In this episode, I chat with Dr. Kelly about what it's like to live in Los Angeles in the summer, what it s like living in New York in the winter, and how to deal with the seasonal depression that comes with living in the city. We talk about the benefits of living in LA, the pros and cons of living there, and why it s better than living in NYC. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it makes you want to move to LA! This episode was produced and edited by Haley Shaw. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Mixer: Alex Blumberg Additional mixing and mastering: Andrew Bergman Special thanks to our sponsor, VaynerSpeakers. Thank you so much for your support and support of the podcast! If you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, rate, and tell a friend about what you're listening to us! We're listening and sharing this podcast on your social media! and we'll get a shoutout on the next episode! Timestamps: if you leave us a rating and review on iTunes! Thanks again for listening to this episode! :) and review us on Podchaser, <3 stars! - Timestar - Tim's Insta: . Thanks for listening and review - Thank you for your feedback! & & review? thanks you're a rockstar, Timestars: - - I'll be back next week's episode is thank you for this week's review is - Cheers, Tim's review will be out in the next one's review and review is out next week! - Tim's new song is out on Tuesday, Tims is out!! so much love you can help us out on this episode is out there! -- Thank you, Timed by you're rockin' with this episode of this episode? and I'll send it out to the rest of the whole world with this one? - thank you, so much thanks to you, too much love, thank you to you. - your review is so much more!
00:01:12.000And there's something refreshing about it because we don't pretend to be okay.
00:01:15.000I mean, we're deeply not okay in New York, chronically.
00:01:19.000Well, is someone okay, like in general, anywhere?
00:01:22.000Is there a spot like, oh, yeah, Seattle, they've got it nailed?
00:01:25.000I mean, there's this term actually in the medical literature, believe it or not, called paleodeficit disorder.
00:01:30.000And it just refers to like how far have you strayed from the path in your lifestyle?
00:01:34.000Like basic stuff, green space, movement, you know, sleep.
00:01:38.000And I would imagine that if you have more of those components intact, you're probably a bit more okay than if you're living, you know, in, you know, midtown Manhattan.
00:01:49.000Like Seattle in the summer to me is a really good place because it's so green and it's so pretty and the ocean's right there.
00:01:57.000So you're getting some good air and then you're getting sun because it's the summer so you don't have that seasonal depression thing that goes on.
00:02:04.000I mean, I imagine they're doing better.
00:02:27.000But recently I've been playing around with the idea that there's actually something cool about, like, you know, sort of cyclical living.
00:02:36.000It's almost just, like, if you embrace it, then there's something, just like everything's dead and miserable for a period of time, and then it blooms, and then you get to experience, like, this rebirth, and then it, you know, flourishes, and then it dies again.
00:02:52.000But there's another perspective on that actually being I don't know.
00:02:57.000It's sort of like a woman who's on birth control has no idea that there's any point to, you know, a cycle of energy over the course of the month, right?
00:03:07.000And she sort of thinks that's annoying.
00:03:08.000But there's a way you can wrap your mind around it where you work with it.
00:03:35.000I'm 39. I was on birth control for 12 years, so I never knew what it meant to have, like, a menstrual cycle until very recently, because then I had two kids, breastfeeding.
00:03:46.000So a couple decades into my life, I'm just figuring this out.
00:03:49.000But you have, like, totally different kinds of energy over the course of the month.
00:03:53.000And you have to know how to work with that.
00:03:54.000So there's a kind of energy that, you know, you want to go out and socialize or you want to stay in and work or you want to sleep more or less.
00:04:00.000And if you don't know how to ride that, then you could be sort of taken off guard by it.
00:04:06.000But if you know how to work with it, it's so much more powerful than just having this like artificial hijacking of your endocrine system.
00:04:25.000But I have thought about birth control before, about how crazy it is that you give a woman a hormone that convinces her body that she's perpetually pregnant.
00:04:32.000And that a giant percentage of women are on it for convenience.
00:04:45.000Younger and very much asleep, I identified as a feminist.
00:04:48.000And I was one of those people who thought that birth control was like a female entitlement.
00:04:53.000Like, how dare you not make this free and widely available?
00:04:57.000But as I began to research more about it and more about how it's in many ways like the ultimate You know, not to sound too inflammatory, but the ultimate tool for oppression of, you know, the modern woman.
00:05:10.000Now I find it incredible that we, you know, that we're still taking it because it seems like a good idea, right?
00:05:17.000Who wants to deal with your annoying menstrual cycle?
00:05:47.000And like the pheromones you secrete, you know, and there was just a million woman study in Scandinavia that showed about the vast increase in antidepressant prescribing for teenagers who are prescribed birth control.
00:06:01.000So it's the beginning of sort of, it's like a gateway drug sometimes for psych meds too.
00:06:07.000I heard, I had a friend who, one of his good friends, his daughter died from some complications with taking birth control pills and smoking cigarettes.
00:06:25.000And you don't even have to have that additional risk factor, you know, because birth control, whether it's the pill or something called the NuvaRing, by itself has that.
00:06:34.000You know, I'm contacted often by parents of girls who have died from pulmonary embolism who've now become like activists in this realm.
00:06:47.000Like, I think that's not being suppressed or hidden.
00:06:50.000It's just that we are sort of entrained to dismiss the risks as we attach to the promise.
00:06:56.000So we sort of like collude in ignoring that potential, you know?
00:07:00.000That's so interesting because most people when they think about the birth control pill they think about it as something that liberated women because they can control whether or not they got pregnant and they were allowed for the first time to have careers and do whatever they wanted to because they didn't have to worry about being trapped.
00:07:26.000Chris Ryan was on here, Dr. Chris Ryan, the author of Sex at Dawn.
00:07:29.000He was on here and he was talking about how women can, like if you smell the clothes of other men, you can literally tell the men that you are attracted to, you would be biologically compatible with those men.
00:07:42.000And that when they did these same studies on women who were on the birth control pill, they couldn't smell the difference.
00:07:51.000Well, essentially, the premise of pharmaceutical medicine is that you can just pull one little thread of the spider web and leave the rest of it intact.
00:08:05.000So with birth control, for example, the idea is we're just, you know...
00:08:10.000Taking over the management of your sex hormones, but the rest of your body is going to be totally unaffected.
00:08:15.000And of course, as we learn more about how all of these systems are totally and inextricably interconnected, we have a better understanding of how when you...
00:08:41.000We haven't even begun to look through the keyhole of the effects on brain and neuropeptides in these arenas where we don't have any idea what hormonal secretion is about.
00:08:53.000We just have to defer to the probability that our bodies are more complex than we've expected.
00:09:31.000That's going to be a common answer, I think, I have to give you, is that we don't really know.
00:09:37.000But it does make sense that the subtle nature of your biology that involves sort of guiding your human interactions, and particularly sex-related interactions, is going to be derailed.
00:09:49.000I mean, low libido is one of, ironically, the most common things.
00:09:53.000Disclosed side effects of birth control.
00:09:55.000So you're taking it so that you can have unprotected sex.
00:09:58.000We don't feel like having sex ultimately anyway.
00:10:01.000So it's not even really that well thought out, I think, by most of us.
00:10:06.000But what other alternatives are there?
00:10:08.000I mean, if you're a woman and you want to have control of whether or not you get pregnant, there's not a whole lot of options other than weird ones like IUDs, which seem real weird.
00:10:18.000Yeah, I mean, some of my patients use what's called a copper IUD. You know, it's funny because I had one put in and two and a half, it cost like $700, and two and a half weeks later I had it taken out because I just felt weird about having like a pharmaceutical metal in my hand.
00:10:33.000My body was felt like a tracking device.
00:11:12.000Because with all of these side effects we've been talking about, there was a male birth control study that was just terminated because of how many side effects the men didn't want to deal with.
00:11:22.000So there's such a sociocultural double standard around this.
00:11:25.000But if we're talking about six days a month, How about we collaborate and try and figure something out?
00:11:29.000You know, that doesn't involve a risk of death, perhaps.
00:11:32.000So this daisy thing just monitors your temperature and tells you exactly what's going on?
00:12:18.000I mean, my interest in it really came from looking at the psychiatric side effects because I'm very interested in medications that have potential, you know, gateway effects around psychiatric meds that we aren't informing women of before, you know, they start the prescription.
00:12:34.000So, you know, whether it's like acid blocking medications, you know, or antibiotics, You know, birth control vaccines, these things have known psychobiological effects.
00:12:46.000If you don't know that, then you'll never connect the dots.
00:12:49.000And then you end up in the polypharmacy realm where you're taking multiple meds without ever knowing where the dominoes started to fall.
00:12:57.000Yeah, I remember there was a commercial that they used to have, I don't know if they still air it, but it was for a psychiatric medication that you take who's an antidepressant when you are depressed from antidepressants.
00:15:02.000Like, say if they put you on some Zoloft or something like that, not to pick on Zoloft, but then they say, well, this is not really totally doing it for you.
00:15:12.000We're thinking about stacking Abilify in with the Zoloft, and I think that just might be the ticket to your happiness.
00:16:46.000When I watch those commercials and those beautiful piano music playing and there's cartoon flowers that are smiling at everybody, I'm like, what are they selling me?
00:16:59.000Multi-billions are put into those commercials, yeah, for good reason.
00:17:04.000So there's no real, like, there's not like a blood test or something they give you where they say, I think this is going to be the ticket for you.
00:18:25.000It feels really good because you're making like 20 grand a year working your ass off.
00:18:29.000And so when someone takes you to a fancy restaurant with your friends, but you could convince yourself that it's not actually going to, you know, that you're an intellectual and you're going to make your own decisions.
00:18:39.000But All of the data suggests otherwise, that you are unduly influenced by that kind of courtship behavior.
00:19:17.000Do they even ask you, like, does a normal...
00:19:21.000I guess someone who's really good would, but...
00:19:24.000Is your diet and your sleep patterns, is that a consideration before they prescribe medication?
00:19:31.000No, in fact, most sort of turncoat doctors like me will tell you that we have one hour of nutrition education in all of our medical school and residency training.
00:19:56.000Just for being honest about this stuff?
00:20:00.000Because I guess the kind of science that I bring to the table, which is not my own, I don't have any original ideas, but I am really good, I think, at curating information and collecting it and synthesizing and presenting it, right?
00:20:13.000So what I have to shine a light on is very inconvenient science for industry interests, but also for conventional practice, because, you know, I don't prescribe medication anymore under any circumstances ever.
00:20:29.000But I do have an entire practice devoted to taking people off of medication.
00:20:35.000So I have sort of my thing, and it's a lot based on lifestyle change, as you mentioned, right?
00:20:41.000If you don't have your methodology as an alternative to prescribing, And you're going to acknowledge what a lot of the science says that condemns the pharmaceutical approach.
00:21:16.000It's just they all agree on it, and they're just going to keep doing it, you know?
00:21:19.000So this consensus medicine, like in psychiatry, there's kind of like this understanding that you don't criticize the system that everybody's operating under.
00:21:37.000Like, I read more science than probably all my conventional colleagues put together because I have a lot of incentive to do so because I'm practicing outside of the...
00:21:46.000You know, the gold standard, so to speak.
00:21:48.000So when you're in the fold, why would you bother reading science?
00:21:56.000So it's, you know, the reason that lifestyle is not presented as a relevant factor in conventional medicine is because We're good to go.
00:22:36.000Maybe it's like of minor interest, but the real problem is your inborn genetic chemical imbalance, right?
00:22:43.000So if that is the premise, and it's not just in psychiatry, it's in all of medicine, is gene-based determinism frees pharma to offer the only solution.
00:22:53.000And it actually validates people on some level as the victim, right?
00:22:59.000So like a lot of people want to feel that.
00:23:07.000Even though there's science that supports that having a healthy, nutrient-dense diet allows your body to produce all the healthy hormones and chemicals and neurotransmitters and then along with exercise, which also increases Simple stuff,
00:23:23.000Haven't there been studies also that show that exercise, regular aerobic exercise in particular, it does as much to treat depression as SSRIs?
00:24:16.000So if you're just doing one of those things in isolation, and even one of those things is more effective, then it really comes down to the mindset.
00:24:25.000Because if you want it in a pill, it's going to be challenging for you to get results through effort or something behavioral.
00:24:33.000So the mindset piece has become a real focus for me as being maybe the most important determinant of what's going to be an effective intervention.
00:25:01.000And if you talk to her, she will argue to the death.
00:25:03.000These are critical for her life and that she needs them and she has some sort of a brain imbalance and it's no different than having some other organ in your body that doesn't function properly and you need medication for that.
00:25:47.000Well, it's just whenever something makes someone uncomfortable with their choices, they immediately want to turn someone else into an aggressor or someone who's victimizing them.
00:25:56.000This woman that I'm friends with, it's unfortunate because I feel like if she exercised, at least she would know.
00:26:45.000Well, these conversations are happening now more and more with people where they're starting to look at, like, what is it in my life that's causing me stress?
00:26:54.000What is it in my life that is depleting my sleep patterns or my health?
00:27:00.000Have I ever gotten my blood test done and find out where my nutrient levels are?
00:27:08.000Needs are very different biologically people like people are gonna respond differently to drugs people are gonna respond differently to food It's just we come from different parts of the world and some people need different stuff And this is being called like n of one medicine and meaning like meaning the number of people in a study So like the phrase is n of one medicine because we're beginning to understand exactly what you're saying Which is yeah,
00:28:33.000It's really coming down to like almost religious level belief systems.
00:28:37.000Like either you believe, right, which I used to, P.S. Either you believe that we're sort of machines, right?
00:28:45.000Like as Alan Watts would say, we're like flesh robots on a dead rock floating in the middle of nowhere.
00:28:50.000So everything is purposeless and random and it's just bad luck and bad genes and You know, it's like the other shoe could fall at any moment and life is just a hustle and you're just trying to survive.
00:29:01.000And you got to avail yourself of real medicine, which is pharmaceutical medicine.
00:29:16.000And then the other, which is, I believe, growing, is Is that we have no idea what we're doing scientifically, and we're just looking through the keyhole.
00:29:29.000It's not like a destination where the science is settled, my favorite phrase.
00:29:33.000So, you know, the body itself has this, you know, chiropractors call it vitalism, like has this innate wisdom, and it doesn't Make mistakes.
00:29:58.000Without, and I could explain what I mean by that.
00:30:00.000But, right, so if I have an ache or a pain, or my hair is falling out, or I have a tumor growing out of the side of my body, My first response, it's possible, could be curiosity.
00:30:21.000Because in indigenous cultures, for example, illness is not something that your body is doing.
00:30:28.000It's the manifestation of things out of balance with you and your soul, with you and the relationships in your life, with you and nature, and maybe the collective itself.
00:30:39.000So it's this expression, it's this physical manifestation of something much deeper that has roots.
00:30:45.000And until you understand what those roots are for you, you won't resolve it.
00:30:49.000Right, but like serious errors like birth defects and things along those lines, that's not like a wise response to anything, right?
00:30:57.000You know, the sort of like congenital question, like if you're just like born without a leg, I mean, you could take it to the extent where you say, okay, so what drove the birth defect, whether it was some sort of, you know, okay, so let's back up a second,
00:31:12.000because epigenetics, right, is the word du jour for beyond or above, actually, technically.
00:31:32.000But epigenetics is like how does the environment impact our genes, right?
00:31:37.000So you could argue that a lot of congenital...
00:31:40.000You know, sort of malformations and things like that, because this was an area of study for me when I was prescribing to pregnant women, which, believe it or not, was my specialty, prescribing psychiatric meds to pregnant women, that it is in response to that exposure.
00:31:56.000And it's the body's method of adapting to an exposure.
00:32:00.000Is it an adaptation or is it just an error?
00:32:02.000Like if someone's born without a leg, what kind of adaptation is that?
00:32:06.000It seems like some sort of a genetic error, no?
00:32:09.000It depends how you want to look at it.
00:32:11.000I mean, to me, there are no errors because the body is responding to a perceived stimulus.
00:32:16.000Now, if you throw a lot of toxicity, you know, in the way of your body, there may be a limit to which it can or will accommodate, right?
00:32:24.000Because, like, something confusing for me was at one point I was reflecting on the fact that, you know, we've had all of these environmental exposures for, like, about 100, 150 years, like, since the industrial...
00:32:37.000So we live totally different lives now with all these toxic exposures that we sit all day and we don't sleep and we have Monsanto and all the rest.
00:32:45.000Pretty much for the past 100 years or so.
00:33:34.000And I think it's happening pretty much.
00:33:37.000Like, I think even though we could biologically adapt, I think we won't because there is like a cosmic intelligence that is holding us accountable to a certain level of respect.
00:33:51.000For this human organism, a certain level of respect for the privilege of being alive, you know?
00:33:56.000And the way we're living today, just like trashing ourselves and trashing this planet, is a violation.
00:34:21.000Yeah, it seems like the sacrifice for productivity, the daily sacrifice for productivity that comes at the expense of health and happiness is the norm.
00:34:31.000That's what a lot of people deal with.
00:34:33.000They deal with having bills, as you were pointing out about exorbitant medical bills.
00:34:39.000So many people that are in the medical industry start their practice or start practicing being a doctor, a professional doctor, with a quarter-million-dollar debt.
00:36:04.000Well, even if it's not a design, it's a very efficient survival mechanism for the industry.
00:36:09.000It just seems like one of the worst ways for someone to start a career in taking care of people is to be all fucked up themselves.
00:36:17.000But they need to be broken down in that way to stay in line.
00:36:21.000It's just basic, sort of hierarchical...
00:36:26.000Is it a conspiracy or is it people just taking advantage of this need and being greedy and just charging exorbitant amounts of money and having the whole thing subsidized by the government so they could be expensive and then the whole thing is crazy and also here's the big one that a lot of people maybe if you're a kid you're not aware of this Your student loans haunt you till you're dead.
00:37:25.000When you find out what the student loan industry is in this country and how much money children go...
00:37:32.000You're a fucking child when you're You're 18 years old, right?
00:37:34.000So you make some ridiculous decision to go to some school and you get some grant or you get some sort of scholarship and then the rest of it you're going to get loans or whatever the hell your situation is.
00:37:44.000And then you get out of four years and then you go and do your masters, you go and do some graduate work.
00:37:54.000And then if you get out, what are the odds you even get a job in your field?
00:37:59.000You have to scramble to try to make some money, and then you have this never-ending pool of debt that you have to suck a little bit out of every month.
00:38:09.000It's like living for the oasis on the horizon.
00:38:13.000But that's what we do in this country.
00:38:15.000You know, we just are constantly waiting for it to feel okay.
00:38:18.000Constantly waiting until we get there.
00:38:21.000I think that free education, I mean, if it would be possible, if it is possible to do it without ruining the educational system, if it's not already ruined, if it is possible to do that, it would be like one of the best things we could ever do for young people.
00:38:34.000Just keep them from being saddled down with some bullshit that you have to keep with you for the rest of your life.
00:38:40.000So you, like, are handicapped out the gate.
00:39:05.000That's a really important point because if you sort of look across dimensions culturally, they're all geared towards supporting a certain kind of mindset and mentality, which is productivity-oriented, which is...
00:39:17.000You know, capitalism and consumer supportive in terms of that, you know, sort of financial apparatus.
00:39:24.000And so the things and elements, you know, like Graham Hancock has talked about this, you know, the elements that are convenient to that paradigm, including psychiatric meds and even alcohol on some level, like these more sort of suppressive, consciousness suppressive tools.
00:39:41.000But the things that would encourage risk-taking, encourage creative expression, encourage, you know, sort of consciousness expansion are, you know, demonized or, you know, rendered illegal because they're inconvenient to the paradigm.
00:39:54.000I guess, but honestly, I think it's a victim of circumstance more than anything.
00:39:58.000I believe that when the Psychedelic Act of 1970 was put into play, it was clearly put into play because they were trying to arrest people that were in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.
00:40:13.000It's been proven that there was a collusion and that what they were trying to do...
00:40:16.000Was make it so that they could go after these people in the civil rights movement, go after these people that were in the anti-war movement, and they would catch them for drugs and arrest them, and they would cripple these movements.
00:40:27.000And this is all documented real clear by the Nixon administration.
00:40:31.000The reason why they passed That sweeping psychedelics act of 1970, which covered a lot of stuff that's not even psychoactive.
00:40:38.000They didn't even know what they were doing.
00:41:31.000Like, financial risk of the pharmaceutical drug companies if they found out that there's so many different things that marijuana could help.
00:41:38.000Whether it is people's appetite or certain arthritic conditions or you can go down the list.
00:41:49.000It's a huge factor on children with autism, especially edible marijuana.
00:41:53.000All these different things that it treats.
00:41:56.000If that was made legal and people started turning to that and exercising a holistic approach, it would cost the pharmaceutical companies literally billions of dollars a year.
00:42:34.000The same reason why, also involved in trying to keep these drugs illegal, you have prison guard unions because they want to keep their money coming in.
00:44:04.000Also, which is not as common in men, but probably because nobody's looking for it.
00:44:10.000Yeah, so I was diagnosed with that, and I just had this intuitive sense that I wasn't going to go to a conventional doctor, even though I had never, ever...
00:44:18.000I've done anything but dismiss alternative medicine.
00:44:21.000I was hardcore into the pharmaceutical model, very into science from that perspective.
00:44:27.000But I knew that all they had to offer was Synthroid, and I had enough patients that never felt well on it.
00:44:46.000When he was talking about Hillary Clinton and all of her health issues, and he was going over her prescription, he was mocking the fact that she was on Armour Thyroid.
00:44:56.000I'm like, he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
00:44:58.000He's absolutely wrong, because I went through a bunch of different stuff, and then when I took Armour Thyroid, all of the symptoms went away.
00:46:29.000So it was a very amazing transition, but my early win was that I started like pooping every day and hadn't ever done that in my whole life.
00:46:51.000I think it was more about what I took out at that point than what I put in.
00:46:57.000But when I saw the change on paper, I was like, this is not even supposed to be possible.
00:47:03.000This is literally not even—we're not even taught that this is possible, let alone that it is anything— I think?
00:47:30.000And that's when I just turned over every stone, like everything, every sacred cow, whether all these meds we were talking about, like, you know, statins or acid blockers or antibiotics.
00:47:42.000Then I got on to psych meds and then I started to look at the science supporting a very different kind of Perspective on, you know, this interconnected model and the gut microbiome and, you know, sort of the impact of belief on our, you know, biology that we can sort of like reprogram our hardware,
00:48:00.000you know, with our software, which is like we're the only species that can really do that.
00:48:22.000I was an atheist my whole, like a belligerent, you know, sort of like Dawkins level atheist my whole life because I was a science worshiper.
00:48:32.000And I was like, well, you know, spirituality and religion is for like weak people who like need to believe in some fairy tale to make them feel better about that.
00:48:49.000It literally is the church of science.
00:48:52.000And so, you know, when I had this crisis of faith, so to speak, like, I was lost for a long time because...
00:49:00.000Science had sort of, you know, or what I believed had sort of failed me in some ways.
00:49:04.000And then I didn't have, I don't know what, the readiness to start meditating or find out what, you know, people were talking about when it came to spirituality.
00:50:22.000It's like you're making a deal to slowly pay to poison yourself.
00:50:27.000You're throwing a little bit of money in the pot every month, guaranteeing that 20 years down the line, 30 years down the line, however long it takes, you're going to have some bolt is going to come off the machinery.
00:50:39.000And hey, Mike, you got a tumor in your lungs.
00:51:14.000And then we don't want to pretend that everything is okay, so we self-medicate, you know, whether with, you know, drugs or cigarettes or, you know, workaholism or, you know, sex addiction.
00:51:26.000We're all sort of in this place not wanting to acknowledge that there's a reason.
00:51:29.000You know, like, one of my favorite quotes is this, like, Krishnamurti quote that it's no measure of health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society.
00:53:29.000So they weren't artists, you get them off meds, and all of a sudden they start, like, composing music or something, or making paintings, or...
00:54:21.000That seems like some shit that people just start making up.
00:54:24.000And listen, and I could be accused of doing the same thing, even commenting.
00:54:27.000But his wife, who is married to him, was the one that said that she believed, like when she talked to him on the phone, that he had taken too much of his anti-anxiety medication.
00:54:35.000And it'd be one thing to just be like, oh, she's like a grieving widow if there wasn't like a very indicting body of evidence that unequivocally, like literally two new studies just came out this week, that unequivocally, Implicate benzodiazepines in homicide and suicide.
00:54:52.000A very important Finnish study demonstrated that benzodiazepines led to a 223% increase risk of committing homicide.
00:56:05.000So we think that it has to do with the way you metabolize, some people metabolize these medications.
00:56:12.000So you might be born with a genetic variant in your liver that makes it so that you, by design, metabolize medications differently than someone else, right?
00:56:22.000So you can enter into a state of what's called auto-intoxication, right?
00:56:26.000More easily than someone else, even sometimes in a couple of doses.
00:56:30.000And you develop what's called akathisia-induced impulsivity, which is like, akathisia is like this feeling like you just want to crawl out of your skin, but you seem really chill.
00:56:42.000It's like a really creepy horror movie level side effect.
00:56:46.000So no one around you knows that you're about to fucking boil over and explode.
00:57:44.000And they went on to do this crazy thing.
00:57:47.000And what they found was when they analyzed each of these, you know, victims, perpetrators, however you want to look at it, they found they all had these liver variants that I'm talking about so that they were basically poisoned by medication.
00:58:00.000But before they were poisoned, they were put into this altered state where they did impulsively violent things.
00:58:08.000So this guy basically gets on the stage where I was speaking.
00:58:12.000And he talks about how he was prescribed Paxil because he worked, I think, as an accountant.
00:58:19.000And he was prescribed it for work-related stress.
00:58:21.000It was just taking on too much stress at work, right?
00:59:27.000Okay, so let's say some people, this is in line with their consciousness to not have any curiosity about why they're having symptoms, not want to see what they can do in terms of optimizing their lifestyle.
01:00:07.000So, and it's, you know, it's one thing to kill yourself impulsively, but like, you know, the school shootings, for example, have, without an exception, been committed by people who are kids who are recently medicated.
01:00:40.000You're turning it to a psych meds issue when it's a gun issue.
01:00:43.000If these people don't have guns, they can't commit these crimes.
01:00:46.000That, to me, is a very bizarre way of looking at one clear...
01:00:52.000But it's what you were talking about before, where psychiatrists aren't talking about this.
01:00:57.000This is such a taboo subject that by the time it gets to the average educated and informed person, who for the most part is probably liberal, because we're talking about people that want to get rid of guns,
01:01:27.000Like, literally, apart from functional medicine doctors, perhaps, but for the most part, they're not going to be the ones starting patients on psychiatric meds.
01:01:34.000Most psych meds are started by primary care doctors after a 10-minute appointment.
01:01:38.000And there's a scientific consensus that this issue exists, that with this liver issue, that if you take these medications, it can...
01:01:53.000It's called akathisia-induced impulsivity.
01:01:57.000Akathisia is the experience, the symptom, neurologic symptom that's induced by I think?
01:02:31.000Yeah, that's the thing that people that I know that have taken them have said, that the doctor will tell you, hey, this is going to work for a little while, and then it's not going to work anymore.
01:02:39.000I just hope you don't shoot up a school in the meantime.
01:02:41.000Well, my friend who got on them, and actually, I have two friends that got a great benefit from getting on SSRIs.
01:02:48.000They had a great benefit, and they both eventually got off of them.
01:02:52.000They got on them, and then their life improved.
01:02:55.000They improved the overall existence that they experienced.
01:03:21.000Now, you could argue that I have a skewed exposure to the population because I only see the people who've been on 10, 20 years and want to desperately get off and can't, you know.
01:03:29.000But I am, again, this public health issue aside, which is that, you know, these medications could be inducing...
01:03:43.000That issue aside, I'm, you know, a crusader for informed consent.
01:03:48.000I believe that you just should know all the options and all of the available science, and then you make your own damn decision, right?
01:03:56.000With your free will, you do what's right for you, what matches your level of consciousness, right?
01:04:03.000The problem is that most people are not taken off of meds and they are maintained for long term, even though all of the long term science suggests that people do worse long term on all categories of psychiatric meds than if they were never medicated.
01:04:21.000And this includes antipsychotics for schizophrenia.
01:04:25.000And the person who exposed this and really, you know, sort of blew the whistle on this issue, his book changed my life and made me put down my prescription pad, is Robert Whitaker, who's an investigative journalist, and he wrote a book called Anatomy of an Epidemic.
01:04:38.000And I read it, you know, and it came out, and I was ready to read it and receive it because I just had this health experience of my own, right?
01:04:47.000So I read it, and basically what he says is, okay, so we have...
01:06:11.000So taking medication for some sort of a psychotic disorder, what are the odds that it's going to work?
01:06:18.000So when we're looking at the data that suggests that it's effective to take an antipsychotic, they're, without exception, short-term studies.
01:06:52.000Are you a functional member of society?
01:06:54.000If we look at those parameters in the long term, people do worse.
01:06:59.000And his argument is that that's why we have more and more of the population literally getting checks from the government because they cannot function in society even though they're medicated to the hilt.
01:07:10.000You know, like they're fully treated, so to speak.
01:07:13.000And he makes this argument for benzodiazepines, for stimulants.
01:07:16.000And if you look into the literature, you understand that all that's happening is you're forcing an adaptation on the part of the body.
01:07:27.000And just like alcohol, okay, like some people love alcohol.
01:07:32.000For some people, it's very relaxing, right?
01:07:35.000Some people hate it and it's terrible and it makes them sick.
01:07:38.000So just like any other chemical substance with unpredictably psychoactive effects, it may be adaptive for a given period of time.
01:07:48.000But we know through the alcohol analogy that there's no free lunch, right?
01:07:52.000So even if it's adaptive in the short term, your body adapts, habituates, you become potentially dependent, although that's a more complex conversation.
01:08:00.000You know, what drives that dependency?
01:08:06.000The long term picture of chronic use of alcohol for, let's say, social anxiety doesn't look pretty if you want to just stop drinking 15 years down the line after you've been drinking every day.
01:08:15.000But we've been told to think of psych meds differently.
01:08:18.000And what I'm trying to say is we shouldn't be.
01:08:21.000Because they are just chemicals having chemical effects that your body is adapting to.
01:08:26.000So obviously that chemical effect is not going to endure, right?
01:08:32.000So one of the major pieces of informed consent I would like to see foregrounded for people is it may be nearly physically impossible for you to come off of this medication Jesus.
01:09:43.000So your friends are very rare examples, because there are millions of people on the internet right now trying to help each other.
01:09:51.000Survive the process of coming, physically survive, let alone, you know, psycho-spiritually, survive the process of coming off of meds.
01:09:59.000So that's what I focus on, you know, in my day-to-day practice now.
01:10:02.000Now, are there certain meds that are more difficult to come off than others?
01:10:07.000I would say yes, although I've seen exceptions to that, too.
01:10:11.000You know, I would say that there are certain antidepressants that are notoriously challenging, you know, meds like Paxil or Effexor.
01:10:19.000But then Prozac, which is supposed to be like, have this long half-life and be easy to come off of.
01:10:23.000I have patients who develop what looks like AIDS. Like, they get so sick in such complicated ways that no one believes them.
01:10:33.000And then they think that they're, you know, well, you must have MS or you must have, you know, mono or you must have, you know, some new diagnosis.
01:10:40.000And the literature since 2014 has told us, no, this is a withdrawal.
01:10:44.000This is a complicated, protracted withdrawal that is worse than any other withdrawal.
01:10:57.000And since I put down my prescription, I have many years now of experience of treating all manner of bipolar disorder, suicidality, psychosis, without medication.
01:11:07.000And let me tell you, the outcomes that I get today, I couldn't have I fantasized about when I was prescribing.
01:11:13.000I didn't even know that this was possible.
01:11:15.000So if you know that these outcomes are possible, then maybe you would consider a lifestyle approach But you have to know it's possible.
01:11:25.000What was best case scenario when you were prescribing?
01:11:27.000And did it ever feel like, I mean, did it ever get to the point where you were wondering, like, none of these people are really getting better?
01:11:38.000They're improving in certain ways, but they're not getting better?
01:11:42.000You don't have the goal of getting them totally better.
01:11:59.000Many of my friends are conventional psychiatrists, so I have compassion for people who are in the trenches practicing conventional approaches because I thought I was doing good, you know, when I was prescribing.
01:12:09.000I thought I was doing good things for these people.
01:12:12.000These friends, how do they feel about what you're doing now?
01:12:19.000Well, it's funny because I have this, I don't know what you want to call it, like scientific advantage, meaning like I know more of the literature.
01:12:51.000He rents from my office, you know, with all the Buddhas everywhere.
01:12:57.000I mean, he's more conscious about it than that.
01:12:59.000Actually, he works in forensics, which means that he works to sort of identify where people in the legal system are being medicated necessarily or unnecessarily.
01:13:38.000They've been hospitalized even in state facilities.
01:13:41.000They're, you know, at the end of their rope because they're not well.
01:13:45.000And even conventional psychiatry has nothing left to offer them.
01:13:48.000So I, you know, people think like, oh, I treat the worried well, like some Upper East Side, you know, woman who's having an affair and she's stressed out or They call it the worried well?
01:15:02.000That's the point I'm ultimately going to make, is that this process of moving through the fire of your mental illness, which I don't believe in mental illness, but moving through the fire...
01:15:16.000I believe that we are, by design as humans, you know, that we feel things intensely.
01:15:23.000And some people have experiences, you know, like in other cultural settings, some of the early experiences as what we would label schizophrenic, you know, there is an elder that is assigned to you to shepherd you through your psychospiritual emergence.
01:15:37.000You know, we just don't have a cultural context for anything other than full and total complacency, full and total adaptation to this sick society, right?
01:15:46.000Right, but regardless of environmental influences and whatever genetic problems you might have, people can have something really wrong with their mind, right?
01:16:15.000So we have turned what might have been a single-episode experience that, when properly supported, totally, completely resolves and you get back to life, which is what used to happen even in the early 1900s.
01:16:28.000You know, when we documented the natural history, so to speak, of these illnesses, we would see that they would go away on their own within a year.
01:18:48.000So the template for the diet that I recommend is based not only on, like, my personal experience, but also on my work with my mentor, Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, who was the most badass figure in modern medicine.
01:19:02.000He passed suddenly in 2015. But he, for 27 years, treated terminal cancer, you know, metastatic, like, no-hope cancer, literally, neurodegenerative illnesses, Lyme disease, you know, diabetes, all with 100% We're good to go.
01:19:49.000And it seems totally crazy and weird, but you do it all yourself.
01:21:28.000And they think like vegan or they think vegetarian or they think, you know, tons of green juice or whatever.
01:21:33.000And I noticed early on that as long as my patients ate a fair amount of red meat, they got better.
01:21:38.000And I used to be like an ethical vegetarian when I was eating like cheese doodles and Pepsi, basically.
01:21:44.000And so it was very confusing to me that, you know, red meat could be a healthy part of anyone's lifestyle or, you know, anything I could ever wrap my mind around recommending.
01:21:55.000Over the past 10 years and now with the understanding of Nick's Metric, you know, where there are some people who do require red meat to balance their nervous system, essentially.
01:22:07.000Now, is this an actual requirement, or can this be mitigated through, like, a very smart and conscious vegetarian diet?
01:22:16.000Like, if you're really careful about your nutrients and making sure that you get the essential fatty acids, making sure you get the essential amino acids and a really balanced profile of vegetable protein?
01:22:29.000Ultimately, my goal in this month is to clear the slate of all the stuff that's yanking on your brain and your immune system and driving inflammation so that you can begin to sense what you need.
01:22:42.000Have you ever had anybody that attempted to do it with, say, hemp protein or pea protein or vegetable-based proteins?
01:23:39.000Yeah, he was like a dentist in the 1900s who like went around the world with his wife and studied all of these different people who, like indigenous people all over, like Eskimos, like Himalayan, you know.
01:23:51.000Folks, Mexican folks and South American, and studied the healthy indigenous populations that were not eating industrialized food, right?
01:24:00.000And what he found was they all ate different stuff.
01:25:00.000But if you have someone, I mean, I'm obviously not a vegan, but if you have someone that comes to you that does not want to eat meat, but wants to try this out, and wants to try this out with, I mean, it's really just the science of nutrition.
01:25:15.000I mean, you can eat a vegan diet and be healthy, as long as you do it right, can't you?
01:25:20.000Well, so his model is that there are different kinds of people and different kinds of people, and I can explain a little more, require, require for their health certain dietary complements and what are called the parasympathetic dominants.
01:26:09.000So while that's true, on the other side of the spectrum are the sympathetic dominants who don't need to eat red meat.
01:26:18.000And who do really well on like a full force like plants, grains, you know, even a high carb diet and they feel well.
01:26:27.000And it's when they eat too much red meat, particularly industrial red meat, that they develop solid tumors like, you know, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer.
01:26:37.000So essentially, when you're dealing with particularly indigenous populations and people that have a very strong gene pool that comes from one very strong area in the world, like Eskimos or like people that live in the Pacific Northwest or something like that...
01:26:52.000Not Pacific North Wales, but you know what I mean, like Alaskan people.
01:26:56.000Like there's people that live on like Nunavac and all these different islands that have eaten seal for hundreds and hundreds of years and have very little access to vegetables, right?
01:27:06.000And meanwhile they have super low instances of cancer.
01:27:10.000So it's just because their bodies have adapted and evolved.
01:27:37.000Because the idea of nutrition research is like taking one nutrient out of the context of the person, out of the context of their life, out of the context of their cultural surroundings.
01:29:19.000Yeah, so his studies, though, and his little tests, although, you know, they're very small, it's just him and his wife, they're really fascinating to see how two people who are in the exact same household, same environment, you know, one's male, one's female, but also just different genetic and backgrounds,
01:29:57.000But the truth is, if you actually take this break and detox, so to speak, from all those addictive foods, and you have this shift in your body, you're not going to want it.
01:33:22.000So the stuff you're doing, whether it's the meditation enemas, detoxing your products and stuff like that, basic functional medicine stuff, or the diet, it's all in your control, which is why you can do this without me, which has been the best evidence I've ever...
01:33:37.000I never even dreamed that was totally possible, and now I'm Super pumped about it because the last thing I want it to be is like about, you know, the Kelly Brogan effect or something like that's not at all what I'm interested in.
01:35:15.000Because then you know what the sort of relationships are between you, your personal, you know, biology, and these, you know, elements of your nutrition.
01:35:24.000So what's the general reaction when you get someone to get rid of processed sugars, cut out the grains, cut out the nonsense, dairy, and just eat regular healthy food?
01:36:55.000And then sometimes it's much more radical.
01:36:57.000So like in Ali's case, within two cycles, she was completely symptom-free.
01:37:06.000So she went from grossly psychotic and suicidal to not only totally symptom-free, but now she's like moved through, is moving through, I would say, a process of awakening.
01:39:53.000So they don't get these highs and lows.
01:39:55.000And so because they don't get the lows, they don't get to rebound and get the highs.
01:39:59.000And then also find themselves, understand themselves, so they can manage how low the lows get through the mind and through your just living in the moment and understanding.
01:40:54.000We just baby our way through life because no one is teaching us how to confront our deepest fears, explore the shadow realms, and integrate it into our own power.
01:42:23.000But you surely must experience a massive blowback from just conventional psychiatric medicine practitioners who are looking at what you're saying and saying, so you're telling someone all they have to do is just stop eating sugar and they won't be psychotic anymore.
01:42:41.000I know you're not saying that, but I'm boiling it down to that.
01:42:44.000You're saying that you took this woman and you took her off of processed foods, you made her eat healthy vegetables and meat and eggs and healthy fats.
01:42:53.000Coconut oil and avocado oil and detox and medication and all the inflammation went away.
01:42:59.000The problem of the insulin spikes and all the blood sugar spikes, that goes away and then the body somehow or another comes back to some sort of a baseline.
01:44:04.000There are real root drivers, but we don't know what it is for you, right?
01:44:09.000Like I said, it could be physiologic, where it's like, you know, there's a similar story about a lifelong vegetarian woman, this is in the published literature, who became psychotically depressed, was admitted for catatonia.
01:44:21.000Catatonia is like the worst diagnosis in In psychiatry, right?
01:44:46.000They give her a couple of B12 injections.
01:44:48.000And not only is she better, but she's better than she's been in like 14 years from a couple of B12. So my point is that for her, it was B12. For her, it was wheat.
01:44:58.000For someone else, it could be blood sugar instability.
01:45:00.000For someone else, thyroid, autoimmune thyroid can make you cry.
01:46:11.000So these are people like your friends and millions of others who think they were treated to remission, think medication really helped them, right?
01:46:22.000Okay, so they're put in this study, 12-week study, and they get to either stay with their same dose of Prozac that helped them or they get crossed over to the placebo arm, the sugar pill arm.
01:46:34.000And they don't know which is going to happen, right?
01:46:38.000So what happened, interestingly, in that study is that the time they were crossed over or not, they both, both groups became statistically significantly depressed, right?
01:46:49.000So like Mary takes her 40 milligrams on Tuesday, enters the study.
01:46:53.000Is still taking her 40 milligrams like next Thursday, but now all of a sudden she's acutely depressed just because of the possibility that she might have gotten the sugar pill.
01:47:38.000He's a psychologist who's like a placebo effect expert, arguably.
01:47:43.000What he identified was that when you control for what's called the active placebo effect, which is what happens when you feel the side effects you've been warned about, Of a given medication, and then you feel the medication is working,
01:48:02.000So when you control for the active placebo effect by giving people in a trial antidepressant, but then also a medication like atropine, for example, that has very similar side effects, dry mouth, you know, headache, constipation,
01:48:17.000this kind of thing, there's no difference.
01:48:19.000So what he showed is that there is no statistically significant effect of antidepressants above and beyond placebo.
01:48:27.000And that the reason that people believe that they're working, and they are, right?
01:48:31.000So they believe it and then they do, is because they feel a shift.
01:49:36.000But that's exactly the efficacy of antidepressants is around 30%.
01:49:41.000There was a study once that was done on a kid who had some horrible wart disease where it was incurable and it was like spreading all over their body and all over their arm.
01:50:22.000But this is unharnessed, and this is untrained, and this is very different than what's going on with the mind with meditation, which is harnessed and trained and focused.
01:50:32.000So your thought is that this mind factor is not just an inconvenience, it's not just a variable, but maybe one of the most crucial aspects to overall health.
01:50:48.000And again, conventional medicine is interested in this to some extent now, noticing that what people believe, like that you'll lose less blood in surgery if you visualize losing less blood in surgery, that that actually happens.
01:51:01.000How can you control the physiologic activity of your body?
01:51:14.000They meditate on it, visualize losing less blood.
01:51:17.000So they have one group that says, you're going to do a visualization where you just like visualize your body letting go of less blood after the surgery or during the surgery.
01:51:26.000And then the other group just does their thing.
01:51:28.000What if you have one group, you say, dude, you're going to spray like a fountain.
01:51:51.000So you know where we see this is in cancer diagnosis.
01:51:54.000It's called medical hexing, that when you are diagnosed with cancer, the completion of suicide, but also other accidents, and your health basically declines.
01:52:04.000Simply because of the diagnosis and that's why it's considered to be it's like bone pointing or something.
01:52:10.000It's what we've always known that like someone could put a hex on you and if you know that a hex is on you you're like god damn there's a goddamn hex on me and you start believing it and then it could really cause a huge issue.
01:52:22.000That's what has become clear to me is real.
01:52:48.000But it's real in a lot of aspects, like the medicine involved in treating a bacterial infection, antibiotics, the medicine involved in healing a broken arm.
01:53:35.000This idea of only concentrating on the medicine and not concentrating on what we know to be viable alternatives and things that can make your body healthier.
01:53:44.000Not taking that into account seems almost insane.
01:53:48.000It seems like you're going to fix a car.
01:54:02.000There's certain aspects they're looking at, the aspects of medication, and because of all the aforementioned variables like student loans, the consensus of your peers, everybody's in this sort of group together, there's all this unspoken word that you're not going to criticize,
01:54:19.000the establishment, and you can't really do that because if you do, you're out of a job and all your money that you spend on...
01:55:30.000So we really do have the fox guarding the henhouse, and that's where we get into trouble.
01:55:34.000If we don't have transparency around a true regulatory body that is not fiscally invested, we're going to have a problem, especially if we're presenting this as the only legitimate course of action for a sick patient, where you can actually,
01:55:50.000as a parent, have your children taken away from you if you don't participate in the model.
01:55:56.000Have there ever been any serious suggestions that we remove this whole ask your doctor commercial aspect of medicine?
01:56:56.000There's these trends, I guess, these stylistic trends in prescribing that, of course, have no evidence base.
01:57:03.000But in psychiatry, we're really vulnerable to that because there isn't a clear, you know, A to B in terms of presenting symptoms and medication recommendation.
01:57:58.000But no, when he was saying that on the Good Morning America show with Matt Lauer, he was essentially just saying what Scientology has always said.
01:58:07.000Like, if you go down Sunset or Hollywood, where's the Psychiatry Kill Center?
01:59:21.000Then you're just transferring dependence, you know, from one model to the next.
01:59:25.000And, you know, sort of my bag is to really...
01:59:29.000Give people back their power through a methodology that's, you know, their own alone.
01:59:34.000I think that highlights why that stuff works for people and why a lot of different things work for people.
01:59:39.000A lot of different kinds of religions and unfortunately a lot of different cults and a lot of different ideologies and a lot of different mindsets do work for people.
02:00:19.000We know, right, that if you put a rat in a cage by itself and you give it the choice of water or cocaine, it's going to drink the cocaine until it dies.
02:00:29.000Yeah, so then these researchers were basically like, well, hold on a minute.
02:00:32.000That's like totally a natural environment for a rat to be in.
02:00:35.000So what if we put it in rat heaven where it can have sex with the rats and hang out and have a community and there's things to play with and little wheels and whatever?
02:01:12.000And so any time we have the opportunity, whether through AA or CrossFit, to plug into a community, we fix something inside ourselves so we have less of a vulnerability to abuse the effects of a substance like cocaine or alcohol.
02:01:47.000I mean, you're kind of in a rat park every day if you're in a cubicle environment, you're in your car in traffic, or you're on the bus and no one's talking to anybody.
02:01:54.000You're in your little cubicle by yourself, you know.
02:01:57.000And then there's shared suffering that's coming from things like CrossFit, where you have these moments where you're bonding together, almost like you guys are, you know, you're in the trenches, right?
02:02:19.000Yoga's really hard, and that's part of what's good about it, is that we need, I think we need hard things.
02:02:25.000I think your body, if you're just constantly nerfed, and everything's soft, and everything's a free ride, and there's no ups or downs, and everything's middle, like, what is that?
02:02:40.000So, like, when you're having a difficult window in your life, you know, and maybe you know why, like you had a loss, or maybe you don't know why, and things are just off, right?
02:02:51.000Like, either you have a consciousness that says, there's something here, you know, there's something to this, there's some meaning to this, I gotta look deeper, I gotta pay attention to things, I gotta rebalance and differ, I gotta up my game, you know, of self-care.
02:03:29.000I have been of the opinion, especially over the last few years, I've really focused on this heavily and I've talked about it maybe too much, but I think people need to struggle in order to appreciate how nice things are and also to mitigate the effects of actual bad things that happen to you.
02:03:49.000If you can do difficult, hard things on a daily basis, on a regular basis, You know, whatever your schedule allows for, but whether it's martial arts or whether it's yoga or whether it's difficult, struggle.
02:04:00.000Physical struggles where you have to test yourself, where you have to pull through, you have to have discipline and resolve, and it's hard to do.
02:04:07.000When you get through that, you develop that muscle and that understanding of struggle.
02:04:12.000And believe it or not, this is where it's going to seem really weird.
02:04:15.000The struggle that you get in a yoga class is so much harder than the struggle that you'll ever experience outside of that.
02:06:37.000But the truth is that when you research the interventions, you will find...
02:06:42.000So I had a natural birth because the research that I did on the interventions, things like fetal monitoring, episiotomy, even ultrasound, let alone C-section...
02:06:53.000You know, antibiotics during delivery, etc.
02:06:55.000What I found was that there wasn't science to support them.
02:06:58.000And actually, the science suggests that they should be abandoned.
02:07:36.000But I don't think that's a huge motivator.
02:07:37.000Women have been made to feel afraid of their own bodies.
02:07:41.000It's the birth control thing we were talking about earlier.
02:07:43.000If you think of your body as a total pain that's dangerous, it's going to fuck up at any given time, and you're going to wish you had listened to your doctor, who's a man and has never had a baby...
02:10:18.000So, is there a self-conscious aspect of it where you do recognize that there are certain science-based practitioners that will be, like, rolling their eyes at you?
02:10:35.000And I published it, and it was a really weird experience because I was a total newbie.
02:10:40.000I'd never written a book before or whatever.
02:10:43.000And out the gate, I got this very generous advance from a mainstream publisher, which shocked me.
02:10:49.000And then it comes time to publish it, and they can't get me on a single The Today Show, Dr. Oz, 60 Minutes, and they're used to waltzing their authors who they give these large advances to right onto these platforms,
02:11:16.000So we're going to have to come up with something else and Ultimately, they didn't listen and they started to spaz when I, a month before launch, didn't have a single interview.
02:11:28.000And so it was cool because alt media, you know, like this, I just called on a bunch of my friends and colleagues and It was like top 20 on Amazon within the first week.
02:12:12.000There is an amazing TED Talk that you need to watch by Cheryl Atkison, who's like a turncoat Like she used to be an anchor, I don't know where.
02:12:22.000And so she has this TED talk on astroturfing and she basically breaks it down.
02:12:26.000Astroturfing is like what, so the word, right, it's like a fake grassroots movement on social media, right?
02:12:34.000So it's paid, industry paid bots, basically, who generate the impression that there is an opinion anti anyone who threatens the establishment.
02:12:48.000And then there are people who organically glom onto that.
02:12:54.000So they'll come on my site by the thousands.
02:13:00.000And immediately after a comment is written, you quack.
02:13:05.000Where did you get that fake medical degree?
02:14:13.000So you generate the impression that there's a grassroots energy and that it's actually not real.
02:14:19.000He picked up 3 million Twitter followers in recent days, most of which appear to be recently created Twitter bots.
02:14:26.000Screenwriter John Niven pointed out Tuesday morning that Trump's account saw a big spike in followers over the weekend, most of them newly created accounts without photos or tweets.
02:14:35.000Tell several times signs of Twitter bots.
02:15:11.000Says President Trump, like other Twitter users with large following, has a large number of followers that appear to be bots or inauthentic automated user profiles.
02:15:22.000What's false, Trump did not receive an influx of five million new Twitter followers in three days.
02:16:42.000They use intentionally shitty language so that if you follow them, their poor grammar sort of alerts them to suspicious people so that suspicious people don't interact with them, but dumb people.
02:16:55.000So they're a honeypot that creates this environment that stupid people are attracted to because they can't see the grammatical errors because they're dumb.
02:17:11.000Like, they're more than capable of using good English, but they use this shitty grammar so that the people that they do get are just really dumb.
02:17:18.000They're not trying to snag, like, the Ivy Leaguers.
02:17:22.000Yeah, well, anybody who's got a discerning idea of, you know, what this may or may not be.
02:17:55.000It would be a big, big deal if we found out that pharmaceutical companies were actively engaging in the use of these bots to attack people like you.
02:18:04.000If you had someone like WikiLeaks on your side that dug into this shit and got some whistleblower from the pharmaceutical industry that cares, And release that stuff.
02:20:40.000They kind of like do the telephone game with quotes and sort of like, this is what people are saying and then they go through all the iterations of how it's been translated out and Well, do you remember that one Greg Giraldo joke that got attributed to me online, and people had photos of me with Greg Giraldo's quote,
02:20:59.000I didn't know whose it was, and then someone had to say, it's Greg Giraldo's, and then people say, why are you stealing Greg Giraldo's shit?
02:21:36.000That's one of the things that—a good, solid meme— That's one of the things that was so egregious about that fat Jewish guy, is that he was stealing these brilliant ideas, and it made him look brilliant, when really he's just sort of this aggregator of other people's awesome ideas without giving them credit.
02:21:51.000And he just got in on this plagiarism loophole, and everybody's like, what— And now he's got this weird thing that he does where he puts up the meme, he writes his own quote, and then just puts the originator's name at the end of it.
02:22:06.000He doesn't even say originally created by, he just puts their name.
02:22:10.000And that's like attributing credit, some sort of a weird way.
02:22:56.000And people are getting these development deals to do television shows and all sorts of other things based on the content of other people's ideas that they're just aggregating.
02:23:05.000Yeah, well, it's just a weird loophole.
02:23:06.000It's like if you were doing it with music, like say if you just wanted to take riffs that you thought were really awesome and put them on your music page, people will go, well, fuck you.
02:24:56.000And in the realm of independent journalism and media, where some random schmo like me can actually have influence, especially, you know, that I am credentialed in a way that people might pay attention to, then why would they not want to,
02:26:07.000I'm saying you might have been told you're broken, that you have a mental illness for life.
02:26:11.000But in fact, you know, like I have a woman who completed my online program, had such bad migraine headaches that she had to be on IV treatment.
02:26:20.000She was treated by the top neurologist at Emory.
02:26:37.000To show you that, in fact, what you're told is a permanent problem you just have to deal with and live with with pharmaceutical medicine could be completely dissolved is a very threatening concept.
02:26:48.000I mean, many functional medicine doctors and holistic healers are working to create awareness of this possibility.
02:26:56.000But regardless, it was pretty weird that, you know, the book made the New York Times list, strangely, and there wasn't a mention of it in mainstream media for a year.
02:27:37.000Like even in the past month or so, there's been like a more of a targeted effort and a couple of Allure and Cosmo and a couple of mainstream outlets have begun to suggest that I am, you know, a dangerous, reckless person who shames women who take meds.
02:27:59.000I don't want to give it the click energy.
02:28:02.000Isn't that funny that like if you give advice that based on actual studies, actual medicine, give advice about, you know, like, hey, maybe it's not a good idea that you take these crazy medications where we don't exactly know why you're taking them.
02:28:15.000We don't know exactly if these are the right medications for you.
02:28:18.000They're testing them on you literally as you go along that you're shaming.
02:28:21.000I'm not even saying maybe it's not a good idea.
02:28:23.000I'm just saying, here's what the science says that you might not have been told, and here's what's additionally possible you should just at least know, okay?
02:28:30.000You know, interviews, I'm publishing four case reports as we speak in the peer-reviewed index medical literature, you know, so this is not like some random blog I wrote, okay?
02:28:41.000So just know that that's possible and then make your decision.
02:31:25.000I just don't understand why anybody thinks that there's something wrong with learning a style of cooking.
02:31:31.000It's like I think you have cultural appropriation if you have a person who's pretending they're from Laos and they start talking with a fake accent and you go, hey man, you're from fucking Cleveland.
02:32:22.000No, it is a weird, it is a weird time.
02:32:24.000And the trouble is, you know, that the more that we, this infighting is like in some ways a distraction from the greater issues that are like government overreach and these greater issues that are allowed to unfold while we're busy calling each other names.
02:32:41.000Yeah, you're doing that on Twitter and the government's literally reading your emails while you're doing it.
02:35:53.000It's just, I really feel like this goes, I mean, it's a stretch, granted, but I really feel like this goes back to what we're talking about, is that people need difficulty in their life.
02:36:08.000I think that's one of the reasons why you're getting a lot of this from these college kids, where their tuition's being paid for, they don't have jobs, they're not competing in the real world, they're just operating on ideologies, and they're being taught by these knuckleheads that are just trying to keep their tenure,
02:36:26.000and they're trying to spread the same sort of ideology that they had when they were in college, and they never really entered into the workforce in a lot of examples.
02:36:33.000A lot of these people went from academia to teaching.
02:36:37.000I mean, right in there, just embedded into the system.
02:36:45.000It's just, people are going crazy today.
02:36:47.000And I think a lot of it has to do with the same thing.
02:36:49.000I think it's this newfound ability to communicate, which is fantastic, and it's going to have its hiccups, and there's going to be some issues, and there's going to be some real co-opting of the system, like what you're experiencing, with trolls attacking an idea.
02:37:02.000But overall, those ideas are spreading in a way that's It's unprecedented and impossible just a few decades ago.
02:37:09.000Like, your ideas, spreading the way they have where I hear about them, and now, you know, you and I sit down and talk about this.
02:37:16.000Millions of people are going to hear this conversation.
02:37:41.000This is more hippie talk that you would hate 20 years ago.
02:37:43.000You'd be like, oh my god, I'm so crazy when I'm older.
02:37:46.000But that's why it is a cool time because it's sort of like the democratization of information where if you want to learn about other perspectives on anything, you look it up, you know, and then you make your own decisions.
02:37:58.000So it is a time where you have the potential to be an individual in ways that we're not honored in a more conformist, you know, controlled media environment.
02:38:09.000I mean, the trouble is that many people are still, you know...
02:38:12.000I still believe that mainstream media is telling them the truth.
02:38:16.000That deconditioning is very challenging.
02:38:21.000I mean, I think even though the Trump stuff with all this fake news talk is so detrimental, ultimately it is like you're getting people, even if they realize that this guy's a knucklehead and he's wrong about a lot of stuff, they're at least challenging these ideas that these networks are only giving you the news.
02:38:40.000I mean, Fox News It is a goddamn sexual assault paradise over there.
02:38:45.000I mean, these guys just keep getting kicked out of Fox News over and over again.
02:38:50.000There's all these sexual harassment allegations and people are resigning left and right, right?
02:38:55.000Well, because of all that stuff, it makes you go, oh...
02:40:01.000Yeah, and they just sandwich them in there, whereas you're not going to see those commercials, like, no one's going to read those drug ads on a podcast.
02:40:11.000You're not going to say, okay, well, hey, been really nice talking to you, and I want to talk to you folks about Abilify.
02:40:17.000Are you, right now, thinking about being suicidal and really want to cement those thoughts?
02:41:23.000And there was a man in Ireland that took this drug and said before the drug, he was a healthy heterosexual, and after he took the drug, he became gay and a gambling addict, and he would engage in risky sex, and he would meet men in chat rooms and have unprotected sex with them.
02:41:40.000And then he got off the drug and was like, what did I do?
02:41:43.000And he won the equivalent of U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of $600,000 from GlaxoKlineSmith.
02:42:44.000They have been doing this on the bottom, like, where usually you'll see, like, another story or similar stories, a sponsored story will pop in there.
02:42:51.000You can't even tell it's sponsored, usually.
02:42:53.000Well, you can now on CNN, they have a ton of those.
02:42:56.000On a lot of websites, they have a ton of those.
02:42:59.000And it's like, you know, you won't believe what they look like now.
02:43:02.000And you're like, God, what do they look like now?
02:43:03.000And then you have to go through, like, fucking 20 pages of what other people that look like shit now to get to this one person that you might not even, they might even be on that, you know?
02:43:17.000Yeah, I mean, on Medscape and these, like, seemingly official medical websites, there are pharma ads that appear to be diagnostic quizzes, you know?
02:43:31.000And then you go take the quiz, and this is known, you know, has been exposed, 100% of people are identified, pretty much no matter what you click, you're identified as being a candidate for antidepressant.
02:43:54.000So, what do you hope to really get into people's heads with this book and with all this information and what you've gone on in your journey?
02:46:20.000And, you know, super infections through antibiotic overuse and the fact that you can't ever get out from under this idea of just killing the bad bugs.
02:46:29.000And so the more you sanitize and you use bleach and alcohol and Purell and all that stuff, you're actually distorting things and you're making it more likely for people to develop what are called nosocomial illnesses or infections, which is hospital-induced infections, right?
02:46:44.000The hospital is a sick environment, in part because we have a wrong idea.
02:49:12.000And even the Indian dude who was sort of like our chaperone in a way, like a friend of the woman who led the trip, was like, oh, we got to bring her to...
02:50:06.000The truth is that if she had taken antibiotics, which she never did, If she had taken them reflexively, she probably would have been sick longer, and she then ultimately, when she got better, would have attributed it to the antibiotics, right?
02:50:20.000So she never would have had the opportunity to just see what her body's capable of.
02:50:24.000So we make these assumptions about pharmaceuticals in the absence of any baseline evidence, information, or even experience to help us understand what our bodies are capable of.
02:50:35.000But what if someone catches one of these antibiotic-resistant, very aggressive strains like MRSA? I mean, you know, so my partner has a website called GreenMedInfo.com, right?
02:50:53.000And he catalogs all of the data from PubMed.gov on these natural substances, evidence that shows that something like garlic Because there's a study he put up on MRSA, and I think it was like garlic and maybe honey or something you would laugh at,
02:51:10.000Dr. Rhonda Patrick went through this, and she talked about it on the podcast.
02:51:12.000She had a persistent staph infection that would not go away, and she treated it with garlic in a topical form, and it cured it when nothing else would.
02:51:23.000And she had gone through this host of antibiotics that really wrecked her gut biome, and she was...
02:51:29.000Really fucked up for like a year because of it.
02:51:31.000And she treated it with a topical application of garlic, which is crazy.
02:51:35.000And it sounds crazy until you actually learn that you wouldn't know that there's actually science to support that.
02:52:09.000Then you'll make different decisions for yourself in the future.
02:52:11.000But you have to have like that woman will probably make different decisions for herself in the future because now she trusts her body like just a little bit more.
02:52:19.000You know, she's that much less afraid of all of the horror stories.
02:52:24.000The fear mongering is the greatest marketing device, you know, employed by the industry is scaring you into what if you don't do it?
02:52:34.000But aren't there a bunch of people that when they do catch MRSA or something like that and then get devastated, the right move is to get on an IV antibiotic.
02:53:04.000For that one, but I mean, don't they serve a purpose in some function, sometimes?
02:53:08.000I mean, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?
02:53:11.000I mean, if someone has some rampant, aggressive infection, a bacterial infection...
02:53:16.000Listen, if we only used antibiotics for true life or death emergencies, we would have a very different situation on our hands than what we have now, which is a combination of, you know, devastating our ecosystem, you know, making people gravely ill because they have very serious and totally unpredictable side effects,
02:53:35.000including long-term neurologic side effects, you know, What's even going on with our livestock?
02:53:43.000We are in a mess with our worship of this idea of...
02:53:55.000If you want to believe in war, you want to war against your body, you want to war against and blame all the bad people who do all these bad things, and you want to lock them up in prisons, and you want to hate the...
02:54:11.000But if that's your general vibe, then it's going to make sense to take medications like that for you.
02:54:17.000But I, you know, have plenty of colleagues and myself, we have a different philosophy.
02:54:22.000So that's why it comes down to, it's a religion.
02:54:25.000You know, it really comes down to your belief system.
02:54:27.000So your philosophy is improve the health of the gut biome, take in natural antibiotics, things like garlic, things like oregano oil, things that are...
02:54:54.000And we're, in some ways, being reminded, you know, that we can't go too much farther without, like, struggling pretty seriously.
02:55:03.000One of the big points that you just made, which is really huge, is that if we only used antibiotics when necessary in life or death situations, we wouldn't have the issues that we have right now with livestock, with people's health.
02:55:15.000And people take Z-packs like it's going out of style.
02:55:18.000I mean, they take them like they take Tylenol for a headache.
02:55:21.000I know so many people that take antibiotics.
02:56:50.000But if I had Adderall, I just don't...
02:56:53.000I want to try it one day, but I'm terrified of it.
02:56:56.000A Canadian study just came out that if you take a stimulant, you're 13 times more likely to be prescribed an antipsychotic and four times more likely to be prescribed an antidepressant.