#423 Simon Lewis: Carnivore, Decentralized Nutrition & The Meat Mafia Story
Welcome everybody to another episode of the How To Carnival podcast. Today, we're joined by the guys from the Meat Mafia, Harry Gray and Brett Ender. I've been following these guys for a long time. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I first saw you guys on Twitter. You started off doing a lot of the mafia Godfather stuff, and I'm a massive Godfather fan as well.
Speaker 1:I think one of you was Salazzo or something and another one. And it was lesser known Godfather characters. And then you were intertwining that with real nutrition and being interested in regenerative farming and eating meat. I was like, wow, this is really similar to the stuff that I'm into. And that was around the time that I'd started How to Carnivore and started working with Doctor.
Speaker 1:Chaffey. Even that painting in the background, Brett, I love that Max Maggiore.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I believe I believe so.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is
Speaker 2:this is my friend's office that I hijacked for podcast interviews like this.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Yeah. It's good. Like the I like the blue walls as well. So, guys, really good to meet you, and, you know, thank you so much for sharing some of your time with everyone.
Speaker 3:Likewise, Simon. Thanks for having us on. This is gonna be an awesome combo. We're excited.
Speaker 1:Cool. All right. Let's kick things off with where did your interest in nutrition come from? Where did this all start?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great question, Simon. I was saying we love getting to do interviews and conversations like this. This entire health and wellness and carnivore community is just so amazing and so supportive. And if you were following us when we were anonymous, means that you're a true OG. That period was 2022, which was the most fun that Harry and I'd
Speaker 3:ever
Speaker 2:had. Just telling a lot of these informative threads and doing investigative journalism on things that had happened throughout the course of just US history that have led to, unfortunately our population being so metabolically unhealthy. And I think the encouraging thing and the work that you're doing on your show is it's pretty simple changes that everyone can be making to be feeling metabolically incredible and just live this flourishing life. But for the listener, I'm Brett and Harry and I have been business partners for about three years. We're the co hosts of the Meat Mafia Podcast.
Speaker 2:And then we're also co founders of Noble, which is our beef based protein powder brand that we started two years ago. But we met about ten years ago playing college baseball. And I think that's really where my health journey kicks off. And why I say that is I always felt like because I was playing sports at a high level, the inputs of my nutrition were more so I can just eat whatever I want, calories in calories out. I train a lot, I drink pre workout powder.
Speaker 2:I'm on my feet all day long. I'm a high level athlete, therefore I must be healthy. And aesthetically I was fairly lean. So I looked healthy on the outside, but my insides and my GI system were telling a different story. And my senior year of college was when I got really sick with ulcerative colitis.
Speaker 2:And I think it was just Simon, a combination of stress, a lot of processed foods, a lot of binge drinking Friday to Saturday nights, every single weekend in college. I think I have a genetic predisposition to autoimmune issues as well. And it was kind of like the perfect cocktail of things that really resulted in me going to the bathroom 20 to 30 times a day, ton of blood on my stool, could not process any of the foods that I was eating and ended up getting rushed to the hospital. I had lost 30 pounds, got diagnosed with UC and was essentially just told that I was gonna have this diagnosis for the rest of my life. And I hit a poor stroke of the genetic lottery.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, I'm telling you, I'm doing all of these things in college that I believe contributed to me getting so sick. And so I hopped on, Prednisone, Lealda, these biologic drugs called Remicade. And the medication I was on was costing the medical system $400,000 a year. Yes. So fortunately I was on my parents' insurance plan.
Speaker 2:My dad had good corporate insurance. Otherwise I would have been I don't even know how I would have been able to afford any of that medication. I just would have been crippled by debt the rest of my life. And I just thought that was what my future was gonna be, getting blood infusions every eight weeks. And then 2019, everything changed because that's when this decentralization of information, around the carnivore diet started to get much more popular.
Speaker 2:And the more research I was doing, I was coming across other individuals that had all sorts of maladies and autoimmune diseases that were claiming that they were curing these things. And so that was really my light bulb of inspiration around, well, if these other people are following this approach and having great results, why can't I do that too? So that belief was a really important first step. And essentially for two years, I ate all animal products, a ton of red meat, a lot of fatty steak, ground beef, chicken thighs, cooking in beef tallow, butter, ghee. I drank black coffee, so that was not carnivore and I had some heavy cream in there too, but I really just gravitated towards these animal products and just cut out sugars, vegetables, processed foods.
Speaker 2:And within a short period of time, my stomach started feeling better and better. My skin started getting better. My clarity of thoughts started getting better. And like anything else, once you taste that intuition and how good the right foods make you feel, you don't wanna go back to what you were doing before. And so I ended up getting off of all the drugs and meds that I was taking in 2022.
Speaker 2:And I've been drug three for the past three years and really feel like I'm in the best shape of my life. I just got married a month ago. Congratulations. Thank you. This nutrition journey was a big catalyst for us starting our businesses, but that's really my story.
Speaker 2:It was more so out of necessity out of crisis and ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me. And you just think about the millions and millions of people around the world that have these incurable diseases. They're on cocktails of medications. They think that their future is essentially hopeless. And there's this other world that exists that comes on the back of just fueling yourself with the right inputs.
Speaker 2:And that was a big motivation for me starting things with Harry was just propagating the right information that no one's being told.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then, you know, my my nutritional journey is, you know, quite different than Brett's, but there's a lot of similar undertones. So when I was young, I I had, a lot of like ear, nose and throat problems. I ended up taking a ton of antibiotics when I was a kid just to solve a lot of problems I was having with ear infections. And then, kind of in the high school time period, realized that I'd done a lot of damage to my gut that resulted in pretty bad cystic acne.
Speaker 3:Get on Accutane to resolve that problem. So, know, similar to Brett, really on this like pharmaceutical merry-go-round and kind of just woke up to all of it as I started getting more and more intense with my training. You know, the Accutane is one of these medications that you have to get your blood drawn every month to make sure that your kidney and livers and all your vital organs are still, you know, showing healthy signs of their healthy enzyme levels and all that. So, it's pretty intense. And so, I was working out a lot and I could see how taking this medication was affecting me.
Speaker 3:And as I started paying more attention to just my physical well-being from a training perspective, I started tinkering a bit more with my diet and really realized that a lot of what had gone wrong with my skin. Yes, I think there was a big issue with kind of just like what had happened from the antibiotic use as a kid. But I also know for a fact that at school I was eating garbage. I was eating potato chips and nachos and sandwiches and basically just like a highly processed diet. And so when it came down to it, I kind of looking back, noticed this.
Speaker 3:I was like, man, there were so many nutritional influences that were, you know, for a lot of reasons, just like perpetuating these problems that I was having. And so as I got to college, I started taking nutrition more seriously. I went down the paleo rabbit hole. And then when I started, I worked at a corporate job for five years. And, you know, during that time period, kinda just got comfortable, not too intense around my workout, started eating worse and worse, started feeling less and less like an athlete.
Speaker 3:And then there was just a moment in time during COVID where I was like, alright. I'm gonna really, like, invest back into my health. I felt like I got some I bought some time back. Didn't have to go on my commute. We were in lockdown.
Speaker 3:So I started a keto diet, which quickly turned into a carnivore diet. And within, like, two months, I had dropped, you know, twenty, thirty pounds. And I was a bigger guy. I'm, like, two two forty. So I went went from, like, two forty to to two ten, two fifteen.
Speaker 3:I was feeling the best I ever had. And that was just right around the same time Brett and I were getting to reconnect after school. And there was just something about, you know, us reconnecting over nutrition where we really felt like we were tapping into a really similar shared interest. And he and I ended up moving down to Austin together for a race that we were running, and that race kind of propelled us into wanting to get more involved with writing and putting information out there about things that we cared about. And that was really about probably the time that you came across our stuff, Simon, when we were writing about, you know, what had gone wrong in the food system.
Speaker 3:And Brett and I really just shared this passion for telling these stories because we had both been so affected by it, you know, in our own ways, you know, the last decade plus of our lives. Love it. It's fantastic that you guys reconnected like that. I agree. I've got
Speaker 1:a few friends who I can talk about nutrition with, who I can talk about what's really happening, the corruption in the system. And when you do find that person who's on the same wavelength and they understand how powerful this information is, it's fantastic. And you feel like you just want to keep talking, you want to do something, you want to spread the information. So I can imagine when you two reconnected after that, it was like, yep, we've got to do something. Brett, you mentioned the decentralization of information.
Speaker 1:Now we are no longer getting all of that information from mainstream TV. It's not one person dictating to the masses. It's now all these independent researchers on Twitter, YouTube, all over the internet can share their findings and people can rebut them and people can challenge it. But often, this information just stays out there because it's true and no one can really argue it. What are some of the things you discovered and who are some of the people that you guys were reading and listening to back in those earlier days?
Speaker 2:It's a great question. Yeah, I would say that I think a lot of the brand of Mafia were really just kind of standing on the shoulders of the giants that have pioneered the space that did a lot of the hard research. I think that's kind of what you're hinting at, And we're very proud of that too. Harry and I would read books or come across articles or YouTube videos and really just try to make sure that we paid homage to the people that we were ultimately learning from. And then just trying to distill that information to other people.
Speaker 2:But I would say, to start, like I remember digging into Mark's Daily Apple, Mark Sison's blog, that was a big epiphany for me and like the first time really hearing this concept of metabolic flexibility and just seeing someone that was in his late sixties at the time, now he's 72, basically saying that every bite of food that you can eat is delicious and it also can be really healthy. And I just remember a lot of his early findings around like just the demonization of saturated fat and carbohydrates and things like that to just be incredibly compelling. And I think the best part about Mark is that he truly has proof of work. Just seeing someone that's 72, that's so lean, that's built this incredible business, has a great family, just checking all those boxes. That was someone that Harry and I both really learned from.
Speaker 2:I think Nina Teichel's work with The Big Fat Surprise, she'd really been writing about this stuff before anyone in regards to her understandings of the American Heart Association being paid off by Procter and Gamble in some of these large multinational food companies. She was incredibly compelling. Mark Schatzker's book, The Dorito Effect was a huge source of information for us too. He really spoke about just even like the chickens in the broiler chickens that we're eating at scale in The United States and above, young and fat we're killing those birds and how the birds that we're eating in 2025 were not the birds that we were eating in 1950. That's not the chicken that our grandparents and great grandparents were eating.
Speaker 2:And you get it, right? It was almost like the first thing Harry and I did was we played around with the foods that we were eating. You feel amazing. And like you were saying, Simon, you then wanna go deeper. There's just so many rabbit holes to go down.
Speaker 2:And then you start to like connect these dots historically where it's almost like there's five to 10 stories that can almost perfectly paint this picture around why Americans are so metabolically unhealthy. And then once you have those dots fully connected and you have this amazing line, you almost feel this responsibility to go out and share it with you because you do see so many people that are decaying. Even when I started this diet, I was 25 years old. You graduate university around like twenty, twenty one, twenty two in The United States. Even a few years later, when you go back for your reunions, you start to see the gap widening between the kids that are participating that nine to five happy hour culture, eating a lot of processed foods versus the person that it's really taking their health seriously.
Speaker 2:And I just remember thinking a lot about how the way that that gap is just gonna continue to widen over time. And I wanna be able to play catch with my grandkids and do maybe a triathlon with my grandson. I don't wanna be the grandfather that's just bedridden and unable to do anything. And I really do believe that a lot of that is possible through nutrition. So I know that's a little bit of a long winded answer, but short answer is that there were so many people that inspired Harry and I to do what we were doing.
Speaker 1:No, that's a perfect answer. Yeah. I've got to say it was similar for me. When I discovered the carnivore diet, I thought, Hey, this makes sense. I was already moving towards a more paleo diet and experimenting with keto.
Speaker 1:When I looked into it and started to read all these stories of people who recovered from ulcerative colitis like you, all sorts of mental health problems, joint pain. Essentially, the list just kept going on and on and on. Autoimmune, metabolic. I found it so incredible. And then similar to you guys, I was reading about I was reading about Owsley Stanley the bear.
Speaker 1:He was a carnivore back in the seventies and eighties, and he discovered all of these things. This is the proper way to eat. There are zero carb forums online that I was reading through and thinking, This is just incredible. The Petersons as well, Jordan and Mikaela. You hear these stories and you read about these people.
Speaker 1:Similar to you guys, I was like, I have to spread this information somehow. You know, I have to I have to try and get it out there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's pretty amazing too. Just, you know, looking back at the show the arc of our show, you know, we started it in March 2022, And we were really speaking to a lot of the people that had inspired us to start the show to begin with. So like, we were having conversations with people like Gary and Belinda Fedke, who had just incredible insight into like the front line, like the front lines of corruption and how, like, they were trying to promote a low carb diet to prevent people from getting amputations that were happening at the hospital that they were working at. And they were really unveiling a lot of that corruption and going to court and defending themselves for it.
Speaker 3:And so it was really inspiring to just kind of see firsthand how this decentralization of information, this kind of breaking of the standard norm of, like, how information is being disseminated and just being able to get, like you know, we had Mark Schatzker on the podcast. We had Nina Teichols on the podcast. Will Harris, like, all these people who have just made a huge impact in all their respective fields and collectively are speaking to a topic of, you know, beyond just eating meat, like how do we just eat real food again and get people healthy? And it was really inspiring for Brett and I when we were first getting started just because, you know, we were quickly realizing that with the show, we had access to a lot of the people who were pushing this information to the forefront. 100%.
Speaker 1:People in this space are so willing to help out, I've found. Sure, they're busy, eventually you can schedule a time and you're getting these leading doctors and influencers and thought leaders on your show sharing their wisdom. I've found that people are so welcoming.
Speaker 2:Definitely. Yeah, I feel like the internet really makes you realize how few degrees of separation there are from almost anyone you want to get connected to. And I remember the first day that I had shared my healing journey on X, I think Brian Lenzkis was the first doctor that saw it, he's an endocrinologist out in San Diego, and he's treating a lot of type two diabetic patients on a low carbohydrate approach to nutrition. He connected me to Sean Baker and then Sean and Harry and I had Sean on our podcast. I went on Sean's show as a guest and he's now a great friend and obviously like one of the biggest, if not the biggest advocates for this movement in general, but he connected us to other people.
Speaker 2:It's just been this incredible web that all just came from us really just having the courage and the conviction and really the blind faith to just say, Hey, we have a voice. We wanna just help people. We wanna just share our learnings. We don't wanna pretend to be anything we're not. I'm not the best person to talk about peer reviewed studies and all of the scientific research around eating meat versus plant based foods, but I have this great healing story and I can teach people about the basics and the blueprint of things that I did to heal myself.
Speaker 2:And that's extremely valuable for people. I think a lot of people that are waking up, especially someone that has ulcerative colitis, that's maybe 32 years old, they've been going to the same doctor for twelve years. They're on the same medication. They're not getting better. They eventually wake up and say, Oh, you know what?
Speaker 2:This crazy 30 year old on Reddit is saying I could eat all meat. He was on the same drugs as me and now he's not. I'm still on these drugs and I'm listening to the Western medical system. Maybe I should deviate my course and see if this guy knows of anything to say, because if the whole purpose of what we're trying to do is getting healed and this decentralized guy might have some of the secret sauce, why would I not experiment with that if I'm not getting better? I think that's a lot of what we've been seeing the last five years.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I think there has been a broad switch from trusting these studies that are generally funded by pharmaceutical companies, trusting certain levels of authority that are speaking from one person to millions, developing into a more do your own research and self experiment. If I've got ulcerative colitis and I know that I can easily find five people just like you, Brett, out there who've healed it with nutrition, I'm going to trust that and give that a go. Because it's real people giving me proper information. A lot of these studies, the meat based cohort are eating lasagna and pizza.
Speaker 1:You just can't trust it. What are you guys finding in your broader community, like family and friends? Are you finding that people are more interested in health? Are people eating more meat? Are people generally supportive of what you guys are doing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think when we first started, Brett and I definitely felt like we were going down this very unique path. And having been in this space for three years, talking about meat forward and animal based and carnivore diets for the last three years, I think it's become in that time period, it's become so much more popularized that a lot of people have really come around to it. Like I know my dad is now eating an animal based diet. Basically every time he's cooking a steak, he's taking a picture of it.
Speaker 3:And you know, I I think the the powerful thing is, you know, you can lead by example. And I think, you know, Brett and I have both, like, implemented, you know, a carnivore diet in the most extreme times. And, you know, now I kinda like I'm a little bit more, you know, open to just having different types of food as I've reintroduced more things back into the fold. But I still believe that, like, you know, 90% of our nutrition should be coming from 90% of our nutrition should be coming from those animal meat based sources and give a little bit of margin there for if you're healthy and resilient for other foods that you can incorporate in. But I think for the most part, it's just like trying to just show people how to model out a healthy lifestyle.
Speaker 3:For the most part, like people who were skeptical about what we were talking about three years ago have really come around to being open minded to it. I don't know if you agree with that, Brett, or not.
Speaker 2:I agree. I think the coolest win, Simon, as Harry mentioned, Harry and I know each other's families really well at this point because we're essentially brothers because we've worked together for three years. We were roommates for a couple years too. We've just been all in on this thing, which has been just the most enjoyable experience ever. But I've seen the changes that Harry's dad has made.
Speaker 2:And even my parents came to Hack Your Health, which is a biohacking conference in Austin, Texas. And Doctor. Chaffee has spoken at that a few times and done an amazing job, but my parents were so inspired that my dad started going low carb after that and lost some weight. Even just smaller changes with my mom where instead of using vegetable oil in the house, she's buying high quality olive oil or beef tallow or good quality butter, just like these little things in the right direction and not trying to push it on my parents, but almost like showing them the resources for them to take it in and draw their own conclusions. Those are the coolest wins is when you start to see your other family take hold of those things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I've got three sisters and two of them were vegetarians and the other one wasn't eating much meat anyway. And I'm telling them, Hey, have you heard about this carnivore diet? And I'm interviewing all these people and posting on Instagram, all that sort of thing. And they definitely thought I was crazy.
Speaker 1:They were like, Why are you so into this? Why would eating only meat be healthy? You're going to get scurvy. What about cholesterol? You're crazy.
Speaker 1:Is this diet just for young guys who are trying to get jacked? They didn't get it. But now, all three sisters are eating meat. Definitely no seed oils. They wouldn't put it down to me.
Speaker 1:It's more, I suppose, just maybe some of my influence, but more just a general societal shift. If we sort of laser in on seed oils, particularly in America, there's a lot of focus now with what RFK Jr. And the MAHA movement is doing, calling out seed oils as the industrial engine lubricant that it is. What's it like being in America with this shift seemingly happening?
Speaker 3:It's been really exciting, I think, especially being someone on the inside with the podcast and being able to interview. Like we interviewed Callie Means pretty early on. Interviewed Marty Makary. Yeah, we've had some conversations with these people who are now like on the front lines making policy decisions and impact. And so the excitement has been here for a while.
Speaker 3:I think there was definitely a turning point around the election time period where it's like, wow, like the stuff that was being talked about three years ago in the dark corners of Twitter around animal based carnivore diet or raw milk or no seed oils or pesticide usage and glyphosate, all these things that are important to this sub community that really does care about the overall health of themselves and people in general. A lot of these opinions are being popularized and at least being discussed at a higher level. So there's been a ton of excitement around it. Think that through our lens, we're probably a little bit biased since we love this stuff and really do believe it's the most important issue. It's where the rubber meets the road.
Speaker 3:Like if the data is correct and eighty eight percent of people are metabolically unhealthy in The US, then we have a serious problem on our hands that if we don't take action on, if we don't start reversing the course of that, it's going be a much bigger and more stressful impact than most people probably even realize. So, you know, I think that it's exciting thinking that change is starting to happen. Yeah, it's cool. Cool. Just being able to look and see people that you've sat across the table from and had conversations with, you know, be on the floor of Congress and other important rooms speaking about, you know, these big changes that are happening.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Talk to me about what's happening at Meat Mafia. I know you guys have a supplements company called Noble as well. What's happening? What's on the horizon?
Speaker 1:How does it all work?
Speaker 2:It's a great question, Simon. I think when we started the Meat Mafia, when we were writing, when we started our recording podcast episodes, there really wasn't a business plan. It was just this sense of we just felt like it was the first time in my life where I'm like, I feel like I have a really clear purpose of what I'm supposed to be doing. And it just feels so good to create something that's uniquely my own. And it sounds very similar to you too, Simon.
Speaker 2:It's it's like, hard to explain the stronghold that this movement takes on you when you just start to, it's almost like when you start eating the right foods, feel the way that God intended you to feel. And then you have this like creative energy and this confidence to wanna go out just do something special with your life. So, we're 400 episodes deep into the podcast now. And we interview a really wide array of guests. We love talking to regenerative ranchers.
Speaker 2:We love talking to doctors that alternative health. We love talking to founders that are doing things the right way. We like talking to people that are deep in their faith that we can learn from spiritually. It's almost drifted, not drifted, but transformed from just a pure nutrition podcast to a podcast around health, nutrition, faith, business, like this cocktail of things where if the modern male can embrace those things, it's a pretty darn good playbook for your life. Ennoble in a lot of ways is our physical product that we've created and wanna put out into the world because where I've been changing and Harry's been changing is just focusing, how do we get away from minutiae and just help people pull really big levers?
Speaker 2:Like something for me in the beginning was I was on a budget when I was 25 years old. I couldn't go to regenerative farmers and buy all these nose tail cuts of meat. I was buying the budget cuts from my local grocery store in New York City and I cooked those for two years and it worked unbelievably well. And I think our beef protein in a lot of ways is a bridge product for people to give you exposure to 21 grams of highly bioavailable protein from the beef protein isolate, which is the actual bone of the animal. We put collagen too.
Speaker 2:So the connective tissue of the cow, there's a little bit of organs in there. There's some colostrum in there, but we also sweeten it with Stevia and we have a chocolate flavor and a vanilla flavor. So, one of the things that helped me a lot was actually paying attention and trying to hit a gram of protein per pound of body weight. And I was noticing that when I wasn't tracking, I was a lot of times under eating the grams of protein. And that's where powders and good quality shakes for certain people can really help them hit those goals and feel really good.
Speaker 2:So a lot of times, I'll do two meals that are protein focused for lunch and dinner, and then I'll have a shake in the morning and then some Greek yogurt at night with some of our chocolate protein powder in there. So just giving people really unique ways. And we're obviously, we're not trying to replace steak or animal protein. We're just trying to give people unique ways to consume these things. Like my mom is like one of our target customers where I'd love for her to eat more animal protein and a shake is a great way to really get her on the path.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. I think the beef isolate is interesting. Don't know if anyone's doing that in Australia, so you guys need to bring the product out here. I know that most protein is made from whey, which is milk. They somehow separate the protein out of the milk and turn that into a powder.
Speaker 1:I know that causes gut distress for
Speaker 3:a lot of people. Doctor. Whey protein's been around for such a long time. I think it was originally invented in the late 1800s, early 1900s. So it's been around for a long time.
Speaker 3:And then the actual use case for it in terms of our idea of it in terms of modern supplementation has been more recent, but it's so pervasive in the world of supplementation because it is relatively easy and relatively cheap to get your hands on it. But I think that the trade off there is that it is from dairy and the cheese making process. And you are getting this highly concentrated form of whey protein, which typically a lot of people struggle just digesting that whey in that concentrated amount. And so our vision with the beef protein isolate is, you know, how can we bring this protein that's, you know, mostly from the bone of the animal, you know, in just this healthy, you know, a lot of people, like, don't really realize how healthy, how mineral dense and how rich the amino acid profile is of some of these cartilage and pieces of the animal that aren't being necessarily used. But, you know, it's 20% glycine.
Speaker 3:There's so many lists, long, long list of benefits of glycine and there's a bunch of different amino acids in there. And on top of that, I think the biggest benefit is that most of our customers talk about how great it is on their gut. And just from the perspective of, you know, most customers are either switching from a whey protein powder or, you know, another, you know, like a vegan protein powder potentially, you know, it's like night and day compared to that. Obviously, you know, there's better forms of protein in real food form. If you're on the run, if you're somebody who likes to have their protein shake after they work out, you know, there's definitely a huge market of people that we think we're trying to touch and capture and bring into this movement of this real food, high protein, animal centric diet.
Speaker 3:So it's been exciting seeing how the product has been able to influence a lot of people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's great. That is the movement. It's real food and animal centric. And my podcast and everything I do with Doctor. Chaffey, it's all about the carnivore diet.
Speaker 1:We're very firm on being 100% strict carnivore. That's exactly what we recommend to our audience if they want to be optimal and for people who have major health conditions. But not everybody is going go to that extreme and certainly not initially. In this whole ecosystem of people who are interested in health, you've got Mark Sisson, who you guys mentioned before, I think he's got a message that's really accessible to millions of people. And he's proved that.
Speaker 1:In a way, it's not too extreme. He embraces a natural life. He's out in the sun. He eats a meat based diet. He avoids things like seed oils.
Speaker 1:If we can get most people doing that, and then the people that really want to optimize or really want to train for something or really want to recover from autoimmune metabolic cancer, all sorts of stuff on the pointy end of carnivore. I think we're all on the same journey. And I like that you use carnivore as a tool, you acknowledge it, but you're also more broadly catering to an audience who just want to be healthy.
Speaker 2:I on. I think that's spot on, Simon. Harry and I have just had It's been life changing for both of us just experimenting with different diets, carnivore in particular. And I think to your point, it's really important to assess like where do I wanna go? What season of life am I in right now?
Speaker 2:Am I married? Do I have kids? Am I training for something? Do I have autoimmune issues that I'm looking to heal? I think all like that season of life really factors into how you wanna stack the deck nutritionally.
Speaker 2:And I just, I love the constant experimentation and just taking intuition. For my wedding, I wanted to shed a little bit of weight and I tried a bodybuilding approach where I actually ate lower fat meats and tracked my carbohydrates. I had a caloric restriction where I was eating 1,900 calories a day. And it was really cool to try something that I'd never done before. And I lost a bunch of weight.
Speaker 2:I felt good aesthetically, but I didn't really feel like I had that same pop mentally to do my job. And that was great to be able to take a mental checklist of that. And I think that's the goal that we have for a lot of people is like, don't just take what we're saying at face value, actually experiment with it and keep a food journal and understand like how these different foods and the way that you eat and the time that you eat, how that specifically affects you and find that unique combination that's gonna make you feel as good as you deserve to feel.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Are you guys training for anything now?
Speaker 3:Personally, I'm not training for anything specific right now, but I really do wanna get something on the counter. I've been dealing with a little of a calf injury the last few months, but I'm just getting back into running. So I could see myself trying to sign sign up for something here at the end of the year. I'm interested in the high rock space. I think that, like, that hour long competition where it's very intense is really attractive to me because Brett and I have both kind of done the more extreme endurance stuff.
Speaker 3:And it's I think it's great, like, mentally, and it really does help, you know, help you find your limits and push your limits. But that being said, just like time constraints with podcasts and business and stuff like that, I'm, like, seeking a little bit more of a high intensity lifestyle, like short shorter workouts, higher intensity. And I feel like Hireox could scratch that itch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love it. Mate, the the calf injuries in your early thirties are an absolute killer. Achilles as well. I've got tendonitis in both Achilles.
Speaker 1:I don't know what it is. It's from not training and then suddenly getting back into your old ways too quickly or something, and your body's
Speaker 3:not ready. It's not good. Well, I realized that a lot of mine stems from foot issues. So I grew up playing sports. My feet were crammed in cleats, ski boots, etcetera.
Speaker 3:And I look at the difference between my left and right foot, and there's a pretty extreme difference between the just the overall composite composition of the bones and the just the structure of the foot. Mhmm. And so what I what I realized in trying to, like, reconcile that and fix some of that, you know, using toe spreaders, using wide toed box shoes, etcetera, is it is kind of a painful process to unwind some of it. And I've, you know, tried to just, like, unwind it on my own. But Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's it's led to some issues.
Speaker 1:Also, I think switching to zero drop shoes. Like, I I think that's when a lot of, like, my Achilles stuff started to happen. Because it's the same as you. Looked at my feet and your toes are coming in like that, and you're like, more spread. And then you go through that whole process of trying to rewild your feet.
Speaker 1:Which, again, That whole concept goes hand in hand with the proper nutrition, with the getting outside, with living a more natural life. Barefoot shoes are so popular now. Oh yeah, they're everywhere. What about you, Brett? Are training for anything?
Speaker 2:No, just training for just being a married man right now. That's pretty much it. Just I've been doing I've been my wife and I, we have been dating long distance for about two years. I've been in Austin, Texas for the last three years. She's lived in New Jersey and New York City, which is where I'm from originally.
Speaker 2:So we got married a month ago. She just moved out to Austin. So just enjoying this season of life as a married couple. And it was great snapping back into shape for the wedding. And now I've just been on a great regimen.
Speaker 2:I really just do like a lot of bodybuilding style training. I love machines and dumbbells and things like that and just walking 10,000 steps a day and getting sunlight, but just doing that first thing in the morning. I do feel like to Harry's point, there's a lot of benefit of putting like a big big race on the calendar once a year. That's like your focal point that keeps you sharp, but I don't have anything right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nice. And do you guys do events? Has there ever been, like, a MeetMafia meetup, or or do you go and feature at other events? What what does your schedule look like?
Speaker 3:We have we've done some events. We haven't done anything recently. So we've pretty consistently cohosted this event in Austin called HPLT, which is a high performance lifestyle training by hosted by our friend Brian Mazza. So it's a mixture of, like, speakers and athletic events, workouts, recovery stuff, and it's just an awesome event. So we've cohosted that the last two years in Austin.
Speaker 3:And then we've been pretty heavily involved in what used to be called KetoCon, but now it's called Hack Your Health. So we've gone to that for the last three years, and that's that's a great event. Mhmm. And then, yeah, we've been doing some, like, light speaking stuff. And early on, we we would go to so many cool little small meetup events.
Speaker 3:We hosted an alt health summit in Nashville, which was very fun over at the Bitcoin Park there. So trying to do more of that because that's like for Brett and I, just being around people and being in person is truly where the magic happens. We love that. So we definitely want to do more of it in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You get a lot of inspiration when you go to events like that and you meet all these people in person who've had amazing health journeys and maybe they've listened to your podcast. I find that when I go to events. It sort of pumps you back up and you're like, okay, I to keep going with this. Totally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like that burst of inspiration. And if you could just kind of like grab onto it and channel it into the next thing, it's so powerful. And it's a really good reminder what you're doing, where especially if you have a show that has listeners and you're DMing and engaging with people, it means so much. But then when you're actually shaking hands and having those in person interactions, it makes you realize this stuff is very, very real and we need to just keep doing what we're doing.
Speaker 2:I love that you just said that. Yeah,
Speaker 1:100. Then you see the same people at events and you start to really connect with the audience.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 1:that's a good way to go. Right, Harry and Brett, Meet Mafia guys. Thank you so much for jumping on. It's been really nice to meet you and I'm sure our paths will cross in person probably sometime soon.
Speaker 3:Make it happen. Appreciate it, We'd love
Speaker 2:to have you in Austin. You need a lot of good red meat here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I need I need to come to Austin. It looks awesome. I mean, a lot of lot of like minded people. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Thank you, man. Totally. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Thanks.
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