Tech, Meds & Processed Foods – What’s Really Fueling Us?

0:00 All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Space Tomatoes podcast. I'm your host Havoc and we have our other host Alex hello and with us today we have a special guest from the War Dragons community got a chance to meet this individual at the War Dragons Summit in San Francisco in what was that 2019 I think it was wow yeah wow that was six years time flies and uh great great gentleman uh can't wait to just get into some good conversation with him and welcome to the show jeremy thank you thanks for having me for showing up absolutely absolutely so whereabouts are you located uh greater seattle area a little bit north of that okay very nice weather weather okay out there right now uh it's it's it's as it normally is it's kind of uh what i like i call bipolar it will go from particularly cold to particularly hot uh but much more forgiving than i think much of the u.s at the moment yeah probably probably

1:35 well awesome so are you still playing this dragon game i am it's not if if it wasn't for my team i don't think i'd be playing anymore i i've long passed the point where I have a lot of faith in the NPG making changes that will reinvigorate the game for me if you know what I'm saying I'm I'm hanging in there for the people that I've been with for a very long time and I think there's a lot of people that are in a similar boat but that's sort of why I still have the game yeah now I know I went through that same thing I I told Ghost I'm like I I'm done I I don't want to play anymore.

2:18 And, you know, asked me to stay around for a while. So, you know, try and find a replacement. Plus I was an officer, right? So, and nobody wants that job. Nobody wants that job. Just, yeah. And so it was kind of a double whammy. And so I was asked to stay around for a little while and a month went by and three months and then six months. And at one point I just finally said, look, it's been nine plus months. in November, I'm done. At Alpaca, that's it. I'm not logging back on. I've heard that there has been kind of a resurgence of new players joining, etc., which I guess would be hard to tell in a higher-tier league because you don't really see them, right?

3:09 But yeah, I don't know how much that translates to players that are going to be, you know, there for a while. Yeah, I don't see the new players outpacing the people that have left the game, to be completely honest. I do see new players, and I have noticed a few that I wasn't seeing before, but, I mean, they're such a small amount, and even some of the more higher-ranked teams are hungry for even like people that know almost nothing about the game have not shown much just because that's the state of where the game is at the moment and i war dragons was not the first game that i played in in fact i was much more competitive in other games but it ultimately came to work-life balance and sort of like a how much money do i really want to spend on a game sort of scenario. Not really thinking anyone needs to spend any, but I tend to find time being the one thing I can't make more of. So if I throw some money at a problem and gain a bunch of time, I usually make that trade. So that's usually where I end up in that situation. But anyways, I mean, I see what happens there is with every game that I've played, especially mobile games, It's like they basically double down on some of the more toxic traits of the game to basically allow the people that I think bankroll most of it to bankroll more.

4:47 Basically, they feed the tail to the snake effectively. And I would think that that wouldn't last for very long. But I played a game, Dragons of Atlantis, before this one. I know a lot of other people from War Dragons also did maybe not as many but that game somehow is still going on today I still have a fairly large account there although it is worthless because the game has made similar changes where it's trying to encourage that spending by that group of people that are still there and has instead become unwieldy in complication as well as just tacked on all these things and completely made anything that was there completely irrelevant.

5:41 I mean, not that there shouldn't be some level of change. I personally was a big proponent for trying to get PG to adhere to a top tier and then like, you know, N-1, N-2, N-3, where you basically try to cost things for the level of subscription people have rather than just trying to like force everybody to always have the best of everything. And, you know, we had some temporary success there, but that's long since gone in my opinion. But anyways, yeah, I don't know. Mobile games, it's love-hate situation.

6:21 I honestly think that the money factor is ultimately what I think ruins it for a lot of people. And like I said, I don't mind some amount of it, but I've never wanted to be the, hey, who can flex their wallet the hardest? Because that's just dumb. Right. It's not a game I'm looking to win. Yeah, not in that arena for sure, right? I mean, there's other areas that, you know, like, you know, my garden's got a lot of plants in it. Okay, I spent some wise money there. But, you know, yeah, the digital pixel realm is not a, yeah, that's a tough one for sure.

7:06 Awesome. So you work in technology, right? I do. I'm technically, to genericize it, I'm a cloud engineer. which just means computer engineering, specializing in infrastructure, especially around effectively AWS, GCP, Azure type of infrastructure and various components. So, yeah, I work deep in technology and I actually enjoy it. It's sort of a big deal.

7:46 And I don't know how everyone else does it, but I definitely went through a, like, what do I want to do? Because I get bored if I do the same thing over and over again. I mean, I can suck it up, but it's just like if I was the guy turning a nut in a factory, I would be just absolutely just banging my head on the table. uh it's not i have to have some way to like have a challenge and like something that's adaptive and the good thing about technology especially it is that even when it's the same kind of problems it's never the same problem twice really if that makes any sense or at least that's sort of been my experience and and you know while you know 25 30 years ago it may have seemed like hey what happens when we like get rid of all these like stupid things it's like there's always going to be work there i'm not afraid of ai in any way shape and form like there's just there's an unending amount of work to be done there you just have to be willing to be flexible to like move with what the need is at the time and honestly i think most work should be that way anything that doesn't adapt probably deserves to be left behind to some degree innovate or die man yeah yeah no i i agree and it is at a slower pace i think it's the same everywhere right um pump plumbing right there's you're not using copper lines anymore you're using packs you know uh or if you're using the

9:20 copper you're not sweating it they have the crimp connectors now it's like basically uh putting together lego pieces for for dummies it's like super simple now yeah exactly so so you know welding same thing right uh it's just you know it changes and you have to adapt right i mean there's you know always going to be the mainframe personnel right and there there will always be a need for the non-changing environments um and sorry if anyone is a mainframe person And it's just one of those places that just, it works. It works. It works exceedingly well at what it does.

10:02 And it only does what it does. And it just old, archaic, but bulletproof, you know? Even that hasn't really gone away. I mean, I don't know if people really realize this, but technology, and I don't think it's just technology, but it kind of works in cycles. There's sort of like iterative cycles that happen. And, you know, computers very much went to like a very specialized scenario because I don't know how far. I mean, I did work on mainframes very early on for a very little bit. It wasn't a main thing, actually, probably a bigger accomplishment. The ones that I decommissioned more than anything else, replaced by like a Pentium 90 or something like that.

10:42 But no, it's like there's we've gone through this cycle with virtualization. I mean, there's several examples of this, but we've gone from a, hey, buy a random piece of whatever, run everything you can on it. And the more you can cram on it, the more cost effective it is to, hey, split everything apart, make it as isolated as possible. And then we went back to like, hey, now put all those isolated things back into one solid place together. we've effectively done both things, but we've layered them. And so that we've, and we've kind of got some inception going on because now we're doing virtualization within the virtualization, especially if you get into the hardware side of things.

11:25 Like if you've ever done like Cisco UCS is something that I've worked with before, for example, where they've tried to virtualize the hardware side of it, for example, the networking and the hardware side of it. And I don't necessarily want to jump too much technical. I don't know how technical your audience is, But basically, the thing is, is that very simple things become very complicated as soon as you, like, put, you know, a ton of layers inside of them. Like, you know, it doesn't matter how basic the concept is, you know. And that's a parallel that I find everywhere in life. I mean, that's sort of, you know, like we've mentioned, you know, we've talked about carnivore a little bit before. It's like that's sort of the same thing there.

12:05 Like there's the simplest things can be crazy complex when you dive into it enough. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's I think that's true with most anything. Right. Having a surface level view of it, it can look, you know, you can get a handle on it and it can look like one thing. But the second you start diving deep on anything, you get into the weeds and it's like this is a whole different ballgame. And like you were talking, right? I mean, you've got hardware virtualization, you've got machine level virtualization. Now you've got process level virtualization with things like Kubernetes. So now you've, I mean, you're literally, you know, and it is funny because we did go from, you know, cram everything you can onto a system and run as much as you can for cost cutting. Right.

12:54 And then we went to splitting everything out to highly specialized systems And then there was a whole thing about like okay well we need all these things So give us a hyper convergent infrastructure that includes all the highly specialized stuff in one system Right. Yeah. So it's, it is pretty interesting that the, you know, the, the amount of, of movement, I guess, in technology in general, it's insane. how and how quickly it moves right yes i think that's a big part of actually i was thinking about mentioning that myself but it's like sort of one of the big problems i've seen so when i first got into it which again i depending on when you start counting i kind of ran a computer business with my dad for a while before we actually went into the corporate world if you will um but uh first corporate experience anyways, everything was in this, like, don't do anything unless you absolutely have to scenario. Like I remember we had, we had firmware on network switches that didn't change for years. And the mere suggestion that we might want to do that was met with just this huge amount of red tape. Whereas today I'm in a situation where it's like, Hey, didn't you implement that thing that came out five seconds ago, like we've literally gone a complete 180 from, from having

14:24 the problem of effectively not moving fast enough to now we're moving so fast that we're actually kind of doing it sort of reckless, which to tie it back to like, I guess, PG, like we've probably all noticed like, you know, QA and developer cycles have changed in a way that isn't necessarily better. I mean, it's faster, but, but, but we're seeing a lot more stuff get turned out that that would have been caught way before it got released. Back when I worked with a team of QA engineers trying to find problems, they would have easily caught many of the things that get shipped these days, if you know what I mean. And it's not just BG.

15:05 I mean, some of the companies that I've worked with over the years, they've all, multiple have actually been, I was with them when they said, hey, let's hire a bunch of like, you know, usually outsourced or, you know, India usually is the scenario, a bunch of offshore folks because they're cheaper, which, by the way, I've never found it to actually be cheaper. I found that the salaries cost less, but it's like something in the neighborhood of like five plus of them to one of us with lag on time. I've had things where, you know, the most basic of thing, a simple question in the middle of the night when no one is around, went back and forth for like two weeks before we got to a resolution on something that would have been handled in five minutes with, you know, same shift kind of scenario.

15:58 I mean, these are all logistics challenges, but I mean, it's a logistics challenge that it seemed like across the U.S. anyway, at least in technology, they seem to be sort of moving towards the same direction, but doing it without having actually prepared for that change first is probably how I would say it. I mean, I think that there's, I think there's a meaningful benefit to most of these changes. It's just that we always go to the one extreme or the other extreme, and then like we sort of find the happy medium, but then we never stop there. It's just, we keep, you know, again, it's kind of the, sort of the adapt or die kind of thing. But, you know, with, with, you know, the way things kind of evolve, you know, if you, so I'm currently working, my current role falls sort of under a DevOps organization, which is the perfect example I'm trying to say.

16:52 And the old world, which I also lived and worked in, it was literally like IT ruled with an iron fist because we knew that if they didn't, dev would produce things that were just embarrassing because they only cared about the thing that I was supposed to make work worked, did not care about various components of security, did not care about various internal policies, documentation, did not care about a whole bunch of things. And so it was always kind of IT's role to like sort of safeguard and ensure that certain things were followed so much so that it became unwieldy slow to the point to where everybody was like, okay, we need to like move that out of IT and have it, which there was a tug of war is sort of my opinion, obviously, but, you know, sort of resulted in DevOps being created, which is sort of the halfway between those two things.

17:41 hey, let's automate as much as possible. Let's try to be more nimble and more agile, but also let's try to keep all of those things in place. And it's not necessarily wrong because we very much needed to be more quick, more agile about, you know, many of those policies. There's many things there that should have been automated a long time ago that never were for most companies anyways. But at the same time, you know, we've exchanged one set of problems for complete polar opposite set of problems. Because like I said, we tend to just leap before we look at, at least that seems to be the situation. And at least amongst the companies that I've worked for, they pay more attention to what like other companies are doing than they do for like thinking for themselves. They're, they're trying to stay with the market. Oh, my peers are doing this. So we need to be doing this. And you, and especially with most executives, you find, you find people that are like, you know, all about like the, you know, cloud this, outsourcing that.

18:39 Like there's always some sort of like, you know, word, which, you know, from a sales and marketing perspective, I absolutely respect it. But I mean, I think any technical person like myself, like you can smell bullshit from a mile away whenever it comes to, you know, a lot of fluff. Yeah, for sure. I had a CIO at one point and, you know, the industry trends, right? And, and every Monday I would come in and on my desk would be a paper clipped stack of cutouts of articles on, you know, current trends and what people are doing, et cetera. And that was, that was my homework to go like, look into this. Should we be doing this?

19:26 I don't know. Now, I do think there's some level of that that everyone should be doing. I do think a lot of technical folks tend to fail to sell themselves. I don't think that's the primary role. And I think a smart company would probably try to leverage the things that are special about that role. Like, I think one of the failings at several companies that I've worked for is you often take like a senior resource such as myself and you end up you end up having them do a bunch of minutiae because of like five minutes of work that was too complicated for someone else to do it and it when 95 of that work was like busy work you know what i'm saying and and i mean that's i don't think again kind of kind of where i came from it's like i don't think the job's ever going to get away. I think that the job could be more satisfying, but like, you know, the, the, the need to like deal with people problems has never gone away. I don't particularly, I do better than a lot of folks that I work with. I mean, you guys have probably met some IT folks who have various stereotypical personalities. I'm not saying that I do or don't. I definitely have had less trouble with crossing personal boundaries, social boundaries, than a lot of people that I've worked with had.

20:47 I've had some people that very much were like anti-social, didn't want to do anything, but were very good at certain sorts of stuff. I've definitely worked with like the brilliant assholes. And I mean, there's all kinds of stuff that I've seen, but most people in IT and technical fields, tend to focus on technical problems. They work in that field because that's either what they're good at or what they enjoy or some combination of the both. And the problem is, is that that usually means they're not focused on things that are outside of that scope. And companies sort of have like a, you know, well, most of them tend to, you know, sink or swim on your own.

21:32 Like, it doesn't matter if it has nothing to do with the skill set we hired you for, you know, you either survive or you don't survive. and yeah and i do think you know being in technology myself right it's it's a reality right uh i think a lot of a lot of the it people i've met right it were technology you know people in technology one of the things and you even said this right i in a way right but and it's the same thing that I said, right? I get along with these machines better than I do with people and it works, right? It just clicks for me. And that's a rampant thing in the technology field. It really is.

22:18 Those soft skills are, you know, people skills, soft skills are not as refined, I think, for a lot of IT people, but they can work magic behind a keyboard, right? So that's the difference, you know? and that doesn't require soft skills. And so I think that the attraction is there for that personality type, and so you see a lot of it. I think you're just trying to suck up for when the AI overlords take over. Maybe. You never know. They're taking me out first because I'm not complying. Yeah, depending on who you talk to, it's already happened, right? We've already hit that inversion curve, but I don't know.

23:02 hard to say. What we know about today as AI is not actual artificial intelligence in any shape or form of the definition of artificial intelligence. It is all marketing, which goes back to what I was saying before. We have a thing that has been made packageable and resellable that is now a management buzzword that every company is like, oh, we need to get on the AI bandwagon before we lose. You know, that's exactly the kind of thing that I'm talking about. Now, don't get me wrong. I think that there's definite benefit to adopting large language modules to effectively automate things that were otherwise unreachable.

23:46 But let's also acknowledge the fact that some degree of a similar logic existed in tons and tons of websites for certain companies for a very long time. And we didn't have a name for it. We didn't call it AI and most people understood it to be closer to what it actually was. You know, it's a, it's a fancy if then with some, with some little bit of, of, of, of language behind it. Text modelers all it really, at the end of the day. But that being said, they, they have made strives now, right. Or strides in the modeling.

24:27 Right. So again, no, I don't believe that it is that truly intelligent thing. I think so it's an awesome tool to be used in the right space. It's still got a long way to go before it's, you know, I just don't, it's not very polished from my eyes, right? The fact that it will hallucinate bad data confidently and tell you, oh, yeah, this is the correct information. Yeah, that's problematic for me, right? I tend to feel when I do engage and use AI, I tend to feel that I've got about a 50-50, right?

25:09 I'll either get, you know, 50% of the time I'll get a correct response and 50%, it will just be incorrect. But inside of that, it mixes as well because in the 50% correct response, there will also be portions that are not correct or not even in line with what I was asking. Right. An example asking about a specific feature and a product, et cetera. And then it gives you, you know, information answering for that feature because it couldn't find it anywhere. But that information is from a completely different product from a different vendor and their solution around doing something.

25:51 Right. So it's incorrect. Right. And those are the things I think are more important at this point But you know I still feel like there are areas that it being put into use that i i personally think are somewhat dangerous you know oh for sure i mean so i mean i i would actually say that i would i i think that we try to humanize things a lot that we don't really need to. And the term hallucination, I mean, I don't know, maybe it was meant to be a humanized thing. But when I first heard it, it sounded more like one of those like sadistic jokes that the tech guy that created it made. It's like, this will be funny. Let's call it a hallucination, you know, because, you know, it's sort of like a way to refer to it that is that, I don't know, it's got that kind of humor that I'm used to seeing from that, you know.

26:52 But I mean, to me, the tool is never wrong. It's like saying like, oh, when I use an airbrush and I operate it this way, it doesn't do the same thing it did that way. Well, you didn't know your tool. We need to stop thinking of AI as a thing that finds correct answers. Again, there's no intelligence there. We like to pretend it does. It wasn't marketed as having intelligence. But you have to apply human thought to be able to have the intelligence to be like, wait, that doesn't add up. I need to ask it something else. I mean, right now, it is like any other tool. You have to basically say, oh, that didn't do what I wanted it to do. I need to adjust my instructions so that it doesn't then check the results there.

27:37 is the difference between, I mean, so there's a lot of people that, quite frankly, get paid for work that they maybe shouldn't get paid for. I mean, let's be honest, if it works and they get away with it, is it really wrong? I mean, that's sort of kind of how our system works to some degree. But I mean, if you're a technical person like myself, that probably annoys the crap out of you, especially if they're one of your co-workers, and they're basically doing no work while other people are working very hard, for example. But the idea that you can just take a thing, throw it into a tool, and whatever the result comes out, just spit that out. Across every tool that we have, I don't care what it is, you get in-depth enough. You learn the boundaries of where and how to adjust the usage of it. And AI is no different than that. It can be very valuable. And To me, it's a time-saving tool because it is essentially an if-then, but it's able to process details that I could spend my whole lifetime doing at the resolution that it can because it can process so much more data.

28:46 I also think it's kind of scary because the one big thing that kind of protected us from being in a surveillance world was the fact that you couldn't have enough humans monitoring all of the various points of data at any given time. For a while, we've had facilities that were capable of recording everything. It's just that you couldn't actually put attention to all of those. With large language models, they can find patterns enough to find enough stuff to where now that's somewhat, I mean, there's still difference there. But we've fundamentally shifted what's possible there with not much effort, you know, without having to hire, you know, millions, billions of people or whatever.

29:28 Oh, yeah. No, it definitely, that is one area that, I mean, you know, you look at things that came before this that worked in massive scale, right? Data lakes, you know, things like Splunk, etc. Right. And you can you can kind of see how, you know, in those areas without a tool like Splunk to be able to do enterprise logging for, you know, and reporting and actually find actionable information, pertinent information is that's just a daunting job. Well, like you said, right, things like carnivore and the predecessor to that where you literally have the communications traffic of an entire nation plus, right, in a data center is, you know, that's one thing.

30:22 But, you know, again, like you said, the saving grace there was there was so much data that, you know, it's kind of like looking for a piece of hay in a haystack. You know what I mean? literally yeah so and llm certainly do that they they allow you to go through and and uh you know and you're right to an extent you know tuning prompts and getting to a place where you you are better at prompting what you want back from it i agree with but again they're just there are times when it's like, hey, you know, with regards to product X, a specific feature, this type, please show me how to enable and configure this on this platform, you know, blah, blah, blah, using command line interface.

31:17 And it comes back and gives you product Y's product sheet as a data reference point and pointing to how they do it. But that's not product X. And I clearly defined, right? So that's just one example that recently really kind of rustled my jimmies, if you will. Yeah, I've gotten tripped up by a few of those because, you know, Google was so quick to replace their search results with AI summary and same with every other one that's out there. And so, you know, it's 99% of the time, you know, pretty darn good summary of what was there. But that 1% of the time, boy, that can sure bite you if you know what I'm saying.

32:00 And I mean, you understand what it's doing. It's also very prone to the age old problem of GIGO, right? Yeah. Garbage in, garbage out. And it's crawling the web. and we all know the web is just a bastion of truthful information there's nothing out there that's incorrect right but if you can't find the answer from a reliable source it'll deepen its search and that's where you start to get into issues with bad information coming back but but it's still if you if you use it correctly it's still not so much better i mean in the tech world I mean, I predate when you could Google things.

32:43 So I used to have to solve things without the ability to do Google or any search. Even the early version of the web, even when you're using like links in a text browser and trying to search on a search engine, there was nothing useful to find there. I mean, news groups, maybe you had some stuff, but usually you were figuring it out on yourself, calling your buddy or, you know, maybe calling the company that made it. We didn't used to have this unlimited amount of information. But I mean, today, I mean, I've had answers that I found like hundreds of pages deep into Google results before. And what you're really trying to do is find that needle in the haystack is pattern recognition. And it's not that you can't do it better.

33:24 It's just that it can do good enough in seconds. What would take you days, basically. And I mean, that's sort of like what I think like it's like one of the biggest places that I can kind of describe what AI does. because it's basically pattern recognition effectively applied with some language instructions effectively. And the thing is, is that to Photoshop, anyone that's ever done image editing and tried to blend two things together or cut things apart, you realize that you can do an undetectable job if you zoom way in and do it one pixel at a time, but no one has the time for that. And so most people, they zoom quite a ways out and they tolerate some slop or they use some sort of like smoothing or smudging tool or some sort of blend it to sort of cheat on the way.

34:16 But an AI tool can do that one pixel at a time and it can do it instantly. And the pattern is generally, I mean, again, you're still going to find scenarios where there's a weird image that the pattern didn't work with, but it's pretty rare. So it's sort of like you just, again, you just got to get like, give me what you got. Look at the result and be like, ooh, this thing didn't turn out how I have to, and then update the instructions sort of. And if you look at it as a tool and stop thinking that it's actually intelligent, it works great. And the worst downside is that it's training on what's on the web, which means as it produces data that gets published to the web, it's feeding from its own results.

35:00 So it's sort of evolving what it trains from over time to some degree, which I don't know, you guys probably heard the joke about how like AI art was like so bad after, I can't remember how much time it was that like all AI art was starting to look the same because it was training from the results of other AI. And it was sort of like a fractal where it was approaching a scenario where it no longer had the look that everyone liked it to have anymore because it was tainted by what it was training on. Why do they never get the hands right? I always got like extra fingers and stuff. They've done some updates and it's doing a lot better.

35:41 But yeah, that was one of the early tells on AI was just look at that. Or even text. They messed up the text a lot in a lot of the pictures I get. Double spaces, way too many commas, double dashes. some of them like chat gpt with the ridiculous overuse of emojis and and things of that nature sure you you can fairly easily spot ai written content yeah but even the google um the ai results that it gives you now they're not very dependable and i think everybody's probably used that and and something as simple as uh i was helping my neighbor change the oil in his truck and i said how many quarts of oil does your truck take?

36:28 And he said, oh, let me Google it real quick. And he told me what it was. And I'm like, that doesn't sound right to me. Let's get your manual out and look at it. And if we would have went by Google, it would have been like two quarts low. And I'm like, yeah, I do not trust the results that it gives. And you would think that would be simple enough to look at. They would have manuals for a five-year-old pickup truck online, I would think. but it's not like being two quarts low is really problematic no no why not you know i mean vehicles are cheap these days you can just buy a new one yeah just get a new one and the motor blows it's yeah i don't even i mean changing the oil is too expensive just to get a new new vehicle yeah the oil capacity thing is actually an interesting thing because i mean all the way back that i can remember that's always been one of those things where you never got I shouldn't say you never in a lot of vehicles that I've owned over the years you've gotten fuzzy results or no results on certain things you know you ultimately had to throw the dipstick in there and see what it came out with and be like oh okay run it a little bit and then check it again but I'm surprised I'm pretty sure that's just I'm surprised they don't have that on the underhood information sticker you would think they would but I've never seen that ever.

37:54 I mean, maybe somebody writes it on there with like a, you know, a pen, a paint pen or something, but I've never seen a sticker with the information. Yeah. I haven't seen that yet either. I have seen manuals though that have the information in there and they give you a range because again, I think this is the root of that particular problem is that everyone's trying to cost cut. So like, you know, if Toyota makes, you know, like 10 different like v6s i don't know what the real numbers are i'm making up numbers for example but you know and like most of them fall within a like a two-quart range they're probably going to say just this to this range and instead of printing two manuals or you know i'm sure they also have but i'm just saying like what's generally available out there you're more likely to find the the high volume version of anything and so that's more likely to be the the economy any mass printed thing that has the generic information on it.

38:51 And, you know, I mean, we've probably all, well, we probably all been around long enough that if we did work on cars you went to get some really basic part looked up the exact thing and answered 50 questions on is it this one or is it that one Is it this one Is it the four liter or is it the five liter Is it the, you know, is it male transmission or is it the automatic? And then you end up getting the result. They give you a part and it doesn't even come close to fitting. Right. Yeah. Like when I ask them for a quarter inch fuel filter. Yeah. And they're like, what vehicle is it for? I'm like, what does it matter what it's for? it's a quarter inch fuel length you know fuel filter is it for an automatic or a manual yeah yeah it's a fuel filter what year is that just can you just go there's the box just i want that you know ai could probably help with that because that's probably a ui thing because what's probably going on is they there isn't a feature they built into there to be able to search by the size they don't probably have that spec or whatever the data might even be in the database but they they just they designed it in such a way where they probably found the last prop these less problems happen if they filter you down this series of questions and that's how it kind of arrives to where it is because again most of these people is like someone that works at napa or whatever which you know may or may not have graduated high school yet and may or may not know much about auto, you know, and so you could see where like an AI model, which could literally

40:27 like look in the backend could theoretically find that data a lot more efficiently without, you know, with just a generic search or something like that, you know, with a degree of inaccuracy. It does make sense. I actually hadn't thought about that, but if I were designing something like that for an auto parts store, the way that I would do it, make model year, I would, it would just be part of the thing and then once you get those three things filtered you've limited your part search to just what would be for that vehicle right and then you go to fuel filter uh it makes sense yeah i miss the old days when you get the one old guy behind the counter that's been there for 30 years he busts out this book that's like this thick and he's got like 10 of them and he's like oh i'll find that part and like 30 minutes later and there's 100 people lined up behind you at the counter and he's like i got it right here back when things that we made in america were over-engineered lasted longer than they should back when you could actually buy parts that were made in the usa yeah you can't even buy brake pads or rotors that are made in the usa anymore i don't think they exist yeah yeah well i wonder that'd be interesting i've looked i could not find them not for the application i was looking for Now we've got to find an auto parts executive or something, get them on.

41:54 I'd be willing to bet it exists somewhere, but I bet if you realize that it costs you like $100 per pad or something like that, you're like, well, I didn't want it that badly. Well, that's the problem. Nobody wants to pay it. If it doesn't squeal, sign me up. Like I can get the same Chinese made pads for $24.95 and, you know, or the OEM replacement pads for $99. I mean, the chances are 99% of the people are going to go for the $25. Yeah. I mean, that's statistically a thing that happens. I mean, I see it happen all the time. It actually pisses me off because I'm like, this is clearly the better product. Everyone spend the extra money on it and nobody does.

42:34 It doesn't even matter if it barely saves you anything. In fact, I mean, this is one of my big pet peeves in business as it was, you know, I'm not rich enough to be one of the business owners yet. But, you know, the our entire market seems to be focused around like short term gains over over their competition. Like nobody seems to care about the long term, but also our population is entirely based upon, you know, what will make me more money today? even if I spend 10 times as much in 10 years, they don't care. They took less money out of their pocket today. And so the whole, I don't know, I grew up in a total cost of ownership evaluation and having to fight the CapEx versus OpEx battles and all this other crap. And today, I find myself in a stupider world where I've been told to buy ridiculously expensive things that didn't do anything we wanted because of reasons, you know, it's, it's, it's, and, and, you know, I, I see this all the time. And why do you think Walmart's doing so good? Why do you think, you know, it's everybody, why does everybody, most people are aware of the trade they're making.

43:45 It's just, they still want to save those few bucks now, even if it costs them a lot more in the future yeah and it's the team thing right it's it's why exactly popular and what people seem to neglect to you know pay attention to is look that team product is probably going to last you maybe a year and you'll buy another one and another one and another one whereas the one that you bought that was 400 times you know the cost not 400 times but you know 4x the the cost right so instead of 25 it's 100 uh 10 years later it's still working yep and and at that point you've bought two and a half of the one that's still working by buying junk stuff over and over and over again now it's not always true right i mean there are some things that are just you know cheap cheaper is fine you know but um you know when it comes to to they're not much i think the cheaper is better at the end of the day the other problem you have with these channels like amazon and timu is that they they pollute the supply chain with counterfeit items and bogus items for something as benign as uh spark plugs on a car which you know they're at most 15 bucks a piece for like really good iridium plugs for a modern engine And he probably, you know, V16, six of them.

45:16 So, I mean, it's a little bit chunk of change, but, you know, people think they could buy it on Amazon for, I can get it for $9 on there. But a lot of the time they're fake and they won't last as long. And then, you know, you're doing it again and doing these procedures on these new cars. I mean, they're not as simple. You don't have as much room to work in there and, you know, you're fighting against each other. And then I've seen that they're polluting, you know, the supply chain down. And at retailers, you wouldn't think that they just, you know, I don't know how they get in there, but somehow they are. Now you've got to be careful where you even get things from. Yeah, I think there's a number of factors there. One of them is that that steep knockoff works good enough to solve the problem enough of the time that people are willing to risk it.

46:03 I mean, I know people that work in various fields and, you know, especially in automotive. they'll often like be like well i'll take the thing that i can get tomorrow for a few bucks and if it doesn't work out they'll either eat it or or or you know try to return it or something like that you know but you know at the same time the the the product that they really wanted you they know they can trust it you know they may have ordered it at the same time but it might not be there for a month or something like that you know it's sort of i i so i mean not to like jump into the economy, but it's just like, you know, sort of like the whole trade war scenario to me is it's, you know, it is an open market has a lot of benefits. I do think that there's scenarios where you want to like guard against having anyone that can like blackmail certain resources. Like I've always felt very strongly about food being something that, for example, each country to the extent that they can, can produce their own energy is probably another one.

46:58 You know what I'm saying? Those are things where you don't want someone to be able to like choke cold you out just because they want to, you know, but, you know, generally speaking though, it, there is, there is a synergy that happens when you have a thing where you buy apart from a person that does better at it there or cheaper or whatever, you know, has a resource that you don't have. I mean, we've got in the U S you know, some of the largest amount of resources available to us, but you know, we're not tapping into all of them and you wouldn't necessarily want us to exhaust them all right away either. Not that you could do that overnight, but I mean, it's, you know, it isn't necessarily better to do that. We've sort of like aligned ourselves to be like a services economy, which, I mean, there's pluses and minuses with that, but there's a lot of financial benefit with that. And honestly, what's better than selling your time for a lot of money, you know, sort of, but yeah, I do think though that we have this problem and I think we all probably lived through this era because light bulbs is probably the thing that I'll say that pisses me off the most, by the way, because we all remember how long they used to last.

48:08 Then they started lasting less long. Then they sold the LED. Well, they had several other iterations, but eventually we ended up in LED light bulbs, which are supposed to last basically forever, except that they don't anymore. And we all probably remember early on, decades ago, the whole conversation about engineered obsolescence, because there were companies that basically did so well that they sold themselves out of selling any more of their product, basically. And that sort of led to a bunch of people that took it to the other extreme of, hey, let's be as greedy as possible and let's try to make things have to fail so often they have to buy them all the time, which also I think kind of feels like the whole carnivore thing and the health scenario, I kind of feel that applies there too.

48:51 How do you sell drugs? How do you sell? If you actually remove the need for them, there's sort of like a problem there. So how much money do you want to invest? When the company that's funding the solution for not needing any more things that the company has, and I'm being a little bit dramatic, but it's just like, is the same company that also sells the products, what is their incentive to actually, if you have that breakthrough and they're like, well, this is going to end our company if we release this, do you really think they're going to do that? companies I've worked for, I'm pretty sure the answer is no, you know? And so it's the same thing with light bulbs. I'm pretty sure if we had a hundred year light bulb, what would that do to the light bulb industry? I mean, I don't, I don't personally think that that should be a problem, but it's just like, it's sort of like running into these like philosophical scenarios with where capitalism, you know, meets innovation meets, you know, several other planes at the same time, you know, because it annoys me so much how often I have to change all my damn light bulbs.

49:57 And it seems to be only happening more as we add better technology to it. And the cost is going up. So you're getting a worse product and paying more for it. And you're going to like it because they've effectively removed any alternative. And I'm seeing that in tons of other products. But light bulbs is one of the ones that piss me off the most. I mean, light bulbs, there's actually a consortium. they started a consortium there's there's a good video on youtube look up light bulb planned obsolescence i think will get you there and and they talk about it and they literally started a consortium which like that's not legal right you can't like go and like you know uh i can't remember what the term for it is but you know go to all the competitors in the industry and like do handshake to like you know lower the that's not legal right but they did it it's known they still you know it's an ongoing thing um and so yeah that's it is it's a it's a serious piss me off and an led i mean come on man yeah i've got you know i remember booting up a uh you know 20 year old Apple 2C.

51:13 The little LED still works. LEDs are like one of the most simplistic electronic devices in the world. They don't go out. I mean, they can. You can break the wire. You know what I mean? You can terminate the lead. But other than that, they don't really tend to just die. So now you're selling light bulbs that you have to plan in a way to make these basically you know very long lasting types of of light amending diodes die you know just you can get more money and it's like dude ah you know but on the flip side would anybody go spend 200 bucks on a light bulb if you knew it was the last light bulb you'd ever buy for that particular fixture would you spend the 200 or would you buy the one next to it for five bucks seven bucks I probably would, but I think most people would not.

52:07 I mean, I'm always thinking about what the long-term thing is. And again, I would depend on my faith in it actually lasted as long as it did. So, I mean, you know, even if it paid for itself, I'd probably try the experiment at least with one bulb or something and see how it worked for a while, if you know what I'm saying. But yeah, I mean, I do think most people are like, oh, no, less money up front. I'm going to take that offer every day and that's what they do. I'm a huge proponent of the buy once cry once philosophy. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, that's why I own a bunch of old crap from decades ago that still works. But I mean, I paid for it. I like stuff that's serviceable as well.

52:50 Like we were talking about like washing machines is a big one, right? The old stuff, right? Without all the, you know, electronics and everything else that goes into it. Nowadays, your washing machine breaks. It's almost 100% of the time. It's a circuit board on the back of the, you know, in the unit. And that's where all the soft touch and the whiz-bang features and sounds and all that stuff comes from. It's not the actual mechanical working portion of the, you know, washing machine. Yeah, speaking of why, like, yeah, we had to replace our washer last year. And we were looking at them. And, I mean, they all have that stuff. Like, every single, almost every single one of them, like Wi-Fi. Like, why do I need to notify my phone when the load is done?

53:34 I don't. Yeah. So with all this stuff, you know, they got screens and whistles and like, you know, notifications. It costs more. Like, so we went with the Speed Queen, which is like the most simplistic. It's like buying a washer from like the late 70s or early 80s. There's nothing to it. It's serviceable and, you know, there's nothing. But it costs more than the one with all the crap on it, which makes absolutely no sense to me. But I guess like if you're curing a disease or any other problem, like you lose a customer. So I guess a lot of these companies see it that way. Well, back on that, you were talking about the whole pharmaceutical thing and that whole industry, right?

54:15 Here's an easy litmus test, right? The idea behind these agencies, and they tell us how much they're spending on it and how hard they're working on it. But just off the top of your head, they've been around for a very long time, right? And I don't know about you, but I hear all the time, we're spending $2 billion on this research to cure. Name three things that they've cured. Not treated, not prophylactic, just actual cure. Name three.

54:56 Okay, let's just make it one. Name one. I think I got one. Exactly. There's no money in a treatment or in a cure. There's only money in treatment or a prophylactic type of a treatment, right? Something you could take to not have something occur. If you create a cure, your business is dead. Yes. It's gone. There's no more of that problem that you make so much money on. And I think there's definitely, I don't have any answer for it, right? But I definitely think that some of that stuff needs to change, right? There needs to be a real, actual, you know, not a vision statement, but like an actual mission to actually cure.

55:48 And if you're not curing anything, then GTFO, man. it ultimately has to come to i think unfortunately some kind of like government because what you what you ultimately have to do is make the wrong choice the more painful choice and the right choice and i'm not saying use the stick instead of the carrot i'm literally saying use both use both or maybe just use the carrot whatever you can get away with but i mean Eat them and shove carrots down their throat. Yeah, seriously. But I mean, it is to that perspective. The food industry is crazy. And if you think about it from a very business perspective, you understand the problem right away.

56:32 If you look at any processed food, the profit margins are like at a minimum of 10x profit from the cost to make it versus the cost to produce it. Take any whole food, but take meat, which I'm pretty big on as I'm doing the carnivore diet, as we mentioned before. It's like meat specifically, there is fractions of percents to be made because it has to go through three different layers. There's really not much in the terms of subsidies anymore. I mean, honestly, you can probably almost do better by raising your own cows or whatever food you want at this point in time. Just because if you've got to go through, by the time you've got to get that, you've got to feed the thing. You've got to butcher the thing.

57:13 You've got to package the thing. You've got to ship the thing. You've got to freeze it. whatever it is that you got to do by the time you've gone through all those stages the amount of of room to make money on is like so narrow it is like zero and that's a similar story exists for everything that's not a processed food and especially when you talk about like seed oils or you talk about like and the other piece right is is that none of the you know whole foods right none of the foods that are good for you yeah uh are shelf stable like the stuff that's not good for you. Exactly. You know, right off the bat, that should be like number one indication. If this stuff can sit on a shelf for 25 years, it's not good for you. Okay. Food should die. It should decompose. It should go back into its natural state and become dirt that more food is made from.

58:06 Right. Yeah. My, my personal opinion, but yeah, no, I agree. And, and, you know, some of that's around regulations and things of that nature. Some of it's also around, uh, uh, the way that we do these things with very large ag shops, right? Back in the day, it would be a farmer and the farmer would, you know, or rancher or whatever, depending where you are. And they would have, you know, their, their meat and maybe they had a packer, et cetera, but you know, there's, they still exist that you just have to find them which are you know actual farmers that you go and they have their meat from their cows on their farm that they sell through their farm stand you know and and at that point you're cutting out a lot of that stuff right yeah there are websites where you can find places to buy a half of a quarter or a quarter of a cow the problem is a lot of people don't want to buy in those kinds of volumes i do but a lot of people don't want to do that but like i said i actually think if you have land you know raising your own cows probably the cheaper way of going and the thing about it is as anyone knows like one cow can pretty much roughly feed one person for a year so you know uh pretty pretty well and you could stretch that to be a lot more if you wanted to basically uh that kind of investment is like you know i don't care what kind of like bad thing happens that cow is still going to feed the same number of people for the same duration of time and it's it's it's it's a solid thing to have but but uh but yeah

59:42 anyways the the whole the whole the whole food thing though it's it's it really does come down to like just like where's the money at and and i don't know if you know this but that all started uh well there's probably other things but the main thing that put us where we are today the western diet was established because of effective problems with world during world war ii there was a big food shortage and so they had to figure a way to feed our populations and when they did that they came up with the best thing that they could it was not meat at the time they couldn't ramp it up fast enough yeah yeah the pyramid was propaganda or pyramid the biggest layer of it was grains you know and it's like ah that if anything that that should just be upside down uh but even then the thing was yeah my my personal opinion of government you know this we talked a little bit at the summit but my personal opinion of of anything you love it related is yeah it's it's a travesty it's just you know i think milton friedman said it best right uh if you gave the federal government uh control over the saharan desert there'd be a shortage of sand in five years yes and so you know but yeah and and food's just a one of those things that you know the highly processed stuff right the the i think the the um the cost benefit to that comes in with the ability

1:01:18 to package and keep on a shelf, right? Because you can have a warehouse stocked with stuff and you're not worried about spoilage. That's a big factor. But just to be clear, you can do pretty good with some whole foods. I mean, for example, we've known how to make pemmican for a long time. And while they'll say a couple of years, the reality is there's people that have eaten pemmican 10 years later and it's still edible. I'm not saying that that's an ideal scenario. I'm just saying that between, I mean, you can shelf stabilize things, but I think that you're onto the right track because it's literally what was the more economical, what made them the most profit, what was the most cheapest, what was the quickest.

1:01:58 Because, yeah, our government could churn out massive amounts of grains and put them on shelves and ship it around as needed, which is exactly what did happen at that time. But also for anyone that has spoken to their relatives that were alive during that time, they'll tell you how the government encouraged them to grow their own gardens. The government encouraged them to have chickens. The government told them to can stuff like they like literally it wasn't just the unilateral thing. And I actually don't even necessarily think there's a problem with that. I mean, I don't like how the government thinks that when when it suits their needs, they can lie. I mean, let's be honest. The government is ultimately more political than it is like factual or scientific or whatever.

1:02:39 The person in office dictates more than anything. You can look at several of the unclassified things. I always like to look at, you know, some of the things that were around the Vietnam War era, for example. There's many things that have been declassified where you're like, holy crap, that was, there's a person's name that's assigned to that. Everyone knows about it. And no one seems to care anymore, which is why they, but I mean, to me, it's like, I just think about if that happened today, well, today, nothing would surprise me very much. But I'm just saying a couple of presidents ago, there's a long list of things that they had got ejected so fucking fast for and it wouldn't wouldn't have mattered. Today, it's a little bit different.

1:03:20 But still, the point is, is that the things that we know that they've standard operating were doing to support policy that was kept quiet until they no longer was a thing they needed to keep quiet is huge. So you can you can fairly safely assume that stuff's never stopped happening. You know what I'm saying? So like whenever it comes to this, whenever they think, oh, it's going to cause panic, it's going to cause this or it's going to cause that, they're going to lie to you because that's what they think is best for everybody. And so you kind of got to expect that to some degree. But I mean, the big travesty was that we made this shift and then we didn't say, okay, war over, everything go back to how it was before.

1:04:00 We implemented a temporary thing, which I mean, we all work in IT, so we probably all have the or have worked with tech at some point. So we all have the joke about how a temporary fix is always permanent, if you know what I'm saying. But I mean, our huge failing was to let that stay in place. I mean, I think we need to have more transparency. In order for government to be less toxic, transparency is the key there, not anything else. Because it's going to do stupid things. So the more that's out in the open, the better. Like, that's sort of my opinion. Not trying to go politics here. But so, I mean, food wise, I don't know that we could have done with meat what we did with anything else.

1:04:44 And we actually had problems with grains. I don't know if you know this, but we had removed the nutrients from the soil to the point where we had to learn how to add nitrogen back. They had to invent a process to re-nitrogenize soil. That the reason why fertilizer is now also explosive or can be made into one I should um it gets even worse i mean with the flour we did that but what we ended up doing is in our genetic modification of flour to make it more you know produce a little bit better heavier grain uh to be you know able to be stored in grain bins for longer and things of this nature we also removed critical mineral components of it as well So now you see it's, it's enriched or enhanced with folic acid and, you know, all this stuff.

1:05:35 And then we bleach it, which you just basically destroyed. There's, there's almost, I mean, honestly, it's almost not worth like, why, why eat this? Right. I mean, if you, if you were, you know, in a bad situation and, and it's hard to come by food, then, then obviously eat what you can. Right. But I mean, if you were, you know, first world and you're not in that situation, anything to do with refined flour or any kind of a refined grain, I just don't. Right. I mean, I would argue, you know, in general, carbohydrates and things of that nature should be something that are special occasions at most.

1:06:20 Yeah. Oh, I'm on board. Yeah. Like that pizza? toxic yeah like that pizza the pizza you can actually make carb-free pizza for the most part but yeah it's it's yeah there's so much things on nutrition so i mean just for i guess people that are watching you know so i like most people believed a lot of the stuff that i was told all my life and didn't really have any sort of evidence to suggest otherwise i about i guess three years ago, maybe four years ago, some three or four years ago, I got a, I got some symptoms early bad, went to the doctor and that was a whole terrible experience, which I could spend a whole time, a whole day on all itself, but effectively came back with, oh, I'm diabetic now.

1:07:09 And it was neuropathy that I was experiencing. It was so bad, which, you know, that went for me from starting out as sort of like a, like, oh, this is like a death sentence. Like everything just got just destroyed for me, especially having seen all the stuff that I've seen her have relatives that have had very bad situations with that. And I was like, this is just worst news I could ever have. But interestingly enough, it actually ended up being kind of the key to unlocking the truth behind nutrition, which, you know, almost everything that I had been told, it's almost the opposite that's true. Not all, but, you know, the vast majority of things. In fact, even like the, I mean, I don't know if people realize this, but, you know, like most of us probably grew up being told, oh, you need to eat carrots because it's good for your eyes.

1:07:58 Well, I don't know if you know this. That was a, I think it was World War II, I think. I don't know. It was one of, I don't think it was World War I. But anyways, we had some really cool new missiles that we were using that were able to do stuff that no one else could do. And we didn't want them to know about that. We were shooting people down left and right. And apparently our government leaked the information that that's because they fed our pilots carrots. And that became so viral that people to this day still think that carrots improve eyesight. And there's not a lick of evidence to suggest that's ever been the case. It's completely not true. It was just a thing to cover up a thing that no longer even matters anymore.

1:08:39 and there is similar things like that but carbohydrates like i for example like i was shocked to find out that that sugar and carbohydrates are indistinguishable they are the same thing carbohydrates there's two types of carbohydrates there's simple and there's complex and the complex carbohydrates are literally a chain of tightly packed simple carbohydrates and your body is either able to break them down into small chunks or not and the ones that the complex carbohydrates are sometimes worse because what they're actually doing is it doesn't taste sweet so you're if you're like me and you thought oh i'm avoiding sugar because sugar is bad for you you know you weren't actually avoiding it because you were getting it in another form that you were told was the top of the freaking food pyramid or what you know you know top bottom i mean sorry but it's like you know the thing you should be eating the most of should be like this and that and the other thing and you know and it turns out like that's actually the exact opposite in fact Historically, and different people will disagree, but there's enough evidence that I feel strongly to say that historically, even like all thousands of years, the upper class has continually preferred more of a meat diet.

1:09:54 And in fact, 200 years ago, even the people that ate a lot of grains ate only like garnishes of them compared to what they did. They still had a majority of their meal was meat. And, you know, my family probably continued that tradition up until the point to where, you know, grocery stores made it very difficult to buy in that way anymore. And that's, I think, what's happened to a lot of people. if you've looked at any sort of charts and seen like the number of diseases that went from like being almost unheard of i mean they were documented but it was like we're talking like five people had had this thing in the course of humanity to now it's the most common thing ever like heart disease was barely a thing you know cancer was not something that was high on the list i mean there arthritis was not high we did not have a lot of uh of alzheimer's we did you know There's so many things and I still say it's, it's like anything else.

1:10:51 We, we understand less of it than we understand, even though we understand more than we ever did before. And so like, it's, it's, you know, it's like space. You, you, you, you could have lifetimes of knowing things and you still don't know shit, you know? Well, and it goes, it goes back to that whole monetary thing, right? Because it doesn't make any sense to train you otherwise or tell you otherwise, right? Because then, you know, money stops flowing for certain things. And then, you know, the whole carbs and sugar, you know, not just those, right? I mean, maltodextrin, you've got other additives that are just in everything.

1:11:31 I mean, you know, corn syrup is in almost every loaf of bread out there. Seed oils. Exactly. And so you start looking at this and one of the main reactions your body has from all that stuff is inflammation. And if you want to take a very small problem and make it a critical, dire health emergency, be inflamed. So right off the bat, you're setting yourself up with more inflammation than is. You shouldn't have that style of inflammation all day, every day, all the time. And so, yeah, it just, it just, you know, boosts the disease stuff. And, you know, we, I mean, I, these are the kind of topics, you know, we get into quite often.

1:12:21 But wait, we have a pill or a shot to fix that. Right. And then you go to the pharmaceutical industry and you start to look at this tangled web. It gets deep, right? But then you look at things like fluoride in water, you know, and everyone, everyone, well, maybe not everyone, but I would say the majority of people would be like, well, yeah, it's because it's good for your teeth. No, that's not why they put fluoride in water. Fluoride is a neurotoxin that is an off, it's an off gas. It's, it comes out of the process of manufacturing chemicals, chemical fertilizers. OK, and this stuff is a neurotoxin and they were dumping it and they got busted and they said, you know, you've got to go ahead and, you know, store this and, you know, contain it and everything else.

1:13:11 will someone commission a study and oh it's good for teeth so you know what we're going to do is instead of paying to store it and you know some chemical storage facility etc that you know is a forever location uh what we'll do is we'll just offer it as that we're going to sell it to the municipal water supplies and they'll just dump our chemicals into everyone's bodies it's a neurotoxin Look, there's... It's worse than a neurotoxin. Well, it is. Outside of very specific cases, there is no safe level of toxin to put in your body. Yeah. Okay? There's a level that you may not notice the harm, but any amount of a toxin that goes into your body is going to produce reaction, right?

1:13:59 Period. Your body is not going to be happy about that. And it's just in the water. Well, now it's starting to be shut off, thankfully. Yeah, they just signed that into law here in Florida. Well, you know, it went to, I think, the 9th District Court, and they came back and went, oh, yeah, it's definitely a neurotoxin and definitely harms. They focused on a very narrow field because it was one with solid studies, but it basically lowers the IQ in children during their critical growth years. It lowers like everyone. It's worse than that, too, because so fluoride is one of the halides.

1:14:40 And I don't know how much you know about that, but you may or may not be aware that iodine is basically like central to your body, being able to do a lot of cellular function. Literally, most of the cells of your body have have essentially an iodine receptor. Well, halides can all effectively sit in and block those halide receptors. and uh i mean i so like i do think what you're saying about like the pollution is a thing it's one of the things that pisses me off when like i say that like oh environmental regulations are in our way i'm not necessarily saying all environmental regulations should exist i'm just saying that when we literally have had hundreds of years of chemicals being poured into rivers and ground killing villages towns cities before we finally made a lot of and then we're just like nope we're getting rid of all of them all of a sudden i mean of course our society is built around do it for cheaper and if that means you don't get caught that is effectively legal in our society and i mean it legal for a for a cost i should probably say because that's really how the world works or at least our chunk corner if it does and to me the thing is is that you know, fluoride, uh, the cavities thing, it is a real thing. I'm not saying that I want to, to deal with it. The thing is, is that there's no logic in swallowing fluoride. So also the amount, the amount of, of fluoride that can stave off cavities is a very small amount. So I don't know

1:16:17 if you know this in the nineties, it quietly happened. I don't even know if I heard about it, But there was basically someone was like, hey, if some fluoride is good, more must be better. And they doubled the amount of fluoride in the nation's water supply. Well, at least they doubled the guidance for the various districts to put more in there. And everybody has been increasing it ever since. Well, again, I don't think you should be drinking fluoride in any way, shape, and form. However, I could go as far as to say low enough dosages, there is enough evidence to suggest that might not be a problem. I'm not saying that it definitely isn't. I'm saying that we cannot prove one way or the other, okay?

1:16:59 What I am saying is that, like, the whole, like, oh, if some is good and more must be better, and also the whole cavities problem, this is the whole problem. It's like everybody's like, oh, let's avoid the root cause. Why are people getting cavities they never got before? What is the problem here? So the statistics are pretty straightforward. The small amount of fluoride increase did make a massive difference on the number of cavities. However, we still have unacceptable amounts of cavities. And there was not any science to say doubling it was going to be better. That was just somebody's opinion, which is kind of how the whole food pyramid thing happened in the first place. You have a person in a position of power and respect that stated a thing.

1:17:43 I don't know if you know, but animal fat has been demonized as the thing that makes you fat. And it was I don't remember which guy it was, but this famously came from the head of the FDA with zero science who backed up his statement by saying, well, we everybody knows you are what you eat. That was his logic for that Never put it to a trial Never did anything And so So you know mean i if you eat grains you turn into a grain yes i mean you get you gain grain you know it just starts coming out your ears yeah they that's yeah i mean arguably look you know i yeah i it's it's hard not to see all this and and realize this is a reality and know that this all ends up funneling through these these certain holes of authority shall we say um and not to think that it's all tied together right in some way shape or form if you look at it and you've got corporations conglomerations that own, you know, farming and grain producing and seed oils and pharmaceutical companies and, you know, stock, you know, bonds for, you know, municipal municipalities and, you know, all of these things, it's not very hard to sit there and go, you know, I'm not saying

1:19:14 that there's any, you know, I'm not saying this is a thing, but, you know, in my brain, it's real easy for me to go, yeah, well, if those guys are working with the lawmakers and legislators, then this all ties together, right? So it's not just, you know, oh, you know, the grain's bad for you. We know this. It's going to cause inflammation. But I also own a pharmaceutical company, which is going to sell you meds for the problems that you're going to accrue with this. You know what I mean? and yeah so it's a tangled web and who gets who gets hit the worst by it it's it's the people with the least power and the least amount of money it's it because eating good is expensive and you know even like the food pantries that all they give out is carbohydrates basically they might so i'll actually disagree but it is expensive it shouldn't be as expensive but most people just don't have the uh either the freezer space or the you know the infrastructure to store a quarter or half a cow or the initial investment to put a thousand dollars into getting a chunk of that meat i mean a lot of people just don't have it you know that that's a part of the problem even if you buy it at like the store and like so little carnivore preaching i suppose like you know the the worst meat that you can buy is still better than the best processed food you can find And again, I'm not, I do lean towards the anti-carbohydrates, but technically you can find plants that will do the trick if you really wanted to. You just got to stick to whole foods and low carb versions of them.

1:20:50 But there's a whole science around how your metabolism works. And there's actually a lot of interesting things going on as far as how the root causes of these energy problems in the body happen. Because it actually may be actually things like diabetes are actually caused by your mitochondria protecting themselves from basically cellular death. it is a a race condition prevention scenario basically so our bodies have so many and the more i learned the more i learned that there's more that i don't know which i mean it's like anything but i mean even in like the most simplified version that i can give it there's so many pathways for our bodies to like adapt around things that you really don't know and in the case of like diabetes, by the time you have symptoms, you, your body has been fighting the war silently for probably at least 10 years. And you didn't know that until you hit a tipping point where your body couldn't compensate for that anymore. And generally that's because insulin resistance has built up to a point where your body can't produce enough insulin to compensate for the blood sugars is essentially what's essentially what happens there. And the downside is that it's so much worse because insulin like everybody that i know probably thinks insulin is just this like hormone to get like energy into cells that's actually well welcome back we were in the middle of a heated uh discussion there yeah yeah yeah i was in the middle of saying that

1:22:28 you know sleep and fat burning are the two things that are uh that are basically uh blocked from happening when you have high insulin in your system. So that's why when you get insulin resistant, the thing about it is that insulin is normally metabolized from your blood and removed quickly enough that it doesn't persist. And so in a scenario where you become insulin resistant, the amount of insulin you need to protect your body from the high amounts of blood sugars is so high that it has to secrete excess amounts. And it actually causes this rollercoaster to happen because what ends up happening is that you put so much in there that it controls the level of blood glucose and then it begins to then dip it below the safe level in a danger in the other direction. It's not dangerous for most healthy people if you're not, unless you're like type one or, you know, but the result is, is that your body's like, oh no, it's getting too low. And so, I don't know if people know this, but your body can produce its own glucose, which is how our ancestors would have dealt with that without eating hardly any plants ever, effectively would have been that their liver does something called gluconeogenesis and it produces sugars.

1:23:51 And generally people that are in this state have other problems, like fatty liver being one of those things. And so when you have a fatty liver, your body will be like, hey, I have too much fat here. I need to get rid of some of the fat and kind of make it human. They're not really, but basically it's opportunistic and says, hey, whenever I need to release sugars into the blood, let's just release a little extra. Because if there's a need to put any, it's as good a time as any to give a little bit more. And so it gets rid of more fat from the liver. I mean, again, it's not really thinking, obviously, but there's biological signals that, you know, through hormones mostly that result in a balance that results in this.

1:24:34 But then what ends up happening is that now you've gone from having low blood sugars for a little while to having high blood sugars again. And so it goes up and down in cycles for a while and it slowly finds its happy medium. But in all that process, you've had high levels of insulin the whole damn time. And so there's some estimates out there about something around 80% of the Western world having some level of insulin resistance and having no idea that it's a thing. And they actually think that number is a low number. That's how bad it is. and a lot of, you know, talking about doctors and stuff like that. A lot of the stuff that we've been talking about, you know, this is kind of my thing on, this is kind of a joke that's more of a side-eye, kind of like, you know, but it's like we say that if you go to your doctor and the first thing out of his mouth is to give you a pill, you don't have a doctor, you've got a drug dealer, because even I can remember when I was younger, you know, I'm not saying it's easy, but they used to try to talk you into doing other things like lifestyle, diet, you know.

1:25:45 They used to at least try to do things to correct the root problem. I mean, I'm aware I've worked with people, you know, I haven't worked in IT, you know. The dealing with end users scenario is like, you know, you can take a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. But I still feel like you still need to take it to water, even if you think it's not going to drink most of the time. You know what I'm saying? And it's just sort of like a, you do as much as you can. And I feel that that's an absolute truism, what you said, right? The fact of the matter is you go to a doctor nowadays, they're looking for something they can put you on. It just, that seems like that's their goal, right?

1:26:25 You walk in, you know, they're expecting, I need to write you a prescription for something. Do you need a refill? You know, I've literally had doctors, you know, ask me coming in, you know is there anything you need a refill for it's like no dude i'd argue that we back that that various companies have have pushed things in a direction to where uh similar to congress uh the ability to afford to exist as a doctor has shifted in a situation where if you're not pushing drugs and getting kickbacks you're not making the lifestyle that you effectively subscribe to already and I have doctors that I know which I don't know too many but many of them started out having relatively high paying jobs they only had to work about three days a week and they could pick the days and even have short hours on some of those days I mean sometimes they ran long you know I mean it was demand based to some degree but I mean like they could basically dictate what they wanted and were very comfortable I'm now seeing the opposite I'm seeing that even the most best well-meaning doctors, they're, they're being worked to the bone. They're, they're getting, they're getting pushed to like move client to client to client. Like it's like, it's like, like it's a seat at a restaurant and you know, get, get that vacated as soon as possible kind of thing. I mean, it's that kind of thing. And, and, and, and the drugs is definitely, I mean, we, there are several people that I follow on, on like YouTube and some other places. Like Dr.

1:27:55 Ken Berry is a person that I like to watch, for example, because he's one of those guys that used to do it the old way. And then he preaches about how, like, he started to question some things, and he explains why. And he says, this didn't add up. And so he talks about how he went into it, how he was fooled into believing that it was the best thing for everybody. And, you know, but anyways, it's, they all sort of have this trap that they get that they fall into, because the drug companies, in many cases, so two things with nutrition, I don't know if you know this, But when you become a doctor, most doctorate programs for medical doctors, there's less than a chapter about nutrition. And that chapter is focused almost entirely on how to keep someone alive that's not able to eat for themselves or not able to make those choices for themselves.

1:28:45 And it's not really a decision. So the guy that most people are going to that's telling them what's healthy and what's not healthy to eat is actually a person that knows less about it than the average person because they're mostly operating off of the same colloquial knowledge that we all are that tells you that, oh, you need to do this, you need to do that. They think fruit is healthy, which, by the way, while I will say that berries are not a huge problem, fructose is one of the worst things that we can have. There are experiments that have been done repeatedly where after three days of having just a glass of fruit juice a day, and this is more to do with the fact that there's nothing but the juice.

1:29:26 We've processed it down to just the fructose and just the sweet part effectively and some flavoring, basically. We've gotten rid of the fibers. We've gotten rid of everything there. And I'm not even pro-fiber, but I'm telling you, if you're going to have berries without the fibers, you're taking something that your cells cannot metabolize, sending it to your liver, which is then converting you to other sugars, which is then becoming regular sugars in your system and probably leaving some of that as fat in your liver. And so it's like fruit juice, which I grew up being told, oh, it is the healthy, natural sweetener you should have, like have fructose whenever you can, is actually worse for you than every other sugar.

1:30:06 And to make it worse, if you actually were diabetic or something like that, fructose doesn't show up on any kind of blood test because those only test for glucose, which is not fructose. You know, it's anyways. So but yeah, so doctors are very much guided to this. Like, you know, they get these seminars of like, hey, here's all the reasons you should prescribe this drug and when and how. And they get told that enough. There's no other information coming to them. They don't have enough time to, like, do a lot of independent studies. Some of them do, but very few of them do. You know, their education was very limited in nutrition, unless there are nutritionists specifically. And even then, you know, this is highly guided by like statements that like FDA, the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association have said.

1:30:56 And if you've ever checked out the funding for those, you'll see that there's companies like Kellogg's that are like the number one donator there and have their logos everywhere And you know they the ones telling you that you need to have breakfast full of carbs every morning And it just like it just like it just amazing how we got where we are but it like the doctors literally, I don't want to defend them, but at the same time, how would they know better? They, they grew up in the same thing we did. Their government's telling them that what they know is right. You know, there's you know literally every source of information that's come at them is going to reinforce the wrong things and and yeah i mean i i hear what you're saying but at the same time you know look here's the doctors are typically you know intelligent people right yes i'll stop short of saying highly intelligent and I will say intelligent people. If you and I can figure this out pretty easily, I'm sorry, I don't have a pass for a doctor, especially someone that is intelligent enough and actually wants to make a difference, right? I think what happens is, you know, you've got the insurance companies and you've got all that billing and, you know, set pricing and you know all this other stuff they can't handle that so they have to hire more people just to handle all the insurance crap and you know they you know my father was a doctor yeah

1:32:33 and you know i mean that was one of his biggest things is he he needed more people just to deal with billing insurance companies and denials and appeals and all the stupidity that comes along with that whole mess right only to get you know probably short changed in some areas and you know probably okay in others but you know you need more people for that than he did for the entirety of his practice you know and you start looking at it and it's not that the job doesn't pay as well anymore it's just that you have to pay so many people to provide the infrastructure to be able to bill people, which is, you know, I don't know if it's still a trend, but I remember about 20, about 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, my doctor, you know, had a talk with me. I went and see him and he said, look, yeah, I just want to let you know I'm changing, you know, moving practice and, you know, here's where I'm going to be and blah, blah, blah. And I said, okay, cool. So I can just follow you there and he was like well if you want to and i'm like okay and he goes but i'm no longer taking insurance so you can you can self-bill or you can pay in cash the cash is obviously heavily discounted um and uh you know at that point i was like yeah i'm not doing that um but you know there was a big move from doctors because of that fact it's like it took their quality of life and

1:34:03 tanked it. And primarily it's just dealing with insurance and billing. It is. It's so much worse than that. I mean, we don't even have time to go into all of it. I mean, I'm not giving doctors a pass, but I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't think it's as straightforward. So, I mean, so, you know, I am an engineer by trade. I think even before I worked in the field that I did, I've always been very analytical and you're pretty analytical yourself. So, I mean, you know, I think we're a little better equipped to sort of break things apart. And even that, there's parts that I've struggled upon. But I will say that in capitalization of everything, whenever you're trying to squeeze as much money out of it as possible, there's a lot of complete bullshit that's going on.

1:34:51 And quite frankly, I think that government regulations is probably the only way to limit how much bullshit can happen. I mean, pure capitalism, I think, has flaws. I agree with that one, but all right, we'll go with that. I don't generally like – I think less government is better in almost every single situation. But there are certain scenarios where capitalism run amok is more harmful than putting some regulation on it. And honestly, I think our main problem with government is that we tend to focus on things that are the wrong things. I would argue that none of what we see today, none of it is capitalism. So anyone going after capitalism for this, I think is barking up the wrong tree. Just right out of the gate. Capitalism is a very simple thing. I have something that you want. I agree that I will sell it to you at a certain cost and you agree that that is something I want. And yes, I'll pay that cost. We then exchange whatever good services or fiscal instrument that is available and we walk away.

1:36:06 There's nobody else involved. That's capitalism. Yes, but capitalism is more than that. But wait, what we have here is you have something to sell. So now you go to government and you say, I need a permit to sell my thing and they give you a permit and then they want to inspect and do whatever else they need and you fill out forms. And of course they give you another thing so you can actually sell, uh, like, you know, you can be a wholesaler and then, you know, all this stuff goes on and then I go and do this and I want to buy this thing, but you know, do I need a permit to buy it? Okay. Well then now I need to go. And what you've got is, you know, defined as crony capitalism, right? And that's what it is. And whenever you inject a third party that isn't mutually agreed upon into that transaction, capitalism isn't the thing you're talking about at that point, right? Well, I think it is a unabridded capitalism allows any exchange of goods, any rules for any reason whatsoever. So I mean, it depends on, yes, there could be a more specific term for the particular thing that I'm trying to say. But what I am trying to say is that I think like a rule against monopolies, I'm not thinking that's a terribly bad thing to have, because where there's no competition, capitalism falls apart, for example, you know, similarly with the whole scenario with doctors, you know, like, it probably shouldn't be allowed

1:37:36 to do something that's to the detriment of the American people. And the government probably should have some kind of law or rule. Again, I say this without having to well thought out what that should be, but there's probably should be some sort of guardrail to prevent what's happening from happening legally. That's all I'm trying to say here, because right now, the things that are happening that we're talking about are completely legal and they're causing a lot of harm. Oh, they are without question, right? There's absolutely no question. The problem that you've got, and I'm going to go back to that Milton Friedman quote, right? Anytime you get, look, government got involved with our air conditioning units.

1:38:18 Now they cost five times as much and the max you get out of one is 15 years. That's it. You know, washing machines, they got involved with washing machines. They got, every time they get involved in something, the price goes up, the quality goes down and the service is trash. It just is. Right. So I hear what you're saying. I think there are probably, and I haven't thought through this because you just brought it up. I know knowledge and talk about this. So I haven't thought all the way through it, but I think there are probably better ways to handle things like this. And then the whole monopoly argument. Yeah, okay, maybe. but right now we have a system that is built on monopolies that tell other people whether or not they're going to be a monopoly or they are a monopoly and need to be broken up so don't think what we have is right i think what we have violates the law that it is it's the there is a there is a problem so i mean i i think fundamentally we're probably more in agreement than not because i think Oh, I agree.

1:39:24 Government should be the minimum necessary for people to get along in a sandbox. No more. That should be basically what's happening there. Anything more than that, it doesn't make sense. I mean, you can make any argument about what should or should not be. But to me, in a world where everyone has afforded the freedom and the will to do as they see fit, as long as it's not harming another person or, you know, sort of scenario like that, anything else that you're doing, you're making that decision for someone and taking that away from someone. And honestly, I would argue that our ability to make dumb choices and to fail is as important as the ability to make smart choices and succeed, you know.

1:40:09 It's more important. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's one of those things as, you know, as, as children, it's, it's important to have those accidents. It's important to figure things out. Like fire is hot. Yes. You know, I mean, it's, and it, all the way through life, failure will teach you way more than success ever will. 100%. I'm assuming you survive it. Well, the problem is all right. You guys just don't take enough antidepressants and stuff like that. You don't have enough fluoride in your diet. This video brought to you by… This is the same reason why your A1C is too high, because you obviously have a lack of metformin or GLP-1 in your system, right?

1:40:57 You know what the problem with that is, right? What is that? So the GLP-1 inhibitors, so I'm greatly oversimplifying it. But I mean, so aside from the very obvious thing, which is diabetics who depend upon that to like basically not be in life or death situations are having a hard time getting GLP-1s because they're being sold as weight loss drugs so abundantly that no one can get it anymore. Well, no one's not the right statement, but let's just say that there is a very competitive amount of effort required to just get that to continue to exist.

1:41:39 But the real cost of GLP-1 inhibitors, it affects, on an overly simplified level, it affects your digestion in a way where you're not absorbing as much stuff. And that's not generally a problem. It's probably one of the safest ways that we've come up with so far to, like, lose weight or not gain weight, I should say, or whatever. But the thing that nobody thinks about is that proteins, specifically amino acids, which is what proteins get broken down into, our bodies cannot make many of them, and we must eat them to survive, and we need to have a certain amount of that to live. when you do not have that to live you start to have muscles and various tissues like bones get weaker your cardiac system becomes weaker you start to have failures you start to have all kinds of problems that happen and as it happens when you when you limit what you're absorbing most people they're just taking it as the magic drug and saying oh so i want i want to just take a thing, not feel hungry and eat less and be fine. And as a result, they're now not consuming enough proteins to sustain their own tissue. And they're actually atrophying it. And it's actually, there's a few studies that have been shown that actually show that a large majority of weight loss by a lot of people that are taking GLP-1s is actually in muscle atrophy, not actually much of anything else. I'm not saying that it's that simple, but... That's one of the reasons I, when I've talked to anyone about this, you know, my wife included, right, is, you know,

1:43:12 forget the scale. Stop, stop, just stop. I mean, honestly, is the number that you're looking for on the scale really what you're looking for? Are you looking for the way you look, the way you feel, the energy levels you have? Because if what you're looking for is I want to be in a certain shape and I want to feel a certain way, et cetera, that number means nothing. In fact, you know, surprising to a lot of people, and I think females really fall into this one and apologies, it's a generalization, but I think they really do fall into this is that you can actually get to your perfect body or whatever that you might have, and you might actually gain like 10 pounds and you look amazing. You're perfect. Everything about it is exactly where you want to be except that number. It went the wrong way. And so just stop. I mean, literally stop.

1:44:09 And then on the GLP ones, one of the things that I, and I haven't done a lot of research on this, right? Because this isn't a problem that I've been faced with personally. But, you know, I'm surrounded in good company that is knowledgeable. the fact of the matter is protein itself is essential no question about it however you cannot get enough protein for a number of your systems your cardiovascular being one of the main ones unless you also have a quantity of fat with that protein you must have fat lean protein by itself will kill you you will die okay fat is necessary absolutely essential and so the glp1s are literally you know sequestering that fat yeah you know expelled right uh you know is anyone like thinking like is it doing with all the fats is it is it as targeted is it even targeted and if not are we really causing like a major health problem that's going to show up in you know years right we're we're definitely making things worse again you look at the statistics things have gotten bad since seed oils introduced things were bad when processed foods were introduced things got bad things got really bad and i think we're seeing like you know exponential

1:45:42 multiple factors building on each other but when you when you take toxic substances like fluoride you know it's a toxic substance and you put it in in the water supply and then you do things like seed oils these these literally literally this is not a joke i'm not making it up go look it up are heavy equipment machine lubricants that they decided at some point oh, look, we can make this food. Freaking cool, dude. So, you know, it's just, it's, and again, you know, I go back to, sure, there are targeted areas where a toxic substance can be used to benefit, right?

1:46:29 We know this. But in general, putting anything toxic in your body of any quantity is not good for your body. It may need so much to have visible symptoms, etc., but your body is still going to recognize that as a toxic substance and it's going to attempt to deal with it. So even in tiny quantities, you're still causing reactions in your body that it wouldn't normally, shouldn't normally have to deal with, right? This should be an emergency situation. You know, I just ate something and oops, now my body has to deal with it. It shouldn't be every day I'm putting toxins and very low doses into my body. Yeah. And technically, our bodies are more capable than people realize. It's just that our diet, and again, I'm not sure that I think, I don't really think it started out as this conspiracy where everybody did a thing.

1:47:28 I think a bunch of people found a way to get rich and they've since discovered the truth and will not let that get out. And they've got billions of dollars that they'd rather spend on keeping people from taking their market away rather than anything else. But but but when it comes to like seed oils, for example, like they're one of the worst things for us. Like here's a thing that not many people know. So, I mean, I you probably can't tell on here because I'm still fairly white color. But I mean, I've always been like very pasty white. Like you could, you could put me on a beach next to an Irish person and probably not tell the difference, but, but you know, my facial hair was the only defining ability to, to tell. Well, uh, I used to also burn like crazy, like the smallest amount of sunlight had to have like SPF a million, you know, I mean, you know, it was like whatever was available to like not come away with sunburns.

1:48:17 And I mean, it wasn't really a problem. It was what I was told was the right thing. Again everything actually completely reverse But it turns out that this is not even controversial So seed oils the main problem with seed oils is not necessarily nutrition although there is plant toxins which is something that I would jump into some But I mean, regardless of what the toxin is, there's a linoleic acid or whatever, which is omega-6 that builds up in your body. And we have a ratio that we can tolerate. And when we have too much of it, our body has to figure out ways of storing it and so forth. As it turns out, many studies have shown that the omega-6s tend to get deposited near the surfaces of our skin.

1:49:05 And as it turns out, omega-6s are especially vulnerable to UV radiation. And there is a lot of studies that strongly suggest a lot of sunburns that happen is influenced by the high amount of omega-6s in our diet. It also is a large amount of evidence to suggest that a lot of skin cancer is actually mutations coming from UV rays, breaking down those fatty acids and causing damage to cells nearby. And so there's, I mean, I'm not saying it's definitive, but I'm saying there's enough science to say there's stronger evidence there than there are on several of the things that I think are stupid right now that we're following, you know.

1:49:55 um but you know it's it's ultimately okay that's what i want to say real quick is so i don't know just not everyone knows this when you saw me i was a lot much fatter last time when we were in you look i mean it's it's a huge difference i you know both of you right yeah i mean lx lx um you know i don't know we're we're kind of running long on this one i'm okay with that but um you know, LX went through a journey of, you know, getting off. I'm still on that path. But you and I have gone on a similar path. You know, we were both diabetic. My A1C was above 11 or something like that.

1:50:37 I think it was almost 14 at one point or something like that. It was crazy. And now it's five something normal-ish. I mean, it's not perfect, but, you know, it's a lot better than it has. But it's, you know, definitely a path. and that's with no medication and I've been able to get off all that stuff so I'm happy with that and it's just great and I say just it's diet right primarily right I'm 120 pounds lighter and I've kept it off for almost 3 years now exactly I think that's about how much it is just understanding the basics of how things work for me it all started with when i got a glucose meter and could test my own blood sugars because most things have rather immediate reactions and you can see exactly what happens when the doctor's like potatoes are okay eat as many potatoes as you want and i i go check my blood sugars i'm like you're you're fucking lying man because this is not okay or uh my wife has this cgm and and we're finding that there's so many foods that have stuff in it that like if you don't yes meticulously look at the like you know she was making a salad which you know it was like you know supposed to be healthy but the dressing had i forget even i think maltodextrin in it and that's just you know right through the roof like you know so that's out but you don't know that stuff unless you have that data to go from yeah i think the whole first year of my diabetic experience was first decoding the lies

1:52:12 and then once i had the the majority of the facts it was discovering things hitting and fucking everything, like literally everything. Seed oils, I did not realize they were in things that didn't even seem like they could have seed oils in them. It's like, this seems like a whole food, but you check the ingredients and nope, they must have like injected seed oils in it. Like yeah you know it because you feel full because there calories and all fats and it the weight is heavier So I mean basically it funny because we all make jokes about the Lay potato chips like basically like oh it 90 air and 10 chips And I'm thinking like, man, I kind of wish that these food industries had done the same things. I'd rather have a very small portion of healthy food than have all this filler added to it. And again, not to bring it back to government, but like food labels is such a thing that pisses me off so much so there's there's all of these rules that make no fucking sense like if you apply an engineering mindset to any of it the way things are it is like designed to be exploited like there's no two ways around it i mean the the you can include this in this case and admit it in this case and you can round it up and run it down in this case and and there's there's so many rules and like the ingredients list which is supposed to tell you the main thing you know maltodextrin i mean aside from being a flavor carrier which is special in a way where it exempts it from even needing to be listed in some cases. There's so many other purposes, but also it's also one of the, so there's, you know this as well as I know this, but like a lot of people probably don't

1:53:43 realize that there's hundreds of various forms of sugars and many of them are very similar to each other. And so when you want to like not have an ingredient show up as like first or second on the list, if you instead put like 10 different sugars in there and have them all be an equal portion, And now they're all way down the list. And now you can't tell that that's there. And it hides it from the thing. I don't like how they do serving sizes. It's so ridiculous. I mean, carnivores joke about bacon. They're like, it should be one serving size for the whole container because nobody opens it up and just eats the, you know. But I mean, it's true of so many other things.

1:54:25 Like, how many things do you only eat the one serving size for? Because it's almost none, right? You know, we, and we just talked about this. You brought this up, right? Tic Tacs, prime example, Tic Tacs, sugar free. It says on the label, it's sugar free. It is almost all sugar. But it falls under that half a gram per serving of reporting. serving is one who eats one tic tac right i mean come on serving size is one so you know people out there looking at it you always you know no sugar you know free sugar free uh it's not crazy yeah yeah it's anything but but just the reporting requirements so that's another way they get around it and you know we were talking about just dried fruits right you have to pay super close attention because so many of those things they add sugar into them oh yeah why i mean it's it's already being dehydrated which is concentrating that fructose in there so you're literally getting a bite full of like very sugary stuff anyway and then they just load it with more sugar and it's because it's addicting that's exactly it and that's that's you know the key key thing there sugar is you know i would probably say it's right up there with nicotine which is right up there with heroin you know i've experimented i've experimented with a few things and had no problem just being like nope i don't want that anymore and what i can tell you is

1:56:00 getting off of carbs any you not just sugar but like it is one of the most difficult addictions I've ever had to deal with, like it had symptoms, even when I was like 99% of the way off of that. And I got rid of that last like 1%, like the symptoms that I faced and the, it rewires your brain. I probably more than I should share, but I was like, I have a brother who was hooked on some hard drugs for a while. And I've seen, I've seen druggy personality. I've seen druggy brain. I know, I know what, what the, the, the, the mentality is like you, you, you think that you're thinking normally, but you're justifying things in some ways.

1:56:45 Well, I've experienced that after getting off of carbs because you're like, you're like, I'm hungry, but then you don't want to eat anything that's healthy. You only want things And it funny because you invent things that you didn even know had carbs in it and i i learned that when i like oh only this sounds good you you dig in dig into the ingredients far enough and you'll find oh guess what there was something in there and and my brain knew that there was carbs in there but i wasn't aware of it you know consciously you know and but yeah the carb addiction was holy crap oh yeah and and for the first at least for me and i've done it you know a few times throughout my life for for different reasons yeah um but there's there's a period at least for me like there's a good solid 30-day period where I literally I just don't feel comfortable in my skin and I'm hungry but I'm not hungry like my body is crying for this crap you know and it literally is a it's a physical feeling and that you know mental emotional kind of ringer that you go through for that for that period of time it is it's challenging it's very difficult oh yeah i mean it's it's very much like you've seen you you've seen an alcoholic detox it's the same symptoms but dialed up worse basically it's it's it's all the same things and And your brain is going to tell you things that aren't really true.

1:58:12 You have to have, I mean, I developed litmus tests. Like I said, it's like, does a piece of meat sound good to me? If it doesn't, then I'm just going to wait until it does. Or that was the kind of thing that I, because I eventually had the realization that like, that wasn't actual hunger that I was like, oh, I'm hungry, but nothing sounds good. Like, no, that wasn't the case. It was addiction that flat out. And it is crazy how that works. And yeah, of course you're going to put something addicting in product because that's going to sell more product. Yep. Yep. Yep. Well, hey, this has been a really awesome session, but we're way longer than what we normally do.

1:58:52 Right. We even talked about this for a little while. Right. And I appreciate you giving us your time. It's been a really good conversation. But first, right off the bat, would love to get you back on. And I think there's so many things I'd like to go into with you and just have more discussion on if you're willing. We'd love to get you back at some point. We didn't talk about a whole lot of stuff, right? So I think I'd love to have you back on and really dive into your journey with the carnivore thing. and what you do on a daily basis and what little hacks and tricks you found that are like for someone maybe investigating it.

1:59:38 These are some things that make things so much better for you. So there's your prep work. So we usually ask our guests. Typically, it's around the War Dragons community. But if you had to give a shout out to one person, and one person only will open it up wide for anyone, anywhere. Sure. I definitely give a shout-out to my girlfriend, Anne. She's been very supportive in a lot of ways. So she's probably going to watch this, and hopefully she appreciates being added in public. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, folks, thank you, everyone, for giving us some of your time today.

2:00:20 We hope you've enjoyed the show. leave a thumbs up if you did if you didn't give us thumbs down throw a comment in there click the subscribe button everyone loves that thing click it do it click click click click it's easy click bing we put out one with one video a week right we're not gonna annoy you so um and most importantly wherever you are whenever you're listening to this have an amazing day thank you so much Thank you.