Matthew Lysiak | Fiat Food: Money Magic & The American Diet

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06:26 Serenity now, Hireside Chatters. From the Sunshine State I'm Greg Carlwood and it's hard to find a slice of the societal pie these days that isn't in need of extreme repair. Childhood education has been hitting impressive new lows. The celebrity-sponsored corporate frankenfood industry is stuffing more faces than ever, causing a cascade of health problems the medical industrial complex is happy to step in and patch up for record breaking profits Constant screen addiction is causing us to withdraw from genuine human interaction inducing new levels of depression and loneliness but surprise there are pills for that too The compromised media chugs along like none of this is even happening and thus many people assume everything is fine. Outside of the economic erosion we can all clearly feel, of course! And the incompetent so-called leadership class does the only thing it knows how to do with economic uncertainty—throw more money into the military industrial complex to exacerbate any and all conflicts they can find and steal what's left.

07:24 Look, we talk about these problems all the time. With each of them often getting hours of dedicated discussion with a wide range of well-researched experts and journalists But what if we've missed some major connective tissue between them and a key catalyst that many of these problems spiral out of? Well, according to today's guest Matthew Leshak that is the case and it all goes back to one specific economic event in 1971. Matthew has spent most of his career as a crime reporter covering mass shootings for the New York Daily News but he is now the author of a book that mainstream media would never touch entitled Fiat Food That really nails the interconnectedness of our problems highlights a few pieces we have been missing from the big puzzle and offers new clarity many of us could use

08:09 So let's get into it. The economic erosion educator, Fiat food author and Pandora's box of problem solver Matthew welcome to the higher side This is an honor, Greg. Thank you for having me. Yeah man I am really psyched thanks for doing this i've read probably over a hundred books that talk a lot about these problems that I mentioned in the intro individually but I can count on one hand the number of them that tie it all together like you have and that's to be expected economists don't usually know much about diet war journalists might not have the same skepticism about the military

08:46 But your book, Fiat Food came out of what is almost an archetypal pattern for a lot of us here. You read something that sounds so outrageous and conspiratorial that you think there's no way that's true. And you set out to debunk it only to find out it is true and probably worse than what you said it was. Talk to us about that process as it went down for you in the case of the research for Fiat Food? Yeah, you stated it pretty succinctly. I used to be what was considered a respectable mainstream journalist so i've contributed to the New York Times The Guardian and I worked for over 10 years at the New York Daily News where my main job was reporting on crime and in particular I was the national reporter So my job was to anytime there is a major event I would parachute

09:41 on the next plane and try to establish usually the motive of the criminal in a mass shooting. You try to find as much as you can about the mass shooter, you answer the fundamental questions of journalism who what why when where how? And this was a passion of mine for many many years and I left journalism after publishing Newtown An American Tragedy which was exposé in a real what I would consider the definitive book on the shooting at Sandy Hook. And that was published by Simon & Schuster, also published with HarperCollins and Scholastic. So I've been through the mainstream journalism circles and a few years ago, I was reading a book by an economist named Seyfedine Mousse. There is a chapter in one of his books that posited a theory on

10:40 health and nutrition that posited that we've essentially been on a 50-year, there's been a 50 year gaslighting campaign to alter the American food supply. And I respected this man as an economist but he wasn't an investigative reporter or he wasn't a nutritionist so I put my reporter hat on and began digging in fact checking this chapter To my utter astoundment, I realized that if anything this case was understated and it took me down this rabbit hole where I learned that since August 15th 1971 when Richard Nixon decoupled from gold. So before August 15 1971

11:28 The people at that point couldn't redeem their promissory notes, their dollars for gold. But foreign countries could so this put a really important restraint on how many dollars the government could print but once Nixon decoupled and now foreign governments were no longer even allowed to redeem their notes for gold as promised and the government was just able to print as much money as they could, this problem where they needed to deal with the monetary inflation. To do this, their biggest concern with inflation wasn't that sofas weren't going to go up in price too much. It was the price of food and throughout history you can see this thread where people will deal

12:21 with corruption from their leaders, they'll deal with endless war. We keep voting these people in power." But one thing the populace will not tolerate has been demonstrated again and again is a high rise in food prices. When food prices go too high political instability ensues and you see that through 12,500 riots in Europe over the last seven years of food-related riots An even more prescient example would be 2022 in Sri Lanka, where the price of meat, eggs, cheese and dairy products went up to such an extent that hundreds of thousands of people stormed the palace. The leaders had to vacate. You see it again in this upcoming election in America where food inflation has become a very big issue. So on August 15th 1971 when we unchained from gold

13:17 Our leaders were really faced with a decision, and I was able to find through Freedom of Information Acts many different examples of this – of these conversations where they could either come clean to the American people and say look we're going to flood this economy with money. It's going to help in certain ways temporarily but the price of food is going to go up they chose a different path, which was to alter the entire food supply. And they began doing that through in Richard Nixon's case he appointed a man named Earl Butz as his Department of Agriculture who began these subsidies of sugar corn and soy and when you subsidize these things you incentivized them and that's why to this day you go down the middle aisle at grocery store

14:13 a significant portion of the food composed of sugar, soy and corn. And if you're eating Doritos and grains, you don't really notice the rising cost to food but if you're eating steak eggs butter, you do What occurred to me through my research is this wasn't some crazy conspiracy where there's a smoky room. What it was, was just in the best interest of three entities that participated corporations which have a higher profit margin on selling us Cheetos than they do on meat because of the intensive nature production and the ability to produce at scale

14:59 A religious group, which is going to sound kind of obscure to most people called the Seventh-day Adventists who have a sincere religious conviction that meat will lead to the end of days and that the purification of people's soul comes through eating grains which repress sexual feelings. And a government trying to obscure the cost and consequences of monetary inflation. That's the path I Take the reader down and fiat food so that is a really great introduction to so many things in this book i wanna dive deeper into but as you say in the book it can't all be laid at the feet of nixon. And give people more context for the problem and life before fiat,

15:49 I have this quote here where you write, Nixon believed the path to lowering the high rate of unemployment would mean confronting another perhaps more formidable hurdle. If he was going to get Americans back to work, Nixon was gonna have to flood the country with more dollars however the actual implementation of such a task would prove problematic at the time every $35 amount could be redeemed for one ounce of gold and the United States Treasury didn't have the reserves of gold needed to increase the dollar supply, to the degree that the administration believed would achieve the desired outcome. The United States Treasury was already underwater by the summer of 1971

16:29 America had just 10.2 billion in gold and owed more than 40 billion in terms of the circulating dollars, the United States did not have enough gold bullion to buy the dollars it already had put into circulation much less the amount they wanted to expand by and I think that's kind of an important point. I do hear a lot of people blame Nixon often for problems we blame the one figurehead president But they had already created this massive fraud. I mean, that is fraud it goes back way before the gold standard because you're supposed to have the exact one-to-one results

17:08 So, it seemed like his hands were tied. And you go on to say that with the increase in the supply of gold being relatively stable growing by an average of 1%-2% a year citizens could be certain that their dollar's purchasing power would hold value over time and in the event of technological developments certain to come see its purchasing power increase. A $1 bill in 1900 could buy a pair of leather shoes or woman's dress Or more importantly, be saved with the confidence that it would be able to purchase more goods tomorrow than it could today. And that is just such an insane idea we hear about reverse inflation. We hear about a currency like Ethereum's doing that thing where with the burn, it becomes more valuable over time and everybody has a grandpa that reminds you that The dollar is worth less than it was in their day

18:03 But we kind of take it for granted. And when you think about this very conscious decision that caused it, man, we should be getting pretty mad. I am pretty mad and got me furious because what it does is in the fiat money printer so if to rewind a bit to the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement which Post-World War II was an agreement that all the countries in the world, most of them. Most of the countries in a world were going to pin their currency to the United States dollar and then the dollar was going to be redeemable for gold so all the currencies...most of the major countries in the world were gonna have a currency individual to them

18:55 pegged by dollars in their reserve that could be redeemed for gold in ours. And when Nixon, and you're right. Look, Nixon is not all to blame here because what he inherited was a complete fraud and it was only matter of time before he became exposed and before America became exposed as a fraud or would have taken in 1971 and it was beginning to happen with a few different foreign countries to redeem, to make a run to redeem their dollars at the same time and we didn't have the gold to pay them. The dollar said, pay the bear on demand in gold. We didn't have it so Nixon was sort of forced to end the link to gold and a lot of that was due to spending in Vietnam

19:49 Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. But what the Fiat Money Printer did post Bretton Woods, where all these countries were linked to gold and then once Nixon decoupled was in the Fiat Money Printer you then suddenly had the ability to weaponize the wealth of not just America but most of the free world and harness their productive labor because Your audience thinks that they own the dollar in their wallet, and yes they own the physical dollar. They own a fiscal $100 bill but the reality is they don't really own what it represents which is their productive labor because somebody else who's unelected can print as much as they want of that currency which affects its purchasing power so once you begin looking at currency in terms of purchasing power you can really see the corruption and

20:43 Because of Bretton Woods, because of all these foreign countries having their currency pegged to the dollar. When we print money were not just taking away the productive labor of Americans but were taking away the productive labor of most of the world and that's why we're able to perpetuate this scam for so long and it's really terrifying to me the extent of what this process has corroded 1971 happened and we saw this rising price in food. You see the Fiat Money Printer aim its extremely powerful kind of focus on dietary policy, number one so we see these shifts in what we perceived as nutrition begin. In 1970 despite corporations profiting more from

21:42 serving us Cheetos than from me, despite the Seventh-day Adventist Church having really established a foothold on nutrition science. People still mainly ate meat for breakfast lunch and dinner if they could afford it this wasn't controversial nobody was doing selling very few people were selling diet books on what to eat people kind of knew what to eat in the same way an animal knows what to eat this wasn't confusion but Suddenly, beginning a little earlier but in 1971 it kicked into gear. This campaign, this gaslighting campaign and very much still an excellent public relations campaign became weaponized by fiat because you have suddenly all this money being sent to A conduct studies that were run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church through a school called Global Lead University in California

22:40 to subsidize cheaper ingredients for corporations, and then to subsidize other nutrition science through the USDA food policy which is a government-run organization sort of because industry contributes a lot to that as well. And the perversion that's happened where over the past 50 years we've convinced the American public into foods that for thousands of years their ancestors have thrived on that that sort of was all just a crazy fad. And then the last 50 years of us eating grains like we're 14th century peasants is the new norm and that's really what's healthy so now it's like you walk down the streets in New York City, you see these emaciated or extremely overweight most at a time people eating salads and peeling skins off their chicken. It's utterly ridiculous

23:37 I try to walk the reader through how we got to this place of complete lunacy in the book. Yeah, and there are so many different good points i wanted to touch on like just the one about when people can't afford food they riot governments are very aware of that fact and they want to maintain power so this is the thing you've got a fix. You've gotta supplement the traditional diet with a cheaper alternative, and then you gotta support that with the science in the education And you gotta make it seem like superior even though its clearly not superior by the results you can find all kinds

24:19 Twitter accounts where they're constantly posting pictures of a 1950s beach versus the beach today. Clearly there's a massive difference, but it's interesting because I didn't think about inflation in food the way you present it because there are many goods out there but not everyone is trying to buy a house at the same time and not everyone is trying to buy a sofa at the same time so if the cost of products goes up i mean it's kind of an isolated situation but food is everyday, food is every single day you're gonna get families and neighbors to grab their pitchforks in there going to the capital that happens so i think that's just a really great point and

25:02 With COVID, we saw a lot of junk science that woke a lot of people up I would say. But this stuff goes back even further and I just think it's an excellent point to say that funding wouldn't be there if they didn't have the money printer. It created a lot of these giant massive behemoth institutions that still are around 50 years later dominating their industries because of this initial funding. And when I interview people about the food space, they usually cite the tobacco industry playbook and how doctors used to recommend cigarettes to even pregnant women

25:40 And everyone knows this happened, but I guess most people just think it was an isolated incident and not a reason to be distrustful of industry-funded science. But I've heard you say most science today is just PR and corporate marketing which I agree with but this is a problem that can also be pegged back to this fiat money printer right? Yeah and just to give your audience some clarity on this issue, I wanted to mention two things one of them is so if you're going to send six billion dollars to the corn industry for subsidies, pre-1970. You would have to do it honestly. You would have to do it either through the taxation directly of the American public or you maybe sell corn bonds like we had to sell war bonds. There's an accountability to these corn subsidies in fiat. You don't have to. You print it and another thing I wanted to mention was because I mentioned

26:38 sparingly, and I wanted to give your audience a little context when I mentioned the Seventh-day Adventist Church because it sounds kind of nuts to be like this church has all this power over nutrition. In late 1800's there was movement called the Millerites and they believed the end of the world was coming in that leader up the group made mistake giving exact date The exact date came and went, and all these people waited outside for the end of the world. It didn't happen. It became known historically as ironically The Great Disappointment Out of that movement there was a young girl who was part of this religion named Ellen G White And she was walking home one day as a teenager and she got hit in the head with a rock

27:37 and she fell asleep or into a coma, depending on the different sources I had. And when she awokened, she was receiving messages from God, she claimed. And God said, Ellen, I need you to start a movement where we clear the human body and make it ready for the next apocalypse which is coming very soon. So Ellen started The Seventh-Day Adventist Church At the time, she believed—this was a widely held belief—that red meat caused carnal desires. And carnal desires in particular masturbation caused almost every health problem known to man from cancer to acne everything back then was widely attributed to masturbation so she had a protege named John Harvey Kellogg

28:34 who she tasked with trying to find a food, because remember at the time everybody's eating meat for breakfast lunch and dinner. She tasked John Harvey Kellogg with finding a food to replace meat, to suppress the sexual urges of young men and he came up with Kellogg's cornflakes and ironically was very successful in marketing this getting lots of people, not just young men to eat it and decrease their sex drive. A little about John Harvey Kellogg real masochist this guy is hard to overstate the influence he had at the time He was a celebrity doctor in early part of the 1900s. He gave tours his writings were extensive people really listened to John Harvey and some of the things that he

29:26 talked about in terms of, it recommended to parents in terms of preventing masturbation included pouring carbolic acid on the clitorises of young women and surgery on young men without anesthesia. Cages binding the hands so this guy was dark but highly influential and He had a protege through the church named Leanna Cooper, who started the American Dietetic Association which became the formalized wing of government nutrition policy. But come 1970 there's still relative curiosity they're growing in popularity but

30:14 They, in 1970 became weaponized by the federal government and the fiat money printer who began sending millions and millions of dollars to their church through a university in California called Global Indian University to conduct these studies again and again which vilified me. What you need to understand about these studies is I don't want to get too into weeds. on studies with your audience, but they should understand that there's really two main kinds they should know about. Observational studies and double-blind randomized clinical research which is the gold standard and an observational study is essentially me just passing out flyers asking people what they did in their habits and then drawing conclusions

31:01 But you can't draw causal relationships from observational studies. You could only draw association. So, for example I could poll 50 people who had cancer and find out that 94% of them at some point have had dairy products. I send out a press release saying cancer linked to dairy. It's all completely accurate but I mean, it's obviously ridiculous. And that's what these studies are – these observational studies. So you'll find when you discuss the issue of meat and health people will point to studies that are just

31:45 tossed everywhere throughout the media because a thing that I understood from talking to a lot of scientists was that these studies from these universities that are observational, they're not meant to impress other academics. They're meant to get headlines. They're meant for the media and that's what they do and they're highly effective because most people listening they fucking have jobs, right? Like they're not spending time going through these studies and going through what an observational study is. And if it's a clinical... They see the headline in the news! Wait what red meat causes cancer recently I read one that red meat causes diabetes which is just on its face absurd because diabetes is glucose driven and red meat doesn't have that but it was weaponized by The Fiat Money Printer who was able to print this money without

32:34 opportunity cost, because there's no opportunity cost now that we don't have the gold standard to printing hundreds of millions of dollars whether it be to Lobel and University or to subsidize corn or wheat or soy. And you go to other countries for instance and you'll find that in Mexico Coke has sugar in Here it's corn. Corn is in our Coke, corn is in everything and the reason is because we've incentivized the corn industry through these subsidies that were created through the fiat money printer and the reason that the solution comes in not just podcasts like this where you try to expose the psyop but through ending the monetary distortion and the incentive to distort the money supply

33:24 by ending the monetary inflation. And that comes through a hard currency, going back to what we were pre 1970. Mm hmm. And I've also heard you make the good point that with industrial food, you can kind of just print more just as they print the money, you can kind of control how much is out there and if the government says look this ain't cheap enough well they can just keep the factory on overnight and make more And it is just kind of a weird way to think about it, but you're not going to print cows chickens and eggs. They are what they are the argument that a lot of previous guests have made is that they're doing this push towards more complex factory-made foods because it's patentable You can't patent a chicken egg or a cow and I think that's a happy accident too obviously there's A lot of times multiple incentives going on at the same time but

34:20 We know that in the current climate there is a big attack on red meat and There's regulators going through and testing chickens for bird flu, and then killing whole flocks. And a lot of people are really worried about like wait a minute this is like our core food and they're like well don't worry about it we got it We're just gonna print the cricket powder and we're gonna put all the stuff you know that's in the middle of the grocery store in the boxes and you're gonna be fine You just gotta eat that and I think that patentability situation is worth raising, but I just never have heard it connected to this. And I think it's really great like regulatory capture we talk about all the time the idea that these corporations have so much money that they just completely compromise any regulation that was supposed to be there and all this can be laid at the feet of getting us off the gold standard but to go back to Kellogg a bit

35:19 You've said that he was a eugenicist in previous interviews, and sometimes I wonder when a person is a eugenicist it's like does the faith just support the eugenicism or what came first? The chicken or the egg because it seems like he has a very convenient faith that helps to support a darker worldview. but he's not the only one involved in this. We could also fold in Ansel Keys as a major contributor to America's nutritional deception, but I guess talk just a little bit more about the players involved and what really happened and how many of them still have influence 50 years later? The Kelloggs' influence obviously not the man himself, but the foundations

36:07 American Heart Association, these things that were propped up in this day. They're still the big players. Yeah you mentioned a lot of great points Ansel Keys wasn't a heart doctor and so he's wasn't a nutritionist he studied eels was one of his expertise and through force of personality largely He got to understand in 1950 there was a bit of a panic over heart attacks The president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower has a heart attack. He's in the hospital for days and the American public is very afraid what is going on like it's this silent killer so people just walking around they die and there was a real hysteria over it and some of it was really justified So the question is what was causing these heart attacks? Now

37:03 In 1950 America, 45% of people were pretty heavy smokers. sugar consumption had gone on the rise and we just got introduced to a new previously unknown food in the sense of these vegetable oils, in particular Crisco which had made its way into the market. But Ancel Keys had a theory that saturated fat found in meat was raising cholesterol which was causing heart attacks called the Diet-Heart Hypothesis. Now a hypothesis is an educated guess, and this is all this was. And when he first presented it he kind of got laughed out of academia. They're like well where's your evidence? What you find is...and I pulled all his studies and read them extensively what you find is real justified reasoning so what he was doing was looking for evidence that would validate his hypothesis. He would have these observational studies

38:08 where he would claim he could find these associations, but you can never establish a true causal relationship. Very adept at the media though and he became good at sort of hijacking institutions through power personality and persuading them. But finally in 1968 Ansel Keys was kind of sick of the criticism I think he really believed or least part of him did that his theory was correct so got the government to give him a few million bucks to try a randomized controlled study on his theory, to test once and for all if it's hypothesis that saturated fat found in particular in red meat caused heart attacks. And this was called the Minnesota Coronary Survey happens in 1968. It lasts for five years in 1973 and this is a controlled study where you can control variables because he conducted this in Minnesota

39:08 in certain nursing homes and psychiatric homes where all the food could be monitored. So previous, you don't really know what people are eating if you're going to ask my kids what they ate in a given day they're gonna lie because they're not gonna admit all the sugar they eat or whatever There is no line. All these variables are controlled because the food is controlled, so this was a really pretty good study and they gave half the participants a diet very low in saturated fats and other half a diet very high in saturated fats. Well 1973 rolls around and studies over millions of dollars hundreds and hundreds of hours and the results aren't released people kind of forget about this study

39:54 until 2016 when a New York Times reporter gets just curious. He'd read about the study happening, he wanted to know what the results were so he tracked down one of the researchers who had died and found his kid and the son of one of the researchers Ansel Keyes was the co-leader of this study and there was another guy named Ivan who was the leader and this is his son found boxes in the basement which had all the data from the study and shocking to these people what it revealed, the first real study on the diet heart hypothesis revealed the exact opposite was true. It revealed that the people who had lower cholesterol

40:46 actually suffered from worse health outcomes. And the people with higher cholesterol did better in terms of all-cause mortality, and this was really stunning and it rocked a lot of you know the medical community. A great journalist named Gary Taubes who reports on this subject extensively tracked down another one of the researchers and asked why didn't you ever publish this data? His response was chilling he said Well, it wasn't that there was anything wrong with the study. The study was perfect. It was that we were quote so disappointed in the results

41:31 Now, look. This was really discouraging to read because by 2016 the government had formalized the diet heart hypothesis as the nation's health beginning in the 1980 dietary guidelines which told us to stop eating saturated meat and start eating more grains but really formalizing in 1992 dietary food pyramid which as a kid growing up in the 90s, which I was said you should have 8 to 11 servings of grains A day that is a diet for metabolic destruction and you should have almost no meat So people might hear this would be like oh who gives a shit. It's the government food pyramid Oh No it matters because if you like me grew up in the 90s and went to public school This became well

42:24 law in the schools of our nation. So if you were a kid like me, what you experienced was the whole milk that we had in elementary school became replaced by low-fat milk which no one drank because it tasted like dirty piss water So they had to flavor it with strawberry or chocolate. Now everybody who grew up in the 90s knows what I'm talking about, we all had strawberry and chocolate milk that has as much sugar in it as soda. The lard that used to fry our French fries and chicken nuggets got replaced by seed oils. And the pizza which used to have real cheese got replaced by some low fat chemical shit storm. By the time I got out of high school, I was fat and I was chemically

43:09 Like I was metabolically compromised and I was already addicted to these highly addictive substances. And not just in schools, but all the nation's hospitals and nursing homes all had to abide by these dietary guidelines, which were marketing campaigns. They were marketing campaigns not just by the government's incentive to obscure the consequences of monetary inflation through having a switch or diet from meat which is cost prohibitive to these cheaper grains to make us feel like we have an abundance of food while in reality

43:51 the nutrients of life, that our ability to thrive as a species is cost prohibitive. It's increasingly expensive. Ask your audience. I mean meat is increasingly becoming a food of the upper classes. We look around oh my god! Look at how cheap...I can get a whole box of cereal for $3.99 still after this podcast? I'm going to a farmer's market to a local farmer where I pick up my rib eyes it's really expensive to get a ribeye right now And it wasn't so in 1970. And to go back to the dietary guidelines and tie this in, and I know this is a lot of hope your audience can stay with me here. The dietary guidelines 95% Nina Teicholz found this out she's an excellent journalist who wrote The Big Fat Surprise. I recommend everybody reads that as well.

44:41 people on the dietary guidelines have been captured or funded in some form by industry. So, the people who are choosing what is in the best interest of our children to eat are working for industry so, of course like when I work for a newspaper, I am accountable to the people paying me my editors you're naive if you don't think that the people paying and funding these individuals are not also calling the tune. And then if you also go on the dietary guideline websites, it sounds like a conspiracy I encourage your audience to just go on and look at who their quote partnerships are PepsiCo Nestle they're literally funding by 11 to 1 ratio The USDA and there are people who are deciding what our food supply is

45:32 Then on the back end, and I know I'm kind of going all over the place but I promise you it's connected. On the back end, you have the pharmaceutical industry who ties it all together because they're all sort of enmeshed. And one of the issues I had as a journalist was, I like to write in a linear fashion and storytelling begins here but I found that these groups were so incestuously tied together that it was very hard to separate. One example I used my book that just chilled me to the bone In January of 2023, there was a 60-minute segment with a woman named Dr. Fatima Sanford—just a real atrocity of the human being who goes on 60 Minutes and she's a very eloquent speaker wearing her white coat and she's talking to Leslie Stahl and she's explaining how everything we knew about diet pre this segment was wrong that lifestyle

46:34 The food we decide to eat has actually nothing to do with our health outcomes. They discovered it's a genetic, quote, genetic brain disease." The segment goes on to explain that luckily there is a solution. It doesn't come again through lifestyle changes. It's through shots like Ozempek that will cure obesity. Now, barely mentioned in the segment was the fact that the only two experts on were at one time paid consultants for Ozempac or that the show itself was sponsored by Ozempac but that same exact month Tufts Food Compass comes out now I think about this more than I should admit because these are people who for years have dedicated their life to studying nutrition

47:25 They're the best and the brightest in the field of nutrition. So they released, the same month as this 60 Minutes piece, The Tufts Food Compass which informs the citizenry that Fruit Loops – Greg, Fruit Loops are better than meat and eggs! And chocolate-flavored soy milk is healthier than whole milk. Same exact month that these two things happen, actually six weeks later the American Pediatric Association comes out with a statement that they're revising their guidelines to doctors.

48:03 that now children as young as 11 are eligible for Rozempek and weight loss drugs. So I could not find in my hunt for documents anything that showed they had all at any time gathered, that these three entities, the Tufts Food Compass which told us eating Froot Loops was healthier than eating meat, that the largest and most media savvy 60 minute show told us that Ozempic was the cure for genetic brain disease and that children now could be prescribed these weight loss drugs. And that was now the best thing that a pediatrician could do to stem obesity, I found no evidence that they all colluded but I would be naive as a reporter to think there was no connection of course it was part of a coordinated marketing campaign and you know to go back to that doctor

48:59 And there was another doctor on that 60 Minutes show. I just, I can't think of anything that's more damaging to a person's personal integrity than to tell them that they have no personal control over the most important aspect of their own existence which is their own personal health outcomes And if you can convince the American public, if you can successfully convince them that they don't have any control over something so foundational as their own health then they are susceptible to become putty to anything. Anything! I think that's sort of the civil war that you see playing out in America right now which is people who subscribe to credentialed authorities and have outsourced their own personal volition

49:49 based on credentials, and then another group who's more evidence-based and they're a little bit more critical. And they're thinking wait a minute, just wait a minute you guys have failed us! And you mentioned COVID as a turning point, and for me it was very much so a turning point I've interviewed former presidents Greg, senators, representatives governors like i'm used to politicians lying. COVID jumped the shark for me though there seemed to be...I didn't think that these people In the past, I knew they were dishonest but they seemed to not have disdain for the American public. There was this feeling that they wanted what was best for people as long as they could hold power so that seemed to be what the line was in context too. COVID jumped a sharp for me where it became apparent that they no longer gave a shit. It's like the jump of shark where suddenly these leaders, the masks were proverbially off

50:45 and they weren't even pretending anymore. So you notice during COVID, where the highest mortality rates were from people who are obese, there were studies coming out about eating more candy to deal with COVID chocolate. They're funded by the confectionaries institutions I outlined it in my book or how the partnership between fucking McDonald's and the government too Eat more McDonald's and on the cups of your Coke, supersized was the website to get your pharmaceutical product. It was just beyond belief but when you look back historically and I trace it with over 200 footnotes, I bring the receipts, you see it's all part of a pattern in escalation." I know that was long-winded so I apologize but it's beyond belief and it's a lot

51:39 Yeah, and it makes a lot of sense. I like the way you present everything yeah i think the dam to break is realizing that the people in power Are at least neutral and don't care about us and at worst they have to stay in for us and i think about my own friends and family and why can get them to necessarily see the world the way i see it. I usually reverse engineer it too that day generally thank well, i know the politicians lie i know the media lies i can't think of any specific examples but probably i will say that

52:15 And I think they're doing the best they can. That's the thing that once that breaks and you do start looking at all these things as more coordinated, we're not afraid of the dirty word conspiracy around here but i do say a lot of the time conspiracy is just good business it's various business interests winking and nodding saying You know, this is going to work out great for us. And it doesn't have to be more complicated than that if you want to see them all in a room together I guess i would look at who goes to the Bilderberg meetings but you don't even really have to and just because the way the show is split before this first hour's over I really want to fold in

52:56 What you present as a solution the full title of your book is fiat food why inflation destroyed our health and how bitcoin fixes it. And now myself i am cautiously optimistic about bitcoin i do follow the leading thinkers in that space but i tend to stay in the bitcoin closet because I know this audience, is thoroughly red pill but not so much orange pilled And I think we just get lied to so often that people have grown cynical and many people see this new currency emerge with an anonymous founder. And they think, well that's a red flag maybe it's a cover for DARPA or some NSA project. They're concerned about central bank digital currency and the individualized control being proposed through digital means

53:41 And we don't need to go over Bitcoin 101. There's plenty of that out there, but you say returning to any hard currency would definitely help. Bitcoin just happens to be the best and an improvement on everything gold did for us helped make that case to the bitcoin cynics. How do we present the facts that it's better than gold? Okay so I am not a cryptocurrency expert I'm not an economist, but one thing that came apparent to me in my research was at the core of this problem you find a government needing to obfuscate the consequences of monetary inflation. When you remove the incentive to gaslight us on monetary inflation

54:37 You're fixing so much of the problem right there because what's the incentive to hide the changing price of food when the food price isn't changing, because the money supply is reasonable and it's not going up. It's not doubling every six years." So I arrived at Bitcoin because you're right any hard currency would work but the reason i would advocate for bitcoin is because historically gold What you see happen over and over again is that while its supply is good in that respect, it goes up by 1% to 2.5%, in general a year. What you find is that people begin putting gold in banks and then they get the promissory notes. That's how money began. It was notes that said I had X amount of gold in the bank. I could bring my note to the bank and get my goal. It was just a note that certified what I had, a receipt essentially. Yeah. Gold's heavy papers light.

55:38 Right. So historically, over and over again what you see happen is a lot of people put their gold in the bank, they get the receipts and then over time the government's like actually the gold is now ours. You get to keep the receipt we keep the gold. You have Roosevelt doing this, you had it happen in Australia, Great Britain, you had a scenario even where Mussolini convinced Italian housewives to exchange their gold bands for steel bands as a sign of patriotism. So you find that this happens any time that there is a national emergency or perceived national emergency, the government – the people put their gold in banks and get paper receipts. This lasts for X amount of years until the government says the gold is now ours. You get to keep the paper receipts and trade those. That can only last for so long

56:33 This has been tried throughout history. It always meets the same end." Bitcoin, in my understanding of it is it changes that trajectory because unless the government can go to everybody's houses or literally shut the internet down. It just has a very difficult time confiscating Bitcoin because if you're non-custodial, meaning that you own your own Bitcoin and you have your own private keys which is a secret code that only you know and you might have it physically written down on a piece of paper they have to come to your house so if you have your bitcoin in custodial merchants it could actually suffer the same fate as gold but my argument would be if people owned their bitcoin

57:19 in own their own keys, that safeguards it against that. But at the end of the day any hard currency that the government couldn't seize would work because it's not so much the solution in terms of a hard currency, but what it does to the fiat money printer. The fiat money printer and the distortions it creates is at the heart of why our food policy has been distorted which I would argue is the most consequential crime of this century in terms of its impact on human health. Go to any Walmart in America and look at the line people are sick like they're metabolically compromised and It's sad. It's awful

58:02 we would end the distortion when we end the Fed. The most effective way to end a Fed is through a new currency, and I would argue that Bitcoin based on my limited economic knowledge and people that I really respect is the singular best way to end the distortions. Yeah, I think there might be a lot of potential criticisms and maybe Bitcoin would open up new problems that we don't have now, that we aren't even aware of until it would be implemented. But it certainly would go a long way to solve a lot of what we've talked about and deflationary was the term I was looking for earlier mentioning Ethereum and Ethereum has a burn so there's literally less tokens. And I know Bitcoin is 21 million, so it's not like there's any fluctuation in that number

58:59 But it's kind of deflationary in the sense that there's that meme going around about the price of a home in US dollars versus Bitcoin. I pulled it up, in 2016, a house cost $288,000 and 2020, $330,000 and 2024, $440,000 But in 2016, it was 664 Bitcoin. In 2020 45 Bitcoin and 2024 6.6 Bitcoin so the more people participate in that ecosystem the cheaper things get because it's more people that 21 million is divided

59:40 up amongst and it can be broken down forever. I think people get really locked into $1, one Bitcoin how am i going to get one bitcoin if it costs seventy thousand dollars you don't need that it just gets cheaper and cheaper, and you start working in the equivalent of pennies instead of the equivalent of Bitcoins. You would use Satoshis to be like well for just X number divided by even more and more 0.0001 Bitcoin is now worth more than it was before And I am kind of a fan of this space. I like Michael Saylor, I like a lot of people who talk here. I got invited to the Bitcoin conference to cover it with a press badge even though I didn't really do much and I didn't really talk about it very much

1:00:28 It's probably over both of our heads to really get into the technical analysis on if it could really do what it claims to do. But when you say that, when you buy Bitcoin, you take a little jab into the ribs of the Federal Reserve I like that and I think that's probably a good way to think about it. And all the time I'll ask people about solutions to these problems and a lot of them are very lofty so lofty it's never really gonna happen. Like if we could all just, there's always that phrase if we could all just... We can't do a fucking thing. There's too many people you can't get them to agree on anything obviously polarization left and right is more divided than ever. You're not gonna get everybody on any one page and I worry about that with this situation too. It's like if we could only get Bitcoin to be the standard maybe we could have some success. You can't even

1:01:26 have an organic garden planted at the White House because the entrenched food powers are so like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're going to give people the wrong idea about health and food." So they really do have everything compromised. And if the money is so key that's going to be the number one thing they're going to want to protect. Do you have any thoughts about the path to even getting into a Bitcoin standard? I do. It's individual, one by one. Eventually it is inevitable. Historically the strongest currency always overwhelms the weaker currency so we've gone from seashells to rocks to all kinds of different methods but we landed on gold for such a long time because it was the strongest currency. It had all the great trademarks. It was indestructible you could divide into many pieces

1:02:21 and it only grew by one to 2%. Bitcoin takes all the aspects of gold and puts them on steroids. So I think it's inevitable, it's just a matter of when that people will eventually move towards a bitcoin standard. And I would refer people to Saifuddin Amouss' work who has heavily inspired me and been a bit of a mentor for me his books we wrote the bitcoin standard but especially The Fiat Standard really resonated with me personally and what's the inspiration for this book, for a better explanation on that.

1:02:57 And Greg, I hate to say this. I didn't anticipate it going this long and my computer probably has five minutes left. Oh sorry that does happen occasionally. I say in the interview request it's two hours but sometimes people just skim that stuff and... I did skim that stuff! I apologize. I understand But I love the in-depth conversations and you were really well versed in this subject which is kind of rare on these podcasts so I appreciate it Well thank you for saying so All right, well I can let you go. Let's do the wrap-up thing we do the dance so we can get the plugs in tell people what they need to know Fiat food is available at safehouse.com and Amazon And Greg i just like really appreciate what you're doing We talk a lot about The pessimistic nature of the future but I will point two examples such as yourself where The information needed for humans to prosper is getting out and Just keep doing your thing man. I really appreciate it

1:03:55 You as well, really impressive. I just think your whole journey is super interesting going from a conventional journalist writing these pieces for the mainstream media to now it sounds like you and Alex Jones would agree on 90% of stuff maybe not Sandy Hook but everything else it seems like you really would be on the same page because the things are saying are about as far down the rabbit hole as anyone ever goes Yeah, man. I remember those days when I used to be a beloved mainstream journalist and well-respected and I'm relishing my role as heretic much like you are and I wear that badge with honor now Yes Well we are lucky to have ya! I appreciate you coming over to the Counterculture team And I'll let you go before the battery does it for us take care out there Hey thanks man

1:04:49 Alright, cool cats and kittens. How do we feel about that? Really sucks that his battery was dying and we lost a couple of good minutes there but I loved it! We haven't had a fractional reserve money show in a long time mainly because its such a fundamental conspiratorial topic It is one of the early things people wake up to But really, this was top tier for me. You know I love throwing shade at the frankenfood makers and to tie the two together is so effective! Matt does show many examples in his book that these food companies were around longer but the government didn't funnel them money and pivot the entire food policy until they needed to hide the effects of inflation

1:05:33 So they say, not only do we have more of these cheap shitty factory foods but they're actually not shitty. They're better for you than steak and eggs! And the 80s and 90s were a real doubling down on that and constant propaganda to reinforce it... ...and a lot of boomer age people still believe it wholeheartedly There's no telling how many people they were slowly killing while Big Pharma was coming in for the assist on patching them up and draining their wallet The irony of the processed food diet is that it's supposed to be cheaper and better, but it sends you into the loving arms of the most expensive set of processes we have with the medical-industrial complex. And you might not love the suggestion of Bitcoin as a solution but again... We need a hard currency or none of it gets fixed! I definitely planned to get into the war cycle points in the first hour But we didn't get there on time

1:06:30 and it was a second hour thing. But just to loop everyone in, the fiat money printer is how we get the endless wars. Citizens were decoupled from war funding just like a volunteer military circumnavigates the level of protesting you have when there's a draft again it's in The Plus Show but Matt pegs the years with the most global peace and those were the years that most nations had a currency backed by precious metals You cannot just print new money with a hard currency, and we obviously know that is a key problem in today's world. We grumble about it—hey don't print that money and send it to Ukraine! Don't send that money to Israel! But like...we can't really do anything about it And it doesn't affect our bottom line directly and immediately so we don't protest about it I mean college kids aside of course This is just the sad reality this is how they get away with the scams

1:07:25 So our shitty processed food creating the problem coupled with big pharma as the solution, they should go together and then you add the endless war cycle. All of these things can be laid at the feet of changing the currency." And I even speculated in there that I wonder if that's a key reason why we shipped the jobs to China and changed everything into plastic? The oil guys rake it in, of course. And goods are cheaper so again the erosion of purchasing power is hidden I mean this really lit a fire for me! None of it is stuff I didn't know but it hasn't been linked like this and I think its an elegant way to identify a major core problem and a great way to approach these topics with regular people Way less abrasive than reptilian shapeshifters or

1:08:17 planned mass shootings or whatever topic you might want to go in with because people know about inflation and they can be educated on the currency without an emotional reaction like they'd have if you got into a vax conversation. And with Bitcoin I have kind of always tried to stay pretty much neutral Or at least keep it out of the show, because I don't like that it requires internet and government infrastructure to function. But I do like that its a hard currency no one can really stop you from using right now on your own One of my guiding principles is always that I dont have faith in these big sweeping systematic changes Because we lack control and masses lack knowledge

1:09:03 In this case, it's like you can't decide that your family is going to go back on a gold standard individually. But you can get into Bitcoin and there are a lot of other people doing that I think if you're paying attention to the bitcoin space government does not like bitcoin at all It's been years, but now banks are seeing the value of the ETFs which again is not Bitcoin. It's a derivative and I'm sure they're going to play games with their reserves eventually if they aren't already and if we have no power or internet and bitcoin becomes impossible to transact in...I don't see people carrying around a lot of gold either! We're gonna have a ton of problems that's Armageddon level stuff. I wouldn't even want gold. I'd be trading meat for eggs at that point

1:09:52 But Bitcoin is easier to hide than gold, easier to carry than gold. Easier to transport, easier to get from country to country? You're going to walk through the airport with your gold and try to get out of this country? Hmm... It's also easier to divide than gold. You have a gold bar and you want to buy some meat. Are you gonna shave some off? These are just some of the practical reasons why Bitcoin people love it! They call it being orange-pilled because when you get it, you get it But it's been around long enough now that I'm not convincing anyone. Yes, they want to get to a CBDC and total control of your finances...I agree with that! but it will not be Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just if its anything It's the way they're gonna get you used to using digital currency systems Just like the early internet was way better than the current internet and everybody loved it And then they kind of flipped a switch

1:10:52 That is my take on why they hate Bitcoin, but they don't outright ban it. But whatever I see a lot more value in having some bitcoin around than i do of 401k or any of that Ponzi scheme shit where you're forced to invest in the very companies that are fucking up the world Or the government's going to take it at tax season Then people get vested in the value of their 401ks and they don't want these companies to go away or suffer At all and it's all coercion You can hate Bitcoin, but you better hate all that shit a lot more because Bitcoin hasn't done anything to you and the fiat money printer has wrecked the world. And maybe even your own family's health If you listen to some people in the bitcoin space another interesting point they make is that if you have a currency that goes up in value not down... ...you preserve it because you want to preserve your wealth which means the market has to sell you a better product

1:11:52 People aren't going to use their valuable Bitcoin to buy cheap plastic bullshit. You think more about spending your money because you are eroding your wealth It's an interesting flip on the concept that we have money that constantly is worthless so we don't think twice about spending it on this, that and the other We know our plastic goods are shitty but they're not melting like you basically could say that our money is melting away So everything changes with a currency that actually has some value because people think twice about spending it and product makers have to make a better product and make a better case that its worth giving up some of that money. There's a lot of interesting psychology in all this stuff too, but you can get into that if you want to but when it comes to Matthew I like his identification of the problem and deep history so much

1:12:53 That is why we did this show. The Bitcoin is just offered as a, hey you know there's this thing and it probably has a little more to do with where Matthew published the book and where he got the idea from the book than it does his actual conviction or obsession with bitcoin And if you never considered some of this stuff listen to some Michael Saylor He's probably the best. He's a real wild man I also like Max Keiser who really is the crazy conspiracy guy of the Bitcoin community. But either way, big thanks to Matthew he wrote a great book and he's great at talking about it! He mentioned that fact that he looked like he got punched in the nose but it was from basketball but the show is audio only so no real need to reference that but you can clearly see it in the clips So if ya see the clips... That's what that's about. Either way loved it I'm not gonna make this too long I have to go see somebody in the hospital

1:13:51 They're getting really shitty treatment and largely being ignored while they sit there miserable, their problem gets worse. And guess what? The hospital is called Advent Health Tampa meaning Seventh Day Adventists So now I'm seeing how awful they are first hand It really sucks and I think the stress is making me sick But the show must go on so last episode with J Dreamers...I knew it would be a polarizing show A real love-it or hate-it episode There are even a few comments on the Plus site where they say, I hated this and i'm just gonna sit out on the rating. But don't do that! That doesn't help me The rating doesn't really affect anything It doesn't affect the algorithm or THC's popularity it's just there for ME So if you have strong feelings about an episode You gotta let me know Anyway Jay got a 4.5 Now yesterday it was a 4.9 which was really wild And I knew that wouldn't stay

1:14:51 People say he's just making shit up, but he has a book and a large following. It might even rival THC's following really He has done a lot of work even if some of it is intuitive But hey, I warned you right at the top. If you're looking for sources and details this isn't going to be the show for you Jay's on the epic big picture side of things And i broadly do gravitate towards the idea of plasma cataclysms and resets but i agree some of jay stuff is too far out even for me but it was fun and i like the guy Now we have a meetup calendar to review Here are the events on deck

1:15:34 May 23rd, Pasadena California. The Yerth Cafe in the LA foothills. May 25th, Minneapolis Minnesota Indeed Brewing Company June 8th, the Iberian Irish Pub in Raleigh North Carolina Also June 8th Palm Bay Florida Small Equipment RX This is the BYOB Barbecue Learn How To Use A Generator event I still need to see how far that is for me, because that could be fun. I am in hurricane country now! And then June 9th Warren Rhode Island at the Guild Good stuff Still some events in May June's filling up nicely Hop on highersidemeetups.com if you want to RSVP for any of these events or If you want to get more details if you heard about one near you and if he didn't hear about one near You just make one think about your local independent restaurant or brewery or park

1:16:32 Throw it up on the calendar, I'll read it and anyone who lives near you will hear it and probably show up. And you'll make some new friends or at least have a network of people to call on when it all goes down But that's it for me big thanks to Matthew Fiat food is a great book and I'm out! I've done my part your move trash food factories central bank banksters and fiat money facilitators Your fucking... Nag it down I eat a bunch of corporate junk That makes you fat, straight wrong. Add an addiction to the digital technology Try to quit, take discipline and don't have fear Ascend every one of them