Dave Asprey dives into mycotoxins in coffee, revealing 50–92% of South American beans retain dangerous ocratoxin despite caffeine’s natural antifungal properties, while decaf often hides chemical residues like hexane. He contrasts grass-fed (toxin-filtering) with grain-fed meat, exposing corn’s near-universal fusarium contamination (90–98%) and its inflammatory effects on humans. Asprey’s biohacking—bulletproof coffee, glutathione supplements—aims to combat mold-induced health crises, like his own black mold exposure triggering nosebleeds and immune reactions, while critiquing raw vegan diets for gut damage. The episode underscores how industrial food systems prioritize economics over safety, leaving consumers vulnerable to hidden toxins with long-term consequences. [Automatically generated summary]
I was sick, and I gave out all that blood, and then boom, it hit me.
Anyway, what Lumosity is, is a website that's designed around the concept of neuroplasticity and all the different objectives that you want to achieve.
Like memory, you can tailor it specifically.
That was the word I'm looking for.
Like recalling the location of objects, remembering the names after the first introductions, which I fucking suck at.
Learning new subjects quickly and accurately.
And then once you fill all those out, then you move into attention.
There's a bunch of different options for attention, things like maintaining focus on important tasks, improving productivity, concentrating while you're learning something new.
All these things they believe they can actually improve upon and design it based on your needs, whatever you're looking for.
Things that you wouldn't even think about.
Like there's a whole area called flexibility.
I've never even thought about that as far as like thinking, but it's actually pretty important if you really stop and think about it.
Like flexibility is kind of important.
You can't just be smart.
You can't just be crisp.
You have to kind of be able to go with the flow on things.
And that's something that you can work on using Lumosity software.
Communicating clearly, thinking outside the box, avoiding errors.
It's a fascinating idea because I know for sure that there are certain things, whether it's podcasting or stand-up comedy or commentating on fights.
I really honestly believe that when I take time off of those things and I'm not doing them for a while, it's almost like it gets lax.
Like my ability to perform those tasks, it just atrophies, just like your muscles do when you don't go to a gym.
So go to lumosity.com forward slash Joe and check out what their website is.
Check out the way they've got it set up.
It's really fascinating.
It's fun.
They're all games that you could play as opposed to just like sitting around just doing math problems.
This is actually, it makes it very interesting.
I've been playing the games at lumosity.com for a few weeks, and they're fun and they're quick, and I see some sort of a difference in my ability.
I'm definitely seeing a difference in my ability to perform those games.
But I think that that's, I think if you focus on stuff, you see a difference.
I mean, it's not magic.
It's one of those things where it gives you an opportunity to work out your brain, just like a gym gives you an opportunity to work out your body.
So check out this special offer, lumosity.com slash Joe, and click on the start training button and start playing your first game.
That's lumosity.com slash Joe.
You can play anywhere from your computer, iPad, iPhone.
There's a Lumosity app, so go check it out.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're also brought to you by Hulu Plus.
And Hulu Plus lets you watch thousands of hit TV shows and a selection of acclaimed movies on your television or on the Go with your smartphone or tablet.
With Hulu Plus, you can catch your favorite current TV shows like Saturday Night Live or Community or Family Guy.
You can also check out exclusive content including Hulu originals like The Awesomes starring SNL Seth Myers and Moonboy starring Chris O'Dowd from The Bridesmaids.
Hulu Plus also offers a great selection of acclaimed films and for only $7.99 a month, you can stream as many shows and movies as you want wherever you want.
So right now you can try Hulu Plus free for two weeks when you go to huluplus.com forward slash Rogan.
Well, Ting has been, the results that we've gotten from Ting, they've been probably our most universally applauded company.
Everybody who's used it has said it's fantastic.
They use a Sprint backbone.
If you like Sprint, Diaz has been using Sprint forever.
Joey uses it.
He loves it.
And it's not like they use some Mickey Mouse network.
It's an excellent network.
And what they're doing is they just basically rent space and then use their own rules.
And their rules are better.
What they're trying to do is set it up so that you can cancel anytime you want.
They have the best Android phones that you could buy, like what Brian showed up there, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which is what I have, or the Galaxy S4, which is what Dave has.
They have all sorts of other phones too, though.
All high-end Android phones, which I use full-time now.
They want to make sure that you can buy a phone, have your service with Ting, and then if you decide tomorrow you don't want to do it anymore, that's it.
You're just done.
No overage charges or penalties.
Like most cell phone companies charge you if you go over your allocated minutes, text, data, all that stuff.
But if you have a heavier month with Ting, you just pay for what you used.
They make it as fair as possible, including if you spend, like if you have one level of service, but you go below that, they knock you down to the lower level and credit you on your next bill.
It's a really cool company.
Ting will break your rates out by minutes, text messages, megabytes, and they'll bill you at the end of the month for what you've used.
It's a sweet company.
It's very ethical.
And again, the service is still excellent.
You can get all these things and still have a sprint network behind you.
You should have a portal, and it's just a website that shows all your sponsors so that they could just go to that one page and see all your sponsors, all your codes, all your links.
There's something he needs to eat, like avocados or something.
You're missing out on something.
Anyway, rogan.ting.com.
Go check it out and save $25 off your first Ting device when you sign up.
So Rogan.ting.com.
We are also brought to you by Onit.com.
That's O-N-N-I-T.
A lot of new shit at Onit, including the zombie kettlebells.
They're the coolest fucking things we've ever sold.
As far as those primal bells, this is the newest, the latest incarnation.
They're all done by this guy, Steven Schubin Jr., who is an artist.
He's really done an amazing job, both with the Primal Bells, the different apes, and with these new zombie kettlebells.
They're really badass.
They're all 3D mapped out so that they are balanced.
You can make a cool kettlebell, but if it wasn't balanced correctly, where you use it, it's 50-50 weight distribution the way it's designed.
If it's not, it's going to fuck up your workouts.
You got to be careful about that.
And also be careful about technique.
If you're thinking about doing this, and I've talked to a lot of people that have done it since we started doing this podcast, and I'm super happy about that.
If you get on some sort of an exercise and strength and conditioning program, one thing that's huge is you got to learn what you're doing, whether it's from a video or hiring a trainer or having a friend who really knows what they're doing show it to you.
But concentrate on form.
It's so important.
Because if you use proper form, you can get by with a lot without getting injured.
But if you don't use proper form, you're going to get hurt.
If you fuck up, if you're imbalanced the way you lift weights, if you're doing it improperly, these Russian dudes have figured out how to do these things for hundreds of years.
They've been swinging these fuckers around.
They got it down.
They know it hurts you.
They know it doesn't.
And it's an amazing way to develop full body strength and conditioning.
It's really my favorite of all time.
We also sell a bunch of other shit like that That also promotes strength and fitness, things like battle ropes and steel maces and clubs and all these different awkward moving things that involve using your entire body, including supplements.
We call on it a human optimization website, and that's probably the best way to design it.
And that's the best way to describe it, rather.
And that's why we started carrying the Bulletproof Coffee Line of products as well.
Because we felt like this is the best shit that we could find online.
The best Himalayan sea salt, the best hemp protein powder, whatever we could find.
If it's good, we try to sell it.
And we try to sell it to you at a reasonable price.
We try to also make sure that, especially with controversial things like supplements, you want to know for sure no one's trying to rip you off.
All of our supplements, there's a 30-day or a 30-pill rather 90-day money-back guarantee where you don't even have to return the product.
Just say it sucks, it doesn't work, and boom, you get your money back.
It's because no one's trying to rip you off.
We're guaranteeing, not guaranteeing, but banking on the idea that we're just selling you the best shit we could possibly find.
And if you like it, you'll just continue to buy it from us.
You're not going to want to rip us off.
And you can only rip us off once.
You know, it's like shame on you, shame on me, that kind of thing.
Fool me once, shame on you.
So go to onit.com and use the code word Rogan and save yourself 10% off any and all supplements.
Brian just pulled up Digest Tech, which is our newest product.
And really interesting stuff.
Digest Tech is something that a lot of people don't consider when they talk about nutrition and what you take into your body.
The real big one is how much is your body utilizing of these nutrients?
Is it 100%?
Is it 50%?
Is it somewhere in the middle?
What is it?
And for a lot of people, they don't know that digestive enzymes are something that you can buy that actually can help your body absorb more nutrients.
It's a really important thing as far as how much you take into your body.
You can't just eat shit food and pop in a multivitamin, right?
It's not going to help.
You need a lot of different things to keep your body working at the optimum.
And until you experience that, until you experience what it's like to have a really healthy diet and a really good workout routine and continue it for a long period of time and then reap the benefits, like, wow, my body's moving better.
My brain feels better.
I just feel like a more elevated person.
I feel like I'm optimized.
That's what we're trying to achieve over it on it.
And these digestive enzymes are the latest and greatest of the things that we are selling.
One of them is the digest tech, the idea is we're putting like what we would call a professional grade natural digestive enzyme combinatory pill.
And inside this pill represents the most powerful digestive enzyme combinations on the market today.
Increasing the natural enzyme levels in the stomach not only helps break down the food faster, but eases bloating and any discomfort associated with eating a large meal.
And I know you fat fucks are out there chowing down.
That's just for healthy skin, healthy skin flora, and for healthy certain amount of healthy bacteria that you actually want in your body.
And acidophilus is a really good one.
With this, digestive enzymes are what you normally get in food.
You know, like one of the issues that a lot of people have with milk, like the reason why raw milk is so much more easy to digest for most people than pasteurized and homogenized milk is because it still has the digestive enzymes in it.
They're not broken down by the pasteurization process.
The pasteurization process is great because it allows cities to get milk and allows people to get nutrition that, you know, you're dealing with mass numbers of people.
Food lasts longer.
It takes a long time to get stuff like into New York City and LA and what have you.
But the reality is you're killing the food in order to do that.
That's the only way you can get milk to last a month.
You're killing it.
You're killing all the enzymes.
You're killing all the life in the food.
When you get milk from a farm, it doesn't taste anything like that shit we buy in stores.
What we buy in stores tastes like this weird water.
But what you get, like when you get a cold glass of milk from a farm that came out of a cow that morning, whoa, that fucking thing's alive, man.
There's a lot of aspects to food.
There's a lot of aspects that people don't consider.
And a big one is enzymes.
And if you go to onit.com forward slash digest tech, they'll do a much better job of explaining why you should incorporate digestive enzymes into your diet.
I recommend that people take lipase because it helps you digest fat, and most people don't get enough fat in, and that's one of the main ingredients there.
So I'm not trying to plug the diet.
I'm just saying this is the good stuff.
I really do think people perform better when they take digestive enzymes.
Yeah, if you don't pivot your feet when you turn around, you put a lot of stress on that knee, man.
That's how I blew mine out the first time.
The left one I blew out throwing a kick on a bag.
I was just exhausted doing rounds on a bag, and I just didn't kick too hard to not pivot my knee, and it just popped on me.
It just gave out.
And my right one was doing jiu-jitsu.
It was caught between someone's legs, and he just extended his legs just half-guard, and my leg, my knee snapped like a carrot.
But both of them I had done, both of them are great today.
I do everything.
I do Muay Thai, Jiu-Jitsu.
It doesn't bother me at all.
It doesn't bother me at all.
So they can fix them solid.
The problem with not getting them fixed is they're moving around a lot and that's causing a lot of undue friction inside on your meniscus and all that jazz.
It's your own blood, and then your blood gets put through this process.
I should find a best way to explain it online.
But I flew back from England, so it was like an 11-hour flight, and then I didn't get any sleep the night before because my clock was all screwed up.
So I stayed up all night, and then tried to sleep on the plane, and then lifted in the morning like an asshole, and then started to feel kind of sick, and then got this quart of blood pulled out of my body.
I don't necessarily know for sure that it's going to work, but it's one of those things that all these different athletes, like Peyton Manning, had it done on his neck.
He had two different neck surgeries, I believe, and he was close to retiring before he had this done.
And I know that Chris Wideman, the UFC middleweight champion, just went over there and had it done on his knee, and he's just raving about it.
Well, I went to getting mine done in Santa Monica.
They started doing it in Santa Monica now.
Sweet.
The guy learned how to do it from the dude in Germany.
There's a cat in Germany that figured this out.
Germany is just so far ahead of the United States when it comes to their experimental medicine.
Everyone in the United States got hamstrung with all that stem cell shit during the Bush administration where people thought they were just going to start sucking babies out of chicks' pussies and turning them into fucking medicine.
There was a real worry that people were going to actually get abortions on purpose in order to do this.
Yeah, there was a lot of nuttiness when it came to stem cells and research.
I'll let you guys know exactly whether or not it's helping or not helping me, but I just had the first series of injections stuck into my neck and back this morning.
They'll pull your blood out, they'll mix it with ozone gas, which causes a whole bunch of anti-inflammatory molecules, and then they inject the blood back in after that Really strong oxidative exposure, and it has not stem cell effects, but it has really strong anti-inflammatory effects.
Well, according to a lot of these doctors, inflammation is the cause of a lot of illnesses, a lot of problems, and there's many different factors.
There's diet, there's certain people have allergies or certain things they're not aware of that cause inflammation, but diet is a big one.
Having a low inflammatory diet or a low inflammation diet, it's really good for you.
And it's good.
We're fucking so hooked on shit that's not good for us.
You know?
Like, I talked, so many people I've talked to about this.
Like, I went gluten-free.
So many people I talked to about it, they were like, how hard is that?
How hard is that to do?
My God, it's got to be so hard to do.
Like, I could never do it.
They just like, they're just wouldn't.
And I'm like, I'm telling you, it's not that hard.
It's really not that big a deal.
You just eat vegetables and meat.
Like, everything tastes good.
But it's like, you get this idea in your head that you need to have this stuff in your body all the time.
Bread and sugar.
But bread converts directly to sugar.
Even if gluten is, it's all bullshit, like the gluten intolerances that people have as far as digesting.
Even if that's bullshit, it's definitely not bullshit that you're becoming a person with much more sugar in their diet if you increase the amount of pastas and breads you eat.
Without a doubt, when you eat pasta, when you eat bread, it converts directly to sugar.
And having sugar in your body causes inflammation.
There's another thing called agglutination, which is when your red blood cells stick together so they don't carry nutrients and oxygen like they should.
And part of gluten is gliadin, which is something that we use to cause clotting.
Like it's a clotting factor that's in this grain, and it's there as a defense mechanism to keep animals from eating the grain.
Do you think that if that was known, that that would be something that they would just start telling farmers, hey, guys, guys, guys, stop growing grain.
Like, look what's going on.
And the farmers would go, oh, we didn't even know.
Oh, it's causing inflammation?
Oh, sorry.
But no, it's just like everybody's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like bread.
Yeah, yeah, I'm not going to stop eating spaghetti.
So I woke up and there was like, I was like having a dream and these two like tingly spots on my neck and my heart would beat and they'd tingle and they'd stop.
It would tingle and it would stop.
And I was like, oh my God, there's a mouse on my neck.
So I reached up and I grabbed it and I was just a kid and this happened.
And I tried to squeeze it to kill it and it bit my thumb.
So I threw it as hard as I could on the ground and it never hit the ground.
And I'm like, what was that?
It wasn't a mouse.
Like it was something.
And I was kind of freaked out and we turned on lights and we caught the bat.
We brought it to the hospital and they told us, you know, it's okay to kill it.
And we called all these bat experts and they all said, yeah, you know, you should pour ether in there and kill it.
So we pour ether in this pitcher where the bat was so they could freeze it and look for rabies in its brain.
And when we pour the ether in there, ether dissolves plastic.
So the bat like falls onto the floor in the hospital.
It's flopping around.
unidentified
I'm sure in Durango, Colorado, they still remember this.
And so this like half-dead bat covered in plastic goose falls on the floor.
The nurses are running around.
And I'm sitting there with the leg on my neck.
It was crazy.
But yeah, so I could get an immune booster because I've had the whole rabies series.
One shot would like boost my immunity for a long time.
So it's not that hard of a thought to say, you know, if you drank a little bit of poison, it could cause a problem in your body for a long period of time.
So I was just on Tom O'Brien, a friend of mine who's been studying gluten for like 30 years.
He has a gluten summit coming up in November or sometime.
And I was one of his guests on there, but he interviewed like a whole bunch of different physicians who've been doing research on the immune effects of gluten.
Six months is a real number.
It's not always there.
And those last few months, it's a very tiny effect, but it's measurable and detectable.
and they can see declining levels of antibodies specifically to the stuff you ate if you're sensitive to it.
But get this.
When you eat gluten, it causes cross-reactivity in your immune system.
And there's whole panels of cross-reactivity things you can do.
What that means is that if your body is genetically or microbiologically set up that way, or let's say you have leaky gut because you didn't take your digestive enzymes, well, whatever the cause there is, this happens.
And then the wheat tells your body, oh, you should attack your nervous system.
You squirt glutamate into a synapse, which causes a little electrical signal to flow, and then you suck that glutamate back out.
And that's how your brain works.
The problem is when you get extra glutamate like that, then you have so much that even when you suck the glutamate out, there's still some left.
So your cells keep firing.
That's why people get migraines and they get tired, they get sleepy.
But if you're a restaurant and you toss a little MSG in there, even stuff that's legally, you're allowed to say, I added no MSG, even though what you added was 74% MSG.
So you go to a restaurant and the cook honestly believes, like, the chef there will tell you, I'll look you straight in the eye and say, there's no MSG in here.
And he means it because he has things that say on the label, no MSG, because as long as it's at least 25% not MSG, you don't have to say what's in there.
What it says online, there's on Wikipedia, it's kind of, I didn't know this, that it's one of the most abundant, naturally occurring non-essential amino acids.
It's a sodium salt of glutamic, glutamic, how do you say it?
Umami, when you're a chef, it's like the sixths flavor.
And it's something that comes from like charring your meat just right, kind of searing the outside, or using soy sauce is the classical umami taste.
It was isolated by Japanese researchers who, funny enough, invented MSG when they were trying to get to the bottom of what's the special taste that people enjoy.
The problem is that that taste, especially in excess, causes these massive food cravings and drops in blood sugar and it causes brain cell death.
Like, is it something you should absolutely definitely avoid Or is it something like along like sugar, as long as you have it in moderation, you should be okay?
Especially for kids, it should be illegal to give kids MSG because their gut isn't that good at filtering these things out and their blood-brain barrier isn't fully formed.
Not that it's that good of a barrier in anyone.
After that, it's a question of how healthy your tissues are, what your genetics are.
I don't think there's any argument that it's good for you.
I've never heard that.
And it likely causes just weakness, headaches, brain fog, and tiredness in people, and they don't know what's happening.
It turns out every one of the major packaged food companies out there right now started out marketing coffee.
The kind of ancient history of coffee marketing.
The techniques we use to manipulate people to eating the cheapest possible crap we can sell, the stuff that causes the most cravings so they'll buy more of it.
You can't eat just one sort of marketing.
That all evolved from the very early days.
And all those companies today, like Post and General Mills, started out as coffee merchants, and they just spread into these other kinds of food.
It kind of makes sense because if you start out with that, coffee, without a doubt, is addictive.
I mean, everybody knows it.
There's a place near me that has two Starbucks right next to each other.
There's a Starbucks that's right here.
And then there's a supermarket that's like 30 paces away with a big Starbucks sign.
So there's a Starbucks in the supermarket and there's a Starbucks store.
And they're right next to each other.
It's hilarious.
We're going to have to put a bulletproof on the third corner and just...
You should do a bulletproof coffee chain.
Most people have no idea what the fuck this stuff is.
When I give people bulletproof coffee, they always go like, whoa, the question everybody has about bulletproof, this is the controversial question.
This process that you have, the bunch of questions.
For folks who don't know what bulletproof coffee is, Dave invented some, this is how I found out about Dave.
Tate Fletcher came over to the Ice House studio and he brought this delicious thermos of amazing coffee that had stevia in it and butter.
And I was like, what the fuck are you drinking, man?
And he used to tell me about bulletproof coffee.
And it's coffee that is mixed with MCT oil and grass-fed butter.
And then more importantly, I started reading about mycotoxins and how just generally accepted it is that there's mycotoxins in a lot of different coffee that you buy, you know, and that people aren't testing for it and they just accept it and that you're drinking this fungus.
There's a reason that you should eat grass-fed meat, too.
This is one of the many reasons because these toxins that are common in grains and cereals, by the way, they feed the crap cereal to the animals that they're going to feed you.
Because the cereals that have high mold, they can't feed them to the pregnant cows because pregnant cows miscarry when they eat the toxic grain.
So they save it for the stuff you're going to eat.
And once you get used to that taste, the other stuff doesn't taste good anymore.
It leaves like a coating in your mouth.
I went to one of those high-end chain steak houses where you spend 80 bucks on a steak, and I'm like, all right, I'll get it.
And I cut the fat off the steak, which I never do because it didn't taste right.
I could tell it wasn't good for me.
But when I get the stuff from a cow that's raised on grass, especially fresh, like just pasture, the fat's like a yellowish color, and it just tastes so good.
When you eat, like a lot of people don't like the gamey taste of venison, but a lot of what you're eating when you're eating venison is the diet of the animal.
Like if you get venison that's from a farm, like farm-raised venison, it tastes very different than wild venison.
Wild venison has like a feeling when you're eating it, like it's alive.
Like this is like a powerful piece of meat.
The farm venison that I've had, I've had some of it that's really good and I've had other that feels like, man, they must be giving these guys the same fucking shit they give cows.
This guy's like, he spent his whole life raising like 500 cattle.
And we went into all these crazy details.
And he said the secret to having the best grass-fed meat was that you wanted to go in and let the cows pick the grass they'd eat and then a cow will naturally get like the clump of grass that has the most nutrients for it.
Like they have radar for the right kinds of food.
And his meat has the darkest yellow fat I've ever had.
So it's, you know, it's one of those things where you have these guys who make wine, and there's the equivalent level of artistry for people who make beef.
And he told me about how after you slaughter the animal, like how they do it in an ethical way.
So there's no pain, no suffering.
They don't see each other die and all that.
But then like when you cool the animal determines whether you have a tender steak or a tough steak.
unidentified
So there's this incredibly complex like artisanal process.
It's got a weird thing going on because you have all the intelligence and worldliness of a big city, but you have nice people.
It's weird.
I mean, there's some douchebags in Toronto, don't get me wrong.
There's douchebags everywhere.
They're unavoidable.
I mean, there's a certain percentage of human beings that were raised by fuckheads.
They did a terrible job and created a shit product.
Just what it is.
It's the same as if you gave a bunch of people car parts and had them put together their own cars.
There's some people that are going to put together amazing cars, and there's some dickheads that are going to develop things where their fucking wheels fly off on the highway.
Well, they've done these studies on rats where they stuff them into a room, and they have 10 rats in a room, then they have 20 rats in a room.
They've shown what happens with rat population densities.
It's the same thing that happens to people in cities.
Rats start sitting in the corner by themselves and rocking back and forth.
They exhibit all these weird fucking goofy behavior characteristics, and they do it in large numbers.
That's what you're dealing with in Los Angeles.
When you see these crazy people cutting in front of each other and fucking flying down the road and doing all this assholeish shit, there's too many people.
Too many goddamn people.
They're freaking out.
They're trying to get away from everybody.
But when I was in Boulder, there's such a marked difference in the way people drive in Boulder.
In Boulder, people wave to each other.
There's only 100,000 of them.
They fucking hit the blinkers.
They let you in.
Nobody's in a rush.
And you feel different when you're there.
There's a general tone in the air that feels more calm and relaxed.
But I think that issue could be possibly managed by having some sort of real comprehensive mental health program in this country for adults and have it, you know, everybody's sort of on their own.
They're on their own from the time they get to high school, essentially.
Their parents drop them off at school, the parents are working, they come home, and then the parents are tired from work.
You're basically raising yourself from 14 on with like a little bit of influence by the older people around you.
Don't get into too much trouble, but you're kind of like that's stupid, all right?
That's the most complex part of a child's life, and it's the most as far as like when you're establishing your traits and establishing your way and your ethics and the way the way you're going to live your life, you develop a lot of those patterns when you're like 14 and 15 and 16.
Those are the years that I think it's very important to help people figure out how to manage life.
Help people figure out how to think, help inspire them, help show them what can be gained from setting goals and achieving them and that excellent feeling, and that it becomes contagious.
And then you can do more with that, and you can inspire other people.
You can surround yourself with a bunch of like-minded people, and instead of being jealous of each other, actually elevate each other and grow stronger as a group than you would as individuals.
There's a lot of things that people just don't get to learn.
And sometimes you're around the wrong people.
You have the wrong job.
You have the wrong career.
You have the wrong whatever.
And you never get around those people.
And then one day you're old as fuck and you realize you wasted your life doing shitty things that are boring, hanging around with assholes who have no social skills.
That aspect of society, I really feel like it's a mismanaged resource issue.
I think that human beings essentially, besides being life, and besides being our brothers and sisters in the community of the world, we're also a resource.
And a life is a resource.
I've always said, if this country was smart, instead of spending all this money fucking with people in other countries, you want to build up, do you want to figure out how to make this country strong?
It's not by suppressing the people inside of it or controlling natural resources.
It's by making it so that there's the smallest amount of losers possible.
Find out what's the weakest link.
Well, the weakest link is people that are born in a shit economic situation to parents that don't give a fuck.
Find them and help them.
Eliminate the possibility of weak scenarios being the cause for weak people.
They went to like the poorest neighborhoods and they went to families with young kids and they gave them one brightly colored toy and that was it.
And then they tracked the results like 15 and 20 years later and there was a noticeable IQ difference and like a life success difference from the kids who got just a little bit more mental stimulation from having something like childlike to play with instead of just playing in squalor basically.
It doesn't take that much to move the needle in a big way.
I honestly didn't think when I was a kid, I mean, I didn't grow up wealthy or particularly poor, call it middle class, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, actually, home of breaking bad.
And I did not know that it was normal to expect people to help you.
I seriously just, that wasn't part of the way I thought the world worked.
And I didn't figure that out until I was in my mid-20s.
I was like, holy crap.
So like now I'm like, it's pretty easy to pay for the toll for the guy behind you or buy a cup of coffee for someone else the way people do at Starbucks.
Just kind of pay it forward.
But it changes someone's whole day just to know that like someone gave a crap about you.
But it makes a difference because, you know, it does something for the psyche for young men.
When you're a teenager like that, you got enough hormones raging and all that stuff to kind of feel the sense of community and all that.
So I have no idea how to create rites of passage because that wasn't really a huge part of my life.
But the research I've seen on that says that's pretty important for kids at different ages.
And then you get this whole thing, like, oh, you're 18.
Now, you know, you can go out, you can hold a gun, you can vote, but you can't drink yet.
So, you know, more power to you.
But your prefrontal cortex isn't done until you're 23, maybe even 25.
So what about like the development that happens in your 20s when you realize around like 23, like, oh, I probably can't drink every night of the week because I'm, you know, not holding up as well as I'd like.
I'm tired all the time.
So by the time you're 25, you're like different than you were when you're 23, than when you're 21.
And when you're 30 and 40, you don't stop evolving through the course of your life.
And like Erickson and guys all studied that and wrote about the stages of adult development.
You can Google that.
And like, why do we stop paying attention to people when they basically turn 18?
Yeah, and we don't even pay attention to them before they even turn 18.
Once they start talking back, we just fucking, you're on your own, fuckface.
You know, I think, and it's once a kid is on a path too, like if a kid is on a path to becoming an electrical engineer or on a path to, it's very difficult to jump off of a path that you've already started.
That's one of the hardest things to do in life.
When you already have some momentum and success, it makes it actually even harder.
And it should reaffirm, like, if you've been successful at this, you could be successful at anything.
But most people don't think like that.
They think, well, hey, this is X is my specialty.
If I decide that Y is my real love, I'm going to start from scratch.
I don't want to do that.
You know, I don't want to tell my, I don't want to, you know, I'm competing with my colleagues.
I don't want to all of a sudden be back to square one and these guys are at step seven or eight.
It's like you're on a train and your train's moving and you can jump off, but if you do, you got to go all the way the fuck back, and then you got to go in another direction.
It's like you're not just starting from scratch, you have to run all the way back and start from scratch.
Part of the problem here is there's so much regulation now, all these professional trade organizations that make it damn near impossible for someone who's sincerely interested in doing a new career to enter the career.
Whether you want to be a plumber, like try and just go out there and say, you know, I read all the books, I learned all this stuff.
By the time you do all the things, you're going to have invested years and a ton of money just to be allowed to go into someone's house and put a wrench on a pipe by yourself.
And the same thing goes if you want to do some sort of quasi-medical, like physical therapist.
The line between a really good functional movement trainer and a physical therapist is pretty blurry in my experience.
Yet one group has like severe restrictions on who can call themselves that and very rigid requirements for what it takes.
And the other group may have similar skills, but they're not even allowed to talk about some of what they do.
So I'd like to see a little bit more fluidity around people's careers because maybe we say, all right, this guy's certified, but this guy is doing similar things.
He's not certified.
probably going to charge less.
But at least he's allowed to talk about what he does.
But right now, That's where it becomes really problematic.
It's like, how do we know this guy knows what the fuck he's doing?
Yeah.
Well, I think that it's just unfortunate that a lot of folks get on a path that they're not actually enjoying.
And I think a lot of times you're getting advice from parents or friends or girlfriends or boyfriends where they're, you know, say, hey, this is the safer bet.
I was never going to be able to work in an office.
I never even thought it was ever a possibility.
Like when I was in high school, my number one thing was, I have to get the fuck out of here.
And then once I'm out of here, now I can figure this out for myself.
But whatever it is that allows you to think that that's good and think that that's preparing you for something that you actually want to do, ooh, I got to not allow that in my brain.
I just knew that those people that were teaching those classes were so unhappy.
Public school, the one good thing about it sucking so hard is that it makes you analyze these poor fucks that are teaching you.
You know, if you have a really incompetent professor, it makes you analyze these poor dummies that are no motivation, not getting paid well, and they're not doing a good job of it either.
They don't take any pride in their work.
It's almost like if you wanted to go all Alex Jonesy, it's almost like they designed it to make sure that there's a certain amount of losers.
There's always going to be a certain amount of people that are willing to take crappy jobs because they have no skills, because it just made education really fucking terrible.
And they spend a lot of time getting certified, especially here in California.
The certification process is crazy.
So they go to all this, and what do they get as a reward for all their college and all their extra training credentials?
They get a job that pays them like $30,000 a year with 42 kids in the room, including some who have special needs who they just couldn't fit in the other classroom.
I volunteered.
I taught eighth graders for a couple days using Junior Achievement, this nonprofit that lets professional people come in and just teach.
And I did this in East Palo Alto a while back, which is a really poor part of the Bay Area, like probably the poorest part of the Bay Area around there.
It's like one side of the freeway is Stanford University, five and $10 million homes.
You go across the road, there's dirt roads and like gunfire.
And it's literally the freeway cuts it down the middle.
And so I'm there and I'm volunteering to teach in this class.
And I just remember I'm usually pretty good in front of a classroom.
I taught at the University of California, so I'm a trained teacher.
And it was so hard because there were two kids there who didn't belong in that class because their brains were tweaked.
Like they were seriously unable to hear the answer to the question.
So they would just interrupt constantly.
And I just looked at the rest of the kids there and they're just sitting there kind of glazed over because they're getting nothing from this.
And I talked to the teacher afterwards and he's like, there's nothing I can do.
And this guy was one of those really good, just warm-hearted, nice guys who was teaching in a neighborhood he didn't have to teach in because that was where he could make the most good.
And like, we need to pay teachers more and we need to make public schools better.
That's one way to make the whole place more peaceful.
And you'll drive away some of the most passionate ones because on top of that, they have all the bureaucracy and lawsuits and just rigmarole of working for kind of an ancient government.
I'm not actually implying that it is some sort of a conspiracy as to why the schools suck.
I think it's simply a matter of they can get away with not paying.
I think they can cut resources in that area and then get away with it.
I think it's just one of those things that people cut.
And I think it's more of an economic matter than anything.
I don't think it's a big grand conspiracy.
But that's one of the reasons why people do think it's a conspiracy.
I mean, if you did want to look at the effects of not having a properly motivated group of teachers teaching children, I mean, that's the effects of a terrible education.
Yeah, I think when you're like a tiny little baby and like a two-year-old, cities are probably not that good for you.
So that's one of the reasons I'm like, all right, you know, I'm going to maintain my connections with all my friends, and I spend a lot of time traveling and all.
But at the same time, I know like when I go home, there's trees and everything.
The areas of mass population are the weirdest ones.
The areas like Los Angeles or New York, those are the weirdest things to try to manage because you see them and you see all these people packed into this area and you just go, there's no way you're going to be able to move around quickly.
There's no way you're going to get into midtown Manhattan at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, shoot across town to the other side to meet your friend.
You're not going to get there.
There's just too many folks.
There's just too many folks and everyone's just jammed into this one fucking tube.
It's just not going to happen.
I don't know how that is ever going to get managed.
And it seems like New York City grows in population every year.
He owned this 100-year-old cannery, like right on Cook's Cove, and you had to get there by boat, so it was totally isolated.
And once a week, for like a half hour, he would plug this string of duct tape batteries into his mobile phone, and that was his only communication with people.
And he was one of the original Alaska, like, like, original guys who drove to Alaska, like, back in the 1920s or something.
And had all these stories and just an amazing dude.
But he was really comfortable.
Like, he caught fish.
That's what he did.
He had a big net.
And in fact, he had a Rolex.
Probably the coolest story ever.
I looked at him and I'm like, he's kind of this poor guy.
You know, looked like he was 60 and he was 84 and wears this yellow coverall things.
And I see this beat up Rolex.
And I did a double take.
And he laughed.
And he goes, oh, yeah.
I called the Rolex guy.
I told him I wanted a Rolex.
So he flew out here in a plane and he stepped out in a three-piece suit into the surf from the float plane and took one look at me wearing my fish guts and all and said, oh, I'm sorry, sir.
You're not a Rolex kind of guy.
And George looks at me.
He goes, Dave, I told him, oh, I just need that watch for work.
I already got a dress watch.
He wanted a Rolex that was gas charged so it wouldn't fog up so he wouldn't get caught in the tide and drowned.
And like the way these people look at the world, it was so cool.
It turns out that we've done the science and the faster you can make the skin cold, the better the anti-inflammatory response.
So they have like liquid nitrogen and they like blast you with it for just a very short period of time and the skin starts making the anti-inflammatory things and you get the response you're looking for, but it doesn't take much time and you don't like freeze your ass off like you do when I'm sitting in that tub of ice water, just dropping my body temperature until my skin is like 45 degrees and you get out.
There's all these different cytokines that are tied to inflammation in the body.
And when you do that, it uses what's probably an evolutionary pathway for survival in people.
I don't think we're certain why it works.
That's one Hypothesis about it, but when you do that, it just turns off inflammation.
So, if you had a really heavy workout or hard fight and you do that, it stops the inflammation.
And, like you said earlier in our talk today, inflammation is at the root of most chronic diseases, and that's why you target inflammation every which way you can.
And cold therapy, if you've got the time to do it, is a very legitimate thing to do.
The problem is that fast cold therapy thing, I just checked, they're like $60,000.
It's like more than a really high-end float tank.
So, if you want to outfit your house with all the badass biohacking stuff, you're going to be throwing out some coin.
So you want to tell your body, frostbite is coming, and it causes physiological change, but then you don't let the frostbite come, so then you don't get the damage that would come from being too cold.
There's deep tissue temperature receptors, and then there's peripheral ones right on the skin.
So whether there's an advantage from just getting the skin ones or the ones like further down, I've never seen the research.
Someone might know.
I just chatted with Jack Cruz, who's one of the neurosurgeons who's done a lot of work on this, including like surgery without anesthetics afterwards, without painkillers, using just ice, and all this crazy stuff, including like massive weight loss with ice.
So there's definitely guys who know about that, but in all the research I've seen and all the people I've talked to, I've never seen a comparison of the two techniques other than one is faster and it costs more, but it takes less time.
There's a lot of stuff that makes a lot of sense on its face.
And you look at it and go, oh, it must make sense.
Therefore, it is.
And like the whole thing about eat less calories and work out more, and you'll lose weight in a safe way and keep it off.
Well, it makes sense.
It just doesn't work.
And if you try it and you lose 25 pounds and gain 30 and lose 30 pounds and gain 40 and you do that over and over until you're a fat ass, at one point you're going to figure out that that is not a way to be healthy and thin and strong and to feel good.
But the problem is not that people are idiots.
It's that the assumption made a lot of sense.
So then it becomes dogma.
And instead of looking at the data, we look at what should work.
And then if it didn't work, it's because we didn't do it right or we didn't try hard enough.
And that little trap gets us on all kinds of things that seem like a good idea on their face.
I'd even say like the whole vegan approach.
It sounds like a good idea to be a raw vegan because you get enzymes and you get all these other things.
But I know a lot of people who got really sick, including me, from being a raw vegan, because of the anti-nutrients that were in the raw vegetables we were eating.
We didn't inactivate the vegetable defense systems.
So it's great to have a hypothesis and to test it.
But if you don't get the data, you don't look at how you're doing and see if it worked, then if you're a pro-athlete or not, especially then you should be getting the numbers.
Yeah, it's one of the more fascinating aspects of professional athletics, even if you're not into watching sports, is the leaps and bounds they're making as far as recovery and nutrition and finding out what helps the body perform in a certain way.
And by doing that, you know, it's sort of just like the trickle-down that you get from cars, car companies investing in race cars.
And then, you know, they develop better brakes for commercial vehicles, for commercial cars, for pedestrian or rather civilian cars, as opposed to the professional race car driver cars.
But those really high-level engineered cars, whether it's BMW or Porsche, all that stuff trickles down to the regular cars that consumers buy.
I kind of liked it when you had Victor Conte on, because when I look at the pro athletes who are cheating, I want to know what they're doing.
I'd rather that they weren't cheating.
I'd rather that they were free to tell people the techniques they were doing because it seems like the techniques that we're using at the very edges of human performance, whether it's military or pro-athletes, that those should be trickling through into the medical profession.
And we have a break there where a lot of times what they're doing is kind of like hidden or it's not talked about.
But rapid recovery for a pro-athlete ought to be able to make my grandmother heal better too.
And injuries, you know, injuries that athletes get, regular people get injuries too.
And the leaps and bounds they've made in recognizing what benefits recovery, what doesn't, diet that benefits recovery, what nutrients you need, how important is protein, how important is this, what vitamins are good for you?
A lot of that is coming from that science of performance athletics because they're just looking for these tiny, tiny edges everywhere.
And these benefits are so small.
What you can get out of taking quartercepse mushroom or what you can get out of B12.
It's not going to make the difference between a guy like you or a guy like Usain Bolt.
You know where else is fascinating for me is World Championship poker.
Because those guys, it's all about focus and awareness, right?
You got to pay attention to all the other guys at the table, all their tells, all their things.
You got to think strategy, and you got to just grind it out.
It's like a marathon for your brain.
It's like they're going for 12 and 14 hours.
And I just literally got a text message before this, but JC Tran, who's in the World Poker Championships, I think actually happening right after this, he's totally on Bulletproof Coffee.
And so is one of the other guys.
But JC's actually, I just literally found out he's going to be wearing a bulletproof patch, and I'm grateful For that, because it wasn't planned.
But it's one of those things where I look at those guys, and I've actually done brain training with Nam Lei, who's another one of these guys.
And they're some of the most dedicated cognitive athletes of anyone I can find.
Like, you have students and all, but that's not the same thing.
Like, where do you go to get the pro-athlete perspective on performance improvement, but to get it for people who want to pay attention all the time and think about stuff all the time?
And I don't know.
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Is there a better place you can think of than pro-poker?
No, I think those guys are probably, if you want, someone whose job relies on being clever and thinking many levels, pro-chess would be the only other people.
What studies have ever been done, or have there been any done, that has anybody, even in personal studies, with bulletproof coffee and cognition or anything along those lines?
So there's a study, and I think my guys are probably ready to put up the summary graph from it, where we recruited 54 people.
We got an institutional review board approval for the study, like basically from the powers that be that say you're allowed to experiment on humans.
And we had them go through a period of drinking basically mass market coffee from the corner coffee shop versus drinking upgraded coffee, just black coffee versus black coffee.
And they did a battery of cognitive tests straight from like psychology research.
Of the things we measured, there was a very substantial difference between the bulletproof coffee versus non-bulletproof.
And this wasn't testing it with the upgraded MCT or even better yet, the brain octane stuff.
This was just black coffee versus black coffee, then coffee with butter versus coffee with butter.
And it was interesting, butter actually had a negative response on one of the five, one of the seven, I guess, measures of cognitive function that we were looking at.
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So this is a, it's pretty darn legitimate for like a small company.
Like we funded this ourselves, and it wasn't, it's not a perfect study, but it doesn't look like there's a placebo effect because butter was supposed to be positive, but it was pretty much neutral with one negative.
So we're going to be putting this stuff up, but there's like more of the write-up that has to happen in order for it to be like an accepted paper and all that.
Toxins from mold are a major, major contributing factor, and I damn well know that.
And there's a reason that in this little test we did, we found people had a difference there.
I'm particularly sensitive.
I've got the lab tests that show it.
And so I'm a canary for this.
And I know very well when coffee has it because I feel like a zombie.
And 28% of the population has the same genes I do that make them more susceptible to mold.
It's in the HLA part of your genetic code.
And it's how you respond to clotting and how you respond to infection.
So I have like a hyperactive immune response, which protects me.
If I was like a rogue invader in Europe, I'm well designed to get cut by a sword, shot by an arrow, and then go invade your town and not get sick.
The problem is if I'm like breathing toxic mold all the time or drinking it in my coffee, it's a chronic low-level exposure, but my body thinks I'm being attacked.
So I tend to clot too much.
I get sticky blood and I get chronic inflammation that won't turn off.
And that's one of the reasons that I'm sensitive to these things and I can feel them.
And then I went out and I did the work to quantify it.
So mold toxins are one of them, but there's hundreds of mold toxins.
So I went through and I identified which ones are causing this problem the most and I test for those.
And I talk about ocratoxin, I talk about aflatoxin, like the main ones, but there's other ones that are in some strains of coffee that aren't in others.
And then there's other things called biogenic amines.
And I look at those as well.
So when you quantify all that stuff, when you get the numbers right and get them far lower than even the European standards, you end up with some interesting effects from the coffee that just don't come out because most coffee has some good and some bad in it.
So like this is, A, I wanted to drink coffee.
I gave up coffee for five years because it was messing with my head.
So this was my own self-interest.
It's a legitimate scientific exploration on my part, partly because I wanted to drink good coffee, but also because like this is what I do.
Like this fascinates me and interests me.
And I did not expect the effects to be this big, especially on other people, but they're real.
And that study and what people say, I'm very sure of it.
It does make sense if there are toxins on coffee and those toxins are bad for you, that that would have a negative impact on cognitive function.
It totally makes sense.
But my question is, what are you doing different?
Like when you say the bulletproof method, what the fuck does that mean, man?
The problem is, like, you've got to tell people what you do that makes sense so that they understand how you can actually remove toxins.
Because the one piece of criticism that I hear all the time is like, how do you know that your coffee doesn't have mycotoxins in it and what is the method for preventing it?
So how I know is I send it through a medical, not medical, we'll call it an analytical laboratory.
You could do medical stuff with it.
But I have a set of internal standards that make it bulletproof or not.
If it doesn't meet the requirements, it's not coffee that I'm going to be putting in a bag and calling bulletproof.
But to get it to that point, that's the proof point.
Then you go back and you look at every step of coffee production.
And I'm not going to be telling the world how to make bulletproof coffee.
I spent a lot of time working on how to do this.
But what I do is I look at what are the sources for these toxins?
Why do they form?
How do they form?
And what's happening is there's old world, like they call it second wave coffee, like the original kind of Starbucks and Pete's coffee and these kind of, even before them, the Folgers and just the normal coffee companies that have been selling coffee for a long time.
They typically look at economics and then we started looking at flavor with the Starbucks.
And you have third wave coffee guys who I greatly respect as coffee artisans.
And these are like the modern, cool coffee shops where they roast their own beans.
And, you know, it was carefully selected by this.
And what the first round of people did is they said, how do I make coffee cheap and widely available and good enough To make a profit.
So that was an economic thing.
The second guy said, How do I make really flavorful coffee?
It was a taste thing.
And I came along and I said, How do I make coffee that makes me feel good all the time?
And I'm willing to sacrifice taste and I'm willing to sacrifice economics.
So I just had a different lens when I was looking at coffee because of my own personal wiring.
And in order to do that, I dug in on the agricultural side, is what happens there on the transport side.
And there's a whole decision tree about what you can do in order to get coffee to be bulletproof.
And it also depends on what part of the world you're dealing with, right?
So I've oftentimes recommended Central American coffee.
There's a little problem, though.
70% of next year's coffee crop in Central America will probably be lost to coffee rust, which is a type of fungus.
And this fungus is going to completely decimate this.
And this kind of fungus called rust actually killed some South American things and Indonesian coffee for many years historically.
So it basically kills the plants.
It eats the leaves so they can't produce any coffee.
And some of the coffee analysts I've talked to are calling it like, you know, a bloodbath in Central America in terms of coffee.
You do a search for coffee rust, you'll see it.
And no one's sure how it got there.
But the Arabica plants that we rely on to make good coffee are particularly susceptible.
And shade-grown coffee doesn't get it because it has a protective fungal biome in the soil, which is something I look for, by the way.
So when you have a fungus that protects coffee from rust, it's likely to survive.
But when you go out to, say, sun-grown coffee, which we do to increase production, there isn't this other fungus in the soil, so then the rust can just run rampant.
So when we clear the forest, when we plant coffee in an industrial way, it increases the odds of bad fungus moving in.
And then there's a whole part of processing the coffee, where there's different techniques and different tweaks you can make in the coffee processing in order to influence the cost, the amount of time, the amount of materials required to process the coffee.
And I looked at that and said, I'm not trying to save money, and I'm not trying to create the world's most flavorful coffee possible.
I'm trying to create high-performance coffee.
And it turns out it tastes pretty darn good.
I've had Cup of Excellence winning coffee, which is so phenomenally delicious.
It has mold toxins in it.
I know very well because I'm a mold detector for it, and I get all the symptoms I get when I have molds, when I drink that.
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I'm like, wow, it was still worth it because it was such good coffee.
They're just a big coffee company whose numbers I know.
They have $816 million worth of coffee in inventory right now.
So in order to get an adequate sample size for $816 million worth of coffee, I am a very small company, and I spend tens of thousands of dollars on quantifying the coffee in order to get the bulletproof process where it is.
And I regularly test my own coffee.
So I don't know how I could possibly get a reliable sample, especially not knowing the back-end processing.
What I'd like to see is I'd like to see U.S. regulatory authorities adopt European standards for coffee.
That'd be a great first step.
But bulletproof coffee is popular in Europe as well because those aren't the only standards we can do.
They were building a new university center, so they just levied the crap out of students.
I didn't have enough money.
So I started a company.
I sold caffeine t-shirts, said caffeine, my drug of choice.
I was like 19 years old.
And I sold them to 12 countries over the internet.
And that was like, you know, ended up getting me an entrepreneur magazine.
So I've been a coffee guy since I was a kid.
I had to give up coffee for five years because I would drink it and I would get like a headache and I would get sore joints and I would just feel like, I'd drink it and I'd feel great and I'd crash and I'd feel like crap.
And what happened is I was getting autoimmune things because the toxic molds that grow in coffee cross-react with gluten.
That's a big problem because I'm gluten sensitive.
So what happened is I just gave up coffee and it made me sad.
And then I would drink a cup of coffee and I'd feel great.
And the next day I'd drink another cup of coffee and I'd feel like a zombie.
I'm like, what changed?
And finally I realized it wasn't me.
It was the coffee.
And I started doing my research and I started digging in.
So call it enlightened self-interest, but like there's no BS marketing here.
Like this is me intentionally creating coffee that I could drink every morning and putting it out there saying, do other people have this?
And the results were bigger than I thought they'd be.
And I'm not ultra sensitive to it, but there's a difference between the way I feel when I drink bulletproof coffee and the way I feel when I drink regular coffee.
But what other coffees are okay to drink?
Like how do you know what's okay to drink and what's not okay to drink?
Well, because people who are coffee people, and I count myself very enthusiastically amongst them, they're people who Are obsessive about it.
And if you go to a coffee shop like that, they're paying more attention to sourcing.
So you reduce the odds.
Now, I would very happily have just gone to the local, and you know, in the Bay Area, you can get lots of artisanal coffee shops.
You go to New York, you go to any big city.
There's a hundred guys competing to say, you know, my roaster is the shiniest and my beans come from Juan Valdez's great-grandson and all this stuff, right?
The problem is that the reliability isn't there.
And like, I'm not going to name names because it's a community.
I've been to some of the coolest, most amazing coffee shops in big cities, and I've come out of there drinking single estate, Central American, and it is not clean coffee.
It is wonderful tasting.
It is a work of art, but it doesn't cause the human performance I'm looking for.
And I know very well that it has molten toxins in it.
And I know that if I took it out and I quantified it, that I could show the difference.
It would be I'd have to do some work on understanding how you preserve a coffee sample to send it into an analytical lab so you don't get like a breakdown over time.
Even one hour after you brew coffee, it changes chemically quite a lot.
So I have no idea what the breakdown of mold toxins is over time in post-brewed coffee.
We have good data about whether brewing takes out the toxins.
And there's one study that says it takes out most of it, but all of the other studies say at least half, and some say upwards of about 80% remain.
And it's pretty well known that ocratoxin is a heat-stable toxin.
I thought about piercing myself just so I could fit in better.
But I mean, seriously, Joe, I go to high-end coffee shops and I marvel at the cool stuff they're creating and the cool vibe and the community and the culture.
And I'm not trying to dump on that stuff.
I'm just saying that if I want to feel at my very best, I literally...
There is a denial there where they say, yeah, that's all BS.
But when I talk to some of the guys who have been working with coffee for 25 and 30 years, they will tell me flat out, yeah, we know about this problem.
It's not, at least I have it on my Kindle, so I can't tell you if it's picturesque or not.
But it's the whole history of the coffee business going all the way back.
And coffee has fueled South American dictators and Central American genocide.
It has changed the shape of economics and food marketing.
It's an amazing thing to read and understand.
And you can sort of see how the use of coffee has changed, but people don't know.
The Revolutionary War and the Civil War were totally coffee powered and they were a strategic asset.
And the reason that your parents drink watery coffee is because there was a spike in coffee pricing.
So the coffee marketing companies, the really big ones like Chase and Sanborn, they got together and they're like, let's convince people to use less coffee per cup and tell them it's the same so we can still charge more for less coffee.
That's why you have three quarters of a pound of beans in a bag.
That's the standard size.
The big mass marketing companies did this 30 years ago, and that's why it's three quarters of a pound.
Now, do you think that the transition during the Boston Tea Party thing, transition from tea to coffee, had anything to do with the way the direction this country went?
You could argue That, but the Enlightenment in Europe was all about coffee.
These people met and did all this, like, like the creation of science.
They were doing it at coffee houses drinking coffee, and the government was trying to shut down coffee houses, and they did it a few times because all the basically revolutionaries were gathering in coffee houses.
So then they come over here, they start drinking even more coffee, which they did in early America, quite a lot of coffee.
I made my decaf beans because of people like that.
There's good studies that show decaf does good things for you.
And so it's a very small percentage of people, but the way I did it is I took bulletproof beans and I send them right over the border to the one place on earth where you can do Swiss water process, which is in Vancouver, and send them back over the border to Portland, where my roastery is.
And it's the best decaf I can make, and it's clean, but it still doesn't taste good.
Like, it's decaf, for God's sake.
So that's why decaf is bad.
It gets bad beans and it removes a protective element.
So it has to be super fresh decaf, and it has to be made from proper beans.
Corn, like 90 to 98% of corn is infected with fusarium fungus on the stalk.
It actually comes in through those little tassels on the end of it.
So by the time you get it, there's already some in there.
It'll grow in fresh corn on the cob if it's not iced right after you pick it.
But if you dry the corn, I mean, there's humidity levels, there's different amounts of things like that that influence this.
But dried corn is universally something that's going to have levels of fusarium and the associated toxins it makes.
And depending on the strain of fusarium, you can get trichostine, you can get ocratoxin, or you can get fusaricin, which is another toxin.
You don't need to memorize all these names, but you should know that dried corn, even like the vegan dried corn, you know, tortilla chips or whatever, are a potential risk.
And again, it varies by season.
It varies by part of the world.
It varies by how dry it was.
If it's too dry, you get mold because the plants are stressed.
If it's too wet, you get mold because the plants were too wet.
So it's an agricultural commodity.
It's not a constant level.
And the main argument for avoiding these things is that we evolved to handle eating something bad, right?
You throw up, you feel crappy, you might get headache, you might get sick, and then you recover, you excrete the toxins, and you go on and you kill the next animal, you pick the next tuber, and that's how it works.
But we never were meant to eat a low level of these toxins every single day and every single meal.
It creates low-grade chronic stress, which leads to low-grade chronic inflammation.
And the level of safety for okra toxin, just one of these toxins that the European Union has for their citizens, is five parts per billion.
You're not going to see mold on your coffee.
You're not going to taste it.
It is part per billion.
Why did they set that level?
It's not because they're smoking crack.
It's because that's a level where you start seeing a problem.
Here's one way to know that you got, this is like the poor man's mold detector test for your coffee.
If you drink a cup of coffee and you have to pee soon after you drink it and your pee is clear, that's a really good sign that you got mold toxins.
Well, so fructose is one of those things that causes advanced glycation end products in the body.
It's one of the most damaging sugars to deal with.
So your body really wants to flush toxins out as fast as it can.
So whenever you have something that makes you have to pee and pee clear, as long as you haven't been like chugging gallons and gallons of water just to dilute your pee that way, what's going on there is your body pulled hydration, pulled water out of your tissues, put it into your kidneys and bladder so it could reduce the concentration.
You want to dilute the toxin as much as possible and then pee it out as soon as possible.
So what you'll find when you pee and it's clear, you're not peeing like two gallons of water.
You have to pee, it's clear pee.
It's your body saying excrete the toxins faster, excrete them faster.
And if you just look at the color of your pee, how often you pee and the volume of your pee, you can pretty much tell whether you had toxins in the previous several hours.
And there's some seasonal effects there too, like especially in pork.
So you get all this stuff stacked up, and then you're like, okay, I ate this meal.
End of the day, was the meat deep-fried or not?
All of those have different heterocyclic amines, acrylamide, all these things form.
So your body's going to say, all right, taking all this stuff in as a total, including what was the ratio of protein versus fat and protein versus carbs, too much protein makes you have to pee more to get that out too.
So it's going to do all that and it's going to do something.
But if you eat a meal of just corn or just corn and a couple things like corn and butter, you know butter doesn't make you have to pee, you may notice a difference.
You may not too.
There's probably also some individual sensitivities there around like allergies to corn and zine and whether the corn is genetically modified or not.
But the main point is that if you have to pee urgently, look at what you just did in the previous half hour to two hours maybe, and you're very likely to say, wait, there's something in there that was different than the time before because it's not normal to go, I have to pee right now.
If you're getting that, there's something going on in your body and your body's saying, get this crap out of here.
One of my favorite ways of doing corn is you get fresh organic corn that was literally picked the day before, hopefully packed in crushed ice.
Like that's what the farmer's market should be doing when they bring that stuff in.
And then you take that, you just toss it on the grill and like let it steam inside the husk.
Like it's amazing.
Roll it in a whole bunch of butter.
That's going to be pretty darn safe.
But if that same stuff was two or three days old, like it might be in the grocery store, and the outside's a little bit kind of crinkled looking and a little gray, I actually noticed a big difference from that.
Granted, I'm a canary.
But if I feel a huge difference, there's a difference in the toxin level.
And what I'm learning in the course of just writing this and having all these people come to the website and share experiences there, they're noticing the same things.
Like, wow, I got really tired after that meal and I don't normally get really tired.
Like, what could have caused it?
And then we trace it back.
And I'm like, well, here's the most likely mold toxin containing things in there.
Why don't you experiment with those?
Eat those again.
unidentified
And it's like, wow, like it was, it was that batch of cashews.
If you talk to a food safety scientist, you talk to CDC, you talk to FDA, they have mold toxin, they have salmonella, they have E. coli, and they have specialists who are tracking all this stuff.
The problem is that testing is spotty.
Sampling is a difficult thing to do.
Like how many samples can you take from where?
Things change over time.
Like those bins where you're storing stuff in the bulk section at the grocery store, how often are those bins cleaned out?
Because a lot of this contamination happens.
If you test it after it's picked, it's pretty clean.
You put it in a dirty silo during storage before it's packaged up in that organic store where you go to, it's going to pick up mold spores there and they're going to keep growing on the dried stuff unless you controlled humidity and temperature.
And not a lot of times do people do that.
So it's just a really complex supply chain.
And the bottom line is fresh local food avoids this problem entirely.
This is one of the reasons the industrialization of our food supply is creating more chronic stress in people.
And this is a problem that is real.
We know it's real.
And we know about the acute problems.
People poisoned by mold toxins.
People get liver cancer from aflatoxin.
They test aflatoxin in peanut butter because it was such a problem.
The problem is that there's a difference between it killed you and it knocked you down for a week and you went to the hospital and I had a crappy day.
Here's what actually happened, as opposed to the ghost theory.
Although I kind of like that one.
Your body uses vitamin C to make glutathione in the liver.
Glutathione is the main detoxing enzyme there.
Your body also uses vitamin C to make collagen in your tissues.
Your arteries and veins are made out of collagen.
So if you have to make a life and death decision biologically between detoxing the liver and building collagen, you will always choose protect the liver first because you can always make more collagen later.
So I was shunting all my vitamin C. I didn't supplement back then.
You know, I'm just a kid eating, you know, McDonald's.
And so I would shunt whatever vitamin C was in my diet directly to my liver to help detox what I was breathing in.
And it didn't help that I'm one of the 28% with the genes that don't handle mold, especially aerosol mold very well.
And that's why I was getting bruising because I couldn't hold my blood in my nose or here, you know, just in my arms and legs.
I just have all these bruises where I couldn't, I didn't like, I was playing soccer, but no one, you know.
Glutathion is one of the major cellular antioxidants in the body, and it's the thing that the liver uses for most of its detoxification.
And a biochemist or a biologist is going to say, well, there's P450 pathways, blah, blah, blah.
But basically, when you drink, you suck the glutathione out of your liver.
And if you run out of glutathione, you start getting alcohol-induced liver damage.
When you take Tylenol, it causes liver damage if it depletes your glutathione.
So it's in your best interest to keep your cellular levels, your intracellular levels, and your liver levels of glutathione as high as you can so you can be more resilient in the face of toxins.
And as a kid, I didn't have very good glutathione because I was taking all of my vitamin C and giving it to my liver because I lived in a basement with toxic mold, not knowing it, but I had all the asthma and ADD and a lot of these things that are directly tied to what I was breathing.
We just didn't know it at the time.
We went to all these different specialists.
No one could say boop, but my symptoms line up perfectly.
And I have all the lab tests showing my immune system is magically reactive to like nine of the top 10 most toxic molds.
I've been working out more on the vibe lately, so I've been increasing my protein intake to account for physical activity because I've decided I need to get my sense of proprioception, get my body lined up right, so I'm doing more work on it.
And then I take glutathione, and this has been a problem because glutathione is a really complex sulfur-bearing molecule.
It's big.
So when you eat glutathione, it gets digested and you don't get any, it doesn't absorb.
So you can take a glutathione pill and nothing happens.
So the old way of doing this was to take vitamin C and an amino acid called N-acetylcysteine.
And these combine maybe with alpha-lapoic acid if you want to be fancy and help you make glutathione.
But it's rate-limited by an enzyme.
So the upgraded glutathione that I make now uses a technique out of actually the pharmaceutical industry.
And we encapsulate the glutathione molecule in phosphatidylcholine, which is basically a healthy form of the fat that insulates your nerves.
And your body loves choline.
In fact, it's one of the things in alpha brain.
There's things that help you have more choline.
So it loves this stuff.
And then we tie another molecule onto it called a lactopherin that your immune system loves.
So when this hits the wall of your stomach, your stomach's like, oh yeah, and it sucks it right in, which raises the blood levels much higher than you can get via any other method that I've experimented with.
And I've done a lot.
I've done IV glutathione, actually quite a lot of it, going back historically, but it costs $150 and it takes an hour to inject the stuff.
So we're getting fantastic results from people who just take this oral stuff.
And that's what I take.
And I take it on a regular basis because I want to be more resilient.
Number one, I wasn't born with a very resilient body.
I have like one kidney.
Like I actually have some spina bifida, believe it or not.
Like my lower spine isn't fully fused.
So I didn't start out strong and I'm pretty stoked with where I am.
But I do things like glutathione.
I do things like collagen, like coffee, everything I can find on the planet that brings me back to above the level I've ever performed before.
And like glutathione, understanding as a kid, I didn't have enough of it, and that affected my health, made me more aware of its role in the body today.
So I could do the stuff that I'm doing now, which honestly, like, I take all my own stuff because it works for me.
You know, A lot of people are skeptical about the possibilities that they're experiencing that much issue in their life because of toxins, because of things that are just naturally in the diet and a slow sort of leak of poison into your body.
I never even thought about it that way.
But if you have a house that has fucking black mold in it, that is exactly what it's like.
If you have a house that...
You've had it.
But have you ever talked to someone who almost died from that?
I know a dude who was like, literally thought he had AIDS and found out that it was just some fungus living in his house.
And that's the other side of what I do with the supplements that I make.
It's about increasing mitochondrial function.
And if you have a fueling problem, an energy management problem in your body, and being fat is a great sign of that, you need to figure out why and you need to correct it.
Because when your body works well, you shouldn't be fat.
It's just people trying to find some sort of an excuse for why they are the way they are and an excuse to continue to be the way they are without feeling any repercussions from socially from other people.
This is a woman.
She had this picture.
She put it on Facebook.
It's her.
She's in a bikini or like a little, you know, one of those little CrossFit outfits or something like that.
Like, whether or not someone has a different life and whether or not someone has a different issue with their body.
That's not what she's saying.
She's saying, what's your excuse?
Because this is what she's been able to do.
You're right.
Everybody's different.
You're right.
Some people have a bad situation that they're in financially.
Some people have bad genetics.
Some people they've been taught poorly, whatever, diseases, all the above.
But that's not fat shaming.
She's celebrating the fact that she's thin.
You know, and this fat shaming thing that people love to say now is it completely alleviates any responsibility you have for your own physical shape.
It's like they want to take it out of the equation that social aspect of being fat, like there's a reason for it.
The reason for it is it's not healthy for you.
There's the girl, if you look at that picture up there.
What's your excuse?
Yeah.
But there's a reason why that exists is because people see what you're doing and they don't like the way it looks on you because they're scared of it being on them.
When someone sees a morbidly obese person, the reason why they're staring is not because they're trying to shame that person.
It's a natural freak out.
Your body recognizes, oh shit, that's possible too.
I could do that.
God damn, I better not do that.
I don't want to do that.
That looks awful.
Oh my God, that guy's going to die.
That's not fat shaming.
That's a natural thing that people do where they recognize success and failure in their environment.
And that success and failure is as much social success and failure as it is physiological health.
If you see someone that's super unhealthy, coughing and smoking a cigarette, that feeling is not cigarette smoking shaming, okay?
That feeling is you're recognizing that someone is doing something incredibly unhealthy and that possibility exists for you too.
But they don't want you to rub it in their face, Dave Asprey, because that's fat shaming.
You make me feel bad.
If you show your six-pack, if you just pull that up like 15 minutes a month, bitch, boom, and show that six pack on Instagram, you're fat shaming.
Isn't that hilarious?
You could fucking work out every morning, an hour and a half a day, get yourself in shape, take a picture, and people would be angry because they didn't.
That's amazing.
They would be not inspired.
Well, of course, but they're saying you're fat shaming.
I kind of get mad though when people say your excuse is that you're lazy and your excuse is that you didn't work out enough and you didn't diet enough.
Because dude, I beat myself up.
I broke my metabolism.
I broke my thyroid gland working out all the time and eating a low-fat, low-calorie diet.
And all it did was make me fat and sick and tired.
Like it doesn't work.
So it's really annoying when you get these people who are genetically gifted, have a good metabolism, and never got a chronic illness or whatever the heck works so they could basically look good without too much work.
And they stand up there and say, you know, you didn't do enough of this.
But when the fat people try and go for a jog, when you weigh 300 pounds, you try and go for a jog, it's destructive on your tissues.
So you get all these fat people who are trying and just failing miserably and feeling bad about themselves because they did it because they got the wrong advice.
Like that's why I started just putting some of this stuff up there.
I don't have to work.
I don't have food cravings.
All that stuff I struggled with like for a lot of my life, it just isn't something I have to think about anymore.
And it kind of upsets me when I see, you know, fat people who are feeling guilty and like fighting all their willpower on these cravings that they're just because like they're doing it wrong, but they don't know they're doing it wrong.
So then they feel guilty and they get caught in all this emotional stuff.
There's a guy from one of the early Whole Foods guys and some McDonald's guys got together and like they'll make something that's I'm forgetting the name of what they're trying to do, but they'll make something that's better than it was.
But is it going to be non-GMO even?
Is it going to be gluten-free?
No, probably not because we have to understand the core tenets of what makes us healthy and we have to understand those widely before there's demand for them.
So the number one predictor for whether you're going to be obese or not is your income level.
The poorer you are, the fatter you are.
That's especially true in America.
And that's a food quality issue.
And it's just not fair the way things are set up that way.
But if you're poor, you have a hard time getting food that doesn't make you inflamed.
It doesn't break your insulin.
It doesn't contain things that make you weak in it.
No, not just dating success, but the way people dress you and the way you move around in society.
That you enjoy thin privilege.
And what they're trying to do is compare being in shape with being a white male.
Like white male privilege.
White male privilege is almost shameful.
You know, it's almost shameful to have this white male privilege while people are star.
It makes you feel like if someone talks about white male privilege, what do you think of?
You think of someone being aloof to the concerns of brown people and poor people and racism and also aloof to the fact that they got super lucky.
They got this lucky roll of the dice and were born in this way that allows them to be, I mean, if you think about white males, think about white males and you think about wealth.
The majority of the super wealthy people are white males.
The majority of the people that are in positions of power, whether it's presidents, mayors, white males.
So that white male, being a white male and having that privilege is almost like being a pig.
It's like being the man.
So thin privilege.
They've figured out a way to make being thin being a pig.
It's a little bit of that, but it's also, it's, you pulled up the blog, right, Brian?
Did you pull up one of the blogs?
It's also alleviating themselves of personal responsibility and finding a new victim or a new culprit.
And the culprit is not their own lack of self-respect or their own willpower or their own ability to discipline themselves or their own ability to educate themselves on proper nutrition.
That's out of the equation.
It's no longer their responsibility.
Now, instead, they'll concentrate on thin people having an ass that fits in an actual airplane seat and being able to squeeze on in an actual escalator.
All of these things these fat fucks are complaining about and calling thin privilege.
Willpower, there's a whole book about this now, and I'm, of course, forgetting the name of the author, but they actually show that there's so many decisions you can make.
I wrote about this a while back.
There's decision-making fatigue, and there's X amount of willpower, and you can apply that willpower to change the world, or you can apply that willpower to say no to the bowl of chips in front of you, right?
And if you're a fat person and your energy reserves are low, and I say this from personal experience, the amount of willpower it takes to get up off the couch and walk across the street and do whatever you're going to do, it requires a hell of a lot more willpower than you would think it would as a healthy person because your cells aren't working.
You don't have the energy and yet you get up and you do it.
And every step you take is sapping your willpower in a way a healthy person doesn't have.
So you're saying that even though willpower is sort of an individual characteristic and some people have it and some people don't, with fat people, it's almost like a catch-22 because although they need it to drop weight, they're not going to have it because they need it to just move around.
You're wasting your willpower saying no to foods that are calling out to you in a biologically unnatural way because your energy systems are broken and you have less willpower than you should have had because your cells aren't functioning right.
Your hormones are broken.
So never say that fat people are fat because of a lack of willpower.
The fact that they're walking is a testament to their willpower.
What they're lacking is knowledge and they're lacking tools.
And when fat people have those things, they immediately go and they get thin again.
There's definitely a willpower component to it, but things like social support will increase the amount of willpower you have.
Things like encouragement, and also things like dying or being disabled or finding a diabetic ulcer on your leg and your doctor telling you you're going to lose your leg if you don't work your ass out.
That can temporarily increase willpower enough that you get your cellular energy kicked off.
But what if you use that willpower and you go on a raw vegan diet?
Dude, you're going to crash.
You might actually lose some weight, but you'll end up wrecking your health even more over the next probably one to two years.
What's missing from a raw vegan diet is saturated fat, and you can say you get it from coconut oil, but you don't get all of it from coconut oil.
All those things that you find in the nice yellow rind of fat, the things you find in oysters, the things you find in liver, trace nutrients, iron, vitamin B12.
Although I don't know where you're going to get vitamin D without relying on animal products unless you get the sunburned shiitake mushrooms is like one source.
The only vegan vitamin D that we know how to make is to take shiitake, pick them, turn them over, and expose them to UV, and they make a small amount of vitamin D. So it's the only, otherwise you'd need to make it.
Is it true that my friend's lactose intolerant, and she recently told me that the ibuprofen that she has to take a lot recently put dairy inside of the ibuprofen, and she started getting really sick from it, and she found out that some ibuprofens have dairy as a filler almost.
Cross-react means there's an eight-amino acid sequence that's present in casein and in gluten and in certain species of toxic molds.
So if your immune system, the memory B cells, get programmed to attack that eight amino acid sequence, you're going to see those foods as invaders and you're going to get a long, low-grade inflammatory response to them.
But 28% of people are going to get that pretty darn likely, and other people can do.
We've got somewhere between like 50 and 100 million people in the U.S. alone with autoimmune conditions today.
It's a pretty big problem.
And the question is, is it like a problem with the gut biome or is it an external environmental thing?
And I can tell you that when we look at the studies of people's immune systems are attacking different parts of their bodies, there's definitely a problem with these anti-nutrients from foods and anti-nutrients from molds and other toxins in the environment.
Yeah, you do the calcium loading thing that I wrote about and just put it in the water or at least just cook it and drain off the water.
And you can account for it.
You just don't want it to crystallize in your blood.
When I was a raw vegan, I certainly was getting the joint pain and some of the things that came from excess oxalic acid because I was like going crazy on the raw, like purple cabbage and kale.
Actually, I really like that stuff, but I did find it was having an effect on me.
And there's a whole class of these things called agglutinins.
And the broader category is called lectins.
And a lectin is yet again, I keep talking about these, it's something used in nature as a defense system.
So our cells in our bodies use lectin, which is a protein that's attracted to a sugar.
It's one of the many ways our cells communicate with each other.
And it's particularly used for blood clotting and coagulation types of things.
Lots of different plants use lectins as part of their defense mechanism.
And you've heard of like ricin, you know, the breaking bad, that little thing.
That's jack beans.
You can extract that from jack beans.
And a super tiny, tiny amount of that stuff is fatal.
And even when we want to look at like what blood type you are, we take lectins that come from food things like beans, and we put a drop of lectin in your blood.
And if your blood coagulates from this lectin, you're type O. If it if it coagulates from this lectin, you're type A. That's actually the test is using these things.
So you can deactivate a lot of lectins by cooking them, but not all of them.
And you can also go through and you can rinse them out.
So like your grandmother, likely, if you ate beans, knew that you soak the beans overnight, you rinse them multiple times, you do all these steps.
And that helps.
You can reduce the lectins, but the lectins are still there and they enter your body and they wreak havoc on your immune system.
So they can penetrate the lining of the gut.
They actually open up holes in your gut lining, which leads to other proteins leaking through.
So when you go on a raw vegan diet with the purest of intent, like I did, I was looking at my own health.
I wanted to lose weight.
I felt great on it for about three months.
What you can do is you can increase your food sensitivities dramatically because you end up cleaving holes in your gut based on the lectins you're eating.
And it's interesting, some foods are higher in lectins than others, like the nightshade family, potatoes, eggplants, tomatoes, and bell peppers.
And there's actually 200 other members of the family, like goji berries and things people don't usually think about.
Those things are highest in lectins.
So your body can detoxify a certain amount of lectins.
Some people are genetically sensitive to, say, potatoes or tomatoes.
20% of all rheumatoid arthritis is tied to that nightshade family I just talked about.
So we could eliminate huge amounts of arthritis drugs if we just told people, hey, it might be that stuff.
Guess where the other big source of lectins is?
It's grains, particularly wheat.
Wheat has a lectin, I believe it's called WGA.
It also contains agglutin.
This is the thing that I talked about earlier that causes clotting of your red blood cells.
It cuts a hole in the lining of your gut, lets other crap through, and then it causes your blood to clot.
So when you go on a vegan diet, you have to eat a ton of vegetables just to get enough calories to function.
And when I was a raw vegan, I mean, I had to buy new salad bowls like this big just so I could get enough salad in me.
And I'd make like these like fatty dressings with like two avocados and like a ton of soaked cashews and sprouted this.
And I'd, you know, add some Bragg's amino acids and all this stuff.
And two hours later, I'm having this ginormous lunch and I can like barely chew it enough.
And my calories are still barely where they should be to keep me going.
But, okay, I got a ton of nutrient density.
I also got a ton of anti-nutrient density.
And those anti-nutrients wreaked havoc on my GI tract and on the other immune reactivity things that I had going on.
And I've seen this in other people who come to the blog.
They literally say, wow, like I'm recovering from this.
And I've had this happen to good friends.
In fact, one of my guys is a black belt and a keto, one of my buddies from school.
He went on a raw vegan diet and it wrecked his health.
He's like one of the more sensitive, one of the guys more sensitive to food than anyone else I've met.
It's kind of amazing, but this is happening.
And this is not about what are you not getting from a raw vegan diet.
It's what are you getting that we should cook out of our food?
And a vegetarian one is a bigger advantage because if you're going to be vegetarian, you're probably not going to have that big of an issue with protein.
I'm a fan of moderate protein unless you're lifting heavy or you're doing some sort of really intense exercise.
You need more to replace what you damaged.
You know, gorillas eat a ton of celery and stuff, and they get reasonable amounts of density here.
But what you're missing there on a vegan diet is the saturated fat, the butter.
You really need saturated fat for your brain, for your hormones, for your skin.
And coconut oil itself does not have butyric acid.
It doesn't have the fatty acid profile that butter does.
And butter, if you're not going to eat animal fat, is your next best source.
It's one of the more useful ways of converting non-food proteins.
Like you can feed scraps to a chicken and they convert it to food.
Mother Nature's cool too because even if you feed kind of moldy stuff to a chicken, like lower quality spoiled food, we're programmed to keep as much, just all animals are programmed that way to keep as much toxin away from the baby or the fetus or the embryo as possible.
So most of the toxins don't go through into the eggs.
Some of them can, particularly like metals, but the organic toxins and anti-nutrients get filtered out by the mom chicken, so the eggs are relatively pure.
Even the crappy industrial eggs that do have some contamination, they have arsenic and things, but they're a better choice than a lot of foods because of that filtering process that happens in the hen.
That was a smarter rooster than I would have thought.
Like he knew that the BB gun was doing it to him.
He didn't know how, but he'd like hide in ditches and do little chicken commando things.
And I actually gained an appreciation for the intelligence of a rooster from having this thing.
It was funny, you know, watching one rooster intimidate two cats, walk up, eat their food right in front of them, stare them down, and then just walk up.
It was amazing just to watch these interactions.
So, I mean, I'm with the way of thinking about when you kill an animal, how many deaths does it take to feed someone?
And give me the beef, give me the lamb, because that lamb is going to feed me for a month for one death.
You kill one of those chickens, it's good for like half a meal, and you're still hungry, and you got really not so good fat out of it anyway.
There's like a creepy children of the corn thing with magpies because they're like in bigger flocks.
When I was a teenager, I lived out in the country and these magpies had decided to like nest in this tree and they were like covering my car in shit, like hundreds of splots in one night.
And I had this idea that if I shot one in the tree, they'd get the message that go roost somewhere else, which is actually a bad idea.
I shouldn't have done that.
So I shot one and I winged it.
It was just with the 22.
And so I was like, I got to go finish this thing off.
I would never leave an animal suffering like that.
So all of these birds suddenly got quiet and they all started yelling and making all this angry sounds.
And it was really kind of creepy.
And I went and I found the bird.
It was running away and I put it out of its misery.
And I felt kind of guilty after that.
Not that I haven't shot a bird and eaten it or something, but it was just like I was just killing it until I stop shitting on my car.
But just the amount of anger and silence and just weird behavior from all the other birds was kind of creeped me out.