Written by Christopher Kelly
Oct. 4, 2019
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Brian, thank you so much for having me here in Los Angeles. I've been staying with my family in Venice Beach and we went for a swim this morning and I found a $20 bill in the water.
Brian: Oh, wow!
Christopher: It doesn't get any better than that. What a great start to the day, sunshine, seawater, and a $20 bill.
Brian: I love it.
Christopher: Tell us about your documentary, "Food Lies". Why on earth would a mechanical engineer find it necessary to make a documentary on food?
Brian: Wow. That's a good question. I ask myself that, what I'm doing sometimes. Well, I grew up with film. Mechanical engineering, that was my straying away from film and I thought maybe I'd get back to it one day, and I actually did get back to it one day, but the main reason why I'm making this film is my family.
My family had some health problems. The thing was we were eating a good diet, what we thought was a good diet our whole life. We weren't going to McDonald's. We weren't eating out a lot. We did go to McDonald's, but it was like a treat. It was a classic, well, let's go. It's once or twice a month you go to McDonald's. Every other meal was cooked at home. I grew up in Hawaii. We had a great childhood -- I had a brother and a sister -- eating good foods, low fat, rice, pasta, and my parents slowly got just a little bit heavier in the belly. They were never obese at all. They had probably problems with insulin. And very early, I think too young, my mom had Alzheimer's. She had to retire early and now, she's in stage seven, unresponsive, completely unresponsive as of last year, and my dad died of cancer. I'm 30 when this was going on. I'm 30. I have no parents basically. That's also the time when you cannot eat whatever you want anymore.
Christopher: Right.
Brian: I was pretty athletic my whole life and I never thought about diet. I was just like, "What do you mean? You just eat whatever you want and you're skinny." I had this idea. Then you're 30 or 31 and that's not true. You're a little puffier or I'm skinny-fat. People just think some people are just naturally skinny. No. Either you're working out a lot or you're finding a way to eat well or you're going to just get skinny-fat soon, so this started to happen and then my friends started getting into Mark Sisson and learning about this ancestral lifestyle. They started losing all this weight and, "Wow! I don't get sick anymore. I feel great." All these things are going on, and so I started to adopt these principles, learn about it. That's kind of the story. I just found so much health from these simple changes even though I thought I was healthy.
It's so weird going my whole life like I thought I was healthy and then I just made this one change when I actually got fat-adapted and cut out the last bit of -- I was eating like one or two pieces of bread a day or a tortilla a day and that was the only carbohydrate I was eating mostly for the day. I cut that out. I got fat-adapted. I was like this is a whole new ballgame. I need to tell people about this. I thought I was okay. I wasn't okay. I was getting sick all the time. I was tired all the time, all these different things, and all I did was make this simple change and I feel amazing. I feel like a lot of people in our space or people we know have these stories and they want to tell the world and it's so fun to tell the world. Then I saw "What the Health" and I was like this is the opposite of what we need to tell the world.
That's the third piece of the puzzle, is I had my parents -- I wanted to not follow the same fate obviously as them. I had my own little health journey and then I got back into film. I'm in Los Angeles. I started working with a sketch comedy group and producing and writing little film stuff. I was like, hey, "What the Health" is terrible. It's giving us the wrong information. Well, I could make something. I could do this. I just began this project two years ago.
Christopher: That's amazing. Congratulations!
Brian: Thank you.
Christopher: Tell me about the food environment in Hawaii. I always think of it being amazing like fresh fish and coconuts, but that's obviously not true.
Brian: Well, it's just a lot of rice and mac salad really.
Christopher: Okay.
Brian: Macaroni salad, it's basically mayonnaise and pasta noodles and rice and that's what everything comes with, so there's a lot of Asian fusion. There's a lot of meat and fish, but for one, a lot of it has just sugary sauce. Teriyaki sauce, it's just like sugary, sugary sauce.
Christopher: Oh yeah.
Brian: And then everything is over rice. A lot of my friends, I try to get them into this way of eating and they're like, "I'm not going to give up my rice." Do you know what I mean?
Christopher: This is staple.
Brian: I went through that too. I remember I was like, "How am I not going to eat rice with this meal?" I don't even know what to do, so that's how it is. A lot of people are pretty overweight in Hawaii who eat this type of food.
Christopher: Yeah. I've certainly seen that. Would you say there's still indigenous population left in Hawaii?
Brian: Not a huge one. It's actually like a melting pot of different Asian cultures, but there are some Native Hawaiians left and they're doing great things to keep their traditions alive and Kamehameha Schools is doing a lot to keep the ancient practices and ways of living alive.
[0:05:05]
Christopher: I often think about how these people are affected by Western diet. It's actually possible to see how they've become affected by Western diets because at one point very recently, they didn't have it. Do you notice that in Hawaii like before 1950 or whatever, there was no such thing as obesity or diabetes, and then Crisco turned up and this is what happened?
Brian: I wasn't around back then, but I think it wasn't as exaggerated as in some places. I just talked to a guy who's in the Arctic. He's a Sami people, the reindeer herder people, and he's talked about it. It's drastic. You could see that come in. You're familiar with all the Weston Price stuff and that stuff definitely did happen, but I think in Hawaii, I don't know if there were hardliner people --
Christopher: Okay.
Brian: Yeah. It just has been creeping in and there are some big people out there, so it's definitely happening.
Christopher: Tell me about your passion for filmmaking when you were younger, the first time around.
Brian: I was just one of those kids that grew up with a camera in their hand. I'm making videos with my brother and my cousin --
Christopher: How did that happen though? That doesn't happen by accident.
Brian: I don't know. It was just luck that we had one of these little cameras. It was like this little Sony thing that had a screen on it so you could re-watch what you saw. It's like a handycam type of thing. It was just all I wanted to do. We would make little army films. We'd repackage fireworks and blow up little scenes in the mud and then army men would blow up. We'd make all kinds of weird stuff. In my school too, my friend, Jay, who's helping me with the film, he's a great director in Hawaii and doing big things there. We were the only two people in these film classes and we'd be running around campus making these funny videos for each school project. Instead of doing a paper or something, we're like, "Can we do a video?" and we'd make these -- we made one video that got shown to 7th to 12th Grade, got shown to thousands of people in our big assembly.
Christopher: What was it about?
Brian: It was supposed to be about commitment and it had very little to do with commitment. It was basically like superheroes. We were saving the world with James Bond, Godzilla, Neo, MacGyver, and all these random superhero-type figures helped save the world.
Christopher: But you were never able to make a living, or maybe that was not your choice. Mechanical engineering was another passion of yours and you chose to pursue that instead.
Brian: Kind of. I think a lot of high school students have this thing where they don't know what the real world is about, but they're just like, "I'm good at math and science." I was just like, okay, mechanical engineering. I didn't even know what it was. I was just like, "I'm good at math and science. I'll just do mechanical engineering" or maybe I thought I'll do special effects for film or maybe I'll get into film later, something like that.
Christopher: Did you cry when you left Hawaii? I can't imagine having to leave the island culture to go to a big university.
Brian: It was really weird. I don't think I settled in for a full year. I just felt weird and I had a girlfriend. We tried to stay together for a while long distance. It's hard. I think a lot of people don't appreciate how weird it is to move from an island and this whole life, and I went to the same school from K through 12, and then go to the big, scary mainland.
Christopher: What was UCLA like?
Brian: Well, it was awesome. UCLA is a great place and there are ways to make it smaller. It's so big you have to find your tribe, so I did that. I played football and just found different groups to connect with.
Christopher: You didn't choose to go back to Hawaii then after you graduated.
Brian: No. There's not a lot going on in Hawaii.
Christopher: Surfing. You've got surfing.
Brian: Yeah. I just choose to --
Christopher: Kiteboarding.
Brian: I just go back to visit as much as I can and I always go back for Christmas.
Christopher: Okay. Yeah, it's a strange place. You feel like Los Angeles is your home now. The reason I feel it's like a strange place, it's got literally everything you can think of apart from a city center, which I can't find anywhere. It's got every type of person, every type of culture, every type of food, every type of everything apart from a city center.
Brian: That's the beauty of it. I think it's amazing. I've travelled all over the world and I think it has the best weather in the world.
Christopher: Yeah, you're right. It's beautifully sunny. This morning on the beach, it was in the morning early and the temperature doesn't change that much during the day, does it? It was beautifully sunny, perfect low 70 degrees Fahrenheit, no wind, so it wasn't too hot, it wasn't too cold. Julie, she's very intolerant to both heat and cold. She's like, "Ah, that's just perfect. I just want to stay here." It's amazing.
Brian: That's me. I can't handle both, and Hawaii is so humid. LA just has it all, but it just has the traffic and it has -- sometimes the people aren't so great. People who know of this LA stereotype, it is kind of true, I think, a lot. Do you know what I mean? It's kind of like, "Who are you? What can you do for me?"
Christopher: Oh, I see.
Brian: Do you know what I mean? "Do you know the DJ?" weird stuff like that. It's not my vibe. I create my own little tribe of Hawaii people or sort of mellow people that aren't like that.
Christopher: LA has beautiful people that I don't see very much elsewhere in the US or in the UK actually for that matter, and I don't consider myself one of those people by any means, but yeah, you just sit down and have breakfast in a local whatever in Venice Beach and there's like a ton of beautiful people there like wow, I don't normally see that when I stop somewhere for breakfast in the US.
[0:10:14]
Brian: It's real. LA is health-focused. It's funny because half of it, I think they have the right ideas on health and half they have this vegan idea of health.
Christopher: Yeah. Tell me about that. I find that interesting. We just went to this super fancy, local, hippie supermarket. I always call them "hippie supermarkets". I forget what it was called.
Brian: It's called Erewhon. I see your bag.
Christopher: Oh, you see the bag? Yeah. My wife's like, "Oh, that supermarket..." Actually, she didn't use the word "supermarket". That's a very British thing. That market was amazing. It was delightful.
Brian: Well, that's funny because I didn't know anything about that. I've never been there. I just heard of it last time when someone was visiting and they too thought it was so cool and hippie and --
Christopher: Yeah, so people get into the place and there's a jeep parked outside that says "Live Vegan" something or other dot-com and I realized that veganism has taken a strong foothold here in LA, right?
Brian: It's huge. I joke around like every date I go on, I've never found a girl that eats red meat on all the days I went on --
Christopher: Oh, really?
Brian: The only one -- there were two and they were both from South America. These are the only girls that will eat red meat, are from South America. They're like, "Oh yeah, I've crushed red meat." I saw this girl before. It's funny. She was from Peru and she was laughing at Americans. She's like, "You Americans and your broccoli and your green vegetables. We don't eat any green vegetables." They eat steak and potatoes and rice and maybe a little bit of onions in there or like cilantro or whatever in ceviche or something. It's just interesting that it's sort of the opposite of what these LA girls think is healthy. This girl in South America is like, "Yes, we just eat meats and starch." It works for them.
Christopher: What makes you think it's not working for these beautiful people in LA I saw this morning? I'm making a huge assumption that they are indeed eating a vegan diet, but I have absolutely no idea, to be honest. It seems like something is working for these people.
Brian: Well, yes, I think it's half and half. That's what I was saying. Half the people do have the right idea. There's a lot of Paleo restaurants or Bulletproof Café or whatever this type of --
Christopher: You can get whatever you want, right?
Brian: Yeah, and then half of it is vegan crowd. I don't even know how big this vegan crowd is. It just seems big, but a lot of people -- it's just if you focus enough, you can be healthy. This is their livelihood, so they work out a lot. A lot of them do know about it. Actually, my sister is sort of in the scene, model, actress type. She actually does clowning, very interesting, but she claims -- she's like, "Oh yeah, every actress knows, every model knows to not eat carbs." I was like, "Do you realize that I'm fighting this battle and it seems like no one knows?" She's like, "Oh, no, we've known this from day one." It's like some industry secret.
Christopher: Well, it reminds me of Vinnie Tortorich who's personal trainer to the stars. He's been talking about no sugar, no grains since time immemorial.
Brian: Funny story is I almost made "Food Lies" with him. We met a year and a half ago in Woodland Hills and we were trying to work it out. We had some calls and it turned out we were just two cooks in the kitchen. We each had our own ideas and he made his own film and it's great. I saw the --
Christopher: Oh, really? I didn't know that Vinnie Tortorich made a film.
Brian: He did. It's called "FAT: A Documentary". It came out a couple of days ago.
Christopher: Wow! I literally had no idea.
Brian: Yeah. I felt like we were on bad terms for a while because we were competing or something. Yeah, he did it. It has a lot of the same people, but his main focus is the story of where we went wrong. It's kind of just like let's look at the last 50 years. Let's look at these bad dietary guidelines of saturated fat, cholesterol, and my film "Food Lies" is way bigger than that. I'm trying to do the whole history like evolutionary history and let's look at sustainable farming and knowing that we should be eating these foods, how do we do it sustainably? Let's synthesize all these different information and put it together for the audience because so many people are confused about what to eat, I feel like.
I always use this example of going to a supermarket and seeing a magazine rack and every magazine will have conflicting information on it. It's like "Don't eat carbs" and then the next one is like "High carb is the way to go" or "Keto diet will kill you." Even the same magazine, it'll say, "Keto diet will kill you." The next month, it'll be like, how awesome is this high fat diet?
Christopher: Well, the media have been doing this forever. I remember once there was this thing called The Daily Mail Ontology Project and it was basically a list of the things that the Daily Mail said that did cause or prevented cancer and things would come up in both lists all the time. It was just complete nonsense, but they're not in the business of getting it right. They're in the business of selling newspapers, so who cares whether it's right or not?
Brian: Well, people need to understand that. See, that's the problem. The normal person just assumes that the magazine is out there giving them information and they have no idea that -- I mean they should have some idea that it's completely nothing to do with -- it's the exact same thing with the food industry. The food industry doesn't have your health in mind. They're trying to make money.
[0:15:03]
It's so obvious to us, but a lot of people don't connect that. They're like, "Oh, this healthy cereal, it's healthy for me." No, it has nothing to do with health. It's marketing. It's them trying to make money. It's cheap, processed foods that have a long shelf life that are easy to sell.
Christopher: Right, and then it's easy to engineer them. We were talking about this this morning. It's really difficult -- let's say go both extremes, vegan and carnivore. I'd say it's pretty hard to engineer a carnivore diet that's hyperpalatable. It's basically impossible. It can be a lot of things. It can be nutrient-dense. It could be highly satiating. It can do a lot of things, but it definitely can't be hyperpalatable, whereas it's easy to make hyperpalatable vegan food. You've just got so many flavors from which to choose, so many textures, so many different things that you can create a diet, and it's cheap. This plant stuff is all really cheap, so it's a much better business model than carnivory.
Brian: Exactly. I got into the meat business and I know that there's no money into it. I do notetotail.org and we're just trying to sell grass-finished meat and I'm making no money. It's like there's no money in trying to sell a real product. You could sell a box of cereal that costs a couple of cents to make and you can sell it for $5. A piece of meat, how many processes and different people had to get this cow raised well and fed and transported? It's obvious there's no profit margin there.
Christopher: Well, the obvious next question is why do it then, but you've already given the answer to that. You saw what happened to your parents and how you've improved your health with a change in your diet towards -- how would you describe it? That's a good question actually.
Brian: Well, I'm calling it the SAPIEN Diet. I guess everyone wants to put their own spin on things, but my spin is this is what humans are supposed to eat. It's not one diet. There's a species-appropriate framework of eating and it encompasses a lot of dietary strategies, but mainly it's based around whole foods, nutrient density, high bioavailable nutrients. These are the animal foods. It's about embracing fat, focusing on protein, minimizing carbs. I don't do ratios. I don't count calories. I don't do any of that stuff, but if you're focusing a meal on the protein, you're going to get fat with that. I'm not afraid of fat obviously. I eat a high fat diet and then I just minimize carbs. I basically have no time for carbs. What are these doing for me? They don't have a lot of nutrient density. They don't have a lot of bioavailable nutrition to them, so I focus on the good things, and then I just don't eat all the time. It's simple. It's 1:45 today. I didn't eat yet. I haven't had a single calorie. I had some black coffee. That's it. I feel great. Maybe I'll eat at 1:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and that's all I need.
To me, it's really simple. Just do those things. Eat nutrient-dense, whole foods. Focus on protein. Embrace fat. Minimize carbs and don't eat all the time. Just pick a smaller eating window and you're done. It ends up being a high animal foods diet. I don't think I'm carnivore. I don't connect with this carnivore crowd although I'm actually friends with a lot of them, but I just believe that there's no -- I don't have any dogma around diet. Everyone has these dietary dogmas like, "Oh, I'm vegan. This is what I do" or "I'm carnivore. Plant foods are terrible" or it's like Paleo. It's like, "If it wasn't around 10,000 years ago, we can't eat it." I don't care when it was around. I don't care about anything. I know I've studied it all. I've looked at all the sides. Let's just look at what works and what doesn't. It's like, okay, maybe raw dairy is good. If you have a good -- some people have problems with it. Some people don't. Maybe you use the A2 cal versus the A1. You can get into these details. Just because we didn't supposedly have raw dairy in the Paleo period, but if it provides nutrients for us and you tolerate it then why would I exclude it?
Christopher: So these frameworks, what they are are mental shortcuts, right? Yeah, sure, I could spend the next three years doing the full systems analysis on raw dairy. Is it the best products for me at this time or I could just use this mental shortcut that is, is it Paleo and I get my answer without even engaging system to thinking, right?
Brian: People like rules. People like guidelines.
Christopher: Yeah, of course.
Brian: That helps people too.
Christopher: Yeah. It's like everybody is making a million decisions every single day. Let's not make that one of them.
Brian: And that works. It's like, "I'm Paleo, so I'm not going to eat this." Even just telling yourself you're on a diet helps you eat less and be more healthy, anything. It's kind of like this placebo effect or this kind of thing or these restrictions or this mental way of thinking of I'm in this mode.
Christopher: So what's the problem with carbs then? There are lots of examples of even modern hunter-gatherers. They're eating extremely high carbohydrate diets, but they don't have any of these modern diseases that you talked about earlier.
Brian: I love looking into that and I did go on my own journey myself. Everyone wants to say they're this unbiased -- especially filmmakers. They're like, "I'm going to go look at this and I'm not going to be biased. I'm going to just follow the information and the data."
Christopher: Yeah, I've fallen for that before. There was this vaccine series where they promised that, an unbiased look at the data, the evidence. Was it unbiased? They definitely have their biases.
[0:20:10]
Brian: So I went down that route and I think in the beginning, I'll admit, I was just a little bit obsessed with carbs are terrible. I went down and I thought I was going to be unbiased. I actually was open-minded and I watch all kind of vegan videos. I watch different things. I read books with people I don't agree with. I interview people I don't agree with on my podcast and I did change my mind. There was this turning point -- and we were talking about Denise Minger before we started recording and she was a big part of that turning point when she brought up what can we learn from the vegans, what can we learn from this potato diet, all potato hack, what can we learn from the Kitavans or the Tsimane in Bolivia that, like you said, they're eating this high carb diet and they're doing fine.
It really shook up my thinking and I realized we've spent a lot of months digging in and thinking why does this work, how does this work biochemistry wise, what is this metabolism that happens when you go low fat enough, you can tolerate these carbs. I just started to understand it on a deeper level that the simple way to think about it is just don't get caught in the middle. Don't get caught in this 40% carb, 40% fat thing that all Americans and Western societies seem to do and seem to be the most sick and fat. If you go to the extremes like the carnivore Keto people, you go on a high fat, you minimize carbs enough, and you're going to do well. I don't deny I see vegans that look thin. I'm not saying it's a good overall diet for life, but it can create a weight loss. It can create health. We know that Okinawans are healthy and they're eating a high carbohydrate diet. We know other ones I've mentioned, Kitavans, Tsimane, all these famous examples of people without chronic disease live a long life. Well, they're going low fat enough -- maybe not all the time, but if they're eating 80% starch, which a lot of these cultures I've mentioned are, they're still focusing on nutrient-dense animal foods when they can get them. They're still eating fish. They're eating eggs, fish eggs, liver, oysters, all these nutrient-dense foods, but they're not eating all the processed foods. They're not eating high fat and high carb at the same time. They're living in their native environments.
It's possible to compare someone especially the Kitavans or Tsimane living out in the jungle or in their native habitats compared to people in the city where there's all the other factors of sleep, stress, sunlight, movement, all this stuff that we talk about, ancestral health circles. There are a million things and I just think this is the biggest that you could look at from the overview. Let's just not be high carb and high fat at the same time, and processed foods. Those are the two things. Those processed foods, of course, are the high carb and high fat at the same time.
Christopher: Cheesecake, shortbread. I just got back from Scotland and shortbread is the thing that's going to get you, not cheesecakes. Shortbread is this biscuit, but it's like a perfect ratio of fat and carbohydrates.
Brian: Oh, it's buttery, right?
Christopher: Yeah. It has amazing texture, incredible mouth feel. It's the perfect thing that you want, and by the way, you can recreate these things while staying within the Paleo framework.
Brian: That's huge. I'm glad you brought that up because I'm trying to get into these nuances too that people think that just because it's Paleo or it fits their macros and Keto that it's healthy. It goes so much beyond that. Just think of the type of fat. You could develop a Ketogenic diet that is terrible if you're just using all vegetable oils and almond flour, but a lot of people are just like, "Well, this is Keto. It's great." I saw someone online who's a bigger person and for years -- they're kind of popular on Instagram and they post their food and all it was was bacon, bacon, bacon, Keto, cheese, bacon, eggs. Well, it's been a couple of years and you don't look like you've lost any weight. Maybe you should think about nutrient density and maybe think about a few other things other than slamming bacon and cheese every day.
Christopher: Yeah, I've seen it. I had access to a dataset from a Keto food logging app and that was the most popular thing, was whatever fat bomb. It was kind of news to me actually. I didn't realize that this was a thing, but I'm sure people listening will know what I'm talking about like if you Google that Keto fat bomb recipe --
Brian: It's like coconut oil and dark chocolate and coconut --
Christopher: And then some sugar alcohol or something.
Brian: Yeah. It's delicious. Another point is that it's so delicious -- we're talking about hyperpalatability. These foods, you're still going to overeat them. People could still gain weight on a high fat diet even if you're Keto. When it comes down to it, calories do matter. I also probably back in my early days thought that calories don't matter. This calorie in and calorie out is bogus. Well, there's something to it obviously. This is just physics. At some point, calories do matter. I think it's a stupid saying to just tell someone to eat less and move more. I'd say that eat densely, move intensely. That's my big thing. Eat nutrient-dense foods and I don't think we need to be doing an hour of treadmill.
[0:25:03]
I think that's a bad idea to work out unless you really like doing an hour on a treadmill. I think it's better to move intensely. I'd say sprints for ten minutes instead of running for an hour on a treadmill at a slow pace.
Christopher: What do you mean by nutrient density?
Brian: It's the bioavailability of complete fats and proteins, micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. A lot of people have different definitions of nutrient density and I've seen spins on it like a vegan person -- I've seen some author -- Joel Kahn or I don't know who it was -- they did an equation and they'd give negative points for saturated fat because they believe saturated fat is bad. Kale and spinach are number one in their nutrient density list. Lean chicken breasts were -- the first animal food was down at like 80 or something and it was something lean. Everyone has their own version of nutrient density, but to me, it's the amount of bioavailable protein and micronutrients, complete protein and micronutrients I guess you could say compared to excess energy. Nutrient-dense foods to me would be oysters and liver. Those are always top nutrient-dense foods --
Christopher: Top [0:26:08] [Indiscernible] of nutrient density.
Brian: Yeah. They have all the bioavailable nutrients and not much extra energy, but fat is an essential component to the diet. You could say maybe a rib eye steak isn't that nutrient-dense. Some people would say, "Oh, because it's so fatty. What are you getting from this fat?" Well, you're getting nutrient. You're getting something from the fat, all these fat-soluble vitamins too. You need fat. If you want to bring up Ted Naiman and his protein to energy ratio -- and you could get into the weeds a little bit on what's truly nutrient-dense of protein compared to energy, but basically, I'm just saying that animal foods are nutrient-dense that they don't have anti-nutrients and they have bioavailable nutrients.
Christopher: I wish there was a way to uncover exactly what you've just got from that last meal. Some studies have been done and Amber O'Hearn has been really good at citing these where they looked at the blood level of zinc after a meal of oysters and then you mix that with -- what was it?
Brian: Corn tortillas and beans, and even both. With the beans, there's a little less absorption, and then with the corn tortilla and the beans and the oysters, there's even less.
Christopher: So basically, what we would conclude from this is that there's an interference effect and you don't really know -- just because you ate some oysters, if you ate something with the oysters that had some compound like phytate that bounds the mineral then you don't really know what the net effect is, and so that stuff, right?
Brian: It's so interesting. I've been trying to quantify this. I'm still a mechanical engineer at heart. I'm sitting here daily trying to figure out this film, how am I going to communicate all these ideas, how am I going to display it on screen. I want to do calculations and be like, okay, let's measure the amount of bioavailable nutrients, but you can't -- I know that plant foods are less bioavailable, but there's no quantifiable way to show that, or some people will say the Vitamin A converting to retinol. It only converts -- the plant sources of Vitamin A don't convert to a bioavailable form and it's only zero to 10% or something. It's like, okay, so this carrot, I'm not actually getting Vitamin A from it, but how do I quantify that? It's impossible, but --
Christopher: Well, that's what I want to see because then these lies would be uncovered. Imagine a device that I pee in my toilet and there's a mass spec in there or something and it tells me how much zinc was in my last -- what my full net accounting of the mineral intake was, and then immediately -- we were in -- where were we? I think we're in Manchester and we're at this kiddie playhouse or something. They had all the different micronutrients in food and it took me a while to realize that it was from a vegetarian or maybe even vegan bent. So they do these weird contortions to tell you that some plant food is the best sources of copper or zinc. I'm like, wait a minute. That's not right. That chart was made with a particular belief system in mind, but if we had some objective measure of micronutrient intake then those lies would just be immediately uncovered, right? "You said that broccoli was the best source of something and I just ate a steak and it was way better than the broccoli. What are you talking about?"
Brian: Yeah. I wish there were hard numbers and maybe we'll probably get there. Even before we get some fancy mass spectrometer reading from the toilet, I think we could just do these food tests. We could do these in a lab. I don't know if there's funding to do it, but we've done some of them like the one that you mentioned. That study actually is an older study. I believe it's in the '70s or '80s because I dug that one up as well, but yeah, these are the type of things I'm trying to talk about in the film. This is also why this whole carnivore group is so interesting because they're really bringing all this to light of the plant anti-nutrients. It's like they either stop absorption of their own nutrients or, like you said, nutrients of the other foods you're eating, and they're not as bioavailable as you think. The protein is not complete. I don't want to get on this whole anti-plant terror, but I just found that the more I cut them out, the better I feel.
[0:30:06]
As I research it more, I understand it more that they're just not all that they're cracked up to be. I'm not saying don't eat plants and I'm always going to include plants in my diet of some kind, but it's just really interesting when you start looking at it and you've got to shake your head a little bit because like the girl from Peru, eating green vegetables is just not part of their culture. We're just in this bubble of we've been in America. We've touted plants as this miracle food.
I did a post on Instagram that was a little controversial maybe where I said, "What if there are just three groups that's very simplified? What if plants, all these plant foods, were just neutral and that the only good part that they're doing is taking away from you eating something worse?" Why do all these people who are healthy go, "Oh, I eat tons of fruits and vegetables"? Well, that's taking up from you eating a bunch of trash, dessert, processed food, and carbs maybe. It's like what if the processed foods are a negative one, these plant foods are zero, and animal foods with all their bioavailable nutrients are a plus one? Just some thought experiment. It's not exact. I'm not saying it's exact, but just think about that, negative one, zero, positive one.
So any diet, say, a Pescetarian diet, if you're cutting out all the processed foods and eating a good Pescetarian diet then you're getting a lot of positives from the fish and whatever else you're eating and then you're getting maybe a neutral effect from all these fruits and vegetables, so you're still in the positive. It's still a good diet.
Christopher: Yeah. I would argue that the carnivores have not done the full net accounting on plant foods either. Paul Saladino loves to talk -- I'll resist the temptation to [0:31:37] [Indiscernible]. I'm going to drive down to San Diego and hopefully I'll get to interview Paul there. He loves to talk about how Vitamin C deficiency isn't a problem on a carnivore diet because of the absence of the refined carbohydrates that increase the need for Vitamin C, but I never hear him talking about folate or magnesium. I also don't hear people talking about the benefits of short-chain fatty acids that can only come from the fermentation of carbohydrates. You're still getting your fats. It's just that they have to be fermented by colonic bacteria before you get them, and I think that Justin Sonnenburg has done a really good job of telling that story in his book, "The Good Gut" and he's also done some podcasts and talks online. He's a researcher at Stanford. So yeah, you really have to do the whole --
Brian: I'll look into that.
Christopher: Yeah. He's definitely worth the look. He's not a protein guy. I think that was one of my problems with "The Good Gut" book, was he eventually went on to recommend eating less protein. Everyone has got their bias and nobody wants to do the full net accounting on every single food, and so they just take these mental shortcuts and I'm just going to be the macrobiota, accessible carbohydrate guy like that's my thing.
Brian: Yeah. I try not to have my pet thing. It's like Gary Taubes. It's like, "I'm the anti-sugar guy" and then anything that goes against that -- it's like, hopefully I can beat that, but what about the short-chain fatty acids? Can't you get that from collagen and different connective tissues?
Christopher: No, I don't think -- oh yeah, you're right. Animal fiber is a thing. You're absolutely right, so you can ferment soft bones in sardines, for example. I think Bill Lagakos has done some good work on that. I'll link to that in the show notes for this episode, but you're right. Generally, people with --
Brian: Even without fermenting. I always have the impression that you could get it from collagen or different connective tissue, that it kind of acts the same. You can still build these short-chain fatty acids in your gut. Also, I heard a sort of counter-argument to all these short-chain fatty acids that we need fiber of some sort. Fasting, what about when you're fasting for a long time and you're getting none of this? You're getting no fiber, but your gut lining is still intact and everything is doing fine?
Christopher: But it also doesn't have to do any work, right? There are no insults.
Brian: Yeah, you're right. It's questioning do we need it. If this was so important, it would die out. These supposed bacteria that only can use these short-chain fatty acids that protect your gut lining -- I don't know. I just talked to one of these USDA scientists on my podcast and he kept saying that.
Christopher: Yeah, so the question then becomes what's the unifying theory here, and I think it's just to eat your food, right?
Brian: Kind of. That's a simple version --
Christopher: Is that not sexy enough though? When you're making a film -- the reason that Gary Taubes is the sugar guy and all these people have their specific bent is because that's what you need to do when you're doing marketing. You can't say, "Well, this is the diet that fixes Parkinson's and Alzheimer's" and "It's the best diet for sports performance. By the way, it'll get you pregnant if you're a woman." You just sound completely bonkers. You have to be specific, and so that's generally what people do, including the carnivores. They're very specific. I wonder whether you could ever make a message of omnivory and opportunistic generalism to be sexy enough for a movie.
Brian: Well, I'm trying to shape it up into something. I'd set my pillars. I think it isn't just omnivory. I don't advocate for just omnivory and it's beyond just eat real food although I think if anyone eating real food will be healthy, I think that's great, but I think there is a more optimum way and I think that's to get yourself fat-adapted.
[0:35:01]
You don't have to always be fat-adapted. I think it's great to initially get fat-adapted. So many people aren't metabolically flexible. Some people don't even know what metabolic flexibility is. To me, metabolic flexibility means you can use fat as a fuel source. If you're eating carbohydrates -- most people never really are burning fat because they're always just eating some sort of carbs and they just never access that part of their metabolism. So if you can get completely switched over, do a month. Do Keto for a month. Get switched over. Get your body ready for that. I'm not saying you have to always be Keto. Get fat-adapted and then get metabolically flexible so that you can handle anything that life throws at you and you can still enjoy life.
I don't make rules like I'm never going to have pizza again. I love pizza. Now, if I'm at a thing, if someone serves me something at an event, I'll eat it, but I'm metabolically flexible enough to handle it and I know how to bounce back from it. Maybe I'm going to work out the next morning. Maybe I'm going to fast a little longer and I can still live life and be great at it. There's a huge difference between acute and chronic stress. If I eat a pizza once a month, I don't think that means anything. I seriously have no problem with that. Some people will tell me otherwise, but I think our bodies can handle one pizza --
Christopher: Or it might even be a definition of health, robustness that you can handle these insults.
Brian: I can handle it. It's hormetic stress. It's hormesis. Sometimes it's not as good. Back to my theory. Is this sexy enough to sell? There's more to it. It's a high animal food diet, which is a little bit different than most people think is healthy. I think it's not eating all the time. It's of course whole foods, as close to being whole as possible, and not eating all the time. I think a lot of this stuff is radical enough to the normal person to shape up into something.
Christopher: You're right. What I was going to say about metabolic flexibility, as regular listeners will know and have heard Mike T. Nelson's talk on the topic, what generally happens and I think it's more likely for people listening to this podcast is they've actually gone the other way. They've lost their metabolic flexibility the other way, so they can't --
Brian: They can't handle glucose.
Christopher: They can't handle glucose, right? Mike T. Nelson talks about this Pop-Tarts test that I'm not sure that I agree with, but the athletes listening will understand that low carbohydrate diets and cyclocross just don't mix. I've talked to enough cyclocross racers now to know that it's just not the right tool for the job, but 99 people out of 100, that's going to be the right message that metabolic flexibility should mean the ability to access the fasted state and stored adipose. That's the biggest problem by far and a tiny fraction of people listening to this podcast may have a slightly different problem, but that isn't what most of the world is suffering from right now.
Brian: Absolutely. I'm trying to address the big issues than most people. I'm thinking Middle America, a random person chugging Mountain Dew, and they're going to come across this film on Netflix. I want to reach them. There's so much to tell this person. Yeah, maybe the people listening to this podcast would be bored by my film. They'd be like, "Yeah, I knew all this stuff," but I guess that's not the target audience. Hopefully, I think there's some stuff you could learn.
Christopher: The reason that I wanted to do this podcast and I think the way that people can help is I feel like you do need a core audience of supporters like people who are part of your tribe and who are going to champion your message and help spread the word.
Brian: Absolutely.
Christopher: And then what you send people, what you send the pre-contemplator. We talked about the pre-contemplators. The pre-contemplator is someone that either doesn't know they have a problem or they don't care. You've got to die of something. Well, a movie on Netflix is probably the ideal entry point for that person like here's a fun movie that you can watch and maybe you'll learn something along the way.
Brian: That's what I'm thinking. We've got to meet people where we're at. We're in this age where it has to be interesting. It has to be entertaining. It has to be fun. It has to be funny maybe. Yeah, I just want to try to get this word out to people who aren't thinking about it or think that -- okay, here's another big thing. We have this big problem of equating health with yucky or health with sacrifice. A lot of people think health is a kale salad with no dressing.
Christopher: I see what you're saying.
Brian: Do you know what I mean? That's ingrained into us.
Christopher: Deprivation.
Brian: Deprivation, exactly. It's willpower. It's deprivation. It's all these things when what we found in our little community is we eat indulgent, delicious foods. I don't think I need a lot of willpower to eat my steak and I eat kimchi and steak. That's the most delicious meal for me maybe because I grew up in Hawaii with a lot of Korean people. I want to eat my kimchi with my steak. That's a great, fermented, low carbohydrate vegetable, and a great giant steak with fat on it. That is easy to do.
Christopher: Where it gets hard is when you get out into the real world and you're surrounded by people who are doing something different from you. That's when it's tough for me. When I'm at home in Bonnie Dune, there's literally nothing I wouldn't want any of my kids to eat in the house and there's no problem, right?
[0:40:01]
But as soon as I get out into the real world, I'm forced to make choices when somebody else is having something completely delicious, or it might be alcohol is the other one that I really struggle with as well. I have no problems not drinking at all. I don't even think about booze when I'm at home with my family on my own, but then when I hang out with other people and they're drinking these delicious craft beers, I'm like, oh no!
Brian: We even try to address that. I try to address this from all sides. I even work as a health coach. I work in a clinic and I work with real people to understand what their problems are. There's food addiction. There's past trauma. There are so many reasons why people eat the way they do, and so we're trying to address these in the film. We even have stories of people in the film that have lost tons of weight and how to do it with the family, how to do it in every day society like strategies. We can't go into too much detail in this, but I love covering every single side of this.
Christopher: You've put your finger in a lot of pies, so you've got the movie going on and then you're doing some work with Dr. Gary. Remind us of his surname.
Brian: Dr. Gary Shlifer. He was my business partner. We were up doing a podcast with you yesterday, which was awesome.
Christopher: It was great. It's very good fun. Tell me about your business relationship there. What's the mission?
Brian: He's an internal medicine specialist. He has a clinic in LA and we're trying to do more functional medicine, reverse chronic disease, look at the root cause. We're building technology similar to Virta Health, which people listening may know. We're building a health technology that helps people communicate with a health coach and their doctor, stay on track, eat a low carb diet to reverse type two diabetes or produce weight loss, and help them stay on track, stay connected, use a smart scale so that they're accountable. We see their weight. Maybe we can connect to a ketone meter or blood glucose strips and see and connect into that technology, so we're just building some technology that will help facilitate adherence and communication with the doctor and health coaches. That's SAPIEN.
Christopher: He's a trooper. He's passionate. He's fired up.
Brian: Gary is fired up. I did a podcast with him recently for my Peak Human Podcast and people loved it because he was just yelling. He's swearing. He's talking about this ridiculous dietician in this hospital that was giving the diabetic patient when their arm was about to be cut off or their leg was about to be cut off and they're eating a cheeseburger with potato and ketchup. I don't know. It's great.
Christopher: He's not just that. The reason I say he's a trooper is because he's doing traditional medicine, the type that upsets health insurance. I assumed especially being in LA that it would be some fancy private practice and all of his patients would have a ton of disposable income, but that's not true at all either.
Brian: Not at all. We're trying to get all people. Maybe it'll turn into that one day, but we're trying to get everyone we can in the door. It'll change. We'll see.
Christopher: Talk about Nose to Toe. You've mentioned it just briefly before. Is it fair to say that it's a US -- well, it does scare me a little bit that I've been dependent on US Wellness Meats for a long time and if they were to ask me, "How would you feel if we just gave up, shut the farm down and went away?"
Brian: You'd be like, "Whoa! What am I going to do?"
Christopher: Yeah. I'll be devastated like where would I get my --
Brian: I'm the alternative, absolutely. I'm 100% a competitor of them and I hope they're not mad at me because I've seen them at the conferences and tried their stuff and it's good. It's great. I have a farm in Texas that I'm partnered with and we're doing grass-finished, sustainably raised meat, nose to tail. We ship out boxes to people to their door, all 48 contiguous states. We have bones, bone marrow. We have liver. We have all the organ meats. It's the whole thing. We're using the whole animal.
I'm learning about the business. Like I said, I don't make much money because there's no profit margin, but I'm also learning how the business works. People were like, "Why don't you have liver in stock?" Well, we have a product that's ground beef with the liver, heart, spleen and kidney in it and it's a great product. You can get all your ground beef and it tastes great. We're about to eat it right now. As soon as we turn off this podcast, I'm going to cook some of it for you, but that's where the liver went. The cow doesn't have two livers. Why don't we have liver? Well, we're using it for this product. Everyone wants a rib eye. Well, if we sell all our rib eyes, the cow only has one set of this specific cut of meat. We can't give you unlimited rib eyes. We need to sell the bone.
Christopher: It's so obvious when you say it like that. That is exactly what people expect.
Brian: Think about it. We have to sell the whole animal. We have to get rid of the bones. We're not going to throw away the bones, so we have boxes that include the bones. You can make your bone marrow out of it. We have beef bacon. We have omega-3 pork. I don't want to turn it into an ad, but yeah, it's kind of like US Wellness Meats and I just --
Christopher: No, please do turn it into an advert. I think you're doing some useful work here, and like I said, I have my personal needs, wants, and desires, and this is one of them.
Brian: Yeah. The only problem is just getting it to people. It's kind of a journey that we have to ship it out, but yeah, I'd say support your local farmers. We didn't talk about the environmental side a lot and I'm not some environmental expert. You could talk to Dr. Frank Mitloehner. A lot of great people will tell you about carbon emissions and sustainable farming and this and that, but we're getting into that in the film. That's also why I got into this business with Nose to Tail. I want to do something that I believe in. I don't want to sell someone else's product. I want to sell something I believe in.
[0:45:02]
Also, I believe that our future is in sustainable farming. The soil health is so important that not a lot of people talk about. All these vegan products, plant food, it takes from the soil. It does not give back. These animals, if you're doing sustainable farming, their manure enrich the soil. It's a whole process. It's the circle of life. It's this harmonious cycle.
Christopher: We have talked about that. Tommy did a really nice interview with Diana Rogers that I can link to in the show notes. I'm certainly not an expert in that. I don't really think I'm an expert in anything actually if I'm honest, but I'm certainly not an expert in that. Yeah, I would certainly refer people to the Savory Institute. I think Robb Wolf has spoken intelligently on this --
Brian: Robb, Diana, and their film, "Sacred Cow". I feel happy to be part of this little club. There's Vinnie Tortorich and his movie "FAT", and I'm making "Food Lies". Diana and I guess Robb is affiliated doing the "Sacred Cow", and then there's Chris Bell doing whatever he's doing, something about the war on carbs. He's like this carnivore --
Christopher: Oh, really? I didn't know that.
Brian: Yes, and we're doing a big sustainable farming segment in "Food Lies" and the second film we're already working on. I was just in Canada traveling around to all these different farms and looking at different ways people are raising animals well. I am turning into a bit of Diana Rogers here. It's amazing. We're seeing all different kinds of farming. I want to look at how they're doing it. These lands can only support ruminants. I was in Canada on this barren land with rocks and the soil was a centimeter thick. What else are we going to do? These vegan arguments are insane. These people are in Santa Monica coffee shop drinking their vegan latte telling farmers what to do. "You could just use that. Why don't you just grow crops on it?" Another farm I went to, their land was forests. It was trees and the cows went amongst the trees to feed. You can't grow anything else there.
Christopher: Right, and it's certainly true. I just got back from the UK and there are lots of hilly, mountainous even, land especially in Scotland where it's just not suitable for any sort of arable crop and it's sheep that -- in fact, it's not even suitable for cows. There's a limit to the gradient that cows can cope with, and so it's mostly sheep farming, a lot of lamb, and oh my goddess, completely delicious.
Brian: I believe it. I guess to wrap all this up is I'm looking at the whole picture. I'm doing this film trying to see all the sides of nutrition. I'm trying to keep my eyes open. I think it all comes together. I was showing you some of these diagrams, some rough drafts of graphics that we'll make for the film and I think it's really interesting that everything lines up when you look at all the aspects like let's look at food by nutrient density, the amount of processing, the amount of sugar, the shelf life, the introduction to human diet. All these things actually line up and it all points in one direction that the animal foods and nutrient-dense organ meats, that stuff is all good. All those things are on the positive end of the spectrum, and then the sugar, the flour, the vegetable oils are all at the bottom end of the spectrum.
I'm sure everyone listening knows ancestral stuff and Weston Price and all that, why sugar, flour, and oil is bad, but there are so many more reasons when you start looking at it and everything lines up. Before you ask me, "Why do you think carbs are bad?" well, I just looked at all these things and it all lined up. I don't think they're inherently bad. I do not think that there's any whole food that's inherently bad, but if you're looking at it in modern society, I think it could be bad because we're having entirely too many carbohydrates in general and too many processed foods and all this stuff. I just keep going back to it just lines up if you're looking at nutrient density. I don't think if the potato is that nutritious of a food or I just prefer to be fat-adapted. Maybe it is nutritious and I just choose not to eat it.
Christopher: Talk about the Peak Human Podcast, who you've had on and what have you learned. Is it some of the people that will appear in the documentary film as experts?
Brian: Yeah. That's kind of the whole thing. I got access to all these great people around the world and all these top scientists and doctors. I talked to Prof. Tim Noakes and then I talked to Jeff Volek who started Virta. I talked to Mark Sisson or Paul Saladino. I talked to a USDA scientist who was on the working group of the WHO that decided meat was a carcinogen. Dr. David Klurfeld is a USDA scientist. I have to get a special clearance to interview him. I don't think he's ever done a podcast before and he told me how it worked. He told me there's a whole bunch of vegans and vegetarians on this group. They were purposely trying to ignore studies that showed that meat was fine and then cherry-picked the ones that were using rat studies to show that maybe meat was bad. That was really interesting to get an inside scoop from him. Yeah, I'd say check out Peak Human. I'm obsessed with it. I spend a lot of time on this podcast. I talked to a guy from the Arctic Circle as my next episode. The guy is a Sami -- well, he's a reindeer hunter. He's an actual guy that follows around reindeer in the Arctic and lives with the reindeer. I talked to a woman, Tara Couture, that is the most amazing person I've ever met. I want to nominate her for the North American treasure like you are a treasure.
[0:50:03]
I don't even know what this award is. She's raising all her own animals on her property from start to finish. She butchers them herself. She cuts them up herself. Do you know what I mean? She slaughters them herself. They shoot it. It's living completely normally and then it drops dead with a bullet in the head on her property. Her and her husband butcher it and they have six or eight deep freezers, cut up all the meat. They make their own milk, all their own -- everything is from scratch. We went and filmed with them. It was the most amazing thing that I've ever experienced. We stayed on her -- we didn't stay there, but we were with her for three days. Best food I've ever eaten in my life. She's a nutritionist. If there's one episode, just listen to Tara Couture. She's an amazing person and I'm glad to get her in the film and it was the best food I've ever had.
Christopher: What about the vegans? You said Joel --
Brian: Joel Kahn.
Christopher: Joel Kahn.
Brian: I actually talked to him at the last conference I was at and I was considering getting him in the film or do a podcast. I didn't do that yet. We were emailing, but I just don't know what I'd gain from him.
Christopher: Yeah. Well, we talked about this in the podcast with Gary yesterday. As Tommy pointed out, what you potentially have to gain is when you've got somebody performing at a very high level and they've got this diet that seems to be counterintuitive at best -- or plain deficient is probably the more accurate description of the diet -- then it's interesting to understand how is it that they're still able to operate at such a high level. If this person is still in fantastic health and is performing well then what is it about them that is enabling them to do that?
Brian: I guess so. I don't know --
Christopher: And that's part of the peak human, right? The peak human is the vegan bodybuilder like what the heck? All the zero gravity astronaut, how has this guy managed to maintain muscle mass in zero gravity? That's an interesting thing to think about, right?
Brian: I think it really is. Yeah, we talked about it yesterday and you had some good points. These people, maybe they have genetic superiority or they're just built well to begin with, but --
Christopher: I find that a weak argument. I don't think that's what it is.
Brian: Oh, I thought -- anyway, I don't know what it is and I am curious, and you know what? I have actually tried to get these people on and they never come on.
Christopher: Yeah. They look at the episodes that you've published so far and I think it's going to be a hatchet job.
Brian: But I told them let's do a debate or something and they never responded to me. I've talked to popular vegan YouTubers, all this type of people, and they never come on. Joel Kahn was the first one that actually responded to me. Well, I talked to him in person. Maybe that's why, but I don't know. I've heard him on other podcast and he didn't seem to add much value. Did you listen to him with Chris Kresser and --
Christopher: I did. I thought that Chris Kresser took care of that in the first 20 minutes and after that, they just talked in circles. I got really bored.
Brian: Exactly. What I am doing is -- I was invited to talk at a food industry conference and do a 15-minute presentation on why meat should be included in the diet and then a vegan will do their presentation why it shouldn't, and then we're doing a fireside chat with a third person who's a vegan food company person that sells the fake products and we'll do a little friendly debate. I'm really excited about that. I think I have airtight arguments on all sides. I could talk about ethics. I could talk about the environment. I could talk about nutrition. There's nothing that holds up to a vegan diet.
As I talked about before, all these plant foods, they just take from the soil. There are no outside inputs to give back. Animals give back the fertilizer. The only other way to get these nitrogen and other inputs is to get it from fossil fuel base for life. I don't see what arguments they have. They can try to twist numbers and they're like, "Oh, it takes so much water." You're counting the rainwater that would have fallen anyway. There are all these different ways that they can try to twist the numbers, but when it comes down to it, I don't see how you're going to get better than a cow on grass. How are you going to employ a thousand people and refrigerate a whole building and get all these different chemicals and ways to refrigerate it and keep it sanitary and antibiotics to keep it -- do you know what I mean? There are so many inputs it would take to lead a lab-grown meat or ship things in from all over the world to make this fake meat. It's just not possible that you're going to cheat nature. So basically, I'm excited to go to this conference and talk about this with people, lay out all my arguments, talk to them live, and then the in-audience, impossible foods, tastes in chicken, this is a food industry conference. It's not a Keto conference.
Christopher: Okay.
Brian: I'm excited about that to get the word out and start having people hear this side of things and see what they would have to say.
Christopher: Get the word out. That's the message. How can people support you? Julie just saw your ground meat that's mixed with organ meats, liver, spleen, heart, tongue. What else was in it? That was it?
Brian: It's heart, liver, spleen, and kidney.
Christopher: Yeah, so not only are these ingredients hard to get hold of, they're also hard to mix together. That's what Julie doesn't want to do. She doesn't want to buy a meat grinder and start putting all that stuff together, so the appeal of ground meat that still tastes good but is nose to tail is a strong one.
Brian: It is.
Christopher: She was excited about that.
Brian: A lot of people have been excited about it. I've only been in business a couple of months, but it's nosetotail.org that helps support all my stuff.
[0:55:05]
I don't make any money really. I'm sitting here in LA trying to live off my savings, trying to make this film. You can preview the film on Indiegogo, so you could go to foodlies.org and click through to Indiegogo. It's still open. You could still get these cool shirts we're selling. I wore it yesterday. It says, "What else do you eat? Not the meat." It just says, "Eat meat really big" but all the problems -- this is also my argument I'm going to say at the conference, is what else do you eat? Not the meat. Come on, people. What are you people eating meat with? We all know you're eating it with fries and a burger and a bun and a milkshake. Come on. So yeah, nosetotail.org and foodlies.org.
Christopher: And then the Peak Human Podcast, I'd highly recommend. I've been listening to that. I very much enjoyed your interview with Layne Norton. I think you did a pretty good job of pushing him and I mostly agreed with both of you. It was a good one.
Brian: He was on his best behavior. He was --
Christopher: He seems to have a bit of a reputation, doesn't he?
Brian: Yeah. We talked on the phone before and I got an intro through Dom D'Agostino. It was this friendly intro. Yeah, I love to push back on people. I did it with Stephan Guyenet. Stephan Guyenet is more a plant-based, but we had a good conversation and he had some interesting points, so peak-human.com and then sapien.org. Sapien.org is kind of an umbrella thing and that's where we're building the technology and all that kind of stuff.
Christopher: Excellent. I think you're doing fantastic work, Brian. Keep up the good work and I look forward to watching the documentary and eating some of your Nose to Tail ground beef.
Brian: Let's do it. Let's eat.
Christopher: Thank you.
[0:56:33] End of Audio
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