The Rich Roll Podcast - Dr. Andrew Weil Is The Medical Mystic

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

The godfather of integrative medicine and a true pioneer of health, today’s guest is a legend in the realm of mind-body healing. Meet Dr. Andrew Weil. Named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine (among a zillion other accolades), Dr. Weil is a New York Times bestselling author of 15 books, the founder and director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, and a man who’s spent the last 50+ years studying and evangelizing holistic wellness, under-appreciated healing modalities, medicinal plants, and the reform of medical education. As an entrepreneur, he is the founder of matcha tea brand Matcha Kari and a partner in True Food Kitchen, a chain of healthy food restaurants located all across the U.S. Dr. Weil has occupied a space in my consciousness for as long as I can remember. However, it wasn’t until I read Michael Pollan’s book How To Change Your Mind that I began to more fully appreciate the vast extent to which Dr. Weill has served as integrative medicine’s greatest pioneer. the legacy of integrative medicine can be traced to Dr. Weil’s breadth of this man’s contribution to introducing and mainstreaming so many ideas and practices he has been advocating since the 70’s. A long-time advocate of simple practices like breath work and healthy eating decades prior to it being vogue, Dr. Weil’s storied legacy also includes the evidence-based study of clinical applications for psychedelics, and marijuana. The nutritional properties of mushrooms. And the advisability of a variety of other alternative healing modalities that, back in the day, were considered anathema and ridiculed by the medical establishment. Simply put, integrative medicine would exist as it does today without the path courageously blazed by Dr. Weil. Today we explore this man’s extraordinary life. Counter-culture days at Harvard. And his convictions as a healer. We talk psychedelics, funghi, food and breath—and the best practices you can adopt to sidestep chronic lifestyle disease and thrive. We also explore what’s wrong with medical education. How to change it. And his quest to completely reinvent health care. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll606 YouTube: bit.ly/andrewweil606 This was a fun one. I learned a ton, and I know you will too. Final note: Dr. Weil was gracious enough to offer all of you a 15% discount on his Matcha Kari matcha tea. Let it be known this is not a sponsored thing, he’s just being a mensch. To avail yourself of this act of kindness visit matcha.com and use code RICH15 at checkout. This is a glorious conversation with one of the most wildly fascinating individuals of our time. I was honored to host it and more proud to share it. Peace + Plants, Rich

What goes on in your mind really determines and shapes your experience of the external world. And I've applied that very much in my work with patients because I just find over and over again that the root causes of illness are often in the mental emotional sphere and not in the physical body or they're like they're in both. But conventional medicine has so ignored that non-physical part of ourselves and I think that's a great limitation. Science conventional medicine has so ignored that non-physical part of ourselves, and I think that's a great limitation. Science and medicine in our part of the world are totally dominated by materialism, you know, a philosophy that says that the only thing that's real is that which can be seen and touched and measured. And that if you see a change in a physical system, the cause has to be

physical. Non-physical causation of physical events doesn't compute. It's not allowed for. So, you know, in hypnosis, there are so many demonstrations, like you can touch a person with a finger and have them believe it's a piece of red-hot metal, and if they're in a deep trance, they get an actual blister. I mean, that is non-physical causation of a physical event. If you try to get a doctor to look at that or a scientist,

oh, it's just a curious thing. It doesn't have any meaning. To me, the essence of science is open-minded observation. You know, that's where you start. That's Dr. Andrew Weil, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast.

It is I, Rich Roll, your host. Good to have you because today, in the words of the late, great Timothy Leary, it's time to turn on, tune in, and drop out. Well, maybe not the drop out part. Maybe skip that step. Disciple of Mr. Leary and Richard Alpert, otherwise known as Ram Dass from his days at Harvard and Harvard Medical School in the mid-1960s, is none other than medical mystic Dr. Andrew Weil, the OG of integrative medicine, a true pioneer of health, a legend in the realm of mind-body healing, and a man who has spent essentially the last 50-plus years studying and evangelizing holistic wellness, underappreciated healing modalities, medicinal

plants, and the reform of medical education and practice. Named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, among a zillion other accolades. Dr. Weil is also a New York Times bestselling author of 15 books and the founder and director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. As an entrepreneur, he's the founder of matcha tea brand, Matchakari, and a partner in True Food Kitchen, a chain of something like 35 healthy food restaurants located all across the US. I've been to a few, they're really good.

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Okay, Andrew Weil. So I distinctly remember him being on the cover of Time Magazine in the late 1990s and then again in 2005. So I guess this guy has occupied a space in my consciousness for decades. But what I didn't fully appreciate or know until I read Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, which also then prompted me to dig much deeper into Dr. Weil is the extent to which this guy deserves a lot of credit for helping

mainstream so many trends, ideas, and practices that he's been advocating dating back to the 1970s. Simple things like healthy eating, like breath work, to a variety of alternative healing modalities, clinical applications for psychedelics, even the legalization of marijuana that way back in the day when he was talking about this stuff, it was just anathema and he was ridiculed by the medical establishment.

Well, he's here today. Culture has definitely caught up to him and he's led an extraordinary life. So today he's gonna tell us all about it from the counterculture days at Harvard to his convictions as a healer to his quest to reinvent healthcare. We cover it all.

It's a glorious experience. So here we go. This is me and Dr. Andrew Weil. It's a pleasure to meet you. It's an honor. Thank you for taking the time. Sure. I'm excited to be here with you.

I don't even know where to begin this other than to say, you know, you've been in this game for a long time. You're a pioneer and icon in the integrative medicine space and so much of what you're about, you were so far ahead of the curve. Like culture is only now even just beginning to catch up to so many of the things you were talking about in the late 60s,

throughout the 70s, when you were kind of like this iconoclast. I guess in some cases you still maybe considered that. I hope so. I don't know. I feel like you're welcomed now in a way that it probably didn't feel that way, you know, in the earlier stages of your career. Well, if I cease being controversial,

I think I'm not doing my job. Right, there's a little bit of a, I'm interested in that spirit, right? There's a little bit of a punk rock thing going on here. Cause you've been pushing the envelope from day one, from what you were writing, you know, in the Crimson at Harvard and all the kind of stuff that dates back to you

being in your like late teens and early twenties. Definitely, and the first book that I wrote in 1972, The Natural Mind, you know, I think really, I went back and read some parts of it and it really predicts what's happening now with psychedelics and, you know, the positive change that this can bring to our society. But for a long time,

I've written and said the same thing really for almost 50 years. And for the early part of that time, nobody paid attention to me. And then I got a larger and larger following in the general public, but none of my medical colleagues paid any attention to me.

And then that changed in the early 1990s. And now, you know, integrative medicine is becoming mainstream and it's very gratifying to watch. Yeah, it's gotta be. It's gotta feel like you've been vindicated. I mean, there's still so much work to be done obviously. It feels like the culture has caught up with me in a lot of respects.

So it must be challenging to check your ego a little bit with that. You're like, I've been screaming about this stuff forever. Well, it seems so obvious to me, the things that I've been advocating, talking about one of my main principles is that the body can heal itself. That's hardly news.

I mean, that's Hippocrates said that in the fifth century BC. It's just that it hasn't been much paid attention to in modern medicine. Yeah, well, I feel like so much of your perspective was well-informed by all the traveling that you did as a young person, right? Seeing parts of the world that were relatively inaccessible at the time to give you a broader perspective

on different modalities of health and healing. I had a very, I had a wonderful opportunity that came my way by chance when I was 17. I won a scholarship to an experimental school that took a group of 22 students and six faculty people around the world for a year. And we lived with native families. So I did this a year between high school and college. That changed my life. And I think traveling has been so important to me and to be in other cultures and to see that there are other ways of interpreting reality, incredibly valuable. I think that's one of the problems I see in our society.

We're a big isolated country and many people have no awareness of what's out there. I saw some statistic a few years ago that I think it was fewer than 40% of members of Congress had passports. I mean, amazing. Really? Yeah, and George W. Bush had never been out of the country when he became president.

I mean, how is that possible? He was the son of a president and he'd never been out of the country. That does seem impossible. Amazing. Yeah. But I think there's no substitute for getting perspectives of other societies

and other cultures. I mean, the most interesting and introspective people that I know are people that are well-traveled and particularly people that took the opportunity to travel when they were young and they're kind of, you know, their minds were still being formed and they weren't calcified around their worldviews. Yeah, and then after I finished my medical training,

I then for a number of years, I traveled a lot in Latin America, lived in Latin America for a number of years, studying plants and drugs and other ways of healing and then also in Africa and Asia. So that's just been very much a part of my life. Well, I'm obsessed with Harvard in the mid 60s. I just can't get enough of learning about

what an interesting time it was in Cambridge with everybody from Richard Alpert to Timothy Leary, of course, Skinner, who I know you spend time with. Was there a sense that it was special then? Well, Harvard has always had a sense of being special. I remember there was a novel written by a faculty wife at Harvard called, We Happy Few.

So there was always this sense that we were this elite, but frankly, Harvard was getting passed by when the 60s revolution started. That was all going on in Berkeley and the West Coast. And it was a few years before it got to Harvard and Harvard started to catch up with what was happening. Did you have access to Leary and- I did.

I had become interested in psychedelics. I'd read about them right before I entered Harvard as a freshman in 1960. And I asked about how I could find out about these. And I had a psychology professor who told me that there was these two guys in the social relations department who were starting to study these drugs. So I went over and met Leary at his office and had a conversation, this was in about 1960, 61, before he really, he was just getting going on the studies he was doing.

He was fascinating. He had a twinkle in his eye. He was a kind of Irish storyteller, very charming. And he genuinely thought that these drugs, these were the most interesting things he'd ever come across. And he thought they had the potential to completely change society.

And he had no sense that this was gonna stir up any kind of opposition. Yeah, it really was a culture clash though, between the administration and these wild-eyed professors who were way out on a limb with some of the ideas they wanted to explore. Well, one of the ideas that they wanted to explore was that everybody was playing games

and that there was the professor game and the university game. Well, the university didn't like hearing that kind of stuff. So I think it was inevitable that there would be a big clash between them. Right. And you then, you know,

began your experimental phase around that time as well. Well, also I had read Aldous Huxley's book, "'The Doors of Perception' about Mescaline." And by chance he was at MIT in that fall semester that I I entered Harvard and he gave a series of lectures on visionary experience that were broadcast on the Harvard radio station. And I listened to them and I wrote him a letter and asked him, where can I get mescaline? And he wrote back and gave me the name of a chemical company. And anyway, eventually I was able to get mescaline and I experimented with it myself and with friends over the next few years. And that was, you know,

before almost anyone I knew had ever tried those substances. Right, right, right. Do you know, you probably know Deborah Zekely. Sure. Oh yeah, she's amazing. Yeah, she's incredible. I spoke at Rancho La Puerta several years ago and I had her on the podcast, but when I was there, I kind of dug into the history of that place

and what I was starting to learn about Edmund, her late husband. Pretty wild. I mean, Huxley used to go down there and it just sounded like a wild time at that moment. And talk about healthy aging. I mean, she's one of the most incredible. She's 100 now, 99? Yeah, something like that. Really impressive.

Yeah, I mean, so interesting how that intersection of experimentation with psychedelics with kind of this emergent wellness culture, in its infancy to look back on that and to see kind of the fruits of that labor and the way the culture has kind of embraced these things now is crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's taken a very long time,

but I was just saying to someone yesterday that in the past few years, I was doing a lot of traveling and lecturing around the country and in other countries. And no matter what the subject was I was talking about, whether it was healthy aging, nutrition, the questions I would get asked would be about psychedelics. That's what everyone wants to talk to you about.

And then I saw last, I think it was this month or last month Vogue had a cover story on psilocybin mushrooms. I mean, that is mainstream. Yeah, it's crazy. It's tricky for me. I mean, listen, just to preface what I'm gonna say, I certainly acknowledge the tremendous amount of science

that's occurring right now in terms of healing modalities with respect to PTSD and depression and all the kind of clinical applications that we're discovering are appropriate for these substances. But I'm always challenged with how to square that with the fact that I'm a recovery guy, like I've been in recovery for a long time. And within that, the construct of that community,

it's a very binary thing, like you don't use substances. I never used psychedelic substances. I acknowledge these benefits that we're now seeing. It definitely fucks with my mind a little bit, because I think, should I try that? And I've got a friend who's like a long time sober guy, like big book banger, like all the way in. And he went and did a supervised psilocybin experience

with, I don't know, whoever like the kind of experts are in this field. And it was profound for him. Well, these aren't really substances that you use in the way that people use alcohol or tobacco or cocaine. There are things that people may take as on a single occasion and have some profound experience from them. In my sense is that psychedelics,

they can show you possibilities. They don't give you any information on how to maintain the possibilities. And then you have to work in other ways to find out how to extend and maintain that. So they're not really things that you incorporate into your daily life. Right, although, you know, with the micro dosing

and all that kind of stuff, there's a lot of that going on. I guess my only reticence around the conversation is that the more it gets talked about, the more mainstream the kind of acceptance of it is, the more likely it is that people will be using it in ways that they shouldn't be. Sure, I think that's always a danger. And the, which is too bad because I think

the potential of them is really only realized if people have the right expectations and use them in the right circumstances. And otherwise I think it, you just fritter away their potential. When you reflect back on those early experiences with psychedelics and kind of pair that with all the travel that you did,

I mean, how do you think about the impact of that on the kind of broader perspective that you've brought to the health conversation? You know, first of all, I don't use these things anymore. I mean, they were things that I used in the past. And on that book that I wrote, The Natural Mind, Alan Watts wrote a blurb for it. And one of the things he said was,

that when you get the message, you can hang up the telephone. And I think that really applies to these experiences. So there's a lot of stuff I learned from them. I don't really feel the need to repeat those experiences. But one thing that I saw very powerfully is that what goes on in your mind really determines and shapes your experience of the external world.

And I've applied that very much in my work with patients because I just find over and over again that the root causes of illness are often in the mental emotional sphere and not in the physical body or they're like they're in both but conventional medicine has so ignored that non-physical part of ourselves. And I think that's a great limitation. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things I appreciate

about you the most is just that level of cognizance and emphasis that you put on the mind and your willingness to delve deep into the nature of consciousness. And these are just anathema in conventional medical practice. Yeah, it just doesn't compute. I took a, one of the most interesting courses I ever took was in medical hypnosis at Columbia University.

It was for physicians. I just, I learned so many fascinating things there. And as a result of that, I made mind body medicine a major component of the integrative medicine curriculum that I developed. And I very frequently refer patients to mind body practitioners, whether that's a hypnotherapists

or visualization practitioners or any one of a number of other modalities, because I find these things to be incredibly effective, cost-effective, I mean, even fun for both practitioner and patient. And relatively free of risk. Totally, and they are so underutilized in medicine. And I remember once I was challenged to a public debate

by Arnold Relman, who was the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. And it was a very publicized event. And I mean, I have never met a more closed minded person. His position was, all you have to do is show me the evidence. You show me the evidence, blah, blah, blah. So anything you'd show him, he'd say,

oh, well, that's not evidence. And one of the questions that I asked him, I said that the best research area of what I do is mind-body interactions. There's been 30 years of studies on that. And yet these modalities are so underutilized, what would you do to increase their use? And his response was,

there is no evidence for mind-body interactions. So I don't know what you can do with that. Yeah, I mean, how are you? Yeah, there's a profound hubris around the scientific method. Science is truth, science is fact, but that overlooks the fact that it's a method. It's not a fact in and of itself. It's a means of approximating truth.

It's a way to approach or discover truth, but it's also not the sole method and it's flawed. And I think there's so much arrogance around, this is the way that we do it. And that kind of approach is very dualistic or binary in that it's controlling for this variable or this and that. And obviously we've made, I'm not dismissing it.

It's like, no, this is the engine of progress, of course, but it overlooks the holistic nature of the human body and the interplay between all of these very sensitive systems. And science and medicine and our part of the world are totally dominated by materialism. You know, a philosophy that says that the only thing that's real is that which can be seen

and touched and measured. And that if you see a change in a physical system, the cause has to be physical. Non-physical causation of physical events doesn't compute. It's not allowed for. So, you know, in hypnosis, there's so many demonstrations like you can touch a person with a finger and have them believe it's a piece of red hot metal.

And if they're in a deep trance, they get an actual blister. I mean, that is non-physical causation of a physical event. So if you try to get a doctor to look at that or scientists, oh, it's just a curious thing. It doesn't have any meaning. Yeah, that kind of makes me think of your interesting ideas around the placebo effect and the way that we kind of think about that backwards.

Fortunately, that's one of the things that's changing now, which is makes me very happy, but the still the most common ways I hear the word placebo used are in phrases like, how do you know that's not just a placebo effect? And the most interesting word there is just, or we have to rule out the placebo effect. That's what we wanna rule in.

The placebo response is pure healing from within, mediated by the mind, unmixed up with the direct effects of treatment, which are likely to be harmful. Yeah, I think I've heard you talk about the fact that in every kind of double blind trial, if you look at the placebo group, there's always a few people that have experienced

the result as if they had taken them. All of the changes, exactly. And that's the most interesting thing of the whole thing. Amazing. That any change we can produce with a pharmacological agent can be exactly mimicked in at least some people some of the time by a mind mediated mechanism. So fortunately the change that's happened,

and this is the result of these new brain imaging technologies, is that now you can show that certain parts of the brain are active when people have placebo responses, and this makes it accessible and real to people. So I think placebos are being taken much more seriously. Right, because now the imaging science has caught up and neuroscience has progressed to the point

where they can provide an explanation that makes sense to the conventional community. And the same thing's happened with meditation. There've been a tremendous number of studies of very long time series meditators showing different activity and in different brain areas as a result. So the fact that a meditation practice

can actually physically change the brain, I mean, that's really interesting stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But within that, there's this profound, deep appreciation for the mystical, right? Which is like my favorite thing to talk about. Oh, good. And I suspect that was in part informed

by all these shamans and various healing practitioners that you've experienced over the decades in South America and Asia, et cetera. One of the attitudes that I just can't stand is that when scientists believe that it's their job to make mystery go away, it seems to me mystery is an essential aspect of the universe and that you have to appreciate that

and wonder at it. Terence McKenna, I once heard say that, the bigger you build the fire, the more you're aware of the extent of the darkness. And I think that's true. And I think that our experience at the heart of our experience is mystery. That's stuff that we can appreciate,

but we can't really understand with our mind. Right, so how do you get a typical doctor to develop a broader appreciation for that? It's like, it doesn like, how does that work? I mean, that's kind of at the crux of your whole thing. Well, I train doctors. At the center I have at the University of Arizona, this is what we do.

We're the world leaders in integrated medical education. And we train doctors and nurse practitioners and medical students and residents. And our main training is a two year intensive fellowship. We've now graduated over 2000 physicians from that in all specialties, all ages. And it's all the things they should have learned in medical school, but didn't including like healing

and the fact the body can heal itself and so forth. So the people who come are self-selected and what's happening today is that so many people in medicine are just burned out. They're so disillusioned that what medicine has become and they know there's gotta be a different way. And so they come to us and there's a new generation out there that I think that gets it in a different way.

There was a social club that I belong to at Harvard Medical School that had a motto that I always really liked, it was, we dress the wound, God heals it. That's acknowledging that aspect of things. Yeah, I mean, on the surface, obviously you've cut your hand or whatever, you can watch it heal.

Like there is something going on that you don't need to really attend to. The body will take care of it. But beyond that, we don't really appreciate the extent to which the body is constantly doing that. Yeah, and I find in my work, one of the things that I have to do is try to instill greater confidence in people

about their body's ability to take care of things. Most people have no awareness of that and think they've got to run off for help as the first thing. Right, and what's interesting is that these are things that have been paramount in all kinds of modalities dating back through history that we're very dismissive of from Ayurveda, Chinese medicine and all.

I mean, now I feel like we're kind of looking at those things with an appropriate level of reverence and critique to figure out what works and what doesn't. Exactly. But these are not new ideas. Yeah, hardly. I mean, you've been in it for 50 years, but this has been going on for thousands of years.

Yeah, it bugs me when I hear doctors refer to what they're doing as traditional medicine. To me, traditional medicine is Chinese medicine, Native American medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, things that are thousands of years old. I mean, our system of medicine in its present form is maybe a hundred years old, 120 at the most. It doesn't go back very far.

But it's packed into that is a certain level of arrogance and this idea that we're always at the pinnacle of human understanding and you don't understand because we have this training and we're gonna tell you what to do. That's starting to shift right now, but that arrogance, that hubris becomes a bar to having a growth mindset or an openness to other ideas.

Very well put. And to me, the essence of science is open-minded observation. Right. That's where you start. I've been rewatching The Nick. Did you watch The Nick? I did, yeah.

The Nick is like the greatest thing on television. It's unbelievable how good this show is. And for those that don't know, it's about Clive Owen plays this surgeon in 1900, Thackeray, he's full of vim and vigor and ego and arrogance. And on some level, he is a genius, but he's on the edge. He's a fanatical cocaine addict and opium addict, but he kind of rules the roost in the Nick, this hospital. And what I didn't realize

until I looked into it a little bit more deeply is that he's based on William Stuart Halstead. Did you know that? I did not know that. Right, who has kind of a similar trajectory having done a cocaine addict and the guy who kind of set in motion this residency program that is a legacy today

of residents working insane hours. And a lot of that was dictated because the guy was like on cocaine all the time. And he could like work around the clock. But I bring it up because that arrogance, right? He's like, I'm the guy who's in charge, I know all. And when you look back on it, it's comedic because he's giving people turpentine

and soaking their feet in mercury and doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's just preposterous. But it makes you think like a hundred years from now, what are we gonna look back on Exactly. at what we're doing in this moment and realize how insane it is.

I gave an invited lecture a few years ago that I called, What Were We Thinking? And I looked at examples in the past 50 years of practices that now we look back on and can't believe we did them, but leaving people with a question of what are we doing now that 50 years from now we'll go back the same way. So some of them, one is there were fluoroscopes in shoe stores when I was growing up

to check the fit of shoes. So, you know, there was this big console and you'd stick your feet with your new shoes under them. And there was a big glowing green screen and you'd stick your feet with your new shoes under them. And there was a big glowing green screen and you'd see the bones of your feet. And the game as a kid was to distract your parents and the shoe salesman so you could spend as much time under there as possible.

I mean, unbelievable. Like an X-ray? Yeah, like an X-ray. Right, so another one was, this is much worse. There was the thymus behind the breastbone is the master gland of the immune system. It's where immune cells go to be trained to recognize antigens and foreign things.

And it's very active in childhood and adolescence and it shrinks in adolescence. When I was in medical school, nobody knew what the thymus did. It was considered a functionless organ, a vestigial organ. And first of all, that's arrogance, right? That you don't know what the function of something in the body is,

so you say it has no function. And then the next step is that that allows you then to destroy it or take it out. So doctors in the, this was in the 1950s, invented a disease that every child had called thymic hypertrophy, meaning the thymus is too large, treatable by bombarding it with x-rays,

which causes it to shrink immediately. I had a good friend who was a graduate in my undergraduate class and then he went to Harvard Law School. He was clerking for a Supreme Court clerk and he got a letter one day from Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, very good hospital in Chicago,

saying our records show that as a child, you were taken to our clinic for a course of x-rays directed at your thymus. And we're now finding that people that had this treatment are developing thyroid cancer at unusual rates. And they urged him to come in and get checked. He didn't even know this had been done to him. But I mean, unbelievable, that kind of arrogance.

When I think about the traditional modalities around healthcare, one thing I'm pretty certain we're not gonna look kindly on years from now is the myopic perspective on lifestyle, diet, nutrition, all of these things that are the key contributors to the real epidemics of our time, which are the chronic lifestyle illnesses that are killing more people than anything else right now.

And the over-medication of everybody, the treatment of symptoms, the inability to really get to the underlying causes and to address those in a meaningful way. A major component of integrative medicine is lifestyle medicine. And I think that puts us in a meaningful way. A major component of integrative medicine is lifestyle medicine. And I think that puts us in a really strong position to offer real preventive advice to people.

The total instruction I got in nutrition in four years at Harvard Medical School was 30 minutes, which we're grudging- It hasn't changed much. No, it hasn't changed much. And when nutrition is taught, it's taught as biochemistry, which is forgotten as soon as the biochemistry exams are over.

So, I think most doctors are functionally illiterate in nutrition unless they've made an effort to learn it on their own, which is not so easy to do. Well, systemically, the education is not about preventing disease or the promotion of wellbeing. It's about the treatment of disease. In fact, that was one of my motivations for getting out and learning other methods

was I had learned nothing about health and healing in my medical studies. I hardly ever heard the word healing used. And it always seemed to me, my main job was to teach people how not to get sick in the first place. And I hadn't learned how to do that. and I hadn't learned how to do that. So let's define integrative medicine. Well, the short definition is

it's the intelligent combination of conventional medicine and natural and preventive medicine and selected use of alternative therapies. But I think, you know, the fuller definition is it's a system that really focuses on the body's ability to heal itself that looks at people as whole persons, not just physical bodies, that takes all aspects of lifestyle into account,

that values the practitioner-patient relationship and makes use of all available treatments, no matter where they come from, as long as they're not gonna hurt people and show reasonable evidence of efficacy. And how does that differ from functional medicine? You know, functional medicine, there is some overlap between functional medicine

and integrative medicine, but I think they're quite different. I think that the functional medicine is very focused on biochemical mechanisms. I think overly focused on that. And some of those biochemical mechanisms. I think overly focused on that. And some of those biochemical mechanisms, I think may not have great clinical relevance. And then in practice, the treatment is correcting

these functional biochemical disturbances by recommending a lot of supplements to take. I think that functional medicine has much less emphasis on mind body medicine, on spirituality and medicine, on the community aspects of medicine. So I personally think that integrative medicine is a more comprehensive, more robust system. Right, so in the training of this next generation

of integrative medicine practitioners, the challenge, you know, there's a lot of challenges, but not the least of which is what is the business model? Because you're butting up against a conventional system that's driven by, you know, insurance reimbursement. By profit. Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, as dysfunctional as our healthcare system is,

and it's very dysfunctional, it's generating rivers of money. And that money is flowing into very few pockets. It's the pockets of the big pharmaceutical companies, the manufacturers of medical devices, the big insurers and the big healthcare corporations. And those vested interests don't want anything to change. They're making out like bandits.

And I feel bad, we train the people that come to us really highly and then we turn them out in the world where everything's stacked against them. The priorities of reimbursement are backward. We don't pay a doctor to sit with a patient and teach a breathing exercise. We pay a doctor to sit with a patient and teach a breathing exercise. We pay a doctor to prescribe drugs to, and often when the doctor doesn't think those are necessary

or to do tests, you know, we don't reimburse for lifestyle counseling. So that all has to change. Yeah, there has been some progress. I know Dean Ornish recently got insurance reimbursement for some of his programs, but that's the key, right? You've gotta get insurance on board with this. Otherwise, it doesn't make financial sense,

especially when a big part of this is follow-up and outreach and accountability, where you have kind of other practitioners in your office who are checking in on everybody and making sure that they're staying on track. Because you can't just say, you need to go, here's the diet you need, or here's the exercise routine and expect people to actually follow that

unless they feel that there's some kind of program or emotional connection to it. Totally, and I think the challenge is that we have to be able to take, we have to generate data that we can take the people who pay for healthcare to show them that it's in their interest to pay for these kinds of interventions. Right, ultimately it's, if you keep these people

from getting diabetes and becoming obese, it's gonna be a far less strain on the insurance mechanism. But apropos of that, I remember seeing a few years ago, there was a week long series in the New York Times about the impact of the type two diabetes epidemic in New York City. And one of the articles pointed out

that for every preventive nutritional counseling session that a diabetes center did in New York, that the center lost, I think on average, something like 50 to $70 for every amputation of a diabetic limb, they made $6,000. Right, so it's a misalignment of incentives. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and that, I mean, that's a systemic change.

It's great to train these doctors and put them out in the world. And I believe that anybody, maybe not all people, but most people who go to medical school are well-intentioned. They wanna help people. Absolutely, and in fact, a lot of the people that come to us for training say that this has really restored

why they went into medicine in the first place. Yeah, because there's so much disillusionment. Tremendous, and that's a huge change. When I was in medical school, medicine looked like a very desirable profession. Doctors had great status in society, but I think one of the great promises was that it offered you autonomy.

You could be your own boss, no longer. I mean, doctors cannot make it in solo practice anymore. You have to work for a corporation that tells you how many patients you have to see an hour, that tells you what you can do and not do in the way of recommending treatments. That's all changed. I can't tell you how many doctors I've met

in the past few years who say they wish they'd gone into another profession. Yeah, I would imagine they have to become pretty leveraged with debt also for all the equipment. Huge problem. And also just the debt from medical school that many of them are still trying to pay off when they're in their forties.

Yeah, it's not dissimilar from the chicken farmer who's really working for Tyson or you know what I mean? And they're just, they're basically servicing debt and they become indentured to a system that is so sort of rigid in its structure. Yeah, true. It's hard, man. What, of all the kind of shamanistic,

alternative healing practitioners that you've encountered over the years, like how do you parse someone who's got the goods from the charlatans? I have a good bullshit detector. Oh, good. And some of that was refined actually by going through Auburn Medical School.

I'm very glad I had that education. You know, it gives me a standard again, which, you know, to judge stuff. Frankly, when I was in South America, a number of shamans that I saw were drunks. They were completely nothing for me to learn from. I would say the mentor that I most value is the one that I learned that breathing technique from, who was an old, elderly osteopathic physician, Robert Fulford. I met him when he was in the early 80s.

He'd come to Tucson to retire. He used only hands-on manipulation. He's the best healer I've ever seen. He placed great emphasis on the breath. The manipulative technique he did was very gentle. He had huge hands. It was great to be worked on by him. And people would, he'd do a treatment

and then people would say, when should I come back? And he would say, you don't have to come back, you're fixed. And he would do these things and say, there, I made these adjustments and now let old mother nature do her work. And I saw remarkable cures in his office, just from this simple, I mean, he was a healer,

but he had a method that also worked. So what do you make of that? Like what is going on? I think, first of all, he was a charismatic healer. There was something special about him, but he also was very talented. He had trained himself, you know, he had incredible sensitivity of his hands and, and what he taught made a great deal of sense. For example, he was incredibly effective at ending recurrent cycles of otitis media, ear infections in kids. You know, and in conventional medicine,

this is treated with cycles of antibiotics. And eventually if they don't work, they put tubes in the ears. He said that the root cause of the problem was improper breathing. And that breathing was the mechanical force that pumped the lymphatic circulation. And if that wasn't working properly,

there was stagnant fluid buildup in the middle ear, which provided a breeding ground for bacteria. And he said, you could wipe out the bacteria all you wanted with antibiotics, but if you didn't change that underlying problem, the infections would come back, which is what our experience is. He would do one treatment of manipulation.

You'd see the kid's chest expanding more fully when he finished and they'd never have another ear infection. I mean, amazing. And I tried for several years to get one pediatrician in Tucson to come down to his office and watch and nobody would come. And that's the attitude I can't stand. But I finally got one, an English woman

who was a pediatrician who came and she eventually sent him patients. And she said, she'd never seen anything like that. And I made a little documentary film of him, but no, he was really inspiring. And when I was working with him, he charged $35 for a visit. He had no equipment.

Right, and he in Tucson, right? After you traveled all over South America in search of- Yes, exactly, that was perfect also, right. That's the Wizard of Oz phenomenon, right? You know, that was right in my backyard and I'd never known it was there to begin with. Yeah, it's interesting how we try to wrap our heads

around things that we don't understand and our resistance to these outside ideas and how it takes time. Like now we have, I'm sure you're familiar with Wim Hof and all the stuff that he's doing with breath. And for some reason, perhaps in part due to his charisma and the fact that he's sharing so much on social media, there seems to be a conversation around breath and the autonomic nervous system.

And what I kind of gather from everything that he does, all of which is rooted in pranayama and like ancient yogic breathing techniques, is this idea that we have more control over these systems that we just believe are running automatically within us that we can actually manipulate them. Right, and breath I think is the key to that because it's the only function you can do

completely consciously or completely unconsciously. And the theory of breath work and pranayama is that by using your conscious system to impose rhythms on the breath, you gradually induce those rhythms in the involuntary system and thereby you get to the autonomic nervous system and can change its function. That's such a simple idea and it's something

that's been paid so little attention to in the West. So it's great to see this coming. Yeah, now he's like being studied and all this stuff. And the cold exposure is what gets all the attention, but it's really the breath. I think it's really the breath. I mean, I think the cold exposure is what gets all the attention, but it's really the breath. I think it's really the breath. I mean, I think the cold stuff is great. I do, I have partly as a result of meeting him

and listening to that. I spend summers in British Columbia on an island, the ocean's pretty cold there and I go in every day and I've gotten to like that and I like cold dips and cold things, I think that's good. Yeah, and that's cold. That's cold. But I think as you say, absolutely the breath is the key

and it's wonderful suddenly to see interest in this. There's books that have started to come out on breath suddenly being taken somewhat seriously. It was so ignored. James Nestor's book. James Nestor's book, which is good. Yeah, what about these stories that you hear about sadhus and caves in the Himalayas

who are breatharians and haven't eaten food for decades? It's like, is this apocryphal? Like have you ever met any of those guys? No, I'm an open-minded skeptic. Yeah, I wanna hear where's the line. Okay, so I'm willing to believe anything, but then I gotta see evidence for it. But that's different from being a closed-minded skeptic,

which is what a lot of people I meet in medicine are, that they have a mindset not to believe from the beginning. No, I've never met a breatharian. There was one famous guy in Los Angeles who had a big following and was caught on videotape stuffing himself with candy bars in a 7-Eleven. Of course, right. So I don't know, that I haven't seen.

However, I've seen enough stuff that make me, you know, I'm willing to believe. You know, Wim Hof, his methods were, he got a lot of that from Tibetan practice and those people that, you know, can warm themselves to an incredible degree in dry blankets sitting out and on a frozen shore of a frozen lake.

I mean, sure, I've seen that. I've done firewalking myself and very impressed seen that. I've done a fire walking myself and very impressed with that. I did it the wrong way several times and then I did it the right way. I did one with Tony Robbins when he was trying to set a world record for the longest fire walk.

It was 40 feet over a very hot bed of coals. And I had on a shorter, much shorter, cooler walk, I burned my feet. But when I did that one, I was in the right state of mind. And it was, there was no sensation of heat. I walked slowly. I could dig my feet into the hot coals. I had nothing.

I got really high, you know, amazing. I mean, that was like, and that was totally where my mind was at the time. Yeah, and he's taken thousands of people through that successfully. So what is the, like, how do you explain that? Well, I think if you're, all right, this is just guess, right?

And then it's also based on some of my psychedelic experiences. I think if the mind gets out of the way, it can leave the nervous system free to allow the body to interact with external things in ways that it's very precise and balanced. For example, one of the experiences I have had repeatedly is in a psychedelic state, walking barefoot over sharp stones, which I normally couldn't do because it hurt too much. But not only did it not hurt,

there were no dents in my foot. So that's the interesting aspect, what's going on there. And it feels to me as if my mind is not interfering that the muscles on the surface of the foot can push back very precisely to neutralize the force at the surface of the skin. And that's like some ability that we have, which we normally don't see

because our mind is somehow not letting that happen. Yeah, you have this other story about doing yoga and being unable to do reverse crow or whatever it was and dropping acid or psilocybin or whatever it was and then being able to do it. Right, but then when it wore off, I couldn't do it again. But having seen that I could do it, I was motivated to practice until I was able to do it. It's getting the mind out of the way

or quieting the mind, right? And then it becomes a conversation around how do you do that without exogenous substances, right? Well, I think obviously it's possible. You know, with Tony Robbins and that fire walk, I wasn't taking anything. It was the group energy that he created that caused the change.

Yeah, yeah, but it's impossible to not develop a deeper appreciation for just how powerful the mind is. And then it becomes even more inexcusable in my perspective from the lack of appreciation for that in medical, in mental health, in the mental health space where we're just over-medicating people like crazy, especially kids, the extent to which

we're prescribing SSRIs. This is a vast experiment being done with kids. These drugs for ADHD and everything like that. We have no idea what these do to the developing brain. And it's ironic that the word psychiatry comes from Greek, it means soul doctrine, what a great concept. But it's ironic that of all the medical specialties, psychiatry is the one that's become most mired

in materialism. The dogma is that all disordered thinking and emotion is the result of disordered brain biochemistry. And the only way to deal with that is by giving pharmaceuticals to change that. And if that were right, if that were true, we would be much more effective at dealing with mental illness.

Yeah, they don't seem to work very well. No, that's a very good observation. If you look at psychiatry journals and look at the ads for the pharmaceuticals, you would think that depression, anxiety, that these would be things of the past, you know, and it's not so, they are not very effective, these methods. Yeah, I also think that there's something going on

culturally where we've been lulled into this belief that we should never be anything but happy. Exactly. You wrote a whole book about this. Yeah, right. Like if I'm not feeling good today, like the first impulse is to figure out how to medicate. Yeah, I don't have enough serotonin in my brain,

so I better take something. Yeah, I think that's a great mistake. You know, we're not supposed to be happy all the time. Right, so beyond breath, what are other practices? I'm sure there are certain people that- It's all the things you know. It's like physical activity is one of the most powerful ways of stabilizing mood.

Nutrition has an enormous effect on brain function and mood. I think who you associate with, the moods are contagious. If you spend time in the company of people who are depressed and anxious, you're more likely to be depressed and anxious. I mean, there's actual research showing

that if you have a happy friend who lives within a half mile of you, you are more likely to be happy. And the effect falls off with distance. You can actually measure this. So, and many people, I mean, that's something I tell people to do, but many people have never think about that.

Yeah, well, a big piece of that is this loss of community that I think is endemic to modern culture. And especially acute right now during the pandemic. Of course, right. I'm sure you, are you friends with Dan Buettner? Yeah. You know Dan? Yeah. Dan's coming over here tomorrow.

Oh, great, how am I? But one of the many things I appreciate about his work is that he understands that you can't shoulder the individual with trying to solve all these problems on their own. We have to reimagine how we construct communities to make these things just in the background so that they're the easy choices,

whether it's bike lanes or access to healthy food or neighborhoods organized so that community is inevitable. Very good point, yeah. Yeah. And I think that's- And that's part and parcel of the integrative medicine message, right? Like those two worlds should merge with each other

in some way. Absolutely, yeah. You know, we place a great deal of emphasis on community and the importance of community to healing and health. Absolutely. Another thing that must strike you is kind of amazing is the kind of recent appreciation for mushrooms, non psychoactive mushrooms. Like everyone's drinking mushroom coffee

and we're all talking about healthy mushrooms. And this is something that you've been talking about forever. I was fascinated from mushrooms from an early age. I think partly because my mother was very afraid of them. And she told me if when mushrooms came up on our lawn that I shouldn't even touch them because I could get poisoned. And somehow that made me wanna, you know, I wanna know about them.

They seemed strange and interesting. And actually throughout history, I think people have found mushrooms strange. You know, it's unclear. They didn't grow from roots like plants and they would suddenly appear from one day to the next. And, you know, they're strange colors and odors and tastes. And some of them are utterly delicious

and there's some that can kill you. And now we found all of these that have interesting medicinal effects. No, they're really unusual, interesting life forms. And as you may have heard, we are more closely related to mushrooms than we are to plants. Yeah, that's a mind blower.

Yeah. And the extent to which the underground invisible network is a communication network that basically plays this massive role in the entire ecosystem. Exactly, I mean, I remember learning, this must have been in the 70s or 80s, and I had no idea this, that trees in the forest could not live

unless they formed symbiotic associations with mushrooms. You know, that the rootlets of trees actually become sheathed with the mycelium of mushrooms. And if you take tree seedlings and sterilize the roots and plant them, the trees are completely stunted and don't grow normally. I mean, I had studied biology at Harvard. I never heard that.

Yeah, that's wild. It was a completely new idea. Yeah, and now, you know, Paul Stamets is the guy that everyone wants to talk to you about this, but you're the guy who introduced him to this whole thing, which is crazy. I think I read that in Michael Pollan's book. Yeah, I got him interested,

especially in medicinal mushrooms, because he was only interested in the magic ones when I met him when he was a young guy. Right, so of all the mushrooms, like what are the ones that you feel like we should be incorporating into our routine? Oh gosh, you know, I think it's probably best to incorporate several, a number of different species

at the same time, because they seem to work synergistically. I think reishi, which has a good anti-inflammatory effect. Maitake mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, shiitake. A lot of these are the ones that have immune modulating effects that increase our resistance to infection and cancer, very useful. Lion's mane, which is now being cultivated. Why it's a very good edible mushroom,

but this has a unique nerve growth factor, appears to improve cognitive function, may help ward off dementia. I think that's a really good one to know about. Chaga. Chaga, which is one, another one of these shelf fungi that grow in trees. And how about cordyceps?

Is that one you're familiar with? That's my favorite. Okay, I thought you would be. I mean, it works as an endurance booster in terms of how it helps you sort of maximize oxygen uptake. Like it's very effective. So this is a strange one. It's a parasitic mushroom that grows on caterpillar larvae.

Yeah, it grows on, it's a fungus that grows on the back of a caterpillar at very high altitude. Yeah, and that kills the caterpillar and then sends up this fruiting stalk. Although in practice now it's cultivated on the brain. But this has a long history of use in traditional Chinese medicine for people

who are debilitated either from injury or illness or old age of increasing energy. And there's been good studies showing increases aerobic capacity. So that's a good tasting mushroom and now it's a good one to know about. Yeah, the more you learn about this, you realize just how mystical and magical it is.

It's insane. I love mystical and magical. That's good to keep that in mind. That's your thing, man, right? Where does the interest in matcha come in? Is that when you traveled to Japan? Yeah, I went to Japan first when I was 17. I was on a part of that when I was in that

around the world student exchange program. And I lived with Japanese families. First one was outside of Tokyo. This was 1959 when Japan was a very different place. And the family that I lived with, there was supposed to be a student there that was studying English, but we had no language in common.

But the second night I was there, the mother of the family indicated she wanted to take me next door to her neighbor who was a practitioner of tea ceremony. And so the three of us sat around and this woman made matcha. And first of all, I was blown away by the color of matcha. I'd never seen that vibrant green was just amazing.

And then also the bamboo whisk that's used to whisk matcha in a bowl. It's just a marvel of Japanese craftsmanship I was fascinated with. So in the 1970s, I was going to Japan fairly regularly. And whenever I'd go, I'd bring matcha back and turn people onto it. Nobody that I knew had ever experienced it

or knew anything about it. And somewhere in the, I think it was in the 19, late 1980s, 1990s, I tried to sell matcha through my website. I imported it. I found a company that I could get it from in Japan, but it was way ahead of its time, so people weren't ready for it. And then, I was amazed to see matcha becoming popular.

Just one of the many things. One of the many things that I was way ahead of. However, I was very disappointed that most of the matcha that I saw here was really inferior because matcha is so, it's such a fine powder that it oxidizes really quickly. And when it oxidizes, it loses that bright green color. It becomes bitter.

It's not pleasant. And most of what I saw available here was that way. So I was determined to see if I could make really good matcha available. So I founded a company. I managed to get the URL matcha.com, which was a big score. Yeah, that is. And made a connection with a traditional matcha producer in Japan.

And we import and sell, I think, some of the best matcha you can get. And by the way, we can offer your listeners a discount. Oh, cool. So it's matcha.com is the company's matcha curry. And if they use the discount code rich15, they will get a discount. That's very generous, thank you. But matcha is, it's the only form of tea

in which you consume the whole leaf. And it's got a higher content of antioxidants and flavor compounds and other healthful compounds. And some of this is because of the unusual way that the leaves are grown. In the last three weeks before harvest, they're grown under a very heavy shade cloth, 90% shade cloth.

And in response to that absence of light, the leaves grow bigger and thinner and produce more chlorophyll, which is why it's so bright green. And more L-theanine, which is the calming compound that moderates the caffeine and antioxidants and other good things. So I think for all those reasons,

matcha is one of the most healthful forms of tea out there. Yeah, I love it. It does give you a little bit of a boost, but it's kind of a calm energy and it sustains itself a little bit longer. And the color is magical. It's magical. I love it.

It tastes great. But I know well the difference between a fine matcha and what you typically see, it's a much darker color. You can tell it's been- Darker or yellowish. Yeah, you could tell it's been oxidized. And I see this with a lot of these, quote unquote, superfood products. The more money there is to be made

with the lack of kind of quality control or regulation in this space, whether it's Moringa or whatever it is, Kamu Kamu, whatever you're trying to get, it's really hard to know like what's the good stuff and what's, you know, Ben. Yeah, and if you've had no experience of the good stuff, you don't know.

Right, and you don't know how it's harvested, how it's grown, how it's picked, how it's stored, how it's shipped, all of those things play into whether or not it's maintaining, you know, the qualities that you're purchasing it for. And most of these products are not good for that reason. By the way, I get a little disillusioned with all the talk about superfoods because we have plenty of superfoods right here.

You know, berries are superfoods and you can get, you know, very good quality organic berries that are just loaded with antioxidants and anti-cancer compounds. Now those are superfoods. Right, going all the way back to the botany days. How many people were in the botany department at Harvard? It was an attic of the university.

You know, first of all, it was the botanical museum. You're gonna study what? Yeah, really, it was biology was being completely taken over by molecular biology and gene stuff at that point. And botany was a little annex that was considered so antiquated. And it was in the botanical museum, which was above the glass flowers and the-

And the Gregory Mendel wing or something. Exactly, right. But you know, my professor, Dick Schultes, was the father of modern ethnobotany and that was just a wonderful association that I formed with him. And having that background in botany has been invaluable to me.

I know very few physicians who studied botany. And it was a shock to me when I went to medical school to see that the people teaching me pharmacology generally had no firsthand knowledge of the plants that these drugs came from. And to see how different the whole plants were from the chemicals isolated from them. So that's given me a great perspective.

Yeah, well, I mean, no surprise given that the idea that nutrition in and of itself really had no value in terms of how the organism operates. So, but that's changing. I love all the new sciences coming out about the microbiome. That's fantastic, that is such a revolution. I mean, that's as fascinating as the mushroom kingdom. Absolutely.

And is mysterious, I think. Yeah, when I was in medical school, the teaching was that yes, there were these organisms and the colon and they helped with digestion, but that was it. And that people who took acidophilus or ate yogurt were health nuts. Right.

You know, boy, has that changed. Yeah, it's changed a lot, it's changed a lot. It's changed a lot. Well, I'm a long time plant-based vegan person. I know you're not vegan, but somebody who appreciates the plant kingdom perhaps as much as anybody. So I love talking about plants.

Can I just say also, I love talking about plants. I love plants. I garden a lot. I have lots of plants around me all the time. But one of the reasons that I would love to see people move in the direction of eating more plants and reduce consumption of animals, that this is a very concrete thing that we could do

to deal with one of the factors that's driving these zoonotic diseases that are responsible for this pandemic and which are putting us at great risk for future pandemics of very serious diseases. It's that we are encouraging organisms to jump from animals to people because of climate change, deforestation, our methods of agriculture. And you look at the ones,

what are we gonna do something about? One of them very concretely is to reduce our dependence on animals for food. If there was just less of that, that would put us ahead of the game. Yeah, 100% in the way that we need to appreciate the human body and its ability to heal and self-regulate, we need to own that perspective

with respect to the planet, right? For sure. And if we're, you know, clearing rainforests and, you know, creating algal blooms in our waterways, we're devastating ecosystems and we're creating less and less areas for these species to exist in the manner in which, you know, they're meant to exist.

And so they end up encroaching on other areas and these species are coming into contact that perhaps wouldn't otherwise. And all of this creates this toxic situation that leads to zoonotic disease and the decay of the planet. And a very simple, practical and effective thing that we can all do as individuals is reduce that meat intake.

You still like the fish though. I still like fish. I'll tell you, I stopped eating. I became a lacto vegetarian in 1970. And I was ate that way for about 15 years. And then I was going to Japan frequently. It is very difficult to go to Japan and not eat fish because fish are in everything.

And then I was reading about health benefits of fish. it is very difficult to go to Japan and not eat fish because fish are in everything. And then I was reading about health benefits of fish. So I started eating fish and since then I've been a pesco pescatarian. But you're not going to Japan right now. That's correct. Come on, I know Sylvia Earle was all over you, right? She was all over me.

She begged me to tell people not to eat fish. Did you watch a Seaspiracy on Netflix? Yeah. Yeah, she's great in that movie. She's great. And you know, it's a big problem. There aren't going to be fish in the ocean from the way that we've over harvested them.

I'm gonna convert you back to being a vegan. All right, you can work on it. How do you feel about lab grown meat or lab grown fish? I think it's interesting. How about lab grown meat or lab grown? I think it's interesting. I mean, look, we can have a discussion on the margins about the health implications of that. But I think we need to focus on the elephant in the room,

which is the extent to which our dependence on industrialized animal agriculture is wreaking havoc on the planet. We are a meat obsessed world. And that has to change if we wanna preserve our ecosystems. This is one tool in a toolkit for accomplishing that. Yep, I agree.

And I would say probably I would tell people in this country that the place to start is with beef because I think that's the one that has the worst consequences. Yeah. You know, it also, there's also issues of antibiotic resistance and there's, it's a toxic stew of so many problems

that we could redress if we just reduce that dependency on it. So whether you go 100% plant-based or 90% plant-based, or you start just making some simple changes in your diet on a daily basis, like these things are important to do and to take seriously, I think. So you still like a little cheese though, right? You know what I did?

My wife is a plant-based cheese wizard and she started this company called Shreemo. She's really like come up with the next evolution of cheese. So I brought you some samples. Oh, I'd love to try that. I'll share with you afterwards. I'd be very interested in that. I'm also very interested in new micro protein foods

that are being developed from cultivating fungi and mushrooms. Right. Yeah, there's this weird intersection of the science catching up with, like sort of hard science catching up with food science to create interesting products out of everything from algae to mushrooms and all this kind of thing.

Are your kids vegan? They are, but they're now at the age where they need to have their own exploration. So we give them a wide leash. I mean, they stray from the hardcore vegan path, but they've never had meat. So they'll have, but they'll like, my teenage daughter, she wants to have a Beyond Burger and stuff like that.

Oh, wow. She wants to have some junk food. It's okay. I'm less interested in that than I am in where her or all of my kids' diet is gonna be five, 10 years from now. And we've just tried to instill in them a certain level of education.

So it's less about like the day to day and more about like in general kind of where they fall. But it's tricky with people with food, right? I know. You've been doing this for a long time, trying to get people to change their habits. I mean, come on, is there anything harder than that? Right.

How do you approach that when- Well, I usually tell people, not to try to do make global change, but to do it in small pieces. You know, like start by, I mean, the most important thing is to start by not eating refined processed and manufactured food. You know, that's the main step that I would urge.

Yeah, I mean, if we could just do that, imagine how different the world would be. And another one is we're in such a nutritional mess in this country, it's hard to know where to start. But the other place I'd start is to get people to not drink sweet liquids. It's not just sodas, it's fruit juice and energy drinks and putting sugar in coffee and tea and all that.

That would be a big step. Yeah, and we gotta do something about these farm subsidies, I think. Again, it goes back to a misalignment of incentives. Absolutely, right, everything is backward. Right. We've made the unhealthiest food cheapest and most available and people eat what's cheap

and what's available. Yeah, extending that thought in thinking about the disastrous state of healthcare, if you were, you know, if you had your druthers, like how would you address healthcare reform? Well, first of all, we don't have a healthcare system in this country. We have a disease management system

that's functioning very imperfectly and getting worse by the minute. We have to have universal healthcare. I mean, it's unconscionable that the richest nation on earth can't guarantee basic healthcare to all of its citizens. Ah, you're socialist. Yeah, well, there you go.

I think there should be a universal income too. Then I think we have to really break the hold of those vested interests on, you know, on the system. I really see, we have to get away from dependence on expensive technology for managing conditions. In terms of shifting the whole enterprise away from disease management to health promotion, the problem is you run up again

against those vested interests again. You know, it's whether one example is the subs farm subsidies there, you know, there's last I looked something like 46% of US hospitals had fast food restaurants in their premises. And if you try to change that, you know, this is, this brings money to the hospital. Yeah.

You know, it's like almost everywhere you look, it's like, you're up against that kind of stuff. Yeah, well, in the way that the human body and the planet are holistic organisms, politics is a whole, like you can't talk about healthcare reform without talking about election reform and campaign finance reform, because it's the lobbying, you know, industrial complex.

There has to be a grassroot social political movement in which we start electing different kinds of representatives who aren't beholden to those vested interests. I don't see that happening. Yeah, who do you think is getting it right? Like overseas Finland, like these other countries. I think Germany and Australia do better.

They both have two tiered systems where there's a government insurance and there's also private insurance. They seem to work somewhat better. But most of the countries, you look at the UK, Japan, that had very well-functioning national health systems, they're broken down for the same reasons. It's an aging population, epidemics of lifestyle-related diseases, dependence on expensive technology. We're I think farther over the cliff than other. I don't think anybody, I don't see anybody that's got it. Yeah.

When you look at culture right now with the internet, it's all about subscription services, whether it's Netflix or the New York Times. And I've often thought like healthcare should be, like I would subscribe to a service that was some hybrid of being able to visit practitioners in person and do digital online stuff. That's an interesting idea, yeah.

Where I could get my blood work done and I could consult about diet and nutrition and all these things. And ultimately, if you develop like, oh, every week we check in or something like that, the insurance company covering that, it seems like a leap, but they're not gonna then have to pay for dialysis or all these other things that are gonna come down the road.

Well, that's what I mean, you gotta show them that's in their interest, that you're gonna save them money by this. Yeah, but it's so radical compared to the way that we're doing it now. But we're gonna be forced to change because this is unsustainable the way it's going. Are you optimistic about that?

I think the system's gonna crash. You know, we're spending something like 18% of our gross domestic product on healthcare and we have worse health outcomes than any other developed nation. It's indefensible in so many ways. How do you think about, you know, ancillary to that, like the opiate crisis and...

Well, I think it's a great opportunity for integrative medicine because, you know, it's very clear that chronic pain cannot be managed by opioids alone as standalone treatments. And that treatment has cannot be managed by opioids alone, as standalone treatments. And that treatment has to be integrated. And so I just see that as an opportunity that's forcing people to look at, you know,

other ways of managing conditions. Of all the alternative modalities that you've come across, hypnosis, meditation, breath work, yoga, all the like, what do you think are the most kind of under appreciated? Well, as I told you, I'm a big fan of osteopathic manipulative treatment. I think that's great. It's unfortunate that only a small percentage

of osteopaths today do manipulation as a primary therapy. And I hope that'll come back because it's a brilliant technique. As I said, I'm a huge enthusiast for mind-body interventions. The whole range of them, I think, are terrific. I have long tried to create and boost the field of nutritional medicine. And when I write treatment plans for patients, almost always the first item or a couple of items

are about dietary change. And making dietary change a primary therapy before you even think about other things to do. Are there supplements that you recommend that you think are appropriate for- Well, I think probably everybody should take a good multi-nutrient supplement that has basic minerals and antioxidants.

And I think a great public health intervention would be to provide a multi-nutrient supplement free to school kids. That's a good idea. That seems like a no brainer. And the prison inmates, I think that would do a lot. Yeah. Simple.

So, and beyond that, I think, you know, I think it's probably a good idea for people to take vitamin D and check their vitamin D levels. Yeah, I think most people are vitamin D deficient. We just live indoors. Even in Southern Arizona where I live because dermatologists have made people so paranoid about the sun. Afraid of the sun.

Yeah. Yeah, well also it's not just a matter of going outside. It depends on where you live, right? Of course, on time of year. Like you have to be pretty far south in the time of the year for getting vitamin D. Any, yeah. Yeah.

And it's like the line is through Atlanta. So if you live north of Atlanta for half the year, the sun is a too low an angle for you to make vitamin D. Right, right. So yeah, I think that would be important. How do you think about all of this in the context of the pandemic and COVID? Well, I think the clear principle is that,

healthy organisms are resistant. So the healthier you are, the less likely that you are to contract that or the less likely you get severely ill. How dare you? We're not allowed to talk about that. This is dangerous. But you know, I also have to say,

I think we were so miserably unprepared in this country for this. And I hope it's a wake up call because we're certain to be facing, other and probably worse things like this. And I hope we get our act together next time. Yeah, I hope so. I hope so.

I mean, listen, it's all the things that we've been told to do are appropriate from social distancing to masks and all of that. It's all fine, but it is frustrating that there is no conversation about taking personal responsibility for your health. And the idea that we should just be locked down and completely isolated and told to stay indoors, is really, that doesn't square with what we understand

about what we need to do to optimize the immune function of our bodies. Right, true. Well, I hope that's gonna change. Final thing I wanted to ask you is if in some parallel universe, you got called up to be surgeon general, what would be top of mind to put in place

in terms of regulations or policies? I would really work on nutrition. I mean, I think that's such a crying need. When Michelle Obama tried to do that, she got crucified. I know, but I think it's gotta be done. I mean, whether it's like putting a, you know, a syntax on sugary beverages, you know, doing something about fast food restaurants and hospitals,

this agricultural subsidies and all that stuff. I think it's like, those are critical things that have to change. It's crazy that there's still fast food restaurants and hospitals. Unbelievable. And how difficult it is to eradicate that. I just want, I'll tell you one quick story. I got a letter a few years ago

from a first year medical student at University of Pennsylvania, who tried, started the campaign to get a McDonald's out of the university hospital. He got a petition going among his students. They got publicity in the Philadelphia papers and he was called in by the Dean of Students who told him if he persisted in this,

he jeopardizes medical degree. I mean, that's in a nutshell, that's the problem. Very, very wrong with our system. That that would be the case. It's terrible. Terrible, the hospital, they'd signed a deal with the devil and that was it. I know, so this is what we're contending with.

So we need you to stick around for another 50 years. I'll do my best. You're a gift. I'm so grateful for the work that you've done over the years and what you stand for. And it is cool to see culture catching up to you. Yeah. And it's an honor and pleasure to talk to you.

Thank you for having me. If people wanna connect with you. My, well, my website is drweil.com, D-R-W-E-I-L.com. The website of my center at the University of Arizona is integrativemedicine.arizona.edu. And that has a find a practitioner link where you can find graduates of our program who are in all states and all specialties.

Macha.com is the website of Machakari. Right, code rich15. There we go. Get your discount. Matcha.com is the website of Matchakari. Right. And code rich, code rich 15. There we go. Get your discount. And True Food Kitchen. And True Food Kitchen.

I love True Food Kitchen. Good. We've got 37 of them now and I think we'll open more. And that's been very gratifying to me because basically, you know, that's how I eat. And it's been good to see other people like. Yeah, it's great. I mean, you can, that's how I eat. And it's been good to see other people like. Yeah, it's great. I mean, you can, it's very tailored to whatever you're.

Like I go in there as a vegan, I never have any problems at all. I've been to the one in Santa Monica and I've been to ones when I'm on the road. Yeah, I'd like to see, I'm constantly pushing for more vegan options there. So, you know, I'm doing what I can. I think you could do with a few more.

Tell me about it. And sometimes they're on the menu, but because not enough people order it or whatever, sometimes it's not available. But if you ask, I mean, when they had their full menu, they'll make anything. Yeah, they've done that for me. They've done that for me.

And I think it's cool that, I mean, 30, how many, 35? 37. 37 of these. To create a successful, I mean, 30, how many, 35? 37. 37 of these? To create a successful, I mean, it's not a chain like a fast food chain, but it is a franchise. Is it a franchise? It's not a franchise, no. But there's that many that are doing that well with kind of offering super healthy food. Even in Texas and in Kansas City,

and it's great to see that happening. How many more are you looking to open? We'll see once things normalize, we'll keep doing it. That's cool. That's good to have a robust commercial enterprise. Yeah, that's been fun. Offering healthy items for people. Good for you.

All right, thanks, man. We'll come back and talk to me again sometime. I'd love to. Appreciate it. Okay. All right, appreciate it. Peace, plants. Plants, yes.

Yes. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.

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