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EP06 Dr Pran Yoganathan
94 Plays1 year ago
Dr Pran Yoganathan is a Gastroenterologist and Hepatologist with an interest in philosophy, psychology, nature and farming.
We discuss the growing autocracy within what Pran describes as the agricultural-pharmaceutical-medical-industrial complex, among other topics like the necessity for physical and spiritual development to achieve optimal health.
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Transcript
Introduction to Dr. Pran Yoganathan
00:00:02
Speaker
All right. Welcome everyone to episode six of my podcast, Nick Taski podcast. Today I'm joined by Dr. Pran Yoganathan. Thanks for joining me, Pran. I'll pass over to you and you can introduce yourself. Yeah, absolute pleasure mate. So my name is Pran, as Nick just said, I'm a gastroenterologist, which is a specialty
00:00:23
Speaker
which I think a lot of people are aware of, but it's fundamentally a specialty that encompasses the digestive tract or what's informally known as the gut, commonly known as the gut. So we basically deal with diseases of that. It's been a very eye-opening experience for me in my career as a 10 years of being a gastroenterologist, because I've realized something that one of the forefathers of medicine
00:00:49
Speaker
Hippocrates said about 3,000 years ago, he said, all diseases begin in the gut. And in my initial stages of the period, I thought that was an absolute mad saying, but the further I get into it, and the more experienced I get, I realized almost every single modern illness that human beings suffer in our society probably has its roots in the gut. So it's a great honor that I'm in this field, and hopefully I've met something for your viewers today.
00:01:17
Speaker
Yeah, cool.
The Gut and Liver Connection
00:01:18
Speaker
And as I understand it, you're also a hepatologist, right? Which means like you specialize in, in the liver too. Or is that, does that go in conjunction with gastroenterology? Yeah, it does, Nick. Most gastroenterologists are hepatologists, but there are some people that will sub-specialize purely in hepatology because the liver is a very, very complex organ system. So there are some people that won't do the procedures that most other gastroenterologists do and will purely
00:01:46
Speaker
focus on the medicine of the liver. They become physicians of the liver, but overall we are general, generally we do cover the liver as well.
00:01:57
Speaker
Very interesting.
Gut Microbiome and Soil Health
00:01:58
Speaker
One of the things that I think really excites me and probably a lot of other people about you is what I think is a newfound interest that I see in agriculture and the soil. And I've seen you post fairly regularly about how all disease begins in the gut, but all health also begins in the soil, right?
00:02:19
Speaker
I see you making a lot of comparison between, uh, perhaps what we refer to as the soil microbiome and the gut microbiome. Are they pretty similar things from your point of view? Yeah. I mean, we can, let's break it down a little bit. And do you mind if I take it in a bit? Yeah, sure. We're launched straight into it, you know, no formalities needed.
00:02:40
Speaker
So the human gut is the interface where the soil meets the human being basically. Now people say, what do you mean by that? Now think about what our gut does or what's the function of the gut? It's basically so that we consume food, right?
00:02:57
Speaker
We eat the food and it meets the gut. 95% of our food comes from the soil, what is grown in the soil, animals feeding on the soil, on plants that are growing there. So pretty much all food that we as human beings consume come from the soil. So a very simple way to put it is the gut is where the soil meets the human being. The soil is the most complex and diverse biobank of the microbiome that basically inhabits our gut.
00:03:28
Speaker
We carry a microorganism, fungi, bacteria, and various other things within our body, but the gut and the oral cavity have to be some of the most concentrated areas where the microbiome is carried. The colon, in particular, holds about 70% of the gut microbiome. The rest of it's sort of spread evenly between the small bowel and the esophagus. So the comparisons that are made in some of the posts that you might have seen, Nick,
00:03:58
Speaker
We are a reflection of the soil. We are a reflection of this farming system that we've recently developed, and we can talk about that. And our gut microbiome reflects what's going on in the soil and the environment around us.
Impact of Industrial Farming on Gut Health
00:04:13
Speaker
Now, the issues that I've had is, as farming has changed to feed a modern way of consumption of food and a shifting culture around food,
00:04:24
Speaker
The soil microbiome unfortunately has changed as well, because the inputs and so forth, it goes into it. So our gut microbiome has fundamentally shifted. So these are the comparisons that I've made. I've linked the decay of the human gut microbiome, which then eventually leads to disease, to the decay in farming. And the decay in farming has come about for many, many reasons, but industrial large scale farming aided by
00:04:52
Speaker
a very loose monetary policy, which leads to corporations rising and gaining a market share or starting to dominate a market share, starting to consume the smaller companies that are up and coming, which fundamentally leads to a decimation of free market type processes where smaller companies can challenge for a market share that no longer happens. The big guy comes in like a shark and just consumes these smaller fishers.
00:05:23
Speaker
the chance to innovate is gone. So we can't innovate anymore because of this domination of corporations in industrial farming.
00:05:37
Speaker
It's interesting to me that you mentioned the degradation of the soil coinciding with the degradation of the gut. And it sort of seems to me that a lot of people and doctors in particular have just completely overlooked soil health. They couldn't be less interested in the agricultural side of things. To me, that doesn't make sense, but I think
00:06:03
Speaker
What, you know, probably the most important point you touched on there was there's this massive disconnection between soil health and human health and no one seems to be paying any attention to it aside from perhaps the few and far between doctors like you.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, in my field, I would certainly be considered somewhat of a quack probably by my colleagues. But that's okay, Nick, because innovation kind of has to start one step at a time. It's little groups that are not clinging on to the
00:06:38
Speaker
common narrative that's been paraded, that spark innovation, that spark hopefully sets up a flame that kind of consumes the old paradigms, burns that down to the ground and reduces it to ashes. And from those ashes, hopefully new ideas spring forth, new ideas blossom.
00:06:57
Speaker
and new paradigms are created. That's the nature of science.
Critique of the Medical Industry
00:07:02
Speaker
At the moment, the resistance to changing that is, as I said, we've got to take it back down to money. Corporations that got just an absolute grip hold on that system, and that's why this system can't change. And why are doctors resistant to change? I think personality comes into it. We're very,
00:07:22
Speaker
We're built for compliance. A lot of doctors are great at following orders. Are they great at innovating and becoming creative? I think the system takes that out of them, whatever they start with, perhaps at the start of med school or even school, because, you know, becoming a doctor is not a, I'll just decide to become a doctor after year 12. It's like, you know, almost that idea is planted in these kids at year three, year four, and then they strive towards that goal to reach it.
00:07:51
Speaker
I think they're very much geared for compliance from that perspective. So if you're a compliant person, you take orders from the authority of the greatest authority of that era, which at the moment is, what would you say that is? It's government.
00:08:08
Speaker
problem is a lot of these government-based guidelines, there's a lot of corporate influence there and so there is really no room for a creative mind, there's really no room for thinking outside the square because we are very much guidelines-based, we follow rules really well and we're
00:08:29
Speaker
upset to, you know, we're loathed to upset the Africa. Therefore, no change really occurs. And that's, that's probably why you'll be wounded as to why more doctors aren't making the link. But that is the nature of the beast. That is the nature of this industry. And you've got to realize it is an industry, not that the doctors realize it, but the, you know, I've made links to the military industrial complex war as a business.
00:08:54
Speaker
therefore we will always have a war. It's the same with the pharmaceutical, medical, industrial complex. Disease is a business therefore we must always have disease. To have disease you need a broken agricultural and food system that perpetuates disease and you throw in other things like a bit of a spiritual void and so forth and people disconnect from nature
00:09:20
Speaker
Um, the, the, you know, Florida use of antibiotics, all of this, and you've got the state set for an absolute whirlwind of disaster, which is modern human disease. Hmm.
Modern Agriculture and Health Issues
00:09:31
Speaker
What would you say sparked your interest in, in maybe going against the grain a little bit? Like, what was the, what was the moment for you where you're like, holy shit, like things aren't right. At least from my perspective. Um, look.
00:09:45
Speaker
I've always, I'm always a strange kid, Nick. You know, I've always had this sense that, you know, we're, we're, is this a movie, you know, is this are we in a movie sometimes. And it's, you know, the movie The Matrix really resonated with me because it was this sense of uneasiness as
00:10:03
Speaker
Is this reality? Truly is this reality? And I read a lot of physics growing up as a kid and even more so as an adult. And these whole ideas of the universe that is a holographic projection kind of is a replayed concept. Not to get too nuanced, but what I started realizing is that we fundamentally exist in a setup that is basically there to keep humans in check.
00:10:29
Speaker
there is no real room for innovation and growth because that upsets the natural order of things. And the natural order of things is very much a system that is dominated by a few market players. We live in a corporatocracy where corporations hold power or will power over governments. So it's this sense, this sense
00:10:52
Speaker
of uneasiness at existence that basically started my pursuit into looking at, well, what is going on within health? Because mate, let's be honest, when you've got autoimmune illnesses up 500 to 600% in 50 years, and my industry is putting that down to genetics, or fitness influences putting that down to overconsumption of calories,
00:11:20
Speaker
that the calorie in, calorie out model somehow being violated, that's where I've got an issue. So I felt compelled to step in to express my view, my humble view that, hey, maybe there is other systems at play that are fundamentally driving human disease.
00:11:41
Speaker
I've noticed you talk a lot about the pharmaceutical, medical, industrial complex as well. And to paint a picture for people who I guess aren't well versed in what we're talking about or who are just maybe just scratching their heads and saying, how are these things related? My understanding is that
00:11:57
Speaker
Was it after the first world war with the creation of chemical bombs, chemical fertilizers, the chemical factories, they had to find the use for NPK chemicals, right? And so the next best use to keep those, I guess, profitable factories.
00:12:18
Speaker
in line was to send that off to farmers. And, you know, I've heard stories of, you know, farmers who have appeared on, you know, Joe Rogan podcast or many, many other other podcasts, you know, there's documentaries like food, ink and all these sorts of things where they're talking about.
00:12:34
Speaker
the first time they saw NPK fertilizers applied to their land and are like, oh my God, this, you know, the grass is growing so fast, uh, in, in comparison to, you know, neighboring pastures. And it was, it was just a, I guess, one of those things where no one asked any questions because it just appeared so, so good. And it, it came from the people in the white lab coats who were like, how great is this?
00:12:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's a complex story, Nick, and it's at the end of World War II, and I'll paint the picture for your viewers, okay? Or your listeners. It's at the end of World War II, or into World War II. No one knew that World War II was gonna end suddenly. It raged on for a long time. Now, to solve the problem of feeding the troops, they needed to come up with food that would survive unrefrigerated for many, many months on end, okay?
00:13:28
Speaker
So the US government turns American manufacturing to solve that problem. And they solved the problem. They came up with this food. Unfortunately for them, the war ended pretty rapidly, right? So they had months and months of product that had been churned out by various manufacturers, but no consumer base. So these companies went to government because they were all government subsidized companies. And they said, what are we going to do? We're going to go broke. So they came up with a plan, which was that
00:13:58
Speaker
they were going to market this to the consumers or the American homemakers as something convenient, something efficient, something healthy and fashionable. And so the message was woven into everything from sponsored shows and food advertising was virtually born. So cartoons like the Jetsons and Bewitched and all this sort of stuff, all that message was woven in.
00:14:23
Speaker
and food advertising on these TV shows as well. And so that's where food advertising was fundamentally born. So they had a huge uptake because people took it up. Oh, this is something that's been promoted, it's fashionable, we'll take it up.
00:14:39
Speaker
And from there on, it was a race to the bottom because the ingredients that were down the hands of companies and it was a race to the bottom to see who can produce the tastiest product. So they knew exactly what they were doing and they hired chemical engineers to keep refining that formula.
00:14:58
Speaker
till Americans are now eating 30% more sugar than they ever did, or more now, 30 to 50% more. Because we know that sugar is hyper palatable, not only refined sugar, but they added in refined fats, you know, the canola oils, and so the brain recognises that as tasty, all very, very low protein mims. But the scary thing about it is
00:15:19
Speaker
is they knew the effects, but they sought to suppress the consequence. And there is a lot of data around the Sugar Research Foundation, which in the 60s and 70s starts paying off scientists to basically suppress it. So they sponsored Harvard scientists to basically promote the message in one of our most prestigious journals, which is the New England Journal of Medicine that sugar was harmful. And they didn't even disclose their sponsorship in that study.
00:15:48
Speaker
So this study came out and it just slowly trained people to think, well, sugar's not a problem. We need sugar as an energy source. It is the fats. It's the fats. And that's what they did. In promoting these foods, they demonized foods that we'd eaten for millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years as modern human beings, such as the eggs, butter, red meat, lamb, beef, kangaroo,
00:16:10
Speaker
and all these sort of foods were demonized slowly that they caused heart disease and so forth. So people just became really confused about what's weak. Now, how does that relate back to fertilizer, which was your point, your original point? You see,
00:16:24
Speaker
This method of eating, which is this ultra-processed way of eating, where food comes out of packages, sold in bulk, requires a special type of farming. It requires something called the rise of monoculture farms. This is when you drive past a farm and you see row after row of the same crop. These are monoculture crops, you see.
00:16:46
Speaker
and our desire for them had to give rise to these monoculture funds, which lacked diversity. They're just a mono means one.
00:16:56
Speaker
and they're just one crop of the same thing. Now, the problem with monocrops is that they lack diversity and diversity in a farm actually suppresses weeds and pests. So if you've got monocrop culture, then you have to bring in external weed and pest control and hence the birth of pesticides and pesticides and whatever else they use to poison the animals that eat on these monocrop farms.
00:17:22
Speaker
In addition to that, with that loss of diversity, because cattle and other ruminant animals weren't grazing through them and dropping their organic material into the ground, they had to bring in fertilizer. So these are all ties into one, ultra-processed food, monoprop farming, pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer. This is the birth, the dystopia that has become
00:17:48
Speaker
the monoculture farming that we now see. And then so from there we see
00:17:57
Speaker
How would you describe it? We see problem and then solution, problem, solution. And so the solution to the problem of weeds on your farm is to apply a herbicide. The solution to a problem when you see insects eating your monocrop is to apply pesticide. And the solution when we see a lack of diversity and so far as you're on the crop is let's apply a chemical fertilizer in the form of most probably NPK fertilizer.
00:18:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right. So it's solution and problem and how this leads to human disease after a while is if you've got this disease soil that lacks diversity in the food is more appropriate. It's this rapid turn of a plant harvest back at it again, you know, like you continually
00:18:45
Speaker
take away from the soil. That's why you've got to add back in with this synthetic fertilizer, which reduces the diversity, similarly reduced diversity. You know, agents such as Bayer's glyphosate is a weak antibiotic. So over time, it basically erodes the microbial capacity
00:19:02
Speaker
of the soil, which then gives rise to food that is less diverse, animals that consume the feed carry less diversity in the microbiome, hence that affects the health of the animal and then we end up consuming this. So it has effects on us because over time we lose our microbial diversity. If we lose our microbial diversity, Nick,
00:19:22
Speaker
Remember, Hippocrates said, all disease begin in the gut, it all comes from a microbiome that's degraded, which gives rise to something we call dysbiosis, which over time leads to something called interstinal permeability, which is informally known in our circles as leaky gut. And once you've got leaky gut, you've just got free transfer of bacterial toxins, of chemicals in our food, just crossing that
00:19:50
Speaker
integral barrier of the gut that they should have. And so this is why we've seen this explosion and disease, in particular, a lot of these autoimmune illnesses, we believe, I believe stem from poor farming practices and they
00:20:06
Speaker
there's a huge burden of autoimmune illness in our community. And some of these drugs to treat them are $20,000, $20,000 a year, you know, to treat some of the violent drugs. So there's this poor method of farming has sparked this rise of the pharmaceutical medical industrial complex. So really, it's not the pharmaceutical medical industrial complex, it's the agricultural pharmaceutical medical industrial complex, which is a triad, a triangle
00:20:34
Speaker
They're all interdependent on each other, and that's the sad fact of humanity's plight as we stand now. I understand you recognize the condition, but how broadly accepted is the condition of leaky gut becoming? Is it starting to become more accepted?
00:20:57
Speaker
Yeah, I believe so. I think endosomal permeability has now been demonstrated by specialized endoscopic techniques that are usually not used clinically. They're used more in research, but it's something called confocal endo microscopy, which is where a microscope can be put down and fire an endoscope to look at the more microscopic or nuanced aspects of the garden. You can see it real time.
00:21:21
Speaker
leakage of dye from the gut, inside the gut, into the cell, dye leaking. And so it can be demonstrated pretty quickly in human beings.
Exercise and Gut Health
00:21:33
Speaker
There's no denying it, whether the doctor recognises it or not is a different story, but it does exist. And I think vast proportions of our population probably suffer it, because there is a way to measure it that is non-invasive.
00:21:49
Speaker
There are some methods that have been proposed, but they're not very standardized. So they're not commonplace. They're not widely used. And again, the recognition by a lot of clinicians, even gastroenterologists, I think at this stage will be still quite poor. It's an emerging concept, one that cannot be denied, however.
00:22:07
Speaker
Do you have, I know that you train pretty regularly. I know you train pretty hard. And one of the interesting side effects of training hard is a leaky gut for a certain period of time, as I understand it, the gut becomes more permeable. And so, is there a way that
00:22:26
Speaker
Do you avoid eating after you train or do you, do you, do you think of that as, Hey, now's the, now's the time where, um, I'm going to take advantage of this leaky gut and I'm going to consume something that could potentially, uh, in, in a way of speaking, uh, benefit me while I've got this, uh, greater gut permeability. Okay. It's a great question. Actually, Nick, no one's ever asked me that now. Do you ever see me running a marathon, Nick?
00:22:52
Speaker
Never. So you'll never see me running one either. So the endurance training is the issue, mate. That's what leads to leaky gut. There's no real data that endurance athletes have better outcomes than the general pocket. You know, some endurance athletes won't like me saying that, but
00:23:16
Speaker
It's the reality of the matter. There's a few things that occur and there's probably quite significant reactive oxygenation species from just overused the mitochondria connoisseurs spearing out these horrible things that damage tissue, but we know that the gut does undergo a significant leaky period. Now the basis for it is probably mitochondria, right?
00:23:45
Speaker
you know, there's a lot of reactive oxygen species being put out by mitochondria, but just because of the energies required to be generated during these endurance sports, potentially it might lead to a degradation of the gut, but the underlying mechanism isn't clear to me, but we know that
00:24:05
Speaker
overuse hours and hours of exertion do lead to leaky gut. This is why I think there's a Goldilocks zone for training, you know 30, 40, 50 minutes, you know 90 minutes even of weight training I suspect is probably optimal. I tend to walk a lot as well as opposed to sprinting might be a better option than running marathons.
00:24:28
Speaker
where you're exerting yourself over very brief periods and not putting your body under that enormous mitochondrial stress that tends to accompany endurance sports. So yeah, you just won't see me doing endurance sport. You might see me walking for hours, but that's not something that is hugely problematic for the mitochondria.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. That was, that's kind of a question that I've had for, for quite a while. And, uh, it's, it's, I'm glad you cleared that up for me that it's on the endurance side of things. I think most of the, the literature, uh, shows that, you know, that, that there was once this idea that endurance athletics was like the way to go. It's like great for heart health and all this sort of nonsense. And I think again, that was, it was one of the, um, listen, they're, they're amazing athletes. You know, heart, lung,
00:25:22
Speaker
Great, but, you know, just from a very, you know, almost a rough example, we've seen athletes that have done endurance sports for years with huge amounts of calcium in their coronary arteries. So their coronary arteries are very, very high. So why is that occurring? One has to ask themselves, and I suspect it's to do with all that oxidative stress that they're putting themselves under.
00:25:51
Speaker
over a long period of time. And endurance sport generally requires you training. If you're gonna do it seriously, like training for a marathon or something like this, you can't just train once a week, once, twice a week. You're training multiple times a week for long periods of time. And the body's like a machine, there's a Goldilocks zone, you know, like you overdo it. And certainly there's a consequence for that. And with weight training, it's pretty difficult to do. It's very difficult to overdo weight training. Some people do, some people,
00:26:21
Speaker
you know, utilize things like exogenous steroids to push past what is, you know, what is physiologically good. And not having a go at those people using exogenous steroids, but there's no doubt that there's adverse cardiac outcomes in those sort of populations. So it's just comes down to anything else. There's a physiological thing that the body's designed to do, pushing it beyond that physiological extremes, both in endurance sport,
00:26:49
Speaker
or in weight training utilizing performance enhancing drugs, I think there's always consequences for that. You can't mess with nature like that unless you're willing to accept the consequences of the same reality. That's it. When did you start weight training? We're changing topics completely here, but... Thanks, mate. I was in uni pretty early, mate. I told you I was a strange kid.
00:27:18
Speaker
I was accelerated through school pretty quickly. I was in uni by about 16. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So I had a mate. It's so funny. Um, he's a Sri Lankan guy, but he was this five foot four, some really solid unit, played a bit of rugby in school. And, uh, he's always still up with weight training. And he said to me, uni, why don't we, why don't we weight train? So I started weight training pretty early 16. Um, although.
00:27:45
Speaker
I wasn't, I wasn't quite ready as yet. I don't think my body was quite ready. I didn't have the knowledge. Um, I paid very little attention to the lower body side of things, you know, very little in the way of squats and deadlifts is all bench press and biceps, you know, how it is. That's the way you got to start bicep curl and tricep extensions, right? Yeah. I'd say it's probably, um, and I maintain that for years, but I think it'll probably be in my late thirties.
00:28:12
Speaker
that I started lifting seriously. When I say seriously, I'm still just a, you know, I'm still, I'd consider myself a novice, but still, but, um, you know, the compound lifts with deadlifts and progressive load and really tracking that and tracking my food and squatting and squatting with depth, um, and working on, on some of these squat or deadlift variants and doing all of that.
00:28:37
Speaker
I'd say probably late 30s and I'm now into my early 40s. I've been doing it a while and I find it to be an addictive exercise because you're constantly challenging yourself and you're pushing yourself just to increase in those 2.5 increments every time and I absolutely love it. I can't see myself not training or drive me mad and probably everyone around me mad if I didn't train.
00:29:02
Speaker
One of the things that I think I've noticed in UN and I'm starting to notice in maybe other doctors as well who are taking a similar route is it starts with a real development of
00:29:16
Speaker
You've worked on your mind and the brain is obviously very sharp in a gastroenterologist or anyone who can achieve that level of certification, especially in medicine.
Holistic Health: Mind, Body, and Spirit
00:29:29
Speaker
But what often happens is with many of these types of people, and Stephen Hawking is someone who comes to mind. I'm not comparing you to him by any means.
00:29:38
Speaker
the mind ends up leaving the body and we end up developing one side of ourselves in or to the detriment of the other. Have you noticed a benefit to I guess yourself as a person or even to like your spiritual health as you've delved more deeply into the physical side of things, perhaps as the physical has caught up to the mental? Thanks mate. Look, I think I said, I wrote some words down
00:30:06
Speaker
And I often share what I write down personally on my little blogs and Twitter and stuff like that. I think I said, no God ever dwelt in a temple that was left to overgrow and uncare for. I don't believe any soul can exist in a body that is uncare for or unkempt.
00:30:25
Speaker
You know, we've got to truly own our physical. No man or woman can be a novice in matters related to physical health. We have to push ourselves. We are tuned to that world where we come from, where we would lift things and move things with great distances and great weight. So that's the world we come from. So we cannot deny who we are. And I think achieving that physicality is really critical in
00:30:56
Speaker
in turning that intuition into yourself and allowing your intuition to grow. And from intuition comes this deep respect for yourself and a more spiritual awareness that, you know, we're actually just all kind of connected, even though we've got this perception that we're separate beings, but really the space between us hums with energy and vibrations and frequencies. And we're all in this big pot together.
00:31:25
Speaker
And I think once you've developed this respect, this healthy respect for yourself and a bit of a spiritual awareness, you start extending that out to people around you, start developing this respect and love for people around you. That certainly helped me with my clinical practice because I'm excited to show my clients, like this is the pathway to health. This is what I think achieves health, you know, working hard.
00:31:48
Speaker
eating well, having a deep connection to your plate, having a deep connection to nature, having a high appreciation of something greater than yourself. I'm not saying you have to go out and be religious, but this concept that we're all receiving one universal consciousness really appeals to me.
00:32:08
Speaker
really helps me from a spiritual perspective. And you need to be spiritually attuned if you're going to achieve health. If you're doing it for the aesthetics, that's one thing. I don't do it for the aesthetics. I do it so that I can mimic and replicate the movements of my ancestors so my mind can work in a way that's sharp and I can be spiritually connected to who I am and my family and the people around me, my tribe.
00:32:36
Speaker
And I think it all ties back to, you mentioned at the very beginning of our conversation, you know, this, this spiritual crisis in conjunction with a, with a health crisis. And I think what, what I see happening in, you know, from, only from my own perspective is that as, as, uh, the.
00:32:56
Speaker
the whole triangular complex, as you describe it, the medical, industrial, pharmaceutical, agricultural complex has become more scientific or more mental. We have, we ditch the, the spiritual side of things. And so as a way of, of, of getting back to health, we have to become like more spiritual in a way. And again, not saying, you know, everyone has to adopt the same point of view or that, you know, you need to go and go on a pilgrimage or anything like that. But,
00:33:25
Speaker
Um, I, I really see you sharing more and more of that stuff more recently, you know, sharing guys like, um, I know you're delving quite deeply into young at the moment. I, I gathered that you're probably a little bit of a fan of, of guys like Jordan Peterson and those sort of people. Yeah. I mean, Jordan's Jordan's fine. Uh, Jordan's good, but when you put in.
00:33:46
Speaker
compare him to people like Jung and Nishi, he really, and I think he'd be the first to acknowledge that really he's not on their level. Not with no disrespect to Jordan. I think he's fantastic. I love the work that he's done. Helped a lot of men worldwide. But Jung was a brilliance that I think even Jordan Peterson himself described as almost scary. It is scary how intelligent Jung was.
00:34:15
Speaker
And we've got to remember Jung descended into five years of absolute madness to write one of his phenomenal works, which is a red book, which really delves into what the psyche is and the collective consciousness. But some of those aspects that Jung and Nietzsche, in particular Jung tackle were very much metaphysical, which is the world beyond the physical dimension. And what I'm talking about, Nick, really shouldn't
00:34:44
Speaker
people's mind, because when you really delve into the quantum realm, and I know you've had guys like Jalal on your show, and he's a, he blows my mind every day with some of the stuff that he shares. But when you delve into the quantum world, where you watch the way particles behave, it is clear that particles don't
00:35:08
Speaker
don't obey the rules of space on that. They enter other dimensions. And we're sadly with the human senses, we are adapted for reproduction and propagation of our species. We're not adapted to understand reality the way it actually is. Because if we saw reality the way it actually is, it will drive you mad.
00:35:29
Speaker
It will drive you mad. So spirituality is an acknowledgement of that, which is that there is a reality beyond which I, my mind, my feeble mind cannot glimpse, but I'll pay respect to that because when you grapple with concepts like space, time and matter, it is apparent that space, time and matter cannot exist without an observer. You need to have an observer
00:35:56
Speaker
to be able to have space, manner, and time. So really, before the universe came into being, there had to be a consciousness for these concepts to be generated. So you know where that leaves me, Nick? It leaves me humble. It leaves me really appreciative of this universe that we inhabit. It is a projection. It is almost a very sophisticated simulation that we inhabit.
00:36:27
Speaker
And I believe there's more to human beings than just brain, heart and a body. I think there is something called a soul, which I think you touched on. And the pursuit of knowing one's soul, I think is the spiritual exercise. You don't want to know it too well because I think our minds are too feeble to deal with it, but we have to acknowledge it and pay some respects to it. That's the whole process of spirituality for me.
00:36:55
Speaker
Um, yeah, I, you know, uh, I, I've, I've seen or watched your interviews with the guys from corrective culture, Calvin and Jake. And I think that was probably, uh, where I, where I started to follow you a few years ago. And you know, one of, one of our mutual mentors, Paul check says a watch can never know what to make up. And I don't know if he, if he was the one who coined that term or if he, if he took it from someone else, but that kind of really sprung to mind when you were talking about, you know, being unable to, to completely comprehend the reality of that we're living in.
00:37:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I don't know if you saw my post a while ago, but the fact that we even visually interpret color
00:37:35
Speaker
and our brain in terms of color. Color doesn't exist. In reality, color doesn't exist. It's just we're seeing a different wavelength of a different frequency of wavelength that allows us to say, well, that's red, that's green, and our visual cortex interprets it. But the reality, if you just strip it down and the human eye wasn't part of it, color doesn't exist.
00:37:57
Speaker
It's all just frequencies and vibrations that we're kind of walking through this super vibrations. And when you start seeing the world like that, you start having a deeper appreciation for just everyone, animals.
00:38:11
Speaker
soil, other human beings and there's an element of kindness I suspect that springs from thinking like that. Whereas if you think of the world from a very much a space and a time and a matter perspective, what does that lead to? Just look around us, we've got wealth concentration in the hands of many, we've got greed, we've got millions that go hungry every year, billions probably, yet there are a few in the world a handful, maybe 100,000 people
00:38:38
Speaker
who hold the vast majority of the world's wealth. This is an appreciation of a space, time and matter, but no appreciation of another person's soul. If you truly appreciated soul, your heart would break for people that go hungry.
00:39:20
Speaker
you've kind of completely broken up on me there i'm not sure if i've if i've broken up on you at the same time but um yeah yeah i've still got you
00:39:35
Speaker
Yeah, you just froze there for a minute. Okay, very good. You cut out there at the end for me, but I think I got the general idea of what you were saying. And I think it was ending with, you know, sharing a hive mind or us all being a part of a collective, which was very much one of Jung's concepts as well, I believe.
00:39:57
Speaker
Yeah, Jung's concept of a collective consciousness or a psyche that we all have access to certainly was something that he delved into and others have expanded upon since. And modern day physics is starting to bring this to the forefront as well. There's a great paper written by Professor Hoffman, which is a diffusion of consciousness, which touches on this. So when science, philosophy,
00:40:25
Speaker
romance, all these things intersect is where reality is found. Reality is not the scientific rational thing. There's a certain amount of mysticism that we have to have as human beings because fact is stranger than fiction.
00:40:43
Speaker
There's another saying, I don't want to just continue giving quotes, but I get another saying from Jung was, I think, intellectualism is a common cover up for fear of direct experience, which is basically, again, what you're saying there. So thinking about things rather than actually experiencing them or taking action and completely ignoring the soul or the spirit side of things, which is
00:41:08
Speaker
You know that, I think that's one of the reasons why you have such a, such a large following, right? Because people are, people are feeling what you're about and they're feeling, um, I guess in a way your soul, your spirit, so to speak, like you're, you're sharing far more or you're reaching people with far more than just, uh, Hey, this is how we treat leaky gut or, you know, come and get your, um, your colonoscopy or whatever it is that, you know, a regular gastroenterologist would say.
00:41:38
Speaker
No, I'm not after clients may go everything I do. I kind of just do it from my heart.
00:41:45
Speaker
I'm a romantic at heart. I believe that we should appreciate some of the finer aspects, the romance of life and to wear your heart on your sleeve and expose your soul. That's a courageous thing to do in this modern world where a lot of men in particular have been trained that, no, that's not something we should do. But I think we should all express to motion and I think it's
00:42:14
Speaker
whether it's bought me a following or not, I'm not sure Nick, to be honest. Some of the stuff that I used to post, which is more polarizing in the past, gathered more people. I think the latest content that I've been posting for the last year or so, because my approach to a change probably doesn't attract as much as polarization. You find that people love polarization, they love contraband.
00:42:38
Speaker
but me posting on, well, what is love really? Or what is the nature of this reality? It doesn't seem to get the traction, but there's good people like yourself that listen and the few people can take something away from the past.
Future of Farming and Health
00:42:58
Speaker
I'm not looking back as close to what sees that light and happens to stumble upon it and resonates with my words. Well, good for them.
00:43:09
Speaker
I know we've only got probably a few minutes left. Um, but you know, what, what do you see as the future of medicine? Where do you see things going in, in perhaps your own career and, and even like your own life? Um, how do things have to change for things to get better? Okay. I'm sorry, you cut out there for a bit, but I think I've got the gist of your question. How do things have to change to get better? Okay.
00:43:37
Speaker
So how do things have to change to get better? Well, we then have to improve our health. How do we improve our health? We're going to have to improve farming practices. How do we get away from some of these monocrop farms? We stop supporting offer processed food production, right? And we start putting our money towards these guys that are the regenerative farmers, organic farmers trying to do it well. We order meat from them. We order eggs from them. We grow our own vegetable potentially. We go to farmers that are
00:44:04
Speaker
that are selling organic produce. We go to the farmer's markets, put our money towards people selling organic produce, fruits and vegetables. We go towards organic grain, ancient grains that are not genetically modified. We start putting our money as a collective
00:44:21
Speaker
to these things and let the free market take hold. The free market, if it was truly allowed, if capitalism was truly allowed and the free market could function properly, these sort of businesses would boom. And that's a positive feedback loop without more and more businesses springing out to compete. And they'll just try and beat each other on concepts
00:44:49
Speaker
this type of regenerative farming will just go up levels because they naturally can be. But at the moment we've got corporatocracy, we've got government guidelines that push people towards some of these nutrient poorer foods such as grains. We've got the promotion of monocrop farming. We have to get away from that. We have to get away from all processed food and monocrop farming. They're both part of the same
00:45:14
Speaker
side of the coin of one coin. So this is my mission is to bring awareness. And then hopefully, myself and other colleagues that are doing this in this space, raise the awareness of the population enough that they themselves can take matters into their own hand and everyone starts illuminating their quarter, we have a collective life. And that's what it's about. We've got to do it as a big team.
00:45:39
Speaker
Mm, very cool. And I think what you start to see as well is as the, as the diversity in the soil increases, you know, the, the diversity in, uh, opinion increases the diversity in what we can share with each other increases. And, you know, the greater the level of diversity that we can have, which, which begins in the soil, which spreads to the gut, um, the, the better things will end up. Absolutely. Nature loves, absolutely loves diversity. Nature loves diversity.
00:46:08
Speaker
and not the type of diversity that's promoted by corporations and so forth. She just loves everything about a vibrant, diverse ecosystem. And we're all part of that and we should promote diversity, but let's start with diversity of soil, diversity of farming, and embrace all the diversity that springs forth from that in our population.
00:46:34
Speaker
Very cool. Well, I think we've probably reached our time here. Where can people find you, Pran? My practice is in Castle Hill in Sydney, in the Hills District in New South Wales. I'm active on Twitter, just Dr. Pran Yerganathan. I'm active on Instagram and Facebook on these mediums. I think my message has been pushed out over the last three, four years on those mediums.
00:47:03
Speaker
I try and put something out every day, post on my thoughts. And yeah, I'm humbled if people choose to follow and read my content. It's always nice to know that you're putting out stuff that potentially might help someone. Well, thanks for joining me today. It's been a long time coming, at least for me. I've followed you for a while and I've wanted to talk to you for a while. So thank you very much.