Matt Lysiak: The Role of Government, Big Corp & Money Printing in Modern Food Consumption | MMP #248
Matt, welcome to the Meat Mafia podcast. I am personally very excited for this one. We haven't done a Bitcoin podcast in a little while, so this will be this will get us back on course, and, excited to have you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. I've been a fan of the Meat Mafia now for at least a year. And the first time I heard you, you had SAFE, Dean on, and I was hooked. So, I'm honored to be a guest on your show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It sounds like we have a shared admiration for SAFE, who's just an incredible thinker. But one of the things I was really excited to dive in with you about is the book that you just launched. It's titled after one of the chapters of Safedines, one of his books. Think it was the Fiat Standard, and you really take it to another level.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious, just wrote the book Fiat Food, just launched this a few weeks ago. I'm curious kind of what the whole process was behind you getting started in really uncovering what you did in your writing with this book.
Speaker 2:So I'm a crime reporter. I've I worked at the New York Daily News for ten years, and my job was whenever a major crime occurred around the country, I would parachute in and essentially try to find motive. Why did the shooter perform these terrible deeds, or why did the person planning to blow up the synagogue, what was his intention and what was the reasoning? I came across Safedean's book, The Bitcoin Standard during COVID And at this point, I'd left the New York Daily News as a reporter and I had already transitioned to writing books. I'd written a book on the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, and I'd written several other books.
Speaker 2:And when I got to Bitcoin Standard, it turned my mind on to what could be considered an economic crime in terms of the fiat money printer. And then I read Saif Fadin's second book, The Fiat Standard, and there was a chapter about food. And I had a lot of respect for Saif at this point for his economic mind, but this chapter sounded absolutely off the hook. I mean, he was proposing a conspiracy between big agriculture, medical industrial complex, and the government to essentially alter our food supply in what could only be conceived of as a historic sort of SIOP to mask the effects of the fiat money printer and inflation. And I was very skeptical of this, but I could recognize a really good mind.
Speaker 2:SAFA has a fantastic sharp mind, So I decided to look into it more and dig deeper. What I realized was if anything SAFE understated that case. I reached out to SAFE Dean and I expressed who I was and told him I had an interest in in going deeper, digging deeper into his theory on the food supply. And what I found I think is nothing short of perhaps the most consequential crime of the century in terms of devastation of the American public's health and the confiscation of their wealth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's remarkable. And you actually quoted, I think it's Virgil, just the quote health is wealth. And just thinking of these things as interchangeable aspects of living a very prosperous life or just living life in general, you need to have a foundation of health. And seems like, and we'll dive into it, but what you've uncovered is really just all the different characters who've played a part in making the food system the way it is today, which for anyone who's listening to the show and is familiar with our show, we have some harsh criticisms around just like the nature of the ultra processed food industry that we have today. 63 of food is ultra processed.
Speaker 1:I just think having gone into your book, I'm just incredibly excited to dive in here. One of the things I was curious about, you start off the book by going to a few of the characters who have played a key role in what's going on in the food system. And the first person is John Maynard Keynes that you dive into, who's a British guy born in the later half of the 1800s. And from your perspective, it seems like he's played a massive role in kind of shaping the economic engine of the 1900s. Can you just explain just why you started off by painting the picture with Keynes and what's his role in the food system?
Speaker 1:Because I think that's less obvious to a lot of people, even if you are familiar with the Bitcoin world and a lot of the things that Bitcoiners like to talk about?
Speaker 2:Well, Keynes is in my he's not the inventor of fiat currency, but he is definitely the modern day OG of fiat. Yeah. A British guy. World War one's happening. It's just started and Great Britain is freaking out a bit because at the time the whole world is on, pretty much the whole world is on a gold standard.
Speaker 2:So paper notes were essentially promises of gold that were kept somewhere at this point. Keynes came up with a theory that you could basically remove the gold and still have the paper and just print as much paper as you want. And the main reason you they that this was so needed was because they needed to keep the war going. At the time, the population really didn't want war. And on a gold standard, a country can't wage war against another country without the consent of the people because if they do, it would have to be very short or they risk spending their own treasury where it's very expensive.
Speaker 2:But with fiat, you're able to wage perpetual war which we've seen in the latter half of this century and you could do so by pilfering the entire wealth of the population. So Keynes came up with this theory where remove the gold, have a printing press, Fiat, make as much paper as you want, and then you could have and keep World War one going, which is exactly what happened. And you could trace Keynes and Keynesian economics for the justification that Nixon had in 1971 on August 15 to permanently remove America from any respect to the gold standard. And I outline in Fiat Food, my book, how that led us down this road of the degradation of not only the currency, but of nutrition.
Speaker 1:Can you maybe provide such good context? I'm curious about the period where Cane's became popular because in reading your book, it sounds like he was almost viewed as a hero in Britain where where he came up with this idea to essentially stabilize the economy or what people felt like was stabilizing the economy, but the actual externalities of what happened when they really not created, but as you said, really modernized the idea of fiat money is that the money printer is now fully in effect to stabilize all sorts of different things. I'm curious, really, really your perspective on just like how how and when he came into relevancy. It was basically the thirties. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The twenties and the thirties and even a little little earlier. He was a charismatic personality. Like a lot of the figures in my book, you'll find that these overwhelming characters were able to sway and tilt history, and Kanes was no exception. Very good Orador.
Speaker 2:And he more than anything became a tool of the central bank. So he was promoted and boosted up and elevated into higher and higher positions because his idea gave justification to the politicians of the time where they could I mean, look. I'm gonna give you a tool that prints money for free. I mean, it's it's great. You sound fantastic and intelligent.
Speaker 2:So he be it what's really interesting to me is watching him become popular not only in Great Britain, but how it spread. Other other countries saw this and was like, wow. Look at what Great Britain's doing, you know, under under Keynes, and we will adopt this and use it in our own system. And what it did was it empowered government officials and these autocrats to really plunder the entire wealth of a nation to their own palms and then weaponize it. So
Speaker 1:when you think about a timeline for everything that's happened, Cain's was kind of early 1900s. Then you bring into the fold a few other characters, one of which is Ancel Keys. And we've talked about Ancel Keys a bit, but I feel like he's still kind of this underappreciated person in the world of food because and it's almost I love the fact that you started the book off with these two characters because between the two of them, can really start to see the alignment between money and food and how there really is a lot of influence pushing regulation nutritional guidelines. I'm curious just what you learned about Ansel Keyes and his story through writing this book.
Speaker 2:Ansel Key is another extremely persuasive personality and he walked into the field of nutrition. He wasn't by nature a nutritionist and he wasn't an expert in heart health. Actually specialized in fish, in particular eels. He seemed one of those classic characters who were just completely after power. And when Eisenhower had a heart attack, which I believe was in 1951 Early nineteen fifties, Eisenhower has a heart attack.
Speaker 2:The whole country was alarmed about what could have possibly caused this, and Eisenhower was out of commission for a few days. Now never mind the fact that he smoked four packs of cigarettes a day. Ansel Keats had a theory, and that was that the saturated fat in meat was the cause. And he was a different character in the the nutritionary landscape. He infused himself in there.
Speaker 2:And what what he was was kind of like a steamroller because most of these players in the nutrition field in history, like John Ledkin were meek, were more science based. They were if you know scientists, they're they're not necessarily after the limelight. They're not doing interviews. So Keith had sharp elbows, so he had this theory that saturated fat in red meat was the cause of heart attacks and cardiovascular disease, and it was a hypothesis and he really said about the next twenty to thirty years trying to prove it, and he never could. The seven country studies I've heard you on a podcast discuss it before, so I know you know the difference between observational studies and clinical studies.
Speaker 2:Just for your audience, observational studies are kind of like handing out flyers. I mean, it's it's not real science. It it it can give you some data points, but it can't establish causal relationships. And Ansel Keyes would would create and find and and create these observational studies and then act through force of personality as though this was established scientific law. And when people stood up to him with contrasting data, his force of personality would come in and he would bludgeon them.
Speaker 2:And you could when I was going through this book and was going through documents, you'd see that again and again how a scientist like John Lodkin would say, well, I'm looking at your data and there's a huge correlation between sugar and heart disease. It seems like a better correlation by your own data. Keyes would respond not by giving a scientific argument. He would say, nobody pays attention to you. I was just at six meetings.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's a big conspiracy, but nobody even mentions your name. Who are you? It was it was kind of that sort of prom king nature. And Keys was also then able to wiggle his way into a lot of the higher institutions of American government, and it wasn't by coincidence. He was welcomed in largely.
Speaker 2:He got into the American Heart Association, and shortly after that, they went along with his hypothesis and mentioned it as though it was established law. And now all these years later, it is that seed from this really poor observational study from Ansel Keyes that persists in the mind of the public. I'm sure you get this when you tell people that you're a carnivore and that you eat meat. They'll start mentioning observational studies to you like, Well, Ansel Keyes, what about this and what about that? It's very difficult because unless you really understand the different kinds of studies and know this like you could see kind of sort of the fifty year sci op that's going on, you sound insane when you're trying to explain why you're eating the way you're eating, but it does come to Ansel Keyes largely.
Speaker 1:And so between John Maynard Keynes and Ansel Keyes, it seems like they have this shared character trait of being, maybe not bombastic, but they're just powerful figures. Another person that comes to mind is Earl Butts, who is the Secretary of Agriculture. I'm sure we can touch on that a bit, but it seems like all these guys they were playing in arenas where they knew they could dominate if they just had that certain character trait almost.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great way to put it. And they were able to manipulate the media. They were able to suck up all the oxygen in the room. Earl Butz is a is a great one. Nixon appointed him as his secretary of agriculture and after Nixon ended any link to the gold standard in in his speech on 08/15/1971, Earl Butz was kind of like his blunt object to transform the food supply.
Speaker 2:So up until that point, there weren't a lot of books on what humans should eat. Somehow humans just kind of knew what to eat, You know, we weren't constantly discussing it, we weren't having 50,000 different podcasts examining what the proper diet is, kind of like a lion, you just sort of knew you ate me, You ate animal products. You ate fruit if, you know, you couldn't find anything else or it was available and in season, which was rare. That seemed to be the way people did it for many, many, many, many years. But once Nixon ended the gold standard, put the final nail in that coffin, you know, what happened was inflation started escalating out of control.
Speaker 2:And the whole goal of government largely at that point, a huge part of their goal was to prevent the people from really seeing that. And I'll give you an example. Lyndon Johnson who preceded Nixon and was in an inflationary mess of his own because he had printed out more papers than we had gold issue the the price of eggs was rising under under his presidency. And at the time, he was considering running for reelection, but he knew how upset people were about the rise in the price of eggs. So he ordered a surgeon general to put out a phony press release that stated eggs were horrible for people to eat.
Speaker 2:So the demand for eggs went down, the supply remained the same, but what you saw as the price come down due to the decrease in demand and it worked. The price of eggs came down, people relaxed. If you look at what happened in Sri Lanka just in 2022, were food riots and they overthrew the government. That was over rising food prices and just in the past ten years, there's been thousands thousands of food riots mainly in Europe over the rising costs of food. So it's this constant battle and this chase where the government wants to stay in power like everybody does.
Speaker 2:This isn't some conspiracy in terms of motive. I mean the government and political leaders from both sides of the aisle of all countries want to stay in power, and it seems like the American people have a really high toleration for war and scandal, but what we don't tolerate is the rising price of food. So instead of trying to deal with the issue of the rising price, what they've done is and I've documented this in the book, I think pretty meticulously, they've gone on a campaign to alter the food supply, and this kinds of brings brings us back to Earl Butts. He was at the beginning of this, and he gave an interview where he was talking about how, you know, people buy a sofa once every ten years, but they have to go to the grocery store at least once a week, and this is a big deal. So he told small farmers, we had a very diverse farming landscape at that point, go big or go home.
Speaker 2:And he geared the Fiat money printer, which again, you could just It's like this huge weapon because it removes opportunity cost from money. If there was a gold standard and somebody like Earl Butts wanted to channel trillions of dollars or billions of dollars into corn, soy, or sugar, you'd have to get to consent of the people because they'd want to know where their gold was going, how this was working. They don't have to ask anybody's permission if they're going to send $40,000,000 of subsidies to corn in 1973. They can just do it and it alters and shifts the entire food landscape. Before you know it, you fast forward a few years, almost every ingredient in the grocery store especially in the Middle Islets is made out of corn, soy lecithin, sugar, and if you're eating only those things you don't really notice the rising price of food, you don't notice inflation.
Speaker 2:Where do you notice it? You notice it in meat because you can't print a cow, can print a Dorito, but you have to cows are you know, ask ask ask a farmer. I mean, cow cows you have to to raise them, you have to butcher them, you have to preserve their meat. It's either not they're not also the profit isn't as high. So while the profit point on a snicker bar is increasing is incredibly high, profit point on a steak is low.
Speaker 2:Like the farmers are not making a lot of money on beef right now. So it's been this fifty year you know, give and take between the government and the food supply of trying to to obscure the rising cost of food. And I think they've been remarkably successful to the detriment of the American public's health, of course. But for them, if you go and you order a steak now, you're more likely to get eye rolls and possibly sort of a lecture than if you order, you know, a Mountain Dew red alert and tasty cakes.
Speaker 1:Right. All right. I'm gonna say you definitely need to make a shop for your website for the book and have a nice merch section that says you can print Doritos, but you can't print cows. I like that. So one of the things I'm curious about is just the advent of processed foods, because they existed before World War I, World War II, but they weren't prevalent.
Speaker 1:And then you've talked about the '70s and breaking from the gold standard being an important line of demarcation for people to think about when it comes to this relationship between food and money and how food has become more processed. But I'm curious, what have you seen in terms of the evolution of processed food? Can you give us just a little bit of context on the timeline there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I include some of this in my book because I found it fascinating. I'll give you two examples, Crisco and margarine. When both of these products came out, they got soundly rejected by the American public. In the case of margarine, I was able to go back to the New York Times and find articles where people had riots over margarine because what was happening was they were inserting it and telling people it was butter, and people knew this wasn't food, this was a waste product, it was chemical alteration, and people didn't accept it. But then during World War two, when everything became tighter because we began flowing resources towards the war effort, butter became more expensive and margarine because it's a cheap substitute food lowered in price And that and it became a huge that's when this marketing campaign hit up.
Speaker 2:And I I think it was actually a genius marketing campaign that for both margarine and in terms of Crisco, which Crisco was Procter and Gamble. Again, not recognized as a food, but people people cooked in lard and in animal animal fats for thousands of years. And then they just get told that they were wrong, that suddenly science has come up with a new better. And if you go back and look at the ads for Crisco or Marjorie, Crisco in particular had a brilliant marketing campaign. It was these women who looked very sophisticated saying the modern woman doesn't have the stench of lard in their kitchen.
Speaker 2:We use Crisco. Highly, highly effective, and it was cheaper. And during the war, themes were very tight for a lot of people. Habits began forming, and Crisco and margarine both became adopted as foods. And this marked a real sea change because this was the first time that the substance substances other than meat, cheese, some plants, eggs were being recognized as food.
Speaker 2:And that shift beginning in the mainly beginning in the forties, but really accelerating in the fifties and beyond was instrumental in what was to come, which was the birth of all these kind of plasticky fake, I call them fiat foods now that proliferate our entire supermarket.
Speaker 1:In the evolution of this, seeing it the way you see it today is now there's a second wave of these types of products coming out. I'd be curious to get your take on the second wave being lab grown meat and fake meat that I think it seems like there's a profit engine behind it that's really trying to push this to be widely adopted. Similarly to what you're talking about when Marjorie and Crisco came on the market, most people really haven't taken to the fake meat sector yet. So I'm curious to get your take on just what you think that evolution will look like.
Speaker 2:So this is I think about this a lot. I've spoken to a lot of ranchers about the issue of of this substitute meat that's coming out, and I've spoken to some some in people in this field of science over it. My fear first of all, the majority of people are never gonna accept it because at the end of the day, we're humans. We're a specific species. And in our in our nature, which matters, it still matters what our nature is, we being.
Speaker 2:That's how we drive. But in for example, in New York City, mayor Eric Adams is pro he's they already have in their public school system meatless Mondays, but how long is it going to be until they begin just substituting these things into the public domain through the public school system, hospitals, prisons like they've done with the dietary guidelines where we used to have real food at the public school system but in 1992 when the dietary guidelines came out they got rid of the whole milk. They got rid of the lard to fry the chicken nuggets and now it's seed oils and they got rid of the real cheese and they've got kids addicted to high sugar, high grain foods. So not only are they metabolically compromised, but I would argue that their intellectual capacity is also diminished because I don't know about you, but if I eat a bunch of carbs, I'm not thinking very clearly and my ability to discern reality is not peak. So my fear is that they're going to do it like that where they just introduce it into the public domain and they say, we're never gonna force anybody to take this but slowly.
Speaker 2:I mean, think of raw milk and what you talk to people about raw milk now, they think it's unhealthy. They're scared of raw milk. Meanwhile, they're eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch, you know, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So it's been when I say it's a SIOP, I don't mean that lightly. I mean, it's you can talk to anybody and almost unanimously, they'll explain to you and lecture to you how saturated fat, raw milk, the healthy essential lifeblood of humanity is vile and evil, and we should substitute it with these fake foods.
Speaker 2:So this meat I one thing I wanna point out, I sorry. I I hope I'm not rambling, but one of the ranchers said Not at all. He was head of one of these organizations and he explained to me that they learned something extremely important over the milk situation. So they were kind of passive when soy milk came out and almond milk. Look, almonds don't have breasts.
Speaker 2:They can't produce milk, right? And they should have fought he was explaining to me, we lost that because we didn't fight over the name milk. People got confused. People were working. They don't have time to sit around like you and I and going over all the minutiae.
Speaker 2:They see milk, they think it's natural. It wasn't. So the fight right now amongst the ranchers, and I just want to give them a shout out, is over the name. They don't want this being named something meat because it's they have a point, it's not meat. And that's where it becomes that's where language becomes important and they begin diluting and transforming reality in our eyes.
Speaker 2:So I think that needs that's the stand that they're gonna make and I'm I hope they win it and I wanted to give them a shout out on that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's always been a point of contention for me, just the ability to really create confusion by just adopting the same language for these things that are just they're not even like for like. I get that the end product can look similar and they could package it similarly, but they're very different in nature. I think it's a really good point. I'm curious, so just taking another step back a little bit, it seems like the 70s is this very important time period to understand when it comes to the nature of what our food is today. I would love to just get your perspective on why you think that is.
Speaker 1:I know inflation was very high during that period. There was a massive shift in how we kind of approached farming. You already talked about Earl Bucks a bit and several other factors at play that I'm assuming you'd dive into, but it just seems like such a critical period for the nature of how food has gone from us really understanding what it was or what it is. And now we've just introduced so many processed foods. So what was it about the seventies that kind of changed the course of the food history in The US?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're you're spot on. The seventies is when all these seeds were planted. And what you have is I think of it as a stool with three legs and one of the legs was the corporate enterprises. So you have these corporations like Procter and Gamble with the Crisco which we discussed, and you had the margarine producers trying to push out these fake foods, and corporations trying to do what corporations do which is they're trying to profit.
Speaker 2:That's not evil. I'm a capitalist. I'm libertarian leanings. I profit. Make your money.
Speaker 2:So you have them pushing, then you have the nutrition science. So the nutrition science headed by Ansel Keyes who was largely funded by the corporation. So this science wasn't independent, It was funded by the corporations looking for certain results, and you found this especially in the sugar industry which funded Ancel Keys famously in several studies which have later been revealed to be false. The New York Times did an expose in 02/06/2016. But one of the things we haven't mentioned yet, and that's the third leg, and this really came through in the seventies, was the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
Speaker 2:And to give your audience a little background on these people, a woman named Ellen Gold was a teenage girl at the beginning of the century and she got hit in the head with a rock. She comes, stands up, comes out of a coma several days later, and has visions from God. And these visions from God tell her that everything wrong with the world, especially the human health condition, is because of the sex drive. And the way to suppress the sex drive is to get people to stop eating meat. Huge part of this religion.
Speaker 2:And she became she started this church, and a guy named John Harvey Kellogg became her protege, and she tasked him with finding a food that could replace meat and would suppress the human sex drive. Now John Harvey Kellogg was it's hard to to overstate the kind of character he he was. He was it's it's it's try to think of the highest, most high profile celebrity doctor of today wasn't a match for John Harvey Kellogg. He gave speeches. He wrote books.
Speaker 2:He was everywhere, and he was highly highly influential. And I think an argument could be made that he was a sociopath. John Harvey would have people come and say, look, my son is 13 years old. We found that he was masturbating. What should we do?
Speaker 2:And some of John Harvey Kellogg's solutions to children masturbating included cages, tying their hands, surgery without anesthesia, pouring carbolic acid, basically torture. Wow. And he had this As to Alan Gold that you need to suppress the human sex drive at all costs at the risk of ushering the end of days. So they began pushing for foods, and as your audience might know, John Harvey Kellogg on assignment from Ellen Gold to come up with a food that suppressed the human sex drive succeeded. He came up with cornflakes, and it arguably was highly successful.
Speaker 2:For fifty years you've had young young girls and young boys eating these grains that do in fact we now know suppress the human sex drive. And meat which gives men testosterone increases the human sex drive. So ironically they were correct in certain aspects, but it wasn't bad enough that he had this private practice and that they had their followers abide by this, but they in the seventies were able to infiltrate the entire American dietary health association where they set up the American Dietetic Association, which was set up through then I I go through the lineage in my book through then somebody named Lena Cooper who set up the American Dietetic Association and from then on, the government's health arm of the government arm of health was really run by followers of the church. To this day, Wilbur Linda University, which is run by the church, gets, I believe it is, $165,000,000,000 in in financial aid, in grants to conduct studies that are observational studies that come out which always predictably have the same result and back up their religious beliefs, which is once again that meat is bad. So meat causes x.
Speaker 2:Over and over again, you get these studies, but anybody who understands data and I I'm kind of a data dork. I love going through studies and and doing this stuff. You you I'm convinced a 12 year old realizes these are real studies. But this took hold in the seventies, and the Seventh Day Adventist Church kind of enmeshed itself with the environmental movement. And the environmental movement, which took very had very they both had very religious I mean, it said it was a church, but what people don't realize about the environmental movement of the seventies, but it was also religious in its own way.
Speaker 2:I mean, for centuries, we've blamed weather on people's behavior. In the sixteen hundreds, you could go back and find how we we when crops wouldn't grow, we'd burn some eccentric women. And it's like, oh, problem solved. Today, it's more sophisticated, but I would argue far more damaging. But these groups colluded in the seventies along with the nutrition science and corporations because they didn't need to meet in a a smoking room and and come up with a conspiracy.
Speaker 2:What it was was it was all just in their own mutual interest. All working towards their interest. And then when the government came on board and they have the power through fiat to weaponize the entire productive energy of working Americans towards what they wanna highlight, it it obfuscated reality in such a way, turned everything upside down. So real foods now are looked at as unhealthy, and these fake foods are we're being told are the way to go, and it's not an accident. I mean, the reason for this is is very evident as I I made clear in Fiat Food.
Speaker 2:It's it's because they they can't they can't risk people seeing that meat and the price that went up to get the nutrients that we need to be healthy. There would be social upheaval. At the very least, we'd be voting these clowns out of office left and right. I know for me, I I know what I noticed the supermarket price is going up
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Rates.
Speaker 1:How would you describe the breaking from the gold standard and its role in accelerating what we're seeing with food? Or maybe accelerating isn't even the right word, but it does seem like the 70s also coincides with this massive monetary shift of fiat money becoming a much more real thing in The States.
Speaker 2:You can't separate it because without the fiat money printer, there's no incentive to create the illusion that fake food is healthy for us. So because we have this inflationary issue and because the government needs to respond to it, that's the incentive to shift the food supply. Without that incentive, why would the government have any role in diet? They would they would need no role. I mean, the Federal Reserve, I remember two years ago, was the Federal Reserve was tweeting out a great healthy alternative to your Thanksgiving turkey is, you know, tofu turkey.
Speaker 2:What does the federal why is the federal reserve somebody might say, why would the federal reserve care what kind of turkey I'm eating? That's well, they do care.
Speaker 1:They do care. It's part of their
Speaker 2:whole ruse is contingent on you shifting your food supply, but we see the results of this all around us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting. So the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate, and the first part of it is the stabilized economy. So then economic growth, I think, is the other part. Think the important part to acknowledge about what you just said about the turkey tofu is that it seems like this whole manipulation of the food system is very much aligned with the ability to stabilize the economy and have more control.
Speaker 1:Is that how you would articulate that, the Federal Reserve's interest in food?
Speaker 2:Their main interest is their own survival. And the Federal Reserve under a hard money currency, whether that be gold or bitcoin or something that can't be automatic, something that's scarce, that supply just can't be infinitely printed, there's no reason for a federal reserve then. You wouldn't need it. Their existence is contingent on us supporting the current monetary policy, is fiat, which gives them the power to and I know I'm being repetitive, but it's when you have fiat and you're able to keep printing dollars, you're able to weaponize everybody's wealth because you really don't own your dollar. So you get paid in, you get paid a $20 bill, you can't say you own that because you don't control the value of it when somebody else can just print twice as many copies of it tomorrow and then the amount of apples you can buy with that $20 gets cut in half or near half.
Speaker 2:You don't really have ownership over your money, they own their money. A hard currency you own your money, you have a certificate that says in bank, I have one ounce of gold, so I'm going to trade this with you or I have this much in Bitcoin. It's more of a rationalist, the ability to perpetuate having what I would argue is the most powerful weapon in the history of the earth, which is the fiat money printer because it isn't just America's wealth. By outsourcing the dollar to other countries, we're draining their wealth as as well. And that's how you can see where people are like, how do we have these billions of dollars to to send to Ukraine and to send to all these other countries?
Speaker 2:Well, we print it and every time we do that, we devalue everybody else's wealth. So if you remove that, if you remove the feed on money printer, there is no incentive to have to hide the rising cost of food because it wouldn't be rising. That's the economic tie in. I think the real hack is understanding that the government, the bankers, the central bank, it's not that they're bad people, it's just that they don't look at us. They look at humans and people as an ends, a means to their ends.
Speaker 2:Like, we were and and that's their profit and to control and to to maintain power, which is how it's been throughout history. And Bitcoin, eating meat, these are ways that we sort of push back.
Speaker 1:One of the stats that you had in your book was talking about incentives, and I loved it. It was well, love that is not the right word, but I just thought it was fascinating. You said billion dollars is, or you said the food companies, big food companies spend $11,000,000,000 on nutritional studies. And then there's another $1,000,000,000 that's spent on nutritional studies by actual, I guess, research institutions. So that kind of painted the picture for me sort of how the incentives can be warped by these companies that are very profit driven.
Speaker 1:I'm curious how you look at the agro industrial complex and the medical industrial complex and just how they're able to use these incentives to manipulate different areas of the food system, whether it's the products that we're agreeably saying are okay to be putting on certain crops like liposate or just like medicine in general, being able to be promoted through research that is largely funded by the people who are selling the good.
Speaker 2:It's almost a beautiful symphony on how these different entities have been able to coordinate. One of the most difficult parts of my book, and I think I dealt rather successfully with it was, as a reporter, I like things linear, begin with the beginning. But I found that with government and industry, it was so incestuous. I had issues in terms of separating them completely because as you mentioned, the USDA, these government agencies, they're really not government agencies in respect as we would view an independent institution. What they literally are are marketing campaigns.
Speaker 2:They're PR campaigns, and that's the way they should be viewed. I mean, that's literally what they are. They're controlled by industry. Not a conspiracy. Go on the USDA's website right now.
Speaker 2:Pull up their partner list. It's Dannen, it's Pepsi, and what you will find is how in sync all these groups are. I'll give you an example and I have a chapter on this because I found it absolutely mind blowing. There is a real detestable human being who is on sixty Minutes in January of this year named Doctor. Fatima Stanford.
Speaker 2:I want to give her a shout out. A vacant human being who went on sixty minutes to to to tell people that, you know, our perceptions of reality for the last thousands of years as humans that eating shit results in bad things for our body was actually all wrong and that we have no control over our weight. It's genetics. That is the greatest, most responsible factor for our health outcomes. And I especially, I find this especially vile because I don't there's you could I don't think there's many things worse to a human being that you could do than to tell them that they aren't in control of their own health, that they're not even empowered to live a healthy life without a credentialed expert explaining to them.
Speaker 2:But to back her up a bit, she explains that although we have no control over food doesn't really have a relation to obesity, and it's it's genetic. But luckily, we have a solution, Ozempic. Now she doesn't mention that she was a paid consultant for the group, and the the show sixty minutes was, during commercial breaks, was advertised by, you know, Ozempic, so it's paid for by Ozempic. This came just weeks apart from the Tufts food pyramid coming out, which told us that Lucky Charms was indeed healthier than ground beef and eggs. When there was pushback against that, the White House came and defended it.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. Peasants. You dumb peasants.
Speaker 2:Of course, Lucky Charms are healthier than eggs. Months after that, all in the same year, the American Pediatric Association for the first time told doctors we recommend you giving these weight loss drugs like Ozempic to minors who have weight issues. So boom boom boom. All these things happen at the same time. Coordinated media campaign.
Speaker 2:And I feel like we're a bit naive if we think this is a coincidence, that all this is just being unveiled at the same time. I look at it as a cynical reporter. I dig in, and you can find the Novo Nordisk. Probably saying that's the parent company of Ozempic that they had planned this marketing campaign in November. They talked there's a press release issued that they were gonna start the campaign in January.
Speaker 2:The sixty minutes news segment was not news. It was, again, PR. The only other person that he had on the show was also somebody who was paid for BioZempec and Novo Nordisk who was a consultant for him. There was no pushback. There was no real mention of actual side effects of Ozempic, but again I don't think you can overstate that right now they're trying to put this seed in the American public in a very literal way that we're not responsible for our own health.
Speaker 2:And if they can do that, then they can do anything. Then we're basically putty because then we become part of the medical industrial complex. And again, the product that they're selling, misery. It's It's the degradation of our health. That's the product.
Speaker 2:And it's very it it becomes monetized and the cycle and the loop continues and the dependence continues. So when you have somebody but doctor Stanford, you'll be glad to know is not punished for these words. In fact, she's being promoted. She is now running. She's become a panelist for the 2,025 dietary guidelines who will establish what all the school children of America will eat, including school children, hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons.
Speaker 2:So this is what we're fighting against, and I'm hoping my book plays a role in just pulling the curtain back and showing how we got here.
Speaker 1:I think you could not have laid out a better picture there in terms of how the incentives have gotten so distorted. And then the gaslighting on the other side of it, where the institutions that are promoting this level of research are trying to make you feel disempowered by the fact that you don't have the right information to actually be a healthy person on your own. You need to be following these guidelines. It's a very dangerous and slippery slope. I think your book does an incredible job of outlining the entirety of this whole history that we're now living with, which is the food system becoming much less a food system and much more of highly processed, hyper palatable garbage system.
Speaker 1:So I would love to read a quick section of your book and then finish off the conversation with a question on Bitcoin because we haven't touched on it nearly enough and I know you're a Bitcoiner. So I'm just going to read from This is very early on in your book. It's actually a quote from Edward Bernays. He says, The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.
Speaker 1:We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes form, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we're dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. I think it's an incredibly powerful quote. My question to you to cap the conversation is, how does Bitcoin play a part in fixing this entire, not only economic engine, but also just the food system in general.
Speaker 2:Bitcoin, in and of itself, it's inconsequential to to to to diet, obviously. But what it does do is it destroys the fiat money printer, which creates the economic distortions, which have altered our food supply. So adopting a Bitcoin standard or just beginning by buying a little bit into Bitcoin and starting that process, you liberate yourself from the system that's contributing to the metabolic destruction of America. I know that sounds like hyperbole but go wait in the self checkout line at Walmart and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:What would you say to a younger version of yourself who hadn't fully gotten there yet on Bitcoin to the remarks that you just made. I just know so many people who are skeptical. Once you come around to the idea that, hey, maybe we can change how our society is, or the architecture of society is designed around money, that maybe we can put this technology in place and start to adopt some hard money that actually isn't manipulated. But I'm just curious, how would you level with a younger version of yourself?
Speaker 2:I remember arguing with people when Bitcoin first came out that it's not real, that Bitcoin is digital currency. Once you really understand the economics, and I think SAFE has led me to a place where I feel confident in having a good grasp of economic realities, you realize that you don't own your money when it's fiat, that some other entity owns your money because you can't control it. The fact that I can have a money printer and I can double the currency that I just gave to you for a transaction meant it makes it there's you don't own your money because you can't control its value. Bitcoin is money that you can own. It can't be printed.
Speaker 2:There's only gonna be 21,000,000 Bitcoin ever, infinitely divisible. So I would say to a younger version of myself, it's about self empowerment and you can't get there when half of every single transaction, which is the money you use, is being manipulated and controlled by an unseen force that you can't even begin to understand.
Speaker 1:I love it. Well, Matt, I want to first thank you for coming on the show, but more so I want to thank you for writing this book. Because one of the things I felt after reading the Fiat standard and reading that chapter that SAFE put together, I felt like in 02/2008, we had a financial crisis. And when these financial crises happen, they oftentimes happen in a blink and they happen quickly. And everyone can feel the reality of that situation.
Speaker 1:But what's less talked about is the slow nature of the health collapse and the health crisis that we're living through. There isn't a massive spike or drop off or collapse, so to speak, that you would see in the nature of a financial crisis. I think your book does just an incredible job of detailing out all the different players and factors that are at play. I just really appreciate the work that you put into the book. Again, thank you for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you and I appreciate you both. I know Brett's not there, but I appreciate you guys keep pushing the word on on meat because meat is health and life, and, you know, you're you're doing a lot of good out there. In my early days of carnivore, I would be weak kneed. I would I would go to I would sometimes pull up a a meat mafia podcast because I needed to get my mind to shut down the carb cravings in my body, and it would work. All I think, it would really work, and it was liberating.
Speaker 2:So you guys are keep keep being skeptical and keep keep pushing truth, man. Thank you.
Speaker 1:We appreciate it. Thanks, Matt.
Speaker 2:Have a good one.
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