Strength Coach Mike Mahler Wants To Optimize Your Hormones

When we ponder health, we tend to think about things like diet and exercise. Overlooked in this conversation is the primacy of hormone regulation. Chemical messengers that control almost all biological functions — from hunger to mood and everything in between — hormones play a massive role in overall well-being. When properly balanced, we function at our best. But should they fall out of whack, we become susceptible to everything we endeavor to avoid: weight gain, depression, poor energy, impaired sleep and a litany of chronic lifestyle diseases to name just a few. So let's stop overlooking this critical aspect of wellness. Today's maestro for all things hormonal is Mike Mahler — a human specimen of strength and power whose personal expertise in hormone optimization was catalyzed by an acute health crisis he struggled mightily to solve. Perhaps best known as one of the leading experts on effective kettlebell training for size, strength, fat loss and conditioning, Mike is a renown strength coach with a specialization in hormone optimization via nutrition, training, supplements, and lifestyle. He is the author of a variety of best-selling kettlebell training e-books and DVDs. He teaches popular kettlebell workshops globally and is a regular contributor to publications like Muscle & Fitness, Men's Fitness, and Testosterone Magazine (yes, this is actually a thing). And he has been featured in Muscle & Fitness, Men's Fitness UK, and CBS News. In addition, Mike is the host of the Live Life Aggresively podcast and the author of Live Life Aggressively! What Self-Help Gurus Should Be Telling You*. Refreshing for his raw honesty and no B. S. style, Mike developed a deep interest in hormone health after a serious bout with pneumonia and chronic stress left his immune system debilitated. Solutions to his malady eluded him until he pulled focus on correcting his hormonal imbalances — a journey that provoked a passion for preaching the importance of understanding the crucial role our internal regulators play in order to live truly well and perform at our peak potential. This is conversation about that journey. We nerd out on the specifics, which hormones do what and why, and how regulatory imbalances can lead to everything from obesity to exhaustion. We talk intermittent fasting; effective training techniques; how to avoid over-training; and the importance of restoration, stress reduction and sleep. We cover this interest and role in the growing kettlebell revolution; the importance of functional strength and mobility; and his every-day rituals. We discuss Mike's interest in combating human trafficking and his support of Project Child Save, a non-profit devoted to locating and recovering children kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. And we explore his vegan journey, why he doesn't wear it on his sleeve, the importance of leading by example. But more than anything, this is a conversation about what it means to live live aggressively — and why compassion is the ultimate strength. Chocked full of great information, Mike was awesome. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange as much as I enjoyed having it. And make sure to break out that pen and paper — you're going to want to take notes. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  The mistake that a lot of men make in particular is that they overly fixate on what's my testosterone level. Yeah, testosterone's important, but so is DHEA, so is pregnenolone, the mother of all hormones. You know, so is leptin, so is insulin, there's so many other things. So you've got to look at hormones as an orchestra. When an orchestra works in unison, it's really special. So with the big picture with hormones, you have to look at what are the master control hormones? What are the hormones that have the most impact on everything else? Because testosterone, that's a downstream hormone, that's way down the line. It's not a master control hormone. So for both men and women, it's leptin, it's insulin, to some extent, growth hormone, to some extent, adrenaline, but definitely leptin and insulin being the most. And out of leptin and insulin, it's leptin.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  That's definitely the master control hormone.

• 1:52Rich Roll?

  That's Mike Mahler, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:08Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, how you guys doing? How is life going? How is the job? Are the kids good? Did you remember to call that guy back? Have you returned that email yet? Have you been meditating? Have you been doing that morning journaling? Getting the workouts in? Avoiding lousy foods? Is September greeting you with a smile? I hope so. I only wish well for all of you. My name is Rich Roll. This is my podcast. Welcome. Great to be with you here today. Thank you for your attention. Real quick, I wanted to say that I appreciate all the feedback I've received on DK's appearance in the intro to the Sanjay Raval episode.

• 2:52Rich Roll?

  Honestly, I think he was a little bit nervous, but I've known DK for a very long time. And this is a guy with a very dry and honest and sometimes self-deprecating sense of humor. He's got a great wit. And one of the reasons I wanted to share the mic with him is that although he's an amazing guy and an incredible friend, he's also in many ways the everyman. He's a very relatable person. And like so many of you out there, somebody who's come a long way in his health and wellness and fitness and diet and mindfulness journey, but still struggles with all of these things, which is very human. So I think it would be great for him, for the

• 3:36Rich Roll?

  show, for all of you, if I have him pop in from time to time to share a little bit about where he's at, with the idea being that perhaps all of us together can help him adopt a few new habits, maybe set a few new goals for him and hold him accountable. In other words, kind of like a fun project of sorts. So let me know what you guys think about all of that. In other news, I just got back from New York City. And as much as I absolutely love that city, I do love it, it's the best city in the world. There is nothing like returning home to my family, my home, my tent and my beloved trails. I'm feeling great, all is well in my world and even better today because I got the great Mike

• 4:20Rich Roll?

  Mahler on the show. Mike is a strength coach and kettlebell expert. He teaches workshops all over the world. With a focus on hormone optimization, hormone optimization via nutrition, via training, supplements, and lifestyle. He is a regular contributor to publications like Muscle and Fitness, Men's Fitness, Testosterone Magazine, which I have to admit, I was amazed to learn is actually a thing. Mike has also been featured in Muscle and Fitness, Men's Fitness UK, and CBS News. He's the host of the Live Life Aggressively podcast, and he's the author of Live Life Aggressively: What Self-Help Guru Should Be

• 5:02Rich Roll?

  Telling You. As always, there's a few more things I want to note before we immerse ourselves in Mike's world. But first.

• 5:18Rich Roll?

  Okay, Mike Mahler. So what I really like and appreciate about Mike is his honesty. He has a very refreshing, no BS, fluff-free style. He's also vegan, which is interesting, not only because of his stature as this respected coach to all kinds of athletes, but also because he's a guy who doesn't wear it on his sleeve. In fact, you have to kind of dig deep to even know this fact about him. In any event, this is a great episode that, as I mentioned moments ago, focuses on the importance of hormone health, hormone regulation, hormone optimization, which is something that often gets overlooked

• 6:00Rich Roll?

  in the broader conversation about health, about fitness, and athletic performance. We track his personal story, including the health crisis that precipitated his interest in hormonal health. We dig into the various hormones that regulate our systems and how hormonal imbalances can lead to everything from obesity to exhaustion. We talk fasting, effective training techniques, overtraining, the importance of relaxation, restoration, stress reduction, and sleep. We cover the kettlebell revolution, the importance of mobility, everyday rituals, his vegan journey, leading by example, and what it means to live life aggressively. So this is me and Mike Mahler.

• 6:48Rich Roll?

  All right, here we go. Mike Mahler, good to see you, man.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Thank you, a pleasure.

• 6:51Rich Roll?

  Long time, uh, long time coming. Delighted to meet you.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Likewise.

• 6:56Rich Roll?

  Can't wait to, uh, get into all of this stuff with you, man. You're, uh, you're a fascinating dude. There's so many, uh, areas that we could explore. Um, but I think the first thing I want to launch into, the thing that's kind of top of mind, um, for me personally, and I think probably with the audience.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:12Rich Roll?

  Is your, your, uh, interest and your, um, research and specificity in the area of hormone optimization.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Sure, I love to.

• 7:25Rich Roll?

  Which is really cool. So first of all, like, how did you get, as a strength coach, as a fitness person, personality instructor, whatever you want to call it.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:34Rich Roll?

  How did you decide to dive deep into this area? Because it's kind of a, it's the bastard stepchild of everything else, fitness, but of course, essential to optimal health and, and athletic performance.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's critical for athletic performance and just feeling good, even for people who don't work out. If they just want to feel good and vital. I got into it because I went through a serious health crisis. I was living in Los Angeles. I was around 29, so this is 2002. And I had a lot of stress going on at the time. I was in a really self-destructive marriage. My finances were really bad, just stress coming from all angles. So personal life stress, financial stress. I was just getting my business going. And this culminated in me getting a serious case of pneumonia.

• 8:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Where I nearly died from it. And being the smart guy I am, I decided to fly to Uganda to visit my parents while I was fighting this pneumonia. I didn't go to the doctor and get it diagnosed. So I, I went on about 20 hours of flying with maybe 10% of one lung functioning. So fortunately, I was healthy before.

• 8:34Rich Roll?

  Did you know that?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. Like I said, I was really stupid. Anytime you have a respiratory issue, you go to the doctor. You don't mess around with that because that can spiral. It started off as maybe bronchitis. I thought I would kick it, but it, it just kept lingering for a long time. But I just tried to fight through it. I was just being really dumb about the whole thing. And I was scheduled to visit my parents in Uganda. I didn't want to cancel out on the trip, so I went. But when I got out there, I just, I, you have to get me to an emergency room immediately. Because it's probably 110 degrees out and I'm cold.

• 9:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Just had that feeling like your life force is with withering away. So the doctor diagnosed me pretty fast with pneumonia, just looking at my symptoms. They did an X ray of my lungs. You couldn't even see my lungs. There was so much just bacterial fluid just covering up everything. So a long story short, he took a needle shoved it in my back, pulled 40 liters of what looked like murky green tea out of my back.

• 9:23Rich Roll?

  40 liters?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, 40 liters. Went back the next day, another 40 liters. But the first day when he pulled that out, it was such a relief. And I was in so much pain and discomfort. He goes, this is gonna hurt. I go, look, you could I don't care where you stick that needle, you know, at this point, anything's better than how I feel right now. And it was immediate relief. So where I'm going with this story is that when people say stress kills, they're not kidding. You know, this is the culmination of stress when it's not checked out. So it's if it wasn't for all those things that were going on, I wouldn't led to this point. And then if I at least had done a few early steps, go to the hospital, get checked out, it wouldn't have led to this point.

• 9:59Rich Roll?

  Right. So in other words, this understanding that it's not just, yes, you had a pneumonia, but what contributed to you incurring that?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:08Rich Roll?

  Obviously, like, you know, severely repressed immune system functionality.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 10:13Rich Roll?

  And then what led to that? Well, the anxiety and the stress and the impact

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:17Rich Roll?

  that that has on your, basically, your lymphatic and hormonal.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. 100%. So I mean, I lost 30 pounds of muscle during this whole phase. And this is when I was heavy into teaching kettlebell seminars. You know, so I want to look a certain way.

• 10:28Rich Roll?

  How long ago was this?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  I want to be strong and vital. This is 2002. This is a long time ago. So I gave myself, after the trip, I got back to America, I gave myself about three months to get my fitness back before I started teaching again. Started promoting courses, but I go, I need at least 12 weeks to get back into things. But I didn't want to just get back to where I was. I wanted to make myself much more resilient than I was before this. And that eventually led to hormones. Now, as a fitness person, you're always thinking about testosterone anyway. So to some extent, all of us are interested in hormone optimization, whether we realize it or not. But the mistake that a lot of men make in particular is that they overly fixate on what's my testosterone level. Yeah, testosterone is important, but so is DHEA, so is pregnenolone, the mother of all hormones.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  You know, so is leptin, so is insulin, there's so many other things. So you gotta look at hormones as an orchestra. When an orchestra works in unison, it's really special. Like I was watching Hans Zimmer on YouTube, right? Does all the background music for a lot of movies. And he, there's a footage of him doing the song at the very end of Inception. And when you watch the orchestra, it's a totally different experience than when you just hear the music in the movie. You don't realize how complex it is until you see it live, how many different performers there are, and how the timing is perfect. And if anyone is off, the whole thing is gonna be a disaster, so it's gonna be a bunch of noise.

• 11:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, this is true of everything. I mean, it's not just true of your hormonal health or music. It's true with every function and facet of what it means to be healthy. And as human beings, we always wanna narrow in on that one thing. Like whether it's protein, or testosterone, or even macronutrient. Like, oh, let's take all of this and boil it down to three things. We're always trying to reduce it down to one control group or one variable, when in, when in fact, it's this interplay of systems that's so complex. And the, you know, this drive to kind of reduce it down to one thing always leads us astray, and yet we continue to do it.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Oh, we always do. And Dr. Mark Gordon will say it's, I don't know if you, you know Dr. Mark Gordon?

• 12:37Rich Roll?

  I've heard of him.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  He's been on Joe Rogan's show many times. He's the foremost anti-aging expert. He does a lot of stuff with soldiers with PTSD. That's how he got into the whole thing. Because a lot of soldiers have PTSD, not because of what they have experienced overseas, but because they had some kind of head concussion. And when you have a head concussion, your testosterone growth hormone completely shuts down. You're not able to produce it naturally. So of course, you're immediately going to be depressed and they go to the doctor and they're just given antidepressants and so forth. No one looks at their lab work, but he does. And when he gets these people on testosterone replacements, or whatever the protocol is to get their hormones back into play, he has a supplement, he makes that increases growth hormone. But sometimes they need the real thing. It's just night and

• 13:18Speaker 01

  day. They go from being depressed, alcoholics, non-functional, to being vital, excited about life, and very functional. But he'll say that when you take, when you put someone on testosterone, let's say it's TRT, whether it's a shot, cream, pellet, whatever it is, you have to also replace the hormones that are the precursors because they get depleted. So if you just replace testosterone, but you don't replace DHEA and pregnenolone, it actually has a negative impact.

• 13:45Rich Roll?

  Why do they get depleted? Because the body goes, oh, we have enough testosterone, we don't need to create the precursors for it?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  That's probably part of it, because that, I mean, testosterone comes from the precursors. So that's definitely part of it. I think the body's always looking for some kind of balance as well. So when something goes really high, it just wreaks havoc. Because you have to remember, any kind of hormone replacement is not natural. You're taking an exogenous hormone and you're putting it into the body. So it's going to be complex, what the interplay is with anyone. The way you react will be different than the way I react in anyone else. You just don't know what the ramifications are going to be. So I'm not quite sure why there's an upstream depletion, but I think what you said is probably a good part of it.

• 14:25Rich Roll?

  Right. So, um, yeah. Oh, I'm low on testosterone, so I'll just get a shot, or I'll take it exogenously, or, you know, I'll take growth hormone, or whatever it is, and I've solved the problem.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  As Americans, we always want to improve numbers on a piece of paper, right? Whether it's our income, or whether it's how much we're lifting in the gym, or how many miles we've run. So hormones are no different. And guys get very competitive, too. It's like, sometimes they'll, they'll see their number, they're like, oh, man, my testosterone's 650, I feel great. And then they find out someone else has 800, they're like, well, wait a minute, how come, you know, how come that person has so much? I go, you just said you feel great. Who cares what the other number is?

• 15:01Rich Roll?

  This is what's wrong with mankind in general?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is the new, this is the new, like, pissing contest, or whatever you want to call it. You're happy to tell you to tell someone else this number, just like your income could be, it was like, oh, I make 300,000 a year. I feel great. And then you find out your neighbor makes 500,000. All of a sudden, 300 is not enough now.

• 15:19Rich Roll?

  And what does it matter if all of your other hormonal levels are thrown out of whack or, or, you know, that interplay isn't functioning properly. So you really have to look at it. And this is what you've done. And what I want to kind of learn more about is go to the, go to the source, go to the origin and kind of an Ayurvedic perspective of understanding that the body works as a system and interplay of all of these systems working together as a whole. And that when there's an imbalance, you can't just supplement to cure that imbalance, but you have to get at the root cause of what is contributing to that imbalance.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You want to address the big picture and then supplements come into play supplementally. So with the big picture with hormones, you have to look at what are the master control hormones? What are the hormones that have the most impact on everything else? Because testosterone, that's a downstream hormone. That's way down the line. It's not a master control hormone. So for both men and women, it's leptin, it's insulin, to some extent, growth hormone, to some extent adrenaline, but definitely leptin and insulin being the most. And out of leptin and insulin, it's leptin. That's definitely the master control hormone.

• 16:23Rich Roll?

  So we're all familiar with insulin and insulin resistance and the like, but, but let's talk about leptin. That's, that's sort of the bastard stepchild of the master hormones. What does leptin do? Why is it important?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Leptins are fuel gauge. It's just like with our car. We don't have to wonder when to fill up. We, we know when we're low and we know when we're filled up. So you don't go to the gas station and just put gas in and then wait for it to overflow and say, okay, I have enough now. And you don't wait until you're, you run out of gas on the side of the road to realize, okay, I should have filled up. So what leptin does is it's in fat cells and it communicates with the brain. It lets us know when to stop eating. So when you start eating a meal, leptin starts rising. And when leptin reaches a certain point, you get the shut off signal, meaning that you've derived enough nutrition from the food you're eating. Anything that you consume more is going to result in nutrient spillover. You go beyond this, it's just going to go into stored body fat. So shut off right now.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Now, people are hearing this going, man, that sounds like an incredible thing to have. I don't have it, but it sounds like a great thing.

• 17:22Rich Roll?

  If I got more leptin, then I wouldn't eat as much.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's what.

• 17:25Rich Roll?

  So I'll just supplement with leptin.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Well, that's what people start thinking. They go, they go, well, how do I? I go, the thing is, is that people that are overweight, they don't have a leptin deficiency. They have a humongous amount of leptin production. What they don't have is leptin sensitivity, just like insulin resistance. They have leptin resistance. So the leptin signal is not getting to the brain.

• 17:44Rich Roll?

  The receptors are dysfunctional.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that can be from stress. That can be from poor diet. You're eating so much garbage. So much of what we eat is not even real food. Our body doesn't even recognize it as food. So it just wears out leptin receptors. They just get tired and weaker and weaker and weaker to the point where they don't respond at all. And now you just have this feeling that your stomach's a bottomless pit. Doesn't matter how much I eat, I'm not content. I can just keep going.

• 18:09Rich Roll?

  Do you think that that's part and parcel of why, you know, people that have chronic obesity struggle so much with weight loss and keeping it off?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. And the other thing with leptin that's, that's really troublesome is that when you have leptin resistance, it lowers your metabolic rate. Because even though you're in this, this state of consuming excess calories to your brain, you're deficient. So it's like, well, look, we're not getting the nutrition we need. So let's just go ahead and slow down all metabolic functions. So any energy that was going to be allocated towards growth hormone production, testosterone, DHA is shut off because those are not survival hormones. Those are basically thriving hormones. When you feel great, you're in a position of luxury. It's like, yeah, let's get your sex drive up so you can go procreate. But they're not survival hormones.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  So now your body's going to conserve whatever energy it can just for everyday existence, just getting by.

• 19:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  So now you're hungry all the time and then you're tired all the time. And then on top of that.

• 19:11Rich Roll?

  Your metabolic rate is lower.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You would think that when you eat more, your metabolic rate goes up. But when you have leptin resistance, that's not the case. So you're consuming more than you've ever had and you're not burning any of it and it's not being allocated properly to useful functions.

• 19:25Rich Roll?

  And you're as hungry as ever.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:27Rich Roll?

  And your body is telling you, I'm undernourished.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:30Rich Roll?

  So.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Because your, your brain can't see you in the mirror, right? So if you're, you're overweight and you're in the mirror, you're looking at yourself going, okay, I have excess energy reserves everywhere. That's really what stored body fat is. It's just excess energy in case a famine comes, right? We're, we're in some ways, we're created to survive famine. So we, we store our energy easily as a result of that.

• 19:50Rich Roll?

  So I would imagine it's also not as simple as that. I mean, if you have a dysfunctional digestive system.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:59Rich Roll?

  If your, if your, um, if your gut, you know, if your microbiome is screwed up. Then you're not able to absorb the nutrients that you're getting, which might compound that problem as well.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Digestion's a huge problem. That's one of the ways to improve insulin sense or leptin sensitivity is, most of us eat too fast. And I'm definitely guilty of that myself. You're in a hurry. You just gobble down something. You're barely chewing it. You really want to chew 30 to 40 times with every bite. But if you do that, it's going to take a long time to eat, but that's not a bad thing. Because I, I, I tend to be a big dinner guy. That's my biggest meal.

• 20:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, me too.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  And I have this huge plate, right? And sometimes you just want to get through it quickly so you can get back to whatever you're doing. Sometimes you're just thinking about dessert you're going to have afterwards. You're going, let me get through this so I can get to that coconut ice cream in the fridge. So you tend to eat faster than you should. But if you slow it down and are more mindful, like Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, he has this whole philosophy of being extremely mindful when you eat. He goes, eating an orange can be a form of meditation.

• 20:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  You just peel it back and very, just take pleasure in what you're doing. And if you're with people, why not? Pause, have a good conversation, rather than everyone's eating and looking at their phone the whole time.

• 21:07Rich Roll?

  And what is that, that process of extending the digestion, you know, sort of time curve? What is the impact on that, on microbiome health?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Well, two things, two good things happen here, and I'll come right back to that. Two things happen. One, you're going to extract a lot more nutrition from the food you're eating. You need to have the saliva mix with the food, so you're going to get way more, you're going to be way more energized. Two, you're giving yourself time so that you're not going to get that bloated feeling, that just worn down sluggish feeling. Like, a lot of people have to take a nap right after they eat, because they're eating way too fast. You're not giving yourself enough time. Also, you're giving time for the leptin signal to get to your brain, because you're eating so fast, leptin's telling you to, you ate so much, so quickly, that by the time leptin told your brain to shut off, to stop eating, you've already gone way past the surplus point.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  While if you slow it down, you have time for that signal, the satiety signal, to get to your brain. So you're not going to overconsume either, is one of the other benefits.

• 22:09Rich Roll?

  Right. That's one argument that's used against drinking smoothies.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I've heard that recently.

• 22:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a, there's a certain faction within the, the medical community, the nutrition community, and even the vegan, plant-based community, that smoothies are no bueno, because you really need to take that time to digest the foods you're eating. But the counterpoint to that, for me, is that as an athlete, like, I'm not going to sit down in the morning and eat a massive salad. Like, I'm just, either I'm going to get the nutrients in a smoothie, or I'm going to just not do it.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:45Rich Roll?

  And it's a great way to get a ton of super-dense, high-nutrient, high, you know, phytochemical foods into your body in an expeditious way.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  I'm definitely pro-smoothie.

• 22:56Rich Roll?

  And the blending is sort of a digestive process.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. Actually, I think, I actually think all the negatives that are brought up are actually positives when it comes to smoothies. That goes predigested, okay, that's good. Especially for someone who already has digestive stress. Now it's less that your body has to work.

• 23:12Rich Roll?

  Unless weight loss is the problem. Priority, I suppose.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think someone brought that up. It might have been on Joe Rogan's show. I think Joey Diaz brought that up where he said that he stopped drinking smoothies because I think it was something about blending the fruits. Your body absorbs it differently than if you eat it whole.

• 23:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know about that, but I think there's a big difference between a smoothie that's packed with kale, spinach, beets, hemp seeds, flax seeds, blueberries versus the one that's, you know, all coconut milk and peanut butter and, you know, yeah, you're taking in 2,000 calories. Like, that's different.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 23:45Rich Roll?

  It's a different animal. So when somebody says a smoothie, that can mean anything.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I do what you said. I pack it with greens, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cacao powder, protein powder, flax seeds, hemp seeds. So for me, it's a very convenient way to get a ton of nutrition in early in the day because like you, I'm not a big appetite guy in the morning. I get up, I want to get my day going. And then I think also in terms of consuming it too fast, what I do is I dilute it a little bit more than most people do. So it's probably about 64 ounces and then I just drink one glass at a time.

• 24:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  I don't just down it all and then like, okay, time to get to work. So I think, I think you can just take the same strategy I just mentioned there. Just slow it down too. Just take one glass at a time. Dilute it a little bit more.

• 24:27Rich Roll?

  That's what I do. I'll do one glass and then I'll thermos the rest and I, and I just take it with me and I'll sip it throughout the morning and it just keeps my energy high and it keeps the appetite at bay and it makes me feel good.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Some workouts, I like being on an empty stomach, sprinting, for example. I do 10, 100 yard dashes a couple of times a week. And I've always found that, that I like doing on an empty stomach. But if I'm lifting heavy weights, intermittent fasting doesn't work on that day. I'm not going to go into the gym and try to deadlift 500 pounds for reps and haven't had a thing to eat that day. This has not happened.

• 24:58Rich Roll?

  All right. So back to leptin.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:59Rich Roll?

  So what are the things that, that, let's say you, you have leptin resistance or you struggle with your appetite, like you're hearing this and you're like, yeah, that's me.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:08Rich Roll?

  How do we right that ship and get that regulated properly?

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Okay. So we'll talk about the quality of food in a second, but just a meal frequency planning, taking longer stretches in between meals is going to help a lot of people. And it doesn't have to be extreme such as an intermittent. In it fasting where you sleep eight hours and then you don't eat for eight hours. So it's 16 hours without eating. Some people do great on that. They feel like a million bucks. Others, they're just, they're just, it's just not going to work for them. What you can do and what will work for everyone essentially is, let's say, three to four meals a day with at least four to six hours in between each meal. So let's say for the average person, three meals a day. I mean, that's what most of us are used to, breakfast, lunch, dinner. So six hours in between each meal. What that allows is these insulin receptors and leptin receptors to have a break. Because when you're eating constantly, they're constantly working as well.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  So you increase the sensitivity in between meals with longer stretches.

• 26:01Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. I mean, that cuts across the, the philosophy of just grazing throughout the day.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:07Rich Roll?

  As opposed to sitting down for.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Some people do well on that too, but those are generally people that don't have any kind of leptin resistance or anything like that. Those are athletes such as yourself, you know, people that are training really hard. It's a different story. So I think sometimes it's a mistake when people look at what athletes do. They're going, okay, so and so in the UFC eats five times a day. I'm going to start doing that too. You have to keep into account, take into account, they train three times a day and that's their whole lifestyle rolling around that. I mean, you can probably make the more frequent meal approach work, but for many people, what they're going to find is if you miss one of those meals, you get a blood sugar drop, you get really tired now. You know, you're basically making your body less, you're, you're making it more, you're, you're never going to store body fat or not going as much because you're always focused on the calories that are coming in.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  And if you don't get one of those hits, then you feel the negative consequences. That's what I always found with myself when I did really frequent eating.

• 26:58Rich Roll?

  Right. So, so in other words, it's, it's trying to create a little bit of metabolic resiliency by taking these breaks.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Right, right. Exactly. And then, you know, several hours, you basically go to stored body fat in between each meal as well, because those are pretty long stretches. So after a couple of hours, the hormones decline and you go, okay, we need to pull from stored body fat to keep our blood sugar level stable. So now that's when another hormone kicks in the gear, ghrelin, which is a powerful inducer of growth hormone as well. And that's a hunger hormone that lets you know, okay, it's time to start eating again. But it's also good to experience a little bit of hunger in between meals. I'm not talking about ravenous hunger where you're ready to pass out. But just a certain level of hunger is not a bad thing. That's the other thing that a lot of us get paranoid about, especially those of us that grew up when I did in eighties and nineties, where you would read the magazines saying, look, anytime you have hunger, you're cannibalizing muscles issue.

• 27:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Well, when I first started doing the Warrior Diet, are you familiar with that?

• 27:55Rich Roll?

  No.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Ori Hoff Meckler, he's the author of that. He basically made intermittent fasting fashionable before it became fashionable. So this is back in maybe 1998 or so. And he wrote about this going the entire day without eating or just having the light meals, very light meals, such as a salad or a few nuts, but essentially a water fest for the most part. And then over consuming in the evening. And this, this website, T Nation, put this article about. And at that time especially, this is when everyone is deep into five meals a day, seven meals a day, some even more than that, eight meals a day. Some would recommend waking up in the middle of the night and having a protein shake.

• 28:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  You know, so when you have, when you have to go to the bathroom, have a protein shake right there and down that, go back to sleep. Yeah, a lot of us did that because we're like, oh, cool. I'm going to get more muscle growth by taking that little protein shake hit, right? People really got crazy with it. But when you, uh, when it, when I started doing his strategy of essentially no eating during the day, I just, I just worked into that. It was amazing how much more energy you had initially, at least for me, because now you don't have to allocate any time towards eating. So you're just focused on other things. And I would find that I'm actually, I wasn't hungry. I would get hungry when actually, if I started snacking, then I would get hungry. So it was actually easier for me to go the whole day without eating than it would be if I actually started trying, if I had to have a few light meals, that would make me more hungry.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Now, I'm not saying this is the best way to go, but I bring this example up that you realize that your body is a lot more adaptable and resilient than we realize. You're not going to just cannibalize muscle tissue just because you went a couple hours without eating. Just like, just like the whole narrative of post-workout nutrition, right? Like, oh, if you don't get something in that window of opportunity, that 45 minutes, you know, that workout's a waste. And when there's, the only study on it shows that if you get a meal within four hours of the workout, you get full recovery. So even that is just clever marketing. And generally, it's usually coming from a supplement company.

• 29:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting how these ideas get planted into our heads and become canon

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:57Rich Roll?

  before we really fully understand what's going on and how they shift. Yeah, it was always, you know, within 30 minutes, that's what, that's your zone in which your body's most receptive to, you know, receive that kind of nutrition.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:08Rich Roll?

  And now we're, I think, at the very beginning stages of people starting to understand the benefits of fasting, intermittent fasting, water fasting, and you're seeing all these people online who are trying different modalities and variations of this and sharing their experience. And this is really a new media, alternative media, like YouTube sort of thing, right? Like, we're not hearing a lot about this

• 30:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 30:30Rich Roll?

  on the nightly news.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 30:33Rich Roll?

  But if you're online and you're paying attention to trends in health, this is forefront at the moment. I mean, I know Tim Sheaf, just, do you know Tim Sheaf?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  The name sounds familiar.

• 30:42Rich Roll?

  Ninja warrior guy.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, sure, sure.

• 30:44Rich Roll?

  He just did 35 days water fast or something like that.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:49Rich Roll?

  And he vlogged every single day of the experience. And I had Volter Mongo in here talking about the fasting mimicking diet.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:56Rich Roll?

  And there's Sachin Panda, who's a, you know, doctor down in San Diego, who's doing a lot of incredible work in this area. And people are getting hip to this, and it's cool to watch people experiment with it and share the results. And I think there's still a lot that we need to learn about it, but this idea that you can't go more than three or four hours without eating is insane, right?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  All of us used to have that.

• 31:17Rich Roll?

  We're over fueled and undernourished like never before.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:20Rich Roll?

  It's like, are we starving or are we obese? Well, we're both.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Most people, the last thing you have to worry about is starving. You have so much excess energy that you could live off of that for probably a month, right? A lot of people probably could do the, I'm not recommending someone listening, just go not eat for 40 days. You would definitely want to do that under some kind of supervision, if you do it at all. But the fact that you can do it and survive that, that'll tell you something about the way we look at food is a lot different than reality really is, is that

• 31:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  you miss a couple of meals, it's not the biggest deal in the world.

• 31:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I think we need to look at it from a broader context than just muscle mass loss or fat loss.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:59Rich Roll?

  Walter Longo was talking about how it stimulates tissue regeneration.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:05Rich Roll?

  Stem cell growth.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 32:07Rich Roll?

  It'll kill cancer cells.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:09Rich Roll?

  But, you know, but, but create, you know, brand new cells.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:12Rich Roll?

  Healthy cells. And I'm speaking out of school and I, you know, I'm an idiot. I don't know what I'm talking about. But there are very smart people that are looking at this.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  There's a lot of research in it.

• 32:20Rich Roll?

  And discovering that there are some pretty cool things that go on when we do this.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, growth hormone goes way up when you fast. Insulin sensitivity improves a great deal, too. There was a doctor on Carla North's show, Superhuman Radio, and he said just one 24-hour fast can reset your insulin sensitivity. So essentially, I don't know if this is just pervasive across the board or categorical across the board, but you can either get someone out of insulin resistance in a 24-hour fast or at least improve it dramatically. And that's just one 24-hour fast.

• 32:51Rich Roll?

  And that's huge, given that, you know, pretty soon 50% of America is going to be diabetic or prediabetic. And this is all about insulin resistance.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:59Rich Roll?

  This is something that they've been treating patients at True North for a long time. I mean, there are these clinics you can go to.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:05Rich Roll?

  You know, and they, they put you on these supervised fasts for people that are either chronically obese or have these chronic health conditions and they see some pretty amazing results.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:17Rich Roll?

  So, again, more to be learned about that. But, all right, so back to leptin. Is there, are there certain foods that we should be eating that can contribute to, you know, sort of making sure that our leptin receptors are functioning properly?

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think the more nutrition you eat, the less calories you actually have to consume. And the more nutrient-denser food, the less energy you have to waste trying to extract everything you need. So when you eat, we both do vegan diets, so if you focus on a whole food, plant-based diet, where you're eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds. These are all really healthy foods that are giving you a lot of nutrition without taking in an excessive amount of calories. So focusing on real food as much as possible. I always like having some kind of balance of macronutrients. I know some people say you don't need to waste any energy on that and I don't think you need to be overly pedantic about it, but I think it's a good idea to have protein source, a good low glycemic

• 34:13Speaker 01

  carbohydrates source and some healthy fats at every meal. And that could be as simple as one of my evening stir fries. It could be garbanzo beans with an avocado added in or hemp seeds or pistachios. After I do the stir fry, mushrooms, tomatoes, a variety of vegetables, put some spices on there. And now you're getting a balance. You're getting everything.

• 34:33Rich Roll?

  Right. And so when the leptin is functioning properly, the levels are appropriate and the receptivity is there, what happens downstream?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Well, now you have energy. Now that leptin is thriving, you have all this excess energy. Your metabolic rate is doing really well and you have energy that can be allocated towards other things such as improving testosterone, improving DHEA, improving downstream hormones. Because now you're more in a thriving state and those are thriving hormones, in particular DHEA, which is the ultimate stress management hormone. And without optimal DHEA, you're not going to have optimal testosterone. Even if your testosterone levels look pretty good compared on the range that people look at, it could still be improved dramatically with DHEA because DHEA protects testosterone from cortisol. Cortisol is actually an anti-inflammatory hormone. We always hear about cortisol as a stress hormone and yeah, that's what it

• 35:26Speaker 01

  does. But when you have inflammation damage, either from maybe poor food choices or you worked out hard, cortisol comes in as an anti-inflammatory hormone to address that inflammation. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but the problem is, is that when you're always in this inflammatory state, you're always increasing cortisol. And if you're always increasing cortisol, you're not in an anabolic state anymore. DHEA is depleted and without DHEA to protect testosterone.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Cortisol is just going to nullify your testosterone. And that's when you get into this depleted state of your sex drive is poor, your mood is poor, you feel like your body's falling apart, you're weaker. Instead of getting stronger, you just work out, you're getting weaker.

• 36:03Rich Roll?

  That's the hole that I could fall in from time to time with the kind of training that I do and the workload that I shoulder and you know, just family life and everything. Like I just, I just fire on all cylinders and I'm just like, I can get, I'll get it done. You know, I'll get out, I'll just, I'll crush this huge workout and I'll go right into the workday and family and all of that. And on some level, I think it, this is totally anecdotal, but it almost, I feel like it almost feeds my adrenaline.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:33Rich Roll?

  There's like, oh, I can do it. Yeah, you become addicted to it, but then I get into this chronically depleted state.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:39Rich Roll?

  And I don't know if that qualifies as adrenal fatigue, how you would define that. But I know that my hormonal balance gets out of whack because I tried to, I pushed myself too hard, I tried to do too much. And eating a clean, plant-based, whole food diet is great, but that's not the whole.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, it's not the whole thing. And the thing also is, there's nothing wrong with what you're doing. You're a successful, just sex-driven person, and I am as well. So there's nothing wrong with pushing yourself hard and wanting to achieve impressive feats. The thing is that you have to balance the equation. So if I work out hard four times a week, I need to do some restoration activities too. I get a massage once a week. I started doing that maybe a couple of years ago. And once I, once I realized the benefits of that, it really, I'm not talking about just a little fluff down, she gets in there and works out problems.

• 37:28Rich Roll?

  Like active release.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So any, any problem you created that week from your workouts is getting addressed. It doesn't just build up, it doesn't multiply with successive workouts. I'll, I'll have days where I just go to a spa and sit in the hot tub, steam room, you know, just relaxation strategies, two joint mobility, Qi Gong type stuff every day, go take long walks with my dogs, clear my head. You know, you gotta do restoration activities as well. So you can push yourself as hard as you want and you'll be fine. You just have to balance the equation with other things.

• 37:55Rich Roll?

  I'm not so good at that part.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not the best either, especially that pneumonia story, I'll tell you that. But I, but because I had such a negative experience with that pneumonia, now it makes me, I realize the consequences of not balancing this equation. And also, as you get older, I'm 44 now, and I still like to lift heavy weights and I still have goals I'm pursuing. So I can, I can do those. I make sure that my hormones are optimal or they're doing well. And then I make sure that the restoration is there. So I get the optimal recovery.

• 38:24Rich Roll?

  And how do you gauge that? Through blood work?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  For hormones, there's, there's two different things you can do. You can do saliva work and you can do blood work. Now, you'll hear pros and cons from different experts. Some will say they prefer saliva because it tells you what's going on on the tissue level. Others will say they prefer blood because it's more accurate. They say, oh, saliva is not accurate because we concentrate a lot of hormones in our saliva as it is. So you're going to get two schools of thought there. The blood work,

• 38:53Speaker 01

  everyone is used to doing that, that's standardized. The problem is, is that if you get your testosterone measured via blood, for example, it tells you what's floating around the bloodstream. Doesn't necessarily mean anything useful is happening, though. Is it getting picked up by androgen receptors? And you may have a lot of testosterone floating around the bloodstream, that, that actually may be a negative thing. It may be so much floating around the bloodstream because it's not getting utilized at all. Because those of us who work out hard, we often have low levels of free testosterone.

• 39:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so explain the difference between total testosterone and free testosterone.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Okay, total is basically your life savings. This is exact, this is the total amount of testosterone you're producing. Free is what you actually have access to. So you can imagine, let's say you have a million dollars in the bank, but you can only pull out 100,000. So you have access to 10% of the million dollars. Free testosterone tends to be low with people that work out hard and in particular, professional athletes. Now, there's a couple of reasons why. One, people will say, well, they're under a lot of stress and so forth. Okay, that's part of the reason. The other reason is that androgen receptors are pulling it out of your bloodstream to be utilized by the muscles, liver, cells, etc., brain. So that the free level may be low because you're actually utilizing it. So it's not just floating around the bloodstream.

• 40:10Rich Roll?

  Right. So, so an indication that you have low free testosterone isn't necessarily determinative of anything.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you don't want it to be at the very bottom of the scale. Let's say the scale is eight to 25. You want to be around 12, 13. Now, if you're lower than that, it may be because you had a hard workout the day before. Maybe you didn't sleep well the night before. There could be a lot of factors. So if you want to get a more accurate number, you could just take a week off from training, rest up a little bit, and then see what if your free level is low under that circumstance, then you have some problems. You want to make sure that you put some things in the play to increase it. But if it's at a good range at that point, and then let's say it's lower during a week when you're working out really hard, then it basically just supports what I just said. It's lower because it's being picked up, it's being utilized. And then the other enemy people often bring up is sex hormone binding globulin. They say, oh, your free testosterone is low because sex hormone binding globulin is attaching

• 41:01Speaker 01

  to it and making it inactive. And that's completely incorrect, too. I mean, sex hormone binding globulin is a transporter hormone. So it's what takes testosterone to places where it can be utilized. So having good levels of that is not necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, it's a sign of a good thing. And then you have to ask yourself, why would we have a hormone whose sole purpose is to make another hormone inactive? You know, we just produced sex hormone binding globulin. For what purpose? Oh, so we can't use testosterone? Well, that doesn't really make sense. But now people understand it more as a transporter hormone, where it's actually attaching to testosterone and taking it places, not making it inactive.

• 41:40Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. And so when you get blood work done, does it tell you like this is your free testosterone marker?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does.

• 41:46Rich Roll?

  And this is your total testosterone?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:48Rich Roll?

  And so if what so so what does it mean if your your total testosterone is low or high?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Okay, if your total testosterone is low, that means you're not producing as much as you should be producing. Now, some will say the total doesn't matter, it's the free that matters. And that's not true either, because the more total you're making, the more free you'll be able to actualize. You know, if my total is only 200, how much of that am I going to be able to free up to even utilize? You're only going to be able to free up a small percentage. So the higher your total, the more opportunity you have to benefit from utilizing more of the free testosterone.

• 42:22Rich Roll?

  I see. And so what contributes to low testosterone?

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Stress is number one. Hundred percent is stress. And most guys. Are pushing themselves so hard that you're in this stressed state all the time. And every time cortisol is going up, your testosterone is going down. That's just the way it goes. So stress is the number one thing. And like I said, it's not even so, I should, I should say, it's not even so much stress. It's just not balancing that equation. You can push yourself hard. There's no reason not to. So a lot of times when people hear me talking about this kind of stuff, they're saying, what do you recommend? That I just sit around and do nothing? I go, no, of course not. I work out hard. I push my business hard. I have goals. I have a lot of different nonprofits I like to support. And I want to put myself out there and make things happen. I'm just going to give myself the tools. I'm going to take supplements like I've designed.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  I have a natural testosterone booster, which is amazing for athletes because anytime you're working out hard, your testosterone is going down. It's not going up from your workouts. So if it worst case scenario, it's going to keep my testosterone from going down. And best case scenario, it's actually going to go up while I'm in this adrenaline state, while I'm working out hard, while I'm pushing myself.

• 43:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  So that's where supplements come into play. Sleep is number one. If you want to improve your testosterone and growth hormone, you got to get sleep in. And I like to get at least eight hours of deep sleep a night. And my lifestyle is organized in a way where I can do that. You know, I work at home. I don't travel much anymore. So even if I stay up late doing whatever I'm doing, whether it's playing cards on the strip or just working on my business at home, I can get eight hours in, no problem.

• 43:56Rich Roll?

  You can sleep in?

• 43:56Speaker 01

  That's the most important thing. Yeah.

• 43:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  No kids or anything like that at home.

• 43:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah. That's one of the things that, that becomes an increasing struggle for me. And I don't know whether it's just age or whether it's something that I'm not doing properly.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:11Rich Roll?

  But no matter what time I go to sleep at night, I'm pretty much going to wake up at the same time in the morning.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of people are like that.

• 44:17Rich Roll?

  And that gets earlier and earlier as I get older. And so it becomes incumbent upon me to be more and more diligent about making sure that I go to bed early. Cause if I go to bed early, then I, that's the best chance I have for getting eight hours.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:30Rich Roll?

  And also having, you know, a diligent.

• 44:34Rich Roll?

  Pre-sleep routine.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yes, that's very important.

• 44:36Rich Roll?

  Which I give myself like a C. You know, I'm pretty good sometimes and then, you know, it's like I'm out late, I just get home and I go right to bed.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  I go through phases. There's a, there's a really good program. It's a meditation program I like. It's called Hallisink. I don't know if you've ever used that. And you can download these programs into your phone and then you can play it while you're sleeping. They have one that's, that you listen to before you go to sleep, right? It gets you relaxed and then you put one on while you're sleeping. So it just stays on the whole time while you're sleeping.

• 45:02Rich Roll?

  I've done certain things like that. Are there certain tones that are, that are supposed to trigger brainwaves in a certain way?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I forget what it's called. Binaural or something like that. I forget exactly the terminology, but that's what it's supposed to do. And you, you definitely feel like something's happening. It could be totally psychological. It could be just be a total placebo effect, but you feel like something's happening in a positive way. You just get more relaxed. Maybe it's just the fact of, of focusing on just that. You put these, this meditation in some headphones and you just sit there and listen to it. Maybe just that act alone is relaxing because you're not looking at your computer. You're not talking to anyone. You're just focused on the moment right there.

• 45:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  But that kind of stuff makes a difference because I'm not a good sleeper either. I'm not someone who can just watch four hours of TV and then just go right to bed and just shut it off. Or it can be really active and then shut it off. I have to go through down phases where I get into a relaxed state. And then the challenge for me is falling asleep and then staying asleep because I wake up really easily. Any little thing.

• 45:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I do too.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  You know, wakes me up. And then I take a long time to fall back asleep. So I'm getting better. I'm getting better at this. Taking magnesium before bedtime. I gave, no, I don't, I don't, I don't want to plug every single one of my products while we're talking here.

• 46:11Rich Roll?

  You have like a magnesium oil, right?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. I have a transdermal magnesium and zinc and MSM. And the MSM acts as a permeability agent to help get the magnesium and zinc more into the skin. But magnesium through the skin absorbs better than taking it orally. And especially on the cellular level and people will find that if they put on maybe an hour before they go to bed, you just start getting, it's a muscle relaxant too, magnesium and a lot of people who work out hard are magnesium deficient and magnesium, magnesium is crucial for testosterone, free testosterone, growth hormone and insulin sensitivity and we get a lot of it through our food, cacao and hemp seeds. I'm a big hemp seeds guy. You get a ton of magnesium in there, but some supplemental on top of that, some supplements, I think, just to give yourself some insurance, whether it's

• 46:54Speaker 01

  mine or another option, some zinc, magnesium, B vitamins, certain things I think are used, used worth adding on top of the equation just to make sure.

• 47:02Rich Roll?

  No, I've, I do like magnesium powder in warm water or a tea.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Oh, the absinthe. Oh, yeah.

• 47:08Rich Roll?

  Like the col, it's called col.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's magnesium, magnesium citrate. That's great.

• 47:13Rich Roll?

  Is it? And so is there a, is there an added benefit by doing it transdermally?

• 47:18Speaker 01

  I think you get a better absorption rate. So it's going to be more impactful, but ZMA is a supplement that many people use and it works well. If you're taking an oral magnesium supplement and you find that it's helping you relax and it's working well for you, then keep doing it.

• 47:31Rich Roll?

  Does it have something to do with melatonin regulation as well? Melatonin being one of the other master hormones, right?

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it definitely helps with melatonin production. Magnesium is important for that as well. Something about putting magnesium through the skin also improves DHEA more than taking it orally. There's some kind of enzyme in the skin that's activated. So that's one of the other benefits that's interesting. Yeah. It's not quite clear, it's not quite understood a hundred percent, but there's definitely a difference with the DHEA production via transdermal magnesium versus oral magnesium.

• 48:03Rich Roll?

  On the subject of DHEA, I mean, that's a big one that people point to if you're vegans. Well, you know, if you're vegan, like good luck, you're going to be screwed with DHA.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  With DHEA? Okay. I've never heard of that.

• 48:15Rich Roll?

  You haven't heard that before?

• 48:16Speaker 01

  On a vegan diet? I've never heard. I've heard people say, oh, you're not going to get testosterone.

• 48:20Rich Roll?

  Whether they know what they're talking about or not, I don't know, but they're like.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  That's never their first thing. That's like, oh, you're a vegan? What about your DHA levels? What are you going to do?

• 48:26Rich Roll?

  It comes up. Well, once you've knocked off the other, you know, ideas like that, it's down in the pecking order, but I've heard it come up before.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Well, I like, like Joe Rogan made a point when he interviewed Louis Simmons and I love Louis Simmons. I think he's the best strength coach out there, powerlifting, uh, powerlifting genius. But he was talking to him and I don't know why it even came into the conversation because Louis is not a vegan or anything. But Joe said, oh, a lot of these vegan bodybuilders take testosterone, you know, because they're not, they're not gonna, they don't have enough saturated fat in their diet to get the testosterone production through food. And that, that's incorrect, it's incorrect literally, but it's also incorrect for other reasons. One, there are sources of saturated fat if we feel we need it. Coconut oil, cacao, so forth, right? But you don't need saturated fat to fuel this hormone chain. You know, any healthy fat will do it, whether it's olive oil. If you don't want to take oils, just get whole food fat sources as well. So whether it's hemp seeds, it's sashes.

• 49:17Rich Roll?

  Every food has some fat in it.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And even if we do need saturated fat, it has some of that as well. And I don't think you need saturated fat to fuel this hormone chain. I just think you need good fats in general, whether it's flaxseeds, hemp seeds, cashews, it doesn't matter.

• 49:30Rich Roll?

  So you don't think being on a plant-based diet has any deleterious impact on your body's ability to produce, regulate, whatever the proper terminology is, DHEA, and then there's DHA also?

• 49:45Speaker 01

  DHA is a, that's an essential fatty acid metabolite. And that's, that's an interesting discussion too, because a lot of, right now, fish oil is all the rage, right?

• 49:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  And I'm not a big fan of fish oil at all. I think fish oil is, at the, at best, it's not causing any problems. At worst, it's causing problems, and I'll get into that. Fish oil is full of EPA or DHA and EPA, right? So these are downstream essential fatty acids. That's all fine and good. But if you take too much of these, it does lower inflammation, but it does so by suppressing the immune system. So unless you have an autoimmune disorder, that's not something you want to do. You don't want to suppress your immune system. Rather than suppress the immune system to lower inflammation, let's lower for, let's lower the reason for inflammation to be high in the first place. Let's avoid inflammatory

• 50:39Speaker 01

  foods, let's avoid inflammatory habits, et cetera. And then if you want to lower the need for inflammation, you take systemic enzymes. That lowers inflammation, C-reactive protein in particular, which is a blood marker of inflammation, way more effectively, in my opinion, than fish oil does without the negatives. So suppressing the immune system is not good, and then thinning the blood too much is not a good thing either. So I think high dose fish oil is problematic. You have to remember, fish oil used to be something people threw away. It was a garbage byproduct of that industry. And then all of a sudden, it's like, hey, we can make money off this thing.

• 51:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's been hyped as this panacea. It's interesting. That's a similar story to how whey protein came about also.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:18Rich Roll?

  How they're discarded.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 51:20Rich Roll?

  The product that they turned into this mega-billion-dollar industry.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. There's a guy named Brian Peskin, he'd be great on your show, I'd love to get him on my show, too. He has researched this topic of essential fatty acids exhaustively, and he doesn't have a vegan bias. And I'm bringing that up because he is very anti-fish oil, and he's very pro-plant essential fatty acid sources, such as flaxseeds, hemp seeds, etc. Because he goes, you have alpha-linolenic acid, and what that is, is a parent's essential fatty acid, meaning that it can convert into DHA and EPA, but not the other way around. And you will convert ALA into the downstream metabolites as needed. So it's basically regulated well, where as you needed that conversion, it'll happen.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Women actually convert a lot more, especially if they're pregnant, because the baby needs. EPA and DHA are important. I don't want to diminish their importance, but you don't necessarily need to supplement with them to improve those levels. If you get parent essential oils, you're going to get the benefits of ALA plus the downstream conversion into EPA, DHA, as needed.

• 52:28Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. If memory serves me, I think it was Chris Cresser on Joe Rogan where they were talking about this. I don't know if you saw that episode.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  I don't think I saw that. I know who he is, of course.

• 52:38Rich Roll?

  I think Chris was saying something about, and I'm sure I'm butchering this and getting it wrong, and I like Chris.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's a good guy.

• 52:44Rich Roll?

  And he really knows a lot about a lot of stuff.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:47Rich Roll?

  And I like him personally. But if I recall correctly, it had something to do with the inability of somebody on a vegan diet to properly or efficiently

• 53:00Rich Roll?

  Do this conversion process that created problems.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I mean, even if that's the case, there's still options, marine algae, there still are options that are vegan, that are sources of DHA.

• 53:10Rich Roll?

  Right. Michael Greger did a video on fish oil and started debunking some of the, you know, panacea hyperbole around it. And he was saying that even like they tested a whole variety of like the cleanest, the supposedly cleanest versions, and they still found some pretty high levels of mercury toxicity in them. So even ones that were saying like we're mercury free, still tested.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:34Rich Roll?

  So it's always advisable to use an algae based.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so too. Exactly. So if you're gonna go that route, I personally, I don't even think that's necessary unless you're for some reason, you've done testing and you find that you're really deficient in DHA EPA. And I believe there are, I believe there are tests for that. There are essential fatty acid tests. But.

• 53:51Rich Roll?

  But you don't think that's really where we should be focusing.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I'm always, I'm always focused on what the big picture is, right? When it comes to weightlifting, I focus on compound exercises. When it comes to hormone optimization, I focus on what are the master control hormones that have the most impact? The downstream is important as well, and we should address that. But let's focus on the big picture. And then anything we need to do supplemental, we can get into.

• 54:21Rich Roll?

  I want to go back to the big picture, master hormones, but, but we touched on testosterone, and I wanted to just kind of see that through.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 54:28Rich Roll?

  So, a lot of guys, you know, I'm 51 now, I'm going to be 52 soon. A lot of guys in my age bracket are like, well, my, my testosterone is low. And that's just because that's what happens when you get older.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:41Rich Roll?

  Or, you know, I'm genetically predisposed to low testosterone. And, you know, this is just is what it is. And my doctor's recommending hormone replacement therapy. I know a lot of guys that are doing this right now. So, again, this is something that's specifically focused on just this one downstream hormone. But what do you say to the person who says, look, I got low T, there's nothing I can do about it. It just is what it is.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Well, one, if you're gonna go that route, that's fine. That's your choice. But just make sure you're working with someone like Dr. Dr. Maury Gordon, someone very knowledgeable, or Dr. Nick Delgado, people that know what they're doing, so that they can make sure that you're getting the full benefits of hormone optimization, not just replacing testosterone. Make sure everything else is working in that orchestra. You're probably gonna have to replace a few other hormones, too. Pregnant alone, DHEA in particular.

• 55:28Rich Roll?

  But if you focus on regulating the master hormones, the downstream effects should take care of itself.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  I think so. I mean, certain people, though, there's a couple of things. One, you know, at a certain age.

• 55:39Rich Roll?

  I mean, T is gonna go low when you get older, right?

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, at a certain age, there's gonna be an inevitable decline. So then you have to ask yourself, okay, I'm 60 now. Like, you know, a lot of people come to me, they're going, look, I'm 70, I've been diagnosed with low testosterone, but I don't wanna shut down my own production. I go, well, look, you're 70. Your own production is...

• 55:57Rich Roll?

  Production's shut down already.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  The store's been closed for a while. Your production is very poor, let's be really honest there. And how much time do you wanna waste trying to figure out how to get it back naturally, even if that's even possible? And I've had older people use my natural testosterone booster with great results, but a lot of people that are at a certain age, it's just not gonna come back to a range, to a level that's good for you. Because here's what I mean by that also is, you may be 70 and your total testosterone is 500, and that's considered a pretty good number, but for you to feel your best, this person in particular, they need to be, they may need to be at 800 or 900 to feel perfect, where their sex drive is good, their mood is good, and they just feel like taking charge of the day. Now, can that person get back there naturally?

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Let's take a look at what's going on in their lifestyle before we answer that. Is that, are they sleeping properly? If the answer is no, then, okay, let's improve your sleep. Is their diet poor? All right, let's improve that. How much stress is going on in their life? Let's improve that. You can try to improve all those other things and then see what happens. Or you can have the attitude of, look, I don't wanna change anything else, you know, just give me the testosterone.

• 57:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's most people. They don't want to be told that they have to modify their lifestyle habits.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  I had a friend who had high cholesterol and the doctor's like, "Look, we can either change your diet or we can get you on Lipitor." It's like, "Okay, I'll just take the Lipitor."

• 57:15Rich Roll?

  Of course. Yeah, there's a reason why that that drug is so successful.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  But I mean, at some point, though, you're gonna you're gonna be doing everything right and it's still not gonna be working any avail. And that doesn't necessarily mean you need testosterone replacement. You may need to try something like Clomid, which is a fertility drug that Dr. Mark Gordon's been using with a lot of his patients. And he has them do 50 milligrams every third day. And this is basically a it's an anti-estrogen, but a very interesting anti-estrogen. It lowers estrogen in the brain, which signals your brain to produce more luteinizing hormone and FSH. So for for some reason, the low levels of estrogen in the brain signals the testes to produce more testosterone. Now, they don't quite understand why this is the case. I have a theory. My theory is that for men, a lot of our estrogen comes from testosterone conversion in estrogen, right?

• 58:02Speaker 01

  From the aromatase enzymes. So it's possible that low levels of estrogen detected in the brain, you may be trying to produce more testosterone so that you convert some of it back to estrogen. But that's just my theory. That's a separate point. But with Clomid, he'll he'll have, before even going the TRT route, they'll try this. Because this drives up your own production of testosterone.

• 58:25Rich Roll?

  Which is what you want to do, right?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  And also, it fuels the entire because I asked him, I go, "Well, what about DHA and pregnenolone? Does it improve those as well?" And he goes, "Yeah, that's what we've seen." So it's not just improving testosterone, it's improving the entire chain. So that's a more comprehensive solution. Now, there's some that say there's some side effects. Some say that there's ocular potential eye damage that can occur, which he says is not the case, Dr. Gordon. That's only if you go way too high. So again, these are these are drugs. These are medicines. This is not something where you want to say, "Wow, that Clomid sounds interesting. Let me go buy some from offshore, start playing around with it."

• 58:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, listen, let's be very clear. Like, I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. I'm not a physician. It's like, I'm not recommending anything here. I think anybody who's listening to this needs to seek out the best professional advice they can get.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm more of a researcher and enthusiast. I'm just hoping to get people to start the conversation. With themselves. So when they hear this, they go, you know what? That's not something I've ever looked into. I need to look into that and I need to find someone that can guide me on that process. And I know plenty of people.

• 59:24Rich Roll?

  They're focused on, you know, building their strength or losing weight.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:28Rich Roll?

  That's kind of where it ends. And, you know, like we said at the outset, like this is a complicated array of many systems that work together.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:37Rich Roll?

  This system of hormone regulation doesn't get enough bandwidth, which is why I wanted to talk to you today.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  We were talking with your crew. I go, you know, hormones have way more effect on how you think and feel than the other way around. So if you're depressed and you're thinking, okay, let me just think a certain way and I'll feel better. Or you can improve your hormonal profile and you'll automatically feel better. So that to me is just more efficient.

• 59:59Rich Roll?

  On the subject of testosterone, is there a biological rationale or imperative as to why it would reduce as you get older? And what is the, if any, the long-term, is there a long-term negative implication to taking it exogenously?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Rich Roll?

  Therapeutically?

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are good questions. I mean, number one.

• 1:00:21Rich Roll?

  People have said like, you should do it. And it's like, well, you know, you're messing with this system.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you are.

• 1:00:26Rich Roll?

  What do you actually, you're going to repress your body's own ability to produce it.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:31Rich Roll?

  Endogenously.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:00:33Rich Roll?

  But what else is it doing?

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:35Rich Roll?

  If you're suddenly boosting your system with this incredibly powerful hormone.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Well, apparently it has a lot of health benefits. It improves heart health and many other things. It improves brain health. Now there are more and more research is coming out about the importance of testosterone with pushing off dementia with any kind of decline in cognitive health. So I think, I don't think there's any negatives if you're doing it properly. So in other words, under doctor supervision. So if it's going too high and you're, you're having these chemical reactions that your individual endocrinology is having, is having a negative impact, you want to catch those things early. And that's what a good doctor will do. They'll go, okay, your liver enzymes are too high. So we need to reduce this. Or you're converting way too much to estrogen. That happens a lot. People take testosterone, their levels go way up, and now their estrogen goes way up too. So now they got to get you on something else to block that conversion.

• 1:01:22Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  It gets complex, right? It's kind of like you go to the doctor and you go, uh. My cholesterol is too high, then you get Lipitor. And then you go, you know, and then one of the negatives of Lipitor is you start losing memories and you start having a decline in sex drive or total shutdown of sex function. So now you gotta go back and go, okay, my sex drive is not working. Okay, well, here's some Viagra. Now you're on two medications. Then you gotta take something else for the negatives of that. So it could become, I'm not saying that TRT should be the first line of defense. I don't think it should be. You know, I don't use testosterone replacement therapy and I'm 44 and my testosterone levels are great. But I don't, but I don't think it should be ruled out as an option either. I think some people are in such a depleted state. Like, for example, these people Dr. Mark Gordon works with who have PTSD from head trauma.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Think about how many of us have had head trauma that we just don't think about. You know, I went snowboarding when I was 15 one time and I had a really nasty fall. My head, boom, hit the ice. That could have had a negative impact on hormone production. A lot of us have been in car accidents where we had some kind of whiplash. It doesn't take much, the brain is delicate. So if you have any kind of damage to your pituitary gland, you're not going to produce testosterone growth hormone naturally and certainly not to the full benefit of your potential.

• 1:02:36Rich Roll?

  Right, wow. All right, let's talk about insulin. Let's, you know, maybe we'll, we'll debunk a few myths. I mean, it's impossible to talk about insulin and insulin resistance without the subject of sugar coming up and diabetes.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:51Rich Roll?

  In your experience and your research and everything that you've learned, like, what is contributing to insulin resistance? And why is this a master hormone? And how can we best ensure that we're regulating it properly?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  And it's, it's a complex subject because there's so many intelligent people that have different views on the topic. So I can understand why the average person gets confused. You know, on one hand, you have people like Dr. Nick Delgado who say that high levels of fat. Cause the insulin receptors to be weakened so that they can't process glucose properly. And now you have high glucose levels as a result of that.

• 1:03:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean Neil Bernard says something similar.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Dr. Garth Davis, I think you've had him on the show, or you know him of course. But he basically talks about it. He goes, it's not, sugar is not the problem. It's your insulin can handle sugar. The problem is when you have way too much fat, in his words, in particular, animal fat, that dulls these receptors. Now you can't handle the sugar.

• 1:03:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Now.

• 1:03:47Rich Roll?

  And when these guys come out and say this, it provokes quite the response.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:50Rich Roll?

  Like, I love Garth, I love Neil, like, I trust these people. And I know, like, both of them have done extensive research.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:58Rich Roll?

  And I believe them, but that's anathema to the conventional wisdom that this is a sugar thing and a sugar thing only.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think it's probably more complex than either one person's right or wrong all the time. You know, they may be right in certain circumstances. While other people who talk about high sugar consumption being a problem, they could be right regarding other people in certain circumstances. Meaning that some people could have prediabetes and insulin resistance because of high sugar consumption. That's just the way they're metabolizing it. Other people could have the same diet and not have any issues, right? So we're all very complex, different things, we're going to have different biochemical reactions, no matter what the case is. I think the way to, to cut through all of this debate is to look at the common ground of,

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  let's focus on reducing garbage food, because that has no benefit. Maybe it's not causing diabetes, maybe it's not causing my glucose, but it has other problems. Let's just cut it out anyway. Because the last thing we want people thinking is that, oh, okay, sugar's not the problem. Well, I'll just cut back on fat and eat a lot of sugars. Like, that's not good either.

• 1:05:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I need to be clear, like, I'm not saying, and I would never say that, that just eating sugar is not problematic. You know, and when I say sugar, I'm talking about refined sugar.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're not talking about fruits or something like that.

• 1:05:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but can we, can we at least say that, like, this idea that you're going to get diabetes from eating fruit is...

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  No, it's ridiculous.

• 1:05:22Rich Roll?

  It's like, okay.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  I've had, and I've, and I've seen people post stuff such as, oh, here's a candy bar, no difference between that and fruit. I go, so absurd. I had a guy at the dog park ask me, he goes, you know, I love eating a banana every day, but someone told me it's really bad for you. I go, come on. I go banana, one banana is bad for you. Let's, let's get real here. So no, I, I think, I think this carbohydrate phobia that society has right now. And I noticed that, at least when I lived in Los Angeles, I noticed that bread stores never made it, right? Like Great Harvest didn't have a location out here because everybody saw this low carb kick, or at least they think they are. It's kind of like the whole low fat craze. It never really happened. People go, oh, remember when everyone did low fat and everyone got fatter? And it didn't work. Yeah, but no one did it.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. No one did it. What they did is added more low fat packaged foods to their existing high fat diets. Super highly processed snack foods. Nobody, nobody cut, nobody cut out all this fat and just drank orange juice and cornflakes. They did that on top of everything else. This whole low fat craze has never happened. Now, I'm all about balance. It doesn't have to be 30% this, 40% that, 30% that. But I think you, we all need the older macronutrients. Some are going to do better on more fat, less carbohydrates. Some, more carbohydrates, less fat. You don't know until you try. I find that for heavy weight lifting, I like to have a good amount of fat in my diet. And I just, I don't keep track of this stuff. I just add it to meals and so forth. I just made, I make sure I have good fatty sources.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  So I think that with insulin resistance though, let's cut back in all the crappy food that we, we shouldn't be indulging in anyway. Let's start there because that's definitely not helping. Just as the way it causes leptin resistance, leptin and insulin are intertwined. So if you have leptin resistance, you have insulin resistance. And if you improve leptin sensitivity, you improve insulin sensitivity. So let's do all the same things that we just mentioned for leptin. Now, when it comes to carbohydrates, if you eat a lot of, if you're, let's say you're on a plant-based diet and you're eating legumes, nuts and seeds, fruits and vegetables, and you do it for 90 days, oil-free, and your blood sugar doesn't improve, which I would find hard to believe. I would think your blood sugar would improve a lot. But let's say it doesn't.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Okay, at that point, let's start playing around because 90 days is long enough to see whether you should have an improvement. You probably don't even need that long, but it's certainly long enough. Let's start playing around. If you have a traumatic brain injury and you're stressed out and you're not sleeping. Yeah, exactly. You can eat whatever you want. That's also true. See, that's the other thing that people don't think about is that it may not even be what you're eating. It could be everything else that's going on in your life.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  So that's where it gets compromised.

• 1:07:51Rich Roll?

  All right, so, so, uh, cut out all the lousy processed food.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Longer stretches in between meals, just like that improves leptin, that improves insulin sensitivity. Intermittent fasting improves insulin sensitivity a great deal as well there. So you may find that your blood sugar improves a lot. Now, you have to be careful, especially depending on, you know, what kind of diabetic you are. Some, if they, if they go too long without a meal, they can have a blood sugar crash.

• 1:08:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that causes a problem.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  So that can, yeah, that can be a problem as well.

• 1:08:14Rich Roll?

  But let's just say you're somebody who's maybe teetering on the precipice of being prediabetic, or perhaps you're even insulin resistant and you don't even know it. Like, what are the downstream, you know, setting diabetes aside, like, what are the downstream implications of just having suboptimal, uh, insulin receptivity?

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, when insulin doesn't work well, cortisol has to come in and pick up some of the slack, you know, to get glucose where it needs to go. And then anytime you have an increase in cortisol, you're gonna have a negative impact on testosterone. So when insulin is not working properly, cortisol comes into play. And then when cortisol goes up, that has a negative impact on testosterone, DHEA, and so forth.

• 1:08:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  So it's all intertwined in that respect.

• 1:08:55Rich Roll?

  But all of the, like, the sort of top-line lifestyle protocols to regulate these master hormones seem to be the same, whether it's, whether it's insulin, or leptin, or, or, uh, what are the other ones? Melatonin?

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, melatonin's important, growth hormones, another one, adrenaline.

• 1:09:12Rich Roll?

  Adrenaline.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Adrenal fatigue's a big thing. Like, we were talking about adrenal fatigue earlier, where you're like, I'm not sure if I have it. Well, one easy way to know whether you have it is, if you wake up tired. Let's say you slept for eight hours and you wake up and you're still tired, and you don't, you have to get that cup of coffee in to go. And I, I'm a coffee drinker, I enjoy coffee, but my attitude is always, if you need a cup of coffee, then you have a problem. You should skip it. If you enjoy a cup of coffee, that's different. In other words, I wake up, I'm excited, I'm energetic, and then I love having a cup of coffee, kick back in my backyard and just get my day going, right? It's a nice ritual. But that's not most people's experiences. Most people, they get up, they're tired, you know, they don't get their motor going until they get a cup of coffee. It's kind of like, imagine your car battery is dead every time you come home, and you have to charge it in the morning to get going. Well, that's a big inconvenience, but that's what most people are doing.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  They wake up tired, they need some kind of stimulant, whether it's coffee or some other stimulant, Red Bull, etc., to get their day going. That's extremely problematic. And then what happens is...

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Your adrenals don't kick in because you want cortisol to be high in the morning and low in the evening. So you're desperately trying to get the cortisol output so you can get through your day to no avail. And then it happens late at night, it finally kicks in.

• 1:10:25Rich Roll?

  And then you can't sleep.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  And now you can't sleep, right? So you're stuck on this vicious cycle of I'm tired, I'm tired in the morning and then I'm tired all day. And then just when I think I can go, okay, fine, let me just wind down now, it'll be better tomorrow. Boom, it kicks in. Then you lie in bed and you're going, I'm just tossing and turning. So Charles Poliquin has a really good strategy for flipping this. He recommends licorice supplements. And what licorice does is it actually increases cortisol and conversion into a longer lasting cortisol. So that if you take it in the morning, you get a cortisol boost. And then you take it in the afternoon, you get another one. And then what happens is your cortisol naturally goes down in the evening as a result of that. So you're flipping it. And you only need to do it for about a

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  week, right? A week to 10 days. Now, some will say, oh, that increases high blood pressure. It's like, okay, if you have high blood pressure, be careful. Again, even with supplements, you want to make sure you're getting checked out before you add anything to your regimen. So that's important. And the other thing is they're going, well, I heard that increases estrogen. I was like, yeah, it increases estrogen in menopausal women.

• 1:11:28Rich Roll?

  The alpha dude who's so terrified that he's gonna get man boobs.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  You gotta, you gotta look at where there's like, yeah, a study did show that it increases estrogen with menopausal women. Are you a menopausal woman? If not, then you don't have anything to worry about. And it's a week to 10 days. You're not getting on it for a year. I've used it many times when I go through periods where you just crash, right? Like you were talking about that. Sometimes you're just, you just crash from doing stuff. And then I'll wake up and I'm tired. I'm like going, man, I'm just exhausted. Like your arms feel really heavy. I hate that feeling. Your arms feel heavy. You just feel tired. You're like, man, I don't know how I'm gonna get anything done today. And then whenever that happens now, though, I just have a bottle on hand at all times. Metagenics makes a really good one. It's vegan, no gelatin caps. And it's a tablet. So you just chew it. It tastes like licorice. I chew it just to digest it better. And one tablet in the morning, one in the afternoon for about 10 days, seven to 10 days, and then you're good. It flips it. You feel way better.

• 1:12:19Rich Roll?

  I'm gonna try that.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Rich Roll?

  But Charles Poliquin is also the guy who said you couldn't be a successful athlete on a vegan diet.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Hey, but he also brought up my name in that question.

• 1:12:27Rich Roll?

  Oh, he did?

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  He prepped.

• 1:12:28Rich Roll?

  I heard you say on London Real.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I'm friends with Charles and he's been on my podcast many times. And I've always had a good relationship with Charles. I think he's a very smart strength coach. But he comes from that old guard of you gotta eat a lot of meat to be strong. And that's just what he's, see, the thing is, is that we look at professional athletes and we go, okay, they all eat a lot of meat.

• 1:12:48Rich Roll?

  Therefore.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  But is that the reason why they're professional athletes and performing at such a high level? These people are also very genetically gifted and they put in a lot of hard work and all that. Meaning that they could probably have crappy diets and they still perform at a very high level, right?

• 1:13:02Rich Roll?

  A lot of them do.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:13:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  That's where I'm going.

• 1:13:05Rich Roll?

  People would be shocked, I think.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  So we, we don't have enough professional athletes. We have a lot more now than previously that are on a vegan diet. But until we have a lot more, you know, we can't say that it doesn't work or that this is a superior way to go. Because we don't have enough to go on.

• 1:13:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I, but it's changing, you know, you're changing more and more and more. And, and I would say like, it's a risk. Like if you're coming up, let's say you're, you know, 20 years old. And you're showing huge prowess and promise in your respective sport. You're being, you know, you're being, you're the next big thing. And then somebody's like, well, you should go vegan. Like that's, that's right. That's scary.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:13:46Rich Roll?

  Like there's so, there's so much that you're wagering on that. Like, how many people are willing to take that bet? So it's only.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:13:54Rich Roll?

  To date, it's only been like the, the rare outlier who like grew up vegetarian or had the hippie parents or whatever. Who kind of just were brought into it and it felt natural to them. And so they don't feel like it's a risk.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Such a good point.

• 1:14:06Rich Roll?

  But that's why we need more examples. And I had, I just had Nema Delgado in here the other day.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, I started following him on Instagram. That's a very impressive young guy.

• 1:14:15Rich Roll?

  I mean, you cannot, I, I challenge you to find anybody with a more impressive physique.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Oh, he looks great.

• 1:14:21Rich Roll?

  I mean, I'm sure there's other, you know, but like.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  How, how old is he? Is he a pretty young guy?

• 1:14:25Rich Roll?

  Do you guys remember how old he is?

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, he looks like he's in his twenties.

• 1:14:28Rich Roll?

  He's pretty young.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Very impressive.

• 1:14:29Rich Roll?

  I mean, yeah, and, and the Swedish guy.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  And he's never had meat, right?

• 1:14:33Rich Roll?

  He's never had meat. He grew up with Hari Krishna parents.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:14:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's got a crazy, super interesting, there's a lot more than meets the eye to that guy.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  He's had dairy then though, you know, growing up in Hari Krishna.

• 1:14:44Rich Roll?

  He went vegan a couple of years ago. So, so going totally vegan is new, but. But that's really when he stepped into bodybuilding in a big way.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Rich Roll?

  And the proof is in the pudding with that guy. I mean, he's like, that guy's physique is insane.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Oh, it's amazing.

• 1:14:56Rich Roll?

  And the fact that he's never eaten meat his entire life.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's important.

• 1:14:59Rich Roll?

  That, it's impossible for you to look at that and go, you know, like all those arguments go out the window. But, and that's why I think he's really important in this conversation.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Oh, very.

• 1:15:10Rich Roll?

  But he's, you know, one of the few, and we're just gonna see more and more and more. It's just gonna take a long time before we reach that tipping point where mainstream society just goes, "Okay, yeah, I guess you can do that."

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  No, definitely. And then, coming back to your point with the professional athlete, it can be very daunting to just overhaul your diet. Because, let's say you're a UFC fighter, right? And someone comes along and says, "Hey, man, I think you'd do great on a plant-based diet." And you go, "Okay, that sounds good. Let me give it a shot." And then you go to your next fight and you just get your clock cleaned, right? You just get your butt kicked. It's gonna be hard not to think, "Well, what did I do differently in the last cab?" Maybe you did a lot of things differently. Maybe your training was different. Maybe you had personal life problems going on. But the one thing that's gonna stick out is, "Oh, I changed my diet." That's gotta be what it is.

• 1:15:54Rich Roll?

  Right. And maybe it was, because it takes time for your body to adjust.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  That's the other point.

• 1:15:59Rich Roll?

  I'm sure you hear this all the time, like, "Well, I tried it, but then, you know, I felt like lightheaded, or I felt weak, or I had bloating in my stomach."

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Rich Roll?

  And, you know, it takes the body a certain period of time to

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%.

• 1:16:10Rich Roll?

  for your microbiome to adjust, to figure out like, "Oh, I actually need to eat more calories." That's a big thing, I think. People think it's protein, but they're actually under-fueled, like.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:16:19Rich Roll?

  And, and this, you know, there's nothing wrong with a gradual, I know your, you know, your transition was gradual, mine was.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Very gradual, yeah.

• 1:16:26Rich Roll?

  You know, there's very few people that flick this switch and go 100%

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:29Rich Roll?

  from one day to the next. And, you know, it's not surprising that, that the body, you know, needs an acclimation period.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, some people do, I know people that have flipped the switch and they do great. And then there's other people that have done a more gradual approach. Myself, my mother is Indian. She's been vegetarian her whole life. So I grew up with her as a role model for vegetarians. She wasn't vegan. But it was there and I ate meat growing up and so but when I was 15, I really got into animal rights and then I knew I just had to cut this out. I just didn't want to go. What happened specifically? Well, a couple of things happened. It's, I was 15 and I was really into a band called The Cromags and I know you know John Joseph. You know Cromags are one of my favorite bands, period. It had a huge impact, not on just my diet, but I actually majored in religious studies because I really got into Hinduism through The Cromags, even though I grew up with it via my mother. I really got into it. So it, when I got into The Cromags, the

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  bassist, Harley Flanagan, was the singer. John wasn't in the picture at that point. Right, right. There's a whole drama around that. And I'm friends with both guys. Believe me, I'm, I know all about every facet of the drama since its inception. I know every narrative of it. And John's one of my best friends. I love that. I like both guys. I don't, I'm not going to say negative, anything negative about either guy. I'm really good friends with Harley and I like John a lot. So here's the thing. I was reading this interview with Harley on the way to Kenya because my dad worked for the International Monetary Fund and we, he, he thought it was important for us to travel internationally. So he wanted to take us out to Kenya to go to safaris and see animals in their natural habitat. Amazing trip. So on the way there though, I'm reading this interview with Harley Flanagan and he talks about how he was always very

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  violent and aggressive and had all kinds of problems and that giving up meat and eating a vegetarian diet and leading this Hare Krishna lifestyle really helped him. And then he said a line in there that really stuck with me. He goes, "Look, we can't talk about peace and all that when you're eating a steak because that animal died in agonizing pain. You contributed to serious violence and you're trying to talk about peace." So that really stuck with my mind because I've always, even when I ate meat, I considered myself an animal lover, right? I had dogs and so forth. So I didn't really think about the hypocrisy of it until reading that. So that was the first seed planted. The second was when I was in Kenya and I saw all these animals in their natural habitat and you can say, "Well, what about seeing a lion kill an animal?" It makes you want to go vegan. It was, it wasn't that

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  so much. It just made me think about all the animals that don't live like that, that are in factory farms, that are being experimented on and so forth. So that's, that was another light bulb going off in my head. And then I saw this movie, The Fly 2 and it's, a lot of people, it's probably one of those forgettable movies from the 90s. I remember The Fly. I don't know if I saw The Fly 2. The Fly, the original, I didn't think was all that great. The second one I thought was really good and it touched on the topic of animal experimentation pretty profoundly. Whether, whether that was their intent or not, I don't know, but. That's how you took it. You, you want to, you want to get someone interested in. Being anti lab experiments on animals to show them that movie because there's a heartbreaking scene where this golden retriever is experimented on and mutilated and you see this animal in

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  agonizing pain and this the guy who becomes the flight goes in and puts the dog down mercilessly. But that made me start thinking also about, okay, what actions am I doing that are contributing to laboratory experiments? So anyway, I just wanted to change my lifestyle so that I'm not contributing to animal suffering. Now, I know it's impossible to not do it to some extent, just being alive, right? So I'm not delusional to think that I'm no longer harming any animal in any way because I've been vegan since I was 20 years old, you know, 25 years now. But it's definitely lessening the negative impact dramatically.

• 1:20:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's an aspiration to create less harm and to kind of live in accordance with this principle of the himsa that comes from, you know, the Harakrishna faith.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the other thing too. Hinduism and Stufism in particular really resounded with me. When I got into college, I really got into those things. But when I first became vegetarian, my mother recommended that I just keep eating fish and cut out all the other meats, but keep fishing.

• 1:20:27Rich Roll?

  Your vegetarian mom, your Indian mom.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  And she was eating some fish because of my dad's influence at the time. So that was kind of what she was doing, that whole pesco vegetile thing. And I was like, okay, that's sensible, a gradual thing. And then when I was 18, I cut that out, but I was still eating eggs and dairy, not much. I was in college at the time, but I would have it. And then I got some literature on factory farming from PETA or some other organization. I forget which one now. This may be when I was 20, Lewis and Clark College. I was out there for a year. And that stuff is horrible. That's heartbreaking stuff to watch.

• 1:20:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  So I don't know how anyone watches that and then feels good about eating a pig or anything.

• 1:20:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it's tough. Either you avert your glance. And why do we avert our glance? Like, why do we, like, we'll wait in line to go see a violent movie.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:07Rich Roll?

  But if you flash like an image of somebody beating a goat or, you know, like, or a cow or a sheep, we just, I don't want to see that because

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I don't want to think about that.

• 1:21:16Rich Roll?

  We're all inherently compassionate. And if we really take a moment to look at that, we'll realize that we're not living in accordance with that compassionate disposition that I think we all have. And that creates Internal tension and anxiety. So it's better to like, well, I don't want to look at that. And then I can just keep doing what I'm doing. And I don't have to wrestle with that, that, um, just, you know, that discrepancy, that, that internal.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Changing anything in your life is, can be difficult, whether it's a job you hate, or a self-destructive relationship, or whatever it is, any kind of change can be difficult, even if it's something that you hate, you're used to it. So it can be difficult to transition from that. And sometimes we hear arguments now of like, oh, vegans are killing more animals than anyone else, because look at all the deforestation that has to be involved to grow these crops. And they take out the, they, they forget the point that the majority of crops are grown to feed the billions of animals that are killed for slaughter.

• 1:22:08Rich Roll?

  That's the thing. It's conveniently overlooked.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, not the 1% of the population that's vegan.

• 1:22:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah. If we took all of that land that's now being used to, uh, grow crops for, as feed for these animals, we would free it up for humans. It's a huge thing that doesn't get addressed. The other argument that kind of comes up, and I've heard Joe say this a number of times, like, and I think he's, he's sort of aiming it more at, at the sanctimonious vegan.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, sure. And that's valid.

• 1:22:33Rich Roll?

  Who sort of stands on a pedestal, but he'll say, look, if you're eating a vegan diet, but you're eating grains, or you're eating, you know, you're eating conventionally grown crops, like the, the, the threshers and the, you know, the, the way in which all of those crops are harvested kills all these rodents and these insects. It's like, yeah, it does, right? It's not about a completely harm-free life. It's about reducing your footprint and your connection to that harm. So again, it goes back to the aspiration. It's like, of course, we're, we're not, we're not living karma-free. And I don't, I don't, you know, it's not my place to judge anybody's lifestyle and stand in, you know, in reckoning of that. Like, this is just what works for me. And if you want to hear about it, I'm happy to talk to you about it.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  That's the best.

• 1:23:15Rich Roll?

  And I think it's, you know, that's what's interesting about you and your journey with all of this is that it's not that you, it's not that you hide, hide that you're vegan, but you don't put it out front, right? And so there's a lot of you, like, people come to you, they want to learn about kettleball, uh, exercises, they want to learn about fitness. And then it's not until they're totally on board and invested in you, and they've learned something. And then they, they find out like, oh, my God, he's vegan.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  I know, I know. People have known me for years. They didn't realize. And it's, yeah, it's not, and that's a good point. I'll bring it all up.

• 1:23:46Rich Roll?

  So I'm interested in why you, yeah, like.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So when I first got into the business.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  I was, I wanted to be a strength coach and train people. I didn't necessarily come in saying, "I'm a vegan strength coach." I'm just a strength coach.

• 1:24:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  And that allowed me to reach an audience that someone who identifies himself as a vegan strength coach is not going to, because once you say that, now people think, "Okay, I have to be a vegan to follow his information." His training system's only gonna work for that. So that, so it's just-

• 1:24:19Rich Roll?

  Or he's gonna hit me up with all this propaganda and I'm gonna have to deal with-

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Anything negative associated with vegan is gonna be... Now, I did write articles about being on a vegan diet for magazines and on my website. So it's always been something that's out there. And people that know me know that I donate a lot of money to different charities and so forth to help people and animals, not just animals, but kids that are being exploited in sex trafficking. One of my favorite organizations is Project Child Safe that helps kids get out of that world. So it's, it's never been something that, I don't, I don't, I don't have a tattoo on my chest and show it proudly, but it's something that, that I, I've never hidden either. This is not something that I use as a number one selling point. I kinda like the idea of someone gets into my information like, "Wow, this guy's badass. Look what he can do." And then they find out like, "Whoa, he's vegan too?"

• 1:25:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Then I think it's really impactful. Where if I led with vegan, a lot of people may not even look at the message.

• 1:25:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  They're like, "Oh, I don't even wanna see that."

• 1:25:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. It's gotta be, I mean, I'm sure you've been in situations where that realization occurs and they're right in front of you and you have to like, you know, like deal with that, you know, as it's like dawning upon them.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  But you know, honestly, when I was in, in this, when I got into the strength world and I started making a name for myself, it was interesting because in some ways I would feel, like imagine someone, imagine a black guy who has never been around racist people and all of a sudden you are, but those racist people like him for whatever reason. So even though they're racist, they're like, "Oh, you know, we like, we like John. Let's just keep him in the fold here." Sometimes I often felt like that because I would be around all these people that are eating meat and I'm the one vegan guy at the table. And people are, these people always, these people had very negative views about the vegan diet. Like, oh, that can never work. You know, Mike's just different. You know, Mike's cool. And I don't, all these vegan idiots always talking about this. I can't stand those people. But Mike, you're cool. You know, you're fine.

• 1:26:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  So I've been felt like that odd man out type thing there.

• 1:26:10Rich Roll?

  What does Poliquin tell you?

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Poliquin and I have never discussed, he doesn't tell me anything. In fact, he wrote a very nice article saying how much he respects me because he's not a fan of kettlebell training either. He thinks it's bad for the body and that kettlebell swings are gonna mess up your back, which I of course disagree with, but that's what he thinks. And, but he wrote this article saying, hey, I really respect Mike because he does a lot of charitable work and he's written some good articles on strength training. I'm not a fan of kettlebell training. I'm not a fan of the vegan diet, but you know, he makes it work. You know, it's always that kind of narrative. It's like, he makes it work.

• 1:26:41Rich Roll?

  No, I find, I find that as well. Like in the more kind of things that I do as an athlete, the more you become the outlier exception. When you're doing it from a place of like, well, I'm trying to show that like anybody can do this or

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:55Rich Roll?

  whatever, but then it just, it isolates you even further.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  I've had a lot of people that have gone vegan recently and a large part of it was just my example. And they, they also conveyed to me that they appreciate that I never pitched them on, hey, you shouldn't be eating that way. You gotta eat this way. But they were watching. They were going, okay, what's he doing and why is he doing it? You know, it was terminating in their mind.

• 1:27:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  So I think the most powerful message you have is your example. You wanna talk, like I have this motto, live life aggressively, right? Which is take charge of your life. Now, a lot of people, that message resonates with a lot of people. But the only reason why it does is because I actually do take charge of my life. You know, I live in a way that embodies that motto. If I didn't, that motto wouldn't mean anything. So if, if I'm healthy and strong and vital and passionate and then I'm also on a vegan diet, people look at all those things. They go, man, I wanna be like him. It's like, oh, he's a vegan diet too, huh? Let me look into that a little bit more. So you're setting yourself up as a, a role model without saying you're a role model. You're just living your life and people find that impressive. They wanna know more. They get curious.

• 1:27:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think we're in this interesting time in our culture right now where we're having a conversation about gender in a way that, that we never have. And I think that brings up,

• 1:28:11Rich Roll?

  Uh, not just gender identity, but like, what does it mean to be a man? What does masculinity mean? And masculinity gets oddly conflated with dietary choice.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:21Rich Roll?

  In a very strange way. And so.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's interesting on that is beer is considered a very manly drink. Right? Let's go get a beer.

• 1:28:28Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  And beer is extremely estrogenic.

• 1:28:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  The hops in beer is extremely, alcohol in general is estrogenic. That's the other thing I didn't bring up before. It's like every alcohol converts testosterone to estrogen. Doesn't matter what it is.

• 1:28:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're big on like no beer, like in all your stuff, you're like, no beer. I don't care. It's like, you do not have a drink.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  No, I have a drink from time to time.

• 1:28:48Rich Roll?

  Forget about like, was veratrol in the wine? Like, you know, alcohol is not your friend. Like you take a fairly hard stance on that.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  I'm pretty, I do take it pretty hard. I mean, I have a drink every once in a while. I'm not someone who never touches a drink. I don't have it at the house. You know, I don't have like a wine cellar at the house or liquor and so forth. If I go out to a concert or something like that, or I play blackjack, you know, I'll have a gin and tonic or something like that. I think someone who has high estrogen levels and low testosterone, they should definitely cut out alcohol, at least until you get back into balance. So I just think it depends on where you at. If you're, if you're fairly healthy and you're happy with your levels and so forth, and you want to partake every once in a while, no big thing. You know, we don't have to do, we can partake in things that are not good for us as well. You know, so we enjoy life a little bit.

• 1:29:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  You can have a, not every meal you eat has to be healthy. I like vegan desserts too. You know, it's not everything I do is under this health umbrella, but most of it is so that when I stray on things, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't have a negative impact. If I'm having a couple of drinks every night, that's a problem. And a lot of people need a couple of drinks just to unwind. So just the fact that they need it is a problem. And you're basically a functional alcoholic at that point.

• 1:29:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  It's like, well, I just have three or four beers every night before bed. I was like, okay, cut it out for a week. Well, I don't need to cut it out.

• 1:29:55Rich Roll?

  I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's some negative downstream hormonal impacts of that.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  Insulin resistance is, alcohol definitely contributes to that. And it definitely contributes to the conversion of testosterone to estrogen. Adrenal issues, you know, so again, we're talking about someone who's drinking a lot.

• 1:30:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  If you have a drink or two, if you have even one drink a day, that's not a big deal. If you have a couple in the weekend, not a big deal. Every time you go out on a bender, though, let's say you get hammered, I mean, your testosterone growth hormone is shut down for many days. And that's not something that's hard to believe. And anyone who's ever had a hangover, you're not feeling in an optimal state at that point.

• 1:30:31Rich Roll?

  Back on the subject of masculinity, I mean, you're somebody, you're a strength coach, you're just, you're jacked, you can deadlift 565 pounds, like you're throwing massive weight around, you were an early pioneer in this kettlebell revolution.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:47Rich Roll?

  You're a, you know, a prime example of like this super strong, you know, alpha male type personality. And so what's interesting is, is how that fits into, like, how that plays culturally in terms of you being a vegan and you being a vegan for, for, you know, coming into it from a perspective of animal rights and compassion. So when, when you think about what it means to be a man, like what is, you know, where does compassion come into that equation and how do you think about that?

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think compassion is the most important form of strength. I look at compassion as a form of strength. And one of the other reasons why I have a lot of compassion for not just animals, but people in well, in particular kids, especially kids that have been through any kind of abusive situation. Like I said, one of my favorite organizations is Project Child Save.

• 1:31:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, how did you get involved with them and what do they do?

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Well, the founder of Project Child Save is Ty Ritter. You'd love having him on your show. He's one of the most interesting guys I've ever met. And he is, he has a team of former operators. So some of these guys are former Rangers, Navy SEALs, et cetera. And what they do is they will rescue kids at gunpoint from human traffickers, the really bad people that are doing horrendous things to kids. So rather than try to go through quote unquote, legal channels, they will go into countries.

• 1:32:09Rich Roll?

  It's like dispatching a SEAL team.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Guns blazing, yeah, it's like an episode of 24.

• 1:32:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like an episode of 24 when you hear the stories. So they will go in there guns blazing if necessary, and a lot of times it has been necessary, and get these kids out of these situations. So when you donate money to them, you're funding those missions.

• 1:32:27Rich Roll?

  Is that, is that legal? Can they do that outside of law enforcement?

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  Well, here's the way, here's the way law enforcement looks at it. They can't publicly support it, but privately, they don't disavow it because they like what they're doing. Who doesn't want to see kids get rescued?

• 1:32:42Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's kind of a vigilante thing, though, right?

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  It is. Yeah. Yeah, it definitely is. It definitely is. And if they get captured in some of these countries, then, you know, they could be...

• 1:32:50Rich Roll?

  But those, do those, those operations take place outside of the US?

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, they take place outside of the US.

• 1:32:55Rich Roll?

  Okay, I got, yeah, that makes more sense.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not happening, it's not a raid happening in Minnesota or something like that.

• 1:32:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I was like, I was like, how does that work? The FBI just turns the other eye to this?

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  No, no, it's happened in the Middle East, it's happened in South America, because that's where most of these, a lot of times, it's American kids that are being kidnapped and smuggled over there, because blonde, blue-eyed girls are very high premium, blonde, blonde, blue-eyed boys are also very high premium, but there's, any kid is a potential target for this. So sometimes you hear about American kids that have gone missing and the body's never found, and the reason, or possible reason, is because they ended up overseas somewhere in some kind of sex trafficking slavery-type situation.

• 1:33:33Rich Roll?

  It's so hard to believe that this is actually going on.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  It, it happens a lot more than we would like, and there's a ton of money being made in this industry, which is why it's so pervasive. And these kind of pedophilia-type people are everywhere. There's people on this street, there's people in my neighborhood, they're everywhere. They infiltrate every facet of society, every ethnic group, every socioeconomic group, every political group, it doesn't matter, they're around. And that's why parents have to be extremely vigilant with protecting their kids. And especially after having Ty on the show, I am always keeping an eye on kids, as a way as in, who's this adult and why is this adult talking to this kid? Where are the parents in relation to this kid? Because these kidnappers know what they're doing, and they'll snatch your kid in a heartbeat.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  And I see parents all the time that are on their phones, just dicking around, and their, their kids are playing 50 yards away, and they think it's a safe neighborhood, no problem. But Ty will tell you that he has profiled pedophiles in person and he said that they will say that they can go anywhere where like you tell me what kids you want, I'll go get that kid within an hour. It's like, oh, you want a blonde, blue, white kid? Cool. I'll go to this neighborhood and snatch him real quick because no one's watching.

• 1:34:46Rich Roll?

  That's terrifying.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it is. It is really terrifying and it's extremely horrific. And when you hear the stories Ty has told about the kind of abuse they've seen when they go into these situations to rescue these kids, he told a couple of stories when he was on my show. And then he prefaced it by saying, that's about a three on a scale of one to 10. And these were horrific stories. Kids brutally raped on video, you know, things like that. I mean, horrible stuff. But he didn't even, I don't even want to know what 10 is. You know, he told me three. I was like, that's enough for me to become a monthly supporter financially. I don't need to know number 10. Like, you know, I don't need to watch factory farm footage at this point to not want to contribute to that. I've seen it.

• 1:35:23Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  So there's some things you just don't want to. So, so his organization had a real impact on me. And when you're giving money to his organization, it's not going to someone's Hawaii vacation or for him to get a new car. This guy barely pays his rent, Ty Ritter, because he puts all of his own money into this whole thing.

• 1:35:40Rich Roll?

  That's amazing.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  And you can tell, and he's, he's in his seventies now, so he doesn't go on the actual missions anymore. He's more mission control. He's the guy who plans out stuff and then he has younger guys go in and rescue the kids. But you can hear in his voice that this is not something that he could turn away from. He used to be a security guy in Las Vegas. People like Steve Wynn and so forth, like that, right? And then he started learning about, sometimes kids would get kidnapped and he would help get those kids back. And through that, he started learning about the larger picture of kids being kidnapped and put into sex slavery, human trafficking. And he said that with my skill set, I couldn't turn away from it. But in some ways, it's ruined his life because when you talk to him...

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  He's, you can tell the emotional toll it's taken on him, you know, just dealing with his day to day.

• 1:36:28Rich Roll?

  That's the tough thing. I mean, I had Mark Ching in here.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I support his organization too.

• 1:36:33Rich Roll?

  And it's the same thing. Like, I think he's doing better now, but when he came in here, he was in a rough state. And it's because he's so empathetic that he can't create a healthy boundary around his emotional state and what he sees. And, and it impacts him so deeply that he literally has devoted his life to this thing, but it's, it was, it was, I don't, I think he's, like I said, I think he's better now, but

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:56Rich Roll?

  It was killing him. Like, and, and it's something I've talked to Gene Bauer about also.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:01Rich Roll?

  You know, from Farm Sanctuary, like, how do you do the, he's like, you can't save all of these animals.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:07Rich Roll?

  Just like you can't save all the kids. You have to just, you know, do what you can do and find a way to make peace with that and be okay with that.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:14Rich Roll?

  Because you're in it for the long haul. Otherwise, it will just, it will, it will devastate you and destroy you.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  That's what Ty says too. He goes, he used to keep track of what happened to the kids after he saved them. But some of their stories were really tragic and he didn't want that in their head, meaning that some of them went on to commit suicide when they got older. They just couldn't deal with what they've been through.

• 1:37:32Rich Roll?

  The trauma.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Some of them have gone on to do really well, though. And one lady in particular, she called him up when she was a grown woman and she has kids now. And she said that, "You don't remember me, but you saved my life when I was a kid. You rescued me from these human traffickers." She's like, "I'll never, I'm always going to be indebted to you for that." And it was just, I think, I was really glad that he got a call like that. Because I think it's really important for someone like him to get a call like that. And it's just to know people support what he's doing. Because when he goes out and lectures about stuff, a lot of times people in the audience are like, "Oh, I don't want to hear this." They're like, "Oh, it's all, I don't want to hear this." They just freak out like that. It's like, that's not making the problem go away. This stuff exists.

• 1:38:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  So you want to have an attitude of, coming back to masculinity is, to me, masculinity is being very compassionate, very taking charge of these things. So when I hear about that kind of suffering, I want to do something about it. Get them on the show, donate money, raise funds. My friend Matt Brown, UFC fighter, he, and he's not an emotional guy at all, anyone who knows him, he's a killer, you know, straight up killer. He's a great guy, but he's, he's like a psychopathic killer when he's fighting. But he heard those episodes, he's like, "Look, I'm not an emotional guy, but those episodes had a real impact on me." And he's been supporting Project Child Save since, and he wants to do more. You know, so it's just one of those things where... A lot of people don't want to hear about this kind of thing, and I get it. You know, when I kick back to listen to a podcast, I don't necessarily want to hear about this topic either. But at the same time. What are you doing? I thought we were gonna hear about kettleballs.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Human trafficking? Yeah, but at the same time, once you find out about this stuff, you have to do something about it. And for me, it's a little bit more personal because when I was five years old, I was sexually abused myself. We were living in Korea and my parents used to leave my brother and myself with a maid, who acted as a babysitter. And we had some that were nice, but one lady was, I always equated her as that if you ever saw that Mummy Dearest movie with Faye Dunaway, she was like that kind of personality, right? This was real hideous person. And so I was abused by her multiple times. And when you're five years old, you don't know what's going on. You can't even, you don't even know what to tell your parents about what's, you know, first of all, you trust adults. You think that, okay, my parents left me with this person, so whatever she's doing, that's just acceptable behavior,

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  even though it doesn't feel good. You know what's going on is, is not acceptable, but you don't really have the, the capacity to handle it at that point. So what happens is, is you suppress that deep, you bury that deep, and it's gonna come out at some other point. It's like a sleeper cell, right? It's always affecting you. It's in your subconscious mind, so it's always affecting your actions, but you're not aware of it, and that's what's dangerous. You didn't have a conscious memory of it. Not until much later. So once I was 28, and it was, it was actually not long after that whole pneumonia incident, I was watching this movie, still one of my favorite movies now, Antoine Fisher. And Antoine Fisher went through a very similar thing. And in the movie, they show that scene where he's around five, six years old, and this, he's in a foster home and he's being abused by this lady.

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  And that had a real impact. I mean, I kept on watching that scene over and over again. And there's a scene at the end of the movie where he confronts the people that abused him. And it's this really powerful, inspiring scene where he just says, you tried to break me, you couldn't break me. I'm still strong. And that.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Basically, I lived vicariously through that and that that's what I would have liked to have done to the person, to the lady who abused me. But I can't do that because I don't even know who she is, or she may not even be alive at this point. And it doesn't matter because I'm over it. But that movie left an indelible impression on me because, one, it gave me total recall of what happened. And part of me starts thinking, maybe this didn't happen. Maybe it's just a fantasy in my head. You know, maybe, maybe, who knows what's real or not. You're five years old. So I talked to my brother about it. I was like, look, I don't know if you remember this, but I just got these memories of, you know, this happening. And he, he, he got really choked up because he does, he did remember. He's like, yeah, I remember that. Is he older? Yeah, he's a couple of years older. And he has a lot of guilt because he fought her off. You know, she tried to do the same thing to him. But he was a couple of years older, and he was a little bit more defiant than I was at this time. At this time in

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  my life, I was very quiet and, you know, didn't have a large personality or anything like that. But my brother Roger fought her off. And I think at one point he bit her, you know, stuff like that. He really fought her off viciously. So she left, she's like, okay, I'm gonna leave him alone. So this is a good lesson for anyone who's being bullied. You know, you fight back, you're gonna be left alone. Because bullies, they're cowards. You know, they just want to deal with people that are not gonna fight back. So with me, I didn't fight back because, like I said, I didn't know what you're supposed to do in a situation like that. You know, you're five years old. It's not like my parents ever said, hey, if anyone ever touches you inappropriately, you know, you tell us, you do this. Nobody thought to have those conversations at that point. You just didn't think that was gonna happen. So he has a lot of guilt in that he feels like he should have done something to protect me. And I've basically absolved him of that by saying, look, you're eight years old, man. You're a kid too. What are you supposed to do? You don't even know

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  what's happening. But that confirmed that it actually did happen. So, okay, now that I know this happened, it started making me think about, you know, why, one of the reasons why I'm so compassionate to animals is because I don't like seeing suffering of any kind, exploitation of any kind. So if I see a dog suffering, or if I see footage of animals suffering, that that hits me on a deep level, because I know what it's like to be in that position of being helpless, powerless. So how did you ultimately work through this? Well, one is, I talked to it to a lot of close friends. I just brought it up.

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  And you know, that wasn't, I didn't just call people up and be like, hey, guess what I remembered? It would just come up in conversations. And a lot of people have been through the same thing. And I'm talking about men here. I had many of my male friends have been through very similar things. Just about all of my female friends have been through some kind of sexual abuse. So it's really rough. And when you have the courage to talk about it, everybody else does too. Because nobody wants to bury this deep. You just don't, you just don't want people to look at you a different way. So a lot of people don't want to bring it up because they don't want people to think that they're broken or that they're, you know, scarred in some way. But it reminds me of a story that I read about this, this World War II soldier where he died recently, there was a CNN story about him. And he survived the internment camps in World War II.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  But he didn't tell his family everything that happened to him then, because he was a young guy and some things he just didn't want people to know about. But as he got older, he didn't want to die with this secret in him. And the secret is that he was raped repeatedly by Nazi soldiers. Not only raped, but it was a spectacle where people would rape him while other people washed and leered and, you know, made fun of him and stuff like that. And he's a young guy, he's only, I think he was 17, he lied about being 18, Latino guy. And he carried this with him his entire life and he never told his family because he didn't want, because they, they held him in such high esteem as this World War II hero and so forth. He didn't want to diminish that in any way. But at the same time, he couldn't keep this to himself anymore.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  So I believe he told either a family member or a therapist, he just got it out of his system. Of course, his whole family just was very supportive and didn't change how they looked at him at all, of course, they were very supportive and they were just glad that they could be there for him the way he was for them, was there for them so much in their lives. And then he's, he just said that the idea of me dying not, without anyone knowing about this, would have been more tragic than it actually happening. And in Johann Hari's book, there's, there's older women who say the same thing. They go, you know, I went through this and I grew up in a time where nobody talked about this kind of stuff. If you brought it up, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't bring that up, keep that to yourself. But for them to actually able to unload that burden at some point in their life was really powerful for them.

• 1:44:52Rich Roll?

  Right. So how did that, so you saw that and that impacted how you were gonna deal with this? Or?

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  I think my attitude is like when you, when you, when you be, when you go through serious abuse, you either have to embrace compassion fully or you're destroyed by anger. So my attitude was embrace compassion fully. Now, use this to be a stronger person, use this to be a better person and be more caring, be more resilient, be more vulnerable, you know, just be a better person as a result of this. Don't be a worse person, don't continue this cycle of abuse. Don't abuse people, don't abuse animals, don't, none of that stuff. Be, use this as a, a fuel to be more powerful than you could be if it didn't happen, you know, make it a positive.

• 1:45:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, people, uh, struggle with understanding that, that, that vulnerability is actually a strength.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:39Rich Roll?

  We perceive it as a weakness and it takes courage to be vulnerable.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:42Rich Roll?

  Um, because you are exposing your weaknesses, but the strength that comes from that and the strength that can be, um, given to other people who have had something similar happen to them, uh, is, is super powerful. And I think that that's also part and parcel of what it means to be a man and, and to kind of imbue this sense of, of masculinity.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  I mean, the most, the most alpha guys I know are the most compassionate people you'll ever meet, you know, and they're also really cool guys too. None of them are bullies or jerk offs or someone who picks a fight at a bar or talks to a woman inappropriately. Now, these are all really cool guys on multiple fronts.

• 1:46:18Rich Roll?

  Cause those behaviors derive from insecurity.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  Exactly, you're just overcompensating. That's all you're doing. It's like someone who picks a bar, tries to get into a fight at every bar, that's not too much testosterone, that's not enough. It's too much estrogen, if anything. It's someone that's overcompensating going, okay, I gotta show people, you know, how manly I am.

• 1:46:33Rich Roll?

  Front thing.

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  Or someone who goes to a gym is like, okay, I'm gonna lift more than anyone here, who cares?

• 1:46:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  So it's just, those are just overcompensating type measures. They're not coming from a real place of strength. Yeah, like I said, the most alpha guys I know were extremely compassionate people. They're, they're always looking at protecting people around them.

• 1:46:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's, that's the ultimate man, right?

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:53Rich Roll?

  To be the protector.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Rich Roll?

  So, uh, so you start off as, as, as this quiet shy kid.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:59Rich Roll?

  You know, you, you didn't play sports in high school.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  No, no, I was just, I was a screw up in high school.

• 1:47:04Rich Roll?

  In like DC area, right?

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was really into the hardcore scene, not the straight edge hardcore scene, but just hardcore and, and heavy music.

• 1:47:10Rich Roll?

  So where were you? Cause I grew up in DC.

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  Did you? Okay. I, I went to Langley High School.

• 1:47:14Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  I grew up in McLean, Virginia.

• 1:47:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  So I used to go to the nine thirty club all the time.

• 1:47:17Rich Roll?

  Ninety, that was the spot.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  Bad Brains and Agnostic Front and Chrome Eggs and DRI. I got into that scene a lot. Yeah. So I was a very shy guy, not a popular kid in high school and not confident at all in terms of talking to people. So I think this was kind of an outlet for me. It's like, you wanted to have those things, but you don't. So like, what's the next best thing? You go listen to intense music from people who embody it. I mean, the Chrome Eggs, you don't get any more confident than that.

• 1:47:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  Like John and Harley on stage, these guys exude confidence and still do, you know, to this day.

• 1:47:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  So you're kind of living by, you're kind of feeding off that energy. I didn't get more, even in college, I became more social, a little bit more confident.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Honestly, for me, it was a nugget negative thing. Like my, my face got, this scar I have on my face is not vitiligo. It's called a coal burn where I was snowboarding when I was maybe around 28 in Utah with my parents and I got sunburned really bad.

• 1:48:08Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  And everything healed except this area. So this is like a residual scar. So this is the only place where it is.

• 1:48:14Rich Roll?

  Happening to somebody.

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:15Rich Roll?

  Usually it's just congenital, right?

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. So vitiligo basically starts off as a small white patch and then it spreads, right? It's never something that, that's this big, so immediate. So basically one day I didn't have this, the next day I did.

• 1:48:26Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  And initially I'm-

• 1:48:28Rich Roll?

  Can I just say, I have to interrupt you on this because for people that are listening and they're not watching on YouTube, you, you have like a discoloration on part of your face.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:48:37Rich Roll?

  But the, the awesome part of this is that on your goatee, it splits one half of it like perfectly down the middle between being white and being black. So you're almost like a James Bond villain.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  That's the look I'm going for. I got the Devil's Peak in the goatee. Yeah, it should be casted in those movies.

• 1:48:56Rich Roll?

  Actually.

• 1:48:57Speaker 01

  No, that's why I grew out the goatee because once I

• 1:48:58Rich Roll?

  Would your mustache do that too?

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't have it. I don't have it there. Yeah. So it's like this. If I grew out a beard, it would probably be white here and then like and there's I'm older. I'm older now.

• 1:49:08Rich Roll?

  It's literally like you dyed it to make it a perfect dividing line.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  Full disclosure, I do dye now because I've gotten older. It goes, it'll come out gray. But when I, when it first happened, it was black and white. I'm just keeping that look.

• 1:49:18Rich Roll?

  All right. Keep it.

• 1:49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's, that's when I embraced it instead of trying to get rid of it. Because when it first happened, I'm thinking, okay, this is just a temporary problem. And you know, my skin is going to heal. And then after a while you realize it isn't.

• 1:49:28Rich Roll?

  How old were you?

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  I was 28. Yeah. So I'm going to dermatologist left and right. And they're diagnosing it as vitiligo. And I go, well, I've researched vitiligo and it doesn't make sense that that's what this is.

• 1:49:37Rich Roll?

  You're born with it.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  The way it manifested, right? Yeah. Vitiligo, you can develop later on in life, but it's not going to start with a big patch like this. It's going to be a milky white patch, usually on the forearms or hands, sometimes on the knuckles. And then it spreads gradually. It can start becoming 50% of your body at some point over time. But it never starts like what I have where boom, just comes right there from a sunburn. So anyway, I would bring this up and they would just be incredulous and say, oh, it's just coincidental. That this is something that was always latent. I was like, really? This is something that was latent? This was just waiting to happen? If it wasn't that sunburn, it would have just magically appeared, you know, like this. So anyway, after going through a lot of doctors, I realized that, well, first of all, not only do I go to these doctors, I actually went through the treatment for vitiligo, which is basically burning your skin again.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  They have this thing called PUVA treatment where they expose it to ultraviolet light at a high degree, which is supposed to stimulate pigment. But I would say that doesn't sound like a good idea because I have this because I got burned. And they're like, oh, this will work. And then I got burned again. So I mean, it was almost worthy of a lawsuit, honestly, because I got burned so bad that the skin was peeling. And it was really painful.

• 1:50:45Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  And I go, look, this is, I'm definitely not doing it again. And even after that, the doctor's like, yeah, you should try one more session. I was like, are you kidding me? This is worse than, now it's just worse than it was before. Fortunately, it didn't leave any permanent scars or additional scarring. But it was definitely something I realized that was clearly not the solution. So long story short. After going to a variety of doctors to no avail, getting the answers I needed, some recommended getting on immunosuppressive drugs because sometimes vitiligo is an autoimmune disorder, or it is an autoimmune disorder where your immune system is attacking healthy tissue instead of just damaged tissue. But the idea of suppressing my immune system didn't sound like a good idea. So they're like, "Oh, you'll be more prone to getting colds and fevers." I was like, "Well, that doesn't sound like a good idea." Now I'm gonna have this scar and I'm gonna have a flu. Forget it.

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  So the final stop for me, and this is when I realized, okay, you're just gonna have to live with this, is I went to this one lady who was basically some kind of tattoo specialist for medical conditions, where she said, "What we can do is permanently remove the hair on that side and then just color it in permanently." I go, "Well, that's gonna look funny. That means I'm gonna have hair growth here. I'm not gonna have it here." And she goes, "Yeah, it won't be perfect." I was like, "Well, forget it." I was like, "This sounds stupid."

• 1:51:56Rich Roll?

  And if you're like in the sun and you do get some coloration from being in the sun, it won't affect that area.

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:52:02Rich Roll?

  You'll have a discoloration anyway.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like, how do you keep it? Anyway, it just sounded more complex than it was worth. So then I used to put like Dermablend on, which is this makeup that people have for scars, right? And I would spend morning putting it on, like covering up this area. And that worked to some extent in terms of my confidence, because I was really insecure about this. That's what I left out is that I was already pretty insecure before this in terms of relating to people, but after this, I was even more insecure where I used to talk like this, right? So you would be on this side of my face. Yeah, exactly. I used to do that. I used to try to hide it as much as possible. I'd have my hand here like that. So I would put the makeup on and I was working in business developments at a company called Respond.com at the time, over there in Fairfax. And it was more for me, it wasn't because I was getting negative flack from people.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  I'm not saying like I had a bunch of negative experiences where people were like, "Whoa, look at that." It was just more in my head. You know, you're being self-conscious going, "Oh, I'm getting looked at. People are staring at me," and so forth. So I started doing this, but after a while, I was like, "What am I doing this for? Who am I doing this for? For strangers that, who cares what they think? You know, this is not my fault and I don't wanna be a slave to this where I'm trying, where I'm not in, where it's having a negative impact on my life." So after a while, I said, "I'm not gonna wear it anymore." Then I grew out the goatee. This is when I moved to Los Angeles. I was like, "I'm just gonna make this part of my look. That's just the way it's gonna be, because you can't do anything else." Everyone has scars, you know, mine are just, some of them are just on the outside.

• 1:53:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like God gave it to you as a, as a... As this obstacle or like this talisman almost for you to say like, look, man, you gotta like own yourself and your path, right?

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:53:42Rich Roll?

  Like, are you gonna get comfortable with who you are and like own it? Or are you gonna skirt it and try to find ways of hiding it? And continue on this path that you're on?

• 1:53:50Speaker 01

  It just made me more comfortable. I mean, I did more public, more seminars and public speaking, all of that stuff. I became way more confident with as we're, you know, initially you were kind of insecure, but after a while, I would, in some ways, I don't mind, I don't mind being paranoid or insecure or nervous because that means it's actually meaningful. You know, that means I'm actually gonna, I like being a little bit nervous before I give a lecture because that means I'm gonna be sharper. You know, if I go in there and go, oh yeah, I got this and so forth. And then you blink out and you might panic. But if I go in a little bit nervous, I'm gonna be more engaged and ready to focus.

• 1:54:22Rich Roll?

  Fitness and strength training came in before this though.

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:54:25Rich Roll?

  Like you started, you kind of got into it like at 17 or 18 or something like that?

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  I did, and I got into it because partially I wanted to build an armor so that I was protected from the outside world. And what I mean by that is if I'm bigger, I'm not gonna get messed with because I'd been abused as a kid and oppressed as a kid.

• 1:54:44Rich Roll?

  Like unconsciously.

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's like I felt it was important to embody strength, project strength, exude strength as a way to avoid conflict. It's like if I look tough and I'm big, then people aren't gonna mess with me. You know, for the most part, it's true. So that, that was, that was part of the reason why I got into it. Also, I just wasn't healthy at the time. I was drinking a lot and I was doing a lot of drugs. I was doing LSD and just doing a lot of marijuana and drinking. That was very unhealthy, you know, excessively. And I just didn't feel good. I'm 17 years old and I feel terrible. So I gotta, I gotta pull it together here.

• 1:55:17Rich Roll?

  Did you have like a moment of reckoning, like an epiphany? Or was it just like a gradual?

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  I think it was more gradual. Yeah, I just started again. I remember my father bought me a weight training sets, just a bench and some dumbbells and so forth. And as I started working out more, I started feeling good from doing that. And then as you started, as your physical appearance changed, that was very motivating. And then getting, I'm more into strength than I am, they're trying to be big and muscular. I'm more of a strength guy. So as I got stronger, that was very inspiring to me because I was really weak when I first started, you know, I couldn't bench press 100 pounds. I got pinned with that.

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  But that to me was motivating. I was like, wow, I'm super weak. So let's get strong. And every time you had a positive step forward in terms of strength development, it was very motivating. And it still is to this day. I love the feeling of lifting heavy weights and blasting through plateaus.

• 1:56:00Rich Roll?

  So you, so you, you start doing this before college, but then you go to college and you, you major in religious studies, right? Which is super interesting.

• 1:56:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. College, the thing about college is that I didn't know, I was, I was, I wasn't a good student in high school until like the last two years. I did pretty well. And that's why I was even able to get into college. Cause otherwise, forget it. But once I was in college, nothing was grabbing me in terms of what I wanted to focus on. Nobody's thinking about a major necessarily as a freshman. I mean, some people are pre-med and so forth, but that's, that's supposed to be an exploratory year where you try a lot of things. And I did, and then nothing gravitated towards me. So I, I decided I wanted to move to another campus. Let's try something else. Let's go to Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. Let's go to the West Coast. Instead of being in Ohio, I was at the College of Worcester in Ohio. And it was, I'm not a someone who necessarily believes in, you know, everything happens for a reason.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  A lot of times I hate that saying because it doesn't take into account that a lot of the negative things happen. And there's nothing good that comes out of it. That's a separate line. But sometimes I, I really believe in that statement because the one year I was in Lewis and Clark College, the mentor who got me into religious studies, this guy named Art Bueller, he was only there that year. He wasn't there before. He wasn't there after. So if I didn't go there that year, I never would have met him. And if I didn't meet him, I definitely wouldn't have majored in religious studies. So I met him, took a class on Hinduism. Liked it, familiar with Hinduism. I read the Bhagavad Gita growing up and my mother, my mother used to buy me Hindu comics.

• 1:57:30Rich Roll?

  Chromags are into this.

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. The Chromags like it. I'm down. My mother would buy us these comic books that had Krishna and Arjuna and stuff like that.

• 1:57:39Rich Roll?

  Those are the, yeah, we've, we have a bunch of those.

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  Do you really?

• 1:57:42Rich Roll?

  Well, you can get them at the Hare Krishna Center and they're like for kids, but they're like super violent. But they're like the original superhero. And they're like, the stories are super complex.

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, they are. The Mahabharata is extremely rich.

• 1:57:54Rich Roll?

  He grew up reading those as well.

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So I grew up reading those for sure. And then I took the Hinduism class. It wasn't until I got to Sufism, which is Islamic mysticism, people like Rumi and Rabiya.

• 1:58:09Speaker 01

  Hafiz, it was their poetry that really impacted me, this notion of being one with God or one with your higher self and not being a slave to your ego. Can't get rid of your ego, but your ego doesn't pull the carriage, you control it. Basically, ego are the horses, but you're the person controlling the carriage, you're guiding your ego. And that word, so Sufism really left an indelible impression on me, this notion of just living in the world, but not being attached to things so much that it has such a negative impact on your psyche, striving for a higher purpose, a more cognizant way of living. That kind

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  of stuff really resonated with me. That's what I don't really consider myself religious, and I don't call myself a Hindu or Buddhist or anything like that, but Sufism is definitely something that affects my everyday life.

• 1:59:04Rich Roll?

  Well, you can see it infused in all of your writing and the work that you do, like this idea of merely the existence of the highest, of your higher self, or the highest version of who you can be, kind of plays into that, your tagline or ethos of like, live life aggressively. Not live life aggressively, like pound your chest like a gorilla, but be intentional with your actions, like have a plan, like have, have a destination that you're working towards, understand the goals you're setting for yourself and how you're going to arrive there. So for me, when I see, when I, what I read into live life aggressively is really live life with conscious intention.

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, just purpose, and just have, have strong reasons for why you do anything, to have meaningful actions.

• 1:59:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:52Speaker 01

  And what's interesting about just, just the gorillas, when I was, when we went to Uganda, we did a gorilla trek out there. So it was my parents, my brother and I. And when you run into a, when you run into a flock of gorillas, they base, or a group of gorillas, they basically say that when the silver, if the silverback approaches you, don't look him dead in the eye. You gotta, you gotta lower your gaze and bow down. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, Nick Delgado will say that gorillas know who the alpha is in the group that they come across. So the silverback's gonna challenge that person. And this silverback in this group, and again, this is not a, this is not a super high testosterone group. This is my family. But this gorilla stopped right in front of me. It was probably about as close as you are. Looked me dead in the eye.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Massive gorilla, huge back, just exuded power. You know, like way bigger than any massive bodybuilder, but just exuded serious power. Looked me dead in the eye. I didn't even have to think twice about, I dropped to my knees and looked down immediately. And then this gorilla just kept going. Walked away, wow. But that was such an amazing experience to be that close. And there's no filter here too. You know, there's no cage protecting this gorilla from me. We're right there. How did you end up so close though? Isn't that, that's gotta be incredibly dangerous. It's not something that they, they don't try to get the gorillas to come close to you. But when you're going on a gorilla track, your goal is to go out there and see gorillas. Now, you're not necessarily, they're not necessarily trying to get you that close to the gorilla. But sometimes the gorillas are gonna come up to you. And if you start running, they're gonna chase you. You know, so you can't just run off or run up a tree or anything like that.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  You just basically have to let them know, hey, I'm not challenging you in any way. Right. They're peaceful animals. You know, they're not, they're not going around ripping people's heads off. Unless they're challenged or you're hurting one of their young and all that. You know, gorillas in particular, they don't have, you know, chimpanzees can have an evil streak and so forth. Gorillas are different than that. So anyway, that, and then the, and then the group is just gonna follow the alpha. So if the alpha doesn't see we're a threat, then the group is just gonna go with that. Right. But you could just, it was, it was like a scene out of Planet of the Apes or something like that. You ran into Caesar. Right. You're like, hey, man, you're in charge. How does that?

• 2:01:51Rich Roll?

  How does that play into like what we're, what were we talking about? I forgot.

• 2:01:56Speaker 01

  I'm not even sure why I brought it up. I just remember you saying gorilla. I thought it was a funny story.

• 2:01:59Rich Roll?

  Here's what I want to talk about. Like you, like you have this sort of online persona that's like a no bullshit. Like, don't pull any punches. Like, I'm gonna, I'm a straight shooter. I'm a straight talker. I'm gonna call you on your bullshit. And like, your book is in that tone. And you have like this thing that you're doing on Twitter now where you go.

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  My moralisms?

• 2:02:19Rich Roll?

  You start all of them. Like, once you start doing blank, like, there's no telling how messed up you're gonna be. And it's just like a litany of like, all of these fucked up things that like, we as humans can fall prey to. That kind of lead us astray.

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:32Rich Roll?

  And so, but like in person, like in real life, like you're a much sweeter guy than I expected. Like, I was like intimidated by you a little bit. You know what I mean? But I appreciate like that no nonsense.

• 2:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:43Rich Roll?

  You know, no filter. Like, let me, let me cut through all the BS that, you know, maybe you've heard and, and, and, and tell things to you straight based on my experience. Which is kind of the subtitle of your book, which is things that, you know, I don't know exactly what it is.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Self-help guru should be telling you.

• 2:02:58Rich Roll?

  What they should be telling you. And I think it begs the question of, of, you know, what's going on right now online? Like, a well-intentioned person could go on YouTube, or on the internet, or on the podcast sphere, or wherever, trying to get good information about everything from health, diet, nutrition, fitness, you know, strength training, self-improvement, psychology.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03:18Rich Roll?

  And there will be like, somebody there who's gonna tell you something along the lines of like, everything you ever thought you knew is wrong. And go behind the velvet rope here for this amount of money. And I'm gonna tell you the truth. And, and, and, and I think the techniques that are being employed are getting more and more sophisticated. Like, it used to be you could kind of smell that from a million miles away. Um, I think you still can to a certain extent, but it's getting trickier to separate who's real from who's full of shit.

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03:48Rich Roll?

  So how do you navigate that, see yourself within that ecosystem? And, you know, what are your thoughts?

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  I just try to be as authentic as possible in all formats. So what, first of all, when I'm on Twitter, or Instagram, or Facebook, I post with my real name. You know, no anonymity, no fake handles or anything like that. So whatever I say, I have to own. It's coming from me. That I think is important because a lot of these, a lot of times we see these negative YouTube comments, it's never with someone with their actual name. You know, it's someone that just wants to ruin someone's day, or feel like they're powerful, I can get on social media and just be mean spirited. And I don't like that trend of trolling, where people feel that the way to empower yourself is to diminish others, or put other people down. I think that's a big mistake. I think we can have differences and be respectful about it. Like,

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  for example, I don't eat meat for the all the reasons we went into, but I know people who eat meat who are very healthy. So I wouldn't tell someone, you can't be healthy and eat meat. My grandmother, great grandmother lived in to be a hundred, you know, eating meat, not a lot, but she ate meat. So I think by, not only is that what I believe, but I think by the fact that I'm not so dogmatic about you have to do things my way if you want to be optimal, that makes people more open for a civil discussion, as opposed to, hey, if you don't do this, then you're an idiot, right? There'll be here that kind of thing too. It's like, oh, those you guys, you guys who don't eat meat, you guys are stupid. So there's a, there's a lot of like, a lot of mean spirited dialogue, but I don't think it's useful in any way.

• 2:05:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's been a de-evolution in the civility of discourse in general, that's, that's being fomented by what's happening politically and economically right now.

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:05:35Rich Roll?

  But you see it in the health space online, you know, in this kind of ongoing, you know, I want to call it a discussion, but it's really, that would be putting it nicely.

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Well, I think people feel like they need to be on teams.

• 2:05:47Rich Roll?

  It's a mudslinging, yeah, everyone's siloed, everyone's picking their team.

• 2:05:50Speaker 01

  So if I'm vegan, then I'm anti anyone who's meat.

• 2:05:51Rich Roll?

  There's a tribalism that's happening, and it's really not serving anybody.

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  No, it's not. It's not.

• 2:05:58Rich Roll?

  So how do we transcend that?

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  I think, I think. I think it's important to interact with people that you disagree with and to not dislike them just because you disagree with them. So I think the more and also I think what happens is

• 2:06:13Rich Roll?

  But what happens is if you step outside your silo and adopt a talking point that doesn't adhere to your tribe's, you know

• 2:06:24Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, then you're a sellout and so forth.

• 2:06:26Rich Roll?

  We just saw this last week when Mark Duplass, a writer, director, actor in Hollywood, who's, you know, like a strident liberal

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:34Rich Roll?

  Said, hey, you know, like I had this encounter with Ben Shapiro, who's a, you know, more of a right, he's a right wing

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:44Rich Roll?

  personality and pundit. And, you know, if you're gonna, if you really have an interest in expanding your mind and hearing other people's opinions, like maybe have a look at this guy. And he got crucified and he had to delete the tweet. And I think it came from a good place in him of trying to build a bridge. But you can't say that if you're a member of this tribe, right?

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:07:05Rich Roll?

  So he had to take it down and he had, it was trending on Twitter and he just got reamed, you know?

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:10Rich Roll?

  And so when I see that, like, should he have said that? Shouldn't he have said? Well, we can debate that, but the bigger point is how can we have a civil, how can we extend our hand across the aisle and have a civil discourse that will move us forward culturally?

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, I think too many people have this all or nothing attitude. It's a very binary approach, right? It's either this or that. And I've gotten flak from vegans for not being more like, oh, you should, you have a platform, you should be more out there just converting people and so forth. I go, look, this is not my thing. I'm not going to be that guy who just berates someone for lunch, you know, for whatever they're eating. Plus, I don't think it's effective because they're not going to want to have lunch with me again, number one.

• 2:07:45Rich Roll?

  That's for sure.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  We're not gonna have, we're not gonna become friends. And they're also gonna have a negative impression of like, you know, those vegan guys are a-holes. I had lunch with Mike one time, the whole time he's just telling me about what I'm eating. And I've had many people, like I said before, that have either transitioned to vegan or are much more in that direction as a result of becoming friends with me because they see why I do it and so forth. That never would have happened if I just berated them from the get-go. So I think, I think those kind of approaches are

• 2:08:14Speaker 01

  I think also the fact that I feel online for marketing purposes, people often feel like they have to take a very stringent approach on something, be very controversial as a way to separate themselves from their herd. So if you're a balanced, reasonable person, people are like, oh, that's boring. This gets lost in the shuffle.

• 2:08:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it's not, it's not gonna, you know, promote, if it's not clickbait, then you're not, it's called clickbait for a reason, because you're being baited to click, right? Like, if you're taking a balanced approach, like, well, let's see what this guy's nuance is all about.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So a lot of vegans will say you can't be healthy. Not only is eating meat unhealthy for animals, which is clearly true, but you can't be healthy at all doing that. And that's not true, because we know a lot of people that are healthy who eat meat, right? Now, we can still, we don't like the fact that they eat meat because it's hurting animals, but let's not, the reasons for not eating meat are good enough that we don't have to add on top of that. That's kind of where I go with that. And then it opens, it makes you more open to these people wanting to talk to you. You know, I've had people like Rob Wolf, paleo diet guy, on the podcast, and he was a really cool guy. You know, he has different views on nutrition than I do. The whole paleo thing's totally different than I am.

• 2:09:29Rich Roll?

  I've had civil, you know, emails with Rob, and, you know, I respect what he does, and we may disagree on certain things, but yeah, I noticed, like, when I was doing research for this, like, he wrote a really nice post about your, about all the work that you've been doing, and

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's very nice.

• 2:09:43Rich Roll?

  and all that kind of stuff.

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  That's very nice. And then, and then there's, there's a lot of things he's doing that I do like. He's trying to get people to eat more fruits and vegetables. He's saying that, that the animals, that factory farming is definitely not good, but you should get it from these sources. Now, animals are still being killed, you know, right? So I don't like those options either, but it's definitely better than factory farming. And that's the other thing. It's like, oh, it doesn't matter if these animals are grass-fed and all that, they're still dying. It's like, yes, that's true. I understand that completely. But you have to understand that factory farming is so bad, and that there's so much suffering involved with that, that anything that's in a better direction than that is a step in the right direction.

• 2:10:17Rich Roll?

  Well, we have to, we have to place our targets on, you know, the biggest Culprits of, you know, things that need to go away. And I think that the great, not the great thing. I mean, the thing about factory farming is that that's something we can all unite and agree on.

• 2:10:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:10:34Rich Roll?

  Whether you're paleo or whoever you are, nobody is in favor of what's happening here for a litany of reasons.

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:10:41Rich Roll?

  And if we can unite on this one issue alone, we can create, you know, incredible change.

• 2:10:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that's where someone like Joe Rogan, who is, he's had, he's had some negative talk about vegans, but not always. He's had people like Mac Danzig on there. He's been complimentary of me before on his show. But he definitely agrees that factory farming is, factory farming is harmful. And he had the guys from Cowspiracy on there. And he definitely said, this is horrible and this shouldn't be happening. Right? So even though he's a hunter and he's a meteor and all that, that's a common ground we can all work on. And that is the biggest source of animal suffering.

• 2:11:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I agree. I mean, I've been on Joe's show twice. He's about to have John Joseph on.

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Cool.

• 2:11:21Rich Roll?

  And we've had a little dialogue. Like Joe really wants to, he, he sees the toxicity of this debate right now.

• 2:11:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:30Rich Roll?

  And he really wants to inject it with a little civility. And I really respect the fact that despite some differences that he has with people like you and I, he's willing to have us on the show.

• 2:11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:44Rich Roll?

  And he's going to have John on it and they're going to have a discussion about this.

• 2:11:48Speaker 01

  That'll be really interesting.

• 2:11:49Rich Roll?

  You know, he doesn't have to do that.

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  No, he doesn't.

• 2:11:51Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? And, and I think that, that that's really cool that he could, he could lend his giant platform to a voice that is coming from a different place from where he's coming from.

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  John explains these things really well.

• 2:12:02Rich Roll?

  And like I said, we, we will unite on factory farming, if anything, right? And this is something that really needs

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  That's gotta go.

• 2:12:08Rich Roll?

  ...redress at the highest level.

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  That's gotta go. I mean, I think the future of meat production is not, I don't think the demand for meat is going to go away, at least not significantly, but I think the way it's manufactured is. And what I mean by that is I think in vitro meat production, that technology is already being utilized now. And I think that's going to become more ubiquitous, more pervasive.

• 2:12:28Rich Roll?

  There's no question about it. And, and ultimately it will render factory farming

• 2:12:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I'm all for that.

• 2:12:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  So I mean, if you can, I don't know about what do you eat under those circumstances? You know, you're not harming an animal. So that's, that's an interesting one. But I would definitely be for other people consuming that 100%. And I think people will, people would do it right now if it were available and cheaper. See, that's the most important thing. If it's way more expensive than forgetting.

• 2:12:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, convenience and price point. It has to be the healthy choice or the more environmentally sound or the more compassionate choice has to be as accessible, as convenient as any other choice.

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:13:07Rich Roll?

  And it has to be at the same or competitive price point as these other products. And until you get there, you're pushing a rock up a mountain.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:13:17Rich Roll?

  So I think we're working towards that and it's exciting. So we're going to see what happens.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  I think so too.

• 2:13:23Rich Roll?

  You know, I'm in the same boat. Like I'm not the target audience for lab grown meat. I'm not the target audience for the Impossible Burger.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:13:32Rich Roll?

  But I'm glad that these things exist.

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  Well, what exactly is the Impossible Burger? Is that something that's injected with in vitro cells? What is that exactly?

• 2:13:41Rich Roll?

  No, there's no, there's no animal cells in the Impossible Burger. It's a plant-based burger, but what they have done that distinguishes it from the other products out there like Beyond Meat is how they have infused it with some form of heme iron that gives it that bloody taste.

• 2:14:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:14:03Rich Roll?

  It gives, it gives it a much more meat oriented texture and flavor than a typical plant-based burger.

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  Okay, got it.

• 2:14:10Rich Roll?

  And that makes it kind of a game changer in that space. And there's a lot of people that love it. Like it's not for me. It's like, it freaks me out to eat it.

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:19Rich Roll?

  But I'm not the audience for it. Like I've just been so long, like I don't need that or whatever.

• 2:14:23Speaker 01

  Is that what fat burgers using now in their patties? Cause I know they have a veggie burger now.

• 2:14:26Rich Roll?

  I'm not sure. I know Impossible is rolling out. Well, they have Impossible sliders at, at White Castle now.

• 2:14:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:14:33Rich Roll?

  And they're like every week, there's more and more chains that are, they're carrying it. And I think, you know, fast forward a year, two, five years, it's going to be pretty much available everywhere. And by that point, the lab grown meat thing will have come down in price. Like this is only going to become more and more integrated into our food system.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%.

• 2:14:51Rich Roll?

  So.

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I like the direction that we see. It can't, it can't happen soon enough. You know, the sooner the better. But at least it's happening.

• 2:14:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. So we've, uh, we've gone over two hours and we haven't talked about fitness. We haven't even talked about fitness yet, right? Like we haven't even, we haven't even talked about kettlebells, except for me mentioning how we haven't talked about it yet.

• 2:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:15:12Rich Roll?

  So, so this is your thing. Like you were early, like early adopter, um, early fan of, uh, of kettlebell training. Now it's everywhere.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. It's totally ubiquitous.

• 2:15:25Rich Roll?

  But you trained with the original guy, right? Pavel

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  Yes, I did.

• 2:15:29Rich Roll?

  Sotzeline. How do you say his name?

• 2:15:30Speaker 01

  Sotzeline, that's it.

• 2:15:31Rich Roll?

  Sotzeline, that's who I know has been on Tim Ferriss's podcast. Uh, so convince me why I need to start using kettlebells.

• 2:15:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:15:39Rich Roll?

  As an endurance athlete.

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  Well, the thing, the thing about kettlebells is that no weight training

• 2:15:46Rich Roll?

  I was calling them kettlebells.

• 2:15:48Speaker 01

  A lot of people do that.

• 2:15:48Rich Roll?

  So that shows my ignorance.

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  That's always someone who's never used a kettlebell.

• 2:15:52Rich Roll?

  It's like calling cycling, biking. Where are you going to go? Bike riding.

• 2:15:55Speaker 01

  Or, uh, what do they call soccer? Calling it, calling football soccer in the UK.

• 2:15:59Rich Roll?

  So I have just demonstrated my ignorance on this subject.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  Well, what I like about kettlebell training is no weight training system improves muscular endurance more than kettlebell.

• 2:16:08Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. You have my attention now.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And kettle, the ballistic exercises, right? Kettlebell swing, kettlebell snatch, kettlebell clean and jerk or push press. These are full body motions where you use your entire body to project that weight where you want it to go to you. Now, when you do it in high repetitions or for time, because there's a kettlebell sport where people do two lifts for time, where it means 10 minutes without putting them down. Either it's cleaning two kettlebells and jerking them overhead, and you can rest here in between reps, but you can't put the bells down for 10 minutes. Or you're doing a one arm snatch, which is an uninterrupted motion of taking the bell from the floor to overhead. And in 10 minutes, you can switch from side, not, you can switch once. So you can't switch side to side over and over again, but once, but you can't put the bell down. So if you can

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  Lift a 70-pound kettlebell for 10 minutes without putting it down. Imagine the structural integrity, meaning your body's ability to delay breaking down, and the endurance that you'll get from that. Because your breathing has to be on point. Your structural integrity has to be on point, meaning that your body's ability to sustain a performance against time, so you don't break down. And then your cardiovascular VO2 max has to be amazing. So developing these things would definitely help you with what you do. But even taking that aside, because I don't do a lot of the, I mean, I do high rep, double kettlebell swings and so forth, not so much the 10-minute stuff. That's just never took with me. But I definitely see the benefits. But even, even just set to 10 with short breaks, set to 20, just working on volume,

• 2:17:39Speaker 01

  you're using your full body, so it's not an isolation move. So you're building up a lot of endurance with it. Then you're also learning how to use your body as one unit, which definitely carries over to athletics.

• 2:17:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's the big thing. The functional strength aspect of using your entire body to do a movement with a heavy weight that is somewhat awkward and requires not just that isolated, that isolated muscle, but really your entire body. And that's what distinguishes it primarily from all of these other sort of, you know, traditional weightlifting, et cetera. And I do know, well, a couple of things. I know the difference in how I perform and how I feel as an endurance athlete when I'm functionally strong, and particularly when my back and my core is strong. It's a huge difference, not because it necessarily is going to make me run faster in the moment,

• 2:18:29Rich Roll?

  but when I start to get fatigued, I'm able to maintain my form and my technique for much longer, which then translates into a performance gain.

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:18:38Rich Roll?

  I'm somebody who just wants to be outside and I want to go on my long runs and all that kind of stuff. So for me, it takes a lot of like mental discipline to go into the gym and do these things and, and I have.

• 2:18:50Speaker 01

  What's cool about kettlebells, you can go to a park. When I lived in Santa Monica, I used to go to the beach and train with them.

• 2:18:54Rich Roll?

  I'm gonna, I've actually ordered a couple for the house already. My coach is really intent on getting me on this. And I've had fits and starts with it. My gym has them and my coach will write out a workout for me. And they all have these crazy names and I don't know what any of them mean. So I go to the gym and I pick, and I get the lightest kettlebell possible because I'm just skinny and I haven't, like, I haven't been in the weight room in a very long time. And, and this is, I've committed this year to becoming functionally strong. Like, I know I need it. And at, at 51, like, You know, my lower back gets tight and I'm a little creaky in the morning and like things aren't, you know, it's like I can't, I just can't get away with stuff I used to be able to get away with.

• 2:19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:30Rich Roll?

  And if I want to continue to perform as an athlete, like this is no longer negotiable. Like it's absolutely crucial.

• 2:19:35Speaker 01

  No, exactly.

• 2:19:36Rich Roll?

  And I've delayed it for way too long. So I get the lightest kettlebell, whatever that is. And then I have to go on YouTube and go, I don't even know what the names of these crazy exercises are. And I have to watch a couple of videos of like the guy doing it to try to figure it out. And I, and then I try to mimic it and I do it in the most inelegant way. Like I know I'm doing it wrong. I'm like embarrassed.

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  It's something you need training for.

• 2:19:55Rich Roll?

  I'm like, I'm supposed to be this athlete and I'm in here like, I don't know. It's like for me, I really have to get out of my comfort zone and be vulnerable because like I'm terrible at this.

• 2:20:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20:03Rich Roll?

  But I know that I need to learn and I'm like committed to doing it so much so that I, that I have ordered these for the house so that I can do them here.

• 2:20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're fun moves. I mean, the kettlebell snatched, a double kettlebell swing is one of my favorites. And that really strengthens up the hamstrings, lower back. In particular, when you're using one heavy bell, like you said, your midsection has to engage quite a bit with that. And so any, any one handed lift, especially with high repetitions, you know, your lower back and your midsection strength is definitely going to go way up.

• 2:20:32Rich Roll?

  Why did you pick this as your specific focus, especially before it was a thing?

• 2:20:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got into it. A good friend of mine who does jiu jitsu asked me, hey, have you heard of this kettlebell stuff yet? I go, no, let me take a look. And it looked intriguing to me. I'd never, I'd seen kettlebells in the old time Strongman magazines and so forth, but I didn't really know what you would do.

• 2:20:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's almost like from the twenties, you'd see these old Strongman guys holding these things.

• 2:20:54Speaker 01

  I, but I just thought that maybe they predated dumbbells and you just did the same thing that we do with dumbbells with this. I didn't really understand that there was a whole system of exercises specific to kettlebell training. I was already a fan of Pavel Sotlin's work. I had his Power to the People book. So I already liked what he was doing. I liked his message. And then I wanted to get into the fitness industry.

• 2:21:16Speaker 01

  And I wanted to get in with a unique selling point. Now, I wasn't thinking, oh, let me go try that that I've never used before. That's going to be the unique selling point. This was just was in my head. When I started playing around with kettlebells just for fun, I wasn't thinking like, let me learn this as a way to go teach it. And I was like, let me just play around with this. I enjoyed the movements. The kettlebell snatch in particular came really fast to me. That's that movement where you take it from the floor to overhead. And I got really good at that fairly fast. So I enjoyed the aggressive nature of the moves. You know, you're putting up, you felt like you were just tearing something apart. You know, you had this real primal feel to it. So that intrigued me to go take Pavel Satylin's kettlebell certification.

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  And this is 2002 in Minneapolis. And after taking his course, I was How many people showed up for that? Probably about 20 people. You know, this is really, or this is the second one he ever taught. And the second, he taught one before that. That's my friend, Steve Maxwell was that. He's been on Josha many times too. And I took that course and then things weren't the same. I was like, wow, this is awesome. I didn't even have actual kettlebells. And I had this handle, which you put dumbbells on. It was a plate loading kettlebell. Cause I didn't want to make the investment yet. So I was just using that. After I took the course though, I immediately bought a sip. So I was like, wow, this is totally different. And I love the way these things feel. I just liked the whole thing. They look cool. The movements are fun. And I also felt that this is a perfect home-based training system that the average person could really get behind.

• 2:22:44Speaker 01

  Because the average person is not really looking to get big and so forth. They want to have more, like you said, functional strength. They want to build a, play with their kids and not get tired. They want to feel strong and healthy. So I felt that what kettlebells delivered in the way that Pavel taught it would be perfect for that audience. Right. I went on to have developed my own style within it. But initially I learned from him and then I took it in my own way. And my technique is different than what he teaches and so forth. And then I learned from other kettlebell people. So it evolved over time. But that was definitely the most important step for the direction I ended up taking, getting into this whole health and fitness thing. It started with, if it wasn't for the four years I spent working.

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  I didn't work for Dragon Door, Pavel's publisher, but I worked with them heavily, meaning that I taught at a lot of their certifications. There were about five of us that were considered their elite team. They called them the Senor KCs back then. Steve Maxwell was one of them. Steve Cotter, who is the best kettlebell instructor by far, he's still out there. I don't teach kettlebells anymore. I just do my supplements now. But Steve Cotter is the best kettlebell instructor. He's still out there. And Nate Morrison was there. Jeff Martone, who's very immersed with CrossFit. He's the kettlebell expert in the CrossFit world. So there were about five of us that were early adapters who all left this organization at one point. I left before some of the other guys did. This guy, Jeff, left before I did. And we all went in our own directions. But the reason why

• 2:24:08Speaker 01

  we were able to go in our own directions is because we built up, we spent so much time getting exposed through Pavel's organization. And he was very generous with allocating time to all of us. It just got to a point where it was, I wanted to go my own way. I just wasn't happy being subjugated to their business philosophy of, as long as I'm involved here, these are the expectations that are on me. And I go, you know what? I want to be my own guy. I don't want to be known as his guy. I don't want to be like, oh, yeah, Mike's one of Pavel's guys. I want to be known as Mike Mahler, the strength coach in and of himself, not because I'm associated with someone else necessarily. So after four years, and it was an amicable affair. It wasn't like, hey, screw you and all that. Some of the other guys had really negative falling outs, but that's the nature of any

• 2:24:50Speaker 01

  organization. People are just butt heads. It's almost impossible.

• 2:24:54Rich Roll?

  So as an endurance athlete, what do you think, like, if I hired you as my strength coach? I mean, obviously, you'd have to evaluate where I'm weak and all this sort of stuff. But just in general, like, there's a lot of endurance athletes, runners, triathletes, cyclists, swimmers that listen to this show, watch the show. What are some key...

• 2:25:16Rich Roll?

  Like strength exercises or perspectives that you could share like what are the things that like everybody should be doing who wants to like excel in the endurance world?

• 2:25:26Speaker 01

  I think the most important thing with a straight training regimen for endurance athletes is to make your body more resilient. You know, you're not trying to become more muscular. You want to make your body stronger. You want to make your structural integrity more sound so that you perform better at what you do.

• 2:25:41Rich Roll?

  There's a huge fear, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt there.

• 2:25:44Speaker 01

  Oh, no, go ahead, go ahead.

• 2:25:45Rich Roll?

  There's a huge fear of like they don't want, like you're trying to get lean like it's all about like your power to weight, right?

• 2:25:50Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:25:51Rich Roll?

  And like for runners, you can never get like they're just trying to get as skinny as possible. And like, I don't know if you've ever seen a Tour de France cyclist with a shirt off, but like, you know, they look like 12 year old boys.

• 2:26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:02Rich Roll?

  And they're so terrified of any additional weight. I've found like if you want to have a long career and you want to remain injury free, like you need to be functionally strong or something's going to give eventually. So.

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  I would say that, you know, shoulders, lower back, ankles and so forth. Feet strength is really important. That's why a lot of us do strength training barefoot. I like to do my sprinting barefoot, Vibram's, you know, I'm not running barefoot on a field. So I mean, basically just making the body more sound. Like Frank Shamrock always said that he did a lot of bodybuilding stuff, not necessarily to make his body look a certain way, but so that his strength was sound. He didn't have imbalances so that when he's fighting, when you're fighting, you're using certain muscle groups more than the others. So it's actually important to use the muscle groups that you're not using in your sport when you're training for balance.

• 2:26:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:26:49Speaker 01

  And that's what bodybuilding gave him because people are like bodybuilding, that's not functional. You don't use those moves in, in the actual sport. And I think that's a mistake too with a lot of strength training now is you're actually trying to mimic the moves that somebody does with resistance. And that's not necessarily the best way to go either. You know, I'm not going to hold a kettlebell and throw punches with it. That's not, that's going to change the technique. I'm not going to take a heavier basketball and try to shoot that because that changes the technique now. I'm not going to put a weight vest on and go sprinting because my technique with the vest on is going to be different than without. So it's actually going to be counterproductive. So you have to look at-

• 2:27:21Rich Roll?

  You want to strengthen the supportive muscles.

• 2:27:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:27:23Rich Roll?

  Everything that gets atrophied through the repetitive

• 2:27:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:27:27Rich Roll?

  motion of whatever the specific sport is.

• 2:27:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. So whatever imbalances you have, your strength training regimen should address it so that you're not imbalanced anymore and you're less injury prone. The most important thing that a strength and conditioning program does is make you less injury prone. Like Steve Maxwell makes a great point of saying, you should never get injured when you're lifting weights because the whole point of lifting weights is to make your body stronger so that you don't get injured in your sport. So the last thing you want to do is push it so hard with weight training that you get injured. I mean, imagine someone who's a UFC fighter and they, they decide to find out what their deadlift max is. Now they blow out their back and they're like, well, I had a million dollar payday on Saturday. I guess that's gone.

• 2:28:08Rich Roll?

  Right. But they're in the gym and everyone's watching, you know?

• 2:28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:11Rich Roll?

  And it's a big dick measuring contest.

• 2:28:12Speaker 01

  I don't think a lot of those guys care. I mean, someone like John Jones is really into powerlifting, but he's an anomaly. That guy's just good at whatever he does. He's just extremely gifted. If he's deadlifting 600 pounds and he's, he just started maybe, this was after, maybe six months after starting, you know, this is unheard of, but he's just a gifted athlete. But if, but someone like him, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have anyone who is, well, first of all, there's really no reason to max out at all. Let's just start there. If you're a power lifter, you do it for your sport, but pretty much every power lifter has serious injuries at some point. If they do it long enough, that's inevitable.

• 2:28:46Rich Roll?

  So it's not about going to failure?

• 2:28:48Speaker 01

  No, I think you should stay away from failure. Like I lift weights, like right now I'm lifting really frequently. Well, I'll deadlift five days a week, but I only do three sets of five with 70% of my one rep max. You know, so that's about 405 pounds for me and I'm just working on technique. I'm working on technique and I want my back to feel great afterwards. I don't want any tightness. And as a result of not lifting so heavy, I can do it more often. And if I do it more often, I get better. Neurologically, I get better and just from the simple act of doing it. And that's probably Pavel's most, Pavel Soslin's most important contribution is this high frequency of training.

• 2:29:23Speaker 01

  With keeping several reps in the bank, staying very far from failure. Because the other problem with going to failure is that.

• 2:29:30Rich Roll?

  Well, you need a couple of days of rest.

• 2:29:32Speaker 01

  That and your technique is never good on that last rep. Right? You go to failure and number 10 is the only, is the last rep you can do. It's not going to look like number one through seven. Even that, even a few reps before that rep, your technique probably started degrading.

• 2:29:46Rich Roll?

  And what about, uh, like heavyweight, low rep versus low weight, high rep?

• 2:29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that just depends on the context as well. So, I mean, if you're weak in those areas and improving it would be useful to you. So, for example, like a UFC fighter, the stronger you are, the better you are. You know, to a point, so if your technique is great and you just, and you get stronger, you're going to be a better fighter. So getting, and then a lot of these guys have to, or men and women have to stay within certain weight classes. So lifting heavy weights and low reps, that allows you to get a lot stronger without getting bigger. Now, that's pretty much the way I train, so I'm not trying to get bigger. Even the size I have is more of a side effect of the training. It was not, it was not necessarily intent. You know, early on, it was, as I said, I wanted to kind of build a shield to protect myself. But at this point, I'm not trying to get bigger. I just like lifting. I just, I like getting, I like, I like the act of demonstrating strength.

• 2:30:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So for me, like where I'm in a very low resistance, high rep, you know, sport.

• 2:30:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:30:42Rich Roll?

  Basically going long distances. Would I be better served by doing, uh, heavyweight, low rep?

• 2:30:50Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 2:30:51Rich Roll?

  You do?

• 2:30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Because it's also, you're also going to be, one, you're going to be way less sore from that. And two, it's gonna, it's, it's a totally different stimulus than what you're used to. You're someone doing, and you can, not to say that you can't do some high repetition. Maybe at the end of a workout, you do a finisher, kettlebell swings or snatches, or you just throw it in the mix. But that wouldn't be my, the, the focus of the regimen. It would be more heavy weights, low repetitions, to make your body more resilient. And to a point, and again, it wouldn't be anywhere close to failure. So these wouldn't be maximum efforts. They would be challenging, but not to the point where an injury is even likely or even close to being likely.

• 2:31:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I got it, man. I'm sold, dude. All right, we gotta wrap this up, but I want to leave people with, um, I want to go back to the hormone thing.

• 2:31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:31:33Rich Roll?

  You know, I want to leave people with some things that they can, um, take away and, and implement it in their own life. Like to get a better sense of whether they're, uh, hormonally, uh, abnormal and some practices to help optimize hormone functionality.

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, one thing people can do, the one test you can do that doesn't cost anything is, like Charles Poliquin has this whole bio-signature approach, right, where he goes, where you hold body fat is an indicator of your hormone imbalance. So if you have a lot of pectoral fat, that's way too much conversion of testosterone to estrogen. If you have a lot of stomach fat, that's basically adrenal issues, your cortisol's too high.

• 2:32:10Rich Roll?

  And this is whether you're a male or a female.

• 2:32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. This is, this is across both sexes. So you can do the mirror test and just look at where you store your body fat. And that gives you a pretty accurate, it's not 100% accurate, but it gives you a pretty good indicator of what's going on with you. If you have a lot of tricep fat, it means low androgens, means your testosterone to estrogen ratio is not, is poor. And most, more often than not, blood work will confirm the assessment from this. I'm not saying that it's, it's in place of it, but that's something you can do right now, get an idea. And a lot of this is, I mean, we look at ourselves in the mirror every day. So nothing's going to be a big surprise, like, oh, wow, I didn't, I didn't think about that until he brought it up. So now you just know why it's happening. Maybe you're storing a lot of stomach fat because you're under a lot of stress. And if you want to get rid of that stomach fat, training and nutrition are important, but you have to mitigate the stress as well.

• 2:32:56Speaker 01

  Otherwise, you're just going to hold on to it. So that's one thing people can do. Blood testing, I recommend, directlabs.com. If you want to bypass a doctor, you can go to directlabs.com. They have different panels for men and women. If you don't know how to interpret the results, it's not going to be that useful. So then you can contact someone like Dr. Thomas Inglon or Dr. Mark Gordon, Dr. Nick Delgado. All three of those people are really good.

• 2:33:16Rich Roll?

  Right. One of the things that you recommended in one of the articles that you wrote is that you shouldn't, that your workout shouldn't, shouldn't exceed one hour.

• 2:33:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:24Rich Roll?

  That, that doesn't work for me, dude.

• 2:33:27Speaker 01

  Well, that'd be, provide some context.

• 2:33:29Rich Roll?

  I get what you're saying, though, yeah.

• 2:33:30Speaker 01

  No, I can provide some context, though. An intense workout shouldn't last more than an hour, right?

• 2:33:34Rich Roll?

  I got you.

• 2:33:35Speaker 01

  Some people, they go to the gym and they're just dicking around, they're taking selfies and so forth. They, they don't need to finish that up in 40, I mean, they should, but that, that workout is... It's not, they're not training so intensely that it's going to be negative. Now, here's the thing, if you work it really hard, you're not going to want to go more than 45 minutes.

• 2:33:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's what Nima said.

• 2:33:51Speaker 01

  When I finish one of my workouts, I'm done.

• 2:33:52Rich Roll?

  My workouts are 45 minutes. I was like, dude, I thought you were in the gym like eight hours a day.

• 2:33:56Speaker 01

  Sometimes it's even less than that because I train frequently, right? I train five, six days a week. So when I go sprinting, it's 10, 100 yard dashes. That doesn't take long. I just drive to the close by field, bang out the runs, come home. That's less than 20 minutes easily. And then my weight training workouts, some I do at the home gym, some I go at a gym too. But it's always a couple of compound drills, three or four movements, four movements at the most. Sometimes it'll be squats, weighted ring pull ups and some kind of overhead press. And then that's it. Maybe glute ham raises or some kind of torso work. Dragon flags is one of my favorite, that Bruce Lee exercise. That's one of my favorite ab exercises. But you get so much abdominal strength from heavy deadlifts and heavy squats and also ring pull ups, weighted especially and overhead that your midsection is getting, is getting hit,

• 2:34:40Speaker 01

  even if you don't hit it directly. So I don't think any of this stuff has to be, consume a lot of your time. These workouts don't take me more than 15 to 20 minutes. I go in my garage, I hit three or four moves, I'm out of there.

• 2:34:54Rich Roll?

  One of the things that you also talk about on the nutrition side of this, I mean, like we could talk about superfoods, we can talk about ginger and turmeric and all that. We could talk about that forever, but really basic stuff like spices, like cinnamon and things like that that everybody has at their home. Or like, you know, starting your day with water with like lime and sea salt and things like that. So can you talk us through, maybe we can kind of wrap it up with just a few, few of these kind of practices?

• 2:35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, a couple of things you could add today. So every morning I start with, I take a lime and I squeeze it into about 12 ounces of water and put a little bit of sea salt in there. And what this does is basically it nourishes your adrenals. So it's a great tonic first thing in the morning and it's very alkaline as well. And it's very cleansing. I mean, you're going to have to go to the bathroom within, you know, a few minutes of downing this. It just cleans you right out, you're feeling good. So I do that every morning. That's a good morning ritual. And that's something anyone, everyone can add that right now. It's just like, well, I don't know if I have adrenal issues. You probably do, you know? If you live in society, you probably do. Just get this in, it has a lot of health benefits anyway. So that's one thing people can do. The spices, I like to add ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon to all my protein shakes. I only have one a day, but I add it to that.

• 2:36:04Speaker 01

  And then with cooked meals, basil, garlic, not only does it make the food taste better, but you're just amping up the health properties of it even more so. And it's easy. You just add it right in there. Yeah, that's good. And what's your, what's like a day, a day in the life of food like? Say, so it's some days I do intermittent fasting. Well, I'll wake up, I'll have the lime and sea salt, and then I might have a cup of coffee with almond milk, a little bit of stevia, and then I won't eat until later on in the day. A lot of days when I, and when I'm going to be lifting heavy weights, because I like to lift weights about four to six hours after waking up, your body is decompressed, you're less likely to get injured, and I just feel stronger. I'm not thinking about lifting heavy weights first thing in the morning. Body's tight, you know, I need to loosen up, do mobility exercises. So I do some joint

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  mobility exercises that I learned from Steve Maxwell and Pavel Sotilin. And I have a YouTube clip, it's me and my dogs doing it in the backyard. It takes more, it doesn't take more than 10 minutes. And that's something I like to do every day. If I slack on that, I feel it. I get tight real fast, especially if you're lifting heavy weights and just getting older. So that's part of the routine. And then I'll have this super shake where it's eight ounces of almond milk, eight ounces of water, three tablespoons of hemp seeds, one tablespoon of flax seeds, one scoop of organic food bar protein powder. It's just one of the ones I like, has five different vegan proteins in it. A teaspoon of ginger, maybe a fourth of a teaspoon of nutmeg, cinnamon. What else do I add in there? I

• 2:37:29Speaker 01

  take a tablespoon of cacao, and then I add in a bunch of frozen fruit, so acai, mango, blueberries, whatever, whatever fruits people like, they can add in there. It doesn't have to be those. I blend that up, and this is a big shake. And then, like I was saying earlier, I just drink one glass at a time. And that gets me through the entire day. I don't have a big meal until much later in the evening. Right. And that'll be a stir fry, usually of just a lot of vegetables and some kind of, some, some legume. So maybe Monday it'll be black beans, Tuesday garbanzo beans, adzuki beans. It's a different legume each day. Mixing it up. Yeah, exactly. And what is, when people come up to you and say, well, what about protein? Or vegan? And what, you know, how do you answer that? Well, you know, what's interesting, what's interesting about protein is that I used to get chiropractic adjustments from Franco Colombo when I lived out here in Los Angeles. And he still has a chiropractic office.

• 2:38:14Speaker 01

  Does he really? Yeah, he does. He just does it for fun. I didn't know that. Wow. You should, you should go to him just for the hell of it. But anyway, I talked to him a lot about training and nutrition. And he told me that even when he and Arnold were in their heyday, they only ate one gram of protein per kilo. Which is considered extremely low by today's standards. And then they would add in maybe thirty Yeah, I think the daily recommendation is point seven for just an average human. Yeah, and I think it's, I don't even think, I don't think you need that much. I don't either. So one gram a kilo per, one gram a kilo and then thirty to forty grams when you're trying to put on size. So if they're just maintaining, they don't even do that, just an extra thirty to forty grams of protein. Now, these guys are big meat eaters. They're not doing it because, you know, a vegan diet is inherently lower in protein.

• 2:38:57Speaker 01

  So maybe you're trying to skew the facts to say you don't need protein. That's not what they're doing. But what they, and then people will say, well, they were taking steroids. I was like, well, steroids improve protein utilization. So that would be more reason to take even more protein, right? So the fact that they're on alabolics and that's all they felt what they needed for protein says a lot. And these guys also did a pretty high carbohydrate diet, about sixty percent of calories coming from carbohydrates. And then fat was, I think, fifteen to twenty percent, right? So it's quite a bit different. And these guys look great. That was the golden age of bodybuilding. People like Franco Colombo and Schwarzenegger and Frank Zane, you know, these guys looked incredible. Nineteen seventy-eight or whenever it was. Exactly. So one, I don't think you need one gram per pound. Definitely don't need that.

• 2:39:40Speaker 01

  And some recommend even more than that. And I just think that's absurd. I think one gram per kilo, which is what I get, so I weigh two hundred pounds, I get around ninety to a hundred grams of protein. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Right. You know, it just depends. And I've gone through periods where I've taken a lot more protein and never found it to have any additional benefit. I wasn't getting stronger, faster, or getting bigger. And my friend, Christian Thibodeau, who's a strength, very well-respected strength coach, he said the same thing, and he's a big guy and he's jacked. He weighs around maybe two hundred and thirty pounds, solid. And he said that he never found any more than a hundred and fifty grams of protein, if even that was that beneficial. Right. And most of these big guys are eating multiples of that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then

• 2:40:23Speaker 01

  But they're also taking, anyone that's a professional bodybuilder, they're using anabolic as well. Now, you can get away with a lot when you're doing anabolic. And you could say that that's more the reason why they're at a certain size. Look, I remember Testosterone Magazine wrote this article about, you know, how to, how to survive with a high protein lifestyle. What they meant is-

• 2:40:41Rich Roll?

  Wait, there's a, tell me the name of that magazine?

• 2:40:43Speaker 01

  This is called T Nation dot com.

• 2:40:45Rich Roll?

  Are you serious? There's a magazine called Testosterone Nation?

• 2:40:48Speaker 01

  It's just called T Nation. It's just a website. It's not, it's not a physical magazine. They had a physical magazine for a little bit. These are guys who used to be with Muscle Media 2000 and then they ventured off. I mean, they've been doing this for a long time, 1990s. But anyway, they, they talked about how a lot of bodybuilders have serious flatulence because they eat so much protein and how some of the big bodybuilders at Gold's Gym would carry around Lysol containers with them.

• 2:41:10Rich Roll?

  Oh, really?

• 2:41:10Speaker 01

  Because they're just farting on command everywhere they go. Okay, now, if that's something you're doing, you're taking in way too much of something. So let's, let's get to the point of, and also here's the other thing. Longer stretches in between meals, better digestion. Better digestion means less need for protein intake, because if you're digesting more of the protein you're eating-

• 2:41:30Rich Roll?

  Less food intake in general.

• 2:41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I don't even eat as much as a lot of people think I would. Most people think I probably eat five, 6,000 calories. I probably eat less than 2,500 calories a day. But what I'm eating is very high in nutrition. Forget about calories, it's very nutritious. And the more nutrition you take in, the less you have to worry about calories. At least that's my take. So I, I think a lot of things we have been taught, we just believe because someone said it, but there really isn't anything to substantiate it.

• 2:41:58Rich Roll?

  So you do do some plant-based protein in your smoothie. What else do you supplement with? And I know you have your own line of supplements.

• 2:42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I take, one of my favorite supplements is one I sell, it's called Restorzym. It's a systemic enzyme which lowers inflammation by, it induces healing, so it lowers the, the need for inflammation. And if I could recommend one thing to you, it would be that, because that'll help tremendously with aches and pains.

• 2:42:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'll try it out. You said you were nice enough to send me a box of your stuff.

• 2:42:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And if you need more, just let me know. That's my favorite. If I could only take one supplement, it would be systemic enzymes. And people are surprised when they hear that because they go, man, your testosterone booster is so awesome. It's a natural testosterone booster. Your brain communicates with your testes more to signal more testosterone production and it works extremely well, way better than anything on the market. It doesn't come close. Just, just look at the testimonials from people that have used it. Nothing comes close. That's my second favorite product because as you get older, you're, I mean, it's not even so much as you're getting older. It's just, it's just more wear and tear, right? It's more mileage. Those of us that are working hard physically and on our businesses and in our life, you know, we're being, we're being inundated with different stresses. What about B12, D?

• 2:43:04Speaker 01

  I take a B, I take a B100, which has B12, but that way I get all the B vitamins covered. I don't take an actual B12. Vitamin D3 I do take. I actually did score low on that when I did a blood test a while back, which is not too surprising because it's so hot in Las Vegas. We're not out in the sun all day long, you know? So, and if I am out in the sun, I'm not walking around half naked or anything. The irony of being like the sunniest place in the world is that you avoid it. It's like I have to take vitamin D3 and it's sunny every day where I live. There's something wrong, dude. It's kind of ridiculous. But I do take that and there's vegan options for D3. Right. And I'm playing around with DHEA cream right now because that is really intriguing

• 2:43:43Speaker 01

  to me. And DHEA cream not only increases DHA levels if you get the right one, right? There's a company that is a former compound pharmacy guy. So he created a DHA cream which delivers through the skin really well. A lot of the ones in the market, they don't deliver well at all. So you don't, you don't end up increasing DHA or anything useful. I'm just playing around with that because sometimes for me, when I go through a period of stress, my DHA can be depleted. So I'm just playing around with that to see how I feel, how different I feel when I'm using that. So I tend to play around with, with quite a few things, but the staples are that restores on my testosterone booster. I use eight weeks on, four off, because you never want to get too adapted to any herbs. I'm a strong believer in cycling herbs. I have an adrenal energy product called RED, which has rhodiola and has ashwagandha, shilajit.

• 2:44:28Speaker 01

  And maca, you know, that's really good for rejuvenating your adrenals and those of us that are working out hard, just giving you more adaptogen properties. The magnesium oil, I love putting on before going to sleep because I do sleep a lot, but I'm a light sleeper. So anything that helps me relax, because I'm always thinking, you know, when you're, I think I'm just naturally a thinker, but when you're an entrepreneur, you tend to always be thinking of stuff.

• 2:44:48Rich Roll?

  Have you experimented with CBD oil?

• 2:44:51Speaker 01

  I have, yeah. I like CBD oil. I, you know, I use marijuana recreationally just for fun, you know, not something like every day to go to sleep or anything like that. But if for, that's, that's my recreational, just alcohol, you know, that would be something I use if I want to go to a concert or something like that. Not driving around on it, just so people know I'm, I'm down there spending the night. But CBD, I think is great for pain, inflammation. Some of my dogs take it. I have an older dog. He's a senior. He's got some heart issues. So I give it to him just to keep him calm. You know, his heart's enlarged. So I have to keep his lifestyle as stress free as possible. So that he's good to go on that. So I do like CBD. I've never noticed anything profound taking it, right? Like, I've never taken it and been like, oh, wow, you know, this, because I've

• 2:45:33Speaker 01

  got bone on bone arthritis in this elbow, and I've had stem cells injected in there, which helped the most.

• 2:45:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:39Speaker 01

  There's a friend of mine in Vegas, Dr. Garcia, I had these mesencinal stem cells injected in there. That helped a lot. But I've got this bone spur in there where it looked like it exploded. So it's everywhere. And I can't have them operated on or shaved down because I went to a couple of surgeons. They said it's too close to the nerve. So that impinges full range of motion. Like, I can't extend this arm fully. But what the stem cells did is they got rid of the pain. Because I used to be in pain all the time, and I just dealt with it. I was like, oh, well, I'm just gonna have to deal with this. And it was a nuisance though, because you're always aware of it.

• 2:46:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:46:07Speaker 01

  But once I got the stem cells in there, the pain went away pretty fast. So that's been pretty powerful.

• 2:46:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, CBD oil is, I mean, for me, like, I haven't, I've tried it a couple of times. I think it helps me sleep a little bit, but it also gives me, it, it kind of makes me depressed.

• 2:46:23Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:46:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:25Speaker 01

  I've gotten that with certain things like,

• 2:46:28Speaker 01

  I remember I tried Sami one time, which everyone said was great for mood. I actually found it to be the opposite. It actually made me really depressed.

• 2:46:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:34Speaker 01

  So you just.

• 2:46:35Rich Roll?

  Everyone's different, man.

• 2:46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're all so complex.

• 2:46:37Rich Roll?

  Which is kind of goes back to the whole thing with your hormonal health.

• 2:46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:41Rich Roll?

  Like, you know, so, so if somebody's listening to this and they're like, man, I should think more about this. I should look into where I'm at with this whole hormone thing. Like, should they get a blood test? Like, what's the first thing somebody should do to get on top of it and begin the process of, of trying to optimize this?

• 2:46:58Speaker 01

  Well, what I would do is, one, go check out an article I wrote on leptins, just to remind yourself of all the things we discussed. That's on my website, MikeMuller.com. I have a hormone optimization lecture series too, which is eight hours. It's $50. It's really comprehensive. So that's good stuff, information to have to refer back to. In terms of testing, like I said, you can go get the blood work done, but if you don't know how to interpret the results, it's not going to be that useful. And sure, you can research these things, but it's always good to have a set of professional eyes on anything you're doing.

• 2:47:27Rich Roll?

  Is there a place where you, there, you can go and figure out if there's a doctor or a professional in your area who knows what they're talking about with this stuff?

• 2:47:35Speaker 01

  Not that I'm aware of. And honestly, it's, it's hard for me to recommend someone I don't know personally, you know, and stuff like this. I'm sure there's plenty of good doctors out there that I don't know that are great. But I've also had a lot of people that give me negative experiences they've had with anti-aging doctors where they walk in there and they just want to get them on stuff. It's like, oh, your testosterone is low. Let's get you on this. Your growth hormones, let's get you on that. It's like, well, let's get, my advice is to work with someone that wants to address underlying causes.

• 2:47:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like a functional medicine, integrative medicine doctor.

• 2:48:02Speaker 01

  I think Delgado is great. Nick Delgado, and he does distance consulting. I think Dr. Thomas Inklon, he's based in Phoenix, Arizona, but he also does distance. And what I like about him is the first phone call with him is free, where he'll assess your situation and he'll let you know if he can help before he charges you anything. And he'll have you do even more comprehensive testing, such as mineral imbalances and so forth, because you could have low testosterone because your copper and zinc are low.

• 2:48:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:48:26Speaker 01

  You know, and you just addressed a zinc imbalance. All of a sudden, your testosterone is great.

• 2:48:29Rich Roll?

  It's complicated.

• 2:48:30Speaker 01

  It is. Yeah, it really is. That's why it's, it's hard to say, you know, just do this one thing and you're going to be great, because you need to know, the more you know about your exact situation, the better it is to know what to do about it. Otherwise, it's just a guessing game. So you get the testosterone test done and it's low. Okay, we don't know why it's low, though. There could be so many reasons why it's low. It could be lifestyle, it could be stress, maybe you hate your job.

• 2:48:52Rich Roll?

  And it may take you quite a while to figure that out.

• 2:48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's why it's good to have someone who knows what they're doing, what he or she is doing, look at it because they've seen this kind of stuff a million times. You know, Thomas Inklon is not going to look at your lab work or mine and be surprised by anything. He's going to be like, yeah, I've seen this before. I know what to do. That's what you want. You want someone looking at it going, you know what? I know exactly what to do. You know, instill that confidence.

• 2:49:15Rich Roll?

  All right, man.

• 2:49:16Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:49:16Rich Roll?

  Great talking to you, man. That was awesome.

• 2:49:17Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Pleasure.

• 2:49:18Rich Roll?

  Super informational, and you gave me a lot to think about, and I'm excited for my kettlebell journey. You notice I didn't say kettleball. I said kettleball.

• 2:49:28Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 2:49:29Rich Roll?

  Cool, man. Thank you so much.

• 2:49:31Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:49:31Rich Roll?

  Really appreciate it. That was really cool. If you're digging on Mike, you can find him at MikeMauler.com. That's an H.

• 2:49:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:39Rich Roll?

  You're at Mike Mahler on Twitter. You gotta like unlock your Instagram account, right?

• 2:49:44Speaker 01

  I'll do that right after this. MikeMauler73 on Instagram.

• 2:49:47Rich Roll?

  And Facebook is aggressive strength, right?

• 2:49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe so. Yeah.

• 2:49:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so.

• 2:49:52Speaker 01

  And if you just go to my website, all the, all the buttons, yeah, exactly. Everything's on there.

• 2:49:56Rich Roll?

  And the Live Life Aggressively podcast and the book by the same name.

• 2:50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. My friend Sinseer Hogan and I do the show. We've been doing it for five years and it's a lot of fun. So I encourage people to check that out.

• 2:50:06Rich Roll?

  Check it out, man.

• 2:50:07Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 2:50:08Rich Roll?

  All right, dude. Peace.

• 2:50:09Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:50:12Rich Roll?

  Good to do that, Mike Mahler, and great information. I really hope that you guys learned more than a few things, and more importantly, that you implement whatever you learned today into your daily routine or your daily rituals. Do me a favor, let Mike know how this one landed for you. You can find him again at MikeMauler.com. On Twitter, he's at Mike Mahler. On Instagram, he is at MikeMauler73. And spread the word. If you enjoyed this episode or the show in general, share it with your friends and on social media. Hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or on YouTube. This whole show is available on YouTube as well, and I appreciate that.

• 2:50:54Rich Roll?

  If you're lost in your nutritional journey, you need additional guidance, you're just not sure what to eat, you're interested in this whole plant-based thing, but you don't know where to begin, I can't stress enough how helpful our meal planner can be, the Plant Power Meal Planner. To learn all about it, go to meals.richroll.com. And when you do that, you will find access to thousands, literally thousands of plant-based recipes. When you sign up, you fill out all this information about yourself, your allergies, your preferences, how many people in your family you're preparing food for, all kinds of good stuff. All of that gets factored into the algorithm, so you only get presented with the recipes that work for you. The system then generates automatic grocery lists,

• 2:51:38Rich Roll?

  so you know exactly what to buy when you go shopping. And if you're in a metropolitan area, chances are, we are able to actually just deliver the groceries directly to you. So you don't even need that grocery list. It's amazing. We also have insane customer support available to you seven days a week. All of this is available for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu at richroll.com. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today, Jason Camiolo, as always, for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for generating all those beautiful graphics and for shooting and editing the

• 2:52:21Rich Roll?

  video version of this podcast, which you can find at youtube.com/richroll. I want to thank my man DK for dropping in on the intro the other day and also for handling all of these relationships with our beautiful sponsors. Support the show by supporting the sponsors. And theme music, as always, by Analemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. I will see you back here next week with a very exciting episode with the one, the only Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, and his brand new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. It was an honor and a treat to spend an hour with him and really excited to share that one with you next Sunday evening. Until then, be well, treat yourself

• 2:53:04Rich Roll?

  well, be grateful, love others, love yourself, and get those hormones in order. Peace.

• 2:53:11Rich Roll?

  Namaste.