Barbell Shrugged - Barbell Shrugged  — The Primal Lifestyle w/ Mark Sisson  — 330

Episode Date: August 15, 2018

Mark Sisson is founder of Primal Nutrition and Primal Kitchen, a fitness author, blogger, and a former distance runner, triathlete and Ironman competitor. He is also the author of numerous books, including The Primal Blueprint, which was credited with turbocharging the growth of the primal/paleo movement back in 2009.   In 2017, Mark officially became a New York Times bestselling author with The Keto Reset Diet. He is also the publisher of MarksDailyApple.com, the #1-ranked blog for over a decade in its health and fitness category.   In this episode, we dive into intermittent fasting, hormone balance, creating health products for longevity, nutrition and lifestyle certifications, implementing healthy practices into fitness facilities, and much more.   Enjoy! - Doug and Anders Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs_sisson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please support our partners! @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20% @thrivemarket - www.thrivemarket.com/shrugged for a free 30 days trial and $60 in free groceries @OMAX - www.tryomax.com/shrugged and receive a free box of Omega 3 Fish Oils @Onnit - www.onnit.com/shrugged for a free 14 pill bottle of the leading nootropic Alpha Brain and 10% savings on all purchases. @foursigmatic - www.foursigmatic.com/shrugged  to save 15% on your first purchase ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Shrugged family, we are hanging out with Mark Sisson this week. This guy is a total savage. When we interviewed him, is there anybody that is like 65 years old that looks like they're 35 better than Mark Sisson? I don't know what that guy does, but I will do whatever it takes to look like that guy. How about now? Not even when I'm 65. I don't have time to wait around to look like that guy does, but I will do whatever it takes to look like that guy. How about now? Not even when I'm 65. I don't have time to wait around to look like that guy. He's in phenomenal shape and he is living the life. And if you've been following him from Mark's Daily Apple all the way through what he's up to now, it is a very, very impressive career that he's put together,

and I am stoked that we got to talk to him down at Paleo FX, and I think you're going to enjoy the interview. I want to, never talked about this on the intro before, but we have, if you're not a part of our mailing list, look, you're only getting a small piece of me every Wednesday. When you could be getting a daily piece of me in your inbox every single morning. I send out a daily email and I talk about training. I talk about awesome products. I talk about show sponsors that are helping us do all the things that we need to do. And I also do a lot of just like fitness advice. I get

a lot of questions from people. A lot of people hanging out in the DMs. Last week, I was at XPT, the XPT experience in Malibu at Laird and Gabby's house and had a really awesome conversation. And I just want to give you a little taste of pretty much what you can get on the daily from me in the email. I hope everyone gets over to shrugcollective.com and gets signed up for the email list because I don't just write these things every single day because they make people laugh or cry or whatever happens. I really think that the information that we're putting out is, is really high quality. And, um, I do a lot of just answering questions that people ask me on a daily basis in there. Uh, this one from today, as I'm recording this called exactly where you are supposed to be. Um, I got this question from a girl that was at the XPT life

experience as an intern. Um, and it's a question that I get a lot. What advice would you give to someone that is coming up in the fitness industry? I was asked this question last Wednesday during the XPT Experience hosted by Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reese, and PJ Nessler. I was talking to the 28-year-old trainer. She had been to the experience before

and runs an XPT training program on her own in Denver. She was flown out to intern for the week to learn more about the program for future opportunities. My response was simple. You are exactly where you are supposed to be. It's easy to look for simple answers to large questions. We all want to know the specific decision that made the largest impact in the billionaire success story. Here's the sad truth. It doesn't exist.

It is a whole lot of small things that seem very unimportant landing you in a place that seems less glamorous the day that you reach your goal. Sounds depressing, right? It is until you learn how to hack the system. You have to create a way of thinking so that you start believing that every single experience you have is your big break. The goal is to maximize every experience. Learn as much as possible and use that information as a chapter in the epic story that is your life.

There are probably 30 people at the XPT experience. 20 of them pay their way, 8 are staff, and 2 are interns. Of all of the attendees, 99% of them have an undergraduate degree. Probably 40% of them have an advanced degree. All of them are learning the same fitness curriculum. Of all the people that have gone to an XPT experience, Gabby and Laird chose her to come back on their dime. She gets to spend three whole days watching the highest performers in the world coach, educate, communicate, and train. Guess what? She made it. To be in that group, someone that is the best in the world saw something in you that made them spend their money, invite you into their home and business,

and give you the opportunity to work and learn. Yes, you are in the exact place that you are supposed to be. You're surrounded by the exact people that are going to take you to the next level. Everything in front of you is happening exactly like it is supposed to. The hard part is recognizing it as special. You have to believe that every moment is special. You have to embrace that moment as special and something that can alter the course of your life. Almost every relationship I've ever had starts in a seemingly meaningless way. Most of them turn out to be duds, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes they land you at Laird and Gabby's on their dime and you get to learn from them,

ask them questions, and see how they affect the way people think. You're in the exact place you're supposed to be because the people around you are investing their time, energy, money, and resources into making you better. In fact, the only way you're not in the exact place you're supposed to be is by disrespecting their resources, wondering when your big break is going to happen, and not realizing that the big break is happening right in front of your eyes. I think it's really important for all of us, no matter what industry we're in,

whether we're coaches, Jesus, financial advisors, accountants, it doesn't matter. But as long as you're on the path to being the best that you can be, every moment that is happening to you has this incredible opportunity to alter the way you think, the way you see the world. And we need to start recognizing

that we are catching our big break every time someone invests their time, their energy and money into our success. Hope that finds you somewhere in your day where you're wondering where the next step is and realizing that there is the next step is happening right now. And all you have to do is kind of open your eyes and realize how special it is that you're surrounded by the people that you're surrounded by. I want to thank our sponsors at Organifi. I'm a huge fan of these guys.

We talk about them every week. We love having them around. Organifi, the green drink, the red drink, the gold. Make sure you get to Organifi.com backslash shrug, all the vitamins, all the minerals. If you're on the road at all, if you're sitting at a desk, if you are an athlete, trust me, you're not getting all the vitamins and minerals you need in your life. Get over to Organifi.com backslash shrug. You're going to save 20% by using the coupon code shrugged and make sure you get into the program vault. We've got 12 programs in there now.

It's growing. Membership's growing. Facebook group's growing. My ability to coach you on the internet, the love for that is definitely growing. I just love seeing all the people that are in there PRing, getting better, moving better, feeling better, everything. All of it's getting better.

Shrugcollective.com backslash vault. And enjoy the show with Mark Sisson. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner. We're at Paleo FX hanging out with our boy Doug Larson. Adam Bonrothfelder's in the house, and we are here with the true legend today and the primal blueprint creator. You're like the original caveman. OG here.

Yeah, right. OC, original caveman. That's it. I have been waiting to do this interview for, I don't know, 10, 12 years. We were just talking about it. I'm excited about this. This is super cool. Not only that, I turned 35 today.

Our boy, Mr. Strong Coffee, turned 36 this morning when we woke up. Nice. And you still look younger than us. Oh, yeah. How is this possible? Yeah, I'll be 65 in July. Really? Yeah.

65. The dude's getting it done way more than we are, too. For sure. Look at him. He looks so young. I need to work out more or something. You've been slipping since this morning. You're over the hump now at 35.

I know. I know. It's all downhill from here. Leading up to 35, you're like, oh, mid-30s, early 30s. 36, late 30s. Yeah, there you go. That's the slipperiest slope there is. I got one year.

My wife, real quick, she wished me a happy birthday before I came here, and she made a cake with the kids. And all of a sudden I hear, oh, shit, come from the kitchen. And she's like, I got a nine instead of a six. So she brings out the birthday cake, and it says 39 on it. And I'm like, what? You know, like it was a crystal ball to my future. Turn it upside down.

Yeah, exactly. You got it, man, right? Before we kick this thing off, I'm sure everybody is at least somewhat aware of you, but can you give us just a brief little background? Sure, yeah. Ex-endurance athlete, marathoner in the 70s, probably before your parents were born. Triathlete in the 80s. Again, original kind of dinosaur triathlete.

Chasing performance my whole life. always interested in health and fitness and as i got more and more fit i got less and less healthy so started to fall apart uh too early in my uh racing career um quit the racing and decided to dedicate the rest of my life to figuring out ways to be strong lean fit happy healthy productive with the least amount of pain suffering and sacrifice because all the shit i was doing was very was was painful it's just managing pain as a as an endurance athlete uh spent the next uh 30 years 35 plus years chasing human performance but more for the masses than for athletes uh written 10 books now 11 books mostly based around evolution and the the ability that we have to affect our future recreation. That would be how we rebuild, renew, regenerate ourselves on a moment-to-moment basis

based on how our genes respond to the signals we give them from the foods we eat, the type of movement we choose to do, the sun exposure sun exposure the amount of play how we use our brain all these things so it's a primal blueprint became a lifestyle sort of template so how early was too early real quick uh you said your body broke down early i mean i had racing how old were you when you started experiencing yeah this chronic pain so i was 27 in 1980 when i had to had to quit uh marathon racing and i shifted over to triathlon. I did two years of triathlon, finished fourth at Ironman in Hawaii, and then just said, you know what? It hurts too much. I'm still too injured. And when I say I switched from, I got injured in running, I couldn't run 100 miles a week anymore at a high level. But I could ride a bike. So my injuries were sort of like

osteoarthritis and tendonitis in my hips. So I could ride a bike and I could swim. I just couldn't run 100 miles a week. i i leveraged my running experience into triathlon yeah when you hear the word paleo now yeah you kind of created this whole uh movement a little bit but what does it what does that mean to you anymore and like the primal side of things i helped advance it i didn't create it but but i'll give it to you. You don't have to. Whatever. Take it. You got it. But if we go back 10 or 15 years,

again, looking at how evolution shaped who we are today and how we've lost track of that and lost control of that, the term paleo seemed to be appropriate to describe the lifestyle of our ancient ancestors, and particularly in the early days, paleo was basically really about diet and what they ate and how that created an expectation of our genes. Our genes are this recipe that wants to build us strong and lean, has certain expectations of certain inputs.

If we don't give it those inputs, if we give it, you know, ho-hos and ding-dongs and Coca-Cola and, you know, Big Macs all the time, we're going to fall apart, which we see in society. So paleo became a great initial operating term. I think, unfortunately, over the last, well, last five years, you know, it's kind of declining in popularity as a search term. I think it's been too attached to the caveman experience and less associated with what it should be, which is an ancestral approach to health, which is basically looking at, you know, real food,

getting a lot of sleep, moving, movement patterns that are building us up rather than tearing us down and things like that. So, I mean, I have great expectations for where the world is headed in this in this movement in this ancestral world i mean that's one of the original reasons that i chose primal as my brand uh and stayed away from the word paleo is i felt that paleo again had that connotation of kind of the caveman um you know camp out in your backyard and hunt for neighbors pets for whatever it was it was some kind of the caveman, you know, camp out in your backyard and hunt for neighbors' pets, or whatever it was. It was some kind of, you know, kind of weird pigeonhole that a lot of people got turned off. I mean, a lot of people got attracted to it, right, for the same reasons.

But a lot of people got turned off to it. So Primal became of primary importance, you know, sort of the Primal urge, primal scream kind of thing. So I'm glad I spent the time to work on a brand name that had a little bit more mass appeal across a broad spectrum. So have you always kind of eaten the way that you eat now, or did you make like a full 180 shift, like being an endurance athlete? Was it like super high carb, low fat back in the day, and then total flip? Yeah, I mean, if you look, I mean, the legendary diet of Michael Phelps would be a good example. You know, you see what that cat used to eat during his training and racing days.

It was like 10,000 calories. Yeah, which I would sometimes, you know, I'd take a little bit of an issue with it. I don't think you can on a regular basis shove that amount of calories down your pile, but maybe. It makes for a good clip on a news story. He once ate 10,000 calories in a day. Yeah, yeah. But, no, I was, you know, there was a time, first of all, when everybody in the science world thought that this whole endurance experience

was about managing glycogen. It was about managing carbohydrate intake and making sure, because, you know, if you run out of glycogen, you know, you hit the wall, the ball game's over. Covert Bailey wrote a book called Fit or Fat, and his sort of key word was fat burns in the carbohydrate flame. You know, and so there's a lot of this. One of the greatest science writers and researchers around, Tim Noakes, you know,

promoted this thing about managing carbohydrates and managing glycogen and carbo-loading and all this stuff. So for decades, that's what we did. As endurance athletes, you managed glycogen and carbo loading and all this stuff so for decades that's what we did as endurance athletes you managed glycogen stores and and yeah you sort of realized that maybe you were going to train yourself to burn fat uh just by the very nature of putting in the miles there was still this uh this requirement that you had to keep taking in carbohydrates to keep doing it and then the irony of being an endurance athlete is you do it every single day. So you deplete carbohydrates on day one on a long workout, and then if you're going to do a long workout the next day,

you've got to replenish carbohydrates. And so you get into this cycle where you're taking in, I mean, I was taking in minimum 500 and sometimes 1,000 grams of carbs a day. And, again, if you do the math, 1,000 grams of carbs is only 4,000 calories. You know, so it's not like 10,000. But what do you think about 1,000 grams of carbs? That's insane. Is that all liquid drinking?

No, no, God. Well, beer. There's a lot of beer in there. This is back in the days when some of the best runners in the world were drinking copious amounts. I mean, they were basically shit-faced every night. And then going out and running hard again the next day. Because beer was a legitimate carbo-loading modality, if you will. But, you know, lots of spaghetti, lots of bread, pasta, cereal.

Yeah, there was an attempt to get some whole grains in there. But that in and of itself became problematic for me, the whole grain side of things. So I went from, I didn't do a 180. It was a gradual turn, like a big, you know, an oil tanker trying to turn around. They don't really do a 180. But, yeah, it was first of all recognizing when I had to quit that I didn't need that amount of calories. And I was kind of afraid that I was going to get skinny fat because I was never going to get big. I figured I'd put on some fat if I kept eating like that, some body fat.

So I cut back on the amount of food I was eating. And then I started doing the research on healthy fats. And I realized that I had been missing some healthy fats in my diet again in in conjunction with this sort of uh accepted mantra that you needed a carbo load was you had to avoid fats because of heart disease right so i had to again it was like the worst of both worlds not the best of both worlds so i started increasing the amount of healthy fats in my diet i started looking i'd always been doing research i was uh you know i was a biology major in college i was pre-medmed. I'd sort of chased performance through diet from the early days anyway, even though the advice was wrong. I was reading all the books.

Robert Haas wrote a book called Eat to Win. It was really very carb-centric and so on. So over the time, I decreased the amount of carbs, increased the amount of fat, and then I was cutting way back on the work. And that was the other thing that I realized that I had been working way too hard. And that they were, as I started coaching people, professional athletes in my late 30s, and I was still keeping up with them. I was like, I had these guys that were racing for world championships, and I'd be out training with them.

Not every day, and that was the big issue. I could train with them once or twice a week and ride with them or run with them. I just couldn't do it every day. So as I got older, my recovery time expanded. I needed more recovery time. But my performance was still right up there on probably 30% of the work that I'd been doing

in the height of my career. So I started to put these things together that we don't need to train that much. Recovery is critical to this. I started to realize that this idea of burning fat was really critical to endurance performance, that you had to learn how to burn fat. And if you could burn fat and then offset the need to take in extraneous carbohydrates, that would be a great performance enhancer. So over the years, you know, I developed this Primal Blueprint,

which looked at what is, about 15 years ago, I created the Primal Blueprint Carbohydrate Curve. And it's this thing that I doodle on a napkin. And it basically had these divisions of, you know, zero to 50 was in ketosis, 50 to 100 sort of the sweet spot for weight loss. 100 to 150 is like maintenance for your weight. And then anything above 150 on a daily basis in terms of grams of carbs was problematic. And I caught a lot of shit for it in the early days. Like, how can you possibly say this? It's been 15 years since I created that chart. And every single year it gets more and more clear to me that was pretty much spot on.

We talked to Mike Nelsonelson yesterday the metabolic variability turns out oh maybe you were on to something yeah no exactly so um and and what comes from that is that nobody needs more than 150 grams of carbs a day i don't care what you you know if you're an endurance athlete and you haven't trained in keto and you haven't uh you know become fat adapted or keto adapted maybe you need more than that. But you don't need 500. What about Ben? Ben Pekulski right there, like former top ten bodybuilder in the world.

Would a guy like that need more than 150 grams of carbs a day just to be fucking huge? No, but I know. But, I mean, you know, we have a lot of humans. Sure, sure, sure. Not Ben Pekulski. No, but that's a good point because if you're trying to do something – We're talking about you right now. If there's something –

You can come up and monitor the conversation. Yeah, well, I'm out. If you are an outlier and you want to do some inhuman activity, inhumane activity, then you take other measures. But if you're trying to be human, and no offense because he's human, but you know what I mean, if you're trying to be sort of, no offense, I'm sorry, fit that paradigm, if you're trying to fit that paradigm, then you don't need more than 150 grams of carbs a day.

So this all became, it coalesced about 15 years ago into sort of a template that I wanted to explore as a as um something that would work for just about everybody and uh you know a general guideline and it included um you know eating lots of plants and animals and avoiding um toxic foods and this became the sort of part of the whole food movement uh moving around a lot at a low level of activity um lifting heavy things once in a while sprinting once in a while getting plenty of sleep so that became the the primal blueprint template but in the on the food side um it continues to evolve because i uh i like i did a keto experiment two years ago and i was fine by the way at 15 years i'd given up grains that was

the biggest thing in my life that was That was life-changing for me. That's what really set me on this path was when I got rid of my arthritis, when I got rid of my joint pain, when I got rid of my gastroesophageal reflux, when I got rid of my irritable bowel syndrome that had run my life, everything changed. And I was like, holy crap, here I am thinking whole grains are supposed to be good for you. I've been eating them my whole life. I've been defending my right to eat grains in the face of guys like

Lauren Cordain who started to write about anti-nutrients and things like that. When I got rid of grains, that was when I said, I've got to tell the world about this shit. So I started Mark's Daily Apple basically to do that. And so in the ensuing decade, I was great. Great body fat, great body composition, if I do say so myself. I'm incredibly good looking. We'll confirm.

You're listening on the radio right now. I've seen you on the beach. We'll confirm. So, you know, I had great energy, never got sick. You know, all these things that we look for. And then, you know, I'm a researcher, and I started looking at keto just as a modality for treating certain uh neurological diseases and it's and it occurred to me that keto might be just the next level stuff in in um human performance and because i even though i was

fine where i was i wasn't feeling like i could you know i i'm always looking for the next thing in my life i just you know i'm a performance chaser so I thought well I'll just do a keto experiment see what happens and you know I did two months of deep keto and I felt great I had more energy I I literally uh felt like I put on a little bit of muscle which I thought was almost impossible when you're keto um you know my some of the lingering minor joint stuff went down even further you know diminished even further um i found that i didn't need as much sleep at night to get the same quality of sleep so it was compelling to me so i decided to write a book about keto and then as i got into the research writing the book i realized this is keto is just a tool it's calling upon human evolution uh you know we only exist today

because our ancestors 10 000 50 000 a million years ago had access to keto keto is what kept us alive it's this ability to take stored body fat and burn it burn the fat in the muscles for real energy but then because the brain typically wants glucose and if you don't eat carbohydrates for three days or four days you there's no glucose available but to be able to take some of the the of the fat, send it to the liver and make ketones, which offsets the need for glucose. It's such an elegant system that we developed. It's why we live today.

And yet most people, like, never tap into that system. So I just thought by tapping into that system, I could increase my metabolic flexibility and by that i mean the ability to extract energy from stored fat on my body from fat on my plate from from glycogen in my muscles from carbohydrates on my plate uh from the ketones that my liver is making and last and hopefully least from amino acids in the form of uh gluconeogenesis i'm just curious you talked about how incredibly shredded and good-looking you are. What did it look like? What is your body comp when you're eating 1,000 grams of carbs a day?

So, you know, because I was running 100 miles a week. Just paper thin? Yeah. So I'm not a big guy, right? I'm 168 to 170 pounds on a good day if I've been in the gym with any regularity. So I raced at 30 pounds less than that. Oh, wow. So I raced at 138 to 140.

And by the way, at that weight, at 5'10", I was still a big marathoner. Yeah. You know what I mean? Not big. I was probably 7, 8 pounds more than I should have been. And yet the same body fat level. So you can imagine how much less muscle I had in those days. What happened to all those calories?

A, they got burned by running. B, they got, and this is where it gets interesting, I think. They, you know, this spontaneous thermogenesis. I just ran hot all the time to the extent that i would you know sweat in my sleep in a cold room the uh so the body adjusts for excess calories by turning up the the furnace and that's not a good thing so a lot of people in a lot of people would would think that's a bingo so yeah no that's exactly yeah yeah so people are are kind of like have these assumptions about how much food is an appropriate amount of food, right? And I think everybody that probably everybody that we know and everybody, you know, around tries to see what they can get away.

What's the most amount of food I can get away with and not gain weight? What's the most amount of this dessert I can have and not feel like crap or whatever? So it's this mentality of like, I want to eat more. And you know, you go to the gym and you see people on the treadmill and they're doing four or five hundred, six hundred calories on the readout. And it's like, okay, what are you doing? You training for a 10K or a marathon? Oh no, I just like to eat. So I'm going to the gym and I'm struggling and suffering and sweating and groaning, you know, for 45 minutes so I can go back and have a few more bites of something I probably shouldn't have in the first place. So this mentality that we have about, you know, how much food is appropriate to keep us going, it's based on this excessive consumption model, right, where we're trying to –

and so in the gym, people are trying to build a fast metabolism. Why? So they can eat more food. It's just ridiculous if you think about it. So the issue isn't whether you can eat more food. The issue is do you get hungry? Because if you don't get hungry, who cares if you eat more food? If you're not hungry, if you're finished eating and you're not hungry,

and whether or not you finish what's on your plate, the issue is really what's the least amount of food I can eat? Maintain muscle mass or gain muscle mass. Maintain energy. Never get sick. And most importantly, not be hungry. Because if I'm hungry, everything falls out the window. But if I'm not hungry and I'm maintaining my mass, I'm actually a more efficient human being.

So now we get back to longevity. And people are tracing a fast metabolism just because so now we get back to longevity and people are tracing a fast metabolism just because they want to be able to eat more food or they think a fast metabolism is going to somehow help them you know burn off uh extra calories in some cases it will but there's a downside to that and in the animal kingdom animals that have the highest the fastest metabolism live the shortest lifespans and those that have a slower metabolism tend to live longer. So if you're in this realm and you're trying to maximize longevity, you don't want to be chasing a fast metabolism.

You actually want to be chasing, and this is in my estimation, some lowered metabolism so you rev at a very low rate when you're resting. And you could go hard whenever you go hard, but there's no reason to go hard all the time every day. I've heard you talk about some of your, like, when you, say, have a piece of cheesecake, that you can take a bite of it, and you're like, that one bite was what I needed. And by the second bite, you're past the moment of wanting cheesecake. Or the fourth or fifth. Right, right, right., you're past the moment of winning cheesecake. No, or the fourth or fifth. Right, right, right.

But you're right. There's a diminishing return to, you know, if you look at hedonistic tendencies, you know, that first bite is freaking awesome almost every time. And then the second bite is like, oh, it's great. You know, almost as awesome. By the fourth or fifth bite, you know, to quote, I think it was Winston Churchill, you know, we've established what you are. Now we're just haggling over price.

To see if we can finish the piece of cheesecake that the establishment served up as a, quote, serving, or that the hostess served up as a serving of dessert. And who's to say what a serving is? Maybe a serving is just three or four bites or four or five bites or one bite. But the point is I'm not suggesting that people avoid those sort of hedonistic foods like cheesecake. I just happen to call it cheesecake because it's one of my favorite. I can't remember what other podcast I was listening to you were talking in great detail about cheesecake. But, I mean, my favorite experience for dessert ever was Cherry Garcia ice cream with creme de cassis on it.

I got the Cherry Garcia. What's the rest of that? Creme de cassis is a liqueur that's made from berries. There you go. Yeah. And I would, you know, there was a day when I would eat a half gallon of ice cream every, well, a day. It was a night. There was a time in my life, about ten years, I would eat a half gallon of ice cream every day, at the end of the day, every night.

And if I didn't have any in the house and it was 10 o'clock at night, I'd go down to Thrifty's and buy a big brick of whatever, chocolate, chocolate. Sounds like my MMA fighting. Go home and just kill a pizza and some ice cream because you felt calorie loss. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, that's the burden of a sugar burner where you've depleted all those carbohydrates. You know you're going to have to go do it again tomorrow. You're not good at burning fat because you haven't done the work and you haven't adapted your diet to a fat adaptation modality.

And so now you're just chained to the carbohydrate treadmill. But all of this, you know, in the actual food, like there's a progression of it. Now you're, well, you have been, but with the Primal Kitchen this in the actual food, there's a progression of it now. You have been, but with the Primal Kitchen and creating your own food, so it's much easier for people to find this stuff. Nice segue. I love it. I got your game here. I know you've got to be out of here in 20 minutes. Mark slipped you a 20 before the show.

He invited me to speak on his panel here afterwards. You guys didn't know. So, one of the things that I've been you know i've been involved in writing a lot about food and clean food on mark's daily apple and in my books and i'm i'm trying to espouse you know this lifestyle where people are getting healthy fats and not trans fats and partially hydrogenated fats and oils and uh cutting back on sugars and processed and processed carbohydrates and getting back to a real food diet. Well, it's hard sometimes to eat a real food diet on a hectic lifestyle that we have.

What we do a lot on Mark's Daily Apple is we do a lot of recipes. And over the years, the recipes have involved sauces that are healthy sauces that use healthy oils and impart not just better taste to the foods, but actually impart some functionality to the food. And I realized after banging my head against the wall for 10 years on Mark's Daily Apple that I was writing so much about food, and yet these foods didn't exist in the marketplace, the ones that I would buy myself. So I started creating healthy sauces, dressings, and toppings, the things that you could put on food that would impart great taste and then added functionality. And so literally, not only great taste, but the concept was the more you put on the food,

the healthier the meal became. And my biggest, the bone I've had to pick with the health food industry for the longest time is everybody would sort of agree that a big salad full of lots of different colorful vegetables is one of the healthiest things you can eat a big ass salad a big ass salad uh one of the from elaine from seinfeld oh no no no she had the big salad she stole it from you she stole it for me no but here's what happened i back in 1981 or 82 seinfeld you're about to get called yeah no shit no shit no i i almost uh started a store a retail store called the Big Ass Store.

And we're just going to sell giant versions of everything, right? And it was going to be the Big Ass Store. And my to-be partner at the time was one of the largest purveyors of ski equipment. Buddy Hoffman was his name. And Any Mountain Sports and Cupertino. Shout out to Buddy. But anyway, so we bagged that idea. But I've been like the Big Ass guy for a long Buddy. But anyway, so we bagged that idea. But I've been like the big-ass guy for a long time.

So anyway, so big-ass salad. And now big asses are in, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was going to say that. We like big asses too. Yeah, yeah. I just moved to Miami Beach and big asses are in. Especially there.

Especially there. The Brazilians. Yeah. Cuban chick. So anyway, so I was just alienated. Every female that listens to this, all four of you. All of you. Sorry.

No, thank you, Kardashians. So briefly, for someone that doesn't have a good lipid biochemistry background or something like that, as an example, me and my wife, we always buy the avocado oil-based mayonnaise that you guys sell. So why would something like avocado oil be that much different than soybean oil or canola oil? So canola is, I mean, you could go down the list of things. It's higher in omega-6 fats, which are pro-inflammatory. It's got, typically, it's processed from rapeseed, which sounds a lot worse than it actually is. But the methods of processing are pretty bad.

Avocado oil has probably the greatest fatty acid profile of any of the oils uh it's highest in monounsaturated fats which are what we're chasing so those are what we would call the industry we call heart healthy fats uh and so we decided to to put to use avocado oil as the base for um for the mayonnaise and then it's also the base for the salad dressing so the point is and again i was going back to the this bone i have to pick with the health food industry is i make a big ass salad and then and then uh i'm told to use dressing sparingly because dressing no matter what it is is bad it's either got too much fat or it's got too much sugar or it's got too much artificial sweeteners but use dressing sparingly

i'm like dude i'm i'm trying to choke down this uh this green leafy stuff and i want it to be as tasty as possible so i wanted i wanted to make a dressing that the more you put on the healthier it would become and i've got somebody who you know uh in a in a restaurant setting where they serve the dressing somebody asked the other day for extra dressing and the gal behind the counter's going how much and and he said basically make it lettuce soup so. So I like that. But this has actually helped a lot of people find this primal paleo lifestyle. It's amazing. I'm getting into restaurants.

The chipotle mayo is insane. Like anybody who I've tried to be paleo in the past X years will be like, man, have you tried this paleo mayo? It's amazing. I'm like, now you're paleo. Yeah, now you're paleo. Way to go, asshole. Yeah, I know. But you know you can't have your friends listen to you.

You could be the world's expert at something. You can't make them drink, right? Yeah, exactly. You're never a prophet in your own land. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, so we've got this amazing, we're in 7,000 stores across the country now, and we've got 11 flavors of dressings, and we've got three flavors of mayo.

And I think, you know, but to your point, we're changing the world because having moved to South Beach and Miami Beach recently, I meet a lot of new people. And just in the course of conversation, it comes up, you know, what are you doing? And if I mention, yeah, I make this primal kitchen, a lot of people will say, oh, I have that. I have that in my – I buy that. Green jar, right, or whatever.

And they never heard of me and they never heard of paleo, they never heard of primal, but they're looking for a healthier version of they sort of know that they want to have a healthier version of a dressing or a condiment or something to put on their food. It's really nice when you see the guy with the spear

running, jumping, and you're like, ah, good. Good for you. Good for you, yeah. But one thing that i struggled with for a long time uh owning a gym for six years and everyone wants to know about nutrition yeah and you never have time to like sit down and explain like here's what a protein does here's the hormonal effect this is a carbohydrate this is how we fuel and it's really easy to just be like hey check out this paleo thing yep and then all of a sudden you've got a gym full of people that don't eat carbohydrates at all. They've gone off the deep end.

And they don't know why. They're eating four pounds of meat a day. And it's not sustainable. And they're like, paleo sucks. How do we get the education to the coaches so that people can do not be a gangster? Oh, look at you, man. You are the gangster. Hope you're enjoying the show.

Want to give a special shout out to our sponsors at Thrive Market. Make sure you get over to Thrive Market. Love these guys. Love getting my box showing up to the door every month. The most delicious peanut butters in the whole, and almond butter too is pretty delicious, and all of the land. Love getting into the website over there because you can search by all the dietary needs that you have. If you are a paleo, if you are a keto,

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fungus. That's a lot of Fs in a row. He also likes fitness. A Finnish farmer that likes fungus and fitness. And I'm running out of Fs. Man, I'm out. That's my rapping skills. You saw them. FourSigmatic.com. I really enjoy their products. I have their coffee every single morning because it's delicious.

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I love it. I'm on. Mark's like, how long do I got to talk about this? No, no, no, no. Boom. Ten minutes. I got this. Ready?

Look. Go. Next time I see you, you owe me two hours, by the way. Sure. No, no, no. It's my pleasure. We could do it later on today if you want. I'm not joking.

Yeah, okay. I'm not either. I got a Frisbee game this afternoon but uh anyway yeah um so yeah so um having had the experience of having one of the most popular websites in the ancestral world if not the most popular uh for 10 years with mark's daily apple i have a lot of people whose lives have changed i mean it's it's it'sifying. What they call psychic income is amazing. We're at this event, and I have people come up to me that I've never met before tell me that their lives were changed forever by having adopted some of the strategies that we espouse at Marks Daily Apple and in the Primal Blueprint and the books. So about five years ago, we decided that my original goal was to change the lives of 10 million people.

I just upped that. I added a zero about three years ago to 100 million people. I'm serious. I want to change the way the world eats. Part of it is through the food. Part of it is through leveraging the technology that my team has developed over the last 10 years, which seems to be embraced by a lot of different communities, and that is this Primal Blueprint. So I decided that we would start the Primal Health Coach Institute,

and we now train people to become life coaches, health coaches. It's an online program. It's very robust. We have at this event, we have doctors, MDs who have taken it who just think it's the greatest thing. Al Dannenberg, a periodontistist is speaking at the event based on his experience um we've got you know nurses and trainers and people who just want the education who just want to learn uh do a deeper dive into primal and paleo so what we do is we it's an online experience

it's self-paced um one module a week if that's as fast that's as fast as you can go 13 modules of of the science and the background and the and the and the history and the evolution uh and you have to take an exam to get to the next level and then um and then three modules of actual coaching practices i brought in kristin christine hasler is one of the one of the top coaches coaches so she she works with uh people with a lot of video experience on how to work with a new client how to enroll a new client, how to teach, turn objections into teachable, coachable moments, things like that. We have a business building section. So I really want people to make a living doing this.

And not just a living, but a good living, a great living. So we've put a couple thousand people through the program, and it's just on fire. And we're really – and now we see a lot of competition in that arena too there are a lot of not a lot but there are other companies doing ancestral health coaching programs which is great i think uh rising tide you know lifts all boats and i think that's one of the ways that we're going to change the world is by having that one-on-one experience so you know even if you are um knowledgeable about the paramba blueprint and you've got friends and family who are just like, oh, Adam, you don't know what you're talking about.

Now you've got sort of a neutral third-party expert who can come into your life and coach you through this transition. And it's not Dr. Oz. Yeah, please. Seinfeld and Dr. Oz got smashed. Man, I mean, every time it's like, oh, I saw that Dr. Oz. I'm like, I told you that eight years ago too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know, I know. So that's really exciting, though, to be able to leverage the technology. I call it technology. It's just the oldest technology in the world. It's just eating real food. I mean, this is the irony. And I don't want to spill any massive trade secrets here, but I've written

10 books now i've done uh hundreds of seminars i've done three-day experiences we call primal con um and and the irony is i could tell you everything you need to do in two sheets of paper right to change your life and to get healthy again but you know people want to hear it different ways some um another example is you know in in the in the coaching realm and why do people need a coach or want to coach because not everybody needs a coach some people get oh i'll do that i'll just check off the box and i'll go do it i don't need anybody looking over my shoulder but my wife's an example who she was a personal trainer when i met her um she's wickedly fit she knows how to work out she will not go to the gym

without a trainer. She just wants somebody looking over and just, you know, making sure that she's on, you know, on her game that day. That's one of the things I really dug about Mark's Daily Apple way back in the day, whenever I can't remember when I found it. But I felt like everybody's looking for kind of a relationship with whoever their coach is. And through the online platform, we're able to sort of develop some trust with people and you coming from a performance background and me owning a gym and being in that space i just really was like how do i help people yep because i can't sit down and do one-on-one coaching every single day and mark's daily apple was just a massive

influence in my ability to be able to coach people and just relate to them because I was able to somehow through the internet find you. Awesome. I mean, I love to hear that because that was always my intent was to, you know, to be a resource for whoever wanted to use it. And if it was a gym owner who didn't have the time to, you know, drill down deeply one person at a time to be able to have a resource that was, you know, fairly prolifically written. In fact, I think we've got, you know, over 4,000 articles now and God knows 6 million words or something like that. I mean, I still get the dings every day, the notification.

I'm like, boom, something to read. All right. You know, and it's quick too. So people can subscribe to Mark's Daily Apple, get these daily tips. And where's the best place to go for that? It's markdailyapple.com? Yeah, markdailyapple.com. We're now almost 12 years old, which just blows my mind.

And primalkitchen.com for the food stuff. You know, we've got a little bit more time. If you've got more questions here, I'm going to play it right up to the edge. What are you speaking on in the panel? This is the State of the Union, Paleo. Oh, I love that. You know what's really funny? You're on the cover of Paleo magazine

this week, right? No, he actually has his own magazine. Oh, then that's what it is. Primal Living. I was in the middle of Sprouse. Mark Sisson's Primal Living. Nothing's cooler, to be honest with you, about this job than when you walk at the grocery store and you look over and you're like, I'm going to interview that guy next week. I know him.

That's dope. We're friends. Yeah, I was in Venice, and I seen the magazine for the first time, and I'm like, oh, cool, Mark's doing something local. And then I'm down in Austin, and I'm like, wait, Mark's doing something national. And so what is this magazine? It's Mark Sisson's Primal Living. Yeah, no, it's a very looking magazine.

No, it's a good-looking magazine. Yeah, great headshot. Killing me. What can I say? No, this great publishing company came to me about a year ago and said, you know, this is what we do. We love your segment. We like the niche that you're in.

We think there's an opportunity to do a one-off magazine publication. This is what they do uh and they like the brand and they like the concept so they basically put this magazine together which is it's essentially a book i mean if you if you read it from cover to cover you'll get every bit of the information you'd get uh in in my books uh in uh you know or on the blog it's it's a very well done-done publication. But the flip side to that is there ain't going to be another issue because I said everything possible. I actually sometimes wonder that. We teach the basics so much, and so many people just need to understand the basics, but we still have to keep creating.

So it's almost like a Cliff Notes to your book? Yeah. So it's like a $5 Cliff Notes? No, it's a $12.95. $12.95, okay. I didn't know how much the magazine was. $12.95 magazine. You haven't bought a magazine5 cliff note? No, it's a $12.95. $12.95. Okay. I didn't know how much the magazine was. $12.95 magazine. You haven't bought a magazine in 20 years.

Yeah, it has been a while. Expensive papers. We're running out of trees. It's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah, it's just another way of saying these things. I'm telling you, when I say I can tell you everything you need to know about health, probably two paragraphs, but I'll expand it to two pages.

But the point is people need to hear things differently they it needs to come into their brain different ways different people resonate with some people like to hear everything you know they want to just get it from all the multimedia i mean you know people listen to podcasts of me um you know a lot and i don't really stray too much from that original theme but they seem to want to you know understand the you know the concept through the lens of a joe rogan or through the lens of a sally podcaster right well also yeah and it's also their life like if i'm a crossfitter i still want to eat healthy yeah and if you're an endurance runner you still want to eat healthy so how do we attack all this because their needs aren't actually the same, even though at a basic level we still have to keep things clean,

keep things pretty tight. Yeah, absolutely. You have to tighter the diet down. You've got to tweak it a little bit here and there, but it's still the basic template. Find a vegetable, eat some healthy protein. Yeah, exactly. Even if you're saying it for the thousandth time,

it might be the first time that person has heard it. No, we have a lot of those sort of aha moments. Yeah, a lot of those. I mean, I would say that the Joe Rogan podcast I did two years ago brought in hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of Primal, never heard of Paleo, never heard of Keto, and all of a sudden, like from that one three-hour podcast, they were like sold.

That's awesome. And all of a sudden, like from that one three-hour podcast, they were like sold. Yeah. Oh. That's awesome. Got the Rogan bump. Yeah. I mean, well, it's – we all too often we're in this microcosm and we just assume so many people know everything. And that's interesting. The Rogan bump. What is he, get like $30,000 for a commercial or something crazy like that?

Yeah. It's amazing. No, the guy – look, the guy's the hardest working guy in show business. Yeah. I love him. And he's keto. It's not easy to talk for six straight hours. Right.

And then go do a comedy special at the end of the night. Yeah, travel across the country to do two sold-out shows in a row. I mean, it's amazing. And to do it while you're stoned the whole time. It's pretty impressive. Shout out to Jumbo. Yeah. I know they're his supplier.

We do have to get you out of here. Yeah. Where can people find you? MarksDailyApple.com. Where else? PrimalBlueprint.com and PrimalKitchen.com. Right on. Strong Coffee, hit us.

All right, man. You want me to do it? Yeah, you do it. I like it when you do it. Make sure you get in there. I don't know all the ingredients, but it's freaking delicious. We load ourselves up on it every morning before we do this. If you feel like I'm talking really fast right now,

go get more strong coffee. Now tell them the details. The details are that I decided to take our coffee experience and make it an instant idea. I like to call it as a sophisticated energy or instant nutritional energy. So it's an instant coffee mixed with collagen, MCT oil, L-theanine, hyaluronic acid, and coconut water extract,

all in one instant formula that has right now, we have one original flavor. We're coming out with an unsweetened, and then we have vanilla down the road. Killer. At Strong Coffee Company? At Strong Coffee Company and strongcoffeecompany.com. Use BBS20 to get 20% off.

Doug Larson. You can find me on Instagram, at Douglas C. Larson. I'm at Anders Varner on all the things. But most importantly, get into the Shrug Collective, at Shrug Collective. Like, subscribe, follow us on Instagram, YouTube, mailing list. We've got private Facebook groups coming out. Leave a message.

Leave a comment. I read it. I'm sensitive. Be friendly. We'll see you every single Wednesday right here talking to legends like this guy. See you next week. Thank you for tuning in. Really enjoy hanging out with Mark Sisson.

This guy is such a savage. Make sure you get into the program vault. ShruggedCollective.com backslash vault. 12 programs. Getting you bigger, stronger, faster, healthier, cooler, better looking. Laid more. If you made it all the way to the show and you heard me say you're going to get laid more, you're my favorite listener of all time.

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You can get that, and there's health properties to that, but we're going to talk about that at a later date. foursigmatic.com, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com backslash shrug. We'll see you guys next Wednesday.