Tim Ferriss joins Joe Rogan to debate pellet grills vs. toxic thermos paint, praising Green Mountain’s precision while Redban questions durability. Ferriss warns U.S. farms face industrial takeover from retiring owners, linking consumer choices—like organic produce—to sustainability. He shares sniper training with L.A. SWAT and hunting insights, including intuitive field dressing despite prior anatomical knowledge. Skeptical but open-minded Rogan engages on neuroimaging studies at UCSF, surveillance risks (FISA, Petraeus), and climate-driven crises like disease spread from overpopulation. Ferriss’s banned 4-Hour Chef and Amazon’s publishing dominance highlight shifting retail dynamics, while Rogan muses on local food’s decline—suggesting shared responsibility could reshape modern consumption. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh shit you dirty bitches internationally known and locally recognized just recently escaped from the government of Canada snuck across they border back to the United States you must be so tired back to the belly of the beast back to the inside of the balls of the dick that's fucking the world America I fucking love Montreal, dude.
I'm a little tired, but we'll talk more.
The Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by several things.
But before that, before we even bring up the sponsors, I want to thank Green Mountain Grills for hooking me up with this fucking badass grill.
They hooked me up with one of these pellet grills.
It's hardwood pellets.
They essentially take sawdust, and they make these pellets out of it, and they use it to power your grill, and it all goes through.
It's all electrically fed, so it keeps the temperature exactly the same.
Apparently, all these...
This dude, Eric, who set it up, gave me the 411. All these grills that they use for these barbecue competitions, they all use pellet grills now.
And the way these pellet grills work is you don't have to light anything, you don't have to fucking use lighter fluid, but it's still wood.
And what it does is it all gets done in a hot coil, and slowly but surely the pellets get fed through a machine to the hot coil.
But you can cook, like, shoulders on these things.
Like, you could do, like, crazy shit.
Like, cook, like, briskets and stuff.
Like, stuff that you would never do because you're not going to be the smart guy who's out there, like, knowing exactly how much firewood to put in the thing.
Because, you know, if you're, like, smoking something the traditional way, you, like, have a That shit's whack, okay?
You gotta get up in the middle of the night and go put some wood in there because your fucking, your meats are gonna get cold?
That's stupid as fuck.
You don't have to do that anymore.
Although there is something pretty badass about that.
There's something very craftsman about that, about getting up in the middle of the night and stoking the fire.
Apparently there's this place in Austin, Texas that has barbecue that's fucking insane.
Ari Shaffir went there, and I saw it on the Anthony Bourdain show too.
It started off as a food truck, and this guy developed this way of making brisket that's fucking insane, and he does it totally old school.
He gets up in the middle of the night, throws wood in the fire.
He knows the right amount of shit to spray on the meat.
It's all just simple, salt and pepper and a little vinegar or something, I don't know, water, whatever the fuck he's using.
But apparently it's unbelievable.
But let's be realistic, folks.
You're not that fucking guy, okay?
And if you get one of these Green Mountain grills, you can make some ribs.
A lot of people didn't believe in the Joe Rogan experience.
They thought that maybe we're a tad fringe.
Maybe we're half-baked, as it were.
Not that technical.
Well, we're slightly technically oriented.
You're far more technically oriented than I am.
But the reality is, it's a great fit for us, this tin company.
The reason being that it's a company that's not trying to rip anybody off.
They're trying to make a respectable profit, but they're not offering you all the sneaky shit that exists in regular cell phone contracts.
First of all, the contract itself...
You can't just get a phone.
You have to get a contract with someone to get that phone activated.
And in most cases, what that means is, if you want to cancel your service, you have to pay.
What they do is, apparently, they sort of move the numbers around when you buy a phone.
Say if you want to buy an iPhone.
And if you go to any big name store, whatever big name cell phone company name the name, when you're paying X amount of money, it's normally more than that.
So they take that money away from the price to sort of entice you into it.
But the deal is, if you try to take that phone and then just cancel in a month and take your X amount of dollar savings, they'll...
They would lose a lot of money that way.
So the way they do it is they make you pay that back if you cancel.
Ting doesn't fuck with that.
Ting makes it very simple.
They offer you the best Android phones you can get.
Really cool ones.
Like I have the Samsung Galaxy S3. And that's the one that's coming to Brian too.
And if you go to rogan.ting.com Fuck, I think that's it.
Yeah.
Rogan.ting.com.
They'll give you $50 off of any Android phone when you start up.
They're on the Sprint backbone, so you don't have to worry about any wonky fucking backwood service.
It's an actual real top-flight cellular backbone.
And because of that, they can offer you whatever A big-name company can offer you as well as offer you what this ethical small company is trying to provide.
Or if you're really gangster, get one of them Virgin Mobile fucking flip phones and pretend you use that shit for anything other than dick.
Anybody sees you entering their number into that and knows, oh, this motherfucker doesn't care about me.
This motherfucker's not here for me.
Rogan.ting.com, excellent company.
They have a couple of things going for them that's great, besides the fact that you don't have contracts.
One of them is that if you, they have certain tiers, like, you know, use X amount of minutes.
I don't know the exact system they have or the plans that they have, but what I do know is if you use what a lower plan would be, they credit you on your next bill.
So no one's trying to rip you off.
They're trying to offer you the best cell phone service available in a way that's very ethical, in a way that I think is very generous, and it makes you feel better about what you're dealing with because you know what else is out there.
If you could deal with a company like this, I like to vote with my money.
And when there's a company like this that comes around that's doing something cool like this, I like to support it.
And so that's why they're a part of the podcast.
We're also brought to you by Onnit.com.
And if you've ever been to Onnit before, we've got a whole bunch of new shit, man.
Like fucking buffalo jerky.
It's this tonka buffalo jerky that's made with cranberries.
We've got killer bee honey.
Why do we have killer bee honey?
Because it's gangster as fuck.
That's why.
It's gangster as fuck to have killer bee honey, man.
You can't read my fucking mind because no kids from the past ever got fish oil pills.
What if their brains start developing out of control and it's the next stage of evolution?
Or not.
We also sell battle ropes and kettle bells.
We sell fitness equipment.
The type of shit that we sell is all the type of shit that I would use.
We also have DVDs now.
For a while, people were saying, what's the best workout you can do online?
Well, there's one that I always talked up, so we just decided to start selling it.
It's called the Extreme Kettlebell Cardio DVD. And this guy is a fucking animal.
My God, it's Keith Weber.
Fuck what a workout this is.
It's so brutal.
I do this shit.
We'll get to that.
I do this thing with just 35 pounds and you feel like such a pussy.
It's amazing how tired you can get with just 35 pounds.
You'd be amazed at like...
Everybody thinks that it's hard to go to the gym and lift some weights.
Lifting weights is easy.
It's really easy.
You know what's really hard?
Lifting something that's not that heavy...
A lot of times.
And doing it with your whole body over and over and over and over and over again.
You're breaking.
Everything just breaks down.
And it's pretty safe because of the fact it's this unbelievable workout in a short amount of time.
But you're not doing the type of things that you do when you blow out discs and really fuck yourself up.
Which is what a lot of people do when they start lifting heavy weights.
Everybody wants to be super big.
And the way to get super big is you gotta do deadlifts and squats and all that shit with heavy weights so that your body goes, oh Jesus, we gotta get bigger.
Well, with kettlebells, the beautiful thing is you just get stronger.
It just makes your body acclimated to doing a lot of physical work that will really manifest itself in real life situations.
Because you're using your body all as one unit, too.
It'll help you with picking up stuff.
It'll help you If you do any sort of sport, it'll help you.
But I'm a huge, huge fan of kettlebells.
There's a bunch of schools of thought.
Steve Maxwell believes in lower weight, higher repetition, clean form, and he's one of the masters of it.
As is Mike Mahler, who's more of a really heavyweight, smaller reps guy.
That guy's yoked as fuck, and he's a vegan too, which is incredible.
I'm rambling.
It's official.
Listen, folks.
Go to Onnit.com.
Get yourself some hemp protein powder.
You will not test positive.
Don't worry.
People need to have that explained to them over and over again.
Hemp protein powder is one of the best, most efficient protein powders for your body to process.
But there's no THC in it.
So you can eat it and it does not come up in your system.
Whereas, like, poppy seeds will come up as morphine or heroin.
You don't have to worry about that.
Hemp is completely non-psychoactive.
But unfortunately, we live in retarded times.
And we cannot grow this plant in America.
We have to actually...
It's legal to have.
You can even buy it.
You can bring it over here.
You can import it.
Nobody has a problem with that.
But you cannot grow it.
How much sense does that make?
Zero!
So they grow it in Canada.
So they grow it in Canada and we have to buy it.
We can't even employ American farmers.
We wanted to start a farm.
We were like, it would be beautiful because we know that Vermont has legal hemp manufacturing.
And now I believe because of what happened, the law that got passed in Colorado and Washington.
I think at least in one of those states you're supposed to be allowed to grow hemp now too.
But the government will arrest you.
That's the bottom line on it.
It's all based on ignorance.
It's a completely non-psychoactive version of the cannabis plant.
It's not the same thing as marijuana and it's illegal all because of it as a commodity.
They hold it down and they keep it from farmers because it could take away a lot of different things, take them out of the market, a lot of different things that we consider standard like ropes, nylon ropes.
Well actually hemp is a better fucking rope.
Clothes, clothes are made out of cotton.
Actually if they were made out of hemp they'd be better, they're more durable.
Paper.
It makes way better paper.
It makes so many things better.
And it's illegal.
And it doesn't get you high.
The whole thing is fucking crazy.
If it looked completely different than pot and had a completely different name and was not related but was going through the same circumstances, people would be up in arms as they should be.
Farmers should be up in arms about this because it's an incredibly...
Good plant to have on your soil.
You can replenish your crops in a short amount of time.
It grows very fast.
It's very healthy.
You don't need pesticides.
It's an incredibly strong plant.
It's good for so many different fucking things.
And if you try to grow it, they'll put you in a cage.
They will take all your money.
They will separate you from your family.
They will lock you in a cage if you try to grow this awesome plant.
So that's why hemp protein powder costs so much, folks.
It's fucking stupid.
And it's fucking ridiculous.
In 2012, wake up, you freaks.
Wake the fuck up.
Go get yourself some Alpha Brain and think this shit through.
Go get yourself a blender.
We can no longer offer the Blendtec blenders with a free hemp force.
They have rules as to how you sell shit because then it just makes it too desirable.
Yeah, there's a really good book called The Biography of a Dollar, which talks about just the development of the currency of the U.S. dollar and where it is today.
And the conclusion of all of those books is basically like, buy shotguns, buy food, get something in a different currency.
And what was kind of wild is, so when I was looking at the, doing research for The 4-Hour Chef and got into this, the wild stuff, and we can talk about that, but like the foraging and hunting and all these things I'd never done.
And I went a little bit off the rails and started meeting all these survivalists and preppers and whatnot.
And so I ended up writing like 150 pages I had to cut because I just went ballistic in more ways than one, just researching all this shit.
And I had a number of close friends in San Francisco, New York, thought I was fucking nuts.
That there could be an anthill that exists in a field and it's a big anthill and these ants have been working in this anthill for God knows how long and they only live for like a short amount of time so it's been there long before they were ever born.
This anthill has existed in its many fucking complicated caverns and then one day this little kid comes along and stomps the fucking shit out of that anthill and no one saw it coming.
It never happened before so they never even considered it.
They just fucking go about their day and this little kid comes along and stomps the shit out of that anthill.
And that's exactly what happened with Hurricane Katrina.
And you start thinking about, let's just say, climate change, and then you look at the wealth Concentration in the first 10 to 20 miles of every coastline.
It's like 80% of the world's wealth would just be wiped out if there's a dramatic temperature change.
And with Hurricane Sandy, what's not amusing, it's depressingly amusing to me is when people are like, oh, that's like one in a hundred, one in a million.
And if you look at, there was a piece in Nature magazine, this is just in the last, I think, few months, where they said, if climate change continues as predicted, 100-year storms will happen every three years.
Jesus!
I took a training course in San Francisco that was done by the police department and the fire department, which was the Northern California Emergency Response Training, NERT. And in the first class, this is the police, this isn't some wacko, paranoid, Doomsday predictor, he said, alright, let's do an exercise.
How many people are there in San Francisco?
Some are like, well, whatever, 800,000, right?
Okay, if everyone's commuting in, like, a couple million, whatever it might be.
Okay, how many fire engines do you think there are in San Francisco?
And everyone's like, 100, 250, whatever it was.
It was something like 19. And he said, what that means is, if you look at, like, the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, it could be 7 to 10 days before anybody gets to you.
No, there's no possible response that would cover it.
And so what I figured out is I started doing the math and I was like, well, I spend, because I've broken myself like a thousand times, I spend $500, $600 a month on health insurance and I don't even have 20 gallons of water and food And a shotgun.
So I met Steve when I was investigating how to reconnect with ingredients as part of this book.
And I think above and beyond that, how to correct manual illiteracy.
So one of the things that really started to bother me in the last few years is I looked at what my dad could do and my granddad could do.
I can't Fix half the things on my car.
I can't do basic, like, woodwork.
I can't do any of that shit.
And I realized it was really causing me a lot of anxiety not to build things with my hands.
So food and foraging and all this stuff became another way, or one way, to try to reclaim that.
And then Steve I met through a bunch of different random circumstances.
And what he countered was my image of a hunter.
Because growing up on Long Island, I had a lot of injured deer come across my property from people who didn't know how to bow hunt.
Beer cans on the side of my driveway.
And I just developed this real...
I just saw them as really responsible, wasteful, kind of jerk-offs.
And then I met Steve, and so I'll give a little...
You've probably heard this story, but what blew me away about Steve is he'll say, look, there are a lot of better hunters than me, although he's a really good hunter.
And he'll say, there are a lot of better cooks than me, but I'm a decent cook.
But there are very few people who can put them together.
And so he took, for one of his books, I guess it was the Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine.
He took this 1906 Escoffier banquet.
Escoffier is like the grandfather of French cuisine.
Three-day banquet, like 40 different dishes, with all this weird shit.
Stingrays and quail stuffed with sea urchin or who the fuck knows.
It's better for you than cows that you buy in a store that have been fed corn and other unnatural things for cows.
It's way healthier for you.
My experience was that my whole life I had thought about it one way and then that one trip home I started reconsidering like this is fucking crazy and then I started looking at but there was no internet back then you know so I'd have to like read a book which is really annoying I've sat down there and I mean I don't mind reading a book now But when I was 20 or whatever the fuck this was, why the fuck are there so many deers?
And then as I looked into all this shit, I realized there's arguments about managing them.
There's the fishing game and the hunters and everyone has to come to an agreement of how many there are.
I go, this is crazy.
They're like rats.
They're like giant rats.
Giant rats that run in front of your car and commit suicide.
Well, they'll hit it with a bow, and then instead of waiting for it to die, they'll chase it, and it'll run around, run around, run around, run around for like an hour, right?
And again, I'm super novice, but based on what Steve told me also, depending on what gender deer you hit and if it's during mating season or not, if you hit a ruddy buck that is just pumped full of naturally occurring hormones, then I can end up being pretty...
Well, he knows what he's doing in all aspects of the whole hunting thing.
His attachment to it isn't just hunting, it's also to the history of the United States and the people that lived in the land, the American Indian heritage, and the stories.
He had some amazing American Indian stories.
I should say Native American stories.
Really, really interesting stuff about that whole area where we went to Montana, to the Missouri River.
And then lo and behold, never got dark because we were above the Arctic Circle.
And we had two huge grizzly bears repeatedly try to come into our camp because the people before us had left a fucking gut pile of caribou like, I don't know, 200 yards upwind.
So we had these two huge bears come in and Steve was so funny because everyone's like, oh fuck, grizzly bear, like 10 o'clock.
And it's like, I don't know, ETA three minutes.
And then Steve found out his cell phone had been in the bottom of his bag and was soaked with...
And he's like, fuck!
My fucking cell phone!
Everyone's like, Steve, uh, grizzly bear, ETA three minutes.
He's like, my fucking cell phone!
He's like, so unconcerned about this grizzly bear.
And then he's just like, alright, fine, fuck it.
And he picks up a shotgun and walks over with birdshot and starts firing it off and waving his arms and scaring it off from like...
How hard it is to kill an animal like that, depending on the circumstances.
I was talking to a friend of mine who's a Navy SEAL and he's still enlisted.
I mean, he does deployments and everything, but he was at one point in Africa and these villagers in sort of the downtime knew these guys were with the military and they said, hey, could you help us call this herd of water buffalo because they're destroying all our property and blah, blah, blah.
We can make Food out of the buffalo that you kill?
They're like, sure.
So they had these long-range sniping rifles, and he's a damn good shot.
I've done some training with him.
And he said that he shot a water buffalo right in the corner of the eye.
Well, when I was in Africa doing research for this book, too, I went to India, Japan, all over the place, and when we were in South Africa, water buff will kill everybody.
I mean, people are afraid of the lions, but if you meet, let's say, the Maasai Mara, these warriors who jump up and down, they're famous for the red robes, they're not afraid of lions at all.
They'll walk off into the darkness with their big walking stick, going from one village to the next.
They're like, eh, big house cats will scare them off.
Because I think mountain lion more is a stalk and pounce type of animal as opposed to the endurance running.
I don't know if you've seen Planet Earth, the series where they have an aerial shot of wolves hunting...
I think it was a caribou.
It may have been an elk.
And how they basically...
The wolves would run this trippiest thing when you see it from the air.
They're almost like a peloton in the Tour de France, so they have the wolf in the front who's tiring out the caribou, and then the replacement runner will come from the back and fill in, and that guy will drop back.
And so they just run this relay race where they tag in and tag out.
When we were camping, what was great is we had these fucking...
Bags of wine because they were from the boxes but they've been taken out and they look just like an IV bag.
So I've been like fantasizing about getting these like rolling carts from the hospital like supply store and just getting fucking IV bags of wine that people can drink through like a camelback at dinner just to creep the shit out of everybody.
So we had to be really careful about keeping all the meat cool.
That's part of the reasons that you need to One of the reasons you need to remove the internal organs so quickly is so that the meat doesn't spoil.
What was super trippy for me, because I've just never experienced anything quite like it, was when I was doing the field dressing, maybe a minute or two into the process, I just felt like I had done it before.
I had this hardwiring moment where I was just really good at it.
That doesn't happen with many things.
It made me think about how do orphaned cats know how to hunt?
But I never read about the field dressing because I wanted to have an intellectually honest first experience for my readers and to be able to convey that to them.
So I did not study butchering, field dressing, anything.
The only thing I studied was the marksmanship because I didn't want to fuck it up.
One of the things I liked about his show, as opposed to a lot of other hunting shows, was the fact that he did do a lot of the field dressing on the air.
He did show you what was going on.
So I had a better sense of it.
I'd seen a lot of hunting shows before.
I'd watched Ted Nugent's show a lot.
But he doesn't clean them as much.
He'll do it occasionally.
But Steve did it quite a bit.
And it's very, you know, you get to see, like, that's realistic shit, man.
Like, you really see what an animal's...
Like, when you get a steak, you know, okay, let's back it up.
Here's the animal.
Now it's dropped.
Now you open it, and then you turn it into steak.
Like, whoa, that's a completely different experience.
And it was fascinating to go through it for the first time, but also document the whole thing in terms of photos and videos and everything else, all the way until that night when we had...
Yeah, some backstraps, which are kind of like the spinal erectors.
Yeah, well, the backstraps, what was trippy about that, because I think about anatomy just in terms of training and weightlifting, deadlifts and blah, blah, blah.
And so I was thinking, oh, backstraps.
And so then I went back to where we were staying with a guy named Dave Amick, who builds custom rifles.
And they had this little Labradoodle.
I was playing with a Labradoodle, and I started feeling its back and its anatomy.
It was so weird.
And I was like, is it weird that I'm looking for back straps on this Labradoodle?
No, no, no.
And Steve's like, don't worry.
When I give my wife a back massage, I think the same thing.
I completely understand, by the way, where everyone's coming from who's a vegan.
Everyone who's coming from is a complete animal lover and doesn't want to have anything to do with eating meat.
I fucking hear...
And I think it's a very noble way of thinking.
If you really look at what they're doing, they're essentially trying to be a part of the next stage of evolution.
When it's done through the right or for the most moral reasons, they're trying to exist with very minimal karma, with no death, no damage to the planet.
But the reality of this environment that we live in now, this world, this existence, this dimension that we live in now, is that these animals, these are all temporary animals.
And some of them, they're dumb as fuck.
There's this whole system going on here.
You've got to recognize this system where we're attaching morals to...
To something that's just this natural, everyday process of animals, consuming animals.
And in order for you to...
You must recognize you are an animal.
And in order for this animal body to work at its best, really it should eat animals.
You know, that's the...
I mean, you can live and exist as a vegan.
There's a lot of top vegan athletes like Mac Danzig.
He's a high-level vegan athlete.
But maybe he'd be better if he ate meat.
It's possible.
You know, if you listen to guys like Dave Asprey, they tell you the science behind...
You know, eating actual animal matter and what that does to your nerves, the way your body performs, the way your body can move.
I don't know if he's right.
I'm too stupid.
I'm too stupid to really know who's right.
But it sounds to me like the people that are trying to be vegans, I like what that stands for.
I like what that stands for.
That stands for people that recognize that like, man, I'm doing something.
I'm affecting something.
I don't want to be a part of it.
But if you want to live in a society, the reality is we've sort of distanced ourselves from what we're doing by not having most people involved with the actual taking of the animal's life.
So even though you're a part of the chain of command or the chain of evidence or the chain of matter from a living animal to steak, you've got nothing connected to it.
So there's a lot of people that are wearing leather.
There's a lot of people that are eating cheeseburgers and they're like, I can never go hunting.
And I would also say, you know, what a lot of people don't realize is the industrially farmed meat, and I use the term, you know, farmed very loosely, but is extremely damaging to the ecosystem and ecological sustainability in the U.S. But what they miss is, like, monocrops, like wheat, soy, corn, are arguably equally or more damaging.
And I think that So one of the things that made me want to actually explore food more is that in the next 10 years or so, I met with a lot of really interesting people like Sam Kass, who's the private chef for the Obamas at the White House, also does a lot of food policy stuff.
When you have a handful of very large industrial food producers and you have basically an exchange program between, let's say, the governmental bodies that regulate food And the Monsantos and the Conagras of the world,
you end up in a really fucked up situation where there are certain crops that do a lot of damage that are forced into the food supply in everything you can imagine, like corn, which will be in everything from certain, like, toothpastes to every condiment you use to bread that you eat,
because the growth of corn and distribution of corn is subsidized by the U.S. government, which makes it possible for farmers to make money by producing excesses of corn.
And if you look at, let's say, the topsoil in many of the most agriculturally productive states, they've been reduced from 10, 15 feet in some cases to less than a foot by constantly producing the same one 15 feet in some cases to less than a foot by constantly producing
So in any case, I think that there's a – when you were saying vote with your dollars, I think it's really important to realize that people are voting for – The future of this country in many, many ways, financial and otherwise, certainly from an ecological standpoint, every time they eat a meal.
You're voting three times a day for what you want in the next 10-15 years, and it's not going to be reversible.
Once that farmland goes away, we're kind of fucked in a lot of ways.
Ultimately, I think the most direct path of making a statement is using your dollars on the right things.
This is a free market.
People respond to money.
If you can buy food whenever possible from smaller producers as opposed to bigger producers, closer producers as opposed to those really far away, The healthier you will be, the better your performance will be, and ultimately the less you'll be shackled to some company that can do whatever it wants.
It's so hard for people to do that though, and it costs a lot of money.
Even if you want to eat organic, that shit's so expensive.
If you want to eat really healthy foods, If you want to go to the supermarket and go to a Whole Foods or something and get all grass-fed this, it's amazing how much more expensive it is than going to a market and you get some weird-looking semi-gray steak and take that bitch home.
Sort of tactical choices, for health at least, about which produce to spend more money on.
Their annual lists, for instance, the Clean Fifteen and the Dirty Dozen, and what all that means is there are The Dirty Dozen are the 12 most contaminated produce items, vegetables and fruits, that exist on the market in the U.S. They're studied every year and chemical analysis is done.
Those are the fruits and veggies that you'll want to get organically if you can afford it.
The Clean 15, on the other hand, Our foods that even when produced conventionally with pesticides, antibiotics, etc., have the lowest levels of contamination.
So those you can actually feel pretty safe buying at lower prices conventionally.
And a good way for people to tell if you're getting screwed by your local grocer or not, or tricked, is on most fruits and vegetables, you'll find a label or sticker, right?
If it starts with nine, it's probably organic.
If it isn't, If that number doesn't start with a nine, then you might be getting bait and switched if they say it's organic.
Organic means a lot of things to a lot of people, but in general it's supposed to mean without, or as it's intended by a lot of people, without additional pesticides, antibiotics, etc., as it would have been grown 100-200 years ago.
But it's a battle for dollars.
A lot of these labels, if they're not regulated, get misused.
And what is the feasibility of, say if you had a community of people, say if you got together with 10, 20 people, whatever, and you all wanted to get in on some farmland and figure out how to grow your own vegetables.
Have you ever thought about how much land it takes, how many animals you need?
A very manageable amount of acreage and it produces an astonishing amount of food.
Now you have to know what you're doing from a Gardening standpoint, I think raising animals in a lot of ways is a hundred times simpler than keeping track of like 20 species and keeping them alive.
Dealing with, you know, setting up whatever the fuck you have around your vegetables, whether it's fences or this or that, or keeping your irrigation going, keeping your watering going, dealing with fucking pests, little fucking things that start eating your food.
You can actually purchase, they're pretty cool, I think they're hydroponic, I might be using the wrong word, hanging gardens.
So they have these plastic containers that hold the various plants and it actually hangs down the side of a door almost like a shoe holder and then there's an automated water system that you can time so you can leave and go away for a day or two and it just grows these plants effectively vertically which is super super cool.
But if you don't keep the power on, then all that means is you have to water the plants, which means you better have some goddamn water if your water system, if your municipal water goes out.
Having a firearm as worst case scenario insurance in a location where a seven point or higher Richter scale earthquake is 80 plus percent probable in the next 15 years.
And there's another method where they have two sticks that are shaped like L's, and they hold them in either hand upside down, and then when they cross, that's supposed to indicate...
I do think there are things like that that are not unexplainable but are yet to have been explained.
And I say that partially because I've seen some pretty weird shit even at...
A lot of people don't realize this.
At Princeton University before...
I think this ended 2000-2001, but one of the reasons I went there as an undergrad is because they had something called the Scientific Anomalies Laboratory.
And this is where, among other organizations, several branches of the military funded research into things like remote viewing, which is basically scientifically controlled clairvoyance, where you have a transmitter and a receiver, and they use double-blind protocols to see if it is possible to report images back from one location, from one person to another.
And they had some...
And then...
To validate whatever, or to design the studies and then analyze the data, they had some of the world's top mathematicians and statisticians supervising this stuff.
And Professor John, J-A-H-N, who ran, I believe that was his name, who ran this laboratory, and I went down, I was a test subject.
I didn't have any X-Men-like powers, sadly.
Who supervised this, did this closing presentation when the lab was being wound down due to lack of funding, and he presented some of his findings.
He basically said, if you look at the statistics, all of this stuff has been validated, but it will never be accepted because of A, B, and C. And what was really trippy about the remote viewing, right?
So in the remote viewing protocol, one of them...
They would have, let's say, three or four envelopes.
The transmitter would choose one.
They would leave, get into a car with the supervisors, the experimenters, and then open the envelope, find GPS coordinates, and go to that location.
And that's where they would transmit from.
And what they found was, for one of the locations, the drawings that came back, and some people were better at receiving than others, the drawings all looked very, very similar, but they didn't resemble the gas station where people were going.
And then they did research on the location and they found out they were drawing barracks that had been there like 120 years earlier.
Say if you wanted to set up an experiment today with remote viewing, are there experts that you would go to that are the bad motherfuckers of remote viewing that you really think could replicate something scientifically, like for a television show or something like that, if they were under the gun?
I honestly think that these types of abilities are at some point going to be as analyzable as shooting three-pointers or looking at the top UFC fighters.
Okay, we're going to look at the fiber composition of a GSP and Anderson Silver.
I think at some point it's going to be like, oh, like, Johnny's really good at remote viewing because he has the blah, blah, blah in his, like, substantial nigra.
Yeah, he's got, like, some fucking the TH374 gene is turned on.
Oh, of course.
And so there are some people who appear to be better than this than others, but just to touch on, like, the Ouija board and fucking tarot cards and all that shit, I think that they're...
I don't place any power in the tools themselves.
I think there are people who have abilities who then use those tools to explain their abilities.
I can't believe I haven't seen it now, now that I think about it.
So, there's nothing that you can, like, no studies that you can point to that definitively have proven it, but you, do you maintain that it's possible, or are you a believer?
I mean, there are tons of scams in China, so who knows?
But what I would say is, you know, in the research for, let's say, The 4-Hour Chef, because it's kind of a book on learning.
It's a book on accelerated learning, not just on food.
But I met people who could memorize a shuffled deck of cards in like 43 seconds, right?
Or somebody who can learn a language like Icelandic well enough in seven days to go on TV and be interviewed.
So to me, if that is within their own possibility, or memorizing, training yourself to memorize 10,000 numbers, like, moving, something like moving the leaves between your hands is not like beyond belief for me.
And again, there's been no physiological evidence to demonstrate that is possible up to this point, but there are lots of things that seem impossible that have been certainly observed, whether it's through looking at...
Theoretical physics or looking at applied physics for that matter.
I mean, there are plenty of things that were thought impossible that are just not.
You're saying that there's so much weird shit that is real that you leave open the possibility that a guy could have some strange telekinetic control over matter.
Yeah, and for instance, you need for something to be scientifically verified with, let's say, statistical...
this number of subjects, the number of N, or you just have such a magnitude of change that the P value, the probability of it being a random event is less than 5%.
To do that, you need tools for measurement.
It's naive to think that we have created all the tools for measuring all things.
the tools for measuring all things we haven't right that's why that's why for instance people try to isolate nutrients get themselves into trouble because they'll say okay beta carotene is good for you this is true like 15 years ago and then people eat a ton of beta carotene they get sick why because they're not consuming it with naturally occurring cofactors that they couldn't isolate and so you have to be science among other things is a game of measurement so i think that as the tools get better for instance
We haven't, right?
That's why, for instance, people try to isolate nutrients, get themselves into trouble, because they'll say, okay, beta carotene is good for you.
uh right now i'm actually involved with and partially funding studies at ucsf university of california at san francisco in their neuroimaging lab where for the first time they're able to do a couple of very interesting things like take a functional mri machine and use it in the same room at the same time as an eeg which is actually a really tough problem, because these fucking magnets will, like, you know, pull shrapnel out of your skull.
I mean, they're really strong magnets.
You have to be careful.
And they're able now...
Using like even retail products like the connect and whatnot to look at how you can reverse Symptoms of dementia potentially like how do you train someone's brain to go from resembling that of a 60 year old to that of a 20 year old and The better the tools for measurement the more precise you can be the more precise you can be the more specific the protocol is that you can use and And it's fucking amazing.
There's stuff going on right now that is going to just turn things upside down when it comes to training mental performance and reversing the symptoms of age from a cognitive standpoint.
So for me, it's just like, God, as we follow Moore's Law and technology gets smaller and faster exponentially, there's certain heat issues when you get to a certain size, but the tools we're going to have for measurement in five years are going to be like Ray Kurzweil land.
And somebody could call me on this if I'm fucking it up, but I believe the Turing test was having effectively a chat communication between a real human and a computer, and having that computer trick the human into believing that it is another human.
I think the more interesting Turing test is when you get an artificial human sitting across from you who tricks you, fools you into believing that it's another human.
And I don't think...
I mean, maybe I'm in my own sort of echo chamber living in Silicon Valley, but just seeing how quickly things are moving and how quickly things are getting quicker, I'd be surprised if we don't hit that point in five to ten years.
Well, if you think about the movie Minority Report, right?
So Minority Report was made, what, like 10 years ago?
And, like, all of that technology, and I think that was supposed to take place, like, 20 years from now or whatever it is, like, that stuff's going to exist.
All of those screens that you can move with your hands and everything, I mean, that's going to be widespread in the next two years, probably.
Because of some of his beliefs, and I think a few of his conclusions are clouded by the fact that he fears mortality and wants to bring his dad back to life and things like this.
But he's a brilliant guy with an excellent track record of prediction.
So when he says we're going to have nanobots that you swallow and are able to diagnose all your issues and fix all these problems, I don't think he's that far off with most of it.
I really don't think he's that far off.
Are we going to be able to make people immortal in the next 20 years and have it very conveniently coincide with his projected median death sentence?
Well, I guess starting a few years ago and for a number of years was a visiting faculty member for the finance and entrepreneurship track of Singularity University, which Ray started along with Pierre Diamandis, chairman of the XPRIZE, based at Ames NASA location in Mountain View, California.
I've had a chance to interact with a lot of Ray's cohorts and colleagues, as well as Ray himself and Peter Diamandis, who's a really impressive guy in his own right.
Ray's a smart guy.
I like that he doesn't back down.
So I think when a lot of people who are very, very smart have extremely bold ideas, they sort of get browbeaten into curtailing their belief.
Well, I think that Ray has stood up to critics so many times and gone on TV so many times despite the fact that People tend to completely dismiss a lot of his stuff out of hand.
And I just like that he has so much intestinal fortitude to stick to his guns.
His level of conviction, based on everything that he has seen, I think is warranted, number one.
I just find it very admirable that he doesn't hedge or try to concede or in any way negotiate.
If you can conceive of the idea of someone dropping an atomic bomb on a city full of people that had nothing to do with the conflict and really had...
No choice whatsoever in where they were born, which is exactly what we did in the 1940s in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
If you can conceive of that, the next step is literally you show up where this town used to be and there's a giant black hole just sitting there.
You can't get too close to it and it's just no matter and you can't see through it and it just sits there.
And that's where the town used to be.
And someone just decided to erase it.
That's not outside the realm of possibility.
A nuclear bomb itself is fucking bananas.
That idea is crazy.
You could figure out a way to harness the very power of the sun itself and drop it on a city.
And instantly make a half a million people just disappear.
You could do that.
You can come up with the next level.
The next level shit is going to be even nuttier.
And that's the forefront of our capabilities.
And of course, it's like distribution of information and beautiful things that have come from medical innovation and the scientific understanding of the world, the universe we live in is beautiful and it helps the growth of the human being.
But at the end of the day...
What we really like doing is figuring out a way to fuck things up with extreme efficiency.
And then there's all of the stuff behind the scenes that people don't see, where there are very competent people who are very deliberately trying to destroy things.
I mean, I have friends who are on deployments to different places, and they're like, oh yeah, we just got a biotech terrorist with a PhD from a brand-name university in the U.S. in Yemen who's trying to build a dirty bomb to explode over the Great Lakes using blah, blah, blah.
One of the big problems with the idea of warrantless surveillance is that you're allowing people that are just regular folks to decide whether or not they should spy on people and whether or not they should take their information or whether or not they should fuck with their lives.
You have no evidence whatsoever that they are enlightened.
No evidence whatsoever that they're operating on a higher frequency, all with the good of mankind.
There's no evidence whatsoever that government people are any different than regular people.
And regular people are fucking crazy.
Regular people are on antidepressants, taking sleeping pills, and drinking every weekend, and they're doing drugs, and they're all fucked up in the head.
And who knows what SSRIs they're on.
That's everybody.
That's a huge percentage of our population, including people in government.
And we've seen with this General Petraeus thing, okay, that the people at the highest level of government, a guy who's the head of the fucking CIA, still can't keep his bitches in check.
He's still got regular people problems.
The guy's still got, like, affairs.
He's still got, you know, this hot woman who's married and this is going on.
And these people, that's the CIA, they're allowed...
Ironically enough, what I think is fascinating about this is this must allow the people at the highest levels of government to understand how dangerous this is because the whole thing came about, like his exposure came about because the FBI was investigating the CIA. The FBI and the CIA don't like each other.
I didn't know that.
Did you know that?
Did you ever think that the FBI and the CIA didn't like each other?
But, I mean, if you look at, let's say, the FISA bill, which Obama passed a couple years ago, which effectively allows warrantless wiretapping, the response that people have, which I understand, which was a response I had for a long time, is, I don't have anything to hide.
Especially the old school people that have been around a long time.
They were rocking it pre-internet.
If you want...
Teddy Kennedy, you want to go to his past?
Those guys, the fucking Newt Gingrichs of the world, they rocked it that way long before the distribution of information.
So now that all this stuff is out and everybody's tapping everything, like, whoa!
You see, with the Petraeus scandal, clearly mapped out the problem with this whole situation.
Because...
There is fucking no reason this should be news.
There's no reason this should be investigated by anybody that's in any organization that's trying to stop crime.
Because there's no crime being committed other than, I guess, morals violations by the guy who's supposed to be exemplary of the military's highest honors.
Yeah, I guess you can look at it that way.
But the reality is, no one's in danger.
Why are you wasting resources on this fucking National Enquirer shit?
And how did you go about doing it?
Well, it's all so obvious.
You can't allow people to just check shit out.
Because the woman, she was just like some crazy bitch that's like this socialite who flirts with guys.
And then there's this other one who's the author who's emailing that girl saying, get away from my man!
And she calls the FBI and says, this bitch is threatening me.
She turned the FBI on her.
And then they're like, why is this?
What's going on here?
And then the guy who's investigating it sends shirtless pictures of himself to the chick.
So then they stop the investigation.
They go, what the fuck are you doing?
unidentified
So they investigate him and find out that he's doing creepy shit while he's investigating.
And we're sitting in the middle of the living room watching the shit on TV. Because it was the first time they would show you these night vision shots of these rockets flying through the air in this eerie green hue.
And you're seeing all these explosions.
And he just looks at me and goes, well, buddy, looks like we're at war.
That Boston accent, I was like, holy shit.
We're back to this?
That one went nice and quick?
And then post-September 11th, it's like the entire lessons of generations that had to go through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, those lessons were, whatever society learned from that, at least it was temporarily lost.
Temporarily, we lost our fucking minds.
And now people are starting to come around to it again, and I'm hoping that the evolution that we make from this version of it will be more lasting because of the freedom of information, rather the free ability to distribute information with the internet, that we can get it out a little bit easier this time.
Then we can say, listen, ladies and gentlemen, we're not saying we don't need government.
We certainly do.
We're not saying people shouldn't have laws that they abide by.
They certainly should.
We should have a nice, peaceful...
I'm not saying you shouldn't make profit.
You certainly should.
What we're saying is you can't get crazy.
You can't go nutty and not look at humans and not look at the human race as the most important thing.
Instead, concentrating on money, concentrating on the extraction of resources from strange parts of the land that people aren't really paying attention to because it's not close by.
So it's okay to kill people with robots that fly in the air.
All of that is bananas.
And it doesn't mean we can't keep A nice order in the world, we can, but we can't get too fucking crazy.
And I'm hoping that, I don't know if you agree with this, but that there's a sort of a wrestling match going on between the idea of an apocalyptic scenario that's human created and the idea of technology and understanding meeting somewhere in the middle and working it out.
I would like to think, you know, human sort of self-interested rationality, but I don't know.
You have the technology to solve problems, which is developing really quickly.
And then you also have problems that are compounding, right?
Just like money at a bank account.
You have these problems compounding, whether it's climate change, explosive population growth in certain areas.
And so it is a bit of a...
It's a race in a sense, and I don't know which side is going to come out in front.
I mean, I'm very, very curious about population growth and how that Population density and global travel and how that compounds the impact of something like avian flu or SARS or whatever.
At what point do we reach a population density where it is like the deer jumping in front of your car?
Where you just have such a high density of people that the inevitability of disease and rapid spread globally through Air travel, effectively, just wipes out.
I actually ended up visiting a couple of, from the last book, for our body, had a number of hedge fund managers who basically want to be the guy from Limitless.
Yeah, so The 4-Hour Chef is the first major book out of Amazon publishing.
Amazon about a year and a half ago announced the launch of Amazon Publishing in New York City, which would be competing against all of the major publishers to recruit authors.
And that's really making everyone in the book industry extremely uncomfortable because Amazon's super ambitious and hyper, hyper confident and competent also.
So the book is being banned as a result.
The first time I'm aware of that book has been banned by all of Barnes& Noble, tons of indies.
Is kill Amazon publishing so that they aren't able to recruit good authors.
And so they want to make an example out of me as this guy who's had two number one New York Times bestsellers, very fortunately.
They want to basically cripple me so I don't hit the New York Times list and then point to that and in effect say, if that guy can't do it with Amazon Publishing, don't sign with Amazon Publishing.
Those are basically, not always, but effectively pay for play.
So that's like buying advertising almost.
You pay for placement.
What a lot of people fail to realize is, let's say at a Barnes& Noble, it's just like a Walmart.
If Coca-Cola owns the first 20 feet of Walmart, they legitimately pay for that space.
Similarly, if you walk into Barnes& Noble and you see the whatever-whatever rack or the new Noteworthy or whatever, the store owners have some decision over that, but a lot of it is paid co-op advertising.
That's why it's so hard if you're self-published to get books into Barnes& Noble because they're like, what are you going to pay us for an end cap?
No, what I'm saying is they were saying, hey, Amazon, you're not letting us put these books on the Nook, so we're not going to carry you in the stores.
And ultimately, this is where I think they're missing the mark.
Number one is, even if Amazon publishing fails, that will not stop the move from print to digital.
That will not stop that trend.
It will not even register.
Secondly is, the only competition is for loyal customers.
And bookstores certainly more than ever need loyal customers.
If someone comes into, let's say, Barnes& Noble, browses around, and then goes home to buy the book on Amazon for price, that person was never a customer to begin with.
If, on the other hand, somebody walks into a Barnes& Noble and says, I really want to buy a copy.
I want to buy three copies of The 4-Hour Chef as Christmas presents and for myself, and then they can't get it, all that accomplishes is they're driving that loyal customer to Amazon to become a customer of theirs.
So I don't quite understand the logic.
But again, humans are emotional, right?
That's why it's so concerning.
I'm not sure if it's a completely rational decision.
Amazon's a big scary company to a lot of booksellers, but I think that, for instance, the only way to keep print relevant for For the foreseeable, let's say, 10, 15 years, is to create a tactile experience,
like works of art through publishers like Faden, P-H-A-I-D-O-N. They make beautiful books that is next to impossible to replicate on digital or to have a very unique experience and a relationship with your customers like Omnivore Books in San Francisco, which is all cookbooks.
It's all they sell.
It's like you want to know anything about cookbooks, buy something out of print, get a recommendation, meet one of the top chefs in the world, that's where you go.
Yeah, there's one called, I think it's Slotnick, S-L-O-T-N-I-C-K, Cookbooks in New York City, same story.
It's like the mecca of cookbooks.
So you want to know something about that?
That's where you go.
And those businesses will continue to thrive, but it's like if you're competing against digital for price and convenience, it's going to be a pretty tough road.
But there are ways to counter it.
So, I mean, the only reason, if I wanted to just make...
More off of the book, I would have stayed with other publishers, quite frankly.
But Amazon was interesting because I want to try new things.
And I want to be allowed to try new things.
Like I'm doing a content partnership with BitTorrent.
I'm putting out like tons and tons, like probably well over a gig of free material and videos and all this shit on BitTorrent because they have 160 million users.
And that's the kind of thing that Amazon will let me do, whereas others may not be so keen to let me.
The other thing that people are talking about the distribution, the distribution, and they're like, oh, well, what's Amazon going to do?
The first thing, no publisher out there, I don't think any publisher except for Amazon, in my case, would let me do a 672 full-color book with thousands of photos.
That is a fucking expensive book to make.
I don't think anyone else would have let me do it.
Like, to create a really physical book, a really beautiful physical book, like a tactile experience, there just aren't many publishers who will do that anymore.
And so, you know, distribution aside, if you...
So what's really...
Because I've been asked this.
What makes...
Amazon interesting from the standpoint of a content creator is that if you look at almost any other publisher, Simon& Schuster, whoever, it doesn't matter, they do not have any direct connection to their readers.
They sell to the head buyer in a category of Barnes& Noble.
They sell to the head buyer in a category at Books A Million in the middle of the country.
But whereas Amazon, I mean, I use Amazon Prime Amazon probably knows me better than I know myself in a lot of ways.
They have such direct access to tens of millions of customers.
It just makes it really attractive as an experiment.
Amazon has a couple good things going for it, besides the fact that people already know it as a great place to buy things with one click and buy books.
They have this new thing that they're doing with Audible, which is one of the sponsors of this show.
I was going to save it for the next Audible commercial, which is this week, but...
What WhisperSync is, essentially, is you read a book and say if you fall asleep, wherever that page is, you can have it on your smartphone where you get in your car, you plug it in, you have an app that plays through your audio jack, and it picks up Where you left off and starts reading the book to you while you're in traffic.
And they're also going to be, at the same time, piloting Panera Bread.
They're going to be piloting a slow carb diet hidden menu, which is from like the 4-Hour Body stuff.
So if you want to actually effectively eat paleo or eat slow carb and lose fat, now you can go to this place that's known for bread and actually get a slow carb meal, which is pretty cool.
As long as the labels are policed to some extent so that assholes don't come along and start mislabeling things purposefully, which happens all the time.
But I think it's a great thing.
And, I mean, one of the goals that I have is to sort of create a supertrend Of about 20 million people who simply think about, let's say, purchasing food for breakfast differently or dinner differently.
And if you can create a super trend by getting roughly that number of people to change a certain buying habit, then I think that this country can really turn towards more of this smaller producer,
many suppliers versus I don't know, 12 months or so.