The Rich Roll Podcast - Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

Episode Date: April 14, 2014

Wow! Last week's guest, T. Colin Campbell, got a huge response. It's only a week since publication and the episode is well on its way to becoming one of the most popular editions of the RRP to date. Glad you enjoyed it and — as always — thanks for tuning in. Because the Dr. Campbell conversation introduced a large new population to the show, thought I would take a brief moment to clarify what we do here. You may think this is just another podcast focused on running & triathlon. I love those subjects and feature plenty of guests in those arenas. But my focus is broader. In short, each week I do my best to bring to you the most forward thinking, paradigm busting minds in health, fitness, wellness, diet, nutrition, spirituality, creativity, entrepreneurship and life transformation. My goal is pure and it is simple. To help motivate and inspire you take your life to the next level. To help you discover, unlock and unleash your best, most authentic self. BOOM.  If you have yet to check out last week's episode, I urge everyone to give that one a listen before checking out today’s show. Even if you think you know all there is to know about T. Colin Campbell, his research, The China Study* and the quote unquote alleged “controversy” surrounding the findings of this seminal work, you might be surprised. Dr. Campbell demonstrated tremendous candor. It was an honor to peek behind the curtain at a life well lived in service to the betterment of humankind. In any event, last week’s guest relates directly to today’s guest. As I mentioned last week, Dr. Campbell was intended as Part 1 of a 2-part series. What began with Dr. Campbell continues today with Howard Jacobson, Dr. Campbell’s contributing author on his latest book Whole: Rethinking The Science of Nutrition* – a book that picks up where The China Study* left off by addressing the inherent flaws in our “reductionist” approach to nutrition research and refocusing how we approach and begin to understand nutrition and it's impact on human physiology from a wholistic point of view – food functionality at the cellular level, working its way up to how it impacts the entire organism. Great. But who is Howard Jacobson? Well, Howard's background isn’t quite what you would think. He's not a doctor. He's not a nutritionist. physiologist or even a scientist. But he is a very smart guy. After getting his B.A. from Princeton, Howard began his career as a school teacher before becoming a successful marketing consultant, running an online marketing agency and writing the book Google AdWords for Dummies* (mental note: I should probably read this one).

Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, Episode 80, with Howard Jacobson. The Rich Roll Podcast. All right, everybody, welcome to the show. My name is Rich Roll. I am your friendly neighborhood podcast host. What do we do here? You know what we do here. What we do here is each week, I bring you the best months forward thinking paradigm

busting minds in health, fitness, wellness, diet, nutrition, spirituality, creativity, entrepreneurship, and most importantly, life transformation. The goal is simple. The goal is to motivate and inspire you to take your life to the next level, to help you discover, unlock, and unleash your best, most authentic self, mind, body, spirit, balance, all of that. You're not going to agree with every guest I bring on the show. That's okay. Take what resonates with you. Discard the rest.

I have learned so much from all of my guests over these 80 episodes, and my life has definitely been enriched, and I hope that yours has as well. And I appreciate you tuning in. I know you have a lot of demands on your time. There's so many choices when it comes to content. So it means a lot to me that you guys are tuning into this podcast and spending your precious free time with me and my guests. So, all right, last week, last week's guest, that was a big one, T. Colin Campbell. It got a huge response. We're only one week into that since it posted,

and it's already well on its way towards becoming one of the most popular episodes and probably one of the most informative and possibly the most important podcasts that I've posted. So if you haven't checked it out yet, please do. I encourage all of you to go and listen to it, particularly before listening to today's episode, because these two episodes are related. And even if you think you know all there is to know about T. Colin Campbell, his research, his books, the China study, and the quote-unquote controversy surrounding the findings of the China study, you might be surprised. surprised. Dr. Campbell showed tremendous candor and openness, and it was really a treat to spend that hour with him. And I learned things about him that I didn't know. You know, his life and work is really important, and I was really proud to help get his message further out there, particularly

for those of you who are kind of brand new to what he has to say. So in any event, again, last week's guest relates to today's guest. As I mentioned last week, Dr. Campbell was part one, and today is part two. So we pick up kind of today where we left off last week, and I'm joined today by Howard Jacobson, who is Dr. Campbell's contributing author on his latest book, which is called Whole, Rethinking the Science of Nutrition. And that book picks up where the China study left off by addressing the inherent flaws in our kind of what is called

reductionist approach to nutrition research, which essentially means we take these isolated variables or nutrients within a particular food and we study their impact on our physiological, you know, sort of well-being or functionality in a way that we honestly can't even begin to comprehend because it's so complicated. And it's really a call to action to think about food in these terms, rather than from this reductionist perspective, but from this holistic perspective. And by holistic, I'm spelling that W-H-O-L-I-S-T-I-C, holistic. And how food works on our systems at the cellular level, working their way up to how they impact our entire organism. It's really interesting stuff, and it's a great book. Anyway, all right,

so Howard Jacobson, who is this guy? Well, his background, it's pretty interesting. His background is not what you would think, not what I would have expected. He's a smart guy. He graduated from Princeton, but he didn't study human biology or nutrition. He studied history and he began his career and continues to earn as a marketing consultant running an online marketing agency. He wrote a book called Google AdWords for Dummies, one of those yellow and black books. That's actually a book that I should probably read, making a mental note. But how does this marketing guy end up hooking up with T. Colin Campbell, the legend of plant-based nutrition, and ultimately become contributing author on this seminal work? It's a question I certainly had on my mind.

I've met Howard a couple times over the last couple of years and always enjoyed his company, but hadn't really spent any real time with him until this holistic holiday at sea, this Caribbean cruise that I went on that I was a speaker on. His whole family was there. My whole family was there. And I was able to kind of hang out with him for seven days and get to know his wife and his kids, all of whom are really amazing people. And I saved that question for the podcast. And you're going to have to wait for the interview to hear the answer. But I can tell you, it's really interesting. It's really a story of a life journey in search of greater meaning, a life journey in search of greater authenticity and purpose. It's a story of faith and serendipity and what can happen when you take the leap into the unknown or set sail without a paddle and remain open to the possibilities the universe presents, the idea that anything is possible. So during the course of our conversation, we do it all.

Of course, it starts and ends with plant-based nutrition, his perspective on Dr. Campbell's work in the China study, his perspective on the China study debunkers, and what's at the crux of whole, our reductionist proclivities when it comes to nutritional science and how we need to reframe how we think about food and how it impacts the body. So I guess the primary takeaway is this. Because our current health system and practices are unsustainable by all accounts. The public, and by the public I mean you, you have more power and influence than ever before. Change is finally within our reach. We now know that most heart attacks, strokes, cancers,

and unnecessary deaths are preventable through nutrition and lifestyle alteration. And we have the power to choose more wisely what we put into our mouths every day. So Howard is all about this. T. Colin Campbell is all about this. And this book, Whole, is an extraordinary tool that shows us how to free our bodies, our minds, and our planet from the economic disparity and biological logic that is making us sicker, making us poorer than ever before, which is a travesty. So this is a journey into cutting-edge nutrition, and it's led by Howard and T. Colin Campbell. So it's pretty cool, right? So beyond that, we talk about his life, his work, the book, the advocacy,

and how he balances all of this with his marriage and homeschooling his kids, something which I'm very interested in because we homeschool our kids. And I could tell you his kids are extraordinary human beings, and he's definitely doing a good job with his homeschooling. Again, my family had the honor and pleasure of hanging out with him and his lovely family during the course of this seven-day cruise, and it was a real treat. They're extraordinary people doing amazing things, and so it was my pleasure and it was my honor to bring this conversation to you today. A little note on the audio. Bear in mind, we recorded this podcast on a boat.

Boats are noisy. We found a quiet room in a restaurant on the boat that was closed, and we thought it would be nice and quiet, but there's a lot of gurgling noises. and we thought it would be nice and quiet, but there's a lot of gurgling noises. We were pulling out a port and you know what? There's, you're going to hear it. There's nothing I can do about it, but hopefully it just adds to the flair, the ambiance of the conversation. So, all right, that's it. Let's dig in. We're brought to you today by recovery.com.

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To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Your story is pretty interesting about how you initially became involved in this plant-based world. It was almost by, well, it's divinely inspired, I guess, in some regard, and also, you know, perhaps a bit of happenstance. Yeah, well, we didn't get into the beginnings of it, which is, you know, it's embarrassing to tell you how many times I have landed in the plant-based world and then sort of rolled out of it. It reminded me a little bit when I was reading your story where... Is that thunder or is that the engines of the boat? I don't know. If this is the end of the podcast... Yeah, I know.

God bless you all. All right, either the boat is going to explode or, yeah, they're pumping the bilge. I don't know what's going on anyway continue wow the anchor oh the anchor oh they're pulling the anchor up all right keep talking well we'll have to use an anchor metaphor at some point um so i i first uh as i say when i was reading your book and all the kind of the ups and downs, like it wasn't a, you know, I hit bottom and then I came back up and everything was fine. But there were sort of, you know, bumps along the way and forgetting a very sort of human story. It's not a, you know, it's not a Hollywood trajectory.

And it was the same thing for me. of Hollywood trajectory. And it was the same thing for me. So in 1990, my dad died of a heart attack. And he was 71, which felt very young for me, to me. I was only 23 or 24 at the time. And like two weeks later, I was in a bookstore and I saw Diet for a New America by John Robbins. was in a bookstore and I saw Diet for a New America by John Robbins. And I had no interest in any of this stuff. And I, for some reason, picked up the book and read it and went completely vegan like the next week. Like there was no thought, there was no effort. And I lost, you know, 20 pounds. I could wear a size like 31 jeans for the first and last time in my life. But in terms of like no thought or no effort I mean something profound sort of clicked in your mind right to make you make such a I mean how are you eating before that?

Very standard I mean as a kid I was a huge eater I would just eat you know prodigious amounts of pretty much everything um nothing really bothered me um i could you know i could eat like three chickens like like that many pieces of chicken if there was like a buffet right um lots of candy i remember loving kit kats in college i used to fuel my all-nighters with kit kats and co-Cola. So, you know, there was nothing. I'd say the one thing I didn't do, I never ate from the window diet. Like, I just, I think because when I was five years old, my parents were political activists, and I had been told when I was five that McDonald's had donated money to the Nixon campaign. Oh, really?

So, like, that was my identity. I was, you know, union, progressive. So I kind of stayed away from fast food mostly. Uh-huh. But, you know, so I did that, and I became this, you know, vegan. And it kind of lasted for, I don't know, four, five, six years, and then sort of gradually stopped. And I'm not sure exactly how or why.

It wasn't conscious. Like there might have been a cookie one day and then the world didn't end. Right. And I didn't have. Once you have one cookie, that's the way my brain works. You know, that's why I don't think I could ever do one of those programs where you get a cheat day. Yeah. Because once I've kind of crossed that line, it becomes so much easier to cross it again.

And it's easier. It's actually, it seems harder, but it's actually easier for me to tow a more of a hardcore line. Yeah. Well, one of the things I talk about when I help people to transition is this concept of decision fatigue, which is the more decisions you make, the less willpower you end up with. So if you're constantly, you know, they've done studies where they had people like picking out items for a wedding registry. It was a fake thing that no one was getting married.

You just had to pick, you know, do I want the bone china or the other thing? And after they had all these decisions, they had people do the traditional test of willpower, which is stick your hand in a bucket of ice water for as long as you can. And the people who had other tasks, they just had to look and rate the stuff, or did they like it or did they not like it, did much better. They could keep their hands in the water much longer than people who had to choose between one or the other. better. They could keep their hands in the water much longer than people who had to choose between one or the other. So if you have a diet in which you're kind of using your intuition or your brain on a daily basis and you don't have set rules, if you're approaching it in terms of should I,

shouldn't I, you literally deplete your willpower. So by the end of the day, you're like, that cookie is much stronger than I am. Right. I've never heard that before. That's really fascinating. So in other words, if you have this rule system set up, that's just your guiding principles, then you're not really having to make decisions. You're just following these rules. So it doesn't involve a lot of mental fatigue. But if you're leaving it open-ended, then every proposition involves a decision tree. Right. So for higher brain function, I'm clear that I only have a certain amount to spend every day, and I want to spend it where it matters. So anything that doesn't really matter

to me, I just don't care about, or I'll set a rule so I don't have to think about it anymore. I think President Obama supposedly has two different suits, many multiple copies of each suit, but he just opens the closet and puts one on because he knows his entire day is deciding things. He doesn't want to have to make that decision, too. Right. He could probably find somebody to make that decision for him, though,

about his attire every day. Right. That's really interesting. All right, so you start to fall away from this, though. You become a former plant-based person for a while. And what year was this? I don't even remember. It was sort of in the 90s. I know my daughter, Yael, was born in 96. And from the photos, I'm sort of getting wider and wider. I'm putting on all the pregnancy weight.

And I had another epiphany in, it must have been late 95, when my wife Mia was pregnant with Yael, and I needed to go to the drugstore at like 2 in the morning to fill some prescription or to get something. It was to fill a prescription because I had to wait. And there's nothing to do in the drugstore at 3 in the morning except take your blood pressure with a little cuff machine. So I was doing that, doing blood pressure and pulse over and over again. And when I first got there, it was quite high because I'd gotten in the car and I'd aroused myself from sleep.

But over the course of an hour, I could not get it down. And I realized, you know, I stood at a scale and I did my pulse and I realized my numbers suck. And I'm thinking I have a pregnant wife. And I'm not, you know, my numbers are not predicting a long life. And my dad died at 71. He'd had cancer before the heart attack. And it occurred to me that I needed to clean up. And you weren't obese or anything like that. And you weren't eating tons of junk food. You were just kind of eating maybe how a typical American would eat. Maybe even better.

Much better because we were cooking. Right. Like we never did the, like the totally processed, the TV dinners. You know, we would cook. We'd sit down, we'd make soups and things. But, you know, it's like, you know, nine egg omelets for Saturday morning and have some friends over and lots of desserts. I wasn't exercising that much because I frankly didn't really feel like it. That's why this eat less, exercise more advice that people give

with such sort of haughty superiority like, duh, this is so simple, don't make it complicated, turns out to be really hard to do because if you're eating badly and you eat less, you have even less energy to exercise right your motivation wanes your motivation wanes you just don't have the fuel and then you start to try to exercise and you're expending all your willpower to stay on the treadmill literally and figuratively right and then you come home and all you want is like that

hot fudge sundae uh-huh and you're restricting your you're focused on restricting your calories all the time right so all right so you're at the drug store three in the morning and then what's what happens next um what happens next is not much like like it was one of those mini epiphanies and i probably like bought some salad. Right. You know, in the back of your mind that you have this, you know, nagging thing about your blood pressure. Yeah. Oh, and you know, at the, at the same time, I just remember this, it's kind of funny that I'd forgotten. I was in a, I did a six year program in health education at Temple University. And so I was able to really distract myself about what real, what really brings about health.

Because health education, it was aligned with sort of medical education. So health is making sure people are compliant on their meds. Exercise is good. But there really wasn't this laser focus on lifestyle. And so there was plenty of ways in which I could distract myself. One of the ways I was distracting myself was through stress reduction, meditation, relaxation techniques, which are great. And there's no question that they are a core part of physical and mental and spiritual and psychological health, but I was trying to use them for everything.

So I remember sitting there with a blood pressure cuff trying to meditate my way to like 110 over 60. Yeah, yeah. Like the Yogi Kudu bringing your pulse down to 10 or something like that. Yeah. So, you know, so in that respect that respect i look back it's like a cheat like you know you talked uh in your talk about everyone wants to know what's the biohack so i was trying to do like a meditative biohack and do an end run around the the reality the

reality actually how you were living your life and you know the irony is palpable because you're you're is that what you got your PhD in? Yeah. So you're getting your PhD in health education and yet you're living your life in accordance with some sort of, uh, you know, principles that are at odds with optimal health, at least as how you see it now. Yeah. And, you know, we, we were struggling financially in that, And, you know, we were struggling financially in that, you know, it wasn't terrible. I'm sure it's better than some people who are listening to this. But when I say struggle, I mean it was on my mind every day.

It was never clear that we were going to pay the mortgage. And that just seemed much more important. Like that, you know, if you're like bleeding out on oxygen, you don't worry about getting a back massage. And sort of, you know, money is kind of like oxygen in this society. So it didn't feel like I had the luxury is that taking care of yourself is a luxury and it's dispensable when there are real life pressures on you to provide and just literally, I mean, for lack of a better word, survive day to day. Yeah, yeah. And so, all right, so where does the journey take you from there? the journey take you from there? So fast forward several years, and it's 2003, and I'm at a internet marketing conference. And I meet a guy who is eating a plant-based diet, and he's a

bodybuilder, and he's working out. I'll give him a little shout out. His name is John Allen Mollenhauer. And we started talking and he was doing everything that I knew from 13 years ago that I should be doing. And I was really attracted to the results he was getting and to the philosophy. Was that incompatible with the curriculum that you were studying during your PhD?

Oh, sure. I mean, you know, it's fine to be a vegetarian, but it's, you know, it's certainly not necessary and it's kind of cute, but it's, you know, there's, there was no one saying, this is the most important part of health is to eat whole plant foods.

This is the foundation. No one was saying that. People, you know, my, one of my main focuses of study was like indoor asthma. And so I would say I spent the better part of a year thinking about hypoallergenic pillow cases. That's, that's important stuff. But it's not fundamental. Right.

That's important stuff. But it's not fundamental. Right. And so, I mean, I'm inferring that there was some level of disillusionment with what you got your PhD in if suddenly you're sort of embarking into this internet marketing world as opposed to just finding a career in the field in which you studied for so many years. Yeah. That feels like a very generous interpretation. I think I just wanted to make money for the first time in my life. Because while I was getting my PhD, I was a school teacher.

And I didn't actually know anyone who made more than $29,000 a year. I couldn't imagine how that was even possible. And then so I decided I wanted to go into the business world. And through a whole bunch of missteps and false steps, I found myself in 2001 with my own business. And it started out as sort of a small business coaching and marketing. And I discovered that when I was trying to talk to people about health and meditation and spirituality, that nobody really cared. But when I was talking to people about how to get more visitors to their website, about how to convert more prospect into sales, about how to build a funnel for a strong back end, that everybody really wanted to know that. And they would pay me a hell of a lot more money for that information. And, of course, the things that were stopping them ultimately were not strategic decisions because I could tell them what to do in 15 seconds, but they didn't have the energy to do it.

They didn't have the focus to do it. It ended up coming back to lifestyle, and then I would be coaching people ostensibly about internet marketing. And it was like, well, you know, what do you eat? Right. And, you know, if we fix that, you'll have, you have two more hours of productive thinking each day. And, you know, I just, I discovered the, uh, the, the secret of, of coming in, not where you are, but where other people are by solving the problems they want to solve. And ultimately all problems end up, you know, coming back to ourselves, our, our, our engines of, of desire and manifestation. Interesting. Um, yeah. And I feel like it's interesting what you say about how people were so, um, drawn to this idea of how to kind of create sales. But it also seems to me like there's so much focus on that and not as much focus on the actual content that they're trying to sell. You

know, it's, it's lead generation and sales funnels and building your list and all of these kinds of things. And, and, and there's so much focus on that, but it doesn't seem like, at least in my experience, and I could be totally wrong or speaking out of school here, but it seems like that's much more fashionable and gets a lot more attention than focusing on the quality of whatever it is that you're trying to offer that might be helpful to people. It's funny, as you're speaking, I can feel like these rusty marketing gears starting to turn in my head, like the anchor is going down,

like this whole other part of my brain is starting to light up. And yeah, it's so true that, I mean, the internet is still kind of the Wild West. It's where people go with their gold panning equipment to try to make it big. And you can see people try to make it big. And you can see people who've made it big.

And the truth is most of the people who've made it really big, at least initially, it's because they had great content. It's because they had something tremendously valuable to offer. They were personable. They worked really hard. They had interesting thoughts. And they really cared about getting this message out. And they used a whole bunch of media and methods to do it. So what we do is we say, oh, well, look, Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.TV did a video podcast every single day.

So all I have to do is do a video podcast every single day. And then, you know, there's no there there. But if you don't have a message that's compelling or helpful or dynamic or a list of any other, you know, sort of things that are compelling, adequately compelling, then it doesn't really matter. Yeah, it's, you know, all these media techniques are subject to the goal of helping people. You know, if you want to say, I want to be a success, I want to have a successful business, I would say, do you love the people you want to help?

Are you dedicated to improving their lives? And if the answer is yes, then everything else is window dressing. Everything else falls into place. But to look at someone else's steps to success and copy those without copying the motive force behind it. And you know what? There's a lot of people who

will be successful at that for a while because all of us have insecurities. We all have these greed dreams. And if we hear someone talking about how, how they're going to make us rich, we're going to, we're going to buy that for a while. We're inherently wired to be attracted to that. Yeah. But, you know, I know, I know a lot of those folks and, you know, the reality is most of them are not that happy. They're not fulfilled.

Most of them are not that happy. They're not fulfilled. Their money doesn't last. And they can show you their big PayPal checks, but they don't show you the big PayPal returns when 85% of the people get their product and realize it's utter crap. And don't come back. And don't come back and tell their friends. And they have to reinvent themselves in some other industry. and they have to reinvent themselves in some other industry. So marketing is really about sharing your love in a way that people are ready to hear.

And that's something that I don't know. You can't really teach that. People either inherently have that passion for whatever it is that they're speaking to, or they don't, right? I mean, that's not something you're going to learn in a class. You're not going to learn that in a class. You might learn it in therapy. Right, yeah, a different kind of class. But, you know, I mean, I've worked with a lot of people who, you know,

they've got a business 10, 15 years old, and it feels a little bit stale, and they're coming to me for some marketing ideas. And I can give them those marketing ideas, and they're very not valuable. What was valuable that I can do is help people remember why they went into the business in the first place, and then they get all these ideas. They get excited. I help them to learn about their customers, to think about what do they want, what are their fears, what keeps them awake at three in the morning, what are some innovations they can offer that no one else is doing, what are some of the holes in the marketplace that no one else is filling. And then they become heroic. And they're like, I am doing this as a mission, not just to pay

the bills, not just to send my ex-wife's kids to school. It becomes something that's fulfilling rather than something that was exciting once and has become a drudge. Right. I think there's a sense of gratitude that comes with being devoted to service of your customer base or your audience or something like that. And when you have that inherent passion for that, then, like you said, I mean, the other things sort of take care of themselves. Yeah, I was sitting next to Dr. Colin Campbell last night, and he was signing books. And I assume most of your listeners may know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the author of the

China study, and we're going to get into that in a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the author of The China Study. And we're going to get into that in a second. And, you know, I'm sitting there next to him. I'm the contributing author to Hull, his second book. And so I'm sitting there. And, you know, people are very nice to me. But they want to meet him. And almost everyone has a story they want to tell him of how he saved their life, how he saved their wife's life, how he saved their mother-in-law,

how their kids, you know, no longer are asthmatic, whatever it is. And, you know, we're on a cruise with like 1,500 people who worship him. And I can still see in his face the way that that feeds the deepest part of his soul. that feeds the deepest part of his soul. Because he spent 40 of his 50-year career basically getting no thanks at all and just getting grief. Right. And for this 10 years to hear, it's almost like it's a wonderful life,

but he didn't have to almost jump off a bridge. Right. He just had to be stuck on a boat. Well, that's pretty much everywhere he goes. Yeah, I would imagine. I mean, just observing him throughout the course of the week, I mean, I'm pretty much everywhere he goes. Yeah. I would imagine. I mean, I just observing him throughout the course of the week. I mean, I'm exhausted from the schedule here. It's, you know, it hasn't, it hasn't been like a leisure oriented experience. It's been wonderful and amazing and

fantastic. Um, but we're on a boat and there's, there's only so many places you can go and hide. And for somebody like him, you know, everybody's here to see him, right? So the demands that are being placed on him for everybody wants to have their moment with him that, you know, if he walks outside of his cabin, you know, he's going to have to, um, interact with people continuously until he returns to his cabin and shuts the door. And that's to be fatiguing. And, you know, I'm sort of empathetic to the amount of energy that it takes to really be present with every person and engage them because, you know, these stories are important and they're life changing and there's a lot of passion and heartfelt, you know, love for this journey that we're all on together.

And when you hear those stories of people that have reversed their heart disease or sort of come back from some illness that they thought they were stuck with the rest of their life or lost 100 pounds's, it's, there is nothing more sort of dramatic that you can share. I mean, you can see the emotion, you can feel the emotion in these encounters and, but it's also, you know, that's, that takes a lot of energy to sit with that, you know, throughout the day with so many people. Yeah, and he does get exhausted. But I think what he, I don't know how, I've only known him for a decade, but I think all of us have some soul mission.

And to have such a difficult path as he's had, where his funding was challenged, personally attacked, called a terrorist, working hard for five or six years on a report and then find out that it comes out totally gutted or misrepresented by the media. To hear at this point, he's going to be 80 next week, to hear that you lived your life. You didn't live anybody else's life. You didn't become a paid spokesperson for the beef industry, which is where he probably would have headed starting out with his career in increasing protein yield. career in increasing protein yield, to look back and say, I lived my own life, and I took the chances that I had to take, and I made the sacrifices. There's joy in that. Of course. And I can see that in him. Of course. Well, let's fast forward to the point at which he comes into your life.

So you're pursuing this internet marketing career. And then explain a little bit about what transpired, the kind of thing we were talking about at dinner the other night. Right. So in 2003, I was starting to feel like I want to do my marketing for good. So I started working with John Allen. And one of the things we did was we went out to a conference called VegSource in 2004. And then there was this whole lineup of speakers, you know, from Dr. Campbell to Doug Lyle to Dean Ornish to John McDougall, Brenda Davis.

Yeah, it's a great event. I spoke there last year. It's fantastic. Yeah. And it was, you know, completely life-changing for me because for the first time I was like outnumbered. Right. There was no way to play defense

against this idea. And I just let it sort of wash over me. The idea being? Being that diet, a plant-based diet is like the most profound thing that most people can do to improve their health in a really rapid way. Like you don't need to have faith. You know, it's like people don't exercise and you tell them, you know, just do something for three weeks and you'll be amazed at how your cardiovascular system will evolve to manage it. And so you get this quick hit of proof, like your body tells you yes. And at that point, things become easier. It's not so cerebral. It's not faith-based. The same thing happens when you start, you know, really cleaning up your diet. You know, your story about that day five or day six of your juice fast, your juice cleanse.

Yeah, it happens whether you believe it's going to happen or not. Right. So to see something outside of your own perception, you know, to, to, to see something that looks objective is very powerful. So, so the people that are getting all these stories and I thought, well, I can try this.

And, and I'd met, I met Dr. Campbell there. I was in line with like 700 people to shake his hand. A couple of months later, the book came out, the China study study.

And I, I sort of devoured it. And it came out in December and I wrote a review on Amazon at the end of January. So this is things, this is how slowly things were moving. Yeah. Usually if you don't post a review immediately, you know, books, the reviews start to stack up quickly with most new releases. Yeah. So, you know, books, the reviews start to stack up quickly with most new releases. Yeah. So, you know, it was sort of the earlier days of Amazon. But even so, this book had not been publicized.

There was no money behind it. It had been rejected by most publishers. The ones who didn't reject it demanded that it be turned into a cookbook and that you get rid of all the science. And this one publisher took a chance on it. And their imprint was mainly like like teen horror novels oh really i didn't know that that's amazing like i didn't know that story i i just i guess i just presumed that when it came out it made this immediate impact you know it was we went to um a book signing with dr campbell in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in a giant Barnes & Noble in a very affluent section.

And it was the four of us, our family, and then a lady who was tired. That was it. There was a chair. And he'd flown all the way from Ithaca. He had talked to the Philadelphia College of Physicians, and then he did this book signing. It's like nobody cared. So I did this review like six, seven weeks after it was published, and it was the third review on Amazon for the book.

Six, seven weeks after it's published, there's only three reviews. You're the third person to review the book. Yep. That's unbelievable. And I double-checked this because you go to your review and underneath it says the date that it was posted. And then I checked the publication date of the book.

And, you know, it just goes to show how little effort was behind the initial marketing. No one thought this was going to be anything. You know? Right.

I can't even begin to tell you how low the expectations were about this book. And maybe a few doctors would read it. Maybe someone in policy was going to make some little change because of it. And a few months later, I get a call on my home phone from Dr. Campbell. He says, is this Howard Jacobson? Yeah. Did you write this review of my – at this point, I'm like in celebrity awkward stuttering. Right. How do you get your home number?

I don't know that. Are you in a phone book or something? I think it was maybe my initial, but he's a good researcher. Right, yeah, I guess. Yeah, that's one thing he knows how to do, right? He got to the bottom of how to track you down. So he found me and he thanked me

because a lot of the reviews, once the book had started becoming a little bit popular, some people from the Weston Price Foundation were orchestrating a real campaign to smear it. They were writing negative reviews. They were attending his events and heckling. Right. And really quickly, because we don't have that much time, but can you explain a little bit about the Weston Price Foundation and who these people are and kind of what they're about?

I'm not entirely sure of the truth. It's kind of unclear, right? It's sort of shrouded in some kind of bizarre secrecy, right? But they're responsible for a lot of the vitriol surrounding the book. Right. You know, I was not shocked to get a Google alert that says that they had rated the whole two thumbs down. Two thumbs down, right? One thumb down wasn't enough? Whole, two thumbs down. Two thumbs down, right?

One thumb down wasn't enough? Okay. Yeah, there wasn't – yeah, I think they're sort of early proponents of what's basically a paleo diet. You know, huge amounts of fat, you know, butter in your coffee, grass-fed. And I'm not clear. I know a lot of people who are – you know, there's a lot of stuff in the Weston Price rhetoric that appeals to me. Right. There is a sort of whole food approach to it in a certain regard and kind of getting rid of the processed foods, etc.

And it's unclear whether they're being funded by any of the, like, the beef industry or I'm not sure what's going on exactly. Yeah. I don't know. I haven't figured that out. But it's, you know, it's a very sort of DIY ethic around, let's retake control of the food system from the industrial and from the politically correct. And, you know, the industrial I'm all for, the politically correct is people like us saying, you know, maybe you shouldn't have that cheeseburger. Right. All right. So Dr. Campbell calls you out of the blue to thank you for writing this review. Yeah. So we were going up to upstate New York and we said, oh, we'd love to meet you.

And we went over to their house and my son got stung by a bee in their back garden and they took care of us. And we just, we had a really nice time together. took care of us and we just we had a really nice time together and it's like um one of the speakers on the cruise jessica porter was going off on this riff like she has this fantasy about like which celebrities she could be friends with like you know i could be friends with meryl streep she'd like me we'd have a good time and i had had that fantasy about like colin campbell like and then like you're manifesting this in your life. Yeah. I'm like, I really do like this guy. He's, you know, he's so humble, no matter what the claim anyone makes, he's just, Oh, could you show me the research on that? I'd really, I'm really curious. Um, so we just started

becoming friendly. And then a year later we moved down to, uh, to, where he has a home. And we just kept up a friendship. When he was in town, we'd cook them dinner. And then in like 2010, I think, he knew I was in marketing. He said, there are some folks who may need some marketing help. They were working on a movie about him and Caldwell Esselstyn, and would I be interested in talking with them? And I said, oh, tell me more. And he sent me an email from the producer,

and they're calling this movie Forks Over Knives. And I said, that's the dumbest title I've ever heard. I'm not even going to waste my time. These people don't know what they're doing. This project is going nowhere. Right. So. Little did we know.

Right. Right. Yeah, I saw an early cut of it as well, and I was unsure as to whether this was going to resonate. I just thought, I don't know if anyone's going to take to this. So, I'm as surprised as you that it has become this force of nature, this movie. And I think it's a testament to just how powerful the information is that's conveyed. Yeah, I was talking to Lee Fulkerson, the director, and also to Brian Wendell, the producer. And I kind of admitted that I had really serious doubts based on the name.

And they were like, yeah, we didn't think this name was going anywhere either. We didn't know what to call it. But I asked Brian, I don't know if you know. Yeah, I know Brian. You know, I said, well, how did, you know, what was your background? It was, you know, in film, in documentaries. He's a real estate guy. I was a realtor. Yeah, I know.

I said, well, how did, you know, how on earth, why did you even try this? How did you think this was going to, he says, I just knew it was gonna work like wow that's i'd like well i'd like some of that that conviction right so you got you did get involved in marketing or you know i said no you passed up on that i passed up on that did you help uh dr campbell with marketing the china study no not at all what was it that that kind of tipped the equation when it went from a book that had three reviews to suddenly becoming so well-known? Was there one thing that happened or was it just a very slow? I think it was just a slow, you know, this graph where just things keep doubling. And, you know, it doubles from one to two, and two to four, and four to eight.

It doesn't look very impressive. But when it starts doubling from like 1,024 to 2,056, then very quickly it gets big. And I think what was happening was people were buying like 10 copies and giving them to everyone they knew. And then it would hit a certain person, an influencer, a connector, a sharer. And then we found out the governor of North Carolina had read it and was friends with Bill Clinton and sent him a copy. We had them over to dinner at our house one night.

And we don't have a TV in our house, but We live in a community that has a TV in the common house. And he says, we have to watch TV. I was surprised. We went over there and it was the golf channel he had to watch. I was even more surprised. There was an interview with Gary Player, a great South African golfer, who literally, and I know what that word means, you English majors, literally got down on his knees holding a copy of the China study and begged every American to read it. Wow. And then he proceeded to, at the age of 70, to like run in a treadmill while pumping like 225-pound barbells for like a minute. Right.

And he says, I attribute this to my plant-based diet. That's amazing. I mean, you can't predict anything like that. And again, it goes back to the power of the message in the book. And it's almost looking back, it's almost this Malcolm Gladwell-esque tipping point. You could do a case study on it. Yeah. I have no idea. I mean, as a marketer, I can explain anything in hindsight, but I could also have explained the opposite. Like I could tell you why forks over knives is never going to amount to

anything with as much clarity and conviction as the opposite. But what I saw people resonated with in the China study was a guy who really wanted to know the truth. And the way he told his story was, you know, it just kind of cut through the confusion. Just said, look, here's what we know. And we don't know everything, but I'm not trying to push anything on you. It ends with, look, can I say anything with 100% certainty? No, science doesn't work that way. All I can say is here's the bulk of the evidence and I invite you to try it. And it really was a breath of fresh air, and it just had a ring of truth to it. We read a lot of diet books, and it's like, you know, this is a fat-burning molecule. It's all sort of, you know, tricks and techniques.

And this was just fundamental. So look, this is how the human body works. And here is the evidence from so many different places that all point to the same thing. And here's why you're hearing different. And just give it a try. And like I said, it doesn't take very long for people to see and feel and experience the results. It's been interesting lately to kind of take the temperature with the book, and it's sort of like how all things go, where something becomes popular and everybody celebrates

it, and then you take a five-minute break, and then it's time to tear it down. And it's become very in vogue to sort of say, well, the China study has been debunked. Didn't you hear? Right? Right. And certainly there are some outspoken critics and some blog posts and some articles written, some longer than others, some with more citations than others. And this is something that, you know, people that are coming from this low-carb perspective are really kind of hanging their hats on right now.

And I'm interested in your kind of perspective on the criticisms and how, you know, how that kind of colors, how you defend the material. And then I want to talk about whole after that, because we're running out of time, but sure. Well,

what it reminds me of, and that's the words you use are verbatim, right? Oh, the China study has been debunked. It reminds me of these clips on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show where he'll show like the Fox News talking points and like 35 different legislators and Fox anchors will use the exact same phrase. Like somebody worked that out in a marketing office and then sent out the memo. It really is a form of laziness for most of the people who haven't read these blog posts, who don't understand them. And just to say it's been debunked. So first of all, the China study, the book, is about 700 or 800 studies, not just the China study, the study. Right.

And quite possibly it would have been more aptly titled something else because the China study is just one aspect of this book. Right. And I believe Colin didn't like the title. I mean, probably because he had foresight that this could be something that would come up. Right. It's not about the China. It's partly, but not entirely. And there's so much more evidence than just that.

So, you know, I've done a lot of research into the research that is put out by the low-carb, the paleo. They say the China study has been debunked. So one of the main sources is a reanalysis of the statistics by Denise Minger. That's sort of the reigning kind of blog, this incredibly long blog post that everyone kind of points to. Right. And she's simply wrong.

She's simply... So walk me through it for somebody who might be, somebody who may have read that article. mean it's so dense it's very difficult to even okay read it and even if you read the whole thing um i mean it's not like i'm gonna go and check all of her references you know it's so you know so it's left i mean for the normal consumer um right. Well, so I can't walk you through it because it involves sort of delicacies of regression analysis. So, you know, in two years, we could...

But if you could sum it up in a few sentences. I could summarize in a few. So the China study itself was a correlational study of about 8,000 different inputs. So let's look at everything that could possibly affect, you know, disease states, rates of disease, mortality from the disease, and biomarkers of the disease, like cholesterol and weight and blood pressure and things like that. And let's look at all these different inputs from fruits, vegetables, meats, breads, exercise,

hours slept, you know, huge, huge analysis. And it was meant to be correlational. So if we get all that data, one thing you can be sure of is if you have that many data points, so you could correlate every single data point to every other single data point. So you'd get, you know, 8,000 to the 8,000, I don't, you know, I'm not completely, but just, you know, billions and billions of individual correlations of, you know, data point one to data point 8,000, data point one to data point 7,999. Every single one of those, you could say, is that significant? And when you have that many, you're going to find a lot of statistically

significant things that don't really matter. You might find that everyone who wore yellow on Tuesday has lower blood pressure than everyone else. So then you go around and say, well, what we should do is have everybody wear yellow on Tuesday. It's the distinction between causality and correlation. Partly. But it's actually the distinction between just getting so much data that you're going to have some random significance that doesn't really mean anything. So the incorrect way to read this, to read the China study, is to look for any correlation

and say that's the one that matters. The correct way is to put it all into a giant regression analysis and say, what are the big trends? Because we're not trying to prove that yellow on Tuesday does anything. We're trying to say, let's look at this huge group of people with kind of homogeneous, to some extent, genetics and very heterogeneous lifestyles, and which people do better and why. And so when you're looking at it from that big perspective, from space, you can see, you know, the oceans and the continents, and you can say, okay, I understand earth. What Denise Minger and others have done is they've zoomed down to the microscopic level and they

say, no, earth, you know, this earth isn't made up of land. Look, there's a puddle. Look, it's earth is made up of water. He's completely wrong. So it's simply a misunderstanding of how to use a study like that. They're, they're applying the tools of, um, you know, a clinical trial where every data point is supposed to be correlated on a very controlled space where you control all the variables except the ones you're studying they're applying those statistic those uh those lenses to a very very different type of study so so colin campbell went out in space and took a picture of the earth and said look how beautiful this is and and they're saying no you know, when we go down to the –

It's not beautiful because here's one toxic dump site over here. Yes. I see. Good analogy. Interesting. It's amazing, though, how much traction this sort of singular individual in her blog has sort of magnetized a community to, in essence, like I said before, hang their hat on this idea that this is the definitive sort of statement on this book and it has been officially debunked, right?

Yeah. I mean, how does Colin take that? He's all pissed off, frankly, that that you know, that that's how the world works. I just finished a really interesting book called Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday, I think, who's a guy who manipulated the internet for a living for his clients to create scandal, to create controversy, to create stories where there were none and then get denials that then became additional stories. And so it's very, you know, the internet is a, it's like yellow journalism back in like 1903.

It's very easy to influence. And, you know, there's a lot of people with a lot of money being funneled into things that look real. You know, there's like activistcash.com. There's a whole bunch of these websites by a guy, I can't remember his name right now, that look like consumer groups raging against the food police.

Like you and me and Dr. Campbell, who kind of say, look, here's a pretty good way to eat. So they're very good at framing. And when you frame things in terms of fear and anger and opposition, it's very hard to respond with a soundbite that includes sort of love and compassion and tenderness and nuance. We just, you know, we just don't get this, you know. That doesn't get page views either.

Right. Right. Interesting. Yeah, and I know that this sort of kind of idea of where he was coming from when the book came out was this presumption that he's presenting all this information and that it would be warmly received or at least sort of intellectually considered. that it would be warmly received or at least sort of intellectually considered. And to have it kind of come out and to not receive that response, at least initially or immediately, was jarring to him. Like, hey, I'm just presenting all this information. This could change the way we look at things.

Isn't this cool? And that was not the reaction. Yeah, which is, of course, very good for me because then he had to write another book. Right. So let's get into that. Yeah. I mean, when he approached you and said, I want you to be my co-author in this book, that must have been a cool moment for you. Yeah.

I wish it had happened. What do you mean? Instead, he had a manuscript. And he said, you know, can you help me clean this up a little bit? I got you. All right. You back-ended yourself into it. Yeah.

So he hired me on an hourly basis as an editor just to kind of clean things up. So I wasn't sure I could do it. I wasn't sure how long it was going to take. So I took one chapter, and I rewrote the first four pages of it and sent it back. And I said, is this what you're looking for? And he said, yeah, it looks great. So we started working on it. And he had really, he'd begun writing whole in 2007. And he would write a chapter at a time over many, many years. It was four, he'd been working on it for four years. And I was just floored by the ideas in it.

But the manuscript needed work. And we started working on it. And through the process of working on it together and me asking questions, and I think, you know, partly what I wanted to do was be a marketer and just make this really, really clear and persuasive. And you could bring an everyman or consumer eye to something that's coming from a heady scientific brain. Yeah, I wanted... And translate that so that the populace could absorb it appropriately. Not even the populace, but me. Like, I would read a chapter and like, I don't quite get this.

Like, there's something big here. And I wanted to give other people the experience I had of just having my eyes opened by this manuscript. And to say, you know, this is a really big point. Like, there was one study that he sort of mentioned in the book that I couldn't believe. It was one of his students, Rui Hai Liu, who had come from China. His dad had been a traditional Chinese herbalist. And he wanted to study the vitamin C properties of an apple. And he did that. And he found that there was like 1500 milligrams of vitamin C like activity in 100 grams of apple.

And then he did a biochemical assay in the lab to see how much actual vitamin C there was, all the flavonoids and ascorbic acid, and he found it was only 5.7 milligrams. So 5.7 created in the whole apple 1,500 of activity. Because of some kind of incredibly complex matrix of nutrients that working together creates something that is not 2 plus 2 equals 4, but 2 plus 2 equals 10. Right. The amount of vitamin C activity was 263 times greater than what was predicted by the actual materials in the apple. And that blew me away. And I wanted it to blow everyone away. So that was sort of my contribution was to, through my own lens, to share my amazement at what Dr. Campbell had discovered

and what he had researched and kind of brought together and the philosophy that he had been developing for decades. And the idea of whole is essentially that we need to take a step back and reevaluate our reductionist approach to science, to nutrition, and to health and to look at it from a more macro perspective and understand and appreciate the incredible complexities, not only in the foods that we eat, but in the way our biomechanical systems, our bodies operate. And to understand that it's more than meets the eye. It's more than what that vitamin C pill, you know, that you take as a supplement is doing

to your body in an isolated sense, but that there is much more going on. And in a sense, to coin the phrase that is used in the book, holism, correct? Right. I mean, is that the idea behind the book? And where does that idea come from? Is that generated out of his experience with the China study? Or what is the sort of germination of this drive to put this book out and the information in it? Right. Well, I can let Dr. Campbell speak for himself about the initial drive. the worldview is that reductionist science, which is seen as the only kind of science worth funding and worth learning from, is quite myopic.

And it doesn't give us the big picture, and it's very susceptible to hanky-panky in the funding process. Because when you're only looking at tiny little details, it's not neutral which details get looked at. The details that get looked at are those that have market potential. And things that have market potential tend to be quick fix. And if you really want to have market potential, you sell a drug that has side effects so you can sell additional drugs to take care of those side effects. So not only is reductionist science not giving us the whole picture, it's actually giving us parts of the picture that are exploiting us.

In some respect, reductionist science is really kind of the scientific method, though, because you have to isolate out these variables and focus on how one thing affects something else, and you have to remove all the other aspects of what might influence that result, right? So the idea of holism or anti-reductionist, you know, science is to appreciate that that's never the case, at least with biological systems. Right. Well, I think, you know, there's nothing wrong with the reductionist science. But I think of it like, imagine a million scientists each looking at the world through a microscope.

And all of them are arguing about what the world is. So it's wonderful information. But there needs to be someone with the perspective to say, hey, let's put this all together. You know, there's an old Indian fable about the six blind men trying to describe an elephant. And each one's touching a different piece of the elephant. And they're arguing. The one with the ear is saying the elephant is a fan. The one with the tail, the elephant's a rope or the elephant's a hose or a wall or a pillar.

And, of course, from the outside, we can look and say, well, they're all right, and they're all wrong. The trouble is, in this society, the scientists who are examining the elephant are all being funded, and we don't have access to the elephant. We have to take their word for it. So we're listening to, you know, is it a paleo elephant? Is it a vegan elephant? Is it a raw elephant?

And people, scientists are not trained or incented to look at the big picture. There's no funding to look at the big picture. It's called going on a fishing expedition. It's not real science to be interested in the world as a whole. So what is the solution to this? Like how do we move from this reductionist perspective into a more, you know, how can we take that 10,000-foot view approach and improve how we evaluate these things? approach and improve how we evaluate these things? Well, one thing is for people to see for themselves that holism is real. And I think we're all born with a sense that everything's kind of connected. So if you try the plant-based diet, which holistic studies and holistic, the bulk of evidence suggests is the healthiest way to eat.

You try that, you might start feeling better. You might start exercising more. You'll experience the holistic power in your own life. You can look beyond that and see that a plant-based diet also has holistic effects on the planet, on the planet, on social justice, on your own mood, on your relationship with nature. You know, I think that to me, that's the ultimate break of holism, is that we as a Western civilization have been cut off from nature. And every symptom, every one of our addictions is based on we're self-medicating to try to get back to nature. And when we do reductionist science only and we call it the only science that we're allowed to do, it's essentially torturing nature to reveal its secrets.

And, you know, in the same, it's part of the same mindset that tortures animals, that tortures people in third world countries, that tortures the earth, and end up ultimately torturing ourselves with these diseases and with our, with the lives of quiet desperation, as you put it in your talk. I think the solution is experiential. There's great work to be done in sort of reading and studying and learning this stuff. But ultimately, when we experience wholeness for ourselves, the facade of a separate world starts to fall away. into integrating ourselves in our own bodies, integrating into our communities, integrating our food system into a civilization that regenerates the earth rather than destroys it. I think we're waking up, and people like Dr. Campbell are way ahead of us saying, hey, look, there's a cliff down there. Maybe we want to change direction. Right. I mean, in some respects, when you are beautifully put, by the way, thank you. Thanks. It sort of becomes, it transcends this focus on nutrients and diet and biological symptoms,

and it becomes much broader than that. And the way you describe it, it starts to sound more like a spiritual journey. Well, for me it is. When we eat, we eat the world. It's the most intimate relationship we have with the rest of creation. We chew it up. We make it part of ourselves. And as human beings, we tend to think of ourselves as so separate.

But the nutrients come in and become us. We go out into the world. We say words words those become nutrients or poisons for other people you know there's a flow and you know i mean that to me that's the the ultimate reason that this mindset is going to win it's just more joyful to live this way than to be miserable and medicate yourself with with comfort foods and junk foods and all the other addictions. You know, ultimately not being addicted to things just feels better. We have to wrap it up.

We're out of time. There's so many things I still want to talk to you about. We didn't even get into the low-carb fraud book that you worked on. We didn't talk about homeschooling. So I hope that you will sit down with me again in the near future. Maybe we could go for a couple hours next time. I would love to. I'd love to ask you all the questions about your journey too. Absolutely. We can do that. But I do want to sort of leave everybody with a final, with some final thoughts from you. You know, somebody who's

listening, somebody who's listening to this, maybe they haven't read the China study. Maybe they have, they have, maybe they're not sure where they stand with the whole thing, but they're feeling kind of stuck and unsure about the best way to eat or the best way to kind of transition out of some situation that they're in in their life where they feel stuck? Is there any kind of guidance or encouragement or insight you could provide to those people? Well, I'd say in general, what I've learned about myself is my first impulse when I'm stuck somewhere or not happy is to figure out why it's my fault and why I should be mad at myself for it. And then I'll try to use that negative motivation to like, you know, kick my ass out of that situation into some other situation. And that

only makes things worse for me. You go into a shame spiral. Yes. And the shame spiral simply feeds the addiction, whatever it is. It just makes me need... The addiction for me is always to numb out and distract myself. And so the more shame I feel, the more I need to numb out and distract myself. And to me, the fundamental practice in my life is tolerating my own feelings, being present for them, and working on coming to understand them and love them. And from that place, I find I have so much more room to make any kind of change, whatever it is. And you know what? If you want to go paleo, go paleo and try it and see if it

works for you. If you want to go plant-based, go plant-based, try it. You know, don't get caught up in dogma. You know, get caught up in your own experience. You know, be present for your own life and you'll see what happens. You know, the truth does not need us. We need the truth. And when we become, you know, very dogmatic about the truth, it's like, you know, we feel like the truth needs us to prop it up somehow. You know, we're so small. The world's so big. Just, you know, just, I don't want to say, you know, sort of enjoy the journey. Relax.

For a lot of, yeah. For a lot of people, you know, that's like, you know, enjoying something when they're in the middle of a miserable episode is too much to ask, but just be present for it. I found that nothing hurts as much as I think it does when I'm running away from it. I have a very good friend and he's fond of saying, they're just feelings, man. You know, we work so hard to try to avoid certain feelings. Or we live in fear of experiencing certain feelings, whether it's fear itself or, you know, shame or whatever it may be. And he's always saying, just feel the feelings when they come. And they change and they pass. and you realize they won't kill you

and they inform the texture and the depth of your life experience and you can draw from that but just know that whatever you're experiencing it will change and you can get through it and to just embrace it and accept it and be present for it and feel it

rather than try to resist it and make it go away. Yeah. And I think that's the place from which change is possible and from which our own agency becomes powerful. Mm-hmm. Beautiful, man. That was great great thank you so much thank you can I plug my website absolutely I was just going to say like

where can people go if they want to connect with you learn more about what you're doing yeah so I have a new website

called plantyourself.com that has very little on it but it has a sign up box and I haven't sent out any emails yet but I probably will and if you're if you're interested in in finding out where this journey is going to take me on it, but it has a sign up box and I haven't sent out any emails yet, but I probably will. And if you're interested in finding out where this journey is going to take me, you can go visit there. You can go to Facebook slash plant yourself. And literally it's a couple of weeks

old and I don't know where it's going to go. And it's always very easy to get off the list if you're tired of it. And the big secret is that Howard has a podcast that he refuses to market himself. So I am going to market it for you. Bless you. What's your podcast called? It's called Plant Yourself. Okay, so that's on the same site? That's on the site.

I believe it's on iTunes. I'm embarrassed to say I don't know how to find it. No, you're an internet marketer. Come on. It's got to be on there. How many episodes do you have up? Well, I've done about 55 interviews um most of them are on another site i was i was working with one of dr campbell's sons um on a site called holvana.com most of the podcasts are available there and i'm i'm doing

stuff on my own right now and so if you Plant Yourself, you can get the most recent ones. And I talk to wonderful people. I mean, I basically do it just for the opportunity to have great conversations, and hopefully they're worth listening in on. Cool. All right, man. Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure hanging out with you all week and your beautiful family. Your kids are lovely and phenomenal. They're bright, shining stars.

And it's been really fun for our kids to hang out with your kids and to get to know your family. So thank you. Right back at you, brother. All right, man. Peace. Take care. Plants.

All right, everybody. That's our show. I hope you enjoyed it. Second part of two parts, a double plant-based nutrition whammy. If you want to learn more about Howard, check out the show notes at richroll.com. Pick up the book, Whole, by, of course, using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com. And lots of other information in the show notes about what Howard is doing and where you can connect with him.

So want to support the show? Tell a friend. Let's just spread it by word of mouth. That's the thing, you guys. The show's free. It will always be free. I just ask that you say a kind word to somebody else

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it will not cost you a cent extra and Amazon kicks us some loose change which keeps our lights on and helps me pay Tyler, my son to produce the show who, by the way, is doing an amazing job and he does all the music for the show he arranges all the audio.

He's been fantastic. And give him a shout out in the comments below because I want to encourage him further. He's been a great producer. If you want to show your love even a little bit deeper, you can donate to the show. There's a donate button at richroll.com. You can donate whatever amount resonates with you. And again, the show's always going to be free. There's a donate button at richroll.com. You can donate whatever amount

resonates with you. And again, the show's always going to be free. Don't feel obligated. But for those of you who have been using the Amazon banner ad and who have been donating, that means tremendous amount to me, to us, to Tyler, and we really appreciate it. So thank you. Final thing you can do is leave a review on iTunes. That helps us out a lot, and you know what would be cool too? By the way, I'm not asking you to leave a five-star review. Just share your thoughts on the show, and I would appreciate it. What's also cool, which I love, is when people post images on Instagram of them listening to the show, tuning into the show, a picture of them out exercising

with a picture of their iPhone listening to the show and stuff like that. I love that stuff. So keep that stuff coming. I really dig it. If you want to learn more about getting more plant-based, you're inspired by Howard and T. Colin Campbell. You can take T. Colin Campbell's eCornell course. There's a link to that in the show notes to the previous episode, episode 79. Or you can check out my course, the course that Julie and I did for MindBodyGreen. It's called The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition. It's three and a half hours of streaming online video content. I basically took all of my knowledge and experience with this whole thing, put it together, tried to answer all the questions I commonly get about how to do it and how to do it right.

Everything from how do you get your kids to eat better and how do you do it when you travel a lot? How do you handle business lunches, et cetera? What do you eat during the day? What do you eat before you work out, after workout, all that kind of stuff. So it's all in this course. what do you eat during the day, what do you eat before you work out, after workout, all that kind of stuff. So it's all in this course. There's also an online community and all these downloadable tools,

a free copy of our digital e-cookbook, Jai Seed, and lots of other bonuses. So check that out at mindbodygreen.com. And, of course, you want to wear your affiliation with this plant power revolution proudly. You can do that now at richroll.com. We've got t-shirts, we've got trucker hats, we've got beanies. We have a couple of nutritional supplement products. We've got vitamin B12. We have an athletic recovery supplement product called Jai Repair.

We have new products coming soon. We're working on a cycling kit. I'm also working on an app, a mobile app, an iOS iPhone app. That's in development right now. We're getting close on that. But I'm pretty excited to be able to share that with you guys soon, which will be a great new and easy way to tap into the podcast and get some added features and bonuses and the like. So that's it.

Follow me on Twitter at Rich roll instagram at rich roll facebook uh facebook.com forward slash ritual fans and that's it all right you guys thanks for being a great audience thanks for all the support thanks for the love and i am more encouraged and enthusiastic than ever to keep raising the bar and get better at this, bring you better guests, more informative guests, and to continue to get better at my diction and my podcast production and all the like. So anyway, that's it. Got great new guests coming up for you over the next couple weeks. And I will see you guys next week. So have a great week. Have an inspired week. Do something that scares you. Try something new. See how that feels. Because the truth is there is no

stasis in life. In every single moment you either you are either growing or you are regressing. So think on that and I'll catch you next week. Thanks you guys. Peace. Plants.