Dr. Shawn Baker, a former military surgeon and nuclear launch officer, abandoned conventional diets after his own mid-40s health collapse—high blood pressure, pre-diabetes—despite rigorous training, finally thriving on an all-meat carnivore diet. His website, n-equals-many.com, documents 100+ cases of reversed inflammation, normalized glucose, and improved strength, including a 74-year-old man’s biceps growth, while critiquing WHO’s red meat warnings as flawed. Baker argues Western medicine’s surgical overreliance ignores diet-driven prevention, like Hong Kong’s high-meat longevity despite U.S. declines in red meat and testosterone. Both dismiss veganism’s longevity claims, emphasizing explosive strength training over endurance and protein’s role in combating frailty. Rogan pledges a month-long carnivore trial, questioning whether modern diets—like glyphosate-laden wheat—are sabotaging health. [Automatically generated summary]
If you would have asked me two years ago, I would have said, that's fucking crazy.
I mean, that's what I would have said.
You know, if you would have asked me even five years ago, I'd say, yeah, diet doesn't really matter that much, just train your ass off.
Because I had been an athlete just training my whole life.
And, you know, I didn't really until I got in my mid-40s and all of a sudden I was like, crap, training ain't working.
I'm getting fat, I'm getting, you know, high blood pressure, you know, probably pre-diabetic.
And then, you know, then I went down this...
You know, this dietary journey where I went from, you know, doing the low-fat, low-calorie fish and vegetables, almost vegetarian, training three times a day just about, trying to get lean.
And then I went down to, you know, then I was like, man, this sucks.
I'm miserable.
I can't maintain this, you know.
Then I went on to a paleo diet.
I was like, man, bacon looks pretty good.
And then I went, and I started reading some more, and then I went on to, you know, low-carb, high-fat, and then I did ketogenic for about two, three years, because I think you do stuff like that, too.
And then I just started reading about these people that do this carnivore diet, and then I went and started reading.
I mean, if you go back into history, we can talk about that, but then there's a guy named Larry Scott who was like the first Mr. Olympian.
He was another guy that was eating just...
Tons of meat, you know, four or five pounds of meat a day, and he won Mr. Olympia.
Again, you know, there's some of their drug use, you know, and some of this stuff.
But I was just reading about this stuff, and I was just like, well, you know, I'm an athlete.
I like trying this stuff.
And so I said, well, I'm just going to try it for a month.
And so I did it for a month, and I was like, man, I feel pretty good, right?
So I was like, well, I'm going to...
So I was like, I did a month, and I'm like, well, I'm going to go back to my ketogenic diet.
And so I started...
Remember that day, the day I did, I was like, I'm going to eat some apples, a little almond butter, you know, I had some berries and cream, you know, stuff you'd normally eat as a treat, and I just didn't feel as good, you know, like my back started hurting a little bit, and I was like, well, maybe that's where someone, so then I went and said, well, I'm just going to go back to eating meat again.
Well, I mean, it was just like, you know, this is one of the things that I've seen, and we can talk about this, you know, in detail, but I've seen a lot of people, what they'll say is, you know, and this is what I saw, you know, when I was working as a surgeon, When I put people on a ketogenic diet, their joint pain was starting to go away.
I don't know what it is for sure, but it's something we eat most like, in a lot of cases.
Not always, but I think there's something out there we're eating.
I'm pretty convinced it's not meat.
That's what I can tell you for sure, from what I know.
You know, whether it's, you know, sugar, whether it's, you know, processed gluten or wheat or stuff like that, whether it's vegetable oil, whether it's, you know, or even some vegetables potentially.
So this is what I'm seeing.
This is what I saw.
You know, I studied these large Facebook groups like an anthropologist.
You know, like they used to study these people, you know, 100 years ago.
They'd go out, you know, Weston Price would go out and see all these people and study their teeth and stuff.
The problem with that is, you know, you don't speak their language.
You know, it's pretty remote.
You can't, you got to translate.
And so some of those observations, you know, while they're valid, they're hard to do now, you know.
But so when you go in these groups and you just, all you can do is just like reading this like a scientist going, okay, this guy went on this diet and his joint went away.
This guy went on this diet and his thyroid disease went away.
This guy went on this diet and his skin got, you know, psoriasis went away.
I kept seeing this over and over and over and over again.
Yeah, I would say that that's a good strategy for most people.
You know, here's the deal.
I don't care what people eat.
You eat whatever makes you healthy.
You know, I think this is a thing.
We have these national guidelines that tell people what to eat, but they don't work for most people, you know, obviously.
I mean, look at our country.
I mean, it's just sad to see all these people that are...
You know really really getting sick and so I think you know there's a guy named Vinnie Tortorich who has this no sugar no grain I think that will that will successfully help a huge percentage of people you know but I think you have to be objective about it you have to do it long enough for it to have an effect and you know I think you have to You know be really be really clinical about it and so one of the big problems I see as a physician and this is a big problem because people will go on low carb diets or ketogenic diets and they'll say I feel the best I've ever felt in my life.
I mean, my mood is better.
My mental cognition is better.
My joints feel better.
My guts don't hurt.
My skin is better.
My sex drive is better.
Everything you would say is, that means you're getting healthy.
And they'll go to their doctor, and they'll get some blood drawn, and their cholesterol will be high.
And their doctor will say, well, you're going to kill yourself.
You're going to have a heart attack, right?
So people get scared away from that, and they go back to eating their other stuff, and then they feel crappy again.
But they're like, well, at least my cholesterol is not bad.
So one of the big problems and I've kind of sort of basically preaching this stuff is I think and this is a problem with health care in general is we have so gotten away from just defining what's healthy you know if somebody comes into your office and you say you know you talk to him for two three minutes because health care is just you got ten minutes to see a patient make a decision so what you're gonna do is like how you doing order a bunch of labs you look at the results of the labs and say Okay, this lab's low, this lab's high, this lab's normal.
Go on this drug, or do this or that.
And the patient may be saying, but I feel great.
Or maybe converse, they may say, I feel like crap.
Well, your labs look fine, so go exercise a little bit.
I mean, I mean, that's just the way you should be.
But I mean, I was aware of what's not in meat.
You know, if you look at the RDA, you know, if you look at the RDA and it says meat is low in vitamin C, it's low in manganese, it's low in, you know, potassium, it's low in, you know, vitamin A, vitamin E. There's a whole bunch of things that's low in, you know, on paper, right?
So I was like, well, I can't rectify why these people are doing so well.
You know, just eating meat.
And we know historically that there are populations out there.
The Inuit, the Maasai, the Samy, and all these people.
Yeah, I mean, you know, if you go to northern Alaska in the wintertime, good luck trying to find a fruit or vegetable.
I mean, you're not.
But what people would say, they would justify, say, yeah, but they ate a lot of their organs, and I got some vitamin C from their liver, and, you know, some of the whale skin had some...
And so they would just try to justify that and try to make, this is how it worked.
And then the same thing with Maasai.
They would say, well, sometimes they would eat some berries once in a while.
So they would always try to justify it.
I'm like, you know, those things aren't available year-round.
So, you know, you can't get berries, you know, especially in Alaska or wherever the Inuit are.
Well, this is what I, after doing a lot of research on this stuff, so we've known, so it's interesting.
So when we look at the development of the RDAs, you know, the recommended daily allowances, those were developed back in the 1940s.
And they were developed basically for soldiers to figure out what the heck you're supposed to feed people so they can survive.
And so they did research on this.
And what they did was they take populations of people that are consuming a normal diet.
Like, you know, back in the 1940s, you know, people would eat a mixture of everything that was fairly high in carbohydrate, not as high as it is now, by the way.
But it was a mixed diet, and so what they see is, you know, if you eat that diet and you're deficient in this nutrient, if you don't get X amount of this nutrient, you're going to develop some sort of nutrient deficiency syndrome.
So they said, okay, well, we know that This level of nutrient deficiency causes disease, so therefore we're going to recommend this, you know, everybody gets this amount, right?
So what they knew, what they found out back, even in 1897, there was a study where they were looking at animals, and they looked at something called thiamine.
You know, they didn't even know it was thiamine back then, but they saw that certain animals, if they were on a lower-carb diet, they didn't get this disease, where animals on a high carbohydrate did get this disease, and that disease was called beriberi, and so that's a thiamine deficiency which causes neurologic problems or Congestive heart failure type problems.
And so they were noticing that these animals are on a low carb diet, even though their thiamine levels were really, really low, they weren't getting diseases.
So if you look at that and you look at all these other nutrients, you know, things like manganese, you know, manganese is We're highly required for carbohydrate metabolism.
And so if you're on a diet where you're not taking any carbohydrate, all of a sudden you've got to say, maybe I don't eat as much manganese, despite what the RDA says.
And you can look at that for nutrient after nutrient.
Glucose and vitamin C is a huge one, right?
So vitamin C, if you don't take vitamin C and you get...
Really, really, you get scurvy.
You get sick, you die.
I mean, they'll kill you.
I mean, you end up with bleeding in your joints, your teeth fall out, your gums rot, your skin opens up with sores, horrible disease.
And these people are not getting scurvy.
And so what's happening is we know that a molecule of glucose and a molecule of vitamin C are almost identical.
And so they compete for the same transporters.
And so if you don't have a lot of glucose floating around, you need way, way less vitamin C. Really?
Yeah.
And this has been known for quite a while as well.
I think what's happening, and this is one of the things I think potentially, and this needs to be investigated, but I think that a lot of people that we have all these vitamin deficiencies, vitamin D deficiency, magnesium deficiency, a lot of that may be caused by just ingesting too much carbohydrate and creating a higher-than-normal need.
So basically, we're creating higher needs for vitamins.
Well, I think if you get a really good doctor who understands the difference between HDL cholesterol and LDL cholesterol and free testosterone available and all the different nutrients that are essential, and if you get someone who really understands that and can have a comprehensive Examination of your blood work.
I think you can benefit from it greatly, but also the knowledge that you can tell them, like, how do you feel?
Yeah, so that's an interesting point because, you know, we've started this, you know, and again, I started doing this and got public on it on Twitter, and a lot of people were saying, well, yeah, you're...
You're doing well.
I'm breaking some world records and stuff like that.
And he was saying, no, you've got to have glycogen.
And I'm like, well, to do highly glycolytic activity.
And so this is a highly, highly glycolytic activity.
It takes about a minute.
A minute to a minute thirty and that's that's intense you know like you're going all out right and so I was able to break the 50 plus world record in that and it was when I went on when it was When I got to 50 it was one minute 18.3 seconds and so I put it down all the way down to 114 so I took four seconds off the world record without a single gram of carbohydrate totally This is one of the issues with the ketogenic diet.
So this is another sort of thing that I think a lot of people sort of have questions about.
One of the things we know about gluconeogenesis, so that's converting protein or fat into glucose, is it's demand-driven.
So your body doesn't just make it.
So if you get a lot of protein, it doesn't just say, I'm just going to make a bunch of blood sugar for the heck of it, because your body doesn't need it.
So one of the things that...
Glucose is extremely important to the body.
We need it.
So the nice thing about it is if you regulate it really, really well, and the best way to regulate it really, really well is just to make your own.
So rather than getting it from kombucha or eating a bunch of carbs, where it's going to be all over the place.
So this is what happens.
So ketosis, again, I probably spend...
You know, significant periods of time in ketosis, but I'm not always in ketosis and that's not the point of this, you know, but I think ketosis is probably a good thing, you know, periodically, but I don't, you know, like I said, I don't think You know, we can talk about evolutionary stuff.
That's very interesting because most people would say you should eat a balanced diet, right?
Most people would say that in order to be healthy you should consume a certain amount of fruits, a certain amount of vegetables, You should have some whole grains.
You should eat some meat.
And if you come along and tell people, like, this is what I'm doing.
I'm eating six pounds of meat and I only eat for 30 hours.
But the point I'm making is, what is it going to tell me?
Here's the thing we don't know.
One of the things is, you know, I'll tell you what a problem, because I've seen hundreds and hundreds of people who've already done blood work, so I know what it's going to show, basically.
You know, so I've gotten, we've got this study going, we've got all these people submitting blood work.
But the, you know, probably my HDL will go up, my triglycerides will go down, my blood sugar will stabilize to a low level, my inflammatory markers will be normal.
That's because I've seen lots and lots of other people's blood work already, so I know what it's going to show.
My cholesterol may be up or down, and that's something that we get a lot of people worried about.
Cholesterol, in my view, is a pretty worthless marker by itself.
You have to take it into context.
You know, there's a couple people that are really, really intelligent about cholesterol that are really testing this sort of stuff.
One guy's name is Dave Feldman.
On Twitter, his name is Dave Keto.
There's another guy named Ivor Cummins, who's an Australian.
They're both engineers.
And so this is what happened to this guy, Dave.
He goes on a ketogenic diet and his cholesterol goes sky friggin' high.
It's like 400, you know, way, way up there.
And his doctor's freaking out and he's freaking out.
So he's like, I don't understand this.
I mean, I feel great.
Everything about me is just the best health I've ever felt in my life.
So what he does is he starts drawing his blood every single day.
He gets a blood test.
And what he finds out is that his blood cholesterol is all over the place.
One day it's 300, the next day it's 200. One day it's 350, the next day it's...
So when we go to the doctor every six months or a year and they get a blood cholesterol, you assume, well, that's my cholesterol, and it's always that way.
Well, he found out that it's so variable.
They've actually known about this since the 1950s, but no one has been talking about it.
So what he figured out, and he's a systems engineer, and these engineers are some smart guys.
I mean, that's one thing I kind of talk about.
It's just because somebody's an MD or PhD doesn't mean they know everything.
There's a lot of people that are plumbers and whatever.
They don't have any formal training that can figure, they're smart people, and they can figure this stuff out.
So he's an engineer, a real smart guy.
And so what he does is he figures out that cholesterol Is basically, all it is, is it's traveling around in your blood based on energy flux.
So if you've eaten a lot, so if you've eaten a whole bunch of food and you're full, your liver is saying, I don't need to put out a bunch of fat because we burn fat as fuel, even if we're not in a ketogenic diet.
So what it does is it transports fat.
So when you're hungry and you haven't eaten it for a while, like you fasted for a blood test, Your liver says, we need fat in the system because we're low on energy.
And so it shoots out all this fat.
And what happens is cholesterol is just cruising around for a ride.
So it's just sitting there, you know, as a passenger.
So depending on how much you've eaten, when you've eaten, that'll change your cholesterol.
And so it's not a very good marker.
I mean, you can find studies that show for all-cause mortality, like if you're like you and me, because you're the same age as I am, I think you're right.
Yeah, we're both 50. So if we look at, you know, and again, associational studies are not that great, but if you look at that and you say all-cause mortality, am I going to die or not?
If your cholesterol is high, you're less likely to die.
If your cholesterol is high, you're less likely to get Parkinson's disease.
If your cholesterol is high, you're less likely to get a bunch of cancers.
So you're saying that, though, but most people hear this and they go, but, but, but, but, but, if your cholesterol is high, you're going to get a heart attack.
This is interesting because, you know, vegetarians and vegans, I don't mean to pick on vegetarians and vegans because, you know, I know some great ones are great people and I think, you know, there shouldn't be a war between this, but...
Vegetarians and vegans, the number one killer of vegetarian and vegan is heart disease.
I mean, that's what kills them too.
It kills everybody.
So it's just like, you know, do you trade, am I going to have cancer or am I going to trade to have heart disease?
Well, most people don't understand that the sugar industry's Hijacking of science in the 1950s, the way they paid off those scientists to literally false advertise the idea that sugar is safe for you, but that saturated fat and cholesterol is what's causing all these issues with people and heart attacks.
Well, like I said, it was just reading about people online.
You know, there's a, you know, if there's a, I'll tell you what, if there's a guy named Joe Anderson on Twitter, his handle is JoeCharlene98, 8898 or 9888. So this guy, you know, it's just a guy, he's been doing it for 20 years.
I'm just like, this is pretty cool.
Like I said, reading back on that stuff.
And then just because I've been an athlete, I'm like, and I don't, you know, I've never taken drugs and stuff like that.
And I was always like, what can get me to the next level as far as athletic competition?
Because I'm just a really competitive guy.
I mean, I just, I just like to, you know, push myself and see what works.
That was something that you talked about outside the studio right before we came in, that the studies that have been done on people consuming meat, and I brought this up as well, that There's a lot of misconceptions about these studies because they're not very clear.
When they say that people who eat meat five times a week are more likely to get cancer, what they're not telling you is what these people ate along with the meat.
Are they eating cheeseburgers?
Are they eating grass-fed beef where it's grass-finished, grass-fed, you know, high in essential fatty acids, Is it healthy for you?
Or are they eating some bullshit cheeseburger with a sugary drink?
Like, what is the rest of their diet?
Are they consuming a lot of refined carbohydrates?
Are they consuming a lot of sugar?
Are they drinking alcohol?
Are they smoking cigarettes?
All you're saying is they're eating meat five days a week.
It's not specifying in any way their actual overall diet.
Yeah, they don't sort that very well out, so they've got all these epidemiology studies.
Statistically, we know they're more likely to smoke, they're more likely to drink, they're more likely not to wear their seatbelt, they're more likely to be in accidents, they're more likely not to go to their doctor, they're more likely just not to care.
Why is that?
Because if I tell you, as I say, Joe, eating meat's bad for you, and you say, F you, I don't care, I don't care about my health, so you just don't care.
So they can't separate that out.
All these studies where they try to separate it out and say, well, we'll kind of even up the smokers, but they never can take that I don't give a, you know, I don't give a fuck thing out of it.
And so you've got this stuff and then all the studies are really, really low strength.
So if we look at, you know, and we can talk about this, about meat being causing cancer, because there's some concern about that with colon cancer.
But if we look at smoking, you know, when they determined that smoking caused cancer, the epidemiology showed a 2,000% increase In the incidence of cancer in a lot of studies.
When they compare that to meat in cancer, they found an 18% increase, which is nothing.
So when you, when you separate all that stuff out and then, you know, there was a, you know, the World Health Organization two years ago, last year, two years ago, declared that red meat was a class two carcinogen and processed meat was a class one carcinogen.
You know, they said it's like plutonium and smoking and, you know, everybody runs, runs all over the place with that.
So first of all, and you can go on their website and they'll tell you what their conclusions were.
So this was done by an organization called the International Association for Research on Cancer.
They're based out of Lyon, France.
And they are, you know, that's what the World Health Organization uses to determine their stuff and so they're written and this is you know besides the point right now the IRC is under under investigation by US Congress for using crappy science and you know promoting political agenda so I don't know if that's true or not part of that's generated by probably be corporations who don't like their findings but so they're under investigation for that but what they say is we have some weak epidemiology which is this 18 percent stuff but we think we have some strong mechanistic reasons
for this right So if everybody, you know, there's a doctor named George Ede, E-D-E, who's a psychiatrist out in Maryland who's got this just tremendous, she analyzed the whole thing.
She has a website called diagnosisdiet.com.
So she did an analysis of all the 800 studies they used, and she found that what they ended up doing is most of them showed that meat didn't cause cancer.
There was a small percentage that did, and they looked at all these rat studies, and there was about 20 20-25 rat studies, and they found like three or four of them showed that meat, you know, if we gave this type of cancer, if we gave this rat a certain, you know, amount of meat, and we genetically bred them, and we gave them a medicine that makes them get cancer, that they get a little bit of change in their colon that might turn into cancer.
This is a real fast way to show up if they get cancer.
But the problem with that, and she explains it very well, is that we don't know that they would get cancer.
It's not shown.
And the other thing, and we talked about this before, is that if you want to look at rat studies, and it's not to say that plants give you cancer, but there are...
Pesticides and plants that have been studied in rats that we eat every day, natural foods and vegetables and fruits that also give rats cancer.
And so the only difference is we've got, you know, some really...
But it just seems to me to be so crazy that they're doing a cancer study and they give the rats something that induces cancer in order to find out what gives them cancer more.
So they give them this compound and then on top of the compound then they check their diet.
When you think about diet and health, you also have to take into account the geography that your ancestors evolved in and what were they accustomed to eating.
There's different adaptations for the Inuit, for example.
Adaptations to cold.
They probably have requirements for a certain amount of dietary fat.
Yeah, I think it's, you know, this is what I think.
I think we're all, you know, this is one of the things that people talk about.
It's like, you know, everybody's so different.
We have all this different genetics.
We all need special diets.
I tend to say that, you know, in certain circumstances, that makes sense.
But I think, you know, evolutionary, you know, we sort of split from primates, you know, we shared a common ancestor with, you know, primates, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas.
Somewhere 8 to 10 million years ago.
We don't know for sure.
You know, it's back and then.
And so what happens is, you know, the human, the pre-humans kind of went one way, and then the apes and chimpanzees went up this way and went up into the trees.
And if you look at, you know, even the difference between a chimp and an ape, you know, an ape, not an ape, a gorilla, a gorilla crushes all these, you know, these all really fibrous food, lots of fiber and stuff like that.
Chimpanzees can't tolerate that as well because their colon got a little smaller.
Well, a human's colon's got way, way smaller, right?
And so what happened is why you and I can throw a rock really far, you know, and a chimpanzee, you know, a chimpanzee can throw, you know, if you give a chimpanzee a baseball, they can throw it about 20 miles an hour.
It's not very strong.
You and I can throw a baseball, you know, 60 miles an hour average guy.
You know, if you get, you know, Major League Baseball players, you're throwing it 95 plus, right?
The reason we evolved to do that is because we were throwing shit at animals.
We were hunting, right?
That's what drove, I mean, our scapula is rotated.
You know, if you look at a chimpanzee scapula, it's, you know, on the side.
It allows them to climb trees and do this stuff.
Strong climate-based evolutionary pressures, which drove us to saying, you know, there's all this Ice Age stuff going on.
The climate's drying out.
The fruits and the jungles are going away.
Now it's all this grassland.
And, you know, there's not much to eat in the grassland, you know, except for some animals.
You know, people eat some bugs and stuff like that for a while.
And that's what, you know, chimpanzees do.
Even chimpanzees, you know, 3% of their diet, you know, there's a lot of people say we're frugivores and all we should eat is fruit.
But even chimpanzees eat about 3% of their diet comes from killing other animals.
I mean, there's this red colobus monkey somewhere in Uganda or somewhere in Africa.
The chimpanzees are hunting this thing to extinction.
Yeah, there's a David Attenborough documentary on it.
It's terrifying.
You see how organized they are to kill monkeys?
They have chimps at one end of this tree line, and they're coming this way, and they have chimps on the side, and they chase them in, and they corner them, they ambush them, they get them in the center.
I mean, so when humans sort of, and I think it's pretty clear that what drove a lot of our evolution, our ability to communicate, to strategize, you know, some of the anatomic things was based around hunting.
I mean, hunting, I know you're a big hunter, Joe, and I know it's not an easy thing to do.
You've got to think a lot.
You've got to be pretty smart to outsmart these animals, especially When you're in big groups, and back then when they've got, you know, I got a spears basically, you know, you look at, there's a population in Central Europe called the Gravetians, right?
So if you look at population markers for nutrition, right?
One of the things I look at is population height.
So if there's a real tall population, it means that they had really good nutrition.
And so if you look at the tallest people that probably ever lived were these Gravetians.
These guys were just decimating mammoths.
I mean, they were so efficient at killing mammoths.
And so that's probably basically all they ate, you know, for the most part.
They might have a little bit of vegetables, but their average height was like 6'2", and this was like 30,000 years ago.
And so the people that have sort of genetically are related to those people now are the people from Croatia and the Netherlands, which are, again, the tallest people in the world.
The only other group that rivaled that Are the Milotic Africans, which are like the Watusi and the Maasai, which are all about six feet tall on average.
And their diet is primarily, as we know, livestock-based.
And then the other tall population historically were the Plains Indians, particularly the Cheyenne Indians.
And they just lived on mostly buffalo.
So it's kind of...
It's kind of interesting as far as what's the best food for nutrition.
That's what I'm finding from a performance standpoint.
It's just what makes me feel the best and work the best.
Now, there's also people that have ethical concerns about the consumption of animals, especially the consumption of factory-farmed animals on a mass basis.
I mean, you're probably responsible for a whole goddamn field of dead cows.
I think people that eat meat should be concerned about it, and we're the ones that primarily need to make sure that's not happening.
And so, I think, you know, as you know, I would argue that, you know, Since evolution began, humans have been eating meat, and that's just what happens in nature.
You know, if you look at how an animal is killed in a wild, if a lion takes down a zebra, it's not a pleasant experience for that animal.
And so most of the way that humans kill these animals now, you know, from a humane sense, is pretty darn humane.
I mean, even as a hunter, you know, if you hit an animal and you don't hit them in the right spot, You've got to track him down.
And so I think that you have to look at, you know, if the animals, like if you've got chickens in cages and they can't turn around, right?
And they're just cramped in there.
That's awful.
That shouldn't be allowed.
One of the reasons they put chicken in a cage is because they'll peck the hell out of each other.
You know, if they don't separate, they'll just tear each other up.
So that, you know, there's different considerations on that.
You know, if you have an animal that you're, you know, because I talk to a lot of cattle ranchers, and most of them, I mean most of them, they really care about their animals.
They're out in the snow and the rain.
Making sure their animals are fed, making sure they're sheltered.
You know, if an animal goes down, they're taking care of that.
So, you know, there's probably some bad apples out there, and if we know about that stuff and some vegan documentary guy wants to make a film about that, then yeah, those guys should be saying, hey, don't mistreat your animals.
You know, don't Don't intentionally hurt them.
Don't have them standing in a pile of crap.
Give them some fresh air and some ability to move.
But if you look at cows or animals in a wild, they're hurt animals anyway.
So they hang out together anyway.
It's not like if they're indoors.
Now, if they're indoors and they've got You know, room to move around and they go in and go out.
I don't think that's a big issue.
And so I think you have to kind of, you know, you can't just make it all black and white.
Yeah, so I think you're right in the fact that if you say what is the most nutrient-dense, what is the Best quality I can get.
Grass-fed, grass-finished is going to fill that bill.
Now, if you compare that to something that was, you know, fed corn, right?
And given hormones, and given antibiotics, and what else do they do?
Yeah, so, you know, you've got those things, and it's fed, you know, grain.
The difference nutritionally compared to, you know, because if you don't have any money and you can't afford this stuff, compared to the rest of the crap in the supermarket is, you know, so I'll use a MMA analogy for you.
So if grass-fed grain-fed beef is, you know, Conor McGregor or GSP, right, then this other stuff is, say, some guy who's like the number three contender or something like that.
And so what they do is they give those animals generally the same hormones.
Natural hormones.
And it increases the percentage a little bit more compared to what you and I make normally.
If we look at like nanograms, maybe, I can't remember the numbers exactly, but the scale is what's important.
So if they give you, if grass-fed beef gives you five nanograms of estrogen, grain-fed beef gives you 10 nanograms of estrogen, and then you compare it to eggs, which give you maybe 90, and you compare it to dairy, which gives you 110, and then you compare it to, if you look at phytoestrogens, You know, that's in the millions, right?
So things like soybeans and stuff like that.
And then you compare it to what does your body naturally make, and that's like 30 or 40,000.
And so it's a really small level.
So I think if you can afford grass-fed and grain-fed, you know, I'm not saying how can you solve the world's problem, but I think if we just isolate for health only, say you're a poor guy and all you can afford is, you know, I can't afford this grass-fed meat.
I can't afford 20 bucks a pound for this stuff, right?
And ButcherBox is still too expensive for me.
Then that's probably still a better option than going back and eating, you know, the other crap, the Cheetos and the, you know, all this other stuff.
And even though, you know, like the organic fruits and stuff like that, you know, it's just expensive for people.
So, I mean, I think it's, you know, like I said, it depends on who your audience is.
You know, if you've got unlimited resources, and most people don't, then you have to say, well, what's, you know, what's...
From a health standpoint, what is most affordable and what's practical?
How do I get my health back?
Like I said, I'm not saying this is the best diet in the world for everybody.
I'm just saying you need to find out what works for you.
And it's, you know, it's a misconception, you know, when you hear, A lot of people will say, you know, if you eat a bunch of meat, it's gonna sit there and rot in your intestines, and it's gonna putrefy, and stuff like that.
So, they've done studies on people that have had ileostomies, and these are people that have had their colon removed, right?
So you've had colon cancer, or, you know, inflammatory bowel disease, like Crohn's disease, where they take out your whole colon, and now you've got a little bag, which you poop into, this little bag, right?
So they've looked at people, and they've looked at what comes out when they eat meat, Almost nothing comes out.
There's a little bit of liquid, right?
So that means all that meat is being absorbed.
But when you eat a bunch of fiber and vegetables and plants, all that stuff goes up in the bag because you can't digest it.
You have to have bacteria in your colon to do that.
And humans are not really good at it compared to other primates.
So I think probiotics, you know, The microbiome is fascinating.
I mean, there's a lot of research going on.
There's a lot of people just talking all about this stuff, how it affects your health.
One of the things that we try to say is, how do we define a healthy microbiome?
You can't yet.
We just don't know enough.
We don't even know everything about the human body.
And then to put in tens of billions of different bacteria, all different species, and say, This is the perfect combination or that's perfect.
We're so far away from knowing that we're in the very infancy of what that means.
So what I would say is if you're healthy, you know, if your joints don't hurt, if everything's going good, then probably by definition your microbiome is fine.
If you're eating just a meat-based diet, your microbiome is going to be different, and the probiotics are probably not going to make a difference for you.
But if you're eating, again, if you're eating a crappy diet, You know, and you're feeding your gut a bunch of sugar.
You're going to get this dysbiosis, which is bad bacteria.
And then, you know, maybe the probiotics might help in that situation.
I'm not convinced.
I just don't think there's enough evidence to show that that's a big deal.
So, the probiotics you think may be only beneficial if people are consuming a lot of variable things, or a varied diet, like carbohydrates, all sorts of different things, and maybe the probiotics are necessary to sort of balance you out?
I mean, your microbiome reacts to whatever you do, how much sleep you get, how much exercise you do, how much you eat, how much stress is in your life.
This is very, very adaptable.
It can change in a day.
So whatever you're feeding it chronically is going to change what bacteria live there.
So, you know, it's like this thing about, you know, again, back to this meat putrefaction thing.
So if we look at the definition of putrefaction, you know, it sounds awful, right?
It's putrefying, right?
Putrefaction is the actary of bacteria on protein, right?
So if protein gets in your colon, it'll putrefy, right?
So again, when we go back to these ileostomy patients, they studied people that were getting soy protein and meat.
And guess which one had more protein going into the colon?
So, but I mean, when you drop down to just meat, then it's pretty easy.
You just say, okay, I'm only eating meat.
Now if I add fruit back in, does that F me up or not?
You know, if it does, then I'm like, man, I shouldn't probably eat that.
You know, if I eat dairy back in.
So probably there will be a point.
When I'll say, hey, I'm going to, you know, maybe once in a while I have a, you know, have some berries again, you know, and then just see how I do with that.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with that.
There are a lot of people, I'll tell you, especially these guys have been doing it for 5, 8, 10, 15 years.
I mean, they're like, man, that stuff just screws me up and I don't want to do that.
If you go on my Instagram, there's about, I don't know, about a month or two ago, I've got a picture.
I put up four of these people.
These are all people that have done it for a total of 55 years.
And there's one guy who's a marathon runner.
And then these other two couple that have been doing it for 20 years, another gal, there's another gal named Kelly Hogan, that she was like a big, morbidly obese woman, and she went on a carnival journey.
She's done it for eight years, and she got super lean.
She was totally infertile, couldn't have kids, right?
Super lean, carnivore diet, three kids later, happy as can be.
All she does is eats hamburgers every day.
I mean, that's her diet.
I mean, it's, you know, the stories I get, you know, this is because now I'm this kind of central point and I get all these crazy, crazy stories of people just...
Well, it's kind of like a little movement, I think.
And I think what you'll see over the next year or two, there's going to be a lot more people doing this just to try it, you know.
And I think, you know, it's a crazy, some people are going to do it just to say, hey, it's cool, I'm going to be a carnivore, I'm just going to screw around.
But I think there's people that honestly are doing it, and they're really seriously improving their health.
Yeah, this is interesting because there's actually a guy named Peery, P-E-R-R-Y, did a study in 2014. Colonoscopies, right?
So he actually looked at people.
He was one of the first ones to do this.
And he looked at people on these diets and he found that the people that ate the highest amount of fiber and had the most bowel movements had the most incidence of diverticulosis.
So diverticulosis precedes diverticulitis.
So diverticula is just a little pouch that shoots out from your colon.
So it's like a little sack.
So what happens is that eventually gets infected and then you get diverticulitis.
But the people that were developing diverticulosis the most in his study, he did two or three like this, Showed the ones that were eating a bunch of fiber.
So the question is, one other thing people don't understand, you know, is because a lot of people, when they talk about ketogenic diets and they cut out their fiber, they're like, you're going to get all constipated, right?
I mean, you know, so basically I haven't had a bowel movement in a year, you know?
Yeah, it's not true, obviously, but so what happens is you just don't make anything.
I mean, all that meat, it goes right into your small intestines, it absorbs them next to nothing, gets to your colon.
But most people think that, just in all seriousness, that consuming fiber is important for bowel movements and overall intestinal health and all that stuff.
Yeah, there's no doubt the more fiber you eat, the more bowel movements you're going to have, but what happens is if you get constipated, and there's another study about this, they looked at people with chronic constipation, they were always constipated, and the only thing that helped them was taking all fiber out of their diet.
Yeah, but what happens is, what you have is you've got a neuromuscular problem where the colon is not contracting the right way, and so you're blacked up, and then you just shove more fiber in there, and it just fills up more and more.
And eventually, you might be able to force it all through.
But that's not, you know, how that's, you know, a lot of people will say that, I will tell you, there's a lot of people that will tell me fiber just jacks up their intestines.
I mean, they feel awful when they're taking a lot of fiber.
I mean, you know, I'm pretty happy with beef, but I mean, when I was in France earlier this year and I had just a bunch of lamb, you know, that's easier to get.
I'll have sometimes without chicken.
You know, I haven't eaten game meat since I've started this, but I've eaten elk or foreign deer and, you know, chilies and stews and stuff like that.
Yeah, I'm always trying to figure out like what is that response that you get when you slice into a steak and it's juicy and delicious and your whole body goes like, oh!
That's why I always try to explain to people that the difference between like domestic beef versus like a slice of like mousse tenderloin.
Like the difference in the richness of the flavor and the darkness of the meat and the nutrition content of the food is so much higher that the I think it's a primal thing.
I've got a bunch of tweets about you, and one of the tweets was talking about your record as a doctor in New Mexico and stuff that you and I went back and forth about.
So, you know, I was, you know, like I said, I'll just go to my background a little bit, so I, you know, I go to medical school, you know, I go to, you know, degree in biology, then I go to medical school, then I drop out of medical school to play professional rugby, you know, I had this kind of crazy, crazy career.
Then I go into the military and I launch nuclear bombs for, you know, five years.
So I come out of training, not long out of training, and me and this other dude, his name's Tom Large, he's an excellent, excellent surgeon, just a great guy, great people.
Me and him are the only two guys at the main center in Afghanistan.
So you fly out there, it takes you about three days.
You go to Bangor, Maine, and these old ladies give you lobster bisque on the way out.
It's kind of cool.
Then you fly into Turkey, and then we sat there for like six hours on a runway.
Wouldn't let us move.
They wouldn't let us off the plane.
Then they fly us into Kyrgyzstan, which is, they used to be part of the Soviet Union.
So we've got a U.S. base in what was usually the Soviet Union.
So we stay there for a while, and it's freezing cold.
And then we get on this C-130, which is a military plane.
You know, you're packed in there with the cargo.
And you fly into Afghanistan, and they're shooting at you, so they turn off the lights, so hopefully they don't hit you and they're shooting at you as you come in.
So we get in there, and then I get off the plane, and they put you in this giant hall with like 300 guys on cots.
First night, and then we go to the first day to go to work, right?
And we're taking over from the Army, and I was in the Air Force at the time.
So we're taking over from the Army, and the first thing rolls in, and it was pouring.
I remember this, man.
It was like, welcome to fucking war.
There was a guy, a Canadian guy.
He was a 23-year-old kid.
He was a Special Forces guy, you know, full beard because, you know, the Special Forces guys would wear beards so they could blend in, right?
Both legs blown right off.
I mean, like, I'm like, holy shit.
You know, so this is like, this is, you know, stuff that's got real.
So every day...
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Trump, crazy Trump.
We would get people blown up by bombs.
I mean, their whole, their legs are being on.
I mean, the third day we got there, we had a kid, he was a 17-year-old kid.
This is an enemy.
We were taking care of enemies, too, right?
He's setting up a roadside bomb to kill our guys, right?
He's a 17-year-old kid from Pakistan.
He blows himself up.
Blows up both his legs above the knee.
Blows off one of his arms and most of his hands.
So he's basically, I mean, he's got nothing left.
So we're operating on this guy.
We do all these operations to basically save the kid's life.
Even though he's an enemy, because as a physician, that's just your job.
You know, we heard about several of our patients this happened to, so it was pretty frustrating.
So we get in there and there's like people like, I mean, little kids.
We're getting these little kids, two, three-year-old kids, stepping on landmines, legs blown off.
We had one little three-year-old kid.
I mean, he was...
I mean, he was...
I mean, somebody drug him behind a truck for like a mile, and they drug this kid through the streets, to the rough asphalt street, and his legs fucking ripped off.
I mean, his kid's road rash.
Actually, his legs were ripped off.
He was burned everywhere, and we're in there treating his stuff.
So what they do is they go to our gate, set off a suicide bomb, and they just kill, I mean, tons of people.
And we get all these casualties.
Most of them are civilians, right?
So we get all these civilian casualties, little kids and adults.
You know, in their suicide vests, they put all these metal bearings, you know, like half-inch thick metal bearings, and they cover them up and cover them in shit so they get infected, and they blow through people.
I mean, you get people with stuff going through their brains and shattered bones everywhere, and all these people that are just, you know, dying.
So it's chaos.
You know, all these people get swarmed in there.
We were getting this stuff all the time.
This was the biggest one we had.
And so we were, I mean, we literally, 40 hours straight, you're working.
You know, you're trying to save people's lives.
You know, I'm operating with the general surgeons on people's bellies, which I'm not trained to do, but I'm just helping.
We're trying to do this stuff.
So in the middle of this operation, we're in there operating, you know, trying to take care of these people.
And the operating room is just a little, I mean, it's like a little metal storage building.
You know, it's like a little, like if you're moving, you know, there's little podge things, you know?
So they stick a couple...
Operating beds in there and we're going as fast and we're wearing body armor.
We have 9mm strapped to us and we're operating.
You know, it's hard to move around.
It's real small.
And we're sitting in there and they say, hey guys, we think there's another bomber inside the hospital, you know, and the hospital may blow off.
So you're sitting there going, you know, your butthole tightens up and you're like, well, fuck, I got to keep operating, you know, because I'm trying to save this guy's life.
So we keep, we just like, well, we're gonna go, we're gonna go, right?
So we just keep, you know, we keep operating.
Fortunately, they, you know, they didn't, they didn't find, because what they thought they did is that somebody snuck in as a casualty, so they'd sometimes do that.
They'd blow people up, and then they'd sneak in as a casualty and blow more people up.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
So it's like, you know, it's kind of freaky, and so I, you know, I was like...
And when I got there, there were like two guys, and they weren't doing hardly any business at all.
It was like really slow.
No one knew they were there.
You know, they were in part of this big, huge group, had all these other doctors, but they didn't even know they existed.
So I got there and I said, well, this is crap.
And one of the reasons, because no one was seeing anything, they refused all these patients.
And I got there and I said, hey man, I'm gonna go talk to all these other doctors and let them know we're alive, that we're here, and that We're going to see anything you want to send us, and we'll take care of it, and if we can't, we'll make sure it gets taken care of the right way.
So that happened, and we started growing, right?
So we went from two guys to 12 guys in about three years, and we were very, very busy, real busy group.
And the rival group from out of town, from across the street, didn't really like it that much, because we were taking millions of dollars from them, I mean, tens of millions of dollars in their business, right?
Because orthopedic surgery is very, very lucrative for a hospital.
There's things like cardiology, where they're putting in stents, And sir, all these procedure-based practices make a lot of money for hospitals, so they really like it, right?
So they're really happy.
They're happy with me.
I'm like the, you know, I'm like the hero, right?
Because they're like, man, you're making us a lot of money.
The group across town doesn't like me very much because I'm taking all their money away.
So they approached us and they said, you know, why don't you join our group?
You know, we'll take care.
And I said, no, I don't want to do that.
But two of my partners did.
They eventually left.
So I'm the only holdout guy.
But I'm still going.
I'm still building the group.
And so I'm like the head of the snake, the rival, right?
But here's what's kind of happened.
So I'm busy.
I'm doing well.
My patients are happy.
I'm doing really well.
I've got low, real low complication rates.
You know, everybody's, you know, I'm very popular.
You know, I'm on billboards.
I'm on magazines.
I'm on radios.
You know, I'm just their poster board, basically, right?
So then, as I found with my diet, I started seeing patients getting better by just changing their diet.
And when you look in the orthopedics, you know, like bone disease, like arthritis, there's nothing about diet in there.
I mean, you study about it.
If somebody comes into your office, you know, you'll tell them, you know, we can give you some Tylenol.
We can give you some, you know, another anti-inflammatory drug.
We can stick some cortisone in your knee.
You know, if that doesn't work, maybe we'll send you to physical therapy.
We might put a scope in there.
And if none of that works, you know, and this is an end stage, we're going to replace your knee, right?
So what I was finding, you know, as I started doing this with patients, is that these patients are getting better just by changing their diet, putting them on a ketogenic diet.
At that time, I was doing keto.
So I was like, hey, man, try this.
So in my nurse, and I had this, and this is one of the things that kind of, I'm very jaded about the way the business side of medicine is now.
This has been a pretty interesting experience for me.
So I had a nurse that was just, I mean, she was a wonderful person.
I mean, the nicest, sweetest gal in the world.
She would work so hard for these patients.
She would take care of, you know, anything you needed done, you'd tell her, hey, take care.
And she was just awesome, right?
The hospital said, you're staying too late and we're having to pay you overtime.
And she's like, well, I'm taking care of patients.
Well, we don't care.
I don't want you to work late because it costs us too much money.
So it's just like...
It was one of these things where you're starting to see that, you know, it's all about the money.
And then we were like, so all these surgeons are, you know, as a surgeon, you get used to using certain equipment.
You know, it's like, you know, I'm using this particular thing to replace people's joints.
And you do it for years and years and years, and you get pretty good at it.
And so what the hospital said is, hey, we got a bargain deal with this other company, so you guys are going to use that.
You know, we're like, no, we don't want to use that.
We learned how to do this.
We don't even know how to use that stuff.
So they force everybody to do this, you know, just to say, you know...
So I'm like, you know, you know, and my nurse will tell me, I was printing out I made a list of all this reading.
I had his book, and I had Anita Tychols' book on, and I had this guy named Butterbob Riggs, all these ketogenic things, references, and I was handing them out 20, 25 of those every single day, and I was spending time with the patients, you know, because normally you'd only get like eight minutes to see a patient, you know, figure out the problem.
Figure out a plan, go, go, go.
And I was like, now I'm spending 20 minutes talking to these guys about diet.
And so, you know, then I'm seeing less patients.
And the hospital keeps saying, you know, we don't really like that.
So because I was ahead of the group and I was well-liked by everybody, I had really good patient records, I mean, really good patient satisfaction, you know, really low complication rates.
I mean, they were like, well, we don't like that.
So then they go, there's something called peer review, right?
So they can just pull your records and say, We don't like the way you did this, and we're gonna criticize your work.
And so they did that, and they went through there, and this is one of the things they said, well, Every surgeon will have X amount of complications, right?
It's like, you know, if you do, you know, 100 surgeries, about 5% of the time there's going to be some complications.
Somebody's going to get an infection.
Somebody's going to bleed too much.
Somebody's going to get a blood clot.
You know, if it's an orthopedic surgeon, maybe one of the screws you put in breaks or something like that.
Those things are all complications.
That happens to everybody, no matter what.
So what they said is there's a low threshold, right?
There's like a, you know, we're gonna say every year we're gonna give you two complications that were your fault, right?
Because most of the time you have a complication, it's like, man, there's nothing I could have done differently.
It'd be like if you were a Bellator guy and he said, I want the Bellator guy to review the UFC, right?
I think Joe Rogan sucks as an announcer.
I'm going to have a Bellator guy go after him, right?
So it's total conflict of interest, right?
So I'm like this naive, ethical guy that's like, well, you know, I know I had good care and patients were doing fine.
And then, you know, I was just like, okay, well, okay, that's fine.
And so they get it back, and the guy, and they looked at these, they looked at a dozen cases they've selected, you know, so they could pick whatever they want.
And they said, well, he said, I think six of these cases were below average.
You know, I don't like the way you documented stuff, and this, and I disagree with what you did.
So I'm like, and they said, well, that's okay, you know, you know, you're fine.
I said, well, do I need to stop operating or something like that?
They said, no, no, no, no, you're fine.
What we're going to do is we're going to get an independent review, right?
And this is supposed to be someone with no conflicts of interest, right?
So the way this is supposed to happen is that they were supposed to let me see what the cases are and put my comments in there, right?
And they were supposed to be totally in there.
So what they did instead is they wouldn't let me know any of the cases.
They told me, you can't see anything, right?
And the guy that had the conflicts of interest, they gave him all of his findings and sent them to this guy, right?
And this guy, and I don't know the situation for this guy, but I found this out about six months later.
He is either senile or totally drunk.
I mean, it was just like...
You know, so he gets this report, right?
And it's just bad.
It's like, looks really bad.
And I'll talk about some of the details in a second, but it just looks really bad.
And they pull me in the office and say, we got this really bad independent report, right?
And I'm like, well, what cases?
We can't tell you.
But it's really bad, and we're going to suspend your privileges.
So essentially what you're trying to say is they targeted you and they targeted you because you were changing what you were doing and you were trying to counsel people with lifestyle and they decided to pick on you and try to find things that were wrong in some of the past surgeries that you've done.
Some people weren't doing it intentionally, but there was definitely possibly some of that going on.
Anyway, so they get this report, and the guy, there's two people, they bring me in the office and say, you know, we're gonna shut down, you can't go to your clinic, you can't talk to anybody you work with, we're gonna deny you access to all the clinic charts, we're gonna shut off your email, you can't look at anything, right?
Like I just committed murder, like I'm some pariah.
And then they say, then the guy, and I'm like, you know, I'm like, I mean, it's like my kid just died.
I mean, this is something I spent my whole life training for.
You know, I'm doing this stuff and it's like, you know, I mean, it's like you're like dazed and confused and numb.
I mean, I'm like numb.
I'm like, I'm like, I'm going to drive my fricking car off a cliff.
You know, you're like suicidal almost, you know?
So the guy comes to me and he goes, hey man, we got this really bad stuff on you.
It's going to go really bad.
We're going to take it to a committee in a couple of days.
And I think the best thing you can do is just say you're sorry, write a letter.
I'll even help you write this letter.
You know, basically say confess that you did the wrong thing.
So I'm like, you know, I didn't have a lawyer at the time.
I didn't know what's going on.
So I said, okay, I'll do this.
And so I write this letter saying, yeah, You know, I probably could have done stuff different.
So when you did afterwards, did the lawyer go back and look at that confession or whatever you would call it and say, well, this is preposterous because you're not even talking about a specific case?
Well, she said it was probably something he shouldn't have done and I wouldn't have counseled you, but this guy was on the committee that condemned me, right?
And they hand this report that says all this bad stuff, and they hand my confession, right?
And this is basically what they have to go on.
No one knows anything about the cases.
And this is all these people that are doctors, but they're not surgeons, right?
All they are is, it would be like if you were reviewing MMA guys.
Like, say you want to kick somebody out of the UFC because you said his performance isn't up to snuff, and you went to a bunch of tennis players and golfers.
And said, hey man, we don't think he has his takedown percentage sucks.
And I'm not allowed to talk about this, because I don't know the specific cases.
For a railroad job.
So then I kind of come out of this haze and I look and I said, we'll give you a fair hearing.
This is what they call it.
Federal law requires us to give you a fair hearing, right?
So I get a lawyer, and this is expensive as shit.
I don't have any income anymore, so I'm spending all this money on lawyers' fees, and the hospital just drags out, and they won't release records for like six months.
So six months goes by.
I'm in here, I got four small kids, I'm like, Fuck am I going to feed my kid?
My kids are in school.
I want an autistic son.
It needs therapy.
And you know, this is tough, you know?
So I'm going through this stuff.
So six months go later, and then I finally get the cases, right?
And I start looking through the cases and what the guy wrote.
And not only are there errors, There are egregious errors, and there's multiple of them, and they're just horrible.
I mean, they're just so wrong.
I mean, that's why I said the guys are senile or drunk.
I'll give you a couple examples, and any orthopedic surgeon that's listening to us will know immediately what I'm talking about, but I'll try to make it make sense for other people.
So of these 12 cases, two of them were something called a reverse shoulder replacement.
So what happens is, you know, if your shoulder wears out, you can replace your shoulder, right?
So there's something called a reverse shoulder replacement, which you basically switch it around.
You put the ball where the socket was and the socket where the ball was, which sounds totally crazy, right?
This was developed in France in the 80s, and then the FDA approved this in 2004. So 2004 was approved in the U.S., and originally it was approved for one reason, right?
If your shoulder is totally arthritic, you know, real bad arthritic, and you don't have a rotator cuff anymore, and it's completely gone, right?
So that's what it was first approved for.
But over the years, over the next five, ten years, people started using it for all these other things and getting really, really good results with it.
So if you come in there with a blasted apart shoulder that's crashed and broke and you're an older person, people do that all the time.
And so that's what I did.
I basically put a reverse shoulder in a person that broke their arm.
I did this twice.
And not only did the patient do well, I mean, the patient was happy as can be.
They're great.
They're like, and no one knew what the outcomes of these patients were.
This patient is happy as can be.
But the guy writes, because he's old, I think, or drunk, or doesn't know the new record.
So basically what happens is, so they dragged us out for a year and a half, right?
And they finally, you know, and at the end, you know, I tell you, because they, I got to tell you this part.
I go through, this is important, I go through and compile all these cases, right, and get all the data to refute this and pull all these references and textbooks and all this stuff, and I'm like, this is a walk in the park, right?
I'm going to, you know, anybody that sees this in their right mind is going to see that they screwed up and there's all these errors and it's wrong.
So in discovery process, you send all this information in, and then they realize that, wait a minute, there's a lot of errors in here.
So now they have to pick a hearing officer, right, who's like the judge, right?
His word goes, they pick another, they get another search, they give me a list of surgeons to choose from.
They say, you can have any of these guys you want.
And I look through the list, and there's one guy, you remember that group that I was competing with?
He's in that group.
And I'm like, I don't want him, because he's on the other group.
And they said, no, he just retired.
And we're going to make you use him.
Right?
So they pick the judge and then on top of that they pay him.
No, he said it was really bad errors, and they said you gave patients too much choice, and you didn't document stuff as well as you should have, right?
And I still think that they should have just suspended you.
So this is a decision they make based on that.
And I will guarantee if anybody was on that committee that knew me, because those people that knew me on the committee knew I was a good guy.
They never had problems with me, so that's why they were shocked when this came out.
But if they knew that information, I'm 100% convinced that would be a difference.
So then, you know, I get done with that, and then the state gets involved, because the state has to respond to any complaints.
So the state gets this complaint, the state of New Mexico.
And it's kind of weird, because my next-door neighbor is on the state board, and I'm just, like, totally avoiding the guy, because I don't want to influence anything, right?
Yeah, or maybe give them an elk steak or something like that.
So then the board gets this and they say, hey man, this is a bad recommendation and we're going to give you two options.
You can suspend your license.
You can voluntarily surrender your license.
Or you can go to trial.
We can do another hearing, which is probably going to take a year.
It's going to cost you tons of money, which I'm just tired of this.
I'm tired of lawyers spending all this money and I'm still trying to figure out how am I going to feed my kids.
So then, you know, the state says, or what you can do is we'll send you to a place that will evaluate you independently, and then if everything goes well, we'll give you a license back.
So I said, okay, that's what I'm going to do, because I'm tired of this.
I don't want to spend $100,000 and wait a year when I can go to this place and spend $12,000.
And get evaluated and go from there.
So that's where I was this week.
In fact, I was in Denver meeting with these other surgeons, and they were just like going through all these case, case, case.
What would you do?
And I am clearly, you know, even though I haven't done this stuff in two years, I'm clearly convinced that they're going to say, hey, man, you're fine.
And they're going to say, here, go operate with somebody for two or three months.
I mean, you know, I've got a girlfriend who makes a good living, but, you know, I don't want to be, you know, but I've got kids, so we've got kids.
I've got a kid with her, and I've got three kids with my ex-wife, and they're all young kids, and so I'm back, and so I said I'm traveling back and forth.
So just in Denver, they said it'll take about eight weeks.
So they'll give me a plan.
They'll say, okay, we think that, you know, and I am almost 100% convinced they're going to say, you know, we need you to go work with some dude for a couple months because you're out of practice.
And I think I'll probably end up doing that.
Then the board, the state board, will review what they say.
And as long as they say, hey, man, you know what you're doing, They'll give it back to me.
So anyway, it's, you know, it's, again, I don't blame the state board.
I don't blame the people who are on the committee because they were clueless.
I didn't know.
I blame some incompetence by the administrators, you know, and just whoever reviewed me, you know, if it were caveman times, Joe, I'd go with a big club and like, what the F? Right.
But then there's a point where, you know, it's kind of like you've got to make a decision between patient care and, you know, and the CEO making a little extra money.
I know you hit Chris Kresser on here a while ago, and I listened to a little bit of his stuff, and his premise at the beginning, which I haven't read his book yet, but I think it's great.
I mean, here's a problem with Western medicine.
We are facing this, I mean, it's like a war against chronic disease.
It's like we're being invaded by Remember Independence Day?
Yes.
And doctors, we got BB guns.
I mean, the stuff we are shooting at them doesn't work for chronic disease.
Now, acute stuff is different.
There's some stuff that we have this wonderful technology, but the run-of-the-mill diabetes and obesity.
But even like arthritis that I saw every day, If we were trained properly in nutrition and exercise, that's what I've done my whole life.
I know what I'm doing exercise-wise.
But if we were allowed to do that, and instead of training all these radiology technicians and blood draw technicians, And nursing assistants.
If you had an army of preventive people, preventive medicine people, you know, and we train all these people to go into people's homes.
You know, I think Chris was talking about that.
And just get the crap out of their diet and show them how to be healthier.
You know, I mean, you would save...
You know, it's funny watching the politicians debate about health care, how to fund it.
You know, it's like, you guys are arguing about the Ticantanic as it's coming up in the iceberg, and you're arguing about the color of the deck chairs.
I mean, we are going over a cliff, and we're not fixing it by keeping putting, you know, Band-Aids.
Yeah, I mean, there's, you know, like I said, there's a guy, Peter Atiyah, I don't know if you know who he is, but he talks about when he was a surgeon, he felt like he was at the bottom of a building and somebody's throwing eggs off, and his job is to catch the eggs.
But it is a changing climate, though, because of people like Chris Kresser and Rob Wolf and Dr. Rhonda Patrick and a lot of others.
They're giving out really good nutrition advice, and people are changing the way they eat and think about food, and it's having a massive effect on the inflammation that they carry in their body.
I know so many people that used to have joint pain.
A great example is the Primal Kitchen, Mark Sisson's book, which is fantastic.
And his story, Mark's story about having his own inflammatory issues with his hands, he had some pretty severe arthritis that he thought was just going to be with him forever.
He changes his diet, reduces all the refined carbohydrates, goes on this protein, high-fat diet, and it all goes away.
I mean, there's so many examples of that.
And I just watched this documentary called What's With Wheat?
And it's all about glyphosate in the wheat, Roundup, and how when they say it's safe for people to consume, they say, well, it only affects plants and bacteria.
They're like, well, what about your microbiome?
Your microbiome is filled with bacteria.
You're killing that stuff.
Like, we don't think of that as being an issue.
You know, we don't think of Sedentary lifestyle as being an issue when it comes to the ultimate cause for you to wind up in the hospital needing surgery.
I can tell you one of the things I used to see, because when you're a surgeon, somebody comes in with bad arthritis and you replace their knee and they feel better for a while, You're like, oh, that's great, man.
I really helped this person.
Then they come in next year and their other knee is all jacked up, and then they replace that.
Well, you should have just done something so they didn't need surgery any other time.
Right, but I will tell you that, you know, just...
I told you now, because I'm a freak, because I'm just eating meat, and I'm doing this athletic stuff, and everybody says, you're an outlier, you're a genetic freak, whatever.
You're an N equals one.
So we made this website called N equals many.
Me and this other Air Force guy, that he's also a carnivore.
We got this thing, and we said, well, what if people...
Started gathering this information together, and we could start documenting that.
That's what we did.
So I put out a survey on Twitter.
I said, hey, how many of you guys would be willing to go 90 days and just eat a bunch of steaks?
And I had like 400, and I didn't have that many followers, but I had like 400 people.
Yeah, we had them document stuff, and some of them did some, you know, it was kind of like one of those things where we, because we'd never done this before, and we made them document all kinds of stuff, and a lot of people, some of the people initially dropped out because we made them document too much stuff, like it's too much of a hassle, like you can record all this stuff.
So we had certain percent that dropped out because they just didn't want to document stuff.
We had a certain percentage that dropped out because they felt like they had a low energy, right?
And so a lot of people, when they do this, they just can't eat very much.
I mean, they get full, and they're not eating enough.
And so that's one of the biggest things I tell people when they switch over to this.
Eat meat like it's your job.
That's why I tell them, you've got to eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, initially.
The problem is a lot of people lose weight on this.
A lot of people get lean on this stuff is that your hunger goes down pretty low because you're eating a lot of fat and you eat a lot of protein.
Especially if you're eating ribeye steaks, that's probably about 70% fat, 30% protein, something like that.
It's really, really satisfying.
You know, they tend to under, because no one's used to, like, if I told you Joe, go eat four pounds of meat a day, you're going to be like, well, I mean, I know you like eating meat, but I mean, even that's probably a big task.
You know, I've had a couple people that, and I haven't tested this, but I've had a couple people that have done this, and again, we need to get more data.
I've had a couple people that have done it that said their testosterone level went up.
You know, they went on all meat, their testosterone went up about 20%.
And so I was like, well, that's interesting.
You know, I don't put a lot of faith in just a couple anecdotes.
Yeah, I'd read something that said that 100% of all people that live over 100, no, it was some high number of all people that live over 100 consume red meat.
Right, but the thing is we're not just talking about if you want to do it.
We're talking about people that are proselytizing.
Like, they have this idea, and they push this idea down everybody's throats.
But if we're just looking at the actual data, the health data, like what's good for you and what's bad for you, there's no, like, overwhelming evidence that the vegan way is the way to go.
I mean, there are studies they like to push, but there's also studies that show the opposite effect.
If you look at the Epic Oxford study, which had about 60,000 people in it, they showed that vegetarians and vegans live no longer than meat eaters.
There's no difference, right?
Even though the meat eaters are probably the guys that don't care about their health, true.
So not only is it not protective, but it may be a negative.
You can look at a study out of Australia that looked at 240,000 people called the 45 and up study.
Same thing.
Vegans, vegetarians, no lever, no longer life, no better health.
So it's kind of like, you know, who do you believe?
And these guys have their studies that they're going to quote.
And I can cherry pick all day, and other people can cherry pick all day.
It's just BS. So my best advice is, and this is, I think, the best advice you can give anybody.
You know, until we start seeing dudes walking around that are in shape and jacked at 120 years old, you're not going to know what the right thing to do is.
And so the best advice you can have is to...
Get strong, get healthy, you know, move well, do everything you can to make your health good, and that's the best you can do, because if you're healthy today, odds are you're going to be healthier tomorrow.
So, you know, the fact that, you know, Joe, you've still got a lot of muscle on you at 50 means you're more likely to have someone you're 60. I mean, there's just no doubt.
That's the biggest correlator.
One of the best predictors of long life is your exercise capacity.
And I think we should bring this up while we're talking about vegan diets versus other diets.
If you have a standard American diet of even eating a bunch of shitty food and fried chicken and bullshit and cheeseburgers and sodas and you go vegan, you will be healthier.
Because you're going to remove all that shitty processed food out of your diet, all the nitrites, all the stuff that's unnecessary, all the preservatives.
If you do that, you will be healthier.
But it doesn't necessarily mean the vegan diet is the way to go.
I mean, it just, it means that the American diet that everybody, like, rightly criticizes is the wrong way to go.
Yeah, I mean, you can do about any diet's better than that.
I mean, you know, it's like in a lot of things, you know, this is another point I bring out, you know, because one of the differences between what I sort of think is healthy, and I'll come out and say, I don't know for sure.
I'm still learning this stuff, but I'm willing to investigate it.
You know, I'm willing to put my body to the test and have other people, you know, give me data.
But there's a big group out there that says you shouldn't eat a lot of protein.
You should really restrict your protein.
There's some data that talks about something called mTOR that maybe it causes cancer.
Maybe it inhibits longevity in these lesser animals like mice and little tadpole nematode things and bacteria.
And then there's another group of scientists out there.
There's a guy named Stuart Phillips out of Canada that's looking at that.
And it shows that the more protein you have, especially when you get older, the The longer you're going to preserve muscle, the better your quality of life is, and likely the longer you're going to live.
What happens if you autopsy an old person?
If you go to an old folks home, their brain has shrunk.
Their muscles have shrunk in a way.
The protein in their bones have shrunk in a way.
Their kidneys have shrunk.
Their heart has shrunk.
Their skin has shrunk.
Everything's shrunk because it's lost all this protein.
What happens is, as you get older and older, you lose some of the capacity to digest meat.
What happens is, where does your body get that protein from?
It just starts taking it from yourself.
You start auto-cannibalizing yourself to sustain function, to sustain cellular function.
So if you're not getting that replaced through a diet, and meat is an outstanding source of that, you're going to be frailer and frailer.
We have an obesity epidemic, but we also have a frailty epidemic.
There are people that are just...
I mean, by the time they're 40, they may be obese, but they're weak as can be.
And once you get back in shape, you just got to keep it going.
And if you just keep it going, it will work for you.
What we compare, it's really interesting.
Because what we compare in terms of normal body function, like the normal capacity that your body has, we're really generally looking at people that are just the average person.
Well, the average person doesn't really exercise very hard.
So we don't have a lot of data on people that are in their 50s that still go, you know what, I'm not letting this go.
I'm gonna keep this fucking body strong.
I'm gonna make sure I lift heavy weights.
I'm gonna do hard cardio.
I'm gonna do sprinting and kickboxing and a bunch of shit that requires explosive energy.
And if you do that, your body can stay vibrant.
But you have to be diligent.
It's very important for people to understand this.
If you're just a casual person who just kind of like half asses, oh maybe I'll take a spin class, good luck bitch.
Your body's gonna die.
It's gonna rot off and fall apart.
But if you just decide to be militant about this, you can keep a functional body far longer.
It's not just about ego.
It's also just about the use of your meat vehicle.
Like, my body can do a lot of shit that most people's bodies can't.
Like, if I want to pick something up, I don't have to call somebody.
I just pick it up.
Just that alone.
To know that you can carry yourself.
To know that you can do 50 chin-ups.
To know that you can move your body around in a way that most people find to be almost impossible.
It's like, I want my body to work better.
You know, it's like having a race car and you can choose what horsepower engine it is based on how much work you put on it.
I mean, that's essentially what your body is.
You can choose how much tread you have in your tires.
You can choose how good the suspension is, how supple it is, and how well it can maneuver based on how much plyogenic exercises you do or how many different explosive maneuvers, you know, clean and presses and things along those lines.
Yeah, I think that, you know, if you look at animals in the wild, right, you know, if you're looking at a pack of animals getting hunted, which one's going to get killed?
The closer you can maintain to that ability as long as you possibly can and do whatever it takes to get there, the farther you are away from death.
I mean, that's just simple nature.
You know, the slow, the weak, they get eaten, they die, they get diseased, they become disabled.
I don't want to be, you know, I'm 50 now, I don't want to be a 60-year-old guy that's walking around, limping around, you know, needing assistance, somebody to, you know, lift my groceries for me.
And that's what we have.
Or even a woman.
I mean, women should be out there, strength training, getting stronger, swinging heavy kettlebells.
And that's the other thing that you brought up, explosiveness.
Because I think we're finally starting, you know, we finally went away from jogging, right?
You know, we went from the 1960s to the early 2000s.
Everybody's jogging.
That's what you do for health.
Then people started discovering strength training.
So now we get people that are in there lifting a little bit.
But I think what you also have to do, and this is something because I've got this little training system that I'm helping people with.
But I think you have to do the explosive work, too.
I get in there with medicine balls.
I take medicine balls and I try to break the fucking things.
I throw them as hard as I can.
I'm jumping.
Like I said, I'm jumping with a vest on.
You know the stuff you have to build up to and it has to be done in a safe manner.
I'm sprinting, I'm on an Airdyne bike.
Have you been on an Airdyne, Joe?
Yeah, I love those.
I was going to say, you've got to get one for here.
But, I mean, if you get on that thing and you go as hard as you fucking can for 30 seconds or a minute.
A minute's even worse.
Every time I do it for a minute, I feel like I'm literally gonna drown.
I'm gonna die.
Here's what I do.
I call these things chainsaw intervals.
So I tell people, pretend there's some fucking maniac with a chainsaw.
It's gonna cut you off.
You gotta go as hard as you can.
I don't have that at home.
I've got the regular air down version.
I keep breaking the damn thing because I go too hard.
It's just not strong enough.
But when I go to the commercial gym, there's a guy that they just made that.
They had me doing that.
There's another MMA guy that Man, I can't remember his name, but he was like a pride champion guy, like pride six or seven that won it.
And he's at the gym I'm at sometimes in Southern California.
But I mean, that thing is, you know, just try, I'm sure those guys would come up here and let you demo it, you know, and just get on there and go, you know.
And this is the thing I talk about when I talk about high-intensity interval training.
You know, a lot of people, They don't get the high intensity part.
They'll do Tabatas where they'll go 90%, 100% of the first one and by the time the third one they're down to like 60% because the rest intervals are too short.
So I'm like, man, go like somebody's gonna kill you for 20 seconds and then rest three or four minutes and then go again because then you keep hitting that high intensity.