Daniel Roytas | The Vitamin Deficiency Deception, Food Synergy, & Can You Catch A Cold?

All right, real quick, before you skip ahead, I just want to remind you that this here is a free first hour version of the show, and every interview has a second hour for plus members in what is now one of the longest running and most successful sponsor free podcasts on this island earth. I think I can say that a plus membership is eight bucks a month and you get the five ongoing two hour interviews I do each month, as well as access to the full archive going back to the beginning, no seasons or tears or gimmicks like that, just hundreds of interviews that have always been free of ad breaks, well edited, information rich, in depth explorations of all sorts of things with tons of amazing guests, lots of timeless classics that get far beyond the stories of the week and the politics of the day, you know, if pluses for you or not, but I do want to add just a few more bits of information. So you have the best experience. If you do come over the easy way to get started is to use the links right at the top of the show notes or at the higher side chats.com. And then when you sign up, look out for a welcome email that includes a custom RSS link that you can easily add to any podcast player with a simple copy and paste. No need to mess with the username and password because God knows we've all had more than enough of that, but you can still use the credentials to log into the website where you can rate the shows, engage in the comments or forums with other plus members and check out the archive based on categories and topics that make it much easier to find the stuff you'll like best. A second signup option is to get plus through Patreon. You get all the same shows, but no access to the site. And the trade-off is that Patreon is a Spotify partner. So that's our little workaround to give you plus on Spotify. If that's your thing, but that's it. It's a pretty simple machine. So come on in, there's so much more to hear sign up is quick and easy, and you're keeping a truly independent platform intact for me to still be doing this the same way after so many years. Clearly that means the members are pretty happy and you could be too. Think about it. Tell a friend and thanks for listening. The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a plan. There's clearly maybe something there beyond the realm of man. And until we've thoroughly tested every last close chested view, I find the more we think we know, the less we really do. Where would... Cause we know their less just don't... It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, people. From the Sunshine State, I'm Greg Carlwood. And in the wake of COVID, so many people have started to look at the big pharma apparatus and their talking heads parroting the trust the science slogan with a lot more skepticism than they would have beforehand. It shook the foundations of faith that many had in the white lab coat cult that they likely took for granted for most of their lives. But the medical machine's time in the spotlight as the spearhead for one of the biggest nefarious operations of our lifetime broke that trust and faith to such a degree that many people have been questioning if the entire paradigm of germ theory, contagiousness, and viruses has been a scam from the start. And really, in a world so full of pesticides, genetic tinkering, processed foods, toxic building materials, and unclean air and water, who can be confident about anything regarding a specific source for suboptimal health? Well, this is what happened to today's guest, Daniel Reuters, who has a master's degree in human nutrition and worked for over a decade as a lecturer and senior lecturer at various educational institutions across Australia. During this time, he taught nutritional and naturopathic medicine to thousands of college and university undergraduate students while working in his own clinical practice as well. In 2020, Daniel launched Humanly with the intention of delivering high-quality online professional development courses targeted towards practitioners with an interest in natural medicine, despite feeling that something was desperately wrong in the field of health and wellness. He could never quite put his finger on what it was, but after interviewing various doctors and scientists on the Humanly podcast, his suspicions were confirmed. As Daniel's consciousness shifted, he was confronted with the harsh reality that everything he thought he knew about the human body, medicine, nutrition, and naturopathy was wrong. Over the last four years, Daniel has come to a completely newfound understanding about health and wellness, which he now shares with like-minded people from across the world. This research rabbit hole went deep and resulted in his wildly popular book, Can You Catch a Cold? Untold History and Human Experiments, that dismantles contagion theory and lays out the best suppressed alternatives to what might be causing these seasonal afflictions, and why they appear to spread from person to person by delving into the historical records, investigating past pandemics, exploring human psychology, and reviewing more than 200 contagion studies. I've learned a lot of unexpected things from his work, and I'm psyched to be paying it forward. The cold and flu critic, lost research resurrector, and vitamin deception detective, Dan the Man Reutus, welcome to The Higher Side. Thanks so much, Greg. What a wonderful introduction. I'm thrilled to be able to speak with you this evening. Thank you so much for having me. Ah, too kind. Thanks for doing this. I've actually read about maybe four or five different books about germ theory versus terrain theory at this point and the whole prospect of contagion and viruses, and a lot of these books walk the reader through the big pandemics of the past, smallpox, Spanish flu, and a lot of the diseases we vaccinate for, actually. But I love that your book focuses on cold and flu, because I think that's where the spell is hardest to break, because that's what we experience most often, and it seems to conform with what we're told, and we will get into that. But I find the most unique aspect of your work lately, the stuff that's made the biggest impact on me, has been hearing you talk about vitamins. And what do we do when we feel a cold coming on? We reach for that vitamin supplementation, and I think a lot of people consider vitamin supplements to be an alternative to big pharma, but it seems like it's really just another revenue stream for them, right? Yeah, I think you could put it that way. I spent many years actually working at a pharmaceutical company who made drugs and who also made many of the vitamins that are on shelves in Australasia. And people don't realize that, that these vitamins that we think are natural substances coming from food are actually synthesized in a lab, put into a pill, put into a bottle, and then marketed as a natural alternative to a drug. But they're coming from the same people who make the drugs. People look for an alternative. They want the alternative because they're often disillusioned and they're not happy with medications for a number of reasons. But they don't realize that the alternative is offered by the same people who are manufacturing the drugs that they don't want to take. And it's a hard thing for people to understand that these substances they believe are coming from foods, that you're actually extracting a vitamin substance from a food. These substances have never seen a food in their entire existence. There are nothing more than a concoction of chemical substances in a laboratory. And this is a huge topic. There is so much to this that I'm not really sure where you want to start, but maybe we can start with the premise of vitamin deficiencies. Yeah. I mean, that's a good way to go. I just wanted to point out that I heard in a previous interview that when you worked for this pharmaceutical company, they had told you that their vitamin division would be bigger than their pharmaceutical division around 2020. And that was odd because I'm like, huh, seems like there might be a crisis of faith around 2020 that you're preparing for. I don't know who's in the meetings and all this, but it was just a curious thing that stuck out to me. And yes, people have this idea that you take an orange, you take a syringe, you pull out the vitamin C, you put it in a pill, and it's basically the same thing. And it's drastically different than that. But you have said that about six manufacturers make all the synthetic vitamins we know, and they sell them to the varying brands. So it's like, hey, here's a giant tub of vitamin C powder, and they're the manufacturers of this stuff. So the vitamin companies, they all have different labels, and they appear different, but their substances inside, the ingredients, come from the same labs. And that's kind of common. We can go into any grocery store and look around and see a thousand brands owned by a handful of companies. Media, same thing. They got all these little branches, but it all comes back to the same tree. They just like to appear to look different. And this field is no exception. So yeah, talk to us about the idea of vitamin deficiency. Clearly, we start to get a cold. We feel it coming on. We're like, oh man, we got to armor up that immune system. It's all that military terminology of armoring and getting attacked and contagion. But yes, do you consider the premise of vitamin deficiency to be flawed as well? I do. And I spent a decade teaching this at colleges and a university in Australia, all about vitamin deficiency diseases and insufficiencies and how to go about correcting them with various different vitamin supplements. And I always took what I read in the textbooks at face value. I never once looked at the reference at the end of a paragraph that said scurvy is caused by a deficiency in vitamin C or beriberi is caused by a deficiency in vitamin B1 or pellagra is caused by a vitamin deficiency of B3. I never went to the reference and looked at how they actually established that. And it was only in 2020 that I did go and start looking. And what I realized was that maybe there are no such things as vitamin deficiencies. Maybe these have been confused as toxicities. So it's very different to a deficiency. Now, it's kind of like the antithesis. So I think so much of what we see these days, the opposite is true. So here we have this idea that these diseases are caused by something that you're not getting, but actually they might be caused by something that you are being exposed to. Now, it's much easier to tinker with the food supply and provide people with processed and refined food. And when they get ill, say that's because of something that you're not getting. That's because of something that's not in the food. And people go, oh, that's cool. What is it that I'm not getting? Oh, well, we just happened to make it. So here it is. Here's the thing that you need. And people take it. They feel better. And that's it. But it's much harder. I think it'd be much harder to sell this idea to people if they were told that it is actually something in the food, in the processed and refined food that's making them ill. So it's actually something that you're being exposed to. If people knew that, I don't think they'd be so happy with eating processed and refined food. So I don't like to sort of get into the motives about why things have been done. Maybe this is a misunderstanding. But if you look back throughout history, when the idea of vitamin deficiencies was first put forward, some of the original scientists who discovered these so-called cures for vitamin deficiency diseases didn't think they were vitamin deficiencies at all. They thought they were toxicity diseases. But their ideas were essentially poo-pooed. And it was like, yeah, you guys don't know what you're talking about. This is a deficiency disease. And there's actually a lot of evidence out there that even people like myself weren't aware about that demonstrates, I think, pretty conclusively that these conditions aren't deficiency diseases. They are toxicity diseases. And yeah, I'm happy to talk about why I think that and what the evidence shows. Yeah. And I think you make a great point that it is a psychological flip to say, oh, well, you know, the processed food maybe doesn't contain as many vitamins. So, you know, you take the vitamin C supplement and the iron and then you're good. And I'm guilty of it, too. Like phoning in a meal, you know, doing the fast food thing and then thinking, oh, well, I'll just get the vitamins I missed from supplementation in one way or another, whether it's a cold press juice instead of a soda with a burger and fries or something. And when you have young kids, you sometimes you just got to you don't put yourself first as much as you might have beforehand. Let me just say that. So let's look at, say, the classic example, the vitamin C example. Everybody knows vitamin C. And then, of course, the scurvy story. This is where in the common culture, I think we get the idea of a vitamin deficiency. These sailors weren't eating enough vitamins. They weren't eating enough fruit. And thus, they weren't getting their vitamin C. And thus, they were getting scurvy. But that story even is a little different, apparently, than it's commonly understood. Yeah. The gentleman who's claimed to have discovered the cure for scurvy, he was a Scottish doctor in the Navy in the United Kingdom back in the 1700s. He realized that when he gave sailors fresh lemons and limes, their scurvy went away. And people say that the experiments that he did proved that it was a vitamin C deficiency. But even James Lind in his work said that he didn't think the fruits and vegetables were providing a substance that the sailors were deficient in, which cured them. He thought that the fruits and vegetables that he was giving the sailors was actually protecting them against the damp conditions that they were living in. He thought dampness was the cause of scurvy, not a vitamin deficiency. And that is true, that their symptoms did go away when they ate fresh lemons and limes. But here's the crux of the issue. When you eat a whole food, there is everything in that whole food. There's probably hundreds, if not thousands of different chemicals and enzymes and minerals and different things that when you consume that, it has everything the body needs for it to be metabolized, absorbed, utilized, and excreted completely by the body. But if you start meddling with that food, you start processing it and refining it and stripping things out of that food so it's now no longer complete, the body can't process it properly. So you actually get a buildup of metabolic waste products, essentially. You know when you are uploading or downloading something to your computer and you've got that completion bar and it's like 97% and then it stops and it just never moves and you've got to uninstall and do it all again. I think that's what might be happening with processed food. So you take something out of a whole food, now it's not a whole food anymore. You eat it, your body gets to 97% completion of processing it, but it can't process it anymore because it's not a whole food. It doesn't have everything in there for the body to metabolize it. So at that 97% completion rate, you now get a buildup of whatever that substance is in the body. There's a blockage there. And it's that buildup of whatever that metabolic intermediate is, that intermediate metabolite is, which manifests as a toxicity disease. So then when you go and eat the lemon or the lime, it provides the body with what it needs so it can metabolize out those intermediate metabolites and your condition goes away. And we think, ah, well, that was, you know, it was a deficiency disease that was causing the problem, but it was actually a toxicity disease. I mean, there is considerable research to show that this is the case. But in the 1940s, in World War II, the Japanese were being plagued by this condition called beriberi. Well, the people were basically starving and they only had access to white rice to eat. So they were just eating this diet of white processed rice. And they were developing beriberi. And there was a lot of infantile beriberi going on. So mothers were eating white rice, predominantly as their staple food. They were breastfeeding their children and the children were getting sick. They were failing to thrive. They were getting diarrhea and muscle wasting and problems with their nervous system. And the doctors and even the mothers thought, well, there's something wrong with my milk. My milk is toxic to my child. And one of the reasons why they thought that was because when they took the child off the breast milk, their infantile beriberi, which is claimed to be a vitamin B1 deficiency, went away. Now, when you take a child off a food and you no longer now provide them with any nutrition, well, if it was a deficiency disease, their problem should stay the same or get worse. But actually, it got better. So when you take the food away, the breast milk, which might have a toxin in it, it would make sense that when the child stops drinking it, they get better. And the doctors at the time, the pediatricians across the country were fairly convinced of this and what they started to do was to take children off breast milk from mothers with vitamin B1 deficiency or beriberi and then provide them with a different food that was also deficient in that same vitamin. So what they did was they took them off breast milk and then gave them like sweetened condensed milk, which is deficient in B1. Guess what happened? Their beriberi went away. So that's impossible if it was a true vitamin deficiency disease. And with that research, the doctors essentially concluded that beriberi, infantile beriberi, was a toxicity disease and not a deficiency disease. Now, this is also true of things like scurvy and pellagra, but I think that beriberi example is quite telling. It is. And going back to the loading screen thing you were talking about, we do get a little bit of a sense of that with the term bioavailability. Like there's a lot of vitamins in the health food store where it's like, well, these vitamins are better than what you get at Walmart and Walgreens because they have better bioavailability. So there already is like a little bit of acknowledgement that these powdered and pilled forms of a one thing that's in a fruit are not exactly doing the same thing. But talk to us about the food matrix and food synergy. I've heard you talk about this saying the whole food is greater than the sum of its parts. You isolate all the parts and even isolated and taken in four or five different pills, let's say hypothetically, it still doesn't have the same kind of magical quality that the natural whole food has. And we're not talking about germ theory directly, but it is the same logic. It is this mechanistic, industrialized, let's break everything down to individual little parts and then isolate this and that. I mean, this is how the whole machine works. The germ theory is let's find the one germ that's causing the problem and let's find the one chemical solution to kill that one germ. None of it's holistic thinking, none of it's naturopathic thinking and being a nutritionist by trade, this food matrix stuff, I mean, this is really important for people to understand. Tell us about this. The food matrix and food synergy is when I was doing my postgraduate qualifications, our lecturers were talking about this concept to us. And I'd also learned this in my undergraduate degree. And they essentially said that it's so complicated, we will never understand it. No one will ever be able to make sense of food synergy or the food matrix. Now, essentially what the food matrix is, is the activity that a food has inside your body when consumed. And that activity is not something that you can achieve by giving the body each of the component parts of that food by itself. So when you give the whole food, you get additional effects that you don't see with the single components. It's crazy. I mean, the math isn't adding up there, you know, it's like clearly there's an extra factor. And I've heard Rudolf Steiner talk about this, saying that there's a spiritual quality to the food we eat. That's got to be, you know, something that's hard to measure. And to make it less loaded with the term spiritual, you could just say life energy, that the tree is absorbing sunlight. You can even say light energy. That has helped me before with live foods versus dead foods. Don't eat crackers from a box. That's a dead food. What you want to eat is things that are storing light energy. You can say light energy, life energy, spiritual energy, whatever. But that seems to be that extra factor that dissipates when you try to break it all down into just vitamins and nutrients. That's right. The eclectic doctors, so at the turn of the 20th century, so 1900, they called it life force. So they were on the same wavelength. They're on the same page. We look at those guys back 100 and whatever years ago and think that they were stupid. But actually, they had accumulated knowledge over hundreds and thousands of years, if we believe in the history that we're told. And again, I question all of that. But they had accumulated knowledge to that point in time and got to the understanding that what is in food, they have no idea. They called it life force. People will look at that and go, well, they're stupid because they didn't know how to isolate certain things from foods and blah, blah, blah. I don't think we can isolate anything from a food. So think about it this way. If you want to bake a cake, you've got to put in flour, eggs, milk, sugar, whatever, right? And you mix it all up in a bowl and you put it in a baking tin and you chuck it in the oven on 180 degree heat for an hour. If you took that cake out after it's been baked and someone gave it to you and said, all right, Greg, now I want you to just isolate out the egg, just the egg. You just isolate and you show me the egg in its original form. Or I want you to show me just the milk in its original form. Or I want you to show me just the sugar in the original form. You couldn't do it. No, can't unbake the cake. You can't unbake the cake. So why do we think that when we have a food, like a lemon or a lime or something that's grown on a tree, which is essentially like the trees baked the cake, the trees created the lemon, and then you come along and you go, right, now we're going to start tinkering with it and start adding stuff. We're going to add chemicals to the lime juice and we're going to precipitate it. So we're going to heat it up and cool it down and dehydrate it and add things in and we're going to get a substance that when given to an individual causes an effect and then we call that vitamin C or we call it glucose or we call it a flavonoid or a quercetin or whatever the substance might be. How do we know that that substance was ever in the food? You don't know because you can't, as you said, you can't unbake the cake. And what you also must do for any of this stuff to be scientific is to have a reference standard or a reference point. So you have to know what the thing is that you're looking for first in order to be able to isolate something from an orange to go, right, this is the thing that we were looking for. When you don't have that and you start adding stuff in, if you think about how they isolated vitamin C, for example, one of the first things they did is they took some orange juice and the first thing they did was add lead acetate or something to it. And they start adding in acetone and they boil it and do all these things. That very first step when you add lead acetate or whatever the first step was, you have to control for that. And what that means is you have to demonstrate that by adding in that thing, it didn't change the original substance that you had and it didn't create the substance that you're looking for and that you cannot control for that. It's impossible to do it. I think that's kind of like a built-in fail-safe mechanism by the universe because it's like you're never going to find out our secrets. It's just not for humans to know. And we don't need to know. I mean, if we're living in harmony with nature, there's no need for us to know this stuff. But as soon as you start tinkering with the food supply, well, then you've got to try and look into the food and go, right, what is it that's causing the problem? Exactly. And with processed foods, we have the nutrition facts and they might tell us, oh, there's some iron, some vitamin, this or that in there. But a lot of times they destroy the vitamin integrity and whatever the vitamin is, they destroy the food's integrity, let's just say. And then they try to put it back in with the synthetic forms that they think they've derived from this process of breaking everything down. But yeah, just hearing you talk about vitamin C when they were first trying to figure this out, they're adding heavy metals, formaldehyde. They're trying to do these things to isolate the vitamin C. I mean, it's very similar to what I hear about vaccine science and trying to isolate a specific germ. It's a lot of adding things in your head. You think, well, they found a way to break down its components, like get its genome or something. And that's it. But no, they're adding a lot of toxic substances, killing off parts of it. What lives? Here, let's give the heavy metal concoction of formaldehyde and this one part of it to them. Oh, they got better. Well, that must be it. We're going to call that vitamin C and we're moving on. And I guess I was curious, when it comes to things like zinc or iron or magnesium, is that the same story? Because at least those things, I don't know, they feel a little bit different. They're on the periodic table. They are substances that you can get other places. But vitamin A, vitamin C, K2, these things, I could definitely see that being just made up because I don't know really another source for it other than them saying it comes from the food kingdom. But what do you think about iron, zinc, and magnesium? These are things that when we start to feel sick, we're told to take another possible deficiency, not exactly vitamins, but is there any difference there at all in your mind? Well, you can find those minerals in nature. So they exist. You can go and find a rock of calcium carbonate or you can find a rock of iron or you can find a rock of magnesium. It's there. So you have a reference standard to go, here's the magnesium. We know what it is. We've got our starting point. And then we can go to a food and we can see is the same thing in the food. So I think it's a bit different when it comes to minerals. There's no tree that you can walk up to where there's just like pure vitamin C, like a leaf of pure vitamin C or a fruit of just pure vitamin C. It doesn't exist. So another way to think about this, yes, you can take minerals, but again, I don't think you can take them in isolation. Mother nature was designed in such a way that the only way you can nourish the body is with food. You cannot supplement your way out of a whole food deficiency. It's impossible. You need everything in the food for it to work inside you. You can't just take out the magnesium and give it because this comes back to food synergy. If you think about a watch and you open up the back of that watch, you see like 50 cogs in the watch if it's a really nice watch. Now, what biochemists do is they look at a food and say, what is the substance in there that's doing the heavy lifting? What is the substance in there doing the work? Oh, it's the vitamin C. Oh, it's the magnesium. So that's what they say. We say, from like a naturopathic perspective, that it's the whole food. It's all of the substances working together. So it's like them opening up the back of a watch and going, which cog is doing all the work? It's not any of one of the cogs. It's all of them working together. So you can't take one cog out and expect the watch to work. And you can't take that one cog out and put it in the back of a watch with no cogs and expect it to show the time. You need all the cogs working together in the right ratios for that watch to keep perfect time. That is the same with food. You have to eat the whole food because everything is in there that when you eat it, it keeps all the cogs turning in your body. If you only go and give magnesium, there might be 100 cogs that need to turn inside your body and you give magnesium and it turns the first cog. But what's going to turn the other 999 or 99 cogs? All of that is in the food and that is why you have to eat food. If you just take the mineral, you can start to cause imbalances. Now, every food that you eat, all of the minerals are in there in the perfect ratios and the perfect balances so that there are no imbalances that are caused in your body. But once you start going in and dosing high doses of isolated minerals, which are often also synthetic, like the mineral itself is derived from the earth, but then they have to bind it to something which is synthesized for it to be absorbed by the body. And when you do this, you can throw the fine balance out of whack and then you're chasing your tail forever trying to re-correct a man-made imbalance caused by supplementation. So what I'm saying, I don't think it's profound. All I'm really saying is eat real food. It was designed for us. It is the only thing that is compatible with the human body and things in pills will never be able to replace it, even if you feel better when you take it. And that's where you've said before that vitamins are really just working like drugs, meaning basically masking symptoms or not addressing what needs to be addressed by giving someone the whole food. And you've thrown out examples like willow bark. Aspirin is derived from willow bark. They extract aspirin from it and they give it to you in a drug and it's for pain relief. But when you isolate that substance, you get other effects, side effects, not good effects that you would want. But those effects don't come if you eat the whole willow bark. So there, that's just more evidence to what you're saying. And you've talked about with the scurvy thing, you found papers where they were curing scurvy with non-vitamin C substances like pot ash. So again, it's like, well, if you're going to tell me it's this one thing, why is this other thing working? Kind of like the breast milk deficiency example. And I want to get a little bit more into vitamin D because this is the one that has felt the most off to me. The idea that you could take sunlight and isolate vitamin D as the good thing and then give it in a powder form and say it's the same and tell people to supplement through the winter months. I mean, this is even more insane. At least a fruit you can hold in your hand and try to break down, I suppose. But again, you know, get rid of that visual that they're taking something out of a fruit. They're actually synthesizing something whole cloth in a lab that is adjacent to, so they say, the thing in the fruit. So we're a few more steps removed from that visual of like taking something from an actual fruit. But let's get into the light thing. Vitamin D, they say it's one of the most important things. Obviously, this came up during COVID. People with high vitamin D levels didn't get as sick. Well, break this down for us because this kind of is in a unique category. Yeah, there's just another thing I wanted to mention as well, which I think is important. Just before we get into the vitamin D, if you don't mind. Don't mind. And so something that you just alluded to was that they're not extracting a vitamin from a food. So when you get a supplement from a store and it says a vitamin C, that vitamin C, they're not taking 100 kilos of oranges and they're taking out the vitamin C and putting it into a tablet. What they're doing is they're taking dextrose, usually from genetically modified corn or just like corn. And then they're adding things to that corn like heavy metals and formaldehyde and acetone and various other things. They're getting a substance that when they give to people with scurvy, their symptoms go away. And they say, well, that's vitamin C. That's the same thing as what's in an orange when someone eats an orange and their scurvy goes away. Well, this substance that we've created in the lab is the same thing. So yeah, it's not a natural thing that you're getting in these products. And some people might also say, well, what about a whole food supplement? My whole food supplement says it's derived from acerola cherry or whatever it is. And literally what I'm holding in my hand right now is that exact thing I was going to ask you about. I don't like to make it about me and little personal examples, but acerola cherry, literally I was trying to get the best vitamin when I felt a cold coming on. And I got this that says it's whole food, camu camu and acerola. Tell me why I fucked up. Well, you see some of the marketing for these things and they say we take 40 pounds of oranges or acerola cherry or whatever, and then we dry it out, remove all the moisture and we grind it up and we are left with one pound of stuff. So where did the other 39 pounds of stuff go? You've got one pound where you've got 2.5% of your starting material. Where's the other 97.5% of stuff? How is that whole? So it's very clever and people go, well, no, it's definitely a whole food. No, it's not. There is not an acerola cherry. You couldn't fit an acerola cherry on one of those capsules, right? It's impossible. So where is all that other stuff going? Why is any of that other stuff in the other 39 pounds any less important than the stuff left over in that one pound? This comes back to synergy. It's like they're now saying, no, no, no, no, no. It's just one of the cogs in the back of the watch that's important. And so we're going to take and discard 39 pounds. We're going to discard the other 39 cogs and we're just going to keep one. So at the end of the day, you can summarize this into just eat real food. Yeah. All right. There's no free lunch. There's no shortcut. Of course, what I want to know is then what do you do? Because I bought this basically out of desperation. I felt a cold coming on. I felt the scratchy throat. I was like, look, with these two kids, I can't be sick. My work schedule is really heavy right now because I'm taking some weeks off. I can't miss an interview. I can't get sick. And so in desperation, I went to go get the highest quality, what appeared to be the highest quality supplement as I'm also eating real oranges and this and that and trying to eat real better foods. But we do these things because we just so don't want to get sick. We can't afford a week off of our hamster wheel lifestyle. So we'll get to the vitamin D thing. But since we're talking about this, what do you do when you wake up and you feel that scratchy throat and your sinuses are not good and you're just like, shit, I know that if I don't do something immediately, I'm going to have a really bad five to seven days. Maybe there's nothing you can do. Maybe it's a detox process you must go through. I'm unsure. But when we're in that state and you tell me, well, this is just masking your symptoms, I'm more than happy to have my symptoms masked in that exact moment. So what do you do when you feel a cold coming on to try to make it better? I let it run its course. Didn't want to hear that. Well, I think our relationship and our understanding about disease is warped. So we look at disease as a bad thing. And disease must be something that we conquer at all costs because disease is bad and it makes people feel ill and it reduces your quality of life, et cetera, et cetera. But what is disease? You have to ask yourself, what is it that we're trying to conquer? So if you go and try and find a definition for what disease is in a medical textbook, it doesn't exist. There is no consensus in medicine about what disease is. If you go to the World Health Organization and try to find a definition, they don't have one. So how can you try to conquer something that you don't know what the thing is in the first place? And when you think about what disease is, what it truly is, when you understand that, it will make sense about my statement that I let the cold run its course. Sometimes if you go somewhere and you don't want to have all these symptoms, like maybe you have to do something. Maybe you've got to take this synthetic vitamin C to press those symptoms down and you can get through that event that you had to do when you wanted to feel well. But I think that's what's happening. And you could still say that anywhere you can buy this bottle of vitamin C, you can probably buy an orange. Yeah. Same mindset of like, oh, I need to fill my body with the good things, but just get the whole food at least. I mean, that's going to be a step better than what you were doing previously. And you're not putting money back in Big Pharma's pocket. Got to starve the beast. Well, you know, talking about starving the beast, that is one way that you can help a cold is to sweat it out. Stay rugged up in bed and help the body do what it's trying to do. So what is the body trying to do? I think it's really important to talk about what disease actually is or what I think it might be. And it's not just me saying this. This is how the field of medicine understood disease 120 something years ago, 150 years ago. And it's in the medical textbooks back then. It's in the medical journals back then being discussed. So when you get a splinter in your finger, what happens? Starts to get inflamed and hurt. Yep. So why do you get the inflammation and the pus and the swelling and the redness? What is all that about? Is that a disease? No, it's trying to expel the splinter. So they're the symptoms, right? Those things are the symptoms. The symptoms are the remedy for the splinter. The symptoms are the answer to the problem. So think of it this way. If you have some water and that water isn't being disturbed by anything, it's perfectly level and it's perfectly flat. It's still. Like on a really calm day, you could walk up to the water and see a reflection in it. Now, if you drop a rock into the water, what happens? It's very disturbed. Ripples across the whole surface. So the ripples are the symptoms of the rock being dropped in. What are the ripples there for? It's just an effect of the force. What are the ripples trying to achieve? Equilibrium again. The ripples are the water in an active state of returning to balance. The ripples are the answer to the disturbance by dropping the rock in. I get that. And I like to think about the car analogy too. I mean, if you're redlining your car and the engine is smoking and your RPMs are up into the red, you have to take your foot off the gas and it will kind of come back to a state that's acceptable. I mean, and it's kind of like the same thing when you get sick, your body's telling you take your foot off the gas and we will fix this and then you'll come back to a regular state. So I guess I wouldn't say how do you get rid of the symptoms, but I guess can you speed this process along in any effective way that isn't going against the grain of what your body's trying to do? Yeah, I think you can. You rest, you provide it with good nutrition, you listen to your body, you ask yourself, what does it need? Sometimes when you're ill and you think, oh, I really crave some strawberries or I'm really craving some chicken soup or I'm really craving X, Y, Z, listen to what your body's telling you to do. So really what we're talking about here is to identify and treat the cause. So the cause was the rock, the cause was the splinter, the dis-ease is the symptoms. But we just said the symptoms were the answer to the problem. So actually disease is healing. Disease is the healing response. So again, we said at the start of this conversation that everything's inverted in this reality. So we're looking at disease as a problem that we must fix, but actually disease is the healing response. It is the body in an active state of trying to repair itself. So would you come along when there's ripples in the water and spend trillions of dollars trying to understand the ripples? No, no. Another good analogy you use in the book, I just want to throw this out while we're still in the first hour, is imagine, because colds are called colds because we acknowledge that they're cyclical with the weather and in the fall and the winter we get sick. You even go deeper into the language that the Chinese use for this and they say, yeah, you were exposed to cold and damp and you got sick. And there's a lot to unpack there. But the analogy you use is in the fall, imagine that we saw the leaves turning yellow and falling off. And we said that is the dreaded yellow leafing disease. And we got to figure out the cause of this and we got to stop it because this is just awful. Look at all of our trees. I mean, it is kind of the same logic. It's like, this is a natural part of the process in this cycle. Now, of course, not every person gets sick every winter. It's not like one-to-one like that, as opposed to the trees where certain varieties of trees clearly, it's like almost every leaf. But even that, I guess there's a little variance in what we see, but the analogy holds. And I like the attacking the mindset of just like, well, we have to intervene here because we don't like the way this looks and there's not really anything you're going to be able to do. The body is perfect. The body knows exactly what it needs to do. We love to try and interfere as human beings. We think that we need to get our hands in there and go, right, there's something wrong and we need to fix it. When actually, no, everything's okay. We just need to get the heck out of the way and let the body do what it's capable of doing. Now, the question that we should be asking here is like, stop looking at the symptoms. Stop trying to spend money on looking at blood sugar and heart rate and blood pressure and cholesterol levels. They're all the symptoms, right? Stop trying to look at inflammation. Inflammation is a healing response. It's like none of those things cause the problem. What we want to try and do is identify and treat the cause. What is the rock? Right. What's the bad input? Yeah. What is that input that disrupted the balance? One thing that you may not be aware of is that once upon a time, human beings were essentially all healthy and free from disease. So there was a report released in the Lancet maybe a year or two ago. And what they said was that 97% of the world's population now have at least one condition, one health condition. Less than 3% or 4% of the world's population are completely healthy. I think that 150, 200 years ago, that was the reverse. That there was 3% of people who were unwell and 97% of the world's population were healthy. Why do I say that? Because there are countless reports in the medical literature of medical teams and anthropologists traveling to remote destinations and interacting with uncontacted tribes and doing studies on them. And in these reports, they all said the people were remarkably free from disease. There was no diabetes. There was no heart disease. There was no depression. There was no cancer. There was no autoimmune disease. There was no Alzheimer's or anything. They couldn't find any illnesses. So you have to look at those people and how they were living and go, why is it that they were so healthy? And again, that is very different to the story that we're told. We're told that, no, no, they were all really sick. And we had to come and give them modern medicine to help them survive. Otherwise, they'd die. So thank goodness for us that we saved these native people. But actually, in fact, that we're healthy. So why were they so healthy? And why is it that we're so unhealthy today? When you answer that question, you'll start to find what the rocks are, what the cause of the problem is. So what were they doing differently to how we're living our life today? When you start thinking about that, a few of the pieces of the puzzle start falling in line. Yes, you go into how some of the big diseases come online, obviously with industrialization and World War I, where we're making tons and tons of chemicals for war. And those chemicals are in the air, in the landscape. The war ends, but the effects of what we did trying to hurt other people, there's still aspects of that. And then the weapons manufacturing companies turn into food companies and pesticide companies. And that has never stopped. So yeah, from the beginning of industrialization and the World War I era on through, we've allowed companies to toxify the air, the water, make things to try to kill people in wartime. And those same products are meant to kill isolated germs and weeds and this and that, and pests and bugs when we're not in wartime. But the chemicals are still out there. So all that stuff is the bad inputs for sure. And there's obviously more to go into, but I want to return to vitamin D just while we're still in the first hour. I don't want to leave first hour listeners with a cliffhanger, even though they should just sign up. But regardless, what I like about the vitamin D example, the way you've said it, the analogy, analogies are so great and you're good with them. Vitamin D is not this thing that's in the sunlight that they can pull out or put your skin under a microscope and then read it and like, you know, oh, that thing got from the sunlight into your body or it could come from a pill and also get into your body. You say it's the marker that you got sunlight, just like a pile of ash is the remnant of a fire. You know there was a fire there because there's a pile of ash there. You know that a person got good sunlight yesterday because there's vitamin D or this thing we call vitamin D measurable in them today. It's just an effect. It's just a marker in the body that you got good sunlight. So can you take that marker and put it in a pill and give it to someone and say it's the same as sunlight? Absolutely not. But you also note that there's dozens of qualities of sunlight beyond the marker of vitamin D that benefit the body. What about all those things? How about you just go out and get some damn sunlight? But talk to us about the vitamin D thing and your take on this because it is one of the biggest things I hear like this third rail in the health world is like it is really a lot of it comes down to getting good sunlight and eating food that was grown in good sunlight. Yeah. Again, one thing that people in the modern Western lifestyle or society aren't getting much of these days is sunlight. So our ancestors used to get a lot of sunlight. They weren't all taking vitamin D pills. And a lot of people rely on it because they've been convinced that the only reason why you take vitamin D is because you're not getting enough sun and the only thing that the sun gives you is vitamin D. But that's not true at all. So the analogy with the fire is really good. If you go camping, you light a fire, it keeps you warm at night. You wake up the next morning, there's a pile of ash on the ground. The ash is the evidence that there was a fire there. Now, you can't scoop that ash up and the next night when it gets really cold, you sprinkle the ash around near your tent and you huddle around the pile of ash and try and keep warm. It's not going to do anything because the ash is the evidence of the fire. It's the byproduct of the fire. It's the remnants of the fire. The only thing that keeps you warm is the fire itself. The fire is the thing that's doing the job. It's doing the work. It's the same with the sun. So the ash is the vitamin D. It's the evidence that you're exposed to sunlight. The thing that's having the effect on the human body, believe it or not, is that big ball of light up in the sky that gives life to every single living organism on the face of this earth. It's like, what a revelation. Right. It's not that complicated. It's not that complicated. It's there for us. It's being put there. Like you walk outside and it's literally there. Stand out in it for half an hour and get some sunlight. But people have become so scared about the sun. They go, oh, no, I don't want to get out and get burnt and get skin cancer and I have to take the vitamin D. Well, if you start looking at the evidence for sun exposure, the people who get more sun exposure have less skin cancers. I mean, this isn't even really that controversial, to be honest, Greg. The evidence now is unequivocal. Vitamin D is nothing more than a proxy marker for sun exposure. That's it. This is discussed in the literature at length. And let's just assume that vitamin D was the thing that had an effect. Well, the sun also has, from what I can understand, close to about three dozen beneficial effects on the human body above and beyond whatever vitamin D could provide you. So do you just want to take the vitamin D if that even does really have an effect in the body and miss out on the other 35 beneficial effects that the sun gives you? Well, that's your choice. I'd rather get the sun. But if some people want to take the vitamin D, that's fine. And people will say, well, I feel better when I take it. Vitamin D is a steroid hormone. So I think when you're taking it in high doses, it may be working similarly to something like prednisone, which is an anti-inflammatory. So it's suppressing the inflammatory response. And people might say, well, that's a good thing because inflammation is bad. No. As we said earlier, inflammation is the healing response, right? So if you've got the splinter in your finger and you come along and you put some prednisone cream on it and the inflammation goes away and you take some antibiotics and you take some analgesics and now there's no pain and there's no swelling and there's no redness, fantastic. Feels good. You still got a damn splinter poking out of your finger. The cause of the problem was never dealt with. Same thing with taking vitamin D supplements. Yes, you might feel better. But I think what you're doing is masking the symptoms. And it's possible that the reason why you feel that way is because you've got a sunlight deficiency. Yeah. So you're taking the vitamin D supplement to mask the symptoms of the sunlight deficiency. So it's a bit of a catch 22 there. The simple answer is to get out in the damn sun. I know. It's so crazy that we try to find workarounds. But I've also heard you say a few other details that are interesting to me. Vitamin D is the pill form derived from sheep's wool, not even from anything really related to sunlight. European health agencies have called vitamin D an endocrine disruptor. And a lot of vitamin D3 supplements contain Chloe Classy Ferrol, which is a major ingredient in rat poison. And I had to look that up. But I did find rat poison that says that that's like an ingredient in it. And it's like really crazy because they work on rats and lab mice because they say that they're so similar to humans. You know, that's a whole nother can of worms. Like, how similar are they really? But if you're going to go with that premise, do you want to take a supplement of a chemical that's made to kill something that the whole medical establishment assumes is a lot like you? Weird. Yeah. Look, it's up to people what they do or don't take and what people put in their body. Me personally, I don't take any supplements anymore. I used to. I prescribed these things hand over fist to patients for a decade. I myself was taking hundreds of dollars of this stuff every month. I don't take a single supplement anymore. And guess what? I feel exactly the same. So it's not providing me any benefits. And actually, what I think was happening with my clients when they were taking their supplements, I noticed a very interesting thing is that as soon as their supplements ran out, their symptoms came back. So they had to call me up and go, Dan, I need more of your supplements. Can you compound me up some? And I'd make it up for them and go, great. Now, I'll see you in a month. And it didn't dawn on me at the time, but all I was doing was providing them a drug in disguise, which is what a vitamin is, and I was suppressing their symptoms. I was never addressing the underlying cause of the problem. So I was giving people vitamin D, but they were sun deficient. So what I should have been doing was educating them about the benefits of sunlight and why it's important so that they don't need to take the vitamin D. The word doctor means teacher. Now, what that implies is that the curriculum is already written. We already know everything that a human being needs to thrive and survive and do well. We know it. It's not a mystery. It's there. So what the role of a doctor is, is to educate their client, which is in the name, about how to modify their diet and lifestyle in such a way that they get all the things that they need and that they minimize their exposure to the things that they don't need. And when you do that and you give the body the raw ingredients and you stop poisoning it, the body heals itself. So this is how we should be approaching healthcare rather than going to war with the body and thinking that it's broken and that it's doing something wrong and that we need to fix it. Well said. So as we're wrapping this thing up, I always ask this in a health show and I'm always left disappointed, but how do you suggest we find a good doctor who understands at least half of this stuff? Even when you were in the conventional paradigm, you were still on the naturopathic end of the spectrum. But I've heard you say that the vast majority of naturopaths today are just green pharmacists, basically. So I agree. But how do we find the right person to turn to in those times where we need a little help from somewhere? Maybe we don't need anyone. Maybe there is no expert to help us when we don't feel good. We just need to stay in bed. But it's nice when you have a young family just to be like, well, I've got some kind of health, nutritional person that I call on when there's a problem, but I just can't find the person who even has the right philosophy about health. What would you say to help me out? Yeah, it's very difficult, Greg. It really is. There's maybe one or two naturopaths that I know of that I would recommend my friends or family to see who really get it. But there's a handful of doctors around, but they're very few and far between. I think we can take responsibility for our own health more than we currently think we can. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a relationship with a doctor or a naturopath or someone when there's a situation that unfolds that you feel you need some additional assistance, but there's so much that we can do to get ourselves in a situation or a position where we don't become ill or we certainly reduce our risk and frequency of falling ill. And the way in which you prevent illness, like preventative medicine, the things that you would do to prevent getting sick are the same things that you would do when you are sick to heal yourself. Those things are exactly the same. So what are those things? Well, I mentioned them earlier. They're really simple. They're really straightforward. And in fact, all of these things, if you went to a government health website right now and looked in the health section, they'd probably list most of these things. So these aren't like outlandish, conspiratorial, crazy nonsense recommendations. It's very sound advice. So those things are to eat real food, eat local, seasonal, fresh, whole food that you prepare. Maybe you prepare it with the people that you care about and you share it with the people that you love. And you exercise, you move your body, you drink good, clean water, you filter it, you get outside in nature, you get some fresh air, put your bare feet on the ground, find meaning and purpose in your life, try and reduce your stress, get good quality sleep, get plenty of sunlight. These really basic, simple things that we all take for granted, those things are essential. A human body cannot live without those things. So if you are missing some of those things, and there's probably a couple of other things that I've sort of missed there, but you get the general picture. If you're missing some of those things and you're ill, well, I think it would stand to reason that you address those things first and then see if you're still sick. Rather than going, oh yeah, look, I'm not really exercising and I'm not really getting any sunlight, but it's okay. I'll just go and take a pill. Maybe the issue is because you're lacking those things. But again, because these things, they require you to take control of your health, a lot of people don't have the time or the willpower to do it and it falls by the wayside. So if you can find a good doctor or naturopath who agrees with those principles and who is on a similar wavelength as you, they may not agree with everything that you think about health and wellness, but if they're on a similar wavelength, maybe they're just a good person to have on speed dial if you ever need them. But I really think you can be your own best doctor. Yeah, that's good advice. I mean, I've always rejected the notion of a checkup. Like I'm feeling good. I'm not going to dedicate any time to making sure you tell me I feel good. That's stupid. And I guess for me, it's just with the kids, you know, when they do get a fever, it can get a little scary to just be like, let's trust the process. And it would be nice. I think maybe I need to find like an herbalist or nutritionist, something like if I just want to put the right things in my body when we're in that red line phase, it's just like I could get that really from a book, but it'd be nice to maybe have someone I know of someone locally who says they make a tea that can cure any cold, that kind of thing. At least now we're in the wheelhouse of like natural foods and natural processes. But I don't know. I don't really need to pay a doctor $100 an hour to tell me to stop eating at Guy Fieri's fast food chicken restaurant. Do I? Oh, man. Well, this is super informative, a lot of fun. The vitamin stuff in particular is just really off the radar, I think, and will be so interesting to people. But before we go, talk to them about humanly and the best way to follow your ongoing work on top of getting the book. Yeah, it was great to chat with you, Greg. I had a great time. I think we've covered a lot of ground here this evening, and I hope people enjoyed listening to this. If people want to learn a little bit more and hear what I have to say and my thoughts on various other topics to do with health, they can go to my website, which is humanly.com, H-U-M-A-N-L-E-Y.com, and you can sign up to the mailing list. We don't really send out that much stuff. It's very infrequent that we actually email people. But you can join or sign up to the free health or free webinar library. We cover a range of different topics there, and I do some presentations so people can get that for free. I do have a paid members area, but yeah, I think the free webinar library is a good start. And then I'm also doing a five-week short course, which I'll be releasing in the next month or so, which is really just teaching people those sort of basic principles, those 10 basic principles that we spoke about today and explaining why those things are so important and providing people with some practical strategies around how they can implement that into their diet and lifestyle. And if people want to get a copy of the book, it's Can You Catch a Cold, available on amazon.com. Just go to Amazon and type in, Can You Catch a Cold? And it should come up. Love it. Well, all this material was great. It really is largely intuitive and pretty simple. It's only made complex because of our conditioning. But otherwise, a lot of it should be pretty obvious. And we didn't even talk about sanitation. That's a whole nother thing that maybe we'll get to down the road. But thanks again for coming here and breaking it all down for us. Take care. Thanks, Greg. Well, well, well. How about it? I've been holding on to this one for a few weeks now, and I even talked about it briefly at the live event in High Springs. I loved this interview and the perspectives of Daniel Reuters a lot. And by the way, the High Springs event audio should be out in the Plus feed very soon, and maybe even the video on the Plus bonus page, but we're having a little bit of a hard time working that part out. But as for this episode, I loved it, and I still think I remain somewhere in the middle, open-minded, but maybe a little unsure of any solid conclusions. I like having to analyze my observed and lived experience through a new lens to see how it fits, and I just like a good argument. Daniel's book is pretty damn ironclad when it comes to the contagion experiments we always reference, but I hadn't seen contained in a single book like this. And it's just facts. Let me read again the exact numbers. Of the 203 contagion experiments in medical history, 26 directly exposed healthy people to sick people. A total of 172 sick donors were exposed to 252 healthy recipients in every way imaginable. They lived in the same houses, slept in the same beds, drank from the same cups, kissed each other, used one another's handkerchiefs, and coughed and sneezed in each other's faces. Despite these efforts, a mere 21 recipients, or 12%, came down with a cold or flu. None of the studies used participant blinding or controls. As for exposure to bodily fluids, of the 6,522 healthy people exposed directly through aerosols, droplets, or injections, or indirectly to the body's fluids of sick people across 117 experiments, approximately one-third, 2,125 people, developed a cold or flu. Only one-quarter of those experiments used some form of control group. Of the 1,585 control participants exposed to an inert placebo, 157, 10%, developed a cold or flu, which implies that inert substances and the nocebo effect can cause respiratory illness. And just one-third of those experiments used blinding, and no studies used positive controls. So that is the book in a nutshell. 12% of exposed people get sick, and 10% of unexposed people get sick because they thought they were exposed and expected to be sick. It's the goddamn same. So if it is mostly mental, the real trick is to use the data to change your mindset, or some might even say conditioning, to get sick less often. To feel like you can be around sick people and it's not a threat to you. Easier said than done, I'm sure, and it's a lot like magic, right? They say it only works if you believe it. Which almost sounds like a catch-22, but you can research magic enough to believe it, and then practice it, and get some reliable results. It's why people say, step into a better story about yourself or some of your experiences. Because the whole reality is mental. So why should your health not fold into that too, to some degree? And in terms of explaining illness, I think he does a great job of making the case that it's weather and humidity changes mixed with your general threshold or pH level. I think that was in the plus show, but he makes a point that if illness kicks in at say a pH of 6, for example, a quick weather change might lower your pH by a factor of 1 or 1.5. And depending on your walking around pH at the time and how well you're taking care of yourself, that 1.5 change might or might not be enough to knock you under the threshold for an immune response, or what we call an immune response. He explains it better than me, but it is the details behind the broader idea of terrain theory, essentially. And the plus show here is way more focused on the book than the vitamin thing and some of the most interesting material I could pull out of it, as well as nuances of sunlight and fasting and fetal programming. Damn, that one really got me. We talk deeper about the history of contagion studies and all the results that I just kind of read to you. And he makes the case for the weather, humidity, pH, and health argument and the relationship between these things, as well as east to west epidemic or pandemic spread. That was a real head scratcher. And he even goes so far as to question what we know about blood cells. And listening back to this interview, it was kind of funny to hear me in real time doing the mental gymnastics to try to think through how people even see blood cells. And he's right. If our bodies are holistic systems, you can't extract one thing and make radical conclusions about it, like white and red blood cells and their ultimate complete function. It's like he said, pulling a gear from a watch and then trying to drill down on its function when it's not a part of its larger system. You can see some of its functions and effects, but you can't really understand everything because they only see these parts by pulling them out of us and measuring them. And that's not the same. So lots of fun stuff. I never thought much about like that in the plus show. You know how it works. Become a member. Get the full two hours of every interview. Putting out the best interviews I can is my top priority. And plus memberships are my only measure of success. So becoming one is a win win. And we do all of this outside of the never ending ad supported everything model. And you know what? It was my 40th birthday yesterday. And all I want is for you to treat yourself to more show. Throw me an attaboy. Pick up a six month or 12 month chunk. Get full access to the archives that go all the way back to 2010. With many timeless classics on so many different subjects. I get a little extra icing on my income cake and you get more of the show you already like. So that's the pitch. But the real unique stuff that I still think about from this interview is what we started with because I sort of had the intuition about it already, but hadn't really taken the time to unpack it. And that's the vitamin stuff. Hearing some of the added context for vitamin origin stories was really useful for me. I mean, what is vitamin C really? How can you isolate it without adding other things to it or breaking it down and then trying to say that this vitamin C thing is something that can be pulled out, powdered down, and pilled up? It really doesn't logic out. It's nice for selling bottles of stuff to people who don't want to eat whole foods, but I'm really on his page with this. It's like just another type of drug. As I brought up, I was at least halfway there trying to buy organic whole food sources of vitamins, but let's just cut out the middleman and go right to the proper source. I actually started feeling a little run down the week after I recorded this and I found myself blending up ginger, turmeric, cayenne peppers, lemon, and orange instead of taking a pill and I felt better by morning. I was quite happy with myself, but the holidays, too, were very rough in the Carlwood home, as I kind of alluded to. Super sick, whole family dealing with it off and on, and in those moments, I just wanted to stop, whatever it takes. Whatever caused it doesn't matter a whole lot when you have to trudge through the day regardless of how shitty you feel. It certainly seemed like my daughter brought something home from school, but at the same time, the environment between here and there, the weather, the humidity, maybe there was a change. But either way, no more shortcuts for me. No more trying to go halfway with grounding mats or whatever, or ground up acerola cherry powder. Just make a tonic, drink it in the morning sun outside, and move on with the day. I also bought some grounding shoes that have copper in the soles and use only organic materials so you can ground in shoes pretty much anywhere you go. There are like three or four companies doing this now, so a simple Google search will bring them up. Plenty of styles that look just like any other shoe. So why not? I can't always be barefoot, but a shoe that's not rubber and doesn't break the connection to the earth seems way closer to right than plugging in a grounding mat into an electrical socket. But I thought about the pH thing when I made my little tonic because it might have just raised me back to a sufficient level, and I kept from getting sick. And pH itself might only be a residual effect of something else. People say that with cancer. It's not the pH exactly, but maybe it's the health of the water in your system, but to us and our instruments, we read it as pH. It's one of those correlation is not exactly causation types of things, but whatever. You get it. This was great, though. I thank Daniel for his work and his time. I hope you got something out of it. In higher side news, I got a lot of messages across the various platforms about this guy and the plus comments who is hitting multiple shows with a flood of wild comments full of slurs and all kinds of that unsavory stuff. And that is why I just jumped on Twitter to say, yeah, I see it, because I had friends coming in town for my birthday. I wasn't going to go in and deal with all that in the moment, but I wanted people to know that I saw it so they could stop telling me about it. I was going to kick him out today, but the thing about people like that is they usually move on quickly anyway, and I might not need to do anything at all. That said, I'm pretty much cool with any conversation about anything on the plus site, except don't use slurs. You could have the exact same conversation without the slurs, and I wouldn't care. We can talk about ideas and have curiosities or whatever about this taboo or that one, but we aren't going to be hateful or talk about violence or be threatening in any way. It takes a lot to cross any line where I actually care about stepping into police comments. I didn't get into this to worry about comments at all, but because of the Tracy thing where she referenced that weirdo in the forums, I learned my lesson about letting it be a free for all. So, just be decent in your tone, and you can talk about some pretty indecent things, you know? But that said, let's get the plus member rating from the last episode with Schwab about goblin markets and the slop being fed to our psycho metabolism. Looks like his fourth appearance on the show brought in a 4.6, and I'm good with that. I liked it, I always enjoy talking to him and reading his work and just the language he uses, but I think our first and second interviews were the best, largely due to the subject matter. But there's something really appealing to me about the term goblin markets and also thinking about our minds as eating what they're fed and protecting that a bit more. Because maybe there are influences and effects that we don't even consciously recognize, and I don't want to eat slop in any form or fashion. I want to have a higher respect for my time, attention, and body, which is why I'm only actively watching three shows right now. White Lotus, Righteous Gemstones, which I do think has gotten worse in the later seasons, and this new little gem I found called Common Side Effects. I'm really not a fan of adult animation in general, I never gravitated to The Simpsons or Family Guy or South Park really, but I'm going to endorse and recommend Common Side Effects. If you're unfamiliar, the premise is, what if a Terrence McKenna type of guy actually discovered an obscure mushroom that could heal anything, anything at all, and how would the pharma industrial complex react to that? It's very good. Very THC. And if it's going where I think it's going, because there's maybe a couple episodes left before the season one finale, it's really going to knock it out of the park based on some aspects of the lead-up to where I think it's going. It's made by Mike Judge and the guys who made Scavengers Rain, which was also great. So check it out if you're looking for a higher form of entertainment. But anyway, let's read off the upcoming meetups and wrap a bow around this thing. Hiresidemeetups.com. Here's what we got. Okay, today is the Dove Creek, Colorado meetup at the Pinto Bean newspaper hangout at Banger's Bar and Pizza. This Saturday, March 29th, Sydney, Australia, Chish, and Phipps Kiosk. Can't wait to stop saying that. March 31st, Gail Brath's Ale House in Auckland, New Zealand. And then nothing so far in April. But go to Hiresidemeetups.com for more info on any event, to RSVP for one you plan to go to, or create your own. Get in there. It's totally free. We can support local businesses, just have a couple drinks with other listeners. Very easy icebreakers is, what are your favorite topics and who are your favorite guests? I'm sure you say that to any other fan of the show and you'll be off to the races. It's a beautiful thing. But thanks for listening and for all the birthday wishes. I had a hell of a time with my friends that I haven't seen much of since I moved. Couldn't have asked for a better weekend, really. We lined RVs up on the back of the property and had like 25 people staying in my house and or backyard. Totally feel recharged. Only just wish it was longer. I even had some gifts from listeners in the P.O. box, which is so unexpected and super kind of you and gifts given to me at the event. Thanks for those gifts as well. Honestly, people have been way too kind to me. I just asked some questions on a silly little podcast. And again, if I can get anything for my 40th birthday, it's just more members enjoying the full show and more people knowing about THC in general. Going forward, I really have to get better about mentioning the importance of word of mouth. As an audio only podcast that's no longer able to use YouTube for discovery like I might have in the past, I just ended up realizing how hard it is to actually end up in front of new people. So I don't want to oversell it. I don't want to cross over into cringy territory or desperation. But hey, 40 is a big birthday. If I can ever do it, it should be right now. So a free gift would be to just tell some people about the show because there really is no algorithm for us right now, but why trust the machines to do what people have done for many years way better. So if you can do that or become a plus member, great. Otherwise, I'm good. And I know we're all quite worried about me, but I hope you're good too. And big thanks again to our guest, Daniel Reuters. Get his book. If you're into this sort of thing, it's really good. And I'll see you on the next one, I hope. Your move, vitamin deceivers, disease disinfo spreaders, and big harm-a-bastards. Your fucking... I've come for the water. Put all the poisons in. It's fluoridated. It's full of estrogen. I've come for your water. I've come for your water. I've come for your water. I've come for your water, yeah. I've come for the water. And any food that's here. I've crushed the insects up. Made the beef disappear. Goodbye to... I've come for your water. I've come for your water. I've come for your water. I've come for your water, yeah. Let's see in desert, even the weather. They're mine forever. Posh, schwang, endeavor. The world's beneath me. I own your body. Say the world gets hotter. Lead lambs to the slaughter. They're dirt and acid rain. I'll do it all again. I've come for your water. I've come for your water. I've come for your water. I love you. I've come for your water. I love you.