Eating 1,000 Sardines in a Month + The Cheapest Grocery Store in America | Dr. Nick Norwitz & George Kamel

00:00:17
Speaker 1: Welcome to two percent. I am your host Michael Easter. Today on two percent, we're going to be talking about food. Now, food is the foundation of health, and we're going to talk about food in two ways that the marketing economy has totally overlooked. You've written them off as either disgusting or way too chaotic, and I think that is a massive miss for your health. So first we're going to talk to Nick Norwitz. Nick got his PhD from Oxford and then his MD from Harvard, and he recently ate a single food for an entire month that most people would think is completely disgusting, but along the way, some really strange and quite miraculous things happened to his health. He literally started registering dolphin level omega threes in his blood. Yes, dolphin level omega threes. So he's going to tell us why this food is arguably the most overlooked but powerful food that you can eat none. After that, we're gonna bring out George Cammell. We're going to be talking to him about the greatest grocery store in the world. George is one of the brightest minds on debt and financial freedom, and he's also an expert with the Ramsey Network. He dispenses a lot of wonderful advice on getting out of debt and living a freer life. Food also happens to be one of the biggest expenses for Americans. Food prices have actually risen twenty percent since twenty twenty two, and I'm sure you can feel this in your pocket. So how do you actually save money on food? Enter this grocery store we're going to talk about. A recent analysis found that it is by far the cheapest grocery store in America, and it is packed with tons of healthy options. So we're going to talk about how do you manage to eat healthy in a world where a lot of people think that healthy food is inherently going to be more expensive. It does not have to be the case. So you're going to leave this episode with a lot of tactics to eat better and save money along the way. Let's get into it all right now, we're bringing on doctor Nick Norwitz. Nick got his PhD from Oxford, he got his MD from Harvard Medical School, and then he left the hospital went on to found the sub stack Stay Curious Metabolism, where his goal is to make metabolic health mainstream again. He's also got a good YouTube channel, and the man is all about doing radical experiments to find lessons that can help you. And he just did a very radical experiment, and that's that he ate only sardines for an entire month. So we're going to learn what happened from that. There were some good things that happened to his health, but there are also some strange and bad things that happened in his relationship of all things. And you will learn why maybe you should be eating a little more fish, and why Omega three supplements may not give you all the benefits just eating real fish. So let's talk to neck right now. Yeah, and I will note that on your video screen right now it says Nick Norwitz, MD PhD, PGP. Were your parents physicians too.

00:03:18
Speaker 2: Both mdphds.

00:03:19
Speaker 1: Dude, Yeah, I if I ever have an incident, I'm calling the Norwitz family.

00:03:25
Speaker 3: The funny thing about that, how I got to where I got to was through, you know, a personal health journey where I had access to all the resources, and conventional medicine still filled me like two mdphd parents financially well off, and then the conventional system still let's you fall through the cracks of some extent. So it got me thinking about the care we actually provide and securitus route through my PhD. Then MD brought me to being a little bit of a thorn in the side of convention.

00:03:56
Speaker 1: But as it is, but there's a good reason for it.

00:04:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I thought you could change the system from within, which is why I went the path I did. And I realized that's probably not an efficacious way to do it.

00:04:10
Speaker 2: But that's a whole other kettle of fish part of the punt.

00:04:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. Well, well, on that note, you're ready to talk startines.

00:04:18
Speaker 2: I'm ready to talk sartines.

00:04:20
Speaker 1: All right, So you embarked on a journey of epic culinary proportions. You did a sardine fast. What made you attempt that in the first place.

00:04:33
Speaker 3: Well, at heart, I'm a giant nerd and I love exploring the natural world through reading, learning externally, but also trying things out of myself. And I also find it, you know, a great tool for education. When I started publicly, I would just get on say like my phone or YouTube video and explain the new cell paper and and you know, people responded to that. But I found when you could wrap it around a human narrative to some extent and draw lessons out of that and use that as the hook and lever. People just really got into it.

00:05:10
Speaker 4: Well.

00:05:10
Speaker 1: I think it also incentivizes them to do something too. I mean, I'll tell you in my own work, I could have written a book like The Comfort Crisis from the Comfort of Home and just read a bunch of studies and interpreted them. That book would have sucked, dude, because it wouldn't have taught me what that actually means and given people some sort of reason to keep turning the pages that had a human element.

00:05:33
Speaker 3: There's also a matter of like, well, when we ask science, like what is science? And I think people think of science as an institution that it's very formalized by people with training, goes through some rigorous peer review process, which I will tell you now is not a meritocracy. But that's not what science is. What science is is something that is deeply intrinsically human that we're born with, which is we are curious by nature. We want to explore the natural world, and you know, hypothesis tests, make observations and evolve our model and you can apply that. It doesn't need to be a randomized control trial. You can apply that in your own equals one journey. It's more of an ethos of how about how you walk through life? So you know, over the years through my PhD in medical school, I did a lot of like coaching, and I always knew someone would be successful, not when they lost like a certain number of pounds on the scale or something, but when you see that light go off in their eye, they're like, Oh, this isn't achure, Like this is cool. My body's a lab and I get to experiment and iterate and observe and just like treat your body like an ongoing experiment. And I like to live like that. And the Sargine diet was something that I tried because it was kind of like going around and the zeitgeist. I was not the first person to talk about it. I know probably people you know Dom Degastino, like big stardine guy. I think he maybe came up with it. I heard about it first when he was talking with Tim Ferris.

00:06:51
Speaker 1: And he's a researcher then the University of Florida.

00:06:54
Speaker 3: Or University of University of Southern Florida. But brilliant guy. And I'm just like, I want to what would happen. And when I do things, I like to go quite hard. So I'm like, for a month, basically the base of my diet is going to be sardines. Ended up eating about a thousand sardines in a month.

00:07:08
Speaker 1: And so let me ask you a question. Did you eat anything other than sardines for a month?

00:07:13
Speaker 3: I did because a goal wasn't to like lose weight, and eating just sardines, I would have just I don't have much excess fat to lose, so I would have just atrophied fat. So originally I was eating just sardines for like three days. I'm like, this isn't going to be sustainable. So then I was adding in a little bit of electrolytes and just added fats, mostly all of oil NMCT oil, but just supplemental fats to get a little bit of extra energy in. But other than that, sardines for like my main protein source.

00:07:40
Speaker 1: You ate a thousand and a month.

00:07:42
Speaker 2: About a thousand?

00:07:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I didn't count them one by one, but if you go through the cans in amount per can, then yes, about a thousand.

00:07:47
Speaker 1: Sort how many cans is that a day? Like eight ish eight ish? So I think that there is a I'll call it a misconception that sardines are gross, and I think that is because they used to be very gross, like fifty years ago. There's kind of can slimy thing. But I will say I feel like there has been a complete renaissance in the world of small fish that are in tins. So which were you eating?

00:08:17
Speaker 3: Aboar, no affiliation, but I was eating fish wife particularly. The one I liked was an extra virgin olive oil with preserved lemon. They are more expensive, but for an experiment like this, having something that I actually look forward to eating made a difference. Like you said, I mean, I like sardines just like plain in brine. They're fine, but after a while it gets a little bit boring. So I'm like all adding a sardine splurge, and those are particularly tasty. I drained the oil, but wasn't like particularly like I'm not too worried about a little bit of the quote like oxidation of the oil in the can, so that wasn't a particular concern.

00:08:54
Speaker 2: But those are the sardines.

00:08:55
Speaker 1: I ate what prompted I mean, I guess, like, what question did you have going into this and why did you want to do this? Why sardines.

00:09:02
Speaker 3: There are different types of experiments. Some you go in with a hypothesis. So for example, another stunt I did was seven hundred and twenty eggs in a month, which is twenty four egs per day. That's how it came to that number that I did have hypothesis that I'm like, I don't think these eggs are going to increase my cholesterol, having to do with how our bodies regularly cholesterol. So there I had an explicit hypothesis that I was testing. This was more exploratory. I'm just like, I wonder what would happen? People are reporting like great energy, this, that and the other. What am I going to notice that's going to be particularly interesting?

00:09:34
Speaker 2: If anything, am I going to hate it? I'm I gonna love it.

00:09:37
Speaker 3: I'm gonna feel energized, hired, what have you. So it was exploratory capture and report and then try to explain phenomenon that were particularly surprising.

00:09:48
Speaker 1: What was surprising along the way two things.

00:09:51
Speaker 2: Two big things.

00:09:53
Speaker 3: The first was a smell and I don't mean like sardine stinct smell my breath and I have to credit I apologize to her, my girlfriend, because she was the one that noticed the smell, but it was like an aura, like it got into my skin and it was giving off like volatiles. She would walk and I'm like, I haven't eaten yet today. She would get back from like a night shift. I haven't eaten, I've showered and I've brushed my teeth until my gums are bleeding. But my skin was just giving off some like volatiles.

00:10:20
Speaker 1: You just smelled like a sardine.

00:10:22
Speaker 3: It wasn't exactly like a sardine. It was potentially something else. I haven't maybe explanation for what was going on there, and we can get delve into the signs of it. But that was the first thing. The other thing I noticed was being cold resistant. So I live in Boston. I did this experiment during the winter and it gets cold, it gets like blizzardy, and I just completely lost that feeling of feeling cold, like I could go out there was we had one really bad blizzard and We've got several feet of snow and I could go out there like fridgid blasts, felt like nothing.

00:10:53
Speaker 1: What do you think was happening there?

00:10:55
Speaker 2: So this is where things get rid of me.

00:10:57
Speaker 1: Let me. Also, we've talked about this, but I need to say that you are a hardcore scientist. You have a PhD, you have an ND, you think you analyze, So this is not you just sort of I'm going to make some stuff off and riffing. This is like, you've looked into this and you've you've got a good theory behind this.

00:11:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent.

00:11:17
Speaker 3: And in fact, if people want the paper that had to come together for me, if people want to go read it, it came out and Sell which is one of the top basic science journals in the world this year. It's entitled Identification of R five V one O l F R one ten as an oxylipin receptor and anti OBCD target. And I can talk about all the methodology and bore you. I won't do that. I'll kind of try to keep it high level. But there are like multiple top tier science journals behind the hypotheses, and I'll admit speculation of me trying to explain what went on in my body. Omega three's startine as we know are original Omega three is and we know those like are heart healthy and brain healthy. The question is why these aren't just like nutrients energy carrying molecules. They are precursors to hormones.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: In the body.

00:12:03
Speaker 3: And I don't mean that lightly. I mean like you're say brown fat, which is a thermogenetic type of fat. It's actually derived from muscle precursor cells, not fat cells. And then there's like an intermediate called base fat but can turn omega three's like EPA or dha, which is a long chain of Mega threeason to various hormones. One is called twelve HGPE, so boring name, very interesting hormone. It actually in humans has an inverse relationship with body mass index.

00:12:33
Speaker 1: So it has some influence on your weight status more or less in body fat.

00:12:38
Speaker 3: Well, we don't in humans know the directionality. So basically, if you're leaner, you tend to have higher levels of this twelve ahgpe, and if you have more obesity, it's lower. So then we enter this new like, okay, we have a problem or possibilities here. Maybe lean people are more efficient at making it from omega three, or maybe it's actually causing leanness, maybe it is promoting weight loss and thermogenesis. It turns out that is actually one of its primary functions, this twelve hgpe, which it is made in brown fat from omega three, and then it acts on brown fat to increase thermogenesis and acts in muscles to help suck up glucose, so it improves glucless disposal, increases heat production, and in animals, because you can do more control animal experiments, it does prevent weight gain increase energy expenditure. So there's a biologically plausible basis for say how an omega three eaten from a heavy omega three diet could increase levels of this hormone, which eating more omega three does increase levels in humans, but thereby increase.

00:13:43
Speaker 1: Your energy expenditure calorie burn more or less more or.

00:13:46
Speaker 2: Less calorie burn.

00:13:47
Speaker 3: Now, in a stute listener might be saying, well, if this is true, wouldn't science have figured it out right? It seems the kind of things like this, This seems like.

00:13:59
Speaker 2: It should have been solved. Two responses to that.

00:14:03
Speaker 3: One of the most interesting things about going through like formal academic training. My PhD was at Oxford, my MD was at Harvard, and throughout you're just humbled by how little we know. In fact, to just circle back to that egg experiment, the reason I did it is because it wasn't until twenty twenty four that we identified the hormone that explains why our bodies don't increase our blood cholesterol when we eat cholesterol. The hormone's called collesin and it was identified in twenty twenty four. And when I read that, I was in medical school. I'm like, really, we're figuring this out now. So the amount of things we don't know would astonish people, and it's one of the reasons I love science.

00:14:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, did you feel like it was one of those things? The longer you were there, the less you realize that we know.

00:14:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean well, I mean it's like any field of expertise and anybody listening, whatever their profession is, I'm sure you have this phenomenon where you're like, people don't understand how difficult my job is. It is true, like across the board. Be you a journalist, be you a scientist, be you a doctor, bu mechanic, whatever. Generally, the more you learn about a topic, the more you're aware of how much there is to learn. It's called the Dunning Kruger effect. People can look it up, but typically people who have the least knowledge tend to overestimate their knowledge, and then you become humbled when you realize how complex these things are, including human biology and medicine. But to get back on the stardine thing, another thing that I had going for me was people don't get to my blood Omega three levels very typically. In fact, I did an interview with the professor and a leading researcher in Omega three biosciences, professor William Harris. He invented the Omega three index, and he's like, yeah, people, I don't see people ever with your blood Omega three levels, which there are different metrics, but on his test, I'm more than maxed out the scale. The average persons it's around five percent a Mega three index. Eight percent is considered optimal. The scale goes to twelve percent. I was at sixteen percent, which is like a marine mammals, Like, it's kind of.

00:16:04
Speaker 1: Like a dolphin were exactly.

00:16:06
Speaker 2: So I was closer to dolphin blood than human blood.

00:16:08
Speaker 1: How did it feel to have dolphin blood?

00:16:09
Speaker 2: Well, it's kind of scary.

00:16:10
Speaker 3: In the age of AI, people were doing like like I don't know, I guess it's not a deep fake of me, but like me saying I'm turning into a dolphin and having me morphed into a dolphin. It was so creepy awesome that aside, let's put the piece of puzzle together here because the plot twists I want. I mentioned that paper and cell. There were a few papers, but there's like a I think an epic plot twist that at least blew my mind and hopefully going to communicate in a way that is interesting.

00:16:35
Speaker 2: So I have this working model.

00:16:37
Speaker 3: Okay, I ate a ton of omega threes and got my blood on mega three levels super super high, higher than most people do, and maybe my twelve HPE levels, which are derived from these omega threes, are increasing my body's heat production burning off energy.

00:16:52
Speaker 2: I also lost.

00:16:53
Speaker 3: I'm pretty lean at baseline, but my body fat dropped like below seven percent by the end of the experiment. So there's a problem though, which is we know kind of what twelve HPE does again increase energy expenditure, and you know thermogenesis, increase decrease, increase glucos disposal the muscles, but we don't know its receptor. And this is often a problem where like there's an orphan receptor, it just doesn't you don't really know how it exists or like what it's binding to and what the mechanism is. So that paper I mentioned is where they discovered the receptor for the twelve HGPE and what it is is pretty mind blowing. It's a smell receptor. And I want to deliver this with its full impact because it's so weird that, like, why would a molecule who we understand its function to be acting on muscles to pull glucose out of the blood so your muscles can burn it as energy and pulling glucose and activating around fast so you can produce heat production. Why would it be a canonical smell receptor. It's olf R one ten. I remember that as oily fish reeks one ten. It's not what it actually stands for. But when you go through med school you become like pneumonic minded, so I remember.

00:18:15
Speaker 2: But long story short, and this is one of those moments.

00:18:19
Speaker 3: Where I just had to sit back and be like, Wow, biology is cool. Is Evolution has done an amazing thing in that it tends to repurpose the same item, let's say, the same unit, for multiple different functions. We see this again and again again, like sharp jawbones migrating and become inner earbones, or consider the fact we are arguably the most complex animal obviously, like I don't believe there's like a pinnacle of evolution per se adaptability. However, we're incredibly complex. Our genomes are comparatively tiny.

00:18:55
Speaker 2: Like there are.

00:18:56
Speaker 3: Fleas with more genes than us. We have twenty thousand genes. There are worms with more gene in us.

00:19:01
Speaker 2: So what's going on.

00:19:02
Speaker 3: It's that our body is really good at splicing things and repurposing things. And with this smell receptor, what they ended up finding is it's not just in the olfactory epithelium. It is also in the liver, It's also in brown fat. It's also in the brain. And maybe I'm stretching a little bit here, but in kind of tying together the story of the things I experienced in my life and in my body, say the stink and the superpower of cold resistance, if we say these are bonafide responses, things that I'm truly that are truly happening to be biologically, this presents a really interesting model because it kind of couples let's say, the superpower of.

00:19:43
Speaker 2: Cold resistance to a price.

00:19:45
Speaker 3: So as I was like having this click in my mind, I was thinking about things like like Ral and The Little Mermaid where you have to have this like fatal exchange. You can like get legs to give away your voice, and it seems very arbitrary, but these things happen in biology and medicine all the time, where you pull one thread and something else moves. The sardine experiments kind of an extreme example of that. But like, take any intervention, take a common medication, statins or whatever, like they'll have good things and they'll have bad things, and those things often couple just because of how integrated our biology is. And I think that is something to like really marinate on or reflect on because it's such a basic truth, but one that I think honestly, medicine often overlooks. You'll be very like my, my but and key hole focus with any given intervention. Oh, we have a number, we want to change it. We're going to give this intervention without thinking systemically about the body.

00:20:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then and then another number changes somewhere else, and we're like, why did not happen? And then that's where they're interesting questions or you don't even.

00:20:48
Speaker 2: Look at that other number, like you know they're there.

00:20:50
Speaker 3: There are stereotypical rivalries in hospitals that you find out when you go through medical training like cardiology and nephrology, they're always like doing intervention on a patient and pissing off the other one because they're you think about their own organ system, like, oh, we care about the heart, we care about the kidney, rather than thinking about the human as an integrated system.

00:21:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's talk about sardines in general for the average person sort of, they're like, if you were to flip over the baseball card of sardines and look at their sort of nutritional statistics, why might they be a good food for the average person even if they're not going to eat a thousand in a month, Like, let's walk through what are some of their benefits.

00:21:32
Speaker 3: I mean, they're about the most nutritionally dense food you can get when you have them with skin and bone, And that kind of makes sense because you're eating the whole organism. You're getting like the calcium from the bones, you're getting the omega three, you're getting tons of micronutrients, even those that won't show up on a label.

00:21:50
Speaker 1: And they have multiples more omega threes than two now, right, and multiples more than even salmon, and people kind of put salmon on the pinnacle of like this is what you eat for omega threees, but sardines actually have more.

00:22:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, sardines are very dense in omega three. I think sardines mackerel uh and salmon as well. Less so tuna or like lean fish like cod and hal of it. You don't get a ton from those. So, you know, in terms of convenient Omega threes, you really can't beat sardines. You know, amounts vary, but it's pretty backed. The only thing that really tops that, I would say, other than the supplement, it's probably cod livers. You can buy can't cod liver. They're pretty delicious, but they are like about as rich and a Mega three as you can get.

00:22:36
Speaker 2: Doms also a fan, where would you buy?

00:22:38
Speaker 1: Is that like you got to go to the specific website.

00:22:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, line, it's like Icelandic cod liver. You're not going to find it out like a whole food something.

00:22:45
Speaker 1: It's also I'm magnesium and iron correct, and magnesium is something a lot of people lack.

00:22:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know what the exact quantity of magnesium is in sardines, but I suspect they have it.

00:22:58
Speaker 2: I know they have iron.

00:23:00
Speaker 3: Which you're all like important nutrients and electrolytes for the body. Actually, if you'll indulge me in a little bit of a sidebar.

00:23:08
Speaker 2: I love mind blowing.

00:23:09
Speaker 1: Let's go.

00:23:10
Speaker 3: Okay, So okay, here's my pitch and I have a letter come out about it on my substat But basically the title is going to be you can legitimately slow aging for six point two cents.

00:23:21
Speaker 1: Per day six I'm in six.

00:23:24
Speaker 3: Point and this is including human data and a three point three three year monkey study. So there's this thing called Faraoh aging. So the connection is you mentioned iron. Iron is good, you want iron, But the funny thing happens with aging where your cells and organs start to hoard iron.

00:23:46
Speaker 2: You actually see this over.

00:23:47
Speaker 3: Time if you go like lung, heart, liver, brain, and humans, iron levels start to accumulate as your cells hoard it, and this can set off a domino chain of effects where basically we get extra extra damaging something called oxidative stress and cells. Scientists identify and let me actually as I'm talking, get the name of the paper, and these are all like top science journals just came out.

00:24:11
Speaker 2: This one.

00:24:12
Speaker 3: It's entitled Vitamin C Inhibits ACSL four to alleviate pharaoh aging in primates. So basically, let me simplified iron accumulates an tissue and then it activates this enzyme called ACSL four. I remember it as aging catalyst switch. The offor's actually referred to it as like an aging switch, and that leads to damaging your cells in aging. So what they did was they screened for compounds like blindly screen Hey, is there anything we know that actually binds to this lynchpin of iron induced aging Pharaoh aging, this ACSL four, And they tested one hundred compounds, including like seven different statins, various medications, but the one that was most effective was vitamin C.

00:24:52
Speaker 1: Interesting, so.

00:24:55
Speaker 3: They ended up doing various experiments, but including giving monkeys, eating monkeys who were already old vitamin C for I think it was yeah, forty months, and then looking at their markers of aging in their cells biological clocks, even like MRIs of the brain. There was slowed biological aging across all clocks including you know, various biomarkers and cells and tissues. There was even slowed shrinkage of the prefrontal cortex from vitamin C. Now, the six point two cents comes from I looked at the dose because people I was like, oh, you know, animal studies, they always hyperdose. It was thirty milligrams per kilogram. So for a seventy kilogram human, that's two point one grams per day of vitamin C. If you buy it and bulk on Amazon, you do the math six point two cents per day.

00:25:42
Speaker 2: So take your vitamin C. I guess.

00:25:45
Speaker 3: So sardines don't have a lot of vitamin C, but I guess you could take it with something with vitamin C. But this is one of those things where I know I'm getting on my nerd high horse, but medicine lag so far behind, like what we call basic science, but like understanding biology at the frontier, And when you can start to implement that understanding of biology at the frontier, I think you can bio optimize far, far beyond what modern medicine thinks you can. Now, can I prove to you, be on a shadow of a doubt in a thirty year human study that two point one grams of vitamin C is gonna slow brain shrinkage? No, but that's because we just haven't done the study. It doesn't mean there's not a biological effect. So you know, what's the cost of taking two gramps of vitamin C if you're interested. So sorry for that sidebar, but there's always something in my mind I'm excited about.

00:26:38
Speaker 1: We'll flow out of the sidebar. Yeah. One thing that I like is that that is practical too. Yeah, and I will say too with sardines, that is a practical food in the sense that it can sit on your shelf for like a year or two and just sit there nice. It's going to be preserved, you can eat at any time, you can throw it in a bag when you travel. When I'm backpacking, actually, yeah, I'll take sardines because I'm like, oh, yeah, it's gonna be fine in my bag, and I just ripped that open, got proteins, got all these different vitamins and minerals. The other thing is that I think people might hear, oh, you're eating a ton of this fish in cans. Your mercury levels is supposed to have been crazy, But that wasn't the case because sardines are relatively low in mercury.

00:27:21
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, sardines are very low in mercury. Just to kind of give you a sense of perspective, one serving of sardines sorry, one serving of swordfish and you can find these tables online is the equivalent to seventy seven servings of sardines. So you can eat sardines twice per day for a month and it would be the amount of mercury yet if you just have like one.

00:27:42
Speaker 2: Slob of swordfish.

00:27:43
Speaker 3: So it really is about the type of fish you eat, not just eating more fish.

00:27:47
Speaker 1: And that's because the heavy metals move up the food chan correct. So basically, long story short, the bigger the fish, the more smaller fish it eats, the more mercury is going to accumulate in its body, and then when you eat that, you're the next step of the food chain more or less exactly. Yep.

00:28:02
Speaker 3: And another concern people have is plastics in particularly BPA. This is one of the number one comments. What about the BPA? What do it look for?

00:28:10
Speaker 1: A BPA supposedly lines the cans.

00:28:12
Speaker 3: Is that the thinking, Yeah, but you can just look for VPA three tens they'll be labeled or you go online, So that's an easy solve it. It's a real problem I think for some tins of startings, but you can also just find the VBA pretends so the brand I used again fish wife, I have no affiliation.

00:28:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, cool ppa free.

00:28:28
Speaker 1: Let me ask you a question. Could a person just take on mega three supplements, you.

00:28:31
Speaker 3: Wouldn't get the full spectrum of nutrition found in startines the things we were mentioning about. Obviously, it's not any protein that on Mega three supplements, and you're also going to miss out on well let me not really sidebar, but background important information. If you look at the literature, there's a very very consistent association between higher fish intake and improved health outcomes, particularly bring health. There isn't as consistent an association with a Mega three supplementation. There's several reasons why that might be, and the literature is not perfect. It's complicated. But one of the reasons is there's other things in fish that is beyond Omega three that are neuroprotective. So, for example, there are neuroprotective forms of selenium. Selenium thirty four on the periodic cable is incredibly interesting and has very important functions in the brain. Once it gets into the brain, it turns into a whole class of proteins called selenoproteins, and actually it's been shown it can increase neurogenesis. The birth of new neurons, like, it's legitimately interesting, and you get various forms of selenium from eating thing.

00:29:37
Speaker 1: So it's like by trying to just distill the omega threes, which by the way, they basically do by grinding up tiny fish, and then the process you also lose about half the fish. You're getting this one thing, but you're missing all these other things that could be happening by eating the entire fish that we're just not entirely aware of.

00:29:56
Speaker 3: In some cases, there's always the way it is with nutrition, not to say don't supplemental mega three's. I still supplemental mega threes for other reasons. I have a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's disease, So I'm like very liberal about my omega three intake, probably like still five ish SCRAMs per day, but that's me personally. So if you don't like stardines, I would say getting at least one point five grams of long channel mega three so EPA and DHA combined somehow, either through diet or for fatty fish, and if you happen to know you're at like you have an apoe four allele, then at least two grams per day, it would be if I were to give practical thresholds would be the thresholds.

00:30:34
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on OMEGA three's and heart health, because I feel like that gets brought up a lot.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: Good for heart health. The literature is a little bit messy.

00:30:43
Speaker 3: They've shown high dose concentrated EPA is good for hypertrichlistridemia and heart health. I think it's the nature of the studies, the background population on which they're given and the dose is given where there may be negative results, but at a high level, Like the breadth of impact so mega threes have on the body is profound, Like they get turned into hormones like I mentioned, but they also get incorporated into cell membranes in the nervous system, they concentrate in the brain stem, they get into cardiac cell membranes, and they change things like heart rate variability, which is a biomarker associated with like risk of heart attack or even death from cardiovasca disease after heart attack. So this is one of those areas of science where I can talk about the basic science and make a personal, confident prediction that is absolutely essential to your cardiovascular health.

00:31:41
Speaker 2: But if somebody were.

00:31:42
Speaker 3: To go to the literature and say, hey, do we have the definitive randomized control trial saying that this dose of EPA is going to do exactly this much in this person for say, risk of a heart attack.

00:31:55
Speaker 2: We don't.

00:31:56
Speaker 3: But when it comes to really whole body health, but especially brain health and heart health, I think megassa.

00:32:01
Speaker 2: Are non negotiable.

00:32:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's interesting from my book Scarcity Brain, I went to travel into the Bolivian jungle and I hung out with this tribe called the Chumani tribe. There was a paper that came out that found they had the lowest rates of cardiovascular disease in the world. They basically don't die of heart attacks. They also don't seem to get dementia. And one of the foundations of their diet is fish because they're living on all these feeder rivers of the Amazon, so they eat fish like that's their main protein source. Now, of course there's a lot of other things going around on. They're very active. They're eating a lot of single ingredient foods. But I do think that that suggestive that you know, eat foods that are ingredients rather than have ingredients, and you should probably eat fish. And the thing is is Americans do not eat that much fish. I think only five percent of our protein comes from fish, Like we just weigh underreat.

00:32:58
Speaker 3: It five percent almost. I'd be impressed for those five percent. That's higher than I would have expected. But I agree now people don't like fish, especially.

00:33:06
Speaker 1: Startings, especially startanes when so day one you start this thing, did you have and then you go thirty days, did you have highs, lows, emotional breakdowns or like what happened to you in the process and where was your headspace and also body space here along the way.

00:33:22
Speaker 2: I enjoyed it.

00:33:23
Speaker 3: I mean, of all the experiments I've done, and I've done a lot, it was not unpleasurable personally.

00:33:30
Speaker 2: The obstacle was social because.

00:33:32
Speaker 1: You smelled like not quite.

00:33:34
Speaker 3: Excite living with my girlfriend and it really really affects her. I mean, I mean, I know, I'm like laughing, but I'm also being dead genuine yeah. And this is something that has been like if you go through the comments section of on of my startings.

00:33:49
Speaker 2: Videos, people are like, you're going to cause a divorce.

00:33:51
Speaker 3: I love this, but I also think like it caused marital problems, and I apologize to everybody who experienced that as a function of me, but there is something about it.

00:34:00
Speaker 2: Maybe it's a twelve eh youpe as.

00:34:02
Speaker 3: We know now the receptor is a smell receptor, but there's something about yeah, sardines that it can It can change your the way you smell. And just to be clear, like that is very biologically plausible. If you think about like conditions that affect our health, they do change the way we give off volatiles. Like if you have cancer, dogs can smell cancer because it changes your biology, so you give up volatiles. Or you know, if you have the pandemic virus and I avoid saying trigger words, but yeah, dogs can smell that out too because it changes your biology. So yes, eating a ton of stardine is going to change my biology to have me to give off certain volatiles that some people might be more sensitive too than others. I'll say I couldn't smell myself. Maybe I just habituated. But that was the low throughout, and by about two weeks in it was like, you need to stop this experiment.

00:34:54
Speaker 2: I'm like, you can't, I already started? Sorry?

00:34:56
Speaker 1: Is she like is she making you sleep on the couch at this point? Are you like in banished to another room.

00:35:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, there's there's a there's a whole apologies series afterwards.

00:35:06
Speaker 1: But what did you did you make it up to her in any way?

00:35:13
Speaker 2: You're I don't want to go there.

00:35:14
Speaker 1: Your your hesitation tells me that, like you really need to build this back and do something very kind to be like, I'm sorry, I smelled so weasy for a month. Okay, so fish wife was your go to You're eating a thousand over the course of the month. M what happened after after I finished? Yeah, Like, did you have something totally different because you're like, finally I don't have to eat sardines? Or was it like were you sad to leave this experiment?

00:35:43
Speaker 3: Kind of it was it was I enjoyed it. I didn't find it unpleasurable. I didn't mind eating the same thing every day for a month. And it was one of those things where I actually when when I when I finished it, this was in twenty twenty five, and I was just left with questions. I was like, what's going on with the scent thing, what's going on with the cold thing? And then I just had my eye on the scientific literature, saying is there anything that can explain it? So that paper I mentioned, the first one that came out in twenty twenty six. I finished this in twenty twenty five. It was just like, oh, that helped me explain what was going on then, So mostly I just left.

00:36:17
Speaker 2: I'm like, well that was interesting. Onto the next thing.

00:36:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you mentioned your body fat drops significantly. Do you think that was just that because you were eating less overall or was there something unique happening there.

00:36:27
Speaker 3: I suspect there was something unique. In this spectrum of opinions on body composition and weight management are probably more to the extreme of I really think calories have next to no utility, and I think there was something going on uniquely unique and biological. And just to be clear, like they're even human control trials showing you can change things like macro distribution and increased col work output by as much as six hundred calories without increasing directly. The human body is incredibly modifiable, So when you change your diet to that extreme extent, it is very possible that you could get like a thermogenetic advantage and you can do.

00:37:08
Speaker 2: Things like redistribute energy in your body.

00:37:14
Speaker 3: I think one thing we're talking about offline, but like you know, people talking all about peptides. Now there are peptides that can selectively reduce specific types of fat, like visceral fat, without touching other fats. So it is not a matter of like everything flows up and flows down at the same time, you can redistribute, You can engineer your body to get certain energetic quote unquote advantages.

00:37:35
Speaker 2: As very plausible, and I.

00:37:36
Speaker 3: Think what's happening to me was beyond just like a change in quote unquote calorie balance. In fact, on my overall calorie and take didn't decrease. That's why I was supplementing with the added fat.

00:37:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that makes sense. What do you think the takeaway for the average person is, Because I will tell you I think that my marriage would end in divorce should I try this, So like what is the light day to day? Is there a version of this or is the takeaway it is just sort of like, hey, maybe you should eat more fish, try sardines and might do some good things for you.

00:38:05
Speaker 3: I think a few levels, you know, I did it to explore I found some interesting things in myself. I think at the highest possible level, it's a matter of what we eat really really affects our biologies. In ways that I don't even comprehend sometimes and just to approach your life with that ethost experiment of like I'm gonna do something with intentionality. I'm going to do something positive for myself with intentionality. I'm gonna observe what happens and treat it literally like an experiment, and then do the next one and immerse in that being a positive experience experience that you're having. It does not need to be sardines. It can be literally anything. So I would say high level is just like treating your body like an experiment. Can't be kind of fun. You don't have to go to the extremes. It's a fun teaching hook. But you can leave it at that if you want. And then if you want to talk about sardine specifically, I mean, one of the reasons I chose sardines is because, like there are food I can just live on. They are more nutritionally dense than basically anything I can think of and more nutritionally complete.

00:39:09
Speaker 2: So they're good food. Like you said, they're convenient food.

00:39:12
Speaker 3: If I'm traveling, just like pack some sardines, I know I have good nutrition for like a few days totally.

00:39:17
Speaker 1: So yeah, and I think you're absolutely spot on about experimentation. So there has been sort of a push online where it's like all diets are terrible, and never try these fat diets because everyone fails. My personal experience with that, and having heard from a lot of readers, is that, Look, I tried this diet for whatever it was. Eight weeks. Am I still on it? No, But I learned one or two things that I have taken with me from then on that have helped me live better. And I would not have learned those things had I not tried this diet. I treated it as an experiment. I got this little piece of advice or this way I change my habits or my eating and I improve from that. And so it's like and then it's this trying and just picking up these little tidbits as you move on, And that's kind of how people end up in a good spot over time.

00:40:09
Speaker 3: That is that is very very well said. I think that's how, like, you know, your lifestyle should be treated. Your circumstances change, your needs change. If somebody like gets pregnant, their diet is going to change because their biology and circumstance change. That happens to all of us all. Not the pregnancy thing, but circumstances changing all the time.

00:40:26
Speaker 2: So just being open to exploring.

00:40:29
Speaker 3: Different diets, you know, I think, and then different things work for different people. Some of these quote unquote extreme fad diets are very life saving for some people and they don't get other people.

00:40:38
Speaker 1: That's fine, Yeah, totally. How many storadines are you eating now?

00:40:42
Speaker 3: Probably have like an average attendant day still daily. Yeah, it's going to be like at like my I eat two meals a day, but like my first meal is going to be like either I like taking like smoked salmon and wrapping it around some cheese, like some manchego and doing a little olive oil so that or like you know, just some sardines and all of oil. It's convenient. The funny thing is I really love to cook, but for other people. For myself, I'm dead lazy, so happy to make like a fancy dinner for my girlfriend. And I'm like, and I'll fry some eggs whatever if we eating different things. So I'm pretty basic when it comes to you know, what satisfies me. And sardines are satisfying and they're convenient. I always have them on hand, and so if I'm like running back from the gym, you need to get to my next thing. Eight if you stardines and move on with your dad.

00:41:28
Speaker 1: Okay, final final question. You're banished to an island. You can only bring three foods. What are you bringing and why.

00:41:38
Speaker 2: Sardines, eggs.

00:41:41
Speaker 3: I feel like I've covered my nutritional basis pretty much with those, so now I have a little bit of a free card with the last one based on like enjoyment rokfort cheese.

00:41:51
Speaker 2: I love.

00:41:51
Speaker 3: Wow, that's my favorite cheese in the world. It's it's the one food that I don't have an off button for awesome, So that that's gonna be my three. And I don't think I out any major nutrients that I wouldn't survive without. So I got essential fats, I got calcium. I'll be out in a tropic islands, so I'm gonna gi vitemin Dee from the Sun.

00:42:08
Speaker 1: I love it, man, Well, thanks for coming on, dude. This is a lot of fun.

00:42:11
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me love it all.

00:42:13
Speaker 1: Right, All right, now we're going to bring on George Cammel. George is a friend. He also happens to be one of the top finance minds in the country. Now, when people start to eat healthy or they want to eat healthy, they think, oh, it's going to cost so much more money to eat healthy food. That is not true. It does not have to be the case. In fact, George and I have a mutual love for a very specific grocery store that can save you a ton of money on healthy food and actually make eating healthy cheaper than the alternative unhealthy options. So we're going to talk about that. And by the way, please just let me note that neither of us are sponsored by this particular grocery store. So let's get into it. George Cammel, thanks for coming on, two percent. It's an honor. Thanks for having me. All right. Do you know off the top of your head how much the average American household spends on groceries?

00:43:04
Speaker 4: Oh boy, average per month, per month? Yep, I'm going to go seven hundred dollars.

00:43:12
Speaker 1: It's a little less. And I will also say I learned this from you, So this is a set you forgot. It's about five hundred dollars.

00:43:19
Speaker 5: It's probably old. We need to update it.

00:43:21
Speaker 1: It's seven or probably with inflation, it's probably more. I feel like every year it goes up by one hundred dollars. Yeah, well that brings me to my next point. Since twenty twenty two, can you guess how much the price of groceries has increased on average?

00:43:36
Speaker 4: Okay, four years? That's kind of the post pandemic universe. I'm going to go thirty.

00:43:42
Speaker 1: Percent, you're close twenty percent.

00:43:46
Speaker 5: See, I wanted to overshoot that way. I look like I'm in touch.

00:43:48
Speaker 1: Still a lot, though, because I feel like when you talk to people in the trenches of daily life, and you talk to a ton of people who are thinking about money, trying to get out of debt, I feel like food is the air where people go the world is more expensive now I was just at this restaurant and this meal used to be fifteen dollars, now it's twenty twenty five. Or I was just at the grocery store. My bill is astronomical. What do you actually hear from people that?

00:44:13
Speaker 5: I mean, you're exactly right.

00:44:14
Speaker 4: If you look at five hundred dollars, well, twenty percent increase, now it's six hundred dollars. And when people are already paycheck to paycheck, now they're in the red. Now they're going, well, I guess I got to use my credit card or buy now, pay later to get by, which is the worst solution instead of going all right, I need to adjust my life. My budget, my expense is my income in order to sustain the life, or I need to compromise. All right, we need to shave down this budget and shop at a different place like Aldi instead of Whole Foods. And for a lot of people who are more conscious, that's a harder decision to make because if there's one thing you're not going to sacrifice, it's you know, the gym membership, the workout routine, the clean eating, and so that means you're going to really feel that even more when it comes to those higher priced items.

00:44:58
Speaker 1: Absolutely, which is a wonderful into today's topic, which is something that is near and dear to both of our hearts. Costco.

00:45:07
Speaker 5: So just a word makes me feel good, all right.

00:45:09
Speaker 1: It's just like I just feel calmer. I feel happier immediately when I hear it.

00:45:14
Speaker 4: But just funny because Costco is one of the most chaotic places to actually be.

00:45:19
Speaker 1: It really is the chaos. Yeah, it's like it's a good chaos, you know, there's it's a metaphor for life, like you can find peace in chaos. You just got to spend more time in Costco.

00:45:32
Speaker 5: I do go like into like a zen mode.

00:45:34
Speaker 4: Yes, or I cannot be bothered even with a child, you know, running around my cart and circles.

00:45:39
Speaker 1: I love it. So the time peg and the big news around Costco is Consumer Reports. They just did a study compared thirty one different supermarkets. What they did is they compared them all to Walmart for the same basket of items. Can you guess which came out on top? Given today's topic.

00:45:58
Speaker 4: It's got to be cost It's got to be Costco twenty one because I'm thinking per unit.

00:46:02
Speaker 1: Yes, for the same puns, for the same foods, twenty one zero point four percent cheaper than Walmart, which I feel like Walmart people are like, oh that's the cheapest place by far. No Costco's beating them by twenty one percent. And there were only six places, six other places that were cheaper than Walmart. The other twenty four more expensive. Can you guess which was the most expensive?

00:46:27
Speaker 5: I mean I'm thinking of like the whole foods, the airwans.

00:46:30
Speaker 1: The public's arawon was not in the analysis. I think it would have come out on number one. But it was Whole Foods two niche maybe two nich By forty percent more expensive than Walmart forty which one is Whole Foods.

00:46:47
Speaker 5: Wow, I'm shocked.

00:46:48
Speaker 4: I do feel like the amazonification of Whole Foods made it feel more reasonable, especially with their you know, three six five brand. Yeah, and I usually shop what's on sale there, so I don't feel the pinch as much. But I do the majority of my shopping at Costco. Maybe an Aldi Trader Joe's thrown in there for the little stuff and then the occasional Whole Foods Public's run.

00:47:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you want like some niche, nice product, you're feeling like.

00:47:11
Speaker 4: We got Kroger here too. I don't know if that's in Vegas, but we do have. That's an okay option. That's kind of like in between your your Walmart and your publics.

00:47:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was I think six five or six percent more expensive than Walmart, So that's not crazy. But with this Costco, So one, are you surprised by this? And then two for people who think that Costco is this mad place of too many people, giant tubs and mayonnaise, giant things of cheeseballs, what are they missing about Costco, especially from your financial mind.

00:47:45
Speaker 4: Well, the running joke is that you go in for the five dollars rotisserie, you leave spending three hundred dollars on stuff you didn't need. So it is sort of like the mecca of consumerism and just like.

00:47:56
Speaker 5: We're gonna go big and we're gonna go home with it.

00:47:58
Speaker 4: And so I think that's sort of part she'll partially what's caused this idea that costco is for, you know, the middle class people and even the upper class people who like they still want the deal, but it is expensive. Like you, it's hard to leave there with seven items under one hundred dollars, Like they need to do a game show like that, like a supermarket sweep to see if anybody can actually spend less than one hundred bucks.

00:48:22
Speaker 1: How do you navigate Costco? Given what you just said, And I'm I'm going to tell you one of the magic tricks they used to get you to leave with more than the road tiss rechicken. After the question is effectively like you said, you go in for the five dollars road tiss rechicken, You're like, that's my goal, maybe have one or two other items, and then you walk around and you end up with two three hundred dollars and stuff.

00:48:42
Speaker 4: Oh yes, So I just spent my birthday at Costco. My wife said, what do you want to do. I got two of my best guy friends and I said, let's go to Costco. We each have to buy one thing that we did not plan on buying, that we did not know existed, and we had the best time. We all had a blast doing that, and I am, yes, I have no hobbies. That was fun for me. But you're right in that Costco is a maze. Nothing is labeled. They move stuff around all the time. I found the stat that twenty five percent of the inventory rotates, so you never know what's there and what was there is now not there. And good luck finding an employee to badger to be like, hey, do you know where the Noko pouches are for my toddler? And they're going to walk you around the store hopefully steer you in the right direction, or find out it's not there anymore. So that scavenger hunt is what keeps you, keeps you moving, keeps you throwing stuff in your cart, And then what keeps me.

00:49:32
Speaker 5: Buying is the return policy.

00:49:34
Speaker 4: Because I know even if I spent five hundred dollars on an item I didn't know existed five minutes ago, I can return it three years later if it no longer works for me, if I didn't like it.

00:49:44
Speaker 1: What's your most that's the costco, mapen, what's your most absurd costco? Return?

00:49:49
Speaker 3: Oh?

00:49:50
Speaker 4: Man, the vacuum I think was uncomfortable for my wife. It was at least three or four years old, and it was just not sucking anymore, which means that, you know. And so I brought it back and it was to the point where they went, hey, man, this really isn't this in the spirit of the policy. I looked at the policy and it just said, like satisfaction guaranteed, bring it back any time for a full refund. Went, I don't know where. There's no spiritual element here. This is a transaction. And so they returned it. They were they were so nice enough to do that. But I have a very little shame when it comes to a cost go return, because I have full confidence that they're they're going to make it right, and they know I'm going to spend so much more than anything I could.

00:50:31
Speaker 5: You know, return to that store, and what happens you return.

00:50:35
Speaker 4: The vacuum, and you go buy the latest and greatest Dison and you restart the process exactly exactly.

00:50:41
Speaker 1: So what I think is interesting about Costco's sort of products pop up, they leave, things are kind of limited time. That almost mimics these sort of gambling mechanics where you walk in there. If I walk into a Kroger, I know exactly what's going to be there. There's no Oh I find when I go into Costco, there's what will I find?

00:51:05
Speaker 5: You want to go into random Miles.

00:51:06
Speaker 1: You want to go into rand Miles and you see something and you're like, wow, I never seen that before. That's really interesting. Also is it going to be there next time that I'm there? And I do think that that is one little trick they use that lead scarcity. Scarcity leads people, leads people to make.

00:51:24
Speaker 4: Someone should write a book about the brain and scarcity.

00:51:27
Speaker 5: Have you thought about this?

00:51:28
Speaker 1: What would you call it?

00:51:30
Speaker 4: I mean, I think scarcity brain. That's kind of phoning it in. But I think that's a good start.

00:51:34
Speaker 1: That's a good idea.

00:51:35
Speaker 5: I would read it.

00:51:35
Speaker 1: Maybe I'll get on that. What is your go tos at Costco? Go to purchases, I.

00:51:41
Speaker 4: Go for the Kirkland brand when I can, and I just was actually watching a video about the Kirkland brand. I mean it's an eighty four billion dollar brand on its own, which is crazy, just the Kirkland signature generic brand products. Because they're known for their such high quality. They're known for partnering with Dura Cel to make the Kirkland battery or Starbucks to actually make their Krookland coffee. So because of that, there's immense trust and nine I'm gonna say nine and a half times out of ten that product is good, if not better than the competitor. Now, the one that really did me dirty was their cold brew coffee in a can. I'm a cold brew coffee guy and it just did not hit And if I could work with them to craft a better cold brew costco hit me up.

00:52:26
Speaker 5: But the go tos for me.

00:52:28
Speaker 4: Of course, you got your staples, the paper towels, the toilet paper, the spring water, the La croix or the water loose, and then you've got the staples for the kids. So you know, think the pouches, the egg bites, and then even meats of getting like a meat in bulk freezing, it getting like a wild caught salmon that's individually packaged.

00:52:49
Speaker 5: That's easy for me to heat.

00:52:51
Speaker 4: Things that are sort of like I know, I can throw a meal together within ten or fifteen minutes in one pot. Those are the things I go for for Costco. Even like it kind of instant rice pack kind of thing a bus Madi. Yeah, it excites me to go all right ninety seconds, and I know with a whining toddler, I can still put dinner on the table and everyone's happy.

00:53:10
Speaker 1: That to me is especially for people who are interested in their health. That, to me is the magic of Costco is that we often think that health food and eating healthy is going to be so much more expensive, it's going to be more time consuming. But when you walk into a Costco, especially if you're looking for those Kirkland signature brands, because to your point, they're partnering with the best brands, and then they're figuring out, okay, how do we get you to make this thing cheaper? And I think they also have a rule that it has to be one percent better than their brand. I don't know how to measure that, but I like that.

00:53:44
Speaker 5: I like it. I mean, even that as a goal is great.

00:53:46
Speaker 1: It's wonderful. And so if you can go find those staples. Like examples, I like is their Kirkland peanut butter that is made by Adams Good one. So if you go into Costco, you can get two of these giant things of what is basically Adam's peanut butter for ten dollars.

00:54:02
Speaker 5: It's like two ingredients, right, It's just like peanuts.

00:54:04
Speaker 1: Peanuts, salt, salt. That's it. And at the grocery store you would get a single one that is half the size for probably six or seven dollars. So we're talking like this is insanely cheaper, and peanut butter is something that lasts the frozen salmon. The Also this is for the meat heads out there. Kirkland Signature just released ready to drink protein drinks. So these come in at like one dollar a whack. I think it comes in a pack of eighteen. If you can't beat that, if you went to the gro if you went to a gas station, to the grocery store, those are like four dollars a whack. So when people say, oh, I need to drink more protein, but then they go to the grocery store and they see that they're like four dollars for that. That's like a lot for one single drink. But if you go to Costco, all of a sudden, it becomes Okay, I can actually figure this health food thing out. I just have to buy in bulk. I have to look for the right and it just becomes like the ultimate path to the basket for eating healthier.

00:55:05
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, and when things are on sale, So what I'll do is I'll you know, one of the only things I enjoy getting in the mail now is the Costco catalog of what's coming up amazing, and I mean I'll like circle that thing like I'm a kid at Christmas with the Seers catalog. I'm just excited to go in there. And it's always like a week ahead, so you can't even go in the day of and get those items. You gotta wait till the sale hits, just like but that's like really helps me know I'm getting a good deal.

00:55:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, just like Christmas, you're waiting for these items to come in.

00:55:32
Speaker 5: I'm stoked. And especially items that I buy a lot.

00:55:35
Speaker 4: And what's cool is I think it's within thirty days. If you had bought that item and now it's on sale, you can just go up to the customer service desk and pull up your receipt through the computer and say, hey, this is on sale. Now I'd like the price difference, really, And so I've done that multiple times, and there's been you know, four items and that you just get twenty bucks and I go, sweet, more Costco money.

00:55:56
Speaker 1: That's awesome. Now I got to ask when you did your birthday sell bras of Costco, you and your two friends, what did you guys buy?

00:56:03
Speaker 4: So one of them bought pool floats because he was about to open his pool for the summer and he found these great little floats, got two of them. My other friend likes to grill and he found like hardwood charcoal in like a thirty eight pound bag. That was very exciting. And then I go for the snacks. So I like a dark chocolate. I want some clean ingredients. I want something interesting, some maybe fruit forward things like a mango chocolate covered mango.

00:56:29
Speaker 5: You have, you had me sold there.

00:56:32
Speaker 4: So I like to peruse the snack aisle, especially the healthier quote unquote all right, don't come at me, health nerds. I know none of this is healthy, but healthy ish snacks, oh yeah, you know, likeur the sour candies that aren't trash. There's like, oh, it's only three grams of sugar in the whole bag. Things like that, like a smart sweet better sour is when I found that I fell in love with.

00:56:55
Speaker 5: So I'm I'm a snack guy, so you have me at the sweets.

00:56:58
Speaker 1: Yeah. So leading to that, I will say one area that people can get in trouble at Costco is if you're buying the really junkie stuff in bulk. Because you go in and you go, oh, well, this bag of Doritos is you know, the size of a Volvo, and it's four dollars and the small one, the normal size one of the grocery store is seven dollars. So you go, well, why wouldn't I buy this?

00:57:24
Speaker 4: Now?

00:57:24
Speaker 1: The problem is is that you're going to eat the whole thing anyways. So one tip I would give people is, if you're going to Costco, do not buy jump food because you're just gonna end up You're gonna end up eating it all, eating more junk. Like you almost want attacks on your junk food. You want to be like, I'm only buying jump food at the normal store. Yes, it's going to be more expensive, but I have to pay for that. So now it's like iron it and that distancentivize I feel it more. Yeah, you absolutely, that's true.

00:57:53
Speaker 4: Feeling well, And I will say Costco what's nice is that right next to the Dorito's, they're going to have the Late July brand or the Tay brand, and so they have the better for you option at the ready, and so if you are more conscious, you at least have the option versus I mean Sam's Club. I have a membership there too, And this is not a knock on Sam's Club, but you walk in there and it's sort of like junk food forward. Now the experience can be better because there's less people. I can do scan and go the technologies there. I've got a pickup order at Sam's lader. I can just pull up my car and they'll load it up and I go. So there's things that I give Sam's a point for, but I'd much rather hang out in a Costco.

00:58:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're gonna end up with better. So I think you're totally right that Sam's Club is probably equally good on the prices, but way more junk. It seems like Costco has really tapped into the psyche of moms who are concerned about their kids' health and feeding their family healthy food, and I love them for that exactly.

00:58:52
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a great trend to be happening in Costco is serving those customers well and they keep coming back. I mean, they have a ninety percent plus rate of retention of people re upping their membership, which is insane. And so when you think about that, there's four point eight billion dollars in revenue just from memberships. If nobody ever stepped foot into a costco, they're still making five billion dollars.

00:59:13
Speaker 1: How does Costco make money?

00:59:15
Speaker 4: Well, memberships make up over half of their net income now they're operating income, and then the other half is through the.

00:59:24
Speaker 5: Products the services.

00:59:25
Speaker 4: I mean, you think about all the other stuff Costco does with the pharmacy, the travel, the gas, and in their actual products, they focus on eleven to thirteen eleven to thirteen percent in margin on the products, which is really slim. If you are in the business, you know those are pretty slim margin.

00:59:41
Speaker 5: So they're going, how do we charge as.

00:59:43
Speaker 4: Little as possible for the products to keep you coming back so that you feel like, man, I'm taking Costco to the cleaners.

00:59:50
Speaker 5: There's so much value here. Yeah, and even with the Kirkland products.

00:59:53
Speaker 4: What's interesting is that becomes a price anchor for the competitor brands, so they have to shift their pricing when Costco comes out with the generic brand because now you're you know, your Dura cell batteries can't be seven dollars more than.

01:00:06
Speaker 5: The Kirkland batteries.

01:00:08
Speaker 4: No one is going to buy Dura sell anymore, so Dura Cell has to lower their price to come down to what Costco is charging. So it actually creates a really beautiful sort of healthy capitalism.

01:00:18
Speaker 5: In the market with all this competition.

01:00:20
Speaker 1: Do you know what the margins are at the average grocery store for context.

01:00:23
Speaker 5: I'm not sure.

01:00:24
Speaker 4: I think it would probably be different for every store, but my guess is that's probably closer to.

01:00:28
Speaker 5: Twenty thirty percent.

01:00:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes sense.

01:00:30
Speaker 4: So maybe it could be triple that of a Costco, which makes sense because Costco, you know, they're the only ones who charge a membership fee, and so they can get away with that because they're making the bulk of their money. And again, you could just go to the gas station at Costco, it's ten to twenty cents cheaper per gallon on average. Well, you know the average family, that could be saving them hundreds of hundreds of year, which pays for the membership. And if you have the executive membership like I do, you're getting two percent cash back. And this is no credit card, this is just using my own money, debit card and cash. I'm getting two percent back and they write you a check and lo and behold, if you spend on average five.

01:01:08
Speaker 5: Hundred five to fifty a month at.

01:01:10
Speaker 4: Costco, you are making that executive membership feedback.

01:01:13
Speaker 1: That's awesome. That's such a good point. How do you how do you think about buying in bulk for people because people will be like, well I don't want to buy that that much, or like what if some of it goes to waste? How do you have people navigate that, especially from a financial perspective.

01:01:31
Speaker 4: Well, I think you know, history will dictate a lot of what you what you should be buying. So don't get the industrial sized kale if you know you're not going to eat that much kale. That's where I go to the smaller grocery stores and go to an all deer Trader Joe's and get a smaller package knowing I just can't eat that much spinach before it's gonna wilt and go bad. Same with fruit and vegetables. I mean you talk about organic vegetables and fruits. Costco has, you know, pound for pound the best price, but you're still paying nine dollars for that those organs and strawberries, and so you got to think, are we actually going to go through all of this? And if you know your toddler is a monster and we'll just like eat an entire pound of strawberries in.

01:02:09
Speaker 5: A sitting, then it's a great purchase.

01:02:11
Speaker 4: And so usually you have to go through some mistakes where you realize, man, that really hurt to throw that away when it was only half eaten, because then you are losing money. So you do have to go in with a plan, with a budget, think about what you're gonna do with the food that you buy. That's something I've had to learn the hard way. Yeah, because I just shop with my eyes and my heart. And then I get home and my wife is like, did you get any like food that we can like eat as a meal.

01:02:36
Speaker 5: I'm like, well, it's not what is a meal?

01:02:38
Speaker 4: You know? We can do a buoy dinner tonight, and so that's where you kind of have to You still have to be thoughtful. But I want to get to a place where I'm financially independent enough to just walk into a Costo no list and just buy whatever the heart desires.

01:02:51
Speaker 5: That's true freedom.

01:02:52
Speaker 1: I love that all right. So, regarding financial freedom, walk us through your own story, because I think it's just fascinating. Yeah.

01:02:59
Speaker 4: Back in twent thirteen when I started here at Ramsey as an intern, I was forty grand in debt between my student loans, my credit cards, and like many people, I didn't know any better.

01:03:09
Speaker 5: Growing up, my parents were very middle class.

01:03:12
Speaker 4: There were immigrants from the Middle East, and they adapted to the American culture quickly. My dad had sixteen credit cards with the rotating rewards and he was playing the game, and so when it came to college, it was just like they're like, oh, we'll figure it out. And I thought, Wow, they've been saving up or really wealthy. Well, that turned into subsidized loans through FAFSA. That turned into all these eleven Sally May loans I had to pay back and getting a credit card for the credit score to try to get my credit up because I was told credit is the most important three digit number in your life, aside from your weight. So that was the focus, and so I ended up broke, miserable, anxious, frustrated, mat at the world that I was lied to. That I thought, if I get a degree, my life's going to be awesome. Someone will hand me a job, hand me a check, and I will be able to pay off any loans that I took out no problem. And as many people have found out, it's not that simple, and those loans will follow you, and the credit card debt will follow you. And it's really the person of the mirror who had to change, not society. I can't change society, but I can change the one guy. And so, following the Ramsay Plan and our seven baby steps, I got out of that debt in eighteen months by doing a bunch of side hustles, cutting my expenses down to nothing. And since we're talking about food, I would wait until Lian cuisines were on sale at Kroger five for ten dollars, because I knew if I could just eat two dollars a day, I could control my budget and know exactly how much I was going to spend. Now, science might study my body after I die to find out what happens when you eat Lin cuisines for every meal for a year straight. But it got me out of debt, and it helped kind of create a different version of me, an identity where debt wasn't on the table anymore. So I cut up my credit card, and I haven't had a credit card in thirteen years now. I've just been using a debit card. And I became a baby steps millionaire in my early thirties. My wife and I, as we got married, decided we don't want a mortgage forever, Like we want to have some freedom and flexibility and options in our life. So we decided to get get angry at it, and we got rid of the mortgage in our early thirties, you know, as normal w two employees. I didn't run a business. I wasn't making a lot of money at the time. We just got really focused. And now I want to yell from the rooftops. If an average George can do it, you can too. Like you can become debt free, you can become a millionaire, you can live on your terms. But you got to buck the broken system.

01:05:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, how hard?

01:05:31
Speaker 4: So that's why I wrote the book Breaking Free from Broke to help people walk through that.

01:05:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, and everyone should get that book if you're at all in debt. How hard was that in the short term, because I mean, you know, a lot of my work looks at improving your life often takes things that are going to be uncomfortable difficult in the short term, but then you end up on the other side of that so much better off and more free. So walk us through how that actually felt like. And also, you talk to so many people on the ground. What do you hear from the people that go through the process and what are they.

01:06:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, that transformation process you're talking about, where it's intense sacrifice for a short time for this long term gain. I'm not even gonna say long term comfort because you still have life. But it just feels like everything that was so loud, that was chaos now just becomes like you just turned down the volume of the noise and the stress of the money problems because the emergency comes along and you have an emergency fund and you just pay it. And so, yes, it was annoying, it wasn't fun to do that, but it also was an inconvenience instead of a crisis, and so that's what getting control of your money can do. And so for me, I was a young guy and so I had the time to I could have been doing a whole lot of other things that would have been more fun instead of side hustling and you know, making websites at night and helping people launch a podcast, or I was.

01:06:48
Speaker 5: Doing uber and Lyft.

01:06:50
Speaker 4: Last thing I wanted to do was be on Broadway in Nashville at ten o'clock at night driving people around. But man, when you see that that money hit the account and you apply it to the debt, you get a different kind of dopamine rush than making a purchase, and you go, man, I want more of that because you get a taste of that freedom, You get a taste of that light at the end of the tunnel, and then you just want to run even faster.

01:07:10
Speaker 5: And that's what I found.

01:07:11
Speaker 4: The people who become debt free and they join us on the stage during the Ramsey Show and share their story is they always say it was so worth it. I would do it all over again, even though it was so hard. And the way we do our plan, it's eighteen to twenty four months on average to get out of all.

01:07:26
Speaker 5: Of your consumer debt.

01:07:27
Speaker 1: It's amazing.

01:07:28
Speaker 4: And most people will live in mediocrity for twenty years, carrying the debt, carrying the stress, in bad relationships, with marriages that are struggling, all because they want their creature comforts and they don't want to sacrifice for a short term. So I always tell people, do you want two or three years of hard work for the next twenty or thirty years to have flexibility and options or the opposite, do you want the next twenty thirty years to be mediocrity because you weren't willing to sacrifice. And I found when you know the student is ready, the teacher appears. So I can't make you want to get out of debt, and I can't want it more than you can, just like if you're my personal trainer, you can't want me to be in shape more than I want to be in shape.

01:08:07
Speaker 5: It's just not going to work.

01:08:09
Speaker 4: And so it frustrates me because I want to help as many people as possible. But I can tell in a phone call on The Ramsey Show within two minutes if I can help this person or not, or if they're just simply not they're not ready for help.

01:08:19
Speaker 5: They wanted a shortcut.

01:08:20
Speaker 4: They wanted affirmation, they wanted a bomb instead of me going, hey, this is going to hurt for a little while longer, but we can get you out of this.

01:08:28
Speaker 1: Yeah. What I think is interesting just from a health perspective is finances are one of the biggest sources of stress in people's life, and if you look at the data on chronic stress and health outcomes, it it's one of the main drivers of chronic diseases and the things that end up killing us. So for my listeners, who are you know, they're interested in health, It's like, if you can take care of that and your stress levels go down, that is going to improve your life in the long run health wise, but also just your mental health day to day, Like you're not going to be walking around stress frazzled. Your relationships will get better. Like it's really an amazing thing. Where do you find people get most trapped? Like, what's the number one thing that hurts people financially?

01:09:11
Speaker 4: The number one thing that hurts people financially is listening to all of the noise and then getting this like indecision, fatigue, analysis, paralysis. Hey man, I could do ninety things now with my investments. I mean, I heard about this thing over here. There's crypto, there's sports betting, there's these prediction markets.

01:09:30
Speaker 5: I heard my buddy said this is going to take off.

01:09:33
Speaker 4: Or hey, there's a whole life insurance policy that this guy told me about that can actually make me money, and I can borrow text free. And I found like all of the complexity in life if you can just get blinders on and say none of that matters.

01:09:45
Speaker 5: I mean, if you look at Dave.

01:09:46
Speaker 4: Ramsey, you look at me, we have very simple lives financially when it comes to what we're actually putting our money into, and it is real estate for Dave, he's a real estate guru. I have just my primary home paid off, and I have mutual funds.

01:10:01
Speaker 5: And index funds. That's it.

01:10:03
Speaker 4: That is the only thing that I own, the only thing I'm interested in. I'm not looking to get a short term rental and to do a vending machine business that I saw.

01:10:10
Speaker 5: On TikTok that can make me money.

01:10:12
Speaker 4: I go, dude, find a job that you enjoy doing, or own the job and start to start your own thing. But don't listen to some goober on TikTok telling you how how to make money and to buy his course on you know, how to launch your own whatever it is digital, Amazon, FBA, sell your own products.

01:10:30
Speaker 5: It's almost so much harder.

01:10:31
Speaker 4: Than they made it out to be, with so much risk that ends up making them money, not you. And so the traps are so much more important than the actual thing you should do. Yeah, half my job is steering them away from the bad thing and trying to get them to do the un sexy, boring thing, which is, hey, are you even investing in your four one K and getting a match? What about the IRA? And they go, I look like I have seven eyes when I talk about it. I was talking to an eighteen year old in the street the other day. He was a day trader working part time at Burger King, and I said, have you ever thought about investing?

01:11:03
Speaker 5: And he said, I don't know what that is? And I went, oh, my gosh.

01:11:07
Speaker 4: This guy understands prop firms and how to day trade and all the mechanics of that, but he's never heard about a raw IRA and investing in a mutual fund in order to make money over the long term. And so it always brings me back to the principle of wealth gained hastily will dwindle. Whoever gathers little by little will prosper. Yeah, and that's an old proverb and it just speaks to the get rich quick mentality of a lot of young people who are struggling.

01:11:31
Speaker 5: I get why they feel that way.

01:11:33
Speaker 4: They're looking at the boomers quote unquote hoarding all the wealth, going well, I'll never have that. I'll never own a home, I'll never get ahead, I'll never make what they make. So therefore I have to find a shortcut. Maybe the sports bet will be it. Maybe the Caul Sheep prediction will be my ticket out. Even if it's part entertainment, part trying to build wealth, it's just so dangerous and bad for your mental health as it becomes very addictive.

01:11:56
Speaker 1: Totally. All right, I want to do a rapid fire your takes on some money centric ideas. First off, all these new prompts for every service that ever lived asking you to tip, like at the coffee shop. What's your take on those?

01:12:15
Speaker 5: Here's my take.

01:12:16
Speaker 4: If I am standing up and I had to wait in a line, I will not tip. And here's the real indicator. And watch this next time you're at the tip screen. They are very normal employees until they go to turn that tip screen around, watch them compliment, you watch the mask about how your day is going, and you'll go, oh, this really is a game.

01:12:36
Speaker 5: They don't care. They don't think my glasses are that cool.

01:12:38
Speaker 4: They're just hoping that in the nicety of them talking, I will then go, oh, I should probably give them a tip. And so I don't do guilt tipping. I don't think that's generosity, that's an obligation. But I will always tip for a service provided. So if someone walked over to my table seven times and you know, brought me the waters, brought me the food, or if it's a service they're dropping something off a house like a door Dash or a pizza delivery, one hundred percent, you should be tipping those people. They're working their butts off and they are not making a lot of money, like they're hustling out there as a ten ninety nine contractor for uber Etz or door Dash or Walmart plus whatever it is, and they're struggling. Like these people aren't doing this for fun. Yeah, they're doing it because they need the money. And so I love to bless people who are out there hustling. I always respect that if you're willing to get off your butt and go do something because I didn't want.

01:13:26
Speaker 1: To do it.

01:13:26
Speaker 5: You deserve a tip.

01:13:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, what's your take on credit cards? You got a controversial one.

01:13:32
Speaker 4: Credit cards are the cigarette of the financial world. They've become normalized. We all kind of know it's bad if you use it improperly, but we all think we can outsmart the system and that we're not going to die from it. And so credit cards to me, even if you pay it off perfectly, which I that's what I hear all the time, George, I paid off perfectly, never paid a diamond interest.

01:13:52
Speaker 5: That's always their one line.

01:13:54
Speaker 4: I go, yeah, but you're probably overspending to the tune of twenty percent if you had used your own money instead.

01:13:59
Speaker 5: Really, And they go, you can't prove that. I go, you're right, I can't. Bet.

01:14:03
Speaker 4: Go try it for a month. See what happens when you use your own money and measure your spending months a month and tell me you didn't spend less and more more conscious.

01:14:10
Speaker 1: So is it that the debit card people see those hits in the account and it just goes, oh, I'm spending a lot more words that the credit card. It just kind of gets drawn out as this lump sum, so there's not the constant reminder, Hey, you bought this, you bought this, you bought this.

01:14:24
Speaker 4: Absolutely, I mean it's all psychological. There was a study done and I talk about this in the book and fMRI study done by MIT and they measured the brain when using a credit card when using other people's money, and they what it does. It pushes on the accelerator of spending while releasing the brakes at the same time. And you can't do that with your own money. There's something in your brain that goes, I know this is mine. I know it's finite. I know I shouldn't be doing this versus let me use someone else's money and pay it back later. Yeah, I'll figure that out. That's a problem for future me. And so I don't think there's a world where you could say you spend exactly the same as you would if you used your own money.

01:15:03
Speaker 5: And so that's my challenge to everybody.

01:15:05
Speaker 4: It's the challenge in the book that I put out there, the thirty day credit card challenge, to go put the credit card in a block of ice and see how you feel after thirty days, see how much less you spend, and I talk about all the different you know they go with's fraud protection and all this stuff. I go, listen, man, there's nineteen ways you can stay safe online using a debit card. I've been doing it for thirteen years, haven't been hacked. There was maybe one fraudulent charge in all those thirteen years. It was quickly reversed. It's a nothing burger compared to the one point three trillion dollars of credit card debt America is in.

01:15:32
Speaker 1: That's an insane numbers. What's the average per person?

01:15:40
Speaker 4: Average per person last time I checked, was around sixty five hundred in credit card debt. And that's a you know, average APR of twenty two percent, which means you're paying a handsome sum just to keep that balance around to the tune of, you know, a couple thousand bucks a year that you're giving to the credit card company while saying, well, I get the rewards and miles in points, so it's worth it for me. So that's the toughest one for me, and it's the hardest on the Ramsey Show to get out of because the APR is so high and they want a shortcut out and I go listen, these companies know it's unsecure debt. They'll charge you twenty two percent without thinking about it, after they promised you zero percent for the first twelve months, and all of a sudden that interest hits and it's unbearable.

01:16:21
Speaker 1: What's your sake on buy now, pay later?

01:16:23
Speaker 5: Oof?

01:16:24
Speaker 4: I think buy now pay later is the credit cards, but for gen Z, because gen Z goes, hey, I don't know about this credit card stuff. I saw my parents and siblings handle that. Don't like that, but by now pay later, Oh it's zero percent interest. Well, I'll pay it off for the next four payments no matter what. And what happens is they add it to their tab. So at the end of the month you go, well, I'll just keep adding more stuff to that. And by the way, it's usually not your actual bills that you need to pay. It's the frivolous stuff. It's entertainment, it's eating out, it's clothing, it's electron it's it's tech. And so what happens is people get stuck in these cycles where they go, I can't pay two thousand dollars this month in payments on all the stuff that I acquired, And again it causes you to overspend, and the websites know it. Klara brags the retailers that customers will you they'll see their cars increase by forty percent if.

01:17:17
Speaker 5: They add the Klara button underneath the.

01:17:19
Speaker 1: Add to cart. Oh wait, crap makes sense.

01:17:21
Speaker 4: Instead of one hundred bucks, now I can pay twenty five bucks. Now, well, let me go ahead and add more stuff to the cart. Then now that the bill has got lowered artificially, and so I think it's it's an epidemic. These companies are making billions and billions of dollars. They're growing exponentially because they found a loophole to the people who are anti debt and they see these micro installment loans as a better form of payment.

01:17:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, someone's listening to this. They're in debt, they've got their sixty five hundred on the credit card. Where can I find you and where should they start?

01:17:54
Speaker 4: Well, if you're if you're a reader or an audiobook listener, my book Breaking Free from Broke was my best shot convincing anybody to break free from the debt system and giving them hope that it's possible for them. With of course, we have the Ramsey Show I've got my own YouTube channel which is a lot more entertainment, a lot more snark, a lot more in depth. No Collins just saw me on the street in the studio covering trending topics that are relevant. So those are the best places to find me, and of course the Ramsey Show if you want to call in, if you've got listeners that have their own questions, and you can always DM me on Instagram if I can answer. I'm always happy to at George Cammell with a K, and I look forward to helping as many people like ken, especially your audience, who are I think are ready for change. They're not scared of hard things, and that to me is the difference maker. If you're going to be willing to get out of debt, if you're going to be willing to build wealth, it's going to take doing something that is unsexy behind the scenes, that is not a flex it's just good for you.

01:18:50
Speaker 1: Final question. Costco is built to add value instead of extract it. How is Costco on metaphor for living a good free life?

01:19:01
Speaker 4: Oh man, I think Costco is perfect because life is costco.

01:19:07
Speaker 5: Life is chaos.

01:19:09
Speaker 4: It's ugly. Lighting warehouse shelving on palettes. That's the day to day of our life. Don't be fooled when you walk into the fancy grocery store going ah, this is the reality I want to escape to now. Costco is that's where the rubber meets the road, and I love that Costco is.

01:19:27
Speaker 5: It really is.

01:19:28
Speaker 4: You can make terrible decisions at Costco, or you can be the cleanest, healthiest person at Costco. And so again, it's a reflection of the person you want to become. Every purchase you make is a vote for the person you want to become and the identity you want to have, and I think Costco is a great representation of that. You can eat the one to fifty hot dog and die in early death, or you can get the Kirkland protein shakes and live to be one hundred.

01:19:50
Speaker 5: Like Michael Easter, the choice is yours.

01:19:52
Speaker 1: That is the greatest answer that maybe has ever happened to a question on two percent. And I thank you for that, and thanks for coming on the show man. It's fantastic to chat. Thank you, Michael, appreciate you. All Right, let's wrap things up. We heard from George about how Costco is on par with democracy, it's one of the greatest things in America now. A couple of years ago, I actually wrote an entire post on my sub sec two percent about how Costco is the ultimate health hack. That post has the food you should buy and how to put them all together in a meal. You can find it at twopct dot com slash Costco. So that is your action plan for when you walk into Costco, so you don't get captured by all the other amazing things around and save some money in the process. Thank you for checking out the show. New episodes are dropping in your feed twice a week, so please keep an eye out for more. We are, of course always open to your questions for our Ask Michael Anything section. Send them to media at twopct dot com or drop them into comments. If you want to send us a voice memo or a video, we would absolutely love that. We'll try and answer as many questions as we possibly can. Do not forget to hit somebe and of course have fun, don't die, eat sardines and get them from Costco.