Cancer Researcher: We May Already Have the Cure (And They're Ignoring It) | Travis Christofferson

this most lofty goal of curing cancer, we might already be there. >> Science is driven by questioning. >> You have this textbook explanation of what cancer is that every oncologist reads in medical school. I don't want to call it indoctrination, but they feel this is settled science. The cancer is still treated by these medieval, antiquated things. We just haven't progressed past it. >> Now, everybody's had somebody in their life that's been touched by cancer. This is a big deal. >> So, Warburg specifically wanted to make his [music] mark on cancer. As a biophysicist, he looked at it as an energy problem. When he looked at cancer cells, what he saw, they were dividing like that, but they were not generating energy with oxygen. They were using [music] this sort of antiquated pathway called fermentation. These cells are fermenting glucose as fast as they can. They're just shoving it down their system to fuel themselves and carry out all their operations. So, this idea of using fasting or [music] ketogenic diet to restrict that fuel, right? It seems very simple and obvious. >> And the data on that is very interesting. >> It's It's very strange that we have this now politicized [music] environment. Certain ideas about medical establishment are associated with certain political [music] persuasions. >> You're outsourcing your critical thinking to a tribe. And it's one of the flaws in human hierarchy. >> We waste so much money. What if we actually repurposed all this waste towards studying these things that the capitalist [music] market has no incentive to study? >> Reading your work, I can't help but get the impression that this most lofty goal of curing cancer, we might already be there. We might already have, most of the time, in most cases, a way to cure cancer. And this to me was incredibly massive. My uncle passed from lymphoma and I watched him suffer and I watched him struggle and it put a lot of fear in me. And then reading your book Tripping Over the Truth, The Metabolic Theory of Cancer, there was just this deep sense of ease that came over me like, "Oh, there's a path. And it's maybe not 100% guarantee, but I know exactly what I would do. And it's given me a deep sense of peace. >> I you know, I most luminaries in the field when you ask them right now, they they all universally agree that we can do so much more with what we have right now. And and the sort of inflexibility, the intransigence intransigence of the system where um and it's set up this way for a reason, but you have to go through very strict protocols to get to what's called FDA approval right for for new therapies. But it's it's tremendously slow and it's by nature um inflexible in that you typically want to prove one variable at a time, so one drug. But since the late '60s um early '70s, it's been well known that combination therapies are s- much you know, exponentially more effective than mono therapies. And so you may be right, the combinations may be sitting there right in front of us. It's a matter of of the the trials. You know, and I I'm like you, I'm very optimistic at the moment about all of these combinations together. The the the metabolic angle, the the repurposed drug angle, um this new idea of unleashing the immune system is getting extremely exciting in cancer. So yeah, this is one of the When I wrote the book, I was hopeful and then you're always you know, like construction when you're remodeling your house, you're always like, "Oh, it's double the time they take." And that's the way it is in biology, it's it just takes a long time. >> Well, what's kind of frustrating is Otto Warburg, he came up with the metabolic theory of cancer a long time ago. Like when when did he get the Nobel Prize? >> Well, he won the Nobel Prize for a different He came up with that theory in 1923. >> Yeah. We're 100 years later. >> Yeah. >> And this is not mainstream accepted knowledge. >> Yeah. >> And so I guess the Nobel Prize is just it goes to speak for the intelligence that he has in general. He didn't win it for this particular he will if people actually pay attention to what he was trying to say because it really makes perfect sense. There's a fundamental difference between cancer cells and regular cells. >> Yeah. >> A major fundamental difference. So why don't we take a look at that? So explain to people what that difference is. >> Yeah, so well and and and when you read the history of medicine, you just be befuddled by the starts, the stops, the gaps of time. Um you remember from Carrel like the the the radical mastectomy >> which Oh, yeah. >> went on for almost 100 years until they finally conducted the trial to show a simple lumpectomy was just as good. And and so 100 years of women just being brutally mutilated from this excessive surgery. >> let's take take your time. We're going to get back to cancer. Take your time and tell this story of the radical mastectomy. >> oh okay, you want to go Okay, so well okay, so this is a a story a narrative about about what you just brought up about how the non-linear relationship of knowledge in medicine. And so at the time this is early 1900s, surgeons were the gods, right? They operate in the surgical theater and and this goes back to Hippocrates where he was the one that's the right the the Hippocratic oath first do no harm. But he also had another statement at the time which was that um a physician's judgment matters more than any external measurement. And so at the time there was a theory called vitalism where it was thought that biology, that life exist existed on this exalted plane beyond physical knowledge. So, the the physical sciences were sprinting. You know, Einstein's relativity, optics, chemistry, while medicine was kept down because it just it was thought that why even bother to measure a treatment's effectiveness when we couldn't even understand what life is. It existed in this this ethereal plane that we couldn't understand. So, that hampered it for a long time. But so the so anyway, back to the night early 1900s, William Halsted, American surgeon, and he was the most prominent surgeon in the US at the time. He came up with this very at a very scant data in his own clinic that a radical mastectomy and the the the theory of cancer at that time was called the centrifugal theory where it starts in one spot and then expands outward through the lymph nodes. So, the idea was the further out you cut, the more likely you were to catch it all and it wouldn't reoccur. So, that was the logic and so you you would you would expand those >> So, somebody would get diagnosed with breast cancer and a lump in one spot. >> Right. >> And then the radical mastectomy was let's take out all the possible tissue. >> Yeah, and it was it was it was called mistaken kindness if you didn't cut far away. So, they would towards the end of it, they were cutting out collar bones, ribs. These women would come out of surgery not knowing if they were going to get surgery. We just caved in, you know, the and then you you screw up the lymphatic system so their arms would swell up like three times their size. They were bru you know, just brutally mutilated. And and the way we and the way we still do think of cancer is it's a war. So, you got to have no pain, no gain, you know, this is part of it. And so they did this for for uh over 80 years, closer to 100 starting early but in so a trial in the 1980s, a surgeon um Fisher said, "What if a simple lumpectomy was as good? And he was considered a heretic at that time. And to conduct the trial, the surgeons they recruited were called murderers by their colleagues cuz they were so indoctrinated that this radical mastectomy was the way to go. Anyway, they did the trial. It was no better you know, radical mastectomy is no better than the simple lumpectomy. And and so back to Otto Warburg. So what Otto Warburg did, he was >> all right. I do want to get to Warburg. I'm incredibly interested in getting to Warburg. Just like to pause for a moment and just recognize like everybody's like trust the science, you're not a doctor, whatever. This was 80 years >> Yeah. >> of doctors brutalizing women on a theory that turned out not to be true. >> Not to be true, yeah. >> So when we're looking at these things, we have to recognize that doctors aren't always right. And there's lots of cases of this, you know, and you actually talk about some more of these cases. You talk about H. pylori. You talk about even hand washing. >> Yeah. >> You know, these were things that you know, and maybe we should touch on those just so people understand from a standpoint like sometimes the mainstream idea is completely wrong. And by asking questions, by continuing to do studies, then the science evolves. Now, you know, I don't think anybody's doing radical mastectomies cuz we've shown that actually, oh, you were wrong. Sorry to all you tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of women that were brutalized for no reason, but >> you know, we were just listening to the science. Well, that's why there needs to be active questioning and not suppression. And just to get to the meta meta point because when you go into Warburg, this to me is a similar type of situation where there's a mainstream idea, war on cancer, let's pump all the radiation, let's pump all the chemotherapy in there, let's destroy it and you know, destroy the person, but the cancer a little bit more than the person and that's how you win the war. It's this war of attrition on all the cells in the body and the ones that survive hopefully are you and not the cancer. >> Yeah. >> Maybe there's a different way and maybe sometimes that has to be the way. I don't know. It's not absolutely utterly conclusive yet, but it's pointing in that direction. But even open your mind that that might be possible, I think it's helpful for people to understand, all right, we have the radical mastectomy example. And is it mastectomy or mastectomy? >> Mastectomy. >> Mastectomy. So radical mastectomy model and then there's also just briefly touch on the H. pylori and the hand washing. Just so people understand, this is not an isolated event. Like, "Oh my god, one time the doctors got it wrong." I mean, we can also go further into [ __ ] leeches and shock therapy for, you know, psychiatric patients. There's lots of crazy [ __ ] that's existed, but these are more recent. >> There's a clear pro-innovation bias in medicine, right? Where there's excessive optimism attached to the more complex treatments. At the expense of the things we know work. They're boring. You know, like like hand washing. I think 2 million people get a hospital-acquired infections every year. And those you can It's so hard to get doctors and nurses to comply 100% to hand washing. Surgical checklists. It's just checking before surgery, checking the boxes you know you need to do before the surgery. And surgeons are always like, I you know, they hate it because they they they've done it 100 times. They know they don't think they're going to forget. They forget. They did a clinical trial that showed when they had the checklists, they have to or they they reduced the chance of death from surgical complications by 43%. That's better than any drug by far. We talked about last time the the story of um fecal transplants. It doesn't get any more unglamorous than that, you know, mixing fecal matter in a blender and giving an enema into somebody, but it's a 100% cure for C. diff, which before that killed 15,000 people a year in hospital settings. >> Yeah. >> So so yeah, there's a huge pro-innovation bias. And then back to that those gaps in medicine, you know, established by Hippocrates ethos that doctors are the sovereign entity of knowledge and never question them. Um the ketogenic diet was shown to be a more or less a cure for a childhood epilepsy in the '20s. And then the drugs came out, Luminal and so forth and in the early '30s. Um so it was forgotten to the literature, completely forgotten. These drugs were horrible. And you know, ketogenic diet's somewhat difficult and people don't want to do it. So it's so much easier to prescribe a pill. >> you feel great when you're on it. >> Well, for epilepsy, too. I mean, there's a there's a you know, you're having seizures or you're not. So the story with that was um this beautiful Jim Abrahams. So he's a guy the Hollywood movie director that did did uh the Airplane movies. And and and um he had a son Charlie who had a horrible case of childhood epilepsy. He was on over 200 seizures a day, which at that point you're getting the point of perma- permanent neurological damage. And he went through every hospital. Um multiple drugs failed. Um he was down to choosing between he had saw in the back of a textbook something about this ketogenic diet by this doctor Johns Hopkins or a herbalist working out of strip mall in Houston. He flipped a coin literally and went to the herbalist. Herbs didn't work, came back. Um flew to Johns Hopkins. They fasted him that day. The next day he was seizure-free for the first time in his since he started having seizures. And he was so Jim was so just befuddled and outraged by this that he did the movie First Do No Harm with Meryl Streep about Charlie's story. But again, it's a story of how these you know, these treatments just get completely forgotten, marginalized, um for whatever you know, variety of reasons you want to >> Well, and and then again, this is another example of follow the money. You know, like unless you're, you know, a big avocado perveyor, you're not going to make money from a ketogenic diet treatment, [laughter] you know, but it's not the same as what, you know, [ __ ] Sanofi or Pfizer or any of these other, you know, companies that are making these super expensive drugs and interventions that are covered by insurance. There's it's the difference between billions to free in many of these cases. >> That's a problem a lot of Yeah, the financial incentive. Yeah, that's a problem. >> So, I made a quick promise. I just want to follow through on it and I I forget the names. I can look them up real quick, but I'm pretty sure that I read about them first in your book. So, there was I think an Australian doctor who was believing that ulcers were caused by H. pylori. You could tell that story and I think maybe it was an Austrian doctor who first said that hand washing was maybe important. >> Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, before yeah, germ theory, you know, Louis Pasteur and doctors fought that, especially the American doctors. It's like you know, they have it's a very hidebound it's a it's a institution built on tradition. And when new ideas come in, they tend to get they tend to get pushed pushed back. And so, that was actually William Halsted who came to the US and was the first one to set up a sterile surgical clinic and he had to fight everybody to do it. They just they heckled him, they laughed at him. And at that time, you know, they used cat guts for sutures and cow cow intestines. Dirty scalpels, they'd just wipe them off before they'd operate you know, operate. Um so that yeah, in the in the the um the story of H. pylori, I can't remember his name, Australian guy. >> But it was There wasn't there another doctor in the hand washing that actually they threw him in like a loony bin. Semmelweis. [snorts] I believe it. >> Really? >> Yeah, so he was he was proposing this, proposing this and then they threw him in a loony bin and beat him and then he died of an infection in the hospital getting I mean like what the [ __ ] And again, it's this kind of mocking, derisive, ridicule that people who have these and we saw this again and in COVID. You know, like it's just this the doctors who had alternative theories about treatments or alternative theories about anything, they became the disinformation dozen. You know, and they had this stain on them and they were like quarantined from from and censored from all conversation. Which is absurd given the history of medicine making big mistakes and needing to have big retractions of their current philosophy. >> Yeah, no, science is driven by questioning. Yeah, especially something as fickle as biology you should always everybody should question everything all the time. >> So, the the Australian physician Dr. Barry Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren, they were the ones so so Barry Marshall, he was trying to propose to the groups of physicians that ulcers were caused by this bacteria H. pylori and they laughed at him and laughed at him and mocked him and ridiculed him. He was the running joke of all of the medical establishment. So, finally one day he's like, "Fuck you guys. I'm going to drink some H. pylori and you're going to watch my ulcers develop." And he did it. And then they're like, "Oh." >> Yeah, that's the extreme of How do I prove this? >> Yeah, exactly. Like, "Okay, well, do it to myself." And ulcers were horrendously painful. >> Yeah. >> But he cared enough about one probably there's a little pride that he was knew he was right, but also cared enough about human beings that okay, we can treat this in a different way than we're treating it. And this was in 19 82. >> Yeah, he won the Nobel Prize for that. >> the Nobel Prize for that. So, this this idea that contemporary medicine, mainstream beliefs are not always right, has all kinds of different things and also not always complied with even when things are accepted and things are shown, there's this one, a big bias towards the more expensive treatments, and two, sometimes the consensus belief just gets momentum. And the momentum is really hard to break. I think there's a study that shows that, you know, while there's a dominant physician or scientist who proposes a theory, there's a suppression of all alternate alternate theories, and then the moment that person dies, there's this flood of new papers published. >> Yeah, that's a great I think Max Planck quote, right? That you have to wait for all the old scientists to die before >> [laughter] >> Which is which is a crazy system. >> And nowhere is that more evident to me in cancer biology. And where [snorts] you have this textbook um explanation of what cancer is that every oncologist reads in medical school. And they then that I don't want to call it indoctrination, but they feel this is settled science. You know, enough Nobel Prizes have been won. It's in a textbook. This is settled science. And to me that is when you look at science, the most interesting questions are those ones on the border, you know, like like in physics physics is the merger of quantum mechanics with Newtonian motion, right? They're still working on that. That's the edge of where it is. To me cancer biology is still that edge. And it's not settled science. And you get there's a lot of extremely smart scientists now that finally are questioning it and coming up, you know, with different answers to that. >> We are in unprecedented times, and the first thing that arises is a need for safety. How do I ensure my own safety and sovereignty so I can protect myself and my family and also contribute to a better world. And so one of the things that I think is really important is to recognize where you are holding your value. And right now a lot of us are holding our value in cash. What is cash? Cash is promises made in paper or plastic from governments that we know we can't trust. But what has real value? 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Lastly, I just want to say like I understand the stress that everybody is feeling in these uncertain times. And really focusing on financial sovereignty is going to be a big part of my message moving forward. I've had the blessing of having taken a beautiful ride. Me and my family are safe and well and we're able to support those that we love. I want you to be that person as well. So I'm going to be talking about that a lot more. So make sure you like and subscribe to the channel and follow me on social media at Aubrey Marcus. Thanks for your attention. We're in this together. All for one, one for all. Let's go. >> Well, let's go back to Otto von Warburg [snorts] and what he proposed. And then I also want to touch on this idea of the war on cancer and how actually one of the main treatments, chemotherapy, came straight out of [ __ ] war. >> Yeah. >> Also. So, we'll talk about Warburg's theory and maybe the traditional theory. Maybe let's start with the traditional theory and also the origins of chemotherapy so just people can be aware of the mindset that continues to exist. Cancer is fight, fight, war, fight, war. >> Yeah. >> That's that's everywhere, right? Your fight with cancer, you know, war on cancer. So, let's talk about what the mainstream traditional psychology is and the mainstream treatment options. And then let's go into Warburg's really what is a revolutionary theory and idea that also adjust your psychology significantly as well as the treatment options. >> Yeah. The original So, the the dominant theory now is called the somatic mutation theory of cancer. And in the early 1900s, there was three competing theories of cancer. One was the viral theory of cancer that was proposed by Peyton Rous where he found that cancer could be transferred from one chicken to another with via virus. And in the early 1900s, that fit perfectly into the zeitgeist of the times because we had typhus, we had typhoid fever, we had polio was sweeping through the Europe and America in the summer months. And so, there's a New York Times article asking is cancer infectious. So, that seemed to fit. You had Warburg's proposal which we'll get into that that cancer was a metabolic origin. Then you had this observation by a German scientist Hanselberg where what they called chromosomes or colored bodies, they finally figured out how you know, this certain dye would stain these interesting thread-like things in the nucleus of a cell, and they appeared to be bent, broken, duplicated in cancer cells. So, that was this They They They didn't DNA and where the gene was was a dim abstraction at that time, but they knew those that chromosomes were important. So, fast forward to 1953, Watson and Crick discover DNA. Um and this molecule was so enormously suggestive. This was the code script that Erwin Schrödinger, you know, during World War II asked, "What is life? It has to be some sort of code." So, a generation of biologists focused on DNA. And then the similar experiments were in the seven late '70s by Michael Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus at San Francisco. And it was ironic because they used this virus that Peyton Rous had discovered. And they they isolated the four genes. And then there's four genes, so it was very simple to work with. They isolated the one cancer-causing gene in this virus called the sarcoma gene. And they didn't know anything about that. They knew viruses could infect cells and capture genes and incorporate it into their own genome. But they did you know, to find out what this So, what was this gene doing? And so, what when they sequenced it, what they found out it was a gene that we all have. All living organisms have this gene. But the viral version was slightly mutated. So, the amino acids that make it up turn the off switch off. So, it's called a kinase protein that shouts the instructions for the cell to divide. So, in one fell swoop, it was like a puzzle solving itself. You incorporated the viral theory into this somatic mutation theory. So, the idea now is we have certain genes in our genome, um oncogenes and tumor suppressors that when they're mutated, they're like pushing the gas pedal or taking off the brakes for this uncontrolled proliferation. And that was what they won the Nobel Prize. You know, this was early '80s, no one looked back. It was They locked the door on what cancer was, we knew what it was. And so if you fast forward then to the Cancer Genome Atlas project. So what we thought we would find, and this was a huge like Manhattan style project to sequence the DNA of cancer and finally find all the mutations that were causing it. And and researchers thought they expected to think what they would find was a tidy series of of like a fingerprint for each type of cancer, a series of mutations that would cause it. And we kind of had clinical evidence for that, right? Cancer didn't just appear, it sort of slouched its way into existence. Like like cervical cancer, colon cancer, there was pre-cancerous lesions, polyps, it would go through these defined steps. And each step it was thought you'd find the mutation that would underpin that. So at the Cancer Genome Atlas project you did found nothing like that. What what astonished everybody was this huge degree of of what do they call intertumoral heterogeneity. Meaning that one person's tumor from another's was vastly different. And so for that theory to make sense, you have to draw a line between cause and effect. You have to have the mutations that would likely cause cancer because cancer is not a disease of random chaos. It's systematic. We have these hallmark features of cancer. It's always doing these certain things. It's got that dysregulated metabolism. It's evading the immune system. It's got uncontrolled growth, right? So these are coordinated operations that they're not coming, you know, from this dream series of perfect mutations. And but not very many people just questioned at that point. What they said was cancer's more complex than we thought. And so what I love is story of of Paul Davies. So he's a high-level physicist. And there was a program at the NCI to hire physicists in 2012 just to look at cancer with fresh eyes because they realized um treatments were coming slow, progress was coming slow. So the idea was just to put brilliant minds that hadn't studied it, hadn't become, you know, indoctrinated into certain belief system to look at it. And when he looked at it, he just said, "There's absolutely no way that mutations are causing this disease." And his quote from that was, "Never in science has there been a preoccupation of the trees at the expense of the forest." >> Mhm. >> So, that's where we sit today with with um cancer biology. It's still very much unsettled science. And back to your, you know, the war on cancer, um which has been what we knew about the disease early on was it was just uncontrolled growth. So, how do you attack uncontrolled growth? Well, toxins that will go into a cell and, you know, kill it while it's dividing. And so, the the first chemotherapy was, yeah, it was it was Bari Harbor in Italy. The Allies forces were all bunched up in their ships there because >> World War I. >> World War II. >> Yeah. They thought the Luftwaffe was stretched too thin to find them. Well, they found them and they bombed them. And the SS John Harvey, and nobody knew this, it had 120,000 lb of mustard gas. >> They were They were supposed to not have that, too, by the way, >> Right, but both sides in World War II. Right. [laughter] They had signed treaties after World War I cuz those are horrific >> Totally. >> chemical agents. And but both sides were stocked by thinking the other side >> to account of that, read All Quiet on the Western Front. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Yeah. >> So, they bombed it. Um it killed the attack killed 100 or 1,000 sailors initially. The rest had to jump off the ships and into the water. And when they came out, they were covered in this sort of greasy, you know, substance that smelled like garlic. And then their blisters started. And then they started losing their eyesight. And they were burning. And they flew in a a Yale doctor to collect samples, you know. Um he brought those back to Yale. And what they noticed was the lymphoid tissue was deplete of T cells. And so, at the time we had surgery and radiation, we didn't have chemotherapy. And so this was that dream substance that may be able to go systemic and attack cancer, especially lymphomas where they're diffuse by nature. Um so they did it in rats and saw little effect and then they did in humans and saw fleeting remissions from this war gas. And so that sort of, you know, ethos defined the next series of what these drugs look like, cisplatin and methotrexate. They were all these very toxic substances that just had one target, stop cell division. And that's why you get those any cell that's dividing is under attack. You lose your hair, you lose your intestinal tract. Um and that was the war on cancer. And the war on cancer was, you know, flushing the NCI with money to take that handful of systemic toxins and just push as hard as you can. And it was a horrific scene. You'd walk into those cancer centers and you know, on cisplatin and you throw up once an hour. People were dying outright from the effects. Um and James Watson at the time had a quote, you know, we're going to pollute the so pollute this atmosphere that no one's going to want to see the play to the end. Um but then, yeah, I'll I'll say one more thing and stop, but um they pushed this and they did have make some progress. They cured testicular cancer with this, Hodgkin's disease, childhood leukemias. So we thought we were winning, right? This was 1971 that Nixon declared the war. Um we landed on the moon two years earlier, so America was, you know, we can do anything. So a biostatistician in 1986 they asked him to tally up the war on cancer. What are the effects? How are we doing? And the only thing that matters is the death rate. How many people are still dying from cancer? So what he showed is we're curing 4% of the people with cancer. But since 1950, the number of people cancer dying from cancer has increased by 9%. So what does that tell you? It tells you the healthcare You think of the healthcare system is like the second law of thermodynamics. You have a system plus the surroundings. The system is decreasing the death rate by 4%. The surroundings are increasing the death rate up to 9%. So, we'd made our world that much more carcinogenic during that time period. Pesticides, toxins, whatever you you know you name it. And and today it's extraordinarily worrisome with the the you know the increased rates of um colon cancer all kinds of cancer in young people are are going up dramatically and you know >> This is a war we're not winning. You know, and if you use that continue to use that war analogy if let's say that cancer is the enemy and you know our people are our own soldiers. Well, if we're killing 4% of the enemy and 9% of us are dying we're losing. >> We're losing. >> Like how long are we going to fight this war cuz we're losing. We need a new method. Maybe even need to try some other thing besides war >> Yeah. >> at that point. Like at a certain point you got to say like, "Okay, we're not going to [ __ ] win this." >> Yeah. >> And we got to have and it's not that people haven't been trying, but I think in that mindset of it's still war it's preventing them from seeing something that was already known. And this is what was really interesting when you started to share about Warburg. >> Yeah. Yeah. Do we even get to Warburg? >> We haven't got to Warburg yet. So, we just went to the traditional side and now we got to get to the metabolic theory. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Otto Warburg. So, he He absolutely brilliant brilliant scientist in the 1920s. And um he his dad was a physicist at the Berlin Institute head of the Berlin Institute of Physics at the time. So, he grew up with Albert Einstein, Emil Fischer, all these Nobel Prize winning scientists were his mentor. Um in that time, you know, it's interesting that time it was it truly was the golden age of science. Those German scientists became part of what's called the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Science at the time. And to become a member um you you never had to ask for funding ever. And Otto Warburg asked for funding once in his life. He scribbled it on a napkin. And we got hired as a member. Um Albert Einstein was a member. All the great scientists of the time was just to unleash their minds. And they told them, "When you you can walk in the woods for a year and look at flowers. We don't care. We just want your mind unencumbered." And you compare that to today where American scientists spend over 50% of time writing for grants. You know, it's a a brutally different It's just a So, a completely different environment and so much productivity came out of that time period. So, Warburg specifically wanted to make his mark on cancer. And so, when his as a physicist, as a biophysicist, he looked at it as an energy problem. So, what Warburg thought he would see He looked at sea urchin eggs, which are a good model to study metabolism because they upon fertilization there's this burst of cellular division, kind of like cancer. And and what he found was that to generate the energy for that cellular division, they use this process called oxidative phosphorylation. So, generating energy with oxygen. When he looked at cancer cells, what he saw was that they were dividing like that, but they were not generating rating energy with oxygen. They were using a sort of antiquated pathway called fermentation. So, the way the cell generates energy is it can take a molecule of glucose and go through this step called glycolysis or fermentation, which has an end product lactic acid or lactate. A healthy cell will go through that process and generate pyruvate. That'll enter the mitochondria and then use oxygen to generate more ATP, which is a very efficient way of generating energy. So, for some reason cancer cells have rewired themselves to produce energy through this old pathway. And >> And then And just to put an asterisk there, for some reason. Cuz that's actually really important to this theory, and we'll get back to that. >> Yeah. >> I know, and it's not for some reason, it's for a very clear reason, according to this theory. But continue. >> Right. And so, he contended that that was the prime cause of cancer, this metabolic shift. And he could demonstrate it in every cancer type he looked at, pretty much. And this is before mitochondria had even been discovered. So, he knew there was a site in the cell for what we call respiration, where the site where oxygen was combining with you know, the substrates from food to generate energy. He didn't know where, but he as the theory contended, there was damage to these what they called grana at the time, what what he thought were the sites of oxidative phosphorylation. So, the cancer cell had to shift to this old method of energy generation, and that was the theory. The The problem with the theory is you got later on, when DNA was discovered, he couldn't make a connection between that shift in metabolism to uncontrolled growth. Right? So, you step forward to a guy like um Pete Pedersen at Johns Hopkins in the '80s, and then Tom Seyfried in the '90s. And then science had progressed enough that they were able to complete that theory to where they contend there's damage to the mitochondria. The cell can't make energy through that mechanism, it shifts to this other mechanism. And the mitochondria and the nucleus, where the DNA are are in constant communication. So, what they discovered is this called retrograde response. When the mitochondria are damaged, they will send a signal to the nucleus to reconfigure all your genetic expression. And you'll see upregulation of all these important oncogenes, like Myc, like Ras, like mTOR. And so, this is affecting broad swaths of DNA. Like Mick alone affects 15% of the genome and it rewires the cellular circuitry towards all the hallmark features of cancer. So those two views of cancer are extraordinarily different. One is a coordinated sort of pre-programmed view. The other one is this disease of just random genetic mutations. >> So if I was going to sum this up and correct me if I don't have this right. So regular healthy cells, they bring in oxygen into the mitochondria through a complex process which probably is beyond what people need to understand, but oxygen is brought into the cell. The oxygen is utilized in this cellular respiration to create ATP. ATP is what gives us the energy to move and acts do stuff and actually it's the energy source for all healthy cells. >> Yeah. >> When the mitochondria is weakened and starts to starts to fail, which is the like a almost like the lungs of the cell to a certain degree. It's like the power center. When that isn't able to be supported properly, it can no longer utilize oxygen to produce energy. So it says, "Okay, like the the engine is dying. We need another We need another power source." So it sends out a signal that says, "All right, we need and life wants to survive. >> Yeah. >> And it's like, "We're not going to be able to continue to supply energy, so we need to produce energy for these cells. So we're going to actually go through a more primitive mechanism, the backup mechanism, >> Yeah. >> which is to ferment sugar >> Yeah. >> to actually produce energy. So through this process of fermentation, we can no longer use cellular respiration, we can no longer use oxygen. It's not working. We're dying. >> Right. >> We want to live, so let's ferment sugar. And in the same time as they put out this signal that modifies all the DNA, it also triggers this kind of exponential growth of those particular cells that are fermenting sugar, which lose communication because they're actually like it almost a different species. >> Yeah, very much. >> So that's like, all right, we have two competing species now in the body and this one species that's fermenting sugar is like, we got to live. >> Yeah. >> And the other body is like, holy, what the [ __ ] are you doing? Like, if you live, we die. But they're not communicating with each other because they're actually different species and the interspecies communication is not working. So, that's kind of what's happening. >> It very that's great description. And and look at just look at the way life happened on the planet. So, 4 some billion years ago life began as unicellular life, right? And the biological imperative of of those life forms is to divide. Divide, divide, divide, divide. When cells started living together, the birth of multicellularism was when mitochondria came into being and the cells then had to sign a contract with each other that I can no longer divide for the sake of dividing. But life builds on itself. So, those programs for uncontrolled for replicative immortality are still there. And so, when you look at that gene shift when cancer occurs, it's back to these very, very early evolutionary genes. And and there's a saying in biology, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, meaning up in the moment of fertilization to where you have a fully developed multicellular organism, you go through this graded like it's a evolution in fast forward. And when you look at the early embryonic cells of an embryo, they look just like cancer cells. They're expressing the same genes as cancer cells. So, that reversion back, that signal from the mitochondria is just tapping into this ancient program that's already there. And that's why I said this this this edge of cancer research presents such vastly different images of what cancer is. And that's what Paul Davies said. He goes, "That data should be screaming at us." >> Mhm. >> That this is a coordinated, you know, disease. And the evidence for this, so there was a series of experiments you probably remember from the book in the '80s that just were shocking. So, this was done by two groups, um uh Warren Schafer in Vermont and Jerry Shay in here in Texas. And they just asked the question, "How much influence does the cytoplasm have over cancer?" Where all the mitochondria are, where all this kind of epigenetic signaling is going on. Um versus the nucleus where the mutations are. And this was This was the '80s, so this was when the somatic mutation theory was dogmatic, right? Axiomatic. It was entrenched. When they looked at it, so the experiments were just beautiful. So, they they had had the technology where they could take out a nucleus of a cell and put in a different nucleus. So, they took a nucleus of a healthy cell and put in the nucleus of a cancer cell. That was their first set of experiments. So, according to the somatic mutation theory, all that information should be there for cancer. The mutations are in the DNA. So, they expanded those cells and injected them in the mice. And he injected them in the 68 mice, one of those mice got cancer over the course of a year. Jerry Shay's group in Texas did the same thing with 10 mice. None of them developed cancer. So, >> [clears throat] >> they were so befuddled by this result that they tested the experimental controls. They transferred a nucleus of a cancer cell into a cancer cell mice, they all got cancer. Same thing, healthy cell into healthy cell, no cancer. So, it wasn't the experimental technique that was leaving some artifact that was, you know, distorting it. Then they reversed it and took the nucleus of a um healthy cell and put into a cancer cell. And 97% of the mice got cancer. So, this is extraordinarily powerful evidence that the seat of cancer is in the cytoplasm, not in the mutations in the DNA. And they couldn't make sense of it. They they played Shafer and Vermont played the NC the NIH to give more funding cuz they knew this was important, but they wouldn't because they were so entrenched. >> All right, so to try and try and make this make sense. So, the nucleus is like the brain. It's where all the DNA is. It's where all the information, you know? So, in this form in this idea, the brain is what's controlling DNA. >> Yeah. >> It's controlling the DNA and all and all of that. And so, they're like, okay, if this if the brain that controls the DNA is responsible for this, which is the nucleus, if you put a cancer, you know, a cancer producing brain, something that's sending out these DNA signals, you put one from a cancer cell into a healthy cell, and then put that cell in, it should actually send the signal to produce more cancer. >> Yeah. >> Right? And then they take and then they go reverse, but it didn't except in in one mouse, which may have been because there's some extra cytoplasm in there. So, maybe got a little extra beyond the brain, you know, in that experiment. Who knows why that one anomaly occurred. But overwhelmingly, it didn't occur. And then they reversed it, and then they put >> [clears throat] >> a healthy brain into a cancer cell. So, all the surrounding cytoplasm, put a healthy brain in there. And they're saying, all right, well, if the brain's controlling it, then actually that should reverse the cancer. And then they put those cells in the mice, and all of them develop cancer. So, then that unequivocally proves that this is not the nucleus that's causing the cancer, it's the cytoplasm. And what is the cytoplasm? Well, the cytoplasm contains the mitochondria. The mitochondria is the energy system. So, this whole theory about DNA should have been pretty much debunked. >> I would >> Right. And it just again is example of how and I interviewed Robert Weinberg when I was writing the book, who's considered one of the most premier cancer researchers in the world. He's MIT. And I asked him if he'd heard of those experiments, and he said, "No." And so, I described them to them. And said, "Can I send you those?" He said, "No, I don't want to see them." And he he goes, "If they were important, somebody else would have discovered it by now." >> Yikes. >> So, you see the you see the issue. It's just things can become so sort of what people up here to be settled. And you got to remember that most researchers research science research has become so niche that like you can spend I know scientists spend 10 years characterizing one protein. So, they're all in their own little silos and there really isn't a cancer like physical you know, physics has theory. Uh you know, theoretical branches. There's no theoretical branch in cancer biology. There's That's where where where writing the book and sort of act putting on the kind of the investigative journalist hat and interviewing, reading everything on both sides, you kind of get an image a picture of why this could occur at this level. >> I [clears throat] mean, >> [laughter] >> I I get it because if you built your whole life and whole career studying one particular mechanism and there's super strong evidence that the entire your entire career and all of your expertise is not pointing in the right direction. >> Right. >> That's intense, but also like if you really have a scientific mind, you're going to want to know that. >> Yeah. >> You know, you should be constantly trying to disprove yourself at every possible opportunity so that you can course correct and use your cognitive power and your resources to actually point yourself in the right direction. But this is one of the you know, human failings. It's difficult. I mean, whether you're an Egyptologist and someone like Graham Hancock's being like, "Yo, Ramses didn't build these pyramids." And then you [ __ ] storm out of the storm out of the room cuz you don't want to hear it cuz you studied everything based on a certain principle. We see this replicated in multiple different fields. >> Yeah. >> And but this is I mean, this is really profound and there's there's human lives at stake. You know, like this is not this is not some like all right, if the pyramids were 12,000 years old versus 4,000 years old like all All you know, Jerry and and Ashley go into the store on next Wednesday. It doesn't matter to them. You know, but it could matter. You know, everybody's had somebody in their life that's been touched by cancer. This is a big deal. And even when you, you know, when I first read your book, I was like, "Oh, this book's going to just fly around the world and everybody's going to get it." People haven't still haven't heard about it. It's like there's people shouting shouting about this information all the way back to Warburg and very few people are paying attention. Even when I was doing some cursory research, you know, with AI about Warburg's the Warburg effect and Warburg theory, and we'll talk about Ivermectin's role in that coming up cuz there's some other interesting things to discuss. It actually said in AI that if you ask most oncologists about the Warburg effect, they won't be able to tell you what it is. >> Oh, really? >> And and that was just what AI said. >> Yeah. >> And I was like, "Whoa." >> Yeah. >> It's kind of it's just almost information. >> Every day. Right? Because a PET scan is radio labeled glucose. >> So, it's like it's right in front of their eyes. That they're actually they're actually they're actually looking at the glucose fermentation, but not actually paying attention >> Yeah. >> to that mechanism and then extrapolating again, looking at this study in the in the mice that was showing that it's the cytoplasm which contains the mitochondria. So, it's some issue with the mitochondria that's actually causing the cancer or not causing the cancer, and then directing all of the treatment modalities toward restoring and rehabilitating the mitochondria. And this is where you get a whole different mindset about cancer entirely. Instead of a war on cancer, you got to kill these things. Well, it's like, "Okay, maybe these cells are sick." >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Maybe they're sick. And what do you do with a sick patient? It's not a war on sick patients. You're not going into the children's hospital and saying like, "A war on the kids." >> No. No, you're trying to heal the kids. You're trying to actually restore health and restore vitality. And if you look at the mitochondria like little sick patients, tiny little microscopic sick patients, okay, well, what can we do to support you, little buddy? >> Yeah. >> You know, like how do we get you strong so that you're confident that you can draw in oxygen and produce energy the way that you were actually born to do. >> Yeah. Yeah, it presents a whole different treatment approach, right? Right. Um And the first sort of low-hanging fruit of that is, okay, these cells are fermenting glucose as fast as they can. They're just shoving it down their system. Um to fuel themselves and carry out all their operations. Um so you What's So this idea of using fasting or ketogenic diet to restrict that fuel, right? It seems very simple and obvious. Um and the data on that is pretty is very interesting. Um Walter Longo at UCLA showed if And so let me just set the stage here. So you have a cancer cell that's using glucose and its mitochondria are not working correctly. Um So when you restrict that, it's struggling to survive. It's put under stress. And also there's an insulin component. When you're restricting carbohydrates by fasting or ketogenic diet, cancer cells have 10 times the number of insulin receptors on their surface as normal cells. So that's a powerful growth signal that you're taking away. >> Because they need they need all of that sugar to come in. Insulin was actually what converts the converts the sugar into utilize glycogen. >> Exactly, right. While a healthy cell has no problem making that transition, the mitochondria are happy to burn ketone bodies, which are the alternate fuel for sugar when you're in the fasted state. Um so you create this differential where the healthy cells are made more robust and the cancer cells are put under stress. And what he showed again, this was a clinical trial. He had a really hard time kicking off cuz he asked the patients to fast 72 to 140 8 hours before the chemotherapy was administered. And oncologists were didn't want to do it. You you know, that the sort of the ethos with that is they're already sick and weak. You we don't want to make them weaker. So they want to feed them. And if you go into a lot of oncologists' offices, there's donuts. And you know, they want them to eat. So he had a hard, you know, the doctors didn't want to He finally convinced them to do it. When they did it, what they found was a huge reduction in and they weren't looking for end points at this time, but they were looking at side effects. Huge reduction in chemotherapy side effects. And the objective ones you can measure, the number times you threw up went from a I can't remember how many a day on average to zero. Less hair falling out. Less mouth sores. So that's interesting in itself. And now he's done more work on a fasting mimicking diet, which is just sort of this very scant diet to limp people through, you know, in the fasting state. >> Restricted ketogenic diet. So 80% of your 80% of your calories from fat, you know, and then like 10% protein and fiber. >> Yeah, as long as you're in that metabolic state of burning ketones. Um and they're starting to see, you know, the outcomes are much better. So these cancer cells, when you do come in with chemotherapy, when they're already weak, they're dying quicker. So it's a very interesting, you know, that and that's the low-hanging fruit. You're right. So and when you present cancer as a metabolic epigenetic disease, you don't necessarily have to kill the cancer cell. You can sort of try to have some sort of dialogue will revert you back to behaving normally. And and we know, you know, this is another thing is people when you look at the tissue around tumors, they can have those mutations. And there's people we could have them, right? We probably do have them, cancer-causing mutations, but those cells don't turn cancerous. So it's not this fixed disease by genetic mutation. So, main you know, and there's epigenetic drugs now they're being developed they're sort of act like a dialogue to tell the cell to start behaving normally. >> Mhm. >> So, for anybody who's fasted for you know, you got to fast for about 3 days usually to get in in ketosis or if you're already kind of ketogenic adapted, >> Mhm. >> you can just switch over to ketogenic diet and start to feel the ketones come in. But, for a little while you get tired because your body's used to utilizing sugar >> Yeah. >> to actually produce energy. Even you know, healthy cells are still using sugar to actually help produce energy. And then once you switch over to the ketone system, you feel incredible. Like the mental clarity, the energy even fasted for 3 days you're like, "Wow, I feel really, really good." So, it's making the healthy cells more robust and kind of cleaning out a lot of different mechanisms. So, when you're doing this while you have cancer, yeah, it might be a little bit of a hump to get over while you're switching over and your cells are kind of starved of any energy whatsoever. But, once you get over that hump and you're into ketosis, then the healthy cells are stronger and the cancer cells are literally starving. You know, and so you're making your normal cells more robust and then you're starving these cancer cells of their fuel source. And again, I mean it is subtly a war analogy. It's like, "All right, do we want to kill all the soldiers or do we just want to make them so hungry that they lose their lose their will to fight?" >> Yeah. >> You know, and like >> Scorched earth. >> Exactly. Exactly. So, I mean this is this is incredibly profound and I think both anecdotally and also there's some additional research that this is a highly effective treatment on its own. But, then there's other things that you can do to support the mitochondria as well and that was kind of this two-pronged approach that you had. One, restricted ketogenic diet or fasting >> Mhm. >> to get [clears throat] yourself into ketosis and then you had another practice that you identified that could also really help support the mitochondria. >> Talk about H bot? >> Yep. >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting, too. That was Dominic D'Agostino that showed and then that that hits to the, you know, cancer biology. These cells are are they're sick cells, like you said. And so when you look at a cancer cell, it's spilling out what we call ROS, reactive oxygen species, more than healthy cells, a lot more. So they're always on this knife's edge of trying to survive this sort of oxidative insult that they're producing internally. And James Watson wrote a paper in 2012, which he called his most important paper since the double helix. It was called Oxidants, Antioxidants, and the Incurability of Metastatic Cancer. And the sort of the thrust of that paper was the way we need to kill cancer is applying oxidative stress cuz these cells are on that knife's edge. And chemotherapy does that. Radiation by definition is an oxidative insult. It creates ionizing radiation in the cell. Um so that sort of therapy where you put if you're in a fasted state or a ketogenic diet, the cancer cells are put under this stress, then you can add in these subtle not not you know, it's been shown in mice, too, that when you add in radiation, it works much better when the mice are in a ketogenic state. But sort of subtle things like an H bot, where you're adding oxidative stress. >> Hyperbaric oxygen therapy. >> Hyperbaric oxygen, um high-dose vitamin C does the same thing. And that was kind of laughed at um until a recent paper came out in pancreatic cancer that showed about a doubling in survival. So what interests me the most is the stacking of those with these subtle healthy sort of oxidative stresses to the to the body. >> Mhm. >> How far could you get, you know? >> Yeah. >> Mhm. >> So get into a ketogenic diet, go into hyperbaric oxygen, which is putting you in atmospheric pressure of oxygen, so that you're actually breathing in more oxygen. I'm sure, you know, doing regular breathwork like the Wim Hof method and different other, you know, type of type of breathing practices can help put you in this state. But, getting hyperoxygenated, high-dose vitamin C, all of these things, the cancer cells are more vulnerable because of part of the mechanism by which they're actually producing energy is causing these vulnerabilities >> Yeah. >> as well, which are being exploited, yes, by the radiation, yes, by the chemotherapy, but there's other ways to exploit them that are not so [ __ ] toxic, that aren't derived originally from mustard gas. >> that, you're you're killing your immune system, right? So, you might you're killing cancer cells, for sure, but you're destroying your your body. And what you hope is during these therapies, you're when cancer cells are dying, they're exposing what we call they're called epitopes. So, they're the difference between the cancer cell and the healthy cell that the immune system can latch onto, right? And if your immune system's gone from chemotherapy, you're not going to be able to do that. And and like you talked about, some of these repurposed drugs like ivermectin, mebendazole, fenbendazole, whole classes of drugs like beta blockers, um ACE inhibitors can be used as tools to All those have been shown to pretty profound degrees that they have anti-cancer abilities along those same mechanisms with minimal toxicity. >> So, let's talk about that a little bit because that was the study that kind of got a lot of attention, especially in the kind of more Maha related. I think actually Dr. Peter McCullough um was uh yeah, Peter McCullough was actually a part of this prospecting observational cohort of 197 cancer patients were prescribed ivermectin and mebendazole off-label. And they saw some pretty incredible results. That was even picked up by Fox News and and again, this is an observational study. So this doesn't have the double blind controls and everything that a normal like a proper study would require >> Yeah. >> to really make you know, make huge waves, but it showed some pretty profound results. And when I was looking at the mechanism of action, the first thing that came up was this is targeting the Warburg effect. And I was like, ah, perfect. I'm about to do a podcast with Travis and then he's going to explain, you know, some of the mechanism of action that these drugs might be working on to actually enhance the ability um to one starve starve those cancer cells which are fermenting sugar of their fuel supply. And that may be accounting for the efficacy that's being pointed to >> Yeah. >> by this recent study. >> I'm glad you said that. Yeah, the study it was all based on self reporting. You you can't that this level you can't you know, put a yardstick to what they're measuring. Um with that type of study, but what you look for are clues like a detective, you know, and there's enough clues with these medications that they need to be explored further preclinically. Um anecdotally in people. And yeah, the the And so with these with these compounds what you what I think people need to know the pharmacology with small molecule drugs is they're these small planar molecules and think of it like an engine like so all these drugs inhibit cellular processes. So think of an engine and you have a gear that you want to inhibit. So the chemist designs a ball bearing that'll fit in that gear. So you throw them into the engine block and it binds up that gear and inhibits its motion, but it's also going to fall into the pulleys and nooks and crannies of other processes in the engine inhibit them inadvertently. And so typically those are called off-target, off-label effects, and typically, they're side effects, you know, deleterious process. However, they also inhibit things that are part of other disease processes. On average, about 6 to 10 per small molecule, 6 to 10 relevant cellular pathways are inhibited. So, a lot of these drugs have one indication by the FDA. >> Anti-parasite. But, they're doing a lot of other things, and those aren't un cloaked until the drug's been in the clinic for a long time. The best case in point is Metformin. It is it's FDA approved for type 2 diabetes. Um it lowers blood sugar. What they noticed when it had been in the clinic for like 10 years that the diabetics on Metformin were getting cancer at rates below the general healthy population. And diabetics typically have a much higher cancer rate. So, that was an epiphany for a lot of scientists. Um uh Lewis Cantley at at Cornell said Metformin may have already saved more people from cancer death than any drug in history, inadvertently. So, there's a tremendous opportunity with these drugs that isn't uncloaked until later. However, by that time, they're usually generics. So, now there's no financial incentive to do the trials for these new indications. So, that's where we're stuck, >> Mhm. >> and but we just talked about I think it's Florida that's uh got the 125 million to do these type of trials, and I think their first one is Ivermectin in combination with fasting. >> Yep. >> And, you know, I mean, just to just to think about that, like our government spends so much we waste so much money. >> Oh god. >> And this is why the people, you know, who are upset for whatever reason that Nick Shurly is exposing these hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud. Well, maybe that 100 million dollars, let's just not look at like, oh, it's just whatever, It goes over here." What if we actually repurposed all this waste towards studying these things that the capitalist market has no incentive to study? If you're Pfizer, or if you're, you know, one of these big companies, why are you going to study something you can't make money off of? So, that's where the government actually has to step in for the good of the people and fund these studies that could actually change the game. But, there's no financial incentive. And part of the problem is is that through the lobby mechanism and through the ways that politicians are influenced by these large corporations, you know, in Big Pharma, Big Ag, whichever category, all of the sudden there's this collusion between politics and our government and the corporations themselves. So, there's not only not a financial incentive for the corporations, there's also a, you know, pressure applied to not study these other things because it might undermine an entire suite of drugs that are targeting a different mechanism with minimal effects and massive side effects, but whatever, it's the best the best that we have out there. And there's just this constant cash cow that exists. But, if we actually pivoted towards, you know, allowing our government to utilize its resources in a positive way, then we could study something like Ivermectin, which, you know, and when I was looking at the, you know, I was looking at the mechanism of action of it. So, it was inhibiting. So, what Ivermectin does, according to AI, is it inhibits the GLUT1 the GLUT1 pathway and also the hexokinase two pathways, which are both involved in what the cancer cells would be utilizing to actually utilize the sugar to produce their energy. But, it's actually inhibiting both of those. So, and again, this isn't the this isn't directly linked to the antiparasitic effect. This is one of those six or seven other small molecule effects that happen from this drug. This is designed to do one thing, but it's actually, you know, blocking GLUT1 and and hexokinase 2. So, explain what GLUT1 and hexokinase 2 are and if that is what is actually causing, you know, the reason why ivermectin's effective, you know, we got to remove the parasite effect and just look at, okay, it's actually doing this very precise thing to these two different pathways. >> Yeah. Remind me hexokinase 2. We'll start with GLUT1. >> Mhm. >> Um so, the cell, when you eat carbo- a carbohydrate meal, your pancreas will release insulin. As your blood sugar goes up, we'll release insulin to draw the blood the glucose in the blood into the cells. And the way it does that is it translocates GLUT1 from the cytoplasm to the to the cell membrane, so glucose can get shuttled in. Um cancer cells are just replete with with GLUT1, GLUT4, I believe, too. So, they're just sugar is just shoveled in, right? >> The other So, the part of that with insulin that's really interesting is insulin um has got There's two sort of There's another insulin-like molecule called IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor 1. And so, when you release growth hormone, it's not growth hormone that's telling your cells to divide. It ramps up IGF-1, and that is the effector. It tells your cells to divide. So, it's a very pro-growth hormone. Um there's a hybrid receptor that can bind both IGF-1 and insulin. So, that's important. Um there's a group of there's a group of people with something called Laron syndrome. So, they have a mutation in the IGF-1 receptor. So, they don't respond IGF-1, so they have dwarfism. There's a population in the Ecuadorian mountains, like 300 and some people with Laron syndrome. Um so, they go into study them, and they're almost completely immune to type 2 diabetes and cancer. They don't get it. Despite the terrible lifestyle, high rates of alcoholism, smoking, terrible diet. That's a huge clue. Right? So, lowering that insulin or that response um is a very protective effect against cancer. And that's one of the thing if you're on a keto fasting ketogenic diet, you're dramatically reducing insulin, so you're you know, reducing that hybrid receptor signal. >> Mhm. >> Um and yeah, the drugs if they're reducing any sort of glucose access to glucose, so that's the those pathways are going to be hit. The hexokinase 2, that one's fascinating. Now, that is also sort of the poster child for this difference between the mutation theory and this metabolic epigenetic theory of cancer. So, what happens in the body during evolution is you have all these genes and the body can accidentally duplicate a gene, so now you have two copies. So, this gives a canvas for evolution to act on and slightly change one gene for a different function. So, your body has four isozymes of hexokinase, one through four. And think of them like tires, so like tires all have one function, so that the car can roll, but you can have snow tires, you can have street tires, mud tires, so they have slightly different functionality. So, cancer cells, when you're healthy, you're you're mostly producing hexokinase 1. Hexokinase 1 is able to respond to something called product inhibition. When gluco it catalyzes the first step of glycolysis, so you go from glucose to glucose-6-phosphate. And hexokinase 1, when glucose-6-phosphate builds up, you it sends a signal for that enzyme to slow down. So, the amount of glucose is regulated being burnt. Cancer cells will shift to hexokinase 2, which doesn't have that product inhibition, so it just shovels it down. >> Mhm. >> So, that's a perfectly non-mutated gene functioning [snorts] for cancer. It's an epigenetic shift. >> Mhm. >> And so that is a hugely important target. If you can hit hexokinase 2, and yeah, after you sent me that, I looked it up. And it's also the azoles, so fenbendazole, mebendazole, and al- albendazole, I think it is. They bind hexo- they can hit inhibit hexokinase 2, and it turns out fenbendazole is the rock star at that. >> Mhm. Interesting. Interesting. So, I mean, I guess again to use this in a simplistic metaphor, hexokinase 1 gets a little bit of sugar into the cell. So, it's like, you know, having a spatula full of, you know, getting like if you had a pile of sugar, you know, it's a giant sand pile of sugar, and you're trying to get some sugar in the cell using a spatula >> Yeah. >> to get a little bit in, and then hexokinase 2 is like, "Okay, let's pull a tractor over here." >> break. >> Let's pull a [ __ ] tractor. We'll get a whole load. We'll just dump all the sugar right into the cell. >> Yeah. >> But if you inhibit hexokinase 2, then you have to go back to the spatula, so you're getting way less way less sugar into the cell, which if you're this kind of sugar burning machine, which these cancer cells are, then limiting the amount of fuel that's actually coming in makes a significant effect. Then you stack that with, you know, stack that with the ketogenic diet, >> Yeah. >> and being in ketosis, again limiting the sugar, the raw supply, so the sand pile itself is less, cuz you have less sugar in your body, actually. And then start applying the other pressures, you know, like the pressures like creating the oxidative stress from hyperbaric oxygen, hyperoxygenation breathing, you know, high-dose vitamin C, and there's probably a whole host of other effects. And then if you just look at purely the mitochondrial health, well, then you get into cold plunging, and then you get you know, different treatments that are targeting mitochondrial health, which is which most people are pretty aware that the mitochondria are important now. You know, that conversation is alive, but I don't think a lot of people have made the connection with okay, there's a cliff here. Like yes, if you improve your mitochondrial function, you're going to be sharper in your mind, you're going to have more energy, you're going to have more vitality. And if it goes too far below the threshold, they may shut off entirely and then move into a different form of energy production, which is cancer. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and one other the importance of hexokinase 2, there's a pathway that branches off that glucose-6-phosphate. So glucose gluco- glucose-6-phosphate, then that goes through another called the pentose phosphate pathway to manufacture glutathione. So that's the cell's master antioxidant, right? So if you're inhibiting hexokinase 2, again, those cancer cells have too much free radicals, too much reactive oxygen species, so they have to manufacture glutathione as fast as they can to survive. So when you're inhibiting that, you're also setting those cells up to die those mechanisms we're talking about, those oxidative therapies. >> Mhm. >> So that's an important and the the you know, the fascinating thing about this so beta-hydroxybutyrate, that's a primary ketone body when you're fasting or eating a ketogenic diet that your body's replacing sugar with, it's got it's just an incredible amount of effects, important effects in the body. Number one, it's a a very it's a more thermodynamically rich fuel. So the energy per carbon unit is higher than glucose. So when you're burning that, you you set the stage in the cell that every metabolic process is driven more to completion. So you are manufacturing way more glutathione in those healthy cells when they're burning ketone bodies than when they're burning sugar. That's why they're able to resist those toxic effects of chemotherapy. Um I was just listening to your buddy um Joe Rogan, he had before I came here on my headphones, he was had had Gary Nolan on. He's an immunologist from Stanford and he was talking about there was a big study where, you know, CT scans give you a huge dose of radiation and the study showed that a lot of those increases the probability of cancer. A lot of those people get He goes, "I wish there was a way that you could give somebody that'd be protective before they went to CT scan, but there's no known way." And and the way antioxidants work is yeah, you can consume them but they have to be recycled. They can take a free electron but then they have to be recycled back. And the only way to do that is increase the thermodynamic potency of the fuel and manufacture more glutathione. The only known way to do that is to burn beta-hydroxybutyrate. So there is an antidote. And I I'd scream at the headphones like, "Oh, it's beta-hydroxybutyrate." Yeah. And the data on that, Aubrey, is incredible. They they showed in cells you can blast them with a dose of radiation when you give them BHB, the DNA breaks DNA damage is reduced by 50%. There was another study that's unpublished that a friend told me about where they did what's called a mice mouse study where they zapped them with an LD70 dose of radiation, meaning a lethal dose where 70% of the mice die. When they gave them a I think it was a ketone ester, none of them died. So Richard Veech, who is the founder of you know, the studied He got his PhD under Hans Krebs, another Nobel Prize winner. He's sort of the godfather of ketone bodies and ketosis. He thought the government should stockpile that for radiation accidents. It's that potent. And so there is a way and maybe you can tell. >> [laughter] >> Well, for sure. And also, you know, my supplement company that I started post on it, correct? I mean, one of our two key formulas is Correct Fuel and that has BHB and also components in it that stimulate endogenous production. So it's got exogenous BHB which is the ketones that are readily readily available and also stimulates endogenous production of ketones as well. So, with the you know, electrolytes etc. So, you can just mix it in your water and have both exogenous ketones and the endogenous production. And that to me is like kind of the holy grail of what we're looking for here is cuz we want the body to produce its own ketones. And sometimes we need additional ketones because that's a a great fuel source and also really helps with that curve, you know, as you're switching over from you know, using glucose to actually using ketones. There's this kind of what they call the keto flu. And that's that that period in between. But if you're supporting yourself and still supporting the body's production. So, that was one of the reasons I was so excited about that formula. And you know, there's a lot of different interesting things. And not to talk about the things that I'm involved with, but I'm involved with them because I believe they're important. And it was one of the things that attracted me to this biotech incubator company in Canada. Tickers MVMD. And I became a big investor because one of their IP portfolios was they have the IP for the only water-soluble ivermectin. So, right now ivermectin is only available as an oral tablet. You go to the hospital like, you know, my wife was just in the hospital. She got a C-section. And they had some indications of white blood cell counts and bands that were elevated. So, they were treating her for an infection. Well, they didn't give her pills. They put it in an IV cuz it's more effective. The body takes it up in a much more effective rate. I think, you know, and so this company MVMD has the patent on water-soluble ivermectin to use intravenously and also a sublingual application through another technology they have that makes desiccated liposomal kind of delivery mechanisms for sublingual absorption to increase the efficacy of ivermectin. And of course, they were looking at it for COVID. They ran into all kinds of [ __ ] static for that cuz that was when COVID was a horse dewormer drug and whatever. So, they got smashed by the empire. But ultimately, as these cancer studies started to come out, I was like, "Holy [ __ ] they may be sitting on something that could take this drug that people are overlooking." But also, you know, there's they have IP around this particular delivery mechanism. So, there's commercial viability. Which I just feel like they just need to get in touch with the people, maybe the people in Florida who are running that governmental study or maybe any other enterprising entrepreneurial biotechs person who wants to go take this, you know, cuz they have several other IP platforms that they're pursuing actively. They're in commercialization. So, they don't have the resources or time to run this all the way through to get their 505b designation and and all that. But if somebody wants to take this and really study ivermectin, like holler. Holler at them. You know, again, I'm an investor, so I am biased in this, but I also fundamentally have believed in ivermectin, used ivermectin since I since the COVID days and I'm just like sitting there going like, "Holy shit." You know, like as we become aware of what's possible, they're sitting on a on a goldmine that everybody's ignoring. >> Yeah. That That The problem with a lot of those drugs is bioavailability. And that's always A lot of the times they impact to get the levels in the body necessary to have that effect. So, anyway, you can find a way around that. The other thing you'll find interesting is So, the most advanced, like technologically sophisticated immunotherapy is called CAR-T therapy. Where they take your T cells out and re-engineer them to fight cancer in in a lab and then re-inject them back in the body. And um costs about 250,000 to do that. Extremely expensive, you know, sophisticated immunotherapy. And the the guys that developed it at Penn State were just curious. You know, you're learning all these things about immunology because of these immunotherapies like the influence of the gut microbiome on how the the immunotherapies, you know, their their ability to work. Um influence of diet, influence of vitamin status, time of day. You know, if you're And this is one that that drives me crazy. There's been two beautiful studies that show when you give immunotherapy in the morning versus afternoon, you get I think it's a 60% increase in the response rate. So, it's huge. And it's because you know, your body's flooded with completely different hormones due to the circadian rhythm in the morning versus the afternoon. So, they're teasing out all these important variables um with these immunotherapies, but this these guys at Penn State that developed CAR-T just asked the question, "I wonder if diet would influence efficacy of CAR-T." And so, they had five diets in a trial with mice. Um one of them is a ketogenic diet. And for >> can get into ketosis? >> Yep. Yeah, yeah. So, they put the mice in ketosis in the CAR-T therapy. >> they do love cheese, I suppose. >> [laughter] >> But it just ripped. The tumor just melted away. So, now it's in a phase one trial with I think it's the HVMN ketone product. >> Mhm. >> So, I thought that was a beautiful sort of, you know, the most sophisticated with this ancient molecule that's a highly immunomodulating in trial together. So, but you see that I mean, the late studies have been coming out in the immune system and how just dramatically it affects the immune system as well. And ivermectin does that, too. It's a you know, documented boosts the immune system. >> Right. And and whatever. You know, I think there's a parasitic load that we all carry, too. You know, and actually and there's nobody argues with ivermectin's antiparasitic qualities. >> Mhm. >> But we're carrying a parasitic load. >> I mean, I think one of six people on have parasites? Probably half. >> probably enough parasites to be measurable, but I think it's probably a gradient. >> Yeah. >> You know, like how many parasites do you have? You know, I think that's really the question. It's like how much candida do you have? Like we always have we have a little bit, and that's different. It's a It's a fungus. >> Yeah. >> And I think it's just also being aware of also how this works in an interconnected system. You know, I mean, one of the things these parasites do is, as far as I understand it, as well as candida, which when they're overgrown, it's a huge problem. >> Yeah. >> But one of their functions in the body is they actually sequester a lot of heavy metals and toxins inside of them. So it actually keeps them from being free floating in the bloodstream. >> Mhm. >> So one of the challenges when you go through a really deep cleanse, where you're cleansing yeast and you're cleansing parasites, is these things die, and then they release all of these heavy metals and other toxins that they've been holding, and then that causes what's called the Herxheimer effect, which is this kind of strong reaction that you get when you're actually in a cleanse. Well, all right. Well, what are you doing to that? Are you taking some kind of, you know, clay, or taking some whatever kind of binders that are soaking up what's free floating, charcoal, you know, activated charcoal, super cheap stuff >> Yeah, yeah. >> that you can get. But just it's just paying attention to little things and looking at an interconnected system. And then instead of looking for one magic bullet, let's look for a whole campaign. >> Totally. >> You know, like >> 100%. >> Let's do a holistic campaign. Let's Let's cut off their resources. Let's, you know, let's put pressure on them here. Let's rehabilitate Let's rehabilitate them. Convince them that they're they're all fighting on the same team anyways, you know? And it It's like it we have this very singular mindset. That's a That's a problem. And part of the way that studies are designed, you don't want conflating variables. So it's difficult to get these studies that are testing multiple things at a time, because they want to isolate that one thing and ultimately monetize that one thing. But if we had like the and again, this is where the government can step in and really design a study that's like, all right, we're going to put all of the best research together in one thing and let's really test the efficacy of all of it. >> The immune the the gut so you can when you give mice immunotherapy um the ones that respond, you can do a fecal transplant from the responders to the non-responders and get a response. So that gut microbiome, you know, is critically important for so much. And who's going to fund that study? You know, that's got to be a non-profit or a government to do something like that. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, we talked I mean, it was a long time ago. We talked about fecal transplants and it's pretty remarkable. Like you do a fecal transplant of a of a really sluggish mouse and you get a really healthy active mouse like an overweight sluggish mouse, you put the healthy feces from the active strong mouse into the sluggish mouse and the mouse all of a sudden changes. >> Yeah. >> You know, and then you reverse it. You know, and you put the sluggish mouse feces in the in the healthy mouse and they get sluggish. Like there's a dramatic effect that happens that's beyond just the it's been isolated for C. diff and you can't even you can't even run this procedure at all. You can't even do it off-label. They have like the most controls on this. Unless you have C. diff. And they actually have they actually I think they have enteric-coated tablets now that actually are like, you know, they extract all the bacteria from healthy feces and they study it and they analyze it and they make sure there's no parasites and all that and they put it in enteric-coated tablet which means that it doesn't release until it gets into the large intestine. >> Yep. >> And it's like it's available already and then the downstream effects for treatments of depression, treatments of all of these other things like we're not even looking at that. And again, it's this it's this known science. You know, we have right here. >> Yeah. >> Then we have this whole [ __ ] industry that's pumping out SSRIs and all of these other drugs and making billions of dollars on something that doesn't really work. >> No. >> You know, are we less depressed since the development of SSRIs? No. Not even [ __ ] close. And of course, there's environmental causes for that, but it's not working. >> Yeah. >> You know, our treatment is not working. And I just wrote a Substack talking about the active placebo hypothesis. We could go into that if we wanted. But there's found treatments that are already that already exist. They exist for cancer treatment. They exist for depression. They exist for like a lot of different conditions, but we're just not looking there. >> Yeah. >> the frustrating that's the frustrating part. >> Yeah. Yeah, how do you monetize it? How does who who's got the incentive to do those to do that work? >> I I also think like, you know, there's a lot of blood treatment options that are available. Whether it's stem cells, whether it's plasma, whether it's a lot of these things. We're kind of we're savvy now that if you take somebody's healthy blood and you spin it up and you isolate the cells. Well, part of the problem that we're in now is that so much blood has been contaminated by these different, you know, RNA therapies that we called vaccines, which are no longer allowed to be called vaccines as far as I understand, but there's contaminants in the blood. But in also contaminants in the feces from all of the pesticides and stuff, but really like the beautiful thing that I see is those people who've lived a really clean life, they're sitting on they're literally [ __ ] out gold. >> [laughter] >> Well, they have the the poop banks, right? Where they >> Yeah, exactly. Like, if so, if you're just like, I'm living a healthy life and I'm going to produce a little extra healthy blood, a little extra healthy plasma, and a little extra healthy poop, you could just your career could be living a healthy life and just [ __ ] and donating blood like And they're going to be like, "Yeah, exactly." It's like the >> [laughter] >> the nurse the nurses in Mad Max. Like the wet nurses. But like, great. And then it incentivizes people to be healthy as [ __ ] You know, and then they can just be like, "What's your job?" I don't know. I go out and I swim you know, I swim in a waterfall and I grow my own food. And then every once in a while I go to I go to clinic and I [ __ ] in a vial and I [ __ ] draw a little blood and you know, I help the world and I live my life. >> Yeah, it's scary that you know, everything everything's affecting your gut microbiome. The drugs you take, the contaminants in the food. And And there was a great study, you know, the way I view it is it's like your body develops a truce with your gut bacteria. And you know, we're this weird hybrid organism. We have more bacteria in our bodies than cells. Um But the truce So So most of those are not beneficial and can be like the candida, right? Can overgrow. I don't know if you read Rob Wolf's he just tweeted on that where he was feeling horrible. And they finally did a he had two parasites and was just overgrown with candida and feeling like [ __ ] for for over a year. Um But the immune system can >> Well, and just to comment on that, I had candida issues as well and one of the problems is you feel like you're hungover. Like I felt like I was constantly hungover and then I looked at what candida does. It's basically a little acetaldehyde factory. Yeah, so it creates acetaldehyde which is one of the things that happens when you're hungover. It's it is actually like you're constantly living in a state where you feel hungover cuz it's producing the same thing that it going on a bender produces the following day. >> There was a guy that had an overgrowth of the yeast that ferments alcohol. I think he was in the UK and they he finally they finally isolated and he was drunk. I mean everything he was eating was getting fermented in his gut and producing alcohol. So, he just had a brewery in his gut. But but you're you know as you a young immune system can can harvest can can direct the microbiome in the gut towards the non-pathogenic healthy species and it's doing this every day. As you get older you start to lose your immune system starts to decline you get immunosenescence, right? So, just your function your immune system declines as you get older and you're less able to harvest those bad bacteria. That's been shown pretty clearly to where if you can you just have to you know keep your immune system healthy and you can do that but it's like a truce to where that those bad guys are always in there but they're being kept in check by the immune system. Once you start throwing you know heavy metals, pesticides, whatever else in there it's just it's game on. You're going to get overgrowth of certain things and yeah. >> Yeah. All right. So, in your book Cureable, which is another amazing book, you know, you really go into some of the perverse incentives that exist in our current health care system. Let's talk about what you know, currently exists in the in the current health care system and I want to ultimately get to you know, kind of your utopic vision of what health care would actually look like but let's talk about you know, we've talked specifically about a few different fields. >> Yeah. >> But the whole system itself is not really set up for human thriving. >> Yeah, we we you know, the US health care system we have remarkable innovation. We have incredible for acute care. You know, we have MRIs um bypass surgeries like the acute stuff we're really really good at. But what struck me was there's this chart on the world and data our world and data that showed uh health care spend of like 14 developed nations versus life expectancy. So, we were by far dead last. So, we spend about close to 20% of our GDP on health care and have worse outcome worse lifespan than countries that are spending about 11%. So, we're doing something very very wrong. And so, when you look at the whole health system in general, we're doing prevention wrong. You know, whatever that's education, whatever that is, there's no focus on prevention. There's a focus on the treatment of disease when it when it shows itself. And then you look at our system and there's two buckets really that where we go bad. One is over treatment and the other one is variation in treatment. So, over treatment it's estimated about 30% of all health care to spend is unnecessary. Right? You see a man with a hammer syndrome. Um and that has a cost. About 200,000 people die every year from medical error. Uh 100,000 people die from hospital-acquired infections. Um every treatment has got some risk involved. And there's extreme examples of that over treatment where again back to that our system is based on the sovereignty of of the doctor. There no nobody can tell a doctor what to do. They have that sovereign um cloak around them to where they they practice medicine the way they they want to. That's the law. So, you can get cultures developed where of massive over treatment. One of those was in Redding, California where everybody that came through that door that had even a remote um occlusion on on a scan got heart got got surgery. Um and their data look good because they're operating on younger and younger people. So, their survival rates look great and they thought they were doing the best thing in the world, but they were just massively over treating. The variation in treatment is everywhere too. Like you can show between two towns in Ohio like you're 90% more likely to get a stent in one town than the other. The back surgeries in Washington and the number of surgeons in the county determines how many back surgeries are dispensed, not the need. Right? So, any any medical treatment that's got kind of a is surrounded is is not certain based on a clinician's judgment, you get over the the the the surgeon will cut if he's there, right? So, those are the two biggest problems. And and the how do you So, how do you focus on prevention over a the need of acute treatment when when disease present prevents itself? And that's I don't know how I don't know what the answer to that is, but there are examples of how health care should be done. Like Intermountain Health as one. And largely it's because of a guy named Brent James. He was a biostatistician who looked in the EMR, electronic medical records of Intermountain. Whenever there's variation in treatment, he would ask the question, "What's the optimal treatment?" So, you usually give an antibiotics before surgery to prevent surgical infections. Some doctors will give it 48 hours before, some right before, some 24 to 48 hours after. So, the question is when the right time. They showed through the EMR that it's right before surgery, you cut surgical infections by a lot. And every single procedure where he'd see a variation in treatment, they would do that. And they pay their doctors a salary. So, they're not incentivized like fee for service. Every time they do a procedure, they get paid. They just dispense the best health care they can. They're going to get a salary for it. >> Mhm. >> Um if you did those two things alone, you would cut the health care spend in this country by 44%. And we have those examples. Kaiser, um Intermountain, Geisinger in Pennsylvania, they do that. They do that system like that where you know, where I live, a community hospital system where the doctors are gods and it's all fee for service, you're just going to get massive over-treatment. >> Yeah, I was I mean, again, this is just a personal experience cuz I was just there a week ago. So, I'm in the hospital with and the first of all, her C-section was it was like a symphony. It was a symphony of competence. It was so slick, so fast, so so precise. It was I mean, and I watched the whole thing. I don't have a queasy stomach. So, although it's intense to see your wife split open and, you know, the baby get pulled out, etc. like it didn't really affect me. So, I was watching it and it was it was unbelievable to see how good they were, how how they worked in concert. It was like I imagine you could see the same thing if you saw a high-level Navy SEAL team clearing a clearing a house, you know, it's like everybody knew their role. Their communication was precise. Everything they were doing was precise. Beautiful. >> Yeah. >> And so, that's again what we do as well as anybody in the world. You know, we're really experts at that level of of care. And then, all right, so baby's healthy and I established early on that whatever treatments, you know, that are going to happen, they need to be discussed. And the the hospital I was really happy with them that it it was Ascension Seton in in in Hays. And mad props to them cuz they really respected that. So, they wouldn't do anything cuz I didn't want them to do anything to, you know, our daughter Huxley. I didn't want them to do anything with V without at least talking to us about it. So, they're testing V. So, then V is recovering and she's on, you know, heavy painkillers after the, you know, after the C-section, also going through the, you know, flushing the anesthetic out of her system and the epidural that they used and everything. And they're testing her blood pressure. And her blood pressure is low. Well, V historically, you know, we get IV treatments and so, her blood pressure's traditionally lower than average and that's data that they don't have. And she's also been pretty much catatonic. She's just been lying on her back in bed. So, of course, her blood sugar's going to be low. So, they bring in some doctors from the ICU and they're saying, "Look, you you Vilana's blood pressure's a little low. It's like 80 over 40. We need to take her to the ICU to give her these and they told me which drugs, incredibly strong drugs to raise her blood pressure. >> Right. >> And I was like, all right, like I hear you. And give us come back in 90 minutes. And if we haven't addressed the situation then we'll consider that option. >> Right. >> And then over that 90 minutes we started laughing, we got her like kind of moving and awake and like drinking some more fluids and having a tea and and then they tested her blood sugar blood pressure again and it was fine. >> Yeah. >> And that would have been a massive intervention >> Yeah. >> you know, 4 hours in the ICU, intense drugs, full monitoring, all of the different things. I don't know what they would have billed our insurance for, but it would have been something significant and it was really unnecessary. But I also understand that a hospital is trying to do everything it can just to keep you alive. >> Right. >> And they're not really worried about the downstream side effects. It's like, if they can keep you alive they will. And somewhere hidden underneath that this is revenue. >> And it's also liability, right? >> Yeah, it's both. It's the carrot and the stick. >> and they didn't do that, right, even though you probably, you know, 90 minutes you're able to reverse it they could have been on the hook if something bad happened. So it's also that liability. >> And that's and that's kind of the situation especially with our kind of litigious you know, culture as well. So they have the carrot which is the increased revenue and the stick which is the liability of getting sued for malpractice. >> Yeah. >> So I I mean I have I respect with the position that they're in and I think we just need to actually evaluate and and look at these other examples that are working really well and then make these make these shifts. >> You're own best dog. You got to be paying attention. >> Yeah. >> You know, to everything that's going on. Um Charlie Munger the the former director of Berkshire Hathaway, he he I love that guy. He's just brilliant guy, but he he would cross off the PSA test on his doctor's form every time. You know, he's 80s, 90s. And then he'd say, "Why are you crossing this off, Charlie? It's it's the the biomarker we have for prostate cancer." He goes, "I don't want to give you an opportunity to do anything stupid." Because if you get diagnosed with prostate cancer from a PSA, there it's really not clear what to do. So, they'll present you with five options typically. Um watch and wait, which is a very slow-growing cancer, especially when you're older, you're more likely to die from something else. Um surgery or in three different forms of radiation, one being proton beam, which is about $150,000 per treatment. Um So, which one do you In a fee-for-service structure, which one do you think gets pushed? The proton beam, which has never been proven to be better than watch and wait. Um so, it's it's Yeah, you're you're Every setting I've been in, you you just need to be very educated and then pay attention like you were with your situations. >> Yeah, I mean this and this is the thing. It's like it's it's very strange that we have this now politicized environment where certain ideas about the medical establishment are associated with certain political persuasions. >> It's weird, isn't it? >> And then this is also This is also interfering with people's beliefs. Like when you know, Kennedy came out and started talking about the deleterious effects, potential effects of Tylenol in pregnant women, you had a bunch of people going on TikTok and Instagram and chugging Tylenol. Some of them getting super sick. And it's like because this was like this was politicized. >> Yeah. >> And it's like what is going on? >> outsourcing your critical thinking to a tribe, >> Yeah. >> and it's one one the flaws in human hierarchy. That's the scariest thing in the planet when that happens, um you get bad stuff. You get Germany, you know, you get when you're when the population is outsourcing all their critical thinking to the ethos of a tribe. >> Mhm. Yeah, I think it's uh it's it's difficult to have a lot of confidence when you look at these examples, but at the same time then you reach out and you talk to real people and the real most people are not that radicalized. >> I agree. >> And I think there's this highlighting of the really radicalized cuz they get the most attention. >> But really actually there's a giant swath of individuals who if they have any fault at all it's just that they're a little too passive. >> Yeah. >> You know, and they're not making their voices heard like the people on the extremes are making their voices heard. But if we can actually empower like the general population to start really caring and standing for something giving give them the appropriate information, you know, and empower them to really speak, I think we're actually much closer to a healthy culture than we realize, but we it when we look when I look at social media it's like we're [ __ ] >> [laughter] >> But then when I go out and I talk to people it's like, "Oh, actually we're okay." >> Yeah, yeah. Most people are yeah, that that's my experience too is we get bombarded with the extremes. >> Mhm. >> And most people generally, you know, they just want to they just want to do their job, they want to go out to eat with their wife, they want to take care of their kids, you know, their primary focus. It just certain people just get spun up by things. >> And I think the system is kind of designed for that. I mean there's advantages that can be leveraged when people get spun up. >> Yeah. >> And when you can target those kind of tribal those deeply seated tribal motivation factors, then you get a kind of opportunity >> Yeah. >> to push your to push your policies. >> Yeah, COVID was a bizarre time for that where you had I've never seen a scientific question, you know, a pandemic be political. It was It was so bizarre and and you're just waiting for data. You're wait you're trying to figure out what's happening, what's going on and there's just voices from it became a completely political event to where it just should have been a data-driven >> Right. >> event where we're learning in real time. What do we do? How do we do this? >> And now as way more data has come out, it's also very interesting to see how few people are willing to even accept the data from once what they once believed. You know, it's like >> If it doesn't match your your whatever your your world view lens, you know, that's the confirmation bias. You're just looking for the data that confirms what you want to believe. >> And I think part of the challenge with that is the sunk cost fallacy, you know, like a lot of people not only believed this, espoused this, but then they also went through with these procedures that may have longer-term effects and so they don't want to think about what actually they've already done. >> Yeah. >> You know, so they'd rather just be in this belief bubble and think like I did the right thing. I did the right thing. Blah blah blah. I did the right thing. And you know, it's tough. It's tough to convince somebody that they made a they made a potentially harmful decision. >> Yeah. Yeah, in in general, you know, you want to be moderate with your health care. That's >> [laughter] >> It's good good advice. We were talking about earlier that the founder of Johns Hopkins said the first principle of any physician is to educate the masses not to take medication. >> [laughter] >> Which in general, I think that's probably good advice. Of course, you know, if you're dying from a infection and you need an antibiotic, you you need it, but >> Right. >> you know, antibiotics were dispensed for the common cold for a long time >> Yeah. >> with consequences. >> Yeah. >> You know, now we know, especially we didn't consider the microbiome important back then. >> Mhm. >> Now we know. >> Yeah, I mean, if we can get our bearings a little bit, I think we'll look back at this time of health care like we look back at the at the time of leeches and shock therapy and lobotomies. I mean, can you imagine? >> chemotherapy alone. It's It's That's been And radiation is well over 100 years. Cancer is still treated by these medieval antiquated things. We just haven't progressed past that. So, yeah, we will look back at a lot of this. >> Like we look at a lobotomy now, and they literally took an ice pick and just thrashed it around in the frontal lobe for different psychiatric conditions. And I think actually one of the Kennedy family had that happen to them. And we look back, and you're like, what were they thinking? But this this happened like all the way up to the '60s. I think was like the last one that >> No kidding. >> And it's like, wow, that was barbaric. >> Yeah. >> And I think we'll look at a lot of this, and we'll say like, wow, that was barbaric. >> And that's medicine, you know, it goes back, and it was so slow to progress. I mean, we talked I talked about We used to bloodlet, right? And this one guy, I can't remember his name, um but he did a small trial, people with fevers, bloodletting versus bed rest, and he's like, unequivocally bed rest was better, but bloodletting went on for another 100 years. Because it was again, it was thought it was a mystic practice. It wasn't one that lent itself to measurement. It was that ethos. And vitamin C, you know, that No one knew what caused scurvy, and hundreds of thousands people were dying from scurvy in 1700s, um till the one guy, James Lind, did a small trial on his boat, where he he had five different treatments. One was like breathing in sulfuric acid, malt, um and one was fresh citrus. And those two they had just enough to give two people a scurvy each treatment. And the guys who got scurvy got up the next day and were working. So, he wrote, "I found a cure for scurvy." >> the guys who got citrus. >> They got citrus, yeah. Um he wrote it down and they ignored it for 50 years until it became mandated on the ships to bring citrus. So, yeah, medicine has been this just notorious arc of these, you know, fits and starts and stops and forgetting things that did work. But then you go back to first principles and that's what this this pro-innovation bias, right? This this sort of tension between okay, we we're smart monkeys, we can fix anything with technology versus the [ __ ] your grandma told you. Go outside and play in the sun, right? And what we've done, you know, in our environments, artificial light. Things of that that biology's coming to light now. Um so there you know, that tension between those two, we just need to step back to those first principles. And and the again, the context we're existing in with microplastics and and we got to get better, obviously, at that. Exposing ourselves all this crap all the time. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean that there's this is a multi-pronged situation because we are faced even if you do live a healthy healthy-ish life, you're still bombarded with EMF frequencies, you're bombarded with microplastics and phytoestrogens and all of these different things which are you know, creating anomalous conditions. You know, I mean, I've I've been on testosterone replacement therapy and a lot of people like, "Why are you doing that? Don't you live a healthy life?" I'm like, "Yeah, I do." And you know, I drink water from water bottles and I drink, you know, aluminum I have aluminum cans that I drink beverages out of they're lined with plastic on the inside and all of these are phytoestrogens and for whatever reason, despite my healthy like active living, like I couldn't overcome and actually produce testosterone like a natural person would. And so these environmental stressors sometimes cause a need to actually address these. And of course, if I started way early, you know, and hopefully for our daughter we'll be able to start her on that path way early. And we're doing everything we can to the from the clothes she wears to the diapers she has, you know, using these Hero diapers that my friend Mickey Agarwal developed that actually decompose themselves cuz they're if infused with um this fungus that eats plastic, which also has some interesting implications potentially as an oral um for the microplastics, but we'll see how that ends up going. But there's innovations that exist now that can start to course correct. But I mean, I remember growing up I mean, growing up in the '80s like I was eating Tyson chicken nuggets that had a meat that was gray. >> [laughter] >> Like it wasn't even pink or like not even close. And you know, and then and if you look at what McDonald's chicken nuggets used to be, I mean, it's it's so far from chicken. You know, it's like it's a chicken adjacent. Yeah, yeah. But it like and we were just eating all that all the red dyes and everything like in Fruit Loops, you know, oh with the milk, it's colorful. It's going to be delicious. It's just a little toxic soup. >> Yeah, it's all for convenience. >> It's for convenience. >> like, you know, I remember I got from the dentist I got these fluoride pills that tasted like sugar. And they tasted so good that I remember they were like candy. So I climbed up into the I climbed up into the, you know, place where my mom would get them from and I just took the whole bottle. >> [laughter] >> Like what do you like we just didn't know better. >> We don't know better. I remember breaking a thermometer with my brother and playing with the mercury. And I remember my brother actually putting a drip on his tongue and like moving it around. We didn't know better. And our parents probably would have just said keep going, you know. >> Yeah, yeah. [laughter] Oh, wow, that's interesting, you know. >> But it's it's Benjamin Bickman's got a good phrase for that. He he it the plagues of prosperity. You know, and in the name of of convenience and civil supporting 8 billion people on the planet, you know, you you plastics as a container and things like that. But then you study like the tribes that are still isolated. They're still enough to study and and universally when you look at them, they don't suffer the two biggest cause of chronic disease, which is metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance, and and sterile inflammation. So, your immune system is not fighting a microorganism, but it's ramped up. Mhm. Right? They they don't have that. You know, they their life they're just devoid of all the crap that we're exposed to and and so they they just are more robust longer, you know, into their lifespan. Well, that's a depressing note. >> It is. And you know, but this now we have the information. And that's what's exciting, I think, for for most of us listening, it's not too late. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Whatever whatever you've put yourself through >> Yeah. >> and whatever you're dealing with, there's if you really pay attention and look at the look at the non-mainstream narratives about this and just become aware, >> Yeah. >> there's so much that exists. I mean, even going back to depression, you know, and like SSRI, so there's a depression scale. I think it's the Hamilton scale and it goes up to 50 50 points. 50 is like at the at the point you're at 50, it's like full suicide watch level of depression. And so SSRI treatment, it drops it by 1.8 points. >> Mhm. >> All right. So, and there's a whole and again, I I wrote a Substack on this, but the active placebo hypothesis of these drugs have massive side effects. And actually, when you test any drug for, you know, a reduction in this Hamilton score, that people are aware in a double-blind study that they're taking a drug, they believe that they're getting better. So, all drugs, whether it's a benzo, or whether it's an amphetamine, or whether it's any class of drug will actually replicate the same 1.8 response that these SSRIs are doing. Also, they've never been able to isolate that anybody who has depression actually is linked to a lowered amount of serotonin. And also, they artificially depressed serotonin in people, and those people didn't get, you know, an abnormal rise in depression by actually like blocking their serotonin production. So, this whole serotonin theory has so many holes in it. The treatment has so many holes in it. Sure, the SSRIs are doing something, but it's because people know they're taking a drug. It's an active placebo. Because if you take a sugar pill, they feel nothing. They take an SSRI, they feel something. And that something means, oh, I'm taking the drug for depression, so they think they're getting better. And so much of it can be explained by that. But at the end of the day, regardless, and then also 40% of the studies based on Freedom of Information Act have been suppressed where the SSRIs didn't work, and they just actually showed the 60% of studies where it did show the 1.8. Regardless, take all of that aside, 1.8. Okay. If that's what this drug that has side effects, which one of the top black box side effects is suicidality, which is the worst result that you could possibly have from depression, right? So, that's just a side effect. Let's just take that aside, along with all kinds of other atrocious side effects that occur, and full dependence, and the challenging multi-year difficulty of getting off getting off these. So, looking at all that, all right, fair fine fine fine. Now, let's look at a study done on gardening. >> [laughter] >> What do you think the result was for gardening >> Better than the 1.8? >> 4.5. >> 4.5? >> Sleep, six. >> Yeah. Lifestyles. Stuff. >> Gardening exercise. >> seriously, like how do you go to a psychiatrist and they're like, okay, before we put you on this SSRI, do you have a garden? Cuz it's going to work two and a half times better. No, they don't do that. but they should. The data is there. It's found data. It exists. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Feeling productive, being outside. >> knowing that you're contributing to the growth of life in something else, and being outside, and working with your hands, and all of these other mechanisms. But, we're just we're not looking at what we've already discovered. >> Yeah. >> And that's the that's the real challenge. >> And the biggest problem right now is loneliness. You know, we've siloed ourselves off. And when epidemiologists look at the leading causes of of death, the worst things you can do, um it eclipses everything. It's It's more than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Being lonely. And it's two things. It's social cohesiveness, so that like the guy, you know, the person you call when you really need someone, a family member, your best friend. And then it's social, um integration. So, the number of interactions you have with somebody throughout your day. Talking to someone at the gym, you know, at work, whatever. Those two, far and away, eclipse smoking, diet, obesity, everything. >> Mhm. >> And and it's an epidemic, and it's not a, you know, that that's not addressed. And that goes to can- it's surprisingly goes to everything, but it and and it there's a new branch of science called social genomics, where they show when people are lonely, um their immune system it affects the genetic expression in the immune cells, specifically. And so, you ramp up the initiation phase of the immune system, meaning you're chronically inflamed, and you depress the steering phase, so your ability to target a pathogen. So, your immune system is just dysfunctional when you're chronically lonely. Um and it goes to cancer, and they showed the people with the most with breast cancer, the people with the most cohesiveness, I can't remember exactly what their the reduction in their over increase in their overall survival, but it was really significant. >> Mhm. >> And they they had a great rat study that scrub Oh, you could say, "Okay, well, they they feel better, so they're more social." >> Mhm. >> But, they had a rat study where rats are really social creatures. They hate to be alone. And so these rats were predisposed to mammary cancer, and they put them isolated them in single cages, or they put them in groups of four. And then they autopsied them after like 3 months. The The lonely rats, the tumor volume and number just exploded. It was like over 1,000% more compared to the you know, the rats that weren't lonely. >> Mhm. >> So yeah, that's a gardening with a friend or >> Yeah. [laughter] Yeah, and then so again, this goes to stacking all of these inner interventions in in a cohesive system, and then looking at this holistically. And I think that's one of the bigger weaknesses with our current scientific paradigm is everything is isolated. It's materialist, reductionist, isolate the variables, control for everything. And that's not how the human body works. >> You nailed it. That's exactly that. Biological action package, right? The reductionist way of methodology of medicine is one variable at a time. But it's that action package that makes the biggest difference by far. And ketogenic diet for depression, that's shown remarkable results. When when you have one intervention that looks like it affects everything, it it you know, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, um type 2 diabetes, all the big ones, depression, then you have to ask yourself, you know, what's the optimal state of mankind? Are we meant to sit around and consume cheap carbohydrates all the time, or are we meant to occasionally fast and exercise a lot? >> Mhm. >> You know, so you know, that even chimpanzees, they have a fruiting season, the rest of the year they're in ketosis. >> Yeah. >> So >> I'm going to get in ketosis right now. >> [laughter] >> [ __ ] motivated. >> And go garden. Going out to my farm. I'm going to be gardening and eating [ __ ] avocados and coconut butter. >> That sounds delightful. >> It will be. Thank you so much for everything that you've shed light on. I mean, I think as I said, reading your book, you know, Tripping Over the Truth, The Metabolic Theory of Cancer, that book changed my life, and I recommend it to everybody who's, you know, either worried or, you know, experiencing some early signs or even, you know, even has cancer, and I have to say it's kind of it's it's interesting to see that the resistance, even if people for people to actually read it, even if they're, you know, experiencing, but it's like once the fear has them, they're the doctors become their god. >> Exactly. >> And >> Yeah. >> they're not really that most people are not really that open to even looking at information >> Yeah. >> that goes against their god, you know, cuz like if I follow what god says, god says I have a chance. >> Yep. >> It's like, all right, well, actually the real god says you have a chance. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And like, well, how about it's like let's not use this kind of interposition of this person in a white lab coat as the divine authority. Let's look to the real divine authority, and let's look at the miracle of life itself, and take a step back, and at [snorts] least weigh both of those. But there is, you know, and I think that's one of the reasons is that people once the fear, that fear virus, I think that's one thing that Dune got really right. Like fear is the mind killer. Yeah. >> And once you're infected with that fear, it is difficult to take a look. So, I encourage people to read it now >> Yeah. >> before you've been infected with fear, and the doctors have been printed that fear, and and made themselves the savior, which sometimes they are, you know, doubt, you know, and I'm not trying to bash doctors here. I think they have a very important role, and the more we're informed prior, first of all, prophylactically, preventatively, we can make a lot of headway, and also we'll be prepared. And it'll just lower this kind of free-floating anxiety that we have about getting sick if we start doing the interventions ahead of time. You know, like what does hyperbaric oxygen and a ketogenic fast every quarter? You just do it for a week. All right, like I'm going keto for a week. At the end of the week, I'm doing HBOT therapy, and I'm doing it once a quarter. >> I'd love to know the result of that, for sure. >> Yeah. >> Nobody's studying it, but damn. >> Um wouldn't that be something? >> Yeah. >> If we just took the And And I'm going to garden, you know. >> Yeah. >> Um Wednesday's my gardening day. >> Yeah. Yeah, and I always try to frame it. I don't want to pit one against the other. Like uh you know, conventional medicine can be absolutely mind-bogglingly good. I wanted I try to position it as a merger between the two. Like like there's three branches oncology. We're trying to introduce a fourth branch, metabolic oncology, that helps with side effects and helps the other ones do better. >> Right. >> with even lower doses, you know, things like that. >> Right. >> So I have a foundation, and that's how we frame it. And we're doing right now, we're doing the largest study to date on the ketogenic diet for brain cancer. And um the reason we were able to do it, you know, 10 years ago when I wrote the book, we wouldn't have been able to do it. But now enough people have been exposed to this that the door's been kicked open. And this guy Jethro Hu, he's at Cedars-Sinai. He's a young neuro-oncologist and was very open to it and became open to it through observation where enough patients with glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, came in on the ketogenic diet, and he just observed they were doing better. They were having less seizures, quality of life was better. They did a phase one trial. The end primary endpoint wasn't measuring survival, but they were doubled median overall survival. So that, you know, gave him enough confidence to do big phase two trial. Now, >> That's great. When when are we going to get results? >> It's ongoing right now. These things take take time. Yeah. Yep. >> Well, again, thanks for all the work you're doing and you know, glad I'm glad we're in touch and please keep all of us and come back on here when you got some new information and new data to share because you know, you're one of the people I think who's dug deep enough to understand a lot of these mechanisms and it certainly informed my thoughts. So, >> Yeah. >> appreciate you and for anybody who's interested your books Tripping Over the Truth and Curable >> Yep. >> are available everywhere books are sold. >> Yep. And Ketones the Fourth Fuel, the third one. >> Ketones the Fourth Fuel. I haven't even read that one yet. I got to get into that. >> what you're going to do when you're done gardening. >> [laughter] >> Beautiful. Thank you so much, Travis. Appreciate you. For sure. Thanks everybody. Bye.