Ted Talk 87: Should I Get the COVID-19 Vaccine?

Ted Ryce: So, I’ve been asked many times because I’m in the health and fitness field, “Hey, Ted, are you going to get vaccinated? What are your thoughts on vaccination?” And today, I’m going to answer that question, because I used to an anti-vaxxer. So if you’re looking now and you don’t understand where people are coming from, where the anti-vaxxers are coming from, I used to be one of those people.

Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about my anti-vaxxer past, how I think differently, what those experiences were that changed my perspective. And I’m going to share in the hopes that you can think a bit more critically about this situation because I know many people are not on the extremes, they’re in the middle and they’re like, “Well, I don’t want a vaccine injury or a weird reaction to a vaccine.”

And I also want to say this: I am not an expert, I’m not a virologist, I’m not an expert in vaccinations, I’m not a medical doctor, I don’t have qualifications to talk to you about these things at a deep level. But what I will tell you is this, what I will share with you is this, I can share with you my story, I can share with you what I’m going to do, I can share with you the conversations I’ve had with people who I trust, who are experts in this type of thing.

And again, in hopes that it can help you think more critically about this situation so that you can make better decisions about your health, about the health of your family. And I just want to kick it off like this. For some of you, you just started listening to the podcast, and what we do here is we break down science-based information on losing fat, longevity and living a legendary life.

And on Real Talk Fridays, we just have a conversation, and that’s what today is, Real Talk Friday. And so many people have given me some great feedback on the Real Talk Fridays that it’s become a thing that I’ve decided to keep up.

So let’s jump into it. If you don’t know how I got into health and fitness, I had a tragedy when I was 19, my brother was kidnapped and murdered, and I was lost in life, I dropped out of school, dropped out of college, lost in life, didn’t know what to do with myself, found myself in the health and fitness business a couple years later working as a personal trainer in Miami Beach.

When I was 22 years old, that’s when I started. I’m 44 now, so I’ve been in the business over 22 years, almost 23 years. And when I got into the business, I lacked some serious education, okay? I was a college dropout, although I did well in the courses I did take, but after my brother was murdered, I could not concentrate, I had PTSD but didn’t know it, and I just couldn’t concentrate, I dropped out, I did not get the help I needed.

But fortunately, I was able to have enough people in my life, have enough education, have enough other things going for me that I was able to pull myself together and ended up getting this fantastic opportunity, after bouncing around and working odd jobs, I ended up as a personal trainer at the Eden Rock Resort and Spa in Miami Beach when I was 22 years old. And let me tell you, it was such an amazing—it was like night and day. I was making $30 an hour to train people. I was making, I don’t know, $15, $13 to work on the floor. I don’t think it was $15, I think it was $12 maybe, to work hourly on the floor to put weights away.

And I had no degree, I had no education, I had no experience—well, I had some experience, but I tutored math before, I worked in an orchid nursery before so I would come to work in the morning to open the gym at 6am, I think it was 6am, and I was not a morning person, I did not sleep well. I smoked too much marijuana, so it was hard to get up early. But I got there and turn on the music, and in the Eden Rock Resort and Spa was such a beautiful place overlooking the ocean.

And I was so happy to be there every single morning when I first started. And it was just incredible how my life went from what it was before, bouncing around from odd job to odd job, working in one of the worst neighborhoods, one of the most violent neighborhoods in Miami called Overtown.

If you’ve seen the…well, it’s a Crackle, which I have no idea what that is, never watched Crackle before but it’s some streaming service. But recently Netflix bought a show from Crackle called Startup on Netflix. If you watch that, in the first season, they talk about Overtown. That’s where I used to work for a whole year. It was…A story for another time.

In fact, I should definitely share that story with you. But what I want to share with you here is when I got into the fitness business, I wasn’t that scientifically literate, I didn’t have a good foundation in the sciences to evaluate health information. And as a result, I got caught up in the cult of the personalities of some of the people who were in the health and fitness business.

Now, some of them were great. And I learned something from everyone. In fact, Charles Poliquin, who was on the Tim Ferriss show many years ago, he’s now since passed away. Who is another one? Ian King, an Australian strength coach. Charles Staley, someone who’s been on the show a lot of times, several times, who’s been on this show, actually. And there was one other one Paul Chek.

Now Paul has made a recent resurgence and has been on more like alternative health shows and biohacking shows. He’s been on Ben Greenfield. Ben Greenfield was really into— I don’t know where he is with him now, but he was on Ben Greenfield Show. So look, over 20 years ago, around 20 years ago, actually, I was hanging out with Paul, I was a big Paul Chek fan. And following with that crowd, Paul Chek was in many ways ahead of the curve.

He was doing Paleo before Paleo. He was the one who broke down movement patterns into a squat lunge, hinge, vertical push, vertical pull, horizontal push, horizontal pull. You know, he was the one who really broke things down and had a big impact on the fitness industry, also brought a physical therapy perspective to the fitness industry, and really loved learning from him.

But then he started to change. I don’t know about Paul’s past. I know he was in the military. I know he was from California. I know he did yoga with Yogananda. I believe Yogananda was the Indian guru who brought yoga to the United States, or something like that. But Paul started getting more conspiratorial in what he was teaching. And he started shifting away from exercise, from learning about functional anatomy of the spine to more like, “Hey, Big Pharma is after you and Big Food is with them, and there’s executives on Big Pharma and Big Food and they’re all conspiring together to make you sick and unhealthy and make your life terrible. “

And I really bought into that idea when he started telling it. My parents were conservative, they were Republicans, more in the sense of financially speaking, they were very sort of liberal, they weren’t racist. They didn’t care if you had, you know, if you were gay, or anything like that, but they really believed in the republican ideals of like, where money should go, it was really all about money for them.

And socially, they just didn’t care. They just didn’t care that much, right? It wasn’t like they had strong feelings about things. They just didn’t care. It was all about money for them. They worked their ass off and drink a lot alcohol. And they weren’t bad people, although they weren’t great people, but they were terrible parents. And for me, they represented the establishment, right? Go to school, get good grades, get a job, make money, buy a house, go to dinner, drink a lot of alcohol, mistreat your children, keep the cycle going.

And because of that upbringing, I had this rebellious streak in me. And when Paul brought up this idea of how these organizations, these big businesses and organizations were all kind of conspiring together to make people sick, it really felt right to me. And during this time, I mean, I was organic before Whole Foods took over Wild Oats. I used to buy my organic fruit from Wild Oats. That’s how long I’ve been eating organic.

Now. I’m much more relaxed about it, by the way, but that’s how long I was eating organic 20 years ago, before it was popular, was paleo before paleo was even a term. And I credit that to Paul Chek as well. He started bringing up these ideas from the Weston Price group and other places. That, “Hey, there’s something to this idea of how things have changed over time, how in Paleolithic times, we ate a certain way, we ate certain foods, we had certain habits and behaviors and lifestyles.

And now the modern world has really taken that and twisted it. I have a more balanced view on it now. I don’t think it’s twisted much at all. I think it’s given us a lot of comfort. And I think there’s a downside to that. But it really had this like, oh, that vibe, like, “Oh, people are out to get you. There are these groups that are out to get you, Big Pharma is out to get you. They’re not here to help you. They’re here to hurt you. They want to keep you sick. They want to keep you this and that.”

And I’m not saying that there’s no truth to that, by the way. It’s not the truth, it is not the only truth. And same with Big Food, right? "Oh, they’re not trying to sell you kale and spinach, they want to sell you processed white flour and sugar and package it in hyper palatable, cheap products that are going to destroy your health so that you get fat and unhealthy and diabetic and then you’ve got to buy your medicines from Big Pharma. It’s a big conspiracy, I tell you.”

And the thing is this: I have a much more balanced perspective now. And what happened, right? How did I go from this not great, not the best educated, let’s just say, not the most scientifically literate personal trainer to where I am now, reading studies and interpreting studies also asked, you know, to the best of my ability, by the way. I’m not the best interpreter of studies. It’s not what I do, I coach.

But I speak to a lot of people who are amazing at interpreting studies and interpreting the quality of studies and interpreting the data from studies and the strength of the data from studies, the confidence intervals and those types of things. And here’s what happened, right? I started realizing that the foundation for my beliefs that the world was out to get me and that these organizations were out to get me were because of the trauma that I had in my life, the anger that I had, more specifically, not even the trauma, but the neglect, the anger that I suffered from my parents.

And what I’m telling you right now is a lot of people, when they’re very impassioned, it’s not people—and we’re not talking here about the people who say, “Listen, I’m concerned about the vaccine. I mean, I know a lot of people say it’s safe, but then there seems to be a lot of like, an unusual amount of injuries or reactions to the vaccine, and it did come out quite quickly and scared about that. And I don’t want anything to happen to my health. And I want to make the best decision for myself.” That’s completely reasonable and rational.

But right now, what we have, there’s the extremes. We have the people who are just like, “Get vaccinated, if you’re not vaccinated, you are a criminal, and you should be thrown in prison or locked in your home, you need to get vaccinated, and you need all the vaccines all at once.” They’re not saying that, but that’s kind of the vibe. They’re just pro-vaccination, you could say, right?

And then on the other side, you’ve got the anti-vaxxers. And it’s just everything’s a conspiracy. And you say, “Well, look at the data. I mean, there are some injuries from vaccines, there’s some reactions from vaccines, there’s some deaths from vaccines, there always has been apparently, but it’s pretty safe if we’re looking at the numbers here.” And they’re like, “Yeah, but who paid for that research?” It’s like, “Yeah, but who do you want to pay for that research? Are you going to pay for that research? It’s the best that we’ve got.”

And just because a company pays for their research, it doesn’t mean the research is bad. Now it can be, it should be, it’s like a little bit of a red flag, like, did these people do this research and fudge the numbers? But there’s been plenty of studies that have been paid for by the group and it didn’t turn out for them.

And again, I’m not naïve, okay? And just to be clear about this, I don’t trust big businesses, and nor do I trust big governments to always do what’s right or to act on the best evidence, but I just don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I think people are messed up emotionally all over the world in all socio-economic levels. There are people who are making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they’re messed up. Just because they’ve got money doesn’t mean they’re emotionally healthy people.

Same thing with being poor. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, you’re trust because you’re broke.” Not really. It just means you don’t have money, okay? But doesn’t mean they’re trustworthy. It’s like we’re in this, what many have called the post-truth era, everybody wants to tell you their opinion. I guess I’m guilty of that right now, but I’m not trying to convince you of anything right now. I’m just trying to share a story, and I want you to think for yourself, and I want you to be clear-headed, clear-minded when making decisions for yourself and your family.

And I suppose I should just say this now. So, look, here’s my thing. I want to travel, and to travel to Europe, I’m going to have to get vaccinated. I don’t want to get the Coronavirus vaccine. I’ve had it once. My immunity is still high, I had a test recently looking at the antibodies, and I don’t really want to get it. And I’m concerned that I might have a reaction, even though I’ve never had a reaction from a vaccine, but I’m going to get it.

I’m going to get it because of two reasons. One, I want that vaccine sort of passport or whatever, right? The proof that I’ve got a vaccine so I can go where I want. Now, here’s the thing, we’re living in a world where you can probably forge that somehow, you could probably lie somehow and get that done, right, make that happen. But the other thing is, I really don’t want to get COVID again, or if I do get it, I want the symptoms to be less severe. I don’t want to have any problems.

And yes, you might be saying, “Well, people who are healthy like you in your age group aren’t having problems.” That’s true, right? If we look at the best data that we have, it’s the age group that is over 65, I believe… I haven’t looked at the coronavirus numbers in while, the death numbers, but here’s the thing, this virus is mutating. Now there are variants, and there are stories here— in Brazil, I haven’t seen numbers yet, because I’ve been trying to stay away from that. Trying to stay away from the numbers, which, you know, lessens the stress and anxiety in my life, which, can stress and anxiety, it can make you more susceptible to getting sick as well.

But the stories are, people are coming in and they’re getting sicker, and they’re younger, and some people are even dying, and the numbers are changing. Now, I haven’t seen solid data on that yet. And I guess the data is we, you know, we’re in a situation with this pandemic, where we’re not going to know everything until after it’s all over. We’re not going to know if we…I think probably we overreacted. No, I shouldn’t even say that, I really don’t know.

And I don’t think anybody’s really going to know, until we look back, after it’s all over, it really have some clear heads who analyze the data and say, did we react properly? And what can we do better next time? Because, folks, this isn’t the first pandemic. It’s our first pandemic, our first worldwide pandemic, where like, the global economy comes to a screeching halt. Oh my gosh!

It’s so funny. People say, “Oh, it’s the people are trying to control…” It’s like, no, everyone’s losing money. You think Marriott isn’t a key player in global economy? I don’t know, super wealthy companies have been taking a huge beating because of this thing. So, you know, it’s so crazy.

And I hope this is kind of helping a bit. I think maybe it’s a bit more entertaining, but I hope it’s helping you to think a bit more clear, to think about the situation that we’re going in and think about some of the people. Man, I’ve had to stop talking to some of my friends because they’re so crazy with the Coronavirus thing, and it’s more on the anti-vaxxer side.

So, let me share this with you. So why did I change? Why did I go from being this conspiratorially-minded person to someone who is more, you know, I’m not a pro-vaccine, “Everybody should get vaccines. Everyone should get all the vaccines all at once.” You know, I’m not that person. But I’m just like, it’s not that big of a deal, folks. And our experts really are kind of experts, okay?

And here’s what happened. I ended up going back to school at the end of my 20s because I wanted to be a medical doctor. And thank God, I had to drop out again because my stepmom died from a heart attack and I dropped out to take care of my dad. Thank God that happened. Not that she died, although there’s a part of me that’s really happy she’s not in my life anymore. Story for another time, folks, story for another time.

But she was terrible, she was such a terrible…she was a very damaged person, and hurt people, end up hurting other people. And she caused me a lot of pain in my life. So I’m really glad she’s not in my life anymore. She didn’t have to die, but I’m just glad she’s not around. But during that time, I ended up dropping out and taking care of my dad. But before that, I started going back to school. And I went back to school, not as a kid out of high school, but as a man in his late 20s and early 30s, who had run his own business, who had serious plans for the future.

And as I started to learn more about science, as I took chemistry, as I took… there’s no indoctrination by the way in, or not…There was indoctrination but with math, right? And with quantum physics, not with… and I say quantum physics, I don’t mean like, “Quantum physics, open your mind.” And I don’t mean like that. But how molecules either attract or repel each other based on their charge and how proteins fold based on their amino acid chains, all these things in science that I started learning. I got indoctrinated in that way.

But what I meant was, it’s not like with some of the liberal arts, where they’re promoting things like critical race theory or something where it’s just like, “Hmm, some of that sounds right, but some of it? Hmm. Yeah, I don’t know about that.” Quantum physics hasn’t been proven wrong in like, 100 years of being around, although, there’s still questions left.

And it’s a much less… I mean, some of it is super, super esoteric, I guess. But it really explains how soap removes grease from your pan. That’s what quantum physics really kind of helps us with, right? And how a certain… Anyway, why fat is not water soluble. At a practical level, it really helps with that stuff. And learning those basics about science really helped me understand science better. And then I started reading more studies, I started getting into reading studies. Before, I was reading books. And I don’t read books anymore.

So often people will say, “Oh, you’ve got to read this book.” Like someone was telling me recently, “You’ve got to read the book by David...” I can’t even remember his last name, David Sinclair, “you’ve got to read it. It’s called Lifespan.” It’s like I don’t read books anymore, folks. I don’t read books on health and nutrition. That’s for lay people. That’s for people who aren’t in this business. I read research, because I’m not interested about David Sinclair’s interpretation of the research. Or if I am, I’ll have him on the show, and I’ll talk to him about it because there’s some serious questions that I have.

And it’s hard, with all books, there’s a bit of hype to them, there’s a bit of entertainment. And I’m more interested in the cold, hard facts. That’s what I’m interested in these days. Why? Because that’s what’s helped me get the results for myself and for my clients, the cold, hard facts. And as close to the truth as we can come, the better the results that we’re going to get. And that’s what research does.

That’s what science really actually is, you test something, and then you start figuring out. Science doesn’t prove things right, it proves confidence for things, right? Proves confidence for things. So, proves something is very wrong, but it never proves anything quite right. It’s constantly trying to ask questions, trying to challenge ideas and trying to prove ourselves wrong, so that we get more confident about something and it’s we like, for example, we’re really confident about gravity, right?

For example, we’re really confident about calories in and calories out. Otherwise, you know, the second law of thermodynamics, actually, that’s the first law sorry, First Law of Thermodynamics, “Energy can’t be created or destroyed, merely transferred.” So we’re really confident about those things. But some things, we’re less confident about, like for a lot of the supplements out there.

I used to be super confident in the supplements. Why? Because I would read marketing. And we’re at a time right now as—I’m a health and fitness consumer too, just like you are trying to figure things out and figure out what should I spend my time on. And it’s super hard now to distinguish marketing from the actual science.

Some dude with his shirt off and a rip body using really big words, that’s not science, that’s marketing. What science is, is testing a hypothesis and proving it, you know, and then showing confidence for it, right? Using a statistical analysis. And then you take that one study, then you do another study and another study and then compile those studies. And then you look at the results of a bunch of studies called a meta-analysis or a systematic review. And that gives you even more confidence about something.

And so, it’s like court, right? Except better, because in court, as you attorneys know, you can fudge some things, but in science, certainly people can misinterpret things, people can intentionally misrepresent the results. There’s a lot of people out there. Rhonda Patrick is someone who I used to like a lot, but now I’m really not confident in what she shares anymore.

She’s not a person I would go to, and not trying to throw her under the bus or anything, but just giving an example of a person who has qualifications, who does puts sciency sounding stuff out. But she kind of overhyped the sauna and fasting and carbohydrate restriction. And we’re just not confident enough yet. There’s not enough research to show things yet.

And we have research to take away opinions, and so many folks, they have opinions. And yeah, we all have one, right? There’s a saying about that, we all have opinions, right? Just like other parts of our body, we all share opinions, and they kind of all stink, right. Opinion is kind of the lowest form of – there’s just no accountability with it. A lot of it’s based on how we feel about something.

And here’s the problem with that, folks, there’s something called The Placebo Effect. And I know you’ve heard that many times over, but just to talk about it briefly. The power of belief is so strong, that drug companies when testing medications, they have to do randomized, placebo-controlled studies. In other words, they have to randomize things. So, in other words, you have one group who’s taking the medication and another group who’s not taking the medication. And the groups are randomized, and there’s a placebo involved.

So, what does that mean? That means one group is getting the drug, one group isn’t. Who’s administering the drug? The scientists. But double-blinded placebo-controlled studies means, the people in the group, they don’t know if they’re getting the medication or not. And the researcher who’s dispensing the medication, that’s double-blinding, doesn’t know if they’re giving the medication or not either.

Why do we have to do this? Because the power of belief shows that the Placebo Effect is quite strong and even outperforms drugs or makes drugs irrelevant. If a drug isn’t proven to work as statistically significantly more than the placebo, it’s not something that goes through, right, it’s no better than the placebo. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that, some drugs maybe get approved. I’m not sure about the approval process. But you can look this up, how did a drug performed compared to the placebo? And if you’re in supplement, if you take supplements, how did it perform compared to the placebo.

This is where we’ve got to get to, folks. Because there’s a lot of people out there who will take a supplement. And you may have done this, as have I, “Oh, I took a supplement, it worked for me, I started sleeping better, I lost fat.” And what really happened is, you took the supplement, you took something that you felt was better for you, you were doing something good for your health. And as a result, you started walking more, but you didn’t even pay attention to it, you started eating better, but you didn’t even notice, but just because you felt better because you were taking this supplement. Does that make sense? It happens all the time.

And actually, one of the biggest opportunities, by the way, is to look into how do we take advantage of the placebo effect? How do we start using it? How do we start harnessing the power of our mind so maybe we take less pharmaceuticals? How do we do that? Because the power of the mind, ooh, super powerful.

And I don’t mean like in a kind of like pseudo spiritual, like, “Oh, I’ll go back in time using the power of my mind,” or “I’ll lose fat right now to have a six pack abs,” or “I haven’t deadlifted in ever, but I’m about to break the world record in deadlifting because I’m using the power of my mind.” No, I don’t mean like that. But it can affect our health. And to what extent and how do we take advantage of it? That’s part of the big question I have moving forward with health.

I want to change gears a little bit here. We’ve been talking for a little bit now, but I want to want to change gears. One other thing that we’re all kind of struggling with is the dominant model in medicine, is the biomedical model. So, in other words, you go to the doctor, what do they ask you? Okay, what are your symptoms? What is your family history? Okay, so you have heart pain? What are your symptoms? When does a heart pain come on? Let’s do an EKG, let’s do some imaging, let’s do a calcium score, let’s take some blood tests. And then let’s do a stress test. Let’s do an echo stress test, and we’ll figure out what’s exactly going on with your heart.

That’s a biomedical model, and it’s great. It’s helpful. But what we’re starting to realize is that one thing they don’t ask, things that your doctor doesn’t ask—and we can tie this into vaccines, the conversation about vaccines versus health later—is they don’t ask, “Hey, listen, you know, did you have childhood trauma or trauma in your past? On a scale of one to 10, how is your stress level? What is your socio-economic status?”

Because people who are poor are under more stress than people who are not, period. How’s your relationship with your partner? They don’t ask you those things. And we know they matter, big time. The stress and disease connection, oh, that’s going to be a thing. It’s going to be... Watch. It’s part of the future of medicine, okay? Addressing the emotional side of things, the psychological side of things, it’s not going to be about putting on your blue blocker.

You know, so many of my clients that have struggled with sleep, it’s like, “Well, wear your blue blockers before you go to bed, two hours before you go to bed, or even when the sun goes down, dim your lights at night, make your room cold, make your bed comfortable, make sure you have a good pillow, keep it quiet or use earplugs.” People do all that, including myself, and you still sleep poorly, and it’s because of emotional reasons.

And when I started doing therapy and doing breathwork, and all the other things that I started doing, I started releasing those negative emotions and started becoming emotionally more healthy. And that’s what led to an improvement in sleep. And now I don’t use blue blocking glasses so much anymore. I should experiment with them again to see if it even makes a difference, but it was the emotional stuff.

And so, for many of us who are doing all the right things, it’s the emotional stuff that we’re not facing, but doctors don’t talk about it. I’m one of the few people who are probably talking about it with you. If you listen to the Biohacker Podcast, a lot of them talk about use some neurofeedback, shine some infrared light on your genitals. They talk to you about these things—not that many people I feel are talking about, hey, we need to address the emotional here. Because the biomedical model is not complete. It’s great, but it’s not complete.

For example, I don’t want you talking to me about the stress in my life when I have a bacterial infection on my arm that I got from  the gym or something. I’ve got a MRSA infection, I want you to treat it with antibiotics. We can talk about my emotional health later, but give me some damn antibiotics. If my arm’s broken, don’t ask me about childhood trauma, not immediately, at least, right? Maybe if it’s like, “Well, why are you jumping off…? Why are you doing all these crazy stunts?” Maybe that goes back to my childhood, right?

But I want you to set my arm and put it in a cast. So that’s where we are, and to bring that around with vaccines. We didn’t hear a lot of people, a lot of experts talking about, “Hey, listen, vitamin D levels, there seems to be a thing here. There’s a connection here with the frequency and severity of upper respiratory infections.” What’s your vitamin D levels, folks? What about how much body fat you have? There seems to be an issue there too. How much exercise do you do a week? It seems to be a connection here, too.

What did we hear? The biomedical model. We heard, you know, wash your hands, social distance, wear a mask and get vaccinated. It’s not bad advice, folks. But it’s incomplete. Because we all know there’s more to it than that. But it seemed like we didn’t want to have—that conversation wasn’t in the mainstream narrative. So, it wasn’t in the mainstream narrative.

Now people are talking about it more, and the reason it comes back to that biomedical model, that’s the first place that they start. That’s where doctors are taught. That’s the perspective, the model of the world that drives medicine. And for the most part, let me tell you, it works. And it’s created... It’s saved so many lives, but it’s incomplete. And certainly, some issues with it.

So, after this conversation, I want to wrap things up, because I feel like I’m talking about a lot of different things here. And I want you walking away from this with something. What did you learn from today’s conversation about this? What is the big takeaway? How are you going to think more critically about information that’s presented to you?

Even from me, and from the people who I have on this podcast, I want you to be critical, I want you to be skeptical. But I don’t want you to be super skeptical, which is just – there’s a thin line between delusional and skeptical, right? It’s a good thing to be skeptical, like, “Oh, maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. What is the evidence for it? How can we evaluate? What is the strength? Okay, there’s the evidence for this statement or this belief? What is the strength of the evidence? How can you ask better questions to evaluate the information that’s being shared with you, about your health? About everything, really? But how can you ask better questions that lead to better answers, that lead to better results? Because that’s what this conversation is about, folks.

Far too many people are lost in their emotional attachment to beliefs; beliefs that are formed from a tough childhood, or a bad experience with doctors, you know what I mean? Bad experience in childhood, a bad experience with doctors. And certainly, look, I’ve had many bad experiences. And just because someone’s a doctor doesn’t make them infallible, or that they’re correct.

In fact, there’s so many doctors in the nutrition, health and fitness space that are wrong, because they promote, say, the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity. And we just know, that’s just not a thing. It’s been tested. How much more testing do you want to show that it’s not a thing? How many more times does it have to be disproven before you’re convinced? So being an expert, being a doctor, having those qualifications doesn’t mean someone’s right, either.

And it’s kind of a tough place to be for us. Wouldn’t it be nice to just be able to trust experts because they have qualifications? I mean, we’re in a weird world right now, where someone like me, I did not graduate college. So not only did I not go to medical school, but I did not graduate college, but a lot of what I share is not from my own personal experience. It’s from research studies.

And the best evidence is the best evidence regardless of who’s telling it to you, versus a doctor who’s sharing something that’s wrong, say, “Carbs make you fat, bro.” That’s what the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity is. It’s like, really? How come people doing the potato hack lose weight? How come the people doing the Masters Cleanse, basically drinking sugary lemonade, lose a ton of weight? It doesn’t make any sense what you’re saying. Insulin seems to play a role, but it’s not the role that you’re saying it plays, okay. And why are we even talking about this? It’s just the confidence is extremely low for it, versus total calories in, which the confidence is extremely high.

So again, how can you ask better questions that lead you to better answers and to better results for your health? Not just for your physical health, folks, but for your mental health. Because trying to figure out who to believe, that’s stressful. And we just got done talking about the biopsychosocial approach, although I didn’t name it, how the biomedical approach is great, but the bio psychosocial approach, really understanding how our psychology and our environments, our social environments lead to, or participate in whether we’re healthier or whether we get sick.

So these are the things that I’m thinking about right now. And that’s how my perspective has changed over time. And I will give you one resource. If you want to learn more about some of what we’re talking about today, I want to give you one resource, something that I’ve been listening to recently. Again, I don’t read books in the traditional sense, but there is a course from the Great Courses called “Mind Body Medicine” by Jason M. Satterfield.

Now, it’s a course and a half and it is not entertaining from a traditional sort of sense, right? But it has some incredible information, as far as some of the chapters, it’s like defining health and illness, how your neuro endocrine system works, basic human immunology, genes health and disease, cognitive function, cognition in everyday life, psychology of emotions, biology of emotions, just an incredible resource.

So again, what is that called again? It’s called “Mind Body Medicine: The New Science of Optimal Health,” by Jason M. Satterfield. I believe it was done in 2013. But just a fantastic resource if you want to get something that’s really based in science, although some of the science is not updated because it’s eight years old, a lot of the science is still pretty solid, a lot of the topics are very solid.

So anyway, I hope that helps. I had a great time with you today. If you want more episodes like this, make sure you hit that subscribe button wherever you listen to this show. And I love having these conversations with you where we can just talk about things and talk things through and think better and learn to think more critically, to get better results in life.

And that’s what it’s all about, living a great life. And to do that we need to be clear, we need to have systems, we need to have clarity. We need to not get lost in the chaos that is constantly surrounding us with all the information coming at us with people trying to convince us of different things. That is how that contributes at least, to living a legendary life. 

And that’s what I want for you. I want you to win. And with that said, have an amazing weekend, and I’ll speak to you on Monday!