In this podcast episode, Mark Metry discusses the impact of big pharma and food industries on people’s health. Listen in as we also touch on the issue of doctors not providing enough information about nutrition and the need for leaders to push for change in school lunch programs and government policies. Mark emphasizes the importance of taking action and making conscious choices about what we consume physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. We also discuss the importance of spirituality and its role in society.
Mark Metry is a mental health advocate, certified nutrition coach, counselor, and author. Mark has dedicated his life and time to teaching professionals, entrepreneurs, students how to manage social anxiety and rewire the mind.
Connect with Mark: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-metry/
Episode Transcript:
00:32
Now here’s your host, Marcus Aurelius Anderson. Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words instead, observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Mark Metry is a top 10 voice on LinkedIn.
01:02
for mental health, certified nutrition coach. Forbes featured top 100 podcaster and not once, but twice TEDx speaker. He’s a counselor and he also has an incredible book called Screw Being Shy. I’ve known Mark for almost five years now and it’s an honor to have him back on the show. Mark, thank you for being here. We were just talking about the last time we spoke was in New York city in person. Yeah, in a whole foods. In a whole foods, right? were actually, even nutrition was big back then. So thank you for being here.
01:31
We were just talking about how that these are interesting times in which we live, interesting actions in which we lead. So thank you for being here. And first of all, tell me about Screw Being Shy because that book exploded and that gave you a lot of traction so that people can sort of understand what’s going on. And you had some of that in your TEDx talks, correct? Yeah, definitely. And Marcus, I’m super honored to be here. And I just want to say one thing about what you said about, you know, us living in interesting times in history. I feel like the time that we’re living in right now.
02:00
is exactly the time where like I remember being a kid in history class and being like, man, you know, if I was still alive in World War II or if I was still alive in this time, what would I do or what would my actions be? And I feel like right now is that exact time in history. And yet a lot of us don’t recognize it because we are constantly surrounded by all these words through social media on our phone and we’re consuming things left and right.
02:30
And like, when you do that, you kind of lose your identity. You you stop taking actions, you lose your identity, and you just like become the spectator. Where even if you move down that path for a while, even if you feel like, I want to change something in my life, or there’s like this really amazing cause that I want to contribute my life towards, it almost seems impossible because you’ve been stuck in this way of, you know, not moving for so long. And I’ve faced that in my own life. I feel like that’s really…
03:00
the energy that I kind of feel right now. What was the question you asked me? You asked me about my book or what was it? It was about the book, but I love again because we have a friendship and we have a relationship already. We can talk about everything and anything. And I absolutely agree. We go back and we almost demonize people in the past and say, how could you stand by and let that happen? And it’s like in the last few years, we’ve seen the gamut in human history. We’ve seen every demonstration of this. We’ve seen every pontification. We’ve seen every person, like you say,
03:29
the social voyeurism where they say that they want to do these things and then they still sit on their ass. So octanon verb is everything like go out, do something, try something and we’re creators, right? So the loudest boos come from the cheapest seats. always have people that will come at you about stuff and it’s like, well, let me, let me see the book that you wrote or let me see the Tedx that you have, or let me see the work that you’re doing. You don’t because they, put themselves in this corner intellectually to where they can’t even step out of it. Like you said, to where it’s about consumption for them.
03:59
And man, if all we do is consume, then we’re just full of shit. We’re not doing anything literally, right? Yeah. I mean, I wish I could just sit by and consume, but I would be too depressed and too existentially filled with dread to be able to do that. I sometimes wish I could, but you know, then I realized I don’t and I’m very, very grateful to be where I am. You’re only 25. I say only, but you’ve done so much in your lifetime already and you’ve done everything in all these different successes, but your path is very much your own.
04:28
So you’re going boldly in this direction of your truth. And dare I say, you’re not afraid to evolve. You’re not afraid to see information. You’re not afraid to say, man, I believe this at this time. I don’t believe that now. I thought this was truth back then. I understand that it’s not now. So you’re not a slave to cognitive bias. And when cognitive dissonance punches us in the face, it’s like any kind of pain. It’s there to show us, man, there’s something not congruent here. Either it’s my belief.
04:57
my actions are what the facts are. If I’m stuck in that place and I continually just placate to that, that idea, it’s never going to help me evolve or change or get better in any capacity. Yeah. And I’ve honestly, when I look back at like the last year, two years, three years, man, there’s been so many things that I have changed my mind on. It’s like a great learning experience. One thing that’s helped me.
05:21
is that like very on in my journey when I started my podcast and I started doing everything, I was always like, hey, you know, I’m young. I’m not going to approach this from a perspective of like, Hey, I know all these things and you you should listen to me. But it was always from a perspective of like, always, always try to be aware of your ego and always, always try to not let it lead you because ultimately you don’t learn as much. And for me personally in my life,
05:50
I was like always that kid growing up who like had no friends or who got bad grades or who was never able to have like any sort of athletic ability and had health problems, you know? And so for me, so much of my life was spent losing. And I realized that because I lost again and again and again and again, and I didn’t let my ego sort of identify with that, that’s really what led me to grow and to just live a life that I’m proud to live today.
06:20
You know, I think it’s really interesting too, like in my generation, like Gen Z, young people, it’s so interesting. Obviously there’s all different kinds of people in that generation. You know, there’s maybe people who are educated, maybe they’re self-educated, maybe they are very vocal, maybe they’re very shy. You know, there’s all kinds of spectrum, so to speak. But I think for me, one thing that I’ve realized recently is that I think that my generation is one of the most talented generations, but it’s also the most like lost.
06:49
generation. And the reason why is because we have lived this world where like we’ve sort of seen like how the world works. We’ve seen history, we’ve seen what previous generations did. And obviously like right now is a time of change. Right now it’s like very tricky because there are some people who want to change things so much to the point where
07:14
we’ve lost our values and our main principles that have withheld the test of time. And we know they are the correct principles, right? Like having a sense of morality, telling the truth, being honest, taking actions, sacrificing, all these things that we know that are good things. And so I think with my generation, a lot of us who maybe are not on the right path, we wanna change things so much.
07:43
because that we think that we are like gods. Like we have such big egos that like we think we can change every single thing in society. Even the things that we know that we shouldn’t change. Like the basic principles of morality and fundamentals. And then the other side of that too, is I think like people like me where it’s like, hey, we’re not gonna approach this in the lens of like, oh, you know, we’re younger and we’re better and all these older people are dumb or anything like that.
08:12
or like we know more, we have more experience, it’s more or less understanding. Like we know that like the human mind is a very beautiful, but it’s like a very archaic machine, right? And a lot of the times, especially the more years you’ve lived life, the mind can get stuck like in the same beliefs, it can get stuck in the same patterns. And for a lot of people, they never break out of that pattern. And so I think like one of the great things about like the good side,
08:40
of like my generation is that some of us are looking at it from a perspective of like, we actually have different brains than other people’s where we can sort of take the good things that are sort of like those principles that have existed for thousands of years. But we can also look at the world and we can look at society and we can look at the problems that we have from different perspectives simply because we don’t have experience. And that can actually be a good thing. You know, maybe not in every single case, obviously, but.
09:08
That’s to the way that I look at it, you and I think the big thing is that a lot of us, need to unite across generations, across cultures, across cities, across, you know, different states in America, different regions. Like we all need to unite because like this division that we have, in seemingly everything, some division is good. You know, it’s good to disagree with people. It’s good. The fact that we don’t live in a society where everybody agrees with everyone, cause that would be pretty terrible, you know? And so it’s good to have some disagreement.
09:37
But at the same time, like we need to come together and like you see it so many levels of the world where people have just like stopped talking to each other and they’ve just sort of like entered in this divisive sort of state. Like for example, like on Instagram, I’ll post something that’ll give someone sort of the indication that I’m on this certain team. And then all of a sudden they start leaving comments of things that I never even mentioned that has to do with them and a conversation they had with someone that I don’t even know. So that sort of like block.
10:07
cognitively, I think has like really been like a meta problem for all of us in every single industry across every state in America. The reality is I don’t think the same is true for other countries. Obviously there’s there’s all kinds of things like I heard over the weekend like Sudan just broke out in civil war, you know, so there’s always diversion throughout humanity. But there’s a lot of other countries that even though there are differences in people, people like are more united. People feel as more like one people.
10:35
And it’s great to have individuality. That’s very important. But at the same time, I think like we all need to come together, even if we disagree and just like have adult conversations, which is something that I’m just noticing less and less happening in the world. And like, that’s such a problem because the less and less you have that, the more that gives people the sort of belief to sort of divorce themselves from the reality and to like make up a narrative that has no truth.
11:03
and then take that narrative and then say, everyone should be doing this. That to me is a huge problem. And like, for example, I started to wake up about a lot of this stuff and like a lot of the stuff that’s like happening in America especially, because I started to dive deeper into nutrition. And I started to see this stuff in nutrition. And I can give different examples if you wanna get down that rabbit hole, but it’s a really interesting scenario in the time that we’re living in history. I’m excited to be a part of it. And just to have conversations with people like you,
11:33
and like other people who are listening to this properly and other guests you’ve had on your show, because we need to come together and we need to start taking actions. Because the reality is, I think about my children and eventually when they’re going to be born one day, we have a lot of work to do, so to speak. At least that’s how I see it. I absolutely agree. And the thing is, it’s very easy for us to demonize somebody else because they don’t believe in what we believe in, which allows us to dehumanize us, which allows us to reinforce that idea of
12:01
them being buffoonish or them being incorrect or me being right and them being wrong. But the reality is you can take two people that grow up in the same family, same background, same schooling, same religion, same nutrition, and you will have completely divergent mentalities. You can also take two that are from the same family that have almost the exact same ideology. And yet if you go down a checklist of enough things, there will be things that they disagree on. So if you had 50 primary things,
12:29
Eventually you would get to number 25 and they say, I believe in this. Well, I don’t believe in that. And that becomes the hot button issue. And now all these other things that we have as a commonality, what do I say in my tech talk? It’s like, if we look at the similarities instead of the differences, we are one big family. That’s what Bruce is saying. Like under the stars or under the heavens, there is but one family. Having said that, that doesn’t mean that we can’t have conversations that are difficult. We can’t push somebody on why they believe something. And then especially because again, beliefs are fine.
12:57
But those beliefs usually lead to action. So that’s why it’s so important to be able to not only understand the belief of somebody else, but also question our own and say, why is what they’re believing hurting me? Or why do I believe that this is, why do I not believe this, whatever the case may be. And if we look at those overarching truths enough, it will come down to, like you said, honesty. Like what’s the best thing here? Can I get this person, can I deploy some sort of pragmatic empathy to them right now, even though there’s this.
13:24
conflict? Do I have the ability to detach, to breathe, to not take this personally? Can I think of my skin enough psychologically to allow them to say what they need to say because this is just simple projection. They’re unhappy about their life. Their nutrition probably is not great, whatever the case may be. And that’s the truth, right? I mean, let’s go into nutrition. Over the last hundred years is pretty much been when the industrial age came in and that’s when there was this industrialization of food. And
13:52
while in many ways it made food less expensive, it made it cheaper in the correct ways or in the ways that it should be nutritionally. So now you have people, again, we’re starting to see this generation, you know, I’m 51. So I grew up on sort of whole food, my, my, most of my life. What do we look at? If you had 20 bucks in your pocket, you’ll get more value. If you go to like a fast food place, or if you go buy a bunch of inexpensive stuff, then if you were to buy meat, vegetables, you know, something that’s actually going to serve you.
14:23
So tell us a little bit about what that is and how we see that coming to fruition right now in the process of our society. You know, it’s crazy. I was having a conversation with someone the other day and we were talking about health problems, right? And I was telling them, you know, when I was a kid, I, you know, had my appendix taken out. had appendix surgery and I was always like one of those kids who like always had stomach problems growing up. And I’d be in and out of doctor’s offices all day, every day. I thought back and I was like,
14:52
Literally not once did a single doctor ever ask me what I was eating or even draw the potential correlation between my stomach hurting and What I was eating never even occurred so you look at that and like you look at like the society we live in There’s a reason why that doctor didn’t tell me that it’s because they were trained in Western medical schools that are predominantly all funded
15:21
by pharmaceutical slash big food companies. And a lot of the times, if you actually look at it, there’s this guy, his name is Cali Means. He’s a former consultant for Coca-Cola. And he really talks about this idea between like in America, what’s really caused a lot of health issues and even mental health issues has been big food and big pharma companies working almost side by side. You know, maybe not so much in a
15:51
coordinated plan, but really sort of like willful ignorance. So like what happens is that in America, we have the NIH, the National Institute of Health, and they fund like studies on nutrition. And private food companies like Coca-Cola, they fund 11 times more than what the NIH funds. That’s a huge problem. If you have huge companies funding studies, they’re only going to fund the studies that favor them.
16:19
Whereas, you know, if you actually have state funding, it might give a more sort of equal representation of the truth versus cherry picking data. And so you have like big food companies that essentially like control science and they create studies that then start mandating sort of national food recommendations. I think I put this up like a year or so on my Instagram and it was like, you know, there was a study done that showed
16:45
95 % of the people who were on the US dietary guidelines, 95 % of them all were funded by big food companies or big pharmaceutical companies. And so you have basically people in society that are supposed to tell people the unbiased truth of what is best. And now they’re using that to basically profit off people’s bodies. And then what happens? They end up getting chronic illnesses, chronic diseases.
17:14
And then the medical industry doesn’t say anything about food. Now, finally, finally, doctors are starting the smart doctors who are a lot of the times self-educated. They take the time and they say, Hey, I actually want to help my patients. So I’m going to go learn about this stuff and find out about the truth. Some of those doctors are, you know, starting to come out, which is awesome, but a lot of them don’t say anything. So you have this sort of willful ignorance from the medical big pharma.
17:44
side that has literally created a culture. I see this every day for my work as a mental health counselor. It has literally created a culture where people believe there is nothing that they can do about their mental health, about their physical health, about their diseases, about the quality of their life, other than to simply take a pill. I’m not saying that all pills are bad and you know, no one should take, but that’s not what saying. But all I’m saying is that that is the current state of America.
18:14
where it has created this culture. And the reality is there are some medications that have saved people’s lives. When World Wars were a thing and people started to come up with antibiotics and things like that, even though they have their own issues today, that saved countless people’s lives. But now it has created this culture, this state, like this public psychological state of mind where people are literally dying. People are literally killing themselves, rotting away.
18:44
because they either don’t know, they’ve been led to believe that, oh, food has nothing to do with it, don’t worry about it. I’ve heard so many doctors say that to, I’ve literally gotten into arguments with doctors and with pharmacists. I talk to them a lot of times, especially like with where I work and my job. And so it’s a crazy scenario, man. And it like led to like this culture to where someone like me, who’s like a mental health counselor, nutrition coach, whatever,
19:10
I don’t want to say that I’m not allowed to say certain things, but there’s a lot of things that I’m not allowed to say. I’ve been reported before. I’ve been, you know, all kinds of stories and things that, you know, I’ve faced simply for just like telling the truth to people that would genuinely change their lives. And yet like we live in such a PC culture, like people are afraid to talk about this stuff, you know? And it’s so sad because I’ve like come to the decision, like I would rather genuinely not be alive.
19:40
than to be dissuaded from telling the truth. And I look back to like my ancestors, I look back to like the history, it’s like the highest forms of like leaders out there. And that’s all they did. All they did was speak the truth and almost every single one of them was persecuted by their society, by their government at the time. That’s honestly the theme of human history. That’s the theme that I wanna continue living because that to me is just like the most meaningful, you know, and I would rather
20:09
go to sleep every night and put my head down knowing that I said what’s truthful. I maybe tried to sway a few people today in the right direction that other people wouldn’t because they’re too afraid or they don’t have it within them to speak or they don’t want to or they don’t know. I’m just trying to do my part and with something as vital as nutrition, it is literally life or death. 75 % of like the mental health crisis is from nutrition.
20:38
No, everyone’s afraid to say that, but then what if someone has this and they can’t do that and this and no one should do this and this point that you’re saying is privileged and it’s so superior and people like you are shaming people and make like it’s this whole culture that’s been created off this. And I see it every day in nutrition and mental health. And it’s so sad. It really is like so sad. And especially like I live in Massachusetts. I live in Boston. So it’s a
21:07
It is a great place to live. I’m grateful I live here, but at the same time, there’s just many schools of thought that are in here. And it’s very interesting, very interesting to the least. it comes back down to the crux of all this is like you said, power, it’s about control. So again, we look at these people throughout history that have bucked against control, bucked against people that are in power, reddened circuses, right? We want to keep people titillated. We want to keep them distracted. And like you said, hand in hand, big pharma food, hand in hand technology, advertisement for
21:37
Big Pharma food. We make it easy. We will deliver it to you. I can hit a button for you right now. It’ll be at your door in 10 minutes. And even though there are healthy ideas, people will not take that. That will not be glued to their screen whenever they try to look up something, right? Big tech and big mental health. It is literally insane. Our society, we’ve always fought against the idea of like, they’re not being a magic pill, right? This idea of like, no matter what you do in life, like there is no magic pill of like literally a pill you have to take.
22:06
and it’ll solve your problems. And yet every day, not every day, sometimes when I watch TV or are on my Instagram or whatever, I’ll see all these ads for someone who they used to be depressed. And then they found an app where they can talk to a therapist in five minutes and then get prescribed literally hardcore narcotics. Like straight up, that is not what we should be doing. And yet, because like mental health has become such a big thing over these last few years.
22:34
All these companies are coming in and they are literally cashing in. You know, I don’t think blanket statements are wise because there’s definitely certain times and certain very specific scenarios under the case of like a medical provider who actually knows what they’re talking about, where that might be appropriate. But like the idea that like we’re going to fix people’s mental health by just
22:59
mass prescribing drugs, it’s terrible. Like it’s not going to work. It’s actually going to make people worse. People don’t have the, the law and the society hasn’t caught up to the damages of this in the next five, 10, 15 years. You know, I don’t mean to be like pessimistic or anything. I can talk to you about this because like we’re two men, everything that we’re seeing today from like all these mass shootings that are happening. This is just the beginning.
23:27
Like I don’t think people realize it the same way that we had a pandemic. Right now we’re having a psychological epidemic. It hasn’t even started yet. And it is very, very scary. I don’t think people understand like the scale of this and like what’s happened in our country over the last 15 years with this big food, with big pharma, with big mental health, with big tech, with kids, with older people. Like this stuff is just starting. I have a lot of hope.
23:56
For sure, I have a lot of faith, but at the same time, we’re just seeing the side effects of this right now. They’re just starting to come out. It’s about to start. I think like the next five, 10, 15 years are going to be incredibly challenging for the world. And I don’t even think it’s started yet. I think that we’ll definitely come out of it in a better spot, but it’s going to take some time for sure. It’s just like anything. It’s going to take adversity to force us to like see what the hell is really going on, to do some honest work.
24:25
And it is going to be ugly, but that’s what’s going to help us get to the next place. When I was in chiropractic school almost 12 years ago, it was the same thing. We’re taking doctorate level nutrition courses because as you said, an MD, what does he do? He’s a vanilla MD. goes to medical school. So medication is what he does. If you go to a surgeon, they’re going to operate on you. You go to a dentist, they’re going to fix on your teeth. Go to a barber, unless you’re me, they’re going to cut your hair. So that’s what they’re designed to do. The idea is this understanding of they’re doing what they think is correct because that’s the only scope of their practice. But again,
24:55
Like you said, you have this person that’s going in, do they not see a correlation? Do they not see the similarity between this person that’s going to Coke that’s as big as their face and the fact that they are tired, lethargic, energy levels are bad, pre-diabetic, type two diabetes on the onset, overweight, demotivated, all these things, right? It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy where it’s like, well, this makes me feel good for right now. And they get that immediate hit of either sugar, dopamine from social media.
25:22
whatever it is, people that believe in what they believe in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of sudden they’re in this, they don’t even realize that they’re in it. And because they can’t see themselves in it, it’s impossible to have any kind of presence to try to make any kind of decisions to get them out of that place. Yeah. I totally agree with you 100%. And you know what’s really funny is that I find it hilarious that like, if you talk to the average doctor, most of them won’t say anything at all about food and nutrition, but they’ll also tell you that
25:50
no matter what you do, don’t eat red meat and eggs. I find that hilarious where it’s like, they don’t tell you anything, literally nothing. But the one thing they say to you usually is, watch out for your cholesterol, eggs, red meat. Which are the two most nutritious, dense food in the world, but yet, don’t have that. Just like you were saying. So we see if we look at what’s going on, like all the inflammation and all the stuff that we see in the arteries where these people are having trouble, that is from inflammation. And what causes a lot of inflammation? Sugar.
26:17
process carbohydrates, all these things that are doing that. So if you’re worried about cholesterol, first of all, cholesterol is good. You have to have a certain amount of it in your body. All the chemicals in your body, a lot of them have cholesterol that’s necessary, which means you need fat, which means all this stuff. But having said that, as you say, what they’re being taught, first of all, it’s 50 years old and it’s wrong. It’s a model that’s out of date and it wasn’t right in the first place. So now trying to push back against that. When I was in San Francisco, there was a physician that I’m out there. He was saying that every day that he was talking to people.
26:46
Just like you said, there was zero agency in them. Zero. Give me a pill, make me feel better. Give me this, give me that. And he was actually one of the people that was brave enough to say, listen, you’re in the process of becoming morbidly obese. Do you take any sort of agency? His general idea was he just said, listen, if you could take a walk, whatever that looks like for you once a day and just reduce or eliminate sugar, processed sugar.
27:13
That would be a beginning step. And even then they didn’t want to do it because like you say, what is it? Essentially they had this glorified victim mentality. It’s somebody else’s job and we cannot farm out our health, our security, our mental state, our beliefs to somebody else. I mean, we can, but we shouldn’t be surprised whenever it’s not in our best interest, right? If I’m asking for permission, it’s probably not going to be in my best interest. It’s called taking action, not asking action. So take action and actually look at what you’re eating, where you’re consuming physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
27:42
psychologically, and then asking, is this going to make me better or worse? Simple exercise like this, is this making me better or worse? And if you eat Doritos or if you drink a Coke and you’re like, man, my joints hurt, maybe let’s go back and see what you’ve been eating. Maybe go back and see what potentially could have triggered that, right? Even with this idea, I mean, veterans, right? I’m a veteran in the VA. It’s impossible for them to fix everybody, especially with what happens to veterans, especially what happens to people that serve.
28:09
But if all you’re giving them is an antidepressant or all you’re giving them is a pain medication. And again, we see this with younger people. You have a person who’s 14 and they’re, they’re dealing with anxiety. My heart goes out to them, but this is part of the growing process. If you say that this gives you anxiety, maybe it does because you need to take action. Maybe you have anxiety about this test because you’re not doing the work necessary to take accountability for yourself. It’s hard to give people a pass on everything and then expect them.
28:39
to actually take any kind of agency or urgency in their own destiny. It’s so sad. And I talk to doctors all the time. And I even talk to doctors who tell me, Mark, I tell my patients to eat healthy and to eat this and not to eat this and to walk and to do this. And they don’t do it. It’s like created this paradigm where this has been like the advice that’s been going around in the cycle for so long that it has sort of been normalized. And people, the vast majority, they expect for that to take place. And like even
29:09
For example, if they have a doctor who tells them, oh, you need to eat healthy or you need to do this, a lot of people, because they have been victims for so long, they will then interpret that as like, oh, this doctor is trying to shame me and trying to tell me to lose weight, for example. And then, oh, I’m just going to go to a different doctor. And of course, yeah, I’m sure there are some doctors out there who unnecessarily shame people and things like that. That’s what I’m saying. It’s become so much a part of the culture.
29:37
You know, it’s very hard for people to break out of it. And the thing is too, is like for kids, it’s even worse because what’s happening is it’s gone past like a social psychological level to now it’s literally at a biological level. Kids that are being born today, there’s this thing called your gut microbiome, right? Which is like a vast ecosystem of bacteria that is directly connected to your brain. And every time you eat food,
30:04
It has a huge part in digesting it. It has a huge correlation with your immune system, cancer, really just every part of your body. And especially with mental health and allergies and autoimmune type issues like asthma and things like that. Kids today that are being born, you get your gut microbiome from your mom. So your mom, maybe they’re like the same as you, they kind of grew up with like half a Whole Foods diet early on in their life. And then as they got older, they switched to the
30:33
highly processed, ultra processed, American standard type food. They have a kid. So then their kid gets that gut microbiome that is already impaired from their mom. So then now you have kids, right? Now they’re being given fried chicken fingers, fried potatoes, chocolate milk at school lunches. So there’s like almost no nutrients going in their body. So like literally what happens over time, you have a certain percentage of kids who don’t have
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the genetic anomalies where they’re able to sort of just like go past this stuff. And then they’re literally, you know, they’re getting asthma, they’re getting allergies, they’re getting skin problems. Some of them are even getting forms of cancer, mental health issues. And then what happens is that like their entire body is now operating in this way where their gut microbiome is heavily inflamed. They’re not eating the right foods. Their body doesn’t have the right nutrients. Their brain doesn’t have the right
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fats, the right protein, the right nutrition, now it’s not functioning properly. Now they can’t learn at school. They have no focus and they can’t go to sleep at night. All of these things come together where it’s like literally unless you get someone like me or someone else who’s like very trained in this stuff to like walk someone through step by step by step in a long-term basis, they’re almost never going to get out of that cycle. And so people now are literally trapped socially, psychologically, biologically.
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under these conditions that make them like, unless you have like someone who comes into your life and who teaches you all these things, they can’t get out of it even if they want to. That’s the really troubling part. And like, that’s why we need people like leaders to step up and start talking about these things of like, no, the school lunch should not look like this. No, the government should not fund this program that actually, you know, does this, it doesn’t help kids, you know? And so we need to…
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start to push the needle and whatever way we can, whether it’s in our own business, individually, our family, some civil governmental level, like we need to start going into these different sort of areas and start pushing against these things because what’s happening is that all of the people who are being born today, unless they come from like some super rare family where their dad and their mom knows what’s happening, which is very rare, they’re going to be born into this condition.
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to where even if they’re hardworking people, even if they’re good people, they want what’s best, whatever, they’re kind to people, they’re not gonna be able to climb out of it. And then you have this whole social, psychological, cultural revolution that’s happening that’s saying, you should accept yourself however way you are, whether you’re depressed and you’re about to kill yourself or you feel like crap all the time, oh, you should accept yourself. And anyone who tells you,
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to eat healthier, to exercise, they’re actually shaming you. And they’re a part of this superiority culture and they think that you’re less than. And so there’s all this like, know, victim culture that’s come in that is almost sort of like a life raft for these people who are at the bottom to cling onto. And then they get older, they’re in their 20s, they’re 25, a lot of them solidify more in that identity. And if they do that, 30s, they’re probably gonna be like that for the rest of their lives.
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It’s like a whole battle, man. Like this is like in a way, especially when I work like where I work, like as a mental health counselor, I would say like this is straight up World War III. Like there’s a battle happening inside of every single person, their mind, their body, their psychology, their consciousness that is then sort of like playing out in this, if you take a step back and everything that’s happening in the world, which I believe is like has always happened throughout human history. It’s just crazy. Like I just think of, for example,
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World War II, right? Where you had all of like these totalitarian governments that were like, man, we got to get information on people. We got to get information. And then now it’s like everyone is willfully putting in their information on social media. You you had totalitarian governments that were like, oh, we’re trying to weaken a population. We’re trying to weaken them. Weakening them. They’re doing that with food, whether it’s intentional or not intentional. And so it’s like all like these bigger patterns throughout history that are still happening today.
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They just look different. I’m 51, so I’ve seen certain things, patterns evolving. But again, even when I study history, again, when we’re in it, it’s hard for us to be that objective. Surely that’s not what’s going on. I mean, that’s what happened before, but that’s probably not what’s happening now. And it’s like, no, it really is. Wake up, take some accountability, take some ownership, even back to what you’re saying about the microbiome, right? How many people that are sick when they go to a doctor, hey, I think I have this, that, or the other. And the doctor’s like, well, we’re going to give you an antibiotic.
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just to be safe, which is a shit protocol. It’s horrible. That’s, that’s a horrible thing to do, but people will do that even if they don’t know if it’s viral or if it’s bacterial, right? And then what does that do? That destroys all of the good bacteria, the good gut bacteria. And people don’t know that they need to build that back up. They don’t need that. can take some sort of like supplementation to give it little bit of a jumpstart and then eat the right foods that will rebuild that. But they don’t understand that. If they’ve been to the doctor three, four or five times, if they’ve had a rough winter, then now what’s going on? They don’t have the building blocks to create.
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Like you said, this physicality, this mentality, the brain functions on different things in different ways. And if all we’re given is processed stuff, a bunch of sugary stuff. Now we have the audacity to be surprised that people’s attention spans are like seven seconds. It’s like, no, that’s all the mental energy that they have literally. And then with the distraction, the rest of the programming, we should not be surprised to see what we’re seeing. What we should be surprised is how long it’s taken for us one, to call the bullshit out and two, to actually begin to take action, whatever that looks like. One of the biggest things that I’ve realized over this last year is that
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I think it’s Martin Luther King. has a quote that says, evil organizes at a much better rate than good sort of organizes. And on top of that too, we now live in a world where if you’re like the average person, right? Like you work, you went to school for something, you have a job for something, you have a family, you just like live a life, you’re living it, right? You’re a good person, you’re trying to be nice.
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There’s now like this culture that’s been created where it’s like, oh, if you speak up about that, or if you have any sort of discernment whatsoever, you are now, you’re something phobic. You’re a conspiracy theorist, you’re anti this, you are, they sort of put you in this sort of bucket that gets rid of sort of your individuality to literally disregard your point and to not even talk and even have like a civil argument about the point in question to even see.
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if it’s a valid point or if it’s a truthful point. I’ve seen that so often with so many different subjects where it’s just like people today, they are so like lukewarm because they’re like sort of afraid of different social repercussions of being perceived as this or that. And like honestly, like over the last like year or so where I’ve sort of tried my best, like speak up about different things. I’ve been called so many different things by so many different groups of people, all the different groups, you know?
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Personally for me, I’m not really afraid of criticism because I spent my life with social anxiety, which is my brain thinking that I’m always being criticized 24 seven. I’m having grown past that. I’m not really afraid of that. But at the same time, I also understand if you get to a certain level of prominence, if you get to a certain level where your audience is a certain size and you talk about certain things, you get put on lists.
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by other organizations that don’t collaborate with you anymore. They don’t invite you anymore to speak if you’re a speaker. I’ve experienced so many things like that. I spoke at a university in Massachusetts. And basically after one of the administrators came up to me, and she basically told me that my speech was very offensive and I offended a group of people. In the speech, literally I didn’t say anything. The speech was like, how to grow your network. I didn’t even talk about nutrition.
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I didn’t talk about anything. And afterwards, I kind of walked out of that. And I’m like, man, I’m all for someone criticizing. Like, I actually like it when people disagree. Like, I genuinely enjoy when people disagree with my ideas or my topics or someone gives me criticism, like valid criticism. I’m all for that. I love that stuff. Like, I actually, when someone disagrees with me, there’s a part of me that gets excited. Because I like to find out the truth. And I understand that I’m not right about everything. You know, I’m sure there’s a lot of things that I’ve got to learn.
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And so I remember like this lady came up to me and like there was no like valid instructive criticism. There was no, oh, you know, this thing. It was just sort of a more like ideological sort of perspective. And I remember when I walked out of that and I kind of like was driving home, I just like kind of remember thinking like, this is one of the reasons why people are not advancing in their minds. And like, I’ll give you an idea, right? There was a time in my life where I was a vegan.
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If people look at my Instagram, I always post things about food, I post things about nutrition. I’ve made a handful of posts that are kind of like, veganism is not a healthy diet. It’s not, you know, people think of eating healthy. A lot of people, they think, oh, you have to go vegan. I vehemently disagree with that. I don’t think it’s going to save the environment or anything like that. You know, there’s always people out there who comment, they say, oh, eating animals, it like rots in your stomach and it’s the root of all disease. And it’s like all things like that.
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And when I hear that, just like, I used to think the same way as you, but I just didn’t stop at one rabbit hole. I kept going. And so a lot of the times, like when people, especially in universities or colleges, our ideas always advance and they progress and they advance and they progress through disagreement, through experience, through learning new things. But then now when we live in a culture where people say, oh, you can’t criticize this or oh, you can’t talk about this, there’s no more sort of public discourse. There’s no public disagreement and people don’t advance.
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their ideas. And the reality is that if someone like this is my belief, if someone is fighting a belief that they know at some level in their psyche that they know is wrong, they’re going to have cognitive dissonance. They’re going to be very emotional instead of sticking to facts and logical points and things that people can agree with. They sort of go to emotional, subjective, cherry picking.
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of like certain scenarios to prove their point because deep down they don’t know that they know it’s an indefensible point. That’s what’s happening in the world, whether it’s with nutrition or this part of society or this thing. And the reality is like, that’s a huge problem. And it’s a, it’s a huge problem for so many different reasons. But you know, one of them is for example, like my parents, they came to America from Egypt. And when you look at, for example, like Egypt, and I went there over the summer.
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There was a time where I was walking through the street and I was recording a video. This is a regular Egyptian neighborhood. There’s very fancy, very rich places where there’s a bunch of celebrities. But I’m in a regular neighborhood and my uncle comes up to me and he’s like, Mark, what are you doing? Put your phone down. And he’s like, you know that if you are recording a street, know a police officer can literally go up to you and arrest you and literally take you in for questioning. Because you’re a US citizen, they probably wouldn’t do anything to you, but it could put you in the…
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like this whole fiasco. I look at like a country like Egypt, which is a great country, but a lot of their governance, a lot of their rules, you know, it’s not right. And a lot of it has to do with like people are not allowed to criticize things. People are not allowed, like through the threat of government force, they’re not allowed to do certain things. Like when you look at America, America was like built off that. It was built off like freedom of speech. It was built off like, Hey, even if you disagree with the government or whoever the highest power,
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you have the right to voice your opinion. And in some ways, you we still have freedom of speech today, but there’s a lot of things that are happening that are almost like warnings, like subtle warnings. These things are slowly slipping away. Like the rights that we have for this are slowly slipping away. And I see it as someone who, you know, I was born here in America, but I see it as someone who my DNA and my family comes from like a different country. That’s why I’m super grateful to have been born here.
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because there’s so many things, there’s so many rights and every country has its problems. And the reality is that there’s so many things in America that make it like the free spirit of the world that don’t happen in other countries. Where like now there’s certain behaviors, show me that. Like, for example, like on Instagram, I have like a post taken down that was like flagged by Instagram. And it was literally a post from Joe Rogan talking about how plant-based meat is not the future. And like, if you look at it, for example, right,
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A lot of the investors in plant-based meat are also the same investors for big tech. There’s sort of all these intersections that are coming together that are trying to create like a narrative. They’re trying to create a path for people to follow and control them in their own certain way. And these paths that a lot of these corporations, these big organizations are carving out, they are not pro-freedom. They are not people living healthy, happy lives. Like they are not these things that
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our ancestors have fought for for thousands of years. It’s a crazy time to be alive, man. What do you think about that? I absolutely agree. And the thing too is it just seems that people bitching complain about how they want more rights and how they want to do more things, but they’re not even exercising the rights that they have right now. And any right that we have that we are not exercising is by default a shrinking right. We don’t have that freedom any longer. So instead of complaining about more freedoms, why don’t you exercise the freedoms that you have now and fight tooth and nail to keep them?
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to stop them from being eroded slowly. The reason why it happens so slowly is because we don’t see it. But like you said, over a five year span, you can absolutely see it’s undeniable. If you look at a pie chart or a bar graph, anything, it will show you where these things are. So if you’re willing to look at it from that standpoint, and that’s the truth, now what do we do? We have this cognitive dissonance because it doesn’t make sense. Now what do we do with it? So I know that we want to be respectful of your time. In the time that we have left, how do we unpack
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How do we reverse the cognitive bias? How do we deal with cognitive dissonance in a way that’s going to be constructive, not only for our country or for the world, but for us as individuals? Because that bias affects every relationship that we have, or in some ways stops that relationship from developing or it regresses. It’s a really tough question, man. I wish I had the answers. Well, the first one I would say is, for me, what I found is, this harming me? First of all, where’s the evidence that this person’s belief is harming me? And oftentimes, you can’t.
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So then what happens if somebody disagrees with what I believe in, what do I do? I look back to the person that taught me that belief. And so in my mind, I’m saying this person doesn’t like that person that taught me this. That means they don’t like my mother, my father, my grandfather, my ancestors. So now it becomes very personal. And then what do we see also? Like you said, if you understand that there is cognitive dissonance and it’s not making sense and we don’t have a leg to stand on intellectually, what do we do? We double down, triple drown, quadruple down on that.
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We react, we don’t respond. And a lot of the stuff that we see from people that are this anger, whether it be men or women, if we look below it, it’s actually fear. It’s fear that they may be incorrect. It’s fear that they won’t even look at this from another standpoint. It’s the fear that they won’t even go one level deeper, just in case, just out of curiosity. And if we could do that, if we had the courage to make that decision and say, you know what, I’m to look at this and what happens, it has to be adversity. We have a friend, we have a loved one, we have a parent, somebody that’s sick and now
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We’re trying to help them. What do we do? Now we go through it down the rabbit hole and hours like, I don’t care about these biases. I don’t care about what side of the aisle this is on. I want to find the truth so I can help this person. And that’s often where we can actually find the real truth and that opens up another world for us. Yeah, definitely man. You know, I think there’s so many different angles, but the angle that I’m going to approach this from, maybe, maybe you won’t like it. I’m sure some people won’t like it, but that’s fine. I feel like so many of the problems that we have now.
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is because we live largely in a godless society. And when you look at the roots of morality and the root of how do we even know what is truth or not truth, it comes from this basic idea of God, where even if two people who disagree with each other, we know that, for example, we have the same sort of God. And when you look at a lot of these different ideologies,
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that I think are negatively hurting the world. A lot of them, if you actually look at like the basic tenants of them, they are almost like pseudo spiritual religions where they sort of believe in this thing and they have like these stories and sort of these whole practices. And I understand people have maybe different ideas, different beliefs, but I just think that we all need to like come back down to that, to like where, you know, we might have different religions, maybe different gods.
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But I think just like the belief in sort of like a deeper lens of reality, like a spiritual world that’s like tied through God, that’s what we need because like that has been slowly, slowly, slowly like stripped away of everyone. And I understand that people have sometimes very extreme experiences to where they grew up in this religion. So then now they hate everyone who’s in that religion, you know? And so everyone, everyone has their own ideas and I don’t judge people for their own.
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and what they believe is right or wrong. But I think like no matter who you are, we have to get back to like living in a society where people believe in God. People are not just sort of like these like biological flesh humans and everything is subjective and it’s all like my truth and to get back to like an original core so that all of us in our society, no matter what we look like, no matter what we think, we can all start to like move together.
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on the same team and advance people. You know, I’ve never really thought about that as like a solution, but I think that’s a huge thing, you know? And I think to like all these horrendous things that are happening, and I think a lot of mental health issues, a lot of it comes from like a lack of spirituality because like the human mind is half a primitive animalistic dirt and bones sort of biological entity, but it’s also very sort of
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metaphysical and spiritual and infinite in a way. And when people remove their sense of spirituality, they completely 100 obliterate every aspect of religion. They don’t believe in God. They don’t believe in anything. What happens is like that part of our brain that is sort of unbound just sort of kind of grows crazy. And that might not happen to every single person. It’s a basic like foundation of our society where
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we all have to sort of be tied together by some spiritual, some religious, some God type of situation. We all have to. And everyone, am I like different for everybody? But I think that’s like so, so, so, so, so, so important. And like the reality is like that is actually the true freedom. Like if you actually look at history and like you look throughout the past, the number one thing of like, know, freedom of speech, it was always tied to freedom of religion.
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Because all throughout history, for thousands of years, governments and other religions have always persecuted other religions. Because a lot of times these religions, they were almost like these vessels. They were almost like these vehicles. Throughout history, there’s been periods of a lot of bloodshed and war and mass destruction and environmental chaos, like during the Black Ages and bubonic plagues.
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where it’s like, yeah, you maybe not every religion is great in every single aspect. It’s still like a human organization. But a lot of the times, like if you look at it, all these religions have been persecuted, have been committed genocides on for thousands of years because they knew if someone was in like a religion that tied them to like the truth to God, they were the ones that had the power to actually rebel against the government because they understood that their real ruler
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was not the king, was not the government official. It was someone who has power over all humans, God and a more spiritual sort of side to our lives. And I feel like that has sort of slowly been obliterated, especially like in America, especially in lot of Western countries over the years. And what’s happened, you have, whether this is a symbol or this is a real thing, you basically have evil, you have the devil.
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coming in in all these areas of our society to really control people where people have sort of removed God, they removed spirituality. Because the thing is, whether we like it or not, whether someone is an atheist or not, spirituality is a real thing. And so there is good and there is bad spirituality. It’s like the same way that there’s a battlefield here on earth between good and evil. The same exact thing is true for the spiritual world. There’s also a battle.
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in the spiritual realm between good and evil, between good and bad, truth versus dishonesty, corruption versus honor. And so all these things are happening and when there’s been like a void of God, which is the symbol of morality and good, all of a sudden we start to see all these different things in society where real darkness is starting to creep up. And I believe that a huge part of that has to do
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with this void, this, and anytime there’s sort of a void, a huge sort of player gets removed, there’s always a power vacuum. And then whoever has the most power gets in there. And so I think that’s exactly what’s happening now at sort of a spiritual level. And you see it at every single layer of our society, every single layer of our government, every single layer of our psychology, every single layer of every organization, every institution. And so…
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I think that that is really like one of the things that we are going to have to look at a lot more in 2023. And like there’s a reason why people are all of our ancestors for thousands of years have been spiritual religious believed in God, you know, and it’s not random. Like there’s a reason why a lot of these things were passed down. No, there’s definitely exceptions. Some of those religions were passed down through the threat of violence, through murder. If you leave this religion, you get killed.
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We’re going to invade your country. We’re going to force every, you know, so there’s a lot of that stuff too. But at the end of the day, I see this stuff every day. Like I see this stuff every day. And I see, I now see the world as like from a spiritual lens of like every day I see this, in a spiritual battle and what we see in the world, that’s just sort of the physical representation of what’s happening, you know? And then for example, right. Every once in a while you get a leader in history who comes in.
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at the right time, classic example, Hitler, World War II. If you look at Hitler, he was diagnosed by a psychologist before he became Hitler. And in his psychiatry report, it’s literally written, mass psychosis, schizophrenia needs to be hardcore evaluated, put into a thing. And so the way that I think about it is every once in a while, you get someone who is the right amount of charisma, the right leader, the country’s suffering a certain amount.
54:29
And they don’t have God. There’s no sense of morality and whatever you want to call it, evil darkness, the devil slips in. And all of a sudden you see tens of millions of people all of a sudden get controlled by sort of this force that makes them do the most terrible things in history. You know, it’s like, that’s an example of how like the spiritual then enters into the physical world if we don’t do anything about it. Or if there’s sort of a power vacuum, which I think is happening today. And so.
54:59
Yeah, man. So I appreciate you for inviting me on. know I just went on a little tangent there, but. No, but that, it’s the truth and all it takes for evil to conquer is for good men and people that actually have courage to remain silent. So when you see this, wherever it is, step in front of it, stand up for what you believe in. Because frankly, that single decision may be that small domino that empowers others, that emboldens others, or builds that belief in yourself, because we’re influencing everybody, whether we’re aware or not. The idea is to make the impact through the actions.
55:29
and not just sitting around bitching and moaning about it. And Mark, you’re actually out there on the front lines making it happen. I know you’ve got to go on and be respectful of your time. Follow Mark Metry on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on TikTok. Where else can we get ahold of you? Oh, hell no, I’m not on TikTok. I know you weren’t. no. You’re like, no, no, no, that’s evil. Yeah, when I downloaded TikTok three years ago, I didn’t even use it I could just tell that there was something off about it. I have a YouTube channel, Mark Metry. I’ve been trying to post videos on that.
55:57
Yeah, that’s it, man. Instagram, LinkedIn. If anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out to me. I always try to make myself the most available as I can. Marcus, I appreciate you. I appreciate everyone out there for listening. This is a whole experience and I wish everyone out there the best of luck and take action. Skip the words. Yeah, skip the words. It’s okay to plan, but actually taking action is everything. And I look forward to talking to you again soon, either via Zoom on the phone or in person somewhere. Thank you, Thank you, brother.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
