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March 26, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:51:51
Joe Rogan Experience #1624 - Mark Sisson
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joe rogan
01:06:56
m
mark sisson
01:42:17
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jamie vernon
00:42
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unidentified
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
All right, we're going.
joe rogan
Time flies, Mark.
jamie vernon
It sure does, man.
joe rogan
How's it been five years?
mark sisson
A little over five years, yeah.
joe rogan
That's ridiculous.
mark sisson
I know.
joe rogan
I feel like I saw you like eight months ago.
mark sisson
I know.
And the world has changed.
joe rogan
Yeah, a little bit.
A little bit.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
And you're in Florida now.
We were talking about this.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
I wanted to save it for the camera because you're going to tell me how great you like Miami.
mark sisson
Well, you know, I grew up in Maine, and when I was in New England, Miami was sort of the place where, you know, only old people went, and it had all of the clichés behind it, and I never really thought much about living there.
And then when I lived in Malibu, I'm like, okay, this is a cat's ass.
This is the best place ever, Malibu.
Well, much like yourself, Joe, I got a little bit disillusioned with California over the years and thought that I would try a different location, particularly one that didn't have any personal taxes.
And, you know, we had gone to Miami Beach for a week every year for vacation, so we felt like we knew it.
And then we wound up saying, you know what, let's try for a year and see if we like it and we'll move out of California.
And if it doesn't work, we'll move back.
And I'm telling you, man, a year in, I'm like, this is like summer camp and a spa and a playground every single day.
I mean, look, the water's 20 degrees warmer on any given day.
The sand is nicer.
The women are a little bit, you know, dressed a little bit more provocatively.
I've got a great gym.
I do stand-up paddling.
I've got an e-foil, an electric foil that I use, a fat bike.
What's a fat bike?
Fat bike is those...
joe rogan
Fat tires?
mark sisson
Fat tire bike, yeah.
joe rogan
Oh.
mark sisson
We should probably, given the current tenor, we shouldn't probably call it a fat bike anymore.
joe rogan
Yeah, let's call it a fat bike.
mark sisson
A pneumatically challenged bike.
unidentified
It's okay.
It's a male.
joe rogan
You can call it a fat bike.
mark sisson
It's a male.
joe rogan
No one cares.
mark sisson
Exactly.
And so I ride in the sand with some friends.
I ride with my wife.
My wife has an electric one, so she can keep up with me.
But I mean, it's amazing.
Every day, I feel like I'm a kid on vacation.
joe rogan
Wow, that's a good endorsement.
I've been watching the news, though, and it seems a little wacky down there right now.
They're shooting pepper spray balls at the people that were all over the streets.
mark sisson
Yeah, spring breakers have always...
joe rogan
Why are the cops shooting pepper spray balls at them?
mark sisson
You know, they tried to enact some temporary ordinances that failed immediately, failed out of the gates, and I don't think they knew how to control the crowds at...
That surged.
joe rogan
Is spring break always like that there?
Or is it just because of COVID because Florida doesn't have restrictions?
mark sisson
Yeah, yeah.
It's because of COVID. I mean, generally, spring break is a challenge.
And this is the time of year when everybody sort of hunkers down.
And a lot of people that live in my building and live in my neighborhood would leave town.
joe rogan
During spring break?
mark sisson
During spring break.
joe rogan
Is that bad?
mark sisson
Yeah, it's a pain to try and get reservations at a restaurant or to navigate the streets because the You know, the streets are not built for that amount of traffic.
So a lot of people just leave, and that's fine.
joe rogan
How long does spring break last?
mark sisson
Well, this year is going to last, apparently, two months.
I don't know.
joe rogan
Two months?
mark sisson
Well, you know, because...
joe rogan
Different schools?
mark sisson
You know, the whole school strategy and the opening and reopening and not opening and having spring break and not having spring break.
And then COVID. Look, as I was saying to some friends literally a week ago, a month ago, two months ago, there's no better place in the world to be right now than Miami Beach.
The beaches are open.
People are having fun.
They're out in the sunshine.
They're getting vitamin D. You know, they're breathing fresh air.
The restaurants are not only open, they're probably exceeding their previous capacity because during COVID, The restaurants were allowed to spill out into the streets.
They closed some of the streets down in terms of traffic.
So they kept that.
And they opened the insides of the restaurant.
So now the restaurant.
So it's...
joe rogan
So they're even bigger.
mark sisson
Yeah.
And a lot of people who live in the building that I live and a lot of people who live in my neighborhood who would typically be occasional residents.
You know, this is probably a second home for a lot of these people.
Many from New York, from Chicago, from South America, sort of decided during COVID they'd hunker down in California.
I mean, in Miami.
And now they're Now they're staying there.
So we've got a nice group of people that are hanging out and having a good time.
joe rogan
And you've been down there for how many years now?
mark sisson
Three years now.
joe rogan
Three years.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
The fascinating thing about Miami or Florida in general, they're...
Approach to the lockdowns, it shows you that the idea that you're going to force people to stay home, it doesn't work.
It's ineffective.
Even though they're wide open, they have less cases, they have less deaths, they have less hospitalizations per capita than California does.
I think that's correct.
mark sisson
It is correct, and it's predictable.
joe rogan
But that's nuts.
Because everybody in California has Stockholm Syndrome.
They're still thinking that the lockdowns are a good idea and that we have to protect ourselves from this thing.
You got COVID. Yes.
What was it like?
mark sisson
For me, it was a lot of nothing.
joe rogan
And how old are you?
mark sisson
You can tell us.
joe rogan
67. 67. Yeah, I'll be 68. You look fucking great.
unidentified
Thank you, man.
mark sisson
I hope I look half as good as you when I'm 67. You know, I don't want to piss anybody off, but I've looked at this from the beginning as a bad case of flu.
It's a virus.
There are millions of viruses that we encounter on a daily basis.
It's an issue of personal immunity.
I mean, if you have a strong immune system, I think you're going to do well during this, and that's been the biggest issue.
Instead of lockdowns, if the government had said, stop eating sugar, spend some time out in the sun, move around a lot, and maybe even—and this is, I think, one of the issues was this whole thing about viral load.
I don't know how much you know about that.
But people who got really sick had massive viral loads partly because of being locked inside with other people for long periods of time.
joe rogan
Exactly.
mark sisson
If you got exposed outside to a minimal viral load, there's a good chance that your body dealt with it already and managed it and got rid of it and set up whatever...
joe rogan
And accumulated antibodies.
mark sisson
Exactly.
joe rogan
Yeah.
But you're in this area, in terms of age, where people think there's nothing you can do.
mark sisson
Right.
joe rogan
Well, I love when I see a guy like you that's so fit, that you're in your later 60s, but you're incredibly fit.
So it flies in the face of all these people that think they're like, well, what about older folks?
unidentified
Yeah.
mark sisson
I've been training my whole life for this.
This is what I say about COVID. I've been training my whole life for this.
And, you know, I'm kind of glad I got it because I was talking shit about it for a long time.
Like, you know, don't...
It's not whatever.
And again, not to belittle the horrible experiences that some people have had, but this really gets old people for what I would say are obvious reasons, whether it's immune system, whether it's lack of vitamin D, whether it's being shut up, whether it's lowered cholesterol.
I mean, we haven't even talked about what happens with all of the statin drugs that people are taking to lower their cholesterol.
Well, high cholesterol is actually protective for something like this.
So you could predict that a lot of older people were going to die if they weren't well protected.
joe rogan
Can we talk about that for a second?
So statin drugs, the idea is you're lowering cholesterol because people have high cholesterol.
The high cholesterol puts them at a higher risk of heart attack and stroke.
mark sisson
Not really.
Not really, but, I mean, we can talk about that, too.
That's the irony there.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's where it gets confusing, right?
Because some people will argue that it's the balance of LDL and HDL and that cholesterol is actually essential for production of sex hormones and a lot of other things that the human body requires.
mark sisson
A lot of things.
things, it's probably the most important, cholesterol is probably the most important molecule in the human body, if you really were to parse it.
Vitamin D, sex hormones, it's a working molecule on a lot of cell membranes.
And to think that we would, I mean, it's so important, the body makes like 1300 milligrams a day, regardless of what your cholesterol intake is from food.
So in my mind, the notion that we would take this amazing molecule that is basically life-giving in many regards and vilify it and then take drugs to lower it, which if you look at the research, and I wasn't planning on going down this path today, but if you look at the research on Cholesterol and heart disease over the past 20 years, it's shifted everything away from cholesterol being the proximate cause of heart disease.
Cholesterol and saturated fat are not the proximate cause of heart disease.
It's oxidation and inflammation.
Cholesterol is involved in the repair of damage to the tissue, and as a result, people get, because of the oxidation and inflammation, there's cholesterol that's in the plaques and things like that.
But I think many, many doctors, I'm going to say the preponderance of doctors, now agree that cholesterol isn't the bad guy.
That people made it out to be.
And if you look at other studies, cohorts of people who've had cholesterol of 130 and lower, or 200 and above, the all-cause mortality, you die of everything else at a much greater rate with low cholesterol than you do with high cholesterol, the only difference is the cardiac outcomes.
And it's not even deaths, it's just cardiac events is a little bit higher in the higher group.
joe rogan
And what is it about cholesterol that...
Why did cholesterol become the bad guy?
Why did it become the boogeyman?
unidentified
You know, I... Does it have to do with...
joe rogan
I hate to interrupt you there.
Does it have to do with when the sugar industry paid off those scientists to push the blame on the saturated fat?
mark sisson
Yeah, I mean, a lot of this goes back to...
I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
You know, I'm not, I think most people at the top are too greedy and stupid to organize into a cabal, right?
So I'm thinking, how did this happen in terms of the collective conscious?
So mistakes were made early on, whether it's Ancel Keys, and I know you've had a lot of people on the show talking about Ancel Keys in the seven-country study.
joe rogan
Can you explain that real quick?
mark sisson
Oh, just this scientist in the 60s, I guess, around then, Ancel Keys, had done a study looking at saturated fat intake correlated with heart disease in different countries and found, at the end of the day, he found that there was a correlation between high saturated fat intake and heart disease.
But then later on you find out that he looked at 32 countries, but picked the seven that fit his paradigm, mostly.
So that was, you know, I don't know if you've had Gary Taubes or Nina on the show, but everyone has sort of beaten this one to death.
The idea was that that was sort of the start of it.
And then McGovern and his committee, when he was overseeing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and trying to create the first food pyramids, was convinced by Pritikin that—because McGovern's wife had had a good experience at the Pritikin Longevity Center, which was a zero-fat sort of protocol— So that politicized that enough that they decided to vilify fat.
Cholesterol over the years has been more vilified because of studies done, again, correlating higher cholesterol with higher incidence of heart issues.
And the drug industry certainly got on that, and that's why statins came to the forefront.
joe rogan
Statins themselves, though, have a host of pretty bad side effects.
mark sisson
I'm telling you.
I mean, I think until some of these other things have come down recently, I would say that statins are probably the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public in terms of medicine.
But that's just me.
I'm not a doctor.
I just do a lot of research and reading.
So the idea that we would, yeah, so to your point, statins tend to, you know, there are brain fog issues, liver issues, muscle weakness issues.
One of the things that statins do is they decrease the amount of CoQ10 that your body produces because it's a similar pathway, and so you have to Should generally take supplemental CoQ10 with statins.
A friend of mine said that when he was researching statins, one of the original patents on statins, acknowledged this deficiency of CoQ10, and so it included CoQ10 in the drug, but CoQ10 was so expensive to make, they just cleaved off that part of the patent.
Anyway, I don't know where that was headed, but if we're talking about COVID, It appears that high cholesterol, higher cholesterol is protective for infections like COVID. But how is that the case?
joe rogan
Because one of the problems with COVID is people with high obesity.
Obese people tend to have a really hard time with COVID. In fact, 78% of the hospitalizations, they found out that those people were obese.
I would imagine a lot of those obese people also have high cholesterol.
mark sisson
Okay, but look at all the other factors.
joe rogan
Obesity is a big factor in terms of just overall diminishing of your immune system.
mark sisson
Yeah, exactly.
Your vitality.
But I would say that from what I've read, blood glucose, so diabetics are much more susceptible to COVID because this virus tends to like higher blood sugar.
If you have a pre-existing systemic inflammation...
Not a good sign.
Vitamin D probably, you know, across the board, the greatest predictor of your survivability of COVID. So if people have been locked inside all year and haven't had any sun exposure, their vitamin D status has been compromised tremendously.
So if you look at those vitamin D status, cholesterol, blood sugar regulation, and then other things like obesity or pre-existing conditions like COPD or whatever, we're in a world of hurt, this country, in terms of our health.
So the idea that we would lock people up...
Inside, by the way, healthy ones, because that's typically you quarantine the unhealthy ones.
Yeah.
It just makes no sense.
I think this is the single biggest mismanaged event in human history.
Wow.
Yeah.
Name another.
Name one that was more mismanaged than this.
joe rogan
I think there's also part of the problem is that people have a really hard time adjusting once they make an initial observation or initial plan of attack.
And the initial plan of attack was that COVID was going to be something that killed a massive amount of people, far more.
We thought it was going to kill like 10% of the people and it was going to be a bloodbath.
It was going to be...
Similar to the Spanish flu, we were terrified a year ago.
And once a lot of people got it, and then once really healthy people got it, and that's once we realized that.
How many asymptomatic?
I remember in the beginning, someone was telling me, well, they're asymptomatic initially, but they're going to get symptoms.
No.
My fucking real estate lady, she's 46 years old.
She's fit.
She works out.
She didn't even know she had it.
She was scheduled to go for a vacation in the Bahamas or something like that, and she had to take a test.
She took the test.
Turns out positive.
She couldn't believe it.
Took it again.
Turns out positive.
Couldn't believe it.
Took it again.
Turns out positive.
Okay, I've got COVID. So she sits home and watches movies for 10 days.
Never feels a goddamn thing.
Like this idea that your immune system is incapable of preventing a serious infection.
Incapable of protecting you.
That once you're exposed, it's like a demon and it's going to take you over.
This is how everybody was treating it a year ago.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
A year later, now we know that that's not the case, but there's still ridiculous people out there that are excited by being afraid.
I don't know if you saw that clip with Ted Cruz yesterday.
Ted Cruz was addressing a bunch of reporters, and one of the reporters asked him to put his mask on.
Outside.
He's like, no, I'm not going to put my...
I think it was outside.
Might have been.
I don't know.
Either way.
He's been immunized, by the way.
He's been vaccinated.
So he's like, I'm not going to do that while I'm talking on the camera.
And the guy goes, well, to make me feel better.
He goes, well, you feel free to step away.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
I don't know what to tell you, but there's a thing where people, first of all, like telling people to put a mask on.
There's a lot of really fucking annoying people that look for an opportunity to tell people what to do.
And this is one of those things.
Tell people to be scared.
Tell people to get vaccinated.
Tell people to put a mask on.
There's a bunch of really annoying people that enjoy telling people what to do.
And that's what you saw with that Ted Cruz thing.
Did you see it?
mark sisson
I didn't see that, but I've seen...
joe rogan
It's adorable.
mark sisson
I've seen a number of...
I've been involved in a number of incidents like that.
I don't wear a mask when I'm outside, primarily now, because I had COVID. I can't get it.
I can't give it.
So I feel like...
joe rogan
Well, not only that, the data shows that it dies in contact with UV light.
I mean, if we're going to base this on science, and we're supposed to, there's virtually no evidence whatsoever for any spread of this disease with outdoor contact.
mark sisson
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And as I say, the best thing we could have done was to open the beaches up and encourage people to go.
Yeah, go exercise.
And another thing, by the way, with regard to the beaches, is involving yourself in other microbial activity, right?
So sand has bacteria and virus in it.
One of the things that happens when you sit in a sterile environment is you lose your immune system.
It atrophies.
joe rogan
How ironic.
mark sisson
Yeah, exactly.
joe rogan
It's like your cardio.
Right.
mark sisson
It's very similar.
And so if you were outside digging in your garden, it would be like the prototypical best scenario for someone who wanted to avoid COVID would go outside in your garden, start gardening, get some vitamin D from the sun.
joe rogan
And don't wear garden gloves either.
mark sisson
Yeah, exactly.
No, exactly.
joe rogan
Get in there.
mark sisson
Get dirty.
Yeah.
joe rogan
I mean, I really love your products, by the way, and thank you for sending me so many over the years.
You've kept me fully stocked up.
mark sisson
You're welcome.
joe rogan
You just make excellent stuff, and it seems so simple.
I love the concept of it, just the idea of primal.
Like, what are you eating?
You're eating whole vegetables, whole meats, food, just real, unprocessed, regular food.
Eat that, you'll be healthier.
mark sisson
It seems so simplistic.
Go figure, right?
joe rogan
It's the most simplistic thing, but the first time you and I talked, and you talked about the issues that you had with inflammation of your joints, and that you were kind of told that this was going to be your situation from here on out.
And as you got older, it was going to get worse.
You changed your diet, eliminated all this processed sugar, eliminated all the bullshit, and...
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
And it all goes away.
mark sisson
Again, it's so simple and simplistic, it's almost like unbelievable.
And yet, my whole background is in evolutionary biology and genetic science and looking how our bodies respond to information from food, from sleep, from sun exposure, from play, from dirt exposure.
And when you realize that we evolved over, you know, Two and a half million years of human evolution and a hundred years of mammalian evolution and a billion years of multi-cell evolution.
A lot of these things are encoded in our DNA that expect us to act certain ways and eat certain things.
And when you bypass that with, you know, crunchy, salty, fatty, sweet, cheap stuff, you mess with the signaling and you wind up with genes getting turned on that might cause inflammation and turn off the genes that It would burn fat and turn on the genes that would store fat and turn off the genes that build muscle.
These are all just, it sounds really, if you look at the level of every study now that looks at what happens at the level of gene expression, you understand that so many of these things that we do on a daily basis affect how we rebuild, renew, regenerate, recreate ourselves.
Minute by minute, and food is still probably the most important aspect of that, if you had to pick one.
joe rogan
It's literally the building blocks of your body.
mark sisson
Right.
joe rogan
And if you eat shitty food, you're going to have shitty building blocks.
mark sisson
Exactly.
joe rogan
It seems so simplistic when you put it that way.
But people have this odd disconnect between what they put in their body and what kind of effect it has on them, because they seek out food pleasure, and they seek it out as a reward.
Oftentimes when you're working and you're bored, you go to the candy machine.
This is like a standard thing that people do.
They give themselves a reward for being in a shitty state of mind.
mark sisson
Well, I'll go you one better.
Guys who go to the gym every day and train two hours because they like to eat.
It's like, okay, wait a minute.
I get that you like to eat.
Everyone likes to eat.
You're wired to eat, but you're going to go struggle and suffer and sweat and strain so you can go home and have a few more bites of something you probably shouldn't eat in the first place?
Like, you deserve it?
How stupid is that, really?
joe rogan
Do you do a cheat day at all?
mark sisson
I don't do a cheat day.
Do you do a cheat meal?
I mean, I don't even partition my meals that way, so I'll eat a portion of a meal as a cheat every other meal sometimes.
I'll have a couple of bites of bread with some great butter on it, or I'll have a couple of bites of a dessert, or I'll have a couple of bites of pizza once in a while.
So, you know, my path has been from almost orthorexic, like really dialed into everything I was eating.
joe rogan
What's that mean, orthorexic?
mark sisson
You're so intent on getting every macronutrient right at every meal that you drive yourself crazy.
joe rogan
Oh.
mark sisson
And there are a lot of people who do that.
And then I shifted sort of into a look at the paleoprimal ancestral way of eating, which is the real food thing that we talked about.
After that, and I got great results from eliminating...
Um, sugars, uh, industrial seed oils.
Those are the big ones.
I know you've had Kate Shanahan on here talking about that.
Have you had Kate on here?
joe rogan
No, no, I haven't.
But I've had plenty of people talk about that.
Seed oils are a giant issue.
mark sisson
Giant issue.
Maybe bigger than sugar for most people.
Because I think most people know they shouldn't be eating sugar.
joe rogan
Right.
And they think that vegetable oil somehow or another comes from a vegetable.
mark sisson
Or in many cases it comes from a seed, a seed oil.
So canola, soybean oil, corn oil.
And when people shift away from the sugar and they go toward even a low-carb diet and they start thinking, well, I'll have salads and I'll have salad dressing.
And then they don't realize that the great salad that they just made, which could be one of the healthiest things, They could eat.
They just ruined with a soy-based dressing or canola-based dressing.
So I got rid of the industrial seed oils, got rid of the sugar, got rid of the processed and whole grains in my case.
So we talked about this before.
The grains are like really a problem for not just me, but for a lot of people.
And that's what was causing my arthritis, for instance, and my IBS and my GERD and everything else.
joe rogan
It was all grains.
mark sisson
It was all grains.
joe rogan
And as soon as you got rid of them?
mark sisson
I mean, it was miraculous.
That was what really put me on a path to change the way the world eats.
Because I thought to myself, you know, if I spent my whole life as an endurance athlete carb loading with healthy whole grains, because that was the moniker, right?
Heart healthy whole grains.
And, you know, that's how you got the predominance of carbohydrates.
And I would eat 5, 6, 7, 800 grams a day of carbs.
But I was miserable.
And I couldn't figure out what it was.
And even after I got rid of sugar and I started doing a lot of research, I still sort of kept the grains in my diet.
Because I'd been indoctrinated into this thought that, The U.S. Department of Agriculture pyramid says 6 to 11 servings of grains every day.
That's the base of the pyramid.
And then my wife at one point said, look, you're doing all this research on grains, and you're starting to uncover some pretty interesting facts that don't point toward health.
Why don't you give them up for 30 days and see what happens?
And that's what happened, and it changed my life.
So I thought...
If I'm a guy who used to eat a lot of grains, who then, even in the face of knowledge about them, defended my right to eat grains, and then I got rid of them, how many tens of millions of people are sort of thinking that grains are healthy and they're good for them, and even though they don't have celiac, they're still on a spectrum of being negatively impacted by grains.
joe rogan
It's so hard for people to swallow because of this thing that's been shoved into our face that grains, whole grains, like that term, whole grain.
If you had a box and you said whole grain and you had an option, healthy, non-healthy, the vast majority of the country would check healthy for whole grains.
mark sisson
Of course.
Again, they've been indoctrinated for years and years.
It's been a, you know, ever since Earl Butz and the first subsidies for...
joe rogan
Fucking Earl Butz.
mark sisson
I don't know who that is.
joe rogan
But there's been a lot of weird shit with grains, too.
mark sisson
Secretary of Agriculture under Jimmy Carter.
joe rogan
You know the Kellogg story, right?
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
He's the weirdest one ever.
Tell people the story behind it.
mark sisson
Well, you tell it.
I mean, basically, you know, it was about sexual...
joe rogan
Yes.
He thought that by giving people bland food, you would curb their sexual urges.
So I guess he thought, like, Mexicans and, you know, like, their spicy food, like, or other people, like, Indians have spicy food.
It felt like foods with a lot of flavor made people want to fuck.
For some strange reasons, Scott!
mark sisson
Your point being?
joe rogan
I mean, I don't know if there's a correlation, but in his eyes, he wanted to curb sexual desire, so he prescribed some very bland grain cereals for people to eat.
And I don't know how many people were eating breakfast cereal before he came along.
I mean, he most certainly had a giant impact on the way people eat breakfast.
jamie vernon
What's up, Jamie?
The Forbes article about this says that he felt that bland foods like cereal would lead Americans away from sin, one very specific sin.
Masturbation.
joe rogan
Yeah, that was one he was worried about.
Like, spicy food makes you jerk off.
Imagine that sexual urges are caused by- They didn't have porn back then, really.
Well, you'd have to go somewhere to watch it.
You'd have to go to a movie theater, you know?
Like the olden days.
mark sisson
That's really olden days, though.
That's like Flipkart or something.
joe rogan
Well, it was Times Square, the peep shows and the movies that they would show.
But yeah, I guess, I don't know.
mark sisson
It's a ridiculous idea.
But it's a good example of how the collective conscious of the country It moved into everyone eating cereal.
joe rogan
Yes.
mark sisson
Like when you say, what did they eat before that?
Well, they ate oatmeal or gruel or something that took long to prepare, but all of a sudden this guy comes along and he says, you open it up, you pour it in a bowl, you put some milk on it, you're good to go.
And through that, everyone ate cereal as a kid.
And I don't know if you did, but everyone where I grew up, that cereal that was breakfast, And you would eat Special K if you wanted to eat healthy.
Yeah, exactly.
If your mother wanted to lose weight, she would buy Special K. Yeah, with low-fat milk.
Exactly.
joe rogan
Which is hilarious.
And isn't it true that some low-fat milk, they actually put sugar in it so that it's digestible?
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
Which is hilarious.
mark sisson
I advise people stay away from 1%, 2%, low-fat, homogenized, whatever.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Well, whole milk feels better for your body.
Raw, whole milk.
And I know, like, that's a big controversy.
I remember there was some health stores in California where they were getting raided.
mark sisson
That's right.
joe rogan
Because they were selling raw milk, which is like...
Bananas.
You can sell raw meat, but you can't sell raw milk.
Please explain this to me.
mark sisson
Well, I mean, that's one of the reasons I left California, is the governance at every level is messed up.
And it's the health police, because they think they know what's best for everyone else.
joe rogan
Well, it also creates a business of regulation.
And once people are vested, they have a vested interest in regulating, and there's a bunch of people whose jobs is to regulate, that only expands and grows.
That's the thing about bureaucracy.
When you have the kind of government like California has that doesn't just...
Have an over bloated bureaucracy, but it encourages it to get more and more bloated.
And anytime there's a new problem, they create new committees and they want to pass new laws and new regulations and hire new people and hire a group to sit around and think about how to handle a situation.
Nothing ever gets done.
But when you have that sort of mindset, that mindset is never the mindset of trimming down and cutting away and, oh, this is what the problem is.
The mindset is just in regulation, and that's the California mindset.
mark sisson
Totally.
And I wonder what it is, because it seems to cross all from local government to state government to even federal government.
You run for office, I guess presumably on a platform of you're going to do something.
You're going to accomplish something.
You're going to enact legislation.
And what if for a couple of years people got elected and all they were asked to do was pair back legislation and look at all the stuff that the previous administrations wrote that didn't work and unwind it?
Wouldn't that be something?
joe rogan
I wonder if that will happen now.
But I wonder if in some places people recognize the errors of our ways over the last year.
Because it's one thing that has been exposed over the last year, more than anything in my lifetime, is how important it is to have a mayor that's not a moron.
How important it is to have a governor that's not a moron and a governor that understands that you have to give people freedom.
They have to maintain their freedom.
You cannot decide that someone's business is not essential because it's not essential for you.
It's essential for them.
It's the only way they feed themselves.
It's fucking essential.
mark sisson
100%.
joe rogan
And there's a lot of essential businesses that got labeled non-essential, which is, by the way, terrible for people's self-esteem, mental health.
It's awful across the board.
And then the economy suffers a gigantic hit because these businesses go under.
California has famously lost 75% of its restaurants in Los Angeles, at least.
mark sisson
Yeah, I mean, I don't see how there isn't yet another shoe to drop on the economic forecasting, because I think a lot of the businesses that were going to fail haven't yet really completed the failure cycle.
unidentified
Right.
mark sisson
Because I know a lot of, like you do, I know a lot of people who...
Went out of business or just struggled, and the worst to me, the first lockdown, and you struggle through it, and you get into April or May, and it looks like there's light at the end of the tunnel, and you borrowed $300,000 to keep your restaurant open, and then all of a sudden, there's another lockdown, and now it's even more egregious.
Now you can't even...
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
I mean, I feel so horrible for those people.
It's great.
joe rogan
It's horrendous.
mark sisson
To your point about the governors, so now some of the governors are becoming really, really popular for their stances.
joe rogan
Like your guy.
mark sisson
Yeah.
Yeah.
joe rogan
That DeSantis guy.
mark sisson
Yeah.
No, he's...
And he got...
joe rogan
He's a yellow fella, too.
mark sisson
He got vilified early on, and he just held his ground.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Well, because everybody wanted to consume that fear porn.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
And they didn't like the fact, and they were like, you're going to kill everyone.
But I love how he did it when he did a press conference with charts, and he said, we are going to protect our most vulnerable, and this is how we're going to do it.
But we think very strongly that children should be able to go back to school.
It poses little to no risk for children, especially in comparison to the flu, which actually kills kids.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
And then as you get older and older, he had sort of a breakdown of when it becomes an issue.
But then it gets into your age category.
It turns out it wasn't an issue for you, but it's because of the way you live your life.
And this is what drives me crazy.
People want to pretend like your immune system is ineffective against this virus.
Well, your immune system...
If that was the case, everyone who caught the virus would be dead.
mark sisson
Bingo.
joe rogan
Because your immune system would fail and the virus would kill all the hosts.
And then it wouldn't spread.
No, your immune system is a functional thing.
And if you take proper supplementation and you exercise and you eat right and sleep right, yeah, you can get through this.
mark sisson
A hundred percent.
joe rogan
But no one says that.
mark sisson
No one says that.
And that should have been the major message across the country was, again, this is an immune system issue.
It's not so much a public health issue as it's a private health issue.
In other words, people take responsibility for yourself.
And that doesn't mean locking yourself up in a room.
joe rogan
And I read the other day, the average weight gain was like half a pound every 10 days during COVID? Yeah, they think they said the average, like 42% of the people gained weight and the average weight gain for millennials was 39 pounds.
Which is fucking insane.
mark sisson
It's insane, yeah.
joe rogan
Let's find that statistic, because somebody sent it to me and it was a meme.
mark sisson
Yeah, I'm not believing that.
But even if it's 20 pounds, it's 20 pounds in the wrong direction.
joe rogan
Well, I think what they're saying is for the 42% that did gain weight...
It's not that everyone gained weight, most people didn't gain weight, but the 42% that did gain weight, the average weight gain was more than 30 pounds, which is a lot of, that's a big change in your body over 30 years that can also have a massive negative health impact for years to come.
When you put that kind of a burden on all of your, your endocrine system, all your body systems so rapidly.
jamie vernon
Yeah, this is one of those things that gets to the polling, but they polled 3,000 people.
So, when you get into those numbers...
joe rogan
Yeah, exactly.
That's why memes are so fun.
mark sisson
Let's make one up right now.
joe rogan
Okay, here it is.
42% of adults said they gained more weight than it intended.
Of course, the amount they reported gaining averaged 29 pounds.
I was wrong there.
10% said they gained more than 50 pounds.
Just that alone.
Weight gain leads to obesity.
More women, 45%, reported weight gain than men.
39%, but men reported a higher average gain of 37 pounds.
Okay, that's what it was.
Compared to the women's average of 22 pounds.
Wow.
That's a lot.
mark sisson
That's a lot.
joe rogan
The average man, 37 pounds for a man, is fucking bonkers.
That's so much weight to gain.
mark sisson
It makes you obese almost automatically.
joe rogan
Yeah, almost instantly.
This is the other thing that we have a real problem with in our culture today.
You can't say you need to lose weight.
Because even though it's true, we have this bizarre...
Like, participation trophy concept of how we treat people when it comes to real issues, like being obese, like being fat.
It's fucking terrible for you.
But if you say that, you're fat shaming, which is so nonsensical and it's just designed to protect lazy people or excuse me, maybe not even lazy people inflicted people that are inflicted with weight.
Maybe they're not lazy.
Maybe they're just they're mentally fucked up.
Like maybe they've got issues and they they can't seem to get it together and discipline themselves and lose the weight, whether it's because of their sugar levels or their addiction to food or whatever it is.
But my God, we're not helping anybody by protecting their feelings and letting their body get destroyed.
It's crazy.
mark sisson
No, it's crazy.
And, you know, seeing obese models, you know, on the cover of magazines.
joe rogan
They're curve models, Mark, you piece of shit.
You don't even know what you're saying.
mark sisson
Okay.
joe rogan
How dare you?
mark sisson
Yeah.
But, I mean, it's just...
joe rogan
The curve model.
mark sisson
Again, talk about sending the wrong message.
joe rogan
Yes, it's a terrible message.
mark sisson
It's a terrible message.
joe rogan
And not only that, but here's where it gets even worse.
When people do get healthy, folks get mad at them.
Like, there's fans that are mad at Adele.
mark sisson
Oh, right, yeah.
joe rogan
Because Adele is really slim now, and she looks fucking great.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Which, by the way, I have a theory.
She's one of those women that got hit up by a male gold digger.
Her ex-husband, she divorced him, and he got...
Shit ton of money.
And I think, you know, that's the best revenge.
She just said, all right, motherfucker.
I'll show you what's up.
You were getting a fat Adele.
mark sisson
Exactly.
joe rogan
And now hot Adele's here.
Because you've seen pictures of her, Jamie?
Pull a picture of her now.
Women are mad.
They're mad.
They're mad that she had discipline and that she took care of herself and she got thin and she's healthier.
Look at her now.
That's incredible.
That's really incredible.
She looks like a fit girl.
She looks like a girl that could be in a CrossFit class or something like that.
If I ran into her and someone says, oh, this is my friend Adele, I'm like, hey, what's up?
I wouldn't think, oh, it's Adele.
mark sisson
Not that Adele.
joe rogan
It's the singer Adele.
Look at that picture in the middle.
Go in that picture in the middle.
Look at that.
Bro, she looks fucking fantastic.
That's incredible.
That's incredible.
We should praise that.
And all you other women out there that are getting angry and stuffing the incorrect food in your mouth, looking at that, you should approach this differently.
You should say, I want to do what she's doing.
But this idea of this plus model industry, and I'm not against plus models, man.
Look, if you're big and you want to wear hot clothes, you should be able to do whatever you want.
But pretending that that's healthy.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
Is where I draw the line.
mark sisson
No, I agree.
And I think my whole thing in life is I want to help people be happy.
At the end of the day, all the stuff we talk about, whether it's dialing your sleep in or getting the right body weight or being strong or fit or productive or whatever, it all trickles down to one thing.
Am I happy?
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
Because you can be fit and ripped and productive and successful and unhappy.
Okay, that didn't work.
If happiness is really what we're seeking as individuals, and it could be I'm happy because I'm making a contribution to the world or whatever, then if you're a large person and even if your health isn't really dialed in, but you truly tell me you're healthy, I'm like, okay, that's fine.
But if you say, you know, I'm...
Typically, if you're obese, you're not healthy.
If you say, I'm happy, one thing.
But if you say, big can also be healthy.
And I'm thinking, no, 230 for a woman cannot be healthy.
joe rogan
Yeah, this is a weird thing that people keep trying to push.
It flies in the face of science.
It flies in the face of all the medical literature.
You can't say that.
You can't say that you can be fat and also be healthy.
You can be fat and not currently suffering from a heart attack.
You can be fat, but you are taxing your system in a damaging way, and also, you're also shortening your lifespan.
You're burning the candle at both ends, for sure.
unidentified
Right.
mark sisson
To that end, You got a book?
I got a book.
joe rogan
Two meals a day?
What is the idea behind that?
Why two meals a day?
Why not just one?
mark sisson
Well, I was going to do one a day, and I thought, nobody's going to buy this fucking book if it's one meal a day.
joe rogan
Isn't that the warrior diet?
mark sisson
I started with two.
You know, I've gone through, again, all these iterations of trying to...
Assist people with the information that I've come across in my research on how they can achieve an ideal body composition, have more energy, maintain or build muscle, improve their immune systems, have better sex, be more productive, whatever it is.
These are the hidden genetic switches that I'm trying to uncover for people.
And in so doing, you can choose to do it or not.
I'm not suggesting you have to do this to have a great life, but here are some of the ways that we do it.
And it started with a primal blueprint and then sort of morphed into, well, the primal blueprint works really well for a lot of people, and it even worked well for me, but is there something else?
Is there a new, like, level I could get to?
And that was the keto.
So I wrote a book called The Keto Reset Diet since I was on here.
And I was into keto for a while.
But then I sort of said, well, you know, ketosis is not a way to live your life.
It's a tool, a strategy that you can use to build metabolic flexibility.
joe rogan
Some people do think that it's a way to live your life, though.
Like, you know, Dom D'Augustino.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
He does it all the time.
mark sisson
Yeah.
I mean, I have a lot of friends who do keto the whole time.
I'm not a person who says, that's the way.
Keto's the be-all and the end-all of how you should live your life.
Because I'm more about achieving metabolic flexibility.
And that's a term that's come up in the last couple of years.
I don't know if you've heard it, but it basically describes your body's ability to extract energy from whatever substrate is available at the time.
joe rogan
So making it easier for your body to balance back and forth from fat to carbohydrates and not require so much of a gap.
mark sisson
Bingo.
joe rogan
Because usually the gap is, what is it, like two weeks or something like that if you're a carbohydrate?
mark sisson
Yeah.
And if you never go down the route of keto and all you do is eat carbs your whole life or have a carb-centric diet, you never get to the point where you're burning fat efficiently or effectively.
So you're really metabolically inflexible.
Your body is just demanding that it continuously run on carbs and never tap into your fat stores.
Typically, you get incrementally fatter and fatter.
And then if you skip a meal or skip two meals or try to go on some sort of a fast, The wheels fall off because you haven't built the metabolic machinery to burn fat, to burn ketones, and all the things that go along with metabolic flexibility.
So it turns out metabolic flexibility is the holy grail in how you get there, whether it's primal, paleo, vegetarian, vegan, fasting, IF, whatever.
It's almost like it doesn't matter What route you use, if you can get to the point where you're metabolically flexible, now you have this ability to extract energy from your own stored body fat whenever you don't eat.
joe rogan
And how does one do that?
Like, what's the best strategy?
mark sisson
Well, the best strategy is keto.
joe rogan
That's the best strategy?
mark sisson
For sure, for sure.
That's the best strategy.
As long as you keep feeding your body carbohydrates every two or three hours all day long, the body goes, hey, I got plenty of fuel.
Taking the carbohydrates in raises my blood sugar.
Blood sugar is a fuel, but I don't want too much of it in my system, and so the body produces insulin, which...
It tries to take excess glucose and protein and fat out of the bloodstream and sequester it in the cells.
And in so doing, your blood sugar drops.
And then you have to eat again every two or three hours.
And it's this cycle that people enter into that they're on for a lifetime sometimes.
And the tendency over time, because you're not burning your stored body fat, is to accumulate body fat.
You never get really adept at burning body fat because you never take time off to require that your body burns its fat.
You just keep accumulating it.
joe rogan
So how does someone go from being metabolically inflexible to metabolically flexible without going into keto?
mark sisson
That's difficult.
The way to do it is through fasting.
Keto is such a better way to do it.
The reason is you're trying to prompt the body into making changes that it doesn't want to make.
When you go to the gym and you lift weights, you're prompting the body to build muscle that it really doesn't want to build, but now you're giving it a reason to.
When you withhold carbohydrate from the diet, sugar in particular, but carbohydrate in general, And the body senses that it's not going to get glucose for a while.
It starts to go to a plan B, which is to build the metabolic machinery to start to extract energy from stored fat cells to burn that fat, to combust that fat in the muscle cells.
It takes some of the fat and sends it to the liver to convert into ketones because the brain works really well on ketones.
In fact, the brain works better on ketones than it does on glucose for most people.
So the body has this built-in plan, this diagram, this genetic program that you're born with to be metabolically flexible and to be able to extract energy from fat and from ketones and from glucose.
And it would normally go that route, but we never give it the reason to.
Now, how is that...
How has it evolved?
Well, for most of human history, we ate and we didn't eat.
It wasn't like, you know, breakfast was the most important meal of the day or make sure you keep, you know, little Tupperware things of a little bit of protein and some carbohydrate to eat every two or three hours or else your muscles will go into cannibal mode.
No, humans are wired to overeat.
And because food was so scarce, when we did come across food, we tended to eat more, and certainly sweet foods like fruits was even more palatable, so we probably tended to eat more of that.
So we're wired to overeat, and we have this amazing...
It's a design that allows us to take excess energy and convert it into fuel that we carry around with us all the time, conveniently located above the center of gravity.
So it's on the hips, on the butt, on the thighs, on the belly.
So we tend to carry this excess body fat as a survival mechanism from a million years ago.
joe rogan
That's why you carry it here?
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's like a fanny pack.
mark sisson
Yeah, it's exactly what it is.
That's exactly what it is.
But again, if you look at evolution and how things work, we're bipedals.
We have to stand upright.
So if we had fat accumulating on our upper back or whatever, we'd be tipping over.
So it's conveniently located over the center.
It's an elegant, elegant design.
The problem is it was designed so that when you didn't eat food, you could take that same fuel, take it out of storage, combust it, and not be any of the worst for wear.
Not think of anything other than, you know, I'm still going to hunt.
I'm still going to do all these things.
I haven't eaten for five days.
I'm not hungry.
I'm not pissed off at my mate.
I'm just going to keep going with a great attitude that I'm going to find something to eat.
joe rogan
Now, what is the standard amount of time?
Is there a standard amount of time between...
If a person eats a normal American diet and they just decide to fast, how long does it take before their body converts to burning fat?
mark sisson
If they're not going keto?
joe rogan
Right.
mark sisson
Yeah.
They're probably going to burn...
They're going to probably use a little bit of muscle in the process because the body, if it isn't used to...
And deriving most of its energy from fat because of a process that you've engaged in to use keto to burn fat, it'll still seek glucose.
And if you don't give it glucose and you haven't done this work, for the first couple of days it's miserable.
And so people talk about the low-carb flu or the...
Or, you know, if they go on a fasting thing at an ashram, you know, I saw Elvis, you know, two days ago.
joe rogan
Elvis went to an ashram?
mark sisson
Whatever.
I saw Elvis in my dreams.
joe rogan
Oh, you're saying because you're going crazy.
mark sisson
Because you're going crazy.
So, you know, your brain is kind of frazzled because you haven't given it the opportunity to really thrive on ketones yet.
Your body's making ketones, but you haven't, again, you haven't built that metabolic machinery to use them efficiently and effectively.
And so the brain's still looking for glucose.
And as a result, what happens is the brain will send a signal to the adrenals to secrete cortisol.
Cortisol then, you know, goes throughout the body and strips amino acids from muscle tissue to send them to the liver to become glucose so you can feed the brain.
So it's counterproductive over time.
And it's also, you know, one of the reasons why back in the old bodybuilding days, in the old training days in any gym...
This mantra about don't go more than three or four hours without eating or you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue.
If you haven't become fat adapted and keto adapted, that does happen.
You do cannibalize muscle tissue when you go long periods of time without eating.
joe rogan
When I say standard American diet, I don't mean junk food, but if you're a person who eats normal, you eat a little bit of pasta, a little bit of bread, but you eat mostly healthy.
If you decide that you're going to fast, Your body's going to cannibalize some muscle.
mark sisson
Not so much.
joe rogan
How much?
A few pounds.
mark sisson
A few pounds, maybe.
joe rogan
A few pounds.
mark sisson
And you'll get it back.
You'll get it back.
joe rogan
But the idea is that if you can weather that storm, how much time are you looking for before your body starts burning fat?
mark sisson
Some people...
A week?
Some people two weeks?
unidentified
A week?
mark sisson
Some people three weeks?
joe rogan
You'll be dead.
You can't fast for two weeks.
mark sisson
Oh, no, no.
You're talking about fasting fasting.
Oh, Jesus.
No, I'm talking about...
joe rogan
No, I'm not talking about...
mark sisson
No, no.
I'm talking about intermittent fasting.
No, that gets us to two meals a day.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
But what if someone just fasts?
mark sisson
So give me a term.
joe rogan
Okay, so if you decide if I'm going to go on a...
Yeah, I'm going to go on a 36-hour fast.
mark sisson
That's probably the high end of what I would do.
And then anything beyond that, I'd be a little bit concerned that I hadn't prepped myself with fat adaptation yet.
joe rogan
So when people go on these crazy three to five day fasts, they report all this energy.
They feel great.
They feel amazing.
What's going on there?
mark sisson
Their brains are using ketones.
joe rogan
Right.
mark sisson
So that's definitely where the energy, the feeling of amazing comes from.
Typically, if you're fasting that long, you're not working out.
Like any of these...
Like my wife does a seven-day water fast twice a year.
joe rogan
Oh, Jesus.
mark sisson
That's what I say.
joe rogan
Do you go on vacation when that's happening?
mark sisson
No, but I eat more.
I eat for her while she's gone.
joe rogan
Why does she do that?
mark sisson
She has this...
You know, she feels like it's good for her.
She's into the autophagy and some of the...
joe rogan
Explain that.
It burns cells.
mark sisson
One of the many things that happens when you fast is that your body goes into a different mode and it starts to realize that there's not going to be a lot of fuel around for a while, and so in addition to burning stored body fat, in addition to making ketones, and by the way, ketones come from fat, so some of the fat that you combust is also just converted into ketones that your brain can use.
It also, the body also says, like if you were to be a, if you had a brain, if you were a cell and you had a brain and you thought, well, generally there's a lot of fuel around, so my job is to pass the genetic material along to the next generation, so there's plenty for two of us, so I'll just divide and there'll be two of us, and that'll be great.
That same cell, in the absence of this sort of bathing in nutrition, goes, wow, this...
Not even enough for one of me, let alone two of me, so I'm not going to divide.
I'm going to repair what I have.
And so the cell goes into a repair process where it starts to consume damaged proteins and damaged fats within itself.
It actually gets energy from that.
It starts to repair broken strands of DNA or whatever little things are going on.
It actually kills off senescent cells at that time.
So it's an anti-aging strategy that a lot of people use.
It's also a—God, I hate the term reset.
I gotta— Why do you hate the term?
joe rogan
Because— It's overused.
mark sisson
No, but—and I used it in a book, but all of a sudden, in the context of what's going on in the world and the Great Reset, like, I never want to hear that term again.
joe rogan
Oh, the Great Reset, isn't that—that's the conspiracy theory that the government is using this to change the financial structure of the country?
mark sisson
And everything else.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Do you hear that a lot in Florida?
Is that what's going on?
mark sisson
No, no, no.
We don't know.
But I read a lot, Joe.
I read the New York Times to see what the other side's doing.
The Great Reset.
Yeah.
So she will do these fast, but she's metabolically flexible, so it's easy for her to do.
But if you're not metabolically flexible and you take on a fast of three days, you can get through it and it's probably good for you.
My whole thing is I want this to be, if you chose to do something like that, I want it to be pleasurable and easy and graceful and something you look forward to doing, not something you dread doing.
joe rogan
Can you intermittent fast and get your body to be more metabolically flexible in that way?
mark sisson
Yeah.
And that's what I'm talking about.
So I'm not even into the multi-day fasting.
I'm into two meals a day.
So the premise of the book is once you've developed metabolic flexibility to engage in as much time as you can of not eating throughout the day to maximize all of these Benefits that we just described that come from not eating.
One of the things we say is most of the good things happen to us when we're not eating.
Most of the repair, most of the recovery, most of the rebuilding happen when we're not eating.
When we're eating, which we have to do, it comes with inflammation and it's a necessary thing, but the good stuff all happens when we're not eating.
So to the extent that we can...
We can expand that window of not eating.
And with the two meals a day program, which pretty much anybody who's keto now does, you just have an evening meal, and then you don't eat until 1 o'clock, 1.30, 2 o'clock the next day.
So you have two meals a day, and you have that 18-hour window.
joe rogan
That's what you use?
mark sisson
An 18-hour window?
An 18-hour window, yeah.
joe rogan
Why do you choose 18?
mark sisson
It works for me.
I mean, you can do 16. I mean, anything less than 14 is back to sort of where you were before.
It's a little bit better, but it's not as...
Like I say, the more time that you can go between eating, the better.
And it isn't about so much a routine on a daily basis.
It's basically, I certainly use that as a template, but once in a while I eat one meal a day.
I'll go, you know, dinner to dinner to dinner.
And the beauty here is because I'm metabolically flexible, I have the confidence that I'm not tearing down muscle tissue.
I have that my immune system is probably benefiting from it as opposed to being somehow hurt by it.
I maintain muscle mass.
Again, I have all this energy.
And most importantly, I'm not hungry.
I mean, hunger is the killer.
Hunger ruins everything.
So anytime we talk about these strategies, you have to address hunger first and foremost.
Because if you ask people, well, one of the things that's going to happen is you're going to get hungry and you're going to get...
And it's going to be, you're going to have to fight your way through it.
No, that's not how we do this.
So with two meals a day, we build a strategy where, you know, we eliminate the big three, the sugar, processed grains, and the industrial seed oils.
And then we, you know, start to cut back a little bit on the starchy carbs for a while, because once you develop the flexibility, you can introduce the starchy carbs again.
And then we basically say, look, let's see how long you can go without feeling bad when you wake up in the morning, you know, and see if you can go till 10 o'clock or 10.30 before you have to eat.
And if you can go longer, that's great.
And if you go that long and do a workout and feel good, that's even better.
So the end result is, well, this all came from a...
A thought experiment I did a while back where I looked at, first of all, how much food we eat as humans.
And we eat a shitload of food.
All of us, pretty much, eat way too much food.
More food than we need, for sure.
And most of us use as a metric, like, what can I get away with?
Like, what's the most amount of this food I can eat and not get fat?
Or what's the most amount of this dessert I can have and not feel like a glutton or not feel guilty later on or not look like I'm whatever?
So we try to get away with As much as we can.
And a lot of guys in the gym, that's their thing.
I love to eat, and I'm going to eat as much as I can.
And if I can get away with more, I'm going to work out more, and I'm going to balance it out.
But it's kind of a ridiculous way of looking at life, like how much of a glutton can I be every day, every meal?
So I did the reverse of that, and I thought, what's the least amount of food we can eat?
And maintain muscle mass or build muscle mass.
What's the least amount of food we can eat and have all the energy we need throughout the day?
Not get sick.
And most importantly, not be hungry.
And if you can look at that in terms of like the minimum effective dose of food, what's the least amount of food I can eat and enjoy every freaking bite with gusto and delight...
And then be okay with saying, you know what?
I think I've had enough.
I'm good.
And typically you find if you've developed this metabolic flexibility that you can eliminate 25 or 30% of the calories you used to eat with zero adverse effect and probably entirely to your benefit.
joe rogan
When you go 16 to 18 hours a day, or anyone does that, if you do that on a regular basis, will that make your body more adapted to burning fat?
mark sisson
Absolutely.
joe rogan
Really?
mark sisson
Because in the 16 to 18 hours a day, that's where your energy is coming from.
And so we look at, you know, you look at some of the top endurance athletes now, Zach Bitter, good example, guy derives 97% of his energy when he's running a 100-mile race, doing 6-minute, 45-second miles, derives 90% from fat.
That was almost unheard of.
Like the science community could not get their head around that for a long time.
joe rogan
A lot of what he does is carnivore.
Yeah.
What he does is like fatty ribeye stinks.
mark sisson
Because it works for him.
Because he's metabolically flexible and he's deriving most of his energy from fat.
joe rogan
But he does take in glucose on the day of a big race.
mark sisson
Metabolic flexibility.
So he's able to burn glucose and it doesn't derail his fat burning or his ketone production.
joe rogan
Because his body is so accustomed to doing that.
mark sisson
It's so flexible.
It's so efficient.
It's so used to doing that.
joe rogan
So in your book, do you set a guideline like how to get this started and what to do?
unidentified
Oh yeah.
joe rogan
What made you do this?
Because first of all, I know you're rich as fuck because I know you saw your company.
And then you didn't have to give up a lot of the money because you moved to Florida.
But because of that, what motivates you to write another book?
mark sisson
I just, you know...
My original mission was to help 10 million people regain their health by understanding how the body works.
joe rogan
You had a number?
mark sisson
I had a number, 10 million.
joe rogan
Where'd that number come from?
mark sisson
Just pulled it out of my ass.
So then a couple years later, I'm like, I think I've already hit that number with books and seminars and blog posts and stuff like that.
Let's make it 100. So I boosted it up to 100. One of the Best things I did with the food company was I brought new people into understanding how the body works and how eating real food with healthy sauces and marinades and toppings and things that made that healthy food taste that much better.
Again, I probably expanded the universe of people that now begin to really appreciate the effects of food on the body.
But I still have like a book a year in me, and I'm still doing books on how we can achieve greatness.
I don't often use that term, but how we can...
You know, achieve this level of health and satisfaction and enjoyment of life.
I mean, the tagline of my company is Live Awesome.
And as I said, I want everybody to, at the end of the day, all I want is to be happy.
You know, and if I can help you do that through my methods, and then the rest of what you do, whether it's financial or with your family, that's up to you.
But I can certainly assist on the health side.
joe rogan
And when you started this book, was there anything surprising that you found while you were putting this book together?
mark sisson
No, this is really the synthesis of 30 years of doing this.
And it's almost like, you know, this book was rewriting stuff that it had already written, but in a way that's more user-friendly to the average person.
So nothing in my framework has changed scientifically, but I'm always trying to figure out how can I say this in a way that will appeal to the most people.
So, I think everyone realizes they probably eat too much food, but how can I find a way to not only convince them to do it, but make it easier and make it not just easier, but pleasurable in a way that enhances their lives?
joe rogan
People like those meal prep companies.
It's one of the things that people like about them is that they give you a reasonable portion of food, especially if it's a good company.
It'll be based on your body mass and what kind of activities you're involved in.
Do you ever use one of those or do you recommend anything like that?
mark sisson
Well, no, because now we produce meals.
joe rogan
Oh, you do?
mark sisson
Yeah, we have meals.
joe rogan
When did you guys start doing that?
mark sisson
Last year, pre-COVID, and then COVID sort of shut down the distribution because they're frozen meals.
So they're frozen, but we have steak fajitas.
We have teriyaki chicken.
We've got an Asian dish.
I mean, these are in bags, and it's all free-range and grass-fed and organic.
joe rogan
And do you microwave it?
How do you heat it up?
mark sisson
You can microwave it, yeah.
And some, the skillets you do in a skillet pan.
joe rogan
How long did it take to figure out how to do that where it tastes good but still maintained all the nutrients?
And it seems like that would be, that's a challenge in and of itself, right?
mark sisson
That's a huge challenge, yeah.
And the challenge is making it to scale, right, and doing it in large quantities.
joe rogan
How many people do you serve with these?
mark sisson
Oh, just one.
It's just that these are individual serving sizes.
joe rogan
I'm sorry, I meant how many people do you distribute these to?
mark sisson
Well, they're available in stores throughout the country that carry us, yeah.
joe rogan
So it's not like, you're not, it's on like a website where...
mark sisson
No, no, no, you can't.
It's because it's frozen, it's too logistically complicated to do individual shipments.
They have to stay frozen.
So it's in the frozen section of a lot of stores now.
And that was one of the things that was curtailed from COVID. So we were going to launch last year in April, and then a lot of the stores said, look, there's going to be nobody coming into our stores, and we're not going to make any big shifts until we know how this sorts out.
But it's taking off.
One of the programs we have right now, and I think we told your team this, is we're...
We're going to donate 50,000 of these meals to needy families through a program.
I hope it's in the show notes, but if not, you can Google Primal Kitchen and check it out there.
By purchasing Primal Kitchen products and showing a proof of purchase, we'll donate one of these meals to families in need.
joe rogan
Oh, that's great.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's very nice.
So you were personally involved in the construction of these meals?
Like, did you have to taste test all of them?
mark sisson
Oh, my God.
So I sold the company to Kraft Heinz two years ago now.
And I've been intimately involved ever since, and mostly on the R&D side.
So the amount of R&D that's gone into creating these has been amazing.
And, you know, so we will have Zoom calls.
To cook in real time whatever, you know, we're working on, whatever the latest iteration is, and then there'll be, you know, eight of us on a call, and then we'll have to fill out forms about, you know, spiciness and sweetness and all that.
It's really, I think, well done.
And so by consensus, we come down to the final iteration.
joe rogan
Now, how do you parse that out between, say, if there's a guy that weighs 250 pounds versus a guy that weighs 150 pounds?
Obviously, you're not even the same for the big guy.
mark sisson
Buy two of them if you're the big guy, yeah.
joe rogan
But is it designed for a specific size human?
mark sisson
No, but that's a good point.
I mean, it's designed for moms who are in a hurry and don't want to fix dinner for their kids or whatever or want to spend less time fixing dinner for their kids and want to serve them up something healthy.
So it really fills a need.
On occasion, like I love to cook steak at my house, so I mostly have steak, but if I'm out of steak or whatever, then I'm going to pull it back up.
joe rogan
Is that a staple of your diet?
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
Is that mostly what you eat?
mark sisson
Well, red meat is still mostly what I eat.
joe rogan
Really?
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
Now, what do you say to people that think that's terrible for you?
mark sisson
More for me.
More for me?
joe rogan
I don't mean for the environment.
I mean, terrible for you physically.
I'm sure you must run into people.
Not anymore.
mark sisson
Not after you had Saladino on the show and Baker.
The carnivore diet, it's a thing.
This really is a thing.
Eating a lot of steak is a thing.
Now, when I say a lot, I don't eat a lot of steak.
But I have steak frequently, right?
And I have fish fairly frequently.
I probably have two.
Both my meals are high in protein, moderate in fat, and low in carbs every day.
And that's the way I want it.
That's what my satiety requirements are.
That's what my taste buds want.
That's what goes best with wine.
Every meal I eat has to be a great meal.
I don't eat anything that's healthy just because you tell me it's healthy.
And every bite of food I put in my mouth, I want to be spectacular.
So I orchestrate my eating around that, and when I'm done, I'm full.
joe rogan
And so you do most of your cooking?
mark sisson
I do most of my cooking, or my wife.
My wife has recently decided to become a great chef, and she's been preparing some amazing stuff.
joe rogan
Do you let her cook the steak?
mark sisson
No, don't let her cook the steak.
unidentified
Ah, I knew it!
mark sisson
No, there is some stuff.
joe rogan
Isn't that weird?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
I mean, you want to talk about primal.
That is a weird instinct that men have to want to cook steak.
I cook most of my meals on a pellet grill.
I use a Traeger, which I love because it's really simple to use and you can maintain the temperature perfectly.
But I started cooking some stuff recently over an Argentine-style grill where you cook over wood, just plain old wood.
It's so dumb.
It takes so much time.
It's so much more annoying, but yet I love it.
mark sisson
It tastes good.
joe rogan
But it's also this weird thing.
You're cooking over wood.
mark sisson
It's primal, man.
joe rogan
That's very strange.
It's very strange, that thing with men and meat over fire.
Something gets ignited, especially if you've killed the meat yourself.
Then it adds an extra thing.
If you've hunted the meat and then you're cooking over the fire, it's almost like I can hear drums when I'm cooking.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
But men like to cook steak over fire for some strange reason.
You know, like forever.
It's been the big cliche that men like to grill.
mark sisson
And it's still true.
My son, who has been mostly vegetarian in his life, and he eats a lot of eggs and protein-oriented stuff.
We went on a hike up to the top of El Cap.
To watch a friend of mine jump off with a parachute the next day.
And I brought a steak up, and I literally cooked it over a fire hanging from a stick, and my son was so impressed.
He's like, Jesus, Dad, that's really primal.
I'm like, well, I've got to have my steak, so...
joe rogan
You know, you can get these little tiny grills that fold up, little camp grills.
They're this tiny little thing that's made out of metal that's like the size of a notebook.
And the little sticks come out of the corner and you put it on the ground, you light a fire underneath it, get it hot and grill right over it.
mark sisson
Maybe next time, but this time I was hanging it off a stick, and it was great.
joe rogan
Well, the problem is you could use the wrong stick.
mark sisson
Yeah, if the stick falls into fire, you're screwed, too.
joe rogan
Also, if you don't know about poisoned sticks, poisoned branches.
I think Callan was telling me about some guy who him and his son cooked food off of...
They made these skewers off of some branch, and it turns out to be a toxic plant, and they wind up getting sick and dying.
unidentified
Oh, wow.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, like there's certain plants that, you know, if you eat the plant, it'll kill you.
And if you shave that plant, you know, and then stick it in your meat, you're getting all of the chemicals from that plant in your meat.
mark sisson
You've made the plant bleed the chemicals into the meat.
joe rogan
Yeah, exactly.
How do you cook steak?
mark sisson
So, you know, again, living in Miami Beach, well, cut back to, I was in Malibu for 30 years.
joe rogan
Right.
mark sisson
And I had a gas grill on my inside, and I'd cook either outside or on gas or inside.
And so that was the only way to cook a steak, as far as I'm concerned.
Well, I had to learn, when I got to a condo in Miami Beach, I got to learn how to cook in a pan on an electric stovetop.
joe rogan
That sounds like a nightmare.
mark sisson
Making the best steaks I've ever had.
joe rogan
Really?
mark sisson
100%.
joe rogan
How do you do it differently?
mark sisson
I pan-fry it with butter, salt and pepper, pan-fry on one side, flip it over, get a lot of the gooey butter and stuff in there, pan-fry on the other side, let it stand for 10 minutes.
joe rogan
So it's moderate heat and you're doing it lower, because if it's butter, you don't really want to sear it at a very high heat.
mark sisson
Correct.
joe rogan
Cast iron?
unidentified
Really?
mark sisson
No!
Some, you know, just some...
joe rogan
Some bullshit-ass frying pan.
mark sisson
Some bullshit-ass French frying pan.
I have a cast iron pan, but, you know...
joe rogan
You don't use that?
mark sisson
I'm not that sophisticated.
joe rogan
Cast iron is the opposite of sophisticated.
mark sisson
Yeah, well, whatever.
Whatever.
I don't like to clean up on a cast iron pan.
joe rogan
Oh, well, you just take one.
You ever seen those little metal things?
It looks like chain mail.
unidentified
Yeah.
mark sisson
For little pads, yeah, whatever.
joe rogan
No, it's not even that.
mark sisson
I know.
joe rogan
They're designed just for cleaning cast iron.
unidentified
Yeah.
mark sisson
I have one.
I have a cast iron pan.
I just don't reach for it.
joe rogan
You don't use it.
mark sisson
I don't, yeah.
joe rogan
Do you cook with garlic and just butter?
mark sisson
I'm the simplest guy.
Salt?
Salt.
Maybe some pepper, but always salt.
And then I'll maybe steam up some broccoli and slather it with butter.
Glass of wine.
I'm good to go, man.
joe rogan
And when you portion it out, how many ounces do you think you're eating?
mark sisson
I mean, I'll typically finish a 12-ounce steak.
joe rogan
That's a reasonable-sized steak.
It's actually on the small side if you went to a restaurant, right?
mark sisson
Yeah.
Well, if I went to a restaurant, I wouldn't finish a 16-ounce, but I can finish a 12-ounce at home.
joe rogan
I went to a restaurant with Jordan Peterson once, and I watched Jordan eat a 32-ounce tomahawk by himself.
mark sisson
By his damn self?
joe rogan
Because that's all he eats.
unidentified
Jesus.
joe rogan
He doesn't eat anything but red meat.
mark sisson
Wow.
joe rogan
And drink water.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's all he does.
mark sisson
Okay.
I mean, that's a...
No, listen.
That's a choice.
joe rogan
But I... It helped him.
mark sisson
I mean, one of the things I come back to is...
I want to be happy.
I want to enjoy every bite of food, and I happen to like some vegetables, too, and I happen to like different things.
So even if you could demonstrate to me that Jordan's way of doing it is better in terms of your health, I might say, well, you know, there's a...
A line that I'm not going to cross because I love the taste.
I love the crunch.
I love the whatever it is of certain foods.
joe rogan
I enjoy salads as a beginning of my meal.
I think also there's something to it's light and you're kind of like priming your body for food.
You're starting off with this sort of light food, lettuce and celery and carrots and what have you.
I prefer just olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
That's what I like for dressing.
mark sisson
That's probably the healthiest, too.
joe rogan
Yeah.
It just tastes the best, too.
I just always feel like I prefer that.
And then I'll eat meat after that.
But I've done the carnivore thing a couple times now.
I did it two months in a row.
This time, this year, I kind of cheated a lot.
I ate dessert a little too many times.
But the first time I was very strict.
mark sisson
Which, by the way, that's like worse than...
It's like the combination of the fat and the sugar.
That's pretty harmful.
unidentified
Really?
mark sisson
Yeah.
We can get into that.
joe rogan
Let's get into that.
Tell me.
mark sisson
A lot of people screw up on keto or screw up on some of these, even IF, intermittent fasting, because...
If you're metabolically flexible, then you can derive a lot of this energy from the fats in your meal and from the protein, and you've cut the carbs down.
But if you then finish it off with a dessert, now you're raising your insulin.
The insulin is—well, you're raising your blood sugar, first of all.
And then you're raising your insulin, so the insulin is trying to get rid of the glucose in your bloodstream, and it's also locking the fat into the fat cells so you can't burn it off.
It's a bit of a...
It's sort of the worst...
The thing you could do would be to combine a standard American diet with parts of a keto or a primal diet.
So don't do that.
joe rogan
Okay.
So if you're going to eat healthy food, if you're going to eat just steak, just don't eat the dessert.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
And what is the mechanism?
What's going on when you're combining the sugar and healthy food?
mark sisson
I mean, the mechanism, as I say, if you're eating otherwise healthy food, even if you've got some starchy carbs in there or some vegetables that are providing carbohydrate, you know, they're slow-burn carbohydrates.
They don't go directly into your bloodstream.
They sort of leak into your bloodstream over time.
Many of these are locked in a fibrous matrix, so it takes a while for your body to digest them.
But then when you consume the sugar, the sugar goes straight into the bloodstream, so the blood sugar goes sky high, and now it sets up this whole reaction where, again, your pancreas is secreting insulin, the insulin is trying to get rid of all the sugar that's in your bloodstream.
joe rogan
So a healthy meal can be ruined by dessert.
mark sisson
Yes, exactly.
joe rogan
Damn it, Mark.
mark sisson
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I mean, you can have a healthy dessert.
joe rogan
What's a healthy?
mark sisson
Berries?
Well, berries and mascarpone cream or something like that used to be one of my favorite desserts.
And we would serve it at dinner parties at our house, and people go, this is the best dessert I ever had.
joe rogan
They were lying to you.
mark sisson
Probably.
joe rogan
Yeah, tiramisu.
If you had tiramisu right next to it, they would dive on that.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
But that's mascarpone cream, too, but that's much more sugary.
mark sisson
Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan
The problem is it's so delicious.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
And those keto desserts are mostly bullshit.
mark sisson
Bullshit.
No, I just have to roll my eyes.
The paleo treats and the keto desserts and all these things are like trying to come up with a version.
It's almost like Beyond Meat trying to come up with a piece of steak that's made out of vegetables.
And here we are trying to create a sugary dessert that looks like a dessert and tastes like a dessert, but is made with erythritol and allulose and all this other stuff.
joe rogan
I'm glad you brought that up, because I think there's real promise in these meats that are made in a laboratory in terms of their cloning meat.
You know, they're taking meat and reproducing it.
And I've seen some of these really strange-looking 3D-printed steaks, but it's actual animal tissue.
Yeah.
But these meat substitutes that are made with seed oils...
Horrible.
Horrible.
Just knowing that.
There was a study, and we've talked about it on the podcast, where they fed rats these things.
And they had horrible...
Fucking rats eat each other.
They eat everything.
They eat garbage.
They're fine.
They eat those fake burgers, and they were sick as fuck.
mark sisson
I know.
joe rogan
They started getting liver problems.
mark sisson
Yep.
Yeah, I can't explain it.
joe rogan
It's amazing how many people think that those things are good for you.
mark sisson
Ooh, beyond amazing.
Yeah.
It's impossible.
Oh, wait.
No.
It's just nuts.
It's just nuts that, again, that the collective conscience of the country would rally around something so inane.
So antithetical to health and in the name of saving the climate or saving the animals or whatever.
There's never going to be any, well, not in our lifetime, even the matrix lab-grown meat, the cell-based stuff.
It still lacks a lot of the nutrients.
You have to have the infusion of the capillaries and all of the stuff.
You have to have a real animal to get the full impact of all this.
joe rogan
They need to clone headless animals with no souls.
mark sisson
Yeah, exactly.
That's what they need to do.
joe rogan
But then they would have to exercise in order to be really delicious.
That's the thing, like the difference between a wild game animal and an animal that's stuck in a pen like veal, which is disgusting.
A wild game animal is rich and red and dark and it's denser, it's more chewy because it's a denser, healthier animal.
mark sisson
And you think you're going to get that from a lab-grown animal?
joe rogan
No.
mark sisson
No.
So, you know, we're back to...
joe rogan
You get a headless elk and you put them on steroids and you have them running on a treadmill.
mark sisson
Let's patent that, Jamie.
Make a note.
Yeah, I think regenerative agriculture is the way we need to go to feed the world.
Not through ceasing growing animals and trying to do it all in the lab.
joe rogan
Well, Rob Wolf has a new book out and he was supposed to be on right around April, but a bunch of shit went down and we're going to have him on again.
But his book is about that.
His book is all about...
The benefits of regenerative agriculture.
Yeah, the people that are skeptical, though, don't think that we could do it at a scale that's necessary to provide as many people with meat as eat meat in this country because of fast food production.
Fast food production, the way they believe, the way I've heard it argued, and it makes a lot of sense, is that the scale in which we're consuming meat in this country because of fast food requires factory farming to keep up with it.
mark sisson
Well, for now it does, but, you know, there's got to be a tipping point.
There's got to be a point at which we have to recognize that by concentrating everything in our world, not just food, but all of these different concentrations, that there is a point at which we can't satisfy people's needs and needs.
And so I see us sort of going back to the cottage industry farm, the local grown, you know, the local farmers.
I mean, I would love to see if there's going to be any subsidies in agriculture, it should be for local small farms that are trying to do regenerative agriculture and reclaim the topsoil and, you know, build back instead of continuously depleting it.
joe rogan
Yeah, I think so too.
And I think one of the interesting things is that one of the big arguments against everyone eating vegetables is monocrop agriculture, which is essentially what you would need.
This is the real problem.
It becomes a conundrum.
Because everyone, I think everyone, with a heart and a soul, agrees that factory farming in terms of animals is disgusting.
It's horrible.
But I don't think they understand the horrors of monocrop agriculture and how bad it is.
It's so bad for the environment.
It's so bad for the soil.
It's bad for the animals.
It's terrible for all the wildlife that gets moved and displaced because of the fact that you have 4,000 acres of corn or some crazy shit like that.
And when they...
Churn that corn up with a combine, a lot of shit dies.
There is no way you're going to go out there and handpick 4,000 acres of corn.
You're not going to do it.
You use machinery.
And during that machinery, it's indiscriminate.
It chews up everything.
Not only that...
You have to use some sort of pesticides.
You have to use something that discourages predation.
You have to use all these different methods to keep animals.
If you have 4,000 acres of corn, you're going to have a food source where animals are going to swarm in and eat all of your crops.
That's what they would do.
If that was a normal thing that occurred in the wild, if in the wild, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there was 4,000 acres of naturally growing vegetables, that would be one of the most wildlife-rich areas.
mark sisson
100%.
joe rogan
100%.
So how do they keep that from happening?
Well, they do with poison.
They discourage it with pesticides, with all sorts of different methods of eliminating insects.
If you care about insects, they destroy insects.
Insect populations.
Insects which are also critical to the growth of the soil.
It's like there's this natural cycle.
So then they have to add a bunch of nitrogen and shit to the soil.
And they estimate that we have like, I think the latest estimation, Jamie, look this up.
The United States farmlands have, I believe, 60 more seasons.
mark sisson
I heard 50, but yeah, it's that number.
It's a dwindling number.
It's a diminishing number until all of the nutrients are depleted.
joe rogan
You and me might be dead, but Jamie's going to ride this out.
Jamie's going to be here at the end of crops.
mark sisson
He's going to be in this bunker with his lab-grown meat.
joe rogan
I'll be 113 hooked up to an IV NAD machine, and Jamie will be out there trucking, eating lab-grown carrots.
I just don't understand why people don't recognize that both these things are terrible.
Factory farming is terrible, and this monocrop agriculture.
And this is the argument they always use.
We need these monocrop agriculture things to feed animals.
Well, no, we don't.
What you need is natural grasslands.
When the settlers saw millions of bison running across the plains, what were they eating?
Were they eating monocrop, GMO, soy?
No, they weren't.
They were eating grass.
That's what they're supposed to eat.
And when they do that, they shit on the ground.
That shit fertilizes the grasses and fertilizes all the other plants.
And then you have this whole ecosystem of animals that exist within these fields.
And it's supposed to be that way.
They're supposed to coexist together.
And they work together symbiotically to make sure that...
You can do that, at least we've demonstrated on small scale, and this is what Rob's book is about, and a lot of other people have talked about this as well, that when it's done correctly, it actually produces a carbon neutral effect.
mark sisson
Yeah.
Nature always has the best answer.
We try to circumvent it, we try to, you know, it really bugs me when tech tries to solve a wet problem.
You know, when the people in tech go, well, we can fix this.
I mean, there's a company called Soylent.
joe rogan
Yeah, I heard about that.
Sounds disgusting.
mark sisson
Wanted to raise $200 million.
joe rogan
Did they not see the fucking movie?
mark sisson
What?
Yeah, exactly.
joe rogan
If you don't know, Soylent Green.
mark sisson
It's people.
joe rogan
Yeah, Soylent Green is a science fiction movie from the 1970s, and it's about people accidentally eating people.
Yeah.
They didn't know they were eating people.
They were eating this new food product called Soylent Green.
And at the end of the movie, they realized, oh my god, we're eating people.
mark sisson
But the concept was, apparently, some tech guys got together and said, people just don't like to eat.
They don't like to spend the time eating.
They want to get back to programming.
So let's make a complete...
That's a tech solution.
So let's make a complete meal.
joe rogan
What's up, Jamie?
jamie vernon
It's named after the movie, just so you know.
mark sisson
They knew what they were doing.
joe rogan
Of course it is.
Soylent's not a thing.
You have to name...
You can't not know about that movie.
Someone's going to tell you.
unidentified
Certainly, if you went to trademark it, you'd But it's just the idea that people don't like to eat.
joe rogan
What the fuck are you talking about?
mark sisson
No, that's my point.
joe rogan
That's so crazy.
mark sisson
How can we do it quickly and efficiently?
joe rogan
Some people don't like to eat, though.
My friend Paul, he fucking hated food.
He was super skinny and he never ate.
And he would always say, I hate food.
I just eat food because I have to.
mark sisson
I think that's an anomaly.
That's what you call an outlier.
joe rogan
I think, you know, like two of my daughters have completely different taste buds.
My 12-year-old daughter does not like spicy food.
My 10-year-old daughter loves it.
All my habanero sauces and all these different stuff, like pretty spicy sauces, she gets into it.
And I'm like, it must be a gene.
It has to be.
I don't think it's been identified.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Has it?
mark sisson
No, I don't know.
I mean, it's almost definitely a gene.
joe rogan
It's got to be because my wife doesn't have it.
My wife does not like spicy food.
And my 12-year-old doesn't like it.
My 12-year-old also has allergies that my wife has that I don't have.
My 10-year-old doesn't have the allergies and loves spicy food.
So it's clear there's a mixture going on here.
But I think it's the same thing with taste.
And some people, I think their taste buds are just fucking terrible.
unidentified
Yeah.
mark sisson
You know, when I had COVID, I lost my taste for a week.
Smell and taste.
It was the weirdest thing.
And I really got how...
Like, I literally lost five pounds.
Not by choice, but by the fact that I had to...
You know, I just didn't feel like eating and my great steak...
Literally, it tasted like chewing rubber.
It was almost disgusting.
joe rogan
Wow, that's so strange.
mark sisson
So, you know, a lot of us, I'm not the only one, a lot of us have thought, okay, that's the way to create a diet product.
It's something that ruins your taste and smell for, you know, a couple of hours.
joe rogan
Or there's a little thing called discipline.
mark sisson
Yeah, well, that's right.
joe rogan
How about that?
How about learned discipline?
mark sisson
Yeah.
Well, again, if you reconfigure your metabolism to be metabolically flexible, a lot of this hunger, appetite, and cravings go away.
joe rogan
It's also a matter of reprioritizing the way you look at your life.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
And you can do that.
And one of the things that I recommend to people is write things down in terms of if you want to accomplish things.
People said to me, like, how do you fit everything that you do in a day?
It's a tight squeeze, but one of the ways I do it is by writing things down so I'm accountable.
So I have to do these things, particularly my workouts.
They're written out.
And I've done that a lot recently, and I've really enjoyed it because it makes me accountable.
I look at that sheet of paper and I know this stuff has to get done.
And there's only one way.
I have to do it.
And I think that should be the same with your food.
I think you can enjoy delicious meals like what you're talking about with a nice steak or salad and some avocado and olive oil and salt.
Nice.
But write that shit out.
Like, this is what I'm eating today.
I'm going to drink 32 ounces of water.
I'm not going to drink anything else.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do that.
But just try it that way.
Try writing things out.
It's such a good idea.
mark sisson
No, prioritization and responsibility, you know, taking responsibility, those are kind of a key ingredient in getting your life back together again, I think.
And with regard to, you know, eating...
One of the issues that I saw people have is, you know, well, noon, it's lunchtime, right?
It's like, whether I'm hungry or not, it's noon, we should have lunch.
Well, what if you, you know, prioritize something else at noon, to your point, and be okay with the fact that you don't have to have something to eat just because it's 12 p.m.?
joe rogan
Isn't the problem with people, though, that that's their only window to eat if they work?
mark sisson
But again, if you're doing two meals, well, okay.
Possibly, but let's go back to breakfast.
Like, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
It's not.
A morning meal from 8 to 9 is not the most important meal of the day.
And for people who are metabolically flexible, it's a waste of time.
It's like, what?
I've got to start my day by sitting down and doing something else instead of going off and being productive and going to the gym and going to work and doing all the stuff I'm doing?
So, you know, this frees up a lot of time as well, this compressed eating window is one of the terms we use for it.
joe rogan
I started a few years ago working out in the morning before my first meal, and it made a big difference.
mark sisson
You work out fast?
joe rogan
Yeah, and I'm accustomed to it, too.
The problem is if you're not accustomed to it, you do not have as much energy as you do.
mark sisson
For a while, but then you'll get accustomed to it.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's normal for me now.
mark sisson
What time do you work out?
joe rogan
Usually around 10 a.m., that's what I like.
mark sisson
So when's your first meal?
joe rogan
Usually around 1 p.m.
mark sisson
Alright.
Like today?
joe rogan
Yeah.
Today it would be around 1, but I just had a protein bar on the way over here.
I eat very light in the morning.
I had a couple pieces of steak with some hot sauce on the way out the door, and then I had a protein bar.
So I usually eat light in the morning after a workout, and then at nighttime I'll have my big meal.
mark sisson
I do every workout fasted.
joe rogan
Every workout?
mark sisson
Every workout.
I mean, mostly because I prioritize my day and my workout time is, like yours, around 10 o'clock.
So I'll go for an hour and a half fat bike ride on the beach in the sand, in the deep sand.
joe rogan
Oh, that's a great workout.
mark sisson
It's an amazing workout.
Like, I never even thought about it until a friend of mine said, hey, I got these bikes.
I got these four and a half inch wide tires.
Let's go out in the sand.
joe rogan
So much resistance, right?
unidentified
Yeah.
mark sisson
It's so much so that there's times where you, you know, and the sand is so fluffy from the wheels going through, people walking through, that you, like, have to focus on going two miles an hour just to stay upright to get through it.
unidentified
Wow.
mark sisson
But it's an incredible workout.
It's a lot of fun.
You're on the beach, so you're seeing all the people back and forth on the beach.
joe rogan
Sand is just...
Do you have any dunes near you?
No.
No hills at all?
mark sisson
No hills at all.
So that's why this is a great workout, because this is...
In Malibu, if I would get on a mountain bike, there were hills all over the place.
But I'm working harder in the deep sand than I would have on the hills, except I'm going flat.
joe rogan
If Malibu had all the freedoms in terms of taxes and regulation, would you still be in Malibu?
mark sisson
Oh, that's a tough question.
Probably yes.
I would not have left.
I would not have left.
joe rogan
But you enjoy Miami regardless.
mark sisson
Love Miami.
joe rogan
That's so crazy.
Every time I go to Miami, it seems like chaos.
It seems like loud music and Lamborghinis and I'm in and out.
I'm like, ah, let me get out of here.
mark sisson
It depends on where you go.
I mean, you did a show at Jackie Gleason at one point.
I tried to get in.
The line was out.
It was down the street.
It was incredible to see and very gratifying to see.
And congratulations on the massive success as a comic or comedian.
joe rogan
I don't care.
mark sisson
Okay.
joe rogan
I know.
I'm a stand-up comic, I guess, but stand-up comedian is okay, too.
mark sisson
Yeah.
But that location is right sort of in the thick of that.
It's just not too far from Lincoln Avenue or Lincoln Road and Washington Avenue.
Yeah, so you sort of put yourself in the thick of it rather than A couple of blocks away where it would be nice and peaceful.
joe rogan
Yeah, we're going to Jacksonville in a few weeks for the first UFC with a live audience in a year.
mark sisson
Wow.
joe rogan
Yeah, well at least the first UFC in the United States.
They did a live audience in Abu Dhabi fairly recently where they, I think they had to have a COVID test, a negative COVID test within 24 to 48 hours or something like that.
Some reasonable amount of time.
But they're going to do one in Jacksonville, just buck wild, 15,000 people, jam them in there.
Yeah.
mark sisson
Go Florida.
joe rogan
Florida doesn't give a fuck.
And then they're doing one in Houston.
mark sisson
Or they do.
joe rogan
They do.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
Well, they do give a fuck, right?
It's not that they don't give a fuck.
It's the reasonable thing to do at this juncture.
mark sisson
Especially at this juncture.
Because one of the things is, by now, most people who are going to get it have gotten it.
Or gotten exposed to it, I think.
Most people who are going to die have died.
I mean, it's a horrible thing to say, but I think it took a lot of elderly people who only had a few months left anyway.
And so now, if you get exposed, and again, the viral load is minimal because you're out and about and you get a couple of little virons instead of You know, a massive dose that the healthcare workers got, for instance, in the first days or first weeks of the pandemic in New York, when the healthcare workers were getting sick, they were getting incredible viral loads.
Well, you can't, you know, there is a difference between a small viral load and body handling.
You know, so I think we've gotten to the point where every state ought to be considering opening back up fully.
joe rogan
Yeah, I mean, California, it wasn't until Gavin Newsom started getting recalled that they started opening things up.
Isn't that amazing?
When they realized that the recall was going to actually take place, that there is going to be a vote, because they've reached the two...
Well, they've reached the...
They passed the 1.5 million threshold.
They got to 2.1.
And 2.1 million people signed those things, and they think it'll parse out to over the 1.5 million that they need once they verify them.
So then they started opening things.
How crazy.
mark sisson
Yeah, a little bit of pressure.
joe rogan
Dude, I wonder what it is.
It's like there's a sickness in power.
There's a sickness in being able to tell people that they can't work, and once you have done that, I think it's just human nature.
I think people are very reluctant to release that, because if they were basing it entirely on the science, they would have to take Florida into account.
They really would.
You'd also have to take into account the evidence that shows that it spreads indoors, and that you might be by...
Continuing the lockdown, you might be encouraging the spread of the virus.
mark sisson
Well, when they say the science has settled, the science has never settled.
That's nonsense.
And in this, the science has changed, you know, every couple of weeks.
Masks, no masks.
Six feet for adults, three feet for children.
I mean, seriously.
unidentified
Come on.
joe rogan
What does that mean?
mark sisson
Double masking.
joe rogan
You got a double mask now.
That was the thing.
After he gets busted, eating at a restaurant, indoors, lying about it.
He says it was outdoors.
There's a fucking chandelier over your head.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
There's no chandelier outside.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
When there's a chandelier over your head, you're inside.
The stars is outside.
Chandelier, that's a fucking roof.
You're indoors.
There's a sliding glass door.
You're indoors, man.
And no mask.
After that, he has the balls to tell people to wear two masks.
Which is just so bananas.
The whole thing is, it's really crazy.
mark sisson
No, as I said, it's the most mismanaged event in human history.
joe rogan
It's not just that.
They're digging their heels in.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's not just they're mismanaging it.
They're mismanaging it and recognizing there's evidence they're mismanaging it, but insanely reluctant to accept that evidence.
mark sisson
To walk it back.
joe rogan
No, they don't want to walk it back.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Because if they walk it back, then they have to admit that you probably cost lives by encouraging this lockdown.
mark sisson
Yep.
Yep.
joe rogan
Yeah.
It's weird, man.
It's weird to see.
It's weird to see, and it's going to be really weird in four or five years when Los Angeles hasn't recovered, because they think California's going to bounce back real quick.
You're out of your mind.
mark sisson
One of the reasons I left California was I saw it on a slippery slope going downhill, even way before COVID. And whether it's the taxes or whether it's the way it's governed or whether it's the...
Their prohibitions on businesses are unbelievable.
And I've had several businesses in California.
How so?
Oh, for example, the Alcoholic Beverage Commission.
I opened a restaurant a couple years ago.
It failed.
But we applied a year in advance for our beer and wine license.
A year in advance.
And over the time, as we were building the restaurant out, We kept checking in.
How's it going?
Yeah, it's great.
Everything's on track.
And then as we got a month away from opening, we lost your application.
You're going to have to start over again.
Get to the back of the line.
So we had to refile and lost like two months.
We were open for two months without a beer and wine license.
joe rogan
Oh, my God.
mark sisson
So then when I sold the business...
Oh, no.
Another one during that construction...
Title 24, which is a good idea, energy conservation, had to build a switch that would dim the lights or turn the lights off whenever there was ambient daylight outside.
It would recognize the amount of light inside and save energy by turning lights off.
Well, at some part of every morning when people were eating breakfast at 10.30 when the sun was up here, if a cloud came by, the lights would go on.
They'd flicker on and off for an hour every day, and you couldn't bypass the switch.
But this was a regulation.
Then when I went to sell the business, it went into escrow, and then the escrow money stayed there for a year because the state wouldn't release it partly because of COVID and partly because they couldn't find a tax return that had been filed a year earlier.
And it goes on and on.
I mean, I could literally write a book about how egregious the regulations are for businesses in California.
joe rogan
I wonder what's going to happen.
People are just going to accept that?
mark sisson
So many people are moving.
If I were a young person, I would never think about going there to start a business now.
There's so many other opportunities.
joe rogan
So many other friendly states that believe in personal freedom.
That sounds like such a crazy thing to say.
Believe in freedom.
When you say believe in freedom, automatically people have images of American flags and right-wing ideology and eagles and shit.
But freedom is so critical for people trying to figure out who they are and what they are.
Who they are and what they want to do and how they want to live their life.
It is the most open-minded principle that we have.
It's crazy that it's been demonized.
The concept of wanting to pursue freedom has been demonized.
It's like, oh, you just want a gun and you want to be able to light things on fire and fireworks every day.
That's not what freedom is.
But this concept, the way it's been applied to California, that this insanely inept government is supposed to be able to take care of you and tell you what you can and can't do.
You're just ruining the city.
mark sisson
Did you ever have to deal with the Coastal Commission?
joe rogan
No.
mark sisson
Oh, you heard about it?
joe rogan
I have friends.
I have friends that built a house there, and it took forever.
mark sisson
Edge took like 15 years to get his approval.
joe rogan
Who?
mark sisson
The Edge.
joe rogan
Oh, from the U2? Yeah.
15 years?
mark sisson
Something like that.
Some crazy amount of time, yeah.
joe rogan
Why did it take so long?
mark sisson
Just...
joe rogan
Maybe because of his name.
Call yourself The Edge people.
Get this fucking guy out of our town.
mark sisson
Big piece of property up on the hills.
No, but my neighbor took 10 years to build his tennis court.
He applied, and then 10 years later, he finally finished his tennis court.
joe rogan
10 years?
He probably can't play tennis anymore.
His knees are gone.
mark sisson
Pretty much, yeah.
That was accurate.
Anyway, I don't want to trash the state anymore.
Too late.
Yeah, too late.
But I've found a new...
And by the way, it's a...
It is so spectacular.
The Big Sur coastline is some of the most spectacular real estate in the world.
joe rogan
Listen, there's amazing parts of California.
The redwood forests are fucking incredible.
mark sisson
I used to run in Big Basin Park, which is just above Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz, full of redwoods.
joe rogan
Gorgeous out there.
mark sisson
We used to do an 11-mile loop among redwoods that were as big around as this...
Bunker here.
Just spectacular.
I think they burned in some of the fires recently.
joe rogan
I think the problem with California is the same thing as the problem with New York in terms of the population density.
I think there's a real issue with government in any place that has a high population density.
They always tend to be liberal governments.
Whether it's New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles, it's liberal governments, and liberal governments tend to favor over-regulation.
mark sisson
Apparently, yeah.
They know what's best.
joe rogan
Or at least they think they do.
mark sisson
No, but I mean, I'll give another example.
My house burned in the Malibu fires, in the Woolsey fires in 2018. I still had a house in Malibu.
We had been trying to sell it, but it burned in the fires.
And the mismanagement of that whole Malibu fire thing was...
Somebody's, I think, writing a book about it, but it was horrible.
And so there'd be fire trucks from neighboring states, not just neighboring communities, but neighboring states, positioned on PCH, and people could ask...
Dude, my house is on fire just up the street.
I'm an aisle and a half.
And they said, well, we have to stay here and wait to be dispatched to go.
joe rogan
Oh, Jesus.
unidentified
Yeah.
mark sisson
So, anyway.
It was a tough time.
joe rogan
Yeah, that fire was a real eye-opener.
Because my friend Bill Burr, he has a helicopter license.
And we flew around.
And you really get to see what the actual damage was when you fly.
And we flew over, like, Point Dume.
unidentified
Point Dume.
joe rogan
Because one of the things that people always thought was, oh, they protect the rich folks.
No protection.
No, there was no protection.
These giant estates that were on Point Dune that were, you know, like six acres overlooking the ocean on the bluff, gone.
Burnt to a cinder.
mark sisson
Some of my friends.
And fire in the history of Malibu had never jumped PCH to Point Dune.
joe rogan
Yeah, never gone across like that.
mark sisson
But this one did.
joe rogan
Yeah, no one thought that was possible.
Everyone thought it was just going to stay on the side of the hill.
And if you were over on the side of the PCH where the water is...
mark sisson
My house burned the second night.
So the first night, the fires came through past my house.
No problem.
The second night, the winds picked up, and embers from burned-down houses a mile away blew through the air into the eaves and rafters of my house.
unidentified
Wow.
mark sisson
So the second night was as bad for some as the first.
joe rogan
And you just weren't in town.
mark sisson
No, we were living in Miami.
So my daughter was living in the house, and I was literally watching it live-streamed on local CBS 2 in L.A., And my daughter's in the house, and I got pictures I could show you, though.
There's the fire line coming toward our house.
And I'm like, get the dogs and get out.
And she's like, no, I think we've got time.
And then when I see one of the reporters on PCH with the flames already down to PCH, I'm like, get out of the house now.
I literally had to tell from Miami.
I had to tell my daughter to...
To evacuate.
joe rogan
Oh my god.
That had to be terrifying.
mark sisson
Yeah, and it was, you know, flames on both sides.
She went to Point Dume.
From there, you couldn't go down to PCH, so she went to Point Dume.
And then she stayed there for three days cooking meals for the firefighters.
joe rogan
Oh wow.
As her husband was unloading, you know, there were boats that were bringing supplies in because no supplies could come in through PCH. Yeah, I was in Bell Canyon, and when the firefighters in Bell Canyon, my friend Bud, I told him where I have all my elk stored.
And so I let him into my house, and then we took all the elk meat and fed the firefighters.
So he kept a grill running while all these guys were trying to...
He's crazy.
He didn't evacuate.
He stayed there.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
He stayed there and was like, had a fucking water hose on his house.
mark sisson
A lot of my friends in Point Doom did the same thing.
I'm like, no, with a water hose...
joe rogan
You could die.
mark sisson
By the way, you could easily die.
I mean, people have no idea how...
This was such an inferno and the winds were 50 miles an hour.
Insane.
And with a water hose, which, by the way, was down to a trickle because the firefighters were using all of the major hydrant, all the pressure had dropped.
Anyway, it was...
joe rogan
Right, you can't even protect yourself.
You couldn't even douse yourself to keep yourself from catching fire yourself.
It was weird to see because I was at home.
I had actually done a set at the Comedy Store, and I came home, and it was about 12.30 at night, and my wife and I were looking out the window, and she was like, I think we should get the fuck out of here.
And it was getting close.
And as the fire was getting close, it just started erupting in all these different spots.
It wasn't just one spot.
And it was pretty obvious it was headed our way.
So we wound up staying in Beverly Hills at a hotel for like a week or so with a couple of our other friends from the neighborhood.
So it was not too bad.
We all got together and we're like, hey, I wonder if we have a house.
We got lucky.
But I had been evacuated three times in California.
mark sisson
So that was another reason.
I had PTSD from the fires.
Because that was not the first time.
My business almost burned in a fire earlier, seven years earlier.
There had been another fire where we'd woken up one morning and seen the hill like at 5 a.m.
My friend calls me up.
I had actually been sleeping in the closet of the master bedroom because the winds were so loud.
And my friend wakes me up and says, have you left yet?
And I'm like, no.
He says, have you looked out your window?
We have this storm shutter.
The whole hillside was ablaze.
And that was pretty scary.
joe rogan
People don't understand that once it gets to a point, there's no way the firefighters can stop it.
And then if you're there while that's happening, you can get stuck.
And you can't escape.
It'll surround you.
And, you know, I talked to these firefighters when we were doing Fear Factor once and this guy said something that scares me to this day.
He goes, it's just a matter of one day where the right wind hits Los Angeles and it burns right through the entire city all the way to the ocean.
I go, really?
He goes, yeah.
He goes, once it catches, he goes, people have a distorted idea of what we're capable of doing.
He goes, we can do our best to save houses.
We can do our best to evacuate people, save lives.
He goes, but California's fires are a different animal because it doesn't fucking rain.
The fuel is just astronomical.
There's so much fuel.
That's one of the things I love about here.
It rains all the time.
It rained last night.
I woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning by rain.
mark sisson
That hail?
joe rogan
Oh my God, it was crazy.
It's beautiful here.
It's green.
It's like things are green and alive.
mark sisson
Do you ever paddle?
Do you ever stand and paddle?
joe rogan
I have.
I have on the ocean on vacation, but I was drunk and I fell off.
mark sisson
This is a great place to stand up paddle.
joe rogan
Yes, I know.
Lady Bird Lake.
Everybody loves doing that there.
mark sisson
Yeah, right out front.
joe rogan
They did a cool thing with that lake, too, where you can't have an engine on that lake.
It's the one engine where you can...
Like Travis, you can have an engine.
Lake Austin, you can have an engine.
And so everybody's just...
You go there and they're all jet skiing and going crazy.
But on Lady Bird, you have to paddle yourself.
That's it.
It's all canoers and...
Those e-foil things are badass.
mark sisson
I love it.
joe rogan
Those things are wild, man.
We see a lot of those guys.
unidentified
Really?
joe rogan
Scoot by.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I see them on the lake all the time.
mark sisson
Oh, nice.
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
It's like snowboarding.
It's like your best powder day times five.
Because have you ever snowboarded?
joe rogan
No, I have not.
mark sisson
Okay, so good powder day.
Because once you rise up on the foil, it's like you're flying, like you're an angel, like you're a foot and a half above the water.
Exactly.
You actually say that when you do it.
And you hear the chorus behind you and everything.
joe rogan
How long does the battery last on those things?
mark sisson
Hour, hour ten.
joe rogan
Oh, that's enough.
mark sisson
No, it's significant.
If you do it, you know, if you're out there and you're carving it up, your legs are ready to go in.
joe rogan
How do you know when you should get home?
mark sisson
Oh, there's...
There's an indicator.
You have a little Bluetooth indicator.
joe rogan
Oh, it says, hey, fucker.
Time to turn back.
mark sisson
It probably should, because sometimes you're like, ah, 10 more minutes, whatever.
joe rogan
Well, there's a lot of people that I see that are out there wakeboarding.
They get behind a boat, and they ride the waves.
And it's so weird to see.
It's like, why are they going forward?
It doesn't seem to make any sense.
But they're riding the wake of the boat, and then these boats are designed to make these wakes that you could surf.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's probably a great way to learn how to surf.
mark sisson
100%, yeah.
joe rogan
Do you do any of that?
Do you do any surfing?
mark sisson
No, I just do stand-up paddling, and I'll catch a wave.
joe rogan
How come you only do stand-up paddling?
mark sisson
Well, first of all, I don't like being in a lineup waiting for my turn to do anything.
joe rogan
Oh, for the waves.
mark sisson
So that was always a big thing in Malibu.
And then there's the politics of where you're from, and whose break it is, and who's the alpha on the wave, and Oh, there's fights, too, right?
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
joe rogan
Guys fight over waves?
unidentified
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
mark sisson
So I'm not into that shit.
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
So I paddle.
I just do...
And I like to work out.
I mean, stand-up paddling, I think, is the greatest workout.
Single, full-body workout there is.
What?
I should...
unidentified
What?
mark sisson
What are you doing tomorrow?
I'll take you out.
unidentified
What?
mark sisson
I'll show you how to get the best workout you've ever had.
joe rogan
I have to do a real man's sport.
I have to do jiu-jitsu tomorrow.
I can't be fucking around with this paddleboard and shit.
unidentified
Okay.
All right.
Okay.
mark sisson
Anyway, that's my go-to.
joe rogan
You really think that that's the best full-body workout?
mark sisson
I do.
joe rogan
Listen, I trust you.
You're a smart man.
That sounds preposterous to me.
mark sisson
Well, first of all, because you can do it...
Do you do it to failure?
joe rogan
Do you ever do it where you've collapsed?
mark sisson
No, but I mean...
joe rogan
What the fuck are you talking about, man?
mark sisson
Okay, but I mean...
joe rogan
Listen to this, Jamie.
unidentified
Fly into it.
mark sisson
Five minutes and then you're done?
I mean, seriously.
joe rogan
Five minutes.
mark sisson
No, so it's the sort of thing that uses the entire body from, you know, uses shoulders, lats, glutes, hamstrings...
joe rogan
Balance.
mark sisson
Balance.
Lots of abs and serratus.
So there's that.
And it's cardio.
I mean, you're not breathing hard, but you're doing this rhythmic motion that at the end of the day is very aerobic and very cardio.
And yet you get off the board and you're just like, well, I better take a nap.
Because if you do it right, I mean, if you do it long enough, not everybody.
joe rogan
So I've seen you do it a lot in Malibu.
I know you were doing it a lot.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's your thing.
mark sisson
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, twice a week.
I try to do it twice a week.
It's the sort of thing that if you do it right, you can't do it every day because, like when I was a runner, I ran every day.
Stand-up paddling, if I do it well enough, it takes me three days to recover.
joe rogan
Really?
mark sisson
I'll do something else the other day.
I'll ride a bike, but I can't go paddle again for three days.
joe rogan
How much have your workouts changed as you've gotten older, now that you're 67, when you look back on when you were in your 30s or 40s?
mark sisson
Oh, Jesus.
Well, even in my 30s, I was still a crazy man.
So I would do, even after I retired from competition, I would still, I was a coach to professional triathletes, so I'd ride with them sometimes.
joe rogan
Tell people what you did athletically, though, so people understand.
mark sisson
Okay, so I was a marathoner in the 70s.
I was a...
You know, ran 100 miles a week for seven years.
Wound up finishing fifth in the U.S. National Championships in 1980. Got injured and fell apart because of the diet, partly.
joe rogan
What kind of injury did you get?
mark sisson
Tendinitis in my hips and arthritis in my feet.
So I shifted over to triathlon and I did Ironman.
My first event ever, my first triathlon ever was Ironman Hawaii.
So I did triathlon for a couple of years.
Wound up finishing fourth in Hawaii, but was not into swimming that much.
But in those days, I was riding 200 miles a week.
I was running 40, 50 miles a week as a triathlete, swimming a little bit, spending some time in the gym.
It was an inordinate amount of time working.
And as I retired, if you're that sort of an athlete and you think about endorphins and the rush that you get from training, you literally do seek it on a daily basis.
And so I couldn't just go cold turkey, so I wound up coaching elite triathletes and riding with them and doing their workouts with them and lifting with them.
I stayed very fit in my 40s.
But there was a point at which I realized I don't need to do this much stuff to look fit.
And I thought, well, it's better to look fit than to be fit.
So now, for the last 20 or 30 years, I mean, I haven't run a mile in 20 years.
I haven't put on shoes to go out and run a mile in 20 years.
Now I can play Ultimate Frisbee or do sprints on the beach and still crush it sprinting.
It's not like I don't run, but I just have no interest in running long distance stuff.
And the bike riding on the sand, it's interesting, it's challenging to me.
It's not like I'm just going for three hours into the hills on a road bike.
joe rogan
A lot of fighters love long-distance running, maybe not heavy distance, but like six miles, seven miles, because they think that it provides you with a cardio base that allows you to recover and keep going.
mark sisson
Yeah.
I'm thinking that a lot of the stuff you're doing with the jiu-jitsu, probably if they just orchestrated it a little bit differently, it would have as much benefit.
That's one of the things I've learned about myself in the past.
As you get older...
You know, your loss of aerobic capacity doesn't drop off as much as your loss of strength and muscle and power.
So you have to work on the strength, muscle, and power.
You have to work on the lean mass a lot more as you get older.
And that's like the number one thing I tell people over 50. Like, stop the running.
You know, you can run once in a while, but don't run 50 miles or 40 miles a week or 30 miles a week.
You know, spend more time in the gym and spend more time doing, you know, hex bar deadlifts or squats or lunges or, you know, and upper body stuff because that's where the real benefit comes to your metabolic flexibility, for one thing, and your organ reserve, right?
unidentified
So...
mark sisson
if you maintain lean muscle mass, then the heart has to keep up with it, and the liver has to keep up with it, and the lungs have to keep up with it.
And if you lose muscle mass, if you atrophy as you get older, then the lungs go, I don't need to work that hard.
I don't need to breathe that deeply.
The heart says, I don't have to pump that much, whatever.
The liver says, I got this, I got this handle.
I don't have to work that hard.
And so you lose vital capacity.
You You lose reserve in your organs.
And then what happens is, you know, as you get older, if you get an infection of some kind, uh-uh, COVID, then something goes.
The lungs give out.
The cart gives out.
You get...
joe rogan
Because the organs themselves have been...
mark sisson
They're the ones...
joe rogan
They've atrophied.
mark sisson
They've atrophied.
They've actually atrophied, yeah.
joe rogan
What kind of weightlifting do you do?
mark sisson
So I do some upper body stuff that would be mostly push-ups, pull-ups, dips.
I use a resistance band a lot now.
I started using one more during COVID, especially when the gyms were closed.
And I really like the resistance band concept.
I'm going to go into that a little bit more.
Because on a deltoid raise, as you go up...
It gets tougher and tougher and tougher.
And you don't need strength at the bottom of it.
You need strength.
You need to develop at the top of it.
So I do that.
I love the hex bar for deadlifts.
I do that once every week at best, at most, because it's a lot of strain on my knees.
joe rogan
Do you do a hex bar with heavyweight?
Do you do it for reps?
mark sisson
So, I do, like, I do 295 six times.
I can do, you know, I'll do, I'll work lower with a lot of reps and work up to about that.
I mean, I've done 330 recently, and I'm, again, at my age, and I'm a skinny former runner, so my joints are not really designed to handle that kind of stuff, and that's The one thing I don't want to do is get injured, you know, working out.
I want to prevent injuries.
So the concept of the one rep max no longer works for me because a one rep max is kind of dangerous.
joe rogan
dangerous is like you can either do it in which case it's not maybe not your max or you can't do it in which case you get screwed up i was watching a video of a guy uh the other day where he was doing an incline press and his check his peck tour and it's you see he has a tank top on yeah and as he's in the middle of it you see it goes it just raises up and pulls away and he screams and lowers the weight and drops it and you're like oh no yeah yeah it's it's horrific yeah Yeah.
mark sisson
I had a friend who did that who was on the juice, and that's one of the problems, is that if you're doing steroids and you're doing heavy weights, the tendons can't keep up with the muscle tissue.
And so at the division, the line there between the tendon and the muscle, it starts to separate.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, this guy looked like he was on the juice.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
But it's horrific to watch.
I'm not a big fan of heavy weight.
The heaviest weight I lift is 90 pounds.
unidentified
Wow.
joe rogan
I use a 92 pound kettlebell.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
Almost everything I do, I'll do heavier than that because I'll use two 72 pound kettlebells.
unidentified
Yep.
joe rogan
But I do almost everything that I do heavy, that's as heavy as I get.
mark sisson
Right.
joe rogan
I have one 90, I think it's a 91 or 92 pound kettlebell, and I use that for single hand stuff, cleans and swings and things along those lines.
unidentified
That's great.
joe rogan
That's as heavy as I get.
mark sisson
That's great, because it's moving through different planes anyway.
Yeah.
joe rogan
I found out, to me at least, what I like to do, martial arts, kettlebells are the most beneficial.
When I use them, for whatever I do, whether I do lunges or split squats or regular squats or overhead squats or cleans and presses and windmills, all those different things, the fact that I'm forced to use the whole body with those, like I'm not trying to get any bigger.
I'm just trying to maintain my muscle mass and keep my cardio.
mark sisson
Full range of motion, too.
joe rogan
And strength.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
Because in jujitsu, you're moving your body in these weird ways and you're trying to keep from getting strangled and you have to constantly be moving.
I find that it's the most applicable to athletics in terms of the kind of athletics.
Even when I kick the bag, the more I lift weights, the more I keep my back strong.
I also like the reverse hyper.
You ever use that machine?
mark sisson
Once in a while.
joe rogan
I fucking love that machine.
mark sisson
Yeah, yeah.
And I probably need to do that more.
joe rogan
So good for the back.
mark sisson
Yeah, yeah.
Wearables.
unidentified
I have a whoop strap that I use.
joe rogan
Yeah, I love it.
mark sisson
What are you monitoring through all your training?
joe rogan
Well, while I'm training, I basically go by feel.
But after all, I look at the strain, I look at my recovery in the morning, that's big, and I'll see what my actual sleep was, what my actual number of hours sleep, and what my recovery score is based on heart rate variability.
That's why I like the whoop strap, because it gives me a good understanding of how I'm recovering.
unidentified
Cool.
joe rogan
And in comparison, like, did I have, like, a couple of glasses of wine or none?
Or did I drink caffeine late at night?
Or, you know, those kind of things, and how much of an effect that has.
It makes you accountable, you know?
mark sisson
I guess.
At some point, I wonder how much of that you already know.
Like, you shouldn't have the wine and whatever.
So I'm like the anti-wearable guy.
I gave up on them a long time.
I think the data is sometimes suspect and...
And when I ask people, like, okay, so how did you adjust your behavior?
They go down the list of all the things they probably knew they should have done anyway, and they just proved that it wasn't working for them, so they have to...
joe rogan
I think sometimes it just makes you accountable when you see that data.
And you know what you did.
Instead of just sort of it being kind of an abstract thing you don't think about.
I really loved, there's a strap that we were using once for Sober October called MyZones Fitness Tracker.
And I love that because it gave you a score based on how many minutes you spent at 80% of your max heart rate.
And that was a great tool to really recognize the actual workload you did during a workout.
mark sisson
Okay.
joe rogan
I really like that a lot.
mark sisson
And again, you use that how?
To see if over time you can increase that number?
joe rogan
Yes.
mark sisson
Okay.
joe rogan
And see what the number is through the day, how many actual calories burned.
And you know it's based on your body weight and all these different things.
You put in all those variables.
mark sisson
Right.
joe rogan
I liked it.
But again, I know when I'm working hard.
I mean, I don't need it.
I like it.
mark sisson
That's the thing.
I just go by feel.
I mean, it's like I wore some of the stuff for a while.
I wore a sleep tracker for a while, told me I got zero deep sleep for three nights in a row and I should be dead.
I'm like, no, I think I've...
I think I slept pretty well.
joe rogan
Which one were you using?
mark sisson
I don't want to say.
joe rogan
Were you using one of those rings?
mark sisson
Okay.
It was an early version of something like that.
Maybe it's better now.
I have a picture of me in 1980 wearing one of the first heart rate monitors.
It was a chest belt with three electrode leads that went from the chest down to a cigarette pack.
I've been into this thing for a long time, way before Polar Electro came out with their stuff.
But after a while, it's like, what do you do with the data if at the end of the day, if you're training, you're going to get in a race, and it's just going to come down to how you feel.
joe rogan
A lot of guys use them to compete against each other as well.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
There's a leaderboard.
mark sisson
A leaderboard for heart rate?
joe rogan
It's a leaderboard for how many points you've accumulated.
We used it because we were doing the Sober October Fitness Challenge.
So for the month, my friends and I, we all competed to see who could score the most points.
mark sisson
Okay.
joe rogan
And so you do with that.
And I know Tim Kennedy, my friend Tim Kennedy, had a score up today.
And it was the same thing.
He was using the MyZone's fitness tracker.
And it was him and all of his buddies and their workouts are putting them through.
And it shows the numbers that they're putting up.
So it's just...
Like, you can say, oh, I got a good workout.
Well, how good?
Well, you got 400 points.
mark sisson
Better than you.
joe rogan
Well, he got 650. He got more points.
He worked harder.
mark sisson
The gamification of exercise.
joe rogan
That's the problem with it as well, because some people think that, whether it's an Apple Watch or any of these Fitbits, that they can become addictive.
And, in fact, that was one of...
Who was it?
Irresistible?
What was the gentleman's name that was...
He wrote that book about the addiction to technology.
Jamie, he was on the podcast.
Nick, Australian guy.
Good book.
I disagreed with some of his points when it came to fitness wearables, but he felt like they'd become addictive the same way phones are addictive.
But I'm like, yeah, but you're addicted to working out, which is a good thing.
If you're addicted to getting in the work, I would say that is one of the most beneficial addictions that you can get.
Yes, there it is.
Oh, Adam Alter.
Why did I think it was Nick?
Nick's another guy.
Which one was Nick?
Too many guys.
Too many fucking people.
mark sisson
Well, you know, people get addicted to exercise, too.
And that's not necessarily a good thing.
You can say, well, you know, I went from being a heroin addict to being addicted to running or exercise.
Well, okay, there's a...
Clear drop-down there, but at some point, that's still an addiction.
It's still something that's not—it's just taking the place of something else that's missing in your life.
joe rogan
Sort of, or is it ultimately beneficial?
If anything can get you away from heroin, heroin's the bad thing, right?
If you're addicted to booze, you're drinking all day, and then you become addicted to running, for sure you're going to have a better resting heart rate, you're going to have a healthier lower body mass, you're going to look better.
mark sisson
Maybe?
joe rogan
No.
mark sisson
Quite likely.
Quite likely.
But not a guarantee that it's better for you.
joe rogan
Some people do go too hard.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
But some people...
mark sisson
Like the Fitbit thing.
I mean, the steps thing just cracks me up.
joe rogan
Oh, yeah.
Get your 10,000 steps in.
mark sisson
Or whatever.
You know, I was shooting for 30 today, and we just finished dinner at a wonderful restaurant in the south of France.
And my friend says, shit, I got 6,000 more steps.
I'll see you guys back at the house.
I'm going to...
joe rogan
Oh, no.
mark sisson
That's like, seriously?
joe rogan
Yeah.
Well, that's ridiculous, especially if you're on vacation.
mark sisson
But that's setting an intention.
It's prioritizing.
It fits all of the metrics that you suggested we need to do.
But I'm just saying, at some point, it becomes a little bit eccentric.
joe rogan
Well, many people would say that about diet as well.
Like, maybe you should just eat what you want, enjoy your food, and if you get a little fat, don't worry about it.
mark sisson
And I would agree with that, 100%.
So what I'm saying is, look, I go back to...
I only do this stuff...
joe rogan
For enjoyment.
mark sisson
Yeah.
You asked at some point, you know, am I... Like, I'm not keto, and I'm not even...
I have a couple of bites of bread, even though I know bread does not serve me well.
I have a couple of bites of bread with some butter every once in a while.
I have a couple of bites of dessert every once in a while.
unidentified
Pasta?
mark sisson
I had an amazing pasta at Carbone, which just opened in South Beach the other day.
Because my friend said, you should try it.
And I didn't just have a couple of bites.
I had a fair amount of it.
That's the metabolic flexibility part.
That's also the part that says...
So let's not be draconian about this.
Let's set the body up in terms of metabolic flexibility so you can do some of these things.
And I wouldn't call it a cheat day.
I wouldn't call it a cheat meal.
I would just say, you know, now where I draw the line is if at the end of that meal, if I'd had You know, a complete dessert, it would have screwed everything up.
First of all, I would have felt like shit.
I wouldn't have slept well.
That is such the truth.
joe rogan
That's the worst thing for me is when I have a big dessert and then I try to sleep.
mark sisson
And you know better.
And you know better, right?
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
And it's like, you know, it's easier with a couple of beers or a glass of wine or whatever.
It's softening you up a little bit.
I realized a while back that I'm not willing to sacrifice five hours of discomfort trying to go to sleep with a high heart rate for what amounts to four minutes of gustatory pleasure.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's the problem.
It's a mouth pleasure.
It's not really worth it.
But it's also, I'm indulgent.
And I see, I'm like, fuck it!
I've got a lot of fuck it in me.
Yeah.
Fuck it, I'll work it off tomorrow.
Fuck it, I'll do it tomorrow.
mark sisson
I'll work it off tomorrow.
joe rogan
I won't eat for 20 hours.
mark sisson
I'll do 50 air squats right after I'm done.
joe rogan
Exactly.
That's not enough.
That's when people don't realize how much calories.
If you have an ice cream sundae, the amount of calories in that, you could run for hours.
Hours.
And not burn that off.
mark sisson
Oh, I mean, that's the part about the body fat thing that people don't get when they say, because I say, well, I live on my own stored body fat for, you know, most of my day.
And, well, you don't have any body fat, Mark.
Well, I got 20,000 calories worth of fat, disposable fat on me.
That doesn't even include the stuff that's protecting the organs.
Everybody's got a lot of fat on them.
joe rogan
20,000 calories of fat is like how many days of moderate exercise?
mark sisson
Well, if you're doing 500 calories a day, it's 40 days of moderate exercise.
You have to live on that.
joe rogan
How many calories do you think you burn in a day?
mark sisson
So if we go back to the concept behind metabolic flexibility and how many calories do we burn in a day, it's a big variability.
Because some people burn a lot of calories because they can get away with it.
And so in my training days, I might eat 4,000, 5,000 calories in a day.
I weighed 138 to 145 pounds.
And I wasn't burning at all.
I wasn't running.
I mean, you run 15 miles, that's 1,500 calories.
Where'd the other 3,000 calories go?
Well, my body was finding ways to dispose of it.
I was running hot.
I was, you know, I would sleep in a sweat.
My body tries to find a way to dispose of those calories.
So those are calories that I did not need, were probably compromising my health.
So we don't need that much food.
And if you break down, you know, the macros, protein, carbohydrate, and fat, protein is largely, shouldn't even have a caloric number attached to it.
It's a building block, right?
You're not supposed to combust protein, except in an emergency.
So if you get 40, 50 grams of protein, the first 40 or 50, I don't care how many you're getting in a day, but the first 40 or 50 probably go to rebuilding and repair.
Shouldn't even be assigned a caloric value.
joe rogan
But when you're eating a lot of protein and you're not taking a lot of carbs, like when you're on a carnivore diet, then you have gluconeogenesis, right?
mark sisson
Enough to keep you going.
But largely, if you're carnivore, you're almost always keto.
And if you're keto, then your brain is working mostly on ketones.
The interesting thing about the liver and ketones is a liver can make 750 calories a day worth of fuel from ketones.
joe rogan
Really?
mark sisson
Yes.
But as you become keto-adapted, as you become fat-adapted and keto-adapted, the muscles burn the fat primarily.
And they don't even need the ketones.
They're like, liver, you just reserve the ketones for the brain.
We're good.
We'll do it with stored glycogen and with fat.
So, the liver makes ketones for the brain primarily.
Now, when you first get into ketosis, people say, oh, my keto numbers are huge.
I'm like 6 millimolar.
I'm in ketosis.
Well, what that means is your body's making more ketones than it needs and it's spilling them out into the urine and the breath and they're in the bloodstream, but you're not using them.
When you become good at ketosis, like these carnivore guys are, most of the ketones are going to the brain, and the liver doesn't overproduce the ketones.
It just makes enough to fuel the brain.
joe rogan
So does that mean when you use, whether it's a urine strip or whatever method of measuring ketones, you wouldn't necessarily show that you're in ketosis?
unidentified
Correct.
mark sisson
So a guy like Dom...
Quite often, won't even show that he's in ketosis, but he's making ketones.
It's just that his body is not overproduced.
Like the term osis connotes a, has a connotation of a disease state.
So ketosis means you have too many ketones.
But guys who have been, like Darth Luigi, one of my friends at LMNT, I see you get the element stuff out there in your thing, Rob's partner in LMNT, Todd White owns Dry Farm Wines.
These guys have been keto-ish for 10 years.
They almost never show much more than 0.5, 0.6, 0.4 millimolar.
So technically they're not even in ketosis.
joe rogan
What is ketosis technically?
Millimolar-wise?
mark sisson
Over 0.5, you're in ketosis, according to the medical literature.
But again, the idea is not to chase the numbers.
The idea is to become metabolically flexible and metabolically efficient.
So when you...
Like Dom is getting most of his energy from fat, some from ketones, and then whatever glucose his body requires comes from gluconeogenesis, which is sometimes converting the excess protein that he takes in into glucose.
Some of it comes from the glycerol part of the triglyceride molecule, which is combusted.
The three fatty acids are combusted for fat, but the glycerol becomes the backbone of glucose.
It's such an elegant system.
I talked about it as a closed loop in the book.
So imagine you're metabolically flexible.
You're on this program where you've built a metabolic machinery.
You've increased your mitochondria at least two-fold with this process, and your mitochondria are actually much more efficient.
And then you go on a seven-day fast.
And you think, oh, God, I'm going to fall apart.
I'm going to tear up muscle tissue.
What's going to happen to me?
Well...
If you envision the closed loop, what happens is you have no incoming food, so your body takes its stored body fat, it uses the fat that it combusts in the muscles to do the work, to walk around, to be active all day long.
It takes some of the fat and converts it into ketones to fuel the brain, which the brain, again, loves ketones.
And then it takes some of the glycerol and whatever needs there are for glucose, certain red blood cells, certain brain cells, it can easily accommodate that.
And then an amazing thing happens where one of the reactions to the body's upregulation of enzyme systems and genes is a protein sparing effect kicks in.
And all the protein that you used to deaminate and piss out on a day-to-day basis because of the amount of protein you're taking in, this all becomes recycled in a protein sink, and so you don't even lose that much protein.
So whatever repair is going on in the body, you have enough protein to do that without taking protein in because of the sparing effect of this.
And it's just so elegant, and you can see how our ancestors could survive for long periods of time without eating food, And without getting hangry and without getting depressed and curling up on a ball and beating their feet on the ground or stomping in anger or whatever, they just, yeah, we'll keep hunting.
joe rogan
And again, this is how the human body evolves.
mark sisson
This is how we all have this information in us.
It's all there, ready to be tapped into if we figure out the ways to turn on these hidden genetic switches that we have.
And that's been my life work for that matter.
One little thing about ketones also.
Is that the brain, if most of the ketones are going to the brain, the brain doesn't have this wild swing in energy demands.
You know, you go into the weight room and you do a heavy leg day, you know, your thighs and your glutes are going to be using 30, 40, 50 times as much energy to do the heavy weights as they would at rest.
While you're doing that, the brain's just cruising along at one, one and a half, two times normal output.
So the brain does not have a lot of energy requirements, chess masters included, by the way.
Really?
Yeah, really.
joe rogan
Have you ever seen the thing with chess masters, how many calories they burn?
mark sisson
It's been debunked.
joe rogan
Really?
mark sisson
It's not their brain.
It's their sweating and fretting and walking around and pacing and all the shit that they're doing.
Yeah.
So it's not the brain that is consuming those calories.
joe rogan
Show me where it's been debunked because I was just reading about it the other day.
mark sisson
The other day?
joe rogan
I'm interested.
unidentified
Yeah.
mark sisson
All right.
Because I looked it up at one point.
joe rogan
We brought it up on the podcast because they were saying that chess masters burn 6,000 calories a day.
mark sisson
Yeah.
So Google chess masters don't burn 6,000 calories a day and see what comes up.
joe rogan
So you think it's just the nervous energy because they're a part of a huge tournament?
mark sisson
The brain does not use that much fuel, even under those sorts of stressful conditions.
Interesting.
Once you get good at, once you get dialed into metabolic flexibility and metabolic efficiency, the liver just goes, yeah, I've got this.
I'm just going to spit out, you know, a couple of grams of ketones every hour for the brain.
You're a good brain.
joe rogan
Even under something that's incredibly mentally intense like a chess tournament?
mark sisson
I'm saying.
No, I believe you.
joe rogan
I've been duped.
mark sisson
There is no metric under which the brain uses...
Typically, the brain uses about 500 calories a day.
I can't imagine a situation where it's going to use a lot, unless you've got some organic condition that's wrong with you, where it's going to use three times that.
Probably not use twice that.
Yeah, the brain is pretty steady-state in its energy requirements.
joe rogan
You got anything over there, Jamie?
I'm curious about this because this is something we discussed on the podcast multiple times.
jamie vernon
It comes from an article that Robert Sapolsky wrote about, and from explanations I'm reading through on multiple websites, it's sort of saying that the brain causes other body things to happen.
So because you're thinking so much, it'll cause an increased heart rate, which then causes the body to do other things.
joe rogan
Oh, okay.
So the consumption of the thousands of calories is not because the brain's burning calories.
The brain's causing the body to burn off calories because you're anxious, you're higher heart rate.
Oh, okay.
Interesting.
mark sisson
By the way, Sapolsky's a very cool guy.
joe rogan
Yeah, I've had him on.
mark sisson
Okay.
Brilliant.
joe rogan
I'm a giant fan of his because I became obsessed with toxoplasmosis.
mark sisson
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers is one of my favorite books of all time.
And again, it set the whole thing for stress and cortisol.
joe rogan
Oh, yeah.
Well, his work on baboons and alpha males and baboons.
Here it goes.
Drawing on research from Sapolsky, who studies stress primates at Stanford University.
The reason for the high caloric burn is due to breathing rates, which tripled during competition, blood pressure, which also elevates during competition, and muscle contractions.
Before, during, and after major tournaments.
Wow!
So that's how elite chess players can burn 6,000 calories a day and lose one kilogram a day.
Okay!
That makes a lot more sense.
mark sisson
And that's all fat.
If they're well-trained, it's all fat.
Otherwise, they're eating cookies and cakes.
joe rogan
So it's because of the significance of the tournament to them, that it's big time and they're making a lot of money, so it's stress and they're thinking about it a lot.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, I wonder...
I wonder how much an intense conversation, like a three-hour conversation like this, where you're spouting off all these facts and all these different things.
It's got to burn off quite a few.
After I get done with a heavy podcast, I'm always hungry.
mark sisson
Yep.
Yeah, so, you know, clearly the brain is not burning more calories.
We've figured that out.
But the effects of epinephrine, the effects of all of the stress hormones and all the things that are going on and the high heart rate, although I don't, you know, I don't feel like my heart rate's high.
I don't feel...
But it's just...
joe rogan
Effort.
mark sisson
It's effort.
And, you know, there's a theory that each of us has sort of a point at which our body knows to shut down from having...
The couch potato syndrome, which is well known among elite athletes, is you train your ass off all day, then you spend the rest of the day recovering, resting on the couch, and your body just goes into a hibernation.
And so at the end of the day, you don't burn any more calories than your neighbor down the street did gardening and walking around and shopping and doing all these other things.
joe rogan
Is that a requirement, though, for your body to recover, that you do sit on the couch and just do nothing?
mark sisson
What happens is if you don't do that and you keep burning calories against your better judgment, you create a deficit.
At some point, that deficit five days, six days, two weeks later becomes an immune compromise or something.
joe rogan
And this is a caloric deficit or a recovery deficit?
unidentified
It's both.
mark sisson
It's a caloric deficit because if you keep burning, if you do more work Then your body is willing to allocate the calories for.
You can do it maybe one day, maybe two days if you're a chess guy, but not three, four, five, six days in a row.
And if you're an elite athlete, particularly an endurance athlete, you train every day.
So you can't dig a hole that deep without recovering.
And the rest part of it is...
It's a good question.
Is the rest...
Is it an artifact of the body saying, no more calories to be expended today?
Or is it a requirement of giving the muscles time to recover and rebuild and repair?
And I think it's probably both.
You can't...
And I did this during my...
I was a contractor during most of my running career.
So I would literally be monkeying up and down a ladder all day, five days a week, In the sun, eight hours a day, and then go home and run 15 miles.
joe rogan
Wow.
mark sisson
Yeah.
And that was a tough life.
A six-pack or two of beer a day helped take the edge off.
Car bloating, baby.
But, you know, it was a stressful life.
That may be why I overtrained.
You know, I did the work, but I didn't give myself enough time to recover the way a true...
World-class elite athlete does.
None of these guys have jobs.
Their job is running, and then they're taking it easy the rest of the day.
joe rogan
Yeah.
What about ultramarathoners?
What about those people that run those massive races, like Moab 240, that kind of shit?
mark sisson
Yeah.
Well, they're few and far between, number one.
joe rogan
Right.
mark sisson
Number two, no offense, they're not going that fast.
Zach is going fast at 640 for 100 miles.
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
But that's...
That's it.
You know, he's going to take a week to recover.
So you can go to the well.
That's the nature of endurance competition.
I mean, we talk about the Tour de France.
They go to the well every day for 21 days.
That's why they use PEDs.
That's why they use drugs.
Not to become Superman.
To frickin' survive the next day and the next day and the next day.
joe rogan
How are they doing that now?
mark sisson
I don't know.
I don't know.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Are they just not getting caught?
mark sisson
That's a possibility?
joe rogan
Now that Lance is gone, they relax?
They don't pay attention?
mark sisson
I don't know.
That's a possibility.
I haven't...
You know, I was involved in doping for triathlon for 15 years.
I basically wrote the anti-doping rules for triathlon and then administered them, every positive test I heard around the world for triathlon.
It's an interesting arena because most of these things that they take are actually medicines that they give to other people without any problem at all, and yet they deny That is funny, right?
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
It's what EPO is.
It's what testosterone is.
It's what any of the inhalers, the inhalers.
Cross-country skiers have exercise-induced asthma because they're on the dry thing.
And for a long time, they weren't even allowed to use inhalers, even though they had asthma.
The IOC eventually created a TUE, a therapeutic use exemption for those guys.
Of course, then what they would do is, even if you didn't have asthma, you would apply for a TUE. That's what they did with mixed martial arts and testosterone.
joe rogan
The TUEs for testosterone, guys would just do steroids, and then they would get their testosterone checked, and their testosterone would be very low, because they just got off of steroids.
And so they'd go, wow, you need testosterone.
And they'd get on testosterone and look jacked.
mark sisson
Yeah.
The thing about any of the anabolic steroids is the benefits stay with you.
So some guys who used, especially in track and field, who used for a while, even if you got caught and you spent two years on the sidelines, you didn't lose what you got.
You didn't lose what you built up.
joe rogan
You keep some of it, right?
mark sisson
You keep most of it.
If you keep training, you keep most of it, yeah.
joe rogan
Depending upon how long you're on it for, though, right?
mark sisson
Oh, sure.
joe rogan
Some guys, when they get off it, their endocrine system crashes.
mark sisson
Yeah, you've got to do it right.
I mean, there's lots of ways to screw it up, but there's a lot of ways to do it right.
There's a lot of people out there who can prescribe a protocol that'll not mess with your endocrine system.
joe rogan
Are you paying attention at all to gene therapies and all of this stuff that's going on with CRISPR? It's scary.
mark sisson
It's some scary shit.
It really is.
You know, I get that parents would like to fix genetic defects in their kids.
I have two kids and I have a grandchild now, so I get all this stuff.
There is a slippery slope there, man.
And at some point, while you're in there fixing the Tay-Sachs, could you make her seven feet tall and give her some fast-twitch fiber?
Which is all going to be possible.
And probable.
joe rogan
Especially when you're dealing with other countries.
mark sisson
Already, you know.
So, yeah, it's scary.
I mean, you know, science is...tech and science and, you know, this whole thing is really interesting.
Like, where are we going to wind up, you know, in 30 years?
You know, is the singularity going to happen?
Are we going to be living forever because of CRISPR and things like that?
I don't know.
joe rogan
It is really fascinating.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
It is scary.
It's scary when you look at it in terms of maintaining the biodiversity of the human race.
Because we're weird.
We're coming in all kinds of shapes.
mark sisson
Apparently all kinds of sexes.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Like 78 of them.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
But when people can actually get into the wiring under the board and monkey with who you are and make you a super genius that's 350 pounds of solid muscle and can run through walls, we're going to have a bunch of genius Hulk babies out there.
mark sisson
Well, sports is going to end as we know it.
joe rogan
Yeah.
End, because there'll be no— Well, I think that's the real concern, is that other—you know, one of the things that people think of when they think of gene doping is, what's China doing?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Because we know China's already used CRISPR on embryos, and they've already done it on living people.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And they're probably going to do it on athletes.
We know what they did in the Beijing Olympics.
And we know what Russia did in the Sochi Olympics.
mark sisson
East Germany did in 76. Yes.
joe rogan
Isn't some of the records from back then for females still standing?
Because they turned these women into...
mark sisson
Into men.
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
And a lot of them will say they didn't know what was going on.
And if that's the case, God bless them.
But...
If you didn't know what was going on and you wind up with that body for the rest of your life, that's going to be a shocker.
joe rogan
It's horrible.
You must have seen Icarus, right?
Brian Fogel's movie?
mark sisson
I'm supposed to see it.
joe rogan
No, you haven't?
mark sisson
I have not seen it yet.
It's amazing.
joe rogan
It's amazing.
It's dark.
It's the weirdest movie because he completely stepped in shit.
He did not mean to catch the greatest doping scandal in the history of the Olympics.
But he just was at the right place at the right time conducting an experiment on himself.
An open experiment where he did this...
This cycling race, completely clean, and then he was going to return the next year doping and film a documentary about it.
In the middle of all this, Gregory Rychenkov, that's how you say his name?
Yeah.
Gets caught up in this whole thing where they bust these people that are cheating in the Sochi Olympics, and he has to escape, and he comes to America, and he testifies, and then now he's on the run, fearful, fearing for his life.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's crazy.
mark sisson
Yeah.
But very plausible.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Which just makes you think, what is China doing right now?
They obviously have their eyes on the prize in terms of technological dominance, military dominance, economic dominance.
For sure, they're going to want athletic dominance as well.
And that is the way to do it.
They've shown that they're more than willing to experiment with people.
mark sisson
Absolutely.
I mean, there's an element of 1938 there.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Eugenics.
mark sisson
Master race and eugenics.
Spooky.
Mike Baker might know, right?
joe rogan
Yeah, he might.
He probably would.
mark sisson
Yeah, about the sports side of that.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Even Mike Baker could be cousins.
Really?
Now that I'm thinking about him, looking at you.
Don't you think?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Totally.
Yeah.
You guys could be related some sort of a way.
mark sisson
Some sort of a way.
joe rogan
Get you two together over a stake.
mark sisson
Absolutely.
Yeah, let's do that.
joe rogan
See if we can pick his brain.
Get him a little liquored up.
See if we'll give up some juicy details.
But I do wonder about that stuff because on one hand, listen, I think we should pursue it because no one wants their child to have some sort of an incurable disease or some sort of a horrible, you know, handicap.
No one wants that, right?
So on one hand, we should pursue it.
But on another hand, like we literally might be reengineering the species.
mark sisson
That's the price.
And at some point, I guess you have to draw the line, although you draw the line in polite society, but do you not draw the line?
Is there going to be a black market CRISPR thing?
joe rogan
Oh yeah, that's going to happen first, right?
That's the real problem, the haves and the have-nots.
The gap will be so wide, because initially it would be really expensive.
So the people that get on it initially are going to be the really wealthy people, and they're going to have this massive advantage, and their children will have this massive advantage, and then that gap will be even wider by the time it trickles down to regular folks.
mark sisson
Exactly.
joe rogan
What do you do for recovery?
Do you do sauna?
Do you do ice baths?
Do you do anything along those lines?
mark sisson
Yeah, I do.
One of the things I do for recovery is I just, by feel, I don't use HRV, I don't use any of the metrics or any of the wearables.
How do I feel that day?
And if I don't feel like training that day, I don't train.
And that's a recovery day for me.
Pretty much every night in Miami Beach, I have this...
I live in an amazing building.
It has one of the nicest gyms I've ever seen in the building, and it has a spa down below with a sauna.
joe rogan
Does anybody go to the gym, or is it one of those things where you're like, how come...
mark sisson
No, there's 500 people live in the building, and the same 15 people are in the gym every day.
It fits the standard demographic.
But the spa downstairs has a jacuzzi, a sauna, a steam, and a cold plunge.
And so my routine is pretty much around 5.30 or 6 at night, because I want to do this before dinner time.
I'll go down and I'll do four or five minutes in the jacuzzi to get warmed faster.
Then I'll step inside.
It's a 195-degree sauna.
That's the highest it goes.
195 dry sauna.
joe rogan
They let you adjust it?
mark sisson
It's the highest it goes.
Yeah.
I mean, some people dial it back to 160s or whatever, but 195 is the highest it goes.
So I'll go in there for 15, and then I'll do a cold plunge, and the plunge is around 47, 48 degrees.
joe rogan
Nice.
mark sisson
Now, sometimes I'll go five minutes, six minutes up, you know, dunk all the way in and then just hang out up to my neck for that.
But then I have to warm up because if I don't warm up after that, I'm going to be shivering the rest of the night.
Other times I'll just do, say, three, three and a half minutes and then, you know, just stay shivery for the next hour and get that brown fat going.
joe rogan
Right.
You feel a big difference when you do that?
mark sisson
No.
So here's the thing.
Here's why I do it, Joe.
First of all, it's a head trip.
It's a head trip to go into that cold water and just hang out there.
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
And just breathe and be there and watch time slow way the fuck down.
Yeah.
And it's so invigorating.
It's so relaxing to get out and then go up and have a nice glass of wine and have dinner, maybe watch a show, a TV show, and then go to bed.
So that's part of my routine.
Now, do I do it for recovery?
Probably not so much.
I mean, there probably are some recovery aspects...
But that's not why I do it.
I do it for the relaxation and sort of for the mental challenge of it a little bit.
It just works for me.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's how I feel about the sauna as well.
And I don't have a cold plunge, but I do do a cold shower afterwards.
But I'm thinking I need to invest in a cold plunge.
mark sisson
Absolutely.
It's one of the greatest feelings.
And a cold shower just does not do it justice.
Have you done a plunge?
joe rogan
I have.
mark sisson
For any length of time?
joe rogan
Yeah.
Well, one of the things I was doing in the wintertime, it gets in the 30s here at night, and my pool's not heated.
mark sisson
Love it.
joe rogan
So I would go from the sauna right into the pool, but one time I almost didn't make it out of the pool.
I did like six minutes and my legs weren't working.
mark sisson
That happened to me one time.
Go ahead, tell me your...
joe rogan
Scary.
mark sisson
It's very scary.
joe rogan
As I was moving, I was like, oh no.
mark sisson
How embarrassing for me to drown in my own pool naked in the backyard, right?
That's what I was thinking when I did it.
joe rogan
I felt like...
I was wondering if I was going to be able to pull myself.
I was having a hard time going up the stairs and then I was like, okay, can I pull myself with my arms?
Because I was in up to my neck and I was like, my arms might not work either.
It was spooky because I was like, Jesus, these aren't working.
They're not working.
mark sisson
Been there.
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
Been there.
That's a bit much.
And that's, you know, that's overdoing the therapeutic, you know, hormetic effect, which is intended to do a small stress to your body and you recover by, you know, by upregulating a bunch of immune things.
But you can, if you overdo it, it's not good.
It's, you know, it's gonna suppress your immune system.
Or you can die.
I mean, that happened to me.
I came back from a very hard day of playing Ultimate for two hours, and no one was home.
Ultimate Frisbee, right?
Yeah, and I go in my backyard pool, and it was in Malibu.
And believe it or not, Malibu gets down into the 40s in the wintertime, and when the Santa Ana's blow, the pool heat comes up, and then the wind blows the heat off, and so it super cools.
Anything that's at the bottom rises, the wind blows it off, so it can get down way below the ambient air temperature and even below the ground temperature around it if a cold sand is blowing.
And that was the case this time.
And again, I'm in for a couple of minutes, and I'm like, I can't walk, I can't move.
Holy shit!
And I didn't have a handrail on mine either.
joe rogan
Yeah, I'm just lucky that I had steps and not a ladder.
Because I think if it was a ladder, I don't think I would have made it out.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
I think I made it out.
But I made it out in time.
Like, another minute?
I might have been fucked.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
That would have been the dumbest way for me to die.
mark sisson
No, I thought the same thing.
unidentified
How embarrassing.
joe rogan
All my haters would have been laughing.
Yeah.
Fucking loser.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Jesus.
mark sisson
But that's about it for recovery.
I get a massage once a week.
I get some body work, some roller and therapy and Theragun stuff.
joe rogan
Yeah, those things are great.
I love those.
Those are great.
Hyperice makes this vibrating ball.
unidentified
Yep.
joe rogan
Have you used those?
Oh my god, that thing's amazing.
I was a little skeptical.
I was like, what's a...
Why is it...
Who gives a shit if it vibrates?
But oh my god, this thing really vibrates.
Well, I roll on it.
I put it on the ground and I put my back on it and I bridge on it.
And it just rips all that tissue and separates and...
It just really shakes it up.
It's really nice.
It's almost like a Theragun, but you've got all your weight on it.
I'm a big fan of that.
That's the stuff that I do.
But again, the sauna for me, I agree with what you're saying.
There's a mental discipline in there.
I do 25 minutes at 185 degrees.
And there's a mental discipline involved in it because the last 10 minutes, it's just concentrating on just being in the moment.
I do this fucked up game where for the last 10 minutes is the roughest part, right?
The first 15 is not that hard.
But the last 10 minutes are rough.
And so one of the things that I do is I do deep breathing exercises where I count.
So I do a six count in and a six count out.
Or I'll do five, five, and five, four.
So five minutes in, hold for five, and then five minutes out.
Or, excuse me, five seconds in, hold for five.
I'm thinking in minutes because I'm so scared.
I'm so scared when I do this, but when I think about doing other things, I think about quitting, I make myself do two more.
So anytime I have a weak thought, say if I'm going to do 20 deep breaths So six seconds in, six seconds out.
If I'm at like eight and I go, okay, this means I have 12 more to go.
Fuck, I don't want to do those 12. Well, now you got 14, bitch.
So I tack on two extra breaths every time I'm weak.
Every time my mind gets weak.
jamie vernon
Wow.
joe rogan
Yeah, and sometimes it's an extra 20 breaths.
So sometimes instead of doing 20, I'll do 40 because I'm such a bitch.
jamie vernon
Jesus.
joe rogan
Or if I move, that's the other thing.
I don't let myself do this, and I don't let myself move around.
I have to keep my hands on my knees and just breathe.
So as soon as I wipe my face or do shit like that, I'll go, no, no, no, you're being weak.
Now you've got two more breaths.
jamie vernon
You're tough on yourself.
joe rogan
I've developed this over time.
mark sisson
It's a great routine.
joe rogan
Because it's the only thing that'll make me stay still.
If I know that I move...
Because otherwise I'll just want...
I used to do that when I started doing hot yoga.
And they taught me in hot yoga, when you lie down, just fucking lie down.
Because you're so hot in the middle of the exercises, this dead body pose.
And the yoga instructor was telling me, like, this is the hardest pose, to just lie still after you've exercised hard for 45 minutes.
And it's only for a couple minutes, and then you get back to doing it again.
People move around.
They make noise.
It's like you're being weak.
You've got to stay put and stay calm.
And so then I applied that, because that was difficult for me to do.
I applied that to the sauna.
So anytime, I know two extra deep breaths are coming if I bitch out.
mark sisson
That's a mind game in and of itself, because like, I would like, you know, it's like, don't think of an apple.
joe rogan
Yes.
mark sisson
Right?
joe rogan
Yeah, exactly.
mark sisson
So I sit on the top shelf, and I lean over, and I count, when I get to about 10 minutes, I count the drips off my little fingers.
And, you know, I count like 200 drips, and okay, check the clock, but don't check the clock too often, right?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Right.
Don't check the clock too often.
It's amazing.
The time slows.
But one thing I found is that AirPods work in the sauna.
Your phone won't work.
Your phone will die in the sauna.
But the AirPods won't.
So I just leave my phone outside the sauna and I'll play a book on tape.
And that'll keep me occupied for the first 15 minutes or so.
unidentified
That's cheating.
joe rogan
It is.
mark sisson
It is.
joe rogan
But the last 10 minutes, you can't pay attention to the book.
That's the last 10 minutes is when I do the deep breathing exercises.
I take the ear pods out.
mark sisson
Part of the discipline for me is the boredom, is being in there.
I'm typically in there alone, even though it's a public sauna.
I own the plunge.
Or somebody to go in and go, ooh!
joe rogan
And then they jump out.
mark sisson
They'll get back out after two seconds.
And I'm like, come on, let me coach you.
joe rogan
Do you coach them in there?
mark sisson
Sometimes.
I can usually get somebody who's hated it and never goes in.
They jump in and they run out.
And I can coach them to their first minute.
And then they're impressed with themselves, like crazy.
I've had a couple people go over the deep end and then they go, Hey, Mark, I did four and a half minutes the other day.
I'm like, now I've got to go do...
unidentified
Now you have to compete with them.
mark sisson
Now I have to compete with them, yeah.
joe rogan
Does your gym have classes?
mark sisson
Yeah, they have classes.
No, it's a serious, serious gym.
joe rogan
Is that one of the reasons why you moved to this place?
Because of these...
mark sisson
Yeah, so we lived in Miami Beach for a year in another building with a great view, and we were getting a sense of South Beach and what it was like.
And then we kept hearing about this other building, and then we decided we would rent a place for six months in the other building.
And then after two months, we're like, we're all in, man.
So we bought a place.
joe rogan
It was that nice.
mark sisson
Oh, my God, yeah, yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, I don't know if I could live in a condo at this stage of my life.
mark sisson
Well, Marshall would have a tough time.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Do you have a dog?
mark sisson
We had a dog.
We still do, but because of the condo, it was better that my dog spends...
So my dog lives with our son now in L.A. And he has a dog, so it's perfect for them.
joe rogan
Oh, that's cool.
mark sisson
Yeah, because otherwise it was, you know, down the elevator, walk the dog three times a day and all that stuff.
joe rogan
I know, and he has to shit and you never know.
What are you doing?
mark sisson
Yeah, and if the dog is not outside and it's inside, you know, in Malibu we had a doggy door, so dogs were always outside.
It was great.
Same in the Pasadena.
We have a house in the Palisades now.
And same thing, doggy door.
But without that, it's like they're trapped.
joe rogan
Do you go anywhere else in Florida other than Miami?
Do you wander around?
mark sisson
So we live south of Fifth.
I don't know if you know the area at all.
Yeah.
We don't go north of Fifth.
Really?
I mean, not really.
I have friends.
I keep my eFoil over on Sunset Island, so I go over to Sunset Island.
I have a friend over there who's got a house I put in there.
joe rogan
Is that that super luxury island that's super high real estate?
Is that the one?
mark sisson
No, that's Fisher Island you were thinking of.
joe rogan
That's Fisher Island.
mark sisson
Fisher.
We're across from Fisher, so we look across the- What's the deal with that place?
It's an enclave for people who want high, high security.
You've got to take a ferry to get to it.
A lot of high net worth individuals and Russian oligarchs and people who want to protect what they've got.
joe rogan
Oh, that's what it is.
So it's like really high-end real estate, right?
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
And then they just take a ferry over and then they have a car park somewhere else?
mark sisson
No, they bring the car over on the ferry.
It's big enough that they have a car, and they just take their car back and forth.
joe rogan
How long is the ferry ride?
mark sisson
Two minutes.
It's literally across.
Like it's across Lady Bird.
Oh, that's weird.
joe rogan
So if you want to go to dinner, you have to drive your car into the ferry.
mark sisson
Yep.
joe rogan
And then the ferry takes two minutes.
How often does the ferry travel?
mark sisson
There's two ferries, and they go.
They literally are all day long.
joe rogan
Back and forth.
mark sisson
All day long.
joe rogan
What about at nighttime?
mark sisson
Less so, but still enough to...
joe rogan
I know how those Miami people like to stay up late.
mark sisson
And they do, indeed.
They do, indeed.
joe rogan
It's a wild place, man.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
I see you as this calm person.
And then when you tell me you're going to live in Miami Beach, I'm like, I don't know.
I don't know if that's going to work.
mark sisson
My wife had a tough time at first, and now she's all in.
She's like, again, if we didn't have family back in California, we go back once a month for a week.
Again, we rent a place in Pacific Palisades.
Our daughter lives there.
Our grandchild lives there.
My son lives there now.
Her parents.
joe rogan
Are there any tents in your lawn yet?
mark sisson
That's the other...
I mean, if we go down the list, that's another one.
That's a huge one for me.
joe rogan
It's crazy.
mark sisson
It's beyond crazy.
joe rogan
My friend lives in Venice.
He's like, it is nuts.
Like, you can't...
You drive down the street.
There's people camping everywhere you look.
mark sisson
When our house burned the first time, we...
We lived at the shutters because we couldn't find any alternative living.
So, you know, the shutters in Santa Monica.
You know, it's great.
It's a lovely place to live, to hang out.
We were there.
We had a place for almost two months.
And we go down and we walk down to Venice.
It's beyond depressing.
And then you see people...
Well-meaning people are bringing them coffee and donuts and money.
They don't want to be helped.
Most of them are just...
There's a big schizophrenia issue there.
Lots of drug use and alcoholism.
Again, I feel badly for them.
There was a point in my life when I wanted to solve the homeless problem.
That was my big thing that I wanted to do, and then I realized it's almost impossible.
joe rogan
What were you going to do?
mark sisson
Well, I was going to create this wonderful, low-cost housing for people who had lost their last paycheck and give them an opportunity to get back on their feet and let them self-govern these little villages.
And it was going to be a utopian thing.
And as I got deeply into it, I'm like, well, that's not going to happen.
joe rogan
Yeah, I have a friend who worked with homeless people, and it changed his perspective.
He thought that he was going to do a great service by doing this, and then towards the end he felt like he was wasting his time.
He's like, there's a problem here that you're not going to fix by providing them with goods and services.
mark sisson
Exactly.
joe rogan
Yeah, he said these, there's, and then there's also, there's a despair.
There's a thing where you're not taking care of yourself.
They think that one of the ways if you're going to rehabilitate homeless people is to give them some sort of sense of self-worth and allow them some method where they work towards recovery.
mark sisson
That's what I thought.
That was my big thing.
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
And?
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
Doesn't, doesn't pan out.
joe rogan
It's a bummer, man.
It's a real bummer.
Because if you do travel around the Venice Beach area, it's so goddamn depressing.
Because, like, how do you put that genie back in the bottle?
How do you make Venice Beach what it was 10 years ago?
mark sisson
You don't.
And that's when I say the slippery slope.
There's not even a blip on the screen on the way down.
It just continues to decline.
And we talk about...
You know, infrastructure declining.
The way government spends money in California, you know, $30 billion on a rail to go from the valley and $2 billion to widen the 405 for 17 miles.
joe rogan
Yeah.
mark sisson
It goes like this, then it goes like this, then it goes like this.
joe rogan
Yeah, does that fix anything?
mark sisson
$50,000 an inch, if you do the math.
$50,000 an inch to widen the 405. That seems like a lot.
It seems like a lot.
You know, it used to cost $50 million to build a bridge.
Even as recently as the 70s and 80s, now it's a billion dollars to build a bridge, and 200 million of it is the environmental impact statement that takes five years to do, right?
So I just don't see who is out there in the wings that can turn this around.
joe rogan
Or how it can be turned around.
Even if there was the perfect person, what's the method?
mark sisson
Right.
joe rogan
What could you do to fix the homeless problem?
No one even has a solution.
It never even gets discussed.
mark sisson
Right.
joe rogan
I mean, it doesn't get discussed.
When they talk about the economic impact of COVID, one thing that they never bring up, they'll talk about small businesses.
That's a big thing.
They want to talk about it like they care about small people.
They want to talk about it like they care about hardworking families and blue-collar families.
Not a fucking peep about all these tents.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Not a peep.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
None of them.
mark sisson
Yeah.
joe rogan
I guess it just is what it is.
It's going to be very interesting to see what it is in 15 years.
Because 15 years ago, this is a non-existent problem.
mark sisson
Correct.
It was so rare.
No, 15 years ago, there were a couple on 3rd Street Promenade asking for a handout, and they would actually go buy food.
joe rogan
Yeah, it was a couple.
And I did Fear Factor in downtown LA in the early 2000s.
We were near where they make American Apparel.
We were in the same warehouse building that we did American Apparel.
We had people jumping off the top of the building, doing crazy stunts and shit back there.
So we were always filming in the downtown area, and that's when I first discovered Skid Row.
I had no idea.
mark sisson
6th Street?
joe rogan
Skid Row.
mark sisson
Okay, yeah.
joe rogan
Skid Row in downtown LA. I don't know what street it is, but I remember driving going, what the fuck is this?
mark sisson
It goes on for miles.
joe rogan
It's nuts.
It's weird to see, but it was contained to this one area.
And there's a Netflix special, a documentary on the Cecil Hotel now.
And it's about a girl who turned up missing at the Cecil Hotel and wound up drowning in the tank on the roof.
And she was off her meds.
Remember that?
But one of the parts of the documentary that's really interesting is it shows how Skid Row was created.
And that they purposely contained people...
Schizophrenics, homeless people, they kept them in that area.
And they put all the places where they can get food and shelter in that area.
Soup kitchens.
Yeah.
And it's just completely calculated.
They did it on purpose.
mark sisson
And they did.
If you want to fix the problem, one of the things you have to do is you do have to find a place For people to go.
They can't legitimately squat on the front of a $10 million mansion in Venice.
But they're doing it.
That's what I'm saying.
joe rogan
And no one can do anything about it.
Apparently, this is where it gets really crazy.
When real estate, when people are selling homes out there, they will bribe these homeless folks to move away from where the house is.
So they'll come and say, listen, I'll give you X amount of money.
You've got to not camp here.
And so they'll do it, but then other guys will find out about it and they'll come in.
And so they have this revolving door of trying to sell a house by bribing these homeless people to not camp out right in front of it.
mark sisson
Yeah.
Well, and again, the state would argue in their very liberal thinking, If they want to live there, why should they not be able to live there?
joe rogan
Meanwhile, you can't throw garbage on the street.
How come you can leave your garbage there if you call it a tent filled with shit?
It's not good, Mark.
But listen, that's not why we're here.
Two meals a day.
I'm sure there's more in it that we haven't discussed.
Folks, you should go buy it.
Primal Blueprint is excellent.
I'm sure this is great, too.
Anything else you want to tell people?
mark sisson
No, just Primal Kitchen, the food company.
Again, when you clean up your diet and you get rid of all the sugar and the bad carbs and the processed carbs and the industrial seed oils, you come down to a fairly short list of actual real food, and what makes the difference are the sauces, the dressings, the toppings, and the methods of preparation, the way you make these exciting to eat and give variety on every meal.
And so that's what we do at Primal Kitchen.
We create these Amazing pasta sauces and salad dressings and condiments and things like that to make real food eating exciting.
joe rogan
It really is great stuff.
I love it.
I'm a big fan of all your stuff.
I love the salad dressing in particular.
unidentified
Thank you.
joe rogan
Pasta sauce, everything.
It's all great.
unidentified
Cool.
joe rogan
It's great to see you again.
Let's do it again quicker than five years.
mark sisson
Okay, man.
You got it.
unidentified
Thanks.
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