Health Experts Reveal The Dangers of Seed Oils + The Lies of American Health Care

The number one reason for the health care epidemic that we have is the illusion of authority. There's like 50,000 studies in the last, what, two to five years funded by the NIH that are all in favor of ultra processed foods.

Intellectuals, scientists, really smart people are also piling up. They're like vegetable oils. Totally cool. Now buy my new book, Please don't hold back.

Right, like people really deserve the truth here.

Justin Nault is a world renowned nutritional therapist specializing in repairing damaged metabolisms. Abel James is a New York Times best selling author and an award winning podcast host.

We worked for more than a year and partnered with Harvard, working with the Department of Education to try to improve the American education system. The biggest thing that I took away was the lever that the best performing schools used to change student behavior and outcomes was food. It was bringing high quality food to the school so that when those kids ate it, they, they would perform better. They took the report that was going to change the face of education in my mind, put it on a shelf, said, you guys can never talk about this again.

Science in America is a marketing funnel and a propaganda machine for a for profit system. That's what the medical system is. We're going to give you credentials that convince people you are the arbitrator of good information and you are the authority that can tell them how to be healthy. Now go sell our products.

Think about the billions of dollars in grants that are afforded to scientific laboratories, specifically by food companies, for food companies, so that they have their theory proven, not disproven.

Yeah, sure.

Which is the opposite of the Socratic method.

Nobody is coming to save us. We are cattle. They will kill us. As long as they are extracting dollars from us, they do not care.

Hey, it's Josh and thank you for watching this podcast. Can you do me a quick favor and click subscribe? And it really helps us get this message to more people across the entire world, which in turn allows me to bring on bigger guests so I can bring them to you. There's a lot of podcasts out there. We totally appreciate, 100% appreciate the fact that you tune into this podcast. So from my heart and my team's heart to yours, thank you for subscribing to this podcast. Now enjoy the show. Welcome to the podcast, y'. All.

Thank you, good sir.

Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

Justin, Abel, this is really cool. Doing a podcast with one person is fun. Three people. Who knows what we might get into.

Man, it's a different game.

There's a different game. There's some black holes but the. The place I want to start first is. Is your guys's correlation. You know, both musicians, both freaking reality TV stars. At one point, abc. What was the title of your ABC show, Abel?

In this country, it was My Diet Is Better Than Yours.

What do you mean in this country?

In some other countries, it would be completely different titles, you know, based on their localized language. When we were shooting it, it was always called Diet Wars. And it wasn't until ABC put it out as a series that they're just like, no, no, we're going to call it My Diet is Better Than Yours. And we're all just like, this is.

Like the opposite of what you stand for.

Yeah, exactly.

Did you revolt to that?

Well, that was kind of the idea because my wife Allison was also. Her first career was as a pro gamer, and she was on a reality show gaming competition. And so she kind of turned me on to how all of this works and what to be prepared for when you go on a major network reality show where basically they're just lining you up on day one for character assassination and they're trying to get you to break. They're trying to, you know, they would put you in a room where you're not allowed to talk. You get no food. You just have to sit there silently for hours or sometimes a whole day. And then they'd pull you out of that room and get you to try to talk poorly or talk badly around the. The other people behind their backs and just like, set you up like this. So if you know that going in, I tried to double down on some of my spiritual background and training that way through meditation and that sort of thing, to just never give them any ammunition to take me down and assassinate that character.

It must have been hard, though, because they're like, hey, talk about this person. Yeah, because that's what sells. That's what pushes ratings.

They literally told me in the middle of the show, they're just like, you're crushing it. Your dude is winning. We got number one in the first fitness competition. Number one in the first weigh in. He was. He had lost the most weight and kind of improved the most. They're just like, everything's going really well. He loves it. He's getting, getting along with you. There's no way you're ever going to get any screen time. This is going too well. You need to bring the drama or we're going to bring it to you.

Get out.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

And what was the name of your show in your 20s?

So mine was called the Big time.

And what was that about?

What was that about? They did a global music talent search. Because I was a professional musician for 15 years, played Nashville. I mean, I did the thing. I was doing 300 shows a year.

Bass.

I played piano and sing. Oh yeah, yeah. So I was, I was a pop act in Nashville. But my, it was, it was funny. We were laughing about it because we were both on abc, both ABC shows. Mine was called the Big Time. It aired in 2012. And my experience was exactly the same to Abel's. And similarly for me, my cousin was on one of the either Project Runway season one or season two and it told me the same thing. He's like, hey, just so you know, like I walked out of an interview cuz they were like pushing me so hard. And then they kicked him off like week two or something. So I knew that like some weird stuff was going to go down.

Yeah.

And this, they would put us in rooms. It was, it was global talent search. They whittled it down to top 11, took us to LA, and then whittled it down from top 11 to top three and took us to Vegas. That was the show. So I was like the American of this global talent search. And they would literally put us in a room like this, no food, no water for hours. And we're like, what is happening here? And they're like, oh, they're setting up the set, whatever. And then this show was sponsored by Budweiser. So after like three, four hours of doing nothing, they would bring in a bucket of beer and be like, would you like a beer? So we'd like start drinking beers. And then they would just take us one by one out of the room into a little interview room like this and just start asking you questions. I was the only person on the show who didn't cry. Like, it's like they just poke, poke, poke, poke. It's really wild.

It almost sounds like CIA manipulation where they put you on sleep deprivation. So they want you to be angry and upset.

Yes. That is so wild. And they want, if, if you're willing to play along and you have a background or history of being an alcoholic or something like that, they'll use that as a tool to make sure they get the best film from you. And I saw this play out in so many different ways and it's, it's tragic. You know, the, the human in me is just like, my God. Yeah, this is how it works. And this was also, I guess you were a few years before me on the show, but like when ours came out. It was the same time that Trump had the Apprentice. And so, like, how TV is made and what they do with reality, to spin it one way or another.

Yeah.

And the overlap with politics, that happened quickly after that. I'm just like, man, this is not what people think it is. TV is not at all what people think.

God, this is the edge. And you're both marketers, like, decade, decade long plus 2011. You started fat Burning man, which is like, wow, I was 31 when you started. Yeah, I'm 44 now. Yeah, it's been a journey, man, to get where you are. Same with you. To go on reality tv. That has nothing to do with reality, actually. It feels like reality TV is the opposite of reality. But there's a corollary because you're both musicians, you both did reality or non reality tv. And I wonder what that is. Is it the creative spark? Is it creativity that is forged from pain, or is it creativity that's forged from joy? Because you can get there either way. Right. Pain can propel you to be a movie star, but then you're an alcoholic and your wife and kids don't want to talk to you. That's not really the life I'm interested in living personally.

Right. Yeah, yeah.

But let's go to you first. So, Abel, what drove you towards creative expression in the beginning? Because I think at the core of creative expression is freedom, authenticity, feeling good, feeling like yourself. You know, I was telling you guys, I just did a live recently, and it's like, I want to be authentic on a microphone, on a camera, and off. I want to be the same person. And I hope this whole conversation feels like that. When I met you at the door and I introduced you to my family, it's the same thing here, because people want that. Man, I am so surprised why somebody turns into someone else when they get on a camera. And after 700 podcasts, I'm like, gosh, it's probably 20, 30, 40% of people that act differently when they're here in the studio versus on the podcast, like, they're different people. So the creative energy is pure. What drove you in the beginning from creativity? Was it pain? Was it pleasure? What was it that drove you in the start?

Yeah, dying it. Way back to when I was a kid, I was very, very shy. I didn't really interact with the world that much. I would just be kind of happy chasing butterflies through the forest and sitting in the corner, reading a book, whatever it was, by myself. And so it wasn't until I started Playing the clarinet and the saxophone and a couple of instruments when I was really young, that I felt something different. And I felt like, oh, maybe this is it, you know? And when I started playing that people would react, you know, first for family and friends and that sort of thing. But I got really into it when I was in third or fourth grade and practicing all the time and playing duets with people who were in high school or whatever, and then playing with my music teachers. And So I was 8 years old, like, busking on the street, dressing up like an elf for the holidays, and just, like, playing Christmas songs on the clarinet or the saxophone, wearing a little elf hat and that sort of thing. And people loved it, you know? And so for me, as a shy kid who, like, couldn't even put any words together and didn't want to, I was, like, too afraid to. That was the first time that I saw that I could bring joy to other people just by kind of like, experiencing joy myself and, like, being fully in the music, especially at that age. And then eventually you follow that forward through junior high, high school, and it became a whole different gear of interacting with people and bringing joy to parties by playing the songs around the campfire. You know, in high school, when kids were partying and, you know, snorting lines in the corner or something or doing weird, weird stuff, I was playing guitar and I was singing, and people were into it. And eventually that transitioned into expressing myself through the spoken word and written word as well. And that kind of became a career in multiple ways. But I. I think it mostly comes from. It's a way of interacting with the world and hopefully bringing goodness to other people and overcoming your own. Whatever that is. Whatever that shyness is and where it comes from. Yeah. Being able to overcome that and then bring some sort of knowledge, joy, or value to other people through what you're doing, whether it's music or. Or the spoken word, and I consider those things very, very similar. Then it's absolutely worth pursuing that path. And I. One of the problems is that a lot of people say, well, I'm not a musician. I don't play anything. I can't hold the tune. I'm not a singer. We all are, though. We all are dancers, we all are singers, we all are creatives. And I think it's really important for whether or not you are considered a great singer or something. We all need to experience that part of being human.

Wow. Okay. So your voice, and everybody can feel it, especially if they have their bass turned up in their car right now. It's so wild that you were a kid and you thought that your voice didn't matter, and now you have this, like, deep bass voice that, like, tens of millions of people, maybe hundreds of millions of people, definitely hundreds of millions have heard.

Yeah.

Do you ever find that utterly fascinating?

If you look back at some of the most, like, iconic voices, like James Earl Jones, Similar story. A lot of these people had a speech impediment or were horrifically shy when they were kids, and so they had to learn how to enunciate and speak very intentionally. And. And so that happened with me, you know, breath control through playing woodwind instruments. And then I was like a didgeridoo. Yeah, like a didgeridoo.

Those things are fun, man. You ever played didgeridoo?

I've not personally.

Oh, my God.

Circular breathing and that sort of thing. I haven't nailed it yet. But, yeah, you know, playing some. Some amount of. Of an instrument and then seeing the similarities between that and the voice. Learning the correct technique because my voice is naturally, like, so low, and I would speak kind of quietly and not drop into projecting, I would trash my voice. And so, like, I would lose my voice if I was talking to people. And through learning the right technique kind of early on how to speak, now I can talk all day as you do. Right. Like, literally. And when I was really going hard in podcasting around the beginning, I was doing eight a day. Each one was about an hour.

Get the fuck out of here.

Well, that was largely so that I could take a few weeks off afterwards. But I'm just like, if I'm already going to be distracted and trashed that day with just, like, being totally into that world, might as well just stack them and batch them and kick my legs up for the weeks after.

Well, what I heard from you was a set. And tell me if I get this right, it came not from pain, it came from joy. Or was there a little bit of pain infused because you were. You're shy about your voice. Was it a mixture of.

It's always a bit of both. You know, it's like. And it's still a bit of both. Right? Like, it's not all joy all the time, and I don't think it should be.

Wait, so you mean good vibes only isn't real?

No, I hate that shit.

Whenever I. Bro, whenever I go to someone's Instagram profile or I see somebody wearing a shirt, I'm like, well, they're obviously practicing spiritual narcissism and spiritual bypassing.

Right?

You think Good vibes only is everything. Which not to call her out. I know she's a friend of yours. Maybe she's a friend of yours, too. We're going to talk about today what's going on with Whole30 and seed oils, because Melissa Hartwig, now Melissa Urban, used to wear a sweatshirt that said good vibes only. So we'll talk about that later in the podcast. All right. Okay. So I got a great blend from you that. That it wasn't just from pain. Was. Was your journey to music and expressing yourself from pain, or was it pleasure? Was it both? I'm always interested in the fuel source of why people do what they do.

Yeah, it was both. It started for me really authentically similar to Abel. Like, and all when every time he talks, I'm like, dude, we have so much in common. It's crazy, even, like, hurting my voice. And, like, I had crazy things happen. But when I was younger, all I wanted to do was make people laugh. I was like, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, when I was like, six or seven, I would have just said, Jim Carrey. I want to be Jim Carrey.

Yeah.

And I would just do these, like, monologues and make my family laugh and, like, remember.

And Living Color, the show in car. The best. Yeah, that's television. When television was actually so good.

Okay.

But that was all I wanted to.

Do, just make people laugh. And same thing that he was saying. He's like, I realized I could make the grownups happy. And then later, like, as I've untangled this because my music career was unbelievably traumatizing for me in a lot of ways. And I can talk about that as much as you want me to, but when I was younger, I started playing piano. I asked for piano lessons when I was 8 years old. I found my dad's Billy Joel greatest hits album. And I would just listen to it on repeat while I was sleeping. I was like, this is incredible. I don't know why I just fell in love with piano. And then at 8 years old, I start taking piano lessons. And then I start doing recitals. And all these grownups were coming up to me, and they're like, oh, my God, this is incredible. Like, usually these things are so boring. It's like the parents of other kids and, like, your kid was here playing. Like, this was amazing. Right. And they started calling me like, a phenom and the next Elton John and all this stuff.

Sweet.

So the ego shadow of the thing was very quickly I Learned, like, this is a way to more love. Which in my personal belief system, like, the only real incentive there is is more love. So as a kid, I realized this is the fast track to love. And then I did my first. I actually hit it. Besides the recitals I was doing, because I come from a very homophobic area, very tough New England town, this little town called Coventry in Rhode Island. I grew up fighting. I played hockey for 10 years. Like, a lot of, like, violence my younger years. And I thought it was like, too, like, feminine to play piano. So I actually hid it from people until I was like 16 years old. And this girl that I knew that had seen me play in my basement, I played and sang She's Got Away by Billy Joel. And there was this local talent show at the high school. She's like, you got to do this thing. So I went and I auditioned and they got me on this thing. So the first time I played and sang was in front of 700 people. And they put me on the news and it was just crazy. Everything blew up. I became like this, like, small town celebrity. So then my senior year, I had to do it even bigger. It's like I played piano, man. I had the harmonica. I'm playing, singing. And like, people went crazy. And then I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I was like, wait a second, I can do this. So I applied to Berkeley College of Music. I got in, went to music school in Boston, got a degree in songwriting, and the rest is history. I ended up moving to Nashville with after I got my songwriting degree. And that turned into 300 shows a year and my YouTube channel and the reality TV show when I was 25 years old. But for me, I think I've said this to Abel before. For me, I don't think that I loved music the way that most musicians do. Like John Mayer has to play music. He can't not play music. It's like this thing in him. I think when I go back to the Jim Carrey stuff, I always wanted to be an entertainer. That was the thing. I didn't have the same drive and passion for music. Even when I was at Berkeley, I saw people where I was just like, these guys eat, sleep and breathe music. But at 17 years old, I was already a professional musician. I was making a lot of money playing and I, I, that's how I lived in Boston. I paid my way through living in Boston and all this stuff. I was going to school Monday through Thursday, taking 11 classes a semester, and then I'D take a train home to Rhode island and get my truck and I'd play gigs Friday, Saturday, Sunday, then go back to school. Graduated in three and a half years. It was like madness. Then I went to Nashville and it got even crazier. 300 shows a year and it was, it was nuts. But what I realized was like the entertainment piece, I was just getting constant external validation.

Yeah.

And what we were talking about a little bit before we started, what I lost track of, which is why I now push this so hard in the work that I do, that the, the constant thing I'm trying to get people to find is unconditional self love and radical self acceptance is because I did it for so long that the performer switch was always in on mode and I had no idea who I was anymore. And my romantic relationships would all fail in the same way. And I couldn't go on dates in the weekend. And you're on stage every holiday, every weekend. It's like impossible to hold down a normal relationship. And then about, you know, seven to ten years into this 15 year music career that I had, I was then drunk seven nights a week. Like I was never on stage and not drunk.

Also, you were getting probably panties thrown at you and bras 100%. Yeah.

So that's hard.

Yeah.

And I'm sure this happens in all musicians lives where there's like the temptation comes and you have to be Odysseus, where you get harpoon to the mast, otherwise the sirens will pull you into the depths. Like temptation is real in that world. This is why so many bands, their lives are just shambles.

Exactly. That's what got me out of the music industry. Is I a buddy of mine? When we were like 26 or the reality TV show, I hated the Experience. And then when the show aired and everything, I hated that whole experience. And I was like, man, I don't like this the way that I'm supposed to. And a buddy of mine got the gig playing drums for a band called Tonic, who we grew up listening to. And in 96 and 97 they were the biggest band in the world. They got invited to the White House. Like they had a number, number one track for two years in a row on every chart. Like it does not get bigger than this, like selling out stadiums. So then there I am at like 28, 29, and all of a sudden I'm hanging out with like Google Dolls and Collective Soul and Tonic and all these guys who are now in their 50s and it did not go well.

Why?

Why? Because you saw how they were living, and it just didn't resonate.

It didn't go well for them.

We were.

I was fine. We were homies. We're hanging out and everything. But I'm looking at them on, like, their fourth marriage, and they're still drunk every night, and they're still on the road, but now they're playing these shows for, like, 200 people. And it's just like. And it just. They didn't progress. I. I always say. I. I think in a lot of ways, uber professional musicians are stunted in their per. Personal and spiritual growth. They stay very childlike, and they're just kind of shipped around from place to place to place. And they get this constant external validation. And that was where I found myself. I'm like, how? Looking back now, I don't drink anymore, and I'm looking back now and I'm like, how could I have thought that I was happy and fulfilled when I was like, I had to get drunk to get through the thing. So it started very genuine when I was younger.

Yeah.

You know, and then it became this kind of golden handcuffs. And that was actually why I hired my first talk therapist, was I was like, I don't know where Justin ends and performer Justin begins. And even at, like, family events and in dating or whatever, it's like you said, like, people are throwing panties at you, putting hotel room keys on the. The piano and everything. They've already decided who you are. They have a projection of what you are. This guy on stage. So then I'm feeling responsibility. Even in a romantic relationship with a girl that I've been dating for two years, I have to show up as what I believe is Justin. And what I've been told is Justin, and it led to this massive misalignment.

Yeah, I just don't know anyone. This is wild how you guys have these interplays, because I look at, like, a band like Metallica, or let's just say any band that's at Metallica's caliber. Do you guys think it's possible to chase down a dream in music? The reason I'm asking this is because you both left music and went to health, which is an interesting bridge. Like, there's definitely a corollary there, which is interesting. But do you think it's possible to be at that level of performance and be spiritually evolved enough to hold it? In other words, can you have the maturity as a musician, a man or a woman, and be able to constantly iterate on your craft and not get stuck in what psychologists call Arrested Development, where a trauma happens or something happens or an amalgamation of things happen, and you literally, on a cellular level, do not progress from that point. That's why Arrested Development is kind of like. There's a song actually by Arrested Development. It was a band back in the day. You guys remember that? The rap group.

Yeah.

And I think the song went something like, Take me to another place. Take me to another land. See, I can sing. There you go. We all can, bro. But the reason I'm asking this is because I wonder, I'm genuinely curious, if somebody can operate at that level where millions and millions of people just want to hear you. What goes on in the limbic brain, what goes on in the reward circuitry in the brain, how to handle that and how to actually be a mature person. I'll just throw it out to both of you. Is that possible? Is it possible to be a world class musician and artist and be deeply spiritual? What does that recipe even look like?

I think it's definitely possible. I've seen it go kind of the way that Justin described more often than not. But more often than not it goes in that direction. But if you're really intentional about it. I was really fortunate to. To cross paths with the guys in the Tim McGraw band, like almost 10 years ago.

He seems pretty rooted.

Yeah, exactly. And so I got pretty tight with his band leader, Denny, who is. Is kind of like my mentor in a lot of ways, musically especially, and produced my album Swamp Thing and all these things. And so we've hung out a number of times over the years and I've gotten to hang out and play with some members of the band, meet Tim a couple of times. And I remember after the show there's like this big line of VIPs to meet Tim McGraw, you know, and Denny was just like, hey, you want to. You want to meet Tim and like hang out? And I'm looking at this line and I'm like, sure, I would love to meet Tim. And I'm looking at this long line of just like raving, rabid fans, you know, and. And I kind of looked at it and I'm imagining if one day, you know, I could be Tim McGraw. And like, standing there, I'm like, I don't think I would want that. Like, he must feel uncomfortable with this every night he plays, you know, it's like this long line of people, this huge fan club or whatever. He's like, no, man, he loves it. He loves it. But they all went funny enough, Denny and some of the Guys in the band had found my podcast about 10 years ago, started listening to that, went on this huge health kick. And once they did, a lot of them went sober, took food seriously in a way that they hadn't before, in the sense that, like, on their tour bus, they're bringing in the healthiest stuff from Whole Foods back in the day, before it was Amazon. And so it was largely. I mean, even if you look at pictures of. Of Tim McGraw earlier in his career, it was pretty obvious that he was going hard on the party train for sure for a while. And there was a discussion, there was something that happened. I don't know what it was with, with him, with the bands that he's played with over the years, but he decided to go sober. I don't know if it's 100% sober all the time, but that was a commitment that was made. And ever since, it's like going. Going to shows like that when there's a stadium full of people singing about being humble and kind of, you know, like the. The meaning that you can put into some of those songs, it's. It's giving me goosebumps a little bit right now because it's. It's a far cry from like, when I was at a wedding and my grandmother, who was in her 90s, was there. Everyone's dancing, and it's like, don't sweat, drop down my balls. And just like all this, really, it's like watching some people, especially from different generations, seeing what's happened to culture or shared songs is quite dark. Or it can get quite dark if you take it seriously. So seeing people do the opposite of that and putting actual meaning and some level of spiritual understanding into their work, combined with not hopping on that party train for too long. You could do it. You could dip your toes into it, but you cannot live there if you want a long career. Like you were talking about.

Well, it feels to me like quicksand. I mean, my 20s were basically. How many women could I have sex with? Sure. That was. That was my mission.

Yeah.

And even my early 30s. And that's where porn addiction came from. I'm saying this because, gosh, you know, Gabo Martes says the opposite of. Of addiction is connection either to yourself or to others. And I know you've had a huge journey with this, which I'm really excited to get into, especially the psychedelic conversation, because all the ropes of our conversation weave this tapestry of. Are you actually living a life that your children's children's children would be proud of?

Yeah. Yeah.

Are you doing something in the world that when you're gone, people that you've touched and that you've loved will look back on you and say, wow, that was a really loving, great human. And it could be in music, it could be in health, it could be in anything. I just love the people that are fucking going for it, the people that are fully expressed. And I wonder how y' all feel about this? Look at the opposite of expression. It's depression. We were chatting about this before I hit the red button. The opposite of expressing yourself is stifling down, which I believe creates bipolar. My mom suffered with this. Your brother suffered with it, too. So I wonder how y' all feel about this. If we know that on a scientific and spiritual level that if you express yourself, it's probably the quickest path to health? Because when you depress yourself, that's what breeds anxiety and stuck energy and sideways movements. So how do we even begin the conversation about expression? Real, authentic expression to where you're just doing whatever it is, you know, you were brought here to do? There's a formula. There's a recipe for that. It's unique to everyone. But I wonder, with all the coaching clients that y' all have had, if you had to put your brains together, how many. How many clients, either individual or group or programs. We're talking millions of people that both of y' all have touched. Right.

For sure.

Over the decades, was there a commonality as to why people don't express themselves? Is it just fear? Is it. Is it literally just false evidence appearing real? Or is it something deeper? Is it generational? Is it epigenetically tied to their grandfather or some kind of traumatic event from their lineage? Like, I think so. But what do y' all think? What do you guys feel about this? Why do people not express themselves?

We're taught not to. Right. Exact school. We're conditioned. Yeah, that's you. You take the boys who are, like, in their seats like this, and you put them on medication, you tell them to shut up, you tell them to sit there all day. And after, you know, a dozen plus years of that, we come out different.

Yeah. I think fundamentally the issue with it is, is the subjective reality of good, bad, right, wrong. Like, for me, good, bad, right, wrong is. Is the most detrimental thing for humans truly, like, to think that anything. And this is where, like, the Paul check and I had a long conversation about, like, what is actual enlightenment?

He was just here last week, and the chair is warm from his butt.

Amazing.

So please speak to this yeah, it's this.

It's. It's the obsession with good, bad, right, wrong, and our desire to judge everything. The ways that we judge things are where the programming that tells us we have to suppress our emotions comes from. Because if I go back to I learned when I make the grownups laugh, I get more love. When you're a child, if you lose love, you die. Period. Your two little ones in the house, if you just decide, I don't love them anymore, and you go leave them on their own, you put them out in the woods, they die. It's death, right? You are completely dependent on your caretakers as children, especially humans. Humans were helpless for, like, the longest number of years of, like, any animal in the animal kingdom. So if you lose love, food, shelter, protection goes away and you die, right? You're kept alive because somebody loves you. So this whole ego shadow piece is the things that get you more love as a child are in your ego. The things that lose you. Love take away love as a child end up in your shadow. And this is where you get in the Jungian depth psychology. And how you have to integrate this later is what Abel saying is like, not just school, but when you're a little kid, like, you know, big boys, don't cry. Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about. Children should be seen and not heard. You'll speak when spoken to. Be a good boy, be a good girl. This, like, militant, just like get in line is. Parents are so uncomfortable with their own emotional experience that when their child is having an emotional experience, they just want it to stop. They're not here to hold the emotional experience. When the kid is well behaved, that is good in the mind of the parent. When the kid is throwing a tantrum, that is bad in the mind of the parent. And we receive this programming so we're taught to believe certain expression of self is good gives you love. Certain expression of self is bad takes away love. So then, I mean, this. You see this play out in the macro everywhere. It's like what Tinder and dating is like. Show up as the best version of yourself. Lie if you have to, to convince somebody that you're a good partner and just bag a partner, you know? And this is so catastrophic for humans. Billy Joel, my favorite artist of all time, had an album called the Stranger and the song the Stranger. And there's a line in there, he's talking about it, he's like, once I used to believe I was such a great romancer. Then I came home to a Woman that I could not recognize. When I pressed her for a reason, she refused to even answer. That's when I felt the stranger kick me right between the eyes. And you hear these statements of like the rose colored glasses. The first six months are great. And then you start to fight. It's because everyone is full of shit.

Yeah.

In the beginning state of this, we just want love and we'll do whatever we think we need to do to.

Well, you're also being bathed in like a catecholamine bath of serotonin and dopamine and everything's a puppy dog. And there's ice cream on her cheek, so you may as well lick it. I mean, that's kind of what's going on in the first, maybe even year, dude.

For sure.

If you have a solid connection, I mean, with Kerry, Michelle and I, it was like month two. We got right to the work.

Yeah.

And that's when I knew. And I don't know how you all feel about this. And maybe Taylor producer can attest to this as well. When you meet the right woman. For me, I knew she was the mother of my children. And I didn't know why. It was such a trippy feeling. I was like, what? This doesn't make any sense. But I just have this inner knowing that this is the mother of my children. It was surreal. I can't actually describe it. I'm not going to do justice of describing it, but there's some soul karmic tie. Whether you believe in twin flames or soulmate, whatever, these are just nomenclature we put on this stuff. What you're describing about the authenticity that really connects spirit to form. That authenticity, you can't fake it. Otherwise you get home one day and the stranger kicks you between the eyes. But we live in a society that's obviously a mirror of example of this. Look at what happened during COVID bullshit lockdowns. That was the ultimate I'll be a good boy, I'll be a good girl fantasy world where everybody was like, yeah, give me nine boosters, you know, Cool.

Yeah. But it was.

I felt from the jump the same inner knowing that it was a complete theater and it was a complete fucking psyop. That same confidence in inner knowing was the exact same confidence and inner knowing that I knew that Keri Michelle was the mother of my children. This inner knowing is really unique. It's like the instinct is like a reptile. Instinct is like a quick hit. But intuition is like this soft whisper where it doesn't have to express itself. It doesn't have to explain itself. It's a deep, deep, deep inner knowing. How do y' all make sense of that? The way that we don't have to be good boys and good girls. We can actually just decide what is good for us. Because I agree with you. Like, right and wrong is a slippery slope. Once we start labeling things right and wrong, you could end up, like being a pastor in a unfortunate situation where you've repressed your emotions for 30 years, and then you're having sex with a schoolboy. I mean, terrible things can happen when you label right and wrong. And that's your dogma. I wonder how y' all make sense of this, this inner knowing, intuition versus instinct, because they can be really confused at times. Might feel similar if you haven't done enough spiritual work to hold it. Is there a difference of how you guys operate of instinct and intuition?

For me, yeah, 100%. But I think it's. It's. It's programming one way or the other, right? It's like doing the bicep curl of learning to trust and listen to your intuition. Because we have. This is the thing, I think what personal development and self actualization is spiritual growth, work, whatever you want to call it. All the things Paul and I talked about, it's peeling away the layers of the onion, which is all the programming to get to your ooey, gooey core. So the question I'd have for you and one for me, I had the same exact experience within 14 days of meeting Megan, my now fiance. I told her that I loved her, which is the fastest I ever told anybody I loved her. I had a mushroom experience where we were literally like king and queen. I was like, this is the mother of my children. Like, inside of two weeks, I just like. I left a mushroom trip, drove to her house, walked into her kitchen, and was like, whatever this thing is, I am all in from right now. I am all in.

Watch.

And she was like, okay. And here we are. It's like now, you know, four years later or whatever. But I think if I had met Megan in my 20s, no chance this would have worked out at 20 years old. I would have not had the intuition that she was the mother of my children. I wouldn't have even known what that internal voice was, because I was still busy judging my own expression as good, bad, right, wrong. Showing up as the performer. I would have given her an inauthentic version of self, and the mirror that is her would have reflected back to me inauthenticity. And I would have been Hiding from her. And she would have been hiding from me, but she and I had both done, like, extensive depth psychology work for years prior to us meeting each other. So as much as we were programmed for years to repress, for most people, I mean, bite the bullet, you're probably looking at years of practicing radical self expression, what Young calls shadow work.

Yeah.

You have to let these things out and express. I think the fastest path to intimacy is vulnerability, which is why I started becoming so honest on podcasts and all these things, because I found it really helps other people open up in that same way.

It's also great therapy, for sure. I get to talk with these world leaders.

Oh, yeah.

And I'm just, like, pouring my heart out and they're doing the same. It's like, this is what people are hungry for.

Yeah.

They just want the realness.

Well. And here with you. Right. It's like we connected really quickly on Zoom that first time we met and today is the first time we're meeting in person.

Yeah.

And I say, anytime I'm meeting somebody, I'm like, I am not interested in you giving me a bullshit version of you. Please do not perform for me. All that I want this experience to be is Josh being his absolute, most authentic self so that I can love him unconditionally. I want to know the real you so that I can love you and you can experience what it's like to express yourself and get love. Which is why, as I worked through this and had a partner in Megan that I could actually open myself up to and be authentic and vulnerable with. I've had moments where I'm, like, crying my eyes out, sharing something with her that, to me, is deep and dark. And I've never told anybody or I had this psychedelic trip that said, you need to clear this, or addictions that I've dealt with and everything. She loves it, dude. I hand it to her. I'm, like, bawling my eyes out. I'm. I've never told anybody this in my whole life. You're the first person I'm telling this thing, and I say it, and she's looking at me, and she's like, I'm going to say this as sensitively as possible, but is that it? And I'm like, I've been holding on to this for 25 years, you know? And then I'm just, like, crying. And she holds me and she's like, I'm totally here for this. Like, what can I do to support you? And I'm like, what? Like, the experience of radical self expression and then receiving unconditional love. That's the medicine. But you don't get that medicine without vulnerability. It doesn't happen.

Yes. Wow. Okay. Similar yet different for you and your lady.

Oh, yeah.

Because you just brought some really unique wisdom about what it feels like on a practical level. And you don't have the perfect words for it either, Megan. Right. You don't exactly know what it is. You just trust it. But like you said, you were at this point in your own maturity process where you had done enough work through Jungian work, and I'm sure a lot of other stuff too. Was breath work in there?

Yeah. Oh, breath work. Psychedelics, young breathwork, psychedelics, therapy, self reflection, emdr. Okay, so you have dry fasting.

Everything, which I feel like in order to really be a comprehensive, loving, present human being, it's. It's par for the course doing all these things, but I feel like so many of us are looking for, like, the bomb drop. Like, oh, I did ayahuasca in Peru and now I'm healed.

Yeah.

Then they come home with the good vibes. Only sweatshirt on.

This is.

This is not the path, y'.

All.

This is not the way you do it. Was it similar for you? What's your wife's name?

Alison.

Was it similar with Allison to his story or. Much different.

I was quite similar. Fourteen years ago we met and I had been dating aggressively kind of to try to get it over.

This is Pretender.

To get it pretty over with. This is Pretender. I met my wife on eharmony. That's. That's how far back it goes with Dial Up. It wasn't quite. I'm not that old.

You had Oregon Trail on one computer.

And then you had or number munchers on the other one. Wow. Yeah. But I remember, you know, meeting a lot of people quite quickly, and we've had this conversation before. Like, as a musician, you meet a lot of women a lot of the time as a musician, and they want to take you home, you want to take them home, whatever. I never really had a good experience in terms of, like, creating an actual relationship from that. And I didn't want a whole bunch of one night stands. I found that dating was. Was quite painful, and I just didn't. I was kind of a serial monogamist. So anyway, like, in that context, when I met Alison, we just, you know, went on a couple of lunch dates. But one of the reasons I loved meeting her on eharmony was because it was basically like we were pen pals. For the first few weeks, we were using actual words. We were writing words to each other. We weren't swiping. This is pre swiping. We had seen a couple of pictures of each other, but it was really about, like, tell me a story about, like, who you are, where you come from, what your family's like. And we would write paragraphs to each other.

Sometimes, like, whole pages.

I loved the way that she wrote. And so when we met the first time, I had been, you know, dating a whole bunch of women and groupies. None of them. I mean, some of them, yeah. But it wasn't. It's not what it seems like it would be, you know, like, maybe if you're young and that's what you're into or something. And, I mean, I had my fun, but I got old fast. And I didn't like the destruction that it kind of created. Because, you know, even if you say, like, hey, I'm not into anything serious, like, yeah, we can go home together or whatever and hang out and have a good time. And sometimes you get the response where it's just like, okay, yeah, yeah, like, what? That sounds good. Like, I'm totally on board. Not on board. You know, a few days later. A few weeks later.

Yep.

So anyway, when I met Alison, she. She walked into this sushi restaurant that she recommended that was close to her workplace at the video game company at the time. And she walks in, and I just remember. Like, when I. When I remember back, it's like there's a light around her. There was, like, colors in the room when I looked at it. And I'm just like, that's not something that usually happens, you know? Like, I don't. I try to be as spiritually connected as possible, but this. This was something different. Like, my gut, my eyes, all of my senses were like this one. And so, you know, had a nice little lunch date or whatever. Then we went on another one. And then Christmas break happened. So we'd met for a combination of maybe like two or three hours tops, and had a very nice, but nothing, like, special, you know, it's a lunch date, you know, in the middle of a work day or something. And so. But we did have a quick kiss goodbye before Christmas break because I was going to Florida to hang out with the folks. She was going back to Arizona. And so I thought, all right, she is. This one might work like this. This is the one. Then I get an email from her, like, over Christmas break. She's like, yeah, I don't think this is gonna Work. I'm just gonna. I'm gonna get rid of all the guys. I'm not gonna date for after she kissed you. Yeah.

What's up?

And I'm like, yeah, exactly. I'm like, interesting.

This is the mystery of the feminine, y'.

All. I thought we were.

And I love and respect that.

I thought we were vibing, you know, like.

And.

And for me, I. I hadn't been in that position before. I'd never been dumped. I'd never had someone just kind of, like, brush me aside because I was usually in a. In a serious relationship. So anyway, I'm like, this is. This is interesting. This is weird. And I'm just like, you know, with all respect, like, I thought we were having a great time, really enjoyed getting to. To hang out with you. Why don't you want to hang out again? And then that convinced her to write back. And I guess what had happened, she told me later, was she was dating a few different guys around that time, as I was dating different women. And one of the guys, like, totally flipped out on her, just went psychotic, you know, and she was kind of thinking that maybe most guys are just like that, and I don't want to deal with it for a while. This guy also might be a psycho. But eventually we got back together in person that January and hit it off right away and just, like, fell madly in love with each other. And ever since, we've gone through so much together, good and bad. But the amount of intimacy that you can build in that sort of partnership when you not only love each other, but also work together, I mean, it's a challenge. It's a challenge for sure, but it's real. And she knows exactly who I am better than I do. She has seen me at my. My worst moments, helped me out of it. We both almost died together. We were poisoned by carbon monoxide. And it was a really, really close call. A few years ago, she's convulsed in my arms, passed out. Me too. Like, going through all that stuff together and recovering together, man, there is nothing like having a partnership and a relationship like that. But you really do have to put in the work, and you can't. You can't fake it. You have to be the real and whole person. And that's something that is a moving target, because you're always changing. She's always changing. Whoever your partner is there, you're always going to be growing and hopefully becoming a different version of yourself. And if you hold each other's hand, walking toward the sunshine together, you know, you can. You can make that a really great experience.

I feel like it was Thich Nhat Han, and maybe I'm wrong, but it was this very wise person that said, to be in real intimacy, you have to die a thousand deaths to who the person is becoming every day.

Yeah.

You actually have to just continue to die. And if she was that person in the past, if you were that person in the past, it's like, how do you actually just love the soul of the person? That's really what we're talking about. And it. And it brings for me this bigger question of, like, what is the whole point of us being here? As you can tell, I'm a deep guy. I like to go deep. My lady sometimes doesn't appreciate it. She likes to just, like, have fun in a day. And I'm always interested in this, which is what we're doing.

Yeah.

And so the challenge for me in my life has been how do I have both? You know, how do I hold two worlds of, like, keeping it light and fun and free and having creative pursuits and also feeling that depth that I never got when I was being raised by my mom and dad. Like, I'm sure you can relate to this with your bro. Being raised by a bipolar mom is so challenging because there's no home base.

Yeah.

There's no. Just, like, place of peace where when you wake up every day, there's the guarantee that you're going to be cared for, you're going to be loved. And by the way, I love you, mom. And I love you to this day. You did the very, very best that you could have ever possibly done, especially being born into a military family. My grandfather was a brigadier general in the Marine Corps, fought in World War II. Like, this is not exactly the grounds for emotional intelligence and expression, if you get me.

Sure.

Like, in 1950, things were way different.

Yeah.

So I wonder, the big question for me, how you guys feel about this? What is the game that we're playing? What is the actual game that we're playing? How do we choose our life partner? You know, Paul, check. The very first time I was on his podcast, it was back in the day when it was the Living 4D podcast. And he looked right at me, and he was like, what do you really want? And I said, I want my wife. I want my family. I want my. My kingdom. And he's like, do you want help with that? And I said, sure. And he gave me Parmahasa Yogananda's prayer, which was blessed me that I choose My life companion according to the laws of perfect soul union. And it's still, like, it still makes my heart feel warmth, just saying it out loud, because that's the game I've always wanted. I knew at a very young age that I wanted a family, that I wanted a legacy, that I wanted something where I was reaching people, but not just in this trite way. I mean, I say this with respect to Taylor. Like, there's a lot of actors out there that are just seeking love because that's what they didn't get when they were a kid. You talked about this, and I knew at a very early age that I wanted to, like, be a performer or an actor in some way. But when I went down the road of acting, I could not take the rejection. It was like, no, no, no, no. And I even had directors and people say, you need to get to Hollywood. You need to go live in Hollywood. And I was like, I don't want to. This is not the game I want to play. So I used to listen to Dr. Drew and Adam Carolla on Loveline. You guys remember that? And I just would listen to it on my old cassette player above my bed, and I would lay there, and I'd be like, wow, it'd be so cool to be a radio dj, to actually, like, lead conversations. But it seemed to me that it was so far out of grasp because I hadn't had enough maturity that was built in order for me to hold it. And now it's been 10 years of me essentially being a DJ, because that's pretty much what podcasting is. You're a DJ without music. So I wonder, for y', all, like, when you look back on your life, was there a really big pivot, especially with both of you being musicians and then going to health? Let's get into that story where you started to actually have the maturity to listen to your intuition instead of just reacting to life and your wounds and your trauma and your stuff. What was the moment? Or was it an amalgamated moment where a bunch of things led up to that? Or was there one moment where you can look back and go, wow, that. That actually is when I decided to be real, to be authentic to myself. What did that feel like, look like?

Oh, man. I mean, there's. It's an amalgamated moment, for sure. I mean, there's so many different things.

Sometimes it can be a quick ax, but, yeah, but, yeah, maybe amalgamated.

I mean, one of the fastest was. Was what Abel was talking about is every relationship I was in as a musician was like, listen I will hang out with you, I will meet your family, we will go on dates, we can go to concerts, we can have a good time. I'm never going to be your boyfriend. If you're cool with that, let me know. And they always said yes. And then I always ended up being an. Because a month later, three weeks later, whatever, they want to get serious. And I'm like, I told you from the jump, and you told me you're okay with this. So in my mind, they're being dishonest, right? And they're, like, not being authentic because they agreed to something and they changed their mind later. Now, in romantic relationship, it's like you're free to change your mind whenever you want. And we're going to get through what this is like. I. We have a. What we live by in our relationship is unconditional safety, even before unconditional love. You can bring anything to me. I don't care what it is. You can share anything with me. If you're having feelings about somebody else, bring that to me and we'll deal with it. We have this, like, this foundation of unconditional safety, which is, like, critically important. I didn't know how to give that to somebody else, and I had never had that. Like, I look at romantic relationship now as we are. It's. It's reparenting like we are meeting the unmet emotional needs of that child, that person when they were a child. That's what we're doing through romance. So for me, I didn't know how to do any of that. And this one girl lost her mind on me when I told her I didn't want to be her boyfriend. Jumped out of my car at a red light and just, like, took off running. And I was like, what is happening? Like, this is crazy. And then she asked me if I would go get coffee with her and explain what happened or whatever. I was like, yeah. When got coffee with her, she gave me a book called Scary Close by Don Miller, Donald Miller, like, way back. And he, like, I read the first chapter. She was like, I really think that you have, like, intimacy issues. She's like, it's okay. We don't need to be together. I'm sorry the way that I did. We're going to disconnect now, but just consider this. And I read this book, and it was exactly what he was. He was like. He was only dating, like, super hot women, which is what I was doing. I'm like, choosing just on looks alone and how much they worship me for being a Musician. I'm like, that's how I choose my girlfriends. Right? And then I would never give them any vulnerability, never any intimacy. They're always the one getting hurt. And I'm just like, rock solid. I'm always fine, never any issues. I'm like, this book is about me. And that was what got me into talk therapy originally. And then I went through talk therapy, you know, and like most people, I show up day one, she's like, why are you here? I'm like, I don't know. My family's great, my mom's great, my dad's great. I have no trauma. I have a perfect childhood. Musician. Everything's great, you know?

Yeah.

And it was like, that's when, you.

Know, you got to uncover.

Yeah. But I didn't at the time. Yeah. In hindsight, I know looking back, you know. So after five years of therapy, I then went. My first psychedelic experience ever was with a shaman named Don Howard in Peru. Don Howard, first psychedelic I ever did in my life. Went to the Peruvian.

Wow. You went to the pinnacle from the jump. Yeah.

Four ceremonies over eight days. And. And just being in the jungle for eight days with no WI fi. Sure. Weird. I think I was 27 or 28 at the time. And I came back and I. I was like, I don't. I didn't have any crazy purge. I've done, I don't even know a dozen ayahuasca ceremonies and never purged. And, like, people had these, like, crazy dark experiences and all this wild stuff. I never had any of that. It was always just very peaceful. Ayahuasca is very much.

Lucky you.

Yeah. Very, very sweet to me. Right. I'm like, what is happening here? But then as I came home, like, at the time, I was, like, doing like, two a day CrossFit workouts, and I was in, like, a toxic romantic relationship and everything. And I remember, like, doing snatches for time or something in this CrossFit gym. And I just, like, put the bar down. My whole body hurt. And I was like, why am I doing this? And I left, and I never went back to cross. I was like, I'm hurting myself this. I'm doing this because someone told me I should or some idea of masculinity. Like, my fitness journey has been crazy masculine. Jiu jitsu, boxing, powerlifting, Olympic lifting, you know, kettlebells. With the founders of Strong first and Pavel Satsolino, it's just like savage masculine. Like, weapons training, everything you can imagine. I went, like, hard down the masculinity hole in in that direction. And then I was just like, why? All of a sudden I was able to walk away from things. So I was just like, this is not good. And I got out of that romantic relationship. I stopped crossfit, whatever, and I just was like, I'm doing all these things that don't feel good at all. I realized like, my whole life was like this series of shoulds and like, how do I get rid of this idea of should? And I don't know if that answers your question, but it was all these little pieces, these puzzle pieces that went together.

Oh, yeah.

So then I just started moving into more of that. I'm like, okay, this psychedelic space seems to do a lot for me and therapy seems to do a lot for me. Then I found a coach who taught me somatic work and I started doing somatic release work, like really deep emotional work through the body. And I remember the first time I had an experience with him, I was doing this deep, somatic work, like smashing pillows and screaming and raging. And I just like burst into tears. It was like a 30 year dam of emotions that came like flooding out of me. And I. For a year I'd been talking to my talk therapist. Like, there's got to be more than this.

We gotta.

We're talking about the same now for five years. Like, yeah, I have a lot of awareness, but what do I do? Yeah, what's the action? Right?

Yeah.

I called her that day. I was like, our time together is over. I was crying and she was like, hey, listen, like, if you found. She's like, you've been asking me for something more for a long time. I think we've reached the limit of what I have available to you. And I was like, I love you. You changed my whole life. You're amazing. Thank you. I'm going off in this direction. And then that led to, you know, now all these years that I have of psychedelics all around the world and coaches and somatic release work and the dry fasting stuff that I've experienced, experimented with. So it's really like I found a lot of radical self expression through the body and getting out of my head. Like my head was where all the problems were. That's where all the shoulds. Good, bad, right, wrong, love, take away love, all of it. I really had to kind of get out of that and also realizing I think we have a lot of this today. I think we need better idols in a, in a lot of ways. But like the hyper masculine, like goggins run 100 miles a day or you're a type thing is like, you have to. We use the body in completely.

Yeah.

Harmful and incorrect ways, in my opinion.

Wow. So good. Oh, my God. Corollaries of similarity exist, for sure. I was a trainer for 10 years. That's how I got into podcasting is I was like, oh, I. I don't want to train anymore. I had a dark night of the soul. And then I went to go actually look at myself in the mirror, and I realized I didn't feel worthy enough to podcast. I didn't feel worthy enough to be an entrepreneur. I just didn't feel worthy enough. And that's where the entry point was for me to access intuition was having a moment where I didn't want to commit suicide, but I definitely didn't want to just be a cog in someone else's dream anymore. I was willing to just do whatever it took. It's like I'm either going to be successful and figure it out and launch this business. At the time, it was called Wellness Force, which is so funny because the etymology of the word force, if you look at Hawkins work, right. I wasn't really coming from a place of abundance. I was coming from a place of pain and scarcity. And so I think your journey with the woman jumping out of the car, I'm excited to hear your journey too. I know it's probably been percolating in there for a moment, but. But my journey, we're all interweaved here. And it is a question that I asked Paul, do we always have to have spiritual growth through pain? And when I asked him that question, I knew that. That it wasn't always going to be a yes, but it just seems like it's 80, 20. It seems like 80% of the time we only grow spiritually. We only mature through the access points of pain. It doesn't always have to be like that, but it just seems overwhelmingly to be so. And it was from that dark night of the soul in 2015. That's why we're even here. That's why I've been able to create abundance for my family. And we have land and all these beautiful things. I don't say that to flex and be like, look how cool I am. I'm saying it. It's just, that's. That's the. The fruits of me being mature and getting beaten down and turning to something greater than just my ego for guidance, for true guidance. Do you feel like that's happened for you in a similar yet different way? Obviously, it's Much different than mine or, or Justin's. How did that unfold for you, this maturity process to be able to hold it all?

I think it's a pursuit of meaning in a lot of ways. For me, I wanted to get the best education possible. Was really close to going to Berkeley School of Music in Boston as well.

How's that for us? A connection, right?

Yeah. Wow. But ultimate ultimately decided that I wanted not just to be a musician, but to also pursue some level of intellectual understanding. And so getting the best possible education I could, going to an Ivy League school and taking on debt was a pretty critical decision because what that meant was that once I got out of school, I would have to pay off that debt.

Right.

And you can't. You kind of can't do that being a musician. You can, but the sacrifices you have to make.

Yeah.

Compared to using the skills that you've built for, for some sort of working.

Situation, you'd have to play in a lot of shopping malls, you'd have weekends, you'd have to.

Well, so this happened anyway, just later.

Okay.

So pursuing that for a while, I resented the fact that I did kind of like have to stop focusing on music and the creative expression and the stuff that I really wanted to be doing and saying and playing and bring to the world and just work for somebody else for a while. So I went into strategy consulting, worked into Washington D.C. and then worked in Manhattan for a while. So for seven years I was a strategy consultant, wearing a suit, shaking hands, you know, working with C level executives and that sort of thing, which was fine because it, like, I actually liked it more than I thought I would, and it allowed me to play music that I wanted to play. So I was playing with bands that I wanted to play with. I was playing the songs I wanted to play that said what I wanted to say, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

And so over the course of time, I kind of did that for a while. And then I went harder and harder into the music side of things. Moving to Austin, Texas. Back in 2008, I was playing 200, 300 shows a year. I was playing saxophone with a bunch of bands, I was singing with a bunch of bands, and I was playing electric guitar and doing my own stuff. And so ultimately, after playing 200, 300 shows a year for a few years and, and trying to make that work in a way that, like, it can finance itself and hopefully bring some money to. To do other things so that I don't have to work as hard in consulting or working for other people that Sort of thing led me to burning myself out so hard because I was playing private parties, weddings that paid very well, but it's not the songs I wanted to, to play. And also, I'm sure, like the musician's view when he's, when he's playing or she's playing is the best in the house, you know, you can. It's the best people watching imaginable. But if you start playing a bunch of weddings over the course of time, going back to what I was saying about like my grandmother listening to the sweat drop down my balls and stuff like that, that it's just like totally degrading the whole experience for everyone without them even realizing everyone's partying, everyone's loving it, right? But if you're part of that problem, right, like if you're singing that song or another song that's kind of instilling these values subconsciously in people or manipulating them subliminally, and those are the songs that are literally requested by the highest paying gigs, it gets ugly. So stepping away from that. And also, like, if you get a contract on your desk that says, like, hey, we're gonna make you a star, you better read it because they want to own you forever, 360, everything you do, basically forever. I've gotten this contract a few times for, you know, a major publishing deal with a, with a book as well as TV shows. Music will do this to you as well. So, like, the paths I was looking at, like, where do I go in the world of music? It seems like I'm kind of at a. I'm at a place where I don't want to keep being. It's not like I was completely unfulfilled, but I'm like, there's, there's got to be something more here. And so at the same time, I was still working in consulting and we were at that point I had worked in alternative energy and pipeline technology and technology companies and all sorts of. I really enjoyed learning things like that. But we worked for more than a year and partnered with Harvard, working with the Department of Education to try to improve the American education system, especially after school programs and looking at best practices across North America, like how do they take kids who are dropouts or D F level, get them to graduate and then pursue higher education. So flew all around and studied all these remarkable schools that were doing incredible things and got to know a lot of the kids and the teachers. So I was loving it. And we were doing exceptional work, if I do say so myself or whatever. The government gets this report, after more than a year, there was one major meeting that happened leading up to this where it was basically 30 of us with. With two days notice, flew from all over the country to sit in a room with the people in the government who had contracted us to work there, shelling out. I mean, it was like 2 or 3 grand just to fly to D.C. where it should have been 200, but because, like, she wanted us there for that meeting and whatever. So we all get there, it's a couple days later, we're looking around, we're like, why are we here? Like, we. We've done the work. Like, we don't really. And so the person who scheduled the meeting, you know, pretty high up in the government, walks into the room, just kind of like, looks around, goes, huh, so why are we here? And then after that, they took the report that was going to change the face of education in my mind in America, especially, put it on a shelf, said, you guys can never talk about this again. Just, like, gone an entire year of, like, working so hard and knowing that this could help people. I'm like, what? Like, you're just giving us money and telling us to shut up now?

What'd you say to her?

It wasn't my prerogative to really say anything.

I mean, everyone was silent.

When you're hired by the government to do a job and you do it, your job's kind of done. You have no more control. It's like they own your work at that point, right? Like, they contracted you. If they tell you to shut up and not do anything with it, you don't do anything with it because it's theirs.

Right? Like, so, wait, I have to interrupt you, and we're going to get to the rest of your journey. It reminds me of that scene in Indiana Jones where they put the Ark of the Covenant in that massive room and they're like, yeah, we have our best people on it. And it's just there with, like, millions of boxes. They just stuck it away. How did you deal with that? A year of your life, just for.

Nothing longer than a year. It felt like nothing. But one of the biggest things that I learned without saying too much.

Why, because you're afraid you might?

No, no, it's just because, like, it's a little bit in the weeds. I mean, it was. It was a significant project for the Department of Education and. And all these things. And there were a lot of things that we learned that wouldn't necessarily be relevant to this conversation. But the biggest thing that I took away was the lever that the best performing schools used to change student behavior and outcomes was food. It was bringing high quality food to the school so that when those kids ate it, they would perform better. And they would also, especially because a lot of them were coming from families that couldn't really afford good food. You know, all over the country, this was, this was a common story. If the food was there during the school day or especially for the after school programs, instead of dropping out, the kids would show up, they would eat, they would hang out, then they would start to learn, then they would start to interact with the world. And so I'm like, okay, so if I can do all of this work and get well paid for it, and then they tell me to shut up. It's like, I don't want to be useless in the world. You know, I'm, I'm full of piss and vinegar in my mid-20s. You know, it's like, let's go, let's, let's do something. And so I had the conversation with people who worked at my consulting firm and I'm like, I'm going to need to call more shots or have equity moving forward so that this doesn't happen again or I'm just going to go out on my own. And so I went out on my own. They offered me some amount of Echo Day. I'm like, no, let's, let's try to change this from the bottom up instead of the top down. And so that, that kind of gave me the fire under my butt to start writing about health more seriously. I'd been doing it for a while, just kind of for fun under this pseudonym, Honest Abe. Honest Abe's Tips was the name of my first blog before Fat Burning Men. And then I decided after, after that whole experience, it's just like, why don't I just put myself out there a little more with the whole like fat burning man thing. Tongue in cheek. Let's make it fun, let's make it interesting, let's make it funny. It doesn't have to. Like, at the time it was all about the Biggest Loser and Jillian Michaels restriction. Oh yeah, just over exercising, all these things. So I'm just like, what if we could eat bacon and have our fitness too? You know, like, what if we could enjoy our food as we're eating? And so I started writing about that and really enjoying it. And like right away it started getting a lot of followers and a reader base on RSS. So I had like, back in 2011 or so when I first launched the website like 40,000 or something, RSS subscribers through like Google Reader and that whole thing. And I loved that experience. But then audio kind of started being a thing, and people are just like, man, you should definitely start a podcast. I'm like, what's a podcast? And since I already had, I was playing all the gigs and so I had the equipment as well as the know how to run the. Be my own producer essentially and set up the shows. I started up this podcast and, and started getting really involved in the ancestral health community that was just getting off the ground in Austin. Met, you know, like Mark Sisson, Rob Wolfe, Jack Cruz, and all sorts of different people way back in the day, before it was really a thing. Before these were household names in a lot of ways, especially at the height of the whole Paleo thing. Right. And so interviewing them and really getting into the podcasting game was super exciting when I started that. But it was interesting because so it kind of got critical mass early and gathered up its own momentum. Then I felt like, all right, let's just do this. And kind of built several different businesses around it over the years. Ultimately, Allison became a huge part of it, and she's been working, running the day to day things for all of our different businesses for more than 10 years now. But it was so funny because, like, I had been, especially in the world of Austin, like, if people recognize me, they had come to my shows or heard me sing or whatever it was, and then, you know, people are just like, oh, you're the health guy. You must be a health guy, huh? You're a health guy. And I'm like, huh?

I guess.

But this really just started from personal passion. But I guess to go a little bit back in that story too, I had made myself quite sick in my early 20s by following my doctor's advice. When I got that consulting job, it came with, they called it Cadillac insurance. Right. It was just like, it had all the bells and whistles, super expensive. But since it was covered by the, the corporation or whatever, I'm like, let's use this thing.

Yeah.

And so I followed my doctor's advice, which was to eat low fat, eat no dietary cholesterol, drink your orange juice in the morning, all sorts of other things. So after following that advice in my early to mid-20s, for about 18 months, I'd put on 30 pounds, my thyroid basically stopped working. I couldn't maintain body temperature, had all sorts of just like health issues, and lost everything in an apartment fire at the same time, you know, like at that 18 months. And so I was happily broke basically for the first time in my life because I'd paid off my loans working in consulting and stuff. But I was like, fat. Felt like I was middle aged, even though I was in my early 20s. And it was by doing what my doctor said, harder than all my friends to try to prevent, you know, the. The history of high blood pressure and thyroid problems and heart disease or whatever that was in the, in the family. Trying to prevent those things gave me all of those things faster than all my friends who were just out drinking, goofing off in their 20s. And so when I lost everything in the fire, I'm like, this isn't working. I looked at myself in the mirror and I'm just like, you're kind of fat, dude. Like, you shouldn't look and feel like this in your mid-20s. And when I, you know, just like, ricocheted hard off of my doctor's advice, found the world of cyclic ketogenic dieting combined with a lot of knowledge around, like, I was running marathons at the time, so fueling was super important. And learning how to manage glycogen in the liver and the muscles and that whole thing, I just, just got really, really into it and started doing the opposite of what my doctor said. Following the people who had for decades been crushing it in, in fitness, the world of health and wellness, getting deep into the work of Weston A. Price, and meeting a lot of the folks in the ancestral health community. I'm like, this is it, man. Let's, let's go. And so, God, more than a dozen years later, I'm still chugging along somehow, and Allison is too.

Well, there's still amazing work to do.

There is.

Like, you. You are one etch on a freaking iceberg. So are you. That needs hundreds of thousands of us to speak as loud as we can about it. Like, people can listen to a podcast and hear this amazing story. By the way, it's so fun for me to connect the dots. I'm like, of course, of course. That's why the education that you got. And then in the government office, when they said, hey, that's a year of your life, we actually don't want to use this information. That food is a corollary between children's mental health. That doesn't surprise me. It also does bring up sadness for me because the truth is literally in plain sight, yet everyone's ignoring it because they're told to ignore it by people that, quote, they trust. It's like the government becomes this mommy, daddy figure. Oh, yeah, that hopefully, and I know, I trust in this conversation, it's starting to even unravel for somebody that's maybe hearing it for the first time. So in this health epidemic that we're in, it truly is an epidemic. I think the research is like one out of three children are predicted to become obese. Might even be one out of two. But I know for sure it's one out of three. This is a huge conversation. On the screen right now is the Pentagon that we teach. And at the bottom is physical. If our physical is wonky, if our conduit is dirty, it's impossible for us to get the other four sides of the Pentagon well or nourished. So let's jump into this. So the health conversation is massive because if we don't have health, we're going to be chasing it forever. And then we have no chi or energy to get the other sides of ourselves nourished. The interesting part about this is you guys, both musicians, both got into health, sometimes wear the same matching shirt. Although today you chose different shirts, but you had a health journey as well.

Yeah.

By the way, I used to be 280 pounds. I'm not going to bore the audience. Y' all can listen to like thousands of times when I've shared my story, but I've struggled. I mean, 280 pounds is a lot of weight.

Yeah.

And I'm 220 now. I feel really good between 215, 220. I have a beautiful gym. I've created a system in my life, an actual plan that I execute on from a place of loving myself.

Yeah.

But that had to be earned because when I was a trainer, I had six pack. I was doing all the things. I had clients from 5am to 6pm at night, just crushing myself, doing like the. Remember the hydroxy cut?

Oh, yeah, I was doing hydroxy cut.

Like just insanity. But that probably my adrenals are still healing from. And. And what I learned from that is that, yes, I was chasing something, but I was burning. I was going the opposite direction of what my soul actually wanted. My soul just wanted peace and acceptance and expression and kindness and authenticity. My. That's what my soul really wanted. But I was giving myself a pseudo connection to my soul. And it wasn't until 2008 where I found Paul Check's book, How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy. Then I found Rob Wolf. And then I entered that whole ancestral movement as well that I just went. I was like, wait. Everything that I was taught in NASM opt model was bullshit. And the emotional connection to my own life and how I show up with clients like that, that's all connected. It was like a light went off for the first time. Did you have a light bulb from your own health journey?

Yeah.

Where you realized you had to shed everything you thought you'd believed?

Yep.

Yeah.

What that feel like?

That? Well, for me, I was a fat kid growing up. You know, I went into high school. I was like 5 foot 2, 195 pounds. Like, I was a. I was a big boy. And I grew up, you know, I was born in 86, so I was obsessed with tough guys. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Hulk Hogan. Hulk Hogan, Okay. So, I mean, I had body dysmorphia very young. Started lifting weights when I was 15. So for me, it was like always esthetic and from a place of hating my body. I fucking hated my body my whole life. Hey, I still. I mean, still, I still struggle with body dysmorphia to this day. Literally, like, I never think I look as good as other people think I look, no matter what. Even at 9% body fat, I don't think I look as good.

Isn't it crazy how deep these impressions go?

Dude? It's insane. And then it's like this. Like, you were talking about training something I've been rallying against. Hard is what I call. We live in a world of infertile six packs. Like, that's what's. What's being pushed in health and wellness is like completely bald men who are 8% body fat, who, like, literally can't get it up without TRT and peptides. And somehow it's like, I'm healthy. Learn from me. And I'm like, oh, my God. Like, so that's what I realized. Like, you know, in this whole health and wellness thing, when I'm 9% body fat and my testosterone 250, I'm like, how is this health? You know what I mean? But anyway, the whole thing came for me with body dysmorphia and just crushing myself in the gym always, six days a week, killing myself, not understanding nutrition. And it was in my mid. I was probably like, 26, 27 right after the reality TV show, which I was 25 when I did that. And I was like, man, I work harder in the gym than anybody I know. And I was like, 24% body fat. Like, how is this possible? And I was like, I think there's something to this nutrition thing. Until then, I'd only worked with, like, personal Trainers doing bodybuilding stuff. I like, always felt terrible, always killing myself in the gym, always sore judging how, how good I'm doing by how sore I am, which is crazy. Just like sacrifice, self punishment, self loathing, restriction. Just nothing nourishing or loving about this thing, right? And around that same time, I started taking nutrition seriously. I saw a documentary film by C.J. hunt called the Perfect Human Diet. I remember that one. Perfect Human diet, yeah. So I watched this, I learned about Paleo, and then I switched to Paleo and I just start dropping body fat, body fat, like effortlessly, like, what is this? So I'm realizing nutrition is important and at the same time, the universe drop kicks me square in the face. My brother's daughter Savannah was born. And she was born what's called terminally disabled. It's like this child is going to die. So she was having over 300 seizures a day within the first seven days of life. So she got put in the pediatric icu. So the next thing I know, I'm like, I'm in the pediatric icu. We're at in Nashville, like Centennial Vanderbilt Neurology, where he started working with the Charlie foundation, which is a foundation that treats epileptic seizures in children and infants and teenagers using the ketogenic diet. So medically, the ketogenic diet is like an anti seizure diet. That's what it's for. So that was my first introduction to the ketogenic diet. I'm like, wait a minute, a diet can just stop seizures? What is this? It's like, like Abel's thing. Wait a minute. You can feed a kid a certain food and they're like, IQ goes up, basically. It's like, food is really powerful. So I'm watching this thing go down and what mainstream medicine does is like immediately they're like prescription hand. My brother and his wife, here are your antidepressants. Because this is terrible, right? And there's this little baby that I'm looking at every day and she's hooked up to all crazy machines and she's got cameras on her 247 so that she literally doesn't die. So we're in and out of the pediatric icu. And I was doing pretty well in the music industry at this point. Like, all my bills were paid. I bought a couple houses. Like my days were my, were mine. Like all day. I could do whatever I wanted, right? So I start researching more and more about nutrition. I find the world of Paleo. Rob wolf, I meet C.J. hunt. All this stuff and the connection here. I found Abel and his podcast and his book. And it was. The first one I listened to was you and Perlmutter when he first did, like, grain brain. Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And I was like, whoa. So I start learning about Paleo. Paleo is transforming my life. And I decided to become. I became a certified nutritional therapist as a hobby because I've always loved learning. And I'm like, okay, well, if I can learn enough about nutrition, then I can train and eat in a way that supports the training, and I can get better results aesthetically. Maybe I'll get the six pack I want and love my body. So all this is happening all at the same time. And I knew, like, just enough to be a pain in the ass to someone like a medical doctor. So what happens with these kids that have seizures? And keep in mind, Savannah is, like, weeks old, and there's something called a G tube, which is when a child can't eat or drink, they drill a hole in their stomach, and they feed them through a feeding tube. But when they do this to the babies, it's like. They tell you it's kind of like a death sentence. So they're, like, holding off, holding off, holding off. And they're like, we got to do the G tube. So they install this G tube in Savannah. And at this time, we still don't know what's wrong with Savannah, but they're assuming epilepsy. She's having seizures. Right. But they're called grand mal seizures, which is really scary. Yeah. Because she, like, has the seizure, and then basically, she flatlines like she's dead for seconds. So she'd sometimes. Sometimes turn purple and then come back live. She'd breathe and start crying. It was gnarly, dude. Crazy I've ever seen. So they give these babies something called ketocal, which is made by Gerber, it's subsidized by your tax dollars, and it's in every pediatric ICU in the entire nation. And it's a ketogenic baby formula. But what the three of us at this table know is mainstream medicine cares nothing about quality. Right. It's just like, okay, so we know keto is high fat, low carb. So let's make a baby formula. Call it Keto Cal. That's high fat, low carb. They're putting this in the stomachs of these little babies, the weakest humans you could possibly imagine, like, relying on us to stay alive. And I read the ingredients. High fat, low carb. Seed oils, soybean oil, safflower oil, artificial flavorings, and Sweeteners. I'm like, this isn't even touching taste buds. Why do you have like artificial flavors in this thing? What is happening? All the vitamins that are in it are like completely synthetic. Like non usable forms. Not like methylated B vitamins or anything, you know. So I'm like, okay. They're pumping poison into the stomach of my dying niece. This is insane. So I bring it to the intent, the. The attention of a. It was a Vanderbilt neurologist at the time. I remember what the guy looks like. I remember his face. I don't remember his name. And again, I think he's probably a great human. He's trying to help. He's trained on textbooks that are paid for by pharmaceutical companies. We can go down that frigging rabbit hole that I went down for years after this. But I show him the ingredients. He looks at the ingredients word for word. He looks at me and he goes, huh. I never thought to check that. And that was my, call it cliche, but that was my red pill matrix moment. I was like, nobody is coming to save us. Like, this is a for profit system. We are cattle. They will kill us. As long as they are extracting dollars from us, they do not care.

Wow. So, gosh, I mean, I had to deep breathe when you're telling that story. Did. Did she survive?

Savannah is 10. Her life expectancy was less than three years. She's 10 years old now. She's what? What we know what's wrong with her now is something called KCNQ2. At the time of her diagnosis, she was one of 96 living cases in the entire world. It's unbelievably rare. Something's wrong with the potassium channel in her brain. There's one case that we know of that lived into adulthood, eventually died at 25 years old. But if you see Savannah now, you know, like she's on my brother's Facebook and stuff. And this is part of our life. She's 100% disabled. Also a harsher term for it is 100% vegetative. She can't stand up. She can't lift her own head up. There's a nurse that lives in their house and takes care of her. She's in like a Christopher Reeve style chair. So she's like, she's growing, but she's like, she's in a diaper. She can't speak. Her eyes just dart around the room constantly. Like still has seizures and stuff. And she's there. She's existing, you know, but the way my first company Started was. I was so upset by this. I went home, I bought food dehydrators, food processors use my oven, went through a list of Paleo superfoods, and I made a baby formula. I was like, I'm gonna make a powder in my kitchen that I can feed. And we got it cleared by Vanderbilt neurology and all these people to, like, feed her through the G tube and actually give her nutrients. Like, let's give her real nutrients through whole foods. And I had just read the four Hour Work Week. I was, like, completely burnt out in my music career. What do I do? What do I do? And I knew the world of CrossFit pretty well. So I added a whole bunch of collagen protein and turned this into my first ever protein powder and started selling it to CrossFitters. And that's how my e Commerce journey started. But from there, it was like. That was when I got in touch with Rob Wolf. Rob is a. A biochemist, like, by education. So he was like the first guy that was like, dude, stop reading people's books. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, you're reading Dave Asprey's book and. And Perlmutter's book and Mark Sisson's book and blah, blah. He's like, just learn how the human body works, man. He's like. So he started sending me biochemistry textbooks. That's how. What he learned and what he was trained on.

Y.

This book is great. This book is great. So I started studying human metabolism really deeply, and then I started studying the horrors of mainstream medicine. I found books like Medical Nemesis and like, you know, mainstream medicine is the third leading cause of death in America, which crazy. I'm thrilled now that, you know, Casey and Cali means and people on Capitol Hill and talking about this stuff and like, the food system being talked about.

But they had to exit the belly of the beast in order to do so.

Exactly. Yeah. And it's like, guys like Abel, that's.

Not easy to do. She had to throw away a career for sure and face financial despair.

Exactly. And the thing and. And all the name calling that comes along with it and like the. The char character assassination. Sure. Guys like me, you and Abel know, like, I've been. I started my podcast, I think, eight years ago. Right. So it's like I've been standing on the hill, taking the arrows, and everybody's saying, this is misinformation. This is dangerous. You're a quack. I'm like, okay, I'm telling people to eat Food that exists in nature, and I'm somehow a quack. Right. But that was really what shifted it for me, was this whole experience with Savannah. So I started, like, learning human metabolism really deeply, and that's what put me on this trajectory. And I started doing Facebook lives. I heard the term ask me anything. I was like, oh, I'll just go live on my personal Facebook page. And I just let my friends start asking me questions. And then that continued once a week for 115 weeks straight and turned into a Facebook group and my social following. And that's how I'm here today.

Yeah, there was a clutch moment for me there when you were sharing, where I felt like I was going to cry. I'm just going to let myself feel the emotion. Right. Because the. The absolute pain and depths of sorrow that her parents must have felt and still feel is so overwhelming that the only way I can make sense of it is that God needs to experience God's self in unlimited ways. And this is a way in which we all can learn about compassion and about understanding and really, ultimately about respecting the mystery of life. Because there's no answer for this. There's no answer. There's no meaning that we can put on a Instagram post and be like, well, it happened to her because of this. That would be a disservice to why this is occurring. Really, the gift in this is to take a breath and realize that we are all in this cosmic soup. And it's such a mystery. It's such a mystery where sometimes things happen, and I'm just like, wow. Like, I could feel in my heart the. The sorrow and the grief of this situation. And the silver lining, with respect, I'll say, is that look what it afforded you.

Yeah.

Look what it happened. Look how it unfolded for you, where you know exactly what's going to heal these children, what's going to make them better students. You know exactly how she can be supported with not seed oils. There's no way it could have unfolded except for the perfectly imperfect way that it did. And that's the part of this life that is so challenging and yet so beautiful. It's such a paradox and a duality that, you know, my. My pain is connected to something very recent, and it's on the screen right now. Melissa Urban comes out with this post for Whole30. And she says, hey, based on new science, all seed oils of any form are now accepted in Whole 30. What comes up for you knowing the pain of your family and what they've gone through when seed Oils were pushed into her body. And then to have Melissa Urban with whatever. I'm not saying she's an evil person. I'm actually not here, y', all, to put down Melissa Urban. I'm not. And I've even. I interviewed her in the past. But I just wonder. There has to be a moment in her psyche and in her heart where she had to pause with curiosity and say, is this the right thing to do or is this financially motivated? Because my meals are coming out in Costco. What's the real truth here? Like, what came up for you specifically when you saw that post?

Yeah, I mean, one, I would be stunned. Behind the scenes, there's not a heavy financial incentive there.

There absolutely has to be.

Yeah.

How could there not be?

Yeah.

And the challenge that I issue, I said this once about Lane Norton, and I said, if you can get me, Lane, to sit in a room with me and I tell the story of Savannah. Now, let's say we go back and Savannah's four weeks old and they've just installed this G tube. And I say, hey, man, you seem real confident about the settled science on seed oils. Totally safe for humans. Not only safe, but beneficial for humans. Now you tell me we're going to make 90% of this baby's diet seed oils, confidence scale of 1 to 10. If he answers 10. This is a completely dishonest, disingenuous human being that we're dealing with. Like, this is. This is a problem. This is a guy who is like, my ego is more important than this child. Me being right and not backpedaling on statements that I made publicly is more important than Savannah's life. Now you got to analyze what kind of people you want to take advice from. You have to decide who you're going to let be the authority in your life. I think the number one reason for the healthcare epidemic that we have is the illusion of authority and us not listening to our own authority. I don't need a randomized control trial to tell me I don't need to pump seed oils into the belly of Savannah. I don't need that. I mean, it's insane, right? So we're in the situation where the. The science, right? It's like Casey and Cali means on. On Capitol Hill, there's like 50, 000 studies in the last, what, two to five years, funded by the NIH that are all in favor of ultra processed foods. If you. If you call yourself evidence based and you decide. The science is decided, here is what the science says. If you have not yet realized that every single generation ever living Thinks the science is. Is settled. Thinks that they know the most. The people who are spraying ddt on children a few decades ago. Also thought the science was settled. If you have not realized yet that science in america is a marketing funnel and a propaganda machine For a for profit system. If you have not realized that yet, I don't know what to tell you. You are literally a child who is like, yes, daddy, please tell me what I am allowed to say and what I am not allowed to say. And you're also putting your identity into your credentials. So this. This happens all the time. Guys like us that are, like, doing our own research. And coming out and saying, like, hey, look, look, look, listen. There's thousands of people that I've helped. They've tattooed my brand on their skin because they've had such a transformation from the information I'm giving them. But you're telling me I'm misinformation and I'm dangerous, and I should listen to you because you have credentials. And then the conversation shifts when I tell them the authority that handed you your credentials, the perceived authority, I don't believe in it. I think it is a completely corrupt, horrible system. That is designed to maximize profits. So the textbooks you learn from Are brainwashing programming for you. It's no different than herbalife. Herbalife says, our science says we have the best supplements. And then they give it to housewives. And they say, now host parties and tell your friends that herbalife is the way to do it. That's what the medical system is. We're going to give you credentials that convince people you are the arbitrator of good information. And you are the authority that can tell them how to be healthy. Now go sell our products. If you can't see that, if you can't do what kasey means did, which is say, holy shit, I'm part of a toxic system that's hurting people. I need to do something different. Then I don't know what to tell you. Because your ego is more important than people's lives. That's what's happening.

And maybe the gift that melissa urban is giving us Is by showing us. Because I don't know what it's like to be at her level. I mean, there's probably an eight, maybe even nine figure deal for sure. Knocking on her door with costco.

Sure.

Hundreds of millions of dollars, I assume.

Yeah, I don't.

I can have compassion and practice non judgment with her and say, wow, what would I do? Yeah, could I say no to $100 million. I mean, I'm sitting here with you now and I'm saying, yeah, I could say no. Yeah, I'm not going to poison people. What the. But if somebody showed up with that much money on my doorstep, that could guarantee legacy wealth for multiple generations. Who am I to say what I would do at that time? I hope that my spiritual practice and my maturity would allow me to stay in integrity, because that's everything to me.

Yeah.

Yet I think what she's showing us. And I wonder how you feel about this, because I know you have a relationship with her and maybe you've even talked to her about this. I mean, I hope. Hopefully you haven't.

No hopefully.

Look, I want us to be as authentic and real as possible, so please don't hold back. Right. Like, people really deserve the truth here. What I can make sense of this as would be she's showing us an aspect of reality that is what happens when someone becomes disconnected to their center or disconnected to their purpose. And again, I'm not here to. To all over this woman. You know, when I remember I met her in 2009 at, like, the first Paleo effects.

Yeah.

And I was like, wow, she's so cool. And I still feel that way about Melissa. I think just like feminism, just like all movements, they all start out with good intentions, but then they become corrupted and compromised by the energy of. Let's just call it demonic evil, because that's really what taking advantage of others is when you know you're going to harm somebody. Even if there's a shred of doubt in your soul that your actions may harm someone, and you still go through it and you still do it. I'm not here to judge her, but I am going to say, how could you not see that part of her acting out God and God dreaming through her in that way? I just don't see how anybody couldn't see it. Right on the screen right now is one of the meals, and it says olive oil. Now. Now, we don't know if in that olive oil there's other agents that we. Because it's not organic. None of the. None of the whole 30 meals that are sold in Costco. And again, it's on the screen right now. None of these ingredients are organic. So we know that there's pesticides, fungicides, all kinds of crap in this food to begin with. And she's knowingly peddling that. So how do you sleep at night there then? How do you sleep at night knowing the massive amounts of research that seed oils destroy people. And how could you stand on social media and make a satire of a boat that says like seed oil? She, she made a satire of it, which shows me from a psychological level that she's aware because she wouldn't satire herself unless she was trying to join the party of making fun of herself. If she were to just come out calm, cool and collected and say, hey, listen, I understand people might not agree with me here. This is the research that's been done. If she would have said, I'm open to changing my mind and been humble, that's a more trustworthy leader. But the fact that she's so adamant and she actually says the phrase, which is the same thing she said during COVID when she was guilting and shaming people for not getting the jab. She actually said, I believe it because it's science. And she said it like, like, like a dart on a dart. It's science. That's why I trust it. So science has become her God, and she's disconnected from God because God, no way in the purity of love would allow her soul to express itself in this way. What came up for you when this happened?

I wasn't that surprised, honestly.

Why?

I, you know, starting early in this. This world and, and seeing a lot of people build hundred thousands of dollars in their business, then millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions, it's all kind of cute, especially coming from the world of consulting, where I was like, starting off working with Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies. It's like these games. The people who are involved in them, the companies that they're leading, may feel very big to the people who are involved, but if you decide to go in the direction of scale and you change your definition of what you're up to and what you represent, is it all for not is a question that I would ask because I have seen it become all for naught for a number of the early leaders in this movement.

Right.

And I'm also fortunate to have gotten in early and met a lot of people at the first Paleo Effects and the, the first ancestral or one of the early ancestral health symposiums at, at Harvard back in the day, like I think 2012, and met so many wonderful people who seemed quite mission aligned, you know, and for me, it's funny because, like the world of vegetable oils and seed oils, I was working in as a consultant with major food and beverage companies, as well as principally in alternative energy. Like, I worked on a big biodiesel project that Essentially took fry later oil and seed oils and used it as fuel in the alternative energy economy. This is back in the 2000s, you know, the actual. Yeah, putting it into boats because boats can run on diesel, so can cars. I converted, I bought an old Mercedes diesel, converted it to run on vegetable oil, drove it around the country for three months and used it as my main car every time I stopped at a stoplight. Smelled like fried chicken. Because if we were using spent fry later oil. One of my first videos before I ever put out a podcast was about how this is seed oils. This is how it's made. It's me driving in my old Mercedes and I'm driving on this right now. I would never eat it though. I would never eat it again. I wouldn't put it in my body. Not on purpose, obviously. It's not always 110%. In my own life, we all have to make exceptions here and there. If you go to a restaurant, you're traveling or whatever, a little bit here and there, I don't think is, is the end of the world. But if you're saying that this is food, you're incorrect. It's gear oil. This is an industrial product. And so many industrial products have found ways to weasel themselves into our foods, our drinks, our environment, all the rest of it. So if you're making hundreds of millions of dollars to sacrifice everything you've ever stood for around the world of real food, I thought what Whole30 was, was about eating real food for 30 days. Right? Which I can get behind that if you're super strict about it though. I mean, our approach was whole 30 was over here on the super strict category. Right. And so were some other like, leaders in the health space and people writing books and doing lectures and, or starting their own companies. Whatever it was. We were more kind of in the middle where it's like, aim for this, you know, aim for real food. Fruits, veg and high quality meats. Make that, you know, the fundamental way that you eat. Avoid the newfangled stuff, the seed oils, the flowers, the artificial nonsense, all that. And so if now, you know, Whole 30 is coming over here, but it's like seed oils are okay. Like, there's no flexibility on other parts of the strictness. But like seed oils, totally cool. Now I look at that and I say, you know, in my mind, like, so you were either wrong for 10 plus years telling everyone that you were right and getting a lot of money to do so, or you're wrong now and now you're making a lot of Money telling people the wrong thing. And I am amazed by the tolerance or the short memory of, of folks who are out there who just pile on. You know, it's like, come on in, you know, the water's fine, Seed oils are great again. Eggs are bad for you. Eggs are good for you. Eggs are bad for you. Eggs are good for you. If you can keep going back and forth with your brand and stamp your stuff on anything that shows up in the grocery store, make lots of money doing. So what exactly are you doing here, right? Like, what, why are you here? Why is anyone paying attention to you? And when you, you know, reach the end of your life and you're kind of like looking back over everything that happened, it's like, what did I do here? And I've had a lot of interesting conversations post pandemic with people, especially in the music and creative fields as well. And this like, really makes me emotional where they're just like, man, I'm 58 years old and I feel like I've never done anything in my life. I feel like I've never really done the thing. Like, what have I contributed here? So I'm gonna start a band and do my thing now. You know, I've seen a few people do that in the past few years. I love that. But you know, the, the story of people, like getting too big for their britches, pursuing money, power, fame, the rest of it, it's fucking predictable. And so when I see it happen, it's a huge bummer. I lose a lot of respect for the people who kind of like make that call. I'm sure that everyone has reasons and usually it's money and money is cute, but it's not real. It's not real, you know, especially when you start talking about that amount of money with a human sacrifice on the other side. What the fuck are you doing? Is what I thought. And I just kind of giggled about it because now there are other people. I, I think this is tragic because she and many others are leaders, right? And people follow the leader. So even other intellectuals, scientists, really smart people are also piling on. They're like vegetable oils. Totally cool. Now buy my new book.

Yeah.

Wow, Mike dropped. Okay.

Yeah.

So I don't even know where to go from there.

Wow.

Okay, so science is really at its core, the Socratic method, right? Where you use. And Socrates talked about, can you disprove and prove and can you have a normal conversation that's intelligent and that's open minded, right? The beginner's mind that Paul Chuck Talks about that. I just love the beginner's mind. I think what happens in science, and I wonder how you all feel about this, is that these scientists get paid so much money. Think about the billions of dollars in grants that are afforded to scientific laboratories, specifically by food companies, for food companies, so that they have their theory proven, not disproven.

Yeah, sure.

Which is the opposite of the Socratic method. Not disproven. That's the big key, that science has become a dogma and a religion. Because if it was true science. And Sean Wells just talked about this on the podcast. He is a chemist and a formulator that has done some of the biggest formulations on planet Earth. And he always says, I'm totally open to changing my mind. This is what we didn't hear from Urban. There is no humility there. There's no fucking humility where she's actually at the table of curiosity in science because she's so rooted in God being the science. She even said on the post, it's rooted in science. Great marketing term, it's rooted in science.

So is the. Aha. What's the difference between Whole 30 and American hearts Association?

Right?

So any science, if we know that any science can be bought and sold, then at the end of your life, at the end of your existence, like you were talking about, I just. I can't imagine how she's going to feel when the wisdom of truth, not just subjective truth, but objective truth, where she can realize that her actions harmed people, that her actions actually harmed people. I can't even imagine what she's going to feel at that moment.

Right.

Am I perfect, by the way? Will I have those moments, too? Of fucking course.

We all make mistakes.

Of course I will.

Again, I'm not here to slander Melissa Urban, okay? I'm not fighting against what she's doing. I'm expressing light on something that I think is in her shadow. I think it's unconscious incompetence. I think that either she doesn't even know that it's there, she doesn't even know that she knows it's there, or even more sadistic, she knows it's there and she continues on anyway. And it's not up to me to judge or to say that I'm right and she's wrong, but objectively, if we float 30,000ft above this entire entire conversation in human health, how much science has to be bought and paid for. Because we, we just. We know intuitively in our soul that if you have to use Hexane and Propane and all these crazy gasolines to clean an oil and then put that oil in your body. In what universe would that ever be health? In what universe or without what lens of integrity would you finally just say, you know what? I'm sorry? And I hope that she comes to this moment. I hope that she comes to a moment where she apologizes and says, you know, I made science a God and I lost connection with God within myself. That's what I pray happens here. I don't know if y' all have any final thoughts on this topic. Well, I've done my best to not be in judgment. I'm sure it's popped up a little bit. Yeah, but that's my process, right?

To.

To just give her compassion on her journey. I don't know what that's like to be her.

Everything is inevitable. And I. I wish her and. And them and everyone at hole 30 the best. And there is always room to make adjustments and hopefully make things better. It doesn't have to be permanent, you know.

Yeah.

We all make the wrong call. We all make the wrong sacrifices. And it could be relatively innocent where it's like some co packer came and said, like, hey, yeah, we can do this, but we're not going to do it with real fat. We've just got to do it this way. And there's no other way to do it. Or if you have, you know, a spice company, they're like, well, we have to put the flow agents in there. You don't have to tell it like, everyone does it, whatever.

And.

And so if you just kind of cave, that's fine, but you're not part of the solution anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well put.

I mean, I. I think too, like, if I'm giving the benefit of the doubt. Right. The same way I told you, that neurologist that was putting keto cal in Savannah's G tube. I don't think he was trying to kill Savannah.

Right.

He was trying to harm her. I think he thought he was doing good because there was an authority that he was looking to for answers, and he trusted that authority. 30, like Abel said, like, whole 30 is now an authority in the world. The same way the American Heart association with their stamp on Cocoa Puffs and.

A very big one. I don't think people realize how massive hole 30 truly is. We're talking. We're talking about, like up there with Martha Stewart and the Tonight Show. Like, it's that big.

Exactly. But now. So I'm gonna. I'll do like a quick rabbit Hole. And try to do this quickly because I just had a conversation with Justin Mares about this, and he was like, what? And anytime I have this conversation with people, they have this says what? Right? And then I send them the research because I've been doing this for years, man. I've been down these rabbit holes deep. I don't think people understand what science is. And I really think Jack Cruz just had an episode on Rick Rubin's podcast with Huberman where. Oh, yeah, he basically schools Huberman for eight and a half hours.

That was. Did you listen to the whole thing?

I did.

That was insane.

Do you remember the moment where Jack Cruz is like, okay, And Huberman's just talking about all the studies that he's done in his own lab, because human has his own lab.

But there was lights on the ceiling lights.

Right. So keep in mind, right, these are sterile environments.

Yep.

Right. Which doesn't exist for anyone in human and anywhere. Right. We're always out in nature and there's. There's pollution in this room right now that we're dealing with. Right. Then how many of those studies, the. The in vivo, the in vivo studies and the petri dishes. Right. How many were under fluorescent lighting? All of them. Okay, so we know that light impacts cellular function, for sure. It's how sunlight works. It's why blue light is a problem when you're trying to sleep at night. All these things.

Right.

So we have the scientific environment, which is a completely unnatural environment. So, okay, these studies are kind of useless, honestly. Then we take it further. I did an episode once. I did an episode called Bad Science. I did an episode called Food is Not Bad for You. Different podcasts I've done over the years that I could send to you. And I went deep down the rabbit hole of rodent chow. So what happens in scientific studies is they feed these mice rodent chow. 1. A lot of these mice are bred for specific things. You'll have them like sterile mice that have a sterile gut microbiome or whatever.

Right.

They're breeding them for specific things. They're raised in a completely unnatural environment. Sterile environments under fluorescent lighting. Then they're feeding them rodent chow. So I got in contact with the company that makes the rodent chow, and there are a couple papers I can send you. You can put them in your show notes if you want to. But there was a guy named Matthew Ritchie who was the CEO of Science Direct or something like that, which was the company responsible for like 80% of all rodent chow in all universities. And laboratories around the world. And there's a direct quote from him that's like, yes, rodent chow has heavy metals, pesticides, other contaminants that we're not really aware of. And we actually never truly know the macronutrient breakdown of that rodent chow. So when you have all these scientific studies, one, over 90% of all nutrition studies have been done after the year 2000. The food pyramid came out in the early 90s. From the 1950s we have had ultra processed toxic junk food pushed on American people. Maple cereals, all the stuff that came out when my dad was a kid, right. So we had decades of people eating ultra processed food before 90% of nutrition studies were conducted on humans. So we're studying the sickest human population that has ever existed in history. Then we're using rodent models to decide what science we're then going to do in humans. Right. So the whole field of longevity in my opinion is completely wrong. The idea that caloric restriction is good for human health is insane. Right. Like we, we have a study where you'll basically take rodent A and feed it. I'm going to make up numbers like human numbers. It wouldn't equate to rodents, but let's say like Rodent A gets 2000 calories a day, Rodent B gets 1500 calories a day, Rodent B lives longer. The headline is caloric restriction extends lifespan. The real headline should be eating less poison makes rodents live longer. Right. So right now we have a message in society that food is bad for you. Food makes you fat, food causes obesity. Food raises your cholesterol, it doesn't po does. Poison is only bad for you. Food is only good for you. But you have to be very careful about the distinction between food and poison. So I mean Richard Feynman has talked about rodent chow, Matthew Richie talked about rodent chow. There's another guy in this same article talking about roden chow that like virtually 100% of the fat fed to rodents is PUFAs. It's polyunsaturated fats, usually from seed oils. The carbohydrates is like cellulose, right. It's like these animal to, to use a term that Rob Wolf talked about all the time, species appropriate diet. It if you try to mimic these things, they've done it in like Reese's monkeys. Caloric restriction put them in an actual like zoo like environment and fed them a species appropriate diet controlled for macronutrients. No benefit to caloric restriction on lifespan whatsoever. So what I'M saying here is I don't know that these people know how science is conducted. I don't think they understand what is happening. They'll read the headline or they'll go to PubMed and go to the conclusion. Turns out less calories made these rodents live longer. And they do this with seed oils. There's one randomized control trial. People send me all the time. Lane Norton debunked seed oils. This person debunked seed oils. This person debunked seed oils. And they go human randomized control trial. We took humans in a metabolic ward, studied their inflammation markers, and then we fed them seed oils for three days. And three days later, their inflammation markers were lower. Not only are seed oils not bad for you, they're good for you. They lower inflammation. Well, how do they do that?

Fat.

We know in hospital settings that polyunsaturated fats decrease immune function. If you decrease immune function, you're going to see inflammation levels go down. Polyunsaturated fats help the human body not reject organ transplants because they suppress immune function so much. You see what I'm saying? So it's like, okay, this stu you. You've decided this study is beneficial because you did what you measured, like, you know, hscrp and it went down. So seed oils are good. You're like, you're. No one is looking at the big picture of this. And Cruise does it with Huberman, he like, blows his brain out where he's like, all of your science is useless. And then Huberman just goes on continuing his podcast and is the number three podcast in the world. I think what science is now is an ego play for most people to parrot something they heard from a scientist so they can sound smart to their friends as an authority. As an authority, 100%.

Which really what you're talking about here is, is someone has an intention and then they frame the conversation or they frame the science so that it yields the desired result.

Yes.

And, and I want to go back because I. I jotted down a note here. I remember when Rob. I'm going to go back to this because it's still causing me some discomfort. So I got to go there when it was actually food lies. Brian Sanders, he posted about Melissa Urban's post and Rob commented. And Rob Wolf, he said, and I love Rob. He's been on the show like five times. I just absolutely have so much respect for Rob. So this is not anti Rob Wolf either, because I have a deep level of respect for Rob, but he went to bat for her. And he said, well, she actually consulted with me. And you guys have to realize that when you're looking at food choice, it's a wheel. And if you have people eating Cheetos and Funyuns and sucking down canola oil. Yes. Having them eat some, I guess, non toxically fed chicken breast with some olive oil that may be cut with canola that they don't have to put on the list because it's grass is okay. And I disagree. I think that when we start flexing our moral values, true, objective moral values, by the way, because I believe that there's a subjective truth in all of us. Everybody has a subjective experience of the world. I'm not here to say that anyone's is wrong. I am actually doing my best to speak from the we, to speak from what is good for the all. Do I have that perfect? No. But when Rob said it's a wheel of choice and I actually wanted Melissa to go forward on this, that broke my heart. This is Rob Wolf we're talking about here. How could he in any way condone putting seed oils into the body, even if it's just like a, a fingernail full. We know how these oils are produced. It just broke my heart. Did you guys see this? What do you feel about that?

That's the first I've heard of it. But you know, Rob always has unique takes on things and I, I respect the hell out of him. Love that guy. And I think it's important that we all listen to it. Everyone's response.

Sure.

You know, because like, let's have an.

Open mind to all of it.

I can totally see that argument as well, where it's like, if we're, if right now the cheetos are, are 10 out of 100 and 100 is great, you know what you're aiming for then getting, you know, like the masses, large amounts of people from 10% to 20%, you're still feeding them a bunch of shit, but it's like way better. It's less shit. It's less, but it's still shit. It's still shit. And I worry about the precedent that it sets because we already have the ha. We already have the American Heart association and a bunch of different organizations and institutions back scratching and revolving doors between the government, private and money making and this sort of thing. It's like, that's not really differentiated or doing anything now except for kind of like sucking up more stuff, whatever that. So I, I can understand why, why Rob would take that position. And I don't necessarily disagree. I, you know, it's kind of true, but I worry about that precedent. I worry about, like, as a leader, you know, as someone who is also, in some ways, some of the founding members of the Ancestral Health, at least in a popular way, movement online, like, like, for them to go in different directions. And it's important that we get each other's backs, but we also need to, like, tell each other the truth and hopefully double down on that truth because, like, things are bad. I don't know if people have looked around, but, like, things are pretty bad out there. Sometimes I feel like a janitor who's just, like, the worst at my job because, like, I've been at this for a while, really trying to keep true to these statements about, like, pretty simple, eat real food, get out there and move. Like, stuff like that. You start to make these exceptions and you say, like, like, well, eat real food, except, you know, soy oil is fine. You can feed your kid goldfish. And, you know, it's like, let's go to Disney World and just eat some cupcakes and stuff. And then all of a sudden you're on the Lean Cuisines, and like, what's the difference between Whole 30 and Lean Cuisine?

It's.

It's. It's a mess. And having come from the world of consulting, like I said before, just like, looking around at all this, different parts of the ecosystem, everything is kind of inevitable. It's going to. Someone's going to do it this way. But just, like, don't make it worse for everybody. Right? Like, and don't. Don't say that you're the good guy and that you're correct.

Yeah.

Like, if, if. Just tell the truth. Like, say people were eating Cheetos, now they're going to be eating vegetables that have a little bit of soy oil or canola. Canola oil. We don't even know which oil that it's got with, but it's better than Cheetos. Like, yeah, fair enough. But just fucking tell people that.

Yeah.

Don't say, like, we're still Whole 30.

This.

It's different. You just articulated that with supreme perfection because. No, really, because my children get the absolute best. If I know that there's just, you know, 1.0,000. If there's a millionth of a percent of arsenic in something, and I know that it's in there, I'm not putting that in my children's mouths or in my family's pantry.

Yeah.

So that's, that's my whole thing here. It's not. I want to take a breath because the heated conversation, for me, it's just like it flies in the face of everything that I hold true. And that is, you know, for Melissa, for Rob, for anybody. I want to come from a place of just seeing their point of view, really being open minded to their point of view. Yet the truth still remains. If something is 10% good for you or it's 100% good for you, why wouldn't we, in the grace of caring for ourselves and our family and our community, just aim for the hundred? Why would we not just aim for the hundred? Instead, we have this conversation where there's a tacit approval. It's like, like, well, we know that because economic disparity exists in concrete jungles that people can't aim for a hundred. And you're just a white dude that's privileged. So who are you to even speak about this? Let's just aim for the bullseye and if we miss, let's have compassion for ourselves for missing, but let's just continue to aim for the bullseye. There's. That's so such a noble pursuit. And I'd like to go a little bit deeper in this because the argument is from Rob that, well, we can't aim for the bullseye because you don't know what it's like, Josh, being in the concrete jungle and dealing with these types of things. I was raised on welfare, which means Velveeta cheese. I literally remember cutting Velveeta as a child. Do you know what kind of ramifications that caused for my sinusitis and lifelong, decades of antibiotics? I mean, it fucking destroyed me to where still just a couple years ago, I had my last surgery. That is a complete byproduct of the food that I ate when I was a child.

Right. Yeah.

So, so who am I to say that we, that we should aim for the, the bullseye? I'm the heart of every parent alive that would not want to cause their child pain. Like, that's what's most heartbreaking to me about this conversation.

Yeah, well, what's happening too is if we compare it to the AHA, right, we have Whole30 as an authority. The AHA is an authority. That's now that's what Whole30 is basically doing. It's like, if you listen to Casey and Kelly means talk about this, she's like, yeah, in the medical system, we're basically trained that Americans are stupid and lazy. Yeah. They're not gonna do the hardest thing. They're not gonna Exercise and eat healthy. So you just try to get them to do what you can get them to do and you give them the pill. Everybody just wants a pill. And they're lazy. Like, it's a fundamental belief that the American people or the global population is just stupid and lazy. So it's like, okay, well, there's no chance we're ever gonna get them to do 100%. So, yeah, let's just give them some seed oils because the seed oils are better, because they're definitely not going to do 100%.

Right.

Part of that is true. Like, if someone's drinking 11 Pepsis a day and I convince them to drink 5 Pepsis a day, that is a win. But it's still not ideal. And like you're saying we should be pushing for the ideal.

This is really powerful. I feel this, this isn't. This conversation is not meant to just be a fight against people. I want to be clear about that. But something that also really caused a rupture in my trust for Max Lugavere is he's at McDonald's in this clip. And Paul Check actually does satire on this. And he actually, he said this out loud. He said, if you really want a great high quality source of protein, go to McDonald's drive thru and order four patties that are sitting inside of a plastic polyphenol dish.

I remember that.

I was like, what. What planet am I living on where this genius of food is telling people to do this? And Paul explained to him the CAFO operations where cows stand on their own feces. And we all know the horrors of what goes into the. The meat of the cow. And then we eat that cow. So. And we'll post this on the screen right now so y' all can see this and put it in the show notes. You guys make your own decisions here. I'm. I'm not here to be a preacher or to tell you what, what you should believe. I'm just presenting my opinion. We're just presenting our opinions and y' all figure it out. But if you have a heart that beats in your chest, how could you eat that type of meat knowingly, on a regular basis? Occasionally when you go to a barbecue joint or when you have to make a decision. This is why I get Rob's taken and maybe Melissa's take on perfection versus good. Yes. Are there times in my life where I eat non organic meat? Yes, there are times, but it's very, very selective. And it's only when literally, I didn't have the means or I didn't have the awareness to go get it first and bring it to wherever I am. I do that, but I'm being honest about it. Right. I aim for the bullseye, and when I miss it, I give myself compassion. But I don't pretend that the bullseye is not in the middle. And I think that's the conversation that Max needs to look at in his heart and go, huh? Yeah, probably sending people to McDonald's is not the best thing. What do you all feel about this?

It's becoming quite political, you know, just in the sense of, like, the movement itself, of eating real food. And this whole thing has. Has gotten to the point where a lot of people in that movement want more influence, want more scale, need to network with people who come from different worlds, the worlds of politics. Right. And I deeply respect a lot of the people who are out there on the front lines of that fight. I don't want to be there. I don't want to, like, kind of be involved in that whole world.

The problem there, Max is there.

He is there.

So that's why I'm trying to have an open mind to this.

Yeah, but what compromises are you making or have you made to get there, to continue those connections and to continue to scale? It's kind of a similar, like. Like Whole30 problem, where it's like, if the. The whole world of personal brands and putting your books out there and your brands out there could acquaint people with strange bedfellows, you know what I'm saying?

So who.

Who are whispering in their ears or puppeteering. And I'm not saying this is happening to Max, but I'm saying this happens all the time. World of music, world of entertainment, world of nutrition is not some exceptional, you know, protected area of the world. It's.

It's.

It's gross. It's corrupt. Especially when you get to the upper echelons of these worlds, you start to see, like, oh, this is how it works. So they're gonna let me say this, but only if I say that. I guess I'll just say that so I can still keep saying this.

Yeah.

And I think that's kind of what's. What's going on. I mean, this sounds a little bit obtuse, but this is actually how it works in the back rooms before you go out in front of the microphone. And I think that a lot of people with these, you know, big followings are rewarded for doing the wrong thing. And that's not new. I mean, like, most people who are household names have gotten there by not being. Aiming for the bullseye of 100% wholesomeness or being 100% correct. There are compromises, there are adjustments, and then all of a sudden you find yourself in a place where you didn't even realize you could be. Sometimes, like, you get carried away with this whole thing. You don't even know what's happening. And I think, think that's some element at play there at, at play here. So we need to be really careful where all this goes. Because, you know, it was such a bummer, like, especially throughout the pandemic when the entire ancestral health, like, paleo world got imploded. You know, literally a lot of people.

Just exploded confetti everywhere. It was complete bifurcation.

It was disgusting and so sad because for a while there it felt like it was really going in the right, right direction and we were making a huge dent. Not just on, like, people on an individual level and the way that they thought and ate in their homes, but we're also building really powerful brands and companies that could help influence people in a positive way by, by literally feeding them real broth, real veggies, real foods, and. And then of course, they're like all these keto companies that come up and they're just selling cookies and like, then there are all these paleo companies and they're selling sugar bars and whatever. It's like, it's inevitable. But once again, ask yourself when you find yourself in some place like that, you didn't expect to be like, am I part of the solution or am I part of the problem? And if, like, if I'm here and I'm saying 80% or 90% of shit, that's true on this podcast. But 10 or 20% is designed to manipulate you.

You for your own financial gain, for.

For my financial gain.

Right.

Or to just kind of like, set things up in a way that I like that you don't. You're not even aware that I'm doing this to you, right? Like, that's what I'm suspicious of. Because this happens in business. It happens in entertainment, happens in politics. It happens everywhere. Be careful, because those people who have the 80 or 90%. True. But 10 or 20% is this manipulative, behind the scenes, unknown, subconscious, subliminal influence that is really scary. And some, sometimes people don't even know what they're doing. We're all just trying to survive, whether we're owning businesses or just like running our own lives, but the people who reach that level of scale where they feel this responsibility to their company, their employees, or their, the type of lifestyle that they're living that just requires more money. All of a sudden you don't have that freedom. You don't have that choice anymore. And so that's one of the reasons that I've loved staying relatively small and nimble and not going too deep and trying to scale some enormous. I've made a lot of early stage investments in companies that I believe in and I agree with a lot of the decisions that they've made. Fortunately, not many of them. It is kind of the business model to start real. The more you scale, the more you dilute the whole thing so that it can reach the masses. Doesn't have to be that way. We can, can, we can be better than that.

If you had to guess, do you think CTE will go that route?

I sure hope not. I mean, like, this is. Once again, there are so many different brands and companies and, and even like individual people who have built their, their brand and their trust with the people on the other side of that, whether it's food they're eating or messaging that they're listening to or science that they trust, whatever it is. But authorities aren't always right.

Right.

And especially during the pandemic, like the, the good versus evil type thing, the authorities that you heard from during the pandemic were kind of put there and the people who you didn't hear from were removed from the conversation. Rob and I have talked a lot about this. Mark Sisson as well, Chris Kresser and so many other people. Like, we had some of the most influential websites on the Internet for many years until Google shut us off. They just said, not you. And that's a huge problem. Especially when they're at the same time propping up other people who may be owned or once again, there's someone whispering in their ears. Sounds conspiratorial, but that's the truth. That is just. Anyone who doesn't see that is out of their mind at this point.

The last thing I ever want to be, and I mean this with every wholehearted cell in my body, I do not give a. About being famous. I don't want that.

Yeah.

I don't actually want. I don't have zero desire to be famous or be known or have. The only reason I would want more followers or more people is to impact greater change.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's not, I don't, I don't need that in my life. I've. I've battled enough with my own ego in regards to Projections on my lady and projections on my friends and. And showing up in ways that I learned through my own process of development were unbecoming of a loving man. I don't trust myself enough to be famous. I don't.

Yeah, it's weird because I don't. Strange. Strange thing.

What is that like? I mean, because if, like I said, combining the both of you, we're talking about hundreds of millions of people who you've helped to shape their decisions on. That's a big responsibility. And I guess even in the. The food world, one could even say that you're both micro or macro celebrities. Right. In your own way.

Yeah.

How have you held true? How do you hold true and not Compromise for the 80% of the hundred? How do you do that?

I actually want to get your take on this, too, because you've been doing this. Yeah, let's.

Abel, how do you stay true?

Well, I want to share this with.

You real quick, because I came with up on you. I listened to so many of your podcasts before I got a chance to meet you. And then I met. I met Abel, Rob, Mark Sisson, Diana Rogers, like, all at the same time.

I was.

I. I sponsored I. Clovis. My company was one of the funders for Sacred Cow with Rob Wolf and Diana Rogers, that documentary film, whatever. But, yes, actually, recently, I will be very careful here with information, but I turned down a lot of money very recently, like. Like a week ago. And it's one of these things where they came in and they're like, we love what you're doing, and we know that you have current products or whatever, but, like, so it was. It was a very large amount of money. The most. The largest lump sum of money I would have ever seen in my life. And it was basically like I would lose control of my company, and I would be contractually obligated to launch new products under my company. And they come in, they come to the table, and they're just like, we love what you're doing. This is amazing. We believe in your mission. And I'm sharing the mission with them, and I'm telling them about science, and we're getting all this deep conversation and everything, and they're just like, yeah, we love this. In the back of my mind, I knew, and I'm. I'm like, wait a minute. The. The dollar amount that they're coming at me with from a business perspective doesn't actually make a lot of sense. This is a lot of money. And I realized I had a conversation with somebody about this, that was like, influencers are the new billboard billboards and the new TV commercials. What these big companies don't have is influence and authority. Right. It's like they do to a certain degree. It's the same way, like when, when native deodorant came out. Right. They got bought for an astronomical amount of money just because they were like the first one to do it. They cornered this better for you. Market in personal care. It's easier to buy that person's audience than it is to try to start a groundswell or launch your own thing without that trust. So anyway, I, I don't know of any, like, thing like this has ever happened to you. It's like a music deal. Right. It's like, I know they're telling me right now, we believe in what you're doing and we're good. You have the final say and all the products that we ever launch, and we want you to promote them to your list and talk about it on videos and everything. I'm like, okay, but I'm going to be contracted at a salary. I'm getting a giant lump sum of money to hand over control of my business. So at the end of the day, I might enter into that contract and everything seems great.

Yeah.

And then a year later, they're like, we're launching this food product and it's full of seed oils. I'm like, I don't want that. And they're like, tough. You signed the line. We own this company. Yeah. You're contractually obligated.

Exactly.

To do this thing. Thing. So I've now seen this up close and personal. I never knew this would happen. I got 650, 000 followers or whatever now. And I'm like, wait a minute. I'm looking at numbers that don't even make sense to me, you know? And I don't. I'm. I've talked to you a little bit about this, but I don't know if anything like that's ever happened. Oh, yeah, you're.

Yeah, I'd imagine I said no many, many times over the years.

I had a feeling, man.

For at least a dozen years, I've been saying no to a lot of things. To most things.

What's one you can share?

I remember well when I first launched the, the podcast as Fat Burning Man. You know, it's. I'm clearly having fun with it. I'm out running, I'm talking to people. It was, it wasn't at the scale yet where I felt a large degree of responsibility to to maintain decorum. But I was extraordinarily dedicated to the message and, and staying true to it, which is just eat real food, stay the away from this corrupt system that's trying to take advantage of us. And so of course, you know, the people who represent the corrupt system don't tend to listen to the podcast or really care, but they're like, oh, this person has influence. This is before the word influencer was the thing. And I hate that word. But, you know, so they're trying to get me to sell fat burning pills and like with seed oils in it and all these other things. Things this, I mean, I get those offers annually that, that are very, very similar in that sense. Or to sell your own supplement that is not what you agree with, but could make this amount of money. So when they lead with the money that you're going to make aside instead of like what you're actually going to do to make the money, that's the first red flag. But one thing that happened during the pandemic as I was getting censored and banned and like getting locked out of my various social media accounts and getting removed from places.

You got locked out?

Oh, big time.

How did that happen?

I don't know.

You logged in. You logged in one day and Zuckerberg just pushed no on Fat Burning Man.

Well, we did post one particular interview with a nurse practitioner who said the for profit, for profit medicine is killing people essentially was a quick summary of what she said. Sharing that message got me locked out of Instagram forever. Under the Fat Burning man account?

No, it's still locked.

Oh yeah, I haven't used it since 2021 or 2022, like 40,000 followers there, whatever. I didn't use Instagram that much anyway. Like, I have several times over the past dozen years taken about a year off from social media, which, to answer your earlier question, is one of the ways that I've stayed sane throughout. Especially, you know, when I was on the, the primetime ABC show in, in 2015, 2016, combined with having the number one health podcast for like five years in a row between those two different things, the amount of people and, and offers that were coming our way, just like literally walking down the street in Austin, I'm walking my dog and like picking up dog or whatever and like people are slamming on the brakes of their cars, being like, hey boy, oh my God. Going to like Wheatsville Co Op or, or Whole Foods or whatever, just the grocery store, Central Market. H E B here in Texas is. I try not to talk because if people hear my voice from the aisle over, they call them running over and be like, trying to take pictures for Instagram or whatever. It's like, I am banned from Instagram. I am banned from these places because I made a career out of asking questions and I'm not allowed to ask questions. So I don't, I don't know how that all goes, but I'm glad that we had unplugged on several occasions. My wife and I at, at kind of the peak of, of these times to reevaluate. So, like, when that happened, we were planning on staying in Austin. My wife and I, but decided to take a breather. You know, we had been working really hard. We felt like we had made a wonderful dent in the world of, of eating and fitness and how we understand how to, how to help ourselves and our families be healthier. But we had kind of been burning the candle at both ends because this was like, like the sun was shining, it's harvest time, you know what I mean? You gotta, like, make hay. And. And so we were working hard and hard, and then it just became a little bit too much. So we escaped to the mountains of Colorado, took a year off from the Internet and let everything just kind of like quiet down a little bit. Spent lots of time meditating, hugging trees out in the woods, getting to know people at a deep spiritual level who had been doing that training for their entire lives, studying with them. And without that, I'm not sure who we'd be at this point or if we had tried to pursue scale and just kind of been enchanted by the idea of fame, money, power or whatever as many people are. I don't think we would feel the same level of meaning in our lives even if we had made that dent. And then we kept going like, like, yeah. I've seen so many people make regrettable decisions. I've seen so many relationships fall apart completely. People are building tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, Billion dollar businesses.

Yeah.

And their family lives are falling apart forever. They've lost sight of who they are. They've lost sight of why they're here. I've seen that happen enough times to be like, I never want that to happen.

I've felt that. And I'm. I'm in a different place in my journey. So I'm with a mentor, launching my first CPG product. It's about methylation. And as you guys know, almost 34% of people have issues with the MTHFR. And also as we age, our methylation goes down.

Yeah.

So my goal is not to scale it to like this hundred million dollar business. I don't really give a shit about that, honestly. I just know how good that I feel when I take my stack and I just want to share that with people. And one of the things you guys are reminding me to do is in the agreement actually say that I have creative and ingredient control to make sure that it stays solid, no how big it goes. So that's a. I'm really loving that this was the reminder that I, that I learned from both of y'.

All.

But also what I've learned today is that anytime that I sacrifice my truth or I sacrifice the, the honesty that my soul wants to bring forth, I actually give a little piece of myself away. And I'm not down with that. I'm not down with giving a little piece of myself away because I never get that bad or if I get it back, I'm on a deathbed or something. I, I say again what I said earlier in our podcast. I want my life to be a vision that my children can be proud of. And their children and their children and their children. I think about all the ways that we've all described the compromising of our soul. It's real, man. The. The dragon's tale of fame and the dragon's tale of having nine, 10 figures in your bank account. I can, I can actually feel it now. Like I said, I'm on a different journey, right? I haven't been in the e commerce world like y' all have been, but I can already, I can already sense it. This, this egoically serving kind of demonic energy that says, just take, just take, just take, just take. Who cares about them? Just take. Just. It's this element of, of greed and of self serving that at times can be so intoxicating. That's why I give grace to Melissa and that's why I give grace to anybody at that stage. God, please bring me the wisdom and the humility to be able to handle whatever kind of growth that I experience, because I want to be proud of myself when I leave, when I'm exiting my body and I'm looking down at my children. I'm spending time as a soul, as a spirit. I want to be proud of it. I want to feel good about what I've done. And I don't think any amount of money could ever compromise that. That. And I just pray that that stays the same for me.

Well, we'll be true to that. We'll make sure that you stick with that. Because one of the things that I. I wish would come back is like, I feel like. And maybe this is a fantasy in my head, but I don't think it is. It used to be, you know, a few decades ago or generations ago, if you owned the corner store, the grocery store in your hometown, right. Like, and you helped feed people real food from that grocery store store, you didn't need to franchise out and have dozens of. Dozens of these franchises popping up in. In D.C. and in Washington and the Philippines and all these. It's like you could just run a business responsibly, serve your community well, and be a beneficial part of that ecosystem. You didn't need to grow. You didn't need to pursue millions of dollars. Millions of dollars isn't what it used to be, by the way. It's like talking about these numbers in nominal terms starts to, like, fall apart pretty quickly, because just to survive, especially with a family, raising kids or whatever, it's like you do need to kind of make bank from something at some point.

Yeah.

But sacrificing your integrity to get there is. Is never worth it.

Yeah. Amen.

Yeah. I think an interesting thing, too, with having three men at the table. I know you have babies. Abel and I are talking about it, and, like, we're all partnered up. And. Yeah, I think another thing, I. I heard the story that Abel told me through Allison's lens, where she was like, it was weird, man. People were slamming on their brakes and yelling, Abel. And blah, blah, blah. Like, I think another thing with men, this. This world where it's like everyone worships at the altar of the hormosis of the world, right? Where it's like the most money, the most scale possible. It's like, dude, consult with your family about your own fame. What are the ripple effects of your fame? Right? I look back in my 20s, I wanted to be famous like crazy. I look back, and I'm 38 years old now. Now I can't believe I wanted to be famous. You could not pay me to be Justin Bieber. You know, it's like, listen, man, if you're in this game to provide for your family and give them a good life, and you want to make a boatload of cash, that's great, amazing, cool. But Megan and I have very intentional conversations. Megan scaled a massive beauty brand. She's a super successful entrepreneur and once had 300,000 followers and all this stuff, and it's like, so we have real talks all the time of, like, how important is fame? How much do we need fame to make the Impact that we want to make, make. How much do we need fame to make the kind of money we want to make? Legacy money for our kids or whatever. You have to have these conversations with your loved ones. If you're just driven by like, I'm gonna get as famous as possible, there's very real consequences in that for people that may not have signed up for it. Yeah, like stop and talk to the people that you love, man. Like, hey, I'm about to go down this path.

Yes.

You know, I. I mean, it can get real weird real quick.

Well, if you look at Kevin Kelly's number, it's a thousand true fans.

Yeah. Right.

If you have a thousand true Fans, pay you 100 bucks. That's a six figure business.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, 100K is a great place to start. That's a great goal for any human being on this planet. Like, can you. And obviously our USD is much higher compared to like Spain and other places. But if you can just like have a goal and pick a goal and go for it, you're gonna meet yourself to get it.

Yeah.

I met myself in creating this studio, in buying the house and the land. I met myself and it was not pretty. There was many times where I was like, wow, I'm an asshole. I'm a total.

Yeah.

And I'm projecting all this on my woman. That has nothing to do with her. It's all my stuff. Yeah. And I wanted to save space for this because, you know, we're winding down a little bit. Taylor actually had to leave because the conversation's going so long, which is great because I feel like we just started. Love it. But, but think about this. Feel into this. The, the way in which you talked about your cabin experience. And I know you shared this before, and if you've had any experiences with psychedelics, then I think it's valid to share this because they deserve ultimate respect. They can be used to. To really harm. Just like a hammer can build a house or you can kill somebody with a hammer. Psychedelics, I believe, are really similar. They're the same way. What did you learn from the wisdom of plant medicine when you went into the cabin? And what was the real gift in that for you?

Yeah, I mean, everything. The core of everything I teach, no matter what side door you come in, if. I mean, I have clients that hire me for, for business coaching or for relationship, masculine feminine dynamics or metabolic health, whatever. The ultimate goal for me is unconditional self love and radical self acceptance. That's what I did not have. So I can look back now at 38 with the understanding that I was constantly using the band aid of external validation. Right? Every night of my life for 15 plus years, someone was telling me I had the most beautiful voice. I'm so sexy, I'm so handsome, I'm this. And there's this constant external validation. All of my esteem was what I call other esteem and actually have self esteem. And society teaches us to build our esteem based on other esteem. Whether it's, you know, Goggins, if I don't run 100 miles, I'm a bitch, right? If I'm, if I'm hormozy, if I don't make $100 million this year, I'm just useless and I'm not a provider. But whatever story you're telling, the, the experience I had in the cabin was the most revealing experience I'd ever had for all of the parts of myself that I had deemed unlovable. And I talked to Paul, check about this. So I, I dry fasted alone in a little. A frame cabin in the forest, phone in airplane mode. I didn't allow my. I didn't read, I didn't journal, no music, no nothing. No external input of any kind, just me, myself and I. No food, no water for four straight days. And then I, I broke the fast if you want to call it with seven grams of mushrooms. And I had a nine hour somatic experience. My goal in this thing was no matter what comes up, no matter what I feel, no matter what I see, no matter what I think, I'm going to move through it somatically. I'm going to try to get out of my head. I'm going to try to not. What does this mean? What story is this telling? What does this say about me? I'm just going to move my body, ecstatic dance, pillow smashing, writhing around the floor. At one point I was in the kitchen with my head submerged in a bucket of ice water. Water. And was just like I don't think breathing is real. I think I've been in here for like 45 minutes just, just having this craziest experience in my life which was not actually was crazy. When I, after taking the mushrooms I was outside and I was like, I think it's time. And I'm like feeling it come up. You guys know the body experience of like the come up. And literal dark storm clouds came over me over the, the cabin and it started hailing and I was like time to go. And I just went in, in the cabin and had this experience and it was the. What I talked to Paul check about was the understanding that for me to be God, everyone must be God. For anything to be God, everything must be God. If you look at it biblically or whatever, like the reason God, the all powerful God who never struggles for anything, the reason that he doesn't just destroy Satan, because Satan is God and God is Satan. He can't kill self, right? There's no light without dark. There's polarity. Go back to the, you know, hermeticism and all these things, all these ancient things telling us that everything is everything. Everything, right? So I was forced to look at just the gnarliest parts of humanity you can imagine. I. I had really, really horrific visions. Really terrible visions of, you know, everything from like sex trafficking and molestation to war to. I was, I was swimming in like an ocean of dismembered body parts. I was seeing humans strung up in these caves, these giant insects, like, eating them alive. It was just like the craziest stuff. And I had to get to this place where not only did I accept all of this it, but I loved all of it and was like, this is it. It's like you said with Savannah, right? It's like God is experiencing every single iteration of what it means to be conscious. Every single thing. And this is a good, bad, right, wrong equation. It's like cold is not better than hot. Hot is not good, and cold is bad. It's like, yeah, like if you're, you know, if you're stuck in Antarctica and you have. And you're in shorts and you're going to freeze to death, cold feels bad. But it is. Is it actually bad? It just is, right? And this is the enlightenment piece. Go listen to Alan Watts talk about this stuff where it was just like, everything is everything and it is. So that was the cabin experience, was what allowed me to come home to. To come home to Megan and be fully seen and to be met with unconditional love. So when I look at her, as you said this about your baby today, he says, just look in these eyes and you'll see God. What you're seeing is the reflection of God. Right? You are. It's you. You're seeing you in this other person. Every single thing, everything we're doing right now, I'm communicating to mirrors that I've named Josh and Abel, right? It's me talking to me. It's you talking to you. That's how we play this game. That's how God does it, right? So as long as I'm willing to deem parts of myself unlovable, then I am robbing other of the opportunity to love me unconditionally. I can't accept unconditional love until I love myself. I can't give unconditional love until I love myself. It always works this way. So you have this system. I talked to Kyle Kingsbury about this recently. It's like when you really look at what's sold to us as good, whether it's how many lambos can you have or how many miles can you run, or are you a black belt in jiu jitsu or what is. It's always, always. Everything is a struggle, man. Everybody is fighting all the time. Jack Cruz is fighting with everyone. The vegans are fighting with the carnivores, the carnivores are fighting with the whole 30 people. And on and on and on it goes. It's a constant divide politics. Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. This is God and the devil. It is internal conflict with self. Until we can get to a place non judgment of self, unconditional safety with self, unconditional love of self. We can't give that to anybody else. And we're going to be constantly finding and seeking conflict. And we live in this massive world right now where it's just like conflict never seems to end. All it is is a reflection of internal conflict always. Same reason I don't make response videos to the countless influencers who make hate videos about me. Because I love them. They're perfect exactly as they are. If I meet them on the street, I'm happy to give them a hug. I don't need to fight with them. I don't need to change their mind. I don't need to debate them. I don't much care what they believe. I know my truth and I know who is my authority. And that's all that matters to me. But I had to get to a place where I was worthy of that title, being my own authority and unconditionally loving myself.

Were you feeling gratitude when you were crying? What were you feeling?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gratitude for freedom.

Yeah.

If. If the world looks at me as a teacher, the ultimate thing that I teach is freedom. That's it.

Yeah.

You're at the right table, man. My, my. My whole intention with this podcast and with everything that comes after this moment is to publicly become liberated myself and to share that process with others. And I really honestly believe that we are only as liberated as we're darkest secrets. Of course, we can only become as liberated as our darkest secrets. Because whatever I'm holding back, like you said, whenever I'm holding back the part of myself that I can't love, not only can nobody love it, they can't feel it. So they don't even understand how they could learn to love it. It's insane. It actually is insanity. Yet this conversation can change a life. I can actually feel it right now that somebody has been with us this whole time and they feel the way that we feel, and they may not agree with everything we've shared and. Good, because you're not supposed to. That's not how it's designed. But that's been my intention with, with wellness and wisdom is how do I learn how to live my life well, and how do I develop the wisdom in order to do so? And ever since I was a little kid, I always was like, what's up with these adults being so pissed off at each other? And what is this tax thing? And why is everybody arguing? I just knew at an early age, I'm like, it doesn't have to be this way. Yeah. And you touched it. You touched it. Doesn't have to be this way. Have you ever touched that where it didn't have. Doesn't have to be that way.

Oh, yeah.

Within yourself.

Oh, yeah, definitely. And I. I think psychedelic. Psychedelics early in the experience were. Were very helpful. Around the time I turned 30 and my wife as well. About 10 years ago, we went down to Peru and spent a couple of weeks there and did a few too many ceremonies.

Damn.

Ayahuasca, San Pedro combo and all the rest of it.

And so you went from zero to.

Hero in a lot of ways. Well, I was very. My older bro, who I. I brought up earlier, when we were growing up, he was hardcore into drugs early and drinking, you know, bringing like vodka to the seventh grade dance, getting in all sorts of trouble. So when I was growing up and a bunch of people who, who were athletes and highly respected kid who are a few grades ahead of me, got caught at a party drinking underage, lost all their scholarships, like a few years as I was coming out. And so I'm like, all right, totally straight edge, you know, like the whole time that I was coming up until college, and that definitely applied with psychedelics as well, because when I was younger, a bunch of my friends got into it, lost their minds. It was kind of ugly.

Yeah.

So my first experiences with psychedelics was coaching other people to not kill themselves. A number of times. This happened in high school. It's happened again with different friends in college. And I was always a straight, straight edge guy who was, like, helping them through this process. And then by the time I turned 30, I'm just like, well, wait a minute. I mean, like, I should. I've been so, like, tightened up for a long time, paying off my loans, working all these jobs, playing all these gigs. Let's try to break my brain a little bit. Let's try to. To. I. I didn't. I was afraid of breaking my brain.

Yeah.

And that's why I wanted to experience something a little bit more. But I wanted to do it in a respectful way that honors spirit.

Yes.

And a way that honors nature as well, because there's a difference between just like, going out and partying and having a good time and losing yourself and finding yourself with the help of substances. So we took going down to Peru very seriously. It was not a vacation, and it did not feel like we one either. It was incredible to experience that with. With Allison as well, because we had radically different experiences. Ayahuasca to her was similar to your experience. Very kind, very gentle. You know, the grandmother plant. And she had wondrous time just, you know, surfing around the moon and just, you know, experience all the magic of life. And I'm just getting, like, floored. Shamating coming out both ends. Just like the sickest I've ever been for day after day after day. And so weekend, I felt like whatever the higher power was was just wiping the floor with me for a while. And at the same time, in the. In that, like, deep physical pain that I was feeling and feeling just, like, horribly ill to try to not vomit more. This was like the fourth night. I want to say middle of the night. And I had been practicing qigong for a while and doing meditation practices. And so just in my head, I was too sick to get up. And so in my head, I went through this whole series of different moves just to try to distract myself. So I imagined myself, like, getting out of my body and focusing all of my energy and intent there and walk to the middle of the temple room and started doing a set of qigong exercises.

Oh.

And so at the end of the night, the. The shaman comes by, and he sits with. He lights a candle to say, you know, without saying any words, this is kind of the end of the experience. And he'll go to each person around the circle. And there were only. There were less than a half dozen of us there because this was like, not even an official event. It was pretty much like a private thing just with us. And so he. He comes up to me, and he's just like.

Like, Abel, that was really interesting.

I haven't seen that particular qigong set before. And I was just like, wait, you mean you. I was here the whole time. He's like, yeah, yeah, you were. You were basically asleep. But that stuff that you did when you moved your hands like this and you put the fire out of your mouth was just like, I hadn't seen that move forward. I'm like, wait, you watched what I did in my mind throughout this whole experience? And he's like, yeah, of course they did it. No problem. And I was like, what? For me, it was. And Allison had a similar experience as well, where, like, this shaman gave us a play by play of what was going on in our minds. And so for me, at the time, that just, like, shattered my idea of reality. And a few more experiences happen. And at some point I realized, well, okay, so combo was bad.

Bad.

The frog poison medicine, right where they burn off part of your arm.

I'm not called.

This stuff.

I'm not called.

I had an immediate allergic reaction. And my face just starts going, yeah.

You know it's poison.

Yeah, exactly. And my eyes start closing. Allison's like, right next to me. She's doing fine. She had a camera on her. She's like, picture of me at my absolute worst. I'm like, wondering if I'm about to die. And I might have been, I'm not sure. But since I didn't die, I was severely weakened for a while, but eventually came back. And when I did, felt a deep connection to everything, to the fact that we are immortal souls that can never be removed, that can never be taken away. People can lop your limbs off, they can cut your head off, they can do whatever they want to to you, and they cannot touch this. So when we've had, you know, a near death experience together after all of that happened, it actually, I mean, it was horrible. And we. The amounts of pain that we were in, in is something that I could never put into words. And the pain that you experience when someone you love is in that deep level of pain and almost not making it is something that. That cannot be described. But if, you know, when you feel that this is all meant to happen, you are deeply connected to something far bigger than you, then no problem. It's like when I was poisoned by carbon monoxide and could not get up. I remember, like, my brain wasn't there. It was like just this horrible pain and emptiness. But so my body was offline, you know, my brain was Kind of offline, but my soul wasn't. My soul was there, and I remember that. I remember that feeling. And it'll never go away, but I don't. So if that had happened before, all of the psychonautics of going deep into the spiritual side of things and really trying to connect through plant medicine, I'm not sure we would have come out the same way at all. And so I encourage people to. If it feels right to them, to experiment with it under the right circumstances. Not a party, but with responsible people who know what they're doing and will treat you well with a high level of trust. If you feel called to go in that direction, I would highly encourage people to do so, but not to live there. Once again, like, the whole point to me of taking these substances and these plants is.

Is.

Is such that you can experience that and you can go to this place so that you know that it's there, and then you can find your way back with or without plant medicine or anything else for the rest of your time on Earth. Hopefully after that, too. Yeah. You know, but it's that. That journey of discovery that you have to think really seriously, and I. I think it's really important that people understand that it can go sideways on you. I've seen a lot of people get carried away in the wrong directions with this stuff, so you have to be careful.

Oh. I mean, my audience has already heard my story, but I'll give you the really quick clip that. That applies to both of your journeys. And by the way, it's just. Can you imagine when you were 15 or 20, in the depths of your process, that we'd be sitting here talking about this?

Right? Yeah.

Yeah.

I would have made fun of us.

Yeah.

I'd have been like, what the hell are these guys talking about?

These are crazy people.

Freaking weirdos.

Yeah.

So what I wrote down on the paper when you were sharing was fear. And yes, fear can be false evidence appearing real, or forget everything and run. But it also could be for everyone's attention responsibly. For everyone's attention responsibly. And that's what I took from my 12th and final ayahuasca journey, which was I got smacked so hard, I can still feel her fingers on my face. And it's five years later. I don't need another ceremony. I almost didn't make it back.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, God, for this. Thank you for this relationship with Paul that he was able to. That I met him at the Heaven house, that he was able to teach me how to meet this entity that I took home from Costa Rica that I was able to heal over 18 months, my OCD. So what you're speaking to deserves massive attention. Fear can be rational or irrational. When it comes to psychedelics, it's rational. There is rational fear that is needed in that space. Now, do I recommend that people do a four day water fast and do seven grams? Nope. But that's the, that's the product of your work, that you respected yourself enough and you trusted yourself enough to go there. Same with you for two weeks in Peru. But there are some people that, that maybe have unearned wisdom and they trust themselves, so they think, and then they go with an intention of scarcity and they get taken by a shaman who has dark, malevolent intention, which, to be honest, I'm not gonna name the center, but that's. That's what happened for me. And I say for me, because I don't wish that on anyone else, what I went through. I'll link an episode where I go deep into it here, but I almost didn't make it back.

That shit is real.

I almost didn't make it back. Like, I. I brought home something that was so dark, so sinister. But Paul looked at me and he said, said, well, the only way that an entity can live is if you have the space for it to do so. That's the only way an entity can really reside in you. Which was beautiful wisdom as well. So over the course of a year and a half, I just sat with myself over and over again with these. I mean, I was having insane looping thoughts to the point where I was like, have I gone mad? Have I actually. You know, the Native Americans call it soul loss. When you go into ceremony, you get shattered. I actually do believe that I had soul loss and I had to go retrieve parts of my soul from this, this teacher, this dark teacher that essentially was there to teach me. So it was good. It was loving this entity. But if I didn't have the right support from Paul and, and doing what I had done for podcasting for so many years, at that point, I may not have made it back. And that's real for a lot of people.

Yeah.

So just because Abel and Justin are sharing about their journeys does not mean you need to do that. You don't need a church to find God. You don't need ayahuasca to find God. You don't need psilocybin to find God. There are people in this world that are incredibly enlightened beings that have never Been to a ceremony in their lifetime, but they just live as if life is the ceremony.

Yeah.

And that is the most beautiful, poignant thing that I can encapsulate on this. This journey. Sharing. Because this is ceremony.

Yeah.

This podcast is ceremony.

Yeah.

So, wow. What an amazing conversation.

And in some ways, nothing is more sacred than anything else. Right? We've had this conversation before. Like, it's all meant to be. It's all here. It's all you.

Huge.

Yeah.

There was a.

It's all wet.

It's all you. It is.

Well, I'm. I'm creating this, as are you. God's dreaming through all three of us. There must be something special here, because there always is.

Yeah.

What were you gonna say?

I was on Wachuma at 15, 000 foot feet elevation in Peru again.

You seem to like these heroic journeys. Well, but you can't just do it on, like a weekend. You have to go to the. To the ends of the.

I mean, my first psychedelic experience was. Was ayahuasca in Peru with Don Howard. First I'd ever. I'd never done mushrooms.

Yeah, you went to outer space.

Yeah. And I had done hero doses of just about everything prior to this cabin experience. And to your point, I would probably never recommend that somebody do that. I had tremendous trust in self before I did that, you know, so it's like, I totally agree with you. I think you need to tiptoe into this thing, find people, find mentors, find people who can help you through this thing, who are really, really grounded in it. But, yeah, I mean, like, we had. I told Abel this. Megan and I shared this with Abel and Allison the other day. We were like, yeah, this conversation with somebody where I was like, listen, we've put meaning behind being in the Sacred Valley. We're told the Sacred Valley is an important place. We're told that being at 15,000 foot elevation is very important to see this vista that we're looking at. We're told that this guy who is, you know, his lineage created this watchuma. This is the important thing. And now we're getting all these epiphanies, and I was like, the experience that we're having right now is not better, worse, good, bad, right, Wrong. It's no different than me scrolling Tick tock in my bathtub. I can get the same insights I'm getting here.

Yeah.

From scrolling Tick tock in my bathtub. And that's where enlightenment comes in. And I don't think people understand that. You don't have to do this. You don't have to go to the Sacred Valley. You don't have to drive fast in the cabin or whatever. And my. My journey is not anyone else's journey. It's unique to me. Me. And it's. For me, I had to do all these things to get to this place where I can know that tick tock in the bathtub is the same as Peru. But I didn't know that 10 years ago. I was like, oh, I thought it was so important to go to the right place in the right facility with the right person. And I've worked with shamans on, like, four different continents now. You know, apparently I had to do that to get to this place. I'm glad I got here, but that doesn't mean people should be emulating my journey.

I remember Darren Olien. I interviewed him at his place in LA before it burned down. And I was talking with him about ayahuasca, and he said, you know, I went once, and she looked right at me and she said, never again.

Yeah, there are.

There are some people where it just takes one. And so, yeah, with respect and reverence to any medicine, I'll close this conversation by saying, be careful of unearned wisdom, which is what Peterson says that Paul actually fought me on. And I respect Paul. He said, you know, no, no, wisdom is actually unearned because you're learning it by making the mistake or having the lesson. And maybe there's more for me to learn there because I still hold true to the be careful of unearned wisdom. So that might be another podcast I have with him. But. But what is the wisdom that y' all have about your journey and what has brought you here? You know, how do you live free? How do you live your life? Well, essentially, what is the. The ultimate essence of wellness for you and how important of how. What can you share with people about what wisdom is most important so that they can live their life?

Well?

We'll start with Abel.

I would say try to be healthy enough. Kind of like we were talking about before with. With that pillar of overall wellness, like, get that dialed in early because, like, a little bit of trajectory change early in the process can lead to radically different outcomes. If you. If you get some of these messages, and I'm grateful that I did in my 20s, you know, know, like, if I were 40 years old and hadn't gotten those messages now, hadn't taken them seriously, I would be a fundamentally different person. Could even be dead at this point. Like, who knows? So try to get that such that you have the ability to take risks that look wild to other people, risks that they'll never understand because those are the ones that are truly you. It's, it's worth it. The things that, that feel totally rational or aligned to you, where everyone else around you is just like, are you sure about that? Like, don't do that. You can't do that. Like, if you feel totally aligned in something, then you don't need to listen to their truth. You don't need to listen to their conditioning. You can listen to it, you can entertain it a little bit. Sometimes it's good and you'll course correct, but a lot of times you'll just keep on going that way. And ultimate, ultimately you'll find that that is your path because if you don't, then you're just going to be shuffled into some corporate position or some vocation or some way of living your life that is pretty plain, pretty plain vanilla. And then all of a sudden you're going to be 58 years old or 70 something, or in your 90s and being like, man, I don't think I ever did anything here. I'm gonna start a band. You start. But no, you need to take health seriously so that you can take radical risks with your time here on earth. Otherwise you'll just turn out exactly the way that the government and corporations want you to be. And I think after the past few years, it's pretty obvious that they don't have our best interests in mind when they're hurting us in one direction or another. So to exercise the freedom of your spirit. Spirit, you have to have some level of health over this vessel that we have here. Dial that in so that you can do some wild stuff with your time here.

I would say so.

Good.

So wellness, the, the wisdom that's required to live life well, what do you make of that? How do you define that?

Yeah, for me, I've said it multiple times in this conversation already, but it's, it's just unconditional self love. I really think that to me, again, to, to go back to what Abel said, this is my subjective truth, right? My journey is my journey. Everything. This is my truth. I believe it. If it makes sense to people, great. If it doesn't, that's okay with me too. But the ultimate goal is unconditional self love. And I think that if you don't know what that means, or you can't feel that, or you find yourself judging or shaming yourself constantly, or old programming of just constantly not trusting your own decisions or feeling Weak or you're not good enough or whatever. Find somebody to help you map out the routine for self love. I call it bicep curls. Self love, bicep curls, right? So many people are focused on optimization in so many areas. Whether it's building muscle or getting the nutrition just right, or getting their biohacking down, or how many minutes do I spend in the cold plunges, right? Put that amount of intention to how you feel about yourself. Get whatever help you need to somebody that can paint you a roadmap or a path to at least the bicep curls for your own journey. Me, Unconditional self love is the pinnacle of wellness to me because I can create from that place. You said this about your personal training experience, right? Like, I can create whatever body I want to create. I can create whatever business I want to create, whatever romantic relationship, whatever relationship with my children. I can change my consciousness experience at any time. But I can do it from a place of self love and abundance and curiosity because I just want the human experience. I think the point of life is experience, right? I'm not changing my consciousness experience or changing who I am because I hate myself or I don't have low enough body fat, or I'm not making enough money or I'm not talented enough, whatever. I think a lot of people think that they're going to lose their edge somehow if they stop hating themselves, you know, And I don't understand that. I. I can be way more abundant. What you talked about light versus dark. Now that I've done all this work, I've done all the shadowy stuff, all the scary stuff, the cabin experiences and all that stuff. And what I've learned is like, wow, it really seems that the point point has shifted from all of the darkness and exploring the depths of self and the parts that I think are ugly and scary and challenging to, like, how much am I willing to let myself receive? Yeah, because, man, from where I'm sitting, like, love is as available as oxygen. Money is as available as oxygen. Adventure is as available as oxygen. Friendships make new friends all the time. Go to this amazing studio. It's just like we live in the garden of Eden, man. It's just like this amazing experience all the time. How much are you willing to let yourself receive? And why are you choosing conflict all the time?

I was doing a live this week and somebody wrote in, they said, well, when I get to the gates, will I be let in if I'm a sinner? And I was like, why? Just like derailed my whole life And I just said, well, the gates of heaven and hell are here right now. Yeah, they're here right now.

Yeah.

What I focus on as being my victimhood or what I focus on as being oh, woe is me or why is this happening to me? And challenging things, egregious, crazy things happen for people. But I really. Maybe another podcast in the future we can go over would be the way that we use language as prayer, in the way that we use language as spell. Because whether it's nutrition, whether it's self talk, whether it's self love, whether it's wellness, whether it's music, whether it's wellness, Pentagon, whether it's anything, we've all been casting spells here, right? And y' all don't need to believe any of this. And I.

And they still work on you.

But, but yes, it's, it's. There's. There's so much truth in what you both have shared. So I'm just, I'm very grateful for this connection. It happened in a way that was pretty magical and surreal how Austin just connected us and then. And I just intuitively felt whatever actually meeting you that it was you needed to meet Paul and I had been following you and heard about your work for a long time. It just never was the right time. And now it is. And so just trusting, like actually learning how to trust God and trust life has been my ultimate surrender. The. The way in which I can just let go of having to control everything, let go of abundance, having to look a certain way, let go of it being a square that I have to fill. And that's been a big lesson. So I'm glad that we got to share. So many ways outside of the box, inside of the box too. It's been a real joy. So thank y' all for coming.

Thanks for having us. Really grateful.

Epic. Really epic podcast. I love having multiple minds at a table because you never know n hearts. You never know what's going to happen. That's why it's so fun, so novel to tell people where they can connect with you more. Justin.

Yeah, I'm on social media everywhere. Just Justin Nault official. My last name is N A U.

L T. And if people love, if you love what Justin is sharing, it's justin nal.com forward/free. There's a training there, which is pretty cool. I caught a couple minutes 20 minute training video on 20 minute free training going into the depths of what we're talking about. Obviously, fatburningman.com is the website abeljames.com.

Has most everything, especially if you want the more like esoteric stuff or more experimental for for a lot of the health stuff. Yeah, Fat Burning man is going to have your tasty recipes and a lot of the shows, but abeljames.com has all the rest of it.

Okay, sweet. Make sure you all subscribe and follow until we see you on other podcasts. We're all wishing you love and wellness. Talk with you soon.