30 - EP 30 with Dr. Benjamin Braddock: Psychedelics and Ancestral Meat, Seed Oils and The Societal Fall of Testosterone

Welcome to the Soulcast. One of the OG Twitter crew, um, probably have known you for over a year now, Mr. Benjamin Braddock.

Hey, thanks for having me on.

No worries at all. Uh, we were speaking just before about the sauna and how I really think— I didn't mention this before, but I just wanted to mention now that like it really is a cornerstone of health and well-being. And we were saying how, you know, you get your best writing done after a sauna. Uh, it seems to just clear everything out of the body, everything out of the mind as well, like nothing else. And you're literally clearing stuff out from your body when you're sweating everything out. A lot of heavy metals and toxins are excreted through sweat, but it kind of— like, most people are not ever either in a sauna or in a temperature that they can sweat for any large period of time. Like, even if you're working out, part of the reason you feel good from working out is because you're sweating so much. But, you know, with the advent of air conditioning in a lot of gyms now, you don't really get that, so If you're listening to this and you're not doing a sauna or, you know, a hot bath soak is also a good way to get that same kind of full body heat. You need to get onto it and, you know, we can both attest to how good it is, especially in today's virus world.

Yeah, you mentioned hot baths. This is something I think actually, uh, Agones van der Plaats, I'm probably butchering the pronunciation, but true. Is one of the OG guys, he recommended it specifically for the PUFA detox. Basically, you need to get your body temperature up for prolonged periods to even, you know, begin to chip away at some of that oxidized fat that, you know, collects inside your body and hangs out there for a very long time if you don't do something to get rid of it. So he recommended that, and then also doing the rapeseed carrot salad you know, around the same time, because as you detox the PUFAs, you also need to take care of the extra estrogen that's in your gut, all of this kind of things. It helps you deal with the metabolites from that. That's one of those things too, like with the, you know, with the issue of PUFA detoxing, this is kind of why I'm a little leery of like people losing way too much too fast by going on a crash diet, because I don't think any good can come of metabolizing large quantities of this stuff in such volume that your detox systems can't handle it. So that's, that's an added benefit too, you know, in addition to helping your lymphatic system, all these other great things saunas do. They also help reverse a lot of this damage that I think is the big issue. I mean, it's probably the main driver of disease in the West right now, are these toxic cooking fats. Say more than anything else, more than xenoestrogens, any of this stuff. I mean, it is a xenoestrogen in and of itself because when you metabolize it, it produces very estrogenic metabolites. And, um, you know, of course that has a major negative impact.

So for the people that might not really understand, uh, the PUFA issue, um, polyunsaturated fatty acids, and they are your seed oils, majority, uh, of the ones that are kind of in our diet in the Western world today, which is Canola oil is the big one. Vegetable oil, the generic name that sometimes is in there. Soybean oil. All of these things that— these oils that were basically repurposed for human consumption. They were only really used in industrial situations. They were repurposed initially for animal consumption because farmers realized that if they fed these seed oils to pigs, they get fatter. And the fatter they are, the more they can sell them for at the market. So they, they started to introduce all these grains and seed oils into to cheaply fatten up their produce or their animals. Now, what do you think is happening to the average person in the Western world today when everything that we eat is either cooked in or— not everything we eat, everything that most people eat anything that's processed, anything that's cooked out or in fast food is now in our diet, such a high PUFA content, or it's literally fried in the stuff, which is, you know, probably the worst way to consume it because you are heating it up and oxidizing it before you even put it in your body, where, you know, we know that the oxidation potential of these things is so low because they were So it's because the seed oils— seed oils are meant to be a liquid at a low temperature because they'll be in the soil so they can germinate. So when that comes in the human body, which is a higher temperature, they're going to oxidate very quickly. And like Ben said, you know, leave these plaque deposits, which is the root of, you know, most obesity, most overconsumption of calories, or these hidden things, but also metabolite metabolism issues. Which is making everyone die of heart disease and all the rest of it and other obesity-related issues. And even if you're not fat, these things just— I feel like whenever I taste them now in, in like restaurant cooking, I'll taste the hint of it on the potato or something that they fried it in and just, it ruins the meal for me really. And my body does sense it now.

Yeah, it's much beyond just being fat. I mean, as far as, you know, it can give you everything from migraines to, you know, setting the stage for cancer. With the oxidation, I think—

and Alzheimer's, right?

Yeah, exactly. One thing that really illustrated to me, you know, just why you really don't want this stuff to oxidize in your body is A friend of mine, Bull Carson, pointed out that these oils were used back, you know, in the, uh, couple hundred years ago originally, like linseed oil or walnut oil, to actually, uh, when you were done with an oil painting, to preserve the painting, you would brush it over with one of these seed oils, and that would oxidize react with the room air and form a very thin but impenetrable protective coating that, you know, preserved these paintings for 500 years. I mean, that's how harsh this stuff is. And that, I thought that was a really good illustration because it really brings home just how nasty this stuff is once it oxidizes. And it, you know, a detox protocol I mean, you're talking 4 years to really get the levels in your tissues way down. So it's something that you have to really—

that long haul.

Yeah, yeah, you have to. And that's why— that's also why I don't, I don't cheat with this stuff. I'm neurotic about it because I'm like, you know, if I put that in my body, it's not— it doesn't come out easily.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes I will let slip a fine art about like if you're at a restaurant, even high-end restaurants, will use this stuff because it's either they just want to cut costs because it's cheaper because it's garbage, or, you know, I think it has a— does it have a higher smoke point than like, let's say, olive oil or, you know, ghee? I think should be better. Butter, probably a bit lower. Um, but it also is relatively, they say, tasteless. But, you know, I can taste it whenever it's in these things.

What I say about the smoke point is that you shouldn't rush the cooking. You shouldn't be cooking food at such high temperatures because the fat aside, cooking food at these really high temperatures can generate carcinogens. You want to do it low and slow. This is the correct way to do things. But, you know, it's, it's, it all comes down to economics, man. This stuff is cheap. It can be produced on a mass industrial scale. A lot of the people who are responsible for producing it, they don't consume it themselves. You know, canola oil was first developed as engine lubricant. But it was a way to feed the masses. And actually, funny enough, you know, you talked about after World War II when they were looking for cheap ways to fatten up livestock, they tried coconut oil first, actually. And the farmers were finding that it had the exact opposite effect. It was making the pigs very lean and muscular. Yeah, that was no good for producing lard. That's coconut oil, right?

Boost your metabolism and has all the good saturated fats, which can help build test. Is that the mechanism there?

Yeah. And then coconut oil, it doesn't oxidize. Your body knows what to do with it. That's kind of a key thing that distinguishes these industrial cooking fats from cooking fats found in nature. If you're talking cooking fats, it would be an animal fat. These tend to be saturated fats, which are— the chemical structure of them make them, you know, nearly impossible to oxidize, right? It's very difficult to oxidize those fats. Yeah. Um, and then fats like— and then coconut oil is also saturated fat, one of the only non-animal, uh, saturated fats. And then olive oil and avocado oil, they're like medium-chain fats to where there's a place for an oxygen atom to attach. They're not as— which that's kind of why saturated fats don't have this oxidation problem. There's just not really anywhere for the oxygen to bind to. Olive oils and avocado oils and other natural fats, they have points where that can happen, but they're not really long-chain. So, the odds of it happening are much lower. But, what you also find And, you know, when these fats are created in nature, they tend to have antioxidants and vitamins that prevent oxidation present with them. So, like, a really good French olive oil will often have a lot of vitamin E in it. And, this is actually something I've only seen it when I've been over in France. Gotten some like the really good stuff from places there in the South to where you could look and they were— it would test, you know, very strong vitamin E content. And what we import to America, like you don't find this anywhere on the label, which, you know, the French keep the best and—

Yeah.

And export—

I think where I am—

Which is also why Yeah. It's also why Austria is not known for their wine, even though they have some of the best in the world. It's just they never, they don't export the good stuff.

So you don't think, or do you think the domestic market is good enough that they don't need to?

Yeah. Yeah. It's coming. I mean, they, they have the, you know, generally a customer base that can afford it and that will pay for it. That's the— that's one of the key differences you see with the true culinary cultures is, uh, and this is kind of my rule of thumb for, you know, if I'm eating out in restaurants, um, I'll eat out at a German, uh, French, or Italian restaurant before a lot of others because the, uh, the chefs there, at least if they're from those countries, they are much more likely to be to take actual pride in what they're cooking. And so they're going to use the real ingredients. You know, that's been my experience so far. And I've— it works out pretty well because I can tell right away. I mean, if I accidentally eat some of this stuff, my stomach starts like twisted up.

Yeah, it's like you get a sixth sense for it. Like I can smell it now. You have Even just like walking by a restaurant with vents out the back or something, it's like a distinct smell, taste that you kind of get in your throat. And I don't know, really know how to explain it, but I'm sure you realize the same thing or notice the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, I think it's, you know, in terms of the effect that it's having on the population, it is the number one health issue in the world right now.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's what's driven this pandemic, to be honest with you. Yeah, that is the key thing. That, you know, there's a couple of genetic mutations that are risk factors, but really the lion's share of the deaths are completely avoidable with proper just fat consumption. You know, I mean, you don't even have to— you can actually be someone who's like overweight in a kind of patrician Berlusconi way and you'll still be fine because you don't have these. And there's a specific mechanism how this happens. COVID drives up your iron metabolism rate. I mean, the people who have severe cases, they have very high iron levels. Well, iron in the bloodstream is highly reactive with polyunsaturated fats, and so that'll actually cause the iron ions to rust, uh, if they react with that. And then that creates damage to the inner linings of the blood vessels. And, you know, often what really happens when people are having respiratory issues, it's not because of the lung tissue that's being affected. It's actually the damage to the inside of the capillaries around the lung and, you know, tiny blood clots and this sort of thing. And so for a long time they treated it the exact wrong way with ventilators, and it really had nothing to do with the lungs at that point. It was just that there was inflammation inside of the blood vessels that was preventing them from doing the, uh, oxygen-carbon dioxide exchange there. And, you know, Aside from that, polyunsaturated fats also just drive your— up your baseline inflammation levels, which means that, you know, when your immune system reacts to the virus, it's reacting from an already active inflammatory state to a hyper-inflammatory state, and that can be enough to shut down your breathing or cause the inflammation levels that would lead to a blood clot.

So what would you say the biggest things we have, you know, the obesity or the, the seed oils, but, um, in terms of the average person things to be doing as well, it's sunlight, sleep, of course, is a massive one. Most people aren't sleeping well, they're not clearing the inflammation of their bodies throughout the night. Uh, you're not going to give— you're not going to get the best fighting chance against anything when your sleep's bad. But I know you've talked about zinc, of course, being massive and a few others, right?

A few others. There's a great glycine brand that just dropped. Love that. That'll help you with the sleep. I am a firm believer in that. And actually, I mean, You know, for people, if you've had COVID or getting over it or something, it gives you the raw materials to repair a lot of the inflammatory damage that the infection can cause. So it's good to recommend that.

That's Sol Subsplicing, everyone, if you don't know, which is run by a pretty cool dude.

Yeah, if you don't know, now you know. Yeah, I would say, yeah, sun, sleep, make sure you, you know, do some form of productive exercise every day. And, you know, another thing too is I think particularly in kind of the current situation we're in where it becomes very easy to just get locked into a routine because, you know, there's not as many options. You know, for going out or doing this or that, not, you know, the concerts aren't happening, all this. Try to just inject some novelty in your life, you know, do something new, you know, because that's the thing that I think really drives people, keeps them sane, really. It's like the utter monotony of life under lockdown. You know, it's like you're just in this big open-air prison, and you know, you read prison accounts and you know there is no good prison, right? It's the, the situation. But what, what they, uh, talk about repeatedly that just drives people to the edge is just, you know, everything is this predictable routine and there's no you know, there's no unique events, right? And so with that, your perception of time gets completely smashed. I don't know if you've experienced this, but I've— I noticed this when like things were really locked down tight. It was like really hard for me to, you know, keep track of the days in a way, you know. It was just everything blended together in one mass and You know, I couldn't tell you, you know, what happened in what month of last year aside from a couple notable ones. So, you know, trying to just try new things or, you know, do something a little different, you know, maybe use your left hand. I don't know. But You know, because I've some— a topic I've been— I've written some on and I've looked at quite a bit is like the decline of testosterone among men in the West. And it's been just a huge drop-off. And, you know, looking at it like a lot of causative factors, you know, you see there's some, there's some evidence of some culprits out there. You get the, the chemical contamination with endocrine disruptors, you have people doing less physical labor, more kind of office jobs and all this. But I think something too is just like the way that, you know, a lot of the wildness of American life, things have just gotten settled down and domesticated. And I wonder, you know, it's kind of like a use-it-or-lose-it hormone.

100%.

You know, are you giving your balls a reason to make testosterone?

Yeah.

You know, are you putting yourself in the kind of situations where you actually need it?

Right?

Because your body's efficient. It's not going to give you anything you don't need, right? It conforms to your demands. So I think that's a big factor.

Oh, it's like, um, you can see before and after pictures of people in war, or, you know, new recruits that are going out for their first tour overseas, and it's such a marked difference between the maybe young boy that went away and the man that comes back. It's like you get more of the, the hunter eyes, you know, your brow becomes more forehead, stronger jaw, leaner, you know, all of these things which are marked indicators of higher testosterone. And it makes sense because you're in this stressful environment where testosterone helps your adaptability in the environment, and ultimately your body responds to the environment that you curate for it. So if you're in an environment where you need to be strong, you need to be quick, you need to be alert, uh, and able to move quickly and things like that, then your body is gonna naturally produce the things, testosterone, that make you able to survive in that environment. And at the moment, most guys, you know, lifting weights is an outlet for that and a really good way to kind of activate that side of yourself if you train with the intensity of, you know, an animal and really like go to war with the weights. In a way. But now if you're sitting at a computer desk and everything's nice and you're getting cake brought to you every second day, then what testosterone do you need? You could be a slug and survive in that environment. So that's obviously what's going to happen to you as well as, you know, low animal fats, being out of the sun, vitamin D being a massive precursor for testosterone production. Like all of these things which are just creating a completely sick population. And a sick population is not going to make good decisions. It's not going to, you know, testosterone being low across the board means people are more agreeable and they don't, you know, they don't make the hard decisions because they don't want to upset people. And that at scale in government is just a recipe for a declining society.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it sets you up to become a country of slaves. Yeah, eunuch slaves, which, I mean, that's, that's exactly what, if you look at, you know, military history, right, some of the Han armies, they would have, there would be these slave armies, and one of the common denominators would be castration. Because it would make them just kind of docile and easy to manage.

Do you think that that's what's causing everyone's kind of just meek acceptance of the lockdown bullshit?

I think so. I mean, I think it is a pretty vicious feedback loop because it's like, yeah, that might cause people to accept it, or maybe people accept it and then it causes the levels to drop even more, right? It's kind of like the, uh, the principle of, you know, if you lose a fight, you're more likely to lose the next fight, but if you win a fight, you're more likely to win the next one after that. And yeah, you know, Jordan Peterson used kind of the famous example of the lobsters. You know, when they have a fight, the loser's, uh, part of his brain dissolves and rebuilds itself as a subordinate lobster, so its brain just physically adjusts to his new spot on the hierarchy.

Shit. Do you think that happens with us as well?

I think— oh, it's been observed. I mean, it's, you know, you look at guys like Tom Brady, right? They're used to winning, they get on a roll, and then that just kind of becomes second nature. I mean, these patterns have been seen throughout, you know, a lot of human competition. It's pretty well studied. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty universal kind of across the animal kingdom of this. And this is how natural hierarchies are formed. So I think it definitely happens to us, and it's You know, I try to stay conscious of this when it comes to goal setting. You know, you want to set up goals that, uh, that challenge you, that are driving you to grow, but you also don't want to set up ones that, uh, where you're setting yourself up for failure, and then that will have, you know, a strong negative impact on you. So, you know, what's helpful with that is you plot your short, medium, and long term, and then you break those up into kind of sub-goals, right? Yeah. So, and if you're breaking them up kind of into sub-goals, even if the whole thing doesn't quite go off the way you envisioned it, or, you know, you have a dud or something, at least you have wins within that project. Right, there's still things you can point to.

The long-term goals, you know, almost I think should be more general. Like, it's pretty much impossible to say, you know, in 2 years I want to have a 6K, a 6-figure revenue in my side business or something like that. And it's good, and the visualization of those long-term goals, like, the higher you make the goal the more you obviously are driven to achieve, the more you have to do and work for that. So it's a tricky one because you don't want to limit yourself. If you say, you know, I want to make $10,000 from my side business next year, because then you will be operating from a place of how do I get to $10K instead of $100K. And then maybe you get to $80K in that year because you're not limited and you're like, You know, you're going the extra mile and looking for more bigger deals or whatever, or doing more sales. So you're not going to get to the 6 figures, but you'll land at $80K, which is better than $10K. And yes, $10K might've been more achievable, but you know, it doesn't matter what the numbers are. It's, it's, it's more the principle of like, have your long-term vision of life and what you need to do each day to get there. If you complete the day well, over the years it'll all come together. And the visuals of the long-term goals, they can kind of be shoot for the stars, you'll land on the moon kind of scenario.

Yeah. And, you know, when you bring up with that, I mean, I think that's a good, good example because, you know, with that, if you're saying, okay, $10 grand, well, you're putting a number on it. And a lot is going to depend on variables that you can't predict, right? You can maybe gauge to some extent how hot you think something will be, but things will surprise you, right? Movies that tested very well with test audiences absolutely flopped at the box office, whereas some that studios didn't think were going to go anywhere, they became cult phenomenons and are still making money for the creators. So there's a there's going to be unpredictability baked in, so you have to find something else. Instead of picking the number, just come up with something like, I'm going to make a movie that I'm really proud of. Yeah, there you go. There you have something that can be achievable, you know, because that's, that's somewhat under your control.

Yeah.

And, and you can, uh, you can predict that. You know, that's because it's internal and it's like, okay, well, this is something I'm capable of. But, you know, some things are just going to be out of your hands. And I think if you set your heart on that a little too much, then, you know, you're just— you're setting yourself up to ultimately get into a kind of defeated mindset. And then, you know, what are you gonna do from there?

Yeah, I think all of these things kind of, again, it's almost related to the low T situation with everyone, you know, if you're a high testosterone man, you're gonna be more driven, more passionate, have more energy to achieve your goals and things like that. That's why I always talk about, you know, If you want to be better in life, get your health better, you know, get out in nature more because you're going to have less stress, your body's going to feel better, you're going to have more energy, and then you start to be able to have the capacity to work a few hours after your day job on whatever else it is, or study, or physically work out.

And you're giving, you're giving about, you're giving your body a reason to make this stuff, right? It's like if you just try to go straight for the TRT, what happens when people do that without— if you just inject pure testosterone, yeah, the body's natural production of testosterone will stop. Yeah. Or slow down to compensate for that, right? So it's like you're not going to trick your body the easy way. You've got to, you've got to put in a level of work and tell it, no, no, I need all this.

Yeah, I, I mean, I haven't obviously, uh, done testosterone, um, maybe down the line when I'm like 40 or 50, uh, but I think it is a— it's almost a go-to.

Well, I like, I like my hair too much to try it, but I'm just— I've, I've looked into the things, you know. I mean, look, look, if you've, if you've never researched steroids, I'm going to call you a liar right now because we all do. Yeah, yeah, just like, well What if the vaccine was trend though, right?

I think you would have a better success rate.

Well, actually, I think we had a question on that from the tweet you put out about avoiding vaccines. I think, you know, you can actually have a very fun time avoiding, you know, any mandatory vaccine if you don't want it. You know, do the trend injection, but, you know, take a picture of it for social media so everybody will think you've been vaccinated. And then I think, I think there's these templates already online, uh, otherwise you can make one with Photoshop, but it's like the cards that they hand out to the people in line. It's these little, just these old janky cardboard things that they like write something down. Well, so many people have posted this stuff on social media that you can get those and see like what it looks like and you can like even write down like an accurate lot number or whatever. So there you go to the guy who asked that. I've solved your problems. Venmo me $300. Thank you very much.

True. I mean, I would never advise people to do anything illegal.

Of course, if there are any 3-letter agencies listening, Well, they haven't got around to making laws about it yet. Honestly, you know, there are no laws on the book that say that you can't. This is the brilliant thing about being on the cutting edge. It's also why the internet has flourished, right? Because like the government has taken so long to figure out like the regulations and this and that. So for a very long time, it was just a total wild west and You know, you see that, uh, just about everything. There's a lag time. But yes, for, for three-letter agencies, don't go after Sol, come after me.

No, I mean, I think I'm just— yeah, I mean, it's— there's nothing illegal about refusing to— refusing a mandatory vaccine. And people, oh, it's not mandatory, bro. You just can't go to the shops, your kids can't go to school. You can't go to work if you don't have it, but it's not mandatory. Like, that kind of lizard-like fucking doublespeak is so— yeah, annoying to me. Let's just say that, because everyone knows, like, it's deceptive.

I mean, it's, it's constant. I mean, these people just lie constantly, always gaslighting you.

Yes.

No, no, there was no— there were no violent protests. They say, you know, it's like, well, we have footage of a mostly peaceful protest and there's like a building burning in the background, you know.

Yeah, it is, it's blatant, it's blatant, and it's like blatant.

We're all victims of abuse, honestly. We are all victims of abuse, genuinely.

And everyone's demoralized because of it. And now no one can fucking trust anything they see on the internet or their reasoning for faculties are just so overwhelmed that they can't look at something objectively and go, what's really going on? It's just like whatever's repeated the most becomes, uh, the common correct truth. And I take a stance as well. It's been very fucked from story.

It's been very demoralizing just to watch this. Go ahead.

Oh yeah, just our attention spans from social media and all the rest of it is like, new story, new story. I mean, yesterday another shooting has popped up, which is very coincidental, and now it's back to white supremacy because the shooter was white. And that's now whatever was happening before the Gavin Newsom stuff, uh, where he killed thousands of people. First it was divert to, uh, the sexual assaults, allegedly, and now boom, shooting. And that's—

well, just, I mean, just on this topic, they've been setting up the narrative for months now about white supremacy driving these anti-Asian attacks. And like, yeah, anti-Asian attacks have gone up. It's a very bad thing. Attacks in general have gone up, like the murder rate in just about every major US city outside of Florida has skyrocketed. Yeah, you know, all kinds of violent crime. But up until this point, all the individual cases they had to look to, it was all Black men carrying out attacks. I mean, I'm just going to call a spade a spade. That's what has been happening. And I'm like, I don't know if this is the demographic that was like listening to Donald Trump and being like, oh wow, suddenly, you know, I hate Asian people, right? And it was also, I mean, the idea that, you know, saying the virus came from China and calling it the China virus, that this would lead to like mass, you know, hatred of like all Asians. I'm like, there's a lot of people who are not Chinese. Yeah, that are Asian too. So like, this is, uh, this is a weird conflation, right? Yeah. By saying that the Chinese Communist Party can't keep a lid on their own, uh, laboratories and these things either escape or they're, you know, doing gain-of-function testing and they might be engineered. It's all this weird stuff going on with the genome. Saying that that you know, is suddenly going to mean that, you know, I want to run down and like hit Mrs. Lee at the grocery store, you know, with a bat or something. It's psychotic, dude.

It's like, well, they act racist while calling you racist, and that's always been the case.

And I mean, the way that they call you racist is actually pretty racist because it's just like You know, somebody was— saw one tweet today that was somebody, uh, talking about how they wanted to like CRISPR edit the whiteness out of themselves. You know, like, what is this? This is just—

it's self-hatred.

Yeah, it's complete delusional self-hatred, but it's just— it's so amplified and it's so performative. You know, I'm like, are you really this awkward when you're like talking to, you know, people of other races that you like feel this need to do this self-flagellation? Because yeah, I mean, I've talked to Black friends about this. They think it's just weird, you know. They're just like, you can't even talk to white people now. Yeah, yeah, because they just act awkward and like, oh yeah, you know, We accept you like you are. You know, it's like, why do you even have to bring these things up? We weren't thinking about it.

You know, just treat every person like a person and don't give them any special privileges because of the color of their skin or backgrounds. But, and then also don't, you know, count them out.

I have to disagree with that. I give special privileges to the Latino ladies. All y'all listening, hola.

Yes, open borders for hotties in America, right?

Buenas noches.

Well, my Latino lady population listeners, uh, hit up Ben. Yeah, he'll, he'll sort you out.

Yeah, no, I mean, that's one of the other things about all these restrictions that have had me going crazy. I haven't been able to go to South America and I'm losing my mind because, you know, I mean it.

I was—

yes, I haven't been able to go to South America through all this and it's making me lose my mind.

Yeah, was that a regular trip for you?

Oh yeah, a couple times a year to a couple of the, uh, favorite spots.

Where do you like?

At least a couple would actually be kind of, uh, slowly— I mean, that would be a bad year. That would be when I was doing a lot of stuff. Couple of years in my 20s where I was there more than here. So I like Brazil, I like Colombia, I like Mexico. There's a couple others, but those are more kind of one-off tourist spots. The three I mentioned, I did, you know, I mean, I've got A lot of friends in those places and I don't know, it feels kind of like a second home.

So yeah, it's a beautiful place and it has, I think, what draws people to it. It has that air of wildness still in a lot of places and yes, that comes with a bit of danger as well, but almost like a—

Oh, I know, I've had a gun put to my head in Rio. 10 o'clock in the morning, 10 o'clock in the morning, getting into an Uber, and this like dude rolls up on a motorcycle and sticks a gun against my head. The fact that it actually touched me, that was the one thing I like, like I can still, uh, I can still feel the steel almost, that kind of thing. That was, uh, it was interesting though. It was, it was I was really calm. Um, something— whenever these kind of situations happen, I actually just find myself in a kind of, uh, Zen mode. And then it hits me afterwards, like, oh wow, you, uh, could have had a bat in your head. Um, and what was, what was interesting about this, uh, this mugging, he only got my phone. Which is kind of funny because I had like my computer, my wallet, all this stuff in my backpack, which was in my hands. Um, you know, it would have been a lot more valuable to him. But, uh, the notable thing about this mugging, um, because it's— it hasn't been like the only time I've been mugged down there, but it was the only time with the gun. But, um, they actually caught this guy, which is very rare. I think it was because I had a Google Pixel and he like couldn't figure out totally how to shut it off. So it was on, you know, normally like when they get an iPhone or something, they shut it off immediately, right? So you can't really do the tracking. So it was on. So I had a perfect map into the favela where he was staying at. I go down to the police station, get my laptop out, I'm like you know, this is where he is, all this. And, uh, and Bolsonaro had, uh, gotten inaugurated like a week before, and he had like declared open season on crime. So it was like these, you know, these police had spent 16 years under, you know, basically communist government that forced them to give, uh, criminals a very wide pass. And so now that You know, now they're in the throes of hunting season and they're all, you know, happy as heck to pursue this guy. So they got him. I ended up having to do like this weird Zoom deposition testimony thing because he had broken out of prison and he had killed 2 people in the span of like the week before he mugged me. And, you know, I was pretty chill about the whole thing, like, up until the point where I found out that he was actually killing people. Because, like, I wasn't even sure if the gun was real, you know. It's like, yeah, this ugly chrome 1911. Like, I was like, you know, I don't know if this is proper. There's that. I was like, this is, uh, So something— but it's, it's part of, you know, that's part of the, the fun though, you know. There's this, uh, there's this tension in the atmosphere, and it's not for everybody, but it's, uh, you know, people there, they, they don't exist in this kind of lukewarm space as in a lot of first world countries where they're not really hot towards you, not really cold towards you. Down there, it's like they either want to kill you or sleep with you. And I'll just leave it at that.

Isn't that interesting how the, you know, the ground-level police, that can all be influenced by the culture of the top government? And I guess that's what's kind of happening in the opposite direction in America at the moment, is you're seeing, you know, rioters on the left, literally like across ideological lines. If you are a line on the left, you can riot, burn down shit, and federal charges would be dropped. But if you, uh, walked peacefully in the, in the Capitol, then, you know, you're being hunted on social media, um, literally government agencies asking for people to turn their fucking friends and family in. And that's happening right now in America, and people are still like, as well as a purge of the military. What's that?

As well as a purge of the military. I mean, they're carrying out these, uh, these extremism stand-downs, so where every military unit's basically getting a talking to about how, you know, evil the Capitol riot was and, you know, the threat and all. And, you know, they've had these, uh, I've talked to people who've been in these kind of briefings or struggle sessions that the military is having. And there's no mention of, uh, the times where, you know, actual, uh, cases of extremism in the military have resulted in attacks on military bases on U.S. soil. You know, like the Fort Hood shooting. You had a guy in the Army, he was, uh, he became radicalized, um, you know, was an Orthodox Muslim and went over to the other side and, uh, you know, went to work one day and, you know, started killing people right on a base in Texas. That's extremism. Um, and that's extremism that killed, you know, service members. But they're not talking about any of this stuff, and they're not saying, you know, be on the lookout for this kind of thing. They're specifically tailoring it to you know, uh, this idea that there's some, you know, plot by white men to, you know, rise up and— I don't even know what they think we're going to do.

Why do you think it's happening? Where is it coming from, like, top-down-wise? Is it the universities? Like, that's the basis of it?

Yeah, actually, I think it's actually coming from the politicians because I think it's driven by a paranoia that the elements of the military that are patriotic could at some point mount a military coup. And I think they're trying to preempt anything like that by carrying out a full purge of the military, even if, even if we're talking about purging out just based on suspicions, not on actual stuff, but it's on suspicion, um, you know, top operational you know, officers, commandos, some of our most capable guys, right? So they'll do something that actually affects the military's capabilities if they think that it's going to make them marginally safer from a military coup. And, you know, the whole concept is, uh, is pretty absurd because, you know, the closest thing we got to a coup was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And, you know, they never even got beyond discussing it with a couple generals, and it's doubtful that any soldiers would have, uh, or many soldiers would have participated. So, you know, America doesn't have a history of, uh, military coups, unfortunately. So it's one of the other reasons I love South America. Um, but I think that the, the purge and, you you know, this just neurotic fixation on this, specifically directed at the military. I think it's just driven by fear on their part. And they've become completely paranoid. I mean, they, you know, they talk about QAnon being, you know, crazy conspiracy theories. At least there's a lot of stuff in the regular headlines that would kind of support the base assumptions of QAnon, right? Like, it's no secret that, uh, you know, a huge portion of the elite are psychotic pedophiles and this and that. That's not a conspiracy, that's reality. The conspiracy that there was a— that the military was capable of stopping it, um, but they have their own conspiracy theories, which, you know, are things that, uh you know, like Russia, uh, installed Trump as president. And Democratic voters actually believe that it wasn't just through information ops, which is kind of what the smarter ones have alleged, like, oh well, they were like Russian trolls and they like sowed confusion and this made people vote for Trump. No, the Democratic voters actually believe that the Russians physically went into the voting machines and hacked them. Now, if we, after this past election, which had a crazy amount of just complete abnormalities, right? 2016 was a fairly routine election, right? The bellwether counties went for Trump. All of these normal things that happen in politics, you know, all the signs pointed— there was nothing, there was no smoking gun that you know, made anyone even suspect voting fraud, except in some states there was some where you had these, uh, more individual cases where Democratic organizers were signing up illegal aliens to vote. And so you had, you actually did have some election fraud on the Hillary side, but it just wasn't enough. But you know, there's, there was just not really any evidence of any coming from Trump or the Russians or this or that. But people repeat this stuff and they believe it. And it's, it's like they're totally casual about it, right? No one, no one is being asked to denounce this, right? No one's telling Nancy Pelosi, well, why will you, why won't you just, you know, come out and refute the big lie, right? This is like undermining people's trust in democracy. Democracy. But then when we have a crazy election like this past one, where you have a crazy amount of anomalies and just alarm bells going off everywhere, it just doesn't look right, right? You have like Trump winning all night, and then suddenly they stopped counting the ballots, you know. Yeah, vote counters went home, and then 4 hours go by, people go to bed, and they wake up, and then suddenly like we're discovering just That alone, that alone is just bullshit. That alone, straight up. Yeah, I could go for days, guy. I got like arm deep in this stuff. But yeah, you know, and so for us, like, we can't even have a discussion about it, right? If I started to— if I broached this topic on any national channel, including like not just Fox News, but like the ultra-conservatives, one ultra-conservative ones like Newsmax, they would interrupt me and start reading a legal statement about how the election was fair. Like, we're living in a complete just Soviet, you know, totalitarian clown state. I mean, it's, it's actually not even that good, right? At least the Soviets had like, you know, a cult of physical fitness. And some of these things, and you know, kind of more— it at least had like the aesthetics of tyranny, right? If I'm going to live in a tyrannical country like this, I want there to be some like brutalist buildings, some military parades. I want them to be like really open about it.

Matching uniforms.

It's that you have to pretend that everything is normal while things are completely insane. And that you're free. Yeah, and if you don't act like everything is completely normal, and, you know, just isn't like it's always been in America, then suddenly, like, people start to think you're, you know, a bit loony or extreme, or they might call the FBI saying that they suspect you're about to, you know, carry out the next Oklahoma City or something. It's a crazy, unreal environment.

And people don't realize it's like— I remember having conversation like this, like, what do you mean there's this communist ideology or, you know, soaking into everything that we're doing? Um, and then it turns out they'd never read a history book talking about this stuff. And that seems to be the case, is that, you know, everything's hunky-dory, people never branch out, or they never— there's never this the pressure to just learn something about these past societies. And when you see the past societies take away freedom of speech, it's the same demoralization tactics that, you know, the Soviets used. All these things which you can clearly pattern match to what's happening now. You know, we've all just lost a year of our lives to the same kind of— like, do you think the lockdowns would have been able to have gone on uh, let's say 60 years ago? Probably not, right? Or maybe that's even too recent.

I don't even think the lockdowns could have been carried out in the, in the 1990s. I mean, you know, the AIDS crisis was a pretty big one, and there was nothing like that. I mean, they were barely even able to shut down the bathhouses in San Francisco, right? Just individual places where the spread was happening. So yeah, I don't think it would be possible without, uh, without this kind of advanced, uh, digital world we're in either, right? Because now communication is instantaneous. You can carry out this stuff fairly quickly, you know. And, and it's also the other thing too is like without social media you wouldn't be able to like socially shame people, right, for, you know, taking a trip that's 100% legal but is not, you know, maybe advised by the CDC, right? And so they're gonna like put you on some Instagram page where you're then going to be harassed by people, and then people on the internet will call your job, this and that. Before social media, there was this kind of like layer of anonymity, right? You could actually go wild out at the Capitol and your bitter ex-girlfriend wouldn't pour through the footage, see you, and call the FBI and say you're a terrorist. Yeah, you know, and that's, that's the thing. It's like we were so worried about surveillance in the form of CCTV cameras and like government interception of stuff, right? Like back in the, you know, around 2010 or so. But then we created a hyper-surveillance state totally voluntary.

Do you think it was voluntary?

Well, I mean, people, you know, people get the Ring doorbells, right? Yeah, which have like a camera view of outside the house, and they put in the cameras inside the house and all of this stuff. And I mean, we carry around the camera phones and give it to Amazon, no worries, Google, you know, it's like, okay, well, I'm, I'm We're all Stasi agents now, right? I'm going to take a picture of this and I'm going to upload it where anyone in the world can immediately access it. It's this giant decentralized, you know, surveillance regime. It's not all coming from the government, but I mean, the government was involved in a lot of the original research and funding of a lot a lot of these projects, including just about all of the, you know, private messaging apps like WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal and even others. You know, like a lot of these were started with grants from DOD or had, you know, such people involved in this. Then there's backdoors for the security agencies, of course, but you know, even some of their funding and some background things they did on some of the social media, uh, platforms. And then you see just like this coordinated effort to stop the social media platforms that, uh, you know, don't have the special permission of the establishment to start up, right? You can't download Parler from from the App Store, uh, for some reason. I mean, what was it? They had extreme content, you know, and ISIS was using Facebook and, uh, Twitter to release beheading videos and recruit people, you know. Like, that's the other bizarre thing to me is like, do you know how much horrific stuff has been facilitated by the big tech platforms And then now they're like, well, Parler, you know, and Gab, like they allow people to, you know, say mean things about some group. And so like, we can't, we can't let that content, you know, we have to deplatform them, but we can't deplatform ISIS, right? Who actually, yeah, thanks to social media, is able to establish a caliphate and just you know, commit some of the most heinous atrocities and all this stuff.

Uh, yeah, it's, uh, well, it's, it's about, you know, furthering their agenda and increasing and consolidating their power while reducing their ideological oppositions. And if that's the prime objective, then, you know, you're going to lie, you're going to well, you know, in their worldview, they're gonna lie, they're going to strong-arm you, they're gonna have double standards, they're going to, you know, let their guys off and protect their guys while prosecuting other guys. And the left is doing that. The right is trying to prove that they're not doing that, and so they're playing by the rules that the other team is not adhering by. And in any situation like that, the side that's playing by the rules is going to lose. And that's not to say that you have to lie and cheat and do all those things. It's just to say, to realize that that's what's happening on one side. You can't play by the same, you know, 'Oh, I'm innocent. Oh, but look at the double standards here. Why are you guys doing that?' That's all conservatives do, it seems, is saying, 'Oh, that's bad. Why are you doing that? Look, we're not doing that. You said that's bad, but you're doing it. And it's just this lame recursive bullshit that's like trying to pull out double standards or point out double standards to some arbiter, which is usually, you know, the courts that are leftist-controlled or whatever else.

Yeah, which, which is why I think the thing is not even to, you know, we definitely can't win playing by the rules, but then we also get penalized for breaking the rules. I think to some extent we just have to play a completely different game.

Yeah.

And, you know, I see actually a lot of positive sides on our sides, like a kind of flourishing, or even you can say like a renaissance, right? I mean, there's a lot of people in our corner of the internet that are doing a lot of cool things. Um, you got Raw Egg Nationalist has put out a men's journal, which is probably the first, uh, men's magazine that I've looked at contemporarily since, uh— oh man, it's been a while since I've been able to handle like Men's Health or Men's Journal or anything, uh, after they went woke. Actually, I finally got around to watching the other day, uh, Vinny is doing his thing, the Dolce Base Files, where he's, uh, he's going to school. Hey, yeah, cool old military sites and that kind of stuff and checking out. It's got like a very, uh, Alex Jones 1990s vibe to it, but kind of cooler. You know, you've got a lot of great writing coming out, just interesting projects all around. I mean, like what you've done with the Glycene and like a lot of your projects, just interesting, innovative stuff that we want. I think we have to build our own institutions. You know, we're totally locked out of the dominant ones.

You gotta build another game. If the game's rigged against you, then you say, okay, that's game that you can go play. We're gonna build our own game that has, you know, better rules and has better incentives for us, and something outside of the typical structure of get a job, go to college, get indoctrinated, go work for a tech company, uh, do what you're told, sit down, shut up. And, you know, you're only allowed money if the overlords deem you worthy and we're going to take it away if you think something outside of, you know, our corporate agenda. You know, like have all the big banks coming out in support of these things and it's like, since when did we become a society— I guess it's been that way for a while— where we give a fuck about what the banks are saying? What are the morals of fucking Chase Bank? And I'm going to be lectured to about racism or whatever it is by a bank. Like, what's happening here? There's a complete conflation of corporate interests and moral superiority, and it's being used to— you gotta think, why is a bank doing that? Because in some form, that is making it richer. It's getting more profits for the company. And so that whole system, if that's the case, that whole system is just rotten from the core. And I think everyone knows that now. And that's why we have to do things out of the box. And this is why they want you dependent on them for income and things so they can control you through these means. And if you go into their system but still have a sense of self-worth and independence, then you can't flourish inside of that weird dependence model. Bullshit.

And, you know, for a long time they've, they've controlled the, uh, they've controlled money itself, you know, just like one of these most basic elements of commercial civilization. And, you know, they've routinely depreciated the value of the dollar. And when you have inflation, it doesn't happen evenly across the society. It transfers some from You know, you have losers, you have winners. And the way the Federal Reserve System works, the, uh, private cartel of banks that make up the federal, Federal Reserve banking system, right, they're the first ones that get their hands on the newly printed money. They're closest to the spigot, and so they're actually siphoning off a fair amount. So what you have, what you have happen is you have a redistribution of wealth built into the monetary system from all the normal working people of the country towards the financial system. And, you know, that's been one of just the— I think since the introduction of that, that was when the beginning of the end began, right? We've just been in a slow-motion train wreck since, uh, since we went off of the gold standard.

That was— that was— there's a specific moment. Was it— was it with JFK, or what's—

well, there was a couple— there was a couple of times because they, they kind of— they manipulated the gold standard a bit. So we were— we were on a full gold standard up until 1932, and FDR took us off. Then we suspended it, I believe, during World War II, but then reinstated it. But we came up with the Bretton Woods Agreement where we made the gold-backed. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like a full gold standard, but there was a gold window where you could still convert dollars to gold. So, you know, it was a workable gold standard, but making the dollar the reserve currency of the world. And then with Vietnam and some other things that were going on, we, uh, and largely the oil crisis, right? The, uh, Arab oil embargo began after the US, uh, gave weapons to Israel for the first time in, uh, during the Yom Kippur War. Uh, I believe that was in 1971. So they transferred the— this military equipment there. They had, uh, been hit with a surprise attack, so so they called for aid. Typically, the, the U.S. had only, uh, given, you know, there were some purely defensive missiles transferred under the Kennedy administration, but normally there was kind of a hands-off policy, right? We're not going to get involved one way or another with Israel and the Arabs because we want to have good relations with both. Well, Nixon, uh, when it had transferred weapons because they got hit in this surprise attack and the country was going to be overrun. And so in retaliation, the Arab countries, they put in place the, uh, you know, like oil embargoes, this kind of thing. They, they created a, uh, an artificial scarcity of oil which had the effect of causing shortages here, but at the same time, like some of the soaring prices. Um, well, actually the soaring prices happened first, and that then started transferring a lot of gold out of Fort Knox to a lot of these Arab countries. And then because of the prices, they institute the price controls. And then of course when you have price controls, you get a shortage. And so we had a full mess from that anyway. We closed the gold window stop it during this crisis, and we went to just a fully fiat currency. And since then, you know, the purchasing power of the US dollar has just— it's fallen off the cliff. Um, and it was, it was completely—

and yeah, yeah, it's, it blows my mind how people don't see it.

You can go to college for, yeah, my dad's generation, you could go, you know, you could pay for college for $500 a semester. $500. Yeah, I don't think you guys have the same crazy tuition as we have over here now in Australia, but, you know, it's at least 20 times that much now just for a normal state school. So, yeah, I mean, I've seen visible grocery inflation maybe up to 30% just in the past year, you know. Yeah, because I, you know, I kind of stick to my staples, and so I have a pretty good sense of what things normally cost, and it's just, it's steadily rose over the past year.

What do you eat usually, day-to-day basis?

What's the Ben Braddock approved, um, I usually, I usually start the day off with a raw egg shake or two.

Nice.

Sometimes if I'm, if I'm feeling a bit cheeky, I will make blueberry pancakes, throw in some sourdough starter. That can be very nice. And then I don't know, like, like a lot of cheese, cottage cheese, raw milk, steak. During the week, I, you know, I'm pretty simple because I don't like to go through so much of the full dinner routine, so I'll just like throw a steak on the grill and call it a night, but, and then Usually post-workout, I demolish about a pint of Häagen-Dazs, usually chocolate peanut butter or just the chocolate chocolate. Currently in a bulk, I'm not saying to do that all the time. Yeah, that's about it. And then, you know, weekends when I have more time to plan, I'll delve into some you know, new recipes or some old favorites. Big on the European stews like beef bourguignon, these types of things.

Yeah.

You know, good clam chowder, a lot of traditional stuff.

Well, yeah, well, that's an important point that I wanted to— well, one of the Twitter questions was, wanted to talk about ancestral eating and That can mean, I think, a couple things. First one being, you know, everyone's genetics are different. We know this. We know that where your, you know, background is from, your racial background, that over the years your body or your family would have adopted to certain local foods, and we have a better time digesting and processing and, you know, being— making use of the food that is more closely in line with your ancestral kind of background. So if you're European, you can handle more fats compared to someone from Africa. Like, they seem to do better with a higher vegetable or carbohydrate content. And I think a lot of people— well, everyone's food's fucked up to begin with if they're eating processed food, but But you can feel like one person's macro split might work for them, and then someone else might do better with a different macro split. So I think it's, it's very important. And, um, you know, Paul Chek talks about this, uh, calls them Polar Types, and you can be one of three kind of main classes. And he has a quiz you can look at to see what your body kind of responds best with. And this can mean like, do you feel tired if you have a lot of carbs, or do you Do you feel good? And do you usually feel the need to eat something before bed? Like all these things which are to do with your metabolism. Is your ancestral profile, maybe as well as like people's genes, like some people like Ben Greenfield, he ate green beans for a while and that gives particularly for him massive things of inflammation. So I think like one size fits all diet is, you know, whole food, of course, all the time, organic, but it does play with a bit of experimentation in terms of your ancestral background. I'm wondering your thoughts on this.

I agree completely. I mean, some people do very well on full carnivore, and, you know, some people, they'll feel low energy and crappy on it, and they need the fruits and vegetables added in and some other things too. So, um, I think it's influenced by a lot. And, you know, if you're— it's interesting, in my family, um, come from a fairly large one, so some of my brothers and sisters will like take exactly after my mom's side, and then, uh, others like me and a couple of my brothers, we take directly after my dad's side, and it's, uh, it's almost like those same, uh, ancestral eating patterns, like, work for us based off of, like, which line of the, uh, ancestry we come out of, right? So my mom's side, they can handle, like, uh, you know, a higher carb load without issues. I'm guessing because there's just like a lot of Irish and German, so some of the starches and things they do better digesting. And then my dad's side, so this kind of counts for me, we do best on mostly like milk, meat, and cheese. It's like we get to lick a prune once every 2 weeks. I got, you know, if I'm gonna do carbs, I have to do them just like right after workout when I've completely depleted my glycogen and it's time to recharge. Because if I do it outside, I feel terrible, you know. And so it's like if I'm gonna eat pancakes in the morning, I have to get up extra early and go like work my butt off at the gym, so I'm just completely drained of any kind of glycogen before I go back and eat those. Otherwise, I will feel sick. I'll just like, I'll feel nauseous and like, I'm, you know, yeah, I'm thankful that I'm pretty good.

Like, I think I had a kilo of potatoes last night, and that just seems to work well for me. But I think it was also like the energetic needs of the body, like lifting heavy weights every second day at the least, and doing some form of exercise. But the other thing about ancestral eating that I think we've moved away from too much is eating nose to tail, which is the principle that, you know, you eat every part of the animal that you are consuming or that you've hunted back in the day, and not letting any go to waste. And now, unfortunately, we're only eating muscle meat. And most people, if they're not kind of red-pilled on this issue, they'll have only muscle meat and they'll cut the fat off their steaks and throw the fat in the bin, which is arguably, you know, what, the more important bit than the, the muscle meat of the steak. So nose-to-tail eating means eating the eyeballs, the brain, the tongue, the thyroid, the lungs, the intestines, the liver, all of these great beneficial parts of the body that— what do we do with those now? We sell the steak and the rest gets ground up into sausages, which is good if you get good quality sausages because it's a nice palatable way to have organ meats and the other bits and bobs that we kind of think is gross in Western society. But it's all, you know, a lot of nutrition that we're missing there. And also things like collagen from the connective tissue. And this is the other, one of the other things, not to plug the glycine again, but glycine helps you with the— because glycine is in collagen or in all those connective tissues that we are not eating. If you're getting only muscle meat, you're— it's a buildup of methionine, and there's a methionine-glycine ratio in the body, and if that's fucked up, exactly, then that could cause issues. So taking glycine kind of works against that a little bit, but you should be having things, you know, bone broth is a really easy one to incorporate into your diet that I recommend getting all the good nutrition out of, out of bones. But we have to be eating the whole body of the animal, and if we're not, we're missing out on a lot.

Yeah, I do, uh, I do a lot of the glycine, uh, because I'm, I'm eating a ton of raw eggs, so I've got to balance the methionine out that way. But also a fan of bone broth. For the organ meats, I actually, I gravitate most towards the heart. To me, that's the tastiest and the most simple I can just like whip up on a grill. It's good, good beef or deer heart. Fortunately, I had a good hunting season last year, so got stocked up pretty well, but it was Funny, uh, by the time I got to my, I guess, fourth one, I was giving away the muscle meat and just keeping the organs because, yeah, I had like more than enough muscle meat left over, but I like wanted as much heart and liver as I could get. Uh, I, I'll admit though, I, I take the Ancestral Supplements beef brain, uh, capsules because I have not That's the one thing I have not been able to— I've been able to eat like all the other bits. And I think I was— I think it was because when I was a kid, I saw Silence of the Lambs and I got like kind of traumatized by Anthony Hopkins eating some dude's brain. And I just— yeah, the texture, it's just— but yeah, I support those who do though.

Yeah, it's impressive. And have you heard of what's it called? Hai meat?

Uh, that's where it's been basically rotted, right?

Raw and fermented liver stuck in a jar for like weeks, and then you eat that.

So the closest I will get to that is what we call old ham, which is where we'll take a ham off a pig, rub it in salt, and then like hang it in the basement for a year. A year? Yeah, it doesn't need to go that long, but I've had one, uh, I've had one that was, uh, a guy in our church, he had cured, uh, he had it hanging for 5 years. Uh, that was some very potent stuff.

But, uh, what does it taste like?

It's, uh, it's pretty salty. It's like an intense flavor. The— it's like a very red color. I don't know, it's hard to describe, but yeah, it's really good. But it's ancestral as far as, you know, like my family has eaten this and prepared this, you know, has done like home curing from, like my dad would actually, he would, you know, just throw a couple hogs out in the, uh, we had horses, but he like made a little space where you could put some pigs. He would just throw some hogs out there so that there'd be hams to do every year. And, you know, we didn't know that this was like the prime, you know, organic, great quality stuff. It was just because it was expensive to buy it at the store. So yeah, like, yeah, we'd raise our own.

Uh, so what's, what's, what's happening there with like, why is that fermentation good for us? And why does the high meat, you know, I'm sure I think some people get sick, like it's just a shock to the system when they first have it. But what, what makes that good? And that those probiotics and fermentation and bacteria good, but then you couldn't eat something that's like gone off after a few days.

It's the process in which it's done. I mean, the salt really kills a lot of the bad pathogens that you would want to avoid, and there's really anything in general. So it's in a lot of that, what, you know, what it's rubbed in, right? So it's not really in contact with air because it's encrusted in salt.

Yeah.

And so like one of the things, you know, if you're gonna do beef tartare, which I'm a fan of, but I only, you know, I only use very high quality grass-fed beef from a local farmer here. I would never do this with a grocery store meat. I wouldn't eat that raw.

Yeah.

But still, you know, after you've like, say you have like a nice wagyu roast you still want to cut a thin slice off of the outside layer, just all the parts that have been in contact with the air since this was first cut, because that's where your, you know, nasty bacteria is going to hang out on. And then the inner part that's not in contact with the air, this actually stays, uh, pretty safe, and you can, uh, you can enjoy it raw. So that's kind of the same principle as why you would, you know, first soak this in a brine to get the salt to penetrate inside the meat, and then you would dry hang it, but it would be completely encrusted in salt and then with like a kind of cheesecloth netting over it to hold that in tight. So it's still preserved, uh, pretty airtight. I, I'm agnostic on high meat. I'll, uh, you know, I— it's not something you really run across a lot of places, and you know, I don't know how to prepare it and I don't really have history of eating it.

So yeah, I think Wunderplatz was a big proponent of it.

Yeah, I should maybe, I should maybe look more into it, but I will say it just that just the idea is still off-putting. I've, I've, you know, I've had to take baby steps, man. You know, the raw eggs was like, that was a step for me. Even though, you know, throughout childhood I loved cookie dough. I didn't like cookies, but I liked cookie dough. But you'd always hear, "No, no, don't eat that because, you know, you'll get sick," or this or that. I've been, oh man, I've been minimum 8 eggs a day raw for maybe the past year and a half. And, you know, I have yet to have like any trace of any kind of food poisoning. I mean, that was one of those things, like when you go through that and you just suddenly realize that you've just been lied to your whole life.

Yeah.

About this stuff. You know, like it was almost like this— Yeah, it was like this solid rule, right? Like if you eat this, you will get sick. Okay, like eat it for a year and a half. And a half, I don't get sick from it. I've had salmonella a couple times. It always came from restaurants, and it always came from like salad greens.

Yeah.

You know, like the last time I got it at Chipotle, and I got horribly sick. I was practically hallucinating for 3 days. Yeah, right. I was— oh, I was working with this, uh, I was working for this crazy, um, French-Israeli lady who was trying to direct like an art film, but then like halfway into the shoot she started wanting to add elements to it that would make it more like a Jeffrey Epstein production. Very, very bad time to get sick and paranoid because like when I get fevers, I, I tend to hallucinate pretty intensely. And so, you know, I'm sick during this period and And then, you know, I have this crazy woman calling me and she's threatening to commit suicide by jumping off of her hotel balcony. And I'm like trying to— it's very—

Why do you think that is? Like what mechanism is the body— is it making you dream so that it can, you know, focus on other things or healing? Or what do you think fever is doing there? Or why do we hallucinate when we have fevers?

I mean, I— One explanation that somebody gave to me that sounded logical enough, so I went with it, was that, you know, if you have a big head— and I have— I can really not even buy hats. You know, I've always wanted to get a cowboy hat and they just don't fit. I guess everything's bigger in Texas except the IQs.

Well, you're 6'7", right?

Yeah, but, you know, with that, you probably— there's a— there would be a larger pineal gland. So basically, when you have a fever, you have all this heat, then the parts of your brain which could release, you know, DMT or some sort of other endogenous hallucinogenic substances, that could be activated, right? Like, you know, There's documented cases where, you know, women have, from the pain of childbirth, they've triggered DMT, right? People after car accidents, this and that, and they have these, you know, crazy psychoactive experiences. So, and actually, I think I remember hearing that it's generally what happens as you die. One of the last things that happens in the brain is there's a huge release of DMT. And I think with that, I mean, I think we are really, we're not talking about just a chemical or a molecule. We're talking about something that seems to have a spiritual significance that, you know, I don't think we've even scratched the surface of understanding.

Have you done ayahuasca in South America?

I have not. That's the one, it's the entities. It's like people always talk about like, you know, like they'll see like a Joker character talking to them and all this stuff, and like this is just, this is a little too much.

Uh, well, I think it has a role, right? The ayahuasca, like I wouldn't advise people smoke an isolated DMT pen, and I'm not recommending that people, everyone go out and do ayahuasca either. I haven't done it. I, so, you know, it's pure conjecture on my behalf what I'm saying, but from what I've seen, from what I've heard of people that have done it, um, you know, it's, it's not their first psychedelic foray. There's done a lot of spiritual work before you should come close to these kinds of things, but It does, uh, I'm interested in trying it because it gives you a— it seems to give you a deep look at your psyche and a deep look at things that you might not have been conscious of that you can then take into, uh, the rest of your life and, you know, work through these issues that we all have.

Um, again, I'm not qualified to say these things because I haven't tried it, but I think there's two really interesting instances of when, when societal institutions or civilizations have adopted compounds like this, you know, DMT and some of your other really potent hallucinogens. The first being the Aztecs, and I think also the Mayans did it, but the Aztecs would do it, and you know, you have this very advanced civilization that actually came about, you know, it wasn't in existence for like a continuous 2,000 years before the Spaniards arrived. I think it was around 4 centuries that the empire had lasted, but it was a rapid development in a fairly short period of time. But you would have, you know, just insane technological feats, but it was also paired with this mass human sacrifice. Right? And then there— and, um, you look at it during World War II where you had the SS was actually doing a lot of this kind of stuff up in their castle. And just the sheer amount of technological output of Nazi Germany in the final 2 years of the war, it's really mind-blowing. And you had rocket propulsion invented, you had jet propulsion, you had a lot of the groundwork that went into nuclear weapons, a lot of this kind of crazy experimental stuff, right? And I mean, our space program was ran by Nazis. That's how it went. I mean, and guys who were in this— Werner von Braun, the architect of the rocket that took us to the moon, you know, he was in the SS. So I don't know, there's this— there's an interesting connection there.

Um, the idea with them is that, uh, they were focusing on these endemic psychological states, um, through tantric breathing and other things. You know, removing— and DMT is a pathway to that— removing— well, most psychedelics, the argument is that you take the drugs, they remove the filter that keeps us in this 3D reality, and then you are able to communicate. This is what, you know, people say, is that you communicate with these entities that are around us all the time, we just can't see them. We know scientifically that there are other dimensions, we just can't see it because we operate in the 3D realm, the savannah field, so we've never needed the kind of equipment to deal with this other stuff and we wouldn't be able to process it. So, our brains are a filter in that sense to only really work with the 3D realm and that's all we can see in front of us and work with our hands and things. But then these psychedelics seem to take away that filter. And this is why, you know, the elite have these child sacrifice things, is that that kind of stuff allegedly draws the entities that give them these ideas, these demonic entities, um, that they then communicate with, allegedly.

Again, yeah, it's a trade-off. It's a trade-off. You trade your you know, you're trading blood for, uh, information.

And that's what happened with the Aztecs, right? That's probably what happened, is that they figured this out. You know, they have carvings of the pineal gland, um, being like this, you know, it's like highlighted in the brain. So back then, people realized that this area of the brain seemed to have some kind of higher significance that's related communication with these other realms, let's say.

You have cave, you have cave paintings showing the double helix structure of DNA, you know, centuries before we ever sequenced the human genome. So people are definitely tapping into, uh, something there, right? And I, I don't even— I think hallucinogen is actually a bad term for it because I've talked to people who they've been in like a, you know, a group ayahuasca setting. You'll have 20 people, right? They'll go under, go into this trip, and then they come out of it and they're talking about it, and they discover that they've actually been talking to the same entities, right? So it's like if this was a hallucination, these would all be kind of independent of events, right? People would be having their own— they would be— every trip would be different, right? They would be seeing different things. But for people to have a consistent shared experience, that to me, it's the smoking gun that no, this is not just something that the brain is generating as a result of, uh, taking the substance. Now, I think the other reason too I have just avoided DMT is, uh, I have tried psilocybin, and that was so mind-blowing that the concept of taking anything, you know, more heavy-duty than that, it was just like, no, this would like— yeah, this would completely dissolve me. This, yeah, that was already transformative.

Like, you have a fairly rational, logical mind. You're probably not going predisposed to schizophrenia or things like that.

Well, you know, the rationality definitely went out the window in Joshua Tree. But it was interesting because there was this awareness of these other dimensions, a kind of unifying power throughout the universe, and just a lot of a lot of things there. I mean, it was something that you just— it carries you away. Yeah, but it does— I think it does depend on your personality type. So it'll move you, you know, when they score these things in the research, it'll move someone on the openness, you know, one of the components of the Big Five personality traits. They'll move 30 points up in terms of becoming more open. And you think of openness as a good trait, but it's not a good trait if it's paired with neuroticism. So I've known some people who they would have like a— they had a very good experience like the first time, and then the second time they would have or third or fourth, they would have a terribly traumatic experience that would leave them, you know, I mean, just lingering effects even for a couple years, being just like more paranoid or more, you know, afraid that this or that is happening. And, you know, they hear sirens and freak out and, you know, like, oh God, what's happening? Like thinking that it's definitely must be happening to someone they know, right? Like, you know, a car accident or something. So it depends a lot, I think, on, you know, how your personality is geared going into that. And I'd say that for, you know, the people I know, for every 7 who try it, you know, maybe 1 actually has the right personality makeup to really have a productive, transformative experience. Then a couple others, it'll just be just kind of fun for them, but they're not really going to get much out of it. Yeah, it's more of just like, just a good, you know, they're having a good time at a party or something. Yeah, the idea of taking this stuff at a party, I Yeah, I hear people doing this and I can't relate to that at all because like I did not want to talk to anybody else. Yeah, I wanted to go, I wanted to literally go hug a tree, which I did. I was like, I can feel the life inside, right?

Exactly. It also depends on dose. Like if you have a little bit, it's going to be that microdose feeling. It's going to, you know, promote neurogenesis, which is obviously always good, new brain matter. Uh, and it— yeah, in regards to openness, it, it helps break up thought patterns that might have been bad for you or habits that you've kind of fallen into. And it does— it increases your openness, so you're more aware of things. And if you're more aware of your own failures, that can be anxiety-producing to people. Um, or maybe, you know, with the whole like ego disillusion thing, it for the first time maybe lets people know that, you know, you are not this separate thing to everyone else. And that's where the love kind of comes from. It's like, wow, I actually am part of this whole greater Earth experience. That's why you want to hug a tree.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it, uh, you know, I, I don't, I don't advise or promote, but I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna do a schoolmarm thing either, but at the same time, my philosophy around this stuff has always been, um, infrequent in the number of times you would use, but enough dosage-wise where you're going to get something out of it. And yeah, I'm not talking about any kind of heroic dose or anything like that because I'm very sensitive to, you know, any sort of compound like this, right? So You know, I don't need much, and it's the way I metabolize it or something like that. But, you know, I would be more apt to do it as like a, you know, one-off trip where I'm going somewhere very special, very significant, or something like that, and make a big deal out of it, right?

Yeah, you know, it's a treat, right? You know, have it ceremonial. Don't have it at a party where you're going to wig out and talk to people.

Yeah, this was done ceremonially. I mean, we had an Indian medicine man in there doing the full thing. But, you know, then it's like, it's going to be more special that way too. So that's that. And I, you know, I think it's basically going to any negative effects aside from just like taking too much and having a bad trip, any negative effects that these might have on you anyway, I would rather take that hit and really have an interesting experience and get something out of it than, you know, using a lot of frequent lower doses and maybe taking a possible negative consequences of it, but without really getting that much out of it, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, it's something that's— yeah, something that stayed with me for a very long time. It was a very religious experience. I mean, at one point, I was watching a Billy Graham sermon, and I had like tears just pouring because it was like I understood it better, better than I'd ever understood anything before. It reminded me of this time in college where a friend of mine who was an atheist, and he was like kind of into psychedelics and stuff, he got really like upset and kind of guilty feeling because he introduced someone to LSD and then they watched The Passion of the Christ and became like a devoted evangelical Christian. He like blamed himself because this guy had been an agnostic before.

So yeah, um, yeah, I think, well, it, it gives you feelings of like connectedness that you might have had in a, you know, like you can, like this isn't the only path to access these psychedelic states, uh, you know, like religious singing and that's when you see people going to fucking fits and everything. It's because they're dancing, breathing, singing, they're committed to this shared energy and that can bring them to these states of delirium and, you know, arousing the same kind of parts of the brain that make people feel this connectedness and everything. So psychedelics are like a shortcut to that. And so that can be both good and bad. Um, it just depends again how you use it. And ultimately, everyone do their own research. Don't take what I'm saying as gospel or whatever. And like anything, there's going to be a risk, you know, when you have alcohol the, that kind of damage kind of gets discounted. But how much damages have, you know, I've done to my body binge drinking over the years when I was younger, that gets kind of brushed under the, you know, so many people literally die from alcohol. And whether it's just societal kind of focus, we go, oh, look at this guy who went crazy after he had this, and kind of, it's a balance of of what's actually doing the harm, what you focus on. Again, the media focuses on the one thing. Um, it is a bit all up in the air and you have to do your own judgment and research. Like all these things, like they've been lying to about diet for so long. And part of the reason why psychedelics outlawed is because they help dissolve these structures that we get stuck in from day to day, like the routine of going to your job that you, you hate just because that's what everyone said. You've got to make money and you do have to make money or whatever to exist in this society, but to do it in a way that's so boring and repetitive just because you get learnt into that behavior and all of that.

It's funny you mention that because I quit my job the week after.

There you go. There you go. And what were you doing before? It was like, like just generally?

It was like, uh, it was just this, this office job, like, you know, for a tech company. But I had this supervisor who was, uh, extremely obese, and she actually was unfireable because of this, because because like her sleep apnea counted as a disability, so she could like show up to work at, uh, 1 o'clock in the afternoon. She would do this, and she would like waltz in— oh no— waddle in, and she'd have like this venti Starbucks in her hand, and I don't know, carrying a bag with a cake or something in the other. And then she would go into her office and review security footage and see if anyone came in at like, let's say, 9:05 instead of 9 AM. And, you know, like write people up for this. And she's like, 4 hours late. It's like, talk about projection. I got written up actually for doing push-ups in my office during the lunch break. And, you know, for like creating an uncomfortable work environment. And I'm like, uncomfortable for who? Like any you know, any of the guys who walked by would like, obviously not be bothered by this. And, you know, I think the women would enjoy it. So I didn't see that it was being disruptive or anything like that. But just, you know, just petty tyrants. Yeah, people will— people, if they're not able to, you know, run a country and execute masses of people, they'll They'll unleash their tyranny wherever they can. And, you know, if these people ever did get control of the government, that's— I mean, it would make the genocides of the past century look like a joke.

So why did you quit that job? Because of the psychedelics?

It was one of those things where, you know, I had known for like quite a few months since I had made the switchover because I was pretty happy with it when I had a different manager, but when I switched to a different project and was put on her team, you know, the environment went downhill fairly quickly. But it was like it had taken so long to get a job because the job market when I graduated, like still in the fallout of the recession, you know, it was like a year finding a job, any job. Yeah. And so it was that there was that uncertainty there because it was like I was— I'd become miserable because of this work environment, but it was kind of questioning, like, did I actually have what it took to you know, make it financially.

Yeah.

Outside of that, right? It provided a degree of financial security, and that's kind of— that's hard to give up on. And, you know, strike out on your own, and it's just a lot of uncertainty, you know. You, you gotta, uh, and, you know, I didn't have much experience doing that kind of thing, um, so I think it was It was that that I kind of realized during the experience. I was like, well, no matter how things go, it'll work out okay.

Yeah.

You know, like even if this like just goes horribly wrong and I just, you know, flat busted broke, I'll be fine.

Yeah.

You know, it was like created a kind of confidence. And yeah, I quit that job in a very strong fashion. I burned my bridges there. It was a lot of fun. Couldn't put them down as a reference anymore on future resumes, but nobody really uses those, so it's fine. And if anybody asks, I would just give them the full story. Because I think a lot of people in the professional world actually relate to that. So yeah, I understand it.

But of course, it's like, it's more, that's the kind of culture of work today is like this schoolmarmory and you're treated like a fucking child in a lot of positions. Like obviously there are good 9-to-5 jobs, but for most people the job market is not such that you can instantly leave a job and go into something else unless you're very, very in high demand. So that is kind of one of the ways that they control you. If you can't, like, you have to adhere to workplace culture and smart people who treat you like shit if you're below them on the hierarchy. And that in itself, going back to the earlier point, is if you're doing that on the daily then you become more and more meek and agreeable. And it's one of the main things that I always say, like, yes, make your job work for you as much as possible, but don't make— like, you find another job if your life and your health is decreasing when you're at that job or because of that job. And that's most of the time now. Like, the people that I know that are working purely in the office now, their bodies are decaying because they're sitting all the time, they're under fluorescent light, they're absent of daylight, of sunlight, and just the general— you know, I do a lot of work on my computer, so hypocritical in that sense, but like, it's such a different animal when you're doing it for someone who— and working under someone that is not smarter than you and It doesn't— like, it's not a respectful relationship and you're just doing it because you have to collect the check. That's like a spiritually bad place to be.

Right. And you know, and there's no purpose in it either, right? It's not about doing good work. It's about navigating the office politics. So you can't— there's nothing, there's nothing in it for you spiritually. If you have, you know, if you have good work, you can actually put up with a harsh environment. Environment and do pretty well because it's like you have something, right? You're achieving something. But this kind of, you know, the petty office politics taking precedence and the work not really matter— mattering that much. And, you know, it's not about doing good work, it's about doing things according to the processes and best practices that have been laid out and this and that. So You know, you could like discover things that would be fairly obvious, right? And this would be like a big improvement or a big mistake that you could avoid. And they would carry on with it anyway because to address that, that would be outside of the established procedures. You'd have to create a new precedent and, you know, they weren't interested in doing that. So, you know, and I thought too, I thought that I had like migraines kind of naturally and, you know, just kind of put up with them. It would be at least a weekly occurrence. And it turned out that, you know, getting out of a fluorescent office made them completely disappear. But, you know, I took this step. I called in my resignation like on a Monday and, you know, I was working on a film set by the end of the week. I was just out on a trip and then I ended up just staying in California. And, you know, I kind of jumped right into it. And then, you know, I go from working 8 hours a day and feeling completely miserable to then, you know, putting in 16-hour days on shoot days and being totally invigorated. Right? I would wake up before my alarm clock the next morning because I was actually excited about what I was doing. I was excited to go to work and do stuff. So it was crazy to me because physically, physically it felt like I could, you know, I was doing all I could to put in the bare minimum, like 40 hours a week. And it just, it felt so long. It felt draining. I was just exhausted. All the time, posture being affected from sitting down and all this kind of stuff. And then, you know, I jump into this environment which, you know, on paper you would think would be so much worse and would be impossible to cope with. And it was like my body just came alive, you know, it was like I was It's hard to describe, but it was like my, you know, even my metabolism had changed. Suddenly I was just like kind of burning to do something and to really get after it. And, you know, that was, I think that was about as positive an experience as you could have. You have a religious experience, you take take care of your, uh, your work and career issues, all of this stuff. But, um, yeah, maybe, maybe atypical. I might have gotten lucky, but, uh, it might have just been something that like was in the cards, you know, something I needed to do. But that's, uh, that's kind of also my approach here is like if you were to do it, you don't do it just for kicks, you know, you need some kind of intention, you need something to process, um, you know, while you're, while you're in that state, right? You may as well take advantage of it.

Yeah, intention, some things that are on your mind that you want to work out, um, but that thing about you quitting your work and your body kind of changing as a result of it. Like, it's— that's a spiritual side to health in a way. Like, it's not necessarily just the physical, um, that's impacting the body and just the, you know, the diet and things like that. And I'm sure that changed as well, but light and air, fresh air, is such a massive point of our nutrition. In a way, you know, what the body needs. If you take nutrition to not just mean, you know, what we eat and consume that way, but health itself. Like, you cannot be healthy, um, if you're spiritually, you know, in a very bad place. Like, you're not enjoying what you're doing. Like, you hate every day. You're forced— like, your alarm— like, I don't use alarm anymore, but, you know, back in the day when you'd have to get up early for work, like, that alarm was just I was just like, "No, not again!" You know, that horrible creeping feeling. And now it's like, boom, feet on the floor, don't need the alarm. I recommend no one use an alarm anyway, just get their sleep cycle in check. But you know, you see the point there. But the Western view of medicine, view of the body at the moment is like it's this well-oiled machine and what inputs you put in affect, you know, the machine and what fuel you put in, and that's true, that's true, but it's not the only thing. And it's, you know, it's not like you catch these things that are chronic health diseases and don't really have one cause as such, like, you know, a virus enters the body or something. It's more, there are inbuilt human processes as a function of your mental state, your spiritual state, that these blockages occur in the body through the energy centers, as well as having bad food and all the rest of the, you know, nitty-gritty Western science side of it. But I think people think that if they just eat well and exercise, yes, it will improve tenfold if you're diet and no exercise before, but you can access these other layers of energy and these other sources of vital energy through the soul once you are acting in a way that is congruent with how you feel on the inside.

Yeah, totally agree. One thing I think it's important to note too, that it's psychoactive compounds, and it doesn't, doesn't get emphasized, I think, as much as it should, is the quality of whatever you're putting into your body. Is just of the absolute utmost importance, right? If mushrooms are grown wrong, then they can have molds in the substrate or something else that can throw off the effects of this and can make people have, you know, really bad traumatic experience. I mean, you know, I haven't had a bad trip because I said I've only done it once and it was positive, but known people who've who have had them. And, you know, it's, it's really something you want to take care to avoid without, without worrying too much about it, because some people will worry themselves right into, you know, a bad state of mind that will then cause this. So it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. But, you know, there's also— you're dealing with a, you know, market where you don't have a lot regulated quality and, you know, there's a lot of varying degrees there. So you do have to be very careful on sourcing and this really goes for everything, you know, like dispensary marijuana, you know, the stuff I think it's complete garbage compared to what some of the you know, connoisseur growers would come up with. Um, and unfortunately the latter's gotten so hard to find. I just— a couple years ago I just, uh, stopped it altogether because I'm like, this stuff that they're growing, it's being grown en masse. They must be spraying something on it or cutting it too early or this or too late or this or that.

And growing it inside is just like relax.

Yeah, it's like, it's complete downer. It's, you know, it's like smoking Percocet or something, right? I don't get the point. Because to me it was always about, you could basically, you could have a near psychedelic experience with it. It was very introspective and creative and energetic. Yeah. And, you know, if you don't have that, if it's just about, you know, getting numb, like, I, yeah, I don't have enough, you know, anxiety or whatever else to like need something to calm me down. Like, that's just my disposition, you know.

Yeah, same.

I need something to wake me up. I'm a stimulant guy. You know, I've got that German blood, so, but, you know, and it's like, I talked to a guy, he was one of the most interesting, you know, random people you would talk to at a party or something to happen across. But he actually did, he did drug testing for a lot of the cocaine traffickers in the Midwest. And he was like this PhD student. At a pretty elite university when it comes to chemistry and such. But like he was telling me about a lot of the adulterants that they were putting in cocaine, you know, like over 50% of the stuff by weight would end up being like a shark tranquilizer or something.

Just insane.

And it's like destroys the nerve cells in your nose and this and that. And it's, you know, it's the same stuff. Like I think You know, pure MDMA probably has a hugely beneficial therapeutic use for post-traumatic stress disorder, but trying to get quality pure MDMA is— Yeah. You know, nearly impossible. I mean, basically the only place you could get it would be one of these universities conducting trials if you happen to know someone. Someone who can, you know, swipe a few grains. But that's, I think, an issue that, you know, it's huge to me and it just, it doesn't get really enough attention is just how much of this stuff is not even really what we're talking about, right? It's not even the same substance. And, you know, There's a lot of, a lot of things to look out for there because, you know, I mean, people, people think they're taking like MDMA or ketamine or something at a rave and it ends up the dealer had been cutting some heroin before he got around to the rave drugs and there were still a couple grains of fentanyl on the table. And some of this gets swept up into this stuff, and then suddenly you have, you know, 4 kids dying at a music festival. You know, this, this kind of thing happens. So that's, uh, I think that's the absolute utmost importance, and that's probably the strongest case for legalization. I'm really, I'm really hesitant. I'm not big on normalizing a lot of things. I like to keep these things like off in the shadows where it's elite and exclusive. I don't want everybody— because I, I think you can look at weed legalization in America and see what a disaster it's been for normies getting into it, right? They ruin every trend, right? So they have to leave us something. They have to leave us stimulants, which is like, you know, maybe there should be a panel to get to decide, like, okay, you're allowed to do cocaine special farm with, you know, like organic farmers that are doing the— they're growing the coca, this and that. Yeah, this sort of that. I don't know exactly how to work that out, but I think the adulterant problem is one of the more potent cases for trying to create some sort of legal framework where this stuff would come from, or at least, you know, at least targeting enforcement in such a way that, you know, you're kind of leaving your purest people, uh, untouched by law enforcement. You're really going after the low-quality ones. But I don't, I don't know if we could get the DEA to agree.

Uh, the power structures that are against all that are very heavily ingrained in everything at the moment. You know, lobbyists and Big Pharma and all the rest of it is— I mean, people don't realize that there are these massive, massive billion-dollar companies that have a vested interest in keeping you sick, selling you drugs that are meant to help you from the symptoms but don't address the fucking core, the causes, and then they're just profiting off your illness and, you know, insurance rebates and medical insurance, and it's all connected. So whenever you have something like that, it's not impossible to actually put in place policies that are going to genuinely help the health of the individual.

Yeah, and look, I'm, you know, very cognizant a lot of the downsides on these things, and I like to, you know, keep keep everything in mind as far as that goes, not get too gung-ho over any one thing. But the fact also remains that like any downsides or harmful effects we're talking about, they look, you know, aside from something getting adulterated with a really dangerous, uh, substance like fentanyl, this is minuscule in comparison compared to the damage that's caused by psychiatric drugs, which doctors freely prescribe. You know, antidepressants can just— can have permanent negative consequences on people that, you know, don't bounce back from. There's germline effects that, you know, will affect reproduction, will affect what your kids' epigenetic profiles look like and all this kind of stuff. That's what's like really psychotic to me is like, you know, we talk about this stuff and we're careful with it. And then, you know, they're out here getting housewives hopped up on every, you know, new anti-anxiety and antidepressant known to man. It's really crazy. Not even to mention, you know, there's the non-psychoactive psychoactives. I mean, these lockdown policies have had such a huge psychological impact that we don't really address. Yeah, right. It's like, saw this argument that was saying, well, you know, they were talking about how Florida is basically, uh, like ranks in the middle of American states, like 25th or something when it comes to the death rate from COVID They're saying, you know, so like 30,000 people there have died, but if they were really, really strict about it, like California, that might have saved like 3,000 more lives. I'm like, well, in a state of 20 million people, you might have saved, you know, an extra— sorry, they said it would be an extra 2,000 lives. Would be safe, not 20,000, but 2,000 lives. You might, like, even if that's true, right, if your model is correct, and most models have not been correct, but if that model is correct, yeah, you might get 2,000 saved lives there. But to throw someone, to throw 20 million people into that level of an extreme lockdown that California's had, you know, you're talking about psychological psychological damage to millions of people. Yeah.

And, you know, and literal deaths as well, right? Like suicide, overdose, that'll increase.

Yeah. And early deaths though, that'll be a result of the psychological damage that's inflicted, right? I mean, people have— we've seen alcoholism rates really spike in the last year, and it's like, well, are we even going to like net lives saved when you consider that, you know, you might have 500,000 people develop cirrhosis in the liver next year, you know, and a percentage of those will die from it. And then others will have to, you know, have a liver transplant, like live on these immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their life, which tends to, you know, result in early death by some kind of other infection. So We're not— the way they're tailoring this stuff, you're just not getting a, uh, you're not getting a very holistic view of it. And it's also— and I think it's tied into this insistence they have of being— of taking like equality, the concept of equality, and not just applying it like politically, or like, you know, people are like equally important under the law or something like that, but saying they're like literally biologically equal, right? So like a 12-year-old kid needs to avoid the virus in the same way that a 79-year-old nursing home patient needs to avoid it, right? That's how, that's how they've carried it out, right? Oh, you can't do sports, right? Because the that, you know, the virus might jump off onto the soccer ball, you know, kids out there like, you know, they've got to stay 12 feet apart and whatever else. And it's like that level of avoidance, that might make sense if you're in a risk group, but it's going to do far, far more damage in these groups that are total non-risk groups. Like, it's, you know, kids just don't get sick sick from this. Like, when it happens, we're talking like, you know, a 400-pound 12-year-old or something. It's like these very rare tail cases that they would have gotten deadly sick from any other infection. I mean, kids get much sicker from the flu, um, which is, you know, in my experience, is an absolutely horrible thing to get. I mean, I would get, like I said, I hallucinate with fevers. I would get the flu, develop a heavy fever, be vomiting my guts up for a week, and, you know, just like in this state of delirium. And it almost feels to me like, you know, my inability to get sick with COVID is like some kind of karmic payback for all the horrific flu experiences I've had.

But well, all of these policies, you have to look at them like people— unfortunately, the reigning narrative is like, oh, but this doesn't make sense. They're treating X group like the other group, and you know, that doesn't help. Actually, it doesn't help the population. And it's like, you— yes, that's true, but they are operating from the space that they want to— that like they want to conflict these things. They want you to feel lonely. They want you to feel powerless. They want you to have the inability to mobilize and communicate, to talk about these things. So they want to treat everyone the same. They want to have kids, you know, completely isolated and on Zoom school and all the rest of it. It's like it's taking away all the human experiences. Wearing masks, you can't read the body language or speak to people properly. You can't breathe properly. Uh, so It does make sense that all of these policies, like, if you look at it from the point of view that they are actively trying to harm us using this COVID as a, you know, as the reason why, but actually there are more nefarious kind of goals behind it. And it just depends whether people accept that and just accept the rules that don't make sense and they don't add up to anyone with a ounce of common sense versus just saying, uh, actually no. And that's what you see in Florida, you know, thankfully, and in some places around the world. And you don't see people dying in the street because it's all fear-based, and because really it's not that dangerous to people unless you are very old or very fat. And even then, you know, likely you're, you're vulnerable to everything.

Yeah, I mean, the one thing that there would be, it's like when, when I had— I have the— I have a mutation called Factor V that's inherited that leads to increased likelihood of blood clotting. So I had a blood clot in one of my fingers. It was at the knuckle and looked like I had frostbite. I mean, the end of the finger turned black, fingernail fell off. It was a very weird experience. But, you know, because I've— I think I've kept my, you know, diet and exercise and all this in line for a long time, that was kind of the extent of it. So really, you would have the groups you mentioned, and then you would have maybe subgroup that would have some sort— there would be some sort of genetic component. And of course, uh, the sensible thing to have done would have been instead of trying to get everyone to take the COVID test, it would be test people's blood, find out who is going to have like the increased clotting risk from it, and then for those people you can have them on a low-dose anticoagulant. Anticoagulant throughout this whole deal, right? You take a baby aspirin every day like we tell people to do to avoid strokes, and there you go. And the thing is, like, you know, it's serious enough to want to treat because it can go wrong along a couple of pathways, and you, you know, you want to avoid these instances. But it's more like there's a strong parallel with the AIDS epidemic. Pandemic in that to the broader population it's just really not a threat. And to the extent that it is a threat, it's a threat because we're very, you know, obese, unhealthy country.

Yeah.

But, you know, you want to develop effective treatments, and it's been their resistance to this that's actually gotten me— you know, I didn't want to I really did not want to think that this was some sort of deliberate scheme because, you know, that just seems too, you know, nightmarish almost, right? It's just easier to just think that, okay, this bubbled up naturally. But there are, uh, there are aspects of this that point towards definitely that it was engineered, if not intentionally leaked. It was— they were doing gain-of-function testing on SARS viruses to make them more deadly and less treatable. So early on, you know, they always referred to hydroxychloroquine as being some kind of quack drug and that it just like came from nowhere. And you know, why would anyone even think about this? Well, actually the origins of why they started using it in the first place was it was very effective against SARS. And this is just SARS-2. Yeah. But the interesting thing is that the— how hydroxychloroquine would work is it would prevent the— I think it would prevent the endosome from making contact with a cell and infecting it, right? So it kind of plugged up the hole, you know, blocked the route that it would attach. And so the one thing that— one of the things that's changed, and it's the first time we've seen it in a coronavirus, right? This family of viruses doesn't have this site, but in this one it does. It's called a furin site, and it's another place where the virus can latch onto a cell. And hydroxychloroquine doesn't block that one. So you do get some benefit if you take this early on because you are like reducing, you know, the ability of the virus. So you lower the viral load basically, right? So the virus, you're not going to have as much of it and your immune system is going to have more time to react and form antibodies. So if you actually takes it and take it in combination with a different drug though, you can actually block that other site, and so you can fully block the virus from getting into the cells, but you have to take this other one. Now, what happened was when they uploaded the information about the genetic sequence, and you know, they were doing all the sharing back and forth with World Health and Chinese officials and all that, they left out this site, right? So they didn't mention that there's this new site that the virus can use to bind to the cells and gain entry. So that was like deliberately left out of this information that was put out and then put into supercomputers that were determining, all right, which are the most likely treatments that might work for this and this, that, and the other. And so that threw a lot of researchers off, or a on. And, you know, you had this weird case where there was a raid and the stockpile of hydroxychloroquine in France was stolen. Happened very early on in this. And there's a lot of, a lot of weird things. And the fact that, you know, you have blood clotting as a significant problem with this virus, but if you go on to the National Institutes of Health treatment guidelines, what they're telling doctors is don't prescribe blood thinners to outpatients, don't put inpatients— so patients who are hospitalized— don't put them on heparin and these other blood thinners, and don't even— they don't even recommend— they actually recommend against against checking the blood levels, the biomarkers that would indicate that there's a problem with clots going on. And, you know, like, we're over a year into this. This is a known issue that we have, and That, the fact that that is left out, that it's not just left out, but it's, they deliberately are telling people to do the opposite of what they need to be doing in a hospital setting. That, you know, I see something like that and I'm like, I can't really get to any other conclusion than that this is a deliberate setup really to condition us and usher in you know, some completely new world that I probably don't want to— probably not a world I would want to be in.

No, it's a world that we have to stop from coming to fruition. And whether that's, you know, we go full in the woods and figure something out in there, I think it's— that's probably one of the better moves. But, you know, there's still, there's still room for people to shrug this off, I think, as long as everyone just acts bravely and does their part. It just depends whether the psyops and the fucking demoralization wins in the end. But, uh, you know, I have faith as always. Um, but man, we're coming up to 2 and a half hours, bro, so I want to thank you so much for this exquisite conversation, Dr. Bren Braddock. Uh, Where can people reach you and what are you working on at the moment?

Uh, you can reach me on Twitter, uh, @graduatedben, and right now what I'm working on at the moment is, um, uh, kind of personal project where I am importing COVID experimental medications. Well, not fully experimental, they've been run through clinical trials are very effective, but you can't get, uh, you can't get them over the counter in the US, and the FDA is telling doctors not to write prescriptions. So I am importing this stuff from India, and, uh, there will be a how-to guide coming out pretty soon on how you can set up your own COVID buyers club. Um, so that's the, uh, that's the next thing coming.

Very good. Can't wait to see what happens with that. Um, yeah, thanks again, man. Appreciate your time. I'm gonna put this up tonight. Uh, but yeah, any closing words for the audience?

Uh, good night.

Good night, everyone. Thanks for listening at home. We'll see you next time on Softcast.