ATEOTT 16 Transcript EPISODE 16 [INTRO]

[00:00:02] ML: It was the first time in my life that I’d ever had had a panic attack. Just googling those drugs, knowing nothing about either condition, I just couldn’t believe what I was reading, just how bad these conditions get. That nobody has ever survived Alzheimer’s disease. It wasn’t even clear whether or not my mom had Alzheimer’s disease, but she was given drugs for the condition, and Parkinson’s disease as well. I was like, “Well, what’s the big deal about Parkinson’s disease?” Then I started reading about how people with Parkinson’s disease, they lose their ability to move. Many of them end up actually dying, because they choke when trying to eat, a major cause of mortality. People with Parkinson’s, late stage Parkinson’s disease. Just thinking about my mom going through that was just the most upsetting thing imaginable. It was just really, really dark. I remember my heart racing.

[00:01:04] LW: Hi, friends. Welcome back to another episode of At The End Of The Tunnel. Today, I’m talking to somebody whose journalism career went in a slightly different direction after his mother was diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease. I got to meet Max Lugavere several years ago when he so graciously agreed to come to one of my Shine events and share the story of how he became one of the leading authorities on brain health. Since then, Max has become a dear friend and quite the expert particularly on the food that you should be eating to keep your brain healthy, and he put it all in his New York Times bestselling book on the subject called Genius Foods.

In addition to writing, Max regularly appears on the Dr. Oz Show. You may have seen him on Rachael Ray and The Doctors. He's also a filmmaker, a podcaster and a speaker. Max wasn't always the go-to guy for brain health. As you'll hear in the interview, he actually started out making these quirky little videos in college with his best friend, Jason Silva. That landed them jobs as co-hosts for Al Gore's independent cable network called Current TV. I remember when that was out.

Then Max hopped around the television world for a bit and it was in 2010, just when his star was shining so brightly, when everything ground to a halt after he got the news that his mother

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 1 ATEOTT 16 Transcript had been diagnosed with early onset dementia. Max, who was a journalist at heart began collaborating with top scientists and clinicians to find answers to his mother's condition. His discoveries led him to a surprising realization.

Brain disease often starts decades before the diagnosis. If only people knew that the foods they put in their body can either make or break a healthy brain, they would make different choices. Then max launched a kickstarter to create a documentary about these findings called Bread Head and he's now written those two books about Brain Health, Genius Foods and most recently, Genius Life. Max's podcast, which is also called The Genius Life is one of the top podcasts in the health and wellness category on iTunes.

Guys, this was an awesome conversation. I really can't wait for you to hear the story of how Max had been on one track to becoming a television star, yet little did he know, he was being divinely groomed to challenge the traditional health care system, where they treat the symptoms more than the cure. After hearing his story, my hope for you is twofold; number one, I hope you feel more empowered to educate yourself and ask more questions in the event that somebody you know is diagnosed with a degenerative health condition. Number two, I hope you remember that everything in your life is steadily preparing you for your purpose.

Without further ado, let's hear from Max Lugavere.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:03:55] LW: Max, welcome to the podcast. As always, I like to start these conversations by talking about childhood. When you think back to little Max and your earliest days, what toy or activity do you remember being really fond of?

[00:04:14] ML: Well, probably my favorite toy from childhood was a toy – there were action figures called Exosquads. I just thought that they were really elaborate and just so cool. Basically, what it was was this exoskeleton machine, fighter robot. The front of it would open up and the toy would also come with this little man. You would put the little man inside this

I think looking back, I probably really appreciated it, because as people, as humans, we're pretty frail. We're strong, but we're not that strong. I’ve always been really obsessed actually with superheroes and super powers and things like that. When this mech toy came out, this Exosquad toy, it was just so cool the concept that you could be this delicate little person, but then put yourself inside of this tough iron and steel exterior strapped with all these different weapons, I don't know, I just thought that that was the coolest thing.

[00:05:23] LW: Is that something you would get for – I know, you're Jewish, so there was no Christmas.

[00:05:27] ML: No Christmas. Yeah.

[00:05:29] LW: Presents. How did you come across the Exosquad? Is that something that – did they have a commercial, or friends you play with?

[00:05:38] ML: My best friend growing up, his name was Bennett. We were inseparable for many years. I was hanging out. His mom would watch over us and we'd have all these play dates. One day, we were in a Duane Reade in his neighborhood of Manhattan, which is where I grew up. They had them and they were very expensive toys. I remember them being – they were about $14 a toy back then. His mom bought me the first one. I was just obsessed with it. It might have even been more. It might have been around $16 or $18, because again, they were really intricate and they came with basically – it was two toys in one.

I discovered it at the Duane Reade. It's one of those things where even in adulthood, I’ve actually probably even this year, gone on to eBay to see if I could buy the whole set, just because I have such fond memories of that toy and how cool it was in my little child Max brain.

[00:06:32] LW: Interesting. I’m surprised they haven't made a movie about the Exosquad. Have they made one yet? Was there a television show or cartoon?

[00:06:40] ML: Well, I certainly wasn't aware of a movie or a cartoon, an Exosquad movie or cartoon at the time, because discovering the toy was the first time I’d heard of it. I think that it actually was a cartoon. I’m not entirely sure. I was just obsessed with those toys. They were so cool. Of course, I was really into superhero toys and X-men and all that stuff. Those were probably my favorite characters growing up. Then when I saw these robot toys, it was mind-blowing. It was just very elaborate and it had all these moving parts. I just thought it was so cool.

[00:07:14] LW: Well, it also gives you, I think a bit of more context for anatomy and the human body, because as you grow up, you obviously go to a doctor's office at some point in your life and they have a little skeleton and you already have a point of reference for all of that. Did that come up at all in your life growing up as a child? Health, wellness, skeletons, anatomy, anything like that?

[00:07:36] ML: Yeah. I mean, I’ve always been interested in health and anatomy. I’ve just always thought that it was really cool. I’ve always had a penchant for understanding interesting factoids about the body and remembering them and just being really – just always gravitating to new insights that I could glean about how the body works. At the same time, I recognized frailty and disease and aging. I’ve always been a really empathetic person just really sensitive and tapped into the suffering of others.

For me, the suffering that was most visible was illness and disability and deformity and things like that. I’ve always just recognized on the one hand, how wondrous the human body is, but on the other hand, how frail and vulnerable it is. This idea that this mythology surrounding superheroes and Exosquad fighters and things like that that we could take our bodies and upgrade them in a way somehow, or conceive of them being upgraded, or invincible, or just stronger than they are, to me that was just always a very enticing promise.

I think that that is what ultimately was the on-ramp into my interest in fitness and supplementation and health and everything that I do today really is ultimately, about bolstering, buttressing the body, because the body is amazing, but the body is also – we're just soft tissue, or these breath-gasping meat bags. I’ve certainly experienced illness in a profound way in my life. I guess, yeah, those were probably the initial seeds that made me interested in all this.

[00:09:30] LW: Before the genius life Max, obviously you grew up in Manhattan, you said, what was your family dynamic like? Did you grow up with both of your parents? I know you had a brother.

[00:09:40] ML: Both my parents were together up until I turned 18. My mom's name was Kathy and my dad is Bruce. They were very good parents. They fought with one another, but despite their differences, they really stuck it out for me and my two younger brothers, Andrew and Benny. Also, they had a business that they ran together, which was really inspiring and the first taste I got of what it meant to be an entrepreneur, or entrepreneurs.

My mom and my dad, they didn't come from money. They came from poor backgrounds and they were very industrious and resourceful. Sometime after they got together, they worked in the same industry. They were in the Garmin Center in New York City, which back then was back when they were working and it was predominantly – it attracted a lot of Jewish people, which is how I grew up.

At a certain point, they launched their own business. They created a clothing manufacturing company that did really well, actually for 15, 20 years. I had a really privileged upbringing. I mean, I was born in midtown Manhattan.

I went to public school my whole life. I was able to get into magnet schools that were known for their diversity, but for whatever reason, I always ended up in the gifted program. I was surrounded by pretty smart people, but I also – come phys ed or lunch time, I was always around just a people from across the socioeconomic spectrum in a New York City public

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 5 ATEOTT 16 Transcript school. I grew up on the one hand, with parents who were doing really well. When I got to enjoy all the amazing fruits of that. On the other hand, I also got to see poverty. I had some of my closest friends growing up, were unspeakably poor. It was a really interesting upbringing. I think it's led to me having a pretty balanced view on things.

[00:11:55] LW: I grew up in Alabama and diet was not even a remote consideration. You ate to get full and you ate because the food tastes good, or something like that. What was your relationship with food and diet when you were growing up?

[00:12:09] ML: My mom was the primary – she did all the shopping in my house. Between her and my grandmother and housekeepers that we had, I mean, those three people provided all of the meals that me and my brothers ate. We had access to healthy food. I mean, again, I grew up in New York City, and so my mom would shop at all of the supermarkets in the neighborhood, chasing deals as one does.

Generally, my mom was a health-conscious person. She was conscious of what she thought to be a healthy eating pattern back then. There was always a salad on the table. There was always a vegetable on the table, things like that. We also indulged a lot. There were always Entenmann's cakes and boxed donuts. I started every morning with a big bowl of cereal. We had those indulgences as well.

In tandem with that, my mom was always very afraid of heart disease, because her father had died of heart disease, or so we believe. Because of that, she was very attuned to the messaging of her day about what it meant to eat a heart-healthy diet. For somebody growing up in the 50s and 60s and even further compounded by the dietary guidelines that were set forth in the 70s and 80s, the diet that we had adopted in my house was a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, certainly one that was low in saturated fat.

Growing up, I remember actually preferring margarine, which came in those pale, yellow tubs to real butter. I actually really enjoyed the taste of margarine for whatever reason. That's what I preferentially opted for. We know now that margarine was back then, made of partially

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 6 ATEOTT 16 Transcript hydrogenated fats, which are just rife with what are called, trans fats. Very bad for you. I never saw my mom eat any eggs. She avoided dietary cholesterol. My mom never ate any red meat or anything like that, because red meat has “artery clogging,” saturated fat.

We would eat things that were occasionally deep fried. We would have lean chicken breasts that were deep fried in corn oil with a wheat flour breading, but the corn oil, that plastic tub of corn oil that we always kept by the stove had a big red heart healthy logo on it. You take a lean chicken breast and you put fat-free seasoned breadcrumbs around it and you flash fry it in some corn oil and that's a perfectly healthy meal.

[00:14:44] LW: Right. That was probably bought and paid for by the – whoever the manufacturer of that stuff was. Yeah. We probably have all kinds of guys writing the requirements, restrictions and FDA.

[00:14:56] ML: I know. I mean, we ate healthy based on our ignorance of what it meant to eat healthy at the time. I mean, it's not for a lack of effort. My mom certainly wanted to eat healthily and she thought that she was. Our understanding of what it means to eat healthy has evolved since then. We now know that those oils are not healthy. In fact, they're quite the opposite. We know the truth about things like dietary cholesterol and red meat.

Science is always evolving, of course. It's continually evolving. Yeah. I mean, think I became interested in the nutritional side of things around my mid-teens. I started eating more salads. I became interested in dietary fat. I read a book by a guy named Udo Erasmus, the Fats That Heal, The Fats That Kill.

[00:15:47] LW: You read that as a teenager?

[00:15:49] ML: Yeah.

[00:15:50] LW: Why?

[00:15:51] ML: I just became really interested in health and fitness. It started as an interest in bodybuilding. Not because I wanted to be a bodybuilder, or because I was necessarily all that vain or anything like that. I was just genuinely interested in various tactics, supplements, steps that we can – things that we can do can transform our bodies into that superhero ideal. As a little kid, as an introverted, shy, insecure computer programmer – I was a programmer when I was in high school; self-taught. I just gravitated to the science, because I just thought it was so cool, that I could go to the gym and pick up and put down these heavy things and take a few mystery powders and eat some protein and maybe a couple tablespoons of the special fat here and there, would make me not only feel better, but look better in the mirror and boost my confidence. I just thought it was a very enticing proposition. I just became really interested.

[00:16:54] LW: Were you playing sports at the time?

[00:16:55] ML: No. I never played any sports.

[00:16:58] LW: You were just this self-taught programmer, where you're in some chat room, is that how you find out about the Fats That Heal book? How did you even find – out of all the health books in the world, why that one?

[00:17:07] ML: Yeah. I was definitely in chat rooms, but then I also discovered what were called news groups. I would access them through AOL. Then ultimately, there was a program called Outlook, Microsoft Outlook. I think that's still around. Yeah, and you could access news groups through Outlook as well. There was alt.bodybuilding, alt.fitness. Those were the message. Those were early message boards, basically.

I would go on those message boards and I would learn about different books. For example, one of the early posters in these news groups is a guy named Lyle McDonald. His name still comes up in fitness circles today. He was one of the early proponents of the ketogenic diet and he actually wrote a book called The Ketogenic Diet. I remember buying that when I was 14, 15 and reading all about the ketogenic diet, decades before the keto craze that we're seeing now.

[00:17:59] LW: That must have sounded like the most off thing in the world growing up in a household where red meat and all that was banned, right?

[00:18:05] ML: Oh, yeah. Towards the end of my high school career, I just remember trying all different kinds of crazy diets. My mom thought that I was insane. I did try ketogenic diet. I did that for a few weeks, which was fun. I even remember what I bought. I remember buying these little – I think the brand is Baby Bell or something. They're these little cheeses that come in wax coating that you open up. I used to eat those for snacks, because they had zero carbs.

I did a ketogenic diet when I was in high school. I tried that. I also did a diet that was floating around in the message boards that I wouldn't recommend to anybody, but it was called a fat fast diet. Basically, what the diet is all you eat on this diet is protein powder and flaxseed oil. The idea is that – it's basically a ketogenic diet, but it's a very low-calorie ketogenic diet. I tried that for a little while and that was pretty awful. I was genuine genuinely interested. I’ve always had a very healthy relationship with food. For anybody listening, thinking that, “Oh, my God. This guy's got an eating disorder, or had an eating disorder.” I’ve just always been very interested in how to push the limits of the body and to see what it could do under these novel stimuli.

[00:19:21] LW: What were some of your successes back in those early days of experimentation? Did you have any?

[00:19:26] ML: I mean, for me, one of my early successes had nothing to do with fitness, but it was actually my high school senior thesis. I wrote a 10-page report on creatine monohydrate, which is a sports supplement.

[00:19:41] LW: Did anybody even read that?

[00:19:44] ML: No. I wish I still had it. Yeah, creatine is – it's like a workout supplement. I was taking it back then. I just thought it was really cool. I thought it was this really cool substance. I was 18 when I did that. I believe I got an A in the paper. This was the year 2000.

[00:20:01] LW: You went to University of Miami, of all places. Why?

[00:20:07] ML: Well. I told you that I was a computer programmer. I definitely began high school as more of an introvert. I spent a lot of time in chat rooms, in those news groups. by the end of high school, I started to come out of my shell, so to speak. I think that my interest in fitness definitely helped with that.

I was feeling good about myself, about my body. I was gaining more confidence. At a certain point, I think I had taken a trip to Miami. Something about the city just really resonated with me. I think it's a very sensual city. It's a city where it gets under your skin. I like that it had this international flair and that it was fashionable and these were all kinds of things that to me were very attractive at the time. Even though I wasn't fashionable at all, I just liked the aspirational aspect of the city. I decided to go there.

When I first started college, I was actually a pre-med major, so I majored in biology. That was basically something that I chose based on my interest in sports medicine and fitness and nutrition science. Once I had gotten to Miami, I was seduced by the city and by the people and the culture. I realized that also at the same time, I realized that I had an artistic sensibility. I had an appreciation for aesthetics, which I think is also why I loved Miami so much.

That led to me actually changing my major, so that I was no longer a biology major. I ended up double majoring in film and psychology. I chose film really – I’ve always been a film buff, but I chose film not necessarily because I had always wanted to be a filmmaker, but I just liked that it was a major that allowed me to explore my other interests and to just feel out my inner space and to figure out what it was that I ultimately wanted to do. It was a major where I was surrounded by artists, people who are interested in storytelling. Yeah. I mean, looking back, it was an odd choice, but it was the right choice for me.

[00:22:27] LW: Talk about meeting Jason.

[00:22:29] ML: Yeah. We met in that introductory film course, where it was the first time I’d ever taken a course on movie-making. It was called Introduction to Motion Pictures. It's really funny. I haven't thought about this in a long time. I sat in that class with a Brazilian girl named Maida, who was this beautiful Brazilian chick. Me and her would always have these heated philosophical conversations. At the time, I was also feeling out my spiritual leanings at the time. I was really into a writer named Jiddu Krishnamurti. It was a very bohemian time for me.

I would sit in this class with Maida, who's this very smart Brazilian girl. This guy was sitting right in front of us and he always wore tank tops and he had this long ponytail hair. He would turn around – one day, he just turned around and he interjected in this conversation that we were having. I think it was really to get to talk to the Brazilian girl that I was sitting next to. Ultimately, we started talking and we became not only really good friends, but best friends. We began hanging out every single day at UM. We shared an interest in philosophy, although I tended to be more interested in science and health and nutrition and things like that. He was much more interested in philosophy.

We shared an interest in artistry and storytelling and filmmaking. Actually, he was a major reason why I became interested in digital filmmaking. He was at the time, taking a course on documentary filmmaking, which he would describe to me. This was before YouTube. This was a course that really came about and was enabled by the fact that for the first time, digital cameras were so inexpensive. You could shoot pretty high-quality video at the time with a point and shoot still camera. That idea that you could take these really interesting videos on the fly, to me was very enticing. He got me interested in documentary filmmaking.

We would run around South Beach, shooting these little videos of ourselves, having the time of our lives, meeting girls and having experiences with women for the first time with South Beach as the backdrop, which was amazing. Then we had all these friends. We had all these international friends. For me as I mentioned, I’ve always had a very diverse friend group; extremely diverse.

In Miami, the same was true. All of my friend – I didn't have a single friend that was from the US. My closest friends were all either from South America, or the Middle East. It was a really interesting place to go to school, because some of my friends, or my acquaintances just came from unfathomable wealth. You got to see what that was like and navigating those waters amid the backdrop of South Beach.

We were always very interested in going out, but not just going out to bars. Me and Jason really enjoyed going out to the best clubs in South Beach, like the top, top, most world-class nightclubs that there were. We saw that as a metaphor. If you can get past the velvet rope of some of the top clubs in South Beach, then you're going to be pretty successful in life. Yeah, it was a really great time. I think that we really enjoyed being able to ping pong off of each other and we learned from each other. We just had a great time.

[00:26:02] LW: He's got the gift of gab, obviously. Is he the one that would talk you guys into these clubs, or did you take turns? That was your strategy?

[00:26:12] ML: No. It wasn't really about that. To get into those clubs, it's not about the gift of gab. It's about street smarts. We would learn – I mean, it sounds vulgar, but you have to – In South Beach, you have to – You can't just roll up to a nightclub, a popular nightclub if you're three guys. We would bring into the fold these groups of girls that we would then become friends with and we would pre-party with them.

Then a good friend of ours, named Ayub, he's this very street-smart Moroccan kid, we learned that it also helps to grease the bouncer. We would start tipping the bouncer to go in. You learn all these things and we were just these kids. When I look back now, it's so funny, but that's how we ended up getting in. We ended up at these nightclubs, where as these South Beach University of Miami undergrad brats. We were rubbing shoulders with some of the wealthiest people in the world, celebrities, famous models and things like that. It was really an amazing experience.

[00:27:14] LW: Did those film clips that you and Jason were recording, did that end up turning into the Textures of Selfhood, or was that something completely separate?

[00:27:23] ML: They did. Yeah. We became very interested. Jason has really been into doing this his whole life. It's something that I definitely appreciated and gravitated to as well, this idea of capturing special moments with your digital filmmaking tools. Because life is fleeting and we were having all these experiences that we felt were just too precious to allow them to just fade into ephemera and to be forgotten, ultimately.

He had a camera. I bought a camera and we would just film each other. We would shoot each other. This was before iPhone. I mean, today it seems like this wouldn't be a revolutionary idea, but back then it certainly was. We literally bought cameras, so that we could take selfies and shoot videos of our friends having, what we would call peak experiences. In doing so, the thinking was that by capturing these experiences on film, we could basically relive them, thereby immortalizing these moments that are otherwise ephemeral, as I mentioned.

We would just do that. Anytime that we would go out, we would – any time that we would have a girl that we were dating or whatever, we would basically do that. We would turn the camera on ourselves, which at the time was again, a novel concept. You buy cameras to shoot something that you're looking at, not yourself. We would do that and then how Textures of Selfhood came about; I had an independent documentary project. I had a class and the final project was to be an independent study documentary. It could be a documentary about whatever you wanted, because I then – I took a documentary class, basically.

The task was to do a documentary about any subject that you want. It was my idea to do a film, basically about our lives in Miami. The whole film was essentially this performance piece of me and Jason taking turns ranting to the camera about our lives in Miami and how it was like a call to spiritual hedonism.

Spiritual wisdom has long decried pleasures of the flesh. To see God, to reach enlightenment, you have to deny the pleasures of the flesh. You have to abstain from sex until marriage. You

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 13 ATEOTT 16 Transcript have to be okay with walking across nails, or lying, or coals, or whatever, or self-flagellation, or whatever it happens to be. There's this romanticization about pain when it comes to finding spiritual truth. We felt very much that we were finding spiritual truth amid the nightclubs of South Beach, with these peak experiences that we were having; with music, with girls, with friends.

I was like, let's do a documentary to capture that feeling. In the documentary, we used all of the footage that, or a lot of the footage that we were shooting at the time just for fun as B-roll. Layered over, Jason and I just ranting to the camera. That ended up being Textures of Selfhood. It was this student film. We as undergraduates, we caught wind of this TV network that was being launched by Al Gore and Co it was called Current TV. They went around the US looking for content creators. Me and Jason, we were just – our jaws were on the floor when we sat in that initial early meeting, because it just seemed like such an amazing job for two kids who didn't know what the hell they were going to do when they graduated college.

[00:30:56] LW: Okay. You're hanging out with Jason Silva. Sounds like you guys are very much boys, or men about town. You're no longer really spending a lot of time in chat rooms and news groups and stuff. Have you graduated, or suspended the whole creatine monohydrate angle of your life? Because now you're on this spiritual quest. You're reading Krishnamurti. I’m sure that's not really aligning so much with the nuances of diet and all of that. Or is it?

[00:31:27] ML: You hit the nail on the head, that I was definitely still interested in it, but it had taken a back seat. I was exploring this new side of myself, this artist side of myself, where I was really interested in in storytelling. I was also really interested at the time in music. That was a burgeoning interest for me. I was seeing myself as a social entity, really for the first time, and having experiences with women, with the real women of South Beach, which is an exciting –

[00:32:05] LW: Miada, the Brazilian.

[00:32:07] ML: Yeah, the Brazilian. Yeah. There was only, I guess, so much bandwidth that I had. I was also really interested in yeah, Krishnamurti as I mentioned. I was becoming more

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 14 ATEOTT 16 Transcript interested in music and film and becoming a filmmaker. Also, I was trying to become a musician at the time. At the same time, I was teaching myself to play guitar.

[00:32:27] LW: This was during the time of Current TV when that first started?

[00:32:31] ML: No. This was in college. In college. That's when all the nutrition stuff got relegated to the back seat.

[00:32:46] LW: How did the Current TV gig come about? Was that a submission, or did you know someone who knew someone?

[00:32:53] ML: No. No. This team of executives at what would ultimately be called Current TV, it had yet to be named, were touring the country and giving these presentations at film schools, at colleges across the country, because they were looking for content creators. They were going to hire 50 content creators to – The proposition was that this company was going to hire 50 students. They were going to give them salaries. They were going to give them a backpack, a laptop and a camera and they were basically going to allow them to travel the world, filming the content that would ultimately make up the airtime of this tv network, Current TV.

[00:33:34] LW: Basically, what you guys have already been doing.

[00:33:36] ML: Yeah, exactly, exactly. What we had already been doing. Me and Jason, we looked at each other and we were like, “This looks like a dream job.” We were these doe-eyed idealists. I don't think that either of us had any sense of what we wanted to do. I mean, we were film majors, but neither of us wanted to go to Hollywood and get jobs working for crew on film sets. I don't think either of us wanted to do.

I think that we both realized that we had a voice that we felt was a little bit more unique and had more to offer to the world. We saw this opportunity as just amazing – as an amazing opportunity, and so we applied. We followed the instructions. We sent in a job application. The application basically read like, what I can only imagine an application to be on the real-world

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 15 ATEOTT 16 Transcript looked like. It was essay questions. Then to send in footage of yourself on camera, talking to the camera, saying a little bit about yourself, your interests. That's pretty much it.

We submitted those applications with thousands of other people around the US. We waited, I think a few weeks and we didn't really hear anything. During that time, I was finishing up this independent study, this Textures of Selfhood project for a grade. What Jason and I did was we decided to e-mail. There was this e-mail box. It was like [email protected] or something, or whatever the URL was at the time. We sent an e-mail in. It's funny, because the person reading those e-mails is a guy named Ezra Cooperstein, who to this day is still one of my close friends.

We sent an e-mail into the powers that were at Current TV and we were like, “Hi, guys. We sent in our applications independently. My name is Max Lugavere and I’m writing on behalf of myself and Jason Silva, who's another applicant. We just finished this independent study documentary project and we think that better than the written application, better than us just talking to the camera, that it really encapsulates who we are. Not just who we are, but our filmmaking sensibilities, our talents as filmmakers and producers.” Ultimately, it really showcases our voice, I think in a way that was much more authentic to who we were at the time.

They responded and they said, “Sure. Send it in.” We sent it in, this crazy film. There were scenes of sex and us ranting against organized religion and it was insane. It was a huge risk to take, but we had nothing to lose. We sent in the film. It was a couple weeks later, we found out that the head of programming was going through the stacks of submissions. Then the guy who we had e-mailed to see if they could just give this film a chance and to watch it in addition to the job applications that we had submitted, he basically plucked it out of the pile and made the head of programming sit down and watch the film.

Essentially, long story short, he thought that it was brilliant. Based on that film, they threw out basically, the original model of hiring 50 digital correspondents. We got a call. I remember where I was. I was on a New York City public bus at the time when I got a call from the

Well, actually before he even hired us, he flew us out to San Francisco to meet us. We met with him. I guess, he wanted to put a face to – faces to this crazy student film. We had a pretty good meeting. Based on that film, he hired Jason and I to co-anchor the network together. Yeah, it was amazing. There were other people that were cast. We weren't the only two faces on the network, but we were the only ones who were authentically plucked out of college and given this incredible opportunity, moved out to LA, put on national TV. We made up hours and hours and hours of air time for the network. It was really an amazing job opportunity. Jason and I continued to be best friends through that entire process. We lived together. We worked together. It was really amazing.

[00:38:10] LW: Was the salary commensurate with all of that, like pizzazz of being in that position, or is it they take advantage of you guys being young and hungry and just –

[00:38:19] ML: Totally took advantage. We made the first year, $30,000. We couldn't afford to live on our own, which was fine. We were happy to be roommates. I think the second year, we made $40,000 or $45,000, which was a nice little bump. We did Current TV for five or six years. I remember that by the last year, I was making about, I think it was $85,000 salary from Current TV. It was never a huge paycheck, but it was just an amazing job.

[00:38:52] LW: Now you're buddies with Al Gore, of course.

[00:38:56] ML: Buddies with Al Gore. Yeah.

[00:38:58] LW: Would you meet Al Gore back in those days?

[00:39:00] ML: Of course. Many times. Yeah, many times. We would always ask Al if he watched our film Textures of Selfhood. He would famously say, he could either confirm nor deny that he has [inaudible 00:39:13] film of ours, but that he admires our work.

[00:39:17] LW: Well, that was back during his Inconvenient Truth days, wasn't it? Or was that after?

[00:39:21] ML: That was during. Yeah. I mean, he's obviously still a celebrity. Back then, he was very relevant, because he was really pushing his environmental agenda, and just a really warm, jovial guy. Always great to get to see him. Saw him at all the company parties. We were very lucky. We were the faces of the TV network. Whenever Al saw Jason and I, we would get the biggest hello and hug. It was really awesome.

[00:39:48] LW: What were some of your big learnings, life learnings from that Current TV experience, those five or six years you spent doing that?

[00:39:57] ML: I think we learned both that it's hard to feign interest and excitement when you're being inauthentic to yourself and when you're not into something. I mean, I can speak for I think, for the two of us. When you're making hours and hours and hours of TV, inevitably you're going to have to cover stories that you're not necessarily that into. I think over six years of doing that, we both realized that what we each wanted to do ultimately with our careers was to do things that – to focus on things that we're passionate about.

We did a lot of brand stuff that wasn't all that interesting. I don't want to sound this privileged guy. We were very lucky to be getting paid and we had a very fun job. There are a lot worse jobs to have. As creators, as storytellers, you get put into a box and you often get enlisted to feign excitement and to do things that you're not necessarily all that interested in.

[00:41:00] LW: What did you learn specifically about the art of storytelling?

[00:41:03] ML: Oh, man. So much. So much. I mean, we got to work with the best of the best. The president of programming at Current, his name was David Newman, he would always say that everything that you do really has to be in the service of the audience. That to me is something that has never left me, this idea that really, if you have the attention of even one

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 18 ATEOTT 16 Transcript person, but ultimately, if an audience is paying attention to you, then that's an amazing thing. That's a responsibility not to be treated lightly.

You really have to respect the audience and to not talk down to them. Also, to not talk yourself up. One of the funniest things when I first got on TV, you want to make yourself look really cool. You want to make yourself look like aspirational and this really cool guy. Actually, an audience is going to endear themselves to you, not if they see you as being this super cool guy, but if you're just being yourself; as you're just being authentic to who you are.

In fact, one of the best ways to make an audience laugh is to be self-deprecating. That's something that – that was a paradigm shift for me in terms of thinking how to present myself on camera. Because you think that these people that are on TV and I grew up watching MTV, so that's the reference point that I’m using. When you watch MTV and you're looking at a VJ or somebody who has their own show, you think that those people are really cool. They're not cool because they're acting cool, they're cool because they're authentically cool and that's why they're on TV.

Really, the key to I think, to speak to an audience and to galvanize an audience really, is to just be yourself, to be authentically who you are, to own your mistakes, to not try to be perfect, or overly polished. There's that. I learned about the three-act structure of telling a story. Every story needs a beginning, middle and an end. Those are some of the basics. Generally, I think something that they say in filmmaking is they use this term. It's crass, but to kill your babies. When you are writing something, you tend to feel very – or creating something, you tend to feel very precious about it. Generally, whenever you can, if there's a line, or a clip, or a piece that you're very proud of but it's just not working, you got to be unafraid to cut it and just leave it on the cutting room floor. That's a useful way to think about things. To always be thinking in terms of tightening up your content, making your pieces shorter.

Good content can obviously go long, but it's got to be really good. Generally, always be looking to cut the fat to whittle down your pieces, because the audience's attention span is fleeting. You got to really keep them.

[00:44:02] LW: Were people recognizing you on the street at that time?

[00:44:05] ML: Yeah. It happened. I mean, not very often and certainly not often enough for two people who were slaving away every single day in the studio, with hours and hours and hours of content. We were in a 100 million homes. The network failed, ultimately, because it didn't reach critical mass. They couldn't figure out how to market themselves. There were a number of different issues. Nonetheless, I mean, we worked really hard on the network. It was underwatched. Yeah, there was a small group of dedicated fans. We would occasionally get recognized and it was always an amazing feeling. We were always so grateful whenever we were recognized.

[00:44:45] LW: About a year before it all ended, you had uploaded your first, or one of your first music videos to YouTube.

[00:44:52] ML: Yeah. I’ve been dabbling in music, as I mentioned. I was learning to play guitar and to be a singer and songwriter. I had the luxury of earning a salary all while doing this. I would moonlight out in Los Angeles as a singer-songwriter. I was playing gigs actually in and around LA. Yeah, I would put up music videos, myself playing guitar and singing on my YouTube channel. That's something that I continue to be very, very passionate about music.

It's not necessarily even something that I ever aspired to do full-time, but I just love the craft and I love the journey. I just think it's always wonderful to suck at something and then put in the time and watch yourself get better. There are a few feelings that I think are better than that. I used to be a terrible guitar player. I didn't grow up singing or anything like that. The fact that I can now listen to myself and be like, “Oh, I actually appreciate how I sound there.”

[00:45:57] LW: Yeah, I looked at some of your videos, man. The first couple, you're clearly a little bit shy, or a little green. You remember, you had sunglasses on in one, inside. Then I looked at some of the later videos. While the musicianship was marginally better, I think it came across your presence was much better, I think because you just had the confidence of

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 20 ATEOTT 16 Transcript having done it. You could tell, you put in a lot of time into practicing. I remember you saying in some interview that you were spending two or three hours a day just focusing on your music every single day.

[00:46:36] ML: Yeah. I was putting hours and hours and hours and hours into it. I think it probably drove – it's probably one of the reasons why Jason moved across the country as soon as he could after Currency TV ended. Yeah, I was practicing for hours and hours and hours. I was gigging. I was playing shows in Los Angeles and I recorded an EP actually, that my one musical claim to fame is that an executive at Virgin America loved my music and put it aboard their airplanes back when Virgin America existed.

[00:47:06] LW: Wow.

[00:47:07] ML: Yeah. It was carried in their system. It's just not something that I grew up doing, but yet, it meant so much to me to be able to learn how to do it. I just was obsessed with the journey, and to be able to call myself a musician and a singer and a songwriter, that's really what I wanted to be able to do. I worked really hard at it.

I mean, it's like, being able to perform and have it be convincing, that's a very difficult thing to do. It takes a lot of skill. It takes a lot of patience and practice. Yeah, I got to a point where I was pretty happy with my performances. Ultimately, I realized that it wasn't something that I had the grit to do full-time. Music is a very competitive industry. I knew that if you have good songs, songwriting really is the key. It's the magic. If you can write good songs, then you can get fans for your music.

You can look at Bob Dylan. You can look at any of the great songwriters and not all of them have incredible American Idol style voices. Look at Bright Eyes, Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst, for example. He was one of my musical heroes. Amazing, amazing songwriter. For me, it was like, I knew that if I really wanted to go all in on the music and put in and continue to practice with the rigor that I was practicing beforehand, maybe I had a shot. I just didn't think that it was very

I decided to basically put it in the backseat. Tt's still a part of who I am. I’m still very much an artist who can play guitar. I’m very proud of the songs that I’ve written and the music that I have up on my YouTube channel. At a certain point, I realized that I needed to demote it in my life to make room for other things.

[00:49:22] LW: Well, in any case, you had an experience with your mom, I believe it was what, 2012?

[00:49:27] ML: Yeah. My mom is somebody who I’ve always been very close with. After the gig at Current TV ended, I was still living in Los Angeles at the time and I was still doing music to some degree, but I started to hear from my mom who was living back in New York, that she was beginning to experience just a few unexplained health problems. She began to have some trouble with her thyroid and she began also to complain of brain fog.

I was living this luxurious life in LA at the time. I was unemployed, but I was very happy with my circumstances, or at least with the fact that LA is a very comfortable city for me. I had lived in LA for 10 years prior, so I had a lot of friends in LA. I was very comfortable in the city. That comfort was starting to actually make me very anxious, because of this looming uncertainty about my mom's health. I started taking regular trips back to New York, so that I could spend time with her and get a sense of what was going on. I would start taking her to different doctors’ appointments. Generally, it was pretty unclear.

My mom was also very young at the time. I mean, the last thing that I would ever think that she had back then, she was about 58-years-old, was a life-threatening illness, or at least an illness that could have implications for my mom's longevity. Things began to escalate. I was working on a project in LA at the time that was just about to wrap up. I really wanted to get back to New York and spend more time with my mom.

As soon as this project that I was working on in LA wrapped up, I decided to move from LA back to New York. I started taking a very active interest in her health, trying to figure out what was going on. In tandem with that, I was close with my brothers and my grandma at the time. I come from a very close family. Ultimately, because we couldn't get answers in New York, which is where she was, we decided to book a trip to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. The Cleveland Clinic is known for taking on very complex medical cases, like the Mayo Clinic. These are the best hospitals that we have in the United States.

They're known for taking an all-hands-on-deck approach. I just remember having this conversation with my mom, actually. “Mom, they're going to bring in an endocrinologist. They're going to bring in a neurologist. They're going to bring in a cardiologist. Everybody's going to be at the table and we're going to finally figure out what's going on with you.” We went to the Cleveland Clinic and we had a battery of different tests. Ultimately, it was there for the first time that my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition. She was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

That to me was – first of all, it was the first time in my life that I’d ever had had a panic attack. Yeah, I just googling those drugs, knowing nothing about either condition. I just couldn't believe what I was reading, just how bad these conditions get, that nobody has ever survived Alzheimer's disease. It wasn't even clear whether or not my mom had Alzheimer's disease, but she was given drugs for the condition, and Parkinson's disease as well. I was like, “Well, what's the big deal about Parkinson's disease?”

Then I started reading about how people with Parkinson's disease, they lose their ability to move. Many of them end up actually dying, because they choke when trying to eat. It's a major cause of mortality for people with Parkinson's, late-stage Parkinson's disease. Just thinking about my mom going through that was just the most upsetting thing imaginable. It was just really, really dark.

I remember my heart began racing. I was sitting in this hotel room, looking blankly into my computer screen. It felt like when you're boiling water, suddenly the water just boils over the

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 23 ATEOTT 16 Transcript pot and it starts making – it starts hitting the fire and the hot stove below. That's what my consciousness felt like at the time. There's actually a music video on my YouTube channel of me. I brought my guitar on that trip to entertain my mom, because my mom was – she always loved listening to me play guitar. I covered this song by the National Fake Empire. It's on my YouTube channel. That was recorded in the hotel room in Cleveland, Ohio.

Basically, that became the line in the sand. I mean, at that point, I essentially lost interest in everything else. I lost interest in trying to make it as a musician. I lost interest in my former career as a TV host. All I wanted to do was learn what I could about why this was happening to my mom, if there was anything that could be done to help her, what could be done to prevent this from ever happening to me down the road. That's really what it was. It wasn't about making money. It wasn't about writing a book. It wasn't about anything other than just trying to find truths that could help my family. That trip to the Cleveland Clinic really was the first step in the journey that would ultimately become what I currently do today.

[00:55:04] LW: I have a technical question about that. Is that something that it's like a privately funded thing to go to the Cleveland Clinic and get this battery of tests with the biggest experts in the world? Or how does that actually work?

[00:55:17] ML: If you have health insurance, you just go as far as I can remember.

[00:55:20] LW: Anyone with insurance can go to the – That's the Harvard of medical facilities, right?

[00:55:26] ML: Yeah. It's either that or the Mayo Clinic. Yeah, at the top.

[00:55:30] LW: Then after they give you their diagnosis, really there's no point in getting a second or third opinion, because those are the top guys, or girls.

[00:55:38] ML: Yeah. We still did. I mean, we did, because even my mom's diagnosis at the time was murky. She had a Parkinson's-like syndrome, but it wasn't fully clear as to what it

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 24 ATEOTT 16 Transcript actually was. I mean, the Cleveland Clinic is – That's their reputation as being one of the top hospitals in the US, but they have other hospitals that have maybe better neurology departments. At the time, we didn't even fully appreciate that it was a neurological condition that my mom had.

I believe it was after the Cleveland Clinic. I think we had made appointments at Columbia in New York, because you want to have a home hospital. Then also, I think around that same time, went down to Baltimore, Maryland, where they have Johns Hopkins, which I believe if I recall correctly, has according to US news, they put out this annual list every year, it might have the best, according to them, neurology department in the US. We really left no stone unturned in trying to figure out what could be done to help my mom.

[00:56:44] LW: You're obviously very knowledgeable right now about a lot of this stuff. What percentage of the knowledge you have now would you say you had back then in those early, early days of your mom's diagnosis?

[00:56:56] ML: Very little. I mean, I knew about the – I knew about nutrition basics, which I guess, to most people would be fairly high-level nutrition knowledge, because of my interest throughout high school. I definitely had a solid foundational knowledge and I knew where to look for good peer-reviewed research. I knew back then what the difference was between fructose and glucose and ATP and creatine and mitochondria. I knew a lot.

Whether or not I had knowledge, I think what I also have always had intuitively about health is wisdom. You know that difference between knowledge and wisdom, knowledge is a bunch of different facts, but wisdom is knowing how to connect the dots between those facts. I’ve always had a penchant for understanding health and specifically, health science. That's why I decided to take an active approach in my mom's health, because I knew that I could be there and ask questions. My background in journalism, my Current TV also helped with this as well to parse out.

Because the vast majority of things that a doctor will say to a patient goes over that patient's head. Patients, especially when they're scared and frustrated, they don't know how to ask questions. They don't know how to ask for specificity from their doctors.

[00:58:19] LW: That's all you did for six years before that was ask people questions.

[00:58:24] ML: I had a vested interest in helping my mom. I had a vested interest in reducing the number of medications that she was on. Whereas, doctors don't really – I mean, they care, but they also don't really care. I mean, I’ve experienced with, I mean, hundreds of doctors. Not one. They tend to be so unwilling to deprescribe, to take a patient off of a medication, even though a lot of these medications, especially in regard to dementia and even movement disorders, like Parkinson's disease are minimally efficacious.

I just knew that if anybody was going to help my mom, that it was going to be me being there with her and really getting to the root, understanding of what was going on and what could be done to help her.

[00:59:13] LW: That led to the kickstarter campaign.

[00:59:16] ML: Yes. Basically, I began reading and reading and reading and reading and researching and diving into the medical literature. When I couldn't understand something, I would cross-reference it. I basically just became fixated on learning all that I could. I read books; books that are written for lay people. I watched TED Talks. I also read scientific literature and I began reaching out to researchers around the world.

Basically, anybody who was a major player in the dementia-nutrition world popped up onto my radar. I became sort of like, when you look at an FBI in the in the movies when they're tracking a criminal and they have the criminal in the center and they've got these red lines. My brain, that's how it became, where I was tracking all these different lines of research. I had memorized fairly effortlessly all of the associated researchers. I began reaching out to them to ask them questions. Not everybody was quick to respond to me.

Then I decided that maybe I could use my skills as a filmmaker to make a documentary and to do a project that would give me the excuse to reach out to these researchers. Not just to reach out to them, to actually go and visit their labs and to learn from them and to put this all on film, and to make a piece out of it, like a body of work that could then be used to show what it is that my mom's going through, to immortalize the experience that we're having, which was a lot less pleasant than the experiences that I was trying to immortalize back at University of Miami.

[01:00:58] LW: But on an emotional level, they would be peak experiences for you being able to spend that time with your mom at this point in your life.

[01:01:04] ML: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. To help other people with the insights that I was learning, that I was able to glean from the literature, that I felt nobody else was talking about.

[01:01:15] LW: What's one of those things that no one else was talking about, that you discovered from your research?

[01:01:21] ML: I mean, I think the most shocking thing is that – and it's actually not – it shouldn't be very surprising, but that dementia often begins in the brain decades before the first symptom of memory loss. When I looked at my mom's brain fog and the memory loss that she was experiencing, I realized that this is something that was probably developing in her brain over 10, 20, 30 years. If you take 30 years away from my mom's age, you get me.

It became something that it was just very obvious to me that – it basically was looking in the mirror and seeing for the first time in your life what your purpose is. I had all these skills and interests and passions that really, I guess, over the course of my life had seemed disparate, that now for the first time seemed completely aligned. It's this interest in health and nutrition, this interest in storytelling and creativity, the love that I have for my mother, the ability that I have to communicate with an audience and to use the tools of social media. Everything's just lined up.

[01:02:26] LW: Even the poetry of the music and expressing and relating to people on a less scientific level, which is also very important.

[01:02:34] ML: Yeah, a 100%. If you're the only person that can do something, then you have to do it. That was how I felt. I felt that my mom had a story. My mom was young and beautiful and very relatable and that I was relatable. At the same time, I wielded – I was able to wield scientific knowledge in a way that most people were not able to do. I saw that. I acknowledged that. That the only reason why I became interested in this topic is because my mom had dementia.

If I was actually going to help people avert this condition, then I had to loop – I had to bring people in that didn't even know that they were interested in it. I had to create a trojan horse. That to me was the documentary project that I started.

[01:03:23] LW: How did that go? Did you get them funding?

[01:03:26] ML: Yeah. We did a kickstarter campaign for it. I cut the teaser trailer, which you could watch at breadheadmovie.com. Breadheadmovie.com. We raised the kickstarter campaign with the goal was $75,000 and we ended up raising via the kickstarter, about a $140,000 from people all around the world. I hired a producer in the project. Then you build out your personnel as you need them, but a director of photography, recording engineers when you go do an interview.

Shooting a documentary is expensive. Essentially, we achieved a rough cut of the film and it's a cut that I’m very proud of. Now we're at a point where we need to actually raise more money to finish it. The film is not fully finished. It's been a somewhat painful process, in that it's just frustrating how expensive it is to make a movie and how limited avenues there are for getting funding for meaningful documentary projects like this. When you see all the money that's spent in Hollywood on fairly frivolous projects.

We've tried a number of different avenues and it's been a little bit difficult to find the finishing funds for the project. I remain hopeful that we will be able to finish it in the near future. Some of the kickstarter campaign contributors and I’m grateful for every single one of them, but because it has taken us a while to finish the film, some of them have left comments, or sent messages that have actually been pretty negative, pretty hateful. That's been very upsetting, because obviously, underlying all of the struggles that it takes to make a movie and not just a movie, but a legitimate movie, my mom's health continued to decline.

It's been actually very, very difficult. I want nothing more than to get the movie finished and to put it out there. I don't yet know how we're going to do that, whether it's another crowdfunding campaign, or maybe some angel investor will come out of the woodwork and help us get to the finish line. It's definitely something that is front of mind for me to finish. It's a beautiful film. I’m very proud of it.

[01:05:58] LW: Well, you also took on two very lightning rod issues of science and diet. Whenever you're going public with an opinion, or perspective on science and diet, you're going to have all kinds of people, lovers, haters, trollers. How did you prepare yourself for that? Because it sounds like you really have to know your stuff when you're talking about either of those topics.

[01:06:27] ML: I’ve always been very transparent about what I know, what I think I know to be true, what my opinion is and what I don't know. I’m very dedicated to learning and understanding. The fact that my mom was sick and I had that experience with her and that I know what the potential repercussions could be of a bad recommendation, it keeps me very honest. I mean, it keeps me very honest and very transparent. Ultimately, I’m 100% fully committed to helping people.

I mean, I also have to make a living obviously, and I’m very grateful and that I’ve found a way to do that. Yeah, my passion really is to help people and to be a voice of reason. Because I think, real harm does come from misinformation in the nutrition space and there's a lot of that. For me, the idea that I could potentially help even one person means that what my mom

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 29 ATEOTT 16 Transcript experienced, though I would in a heartbeat give up everything that I’ve accomplished since that early diagnosis, if I can use that tragedy and that pain for something positive and to help somebody potentially not go through what my mom went through, then it wouldn't have been in vain. I think people know that.

Nutrition, yeah. Nutrition is like, I get into battles on social media all the time, because people tend to feel very strongly about their nutrition choices. Nutrition is like a religion for most people, like what they eat. I mean, it's one of the few things that you'll see consistently in people's bios, on their Instagram pages, like the way that they eat, whether they're vegan, or keto, or paleo. It's something that’s mind-boggling. For me, it's really just about helping people understand the truth and to be a little bit less confused by nutrition science. Because nutrition science, it can be as complex, or as simple as you have the time to make it.

[01:08:19] LW: What are like the top three things that you learned about nutrition that you didn't know before all of this happened.

[01:08:29] ML: Well, I’m pretty unapologetic in the fact that I’m pretty convinced that a diet that incorporates both plants and animals is an optimal diet. There's really no way to actually prove any of this in humans. The way to prove something in science is with a with a long-term, randomized controlled trial. You're never going to have a randomized controlled trial that puts people, large groups of people on a specific diet and have them live out the entirety of their lives with that diet, while comparing health outcomes. We have very few certainties in this field.

I’m convinced, based on my research and based on talking with the brightest minds in the field and just from an evolutionary perspective, that a diet that incorporates both animal products and plants is optimal. That sounds very straightforward, but you have vegans and you have carnivores. It's the eternal battle. Yeah, I’m a huge fan of grass-fed red meat, of wild, fatty fish, of eggs. I’m also a fan of dark leafy greens, like kale, spinach, arugula, of berries, of cruciferous vegetables and things like that.

Just for what it's worth, my mom was a very – as I mentioned, she was very attuned to messaging surrounding heart disease. My mom never ate any red meat, ever. Never ate any eggs, never saw her eating a whole egg, or anything like that, because of the dietary cholesterol in the oaks.

Instead, she ate a fairly low-fat diet though. She consumed the government recommended 6 to 11 servings of grains per day. She avoided saturated fat. She avoided dietary cholesterol and look how her health turned out. Now I’m not saying that that was the – that I know for sure that that was the cause, but it certainly didn't help her. You have a lot of people in the nutrition sphere that promote their dietary philosophy as if it's gospel. My message is actually one of balance, incorporate both animals and plants.

I would say the second thing, it's really important to avoid, as best you can, ultra-processed foods, to minimize your consumption of packaged, processed foods. I eat packaged foods like anybody else, but I minimize my consumption of them. I know that if it's in my shopping cart, it's as good as in my stomach. Whole foods, so minimally processed foods, like single-ingredient foods. These are going to be the best foods for you.

Cooking at home. Cooking at home is massively important. Now with these quarantine times, I think a lot more people are doing that. When you eat out of the restaurant, the food that you're eating is just usually, it's soaked in added oils, added sugar, all kinds of unsavory additives. Cooking at home is massively important. Then aside from the ultra-processed foods, I would say the third thing, I think it's pretty worthwhile to minimize your consumption of unhealthy fats.

When it comes to the brain, your brain is made of fat. The fats that you eat dictate to a large degree, the quality of your brain tissue. I make the recommendation to people to avoid as best they can, canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, these ultra-refined grain and seed oils, I think are not doing your brain health any favors. They're also not good for your cardiovascular health. Problem with these cooking oils is that they're very damage prone. A damaged fat damages you. Avoiding those oils and instead, reaching for extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, these sorts of Mediterranean fats, butter, I think are all great options.

[01:12:14] LW: I mean, you had a best-selling book, Genius Foods that was a New York Times bestseller. That put you in the spotlight. You've been debating with doctors and nutritionists and people with lots of degrees and titles and things like that. How has that experience helped you to evolve in your own perspective on the service, the work that you do in the world?

[01:12:42] ML: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think it has made me very deliberate in my messaging. I’m always very cautious. I’m also always open to feedback and to acknowledging when I’ve been wrong about certain things. Generally, I’m always cautious about that person on the other – on the receiving end of the receiving phone, like how is this person who might be in poverty, or who might be morbidly obese, or who might have an eating disorder, how are they receiving my message?

What if this person currently has cancer? What if this person has a loved one with advanced Alzheimer's disease? Everything that I do, aside from being filtered through the lens of science, also has to go through the lens of empathy for me. I think that's another reason why people really have gravitated to my message, it's that for me, this is not just about data and evidence and facts. It's really about getting people to make change in their lives and to not doing any harm.

I’m not a medical doctor, but I know that medical doctors, the Hippocratic oath is first, do no harm. Doctor in the purest sense of the word, means literally, teacher. I might not be a doctor, but I’m certainly – I’ve been I’ve been blessed in that I’ve been able to teach many people around the world. I think when you have that position, what comes with it is great responsibility. I’m always trying to make sure that my messaging is one that's rooted in science and pragmatism, but also empathy for people. Because people are struggling. We have an uneven distribution of resources around the world. Especially in the wellness world today where there's so much money and commerce tied to it, there's a lot of people that prey on people's ignorance about what it means to be healthy. I mean, I like to offer people the low-hanging fruit, because it's the low-hanging fruit. It's the dietary modifications that I just mentioned that are going to get most people most of the way there.

[01:15:06] LW: You have a podcast. It's called The Genius Life, which is I guess, named after your second book, which is a more of a lifestyle type of manual for on-ramping people to this healthier lifestyle. You have a very prolific social media feed. We talked about this before, because we're friends outside of all of this, but I’m so impressed. Are you still doing your own social media, by the way?

[01:15:31] ML: Yeah, I still do.

[01:15:33] LW: I’m just looking at – I’m looking at your feed now. I see this one post, the 20 Trader Joe's keto products. It's wonderful. I’m looking at it from a technical perspective. I’m thinking, okay, this guy's got 20 products. You have to spend time Google searching these products, looking for white backgrounds, if there weren't any white backgrounds. You had to cut them out. You had to lay them all out with the numbers and make sure everything was proportioned properly. I mean, this is like – it's a good two hours right there.

Then you also always include these really in-depth captions, descriptions. I mean, so generous, all the information you're providing, and then you're all up in the comments on top of that. I mean, how do you have time to do all of that?

[01:16:19] ML: Oh, my God. Well, it's sometimes to the detriment of my personal life.

[01:16:24] LW: Is that part of your mission that you see yourself as the superhero of health that you have to dedicate that time in the bat cave, to put all this together for us, people of Gotham City?

[01:16:36] ML: I feel like it. Yeah. I like the superhero, bringing it back to that. I do feel that way. People are so misled and confused. There are also well-meaning people in the fitness world, who promote science, but do it in a way that I think doesn't have that empathetic aspect to it. I just feel for people. Ultimately, I think about the other person, when the person who's reading my post as being my mother.

Sometimes, you have to be firm with people. That's how sometimes I am. I like to I have a perspective and I have a point of view and I don't really like to beat around the bush. I know that a lot of people want change, but not many people want to change themselves. Not many people want to make that change in their lives, but they want things to be different. It's just what I’m passionate about. It's what I feel my life's purpose is. I probably should spend less time on social media. Sometimes when I get an insight or a new way to think, or describe something, I just can't help myself. I just have to create it.

[01:17:52] LW: It's so great, man. Like this one post, how to detox. I mean, you have a poop doll. Did you buy that on Amazon for this post, or did you happen to already have that? How did that –

[01:18:05] ML: I bought it on Amazon for –

[01:18:06] LW: For the post.

[01:18:07] ML: Yeah.

[01:18:08] LW: Wow.

[01:18:09] ML: Yeah, it's commitment.

[01:18:11] LW: I mean, because, I remember when your following was not 350,000. It was probably much less than that. You've just been so committed. You're posting every day. You're dedicating a lot of time to this. I’m curious, were you one of the innovators of this comparison model of the social media post? Did you get that from somewhere else? Because I see a lot of other people doing it now.

[01:18:39] LW: I wasn't the first one, but I definitely was one of the early ones. I got in at the right time. I started with infographics. Then I started doing the compared posts. Yeah, I would

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 34 ATEOTT 16 Transcript say that I was one of the – definitely one of the early ones. Especially putting out higher quality content, there's been a lot of low-resolution stuff floating around on Instagram for a while. Yeah. I mean, my content I think from day one always looked a little bit more professional.

I’ve been a professional Photoshop user for 20 years. Not 20 years, but – Yeah, 20 years just about, because I picked it up back when I was in high school. Again, it's just all of the things – all of these disparate skills have been very useful to me today. That's why I can do it and it's not – it might not take me as long as it would take an intern, for example.

[01:19:32] LW: Right. That's incredible, man. What advice would you give to someone who went through the same thing you went through with your mom and they wanted to become more informed, or maybe even a little bit further than that and become more of an industry expert in the same way?

[01:19:49] ML: Do your homework. Always be open-minded. Always be willing to challenge your assumptions and your beliefs. For me, for example, before I got started in all this, I would be – a brown rice bowl would be the number one – my number one favorite food to eat. Then I realized that grains, like rice are just – most people don't need to base their diet around grains and grain products. One of the things that I discovered when writing The Genius Life is that brown rice is actually a great vehicle for arsenic today. If you're eating lots of brown rice, you're accumulating inorganic arsenic, which is shortening people's lives prematurely around the globe.

I still eat rice occasionally. Yeah, you just always have to be willing to look into your constitution and be willing to challenge your preconceptions. Do the homework. Make connections. Reach out to people. That's what I did. Be transparent in your motivations. When I first started doing this as I mentioned, it was not to create a business. It was not to build a social media profile. It was to help my mom. To be patient with people. To be authentic and just to be – and to be consistent and persistent and to just show up every day. Dedicate an hour, two hours, three hours of your day to reading medical literature and going into the references and following the breadcrumb trail to truth. I mean, that was all, and continues to be

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 35 ATEOTT 16 Transcript a major part of my day every day. I’m looking at the latest studies that come out. Yeah. I think, all that together is really what it takes. Yeah, and just to not be hopeless. To have hope.

[01:21:43] LW: I like that. Have hope. How are you defining success these days?

[01:21:47] ML: I mean, for me, I feel successful because I’m able to do this for a living. It's not about how much money I make, or anything like that. It's the fact that I’m able to do this, that I have been able to move into a house where I now have my own podcast studio, that's an amazing thing that my podcast can help pay my rent. That's incredible that I get to write books for a living, that I wake up every day and I get to basically create my own schedule. To me, that's amazing.

I’m surrounded by passionate people, who are also doing what they love. I have people that I work with that support me. To me, that feels great. I’ve never really had a job that anybody would describe as being a corporate job. Yeah. I mean, what I do now, it brings together all of my skills, all of my interests. I feel like I’m helping people. I get feedback on a regular basis, that keeps me going. Yeah, that to me is what makes me feel successful.

[01:22:54] LW: Beautiful, man. Well, I just want to offer a couple of quick reflections. I mean, you've pretty much done the work for me. Typically, at the end of my interviews, I’ll talk about the connections between where you are now and where you started off as a kid. It's pretty obvious that you've embodied this Exosquad fighter archetype throughout your entire life and you've taken the skills that you've learned at every stage and you've incorporated them, not just in a way to contribute professionally, but in a way, to help people. It's a great example for other people, I think to look at their lives and whatever they're doing right now and to see it as something that if it's not coming into play right now something that's useful, it will at some point.

Just don't give up hope. Keep hope. Keep the hope and keep doing what feels right and keep doing what is in service to humanity. I really love the part about the why behind the time that you invest in your social media posts. I imagine, also with your books and your podcast is what

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 36 ATEOTT 16 Transcript if someone like my mom was listening, or reading, I would want them to be as informed as possible and in a relatable way. I think that's beautiful.

Thank you so much for your dedication, for your courage, for your creativity and taking the leaps of faith that you've taken in your life. The world is definitely a better place, because you're in it. I’m happy to be able to call you a friend. I’m inspired by you. I’ve been inspired by many of the things you've put out there. I think about you often, man. Whenever I’m in a restaurant, or wherever I’m cooking, I think about you.

[01:24:40] ML: Wow. I love that.

[01:24:44] LW: I do. Yeah, I do. I mean, this may not be right there in the prefrontal cortex, but it's somewhere in my consciousness, I think about genius food and brain health and all of that. It's left an impression on all of us. I think about you and the social media. I think look, anytime I – because I post these videos every day and it takes me a good couple of hours to do it and I’m like, “Hey, Max is over there putting in the work. I may as well put in the time as well.” Thanks for that example as well. I really appreciate that.

[01:25:15] ML: Oh, man. Of course. Yeah. Well, you're killing it. I feel the same way about you. Very grateful to call you a friend and love the content that you've been putting out lately and yeah, it's just amazing that so many people, they get up every day and they for any number of reasons, they go and they work for somebody to make somebody higher than them richer, or whatever. Maybe it's just to pay the bills. I think that you and I are very similar in that for us, it's always been mission first.

I definitely spent a good number of years broke before I started making any money, when I was doing this research really for my mom and trying to figure out how I was able to balance the two. When you put good things out into the universe and when your intention is pure and you're authentic and you're doing what it is that you've got the skill set to be able to do, then I think the universe has no choice, but to open doors for you, and to help you in your journey to be successful.

I’ve seen it in you, with your work and I’m grateful to be in the middle of it now with mine. It's a reproducible formula. To anybody listening, it's definitely something that you yourself can also do.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[01:26:35] LW: Thank you for listening to my interview with Max Lugavere, co-author of Genius Foods and Genius Life and host of The Genius Life Podcast. For all things health and science and wellness and diet-related, you definitely want to follow Max on Instagram. He's @MaxLugavere. L-U-G-A-V-E-R-E. He puts out these really fun and accessible, but informative health graphics and he's very consistent and super relatable.

If you want to hear more stories like Max's, make sure you subscribe to the podcast and check out the archive. I’ve got so many other interviews with amazing people who've overcome all kinds of crazy challenges in order to start their movement. What I keep finding and what you'll keep hearing conversation after conversation, is that the person's greatest obstacle, the one they wrestled with the most, the one they curse day after day, the one that kept them up tossing and turning at night, always ends up playing either a feature, or a guest role in helping them find their purpose.

If you like what you hear, please rate the podcast. It helps other people discover these inspirational stories. As always, you can find everything that Max and I discussed in the show notes, as well as a transcript of our entire interview on my website, which is lightwatkins.com/tunnel. While you're there, sign up for my daily dose of inspiration e-mail. I send out this free, short, sweet daily motivational message every morning at 6 a.m. Pacific time. I guarantee you after a week, you'll be addicted to them and you'll tell all of your friends about it.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for me, what I should do more of, what I should do less off, who I should bring on the podcast, you can actually text me directly. I’ll give you my

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 38 ATEOTT 16 Transcript number. You ready? It’s 323-405-9166. 323-405-9166. That's my number. Text me directly. Just whip out your phone, if you don't already have it in your hand. Dial that number and you'll get right in touch with me. All right.

Thanks again for listening. I’ll see you next week with another conversation from The End of the Tunnel. Have a great one.

[END]