Robb Wolf joins Joe Rogan to debate cordyceps mushrooms—used in Olympic training and traditional Chinese medicine—while Rogan highlights his kettlebell-based workout routine, contrasting it with Wolf’s paleo diet, which cured his ulcerative colitis by eliminating grains, legumes, and dairy. They critique NSAIDs’ deadly risks (thousands annually) and processed foods’ hyperpalatability, linking obesity to systemic health crises like diabetes and heart disease. Wolf’s hormesis theory on alcohol and Rogan’s sponsor plugs (Onnit’s supplements, Audible’s audiobooks) segue into hunting ethics vs. industrial farming, with Wolf’s atlodle spear hunt losing 18 pounds in eight days. The episode ends with Rogan and Wolf mocking Twitter’s absurdity while advocating libertarian market solutions to societal decay, questioning government incentives that stifle personal responsibility. [Automatically generated summary]
Any way, Audible.com is a great resource for any audiobooks, and there's some that you can get from our friends that have been on the podcast for, like Bobcat Goldwaite.
He's got a great audiobook called, I Don't Mean to Insult You, But You Look Like Bobcat Goldwaite.
And it's narrated by him, so it's got to be awesome.
And they just notice that when they eat this certain caterpillar that has this funky smell to it, maybe, that's the cordyceps mushrooms on the caterpillar?
And between that, kettlebells, chin-ups, and bodyweight squats, that's pretty much all I do.
Everything I do is with kettlebells.
It's either kettlebells or battle ropes.
And battle ropes is a new thing.
It's like, I don't want to do anything else.
I have no time for...
There's not enough time in the world.
I want to be able to get strength and conditioning done quickly.
So for me, doing the whole body like as one big motion like that, you know, like kettlebell type stuff or cleaning jerks, you know, that to me is like, feels like the stuff that translates the most to real world strength.
All this stuff, when it comes to supplements, nootropics are a very controversial subject.
And because of that, we want to make sure that nobody ever feels ripped off.
You buy Alpha Brain, the first 30 pills uses a 100% money back guarantee.
If you don't like it, you don't even have to send the pills back to say this shit doesn't work.
It does.
That's why we're willing to do that.
And that's why I use it.
I wouldn't use it.
I wouldn't tell you to use it if I didn't believe in it.
I think there's a lot of essential nutrients that can benefit people.
And most people aren't taking them.
Fish oils and eating a healthy diet.
But there are certain nutrients that have been proven and shown in tests to have a positive effect on your mental clarity, your ability to solve problems, your ability to See things, like a recent ingredient in AlphaBrain, I don't even remember the name of this shit.
I should look it up.
Especially with you here, because you're super smart.
What's in this?
It's all like, it's nootropics.
It's all vitamins for mental function.
If you can read all the ingredients in this dark room, you're like an eagle-eyed motherfucker.
Well, you know, I've got to give a bunch of credit to my professor, Loren Cordain, because he's the guy that did a ton of the research really early on.
So almost 15 years ago, further back than that, I was a California State powerlifting champion.
I was into kickboxing.
I was totally into athletics and all that.
And always trying to figure out what's the best way to fuel my body, like looking for better performance.
And I tried a high-carb, low-fat, vegan diet.
And I went from 185 pounds, able to back squat almost 600 pounds, down to 135 pounds, and like sick.
I had all kinds of gut problems, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel, like all kinds of poop-related stuff.
And this idea of the paleo diet just...
It was kind of weird how it got onto my radar, but I was kind of thinking, okay, these Neolithic foods, grains, legumes, and dairy, seem to have some problems for us with regards to health.
And so I started eating that way, and then I was a research biochemist at the time doing lipid metabolism research related to cancer and autoimmune disease.
So I was able to experiment on myself and then also do some research And that's how I, you know, this whole kind of evolutionary biology thing got on my radar and opened a gym, started, you know, using this with our clients.
Our gym made Men's Health Top 30 Gyms in America within a couple of years.
And then the book has been on the bestseller list for like two years.
And like there's been no marketing budget, nothing other than just like word of mouth.
People buy the book, they get benefit, and then they, you know, they just go from there.
I think it's good for everybody, but within that, some guys are going to do pretty well on low carb, other people are going to bonk, and they're going to do terribly.
Yeah, and this is a period of time when we really changed from the previous ancestors when you look in the anthropological record.
And when you look at our genetics, it's pretty darn similar to what the people were living during the Paleolithic time.
And we can kind of verify that with different, like there's this place, the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Genetics in Leipzig, Germany, you know, and they do all the kind of scientific validation of this stuff.
But, you know, at Brasstacks, really, it's talking about eating lots of fruits and vegetables, roots and tubers, lean meats, and kind of steering away from grains, legumes, and dairy.
These newer foods that, for a lot of people, cause a lot of problems.
That's a fascinating thing when you think about it, how our technology and our ability to process food and grow food and store food has evolved much faster than the body is capable of doing on its own.
Right.
It's kind of a fascinating thing with human beings, is that we essentially have the same bodies that cavemen did, but we have all this new stuff that we've sort of added to the mix, and we haven't really figured out what the long-term effects of this are.
Yeah, and you know, everything from sleep, like if you start doing some Googling around on like sleep and health, sleep and diabetes, you know, we don't sleep the way that we used to.
We used to, the sun went down and we went down.
You know, the sun comes up, we get up.
Now we have this extended photo period.
We have light on us all the time and it messes with our circadian rhythm, the way that we release melatonin, the way that we heal.
So, you know, the whole lifestyle package, exercise, nutrition, The lifestyle, the way that we don't really interact with a social group the way that, you know, it's kind of wired in.
I think that that's why things like CrossFit, different gyms, different social networks are really valuable for people.
Because we live in a, you know, we're tribal in our DNA. Like, we see that out.
It is fascinating how our needs are essentially the same, but wow, have we done a crazy job of changing our environment in such a short period of time.
It's almost like we just really can't keep up with that.
What we've been able to do, our body just can't keep up with it.
And if you look at some native populations, they are crushed by type 2 diabetes and autoimmune diseases.
And they were eating basically a paleo-type diet maybe only a couple hundred years ago.
So depending on...
Your genetic ancestry, you might be able to deal with, you know, high fructose corn syrup or something a little bit better than somebody else that's maybe like Native American or African American because their ancestry is just young enough with regards to being exposed to this modern environment that they don't cope with it.
You know, you just look around and you look at like the diabetes epidemic and, you know, autism spectrum accelerating.
It's just everything from cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's.
All of this is related to this process called inflammation.
And inflammation is kind of an overactivity of the immune response.
And interesting with the Cordyceps product, it actually modulates the immune response.
It makes the immune system do what it's supposed to do.
Whether you're under stress or exercising or whatever, and that's kind of the benefit of that stuff.
And the negative part of the way that we're living, we don't get enough sleep, we eat the wrong types of foods, we don't really exercise enough, and all of that kind of sends a weird signal to our immune system, and it tends to make you diabetic, or it can make you autoimmune, or it can accelerate things like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
So, you know, we're facing, there's some projections, and this is from like, you know, governmental agencies or as orthodox as it gets.
We're looking at by like 2030 that, you know, we're going to have a 300% of GDP being allocated to our debt, and then most of that being allocated to healthcare.
And it's nuts.
We know more about disease and cancer and everything than we've ever known, but yet people are getting sicker faster than they ever have.
There's a bunch of food chemists that put all their kids through school by figuring out there's this thing called palatability.
And if you can make something hyperpalatable, like it tastes so good...
Then you actually override the mechanisms in the brain that normally tell you I'm full.
Like if you sit down and eat some chicken and some fruit and like some yams, you'll eat until you're full and you're done and you're not gonna get up and you know dust another plate of that.
But when you tinker with these foods and you make them really crunchy, you add some salt, you add some high fructose corn syrup, these things become hyper palatable and it turns off the part of the brain that tells you I'm full and it would be like You know, you're filling up your gas at the gas station, and if you turn off the mechanism to know when the gas tank is full, it's kind of the same analogy, like you just keep pumping stuff in there and you have a disaster brewing.
And you know it's that thing again where like you just you get full from real food so it's really hard to overeat it but if you have something that turns off literally the mechanism in your brain that says I'm full like if that never kicks in then you can just keep going and going.
No, he said that if he's going to waste any of it, he'll shit the bed.
And then earlier he said that he needs a lot of sleep, which I agree.
I spend a lot of money on mattresses because I need a deep sleep.
And so I spend as much money as I can on just the bed.
I think that's...
So many people spend like $30,000 on a car and they're in it for like 10 minutes to go to work back and forth But you're in your bed half of your life, and people buy an $800 mattress with springs going up your ass and stuff like that.
People will say, I only need like five or six hours of sleep.
And then inevitably, if they put up some blackout curtains, if they turn off all the lights and they actually get in an environment that's good for sleeping, then they're like, you know, ninja blow dart.
They're out for like 14 hours the first time you do it.
And then they start getting caught up on their sleep.
And these people that usually think they can get by on like 5 or 6, they discover they're like, okay, yeah, I feel way better on 8 to 10. I mean, it's a lot of time.
There's a lot of other shit you could be doing, but you just don't do it as well when you don't sleep.
It's like you're fighting then when you would normally be asleep.
And it takes weeks for all that to kind of get shifted around.
And once you, you know, you do that travel, say you go from Japan to here, you go from here to Europe, your testosterone levels drop, your inflammation goes up, your immune system goes down.
And it's going to stay that way for a while because it's a stress.
It's like the same way that working out or working too much is a stress on your system.
It's going to drop all of your recovery capacity.
Yeah, it's that internal clock that kind of gets tied into the sunlight and all that stuff.
Yeah, but it just drives everything.
All your hormones, neurotransmitters, the way your gut functions, everything is tied into these internal clocks.
So if a fighter wanted to acclimate when he came to somewhere he was going to fight, should he go there at the beginning of his training camp and never leave?
I wouldn't travel more than three hours if you had control.
Like, if you have a well-established fighter, if they need to travel more than three hours and, you know, three time zone changes, then I would really recommend, you know, the camp at least a couple of weeks beforehand gets moved, but possibly from the beginning so that you've got the continuity.
But when someone, that one one-hundredth of a second is someone connecting or, you know, spotting your punch, getting out of the way just in time and countering you, and you get knocked out.
Then it becomes even more crazy and even more obsessive.
And then just more kind of internet coaching, you know, trying to Folks have come to me when people weren't recovering, they were starting to get a ton of soft tissue injuries, bad sleep started popping up, you know, like they started getting some depression during training camp and everything and so looking at the diet, looking at lifestyle factors and I mean It all boils down to the same thing, though.
A clean diet, obviously I'm going to gear more towards a paleo gig.
Protecting the sleep area at gunpoint.
People sleep eight to ten hours if you have to kill somebody.
And then just kind of a mellow lifestyle outside the rest of that to the best of your ability to construct that.
I mean, it's 50% of your recovery probably is having that sleep.
So you can go in and train really hard and then go home and not sleep and you don't get really any of the benefit from the training session, even if you're working skills.
Say you're working a bunch of head movement and stuff like that.
That is all a skill that needs to go from one part of your brain to another.
It goes from short-term memory to long-term memory and starts getting You know, woven into like your brainstem.
It's a learned pattern.
If you don't sleep, you don't access that transition.
So it's like that training session then is just gone.
So it's like if you're going to spend the time to do it, there's a great book, another good dude you should have on that wrote The Talent Code.
And talking about like needing really good repetitions and like 10,000 repetitions in something like playing violin or learning, you know, quick draw shooting and stuff like that.
You want to do it perfect and then you need a good environment for that stuff to kind of cook in the brain and actually become a part of your person, part of the motor memory.
So it's a huge part of the game that people are just kind of, again, shitting the bed on.
You see so many people work so hard, but they almost work too hard, and then they don't give enough credence to the rest because it's like, oh, that's being lazy.
I mean, just the weight cutting alone, the fact that they have to be miserable and malnourished and dehydrated in training.
It's really hard, but that's not the way to do it, right?
If you want optimum performance, it's great that it makes them so tough, but if you really want to take care of the body, that is so not the way to do it.
Yeah, I mean, staying in close to contest shape year-round, kicking your heels up a little bit, but the thing is that when people go so extreme, then when they're off-season, they gain 30 pounds of weight, and it's all hookers and cocaine.
And for a lot of people, it's like when you attain a certain level, then you drop off drastically.
And then it's all about getting your body back in shape.
Like guys who get really big in between fights, like you know that those guys, like that's not the same level of commitment as say an Anderson Silva or George St. Pierre.
And so even though they're still obviously moving a lot of scale weight to make weigh-ins, it's not as dramatic a shift.
And just like when we travel, whenever you change these internal kind of signaling, the biological signaling, when you fly You know, from six time zones or eight time zones, that messes with your sleep.
If you are taking your body and forcing it to shed a bunch of weight very, very rapidly because you got out of shape, then it's more of a stress and it drops testosterone.
It impacts your immune system.
So staying as close as you can, you know, obviously like you want to be as big and strong and muscular as you can at any given body weight.
But within striking distance, being able to go down and make weight when you need to make it.
Yeah, you know, I think it'd be cool to just see it almost like Jits, where you show up and you step on the scale and you weigh what you weigh and then it just goes.
Well, it replenishes everything, but I mean, the body's in a pretty rough state by that point, so I mean, it's 24 hours you can bounce back pretty good, and particularly, you know, like you said, with wrestlers, they've been used to pulling their body up and down like that, so they're a little bit more acclimatized to it, but it's rough.
How much of a percentage do you think it takes away from them?
It's got to be a damage.
I mean, if you're not supposed to get drunk while you're in training camp and you eat clean and everything like that, and then you do something way worse than getting drunk, you get crazy dehydrated.
I've seen guys shuffling to the scale because they can't pick their feet up.
I've seen that.
And they were going to fight in a world championship the next day.
I mean, there's got to be a way to find people that are really the same size and just make some sort of an honorable agreement to never get over a certain weight.
You know, in some ways I think it would be more exciting fighting because a lot of the fatigue that I see set in in folks, it's probably the weight cut.
Well, Damian Maia really just couldn't do anything with Weidman, and Weidman was way too tired from the weight cut because he took the fight on really short notice.
So the guy had to cut some insane amount of weight the day before.
And that's what they kept saying to him.
I saw what you did yesterday when you made weight.
You know, you can do anything.
You can do anything.
So the guy in the weight cup must have been death-like.
It does, but I mean, 24 hours is a pretty good period.
And I'm not super up on this, but you could take somebody who's extremely dehydrated 24 hours later.
They're pretty good, but they're still after effects.
You know, I think you could probably find things in blood work that a week later, you know, like if you just shrink wrap a guy down, like you do the usual, you know, like 20-pound weight cut that you see in a lot of these fighters for like a 200-pound guy or something, 10% or more of body weight, I bet we could see things in their blood work a week later.
Like they don't fight, they just weight cut, and then we see what changes in their blood work.
I bet we could see bad stuff in their blood work a week later.
And I think you get as big as you can, as lean as you can, and then kind of see where that...
But then, you know, doing some field testing where you practice it.
Say like you've got some sort of a...
A metabolic workout, you know, like whether it's pads and bags or whether it's a CrossFit looking thing or something, but you've got a standard and so you weight cut at a certain starting weight, go down, rehydrate, do your whole, you know, your whole rehydration process, see how you do on this kind of standardized workout, and then maybe you gain a little bit more weight, a little bit more muscle.
Is it that much more difficult to go down and does it actually then tank your performance?
So I think you've got to get in and do some field testing, but it's hard to do that.
You know, you're already trying to get ready for fight camps and do everything else.
And just a little bit of strength or power training, a little bit of mobility work.
But let's say you want to do some cardio.
As a fighter, are you better off getting out and running?
Are you better off having somebody hold pads for you?
and you go at like 50% and you just, you get your heart rate up a little bit, you know, it's like, you know, 70, 75% of your VO2 max or whatever, but you do a little bit of that.
You do a little bit of positional sparring on the ground.
You do a little bit of clench work, but it's all at a very controlled pace.
Like are you going to get more out of that or out of putting on your sneakers and going for a run?
But very few people will actually go over a whole routine in their head.
Like, say if you were a wrestler and you had a series of takedowns and you put yourself into a state of concentration where you're only thinking about your wrestling and then All you do is concentrate on this power double over and over again.
See yourself penetrating, see yourself sliding off that knee, getting your hands clasped together.
If you really spent the time, like a whole full hour and a half of nothing but that, just like you would do if you were training nothing but that, I think that is a fascinating exercise to see how much it would improve a guy maybe who's not doing that, who's already very good. I think that is a fascinating exercise to see how Right.
Someone who has a hard time seeing a next plateau.
You know, there's something you can get out of just a straight cardio exercise, I think mentally and physically.
Yeah, yeah.
I love doing, at hotel rooms, I don't like doing this at home because it's kind of boring compared to other shit I can do, but I do this crazy elliptical workout where I'll sprint for 30 seconds, and then I'll relax for 30 seconds, and then I'll sprint for 30 seconds, and I just do as many rounds of that as I can.
And it's fucking horrendous.
Like, I don't like doing it.
Like, it's so hard to do that when I see one of these things at a hotel gym, I'm like, alright, you motherfucker.
I was hoping I would walk in and it would just be like a universal machine.
But if there's an elliptical machine, we've got to go to war.
I've got to do my thing.
That's what I do at every hotel that has this elliptical machine.
So it's become like this battle of man versus machine.
But it's a brutal workout of just a silly little elliptical machine.
You've got to crank the power up, the resistance up, super high, and you go to war for 30 seconds.
You've just got to go crazy for 30 seconds, and then crank that bitch back down to 8 or 9 or 7 or something, relax, and you do that for the next 30 seconds, and then right back up again.
Like, if it's totally just nothing going on, then I'll just do some sprints, like in the stairwell and stuff like that.
And then I do some handstand push-ups, maybe some L-sit press-to-handstand and chairs doing some gymnastic stuff.
But it really depends.
I've been hitting, like, double trees now because they usually have a half-decent gym.
And then, like, you can swing some dumbbells like you do with kettlebells and just get some basic strength training in and then do some intervals on, like, a StairMaster or an elliptical.
There's definitely something that goes on when your body goes to a new place where if you do get a good workout in, it sort of makes everything feel okay.
Now, if you go to a place and you settle in and you do exercise and you do take melatonin to sleep, what is the best case scenario for you settling into a new time zone?
Like if someone goes from California to New York...
If you haven't seen the show, folks, it's about three different dudes who live.
One's North Carolina, one's Montana, one's Alaska.
Yeah.
The Alaska dude flies everywhere in a plane, goes for hours to be away from his family, or, excuse me, months, rather, to be away from his family, and just traps animals.
What's the fuck Juan Manuel Marquez is famous for drinking his own piss, the boxer?
Yeah, there's this idea of urine therapy.
There's vitamins and nutrients that go through your body that don't get used by your body, but they're in your piss, but they will get used if you drink your piss.
I think just like stacking psilocybin plus mescaline plus LSD is probably a more direct route to that instead of light drinking your own urine doing the whole thing.
That is something that cultures that didn't have psychedelics, they had rituals and rites of passages through different substances that would be poison.
And so instead of having that come through the amazing and enlightening experience of the psilocybin experience or the mushroom trip, instead of that, you just almost die.
I would not think that anybody working at a fucking cricket protein bar in Thailand would be clean and tidy and shit into the batch every now and again.
What do you think about an actual vegan diet like the China study and things along those lines where people have been advocating a completely vegetable-based diet?
You just get such a concentrated source of proteins from meat.
On a hormonal level, you're releasing insulin and glucagon when you eat protein, and that is really beneficial for energy levels, for muscle mass.
I mean, when you look at most of the vegan athletes, particularly in the kind of bodybuilding and strength scene, they're always using some sort of protein concentrate, like a rice protein concentrate or something.
They're not just eating beans, rice, quinoa.
They're not really eating whole foods.
They're still eating a concentrated protein source.
But when you say, I'm sorry to ask because my vegan friends would go crazy if I didn't.
When you say it works better, have there been studies where they have shown a decrease in physical performance because of following a vegan diet as opposed to an increase in a meat-eating diet?
And so that's where, like, you take somebody eating a standard American diet that's super pro-inflammatory, it's tons of, you know, refined foods and everything, you put them on a vegan diet, I think they're probably gonna look, feel, and perform better.
Like, there's no doubt about that.
Down the road, I just don't see people doing as well.
And, you know, it's not like you need to eat boatloads of meat To round out, you know, like say you take this vegan diet that I would still put like paleo carbs in.
Instead of beans, rice, quinoa and stuff, I would have yams, sweet potatoes, fruits, veggies, which still have more vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants per calorie.
So you're still good there.
And then if you throw in...
A little bit of eggs, a little bit of fish, a little bit of meat.
You're getting a ton of nutrition from that.
You're going to build muscle.
You're going to recover well.
And it doesn't need to be the whole part of the diet.
That's where the individual specifics, dialing this stuff in, could really work.
And just the fact that the way that we do mega farming, you destroy whole ecosystems to do that.
Whereas there's this guy, Joel Salatin, who has the polyface farms, and they do biodynamic farming where you've got pigs and chickens and it's outside and they use solar power.
That farm produces more food, more nutrition per acre than any other farm on the planet.
Early 1970s, there were some fluctuations in food prices, and there was a desire on the part of the U.S. government.
I think it was right at the end of Nixon's scene.
They started dumping a bunch of subsidy money into intensifying farm production of basically like corn and soybeans, stuff like that.
And they wanted to create an export commodity out of that.
And when we started producing all of this grain, like high carbohydrate stuff, we needed to do something with it, which is where we then started recommending it via things like the food pyramid, that you need to eat 12 servings of whole grains a day and stuff like that.
A government sponsored move, which I'm just totally a nutcase libertarian, like I just can't fucking stand the government coming in and subsidizing any industry because you end up destroying the market forces that would normally control it.
So now we have a Twinkie that costs less than an apple, but it really doesn't cost less because we're paying for the subsidized production of that food via taxes and via going and acquiring oil and all these other indirect methods.
So if you had kind of decentralized farming and you have something that looks like the polyface farms where they grow cattle and horses and pigs and it's all kind of a self-contained nutrient cycle.
So the cattle go through and then the chickens go through and move the cow poop around.
I've always thought that would be such a cool fucking thing to be able to buy a farm somewhere and actually have it set up like that where you get all your food from the ground that you actually live on.
And if you have somebody who's type 2 diabetic, they would benefit a lot from something that looks like an Atkins diet.
Type 2 diabetes is 100%.
It's reversible in that you can take somebody who's not managing their blood glucose and they're on a host of drugs and they're very likely to die from heart attack, stroke, cancer, and if you feed them a ketogenic, like a moderate protein, high fat diet, you can shift their body's metabolism to run on ketones and they're going to live amazingly well and they're not going to bankrupt society because we're spending a bunch of money trying to manage this stuff.
But for an athlete, for somebody who's not metabolically broken, I just like to steer people more towards like the, you know, fruits, veggies, yams, sweet potatoes, stuff like that for the carbs.
But meanwhile, if I were to go for a yam or a plate of spaghetti, I'm going to take that spaghetti because it's yummier and I feel like I'm getting away with something when I eat it.
Have you ever thought about working with big name MMA guys and getting together with some high level fighters and organizing their Food in their camps.
And so I think if you have somebody eating vegan and they're doing more like yams, sweet potatoes, fruits for their carbs, then they're probably going to do better.
Morgan Spurlock hosted the one that we were on, then Robin Williams did a show on drug use, and so they would get people whacked on just a variety of drugs and do pet scans on their brain to see what was firing and everything.
Wow.
Funny enough, the dude, Robert, who was on the show with me for iCaveman, he ended up getting picked for the drug show.
They gave us clothes, but we had to learn how to make our own fire, make our own tools, and there was this guy, Billy, who was a primitive skills expert, and he could take a big rock, start whacking it, and then have a stone knife in five minutes.
I've had this idea of the weight loss show, but it...
So you've got people that are living this kind of caveman-esque lifestyle.
They work out and they eat paleo and, you know, they get put through challenges and stuff.
But instead of, like, the punishment would actually be giving them westernized refined food, not letting them sleep, making them stay up late and play video games.
So basically the punishment would be living the westernized lifestyle.
Because it ultimately say like you have like a million dollar prize or something and it's all based on like body composition change or weight loss or something but if you give them the only food to eat is shitty food and you keep them awake and you don't let them exercise and they're not going to lose body weight.
So the punishment is actually living modern life and the only way that you could win like the people who do it best the way that they win is by actually avoiding the modern I think the idea of people who work out hard and then they get to a certain...
But they checked out an atloddle on that show, and it has as much power as a 273 round because of the weight and the velocity you're able to get on it.
And there's this photo on the town's website where it's like...
I don't know, a hundred elk walking right down the middle of their mainstream, completely blocking traffic.
It's like, holy shit!
What a cool little piece of nature that these delicious animals wander through your whole town by the hundreds and then make their way through the forest.
There's something fucking magical about that, man.
I mean, it sucks a big fat dick when it snows up there.
I have the, yeah, of course, my crazy friend Duncan turned me on to this.
He claims that I turned him on to it, but I think he's crazy.
But the idea is that they would take these birds, and it was some weird, ridiculous delicacy, where they would eat it.
Yeah, Ortolan, this is what it is.
A rite of passage for French gourmets has been eating of the ordelan.
These tiny birds captured alive, force-fed, and then drowned in Armagnac.
I guess it's a type of cognac or something like that.
Were roasted whole and eaten that way, bones and all, while the diner draped his head with a linen napkin to preserve the precious aromas and, some believe, to hide from God.
If you actually eat meat, would you prefer your pig to be stuffed into some fucking crazy container and live its life in its own shit until it finally gets slaughtered?
You know, is that somehow or another better if you're not involved?
Do we have to be concerned with a lack of minerals in the topsoil?
I've read people have discussed whether or not it's healthy to be trying to replenish them with chemicals and whether or not there's supposed to be a natural cycle of leaving certain areas alone for a while and then planting them in the future.
But when you look at the economy and everything, I mean, instead of driving towards the top end, then you make some cheap, you know, box wine style stuff within a different delivery deal.
I mean, the poison's all in the dose, so, I mean, I have a couple drinks a day, and, you know, not too bad, and I stick more with, like, NorCal margaritas, just, like, tequila, lime juice.
It's interesting, like, just being exposed to a stress, there's this process called hormesis, where, like, when you exercise, you get some damage to the muscles or to the cardiovascular system, and your body needs to adapt to that, and it's actually the process of adapting that's good for you.
And alcohol causes some damage to the body that then it needs to respond to, and there's some kind of beneficial, you know, elements to that.
It's a stupid idea, but it was like, if you smoke cigarettes, maybe it would make your lungs stronger, because they'd have to fight off the cigarette smoke.
I really did think that.
You just got to quit when you were about 40. When I was in wrestling, one of the best kids on our wrestling team was a smoker, and I was worried about that.
Let's say you're a police or firefighter and you're working night shift and you're working out like crazy and you're using caffeine to drive a lifestyle that is totally over the top.
Then it's not necessarily good.
It's going to get into some adrenal fatigue.
Your adrenals are the...
You know, the hormones release cortisol and it deals with stress and you can completely bomb that whole system out.
And then you can drop testosterone levels and drop your immune function.
Well, the real madness is how many people fucking die from it, and yet it's still so prevalent.
And even amongst young people, in 2012, the internet out there, for whatever reason, there's this weird romantic pull towards self-destruction through use of tobacco.
I think it was the tipping point, but he talked about the fact that if you try to demonize something and make it not cool, that kids are going to gravitate towards it even more.
It's interesting when it's contrasted with, say, tobacco.
You don't see the same type of emphysema.
You don't see the same type of carcinogenic effects, even though you've got all...
I mean, you're creating a ton of different chemicals.
When you burn something, you make these things, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, these soot particles that get in between DNA and can cause problems.
When you look at the research on marijuana use, you just don't see the same types of things popping up.
Now, for a hard-charging athlete, I think that you would probably be better off if you want to have a relaxing evening, like making some brownies or something like that.
The delivery system is going to change the effects a lot, for sure.
Well, the delivery system changes the effects, but it's also vaporizing, which is the same sort of delivery system, a very similar delivery system, but you're just getting the THC vapor and you're not getting all the carbon.
Each year, thousands of people, I don't know, like, it'd be easy to do a doctor Google on that, but see, you know, how many deaths there are each year due to NSAIDs, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory overdoses.
Wow.
Fucked up stuff.
With Vicodin, they pair Vicodin with acetaminophen, Tylenol, with the express purpose so that people don't take more of it to get a narcotic effect because it will cause liver damage.
And there are thousands of people that end up dying But, you know, inadvertently because they may have a drink and then they take some Vicodin, which you're not really supposed to do.
But the acetaminophen makes the whole thing so much more toxic.
Like, they're literally killing people into no better effect versus taking, you know, if somebody has some legitimate pain, just taking some opiates is going to be really powerful on that.
You may not want to stay on that forever because the stuff's super addictive and has all kinds of other side effects.
But a lot of our kind of drugs policy, even on the orthodox side, Over-the-counter side is really goofy.
And the stuff is dangerous.
There are a lot of people who will work out, get sore, take NSAIDs to go work out again.
There's problems with increased tendon ruptures because the tendons don't heal.
It decreases cardiac output.
So there's a lot of reasons for not using it.
And for just taking some fish oil, getting your vitamin D levels up by either being out in the sun or supplementing with vitamin D. Smart training, periodizing your training a little bit, stuff like that.
Is there any sort of dietary remedy or is there anything that you could replace ibuprofen with that's a good anti-inflammatory that's actually beneficial or healthy?
So the fact that you put coconut oil in there is good because a lot of people make all that stuff low fat and a lot of the phytochemicals, a lot of the antioxidants only dissolve in fat.
So when you put that, it's kind of like doing an extract.
Bacon and eggs for breakfast, because people usually whine about, I don't have time, I need to get stuff done quickly.
I call it the meat and nuts breakfast, where it's basically some eggs, some bacon, some turkey with some almonds or something like that.
It's quick.
It's easy.
You get a dose of dopamine.
You get your hormones balanced, going right out of the gate.
If somebody's a hard-charging athlete, they're probably going to need to throw some carbs in it.
I'm just saying general.
So if you're going to work out later in the day, you might want to start with like some fruit or like some yams or some sweet potatoes or something like that with this.
But that first meal, if you make it mainly protein and fat, you have good rock solid energy level.
I usually train at noon, like if I'm able to get into Jits at noon, then I eat at either one or two.
Post-workout, I eat like a giant sweet potato, like mega sweet potato with some protein.
And I've got some veggies.
And then my dinner...
Is a little bit of protein with a metric ton of veggies and then some fat.
So I'm doing a boatload of cooked veggies or a salad or something.
So I'm getting all the veggies at the end of the day with a bunch of fat.
I'm streamlining my breakfast, but I'm getting enough protein in the morning so that my energy level is good, my blood sugar is good, and all that stuff.
And then I'm recovering from training by doing some post-workout carbs.
And say, like, when I start doing jits, because I'm old now and just beat down and everything, I'm not really doing much else.
I might lift weights a little bit or do a little gymnastics, but I'm not really needing a lot of glycogen repletion between workouts.
But if you had somebody that was doing multiple sessions a day, then you just start doing more carb repletion feeds.
So, you know, breakfast would be protein and yams and sweet potatoes and fruit.
So, you throw down the carbs based on kind of what glycogen you're burning in your workouts.
Less nutrients, but again, it's a little bit specific to the person.
Somebody like you that's lean and athletic and doing a lot of activity.
Then for dinner, a piece of meat with a baked potato or a sweet potato, that's fine because you've got the activity level where you need that level of carb intake.
Somebody that's trying to lose some weight and they maybe have some insulin dysregulation, like their blood sugars go high and low, their insulin goes high and low, they would probably be better off not having that.
Folks want to paint like a kind of a one-size-fits-all picture, but it's very specific.
It's like, are we talking about a metabolically broken type 2 diabetic?
Are we talking about an athlete?
Are we talking about just kind of a recreationally active stay-at-home mom?
So it's really important to consider who are we talking about?
What are their goals?
What are they working towards?
And that will steer the boat both with regards to their training and also their nutrition.
Yeah, I've always felt that with athletics that there's a reason why when you have a heavy weightlifting workout you crave meat.
I mean, it's a very distinct craving.
If you're a meat eater, if you're the type of person who eats meat, when you work out right away, like right when it's over, you want a fucking steak, you want a burger, your body is saying, give me some meat, bitch.
You know, it's not a bad idea, and it's a little bit lunatic fringe, but you dilute the digestive enzymes a little bit, and I think that you probably have better digestion without liquids during the meal.
And part of it, too, you notice when people drink liquid with their meal, they just kind of gum their food once or twice, and then they take some water and shoot it down, and their eyes bulge because it's like a python swallowing a swamp rat or something.
And I was talking to their underwriter about the whole paleo thing, and I'm like, because the one thing they ding me on, I'm 5'9", 175 pounds, and so according to their charts, I was overweight.
And I was like, well, I lift weights, and I'm reasonably lean, and I shot on pictures and everything.
And you could imagine that maybe it's like, okay, maybe it's 12 or maybe even 15, which would be almost 50% off, but it was like, okay, yeah, there's something seriously broken there.
Well, dudes that are really super lean when you see them competing in MMA that have cut an incredible amount of weight, how much of an impact does that have?
Just the fact that even when they rehydrate, they have to fight so lean.
Some people run lean and still have some good performance, but wired into our brain, wired into our genetics is a really tightly controlled mechanism to know how much body fat we have.
Usually we want some, not too much, because you start getting unhealthy with too much.
But if you start getting really, really lean, your body registers that as a stress because you don't have much survival reserve.
Like if there was a starvation scenario, then, you know, your body starts getting anxious about that and it'll elevate cortisol.
It'll suppress your work output because it doesn't want you to be too lean.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting though, like if you find folks, like we spent a bunch of time in Nicaragua and stuff, and the folks from there, you get used to eating the meat that's grass-fed, and it's definitely leaner, but it's very, very flavorful and it's different.
Yeah, when you feed cattle grains, it's a race against time to get them fat enough to take them to market before they die from all the gastrointestinal problems.
Here's an interesting thing.
There's a guy, Dr. Michael Eads, who's kind of a long-time low-carb guy, but he's kind of a paleo guy too.
Really interesting dude.
But he was doing some research on just diets and different things.
He's from Arkansas, so he went to a feedlot, a feed store, and he asked the guy, hey, what do you feed animals to get them fat?
Horses and cattle and pigs and all that.
And they're like, well, the guy upstairs, It has this manual, and it was like a feeding manual for weight gain in animals or something.
And he opens it up, and when you looked at the ratios of protein-carbohydrate to fat, it was like identical to the food pyramid.
I mean, fucking spot on.
Whereas used to, you know, like the four food groups even, which like when you and I were kids was still more the gig, you typically ate more fat, more protein, and less carbs, just in general.
So it was really interesting, like the formula, the standardized formula in this Huge tome of a book to get animals fat for sale was identical to the food ratios recommended by the ADA. Wow.
It's a fattening diet because of the carbohydrate content, because of the allowance for refined sugars and stuff like that.
Yeah, you know, prior to like the late 60s, early 70s, whenever you went to a doctor and you were overweight, you were recommended, you were prescribed a low-carb diet.
For like a hundred years, that was the norm.
And this is, Gary Taubes wrote a really interesting book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.
It's huge.
Like you can only read it like a page at a time.
It's like reading biblical text.
It's super thick.
But for a hundred years, It was just understood that if you were overweight, you cut out beer, potatoes, pasta, rice, eat protein and fat and green vegetables, and you lost weight.
And it was just woven into You know, all of medicine.
And then around the 1950s, we had this idea that heart disease was caused by fat consumption, which had never been borne out by the science.
It was, interestingly, a vegetarian on a political committee That kind of put this thing forward and ended up enacting a bunch of the laws that push this stuff forward.
And we've spent billions of dollars trying to prove that saturated fat causes cardiovascular disease.
They had the Framingham Heart Study, which was 30,000 nurses or something like that, tracked over like 30 years.
And the nurses that ate the most fat, the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, were the leanest, had the highest energy levels, and tended to be the longest lived.
And so, I mean, it's totally the Emperor's New Clothes type thing.
Like, everything we've been told is just fucking wrong.
Like, and not Petit Mall wrong, like Grand Mall wrong.
It can, but interestingly, when you consume carbohydrate and your insulin levels go up, when insulin goes up, another hormone called aldosterone goes up, and aldosterone causes your body to retain salt.
And when you retain salt, you retain water.
So it's actually an indirect way that sodium elevates blood pressure.
But if your insulin levels are high, say you're eating a high-carb diet, you know, like grain-based, you know, ADA-recommended diet, and you cut your salt back, you may still have very high blood pressure because of the insulin problem, not necessarily the salt problem.
Whereas you're eating a little lower carb, you could eat some salt, and it's not going to be problematic at all.
They look like crazy fucking time portals, these things.
And they really are.
I mean, what it really is, it's like, if you could take a pill that would put you in that state where you're in this crazy darkness flying through space, relieved from all the input from your body, that would be a crazy fucking drug.
Yeah, we're just getting ready to basically bring a mobile recording deal to my house, and then I'll sit down and bang the thing out, and then we'll be good.
If you're 40, I'm 44. We're here for a certain amount of years.
We only have a certain amount of time.
There's got to be a way to make this a more pleasurable and sustainable experience for all the people involved in it and all the future generations before the sun burns out.
There's gotta be a way to make it more comfortable.
And if it's not the foot soldiers, it's whoever the fuck tells them they have to go and bust it.
Maybe the soldiers...
The actual officers are the ones who are trying to make a difference.
I mean, who knows who's the dummy that's telling them they need to close down the medical marijuana dispensaries, but that is the only way you can keep all those people employed.
You know, if you have a million DEA agents, or whatever the fuck it is, and you all of a sudden make marijuana legal, what the fuck do they do?
You know, what do the prisons do?
When they have all these people that are in jail for something, retroactively should be released...
I mean, just because they violated a ridiculous law ten years ago, they shouldn't be still locked in a fucking cage if we've determined that law doesn't make any sense.
So then what happens?
We let everybody out of the prisons.
The prisons don't make money anymore.
The privatized prison stocks go down.
You're going to fire some of the jail guys?
Well, then they're going to go crazy with their union.
Yeah, fuck it could but it's not it doesn't seem like that's happening in our life We need to figure out a way to force feed that like a fog wad duck and just listen cocksuckers.
This is the future It's not right to lock people up for marijuana, you know, it's it's interesting the there was a Ron Paul rally in in Nevada that I went to in Reno, and it was huge and It was all young people and it was like Black people and white people and Asian people.
And I mean, Nevada doesn't have that much racial diversity.
And so the fact that there was, you know, this mix there and that they were young and they were impassioned about this kind of libertarian idea, it was pretty interesting.
And in this Paleo scene, it's a really interesting overlap with it.
Like almost everybody in this Paleo scene is like kind of libertarian politics.
The vegetarians, and I know people are going to hate me, but there's a sense about, well, we're going to nice our way into a stable world, but the reality is that the way that nature works is that you have carnivores and herbivores, and there's a biodynamic kind of system there, and I think that people in the Paleocene more embrace that, and they embrace decentralized farming and permaculture and things like that, but there's a really...
Powerful kind of libertarian element to this Paleo scene and it's growing like crazy.
Like every 12 months on Google it's doubling.
And as it stands right now, it is just growing exponentially.
And so you've got kind of a food-oriented, kind of exercise-oriented scene, which is a little culty, but it's also got this interesting kind of market-based libertarian kind of politics that seem to be woven through the whole thing.
When you say culty, though, I think it speaks to people's ideas.
It's like...
When it comes along, when something comes along that speaks to what people had sort of surmised on their own, or at least suspected, but didn't have a direction to put all the facts in, especially when it comes to libertarian ideology and just leaving people alone, letting them do what the fuck they want to do.
For so many people, that's just a big yes!
Like, finally!
What the fuck is going on?
Is it just this weird-ass fucking society where dumb people are allowed to thrive and that promotes these ridiculous solutions like a 10,000-year-old earth and supporting ridiculous old texts that were written back when people thought the world was flat and the sun was 17 miles away?
I mean, it almost is like that's suppressing the growth.
The problematic things that pop up, like when you see people who are homeless, when you see families with kids who don't have a job and they don't have a home, then you want to do something to help them.
And I think having support networks and safety nets are smart, but when you create them in such a way that you're incentivized to stay in versus get out, then you create an indentured class and essentially a slave class because they can't get...
If you don't incentivize people to have self-direction, Then it's easier for them to stay there, but the easiest way to destroy a person's soul is to provide them their means and not cause them to suffer and to find their own way through life.
Right, and I think that there's lots of good intentions that, you know, the path to hell is paved on good intentions.
So there's a lot of desire to help people, and, you know, there's a...
Doing these more market-based approaches like having You know, social support networks being driven more at the local level instead of the federal level and stuff like that.
So, you know, there's been this thing floating around like the Cato Institute for ages where instead of paying like 50% of my taxes to the federal government like I'm doing now, if I pay to a local 5013C, a local nonprofit, then it's dollar for dollar reduces my tax burden at the federal level.
And then how, you know, a local nonprofit is going to be transparent.
It's going to be efficient.
If they shit the bed on something, you can shut them down and pull your money and put it someplace else.
And there's a lot of other ways besides just expanding government to get things done and to take care of people.
And people look at this kind of libertarian idea as being cruel and Machiavellian, that some people are going to be winners and losers.
That will always be the case, but if we create a vibrant society with freedom and we respect each other's rights, and even if we don't agree, we don't fucking kill each other over the differences and stuff like that, you've got a really amazing thing that could happen from that.
And I'm optimistic, even while we've got drones flying overhead, even while we've got another move by our supposedly hope and change-oriented president that is oriented towards more internet.
Suppression and more internet monitoring.
Like it is really scary shit.
And it's just wacky to me whether you're on the more liberal side or on the more right-wing conservative side.
The stuff that people rally behind but not see the cracks in the methodology, it's crazy to me.
I love the fact that you could be a fucking idiot with 10 speeding tickets, 15 fucking crashes.
As long as you're insured...
And you have whatever it costs, 80 grand or whatever the fuck it is, you can go to a Ford dealership and get by yourself a goddamn 2013 Shelby GT500 and just drive like a maniac until they pull you over and arrest you.
It's something designed to break the law.
It's bright red with white stripes on it.
It sounds like war.
And it's got 660 fucking horsepower.
I love that you can just do that.
But really, you shouldn't be able to.
Right.
Really, it is kind of fucking crazy that we allow some asshole who could be texting to have 660 horsepower.
We trust them.
We trust them to have their shit together.
We have to figure out a way to make it so that you have to overcome something to achieve success.
In order to feed yourself, you've got to do some work.
In order to, you know, improve your environment and your surroundings, you have to put forth some effort.
And when we make it so that people just get checks for nothing, that is like the complete opposite of the natural behavior response, natural reward system that's set up for human beings.
But it's a great service, and I'm a huge fan of audible books, audio books.
They're great to listen to in the car.
They literally make traffic dissolve.
All you think about is what you're hearing in the story.
It's a chance for you to instead listen to some stupid gossip news or some depressing shit about the world.
You can get lost in some cool fiction or some informative stuff.
Or, you know, you could listen to our friend Bobcat Goldthwait in his book, I Don't Mean to Insult You But You Look Like Bobcat Goldthwait.
That's my recommendation.
And one that has helped me tremendously, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
Winning the inner creative battle.
It's a really amazing and inspirational book that I really enjoy.
And you can get that from audible.com.
Thank you also to onnit.com.
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