The Rich Roll Podcast - How Chef Seamus Mullen Leveraged Holistic Lifestyle Medicine To Heal Himself

Episode Date: August 3, 2015

Imagine yourself so debilitated by a battery of chronic ailments you can barely get out of bed. Merely walking down a simple flight of stairs or lifting a a book is excruciating. Knife-like pains cause you to scream so loudly, your neighbor calls 911. Then one day you collapse at work and awake in the hospital to discover you have suffered 36 embolisms that are filling your lungs with blood so quickly, drowning is a very real possibility. Now imagine yourself a couple years later in a tropical jungle competing in La Ruta Del Conquistadores. Widely considered one of the toughest endurance challenges on the planet, La Ruta is a 3-day, 161-mile mountain bike race with over 29,000 feet of climbing that traverses Costa Rica from the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea. This is the incredible arc of today's guest, Seamus Mullen. An award-winning New York City chef, restaurateur and cookbook author known for his inventive yet approachable Spanish cuisine, Seamus is the proprietor of several restaurants, including Tertulia (a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award for “Best New Restaurant”), El Colmado, a Spanish tapas and wine bar at Gotham West Market, and Sea Containers at Mondrian London. A semi-finalist for Best Chef NYC by the James Beard Foundation 3 years in a row, Seamus was also one of 3 finalists on the Food Network’s The Next Iron Chef. He frequents the popular Food Network series Chopped and Beat Bobby Flay as a featured judge and is a recurring guest on programs such as The Today Show, The Martha Stewart Show, and CBS This Morning. But the important things in life snapped into focus for Seamus in 2007 when he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that precipitated a near death experience and quite literally brought him to his knees. A once avid cyclist who raced competitively in his twenties, Seamus suddenly found himself unable to properly function. Pedal a bike? A pipe dream. Seamus was faced with a choice. Either live out the remainder of his days with unbearable suffering, or take matters into his own hands. He chose the latter. It wasn't easy. And it wasn't overnight. But by making a decision to make wellness his number one priority; by harnessing the power of holistic, functional medicine; and by rebooting his lifestyle wholesale, Seamus Mullen ultimately healed himself. By virtue of working with people like lifestyle architect Ari Meisel and functional medicine doctor and RRP alumnus Frank Lipman (click here to listen to my podcast with Frank), Seamus can now add wellness advocate and authority to his already impressive resume. And when he's not racing his bike across Costa Rica, he's pedaling for charity or lost on one of his many cycling and motorcycle adventures exploring remote parts of the planet. Seamus has shared his amazing story of renewal with major publications like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and through his bi-monthly column in Men’s Journal. He is currently making a documentary about his journey called Back on the Bike. Seamus is a great guy and we had a fantastic conversation that explores all the aforementioned topics and then some, including: * the importance of healthy school lunch programs * the story behind his Rheumatoid Arthritis * the failure of traditional RA treatment protocols * symptomatic treatment vs. true healing methodology * his vivid near-death experience

If you just try to deal with the symptoms, you're never going to get better. If you kind of re, you give birth to yourself in a new way, you bring your body back to where it's meant to be and you really care for your body, that then you set yourself up for success and you stack the cards in your favor. That's award-winning chef, restaurateur, wellness advocate, and adventure cyclist Seamus Mullen this week on the Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, how you doing? What's going on? It's Rich here. It's the podcast. I'm the host. Thanks for tuning into the show where I do my best, I really do, to engage the most compelling,

intriguing, paradigm-breaking minds and personalities across all categories of positive culture change. The idea? Well, the idea is to help all of us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves so we can simply live and be better. So thanks for subscribing to the show. If you want to support the show, please take a quick moment to give us a review on iTunes. That helps us out so much. And you can also support the show by clicking on the Amazon banner ad at richworld.com for all your Amazon purchases. It won't cost you anything extra on your purchases. And it's a really great free way to support the mission.

And you can make it easy by just bookmarking the link from the banner ad on my site to your browser. That way you don't have to keep going back to my site. And everybody wins. All right, so what's going on? Well, I'm in Utah today for the second time in a week, actually. Why am I in Utah? Well, the Iron Cowboy, that's why. As you might know, I came out a couple of days ago to support the Iron Cowboy on the final day of his extraordinary 50-50-50, where he completed 50 Ironmans in 50 states in 50 days. I had the

great privilege of running the final marathon with him that day and getting to witness him achieving something that I think will go down in the annals of endurance history as one of the most epic accomplishments of all time. And I wanted to do the podcast with him the morning after he completed the event. But unfortunately, he lost his voice because he stayed super late and talked to everybody. There were like 3,500 people there, I just found out. I thought it was like 1,500 or something, but it turns out there were like well over 3,000 people there. And the guy literally was there until almost one in the morning talking to everybody who wanted to talk to him. Woke up the next morning, lost his voice.

We couldn't do the podcast. I wanted to get it while it was hot. So I flew out Friday morning to get it done. And we just wrapped it. It lives up to all the hype. It's an extraordinary conversation with James. I get the full story of the whole thing. And his wife, Sonny, was on the

podcast as well as his wingmen, Casey and Aaron, and a special appearance by his daughter, Lucy. It's a really incredible conversation. I actually got emotional at the end, which is a first on the podcast. I was tearing up at the end. I plan on putting that out in the next two weeks. I'm not sure exactly when, but of course, I'll let you know and keep you posted on all of that. But today, today, it's all about my friend Seamus Mullen, who is quite inspirational in his own right. More on Seamus in a minute, but first. So this week's guest on the show is my friend Seamus Mullen, who is a New York City-based award-winning chef. You might have caught him on the Food Network's The Next Iron Chef or on The Today Show or Chopped or CBS This Morning or Martha Stewart. He is the proprietor of four restaurants, which include Tertullia, which was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award for Best New Restaurant, as well as El Colmado, both in New York City, and Sea Containers at the Mondrian Hotel in London. He's a cookbook author, and he's become a leading authority in the conversation on food, health, and wellness, and this is where things get interesting. wellness. And this is where things get interesting. Because Seamus was an avid cyclist who raced competitively in his 20s. But in 2007, he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which is an

autoimmune disease that truly debilitated him. It really brought him to his knees and forced him to rethink his relationship with food. And through a holistic approach to food, exercise, and lifestyle change, Seamus was quite miraculously able to successfully turn his health around. So much so that he's gone on to do amazing things, including conquering the incredible La Ruta de los Conquistadores, one of the most challenging mountain bike races in the world. And he spends most of his free time these days on crazy cycling adventures with pro cyclists like cyclocross king Tim Johnson and Cannondale Tour de France rider Ted King. It's an amazing story. It's one he shared with the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and on his bi-monthly column in Men's Journal. And it's what we're going to focus on today. So let's just get into it, shall we?

Let's do this thing. Ladies and gentlemen, Seamus Mullen. I like how you just came up. You're all sweaty. Do you ride like a mountain bike in the city? What kind of bike do you ride in the city? I have a single speed. I've got like a Bianchi single speed that I ride in the city.

But I'm thinking that I have an old mountain bike that I'm going to convert to a single speed as my town bike. Right. Well, you don't want your city bike to be too nice. No. In fact, mine is like so geared up that you can't steal anything off of the bike. I mean, you can steal like the brake levers and things like that. But the seat post is locked down. The seat is locked down. The wheels are locked down. can't steal anything off of the bike. I mean, you could steal like the brake levers and things like that, but the, you know, the seat post is locked down.

The, the, the seat is locked down. The wheels are locked down. So I can just kind of lock it up and forget about it. I don't want to lock or do you do the double lock? I just do one lock because I have the, the pinheads on,

on my, um, front and rear wheel. So you theoretically can't really steal the wheels either. So it's, it's a bit of a pain in the butt, but you know, getting around on the bike is that I don't take the subway and I don't take taxis. I go everywhere. I put in like 80 miles a week on

the, on the single speed, just commuting around town. Yeah. Do you live in Brooklyn or? I live in Brooklyn. Yeah. So it's a minimum of like a 16 mile commute for me a day. Right. Right. Right. But then running around doing other stuff. When I came here, I almost just tried to find a used beater bike to just buy so I could just ride around. And then I was like, I'm so busy every day. It just seemed silly. Then I was going to have to sell it at the end. So I've been riding around on those stupid city bikes. But at least it's better than...

It's better than being stuck in traffic. Oh, my God. It's so much nicer. No, I can't. I've been riding bikes for all my life. And the idea of having to be stuck in traffic in the city is just, I mean, it took me, what, like eight minutes to get here from the West Village and we're in Midtown. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, you can't beat that.

That's crazy, man. And you're coming off a three-day, 300-mile ride from New York to D.C.? Yeah, from New York to D.C. We left on Sunday morning. We rode down to Philadelphia, actually just outside of Philadelphia to Bucks County, and then went and spent the night in Philadelphia. And then we drove out. So we didn't do a direct route. We did sort of a nicer route.

We drove out to Amish country near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, rode through all the way into downtown Baltimore, and then spent the night in Baltimore. Excuse me. Then we rolled out the last day to D.C. Cool.

And you work with a bunch of charities. What charity was that one? It's with an organization called Share Our Strength, and they focus on ending childhood hunger in the U.S., primarily through providing breakfast in public schools for kids that don't have food at home. So it was really cool. We actually got to go to one of the schools that's one of of our pilot schools in baltimore and meet all the kids that we came in there's a bunch of media there and just seeing actually the last you know the last 12 inches of the journey where the food's actually

getting to the children right was very very cool so we raised about three hundred thousand dollars which is roughly three million meals that we're providing for kids so it's a dent so what is the difference like what are they doing with the meals there that makes it special? Well, I mean, the main thing is, is that a lot of these kids don't even have food at home. So if they don't get breakfast at school, they're not, they're going to be hungry through lunch. And then trying to provide them a breakfast that is not just all processed food. So they're getting, they're getting fruit and vegetables and, and it's, you know, there's a, there's a long way to go and we can definitely improve the quality of the food. But the first part is just

getting the, is the, is the context and getting, getting the kids food and getting them food, this real food so that they're not, you know, they're not starting the school day without any nutrition whatsoever. Yeah. I mean, well, school lunch is such a disaster. Oh, it's a huge, huge problem. And it's, it's amazing how difficult it is to enact change in that field because everyone agrees, but there's so much money being made and there's a lot of politics with it. Um, later or next week, I'm going to do a podcast with this guy, Steven Ritz. Do you know him? He works up in the Bronx in schools and they're like growing all their own food in the library and doing all this amazing stuff that's great he did a really cool ted talk so awesome i wonder if he's affiliated with karen

washington who's in the bronx she's a she's an urban gardener and she's done a great job getting getting fresh produce into into areas neighborhoods that don't have fresh produce yeah cool she's she's super cool yeah well i'll ask him now yeah i bet he knows her i mean they're in the bronx so he probably knows right right right very cool. So nice, man. So you guys raised a bunch of money. Yeah, I raised a bunch of money. It was a lot of fun. It was all chefs riding.

And this weekend, they're doing another ride on the West Coast from Santa Monica to San Diego. Yeah, nice. And so it was chefs, and then you were with a guy who's like Doctors Without Borders, right? No, that was a different ride. Oh, that was the Baja. That was my motorcycle adventure, yeah. I can't keep track of all your adventures. I'm like, for somebody who's got a whole bunch of restaurants

and seems like a super busy entrepreneur, it's amazing that you find time to go on these amazing adventures and make cool videos. Well, I sneak out. Like Men's Journal and stuff like that. Yeah, I sneak out. That one was cool. That was a little bit more fun and less less charity involved in that but with my one of my

best friends who works with msf and yeah he's based in he's in africa um but he happened to be home on on a on a break and men's journal wanted to make a video of an adventure so they said you know what do you want to do i said let's go to baja man riding motorcycles how does that work do they like finance that or they just, yeah, they got sponsorship to do it. And BMW hooked us up with bikes and we spent eight days motorcycling around Baja, which is pretty tremendous. That's a sweet gig.

Yeah. And they send a guy to just, you know, film it. We had a crew. We had like four guys filming. Wow. Yeah, we had some drones. It was pretty amazing. That's pretty cool.

Yeah, I watched it this morning. It was pretty neat. Yeah, it was fun. And then you did something for men's fitness when you rode La Ruta, right? Yeah. Well with men's journal. Yeah. Um, I I've done stuff with them in the past. I didn't for La Ruta. I didn't specifically do, do anything with them. I'm actually working on a documentary that we're producing about that journey. So that was kind of this culmination of my coming back from being very unhealthy for many years and then

getting back onto the bike and and really rediscovering my love for the bicycle and so i kind of had to give myself something that was more challenging than what than what i'd been going through when i was six so we figured why not do la ruta de los conquistadores it's a pretty pretty epic yeah it's cool and i want to get into that but this is probably a good kind of like launch pad to kind of get into you know the pivotal part of your whole story, which is this amazing journey from, you know, being somebody who really had like a whole battery of health issues that were seemingly impossible for you to overcome and then overcoming them. And then now leading this, you know, very entrepreneurial, adventuresome, athletic lifestyle that you lead. Yeah, it's been an incredible

journey. And I really could not have done it without a lot of help from, from my family and from my friends and from, from Dr. Frank Lipman, who's become a very close friend. I went from being like this very healthy guy who was really athletic and competitive to slowly, like all the nuts and bolts of the wagon started to get loose until eventually the wheels started falling off the wagon. And by the time I was in my late 20s, I was really sick. And I didn't know what was going on. I looked, you know, I looked around everywhere I could to try to find answers and my doctors didn't really have any answers for me. And eventually my health got to the point where I was basically incapacitated. I mean, working was really,

really hard. Getting out of bed was really hard. And I was eventually diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which, you know, for most people that have, most people have heard about arthritis and they think of osteoarthritis, they think of the wear and tear in your joints, as I had as well. But I didn't realize, and a lot of people don't realize, that it's an autoimmune disease, that the actual aspect of arthritis is really a presentation of the disease rather than the cause or the real issue. So I went through the very traditional treatment of treating the symptoms through heavy-duty drugs, a lot of things like prednisone and methotrexate, which is a chemotherapy drug, and immunosuppressants.

And I was able to function, but it was no life. But let's take it back and break it down in a little bit more detail. I mean, you grew up in Vermont, right? You grew up essentially, and for people that are listening, I had the pleasure of hearing your story, and we met at Revitalize at this conference recently, and I was very moved by it. It's an incredible thing what you've overcome. But, you know, you kind of grew up with a mom who loved to cook and kind of taught you about this connection between food and health.

And you had a very kind of like physically tactile experience with food as a young person, right? Totally. So you had that kind of seed planted early. I did, but then I kind of lost touch with it. So I had this moment where, you know, I grew up in a very, you could say, sort of back to nature environment in the 70s in Vermont, where my folks were raising all of their own stuff. And my mom was really, really concerned with the quality of the food that my brother and I were eating. But we were also in a really, really rural environment where there weren't a whole lot

of educational opportunities for us. And so my folks decided that it would make the most sense for us to go away to school, to go to boarding school. And we did. And what that really meant is that we were able to really kind of cultivate our intellect, if you will, but our internal culture, our bodies really suffered from it. Back to school lunch. Exactly. Back to school lunch. I mean, it's about as, you know,

that's school lunch is as bad as it gets. And that's the foundation of, of your health. And it really, you know, I, it's funny, I look at my brother and he's, he's very healthy and hasn't had any sort of health problems like I have had. But as I, I look back on my own history, I realized that all it takes is one little infection or one, you know, one thing to kind of throw the gut off. And if you're not eating well, then it just can set off a chain of events.

Yeah, it cascades into a series of other medical issues. And the problem with a lot of the Western approach to treating that is that you end up creating all these other subsidiary, whether they're symptoms or diseases or other things that are a product of the actual treatment. So yeah, I had this really great upbringing, you know, lots of great food, went away to school, started to get sick. My health slowly declined. But you were bike racing when you were younger, though. Yeah, I started bike racing when I was a teenager. And even, you know, I was, at that point, a teenager and, uh, and, and even, you know, I, I, I was at that point I was lactose intolerant.

Um, I had food allergies, you know, all sorts of things, but I was still able to, as you can, when you're 17, 18 years old, just, yeah, you can get away with it. But you knew, but you kind of knew that already. Yeah. But I didn't know that, um, what I was dealing with was, was really part of a much bigger issue. I mean, I didn't feel like I didn't feel terrifically sick, but I just felt like how I felt and I didn't have, I was young. So I didn't really have a, um, I didn't have a control to look at and say, Oh, I should really feel like this. I should feel a lot better than I do. Um, it's only kind of now that I'm, that I feel really good that I look back and realize how horrible I felt for so many years, which is really a remarkable, remarkable thing. So cyclocross racing, mountain bike racing.

Yeah, mountain biking, cross. In high school or in college? The end of high school, college, and then after college is when I really got serious about it. Right, right, right. So like 21, 22, until I was about 26. And when does, so you go to Michigan to college, right? Yeah.

And then do you come to New York right after that? Or you start, you went to Spain, right? I went to Spain, yeah. You traveled a bunch. Yeah, I traveled a bunch. So my senior year in high school, I did in Spain. Went to Michigan for a year, then went back to Spain for a couple years.

Then came back and I moved to Philadelphia for a few years and then moved to California. And this is why I was really cooking seriously, moved to California. When did the idea of becoming a chef crop up? Kind of when I was in college in Spain. I was working in a restaurant there. I was around food again and starting to rekindle that love for food,

and I really enjoyed cooking. And I didn't think of it as something I could do professionally as a career, but my grandmother said, listen, this is what you like doing. You should do it. You always liked doing that as a kid. but my grandmother said, listen, this is what you like doing. You should do it. Like you always like doing that as a kid. Yeah, I always liked doing it. And the notion, you know, in school they don't really teach you

this is what you love doing, then you should try to build a career out of it. It's kind of like they try to fit you into these little boxes. And I had this amazing moment with my grandmother where she was like, listen, this is what you're passionate about. You can make a living out of this. You can? Like, you, wow, you know what? I don't have to be a consultant.

Exactly. Exactly. I think you probably went through a very similar epiphany, maybe a little bit later in life. Much later. Yeah. Much later. Yeah. Um, wow. So that's cool. So you, so you're in Spain and you're starting to kind of apprentice and learning and doing all that. And then I came back and, um, so I was working in Philadelphia and cooking and I was also riding bikes and pretty seriously racing bikes, which is a kind of burning the candle at both ends. Cause you're working late at night, you've got these long hours and then I'd get up in the morning, I'd train. And on the weekends I'd try to, sometimes I'd, you know, race on a Saturday and then I'd have to drive back to the city as quick as I could to get to work on time and then work all night long. But, you know, it's what I did and it gave me the days free at least to train.

Yeah, that's crazy because you hear these stories of, you know, the chef life and it's just, you just live in that kitchen all the time. Oh, yeah, all the time. You even attempted to try to be an athlete on any level and maintain that lifestyle. It was kind of amazing. It was really hard, yeah. I mean, there must have been a lot of adrenal fatigue. Oh, totally. I mean, I was wasted all the time. And I think that eventually that's

why I stopped raising because I got to the point where you're, I mean, I was also racing with guys who I was racing in a pretty competitive field with guys that were literally sitting all day long. They were, if they weren't training, they weren't even, you know, you know, the classic cyclists that are like, how many, how many minutes can I spend sitting down, lying down and not using my leg muscles at all with Norma tech boots. Exactly. Norma tech boots, legs up. Yeah. Watching television, icing themselves. And I, you know, I would like finish a training ride and go straight to work. Right. Um, so it was pretty hard to get to the point where I just, I, I, I don't want to say I got burned out on racing, but I just, I couldn't compete at the same level. And, uh, I, I was really used to being

competitive and being strong. And then suddenly I was not in the same league. What kind of, what level were you at when you were doing that? I mean, were you racing against the Tim Johnson's and you know, those kinds of guys a little bit younger than I am. Um, and I don't think Tim and I ever raced together, but, um, some of the guys just above him, uh, actually raced against Floyd at one point way back when he was, when he when he was mountain biking, when he was wearing cutoff shorts. Yeah. Yeah, I raced, I mean, Jeremiah Bishop, who's now like one of the top endurance mountain bikers, he was coming up just as I was kind of coming out.

But I was in the expert semi-pro field, um, eventually semi-pro. And then I just, that's when I stopped. I realized I couldn't. So the, the, the old categorization in Norba, which was predates when Norba and the UCI joined or USA cycling joined, um, there was beginner sport expert, semi-pro and pro. So I kind of worked my way up over the years. Wow. wow yeah pretty tough to make a living in that oh i don't yeah i don't know how on earth you can yeah like i don't know how those guys do it no it's crazy and they're on the road so much they work you know but you see the guys that i mean they they do get to ride their bike for a living so that part is cool that is pretty cool all right

so so you make this decision to devote yourself full-time to the kitchen? And when does the health stuff start to really impact you? It starts early on in very sort of, in like fits and starts. And I don't even realize that it's happening, but I'll develop like a pain in my shoulder or a pain in my elbow. And there'll be, and when I say pain, I don't mean like, oh, my elbow kind of hurts today.

It would be like a really severe acute pain that feels like something is dramatically wrong with the joint. And it would happen to me primarily in my, in my shoulder, my right shoulder would happen a lot. It would last for like three days. I wouldn't be able to move my arm and then it would go away. And, uh, it was just as mysterious when it disappeared as when it came. Like I had, I couldn't figure out what might be bringing it on. If there's any, any sort of, um, set of, uh, uh, of, um, circumstances that might make it happen. It just would sort of happen. And that started getting to the point where that was becoming kind of chronic. Um, actually let me rewind a little bit before that I started feeling just general malaise, just sort of exhausted all the time. Hard time getting out of bed in the morning. Not feeling myself.

Certainly was not exercising at this point at all. Not really taking care of myself. Leading more of like the typical fast chef's life where you're drinking a lot and partying a lot and you're up late and all of that. And you're just kind of grazing on food all day long, right? Yeah, no meals. I mean, literally, I went years without eating a meal. I was kind of always eating, but never really full. Yeah. And you're, I mean, the classic chef move is you see the guy at nine o'clock at night with a cork container full of like macaroni and cheese from

family meal. And he's like throwing like three bites in his mouth as quickly as he can. He puts it back and he goes back to cooking like a maniac. because you just, you don't ever have any time. And the time that you should be eating or which, I mean, that's arguable. I'm not sure that I agree with it. We have to eat at three, you know, three designated times of the day, but at least I do feel like it makes sense to stop what you're doing and eat a meal and be aware of how much you're eating and that's that. But when you should be doing that or when you could be doing that, you're actually feeding other people. So it's really, really hard to do it. So that was, I was, I was feeling pretty crummy. And then I developed like a weird lump on the back of my neck and it grew and got bigger and bigger, eventually got to the size of a golf ball. And outside of your neck, right? Right on

the, it was, well, it was under the skin. It was subcutaneous behind your ear. Yeah. Right behind my ear. Exactly. And which I now know it was a lymph node and my immune system was totally out of whack. And that was, I was inflamed or it had, there was, it wasn't draining properly or whatever was going on. But, um, I went to my doctor, he looked at it, was concerned, did blood tests, saw that my white blood cell count was very elevated and that my liver enzymes were extremely elevated. And, um, and then a few other markers for inflammation. And he was very elevated and that my liver enzymes were extremely elevated and, um, that a few other markers for inflammation and he was very concerned that there might be, it might actually be, um, lymphoma. So I was then sent to an oncologist.

How old were you then? I was 27, I think 28. Were you already here in New York? I was in New York. And, um, uh, so they looked at that and they decided to take it out and biopsy it. So they just kind of drilled into my neck and cut this massive thing out and then came back as benign. They're like, well, we don't know what it is.

Okay. See you later. And that was that. Wow. And then I just started to like have more and more symptoms and, and, um, yeah,

clearly something is seriously wrong. Your white blood cell count is like super high. It's like causing your lymph node to engorge itself. Oh yeah. It's not, it's not good. Something, but, but. Oh, yeah. It's not good. But then again, there was also like, I turned to my doctor when he said it was benign,

which obviously I was glad that it wasn't cancerous. But then I said, okay, well, what the hell is going on? I mean, this doesn't make any sense. And the classic answer was, well, we don't really know, so we'll just wait it out and see what happens. So that went on. And then the attacks on my shoulder became much more frequent. And they started happening in my hip.

And every time I'd have one of these attacks, it was so bad I'd end up going to the ER. And they'd sort of dismiss me for not having gone through any major trauma. So they figured it was just either I was told I was a hypochondriac or that there was some old sports-related injury that would need to be fixed by an orthopedic surgeon. And then it would just go away, but then they'd come back. And they went on and on and on. Eventually, it got so severe that I was admitted to the hospital, and that's when I was diagnosed with RA. How long ago was that? That was 2007, so eight years ago.

Right. And how old are you now? 41. 41. Okay. So, all right. So you're in the, you get this diagnosis and what's the, you know, what's the prescription? So the prescription is, and that's exactly, you know, that was my exact questions with a doctor came and said, listen, you have, you've got RA, don't worry. There are lots of great drugs. You're going to be totally fine. We have all this great new technology for treating it, which relative to the way they had been treating RA in the 70s and 80s, which is with things like gold injections and all sorts of stuff that just didn't really do anything.

And if you look at folks— Gold injections? That was a big treatment. Literally injecting you with gold. Yeah, exactly. I don't know. They didn't even know why it worked. I mean, a lot of these things would—they'd quell out of the symptoms and if you look

at folks that had RA in the 80s and early 90s a lot of them ended up with very disfigured joints like their fingers would be all gnarled or their wrists would be gnarled and end up having to have lots of surgeries to reconstruct their joints and what a lot of the newer drugs did do and they do quite effectively

is they slow down the degenerative symptoms or the acute attacks that cause degeneration of the newer drugs did do, and they do quite effectively, is they slow down the degenerative symptoms or the acute attacks that cause degeneration of the joints. But the main problem is that they don't, I mean, they do, they cause a host of other problems, and they don't address the root cause of any of the issues. Right. It's symptomatic. Symptomatic. It's symptomatic. What are the effects, the negative effects of taking these drugs?

They're horrific. I mean, when you talk about prednisone, prednisone is one of the most overprescribed drugs on the market. It's a steroid, right? It's a very powerful steroid, and it's very good for stopping acute inflammation. That, to me, is not really a great thing to do because you need to understand what is driving acute inflammation. That to me is not really a great thing to do because you need to understand what is driving acute inflammation. What's causing your immune system to create inflammation in the first place. So prednisone is one of the major ones that they use. Then there are all these drugs they call biologic drugs, which are mostly injectables. And those are drugs

that will target specific inflammatory cytokines, specific inflammatory proteins, and reduce the production of them to stop inflammation in the joint. Essentially what happens with the way rheumatoid arthritis is usually explained by a rheumatologist is that it's a glitch in the immune system whereby the immune system perceives some sort of problem within a joint and will attack that a joint that joint with white blood cells to to uh to cure this in this infection that's perceived to be there the problem is is that then that becomes uh hugely inflamed and then causes deterioration of the joint in addition to also just creating a whole host of other problems from respiratory problems to just general, to fever, malaise, achiness, fatigue, all of that. And this glitch, right?

So they're just saying, well, there's some kind of mistake here that's causing this to happen without kind of looking behind. Maybe there's some other reason that might be provoking that. there's some other reason that might be provoking that. Is there a rationale that like conventional medical wisdom would say is the reason that some people get this and some people don't? Like, is there a genetic aspect to it or is there a lifestyle aspect to it? Yeah. I mean, that's a question that most rheumatologists are really hesitant to respond to. And I think that's part of the problem with allopathic medicine in general, and the fact that we live in such a litigious environment, that most doctors are very, very, very hesitant to make a claim and say, this is what is causing

this, or this is what I believe is causing this. Because if they turn out not to be right, then they can be sued for malpractice and all sorts of other things. Except that's the whole reason you're going to them. Exactly. No, it's the problem. It's the major problem with the way, yeah. But they will say things like, well, we don't really know what causes RA, but there are some suggestions it might be caused by a bacterial infection or a viral infection at some point. by a bacterial infection or a viral infection at some point,

or it could be caused by, you could be genetically predisposed to it. There does seem to be a prevalence of mothers who have RA, who have children who have RA. Of course, when I look at that, I look at that as nurture, not nature. This is the environment in which... Yeah, what kind of environment are they living in? Exactly. If you are living in a toxic environment and you're sick, in all likelihood, the children you raise in that environment are also going to be sick. And it's not because you are predisposed or they are predisposed to being sick, but rather that the environment in which we're growing up is conducive to it. Or to the extent that there is a genetic aspect to it, that the environment helps that genetic predisposition get more fully expressed.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. And how many young people get rheumatoid arthritis? More and more. I mean, it's amazing. And RA is, there's sort of a family of these autoimmune diseases. There's rheumatoid arthritis, or RA as we call it. There's Crohn's and colitis. Ulcerative colitis. So these are all MS.

Interesting, because you think of it just being related more to something like carpal tunnel than you would to ulcerative colitis. But I have lots of friends that deal with these kind of digestive problems. It's becoming a much more prevalent thing. Way more prevalent way more prevalent and we have to ask ourselves why you know anybody that you know like nobody suffered from this kind of stuff and now who do you know i mean to and just to name a few i mean like colitis and ms etc etc i'm sure that you and i between the two of us we could name like 10 or 15 people within our immediate circle that have some sort of whether it's psoriasis, MS, or they're touched

by it, or they have autism spectrum children, or whatever the case may be, all of these modern diseases, which are definitely, part of it, we're more aware of it, but I think definitely much more prevalent than they were when we were younger. For sure. All right. So you get this battery of prescriptions and you start taking these medications, I presume, right? Yep. And I get sick. I mean, I really get sick. Did it alleviate it though at the same time or? Yes. So, so two things happen. One, um, the acute flare ups as they call them, um, stopped happening or, or became much, much more infrequent. The general malaise didn't really get

any better. Um, and then I just felt, you know, crummy all the time. Like my hands were so swollen in the morning, I could barely button my shirt. At work, I'd often like wouldn't be able to hold a knife because my hands hurt so much. Sometimes I'd get an ache in a joint like on my pinky toe that felt literally like someone had put a nail through my pinky toe. So it was so distracting and painful and just this one very small part of my body that it would make the rest of my day, you know, dysfunctional. Um, but the, what the drugs did do is they, they, they kept me out of the hospital for the most part with those major, major, um, attacks that I was getting in my joint before, but they also severely weakened my immune system.

So I would get sick really, really easily. When you're taking an immunosuppressant, it makes it very easy to get sick. Yeah, then you're susceptible to whatever's going on. Your body can't react to it to combat it. And what's really sad about that is that there's so much money to be made on obviously in the pharmaceutical industry and particularly with, with biologic drugs. Um, but what they do is while they do take care of the symptoms, they actually make the disease a lot worse because they're doing, they're, they're, they're combating the exact source of the problem, which is the immune system. So they're compromising the immune system even more, which is already what needs to be fixed. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, that's, that's sort of endemic though. I mean, you know, and it pretty much every single sort

of prescriptive drug out there is treating symptoms and not underlying. I mean, it makes me crazy when you see something like, I mean, Viagra, for example, right? Like if you have erectile dysfunction, that's the canary in the coal mine. That's your body telling you that that very tiny artery is not receiving blood flow, which is your body's way of saying that you're, you quite possibly have, you know, you're on a crash course with heart disease. You might want to look at that, but you take the blue pill and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. And then, you know, the heart attack looms in the future. It's actually preventing you from getting healthy. Yeah. No, it's removing the warning sign. And that's the exact problem that I was going through is that when, when you're taking all of these things that, that, that do

symptomatically make things a little bit more livable, then you don't really address it. It's cool. Yeah. Yeah. I can deal with it. I can deal with it. And I did get to the point where, you know, there, I, for me, there was a, there was a big, um, element of, of just feeling completely overwhelmed and exasperated too, uh, where I just wanted to, okay, you know, if I take the pill, I'll feel a little bit better and I can get on with my life and I don't have to deal, I'll deal with this later. I'll deal with this later. I just don't have the time. I don't have the energy. I don't have the capacity. And, and the reality was, I also didn't know that I could improve my situation. Right.

That was a huge, huge- Yeah, you didn't have anybody in your corner who was empowering you or who believed, actually, that this could be positively resolved. Absolutely not. No, I was completely at the behest of the medical community, which really is not very good at, I mean, it's great at dealing with acute trauma and terrible at dealing with chronic, chronic disease. So where do you kind of hit bottom with this? I hit bottom, you know, I kind of hit the bottom and then I bounced off the bottom a few times. So I hit bottom and then I kind of came up a little bit. The first real nail hitting bottom was I was on vacation uh my wife and i had gone to um to thailand for a friend's wedding

and uh think about how bad this is i went to thailand for two weeks and i don't remember any of it that's that's how i mean like how i mean i've been fortunately i've been to thailand before but yeah i went there for two weeks and i don't well that could mean it that could mean yeah i suppose it could yeah it depends on what movie movie or what script you're reading. But yeah, in my life story, that means it's something probably very different. Exactly. Yeah. No. So I, I, I, we got to Thailand and been there for two days and, uh, I was having breakfast

with some friends in the hotel. And the next thing I knew it was like 12 hours later and I was in the hospital and I'd had a grand mal seizure, um, in the, uh, in, in, in the hotel. had a grand mal seizure in the hotel. And my brain was so scrambled from that that I really, I don't remember anything from those two weeks or very little. And it turns out that was caused by two medications that were prescribed to me by one by a neurologist and one by a rheumatologist. So it was the intermixing of those two things. I mean, what is a grand mal seizure? The only time I ever hear that described is also like detoxing off of, you know, when you're kind of detoxing off alcohol, that becomes a problem for like a real alcoholic. So, I mean, it's, I don't really

know that much about it. You know, it's similar to an epileptic seizure. It goes on for a long period of time. Your brain, there's some sort of neurological inflammation and disconnect in your brain and the nervous system goes haywire. So, you know, I think from, I don't know, because I was not there. I don't remember any of it. You don't have any memory of the actual experience of having that. No, but from what my wife told me and everyone else, they sort of, they watched it happen. And it was sort of the classic, my eyes rolled in the back of the back of my head. And then I just started convulsing and wouldn't stop convulsing for like 10 minutes or so. So it went on a long time. Yeah. Um, so that, that, that happened and I, I kind of bounced back from that and I was, that was kind of bouncing off the floor of the rock bottom and

I got a little bit better. And about a month and a half later, um, I was filming some TV, a TV segment, and I developed this, this headache that was unlike a headache I'd ever had before. I mean, it was like a searing, searing headache that, that just came on out of nowhere and progressively got worse. And within an hour and a half, I had a very high fever. Um, so I called my doctor and he said, he goes straight to the ER and I got there. And by the time I got there, my fever had gone up to 105 and then it went up to 106 and, uh, get much higher than that. No, I can't even believe it got that high. And, uh, and that was a moment where I literally had one of those, you know, people talk about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I mean, I was in that tunnel and there were two directions I could go. I could

float up towards this light, which is a very peaceful and, and, and enticing place to go that required no battle whatsoever, where I could dig my nails in and grip and pull myself back away from that. And I had this, I mean, I remember very clearly at this moment where I just was like, I'm not, it's not my time to go. I'm not, I'm not going to die right now. So you really had like, I had that whole experience and I crawled back in my brain. I crawled back and suddenly all the noises in the ER, uh, got louder and louder and louder, and I could start to see faces. And, and then the next day I remember the doctor coming to me and saying, you know, we almost lost you. And I said, no, I know I was there.

I remembered it very, very vividly. And that was that moment where I kind of decided this is the end. I cannot live my life like this. I cannot live my life never knowing what's going to happen tomorrow, if I'm going to be in the hospital tomorrow, if the wheels are going to completely fall off the wagon. And I made a commitment to myself then that I would do whatever it took. The, the big problem for me was that I didn't, I had no idea what it was. I mean, I had, I had committed to myself that I was going to get

better, but I didn't know what that meant. And, uh, so it took a couple of, of, you know, over the next six months, I had a few really, really, um, revolution, revelatory moments with thanks to other people that, that really started setting me on, set me on my path. Well, a couple observations. The first is this sort of glossing over of the near death experience, which could be its own podcast. Yeah. I might have to have you back just to talk about that you know do you have you heard of this uh neurologist named um dr evan frick i'm forgetting his last name i want to say evan alexander i'm not sure but anyway he's like a harvard trained neurologist oh i had who had a near-death experience yes he went into a coma and he had this and he wrote a whole book about it yeah and he was a total

skeptic until he actually yeah i just met him at another one of these wellness conferences and he gave me his book which i just started reading but yeah he was a super skeptic until he actually, yeah. I just met him at another one of these wellness conferences and he gave me his book, which I just started reading. But yeah, he was a super skeptic. And then he was in a coma for like seven days. But during that period of time, he experienced it as a much longer period of time. He had all this vivid experiences that now his whole perspective on everything in life has changed. But anyway, it's amazing. But like the power of the mind, it's incredible. I mean, the fact that you had that, like you,

I mean, you are out of it, but you have that, you know, vivid experience that you recollect. It was incredibly lucid. It's kind of amazing. Yeah.

Yeah. And it was, it was, and it was a moment I wasn't even in that moment that I, that I was like, Oh, I have to fix myself and I got to get better. It was more like,

uh, here are two choices. I can either go the easy route which is just to let go and I and I I know and I knew then that letting go meant I was gonna die or I could fight and the weird thing about the fighting aspect is that it wasn't like a it's a physical struggle but it really when I think about it it was kind of like being you know hanging off the edge of a cliff or something and you're holding on for dear life and you can feel your fingers slipping away really, when I think about it, it was kind of like being, you know, hanging off the edge of a cliff or something, and you're holding on for dear life, and you can feel your fingers slipping away, and you're down to like two fingers. And you can either just slip away and finally relax,

because you're just at that you're at that very last moment, your body can't anymore. Or you can just suck it up and dig in and find it, you know, somewhere to pull yourself up back up over the cliff. And that's what And that's what that moment was like. It was really, really remarkable. That's interesting. All right, so you come out of that, and you're like, I've got to do something different. I've got to change my life, yeah. First of all, you've got to fire your doctor.

Exactly. This guy is not— That was the last time I went to see him, actually, yeah. That was the end. And what leads you to Frank? So, you know, well, first, before I even met Frank, I met this guy named Ari Mizell, who I didn't meet, but I saw a podcast that he did, or rather, I saw a TEDx talk he gave. And in it, he had been living with Crohn's for a number of years, and he had managed to turn it

around through diet, exercise, supplementation. And he got off of all of his meds and to, you know, to the complete disbelief of his doctors, no longer had any sign of Crohn's in his, in his bloods. Um, and so I watched his talk, which was really just kind of about his experience. And it, it, it was this moment where I saw it and I was like, God, I really want to be this guy. This guy did it. Then if he did it, I can do it too. You know, he, he went from being hospitalized a year later to doing an Ironman. So if he could do it, I could do it too. Right. Um, and I got to meet him, uh, and he became friends. Um, and the most important aspect of all this was really just learning that was the inspirational element of, of, of knowing somebody who'd gone through a very similar experience and knew what it was like to feel

helpless and knew what it was like to feel self-pity and anger and depression and all these things that come along with being chronically sick. Um, and, and was, was very supportive. Um, and it wasn't so much that he was like, Oh, take this supplement and do this and don't eat that. It was more than just he had done it himself and I was going to have to figure out my own path. But there was some inspiration. So I met him and I met Frank shortly after that. A little accountability too.

Accountability too, yeah. Somebody to say, to bounce ideas off of or somebody who at least could hold that belief that maybe you do have the power to resolve this for yourself. Totally, totally. And you just reached out to him randomly after seeing the video? Actually, no.

So the way it happened, he's actually very good friends with a friend of mine. And my friend had seen what I was going through and said, you've got to meet Ari. You really got to meet him because you guys have gone. He went through a very similar thing. And when he told me that, it was like the end of all. When you're not well, you get so much unsolicited advice about what you should and shouldn't do. Oh, you've got to eat cherry. You got to drink cherry juice and you've got to stop eating.

Everybody's an expert on your condition. Exactly. When they have no idea what it's like to, to, to be in your shoes. And that makes, you know, it, it makes you pretty jaded, honestly, like at this point, I, you know, I never offer advice to people unless they really asked me for it. Uh, I'm happy to, to, to, to share my experience and I'm happy to, to be as empathetic as I can, but I'm not going to offer any advice to anyone until they come and ask for it because it's, I feel like it's just not appropriate. And, and people aren't really ready to change until they're ready to do it. So for me to try to impose my own values or my own, my own experience upon them, it may not, what works for me may not necessarily work for someone else either. But, but that was,

you know, that was a moment where Ari kind of got me to think about the fact that what I was living through RA or Crohn's or whatever you wanted to call it, or colitis or MS or any of these diseases, which are all have the same root cause that if you just try to deal with the symptoms, you're never going to get better. If you kind of re you, you give birth to yourself in a new way, you bring your body back to where it's meant to be, and you really care for your body, that then you set yourself up for success and you stack the cards in your favor. If you're constantly getting in the way of your immune system and getting in the way of your body, your body wants to heal itself.

It doesn't want to be sick. Our bodies do not want to be sick. But we put up so many hurdles and roadblocks that make it really hard for our body to do its job and to be healthy. And so what he was kind of pointing out to me was that if we can start to remove some of those roadblocks and clear things up and, and, and then also get that tailwind, because that's what you want is you want a little bit of tailwind behind you so your body can do, do what it does best. And that was the beginning. And then,

and then I was very, I was fortuitous to meet Frank Lipman, um, who I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with. Well, I've had him on the podcast. Oh, great. Awesome. It was a while ago. Yeah. So I just had dinner with Frank last night. Oh, you did?

Cool. Are you going out to see him this weekend? Yeah, I'm going to see him this weekend. We're going to talk at the Bank of America Wellness Retreat in Montauk. Very cool. Which will be nice to get out there. We'll say hi to Frank. I definitely will.

So I met Frank, and Frank and Montauk, which will be nice to get out there. I'll say hi to Frank. I definitely will. Um, so I met Frank and Frank was, was, um, was super cool. You know, I didn't think I was going to see him as a doctor. Um, I met him socially. Uh, but as soon as I, I met him, he took a deep interest in me. I think he saw, he saw how sick I was. You could see in my face, he saw how inflamed I was. He could tell that I was not well. Good God, man, what are you doing? What are you doing to yourself? You look like shit, man. You look terrible. Yeah, in his South African accent. No, but what he did say, which is amazing, he looked at me and said, it's a shame. It's a shame what you've gone through. That I had suffered so unnecessarily that really that what I was dealing with and what I was living through was totally not necessary.

You know, I didn't have to live that way. I didn't have to be suffering from RA. I didn't have to be going through all of these issues that I was going through for years and years and years if Western medicine had just not been so arrogant. And if I had, you know, if I had met him 15 years earlier, things would have been a lot different. But what he, what he made very clear to me was that he wasn't interested in treating rheumatoid arthritis or anything. He didn't even really want to call it RA. He, he wanted to treat this underlying issue, which is the, the immune system or, or,

you know, as he refers to it as the gut, which is really treating the microbiome as the driving force behind the majority of modern disease, and rebalancing our relationship with our bacteria and developing a much more, reversing this dysbiosis that I was experiencing and been living through for years and years and years that I was totally unaware of, totally unaware of, um, as, as it was being driven by probably by a number of factors from infection to overuse of antibiotics, to bad diet, to, um, to all sorts of issues. But, you know, all this antibiotics a lot as a kid, I, well, I didn't until I was a teenager and then I did a lot. Um, and I started getting sick a lot as a teenager. So I would get, you know, pneumonia, which is not very common for teenagers to get or bronchitis. And every time I had, you know, some sort of infection or, or illness, boom, take, you know, even if it's viral, even if it's viral,

yeah. They would just take a touch recycling for acne. Cause I did not, but I know a lot of kids, I didn't, I was lucky. I didn't have, I didn't have acne, but I know that a lot of people that, that do take that. And the real and the horrible thing about that is that they're making it worse. Oftentimes, acne is driven by dysbiosis in the gut, and then you take this really powerful antibiotic that is just going to wipe out the majority of the good bacteria that you need to have in your gut. bacteria they need to have in your gut. So he helped me kind of reevaluate the way I was living my life. And then through, you know, a bunch of different tools, I'll call them, you know, some being actually being, believe it or not, antibiotics for a short period of time, because I did have a pretty serious infection that we had to clear up. But then switching to a very, very strong pre, strong pre and probiotic, um, protocol and,

and, uh, healing the gut lining and trying to, to, to close up, um, uh, the, you know, over porous leaky gut and, um, and then cleaning up my diet and just trying to get me healthy. And a large component of that too, was also mental health, understanding the importance of, of letting go of things. And, you know, well, it's, it's almost a, an Ayurvedic approach in the sense that, you know, the body is composed of energy systems. And if these are, if these systems are out of balance, you're, you're headed towards dis ease, right? Like you are, you are in disease. And so how do we bring this back into balance? Yeah. And it's interesting that the gut biome, it's now sort of at the advent of everybody's, it's on the tip of everyone's tongue, it's kind of this zeitgeist thing in the medical field, but it wasn't that long ago that that was a crazy idea.

Totally crazy idea. So how do you even begin to parse that out? I mean, does he take a sample from your gut biome and figure out what's in there and what's missing and what's bad? Like, what's the difference between good and bad? And how do you figure that out? Yeah, no, it's hard. I mean, it's not and it's not as simple as saying this is good bacteria and this is bad bacteria. I know there are kind of two families, if you will, of bacteria and having the right balance of both is important.

It's kind of like saying, well, you can't say that omega-3 fatty acids are good and omega-6s are bad. They're both necessary, but if you don't have them in the right balance, exactly. So yeah, I mean, we can test the gut biome as we did. We can do all those sorts of things, but it's ultimately right now kind of more flying blind. It's a lot of intuitive response. And Frank kind of started with me. We started together and then I really just like took off on my own and just threw myself into this a thousand percent. And my approach, you know, I saw him on a

weekly basis, if not biweekly basis for a very, very long time. Um, but I also was, I changed the way I thought about working with a doctor, uh, which was not this, the notion that I'd really been mired in for a long time was that I got sick and I would go to the doctor and the doctor would treat me. And then I'd go about doing everything else in my life. And that was it. Like I did, I dealt with the treatment. Now I can go back to doing everything else in my life. And Frank really got me to realize that, no, if I wanted to really care for this, it had to be a whole package. So it meant that every decision I was making throughout the day really was made with the, the, the, the background of my health in mind. So always thinking about that.

So whether that's the food that I was eating throughout the day or my stress levels or how much rest I was getting, all these things in conjunction with the supplementation that I was doing and any other treatment that I was doing with him. So it was this notion that I had to have full buy-in and I had to be an active participant in my own well-being. Yeah, you have to take ownership of it and understand that you're in partnership with

your doctor. Exactly. Right. And that he's not the person giving you the answers. He's only as effective as, you know, his ability to be effective to you is in direct proportionate to your willingness to engage in the process and communicate and follow through and all that kind of stuff. It's like a good coach, you know, a good coach that you do the work, the coach can help you. But while you're doing the work, you might figure out, oh, I can change my stride a little bit like this. Or, or if I, you know, if I accelerate right now or change my cadence slightly, you learn things on your own as you're doing it. But the coach is there to kind of guide you and give you some structure. But if you don't do the work, it

doesn't matter. Yeah. You can get your weekly workouts and never do them. And, uh, it looks, it looks great in your emails and it looks great to everyone else, but if you're not doing them, you didn't make no progress. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Interesting. Um, and, and also important to understand that this is not going to be an overnight thing. No, you're on, you're on a long road that is about a lifestyle change. And, you know, sort of being open ended as to where it would lead and adjusting and understanding that this is now your life. This is exactly something with a destination, you know, in mind of, oh, I, I, I heal this, or I resolve this issue. And then I can go back to living the way I was living before. Yeah, I think that's indicative of one of the problems of setting goals. You set these goals, and then there's this notion that, okay, then I've accomplished this, now it's done. I can check that off my list. And you can't do that with your health, because you're, I mean, we're changing every moment. You know, our cells are changing every moment. And if we want to thrive in that change, we have to also be changing every moment,

and we have to be aware of it. It's an ongoing process. You know, you aren't, you're not arriving at good health, finally. And you didn't arrive overnight at bad health. It was a slow and insidious process. And to get out of that, that deep hole, it's going to be a slow and intentional process. And you have to kind of go through that and be willing to. And in our environment, our culture is very much based on, we want what we want and we want it right now. You know, we want our Amazon Prime delivered tomorrow. We want our Netflix on demand right now. We want all of those things. We want the biohack that's going to deliver the result immediately. Right now. And I, you know, I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of talk now that, you know, in the, in the, one of the next and most exciting future treatments is fecal transplant.

And people are really excited about it. And I think it's really, it's very cool because it does have, it opens up a whole world of potential that we haven't seen to date. But the expectation that you're going to take a poo pill and tomorrow have like a great microbiome is also not, you know, that's not, that's just as bad as thinking you can just take a, um, a lot of people switch the supplements, the drugs for the supplements and they become hooked on the supplements. And when ultimately the goal is to get your body to a point where you take things that you might need periodically, but you really are a place of homeostasis. It's human nature. You know, we just, we want that one thing and what's the next thing. And, you know, we're always looking for what's going to be the next thing.

And so when we were at the revitalize conference, we both got to hear Dr. Robin Shukan speak and she's this expert doctor on the microbiome, gut biome. She's amazing. She's incredible. I know you had a long talk with her after. Yeah. She cool she really is cool and i've got to get her on the podcast yeah she's like a firecracker right um but she pointed out something in her talk about she could foresee like these beautiful salons yeah people would go in and it would all be very she she you know sort of madison avenue and people would get their fecal transplants these beautiful little vials yeah they'd be branded with, you know, bizarre, like dystopian future.

But I can see that happening. Totally. Just like, listen, there were oxygen bars in Los Angeles not too long ago. So it's like anything's possible. But I think that's very astute that, look, that's the thing everyone's going to go to and think that they've solved the problem. But it just doesn't work that way.

Like, it really involves, you know, a comprehensive approach to every aspect of, of how you're living your life. If you want to have any expectation that any of these one things, which all on their own right play a part, but if you want them to function properly and maximally that, you know, you have to have that global approach to your health. Yeah, no, it's totally true. And I get, you know, I'm very, very lucky in that, you know, I have regained my health and I feel really, really wonderful. And I'd forgotten what it was like to, I mean, being a healthy human being is a wonderful thing. It's a really remarkable gift that we have. Being able to play outside on a bicycle or jump in the ocean and go swimming and feel good about doing those things or eating really good food or hanging out with the kids or any of that stuff. Those are, those

are really amazing things to be able to do in a body that wants to do them. And I'd forgotten that I'd forgotten what that was like. Um, but we, uh, you know, we really do need to understand that it is an ongoing process and you've got to, you have to, you have to look at your body as, as you, you can't separate your, your everyday life from your body. You experience your everyday life in your body, which means you really need to be constantly caring for it. Um, and the decisions that you make will really impact your ability to, to have a wonderful life in your body. Um, and, uh, and if we expect that we can just kind of take a pill, we can do whatever we want and abuse our bodies and do everything. And then, and then just take a pill and everything's going to be fine, regardless of whether that

pill is a pharmaceutical pill or it's a, you know, it's a, it's a poo pill, you know, it doesn't matter. Like you have to, you can use tools as you go and as you need them. But if you become dependent upon expecting one tool to change everything, you're really setting yourself up for, for a big, big disappointment. Yeah, and whether you feel lousy or great, the ripple effect of that is unfathomable. It impacts every single microsecond of every single day and how you interact with people and then how they then interact with you and their perception of you throughout your relationships, through, throughout your relationships, your marriage, your kids, your profession, you know, like every aspect of it is indelibly, you know,

marked by your emotional state, your physical state, all of that. And so, you know, I, I don't know. I just think that, that, that we don't think of that enough in its most comprehensive sense. It's true. So, and that's what somebody like, like Frank can really bring to the surface. Like, oh, this is not just, this isn't one thing, you know, it's like, it's, it's symptomatic. It's funny. It's symptomatic, but it's symptomatic of this reductionist approach to medicine, which is, you know, medicine by its very nature has to be reductionist as a means of trying to understand it. But that also gets in the way of how we address these health problems because we're complex systems.

Yeah, we're not just a hand. We're not just like an eyeball. So you can't just look at what's going on in your hand without looking at the greater system. I mean, we are these complex systems. And one of the problems that I think we've gotten into with allopathic medicine through the 20th century is that we treat things in verticals and in highly specialized verticals. So these are all the sets of symptoms that fall into my area of expertise as a hand specialist and as a GI doctor. These are all the symptoms that fall into my area of expertise. And what I find often ends up happening with a lot of people who are ill is that they might

end up going to see an immunologist or whoever they might see. And that person looks at what they're going through and tries to fit their symptoms to what their knowledge base is without looking at, okay, well, that's related. Let's connect the dots. Let's look at the whole system and see everything that's going on within the body. And it really is, I mean, I think it's the future of medicine to look at things in a much more broad element and to also start to look at the correlation between mental health and the gut biome and mental health and the physical health of the body. You mentioned something that made me think about this

idea that has been resonating in my mind, kind of rebounding in my mind for the past few years, that we talk about disease. We've always thought of disease as being something that's contagious. You can catch a disease or you can catch a virus or catch a bacterial infection from someone. or catch a bacterial infection from someone. But I've really started to look at health as being contagious in a way that when you start to make really good and considered choices about your own well-being, the people around you take notice, and they start doing the same thing as well.

They start asking the same thing. Like, oh, that's a good idea. Maybe I should do that as well. And sometimes it's through pressure. It's through a little bit of peer pressure like they feel guilty about eating a bag of potato chips like i see this with my my cooks around me like they feel guilty about eating a bag of potato chips in front of me but that's okay i'm okay with that kind of a little bit of guilt like that but then i see them doing like i have um my my chef de cuisine who's a great guy who's been working for a long time and he he's kind of kind of my, my right hand. Um, he's, you know, as, as I've become more and more and more enthusiastic about

understanding the gut biome and, and the importance of, of bacteria in our health, he's like gone way deep on fermenting vegetables. And so like, he's like the fermenting, if it can be fermented, he's fermenting it. Interesting. And he's all about integrating some fermented vegetables into his daily diet for health. And I just think that's really cool because I see that and that's just sort of like that's another example of how health can really be contagious. And leading a healthy lifestyle can inspire other people to lead a healthy lifestyle. Yeah, there's no question about it. I think that's beautifully articulated. It's important. That's a great ethos, I think, to kind of carry around with yourself. Yeah, there's no question about it. You know, I think that's, that's beautifully articulated. It's important. Great ethos, I think, to kind of carry around with yourself. Yeah, nice. So how long did it take before you you balanced out?

compost, I think. But, but it took, you know, it took six months before I actually noticed any change. For the first six months, I still felt exactly the same. Did you? I mean, that's a long time to feel continue to feel lousy and maintain hope that there's going to be a light at the end of this tunnel. Yeah. And there were definitely times that I kind of thought, what's the point? I'm not getting any better. This is not changing. And I think the thing that really, that really helped me in this was that I did see Frank so frequently. And he was really supportive and said, listen, don't despair. It is going to take time. But please, please, please trust me that if you continue at it and you stay, you know, you stay focused and you're disciplined, you are going to see change. And it may not be a 90% or

a hundred percent change. It'll probably be somewhere between, he kept saying between 30 and 90%. That's what we're looking for. A 30 to 90% recovery. But he had conviction that, that there would be improvement. There would be improvement. And that's interesting. You know, I can't remember whether I told you this story the other day, but my wife, Julie, she healed herself of a cyst on her neck, right? And so her Ayurvedic doctor who, you know, really in many ways is not dissimilar from the protocols that Frank prescribes, you know, is basically like, it's a comprehensive approach of what, you know, sort of, you can eat this, you can eat that. Yeah. And like some crazy herbs and, you know, some wacky stuff in there, but essentially, you know, not really that far left of field. But, but the point that I'm trying to make is that

this Ayurvedic doctor basically said it wasn't like, well, try this and we'll see how it goes. You know, I don't know, you know, it should work, but you know, we'll just, we'll just, you know, evaluate it in six months. This guy was like, no, there was no doubt in his mind. Total conviction, yeah. Complete conviction. And whether that's placebo or not, it doesn't matter to have somebody like that who believes in you. Because when it is going to take a long time, like, you need to be able to hold on to something like that.

And this guy was like, no, there was no doubt in his mind. You know, so I think that was what Julie was able to hold on to something like that. And this guy was like, no, this, this, there was no doubt in his mind, you know? So I think that was what Julie was able to hold on to. Right. Cause it took her like nine months. You know, that's a, that's a long time. But she completely made, made assist disappear, which is virtually unheard of in Western medicine. I mean, he's every single specialist said it was impossible, impossible, you know? So, you know, it just makes you, it broadens your horizon

as to, you know, how you think about these systems in terms of, of health. I mean, and, and indeed, and in kind of going through this protocol with Frank, I mean, were you doing, you know, acupuncture and meditation and what other aspects of your lifestyle were kind of, you know, altered through new modalities? So I mean, I was doing acupuncture with Frank, um, at least once a week. And I would, uh, it's a pretty amazing experience having, I don't know if you've had needles from Frank, but it's a really cool experience. Not from Frank, but I've had acupuncture, but not with Frank. So he, he does, you know, he, he puts in the needles

and you get in a really comfortable place. And then he puts on like some noise canceling headphones with, with some just beautiful sounds, whether it might be just birds or ocean or something. And, uh, turns the light off and you're in complete darkness. And then you lie there for like 45 minutes with yourself needled. And, you know, I, I experimented roll over and no, you don't want to move. No, I, I, yeah, no, I never, I was always worried that I might find an extra needle in my shirt when I got back to work or something. But, um, no, I, I would, I would experiment in those, those moments, those 45 minutes or sometimes longer sitting with, with, um, lying there with, with needles, I would do different things. Like I would, I practice some, some breathing techniques and I would do box breathing and I would try some, some, some, um,

mindfulness, uh, body scanning, things like that. But the thing that I found to be most interesting and most therapeutic for me was to just envision all the points at which I had contact with needles and just kind of become extremely aware of my body. And in doing that, like you could, I could feel myself breathing into the, into each point. Um, and, and that was, that was a remarkable

moment just to cleanse myself completely of everything else that was going on in the world. Like it didn't, I didn't care if my phone was ringing somewhere. I didn't care if, uh, you know, if I had a bill that was due, I didn't care if, you know, I was getting a million emails. It was just that moment to be there. And that was really, really, really important. So yeah, I did a little bit of, of that. Mostly what I did with him was acupuncture and herbs and supplementation and diet. There was a lot of, also just a lot of, same thing with Julie. I mean, there was a lot of like, just belief that I was going to get better. And the confidence that he had that I was going to improve made it much, much easier for me to have buy-in and to really believe it.

Stick with it. Yeah. And I think the other part that was really huge for me is that even going back a year before I felt better was when I had first seen that TEDx talk that Ari gave. I had at that point planted the seed in my brain that I could get better. So I believed it. And even through those six months where I didn't feel better, I still believed it. I still believe that I could get better. And I think that if you don't actually believe in your own ability to be well, you can't, you'll never get better. You have to, you have to believe. And it doesn't mean that you can believe it has to start with, I mean, it has to start with this,

this very positive outlook where you, you just have to get past feeling like a victim, and you have to get past feeling a sense of hopelessness and self-pity, because those are very easy traps to get caught in, and it's not easy to get past them. And for me to get past them, it took Frank telling me, I'm going to get you better. I actually didn't say it like that. I said, we're going to get you better. And that was the first. That the first huge difference. Yeah. Huge difference. Yeah. And that was, yeah. And that was something that was very different from what doctors in the past had said, which is like, I can give you this drug and I can give you that

drug. I'm going to tell you what you need to do. Exactly. Yeah. But he kept pointing out, he's like, we're going to do this. You're going to have to do all the work it's gonna be really hard for you but we'll be we'll go through this together so it was six months and then i woke up one day and literally and he even told me though he told me he said i think it'll take about six months and it was remarkable because it literally was six months almost to the day that i woke up and i walked down our stairs we have a really large spiral staircase in our apartment and I used to hobble down at one step at a time. And I was walking down the stairs, no handrail, like a normal human being. And I got halfway down the stairs and was like, oh my God,

I'm actually walking down the stairs and I don't hurt. And my wife was on the, on the ground floor and she looked up at me and she's, she's just like, I can still remember her. She had like an apple in her mouth and she just kind of stopped chewing and was staring at me. And I said, it doesn't hurt. I feel good. And she had only ever known me as a sick person. And she immediately started crying. I mean, that was like she couldn't believe it.

And I was like, I was totally worried that I wasn't going to make it to the bottom of the stairs without it coming back and out, you know, without things going south again. But what's amazing is that was, you know, over two years ago. And I've had nothing but positive change since then. Wow. So you don't get occasional flare-ups or things like that anymore? Nothing. And, you know, I'm actually just, I just did another set of blood work. I haven't done blood work in about a year, but I just did another set of blood work,

and I'm waiting for those results. And I also got my microbiome checked. But I'm curious to see what the results are. But the last time I was checked, everything is completely normal and healthy. And I feel even better than I did then. So I can only imagine, you know, I'm sure I'm, I'm doing totally fine. Yeah. Amazing. Well, a big part of this also is, is the diet aspect of it. And, you know, in, in, in the most general sense, I suppose I would characterize that as just a return to whole food, right? I mean,

real cooking. Yeah. And that can mean a lot of different things. I mean, you know, I, I, I, I believe that if we eschew foods that are are adulterated and taken away from their original, their, their original source, their original, their, their, their original content, how they how, you know, whether it's using an excessive amount, like even you look at a lot of the gluten-free foods that are out there, they're, they're just as bad as foods that are highly processed. So if you can, if you can kind of return to a very, um, natural way of, of relating to food, whether it's, um, cooking, whatever that means for you as an individual, you know, everyone's very different. Um, and I've found myself interestingly enough, like I've found myself gravitating more and more towards, uh, towards a plant-based diet, even though I don't, I'm not a vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination, but I treat one. I only eat meat that I know where it's coming from. And, and I'm very,

very careful about the quality of that meat. Um, and, and when I do eat meat it's like uh 10 of the meal you know it's not like it's 80 of the meal um and and i think that you know i mean that's really a more paleolithic approach anyway like this idea like i don't understand like i'm no expert on the paleo diet but it seems to me that first of all like whatever Paleolithic man was eating was probably highly contingent upon where they lived. Exactly. But in either case, unless you were living in a place where there was no vegetation and there were only animals, like animals are hard to catch, right? So that was a rare kind of like exceptional circumstance. Sure, that was north of the Arctic Circle.

So for the most part, it was like, you know, it would be a delicacy, you know, on the plate. For the most part, it was like, you know, it would be a delicacy, you know, on the plate. And so the idea that it's been perverted to this very meat-heavy diet, like in its sort of modern incarnation, I think is not really maybe the original idea behind it. Yeah. You know, and if you look at the blue zones and all these places, like they're not, you know, they're either plant-based or if they're eating meat, the meat is a really small aspect of it. It's a side dish to a proliferation of. Yeah. It's an ingredient that's no more or less important than the asparagus or anything else that's on a plate. And I do think that there are a lot of people in the paleo movement that get that.

Yeah, I think so too. I'm not saying they don't, but it's become like suddenly it's about like bacon as if you're supposed to eat bacon at every meal right you know like i don't i don't really understand where that's coming from yeah i guess people like you know they like to hear that so that becomes a popular meme yeah to be able to be told that you can oh this thing that was indulgent we weren't supposed to eat before is actually now i can justify it and and it's really good for me that i'm just going to throw myself whole hog into it you know pardon the pun i didn't mean that as a pun but uh that that that's that's just as dangerous as as you know i mean any ism

in general or any any like extreme extreme um adaptation of of a life with food i think is kind of dangerous too i think too. I think it's, I think it's good to go to variants, too. If you look at humans as they evolved, like we didn't, we ate meat when we could get meat. But there was a lot of time with times when we couldn't get meat, and we ate what we could get, which is, you know, a lot of fibrous vegetables and tubers and all sorts of other stuff. And also, the foods that we have available to us now are very different from the foods that Paleolithic man had. So to draw a complete conclusion, you know, the strawberries we have now are very different from the wild strawberries that they might've been foraging.

Well, it's certainly the grains and the wheat. Yeah, yeah. All of that. It's very, very different. Anything that's been hybridized and then forget about the cheeses. And our gut biome adapts to that, right? So the foods that you're eating is what's cultivating your gut biome. Absolutely. And then that becomes the foods that you crave

and that ecology in there then demands those foods to survive. So I think that that plays a part in people getting stuck in however they're eating and that makes it more difficult to change. I mean, if you have a proliferation of firmicutes and bacteria in your gut, which feed on sugars and starches, refined sugars and starches, you're going to have to eat more to feed

them. And the more you eat, the greater that population of firmicutes grows, which is very likely to be one of the driving forces behind obesity. One of the elements that causes obesity certainly causes dysbiosis. Whereas when you're feeding gut bacteria low in your lower intestine and your colon, you have to be eating a lot of fibrous vegetables. And the stuff that we can't actually digest is the stuff that the bacteria is breaking down and eating and living off of. So yeah, what we eat directly affects how we feed those bugs and that affects our performance in our, in our health. Right. Well, I like the idea that you're, you're, you're moving more plant-based.

I dig it. When's the, when's the, uh, the vegan restaurant? Oh yeah. Well, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be beyond doing something like that at some point. Um, you know, I, I think the thing for me that's hardest is that I don't like to, um, I don't like to, I try to keep food in politics. I know it's hard to separate them. Um, but I have a real, I have a real problem when people, um, confuse like a moral statement with a health statement and they make a moral decision about, like, I know a lot of vegans that are really, really unhealthy people and their decisions to be vegans come from a position of you know ethics and morality which i totally get and i actually am completely in a line with

um you know i i i uh i look at the state of of um factory farming and i find it appalling um and and and i i don't want any part of that and I don't want to support that system in any way. And I don't think it's unlike a lot of paleo people who are just like, well, meat is meat and you know, it doesn't really matter if it's Hormel pepperoni or if you're getting, uh, you know, uh, you're getting an, uh, heritage pig from, from a small farm that's raised naturally. I don't agree with that. I think there's a huge difference in quality of product and quality of life of that animal. Um, but, uh, but to that end, like, I don't like to personally, I don't like to say I never would call myself a paleo, a paleo person or a follower of the paleo plan. I wouldn't say that I'm a gluten free person. And I mean, I don't happen to eat grains that

have gluten in them too, but that doesn't mean I want to be labeled as being a gluten-free person. And I mean, I don't happen to eat grains that have gluten in them, but that doesn't mean I want to be labeled as being a gluten-free person. You know, I don't like these camps. So I would certainly have, you know, in my restaurants, there are lots of options for people that choose not to eat dairy or choose not to eat grains or choose not to eat meat, but I would never call any one of them. I wouldn't say this is our gluten free label. Yeah. Well, it's really tricky. I mean, food, you know, to the extent that you can extract politics from food, you know, it's very difficult and, you know, it's very emotional and it's becoming increasingly more and more difficult to even talk about it without like people getting inflamed, getting inflamed. And, and, you know, when you said kind of at the

outset of the podcast that you don't like to proselytize and you don't like to give people advice and, you know, you're there to share your experience to the extent that people are interested. Like I kind of share that perspective, you know, maybe I'm a little more vociferous because I have a podcast and all this sort of stuff, but, but I don't go around taking people's inventory about how they live their lives and saying, you've got to do this. If you're interested, this is what happened to me and this is how I did it. And I, and I'm happy to speak to you about that. And I'm happy to have people on the podcast that share my point of view. And I'm happy to have people on that disagree with me. That's part of the dialogue, but I think

it's important to remain, you know, kind of grounded and mature in those discussions because when they get inflamed and heated, it turns into like an episode of Crossfire on Sunday morning. And it's like everybody's just kind of preaching to their base and it's not really productive or helpful. You know what I mean? There are huge problems with our food system. You know, we talked about school lunch and certainly nobody is going to disagree that factory farming is an abomination. And, you know, it's also incredibly destructive on the environment. It's not sustainable. We're not going to be able to feed the planet this way much longer. No way. Unless we're just so short-sighted that we're just going to run

the planet into the ground and then go, uh- you know which is kind of which is the mo that's the way we roll yeah that's what we do we're kind of rats in that you know so to the extent that that you know you are sourcing your ingredients for your restaurants you know sustainably and all of that like this is this is a positive thing but it does get it does get tricky with the politics and all that yeah and i'm sensitive to that you know and i think that to the extent that you are able to accommodate people from all the, I mean, it's getting harder and harder. Well, I don't eat sugar and I don't eat grains and I'm vegan, but I'm lacto. And I mean, it's like, dude, how many subcategories are there at some point? Right. But I know that you're, you know, real careful about, you know, where you're getting all of your

ingredients from. Yeah. Yeah. And that's really as local as possible. Yeah. And that's super, that's really, really important to me. I mean, it's important to me for a number of reasons. It's important because it tastes better ultimately, and it's better for you. I mean, it's just simply better for you to eat food that is in season. You get something that's local, that's harvested ripe, you know, a few days ago versus something that's gassed and harvested ripe you know a few days ago versus something that's gassed and put in a box and comes across the ocean that's not good for your body also the fossil fuels that are involved in bringing it from peru to new york city that's not good for the body of the of the planet um the the you have very little control over the quality

of the grapes that you get from per. But when I talked to the guy that I get grapes from the Finger Lakes from, and you know, in the height of summer, I know exactly how he's growing his grapes. And there's a there's a there's a distinct difference. And it, it forces me to have a relationship with with not only the food itself, but with the people that that are growing the food, who tend to be pretty passionate people because like other aspects of the food world you don't get into it if you just want to have to be to be doing that yeah you're not doing it's a labor of love and is this something that has always been a through line through your cooking as a result of the traditions with which you were brought up

with your mom or has how has the experience of weathering your disease and your kind of recovery from that informed how you approach the kitchen and your restaurants? Well, both. Those are two really interesting points. Yeah, definitely growing up I had this relationship with food because I grew up planting carrots, harvesting carrots, and cooking the carrots. harvesting carrots and cooking the carrots. And if you've never had a carrot that's like just out of the ground, that you wipe a little dirt off of it, maybe a little bit of cold water, and then you eat it and you still got some dirt on it. You've never really eaten a carrot. I mean, honestly, I believe a carrot stops tasting like 100% carrot about a minute after it comes out of the ground. There's that moment when it comes out of the ground is just really remarkable.

But so I had that, you know, growing up. And then when I went away to Spain and I lived in Spain, it's changed a lot in Spain now, but a long time, well, not so long ago. In the 90s, 20, 25 years ago, there were not grocery stores. There were very few grocery stores in Spain. And people shopped at the markets. They bought fish from the wife of the fisherman. They bought potatoes from the wife of the potato farmer.

Every kind of specialty grower producer had a little stand in the market, and they brought their product to market. And as a result, you ate seasonally and locally because that's what you did. There were no other options. So that, as I was learning to cook in Spain, that really was a big part of how I cooked and how I thought about food. And then getting sick. The irony is that I was sick for so long and I didn't know. And I talked about this in my talk at Revitalize. Like, I didn't, I was so blind, I couldn't see that the answer was right in front of me, that it was food all along, that that was the answer to my. The answer was given to you as a small child.

Exactly. Out of your whole life. Out of your whole life. Out of my whole life. And I guess the moral of the story is always listen to your mom and listen to your grandmother because they're so smart and they know. I hope my mother hears this because that will give me good brownie points. But no, completely. I mean, my mother and grandmother intuitively, and maybe it's a maternal thing.

Maybe mothers kind of know this. They know how instinctively they know what to do to care for their, their children. But my, my mom and my grandmother just kind of, they, they kept saying, look at food, look at food. That's, you're going to find your answers in food. And like most kids, like, you know, your mom tells you what to do. You don't do it, but then someone else tells you what to do. And it's the same thing your mom told you and you do it. And then your mom's like, see, I told you so she's just listening. But, but, uh, no, so I did, you know, I eventually came around and, and obviously that was a huge component, a huge aspect of my, of my journey and healing.

And as a result, it has had a huge impact on how I cook in the restaurants and how I think about food in the restaurants. In what specific sense? Oh, I mean, you know, in the reduction of the amount of gluten that we have on the menu, in getting rid of any refined white flour, we only use heritage grains when we use grains. I mean, there's things in the menu that I don't eat. Don't get me wrong. Like I don't, I don't eat sugar. We have to use some sugar, but we use almost no refined sugar. Now we do pretty much all of our, our desserts are, you know, when you have the desserts, they're not that sweet. We've taken a lot of the sweetness out and we use just natural sweetness from the fruits that we're using. If we do use

sweeteners, it's things like raw honey or using some maple syrup, but we've really reduced that a lot. We've reduced the amount of bread, like there's much less bread within the restaurant. Ratcheting back the way we look at the proteins, as I talked to you, as I mentioned before, like using meat as an ingredient rather than as a main component. I mean, we do have some dishes that are meat dishes that are meant for sharing, but they're not meant for a single person to sit down and eat 42 ounces of beef. I mean, that's not the way it's designed.

So there's definitely been an impact. And then certainly how I cook outside of the restaurant. And the challenge that I do have is that my restaurants right now are Spanish restaurants. So they're very much within a concept of Spanish food. Within that, I have a little bit of leeway in terms of what I can do. But there's an expectation that there's going to be, you know, some of the greatest hits of Spanish cuisine are going to be on the menu. So I do have to also be conscientious of that. Right. But it's kind of a sharing culture,

right? In this sort of tapas tradition. Yeah. So it's the idea of ordering a bunch of plates and snacking. And yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's the idea of ordering a bunch of plates and kind of snacking. And yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the career a little bit. I mean, you know, here you are celebrity chef, you know, you, I know, but it's like, that's why I'm laughing. Cause I'm sure but it, you know, it's a weird time where suddenly the ascendancy of the chef as a kind of celebrated personality, it's never been kind of a better time for that. And maybe you kind of lament that in some respects, but I think it's probably also been, you know, it's a good time for you. There's a lot of interest in what you do. And look, you've been on TV, and you get to contribute to Men's Journal and Esquire and all these magazines.

And you're doing stuff on Vice. And you've had a pretty storied career. I mean, you've got three restaurants now, Tertullia. Four, with one in London. Oh, so, well, Sea Container is London. Yeah. And what was it? So I thought there were three.

So El Colmado. El Colmado. El Colmado Butchery, which is sort of a natural butcher shop and tapas bar, and Tertulia. Right, and Sea Container. And Sea Container is the fourth. Sea Container is the fourth one. So I'm still missing one. Tertulia, El Colmado, and El Colmado Butchery.

Oh, okay. I thought those were the same thing. No, they're separate. They're two different units. Yeah. So, I mean, it's about, it's funny, you were mentioning earlier said, well, you're running around, you're doing these things like going on these trips and doing all this stuff. And that plays into that part of, um, it's very, you're, you have, you're like this Hemingway ask, you know, you know, getting to do all these crazy adventures

and then write about it. And then, you know, it's all very, you know, related and kind of interwoven with the food and the story that you tell around food. Well, that's the great thing about food is food can be this really amazing narrative. You know, food is like the oldest ingredient in culture. It's the one thing that brings us all together. It's the, I like call it the language of culture. You know, it's, you look at, can you imagine Italian food without tomatoes?

That's a new ingredient. It's only been in Italy for 350, 400 years. You know, so it's a very, very new thing in so many ways. Or potatoes, Spanish food without potatoes. Nobody wanted to eat potatoes until the 17th century. They thought they were poisonous. So food evolves and the culture of food evolves and nowhere does it evolve faster than New York, which is this confluence of all these different cultures. And we're constantly reinventing ourselves and what cuisine in New York is because you have all of these new food cultures all the time that we're aware of and that are flowing by us.

of and that are flowing by us. So having this as this great narrative thread to be able to explore, whether it's, you know, I'm going to Spain in two weeks on my bicycle, but we're going to be going to wineries and to small little restaurants and markets, and I'm going to be cooking some dinners and it's food is an element of it, but it combines food and cycling. So two of my favorite things, in a great place. That's another great way that food can be a, and it is now you look at travel, people base so much of their travel on food. Like they don't go to places that have bad food. They make whole decisions about their vacations based upon a single restaurant that they want to go to or a food destination that they've heard about or they've read about. And there is a bit of a national obsession, even an international obsession with food these days. And some of it is fetishistic. Some of it is, you know, folks going to the market and taking pictures and updating their Instagram so everyone can see how, you know, food conscious they are. But I think a lot of the, the, the, the, the noise that that

creates is, is good because it, it forces us to, to constantly go back to thinking about food and about real food and being aware of it because we went, we've got, we went through this real, this, this vacuum dark age from like the 1940s to very recently where, you know, we were really geared towards efficiency and food, getting your calories and the right calories and just enough of them, not too many, because that's what's important as quickly as possible. So you can get onto being a productive human being. Um, and you know, it sounds, it sounds almost misogynistic, but I really, and I don't mean it to sound this way, but, but our health really kind of went off

the rails when, when women started working and developing careers. And not that I don't, that I think it's a bad thing. I think it's a wonderful thing that, that, that we've been able to come much closer to equal rights for women. Although, you know, there's still a lot of disparity in terms of income. But what it meant is that we stopped having somebody within the family whose primary responsibility and goal was making sure that there was good food for the family and they were considering food. So we we had to there was a hole that had to be filled. And that's where, you know, TV dinners started happening and canned food and frozen meals and packaged and prepared foods. packaged and prepared foods. So if we can get back to more of a dialogue about real food,

and if that has to come from a point of food fetishism, then it's not such a bad thing. But it is like this really interesting narrative thread that goes through so much of our lives. Yeah, that's really interesting culturally, how that's kind of evolved. And it'll be interesting to see with this new kind of welcoming of mindfulness practices, how that's kind of evolved. And it'll be interesting to see, you know, with this new kind of welcoming of mindfulness practices, how that influences how we approach the mealtime and how we approach like communion, you know, like actually just sharing this, you know, sacred thing with our friends and our, and our loved ones, which is something that we just, you know, move too far away from. But I do see it moving back. You know, it's almost like this recapturing of that lost tradition. That's so integral, uh, and important when it comes to

what it means to be human and be fulfilled and be happy. That connection there there's, I mean, since time eternal, we've gathered around food and that's how language evolved. And that's how culture became more complex and diversified. I mean, we literally, at its most basal level, we went out and we looked for some roots and shoots, and we picked them, and we huddled down and squatted around a campfire, and we maybe cooked them a little bit together. But we did it, generally speaking, we did it together. We're social animals, so the notion that you eat food out of a bag interfacing with a device is very much in, um, in opposition to our nature. And, and I think that we, you know, it has

detrimental effects, both emotional, psychological, and physical effects on the human being. As a culinary entrepreneur, is it fair to call you that? I guess it's fair, you know, entrepreneur, is it fair to call you that? I guess it's fair. You know, how would you characterize, you know, what you do or how what you do distinguishes yourself from the other chefs out there? I mean, what do you attribute your kind of success and ascendancy to? Like, what is it that you're doing different or what is it that, you know, you think when you when you think back on your path has allowed you to become so successful? I mean, I think that one of the things that, you know, there's there's first of all, there are a lot of amazing chefs in our space. And there's been a real I'm one of many guys that has gotten to a point where I'm really concerned with food and wellness. has gotten to a point where I'm really concerned with food and wellness.

And I see it from, you know, to differing degrees. I see, I have a friend, Bill Talapan, who's a great chef in New York, and he's focused, he started a foundation called Wellness in the Schools. And he's taken his platform as a chef and his knowledge as a chef to really try to innovate and make change in the school lunch programs within New York City and now expanding beyond New York City. And he's done an incredible job. So I think we all have this sense of responsibility with the attention, the focus that's put on us through the media. We have a sense of responsibility and ownership over what we do. In my case, I think that

initially I was very fortunate to start cooking in a space that very few people were cooking in, which was in Spanish food. There weren't really a lot of spokespeople for Spanish food. And then over time, as my health has really become a focus in my life and something that to me I feel, you know, I'm, one, very grateful to have reclaimed and to be aware of the relationship i have with with food and how it impacts my well-being i feel that i have a lot to share with that and i'd like to share as much as i can so i you know i don't know that i wouldn't say that it distinguishes me from my my colleagues and i think there are a lot of great people there i have a lot of amazing colleagues i don't think of myself as being more or less successful than, than, than most of them. Right. I mean, but you're comparing yourself, you know, to sort of the great talents of, of Manhattan or, or perhaps the world,

but in the sort of grand scheme of, you know, people that are interested in doing what you do, you know, it's like, look, you've got four restaurants, you're growing, I'm sure you've got plans to, you've got other things that you're working on right now. Um, you know, how does that, how does that happen? Like, how do you, you know what I mean? Like what's the difference between you and the guy who might be a great talent in the kitchen, but just can't, can't move it to the next level? Well, I think a big part of it is letting go and developing a team and understanding that when, when you, when you foster a team and you have people that are really successful, give them autonomy.

Let them spread their wings. And in spreading their wings, that's part of why I can do a lot of the things that I do outside of the restaurant. Because I have a great support system within the restaurant that I've spent 10 years developing. And that's, I would think, counterintuitive. Because I would imagine that a sort of great talent in the kitchen is going to go hand in hand with being a control freak. Totally, it does. But that's how you run yourself into the ground, right? Yeah, and the problem is that when any, someone was talking to me recently about the way a lot of hedge fund guys, the way they work, and they'll go into a business and they'll

say, okay, tell me who's the one person here who's indispensable. And they'll find the one person that's indispensable. And then they'll fire that person. And they're no longer indispensable because they're gone. No business should really depend upon, and it happens in the restaurant too. If the restaurant is completely dependent upon the chef and the chef has to do absolutely everything and it all comes down to that one individual, then you're, you're never going to be able to grow. You're going to be completely hamstrung by that one individual. You need to foster a team and a community of people that, that all has autonomy and takes ownership over what we do as a group. Um, and I think, you know, a lot of that comes from creating a culture and the language that you use. Like I, I, within the restaurant or even outside of the restaurant,

I never talk about people in terms of so-and-so works for me and he works for me and she works for me. I, I always say, well, we work on this and I use the term we, and I think it's really important to remember that. And I, I have to sometimes remind myself to do it, but it's a conscious thing because it ultimately people, when they have, when they feel a sense of autonomy and pride, a sense of pride and ownership in what they do, uh, they, they have much more, um, allegiance there to the, to the organization that they work for. They care much more about what they do and they have a, a greater sense of pride. Um, but to work for a tyrant who just says, no, you work for me and you do it my way. And this is the

way it is that, that, that gets old pretty quickly. I'm sure you've worked for someone like that. Yeah, sure. I worked for a chef that used to burn me all the time intentionally or hit me and do all sorts of crap like that. And that works for a period of time. You can manage through fear for a period of time. But eventually that'll backfire. You know, the whole Gordon Ramsay syndrome of yelling and screaming at everyone, belittling people, that doesn't work very long. You know, eventually people get sick of it and they go and find someplace else to work.

Right, right, right. Unless their self-esteem is so low, but then those aren't necessarily who you want. Yeah, that's not who you want. They think so poorly of themselves that they don't stick around. I have a guy that works with us um shiaka i really really like him a lot um and he's he's uh he's from gambia and um you know he's he has a degree in accounting he got a scholarship to come to the u.s to study accounting and then the university he went to went belly up and he lost his scholarship and he ended up in the U S and here's a guy who'd never worked in

a restaurant before, but he needed a job and he showed up as a dishwasher. Um, that was like almost two years ago. And now he's, he's a, one of the best cooks we have. And he's totally like,

he's on the path to being a chef because he, we, we saw that he had potential. He cared. He was very, very loyal and hardworking and really wanted to be there. And so we started giving him more responsibilities. And every little responsibility we gave him,

he kind of grabbed it and took a hold of it and took ownership of it and took pride in it. And so we rewarded him by giving him more responsibility. And he just started growing through the ranks and he's coming up through the ranks in the kitchen and he's learning new skills and earning more money and becoming a more indispensable part of the team. You know, and that's, that's something to me that's really, it's really important to look at, um, the individual and, and, uh, one of my partners

in the restaurant, Gil, um, who runs all of the service in the front of house, he taught me something. We've worked together for about 10 years and he taught me something a long time ago that I always think about. And it's a great lesson. Don't try to fit the job to the person. Fit the person to the job. Or sorry, vice versa.

Don't try to fit the person to the job. So find the job that that person will succeed at rather than trying to change the person. It's easier to change the job than to change the person. So find out what they're really good at and make the job fit them. And then there's certain jobs that just, that's the job. Yeah. But there are some people that are good at just, that's the job. Like for some people it's, that's, that works for them. They don't want the burden of responsibility or they don't want the burden of creativity.

And I totally get that, too. All right. Cool. All right. Well, we got to close it down here soon. But it would be great. I would love to leave people with a couple sort of, you know, tips that they could take with them. Like if you had to articulate.

A couple of nuggets. Yeah. Just like pressure. Yeah. Just a couple things like if you want to be more mindful about your health, what are a couple simple things that people could incorporate into their life that have been helpful to you? All right. Well, one is very, very basic, but I think it's, um, I think it's very valuable that before you put anything in your mouth, ask yourself, is this helping me or is this harming me? And it's okay if sometimes the answer is it's harming me. I mean, there's, I think you'd be

hard pressed to make an argument for eating ice cream and claiming that it's a health food or sorbet and claiming that it's good for you. But sometimes that's okay. Like sometimes the joy that you get from that, as long as you're keeping it in check with everything else you're doing is just as important. I think joy is really important. And on that note, if you don't feel joyful about the food that you're eating, then you're doing something wrong. You really need to find the joy and the pleasure in the relationship you have with food. Because if it's an antagonistic relationship, it's a doomed relationship. And I think the other thing- Goes to the preparation of the food as well yeah totally the joy of

preparing food the ceremony of it i mean i think there's a lot of spirituality in food and there's a lot of spirituality in cooking if you think about it in terms of providing sustenance to to your friends and your family and your loved ones and to yourself like there's there's a very serious spiritual element to that um so so it with, with consideration and with consideration from where those ingredients came from and with reverence and respect for those, for those ingredients. And then ultimately for the people that are going to be eating them. Um, so I don't know, maybe that's too, too broad and heady, but I think that's good. I think that's good. And I think that that's, too broad and heady, but I think that's important. I think that's good. And I think that that's,

those are things that are easy to sort of cast aside in our busy, you know, the gestalt of our busy modern lives. And, you know, I think that goes back to mindfulness as well. It's just like being present and being aware of what it is that you're doing when you're, you know, when you're doing it, you know, which is so basic and yet is, you and yet eludes me most of the time. Well, it's hard because we live in this world of devices, which are the biggest obstacle to mindfulness. When you're trying to sit here, I mean, even now we're having this great conversation. I feel my phone is vibrating, but I'm like, you know what? I don't care what it is. It doesn't matter if it vibrates all along.

But they take us out of the moment and make it very hard to be mindful. So I think it's certainly with meals, I think that's a good time to put the device away. And just be, as you said, be in that moment and be whatever it is you're doing, be doing it 100%. Well, the Spanish culture seems to understand that, at least with respect to mealtime. Oh, totally. They got it. They got it. They got it. They, you know, they learned something and then they sit around the table and they talk and they

talk forever. And so that's, yeah, I mean, that's what, you know, it really is. And they do it in Italy as well. Um, you know, it's a very Mediterranean, uh, in Greece, obviously it's, it's a very Mediterranean, um, uh, tradition, but it's one that I think we can, you know, everybody could benefit from. Cool. All right, final question. How hard is La Ruta? Well, let's just say that after the first day, I really had serious doubts, even when I was lining up the starting line the next morning, that I going to be able to to go on uh-huh and then i just found it six days it's only three days three days yeah only three and only 29 000 feet of climbing it uh it's really it's one of those you you i mean and you've you've

done crazy crazy feats on uh in in iron man's and ultra man not on a mountain bike doesn't matter though i mean it's the same thing. You go into that place where people call it the pain cave, or you go deep in your head, and it's a psychological moment of moving the needle and knowing that you can do way more than you think you can do. But you just have to trust that you can. What's the next big challenge? what's the next big challenge you know this year i i wanted to do um the breck epic which is a similar um similar race in in colorado but unfortunately the timing didn't work out for me so i i think that this year is going to be not not so many not so much competition i'm going to

be doing a lot i've already done a bunch of charity rides um a lot of long long rides i'm going to do this really cool race in uh massachusetts called the d2r2 which is um all it's like a road bike race but all on gravel oh wow it's very cool and then i think next year i'm going to try to do this uh do an adventure race across mongolia on mountain bikes uh-huh cool so that's that's i think the one that we're going to really kind of gear for nice man is that going to be another men's journal? That'll be something. We'll see what it is. Yeah, it might be in a magazine.

Who knows? I'll figure that out. I need somebody to fund crazy adventures. Yeah. Maybe you can come and do this one with me. Yeah, basically, that's the whole idea behind this, is get you to invite me to come do one of those. Yeah, totally. We've got to get you on a mountain bike.

Well, at the very least, if you pass through LA, man, we've got to find a way to get out on bikes. Well, in July, I'll be out there. I'm going to bring my bike. Oh, cool. So I'll be out there for two weeks in July. Hopefully, you'll be there. Let's make it happen, man. That would be awesome.

Right on. Cool. So thanks so much for doing this, man. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. You're an inspiration. That was an absolute treat.

I appreciate it. So if you're in New York City, visit Tertullia. Yep. El Colmado. El Colmado. Colmado. You've rolled the tongue. El Colmado, yeah. Just perfectly. Just a little bit. Yeah. Right. And if you're in London, Sea Container. Yeah. Is it the W? The Mondrian Hotel. The Mondrian.

Okay. Yeah. Are you opening up something new? I have a new place opening in Brooklyn in the beginning of next year. 2016. Does it have a name yet? It does not have a name, unfortunately. That's something I've got to get on. Spanish-infused, though? No, this is going to be right up your alley.

It's going to be a, I don't want to say fine dining, but it's going to be sort of an elegant restaurant, but all focused around local ingredients and a lot of vegetable cooking. Very cool. I like that. All right, so if you're digging on Seamus, uh, at Seamus Mullen on Twitter and Seamus Mullen.com, those are the best places to figure out, right?

Yep. And I'm going to go to a tertulia tonight. Awesome. Yeah. We'll see you in a bit. Some good plant food for me. You got it. Cool,

man. I'm looking forward to it. Cool. Thanks so much, man. Thank you. Peace. Plants.

All right, we did it. That's the podcast. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Let me know what you thought of the episode in the comments section on the episode page at richroll.com. Keep sending in your questions for future Q&A podcasts to info at richroll.com.

I'm loving all the questions that you guys are doing. And of course, as you know, we're doing more and more AMA episodes of the podcast for all your plant power needs. Visit richroll.com. We've got nutrition products. We've got fine art. We got signed copies of our books.

We got 100% organic cotton garments. We got Julie's meditation program. We got plant power tech teas, basically everything you need to take your health and your wellness to the next level. We got your basis covered at richroll.com. I got two online courses at mindbodygreen.com, the art of living with purpose and the ultimate guide to plant based nutrition, both really great multiple hour courses that are very affordable. Just go to mindbodygreen.com click on video courses, you can find it there. What else? Thanks for supporting

the show, you guys. Thanks for telling a friend. Thanks for sharing it on social media. Thank you for giving us a review on iTunes. And thank you for using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. I'll see you guys in a few days. I'm excited for some amazing upcoming episodes I'm going to be sharing with you guys. I'm really kicking it into high gear. And I hope you guys have an awesome week. Peace. Plants. Thank you.