Mind Muscle with Simon de Veer
Mind Muscle with Simon de Veer
CGM Craze, Fauci Hearings Unpacked, and AI-Powered Meal Mastery
Can Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) devices truly benefit non-diabetics, or are they just another business gimmick? Explore this provocative question with us as we delve into the latest advancements in CGM technology and scrutinize its real-world applications beyond diabetes management. We also tackle the complex and often contentious COVID-19 discourse head-on, examining the facts and myths surrounding the Fauci hearings and the lab leak theory, all while advocating for a balanced, scientifically-backed perspective.
Discover the transformative power of AI in nutrition planning, a game-changer for anyone serious about their health and fitness goals. I share my personal journey of overcoming the tedium of nutrition logging by leveraging ChatGPT for meal planning and optimizing my diet to achieve muscle hypertrophy. With practical tips on streamlining meal prep and the benefits of a nightly protein shake, this episode equips you with tools to enhance your dietary regimen efficiently and effectively.
We also take a critical look at the political polarization surrounding COVID-19 and how identity politics shapes public opinion on vaccines and health measures. By dissecting the main arguments behind the lab leak theory and highlighting the importance of staying open-minded, we emphasize the need for caution in making definitive statements amidst ongoing scientific inquiries. Join us as we stress the interconnectedness of mental and physical development, championing our mantra: "There are no gains without brains. Keep lifting and learning.
Producer: Thor Benander
Editor: Luke Morey
Intro Theme: Ajax Benander
Intro: Timothy Durant
For more, visit Simon at The Antagonist
Welcome to the Mind Muscle Podcast. Here's your host, simon DeVere, and welcome back to Mind Muscle, the place we study the history, science and philosophy behind everything in health and fitness. Today I am Simon Devere and there's nothing new except all that has been forgotten. All right. So title you're probably seeing on the show today. We're going to talk about constant glucose monitoring. I'm going to refer to that as CGM throughout the rest of the show. Refer to that as CGM throughout the rest of the show.
Speaker 1:This is a new device that you're going to be seeing more and more Obviously. This is something if you're diabetic, you're familiar with. There are some new breakthroughs in the technology of the devices that handle the constant glucose monitoring, or continuous, but we are now seeing that these are going to be marketed to a different set, people who don't have diabetes or blood sugar issues. So, anyway, just wanted to have a quick discussion. We'll see how quick it goes. But, yeah, cgm, is that a big business or a big deal for your health? I want to take a deep dive into that. I also actually want to touch on some persistent COVID bullshit. We got the Fauci hearings going on right now and a lot of popular podcasts have been weighing in and covering that. So, at the risk of being yet another podcaster weighing in, I don't, or shall we say. The irony of that isn't lost on me. I am going to keep it a little closer to the accepted scientific literature and break down sort of the most popular claims that I see flying around to this day, even though we've all had about three years to look at this data now. But anyway, guys, that's kind of the main two for the day. I think each of those is going to give us plenty to dive into.
Speaker 1:But before I get into the main topics, I wanted to continue following up on my personal journey with getting back into nutrition logging. The reason I've been running this down is that one of the biggest issues that I've seen over the years with my own clients myself, with nutrition logging. It works, but it's tedious, it's annoying, a lot of people can't do it for an extended period of time, so it doesn't work in that context at all. It doesn't work in that context at all. So anybody who's been up on the last few episodes of the show you know that I started to try out this new thing for me anyway, maybe somebody had already been doing this and I'm not crediting them. But yeah, if I wasn't first, I at least didn't take this from anybody, I just intuited it on my own. I just doubt I was the first person to ever do it.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, if you remember, to get myself in the habit of nutrition logging, coming from a place where I wasn't logging anything, the first step that I got to is just logging all my bad food. This step actually worked really well, because I still don't like logging and I find it tedious. So, because I had committed to logging bad food, I actually started making better choices, simply because I didn't want to write it down. Had a couple of weeks with that and, honestly, my behavior shifted. I was just making better choices consistently. I still do find logging tedious, but it is kind of getting to the time where I've already trimmed out the obvious junk. I'm still going to push a little bit farther with my goals, so I kind of have to start generating some logs. I still don't want to log my food, though, so work in a strategy that I have employed in the past. This one isn't as new, but I'm finding that this is helping me out a lot. So, after we go from log the bad stuff. Next, let's log ahead of time. I'll tell you what that looks like for me, and then I think you could pretty easily adapt this to your week or your flow.
Speaker 1:Sunday is a day where I have no clients, nothing going on. That is planning day. So first step is to get a plan, then get the food you need for it. Do all that planning on Sunday. I have done this for years for myself and for my clients, and I do want to confess something. And then maybe I have a pro tip in here. But cheater alert. I use ChatGPT to create my own nutrition program and I'm somebody who's done this professionally for a long time. Anyway, I'm still personally catching flack for using GPT and before I give you guys this tip, you know, just quick rant, if you will.
Speaker 1:Um, the thing that I find annoying about the flack that I keep getting for it is I honestly think I'm one of the only people who's being honest and flagging when he's actually using a LLM. The reason that I flag that to people when I've used it for whatever I'm sending or producing is actually the first thing is I'm kind of letting them know that hey, I didn't write this. I say that so that if they want to critique the ideas in there, they're free to rip it any of it as hard as they want to and not protect my feelings because I didn't write it. So one of the reasons that I'll actually if I, you know this will happen, if we're ever talking and I send you something and I reference hey, I did this in chat, gbt part of what that means is I'm not going to take anything personal Attack this all you want. Another reason that I actually just like to be, you know, transparent about its use one attack this all you want because I didn't write it.
Speaker 1:Um two, I've actually just found like, like, let's say that you were in a debate with somebody and they already know my position on the debate. It's probably pointless for me to then just like rewrite out all of the stuff that I've already said. So, anyway, fun prompt. And then I'll tell you the nutrition prompt I like doing this now on something that people are debating is. I will ask GPT, you know, whatever the debate topic is, can you write a position for this, the best position you possibly can, write a position against it, the best position you probably can, or you possibly can, and then, when both of those two are done, I want you to read both of those statements and now write a third statement saying which of those two scenarios is the most plausible. So again, I want to be clear that I don't offer that then as a plausible. So again, I want to be clear that I don't offer that then as a source of anything. But I have found that this is a great tool to help me think clearer about the problem at hand.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I do find actually ChatGPT does a good job of, particularly with a prompt like that, is, rather than trying to straw man and find the weak points of an argument so that I can just beat it and win which, even if you have intellectual integrity, if you engage in a debate with somebody in a public forum, you're probably going to try to win, and you might actually employ some techniques in the course of winning that debate that if you had a private moment with yourself and all those people weren't watching, you would know that you might have just misrepresented either an argument they were making or maybe you slightly chair picked your data to make it look a little bit stronger. Anyway, this prompt form that I just did is actually kind of allowing a generic steel manned version of the argument. The argument isn't authoritative. I just think it can break people out of their own biases. The argument isn't authoritative, I just think it can break people out of their own biases. And one thing I would throw out there is, if you think you don't possess any biases, debate about what generative AI can possibly achieve, and it feels like that debate hasn't moved in over a year and my use of the technology has changed quite a lot in that time. But anyway, tired of that aspect of it.
Speaker 1:But anyway, here is an effective prompt that I use to get chat GPT to create a good nutrition plan, and then again, I have been refining this skill. I know over a year ago, when I talked about the uses of LLMs, we talked about building some nutrition plans. I've actually gotten a lot better at it in the last year, and one hack in particular I'm going to give you once I actually get into the prompt. So this is actually what I really like, though I actually worked back from what I'm actually doing right now. There is some overnight oats that I'm very attached to that I'm really liking, and I'm making a burger every single day at lunch. I can execute it perfectly in about 13 minutes.
Speaker 1:So those were, for whatever, those were the non-negotiables in my diet. So the prompt was something to the effect of you know, I need to get 190 grams of protein. I detailed my training, I detailed the supplements that I'm currently taking, I referenced the two meals that I eat every single day, and then I asked it to give me eat every single day, and then I asked it to give me, according to science, a diet program that would give me the protein needs that I need in light of the things that I'm eating every day, and I suggested that it could fill the gaps of any major nutrients that I was missing for my goal of muscular hypertrophy. Here is my favorite little hack that took me about a year to learn. So then I will also ask it at the end of the prompt I will say you know, please put this in the form of a spreadsheet that I can copy and paste in a separate column for each meal, include the grams of protein and sum the column. So I know you guys are reading tons of articles about AI hallucinating. To this day. Every one of those articles is written by somebody who prompted the system poorly.
Speaker 1:Ai or LLM results are highly dependent on the prompt. If you keep getting bad results, you need to work on your prompt writing, having it put it in a spreadsheet and total the column. This was just something I accidentally stumbled into that vastly reduces hallucinations when you are dealing with numbers, which was a big issue early on. This is just a little line that you can add to your prompt, the line being put those values in a spreadsheet and total the column. If you do that, what you're going to find because I do go back and check the work it doesn't take that long. But adding that simple step to the prompt has actually I haven't had to correct any columns. It's produced with that line in the prompt.
Speaker 1:So anyway, quick sponsor break. I just want to give a quick shout out to my good friend Sam Altman over at OpenAI. Just kidding, no, I actually am using the product more and more Program planning, nutrition planning, talking about health issues that have unfortunately been popping up in my family my father, my daughter, both important to me. Chatgpt has been a great tool. I even referenced that. And then people tell me oh, you got to have caution. I'm like, yep, I read the same articles too. I'm just actually speaking on an anecdotal experience of ChatGPT, correctly predicting the course of treatment that my dad has actually undergone and helping to enlighten me on a condition that I'm going to have to monitor with my daughter. So anyway, particularly with health stuff, I completely understand all of the issues. I've read the same damn articles. I'm not sure that these people have read the work of folks like Ethan Mollick over at UPenn, who's teaching people how to actually prompt and use AI systems. I think if they practice on their prompts we might see fewer and fewer of these articles. But anyway, I'm not here to talk AI again.
Speaker 1:The numbers I got from the program were good. I told you that little bit about having it crank out the spreadsheet so then I could actually then take and then just copy that right over to my fitness tracking app, which is my fitness pal. I plugged it all in. It was pretty damn good right out of the gate. I did do a little bit of tweaking, like added, you know, like an afternoon snack with some cottage cheese and an apple stuff like that, but legitimately very minor tweaks and since I have done nutrition logs for years, can confirm this was way faster than any other way that I've attempted to input this Um and admittedly, I actually don't need chat GPT to do any of this.
Speaker 1:I could do it all from scratch. It just simply takes me a lot longer and I get like basically the same result in way less time. So that that's kind of why I've converted to not um, spending all that time um on the setup and, ironically, I've been putting out some programs with it. It gives me more time to make the spreadsheets colorful and pretty and find video demonstrations that are really good, because I'm not spending as much time on formatting my cell blocks and doing all of these things that at this point actually take up most of the work. For me. The programming part goes very, very fast. Inputting the data into a form that's clear and people like to look at that's what actually takes the most time. So anyway, got my nutrition program done with ChatGPT. So the breakfast and lunch obviously those are parameters that I put in. It was basically work around this.
Speaker 1:This is what I'm eating. I kind of know roughly what dinner is. Every night my wife cooks that. It's pretty much a protein, a whole grain and a vegetable every night. So I don't know exactly what it'll be, but I just basically it's easy enough to estimate, subtract that out and build the plan without dinner in place, knowing what a typical dinner is going to provide, and then I'll actually, you know one other tip to go with this. I've given this one before, but so let's say I do all that estimating and then my wife doesn't cook as much dinner as I was planning for.
Speaker 1:This is where I love that nightly protein shake. If you're ever on a muscle gain or you know program like that, I love to have a nightly protein shake there to fill the gaps. And at least this is the way I think of it, because the more stuff you get to put into your protein shake, the better it tastes. So, in a sense, the less food you have eaten during the day, the better your nightly protein shake will taste, because whatever we're off in terms of calories, I'm going to put it into the shake. So, um, yeah, you know it's not fun normally to be skipping meals, but if you get a little busy and skip some meals, you get to have a shake that you know it's like, made with like cream. You're going to throw some peanut butter in there and all your protein and you just basically make it taste like you know the that you get from Jamba Juice, but yeah, if you're logging, you'll know when you actually need to pull that big giant shake, when you need to break that glass. So that you know. I've only got about a week running this program. I've done this in the past, so the current results are really mapping One of the biggest benefits that I want to talk about, because the physical stuff that comes and, quite frankly, you don't see it after a week, I mean, maybe I feel a little bit better, but it's mostly psychosomatic in my head at this point.
Speaker 1:One of the biggest benefits when you plan ahead, though, is that you don't think about food, and you aren't really going to realize how much time you spend in a day thinking about food until you completely remove that from your docket. It makes my week actually just flow a lot easier, because I'm not having to stop and think about you know, when am I going to take that break, where am I going, et cetera. It's already been done for me. This doesn't for me, you know, sap the joy out of eating. I told you, every night I'm eating with the family, and that is not a planned meal. It's, you know, kind of makes it so that when I'm trying to enjoy food which I know a lot of people like to do, that I'm typically with company and people that I want to enjoy food with. I'm not doing it because it's Tuesday and I'm bored. My dopamine crashed and I'm near a cinnamon scent wafting down one of the streets I'm walking. Nothing against that. That's fantastic. But obviously eating in that fashion isn't consistent with me delivering any type of result. So that's for times when I don't care about any type of particular training result. That's not right now for me the infomercial pitch, but it literally makes your meals more efficient, healthier, cost less. There really aren't a lot of downsides. The other one that I feel, and this is starting to form at about a weekend I wouldn't say that I'm there yet. Give me two more weeks and then I will.
Speaker 1:But good habits really are just as sticky as bad ones. You get just a few days under your belt and it already starts to feel easy to do the right thing. You know, example of that I just started doing the. I make the overnight oats the night before, put everything in. When you first start that routine, you have to kind of remember to do it. It's only been, you know, maybe two weeks on that and it's just part of my nightly routine, I don't even think about it. I'm, you know, I like podcasts and books, audio books, and a lot of times, um, rather than sitting on the couch listening to a book, I'm I'm prepping up my food for the next day listening to a book. After about three weeks of this, and it really becomes second nature and doing anything just to hammer home how much time people really do spend on thinking about food.
Speaker 1:I used to run a lot of sessions for a bunch of casting directors in Los Angeles not only my wife, but a bunch of other ones and one of the common things you would do on a callback session is you've got clients and maybe they're in from New York or wherever, and then full disclosure within their own company, whoever gets to travel and be that guy or that gal, that's kind of like well, I don't know, I'm not in their companies, but but they're higher up there, they're better, it's a flex, um, so so they got their moment in LA and when they come here, um, they, they do. They want to go to whatever club is cool, they want to eat at whatever restaurants are cool, and so, even when we have them in the studio at lunch. A lot of times lunch was also a big deal. You got to give them some good options. But yeah, we used to have this big giant menu book of everything in LA and I just remember watching college educated, very successful people sit there and lose about an hour of time trying to figure out what they were going to eat. Obviously, you can't really tell people like that what to do, so we just kind of roundabout figured out that if you just kind of printed up what looked like the equivalent of like a prefix menu, something that they would see like at a fancy spot, make it look nice, limit the options to like three things that were easy to get, people would make that choice in a few seconds and they still felt like it was exclusive and special and we just didn't have to lose the hour of work time watching people try to decide what food they were going to eat. And, trust me, I still want you to love your meal, still want to be great, all that. People are just seriously just watch the next time and maybe at least I can just be the only person not annoyed with how long it takes people to decide what they're going to eat.
Speaker 1:Last rule I'll say on this, because another one that I've just done to simplify at least the ordering process. Some of my clients do have to go to work dinners, things like that. Obviously, anytime you're eating in a restaurant, I don't care where it is, they sell food to make it taste good, so it's not as healthy as you would make at home. Period, sorry, don't try to tell me about what they do at your kitchen or whatever. I've heard this. If you're eating out regularly and the physique goals haven't hit, quit telling me your restaurant does it the way you tell them to. They got to make it taste good to keep you coming back.
Speaker 1:So I told my clients who have business meetings they can't avoid that are over food that there's basically three things on the menu every time you go out for work. There's a steak salad, there's a chicken salad and there's like fish and vegetables. Pick one, get on with it. If you don't, you just burned one of those free meals that we talk about. Everybody gets three in a week. So every time you go to a quote unquote work dinner and you don't do what we just said, you just burned one of your free meals and that's fine. But seven days you get three of them. Have fun and see how that works out Much, much easier. Because obviously some folks, like agents people I've worked with are out for meals a lot. You can't make it a party every single time you go out.
Speaker 1:If going out is a part of your job, don't make a big thing of it. Don't tell people you're on a diet. That puts people in a weird headspace. Just order it like it's the thing you're actually excited for, and literally nobody will care. But if you say anything to the effect of like oh I'll have a steak salad, I'm trying to lose weight or I'm not drinking because I want to like now just get ready for a big subject of the conversation to be that person trying to convince you to not do whatever you're doing for any number of reasons oh, you look great, don't worry about it. Oh, I'm not here that often. If you want to have that conversation, tell like you enjoy what you're eating and that's actually what you are there for, and you won't trigger any of the conversations that we just talked about happening.
Speaker 1:Anyway, guys, I know I meandered a bit. All that I really do like plan ahead with your food logs. I think the biggest concern is it's gonna sap joy, kill spontaneity. I don't think that's a big issue. Build some space so that you can still have, like I did. I planned for dinner every single night and I don't know what it's going to be. It's fine, I've worked the space out for it. We still have those three free meals every week. So I would argue that I think the most valid contention would be sapping joy. I don't think that's a big problem if you kind of throw in the amendments that we were just talking about there. All right.
Speaker 1:Next one, and this was actually so it's kind of funny. I want to be a little more specific because sometimes I'll say I'm seeing articles everywhere and that to me sounds a lot similar to the idea of a lot of people are saying so. First I saw an article at the Wall Street Journal. It was just asking the question how often do you really need to check your insulin levels? Not going to lie to you guys, I don't subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, so I only see the headlines, articles behind a paywall. I saw the first half of the paragraph and then they kind of faded the text off. Then actually it was in one of my finance newsletters, the Verge, abbott Labs just got FDA clearance for over-the-counter continuous glucose monitors for non-diabetics.
Speaker 1:So this is when I kind of actually decided that I wanted to talk about it, because I now I have a few people that I know who have actually gotten these from trainers, these from trainers. I now am seeing it pop in mainstream publications, so I think that this is now starting to jump into the mainstream, if you will. So this is one of those things. To be honest, if you wanted to get one of these a couple of years ago, you really did need a prescription and to be diabetic. So I do personally know a handful of trainers who have been using these with clients around Los Angeles. This is one of those things that quote unquote Hollywood trainers, that stuff you read about in the articles that they have been using. We'll get there. Anyway, these devices used to require a prescription or you had to go to a trainer who would get it some other way, but now the big change is that they are just flat out rolling these out for non-diabetics selling them.
Speaker 1:So I think it does raise an important question that if you don't have diabetes, do you need to monitor your blood sugar. I think this is probably the best place to start, but obviously there is a ton of evidence of positive benefits of glucose monitoring in people with health problems. I also should say it up front there's almost no evidence showing improved health from continuous glucose monitoring in people that are already healthy. Admittedly not a lot of studies, but one of the best ones that I could find. They had 153 people who didn't have diabetes. 153 people who didn't have diabetes. About 96% of the time their blood sugar levels were normal or nearly so. So often, in fact, that the studies, or the scientists running the study, believe that most of the abnormal levels were actually implausible. A mistake, maybe a reading error? So again, it's only one study. It's 153 people. That's not that big. But the lack of variance in their blood sugar levels kind of points to just sort of a basic fact in a sense that when you have a healthy insulin response there isn't wide variance. Hence there isn't much to see through continuous glucose monitoring.
Speaker 1:I guess in a way it's a little bit of a jump, but it's analogous or similar to detox diets, where some people will push that you go on this special diet and that'll handle detoxing. We've talked about this, but that's what a healthy liver does, and if you have a healthy liver you're not going to be in any need for detox. So this isn't trying to be dismissive of the problem. It can sound that way or like we're trying to be funny, but if you have a healthy insulin response, it might not be beneficial to record um your blood sugar, because it just simply isn't going to show much your your body. If you have an ability to maintain your blood sugar, because it just simply isn't going to show much your body, if you have an ability to maintain your blood sugar levels, we really aren't going to see much.
Speaker 1:I honestly could see, particularly like that quantified sulfur, the person who, like me, has fitness watches and likes to gather data on themselves. Knowledge is power. Why not? Maybe you could detect prediabetes. Maybe there would be a slight edge there. I'm trying to be devil's advocate. I think healthy people are tested every three years, just thinking through it. But prediabetes also isn't diabetes. So if you were getting your regular physicals and screening, you would normally be diagnosed as prediabetic before you got to diabetes. That being said, it wouldn't be inconceivable that maybe some CGM could improve the diagnosis time. Maybe it could be useful for someone with a family history who really suspects that they might be diabetic. Uh, outside of that, though, I don't know if there really would be a massive edge. Most people just getting their regular physicals and things done, um, I think would have that spotted in a relatively timely manner.
Speaker 1:One thing that I also see the training crowd that I'm familiar with here already pushing is this idea that you can optimize blood sugar for performance, that if your blood sugar is here, now's a good time to give that speech or have that. This is very, very popular and also completely unverified. I think. If there's any real result behind it, it might be a placebo effect or just a sense of control. Some people really do like that. That itself might be a valid reason to monitor glucose consistently. If having that feeling of being in control makes you feel better, then that might be something you could achieve with CGM.
Speaker 1:You know, I guess last, you know, just general curiosity, why not? It's just another data point. If you're somebody who doesn't overread into data points, you know get too reactive to things. Not a big deal. Maybe you're quantified selfers that again know what to do with the data they gather. All that being said, I personally still find very limited utility in doing something like this. I'm a quantified selfer and have been. I'm not really that interested. It's from a 2012 book, at least the title, nate Silver's the Signal, and the Noise clearly been talked about elsewhere, but obviously some data is indicative of a trend or a direction and a lot of data is just noise that you actually don't need to pay attention to.
Speaker 1:I do think for healthy people, it's not hard to make an argument that constantly monitoring your blood glucose would be useless, redundant or inaccurate information. That really isn't making you more powerful. Devil's advocate one more time, like let's say that it did work. I would still even have concerns then, like if you're using this device and you make a mistake and it beeps or does whatever, and then you you know, then you start to get better choices through that mechanism, I would still argue it's a bit like having a helicopter parent and even if it directs you to make the right choices, you aren't learning how to make them.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't think that somebody who was really relying on this to make choices about the foods they eat again outside of people with blood sugar issues, who I think that there would be completely valid and fantastic verified uses of I'm talking about non-diabetics here Don't think that's going to help them develop intuition around food choices or a sustainable relationship with food, quite frankly. And then, yeah, last little analogy I'll reach for here with you guys, but I do think there would be a major risk of over reliance, just like when you use GPS, driving you know too much kind of dulls your ability to navigate, no matter how long you've lived in the city that you're driving in. I could see. I actually think that most people will wind up getting only more lost with their nutrition efforts if they get into continuous monitoring. I don't think this is going to be a big panacea. That, you know, is just some data that really unlocks big gains for people, for healthy people who this product that we're talking about is going to be marketed simply eating a balanced diet, rich in whole foods, you know, lean proteins, healthy fats, complex carbs. That can achieve almost identical results to continuous monitoring. So yeah, to repeat something I say often, but I kind of see this product, as you know, another one of those majoring in the minors bits. Go for it if you want to. I really wouldn't expect big changes. I wouldn't imagine that six months out, your eating has gotten fundamentally better or you understand it better. I really do think that, yeah, for healthy folks, whole food diet is going to absolutely crush continuous glucose monitoring and if you want to spend money, just spend money on like a food service or something delivering that to you and then you probably won't have to monitor your glucose continuously.
Speaker 1:But anyway, that is me, the bearer of bad news and the killer of all new products, except for chat GPT. If you guys want to run some ads, hit me up. I know you got money, but, all right, last one of the day and I feel like I've actually danced around this a little bit. I have. Even though I say some mean things every now and again, I really do try to respect a lot of people's opinions. I know a lot of people on all ends of this one. So anyway, I want to talk about some persistent COVID bullshit and I don't know if I'm going to do as much dancing today.
Speaker 1:I also don't want to present myself as an expert in this. I am just another guy with a podcast talking. But I think the critical advantage that I have with most of the guys with podcasts talking is I'm not going to pull any of the ideas out of my own head. I just want to cite the studies, the data that we have right now. So I don't know if you saw this, but we got the Fauci hearings going on, so that's kind of what's motivating this.
Speaker 1:I just saw a clip. It was Joe Rogan talking about how some people just live in this fantasy land and they haven't updated anything. And I know that he means people who have, I don't know, gotten vaccines or gave a shit during the pandemic. But yeah, so I actually wanted to be very specific and highlight some of the things that we know with pretty good certainty are bullshit at this point. There's still a lot of things that are unknown and might continue to be that way, um, but as many years we're into this, there's still just a lot of persistent bullshit that I want to shoot down. So anyway, first one this one's also a little bit of a rant, kind of like you know my ai stuff, but I had a really good trainer friend. Um, don't want to throw him under the bus, he he's actually a pro bodybuilder, uses a lot of steroids, but also during the pandemic he was very against the vaccine. We had some very open conversations about that.
Speaker 1:Maybe you didn't pick up on this already, but I did find there to be an inherent irony in somebody who injects PEDs, even attempting the won't put that in my body line, but yeah, that was one angle, another one, and actually this is going to get us to the study I wanted to talk about that. I just saw my friend is really big into dog rescue. So in between you know posting anti-vax material, one day he posted a dog that was available for rescue and me, being a little bit of a troll, I did respond to the story and just asked does he have all his shots? And I laughed. My buddy didn't think it was funny, but I'm pretty sure he got the irony, which was probably why he didn't think it was funny. But no, so I just remember the story.
Speaker 1:If you guys remember this, you know Fauci kills puppies. That was a moment in the pandemic. Many of my friends believed it and so, in a big think, media fact, chest bias. By the way, I put their plug in on my Chrome browser so I can see the bias of every page I'm on. They score them as the least bias bias. So anyway, they had a title on an article that caught my attention. It was no gain of function research did not cause COVID-19. So again, that's the article. That's my source, if you guys want to go check, because that's where we're going to break down a whole bunch of this science that was contained in the article.
Speaker 1:I didn't do any of these studies and I'm not pretending to be an expert on any of this. That's again. I'm just prefacing all that because so many guys with podcasts act like they're the end all be all authority on this and most of us, myself included, the only reason that we're even talking about this is that we have free expression and you can't tell me to not talk about it. We don't have any right to actually be discussing this the way we all do. But obviously, you know, tied to the puppies getting killed was this gain of function research. And now this story was also tied to one of the most popular conspiracy theories that COVID was created in a lab.
Speaker 1:Should say right up front, I actually remain open minded to the possibility that it did come from a lab. Should say right up front, I actually remain open-minded to the possibility that it did come from a lab. But again, that's really different than saying that it did. With the available evidence you couldn't say right now going one way or the other, which it really was. There is no proof and the data overwhelmingly does point to a zoological origin. Even after I get done saying that if there's other evidence in six months, I'm not really anchored to that.
Speaker 1:So again, I think, unlike other people, I don't really have a horse in this race. I don't really care which way it plays out and I've even tried to explain this to friends when I've been debating this but for me the origin actually doesn't matter. It's truly interesting but it really doesn't matter in any sense, particularly now that we're in 2024. Again, it would be a nice fact to know one day, but it changes nothing about what you've done over the last few years. It literally changes absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1:So I know that some people, behavioral economics teaches us about sunk cost fallacies. So I know that some people, behavioral economics teaches about sunk cost fallacy. So if people have public opinions on one side of this debate, it might be very, very hard for them to let that go, as they'll see it as a personal affront or attack on the identity. I admit I don't really have a horse in this race, so I know that other folks maybe have said things in the past and your buddies heard you and you know now it's going to make you look like a fool, but all I would say is don't don't speak so certainly about stuff that's playing out in real time, so you won't be in that position. But anyway, I am genuinely open minded following the science.
Speaker 1:I just want to point out that when I am looking at the information right now, overwhelmingly points to zoological origin and actually, just because the identity politics do trigger into people's understanding of this, I just want to remind people that prior to COVID, the anti-vax space was actually and sort of alternative medicine, if you will, really was like the kale and, frankly, liberal identity politics, particularly out here where I live on the coast. So that was part of the whiplash that people like me got under. Covid was how, you know, you used to go out to like Topanga or Venice and it was like those hippies out there eating raw food and stuff who would tell you about the vaccines and this and that. And then all of a sudden COVID hits and now it was, you know, my friends in North Carolina, my friends up in Montana, who I've known them their whole lives, never gave a shit, never talked about that until I saw it on the podcast they were listening to. So obviously that shows some of my priors.
Speaker 1:I actually don't think many people in reality are deeply anchored to this. I think that this issue was politicized and kind of became a part of people's identities. For against, I don't think many people were thinking their way through it. I think they were just going with the people around them. Even folks who got onto the quote unquote right choice, many of them did so just because their neighbors were. That's how most people make their choices anyway. So there's a handful of people out there who are actually thinking about things and the vast majority of people are just copying the people they trust. That's the most reliable heuristic they have. But anyway, I just want to point out one. I don't see this either as a really strong ideological or identity issue, because in my lifetime both ends of the American political spectrum have been rip-roaring for anti-vax, or at least yelling it at me at various times in my life.
Speaker 1:Where I train the West side of LA, this really was one of the first. Like Marin County up North and down here in LA, we were the first places to bring back measles. By the way, we did that first. The first places to bring back measles, by the way. We did that first and it wasn't, you know, in the mid city, it was over in Malibu, it was over on the west side. That's where we brought measles back first, just by simply not giving our kids vaccinations. Actually, you know. Full disclosure. Now to my daughter was born in 2018. Pandemic hadn't happened yet, so no one had their positions public on vaccines.
Speaker 1:Yet my belief then was actually that more people were anti-vaxxed in the area that I live in, and this was actually holdover from Jenny McCarthy, oprah and the MMR stuff. I had to inform myself on all of that, because highly available in my mind when I was getting ready to have a kid was all this. Vaccines cause autism. So I, while my wife is pregnant and I'm reading up on books, that was a segment that I kind of went heavy into was the vaccine stuff, and so, yeah, I actually felt in 2018 when I chose to give my daughter all of the vaccines that were available then, that I was actually making a very counter decision to many of my friends in Los Angeles, particularly the ones on the West side, particularly the high income, high status friends. Back then it was way cooler to go without those shots or to space them out, do lower doses. So again, if you didn't have that experience, you may see this as just a starkly partisan issue. I do think this has been one that different political ideologies grab onto at different times.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and also, while I'm just still running down my memory of it, I can kind of remember when it flipped in my mind and it was in the pandemic and it was when gyms got closed down and I'm not throwing anybody under the bus, but a lot of my trainer friends were emailing me and trying to get us to organize, to go and protest the shelter in place because they didn't have money, and one of the things that really upset a lot of people was that there was a lot of money going around through programs like PPP, tax incentives, other stuff like that. Many people describe the pandemic as the great pause where they collected that money and they sat back and they thought about what they wanted to do with their life and they worked from home. That wasn't an experience in the health and wellness space. A lot of these people were out of work. They weren't getting PPP, they weren't getting anything through their employment, because most fitness workers, to be honest, they're 1099. They're temp. They're not really going to have health insurance, anything like that. They're probably splitting revenue with the business they're working at. So what you had was a bunch of precarious workers who were just immediately chucked off.
Speaker 1:And actually, despite what people think about stimulus and other programs, what even was that stimulus check? Was that 1200? But even bump it up, double it, triple it, I don't care. Let's call it 5000 actually, because it definitely wasn't that much. For many people in the city of Los Angeles, which is obviously all of the trainers I'm speaking to, that's not a month of expenses. So I know that a lot of people wrote big op-eds about how that fueled inflation for two years. The truth is, most working people who had rent and things to pay and kept up on that, if they got a stimulus check, it was probably burned through in the first month, definitely didn't get through two months.
Speaker 1:I mentioned all that because this is when people in the health and wellness space started to get a little bit agitated. They wanted to get back to work and I actually understood why so many of my cohorts were protesting and going against the shutdown orders, and it was because they were running out of money. The other thing that I think is very unique to the health and wellness space is a lot of these people, even before the pandemic, they already had a business where they were speaking out about the benefits of eating healthy working out. So pivoting their core product to becoming a COVID cure was not only one of the easiest things to do, but it was also one of the only things that they actually could do. You've heard enough from me that obviously I don't think it works.
Speaker 1:If, like ivermectin or drinking bleach or any of the shit that people said had worked, that would have been great. They didn't, and so, although I clearly think it's unethical to put out bad information, particularly when you don't have the qualifications to put that information out, in the same token, I do understand why so many people did it, and the brutal reality is it's because they were broke and they didn't have any other options. One more specific to LA but we did get hollowed out Everybody who wasn't making their rent left. That's what we're left with on this end is everybody who didn't go broke during the pandemic. So many people not just health and fitness got hollowed out of here, but I do think it was the financial demands of the pandemic that turned my training friends into like kind of hardcore. You know, anti-vax.
Speaker 1:I think that's why there is so much overlap in the health and wellness space and, yeah, also how it's kind of like I don't know if you guys are seeing this as clearly as I am, but the alternative medicine space has really morphed from like that burnout hippie that smells like patchouli. You're going to see a lot more red trucker hats in there these days, and that, actually, I think, is what well brings me to another thing that I'm not sure people get to see, particularly if they are in echo chambers. If you step outside, you're going to notice that a lot of the not only COVID conspiracies but a lot of conspiracy theories tend to occupy the far extremes of the political spectrum. Um, some call this horseshoe theory, but these folks seem like strange bedfellows and I think that they are generally unawareinges. If you will, I'm not really well.
Speaker 1:I was going to say clearly, like anybody else, I have a bias and I have a set of partisans, but what is different for me is I really am not dogmatic about it. I will actually switch based on how things go. Look at the data. So I'm just saying that if I need to talk shit about somebody I'll say it and I'll call them out. I don't actually think there's an ideological bias to this as much as other people do. I think people think that's one of the main drivers. I'm not so sure that it is myself. I think it has a lot to do with feelings of alienation, loneliness, control, things like that. That are the real psychological drives to why people accept conspiracy theories, and these are present in every single ideology. So anyway, I know I've meandered around. I told you guys about my whole LA pandemic story.
Speaker 1:There are five main points that the lab leak proponents make. Let's try to run through them quickly. I don't want to burn out your time. So the SARS-like virus emerged in Wuhan, where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is located. That's fact number one from their standpoint. Two a year prior to its emergence, in collaboration with US partners, they created similar viruses to COVID through gain-of-function research. That's number two fact, they say. Number three, they say is a fact Scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could have contaminated an infectious airborne virus like SARS-CoV-2.
Speaker 1:Four piece. Four, they say the hypothesis of a natural spillover for COVID-19 from an animal at the Hunan seafood market in Moonhead is not supported by the evidence. And five, the key evidence that would be expected to have emerged from a natural spillover event. The progenitor animal host has never been found. So is any of that true? Let's start with number one yes, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is located in Wuhan, china. Fact number one is correct. Number two so this was that a year prior, the US collaborated. This is very misleading. There was an international collaboration to investigate the features of coronavirus that could lead to an infection of humans, and that collaboration included US-based partners. However, they never created a potentially infectious variant and, importantly, the specific proposal to create a virus with the defining features of SARS-CoV-2 was rejected and that research was never conducted. So three they pursued this work under bad safety conditions. That is also simply not true. All the work was conducted at Wuhan Institute of Virology was pursued under the standard biosafety procedures for the type of work that was done and even passed an international inspection.
Speaker 1:Quick point of order on that, because no one ever talks about this. I just want to remind everybody, because we weren't talking about COVID when this happened. The United States of America did dismiss the CDC chief from China in 2019. Chief from China in 2019. So I just want to remind people that, had we not been on a cost-cutting thing in 2019, you wouldn't need to rely on Chinese officials for the data. But we, the United States of America, pulled the CDC out before the pandemic ever started. Maybe you can question that decision I don't hear anybody ever talk about that but if you wanted clean information, you did lose your chance in 2019. So, yeah, sidebar, but yeah, we don't know. Simply, international investigations that have been done showed that actually they did use the sanitary protocols that were up for whatever they were doing. So that one's also not true. So, number four the hypothesis of a natural spillover is not supported at the Hunan seafood market.
Speaker 1:This one got a special note in the article. So this one is so thoroughly untrue that it demands pushback. And then we have one, two I'm not going to read them all to you guys, all right. So I got like seven different. Two I'm not going to read them all to you guys, all right. So I got like seven different studies here we're going to make a few quick points.
Speaker 1:A 2023 critical analysis of the evidence of the origins of COVID. Let's see. Oh yeah, no, I already told you. So we got seven different studies that have been looking at how it has originated. The sum of all of this work is that when you're trying to find a natural progenitor, you almost never find the actual monkey number zero. This gets so far beyond my pay grade, but they're getting into comparing different protein structures what could support it.
Speaker 1:But the bottom line is that even when something does have a natural host and we know that there was a natural host you never find that progenitor, animal host, if you will, the one that causes the spillover. You don't need that evidence to know that it that it started with natural origin and cause. This is their sort of point number five. I guess it is um that that they haven't found the animal host. Um, that that's a goalpost that will probably never cross, um, so now, all that being said, I just want to really hammer home that this is, right now, the current accepted literature. Things might change and we might have a different topic, but the main five points about it emerging from a lab, only one the fact that the lab is located in Wuhan, china. That's true.
Speaker 1:I really haven't been able to validate any of the other four major claims you know more so than me, talking about the people I know and the annoying conversations I've had, the main downside of all this is that the misinformation being spread is actually putting these scientists in the literal line of fire over research that they didn't do and these conspiracies have no basis in reality. That they didn't do and these conspiracies have no basis in reality. So I'm annoyed when science is attacked from people just being stupid and misrepresenting things. This is causing sometimes to actually be threatened and absolutely muddying the waters and making it almost impossible for people to get to truth. All that I know. This is the part I'm most passionate about, so one of the most annoying things to me that has persisted throughout COVID is this idea that if you're healthy, you have nothing to fear.
Speaker 1:I don't know what you guys are looking at who say this. The first instance that I had pop in real life was a client in roughly April of 2020, 20-year-old, who'd had it asymptomatically in a workout reach for his heart. Um, fortunately, he has um great healthcare plan and he'll be taken care of. He's fine. But I know that a lot of people don't have the kind of healthcare that this young man has and if, if you had an asymptomatic case of COVID and a similar heart issue probably wouldn't get discovered. But no, so I actually personally know a number of healthy young people who have had cardiac injuries as a result of COVID infections.
Speaker 1:It just was annoying hearing again and again and again that there was quote unquote nothing to fear for healthy people. That was never true, and I know you heard it a lot. But if you were unhealthy, you nothing to fear for healthy people. That that was never true, and I know you heard it a lot. But if you were unhealthy, you needed to fear for your respiratory system. If you were healthy, you needed to fear for your vascular system. Sorry, I'm just now getting to this in 2024, but I don't know how it went on that long.
Speaker 1:Um first study I saw again was probably like April of 2020 or May of 2020. And it was heart issues popping up in NCAA athletes obviously young and healthier younger and healthier than every single person that I've saying on TV that it wasn't something to worry about. Ironically, I'm a jerk. If I looked like any of those people saying it on TV, I would get off TV and work out and change my life choices. But their confidence is awesome because they go out there every day and say those things and look the way they do and it doesn't bother them one bit. Not everybody has that confidence so that one could at least look up to. I know I deal with depression, so if I look like that I might not be here. Oh, that was mean. All right, we got to try to dial it back in. No, but they so. Yeah, it is annoying.
Speaker 1:Some of the heart issues that have been observed in studies heart arrhythmias, mitocarditis, difficulty breathing, rapid heart rate, chest pain they're obviously. There is no such thing as zero risk. Um, this one's annoying me cause it's popping up now. So you know, whatever be specific, my dad had a COVID infection and now has heart issues never had in his whole life, and so now, once that presents, people start talking and there's this idea that, oh, I wonder if the vaccines caused that. And you know it's my dad. So of course I wonder that too, and so I actually went and ran the numbers, though, instead of just spouting bullshit like everyone else seems like they want to do. I did. Yes, there are side effects. There's no such thing as zero risk.
Speaker 1:So what I found for the risk of having heart issues from an mRNA vaccine the type that my dad had. That's about 0.002% to 0.005%. The chance that you get a cardiac injury from a COVID infection is between 10% and 20%. People are terrible with numbers, so let's put that another way. Let's put that another way. The chance that you get a cardiac injury from an mRNA vaccine it's about as likely as you getting injured in a car accident in a year of driving, where getting a cardiac injury from a COVID infection is about as likely as having a complication during a major surgery. Again, maybe that's still a little bit too nebulous. So why don't we put it even more directly If 100 people got COVID, about 10 to 20 of them are going to have some form of cardiac injury. And if, like 100,000 people got vaccinated, like two to five of them might have some form of cardiac injury. Not a math major, so I also don't want to flex and pretend that, but I can run that one in my head. Probabilistically it is so much more likely if you had a cardiac issue that it came from a COVID infection than a shot. But no, in fairness to everybody out there saying it, yes, it is possible to have a cardiac injury from a vaccine or COVID, but the probabilities are nowhere fucking near equivalent. Unlike all the other podcasters, I actually understated the risk because if you include long COVID, the observed rates of cardiac injury go up significantly to 75%. So I'm not going to rerun all the numbers, but now 100 people got COVID, 75 will have some form of cardiac injury. That is versus two to five if 100,000 get vaccinated.
Speaker 1:So anyway, last two that I guess I'm shooting down here annoyed the hell out of me. For all these years People have been saying that if you're healthy there was nothing to fear. That was one of the most persistent, annoying and inaccurate beliefs. I wish you guys were right, but I have two cardiac patients in my family right now. And then, yeah, obviously, if you're one of those and you're thinking, well, it could have been the vaccine. People have already said that You're technically right. There is a really fucking slim chance that might have happened and there is an overwhelming chance that it probably just happened from the fucking COVID. But anyway, mind is open.
Speaker 1:But the thing that we really do and I really kind of want to hammer home in here, is probabilistic thinking. We don't know any of these things for certain, but we can start ascribing probabilities to certain things, and that is what I'm doing when I'm kind of framing what is most likely. Any one of these things might change with further study. But what you really are trying to do with health and this is why I've even presented health as a subject that is very, very similar to finance. You don't know which way markets are going, and if you think you do, you're fucking wrong and you're confused and you bought into some marketing bullshit. But you don't need to know the direction that the market is moving If you can start assessing some probabilities and making some wagers based on that. You want to avoid negative asymmetries. You want to seek out some positive asymmetries. Avoid the behaviors that can cause quick death or blowing up In your portfolio. That's trading with margin, that's trading on meme stocks, that's watching CNBC or reading Wall Street bets and buying what everyone else is buying. Now flip it around If we want to take advantage of asymmetries.
Speaker 1:Wearing sunscreen unsexy, but skin cancer I don't know if you guys looked at it really bad, really disruptive Sunscreen, really cheap, doesn't really cost you much time or anything. So again, a big part of elite performance in health, just like elite performance in finance, is avoiding the big losses. Some of these things are really like the most boring and unsexy stuff and everybody thinks they have it mastered. But when you really come down to the basics and see who is actually consistently mastering the basics, that's a tiny group of people that we call the elite in every single domain. So, anyway, I know that COVID is over. You know, quote unquote it's not in the sense that it still exists, it's not going anywhere. Covid itself and the vaccines are a part of life. Now I just want to remind people that there are no mandates, there are no vaccine passports, there were no tracking devices, no 5g um.
Speaker 1:Years have gone on and a lot of our debates really haven't. Um again, it's. Covid isn't over in the sense that like you can get covid, just like you can get flu or the strep throat, but a lot of these circular debates that are going on, particularly representing those fauci hearings that are going on right now, they're actually fucking over and you guys can keep talking, but we're four years out of this pandemic and a lot of us really would like for you to come back and join reality. I get there's irony because, you know, obviously opened this segment on this, but Joe Rogan feels the same way about people who've, you know, viewed this differently. So I want to be clear it's not because I disagree with him on the points of this, it's because how much he has sat there and talked about this thing, while not being an expert, not bringing them on on it's frankly become a little bit of a personality for someone like him. And then, as I can readily say right now, if the evidence points to a different conclusion than what I put out here today or in any past episode, I'm going to switch it up just that fast. It means absolutely nothing to me that I have spoken to the most probabilistic things throughout this and if new evidence demonstrates it to not be the most likely, it'll be that easy for me to say that it isn't so. Anyway, in that way, guys, covid is over. Stop with the gain of function, the puppies, all that stuff, all this stuff has already been debunked. And even on the vaccine, quite frankly, we have more data points on this uh, you know medical intervention than anything in human history. So it's over, at least the the circular debates around it.
Speaker 1:Um, anyway, guys, I'm running up on time. I really do appreciate you guys spending, you know, almost an hour of your time with me. Um, I I really do believe that that is absolutely the most valuable thing we all have. I'll be quick, but Father's Day, people were asking me hey, what do you want? And I was like I'm just like every other dad in the world, I just want time, that's it. I don't want to go out to brunch, I don't want to go shopping, I just value time. So, anyway, that was on my mind over the weekend. It is never lost on me when you spend your time here and you put your trust in me. I never want to violate that and I hope that you are learning stuff. Pass this along to anyone else that you think might get some positive value from this, and remember mind and muscle are inseparably intertwined. There are no gains without brains. Keep lifting and learning. I'll do the same.
