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Being a Part of the Solution w/ Patrick See
150 Plays4 months ago
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Connect with Patrick:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neocord.vision/
Sick to Death film: https://www.sick2death.com/
Web: https://neocord.gumroad.com/
Web: https://neocord.vision/
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the Connecting Minds podcast, Christian Jordonov here. Make sure I want to plug my book before we start. How to actually live longer volume one, folks. If you're interested in the topic of longevity, living longer,
00:00:13
Speaker
while maintaining your health span as well. Check the book out. It's only volume one of a multi-volume series. So with that said, very happy to present today's guest, Patrick Connelly. He's an animator and a VJ who goes by Neil Cord. He's a previous documentary editor from Maine, lover of questioning, research and humanity. And he was editor of a film that we'll be talking about
00:00:40
Speaker
today called sick to death before I talk a little bit about the film Patrick welcome to the show man.
00:00:46
Speaker
Thank you so much. Two quick things. One, I don't want anyone to get upset. So Ilco, this awesome dude, Ilco Davidoff, who is from Bulgaria. He's actually the main editor. I was just the assistant editor on the movie. But also my last name is C because I took my wife's last name. Interesting. Very cool.
00:01:14
Speaker
Yeah, we wanted to have a unified family name for our baby and who's on the way and, you know, whatever we like to see.
Film "Sick to Death" and Medical Corruption
00:01:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. So you'll call Dav, Davidov. So he's Bulgarian. I'm Bulgarian. I don't know if you knew that.
00:01:36
Speaker
That's interesting. I don't know if I remember that, but... Yeah, I've actually got a friend. He's a... I think it must be one of the most famous Bulgarian filmmakers at the moment, Andrei Andonov. He's done quite a few films now in Bulgaria. I wonder if they know each other. Perhaps.
00:01:59
Speaker
Ilco was the editor. There's two documentaries on William S Burroughs. One was made, I think, by the BBC and is like boring and kind of sucks. And the other one, I can't remember the name of the dude who made it, but Ilco was the editor on that one too, called Burroughs a Man Within. And it's an awesome movie if you haven't seen it.
00:02:23
Speaker
Awesome. So the topic of the one we'll be talking about today is sick to death and very quick blur for the listeners. So basically, after drinking radioactive iodine to kill her overactive thyroid, filmmaker Maggie Hadley West catapults into illness only to run smack into the medical corruption.
00:02:47
Speaker
that is shredding the fabric of American life. In Sick to Death, filmmaker Maggie Hadley West exposes her own disturbing yet determined 30-year struggle to regain her spiraling health. After seeing hundreds of doctors who either disregarded her symptoms, misdiagnosed or undertreated her, Maggie discovers that her lifelong thyroid problems was a fully understood medical issue with
00:03:12
Speaker
as early as 1914, yet it's been obscured by systemic medical corruption, pharmaceutical greed, and physician negligence, leaving more than 750 million people sick and suffering worldwide.
Thyroid Disorders and Diagnostic Challenges
00:03:26
Speaker
That is... You know what? It's business as usual, though, from... I know enough about these guys to know this is just business as usual, isn't it?
00:03:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it is. It kind of gets into it closer towards the end of the movie. G. Edward Griffin kind of gives it a little background on the Flexner report and basically how our whole country's medical system got overtaken by allopathy, which ultimately was to get rid of excess oil that they had
00:04:05
Speaker
as far as I know, like, you know, all this byproduct from industry that they had to do something with. So, I mean, a lot of different ways that you slice it, it's like it's money. And it's like where we get the brunt end of that. But, you know, people are getting super rich off us being sick.
00:04:29
Speaker
Oh yeah, it's a big business. Actually, I had a doctor on the podcast last month and he said a very interesting thing is that now, at least now,
00:04:42
Speaker
there is starting to be more money in health, like, you know, these tracking devices and nutrition tracking apps. And so at least there's an economy burgeoning around the health, getting health, people healthy. So perhaps, perhaps we can make some inroads on that side of things. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. Yeah. I guess, I mean, part of, you know, part of the,
00:05:12
Speaker
I mean, it's just such a rabbit hole, but it's like a big part of it is pathologizing too much in certain areas and not enough in other areas. Like, for example, just to kind of get in the thyroid stuff. The thyroid is a gland, I guess, in the neck that
00:05:36
Speaker
that at the very least turn, well, it creates thyroid hormone, a couple of different ones, T3 and T4. I'm not a doctor, so I just worked on this movie for a while. So this is like my kind of bare bones understanding. But basically T4 is the, it is short-lived.
00:06:01
Speaker
but stronger of the two versions and T3 is the kind of longer acting and T3 gets converted into T4. No, it's the other way around. T4 gets converted into T3. Okay. Yeah, sorry. Thank you. No worries. But basically, we have all these people who, like it said on the board, according to the WHO, which take that as you will, 750 million people worldwide have some sort of thyroid disorder.
00:06:34
Speaker
And so a lot of these people with that disorder, it's not that they don't have thyroid hormone being produced. It's that they can't convert. They have a problem with the conversion or the uptake of this thyroid hormone.
00:06:50
Speaker
And so also like it said in the blurb in the early 1900s and the late 1800s even, because I have some notes here, it was 18... 1891 naturally desiccated thyroid is what they used to treat thyroid illness, which is basically
00:07:18
Speaker
desiccated means dried, uh, pig thyroid, um, is what they would use, which, which. In 1891, huh? In 1891. Yeah. I mean, that's according to, I don't have it pulled up, but we had that in the film and it's, um, in the naturally desiccated thyroid, it has both T3 and T4.
00:07:40
Speaker
So it's kind of more of a holistic, you know, additive. And then after the Flexner report, the demonization of kind of integrated health, holistic health, naturopathy.
00:07:59
Speaker
We decided that humans are gods, and we know everything that there is to be known about the human body. And we can just create synthetic versions of these chemicals that we find in our body. And we can just do that, and we'll be healthy. And so they created a synthetic version of T4 called Levothyroxine, which
00:08:27
Speaker
in 2016 became the most commonly prescribed drug in the United States. Part of the trouble with thyroid illness is that
00:08:44
Speaker
As a hormone, it regulates so many different things in our body. So for example, if your thyroid hormone is low in your skin, it can leave you with dry skin. If it's low in your brain, you can get brain fog. If it's low, like on your head, you can get like scalp and hair, like thinning hair.
00:09:06
Speaker
It can cause weight gain, but especially like water retention, so it'll look a little different than a traditional weight gain. And in the past, these are all physical symptoms that you can see and that doctors were, you know,
00:09:27
Speaker
familiar with and with a system uninvolved with insurance and seeing somebody for five minutes and looking at some blood work, you had a system where people could still put their hands on you and look at you in the face and ask you questions about your life and sit with you for an hour or whatever.
00:09:48
Speaker
And I guess people now still can do that. But A, you have to have enough money to see somebody who's outside of insurance. And B, you have to you have to know that something is wrong, that something that just going to the same people and becoming sicker and sicker isn't going to help. Yeah. So that's kind of a barrier there.
00:10:11
Speaker
So the lady that the movie outlines her story. So apparently she had Graves disease, which is kind of...
00:10:22
Speaker
It's the opposite of hypothyroidism. It's actually the TSH, which is kind of when the TSH is high, that's thyroid stimulating hormone. And that's kind of a lot of doctors only to with which to gauge whether their patient is hypothyroid. But what actually like it's interesting that you mentioned the thing about 1891, they were using desiccated pig thyroid is because
00:10:50
Speaker
Not only with the using like big thyroid and chicken chicken thyroids like chicken neck soup and fish head soup and stuff like that but also they were using before th th stimulating hormone became the gold standard they were using
00:11:08
Speaker
basal body temperature and heart rate to diagnose hypothyroidism. Once you have lab work that you can charge for and be the gatekeeper of, because not everybody has the lab equipment to do that, now you become the go-to and you start to monopolize the industry.
00:11:30
Speaker
And yeah, nobody gets to know that their thyroid is messed up unless they go through you. And that's the thing. I mean, I think it's similar to other tests, or at least I've heard with other tests, it's like you're not actually, the TSH is not a test of how much thyroid is in your system. It's not a test of how much thyroid you're up-taking. It's testing a chemical that's created by the pituitary gland, not even the same
00:11:59
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And just being so bold as to say, Oh, this means that like X means Y when it's not really been proved. And so yeah, like even till today, there are old timey doctors who say that, and I'm sure research that shows that
00:12:22
Speaker
using basal body temperature is still much more accurate than getting your TSH test tested. And that's also why for a lot of people, it takes so long to get diagnosed because not only are you having
00:12:44
Speaker
symptoms all over your body that makes it kind of confusing. Not only is it a very women-centered disease because of the amount of thyroid receptors that women have versus men that we know in the medical system, women have always been kind of stigmatized as, what's the word, hysterical or whatever. Like they're making it up.
00:13:14
Speaker
to such a degree that according to these captured agencies, the American Thyroid Association, they recommend that after you test for TSH and after you drug these people with
00:13:31
Speaker
synthetic T4, levothyroxine, if they're still having symptoms, then you are supposed to refer them for a mental health diagnosis. That's, that's from the top. So it's like, Oh, what is everyone in on it? It's like, no, not everyone is in on it, but there are these, these groups that dictate what individual doctors and physicians, what they have to do basically, if they want to continue practicing.
Medical System Pressures and Personal Stories
00:14:00
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. If you as a doctor, if you steer out of standard protocols, you could lose your license. Yeah. And it's like the way they set it up, it's like for pediatricians, it's like, well, they are allowed to not vaccinate their
00:14:19
Speaker
their patients, but if their rates fall below a certain percentage, then that's when investigations start and your license is about to be suspended while they do their phony investigations and then decide by themselves that you're bad, you're harmful. But I think also they're smart that they also, I think, I cannot
00:14:46
Speaker
be quoted on this, but I think they also incentivize doctors so they get like kickbacks. Oh, I think they, as far as I remember, there is a literal payment of around $50 or something like that from the insurance companies for everyone they get. I'll tell you a quick story here.
00:15:08
Speaker
A week or two ago, my dog, um, I just looked at her and my wife was out with her and her eye was swollen. So I'm like, Oh, bollocks. She like everything is dry out here or the sticks and grasses and everything. So I'm like, she probably like hurt her eye, but probably she started scratching it a lot. So I'm like, Oh, bollocks. We have to go to the vet. And I knew it was probably just something to get a cone. We need to put a cone on her and she'll be fine in a few days.
00:15:35
Speaker
So we went to the vet and they looked at her little stupid doggy passport and it's like, oh, these vaccines are not up today. This is so dangerous. So he started talking about vaccines. I'm like, bro, give me a freaking cone for my dog. So 82 Euro later, two drops for her eyes full of toxic shit, like absolute garbage, bro. He kept pushing about the vaccines and then his assistant, as she was billing me, I'm like, fucking hell, I need to have a cone in my house.
00:16:05
Speaker
for situations like this, so I don't have to deal with BS anymore. She's like, oh, can we book you in for the vaccines? Can we book you in for the vaccines? I'm like, look, don't worry about the vaccines. I'll call you when I'm ready. But it's so clear that for them, it's like, oh, yeah, we're going to make some money today, get all these vaccines, like four years worth of vaccines. So I'm like, it's not even about health. It's like, whose health are you going to protect?
00:16:32
Speaker
By vaccinating a dog, you know what I mean? Like, oh, she bites somebody. Wait, isn't the vaccine so she doesn't get the virus? Like, what the hell? What is even your rationale for pushing these things on an animal, you know?
00:16:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's funny that you say that because I had basically the exact same interaction like a month ago my dog he's a puppy he got sick and I took him to the vet because he was You know it had been like I was trying to you know wait it out See if he could just kind of improve on his own. I waited it out and then When I I mean he got like one
00:17:14
Speaker
or two or something when we first got him. And then we took him, or then when we came home, we talked about it and we're like, dude, what is all this bullshit? And so my wife's like, oh, they're gonna like get on you about the vaccines when you go take the dog back. And dude, like if he hadn't, him having stomach issues was like our out. She was like,
00:17:39
Speaker
the nurse or whoever the vet was like, Oh, he needs this vaccine. He's that vaccine. And the little the helper lady was like, Oh, she she was like trying to she was trying to push it but also be rational. She was like, Oh, I mean, do you want to give it since he's like sick? And the vets like,
00:18:03
Speaker
No, I don't really like to do it when they're sick, but next time, you know, you come back in here, we're going to get those taken care of. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm never. Okay. See you again. Bye bye now. I came home. I never going back there again.
00:18:20
Speaker
Bro, that's what I said to my wife. She came home later and I told her, well, I guess we're going to have to take Kyla to a new vet every single time. These are like six or seven of them in our close vicinity here. I'm like, these guys are not going to give us a break. But by the way, I wasn't going to state this publicly.
00:18:42
Speaker
because I know the AI will pick up on it and then, you know, this is why the AI is there. So people are gonna say things and they're like, oh, how do we circumvent their circumvention? But anyway, the next time a vet says like that, I was like, yeah, sure, just, would you humor me, please? Can you give me the literature references to the studies about the vaccines? And they'll be like, what, the safety studies? No, the studies about how did they actually isolate, purify,
00:19:12
Speaker
inoculate and then cause the same symptoms to appear in another animal to prove that it does what it is performing to. So I just want to know whether these pathogens even exist that you're back. And then of course we'll talk about safety and efficacy of the interventions that you're trying to sell me. So yeah, I will say that and I will scour through all that literature if they give it to me.
Radioactive Iodine Treatment and Hospital Criticism
00:19:40
Speaker
Yeah, I doubt they will. Yeah. So in the case of Maggie, because these guys used freaking radiation to kill her thyroid, she had to be on some sort of thyroid replacement hormones for no other way.
00:20:01
Speaker
So as far as I understand it, Graves' disease is an autoimmune disease where your thyroid is overactive and your body attacks it thinking it's foreign or something. And so at some point in the last 100 years, they decided that the best way to counter that
00:20:30
Speaker
a, you know, something going wrong in your body is, of course, just kill it. Yeah. Which, um, which a lot of, you know, people at this point see as pretty crazy, uh, crazy thing to do. Um, but it also just guarantees you that you're a patient for life. Like you, your body can at this, at that point, cannot make any thyroid hormone and you have to be on replacement for life.
00:21:00
Speaker
So let me see if another problem with that is that, um, they just assume that when you drink this radioactive iodine, it goes to your thyroid and nowhere else in your body. But as we know that, um, is unrealistic and it accumulates in the, um, in the breasts and.
00:21:27
Speaker
I think there's probably a lot of evidence that can link that to breast cancer. It's just all of these things that it's like, we know this action causes this result. And I just reject their premise outright because they don't understand the human body. They don't understand the interconnectivity of everything.
00:21:56
Speaker
And they understand disease and like how the body degenerates, decays and just all that stuff. But there's nothing about fixing it, creating healthy individual, you know, that's very lacking.
00:22:13
Speaker
Or creating an environment where the body can heal itself, which we know it can do under the right circumstances. Yeah, just look at a hospital. Is that in any way, shape, or form an environment where you go in and now it's all 5G?
00:22:31
Speaker
5G and Wi-Fi blasting you with radiation, all these fluorescent lights and everyone's scaring the jinkers out of you, you know, the whole bedside manner of the doctors when they give you bad news. It's like we're talking with some other guest recently, like the medical hexing where they're
00:22:50
Speaker
they're giving you all the horrible things your diagnosis will cause, and then you manifest them when you go home, you Google them as the doctor said. Like when I had my leg broken some 15 years ago, the doctor's like, you're going to probably have arthritis one day and stuff. Like, dude, I'm not even like, I'm half awake here. Why are you telling me I'm going to have like arthritis in like 50 years time, you know? Plus I'm 25 years old, I don't care about arthritis now. I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.
00:23:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's just this obsession with tests and knowing and it's really crazy. And we know that the placebo effect is a real thing and we know that the nocebo effect is a real thing. So if you are being tested for something,
00:23:44
Speaker
that if you're if you're feeling fine and you're being I mean this isn't specifically related to thyroid I'm just kind of thinking but if you are feeling fine and being tested for something and they're like oh like this could be bad you know that can create harm in the body it can create disease yeah absolutely
00:24:06
Speaker
Stress, stress causes disease, even just being stressed out too much. We know for a fact can cause disease. So it's like, so just to say that, like, Oh, um, well, you know what, I kind of lost my train of thought.
Patrick's Journey in Film and Health
00:24:22
Speaker
How did you get the role to work on the, on the film, by the way? Oh, so, um, I,
00:24:31
Speaker
I grew up in Maine. My parents grew up in Chicago and I went to college in Chicago to film school, which is one of the two schools to accept me. Their acceptance right now is like 85% or something like that. So they just really want people to spend their money there. But my grandma lived in Chicago, so I kind of transitioned over there.
00:25:00
Speaker
After college, before I ended college, I visited New Orleans and kind of decided that I'd like to go live there. And I talked to some of my teachers and basically asked them if they knew of anyone who was trying to make
00:25:21
Speaker
a movie or could need an editor or something like that down there. And so I was connected to Ilko, the editor of the film through, he had, I think he had taught, I think he had gone to and taught at the school I went to. And so I got connected with him when I visited in April before I graduated.
00:25:49
Speaker
I kind of had an interview in the little office. It was Ilko and Maggie, Ilko the editor, Maggie the director, and me. And then I got hired. And then after I graduated, like basically a week later, I moved down to New Orleans and started working on the movie. That's so awesome. And you said, you told me you worked on it for a year. So editing of a movie takes a year.
00:26:16
Speaker
Bro, it, it was the craziest. It was the craziest thing because it's like we, so you know how you've heard of like a rough cut and a fine cut on a movie, you know, like.
00:26:31
Speaker
So basically in the editing process, you start with kind of they call it like a radio edit, which is basically just, you know, you have a script or an idea and then you get out just rough chunks of the order that you want the film to be in. And then from there you go in and refine it and kind of like dial in
00:26:53
Speaker
the exact quotes or the exact B-roll that you want. And then you kind of get through the whole movie and then that's the rough cut. And then you take notes on that. I'm kind of skipping over some steps, but like you...
00:27:10
Speaker
you know, consult with producers or whatever. And then what you arrive at is a fine cut. And then you take the fine cut and you send it to the colorist, which I did some of on the movie, and the music or the score composer, that's the word. The colorist just makes sure everything is like on a certain tonality matches scene by scene. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
00:27:38
Speaker
basically making bad, because a lot of documentary footage is, you know, like you're walking around, it's in a much less controlled environment. So you can have a much different look from shot to shot, or from scene to scene, or like even like if you have a different film crew who's like doing their own thing. I mean, it was kind of
00:28:01
Speaker
I wasn't there for a lot of the filming process. So I don't know what their shoots looked like. But yeah, basically in the same way that for an audio album, you do mastering so that it all sounds cohesive. For a film, the colorist is basically just making sure all the scenes look good. And as much as possible, look cohesive together. Yeah, that's many. If I were to
00:28:31
Speaker
Let's just say in another life, I'll probably get into this kind of stuff because I can see how much pain for me it is for every minute. Let's say if I record a video that I need to edit for every minute of recording, on average, I need four or five minutes of editing.
00:28:49
Speaker
So when I record like an hour-long thing, I'm like, oh, bollocks, that's five hours. I have to be at the computer blasting myself with this light. So I can only imagine for like a proper production how much blood, sweat and tears goes into. Is it a, for you, is it a frustrating process or I'm sure you just love, do you love the whole process or is there any parts of it you don't like?
00:29:14
Speaker
So it was definitely frustrating. I joined the project as an intern and from there I moved to working full time on it, but I was not paid very well at all. An embarrassingly low rate, like even for a regular job, not just talking about media in comparison to media jobs, just in general. So not feeling super valued definitely made it hard.
00:29:44
Speaker
but also just what I was doing on the film wasn't like ideally what I like doing in the editing world. Like when I got, when I started working on the movie, my first
00:29:57
Speaker
My first job was to go through all of the footage, all of the footage from all of the shooting days and just like take notes on it. And my primary objective was to like take notes on funny things that happened or like humor.
00:30:17
Speaker
because it's like such a serious topic of a film, but you wanted to like kind of keep it as lighthearted as possible. And we would and so this is like me work after working there for like,
00:30:30
Speaker
for like a week or two. And it's like, we're already bickering because she's, I'm like, gone through six hours of a shoot. And I show her my notes of like the funny parts. And she's like, only four parts were funny? Like, no, I know there were more funny parts. And so I'm like, where? Show me. Like, let's watch it together. And you tell me where the funny parts are. And she's like, that, that was funny. And I'm like, that wasn't funny. You just said something in a weird voice.
00:31:00
Speaker
If we want it to be funny, let's try to carve it down. Yeah, exactly. She thought she was very funny, which she was funny to a certain extent, but it's hard to get that perspective when you're the person.
00:31:19
Speaker
It's such a heavy topic that you really have to figure out how to present these heavy topics to people in a funny way. That's why my book on longevity, like you said, you know, stress,
00:31:36
Speaker
does cause disease so i'm talking in the book i'm talking about how this stuff happens and i'm talking about what's slowly killing us but then so in order to increase your longevity you need to know what's. Decreasing it and knowing about these things is not a light hearted conversation like the food the poison the toxins the government china you know,
00:32:00
Speaker
destroy your health than what a pharma. So I tried very hard to weave some of my dark humor into the story because otherwise it's a very bland read. I don't think most people will be able to get through even a short book like that. Yeah, so I mean, it was definitely worth it, you know, finding the funny bits, but
00:32:28
Speaker
So, so yeah, I was working on, you know, it would have been cool to just be the editor. Um, I feel like I, you know, had the skills to do that, but it's not where I was needed for that, which is totally fine. But so what I, I started saying this before, like, you know, you get to a rough cut, you get the fine cut to send it off and we,
00:32:53
Speaker
we would, Ilco would finish a cut of the film and then we would screen it. And at the time that we started screening it, it was like, I think over three hours long. And, and
00:33:10
Speaker
And so we'd screen it and that's like, okay, let's just say that was fine cut one. And then we would all take notes on it. And then we would all go through our notes and discuss them together, Miyoko and Maggie. And then Ilko would work on fixing the things that we talked about. And bro, we got to like fine cut 32 part C. Like we watched this movie so many times, just like as part of the process of whittling it down.
00:33:39
Speaker
and changing the story, like, you know, finding like what the meat and potatoes of the story is, finding how to keep people interested. And we had this board on the wall that was like little note cards that were color coordinated that had the entire movie broken down by clip basically into 15 minute columns so that we could like visually look like, OK, the pink ones are doctor interviews.
00:34:08
Speaker
The yellow ones are patient interviews for the movie. We interviewed a bunch of people who had thyroid issues and kind of got their stories and included those in the movie. But as we got closer toward the end, my job was like to update the wall. And it was like hours. Every time we went through the movie, it was hours of taking note cards from here.
00:34:34
Speaker
This has to go in here, so everything gets scootched down here, but also everything past it gets scootched down.
00:34:39
Speaker
Oh my God, bro. So it's just like a ton of work like that and refining. And the reason why I worked on it for exactly a year is because I needed, like, I needed to leave. Like she, if I had stayed, I would have been working on that movie forever is what I felt like at the time. And I was like, if I don't leave this town, then I'll never stop working on this movie. And I was like, Groundhog Day.
00:35:08
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And so I moved back to Chicago at the end of the year as partially because when I was living down there, I was super unhealthy. I was super fat. I was drinking all the time. I not only was I working on this movie 40 hours a week, I was also the sous chef at a wood fire pizza restaurant doing that probably 28 or 30 hours a week and just wrecking myself. Yeah.
00:35:38
Speaker
And a lot of the concepts that I learned from this movie, what I didn't mention yet is that one of the main makers of synthetic thyroid hormone is Pfizer.
Thyroid Treatment Research and Nutrition
00:35:53
Speaker
I went down this deep rabbit hole about Pfizer and how they
00:35:57
Speaker
pay for studies to discredit the natural desiccated thyroid, what they would say is like, oh, it doesn't outperform the synthetic version. But really, it's just that because it actually has the possibility of helping people feel better, not to say that Synthroid or Levothyroxine doesn't in certain people, but for most people,
00:36:25
Speaker
it doesn't help that much. And so when you're getting something that actually can help you, it takes longer to really dial it in and to figure out exactly what dose and exactly in what formulation can help you feel better. So it's just like, yeah, like you said earlier, it's like magic. It's like sorcery, like, oh, this isn't better than our synthetic version, but it's like, well, your synthetic version sucks. So why don't I just, you know, try this other thing?
00:36:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's also, from what I understand, a lot of... The thing is, it can help some people if you're really hypothyroid, if you're, for whatever reason, you're not producing thyroid hormone. It can help some people, but for me, the real travesty is that
00:37:16
Speaker
Doctors are only, many doctors only check just the TSH, which like we said is only, it's a pituitary hormone. It's not evaluating thyroid hormone production, like T3, T4, Toto, free, et cetera, reverse T3, all these other things. And so a lot of doctors, they just wait for the TSH to be like, let's say five or whatever.
00:37:42
Speaker
And then they'll give T4, and then even if their patients start taking it and they don't feel better, they will only increase it. Very few doctors are actually going to try T3. Or a combination. Yeah. Exactly. And a lot of people, they really need that T3 with a specific ratio that they have to kind of determine themselves with experimentation, like three to one, two to one, whatever.
00:38:08
Speaker
four to one or one to four. So it's kind of a travesty that they're so like one dimensional with everything they do and they're giving zero. And here's the other thing, by the way, a lot of what people don't understand is a lot of where this hypothyroidism comes from to begin with is actually nutrition and not necessarily how clean your diet is.
00:38:35
Speaker
but how much you're eating, especially carbohydrates. I talk about it in my book about why low-carb diets are bad for longevity. They can very quickly see on a low-carb or a keto diet how quickly the body turns down the metabolism by reducing thyroid hormone production. When you actually see what people were eating 100 years ago, it seems like
00:39:02
Speaker
As a culture, we're eating a lot less, but it's clear that our thyroid function is not working well. It could be because we're eating less. The problem is you can't just start eating more because our metabolisms are so wrecked as a population due to the seed oils, the toxins, all this other stuff. I think it's such a complex issue that a doctor with these one-dimensional tools that they just
00:39:30
Speaker
Throw at you and it doesn't even matter what happens to you. They just keep trying the same thing They're not helping anybody really or very few people Yeah, because like you said it can help a certain subset of people but what would help them more is probably a Holistic view of like what are you eating? What? what kind of emf store in your house like how can we just increase your general health and
00:40:01
Speaker
so that everything works better.
00:40:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's like the plasticizer is BPA. There's certain things that are thyroid antagonists. And then you have things like, first of all, a lot of people just by virtue of not eating enough protein and not eating enough like meat, basically, or animal protein, that's a big issue because the amino acid tyrosine is needed to make that thyroid hormone. So if you're not eating enough protein, not enough amino acids,
00:40:34
Speaker
are in the pool in the body to go around for all the functions because you know you have to regenerate your bones and like bones are 40% protein it's not just calcium 40% of bone is protein and skin and yeah yeah and all your vascular system a lot of that is collagen and collagen is protein it's just different amino acid ratios
00:41:00
Speaker
When compared to like muscle meter whatever so and this is a big why is this why is this a big issue in women the hypothyroidism well women generally at least all of my all of my clients.
00:41:11
Speaker
I've not had one client so far that is eating too much. I swear to God, not one woman I've worked with is eating too much. They're all chronically under-eating. Some days it's okay, but on average, they're all under-eating to begin with. And then the other issue is a lot of them are not eating enough carbohydrates. And this is again, like I said earlier, this is a very, so the two
00:41:38
Speaker
biggest signals for the body to lower its metabolic rate or thyroid function is to not eat because it has to do that as a survival mechanism or to not eat carbohydrates because actually, if you look into the literature, not eating carbohydrates sends a very similar signal to the body, the signal of starvation, as does fasting. It's insane.
00:42:07
Speaker
I wonder if that has changed over time with kind of in relation to
00:42:18
Speaker
our diet as humans, you know, like, I wonder if that came kind of post agriculture, agricultural revolution, you know, after people started farming, or if that's just, you know, always been that way. I don't know the answer is just something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually a very good thought because just earlier today I published an episode on my on my podcast about the grains and the seeds and how
00:42:47
Speaker
how a person cannot be optimally healthy or they cannot restore their health from health problems, like optimally well, if I can say that, if they're continuing to eat grains and beans and nuts and seeds and things. And I definitely think that, so for example, not seeds particularly, but in a lot of the cabbage, the cabbage family or the brassica family, so cabbage, Brussels sprouts,
00:43:17
Speaker
cauliflower, broccoli. So they have iodine antagonists. There's a ton of different toxins in these foods, isothiol, cyanates, and goitrogens. Some of these are goitrogens. They're associated with goiter, which is a swelling of the thyroid gland, a big massive lump on the neck. And that is caused by, for whatever reason,
00:43:45
Speaker
When the thyroid gland doesn't get iodine, it will expand for whatever reason. So a lot of people are eating these things a lot because they're told it's good for you and your detox systems and blah, blah, blah. And then there's other things like the fluoride. Fluoride is another one. That's a big one. I really think that's a massive reason why hypothyroidism has become so rampant is because of the water fluoridation. And then there's also bromides.
00:44:14
Speaker
which are found in processed foods and bread is one of them. So you put a stack a bunch of these things so not eating and then also I know women that they under eat a lot and then a lot of what they eat is like would be bread and grains and stuff. So you have all of these things stacking one on top of each other, not eating, under eating, then you have fluoride in your water,
00:44:41
Speaker
bromide in your bread and your own cabbage is so good, broccoli is so good, I'm not going to eat meat because it will give me heart disease and cancer, I guess. How far it's destroying the world. Exactly. This is why again, you really need to work with someone that can guide you through this journey because people think, okay, a lot of people don't think I just have to take one pill and they know that they understand that paradigm is bullshit.
00:45:11
Speaker
But people don't understand fully that there's not one thing, not two things, not five things you have to change. You have to systematically change dozens of things when you actually think about it over the course of however many months you decide to do this. It can take people years really to get there. Yeah. And on top of all of that, just like our
00:45:38
Speaker
our propensity for drinking alcohol.
Personal Health Improvements and Career Shift
00:45:42
Speaker
I feel like kind of just is a blanket on top of all health issues. Like I said, when I was living in New Orleans, I was drinking all the time. Three and a half years ago, I stopped drinking completely. And one of the things that I noticed was, aside from being able to remember my life,
00:46:07
Speaker
I was able to like tell when something in my body felt wrong. And that's something that I feel like people don't really think about is that I mean, I'm sure I know that there are people who don't, you know, drink in excess, but still consume it. But if you do, I mean, I was like, you know, younger partying, whatever, a lot of people do that. And it's
00:46:33
Speaker
It's like if you wake up feeling like shit, you know, four out of seven or five out of seven days, you're not going to notice when something in your body is feeling out of whack. And so it's it's it's funny or it's hard to try to imagine that you can fix health problems if you can't even
00:46:56
Speaker
One thing that they try to get us to think is that we can't trust our intuition like we can't possibly know anything about ourselves if we don't you know, take their test or if we don't do this or that but it's like intuition has been guiding people to survive since people existed and
00:47:14
Speaker
the more things that can kind of cloud that is like you're at a disadvantage. And so that was one major advantage I found from not drinking is that I can feel in my body when something's not right. And that doesn't mean that nothing ever goes wrong. But it's like the first step is knowing is identifying what a problem is. And I think that's very helpful to have that sort of, you know, be able to tap into
00:47:41
Speaker
more insight with a clear mind body, you know? Oh, yeah. I was the same. I was the same man. Like in my twenties, I was a barman in Ireland for God's sake. Oh my God. Yeah. You have no idea, man. And I was into techno music like I was telling you and going to parties. Yeah. I was big time like into raving and, you know,
00:48:07
Speaker
have done it all. But yeah, so after working on this movie for a while, I moved back to Chicago and then the whole experience of working on the movie, I feel like I needed to like detox from it. I kind of got soured on working, you know, under somebody else's thumb. And we would argue in the office and
00:48:37
Speaker
just like I don't know the stakes were the emotional stakes were so high and it like wasn't even my project so I kind of switched gears and after going to this festival in Florida I decided that I wanted to do like live
00:48:56
Speaker
animation art, it's called VJing, which is basically the people who perform art behind an artist, generally like a DJ, but sometimes bands and stuff on at concerts. And so that's kind of what I leaned into over the last five or so years.
00:49:17
Speaker
which I had like a pretty decent run in Chicago. And then I just moved back to Maine, like 15 minutes from where I grew up and the opportunities out here are far lower. And I am just kind of settling into like so much crazy shit went down, like, you know, starting four years ago or whatever. Yeah.
00:49:45
Speaker
And I mean, I think the answer is just like getting healthy in your body, getting healthy in your community. And it's like, the more news and media and stuff exists, it's like fear and stress is more and more at our fingertips. And it's just, I feel like, you know, holding people down and
00:50:12
Speaker
Personally, I think that the most help that I can be to the world is just to focus on getting myself healthy, focus on my family. I'm having a baby, which I think is amazing and is
00:50:30
Speaker
a thumb in the eye of the people who want us to not, you know, reproduce. They don't want smart, free thinking people being born because that threatens their monopoly on, you know, power and just kind of taking a smaller, more localized view of life. And it's, uh, it's been really good. Yeah, man. Like,
00:50:54
Speaker
I forgot who had that quote, was it maybe Wayne Dyer or something? When you look at how, when you change, I'm butchering this royally, when you change how you think about the world, the world outside your changes. So I think this positive movement
00:51:21
Speaker
in terms of the truth and the freedom movement and whatever else, that really has to start within us. And when I say we, I'm talking about myself, we have a lot of housekeeping to do in our minds where we really have to
00:51:39
Speaker
We are going to give birth to a better future, but that comes from within. It's not seeking someone or something or an event or whatever to do that for us. Or asking somebody else to fix it in X, Y, and Z way. Yeah, you're totally right.
00:52:01
Speaker
Yeah it's the quote or what you're saying sounds similar to this quote I think about which is like you're part of the world so if you make yourself better you're making the world better. Absolutely I think and it's kind of crazy but I remember
00:52:21
Speaker
when Fight Club came out in 1999, right? So that is one of my favorite movies. But when I watch it once in a while, I can see them seeding so many little insidious things that have corrupted my generation of guys or things like to get into the bus and they look like a Calvin Klein model ad and
00:52:49
Speaker
Norton is like, is that what a real man looks like? And Brad Pitt is like, self improving his masturbation. And really, these kind of things get seeded into these young lads, consciousnesses, psyches, and
00:53:07
Speaker
that does that these kind of things would create this sort of the 20s. A lot of us squander our 20s with debauchery and bullshit. And they like that because at the end of it, they've created, you know, weaker men. And then these weaker men are going to create weaker offspring and these weaker offspring are going to be much easier to control.
00:53:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And you're saying like, it seeds these ideas and call me crazy. But I don't think that that's always, you know, just a byproduct. It seems pretty intentional of like, just getting, getting ideas, getting people familiar with
00:53:54
Speaker
ideas about the way they they Trademark want the world to you know operate. Well, you make we go made films Yeah, that's really difficult it is to like put what how to make this thing appear the way you intended it to appear So everything is very intentional every second every scene is very intentional. What's in the background is very yeah, so
00:54:23
Speaker
That's something that I kind of grapple with a bit. It's like I want a way to express myself artistically. That's totally fine. But then on the other hand, it's like I know that these telescreens, the ones that we're looking into right now,
Balancing Health Advocacy and Technology
00:54:44
Speaker
are kind of like capturing society and we're always, you know, looking at our phones or like we want flashy, you know, we understand that flashy content gets seen by a lot of people. And so it's like, now I'm at this place where it's like, I don't want people to live their lives looking at a screen. And my chosen medium of art is only on a screen. Yeah.
00:55:13
Speaker
I mean, I guess technically I can like, you know, projection map a house or like a structure for people to look at in real life, which is kind of what I enjoy doing is like taking a large structure and, you know, putting art onto it.
00:55:28
Speaker
But outside of that, it's like it leaves me in a place where I feel like I'm kind of like feeding the beast. Yeah, it's an interesting sort of dilemma because also me, I have to be at the computer a lot to help people and to create content and whatever, writing books or making courses, whatever.
00:55:56
Speaker
and like I can feel it destroying my back and stuff and like I can feel my joints kind of hurting because I'm like sometimes I'm here 10 hours a day and like it's kind of I'm supposed to be setting an example about health and stuff and now the weather is really good and someday the last couple of months I've been working really hard on some stuff and some days I'm like getting like an hour of sunlight and daylight like
00:56:26
Speaker
That's really not congruent with what I want people to be outside in the sunshine, grounded on the ground and breathing clean air, drinking clean water and all that stuff.
00:56:44
Speaker
There's an incongruency there I'm kind of grappling with. And I think that's something that we have to kind of dig deep. And I'm sure that our heart will help us find the right path, I suppose, is a very waffly way to fudge. No, I am totally with you. I'm grappling with the same thing. I don't want to live my life behind a computer.
00:57:15
Speaker
I grew up in the 90s and my memories as a kid of my dad are just him on a computer emailing people all day or talking to people. And it's like, I don't resent him for that being so prevalent in my childhood memories, but it's like,
00:57:38
Speaker
I, if I can, if I can, I would love to, for my kid to not just like when they close their eyes, imagine me just like sitting at a computer, like typing away or like, this is so important. What's happening right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:57:53
Speaker
But yeah, chatting, you know, connecting minds, if you will, is super important. It's a really nice application of computers. Sitting and chatting with interesting people for an hour, I feel like is a great way to spend an hour. And yeah, the best I, over like, since college, I mean, even starting in college, I've had all sorts of like,
00:58:24
Speaker
very odd, weird jobs, including like translating what's the baseball, not NBA, MLB, translating Major League Baseball games into Chinese for like Taiwanese gamblers over the phone. That was a super random job I had, but I also
00:58:53
Speaker
Wait, but do you speak Chinese? Yeah, I speak Mandarin. Whoa. It's been getting worse and worse because we went a lot when I was a kid. I was made in China.
00:59:09
Speaker
And I went to like elementary school over there when we would go back as a kid. And I just like completely fell into this job in Chicago of, you know, translating the games for this like weird gambling ring in Taiwan.
00:59:26
Speaker
He was like, he was like, if they're gonna call you on your phone, they shouldn't ask you anything. If they do ask you anything, just say you work for Dennis. I was like, this guy's name was not Dennis. I was like, all right, man. But they always paid me. The point of saying all this was that my favorite job that I've had to date was being a landscape surveyor, which I did for about
00:59:50
Speaker
on and off for about three years. Um, I started, I, I was working as a video technician for an audio video company before the, um, convid happened. And when I started, we were, we were working in live events and so we were basically one of the first fields to go to, you know, stop work, get laid off when everyone was afraid.
01:00:17
Speaker
When I started working again, I worked as a landscape surveyor and dude just like as for a residential. And I worked on a one man team, just me and my little robot. And I just walked around outside all day listening to podcasts, listening to your podcasts, listening to I found you. I found you through the ripple effect. Love his podcast.
01:00:42
Speaker
And just like, I've never felt better than just being outside all day. And so ideally, eventually I want to find my way back outside and do some sort of, you know, not super intellectual, but like, you know, feels good and helps people. Like it would be cool if when I was doing that, it was like, you know, helping rich people build even bigger houses. It's like, okay, yeah, you're helping people, but,
01:01:12
Speaker
You know, like, who are you helping? How are you helping? These are things that I can come to terms with. I can help rich people build, you know, fancy houses if it means me, like, living a happy, healthy life. Oh, yeah. Totally, Ben. Something I've been thinking about for years is eventually I want to have a retreat center here in the south of Portugal, and you come and, you know, we'll have on...
Christian's Vision and Fermentation Passion
01:01:40
Speaker
During your time here, we have an acupuncturist, chiropractor, sound healer. We have a shaman, whatever tickles your fancy. Trippy visuals. Yeah, there you go. I wouldn't mind flying in some cool DJs and doing some cool stuff. But eating clean and being in nature and being close to the ocean,
01:02:09
Speaker
And then I can do what I want to do, which is kind of, you know, helping people make an impact in the world by getting people healthier, teaching about health. And we can do that outside in the sunshine and in the, you know, hearing the birds sing, the wind, you know, rustling, whatever else. And I think it's good to
01:02:32
Speaker
to have a vision for something like that. Because at the end of the day, man, yeah, we're going to be stuck in front of screens. But maybe we can take the screens outside. We can always improve the situation a little bit. You can take it out in the garden, in the veranda, work there. So at least then you're in the daylight. So I think there's always, where there's a will, there's a way to kind of do this. And then our children don't have to,
01:03:01
Speaker
Right now, when I'm working, my daughter doesn't see me work, but I think it will be useful for her to actually see me working with a client, which actually one time she was on a call because she wouldn't take a nap. So I told my client, we're doing this with an intern here. But I think it would be useful for her to see what I do as well.
01:03:24
Speaker
because then she'll get her question, why are you talking to that lady? What are you talking about? What do you do? Oh, you help people? Why do you need to help them? But why aren't people, why do people have health problems? Oh, okay. And then that will teach her then instill some of my values around the house. Like for example, now I'm trying to, she's breathing out through the mouth a lot like,
01:03:51
Speaker
You know, I'm trying to teach her nasal breathing, which is extremely important for children to learn from an early age for jaw development and for a bunch of other sort of just the whole facial structure.
01:04:06
Speaker
it's required for the facial structure to develop properly. So I'm explaining the stuff to her and soon enough she'll be able to understand more complex concepts. So I think we just have to take whatever situation we have and I feel like there's always something we can do to improve it and optimize it a little bit more and a little bit more like 1% every day or whatever. Yeah, definitely.
01:04:35
Speaker
Yeah, I like to, I don't work at any kitchens or anything anymore, but that's kind of what I also spend my time doing is like, we try to eat as good as possible. I do like the vast majority of the cooking just having
01:04:56
Speaker
I worked at a lot of different restaurants, you know, while I was in college after college. And then a couple years ago, I took some fermentation workshops by Lanny from
01:05:12
Speaker
the world as it is today and her podcast which is her podcast with her husband chud and then she has a cooking based one and a youtube channel called preserving today or greener postures i can't remember which is like her company which is the podcast but
01:05:31
Speaker
fermenting stuff is my new big passion. I also don't drink anymore, but I can make these delicious fermented beverages. When you think of fermented beverages, you think beer, wine, or kombucha, if you're thinking fancy non-alcoholic ones.
01:05:56
Speaker
kavass is one fruit kavass. Well, kavass was originally made out of wheat, but you can basically just ferment fruit, water and sugar and make delicious seasonal beverages that are more satisfying than soda that are healthy. Uh,
01:06:15
Speaker
contain all sorts of probiotics. And that just kind of opened up the next chapter of like experimenting in my house. It's like, there's always something on the counter. We got ginger beer going sauerkraut. You can catch up. Dude, I had that face mustard beer and water kefir.
01:06:37
Speaker
Which dude I I've tried to make well, I guess I haven't tried water I've tried to make dairy kefir like four different times and each time it's messed up and I have one packet left and I'm like, all right I'm gonna follow the instructions so good this time. This is the one yeah, I was making very good yogurt with with that but the water kefir
01:07:00
Speaker
The awesome thing is, because you're ferment, it's just water, they're different, they're not kefir grains, they're different. You stick those in, you put the sugar in, obviously that's fermenting, and then you can also add dried fruits. So dude, I had these organic dried sweet cherries. So, oh my God, and figs. I love cherries. So you can then transfer it
01:07:26
Speaker
after a day or two into a new sort of vessel and you can put more dried fruit like plums and whatever and just what gets created is from oh my god but like you my kitchen counter was full and at one point my wife just was sick of it it was like these things they were like turning nasty honestly I made this uh kimchi it was like purple at one point and like my wife was like dude like throw that thing out it's been there like a year and a half
01:07:55
Speaker
Just throw that damn thing out. I'm sick of looking at it every day. You're like, it's just getting better and better. It's my baby. I've given it a name. I can't. But the ginger beer as well. Oh my God. I had that phase as well. It's pretty epic. Except one time.
01:08:12
Speaker
I completely forgot that it's super carbonated and I opened the bottle. It was a flip top bottle. And at the time we had a, cause we were still with a young baby, we had a cleaning lady coming in and it was all over the ceiling in the kitchen. So she looked at me, she looked at my wife and she just started laughing like, cause you see what a head case I have there with my ferments all over the kitchen.
01:08:37
Speaker
Yeah. Definitely don't open them near like blinds because I did that and it got on each blind individually. And so you can't, you can't just, it took a long time. That's a nightmare. Well, Patrick, this was a pleasure, my friend. Um, before we go, let the listeners know where they can connect with you on the interwebs.
01:09:01
Speaker
Yeah, you can probably the easiest place to find me is on Instagram. My art page on there is neocord.vision. That's N-E-O-C-O-R-D dot vision. And I have like a link tree on there that links to YouTube and a couple other random spots. Awesome. Awesome. And also it was really, really nice to meet you. Yeah, bro. Thank you so much for your time.
01:09:31
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for yours. Take care.