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Use the coupon code "cyber50" to receive 50% off all of my premium courses available at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today we move our conversation from the normal technical side of financial planning and we talk a little bit about food, health, and weight loss. My guest today is Jack Spirico, the host of the Survival Podcast. Jack, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Hey Joshua, man. Thanks for having me on today.

I've invited you on today because you have recently been talking extensively about your experience with weight loss on specifically the ketogenic diet. And as with many things, I consider you a polymath and I find that you do a really good job of digging into subjects and talking about it.

And when it comes to finance and wealth building, back when I was a financial advisor, one of the things that really annoyed me was how myopic the financial advice industry is, basically focused specifically on financial products and of course, usually the financial products that can be sold most easily.

Where when I looked around and I looked at the things that had an impact on the quality of people's lives, I found that things like food and eating and exercise and the kind of work that you did had a far bigger impact on people's lives than the specific financial products that they owned.

So you've been doing a series recently and talking a lot about your weight loss journey. Share with us a little bit about your journey, specifically in your recent weight loss. Sure. So I have always been an advocate toward eating really healthy food and also toward sticking toward the low carb side of things.

And what I'll start out with, I'm not saying that the way that I'm eating now and the way I'm suggesting people consider is the best diet for everyone. I do think it might be the best diet for the most people. So I just kind of want to clear the air with that.

But there is, all of us, especially those of us that teach, we tend to, you can only do so many things. And even when you know what you should be doing, sometimes you're not. And that's been really me with my overall diet for the past couple of years. I have been eating not completely horribly, but not right.

And I have also was probably drinking too much as well. And a lot of hard fought weight loss that I had achieved in the past, I had gained back, I was up to about 250 pounds. And that's heavy. It's not hugely heavy for me, I guess, because I'm a big guy overall, but I mean, it's way overweight.

And so when I decided I needed to fix this, I immediately headed right back to kind of my comfort zone of low carb. A lot of people have told me about keto. And I always kind of, you know, believe that you should investigate things before you write them off.

And I kind of written it off without investigating it. As I started to investigate it, it answered a lot of questions for me about my past successes and kind of rollercoastering with low carb, and realizing that when you go low carb, you focus on eliminating carbohydrates, obviously. Well, if you don't specifically control then your ratios of fat and protein, then it's all over the map where you might be.

So you might be really high in protein for a while as you kind of go one way and you can have some issues there. It's not as easy to maintain a diet when you're high protein, low carb. But when you go to high fat, low carb, it actually gets really easy.

A lot of things start to make sense. And I thought, well, you know, why not give this a go. So about 80 days ago, I entered into that journey at about 250 pounds. Today, I weighed in at about 212. So that is a significant weight loss. The more interesting thing, though, is how I feel and how I look.

I recently had someone tell me on these YouTube videos that I've been doing on this that Jack, you look younger than your profile picture on Facebook. I was like, wow, that's interesting, because that picture is 10 years old. And I'm almost 50 now. So I mean, that kind of a change is dramatic.

And there's a tremendous amount of science behind this. What I found interesting as I started digging into this is the lack of science for the way that they tell everybody that they're supposed to eat. So of course, we all know we're supposed to follow the food pyramid. Now it's a plate.

They spent $9 million to turn it from a triangle into a circle of taxpayer money. But either way, we're supposed to eat mostly grains. And then we're supposed to eat mostly fruits and vegetables. And of course, they call things like a potato and a french fry a vegetable. So what that means is our diets are supposed to be based on sugar.

That's the advice that the government's giving us. And it's what they've been giving us in earnest since the 70s. And thanks to the work of a dude named Ansel Keys, who was an advisor to the doctor that took care of Dwight Eisenhower, who brought us all of this mayhem.

And it sounds like it makes sense when you just listen to it, because we've been programmed to believe this our whole lives. And obviously, grains are healthy. But grains are sugar. And what's happened since we've made this dietary shift in the United States, and it's absolutely been made worse by things like high fructose corn syrup and all that.

But what's happened, and you can look at a parabolic curve of this, is the very thing that they said that they were trying to fight by putting us on this diet, which is heart disease, has gone parabolic and increased. And along with it, a thing called metabolic syndrome. And along with that, and parcel to that, type 2 diabetes.

So the point where we're at right now, Joshua, where the single largest expense in the healthcare industry within 10 years will be complications of type 2 diabetes. In fact, if things stay the way they are within 10 to 15 years, there might not be any money in the healthcare system for anything but treating type 2 diabetes.

And I was, when I had all my lab numbers done right before I started this, because I didn't want to just be a case for weight loss, I wanted to be able to say, here's also like your A1C, your blood sugar, etc. I was listed as full-blown metabolic syndrome.

And somehow, somehow, and I believe it's because I was already doing the diet for a week before I actually was tested, I was a borderline type 2 diabetic, wasn't considered quite type 2 diabetic. Everything in my life has gotten better since I've done this. And I've realized that coupling it with growing your own food, eating pastured meat, etc., what we're really doing with ketogenics is we're eating the way that our ancestors ate, not for 100,000 years, for 100,000 generations.

Anybody that tells you that you can go out and live in the wild and live on a plant based diet in the wild, other than a very narrow band of the tropics, has never tried it. If you go try it, you're going to find out without modern agriculture, which is at best, and not all over the world, at best anywhere in the world, 10,000 years old, without that, there is no diet that sustains human life on this planet that is not killing things and eating those things.

And when we do that in our natural state, if you think about it this way, I don't know if you hunt at all, if you've ever hunted, but if you kill a deer, what we do today, we gut that deer and we throw away the entrails. Well, if you're trying to survive as an early human, you don't throw away anything.

Well, the first thing that's going to go bad on that deer is the organs, the liver, the kidneys, the spleen, etc. So those are actually extremely, when we think of game being lean, they're extremely high in fat. So if we look at the way our ancestors ate, they ate a very high fat for what we think of as high fat today, diet.

And if we look at that profile, it's about 70 to 80% of your calories from fat. That's not total volume of food. Like if you actually look at a plate of my food, when you look at what's on the plate, there's more plant matter on there than animal matter, right?

I eat a lot of leafy green vegetables, etc. But the caloric yield is about 70% to 80% fat. And then about only 20 grams of carbohydrate, that's going to be less than 5%. And then the balance coming from protein and protein at that quantity is mostly structural, meaning that our body can break down protein and turn it into sugar and use it for energy.

But it will only do that if it's if it needs to do that, because it's a very energy intensive process to do that. It's only about a 60% yield. So the first thing your body wants to do with protein is it wants to make new muscle, new skin cells, etc, new connective tissue, etc.

So that protein is first a structural macronutrient, and then second a nutritional one. So by doing that, what we do is we drop our blood sugar through the floor, we bring insulin into balance. And once you do that, weight begins to self correct. Because here's my question for you.

Can you name an animal in the world that requires caloric moderation to stay healthy, unless we put it in a zoo? That's a that's a excellent, an excellent analogy, because certainly not. There is not, right? There's nothing, there's no animal anywhere on the planet that has to count calories, until we alter its natural diet.

So why would human beings be the only creature on planet Earth that have to moderate calories? I'm not saying calories don't matter. What I'm saying is when we eat the right way, our bodies largely will self moderate. Now what I had to learn about this, and this is part of my roller coaster is when you are obese, and you have been eating the wrong way a long time, you've been shocking your body with sugar for a long time, even health, I don't care if it's, I don't care if it's honey, the healthiest sugar in the world, you've been doing that a long time, you're basically a carbohydrate addict, and you're a food addict.

And so when you make this shift, you do have to look at calories. That's one of the things I always bought into that lie in the past, when a lot of people say calories don't matter. They absolutely do matter. But once you get your body rebalanced, you know, unless you have like a few days where you get a little insane, and you have to start tracking again, you really can let go of that.

Because we self moderate the way every other living creature does, when we eat the food we're designed to eat. If you look at a zoo, they have these animals that have diabetes, they have heart disease, they have dental problems, all these things that animals have in zoos, you go look at the same species in nature, they don't have any problems.

The only real difference is the diet. Or think about this, Josh, you look at, you take two kids, eight year old boy, eight year old girl about the same height, and I put them facing away from you, and all you see is the silhouette. You can't see anything but a silhouette, no hairstyles, no nothing.

You can't tell me which one the boy and the girl is at that age. Assuming they're about the same weight, you can't tell, right? Okay, so now let's move them on to about 18, they have the exact same diet, they're about the same weight, and I show you the silhouette of those two individuals, you can tell me the boy from the girl like that.

It's easy. Because she's curvier, she has fat on her hips, they're eating the same food. What told her body to put that fat on her hips, to retain that extra weight there? Because it's fat that makes the body look different on a female from a male, they retain more fat.

Hormones did it. Hormones did it. So if we get our hormones right, and we eat right, our bodies largely, not 100%, largely self-moderate. - So the thing that's interesting, and I'll share about two minutes of just my experience over the last 20 years, I have been overweight/obese pretty much my entire life.

When I was in high school, I was overweight, and I used the Atkins diet, lost about 60 pounds when I was in high school, which made a big difference for me. But then over the years, my weight increased. I had relatively poor eating habits in college, for a brief time.

But for the vast majority of my childhood, my mom has always made, cooked from scratch, made just standard but healthy meals. We didn't eat Oreos, we didn't eat junk, we didn't eat pizza all the time. She always cooked from scratch. But in college, my body weight increased about 300 to 320 pounds.

And basically since college, up until now, I'm 34 years old, my body weight has always been between 300 and 320 pounds, almost no matter how I have eaten. Sometimes I've gone on diets, done this, done that, gotten it down, got down to 270, back up to 320. And the thing that has been the most frustrating to me about that experience has been observing the quality of my diet accurately with a food notebook and a journal, et cetera, and looking at it and saying, "I don't eat in a way that should cause me to be as fat as I am.

I don't eat at McDonald's, I don't eat pizza. I eat, in our household, my wife and I, we cook all our meals from scratch. We don't buy packaged foods. We shop around the corner, around the edge of the grocery store. We don't have a lot of sugar, a bowl of ice cream three days a week, after dinner kind of thing, but we don't eat a lot of sugar." And it was just so obnoxious to me that I should be so fat.

Now, I'm also six and a half feet tall, so most people wouldn't think I'm that obese, but 320 pounds is pretty significant. And about eight months ago, sorry, at the beginning of the year in January, I was looking in my mouth one day, and I hadn't been to the dentist in a while, and I was looking in my mouth one day, and I look, and I said, "I can see cavities in my teeth." And that just about destroyed me.

It angered me deeply, because you should not be able to look in your mouth and see dental caries, gray cavities in your teeth. And I thought, "This is not right. I brush my teeth twice a day. I floss my teeth. I eat a good diet. Why are my teeth rotting?" And it really just bothered me deeply.

So we were in the process of moving outside the United States. We were having babies and whatnot. But anyway, about six months ago, I said, "That's it." And so I went through the whole process, and I researched, and I thought, and I said, "I'm going to go ahead, and I'm going to change the way I eat, and I'm going to change the way I eat, and if I got to do it forever, that's what I do." So six months ago, I started with the ketogenic diet.

It seemed like that obviously seemed to have the most stick-to-itiveness of people, seemed to have tremendous results. I was satisfied, based on my previous good experience with low-carb, I was satisfied that it was doable. And with all of the advancements and innovations with ketogenic foods, just the different kinds of almond flour and things like that, it can make some treats.

I said, "You know, I can do this." I don't know if it was age, but I came to a point of commitment, and committed, and I did that. Then at the end of August, somebody said, "Have you heard of the carnivore diet?" And I'd never heard of it. I had no idea about it.

So it sounded nuts, carnivore diet, eating only meat, sounded insane. So I started looking at it, and I was stunned to hear all of the stories that people were having on the carnivore diet, especially of improvements in mental health. And some of the people, just the stories that people were having were incredible.

And so I have my entire life been a vegetable eater. We eat vegetables multiple times per day. My kids will eat plates and plates of vegetables. We've always done that. But starting on September 1st, I decided to do a three-month trial personally of the carnivore diet. So since September 1st, to our recording this on November 1st, I've eaten exclusively meat for the last two months, one more month of my experiment.

And along the way, I've lost, I've gone from probably, I didn't get exact scale at the beginning of about 320 pounds to as of now, 255 in the last six months. And it's been a great journey. And it's really, I guess, it's been obviously very gratifying to lose weight, it's gratifying to lose six inches on your belt, et cetera.

And especially for men, it's been gratifying to do it without having to suffer, which in so many diets that you do, you about want to kill yourself because you're in constant deprivation with ketogenic or with carnivore or some version of that. There's so much satiety in the food that you eat that it's really doable.

So that's a little bit of my background of where I'm coming from, where I thought it would be an interesting conversation. But here's the point that I want to home in on though, Jeff. I don't have the impression, when you say you probably weren't eating well, yeah, you're probably drinking extra calories, but you're so intent on growing your own food, growing your own animals.

I have the impression that you weren't eating a standard American diet with Twinkies and McDonald's all the time. You were eating quality food and yet you were still fat, just like I was. Is that a true impression? Certainly to a degree. I mean, I have grandkids in the house all the time now, so my wife buys them crap they shouldn't be eating.

So occasionally, get in the Cheetos or something. But not to the level that the average person is in America today. It's probably why I weighed 250 pounds instead of 300. And I have been 300 pounds in my life. Not quite, but I mean, within a pound or two. It's probably what kept me from going back up.

There was the quality of the majority of the food I was eating. I was certainly drinking too much alcohol. That is something that I've learned. You can use alcohol responsibly, but if you want to lose weight, you got to cut out the booze. I mean, to having maybe a drink or two once a week.

And then know on that day, you are not going to be burning fat. You have to have your liver functioning optimally for these diets to really, really work. And I know there's people that they drink through it and they lose weight. Okay. Yeah, you might, maybe, but if you're stuck, you really need to stop.

And so that's a big part of it. Now, I wanted to back up a little bit too, though. You mentioned carnivore and you mentioned bringing the fats in and things like that. My belief is what actually is the magic of going with a keto or at least keto-esque or keto-light diet is the fat.

The fat is what makes the diet sustainable. You mentioned Atkins. I came on this a little later than the Atkins craze in the middle of what the protein power craze, which was a slightly improved version of the Atkins diet by Dr. Michael and Mary Dan Eads. And they made a lot of sense, but they were very big on your protein requirement.

And this is where I found the argument being made against keto today by so many people and carnivores being a subset of keto is that it's not sustainable. And the thing is that these people are talking about information that's 30 and 40 years old. That's how old that information is.

That's how old that style, that high protein diet is. A high protein diet is actually very difficult to sustain. And one of the reasons is if you go out in nature and I don't care whether you eat, like if you're in the tropics, you can find fruit and all.

Or if you're in a Nordic country and you have to live on reindeer, right? You can't find a natural diet with protein that goes over about 30 to 40% in it. If you're actually getting it from nature and you're eating it from nature, what you're going to find is you're going to either get majority of your calories from fat or you're going to get your majority of calories from carbohydrate, which I don't care what anybody says, it's all sugar.

And so the other thing that doesn't exist in nature is those two things being high together. If you think about like a person that lives in the tropics and is a forager that lives off of fruits and nuts or whatever, okay, they're going to have a diet that's relatively high in carbohydrate, but it's going to be relatively low in fat.

If you look at somebody in a Nordic country that's living off of moose and reindeer or whatever, they're going to have a diet that's very high in fat and very low in carbohydrate. So when we look at ketogenics, we're actually mimicking the natural diet. And it's that fat though that changes everything.

Because when you eat a high amount of fat, and again, this is a relative number, in the absence, and that's what's so important, in the absence of carbohydrate, it is very self-limiting. You can give a person a loaf of bread and a stick of butter, and they can and often will eat the entire thing, especially like a good fresh warm bread, good creamy butter.

You give them either of those things independently, and they will stop eating relatively quick. I don't know if you ever tried to, I'm not going to do it, but I could just imagine trying to eat a stick of butter with a spoon. That does not, but you wrap it in bread.

But if you're sitting there eating dry bread, it's also self-limiting. When those two things come together, for a very good evolutionary reason, it triggers a response where we can eat way more food than we want to. And it goes back to hormones, in this case, leptin. And leptin is the hormone that says, "Yo, dude, you're done.

Stop. We're good. We got enough energy. We've got enough food. You need to quit eating." The very rare times where you get high amounts of fat and carbohydrate available together, or even just high amounts of carbohydrate available in nature, are these big booms in fruit production or something. They're very seasonal.

And as a hunter-gatherer, it makes sense that you would want to put a lot of fat on. So the human body has been conditioned. When you have all this sugar, shut the leptin down and eat, eat, eat, eat, because we need to eat because winter's coming. And until a few hundred years ago, you couldn't just run down to an Albertsons and buy more food.

So it was necessary for us to be able to do that. And this is why, have you ever had this experience, Josh? You have a meal, you're full. You even look at your plate and there's a little bite left and you're like, "No, I'm done." And somebody brings out the dessert cart and you're like, "Well, a little bit of cheesecake.

That wouldn't be bad." And then all of a sudden, you can eat a whole piece of cheesecake. You couldn't eat one more bite of your steak, but you can eat because we have this hardwired into us. Now that you were asking about the quality of my food, the quality of my food is exceptional, but it only takes a little bit of the bad stuff to screw everything up.

And when you're an addict, and I have to admit that I will always be a carbohydrate addict, just like a person that comes out of like Narcon or Alcoholics Anonymous, like you're always an addict. You can't screw around with small amounts of drugs and stay clean. And so if you start eating a Cheeto or two, you will eat the bag of Cheetos.

And once you mess up the hormone balance, everything is done. And so I have had to basically purge this and I had to be rigorous. I had to be really rigorous. I use a Keto diet app and I track everything that I eat. I am now at this point where I don't necessarily every day track everything I eat anymore.

I do keep an eye on my carb limit and what have you. But if I find myself even remotely slipping, then I go back to tracking every single calorie, every single thing I eat. And it astounds you how easy it is to overeat even on Keto with processed foods.

And I don't mean like highly processed. I mean, like if you take meat and turn it into sausage, there's nothing in effect by itself wrong with that. But all of a sudden, you can eat a lot more than if you eat it as a whole food meat, if that makes sense.

- I definitely, so one of the questions, and I wonder what you think about this. One of the questions that's bothered me is why does it seem like some people thrive on one certain kind of diet or at least with regard to weight and some people don't do well?

For example, I've traveled extensively in Asia. I've seen people that live on rice and yet they're ripped. They got an eight pack right there. And I don't understand why there's so much diversity in human bodies such that some people do well on one type of diet and some people don't.

Do you have any insight on that? - Yeah, I do. I mean, first of all, we have to understand when we look at something like an Asian paradox there that if you go over to Asia today and you travel through the countryside where you've got the little farmers living on rice and fish and a traditional Asian style diet, yeah, they're relatively healthy and they may kill over of a heart attack at like 91 or something, but hey, we all got to go sometime.

If you go into like Beijing where they're eating our diet, now they have the same problems we do and they're just as fat as we are. There really isn't a huge difference in our genetics. Now there's an endomorph and an ectomorph like body type and an ectomorph will never be an endomorph.

It's just not, and an endomorph can't become an ectomorph. It just, that is your body type. But overall, most people I do believe will do really well on a low carbohydrate diet. That doesn't mean that it's the only healthy way to eat. So if you look at that rice diet, what aren't they eating?

What aren't they eating? They're not eating any processed foods. Their dairy is extremely low. Now I don't hate dairy like some in the keto world do, but for many there is an inflammatory response to dairy. And if you have an inflammatory response, there go your hormones and there goes everything away.

So they're not heavy on dairy. They are eating significant amounts of lean proteins and vegetables. They don't eat many other starches other than rice and they don't eat rice in a refined mechanism. In other words, there's not a lot of rice flours and rice cookies and rice cakes and things like that.

They're eating rice mostly as a whole grain and they never screwed their body up in the first place. So I think one of the places, if you compare it to a drug, there are people that use drugs recreationally and it doesn't screw their life up. I don't recommend you try it, but it does exist, right?

There are people that yeah, they do their dope and they're good. Once a person creams over the world into addiction, they can't use drugs. And at minimum, you'd say you have to take the drugs away for like a year to get them completely clean before they could ever even touch a drug again.

And I think a lot of us, the keto diet is a pathway to a paleo diet eventually, if we stay on it long enough, where we bring in some fruits and some other things, a little bit more of that, and maybe don't restrict the carbs down to like 20.

Actually, like a 70 carbohydrate a day diet, that sounds huge to me and you now, but that's actually incredibly restrictive compared to the average person. And that paleo way of eating may even be a better way of eating, but not necessarily for the person that's 300 pounds that has been obese for 20 years.

In many ways, keto is a therapeutic way of eating. But if you wanted me to make the case that it's impossible to have a diet that is more of a grain-based, vegetable-based diet and not have that diet be healthy, I can't make that case that it can't be healthy.

I just think that as you look at it for most people, it's a hell of a lot easier to do with quality fats and quality proteins. And I will say, I know you have people out there right now screaming at their speaker, "Don't do that, Josh, I can't hear you," about everybody knows, everybody knows, everybody knows.

Well, here's the thing about everybody knows. Everybody knows it's not a logical argument. It's not a valid argument. It is a classic fallacy known as an appeal to authority. And when people tell you things like fat makes you fat or fat causes heart disease, I have issued a challenge now.

My podcast, 40,000 YouTube subscribers, I put this out on YouTube as well. I have 100,000 followers on Facebook for my page. No one has taken my $100 bill yet. And I'll put it out to your listeners today. If you can bring me a single scientific study that shows that people who consume large amounts of clean fats, animal fats, avocados, et cetera, not trans fats, not vegetable fats that have been cooked like soybean oil, et cetera, good, clean, natural fats, fish oils, et cetera.

And any study that's ever shown that eating that in the absence of carbohydrates increases the risk of heart disease at all, 1%. I will give you a $100 bill signed with my name on it. I've had that in place for 90 days. Nobody's gotten my $100 bill yet. And so one of my big concerns for people is this concept of everybody knows.

Well, if everybody knows that's true, surely somewhere there's proof of it. If everybody knows something, there has to be proof. What do you think somebody could find proof really, really quick if everybody knows this? So I know that you're asking me there more about our different body types. I don't think the different body type or the different who thrives on what diet is really that critical.

I think people can work that out for themselves, but I have yet to see anybody who actually does this diet that doesn't benefit from it. And I've just had 50 people take part in a 40-day challenge. My average weight loss was 14 pounds. And this is all over the map.

I had people I'm like, "God, you're not going to lose any weight. You're already skinny." And I had people like, "Holy crap, this might save your life." And with all said and done, my average weight loss over 40 days is 14 pounds. If there was a pill that did that, the people that held the patent on it would be worth a trillion dollars right now.

When you start digging into the data as best you can, I think Gary Taub's books are accessible for people who are interested in why we get fat and some of his conversations. But when you start digging into it, one of the things that I have learned is the things that everybody knows that's backed up by science, it's kind of embarrassing when you actually look at what is said by the scientific research, the evidence behind it, and what conclusions you can actually draw from it.

One of the things that I think is one of the healthiest solutions, there's an increasing movement of what they're calling the N equals one movement, meaning it doesn't matter what results necessarily you get, what matters is the results that I'm getting, how do I feel. And I think that there's an increasing number of people like me who I have been mystified and annoyed by the topic of eating well for so long because for every single style of eating, I can find a noted expert who says, "This is the way to go and look, here's my evidence." And I'm not competent to assess their arguments.

I don't have the background, I don't have the time, I don't have the ability in that field to assess their arguments and know for sure who exactly is right. But I do know how to look at my own body and say, "How do I look? How do I feel?" I do enough, and I don't need a bunch of blood tests necessarily, I can just look and say, "How do I look?

How do I feel?" and have some good indicators of how I'm responding to a certain style of eating, to a certain kind of exercise, etc. And I hope that that N equals one movement continues to grow because I think that is what matters. I want to dig into some specific questions.

>> Let me talk on that for a second, though, because that's an incredibly good point. And there's something happening today that could have happened 30 years ago with that movement. The individual is now scalable. The same reason that people like you and I can earn a living from home with a podcast.

>> Right, absolutely. >> It's the same reason that this movement is scalable. So what I mean by that is if you go to YouTube and type in "Keto diet success story," you will find not just big-time YouTubers like Ken Berry and Thomas DeLauer, you will find hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of individuals who aren't even really trying to make any kind of money or anything like that.

They're just really excited, and they're just going to show you, "This is my N plus one. This is what it's done for me." And you can look through and see thousands of these people going from 300 to 180 pounds over and over and over again. Go look for Jenny Craig success stories that aren't by Jenny Craig.

Go look for Weight Watchers success stories that aren't by Weight Watchers. If you look at those two particular programs, they are the healthy version of the standard American diet, the Jillian Michaels of the world, right? And you don't have an N plus one there. And it's not scaling. If it was there, you would see it.

I haven't found a Facebook group with a half a million people really excited about Jenny Craig. And I'm going to tell you right now, you're not going to. If you find one for Jillian Michaels, it's a bunch of guys looking at her in yoga pants, but they're not going to be eating the way that she says and posting pictures about how healthy they are.

This movement is scalable today because the individual can be heard. And I think it's reaching kind of a critical mass. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. So that brings, that's a good segue, an ideal segue into my kind of twist. I don't know how much you've followed some of the carnivore world, but I've been fascinated by it.

And the thing that fascinated me the most, the reason I decided to try and see, try eating the carnivore, full carnivore diet for three months was because of all of the experiences that people were sharing of things, of health conditions that they had struggled with that were only improved when they literally started eating only meat.

The most famous one, that's the best place for anybody who is the most, who's new to the idea would be Dr. Jordan Peterson's appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast. He and also his daughter, Michaela Peterson, are probably the most popular advocates of eating a diet exclusively of beef and water and salt.

Michaela Peterson calls it the lion diet. But they experienced tremendous improvements in mental health. Dr. Peterson shared in his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast how day by day, his lifelong depression, anxiety went away by when he stopped eating greens. He had eaten a low carbohydrate diet for a time, was eating meat and some greens.

And finally, his daughter convinced him to stop eating greens and he experienced tremendous improvements in his mental health. So Dr. Jordan Peterson and Michaela are probably the most well-known. But then I went to the internet and I started looking for stories. And I found person after person, after person, after person who said, "I went on the carnivore diet.

I started eating only meat and all these physical problems went away." And the thing that most intrigued me was the tremendous improvement in mental health. Many people reporting that their depression disappeared. Many people reporting that their anxiety disappeared. And years, chronic, diagnosed depression, tremendous improvements there. And I was just so stunned because based upon all of what I believe to be the science of healthy eating, I could never believe that vegetables are causing problems to people.

But there seems to be at least a small subset of people that vegetables themselves were making them sick or keeping them sick. And so I decided to do the carnivore diet. And I don't think I'll stay on it forever. I think I'll go back to eating a keto diet.

I put my whole family on a keto diet. And I don't like always eating my own food. But I will say this, when you compare the experience that you have, especially as a man, of the fact that you can eat just simply meat and eggs, and have eggs and bacon and steak, you feel so satisfied.

You don't feel like you're suffering. And that helps the ability to stick to a diet. That helps to stay with it. And I can show you example after example after example of people who've been eating a pure carnivore diet for, in some cases, almost two decades, and they look younger now than they did when they started.

So I don't know if you've ever tried it. But I've been fascinated by my own personal experiment to go all the way to full carnivore and stop eating even vegetables, just to see. So far, I haven't noticed that I have any sensitivity or any problems to vegetables, which is why I'll go back probably to eating significant amounts of vegetables.

But I recommend it as something to test, to do that N=1 test, because the stories that are available with the ability to access individuals— I think it'll be the biggest trend of 2012. Or sorry, 2012. 2020, in my opinion. Well, so there's actually a lot to that. And remember, I'm not a doctor.

I don't even play one on TV. And I'm certainly not a nutritionist, which means I probably know more about nutrition than most nutritionists. But I'm speaking as a layman here and some postulations. So number one, I've used carnivore whenever I felt stuck. I go four or five days, I'm not losing weight anymore.

I'll go carnivore for a week. Sometimes that'll unstick you. I don't know whether it unstuck because I went carnivore or it just was going to happen anyway. I kind of look at it as I'm not far off anyway. But I have done a tremendous amount of research into all of this since I started.

And one of the things that I've learned is that one of the things we're told so much that we need to have, maybe we don't for a time, and that is fiber. And we're always told how important fiber is fiber, fiber, fiber. Well, I've now listened to quite a few different doctors coming from different viewpoints on this of people that have gut problems.

And the first thing they do is cut the fiber out and the gut problems go away. Well, one of the reasons could be that we have so screwed up our intestinal flora that we can't properly digest the fiber. And the way we digest soluble fiber is through fermentation, but we do it through probiotic fermentation, lactobacillus and other bacterium like that in our gut.

And the actual nutrient we take from the fiber is in the form of something called a short chain fatty acid, which is almost, almost its own macro. It's really not a carbohydrate and not a fat at the same time. It's its own unique little thing. And that's good for us.

That's a good thing. And a lot of the vegetables that make a lot of sense for us to eat, or even some of the tubers that makes us worry if we move toward more of a paleo diet, have large amounts of soluble fiber called inulin in it. And that is a primary source of these short chain fatty acids.

Well, what if your gut flora is screwed because you've lived for 20 years weighing over 300 pounds and you haven't actually been taking care of your gut flora and you thought you were going to pop a bunch of probiotic pills that were going to fix that. They can't actually fix that because they can't get through your stomach assay to live.

So you have a screwed up gut and you're continuing to eat large amounts of cruciferous vegetables and other vegetables that have a lot of fiber in them. It may not be the vegetables themselves that are the problem, but eliminating the fiber from the intestine so that your intestine can actually heal and redevelop its flora for a time where you're not killing it with artificial sweeteners like sucrose and additives that are in all of the food that we eat today may be very therapeutic.

So that could be part of the issue. Then I'm also back to Mark Sesson, who I don't agree with on everything, but I think he's a brilliant man, the primal blueprint guy. And he certainly looks like you and I would probably like looking when we're 66. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. If I'm like that at 66, I'm good. Right. This is a guy that was on the cover of Runner's World Magazine back in the seventies and he was carb loading and everybody thought he was a picture of health. And he'll tell you in his own interviews, he was ready to, he was, he was killing himself.

He looked great, but he was killing himself on carbohydrates. Well, he's more of the primal paleo type thing. He's more of, yes, some fruit here and there, et cetera. Less of a, certainly not carnivore though. I think he's, he's like, I don't even know if we should count protein calories at all if we're eating enough fat anyway, because we're going to use it from so much for structure.

But he was asked by, I don't remember who the interview was about, you know, what about healthy vegans? There are healthy vegans, there are healthy vegetarians. And he went back to the thing I said earlier. What have we, what have we, what do we have in common? It's what we've eliminated.

So I also think there may be people that do really good on carnivore and they say, well, I was eating keto and I was eating healthy keto before I went carnivore. But okay, well, what was going on your salad? What oils were you using on your salad? What, uh, what, what, what, what salad snacks were going in there?

What, what things were you eating that may not have been the best things? How clean was your keto? Because, you know, we have like, we call clean and dirty keto. And I think dirty keto may be as bad or worse as the sad American diet. You may lose some weight, but how clean were you?

Well, if you go carnivore and you say, well, when I go carnivore, I'm also going to eat grass fed meat, pastured poultry. I'm going to eat, you know, the best quality bacon I can get. If I'm going to eat eggs, I'm going to eat, you know, backyard eggs or pastured eggs.

Well now by going carnivore, you've also gone clean. And I wonder if some of the people that were keto with giant Dr. Evil air quotes around it, I was keto, right? Were keto, were actually dirty keto and going carnivore made them clean keto. And then I think there's a subset like Ken Berry, you know, you, I'm sure you follow him.

You know, when he had his 23andMe DNA done, he was like 98% Nordic DNA. Well, I think if that's you, you're going to actually probably have some genetic disposition toward carnivore because what the hell are you going to eat in Northern Sweden for nine months out of the year?

You might find a lingonberry or two here and there, but I mean, you're going to live on reindeer. You're going to live on reindeer, reindeer milk and reindeer fat, because that's what they have there. If you're, if you have Inuit DNA, you're going to live on seal blubber because that's what they have there.

So I think that there may be people that have a more of a predisposition toward carnivore just because of their genetic makeup. I think blood type can be an indicator of this. I'm an, I'm O positive. That's why I always donate blood because I feel like I'm obligated to as universal donor.

But the reason O positive can go to anybody, it's the primal blood. It's the, it's, it's our original hunter gatherer blood is the O blood type and specifically O positive. So that's probably why I do, even though I say I'm keto, I'm very carnivoresque, right? I might have a big salad, but my big salad is a bunch of leafy greens with meat on it.

It's not four pounds of cheese on top of the salad and I call it a salad, right? It's, it's meat and greens. And so I think there's the combination of things there, damage to the gut, actually going clean, the things that we have in common and what is your genetic predisposition.

But I don't know any of that. I want to be very clear. Like a lot of times when I'm talking, like everything I said up to that segment was pretty much not my opinion. It was like my opinion of facts, right? This is my opinion of opinions at this point.

- Right. To me, I think going back to N equals one, most of us should simply test different things. And I really admire that there are a whole community of people who are ex-vegans, who started testing and saying, how do I feel when I started eating meat again? And they, and they experienced better results.

Then of course, there are some people who probably didn't experience those results. And the key is to test. One anecdotal thing that I find really interesting on the fiber thing, in my opinion, that's probably the best example to start with to say, the things that you think you know, might not actually be true.

We've all been told that you need fiber, especially to keep your, your regularity with your bowel movement. Anecdotally, I haven't had a bit of fiber. I've eaten nothing but meat and eggs for two months. I haven't had a bit of fiber and I have had entirely regular bowel. And in fact, there's an interesting website called gutsense.org, where they publish a whole book called the fiber menace.

And it's fascinating to read these alternative perspectives and say, wait a second, does my Cheerios box telling me the truth that I need fiber for heart health, or should I trust and see what my own personal experience is? And I think that's the key because I'm convinced that the- Well, you know, there's, there's another thing there that you're, you're hitting on.

So how many people decide they want to go keto and the first thing they want to do is make keto cookies and keto bread, right? That's like the keto treats. And I'm like 40 days, just be a damn adult, pull up your pants, tighten your belt and no, you get whole foods.

It's like whole 30, only it's worse. That's what you get for 40 days. And then you can have a keto cookie or something from time to time. You got to, we got to get you through, it's a 12 step process to get the alcoholic, right? I got to get you to step 10 and then maybe you can have a cookie, right?

So how, but nobody wants to hear that. That's uncomfortable and we don't like to be uncomfortable. So they're going to go make keto pancakes and keto flatbreads. So what do they make it out of? How do you make that and make it taste like bread? You go and you find something like psyllium husks, right?

You go find these coconut flour, et cetera, these extremely high fiber things because the fiber is indigestible. So now you're slamming your damaged gut with a shit ton of indigestible and semi-digestible fiber and boy, you have a problem. Well, duh. And I'm not saying that's, I want to be clear what, because the people are going to get mad at me and then they're going to see that I have a low carb tortilla that I make and they're going to get like, the keto police will get me.

You said not to eat that, right? So like, I'm not saying not to eat that. I'm saying don't eat that every day, all the time to the exclusion of everything else. If you go to a keto diet and the first thing you're doing is making pizza balls and almond bread and coconut tortillas and that's what you're going to base your diet on now.

Now you're eating like a stupid amount of fiber and again, this is on Bracto Opinion here. I don't know, but it seems to me that most of us probably don't have the healthiest guts. And fiber in an unhealthy gut is probably not a good thing because it's going to feed what's there.

See, people think, well, it's going to reestablish my gut flora. No, it's going to feed what's there. So if the biotics in your intestine are the ones that cause irritable bowel syndrome and discomfort and large amounts of gas and you give them fiber, guess what they're going to do?

They're going to eat it and they're going to reproduce and they're going to increase in numbers. You almost have to starve them out, which is ironic because that may lead us to talk about cancer here in a minute because that's another huge benefit here. And I know your show's on finance and one of the things we got to reinforce all the way through this, all of this puts more money in your pocket by preventing money from leaving it.

People tell me this is expensive. You know what's expensive? Insulin. Insulin's expensive. You know what's expensive? Dialysis. You know what's expensive? Chemotherapy. These things are expensive. Heart transplants are expensive. Heart bypasses are expensive. Stints are expensive. Statins are expensive. Good food is not expensive compared to those things. Right.

Yeah, I'll add to that and we'll switch to money in just a moment. But a phrase I looked for it, it was attributed to Joel Salatin. I went and looked to see if I could find the original source for it. But the quote that was said to me was, you know, a hundred years ago, people spent 30% of their budget on food and 5% of their budget on health care.

Today we spend 5% of our budget on food and 30% on health care. I've never verified those numbers, but I think directionally it's probably, probably. I mean, I can tell you flat out that my single largest expense is health insurance. I barely ever go to the doctor. So even if I'm, if you're not paying the bill today for direct medical supplies and treatment, you're paying the bill for others.

I mean, so yeah, I actually think that number might be low. The 30%. I think there's people today that are spending like maybe half of their money in total cost on health care. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to give just my tips and then you give your tips for anybody who wants to test or try a transition to a keto diet.

And then I want to talk about the money and the food quality, et cetera, because I think with your experience, and also I want to talk about with prepping as well, as we, as we wrap up in a little bit. Number one, my advice based upon having dieted in many ways and done many different versions of diets, my advice to anybody who is interested in trying it is the following.

Number one, do a little bit of research, obviously, about the keto diet or any diet that you're going to try. But at the end of the day, it's fairly simple. You're going to eat meat, vegetables, and you're going to try to eat some sources of fat and it's going to be heavy on fat.

So you want to understand the ratios as well. My experience has been that a keto diet is one of the best diets to transition to because of your ability to enjoy luxurious food. And what I have found is that if your body is addicted to carbohydrates, as you transition out of running on sugar and your entire metabolism going to sugar to running on fat, make sure that you feel satiated.

So what I do is I try to make sure I have lots of good food, lots of good steak, lots of good fat, heavy cream with some berries, et cetera. And I don't try to worry about losing weight. I just try to feel really satiated and really full, even if I'm probably overeating.

Then once I make the transition from running on carbohydrates to actually being in ketosis and burning ketones for fuel, then I can pull back on those things without feeling like I'm missing out. One of the great side benefits of a low carbohydrate diet is that once you're in ketosis, what I have found is your appetite fairly easily moderates.

And it makes it fairly easy to practice a compressed eating window or perhaps called intermittent fasting, where you eat instead of eating three times per day or seven small meals per day, you eat one or two times per day. And I find that it's very easy to just simply go with, get up in the morning, I drink some black coffee and have my first meal around noon, have my second meal around six o'clock.

And that practice in and of itself also moderates the calories. So I think the most important thing is the transition period, making sure that you have luxurious food, lots of fat. And then once that transition is done, then you can move to pulling off on the calories, et cetera.

And it's a lot easier to do. That's my kind of getting started advice. Jack, what's yours? It's going to sound different, but it's very similar actually, because I'm going to focus a little bit more on calories, et cetera. But it's the same thing. It's the same, but different man in the words of Tommy Chong, right?

So for about a week to 10 days, I say do exactly what you said, which is you keep your carbs under 20 and eat as much as you want. Eat until somebody's afraid you're going to eat to sink. If that's what you feel like doing, because during this time, you're going to be making your body do exactly what you said.

You're going to make it shift from burning glucose to burning ketone bodies. And that's a big... You're asking a lot. It's like taking somebody on heroin and going, "No more heroin for you. Here, you can have all of this oranges. You have to live on oranges instead of heroin." I mean, that's what you're doing to your body.

So getting through that, and this is one of the my biggest gripes with Atkins. Dr. Atkins didn't tell anybody that about half of the people that do this are going to feel like they're having a 10-day version of the worst hangover you can imagine. Now, some people are just going to be like, "Oh, that's fine." Other people, it's going to hit you like a ton of bricks.

They call it keto flu. So if you got to eat, consider that your methadone, right? For getting off the meth. And you eat through... If it's 10 days, if it's 14 days, whatever, and you're going to lose weight in that time. And for some of you that are really overweight, you're going to lose a lot of weight because your body's going to purge water.

Most people that are extremely overweight, because their stomach, you think it's going to be like a bowl full of jelly like Santa Claus. You got that stomach that's really, really hard, that big, fat, hard stomach. There's so much fluid and extra bile in the body. And as soon as you change this, you're going to start purging it.

Now, what's going to come with that is, number one, you got to drink like a fish and then some. And you got to drink water. And if you want to drink sparkling water or something, that's fine. But don't be drinking huge amounts of artificially sweetened crap. Water and drink and drink.

And you're going to pee your brains out. And then you're not going to want to drink because you're going to get to pee again. I'm sorry. You got to get through this period of time. So drink like crazy during this time. And you need to be supplementing magnesium and sodium.

So salt your food is the best way to do the sodium. A good quality absorbable magnesium and potassium doesn't hurt here either as a supplement, because you're going to be purging those three minerals from your body with all of this water loss. I work with a guy named Dr.

Stephen Lewis. And he's at a site called Green Wisdom Health. He uses blood testing. He's a chiropractor, but he uses blood testing. It's way more than my doctor has ever ordered to evaluate your nutrient levels and supplement you. And I didn't do that because I was doing this. They just sort of kind of came together.

And I think a lot of the things I avoided was because every time I would find out was people were asking me like, "Well, I'm having this problem." I'd go like, "Well, supplement this." And I'd look at my supplements and go, "Well, I'm on that." So it was like everything I needed was already in there.

So look to supplements for some of the things that you're going to be deficient in, because now some of them you were already deficient, but you're going to become critically obvious. The other thing you have to watch out for is then you start burning this fat. And like you said, you've been overweight your whole life.

I've been overweight for a lot of my life. So that means a fat cell that you're burning today might've been there for 15 years. We store toxins in our fat. It was the old thing, it's going to get worse before it gets better. So you start burning those fat cells and toxins that have been stored up in your body forever, all of a sudden are moving through your bloodstream to be eliminated.

We have to get through that, but it happens. It's important that people know this. I started getting zits. I'm almost 50. I started getting zits, not like breaking out of my face, like one zit, like at that one spot in your back you can't reach, it was almost like a little boil.

And there'd be nothing there. And then the next morning, there's a big giant bulbulous zit there, or maybe on my bicep or something. And it would come like one at a time. That went on for about three weeks. So expect, some people get a rash. I got a really light rash.

My wife looked like she had poison ivy. And this is the body purging all those toxins. So I think it's important that we have people ready for that. Because people say, "Well, I went on keto and I felt like shit." Well, you know what? Imagine if you were getting off of heroin, and you went to your doctor, you were an alcoholic, and you went to your doctor and you said you felt bad.

And he said, "What'd you do?" "I quit drinking beer." And you say, "Well," he guy says, "Well, how much beer were you drinking?" "I was drinking like a case a day for the past 10 years." He says, "Well, go have a beer. You'll feel better." You get a new doctor.

We have to be prepared for this shift and this change. Once you get through that 10 days though, and you get over to where the body is working and running on fat and ketone bodies, I think that is the point. Maybe it's 14 days, maybe it's 21 days. Somewhere in that reasonable period, you've got to rein in the calories.

And I think eventually you will self-moderate like every living being. But so many people say it doesn't work for them. And then I say, "Send me a picture of everything you ate today," and they're eating 7,000 calories. They're 300 pounds, they're eating 7,000 calories, one pound of human fat.

Do you know how many calories is in one pound of human fat, Josh? Josh McCallen (00:15:00): 3,500, right? Dr. Justin Marchegiani (00:15:02): 3,500 calories. How am I going to get my body to burn 3,500 calories of fat when I'm shocking with 4,000 calories a day of additional fat? You might not even stop gaining weight at that point, but it's going to be very hard to lose weight.

So pull the calories back. I use an app called the Keto Diet App. I run a caloric deficit most of the time of about 15% to 20%. A lot of people say calories don't count. It's only an estimate. It is only an estimate, but it's an estimate, right? I do a lot of things with estimates.

I used to make a living as an estimator, right? So estimates are a valid way. There has to be some level of portion control. So get the portions that are under control and then kind of work your way through it. Don't be afraid to use YouTube University. I would tell you also be careful with that.

There's some real idiots out there that say some things that don't make any sense. Tom DeLauer, Ken Berry, and this couple called Keto Connect. Those three channels to me, and I want to be clear, I can still tell you specific things. Each of them said, "Bro, you are absolutely verifiably wrong with this claim." But they're right 95% of the time.

So 95% is a good estimate. If you can estimate at 95%, you could be a hell of a salesman in the construction industry and you'll do very well. So you're 95% of the way there most of the time with those guys. So if you check stuff and you're like, "Why do I have this problem?" and you search YouTube for that, and you find one of those three people talking about it, you'll probably do really well.

I also have a whole playlist and you can just look up "Jack's Low Carb Journey" on Google. You'll find a playlist. I go through this whole period and I have one particular episode there to make this short, as short as we can. It's exactly how I manage my diet.

It's about 30 minutes and it's exactly what I do. So I would tell people to kind of tune into that. Cool. I added it to the notes. Let's talk about money. One of the challenges with personal finance is, in general, one of the standard pieces of advice for those of us who try to save money on our grocery budget is eat less meat, eat more rice and beans.

You can buy huge amounts of grain extremely inexpensively, whereas finding huge amounts of meat extremely inexpensively is very challenging. So what are your thoughts in terms of managing the cost and having an appropriate budget while also eating in a ketogenic manner? So before I say this and sound like a jerk, I'm going to say that there are people out there who are really living at the edge financially.

And what I'm about to say doesn't pertain to you at all. But for many people, that excuse is total bull because I look at what they're eating and they're spending more money than I do on food in many instances because they're eating so damn much of it. And yet you can eat cheap on rice and beans.

It feeds half the world. And if you have to live that way, I'm not going to make your life worse by telling you you're wrong. I'm not going to do that. However, we can eat not just meat, but good quality meat without breaking the bank. And we need to be creative about how we shop to do that.

But one of the best things you can do is find somebody producing grass fed beef and buy a half or a quarter or even a whole beef and put it in a deep freezer. And as a prepper, people are like, "Well, what do you do then?" I have a generator.

I have a generator and I have 120 gallons of gasoline. Right? So the last thing I'm worried about when the power goes out is my freezer. I only have to run that sucker a couple hours a day and everything will stay frozen in it. I'm more worried about my fish tanks because I want my fish to die.

So we could just solve that straight out of the gate with the number one prep you should have anyway is a good generator. But here's some examples of ways that I've reduced the cost of our meat. One is Costco and organic poultry. Now, I would much rather have pastured chicken than just organic chicken.

But organic is better than commercial by a long shot. If you go to your local Costco and you go into the chicken section, you'll see they have a package of I don't know how many pounds is because it varies by the one, but it's three sections and each one has about six chicken legs in it, organic.

And that whole thing, which is multiple meals is about nine bucks. Now to me, you can't tell me you ate McDonald's and you ate better for less money than I did if I'm eating that chicken in the hundred different ways that I can cook it. You can't just go away.

There's no discussion to be had there. You drop five bucks at McDonald's. I drop nine bucks on three meals of chicken for two people. We're done on that money discussion. Next is with beef. Grass-fed beef is very expensive when you buy it from the grocery store, unless it's ground.

Ground beef sells for about seven bucks a pound at Albertsons, grass-fed. Learn to cook with that. Learn to make sausages. And I don't necessarily always mean links either. I mean different types of sausages. I can spend five minutes with a pound of ground meat and you tell me what you want to eat that day.

You want chorizo? You want to go Mexican? Do you want something that's more Italian? I could go anywhere with that with my spice cabinet. That's another way to cut costs. Growing some of your own food is a huge thing that you can do to cut costs, including, I mentioned pastured poultry.

Unless you live in an HOA, you probably could raise a couple dozen pastured chickens a year with a chicken tractor. That would be another way to cut it. I really think that probably the best thing though is buying bulk beef, grass-fed locally produced. You can probably find someone to do it.

If the guy's like, "Well, I only sell whole beefs," or, "I only sell halves," I guarantee you when you tell that guy, "You know what? If you find somebody to split one with, I'll split one," he will call you back in two days. Ask me how I know. The guy that says, "I don't do that," two days later, he'll call you back and go, "Hey, I found you a guy." Sooner or later, he's going to run into somebody else that says the same thing, and he wants that cow salt.

Those are some of the things we can do. Looking to eggs, the best, most expensive eggs are still cheap by the calorie. That is a huge step in the right direction. Then also looking to fish and seafood, I recently found a product by a company called Wild Planet, and it's Atlantic mackerel.

Mackerel have a bad rap as being high in mercury. If you're eating king mackerel, yes, these are big fish. They live a long time. Atlantic mackerel grow like a pound, pound and a half. They're a small fish, low on the food chain, safer than the safest tuna from a mercury standpoint.

I thought, "Well, this is going to be like a sardine, but I like a good sardine, so I'll try it." No. If you've ever eaten really expensive Italian jarred tuna, really firm flesh, some of it's gourmet, even it'll come out of a jar. That's what this stuff's like, and it's like three bucks a can.

It's high in omega-3s, which is something we struggle to get even on grass-fed beef. It's incredibly healthy. It's inexpensive. There's a lot of other seafoods that we can look to like that. Sardines are a great example. Anchovies are a great example of a way to up the protein and the fat from a good quality standpoint.

Then the other thing we could do, let's say you're like, "Yeah, Jack, I don't have money." You're having to eat more of a factory beef or something like that. Okay, then the cheapest cuts of beef are the lean cuts of beef, with the exception of filet mignon. If you look at a rib eye, it's really expensive.

Sirloin costs less. It's a lot leaner. Eye of round is even less, and it's a lot leaner. Well, factory beef, I don't like the way the animals are treated, period. That's where I stand arm in arm with a vegan. I cannot make a case for factory beef, but it is what it is.

If it's what you got to eat, it's what you got to eat. Then focus on eating that at a very lean, look for the 97% lean ground, etc. Buy that lean cut of beef, and then get your fats from other sources where it's less expensive to do so, like olive oil, and avocados, and avocado oil, and things like that.

Then broaden your palate. I meet people all the time, and you eat avocados and everything. Well, not everything, but a lot. Yeah, I like me some avocados. Some people just like, they don't really care. I don't know if you like avocados, I don't care for the taste. Try taking avocado, cube up half an avocado, and throw it in a soup right at the end, and let the heat warm through it.

It doesn't taste the same anymore. It pulls in the flavor of the soup. Figuring creative ways to get the fat content up with lesser expensive proteins, and since you should be getting the majority of your calories from the fat anyway, things like, again, coconut oil, MCT oils, avocado oil.

Doing that to get the fat up, you can reduce the cost of this. I actually think we spend less on groceries today than we did six months ago. Because as you know, you can only eat so much when you eat this way. It will eventually self-moderate, so you eat less food.

Then you can splurge once in a while, and make up a cheese board with some really expensive cured meats and stuff like that, and you can live a little bit here and there. Overall, I don't think it's really as hard as people make it out to be. Like I said, it's expensive, but they're spending $1,000 a month on insulin.

Yeah, I agree. One of the challenges for me, I've always been annoyed with this category of food, because I believe your body is made of the food that you eat. So I want to have high-quality food. I don't mind spending more on food, because I believe it has a ripple effect in other areas of your life.

I think it's a good investment. The challenge is knowing which foods. And so I concur with everything that you said. My strategies have been basically what you have said to try to do that. Number one is we have a garden. We're trying to continue to increase the amount of vegetables that our garden produces.

I think that it's hard to find a higher return than the difference of the cost of some seeds versus the value of produce that gets spat out on the other side from gardening, even if it's just mainstream conventional gardening. And in our case, I do it because I want my kids in the garden, and I want to be in the garden, et cetera.

But that's been good to lower the cost of some vegetables. And by growing the vegetables that grow easily where I live, that allows me to buy some of the other vegetables and still moderate that. I buy pastured eggs from a local producer, but I would like to expand and be able to produce more eggs myself.

I just haven't developed the infrastructure. And then I buy raw milk and raw cream and whatnot from another local producer. And then to save on the meat, I've been able to find pastured chickens from a local producer. And then I'm in the process of negotiating for buying a cow.

And buying a whole beef, and it definitely changes dramatically on the price. But one example I would say is interestingly, there's this one guy on Instagram goes under the handle of thankful carnivore. And this guy has been eating exclusively ground beef and bacon, three meals a day for the last almost two years.

And he eats every for three meals a day, he eats a hamburger patty, and several slices of bacon. And the thing about that is I don't intend to eat that way. I like diversity. I want to eat all kinds of different animals. I don't want to do that. But for him, it was a cure to his lifelong depression.

And he is just does tremendously on that diet. And his Costco shopping trips are very simple. And in a lot of ways, buys a couple of tubes of ground beef and a big box of bacon. And in reality, that's a more satiating diet than a lot of other things I have seen.

In his case, I don't advocate it. But in his case, he credits it with tremendous improvements in his life. So more power to him. So yeah, ground beef and hamburgers is certainly a fine way to have food and grass fed ground beef is fairly inexpensive. Jack, let's- It's expensive and you can get creative with it.

Real quick there, I wanted to give you something because I just learned about this with growing your own food. And you know, for me, like, you know, my background. So for me to learn something new about growing your own food is today is like, you would think I have the encyclopedia on it.

A guy asked me about something called crack key hydroponics. And I'm like, oh, geez, here's another thing. Because I've seen so much of this where like, somebody wants to make money. So they come up with a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. And I'm like, oh, yeah, but I'll look into it.

I, when my listeners ask, I look into it. This is probably the easiest, fastest way to get into growing your own food I've ever seen in my life. You get a $10 rubbermaid tub, cut some holes in it. You put some net cups in it and some rockwool and you drop your lettuce seeds or whatever in there.

You fill it up with water and you mix in your fertilizer. And then you close it up and you don't do anything. There's no pumps, there's no moving water, there's no nothing. And I thought this was a scam till I looked into it. What happens is the water gets used by the plant.

The water level starts dropping. The roots get bigger. And the biggest thing, the reason we move water and aquaponics, hydroponics, et cetera, is because the roots need oxygen. By just letting the water evaporate and the growth, these people get this stupid. And I've looked at this stuff now and I see these guys and they're growing all of the greens for their family.

And they're spending, you know, 50, well, once they buy the 25 bucks worth of stuff, they're spending about 50 cents a month to grow all the greens like a family of six can eat. And I was blown away by that. So I just wanted to put that out because, you know, we're in a radical personal finance show here.

And I've been growing food for my family since I was a kid, growing it for my grandfather. And for somebody to show me something completely new, that is not normal. And it's like, here's another thing. I got to do this now just as a project, just for my people.

But that would be, to me, if you wanted to start producing some of your own food, extremely high quality for as cheap as possible, it costs money to build one raised bed. Lumber's expensive. And then if you have to get soil, soil's expensive. This, again, it's called Kratky, K-R-A-T-K-Y.

Just Google that and my God, the food you can make. And then like you said on the ground beef, if you want to do what that guy's doing, just remember there's more than one way to make ground beef. They don't have to all be burgers. Yeah. And I guess the other, I'll check out the Kratky thing because to try that just for our place, one of the challenges, we don't live in the US anymore.

And so getting like the pumps and all of the stuff that's so easy just to order on Amazon is more challenging for me now. But I found it Kratky, K-R-A-T-K-Y. Other tools for low cost cuts of beef, also sous vide, salted steak and a crock pot can make cheap cuts of meat taste a whole lot better.

Jack, let's finish with talking about prepping. Real quick on the sous vide. All right, go ahead. The sous vide. Get a sous vide machine. You got to get one. The cheapest cut of meat you will find in a market that's grass fed and high quality is lamb shoulder chops.

Nobody wants them because there's so much fat in them and the lamb fat is really assertive. You put that in a sous vide machine for five hours, you think God cooked for you. So get a sous vide, absolutely. And give that a shot. Anyway, go ahead. And you taught me something about lamb that I had never thought of.

That basically all lamb that you buy, though it be labeled conventional, is effectively grass fed. There really aren't any commercial feeding operations, any CAFOs for lamb. It just does better on grass. And so if you want non-labeled grass fed meat, buy lamb. I had never thought of that before, but I think that's absolutely a great tip.

Ground lamb is cheap. Ground lamb is about $6.50 a pound at Albertsons and it's all grass fed because it doesn't make any economic sense to feed a lamb grain. And if you use a seasoning called Ras el Hanout, which is a Moroccan seasoning, about a tablespoon of that to a pound of lamb and then do whatever you want with it, throw some bacon in it.

And that's pretty amazing. I'm getting hungry. All right, let's talk about prepping. One of the interesting things that I've thought a lot about over the years, and I used to remember this when you would talk about, you used to do shows on your show about eating paleo and prepping, paleo of course avoiding grain.

One of the challenges, the staples of preparedness food is often grain, buckets of wheat, buckets of rice, beans, et cetera. If you walk away from most of that food, it changes your entire strategy with regard to food preparedness. How do you think about the philosophy of food preparedness when eating in a ketogenic manner?

So let's just look at it this way. Let's say you're worried about the apocalypse. Fine, store up some buckets of beans and rice and wheat. They'll last for 25 years. Put them in the back of the closet and forget about them. And if the world ends, you can go ahead and eat them.

I mean, that doesn't follow eat what you store and store what you eat, but if you're that worried about having more than about 30 to 60 days of sustainability, go ahead and do that. So you can still have the beans and the bullets and the band-aids in the back if you need it.

But I do try to practice eat what you store and store what you eat. And as I said, one of the easiest things to do is get a good deep freezer and get a generator. You should have a generator as a prepper anyway. The number one prep I've used in the last 20 years has been my generators, actually, in so many ways.

When I lived in Arkansas, we lived at the end of the end of the end. And when the power went out for us, there might be 13 people without power. And 15 miles away in town, there's 20,000. The electric company is just fixing their stuff. You couldn't even get mad about it.

How do you get like, well, of course, they're going to do that first. So we learn the value of a generator. So store meat. You can also, you can can meat. I used to recommend All-American canners. They're probably still the best pressure canner on the market. But I also recommend things that people will use.

Keri Shard is the company. Keri Shard makes one that is an electric pressure canner. It's kind of like the Instant Pot, except it actually is good for canning meats. So you can can meats. That's another way to extend things. Learn to make biltong if you really want to store your protein up.

And biltong is so superior to jerky. Oh, by the way, do not think you're keto or low carb and go to the store and buy beef jerky. There's more beef jerky and a five, there's more sugar in a five ounce bag of beef jerky than there is in a can of Coca-Cola.

Go check that out and you'll see I'm dead on with it. So those are ways that we can do this. And I mentioned before, seafoods, especially canned fish. Canned fish is one of the best stores of fat you can have. The mackerel I mentioned. There's a sardine brand that I recommend called Matisse Gallego.

It's probably the best quality sardine in the world. It's still a sardine, but that's incredibly high quality protein. You can buy canned meats. You can buy canned chicken and canned beef. I generally don't like that because it's about the worst of the worst of factory. But if you're eating factory anyway, you can do that.

But probably the number one way you can store your meat products is if you can get into homesteading. Don't kill your rabbit until you want to eat it. You follow me there. So we can set up a rabbit tree and I can produce more rabbit meat with a rabbit tree with let's say three does and one buck rabbit than you could from a couple of meat goats a year.

And I don't have to actually slaughter those young bunnies until I'm ready to eat them. And I have the incredible high quality protein then. And if I have a place where I can grow lots of grass, I can feed grass and clover. I can feed them mostly with a bag mower.

So it all depends about your individual situation. But I think that the idea that all of a sudden we can't store food because we're not storing rice. And I ask these people to say that like, how much rice do you eat right now? And it turns out most of them don't eat a lot of rice.

They don't eat a lot of beans. And they might eat a lot of wheat and corn, but they don't eat it in the form of raw wheat and raw corn. They eat it in the form of processed foods from the store. So that means that they're storing food that they, unless the zombies come, they're never going to eat it anyway.

So it doesn't really affect me much. And then gardening, things like the crack key hydroponics, that's quick turnover food. Learning to grow things like micro greens is another awesome way. So now we can store seeds that can turn into vegetables very, very quickly. Like we could grow a black oil sunflower into sunflower micro greens in about 10 to 14 days.

And once we have that happening, we can have a new crop coming in every day with almost no effort whatsoever. And I'm not suggesting maybe that you do this, but I'm also suggesting that maybe it's not as important to buy organic as you think when it comes to something like black oil sunflowers.

So I don't know if you know any farmers, Josh, but they don't tend to spend money unless they have to. Like they don't spray chemicals just because they want to spray chemicals. They spray chemicals because they have to. Well, nothing really is a pest on sunflowers. And sunflowers don't really have to worry about weeds because they grow so tall.

So the sunflower seeds that you buy for like 16 bucks for a 50 pound bag of tractor supply have never been sprayed with anything. So if you really had to eat on the cheap and you wanted to grow your own food, you could be growing sunflower micro greens for a ridiculously low price.

And by the way, for you keto people, they're actually high in fat. So it's like so many ways. I mean, I could keep going, but I mean, it's just not really that hard. If you just think about what you're consuming and how do I make sure I have food for the next month or two.

And as a prepper, I'm all about the people that want to be ready for a year. But I'm also about common sense and what works for the most people. If you can get through 60 to 90 days with food, water, shelter, energy, and money, you're going to get through 90% of what will ever go wrong in your life.

So that's my day is kind of like about 90 days for 90%. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And obviously the human body is incredible. We can eat so many diverse types of foods. For me, from the prepping perspective, the thing that I just thought really opened my eyes when I recognized that, wait a second, it is actually possible to thrive on a diet exclusively of meat, which, yeah, I knew that the Inuit ate meat and fat.

But when I actually tried it and said, I'm thriving and I only eat meat again, I think I'll probably go back to vegetables because I don't see any reason not to. But there are people who just are thriving and been for decades on just that. Then it kind of changes the whole dynamic.

And I realized that. Well, let me ask you this, right? The Inuit were living on all that fat and meat for that long. Where's their deep freezer? Where's their root cellar? If you look at the people that live in the outback of Australia, the Aborigines, it's very warm there.

They somehow managed to survive with no grocery store. They don't run to the grocery store or the indigenous cultures in Africa or the indigenous cultures of South America, the few that are left, New Guinea, all over the world, these cultures live and they primarily live off of animal food.

One of my challenges to vegans has always been, since this is supposedly the way humans are supposed to eat, show me a vegan indigenous culture, go. You get a lot of autistic level screeching, but you don't get a lot of answers to that one. >> Right. And from a prepping perspective, if animal flesh is your primary source of nutrition, the thing that animals do better than anything else in the world is take stuff that people don't eat and turn it into stuff that people do.

You could take a brushy overgrown lot and put some goats or put a cow on there, and they'll take stuff that's nasty and gross and turn it into stuff that is delicious on your grill. And so in many ways, if you, now this doesn't work in the city, I'm just drawing a fun example, but if you calculate that each year I eat three quarters of a cow, then you're, and that's how much steak it takes to keep me fed for a year.

Then you simply calculate the number of cows that you can produce per year and you put cows on the grass pasture out back and you keep them alive. And if you do that, you have a sustainable source of food. You have a milk cow that provides you with milk to drink and you have a new, a fresh beef cow every year as they grow up to a butchering size.

And obviously that is why meat has always been a primary component of the human diet is because animals take stuff that people don't eat and turn it into stuff that we do. And it's a whole lot easier to go out and butcher a cow than it is to garden enough vegetables to keep you alive for a year.

There's just no comparison. Give me a few number one and a half coal spring traps and drop me off in the woods and I'll feed myself. Drop me off in suburbia, I'll feed myself. I might be eating raccoon, but anybody that says raccoon is not good to eat probably never ate one or you ate one with somebody too stupid to take out the glands.

And then there's a couple of glands that need to come out of them. But I mean, you put me anywhere on this planet and there are critters that live there that I can trap and or shoot and eat. One of my favorite ways of hunting involves driving around in my truck and looking for a deer that didn't make it last night.

They got hit by somebody else in the vehicle. It's technically illegal here, but I've had a cop help me put a deer in the back of my truck. So I don't think they're enforcing that real hard. And people say, "Oh my God, you ate roadkill." Well, you ate a cow that somebody put a bolt through its head.

I mean, I don't really understand the difference there other than if there's damage to the meat or whatever. So there's always something to eat. I mean, I have not been in an ecosystem yet where I couldn't figure out how to feed myself off of other living creatures. I have been in ecosystems where if you told me I'm not allowed to do that, I would be very hungry very fast.

Yeah, absolutely. Jack, anything we haven't covered on this subject? I think the only thing I'd like to just a couple of words on for people here toward the end of this is cancer because it is one of our leading causes of deaths. And I know that there's this belief that a lot of people have that eating a lot of meat is going to get you cancer.

And there just really isn't a lot of proof for that because again, all the studies that say, "Well, this person eats a lot of meat." Well, they're eating lasagna, right? That's... Come on. Like eating meat the way we're talking about today. There is one thing that is cancer's Achilles heel, and that is every cell in your body can survive without sugar.

Your body can make enough glucose for the limited things that are necessary from protein you consume and a process called gluconeogenesis. The tumor has to have sugar. It has to. It cannot live on ketone bodies. And we're talking like PhD level research being done right now that shows that we just go straight standard of care therapy for cancer.

The thing that everybody... Chemo, radiation, whatever. Coupled with ketogenic, extremely low carb eating has better survival rates for cancer. And it makes perfect sense. We're starving the tumor. Then you go to some nutritionist that puts his cancer patients on carrot juice. The guy should be... Honestly, should be killed and buried for doing that.

You're throwing gas on a fire when you give sugar to a cancer patient. So now that's fact. Now I'm going to go to my opinion. My opinion is if cutting sugar extremely during standard of care treatment for a person who already has cancer is helpful, it should be the case that we're at least on some level in the right school of thought for prevention of many cancers by doing it before.

Or even if the person is going to get a cancer, it should slow the progression. And a slow moving cancer is easier to treat than a fast moving one. We always hope we catch it early is a thing. So I think that there's a tremendous benefit toward the prevention and treatment of cancer here.

There's more research that needs to be done. And I do want to be clear, I am not saying keto cures cancer. And I'm not saying certainly keto is right for all cancers. For instance, I've learned like a ton of research. There is a rare form of breast cancer. And then there's a mutation of that rare form that actually is aggravated and grows faster in some of the byproducts of ketogenesis.

So if you had that particular, like would be like one 10th of 1% of all cancers, it probably would be bad. So there's always an exception. But I think if we follow kind of the rule of thumb with how cancer and we look at cancer's progression, and sugar in the diet, it seems to me that people have like the trifecta of things that people worry about from health.

Type 2 diabetes and metabolic problems, heart disease and cancer, we're better off all around. And the fourth one is obesity. So I would challenge anybody in your audience, if you doubt this, do what my 50 people did in my 40 day challenge. Give yourself 40 days, follow what Josh is talking about, follow what I'm talking about, and tell me how you feel in 40 days.

I mean, I would go to, I don't know about you, I would go to like hardcore prison for 40 days for $10 million. I mean, like, there's not much, like, if you'd be 10 million, 10 million, right? Yeah, I mean, I might, I might get myself thrown in the hole and spend 40 days in solitary, somebody shivs me or nothing.

But I'll do about anything for $10 million, as long as it's moral and legal. 40 days of eating really good food for the possibility of transforming your life. It's not a big sacrifice, folks. I want to add to that list. Have you read anything, any of the research or noticed anything that people some researchers are doing on Alzheimer's and low carbohydrate?

Yes. I can't believe we didn't talk about that. Go ahead. The the cutting edge research. And again, this is mostly like PhD students doing their thesis is this has become a thing to do now. And one thing is important with science, a study that says something means nothing to me, you have to have this guy does a study, he publishes his study and his methodology.

This guy over here takes the methodology and repeats the result. Now you got some, and they're getting highly repeatable results here to the conclusion they're coming to is that Alzheimer's most likely is diabetes of the brain. And that is earth shattering, that should be on every television station, every news report, but it doesn't benefit the people in power to tell you this.

And so what and they know this to be a fact that we think of somebody has type two diabetes, it's I hate the word diabetes where it's not diabetes, it's insulin resistance. So you have a person, it's not that they can't make insulin, their pancreas is making too much insulin, but their cells have become so resistant to insulin from from high blood sugar their whole life, that that cell can't get the energy in anymore.

So the pancreas is working overtime to get the sugar out of the blood. So what does the doctor come along and do gives them more insulin? I mean, it should be up, this should be actually a crime to do this, honestly, that person immediately should have their blood sugar cut.

That's the solution. Well, that's type two diabetes, it's really insulin resistance. But what we've learned is individual systems and individual organs can develop independent resistance to insulin. So your pancreas can develop its own resistance to its own insulin, your liver can, your intestinal tract and your brain can. Well, we thought more settled science right until about 15 years ago, they thought the brain could only run on glucose.

It was the only thing a brain could run on. Turns out, you know what your brain can run on fat, it's made out of fat. So that makes sense, runs on ketone bodies just fine. When you go low carb, and they're not creating this insulin resistance, it's very it's not proven yet, but it's very promising that it can be helpful with Alzheimer's.

The most amazing thing that they've done is they're able to put radioactive markers, it's substances that go into your body. So they can see everybody's seen, you know, scans where they do this and see where it gets into your body. You take a dementia patient, you give them a bunch of glucose with this radioactive marker, you scan their brain.

And it's horrifying when you realize what's going on, when you actually see it, you see the brain light up and there's a site, you know, thing the size of a baseball in the center of their brain, it's dead. No energy goes into their brain. And you look at that goal, that is horrifying as Alzheimer's did, it becomes more horrifying.

It's the brain dying from the inside out. Like take the same patients and they give them something called MCT oil, which is a medium chain triglyceride. And we're long so I don't want to get too deep here. But this is just simply a fat that can be used almost instantly.

Even a lot of the fats that are very easy for your body to use, they have to go to liver, they have to be synthesized. MCT goes right through the intestinal wall gets one little modification, and it's off to provide energy. Your brain, your little three pound brain uses 40% of the calories you consume a day.

So it's an energy hog. Those MCT marked molecules, like that part of the brain up in an Alzheimer's patient that can't use glucose in the brain anymore. It turns the brain on, they could actually scan it and look at it and see it. So we have so much there with just eating this way may in fact reduce this epidemic of Alzheimer's.

How old are you, Josh? You're like similar to my age, right? No, I'm 34. 34, so you're younger. So maybe you don't remember. I'm almost 50. When I was a kid, like there was one old person, it was crazy. That's what we called it back then. We didn't even understand what it was.

We said they had dementia, they were crazy. We didn't really call it Alzheimer's yet. And it would be like there's a hundred old people, there's like one or two that had lost their faculties. Now it seems like every third one by the time they're in their 80s is having these issues.

Well, they didn't eat the way we did back then. So the eating may do it, but even people that are already there, I wish I would have noticed when my father-in-law went through this, just giving them a tablespoon of MCT oil a day is not fixing the problem, but it's mitigating the condition.

And we're coming up to the realization that almost every chronic disease we have today is dietarily related. And if you think about what we've done to ourselves, we had, most people used to die of infectious diseases. If you go back a hundred years, they died of typhoid, they died of polio.

And science came along and did amazing things with drugs in treating infectious diseases. We've pretty much beaten most infectious diseases. And if we have a new infectious disease, we can beat it pretty quickly. Usually we're screwing some things up with resistant bacteria, antibiotics, but overall we can handle it.

Then we created these chronic conditions that didn't used to exist with diet. And we're trying to medicate them away with drugs, where diet is actually the solution. Thank you for bringing that up because I think that's going to, that was one of my greatest fears in my life that I would end up with dementia.

As a guy that uses his brain for a living, it's a horrifying thought. And I'm not saying I don't have to worry about it at all, but I think about it a lot less now. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there are, I agree. I can't find any evidence to say that carbohydrates are, that large consumption of carbohydrates is very important for most people.

Maybe, I don't, you know, they argue about it in the athletic world. I'm not competent to assess that, but it does seem to me that I can find story after story after story. And I can find many competent medical professionals that say, say, and show that basically type two diabetes is completely treatable with carbohydrate restriction.

Obesity is almost completely treatable with carbohydrate restriction. There's the interesting discussions on Alzheimer's, which is, I mean, I've been through it with my grandfather and it's horrifying. It's one of the worst things out there. And it makes sense when you read what some of them are testing. Now, I don't know.

Well, if you, if you, again, like it's not proven, but if you had a drug that did what MCT oil did, right. A freaking supplement you can buy from Amazon. If you had a drug that did that, it would be patented and it would be being prescribed across the country.

There'd be a million commercials for it on Fox news tomorrow. Right? Right. And it's just there and it can't hurt you. Right. And it hurt you, I guess. Agreed. Agreed. And there's no, and when you say, okay, I'm going to try at least I'm going to try, I'm going to do three months on a low carbohydrate diet.

It's such a look, it can be such a luxurious way to eat and it can have all these other benefits. There's no reason not to try it for yourself and to see if your N equals one results are worth pursuing farther because you and I, as individuals, we are the ones that are the most important.

And I've gone through the emotions of being, I spent years just frustrated. Like what is wrong with me? What is wrong with my body? Why on earth is this happening? I don't eat badly. Um, and so I've been in that place. And then I've also been in the place where, man, it makes a big difference.

I've never felt better than I do right now. And just the mental clarity, the physical energy, et cetera. It's, it brings back your zest for life. And there's one thing about money. It is very difficult to be productive when you don't feel well. It's very difficult to be productive when you lack self-confidence.

It's very difficult to be productive when you're dealing with all kinds of health issues. If there's one thing that's going to derail your income, get sick. If there's one thing that's going to destroy your money, get cancer. And so we owe it to ourselves to become highly educated and to experiment with each of our bodies to find the ideal human diet for us.

Jack, um, close it out. Anything you want to say, the survival podcast, tell us about some of your projects, uh, because there's a lot of overlap between our audiences. So close us out for today. Well, I mean, if, if you want to kind of check out everything I do, the best thing to do is go to the survival podcast.com.

We do focus a lot on preparedness, but really what my podcast is about is lifestyle design. Uh, being a good marketer back in 2008, when I started the show, we have over 2,500 episodes. Now I knew if I called it the lifestyle design podcast, I mean, this is before Tim Ferriss became like a rockstar God on the internet.

Like I would get like three people listening. So I went with what was hot, which was preparedness, which I think lifestyle resiliency is preparedness. That's, that's what we really talk about. So if you can think of it, I mean, from traditional things you would think of in a show like mine, like off-grid living, basic preparedness, disaster preparedness, we cover that, but we cover the economics, we cover entrepreneurship, we cover, you know, lifestyle design, lifetime education.

I just did a show this week, 10, 10 skills that you should teach your children. And I guarantee if you listen to that show and you teach your kids that your kids will be millionaires by the time they're 30, if your kids are young right now, if they follow the advice on that show.

Uh, it's, it's just really about living a better life. And that fact, that's our tagline. We have the worst tagline ever, but it says what it, what it is and does what it says. And that is helping you live a better life. If times get tough or even if they don't, and that's what we're all about.

You can check us out and everything else I do, you can find from there. And if you want to know what I'm doing with keto again, it's called Jack's Low Carb Journey is the, uh, the playlist. And, uh, you can either find it for everybody or I can send you a link, Josh.

Um, there is the one out of those 40 odd videos now that is, you know, nuts and bolts, exactly how I manage keto for what I do. It doesn't mean you should too, but yeah, it worked for me. It might work for you. Try it. And then at least what I say is like, start with something that is organized with keto.

These people would say to do lazy keto, dirty keto, whatever. Start with something organized that's proven to work. And then you can decide, well, I want to add or take away from it. That way you're starting from something that's a no. And some people tell me like, I get a recipe for making bread, make it the way the recipe is, and then decide if you want to throw walnuts in it.

Right? So it's that same type of thinking, start with something like that. And you know, if anybody has any questions for me, you know, they can ask if you have like, you know, blog notes or whatever in, and I'll, I'll be happy to kind of come by and answer those or they can get in touch with me directly.

Absolutely. And Jack's low carb journey is all on YouTube. So just go to YouTube. Jack, thank you for coming on. And I want to close it just with one closing note. Um, the reason why I brought Jack on to discuss this subject instead of going and pursuing, you know, doctor so-and-so is because what I have found is that there are some experts who are very good teachers.

You know, Jack mentioned, um, some of the people that he really appreciates on YouTube, Dr. Ken Barry and the keto couple, et cetera. But a lot of times the best person to teach a subject to somebody who's just a little bit beyond because that person can understand what it was like to be a little bit before.

And so that's where with, you know, Jack's a polymath, he, he, he's a self educator, but he's studied it and understood it, but being just a little bit beyond allows somebody like Jack or somebody like me who says, I know what it was like six months ago. And let me tell you how I've overcome that.

And what I have found is that learning from people who are just a little bit farther ahead is sometimes better and more effective than learning from somebody who's 20 years ahead. There's a big, if you're deeply in debt, you got credit card debt. You don't go talk to a billionaire and say, how do I become a billionaire?

Because you're not going to connect with that. You start with somebody who's a little bit ahead of you. And then as you grow, you keep pushing up on and on because then you'll people will be able to give you advice that you can implement. So Jack, I think you did a great job and I thank you for coming on the show.

I appreciate you having me, Joshua. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I hope I helped you with some ideas and some encouragement, inspiration to help you achieve your goals faster, living a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less as we go three things.

Number one, I teach a number of premium courses found at radical personal finance.com/store courses that I have designed and written to help you solve some specific problems. Go and check those out at radical personal finance.com/store. Those courses contain ideas and strategies not otherwise released here in the free podcast.

And you can find those at radical personal finance.com/store. Number two, I offer a limited amount of private consulting and coaching work. If you'd like details on how to talk to me privately regarding the details of your specific situation, email me joshua at radical personal finance.com and you will be able to get in touch.

I'll share all those details. Joshua at radical personal finance.com. Number three, catch up with me around the web, Facebook and YouTube. I'm at radical personal finance, uh, Twitter and Instagram at Joshua sheets. S H E A T S. Follow me on those platforms. If you are active there for some additional content, not found here in the podcast.

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