The Joe Rogan Experience - #1624 - Mark Sisson

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

Mark Sisson is a fitness author, paleo diet expert, and retired elite athlete. His newest book is "Two Meals a Day: The simple, sustainable strategy to lose fat, reverse aging, & break free from diet frustration forever".

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day time flies mark it sure does has it been five years a little over five years that's ridiculous i know i feel like i saw you like eight months ago i know and the world has changed yeah a little bit a little bit. A little bit. Yeah. And you're in Florida now. We were talking about this. Yeah.

I wanted to save it for the camera because you're going to tell me how great you like Miami. Well, you know, I grew up in Maine. And when I was in New England, Miami was sort of the place where, you know, only old people went and it had all of the cliches behind it. And I never really thought much about living there. And then when I lived in Malibu, I'm like, okay, this is the cat's ass. This is the best place ever, Malibu. Well, much like yourself, Joe, I got a little bit disillusioned with California over the years and thought that I would try a different location, particularly one that didn't have any personal taxes.

And we had gone to Miami Beach for a week every year for vacation, so we felt like we knew it. And then we wound up saying, you know what, let's try it for a year and see if we like it and we'll move out of California. And if it doesn't work, we'll move back. And I'm telling you, man, a year in, I'm like, this is like summer camp and a spa and a playground every single day. I mean, look, the water's 20 degrees warmer on any given day.

The sand is nicer. The women are a little bit, you know, dressed a little bit more provocatively. I've got a great gym. I do stand-up paddling. I've got an e-foil, an electric foil that I use, a fat bike. What's a fat bike? A fat bike is those... Fat tires?

Fat tire bike, yeah. Oh. We should probably, given the current tenor, we shouldn't probably call it a fat bike anymore. Yeah, let's call it a fat bike. A pneumatically challenged bike. It's okay. You can call it a fat bike. That's right.

No one cares. Exactly. And so I ride in the sand with some friends. I ride with my wife. My wife has an electric one, so she can keep up with me. But, I mean, it's amazing. It's like every day I feel like, you know, I'm a kid on vacation. Wow.

That's a good endorsement. Yeah. I've been watching the news, though. Oh, yeah. And it seems a little wacky down there right now. They're shooting, what, pepper balls? Yeah. Pepper spray balls at the people that were all over the streets. Spring break. I mean, spring breakers have always—

Why are the cops shooting pepper spray balls at them? You know, they tried to enact some temporary ordinances that failed immediately, failed out of the gates. And I don't think they knew how to control the crowds that surged. Is spring break always like that there? Or is it just because of COVID? Because Florida doesn't have restrictions? Yeah, yeah. It's because of COVID. I mean, generally, spring break is a challenge. And this is the time of year when everybody sort of hunkers down. And a lot of people that live in my building and live in my neighborhood would leave town. During spring break? During spring break.

Is that bad? Yeah, it's just, it's a pain to try and get, you know, reservations at a restaurant or to navigate the streets because the, you know, the streets are not built for that amount of traffic. So a lot of people just leave and that's, you know, that's fine. How long spring break lasts? Well, this year's going to last apparently two months. I don't know. Two months? Well, you know, because...

Different schools? You know, the whole school strategy and the opening and reopening and not opening and having spring break and not having spring break. And yeah, so I think... And then COVID. I mean, look, as I was saying to some friends literally a week ago, a month ago, two months ago, there's no better place in the world to be right now than Miami Beach. The beaches are open. People are having fun. They're out in the sunshine. They're getting vitamin D. They're breathing fresh air. The restaurants are not only open, they're probably exceeding their previous capacity because during COVID, the restaurants were allowed to spill out into the streets, right? They closed some of the streets down in terms of traffic.

So they kept that and they opened the insides of the restaurant. So now the restaurant. So they're even bigger. Yeah. And a lot of people who live in the building that I live and a lot of people who live in my neighborhood who would typically be occasional residents. This is probably a second home for a lot of these people. Many from New York, from, you know, Chicago, from South America, sort of decided during COVID they'd hunker down in California,

I mean, in Miami, and now they're staying there. So we've got a nice group of people that are hanging out and having a good time. And you've been down there for how many years now? Three years now. Three years. Yeah. The fascinating thing about Miami or Florida in general,

their approach to the lockdowns, it shows you that the idea that you're going to force people to stay home, it doesn't work. It's ineffective. Even though they're wide open, they have less cases. They have less deaths. They have less cases they have less deaths they have less hospitalizations per capita than California does

I think that's correct it is correct and it's predictable but that's nuts because everybody in California they got Stockholm Syndrome they're still thinking that the lockdowns are a good idea and that we have to protect ourselves from this thing you got COVID.

Yes. What was it like? For me, it was a lot of nothing. And how old are you? You can tell us. 67. 67. Yeah, I'll be 68.

You look fucking great. Thank you, man. I hope I look half as good as you when I'm 67. You know, I don't want to piss anybody off, but I've looked at this from the beginning as a bad case of flu. It's a virus. There are millions of viruses that we encounter on a daily basis. But I've looked at this from the beginning as a bad case of flu. It's a virus. There are millions of viruses that we encounter on a daily basis. It's an issue of personal immunity.

I mean, if you have a strong immune system, I think you're going to do well during this. And that's been the biggest issue. Like if instead of lockdowns, if the government had said, stop eating sugar, spend some time out in the sun, move around a lot, and maybe even, and this is, I think, one of the issues was this whole thing about viral load. I don't know how much you know about that. But people who got really sick had massive viral loads, partly because of being locked inside with other people for long periods of time. If you got exposed outside to a minimal viral load, there's a good chance that your body dealt with it already and managed it and got rid of it and set up whatever. And accumulated antibodies.

Exactly. Yeah. But you're in this area in terms of age where people think there's nothing you can do. Right. Well, I love when I see a guy like you that's so fit that you're in your later 60s, but you're incredibly fit. So it flies in the face of all these people that think that like, well, what about older folks? Yeah. I've been training my whole life for this. This is what I say about COVID. I've been training my whole life for this. And, you know, I'm kind of glad I got it because I was

talking shit about it for a long time. Like, you know, don't, you know, it's not whatever. And again, not to, you know, belittle the horrible experiences that some people have had, but, you know, this really gets old people for what I would say are obvious reasons, whether it's immune system, whether it's lack of vitamin D, whether it's being shut up, whether it's a lowered cholesterol. I mean, we haven't, you know, you don't even talked about what happens with all of the statin drugs that people are taking to lower their cholesterol. Well, high cholesterol is actually protective for something like this. So you could predict that a lot of older people were going to die if they weren't well protected.

Can we talk about that for a second? So statin drugs, the idea is you're lowering cholesterol because people have high cholesterol. The high cholesterol puts them at a higher risk of heart attack and stroke. Not really. Not really, but, I mean, we can talk about that, too. That's the irony there. That's where it gets confusing, right? Yeah.

Because some people will argue that it's the balance of LDL and HDL and that cholesterol is actually essential for production of sex hormones and a lot of other things that the human body requires. A lot of things. It's probably the most important—cholesterol is probably the most important molecule in the human body, if you really were to parse it. Vitamin D, sex hormones, it's a working molecule on a lot of cell membranes. And to think that we would— I mean, it's so important, the body makes like 1300 milligrams a day, regardless of what your cholesterol intake is from food. So in my mind,

the notion that we would take this amazing molecule that is basically life-giving in many regards and vilify it, and then take drugs to lower it, which if you look at the research, and I wasn't planning on going down this path today, but if you look at the research on cholesterol and heart disease over the past 20 years, it's shifted everything away from cholesterol being the proximate cause of heart disease. Cholesterol and saturated fat are not the proximate cause of heart disease. It's oxidation and inflammation. Cholesterol is involved in the repair of damage to the tissue, and as a result, people get, because of the oxidation and inflammation, there's cholesterol that's in the plaques and things like that. But I think many, many doctors, I'm going to say the preponderance of doctors now agree that cholesterol isn't the bad guy

that people made it out to be. And if you look at other studies, cohorts of people who've had cholesterol of, you know, like 130 and lower or 200 and above, the all-cause mortality, you die of everything else at a much greater rate with low cholesterol than you do with high cholesterol. The only difference is the cardiac outcomes. And it's not even deaths, it's just cardiac events is a little bit higher in the higher group. And what is it about cholesterol that, why did cholesterol become the bad guy? Why did it become the boogeyman? Does it have to do with, I hate to interrupt you there, does it have to do with when the sugar industry paid off those scientists to push the blame on the saturated fat? Yeah, I mean, a lot of this goes back to I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

I think most people at the top are too greedy and stupid to organize into a cabal, right? So I'm thinking how did this happen in terms of the collective conscious? So mistakes were made early on, whether it's Ancel Keys, and I know you've had a lot of people on the show talking about Ancel Keys in the seven-country study. Can you explain that real quick for people who don't know what I'm talking about? This scientist in the 60s, I guess, around then, Ancel Keys had done a study looking at saturated fat intake and correlated with heart disease in different countries and found,

at the end of the day, he found that there was a correlation between high saturated fat intake and heart disease. But then later on, you find out that he looked at 32 countries, but picked the seven that fit his paradigm mostly. So that was, I don't know if you've had Gary Taubes or Nina on the show, but everyone has sort of beaten this one to death. So the idea was that that was sort of the start of it. And then McGovern and his committee, when he was overseeing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and trying to create the first food pyramids, was convinced by Pritikin that, because McGovern's wife had had a good experience at the Pritikin Longevity Center, which was a zero-fat sort of protocol. So that politicized that enough that they decided to vilify fat. Cholesterol over the years has been more vilified because of studies done, again, correlating higher cholesterol with

higher incidence of heart issues. And the drug industry certainly got on that. And that's why statins came to the forefront. Statins themselves, though, have a host of pretty bad side effects. I'm telling you. I mean, I think until some of these other things have come down recently, I would say that statins are probably the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public in terms of medicine. But that's just me. I'm not a doctor. I just do a lot of research and reading. So the idea that we would, yeah, so to your point, statins tend to, you know, there are brain fog issues, liver issues, muscle weakness issues. One of the things that statins do is they decrease the amount of CoQ10 that your body produces because it's a similar pathway, and so you have to, should generally take supplemental

CoQ10 with statins. A friend of mine said that when he did the original, when he was researching statins, one of the original patents on statins acknowledged this deficiency of CoQ10, and so it included CoQ10 in the drug, but CoQ10 was so expensive to make, they just cleaved off that part of the patent. Anyway, I don't know where that was headed, but if we're talking about COVID, it appears that high cholesterol, higher cholesterol, is protective for infections like COVID. But how is that the case? Because one of the problems with COVID is people with high obesity. Obese people tend to have a really hard time with COVID. In fact, 78% of the hospitalizations, they found out that those people were obese. I would imagine a lot of those obese people also

have high cholesterol. Okay, but look at all the other factors. So, you know, if we're, again, obesity is a big factor in terms of just overall diminishing of your immune system. Yeah, exactly. But I would say that from, you know, what I've read, blood glucose, so, you know, diabetics are much more susceptible to COVID because this virus tends to like higher blood sugar. If you have a preexisting systemic inflammation, not a good sign. Vitamin D probably, you know, across the board, the greatest predictor of your survivability of COVID. So if people have been locked inside all, you know, all year and haven't had any sun exposure,

all year and haven't had any sun exposure, their vitamin D status has been compromised tremendously. So if you look at those vitamin D status, cholesterol, blood sugar regulation, and then other things like obesity or pre-existing conditions like COPD or whatever. You know, we have a—we're in a world of hurt, this country, in terms of our health. So the idea that we would lock people up inside—by the way, healthy ones, because that's—typically you quarantine the unhealthy ones. Yeah. It just makes no sense. I think this is the single biggest mismanaged event in human history. Wow. Yeah. It just makes no sense. I think this is the single biggest mismanaged event in human history. Wow.

Yeah. Name another. Name one that was more mismanaged than this. I think there's also part of the problem is that people have a really hard time adjusting once they make an initial observation or initial plan of attack. And the initial plan of attack was that COVID was going to be something that killed a massive amount of people, far more. We thought it was going to kill like 10% of the people. And it was going to be a bloodbath. It was going to be similar to the Spanish flu.

We were terrified a year ago. And once a lot of people got it, and then once really healthy people got it, and then once we realized that, how many asymptomatic? I remember in the beginning, someone was telling me, well, they're asymptomatic initially, but they're going to get symptoms. No. My fucking real estate lady, she's 46 years old. She's fit.

She works out. She didn't even know she had it. She was scheduled to go for a vacation in the Bahamas or something like that, and she had to take a test. She took the test. Turns out positive. She couldn't believe it. Took it again. Turns out positive. Couldn't believe it. Took it again. Turns out positive. Okay, I've got COVID.

So she sits home and watches movies for 10 days. Never feels a goddamn thing. This idea that your immune system is incapable of preventing a serious infection. Incapable of protecting you. That once you're exposed it's like a demon and it's going to take you over. This is how everybody was treating it a year ago yeah a year later now we know that that's

not the case but there's still ridiculous people out there that are they're they're in excited by being afraid like i don't know if you saw that clip with ted cruz yesterday ted cruz was uh addressing a bunch of reporters and one of the reporters asked him to put his mask on outside whether he's like no i'm not gonna put my thing was outside might have been i don't know either way he's been immunized by the way he's been he's been vaccinated so he's like i'm not gonna do that while i'm talking on the camera and the guy goes well to make me feel better he goes well you feel you feel free to step away yeah you know like I don't know what to tell you but there's a thing where people first of all like telling people to put a mask on there's a lot of really fucking

annoying people that look for an opportunity to tell people what to do and this is one of those things tell people to be scared tell people to get vaccinated tell people to put a mask on there's a bunch of like really annoying people that enjoy telling people what to do. And that's what you saw with that Ted Cruz thing. Did you see it? I didn't see that, but I've seen... It's adorable. I've seen, yeah, I've seen a number of, I've been involved in a number of incidents like that. Like I don't wear a mask when I'm outside, primarily now because I had COVID. I can't get it. I can't give it. So I feel like... Well, not only that, the data shows that it dies in contact with UV light. I mean, if we're going to base this on science, and we're supposed to, there's virtually no evidence

whatsoever for any spread of this disease with outdoor contact. Right. Yeah, exactly. And as I say, the best thing we could have done was to open the beaches up and encourage people to go exercise. And another thing by the way with regard to the beaches is involving yourself in other microbial activity right so sand has bacteria and virus in it and one of the things that happens when you sit in a sterile environment is you lose your immune system it atrophies. How ironic. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like your cardio. Right. Yeah.

It's very similar. Yeah. And so if you were outside, you know, digging in your garden, it would be like the prototypical best scenario for someone who wanted to avoid COVID would go outside in your garden, start gardening, get some vitamin D from the sun. And don't wear garden gloves either. Yeah, exactly. No, exactly.

Get in there. Get dirty. Yeah. Yeah. You've always been a proponent. I mean, I really love your products, by the way, and thank you for sending me so many over the years. You've kept me fully stocked up. You're welcome. You just make

excellent stuff, and it seems so simple. I love the concept of it. You know, just your prime, the idea of primal. Like, what are you eating? you're eating whole vegetables whole meats food just real unprocessed regular food eat that you'll be healthier it seems so simplistic go figure right it's the most simplistic thing but the first time you and i talked and you talked about the issues that you had with inflammation of your joints and that you

were kind of told that this is going to be your situation from here on out. And as you got older, it was going to get worse. You change your diet, eliminate all this processed sugar, eliminate all the bullshit, and it all goes away. Again, it's so simple and simplistic, it's almost like unbelievable. And yet, my whole background is in evolutionary biology and genetic science and looking how our bodies respond to information from food, from sleep, from sun exposure, from play, from dirt exposure. And when you realize that

we evolved over, you know, two and a half million years of human evolution and a hundred years of mammalian evolution and a billion years of multi-cell evolution, a lot of these things are encoded in our DNA that expect us to act certain ways and eat certain things. And when you bypass that with, you know, crunchy, salty, fatty, sweet, cheap stuff, you mess with the signaling and you wind up with genes getting turned on that might cause inflammation and turn off the genes that would burn fat and turn on the genes that would store fat and turn off the genes that build muscle. And these are all just – it sounds really – if you look at the level of every study now

that looks at what happens at the level of gene expression, you understand that so many of these things that we do on a daily basis affect how we rebuild, renew, regenerate, recreate ourselves minute by minute. And food is still probably the most important aspect of that, if you had to pick one. It's literally the building blocks of your body. Right. And if you eat shitty food, you're going to have shitty building blocks. Exactly.

It seems so simplistic when you put it that way. But people have this odd disconnect between what they put in their body and what kind of effect it has on them because they seek out food pleasure. And they seek it out as a reward. Oftentimes when you're working and you're bored, you go to the candy machine. This is like a standard thing that people do. They give themselves a reward for being in a shitty state of mind. Well, I'll go to you one better.

Guys who go to the gym every day and train two hours because they like to eat. It's like, okay, wait a minute. I get that you like to eat. Everyone likes to eat. You're wired to eat, but you're going to go struggle and suffer and sweat and strain so you can go home and have a few more bites of something you probably shouldn't eat in the first place? Like, you deserve it?

How stupid is that, really? Do you do a cheat day at all? I don't do a cheat day. Do you do a cheat meal? I mean, I don't even partition my meals that way. So I'll eat a portion of a meal as a cheat every other meal sometimes. I'll have a couple of bites of bread with some great butter on it, or I'll have a couple of bites of a dessert,

or I'll have a couple of bites of pizza once in a while. So, you know, my path has been from almost orthorexic, like really dialed into everything I was eating. What's that mean, orthorexic? You're so intent on getting every macronutrient right at every meal that you drive yourself crazy. Oh. And there are a lot of people who do that. who do that. And then I shifted sort of into a look at the paleo primal ancestral way of eating, which is the real food thing that we talked about. After that, and I got great results from eliminating sugars, industrial seed oils. Those are the big ones. I know you've had Kate Shanahan

on here and talked about that. Have you had Kate on here? No. I've had plenty of people talk about that. Seed oils are a giant issue. Giant issue. Maybe bigger than sugar for most people. Because I think most people know they shouldn't be eating sugar. They think that vegetable oil somehow or another comes from a vegetable. Or in many cases it comes from a seed, a seed oil. So canola and soybean oil, corn oil. And when people shift away from the sugar and they go toward the, you know, even a low-carb diet and they start thinking, well, I'll have salads and I'll have salad dressing on the, you know. And then they don't realize that the great salad that they just made, which could be one of the healthiest things they could eat, they just ruined with a soy-based dressing or a canola-based dressing. So I got rid of the

industrial seed oils, got rid of the sugar, got rid of the processed and whole grains in my case. So we talked about this before. The grains are like really a problem for not just me, but for a lot of people. And that's what was causing my arthritis, for instance, and my IBS and my GERD and my, you know, everything. It was all grains. It was all grains. And as soon as you got rid of them? I mean, it was miraculous. It was, it was, that was what really put me on a, on a path to change

the way the world eats. Cause I thought to myself, you know, if I spent my whole life as an endurance athlete, carb loading with healthy whole grains, because that was the moniker, right? Heart healthy whole grains. And, you know, that's how you got the predominance of carbohydrates. And I would eat five, six, seven, 800 grams a day of carbs. But I was miserable. And I couldn't figure out what it was. And even after I got rid of sugar and I started doing a lot of research, I still sort of kept the grains in my diet because I'd been indoctrinated into this thought that, you know, the U.S. Department of Agriculture pyramid says, you know, 6 to 11 servings of grains every day. That's the base of the pyramid. And then my wife at one point said, look, you're doing all this research on grains, and you're starting to uncover some pretty interesting facts that don't point toward health. Why don't you give them up for 30 days and see what happens?

And that's what happened, and it changed my life. So I thought, if I'm a guy who used to eat a lot of grains, who then, even in the face of knowledge about them, defended my right to eat grains, and then I got rid of them, how many tens of millions of people are sort of thinking that grains are healthy and they're good for them, and even though they don't have celiac, they're still on a spectrum of not, you know, of being negatively impacted by grains. It's so hard for people to swallow because of that, this thing that's been shoved into our face,

that grains, whole grains, like that term, whole grain. If you had a box and you said whole grain, and you had an option, healthy, non-healthy, the vast majority of the country would check healthy for whole grains. Of course. Again, they've been indoctrinated for years and years. It's been ever since Earl Butts and the first subsidies for— Fucking Earl Butts.

I don't know who that is. But there's been a lot of weird shit with grains, too. Secretary of Agriculture under Jimmy Carter. You know the Kellogg story, right? Yeah. He's the weirdest one ever. Tell people the story behind that. Well, you tell it.

I mean, basically, it was about sexual— He thought, yes. He thought that by giving people bland food, you would curb their sexual urges. So I guess he thought Mexicans and their spicy food, or other people, Indians have spicy food. It felt like foods with a lot of flavor made people want to fuck. For some strange reasons, Scott. Your point being? I don't know if there's a correlation, but in his eyes, he wanted to curb sexual desire.

So he prescribed some very bland grain cereals for people to eat. And I don't know how many people were eating breakfast cereal before he came along. I mean, it most certainly had a giant impact on the way people eat breakfast. Well, I mean, people ate gruel. What's up, Jane? It says, the Forbes article about this says that he felt that bland foods like cereal would lead Americans away from sin, one very specific sin. Masturbation.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was one he was worried about. Like, spicy food makes you jerk off. Yeah, that was one he was worried about. Like, spicy food makes you jerk off. But he was worried.

Imagine that, like, sexual urges are caused by porn. They didn't have porn back then, really. Well, you'd have to go somewhere to watch it. You'd have to go to a movie theater, you know? Like the olden days. That's really olden days, though. That's like Flipkart or something. Well, it was Times Square, the peep shows and the movies that they would show. But, yeah, I guess, I don't know.

It's a ridiculous idea. But it's a good example of how the collective conscious of the country moved into everyone eating cereal. Like when you say, what did they eat before that? Well, they ate oatmeal or gruel or something. It took long to prepare. But all of a sudden, this guy comes along and he says, you open it up. You pour it in a bowl. You put some milk on it.

You're good to go. And through that, everyone ate cereal as a kid. And I don't know if you did. I did, yeah. Everyone where I grew up, that cereal was breakfast. And you would eat Special K if you wanted to eat healthy. Yeah, exactly. If your mother wanted to lose weight, she would buy Special K.

Yeah, with low-fat milk. Exactly. Which is hilarious. And isn't it true that some low-fat milk, they actually put sugar in it so that it's digestible? Yeah. Which is hilarious. I advise people stay away from 1%, 2% low-fat homogenized, whatever. Well, whole milk feels better for your body.

Raw, whole milk. And I know that's a big controversy. I remember there was some health stores in California where they were getting raided. That's right. Because they were selling raw milk, which is like bananas. You can sell raw meat, but you can't sell raw milk. Please explain this to me. Well, I mean, that's one of the reasons I left California, is the governance at every level

is messed up. And it's the health police, because they think they know what's best for everyone else. Well, it also creates a business of regulation. And once people are vested, they have a vested interest in regulating, and there's a bunch of people whose jobs is to regulate. That only expands and grows. That's the thing about bureaucracy, when you have the kind of government like California has that doesn't just have an over-bloated bureaucracy, but it encourages it to get more and more bloated.

And anytime there's a new problem, they create new committees, and they want to pass new laws and new regulations and hire new people and hire a group to sit around and think about how to handle a situation, nothing ever gets done. But when you have that sort of mindset, that mindset is never the mindset of trimming down and cutting away and, oh, this is what the problem is. The mindset is just in regulation, and that's the California mindset. Totally. And I wonder what it is, because it seems to, you know, cross all from local, local government to, you know, state government to even federal government. You run for office, I guess, presumably on a platform of you're going to do something, you're going to accomplish

something, you're going to enact legislation. And what if for a couple of years people got elected and all they were asked to do is pare back legislation and look at all the stuff that the previous administrations wrote that didn't work and unwind it? Wouldn't that be something? I wonder if that'll happen now. But I wonder if in some places people recognize the errors of our ways over the last year. Because it's one thing that has been exposed over the last year, more than anything in my lifetime, is how important it is to have a mayor that's not a moron. How important it is to have a governor that's not a moron. And a governor that understands that you have to give people freedom.

They have to maintain their freedom. You cannot decide that someone's business is not essential because it's not essential for you. It's essential for them. It's the only way they feed themselves. It's fucking essential. 100%. And there's a lot of essential businesses that got labeled non-essential,

which is, by the way, terrible for people's self-esteem, mental health. It's awful across the board. And then the economy suffers a gigantic hit because these businesses go under. California has famously lost 75% of its restaurants, in Los Angeles at least. Yeah, I mean, I don't see how there isn't yet another shoe to drop on the economic forecasting. Because I think a lot of the businesses that were going to fail haven't yet really completed the failure cycle. Because I know a lot of, like you do, I know a lot of people who went out of business or just struggled. And the worst to me, the first lockdown and you struggle through it and you get into April or May and it looks like there's light at the end of the tunnel

and you borrowed $300,000 to keep your restaurant open. And then all of a sudden, there's another lockdown. And now it's even more egregious. Now you can't even... Yeah. I mean, I feel so horrible for those people. It's great. It's horrendous. To your point about the governors, so now some of the governors are becoming

really, really popular for their stances. Like your guy. Yeah. That DeSantis guy. Yeah. No, he's... He's a young fella, too. He got vilified early on, and he just held his ground.

Yeah, well, because everybody wanted to, they wanted to consume that fear porn. Yeah. And they didn't like the fact, and they were like, you're going to kill everyone. But I love how he did it when he went on, he did a press conference with charts, and he said, we are going to protect our most vulnerable, and this is how we're going to do it. And, you know, but we think very strongly that children should be able to go back to school it's it poses little to no risk for children especially in comparison to the flu which actually kills kids yeah um and then as you get older and older and he had like sort of a breakdown of when it becomes an issue yeah but then it gets into your age category it turns out it wasn't an issue for you, but it's because of the way you live your life.

And this is what drives me crazy. People want to pretend like your immune system is ineffective against this virus. Well, your immune system, if that was the case, everyone who caught the virus would be dead. Bingo. Because your immune system would fail and the virus would kill all the hosts. And then it wouldn't spread. No, your immune system would fail and the virus would kill all the hosts. Yeah. And then it wouldn't spread. No, your immune system is a functional thing. And if you take proper supplementation and you exercise and you eat right and sleep right, yeah, you can get through this.

100%. But no one says that. No one says that. And that should have been the major message across the country was, you know, again, this is an immune system issue. It's not so much a public health issue as it's a private health issue. In other words, people take responsibility for yourself. And that doesn't mean, you know, locking yourself up in a room. And I read the other day, the average weight gain was like half a pound every 10 days during COVID. Yeah, they think they said the average,

like 42% of the people gained weight, and the average weight gain for millennials was 39 pounds. I mean, I'm not sure I believe. Which is fucking insane. It's insane, yeah. Let's find that statistic, because somebody sent it to me and it was a meme, which means...

Yeah, I'm not believing that. But even if it's 20 pounds, it's 20 pounds in the wrong direction. Well, I think what they're saying is for the 42% that did gain weight, it's not that everyone gained weight. Most people didn't gain weight, but the 42% that did gain weight, the average weight gain was more than 30 pounds, which is a lot of...

That's a big change in your body over 30 years that could also have a massive negative health impact for years to come. When you put that kind of a burden on all of your systems, your endocrine system, all your body systems so rapidly. Oh, yeah. This is one of those things that gets to the polling, but they polled 3,000 people. So when you get into those numbers. Yeah, exactly. That's why memes are so fun.

Yeah. Let's make one up right now Okay here it is 42% of adults said they gained more weight than intended Of course the amount they reported gaining Averaged 29 pounds 10% said they gained more than 50 pounds Just that alone Weight gain leads to obesity

More women 45% reported weight gain than men, 39%. But men reported a higher average gain of 37 pounds. Okay, that's what it was. Compared to the women's average of 22 pounds. Wow. That's a lot. That's a lot.

The average of 37 pounds for a man is fucking bonkers. That's so much weight to gain. It makes you obese almost automatically yeah almost instantly yeah yeah and you can't this is the other thing that we have a real problem with in our culture today you can't say you need to lose weight because even though it's true you we we have this bizarre like participation trophy concept of of how we treat people yeah when it comes to real issues like being obese like being fat it's fucking terrible for you but if you say that you're fat

shaming yeah which is so nonsensical and it's just designed to protect lazy people or excuse me maybe not even lazy people inflicted people that are inflicted with weight loss maybe they're not lazy maybe they're just they're they're mentally fucked up like maybe they've got issues and that they they can't seem to get it together and discipline themselves and lose the weight whether it's because of their sugar levels or their addiction to food or whatever it is but my god we're not helping anybody by protecting their feelings and letting their body get destroyed. It's crazy. No, it's crazy. And, you know, seeing obese models on the cover of magazines. They're curve models, Mark, you piece of shit.

You don't even know what you're saying. How dare you? Yeah. But, I mean, it's just... A curve model. Again, talk about sending the wrong message. Yes, it's a terrible message. It's a terrible message.

And not only that, but here's where it gets even worse. When people do get healthy, folks get mad at them. Like, there's fans that are mad at Adele. Because Adele is really slim now, and she looks fucking great. Which, by the way, I have a theory. She's one of those women that got hit up by a male gold digger.

Her ex-husband, she divorced him, and he got a shit ton of money. and i think uh you know that's the best revenge yeah she just said all right motherfucker yeah i'll show you what's up yeah you were getting a fat adele exactly and uh now hot adele's here yeah because you've seen pictures of her jamie pull a picture of her now women are mad they're mad they're mad that she had discipline and that she took care of herself and she got thin and she's healthier. Look at her now.

Wow. That's incredible. I mean, that's really incredible. She looks like a fit girl. She looks like a girl that could be in a CrossFit class or something like that. If I ran into her and someone says, oh, this is my friend Adele. I'm like, hey, what's up? I wouldn't think, oh, it's Adele.

Right. Adele. Not Adele. It's the singer Adele. Look at that picture in the middle. Yeah. Look at that picture in the middle. Yeah. Go in that picture in the middle. Look at that.

Bro, she looks fucking fantastic. That's incredible. Yeah. That's incredible. We should praise that. And all you other women out there that are getting angry and stuffing the incorrect food in your mouth, looking at that, you should approach this differently. You should say, I want to do what she's doing. Yep. But this idea of this plus model industry, and I'm not against plus models, man.

Look, if you're big and you want to wear hot clothes, you should be able to do whatever you want. But pretending that that's healthy is where I draw the line. I agree. And I think my whole thing in life is I want to help people be happy. At the end of the day, all the stuff we talk about, whether it's dialing your sleep in or getting the right body weight or being strong or fit or productive or whatever, it all trickles down to one thing. Am I happy? Yeah. Because you can be fit and ripped and productive and successful and unhappy. Okay, that didn't work.

Right. and successful and unhappy, okay, that didn't work, right? If happiness is really what we're seeking as individuals, and it could be I'm happy because I'm making a contribution to the world or whatever, then if you're a large person and you're, you know, even if your health isn't really dialed in, but you truly tell me you're healthy, I'm like, okay, that's fine. But if you say, you know, typically if you're healthy, I'm like, okay, that's fine. But if you say, you know, typically if you're obese, you're not healthy. If you say I'm happy, one thing. But if you say big can also be healthy. And I'm thinking, no, 230 for a woman cannot be healthy.

Yeah, this is a weird thing that people keep trying to push. And it flies in the face of science. It flies in the face of science it flies in the face of all the medical literature you can't say that you can't say that you can be fat and also be healthy you can be fat and not currently suffering from a heart attack right you can be fat and be but you are taxing your system yeah in a damaging way and also also, you're also shortening your lifespan. You're burning the candle at both ends, for sure. Right. To that end, I had... You got a book? I got a book. Two meals a day? Yeah.

What is the idea behind that? Why two meals a day? Why not just one? Well, I was going to do one a day, and I thought, nobody's going to buy this fucking book if it's one meal a day. So I started, nobody's going to buy this fucking book if it's one meal a day. So I started with two. You know, I've gone through, again, all these iterations of trying to assist people with the information that I've come across in my research on how they can achieve an ideal body composition, have more energy, maintain or build muscle, improve their immune systems, have better sex, be more productive, whatever it is. These are the things that, these are what I'm trying to, the hidden genetic switches that I'm trying to uncover for people.

And in so doing, you can choose to do it or not. I'm not suggesting you have to do this to have a great life, but here are some of the ways that we do it. And it started with a primal blueprint and then sort of morphed into, well, the primal blueprint works really well for a lot of people and even worked well for me, but is there something else? Is there a new level I could get to? And that was the keto. So I wrote a book called The Keto Reset Diet since I was on here. And I was into keto for a while, but then I sort of said, well, you know, ketosis is not a way to live your life. It's a tool, a strategy that you can use to build metabolic flexibility. Some people do think that it's a way to live your life, though. Like, you know, Dom D'Agostino. Yeah. He does it all

the time. Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of friends who do keto the whole time. I'm just, I'm not a person who says that's the way. Keto's the, you know is the be-all and the end-all of how you should live your life. Because I'm more about achieving metabolic flexibility. And that's a term that's come up in the last couple of years. I don't know if you've heard it, but it basically describes your body's ability to extract energy from whatever substrate is available at the time. So making it easier for your body to balance back and forth from fat to carbohydrates and not require so much of a gap. Bingo. Because usually the gap is, what is it, like two weeks or something like that for you if you're a carbohydrate? Yeah. And if you never go down the route of keto and all you do is eat carbs your whole life or have a carb-centric diet,

you never get to the point where you're burning fat efficiently or effectively. So you're really metabolically inflexible. Your body is just demanding that it continuously run on carbs and never tap into your fat stores. So typically you get incrementally fatter and fatter. And then if you skip a meal or skip two meals or try to go on some sort of a fast, the wheels fall off because you haven't built the metabolic machinery

to burn fat, to burn ketones, and all the things that go along with metabolic flexibility. So it turns out metabolic flexibility is the holy grail, and how you get there, whether it's primal, paleo, vegetarian, vegan, fasting, IF, whatever, it's almost like it doesn't matter what route you use. If you can get to the point where you're metabolically flexible, now you have this ability to extract energy from your own stored body fat whenever you don't eat. And how does one do that? Like, what's the best strategy? Well, the best strategy is keto. That's the best strategy. For sure,

for sure. That's the best strategy. So because as long as you keep feeding your body carbohydrates every two or three hours all day long, the body goes, hey, I got plenty of fuel. Taking the carbohydrates in raises my blood sugar. Blood sugar is a fuel, but I don't want too much of it in my system. And so the body produces insulin, which tries to take excess glucose and protein and fat out of the bloodstream and sequester it in the cells. And in so doing, your blood sugar drops because it's, and then you have to eat again every two or three hours. And it's this cycle that people enter into that they're on for a lifetime sometimes. And the tendency over time, because you're not burning your stored body fat, is to

accumulate body fat. You never get really adept at burning body fat, and you never, because you never take time off to require that your body burns its fat, you just keep accumulating it. So how does someone go from being metabolically inflexible to metabolically flexible without going into keto? That's difficult. The way to do it is through fasting. And it's just keto is such a better way to do it. And the reason is you're trying to prompt the body into making changes that it doesn't want to make. You know, when you go to the gym and you lift weights, you're prompting the body to build muscle that it really doesn't want to build, but now you're, you know, you're giving it a reason to. And so when you withhold carbohydrate from the diet, and sugar in particular, but carbohydrate in general, and the body senses that it's not going

to get glucose for a while, it starts to go to a plan B, which is to build the metabolic machinery to start to extract energy from stored fat cells, to burn that fat, to combust that fat in the muscle cells. It takes some of the fat, sends it to the liver to convert into ketones because the brain works really well on ketones. In fact, the brain works better on ketones than it does on glucose for most people. So the body has this built-in plan, this diagram, this genetic program that you're born with to be metabolically flexible and to be able to extract energy from fat and from ketones and from

glucose. And it would normally go that route, but we never give it the reason to. Now, how is that planned? How has it evolved? Well, for most of human history, we ate and we didn't eat. It wasn't like breakfast was the most important meal of the day or make sure you keep little Tupperware things of a little bit of protein and some carbohydrate to eat every two or three hours or else your muscles will go into cannibal mode.

No, humans are wired to overeat. And because food was so scarce, when we did come across food, we tended to eat more. And certainly sweet foods like fruits was even more palatable, so we probably tended to eat more of that. more palatable, so we probably tended to eat more of that. But, but, so we're wired to overeat, and we have this amazing design that allows us to take excess energy and convert it into fuel that we carry around with us all the time, conveniently located above the center of gravity. So it's on the hips, on the butt, on the thighs, on the belly. So we tend to carry this excess body fat as a survival mechanism from a million years ago. That's why you carry it here? Yeah.

That's – sure. It's like a fanny pack. Yeah. It's exactly what it is. It's exactly what it is. But again, if you look at evolution and how things work, we're bipedals. We have to stand upright. So if we had fat accumulating on our upper back or whatever, we'd be tipping over.

So it's conveniently located over the center. It's an elegant, elegant design. The problem is it was designed so that when you didn't eat food, you could take that same fuel, take it out of storage, combust it, and not be any of the worst for wear. Not think of anything other than, you know, I'm still going to hunt. I'm still going to do all these things. I haven't eaten for five days. I'm not hungry. I'm not pissed off at my mate. I'm just going to keep going with a great attitude that I'm going to find something to eat. Now, what is the standard amount of time? Is there a standard amount of time between, if a person eats a normal American diet

and they just decide to fast, how long does it take before their body converts to burning fat? If they're not going keto? Right. Yeah. They're probably going to burn, they're going to probably use a little bit of muscle in the process because the body, if it isn't used to deriving most of its energy from fat because of a process that you've engaged in to use keto to, you know, to burn fat,

it'll still seek glucose. And if you don't give it glucose and you haven't done this work, for the first couple of days, it's miserable. And so people talk about the low-carb flu or if they go on a fasting thing at an ashram. I saw Elvis two days ago. Elvis went to an ashram? Whatever. I saw Elvis in my dreams. Oh, you're saying because you're going crazy. Because you're going crazy. So your brain is kind of frazzled because you haven't given it the opportunity to really thrive on ketones yet. Your body is making ketones, but you haven't, again, you haven't built that metabolic machinery to use them efficiently and effectively.

And so the brain is still looking for glucose. And as a result, what happens is the brain will send a signal to the adrenals to secrete cortisol. Cortisol then, you know, goes throughout the body and strips amino acids from muscle tissue to send them to the liver to become glucose so you can feed the brain. So it's counterproductive over time. And it's also, you know, one of the reasons why back in the old bodybuilding days, in the old training days in any gym, this mantra about don't go more than three or four hours without eating or you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue. If you haven't become fat adapted and keto adapted, that does happen.

You do cannibalize muscle tissue when you go long periods of time without eating. When I say standard American diet, I don't mean junk food, but if you're a person who eats normal, you eat a little bit of pasta, a little bit of bread, but you eat mostly healthy. Yeah. If you decide that you're going to fast, your body's going to cannibalize some muscle. Not so much. Yeah. How much?

A few pounds. You know, a few pounds, maybe. A few pounds. And you'll get it back. You'll get it back. But the idea is that if you can weather that storm, how much time are you looking for before your body starts burning fat? Some people a week, some people two weeks, some people three weeks.

You'll be dead. You can't fast for two weeks. Oh, no, no. You're talking about fasting, fasting. Oh, Jesus. No, I'm talking about— No, I'm not talking about— No, no.

No, I'm talking about intermittent fasting. No, that gets us to two meals a day. Right. But what if someone just fasts? So give me a term. Okay, so if you decide I'm going to go on a 36-hour fast. That's probably the high end of what I would do, and then anything beyond that, I'd be a little bit concerned that I hadn't prepped myself with fat adaptation yet. So when people go on these crazy three to five-day fasts,

they report all this energy. They feel great. They feel amazing. What's going on there? Well, their brains are using ketones. Right. So that's definitely where the energy, the feeling of amazing comes from. Typically, if you're fasting that long, you're not working out.

Like any of these, like my wife does a seven day water fast. Oh, Jesus. Twice a year. Oh, Jesus. That's what I say. Do you go on vacation when that's happening? No, but I eat more. I eat for her while she's gone. Why does she do that? She has this, you know, she feels like it's good for her. She's into the autophagy and some of the anti-aging. Explain that. It burns cells that are bad. Yeah, so

this, when you're, one of the things, one of the many things that happens when you fast is that your body goes into a different mode and it starts to realize that there's not going to be a lot of fuel around for a while. And so in addition to burning stored body fat, in addition to making ketones... By the way, ketones come from fat, so some of the fat that you combust is also just converted into ketones that your brain can use. come from fat, so some of the fat that you combust is also just converted into ketones that your brain can use. It also, the body also says, like if you were to be a, if you had a brain, if you were a cell and you had a brain, you thought, well, generally there's a lot of fuel around, so my job

is to pass the genetic material along to the next generation, so there's plenty for two of us, so I'll just divide, and it'll be two of us, and That'll be great. That same cell, in the absence of this sort of bathing in nutrition, goes, well, there's not even enough for one of me, let alone two of me. So I'm not going to divide. I'm going to repair what I have. And so the cell goes into a repair process where it starts to consume damaged proteins and damaged fats within itself. And it actually gets energy from that. Starts to repair broken strands of DNA or whatever little things are going on. It actually kills off senescent cells at that time. So it's an anti-aging strategy that a lot of people use. It's also a, God, I hate the term reset.

Why do you hate the term? It's overused? No, and I used it in a book, but all of a sudden, in the context of what's going on in the world and the Great Reset, like I never want to hear that term again. Oh, the Great Reset, isn't that the conspiracy theory that the government is using this to change the financial structure of the country? And everything else. Yeah. Do you hear that a lot in Florida? Is that what's going on? No, no, we don't.

No, no, no, we don't know. But I read a lot, Joe. I read the New York Times to see what the other side's doing. The great reason. Yeah, but so she will do these fasts, but she's metabolically flexible, so it's easy for her to do, but if you're not metabolically flexible and you take on a fast of three days, you can get through it, and it's probably good for you. My whole thing is I want this to be, if you chose to do something like that, I want it to be pleasurable and easy and graceful and, you know, something you look forward to doing, not something you dread doing. Now, is there an amount, can you intermittent fast and get

your body to be more metabolically flexible in that way? Yeah, and that's what I'm talking about. So I'm not even into the multi-day fasting. I'm into two meals a day. to engage in as much time as you can of not eating throughout the day to maximize all of these benefits that we just described that come from not eating. One of the things we say is most of the good things happen to us when we're not eating. Most of the repair, most of the recovery, most of the rebuilding happen when we're not eating. When we're eating, which we have to do, it comes with inflammation and, you know,

it's a necessary thing, but the good stuff all happens when we're not eating. So to the extent that we can expand that window of not eating, and with the two meals a day program, which pretty much anybody who's keto now does, you just have an evening meal, and then you don't eat until 1 o'clock, 1.30, 2 o'clock the next day. So you have two meals a day, and you have that 18-hour window. That's what you use, an 18-hour window? Yeah, an 18-hour window, yeah. Why did you choose 18?

It works for me. I mean, you can do 16, you can do, I mean, anything less than, you know, 14 is back to sort of, you know, where you were before. It's a little bit better, but it's not as, like I say, the more time that you can go between eating, the better. And it isn't about so much a routine on a daily basis. It's basically, I certainly use that as a template, but once in a while I eat one meal a day. I'll go, you know, dinner to dinner to dinner. And the beauty here is because I'm metabolically flexible, I have the confidence that I'm not tearing down muscle tissue. I have that my immune system is probably benefiting from it as opposed to being somehow hurt by it. I maintain muscle mass. Again, I have all this energy. And most

importantly, I'm not hungry. I mean, hunger is the killer. Hunger ruins everything. So anytime we talk about these strategies, you have to address hunger first and foremost. Because if you ask people, well, one of the things that's going to happen is you're going to get hungry and you're going to get, and it's going to be, you're going to have to fight your way through it. No, that's not how we do this. So with two meals a day, we build a strategy where, you know, we first first we eliminate the big three, the sugar, processed grains, and the industrial seed oils. And then we, you know, start to cut back a little bit on the starchy carbs

for a while because once you develop the flexibility, you can introduce the starchy carbs again. And then we basically say, look, let's see how long you can go without feeling bad when you wake up in the morning you know and see if you can go till 10 o'clock or 10 30 before you have to eat and if you can go longer that's great and if you could go that long and do a workout and feel good that's even better so the uh the end result is well this all came from a thought experiment I did a while back where I looked at, first of all, how much food we eat as humans. And we eat a shitload of food. Like we eat, all of us pretty much eat way too much food.

More food than we need for sure. And most of us use as a metric like what can I get away with? Like what's the most amount of this food I can eat and not get fat? Or what's the most amount of this dessert I can have and not feel like a glutton or not feel guilty later on or not look like I'm whatever. So we try to get away with as much as we can. And a lot of guys in the gym, that's, you know, that's, that's their thing. I love to eat, and I'm going to eat as much as I can. And if I can get away with more, I'm going to work out more and I'm going to balance it out. But it's kind of a ridiculous

way of looking at life. How much of a glutton can I be every day, every meal? So I did the reverse of that and I thought, what's the least amount of food we can eat and maintain muscle mass or build muscle mass? What's the least amount of food we can eat and have all the energy we need throughout the day? Not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. And if you can look at that in terms of, like, the minimum effective dose of food, what's the least amount of food I can eat and enjoy every freaking bite with gusto and delight and then be okay with saying, you know what? I think I've had enough. I'm good. And typically, you find if you've developed this metabolic flexibility that you

can eliminate 25 or 30% of the calories you used to eat with zero adverse effect and probably entirely to your benefit. When you go 16 to 18 hours a day, or anyone does that, if you do that on a regular basis, will that make your body more adapted to burning fat? Absolutely. Really? Because in the 16 to 18 hours a day, that's where your energy is coming from. And so we look at, you know, you look at some of the top endurance athletes now, Zach Bitter, good example, guy derives 97% of his energy when he's running a 100-mile race, doing 6-minute, 45-second miles, derives from fat. That was almost unheard of.

Like the science community could not get their head around that for a long time. A lot of what he does is carnivore. Yeah. What he does is like fatty ribeye stinks. Because it works for him because he's metabolically flexible and he's deriving most of his energy from fat. But he does take in glucose on the day of a big race. Metabolic flexibility. So he's able to burn glucose and it doesn't derail his fat burning or his ketone production. Because his body's so accustomed to doing that. It's so flexible. It's so efficient. It's so used to doing that. So in your book. It's so efficient. It's so used to doing that.

So in your book, do you set a guideline, like how to get this started and what to do? Oh, yeah. What made you do this? Because first of all, I know you're rich as fuck because I know you sold your company. And then you didn't have to give up a lot of the money because you moved to Florida. But because of that, what motivates you to write another book? I just, you know, my original mission was to help 10 million people regain their health by understanding how the body works. You had a number? I had a number, 10 million.

And then about... Where'd that number come from? Just pulled it out of my ass. So then a couple years later, I'm like, I think I've already hit that number with books and seminars and blog posts and stuff like that. Let's make it 100. So I boosted it up to 100. One of the best things I did with the food company was I brought new people into understanding how the body works and how eating real food with healthy sauces and marinades and toppings and things that made that healthy food taste that much better. Again, I probably expanded the universe of people that now begin

to really appreciate the effects of food on the body. But I still have like a book a year in me, and I'm still doing books on how we can achieve greatness. I don't often use that term, but how we can, you know, achieve this level of health and satisfaction and enjoyment of life. I mean, the tagline of my company is Live Awesome, and as I said, at the end of the day, all I want is you to be happy, you know, and if I can help you do that through my methods, and then the rest of what you do, whether it's financial or with your family, that's up to you. But I can certainly assist on the health side. And when you started this book, was there anything surprising that you found while you were putting this book together?

No. This is really – this is the synthesis of 30 years of doing this. And it's almost like, you know, this book was rewriting stuff that had already written, but in a way that's more user-friendly to the average person. So nothing in my framework has changed scientifically, but I'm always trying to figure out how can I say this in a way that will appeal to the most people. So I think everyone realizes they probably eat too much food, but how can I find a way to not only convince them to do it, but make it easier and make it not just easier, but pleasurable in a way that enhances their lives. People like those meal prep companies. It's one of the things that people like about them is that they give you a reasonable portion of food, especially if it's a good company.

It'll be based on your body mass and what kind of activities you're involved in. Do you ever use one of those, or do you recommend anything like that? Well, no, because now we produce meals. Oh, you do? Yeah, we have meals. When do you recommend anything like that well no because now we produce uh meals so oh you do yeah we have meals when did you guys start doing that um last year pre pre-covid and then covid sort of shut down the distribution because it's they're frozen meals so they're they're frozen but you know we have a steak fajita we have uh you know uh teriyaki chicken uh we've got a asian asian dish i mean it's a these are in in bags and it's all you know free range and grass-fed and you know organic um but how do you microwave it how do

you heat it up you can microwave it yeah and some the skillets you do in a in a skillet pan um so how long did it take to figure out how to do that where it tastes good but still maintained all the nutrients and it seems like that would bethat's a challenge in and of itself, right? That's a huge challenge, yeah. And the challenge is making it to scale, right, and doing it in large quantities. How many people do you serve with these? Oh, just one. It's just that these are individual serving sizes.

I'm sorry, I meant how many people do you distribute these to? Well, they're available in stores throughout the country that carry us. Yeah. So it's not like you're not, it's on like a website where... No, no, no, you can't. It's because it's frozen. It's too logistically complicated to do individual shipments. They have to stay frozen. So it's the frozen section of a lot of stores now. And that was one of the things that was curtailed from COVID. So we were going to launch last year in April, and then a lot of the stores said, look,

there's going to be nobody coming into our stores, and we're not going to make any big shifts until we know how this sorts out. Yeah. But it's taking off. One of the programs we have right now, and I think we told your team this, is we're going to donate 50,000 of these meals to needy families through a program. I hope it's in the show notes. But if not, just, you know, you can Google Primal Kitchen and check it out there.

But we're, by purchasing Primal Kitchen products and showing a proof of purchase, we'll donate one of these meals to families in need. Oh, that's great. Yeah. That's very nice. So you were personally involved in the construction of these meals? Like did you have to taste test all of them? So I sold the company to Kraft Heinz two years ago now, and I've been intimately involved ever since and mostly on the R&D side.

So the amount of R&D side. So the amount of R&D that's gone into creating these has been amazing. And, you know, so we will have Zoom calls to cook in real time, whatever, you know, we're working on, whatever the latest iteration is. And then there'll be, you know, eight of us on a call. and then we'll have to fill out forms about spiciness and sweetness and all the – it's really, I think, well done. And so by consensus, we come down to the final iteration. Now, what if – I mean, how do you parse that out between, like, say if there's a guy that weighs 250 pounds versus a guy that weighs 150 pounds?

Obviously, you're not eating the same for the big guy. Buy two of them if you're the big guy, yeah. Yeah, but is it designed for a specific size human? You know, no, but that's a good point. I mean, it's designed for moms who are, you know, in a hurry and don't want to fix dinner for their kids or whatever, or want to spend less time fixing dinner for their kids and want to serve them up something healthy. or want to spend less time fixing dinner for their kids and want to serve them up something healthy. So it really fills a need. You know, I, on occasion, like I love to cook steak at my house,

so I mostly have steak, but if I'm out of steak or whatever and I'm in a... Is that a staple of your diet? Yeah. Is that mostly what you eat? Well, red meat is still mostly what I eat. Really? Yeah. Now, what do you say to people that think that's terrible for you?

More for me. But isn't that the thing? More for me. I don't mean for the environment. I mean terrible for you physically. I'm sure you must run into people where you tell them you need something. Not anymore. Not after you had Saladino on the show and Baker.

Like the carnivore diet, it's a thing. This really is a thing. This eating a lot of steak is a thing. Now, when I say a lot, I don't eat a lot of steak, but I have steak frequently, right? And I have fish fairly frequently. I probably have two, you know, both my meals are high in protein, moderate in fat, and low in carbs every day. high in protein, moderate in fat, and low in carbs every day. And that's the way I want it. That's what my satiety requirements are. That's what my taste buds want. That's what goes best with wine. I mean, every meal I eat has to be a great meal. I don't eat anything that's healthy just because you tell me it's healthy. And every bite of food I put in my mouth, I want to be spectacular. So I orchestrate my eating around that.

And when I'm done, I'm full. And so you do most of your cooking? I do most of my cooking or my wife. My wife has recently decided to become a great chef, and she's been preparing some amazing stuff. Do you let her cook the steak? No, so do you let her cook the steak no don't let her no there is there is some stuff isn't that weird yeah that is i mean you want to talk about primal yeah that is a weird instinct that men have to want to cook steak yeah i recently got uh i cook most of my meals on a pellet grill. I use a Traeger, which I love because it's really simple to use and you can maintain the temperature perfectly.

But I started cooking some stuff recently over an Argentine-style grill where you cook over wood, just plain old wood. It's so dumb. It takes so much time. It's so much more annoying. Right. But yet I love it. It tastes good. But also it's this much more annoying right but yet i love it it tastes good but but it's also it's this weird thing like you're cooking over wood it's primal man that's that's very strange yeah it's very strange that thing with men and meat over fire like there's something

gets ignited especially if you've killed the meat yourself then it adds an extra thing yeah if you've hunted the meat and then you're cooking over the fire, it's almost like I can hear drums when I'm cooking. Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. But men like to cook steak over fire for some strange reason. Yeah. You know, like forever.

It's been the big cliche that men like to grill. And it's still, it's still true. Yeah. I, my son, who has been mostly vegetarian

in his life and it was, he eats a lot of eggs and protein-oriented stuff. We went on a hike up to the top of El Cap to watch a friend of mine jump off with a parachute the next day. Oh, Jesus. And I brought a steak up, and I literally cooked it over a fire hanging from a stick, and my son was so impressed. He's like, Jesus, Dad. That's really primal.

I'm like, well, I've got to have my steak. You can get these little tiny grills that fold up, little camp grills. They're this tiny little thing that's made out of metal that's like the size of a notebook. And the little sticks come out of the corner, and you put it on the ground, you light a fire underneath it, get it hot, and grill right over it. Maybe next time. Maybe next time.

But this time I was hanging it off a stick, and it was great. Well, the problem is, like, you could use the wrong stick. Yeah, if the steak falls in the fire, you're screwed, too. Also, if you don't know about poisoned sticks, poisoned branches. I think Callan was telling me about some guy who uh him and his son cooked food off of uh they made like these skewers off of some branch and turns out to be a toxic plant and they wind up getting sick and dying oh wow like yeah like there's certain plants that you know if you eat the plant it'll kill you and if you shave that plant you know and then stick it

in your meat you're getting all of the chemicals from that plant in you. And if you shave that plant, you know, and then stick it in your meat, you're getting all of the chemicals from that plant in your meat. You've made the plant bleed the chemicals into the meat. Yeah, exactly. How do you cook steak? So, you know, again, living in Miami Beach, well, cut back to, I was in Malibu for 30 years. Right. And I had a gas grill on my inside, and I'd cook either outside or on gas or inside. And so that was the only way to cook a steak, as far as I'm concerned. Well,

I had to learn, when I got to a condo in Miami Beach, I got to learn how to cook in a pan on an electric stovetop. That sounds like a nightmare. Making the best steaks I've ever had. Really? 100%. How do you do it differently? I just pan fry it with butter, salt and pepper, pan fry on one side, flip it over, get a lot of the gooey butter and stuff in there, pan fry on the other side, let it stand for 10 minutes. So it's moderate heat and you're doing it lower because if it's butter, you don't really want to sear it at a very high heat. Correct. Cast iron? Really?

No. Some, you know, just some. Some bullshit ass frying pan. Some bullshit ass French frying pan. I have a cast iron pan, but, you know. You don't use that? I'm not that sophisticated. Cast iron is the opposite of sophisticated.

Yeah, well, whatever. Whatever. I don't like the cleanup on a cast iron pan. Oh, well, you just take one. You ever seen those little metal things? It looks like chain mail. Whatever. I don't like to clean up on a cast iron pan. Well, you just take one. You ever seen those little metal things? It looks like chain mail. Yeah. Little pads.

Yeah, whatever. No, it's not even that. I know. They're designed just for cleaning cast iron. Yeah. I have one. I have a cast iron pan. I just don't reach for it.

You don't use it. I don't, yeah. Do you cook like with garlic and just butter? Do you add things? I'm the simplest guy. I mean, I'll do- you know salt salt maybe some pepper but always salt and um you know and then i'll maybe steam up some broccoli and put slather it with butter glass of wine i'm good to go man and when you portion it out like how many ounces do

you think you're eating i mean i'll I'll typically finish a 12-ounce steak. That's a reasonable-sized steak. It's fairly, actually, kind of on the small side if you went to a restaurant, right? Yeah. No, I mean, it's, well, if I went to a restaurant, I wouldn't finish a 16-ounce, you know, but I can finish a 12-ounce at home. I went to a restaurant with Jordan Peterson once, and I watched Jordan eat a 32-ounce tomahawk by himself.

By his damn self? Because that's all he eats. Jesus. He doesn't eat anything but red meat. Wow. And drink water. Yeah. That's all he does.

Okay. I mean, that's a—no, listen, that's a choice. But I— It helped him. I mean, one of the things I come back to is, you know, I want to be happy. I want to enjoy every bite of food, and I happen to like some vegetables, too, and I happen to like, you know, different things. So even if you could demonstrate to me that Jordan's way of doing it is better in terms of your health,

I might say, well, you know, there's a line that I'm not going to cross because I love the taste, I love the crunch, I love love whatever it is of certain foods. I enjoy salads as a beginning of my meal. I think also there's something to it's light, and you're kind of like priming your body for food. You're starting off with this sort of light food, lettuce and celery and carrots and what have you. I prefer just olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

That's what I like for dressing. That's probably the healthiest, too. Yeah. It just tastes the best, too. I just always feel like I prefer that. And then I'll eat meat after that. But I've done the carnivore thing a couple times now. I did it two months in a row.

This year I kind of cheated a lot. I ate dessert too many times. But the first time which by the way that's like worse than you know it's like the combination of the of the fat and the sugar is is that's pretty harmful if yeah but we can we can get into that let's get into that tell me what am i i mean a lot of people screw up on on keto or screw up on some of these, even IF, intermittent fasting, because if you're metabolically flexible, then you can derive a lot of this energy from the fats in your meal and from the protein, and you've cut the carbs down. But if you then finish it off with a dessert, now you're raising your insulin.

The insulin is—well, you're raising your insulin. The insulin is, well, you're raising your blood sugar, first of all. And then you're raising your insulin. So the insulin is trying to get rid of the glucose in your bloodstream. And it's also locking the fat into the fat cells so you can't burn it off. It's a bit of a, you know, it's sort of the worst thing you could do would be to combine a standard American diet with parts of a keto or a primal diet. So don't do that. Okay. So if you're going to eat healthy food, if you're going to eat just steak, just don't eat the dessert.

Yeah. Yeah. And what is the mechanism? Like what's going on when you're combining the sugar and healthy food? The sugar? I mean, the mechanism, as I say, is if you're eating otherwise healthy food, even if you've got some starchy carbs in there or some vegetables that are providing carbohydrate, you know, they're slow-burn carbohydrates. They sort of, they don't go directly into your bloodstream. They sort of leak into your bloodstream over time.

Many of these are locked in a fibrous matrix, so it takes a while for your body to digest them. But then when you consume the sugar, the sugar goes straight into the bloodstream, so the blood sugar goes sky high. And now it sets up this whole reaction where, again, your pancreas is secreting insulin. The insulin is trying to get rid of all the sugar that's in your bloodstream. So a healthy meal can be ruined by dessert. Yes, exactly. Damn it, Mark.

I'm sorry. I mean, you can have a healthy dessert. What's a healthy dessert? Berries? Berries and mascarpone cream or something like that used to be one of my favorite desserts. We would serve it at dinner parties at our house and people would go, this is the best dessert I ever had. They were lying to you. Probably.

Yeah. Tiramisu. If you had tiramisu right next to it, they would dive on that. Yeah. Well, that's mascarpone cream too, but that's much more sugary. Yeah, yeah. The problem is it's so delicious. Well, that's, you know.

And those keto desserts are mostly bullshit. Bullshit. To be honest. No, I just have to roll my eyes. The paleo treats and the keto desserts and all these things are like trying to Desserts are mostly bullshit. Bullshit. No, I just have to roll my eyes. The paleo treats and the keto desserts and all these things are like trying to come up with a version. It's almost like Beyond Meat trying to come up with a piece of steak that's made out of vegetables. And here we are trying to create a sugary dessert that looks like a dessert and tastes like a dessert,

but is made with erythritol and allulose and all this other stuff. I'm glad you brought that up because I think there's real promise in these meats that are made in a laboratory in terms of they're cloning meat. They're taking meat and reproducing it. And I've seen some of these really strange-looking 3D-printed steaks, but it's actual animal tissue um but these meat substitutes that are made with seed oils yeah uh just horrible just knowing that there is a study and we've talked about it on the podcast where they fed rats these these things and they had horrible fucking rats eat eat each other. They eat everything.

Yeah. They eat garbage. They're fine. Yeah. They eat those fake burgers, and they're sick as fuck. I know. They started getting liver problems. Yeah.

Yeah. I can't explain it. It's amazing how many people think that those things are good for you. Beyond amazing. Ooh, beyond amazing. Yeah. It's impossible. Oh, wait.

No. It's just nuts. It's just nuts that, again, that the collective conscience of the country would rally around something so inane, so antithetical to health, and in the name of saving the climate or saving the animals or whatever, there's never going to be any, well, not in our lifetime, even the matrix lab-grown meat, the cell-based stuff, still lacks a lot of the nutrients. You have to have the infusion of the capillaries and all of the stuff. You have to have a real animal to get the full impact of all this.

They need to clone headless animals with no souls. Yeah, exactly. That's. They need to clone headless animals with no souls. Yeah, exactly. That's what they need to do. I mean, yeah. But then they would have to exercise in order to be, like, really delicious. That's the thing, like, the difference between a wild game animal and an animal that's stuck in a pen like veal, which is disgusting. A wild game animal is rich and red and dark, and it's denser, it's more chewy because it's

a denser, healthier animal. And you think you're going to get that from a lab-grown? No. No. So, you know, we're back to... Unless you get a headless elk, and you put him on steroids, and you have him running on a treadmill. Let's patent that, Jamie.

Make a note. Yeah, it's... I think, you know, regenerative agriculture is the way we need to go to feed the world, not through ceasing growing animals and trying to do it all in the lab. Well, Rob Wolf has a new book out, and he was supposed to be on right around April, but a bunch of shit went down, and we're going to have him on again. But his book is about that.

His book is all about the benefits of regenerative agriculture. Yeah, the people that are skeptical, though, don't think that we could do it at a scale that's necessary to provide as many people with meat as eat meat in this country because of fast food production. The way I've heard it argued, and it makes a lot of sense, is that the scale in which we're consuming meat in this country because of fast food requires factory farming to keep up with it. Well, for now it does, but all of these different concentrations, that there is a point at which we can't satisfy people's needs. And so I see us sort of going back to the cottage industry farm, the local grown, you know, local farmers. I mean, I would love to see if there's going to be any subsidies in agriculture, should be for for local small local small farms that are trying to do regenerative agriculture and reclaim the topsoil and and you know build back instead of continuously depleting it yeah i think so too and i think one of the interesting things is that

one of the big arguments against everyone eating vegetables is monocrop agriculture which is essentially what you would need. This is the real problem. It becomes a conundrum because everyone, I think, everyone with a heart and a soul agrees that factory farming in terms of animals is disgusting. It's horrible. But I don't think they understand the horrors of monocrop agriculture

and how bad it is it's so bad for the environment it's so bad for the soil it's bad for the animals it's it's terrible for all the wildlife that gets moved and and displaced because of the fact that you have you know four thousand acres of corn or some crazy shit like that and when they churn that corn up with a combine a lot of shit dies there is no way you're going to go out there and hand pick 4 000 acres of corn you're not going to do it right you use machinery and during that machinery it's indiscriminate it chews up everything not only that you have to use some sort of pesticides you have to use something that discourages predation you have to use all these of pesticides. You have to use something that discourages predation.

You have to use all these different methods to keep animals. Like if you have 4,000 acres of corn, you're going to have a food source where animals are going to swarm in and eat all of your crops. That's what they would do. If that was a normal thing that occurred in the wild, if in the wild all of a sudden out of nowhere there was 4,000 acres of naturally growing vegetables, that would be one of the most wildlife rich areas 100 100 yeah so how do they keep that from happening well they do with poison they do they discourage it with with

pesticides with uh all sorts of different methods of eliminating insects if you care about insects they destroy insect populations insects which are also critical to the growth of the soil it's like there's this natural cycle so then they have to add a bunch of nitrogen and shit to the soil and they estimate that we have like i think the latest estimation jamie look this up the united states farmlands have i believe believe, 60 more seasons. I heard 50, but yeah, it's that number. It's a dwindling number. It's a diminishing number until all of the nutrients are depleted.

You and me might be dead, but Jamie's going to ride this out. Jamie's going to be here at the end of crops. He's going to be in this bunker with his lab-grown meat. Yeah. I'll be 113, hooked up to an IV NAD machine, and Jamie will be out there trucking, eating lab-grown carrots. I just don't

understand why people don't recognize that both these things are terrible. Factory farming is terrible, and this monocrop agriculture, and this is the argument they always use. We need these monocrop agriculture things to feed animals. Well, no, we don't.

What you need is natural grasslands, which is what these... When you saw... When the settlers saw millions of bison running across the plains, what were they eating? Were they eating monocrop GMO soy? No, they weren't. They were eating grass. That's what they're supposed to eat. And when they do that they

shit on the ground that shit fertilizes the grasses and fertilizes all the other plants and then you have this whole ecosystem of animals that exist within these within these fields and it's supposed to be that way they're supposed to coexist together and they work together symbiotically to make sure that and you you can do that, at least we've demonstrated on small scale, and this is what Rob's book is about, and a lot of other people have talked about this as well, that when it's done correctly, it actually produces a carbon neutral effect. Yeah. Nature always has the best answer. We try to circumvent it. We try to, you know, it really bugs me when tech Tries to solve a wet problem

When the people in tech go We can fix this There's a company called Soylent Yeah I heard about that Did they not see the fucking movie? What? Yeah exactly If you don't know Soylent Green

It's people Soylent Green is a science fiction movie from the 1970s And it's about people accidentally eating people. Not accidentally. They didn't know they were eating people. They were eating this new food product called Soylent Green, and at the end of the movie they realized, oh, my God, we're eating people. But the concept was apparently some tech guys got together and said,

people just don't like to eat. They don't like to spend the time eating. They want to get back to programming. So let's make a complete – that's a tech solution. Fucking robots. So let's make a complete meal. What's up, Jim? It's named after the movie, just so you know.

Yeah. They knew what they were doing. Of course it is. I mean, Soylent's not a thing. Like, you have to name – I mean, soylent's not a thing. Like, you have to name... I mean, you can't not know about that move. Someone's going to tell you. Well, certainly if you went to trademark it, you'd figure it out.

But it's just the idea that people don't like to eat. What the fuck are you talking about? No, that's my point. That's so crazy. How can we do it quickly and efficiently? Some people don't like to eat, though. My friend Paul, he fucking hated food. He was super skinny, and he never ate.

And he would always say, I hate food. I just eat food because I have to. I think that's an anomaly. That's what you call an outlier. I think, you know how two of my daughters have completely different taste buds. My 12-year-old daughter does not like spicy food. My 10-year-old daughter loves it. does not like spicy food.

My 10-year-old daughter loves it. All my habanero sauces and all these different stuff, like pretty spicy sauces, she gets into it. And I'm like, it must be a gene. It has to be. I don't think it's been identified. Maybe I'm wrong. Has it?

No, I don't know. I mean, it's almost definitely a gene. It's got to be because my wife doesn't have it. My wife does not like spicy food. And my 12-year-old doesn't like it. My 12-year-old also has allergies that my wife has that I don't have. My 10-year-old doesn't have the allergies and loves spicy food. So it's clear there's a mixture going on here. But I think it's the same thing with taste.

And some people, I think their taste buds are just fucking terrible. You know, when I had COVID, I lost my taste for a week, smell and taste. It was the weirdest thing. And I really got how, like, I literally lost five pounds, not by choice, but by the fact that I had to, you know, I just didn't feel like eating. And my great steak literally tasted like, it tastes like chewing rubber. It was almost disgusting. Wow. That's so strange. So, you know, a lot of us, I'm not the only one, a lot of us have thought, okay, that's the way to create a diet product. It's something that ruins your taste and smell for, you know, a couple of hours. Or there's a little thing called discipline.

Yeah, well. That's right. How about that? How about learned discipline? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, again, if you reconfigure your metabolism to be metabolically flexible, a lot of this hunger, appetite, and cravings go away.

It's also a matter of reprioritizing the way you look at your life. Yeah. And you can do that. And one of the things that I recommend to people is write things down in terms of if you want to accomplish things. People said to me, like, how do you fit everything that you do in a day? It's a tight squeeze, but one of the ways i do it is by writing things down so i'm accountable so i have to do these things particularly my

workouts they're written out and i've done that a lot recently and i've really enjoyed it because it makes me accountable i look at that sheet of paper and i know all there's this stuff has to get done and there's only one way i have to do. And I think that should be the same with your food. I think you can enjoy delicious meals like what you're talking about with a nice steak or salad or some avocado and olive oil and salt. Nice. But write that shit out.

This is what I'm eating today. I'm going to drink 32 ounces of water. I'm not going to drink anything else. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. But just try it that way. Try writing things out. It's such a good idea. No, prioritization and responsibility, taking responsibility, those are kind of a key ingredient in getting your life back together again, I think. And with regard to eating,

I think. And with regard to, you know, eating, one of the issues that I saw people have is, you know, well, noon, it's lunchtime, right? It's like, whether I'm hungry or not, it's noon, we should have lunch. Well, what if you, you know, prioritize something else at noon, to your point, and be okay with the fact that you don't have to have something to eat just because it's 12 p.m. Isn't the problem with people, though, that that's their only window to eat if they work? But again, if you're doing two meals, well, okay, possibly. But let's go back to breakfast. Like breakfast, the most important meal of the day. It's not.

A morning meal from 8 to 9 is not the most important meal of the day. And for people who are metabolically flexible, it's a waste of time. It's like, what? I've got to start my day by sitting down and doing something else instead of going off and being productive and going to the gym and going to work and doing all the stuff I'm doing? So this frees up a lot of time as well, this compressed eating window is one of the terms we use for it. I started a few years ago working out in the morning before my first meal, and it made a big difference. You work out fast? Yeah, and I'm accustomed to it too.

It's like this is what—the problem is if you're not accustomed to it, you do not have as much energy as you do. For a while, but then you'll get accustomed to it. Yeah, it's normal for me now. Yeah, yeah. What time do you work out? Usually around 10 a.m. Okay. That's what I like.

Great, yeah. Yeah. So when's your first meal? Usually around 1 p.m. All right. Yeah. Like today? Yeah, today would be around 1,

but I just had a protein bar on the way over here. Okay. I eat very light in the morning. I had a couple pieces of steak with some hot sauce on the way out the door, and then I had a protein bar. So I usually eat light in the morning after a workout, and then at nighttime I'll have my big meal. I do every workout fasted.

Every workout. Every workout. I mean, mostly because I prioritize my day and my workout times, like yours, around 10 o'clock. So I'll go for an hour-and-a-half fat bike ride on the beach in the sand, in the deep sand. Oh, that's a great workout. It's an amazing workout. Like I never even thought about it until a friend of mine said, hey, I got these bikes. I got these four and a half inch wide tires.

Let's go out in the sand. So much resistance, right? It's so much so that there's times where you, you know, and the sand is so fluffy from the wheels going through, people walking through, that you you have to focus on going two miles an hour just to stay upright to get through it. Wow. But it's an incredible workout. It's a lot of fun.

You're on the beach, so you're seeing all the people back and forth on the beach. Sand is just... Do you have any dunes near you? No. No hills at all? No hills at all. So that's why this is a great workout

because this is... In Malibu, if I would get on a mountain bike, there were hills all over the place. But I'm working harder in the deep sand than I would have on the hills except I'm going flat. If Malibu had all the freedoms in terms of taxes and regulation, would you still be in Malibu? Oh, that's a tough question. Probably yes. I would not have left. I would not have left.

Right. But you not have left. I would not have left. Yeah. Right. But you enjoy, you enjoy Miami regardless. Love, love Miami. Love Miami Beach. That's so crazy. Every time I go to Miami, it seems like chaos. It seems like, like loud music and Lamborghinis and like, I'm in and out. I'm like, ah, let me get out of here. Depends on where you go. I mean, you did a show at the Jackie Gleason at one point. I tried to get in. It was, the line was out the, like it was down the street. It was incredible to see and very gratifying to see.

And, you know, congratulations on the massive success as a comic or comedian? I don't care. Okay. I know, I'm a stand-up comic. Yeah, yeah. I guess, but stand-up comedian is okay too. Yeah. But that location is right sort of in the thick of that.

It's just not too far from Lincoln Avenue. Right, so that's why I always... Lincoln Road, I mean, and Washington Avenue. Yeah, so you sort of put yourself in the thick of it rather than a couple of blocks away where it would be nice and peaceful. Yeah, we're going to Jacksonville in a few weeks for the first UFC with a live audience in a year. Wow.

Yeah. Well, at least the first UFC in the United States. They did a live audience in Abu Dhabi fairly recently where they, I think they had to have a COVID test, a negative COVID test within 24 to 48 hours or something like that. Some reasonable amount of time. But they're going to do one in Jacksonville, just buck wild, 000 people jam them in there yeah go florida florida doesn't give a fuck and then they're doing one or they do they do yeah yeah well they do give a fuck right it's not that they don't give a fuck it's like it's the reasonable thing to do at this at this juncture

especially at this juncture because because one of the things is like by now most people who are going to get it have gotten it or gotten exposed to it i think most people are going to die have died i mean it's a horrible thing to say but i think you know it took a lot of a lot of uh you know elderly people who only had a few months left anyway yeah and so now if you if you get exposed and again the viral load is minimal because you're out and about and you get a couple of little virons instead of a massive dose that the health care workers got, for instance, in the first days or first weeks of the pandemic in New York. When the health care workers were getting sick, they were getting incredible viral loads. Well, you can't – there is a difference between a small viral load and body handling. You know, there is a difference between a small viral load and body handling.

You know, so I think we've gotten to the point where every state ought to be considering opening back up fully. Yeah, I mean, California, it wasn't until Gavin Newsom started getting recalled that they started opening things up. Isn't that amazing? When they realized that the recall was going to actually take place, there is going to be a vote because they've reached the two... Well, they've reached... They passed the 1.5 million threshold. They got to 2.1. Yep. And 2.1 million people signed those things

and they think it'll parse out to over the 1.5 million that they need once they verify them. Right. So then they start opening things. How crazy. Yeah. A little bit of pressure.

Dude, I wonder what it is it's like there's a sickness in power there's a sickness in being able to tell people that they can't work and once you have done that i think it's a i think it's just human nature i think it's very people are very reluctant to release that because if they were basing it entirely on the science they would have to take florida into account they really would well you'd also have to take into account the evidence that shows that it spreads indoors and that you might be, by continuing the lockdown, you might be encouraging the spread of the virus.

Well, when they say the science is settled, the science is never settled. That's nonsense. And in this, the science has changed, you know, every couple of weeks. Masks, no masks, six feet for adults, three feet for children. I mean, seriously. Come on. what does that mean double masking you got a double mask now that was the thing after he gets busted eating at a restaurant indoors lying about it he says it was outdoors there's a fucking chandelier over your

head yeah there's no chandelier outside when there's a chandelier over your head you're inside the stars is outside chandelier that's a fucking roof you're indoors i know stars is outside. Chandelier, that's a fucking roof. You're indoors. I know. There's a sliding glass door. You're indoors, man. And no mask. After that, he has the balls to tell people to wear two masks,

which is just so bananas. The whole thing is, it's really crazy. No, as I said, it's the most mismanaged event in human history. It's not just that. They're digging their heels in. Yeah. It's not just they're mismanaging. They're mismanaging it and recognize there's evidence they're mismanaged event in human history. It's not just that. They're digging their heels in. Yeah. It's not just they're mismanaging. They're mismanaging it and recognizing there's evidence they're mismanaging, but insanely

reluctant to accept that evidence. To walk it back. No, they don't want to walk it back. Yeah. Because if they walk it back, then they have to admit that you probably cost lives by encouraging this lockdown. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's weird, man. It's weird to see. It's weird to see. It's weird to see, and it's going to be really weird in four or five years when Los Angeles hasn't recovered because they think California

is going to bounce back real quick. Like, you're out of your mind. One of the reasons I left California was I saw it on a slippery slope going downhill, not even way before COVID. And, you know, whether it's the taxes or whether it's the way it's governed or whether it's the, you know, trying to – their prohibitions on businesses are unbelievable.

And I've had several businesses in California. How so? Oh, for example, Alcoholic Beverage Commission. I opened a restaurant a couple years ago. It failed. But, you know, we applied a year in advance for our beer and wine license, a couple of years ago it failed, but, um, you know, we, we applied a year in advance for, for our beer and wine license a year in advance. And over the time, as we were building the restaurant out, we kept checking it. How's it going? How's it? Yeah, it's great. All everything's

on track. Um, and then as we got a month away from, uh, opening, we lost your application. You're going to have to start over again, get to the back of the line. So we had to, we had to refile and lost like two months. We were open for two months without a beer and wine license. Oh, my God. So then when I sold the business, oh, no, another one during that construction, Title 24, which is a good idea, energy conservation, had to build a switch that would dim the lights or turn the lights off whenever there was ambient daylight outside. It would recognize the amount of light inside and save energy by turning lights off. Well, at some part of every morning when people were eating breakfast at 1030 when the sun was up here, if a cloud came by, the lights would go on. They'd flicker on and off for an hour every

day, and you couldn't bypass the switch, but this was a regulation. Then when I went to sell the business, it went into escrow, and then the escrow money stayed there for a year because the state wouldn't release it partly because of COVID and partly because they couldn't find a tax return that had been filed a year earlier. And it goes on and on. I mean, I could literally write a book about how egregious the regulations are for businesses in California. I wonder what's going to happen. People are just going to accept that? It's never going to. So many people are moving.

No, and if I were a young person, I would never think about going there to start a business now. It's just there's so many other opportunities. So many other friendly states that believe in personal freedom. Believe in freedom and believe in business. That sounds like such a crazy thing to say, believe in freedom and believe in in you know in in that sounds like such a crazy thing to say believe in freedom like when you say believe in freedom automatically people have images of like american flags and right-wing ideology and eagles and shit yeah but freedom

is so critical for people trying to figure out who they are and what they are who they who they are and what they want to who they are and what they want to do and how they want to live their life. It is the most open-minded principle that we have. It's crazy that it's been demonized. The concept of wanting to pursue freedom has been demonized. It's like, oh, you just want a gun and you want to be able to light things on fire and fireworks every day.

That's not what freedom is. But this concept, the way it's been applied to California, that this insanely inept government is supposed to be able to take care of you and tell you what you can and can't do. You're just ruining the city. Did you ever have to deal with the Coastal Commission? No. You heard about it? I have friends. I have friends that built a house there, and it took forever.

Edge took like 15 years to get his approval. Who? The Edge. Oh, from the U2? Yeah. 15 years? Something like that. Some crazy amount of time, yeah.

Why did it take so long? Just because he had a big... Maybe because of his name. Call yourself the Edge people? Get this fucking guy out of our town. Big piece of property up on the hills. No, but my neighbor took 10 years to build his tennis court. He applied, and then 10 years later,

he finally finished his tennis court. 10 years? He probably can't play tennis anymore. His knees are gone. Pretty much, yeah. That was accurate. Anyway, I don't want to trash the state anymore. Yeah, too late.

But I've found a new... And by the way, it is so spectacular. Like the Big Sur coastline is some of the most spectacular real estate in the world. Listen, there's amazing parts of California. The redwood forests are fucking incredible. I used to run in Big Basin Park, which is up just above Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz, and full of redwoods. And we used to do an 11-mile loop among redwoods that were you know

as big around as this as this uh bunker here um just spectacular yeah and i think they burned in some of the fires recently but i think the problem with california is the same thing as the problem with new york in terms of uh the population density i think there's a real issue with with government in any place that has a high population density. They always tend to be liberal governments, like whether it's New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles, it's liberal governments, and liberal governments tend to favor over-regulation. Apparently, yeah. They know what's best. Or at least they think they do.

No, but I'll give another example. My house burned in the Malibu fires, in the Woolsey fires in 2018. I still had a house in Malibu. We had been trying to sell it, but it burned in the fires. And the mismanagement of that whole Malibu fire thing was, somebody's, I think, writing a book about it, but it was horrible. And so there'd be fire trucks from neighboring states, not just neighboring communities, but neighboring states, positioned on PCH, and people would go down and say, dude, my house is on fire just up the street, an aisle and a half. And they'd say, well, we have to stay here and wait to be dispatched to go.

Oh, Jesus. Yeah, so anyway, it was a tough time. Yeah, that fire was a real eye-opener. Because my friend Bill Burr, he has a helicopter license, and we flew around, and you really get to see what the actual damage was when you fly. And we flew over, like, Point Dune. Point Dune, yeah. Because one of the things that people always thought was,

oh, they protect the rich folks. No protection. No, there was no protection. These giant estates that were on Point Dune, that were, you know, like six acres overlooking the ocean on the bluff, gone, burnt to a cinder. Some of my friends. And the fire in the history of Malibu had never jumped to PCH to Point Dune.

Yeah, never gone across like that. But this one did. Yeah, no one thought that was possible. Everyone thought it was just going to stay on the side of the hill. And if you were over on the side of the PCH with the water. My house burned the second night. So the first night, the fires came through past my house. No problem.

The second night, the winds picked up and embers from burned down houses a mile away blew through the air into the eaves and rafters of my house. Wow. So the second night was as bad for some as the first. And you just weren't in town. No, we were living in Miami. So my daughter was living in the house, and I was literally watching it live streamed on local CBS 2 in L.A.,

and my daughter's in the house. I got pictures I could show you. There's the fire line coming toward our house, and I'm like, get the dogs and get out. And she's like, no, I think we've got time. And then when I see one of the reporters on PCH with the flames already down to PCH, I'm like, get out of the house now. I literally had to tell from Miami, I had to tell my daughter to evacuate. Oh, my God.

Yeah. That had to be terrifying. Yeah, and it was flames on both sides. She went my God. Yeah. That had to be terrifying. Yeah, and it was, you know, flames on both sides. She went to Point Dome. From there, you couldn't go down PCH, so she went to Point Dome. And then she stayed there for three days cooking meals for the firefighters. Oh, wow. As her husband was unloading, you know, there were boats that were bringing supplies in

because no supplies could come in through PCH. Yeah, when the fire—I was in Bell Canyon. There were boats that were bringing supplies in because no supplies could come in through PCH. Yeah, I was in Bell Canyon. When the firefighters in Bell Canyon, my friend Bud, I told him where I have all my elk stored. And so I led him into my house, and then we took all the elk meat and fed the firefighters. So he kept a grill running while all these guys were trying to. He's crazy. He didn't evacuate. He stayed there.

Yeah. He stayed there and was like, had a fucking water hose on his house. A lot of my friends in Point Doom did the same thing. I'm like, no, with a water hose. You could die. By the way, you could easily die. I mean, people have no idea how. This was such an inferno when the winds were 50 miles an hour. Insane.

And with a water hose, which, by the way, was down to a trickle because the firefighters were using all of the major hydrant when the pressure had dropped. Anyway, it was— Right, you can't even protect yourself. You couldn't even douse yourself to keep yourself from catching fire yourself. It was weird to see because I was at home. I had actually done a set at the comedy store, and I home and it was about 12 30 at night and my wife and i were looking out the window and uh she was like i think we should get the fuck out of here and uh it was getting close and uh as the fire was getting close it just like it started erupting in

all these different spots it wasn't just one spot and it was pretty obvious it was headed our way so we wound up uh staying in bever Beverly Hills at a hotel for like a week or so with a couple of our other friends from the neighborhood. So it was not too bad. We all got together and like, hey, I wonder if we have a house, you know. We got lucky. But I had been evacuated three times in California. So that was another reason. I had PTSD from the fires. Because that was not the first time. My business almost burned in a fire earlier, seven years earlier. There'd been another fire where we'd woken up one morning and seen the hill like at 5 a.m. My friend calls me up. I had actually been sleeping in the master, the closet of the master bedroom because the winds were so loud. And my friend wakes me up

and says, have you left yet? And I'm like, no. He says, have you looked out your window? We have these storm shutters. The whole hillside was ablaze, and that was pretty scary. And then anyway. People don't understand that once it gets to a point, there's no way the firefighters can stop it.

And then if you're there while that's happening, you can get stuck, and you can't escape it'll it'll surround you and you know i talked to these firefighters when we were doing fear factor once and this guy said something that scares me this day he goes it's just a matter of one day where the right wind hits los angeles and it burns right through the entire city all the way to the ocean i go really he goes yeah he goes once it catches he goes people have a distorted idea of what we're capable of doing he goes we can we can do our best to save houses we could do our best to evacuate people save lives he goes but california's fires are a different animal because it doesn't fucking rain right the fuel is just astronomical there's so

much fuel that's one of the things I love about here. It rains all the time. It rained last night. I woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning by rain. That hail? Oh, my God. It was crazy. Yeah. It's beautiful here.

It's green. It's like things are green and alive. Do you ever paddle? Do you ever stand up paddle? I have. I have on the ocean on vacation, but I was drunk and I fell off. This is a great place to stand up paddle. Yes, I know.

Ladybird Lake. Everybody loves doing that there. It's a great place. This is a great place to stand up paddle. Yes, I know. Lady Bird Lake. Yeah. Everybody loves doing that there. Yeah, right out front. They did a cool thing with that lake too where you can't have an engine on that lake. Good.

It's the one engine where you can, like Travis, you can have an engine. Lake Austin, you can have an engine. And so everybody's just, you go there

and they're all jet skiing and going crazy. But on Lady Bird, you have to paddle yourself. That's it. So it's all canoers. Those e-foil things are badass. I love it.

Those things are wild, man. We see a lot of those guys. Really? Scoop by. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see them on the lake all the time. Oh, nice. Yeah.

It's like snowboarding. It's like your best powder day times five. Have you ever snowboarded? No, I have not. A ski? A ski, yeah. best powder day times five. Because if, have you ever snowboarded? No, I have not. All right. A ski? Yeah. Okay.

So good powder day. Because once you rise up on the foil, it's like you're flying, like you're an angel, like you're a foot and a half above the water. And it's, yeah, exactly. You actually say that when you do it. And you hear the chorus behind you and everything. How long does the battery last on those things? Hour, hour 10.

Oh. Yeah. That's enough. No, it's significant. On those things. Hour, hour 10. Oh, that's enough. No, it's significant. If you do it, if you're out there and you're carving it up, your legs are ready to go in. How do you know when you should get home? Oh, there's an indicator.

You have a little Bluetooth indicator. Oh, it says, hey, fucker. Yes. Time to turn back. You probably should because sometimes you're like, ah, 10 more minutes, whatever. Well, there's a lot of people that I see that are out there wakeboarding. They get behind a boat and they ride the waves.

It's so weird to see. It's like, why are they going forward? It doesn't seem to make any sense. But they're riding the wake of the boat, and then these boats are designed to make these wakes that you could surf. It's probably a great way to learn how to surf. 100%, yeah. Do you do any of that?

Do you do any surfing? No, I just do stand-up paddling, and I'll catch a wave. How come you only do stand-up paddling? Well, first of all, I don't like being in a lineup waiting for my turn to do anything. Oh, for the waves. So that was always a big thing in Malibu. And then there's the politics of where you're from and whose break it is and who's the alpha on the wave. Oh, there's fights too, right?

Oh, yeah. Don't the guys fight over waves? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm not into that shit. So I paddle. I just do. And I like to work out. I mean, stand-up paddling I think is the greatest workout, single full-body workout there is.

What? What? What are you doing tomorrow? I'll take you out. What? I'll show you how to get the best workout you've ever had. I have to do a real man sport. I have to do jujitsu tomorrow.

I can't be fucking around with this paddle board and shit. Okay. Anyway, that's my go-to. You really think that that's the best full-body workout? I do. Listen, I trust you. You're a smart man. Yeah.

But that sounds preposterous to me. Well, first of all, because you can do it... Do you do it to failure? Do you ever do it where you collapse? No, but I mean— Then what the fuck are you talking about, man? Okay, but I mean that's— Listen to this, Jamie.

Just lie into it. Yeah, but five minutes and then you're done? I mean, seriously. Five minutes. Yeah, okay. No, so it's the sort of thing that uses the entire body from, you know, uses shoulders, lats, glutes, hamstrings, calves. Balance.

Balance. Lots of abs and serratus. So there's that. And it's cardio. I mean, you're not breathing hard, but you're doing this rhythmic motion that at the end of the day is very aerobic and very cardio. And yet you get off the board and you're just like, well, you know, I better take a nap. Because if you do it right, I mean, if you do it long enough, not everybody. So I've seen you do it a lot in Malibu.

I know you were doing it a lot. Yeah. That's your thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, twice a week. I try to do it twice a week. It's the sort of thing that if you do it right, you can't do it every day.

Because like when I was a runner, I ran every day. Stand-up paddling, if I do it well enough, it takes me three days to recover. Really? I'll do something else the other day. I'll ride a bike, but I can't go paddle again for three days. How much have your workouts changed as you've gotten older, now that you're 67, when you look back on when you were in your 30s or 40s? Oh, Jesus. Well, even in my 30s, I was still a crazy man.

So I would do, even after I retired from competition, I was a coach to professional triathletes, so I'd ride with them sometimes. Tell people what you did athletically, though, so people understand. Okay, so I was a marathoner in the 70s. I was a, you know, ran 100 miles a week for seven years, wound up finishing fifth in the U.S. National Championships in 1980, got injured and fell apart because of the diet, partly. What kind of injury did you get? Tendonitis in my hips and arthritis in my feet. So I shifted over to triathlon, and I did Ironman. My first event ever, my first triathlon ever was Ironman Hawaii.

So I did triathlon for a couple of years, wound up finishing fourth in Hawaii, but was not into swimming that much. But in those days, I was riding 200 miles a week. I was running, you know, 40, 50 miles a week as a triathlete, swimming a little bit, spending some time in the gym. It was an inordinate amount of time working. And as I retired, I kept, you know, if you're that sort of an athlete and you think about endorphins and, you know, the rush that you get from training, you literally do

seek it on a daily basis. And so I couldn't just go cold turkey. So I wound up coaching elite triathletes and riding with them and doing their workouts with them and lifting with them. And then I became, you know, I stayed very fit in my 40s. But there was a point at which I realized I don't need to do this much stuff to look fit. And I thought, well, it's better to look fit than to be fit. So now for the last 20 or 30 years, I mean, I haven't run a mile in 20 years. I haven't put on shoes to go out and run a mile in 20 years. Now, I can play ultimate frisbee or, you know, do sprints on the beach and still crush it sprinting. It's not like I don't run, but I just have no interest in running long-distance stuff.

And the bike riding on the sand, it's interesting. It's challenging to me. It's not like I'm just going for three hours into the hills on a road bike. A lot of fighters love long-distance running, maybe not heavy distance, like six miles, seven miles, because they think that it provides you with a cardio base that allows you to recover and keep going. Yeah, I'm thinking that a lot of the stuff you're doing with the jiu-jitsu, probably if they just orchestrated it a little bit differently, would have as much benefit. That's one of the things I've learned about myself in the past.

As you get older, you know, your loss of aerobic capacity doesn't drop off as much as your loss of strength and muscle and power. So you have to work on the strength, muscle, and power. You have to work on the lean mass a lot more as you get older. And that's like the number one thing I tell people over 50. Like stop the running. You know, you can run once in a while, but don't run 50 miles, 40 miles a week, or 30 miles a week. You know, spend more time in the gym and spend more time doing, you know, hex bar deadlifts or squats or lunges or, you know, in upper body stuff, because that's where the real benefit comes to your metabolic flexibility, for one thing, and your organ reserve, right? So if you maintain lean muscle mass, then the heart has to keep up with it,

and the liver has to keep up with it, and the lungs have to keep up with it. And if you lose muscle mass, if you atrophy as you get older, then the lungs go, I don't need to work that hard. I don't need to breathe that deeply. The heart says, I don't have to pump that much, whatever. The liver says, I got this handle. I don't have to work that hard. And so you lose vital capacity. You lose reserve in your organs. And then what happens is, as you get older, if you get an infection of some kind, COVID, then something goes. The lungs give out, the cart gives out, you get... Because the organs themselves have been... They're the ones...

They've atrophied. They've atrophied. They've actually atrophied. Yeah. What kind of weightlifting do you do? So I do some upper body stuff that would be mostly push-ups, pull-ups, dips. I use a resistance band a lot now. I started using one more during COVID, especially when the gyms were closed. And I really like the resistance band concept. I'm going to go into that a little bit more.

Because as like on a deltoid raise, you know, as you go up, it gets tougher and tougher and tougher. And you don't need strength at the bottom of it. You need strength that you need to develop at the top of it. So I do that. I love the hex bar for deadlifts. I do that once every week at best, at most, because it's a lot of strain on my knees. Do you do a hex bar with heavyweight? Do you do it for reps? So I do, um, like I do two, two 95, um, six times. Um, I can do, you know, I'll do, I'll work lower with, with a lot of reps and work up to about that. I mean, I've done three 30 recently and I'm again at my age and age, and I'm a skinny former runner, so my joints are not really designed to handle that kind of stuff. And that's the one thing I don't want to do is get injured, you know, working out.

I want to prevent injuries. So the concept of the one rep max no longer works for me because a one rep max is kind of dangerous dangerous it's like you can either do it in which case it's not maybe not your max or you can't do it in which case you get screwed up i was watching a video of a guy uh the other day where he was doing an incline press and his check his pector and it's you see he has a tank top on yeah and as he's in the middle of it you see it goes it just raises up and pulls away, and he screams and lowers the weight and drops it. And you're like, oh, no.

Yeah. Yeah, it's horrific. Yeah. I had a friend did that who was on the juice, and that's one of the problems is that if you're doing steroids and you're doing heavy weights, you know, the tendons can't keep up with the muscle tissue. And so at the division, the line there between the tendon and the muscle, it starts to separate. Yeah. Yeah. This guy looked like he was on the juice.

Yeah. But it's horrific to watch. I'm not a big fan of heavy weight. The heaviest weight I lift is 90 pounds using a 92-pound kettlebell. Yeah. Yeah. is 90 pounds. Wow. I will use a 92-pound kettlebell. Yeah.

Yeah. Almost everything I do, I'll do heavier than that because I'll use two 72-pound kettlebells. Yeah. But I do almost everything that I do heavy, that's as heavy as I get. Right. I have one 90, I think it's a 91 or 92-pound kettlebell, and I use that for single-hand stuff, cleans and swings and things along those lines that's as heavy as i get that's great because it's moving it's moving through

different planes anyway yeah yeah so i found out to me at least what i like to do martial arts it's kettlebells are the most beneficial i when i use them for whatever i do whether i do lunges or split squats or regular squats or overhead squats or cleans and presses and windmills, all those different things. The fact that I'm forced to use the whole body with those, like I'm not trying to get any bigger. Yeah. I'm just trying to maintain my muscle mass and keep my cardio.

Full range of motion too. And strength. Yeah. Because in jujitsu, you're moving your body in these weird ways, and you're trying to keep from getting strangled, and you have to constantly be moving. And I find that it's the most applicable to athletics, in terms of the kind of athletics. Even when I kick the bag, the more I lift weights,

the more I keep my back strong. I also like the Reverse Hyper. You ever use that machine? Once in a while. I fucking love that machine. Yeah, yeah. And I probably need to do that more. So good for the back. Yeah, yeah. Wearables. What do you got your... I have a whoop strap that I use. Yeah, I love it. What are you monitoring through all your training? Well, while I'm training, I basically go by feel but after all i look at the

strain i look at my recovery in the morning that's big and i'll see uh what my actual sleep was what my actual number of hours sleep and what my recovery score is based on heart rate variability that's why i like the whoop strap because it gives me a good understanding of how i'm recovering cool and in comparison like did i have, a couple glasses of wine or none, or did I drink caffeine late at night, or, you know, those kind of things, and how much of an effect that has. It makes you accountable, you know? I guess.

At some point, I wonder how much of that you already know. Like, you shouldn't have the wine and whatever. Right. So I'm like the anti-wearable guy. I gave up on them a long time. I think the data is sometimes a suspect. And when I ask people, like, okay, so how did you adjust your behavior, they go down the list of all the things they probably knew they should have done anyway.

Right. And they just proved that it wasn't working for them. So they have to. I think sometimes it just makes you accountable when you see that data, you know, and you know what you did. Yeah. Instead of just sort of it being kind of an abstract thing you don't think about. Yeah.

I really loved – there's a strap that we were using once for Sober October called MyZones, MyZones Fitness Tracker. And I love that because it gave you a score based on how many minutes you spent at 80% of your max heart rate. And that was a great tool to really recognize the actual workload you did during a workout. Okay. I really like that a lot. And again, you use that how? To see if over time you can increase that number? Yes.

Okay. And see what the number is through the day, how many actual calories burnt. And you know it's based on your body weight and all these different things. You put in all those variables. Right. I liked it. But again, I know when I'm working hard. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I don't need it. I like it. That's the thing. I just go by feel. I mean, it's like I wore some of the stuff for a while. I wore a sleep tracker for a while. It told me I got zero deep sleep for three nights in a row and I should be dead. I'm like, no, I think I slept pretty well.

What one were you using? I don't want to say. Were you using one of those rings? Okay. But it was an early version of something like that. And, you know, maybe it's better now. But it's not like I'm not – like I have a picture of me in 1980 wearing one of the first heart rate monitors. It was a chest belt with three leads, three electrode leads that went from the chest down to a cigarette pack that gave you your heart.

So I've been into this thing for a long time, way before Polar Electro came out with their stuff. But after a while, it's like what do you do with the data if at the end of the day, if you're training, you're going to get in a race, and it's just going to come down to how you feel. A lot of guys use them to compete against each other as well. Yeah. There's a leaderboard. A leaderboard for heart rate? It's a leaderboard for how many points you've accumulated. We used it because we were doing the Sober October Fitness Challenge.

So for the month, my friends and I, we all competed to see who could score the most points. Okay. And so you do with that. And I know Tim Kennedy, my friend Tim Kennedy,

had a score up today. And it was the same thing. He was using the MyZones fitness tracker. And it was him and all of his buddies and their workouts are putting them through.

And it shows the numbers that they're putting up so it's just it's forced it's for like you can say i got a good working well how good well this you got 400 points better than you well you got 650 you got more points yeah he worked harder the gamification of exercise that's the problem with it as well because some people think that whether it's an apple watch or any of these fit bits that they can become addictive yeah and in fact that was one of who was it uh irresistible what was the the gentleman's name that was uh he wrote that book about the addiction to technology jamie he was on the podcast nick australian guy good book I disagreed with some of his points when it came to fitness wearables, but he felt like they become addictive the same way phones are addictive. But I'm like, yeah, but you're addicted to working out,

which is a good thing. If you're addicted to getting in the work, I would say that is one of the most beneficial addictions that you could get. Yes, there it is. Oh, Adam Alter. Why did I think it was Nick? Nick's another guy.

Which one was Nick? Too many guys. Too many fucking people. Well, you know, people get addicted to exercise, too. And that's not necessarily a good thing. You could say, well, you know, I went from being a heroin addict to being addicted to running or exercise. Well, okay, there's a clear drop down there,

but at some point that's still an addiction. It's still something that's not, it's just taking the place of something else that's missing in your life. Sort of, or is it ultimately beneficial? If you're of anything that can get you away from heroin, heroin's the bad thing, right? If you're addicted to booze, you're drinking all day, and then you become addicted to running, for sure you're going to have a better resting heart rate.

Yeah, yeah. You're going to have a healthier, lower body mass. You're going to look better. Maybe. Scott, no? No, quite likely? Quite likely. Quite likely. But not a guarantee that it's better for you. Some people do go too hard.

Yeah. Yeah. But some people... Like the Fitbit thing. I mean, the steps thing just cracks me up. Oh, yeah, get your 10,000 steps in. Or whatever. I was shooting for 30 today, and we just finished dinner at a wonderful restaurant in the south of France.

And my friend says, shit, I got 6,000 more steps. I'll see you guys back at the house. Oh, no. That's like, seriously? Yeah. Well, that's ridiculous, especially if you're on vacation. But that's setting an intention. It's prioritizing.

It fits all of the metrics that you suggested we need to do. But I'm just saying at some point it becomes a little bit eccentric. Well, many people would say that about diet as well. Like maybe you should just eat what you want, enjoy your food, and if you get a little fat, don't worry about it. And I would agree with that 100%. So what I'm saying is, look, I go back to, I only do this stuff so that... For enjoyment. Yeah.

You asked at some point, you know, am I... Like, I'm not keto, and I'm not even... Like, I have a couple of bites of bread, even though I don't like... You know, I know bread does not serve me well. I have a couple of bites of bread with some butter every once in a while. I have a couple of bites of dessert every once in a while. Pasta? Endowed with pasta?

Jesus, I had an amazing pasta at Carbone, which just opened in South Beach the other day. Because my friend said, you should try it. And I didn't just have a couple of bites. I had a fair amount of it. It's like, that's the metabolic flexibility part. That's also the part that says, let's not be

draconian about this. Let's set the body up in terms of metabolic flexibility so you can do some of these things. I wouldn't call it a cheat day. I wouldn't call it a cheat meal. I would just say, you know, now where I draw the line is if at the end of that meal, if I'd had a complete dessert,

it would have screwed everything up. First of all, I would have felt like shit and I wouldn't have slept well. And so, I know... That is such the truth. That's the worst thing for me is when I have a big dessert and then I try to sleep. And you know better. It's simply shit. And you know better, right?

Yeah. And it's like, you know, it's easier with a couple of beers or a glass of wine or whatever. It's, you know, softening you up a little bit. But it's, you know, I realized a while back that I'm not willing to sacrifice five hours of discomfort trying to go to sleep with a high heart rate for what amounts to four minutes of gustatory pleasure. Yeah, that's the problem. It's the mouth pleasure. It's not really worth it. But it's also, I'm indulgent.

And I see, fuck it. I've got a lot of fuck it in me. Yeah. I've got to work it off tomorrow. Fuck it, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll work it off tomorrow. Fuck it, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll work it off tomorrow. I won't eat for 20 hours. I'll do 50 air squats right after I'm done. Exactly. That's not enough. That's when people don't realize how much calories. If you have an ice cream sundae, the amount of calories in that, you could run for hours, hours, and not burn that off. Oh, I mean, that's the part about the body fat thing that people don't get when they

say, because I say, well, I live on my own stored body fat for most of my day. And well, you don't have any body fat, Mark. Well, I got 20,000 calories worth of fat, disposable fat on me. That doesn't even include the stuff that's protecting the organs. Everybody's got a lot of fat on them. 20,000 calories of fat is like how many days of moderate exercise? You know, if you're doing, well, if you're doing 500 calories a day, it's 40 days of moderate exercise. Now that's, you have to live. No, you have to live on that.

Living too. It wouldn't be just, like how many calories do you think you burn in a day? So if we go back to the concept behind metabolic flexibility and how many calories do we burn in a day, it's a big variability. Because some people burn a lot of calories because they can get away with it. And so in my training days, I might eat 4,000, 5,000 calories in a day. I weighed 138 to 145 pounds. And I wasn't burning at all. I wasn't running. I mean, you run 15 miles, that's 1,500 calories. Where'd the other 3,000 calories go? Well, my body was finding ways to dispose of it. I was running hot. I was, you know, I would sleep in a sweat. My body tries

to find a way to dispose of those calories. So those are calories that I did not need, were probably compromising my health. So we don't need that much food. And if you break down, you know, the macros, protein, carbohydrate, and fat, protein is largely, shouldn't even have a caloric number attached to it. It's a building block, right? You're not supposed to combust protein except in an emergency. So if you get 40, 50 grams of protein, the first 40 or 50, I don't care how many you're getting in a day, but the first 40 or 50 probably go to rebuilding and repair. Shouldn't even be assigned a caloric value. But when you're eating a lot of protein and you're not taking in a lot of carbs, like when you're on a carnivore diet, then you have gluconeogenesis, right?

Enough to keep you going. But largely, if you're carnivore, you're almost always keto. And if you're keto, then your brain is working mostly on ketones. The interesting thing about the liver and ketones is a liver can make 750 calories a day worth of fuel from ketones. Really? Yes. But as you become keto adapted, as you become fat adapted and keto adapted, the muscles burn the fat primarily. And they don't even need the ketones.

They're like, liver, you just reserve the ketones for the brain. We're good. We'll do it with stored glycogen and with fat. So the liver makes ketones for the brain primarily. Now, when you first get into ketosis, people say, oh, my keto numbers are huge. I'm like six millimolar. I'm in ketosis. Well, what that means is your body's making more ketones

than it needs, and it's spilling them out into the urine and the breath, and they're in the bloodstream, but you're not using them. When you become good at ketosis, like these carnivore guys are, most of the ketones are going to the brain, and the liver doesn't overproduce the ketones. It just makes enough to fuel the brain. So does that mean when you use, whether it's a urine strip or whatever method of measuring ketones, you wouldn't necessarily show that you're in ketosis? Correct. So a guy like Dom quite often won't even show that he's in ketosis,

but he's making ketones. It's just that his body is not overproduced. Like the term osis connotes a, has a connotation of a disease state. So ketosis means you have too many ketones. But guys who have been like Darth Luigi, one of my friends at LMNT,

I see you get the element stuff out there in your thing, Rob's partner in LMNT. Todd White owns Dry Farm Wines. These guys have been keto-ish for 10 years. They almost never show much more than 0.5, 0.6, 0.4 millimolar. So technically they're not even in ketosis. What is ketosis technically, millimolar-wise? 0.5.

Over 0.5 you're in ketosis according to the medical literature. But again, the idea is not to chase the numbers. The idea is to become metabolically flexible and metabolically efficient. So when you, like Dom is getting most of his energy from fat, some from ketones, and then whatever glucose his body requires comes from gluconeogenesis, which is sometimes converting the excess protein that he takes in into glucose. Some of it comes from the glycerol part of the triglyceride molecule, which is combusted. The three fatty acids are combusted for fat, but the glycerol becomes the backbone of glucose. It's such an elegant system.

I talk about it as a closed loop in the book. So imagine you're metabolically flexible. You're on this program where you've built a metabolic machinery. You've increased your mitochondria at least twofold with this process, and your mitochondria are actually much more efficient. And then you go on a seven-day fast. And you think, oh, God, I'm going to fall apart. I'm going to tear up muscle tissue.

What's going to happen to me? Well, if you envision the closed loop, what happens is you have no incoming food, so your body takes its stored body fat. It uses the fat that it combusts in the muscles to do the work, to walk around, to be active all day long. It takes some of the fat and converts it into ketones to fuel the brain, which the brain, again, loves ketones. And then it takes some of the glycerol and whatever needs there are for glucose, certain red blood cells, certain brain cells, it can easily accommodate that.

And then an amazing thing happens where one of the reactions to the body's upregulation of enzyme systems and genes is a protein sparing effect kicks in. And all the protein that you used to deaminate and piss out on a day-to-day basis because of the amount of protein you were taking in, this all becomes recycled in a protein sink and so you don't even lose that much protein. So whatever repair is going on in the body,

you have enough protein to do that without taking protein in because of the sparing effect of this. And it's just so elegant and you can see how our ancestors could survive for long periods of time without eating food, and without getting hangry, and without getting depressed, and curling up on a ball, and beating their feet on the ground, or stomping in anger or whatever. They just,

yeah, we'll keep hunting. And again, this is how the human body evolves. This is how we all have this information in us. It's all there, ready to tapped into if we figure out the ways to turn on these hidden genetic switches that we have. And that's been my life work for that matter. One little thing about ketones also is that the brain, if most of the ketones are going to the brain, the brain doesn't have this wild swing in energy demands. You know, you go into the weight room and you do a heavy leg day, you know, your thighs and your glutes are going to be using 30, 40, 50 times as much energy to do the heavy weights as they would at rest. While you're doing that, the brain's just cruising along at, you know, one,

While you're doing that, the brain's just cruising along at, you know, one, one and a half, two times normal output. So the brain does not have a lot of energy requirements. Chestmasters included, by the way. Really? Yeah, really. Have you ever seen the thing with chestmasters, how many calories they burn? It's been debunked. Really? It's not their brain.

It's their sweating and fretting and walking around and pacing and all the shit that they're doing. Yeah. So it's not the brain that is consuming those calories. Show me where it's been debunked because I was just reading about it the other day. The other day? I'm interested. Yeah. All right.

Because I looked it up at one point. We brought it up on the podcast because they were saying that chess masters burn 6,000 calories a day. Yeah. So Google chess masters don't burn 6,000 calories a day and see what comes up. So you think it's just the nervous energy because they're a part of a huge tournament? The brain does not use that much fuel, even under those sorts of stressful conditions. Interesting. Point being, once you get good at, once you get dialed into metabolic flexibility and metabolic efficiency, the liver just goes, yeah, I've got this.

I'm just going to spit out a couple of grams of ketones every hour for the brain, your good brain. Even under something that's incredibly mentally intense like a chess tournament. I'm saying. No, I believe you. There is no— I've been duped. There is no metric under which the brain uses. Typically, the brain uses about 500 calories a day.

I can't imagine a situation where it's going to use a lot unless you've got some organic condition that's wrong with you where it's going to use three times that, probably not use twice that. Yeah, the brain is pretty steady state in its energy requirements. You got anything over there, Jamie? I'm curious about this because this is something we discussed on the podcast multiple times. It comes from an article that Robert Sapolsky wrote

about and from explanations I'm reading through on multiple websites. It's sort of saying that the brain causes other body uh things to happen so because you're thinking so much it'll cause an increased heart rate which then causes the brain the body to yes not the brain using other things okay so the consumption of the thousands of calories is not because the brain's burning calories the brain is causing the body to burn off calories because you're anxious, you're higher heart rate. Oh, okay.

Yep. Interesting. By the way, Sapolsky's a very cool guy. Yeah, I've had him on. Okay, no. Brilliant. I'm a giant fan of his because I became obsessed with toxoplasmosis.

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers is one of my favorite books of all time. And again, it set the whole thing for stress and cortisol. Oh, yeah. Well, his work on baboons, and alpha males and baboons stress and cortisol. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Well, his work on baboons and alpha males and baboons. Very quick. Here it goes. Drawing on research from Sapolsky, who studies stress primates at Stanford University, the

reason for the high caloric burn is due to breathing rates, which tripled during competition, blood pressure, which also elevates during competition, and muscle contractions before, during, and after major tournaments. Wow. So that's how elite chess players can burn 6,000 calories a day and lose one kilogram a day. Yeah. Okay. That makes a lot more sense.

And that's all fat. If they're well-trained, it's all fat. Otherwise, they're eating cookies and cakes. So it's because of the significance of the tournament to them, that it's big time and they're making a lot of money, so it's stress and they're thinking about it a lot. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I wonder how much an intense conversation,

like a three-hour conversation like this, where you're spouting off all these facts and all these different things, it's got to burn off quite a few. After I get done with a heavy podcast, I'm always hungry. Yep. Yeah. So, you know, clearly the brain is not burning more calories. We figured that out.

But the effects of epinephrine, the effects of all of the stress hormones and all the things that are going on and the high heart rate, although I don't, you know, I don't feel like my heart rate's high. I don't feel... my heart rate's high. But it's just effort. It's effort, and there's a theory that each of us has sort of a point at which our body knows to shut down from having. So the couch potato syndrome, which is well-known among elite athletes, is you train your ass off all day, then you spend the rest of the day recovering, resting

on the couch, and your body just goes into a hibernation. And so at the end of the day, you don't burn any more calories than your neighbor down the street did, gardening and walking around and shopping and doing all these other things. Is that a requirement, though, for your body to recover, that you do sit on the couch and just do nothing? What happens is if you don't do that and you keep burning calories against your better judgment, you create a deficit. At some point, that deficit, five days, six days, two days, two weeks later, becomes an immune compromise or something. And this is a

caloric deficit or a recovery deficit? It's both. It's a caloric deficit because if you keep burning, if you do more work than your body is willing to allocate the calories for, you can do it maybe one day, maybe two days if you're a chess guy, but not three, four, five, six days in a row. And if you're an elite athlete, particularly an endurance athlete, you train every day. So you can't dig a hole that deep without recovering. And the recovery, the rest part of it is, it's a good question, is the rest an artifact of the body saying

no more calories to be expended today? Or is it a requirement of giving the muscles time to recover and rebuild and repair? And I think it's probably both. You can't, and I did this during my, I was a contractor during most of my running career. So I would literally be monkeying up and down a ladder all day, five days a week in the sun, eight hours a day, and then go home and run 15 miles. Wow. Yeah. And that was, that was a tough life. A six pack or two of beer a day helped take the edge off. Carb loading, baby. But, you know,

it was a stressful life. That may be why I over-trained. You know, I didn't get my, I did the work, but I didn't give myself enough time to recover the way a true world-class elite athlete does. None of these guys have jobs. Their job is running, and then they're taking it easy the rest of the day. Yeah. What about ultra-marathoners? What about those people that run those massive races, like Moab 240, that kind of shit? Yeah. Well, they're few and far between, number one.

Right. Number two, no offense, they're not going that fast. Zach is going fast at 640 for 100 miles. Yeah. But that's it. He's going to take a week to recover. So you can go to the well. That's the nature of endurance competition.

I mean, we talk about the Tour de France. They go to the well every day for 21 days. That's why they use PEDs. That's why they use drugs. Not to become Superman. To freaking survive the next day and the next day and the next day. How are they doing that now?

I don't know. I don't know. Are they just not getting caught? That's a possibility. Now that Lance is gone, they relax? They don't pay attention? I don't know. That's a possibility. I was involved in doping for triathlon for 15 years.

I basically wrote the anti-doping rules for triathlon and then administered them every positive test I heard around the world for triathlon. It's an interesting arena because most of these things that they take are actually medicines that they give to other people without any problem at all, and yet they deny them to athletes who are killing themselves, literally, in their training. It's an interesting ethical question. That is funny, right? Yeah. Because that's what EPO is, right?

It's what EPO is. It's what testosterone is. It's what any of the inhalers, the inhalers. People have, cross-country skiers have exercised and used asthma because they're on the dry thing. And for a long time, they weren't even allowed to use inhalers, even though they had asthma. The IOC eventually created a TUE, a therapeutic use exemption for those guys.

Of course, then what they would do is even if you didn't have asthma, you would apply for a TUE, a therapeutic use exemption for those guys. Of course, then what they would do is even if you didn't have asthma, you would apply for a TUE. That's what they did with mixed martial arts and testosterone. The TUEs for testosterone, guys would just do steroids, and then they would get their testosterone checked, and their testosterone would be very low because they just got off of steroids. And so they go, well, you need testosterone. So they'd get on testosterone and look jacked.

Yeah. The thing about any of the anabolic steroids is the benefits stay with you. So some guys who used, especially in track and field, who used for a while, even if you got caught and you spent two years on the sidelines, you didn't lose what you got. You didn't lose what you built up. You keep some of it, right? You keep most of it. If you keep training, you keep most of it. Yeah. So depending upon how long you were on it for though, right? Oh, sure. Some guys, when they get off at their endocrine system crashes. Yeah. You got to do it right. I mean, you know, there's lots of ways to screw it up, but there's, but there's a lot of

ways to do it right. There's a lot of people out there who can, you know, there's lots of ways to screw it up, but there's a lot of ways to do it right. There's a lot of people out there who can, you know, prescribe a protocol that'll not mess with your endocrine system. Are you paying attention at all to gene therapies and all of this stuff that's going on with CRISPR? It's scary. It's some scary shit. It really is. It really is. You know, I get that, you know, parents would like to fix genetic defects in their kids.

You know, I have two kids and I have a grandchild now, so I get all this stuff. But there is a slippery slope there, man. And at some point, you know, while you're in there fixing the Tay-Sachs, could you make her seven feet tall and give her some fast-twitch fiber? Which is all going to be possible. And probable. And probable. Especially when you're dealing with other countries. Already.

So, yeah, it's scary. I mean, you know, science is tech and science and, you know, this whole thing is really interesting. Like where are we going to wind up, you know, in 30 years? You know, is the singularity going to happen? Are we going to be living forever because of CRISPR and things like that? I don't know. It is really fascinating. Yeah. It is scary.

It's scary when you look at it in terms of maintaining the biodiversity of the human race because we're weird. We're coming in all kinds of shapes. Apparently all kinds of sexes. Yeah. Like 78 of them.

Yeah. But when people can actually get into the wiring under the board and monkey with who you are and change all sorts of make you a super genius that's 350 pounds of solid muscle and can run through walls like we're gonna have a bunch of genius hulk babies out there well sports is gonna end as we know it yeah end because there no... Well, I think that's the real concern is that other... One of the things that people think of when they think of gene doping is what's China doing? Because we know China has already used CRISPR on embryos, and they've already done it on living people. And they're probably going to do it on athletes.

We know what they did in the Beijing Olympics, and we know what Russia did in the Sochi Olympics. East Germany did in 76. Yes. Isn't some of the records from back then for females still standing because they turned these women into— Into men. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, a lot of them will say they didn't know what was going on,

and if that's the case, God bless them. But if you didn't know what was going on and you wind up with that body for the rest of your life, that's going to be a shocker. It's horrible. You must have seen Icarus, right? Brian Fogle's movie? I'm supposed to see it.

No, you haven't. I have not seen it yet. It's amazing. It's amazing it's amazing it's dark like and it's so it's the weirdest movie because he completely

stepped in shit yeah he did not mean to catch the greatest anti the greatest doping scandal

in the world in the history of the Olympics but he just was at the right place at the right time conducting an experiment on himself yeah an open experiment where he did this cycling race completely clean.

And then he was going to return the next year doping and film a documentary about it. That's how you say his name? Yeah. Gets caught up in this whole thing where they bust these people that are cheating in the Sochi Olympics, and he has to escape, and he comes to America, and he testifies, and then now he's on the run, fearful, fearing for his life. It's crazy. Yeah. But very plausible. Yeah. Yeah.

Which just makes you think, like, what is China doing right now? Yeah. Which just makes you think, like, what is China doing right now? Like, are they, I mean, they obviously have their eyes on the prize in terms of technological dominance, military dominance, economic dominance. For sure they're going to want athletic dominance as well. And that is the way to do it. I mean, they've shown that they're more than willing to experiment with people. Absolutely. I mean, there's an element of 1938 there. Yeah.

Eugenics. Master race and eugenics. Spooky. Mike Baker might know, right? Yeah, he might. He probably would. About the sports side of that. Yeah.

Even Mike Baker could be cousins. Really? I'm looking at you. Don't you think? Yeah. Totally. Yeah, you guys could be cousins. Really? I'm thinking about it. I'm looking at you. Don't you think? Yeah. Totally. Yeah. You guys could be related

some sort of a way. Some sort of a way. Get you two together over a steak. Absolutely. Yeah, let's do that. See if we can pick his brain. Get him a little liquored up.

See if we can give up some juicy details. But I do wonder about that stuff because on one hand, listen, I think we should pursue it because no one wants their child to have some sort of an incurable disease or some sort of a horrible handicap. No one wants that, right? So on one hand, we should pursue it.

But on the other hand, we literally might be reengineering the species. That's the species. That's the price. And at some point, I guess you have to draw the line. Although, you know, you draw the line in polite society, but do you not draw the line? Is it going to be a black market CRISPR thing? Oh, yeah, that's going to happen first, right? That's the real problem. The haves and the have-nots, the gap will be so wide because initially it'd be really expensive. So the people that get on it initially are going to be the really wealthy people, and they're going to have this massive advantage, and their children will have this massive advantage,

and then that gap will be even wider by the time it trickles down to regular folks. Exactly. What do you do for recovery? Do you do sauna? Do you do ice baths? Do you do anything along those lines? Yeah, I do. One of the things I do for recovery is I just, by feel, I don't use HRV. I don't use any of the metrics or any of the wearables.

How do I feel that day? And if I don't feel like training that day, I don't train. And that's a recovery day for me. Pretty much every night in Miami Beach, I have this. I live in an amazing building. It has one of the nicest gyms I've ever seen in the building, and it has a spa down below with a sauna. Does anybody go to the gym? Or is it one of those things where you're like, how come no one's in here? No, there's 500 people live in the building, and the same 15 people are in the gym every day. So it fits the standard demographic. But the spa downstairs has a jacuzzi, a sauna, a steam, and a cold plunge.

And so my routine is pretty much around 530 or 6 at night, because I want to do this before dinnertime. I'll go down and I'll do four or five minutes in the jacuzzi to get warmed faster then I'll step inside the 195 degree sauna that's the highest it goes 195 dry sauna they let you adjust it? yeah I mean some people dial it back to 160s or whatever

but 195 is the highest it goes so I'll go in there for 15 and then I'll do a cold plunge and the plunge is around 47, 48 degrees. Nice. Now, sometimes I'll go five minutes, six minutes up, you know, dunk all the way in, and then just hang out up to my neck for that. But then I have to warm up because if I don't warm up after that, I'm going to be shivering the rest of the night.

Other times I'll just do, say, three, three and a half minutes, and then just stay shivery for the next hour and get that brown fat going. Right. You feel a big difference when you do that? No. So here's the thing. Here's why I do it, Joe. It's just, first of all, it's a head trip. It's a head trip to go into that cold water and just hang out there.

Yeah. First of all, it's a head trip. It's a head trip to go into that cold water and just hang out there. Yeah. And just breathe and be there and watch time slow way the fuck down. Yeah. And it's so invigorating in a – it's so relaxing to get out and then go up and have a nice glass of wine and have dinner, maybe watch a show, a TV show, and then go to bed. So that's part of my routine. Now, do I do it for recovery?

Probably not so much. I mean, there probably are some recovery aspects for me, but that's not why I do it. I do it for the relaxation and sort of for the mental challenge of it a little bit. It just works for me. Yeah, that's how I feel about the sauna as well. And I don't have a cold plunge, but I do do a cold shower afterwards. But I'm thinking I need to invest in a cold plunge. Absolutely. It's one of the greatest feelings. And a cold shower just does not do it justice. Have you done a plunge? I have. For any length of time? Yeah. Well, one of the things I was doing in the wintertime, it gets in the 30s here at night, and my pool's not heated. Love it.

So I would go from the sauna right into the pool, but one time I almost didn't make it out of the pool. I did like six minutes, and my legs weren't working. That happened to me one time. Go ahead. Tell me your story. Scary. It's very scary.

As I was moving, I was like, oh, no. I was like, oh, no. How embarrassing for me to drown in my own pool naked in the backyard, right? That's what I was thinking when I did it. I felt like I was wondering if I was going to be able to pull myself. I was having a hard time going up the stairs. And then I was like, okay, can I pull myself with my arms? Because I was in up to my neck.

And I was like, my arms might not work either. It was spooky because I was like, Jesus, these aren work either. It was spooky, because I was like, Jesus, these aren't working. They're not working. Been there. Yeah. Been there. That's a bit much. And that's, you know, that's overdoing the therapeutic, you know, hormetic effect, which is intended to do a small stress to your body, and you recover by, you know, by upregulating a bunch of immune things. But you. But if you overdo it, it's not good. It's going to suppress your immune system. Or you can die.

I mean, that happened to me. I came back from a very hard day of playing Ultimate for two hours, and no one was home. Ultimate Frisbee, right? Yeah, and I go in my backyard pool, and it was in Malibu. And believe it or not, Malibu gets down into the 40s in the wintertime. And when the Santa Anas blow, the pool heat comes up, and then the wind blows the heat off, and so it super cools. Anything that's at the bottom rises, the wind blows it off,

and so it can get down way below the ambient air temperature and even below the ground temperature around it if a cold Santa Ana is blowing. And that was the case this time. And again, I'm in for a couple of minutes and I'm like, I can't walk. I can't move. Holy shit. And I didn't have a handrail on mine either. I'm just lucky that I had steps and not a ladder. Because I think if it was a ladder,

I don't think I would have made it out. I think I made it out. But I made it out in time. Like another minute, I might have been fucked yeah yeah that would have been the dumbest way for me no i thought the same thing all my haters have been laughing yeah fucking loser yeah jesus but that's about it for recovery i mean uh oh i i you know i get a massage once a week i get some body work work, you know, some roller and therapy and Theragun stuff. Yeah, those things are great. I love those. Those are great. And we have Hyper Ice makes

this vibrating ball. Have you used those? Oh my God, that thing's amazing. I was a little skeptical. I was like, why is it, who gives a shit if it because it vibrates but oh my god this thing sit on it well i roll on it i put it on the ground and i put my back on it and i bridge on it and it just rips all that tissue and separates and it just really shakes it up it's really nice so it's like a combination it's almost like a theragun but you're all you've got all your weight on it yeah you know i'm a big fan of that cool yeah that's the stuff that i do but again the um the sauna for me is i i agree with what you're saying it's there's a mental discipline in there i do 25 minutes at 185 degrees and it's

um there's a mental discipline involved in it because the last 10 minutes it's just concentrating on just being in the moment i do this fucked up game where um for the last 10 minutes is the roughest part right the first 15 is not that hard but the last 10 minutes are rough and so one of the things that i do is i do deep breathing exercises where i count so i do a six count in and a six count out, or I'll do five, five, and five, four. So five minutes in, hold for five, and then five minutes out, or excuse me, five seconds in, hold for five. I'm thinking in minutes because I'm so scared.

I'm so scared when I do this. But when I think about doing other things, I think about quitting, I make myself do two more. So anytime I have a weak thought, say I'm going to do 20 deep breaths. So six seconds in, six seconds out. If I'm at eight and I go, okay, this means I have 12 more to go. Fuck, I don't want to do those 12 well now you got 14 bitch so I tack on 2

extra breaths every time I'm weak every time my mind gets weak sometimes it's an extra 20 breaths so sometimes instead of doing 20 I'll do 40 because I'm such a bitch or if I move that's the other thing I don't let myself do this

I don't let myself move around and I don't let myself move around. I have to keep my hands on my knees and just breathe. So as soon as I wipe my face or do shit like that, I'll go, no, no, no, you're being weak. Now you got two more breaths. You're tough on yourself. I've developed this over time. It's a great routine. Because it's the

only thing that'll make me stay still. If I know that I move, because otherwise I'll just want i used to do that when i started doing hot yoga and they taught me in hot yoga when you lie down just fucking lie down like because you're so hot in the middle of the the exercises there's this dead body pose and the yoga instructor was telling me like this is the hardest pose to just lie still after you've exercised hard for 45 minutes and it's only for a couple minutes and then you get back to doing it again but people move around they make noise

it's like you're you're being weak you got to stay put and stay calm and so then i applied that because that was difficult for me to do i applied that to the sauna. So anytime, I just, I know two extra deep breaths are coming if I bitch out. That's a mind game in and of itself, because like, I would like, you know, it's like, don't think of an apple. Yes. Right? Yeah, exactly. So I sit on the top shelf, and I lean over, and I count, when I get to about 10 minutes,

I count the drips off my little fingers. And I count like 200 drips and okay, check the clock, but don't check the clock too often, right? Right, don't check the clock too often. It's amazing how the time slows. But one thing I found is that AirPods work in the sauna. Your phone won't work.

Your phone will die in the sauna, but the AirPods won't. So I just leave my phone outside the sauna, and I'll play a book on tape, and that'll keep me occupied for the first 15 minutes or so. That's cheating. It is. Yeah. It is.

But the last 10 minutes, you can't pay attention to the book. That's the last 10 minutes is when I do the deep breathing exercises. I take the AirPods out. Part of the discipline for me is the boredom, is being in there. I'm typically in there alone, even though it's a public sauna. But, like, nobody, like, I own the plunge. Like, there's never, or somebody will go in and go, ooh, ooh, ooh. And then they jump out.

They'll get back out after two seconds. Yeah. And I'm like, come on, let me coach you. Do you coach them in there? Sometimes. I can usually get somebody who's hated it and never goes in. They jump in and they run out. And I can coach them to their's hated it and never goes in. They jump in, and they run out. And I can coach them to their first minute, you know.

And then they're, like, impressed with themselves, like, you know, crazy. I've had a couple people go over the deep end, and then they go, hey, Mark, I did four and a half minutes the other day. I'm like, now I've got to go do, you know. Now you have to compete with them. Now I have to compete with them, yeah. Does your gym have classes? Yeah, they have classes. Great. Yeah. No, it's a serious, serious gym. Is that

one of the reasons why you moved to this place, because of these? Yeah, so we lived in Miami Beach for a year in another building with a great view, and it was, we were getting a sense of South Beach and what it was like, and then we kept hearing about this other building, and then we decided we would rent a place for six months in the other building. And then after two months, we're like, we're all in, man. So we bought a place. It was that nice. It's, oh my God, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if I could live in a condo at this stage of my life. Well, Marshall would have a tough time. Yeah. Do you have a dog? We had a dog. tough time yeah so um you have a dog we we had a dog um we we still do but um because of the condo it was better that my dog spends so my dog lives with our son now in in la in la and he has he has a dog so it's perfect for them oh that's cool yeah because otherwise it was you know down the

elevator walk the dog three times a day and he has to shit and you never know. What are you doing? Yeah. And if the dog is not outside and it's inside, you know, in Malibu, we had a doggy door. So dogs are always outside. It was great. And same in the, we have a house in the Palisades now. And same thing, doggy door. But without that, it's like they're trapped.

Do you go anywhere else in Florida other than Miami? Do you wander around? So we live south of Fifth. I don't know if you know the area at all. Yeah. We don't go north. Really? I mean, not really.

We, you know, I've got, I keep, I have friends, I keep my e-foil over on Sunset Island. So I go over to Sunset Island. I have a friend over there who's got a house, so I put it in there. Is that that, that like super luxury island that's like super high real estate? Is that the one?

No, that's Fisher Island you were thinking of. That's Fisher Island. Fisher. So we look, we're across from Fisher so we look across the... What's the deal with that place?

It's an enclave for people who want high, high security. You've got to take a ferry to get to it. Oh. You know, a lot of high net worth individuals

and Russian oligarchs and people who want to, you know, protect what they've got. Oh, that's what it is. Yeah. So they just, it's like really high end real estate,

right? Yeah. And then they just take a ferry over and then they have a car park somewhere else? No, they bring the car over on the ferry.

Oh. The island, it's big enough that they have a car and they just take their car back and forth. How long is the ferry ride? Two minutes. It's literally across. Like it's across Lady Bird.

Oh, that's weird. So if you want to go to dinner, you have to drive your car into the ferry. Yep. And then the ferry takes two minutes. How often does the ferry travel? There's two ferries, and they go. They literally are all day long. Back and forth.

All day long. What about at nighttime? Less so so but still enough to I know how those Miami people like to stay up late and they do indeed

they do indeed it's a wild place man yeah I see you as this calm person and then when you tell me you're going to live in Miami Beach

I'm like I don't know I don't know if that's going to work my wife had a tough time at first and now she's all in she's like again if we didn't have

family back in California we go back once a month for a week. We have, again, we rent a place in Pacific Palisades. Our daughter lives there. Our grandchild lives there. My son lives there now. Her parents, my, my, my. Are there any tents in your lawn yet? Fuck. That's the other, I mean, if we go down the list, that's another one. That's, that's a, that's a huge one for me. It's crazy. It's beyond crazy. Then my friend lives in Venice. He's like, it is nuts. You drive down the street, there's people camping everywhere you look. When our house burned the first time, we lived at the shutters because we couldn't find any alternative living.

So, you know, the shutters in Santa Monica. You know, it's great. It's a lovely place to live, to hang out. We were there. We had a place for almost two months. And we'd go down, and we'd walk down to Venice, and it's beyond depressing. And then you see people, well-meaning people are bringing them coffee and donuts and, you know, money, and they don't want to be helped. They don't want to—most of them are just, you know, there's a big schizophrenia issue there,

lots of drug use and alcoholism. And, you know, again, I feel badly for them. There was a point in my life when I wanted to solve the homeless problem. You know, that was my big thing that I wanted to do, and then I realized it's almost impossible. What were you going to do? Well, I was going to create this wonderful low-cost housing for people who had lost their last paycheck

and give them an opportunity to get back on their feet and let them self-govern these little villages, and it was going to be a utopian thing. And as I got deeply into it, I'm like, well, that's not going to happen. Yeah, I have a friend who worked with homeless people, and it changed his perspective. He thought that he was going to do a great service by doing this. And then towards the end, he felt like he was wasting his time.

He's like, there's a problem here that you're not going to fix by providing them with goods and services. Yeah, he said. And then there's also there's a despair. There's a thing where you're not taking care of yourself. And then there's also there's a despair. There's a thing where you're not taking care of yourself. They think that one of the ways if you're going to rehabilitate homeless people is to give them some sort of sense of self-worth and allow them some method where they work towards recovery. That's what I thought. That was my big thing.

Yeah. And? Yeah. Doesn't pan out. It's a bummer, man. Yeah. Doesn't pan out. It's a bummer, man. Yeah. It's a real bummer because if you do travel around the Venice Beach area, it's so goddamn depressing. It's because, like, how do you put that genie back in the bottle? How do you make Venice Beach what it was 10 years ago?

You don't. And that's when I say the slippery slope. There's not even a blip on the screen on the way down. It just continues to decline. And we talk about, you know, infrastructure declining, the way government spends money in California, you know, $30 billion on a rail for, you know, to go from the valley and $2 billion to widen the 405 for 17 miles. Yeah. It goes like this, then it goes like this, then it goes like this.

Does that fix anything? $50,000 an inch, if you do the math. $50,000 an inch to widen the 405. That seems like a lot. It seems like a lot. You know, it used to cost $50 million to build a bridge, even as recently as the 70s and 80s. Now it's a billion dollars to build a bridge, and $200 million of it is the environmental

impact statement that takes five years to do, right? So I don't see, I just don't see who is out there in the wings that can turn this around. Or how it can be turned around. Even if there was the perfect person, what's the method? Right. What could you do to stop, like, what could you do to fix the homeless problem? No one even has a solution. It never even gets discussed. Right.

I mean, it doesn't get discussed. When they talk about the economic impact of covid one thing that they never bring up they'll talk about small businesses that's a big thing they want to talk about it like they care about small people they want to talk about it like they care about hard-working families and blue-collar families not a fucking peep about all these tents yeah not a peep yeah none of them yeah it's like, I guess it just is what it is. It's going to be very interesting to see what it is in 15 years. Because 15 years ago, this is a non-existent problem.

Correct. Yeah. It's so rare. No, 15 years ago, there were a couple on 3rd Street Promenade asking for a handout. And they would actually go buy food. Yeah, it was a couple. asking for a handout and they would actually go buy food yeah yeah it was a couple yeah and um i did fear factor in downtown la in the early 2000s we were uh near where they make american apparel that's we were in the same warehouse building that we did american apparel we had people doing

fucking jumping off the top of the building doing crazy stunts and shit back there um so we were always filming in the downtown area and that's when i first discovered skid row i had no idea six street skid row okay yeah skid row in downtown la i don't know what street it is but i remember driving going what the fuck is this goes on for miles it's nuts yeah it's it's weird to see but it was contained to this one area and there's a Netflix special a documentary on the Cecil Hotel now and it's about a girl

who turned up missing at the Cecil Hotel and wound up drowning in the tank on the roof and she was off her meds but one of the parts of the documentary that's really interesting is it shows how Skid Row was created and that they purposely contained people schizophrenicsics, homeless people, they kept them in that area.

And they put all the places where they can get food and shelter in that area. Yeah. And it's just completely, like, it's calculated. Like, they did it on purpose. And they did. I mean, you know, if you want to fix the problem, one of the things you have to do is you do have to find a place for people to go. They can't legitimately squat on the front of a $10 million mansion in Venice. Right.

But they're doing it. But they're doing it. That's what I'm saying. And no one can do anything about it. Apparently. And apparently, this is where it gets really crazy. anything about it apparently this is where it gets really crazy when real estate when people are selling homes out there they will bribe these homeless folks to move away from where the house is so they'll come and say listen I'll

give you X amount of money you got it you know not camp here and so they'll do it but then other guys will find out about it and they'll come in yeah and so they have this like revolving door of trying to sell a house by bribing these homeless people to not camp out right in front of it. Well, and again, the state would argue in their very liberal thinking, if they want to live there, why should they not be able to live there? Well, meanwhile, you can't throw garbage on the street. How come you can leave your garbage there if you call it a tent filled with shit?

It's not good, Mark. But listen, that's not why we're here. That's not why we're here. Two meals a day. I'm sure there's more in it that we haven't discussed. So folks, you should go buy it. Primal Blueprint is excellent. I'm sure this is great too.

Anything else you want to tell people? No, just Primal Kitchen, the food company. Again, when you clean up your diet and you get rid of all the sugar and the bad carbs and the processed carbs and the industrial seed oils, you come down to a fairly short list of actual real food. And what makes the difference are the sauces, the dressings, the toppings, and the methods of preparation. The way you make these exciting to eat and give variety on every meal. And so that's what we do at Primal Kitchen. We create these amazing pasta sauces and salad dressings and condiments and things like that to make real food eating exciting.

It really is great stuff. I love it. I'm a big fan of all your stuff. I love the salad dressing in particular. Thank you. Pasta sauce, everything. It's all great. Cool. love it. I'm a big fan of all your stuff. I love the salad dressing in particular. Thank you. Pasta sauce, everything. It's all great. Cool.

It's great to see you again. Let's do it again quicker than five years. Okay, man. You got it. Thanks. Thank you, Mark. Bye, everybody.