Joe Rogan and Rich Roll dive into nutrition, nootropics, and extreme endurance—like Roll’s 2008 Ultraman finish (11th place) after just five days of juice-cleansing—debating plant-based diets vs. animal protein, citing The China Study and Dr. Esselstyn’s heart disease reversal research. Rogan shares his gym-driven mental discipline, while Roll critiques meat’s role in chronic inflammation, linking it to Western diseases like diabetes. They contrast modern intolerance (e.g., veganism backlash) with Black communities’ early tech adoption, from pagers to raw milk legality battles like Santa Monica’s crackdowns, and explore evolutionary running theories from Born to Run. Ultimately, the episode frames health and passion as rebellions against societal stagnation—whether through diet, fitness, or career reinvention. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, when I did a podcast with Rob Wolf, who was the paleo diet guy, one of the first things that happened was that I got an immediate influx of vegans who had to set Rob Wolf straight because Rob Wolf said some crazy shit.
Like, I told him I drank a kale shake every morning and it makes me feel great, gives me a lot of energy.
I had been an athlete in college, I was a swimmer in college, but it kind of got away from me after that.
When college is over, that was kind of the end of that athletic chapter.
Life goes on and I went to law school and then it's just about the job and getting married and having kids and climbing the corporate ladder and all that kind of stuff.
In the wake of that, I lost sight of Being fit and being healthy and was pretty much a couch potato.
Depressed, lethargic, a little bit lost in life.
You know how it goes.
So I decided I had to take it back.
I had a little bit of a health scare that kind of triggered me to do something about it.
Well, I mean, I wish I could, you know, say I ran off to the library and got a bunch of books and, you know, read all the paleo books and read all the vegan books and did a double blind study with people with double blindfolds on and, you know, figured out the right way to do it.
And, you know, that's not what happened.
I mean, I fumbled around for a while trying to figure out what would work for me.
But the first thing I did, My wife is like she's big into yoga and healing and meditation and she's like you know she's constantly reading like crazy spiritual texts and you know she's pretty well schooled in alternative thinking and lifestyle and all that kind of stuff and you know if you were to open the refrigerator is pretty clear like kind of food she was eating and what I was eating which was essentially crap so but she would do like a juice cleanse pretty much every year you know and That
was fine for her, but that was definitely not something that I was ever interested in doing.
But, you know, I was kind of desperate, and I thought, you know, maybe I'll try that.
And so I just sort of reached out to her, and I said, yeah, I think I want to do that.
And she hooked me up with...
We got all these crazy herbs, and, you know, we got a juicer and the whole thing, and kind of dialed it in.
And, you know, I did that for, like, five days.
Kind of a...
Not like the...
You know, in Hollywood, a lot of people do like the cayenne pepper thing or whatever and lemon juice.
Yeah, I mean, that's like a starvation thing.
So it wasn't like that.
It was like I kind of weaned myself off food for a couple days and just did juice for a couple days and then kind of leaned back into food.
But It was a pretty eye-opening experience.
The first couple days, it was like I was in rehab, man.
Just buckled over on the couch, detoxing, just feeling like shit.
It's a strange thing that even bad habits like gambling, like people that become gambling addicts, it really is some sort of like a Like a hijacking of your reward systems.
For sure.
Giving you this rush towards something that really doesn't make any sense.
And there's also the comfort factor that comes in repeating patterns.
It's like your brain knows how to do it.
It's done it before.
Let's stop fucking around.
Just keep doing the same shit you've been doing.
And just blow off the gym and take a nap and go beat off.
And just do the same stupid shit you've been doing.
It's really hard for people to move away from that.
The solution, though, it seems to be it's not as simple as don't eat meat.
Because even if you don't eat meat, what are you going to do with all these fucking cows?
Are you going to stop them from breeding?
Are you going to let them starve to death and die off?
Are they going to go extinct?
How are we going to regulate these cows?
You're either going to shoot them or you're going to castrate a bunch of them You're going to have to shoot some of them, because otherwise you're going to have cows wandering through the streets everywhere.
You've got to deal with the fact that you've created a species, essentially we've bred cows to this domestic form from wild cows.
And, you know, we've done it for so long that they're pretty much helpless without us.
Talking about food in general is emotionally charged.
I mean, just look at...
The Twitter feed is going to explode over this, and that's a good barometer of that.
You know, it's right up there with religion and politics.
It really is.
And when you say vegan, it immediately, you know, people snap into a preconceived idea of what that is and what that means, and they have a visual image of a person in their mind.
You know, it's a guy with dreadlocks kicking a hacky sack up in Humboldt.
Yeah, I mean, whatever it is, somebody has that image already.
So that word And people have different reasons for getting into it.
The people who are into it for the compassion and saving the animals, that's a very different crowd and attitude from the people that get into it for health reasons or because they don't want to have a heart attack or whatever.
I guess are technically vegans, but they're also, you know, very different.
And just because you choose to not eat meat or whatever, does that mean that you're automatically a Democrat?
Or, you know, what is your political point of view?
And all these things get woven together and it makes it challenging, you know, to even talk about it with an open mind, I think.
And there is the very real issue of the fact that we are at the top of the food chain.
And when you're at the top of the food chain, it bears some responsibility.
And you can, you know, we're the only animals that can really decide and choose how to alter other animals' lives, like, on purpose and figure out how to do it.
And when you look at how we choose to do it, if you look at, like, food, ink, and you see factory farming and stuff like that, it really is a damning statement about, like, where we're at.
Like spiritually, like as a race.
Like we're getting away with this really heinous shit because we can because it's easy to just not pay attention to it.
And that's the worst case scenario.
Like the best case scenario you would think they have it set up so these animals live like they're on an open prairie and they all just live a natural life and then you cull them from the herd.
So they live a natural life, no different than any other cow, in a large environment where they get to roam around and eat grass instead of being force-fed corn.
And then you just kill them.
I mean, that's like the best case scenario if you're going to eat cows.
But the way we do it, it's pretty damning that human beings in the idea of maximizing profit Have decided to run these ridiculous places where you're packing pigs right next to each other in these little boxes.
And you see the chickens all stuffed in together with each other and pecking at each other.
Yeah, so I did that juice cleanse and by the fifth day of that I just felt unbelievable.
My energy level was through the roof and all I'd been doing was drinking fruit and vegetable juice and drinking this beetroot broth and some teas and stuff like that.
It was amazing because I had abused my body for so long with terrible food and terrible lifestyle.
I'm also a recovering alcoholic, so I used to drink a shitload.
The idea that within five days I could feel that good.
I didn't know that I could feel that good or I hadn't felt that good in 15, 20 years.
It's pretty amazing.
The body is incredibly resilient when you treat it right.
When I was done with that, I thought, well, what am I going to do?
I want to keep feeling this good, but I don't know what to do next.
Again, I wish I had gone out and read a bunch of books or something.
But I just thought, maybe I'll try a vegetarian diet.
Like, I didn't do any education or research, but it just seemed like, well, that sounds, you know, healthy or healthier than what I'm doing.
But kind of coming from an addiction perspective and a recovery perspective, like I went to rehab 14 years ago, and so a lot of like the way, like I sort of rewired my brain and the way I think is kind of in the context of addiction and recovery.
It just seemed like something I could wrap my brain around because You're either eating meat or you're not.
It's very black and white.
You're using drugs and you're drinking or you're not.
You're either sober or you're using.
That made more sense to me than, hey, I'm going to eat better.
I'm just going to eat healthy and go to the gym because it's so vague.
I don't know what that means.
Maybe I would for a week or two, but I would definitely fall back into my regular old behavior pattern.
So I started doing that, but it wasn't long before, you know, I'm looking for the loopholes or whatever, because you can eat like shit on a vegetarian diet.
You can eat like shit on a vegan diet.
So, you know, I could, I could eat Pizza Hut cheese pizza and get nachos and, you know, eat McDonald's French fries and I'm a vegetarian, right?
So certainly, you know, that wasn't working, but I did that for like six months and of course, you know, didn't lose any weight.
I was about 50 pounds heavier than I am now.
I was kind of back on the couch and lethargic.
I was ready to just bag it, but I thought I wonder what would happen if I just went that extra step and got rid of the dairy and cut out the processed foods.
I didn't really think it would make a difference.
I almost did it to prove that it wouldn't or to prove to my wife that it wouldn't work so I could keep doing what I was doing and be guilt free about it.
So I tried that, and within a week, I was back to that energy level that I felt when I did the cleanse.
My energy level was through the roof.
It was so high that I could only sleep a couple hours a night, and I was bouncing off the walls.
Really?
Yeah, it really did.
It really did.
It made a huge difference.
And I think getting rid of the dairy made a much bigger...
Not eating the meat wasn't that hard for me, but getting rid of the dairy in my diet, that was a lot harder.
That was almost like another detox, because dairy is in so many foods.
And I crave it, man.
I love it.
So it was very difficult to kind of break that behavior pattern.
Yeah, because, well, that's the thing, like, I know, you know, like, Tim Ferriss is big on the cheat day with his slow carb and all of that, and it seems to work for a lot of people, and it makes sense.
For me, like, for me, it's about, it goes back to, like, the addiction model, because I do crave this stuff, man, and I know if I had a cheeseburger, like, once a week, I'd start eating cheeseburgers all the time.
Because you break the cycle and now I don't think about it that much.
Every once in a while I'll smell it and it smells good to me.
But I don't go around craving it all the time.
But if I was to have it every once in a while, then you're still fertilizing that little seed.
There should most certainly be a doctor of nutrition that you go to.
A doctor who is a full-fledged doctor at the top of all the information that's available today.
He's on top of all of it.
And his job is just to check your blood.
And give you a detailed write-up of what's wrong with you nutritionally.
You don't have any B12 in your body.
You don't have this in your body.
You're missing niacin.
Whatever it is that he could show you what your optimum levels of your various nutrients should be.
Very, very, very few people No, and they do exist, but that should be part of your physical.
Yeah, it should be a regular thing.
I talk about it on this show all the time, how much it changed me when I started drinking kale shakes in the morning.
And I'm not vegan.
I still drink milk.
I eat meat.
But in massively increasing the amount of plant nutrients I get into my body, and especially it seems like starting my day with them, I usually don't eat right when I wake up.
I like to exercise sometimes or just get up and do some stuff, and then I'll eat.
And my first meal is always really light.
It's always either some sort of a hemp protein shake or it's this kale shake thing that I have.
But the difference is the kale shake gives me this fucking steady energy.
I can feel my body responding to the nutrients.
You can literally feel it.
And the only negative about it at all is that you have to shit more.
And people who have gone to altitudes, like who had to change altitudes rapidly, like move up to Boulder, like real quick, that normally would have issues with that, they've found that if they take cordyceps mushrooms, it can settle them in.
Settle them in quicker.
Because for a lot of people, that altitude sickness is no fucking joke.
I read this thing about babies being born in Colorado, that like a record number of babies are born prematurely.
It was another kind of weird, organic thing that just evolved over time.
When I got on the plant-based diet, I started exercising again.
Mainly because I just had all this energy I had to burn off.
I didn't have any designs on Going back to being an athlete or being competitive in anything.
I just wanted to lose a little weight.
I wanted to be able to enjoy my kids at their energy level.
You know, I have four kids now.
So it was really just about, you know, connecting with that part of myself that I kind of lost touch with, but nothing crazy.
You know, I would go to the pool and swim a couple times a week and, you know, do a light jog here and there.
My wife bought me a bike for my birthday.
I'd never really ridden a bike before.
And this was when I turned 40. But then I had like an experience after I'd been doing this for maybe four months or something like that, a really moderate exercise.
I went out for a morning run Out at, you know, where Mulholland Drive, the dirt road part of it, that dumps out at the bottom of Topanga on the valley side?
So there's a trail that you can literally go like all the way to Brentwood, right?
It goes forever.
And I just went out there one morning on a weekday for a morning run and just, you know, you have those days, and I'm sure you have it in jujitsu, where you just feel unstoppable, like you just keep going forever.
I just started running and I just felt I just kept going and going.
I was like, I don't have to be back.
I'm going to keep going and going.
I ended up running like the better part of a marathon just by myself.
I think 24 miles or something like that that morning.
Excuse me.
And I got back and I just was like, what is going on?
It's not like I had a background in running or had any proficiency in it, really.
And it wasn't like I was going fast that day either, but it was just the idea that I could keep going and I thought, Something's going on here.
I don't know whether it's the nutrition change or I've just unlocked some dormant gene inside me, but this felt good.
Then I was like, I'd like to challenge myself.
Then I started looking for something to do.
When you're 40, it's like, what's the bucket list item or what's the midlife crisis thing you want to do?
I started thinking about doing an Ironman because that's a pretty typical goal for a 40-year-old guy who wants to conquer a mountain or whatever.
And started training a little bit more and more.
And I didn't know anything about triathlon.
I didn't know anything about Ironman or anything like that.
But I figured it seems like there's those Ironman races that are like every weekend somewhere.
And like tons of people are doing it.
It can't be that hard to get in one.
I'll just pick a city, you know, a ways out and, you know, train for it myself.
And I went on the website one day and realized that they all sell out like a year ahead of time.
Like they're like U2 tickets.
Like the day after one of those races, the next day...
And they just sell out like in a couple hours.
So I couldn't get into any of those.
And I was like, well, you know, what am I going to do?
And nothing seemed to excite me and I kind of lost my mojo for a little bit.
But I was at Jamba Juice one morning.
Like maybe a month after that experience getting a juice and you know how they have those like competitor magazines that you see in like running shoe stores or whatever like running shoe reviews or whatever just laying around and I picked it up and started looking at it and there was an article about this dude Named David Goggins who's this badass Navy SEAL guy like guy had been like a football player and a power lifter like big strapping guy I think he was up he had weighed like 275 pounds at one point and had seen
some shit you know as a Navy SEAL and had lost a lot of friends in in action and he decided that he was gonna go he was gonna find the 10 most difficult endurance races in the world and do them all to like raise money for It wasn't the Wounded Warriors Foundation, but it was something like that, so that he could raise money for the families of these friends of his that had fallen.
And he had just done this race called Badwater, which is a 135-mile run through Death Valley that goes up Mount Whitney at the end.
And it's crazy hot, like 110, 120 degrees out in the desert.
And he had just done really well in that, and he had never really done much endurance sports before that.
He literally had fallen into it and had just put in an incredible performance.
And then a month later, he did this race called Ultraman.
Which is this insane double Ironman distance race in Hawaii, where over the course of three days, you circumnavigate the entire Big Island of Hawaii, which is like a big island.
It's like the size of Connecticut, right?
So I was reading about this and it just seemed like such a cool event.
Not only was it longer than Ironman, which I didn't think was possible, It was broken up into stages.
So the first day is a 6.2 mile ocean swim, followed by a 90 mile bike.
And the last 20 miles of that bike, you go up to Volcano National Park.
So it's like a 4,000 foot gain.
And the second day you ride 170 miles around the eastern side of the island, like up through Hilo.
And you end up in this little town called Javi.
On the third day, you run 52.4 miles double marathon from Javi back into Kona where the race started.
I was like, what is this?
It was cool because they limited it to just 35 invitation-only competitors.
You had to apply to get into this race.
They don't close any of the roads.
It was almost like this family affair where you have to bring your own crew and they take care of you and feed you out of a van while you're doing this race.
The crews help each other out and the competitors help each other out.
It's a race, but It seemed almost like this crazy spiritual odyssey, you know, like this experiment in expansion, you know, much more than a race.
And I was like, that was what I was looking for.
You know, it wasn't like I was looking for a race to go see how fast I could go or how many guys I could beat.
Like, it resonated with me because it seemed more like An opportunity to learn more about myself in a way that was unique.
You know what I mean?
Like it was like this crazy down the rabbit hole like spiritual adventure.
And so it just captivated me and I was like...
It was one of those things where...
You know when you come across something and something just clicks inside you and you know...
Like, that's the direction you're supposed to go in or you're on the right path or, you know, maybe you've had that in stand-up or at some point in your life where you just feel like you're directed in a certain way, you know, where everything just kind of seems in alignment.
It was like, I just knew I was going to do that race.
Like, I just, I didn't know how and I hadn't done anything of note, you know, to merit getting into it or anything like that.
But I was like, I'm going to find a way to do that.
Like, I've got to do that.
And I couldn't stop thinking about it.
And I ended up calling up the, uh, Race director.
And it was some months before you could even send in your application.
Because I was like, I couldn't stop thinking about it.
And I needed to like, just if she was going to tell me like, there's no way I was getting in, then I could at least like put that to bed.
So I just called her up and said, you know, I read about this race, and I can't stop thinking about it, and I'd really like to do it, but, you know, maybe I'm crazy, because, you know, I don't know why I'm even calling you, because I haven't really done very much.
You know, and she said, well, what have you done?
And I said, I haven't done anything.
You know, I'm barely, you know, I'm just getting back into being fit again.
And she had every reason to just say, well, you know, why don't you call me in a couple years, and, you know, we'll see what you've done then, and maybe I'll let you into this race.
She was like, well, listen, it means a lot that you called early, and why don't you just touch base with me in a couple months, and we'll evaluate your training, and we'll go from there.
So she kind of left a crack in the door open.
So it was enough to give me a little bit of hope, like the pilot light was lit a little bit.
And I was like, I'm going to get into that race.
I'm going to find a way to get into that race.
And I hired a coach, and I started training as if I was already in.
This was back in early 2008. And I mean, it's a long story, but ultimately she ended up relenting and letting me in and I ended up doing that race in 2008. And I hadn't done an Ironman before that.
I tried to do a half Ironman the year before and I didn't even finish.
So, you know, I wasn't going in with some crazy like endurance pedigree.
So it was a cool experience, though, and I ended up doing pretty well in that race.
I got 11th in 2008, and at that time, we were like the bad news bears.
I had no idea what I was doing.
My dad came out to help me crew and a couple buddies from out here.
And none of us knew anything about anything.
And I just wanted to finish, you know, and I just wanted to, like, not die.
So I approached it, like, very conservatively.
But I ended up exceeding my expectations.
So I thought, you know, I wonder what would happen if I spent a year, like, preparing to go back and actually race it, you know, rather than just trying to finish and kind of being timid about it.
So for 2009, I trained my ass off and I went back and, uh, And I ended up getting out.
I got out of the swim with a 10-minute lead on the next guy.
And I held that lead for the rest of that day through that 90-mile bike.
So I finished the first day with a 10-minute lead on the field.
And that van is filled with, like, all your shit, man.
So you gotta have all your food that you're gonna eat, like, while you're racing, and then afterwards, and then, you know, ice for ice baths afterwards, and they're filling your bottles and feeding them, you know, feeding you.
They kind of leapfrog you and park, and then you do bottle handoffs, so you always have nutrition on the bike.
And they make sure you don't take any wrong turns.
They're in charge of navigating.
And if you have anything that mechanically goes wrong with your bike or whatever, extra parts.
And it's filled with all your clothes because you're going around the island.
You're not going back to where you started that day.
You're going to stay in a different place each night.
So you have to have all your stuff with you.
So these vans are packed from floor to ceiling with stuff.
What I eat is probably different than certain others.
Everybody has their own thing.
I like to stay away from Like a lot of endurance athletes run or whatever, you know, usually kind of Gatorade-y kind of stuff, like the Cytomax and that kind of stuff, the real high sugar stuff.
But when you're going all day, like you're going to be out on a race course for eight or nine hours and then you got to do it the next day, your system can't handle that.
So I try to eat a...
More like a lower glycemic, higher carbohydrate fuel source.
So they have this stuff called Carbopro or something called Perpetuum.
They're like maltodextrin powders.
So it's like a low glycemic kind of complex carbohydrate fuel source.
I mean, it seems like there's differing schools of thought on that.
I mean, I think that, you know, you have the really hardcore raw foodists who just eat everything raw, and certainly I think it's great to eat lots of raw foods, you know what I mean?
Like the raw foods you put in your Vitamix or whatever, and I eat a lot of raw foods, but I still eat cooked foods, you know?
I've gone periods without it, and then I've used it as well.
I think that when you're using it compulsively and addictively, it's not a good thing.
It fries your adrenals and makes you tired, ultimately.
I think a cup of coffee in the morning is not the worst thing, particularly for an athlete.
I mean, it's definitely a performance enhancer.
Like if I'm going out for a long bike ride, you know, a nice little strong cup of coffee before my ride, definitely, I can definitely feel the difference.
But I think it, you know, you can't be just hammering coffee all day long.
It was over a course of a few days where I was really hitting at hard writing.
You've got to be careful.
I had headaches.
I had withdrawals.
But I found that a really strenuous exercise, like if I have anything wrong with me, if I have jet lag, if I'm just a little out of it from landing somewhere and I can't shake the cobwebs loose, just really intense, strenuous exercise just seems to reset the whole thing.
But if you can overcome that, it gives you that feeling like, you know, like lately I've got a lot of shit done that I wanted to get done, and I got this great, like, feeling because of that, you know?
I've got, like, momentum, you know?
And whenever I feel like that I'm accomplishing things that I wanted to do, I set out to do X today, and I got it all done.
It's like, yes!
The next day, I feel like a little more charged up.
I feel like I've got, well, look, I'm doing what I'm trying to get done.
I'm getting it done.
I'm feeling great about it.
And a lot of people, I think, don't have that.
They don't build that momentum enough in their life.
They don't pick a few goals, lock onto them, go with it, and then let it build up to something else.
And also I think that there's this weird equation with exercise because it's so easy to say you don't have time or you're busy or whatever and you know I go through that a lot and and and it's easy to justify not doing it but ultimately when I just quiet that thought and and do it anyway I end up getting more done and everything that I needed to get done ends up getting done and if I don't do it I end up wasting time and I'm less productive and I'm not thinking clearly and yeah there's a lot of like down wasted time I think everybody has a different sort of biology.
I don't like getting annoyed at things too easily.
I don't like this weird testosterone buildup that happens after a few days of not exploding on something.
It's like my body's become most certainly addicted to that release.
And it knows that it can navigate social waters better when it's just totally drained of all the monkey DNA. If I don't get that out at the gym, I don't feel like I'm as nice a person.
There, that cuts out a lot of the fucking bullshit and procrastination with the 20 minute ride to the gym and then I'll only have 40 minutes to work out because, my God, if I just took a nap right now, maybe I would perform better tonight and maybe I could just do some working out at home tonight.
Having it in my house, for me, is huge.
The ability to just go outside and Even when I was broke, I always had a heavy bag.
Just tied something to the rafters in the garage.
Having something like that is, to me, having just a place where you can at least release in some way.
He's got a startup company called Ascended Health.
He's all about trying to find the best superfoods all over the world and provide them to customers.
He's traveling all the time.
He's going to, like, Thailand, all these crazy places, trying to find, you know, places where he can grow this stuff.
And so I would go to his house, and his house looked like, in his kitchen, it looks like a giant meth lab.
He's got all these tubes everywhere and all this crazy stuff.
He's like, oh, you gotta try this.
I just got this resveratrol in.
It's from the finest Bordeaux grape skins.
Stuff's amazing.
I'm going to make some powder for you.
And he's always trying to help me with my training and racing nutrition by giving me some of this crazy stuff.
And so his whole thing is he's super knowledgeable about probiotics and microbes because he studied microbes and the GI tract microbial activity forever and ever and knows more about it than anyone I've ever met.
And it's fascinating, man, because, and I talk a little bit about this in my book, too, that we think we're made up of trillions of cells, right?
And we think we're these sentient beings and we have control over What we think and our decisions and all of that.
But at the same time, we have to realize that we have like 10 times the number of our cells in microbes in our gut alone.
Like our microbial ecology in our GI tract has like, you know, 10 times the number of microorganisms compared to all of our cells in our entire body.
And there's been these studies that have come out And they're starting to come out where they're studying the extent to which your microbial ecology in your gut can trigger your nervous system and actually impulse you in a decision-making way.
And they've discovered links between what kind of microbial ecology you have in your gut and the foods that you crave.
So, yeah.
Probiotics are all about improving the health of your flora in your gut, right?
And if you have healthy flora, it craves and feeds on healthy foods, right?
But if you go to Jack in the Box every day, or you eat Lean Pockets every night, then you're going to have a different kind of microbial ecology.
The microbes that are in that food start to propagate in your gut, And that takes over and that becomes the ecology.
And they're realizing that that ecology then sends signals to your brain that makes you crave more of those foods.
So it's that craving cycle that I was talking about earlier.
That's so crazy.
And it sounds insane, but then I was thinking about that.
You saw, remember the documentary Super Size Me?
Yes.
So Morgan Spurlock, when he first starts out, remember he's getting sick when he's eating McDonald's?
He can't handle it.
He barfs out the window one day when he's a couple days in.
He just cannot manage.
I can't imagine going back to McDonald's.
He's only three days in.
He's getting sick all the time.
And then, fast forward a couple days later, and he wakes up with headaches.
And he's craving the food.
And his headaches won't go away until he goes to McDonald's.
So it's like you can make the argument that that could be, you know, attributable to a change in his microbial ecology.
You know, like now he's replaced his healthy...
Because I think his wife or his girlfriend at the time was like a vegan chef.
He was eating really clean.
And then he just starts eating this McDonald's and he replaces that microbial ecology in his gut with the kind that...
It feeds on McDonald's and suddenly he's craving it all the time.
Could you imagine if they found out that McDonald's actually had implanted microbial biology that they created in a lab that specifically makes you want their shitty cheeseburgers?
You just fucking crave that cheeseburger.
McDonald's cheeseburgers.
I saw a thing online where a dude left one out for six months and it never rotted.
So there's a lot about paleo that I think is fantastic.
They eschew dairy.
They eschew processed foods.
I think the only oil that they say is okay is olive oil in moderation.
We disagree.
It's a very Like, the idea is low-carb, right?
Like, it's low-carb, kind of high-protein.
And I think that, you know, that works really well for losing weight and maybe works for some people in terms of energy levels.
But my perspective on the whole thing is I'm coming from looking at the healthcare crisis in America, where, like, people are just keeling over with heart attacks constantly.
You know, I mean, heart disease is rampant, you know, and People are getting diabetes like crazy, and even children are getting diabetes.
I mean, when we were kids, diabetes wasn't really a thing, right?
Now, like, diabetes is a huge thing.
Like, obesity, and the obesity figures are insane.
Like, 40% of Americans are going to be obese by 2014, and childhood obesity rates are crazy, and school lunches are terrible.
And when I look at it like that, like, I think that...
I can't get around the fact that when I read the studies on plant-based nutrition, when you read the China study or you read Dr. Esselstyn's book, Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, there's a pretty clear correlation between getting rid of the meat and dairy and eating a whole food plant-based diet and your ability to repair your body from these conditions that are plaguing us unnecessarily.
Heart disease is a foodborne illness.
Not only prevent it, you can actually reverse it.
And this this guy, Dr. Esselstyn, have you ever heard of this guy?
Okay, so for maybe your listeners who don't know, he is a he's a badass.
First of all, the guy was like he's Yale educated and he's an Olympic gold medalist in rowing in like 1968. And I think he was a I think he's a I think he was a Vietnam I think he's a Vietnam veteran also.
I'm not sure about that.
But then he became a surgeon, and he was a head surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, which is, if you have heart disease or you have heart problems, that's where you want to go.
And back in the 70s, he started to realize that when he treated his patients with a plant-based whole food diet, that they were able to reverse their heart disease without surgery.
And he was starting to look at the...
I'm having a brain fart.
What are those pictures of the heart called?
The angiograms.
So you'd see these before and after angiograms and you could clearly see, you know, the clogged arteries becoming clear again and it working.
And that was not a popular thing like in the 1970s and the 1980s.
To a large degree, it's still not popular, but it didn't make him a popular surgeon there.
You're saying putting that information out that you can heal yourself through vegetables was not popular because they literally wanted people to be sicker?
You go in with high cholesterol or whatever, your doctor is most likely going to prescribe you statins.
He may say, you know, change your diet or do this, and then you'll come back and it doesn't change.
And then he'll say, well, it's genetic and you need to take this medicine.
In fact, I believe that actually you can lower your cholesterol if you change your diet properly.
But the point, getting back to Dr. Esselstyn, is that he was sort of blazing this trail a long time ago back when not too many people were listening.
And it's taken him many, many years to kind of get traction with this.
And it's taken the China study and his book and the documentary Forks Over Knives to get people sort of paying attention and listening now.
And now there's kind of like An awareness that didn't exist before.
And the scientific studies are pretty compelling, that when you remove the animal proteins, you remove the processed foods, and you remove the dairy, that you can really heal yourself.
Well, if you cut, I mean, what has been proven that that is the order that works.
Has it been proven that if you cut out the dairy, cut out the processed food, cut out the meat, specifically live off of vegetables, vegetable nutrition, that that is the only way to go?
Or have they done vegetable nutrition and grass-fed meat and natural meat?
So what they found, though, essentially, was that a lot of ailments are started, and the activator for starting these ailments and diseases is animals.
So you eat animals, you're going to get certain diseases that you would avoid if you just ate vegetables.
And the China study originated around studying cultures where there really wasn't any animal products or animal proteins in their diet and looking at the extent of cardiovascular disease.
So there's a certain area in China where it had a huge population, like 260,000 people or something like that.
Well, I think there's a lot of misconceptions about that, and there's been a lot of sort of debunking of the complete versus incomplete protein argument that gets pretty technical.
But I think that if you're eating a well-rounded, balanced, plant-based diet with lots of different...
Essentially, if you're eating grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables in all the different colors, and you're rotating them through or whatever, then you're not going to have a problem.
It's almost like Nature has rigged it.
You're not going to have a protein deficiency.
And, you know, just speaking from my own experience with this, when I first started on the vegan diet, you know, I was nervous about that.
I was scared about it, especially as I was starting to train more and more.
And my cabinet was like full of all kinds of crazy supplements, just tons.
And I was like, just mounds and mounds of plant-based proteins in my shakes.
Because I was nervous that I was going to injure myself or I was going to get sick or something like that.
And over the last couple of years, I've slowly started weaning myself off of a lot of that stuff where I use very little now and I haven't noticed a difference in my ability to, one, recover in between workouts or Build lean muscle mass.
And my endurance is continuing to improve.
So I do use hemp protein.
I love hemp protein.
I usually combine it with pea protein or sprouted brown roast protein.
He said that he was a vegan before that, but he had to stop being a vegan.
I'm pretty sure, I don't want to paraphrase this guy's story, but...
I'm pretty sure that is how we said it.
Is there any possible benefit in your eyes to eating animal protein for as far as performance, physical performance as far as, I mean even though it may be the catalyst to triggering certain ailments in certain individuals and that can be documented, is it also possible that there's a benefit to it too?
Yeah, I mean, you know, what I do is so long, it's a very specific kind of sport that's very different from jujitsu or sprint running or anything like that.
But there are plenty of, you know, athletes out there in various disciplines that seem to be doing well.
But, you know, has there been a double-blind, you know, sort of case study on the difference?
I don't know the answer to that.
And I think that, you know, for me, it goes back to The reason that I started doing this to begin with, which was, you know, really long-term wellness and not having a heart attack.
Like, heart disease runs in my family.
My grandfather, who was a champion swimmer, died of a heart attack in his early 50s.
And, you know, I have to constantly remind myself that that was what motivated me to do this to begin with.
It wasn't performance reasons.
At the same time, if I felt like I was missing something, like if I started to feel like I wasn't recovering or I wasn't improving or I wasn't able to get stronger or I wasn't feeling good, I would certainly entertain the possibility of eating meat if I thought my health was suffering, but I just haven't had that experience yet.
How do you feel about that idea that everybody's got a different sort of nutritional requirement and that some people really shouldn't eat red meat and some people really should be vegetarians?
It's based on your blood or where your family's origins are geographically and that's the kind of genes that you're carrying around?
Um, they, um, I thought the whole deal was, is it cancer that they, that you almost never see in your population and they were attributing that to, uh, the, uh, nutrition that they got from fish oil.
Do you, uh, do you substitute with any animal, um, like fish oil or anything like that?
The oil has been linked to, there's some evidence to suggest that it's linked to incidents of prostate cancer, but for some reason the seeds aren't.
That's so weird.
The seeds have like the case, you know, like they have that casing on them or whatever, so you have to grind them up because otherwise they'll just pass right through you.
Yeah, I think it's important when it comes to joint relief and looking at inflammation, is looking at the acidic or the alkaline nature of the foods that you're eating.
And animal products, dairy and meat, tend to be very acid-forming.
Like, your body has a certain pH, right?
It's trying to maintain that sort of pH right in the middle.
But, you know, the foods we eat and the toxins we breathe in the air and stress of our lives or whatever, We can all try to push that one way or the other, and then our body has to kind of go into hyperdrive to bring it back to its normalized state.
So the truth is that most people that are eating a standard American diet and living the North American way of life are eating a predominantly acidic, acid-forming diet.
And they're in a state of what's called chronic acidosis.
And that's a state in which, you know, you're constantly bombarding your body with a very acid-based diet, and your body has to kind of go into hyperdrive to bring it back.
And that's an environment where you become very rife for getting injured, for getting sick, and it's also, you know, an environment that makes you more prone to those congenital diseases.
So when you're eating a more plant-based diet, those tend to be, I mean, not every plant food or whatever, It tends to be, in the balance, more alkaline forming.
And when you're in a more alkaline state, you're not getting sick, you're recovering more quickly, because inflammation is sort of the root cause for a zillion diseases, and it's like the enemy of the athlete, right?
You're always trying to, like, If you can reduce your inflammation, your muscles are going to repair themselves more quickly.
You're going to be able to bounce back quicker.
You're going to be able to train harder.
It doesn't necessarily make you a better athlete in a short period of time, but protracted over the course of a season, you're going to have a much more efficient and effective training period, and that's going to result in performance gains in the long run.
So you're essentially saying that all the benefits of taking fish oil, you could get those same benefits with just changing your diet to a vegetarian diet, that you don't need fish oil.
Well, with respect to fish oil, I mean, the purpose of fish oil is to get those omega-3s, those essential fatty acids, right, that are important.
I mean, you know, there's a lot of talk about EFAs and the omega-6 and the omega-3, and we get plenty of omega-6 in all the foods we eat or whatever, but the problem comes when The ratio of 6 to 3 is kind of off.
And most people don't get enough omega-3 in their diets.
And fish oil is great for kind of rectifying that.
But my point is only that it's not the only way of dealing with that.
Yeah, I would be willing to try, but I always thought that it was like, almost like it was like lubricating.
It doesn't make sense really, but that it was like...
WD-40.
Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
How much oil would you need to lube up your fucking joints?
But that's how I almost thought it in my head, because there was such a correlation between...
Taking these pills and joint pain relief.
I've read a lot of great things about fish oil and studies on fish oil and there's absolutely some nutritional benefit to taking it.
I don't know why you wouldn't take it unless it was because of the fact that you wanted to not have anything animal in your body, like to just subscribe to.
It's interesting because any time you say, this food is good, then you can immediately go on the internet and find some reason why it's not.
You can fall on any category of that.
There are some studies out there that show that the fish oil thing is a little over-hyped.
It's hard to quantify who's right and who's wrong and all that kind of stuff.
Have you been to a...
There's a guy named Dr. Michael Greger.
He's got a site called nutritionfacts.org.
And it's amazing.
The guy has a zillion...
He puts up videos almost every day.
And they're short.
Two to five minutes at max and you can look at, you can enter in any food or any disease or whatever and most likely he has a short video on it and it's all based on peer-reviewed scientific studies or whatever.
But I always go to that when I have a question about this food or that.
I went to nutrition for the first time when I was like 17, when I was losing weight for martial arts competitions and I was fucking my body up and I was trying to figure out how to monitor my nutrition, how to lean myself out in the healthiest way possible to drop the most weight before I had to dehydrate myself.
But that was Nancy Clark, who's pretty famous for working with athletes.
She was in Boston at the time.
She's got a bunch of books on that stuff.
And I think she's worked with other MMA athletes too now.
This is like...
Way after, I mean, I must have done it, did it with her in 85 or something like that.
But that's when I first became, it was from martial arts competition, before I had to worry about my diet.
I didn't watch what I ate at all.
I just ate what I felt like eating, even when I was competing.
I had no emphasis or focus on nutrition.
It wasn't until I got older that I just threw trial and error and just going on a whim and saying, you know what?
I'm going to juice all day.
I'm just going to have beet juice and carrot juice and celery juice.
I've done that a few times and you get this weird kind of energy that you get from that intense plant nutrition that you don't get from anything else.
You really don't.
It's not the same feeling that you get when you have the satisfaction of a fat ribeye and it's just perfectly cooked and you slice into that medium rare.
It's so good.
It's not that satisfaction.
But it is this weird sort of vibrancy that you get.
Like you're ingesting live plants.
Essentially, they've just died a short period of time ago.
They're still vibrant with energy.
And you don't get that from anything processed.
And there's a lot of people out there that are miserable, that are depressed, I have friends that have shit-fucking diets and their way of dealing with it is to take antidepressants.
You've got no exercise, terrible sleep, shit diet, you feel terrible, take a pill, you feel better?
Really?
You've got to clean up all that other stuff, man, and then see how you feel.
If you have all these goddamn issues as far as your diet, as far as your sleep, as far as stress levels, Clean up that shit first before you go take a goddamn pill.
I mean, we're a nation of crazy people who are addicted to all these weird, new, not-natural, non-native chemicals that we're introducing into our body and that we become addicted to.
If we could just look, if you could have an overlay of the United States and who's on the influence of any sort of a pharmaceutical drug right now.
And not to spin too much of a new age thing, but you're right.
Food carries a vibrancy and an energy to it.
It's very specific.
And in my case, I've been on this crazy, amazing journey that I would have never predicted.
And it honestly started with changing my diet.
And so I look at it With, like, a respect and a reverence.
And I go, this is what catalyzed this path.
And it opened me, like, it opened my heart to the possibility of living differently and to doing different things than I was doing.
And, look, you know, people are sicker than they've ever been.
We're such a prosperous nation, and people are just over-medicated.
They're fat.
They're unhealthy.
And for the most part, they're, people are, you know, there's, what do you think the level of happiness is now compared to what it was like, you know, 100 years ago?
And I got to the place that was supposed to be the brass ring.
And I was like...
What the fuck?
I was not happy and I felt lost.
It's like a feeling of being in free fall.
And you have a choice.
I was making a decent amount of money, so a lot of people in that situation, they'll just gild themselves with stuff they can't afford.
Like, well, I'll lease that car that's a little bit out of my reach.
Reward myself.
Yeah, exactly.
Because when you're unhappy, you know, you need something to solve that wound and then you do that long enough and then you're stuck and you can't make a change or it becomes too difficult.
And, you know, I think it was Henry David Thoreau that said, you know, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Because he's so fucking good and his plan is so good.
But...
With boxing and kickboxing, you're standing in front of each other and you're hitting each other, period.
And there's no takedowns and there's no rear naked choke for the finish in the first round.
There's none of that.
There's slamming bones into your head trying to shut that melon off.
And ultimately, for me, I knew that I had to do something differently.
I was terrified.
And there was no future in it.
But because of that, I developed a real compassion for understanding how difficult it is.
I was 21. I had no children.
They'd repossessed my car, so I had no car anymore.
It was really like I could live on the cheap.
I could scratch by.
But if you're a person who is trying to change careers, and you have a family, and you have a mortgage, and you have a car that you lease, and you've got to pay for your kids' after-school activities, that is unbelievably hard.
And made a lot less money but was able to control my time.
And that was just a little bit before I changed the diet and started getting back into fitness.
But because I had control over my Because I didn't have a boss anymore, I could set up my work schedule the way that I want, like Tim Ferriss style, then it allowed me to be able to train at odd hours that wouldn't necessarily flow with somebody who had, you know, a 9 to 5 job.
But I was able to structure my life so that I could make that possible.
And again, it was just feeling like, you know, when you feel like you're guided to move in a certain direction, a certain path, you know?
When your car was repossessed and you were starting to do stand-up and move into that world, I'm sure you felt like this is what you wanted to be doing, this is what you're supposed to be doing, even if there was no real-world material affirmation of that initially.
We were in the middle of talking about changing your life and changing your diet, changing your path into something that you love.
That's something that we stress on this show as much as possible because it's something that someone doesn't tell you when you're growing up in the most formative period of your life.
They don't say, you're different than me.
Everyone's different.
You have to find what you're drawn to, find what you love, and then go chase that.
I love when I see young people that latch on to something that they love doing when they're young, whether it's playing the guitar or whatever it is, that they're just passionate about, and then they just become very self-directed about it.
I'm so jealous.
When I was a kid, I wish I had that.
My whole life kind of doing what I was supposed to and never really stopped to think like, well, what do I want?
Or what makes me happy?
Or what am I passionate about?
It just wasn't really part of my equation, you know?
And that just seems so wrong.
Sucks.
Yeah, it's terrible.
And it almost like it doesn't even matter what it is.
You know, everybody has something inside them that they probably, you know, Love doing or could be passionate about or could be good at or whatever.
Listen, I think that, look, not everyone can be an NBA basketball player or whatever.
So not everyone is innately gifted, but I think everybody inside of themselves has something that makes them happy.
And I think that if you pursue what makes you happy without getting so caught up in how am I going to make money doing this or there's no career in it or whatever, And living a little bit more faith-based with what you're doing and focusing more on the passion that we'd probably be better off.
And I think people would be happier if that was a priority.
I tweeted this yesterday that this company came up with this new light bulb that you can control your iPhone app.
You put all these light bulbs in your house and you can do all this crazy stuff with them, like change all their colors, change the colors, have them turn on, have them on timers that go off and on.
Well, they're probably mowing their lawn as they're doing it.
A lot of people do it while they're working, which is cool as fuck, because then they get to be a part of a conversation instead of just be sitting there screwing widgets together.
I stack it with podcasts because if I'm going out to ride my bike for a long day, an eight-hour training ride or something like that, I can't listen to music the whole time.
I'd go insane.
So I'll listen to your podcast, a couple other podcasts, and I just lose myself in the conversation.
He's coming from a very different place and his priorities and perspectives and all of that are so, just in the way he speaks, are so different from what we're used to.
You know, I think it's very important that the only way this future is going to be any brighter is if it's very important that we enlighten young people coming up to alternative passive thinking by you telling your story that you had gone down the exact correct path, you know, in some sort of a predetermined pattern to success which would equal success.
Happiness, supposedly, for you.
And then reaching that point of success.
You're not speculating.
You're one of the rare people that actually made it to the end of the game and went, this is horseshit.
Okay, let's get out of here.
You can't get trapped here.
Let's get the fuck out of here and try something different.
It has to be done.
That message, when that message is in some kid's earbud when he's on a train, you know, headed to his job or headed to school or whatever, that message can resonate and change thousands of people's lives.
I have had more fucking people come up to me in the past two years and say, your podcast changed my life, than...
Than any one thing that people have said to me other than fear is not a factor.
They probably said that more than anything else.
But that fucking theme keeps happening.
And a lot of it is nutrition and a lot of it is exercise.
But a lot of it also is just this...
Understanding that you're not alone in thinking that the standard path seems like shit.
You're not alone in that.
There's a lot of other people like us out there.
And we could all get pigeonholed into some ridiculous patterns that were created without individual personalities and unique traits and artistic intentions and qualities in mind.
If I could have done one thing when I was young, it was just to live as lean as possible and keep all those doors and options open so you don't get stuck in some place you don't want to be and make it more difficult for yourself to get out.
Yeah, I got out, but I could have easily just not gotten out.
I know a lot of people that didn't.
I know a lot of people that are postmen somewhere that really want to be a rock star.
There's a lot of weirdness in this world.
Most depressing things to be around is someone who never went for it.
The people that you know that never went for it, that had an idea in their head, whatever it is, be an author, whatever it is, whatever it is, they just never change.
I want to be a longshoreman.
I want to be a fucking professional fisherman.
I want to fucking do what those crab guys do on that crazy show.
Those guys go fishing for crab just to fucking know I'm alive.
If you have that thought in your head and you don't do it, you're living like a bitch, man.
The feeling that you get when you're around someone who just stayed on the couch, just never pursued anything, artistic, anything, physical, anything, anything.
For me, it always feels like...
One of the big things of happiness is seeing improvement.
Either seeing improvement in stuff that I'm working on, like comedy stuff, or seeing improvement in my jujitsu, or seeing improvement in playing pool, anything to me.
If I don't see improvement in things, then I get really bummed out.
I feel like I'm not doing anything.
I feel lazy.
I feel like I'm just getting by.
If I go four or five days where I'm not at least actively working on improving some aspect of my life, I feel totally lazy.
Do you remember the transitionary period where a lot of folks in the urban community had those little pagers that would send messages, and you could send a little message to somebody?
Meet me at the club.
Black folks were way ahead of the curve on that.
They were way ahead of the curve.
I never thought that would have caught on.
Like, what are you guys doing?
Are you texting?
I didn't even say texting.
It wasn't even called texting.
I was like, you're writing each other letters?
Like, why are you doing that?
And they were like, well, it gets loud in the club.
Right after they accused me of being racist, I went to Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles, and there's a dude standing right in front of the place, talking on his phone like this.
Oh, hell no!
Oh, hell no!
The other dude was talking loud.
You could hear the other dude like super loud.
Maybe he heard the Sheryl Crow story, and he's worried about brain tumors, but I don't think so.
I think there's something going on.
They even had a commercial.
Remember that commercial for Boost Mobile?
They would have their cell phones like, where you at?
They would talk into it!
They're not doing this.
They're not treating it like a white person phone.
Yeah, we're afraid to be in a fucking town without a cell phone on.
I mean, I feel bizarre if I'm in a town, like say, and it's like a place where you can walk around, and I leave my phone in my hotel room, and then I'll go downstairs and I'll just walk to a restaurant and sit down.
I feel fucking strange!
Like, I feel like I can't talk to anybody right now.
His name is Mike Callahan or whatever the fuck his real name is.
When, I think, the more we have that, the more we have, like, a sort of a transparency about, like, who, like, I think people are less likely to just lash out and have it become super negative.
By the way, tolerance and acceptance of people benefits your life very much directly.
It benefits the way you feel.
The more tolerant and accepting you are of people and the more you're just cool with people, The more positive interactions you'll have, the better your feeling in life will be.
And the negative shit that a lot of people project at people for no reason, what it really is, is your own shortcomings magnified through your personality traits.
I'm going hunting for the first time in October with Steve Rinella.
He's a guy who had a TV show on the Travel Channel called The Wild Within.
Now he's got a new one called The Meat Eater.
His original show was all about...
You know, sort of like living off the land.
And he would do a lot of things that were really similar to what people had to do in the 1800s.
Like he would kill a water buffalo with a musket and shit like that.
And in his new show, it's all about what you call fair chase hunting.
And one of the things that I've been really paying attention to a lot lately...
is the idea of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle being actually Like a physically benefiting experience for people and that there are certain amounts of, there's a certain system, a reward system that's in our bodies that is satisfied with growing your own food.
There's a certain reward system that's satisfied with the hunting and fishing and that our bodies are essentially the same as the bodies of people that lived 20,000 years ago.
There's very little genetic change and that we still have these reward systems, these primal feelings of satisfaction that are built into our very being as a human being in order to motivate us to do the correct things to survive and to carry on.
And me, personally, as a person who's a meat eater, I've never killed an animal ever.
You know, except accidentally, like, car accidents and shit.
You know, I've never, like, went hunting.
I've never...
Actually, I shot a squirrel with a BB when I was, like, little.
I think I might have killed that little guy.
Sorry.
Sorry, squirrel.
But what I'm saying is I've never hunted anything and killed what I ate.
And I don't know how I'm going to feel.
I might shoot a deer and be like, okay, fuck this.
I need to get some beats because I'm done with this.
Or I might go, well, you know what?
If I didn't shoot that thing, it would probably get hit by a car.
Or it would get killed by a coyote.
Or, you know, it's like it's going to die.
It's not going to live forever and become magical.
You don't put out, like, bait and leave food in a very certain spot over and over again so that you know the animals will be there.
In Texas, they actually have feeders where they have these giant drums that dispense food on a timer.
So in the morning, the deer just start walking in because they know they're going to get fed because most of the time you're not hunting there because they have...
Giant, what they call high-fence ranches, and these high-fence ranches, it's essentially like they've converted, they've done like a mixture of farming and hunting.
Because it's like, it's really like farming.
I mean, you're just harvesting meat.
You're in a blind, the animal walks out to the spot he goes to every day, goes to get his food, and Bob blew me!
His heart blows out of his chest and he's done.
He lies there at his legs kicking.
You turn him into meat and you cook him up.
And that's a way more humane solution for sure than a factory farm.
No doubt about it.
I'm not criticizing it, but that's not what Steve Rinella does.
What Steve Rinella does, he believes that the real...
Satisfaction comes from stalking the game, finding the right place to be, whether you're upwind or downwind, and getting away from the area where the animal can detect you, and stalking and hunting an animal the way people did thousands and thousands of years ago.
Anyway, this guy went down to the Copper Canyon in Mexico, which is this really remote area I think it's in the northern part of Mexico, but below the Arizona border somewhere.
And it's like a land lost in time.
Like, it's impossible to get in and out of there.
And there are these tribes in there called the Tarahumara.
And they're like this It's a population of endurance runners that essentially run barefoot.
They have little sandals or whatever.
And they'll run incredible distances.
And in the course of the book, he gets to sort of commune with these people and it goes into kind of like ultra running and the barefoot running movement and the history of how the running, you know, how Nike Sort of created this business around running shoes.
It's fascinating, but one of the things he talks about is this theory that man evolved as a persistent hunter and that we evolved to be endurance runners because we would go to We could chase down these animals that are faster than us, that have much more fast twitch muscle.
You can't run as fast as them.
But eventually, they get exhausted.
Like, they can't run days at a time.
And these humans would just patiently People still do it today.
Right.
So the idea that we were sort of bred to be endurance athletes or runners as a result of this That's fascinating.
Wouldn't it be fascinating if we really knew for sure?
It's like really funny when you have like things like that like how did we develop this ability to do this?
When did they figure out about persistence hunting and running?
It would be really amazing if we could know for sure.
It's so funny about how much of like the past of human beings is like This weird just ideas where you're trying to like piece it together and like formulate like a vision of how things went down.
It's really hard to just extrapolate that across you know and apply it to a certain nutritional way of living like you know with paleo it's sort of all right well paleolithic but you know how many how many thousands of years ago are we talking about or millions of years ago four million forty million forty thousand Right, what is it where your body accepts it?
And what part of the world and, you know, certain peoples evolved to, you know, had an approach to food because of what was available to them in a different way than somewhere else.
And piecing that puzzle together is, you know, I mean, it's tricky.
And they've just started finding some really interesting things that show that you might be dealing with far, far older societies than we think in the first place.
Like, they're always pushing the dates back of, like, when people figured certain things out.
Like, there's some cave art now that they've discovered now that they're looking at, like, 40,000-plus years ago.
And, like, okay, this is, like, this throws things way back.
You know, there's...
It's really a fascinating thing, trying to piece together what human beings, how we become what we are right now, and what led us to this point, this apex of 2012, the whole process of hunter and gathering.
I mean, that's what a lot of people say, the thing went wrong when we developed agriculture.
That's when the thing went wrong.
So we figured out how to have a surplus, because then we had to defend that surplus, and then we had this big fucking fort.
Is there a way to inspire in the classroom a different way of looking at things so that people don't grow up to be the same fucked up pattern monkeys over and over and over again?
Well, it's weird, because in some ways I feel like it's changing and it's getting better, and then in other ways I feel like it's moving backwards.
I mean, when you have the internet and you have all this unbelievable, you know, amount of information available to you where you can find out anything in an instant and you can get to the bottom of, you know, what's happening in subject X, that's like a good thing, right?
Like, it pulls the covers on a lot of people and a lot of organizations and what have you.
And yet, at the same time, you have traditional media that's becoming even more and more entrenched.
You know, it's sort of like, remember when we were kids?
It was like the local news and that was how you got your news, you know?
And you're going to believe what they tell you.
And now, with the internet, you watch the news and you're like, well, I don't know if that's the whole story.
And why aren't they saying this?
And it's easy to go online and extrapolate upon that and find out more and figure out why they're not telling you this part of the story or that.
Whereas you didn't have that before.
Yet at the same time, I feel like we're more and more entrenched in this fear-based culture in which there's a clampdown.
And I think, believe it or not, without sounding grandiose, conversations like this are a part of the decision-making process.
It's a part of how society looks at it, about how we approach it, because there's a lot of people that are like you that realize that this is not natural.
This whole thing is bizarre, and it can go wrong.
It can all go wrong.
This fear-based culture that you brought up, the idea of the lack of civil liberties, the lack of privacy that we really have in this country now, the laws that are being passed over and over again that allow people to Look into your stuff because you might be a terrorist.
How did we not learn from the McCarthy era?
How did we not learn that the way is not to crack down?
We're distracted by our iPhones and the Kardashians.
You know what I mean?
People are...
There is a malaise.
And technology plays a huge part in that, in distracting us.
Again, it's like the Matrix.
It's crazy.
It's weird because...
You used to be, if you were to talk about this kind of stuff or propose any of these ideas, you were just a crazy conspiracy theorist.
But now, there's too many crazy things going on to not, you know, realize that there's a lot of truth to all this stuff.
I mean, everything from, like, the label on the front of a food product that you buy that's telling you this and that, you turn around and look at the nutrition facts panel and you realize it's nonsense.
It's weird because there's a bunch of different theories and no one seems to know what the fuck it is.
Some people say it's cell phones and that the extra cell phone signals are fucking with the bees.
And I've talked to experts and they say there's no doubt about it that it has an effect on the bees.
That the frequency that they operate in, that they can pick up bands of radio waves and things because of their antenna.
I mean, they communicate with each other.
We had a thing on Fear Factor once where we covered these people in bees.
And when we were out in this place called Sable Ranch, and it's a huge ranch, and a natural hive of bees was at the ranch.
So they have all these bees on these people.
These local bees came flying in, like a giant group of them, and they all made a huge cloud in the sky.
And the bee handler was like, alright, everybody, let's back away from this.
Everybody get way back.
They've got to work this out.
So they worked it out.
They communicated with each other, and they found out who was who, and then the local bees separated.
And they let the bees that were this guy's honeybees, the trained bees, they're never trained, the contained bees, I guess you would say, let them go about their business.
But it's like there was some communication going on.
Shout out to the OPDC Hub, a raw milk store where you can buy raw milk in L.A. Yeah, oops, every now and then it sickens 10 people.
Raw milk sickens 10 people.
Well, you know, the thing about raw milk is, it's like the thing, you're not supposed to be able to take milk, and it sits on the couch, or it sits rather in the refrigerator for a fucking week and a half, and it's still good.
That's crazy!
That doesn't exist in nature.
You can't take a steak and leave it in your fridge for a week and a half.
It looks like shit.
It smells terrible.
Because it's rotting.
That's going on with your milk, too.
At a certain point in time, it's not going to be good anymore.
Grass-fed is a big issue now with a lot of people.
Specifically, before we end this, I wanted to find out, what is wrong with what the paleo guys are saying, in your opinion, and what's faulty about their thinking?
Yeah, I mean, we were hunter and gatherer, so there's a gathering part to that that gets overlooked in favor of the hunting part, because that's a little sexier, I guess.
It is sexy as fuck.
But the idea of eating, you know, such a low, like the no grain thing, the no fruit thing, all of that to, you know, focus on the meat, the saturated fat, the high protein, the low carbohydrate is sort of,
in a certain respect, is kind of an extrapolation of the Atkins diet, you know, which is where this whole idea of, you know, this way of eating, which helps you lose weight relatively quickly, but also Can cause you problems with ketosis and eating too much protein, which can be damaging.
As an athlete, I don't know how you're supposed to function without eating more carbohydrates.
I couldn't do it without eating plenty of grains and fruit.
And that's just speaking from my own experience.
But my biggest thing is, again, going back to what we talked about earlier, which is This incredible incidence of Western disease that we have to deal with here.
And when people are dropping dead of heart attacks left and right, and it's a gigantic problem.
Diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, all these kinds of things.
And there are studies that link animal products to the incidence of these disease.
To me, it makes more sense to eat plant-based.
And the studies show that when you eat a plant-based diet, you can actually prevent yourself from contracting these essentially food-borne illnesses.
So it's not that I have some huge beef with paleo, per se.
I'm just more pro-plant-based diet.
And again, I think there's a lot of cool stuff about paleo.
Like, I love the evolutionary fitness aspect of it.
You know, the sort of return to Moving your body and the kettle balls and the focus on core strength and how that birthed CrossFit and all of that.
I think that stuff's fantastic.
I think that a plant-based diet and a paleo diet have a lot more in common than they do differences when compared to a standard American diet, for sure.
I know, but the problem is that If you ask people, 90% of people, if you ask them, will tell you they eat healthy, when in fact it's probably like 1% of people that actually eat healthy, or everybody wouldn't be keeling over with heart disease.
And I think that heart disease starts when you're a teenager.
You start clogging those arteries at a very young age, and you hear these stories of like, oh, I had no symptoms, and then I keeled over from a heart attack.
You've been working on that disease for 20 years.
You know what I mean?
And it's a real problem.
And it just doesn't need to exist.
And so from everything that I've read, the best way to prevent that is to cut the meat and dairy out of your diet.
And the paleo guys seem to point to the fact that there's an actual benefit to eating meat and that a vegetarian diet or a vegan diet does not have All the nutritional benefits of meat-eating, protein-eating diets.
I don't know why they say that, because I don't believe that to be true.
I mean, if they're saying that you can't thrive on a vegan diet, I mean, it's an ill-founded statement.
I mean, I think even Rob himself said, you know, lots of guys do well on a vegan diet, and he said he tried a vegan diet, and ultimately he lost a ton of weight.
I think he said he lost a whole bunch of weight or whatever.
And I can't remember why he said he decided to not do it anymore, whether he wasn't feeling good or whatever, but I'd be interested in knowing what it was that he was eating.
Because I think most people that say, yeah, I tried a vegan diet, it didn't work for me, or I felt lousy.
Well, I don't know what that means, you know?
I mean, you can be a junk food vegan and eat terribly and be nutrient deprived for sure, you know?
So it's not about eating tofurkey and fake chicken fingers, it's about the whole foods, you know, the whole food plant-based diet.
And that means You know, similar to paleo, getting rid of the oils, you know, or, you know, reducing the oils.
Well, not the saturated fats, but the other fats.
I mean, most of the plant-based oils don't have saturated.
These are the people that are, this is like the Dr. Esselstyn, the T. Colin Campbell, like the hardcores or whatever, and they're speaking to people that have suffered heart attacks or, you know, are in seriously poor health and are in a position where they really need to reverse a condition that they're in.
So it's an extreme situation.
Personally, I eat oils.
I put coconut oil in my morning Vitamix.
I like olive oil in my dressing or whatever.
I try not to overdo it.
I'm judicious about it.
But I feel like I need that in order to get the calories that I need to train the way that I want to train.
Not only that, they're a very efficient source of energy, especially in endurance sports, because every gram of fat has much more, whatever it is, kilojoules of energy than a gram of sugar or gram of carbohydrate.
In endurance sports, you're always looking at what zone of exertion you're training in.
And that can be calculated by heart rate, like wearing a heart rate monitor or on a bike by a power meter that measures the amount of watts, like the force that you're exerting on the pedal.
And you can be very specific about what your exertion level is and how that correlates to which energy mechanism you're using.
And so when you're an endurance athlete, you want to really emphasize the fat burning zone, which is like the lower intensity, the aerobic zone of energy, which is kind of like Just below that level where you feel like you're getting a little too winded.
You know what I mean?
And it's a certain level of exertion in which you're metabolizing fat for energy as opposed to glycogen.
And if you're metabolizing fat for energy, you can essentially go all day.
The more you train that mechanism, it gets more and more efficient.
But if your exertion ramps up and you're burning glycogen all of a sudden for energy, You're only going to be able to go about 90 minutes before you run out of fuel.
You're training your body to utilize fat for energy.
So it's not like you're, you know, there's a difference between dietary fat, subcutaneous fat, but we all have, no matter how lean you are and how matter, you know, I've gotten very, very lean, you still have a lot of, you know, fat in your system that's available as an energy resource.
By being very specific about the training zones and the exertion levels that you're doing, whether it's running, swimming, or biking.
So, for example, cycling is like a perfect machine for the human because you can rig it all up to a computer and you can be very, very specific about what your output is.
You have a heart rate monitor.
The bikes these days have a computer on them, right?
So you have your power meter, which registers the force you're exerting on the pedals in watts.
And then you can extrapolate that out after a ride, what your average watts are for that ride.
And then you balance that against what your heart rate was at that particular watts, what the grade, you know, how much elevation gain you had, what the exterior temperature is.
And you can create these insane graphs and look at it and, like, make judgment calls about where your fitness is, where your weaknesses are, and adjust your training program accordingly.
And so when you're training for Endurance or ultra-endurance, again, it goes back to really emphasizing that fat burning zone, that aerobic zone.
Because the more efficient you can be at that, you can improve your speed without doing that much speed work.
I'm not saying this very articulately.
I'll give you an example.
When I first started doing this endurance stuff and wanted to stay in my zone two, which is the aerobic zone, I would have to keep my heart rate when I was running below about 145. Initially, When I first started running, if I ran faster than like a 9 or a 9.30 pace, my heart rate would go over 145. And when it went over 145, I knew I was no longer in the fat burning zone and I was getting into the glycogen burning zone.
But by staying in that specific heart rate region over time, my pace increased without my heart rate going up, which is telling me that I'm becoming a more efficient athlete.
At a certain level of exertion, my body is becoming faster and more efficient.
And so, for example, when I first started doing this training and I'd go out for these crazy long training sessions, I'd come back, I was starving, I'd be eating, you know, I just couldn't eat enough food.
Now, the toll that it, the tax on my body for doing a similar workout, like four or five years later, Is de minimis compared to what it was before.
So actually my appetite has gone down, even though the training has been the same, if not more difficult.
Well, you know, coming from swimming and what it was like in the 80s, you know, it was always, you know, go hard or go home and no pain, no gain.
It's like if I had an hour to work out and I was going to go for a run, just run as hard as I can, you know, as fast as I can in that given hour and that's the best workout that I'm going to get.
And actually, you know, the truth couldn't be more different.
So if you want to get better, and that's the problem with a lot of sort of amateur athletes that want to do marathons or 10Ks or even like shorter distance triathlons, by training that way of just kind of using the time allotted and going as hard as you can in that allotted period of time, you're going to reach a certain level of fitness and aptitude in what you're trying to do, but you're very quickly going to hit a glass ceiling and you're going to plateau and you're not going to be able to break through.
The way to break through is to step it back and really, again, go back to building that foundation from the ground up and focusing on if you slow down and really focus on improving your aerobic efficiency, and it's time consuming.
It takes time to do this.
Then you are building a platform upon which that speed work which you will do later is going to catapult you into a new realm of proficiency.
Well, it's a little bit different because endurance sports are so much about efficiency of movement, you know, and over a prolonged period of time, whereas something like jujitsu or what have you is about explosive speed.
But at the same time, you're going to be in the ring for a prolonged period of time.
If you have the sort of lung capacity and stamina to endure longer than your competitor, so that you're fresher in that last round than he is, then you're going to have an advantage.
So I think that what that would mean, and certainly I'm no expert in martial arts or what have you, so I don't want to get schooled for saying the wrong thing, but it would seem to me that in the off-season, Quite a bit of time before you get into your training camps leading up to a fight, you would focus on doing a lot of base aerobic training work to kind of lay that endurance foundation.
And then you build upon that with the specific strength and explosive speed exercises to, you know, have that pyramid come to a peak when it comes to fight day.
It's like my personal story, but it has a lot about how I sort of reinvented myself as an athlete and how I had to kind of relearn some certain principles about fitness that I grappled with and didn't understand initially that...
Sort of allowed me, I believe, to reach a new level of fitness heights that I certainly didn't think was possible, particularly as a middle-aged guy.
Yeah, and I was training for a very specific thing that is, you know, not what most people are training for.
The kind of principles that we were just talking about, I think, are applicable to, you know, the sort of weekend warrior athlete, whether you want to, you know, go out and be able to feel good in your pickup basketball game or touch football or whatever it is, it's how to use your time-crunched days effectively, you know, rather than just going out haphazardly and saying, I'm going to blast this 30 minutes on the treadmill and do it time and time again and wonder why you're never getting any faster.
Go to deskquad.tv, you dirty bitches, and pick yourself up some funky-ass cat t-shirts.
And they come with a free sticker, too, so you put it on your call.
They don't come with a free sticker.
I thought you said you were sending those stickers.
No, you can order stickers coming soon.
Pay for that sticker, hooker.
I mean, Go get yourself a sticker.
But those, you can identify fellow deskwaters in parking lots and sheds.
Good.
So you know what's up.
A guy just tweeted me so that his neighbor, who he never met before, knocked on his door when he heard he was listening to this podcast.
He heard my voice booming out of his living room.
And so the neighbor knocked on.
He's like, man, I fucking love that podcast.
Thanks, everybody.
I can't thank you guys enough for being the coolest crowds ever.
Sacramento was fucking completely off the chain.
I never imagined that we would have these kind of crowds on a regular basis.
It's really amazing, and we appreciate the fuck out of it.
What I said earlier is not lip service.
I really do feel a massive obligation to you guys.
I know that this has become a part of your life, and it's a part of our life, too.
Everything we're doing, Brian and I, is moving towards making sure we just keep doing more of this, keep digging deeper, keep having more people, more cool people like Rich Roll come on the show.
And tomorrow, Mac Danzig will be on, as I said, as will the director of Cocaine Cowboys, Billy Corbin, who's also a cool motherfucker.
Thanks to Alienware MMA for sending us some cool-ass laptops that Brian runs all the YouTube videos on.
If you go to follow them on Twitter, AlienMMA on Twitter, and thanks to Onnit.com.
Use the code name ROGAN, O-N-N-I-T. The code name ROGAN will save you 10% off any and all supplements.
All right, you fucking freaks.
Tomorrow we have a double podcast day.
So first we'll be Mac Danzig, and then it will be Joey Diaz and Billy Corbin.
And then we have a spectacular show tomorrow night at the Ice House Comedy Club.
It is Dom Irera.
It is Duncan Trussell, Doug Benson, Brian Redband, Joey Diaz.
The list goes on.
And whoever winds up coming by, they can get on stage too.