Stay Sick or Eat Meat? Facing a Vegan Crisis – Monica Hershaft – #897

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey, formerly Bulletproof Radio. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey Today. Well, it's going to be a lot of fun. We've got our live audience from the Upgrade Collective, my membership and mentorship group. If you'd like to be a member, you can go to ourupgradecollective.com or just hit me up on daveasprey.com get to be in the live audience. But the reason today is going to be a lot of fun is that not only does our guest have headphones, glasses, eyes, and a shirt that all match, which has never before happened in almost a thousand episodes, we're also going to talk about why the human body can't be vegan and healthy. Because she was raised vegan, got sick, went paleo, and is now working on healing other people. Kind of on a similar path to what happened to me. I wasn't raised as a vegan, thank God. I'd probably be dead. So congratulations on your resilience. But I was. I definitely went vegan, and it made me even sicker. So, Monica Hershaft, welcome to the Human Upgrade.

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Do you get death threats?

I have gotten death threats, yes.

That is a sign that you're making a positive impact in the world. Most of my death threats came from Joe Rogan fans who were mad when Joe Rogan decided to back another company copying my stuff. But I've had hundreds of them. Oh, yeah, I know. He doesn't have control over what he censors from his show, but he did delete my three episodes when he went to Spotify. What I realized then was every time someone's talking about you, even if they're, you know, even if they're saying bad things about you, you're making a difference. So congratulations on your death threats.

Appreciate it.

Now, there is an animal rights terrorist group out there. They're called PETA, and it does not stand for the People for the Eating of Tasty Animals, which I thought it should. But these are actually people, some of whom have gone to jail for the crimes that they've done. And they will tell you that it's healthy to be vegan, not because they care about your health, but because they think animals and humans are the same thing. I think we have a sacred connection with animals and that as a farmer, a small farmer, I would never mistreat one of my animals, and I would eat them with Gratitude.

But you.

You kind of were raised as a vegan, and you went over to the dark side of being healthy and taking care of our soil and our planet. What was it like to have this. This realization because you were conditioned from birth?

Yes, it was. It was. I just didn't know any different. And I was being raised vegan at a time when people weren't vegan. That wasn't a thing yet. And the real the animal rights movement kind of started in our living room. I mean, PETA was also started in our living. And the real the animal rights movement kind of started in our living room. I mean, PETA was also started in our living room. And my dad was friends with Ingrid Newkirk, who started PETA with Alex Pacheco. And I remember when I was the little, little girl, them talking about it. And PETA wanted to get more into the animal experimentation, and my dad wanted to focus more on the factory farming. And so they split and they did all the talk show circuits together, and Phil Donahue, Dinah Shore. And I just knew that my dad was this great man doing all these big things, and he was on TV and we were going to these giant conferences with tons of audience and people, and. And I admired and respected him. And of course, didn't even occur to me as a child to think anything different because that's just how I was raised, and that's how we ate. And, you know, eventually when I did grow up and get sick, it took a while for me to even consider that it could be my diet. So it was very big pivot, mentally, to make that leap.

Is your dad still around?

Yes, he's actually. They just completed a documentary on his life in Eastern Europe. They were going. They did a whole European tour just a few months ago that's coming out in film festivals next year.

I. The thing that kind of makes me sad is the message about industrial farming of animals. He's totally right. It's wrong to eat industrial meat. It's wrong what we're doing, just to be really clear.

Totally. Yeah. And let me just share the story of how that happened for him, because he was actually a scientist working for the epa, and he was assigned to go assess conditions at a factory farm. And so he walked in to do his assessment and just saw the conditions in this factory farm and the body parts and the screaming animals and the whole thing. And it. For him, the whole thing that makes my dad kind of well known in the community is because he was a Holocaust survivor. And so his connection to that was the way his family was taken off in cattle cars and the way they were killed and you know, that was what the connection was for him. So that's what flipped for him when he went into that slaughterhouse, which was a commercial factory farm. And, and so there was no idea that there was anything other than that. And.

Right.

So. And nobody knew about factory farms back in the 70s. That wasn't public knowledge. So he made it his mission to make those conditions public knowledge. And that's how it started the, the.

Deep seated trauma that's behind a lot of the, oh, I could never eat an animal type of vegans. It's something that we just have to talk about. And I mean, there is no bigger trauma that I'm aware of than Holocaust surviving. A member of my family through marriage was in a concentration camp for specifically unhooking boxcars full of Jewish people. And he was not Jewish. But, you know, the trauma reverberates through the generations. It really does. And it's stuff that, you know, our family deals with and probably will a couple generations from now. The distributed family.

Yeah.

So like, I appreciate that you're, you're calling out the connection there. And if, you know this is life threatening and then you see animals here, that way, it's going to push a really deep button. And so this idea of compassion for, for the, the idea like, let's not do this to animals because if you look a cow or a dog or a cat in the eye, they're alive and there's a connection. And you have to be a really bad person to do something intentionally cruel or mean to them. And that's why meat isn't expensive enough. And that's why distributed meat could be very affordable. But you can't do it the way we're doing it. So I just have to say, despite my terrorist thing, and I was at a university where they actually went to the houses, PETA members went to the houses of the researchers who were doing research on chicken eggs and, you know, threatened their children and lit fires in their labs. And this was terrorism and it went too far. But the core of it, let's be kind animals. There's more alignment between the modern Paleo movement, especially grass fed, and PETA than anyone would ever think. But the idea to say being vegan is going to work for you, man, it's tough. So what happened as a child? You were eating. Tell me what you were eating. I'm guessing it was seitan. Not seitan, but the gluten stuff. But all the weird vegan foods from the 70s. Is that what you were raised on?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember and we had family in Israel, so they had some interesting canned products that came from Israel that we were eating as well. But there was. And I just want to say PETA's not the only group. There are a lot of groups like that that are doing terrorist activities. And that was one thing that did used to bother my dad a lot. Like, he. He really had a problem with that. He felt like it made the whole movement look bad. But there are multiple groups that behave in that manner and. But to get back to growing up in the 70s, we really did a lot of that plain tofu. Like, that was huge, you know, like those bl. Box of white tofu, you know, and you would just. And, you know, so I. I mean, I don't remember my mom cooking a lot, but, you know, I was kind of a latchkey child anyway. But, you know, it was a lot of those, you know, just veggies and tofu. And they did have veggie burgers back then. I don't even know what was in them.

It was just pressed grains, mostly.

I mean, there was. There was a lot of wheat based. I do feel like a lot of that vegan diet comes in. Wheat and soy are so predominant. So you get really high levels of wheat and soy in your diet like crazy.

Because it's just the protein. It's like they throw away all the fiber and stuff, and all that's left is just straight gluten.

Yeah. And when you're growing up in the 70s and you're eating that much soy and you're a female, and, I mean, I'm going to bring birth control into it, because as a teenager in the late 70s, early 80s, the type of birth control that was used back then was horrendous. It was really, really horrible. Hormones combined with eating soy all day every day, it's kind of a recipe for disaster for the thyroid.

So it trashed your thyroid for sure.

The whole endocrine system. Yeah, I had a lot of issues that I never recognized back then, but just emotional and you just think, oh, she's a teenager. But there was a lot of mood swings, depression for no reason, and. And, you know, outbursts and just didn't know what was wrong with me. Anxiety and, you know, but other than that, I didn't really get sick. I never really had any health issues, but I had this stuff brewing and it, you know, it cumulatively builds over the years, like little layers until finally you hit that tipping point. And then goosh, it's over. And for me, that happened at 34.

Wow. It's. It's amazing you made it to 34. But your dad, to be clear, he was a vegetarian.

Yes.

Like, not a vegan. Did he go full vegan? Because I think vegetarians can probably be healthy with a lot of work. Not as healthy, but you can get 80% of the way there if you're eating enough saturated fat. You're really careful, but you won't be as good as you could be if you had some marrow and some liver and whatever. But did he cut over to just. No, you know, no, no, honey and all that kind of really, really radical.

Yeah, I mean, hardcore. There was a whole fight at my wedding about, um. I remember he was friends with Casey Kasem back then. I remember Casey was invited to my wedding. Yeah, I mean, they did well, because Casey Casem was a huge animal rights activist. So he used to donate a lot of money to my dad's organization and he would speak there and he was a sweet man. I met him before he passed, but anyway, he was a big part of the movement and. But there was a whole thing with something to do because back then when I got married was when they still used film and cameras. Remember that? Remember that time?

I remember that time.

I guess.

Where are your fat pictures? I'm like, do you remember what film is?

But yeah, there's something with film that was an animal rights issue. Some process with film. So there was a big fight about the photos or something and then. But yeah, everything down to bees, honey, everything. And I don't remember what year he went vegan. I. It was. It was when I was pretty young, it probably says on his Wikipedia page. I just don't remember. But he was vegan for a really long time and he was vegetarian before I was born. But the vegan thing started when I was little for sure.

Okay. It's interesting because you're the second generation of that. I'm assuming that he was vegetarian vegan before you were born.

Yeah.

Okay. And so did you have spina bifida? The flattening of the spine, lack of fusing of the lower spine that comes from eating lots of wheat teeth, cavities, none of that stuff. No, it's usually multi generational. From what Weston A. Price and people would tell you.

Yeah, I know. And Weston A. Price does talk a lot about that. But for one thing, my mom, they're both Eastern Europeans, so they grew up eating all of the traditional Eastern European Diets which are a lot heavy in organ meat and a lot of that stuff. Right. So. So they had a good base growing up, right? And. And my dad was in, I believe, his. Probably his mid to late 30s once he started being a vegetarian. So. And my mom, you know, she's the one that carried me. So. Yeah, I mean, so technically I would consider myself first generation, really, because they didn't grow up that way. They kind of started doing it later in life, like not even in their twenties. So. And I know my mom had me in her early 30s, so. Anyway. But as far as the kind of vegetarian and how healthy you can be, let me be clear here. We did grow up, and I remember this clearly, and you people from the 70s will enjoy the reference. We had Pepperidge Farm cake in the freezer. We had the Reese's peanut butter cups. We had pistachio ice cream. That was my dad's favorite before the vegan thing started. And. And all of the foods that we had were processed and everything. You know, that's when microwaves came out. And everyone, if you were cool, you had a microwave and you used it. And so if you're.

If you're 25 and listening to this, there are things in your life where you got the first one of that that won't register for another 10 years. But I remember getting my first microwave. I remember getting my first Walkman. They were huge at first Walkman. And my first MP3 player, long before you could buy an ipod or any of the other apple things like that. And you look back, you go, wow, that was actually kind of a big deal. So, yeah, the microwave was a big thing. And that ruins food anyway, whether it's vegan or not, right?

And especially the early microwaves, they were horrible.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. So, yeah, the microwave was a big thing, and that ruins food anyway, whether it's vegan or not, right?

And especially the early microwaves, they were horrible. And anyway, so all of our food, you know, it wasn't like, oh, healthy vegetarian. Like, eggs would be the only healthy thing that came out of being vegetarian. The rest of it, my dad, for as long as I can remember, he's been a sugar junkie. It's like the soy ice creams and all that kind of stuff. Once he did go vegan, so it's really. It's really not. He didn't do it for health reasons, as we know. He did it for ethical reasons. So he's never really been in it for the health he's been in it for. Making peace with the survivor guilt.

I actually can respect, respect that. It's when the people with an agenda conflate health benefits with something they're doing for another reason that strikes me as manipulative. And then there's a dishonesty thing because as I mentioned, I was calling me a devout vegan, not for animal rights reasons, because I became convinced that that was a raw vegan, just a regular vegan, all sorts of stuff as I was trying to lose the hundred pounds I had to lose. This was before I had to go bulletproof to restore my health, which got much worse after a year plus on the vegan thing. But when we talk about deaths per calorie. It was a llama in Tibet, like a Tibetan lama at a monastery. And I pointed at a yak skin on his prayer pole in the middle of the compound and I said, you tell me. No killing yet. That looks like you killed that yak, didn't you? And he laughed at me. They loved spirited debate in Tibet, like it's a part of the culture, so I wasn't being offensive. But he laughed and he said, one death feeds everyone. And I came back and I looked at the deaths per calorie from eating a pound of cow every day. And it turns out you're killing between 0.3 and 0.5 animals per year, including the entire life cycle. Because it's on prairie that we didn't have to destroy the ecosystem on that prairie as long as the cows weren't too dense. So, you know, there were no butterflies killed, no turtles, bunnies, rabbits got sliced up by tractors. It actually is far less than some of that tofu where ecosystem destruction happened for it. So I feel highly ethical from an animal thing as long as no one tortured the animal before I ate it and I don't eat industrial meat for that reason. Like I'll be vegan at a restaurant if they don't have grass fed.

Yeah, that is the key. And that's what I talk about. And I did a talk at Paleofx about this exact thing when people say, how could you make this eth? I said, well, yeah, it's an ethical dilemma, right? But so in order to make peace with it, I don't eat animal protein if it comes from a factory farmed source. I just not going to do it if I'm at a restaurant and they don't have either wild caught fish or free range, you know, pasture raised, grass fed animal protein or whatever the case may be. Then I will skip it. I just. If you're getting it from a paleocentric farm where they have humane kills, it's a whole different story. And not only that, but that exact same piece of steak that's factory farmed will actually make you sick and be bad for your health and hurt you. Whereas the opposite, the humane raised paleocentric raised animal protein will actually heal you and repair your body. So it's a no brainer.

It is a no brainer. And if you're really into environmental and animal rights things, have you ever looked at how much plastic waste comes out of a hospital?

No.

Well, you do not want to be in a hospital if you're an environmentalist. Everything is single use wrapped in double plastic for everything. So if you're saying, oh my vegan lifestyle, which makes you sick, let's be really clear, it actually does. It is going to result in a lot more visits to healthcare facilities which are also going to be environmentally destructive. And if you're tired and anxious all the time and you're eating a bunch of whatever tofu to fuel that tiredness and anxiety, you're probably wasting all of your time on earth here.

Well, I have to tell you a little secret. And obviously I'm not naming names, but I've had multiple people, multiple people reach out to me secretly that are vegans and they're not doing okay, but they don't want people to know that they reached out to me and they ask me if I can help them. So that's a thing.

It happens all the time. Someone I'm not going to name her but who's a guest on the show, was a vegan with a big vegan community. And I got her on bulletproof coffee and it was like when you see that, that happened that first time, it's like this sense of relaxation comes through another time. The fiance of a friend is very high in the supplement industry. He had told his fiance who was pregnant that she had to be vegan. And I said, this is nonsense. And I walked both of them over to a restaurant that had grass fed meat. I pulled out a stick of grass fed butter and I put a huge hunk of butter on the steak. And yes, I carry grass fed butter in my little man purse sometimes. And then she ate like a prisoner and she put her hand around it and she just wolfed it down and made the sound like oomph, oomph, oomph. I remember my friend looked at me and goes, dave, I think she likes you more right now than me, because the core need to nourish another life in there. This is nourishing food. And I can tell you, you don't get that same response from a vegan pizza. It just doesn't work like that, or a salad or kale or any of that stuff. It simply doesn't give you the power to make another life at your maximum ability. So that sense of lack creates the anxiety. And that's what I felt when I, especially after probably about two to three months of being vegan. And what you describe, the flightiness, the ungroundedness, and you see this quite a lot, all the jokes about angry vegans. Well, there's a little bit of a truth in that, by the way. Angry fasting people and angry keto people who overdo those, it's a very similar mindset. So not to just pick on vegans, but the ungroundedness that happens from that, it's a real thing. And in fact, I got a text right before the show from a friend who has been vegan for decades and had her first piece of bacon over New Year's and is feeling better. So who would have thought? It's one of those things where we have the drive and something in us stops us from acknowledging the desire for that. Because there's a voice in your head that says, oh, that's wrong, or it's going to make me fat or it's bad or something. Your voice came from your parents. Where do you think kind of vegans just pop up out of nowhere who weren't trained that way? Where are they getting the voice that says, if I eat meat, somehow X is wrong?

Well, that's easy. I mean, organizations like my dad's and like these other animal rights organizations are, Are disseminating information in order to try to get people to go vegan because they want to save as many animals as possible. So they're going into the schools, they're going into social media, they're. They're disseminating marketing, doing demonstrations, whatever they can to get the word out. And I understand that because that's the passion behind it. That's how I feel about what I'm doing with my work, you know, so. So that's where it's coming from. It's coming from, you know, and especially the younger kids that they're hitting, you know, because a lot of the little kids don't have that mindset of like, oh, I'm eating something that used to be alive. And so there's a shock when there's A child, you know, and they have that realization. So I've seen it, I mean, over the years, just in all of the different conferences that I've attended, you know, over the years. And that's what those conferences are for. They have these conferences, you know, where they disseminate information and they have like, you know, if you look at paleo effects and how many vendors they have there, I don't know, 30 or 40, 50 vendors maybe, who knows? So many. It's like giant. That's how it is at these conferences as well. There's like every possible different organization you can think of that has a booth and then there's plenaries and talks, multiple talks going on for days and days and days and days and, and you know, and also then all of the TV and the radio and all of the media.

So it's, it's an orchestrated campaign. I'm going to call it, I love this word now, misinformation. I mean, stuff I disagree with, that's all that word means. But anyway, it is, is I would say it especially what the health was probably the height of just propaganda where the guys who made it clearly don't care about health at all. That just go, well, we'll say anything in order to get you to do what we want you to do. Yeah, I have another little story about this. So one of the raw vegan, real famous guys is my friend David Avocado Wolf.

Oh yeah, I know who he is.

Right. And he's got a big following online. And he and I and all vegans, really and I, we have way more in common than you'd think. Where if you're interested in health. Yes. Interested in preserving the environment. Yes. Interested in reducing cruelty to animals. Yes. Now the path to do it, I'll argue I'm killing less animals than a vegan with what I'm recommending. But okay, there's debate there. So he asked me to speak at his conference and I said, all right guys, I'm a lacto ovo beefo porco vegetarian. I hope that's okay. And they're going to hate me or they're going to love me. And they love me. And I gave a talk and I said, here's why you should have grass fed ghee, which is clarified butter, with your vegetables because you'll make more use of the vegetables because if the cow is local and organic and all that, no animals died, you made healthier soil and you'll feel better. And two things happened. One, I came back the next year to present. And I took a poll and 2/3 of the audience was doing ghee, so they were no longer technically vegan. And David also started selling ghee because it actually worked and it's in alignment with the principles. Even if you're an animal rights person, well, don't do industrial milk. That stuff is terrible for you. Like, I don't do it either. So that was interesting. But then I went to the hotel and I said, you guys must hate this conference. A big conference, thousands of people. You must hate this conference because no one will order your room service. Right? And they started laughing and they said, no, no, no, this is our biggest conference ever of the year for room service orders. I said, what do you mean? He said, oh, everyone just orders chicken and all the other normal food up in the rooms and they eat all the vegan stuff down here and literally the highest revenue. So there's a lot of people who want to be vegan because they believe, but their body won't let them. Just like trying to quit smoking, you just naturally reach for the cigarette. Your body will naturally reach for the healthiest foods and those healthiest foods contain animals. And then the question is, how do we make it so it was healthy animals, not unhealthy. So I thought it was funny. And this isn't hypocrisy. Some of the guys from the Upgrade collective are saying that this is a fundamental mismatch. If you tell yourself a story and the story is not reality based on, you're going to go ahead and try and do this and then you're going to fail and you're going to feel guilty about it, but you're still going to do the things that make you alive. Also, Breatharians. I've heard from two different people who have been very close with so called Breatharians. They're so convinced that they can live on just air that they don't know that they're eating Snickers bars. There's like a Snickers bar wrapper, but they don't know they ate it because the body will take over and make you do something, including order room service. If you've just been too vegan for too long, that's just how it works. Now let's get back to what happened when you're in your 30s.

Yeah.

Because you lasted a long time, especially having grown up like this. You had, I'm assuming, PMS and hormone issues and anxiety issues. You mentioned before you were 34, right?

Yeah. I mean, well, and I was on the pill, so, you know, okay, that.

Would do it all by itself. Almost, right?

Yeah. But just to explain what happened in my situation and, and what was so astonishing to me when I did get sick, because I'd never heard of holistic in my life. I didn't even know what that was. So I just would go to the doctor if there was a problem. But I never had any illness issues prior to this. And so what triggered this was I was an actor back then and a lot of my friends were doing this big trendy detox program in la. And I was like, oh, I'm going to do that. And I got violently sick really fast on this detox program, program. And I started having severe symptoms right off the bat and kept waiting for them to pass because, oh, this is a detox reaction. But it was getting scary and I had. I stopped sleeping. I was sleeping maybe two hours a night. My heart palpitations, really severe anxiety. And I couldn't eat solid food without pain. And so they were giving us a lot of supplements on this detox but program. And they kept sending me to the doctor to get checked out. And the doctors kept telling me nothing was wrong with me. So I had a weird. This is where your higher self knows, right? I was like, hey, I'm a vegan born and raised. Could that be the problem? Nope. Diet's got nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with it. And you're fine. And I was like, okay. So then I would go, keep, keep pushing through, get worse and worse and worse. Now the skin's coming off my face and bleeding for no reason. I can't even stand up long enough to take a shower. I can't drive because now I am not gauging distance properly and I'm hitting things in my car and I feel crazy. And so again, go to the doctor, doctor after doctor, because I've got really good Screen Actors Guild insurance. So I'm using it. I'm going to the top specialist, every single one of them. Your diet's got nothing to do with it. It doesn't matter that you're vegan. Your labs are normal. You're just being dramatic and being treated like a hysterical female. And, you know, eventually I got to the point where I quit the detox because I was scared I was going to die. And after about three months on this stupid detox program, I was wrecked. And nothing worked. Nothing. I couldn't. I was sensitive. I couldn't be around anything or anyone without getting sick. I couldn't breathe any little tiny piece of chemical, a cigarette smoke. I Couldn't be around a sick person. I just had no immune function left at all. So, yeah, so eventually I had a friend of a friend, referred me to an osteopathic and he found a problem with my phase two liver function, which is how you detox.

Detox all the vegetable toxins that you don't hear about from the vegans.

I mean, you know, basically this detox was pulling all the toxins up and then they had nowhere to go. They were just trapped. And so because, you know, phase one is you're bagging up the trash, phase two, throwing it out. That didn't work. That didn't work at all. So basically I went to my first holistic person and they had me on a ton of herbs and all kinds. They were doing all kinds of stuff. They were using that zapper machine on.

Me and the whole Accord zapper, that was way 80s. I made one of those myself.

Didn't work, but just kept getting sicker and sicker and. Yeah, and my whole life was revolving around it. At this point, I had to quit acting. I couldn't even come out of my trailer. I remember I was on a sprint commercial shooting 10, 10 second spots for football season. I shot one spot, went into my trailer, never came out. I could not physically get up again. And that was the end of it for me. And I knew I was in trouble. So once I found out that phase two liver function wasn't working properly and I couldn't detox, there was no solution to fix it. So eventually, after years and years and trying different people, and every single time, my higher self knew and I would go, born and raised vegan. Is that a problem, everyone? It was like, nope, nope, I finally get to this one person. And they were like, yeah, I actually can't heal you if you're gonna stay vegan and I don't wanna waste your time and money now. My dad was there because at that point, at that point, I couldn't take care of myself anymore. I couldn't even do laundry. So he had flown out to like help me and drive me to appointments and stuff to try to figure it out. In the beginning, no one believed me. And now at this point, I was far enough gone. I lost so much weight, I couldn't even fit into a size zero. You know, at first everyone in Hollywood's like, you look great. And then it gets to the point where it's not good anymore. And so basically my dad was there, so I couldn't say anything in front of him, but I was like, if you tell me to drink my own pee, I'll do it. If it gives me my life back, I don't care. Whatever it takes.

Are you serious that no one ever told you to do that?

Swear to God.

I've had people tell me to do that. I tried it once. I'm like, that is not good.

That is also how they survived in the Holocaust, FYI. But anyway, that's another story. But yeah, so basically we get back to the house and I literally took my cell phone and went into the bathroom and snuck into the shower and got on the phone, and I was like, hey, hey, it's not a ca Herschaft. I'll eat the meat. Tell me what to do.

Oh, my God. So you were really desperate, like, as close to death as you could get. You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey.

And I was like, hey, it's Monica Hershaft. I'll eat the meat. Tell me what to do.

Oh, my God. So you were really desperate, like, as close to death as you could get. Wow. I have seen so many very unhealthy people in the same thing, but I believe this works. I call it the vegan trap, where when you first go vegan, which you didn't have to experience because you were always vegan, but you actually feel better than eating the crappy industrial animal junk food diet. So then after six weeks, you know it works. And then when you start getting teeth that crack and you start losing bone density and you're anxious all the time and you can't focus and you're forgetting words and you're getting sick all the time, and you have thyroid problems and autoimmunity. I'm just telling my story real fast. All of a sudden you go, well, it's because I'm not vegan enough. Like, maybe I heated up to 119 degrees, not 117 degrees, and you start doing these weird behaviors because you know it works. And it's that cognitive dissonance when finally you're just desperate going, I, this is just not okay. But what could. Let me phrase it real, real perfectly here. What could someone have told you when you were 16 years old that would have gotten through to you and said, eat some meat already, to help you avoid all the pain that you went through?

Nothing. Because, I mean, in my situation, it would. It would have been. I had no health issues, so there would be no impetus to make me do that. I'd never been sick a day in my life. At 16, I was. Not only was I Super healthy. I was a dancer. I had danced at the Kennedy Center. I was like very athletic. I was, you know, there's nothing you could have told me. And I also try telling any 16 year old anything.

That's a fair point. Okay. I'm actually going to really own that. I've got a 14 and a 12 year old. So let's go up to maybe when you were 20 or 24. Is there something what people in the Upgrade Collective here on the chat. And also what I want to do is how do you get through to someone who is choosing a vegan lifestyle either for animals or for health, where it's not doing either one of those? What do you say? What's the magic incantation to get them to just go, oh my God. I'm going to reconsider my lens on reality?

That's a good question. But I don't think that I'm a typical representative because of the fact that my dad started the movement. This was in ode to our family who had been murdered in the Holocaust and all of the people that he watched get tortured and killed and as he was growing up. And so I wasn't going against an idea, I was going against my family, you know, and my legacy and why my dad survived the Holocaust. It's. It's not like it was.

It doesn't get bigger than that, right? Maybe. Oh, and you went against God too, right?

Well, there is no God in this family.

There isn't a higher.