap table. And I love kind of your view of how this new phenomenon of the influencer investor has percolated. Yeah. I mean, I love to invest in companies where I think they're doing good for the world and they're good for the food, they're doing good for the food environment. For example, I invested in a company recently called Serenity Kids, which makes the best healthiest uh toddler and children formula that that I've ever seen. I mean, if you if you look at the if you've got to even whole foods, right, and you look at the offerings for children's food, it's like you're feeding your kids jomba juice, you know, which is just like very fruit juice, heavy um, lots of unhealthy oils and the like. So I found this company. They're the only company of its kind making UM. And obviously my disclosure is that I'm an investor, but other than that, I have no say day to day in the in the operation of the company. But they may they take a meat centric approach, high and healthy fats, no fruit sugar. Um, they use all you know, complex carbohydrates from tubers and stuff like that. Uh. If they use beef, it's gonna be grass finished beef. If they use salmon, it's gonna be wild salmon. It's called Serenity Kids, as I mentioned. And UM, yeah, I love you know, It's like I love investing in in in the in products that I personally would eat or would recommend to my loved ones. And of course I also have the ability at this point, thankfully to influence the success of these companies, right because I can tell my audience about them. Um. So I think it's a really great uh sort of you know intersection and um and yeah, this the CpG space, especially these better for UCBG products. I think it's just it's a sector that's exploding. I mean, all you need to do is does check out Expo West right Natural Products Expo West for day and it's just you'll see all the products, all the excitement. Um. There's been a number of really big exits lately in the space, whether it's like Primal Kitchen or Hugh Kitchen, which you know makes those those really great chocolate bars. Um. And so there's there's real money to be made. This is no longer just like some Arajwuan niche thing that's like catering to just a few, um interested parties. You know. This is like it's it's gone mainstream. Um. And so it's it's super exciting and it's exciting. It's exciting. It's exciting obviously from a commercial standpoint, but it's exciting also because people, as you mentioned, are are now more invested than ever in their health and their well being, in their wellness. There's all these new avenues to explore UM fitness. Right, so if you don't like going to a gym, or if you don't like, uh, you know, pilates, well we've got this new you know, like platform where you can you know, hope we find what works for you. There's like all these different options. Now it's like it's become like a Vegas buffet and um, and I think it's only I think it's great. Is it working? I don't know. People are still sick, but at least, uh, at least you know there at least we're trending in the right direction. Well, at least we're we're at least we see what's possible. Now we see that there are some some solutions out there. They have only filtered to a select number. Uh you know, they've filtered selectively. Hopefully they can filter more widespread, and particularly now after the pandemic, when I think a lot of people are willing to their their focus more on their health. They're focused more on using the tools available to them. So we'll have to see how that translates. Hopefully that the pandemic was a wake up calling. Now that we're out of the fog of the the the boots on the ground, the actual situation here, you know, people can look at it with a bit of a clear view. Um. But in terms of commercial products out there that can help your health and fitness and help you lead a healthier and better life, The Genius Kitchen available of Core on Amazon. Um all the obviously you got to hear Max. You can not difficult to identify him as a wealth of knowledge. So if you want access to this knowledge in more consumable form to inform your choices day to day, The Genius Kitchen Max. Anything else about this book or where we can find it, I'm just super excited that. I mean, the recipes are all incredible. I've got like the best of the best in there. Also, it's like it's a kitchen guide, so whether you're a total novice in the kitchen or your seasoned pro. I mean, one of the things that I knew going into this book is that dudes don't typically buy cookbooks, right, Like, when was the last time you bought a cookbook? Matt Blinsky? I think I bought the Joy of Cooking just for ships and giggles is a decorative item maybe like seven years ago. So that's about it. Yeah, So I mean I went into it, like I I wrote a book that I thought would appeal to um all agendas and uh and and therefore provide foods that were and and photos and sort of a look for the book that was not just like super um you know, like for lists uh and and and um florid, but something that would appeal to you know, to anybody really looking to improve their cooking and cooking I think is like, you know, we talked about how we are we now live in the era of the specialist, right, and I think, as I mentioned, we've suffered as a result. We outsource our culinary knowledge, right, we outsource our financial literacy, we outsource our health literacy, we outsource our nutritional literacy. The fact that we all now have like smartphones and a traitor Joe's and restaurants you know, everywhere. We've solved the issue of food scarcity, right, but our ability to to fend for ourselves, to cook delicious meals for ourselves has been lost. And cooking, eating together it's the way that we communicate. It's the way that we bond the way that we express love. It's super important. So I hope to bring it back UM with the Genius Kitchen by paying a by paying homage to UH the joy of cooking and the joy of eating together and being able to create delicious, healthy, nourishing meals UM for ourselves and those that we care about. Very noble goals, My friend Max, it was a pleasure and a long time coming. Congrats on the new book. It's fantastic. Can't wait to put it to use myself. Thank you so much for joining us, ladies and gentlemen. This is the Prevailing Narrative. I Am at Bolinski once again. You can listen and subscribe to the Prevailing Narrative on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you're listening right now. Make sure to follow me on my socials at Matt Bolinsky m A T T B I L I N s k Y. The Prevailing Narrative is a Cavalry Audio production and association with I Heart Radio produced by Brandon Morgan, Executive produced by Dana Bernetti and Kegan Rosenberger for Calvary Audio. I'm at Bolinsky