The School of Greatness - 314 Train Your Body To Burn Fat and Enjoy Life with Mark Sisson

Episode Date: April 11, 2016

"Everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur." - Mark Sisson If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/314

This is episode number 314 with Mark Sisson. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome everyone to the School Greatness Podcast.

I'm so pumped right now. I'm in Vancouver, Canada. That's right. I'm having an incredible time. I just spoke at a conference called Man Talks. It's all about how to help evolve men, insecurities and become better men in the world, better husbands, better fathers, better brothers, all those things. And we had an incredible time.

Lots of great people came out. So thank you to everyone in Vancouver who came out to wait in line for me to sign your book. We had an incredible time together, got to say hi to so many people that listen to the podcast, and I'm so very blessed and grateful every time I meet someone that listens to the show. So thank you guys for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. And I had the chance to sit down with an incredible man. His name is Mark Sisson. He's the best-selling author of The Primal Blueprint

and one of the leading voices in the evolutionary health movement. He's a former elite endurance athlete with a two-hour, 18-minute marathon and a fourth-place Hawaii Ironman finish. He's got a new book called Primal Endurance that applies the primal eating and lifestyle principles to the challenge of endurance training, helping athletes overcome the common conditions of burnout and carbohydrate dependency. And in this episode, we talk a lot about how to optimize your body and your health and your lifestyle, really how to eat, sleep, and train in a way that will bring the most

pleasure. Also, the importance of rest and recovery and how to recover effectively, how to become good at fat burning, and he talks about how to burn fat constantly throughout all day long and how to become a fat burning machine by what you're eating and how you're moving, why inconsistency in your workout and routine can help you, and best of all, how to look good naked. That's right. Everything and more in this episode with the one, the only, Mark Sisson.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness podcast. We've got a huge guest in, Mark Sisson, in the house. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it. I'm pumped. I heard about you, I think, probably like seven or eight years ago when I started kind of getting in the blogging world, the social media blogging world, and just kind of dipping

my toes. And you were a huge success already in the fitness space, and you had a book out called Primal Blueprint. Right. Or The Primal Blueprint. Is that right? Correct. And I think you had like a couple hundred thousand subscribers at the time. Maybe this was 2009, 2010, but you were already kind of just crushing it in the fitness space and doing

very well as a blogger. And that's how I first heard about you. Right. And since then, you've got like tons of products in terms of you had supplements before then, but you've got about 20 something books, right? You've got food products, training, restaurants, you've got about 20-something books, right? You've got food, products, training, restaurants. You've got everything, right? Fitness programs. You've just kind of expanded the brand, which is really cool to see. You've got a new book out today called Primal Endurance as one of the new books. And I want to dive into what you just mentioned beforehand before we started this interview is talking about your lifestyle and the

whole philosophy and the approach to your lifestyle, whether you want to be an endurance athlete or have endurance in your life, or you want to put on mass or you want to get lean or whatever it may be. You have a specific lifestyle that I've always been excited about. When you came in here, you were talking about how I have the same standup desk as you. And I was like, yes, if I'm doing something that Mark is doing, I feel like I'm doing it right. So I just want to dive into what this philosophy is and how you actually live. Right. So my main goal is to live awesome.

That's the tagline. That's the motto of our company. Primal Blueprint, live awesome. And what does that mean? It means extracting the greatest amount of pleasure, enjoyment, contentment, fulfillment that's possible out of every possible moment. Now, there are going to be bad times, of course, but to live in the moment, to appreciate the now, to appreciate the relationships, to have fun when you're working out,

to enjoy every single bite of food you ever eat and not choke something down just because it's healthy. So it really revolves around orchestrating a life way of pleasure, of hedonistic experiences in the context of this modern world that we have here, understanding that we sit here with hunter-gatherer genes that have certain sort of proclivities and expectations of us that we can meet either through natural means or through artificial means. And sometimes there's not a right answer, but it's about choices. So how do I make choices that serve me in the short term, that give me pleasure, that don't harm me in the long term? So it's sort of an overview of what we're up against here. But as you drill down, as you boil it down and

distill it down to what does it look like, it looks like what are the types of foods that we choose to eat that turn on genes, that build muscle or burn fat? How much sun exposure do we get that allows us to make vitamin D and get tan, but not too much so we get burned? How much sleep do we get? And by the way, sleep is a very pleasurable thing if you're willing to acknowledge that. How much sleep do we get in a way that reinvigorates us and allows us to be creative on a daily basis andDAs, but do we do puzzles? Do we play games? Are we creative? Do we play musical instruments? Do we learn a language? How do we use our brain? All these things make the totality of the human experience, and I love to look at all the ways in which we can choose these behaviors that manifest themselves as pleasurable, enjoyable, providing contentment and fulfillment

and build us toward a better human being. When did you start to take this on? Because you were a triathlete? Yeah, I was a marathoner in the 70s. Wow. Actually, the late 60s and early 70s. Wow. And from there, I went to triathlon.

I was always trying to improve you know, improve myself. Optimize performance. Optimize performance. Yes. Using the tools of the day, which were pretty rudimentary. It's like, all right, run a lot of miles and eat lots of carbohydrates and you'll be where you need to be. Well, you know, that's what we knew.

That's all we knew. And it wasn't exactly appropriate. So over the years, I got injured. I got sick from the overtraining, from the diet, which was very highly inflammatory. It caused sorts of— Pastas and breads or what? All that stuff that they said you had to eat. I had so many pasta meals and pizza meals and lasagna meals the night before every game. And I remember just being so exhausted in every game.

High school, college, pro. It was just like exhaustion. Right. Yawning. I would yawn so much. No, that, it was just like exhaustion. Right. Yawning. I would yawn so much. No, that's a classic symptom of it. Why am I yawning? Right.

I'm supposed to be excited about the game and pumped up. I wanted to take a nap. I wanted to take a nap. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we have these sort of old conventional wisdom technologies that we were using to improve performance, theoretically. Yes, yes. And they weren't. So I basically ended my career

early, prematurely. I was too injured to continue running. My health had suffered. I had arthritis and tendonitis and irritable bowel syndrome, and I got sick a lot, and I had heartburn and hemorrhoids, and I was a real wreck. I mean, here's theoretically the picture of health because of the training I was doing, but I was falling apart on the inside. So I sort of rededicated my life to figuring out how I could be fit and strong and lean and happy and healthy at the same time without being overly, you know, without too much struggle and sacrifice and suffering. You know, is there an easy way, an easier way to be all those things I wanted to be that, that allowed me to have more pleasure in the moment and didn't sacrifice my long-term health. Uh, so that's, that was the

big shift in me and that's, and it's been going on for 35 years and it continues to go on. So I, as soon as I made that shift, I started doing the research. I started – I mean I wrote my first book in 82 on how to train for triathlons. And even then, I was calling upon evolution as the main basis for how we train. And I was looking at the previous few years of triathletes because in 82, there hadn't even been a decade of triathlon training. Wow. But I already recognized that we were doing it wrong. We were training too hard. We were putting ourselves –

Too many miles, too many – Too many miles, too much redlining the heart and the body, and there was a better way and an easier way to do it. So I started recognizing that back in 82, And then even up until three years ago, when I started researching the Primal Endurance book, I started thinking, well, you know, all of the science continues to show us that the old choice was probably a wrong choice. That reliance on carbohydrates and that intent of managing our glycogen stores in our muscles was kind of the wrong approach. And maybe we ought to come

at it from the exact opposite end of the spectrum, which is how do we become really good at burning fat and in so doing spare glycogen and in so doing unburden ourselves of having to take in so much carbohydrate in the form of pasta and breads and cereals and rice and crackers and cookies and all the other stuff. Sure, sure. And you're 62, right? Yeah. Right? And you're like leaner than anyone I know.

So what's the most effective way to burn fat and still be strong? Yeah, of course. You know, as we said initially in the Primal Blueprint, and I've said it decades before I wrote the Pr primal blueprint, 80% of your body composition is determined by how you eat. So there's a certain way in which you can eat where you can literally reprogram your genes to derive most of your energy from your stored body fat. Really? Yes. So as opposed to waking up, being hungry, having breakfast, being hungry at the 10.30

break, being hungry for lunch, having a snack in the afternoon, having a dinner and having a snack before you go to bed, which is the sort of standard American approach. Like even the old bodybuilders would say, don't go more than three hours without eating or you will cannibalize your muscle tissue. That was all based on an assumption that we had to burn carbohydrate, had to access glucose and glycogen for the muscles to be able to continue to work. It never contemplated that we are obligate fat burners.

We are born with this amazing ability to extract calories from stored body fat. And the reason that we don't as we go through life is we present our – you're two years old. You're eating cookies and crackers and mushed peas and all sorts of carbs, all that stuff. And so your body learns to depend on glucose, on carbohydrates as a source of energy and never really gets to the point where you force it to burn fat. So what we do is we shift the diet around. It's not painful. You get rid of the breads, the pastas, the cereals, the crackers, the cookies, the candies, the sweet and soft drinks. Well, it does sound kind of nice, doesn't it?

But what you're left with is meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, some starchy tubers like sweet potatoes, things like that. Those are great tasting foods if you eat them right. And they're real food. And they're real food. And you can use butter and lard and you can eat bacon on this program. And what it does is it reduces the amount of simple sugars and carbohydrates you take in and just sort of gently forces your body to upregulate all the enzyme systems

that access stored body fat and burn it and allow you to have more energy throughout the day without having to eat so often. So the first thing that happens is your appetite self-regulates. So now you get into this space where you become a good fat burner. You start to melt away. You're not as hungry because you're always carrying around a meal. It's on your thighs. It's on your ass.

It's on your belly, wherever it is. Your body becomes so adept at accessing those stored calories. It says, I don't need to eat. I'm really not that hungry. Wow. Yeah, and that's so empowering for so many people. But when you, you know, I was a, still love sugar. Yeah.

But I used to be really bad at sugar. I feel like I have much more under control. But I feel like when you're eating a lot of candy, sweets, and sugar, you're never satisfied. You just want to eat more and more and more. But that's. Until you're sick. No, exactly. I'm full because I'm sick now.

Yeah. I mean, the stories of Lam full because I'm sick now. Yeah. I mean, the stories of Lamar Oda eating four pounds of candy before games or whatever. Yeah. But, I mean, look, we're all hardwired. But look what he's had now.

We're all... By the way, sugar's a very addictive substance. So addictive. So, you know, we're all hardwired to seek out sweet things. That's part of that

hunter-gatherer DNA that we all carry that hasn't changed in thousands of years. So how do we shift our minds? So the first way you do it is you go from the craving, which is what you're talking about. Like you crave sugar, so you eat sugar, and then that just promotes more craving, and it gets you into this sort of addictive cycle. and it gets you into this sort of addictive cycle. You're actually producing sort of opiate-like substances that are occupying receptor sites that are giving you sort of a feel-good experience. So you've got to kind of be willing to get rid of that. So you get rid of the candies.

You get rid of the sweetened beverages and soft drinks and teas. And you get rid of the carbohydrates that – not all carbs, but the breads that convert to glucose in the bloodstream so rapidly. So now you've lowered your blood – your glucose experience on a daily basis. So now the brain is starting to get, yeah, I don't need to really get that much glucose. You know, I can – the body is burning more fat. As a result of your being able to burn fat, you create these byproducts called ketones, which the brain loves to burn ketones and burns them preferentially.

So you need less and less sugar to maintain clarity throughout the day. If you haven't become fat adapted and you're a sugar burner, which is what we – it's not a derogatory term, but we use a term to describe people who haven't become fat burners yet. They're sugar burners. If you don't eat – it's true. If you don't eat for a couple of hours, your blood sugar dips because you haven haven't become fat burners yet. They're sugar burners. If you don't eat, it's true. If you don't eat for a couple of hours, your blood sugar dips because you haven't learned how to burn fat yet. You don't know how to access it.

You can't take it out of storage and burn it. So now the blood sugar is low. The brain goes, I got to go get some more glucose. I got to get energy somewhere. Sugar or something. Sugar or something. So you have the bagel at 1030 in the morning. Oh, my gosh.

Or you have the – That's amazing for an hour. No, exactly. But then you're hungry Oh, my gosh. Or you have the – That's amazing for an hour and then it's – No, exactly. But then you're hungry again and that's this vicious cycle. So if we can take the steps – we say it takes 21 days. That's why I have a book called The 21-Day Total Body Transformation. Twenty-one days of this cutting these sugars and starchy – not starchy, but simple carbohydrates out of your diet and just focusing on healthy fats and lean proteins and vegetables, your body gets the message and says, I'm not going

to be getting that much glucose. I'm going to learn how to burn fat and I'm going to do it well, damn it. And then it takes the fat out of your body fat stores. So over time, you lose a pound, two pounds a week, and you trend toward your ideal body composition. Wow. So all of this is a 10-minute long-winded answer to your question of what does it take to burn fat. It doesn't take a lot of exercise. It mostly takes the dietary shift.

Right. Yeah, you got to do some exercise. You don't have to do anything, But you can choose to do some exercise. It'll help accelerate. And it'll help accelerate it a little bit. But most of it happens as a result of the shifts you make in your diet. Absolutely. It's all in the kitchen.

Yep. So you can get abs in the kitchen and not do anything different working out. Absolutely. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So what's the difference between, because it sounds like a little paleo-ish, what's the difference between primal paleo and like a bulletproof, which has kind of been picking

up as well? You know, they're all sort of versions of a similar theme, which is to cut the sugars way down, cut the processed carbohydrates way down, get rid of the industrial seed oil. So that would be the soybean oil, the corn oil, the canola, which are causing inflammatory responses in a lot of people. And just kind of go to real food. And just kind of go to real food. With the Primal Blueprint, we said at some point, you know, dairy, if you like it, why not include it in your diet if you don't have an issue with it, right? I love it. But all these foods exist on a spectrum.

So dairy, you know, there's raw milk, which is good for you. There's A2 protein, which is a form of casein. We could have a whole discussion about the different types of cows and the different types of protein that they make. But on the far end of the spectrum, the good end, there's butter, there's cream, there's all these things. At the other end, at the bad end, there's 2% skim, homogenized, pasteurized, nonfat, whatever. Stay away from that stuff.

Yeah. You know? So all these foods sort of exist on a spectrum. So cheeses, for instance, part of the dairy family. I love cheese. I love cheese. I love cheese. So, you know, we include it in our eating strategy because we say there's no real reason not to. Get the right cheeses.

Paleo, yeah, exactly, artisanal cheeses, and there's good and bad cheeses as well. But on the paleo program or the paleo strategy is pretty strict for a lot of people. So they would say no dairy at all of any kind. So no milk, no butter, no cream, no cheese. So that's, you know, there are little variations in this here. But mostly whole foods. Mostly whole foods is what we're all looking at. I mean, even if you look at a vegan experience these days or a vegetarian experience, it's really these dietary programs work largely as a result of what you eliminate, not what

you're eating. Right. Right. So if you eliminate the crap and you're left, even if you're only eating vegetables, as long as you're getting enough protein, you should be fine. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay.

What is LGN and how does it motivate you? Yeah. So LGN is Look Good Naked. And it's just a little mnemonic device we've used for the last 10 years. I think people have used it before, but we sort of made it a meme for a while. And it's just this idea that one of the things that we are seeking is we want to look good naked. And I think that happens for a lot of people. And I think that happens for a lot of people.

That's a subset of their greater goal or it's a side effect of the original intent. The original intention for a lot of people who go to Primal Blueprint and to Mark's Daily Apple, my blog, is they're frustrated. They're sick. They can't get off the meds. They've had health issues and they've not been able to resolve them through the traditional medical channels. So a lot of people come to me having had that experience in the medical community, not a good one. So the first thing that they recognize is their blood sugar normalizes or their polycystic ovarian syndrome goes away or their irritable bowel syndrome goes away or their GERD or whatever it is that they're dealing with goes

away. And that's wonderful. And then they go, oh, by the way, I'm losing some weight too. That's awesome as well. And I'm starting to look good naked. So it becomes a nice side effect. Gotcha. So what's a typical eating day look like for you? Like what are you putting in your system? Yeah. So I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee around 6.30 in the morning. I like coffee. I'm a big fan of coffee. I don't eat until 12.30 or 1. So I use what we call a compressed eating window.

Now, I will wake up and I have plenty of energy because I'm so good at burning fat. I've trained my body to do that. So you have the energy. I have the energy. I'm not in a slump waking up from having not eaten for the 12 hours that I was sleeping. It doesn't matter. I'm so good at accessing the stored body fat. I've got plenty of energy.

In fact, I'll go to the gym at 9, 30, or 10 o'clock, and I'll do my workout fasted. Sometimes it'll be a heavy leg day. Sometimes it'll be intervals of some kind. Again, I don't – You feel fine. I feel fine. Right. And then when I get home, I won't eat.

If I get home at like 11, I still won't eat for an hour and a half, partly because I'm not hungry and partly because I got stuff to do, right? Right, right, right. Exactly. But I'm not compelled to go, oh, my God, I just finished my workout. I must eat a post-workout shake or something. Yeah, there's so many people that say that, you know, have a protein shake within the first 30 minutes of waking up to start your metabolism,

drink a shake right after a workout. Why do they say that and why do you think you don't need to? I think you don't need to because if you become good at burning fat, a couple things happen. First of all, you have the energy to get through the day. Second of all, if you're good at burning fat and you're not hungry, I say if you're not hungry, why are you eating? If you're not hungry, don't eat because that's kind of key. When you become good at burning fat, you don't enter that cannibalistic zone that the bodybuilders enter when they're dependent on carbs a lot, which is you start to tear up your muscle tissue.

Because when you're a sugar burner and you run out of sugar or you're depending on carbohydrate. By the way, I use glycogen, glucose, carbohydrate, and sugar sort of interchangeably. But when you're a sugar burner and you haven't eaten for a while, you've depleted the glycogen in your liver and your muscles because your body is expecting you to have sugar all this time and that's where you store it, but you don't store very much of it. So when you run out of it, the brain— You need to fill it up.

The brain goes, hey, something's off here. We got to eat. And if we don't eat, then here's what we're going to do. We're going to signal the adrenals to create cortisol, which is going to go tear down muscle tissue so that the amino acids can be sent to the liver to be converted into glucose so I can fuel the brain. So it's like you're tearing down the muscle you just spent all the time trying to build because of your dependence on glucose.

All that goes away when you become a fat burner. When you become good at burning fat, now when you don't eat, your body knows how to access the stored body fat so your energy levels don't dip, your blood sugar doesn't dip. And so you don't cut into muscle tissue. Gotcha. So you can train really hard to try to build muscle, and you're still saying you don't need this post-recovery shake right afterwards if you learn how to eat the right way. Exactly. Exactly.

Now, again, if you're the old paradigm and you are the carbohydrate-dependent athlete, then, yeah, you probably do want to eat a post-workout meal because you probably will cannibalize some of the muscle tissue because you're working on an entirely different operating system. Interesting. Man. And so that 21-day transformation is how you get off of that cycle and get into the fat-burning cycle, essentially? Yeah. Exactly. Okay, cool. We'll have that linked up here as well. And also the Primal Endurance, the book, this has it all in here, but this is really specific to people who want to race 10Ks, 5Ks, marathons, triathlons, Spartan races, all that stuff. Gotcha. Yes.

Have you done a Spartan race yourself? I haven't. I did one, a short one, like a five-miler. It's pretty intense. Yeah, it's intense. It's fun, though. It's fun, though. I wish it had been around when I was in my prime.

You would have been a machine. Because I was a good marathoner, but I had my DNA fitness thing done a few years ago, and I was like 57% endurance and 43% strength. What that means is it made me a pretty good endurance athlete, but I was never going to be the best in the world because you'd have to be 80% or 85%, right? But it also told me that I had the strength, which is sort of in retrospect, that's why I realized I used to lift weights even when I was a marathoner. I lifted weights in the gym. So I maintained my strength. And I was a gymnast before I was ever an endurance athlete.

So you look at the Spartan races and you go, well, it's got some gymnastics, some parkour-type movements. Rope climbing. Yeah, yeah. Some heavy lifting, all that stuff combined with the endurance. That would have been my thing. Wow. But right now it's like I'm too guarding of my current fitness level and health. I don't want to get injured.

Yeah, of course. So the big thing for me is my ultimate Frisbee game once a week. You're an ultimate Frisbee? Oh, my God. I love ultimate Frisbee. You've got to come out to Malibu, man. College champion with my team in college.

Get out of here. It's been a small D3 school. Whatever, man. You know what? We have a game in Malibu every Sunday at 9.30. It's crazy. I would love to come. It's been years, but I'd love to come.

No, no, no. It's the most fun. Can you wear cleats? You can wear cleats. I wear my Vibrams, but guys wear cleats. Wow. No, it's – anyway, so you know. I'd love to come.

You know what a good workout it is then. That's one of the hardest workouts. An hour of Ultimate and I'll make it awesome. We play two hours, by the way. Oh, my gosh. I would be like, sub me in. 15 minutes. I'd have to get back in the shape for it.

Wow, that's cool. In Malibu, huh? In Malibu, yeah. 9.30 a.m. Yep. I'll be there. And there's guys from West Hollywood that come out there, too. I will come out for sure.

What is it, like 30 guys go out there? Last week we had six on six. That's the most fun. Wow. In the summer we'll have 10 on 10 sometimes. It's a little bit crazy, but yeah. Wow. Okay, awesome.

Okay, so you wait until about – you have coffee in the morning. Then you wait until about noon to 1. Oh, yeah. We haven't even gotten to any food yet. And what is that meal? Yeah. So that meal is typically – it might be what I call a big-ass salad. It's a big salad with lots of vegetables in it and some form of protein with lots of salad dressing.

If you make dressing – So you have your own salad dressing. Now I have my own salad dressing because I couldn't find any that I could put a lot on and feel like this is – That isn't filled with sugar. Or unhealthy fats or unhealthy oils like the soybean oil that I was talking about or the canola. It's like no canola. Our salad dressings are made with avocado oil, which is the healthiest of all the oils. So I have a big salad with chicken left over from the previous night or a piece of fish or something on it.

Nice. Okay. And then? And then I go until the middle of the afternoon, maybe late afternoon. I might have a handful of macadamia nuts. We do make a protein bar now. All my products I make for myself, by the way. Just so you know.

I make stuff that I wish existed. This one, the dark chocolate almond bar? The dark chocolate almond bar. It looks amazing. It is amazing. And it's got 15 grams of protein, but mostly it's 9 grams of collagen. So it's got more collagen than a cup of bone broth. So I love bone broth, but when I'm driving my car.

You can pour out a bottle of bone broth. Yeah, yeah. So the bars are there because I'm really into the repair. So one of the issues I have as a 62-year-old guy trying to keep up with 20-somethings on a sprint to the end zone to defend a long pass is my Achilles. You know, so the collagen really works well. Really? Absolutely. So the collagen really works well. Really?

Absolutely. I can tell the difference between when I've been eating a lot of collagen and when I haven't in my Achilles. What happens? Is it tighter when you're not? Yeah, they feel like they're going to snap. Really? And they'll feel sore enough that I'll choose not to back way off for weeks at a time. So anyway, I might have a dark chocolate almond bar in the afternoon. I'm going to have to get all this stuff.

Yeah. I'm going to have to try it all out. Okay. And then in the evening, I have to have a piece of steak. I've got this great Wagyu short rib that I get. It's my favorite cut of meat anywhere in the world. And I'll have that with a whole ton of steamed vegetables or lightly grilled vegetables with some butter on it. And once in a while,

I'll have a glass of wine and that's it. That's the whole day. Yeah. You don't need much more than that. No. So here's the thing. You may have gleaned from that that it's not a lot of food. Right. And one of the things that you realize when you become good at burning fat... You don't need a lot of food. Right. And one of the things that you realize when you become good at burning fat… You don't need a lot of food. You don't need a lot of food. So a few years ago, I had this thought experiment.

I thought, well, you know, I used to my whole life see what I could get away with, see how much food I could eat and not feel like I was going to puke or not feel like I was going to gain weight, right? It's how much food can I eat and not gain weight. I think a lot of people live their lives that way. They sort of finish what's on their plate. Basically, there are a lot of people who run or work out just so they can eat more. Like, why do you run so much? Lewis, well, I run because I love to eat. Well, dude, I love to eat too, but I don't want to beat myself up just so I can eat more. So that was the thought experiment. And then if you reverse it, you go, well, if that's the case, what's the least amount of food I can eat and maintain my body mass, maintain my energy, not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry? And it turns out it's about 30% fewer calories than I used to eat.

Wow. Yeah. fewer calories than I used to eat. Wow. Yeah. So I learned within the last 10 years, I've learned to sort of halfway through a meal, ask myself just sort of subconsciously, am I really hungry for the next bite? Not am I full, not am I whatever, but am I truly hungry for the next bite? And if I'm not, I'm okay pushing the plate away, wrapping it up, throwing it away, giving

it away, whatever, because I know there's food wherever I want, whenever I want, so it's not like I'm trying to pack on the – Doing the stuff, yeah. Yeah. What if you just enjoy it? Well, if you enjoy it, keep going. Yeah. But a lot of times you get into that space where you go, you know,

am I eating this because – It's still there. Because it's still there. Yeah. Am I truly eating it because I enjoy it, or am I, you know, like I used to, I had a habit of one half gallon of ice cream a night. Oh. For five years.

That sounds amazing. It was amazing. And I was, it was in my training days. Right. So burned it all off, never gained any weight. I actually weighed probably 20 pounds less than I weigh now. Wow. Yeah.

But it was a half gallon of ice cream every night. And it was like I couldn't only eat a pint. It was like a pint of ice cream? Like why am I going to get started on that? I'm just going to rip your throat off and want more. It was whatever. Rip your head off. So I would – and if I – it was 10 o'clock at night and I didn't have any ice cream in the house,

I'd get in the car and drive and get some. It was like a real addiction, a real sugar addiction. Clearly, I got rid of that. But it was, you know, I wonder at times whether I had described this. It's a half gallon is my dose of ice cream. Right. And even though I could have satisfied myself with a pint or a half a pint, because it was there, because I could eat it and I could get away with it, that became my dose.

It's like people have a bag of potato chips. You have a little individual serving size of potato chips, and you have one this big. To some people, each one is an individual serving size. It is. It's tough to just have a few chips in the big bags. So what are these, you know, for athletes listening or for people that want to get back into their athletic ways?

You know, I used to be a professional athlete and I'm still, I consider myself an athlete. You've got nine pieces of primal advice for athletes. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs could live this way too

and still like be better entrepreneurs, be more productive, have better relationships, be sharper, all these different things. I think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur. Absolutely more productive, have better relationships, be sharper, all these different things. I think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur.

Absolutely. Absolutely. But you talk about adequate sleep, and this is something I've been talking about a lot lately on my podcast and bringing out different sleep experts, but why just emphasize is sleep important for you? I mean, sleep is when the body renews and regenerates, repairs itself. It's when a lot of the neural networking happens to overlook sleep and to think, well, I can sleep when I'm dead. Well, that just is such faulty logic. It's so critical and so important. I try to get eight hours a night myself. If I get less than six for

some reason, I feel it. I know it. I try to make up for it. I try not to let that happen. I try not to schedule late nights because I wake up at the same time pretty much every morning. 6 a.m. wake up? Yeah, 6.30, 6 a.m., 6.30. But if I were to go to bed at 1, I'd still wake up at my normal time. So I have to really force myself to – not force myself because I'm tired at the end of the day. And I have this whole wind down process. What is that? So my wife and I will watch some – we'll do some television after dinner.

We'll catch up on – we'll do some binge watching, catching up of whatever the latest series was. But around 10, we'll break – I have a pool in my backyard and a jacuzzi. So I go in – the pool is unheated. So in the wintertime, it might be in the 50s. I'll walk into the pool and hang out there for a couple of minutes and get really, really cold. But not to the point of shivering. It's kind of a process in and of itself. Then I'll get in the jacuzzi.

So my wife and I will hang out in the jacuzzi. We'll just recap what the day's events were. We turn off all the lights in the house. We have a fire pit out there. So there's a real sort of a primal caveman kind of thing to that. Then I'll just finish off with another minute in the cold and towel off and go up to bed. And I sleep like a baby as a result of that. Wow, the hot-cold therapy.

Yeah, the hot-cold therapy. And that's kind of how I wind my day down. And that prepares me to sleep, brings my body temperature down, which is, you know, they say that you should have your lower body temperature to sleep better. We keep the room around 67. Yes. We have blackout curtains. So it's a real cool sleeping environment, you know. Yes.

I always like to keep it cold. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so if you do like a cold shower before bed, you think that's a good thing? I think it's a good thing, yeah. It'll help you sleep better. I always like to keep it cold yeah yeah okay and so if you do like a cold shower before bed you think that's a good thing i think it's a good thing yeah it'll help you sleep better i think so try it i mean you can't hurt okay yeah you talk about stress and rest balance what does that mean well uh you know you there are certain stresses in your life that are unavoidable work

stress uh commuting stress uh sometimes training stress. Waiting in the lobby for 45 minutes of stress. Sorry. Well, I'm more stressed about the traffic coming from it. Right, right, right. Because you never know what it's going to be. It could be, you know, I planned for two hours. I got here in an hour, or I got here in less than an hour. Right.

That's good. Yeah. So you have these stresses, and some of them are imagined, even though your brain thinks they're real. They don't exist. Our stress mechanisms in the body, they evolved to handle true life or death situations, a tiger bearing down upon you, an infection that's going to kill you, a broken leg that may whatever have its impact on you. Not, you know, am I going to miss my kid's rehearsal? Or am I going to be late for work or whatever? Those cause stress, but they're not life-threatening.

And yet we, the brain sees them as life-threatening. So the message here is that you sort of have to identify stresses and then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery. Now, we talked about this before the show, And then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery. Now, we talked about this before the show, that meditation is a form of rest and recovery. But just taking maybe if you need a nap, you can do that. But certainly that goes back to the whole sleep thing being critical. But the other part of rest is recognizing, if you're an athlete, recognizing when it's just inappropriate to go out and train just because your schedule says, I have to go do six miles today.

If you wake up that day and you feel like crap and the metrics, the heart rate variability is wrong or you're just not feeling good, then you're better off taking that day off than plowing through it and being able to write in your logbook, yeah, I got through the workout. It felt like crap, but I got through the workout. I was just rested that day. Just rested that, yeah. Gotcha. Okay. And the third thing you talk about is personalized schedule and inconsistency is the key. So in primal endurance, we go back to that philosophy that the body is a very sort of

temperamental, it's in temperamental states back and forth. Sometimes you're in a state of energy and health and sometimes you're not. And you can't really plan on when those states are going to be. So you have to be willing to listen to the cues. And for that reason, we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing if you're an athlete. So it's when you feel good, you can go hard. When you don't feel good, back off. Take time off.

We use the term periodicity so you can periodize your training so that there are tranches of training days a week at a time where you're really going deep, deep, hard, hard, and then you might take a week off or take it real easy and back off. You can break those further up into quarterly, annual segments, always with the idea that some days are going to be good, some days are going to be bad. You're going to trend toward wanting to build, to ratchet up over time, but you're okay kind of not doing stuff as hard. And so it doesn't become this linear kind of progress. It becomes more of a fractal thing that trends toward improvement. Gotcha. The next thing you talk about is aerobic emphasis, train slow to race fast.

What does that mean? Yeah. So this is the toughest one for current endurance athletes to really – to grok. And that is a lot of athletes, and i was certainly one for 20 years you basically go out and you train to hurt so you run or you ride or you swim at a heart rate that's you know 75 to 90 percent of your max heart rate and you see how long you can hold that right and and so you're training to hurt and it's and it's and it hurts you know it does hurt you but you feel tough as a result of it.

But the problem is you're not really training the body to become more efficient. You're just training yourself to hurt. So when we talk about efficiency in racing, we go back to the original premise about glucose and glycogen being sort of this determining factor in muscle tissue. When you run out of glycogen, you sort of hit the wall. So how do you manage glycogen? Well, one way would be to eat a lot of carbohydrates and drink a lot of gels during the race. The other would be to become so good at burning fat that you never really tap into that glycogen. Interesting. So we train you to become so good at burning fat.

Now, that's the 80% that we talked about with the diet. But the other part of that for the endurance athlete is if you train at a low enough heart rate that you are, typically it's 180 minus your age. So let's just say you are 40 years old. So 180 minus 40 is 140. So that's going to be your maximum heart rate. You're never in your training, you're not going to go above that.

You set your watch, you set your heart monitor to give you a signal as soon as you get above 140. Now, you start out at that 140. Maybe you can only run 13-minute miles, even though you're capable of running 7-minute miles at 175 beats a minute or whatever. Right. But now what we're doing is we're measuring how good you are at burning fat. And we know that at that number, 180 minus your age, that's the highest rate that you can put oxygen through your system

and know that you're put oxygen through your system and know that you're burning mostly fat. And we know that because that's the pace at which you could close your mouth and breathe through your nose and get plenty of oxygen. Or that's the pace at which you could be with a training partner and talk without losing your breath. Once you start losing your – having to catch up or having to get winded, we know that you're going into burning – you're building up lactic acid.

You're not burning fat. You're not burning fat or you're burning less fat and starting to burn more sugar. So we want you to be at the highest end of your fat burning without tapping into your sort of glycolytic abilities. And we know that number to be generally around 180 minus your age. So now the idea is you go out and you train. And the first day you go out, you're running 13-minute miles, and that's as fast as you can go without the heart rate, you know,

bumping up over 140. Well, you're not very good at burning fat. You might be good at burning sugar. Like I say, you might be able to run 7-minute miles or 6-minute miles. Right, right. But over time, if you stay at that maximum heart rate of, which is low, much lower than you're used to, you find yourself running 12-minute miles and then 11-minute miles and then 10-30s and 10

and 9-30s. And what it means is even though the heart rate hasn't changed, you're still putting the same amount of oxygen through, now you're burning more fat. So you're becoming more efficient at burning fat. So that when you do decide to ramp up and throw in the interval training and the weight stuff that we have you do in the gym. Now you're starting from a baseline of being a much better fat burner than everyone else around you. So just so I wrap my head around this, is your heart rate dictating how much fat you can burn based on how –

No. So your heart rate is dictating how much oxygen you're putting through your system. And it's because it's delivering oxygen to the muscles, and the muscles are using oxygen to burn fat. They can burn glycogen or glucose with oxygen, but they also burn without oxygen. So, you know, like you could run a 100-meter sprint with your nose plugged, and there's no oxygen involved. It's all – yeah, you'd still want to –

Breathe. You'd want to breathe at the end of it, but – and you'd have to recover, to recycle, but you don't need that oxygen to burn that full amount. Gotcha. So when we train the body to become more efficient at burning fat – and by the way, the heart, it's interesting. The heart – we're not training the heart to be stronger. The heart's already pretty strong.

So the heart doesn't get stronger. The heart doesn't have a PR, right? You know what I mean? It does what it does. But what happens is you become more efficient with the materials that the heart gives you. So if the heart is pumping oxygen, X amount of oxygen, and you're not good at burning fat, you can't do anything with that oxygen. But the better you are at burning fat, the more you can use that oxygen and burn the fat in the mitochondria and avoid having to go into that glycogen storage situation. Okay. All right?

So it's really about training you to become more efficient at burning fat. Not forever, but it's certainly through the base building phase. And that's just a huge hurdle for a lot of endurance athletes to overcome because they go, wait a minute, I can already run 7 minute miles. Why am I dropping down to 13s? But invariably

and across the board we see, if they stick to this for weeks at a time, they become more and more efficient. So now we know that you're running 7 minute 30 second miles and you're running 7-minute, 30-second miles, and you're getting 92% of your energy from fat. Wow.

So that when you do decide to run those 6-minute miles, now you're starting from having burned more fat, and you don't have to use as much glycogen to get there. Interesting. Okay, cool. Structured intensity, what does this mean? Interesting. Okay, cool. Structured intensity, what does this mean? It means – partly means you've got to go into the gym and do some heavy lifting.

Yes. But not a lot. Okay. This is if you want to be an endurance athlete. Yeah. Even if you want to be an endurance athlete, one of the things that athletes used to avoid like the plague was the gym. Right. the gym. Or if they went, they would do 50 repetitions of a light weight because they're thinking, well, when I'm running a marathon, I'm running 3,000 repetitions of a leg turnover, so why don't I simulate that in the... But you're saying lifting some weights is going to be key to your endurance as well. So what happens in any long endurance contest, in addition to running out of fuel, your power decreases because you haven't trained the power. An example would be you've got three hills to climb in a bike race.

The first one, you go up with 100% of your power. The second one, even though you have energy, your muscle fibers, they've been exhausted, and they haven't trained to sustain your power. So now you go up the second hill at 82% of your max power, and you might go up the third hill at 65% of your max power. Well, if we could train those muscle fibers deeper and deeper to sustain power for those efforts that require actual power, we can maybe go up that first hill at 100 and go up that second hill at 100 and that third hill at 95. So we do this work in the gym where you load muscle fibers up with fairly heavy weights. It's typically 80% of your one rep max. And we do sequential repetitions with sequential rest in between. So it's not like you do three sets of five and you stop. It's like you do three repetitions, rest 10 seconds, three repetitions, rest 10 seconds, two repetitions, rest 10 seconds, rest 20 seconds until you can't finish one good rep.

And then the workout's over. So you just did one set, and, might have comprised 200 repetitions. Right, right. But that maximally loaded the fibers deeper and deeper and gave you this ability

to sustain power. Gotcha. And the next thing you talk about is lifestyle practices. What do you mean by that? Well, so now we talk about

everything else but the training. So if you're, you know, it's, it's spending time with your family, it's playing, playing games with your, you know, it's spending time with your family, it's playing

games with your, you know, playing Frisbee with your dog, playing Ultimate with your friends. It's, you know, it's all of the other things that make life enjoyable that as an endurance athlete, I know I used to go, well, I can't afford to do that. I might get injured or I might, you know, I can't, like, I can't go skiing because I might twist a knee. Well, if you do the training right and you spend that time in the gym, you're less likely to twist a knee skiing than if you were, you know, than if you were just going to the slopes without having done any training at all. Sure, sure. Right? So we want people to have a full life because training for endurance contests should be

preparation for an undertaking that you would not want to encounter on a daily basis. You know, you want to wake up in the morning and go, I got that 10K today. I got to go clean out my GI tract. I'm so nervous, you know. But you want to be that nervous because you want to put it all on the line that day. What we're saying is don't put it all on the line every day in your training. Have

fun. Do the right sort of training that builds this beast that when you get to the race, you're going to enjoy it. You're going to have fun. You're going to perform probably better than if you'd done the old paradigm of training, but you'll have lived a life in the interim. I mean, so many of my ex-triathlete marathon buddies couldn't have a relationship.

It was just, you know, imagine. They put all their energy in this one thing. Yeah. I mean, it's like the wife says, can't you stay home and cuddle on a Saturday morning? And the husband goes, no, I got a 100-mile ride I got to do. Yeah. And then I'm going to go run after that. And then I'm going to take a nap because I'm going to feel like crap because I did so much.

So we try to look at the life in general and say, well, an awesome life includes participating in these events. Participating in life. And doing well, but it also includes participating in life. Yeah. Yeah, so not to the exclusion of everything else. What feedback would you give an entrepreneur listening or someone with a busy schedule about how to live this lifestyle? They want to be a primal athlete in their daily life, but they also want to run a business, and they're spending a lot of time and energy into this one thing. Maybe their entrepreneurial life is like this marathon life that we're talking about where

they put all their energy into this one thing and they're not doing anything else. What would you suggest? You're doing it. You've got the healthy lifestyle and you're running a multimillion dollar business, multiple of them. What would you suggest to them? So there are ways to have it all, but you can't be like the best endurance athlete in the world and a really successful entrepreneur. So you've got to choose how like the best endurance athlete in the world and a really successful entrepreneur. So you've got to choose how much of the endurance athlete you want to be. I would suggest that for me, the best choice was I want to tow the starting line with the least amount of training possible to still kick 90% of the field's ass. So for me, the goal is almost how little can I get away with to get the maximum result

without having to go, okay, because if it's going to take 20% of the effort to get 80% of the result, I'm not willing to put in the other 80% to win the thing anymore. And maybe I won't even win the thing because maybe I'll have overtrained. So now you're back to the entrepreneur slash endurance athlete. Get a stand-up desk and a tread desk. So I have a treadmill. Every one of my employees has a treadmill at their work. I don't force them to use it.

They can if they want. But they can. They request it. I give it to them. So you can put in eight miles walking easily, and no one on the phone or even on the Skype will know that you're walking. Yes. You know, because you can make it uphill, whatever.

Take frequent breaks and drop and do some push-ups or some air squats. What I do is I like to go for a paddle, and I'll bring a recording device on a stand-up paddle board. And if I get my great ideas when I'm paddling, so I'll just record my ideas, right? Or I don't fall in. Well, it's a plastic bag. By the way, I almost never fall in. So I typically will paddle for an hour and a half.

I'll step on, get wet up to my calves, and step off wet up to my calves. But the other thing is hiking. So if you want to do some serious hiking, bring a headset and your phone. Make business calls while you're hiking. I got a friend who's basically a billionaire, and that's where he makes most of his business calls. Wow. He does two hours of hiking a day.

Nobody knows that he's hiking. Wow. Okay. Awesome. And then so the grunt work you do in the gym takes almost no time. It's not like you have to spend an hour in the gym doing any of this stuff. Like I said, that maximum sustained power workout I just described, it's basically a short warm-up, maybe 10 minutes of doing it, and then you're done. And if you could do it two days later or three days later, you didn't do it hard enough that day,

right? So we want you to take a week to recover from that. From that specific work, it doesn't mean you can't go walk the next day or do anything else the next day, but you just wouldn't want to repeat a heavy leg day the next day. Right, right, right. Exactly. So it's how you – this is the sort of orchestrated structural components to this thing where when you put it all together, you can have it all. You can be an effective, efficient entrepreneur and you can compete against all of those other guys who are claiming they're going to kick your ass in the 10K or the Spartan race or whatever it is. Right, right.

I love that. And we talked about the diet already, but the last thing is proper recovery. So how much – when do you know you're overtraining? Well, so there are all sorts of metrics. I mean, you just wake up in the morning, and if you haven't slept well and you're sore, then you're probably overtraining. Should we not feel that soreness at all? Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's appropriate to feel... You can feel it on a day-to-day basis, but not on a week-to-week basis. So you can feel sore after a workout yesterday or two days ago. But I think if you're still feeling sore for days on end, then you're probably linking together too many hard workouts or you might have overreached on one of your workouts.

So that's one indicator. We have a metric that we use called heart rate variability, HRV, and you can buy these apps that measure the time between heartbeats. that measure the time between heartbeats. And you'd think that you'd want to see a metronomic beat, like an exact amount of time spaced between each heartbeat. But it turns out that that's an indication of overtraining, that in fact we want the heart to be beating almost in demand to whatever is being called upon in real time. So there might be a 0.8 second skip

and then a 1.1 second skip and then a 1.2 and then a 0.8 and then a 0.9. And that's heart rate variability. And if you've got a good heart rate variability score, it's probably a good indicator that you're rested and well-trained and ready to go again. Okay, cool.

A couple of questions left for you. This has been great information. I want people to go check out primalblueprint.com so you can see all the books, especially Primal Endurance, the new one, but all the books, the products, everything else. If you want to own a restaurant, you can learn about that too. A few questions left for you. What's a question that you've done tons of interviews over the last decade alone from everything you've been doing? What's a question that no one's ever asked you you've always wanted to answer? Oh, wow. You should give me time to think about that one. Is there anything that comes to mind? No. Because I've done a lot of

interviews and I've been asked a lot of questions. Yeah, I'd have to give that some thought. Okay. What's something small you've done that you're really proud of that not a lot of people know about you? It's not that small, but not a lot of people know that I helped get triathlon in the Olympic Games by drastically changing one of the rules of the sport. Really? Yeah. You got it in the Olympic Games? No, I didn't personally get it in, but I was on a board of the International Triathlon Union, which was the International Federation for the Sport of Triathlon. Wow.

And for the first 15 years of triathlon, there was no drafting allowed on the bike. And I convinced the board to change that rule to allow drafting on the bike, which pissed off every top triathlete in the world at the time. But it was the only way we could get in the Olympic Games. Really? Yeah. So that move allowed us to have races where 50 people could be close to each other, and you didn't have to disqualify them for being too close for drafting. And it made for much more telegenic events and things like that.

It was just following one person at a time. Exactly. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Wow. And then you qualified for the Olympic trials, right? In the marathon, exactly. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Wow. And then you qualified for the Olympic trials, right? In the marathon, yeah.

In the marathon, not in the trial. Right, yeah. Okay, cool. What was your fastest marathon? I ran 218. That's good. That's really fast.

Yeah. Well, it wasn't fast enough, but it was in those days. That's fast. It was in the 70s and 80s or whatever it was. It was really fast. Okay, it's one of your final days many, many years from now.

Yep. And all your books have been erased. Everything you've created is gone. Yep. And you have a piece of paper by your bed and all your friends and family are there. Yep. And they ask you to write down three things that you know to be true about your experience in life. The three simple truths that you would pass on to them to essentially

all your lessons down to three things, what would they be? The first one is if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Does that resonate with you? Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. The second one is absolutely find as much joy in every moment as you possibly can. In other words, live in every moment as you possibly can.

In other words, live in the now. And the third is, I'm going to say, always be in a relationship. Always be in a relationship. Yeah. What type of relationship? Either with someone else or yourself. Okay. Why that? Well, because I think, first of all, I think we're sort of groomed to be

in a relationship of some kind. And that's, I think, not just groomed. We're hardwired to be in a relationship, I believe. And it doesn't have to be the same person forever, but we have relationships come and go. And I just find that most of the time when you're in a relationship, you're experiencing the better parts of life. And if you're not in a relationship, then if you're in a good relationship with yourself and you have that self-love, you're still able to experience that stuff. That's cool. But as opposed to saying, I'm a loner, I'm'm fine alone and I can cruise through life and do whatever it is. Right. Okay.

That's cool. That just came to me, by the way. So I haven't been working on that for a long time. No, that's great. That's great. Yeah, yeah. What are you grateful for in your life right now? Oh, my God.

I am – I could not – the list is so long. I'm grateful for my path and how it got me to where I am. So I'm grateful for every bad thing that happened to me, and there were a lot of them. I'm grateful for my wife and for my kids. I have an awesome wife, two awesome kids. I'm grateful for the time that we live in that would allow me to be able to talk to millions of people because 20 years ago, that wouldn't have been able – would not have been able to do this. Right. The internet and this ability to reach out to millions of people, tens of millions of people.

Right, right. Wouldn't have existed. So I'm grateful for that. I'm certainly grateful for my health. I'm grateful that – grateful for good food. I mean, just – and by the way, I think that's important is to spend a little bit of time each day. I mean, I remember I'm grateful for this awesome pen that just writes perfectly when I'm trying to take notes. Where does pen come from?

Right, right, right. Okay. There you go. I love it. Final two questions. If you had all the money in the world to spend on one thing and you had to spend it on something, what would you spend it on? Wow. To solve a problem in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What would you spend it on? That would automatically change it forever, that problem, and be solved. I mean, I'd

spend it on a food project that had that not only fed people, but fed them without

causing further downstream problems. I'll give an example of what I them without causing further downstream problems. I'll give an example of what I mean by causing further downstream problems. We can provide grain to most of the world, but all that does is just keep them alive long enough to get type 2 diabetes or scurvy or berry-berry disease or whatever. It costs more money. Right. And I don't mean to sound harsh about that, but there's a lot more to it than providing grain. So I would like to fix the world's food problem.

I'd probably do something like a massive grazing program that would reclaim desertified lands using Alan Savory's methods of growing grass and grazing beasts and creating more topsoil. That would be the single project that I'd probably – yeah. That's cool. Final question before I ask, where should we go for you personally? PrimalBlueprint.com, but where are you personally online that we should connect with? Yeah, Mark's Daily Apple is my blog. That's the best place to find out about what I do, and we blog there every day. Every day you've got an article, right? Yeah.

Every day for 10 years. And you do most of the writing, don't you? I do a lot of the writing. Now I have, you know, Mondays is a Q&A. That's easy. But Fridays we do a success story. So that's always somebody writing in their story. It's been that way for eight years. It's phenomenal.

We have a recipe on Saturday, Link Love on Sunday. So yeah. That's cool. Very cool. Well, I want to acknowledge you, Mark, for teaching the young generation how to live young at an older age.

It's incredible. You're 62, right? Yeah. 62, I'm 33. I feel like you're way better shaped than I am. I don't know about that. You've got a ton of energy. We'll find out when you come play Frisbee.

You'll be in better shape for sure the first time, maybe a few more times. But your consistency in educating the world and educating yourself and constantly learning and evolving is so inspiring. So I want to acknowledge you for your incredible commitment and consistency to teaching and educating. And your reach to 10 million people and beyond is happening in a powerful way. So I appreciate and acknowledge you for that. Thank you so much. The final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

Definition of greatness is living a life of grace and ease and success by your definition. Mark Sisson, thanks so much, man. Appreciate it. You bet. And there you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please share this with your friends, lewishouse.com slash 314. All the show notes and the full video interview is back at that link on my site slash 314.

Go ahead and tweet me, at lewishouse, or tag me on Instagram or on Facebook and let me know what you thought of this interview. And also tag Mark as well over there. All of his information is back on the show notes as well, so you can follow him on social media. Check out his books and all of his incredible products. Thanks again for all you do to support the podcast and the movement of greatness. You guys are incredible. I love you very much. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Thank you. Outro Music