[00:02:10] So what I want to do is start off telling the audience about your background because you’re an investigative journalist. Tell people about that background and how it assisted you in this research that you did for the book.

[00:02:22] Matthew Lysiak: Yeah, I’ve been an investigative reporter for about two decades now. Spent most of my years at the New York Daily News, which when I was there was the fifth biggest paper in the country.

[00:02:31] Specifically, my role was to parachute into any breaking news story across the country. So I spent about half my year on the road, chasing down some of the biggest stories of the past two decades that I’m sure your audience has heard of. I began seeing that the newspaper industry was going to hell pretty early on.

[00:02:51] It was evident. And, I transitioned into book writing. My first book. Was about the mass shooting in Newtown, admitted by a young man named Adam Lanza. I published that with Simon and Schuster and I’ve done work with HarperCollins, Scholastic, Ben Bella. So I’ve worked for a wide range of publishing houses.

[00:03:12] Investigative reporting is really my passion. I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not an economist, but I’m a data dork. I love doing deep dives into In particular, government corruption. So I’ve interviewed former presidents and senators and governors. I’ve become very used to corruption in government and how it’s hidden and ways to find documents to uncover that corruption.

[00:03:42] Preston Pysh: Yeah, I love it. And I think I would argue that’s why I think you were able to look at it with the lens that you were, is because this wasn’t necessarily your, sometimes people are too close to a particular area that they can’t view it from an outsider’s perspective and boy, did it shine through.

[00:03:59] So what inspired, like, what was the moment that you were I have to write a book about this. Like I have to like dedicate, I don’t know how much time you spent writing this. I would imagine a ton with the amount of end notes and research that I see throughout the book. But what was the thing that inspired you to take this on?

[00:04:16] I mean, this is huge.

[00:04:18] Matthew Lysiak: I think about that a lot. Because I’ve written so much. I’ve written over 10 books and I’ve written plays that have been produced. I have a movie coming out. My first screenplay I wrote recently of all my work, this is what I’m most proud of. Fiat food, really? Yeah, it is. And I have four daughters and this is the book that I want them to read when they’re a little bit older and can understand a bit about the world around them from more of a cynical viewpoint.

[00:04:45] But going back into my personal history, I grew up in the nineties and. At that time, my great parents, they were pushing something they being society and nutritional health authorities were pushing the dietary food pyramid, which instructed us to eat between 8 to 11 helpings of grains a day and to limit your saturated fat found in meat to very, very minuscule amounts.

[00:05:12] So I was raised on that and I became fat. I was a fat little kid. I got cancer at the age of 15. I had osteogenic sarcoma. So I was pretty much hospitalized for the better part of two years. I remember asking one of my doctors from my hospital bed. What did I do? Like, why do I have this? And he said, oh, it’s not your fault.

[00:05:35] We don’t know why people get cancer or something is genetic or there’s a lot of different beliefs I intuitively realized I’d done something wrong. I wasn’t eating a moderate amount of garbage I was eating tons of the food, but it was also the food that was recommended by the government I was eating a lot of grains at this time Saturated fat was replaced mainly by seed oils Like Crisco and all these other atrocities of science You And I had so going back to my teenage years, I always had something in me that made me think, man, I had done something wrong.

[00:06:12] I abused my body. So health, even though I went on to as a career as an investigative reporter, health in my personal health was always on my mind. Like, what did I done wrong? And I’m still in remission for cancer. I don’t want that back. Cancer is really bad. It’s awful to have. You don’t want it. And I also like, I think I’m naturally attuned to thinking that I’m responsible for things that happen to me.

[00:06:36] I think that’s something that’s been installed in me from my parents and I just take responsibility for the good and the bad in my life. That was a bad and I never was able to shake it. So when I began my career as a journalist, I did it. My focus was mainly on mass shootings and government corruption.

[00:06:54] But I always took like a side interest in health in 2021. With COVID, it became very clear to me early on that this was a scale of government corruption I had never encountered. There was some truth to this, a lot of the pandemic, but there were also a lot of lies, which is what you find with government.

[00:07:14] They don’t generally make things up whole cloth, but they weaponize real events in ways that are often dishonest. And I found that to be apparent with the COVID pandemic. And it led me to Saifedean Ammous. I don’t know if your audience is familiar with him. Yes. I love economics and I read The Bitcoin Standard, but it was The Fiat standard, his second book, that really caught me.

[00:07:38] Particularly a chapter he wrote called Fiat Food. I respect Saifedean. I think he’s probably one of the top five economic minds in the world right now. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. But the chapter sounded insane. It was this very short chapter just alleging this conspiracy that manipulated our food supply.

[00:07:57] So I’m like, look at this. Wow, this guy’s brilliant, but what is this? This is wacky. Like this is off the deep end. So I began fact checking it like a reporter does. And to my shock, he had understated the case. And when I began pulling this sheet back a little bit, what it revealed was what I would argue to be the most consequential conspiracy of the past 60 years in terms of its effect , on the human health of our nation, on the health of our nation.

[00:08:29] So I reached out to Saifedean and I’m like, hey man, here’s who I am. This, if it is what I think it is, deserves a book, not seven pages that you did. I also understood that Although I’d worked for all these major publishing houses, none of them were going to accept this premise. It was too far out there. So I said, look, man, you should start your own publishing house and I should be your first author.

[00:08:52] I was pretty bold. He agreed, and I didn’t realize this at the time, he had already been considering launching his own publishing house called The Safe House. So I worked with him and that’s been great and we launched Fiat Food.

[00:09:07] Preston Pysh: Yes, so what you’re talking about, so I’ve read the book, The Fiat Standard that you’re talking about, I went through this section and when I was reading the section, I didn’t have the exact same reaction as you, as you did, which was, there’s no way, like, let me dig into all the resource.

[00:09:23] I was kind of just like, yeah, , I agree with you. See, I was just like all in right. And so when I saw this book, I’ve been meaning to read this book for quite a while, and I knew you really took like a wire brush comb to like all these ideas. I couldn’t wait to plow into it. And. When I did the, this Ancel Keys actor or character, or I mean, real person, it was mind blowing to me.

[00:09:49] Like the analysis that you did and like the history on like, and how instrumental this person was into these debauchery that we have today, in modern nutrition. Can you give the audience just a little taste of like who this person is, how they impacted all of this and why it’s important.

[00:10:11] Matthew Lysiak: Thank you. Ancel Keys was very pivotal in how our food supply in America has been degraded. Yeah. It’s hard to understate. His role because he in the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies, the late forties, early fifties, he was the leading nutritionist in America. So what he said. Really went and he was in bed with industry, so he was getting funding from all kinds of conflicts.

[00:10:44] He was getting funding from the sugar industry. New York Times did some great work in 2016. I hate to give them credit because of what they’ve become, but 2016, they uncovered one of the leading studies on sugar that we have. Had Ancel Keys was bribed. And these are studies that we still rely on today.

[00:11:06] These are studies that are still commonly cited. It was. What you have to understand, I think, what your audience should understand about a lot of these nutritional studies is that they’re not science. It’s more like marketing. Yeah, it’s PR. Yes, and Once you understand that it all kind of falls into line much easier And you have I don’t want to get into the weeds too much on science on studies because your audience is gonna get bored But brief overview is you have these observational studies, which can’t establish causal relationships they can only establish association and These are almost exclusively all the studies that you’re seeing in nutrition science, not clinical double blind gold standard studies, which control variables and can control and can establish causal relationships.

[00:11:54] For example, I can cite you that. I took a poll of people who have cancer and 97 percent of them have had meat. That’s an example of an observational study. And then from that, you have a headline that will say 97 or meat linked to cancer. And I spoke to so many scientists in research for this book, and they would explain to me kind of humorously how these studies aren’t really meant for other scientists or for the scientific community. They’re meant to garner media attention where normal Americans are working. They’re not going to go look at the actual study, but they see the headline and they might read the first graph and then that establishes a narrative.

[00:12:35] Preston Pysh: Especially today, especially today with social media. It’s like they read the headline and like, that’s all they don’t even open the article sharing it. One thing on the Ancel Keys thing, he wasn’t a nutritionist. He didn’t go to school for any of this, right? Like what?

[00:12:49] Matthew Lysiak: No, he was like a fish doctor. He studied eels.

[00:12:52] That’s how he got his, that’s how he got his gravitas. But he was a really great personality. He was strong and determined. And he had a theory that saturated fat found in meat clogged arteries, which caused heart ailments. And this was a big deal because in the early fifties, the president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, had a heart attack and everybody was very afraid of heart attacks.

[00:13:19] Where are these heart attacks coming from? What is the cause? There’s a race in science to figure out what was happening here. And a few theories emerged. One of them was a type A personality. People very stressed out. Some people thought it might be the increase in car exhaust and fumes. Other people thought it was sugar.

[00:13:37] Ancel Keys thought it was saturated fat found in meat. And what you find is that he begins through a structure of what appeared to be motivated reasoning to try to find science to validate his conviction. And that’s where the observational studies come in because you can really manipulate data to say anything in an observational studies where there’s no real controls over variables.

[00:14:03] And He initially got a lot of flack for this theory because other scientists kept saying, well, you’re presenting this diet heart hypothesis linking Saturated fat found in meat to heart ailments, but where’s your evidence? He could never present evidence. So finally in 1967 He got a huge government grant And he’s like, you know what?

[00:14:24] I realize all my studies are observational. This time we’re going to do a clinical double blind placebo gold standard study that will establish causal relationship between saturated fat and heart health called the Minnesota Coronary Survey established in 1967. Four year survey. I’ve done over a few thousand patients in nursing homes in Minnesota where all the food could be controlled because, you can really do good science when you have these situations where you know everything these patients are eating and everything they’re not eating and you could chronicle it.

[00:15:05] For four years they did this and it was by all accounts a really great study. 1971 rolls around, study’s over. There’s Preston. There’s no word of the study. Nobody’s discussing the study. This is crazy. We begin to formulate We assume that Ancel Keys is correct. Although there’s no evidence and the American Dietary guidelines move forward based on his premise In the, I think it was 2014, it became revealed.

[00:15:34] How many, how many decades is that? It’s a long time. Yeah, it’s like four decades. Finally, somebody from, once again, I hate to give credit to the Times, but truthfully, they did great work on this. Somebody from the Times was like, what happened to that study? I remember hearing about it when I was a kid and it was a huge deal and nobody ever said anything about the study.

[00:15:52] So, we was able to get a hold of one of the researcher’s sons, Ancel Keyes was one of the lead researchers, another researcher’s son, who said, their father had died, but they had all the boxes in their basement, and they went through the boxes, and it revealed that not only did the study not validate And so keys is diet heart hypothesis.

[00:16:14] It actually indicated that the opposite was true, that lower cholesterol was associated with poorer health outcomes and higher cholesterol was associated with better outcomes and lower mortality rates. So how could this be? It was the exact opposite of what Ancel Keys and the Diehard Hypothesis had hypothesized.

[00:16:38] That’s why it was called a hypothesis, right? It was an educated guess. They didn’t know. Now they knew. And one of the researchers, Gary Taubes, who is a fantastic science journalist asked, well, why didn’t you release this data earlier? Mm hmm. And his response was very telling. He said, there is nothing wrong with the study.

[00:16:58] In fact, the study was great, but quote, we’re just so disappointed in the results. And you got to understand that these scientists had their entire reputations built on this. There was an infrastructure, but what happens is, and what I chronicle in the book is. Industry, science, and this religious group, they all had this interest in removing meat from the American diet.

[00:17:24] But still, in 1970. Americans ate meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So they heard these arguments, but the diet that for thousands of years, humans have eaten, they continue to eat. And it hadn’t been swayed. 1971 rolls around and a very powerful player emerges into this debate. And it’s the federal government.

[00:17:46] I mean, this is, I think where a lot of your audience is going to find it intriguing. And this is where I found it most intriguing was the government’s. motivation in altering our food supply. What you’ll discover when you look at governments historically is that governments can survive endless war. You see it all the time.

[00:18:05] Like we keep electing these people in America. We’ve been in war every year, but five since 1971. Governments are the people accept corruption, but what you don’t accept what people won’t accept is rising food prices. This is when governments get overthrown. You saw in 2022, according to American University, there are 12, 500 food and energy related riots in Europe alone, just in 2022.

[00:18:32] Same year in Sri Lanka, riots over primarily attributed to the rising cost of animal based products. Thanks. escalated to such an extent that hundreds of thousands of people went into the Sri Lankan government and the leader said to flee. So governments are very, very aware of the link between government instability, And rising food prices.

[00:18:58] So when Nixon decoupled from gold, so I want your audience to stay with me. I know I’m throwing a lot out. No, no, this is great. In 71, Nixon decoupled from gold. Up until that point, the American people weren’t able to redeem their promissory notes for gold, but foreign banks could. So this provided a powerful restraint on the ability for the government to just keep printing money.

[00:19:20] Which kept inflation relatively modest, but when Nixon decoupled completely in 1971 on August 15th in a speech known as the Nixon shock, he knew, and all government leaders knew, and I have this from several FOIA requests that came through, they were very aware that food prices were going to rise extensively, so they began a campaign, what amounted to a 55 year gaslighting campaign, Not to come clean with the American people on the consequences of decoupling and monetary inflation that would ensue, but to change the entire trajectory of the food supply.

[00:19:55] So that Americans don’t really notice the rising cost of food. This man named, um, Gosh, I can’t think of his name right now. The Nixon appointed to the head of the Department of Agriculture, Earl Butz. He was tasked with Now that the fiat money printer could print money, printing a bazillion dollars in subsidies to the corn, soy and sugar industries with the goal of consolidating American farmland so that we could really lower the cost of the American food supply for the consumer as an increase in the money supply was going to change the price of the real foods that you can’t print.

[00:20:37] So, for instance. If you’re eating nothing, but a diet of Doritos and grains, you don’t really notice monetary inflation. Right? Like, I mean, today you can look around and I could feed my entire family. I have four daughters. I could feed them all three boxes of cereal in a day. That’s pretty cheap. But if you’re talking about nutrients, the nutrients for humans to thrive, what you find is it’s become remarkably cost prohibitive to the point where red meat is increasingly becoming.

[00:21:06] A food of the upper classes.

[00:21:11] Preston Pysh: No. It was amazing. In the book, you have this amazing illustration of how there’s this reflexive, nature with CPI and the food. So you, you were talking about it a little bit there at the end, but let’s say we go back five decades or six decades and let’s say Americans are 20 percent of their food budget is red meat or this really high density nutrient food.

[00:21:37] But then as the money’s getting debased now, all of a sudden they can’t necessarily afford 20 percent of their, of their budget going to that really nutrient dense food. And it’s 18 percent or it’s 15%. And so then it has this recursive impact on what’s actually in the CPI bucket, because instead of buying the red meat or whatever it was, they’re now buying Lucky Charms or whatever food is, is now going into the, and so it just further compounds.

[00:22:03] And so it’s like this moving target that you’re not able to ever really fully understand because it’s keeps moving. I’m curious if you have any other points. I’d love that. It was like a quote in the, I can’t remember, which chapter that was. It was so good.

[00:22:17] Matthew Lysiak: So your audience is, is like pretty educated in economics.

[00:22:20] Preston Pysh: Yes. Yes.

[00:22:21] Matthew Lysiak: Yeah. So I’m not going to go too into weeds on it because they already understand it all. But it’s interesting. I’m not an economics guy. But what I understood was that it’s, it’s a statistical tautology, right? Because it’s like these food studies, it’s just marketing where, when CPI was first brought into the picture in America during world war one, it was a pretty good reliable barometer because it covered stable goods that people bought.

[00:22:49] It’d be like steel, me, and they didn’t change. You could see what the price of a pound of beef was. One year ago, and what it is today, a price of beef, one year ago, a price of coffee, one year ago, and then today, and you can, you can measure it. The problem with CPI, initially, as constructed, was that it was a reliable barometer, and that people could then see the rise in prices, and that was problematic for governments.

[00:23:13] It wasn’t as problematic when we were on a hard currency. We were on a gold standard up until around 1917. And then it was a partial gold standard because we no longer allowed the Americans, our own people to. Redeem their gold before a nation still could, but after 1971, what you see with, Arthur Burns, who was the head of the treasury under Nixon was, I mean, it’s, he talked about it.

[00:23:39] He just had to, he had to keep taking and substituting things out of the CPI that revealed the actual consequences. You want to know a real CPI. Look at a McDonald’s billboard. There’s pictures of it. They haven’t been able to Orwellian pigeonhole it yet from 1986 and look at it today. That’s a decent barometer.

[00:23:57] Candy bars, decent barometer. CPI is current in its current iteration is nothing more than marketing. So if you’re relying on a CPI, which uses dollars, Which, the amount of dollars it costs to buy a ribeye, you substitute the ribeye out for some kind of chemical storm soy burger patty, then they don’t adjust the CPI, they just say, oh, you’re a hundred dollar ribeye, you’re now buying a ten dollar soy burger, they just, they just, and it’s an equivalent, yeah, and it’s not even close, yeah,

[00:24:32] so I would encourage your audience to not even waste time, like, Yeah, I wasted way too much time trying to understand the CPI and when I did, I was like, Ugh,

[00:24:40] I felt like I just took a community college course from a Keynesian professor. Yeah. Where you come out dumber. Yeah. You’re like, wait, I ran a lemonade stand as a kid, and I thought I understood it, but now I, the Keynesian economic multiplier effect is telling me that if I just give all my money to the government and not to the lemonade stand, it multiplies me.

[00:24:57] No, no, no. Just don’t go in the classroom like that’s, you’ll be dumb to that.

[00:25:02] Preston Pysh: Amen to that. Oh, I love that quote. One of the things that I think is a really popular thing, at least in Bitcoin, it’s a really popular topic, topic for discussion is seed oils. You cover some of this from the very early days back to 1884, with the national food policy where I think it was in New York.

[00:25:22] Was that where it originally started in 1884 where they were trying to, the cotton seed. Producers were trying to push these polysaturated butters on the populace and they weren’t having it. They were passing laws and then they were being overturned because of the corporate interest. So talk to us a little bit about seed oils and also talk to us about this corporate interest and how some of this just like tentacles, like figures out its way to like, Sorry, this question’s so long.

[00:25:51] I like to try to make the question short, but like it’s weird to me how the corporate interests almost perfectly align with the government interest and how they’re able to put their tentacles into all of this so that it’s just lost on everybody. That’s the thing that I think I walked away from the book probably most blown away with.

[00:26:09] It doesn’t seem like it’s one person. It just seems like it’s this blob of people that we’re all incentivized to act in this kind of way. And we all just kind of got rope a doped along the way, but back to the original question, seed oil, seed oils and corporate interest.

[00:26:25] Matthew Lysiak: I think you put it really well. And I appreciate long questions. I also appreciate I do a lot of podcasts and a lot of media and rarely does somebody actually read my book. So I can tell when somebody has, and I find it refreshing. Usually they sketch my book and they’ve seen me on another podcast and then they have me on, which is fine.

[00:26:41] I appreciate it, but kudos to you.

[00:26:44] Preston Pysh: I love the book. I love the book. It’s really good.

[00:26:46] Matthew Lysiak: Thank you. So what I found, what really astounded me was that about the seed oils was how historically Americans were accustomed to eating real food. So this is, this is how I broke this up in my mind. And then corporations in particular with seed oils, it was.

[00:27:09] Procter Gamble had all this cotton seed waste because we had transitioned after the Industrial Revolution and all this cotton, nobody was buying candles anymore, we had electricity. What do we do with all this cotton waste? Oh, yeah. So one of the largest corporations in America decided to launch a campaign to try to convince people for the first time to eat things that weren’t food.

[00:27:31] I mean, that’s really simply what it is. Like cotton seed. Is not like that’s not food and it’s not even vegetable like I don’t know how somehow along the way is it got defined as a vegetable, but what you have pre 1971 is you have these corporations constantly trying to convince us to eat things that aren’t real foods and that’s where the seed oils came in that was lubricant that was industrial waste when it no longer became viable through industry.

[00:27:59] Suddenly they tried to market it as food. They weren’t going to let go of the product and that began a huge marketing campaign war. That’s where you find a lot of nutrition health people like, so a lot of these industries began investing in something called into something called the nutrition foundation, which was industry sponsored to come up with studies that validated reasons why we shouldn’t be eating real food, why we should be eating industrial waste, why it was better for us.

[00:28:25] And then we’re always available to the media as the New York Times will quote an expert from the Nutrition Foundation which wouldn’t mention the conflicts of interest. They’d say, actually, you should be drinking seed oils instead of breast milk. It’s healthier. And as if for babies, all this, all this nonsense.

[00:28:43] But when you’re talking about these incentives and you’re spot on with that, I think that’s something that’s really important. I kind of want to take a step back and talk about how you have. , 1 thing we haven’t mentioned yet is the 7th day Adventist church, which is extremely powerful. And to me, my story and a little background on the church, It started by a woman named Ellen G.

[00:29:03] White, who went to the services by the Millerite movements in the late 1800s, which preached the end of the world and was coming. And the head of the Millerite movement made the mistake that most cult leaders have learned from, which is you don’t give a date. You’re vague about the end of the world. You don’t give the date.

[00:29:25] He gave the date and everybody waited. For the end of the world, and it became known in history as the Great Disappointment, when the world did not end. All these people sold all of their things, they waited for the moment to come, and it didn’t come. Ellen White believed that it did come and it was coming.

[00:29:45] We just didn’t see it clearly. So she thought the apocalypse was coming. She had brain damage, right? Like she correct. She was walking home from school one day, according to her, got hit in the face with a rock, fell into a coma and woke up with visions from God. And God basically said to Ellen, we need to purify mind and body for the next world.

[00:30:06] It’s coming soon. The apocalypse is coming. So we need to purify. The soul and the body and at the time, this is where your audience is just, this is going to sound crazy at the time. Nearly every medical problem associated with especially young men came from the belief that masturbation caused these health maladies.

[00:30:27] And that meat caused the carnal desires that caused the masturbation, which resulted in health maladies. So a huge part of this church’s energy came into being trying to change the food supply, trying to alter it so that people weren’t eating as much meat. And they were doing this, unlike industry, they were doing this really out of sincere religious conviction.

[00:30:48] They really believed it was in the best interest of individuals to not eat meat. She hired Ellen hired a young man called John Harvey Kellogg tasked him with a job of coming up with a food that would in particular replace meat for breakfast. Everybody was eating meat for breakfast. This was terrible.

[00:31:06] She thought he came up with Kellogg’s cornflakes as an anti masturbatorial drug, essentially to lower the sex drive of young men. A little about John Harvey Kellogg.

[00:31:17] Preston Pysh: The research on this is totally nuts. People hearing you say that are going to say, Oh, that there’s no way. I mean it is, it is there.

[00:31:26] Matthew Lysiak: Well, I know how I sound. Yeah. But I bring the receipts like I totally, I have over 212 citations in my book. Yes. And this is according to John Harvey Kellogg. I went through his writings, which were terrifying. It’s hard to overstate John Harvey Kellogg’s influence. He was the celebrity doctor of the day.

[00:31:41] He gave speeches, he wrote books. He advocated putting carbolic acid on the CTOs of young females. Cages, surgery without anesthesia, real torture. He was kind of a masochist in many extreme enemas, all to purify people from sex drive and corn flakes is one of like by eating more grains and eating less meat.

[00:32:07] And science is later vindicated this, you can lower people’s sex job. I’d argue he’s been pretty successful, but to kind of get back to, I’m trying to stay streamlined because this is a lot after John Harvey Kellogg, he had somebody named Leanna Cooper step in and she started the American Dietetic Association, which became over time the institutionalized government arm of nutrition.

[00:32:30] All that said, come 1970, you had The Seventh Day Adventist church growing, but still most people ate meat for breakfast and lunch and dinner. Despite all the corporate push to have us eat these fake non foods, people still ate meat for breakfast and lunch and dinner. But in 1971, when we shifted our money from a gold based currency to fiat, meaning now the government prints as much as they want, they began an incentive structure through fiat to conduct a gaslighting campaign that actually saw the food supply shift Not the shift that we saw from 1910 to 1970 with corporate influence and just the influence of this religious group.

[00:33:17] It really shifted notably then. And where in 1970 the average person ate around 155 pounds. You might want to fact check this. It’s off the top of my head. Pounds of red meat a year. That got more than cut in half by 2010. And what you saw was it replaced by all these grains. Americans were remarkably compliant and through Fiat, what you saw was they directed to Fiat money printer towards the university, for instance, called Global India University.

[00:33:49] Which was an arm of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and their job was not to do science, but to come up with studies that validated not science, but religious convictions. So most of the studies that your audience is reading today that say red meat is bad, red meat causes X. They’re observational studies conducted from global university just in a few years in between 2012 to 2015.

[00:34:15] They got over 155 million in Fiat grants because you have all these motions moving in the same direction suddenly. And then you have nutrition science, Tufts food compass. I’m not sure if your audience understands what this is. The leading, it went from 1980, nutritionary guidelines, the first of its kind.

[00:34:36] Government used to not tell us what to eat. In 1980, they began. They said, oh, eat more grains, eat less, eat less meat. 1992, which we discussed briefly, was the dietary food pyramid. That was far more invasive because that told us exact portions, 8 to 11 portions of grades.

[00:34:55] Preston Pysh: Posted in every single school across the country, yeah.

[00:34:58] Matthew Lysiak: Yeah, and you’re right, like that’s a huge thing because as a kid growing up in the 90s, I grew up metabolically compromised because By law, my cafeteria was no longer allowed to sell whole milk. It was shifted to low fat milk, which nobody drank because it tasted horrible. So they had to infuse it with chocolate and sugar.

[00:35:17] So essentially I was addicted to sugar and grains by the time I got out of high school. It was gross. The seed oils replaced the lard that fried my chicken nuggets. The whole cheese that used to be on my pizza boat. I don’t know if you had that where you grew up pizza boat. It was some kind of weird substance.

[00:35:33] So by the time a normal kid comes out of high school today, you’re already metabolically compromised. That in 2021 got replaced by I think about this a lot. I think about the nutritionists at Tufts University because they’ve spent years, they’ve spent their whole lives, Preston, studying nutrition. They released something in 2021 called the Tufts Food Compass, which told us that Lucky Charms were healthier than meat.

[00:36:00] Come on. Chocolate, soy milk. In 2021? Yeah. No, no, I’m sorry. correction, 2023. January of 2023, this came out. Oh. And it’s sponsored all by the same industry, but masquerading as science. So industry sponsored these studies, colluded with government grants, years of study. And these geniuses come up with the Tufts Food Compass, leading nutrition of the day that tells us that Froot Loops, Honey Nut Cheerios are healthier than the food our ancestors have eaten for thousands of years, including eggs.

[00:36:39] Same month, January of 2023, an episode of 60 minutes comes out. Hosted by, by Leslie Stahl, a renowned journalist, and she has on a doctor in a white coat named Dr. Fatima Stanford, a real terrible human being by any, any standard, if, if words have meanings and the word terrible as a meaning, she’s a horrible person because she went on this episode and she talked about how people no longer have control over obesity through lifestyle choice.

[00:37:09] That’s out that obesity is a genetic brain disease. It wasn’t mentioned very much that the episode was sponsored by Ozempic, and that she herself was a paid consultant by Ozempic, or that the only other expert on the show to talk about obesity was also a paid consultant by Ozempic. But fortunately, She explained there’s a solution now, and that’s Ozempec, and these weight loss drugs.

[00:37:37] That same month, Food Compass comes out. This show airs, which was an advertisement, and what’s in a new show is an advertisement. The American Pediatrics Association for the first time changes their standards for what doctors should say the treatment for obesity in children should be. Now, they’re saying that treatment should be weight loss drugs, Ozempac, all happens in the same month.

[00:38:01] I couldn’t, in my research, find a smoky room, right? I couldn’t find that they had all gathered. I couldn’t find emails. I looked. I couldn’t find any of that. However, I’d be naive to think that there wasn’t some sort of coordination. Of course, there was coordination, of course, of course, right? I guess why I’m hard on Dr.

[00:38:18] Fatima Stanford and her beautiful white coat is because I think there’s not much more There’s few things more evil you can do than tell somebody that they’re not in control of the most One of the most fundamental aspects of being a human which is the control of your own health Yes, right like she’s undermining that and that’s something that I found throughout you’re supposed to ignore your common sense You’re supposed to ignore what your ancestors and the advice of your great grandparents have done.

[00:38:48] And you’re supposed to rely on credentialed experts. And one of the blessings, I think, of COVID was that got broken.

[00:38:55] Preston Pysh: Yes, it did.

[00:38:55] Matthew Lysiak: A lot of people, including myself, who, I grew up trusting these American institutions. Yeah. Um, I didn’t think they were perfect. I covered a lot of corruption in my time as an investigative reporter, but I’d always assume that they had the best interest at heart as long as it didn’t conflict with their own agenda.

[00:39:12] This changed me and watching these people like these doctors get on and, during COVID, you saw a lot of fat, overweight, obese doctors. Giving health advice and I could not like then you look at something like Dr. Sean Baker who’s a heretic in health Wait, so dr. Sean Baker is telling me not to get a weight loss drug and he looks like Zeus You know as he’s talking while I go to my doctor and I run every day.

[00:39:38] I play basketball I feel like I’m in pretty good health. I eat tons of meat And he’s telling me I’m eating too much meat, and he’s wheezing, can’t really talk because he’s so big, he’s wheezing, he’s a good guy, but he’s wheezing, and he’s the one giving me advice. So, I think that there’s been a movement to, and towards self-autonomy, and I find that to be beautiful, I know that was long winded.

[00:40:00] Preston Pysh: One of the things that you’ll hear people push back on is they always say this word cholesterol. If you’re eating egg, if you’re eating a lot of eggs, all there’s too much cholesterol in that, or you’re eating a lot of meat, there’s a lot of cholesterol in that. You know what I found really interesting?

[00:40:14] So I’ve been using this GPT 4. 0 for a lot of the nutrition things that I’ve been doing lately.

[00:40:20] Matthew Lysiak: What is that? I’m sorry.

[00:40:21] Preston Pysh: The chat GPT transformer. And so I’m literally taking picture. I’ll get a plate of food. Most of it’s meat. I’ll take a picture of it and I’ll say how many grams of carbs and how many grams of protein are in this?

[00:40:36] How many calories is it? And it’s doing an estimate like right there on the spot just from the picture. But I was told recently, because I, I eat eggs before I go to the gym in the morning. And, I had a person say, oh, there’s so much cholesterol in that. So, I, I hit the AI and I was like, I’ve, I’ve been told there’s a lot of cholesterol in this, but all the people that look like they’re literally in perfect health are telling me that it’s extremely healthy for me to have eggs in the morning.

[00:41:03] I’m sorry. Like you, I look at the people and I say, that person knows what they’re talking about and that person’s wheezing and they have no clue what they’re talking about. And I’m gonna take advice from this person over here. So I asked the, the ai and it came back with all of these studies and like all of this information on how if there’s a lot of cholesterol in the food, that doesn’t necessarily translate over to you then having high cholesterol in your blood, in, in your veins, and all these other things.

[00:41:31] And it may be something else. And I was like, Hmm, I wonder what that is. And I’m sure it’s a lot of the, the seed oils and things that we were talking about earlier, but this stigmatism of just saying the word cholesterol and its association with meat and eggs. Is in my opinion, just looking at, just looking at the people that are saying it versus the ones that are, that are eating it, that are saying it’s bad versus the ones eating it.

[00:41:58] It’s just so obvious. Like it doesn’t take hard work or for me to read some Harvard produced or Tufts produced document to convince me that, that they’re right versus the person who’s walking around and looks like Zeus. So where’s the question in that, Matthew, I’m, I guess I’m just venting and frustrated, but like, but from your point of view, how does this become overcome from the branding from the decades of branding that has happened and plagued our country?

[00:42:25] Like, how do we overcome this?

[00:42:28] Matthew Lysiak: It’s a great question because we’re fighting, it’s only getting worse on their end. They’re becoming better at their propaganda and their gaslighting. I saw Mayor Eric Adams of New York City recently was talking about how now we can’t eat meat because we have to change the thermostat of the earth, right?

[00:42:45] You have to, the, the, my consumption of meat.

[00:42:48] Preston Pysh: You’re not even joking. That’s the, that’s the sad part. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

[00:42:52] Matthew Lysiak: No, I’m not. I, I mean, it sounds like I’m joking. I, I realize I sound like I’m in some kind of skit. It’s true. So they’re going to take it out on our children though. They’re going to do meatless, they already have meatless Mondays in the public school systems in New York, but they’re going to expand for the good of the temperature of the earth.

[00:43:09] And in 19, in 1970 it was a different argument. The crisis was overpopulation and there was a book called the population bomb written by. One of history’s largest morons a guy named Paul Ehrlich who if he tells you not to invest in a stock invest in that stock because he’s like the reverse Nostradamus of predictions and He posited this that you know We’re all gonna run out of food by like 1986 because we’re eating too much meat and meats resource intensive So that was why we shouldn’t eat the meat in the 1940s.

[00:43:41] We shouldn’t eat meat because We acknowledge that meat was really healthy and we needed to save it for the troops fighting abroad. So plant your victory gardens. Today, we’re convinced in virtue signaling over while eating like peasants from the 1400s. And it’s always never in our best interest of the people, it’s always to the aggrandizement of our leaders.

[00:44:03] Because as I mentioned, if you’re only eating cereal, you don’t notice the consequences of inflation. But there’s a deeper issue, which I found when I began my personal journey. So I eat Animal based about 90%. I start my morning. If you could see over there, I have a ribeye. I start my morning with a steak and I’m fortunate that I can afford these things.

[00:44:21] So I know not everybody can, but my mental clarity is increased a lot. And I think a lot about the societal gifts. that future generations and our generation are missing out on because you have like the Wright brothers, right? And the courage it took when you could go through the New York times time machine and see how nobody thought it was agreed consensus that nobody could fly back then.

[00:44:43] And they, they pushed forward a Henry T for these brave entrepreneurs. Who fought for their ideas, would they be able to have done it on a public school diet of lucky charms and grains with their fat flabby bodies like the kids today? I noticed when I eat pure carnivore. Um, my mind is on hyperdrive. It’s a life hack and I want to shout it to everybody.

[00:45:09] I know like little things to I’ll notice. So I’m working on my next book now and I’m trying to move notes from one thing to another. It’s like, wow, I can remember three sentences right now to move over instead of one. My mind just on a completely different level when I’m not eating industrial waste and grains.

[00:45:26] I mean, it’s kind of shocking, right? Like, wow, I’m not poisoning myself and I feel better. Just ignore the noise in essentially your great great grandmother was right, like I have cooked for part of my research I bought tons of cookbooks from the 1800s and it’s interesting how Everything was based on me and plants were eaten But basically if you were kind of starving or didn’t couldn’t afford other food I mean, we weren’t eating fruit in Arizona here in January.

[00:45:55] That wasn’t how it was. And you weren’t eating berries in the Northeast. Then you might find some berries in Pennsylvania for a few weeks out of the year, if it hadn’t been mauled by bears and stuff, but the amount of sugar we’re eating. Has made us metabolically compromised to the point that we can’t think straight.

[00:46:13] And I think that’s to the advantage of authority because we’re compliant. Yeah. Oh, you want me to wear the mask for two more years? Okay, I’ll wear the mask for two years. So the new, new pharmaceutical product comes out. I won’t question it. You have a white coat. I’ll just obey authority. I think there’s a movement of people like yourself and look, you look like you’re in booming health.

[00:46:31] I, I don’t know. You, you look very healthy. You probably feel good by eating eggs. Yeah. But a lot of that egg stuff comes from a press release that came out under Lyndon Johnson. So under Lyndon Johnson, even though we had a gold standard, inflation had begun because of the Great Society. So America was already committing a fraud at the time because we had issued so many more paper notes than we had gold in our treasury.

[00:46:55] All it would have taken was a few countries at the same time to come and try to redeem, to expose this as a fraud. So while Nixon’s a bad guy, he wasn’t totally culpable. The fraud that was happening had been happening by prior presidents. And Lyndon Johnson at the time was considering re-election and eggs were going up in price, to come back to eggs.

[00:47:14] Eggs were skyrocketing in price. And Lyndon Johnson, this is a true story recounted by Samuelson, who worked in that administration in one of his books. He called his Surgeon General into his office and was like, everybody’s angry, eggs are going up in price, we can’t have this. And the Surgeon General was like, look, it’s supply and demand, what, I can’t do anything.

[00:47:35] it’s Lyndon Johnson instructed his Surgeon General to write a phony press release saying that eggs are unhealthy, distribute it to the media. The media pushed it. The demand for eggs went down as a result, the supply stayed the same. So the price lowered. And to this day, people think that that idiotic press release, which was nothing more than a shy op to lower the price of eggs for political reasons.

[00:48:01] is legitimate science. So they’ll be like, Oh, you can’t eat eggs. Eggs are one of the most nutritionally dense foods you could have. Eggs are amazing. The only issue I had with carnivore was that my weight went down too much. I play a lot of competitive basketball with people much younger and much bigger and much more skilled than myself.

[00:48:19] You see my pinky, like I’m all bruised. I got poked in the eye last Saturday. I mean, it’s a mess. So I drink a lot of raw milk to like keep my weight up.

[00:48:28] Yeah. Yeah. For some carbs. Yeah. Let’s close this out with a discussion around Bitcoin. So in the last part of your book, you talk about how Bitcoin solves this.

[00:48:38] And, I think very simply it’s incentives. The incentives are changing. But talk to us about, from your perspective, if you were going to kind of wrap up our whole conversation and a person who’s hearing this and then knowing that we’re Bitcoiners and like how this all kind of fits together, give them a rundown from your point of view.

[00:48:56] I want to preface this play. I’m not a Bitcoin expert. I’m a novice. I got in late in the game. I love economics. Saifedean Ammous has been my mentor.

[00:48:58] Preston Pysh: You’re early. Matthew, you’re early.

[00:49:05] Matthew Lysiak: Thank you. I would recommend, I think, I think I am, I think you’re right. I would recommend, the Bitcoin Standard and, Fiat Standard and Principle of Economics, three of his books that are just instrumental in really breaking it down.

[00:49:22] Also, Gradually but Suddenly is a really great book by Parker Lewis. Do you know Parker?

[00:49:34] Preston Pysh: Yes. It’s a really good book. Yeah, I got to meet him in Austin. I did an event in Austin and just remarkable in breaking it down. But short end of this, how does Bitcoin solve diet? Right? It sounds nuts. How does it?

[00:49:43] Matthew Lysiak: Well, I would argue that any hard currency implemented would solve this crisis because what it does is it undermines the incentive for the federal government to obfuscate our money, our food supply. So there’s no reason for the government to want to alter the food supply to obscure the rising consequences, cost of food to the rising consequences of money printing when there’s no more money printing.

[00:50:11] It puts a spoke in the tire. Of this whole gaslighting campaign by removing any incentive to do it. So I really think Bitcoin is evident. It’s self evident that it’s better than gold because gold historically goes in the banks where it can be centralized. Like always government always confiscates gold.

[00:50:30] There’s never been a time where the government hasn’t come in and confiscated gold. Even in America under Roosevelt, we confiscated the gold. Bitcoin is a decentralized way. And every time you buy a little bit of Bitcoin. It’s the most charitable act you could, you could, you could commit when you’re transitioning your fiat to Bitcoin because you’re taking a little jab at the fiat money printer and you’re hurting its ability to distort markets in our food supply, health, architecture, every aspect.

[00:51:01] I would argue most consequentially in the food supply. And that’s beautiful. So you don’t need to pick it. And I would recommend go find a local farmer. Like I, I’m fortunate enough in Sierra Vista, white, white barn farms is my local rancher. And they’ve supplied me with all the meat I need. There’s no shots in my cows.

[00:51:21] They’re not getting vaccinated. I try to buy with Bitcoin. And every time I do that instead of Fiat, I end the distortion by just a little bit.

[00:51:33] Preston Pysh: Yes. Yes. Amen. You couldn’t have said it any better. Matthew, I could talk with you all day on this particular topic because I am very interested in just nutrition and just, I think it just like you had a point earlier, it was like, you feel like you can just think differently, like you can operate differently and amen to that.

[00:51:52] You’re exactly right. I think that if people really kind of give it a try and really kind of focus on the food that they’re putting into their system, I think that they might be actually really surprised at the change that they’re getting.

[00:52:02] Matthew Lysiak: Yeah. Forget all the studies. Yeah. Don’t even buy my book.

[00:52:05] Just go 30 days eating nothing but animal based products. Just 30. Just give it 30 days and just see what your body tells you. Just give that a try. And you’ll find yourself more free because if you’re not healthy, you’re not free and your self autonomy begins with personal health.

[00:52:23] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Amen. But thank you so much for coming on.

[00:52:26] Thank you for the incredible book. I can’t tell people enough. This is something totally worth reading and very, for a nutrition book. It was very entertaining, especially the historical part of it. The first half was very entertaining for me personally, at least. But thank you for making time and thank you for coming on the show.

[00:52:44] We’ll have links to the book in the show notes. Did you have anything else that you wanted to highlight or for us to put in the show notes?

[00:52:50] Matthew Lysiak: No, Preston. Thanks man. Thanks for having me. I was kind of shocked that you tweeted something out about my book. I didn’t know you. And suddenly you’re following so huge.

[00:52:58] You have such a devoted listenership that I got flooded. I’m horrible at social media. I got flooded. I was like, Bridget, look, people like me. They’re following me on Twitter. I’m horrible at Twitter or X, whatever it is. So I appreciated the shout out and thanks man. Thanks for giving me a platform to address this.

[00:53:13] Preston Pysh: Yes, sir. Yeah. for your time today.

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