The Joe Rogan Experience - #642 - Rich Roll

Episode Date: May 1, 2015

Rich Roll is a plantpowered wellness advocate, bestselling author, ultra-athlete and host of "The Rich Roll Podcast," available on Spotify. http://www.richroll.com/

Are we live? Oh my goodness. Rich Roll, ladies and gentlemen. How are you, buddy? Good, man. Good to see you. What's cracking? Happy to be here, man. Drinking green juice in honor of you. I hope that's in my honor. Sort of. I drink it every day. I appreciate that.

It helps. Where'd you pick that up? Juicy Lady. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know where that is? I do. I go there all the time. I love that place. Yeah, me too. I wish they'd changed the name of it, but Juicy Ladies, I don't know.

Why? I think a lady owns it. Yeah, no, she's cool, actually. I like her. Maybe she's juicy? Yeah, the food there is pretty good. It's a little sexual, the name, right? Is it an assault to your masculinity?

No. No, I'm cool with it, but some weaker men might have an issue. Yeah, you have to be self-assured. You have to be strong enough to go in there and order vegan food. They do, but they make a good green juice. Yeah, they make a lot of good stuff there. It's a good spot.

There's more and more of those places that are opening up. It's true. McDonald's is going to offer a kale shake. No way. Yes.

I have not heard that. Yes. The world's changing. Something's working. People are getting nutrients in their body. It's crazy. Starbucks has them now.

Starbucks has what? Kale shakes. Get the fuck out of here. Do they? I didn't know that. Get the fuck out of here. Do they? I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. Get the fuck out of here. They take those Evo green things

and mix it up with yogurt and fresh kale if you wanted to. But why would they put yogurt in it? I don't know. Because it's McDonald's. Smoothie. It makes it a smoothie.

Oh, Starbucks. But Starbucks. Yeah, yeah. Oh, it makes it a smoothie. Well, you know, the market, you know, the market will dictate it

if people want it. Yeah. It's sort of like when you talk about conspiracy theories with evil corporations. It's like they're responding to what people want it. It's sort of like when you talk about conspiracy theories with evil corporations. It's like they're responding to what people want. That is true.

If people want it, they're going to start making it. That's the whole conspiracy with really shitty television shows too. People are like, man, they're trying to make us dumb. Nope, we're already dumb. All you have to do is look at the ratings and see what people are actually watching and they're responding to that.

Well, people are tired. They get home from work. They're exhausted. They don't want to watch Cosmos. Or some of them do. I do. But some people just want to zone out and watch Honey Boo Boo. I don't think that's on anymore, right?

Is that not on anymore? There's always a new one. We got rid of our TVs. What? Yeah. Who are you? Like a year ago. What? Believe me, I did? Like a year ago. What?

Believe me, I did not want to do it. It was not my idea. I was quite vociferous in opposing that idea. That was my wife's idea. But actually, it's just like anything else. You adjust to it. I mean, I still watch Netflix and I watch the shows I like to watch. And now I don't miss it.

And I have total, like when I i i've been traveling a lot and and you know when you're in hotel rooms you turn the tv on and i have a zero tolerance policy for commercials now like i just can't even i'm like really you know and i just turn the tv off and go back online yeah commercials are fucking brutal whoever invented the idea of stopping a show every 15 minutes for three minutes or whatever the hell it is for commercials, that's awful. Well, it's crazy how you acclimate to that because as a kid, you know, think about how many hours of your life, you know, we're just basically watching commercials. Well, you know what happened though? DVRs. DVRs made commercials really stupid. But that's still, I mean, we're about the same age, right? So that's still a recent development in our life.

Yeah. You know, most of our formative years was terrible television commercials. Yeah, I got my first TiVo in the early 2000s. It was like a standalone unit that hooked up to DirecTV. I think it was, I want to say like 2003 or something like that. And I was like, this is amazing. You can pause the TV. You know, you can pause it. You you go take a leak you could record things you could find search things and have them on a schedule because

I fucking I had probably 10 VCRs in my life and never figured out how to record one of those bitches like just flashing 12 o'clock I never scheduled oneclock. I never scheduled one of them. I never had one of them scheduled. I don't think anybody figured that out. Some people must have. But it's cool how it's changing. I mean, you know, to see how, you know, what's going on with Netflix and Amazon and all that kind of stuff. And most recently, what Tim Ferriss has done with his show.

Have you followed that at all? Which, what did he do? So Tim had a show called The Tim Ferriss Experiment. it aired on I can't remember CNN what yeah it was like it was a it was like a another channel that was part of the CNN right like headline news yeah it wasn't headline news it was something like that it went under right and so his show was I don't know how many episodes it aired but certainly not the entire 13 you know of the season and then it was just, you know, how it is in entertainment. Like, you're just done, right?

They own the show. And even though they were all taped and locked and completed, nobody had seen them. And somehow he was able to get his show back. And he, I don't know, you know, through lawyering or what have you, and bought the rights back, got his his show and cut a deal with iTunes and it's premiered on iTunes this past week and I think it's like the top ranked TV show on iTunes now I wonder if their TV show rankings though or just like their podcast rankings you know well who knows how the iTunes algorithm works well it

does it's definitely not based on the number of downloads. No, it's definitely not. It's based on new, like it takes precedent, new subscribers and also comments. So like Chelsea Peretti had the number one podcast in the country and she hadn't even released an episode yet. Right. So zero had been downloaded because people had subscribed. They over inflate new shows. So when somebody premieres a show with one or two episodes, it's super high up for a while

before it settles into where it should be. Well, I think that's good, because it doesn't keep anybody from downloading other shows that are already popular. And it does give new shows a window. But you'll see people, I'm number one. Like you'll see like these, like, come on, man.

Like, do you know what that means? Like, what is it? What are your numbers? How many downloads do you get? Because you're definitely not number one there. It's weird. The rankings is weird. It goes all over the place.

Like my show this week, it's got a banner, you know, on the top carousel of iTunes on the iTunes homepage for podcasts. So my numbers went way up this week in overall rankings. But I know that's not real. It'll settle back down. It will, but it won't. It will, but it'll build. I remember when we first started doing this podcast, I don't know what our downloads were.

There were nothing, though. It was like a few thousand here or there. And then one day it was like, oh, we're getting a million downloads a month. What? A million. And now it's somewhere around 14 million. Is it really? Yeah.

What's your average download per show? Can you talk about that? Depends. Depends on the show. But there's all the different things. There's iTunes. Then there's the raw MP3 that you can download. There's Stitcher, which is really hard to track.

Yeah, you don't know what's going on there. Right, because Stitcher only takes one. They'll give you numbers, but, you know, you've got to chase it down. What they do is Stitcher is an application for cell phones that allows – they take a podcast, and they lower the bit rate. They make it a much smaller file and then they so they only download one episode but then it gets distributed through their system you know i don't know how many times so then there's that then there's you stream which is a few thousand

usually um and then there's youtube which is tens if not hundreds of thousands, usually hundreds of thousands. And then it's never tens of thousands. And then Vimeo. So altogether, it's usually around a million an episode, depending on the episode. That's crazy. Yeah, it could be more. Those are crazy numbers. Yeah. Powerful job.

Well, it's just a number thing. You keep doing it. Have interesting people. Like Rich Roll, keep doing it. Have interesting people. Like, rich roll, ladies and gentlemen. Have interesting people on. Have funny conversations, fun conversations, and just keep doing it. And it builds. I just listened to your episode with Sam Harris from the other day.

That guy's captivating. He's such an interesting dude. He's a very intelligent, very cool guy. I want to get him together with Abby Martin, though. She's not down. Get them both in the same room. I'm sure your phone rang from her after that show. I got a few text messages.

We went back and forth. She's my friend. I'm very good friends with her. And I'm good friends with Sam, too. I like both of them. Well, Sam's got a next level brain. Yeah, he's very smart. Whether you agree with him or not, he has an incredible acuity to present an argument and support it and communicate it in a very clear and calm way.

He's also very honest. You know, like if he's communicating an argument, he is not doing it to be deceptive. These are his actual feelings and thoughts and agree with them or not agree with them. This is his point of view. And as is hers. You know, I mean, I respect both of them very much. I'm in the middle between both of them as well. I'm not necessarily 100% her side.

I'm not necessarily 100% his side. It's, you know, you're talking about death and war. about death and war and uh anytime you can find any way to minimalize or trivialize that it's easily open for argument open for criticism so that's why i see i see her point of view but i also see his point of view there's a lot of fucking crazy people in the world a lot of awful terrible people there's a lot of really dangerous ideologies that are being passed around and have been passed around for a long time and the people that are embedded in these ideologies are married to them. They're very, very committed to it. And, you know, I see his point of view.

He knows what he's talking about and so does Shade. So it's crazy, you know. Well, a couple things. I mean, first of all, I'm always impressed with how you kind of navigate the treacherous waters of having guests on that you may disagree with, which may be me today. I don't know. But, you know, sort of you'll have people with differing point of view, sometimes extreme, sometimes not. And the way that you kind of have to gracefully like as a podcast host myself, that's always a challenge. You know, like how do you have a respectful, engaging conversation, but also make sure that you're asking the right questions so that you're

not just people pleasing the whole time. Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with disagreeing with someone, you know, and I don't think there's anything wrong with having a pleasant conversation with someone whose views you don't share. I think two people can be diametrically opposed on certain issues, but still be nice to each other. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I think when I talk to someone who doesn't share my opinions or has differing opinions I try to relax whatever part of me wants to argue with that and just try to figure out what is it where are they coming from you know where's what's their point of view based on? Is it logical? Is it emotional? Is it objective?

Is it non- You know, where are they at? You know? And also, I like to play- Like, sometimes people say, Yeah, but you asked this and you asked that. And, like, sometimes I'll ask people things that I don't even- I don't even believe what I'm saying. What I'm trying to do is either play devil's advocate or argue the counterpoint.

Just to try to figure out where they're at and try to cover all the bases. Because especially when it comes to a controversial issue, you want to explore not just where a person's at, like what they're trying to say, but how did they come to that conclusion? Right. And in the case of Sam, I mean, he's traveled extensively. He has firsthand experience with all these kinds of people. So he has a basis from where, you know, for where he's coming from. I was actually a funny story about him. I've never met him. I don't know him, but we were classmates. We were in the same freshman class in college at Stanford. And I don't like I said I don't know him but we have mutual friends in common so a couple guys that I'm close with that

he's still close with and I was talking to one of them recently he just said we were talking about Sam because he's blown up and he's everywhere and you know he's so in sight guys right now and he was telling me that in some freshman I don't know if it was a freshman English class or something like that, that Sam just distinguished himself immediately, like by challenging the professor, and just everybody knew that he was on another level intellectually at a young age. Well, it's got to be very difficult if you're in college

and you're taking classes from a person that you think is a dumbass, which does happen. Right. Right? I mean, I had it happen in college. I can clearly remember. I forget what class it was in, but I can clearly remember going, oh, all right. Well, now I have to just think only of the information, the actual numbers and the data that's being presented in this class and ignore this person's opinion because they're a fucking idiot it was I believe it was either a philosophy class or a

psychology class I don't remember the exact circumstance but I remember thinking like yeah this is a real issue and then as I got older and I started paying attention to some of the things that get taught in school and some of the like very rigid ideologies that some people, especially, like, really super lefties, like to impose on students. And some of the ideas they try to impose on students are very subjective ideas, you know, very much personal opinions. They get stuffed into kids' heads. And then, you know, it becomes an issue of whether or not you know whether or not you want that in your head whether or not i mean are you going to get an a in this class if you disagree

with this guy but still present good arguments or are you going to have to go along with the way this person is trying to portray the world in order to be graded accordingly i don't think critical thought is really uh taught uh to the extent that it should be in young people. You know, we're on this, you know, our education system is about, you know, getting through as much information as possible and standardized testing and, you know, getting good grades and all that kind of thing. And, you know, the idea that you should be questioning the ideas that are presented to you is really not something that is, you know, part of that world to the extent that I think it should be. I agree. And I also think that there's very little being taught, especially at a high school level, of how to think. And not just like, this is mathematics. This is the way you calculate

things. These are the facts of history that we're aware of. Instead of, how do you deal with problems? How do you address interpersonal relationships? How do you look at yourself objectively? Do you ever step back and try to look at yourself the way maybe someone else would and judge yourself in your own actions. Instead of protecting yourself with your ego and all those things that people do, like almost naturally to protect themselves, really wind up being traps. They really wind up fucking you up

and you have to kind of clean up that mess as you get older. Well, I mean, I guess that's supposed to be on the parents. But you know what I mean? They don't know how to do it either. Good luck with that. Especially for, you know, parents. I mean, life skills. What about just, you know, learning how to navigate this crazy world that we're living in?

How about learning how to eat? For me, the most important thing, you know, as a parent, it's like I want my kids to be excited about life and to be excited about something. To figure out a way to be passionate about something. Because if they have that motor, that drive, that is like half the game right there. It really is, right? And then also to have that ability to critically, you know, to want to learn. The desire to learn is much more important than whatever you're learning. Yeah, I agree.

So how do you make your kid enthusiastic about that? Especially when they're getting beaten down. You've got to find whatever it is that they're drawn to, right? Yeah. So you expose them to a lot of things. And then when they find something that they kind of gravitate towards, your job is to support that. At least that's how I see it. Yeah, and then give them the opportunity to switch gears too.

I remember when I was a kid, I would be into a lot of different things. And my parents would always be, like, super resistant if I got into something else. They'd be like, well, what about the other thing that you do? And I'm like, well, I want to do this now. Stop fucking with me. What were you into? Well, initially, I was really into art. Yeah, you're a crazy drawer.

That's what I used to do. Yeah, all day long. When I was really young, I wanted to be a comic book illust That's what I used to do. All day long. When I was really young I wanted to be a comic book illustrator. So I used to draw a lot. And then when I was in my teenage years I discovered martial arts. And that's all I wanted

to do. And my parents were like, why do you want to do that? Why are you doing that when you used to do this? I'm like, because that's what I like now. Can I just like that? Also there's also that presupposes that you have to make a choice between two things. Like, why do you have to define yourself by one of those? Well, why couldn't you be my dad? What happened? Where were you when my mom was hot? Yeah. I think there's, um, you know, it's a lot of it is people,

you know, they're raising their kids. They just want the best for their kids. Of course. They just maybe don't have the best ideas. You know, they don't necessarily know. And it's also like, I mean, I was born in 1967. So my parents were basically cave people. I mean, let's be realistic.

Like people that were, if you're born in 67, that means your parents were if my parents were born in like 47 right my mom was like 20 when she had me So in 1947 that's fucking World War two dude Yeah, that means that her parents were born during World War one my her parents came over on the boat from Italy It's they're savages. They're basically, they might as well be Magellan. Well, they're too, I mean, I was born in 66, so same basic idea. My parents, they're too old to have been part of kind of 60s subculture. So they kind of missed that part. But too young to kind of be 70s vibe also.

So there's sort of a weird, like light dusting of Mad Men era on them, you know, and they're great people. I love my parents, you know, they're, they're, they're a fan and they did, you know, the best job that they could raising me and we're close and all that kind of stuff. But, but they live, you know, they don't understand. They have a, they have a challenge trying to understand, like, what I'm doing now. Really? They try.

Yeah. Like and they're happy that I'm that I'm happy. But it's very, you know, they're coming from a generation where, you know, look, I grew up in a really education focused household and I tried to my best to live up to that. And to some extent, I succeeded at that. that. And to some extent, I succeeded at that. But the whole idea was premised on, you know, this myth of the American dream, you know, study hard, get into the best school, get into the best graduate school, get the best job you can, you know, work hard and like do as you're told and ascend the ladder. And the implicit promise, you know, at the end of that rainbow, of course, is not only, you know, sort of security and prosperity, but happiness. Yeah.

And for me, I chased that without ever really, without those critical thinking skills, because I never really intuited that. I was just so focused on the prize. And I'm very disciplined and determined. But I wasn't able to step outside the box and look at it analytically in comparison to, you know, what would be best for me. Like I never said, what do I want? It was just, this is what you do. This is how you get ahead. This is how you have a good life. I think there's also their fault. Sure. No, it's definitely

not their fault. The amount of information that they had available to them back then, comparison to what we have today, it's unbelievably different now there's so much more information now and I think there's also a very there's a real lack of understanding of the landscape of the race you're in like everybody wants to think of it as a race is over the rat race but if you look if you could get an aerial view of the actual race from birth to death from the time you're born to the time you leave this planet and look at it as like you're looking at a formula one racetrack and you can actually see the course you'd be like oh fucking jesus christ what am i doing here i'm

wasting all my time doing shit i don't want to do this race is not very long this race is going to end like this is oh fuck i thought it i thought there's like a happiness truck somewhere along the line that I was going to refuel with and change my tires when I get my PhD. It's the idea that you're going to arrive at some point or that you're going to land in this destination that is called success or happiness. And when you get to our age, you realize that that's just that's an illusion. Right. It just continues. And you start to think about, you know, what your life means. What do you stand for? And what is your is your legacy you know it's like we're

approaching 50 it's like what it you know if I died today what was you know what did I what did I leave in my wake well even that look the bottom line is whatever you leave it's not gonna matter because it's gonna matter to some people that you know and they're gonna leave too leave too. Everyone's going to leave. But are you enjoying this? Are you enjoying the moment? Everyone's working towards this ultimate, like the retirement years, the golden years. You're fucking almost dead when those years come.

You see those people holding hands and walking along. They barely can walk. Their knees hurt. They're all fucked up. That's not what you work for. You don't work towards this ultimate point where you don't do anything anymore. Their knees hurt. They're all fucked up. Like, that's not what you work for. You don't work towards this ultimate point where you don't do anything anymore. And that's ridiculous. That what you should work towards is doing what you enjoy doing right now, enjoying your life right now, enjoying your friends right now, enjoying whatever hobbies you like to pursue, whatever, you know, love affairs and friendships and all that stuff

is what life is is life is the moment being in the moment and we somehow have turned it into this this weird uh like journey to a very specific point specific points of high school graduation college graduation good job marriage, marriage, children. We have all these milestones that are supposed to impart happiness in this race. And they're not real. They're social constructs. And we've created these social constructs and we've fed into them and passed them down from generation to generation without anybody stepping back and going, well, who set this up? Who set up graduate school? Who set up graduate school? Who set up Common Core?

Who are these people? Why is it this way? We're just biological organisms trying to have as much happiness and good feeling while we're here as we can. I feel like that's changing, though. good feeling while we're here as we can. I feel like that's changing, though. You know, I think that if you talk to somebody who's in their 20s, you know, the idea that you would work a corporate job and stay in that job for your career and collect your pension and then ride out your 60s and 70s playing golf is a foreign concept to a young person. Whereas that was the kind of paradigm, right, for our parents' generation. And when you look at the advent of the Internet and what that provides and allows,

you see this explosion in kind of lifestyle careers where you're not wed to a geographic location. We live in a kind of subcontractor economy where people, you know, are more project-based than, you know, working for the big corporation or the plant. And certainly all that stuff exists on some level, but not to the extent that it used to. And I think that's super interesting. And I think that allows people to engage in critical thinking in a new and different way.

And I think you see young people who are asking themselves those very questions, like, what do I want to do? What makes me happy? With that can come entitlement. And that's why I think the a get a bad rap for that. But at the same time, I think that they are much more engaged in trying to grapple with who they are and what it is that, you know, they're passionate about expressing and then finding a way to tap into the economy somehow so that they can contribute and make a living doing that. And I think that that's really cool to watch unfold. I agree. And I think that the idea that millennials are entitled, I think kind of every young kid has a distorted perception of the world that we live in.

And in every generation. Well, they're going to be in some probably not on a podcast, but in some form of media, you know, 20 years from now, talking about how, you know, you and I are out to lunch. I mean, that's the natural order of things. Yeah. But how our priorities and how we raise them, you know, is myopic in some way. Sure. I'm sure. Yeah, they'll figure it out.

They'll get it better than we're doing it. Well, with the acceleration of technology, I mean, who knows where things are going to be. We just can't foresee what that world would look like. Yeah, human beings might be obsolete in 20 years. Did you listen to the last hour of the Sam Harris podcast where we were talking about artificial intelligence? No, I got into the first. I think I

didn't make it to the end of it. The last hour keeps me up at night. Did you see, there's a movie called Ex Machina. Yeah, I'm going to see it tonight. It's so interesting. Aha! Tomorrow night. It's haunting.

It's very well done. It's a very small, you know, very contained, independent movie. But it's so well executed. And you just leave, like, with a lot to think about. There's a lot to think about, period. You know, I had a long sit down with ray kurzweil and i interviewed him for the sci-fi show that i did and we went back and forth over the possibilities of this new era that we're entering into we were we went to excuse me this

global 2045 initiative yeah that they were having in new york city where all the futurists got together and they were all comparing notes and talking about the different possibilities for not just artificial intelligence but symbiotic relationships with computers downloading consciousness into databases and all this kind of crazy shit and you walk away thinking like i don't i don't know if anybody knows where this is going and it's not going going to stop. There's going to be continual innovation until we reach some event horizon of science, some point of no return, some what they call ultimate novelty point. That's what Terrence McKenna used to call it. You know, this ultimate novelty point. And it's probably going to happen within our lifetime. It's probably going to happen within the next 20 or 30 years. You think it's going to happen that soon?

I mean, I'm just guessing. It's total guessing. Well, there's always the issue of natural disasters. Any real natural disaster would throw a massive hiccup into any plans that anyone has. I mean, all we'd need is Yellowstone to blow, and it would set back civilization two, three generations easily, if not forever. Well, how about just California running out of water? You know what?

I think if we can get oil from Saudi Arabia, how the fuck can we not get water from Antarctica? Everybody's whining about those ice caps melting. Just stick a fucking big pipe on those bitches and run them down the almond fields. How hard is that? You know what's weird is how you would think, like, if you didn't know better, you would think,

how hard can it be to desalinate the ocean? Like, that's got to be elementary school chemistry, right? Right. But it's interesting that it's so difficult that the best minds are having such a hard time figuring that out. And it's almost like the universe has rigged it that way because human beings are such idiots that if they made it easy, our oceans would be dry deserts right now because we can't help ourselves. We cannot help ourselves. And that is the same compulsion that is propelling technology forward and will ultimately catapult us into this AI universe that's going to destroy us.

I think whatever it is to the left. And render us obsolete. Why we find that funny is weird, right? I know. But it is true. If we could fucking dry out the ocean. We would have done it a long time ago. Those houses in Malibu would be worth dog shit. His dummies

have bought $20 million houses and it's not really a $20 million house. It's just $20 million because it's right there on the water. Yeah, that house would be worth fuck all. Because there would be like a few hundred yards of dirt in front of your house now. I mean, how hard can it be to separate salt from water?

Apparently it's pretty hard. Yeah. But, you know, they just opened up a large desalination plant in San Diego. I heard about that. Spent over a billion dollars in this fucker, and they gave it a run. Right. I just think it's a matter of time. I mean, it's absolutely possible to take salt out of water.

So I don't think that there's been as much incentive in the past as there is now. And now that California has gone on this three-year drought where we need 11 trillion gallons of water just to bring us back to normal. Wow. Well, it's kind of emblematic of how we deal with problems because instead of trying to solve the problem that got us to this place we're just looking for another source of water right it's sort of like taking you know it's like taking viagra to deal with the fact that you can't get a boner instead of looking at why it is you can't get a boner right but i mean like you're you're you're dealing with the symptom but there are deserts that didn't used to be deserts.

I mean, there's... But not because of humankind. Right. That's because of natural forces. Right. So there is certainly one aspect of this that you can kind of point towards human beings. But the reality of the earth, the absolute reality of the earth is climates change, oceans, the levels change.

They always have. And even if people didn't exist, you would have to deal with that. You're starting to sound like a climate change denier. No, no, no. I'm definitely not. All I'm saying is we have this idea that once we're in a spot, we should be able to stay in this spot. Like this is a spot. But there are spots in North America, first of all, like half of North America was covered in a mile of ice just 10,000 years ago. That's a fact. And we have to deal with the fact that if we want to like set up a house and have, we don't have

five acres right here. Well, guess what? In 20 years, for whatever reason, that might not be a good spot anymore. And we have this idea that once we own property that that spot should be livable and ideal forever and even if people didn't have anything to do with the climate the climate will shift change things change they always will change we just have this really rigid idea of like where we should be able to put cities i mean when they keep finding these cities from like several thousand years ago like did you ever see those concentric circles that they found in the water that they believe represents like something very similar to what Atlantis was described as outside of Spain? Outside of Spain, they've found many, many underground cities where at some point in time, the sea level changed. And it was long before carbon emissions long before people were burning fossil fuels and using machines

It's just things shift. It's not to exonerate Large corporations coal our dependence on fossil fuel. That's it's a totally separate argument I'd absolutely think all you have to do is look at LA from a fucking airplane or worse I got photos of Mexico City. Holy shit Yeah, I was I was in Mexico City a couple months ago We go to Mexico City in June again for the UFC by the way nicest people very very friendly like you have this idea of Mexico City has been like horrible crime ridden awful place. It's not they're really nice people But they just need better roads god their fucking pollution is insane

You can taste it with your face like when when you get out of the airplane, you're like, whoa, this is crazy. And apparently it's better than it used to be. Whether it's Mexico city or LA, you, you, you get this really kind of potent sense. You see the lights and the grid and, and you realize, and the cars driving on the freeway and you realize it's just an organism. Yeah. These freeways carrying cars are the arteries and the cars are the blood cells. And we're feeding these cities like they're, you know, organs in this larger, you know, unit that is interdependent. And it's interesting.

And it's interesting. And I think it, you know, what you said about this idea of human beings and this idea that we think everything is static. I mean, I think that applies across the board. Like we think these cities will always be there, but we also think that our lives are somewhat static or that our relationships are static or our jobs are static or our bank accounts, all of these things, you know, we kind of agree to in this social contract, but everything is fluid, man. It's true. Everything is fluid and changing, you know, all the time on the micro level that leads to the macro. And it's always going to be that way. And you also have to realize, I think we have to realize that one of the, I can't find these pictures of fucking. I think you posted that.

Yeah, I definitely did. I remember when you. It's on my Instagram. Yeah. find these pictures of fucking i think you posted that yeah i definitely remember when you saw my instagram yeah um but the point is that the only way a city got to be a city in the first place is things had to change radically if you you looked at where that city is you look at los angeles where it is 400 years ago there was absolutely nothing you know there's probably some native americans and some mexicans and some various people is back when it was mexico and they were wandering around and doing their thing. This was back when it was Mexico. And they were wandering around and doing their thing.

But there was no highways and sky rises. All that stuff was really, really recent. And in terms of the actual age of the earth, my God, it's like blink your eye and then all of a sudden cities are there. Literally a blink of an eye and then everything's polluted. Everything's fucked and Malibu beachfront property is ridiculously overpriced but in the history of this planet has there ever been more change planetarily with the exception of natural disasters than there has been in the last 200 years well in that sense aren't human beings a kind of a natural disaster we're a virus on the planet. I mean, come on.

That's what Hicks called us. He called us a virus with shoes. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Well, the opening of my Showtime special from like 2005, I argued that if you looked at the Earth as a living organism and you're flying over and you saw L.A., you'd go, well, that's cancer. That's a growth. It's growing. It's out of control. well, that's cancer. That's a growth. It's growing.

It's out of control. It stinks. It looks like it's a mess. And it's getting bigger. We're greedy bastards. We're lacking that gene that prioritizes doing things sustainably. I think it's a huge problem. Like, we're predatory.

We're not symbiotic. Well, I think we have an inescapable thirst for innovation. We want new and better things, and we want progress. But we're short-sighted in that regard. We are. We're unable to see the bigger picture. We don't have the foresight to make the responsible decision quite often. Quite often. responsible decision quite often quite often well we we we err towards the size of prop sorry toward

the uh side of profit and uh and and success and oftentimes at the expense of what is that you think i mean other probably other animals don't have that you know they do though they do though they do the beavers fuck up dams and they create dams and ruin rivers I mean they don't make beaver cities cuz they can't now if they could they would could get together And you know if they could chew more wood huge giant dam in the Mississippi River If they could agree with each other and they would probably do it they don't give a fuck about you You know I mean the Bears just shit wherever they walk they don't they don't clean up They don't have like a certain spot where they put all their shit

They just don't have enough of an impact to really change the environment around them. But if they could, they would. I was listening to a Radiolab podcast about the Galapagos Islands. And it's very fascinating because they had to eradicate goats. Because these sailors had brought goats over way back in the day. And they had brought goats and they put them on the island so that they could come back and eat them. Like they would have a food source. But these goats just destroy everything in their path.

They just killed everything and they fucked it all up for the tortoises. These poor tortoises were fucked. They didn't have any plant matter anymore because all these goats were coming along. So then they hired these people to kill the goats. So they flew over in helicopters and they gunned down the goats and then goats started getting smart. So what they do was they would find goats, they would capture them, they would put radio collars on them, they would scare them, they would run over to where the other goats were, and then they would find where the goats were. They would kill all of them except the ones with the radio collars. And so they became what they called Judas goats. It's

really fascinating how they set this up. And then it got to a point where it was nothing but Judas goats. That's all that was left. And so then, you know, they tried to reintroduce tortoises. It's really, really fascinating. But the argument could be made that any animal acting purely in its own interest will ultimately fuck up everything around it. And that's one of the reasons why there's got to be some kind of a balance. There's got to be some kind of a balance between humans and the plants that we coexist with and the animals that we coexist with. And the same can be said with animals. Like, you know, you can't have too many predators in an area. You can't have too many, you know, too many deer in an area. You run into them with cars, they start starving to death. You get ticks and people start spreading,

they start spreading Lyme disease. And there's like humans and animals and they all act in their own interest. It's just, we're the only ones that have fingers. We can manipulate shit and change the environment in ways that no other animal could even come close to. There is an infinitely complex play that's going on, and we insert ourselves into that, and we have this reductionist idea. Oh, if we insert this one thing, then that will fix the problem.

And what we don't do is really understand that the extent to which the interdependency of everything else comes into play. And I think that's true whether you're introducing an animal to an ecology to solve a problem and it creates a bigger problem, or whether you're taking a drug to resolve one condition that has side effects, or whether you're overly focused on one micronutrient or macronutrient as the solution to your health problem, you know, everything is more complicated than that. And, you know, I don't think that we kind of embrace a more holistic approach to, you know, whether it's our problems or our health or what have you. That's another

thing that's like not part of our wiring and it's not part of the... The scientific method is by definition reductionist, because you have to isolate variables and look at one thing at a time. It's true. Yeah, that's very true. That's very true. Science in and of itself is reductionist. And I think that there's also this weird hope

that people have, that if we fuck something up, then our backs get against the wall then someone really smart will invent a solution and it'll all be better you know that someone like right now is analyzing the who knows how many fucking trillions of pounds of plastic we've dumped in the ocean and they're trying to figure out some way to suck all that stuff out and turn it into some sort of a fuel or some resource that we can capitalize on. That's those kind of thinking or that kind of thinking is real common. We always think that

eventually someone smarter will figure out a way out of this mess. Yeah, Elon Musk is going to solve it for all of us, right? And I think that part of that is just the level of disenfranchisement that the average person has. Like, we just don't feel like our vote counts. We don't feel like our dollar counts. And, like, fuck it. You know, Dancing with the Stars is on. And, like, I can't make a difference. So, you know, I'm going to throw my garbage out the window.

And who cares? I just found out that Dancing with the Stars has been on for 10 years. Has it? I've never watched a single episode. I really have never. I've been flipping through the channels and I saw some people dancing and everybody cheering

and I was like, what in the actual fuck? And then I changed the channel again. Like, we're watching people dance now? Really? Like, nobody likes to dance like that. That was like, isn't that real rare?

Isn't that what, like, Mexican TV was? Dancing with the stars? No, but like, you know, you turn on like, when we were kids, it was like, it was all song and dance, you know, you turn on like when we were kids, it was like, it was all song and dance,

you know, on the Spanish television shows, Spanish networks. I thought it was all those crazy soap operas. Yeah, that too, but that's what reality TV is sort of right. We've regressed in some ways.

Well, there's a part of us that really, we really love base things. You know, we love emotions. Like I was just thinking of this the other day, So part of us, we really love bass things. We love emotions. I was just thinking of this the other day. The talk show host, like a Morton Downey Jr. or a Jenny Jones or a Geraldo Rivera, any of those shows, or like Montel Williams, where they would have guests,

and then they would go to the audience and the audience would like say something that would Get everybody go. Oh like that That thing that they created that parent doesn't like the original YouTube commenters There's like the original like social media commenters the people that are in the audience They don't have anything to do with what's on it But they get to interject and say something and then that becomes a part of the entertainment. Right.

But it's really just, you know, it's this weird social interaction between human beings and us, like, sitting as sidelines. What are you showing? Jerry Springer. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Of course. Jerry Springer.

He's the master of that. What a crazy way to make a living, right? I know. I mean... Well, that guy was a character. Yeah. He still is. He's the master of that. What a crazy way to make a living, right? I know. I mean. Well, that guy was a character. Yeah. He still is. He's still alive, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's actually a very intelligent guy. He is. Wasn't he mayor of Cleveland or something like that? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And he got in trouble, some prostitution.

Cincinnati? I think there was a little cocaine problem at one point. A little bit of that. A little bit of blow. I think there was a little cocaine problem at one point. A little bit of that. A little bit of blow. But, you know, we enjoy those stupid moments that don't mean anything. You know, where someone says something and everybody goes, oh!

There's nothing wrong with a guilty pleasure, though. You know what I mean? No, not necessarily. Look, you can't fix the world. You can't be Captain Save-A-Ho and go out there and fix the whole world and go to the Jerry Springle crowd and start hanging out kale leaves and pamphlets for yoga classes. It's not going to work.

Are you talking about me, Joe? I'm talking about everybody. Look, I eat kale too, dude. I know you do. That's a thing, man. If you've ever mocked very ridiculous proselytizing vegans which i have people think all of a sudden i don't like vegans they think i don't like them or i don't eat that food i eat that food almost always like i eat more vegetables than i eat meat i eat way more

vegetables i eat a lot of it i think it's good for you well vegans are an easy target you guys are easy as fuck i mean know what I mean? So, uh... But you're not. You're, you're like, you're like the, if, if all vegans were like you, there would be no target. It was like people who just eat healthy. That's it. You're just someone who enjoys eating plants instead of animal products.

And that's just, that's just your diet. It doesn't become a fucking religion with you. No, I mean, look, you know, first of all, it's not my place to pass judgment on anybody else and their behavior patterns and their habits. And, you know, I'm not trying to, you know, recruit people to my lifestyle. You know, if people want to ask me about it, I'm happy to talk about it. But I'm not like yelling from a bully pulpit, you know, shaming people or the shaming people. I have no I have no, you know, air of moral superiority about it whatsoever. It's a it's a lifestyle that I choose. I don't think that that gives me, you know, permission to levy judgment on any other human being and their choices.

So, you know, the way that I try to communicate the message is just to, you know, live my life and, you know, sort of stand where I'm standing. And if people are interested, they'll come to me and, you know, I can communicate to them. it they'll come to me and and you know i can communicate to them but um but it's you know it's not a proselytizing point of view that i adopt i think some people adopt certain behaviors just because it gives them license to be an asshole i really do i mean there are there are certain vegans that think that because they are vegans they can go out and attack and be really shitty to other people. And somehow or another, they're acting in a positive way, and they're going to enact some positive change by being really shitty to people. It's like this idea of a social justice warrior falls into the same category. By being really mean to people that you think think the wrong way or behave the

wrong way, that somehow or another you're going to shame them into changing by being really aggressive and offensive to them? I mean, shaming somebody is not an effective way of trying to getting them to change. It's one of the least effective ways. I mean, look, people change when they're ready to change. You know, it's really an internal willingness that drives change. And, you know, somebody's either ready to make a change or they're not. And different people receive messages in different ways. So if you look at, look, if you look at the vegan movement, because that's what we're talking about,

you know, there are super hardcore animal rights activists and they have a certain way of communicating. And there's a certain population of people that are receptive to that kind of communication. There are other people that are interested in environmental issues. They want to be better environmentalists. And so there are people that speak to the vegan movement from that perspective. And there's a certain audience that's receptive to that. And the way that I communicate it or carry the message is in a different way. And there's different people that are attracted to that. So I think whatever think whatever your, your point of view is, or whatever

movement you're part of, and that we can get into the whole idea of how we're wired to be on teams and how counterproductive that is. But, you know, there's enough people out there that are, you know, there's a diversity of voices and a diversity of audiences, that every kind of voice carries a frequency that other people respond to, I guess. I didn't say that very articulately. I know what you're saying, though. There's no one that responds well to being insulted, though. No one.

I mean, if you're really trying to convey a a message being really shitty about it is the last thing well look at look at you know political talk shows on saturday and sunday morning and they're just shouting at each other and and basically they're just rallying support from their base each side they're trying to win but they're not they're not converting people from one side to the other no one ever gets converted the only way anybody ever gets converted is like if you can say something very thoughtful that penetrates past this wall of ideology they have in their head and they go hmm and then they have to consider it but they're not going to consider if you're insulting they're just not it's gonna be

a contest it's gonna be you versus them you say something rude to them they're gonna try say something ruder to you. And you're playing ping pong. Ping pong, ping pong. Right. You're just ping pong with insults. And to be clear, like, you know, I'm a member of this community. And, you know, a proud member, I would say.

Are you a card carrying member? I think I have the card in my wallet. Is it a leaf? It is a leaf. It's in that juicy lady's glass over there. We don't have cards. We just carry a square. I think, you know, my theory on it,

the people that are kind of you would characterize as, you know, vociferous and angry and judgmental, my theory is that there's a certain percentage of the population that come out of the womb. Broken? Well, there's that. Okay. So there's that, of course.

There are those people for sure. And there are other people that I think are wired to be super sensitive. Sure. And from a very early age, they just find the idea of an animal dying for food to be the most intolerable concept they can imagine. Right? And that's how they came into the world. Right? animal dying for food to be the most intolerable concept they can imagine, right? And they're just, that's how they came into the world, right? And so they kind of, you know, grow older and they navigate the world and they start, you know, becoming sort of more outspoken about this idea. And when people are not receptive to it, or they're not seeing the world the way that they're

seeing it, they become progressively more frustrated. And that frustration turns to resentment, that resentment can morph into anger. And then, you know, you have what you see, which is which is people who are, they're just they're just incensed that other people are not seeing the world the way that they're seeing it. And I think that applies, you know, to any contingent of the population that holds a very strong point of view i i agree with you i think that there's there's definitely going to be certain people that are hardwired for sensitivity there's just no getting around it and you realize that when you have children you know i have um two young daughters that are so different they're only two years apart from each other grew up in the same household. They could not be more different, right? It's just right out of the box. They're just different people. Yeah, and you realize like

You had nothing to do with that Yeah I mean you have a little bit to do with how they you know how they process things and how they deal with things based on learned but that innate core kind of Perspective and whatever they're naturally inclined to is just, you can see it at such a young age. Yeah. That's the difference, right? The difference is like, what, what is just a real part of them? What is a real part of them? Like what, what, what is just inescapable? Like they have certain ingredients, like a car is made out of aluminum and rubber and metal

like there's certain ingredients that certain people have when they're born and also inclinations inclinations towards certain activities like we were talking about before like trying to find things that make your children happy trying to encourage things that make your children happy to find a thing that they like in they, the jives with their ingredients, you know, and some people, they look at animals and they just have this inescapable, inescapable kinship.

And some of that, some of that kinship is ridiculous to the point where you ever read those Tumblr blogs where people think that they're, they should have been born a Fox. No, I haven't seen Fox kin. You never seen that? That sounds like something red band would spend a lot of time doing.

Thinking you used to be a fox? No, just being on weird Tumblr sites. Weird Tumblr sites can get very addictive. You wonder whether or not you're being trolled. Some of them are so weird, you wonder, like, okay, is this real? You know? Yeah, I don't know. Foxkin.

You never heard of that? No, I haven't. So look around. People, they believe that they should have been never heard of that? No? I haven't to look around people that would they they? They believe that they should have been born as foxes. Yes, okay. They believe they're a fox can well You're an open-minded thinker There's other dimensions at play you saw interstellar. There is a I didn't see interstellar you didn't know I haven't seen it yet I'm fucking busy, bro

but the the idea is just I'm talking busy, bro. But the idea is just, that's a ridiculous idea. But I also think that there's also people that have this very idealistic idea of animals and nature itself, which is, there's some videos we've been shown recently with deer that are eating birds, eating birds alive, which apparently is a recent discovery, that deer are not really just herbivores they're herbivores by convenience but when they find uh birds on the ground they eat them they seek them out they

actually chase them is that is that a result of encroaching habitat by urban centers or no no these are wild deer in very uh rural areas they've been observed to it's just apparently they get minerals and stuff from from deer uh from birds rather and uh they're more inclined to do so when they're growing their antlers they uh feel you know more uh more drawn to eating birds that's interesting i didn't know that yeah there's a bunch of videos it's kind of disturbing because you know even though i'm a hunter and i eat deer i i think they're beautiful and i always think of them as being these peaceful things and we see them chasing a bird and just chewing it alive and this fucking thing is kicking inside their mouth and trying to

get away well they're just they're part of the you know natural cycle of life they're just trying to survive like everything else yes and i think you know i think to the casual observer you know, natural cycle of life. They're just trying to survive like everything else. Yes. And I think, you know, I think to the casual observer, you know, or somebody who's listening to this podcast, they may think that there's this, you know, giant gap between the way that you live and the way that I live. And I think there's actually a bigger gap between the way that I live and the normal human being than yourself because of, you know, look, you're a hunter. I don't hunt. You know, it's not something that I'm interested in normal human being than yourself because of, you know, look, you're a hunter. I don't hunt. You know, it's not something that I'm interested in doing. But you have a connection to where your food is coming from that is very close and primal.

And in the grand scheme of things, more sustainable than the way that, you know, the average typical American. It's kind of more sustainable, but honestly, not for everybody. The reality of life. Well, not everybody could do it. Yeah. Not everybody could do it. I mean, I think that right now our food system is broken. Our system of factory farming, it's unsustainable.

I actually brought you this documentary. What is it? It's called Cowspiracy. Cowspiracy? Oh, Cowspiracy. Cowspiracy, yeah. I was involved in producing this movie. You should check it out. But basically, it's a look at the impact of animal agriculture on our environment. It's horrible. It's pretty interesting.

Did you see that video that they got of a drone video of these gigantic pig farms? And just the fucking unbelievable environmental catastrophe these things create. Where they have lakes of piss and shit from these pigs. It's abhorrent. Have you seen it? No, I haven't. I can only imagine. You should see it.

See if you can pull that video up, I haven't. You really should see it. See if you could pull that video up, Jamie, because it's insane to look at. When you stop and think about the amount of Smithfield Foods factory farms, that's it right there. This guy flies his drone, which is pretty fucking cool that they have these drones now that you could do this and get this high resolution video. That's interesting video um well if you're dealing with a place like los angeles 20 million people 20 million people and 95 of the meat meat you're dealing with an insane amount of flesh that needs to be consumed on a daily basis and it has to be grown somewhere and shipped somewhere and conveniently we want to sort of ignore it. That is a lake of shit and piss.

And it's all coming from these factories right there in front of you. Those are housing units for pigs. They're stuffed into these things, crammed next to each other, and they stand on these metal grates. So the metal grates are porous. They piss and shit. It goes through the holes, and it all goes through these tubes that lead down into that giant lake.

Apparently, the smell, if you're anywhere near there, is so bad, you literally feel like you could probably light the air on fire. I'm sure Smithfield is not too excited about this video being out there. And, you know, there's all these ag-gag laws right now that prevent consumers from filming this kind of thing. Isn't that insane? It's interesting that he's been able to do this with a drone. And, you know, whether you're, you know, whether you eat bacon for breakfast every morning or you eat more like me, I think we can all agree that transparency is important. And these companies are not transparent about how they produce their food. And there's a lot of problems with it and the waste that it creates and the amount of resources and what goes into this process is something that I think

we could all benefit from taking a harder look at. You know what would be interesting is if you go to the Cowspiracy website, they have all these facts about kind of every sort of environmental impact of what animal agriculture does from water use to CO2 emissions, to land use, to species extinction, to rainforest destruction. And when you look at the statistics, it's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. It's like the elephant in the room.

You know, when we talk about global climate change or greenhouse gas emissions, we talk about fossil fuel use. We talk about fracking. And rightly so. These are important things to talk about. But really, the thing that we're not talking enough about is the impact of our food system on all of these systems. And when you look at, for example, water use, we're talking about water, right? Well, you know, there's PSAs in California. We're not supposed to take long showers. We can't water our lawns, all these sorts of things. And the truth is, is that consumer water use in California is like 5%. And animal agriculture accounts for like 55% of all water use.

And you know what a big one is? You know what the really big useless one is? Well, golf courses. Golf courses. Well, animal agriculture trumps golf courses. Right, but at least animal agriculture is like feeding animals that people eat. Right, right. You're just feeding fucking white dudes rolling balls around in the grass.

That's an insane amount of water. For your amusement, right? I think it takes something like 660 gallons of water to produce a hamburger. And like 1,000 gallons of milk or 1,000 gallons of water to produce one gallon and like a thousand gallons of milk or a thousand gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk something like that like the statistics are completely insane and that because a lot of it is the water that's used to grow the grain that you're feeding to these animals so when you look at it systemically you know it's just it doesn't like if you were an alien who beamed down to planet Earth and said take me to

your leader and show me how you make your food he would just be like you guys are crazy you're like killing the planet to do this doesn't it doesn't it doesn't make sense not sustainable in the long term if we did it exactly the way we're doing it right now forever would that be sustainable I don't think so we can do it right now well I mean we're the way that we're doing it right now, I mean, we're destroying rainforests like crazy, right? It's like one to two acres every hour or something like that. But isn't that a lot of it is due to they're getting exotic hardwoods and all these different—it's all lumbering. There's some of that for sure, and there's palm oil and there's other things like that.

But I think the gravamen, like the majority of it goes to grazing land and growing crops for livestock. And this is other countries. This is not America. I mean, America is not – Yeah, like Amazonian rainforest. Yeah, we're not cutting down the rainforest in America. And we're not getting our beef from there either. But I think, you know, like an insane amount of our total land mass is devoted to is devoted to animal agriculture too so you know it's

like billions of these animals that we're specifically raising to eat you know and it's it's a it's a huge it's a huge problem it is a huge problem that is something that is outside of your normal thinking you normal everyday, you're getting on the highway. God damn it, there's traffic today. You're getting to work. Oh, great, we've got this new project we have to deal with. And your real existence, like, all that stuff is bullshit if you don't have any food. All that traffic, all the work stuff, like, hey, you're going to die.

You don't have any food. Like, this is, like, here's a bunch of things that you need to have in place before you think about any other hobbies or projects or whatever you're trying to accomplish with your career. You've got to have a place where you can breathe the air. The air has to be clean. That's one. Well, and the ocean has to be hospitable for fish and plant life, right? Yes.

Well, if you're a vegan, you really don't need to worry about anything other than the plant life in the ocean. If you're only eating kelp, but actually kelp is a very good source of protein. That goes back to this reductionist idea, right? These are complex ecosystems. So you knock one thing out in the ocean and the domino effect of that,

you know, like these, the runoff that's caused from, you know, waste, animal agriculture is a big one. There's all kinds of waste that pours into the ocean. And it creates these massive dead zones, the algal blooms, right, that deprives them, like thousands of acres worth across the ocean

that are so oxygen deprived that nothing can live in them. Well, there was a big die-off when I was in Hermosa Beach a couple of years ago. They had a giant fish die-off where it was oh so fucking stinky it was so nasty wash up on the shore well i think they just died like in in certain bays you know there was an an area where they just hit a dead zone and a bunch of fish died and super normal very common happens all the time and it smelled so bad. It was just, you know, probably a fucking million dead fish or something. Yeah.

Awful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we're so... What we're getting at. But, I mean, yeah, I mean, as, you know, as typical consumers, we're divorced from that. That's not in our face. You know what I mean? Like, we're not really...

We don't have to, like, reckon with that on a daily basis. Is it possible that, like, could you have an entire city of 20 million people? You couldn't have an entire city of 20 million people that lived as hunters You really couldn't you would need more animals, but could you have an entire city of 20 million people that were vegan? Oh? Yeah, I mean I think that that the amount of land that you need to grow food for vegans is like, you know, I don't know, a fraction, a tiny fraction of the amount of land that is required to raise animals for food. Because the animals have to eat a lot of food in order to get to a size. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you need tons of grazing land.

And, you know, like if you go to Cowspiracy.com and there's a section called facts and they kind of break it all down. It's kind of interesting to look at. But, yeah, I mean, I think that the amount of land—like, we're producing enough food to feed the planet, really. It's really like an allocation and distribution issue as much as anything. You mean we, like America? Is that what you're saying? But most of the food that we're growing in the breadbasket of America is going to livestock. Right.

It's not going to human beings. You mean like the cornfields yeah they're also making that corn that's really not even edible for humans that did you see you've saw King Korn yeah I did amazing but um yeah amazing documentary we're all like made out of corn who's fucking crazy right when they do the tests on their body and they find out that the carbon for corn and human The carbon in their body is coming from corn. And you find out how many different things at the supermarket, when they went to the supermarket,

they looked at all the different things that have corn syrup in it, corn starch, corn this, corn that. It's like, wow. Right. How did that happen? How did they hijack the entire food system? I mean, you don't need fucking corn. You know, like all that stuff that they're using corn for

is not really necessary. But you can profit off of it if you own the corn. And if you have some sort of a relationship with the government, you can get subsidies. And that's what happens. They're being fed off subsidies. That's one of the things that was most disturbing about it. Like, wait a minute, this is so destructive, and you guys couldn't even

afford to grow this shit if it wasn't for the government? If the government didn't pay corn farmers, if they didn't have government subsidies, a lot of them would just go under. Yeah. I mean, I think that we're entrenched in this system that is dependent upon these subsidies, right? And so much of our economy, you know, functions in this way. And I think if we really want to change our food system, we have to eradicate these subsidies. And when you look at, you know, look, there's a reason why, I think we talked about this last time, I can't remember. There's a reason why like, you know, a Taco Bell taco is like whatever it is, like $0.89 or whatever.

And it's like it's the same price it was when we were 12. It's like, how does that work? Right. You know, a Big Mac would actually cost something like $7.50 or, you know, it'd be like a multiple on its price. There's a book called Metanomics by this guy called David Simon, where he, I'm sorry, Metanomics, and he really breaks down how these subsidies work and how that kind of fuels this food system that really is creating, you know, it's sort of, it's making the lower socioeconomic class, like, less and less healthy because it's creating this wider gap between healthy living and unhealthy living. Because in food deserts, in urban food deserts, where there is no farmer's market, but there's McDonald's and Jack in the Box on every corner, and, you. And you're on welfare and you got three kids, like, what are you going to do, right?

You're going to eat the shitty food. This is too cheap to not do it. That's a really good point. That's a really good point as far as the amount that it costs for these things and then the fact that it's because of subsidies. And as a result of that, we're in this place right now where suddenly health and wellness have become elitist ideals, you know, synonymous with, you know, spending a ton of money at Whole Foods. And that's crazy. Are you opposed to eating like chicken eggs, like from someone who grows chickens and has them like free ranging and, you know, like, like I have I have chickens that they lay eggs every day, and they're essentially my pets. I eat my pets' food.

I feed them. They eat some table scraps, but a lot of them, they eat just free-range. They run around eating stuff in the grass and eat bugs. From an ethical point of view, you mean? If you're raising your own chickens and they're like your pets and they're laying eggs that are not going to turn into chickens, then I think ethically, I don't really see a problem with that. You know what I mean?

Like they're not going to, you know, they're not going to, those eggs are not going to turn into chickens. But PETA has this thing on their website about eggs being chicken periods and they're trying to discourage people from eating eggs. Have you ever seen it? It's hilarious. It's one of those things where it just shows you, like, there's ethical considerations when it comes to livestock and animals that are rational. They make sense. And then you get into this extreme animal rights ideology where they're trying to twist reality.

And so they have like a bloody pair of underwear and a chicken. Here it is. Look at this. Eggs come from chicken menstruation. So they're frying a bloody pair of underwear in a frying pan don't eat eggs period and the word period is red like period blood i mean this is the reason why peter they're very effective at marketing they know see we're looking we're talking well we're talking about it right now we're talking about how retarded they are i eat

seven more eggs today just because of these assholes that's not that's not like effective i think that if you're if you have chickens at your home and they're your pets and your kids play with them and they're laying eggs that are not going to turn into chickens and and you decide that you want to eat those eggs from from a morality point of view like how can i i don't really see how i could have a big problem with that now if you decide that you want to cut the head off that chicken and fry it up then then it becomes

well it just becomes a different thing it becomes a different thing when was the last time you ate meat it's been a while how many years vegan and it's been about 8 years coming up on nine maybe wow do you ever smell like your neighbor cooking a steak and go yeah i mean it's good you know i'm not one of

those people who's like oh it repulses me and i want to throw up you know like i got into it for health reasons right and you know i listen i've eaten more meat in my lifetime than any human being ever should. It's like I'm not, you know, I like it. You know, I drive by McDonald's or Jack in the Box and I smell that. And that might disgust some people, but it triggers like this addictive response in me where it's like I will crave that, you know, because there's so much time has passed between me and eating those foods. I don't have that that sort of obsessive compulsive thing that kicks in. Like I'm also, I'm a recovering alcoholic. Like I have, I'm, I'm like, you know, I can get addicted to things pretty fucking easy. Right. So that's part of my thing. Like for me to draw a line, uh, you know, kind of a, uh, a line in the sand and say like no more

is kind of the way that I have to do it because Right. Because otherwise it inhabits my consciousness too much. Right. You have to put up boundaries where the insurmountable boundaries. Yeah. Like there are certain diets that say, Oh, you can have a cheat day. Right.

So it's like, if you told me that I could have In-N-Out burger like once a week, like I would, I would spend six days thinking about the day that I could have In-N-Out burger. You know what I mean? Like in order to free myself from that prison, I need time away. So, you know, it's really powerful with me, whether it's a cheeseburger or a drink or a drug, you know, and that's just me. You know, that's just my experience.

But when I smell that, yeah, it triggers that thing. I'm like, oh, that smells good. But it passes quickly. But if I was eating those things, I might find myself driving into the drive-thru. That's an issue with people that have eating disorders where it's almost like the desire to have that forbidden food overwhelms their desire to be healthy. It's like that. It just becomes this thing like I've got to itch it. It's like that, that it just becomes this thing. Like I've got,

I've got to itch it. I've got to itch it. I'm itchy. I got to scratch it. I can't help it. Yeah. It transcends logic and becomes psychological. It becomes a psychological issue way more than it is a physiological issue.

It's, it's almost beyond psychology though. Like it's so embedded Right now I mean for anybody who's truly like an addict or an alcoholic like it it goes to the core You know there is no overriding it When that kicks in It's just it's happening. I had a friend who was on the Atkins diet my friend Eddie Bravo He was on the Atkins diet, and he would do it for six days a week.

And then midnight on Saturday night, that motherfucker would go off the rails like a runaway train piloted by a meth addict. Oh, my God. Right, so what do you intuit from that, right? Well, he lost a lot of weight. He's building up all week. Yes. So it worked

though but why would you i'm not saying that an atkins diet is a healthy diet because i don't think it is but but what's wrong with an atkins diet if you could say so from an expert perspective i mean i'm not a nutritional scientist or a doctor but i would you know i would say that that that um a diet that's super focused on basically excluding anything with any carbohydrates in it and eating foods that are devoid of any fiber, which I think is really important. We talk about protein a lot, but I think most people, I think that conversation should really be about fiber. Like nobody's protein deficient. I think 3% of the population is protein deficient. Most Americans are fiber deficient though. We 3% of the population is protein deficient. Most Americans are fiber

deficient though. We just don't eat enough vegetables. But is the Atkins diet fiber deficient? I mean, you can eat broccoli. I think that there is a focus on like meat and dairy products, right? It's like, I mean, I'm not an expert on the Atkins diet, but it's all about sort of, yeah, it's like being in ketosis. And, you know, that's a very, you know, hot button thing. And, you know, there are people that are all about like being in ketosis. And my understanding of that is that it's kind of a crisis state for the human body. It's not a natural state of being. It's sort of like what your body has to do when it's being deprived of other nutrients to be in this state. Like you put these acid ketones in your body, which then are converted to some form of glucose because you're so glucose deprived, right? Our brains run on glucose. Our bodies need glucose. You know, if you look at, look at, you know, the longest living pockets, pockets of civilization across the world where people live the longest and are the healthiest and are the happiest, like the blue zones. You the happiest like the blue zones you've heard of the blue zones right so dan butner who's the guy who traveled

all these places is a friend of mine he's amazing guy you should have him on the podcast he's amazing what's his name dan butner b-u-b-u-e-t-t-n-e-r he's a national geographic fellow he's so impressive he's what's his uh his uh well he's he's the guy who wrote the blue zones books so he he was a like a global adventurer who set like three world records like cycling across the the planet doing all these crazy things and cycling well he rode his bike across africa like north to south i think what the fuck he rode He rode across Russia. This was when he was younger. And then he became interested in indigenous populations. He started working with National Geographic.

He became a writer. And in his travels, he became obsessed with finding places where people are the happiest, live the longest, free of disease, et cetera. And that ultimately became what are today known as the blue zones, like these little sort of hidden pockets in the planet that are kind of untouched from the gestalt of our modern society. And, you know, they're little tiny places kind of off the beaten path. You know, Ikaria, which is like an island off the coast of Turkey, Sardinia, Okinawa, and ironically, Loma Linda here, like not too far from here.

Loma Linda? Which is pretty interesting. How's that work? It's a cultural thing because it's a community of Seventh-day Adventists, and it's a very strong faith-based community that also basically subsists on a plant-based diet. Good guess. And they live incredibly long. There you go

so the seven-day advent adventists how do you say it seventh day adventists yeah it sounds like it's weird word they are like you say it even if you're saying it correctly it seems like you're doing it wrong and it's a very strong you know faith-based community and they start a base diet they yeah moderate physical activity activity, social engagement. Social engagement's important too. Huge. It's huge. And so from studying these cultures, he extracted certain kind of guiding principles about how they live their life.

And one of them, to get back to the question about kind of Atkins and diet, is they all eat a very starchy, fiber-rich, essentially plant-based diet. It doesn't mean they're all vegans., they all eat a very starchy, you know, fiber rich, essentially plant based diet doesn't mean they're all vegans, like the a little bit of meat, but essentially, their diet is founded upon starchy vegetables, for the most part, and community and accountability and kind of keeping your elders around and all these sorts of things have really, you know,

distinguishes them as, you know, from the way that we we live our lives now, right? Like we're isolated, we're fast-paced, and all these sorts of kind of principles upon which we navigate our day are just very divorced from the way that these people are living. I love that it says empowered women. Empowered women is a factor in age. That's fascinating. I wonder what that's about. A big part of it too, I had Dan on my podcast. So if people are listening, they can check him out. He's great. But a big part of it

too is having purpose, like sort of identifying early on in your life, you know, what your purpose is and serving that purpose. And these people don't retire, you know, they're just, they're sort of, you know, living and continuing to be productive, like way later in life than we're used to seeing. Enjoying your time here and that positive energy that's attached to enjoying your time here sustains your existence in a much better way. Yeah, sort of low-grade exercise. These people, you know, they're always moving. You know, they're not out running. They're not on the treadmill, but they're in their garden, and they're walking to their friend's house. And, you know, they're very engaged with their

community, you know, in a very intimate way. Yeah. Do you know, I had Aubrey de Grey on the other day, who's a life extension scientist at the forefront of the various technologies that are being developed to extend life. He said the difference between the average and these cultures where they live far longer is four years. That's the, you know, this big goal that everybody's trying to attain, like live like these people that live the longest and that's four years. There's a four year difference.

Right. Well, I think, you know, in these blue zones, they have the highest percentage per capita of centenarians, like people living more than a hundred. But I think it's less about that age than it is about the quality of your years, right? Like, you know, listen, go to the airport and look at how many people are like in wheelchairs and, you know, on walkers and stuff like that. People that are not old. Go to Disneyland.

Yeah, it's crazy. You ever go to Disneyland and see the people on scooters? Yeah. Overflowing out of the side of the scooters with their legs and their gut and just, whew. Right. So right now in America, you know, we can split hairs over, you know, should you take fish oil or not, or is it okay for you to eat the eggs from your chicken in your backyard? But the truth is this is not the problem that we need to be talking about.

We need to be talking about the fact that one out of every three Americans is going to die of a heart attack, And 70% of Americans are obese or overweight. And they're predicting that by 2030, 50% of Americans are going to be diabetic or pre-diabetic. What? Just think about that. What? Is that real? Mm-hmm. By 2030, 50% of Americans are going to be diabetic or pre-diabetic.

Diabetes is insane. Holy fucking shit. That's insane. One out of every three people is going to die of heart disease wow heart disease is a lifestyle and foodborne illness it doesn't have to exist and we're in this place right now we're sort of like some congenital version there there there is for sure but that's not what but if you look back through the you through the sort of history of mankind, there are plenty of populations that existed for hundreds and thousands of years without any significant incidence of heart disease. Especially in rural areas of China for long years until we started exporting our diet and lifestyle overseas. And now it's sort of like the latest installment of the Avengers.

You know, we're sending these fast food restaurants to these places, and they're having, and as the sort of ascension of the middle class in China, you know, continues, and they can afford to, you know, sort of purchase more meat products, they're having disease problems that they haven't seen. It's unprecedented in the history of their culture. It seems also there's a real issue with human beings when it comes to patterns of behavior and habit that are very, very difficult to break.

And like as you were saying before, if you could have a day where you could cheat, that day, that would become the habit. And then you would be thinking about that one day. It's very hard for people who are extremely obese who just their main form of pleasure is mouth pleasure. Of course. They get that food. It's hardwired. They just stuff it in their face and then that's what they're, oh, man, that fucking corn dog is so good.

And that's where they're getting their pleasure from. It's hard to deviate from that. It's hard to change your patterns. Yeah, you are managing your emotional well-being through the food choices that you make. Good way of putting it. There's a great book called Salt, Sugar, Fat by this guy called Michael Morris.

And he kind of looks at these big food companies and draws an analogy to the tobacco companies in the 70s in the way that these companies are funneling money and research and marketing dollars into devising food products that are specifically designed to activate that pleasure center in your brain. Right. So that they know they're, they're trying to make that food impossible for you to just have one. And once you kind of, you know, tap into that, that, you know, ability to trigger that response in somebody and you create a habit out of that, an addictive response, then you have a customer for life, right?

You know, it's like, why is it so hard to eat one fucking chip you know there's a reason behind that there's something about the the the proportion of of salt and and grease you know that will just trigger something in somebody do you know there's a feeling that you have when you do indulge in some really shitty food that you have just like after it's over you feel like such a loser right if i eat like a bag of chips you go into a shame spiral i feel angry at myself what you fucking dummy eat a bag of chips i know but when i eat a whole bag but when you're doing it you're like i can't even help myself. It's hard. I'm like a greedy, greedy monster.

Like, you know what I have a real weakness for those sea salt and vinegar potato chips. Good God, they're good. The real thick ones. The kettle chip ones. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Oh, they're so good. And you look at the bag and it says non-GMO on the front. You're like, oh, okay. Non-GMO.

Excellent. Excellent. Right. I don't want a GMO potato. I mean, are there even GMO potatoes? I don't know. You don't have to. Potatoes last a long time. I don't think so.

You don't need to. All right. Yeah. Storm correctly. Heading in that direction, though. Do you eat potato chips? That's my guilty pleasure. Oh, yeah.

It's tough. The kettle chips are tough. Fucking real hard, right? I's my guilty pleasure. Oh, yeah. It's tough. The kettle chips are tough. Fucking real hard, right? I'm like, oh, that's vegan, you know? I try not to. Vegan can be bad.

I have a friend who's vegan. He's fat as fuck. Well, it's never been easier. It's never been easier to be an unhealthy vegan. I mean, you just walk the aisles at Whole Foods

or Air One. Like, you know, there's so many vegan, you know, ice creams now and like sort of meat alternatives and things that are tasty. And spaghetti is totally vegan if you get it from the right place. Oh, yeah.

Without egg. Yeah. So there's plenty of options now. And so just because you're vegan, that doesn't mean that you're eating a healthy diet. For sure. You know, that's important, I think, for people to understand. Yeah. And there's a lot of people also that think that drinking juice, drinking fruit juice is really good for you.

Be careful about that, folks. Because, like, you're not supposed to, if you drink, like, a quart of orange juice, that's not how that juice is supposed to get to your body. The way the juice is supposed to get to your body is by eating a fucking orange. Exactly. Yeah. When you drink like a quart of pineapple juice, like what a fucking shock of sugar to your system, just because it's attached to fruit, which we assume rightly so is healthy. Just have some goddamn fruit, drink some water while you're having a big plate of pineapple and you'll be way better off than drinking pineapple juice. Yeah.

I couldn't agree with you more. You know, we were talking about fiber. It's like, why would you remove all the fiber from that plant? I think juicing has its place though, but there's a huge difference between that gallon of Tropicana at the grocery store and cold pressing, you know, some kale and spinach with some turmeric in it. That's different. You know what I mean?

Because it doesn't have the sugar. Yeah. The sugar is the real issue, right? I look at it as medicinal. It's like if you want a really concentrated dose of micronutrients and the kinds of highly compacted vitamins and minerals that you can get in some of these foods, these plants, then it has its place. But to, you know, run 20 oranges through a juicer and drink that, you're getting a huge amount of sugar in that. And you're depriving yourself of the digestive process and the fiber that comes with just eating the whole food.

Like nature figured it out, man. Like, why are you trying to, you know, it's just like, the more you focus on eating these kinds of foods close to their natural state, your palate changes and you start to desire them. Like I know these guys that are, uh, that are fruitarian, like they, all they eat is fruit. Like this is their whole lifestyle, right? It's called the 80, 10, 10, 80, 10-10 diet, 80% carbs, 10% protein, 10% fat. But essentially what it means is they eat fruit all day long. That's it. Totally raw. They'll eat like 30 bananas a day. I've heard of these guys. Right. And so somebody who is from the Atkins ketosis, low carb camp will tell you that that's an extremely unhealthy thing to do. Now, I'm not a fruitarian.

I don't have any direct experience with that. I don't know what the long-term ramifications of living that lifestyle are. But I do know people that live this way, and they're super healthy people, and some of them are amazing athletes. Like my friend Michael Arnstein, he's fruitarian. He has been forever. And he was like the fifth fastest guy at the New York City Marathon not too many years ago. Like an elite athlete, you know, who's eating this way. That's interesting. Literally, he has to eat so much fruit that he has like two giant extra refrigerators in his house.

And he would have to drive this big truck to, like, a fruit wholesaler once a week. And, like, the guy at the wholesaler thought that he had, like, a bodega or something like that. Because he couldn't believe how much fruit this guy was buying, you know? One of the UFC fighters eats like that.

I believe Nate Diaz eats like that. I think he's on the 30 bananas a day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well... But that didn't work. He got his ass kicked his last week. Yeah, I mean, Mac Danzig was playing around with it for a while. I don't know if he's still on it, but people that I've talked to who have dabbled in it say that when they're doing it, they feel amazing.

And these people are trim, and they don't have – look, they're not getting diabetes, and they're getting a tremendous amount of glucose. They're also getting a huge amount of fiber, and they're still meeting their protein needs, which is interesting. So when I look at that, it just makes me, you know, it gives me a different perspective on this obsession that we have with protein. Like everyone's walking around worried about, you know, meeting their protein needs. And the truth is, is that, you know, the average semi-sedentary person is eating two to five times the recommended daily allowance of protein. Like, it's a non-issue. It's really kind of a red herring. I should clarify that Nate Diaz was probably injured.

I think there was something wrong with him in his last fight. So it had nothing to do with his diet. I'm just fucking around. And he also fought Rafael Dos Anjos, which is one of the best fighters in the world. He was the current champion. So his diet, I'm sure, had nothing to do with him losing. which is one of the best fighters in the world, was the current champion. So his diet, I'm sure, had nothing to do with him losing.

But is there higher dietary requirements of protein for people that, like, say, compete in powerlifting or things along those lines? And are there any powerlifters that are vegan? There is a guy called Patrick Baboumian. He's a German dude, German strongman. This dude is the human Wolverine. He's insane. And I had the privilege. I made a YouTube video of it.

Maybe you guys can pull it up. I was on stage with him at an event in Toronto a couple of years ago where he attempted to break a Guinness Book of World Record by being by carrying more weight than any other human being ever had. He put twelve hundred pounds on a chassis that he carried. He had to carry it 10 meters and he accomplished it it was extraordinary and the guy's totally vegan Wow pull that up didn't that guy the mountain from Game of Thrones just break that though I think he did like 1600 pounds yeah he he's like one of the strongest man in the world the guy who's a dude he's gonna be Aquaman that guy no no no he's he's the mountain in the Game of Thrones. He's from Iceland. I'm a little bit behind normis enormous, man Go full screen on that can you already will it fuck us up

Our videos all fucking weird here because we do it off a TriCaster Oh, I gotta tell you I met one of the guys that works at TriCaster. We're hooked up Look at this guy's 1200 pounds. Yeah, why gotta tell you, I met one of the guys that works at TriCaster. We're hooked up. Look at this guy. So that's 1,200 pounds. Yeah. Why does that not look like 1,200 pounds? It's kind of dark. That doesn't look like 1,200 pounds. It definitely is. There were all these people that were verifying it and they had all these scales and shit. How the fuck is that 1,200 pounds? That doesn't seem like it's 1,200 pounds. Why does that look so light? I assure you that it was. How dare you? How dare you lie to me like that?

That's like 50 pounds. Do you guys that it was. How dare you? How dare you lie to me like that? That's like 50 pounds. Do you guys grade it on a scale because he's vegan? Like it's not really 1,200 pounds? 1,200 pounds like dog years? A vegan 1,200 pounds, which is 120 pounds? Well, he's enormous. That guy's fucking giant. And so, whatever it is, that guy got all that muscle from being a

vegan. Like a bull. Bulls eat grass. He hasn't been a vegan his entire life, you know, so it's not like, you know, he was reared that way. But I think he's been that way long enough. And he will tell you that his strength training improved and his agility and his ability to recover was significantly enhanced when he changed his diet to this. Yeah, here's Mountain. Thousand-year-old weightlifting record. Yeah. He put this fucking huge log on his back

that guy's enormous what terrifying yeah it's a different uh it's a different animal especially iceland there's something about iceland you see that vice piece on iceland the strongmen of iceland the vice did a whole video on it like apparently the people in iceland they have a long history of being like strong men competitors for whatever reason. Yeah. There's fucking giant dudes out there, former Vikings or something. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I think, you know, to your point, your question was, you know, do you think that somebody who's of that ilk or, you know, like a power lifter or strength athlete, if their, if their protein requirements are higher,

powerlifter or strength athlete, if their, if their protein requirements are, are higher. Um, I don't know. I know that Patrick supplements with plant-based protein powders from time to time. Um, I don't know that, you know, he, he probably is taking in somewhere between 80 to a hundred grams a day. So it's not, it's not, you know, like pre P brown rice, hemp protein. I like hemp protein. I think it's great. Complete amino acid profile. I mean, essentially, look, it's complicated, right? It's not, we can't be reductionist about it. But in the most general sense, when we're talking about protein, we're talking about amino acids, right?

We're talking about the building blocks of protein. And we're specifically talking about the nine amino acids, you know, the essential amino acids that we can't synthesize on our own, that we have to get from the foods that we eat, right? So it's a question of making sure that we are ingesting those nine essential amino acids, right? So does it matter where they come from? In what form, you know, they are delivered to your body? Does it matter if it's in hemp or if it's in steak we don't know we don't yeah we don't know all i can tell you is that you know i seem to be doing okay with it so and i can just share my experience with it that's all yeah there's um there was that issue where travis barker was in that plane crash do you know that story travis barker the drummer yeah uh-huh i see him yeah i see him at gc ladies all the time yeah he's in the neighborhood

he uh he was in a plane crash and had to get skin grafts and got off of his vegan diet because of that like he was having a hard time healing and starting meat and he healed much quicker yeah i don't know. I hadn't heard that But that's pretty sure he's pretty sure he's you know, he's he's he's pretty hardcore vegan He's partner in that restaurant crossroads. Have you been across roads? No, where's that's phenomenal? Restaurant it's in Hollywood. Yeah, but it's tell Ronan who's the chef there ismind. He's a genius, and the food is extraordinary. You should check it out. Okay.

I'm just stating what I heard, what I read about him after the accident. I hadn't heard that. Is there any properties that would exist in flesh and blood and eating meat that would somehow or another benefit you recovering from an injury? Does that make sense? Yeah, I don't. You know, that would expedite that process I mean there are there's a difference between the way I feel when I eat like wild game versus the way I feel when I eat steak that's like raised factory raised steak or whatever there's a difference in the way your body reacts to it like your body has like

there's a there's a feeling that you eat especially body reacts to it like your body has like there's a there's a feeling that you eat especially like moose moose is very unusual for whatever reason when you eat moose you get this like you almost feel like it's a stimulant it's very strange like when you eat rare because you eat it rare it's very lean and there's this weird like whoa like you get a charge after it very similar to what i get when i eat kale shakes when i when i eat kale shakes one of the things that i tell people um if you want to change your diet like here's one of the best ways eat something healthy get a positive reaction from that you want to repeat it and one of the best positive reactions i've ever gotten is i drink these

kale shakes in the morning i'm call them Hulk loads. I talk about it all the time. It's kale, cucumber, celery, a large chunk of ginger, four cloves of garlic, coconut oil, and an apple. Blend that sucker up together and there is a nutrient blast that you get in there that it's a tangible, stimulant sort of a feeling. Like I get, I feel stimulant. Yeah, that'll get it done. Right. And, and that's what I say to people all the time.

They're like, I'm like, look, man, don't worry about whether you're going to do this all the way or what you're going to do tomorrow. Just like wake up and drink that salad for breakfast and make that connection with how you feel because truly nothing with how you feel. Because truly, nothing will make you feel better in the morning than drinking a super nutrient-dense green shake. Yeah. It's just, I mean, whether it has, you can have variations on a theme. Like I do something similar, it's a little bit different, and it's never the same.

I change it from day to day or whatever. But once you make that connection and you're like, oh, wow. Yeah. You know, then that starts to change the microbial ecology in your gut. Yeah. That's interesting, isn't it? And I think we talked about this last time, too. Like all these studies that are coming out about how important your microbiome is to all kinds of things that impact your health.

is to all kinds of things that impact your health and how there's some evidence to suggest that the quality of your gut biome can impact your cravings, right? Oh, for sure. So sugar, that's a real issue with sugar, right? So when people say, well, I just crave this, you know, my body's telling me that I need it. Well, that's not an objective analysis, right? Just because you crave something, that doesn't mean that your body needs it. Right. It might though. Maybe it does. It might, but it might not. But if I, yeah, exactly. Right. So how do you discern between the two?

Yeah. That's an interesting point. Um, well, that's absolutely a fact when it comes to, uh, gut microbes, when it comes to sugar, that if you feed those microbes a lot of sugar, they become dependent upon it and they want it. Yeah, they need it to survive. And so they're, they're impulsing you. I need more of that. And then you're in this cycle. So they analyze the gut biome of people that are like chocoholics, right? And it was very different from people that are ambivalent about chocolate. That's such a bizarre thing that you could have these organisms living inside your intestinal tract that are actually changing the way you crave things. So they're sending some

sort of stimulus that gets to your brain and it's altering the way you want food in your body. Well, it's an assault to your idea that you're a sentient human being who is in control of your thoughts. And then that leads to, you know, the question of higher consciousness versus, you know, the sort of looping, you know, kind of thing that your brain can do. Right. Like, what is that? You know, when you observe your own thoughts, what is it that you're, who's the observer? Right.

You know what I mean? Like, so. Yeah. Right. So we can get on that rabbit hole. Yeah, if you say you think something's stupid, right? You know what i mean like so yeah right yeah you can get on that rabbit hole you know what i mean like if you're having a dream and you're having a conversation with somebody in a dream and you're surprised at what somebody tells you but you're imagining that right right so because you didn't know in your dream that that person was going to say that thing to

you but on some level obviously you did, that's the complex nuances of creativity, right? For sure. And the complex nuances of just consciousness. Yes. Yeah. The idea that there could be microbes in your body that are stimulating and changing the way your brain functions, that seems so alien to people because we like to think of ourselves as autonomous. Right. But we're not, we're- We're far more microbe than human. Way more. I mean, the percent, I don't know, I can't remember what the percentage is, but it's ridiculous. Like the number of microorganisms

like trumps the number of cells you have in your body by like a factor of, you know, some, I don't know if it's 10 or something crazy. Well, there's more E. coli living in your gut than there have ever been people ever. That's real. Those are real numbers. And it's not, you know, you have to have a healthy symbiotic relationship with this, right? Like you need it to live. It's part of being healthy. Yeah.

We talked about this, I believe, last time, the various forms of probiotics that you engage in. Sauerkraut, I think you said, one of them. Yeah, kimchi. I love kimchi. Kimchi's great. Love that stuff. Boy, my wife fucking hates it, though. Yeah, it's good.

Says it makes me smell tough shit. Yeah, kombucha. I love that stuff, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know what pisses me off, man? That GT's kombucha had to pull the really good stuff and put that watered-down horse shit because it's more than one-half of 1% alcohol because of the fermentation process. Tiny trace of fermentation that left a little bit of alcohol in it that caused this whole thing.

And they had to pull everything. Nanny state. We started making our own. Have you ever made your own kombucha? Yes, I did. So you have the big scoby. I've been a kombucha drinker since 94. Oh, wow. And when I started drinking it, Andy Dick turned me on to it. And Andy Dick gave me a fucking slab of kombucha fungus to take home. And I got a bowl

and I started brewing it in my refrigerator. That's OG, man. Old school. That was long before GTs or anybody was doing this. Oh, you couldn't buy it. I used to have a bowl, like a huge salad bowl in my refrigerator with a fucking living fungus in it. And I would have the saran wrap on it and there was sugar and stuff in the bowl. I forget what the ingredients were. And it would feed off of that. And I would leave it in there for a certain amount of time and then pour it into a glass and drink it. It's great. And it would feed off of that, and I would leave it in there for a certain amount of time and then pour it into a glass and drink it. It's great. But it was too much of a pain in the ass.

And then somewhere in the late 90s, I started finding it in stores. And then I got into it. But now, I mean, I have a bunch here. It's everywhere. I don't go. I mean, I drink it every day. And when I go on the road, most of the times, I'll find a Whole Whole Foods and I'll stock up on it and leave it in my hotel room. I think it's probiotics are so huge. I'm very rarely sick.

I mean, very rarely. And I travel a lot. And one of the things that I attribute that to is probiotics. I think that you really, it's one of the unsung heroes of the immune system that people don't take into consideration. The symbiotic relationship that we have with all these weird microorganisms that you ingest. And the more of those you have, the less deficits you have in terms of your nutritional intake and the more positive microbes and positive bio-organisms that you take into your body, the more you're going to have, the whole system's going to function better and you're going to be able

to fight off immune or fight off disease better. Yeah, for sure. The example that I always give, I think I might have shared this last time. I'm not sure. It was the last time. It was a long time ago, by the way. It was a long time ago. Probably nobody saw that anyway.

But the example that I always give is from Sup Size Me, the Morgan Spurlock documentary, where he decides he's going to eat McDonald's for 30 days straight. And for people that saw the movie, you might remember that a couple days into this experiment, he can't imagine how he's going to make it through 30 days. And there's that scene where he's in the car and he actually vomits out the window after he drinks a milkshake or something like that he's just like this is the worst and then and then fast forward like two weeks later and there's a scene where he's like waking up in the morning and he's like I feel so sick he's like I feel terrible he's like let's go to McDonald's you

know first breakfast and then he eats his, whatever he ate for breakfast at McDonald's that morning. And like, he walks out and he's like, I feel awesome. You know, like he had to get, there's like, yeah, he had to get his fix. And so, you know, what I see in that is somebody whose microbiome has adjusted. He has replaced, microbiome has adjusted. He has replaced, because at the time, his girlfriend was a vegan chef, right? So he was coming off of eating essentially, you know, plant-based diet, goes into this McDonald's thing. And by virtue of, you know, bombarding his system with McDonald's food, he repopulates his gut biome with the kind of microorganisms that feed off McDonald's food, right? So suddenly, you know, because those microorganisms are on the food that you're eating, right?

And then they seed into your gut, and then they start to propagate. And suddenly, he's craving these foods that were making him sick two weeks earlier that he couldn't imagine continuing to eat. That's the weirdest thing about diet is you're essentially creating a civilization in your body and the trip it really is it really i mean you're you are you're you're a super organism you are a container and human beings are the microbiome of the planet earth right yeah yeah i mean that's a good sign that our Earth is sick. When you check out our ocean.

We're an unhealthy gut bacteria for the planet. In a lot of ways. I mean, it really is. It's almost like everything behaves in this sort of fractal manner, where the bigger you get, and the Earth itself is probably, you know, a microbe in the greater sense of the galaxy, which is a microbe in the greater sense of the universe. And it's all sort of connected in some weird way. And the lower you get down to gut microbes and how you fuel those gut microbes and how it impacts the health of the actual super organism itself, the human being, that's really

fascinating. It really is. It really is when you stop and think about it because very few people think of themselves as being a host for life like I am just this I'm just trying to keep my garden healthy you know the garden of my body which is filled no you think of it I am rich roll I am this one I am the one I'm one I am one thing but you're not no one is one thing but the brain thinks it's one thing which is a fucker man it's what a weird thing that your brain doesn't realize hey you know um i'm getting all these signals to eat mcdonald's because i've got all

these weird asshole mcdonald's bacteria living in my gut and what I need to do I need to get some cucumber bacteria down in there to fuck with the McDonald's bacteria It's very it's a very fascinating thing to be a human being and to be completely disconnected from that reality without Externally taking it in in the form of education and knowledge and then having to in the form of education and knowledge and then having to internalize it having to think about and go okay i need to take into consideration that i am not just a one i am a container for all these different organisms and the the amount of positive organisms will directly affect the way the brain works fuck that's hard that's hard to, man. That's hard to wrap your head around. Then factor in the emotional override that takes over, that compels you to take an action

irrespective of the logical choice after you've been educated. Because I think that's equally as powerful, if not more powerful. Yeah. And oftentimes that can be adjusted. All of it can be adjusted with momentum. If you can just, just fucking force yourself into a pattern that's more positive, just somehow or another say, okay, you know, like some people say, I'm going to start training for a marathon. I'm going to start on Monday and Monday, I'm going to run, you know, two miles. And then, you know, we're going to, I'm going to run, you know, two miles and then, you know, we're going to, I'm going to be on the system of recovery and this is what I'm going to do. And you're going to go into training.

I'm going to start a training camp. It's all written down. And if you can do that, if you can do that with your diet, I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said, I have lost a tremendous amount of weight since listening to your podcast because I started incorporating kale shakes into my diet. That's my primary breakfast is a kale shake, and it changed everything. I mean, I'm talking about hundreds. It's almost like a joke.

Like I run into people and they go, dude, I lost 100 pounds from your podcast. Okay, another guy. It's almost like a joke. Like you guys are all. I mean, you tweeted out that I was coming on the podcast, and there's like 50 comments after that about Hulk loads. It's like all about the Hulk load. Well, I added beets to the Hulk loads because of you.

Oh, you did? You recommended. Beets will get you out of bed in the morning. Beets are fantastic. That's the ultimate pre-workout boost. What a nutrient-rich plant that is or root that is. They're amazing. Just like the first time you do it, though, don't freak out the first time you take a dump. I know

Yeah, you know it's crazy is actually done You go to the store and you get you get the beets right and you put them on the thing and like unless you say Otherwise they they're gonna cut the the beet greens off and throw them away. Like that's's the good stuff, man. It's also good as well. Yeah, it's definitely good as well. I mean, I don't know why people don't think that that's edible. Isn't that strange? It's like we just have this idea that we're very rigid in, like, our idea, like, what you eat and what you don't eat. Like, just throw that out.

Chop that off. Beet greens are awesome. Yeah, they don't taste bad. It's not like it's weird. You never see a beet green salad. That's not common. We do at our house, Joe Rog't taste bad. It's not like it's a... It's weird. You never see a beet green salad. Mm-hmm. That's not common. We do at our house, Joe Rogan.

Whoa. Rich Roller just called me out. What are some other, like... I mean, here's a funny thing that I fucking saw the other day at Whole Foods. Bok choy is the new kale. How about it's bok choy, you fucks? That's good, too. It's not the new kale. It's just more

But what is that why do people have to do that? Why if they ruin everything with their nonsense? Just orange is the new black we live in a commercial, you know, we live in a commercial society, right? They're gonna push something else out there. I don't know, you know, it's the same thing that you know, there's a You know why BuzzFeed BuzzFeed is always, you know, there's crazy headlines about crazy stuff that's inflammatory and whatever. Clickbait. Exactly. Yeah.

Do you grow your own vegetables? That's our next thing that we're looking into. And we have a bunch of land. So it's underutilized. And so we just started meeting with a bunch of people to start growing. Yeah, we've been doing that for a while now at my house. And it's very rewarding to have like a – we had a cucumber salad the other day, cucumber and tomato salad. It was so good.

It was like this – I saw this when it was a fucking seed in a little container and put it in the dirt. What do you use for a fertile – oh, you don't grow. So you don't have like a – Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, we'll get into that once we start growing but the one thing that we are doing which is fucking awesome is uh we started um we have we have all these uh beehives now we have like 40 hives at our house um that we're hosting for a friend who is like an organic beekeeper who creates his own honey. And that's been super interesting.

Also for the kids to learn about what that's all about. I mean, that is so interesting. That's cool. Which is really cool. I want to do that. And I also, I was thinking about doing that. I was like, God, that's a lot of work. I've got to bring in a fucking beehive guy and all that.

But I found out about this new invention yeah this guy in australia has created you've seen it the tap it's the yeah he had like the craziest kickstarter of all time yeah yeah i retweeted it he raised like insane millions of dollars he was only trying to raise like 100 grand or 200 grand or something and he raised like four million dollars in like no time because it's in his invention is so astounding well i was definitely a part of that because when I got it, it wasn't nearly that much. I tweeted the shit out of that. I thought it was amazing. It's a tap. You actually probably

had a lot to do with him raising all that money. I had a little bit of something. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people reacted the way I... Well, look, the 100% of what had to do with it was this invention is amazing. $12 million! Holy shit! Dude, when I looked at it, I swear to God, I don't think it was more than a couple hundred thousand dollars.

I mean, I think I looked at it maybe a couple weeks ago, and I think it was like at four. Which is a lot! That's amazing. But it just shows how cool it is. Well, a good idea. Well, let's play it, because it's really amazing. If anybody hasn't heard, the people that are listening, you're only going to hear it, but this guy's

invented a beehive that essentially has a dial that you can turn, and the dial changes the honeycombs into a flow pattern. It actually opens up, and then the honey drips down slowly into these jars. It doesn't disturb

the bees. It doesn't disturb any of the normal natural processes that these bees engage in to make honey. And it's so much less invasive. And when you see it, if you go to the video, it's called Flow Hive. If you go to the video online, it'll do a much better job of explaining how all this is made.

But it's really fucking cool. Right. It's Indiegogo, right? It's an Indiegogo campaign. Yeah. But you don't get the bee pollen and you don't get the actual honeycomb itself, which I like to eat. I love that stuff. Yeah.

I mean, the idea is that you're not disturbing the bees, right? You're not really invading their, you're not impeding on their kind of habitat was that make honey vegan now because honey wasn't vegan for a long time I mean look there are there is a hardcore you know vegan perspective that that honey you know you shouldn't eat honey right animal product but it's not and I respect people that have that opinion. I mean, I think that, you know, my perspective on it is that, you know, our bee populations are threatened because of, you know, human beings being fucking idiots. And, you know, we've fucked a lot of shit up, right?

Cell phones too, right? And so I think that, you know, our family is trying to be of service by helping foster the cultivation of bee populations in a sustainable way. By getting involved, there's one school of thought, like, we'll leave it alone, right? But this is a threatened population that needs a little bit of, you know, graceful intervention in order to help help them, you know, foster their population. So to the extent that, you know, I can play a small part in that, I think that's a cool thing. No, I think that's a cool thing as well. And I agree. There's there's that the very hardcore segment of the vegan population that don't think that you should eat honey. But they don't have it like this.

You know, this is like normally when you get honey, it's like this really complicated process. You have to pull the hives out. You have to scrape the honey off and extract it in that way. This is totally different. This is a different animal. Yeah, I mean, commercial honey production, you know, there's practices involved with that that are harmful to those insects, right? So to the extent that you can find a better way to do it, where you're still, you know, able to harvest the honey in a way that is not, you know, kind of overly tapping into what they need to survive and thrive. I don't know, you know, it's also again,

this is like, you know, it gets into like, splitting hairs, like, it's like, all right, we're gonna talk about this when we have, you know, when you know, 55% of CO2 emissions is caused by animal agriculture, like we have bigger fish, bigger things like so, you know, I'm just trying to kind of, you help be populations in in in our tiny little way by educating my kids about it and by being a home to these 40 hives which is a trip that's a it's a lot of hives 40 hives we have yeah like what is it like how much space is there like i think they stack them four high so there's 10 of those 10 little towers yeah how tall is the tower down the hill i don't, three or four feet high.

And they brought them in the middle of the night, and it was like, okay, are we going to have swarming bees? Is there going to be like, and we were like, don't go near them for a couple days, let them acclimate. They have to get used to their environment. Wow. I mean, the way the bee populations function is a trip. It's really trippy. The little aliens. Do you have to plant specific flowers around your area to help them? We haven't had to do that. I mean, the big kind of hurdle that we had to get over was making sure that we had adequate water supply for

them, but not that I'm aware of. We have, in our property, we have specific plants and flowers that attract bees and other ones that attract hummingbirds. We have, in our property, we have specific plants and flowers that attract bees and other ones that attract hummingbirds. We have a lot of hummingbirds on our property just because of that. Because we put certain plants and flowers. But the bees have a real issue, apparently, with cell phones. I was reading this whole thing about how... Oh, the towers, like, impact them, something like that? The actual signals themselves, they impact the bees ability to communicate.

They fuck with their head. They can hear that shit. It wouldn't surprise me. I mean, the way that they have the high, they literally have the hive mind and the way that they, they sort of function in that way. Like the,

the, you know, the frequency at which they're communicating is so mysterious and amazing. Yeah. It's, it's so cool. I've told this story before, but you might not have heard it. When we were on Fear Factor, one of the stunts they had,

they had these people, they had to get handcuffed to a pole or something like that. And then we covered them with bees. And while we're doing this, the beekeeper told us that we had to stop filming because a local population of bees had came over to investigate his population of bees. And they were above us in this cloud in the air sorting it out. They weren't fighting. They were somehow or another communicating. Like, who the fuck are you guys? Oh, man, we're here for a TV show. Okay, so you're not moving in. No, we're not moving in.

Are you guys taking our pollen? No, we're not moving in. Are you guys taking our pollen? No, we're not taking your pollen. And they had to work it out. They worked it out. They worked it out. They disappeared. And then we kept filming. But we had to stop.

That's so amazing. It was really cool. It was really cool to watch because it was like, what is going on? It was weird how people weren't interested in it Because they're like Oh we gotta stop filming Apparently like there's a local bee population That's intermixed with this bee population I was like what? First of all

I was high as fuck So it was super Super interesting to me So I was like wait a minute Wait a minute They're talking? Like how do you know who's bees or who's bees? He goes

And he was like you could tell Just by the way they're Swarming in the air They're trying to work this out And so there was just like small cloud of these bees because he had brought a lot of bees and the local bees got together with his bees and they were Hovering and they but they had a disperse like they told everyone to get away They told all the crew to get away everyone leave the area

You know he wanted to make sure that there was nothing fucking with this interaction this strange right because he has you have like the beekeeper guy yeah well he's a deep respect for bees this guy really does love bees it was really really interesting it was interesting for me too because i was covered with bees in that episode i mean they were all over my hair my face and my arms and everything like that and i never got stung i didn't get stung a couple people got stung on the set but i don't know you know what happened It could have been like you know like maybe if like a bees in your armpit And you you you move your arm, and it gets trapped, and it's like fuck this and it stings you Probably just just accidental circumstances that came from having millions or thousands or whatever it was a beer right right?

That's pretty interesting. Yeah, it was really cool. It was really cool seeing them all get together and try to figure it out Just flying overhead Communicating so in some way that we just really don't even have a clue we believe pheromones are involved But we also know that there's some sort of signal that they're sending out. We just don't know what it is. You know The whole insect world is a real trip i mean they really are alien they just really are some strange alien life form we found them on another planet we'd be blown away yeah you know i mean you know just the idea that there's a queen and and and the fact that the hive is lost without it. Yeah. And that everything kind of falls into place when the queen is inserted into the population.

I mean, I can't begin to, you know, it's like I know very little about this. How about the queen's a murdering bitch? She's got a fucking stinger that doesn't come off. She doesn't have like barbs on it the way everyone else does. And what she does is she wanders around the hive looking for female babies and she stabs them right through the fucking honeycomb Yeah, that's what the female uses. It's like Game of Thrones. Oh, it's awful She's fucking heartless cunt and you know one day she will be usurped there A new female will come along and kick her ass and that's it

But right now she's gonna stab those babies So she runs around like sticking her needle in the honeycomb when she smells a female the fucking girl in there What's coming take my spot? No threat to the throne yeah, it's very bizarre world of bugs have you ever seen the leaf cutter ant? the documentary they did where they They cemented they poured cement through this leaf cutter ant hive, this enormous hill, and then they dug it out and revealed the structure.

Yeah. It was incredibly labyrinthine, right? And it went, it was vast. Vast. It was huge. Yeah. Huge and incredibly complex. Like, they had areas where these leaves would ferment, and then they had pipes that led, like, tubes that led through to the sky or to the surface area where they would hit air so that they could, the fermentation process, the gases could be released.

Yeah, that's crazy. Like, with these tiny brains. How the fuck are they figuring that out? Like, we don't even know. Well, human beings would fuck that up in an instant. For sure. Unions would get involved. There it is. Caving in. Look at that. Yeah, I did see this. Industry in the rainforest. It's like they did an

archaeological dig to extract it, right? Yeah, they filled it up with cement. First of all, it's enormous. You look at how wide it is. It's probably 50 feet wide. And it's insane. It's very deep as well. And there's so much to it.

There's so much going on there. And how are they communicating? Who is the architect of all this structure? How did they figure this out they all know how to do this like what in the fuck man unbelievable and unbelievable and a huge fucking mystery and until like a decade or two ago we had no idea what the fuck was even below the surface we had no idea what they were doing down there. I mean, it really is amazing. It is just absolutely amazing.

Have you seen the ant death spiral? Have you ever seen that? No. Whoa, that's a trip. Check this out. You're like king of the obscure animal video. So I do it in my free time, man. I love to watch animal nature videos. I think it's very underappreciated, the uniqueness or just the eccentricities of the animal world.

Just how amazing and fascinating complex it is. What is that crazy rodent that looks like a huge... Capybara? Yeah. Do you see that one where they're climbing into a hot tub? No. They have this hot tub party There's an animal there's an ant capybara amazing All right

This is an ant death spiral and this is when the Queen dies When a queen dies and the scent is no longer there and they don't know who to follow they don't know what the fuck to do And they go into this spiral and they will just do this until they've run out of energy and food and they will fucking die Is I mean I'm probably a shitty job. They just saying this they'll just continue to spin like that until they just yeah perish Yeah, yeah, they don't know where to go. They don't know who to follow. I mean, there's a vert There's a hierarchy in the ant community I'm sure it could be explained. See if you can find an explanation for it, Jamie. I probably butchered it.

But the idea being that they're following the scent of the queen, and somehow or another they lose it, and so they don't know what to do, so they just start going in a spiral. Maybe someone stepped on the queen or something happened. They removed the queen, perhaps. And a bird might have stolen the queen. Like a dragon come down, down swoop take away their queen Yeah, world's crazy mysterious place well insects in particular could we we know we don't think of them that much because they're so small

But ants have the almost exact same Calculated biomass as human beings when it comes to weight meaning that there's exactly the same amount of ant weight For the bodies of ants on earth as there are humans Oh, oh, yeah I mean in total in total like if you added up all the ants and all the humans that the Total mass would be the equal. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's crazy That's how many ants there are yeah, I mean how many fucking ants does it take to equal a 180-pound person? It's got to be a lot.

What's the average height or weight of a person? It's probably somewhere around there, like 160 or something like that, between men and women. Not in the U.S. Yeah, it's like 100 pounds more than that, right? The average. What is it? How to make ants commit suicide or go into a spiral. You can make them do it. You can make them do it? Why would you do that, right? The average, who is it? How to make ants commit suicide would go into a spiral.

You can make them do it? Why would you do that, dick? Yeah, that's totally not cool. You simply divert the ants into an enclosed space such as a plant pot. The largest ant mill I've ever discovered was staggering 1,200 feet in diameter, with each ant completing a circuit every two and a half hours. Holy shit. Whoa.

So you can make them do it? Yeah. That unable to break free, owing to their lack of sight, and they march around in a loop until they drop dead. What does it say before that? It explains it. How do they remove the... Army ants navigate by following the pheromone trails left behind by others.

However, should enough of them lose the scent, they begin to follow the ant immediately in front of them in a huge ant spiral forms. Ah. Whoa. They follow the scent of those in front of them. That's a fucking trip, man. How weird. It's weird that not only did nature somehow or another have a need for this

But it you know it came about it Developed and it's been the same way that way for who knows how many right? I mean, what is the evolutionary purpose of that though? Hmm? Just they follow each other. They can't see shit But who the fuck is the first guy who does he know how does he know what he's doing shit going deep? Not enough leaves and making these from fermentation bowls in the ground and like wow Trippy fucking world the insect world is the insect world to me is one of the most bizarre worlds or the you know Most overlooked because they're so small

We don't think of them as as alien as they truly are you know if an ant was the size of a dog it was Like he's a fucker. I mean it's downright prehistoric. Yeah, Oh beyond yeah I mean they're prehistoric even to dinosaurs dinosaurs look at ants and what the fuck is that? Crazy thing with an exoskeleton with unbelievable physical strength. I mean, the physical strength that an ant has. Yeah, the power to weight ratio is pretty off the charts. Oh, it's incredible. Incredible.

Have you ever seen ants carry large things away? Just what the fuck, man? The ant world is a ruthless, evil, vicious world, too. You ever see when the female ants get a hold of, I think it's leaf cutters as well. They get a hold of a male. Males are larger and they have wings. Might not be leaf cutters, but whatever it is. They chop the wings off of the male, chop his arms off and legs, and then carry him to the hive to breed.

I haven't seen that. Bitches. So rude. I got to bone up on my nature videos, I think. Yeah, I probably have to bone down. I probably have too many of them in there. Too much useless information. How do you have the time, Joe?

I don't know. I don't know where it comes from. I get compelled to research things and to follow up and to start reading and watching things. And the next thing you know, I've gone on this crazy cycle is that a yeah what kind of answer is it the biggest ants two and a half inches oh that's a big ass ant well have you ever seen that with wings my friend brian cowan at one point in time was studying to be an ant scientist and he had spent some time in rainforest, I think it was Borneo, New Guinea?

I forget what it was. But they had to, everyone stayed in these tents, these elevated platforms. They had to coat the posts with turpentine. Because there were so many ants and if the army ants found you, if they found you and one of them decided to bite you,

just like they follow the scent, then millions and millions and millions of them would just eat you alive. And people would regularly get killed by ants there. That's crazy. How about the fact they kill elephants? They climb up the elephant's leg, they find the ear, and they start eating the fucking elephant's brain. And then they all follow the scent and they all follow, go up the elephant's body and eat his fucking brain alive.

Yeah. From the inside out. Ants kill a lot of things. You wouldn't think so. Well, all you have to do is leave something out on your kitchen counter for five minutes. Yeah. And out of mysterious nowhere, a line of ants will appear. Yeah.

Or flies. And then if you remove it, they disappear. Well, have you ever seen something outside that wasn't there before, and then all of a sudden the flies find it? And then within minutes, there's all these fucking flies. There was no flies. And then within minutes, they find this, and somehow or another they go, yo, yo, yo, here we go. We got something. And then there's all these fucking flies. There was no flies. And then within minutes, they find this and somehow or another they go, yo, yo, yo,

here we go. We got something. And then there's all these fucking flies. It's very, like, how are they doing that? Like, we don't even know. We have no idea. I don't know. We got diverted. You need, I know. You need an insectologist. Is that what they would be called? Nope. Come on that. Some sort of a word for that.

What is it? Entomologist? Entomologist, that's right. Is that what it is? Yeah. What's the study of words, the origins of words? Etymology? Etymology. Etymology.

Don't get confused. Order one and get the other. I'm trying to find out the origin of the word cunt. Well, I know about bugs. I don't know what you're trying to get to. There's a lot of layers to that, Brian Callen. What compelled him to want to study that? I don't know trying to get a lot of layers to that Brian Callen what what compelled him to want to study that I don't know he's a there's a lot of layers to Brian yeah Brian's a deep dude you know you you start getting to know him you dig deeper and deeper and

deeper you find out his educational background and he's uh he knows a lot of shit about weird stuff you know yeah yeah yeah but that's that him out. He said he could hear them marching, the ants. You hear them walking at night. Yeah, it's crazy. So many of them on the floor that you just realize, like, oh, my God. There's millions of them. You were talking about how you're a huge Radiolab fan, right? Yes.

Have you gotten down with the show Invisibilia? No. What is that? Oh, it's pretty cool, man. I think you would dig it. Is that a is that? Oh, it's pretty cool, man. I think you would dig it. Is that a different podcast? Yeah, it's a different podcast. It's another one of those Invisibilia.

It's another kind of NPR offshoot. You know, like how sort of Ira Glass at This American Life, all these producers that have worked for him have now started all these other podcasts. Super interesting stories. There was one recently about a guy who I guess is a pretty well known guy. He's blind. I think he went blind as a as a like a four year old or something like that. He lost his sight. And he started in school, he started making these like clicking noises with his mouth, like, like that. And his teachers would say, you know, what are you doing? Settle down, stop doing that.

And his mother realized very early on that there was some purpose to this. There was some reason why he was doing this. Echolocation. Yeah, and what they realized is that he was developing, over many years of practicing this, like a finely attuned sonar ability. years of practicing this like a finely attuned sonar ability like he would literally be able to figure out like where he was and what was in a room and what was going on by basically making these clicking noises and the sound waves bouncing off and he developed the security to be able to discern from that the parameters of his environment, to the extent that he goes running, he rides

a bike. What? It's insane what this guy has been able to do as a blind person. He goes running. And his whole thing is that he doesn't think that he's anything special. He thinks that all blind people could develop this skill, but that our education around blindness is sort of a vernacular of disability, right? Where we say, well, you're disabled, you can't do this, so we're going to put you into this system. And this is how we do it

with blind people. And he's like, that's bullshit. Like everybody could learn to do what I'm doing. We need to like Empower blind people in this way. It's super interesting. It's like a long interview with this guy But anyway each week they have some kind of interesting story like that Well there's a video of a young kid who can do that a young kid who walks on the street makes clicking noises And he knows where trash cans are and stuff That's crazy right yeah, well so like the, the latent abilities that we all have, right? If we develop them, it's sort of like how the disability unlocks some other

aspect of your brain that, that needs to develop in order to survive. One of the best pool players in the world is this young man named Shane Van Boning and he's deaf. He's been deaf since birth. And when he plays, he shuts his hearing aid off, and it allows him to concentrate more. Yeah, here's this guy. Look at this. Oh, that's the guy. That's him. This is a different guy than the other guy was a young black guy.

Right, so this is the guy from the podcast. So is he clicking? Daniel Kish. He is completely blind. In fact, he doesn't even have eyes, save for prosthetic ones. Daniel has never seen a tree, a car, or even the bicycle he's riding. So how does he know where he's going? He's literally driving down the street.

The answer can be found in the clicking sound you hear. It's called echolocation. Bats use it to fly around in the dark, and dolphins use it to navigate the oceans. Daniel uses echolocation, or sound, to see. Every environment has its own acoustical signature. Every surface has its own acoustical signature. Daniel was born with an aggressive form of eye cancer called retinal blastoma.

By the time he was 13 months old, both of his eyes were removed. You're 45. So you lost your sight at such a young age. You don't have any memory of vision. I have no memories at all. I was using echolocation from the age of two or younger, but I really didn't know that much about it. It was just how you adapted to your environment without really understanding it? Yes, I doubt very seriously that most sighted people give much thought or attention about how they see. So I really didn't give much thought or attention about how I see. Daniel uses echolocation to ride his bike, cook. Is this a dish that you normally cook Daniel or are you experimenting with me? This is a total experiment.

And even hike alone in the mountains. Using sound to see can be a hard concept for a sighted person to understand. What the fuck? But Daniel will tell you he sees his environment as a series of images created in his mind based on what he hears using echolocation. So you're calling out into the environment. You're essentially asking the environment, what are you and where are you? And you're receiving those answers. So you're getting an image in your mind. Yes, I definitely get three-dimensional images

with depth and character and richness. And I can process those, and I can interact with those. From his modest bungalow in Long Beach, Daniel runs a small non-profit called World Access for the Blind. Since being established in 2000, World Access has been the lone voice preaching echolocation. In fact, every major blind organization in America does not support Daniel's mission. So Daniel, the National Federation of the Blind will say that echolocation is just too complicated for most blind people to grasp. It's not so much the Federation that's a concern.

You have here a blindness profession, the blindness field, who, by and large, really kind of intractably remains committed, if you will, to a traditional approach which is about in my opinion restriction it is about this is how you do things this is the right way for a blind person to do things this is safe this isn't safe watching that guy drive his bike is a fucking trip that is bizarre right and so you watch that and it makes you just think about human capability in a different way well it certainly does it certainly makes you wonder like what what else we could do you know if we could figure that out if there's a person like him that can figure out how to see things with his sound, making echolocations, what other possible senses could be developed to that extent?

Well, in the animal kingdom, aren't they training these German shepherds that can smell cancer yeah like early onset of cancer they're doing similar things with you know rats and you know i mean obviously those animals have a more developed you know sense in that area but to the extent that human beings have unlocked you know potential in areas that we haven't really looked at i think it's pretty interesting well people certainly have finely developed senses like certain people that play instruments have finally developed senses of sound uh sommeliers have finally developed sense of taste like you ever talk to someone who's like a real wine sommelier and they can they can drink a glass of wine have a sip of it and tell you what part of the world it came from like that's real that i mean they can sip it and tell you what part of the world it came from like that's real that i mean they can sip it and tell

you what part of france they're they're growing these fucking grapes yeah well there are these people with uh crazy noses that work in the perfume industry that are highly paid to you know decipher these accents yeah it's like something i i couldn't even relate to but i think in general you know uh need is the mother of that invention. Like, you know, somebody who's not in Daniel's condition is not on their own going to develop echolocation. Right. You know what I mean? It also makes you really wonder if there are fields, like we were talking about how bees can tune into the sound that a cell phone makes and it fucks with them.

I wonder if there's anything like that that's affecting us in some sort of a strange way that we're not aware of because one of the things that i'm always like really aware of when i go if i go to the wilderness if i go to a real wild place is the sound of it is different than the sound of silence here like if you're in a park here and it's beautiful it's nature it's nice it's relaxing but there's a certain tone to like Prince of Wales I don't know Alaska is a perfect example we were there and we were on the top of this mountain we're sitting there I was like do you hear that like it's like it sounds different it feels different here it's

like you're getting a signal of no signal. There's no cell phone. There's no radio. You're not tuning into anything other than nature itself. And it has a different tone to it than a city has. Well, for sure. I mean, I would say that there's you're saying there's no signal, but I think there's probably a really powerful signal. It's just a different signal.

Yeah, I shouldn't say no is the wrong way to say it. Yeah, you know, listen, everything is vibration and energy. And, you know, if you don't think that, you know, that isn't real, you know, go hang out with negative people for a week and see how you start behaving. So true. You know, an environment is no different. And we tend to believe that if we can't see something, that it's not real. So here's, you know, Daniel, who, you know, is putting out sound waves into the world and he's able to figure out what his environment is.

You can't see that. He can't see that. But to him, it's very real. And, you know, we're surrounded by all kinds of crazy invisible energies and waves from cell phone towers to Wi-Fi signals and all this kind of stuff. I mean, do we know how this is impacting us? I know people that are super sensitive to Wi-Fi and cell phones. Like they get headaches and all kinds of stuff. What is this, Jamie?

Student science experiment finds plants won't grow near Wi-Fi router? Some ninth graders in Denmark did a test where they put, what they said was where they tested, it's the same radiation a cell phone gives off. So they put some water cress, I think is what it's called, or garden cress, and six trays in one room, six trays in another with two Wi-Fi routers. And essentially, as you can see in the picture, it didn't grow. So the ones in the Wi-Fi routers is no different in the environment other than the fact that Wi-Fi routers were there?

Yeah. Yeah, that ain't good. That's frightening. It is. 12 days of growth. It totally makes sense. I mean, there's a signal. If your phone can pick up that signal, there's something in the air.

And that something in the air is probably disruptive to other things that are also in the air. Yeah, that's one of the... If it's fucking up the bees, what's it doing to your brain? Exactly. Right? It feels different, man. When you go to a place with no cell phone signal, it literally feels different. And it's so rare that we do that.

So rare. Yeah, but it's not just the cell phone signal. I mean, it's so rare that we do that. So rare. Yeah. But it's not just, it's not just the cell phone signal. I mean, it's all kinds of things. Yeah. People give off a certain signal too. You know, people want to think that that's hippie and woo woo. But man, when you're around really negative people, you just got to get away from this person. And it's not just, you got to get away from them because they say certain things like they they give off a vibe. You know, that's a hippie thing to say, the vibes. Guys give me a bad vibe, man. But I think it's real.

I think there are certain signals. You walk into a room and you're like, well, there's a heavy energy in here. There's something weird. It doesn't feel right to me. You know, you get like anxious and you've got to leave. Yeah. Everybody's had that experience well that's why nobody wants to buy a house where someone was killed in it right i mean the house is awesome you find out this there was like a double homicide there you're like fuck this place have you ever been up in um uh towards see um, that like dry lake bed in Chatsworth.

Yes. What's that Canyon, uh, called right there. That's creepy. Um, topo. No,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, You know what I'm talking about? I know what you're talking about though. Like I've ridden my,

I ride my bike all, you know, like I do a lot of training around here and I've ridden up that Canyon. It's a great climb, but like there's something weird, you know, you can feel like a weird energy and it turns out know, you can feel, like, a weird energy. And it turns out that...

Box Canyon? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Box Canyon. And, like, what's that? The Manson family. Yeah, there was, like, the Mansons were back there. And also there are, I think it's Boeing is back there, defense contractors, where they were doing, like, nuclear testing in the ground,

which is why that's a dry lake bed. And there's still some people that will tell you that they're, you know, it's like, it's not so safe there. They did some shit out there, you know. Well, they definitely did some shit there. Not only that, there was some, in Simi, there were some water well tests that they did that found traces of rocket fuel in the water well. And there's a cleanup that's going on up there right now. Is it really? Yeah. Santa Susanna Pass,anna pass around there right people are worried about that cleanup because

what they're worried about is that if they start digging and cleaning up that the the dust is going to get into the air and it's going to blow through the valley and whatever trace elements of that rocket fuel apparently there was a lot of disasters up there they did a lot of shit down there in the 50s and the 60s a lot of like early testing on stuff yeah they had like some sort of a nuclear thing there as well I mean apparently there was a nuclear incidents much worse than three miles worse than Three Mile Island really in 1959 they had something worse than Three Mile Island huh apparently I read don't know. I read a study on it, though, and one of the things that said the study, like the half-life of the type of radiation they had was very short-lived. So it's not something that, like, lingers in an area.

The real concern that the, apparently, according to what I read, that the sober environmentalists are concerned with is the rocket fuel that's leaked into the ground and gotten into the well water into that area. That's the real concern. Is that why the lake bed is dry? I don't know. I have no idea why the lake bed is dry. Interesting. I knew a dude who lived near a golf course,

and the pesticides from the golf course leaked into the well, and he got cancer. His neighbor got cancer. Kids in his neighborhood. All throughout their neighborhood, people got cancer. Wow. And they got cancer because of the pesticides. They all got a very specific type of bone cancer.

Scary shit. He doesn't have a femur. One of his femurs is like a metal rod that they replaced his femur with because he had cancer. That's crazy. Yeah. And it's from pesticides. I hope there was a big class action. Yeah yeah i don't know i don't know what what the fuck went down but you know bone cancer from a golf course fuck you know imagine what a rocket facility they're dumping what kind of shit they're dumping into that fucking ground yeah no kidding right i mean you know our world is getting more and more toxic, right?

All these things we have to worry about and think about. Think about, you know, you just look on the back of, you know, the average packaged food that you pick up at the grocery store and all the ingredients in it and, like, you know, who knows what all that stuff is and whether it's safe. And we're entrusting regulatory bodies to make these decisions for us, right? How about medication? Yeah, of course, right?

All the new medications are constantly coming out, side effects. Well, I mean, the commercials are just comedic, you know, like literally way more disclosures about side effects than actual product information. Yeah, we played one for acne medicine the other day that was hilarious. Because there was this like suicidal ideation. Yeah, oh, not just suicidal. They were talking about bloody diarrhea. They had these really pretty girls

and they were walking down the street. They were bopping. One of the girls from that commercial, the redheaded girl, contacted me on Twitter. They had no idea what the fuck they were selling. You know, they were just trying to be pretty. You know, they're not talking in the commercial.

But they're bopping down the street to that Pharrell song, Happy. And they have like beautiful skin and beautiful hair and their perfect bone structure and they literally like bopping as they're walking like they're in some like happy music video and then as they're doing that the they start reading the laundry list of possible potential side effects that are fatal bloody diarrhea stomach cramps all these different things and then they're very specific, which could be fatal. Just because you're getting zits.

And again, like you're saying, like looking at the- You're just kicking back on the couch watching this. I mean, we've signed up for this. I mean, the Orwellian dystopia is like weirder than you could have ever imagined. Right. And again, what you were talking about earlier is you're using a medication to deal with an issue that if you take a holistic approach, what's causing you to have acne? What is causing your skin to break out in some sort of a horrible way that you need this fucking bloody diarrhea inducing medication to combat it? Yeah. I mean, at some point, you know, the side effects far outweigh you know

the condition that you're trying to treat and there's a there's it's too bloody there's there isn't even a single thought put into the cause like why don't we talk about what might be leading to this and maybe some choices that you could make that could alleviate or prevent this no just take Well, you can't make any money with those choices. Enjoy your bloody diarrhea. There's only one way to make the money. The way you make the money is you've got to sell

the stuff. You don't make money by getting people. You can. You can write a book. A book will make some money. It's not going to make as much money as Accutane or something like that. I know. The broccoli growers need to unite.

Yeah, imagine if there was like a plant that cured zits. Just one plant. Boy, would they make that plant illegal quick. Croaching on Pfizer's profits or something. Yeah, all that. What is that stuff? The benzoyl peroxide, the stuff, all that money? Oh, yeah. All that does is that stuff the benzoyl peroxide the stuff all that money oh yeah all that does is gc10 dries your fucking skin out that's what it does it's all the pus gets

dried out your skin feels like shit yeah i mean look you know western medicine is fantastic if you have you know an acute disorder i'm not not like, you know, against Western medicine or pharmaceuticals when appropriate. I just think that, that, you know, we're too quick to take them to, you know, deal with things that might be better addressed in other ways. I agree. And it's also as, why does it have to be one or the other? You know, why does it have to be pharmaceutical drugs are evil or they're great? No, it's like, sometimes they're great and sometimes they're evil. And, you know, the problem is profit. Once profit gets in the way or profit gets into the mix,

that becomes a sole thing you're chasing. It's not like, let's make sure that what we're doing is the most beneficial to society and to human beings possible. No, let's make sure we make a fuckload of money, the most money we could possibly make because getting something passed by the FDA is a huge process that costs millions and millions of dollars. So by the time

you actually do get a product to market, you have to protect that product. You have to protect that money. It's all about money, money and profit. The best thing to do is just be proactive enough about your health so that you can do whatever's under your control to prevent you from getting any kind of, you know, acute disease. Not to say that it doesn't happen, because of course it does. But, you know, I think there's lots of things that could be more deeply explored than, you know, our culture really is, you know, sort of permittable to in kind of our, you know, what we accept as mainstream or not. Like I started recently going to acupuncture, which I'd never done before. Do you think it was bullshit before? Yeah, I've done it. No, I didn't, I didn't think it was bullshit. I mean, you know, I'm a pretty

rational guy, you know, so the idea of sticking, you know, sort of like the idea of meridians and sticking needles into my forehead and all, you know, I was like, I didn't really, you know, I wasn't an immediate, you know, somebody who's going to immediately jump on that bandwagon, but I know a lot of people who have benefited from it. And I was having some things that I wanted addressed, like particularly sleep, like I've been challenged by sleep lately. And so I went to see my friend who's a Chinese medicine doctor and he started doing it on me. And it was, it was really helpful. Yeah. It was really helpful. And it's so interesting, the idea of like balancing energy systems and, you know, kind of how it works. I mean, it's so ornate and, and this, you know,

my friend who's, he's studying Chinese medicine and he's still kind of in his residency. So he's working underneath like this Chinese dude who's been practicing this forever. And they come in and the guy like literally this this this Chinese medicine doctor. The only thing he wants to do is take my pulse on both wrists. And he takes it with his thumb in a couple of different places. is so finely attuned that he can tell all kinds of things about like where you're at based upon the pressure of your pulse and you know the frequency and the tempo and all these sorts of things so he wants to do that and then he wants to look at uh your tongue and he can tell by looking at your tongue like all sorts of crazy shit about where you're at do you believe it's super interesting do you believe it or do you believe in the possible placebo effect?

I think the placebo effect is powerful. You know, I'm into, like, trying anything. You know, why not, right? Like, you know, contempt prior to investigation. That's a good way to get... Get hoodwinked? Yeah, something's going to happen. Well, I mean, I think... With a dude.

But is that better than saying I'm not going to explore that because I think it's BS without having any direct experience? No, but I mean, it's nice to have some sort of proof. Yeah. Something. I mean, how do you prove? I mean, I think that, you know. You run some tests. Some tests on what?

Like, so for example. Have the guy prove that he can actually do that. Well, I mean, all I can tell you is that I was having issues with sleep and relaxation. And this seemed to benefit and alleviate my problem to some extent right we don't know he's not placebo is that the herbs that he prescribed me is that the acupuncture it certainly could be those things because you got to think about like sleep oftentimes is psychological oftentimes sleep is a matter of your ability to relax and we've all been in that situation before when you know you have

to be at work in five hours and if I go to sleep right now I can get four hours sleep and you look at that clock and for whatever reason you you're stuck in that thing because you know that you have to go to sleep right this moment and the pressure of that keeps you awake even if you're tired if you take action to try to alleviate that by acupuncture or whatever it is. Just the mere act of taking action will shift your focus into a cure. And you can oftentimes start thinking that whatever this placebo effect is, is real. I'm not doubting that this guy has a real possible gift or whatever it is, but wouldn't it be nice if we just can prove it? Like, wouldn't you want to prove that?

Wouldn't you want to just work with a bunch of people and find out, oh, look, you know, he's right. This guy does have a gallbladder issue, or he's right. This guy does. I just met a lot of fuckers. Yeah, or doing your TV show. Zone healers and all these crap. I'm becoming much more cynical about this kind of stuff.

Even before that, there was a guy that was working with all these MMA guys that I know, and he was a zone healer and and he's like would press the back your head and tell you from the spots that he was pressing what was wrong with you and it but it was bullshit like he he would like press harder here does that hurt when I do that like yeah cuz you're pressing harder stupid I think I'm dumb and like we had this conversation I'm like how was it how exactly is this working and he was like well your body's ability to heal itself is dependent upon freeing your energy and is how does that work how does that work how does that

work and after badgering him with a bunch of different questions he essentially admitted it was all placebo effect mmm I was like Jesus fucking Christ and he was charging like 160 bucks to get adjusted and he would touch your head was this part of your show or No, this was a dude that I knew that was in the mixed martial arts world who was dealing with all these different fighters and jiu-jitsu guys that had back injuries and neck injuries. He was a good chiropractor

but this zone healing thing as he was getting into it, the more I would listen to it, I was like, okay, what? You're telling me you could touch the back of someone's head and press spots and tell if they have a thyroid condition? Get the fuck out of here. That's not true.

That's just not true. And he kind of admitted it wasn't true. He kind of admitted that ultimately what he's doing is if you believe in what he's doing, it will fix what you have that's wrong with you. Because ultimately, there's another great radio lab podcast on placebo effect and there was one of them where they were talking about this guy they they hypnotized this kid who were this insane wart problem skin warts like we've ever seen people that have warts all over their skin where they become it becomes incurable by medication and they convinced this kid that they had hypnotized him and that it was going to go away.

And it went away on his arm. His arm was like completely free of warts, which just never happens when someone reaches such an acute level of infection like this kid had. And so in a sense, it is real. In a sense, it's not hooey. As long as you're gullible, as long as you're willing to wholeheartedly jump in and believe it. And I think that might be what's going on with acupuncture. That might be what's going on with a lot of, you know, quote unquote, Chinese medicine or Eastern medicine. I think if you believe that they have found you a cure, your body starts producing whatever it actually needs to fix whatever ailment you have, and thus it becomes actually effective. So the method is not correct.

The method is a trick, but that trick is effective. And that effective trick does convince your brain to fix whatever the problem is. And it's really baffling. And it only works if you're not a discerning, critical person. Because if you're a discerning person who's skeptical, it's not going to work. Because then you're going to hyperanalyze whatever it is or the potential possibilities of whatever it is. And it just won't work, which is weird. There's no shortage of snake oil salesmen pitching all kinds of crazy healing techniques, you know, no doubt.

But I think that in fairness, you know, acupuncture and traditions of Chinese medicine, these go back, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of years. So does witchcraft. I think they're, well. So does slavery. Yeah, but people are not going to see witchcraft doctors in West LA. Well, they would. You know what L.A. Well, they would. You know what I mean?

Believe me. They would. I think that the history and the sort of traditions behind it, there is merit there. Is there, though? What scientifically? I don't know. I mean, I'm the wrong guy to ask about that, I think. But if you're the wrong guy to ask about that, you're probably the wrong guy to talk about it, though, right?

Yeah, probably. Yeah. Probably. But I think that, I mean, listen, you know, I just know from my friend who's been studying this, I mean, he's been in school, like, for crazy long periods of time. But do you say school? Do you do air quotes? No, no. I think it's, you know, it's essentially like medical school.

It's nothing like medical school. How about that? You're sticking needles at people and lighting little incense. But in terms of, like, studying physiology and studying chemistry and organic chemistry and all that kinds of things. Right. But it's like on energy meridians and chakras and all that jazz, right? I mean, isn't that like what it's kind of based on? There's some aspects of that for sure.

But there's a lot of herbal medicine, I think, too, you know? For whatever reason, I thought you said urban medicine. No, you know, the study of herbs. Right. I mean, there's certainly some herbs that have medicinal values. One of my favorite herbs has massive amounts of medicinal values. Oregano, marijuana. But I just think that the sticking the needles in you, it's probably more that you're doing something.

You're doing something to deal with it. And in doing something, your body reacts. You know, the weirdest thing about drugs. Isn't that kind of half of what like sort of psychotherapy is too? Sure. Just the willingness to show up for it is, you know, to walk through the door and to engage somebody else is almost, you know, no doubt half the battle. Yeah, no doubt. There's definitely merit to that. I mean, and also, like I said, like the idea of any, you know, fill in the blank, whatever type of

modality, any type of therapy that's actually effective, even though it doesn't have any real scientific basis to it, the, the effect is still real. You still get a benefit from it. Like this zone healing shit, like if you believe in it, it will affect you, which is kind of fucking crazy. It's kind of crazy that in some ways there's merit to it. Well, I mean, let's just talk about meditation and mindfulness practices, right? So if you want to apply your sort of, you know, analytical perspective to that, you can draw the same conclusions.

Really? I could tell you. Well, I mean, listen, anybody who is a consistent, who has a consistent meditation practice will tell you that, you know, it improves their life. Right. So is that a placebo? No. Like is there a provable thing that sort of could you apply that same litmus test to that? Because this is another sort of non-Western approach to being healthier. But there's been a lot of studies done on meditation.

I'm sure there's been. There's been a lot of studies done on the effectiveness of mindfulness and the actual effect on the mind. But it's an ethereal thing, right? Yes, but it's not lying to you. It's not saying that this frog potion that I give you is going to cure your cancer and then your body cures the cancer. There's a certain aspect of meditation that's undeniably beneficial. But that aspect of it that's undeniably beneficial. But that aspect of it has really been scientifically analyzed. They've done all these fMRI scans on people that are Buddhist monks that have spent years and years meditation.

They've done scans on people that were in deep REM sleep and different stages of the mind. I mean, there's a lot of scientific work that's been done on what we call meditation, achieving certain brain waves, achieving certain states. Those aren't fake. And in a sense, placebo effect isn't fake either, right? Because every drug that exists, exists because there's a receptor for it in the human mind. The reason why those drugs are effective is because the mind knows how to actually produce that effect in some sort of limited quantity on its own. That's one of the reasons why placebo effects work.

That's the reason why we have opiate receptors and cannabinoid receptors and all these different things and processes that the mind can engage in with or without medication. That's why those medications have an effect on the body. So in that sense, placebos, if you believe in them, work. There really is something there. Isn't it even more than that, though? Like the placebo effect works even when you know it's a placebo. Sometimes.

Right? Sometimes, but not as much. Has anyone ever seen a study about that? much study about it was yeah yeah there was um and that's i think what we're talking about just doing something the act of doing something to deal with it makes you focus on whatever that that issue is you know i mean how many issues that people have health-wise are just due to a complete lack of awareness of their physical body. Just stumbling through life on this drunken momentum of coffee and donuts and stress and cigarettes and traffic and pollution and stress and cigarettes and coffee and donuts. And then just the mere act of taking the time to reassess like what it means to be a person to to just stop and pause and give thought to your your day-to-day existence might be enough to reset a lot of the processes that

are in place yeah i mean it's it's been huge in my life i mean it's so counterintuitive like i would rather go out and do a four-hour run than sit down for 20 minutes in the morning before I leave the house and engage in that practice. And, you know, over the last six or eight months, I've really kind of dedicated myself to it in a, you know, by prioritizing it. And it's really, it has been great. What do you do? How do you do it? You know, I've played around with so many different techniques over the years. And, you know, you were talking about momentum earlier, right?

Like I've never been able to like hit momentum with it. Like I'll do it for a couple days, this version, that version. And I could never find a way to really stick with it. And I downloaded the Headspace app, which is an iPhone app. It's got guided meditation programs on it. Um, and it started by this dude, Andy Puttacombe, who I've had on my podcast recently, because I became so fascinated with this guy and they're very easy to follow. Uh, and I put it like down in the dock, you know, like the bottom menu of my iPhone. So I see it in the morning and it's super simple app and you just open it up and it's got a whole series of programs

that you can do. And I just put the earbuds in and he just kind of talks you through it. So he takes the thinking out of it and it just makes it easy. And I've been able, just something about the ease of that, I guess, I've been able to kind of just do it and create momentum around it. and like anything else once you have momentum and once you start to see the benefits of it then you're more you know enthusiastic about pursuing it further um and it's been cool and this guy's he's really he's a cool dude he uh he's like British dude and he was in college dropped out of college Andy Pudicombe Puttacombe, P-U-D-D-I-C-O-M-B-E. He has a great TED talk, by the way, but he grew up in London and dropped out of college and went to Nepal and started studying Buddhist meditation and became a

Buddhist monk. And he lived basically in relative seclusion for like 10 years as like a Buddhist monk practicing meditation. And then he had this kind of postmodern Siddhartha moment where he realized like, you know, I need to go back to the West. He had this calling to come back and be a teacher. And he started this company Headspace that's become huge. They've got like over a million subscribers on this app. He's developed this huge business around it and he's very accessible. Like he's friendly and engaging and very modern. And, you know, he's where's he live he lives here in venice now he moved from london he lives here in venice it's a cool dude you should yeah there he is his ted and

then he um right before he once once he decided he wasn't going to be a monk anymore and before he kind of returned west he studied circus arts at the moscow like college of circus and then went to a concert yeah like he became like face painting like no like the like cirque de soleil oh type stuff so he's got like this crazy skill set and during his ted talk he's like juggling the whole time really he's he's cool dude um what what benefits have you found from this meditation? The biggest thing that I found is that I'm able to navigate stressful situations much more gracefully. I'm far less reactive to people. I'm able to kind of calmly take information out, engage it, and then respond more mindfully. And I'm able to, you know, I've got a lot of stuff going on right now.

and I'm able to, you know, I've got a lot of stuff going on right now. It's like, you know, it's just, and to be able to kind of not get anxious over that and just be able to say, okay, you know, focus on one thing at a time and not get worked up about the smaller stuff. And just ultimately much more productive and constructive in my interactions with other people, focused when I'm working, present with my wife and my kids, and calmer. And that's impacted my sleep as well. It's been cool. I mean, it's been, you know, I think the benefits have exceeded what I expected. I don't know how, you know, I didn't expect it to be any crazy difference, but it's been really great. And it's sort of like,

it's powerful too, to be able to kind of stand in your space and not get rattled by things. Like that's a pretty potent sort of skill to develop. Like just imagine yourself, you know, you're at work, your boss is coming at you. He accuses you of unfairly of something. And you know, what do you do? You're like, your buttons are pushed, like you're on autopilot, you react in a certain way but to be able to like reprogram yourself and go oh i have a choice here you know my brain is saying this but you know i don't have to engage in that pattern i can actually tell a different story and react in a different way i think that's a that's a pretty powerful life skill that's worth developing. Yeah, no doubt.

No doubt. That's very cool. I'm going to look into that. I'm definitely going to download that app and check out him. That's a, that's fascinating stuff. It's good stuff. Do you ever fuck around with a sensory deprivation tank? I've been wanting to do that for so long. I want to go to the float lab in Venice. I've got a friend who's got a tank. I know you're big into that. I know that I would really dig it. Yeah, I have a tank. I have a tank in my basement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, what are the, you probably talked about this a ton on your show already, but like what, you know, if you could like encapsulate the benefits of that. Removes the mind from the body, the influence of the body and all the stimuli of the world erodes, evaporates rather it just it's the mind untethered from the body in a very weird way and the way i always describe it is if we were having this conversation but right next door so you're people screaming at the top of their lungs would be very distracting we would want to go let's go talk over here and that that screaming is information it's stimuli it's stimulus um you

you're constantly getting it right now we're sitting in even though these are very comfortable ergonomic chairs from the ergo depot capisco chairs very good for your posture i used to fucking these i used my back used to kill me at the end of every show yeah but because of these chairs it's really fantastic but it's still you're still in a chair. Your ass is pushing against it. You feel the weight of your body. You're moving around. There's a desk in front of you. We have visual cues. We're hearing things. We have earphones on. There's all this stuff that's going on constantly that we look at it as the world, but really what it is is data. It's data coming into your brain that your brain has to process. is is data it's data coming into your brain that your brain has to process and that data life itself is a distraction in that tank there is no data there you mean you have a very limited amount

of sensation of the fact that you're in water that will eventually go away if you stay still long enough the water is the same temperature as your skin so you will get to a point where you don't feel it there's a thousand pounds of salt in that water. So you'll float effortlessly and you're in total darkness. And as long as there's no banging around the room, as long as you're in a good silent area, you will experience quiet in a way that you never get. You will experience physical quiet. There will be no input.

In the absence of that input, your will experience physical quiet. There will be no input. In the absence of that input, your brain becomes supercharged. It makes it so much easier for me to understand influences, objectives, all the things that I have been pushing to the back of my brain, avoiding, come to light instantaneously, highlighted. All issues become highlighted, any stumbling blocks, any things that you really need to address, all come to the forefront. And the way I describe it is the first 20 minutes or so seem like a seminar on my life, like my life is being explained to me. Like here's, if I went to a guru that could explain to me in no uncertain terms like someone who really knows every aspect of my life like if you could plug a usb drive into my head into some

supercomputer that can fix things they go oh well look at all these issues you have you have to get rid of this clean out this clutter stop doing that because you don't like it don't do this don't hang out with this person hang out with with that person more. Concentrate on more on this aspect of your life. Just creatively, it's an unbelievable tool. I go over jujitsu techniques in the tank. I go over transitions. I go over stand-up comedy in there. I go over everything in there. Yeah, that's great. I want to check it out. I mean, it sounds, the way that you describe that is very similar to the experiences that I have when I'm in long distance running and training. I'm sure it's that, you know, it's different because your heart's beating and it's it's kind of an active meditation version of that. But, you know, it's so powerful, you know, and the more that I learn about this world of mindfulness, it's just it's untapped reservoirs of potential, personal potential. Exactly. And,

and, you know, again, it goes back to, you know, Western culture priorities. Like this is not, you know, this is, that's, you know, the float lab, like your tank, that's not a mainstream idea. You know what I mean? It's becoming more so, but yeah. But I mean, to look the typical American, right. You know what I mean? It's kind of a, but yeah. But I mean, to look, the typical American, right? You know what I mean? It's kind of a foreign idea. But this idea that, you know, your thinking mind is distinct from your higher consciousness. And to the extent that you have control and you can harness your thinking mind for your benefit and you're able to, you know, silence the idle negative chatter. You know, most people, like you said, you know, it's coffee, you know, donuts, whatever. There is a looping, you know, silence the idle negative chatter. You know, most people, like you said, you know, it's coffee, drink, you know, donuts, whatever. There is a looping, you know, and my mind loops

as much as the next person. And generally it's not very kind things that are looping, you know, self-defeatist ideas, negative thoughts. Oh my God, I'm going to do Joe Rogan's podcast. What if the death squad army gangs up on me? You know, what's going to happen? You know, like whatever it is, you know what I mean? Like, and meditation allows you to understand that you don't have to engage in that and gives you a toolbox to say, let me tell a different story. I don't have to entertain that story. That story that I've been listening to my entire life, that's led me down a certain path in my life and helped sort of forge a certain trajectory. What if I tell a new story? And let's put that story together and see where that leads. Like, could there be anything more powerful than that? Very few things. Acting

on those positive thoughts. Right. That's just as powerful, if not more. That's it. Yeah. And uninstalling those buttons that cause you to react and create you know negative consequences for you that's a good way

to end this podcast Rich Roll yeah that was three hours of awesome was it? yeah we did it already

thanks dude bam it's done awesome man thank you your podcast available on iTunes what is the name of it?

how do people get it? the Rich Roll podcast perfect name absolutely can I pitch my book? no confusion please do pitch my book plant power way plant power way on iTunes was the name of a rich roll podcast perfect name absolutely kind of no confusion please do it pitch my book here plant power away out this week oh is it out this week and lifestyle guide Oh modern and lifestyle guide all right man it's awesome thank you very much awesome beautiful for having me dude anytime man we're local so let's do this more often.

Not once every two years or something. When was the last time we did it? I'm down, man. I'd love to have you on my show, too, if you're up for it. I would love to. I'm excited that you have a show, too. You're a really interesting and fun guy. Yeah, man. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Rich Roll, ladies and gentlemen. You can find him on Twitter, Rich Roll on Twitter, richroll.com, richroll.com, and check out his podcast. Check out his book, The Plant Power Way, available right now, you fucks. Absolutely. Go get it.com and check out his podcast check out his book The Plant Power Way available right now you fucks go get it

peace thank you man yay