The Joe Rogan Experience - #266 - Rich Roll

Episode Date: September 18, 2012

Joe sits down with Rich Roll.

This weekend we're being in Toronto, Ohio, but this Wednesday we have a fucking gnarly show here at the Ice House. We've got Doug Benson, we've got Duncan Trussell, we've got Brian Redband, we've got Joey Diaz, we've got Dom Herrera. Is that it? Greg Fitzsimmons too. It's gonna be fucking crazy. And we also have one Friday if you're in town in LA. Yeah, and who's on Friday? We've got Clownvis, which is Clown Elvis. I like how you lead strong. Gareth from that new MTV show,

and Francisco Ramos, who was confused by Francisco. I remember we had him on a podcast, and it was Pablo. Oh, that's right. You're the wrong guy. It was supposed to be Pablo. You thought it was Pablo Francisco.

That's right. But now we're friends, so it's cool. Well, dude, sometimes shit You're the wrong guy. It was supposed to be Pablo. You thought it was Pablo Francisco. That's right. But now we're friends. Dude, sometimes shit just works out. Yeah. Anyway, go to DeathSquad.tv and all the information is there, right? All the posters for shows and all the information for T-shirt sales. Aren't you fucking freaks? Rich Roll is here.

We're finna get busy. Finna get down to the bottom of this thing. Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Well, when I did a podcast with Rob Wolf, who is the paleo diet guy, one of the first things that happened was that I got an immediate influx of vegans who had to set Rob Wolf straight because Rob Wolf said some crazy shit. I told him I drank a kale shake every morning and it makes me feel great.

It gives me a lot of energy. He's like, no, you've got to eat bacon and eggs. And sugar. It's in coffee. You've got to get your dick sucked by truckers. He was my superhero. Yeah. He said some awesome shit that you should have bacon, eggs, and coffee in the morning,

and that's a good way to get your day started. A lot of people didn't want to hear that. A lot of people felt that was silly, and you were one of the people that contacted me, and then I looked up your story, and it's pretty fascinating, man. You were around 40, and you were out of shape. Yeah, I mean, I'd been an athlete in college. I was a swimmer in college, but it kind of got away from me after that.

You know, when college is over, that was kind of the end of that athletic chapter and, you know, life goes on and, you know, I went to law school and then it's just about the job and getting married and having kids and, you know, climbing the corporate ladder and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, in the wake of that, you know i went to law school and then it's just about the job and getting married and having kids and you know climbing the corporate ladder and all that kind of stuff and you know in the wake of that you know lost sight of being fit and being healthy and you know it was was pretty much a couch potato depressed lethargic a little bit lost in life you know how it goes so uh yeah decided i had to uh take it back i had a little bit of a health scare that kind of

triggered me to do something about it. And so what action did you take specifically? Well, I mean, I wish I could say I ran off to the library and got a bunch of books and read all the paleo books and read all the vegan books and did a double blind study with people with double blindfolds on and figured out the right way to do it. And, you know, that's not what happened. I mean, I fumbled around for a while trying to figure out what would work for me. But the first thing I did, my wife is like, she's big into yoga and healing and meditation. And she's like, you know, she's constantly reading like crazy spiritual texts. And, you know, she's pretty well schooled in alternative thinking and lifestyle and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, if you were to open the refrigerator, it was pretty clear like the kind of food she was eating and what I was eating, which was essentially crap.

So but she would do like a juice cleanse pretty much every year, you know, and that was fine for her. But that was definitely not something that I was ever interested in doing. But, you know, and that was fine for her, but that was definitely not something that I was ever interested in doing, but, you know, I was kind of desperate, and I thought, you know, maybe I'll, maybe I'll try that, and so I just sort of reached out to her, and I said, yeah, I think I want to do that, and she hooked me up with, we got all these crazy herbs, and, you know, we got a juicer, and the whole thing, and kind of dialed it in and you know i did that for like five days kind of a not like the you know in hollywood a lot of people do like the cayenne pepper thing or whatever and lemon juice yeah i mean that's like a starvation thing so it wasn't like that it was like

i kind of weaned myself off food for a couple days and just did juice for a couple days and then kind of leaned back into food but it was a pretty like eye-opening experience you know like the first couple days i was like it was like i was in rehab man it's like buckled over on the couch like detoxing feeling like shit i could barely move what was your diet like before that like what was standard cheeseburgers yeah i mean cheese you know fast food all the time man you know domino's pizza pizza hut wendy's jack-in in the Box, late at night coming home from work. It didn't matter. And, you know, part of that was because when I was swimming in college, you know, I'm training like four hours a day. And, you know, you're 19, 20 years old or whatever.

And it was just about how many calories can I put down my throat and trying to fill myself up. And, you know, it didn't really matter. And, you know, you can get away with that stuff. You know, and I did for a long time. It catches up to you. You form those habits that carry with you. They're hard to break. We really are a creature of habit. It's a strange thing that even bad habits like gambling, people that become gambling addicts, it really is some sort of hijacking of your reward systems. For sure.

And it's giving you this rush towards something that really doesn't make any sense. And there's also the comfort factor that comes in repeating patterns. It's like your brain knows how to do it. It's done it before. Let's stop fucking around. Just keep doing the same shit you've been doing

and just blow off the gym and take a nap and go beat off and just do the same stupid shit you've been doing. It's really hard for people to move away from that. Yeah, you get these cemented pathways in your brain and it's just your default. I think with certain behavior patterns, after a while, you don't even know you're doing it. It's like you're programmed like a computer. You just follow that pattern every time. And change is hard, man.

It is hard man it is hard and it's it's also it's hard to find a healthy meal at like fucking burger king or jack in the box it's hard to go in there and really get some nutrients yeah it's not gonna happen yeah i mean you like you look you like do you got a salad you got a salad over there and you look at the salad you're like oh jesus it's all like iceberg lettuce it's all wilted and everything's closed early here in la so if you're working late and coming home like it's sometimes it's all like iceberg lettuce it's all wildered and everything's closed early here in la so if you're working late and coming home like it's sometimes it's the only option subways yeah yeah subways though that's you know all that stuff that they can keep on a shelf for that long

yeah none of that is good for you so much it's way better i would you know imagine if you just got a chicken sandwich or uh like on whole wheat or something like that. They need more drive-thru Subways, if they even have any at all, but that would be perfect. This dude's talking to you about some serious fucking vegetable nutrition. You want to talk about Subway? Subway would be awesome. You want to find the healthier option. But I mean, I can't imagine the produce that, like, Subway,

and you're such a huge corporation, you're getting the low-rent shit. You cannot fuck with In-N-Out Burger, man. If you had, like, some, like, really sexy tofu lettuce wrap thing that you were selling, but right next door is In-N-Out Burger, you're doomed, son. It's tough, man. It goes back to those pathways, you know? You smell it, it's like a pheromone. Yeah. It's powerful. It also goes back to the fact. You know, you smell it. It's like a pheromone. Yeah.

It's powerful. It also goes back to the fact that In-N-Out is fucking delicious. Yeah. That's a problem, too. You can't deny that shit's delicious. Hey, man, I did it for years and years and years. Yeah, especially In-N-Out. Those fresh burgers, so much better than burgers at, like, you know, some place where they nuke it.

Didn't they just have, like, a little bit of a scandal there, though, with some of their meat? Did they? They screwed up. Yeah, I thought I remembered reading something about that. I don't know. This might be vegan propaganda. Yeah.

Probably wasn't like the Zancou murders. I don't want the death squad coming down on me like a ton of bricks, man. My Twitter already exploded. Your fans are fucking rabid, man. I mean, it's intense. You have an intense following. Yeah, I don't know what happened. God damn.

You ever want to go to war? You just rally the troops. Well, we're trying to build armies. That's why we're selling kettlebells. We're selling kettlebells and battle robes and selling vitamins and brain pills and subscribing to YouTube videos. Yeah, you were right. Their In-N-Out Burger plant got closed by a USDA-supplied,

or rather the inspectors, temporary shutdown California meat company that provided the beef for the popular In-N-Out Burger chain. Ew, that's not good. No propaganda here, man. And also, of course, it's always good to have the information. I say things all the time and I need to check them, so I do it when anybody else says something too.

But the U.S. school lunch program, they also provided food for them. Ew. Yeah, yeah. Who fucking, can you imagine? Listen, if you're sourcing that much beef, you know, you're a huge company like that, you're going to have a problem like that from time to time. Yeah, there's a lot of cows involved in that, huh?

What are the numbers in something like that? I don't know. It's got to be enormous. Diane Sawyer looks pissed as fuck. That is the last person you want on TV. No, Nancy Grace is the last person you want on TV. Talking shit about you. Angry faced.

But how many cows do you think they use like just in and out a small chain like in and out how many do they use in a day it's gotta be mind-blowing yeah whoa really stop and think about that it's like the holocaust of cows over there well you know what it is man we figured out how to make this society work without people hunting if you like we this this weird notion that we have zero connection with how the food is gathered that's a really fucking crazy way to live so everybody's like yeah I'd like meat

yeah I'd like meat but you don't have to do any of the stuff that makes you respect the animal you don't have to hunt it down you don't have to kill it you don't have to be thankful that you got it and bring it back there's none of that anymore well the system is set up to prevent you from thinking about it. Yeah.

It's almost like grocery stores in a certain way. It's analogous to like a Vegas casino where, you know, the casinos, I don't know, they're pumping the air conditioning in. There's no clocks. You can't find the exit door. It's disorienting. In the same way, like a grocery store, everything's perfectly packaged. It looks clean or whatever. You know, you're not supposed to think about that.

I was at a grocery store that has a butcher shop in the back and they were sawing through a side of beef and you don't really see that. You really rarely see that. What usually you get is you get like, you know, they have these packages and the steak is

very nice and wrapped up and you go, this one is a full pound. That's a good sized steak. i'll take that home no no this dude had a saw and he was running meat through the saw i was like yo that's real life son that's that's a body it's not like a steak now there's a body that has to get chopped up and become sex and we're so separated from that that actual experience of uh the you know the seeing the animal lose its life and understanding what it means to eat it. We're completely separated from it.

It's really strange. Imagine if your job was the guy in the slaughterhouse doing that. He's cutting the throats or whatever. I mean, that's got to take an emotional toll. It's got to be madness. It's got to be madness. All day you're seeing terrified animals, and you're giving them the very thing that they're terrified of.

They're terrified of losing their lives. It's fucking horrifying. Yeah yeah it's weird man and i think you know you know i think you can appreciate this as a deep thinker but you know food is energy man it carries a vibration and so when you put something in your mouth and you know you're making a decision to take that vibration into you and so you know what what is that vibration you know when you're making a decision to take that vibration into you. And so what is that vibration? When you're taking in a terrorized animal, does that affect you? Does that change your perception, your decision-making, your outlook? Does it not? I don't know.

It's a very good question. The solution, though, it seems to be it's not as simple as don't eat meat. Because even if you don't eat meat what are you going to do with all these fucking cows are you going to stop them from breeding are you going to let them starve to death and die off are they going to go extinct like how are we going to regulate these cows you're either going to shoot them or you're going to castrate a bunch of them you're going to have to shoot some of them because otherwise you're going to have cows wandering through the streets everywhere like you got to deal with the fact yeah've got to deal with the fact that you've created a species.

Essentially, we've bred cows to this domestic form from wild cows. And we've done it for so long that they're pretty much helpless without us. It would be mad cows. Yeah, there's no predators out there. It's not like we live in fucking Africa and there's lions running around that could take care of the cow problem. It's not going to happen. You would have a real problem with cows if we stopped eating them. Just the fucking sheer numbers that exist now. I mean, unless you could absolutely keep them from breeding and then you would have to figure out what you're going to do.

You're going to just let the old ones die? Are you going to let some of them breed? You know, what are you going to do? I don't know. It's not, yeah. I mean, there's no, there's no easy solution, but the vegan solution of not eating the meat at least removes karma from your position. It moves, it removes you from interacting with the terrified animals last moments and to, for you to be, I don't want to say profiting, benefiting from that. Well, I don't know i mean i'll you know i just speak to my own experience you know and i know i feel better i feel you know more energized i feel like my energy is even and good my my mood and my outlook is

positive and and i think that you know when you when you talk about vegan and the word vegan and what that means i mean that means different things to different people. You know, it's a tricky word. You know what it means to a lot of people? Well, it means fuck you. No, it means you run the high risk of them being annoying. It doesn't mean that they're annoying. I have a lot of vegan friends that are awesome.

Like Matt Danzig is a vegan and he's a great guy. He's a great guy. And he's, by the way, he's going to be on the podcast tomorrow. Again, we fucked up, and a big disaster. Yeah, I can't wait for this podcast just so my Twitter feed won't be like, Brian, stop being a lazy fuck. Yeah, people are so silly. You know, no, Matt's a great guy.

He's an awesome guy. But, you know, he's got his reasons and their intelligent reasons for being a vegan. However, there are a few people that do it as like a sanctimonious starting point. They do it as like, they're claiming a moral high ground with this new position. And they flaunt it in this like, you know, really annoying, self-satisfying,

kind of in your face way. And it's defeatist for what they're trying to say as well. And I think that, yeah, it's a very emotionally charged work. I mean, food in general. Might as well be religious. Talking about food in general is emotionally charged. I mean, just look at, you know, the Twitter feed is going to explode over this. And that's a good barometer of that.

But, you know, it's right up there with religion and politics. It really is. And when you say vegan, it immediately, people snap into a preconceived idea of what that is and what that means, and they have a visual image of a person in their mind. It's a guy with dreadlocks kicking a hacky sack up in Humboldt. Always blowing a guy while they're eating a salad. Yeah. I mean, whatever it is, somebody has that image already. So that word, you know, is... And people have different reasons for getting into it.

You know, you have the people who are into it for the compassion and the saving the animals. That's a very different crowd and attitude from the people that get into it for health reasons or because they don't want to have a heart attack or whatever. Yeah. And, you know, they both, I guess, are are technically vegans but they're also you know very different and just because you choose to not eat meat or whatever doesn't does that mean that you're

automatically a democrat or you know what is your political point of view and all these things get woven together and it and it makes it it makes it challenging you know to even talk about it with an open mind, I think. Yeah, it is a quite interesting situation. And there is the very real issue of the fact that we are at the top of the food chain. And when you're at the top of the food chain, it bears some responsibility. And we're the only animals that can really decide and choose how to alter other animals' lives on purpose and figure out how to do it and when you look at how we choose to do it if you look at like food ink and you see factory farming and stuff like that it really is a is a it's a damning statement about like where we're at

like spiritually like as a race like we're getting away with this really heinous shit because we can because it's easy to just not pay attention to it and that's uh that's that's the worst case scenario like the best case scenario you would think they have it set up so these animals live like they're on a an open prairie and they all just live a natural life and then you call them from the herd right you do it you do it you know easily so they live a natural life. And then you cull them from the herd. And you do it easily. So they live a natural life, no different than any other cow, in a large environment where they get to roam around and eat grass instead of being force-fed corn. And then you just kill them. I mean, that's like the best-case scenario if you're going to eat cows.

damning that human beings in the idea of maximizing profit have decided to run these ridiculous places where you're packing pigs right next to each other in these little boxes and you see the chickens all stuffed in together with each other and pecking at each other it's fucking gnarly man yeah when you see food inc and you see the chicken coops it's pretty that's pretty disturbing to you know and you make that connection because you know it's pretty disturbing. And you make that connection because it's easy to go, well, chicken's the healthier option or whatever, and then you see that and it makes you think twice. But I also think we've created this system that ultimately is not sustainable. I mean, like an insane amount of our agriculture goes to produce grain

to feed livestock, something like 90% or something like that. Is it really? It's crazy high. 90%? Crazy high. And then it brings up all the ecological arguments about greenhouse gases and all that kind of stuff. Oh, they fart up a fucking storm.

Those goddamn animals ruined India. Do you know what they do? They cause global warming. No bullshit. From farting? Yes. Dude, it's not bullshit. It sounds silly, damn animals ruined india do you know they do they they fucking they cause global warming no bullshit i'm farting yes dude it's not bullshit it sounds silly but they fart so much you're dealing with in india you have so many fucking cows that they really have pollution issues because of cow farting in the air i heard that the grass fed beef farts even more really yes i don't know where oh that's hilarious well that makes makes sense because India would be much more grass-fed, right?

And they're the ones who have the big issue. But they also have the issue that they don't kill cows, or at least the Hindus do. You apparently can buy beef in India. It's not uncommon. It's just there's a huge group of them that won't fuck with the cows. Is that why they don't wear deodorant so it smells like deodorant or armpits more than poop and and farts all you know like like it's like you're building your own force field yeah maybe your own body smell yeah cancel out the shit smell in the air yeah that's like way better than fucking shit yeah

man that's like the worst case scenario is like you're living around animals who stink up the air constantly with their fart gas and you can't kill them because dog farts are fucking nasty like so a big cow farts that's way i'd be sniffing our pits all day long you're hungry and you know there's people starving and they're just letting these delicious cows just wander around how the fuck did that ever happen i don't know i think it goes back to religion what a bunch of silly bitches they are in india That is one of the silliest choices ever. What do you want to do? You want to starve to death

or you want to eat these fucking delicious cows? Let's just sit around and smell their farts and complain and have more people. It's cultural mores, though. I mean, there are cultures that think that we're insane for having dogs in our houses. It's true. Yeah, it's interesting how we just sort of adopt

a pattern of behavior based on our surroundings and what's existed in that area. Yeah, for Indians, I guess, the cow is sacred in the Hindu culture. Is that what it is? It's a god or something like that? Or relatives come back to life or something? Yeah. Yeah.

Do you know what it is? When I worked at an Indian company, I had a steering wheel. Me and my ex-girlfriend used to share a car and her steering wheel cover it was a cow uh print right and they saw me drive up to that and i had a meeting and they told me to please remove that from their steering wheel because uh they have they respect cows what yeah really an indian company it was called the Software People. Oh, wow. Whoa, you showed up with murdered skin on your steering wheel. They were like, oh, please, just be nice. Wow.

That's got to be weird. What a strange thing to just choose to really worship and lock on to. But it shows you. I mean, that's what they did in India. Someplace else it was Buddha. Someplace else it was Jesus. We're so fascinating when it comes to to that human beings are really, really bizarre animals. So your, your story was that you were an athlete and then you got unhealthy and then you had a

little bit of health scare. So that's when you decided to go vegan. Yeah. So I did, so I did that juice cleanse. And then, you know, by the, by the fifth day of that, I just felt unbelievable. My energy level was through the roof, and all I'd been doing was drinking fruit and vegetable juice and drinking this beetroot broth and some teas and stuff like that. And it was amazing because I had abused my body for so long with terrible food and terrible lifestyle. And I'm also recovering alcoholic. So, you know, I used to drink like a shitload. You hit it on both ends. Yeah, I was hitting it. I was hitting it hard. Like I just, you know, I did not treat myself well. And the idea that like within five days I could feel that good, like I didn't know that I

could feel that good or I hadn't felt that good in 15, 20 years. It's pretty amazing. You know, the body is like incredibly resilient, you know, when you treat it right. So when I was done with that, I thought, well, what am I going to do? You know, like I want to, I want to keep feeling this good, like, but I don't know, you know, I don't know what to do next. And, you know, again, I wish I'd gone out and, you know, read a bunch of books or something, but I just thought, uh, maybe I'll try a vegetarian diet. Like I didn't do any of books or something but I just thought uh maybe I'll try a vegetarian diet like I didn't do any education or research but I just it just seemed like well that sounds you know healthy or healthier than what I'm doing but kind of coming from an addiction

perspective and a recovery perspective like I went to rehab 14 years ago and so a lot of like the way like I sort of rewired my brain and the way I think is kind of in the context of addiction and recovery. It just seemed like something I could wrap my brain around because you're either eating meat or you're not, you know, it's very, it's very black and white, just like you're using drugs and you're drinking or you're not, you know, you're either sober or you're using, you know, and so that made more sense to me than, hey, I'm going to eat better. I'm just going to eat healthy and go to the gym because it's so vague. I don't know what that means.

Maybe I would for like a week or two, but I would definitely fall back into my regular old behavior pattern. So I started doing that, but it wasn't long before I'm looking for theopholes or whatever, because you can eat like shit on a vegetarian diet. You can eat like shit on a vegan diet. So, you know, I could eat Pizza Hut cheese pizza and get nachos and, you know, eat McDonald's french fries, and I'm a vegetarian, right? So certainly, you know, that wasn't working. But I did that for like six months and, of course, you know, didn't lose any weight. I was about 50 pounds heavier than I am now. And, you know, I was kind of back

on the couch and lethargic. And I was ready to just bag it. But I thought, I wonder what would happen if I just kind of went that extra step and got rid of the dairy and cut out the processed foods. And I didn't really think it would make a difference. I almost did it to prove that it wouldn't or to prove to my wife that it wouldn't work, you know, so I could kind of keep doing what I was doing and be guilt free about it. But so I tried that. And within a week, like I was back to that energy level that I felt when I did the cleanse, like my energy levels through the roof, like it was so high that I could only sleep like a couple hours a night. And I was like bouncing off the walls. Really? Yeah, it really did. It really did. It made a huge, it made a huge difference. And I think getting rid of the dairy made a much bigger,

like not eating the meat. Wasn't that hard for me, but getting rid of the dairy in my diet, that was a lot harder. Like that was almost like another detox, you know, of like, cause dairy is in so many foods. So, and I crave it, man, you know, know i love it so it was very difficult to kind of break that do you have cheat days i don't have cheat days so your your attitude is essentially uh the same attitude that you have about like recovery yeah because well that's the thing like i know you know like tim ferris is big on the cheat day with his slow carb and all of that and it seems to work for a lot of people and it makes sense for me like for me it's about I it goes back to like the addiction model because I I do crave this stuff man and I know if I had a cheeseburger like once a week like I'd start eating cheeseburgers all the time because it would

you know you break the cycle and now I don't think about it that much like every once in a while I'll smell it and it smells good to me but I I don't go around like craving it all the time. But if I was to have it every once in a while, then you're kind of, you keep, you're, you're still kind of like fertilizing that little seed. I respect that.

Anthony Bourdain loves pork so much. He loves pork so much that they gave him the option of quit eating pork or take medicine to lower your blood pressure and your cholesterol rather and he took the medicine said i'll take the fucking medicine i need pork yeah he talked about it on the show yeah like being addicted to food and he's for him it's pork fatty pork he's willing to sacrifice his health yeah because he likes to eat pork i mean that's that's pretty heavy. It's pretty fucking intense. Yeah, and I don't know how good that anti-cholesterol medication is for you. Is that okay for you?

The statins. I mean, you know, there's plenty of side effects from that. I would imagine there has to be, right? There are a crazy number of people that are on these drugs, and it's amazing the extent to which the, the, the healthcare system, you know, the doctors just,

you know, they just knee jerk prescribe this stuff and they're not that educated about nutrition, whether it's paleo or vegan or whatever. It's not really part of the medical school curriculum. I've been shocked talking to doctors about nutrition. I've been shocked having conversations with doctors. Very, very few.

And it's not their fault. Like, you know, they're studying all sorts of stuff. And, you know, maybe there's an elective here or there, like one required course that they have to take. But they're not really that schooled. And in our system, we're sort of grown and raised to believe that, you know, doctor knows best. And you go to the doctor and the doctor knows everything. that doctor knows best. And you go to the doctor, and the doctor knows everything.

And it's kind of alarming and eye-opening to realize that that's not necessarily the case, at least with respect to nutrition. There should most certainly be a doctor of nutrition that you go to, a doctor who is a full-fledged doctor at the top of all the information that's available today. He's on top of all of it. of all the information that's available today. He's on top of all of it. And his job is just to check your blood and give you a detailed write-up of what's wrong with you nutritionally. You don't have any B12 in your body.

You don't have this in your body. You're missing niacin. Whatever it is, that he could show you what your optimum levels of your various nutrients should be. Very, very, very you know ever get that done no and they do exist but that should be part of your physical yeah it should be a it should be a regular thing because for you know i talk about it on this show all the time how much it changed me when i when i started drinking kale shakes in the morning and i'm not vegan. I still drink milk. I still eat meat.

But in massively increasing the amount of plant nutrients I get into my body, and especially it seems like starting my day with them, I usually don't eat right when I wake up. I like to exercise sometimes or just get up and do some stuff, and then I'll eat. And my first meal is always really light. It's always either some sort of a hemp protein shake or it's this, um, this, uh, kale shake thing that I have.

But the, the difference is the kale shake gives me this fucking steady energy. Like I can feel my body responding to the nutrients. Like you can literally feel it and there's no the only negative about it at all is you have to shit more but that's just like cleaning out your pipes and you actually look forward to it because they're they're wonderful these poops are like a ride they're like we you can feel it you can feel it in the way that you know like when you have that first cup of coffee and you can feel your spine getting tickled by the caffeine.

It's like a similar thing. I mean, it jacks you up. I could not live without the Vitamix. It's amazing. It's an amazing creation. When we go out of town, we bring it with us. We travel with it. You're an animal.

You're an animal. Good for you. It's such a part of your life. I mean, it's amazing. It's a heavy thing because it's it's expensive right things like 500 bucks 450 bucks or whatever it's a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people to tell them they ought to get one but it's a motherfucker once you have it you can't imagine not having it yeah it's a motherfucker it's it's a beast that thing's. It's such a great thing. Just stuff everything in there and plunge it and then just turn that bitch on. I,

I, uh, blended an avocado pit once. Whoa. Drink it. Whoa. What was that like? Well,

I had a bunch of other stuff in there. Is that good for you? But just, I didn't, I just wanted to see if I could do it. You know, I couldn't believe that avocado, even the pit.

That's what I'm talking about. Isn't that the poison that's got like a nitrates in it or something crazy like that? No, it has... The shit from Back to the Future. Nitrates. It's fucking nuclear. It's like those sneakers that light up when you step on them. It's that stuff.

It's that stuff. I wouldn't recommend doing it all the time. I just wanted to see... The point is that I couldn't believe that it was so powerful that it could i could actually blend that into yeah for folks who don't know what a vitamix is it's essentially a really high powered blender that's designed to make like vegetable smoothies but it also has like a top with a hole in it and you have like a plunger and the plunger drops down to like right above the blade so it shoves everything into the blades and matches it's incredible it never breaks the fucking thing they're indestructible

like a World War two relic even the design of it looks like it's been around forever have you I think I tweeted you this did you have you tried putting beets in there no the kale no I haven't my recipe is so fucking good i i don't want to mess with it too much i messed with it but chain beats does sound good but i changed pears to uh pineapple put like a half a beet in and the beet greens because the the the nitrites is it nitrites or nitrates i always get that wrong or whatever it's been shown to have like a significant impact on uh the efficiency of your oxygen utilization like it really it's it's been shown to have like a significant impact on uh the efficiency of your oxygen utilization like it really it's it's an it's a pretty significant like energy booster wow okay

so the greens as well yeah you can put the greens in and then it'll turn everything red like even if you put a tiny amount of beat in the whole shake will be red and it's you know you want to put some other stuff in there because it has kind of a heavy taste but but you'll notice the difference all right definitely i would definitely do i'll try that shit tonight the same way that um the cordyceps work because you know the cordyceps are so good at boosting your oxygen uptake and the efficiency of your oxygen utilization it has a similar effect i mean the cordyceps are crazy awesome it's amazing you know yeah well that's what the main ingredient of shroom tech sport is. I take four of those before jiu-jitsu class.

Even if I haven't been training recently, it's amazing how much more energy I have. It's like a significant feeling of an extra little boost that you have. It's like you've been training at altitude and then you come down to sea level. You feel like you don't get winded. You don't get winded the same way that's for sure and uh people who have gone to altitudes like you've had to change altitudes rapidly like move up to boulder like real quick and that normally would have issues with that they've found that if they take cordyceps mushrooms it can uh can settle them in settle them in quicker because for a lot of people that altitude sickness is no

fucking joke i read this thing about babies being born in Colorado that like a record number of babies are born prematurely like in Colorado because the the high altitude but it totally makes sense like that's a harder way to live the whole thing is tougher oxygen utilization is fucking everything, man. It's everything. It's everything. And it's in beets. Beets, man. Check it out.

Check out some rhubarb while you're at it, Joe. Awesome. So you don't, do you miss meat at all? Do you miss the smell? Like if you have a neighbor who's barbecuing and you... Yeah. Nightmares about Fogo de Chow. Oh, Fogo.

I'm a human being, man. You know, like, you know, I ate that stuff for a long time. I like it. You know, I like the smell of it. I mean, there are certain vegan people that will say it disgusts them or whatever. And, you know, I'm sure it does or whatever. But for me, I smelled it. That's my problem.

It smells good. I drive by Jack in the Box. I think that smells good. You know what I mean? And it's, yeah, see, that's like like my problem that's why I can't have a cheat day for me yeah I understand so how did you get involved in endurance athletics what happened there it was another kind of you know weird like organic thing that just evolved over time I mean when I when I got on the plant-based diet I

started exercising again you know mainly because I just had all this energy I had to burn off. Like, I didn't have any designs on going back to being an athlete or being competitive in anything. I just wanted to lose a little weight. I wanted to be able to enjoy my kids at their energy level. You know, I have four kids now. So it was really just about, you know, connecting with that part of myself that I kind of lost touch with, but nothing crazy. I would go to the pool and swim a couple times a week and do a light jog here and there. My wife bought me a bike for my birthday.

I'd never really ridden a bike before, and this was when I turned 40. But then I had an experience after I'd been doing this for maybe four months or something like that, a really moderate exercise. I went out for a morning run out at, you know, where Mulholland Drive, the dirt road part of it that dumps out at the bottom of Topanga on the valley side. So there's a trail that you can literally go like all the way to Brentwood, right? It goes forever. And I just went out there one morning on a weekday for a morning run. And just, you know, you have those days, and I'm sure you have it in jiu-jitsu, where you just feel unstoppable, like you can just keep going forever.

I just started running, and I just felt amazing, you know? And I just kept going and going. I was like, I don't have to be back. You know, I'm going to keep going and going. And I ended up running, like, the better part of the marathon, just by myself, like, out on, you know, like, I think 24 miles or something like that that morning. Excuse me. And I got back, and I just was like, what is going on?

Dude, that's some Forrest Gump shit. Yeah, it was. It was a really weird. I mean, I'd never been a runner. You know, it's not like I had a background in running or, you know, had any proficiency in it, really. And it wasn't like I was going fast that day either, but it was just the idea that I could keep going. And I thought, something's going on here. I don't know whether it's the nutrition

change or I've just unlocked some dormant gene inside me, but this felt good. And then I was like, I'd like to challenge myself. And then I started looking for something to do. And when you're 40, it's like, what's the bucket list item or what's the midlife crisis looking for something to do and you know when you're 40 it's like you know what's the bucket list item or what's the midlife crisis thing you want to do and started thinking about doing an Ironman because that's a that's a pretty typical goal for a 40 year old guy who wants to you know conquer a mountain or whatever and uh and started training a little bit more and more and I didn't know anything about triathlon I didn't know anything about Ironman or anything like that.

But I figured it seems like there's those Ironman races that are like every weekend somewhere. And like tons of people are doing it. It can't be that hard to get in one. I'll just pick a city, you know, a ways out and, you know, train for it myself. And I went on the website one day and realized that they all sell out like a year ahead of time. Like they're like youtube tickets like the after the day after one of those races the next day registration and they just sell out like in a couple hours so i couldn't get into any of those and and uh it's like well you know what am i gonna do and nothing seemed to excite me and i kind of lost my mojo for a little bit

but uh i was at jamba juice one, like maybe a month after that experience, getting a juice. And you know how they have those like competitor magazines that you see in like running shoe stores or whatever, like running shoe reviews or whatever, just laying around. And I picked it up and started looking at it. And there was an article about this dude named David Goggins, who's this badass Navy SEAL guy. Like, guy had been, like, a football player and a power lifter, like, big strapping guy. I think he was up, he had weighed, like, 275 pounds at one point, and had seen some shit, you know, as a Navy SEAL, and had lost a lot of friends in action.

And he decided that he was going to go, he was going to find the 10 most difficult endurance races in the world and do them all to like raise money for it wasn't the wounded warriors foundation but it was something like that like like a you know so that he could raise money for the families of these these friends of his that had fallen and he had he had just done this race called bad water which is 135 mile run through death valley that goes up like Mount Whitney at the end. And it's like crazy hot, like 110, 120 degrees out in the desert. And he had just done really well in that, and he had never really done much endurance sports before that.

Like he literally had like fallen into it and had just put in an incredible performance. And then like a month later, he did this race called Ultraman which is this insane double Ironman distance race in Hawaii where over the course of three days you circumnavigate the entire big island of Hawaii which is like a big island it's like the size of Connecticut right so I was reading about this and it just seemed like such a cool event. Like not only was it longer than Ironman, which I didn't think was possible, it was broken up into stages.

So the first day is a 6.2-mile ocean swim followed by a 90-mile bike. And the last part, like the last 20 miles of that bike, you go up to Volcano National Park. So it's like a 4,000-foot gain. And the second day, you ride 170 miles around the eastern side of the island, like up through Hilo. And you end up in this little town called Javi. And the third day, you run 52.4 miles double marathon from Javi back into Kona, where the race started. And I was like, what is this? And it was cool because they limited it to just 35, like, invitation-only competitors.

Like, you had to apply to get into this race. They don't close any of the roads. And it was almost like this family affair where you have to bring your own crew, and they kind of, like, take care of you and feed you out of a van while you're doing this race. And the crews kind of help each other out and the competitors help each other out. So it's a race, but it seemed almost like this crazy spiritual odyssey, you know, like this experiment in expansion, you know, much more than a race. And I was like, that was what I was looking for.

You know, it wasn't like I was looking for a race to go see how fast I could go or how many guys I could beat. It resonated with me because it seemed more like an opportunity to learn more about myself in a way that was unique. You know what I mean? It was like this crazy down the rabbit hole spiritual adventure. And so it just captivated me and i i i was like it was one of those things where you know when you come across something and something just clicks inside you and you know like that's the direction you're supposed to go in or you're on the right path or you know maybe you've had that in stand up or at some point in your life where you just feel like you're directed in a certain way, where everything just kind of seems in alignment.

It was like I just knew I was going to do that race. I didn't know how, and I hadn't done anything of note to merit getting into it or anything like that. But I was like, I'm going to find a way to do that. I've got to do that. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I ended up calling up the race director and it was some months before you could even send in your application because I was like I couldn't stop

thinking about it and I needed to like just if she was gonna tell me like there's no way I was getting in then I could at least like put that to bed so I just called her up and said you know I read about this race and I can't stop thinking about it and I'd really like to do it but you know maybe I'm crazy because you know I don't know why I'm even calling you because I can't stop thinking about it, and I'd really like to do it, but, you know, maybe I'm crazy because, you know, I don't know why I'm even calling you because I haven't really done very much. You know, and she said, well, what have you done? And I was like, I haven't done anything. You know, I'm barely, you know, I'm just getting back into being fit again.

And she had every reason to just say, well, you know, why don't you call me in a couple years, and, you know, we'll see what you've done then, and maybe I'll let you into this race. But she was like, well, listen, you you know it means a lot that you called early and uh why don't you just touch base with me in a couple months and we'll evaluate your training and we'll go from there so she kind of like left the crack in the door open you know so it was enough to like give me a little bit of hope like the pilot light was lit a little bit and I was like I'm gonna get into that race you know I'm gonna find a way to get into that race and I hired a coach and I started training as if I was

already in this was back in early 2008 and I mean it's a long story but ultimately she ended up relenting and letting me in and I ended up doing that race in 2008 and I hadn't done an Ironman before that I tried to do a half Ironman the year before, and I didn't even finish. So, you know, I wasn't going in with some crazy, like, endurance pedigree. So it was a cool experience, though, and I ended up doing pretty well in that race. How well did you do? I got 11th that year. Wow, that's amazing.

That's crazy. You couldn't finish, and then a year later you get 11th. I got 11th in 2008, then and and at that time really like we were like the bad news bears like i had no idea what i was doing like my dad came out to like help me crew and a couple buddies from out here and none of us knew anything about anything and and i just wanted to finish you know and i just wanted to like not die so i i approached it like very conservatively but i ended up exceeding my expectations. So I thought, you know, I wonder what would happen if I spent a year like preparing to go back and actually race it, you know, rather than just trying to finish and kind of being timid about it.

So for 2009, I trained my ass off and I went back and I ended up getting out. I got out of the swim with a 10-minute lead on the next guy. And I held that lead for the rest of that day through that 90-mile bike. So I finished the first day with a 10-minute lead on the field. 10 minutes? Yeah. Holy shit. A huge lead going into day two.

If that was a race car, that would be a ridiculous amount of time. It was crazy because I didn't see anyone else all day, you know, like because I was out in front. And my wife and my kids were crewing me actually. So I was like, I haven't, I haven't to kind of like tell them what to do. And they were great, but it wasn't like they had experience with anything like this, which made me very nervous. Well, each competitor has to bring a van, and that van is filled with, like, all your shit, man. So you've got to have all your food that you're going to eat, like, while you're racing and then afterwards, and then, you know, ice for ice baths afterwards, and they're filling your bottles and feeding them to you. They kind of leapfrog you in park, and then you do bottle handoffs, so you always have nutrition on the bike. And they make sure you don't take any wrong turns like they're in charge of navigating and just you know and if you have anything mechanically goes wrong with your bike or whatever extra parts so and it's filled with

all your clothes because you're going around the island you're not going back to where you started that day you're going to stay in a different place each night so you have to have all your stuff with you so these vans are like packed from floor to ceiling with stuff wow i would have never thought there's that much involved in racing yeah logistically it's very it's it's it's there's a lot that goes into it to pull it off and everything now does there does everybody know how to apply nutrition to these races is it like a consensus or do some people try to do them without eating there's no way you can do it without eating i mean you gotta be you gotta be taking in i mean the consensus is you gotta take in about two to three hundred calories an hour and everybody's stomach's different and the intensity with which you're you're going will depend upon how well you can digest the food like if you're

on the rivet and going hard it's gonna be to digest calories, and the kind of calories become more important because you're not going to be able to eat solid food if you're hammering. You know what I mean? What do you eat? Do you eat fruits? So what I eat is probably different than certain other. Everybody has their own thing. I like to stay away from the sugar.

Like a lot of endurance athletes run or whatever, you know, usually kind of Gatorade kind of stuff like the Cytomax and the, and that kind of stuff, the real high sugar stuff. But when you're going all day, like you're going to be out on a race course for eight or nine hours and then you got to do it the next day, your, your system can't handle that. So I try to eat a more, um, like a lower glycemic higher carbohydrate fuel source so they have this stuff called carbopro or something called perpetuum they're like maltodextrin powders so it's it's a like a low glycemic kind of complex carbohydrate fuel source and you can put like 900 calories in one bottle and you can kind of sip off that it's like pancake batter it tastes terrible huh but i'll eat that i'll eat bananas i'll put like a lightly baked yams are good dates are good

and then how can we lightly baked um because if they're overcooked that like fries a lot of the nutrition out of them but you want them soft enough like there's they're almost like you can squeeze them into your mouth they're easy to digest when you're riding a bike you know and they have most of the nutrition in them yeah they're great for nutrition yeah yams are awesome what is it that kills the nutrition i mean if it breaks down the tissue like that how come it doesn't kill the nutrition if it makes it all soft and mushy well you just don't if you if you if you like completely fry it and overcook it then it becomes like a dead thing right do they know like exactly at what temperature it actually starts to break down? Yeah.

I mean, somebody probably does. Somebody probably does. Yeah. I've always wondered that about cooking, like killing vitamins. Like they say, if you lightly saute it, you're okay. Are you sure? Right. At what level?

Is it really that bad to eat them raw that we have to fucking jazz everything up with fire and hot metal? Yeah, I know. Well, we're the only animals that cook our food, right? We're also the only animals with TVs. We're the only animals that drive cars. That's right. We're the only animals that talk.

Let each other know how good shit tastes when you cook it. We talk to each other. We go, dude, fucking shit tastes good when you cook it. That is the problem. It does taste better. Like, you know, there's even vegetable dishes that are absolutely delicious because they're cooked, you know. Yeah. But that's just not as good for your body.

Well, I don't know. I mean, it seems like there's differing schools of thought on that. I mean, I think that, you know, you have the really hardcore raw foodists who just eat everything raw. And certainly I think it's great to eat lots of raw foods. You know what I mean, I think that, you know, you have the really hardcore raw food is to just eat everything raw. And certainly I think it's, it's, it's great to eat lots of raw foods. You know what I mean? Like the raw foods you put in your, in your Vitamix or whatever. And I eat a lot of raw foods, but I still eat cooked foods. You know, I got, I got to have me a little cooked food. Right. Just for the, like the feeling of it, right. Comfort food. You know, do you eat pastas at all? I'll eat a brown rice pasta, like the gluten-free kind.

Ezekiel? You ever have Ezekiel? I have Ezekiel bread, too. Yeah, yeah. I love that. I mean, I try not to overdo it on the pasta. I usually have more brown rice stuff instead. Brown rice, steamed veggies, sautéed veggies.

And top it off with a Coca-Cola or perhaps a Pepsi-Cola? A Red Bull. A Red Bull. Do you take in any caffeine what do you what are your thoughts on that um i've gone back and forth on caffeine i've gone periods without it and then i've used it as well um i think that uh you know when you're using it compulsively and addictively it's not a good thing fries your adrenals and makes you tired ultimately i think a cup of coffee in the morning is not the worst thing but particularly for an athlete i mean it's definitely a performance enhancer like if i'm going out for a long bike ride you know a nice little strong cup of coffee before my ride definitely i can definitely feel

the difference but yeah i think it you know you can't be just hammering coffee all day long i like a nice cup of coffee before a podcast and a nice cup of coffee before jujitsu i like to get a little but it's really a crutch it is it is it's weak but and i've gone periods when i when i don't you know drink coffee at all and i feel fine and you know then i'll lapse back into drinking it from time to time well i uh during periods of heavy writing, I will drink a lot of fucking coffee. And I had one day where I was working on this piece, and I was up until like 5 o'clock in the morning just wired with coffee. And then the next day I tried no coffee.

And boy, was that a trip. Like I had a headache all day. Like my body was like dude let's just have a cup of coffee let's just feed the demon just feed that demon give it a little it's like i was like i gotta be careful like this is how you get addicted to powerful drug man yeah and i was setting i was setting the stage for addiction i was like i was i had a headache like i didn't i didn't want to not have the caffeine, you know? So I just, it was taking too much.

And it was over a course of a few days where I was like really hitting it hard writing. Yeah. You gotta be careful. Cause fucking, I had headaches. I had withdrawals, but I found that a really strenuous exercise,

like if I have ever anything wrong with me, if I have, um, uh, jet lag, if I'm, uh, I was just a little out of it from landing somewhere and I can't shake the cobwebs loose, just really intense, strenuous exercise just seems to reset the whole thing.

Yeah, snaps you right back. Snaps you right back. I really feel bad for people who don't exercise, who try to travel a lot because I hear people tell me that they're fucked up for like two weeks and that's crazy I've been traveling a lot lately and that's the only thing I don't sleep great in hotel rooms and just you know that first night in a new environment or whatever it's always a little off and you know the first thing when I get there just I've got to work out or whatever it's it's exactly what it is you got to wipe the slate clean and then it just it really helps with the jet lag and sleep and acclimating and everything yeah it's and it's one of those things where you just got to start it just get it going and then once you get it going it sort of takes care of itself and you're in the

middle of it it feels great but it's like that first step of doing that first squat doing that you know the first anything it's like oh come on now but if you can overcome that it gives you that feeling like you know like lately i've got a lot of shit done that I wanted to get done. And I got this great like feeling because of that, you know, it's got, I've got like momentum, you know, and whenever I feel like that I'm accomplishing things that I wanted to do and, you know, do like, uh, you know, I set out to do X today and I got it all done. It's like, yes.

And like the next day I feel like a little more charged up. I feel like I've got, well, look, I'm doing what I'm trying to get done. I'm getting it done. I'm feeling great about it. And a lot of people, I think, don't have that. They don't build that momentum enough in their life. They don't, you know, pick a few goals, lock on to them, go with it, and then let it build up to something else.

Let it build up to more. Let it build up to the next thing. And also, I think that there's this weird equation with exercise because it's so easy to say you don't have time or you're busy or whatever. And, you know, I go through that a lot. And it's easy to justify not doing it. But ultimately, when I just quiet that thought and do it anyway, I end up getting more done. Everything that I needed to get done ends up getting done. And if I don't do it, I end up wasting time and I'm less productive and I'm not thinking clearly.

And there's a lot of like down wasted time. I think everybody has a different sort of biology. And I know, I know this for sure. People have different needs. So I don't say that everybody needs it. You know, I mean, I think it benefits everybody, but I don't say that everybody needs it. I mean, I think it benefits everybody, but I don't know that everybody needs it. But I certainly know that I need it. When I don't have it, it makes a big difference. I don't like the way I feel. I don't like getting annoyed at things too easily. I don't like this weird testosterone buildup that happens after a few days of not exploding on something.

It's like my body's become most certainly addicted to that release and it knows that it can navigate like social waters better when it's just totally drained of all the the monkey dna you know if i don't get that out at the gym i don't feel like i'm as nice a person i don't feel like i'm as balanced yeah my wife will just kick me out of the house just you need to go ride your bike or do something don't come back until you do i have a crazy gym in my house it's in the garage like half of the garage was done for a company called garage mahal oh wow so my garage is set up it's got mats i've got a grappling dummy that i strangle i like to do jujitsu on a dummy and i have a kickboxing bag and ropes to climb so i

never have to go anywhere it's always right there so there that cuts out a lot of the fucking bullshit and procrastination with the 20 minute ride to the gym and then I only have 40 minutes to work out because god if I just took a nap right now maybe I would perform better tonight and maybe I could just do some working out at home tonight like having it in my house for me it's huge the ability to just go outside and even when i was broke i always had a heavy bag you know just tied something to the rafters in the garage you know having something like that is uh to me having just a place where you can at least release in some way you know get that fucking blow out in some way so important for

maximizing sanity yeah i need it i don't know some people some people don't need it yeah i just sneeze a lot yeah brian's fine without it i'm telling you he's not even an angry guy um i think uh though it's it's a it's a great benefit to everybody people can get through life without that benefit but you're silly you're silly to do it that's what i tell him i'm like you're silly. You're silly to do it. That's what I tell him. I'm like, you're silly. He got really skinny at one point in time, though. Brian was like way fat at one point in time, and then he went crazy Weight Watchers, and he shrunk down to like a tiny man.

It was strange. Where are you at now? I'm about halfway back to what I used to be. But now it's more just I eat barely little. I eat only at 9 or 10 o'clock at night until I go to bed. But it's not like I eat crazy bad. It's more like I'll go home and eat lean pockets and a salad. You don't eat until 9 at night?

Are you saying you literally don't eat food all day? No. And it's mostly because of Starbucks. Yeah. Jacks himself up with a Trenta double shot. He gets Trenta double shots, which is basically cancer. It's just cancer in a liquid form.

You go all day, all day. And then you hit the lean pockets at night. Yeah. Crash out. Yeah. Yeah. It's fucking super good for you. you're on the right track son here's a here's a here's a video of me uh when you were super skinny yeah super skinny you got really what is the lightest you got you got

below 170 right gotcha you've just been rickrolled you don't think this motherfucker doesn't want to hear about rick rolling when your name is ritual how annoying is that every day man it's so rude fucking day that's so rude and it came out of nowhere too you lived most of your life without a without a rickroll and then all of a sudden this one fucking song the internet is so bizarre it's the bane of my existence. You know, it's funny, too. There's a, you know this rapper, Nipsey Hussle? No.

There's this rapper named Nipsey Hussle, and he has a song called Rich Roll. So it's all about the rich roll. And so my Twitter feed fills up with all this crazy insanity from people retweeting this song that I guess is a pretty popular song. And so I have to, you know, like i'm getting confused with this dude you should embrace it you should go like the opposite of what rick ross did you should do a music video you should claim that i'm the real rich roll son that's right you know and then maybe you could like get hip-hop people into being vegans it's so close to being to to rick ross too it's all it's all confusing it is right you know it's right there it's right next door neighbors just buy a lot of trench coats and you'll be good do you um fuck around with uh probiotics do you uh yeah a little bit yeah yeah yeah there's there's some um pretty

good like plant-based ones i have this uh nutrition guru my nutrition guru, my buddy, um, Compton Rom. He's got a, that's his name. His name is Compton Rom. You should actually, he would make an incredible guest for you. You can watch videos of him on YouTube. Um, he talks about some crazy stuff, just like the energy of food. And he's super into like, he's a, he has a PhD in microbiology. And so he's helped me a lot with like my nutrition and he's super into like he's a he has a phd in microbiology and so he's helped me a lot with like my nutrition and he's been a little bit of a mentor and he's got a startup company called ascended health and he's all about trying to find the best superfoods all over the world and provide them um to uh to customers and he's traveling all the time he's going to like thailand all these crazy places places, trying to find places where he can grow this stuff.

And so I would go to his house, and his house looked like, in his kitchen, it looks like a giant meth lab. He's got all these tubes everywhere and all this crazy stuff. He's like, oh, you've got to try this. I just got this resveratrol in. It's from the finest Bordeaux grape skins. Stuff's amazing. I'm going to make some powder for you.

And he's always trying to help help me with my like training and racing nutrition by giving me some of this this crazy stuff and and so his whole thing is um he's super knowledgeable about probiotics and and microbes because he studied microbes and like um like the gi tract microbial activity forever and ever and knows more about it than anyone I've ever met And it's fascinating man because and I talk a little bit about this in my book too that we think we're You know, we're made up of trillions of cells, right? And we think we're these sentient beings and we have control over What we think and our decisions and all of that but at the same time

We have to realize that we have like 10 times the number of our cells in microbes in our gut alone. Like our microbial ecology in our GI tract has like 10 times the number of microorganisms compared to all of our cells in our entire body. And there's been these studies that have come out, and they're starting to come out, where they're studying the extent to which

your microbial ecology in your gut can trigger your nervous system and actually impulse you in a decision-making way and they've discovered like links between what kind of microbial ecology you have in your gut and the foods that you crave. Wow. Yeah, yeah. So creepy. Probiotics are all about improving the health of your flora in your gut, right? And if you have healthy flora, it craves and feeds on healthy foods, right?

But if you go to Jack in the Box every day or you eat Lean Pockets every night, then you're going to have a different kind of microbial ecology like the microbes that are in that food start to propagate in your gut and that takes over and that becomes the ecology and they're realizing that that ecology then sends signals to your brain that makes you crave more of those foods so it's that craving cycle that i was talking about earlier. That's so crazy. And it sounds insane. But then I was thinking about that. You saw, remember the documentary Supersize Me? Yes.

So Morgan Spurlock, when he first starts out, remember he's like getting sick when he's eating McDonald's. Like he can't handle it. Like he barfs out the window one day when he's a couple days in. Yes. Like he just like cannot manage. He's like I can't imagine going back to McDonald's. He's he's only like three days in he's getting sick all the time and then fast forward like a couple days later and he wakes up with headaches and he's like craving the food and he and his headaches won't go away until he goes to mcdonald's so it's like you can make

the argument that that could be you know attributable to a change in his microbial ecology. Like now he's replaced his healthy – because I think his wife or his girlfriend at the time was like a vegan chef. He was eating really clean. And then he just starts eating this McDonald's and he replaces that microbial ecology in his gut with the kind that feeds on McDonald's. And suddenly he's craving it all the time. Could you imagine if they found out that McDonald's actually had implanted microbial biology that they created in a lab

that specifically makes you want their shitty cheeseburgers? You just fucking crave that cheeseburger. McDonald's cheeseburgers. I saw a thing online where a dude left one out for six months and it never rotted. And I I saw that too.

And I was like, check, please. That's it. I'm done. No more. It's crazy, right? Only filet of fishes, which are nutritious. Yeah. And delicious.

Yeah, I think he let out that it was the burger and I think the fries too, maybe even. I saw that though. Yeah, I don't think the fries rot either. It's fucking crazy. It's not food. It's like, it's just filler. It's weird. I mean, it's like's fucking crazy it's uh it's not food it's like it's just filler it's weird i mean it's like gut filler right i mean you can live on it for short periods of time it's better than starving to death but man that stuff is fucking bad for you it's so common it's everywhere

i know and his numbers from that movie like just after 30 days his doctor was like yeah this is bad yeah crazy bad and it took him like a couple years to like lose the weight and get back to his baseline did it really yeah i mean it said it took him a really long time well that sounds like he's a lazy bitch and people have lost weight quicker than a couple years but i think it wasn't just his weight it was like his cholesterol levels and all that kind of stuff really and did he try to go vegan after that or a heavy vegetable diet i don't know i mean i know his girlfriend was a vegan chef so i would imagine he returned to something along that lines but i don't know now what do you think of when you hear guys like rob wolf say uh eat bacon and eggs for breakfast well i mean the first thing

i would say is that that you know i have a lot of respect for rob you know i think rob great guy yeah and and i love the interview and um you know rob and i have the same goal you know I have a lot of respect for Rob you know I think Rob great guy yeah and and I love the interview and um you know Rob and I have the same goal you know what I mean like we're both working towards the same thing which is trying to get people healthier and and more fit you know we differ on a couple you know subcategories of that but like I think Rob is is doing good stuff I mean I definitely disagree when he says you should eat, you know, bacon and eggs for breakfast. I think that, you know, and I remember your reaction to that. Even you were like surprised, you know, that that was... I've never heard anyone say that myself. I've never heard anyone say that

kale shakes, like don't eat kale shakes either. You don't need to. Right, right. So there's a lot about paleo that I think is fantastic. They eschew dairy. They eschew processed foods. I think the only oil that they say is okay is olive oil in moderation. The idea is low carb, right? Like it's low carb, kind of high protein. And I think that, you know, that works really well for losing weight and maybe works for some people in terms of energy levels. But my perspective on the whole thing is I'm coming from looking at the healthcare crisis in America where, like, people are just keeling over with heart attacks constantly. You know, I mean, heart disease is rampant, you know, and people are getting diabetes like crazy. And, you know, even children are getting diabetes. I mean, when we were kids, diabetes wasn't really a thing right now, like diabetes is a huge thing,

like obesity, and the obesity figures are insane, like 40% of Americans are going to be obese by 2014. And childhood obesity rates are crazy, and school lunches are terrible. And when I look at it like that, like I think that, you know, I can't get around the fact that when I read the studies on plant-based nutrition, you know, when you read the China study or you read Dr. Esselstyn's book, Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, there's a pretty clear correlation between getting rid of the meat and dairy and eating a whole food plant-based diet and your ability to, you know, repair your body from these conditions that are plaguing us unnecessarily. I mean, heart disease

is a food-borne illness. You know, you can not only prevent it, you can actually reverse it. And this guy, Dr. Esselstyn, have you ever heard of this guy yes okay so for maybe your listeners who don't know he is a he's a badass first of all the guy was like he was Yale educated and these Olympic gold medalist in rowing in like 1968 and I think he was a I think he's a I think he was a Vietnam I think he's a Vietnam veteran also I'm not sure about that but then he became a surgeon and he was a, you know, head surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, which is if you have heart disease or you got heart problems, like that's where you want to go. Like the Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Clinic. Yeah.

So if you're feeling like shit, right. Go to Cleveland. He's yeah. They know what's up there. And like back in the seventies, he started to realize that when he treated his patients with a, with a plant-based whole food diet, that they were able to reverse their heart disease without surgery. And he was starting to look at the, what are you, I'm having a brain fart, one of those pictures of the heart called angiograms. So you'd see these before and after angiograms and you could clearly see the clogged arteries becoming clear again and it working. And that was not a popular thing like in the 1970s and the 1980s.

And to a large degree, it's still not popular. But it didn't make him a popular surgeon there. What wasn't popular? Well, because they make money off surgery. So you're saying putting that information out that you can heal yourself through vegetables was not popular because they literally wanted people to be sicker? It's not that they wanted people to be sicker. It's just that the system is set up, you know, the way that you profit is by performing expensive surgeries. Yeah, that is the way they profit, but it's a big leap between that and being upset at something that heals people.

It's not. I don't think that it was that they were upset. It was that it was new, and there wasn't enough evidence at that time to fully substantiate what he was doing. And, you know, they had their sort of this is what we do here. And when somebody comes in and they're in this condition, we prescribe this procedure. And he was saying, I don't want to do that. I want to do this intensive diet thing with them and counsel them and see if I can avoid that. And that was not a popular option.

Okay, that makes more sense. So essentially the doctors had a very specific path that they would follow when you had X wrong with you. And that path usually led to some sort of a surgery. And he was trying to avoid that with vegetables. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's still true today. And we were talking about statins. You go in with high cholesterol or whatever,

your doctor is most likely going to prescribe you statins. He may say, you know, change your diet or do this, and then you'll come back and it doesn't change, and then he'll say, well, it's genetic and you need to take this medicine, when, in fact, you know, I believe that actually you can lower your cholesterol if you change your diet properly. But the point, getting back to Dr. Esselstyn, is that, you know, he was sort of blazing this trail a long time ago, back when, you know, not too many people were listening. And it's taken him many, many years to kind of get traction with this and it's taken you know the china study and and his

book and you know the documentary forks over knives to get people sort of paying attention and listening now and now there's kind of like an awareness that didn't exist before and the the scientific studies are are pretty compelling that when you you when you remove the animal proteins, you remove the processed foods, and you remove the dairy, that you can really heal yourself. Well, has it been proven that that is the order that works? Has it been proven that if you cut out the dairy, cut out the processed food, cut out the meat, specifically on vegetable, live off of vegetables, vegetable nutrition, that that is the only way to go?

Or have they done vegetable nutrition and grass-fed meat and natural meat? Yeah, there's plenty of studies out there. And what do they show? What are the differences between? They found that the actual animal protein is the activator of a lot of these congenital diseases. Really? Yeah.

And what do they attribute that to? Just even game? Or is it fatty meats? Even game. Well, certainly the saturated fat doesn't help, but there's something about the animal proteins themselves, and in particular the casein, which is the protein in the dairy. That proves problematic.

And what does it do specifically to the human body? which is the protein in the dairy. That proves problematic. And what does it do specifically to the human body? That's a good question. I wish Dr. Esselstyn was here to answer that. We're starting to get a little too technical. I don't want to speak out of school or say the wrong thing. So what they found, though, essentially, was that a lot of ailments are started,

and the activator for starting these ailments and diseases is animals just you eat animals you're going to get certain diseases that you would avoid if you just ate vegetables right and the china study originated around studying uh cultures where there really wasn't any animal products or animal proteins in their diet and looking at the at the extent of cardiovascular disease. So there's a certain area in China where it had a huge population, like 260,000 people or something like that. The incidence of heart disease was almost zero. Wow. That's crazy.

Zero. And so it began this long epidemiological study where they really took a hard look at it. And it's interesting. It's really interesting. That's incredible hard look at it. It's interesting. It's really interesting. That's incredible. The number zero. That's ridiculous. I don't know if it was zero, but it was close to zero. It was very, very, very low.

That's incredible. How do they make sure that they get the proper amount of protein and the proper amount of amino acids? From what I understand, the real issue with the vegan diet is that you have to be really diligent about the proper proteins that you get. Because all the various – like even broccoli has protein in it, but it doesn't have like a complete protein like say meat does.

But there's quinoa and hemp is a very complete protein. But how do you make sure that you get the right amount? Well, I think there's a lot of misconceptions about that. And there's been a lot of sort of debunking of the complete versus incomplete protein argument that gets pretty technical. But I think that if you're eating a well-rounded, balanced plant-based diet with lots of different, you know, if you're essentially, if you're eating grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables, and all the different colors, and, you know, you're rotating them through, or whatever, then you're not going to have a problem. It's almost like nature has rigged it, like, you're not going to have a protein deficiency, and, you know, just speaking from my

own experience with this, when I first started on the vegan diet, you know, I was nervous about that, I was scared about it, especially as I was starting to train more and more. And my cabinet was like full of all kinds of crazy supplements, just tons. And I was like, just mounds and mounds of plant-based proteins in my shakes, because I was nervous that, you know, I was going to injure myself or, you know, I was going to get sick or something like that. And over the last couple of years, I've slowly started weaning myself off of a lot of that stuff where I use very little now, and I haven't noticed a difference in my ability to, one, recover in between workouts or build lean muscle mass,

and my endurance is continuing to improve. So I do use hemp protein. I love hemp protein. I usually combine it with pea protein or sprouted brown rice protein. Wait, what? Pea protein. Pea protein. I had some today in honor of this podcast.

That's different from urine therapy. Yeah, peas, man. Green peas. It's very high in protein. But I don't even do it every day. I only do it when I'm training really hard or I feel like I don't have any lentils in the house or something like that. I'm always trying to source my proteins from whole foods. So the misconception is that you've got to eat tons and tons of protein,

and you can only get real good protein, quality protein from animal products. I just don't believe that to be true. Do you remember when that dude, what was his name, Travis Barker, got in a plane crash and he got burned and he needed a skin graft. And when he had a skin graft, his body was not healing until he started eating meat again. And when he started eating meat again, it started healing rapidly. He said that he was a vegan before that, but he had to stop being a vegan.

I'm pretty sure. I don't want to paraphrase this guy's story, but I'm pretty sure that is how he said it. Is there any possible benefit in your eyes to eating animal protein for as far as performance physical performance as far as I mean even though it may be the catalyst to triggering certain ailments in certain individuals and that can be documented is it also possible that there's a benefit to it too and from a performance perspective yes it's certainly it's certainly possible I don't know especially in fast twitch sports yeah I mean you know. Especially in the fast twitch sports. Yeah, I mean, you know, what I do is so long.

It's a very specific kind of sport that's very different from jujitsu or sprint running or anything like that. But there are plenty of, you know, athletes out there in various disciplines that seem to be doing well. But, you know, has there been a double blind, you know, sort of case study on the difference? I don't know the answer to that. And I think that, for me, it goes back to the reason that I started doing this to begin with, which was really long-term wellness and not having a heart attack. Heart disease runs in my family. My grandfather, who was a champion swimmer, died of a heart attack in his early 50s.

And I have to constantly remind myself that that was what motivated me to do this to begin with. grandfather who was a champion swimmer died of a heart attack in his early 50s and you know i have to constantly remind myself that that was what motivated me to do this to begin with it wasn't performance reasons um at the same time if i felt like i was missing something like if i started to feel like i wasn't recovering or i wasn't improving or i wasn't i wasn't able to get stronger um or i wasn't feeling good i would I would certainly entertain the possibility of eating of eating meat, if I thought my health was suffering, but I just I haven't had that experience yet. So, you know, I just try to stick to, you know, I don't want to speak for anyone else. Right. So how do you feel about that idea that everybody's got a different sort of

nutritional requirement, and that some people really shouldn't eat red meat and some people really should be vegetarians. It's like that it's based on your blood or where your family's origins are geographically and that's the kind of genes that you're carrying around. Yeah, I don't know. Do you buy into any of that? I don't know. I don't really buy into any of that. No? No.

any of that no no but hasn't there been evidence that different people that that grow up in different parts of the world have different nutritional requirements like for instance people that live in like eskimos or inuits they don't like to be called eskimos apparently um inuits uh they they have no issues as far as like scurvy or anything but they're not getting any vitamin c they're just eating salmon also have. They also have a relatively high incidence of heart disease. Oh, do they really? Yeah, they do. I thought the whole deal was, is it cancer that you almost never see? Is that right?

Yeah, in the Inuit population. And they were attributing that to the nutrition that they got from fish oil. Do you substitute with any animal, um, like fish oil or anything like that? No, I mean, you know, I think getting your omega threes is, is really important. Um, you know, fish oil is really popular with a lot of people, but you can essentially do the same thing with flax seeds, ground flax seeds. I wouldn't, I wouldn't use flax oil, but like ground flax seeds or something i put in the vitamix all the time why uh wouldn't you use the uh actual oil the oil has been linked to there's some evidence to suggest that it's linked to incidents of prostate cancer but for some

reason the seeds aren't but the seeds the seeds have like the case you know like they have that casing on them or whatever so you have to grind them up because otherwise they'll just pass right through you so um you grind them up like a vitamin mix yeah yeah or you can you can buy them ground or you can put them in like a coffee grinder or like a cuisinara or something like that oh what about hemp oil that's supposed to be pretty nutritious too like hemp oil then all that stuff has the same benefits as fish oil well, flax seeds are the closest from my understanding. Does it have the same benefits as far as like joint inflammation relief? Because fish oil is incredible for that. Yeah. I mean, I think it's important when it comes to joint relief and looking at inflammation is looking at the acidic or the alkaline nature of the foods that you're eating, you know, and

animal products, dairy meat tend to be very acid forming. Like your body has a certain pH, at the acidic or the alkaline nature of the foods that you're eating you know and and animal products dairy meat tend to be very acid forming like your body has a certain ph right it's trying to it's trying to maintain that sort of ph right in the middle but you know the foods we eat and the toxins we breathe in the air and stress of our lives or whatever can all put you know try to push that one way or the other and then our body has to kind of go into hyperdrive to bring it back to its normalized state. So the truth is that most people that are eating a standard American diet and living the North American way of life are eating a predominantly acidic, acid-forming diet, and they're in a state of what's called chronic acidosis.

And that's a state in which, you know, you're constantly bombarding your body with a very acid-based diet, and your body has to kind of go into hyperdrive to bring it back. And that's an environment where you become very rife for getting injured, for getting sick. And it's also, you know, an environment that makes you more prone to those congenital diseases. So when you're eating a more plant-based diet, those tend to be, I mean, not every plant food or whatever, but it tends to be in balance more alkaline forming. And when you're in a more alkaline state,

you're not getting sick, you're recovering more quickly because inflammation is sort of the root cause for a zillion diseases, and it's like the enemy of the athlete, right? You're always trying to, like, if you can reduce your inflammation, your muscles are going to repair themselves more quickly. You're going to be able to bounce back quicker. You're going to be able to train harder.

It doesn't necessarily make you a better athlete, right, you know, in a short period of time, but protracted over the course of a season, you're going to have a much more efficient and effective training period, and that's going to result in performance gains in the long run. So you're essentially saying that all the benefits of taking fish oil, you could get those same benefits with just changing your diet to a vegetarian diet, that you don't need fish oil. Well, with respect to fish oil, I mean, the purpose of fish oil is to get those omega-3s,

those essential fatty acids, right, that are important. I mean, you know, we, you know, there's a lot of talk about EFAs and the omega-6 and the omega-3, and we get plenty of omega-6 in all the foods we eat or whatever, but the problem comes when the ratio of 6 to 3 is kind of off, and most people don't get enough omega-3 in their diets, and fish oil is great for kind of rectifying that but it's just my point is only that it's not the only way of dealing with that what are the other vegetarian options besides is hemp oil flax seed hemp oil and walnuts I believe there's some nuts that are that are pretty high and how many do you have to eat? Hemp seeds. Not that many. Really? You don't need like a ton of this stuff. With fish oil,

I've been on like a really high fish oil diet for a long time now. I take like 5,000 milligrams, a thousand milligram pill. I take five of those in the morning and five of those at night. Right. And when I don't do it,

I notice a difference in like how my joints feel. Right. Like from doing a lot of jujitsu especially. I'd be interested if you switched it up to ground flax seeds if you felt a difference or not. Yeah. I would be willing to try. But I always thought that it was like almost like there was like lubricating. It doesn't make sense really.

But that it was like. WD-40. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. How much oil would you need to lube up your fucking joints but that's how almost i thought it in my head because there was such a correlation between taking these pills and and joint pain relief that i found that uh i've read a lot of great things about fish oil and studies on fish oil and there's absolutely some nutritional benefit to taking it. I don't know why you wouldn't take it unless it was because of the fact that you wanted to not have anything animal in your body,

like to just subscribe to. Well, I think that you have to be careful with the toxins that are in marine life, too. Well, it's all filtered. When you buy like Carlson's fish oil, they test that stuff, and it's all filtered out. There's nothing. You don't have to worry about that in those. They're very high-end companies. They test all their stuff. But I just don't see why there would be,

unless you were into it strictly from the point of view of staying vegan or introducing no animal into your body at all, it doesn't seem like there's anything that you lose from taking fish oil. It's interesting because anytime you say this food is good, then you can immediately go on the internet and find some reason why it's not or something. You can fall in any category of that. And, and, uh, there are, there are some studies out there that show that, that the fish oil thing is a little overhyped and, you know, I, it's, it's hard to quantify like who's right and who's wrong and all that kind of stuff have you ever have you been to a uh um there's a there's a guy named dr michael gregor he's got a site called nutritionfacts.org and it's amazing yeah the guy has like a zillion

he puts up videos like almost every day and they're short they're like two to five minutes at max and you can look at you can enter in any food or any disease or whatever. And most likely he has a short video on it and it's all based on peer reviewed scientific studies or whatever. But I always go to that when I have a question about this food or that really good resource. I went to a nutrition for the first time when I was like 17 and I was, uh, losing weight for martial arts competitions and it was fucking my body up. And I was trying to figure out how to monitor my nutrition, how to lean myself out in the healthiest way possible

to drop the most weight before I had to dehydrate myself. But that was Nancy Clark, who's pretty famous for working with athletes. She was in Boston at the time. She's got a bunch of books on that stuff, and I think she's worked with other MMA athletes too now. This is like way after i mean i i must have done it did it with her in 85 or something like that but that's when i

first became it was from martial arts competition before i had to worry about my diet i didn't i didn't watch what i ate at all i just ate what i felt like eating even when i was competing i had no emphasis or focus on nutrition it wasn't until i got older that i do you know i just through trial and error and you know just going on a whim and saying you know what this i'm gonna juice all day i'm just gonna have beet juice and carrot juice and celery juice and and i've done that a few times and you you you get this is a weird kind of energy that you get from that intense plant nutrition that you you you get this is a weird kind of energy that you get from that intense plant nutrition that you don't get from anything else you really don't it's not the same

feeling that you get when you have the satisfaction of a fat ribeye and it's just perfectly cooked and you slice into that medium rare oh so good it's not that satisfaction but it is this weird sort of um a vibrancy that you get like you're injecting you're ingesting live um live plants i mean essentially they've just died a short period of time ago they're still vibrant with with energy and you don't get that from anything processed and there's a lot of people out there that are miserable that are depressed that are and i have friends that the shit fucking diets and their their way of dealing with is take antidepressants right and it's like there's no you got no exercise terrible sleep shit diet you feel terrible take a pill you feel better really you got to clean up all that other

stuff man and then see how you feel if you have all these goddamn issues as far as your diet as far as your sleep as far as you know stress levels get clean up that shit first before you go take a goddamn pill i mean we're a nation of of crazy people who are addicted to all these weird new not natural non-native chemicals that we're introducing into our body and that we become addicted to it i mean if we could just look if you could have a uh an overlay of the united states and who's on the influence of any sort of a pharmaceutical drug right now it's insane it's like the matrix yeah i mean it really is and, you know, not to spin too much of a new age thing, but you know, you're, you're right. It, the, you know, food carries a vibrancy and an energy to it. It's very specific. And in my case, you know, I've been on this crazy, amazing journey that

I would have never predicted. And it honestly started with like changing my diet, you know? And so I look at it with like a respect and a reverence and I go, this is, this is what catalyzed this path. And it opened me, like it opened my heart to the possibility of living differently and, and, and to doing different things than I was doing. And look, you know, people are sicker than they've ever been. We're the, we're such a prosperous nation and, and people are just over-medicated, they're fat, they're unhealthy. And for the most part, they're people, you know, there's the, what do you think the level of happiness is now compared

to what it was like, you know, a hundred years ago? Do you think we're happier? Do you think we're more unhappy? Well, I think obviously it's in the individuals. I'm happy as fuck. Yeah. I mean, it's, but the thing is you're doing what you're meant to be doing. You know what I mean? You're on, you're on a path that, you know, you've been blazing for a long time, what you're meant to be doing. You know what I mean? You're on a path that you've been blazing for a long time, but you've made something happen that you're passionate about. But most people, unfortunately, don't live that kind of life. That is true, but I think they could live their own version of it. They could.

And then you can be happy. But a lot of people don't. And I know this because I was a corporate lawyer. I was miserable. I was doing the 80-hour weeks and i i'd done everything right my whole life just you saying that makes my spine chill you know i studied hard i got into the good schools and i you know i played the game you know what i mean and i and i got to the place that was supposed to be the brass ring you know and i was like what the fuck you know i and I was like, what the fuck, you know, I was like, not happy. And I felt lost.

And it's, it's like a feeling of being in freefall. And you have a choice you can, you know, I was making a decent amount of money. So you know, a lot of people in that situation, they'll just, they'll just gild themselves with stuff they can't afford, like, well, you know, I'll lease that car that's a little bit out of my reach and reward yeah exactly because when you're unhappy you know you need something to solve that that wound and then you do that long enough and then you're stuck and you can't make a change or it becomes too difficult and you know i think it was it was henry david thoreau that said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation i think that's very very true it's one of my favorite quotes ever and it's it's sad

man it's sad and you know i look at you you've built this thing here you're doing what you love you spend your day laughing i didn't build shit brian built yeah but i mean you're you're like you're you're like you know in your juju you know what i mean yeah and most people most people aren't i think that's okay he knows jews you're allowed to use that. Yeah, no, most people aren't, but they could be. They could be, but it's hard. I mean, you think it's hard to change your diet? I mean, try overhauling your entire lifestyle. Yeah, oh, believe me.

It's very, very difficult and scary. It's terrifying. And we live in a fear-based culture. But I did it. I went from being a martial arts instructor to being a stand-up comedian. And got my car repossessed, went broke, lost all my credit cards. I mean, I just was a loser for years. But you were willing to double down to do that, you know?

I just didn't want to get brain damage. I saw a future in kickboxing, and I was like, you know what? This stuff is not good for your fucking head. And I was meeting guys at the gym that I knew were, were punchy. And, uh, I just was too many, I did too many hard sparring sessions where, uh, I never got knocked out in sparring, but I definitely got my bell rung before. Um, and, uh, I got hit with hard shots before we would, we would trade, you know, but I, i worked out at a particularly uh heavy duty gym and these they you know different gyms have different philosophies as far as sparring and our gym's philosophy was you put on big gloves and you fucking go at it there was there was it was basically kickboxing bouts with big giant gloves on and headgear and shin pads and stuff

like that and uh i knew that it was not good for you so for me it was like i had this crazy like i got a jump ship i got a job because this is a path of deteriorating brain function like i would uh have moments where i'd be lying in bed and it wasn't even like there was a like a goal like it wasn't there was no ufc back then so it was just kickboxing and in my opinion like mixed martial arts is uh it's first of all it's there's way more options and just because there's more options you could protect yourself period there's no i mean you could say that mixed martial arts fighters have damage too and i'll tell you some do but there's some that don't have any there's some that rarely get hit

and that is possible as well and the the ability to mix up between the striking and the grappling and the fact that you have so many different options if you have a creative and spontaneous approach as well as being able to drill things over and over again until they become zen when you reach a certain level you can get away with way less damage than any boxer does like you'll see uh certain guys fight in a five-round UFC fight and take very little damage, like a George St. Pierre, because he's so fucking good and his plan is so good. But with boxing and kickboxing, you're standing in front of each other and you're hitting each other, period.

And there's no takedowns and there's no rear naked choke for the finish in the first round. There's none of that. There's slamming bones into your head trying to shut that melon off. And ultimately, for me, I knew that I had to do something differently. I was terrified. And there was no future in it. But because of that, I developed a real compassion for understanding how difficult it is.

I was 21. I had no children. I had no – I mean, they'd repossessed my car. So I had no car anymore. It was like, it was really like I could live on the cheap. I could scratch by. But if you're a person who is trying to change careers and you have a family and you have a mortgage and you have, you know, a car that you lease and you got to, you know, pay for your kids after school activities and like, that is unbelievably hard. Very hard. And then at the same time, it's like, you know, life's short, man. And most people are not, are not doing what they, what they want to be doing or maybe even what they're supposed to be doing. So what did you do? How did you, how did you, uh, just exit

yourself out from the machine? Well, I, I had, uh, you know, I left corporate law firm life and started my own, my own little thing. And, you know, because I just couldn't, I couldn't live that way anymore. What little thing were you talking about? Uh, just a solo entertainment law practice. Um, and you know, made a lot less money, but was able to control my time. And that was just a little bit before, you know, I changed the diet and started getting back into fitness, but because I had control over my day because I didn't have a boss anymore, I could set up my work schedule the way that I want, like Tim Ferriss style, then it allowed me to be able to train at odd hours that wouldn't necessarily flow with somebody who had a 9-to-5 job.

But I was able to structure my life so that I could make that possible. you know a nine to five job but I was able to structure my life so that I could make that possible and and again it was just feeling like you know when you feel like you're guided to move in a certain direction a certain path you know when your car was repossessed and you were starting to you know do stand-up and move into that world I mean I'm sure you felt like this is what you wanted to be doing this is what you're supposed to be doing, even if there was no kind of real-world material affirmation of that initially? There was a lot of apprehension. There was a lot of thinking that I was fucking up and I was doing the wrong thing. I mean, there was not much confidence.

It's certainly not like I knew this was my path. Like, I had an idea that this was something that I could do, but I was terrified because I sucked at it, too. There was no evidence that I could ever be really good at it you know when I quit uh teaching martial arts I mean I was teaching at Boston University I had my own school and um I was uh I was making a living teaching Taekwondo and then you know I deliver newspapers sometimes in the morning I would occasionally take like newspaper routes um I to to switch from that didn't give up training and teaching entirely altogether to to to do something that i wasn't very good at it was fucking terrible

that was a terrifying move that i would only make when i was 21 and you know when you're 21 you're all fucking cocky but you know this like if i was going to do that in this day and age Is that really one of those old school alarms Right outside our door You dumb motherfucker But it would be very hard for me To do something like that today Well yeah it's different when you're 21 Does anybody pay attention to car alarms ever I don't know

Oh open the door Brian and make it louder That's a good move Yeah your instinct is never Oh my god somebody's stealing that car No your instinct is this cunty fucking alarm is ruining our conversation is anybody anybody in stand-up good in the beginning no because i've heard that everybody says they were you know they were awful when they can think that they're what what are you doing man shut my mic off there you off. There you go.

You might think you're good. I mean, I've heard people say that they were good right from the very beginning, but they're either full of shit or they were stealing jokes. It just doesn't make sense that you were good right from the beginning. Unless you had some experience in something else before. One group of people that were actually pretty decent, like not bad for beginners, was Alcoholics Anonymous people. Because this is driving people on iTunes fucking crazy.

I guarantee you. You want to take a quick five-minute break? You might keep going, right? How long do these things keep going? I don't know. We'll just pause this, folks. We're going to pause this for a couple minutes and let this shit stop. All right.

Thank you. This, ladies and gentlemen, we're very vulnerable folks, technically. But we were in the middle of talking about... This show's off air. There it goes. We were in the middle of talking about changing your life and changing your diet, changing your path into something that you love. That's something that we stress on this show like as much as possible because it's something that someone doesn't tell you when you're growing up

in the most formative period of your life. They don't say, you're different than me. Everyone's different. You have to find what you're drawn to, find what you love, and then go chase that. I love when I see, is this mic on, Brian? It's working because I don't hear anything. Young people that latch on to something that they love doing when they're young,

you know, whether it's playing the guitar or whatever it is that they're just passionate about, and then they just become very self-directed about it. And I'm, like, so jealous. I wish I had, when I was a kid, I wish I had that. You know, I never, I spent my whole life kind of doing what I was supposed to and never really stopped to think like, well, what do I, what do I want or what makes me happy or what am I passionate about? It wasn't really, just wasn't really part of my equation, you know, and that just seems so wrong. It's like,

yeah, it's terrible. And, and, and it, it almost like it doesn't even matter what it is. You know, everybody has something inside them that they probably you know love doing or could be passionate about or could be good at or whatever and and for whatever reason everyone do you think there's some people that are ditch diggers no listen i think that not look not everyone is you know can be an nba basketball player or whatever so not everyone is innately gifted but i think everybody inside inside of themselves has something that makes them happy. And I think that if you pursue what makes you happy without getting so caught up in how am I going to make money doing this, or there's no career in it or whatever, and living a little bit more faith-based with what you're doing and focusing more on the passion, that, you know,

we'd probably be better off. And I think people would be happier if that was a priority. There would also be a lot more people trying to borrow money. There would be a lot more people. Yeah, probably. Yeah. Well, Hollywood's full of these kinds of people.

Of course. Yeah. There'll be a lot more people that need a loan to try to get through this next thing that they're trying to fucking get launched. Kickstarter would have gotten invented a long time ago. Yeah. Kickstarter changed the whole game of begging. Yeah.

You know, it made it kind of cool. You know, you figured out a way to put a long time ago. Yeah, Kickstarter changed the whole game of begging. It made it kind of cool. You figured out a way to put a name to it that makes it seem, oh, I'm just kick-starting my business. I just saw, I tweeted this yesterday, that this company came up with this new light bulb that you can control your iPhone app. You put all these light bulbs in your house, and you can do all this crazy stuff with

Them like change all their colors Yeah Like that like change the colors have them turn on have them like you know on timers that go off and on there and it was It's pretty cool, but they raised a ton of money on Kickstarter. No shit. Yeah, I'm sure yeah It's a brilliant idea and you you know you there's all sorts of different offers that companies give to people that you can actually become a part of. Like Cocaine Cowboys. Didn't he do something like that?

No, no, no. That wasn't him. It was The Union. The guys who did The Union. His next film that he's doing, he got people to buy it in advance on Kickstarter. Instead of just asking for money, he said, listen, you'll get the first copies of this film. Right. I think the successful product ones, they're almost pre-orders.

So it will cost a lot of money because you're going to actually get the product. Yeah. It's like the people that enjoyed the first film can actually fund and finance the second one. I mean, it's really cool. If you look at it that way, it's really cool. It is cool. We live in the most strange times this is a really things like that you know or just like you can do that yeah you can do that and you can make a lot of money like look at these fucking um the coney guys yeah

that made millions of dollars off this uh where'd that go by the way that fucking was the quickest in and out fad that con Kony fad, man. That's almost like an alien blip. Like they just tested us for retardation. Like a pH test from the heavens. In the same way that technology is accelerating, our attention spans are shrinking. It's amazing the rapidity with which stuff comes and goes. Now it's immediate.

It could be the biggest thing ever and then it's immediately forgotten. Could you imagine though, Joseph Kony's email box? It's like nothing, nothing, nothing. Millions of emails, millions of emails. Stop. It was just viral marketing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

He's not getting the emails today. Joseph Kony doesn't even get Nigerian scammer emails today. That was just viral marketing for Peter Pan on Blu-ray. Yeah, he told me. And yet at the same time, you do this podcast and you hold people's attentions for three hours a day, man. That's ridiculous. These people need to get

outside. Stop listening to this fucking show. Go mow your lawn, son. Well, they're probably mowing their lawn as they're doing it. A lot of people do it while they're working, which is cool as fuck because then they get to be a part of a conversation instead of just be sitting there you know screwing widgets together i got on my long training rides i just i stack it with podcasts because i can i can't if i'm going out to ride my bike like for a long day like an eight hour training ride or something like that i can't listen to music the whole time you know i'd go

insane so i i'll listen to your podcast, a couple other podcasts, and I just lose myself in the conversation. So for me, it's like the longer the better, man. I love it. Yeah, but when we first started out, everybody was telling me we were crazy for doing an hour. Ari Shaffir was constantly like, you've got to definitely edit it.

You can't have more than an hour. People are not going to listen. I go, well, how about this? Don't listen to the rest. You just shut it off at any point in time. What fucking difference does it make, son? This is ridiculous. Two hours, three hours. You don't going to listen. I go, well, how about this? Don't listen to the rest. You just shut it off at any point in time. What fucking difference does it make, son? This is ridiculous. Two hours, three hours.

You don't have to listen. Do I get bummed out that a radio show is four hours long and I only was in my car for an hour? No. You listen to whatever the fuck you want to listen to. I think the key is just giving people content, just keeping it coming. That's the most important thing is the momentum,

keeping it coming like that's the most important thing is the momentum keeping it coming and then you become a part of people's sort of daily routine and when you become a part of people's daily routine then you have an obligation and responsibility to keep it coming right you know because like now you're bumming a bunch of people out it's not as simple as you put something out and they enjoy it it's you don't put it out and you bum them out. Like, what the fuck? This is fucking – They're angry with you. Fucking Joe Rogan podcast. You create an expectation.

Yeah. I mean, you're making junkies and you have to feed those junkies. I mean, it seems like – Yeah, but you're keeping the quality really high. I mean, that David Seaman interview was amazing. Thanks. I never even heard of that guy. I was like, why is he having – like, a guy who's running for Congress on his show.

I just thought – and I listened to it. I was like, that is he having like a guy's running for Congress on his show? I just thought, and I listened to it. I was like, that is amazing. I immediately started following him. He's coming back. He's doing it again. Fascinating guy. And it's a real interesting,

I was thinking about it the other day because he's the first guy from like that generation to be in this sort of, you know, a political candidate. Yeah. And, uh, and the generation gap gap is very palpable.

That kid can be president. He's coming from a very different place, and his priorities and perspectives and all of that are so, just in the way he speaks, are so different from what we're used to. You know what I mean? Well, he's smart. He's a smart kid. He's like 26 years old and smart as shit. He is, but it's beyond that too because he is interested in things

and is talking about things that no one in the traditional political stratosphere want to get anywhere near. Right. Well, either he'll wind up being killed or he'll be the new king. Right. Either way, we got your back, son.

I think it's very important that the only way this future is going to be any brighter is if it's very important that we enlighten young people coming up to alternative passive thinking by you telling your story that you had gone down the exact correct path you know in in some sort of a predetermined pattern to success, which would equal happiness supposedly for you. And then reaching that point of success, you're not speculating. You're one of the rare people that actually made it to the end of the game

and went, this is horseshit. Okay, let's get out of here. You can't get trapped here. Let's get the fuck out of here and try something different. It has to be done. That message, when that message is in some kid's earbud when he's on the train,

headed to his job or headed to school or whatever, that message can resonate and change thousands of people's lives. I have had more fucking people come up to me in the past two years and say your podcast changed my life than any one thing that people have said to me in the past two years and say your podcast changed my life then

then any than any one thing that people have said to me other than fear is not a factor they probably said that than anything else but that that key that fucking theme keeps happening and a lot of it is nutrition and a lot of it is exercise but a lot of it also is just this understanding that you're not alone in thinking like that that the standard path seems like that you're not alone in thinking that the standard path seems like shit. You're not alone in that. There's a lot of other people like us out there and we could all get pigeonholed into some ridiculous patterns that were created without individual personalities and unique traits and artistic intentions and qualities

in mind. None of that stuff in mind. They were're just this is a plumber this is a vacuum salesman this is go down that path son you'll be an electrician and you know and we're we're disconnected from our own heartbeat you know i mean it's like you could say well you know most people are well i don't even know what i like you know it's like we're not we're disassociated from like a higher version of ourself. A more authentic version that wants to come out is locked down so deep that it's almost like the key is, you know, unfindable. Well, we've become a victim of our own culture, of our own creation.

The culture of our own creation is a culture of predetermined patterns and obligations and things that you just must do that a lot of them suck. And we've become a prisoner to that. And this idea that if you do those things and somehow or another, you will be happier is ludicrous. It's ridiculous.

Yeah. But then there's also, you have to pay your fucking rent and you want to drive. Well, cars is expensive. Gas is expensive. Well, what are you going to do?

You gotta, you gotta get a job, son. It's finding the, the, the ability to pay yourself, feed yourself, and on top of that, still pursue a dream. That's the hardest thing.

You've got to do it before you develop any fucking baggage. Live lean when you're young, man. If I could have done one thing when I was young, it was just to live as lean as possible and keep all those doors and options open so you don't get stuck in some place you don't want to be and and and make it more difficult for yourself to get out yeah i got out but i could have easily just not gotten out i know a lot of people that didn't i know a lot of people that are postman somewhere that really want to be a rock star you know there's

a lot of a lot of weirdness in this world and then the one of the most depressing things to be around is someone who never went for it yeah you know the people around is someone who never went for it. The people that you know that never went for it, that had an idea in their head, whatever it is, be an author, whatever it is, whatever it is, they just never change. I want to be a longshoreman. I want to be a fucking professional fisherman. I want to fucking do what those crab guys do on that crazy show.

Those guys go fishing for crab just to fucking know I'm alive. If you have that thought in your head and you don't it you're gonna you're living like a bitch man you don't want to you don't want to have those regrets man it's the saddest thing in the world isn't it the the the feeling that you get when you're around someone who just stayed on the couch just never pursued anything artistic anything physical anything anything for me it always feels like like one of the big things of happiness is like seeing improvement either seeing improvement in stuff that i'm working on like comedy stuff or seeing improvement in um my uh my jujitsu or seeing improvement and playing pool anything to me it's like if I don't see improvement in things, then I get really bummed out.

I feel like I'm not doing anything. I feel lazy. I feel like I'm just getting by. If I go four or five days where I'm not at least actively working on improving some aspect of my life, I feel totally lazy. Right. What the fuck's going on here, Brian? This place is haunted.

This place is haunted. I found out that Matt Danzig was coming. Is that what it is? Yeah. Why? Why would that make it haunted? I don't know. Because his podcasts are haunted.

Oh, his podcasts are haunted. That's right. He's had two podcasts that fucked up. Two? One, Ari. Ari's podcast. He did this long podcast with Ari Shafir, and it got deleted. And he couldn't retrieve it.

And then mine, which just crashed recently, so he may be podcast haunted. Is he going to come back tomorrow? He's coming tomorrow, yeah. Tomorrow is going to be a crazy day, ladies and gentlemen. We have not just powerful Mac Danzig. We have Billy Corbin, who's the director and producer of Cocaine Cowboys. He's coming in with Mad Flavor, a.k.a. Joey Diaz. So Joey Diaz and the director of Cocaine Cowboys.

And Joey was on the phone with me yesterday. He was dropping knowledge. He was warming up for this. He goes, let me tell you something, dog. I'm going to tell people shit I ain't never told before. I'm going to tell people shit I ain't never told before, Joe Rogan. I'm going to go back to my uncle. We can call him in Miami.

He's 70 years old. He'll tell you what the fuck happened. And he started going off and screaming at me on the phone. After he screamed at me for leaving a message, I fucked up and left a voicemail message on his machine. If you leave a message on his machine, he'll go crazy and call you up and motherfuck you.

Why? He doesn't like to listen to messages. But he gets angry at you. So if you call his voicemail, it goes, what the fuck did I tell you? No messages. Do not leave a message on this fucking phone. So if you leave a message, he goes bananas.

Even if you have like... Tell him to turn that, you can turn that off, can't you? Nope, he's Joey Depp. He's a fucking ape. He doesn't know what's going on. Unless you have cash. Unless everyone's got a job.

Yeah, that phone might as well be solid wood. He doesn't know what the fuck the buttons do. It shuts off when it runs out of batteries and he hands it to somebody. He's getting better at that, though. He sent me text messages before and I stuck it in his face. I go, what the fuck is this? You sent me a text message? For the longest time, Joey just had a pager.

When everyone had cell phones, he still had a pager. Yeah, he didn't have a cell phone until like the 2000s. I'm not bullshitting either, man. I know. Joey Diaz had a pager. Did he have a pager yeah he didn't have a cell phone until like the 2000s i'm not bullshit neither man i know joey diaz had a did he have a pager when you met him yeah he might have had a pager when you met him yeah yeah he kept a pager deep deep into his history yeah when a lot of people had given up the ghost in the pager it's weird how these things just haven't been around that long and yet you can't even imagine not having them anymore you know do you remember the transitionary period where a lot of uh a lot of folks in the urban community had those little pagers that would send messages?

Yeah. And you could send a little message to somebody. Yeah. Meet me at the club. The black folks were way ahead of the curve on that. They were way ahead of the curve. I never thought that would have caught on. Like, what are you guys doing?

You're texting? Why are you texting? I didn't even say texting. It wasn't even called texting. I was like, you're caught on. Like, what are you guys doing? You're texting? Why are you texting? I didn't even say texting. It wasn't even called texting. I was like, you're writing each other letters? Like, why are you doing that? And they were like, well, it gets loud in the club. I was like, oh, it gets loud in the club. That makes sense. That's what started it all.

Yeah, for real. That's what started it all. It was too loud in the club. Fast forward to the iPhone 5. Well, not only that, but a lot of times, there's another thing that is a phenomenon in the urban community. They like to talk on speakerphone. I don't know what what's up with that i've talked about this on this podcast and people have accused me of being racist i'm not touching that right after they accused me of being a racist i went to roscoe's chicken and waffles and there's a dude standing right in front of the place talking on his phone like this oh hell no oh hell no the other dude was talking loud you could hear the

other dude like super loud and he's maybe he like heard the cheryl crow story and he's worried about brain tumors but i don't think so i think there's something going on like they even had a commercial remember that commercial for boost mobile they would have their cell phones like where you at they would talk into it they're not doing this they're not treating it like a white person phone now they're holding it where you at where you were that was the that was the commercial they were doing it urban style it's a weird thing so i guess that didn't work you know cell phones and clubs it's when you're gone speakerphone all the time it's kind of just chaos right so imagine i mean remember i used to have jokes in my act about how text messages were stupid.

Before, like in 2005, my Showtime special, I totally mocked text messaging. Like, it takes you four presses to get an S. It was before anybody had keyboards. People would, like, they were starting out with that crazy shit where you would have to press four times to get an S. To get the letter, right. Yeah. That was ridiculous. You remember that?

I remember that. Dude, we're dinosaurs. I remember when the texting plans were like 25 texts per month 50 texts per month 100 yeah if you've got a girlfriend you go through that in a day yeah you know girls love texting people are dying and crashing their cars because they just can't keep their fingers off it oh yeah it's a real issue it's a real issue they say um it's one of the worst ever, that you literally cannot focus on your phone. It's like zooming in on something like that,

and intently, it's so non-peripheral. You don't see anything peripheral. You're completely concentrated on that thing. Some lady almost ran into me at the mall the other day because she was on her phone. She was doing this, and she looked up, and I was right in the crosswalk. People are fucking nuts, man.

They're nuts. And we've created this weird culture, again, that we're a prisoner to. And one of the prisons is technology. I mean, we benefit from it, no question about it. But we are also locked into this really weird symbiotic relationship with it. Like I do not leave my house without my phone, man. If I don't have my phone on me, I weird yeah it is a weird thing where's my fucking phone shit and i'll panic even though it's like all you have to do is you buy a new phone you stick it in your

computer all your contacts come it takes you i mean if you lost your phone it's not the most but you're like how am i gonna call people i'm alone i'm out here on my own with no no tether it's like yeah we're afraid to be in a fucking town without a cell phone i mean i feel bizarre if i leave if i if i'm in a town like say and uh it's like a place where you could walk around and i leave my phone in my hotel room and then i'll go downstairs and i'll just walk to a restaurant sit down i feel fucking strange like i feel like I can't talk to anybody right now it's worse I mean it and it gets even crazier with all the social media like you have this compulsion to like check Twitter and see what certain people are saying that you don't even these are people you don't even know well

some people have it hooked up to their phone where they get a text message every time someone tweets any sort of a mention of their name. Yeah, that's insane. Doug Benson has that. So does Dom Herrera. I tweeted Instagram the other day a picture of Dom Herrera in his sexy pool moves when he's shooting pool. And it showed up on his phone. I'm like, you silly bitch. You need to turn that shit off.

I'll have people just, oh, I think I already have. Do that. Now your phone's going to blow up down the road. Well, your mention feed is insane. It just scrolls like crazy all day long. I don't know. You can't read all that stuff. I read as much as I can, but the problem is some people think I read it all,

and they're like, did you respond to my text? I'm going to get mad at you. Did you respond to my tweet? I'm like, respond to what tweet? You want me to really go into your thing? There's a lot of people here, dude. You had a chance to say it again right there, and you didn't. You just said, did you respond to my tweet?

Do you respond to fans? Do you not respond to fans? Is that what's up? Oh, the negative approach. I get it. The guilt move. Always good. I was hearing Howard Stern talk about Twitter, about how many people are nasty to him on Twitter

and how evil they are. I don't get that. I really don't get that much. Twitter is pretty overwhelmingly positive. Yeah. For the most part, compared to other platforms that I've found. I get overwhelmingly positive. I mean, there's always a few cunts.

But it's so easy to block them. Why even bring them up? And it's rare. It's just really rare. And I think a lot of people on Twitter, like you look at their names, it's like that's their real name. It's more than, say, message boards. Message boards, I've always felt like we have a message board on JoeRogan.net. And I've always felt like part of the problem is the anonymity that it provides.

In a way, it's good because people can talk about things, especially like people that have sensitive jobs and people that are at work. They can get away with talking about things, and there's no way to google them and data reference their name but in a way it's bad because people say shit without any re they don't worry about the uh the the social repercussions of looking in a person's eye and calling them a cunty douchebag you know and then you're like what the fuck man you like that that negativity is gone so it's just these verbal barbs. I think with Twitter, a lot of times, people have their photo. It's not everybody, but a good percentage.

I'm looking at my Twitter feed, and most of these are people's names. They're real people. Yeah. There's a few that aren't. There's a few weird names. It's like maybe one of them is Devo. Bitch, you're not Devo.

And Devo is me, is his Twitter Bitch, you're not Devo. And it's Devo is me is his Twitter name. You're not Devo, son. I mean, you might like Devo, but you're not Devo. Who are you really? His name is Mike Callahan or whatever the fuck his real name is. I think the more we have that, the more we have sort of a transparency about who – I think people are less likely to just lash out and have it become super negative yeah it's true i mean i think um like a couple weeks

ago when you had you retweeted like a video i made of a kale shake or something like that we had a back and forth over like kale vitamix or something like that so so you retweeted this stupid little video that i made of just me making a drink after a run. And I got slammed with comments, death squad army in full effect. Just like, if I saw that guy in the street, I would, I would,

you know, stab him in the face. And like, what? It's like the most benign thing ever. I'm like face for making a shake. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Really? I mean, there were some that were fine too, but I was like suddenly out of the blue, all these comments popped up. So it's clearly as a result of you having this huge following or whatever. Why do they want to stab you, though, for your dietary choice?

People are very threatened by the kale, Joe. Yeah, that's why they don't know what to do with me. Because I enjoy the kale. I love the kale. I'm a big fan of pure vegetable meals. It's just food. It's just food. It is just food, but people need to be on a fucking team. Okay?

Now they're in the death squad army, and if they feel like they're being attacked by vegetarians, they'll fucking throw out all their vegetables. I don't know why we all can't just get along, to quote Rodney King, before he drowned on pcp in a swimming pool it's uh it seems to me that uh the real problem is annoying people it's not vegetarians it's not meat eaters it's not the real problem is annoying people people that are annoying that that's the issue it's not your different ideology your different desire i know people that legitimately really love classical music and they can't wait to get home to put on headphones

and sit there in front of some shit that, to me, would just drive me out of my head. I can listen to classical music for a couple minutes and then I go, you know what I could be listening to right now? Led Zeppelin. Why am I listening to this stupid shit when I can hear a whole lot of love? To me, I don't like classical music,

but it doesn't mean that it's not awesome to you. It's the same thing with dietary choices, the same thing with the way you dress. Have at it, man. Enjoy your life. We've lost a little bit of... Tolerance. Acceptance and tolerance.

It's one of the dumbest things to lose. That diversity is a good thing. It's one of the dumbest things to lose. That diversity is a good thing. It's huge. So why are you taking a dump on somebody else's preference that has nothing to do with you? By the way, tolerance and acceptance of people benefits your life very much directly. It benefits the way you feel. The more tolerant and accepting you are of people and the more you're just cool with people, the more positive interactions just cool with people, the

more positive interactions you'll have. The more positive interactions you'll have, the better your feeling in life will be. That's like a real direct thing. For sure. And the negative shit that a lot of people project at people for no reason, what it really is is your own shortcomings magnified through your personality traits. It has nothing to do with the person that's being projected. Very rarely does.

Very rarely does. You just choose them to, for your ire, the target of your bullshit. But the reality is you wouldn't have that bullshit. I got to try to explain this to a guy once who was a heckler. I know that I was like, you're,

you have to be a loser. There's no way you can be a winner. You know what I'm saying? Like, do you really think that Michael Jordan would go to a comedy club and heckle? Do you think anybody who would be really good at anything would interrupt a performance and just try to interject? No, you have no appreciation for things that are good. Like, this is a dire moment for you where you need to realize this. Anybody who would try to fuck up someone's time

if you're trying to fuck up their enjoyment you're trying to fuck you got something wrong with you man you got something wrong with you 100 there's no way around it you have to be fucked up and if you weren't that way you would be happier believe it or not like that energy that you put out is palpable the energy that you put out being an asshole is real and it does come it it does flavor your life comes back yeah and for you you feel that's uh dietary as well right so what do you mean you mean i mean as far as like putting out energy i mean you're taking in vegetables you You have almost like a pure, that existence of only eating vegetables and not being connected to animal farming or any of that horrible shit that you see in food.

Well, we're still all connected to it, just by virtue of living here and all the other things that we have to do. Do you drive a Prius? Please say no. No, I don't. Thank you. If you drive a V8, like a fucking muscle car, thank you i don't if you drive a v8 like a fucking muscle car i'd be very proud of you i wish can't do it what the fuck what have we what have we been talking about these past two hours give me the keys you really wish you really wish yeah i

know you need to get a kickstarter account to get uh every need that gto a muscle car yeah no there's a certain um i guess it, I guess it sounds weird to say it, but there's definitely a feeling of greater harmony in the environment. Makes sense. It sounds really stupid. It doesn't. I'm going hunting for the first time in October with Steve Rinella. He's a guy who had a TV show on the Travel Channel

called The Wild Within. Now he's got a new one called The Meat Eater. And his show is essentially, his original show was all about, you know, sort of like living off the land. And he would do a lot of things that were really similar to what people had to do in the 1800s.

Like you would kill a water buffalo with a musket and shit like that. In his new show, it's all about what you call fair chase hunting. One of the things that I've been really paying attention to a lot lately is the idea of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle being actually a physically benefiting experience for people. And that there are certain amounts of, there's a certain system, a reward system that's in our bodies that is satisfied with growing your own food. There's a certain reward system that's satisfied with hunting and fishing.

And that our bodies are essentially the same as the bodies of people that lived 20,000 years ago. There's very little genetic change. And that we still have these reward systems, these primal feelings of satisfaction that are built into our very being as a human being in to to motivate us to do the correct things to survive and to carry on and um at me personally as a as a person who's a meat eater i've never killed an animal ever you know except accidentally like car accidents and shit you know i've never like uh went hunting i've never actually i shot a squirrel with a bb when i was like a little i think i

might have killed that little guy. Sorry. Sorry, squirrel. But what I'm saying is I've never hunted anything and killed what I, you know, what I ate. And I don't know how I'm going to feel. You know, I might, I might shoot a deer and be like, okay,

fuck this. I need to get some beats because I'm done with this. Or I might go, well, you know what? If I didn't shoot that thing, it would probably get hit by a car or it would get killed by a coyote or it would,

you know, it's, it's like like it's going to die. It's not going to live forever and become magical. What's the term you use? Fair? Fair chase. Fair chase? What does that mean?

That means you don't set up bait. You don't put out bait and leave food in a very certain spot over and over again so that you know the animals will be there. In Texas, they actually have feeders where they have these giant drums that dispense food on a timer. So in the morning, the deer just start walking in because they know they're going to get fed because most of the time you're not hunting there because they have giant what they call high fence ranches. And these high fence ranches, it's essentially like they've converted. They've done like a mixture of farming and hunting because it's like it's really like farming i mean you're just harvesting meat the the animal you're in a blind the animal walks out to the spot he goes to

every day goes to get his food and by bloomy his heart blows out of his chest and he's done he lies there his legs kick in you turn him into meat and you cook him up and that's that's a way more humane solution for sure than uh factory farm, no doubt about it. I'm not criticizing it, but that's not what Steve Rinella does. What Steve Rinella does, he believes that the real satisfaction comes from stalking the game, finding the right place to be, whether you're upwind, upwind or downwind and getting away from the area where the animal can, you know, detect you and, you know, and stalking and hunting an animal the way people did thousands and thousands of years ago. Did you read, uh, did you read that book born to run?

No. So what is it? It's, it's called born to run by Christopher McDougall. It's an amazing book. Um, he's a, uh, contributing writer to, I think, Men's Journal or Outside Magazine or something like that. It was a hugely successful book that... Let me shut this door.

These people are really loud. Yeah, yeah, sorry. I got to get that door shut. Sorry. Anyway, this guy went down to the Copper Canyon in Mexico, which is this really remote area. I think it's in the northern part of Mexico, but, you know, below the Arizona border somewhere. And it's like a land lost in time.

Like it's impossible to get in and out of there. And there are these tribes in there called the Tarahumara. And they're like this population of endurance runners that essentially run barefoot. They have little sandals or whatever. And they'll run incredible distances. And in the course of the book, he gets to sort of commune with these people. And it goes into kind of like ultra running and the barefoot running movement and the history of how Nike sort of created this business around running shoes.

It's fascinating. But one of the things he talks about is this theory that man evolved as a persistent hunter and that we evolved to be endurance runners because we would go to chase down these animals that were that are faster than us that have much more fast twitch muscle we could you can't run as fast as them but eventually they just they get exhausted like they can't run days at a time and these humans would just you know patiently like sort of track them and just follow them and follow them and follow them and then just wait until the animal like keeled over out of dehydration or exhaustion and that's how they would conquer the animal and bring it back to to eat people still do it today right and so so the idea that we were sort of

bred to be endurance athletes or or runners out as a result of this you know thousands of however many thousands of years of doing this that's fascinating so uh did they um did they use weapons when they first did it, or did they just, like, strangle them and hit them with a rock once they got tired? Yeah, I think it was sort of like it was a really, these animals would be so, yeah, they'd be so exhausted that there wasn't much need to do anything severe.

Like, they'd keel over, they'd get hit with a rock or whatever. Wouldn't it be fascinating if we really knew for sure? It's, like, really funny when you have, like, things like that. Like, how did we develop this ability to do this? When did they figure out about persistence, hunting, and running? It would be really amazing if we could know for sure. It's so funny about how much of the past of human beings is this weird just ideas where you're trying to piece it together

and formulate a vision of how things went down. It's really hard to just extrapolate that across, you know, and apply it to a certain nutritional way of living. Like, you know, with paleo it's sort of, all right, well, paleolithic, but you know, how many, how many thousands of years ago are we talking about? Or millions of years ago, 4 million, 40 million, 40,000. Right. What is it where your body accepts it? What part of the world and certain peoples evolved to

had an approach to food because of what was available to them in a different way than somewhere else. Piecing that puzzle together is tricky. They just started finding some really interesting things that show that you might be dealing with far, far older societies than we think in the first place. Like, they're always pushing the dates back of, like, when people figured certain things out.

Like, there's some cave art now that they've discovered now that they're looking at, like, 40,000 plus years ago. And, like, okay, this is, like, this throws things way back. You know, there's, it's really a fascinating thing trying to piece together what human beings, how we become what we are right now, what led us to this point, this apex of 2012, the whole process of hunter and gathering. That's what a lot of people say, the thing went wrong when we developed agriculture. That's when the thing went wrong. We figured out how to have a surplus because then we had to defend that surplus

and then we had this big fucking fort. But that was also sort of the birth of civilization and the intellect too. Exactly, where it went wrong. It all went wrong, man. We fucked it up. We fucked it up by thinking. We could have been having a great time.

Spending a week chasing down one gazelle. Yeah, the video where the guy does it he does it in africa the video that i saw and uh he's fucking persistent hunting so he just how long did it take him forever it was a long day he just kept chasing this fucking thing and at the end he was so tired and they said that the guy doesn't even eat it the guy who uh kills the animal didn't even eat it out of respect for you know the process or you know the the connection that he has to the animal, didn't even eat it out of respect for, you know, the process or, you know, the connection that he has to the animal, you know, which we, that's the weirdest thing. And I think, you know, one of the weirdest things about human beings is our lack of connection to what food is.

You know, people that are, they get upset if you want to go hunting, yet they're wearing leather. People that eat meat but would never kill it themselves it's like we we've really like figured out a way to completely disconnect people from the process which i just i can't see that being natural well living with this ignorance but denial and disassociation are very powerful and they're they're powerful defense mechanisms for just getting through the day. Yeah. How do you fix that? How do you – is there a way to inspire in the classroom a different way of looking at things so that people don't grow up to be the same fucked up pattern monkeys over and over and over again?

Well, it's weird because in some ways I feel like it's changing and it's getting better. And then in other ways, I feel like it's moving backwards. I mean, when you have the internet and you have all this unbelievable amount of information available to you where you can find out anything in an instant and you can get to the bottom of what's happening in subject X, that's like a good thing, right? Like it pulls the covers on a lot of people and a lot of organizations and what have you. And yet at the same time, you have traditional media that's becoming even more and more entrenched. You know, it's sort of like, remember when we were kids,

it was like the local news and that was how you got your news, you know, and you're going to believe what they tell you. And now it's with the internet, it's you watch the news and you're like, well well i don't know if that's the whole story and why aren't they saying this and it's easy to go online and and you know extrapolate upon that and find out more and figure out why they're not telling you this part of the story or that whereas you didn't have that before yet at the same time i feel like we're more and more entrenched in this fear-based culture in which there's a clamp down. And so where does that lead us? Like ultimately does that like implode on itself? Or like how does that all play out?

That's the question, right? I mean it is playing out. And I think, believe it or not, without sounding grandiose, conversations like this are part of the decision-making process. It's a part of how society looks at it, about how we approach it, because there's a lot of people that are like you that realize that this is not natural. This whole thing is bizarre, and it can go wrong. It can all go wrong. The whole sphere-based culture that you brought up,

the idea of the lack of civil liberties, the lack of privacy that we really have in this country now, the laws that are being passed over and over again that allow people to look into your stuff because you might be a terrorist. I mean, how did we not learn from the McCarthy era? How did we not learn that the way is not to crack down? Because we're distracted. We're distracted by our iPhones and the Kardashians.

You know what I mean? People are, there is a malaise, you know, and, and technology, you know, plays a huge part in that, in distracting us. Like, again, it's like the matrix, you know, it's crazy. Well, I've said, it's weird because you used to be, if you were to talk about this kind of stuff or propose any of these ideas, you were just a crazy conspiracy theorist but now it's there's too many crazy things going on to to not you know realize that there's a lot of truth to all this stuff i mean everything from like the the label on the front of a food product that you buy that's telling you this and that you turn around and look at the nutrition facts panel and you realize it's nonsense. Or how about genetically modified foods?

Well, that's insane. Have you looked at, I mean, to the people that are making them, have you looked down the road 20 years and found out what's going to happen when people eat these? That's really scary. How's it going to alter the environment? Like you're putting pests, you're developing a fucking thing that has a natural pesticide? And humans are not, we're not wired to be forward thinking or to consider the long play, you know? No, we're a bunch of scary creeps, button pushing monkeys with bank sticks. Recently somebody said, I can't remember where I heard this, but if all the insects died, the whole earth would be dead in 50 years or something like that.

But if all the humans died, the earth would thrive. It would repair itself. I believe that. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, just the mass of ants and the jobs that ants do. People don't understand. You know, gazelles have to be there. Then that means you have to have cheetahs.

You have to have something that cleans things up. And, you know, ants play a very important role in the removal of shit that we leave around. I mean, ants have, you know, when you leave something on the table and the ants swarm it, that's what they're supposed to do. They find shit on the ground. They find dead bodies. They find everything. And they go to work. What about all this craziness with the bees?

It's weird. Yeah. It's very weird. It's weird because there's a bunch of different theories and no one seems to know what the fuck it is some people say it's cell phones and that the extra cell phone signals are fucking with the bees and i've talked to experts and they say there's no doubt about it that it has an effect on the bees that the frequency that they operate in that they can pick up bands of radio waves and things because their antenna i mean they communicate with each other we had a thing on fear factor once where we covered that they operate in that they can pick up bands of radio waves and things because their antenna

i mean they communicate with each other we had a thing on fear factor once where we covered these people in bees and uh when we were uh we were out in um this place called sable ranch and it's a huge ranch and a natural hive of bees was at the ranch so they're they have all these bees on these people these local bees came flying in like a giant group of them. And they all made a huge cloud in the sky. And the bee handler was like, all right, everybody, let's back away from this. Everybody get way back. They've got to work this out.

So they worked it out. They communicated with each other. And they found out who was who. And then the local bees, like, separated. And they let the bees that were this guy's honeybees, the trained bees. They're never trained. The contained bees, I guess you would say, let them go about their business. But there was some communication going on.

And this guy said they had to work this out. That's how he described it. And I go, what do you mean work it out? What's going on here? That's incredible. Oh, it was amazing. What's amazing is that nobody seemed to give a fuck. I was baffled.

I'm like, are they up there talking? Are they talking right now? His bees were like, they all got together. And I was amazed that this guy knew what was going on, that he knew that some local bees came in, and he knew that that's all they had to do. They just had to get together and talk. I'm like, how often does this happen?

And he's like, it happens all the time. The bees find out there's some other bees in their area. Like, how the fuck are they finding out? I guess they send scouts, maybe. They have one guy that's like, dude, there's a fucking hundred guys I never met before. How does the scout come out and then come back and communicate that information to get everyone else to come out? Yeah, they say they do it through pheromones.

There's a lot of confusion about how they do it and what level of communication they actually have because they're so alien to us. They're fascinating. If they're using any of our cell phone networks, they're probably just texting each other. I think they're just getting jacked. I think our cell phone networks are like jackhammers in their heads. They're disappearing, but they can't find them either. It's sort of like, where are they going?

Well, they're not disappearing. They're dying. They're not breeding properly, right? Yeah, it's crazy. And if we don't have bees, especially honeybees, we're really fucked. We need to come up with little robot bees that do a better job than bees.

Little tiny microscopic robots that go out and pollinate shit what is that so hard yeah why do you have to have drones to kill people in pakistan you need some drone bees so complex what if we have this badass bee that's less complex and we control that little motherfucker all it has to do is pollinate i don't you know we can make our own honey i'm pretty sure we don't need bees for that right can we figure out a way to make artificial honey probably not like they say that local honey All it has to do is pollinate. I don't, you know, we can make our own honey, I'm pretty sure. We don't need bees for that, right? Can we figure out a way to make artificial honey? Probably. They say that local honey from the area that you are contains protection from the local ailments.

Like, say, if there's local colds going on, that it would be a good antioxidant, going on, that it would be a good antioxidant, not cure, but a good prevention from catching local colds, raw honey. And raw food really is where it's at. The real problem with milk for a lot of people is the fact that you have to get it homogenized and pasteurized. If you get raw milk, it's way easier to digest. I don't necessarily know i mean in your government crazy well i mean that whole thing that went down in santa monica i think they're still in what happened there was that there's a was it the santa monica co-op or there

was some place in santa monica that was selling raw milk and uh government like clamped down they had they like raided the place i guess they'd given them a couple warnings or maybe had done a mellow raid earlier and they kept trying to sell raw milk and then they finally went in like guns blazing and shot them down. There's always lawsuits now. Yeah, the guy was on like a million dollars bail or something crazy, right?

What I found out though is that raw milk is still legal. You can buy raw milk in this country, in this state. What did the guy do? Some regulatory issue. Sprouts in Woodland Hills has raw milk. They do?

Yeah, there's certain companies that in California sell raw milk. Yeah, hold on. There's a famous raw milk company and they list where they sell it. And they sell it at quite a few different places. Yeah, we need to find the law on that, because raw milk...

I was under the mistaken impression that it was illegal because they pulled it out of Whole Foods. Whole Foods? Whole Foods. Whole Foods? Raw Milk Los Angeles. Yeah, let me see here. Yeah. Yeah, you can get...

There's websites that are... Then what happened with that guy in Santa Monica? Because that was a gnarly situation. There's actually a raw milk store in Hollywood. Shout out to the OPDC hub, a raw milk store where you can buy raw milk in LA. Oops, every now and then it sickens 10 people. Raw milk sickens 10 people. Well, you know the thing about raw milk is you're not supposed to be able to take milk and it sits on the couch or it sits rather in the refrigerator for a fucking week and a half and it's still

good. That's crazy. Like that doesn't exist in nature. You can't take a steak and leave it in your fridge for a week and a half. It looks like shit smells terrible because it's rotting, you know, and that's, that that's going on with your milk too.

Like at a certain point in time, like it's not going to be good anymore. You can't just, but that homogenized pasteurized shit, you just leave in there yeah weeks later it stays good yeah you open the top weeks later you smell it you're like it's fine that's crazy i mean we we've figured out a way to preserve things and make them all fucking funky did you have a milkman when you were a kid for a very brief point in time i think my grandparents did because i do remember it but it what i don't think it was our house but i do remember it so i think it was my grandparents but they had like a glass bottle

with a foil top yeah exactly does i mean does that even exist anymore i bet somebody must offer that service there's always these like small companies like grass fed is a big issue now with a lot of people um specifically before we end end this, I wanted to find out, what is wrong with what the paleo guys are saying, in your opinion, and what's faulty about their thinking? What's faulty about their thinking? Well, I think that what's problematic for me

is this idea that it's a low-carb focus, right? It's low-carb, high-protein. I think the focus is to eat like people ate thousands of years ago because that's how our body is set up. So it's essentially like just vegetables and meat. I think that the research on how we ate thousands of years ago, again, going back to what we talked about before, like, you know,'s holes in that so is there yeah i mean we were hunter and gatherer so there's a gathering part to that that gets overlooked in favor of the hunting part because that's a little sexier i guess it is sexy as fuck but uh the idea of eating you know such a such a low, like the no grain thing, the no fruit thing, all of that to, you know, focus on the meat, the saturated fat, the high protein, the low carbohydrate is sort of,

in a certain respect, is kind of an extrapolation of the Atkins diet, you know, which is where this whole idea of, you know, this way of eating, which helps you lose weight relatively quickly, but also can cause you problems if you know, with ketosis and eating too much protein, which can which can be damaging. And so, as you know, as an athlete, like, I don't know how you're supposed to function without eating more carbohydrates, like I couldn't do it without eating plenty of grains and fruit. And that's just speaking from my own experience. But my biggest thing is, again, going back to what we talked about earlier, which is this incredible incidence of Western disease that we have to deal with here.

And when people are dropping death of heart attacks left and right, and it's a gigantic problem, and you know, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, all these kinds of things, and there are studies that link animal products to the incidence of these disease, and that to me, it makes more sense to eat plant-based, and the studies show that when you eat a plant-based diet, you can actually, you know, prevent yourself from contracting these essentially food-borne illnesses. So it's not that I have some huge beef with paleo per se. I'm just more pro plant-based diet. And again,

I think there's a lot of cool stuff about paleo like i love the evolutionary fitness aspect of it you know the sort of return to moving your body and the kettle balls and the focus on core strength and how that birth crossfit and all of that i think that's that stuff's fantastic yeah there's you know and it's certainly you know i think that a plant-based diet and a paleo diet have a lot more in common than they do differences when compared to a standard American diet, for sure. Well, standard American diet isn't even really a diet. It's just a filler. I know. But the problem is that if you ask people, 90% of people, if you ask them, will tell you they eat healthy, when in fact, it's probably like 1% of people that actually

eat healthy, or everybody wouldn't be keeling over with heart disease. And I think that heart disease starts when you're a teenager. You start clogging those arteries at a very young age. And you hear these stories of like, oh, I had no symptoms and then I keeled over from a heart attack. Well, you've been working on that disease for 20 years. You know what I mean? And it's a real problem. And it just doesn't need to exist.

And so from everything that I've read, the best way to prevent that is to cut the meat and dairy out of your diet. You know, I don't know how to, I don't know how to say it any other way. So why do the paleo guys deny this? And the paleo guys seem to point to the fact that there's an actual benefit to eating meat and that a vegetarian diet or a vegan diet does not have all the nutritional benefits of a meat eating protein eating diets i don't know why they say that because i don't i don't believe that to be true i mean if they're saying that you can't that you can't you can't thrive on a vegan diet i mean it's just it's an it's a ill-founded it's an ill-founded statement i mean i think even rob himself said you know lots of guys do well on a vegan diet

and he said he tried a vegan diet and and ultimately he lost a ton of weight. I think he said he lost a whole bunch of weight or whatever. And I can't remember why he said he decided to not do it anymore, whether he wasn't feeling good or whatever. But I'd be interested in knowing what it was that he was eating. Because I think most people that say, yeah, I tried a vegan diet, it didn't work for me or I felt lousy. Well, I don't know what that means, you know. I mean, you can be a junk food vegan and eat terribly and be nutrient deprived for sure, you know. So it's not about eating tofurkey and fake chicken fingers. It's about the whole foods, you know, the whole food plant-based diet. And that

means, you know, similar to paleo, getting rid of the oils, you know, or, you know, reducing the oils. Well, not the saturated fats, but the other fats. I mean, most of the plant-based oils don't have saturated. I mean, coconut oil does. There are a couple that do. But, you know. That's actually still very good for you. Yeah, exactly.

But those also, you know, contribute to arthrosclerosis and stuff like that. Coconut oil does? No, just oils in general. Coconut oil can contribute to that? Well, if you are, yeah. I mean, there is a certain contingent of the whole food plant-based diet movement that basically say no oils. No oils in your diet.

What? Yeah. But I thought that oils are essential for brain function and for... These are the people that are, this is like the Dr. Esselstyn, the T. Colin Campbell, like the hardcores or whatever. And they're speaking to people that have suffered heart attacks or are in seriously poor health and are in a position where they really need to reverse a condition that they're in. So it's an extreme situation. Personally, I, you know, I eat oils. I put coconut oil in my morning Vitamix. I like olive oil on my dressing or whatever. I try not to overdo it. I'm judicious about it, but, um, I feel like I need that in

order to, you know, get the calories that I need to train the way that I want to train. Yeah. Because there's a lot of people that believe that fats and oils are critical to brain function. Not only that, they're a very efficient source of energy, especially in endurance sports. Because every gram of fat has much more, whatever it is, kilojoules of energy than a gram of sugar or a gram of carbohydrate. Really? So you're better off with more. But it's metabolized in a different way. You know what I mean?

Like in endurance sports, you're always looking at, you know, sort of what zone of exertion you're training in. And that can be calculated by heart rate, like wearing a heart rate monitor or on a bike by a power meter that measures the amount of watts, like the force that you're exerting on the pedal. And you can be very specific about what your exertion level is and how that correlates to which energy mechanism you're using. And so when you're an endurance athlete,

you want to really emphasize the fat-burning zone, which is like the lower intensity, the aerobic zone of energy, which is kind of like just below that level where you feel like you're getting a little too winded. You know what I mean? And it's a certain level of exertion in which you're metabolizing fat for energy as opposed to glycogen. And if you're metabolizing fat for energy, you can essentially go all day. The more you train that mechanism, it gets more and more efficient. But if your exertion ramps up and and you're burning glycogen, all of a sudden

for energy, you're only going to be able to go about 90 minutes before you run out of fuel, you can deplete your glycogen stores, you're never going to deplete your fat stores. There's just too much of it. So you can train your body to burn off fat instead of training your body to burn off carbohydrates. You're training, you're training your body to burn off carbohydrates? You're training your body to utilize fat for energy. So it's not like you're, you know, there's a difference between dietary fat, subcutaneous fat. But we all have, no matter how lean you are and how matter, you know, I've gotten very, very lean, you still have a lot of, you know, fat in your system that's available as an energy resource. And how do you train your body to do that?

By being very specific about the training zones and the exertion levels that you're doing, whether it's running, swimming, or biking. So, for example, cycling is like a perfect machine for the human because you can rig it all up to a computer and you can be very, very specific about what your output is. You have a heart rate monitor. The bikes these days have a computer on them, right?

So you have your power meter, which registers the force you're exerting on the pedals in watts. And then you can extrapolate that out after a ride, what your average watts are for that ride. And then you balance that against what your heart rate was at that particular watt, what the grade, you know, how much elevation gain you had what the exterior temperature is and you can create these insane graphs and look at it and like make judgment calls about where your fitness is where your weaknesses are and adjust your training

program accordingly and so when you're training for endurance or ultra endurance again it goes back to really emphasizing that fat-burning zone, that aerobic zone, because the more efficient you can be at that, you can improve your speed without doing that much speed work. I'm not saying this very articulately, but I'll give you an example. When I first started doing this endurance stuff and wanted to stay in my zone 2, which is the aerobic zone, I would have to keep my heart rate when I was running below about 145. Initially, when I first started running, if I ran faster than like a 9 or a 930 pace, my heart rate would go over 145. And when it went over 145, I knew I was

no longer in the fat burning zone and I was getting into the glycogen burning zone. But by staying in that specific heart rate region over time, my pace increased without my heart rate going up, which is telling me that I'm becoming a more efficient athlete. At a certain level of exertion, my body is becoming faster and more efficient. So by training less hard, less physical exertion, you actually improve your boundaries. In a certain respect, yeah. I mean, it was explained to me initially,

like if you want to go fast, first you're going to have to go slow and build the foundation of this machine from the ground up. And that doesn't mean there isn't a time and place for speed work and super exertion work at a higher intensity zone. But the key to success in endurance sports is really emphasizing that aerobic zone training. And efficiency.

More and more efficient. And so, for example, when I first started doing this training and efficiency more efficient and so for example when i first started doing this training and i'd go out for these crazy long training sessions i'd come back i was starving i'd be eating you know i just couldn't eat enough food now the toll that it the tax on my body for doing a similar workout like four or five years later is de minimis compared to what it was before so actually my appetite has gone down even though the training has been the same, if not more difficult. So, so the body adapts in other words. Wow. That is fascinating stuff. So, um, how often are you wearing a heart monitor while you're training, where you're exercising? Always, always, always. You're cause you see,

I never, I always buy them and I just fucking leave them sit there and I just work out and i'll just work out hard and then i'm done well and you know coming from swimming and what it was like in the 80s you know it was always you know uh go hard or go home and no pain no gain it's like and if i had an hour to work out and i was going to go for a run just run as hard as i can you know as fast as i can in that given hour and that's the best workout that i'm going to get and actually you know the truth couldn't be more different. So if you want to get better, and that's the problem with a lot of sort of amateur athletes that want to do marathons or 10ks or even like shorter distance triathlons, by training that way of just kind of using the time allotted and going as hard as you can in that allotted period of time, you're going to

reach a certain level of fitness and aptitude and what you're trying to do, but you're very quickly going to hit a glass ceiling and you're going to plateau and you're not going to be able to break through. So what is the way to break through? The way to break through is to step it back and really, again, go back to building that foundation from the ground up and focusing on if you slow down and really focus on improving your aerobic efficiency, and it's time-consuming, it takes time to do this, then you are building a platform upon which that speed work, which you will do later, is going to catapult you into a new realm of proficiency.

So it's all about pushing the heart rate at a certain pace, maintaining that certain pace for prolonged periods of time, and then building up to the point where you could do that easier and easier and easier. And that is your aerobic base. It's not about these wild sprints to your heart wants to fucking explode. It's, it's actually about building up your ability to maintain a heart rate even though you're doing more work.

Maintain the same heart rate of 145. Is that what you're recommending? Well, yeah. I mean that's just my personal example. But, I mean, it requires a different kind of discipline because you kind of have to check your ego at the door. Right. You know what I mean? And sometimes you want that feeling of like I just exerted myself.

I feel like I did some work. I got something done. you want that feeling of like, I just exerted myself. I feel like I did some work. I got something done and having the discipline to say every workout has a purpose. And the purpose of this workout is I'm going to run for an hour and a half. And my goal is to never let my heart rate exceed that zone to threshold. So say if that means I'm going to finish the run and maybe I'm not even going to feel that tire. I might not feel like I was like, I don't feel like I got anything out of that and believing in that program and sticking to it over time to build that tire. I might not feel like I, I was like, I don't feel like I got anything out of that. And believing in that program and sticking to it over time to build that house. Do you think that that's a good way that someone should approach martial arts as well? And that like strength and

conditioning for martial arts, like say kettlebells or something like that, they should also do the same sort of a thing, maintain? Well, it's a little bit different because endurance sports are so much about efficiency of movement, you know, and over a prolonged period of time. Whereas something like jujitsu or what have you is about explosive speed. But at the same time, you're going to be in the ring for a prolonged period of time. If you have the sort of lung capacity and stamina to endure, you know, longer than your competitor so that you're fresher in that last round than he is, then you're going to have an advantage. So I think that what that would mean, and certainly I'm no expert in martial arts or what have you, so I don't want to get schooled for saying the wrong

thing, but it would seem to me that in the off season or quite a bit of time before you get into your training camps leading up to a fight you would focus on doing a lot of base aerobic training work to kind of lay that endurance foundation and then you build upon that with the specific strength and explosive speed exercises to you know have that pyramid come to a peak when it comes to fight day well one of the best fighters in the world uh nick diaz is a known triathlete i mean he's uh he's constantly doing massive endurance work and right the thing about nick is that he puts guys he puts him into a pace he sets them up like when he's uh when when he fights he pushes a pace that

other guys can't compete with like he uses his endurance he uses his very strong endurance base as an extra weapon. It's an extra thing. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, because he can just keep going. He swam back from Alcatraz twice. I mean, he's got ridiculous endurance. Right.

And because of that, you know, he's like one of the scariest guys in the world because of that. Because you know you're not going to wear him out. You're never going to wear him out. It's impossible. He'll be scrambling deep into the fifth round while you're gasping for air. He'll be fine. And he talks shit to you while he's beating on you.

Sort of fucking terrible nightmare. Demoralizes you at the same time. Pretty sure he follows basically a vegan diet as well. Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah, he does it for performance reasons. I think Jake Shields does as well. I think Jake may eat eggs occasionally. But I think that's it. And for a lot of people

who don't know, I didn't know until I was 30, that when you have an egg, it's not like something died. The chickens just lay those eggs. And if they're not fertilized by the male, if the rooster doesn't get in the hen house, those eggs are just, they just go to waste. You can eat them. You don't even have bad karma.

Dude, what could someone, is there a book that someone could read about this uh this conditioning thing i know that for a lot of people that do jujitsu this is going to be uh really uh fascinating for a lot of people that do anything athletic what is a good book that they could read about heart rates and um well they could read they could read my book well tell us what it is what's your book my book uh is called Finding Ultra. Actually, can I grab it? I have it. Yeah, please do. I would love to read it. Here's it on the screen.

Oh, there you go. Oh, boom. And is this your life story? Is it also? Yeah, I mean, this is, it's essentially memoir. It's like my personal story, but it has a lot about how I sort of reinvented myself as an athlete and how I had to kind of relearn some certain principles about fitness that I grappled with and didn't understand initially that sort of allowed me, I believe, to reach a new level of fitness heights that I certainly didn't think was possible, particularly as a middle-aged guy. And you did this all through that method of building up the aerobic base? Yeah, and I was training for a very specific thing that is, you know this all through that method of building up the aerobic base.

Yeah. And I was training for a very specific thing that is, you know, not what most people are training for, but the kind of principles that we were just talking about, I think are applicable to, you know, the, the sort of weekend warrior athlete, whether you want to, you know, go out and be able to feel good in your pickup basketball game or, or touch football or whatever it is. It's how to use your time crunched days effectively, you know, rather than just going out haphazardly and saying, I'm going to blast this 30 minutes on the treadmill and do it time and time again and wonder why you're never getting any faster. So people can get any answers to any questions about conditioning and what you learned from Finding Ultra. Can they get that on Amazon and all the ultra yes everywhere it's on Amazon

Barnes & Noble and if people want to reach you it's rich roll our ICH not Rick not a fucking Rick Astley this is not a joke rich roll the real rich roll just like the real rich Ross but a different guy and you could find rich roll on Twitter just rich roll our ICH-I-C-H-R-O-L-L. Is that the best way to get a hold of you? The best way to find information about you? I mean, I'm on Facebook too. My website's Rich Roll, R-I-C-H-R-O-L-L.

Well, listen, man, your story's an awesome story. I love a comeback. I love a guy who figures something out in his life and makes a change and then spreads that information. And you're an inspirational dude. And having you on the podcast is really cool, and I would love to do this again if you want to come in again. Feelings mutual, man.

Yeah, we could keep talking about this forever. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, but I had to stop myself from the endurance questions. I would have bored the fuck out of everybody. I know. I was like, this is getting a little technical, man. I don't know if people really are going to be that interested. Some people will, hopefully.

Thank you. Thank you very much, man. Really appreciate it. It's a rich role,, follow him on Twitter. Go to deskwad.tv, you dirty bitches, and pick yourself up some funky-ass cat T-shirts. And they come with a free sticker, too. So you put it on your call so people...

They don't come with a free sticker. I thought you said you were sending those stickers. No, you can order stickers coming soon. All right. Pay for that sticker, hooker. Go get yourself a sticker. But you can identify fellow desk waters and parking lots and shit. It's good.

So you know what's up. A guy just tweeted me so that his neighbor, who he never met before, knocked on his door when he heard he was listening to this podcast. He heard my voice booming out of his living room. And so the neighbor knocked on his door. He's like, man, I fucking love that podcast. So thanks, everybody. I can't thank you guys enough for being the coolest crowds ever.

Sacramento was fucking completely off the chain. I literally never imagined that we would have these kind of crowds on a regular basis. It's really amazing, and we appreciate the fuck out of it. And what I said earlier is not lip service. I really do feel a massive obligation to you guys. I know that this has become a part of your life and it's a part of our life too. Everything we're doing, Brian and I

is moving towards making sure we just keep doing more of this. Keep digging deeper. Keep having more people, more cool people like Rich Roll come on the show. And tomorrow Mac Danzig will be on as I said, as will the director of Cocaine Cowboys

Billy Corbin who is also a cool motherfucker thanks to Alienware MMA for sending us some cool ass laptops that Brian runs all the YouTube videos on if you go to follow them on Twitter Alien MMA on Twitter and thanks to Onnit.com

use the code name Rogan O-N-N-I-T. The code name Rogan will save you 10% off any and all supplements. All right, you fucking freaks. Tomorrow we have a double podcast day. So first we'll be Mac Danzig, and then it will be Joey Diaz and Billy Corbin. And then we have a spectacular show tomorrow night at the Ice House Comedy Club. It is Dom Irera. It is Duncan Trussell, Doug

Benson, Brian Redband, Joey Diaz. The list goes on and whoever winds up coming by, they can get on stage too. Alright, we'll see you tomorrow, folks. We love you. Thank you.