Eating 1,000 Sardines in a Month + The Cheapest Grocery Store in America | Dr. Nick Norwitz & George Kamel - Two Percent with Michael Easter

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:17):
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

(00:38):
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,

(01:05):
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

(01:26):
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

(01:47):
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

(02:09):
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

(02:30):
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

(02:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Both mdphds.

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

Speaker 3 (03:25):
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

(03:47):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (04:00):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (04:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
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,

(04:54):
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.

Speaker 4 (05:10):
Well.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
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

(05:31):
the pages that had a human element.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
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

(05:55):
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

(06:16):
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

(06:38):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (06:54):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (07:13):
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

(07:36):
little bit of extra energy in. But other than that,
sardines for like my main protein source.

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

Speaker 2 (07:42):
About a thousand?

Speaker 3 (07:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
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

(08:09):
a complete renaissance in the world of small fish that
are in tins. So which were you eating?

Speaker 3 (08:17):
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.

(08:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
But those are the sardines.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
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.

(09:23):
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?

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

Speaker 3 (09:37):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (09:51):
Two big things.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
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

(10:15):
brushed my teeth until my gums are bleeding. But my
skin was just giving off some like volatiles.

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

Speaker 3 (10:22):
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

(10:44):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (10:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, one hundred percent.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
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

(11:39):
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

(12:02):
to hormones.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
In the body.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
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.

(12:28):
It actually in humans has an inverse relationship with body
mass index.

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

Speaker 3 (12:38):
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.

(13:03):
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,

(13:24):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (13:46):
Less calorie burn.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (14:03):
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

(14:28):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (14:47):
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

(15:09):
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

(15:29):
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

(15:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
Like a dolphin were exactly.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (16:10):
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

(16:31):
that at least blew my mind and hopefully going to
communicate in a way that is interesting.

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

Speaker 3 (16:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
I also lost.

Speaker 3 (16:53):
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

(17:17):
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

(17:41):
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.

(18:05):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (18:19):
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

(18:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
Like there are.

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

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

Speaker 3 (19:02):
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

(19:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
Cold resistance to a price.

Speaker 3 (19:45):
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

(20:05):
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,

(20:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (20:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
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

(22:26):
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.

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (22:58):
I know they have iron.

Speaker 3 (23:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
I love mind blowing.

Speaker 1 (23:09):
Let's go.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (23:24):
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

(23:45):
hoard iron.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
You actually see this over.

Speaker 3 (23:47):
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

(24:08):
are all like top science journals just came out.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
This one.

Speaker 3 (24:12):
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

(24:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Interesting, so.

Speaker 3 (24:55):
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

(25:15):
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

(25:37):
vitamin C. If you buy it and bulk on Amazon,
you do the math six point two cents per day.

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

Speaker 3 (25:45):
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

(26:06):
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

(26:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
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

(26:59):
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

(27:19):
because sardines are relatively low in mercury.

Speaker 3 (27:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Slob of swordfish.

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

Speaker 1 (27:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:02):
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?

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

Speaker 3 (28:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah, cool ppa free.

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

Speaker 3 (28:31):
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

(28:53):
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

(29:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
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

(30:20):
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.

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

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

Speaker 3 (30:43):
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

(31:05):
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

(31:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
But if somebody were.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
We don't.

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

Speaker 2 (32:01):
Are non negotiable.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
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.

(32:22):
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,

(32:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
I enjoyed it.

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

Speaker 2 (33:30):
The obstacle was social because.

Speaker 1 (33:32):
You smelled like not quite.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (33:51):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (34:02):
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,

(34:25):
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.

(34:48):
But that was the low throughout, and by about two
weeks in it was like, you need to stop this experiment.

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (35:14):
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

(35:37):
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?

Speaker 3 (35:43):
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

(36:04):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (36:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
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

(36:50):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (37:14):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (37:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:05):
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

(38:28):
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.

(38:51):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (39:17):
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.

(39:39):
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.

(40:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (40:29):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (40:42):
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.

(41:03):
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

(41:23):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (41:38):
Sardines, eggs.

Speaker 3 (41:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:51):
I love.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (42:13):
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

(42:36):
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,

(42:56):
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?

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

Speaker 1 (43:12):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (43:21):
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?

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (43:48):
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.

(44:11):
My bill is astronomical. What do you actually hear from
people that?

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

Speaker 4 (44:14):
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.

(44:37):
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.

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

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (45:19):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (45:39):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (46:02):
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.

(46:24):
Can you guess which was the most expensive?

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

Speaker 1 (46:30):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (46:48):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (47:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (47:18):
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,

(47:42):
especially from your financial mind.

Speaker 4 (47:45):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (47:58):
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

(48:20):
if anybody can actually spend less than one hundred bucks.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
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.

Speaker 4 (48:42):
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.

(49:06):
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

(49:27):
that scavenger hunt is what keeps you, keeps you moving,
keeps you throwing stuff in your cart, And then what
keeps me.

Speaker 5 (49:32):
Buying is the return policy.

Speaker 4 (49:34):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (49:49):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (49:50):
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

(50:10):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (50:41):
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

(51:03):
I find?

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

Speaker 1 (51:06):
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.

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

Speaker 5 (51:27):
Have you thought about this?

Speaker 1 (51:28):
What would you call it?

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

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

Speaker 5 (51:35):
I would read it.

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

Speaker 4 (51:41):
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.

(52:04):
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

(52:25):
costco hit me up.

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

Speaker 4 (52:28):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (52:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
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

(53:30):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (53:46):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (54:04):
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

(54:28):
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

(54:49):
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.

Speaker 4 (55:05):
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

(55:25):
like but that's like really helps me know I'm getting
a good deal.

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

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

Speaker 4 (55:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
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?

Speaker 4 (56:03):
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.

(56:24):
I want something interesting, some maybe fruit forward things like
a mango chocolate covered mango.

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

Speaker 4 (56:32):
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

(56:54):
love with.

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

Speaker 1 (56:58):
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

(57:21):
one of the grocery store is seven dollars. So you go, well,
why wouldn't I buy this?

Speaker 4 (57:24):
Now?

Speaker 1 (57:24):
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,

(57:45):
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.

Speaker 4 (57:53):
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

(58:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
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.

Speaker 4 (58:52):
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

(59:12):
billion dollars.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
How does Costco make money?

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

Speaker 5 (59:24):
Products the services.

Speaker 4 (59:25):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 4 (59:53):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:00:08):
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 4 (01:00:30):
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,

(01:00:51):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:01:13):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:01:31):
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

(01:01:52):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:02:11):
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

(01:02:32):
get any like food that we can like eat as
a meal.

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

Speaker 4 (01:02:38):
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.

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

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

Speaker 4 (01:02:59):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:03:12):
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

(01:03:33):
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.

(01:03:55):
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

(01:04:16):
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

(01:04:38):
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

(01:04:59):
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

(01:05:20):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:05:34):
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

(01:05:54):
to so many people on the ground. What do you
hear from the people that go through the process and
what are they.

Speaker 4 (01:06:01):
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

(01:06:23):
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

(01:06:44):
side hustling and you know, making websites at night and
helping people launch a podcast, or I was.

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

Speaker 4 (01:06:50):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:07:11):
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.

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

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

Speaker 4 (01:07:28):
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,

(01:07:50):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:08:09):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:08:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:08:28):
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

(01:08:49):
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?

Speaker 4 (01:09:11):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:09:33):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:09:46):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:10:03):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:10:12):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:10:31):
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,

(01:10:52):
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?

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

Speaker 4 (01:11:07):
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

(01:11:27):
just speaks to the get rich quick mentality of a
lot of young people who are struggling.

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

Speaker 4 (01:11:33):
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

(01:11:54):
bad for your mental health as it becomes very addictive.

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
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?

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

Speaker 4 (01:12:16):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:12:38):
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

(01:13:00):
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

(01:13:21):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 4 (01:13:32):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 4 (01:14:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:14:10):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:14:24):
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

(01:14:45):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:15:05):
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

(01:15:26):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:15:40):
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,

(01:16:03):
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.

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

Speaker 5 (01:16:23):
Oof?

Speaker 4 (01:16:24):
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.

(01:16:45):
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

(01:17:06):
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.

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

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

Speaker 4 (01:17:21):
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

(01:17:42):
installment loans as a better form of payment.

Speaker 1 (01:17:45):
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?

Speaker 4 (01:17:54):
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

(01:18:15):
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

(01:18:35):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 4 (01:19:09):
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.

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

Speaker 4 (01:19:28):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (01:19:52):
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

(01:20:14):
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

(01:20:38):
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.

(01:20:58):
Do not forget to hit somebe and of course have fun,
don't die, eat sardines and get them from Costco.

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

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Eating 1,000 Sardines in a Month + The Cheapest Grocery Store in America | Dr. Nick Norwitz & George Kamel