Rich and Rich are joined by their good friend Rich Rollie to talk about a variety of topics, including the new kale shake, their love of Juicy Lady's, and how they got rid of their VCRs. Rich also talks about how he doesn't watch TV anymore and why he thinks it's a good thing. Rich and Rich also talk about how they started their podcast and why they don't want to watch TV any more. They also discuss what they've been up to in their lives and what they're looking forward to in the future. And Rich talks about why he doesn t want to go back to VCR's and why it's time to get rid of them. This episode was brought to you by SeatGeek and produced by Vevolution. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our employers. We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this podcast. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your music. It helps spread the word to the rest of the world. Thank you for listening and supporting the pod. XOXO, Rich and Rollie <3 - Rich and Rachael - The Crew (Music by Jeff Perla Music by Rich Roll ( ) and the Crew at is a production of Zapsplat . (Shoutout to: ) (Song by: , & (featuring: ), (Recorded by ) ( ) ( ) is a song written by in this episode was produced by (c) by . . and on this episode is by , and ) and (Alicia ( ) is (C) ( ) and ( ) & has a song by ). (Feat. (Sue is a tribute to from with thanks to . ( ) in this song is . ) and is , which is ? ( (and ) by in the music is by ? ( ) , ) on ( ), s ( & is also (?) ( ] and , & ) . can be found on Soundcloud ( ) on SoundCloud
00:02:17.000I mean, I still watch Netflix, and I watch the shows I like to watch, and now I don't miss it.
00:02:23.000I've been traveling a lot, and when you're in hotel rooms, you turn the TV on, and I have a zero-tolerance policy for...
00:02:30.000Commercials now like I just I'm like really, you know, and I just turn the TV off and Go back online.
00:02:36.000Yeah commercials are fucking brutal whoever invented the idea of stopping a show every 15 minutes for three minutes or whatever the hell it is for commercials That's awful.
00:02:46.000Well, it's crazy how you acclimate to that because as a kid, you know think about how many hours of your life You know, we're just basically watching commercials Well, you know what happened though?
00:03:05.000Most of our formative years was terrible television commercials.
00:03:09.000Yeah, I got my first TiVo in the early 2000s.
00:03:12.000It was like a standalone unit that hooked up to DirecTV.
00:03:17.000I think it was, I want to say like 2003 or something like that, and I was like, this is amazing!
00:03:22.000You can pause the TV! You know, you could pause it, you could go take a leak, you could record things, you could find, search things, and have them on a schedule, because I fucking, I had probably 10 VCRs in my life and never figured out how to record one of those bitches.
00:04:18.000I don't know how many episodes it aired, but certainly not the entire 13 of the season.
00:04:23.000And then it was just, you know, how it is in entertainment, like, you're just done, right?
00:04:27.000They own the show, and even though they were all taped and locked and completed, nobody had seen them.
00:04:32.000And somehow, he was able to get his show back, and he, I don't know, you know, through lawyering or what have you, And bought the rights back, got his show, and cut a deal with iTunes.
00:04:45.000And it's premiered on iTunes this past week.
00:04:47.000And I think it's like the top-ranked TV show on iTunes now.
00:04:52.000I wonder if their TV show rankings, though, are just like their podcast rankings.
00:04:58.000Well, who knows how the iTunes algorithm works.
00:05:00.000Well, it's definitely not based on the number of downloads.
00:08:23.000Whether you agree with him or not, he has an incredible acuity to present an argument and support it and communicate it in a very clear and calm way.
00:09:18.000There's a lot of really dangerous ideologies that are being passed around and have been passed around for a long time, and the people that are embedded in these ideologies...
00:09:36.000I mean, first of all, I'm always impressed with how you kind of navigate the treacherous waters of having guests on that you may disagree with, which may be me today.
00:09:46.000You know, sort of, you'll have people with differing point of views, sometimes extreme, sometimes not, and the way that you kind of have to gracefully, like as a podcast host myself, that's always a challenge, you know, like how do you have a respectful, engaging conversation, but also make sure that you're asking the right questions so that you're not just people pleasing the whole time.
00:10:07.000Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with this agreeing with someone, you know?
00:10:10.000And I don't think there's anything wrong with having a pleasant conversation with someone whose views you don't share.
00:10:15.000I think two people can be diametrically opposed on certain issues, but still be nice to each other.
00:10:22.000I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
00:10:23.000And I think when I talk to someone, Who doesn't share my opinions or has differing opinions?
00:10:29.000I try to relax whatever part of me wants to argue with that and just try to figure out what is it, where are they coming from?
00:10:39.000You know, what's their point of view based on?
00:11:36.000I don't know him, but we were classmates.
00:11:38.000We were in the same freshman class in college at Stanford.
00:11:44.000Like I said, I don't know him, but we have mutual friends in common.
00:11:48.000A couple guys that I'm close with that he's still close with.
00:11:51.000And I was talking to one of them recently and he just said, we were talking about Sam because he's blown up and he's everywhere and, you know, he's so in Zeitgeist right now.
00:12:00.000And he was telling me that in some freshman, I don't know if it was a freshman English class or something like that, that he, that Sam just distinguished himself immediately, like by challenging the professor and just everybody knew that he was on another level intellectually,
00:12:19.000Well, it's got to be very difficult if you're in college and you're taking classes from a person that you think is a dumbass, which does happen.
00:12:33.000I forget what class it was in, but I can clearly remember going, oh, all right.
00:12:38.000Well, now I have to just think only of the information, the actual numbers and the data that's being presented in this class, and ignore this person's opinion because they're a fucking idiot.
00:12:49.000I believe it was either a philosophy class or a psychology class.
00:12:53.000I don't even remember the exact circumstance, but...
00:12:55.000Remember thinking like yeah, this is a real issue and then as I got older and I started paying attention to some of the things that get taught in school and some of the like very rigid Ideologies that some people especially like really super lefties like to impose on students and some of the ideas They try to impose on students are very it's very subjective ideas,
00:13:15.000you know very very much personal opinions They get stuffed into kids heads and then you know it becomes an issue of whether or not Whether or not you want that in your head.
00:13:26.000Are you going to get an A in this class if you disagree with this guy, but still present good arguments?
00:13:32.000Or are you going to have to go along with the way this person is trying to portray the world in order to be graded accordingly?
00:13:39.000I don't think critical thought is really taught to the extent that it should be in young people.
00:13:46.000You know, we're on this, you know, our education system is about, you know, getting through as much information as possible and standardized testing and, you know, getting good grades and all that kind of thing.
00:13:57.000And, you know, the idea that you should be questioning the ideas that are presented to you is really not something that is, you know, part of that world to the extent that I think it should be.
00:14:08.000I agree and I also think that there's very little being taught especially at a high school level of how to think and Not just like this is mathematics.
00:14:21.000This is these are the facts of history that we're aware of instead of How do you deal with problems?
00:14:29.000How do you address interpersonal relationships?
00:14:33.000How do you look at yourself objectively?
00:14:37.000Do you ever step back and try to look at yourself the way maybe someone else would and judge yourself in your own actions instead of protecting yourself with your ego?
00:14:49.000And all those things that people do like almost naturally to protect themselves really wind up being traps.
00:14:55.000They really wind up fucking you up, and you have to kind of clean up that mess as you get older.
00:15:00.000Well, I mean, I guess that's supposed to be on the parents, but you know what I mean?
00:15:16.000For me, the most important thing, you know, as a parent, it's like, I want my kids to be excited about life and to be excited about something, to figure out a way to be passionate about something.
00:15:58.000Yeah, and then give them the opportunity to switch gears, too.
00:16:02.000I remember when I was a kid, I would be into a lot of different things, and my parents would always be super resistant if I got into something else.
00:16:10.000They'd be like, well, what about the other thing that you do?
00:16:12.000I'm like, well, I want to do this now.
00:18:27.000They try, yeah, like, and they're happy that I'm happy.
00:18:30.000But it's very, you know, they're coming from a generation where, you know, look, I grew up in a really education-focused household, and I tried my best to live up to that, and to some extent I succeeded at that, but the whole idea was premised on, you know, this myth of the American dream,
00:18:46.000you know, study hard, get into the best school.
00:19:49.000There's a real lack of understanding of the landscape of the race you're in.
00:19:55.000Like everybody wants to think of it as a race, the rat race.
00:19:58.000But if you could get an aerial view of the actual race from birth to death, from the time you're born to the time you leave this planet and look at it as like you're looking at a Formula One racetrack.
00:20:21.000I thought there was, like, a happiness truck somewhere along the line that I was going to refuel with.
00:20:27.000Are you going to change my tires when I get my PhD?
00:20:29.000It's the idea that you're going to arrive at some point or that you're going to land in this destination that is called success or happiness.
00:20:36.000And when you get to our age, you realize that that's an illusion, right?
00:22:13.000And we've created these social constructs and we've fed into them and passed them down from generation to generation without anybody stepping back and going, Well, who set this up?
00:22:44.000I think that if you talk to somebody who's in their 20s, the idea that you would work a corporate job and stay in that job for your career and collect your pension and then ride out your 60s and 70s playing golf is a foreign concept to a young person.
00:22:59.000Whereas that was the kind of paradigm, right, for our parents' generation.
00:23:03.000And when you look at the advent of the internet and what that provides and allows, you see this explosion in kind of lifestyle careers where you're not wed to a geographic location.
00:23:13.000We live in a kind of subcontractor economy where people, you know, are more project-based than, you know, working for the big corporation or the plant.
00:23:23.000And certainly all that stuff exists on some level.
00:23:26.000But not to the extent that it used to.
00:23:44.000And that's why I think, you know, the millennials get a bad rap for that.
00:23:48.000But at the same time, I think that they are...
00:23:51.000Much more engaged in trying to grapple with who they are and what it is that they're passionate about expressing and then finding a way to tap into the economy somehow so that they can contribute and make a living doing that.
00:24:05.000And I think that that's really cool to watch unfold.
00:24:09.000And I think that the idea that millennials are entitled, I think kind of every young kid has a distorted perception of the world that we live in.
00:24:21.000They're gonna be in some, probably not on a podcast, but in some form of media, you know, 20 years from now, talking about how, you know, you and I are out to lunch.
00:25:11.000It's a very small, you know, very contained independent movie, but it's so well executed and you just leave, like, with a lot to think about.
00:25:23.000You know, I had a long sit down with Ray Kurzweil.
00:25:26.000And I interviewed him for the sci-fi show that I did, and we went back and forth over the possibilities of this new era that we're entering into.
00:25:36.000We went to this Global 2045 Initiative.
00:25:41.000They were having a New York City where all the futurists got together and they were all comparing notes and talking about the different possibilities for not just artificial intelligence but symbiotic relationships with computers downloading consciousness into databases and all this kind of crazy shit and you walk away thinking like I don't I don't know if anybody knows where this is going and It's not going to stop.
00:26:07.000There's going to be continual innovation until we reach some event horizon of science, some point of no return, you know, some what they call ultimate novelty point.
00:26:22.000That's what Terence McKenna used to call it.
00:26:24.000You know, this ultimate novelty point.
00:26:26.000And it's probably going to happen within our lifetime.
00:26:29.000It's probably going to happen within the next 20 or 30 years.
00:26:31.000You think it's going to happen that soon?
00:27:31.000The universe has rigged it that way because human beings are such idiots that if they made it easy, our oceans would be dry deserts right now.
00:27:43.000And that is the same, you know, compulsion that is propelling technology forward and will ultimately catapult us into this AI universe that's going to destroy us.
00:28:58.000Well, it's kind of emblematic of how we deal with problems, because instead of trying to solve the problem that got us to this place, we're just looking for another source of water, right?
00:29:30.000So there is certainly one aspect of this that you can kind of point towards human beings, but the reality of the Earth, the absolute reality of the Earth is climates change, oceans, the levels change,
00:29:46.000they always have, and even if people didn't exist...
00:30:36.000We just have this really rigid idea of, like, where we should be able to put cities.
00:30:41.000I mean, when they keep finding these cities from, like, several thousand years ago, like, did you ever see those concentric circles that they found in the water that they believe represents, like, something very similar to what Atlantis was described as outside of Spain?
00:30:56.000Underground cities where at some point in time the sea level changed and it was long before carbon emissions long before People were burning fossil fuels and using machines.
00:31:10.000It's not to exonerate Large corporations coal our dependence on fossil fuel.
00:31:16.000That's it's a totally separate argument I absolutely think all you have to do is look at LA from a fucking airplane or worse I got photos of Mexico City?
00:32:23.000You know, what you said about this idea of human beings and this idea that we think everything is static.
00:32:30.000I mean, I think that applies across the board.
00:32:32.000Like, we think these cities will always be there, but we also think that our lives are somewhat static or that our relationships are static or our jobs are static or our bank accounts.
00:32:41.000All of these things, you know, we kind of agree to in this social contract, but everything is fluid, man.
00:33:09.000The only way a city got to be a city in the first place is things had to change radically.
00:33:13.000If you looked at where that city is, you looked at Los Angeles, where it is, 400 years ago, there was absolutely nothing.
00:33:19.000You know, there's probably some Native Americans and some Mexicans and some various people, back when it was Mexico, and they were wandering around and doing their thing, but there was no highways and sky rises and All that stuff was really, really recent.
00:33:34.000And in terms of the actual age of the earth, my God, it's like blink your eye and then all of a sudden cities are out.
00:33:41.000Literally a blink of an eye and then everything's polluted.
00:33:45.000Everything's fucked and Malibu beachfront property is ridiculously overpriced.
00:33:49.000But in the history of this planet, has there ever been more change planetarily, with the exception of natural disasters, than there has been in the last 200 years?
00:33:59.000Well, in that sense, aren't human beings a kind of a natural disaster?
00:34:11.000Well, the opening of my Showtime special from like 2005, I argued that if you looked at the earth as a living organism and you're flying over and you saw LA, you'd go, well, that's cancer.
00:35:50.000I was listening to a Radiolab podcast about the Galapagos Islands, and it's very fascinating because they had to eradicate goats Because these sailors had brought goats over, you know, way back in the day.
00:36:03.000And they had brought goats and they'd put them on the island so that they could come back and eat them, like they would have a food source.
00:36:10.000But these goats just destroy everything in their path.
00:36:15.000They just killed everything and they fucked it all up for the tortoises.
00:37:36.000There's like humans and animals and they all act in their own interest.
00:37:41.000It's just we're the only ones that have fingers.
00:37:44.000We can manipulate shit and change the environment in ways that no other animal can even come close to.
00:37:49.000There is an infinitely complex play that's going on, and we insert ourselves into that, and we have this reductionist idea.
00:37:58.000Oh, if we insert this one thing, then that will fix the problem.
00:38:01.000And what we don't do is really understand that The extent to which the interdependency of everything else comes into play.
00:38:10.000And I think that's true whether you're introducing an animal to an ecology to solve a problem and it creates a bigger problem or whether you're, you know, taking a drug to resolve one condition that has side effects or whether you're overly focused on one micronutrient or macronutrient as the solution to your health problem.
00:38:29.000You know, everything is more complicated than that.
00:38:32.000And, you know, I don't think that we...
00:38:34.000Kind of embrace a more holistic approach to, you know, whether it's our problems or our health or what have you.
00:38:41.000That's another thing that's like not part of our wiring and it's not part of the, you know, the scientific method is by definition reductionist because you have to isolate variables and look at one thing at a time.
00:38:55.000Science in and of itself is reductionist.
00:38:57.000And I think that there's also this weird hope that people have that if we fuck something up, then our backs get against the wall, then someone really smart will invent a solution and it'll all be better.
00:39:09.000That someone right now is analyzing the Who knows how many fucking trillions of pounds of plastic we've dumped in the ocean?
00:39:17.000And they're trying to figure out some way to suck all that stuff out and turn it into some sort of a fuel or some resource that we can capitalize on.
00:40:22.000No, but like, you know, you turn on like, when we were kids, it was like, it was all song and dance, you know, on the Spanish television shows, Spanish networks.
00:40:29.000I thought it was all those crazy soap operas.
00:40:45.000Like, I was just thinking of this the other day.
00:40:47.000The talk show host, like a Morton Downey Jr. or a Jenny Jones or a Geraldo Rivera, any of those shows, or like...
00:41:00.000Montel Williams, where they would have guests, and then they would go to the audience, and the audience would say something that would get everybody to go, Oh!
00:41:12.000That thing that they created, those are like the original YouTube commenters.
00:41:16.000Those are like the original social media commenters.
00:41:20.000The people that are in the audience, they don't have anything to do with what's on them, but they get to interject and say something, and then that becomes a part of the entertainment.
00:41:28.000But it's really just, you know, it's this weird social interaction between human beings and us, like, sitting as sidelines.
00:42:21.000You can't be Captain Save-A-Ho and go out there and fix the whole world and go to the Jerry Springle crowd and start hanging out kale leaves and, you know, pamphlets for yoga classes.
00:43:53.000There's no air of moral superiority about it whatsoever.
00:43:57.000It's a lifestyle that I choose, but I don't think that that gives me, you know, permission to levy judgment on any other human being and their choices.
00:44:10.000So, you know, the way that I try to communicate the message is just to, you know, live my life and, you know, I sort of stand where I'm standing, and if people are interested, they'll come to me and I can communicate to them.
00:44:25.000But it's not a proselytizing point of view that I adopt.
00:44:31.000I think some people adopt certain behaviors just because it gives them license to be an asshole.
00:44:37.000I mean there are certain vegans that think that because they are vegans they can go out and attack and be really shitty to other people and somehow or another they're acting in a positive way and they're gonna enact some positive change by being really shitty to people.
00:44:56.000It's like this idea of a social justice warrior falls into the same category by being really mean to people that you think Think the wrong way or behave the wrong way, that somehow or another you're going to shame them into changing by being really aggressive and offensive to them?
00:45:13.000I mean, shaming somebody is not an effective way of trying to getting them to change.
00:45:32.000Look, if you look at the vegan movement, because that's what we're talking about, you know, there are super hardcore animal rights activists, and they have a certain way of communicating, and there's a certain population of people that are receptive to that kind of communication.
00:45:45.000There are other people that are interested in environmental issues.
00:45:48.000They want to be better environmentalists.
00:45:50.000And so there are people that speak to the vegan movement from that perspective.
00:45:55.000And there's a certain audience that's receptive to that.
00:45:58.000And the way that I communicate it or carry the message is in a different way.
00:46:03.000And there's different people that are attracted to that.
00:46:05.000So I think whatever your point of view is or whatever movement you're part of, and we can get into the whole idea of how we're wired to be on teams and how counterproductive that is.
00:46:17.000You know, there's enough people out there that are, you know, there's a diversity of voices and a diversity of audiences that every kind of voice carries a frequency that other people respond to,
00:47:04.000The only way anybody ever gets converted is if you can say something very thoughtful that penetrates past this wall of ideology they have in their head.
00:47:14.000And they go, hmm, and then they have to consider it.
00:47:17.000But they're not going to consider it if you're insulting.
00:47:49.000I think, you know, my theory on it, the people that are kind of, you would characterize as, you know, vociferous and angry and judgmental, my theory is that, There's a certain percentage of the population that come out of the womb...
00:48:15.000And from a very early age, they just find the idea of, you know, an animal dying for food to be the most intolerable concept they can imagine.
00:48:30.000And so they kind of, you know, grow older and they navigate the world and they start, you know, becoming sort of more outspoken about this idea.
00:48:38.000And when people are not receptive to it, or they're not seeing the world the way that they're seeing it, they become progressively more frustrated.
00:48:45.000And that frustration turns to resentment.
00:48:50.000And then, you know, you have what you see, which is people who are, they're just incensed that other people are not seeing the world the way that they're seeing it.
00:48:59.000And I think that applies, you know, to any contingent of the population that holds a very strong point of view.
00:50:26.000You know, and some people, they look at animals and they just have this inescapable kinship.
00:50:33.000And some of that kinship is ridiculous to the point where you ever read those Tumblr blogs where people think that they should have been born a fox?
00:52:46.000I think to the casual observer or somebody who's listening to this podcast, they may think that there's this giant gap between the way that you live and the way that I live.
00:52:57.000And I think there's actually a bigger gap between the way that I live and the normal human being than yourself because of...
00:54:24.000See if you could pull that video up, Jamie, because it's insane to look at.
00:54:28.000When you stop and think about the amount of Smithfield Foods factory farms, that's it right there.
00:54:35.000This guy flies this drone, which is pretty fucking cool that they have these drones now that you could do this and get this A high-resolution video.
00:55:13.000They're stuffed into these things, crammed next to each other, and they stand on these metal grates.
00:55:19.000So the metal grates are porous, they piss and shit, it goes through the holes, and it all goes through these tubes that lead down into that giant lake.
00:55:28.000Apparently the smell, if you're anywhere near there, is so bad, you literally feel like you could probably light the air on fire.
00:55:36.000I'm sure Smithfield is not too excited about this video being out there.
00:55:40.000And there's all these ag-gag laws right now that prevent consumers from filming this kind of thing.
00:55:58.000And these companies are not transparent about how they produce their food.
00:56:01.000And there's a lot of problems with it.
00:56:03.000And the waste that it creates and the amount of resources and, you know, what goes into this process is something that I think we could all benefit from taking a harder look at.
00:56:14.000You know what would be interesting is if you go to the...
00:56:36.000The elephant in the room, when we talk about global climate change or greenhouse gas emissions, we talk about fossil fuel use, we talk about fracking, and rightly so.
00:56:47.000These are important things to talk about.
00:56:49.000But really, the thing that we're not talking enough about is the impact of our food system on all of these systems.
00:56:56.000And when you look at, for example, water use, we're talking about water, right?
00:57:36.000I think it takes something like 660 gallons of water to produce a hamburger.
00:57:43.000And like a thousand gallons of milk, or a thousand gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk, something like that.
00:57:49.000Like the statistics are completely insane.
00:57:51.000And that, because a lot of it is the water that's used to grow the grain that you're feeding to these animals.
00:57:56.000So when you look at it systemically, you know, it's just...
00:58:00.000If you were an alien who beamed down to planet Earth and said, take me to your leader and show me how you make your food, he would just be like, you guys are crazy.
00:59:41.000Like, this is, like, here's a bunch of things that you need to have in place before you think about any other hobbies or projects or whatever you're trying to accomplish with your career.
00:59:52.000You gotta have a place where you can breathe the air, okay?
01:01:39.000I mean, I think that the amount of land that you need to grow food for vegans is like, you know, I don't know, a fraction, a tiny fraction of the amount of land that is required to raise animals for food.
01:01:51.000Because the animals have to eat a lot of food in order to get to a size that you can cook them in.
01:02:00.000Go to Cowspiracy.com, and there's a section called Facts, and they kind of break it all down.
01:02:43.000The carbon in their body is coming from corn.
01:02:46.000And you find out how many different things at the supermarket, when they went through the supermarket, they looked at all the different things that have corn syrup in it, corn starch, corn this, corn that.
01:03:41.000I mean, I think that we're entrenched in this system that is dependent upon these subsidies, right?
01:03:47.000And so much of our economy, you know, functions in this way.
01:03:50.000And I think if we really want to change our food system, we have to eradicate these subsidies.
01:03:56.000You know, look, there's a reason why, I think we talked about this last time, I can't remember.
01:04:00.000There's a reason why, like, you know, a Taco Bell taco is like whatever it is, like 89 cents or whatever, and it's like, it's the same price it was when we were 12. You know, it's like, how does that work?
01:04:12.000A McDonald's cheeseburger is like two bucks or whatever it is, but if you factor in, like if you look at it from a meta perspective, and you take into account all the subsidies, You know, a Big Mac would actually cost something like $7.50 or,
01:04:27.000you know, it'd be like a multiple on its price.
01:04:30.000There's a book called Metanomics by this guy called David Simon, where he, I'm sorry, Metanomics, and he really breaks down how these subsidies work and how that kind of fuels this food system that really is creating, you know, it's sort of It's making the lower socioeconomic class less and less healthy,
01:04:52.000because it's creating this wider gap between healthy living and unhealthy living.
01:04:57.000Because in food deserts, in urban food deserts, where there is no farmer's market, but there's McDonald's and Jack in the Box on every corner, And, you know, you're on welfare and you got three kids.
01:05:14.000That's a really good point as far as the amount that it costs for these things and the fact that it's because of subsidies.
01:05:21.000And as a result of that, we're in this place right now where suddenly health and wellness have become elitist ideals, synonymous with spending a ton of money at Whole Foods.
01:06:06.000If you're raising your own chickens, and they're like your pets, and they're laying eggs that are not going to be turned into chickens, then I think ethically, I don't really see a problem with that.
01:07:28.000I think that if you have chickens at your home, and they're your pets, and your kids play with them, and they're laying eggs that are not going to turn into chickens, and you decide that you want to eat those eggs from a morality point of view, I don't really see how I could have a big problem with that.
01:07:45.000Now, if you decide that you want to cut the head off that chicken and fry it up, Then it becomes an issue.
01:07:51.000Well, it just becomes a different thing, right?
01:08:07.000Do you ever smell like your neighbor cooking a steak and go...
01:08:11.000Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not one of those people who's like, oh, it repulses me and I want to throw up.
01:08:16.000You know, like, I got into it for health reasons, right?
01:08:19.000And, you know, listen, I've eaten more meat in my lifetime than any human being ever should.
01:08:24.000It's like, I'm not, you know, I like it.
01:08:27.000I drive by McDonald's or Jack in the Box and I smell that, and that might disgust some people, but it triggers this addictive response in me where it's like, I will crave that.
01:08:38.000Because so much time has passed between me and eating those foods, I don't have that sort of obsessive-compulsive thing that kicks in.
01:09:12.000Diets that say, oh, you can have a cheat day, right?
01:09:15.000So it's like if you told me that I could have In-N-Out Burger like once a week, like I would spend six days thinking about the day that I could have In-N-Out Burger.
01:09:46.000But if I was eating those things, I might find myself driving into the drive-thru.
01:09:50.000That's an issue with people that have eating disorders, where it's almost like the desire to have that forbidden food overwhelms their desire to be healthy.
01:10:04.000It just becomes this thing, like, I've got to itch it.
01:11:07.000I'm not saying that an Atkins diet is a healthy diet, because I don't think it is, but...
01:11:12.000What's wrong with an Atkins diet, if you could say so, from an expert perspective?
01:11:15.000Well, I mean, I'm not a nutritional scientist or a doctor, but I would say that...
01:11:21.000A diet that's super focused on basically excluding anything with any carbohydrates in it and eating foods that are devoid of any fiber, which I think is really important.
01:11:34.000We talk about protein a lot, but I think most people, I think that conversation should really be about fiber.
01:12:35.000Look at, you know, the longest living pockets, pockets of civilization across the world where people live the longest and are the healthiest and are the happiest.
01:13:34.000And in his travels, he became obsessed with, you know, finding places where people are the happiest, live the longest, free of disease, etc.
01:13:44.000And that ultimately became what are today known as the Blue Zones, like these little sort of hidden pockets of the planet.
01:14:11.000It's a cultural thing because it's a community of Seventh-day Adventists, and it's a very strong faith-based community that also basically subsists on a plant-based diet.
01:14:47.000And so from studying these cultures, he extracted certain kind of guiding principles about how they live their life.
01:14:57.000And one of them, to get back to the question about kind of Atkins and diet, is, you know, they all eat a very starchy, you know, fiber-rich, essentially plant-based diet.
01:15:07.000It doesn't mean they're all vegans, like they eat a little bit of meat, but essentially their diet is founded upon Starchy vegetables, for the most part.
01:15:14.000And community and accountability and kind of keeping your elders around and all these sorts of things have really, you know, distinguishes them as, you know, from the way that we live our lives now, right?
01:15:29.000Like, you know, we're isolated, we're fast-paced.
01:15:32.000All these sorts of, you know, kind of principles upon which we navigate our day are just very divorced from the way that these people are living.
01:16:44.000Do you know, I had Aubrey de Grey on the other day, who's a life extension scientist at the forefront of the various technologies that are being developed to extend life.
01:16:56.000He said the difference between the average and these cultures where they live far longer is four years.
01:17:04.000That's this big goal that everybody's trying to attain.
01:17:08.000Live like these people that live the longest, that's four years.
01:17:15.000Well, I think, you know, in these blue zones, they have the highest percentage per capita of centenarians, like people living more than 100. But I think it's less about that age than it is about the quality of your years, right?
01:17:24.000Like, you know, listen, go to the airport and look at how many people are, like, in wheelchairs and, you know, on walkers and stuff like that.
01:17:44.000So, right now in America, you know, we can split hairs over, you know, should you take fish oil or not, or is it okay for you to eat the eggs from your chicken in your backyard?
01:17:54.000But the truth is, this is not the problem that we need to be talking about.
01:17:58.000We need to be talking about the fact that...
01:18:00.000One out of every three Americans is going to die of a heart attack, and 70% of Americans are obese or overweight, and they're predicting that by 2030, 50% of Americans are going to be diabetic or pre-diabetic.
01:18:40.000But if you look back through, you know, the sort of history of mankind, there are plenty of populations that existed for, you know, hundreds and thousands of years without any significant incidence of heart disease.
01:18:53.000You know, especially in, you know, rural areas of China, you know, for long years until we started exporting our diet and lifestyle overseas.
01:19:03.000And now, you know, it's sort of like...
01:19:06.000The latest installment of the Avengers, you know, we're sending these fast food restaurants to these places and they're having, and as the sort of ascension of the middle class in China, you know, continues and they can afford to, you know, sort of purchase more meat products, they're having disease problems that they haven't seen,
01:19:25.000you know, it's unprecedented in the history of their culture.
01:19:29.000So it seems also there's a real issue with human beings when it comes to patterns of behavior and habit that they're very very difficult to break and Like as you were saying before like if you could have a day where you could cheat that day That would become the habit and then it would just you would be thinking about that one day like it's very hard for people who are extremely obese Who just their their main form of pleasure is my pleasure,
01:20:15.000There's a great book called Salt, Sugar, Fat by this guy called Michael Morris.
01:20:20.000And he kind of looks at these big food companies and draws an analogy to the tobacco companies in the 70s in the way that these companies are funneling money and research and marketing dollars into devising food products that are specifically designed to activate that pleasure center in your brain,
01:20:42.000So that they know they're like they're trying to make that food impossible for you to just have one.
01:20:47.000And once you kind of, you know, tap into that, that, you know, ability to trigger that response in somebody, and you create a habit out of that, an addictive response, then you have a customer for life.
01:23:52.000I think juicing has its place, though, but there's a huge difference between that gallon of Tropicana at the grocery store and cold-pressing some kale and spinach with some turmeric in it.
01:24:13.000It's like if you want a really concentrated dose of micronutrients and the kinds of highly compacted vitamins and minerals that you can get in some of these foods, these plants, then it has its place.
01:24:29.000But to run 20 oranges through a juicer and drink that, you're getting a huge amount of sugar in that.
01:24:36.000And you're depriving yourself of the digestive process and the fiber that comes with just eating the whole food.
01:25:28.000I don't have any direct experience with that.
01:25:30.000I don't know what the long-term ramifications of living that lifestyle are, but I do know people that live this way, and they're super healthy people, and some of them are amazing athletes, like my friend Michael Arnstein.
01:26:24.000Yeah, I mean, Mac Danzig was playing around with it for a while.
01:26:27.000I don't know if he's still on it, but people that I've talked to who have dabbled in it say that when they're doing it, they feel amazing.
01:26:34.000And these people are trim, and they don't have...
01:26:36.000Look, they're not getting diabetes, and they're getting a tremendous amount of glucose.
01:26:40.000They're also getting a huge amount of fiber.
01:26:42.000And they're still meeting their protein needs, which is interesting.
01:26:46.000So when I look at that, it just makes me, you know, it gives me a different perspective on this obsession that we have with protein.
01:26:54.000Like everyone's walking around worried about, you know, meeting their protein needs.
01:26:57.000And the truth is, is that, you know, the average semi-sedentary person is eating two to five times the recommended daily allowance of protein.
01:29:25.000He hasn't been a vegan his entire life, so it's not like he was reared that way.
01:29:29.000But I think he's been that way long enough, and he will tell you that His strength training improved and his agility and his ability to recover was significantly enhanced when he changed his diet to this.
01:30:13.000I mean, I think, you know, to your point, your question was, you know, do you think that somebody who's of that ilk or, you know, like a power lifter or strength athlete, if their protein requirements are higher?
01:30:54.000But in the most general sense, when we're talking about protein, we're talking about amino acids, right?
01:30:59.000We're talking about the building blocks of protein, and we're specifically talking about the nine amino acids, you know, the essential amino acids that we can't synthesize on our own, that we have to get from the foods that we eat, right?
01:31:10.000So it's a question of making sure that we are ingesting those nine essential amino acids.
01:31:17.000So does it matter where they come from?
01:31:19.000In what form they are delivered to your body?
01:31:22.000Does it matter if it's in hemp or if it's in steak?
01:32:33.000Is there any properties that would exist in flesh and blood and eating meat that would somehow or another benefit you recovering from an injury?
01:32:43.000Yeah, I don't, you know, that would expedite that process.
01:32:48.000I mean, there are, there's a difference between the way I feel when I eat, like, wild game versus the way I feel when I eat steak that's, like, raised, factory-raised steak or whatever.
01:33:01.000There's a difference in the way your body reacts to it.
01:33:04.000There's a feeling that you eat, especially like mousse.
01:33:07.000Mousse is very unusual for whatever reason.
01:33:10.000When you eat mousse, you almost feel like it's a stimulant.
01:34:33.000It's just, you know, I mean, whether it has, you know, you can have variations on a theme, like I do something similar, it's a little bit different, and it's never the same, you know, I change it from day to day or whatever.
01:34:43.000But once you make that connection, and you're like, oh, wow, you know, then that starts to change the microbial ecology in your gut.
01:34:53.000And I think we talked about this last time too, like all these studies that are coming out about how important your microbiome is to all kinds of things that impact your health and how there's some evidence to suggest...
01:35:09.000That the quality of your gut biome can impact your cravings, right?
01:35:52.000So they analyzed the gut biome of people that are like chocoholics, right?
01:35:57.000And it was very different from people that are ambivalent about chocolate.
01:36:01.000That's such a bizarre thing that you could have these organisms living inside your intestinal tract that are actually changing the way you crave things.
01:36:10.000So they're sending some sort of stimulus that gets to your brain and it's altering the way you want to.
01:36:18.000Well, it's an assault to your idea that you're a sentient human being who is in control of your thoughts.
01:36:24.000And then that leads to, you know, the question of higher consciousness versus, you know, the sort of looping, you know, kind of thing that your brain can do, right?
01:36:48.000Like, if you're having a dream, and you're having a conversation with somebody in a dream, and you're surprised at what somebody tells you, but you're imagining that, right?
01:37:15.000The idea that there could be microbes in your body that are stimulating and changing the way your brain functions seems so alien to people because we like to think of ourselves as autonomous.
01:38:19.000That GT's kombucha had to pull the really good stuff and put that watered-down horseshit because it's more than one half of 1% alcohol because of the fermentation process and the microbes.
01:38:30.000Yeah, a tiny trace of fermentation that left a little bit of alcohol in it that caused this whole thing, and they had to pull everything.
01:40:14.000The less deficits you have in terms of your nutritional intake and the more positive microbes and positive bio-organisms that you take into your body, the more you're going to have, the whole system's going to function better and you're going to be able to fight off immune or fight off disease better.
01:40:40.000But the example that I always give is...
01:40:43.000It's from Super Size Me, the Morgan Spurlock documentary, where he decides he's going to eat McDonald's for 30 days straight.
01:40:49.000And for people that saw the movie, you might remember that a couple days into this experiment, he can't imagine how he's going to make it through 30 days.
01:41:00.000And there's that scene where he's in the car and he actually vomits out the window after he drinks a milkshake or something like that.
01:41:06.000And he's just like, this is the worst.
01:41:08.000And then fast forward like two weeks later, and there's a scene where he's like waking up in the morning, and he's like, I feel so sick.
01:41:56.000Bombarding his system with McDonald's food, he repopulates his gut biome with the kind of microorganisms that feed off McDonald's food, right?
01:42:07.000So suddenly, you know, because those microorganisms are on the food that you're eating, right?
01:42:11.000And then they seed into your gut, and then they start to propagate.
01:42:13.000And suddenly, he's craving these foods that were making him sick two weeks earlier that he couldn't imagine continuing to eat.
01:42:21.000That's the weirdest thing about diet is you're essentially creating a civilization in your body.
01:42:52.000It's almost like everything behaves in this sort of fractal manner where the bigger you get, and the Earth itself is probably a microbe in the greater sense of the galaxy, which is...
01:43:07.000Microbe in the greater sense of the universe and it's all sort of connected in some weird way and the lower you get down to gut microbes and how you fuel those gut microbes and how it impacts the the health of the actual Superorganism itself the human being as a really fascinating it really is it really is when you stop and think about it because very few people think of themselves as being a host for life like I am just this I'm just trying to keep my garden healthy.
01:43:36.000You know, the garden of my body, which is filled.
01:43:50.000What a weird thing that your brain doesn't realize, hey, you know, I'm getting all these signals to eat McDonald's because I've got all these weird asshole McDonald's bacteria living in my gut.
01:44:02.000What I need to do, I need to get some cucumber bacteria down in there to fuck with the McDonald's bacteria.
01:44:10.000It's a very fascinating thing to be a human being and to be completely disconnected from that reality without externally taking it in in the form of education and knowledge and then having to internalize it, having to think about it and go,
01:44:26.000okay, I need to take into consideration that I am not just a one.
01:44:30.000I am a container for all these different organisms and the amount of Positive organisms will directly affect the way the brain works.
01:44:48.000Then factor in the emotional override that takes over, that compels you to take an action irrespective of the logical choice after you've been educated.
01:44:58.000Because I think that's equally as powerful, if not more powerful.
01:45:02.000Yeah, and oftentimes that can be adjusted.
01:45:05.000All of it can be adjusted with momentum.
01:45:08.000If you can just fucking force yourself into a pattern that's more positive.
01:45:32.000And if you can do that, if you can do that with your diet, I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said, I have lost a tremendous amount of weight since listening to your podcast because I started incorporating kale shakes into my diet.
01:45:47.000That's my primary breakfast is a kale shake and it changed everything.
01:49:12.000He raised like insane millions of dollars.
01:49:15.000He was only trying to raise like 100 grand or 200 grand or something and he raised like 4 million dollars in like no time because his invention is so astounding.
01:49:23.000Well, I was definitely a part of that because when I got it, it wasn't nearly that much.
01:51:41.000And so I think that You know, our family is trying to be of service by helping foster, you know, the cultivation of bee populations in a, you know, in a sustainable way.
01:51:54.000Like, by being, by getting involved, you know, there's one school of thought, like, we'll leave it alone, right?
01:52:00.000But this is a threatened, you know, population that needs a little bit of, you know, graceful intervention in order to help them, you know, foster their population.
01:52:11.000So to the extent that, you know, I can play a small part in that, I think that's a cool thing.
01:52:16.000No, I think that's a cool thing as well.
01:53:21.000I'm just trying to help bee populations in our tiny little way by educating my kids about it and by being a home to these 40 hives, which is a trip.
01:55:04.000I've told this story before, but you might not have heard it.
01:55:07.000When we were on Fear Factor, one of the stunts they had, they had these people, they had to get handcuffed to a pole or something like that, and then we covered them with bees.
01:55:17.000And while we're doing this, the beekeeper told us that we had to stop filming because a local population of bees had came over to investigate his population of bees.
01:55:30.000And they were above us in this cloud in the air sorting it out.
01:57:54.000I mean, you know, just the idea that there's a queen, and the fact that the hive is lost without it, and that everything kind of falls into place when the queen is, you know, inserted into the population.
01:58:09.000I mean, I can't begin to, you know, it's like, I know very little about How about the Queen's a murdering bitch?
01:58:15.000She's got a fucking stinger that doesn't come off.
01:58:17.000She doesn't have like barbs on it the way everyone else does.
01:58:20.000And what she does is she wanders around the hive looking for female babies and she stabs them right through the fucking honeycomb.
01:58:55.000Yeah, it's a very bizarre world of bugs.
01:58:58.000Have you ever seen the leafcutter ant documentary they did where they cemented, they poured cement through this leafcutter ant hive, this enormous...
01:59:25.000Like, they had areas where these leaves would ferment, and then they had pipes that led, like tubes, that led through to the sky or to the surface area where they would hit air so that the fermentation process,
02:01:27.000There's an animal, there's an ant death spiral.
02:01:30.000This is an ant death spiral and this is when the queen dies.
02:01:34.000When a queen dies and the scent is no longer there, they don't know who to follow, they don't know what the fuck to do, and they go into this spiral and they will just do this until they run out of energy and food and they will fucking die.
02:01:49.000I mean, I'm probably doing a really shitty job of explaining this.
02:01:52.000They'll just continue to spin like that until they just perish.
02:02:04.000See if you can find an explanation for it, Jamie.
02:02:07.000I probably butchered it but the the idea being that they're following the scent of the Queen and somehow or another lose it and so they don't know what to do so they just start going in the spiral maybe someone stepped on the Queen or something happened they remove the Queen perhaps and a bird might have stolen the Queen mmm like a dragon come down swoop take away their Queen yeah world's crazy mysterious place Well,
02:02:31.000insects in particular, we don't think of them that much because they're so small, but ants have the almost exact same calculated biomass as human beings when it comes to weight, meaning that there's exactly the same amount of weight for the bodies of ants on Earth as there are humans.
02:04:21.000It's weird that not only did nature somehow or another have a need for this, but it came about, it developed, and it's been the same way, that way, for who knows how many millions of years.
02:04:37.000What is the evolutionary purpose of that, though?
02:05:51.000Might not be leafcutters, but whatever it is, they chop the wings off of the male, chop his arms off and legs, and then carry him to the hive to breed.
02:07:00.000Because there were so many ants, and if the army ants found you, if they found you and one of them decided to bite you, just like they follow the scent, then millions and millions and millions and they would just eat you alive.
02:07:11.000And people would regularly get killed by ants there.
02:09:28.000It's another one of those Invisibilia.
02:09:31.000It's another kind of NPR offshoot, you know, like how sort of Ira Glass at This American Life, all these producers that have worked for him have now started all these other podcasts.
02:10:29.000Figure out where he was and what was in a room and what was going on by basically making these clicking noises and the sound waves bouncing off.
02:10:37.000And he developed this acuity to be able to discern from that the parameters of his environment to the extent that he goes running, he rides a bike.
02:10:58.000Is that he doesn't think that he's anything special.
02:11:01.000He thinks that all blind people could develop this skill, but that our education around blindness is sort of a vernacular of disability, right?
02:11:14.000Where we say, well, you're disabled, you can't do this, so we're going to put you into this system, and this is how we do it with blind people.
02:11:43.000So like the latent abilities that we all have, right?
02:11:47.000If we develop them, it's sort of like how the disability unlocks some other aspect of your brain that needs to develop in order to survive.
02:11:55.000One of the best pool players in the world is this young man named Shane Van Boning, and he's deaf.
02:13:57.000But Daniel will tell you he sees his environment as a series of images created in his mind based on what he hears using echolocation.
02:14:06.000So you're calling out into the environment.
02:14:08.000You're essentially asking the environment what are you and where are you and you're receiving those answers.
02:14:15.000So you're getting an image in your mind.
02:14:17.000Yes, I definitely get Three-dimensional images with depth and character and richness.
02:14:27.000And I can process those and I can interact with those.
02:14:32.000From his modest bungalow in Long Beach, Daniel runs a small non-profit called World Access for the Blind.
02:14:39.000Since being established in 2000, World Access has been the lone voice preaching echolocation.
02:14:46.000In fact, every major blind organization in America does not support Daniel's mission.
02:14:52.000So, Daniel, the National Federation of the Blind will say that echolocation is just too complicated for most blind people to grasp.
02:15:03.000It's not so much the Federation that's a concern.
02:15:07.000You have here a blindness profession, the blindness field, who by and large really kind of intractably remains We're committed, if you will, to a traditional approach which is about,
02:15:57.000You know, if we could figure that out, if there's a person like him that can figure out how to see things with his sound, making echolocations, what other possible senses could be developed to that extent,
02:16:17.000Well, in the animal kingdom, aren't they training these German shepherds that can smell cancer, like early onset of cancer?
02:16:25.000They're doing similar things with rats.
02:16:29.000I mean, obviously those animals have a more developed sense in that area, but to the extent that human beings have unlocked potential in areas that we haven't really looked at, I think it's pretty interesting.
02:16:42.000Well, people certainly have finely developed senses, like certain people that play instruments have finely developed senses of sound.
02:16:50.000Sommeliers have a finely developed sense of taste.
02:16:52.000Have you ever talked to someone who's like a real wine sommelier and they can drink a glass of wine, have a sip of it, and tell you what part of the world it came from?
02:17:34.000It also makes you really wonder if there are fields, like we were talking about how bees can tune into the sound that a cell phone makes and it fucks with them.
02:17:43.000I wonder if there's anything like that that's affecting us in some sort of a strange way that we're not aware of.
02:17:49.000Because one of the things that I'm always really aware of when I go If I go to the wilderness, if I go to a real wild place, is the sound of it is different than the sound of silence here.
02:18:03.000Like, if you're in a park here and it's beautiful and it's nature, it's nice, it's relaxing, but there's a certain tone to, like, Prince of Wales Island in Alaska is a perfect example.
02:18:13.000We were there and we were on the top of this mountain.
02:18:16.000We're sitting there and I was like, Do you hear that?
02:18:46.000You know, listen, everything is vibration and energy.
02:18:49.000And, you know, if you don't think that, you know, that isn't real, you know, go hang out with negative people for a week and see how you start behaving.
02:19:20.000And, you know, we're surrounded by all kinds of crazy, invisible energies and waves, from cell phone towers to Wi-Fi signals and all this kind of stuff.
02:19:30.000I mean, do we know how this is impacting us?
02:19:37.000To Wi-Fi and cell phones like they get headaches and all kinds of stuff.
02:19:43.000Student science experiment finds plants won't grow near Wi-Fi router?
02:19:47.000Some ninth graders in Denmark Did a test where they put, what they said was, or they tested, it's the same radiation a cell phone gives off, so they put some watercress, I think is what it's called, or gardencress, and six trays in one room, six trays in another, with two Wi-Fi routers,
02:20:03.000and essentially, as you can see in the picture, didn't grow.
02:20:07.000So the ones in the Wi-Fi routers is no different in the environment other than the fact that Wi-Fi routers were there?
02:20:48.000Yeah, people give off a certain signal, too.
02:20:51.000You know, people want to think that that's hippie and woo-woo, but man, when you're around really negative people, they're just, oh, I've got to get away from this person.
02:20:58.000And it's not just you've got to get away from them because they say certain things.
02:22:47.000People are worried about that cleanup because what they're worried about is that if they start digging and cleaning up, that the dust is going to get into the air and it's going to blow through the valley.
02:22:57.000And whatever trace elements of that rocket fuel.
02:23:00.000Apparently there was a lot of disasters up there.
02:23:02.000They did a lot of shit down there in the 50s and the 60s.
02:23:23.000I read a study on it, though, and one of the things that said the study, like, the half-life of the type of radiation that they had was very short-lived, so it's not something that, like, lingers in an area.
02:23:35.000The real concern that the, apparently...
02:23:38.000According to what I read, that the sober environmentalists are concerned with is the rocket fuel that's leaked into the ground and gotten into the well water in that area.
02:23:54.000I knew a dude who lived near a golf course and the pesticides from the golf course leaked into the well and he got cancer, his neighbor got cancer, kids in his neighbor, like all throughout their neighborhood people got cancer and they got cancer because of the pesticides.
02:24:12.000Like they all got a very specific type of bone cancer.
02:24:16.000Scary shit, like he doesn't have a femur.
02:24:18.000One of his femurs is like a metal rod that they replaced his femur with because he had cancer.
02:24:43.000I mean, you know, our world is getting more and more toxic, right?
02:24:46.000All these things we have to worry about and think about.
02:24:48.000Think about, you know, you just look on the back of, you know, the average packaged food that you pick up at the grocery store and all the ingredients in it.
02:24:55.000And like, you know, who knows what all that stuff is and whether it's safe.
02:25:05.000All the new medications are constantly coming out, side effects?
02:25:08.000Well, I mean, the commercials are just comedic, you know, like literally way more, you know, disclosures about side effects than actual product information.
02:25:18.000Yeah, we played one for acne medicine the other day that was hilarious.
02:26:20.000And again, what you were talking about earlier is you're using a medication to deal with an issue that if you take a holistic approach, what's causing you to have acne?
02:26:31.000What is causing your skin to break out in some sort of a horrible way that you need this fucking bloody diarrhea inducing medication to combat it?
02:26:40.000Yeah, I mean, at some point, you know, the side effects far outweigh, you know, the condition that you're trying to treat.
02:26:47.000I would say zits to bloody diarrhea that kills you.
02:26:50.000There isn't even a single thought put into the cause.
02:26:54.000Like, why don't we talk about what might be leading to this and maybe some choices that you could make that could alleviate or prevent this.
02:28:39.000Let's make sure we make a fuckload of money, the most money we could possibly make, because getting something passed by the FDA is a huge process.
02:28:46.000It costs millions and millions of dollars.
02:28:48.000So by the time you actually do get a product to market, you have to protect that product.
02:28:57.000The best thing to do is just be proactive enough about your health so that you can do whatever's under your control to prevent you from getting any kind of, you know, acute disease.
02:29:07.000Not to say that it doesn't happen, because of course it does.
02:29:09.000But, you know, I think there's lots of things that could be more deeply explored than, you know, our culture really is, you know, sort of permittable to in kind of our, you know, what we accept as mainstream or not.
02:29:25.000Like I started recently Going to acupuncture, which I'd never done before.
02:29:34.000I mean, you know, I'm a pretty rational guy, you know, so the idea of sticking, you know, sort of like the idea of meridians and sticking needles into my forehead and all, you know, I was like, I didn't really, you know, I wasn't an immediate, you know, somebody who's going to immediately jump on that bandwagon.
02:29:50.000But I know a lot of people who have benefited from it, and I was having some things that I wanted to address, like particularly sleep, like I've been challenged by sleep lately.
02:29:58.000And so I went to see my friend who's a Chinese medicine doctor, and he started doing it on me, and it was really helpful.
02:30:14.000And this, you know, my friend who's, he's studying Chinese medicine and he's still kind of in his residency, so he's working underneath like this Chinese dude who's been practicing this forever.
02:30:24.000And they come in and the guy, like literally this Chinese medicine doctor The only thing he wants to do is take my pulse on both wrists, and he takes it with his thumb in a couple different places.
02:30:38.000And apparently his touch is so finely attuned that he can tell all kinds of things about where you're at based upon the pressure of your pulse and the frequency and the tempo and all these sorts of things.
02:31:17.000Well, I mean, I think, yeah, but is that better than saying I'm not gonna explore that because I think it's BS without having any direct experience with it?
02:31:26.000No, but I mean, it's nice to have some sort of proof of something, some sort of information.
02:31:36.000Have the guy prove that he can actually do that?
02:31:38.000Well, I mean, all I can tell you is that I was having issues with sleep and relaxation, and this seemed to benefit and alleviate my problem to some extent.
02:31:52.000It certainly could be those things because you got to think about like sleep oftentimes is psychological Oftentimes sleep is a matter of your ability to relax and we've all been in that situation before where you know You have to be at work in five hours and if I go to sleep right now I can get four hours sleep And you look at that clock and for whatever reason you're stuck in that thing because you know that you have to go to sleep right this moment and the pressure of that keeps you awake even if you're tired.
02:32:18.000If you take action to try to alleviate that by acupuncture or whatever it is, just the mere act of taking action will shift your focus.
02:32:28.000Into a cure and you can oftentimes start thinking that whatever this placebo effect is, is real.
02:32:34.000I'm not doubting that this guy has a real, a possible gift or whatever it is, but wouldn't it be nice if we just can prove it?
02:32:44.000Wouldn't you want to just work with a bunch of people and find out, oh look, you know, he's right, this guy does have a gallbladder issue or he's right, this guy does.
02:34:09.000And he kind of admitted it wasn't true.
02:34:12.000He kind of admitted that ultimately what he's doing is, if you believe in what he's doing, it will fix what you have that's wrong with you.
02:34:21.000Because ultimately, there's another great Radiolab podcast on placebo effect.
02:34:28.000And there was one of them where they were talking about this guy They hypnotized this kid with this insane wart problem, skin warts.
02:34:37.000Have you ever seen people that have warts all over their skin?
02:34:39.000Where it becomes incurable by medication and they convinced this kid that they had hypnotized him and that it was going to go away and it went away on his arm.
02:34:49.000His arm was like completely free of warts, which just never happens when someone reaches such an acute level of infection like this kid had.
02:35:04.000As long as you're gullible, as long as you're willing to wholeheartedly jump in and believe it.
02:35:11.000And I think that might be what's going on with acupuncture.
02:35:14.000That might be what's going on with a lot of, you know, quote-unquote Chinese medicine or Eastern medicine.
02:35:20.000I think if you believe that they have found you a cure, your body starts producing whatever it actually needs to fix whatever ailment you have, and thus it becomes actually effective.
02:36:04.000There's no shortage of snake oil salesmen pitching all kinds of crazy healing techniques, you know, no doubt.
02:36:11.000But I think that in fairness, you know, acupuncture and traditions of Chinese medicine, these go back, you know, hundreds if not thousands of years.
02:36:47.000I mean, listen, you know, I just know from my friend who's been studying this, I mean, he's been in school, like, for crazy long periods of time.
02:38:11.000I mean, and also, like I said, like, the idea of any, you know, fill in the blank, whatever type of modality, any type of therapy that's actually effective, even though it doesn't have any real scientific basis to it, The effect is still real.
02:38:51.000I could tell you, well, I mean, listen, anybody who is a consistent, who has a consistent meditation practice will tell you that, you know, it improves their life.
02:39:33.000It's not saying that this frog potion that I give you is going to cure your cancer and then your body cures the cancer.
02:39:40.000There's a certain aspect of meditation that's undeniably beneficial.
02:39:44.000But that aspect of it has really been scientifically analyzed.
02:39:49.000They've done all these fMRI scans on people that are Buddhist monks that have spent years and years meditation.
02:39:55.000They've done scans on people that were in, you know, deep REM sleep and different stages of the mind.
02:40:02.000I mean, there's a lot of scientific work that's been done on, you know, what we call meditation, achieving certain brain waves, achieving certain states.
02:40:13.000And in a sense, placebo effect isn't fake either, right?
02:40:18.000Because every drug that exists, exists because there's a receptor for it in the human mind.
02:40:25.000The reason why those drugs are effective is because the mind knows how to actually produce that effect in some sort of limited quantity on its own.
02:40:33.000That's one of the reasons why placebo effects work.
02:40:36.000That's the reason why we have opiate receptors and cannabinoid receptors and all these different things and processes that the mind can engage in with or without medication.
02:40:47.000That's why those medications have an effect on the body.
02:40:50.000So in that sense, placebos If you believe in them, work.
02:41:07.000And that's, I think, what we're talking about, just doing something.
02:41:10.000The act of doing something to deal with it makes you focus on whatever that issue is.
02:41:16.000You know, I mean how many issues that people have health-wise are just due to a complete lack of awareness of their physical body?
02:41:24.000Just stumbling through life on this drunken momentum of coffee and donuts and stress and cigarettes and traffic and pollution and stress and cigarettes and coffee, and then just Just the mere act of taking the time to reassess what it means to be a person,
02:41:45.000to just stop and pause and give thought to your day-to-day existence, might be enough to reset a lot of the processes that are in place.
02:42:02.000Like, I would rather go out and do a four-hour run than sit down for 20 minutes in the morning before I leave the house and engage in that practice.
02:42:09.000And, you know, over the last six or eight months, I've really kind of dedicated myself to it, you know, by prioritizing it.
02:43:17.000Just something about the ease of that, I guess.
02:43:20.000I've been able to kind of just do it and create momentum around it.
02:43:24.000And like anything else, once you have momentum, and once you start to see the benefits of it, then you're more, you know, enthusiastic about pursuing it further.
02:44:33.000And then he, right before he, once he decided he wasn't going to be a monk anymore, and before he kind of returned west, he studied circus arts at the Moscow College of Circus.
02:45:14.000I'm able to kind of calmly take information out, engage it, and then respond more mindfully.
02:45:20.000And I'm able to, you know, I've got a lot of stuff going on right now.
02:45:24.000It's like, you know, it's just, and to be able to kind of not get anxious over that and just be able to say, okay, you know, focus on one thing at a time and not get worked up about the smaller stuff.
02:45:35.000And just ultimately, much more productive and constructive in my interactions with other people, focused when I'm working, present with my wife and my kids.
02:47:08.000You probably talked about this a ton on your show already, but if you could encapsulate the benefits of that.
02:47:16.000It removes the mind from the body, the influence of the body, and all the stimuli of the world evaporates.
02:47:28.000It's the mind untethered from the body in a very weird way.
02:47:32.000And the way I always describe it is if we were having this conversation, but right next to us there are people screaming at the top of their lungs, it would be very distracting.
02:47:39.000We would want to go, let's go talk over here.
02:47:41.000And that screaming is information, it's stimuli, it's stimulus.
02:47:47.000You're constantly getting it right now.
02:47:49.000Even though these are very comfortable ergonomic chairs from the Ergo Depot, Capisco chairs.
02:48:30.000I mean, you have a very limited amount of sensation of the fact that you're in water that will eventually go away if you stay still long enough.
02:48:37.000The water is the same temperature as your skin, so you will get to a point where you don't feel it.
02:48:42.000There's a thousand pounds of salt in that water, so you'll float effortlessly.
02:48:49.000And as long as there's no banging around the room, as long as you're in a good silent area, you will experience quiet in a way that you never get.
02:49:08.000It makes it so much easier for me to understand influences, objectives, all the things that I have been pushing to the back of my brain, avoiding, come to light instantaneously, highlighted.
02:49:23.000Any stumbling blocks, any things that you really need to address, all come to the forefront.
02:49:28.000And the way I describe it is the first 20 minutes or so seem like Like a seminar on my life.
02:49:37.000Like my life is being explained to me.
02:49:40.000If I went to a guru that could explain to me in no uncertain terms, like someone who really knows every aspect of my life, like if you could plug a USB drive into my head into some supercomputer that can fix things, they'd go, oh, well, look at all these issues you have.
02:49:55.000You have to get rid of this, clean out this clutter, stop doing that because you don't like it, don't do this, don't hang out with this person.
02:51:07.000But this idea that, you know, your thinking mind is distinct from your higher consciousness.
02:51:13.000And to the extent that you have control and you can harness your thinking mind for your benefit and you're able to, you know, silence the idle negative chatter.
02:51:22.000You know, most people, like you said, you know, it's coffee, you know, donuts, whatever.
02:51:27.000There's a looping, you know, and my mind loops as much as the next person.
02:51:31.000And generally, it's not very kind things that are looping.
02:51:44.000You know, like, whatever it is, you know what I mean?
02:51:46.000Like, it's And meditation allows you to understand that you don't have to engage in that and gives you a toolbox to say, let me tell a different story.
02:51:57.000I don't have to entertain that story, that story that I've been listening to my entire life that's led me down a certain path in my life and helped sort of forge a certain trajectory.
02:53:15.000Rich Roll, ladies and gentlemen, you can find him on Twitter, richroll.com, richroll.com, and check out his podcast, check out his book, The Plant Power Way, available right now, you fucks.