Habits and Hustle - Episode 295: Mark Sisson: The Primal Blueprint for Fitness, Metabolic Flexibility, and Entrepreneurship

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

In this episode of Habits and Hustle, I chat with Mark Sisson, who at the age of 70, credits his health and fitness to his consistent workout routine, his belief in metabolic flexibility, and a diet centered around real food that tastes good. Mark shares his journey in the entrepreneurial world, from starting a supplement company in 1997 to starting his blog, Daily Apple, and later selling Primal Kitchen to Kraft Heinz. We discuss the importance of listening to one's body and developing the ability to know when to stop eating, as well as the concept of metabolic flexibility, which allows for a steady energy supply without being dependent on hunger and cravings. We also discuss the significant role of nutrient-dense foods in curbing hunger and how mindful eating can lead to a healthier lifestyle, what Mark’s go to supplements are, and how walking is better than running plus the right type of shoes to wear that truly support the feet. Mark Sisson is an American fitness author, food blogger, and a former distance runner, triathlete and Ironman competitor. What we discuss: (0:00:01) - Mark's regimen for maintaining his health and wellness at 70, and his lifelong commitment to performance. He shares his journey from marathon running to triathlon and his philosophy on diet and metabolic flexibility (0:05:40) - The benefits of biking in the sand and stand-up paddling, and the benefits of toe shoes and other trail shoes (0:16:25) - Mark's approach to eating and his advice on listening to your body to determine when you have had enough. He also touches on the idea of eating nutrient-dense foods, rather than relying on processed snacks (0:28:22) - Mark shares his entrepreneurial journey from starting a supplement company to creating his blog, Daily Apple, and eventually starting Primal Kitchen (0:38:02) - Mark's lifestyle changes after the sale of Primal Kitchen and the success of his Primal Health Coach Institute (0:45:29) - Why collagen should be considered a fourth macronutrient (0:56:10) - The concept of tracking steps with a phone or wearable device and Mark's experience with running (1:03:20) - Mark explains why walking is the best exercise for humans and the benefits of minimalist shoes for both walking and running (1:12:06) - The importance of listening to your body when it comes to eating and how Mark's background helped him become an early adopter of healthy living (1:19:22) - The benefits of walking with minimalist shoes Thank you to our sponsors: Greenfat: Head over to greenfat.com and use code Hustle20 to save 20%! OneSkin: Head over to oneskin.co and use code HUSTLE15 for 15% off. Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off. Find more from Jen:  Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen  Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Learn more from Mark Sisson: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksissonprimal/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I got this Tony Robbins you're listening to Habits and Hustle, crush it. Mark's on the pod past and I've been a huge fan. I just was basically like fan-girling over him before we started rolling. Mark just quickly is like the OG in the health and wellness space in my opinion. As in entrepreneur he had this thing called the Daily Apple. You still have it by the way. It's not like it's gone, but it started in 2006, which makes it almost like, it's 17 years old.

Yeah, 17 and still one of the best newsletters that I've ever read, you're welcome. And Primal Kitchen, which is in my kitchen right now. So I'm just going right for the jugular. You look so good. How old are you? I just turned 70. You just turned 70.

Okay, you look like you're like 40. Your body is insane. What are you doing? I want to know everything. I want to know what your routine is, what your regimen is. You know, it's genetics. Okay.

You cannot discount that. I've been athletic my whole life. So I started a routine, a habit of working out daily in my early teens. It started with running, but I also started lifting weights in my teens. I've always been competitive. So the level of my athletics was such that I would be forced

to dig deep and find the pain cave and all of the things they talk about right now. I chose to be an endurance athlete. So I chose to, first of all, it was a marathon runner in the 70s, quite a good one. And from there, I got injured after seven years of, of, of overtraining and beating myself up doing that. So I, I switched to triathlon. And so my first triathlon ever was Ironman in Hawaii in 1981. I went up in fourth in the 82 Hawaii Ironman. So I've always somehow been associated with a type of workout that is basically managing discomfort.

You know, some people will play soccer and basketball or I now play, you know, Frisbee, ultimate Frisbee. But in those days, I was just managing discomfort every day. How deep a hole can I dig for myself? Right. And hopefully recover from it and improve as a result of it. So it was all about performance for me for the longest time. What's interesting is that people who've done that for as many years,

like you said you started in the 70s and like your body doesn't seem, like I don't know, I don't know you in a very deep level, I just met you, but you don't seem like your body's broken down. Like you look like you're very fit, like you're still very active, you're doing ultimate frisbee. How did you even maintain that ability given the fact that like, especially people who are runners like you, their bodies break down so like after a while. Oh, I want a campaign to eradicate running.

Really? We'll talk about that. Yeah, I want to. But you know, as I think walking is the best thing a human being can do for oneself. No, I mean, I've lifted weights, so I've maintained muscle mass, I've maintained range of motion, I stretch a little bit, I don't do yoga for better or worse. We'll talk about diet, I think 80% of my physical results, my body composition as a result of my food choices, which is what I've written about for 30 years.

I started with just real food, but then sort of morphed into paleo and then primal blueprint and then keto and then intermittent fasting. So I've been at the forefront of a lot of these different modalities or these different ways of eating that manifest themselves in improvements in metabolic flexibility and metabolic efficiency. You talk about that a lot though. We're going to talk all about the metabolic flexibility. Sure. I know that you're like a big advocate for that. Obviously for good reasons. Talk about that. By the way, did you start this whole idea behind that?

Because I always whenever I like click on something or back when, I would always hear you talking about metabolic flexibility. And other people would say when I was speaking to Mark, we were talking about, right? I mean, Rob Wolfen, I popularized the term many years ago. And it just became this way to describe a state of the body where you could access any substrate for energy that was available at the time or necessary at the time. So whereas most people spend their lives

just being good at burning carbohydrates, right? They eat a lot of carbs, they turn it in the glucose or glycogen, they work out, they burn that, they never burn fat, because they never get to the point where the body says, let's burn fat. There's always plenty of calories available in the form of glucose or glycogen.

So metabolic flexibility describes the ability to extract the energy from the fat stored on your body, the fat on your plate of food, the glucose in your bloodstream, the glycogen in your muscles, the carbohydrates that are on your plate of food, the ketones that your liver makes in the absence of glucose, and once you develop the state of flexibility, a whole world of empowerment opens up where you're not tethered to appetite and cravings and hunger all the time.

Your day isn't dictated by when meal times are. You have all the energy you want all the time for the most part, and one of the side effects of that is you, because you're continually burning off your own stored body fat, you tend to have low body fat, which a lot of people think is a good thing. Yeah, then I'm one of them. Yeah.

We're both one. Yeah, so back to, how did I get to where I am today? It's a combination of some initially starting with aerobic athletics cardio, they call it in those days. And then- This don't call it cardio. And transitioned over to weight lifting and speed and strength, which I think was the probably the right way to do it. And then recently, if combined the two of them, so I was telling

your husband, I ride a fat bike on the beach, a fat tire bike on the sand in Miami. Do that at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. It's a brutal workout, but it's a lot of fun. Wow. Is it just all the resistance? It's all the resistance from the deep sand. And, but, you know, the good news is you don't even need a helmet because there's no cars.

The worst that's gonna happen is you fall over because you're going so slow. You can't even keep the bike upright in the sand. So you fall into soft sand. I do that. I do stand-up paddling. Well, how long do you go on the bike for when you do that? Minimum an hour, and actually I have one in L.A. and I took it down.

Yesterday, I had an hour and a half ride down to Measkell and then down to the beach. And it was low tide, and I ride the low tide line down to Venice Pier and back, and then up to Measkell to finish. It was an hour and a half. Wow. It's amazing. I want to get one of those bikes and do that. I'm surprised more people don't. It's really one of the coolest workouts I can imagine. The bikes are very stable and sturdy.

So between that and stand-up paddling, which is my other sort of, I would say cardio, except my heart rate never gets above 130 when I'm doing stand-up paddling. I can get it to 170 still on the fat bike. Do you do e-foiling still? I do. I saw my foil.

It's one of those things where I'm at a stage of my life where I'm managing risk better. I stopped snowboarding two years ago. I just don't have the need for speed anymore. I was an avid snowboarder for a long time. One of the best weeks I've had in my life. I took my 17-year-old son at the time. We went up and did helicopter snowboarding for a week in Northern.

I'm pretty skiing, but hell of snowboarding. Hell of snowboarding. In fact, we went with skiers. You know Tony Horton was here. Yeah, of course, I know. So Tony's a very good friend. So he and I, we went to Michael Wiggley's place. Anyway, so that's like my idea of adventure,

snowboarding and deep powder. Now that I'm 70 and I'm just relegated to doing, going down groomed slopes in Aspen or mammoth, I'm like, I don't need the speed and if all I'm doing is trying to stay safe and scrub off speed, let me find something else to do. So I did that with no more snowboarding for me and then with the foil,

it's great and it's an amazing feeling. It's like snowboarding times five in terms of the feeling of floating and flying. But you know, at some point when you've done it enough times, you just doing figure eights around a loop around a lake or around the ocean, it kind of loses its adventure nature for me. And I had an accident on it that sort of made me think, yeah, maybe it's not appropriate for me to keep doing this. So I sold my foil recently. So when was the accident and what kind of accident was that?

Just, I just had a long, for me a long session, like 45 minutes, and I literally hadn't touched the water once in 45 minutes, which is going back and forth. I thought, typical of skiers, too. One more run. I'll make one more run. And on that last run, I did a tight turn, and I got too high out of the water. And when you're out of the water, you lose the lift and the flight. And so it started to fall in with a, with a, a foil like that. It's, you're riding a guillotine. It's a very sharp blade, the wing. So I kicked it aside while I kicked it so hard

it flipped up and cut me in the back. So I just said, ah, that's the universe. Tell me, this was fun while it lasted. And let's what's next. Exactly. I have a couple of them in my garage because my husband's a big foil or two. Did you ever do, by the way, any of those 100 mile runs or just marathons? Just marathons? So you didn't do those crazy 100 miles? I mean, I

probably would have and could have, but by the time I retired from running with injuries, I was unable to do the kind of training that was necessary to do that. So I would have been good at it because the longer the distance was, the more efficient I was. You know, I was not a very strong, I was quite strong as a 10K runner, but Marathon was a much better distance for me because I could maintain such a high level

of my aerobic capacity for a long period of time. So I think, you know, I think I would have been good at Ultras and now that, now with the new, you know, equipment that they have, I have a lot of friends good at altruism. Now with the new equipment that they have, I have a lot of friends who are wearing my shoes. Doing the training in my shoes for altruism, and then wearing their special trail shoes. But doing nine hour rucking in the mountains

over steep terrain, wearing the polluvus, wearing the toe shoes. So why would they be wearing them with the training? But they're basically like, they look like five fingers. By the way, and you weren't behind five fingers shoes back when I thought you were. No, no. So because that's what I thought that was your whole movement. Primal, this, that.

Well, I mean, I was a big fan for the longest time, but you know, in my estimation, they sort of left a lot on the table. A lot of design, potential, and a lot of other things that should have evolved with that technology, they never got around to. So I said to myself, I'll do this myself. So when, like, when did they disappear? They don't disappear? They're still around. Of course, yeah. Okay, so, because why would people train in these shoes? They're called Paluvra guys, and they're very comfortable, and I will tell you something. They actually look cute on, even though they may look a little strange in the box or in a picture, because Mark's wearing a really nice pair. They're like fake leather, right?

So it's real Napa leather. This is actual leather. Oh, because they're actually cute. I think they're really cute. And they are way better for your feet. It's called foot health, which we're going to get all into. Don't worry. But you're saying something that like people are training in them. But then why wouldn't they actually run in them? Well, at some point, we're going to encourage running in these, but it's such a strong, a long transition. When you go from wearing restrictive footwear that's thick and cushiony and encapsulates in cases of feet, and you don't work the small muscles of your feet. Right. Attrophied.

So if the muscles of your feet actually atrophy. And so what happens is you put all that pressure and all the burden on the ankles and the knees and the hips, and that's why people get injured. That's so quick. I have a lot of injuries from that. I had tons of ankle issues. And my feet became flat because I wear orthotics in my shoes.

When you wear orthotics, you're telling your feet, ah, you don't even need to wear your ass. Yes. Arches out. We'll support your arches for you. We don't, I don't know. We'll get into this. That's so true though. It's so crazy.

So my ultra runner friends and some of my marathoner friends are now spending the day in Paluvas doing their errands, walking around, passively training the small muscles that they're feet all day long. They might even, they'll wear them to the gym and they'll do their leg work in them. They'll do sprints in them.

Anything that you would do barefoot, like if you're going to do barefoot sprints, you'd do this. But at some point, you know, if you haven't trained well enough to get your, those small muscles of your feet acclimated and adapted, then you know, you can encounter, you can get some injuries. Now, there are people myself included, I could run forever. I think my Paluvas, the ones that we make for training, are the best running shoes ever made.

I've been doing this for 15 years. We just don't encourage it with new people. So where did the whole idea come from? That you have to wear like, for me, and like all my feet are flat and narrow. So then they say, where are these orthotics and do all these things? And then like that, and then over time,

those are the things they're probably causing all these crazy injuries. It's bizarre, but that's medicine. That's so podiatric medicine, podiatry. I was in college. I was one of the best, I was the best runner of the Catholic Cross Country team and on the track team at Williams College. I sat my last year out with with Condromalacia, with a knee injury because I was wearing Nike's

thick, cushioned trainers trying to get 40 extra miles a week in because I wasn't feeling the pounding. And because of those 40 extra miles a week, all of the stuff that would have been my feet that say, hey, hey, slow down, stop, it's good enough running for the week. When you bypass all that information, you send it up the chain to the knees or the hips or whatever. And so in my case, I got Conor Malesha. Well, one of the, I was one or the hips or whatever. And so in my case, I got conor malacia. Well, one of the, one of the, I was one of the first miracle cures with orthotics.

In 1974, 1975, I went back to running and racing because I wore these card acrylic orthotics. Well, they didn't fix the problem. They alleviated the pain. Yeah. So I still wound up with the problems over time. So for a lot of people, if you're not fixing, this is medicine, right?

You don't fix the problem, you alleviate the symptom. That's modern medicine. So if you have a, if you're a podiatrist and you believe in orthotics, you're going to want that approval from your patient, oh my god, my pain went away because of the orthotics, thank you, Doc. Well, went away for now, but it's just moving around to other parts of the body.

And I'm not gonna say that some people don't need orthotics, but your feet are born perfect. Some people always born with flat feet. Jennifer, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I've got flat feet, how am I? I was born that way. You are born with perfect feet. You just, the fact that you don't have a pronounced arch doesn't mean that all of the musculature in

your foot, including the plantar fascia, doesn't work, it's just you haven't used it. Right. You've been encasing it your whole life, your parents fault. They put you in these cute little shoes. They look so cute. You know, the little Mary Jane's and all of them. They look really cute. You know, and then you get to high school and you start wearing heels and you start looking, oh, that looks really cute. And then the next thing, you know, you've got foot problems.

No, 100% and it's over, it's overuse over time. Okay, we'll get back to that afterwards. I wanna get back to why you look so good. Okay, so the running, then you did the strength training. But now, what else are you doing to maintain this? So you told me what you do in terms of exercise. Yeah, so I lived twice a week. I mean, I do.

I want the non-negotiables. Like, would you do every morning? I want to know your routine. Usually I wait till the end for this part, but I saw you. I'm like, I got it out. Like, this is the information people want to know, right? Because look at you. I mean, he literally is like, you would think he was 35.

OK, go on. Thank you. I gosh. Yeah, it's true. Uh, appreciate that because I've spent a lot of time in the sun and mind I think by, you know, the face does not, does not lie about that. But anyway, non-negotiable. So I mean, like, I don't eat breakfast. Uh, so you intermittent fast. I don't even call it intermittent fasting because I think it's, it's more like intermittent eating, but it's a restrictive eating window, right? So it, it, what it means is I wake up and I do an assessment like I have all this energy and I don't feel hungry,

why would I want to eat? So I have a cup of coffee when I wake up. I do. You put milk in the coffee or heavy cream. Heavy cream. Okay, so I know you're also in the ketogenic stuff. Yeah. But wait, past you quite, before I even go into this,

I think this is an important thing to ask. Are you someone who lives to eat or eats to live? Because if someone who lives to eat, like I love food, it's really hard for me to intermittent fast and to do all these things, right? Because I love food so much, right? People who don't, there are other people don't give a shit, like they can eat,

they forget to eat, I'm not one of those people. So it's easier for them for, are you one of those people? Yeah, no, I'm someone who I don't live to eat. I eat to live. But that doesn't mean I don't enjoy every single bite of food I put in my mouth. So I don't eat stuff just because it's supposed to be good for me, for instance. If it doesn't taste good, like you could make me the best kale salad you ever made with a lemon, you know, vinegar, whatever dressing I'm like, thanks, but no thanks, not having it.

I eat what I want to eat, and typically when I want to eat it, and then I think one of the great skills is to realize when it's time to finish. It could push the plate away and say, you know what, I don't need to finish that 12-ounce steak. I don't need to finish all of the salad that was put in front of me, even though it might be considered ultra healthy. Right, so you limit the amount of intake, food intake.

I don't do it out of some sense of... Interrexy, you know. Oh yeah, and orthorexia, or anorexia. Yeah, I just do it because I'm so entuned with when I'm no longer hungry for the next bite. And it's, so many people, you're a great example of what I would say most people who look at life and who really appreciate food and who would say, what's the most amount of this meal I can eat and not gain weight?

What's the most amount of this dessert I can have and not feel like it's like? Or I pick food that has big volumes. Sure. Or what's, you know, how can I really fill myself up here and not feel like a pig or not feel like I'm over doing it and feel good about myself? How can I gorge and you know, and how can I, how can I gorge, and then over lifetime,

how can I eat a lot and not gain too much weight? Yeah. And so you see people who are, I've seen over the years, decades see people at the gym and they're on the treadmill, like five days a week, burnin' 450s, 500 calories in treadmill. I'm like, like, first of all, it's beautiful outside, you could go run outside, why are you in the gym burning, you know, on this treadmill?

Well, I like to see how many calories I burn on the treadmill. Why do you do that? Well, I love to eat. So, wait a minute, you're kidding me. So you would rather put yourself through all this struggle and suffering and sweating and misery. So you can have a few more bites of something you probably shouldn't have in the first place. How bizarre is that as a motivation?

So true, but haven't you ever heard of the saying common senses and so common? So I took an opposite approach a bunch of years ago and I said, instead of seeing what's the most amount of food I can eat and not gain weight, what about what's the least amount of food I can eat, maintain muscle mass or build muscle mass, have all the energy I want, never get sick and most importantly not be hungry. Because the hunger part of it destroys everything. And if you do that experiment and you start to really pay attention to how much food you're used to eat and how much you don't need to eat.

And if you break it down, it's like nobody needs more than 120 grams of protein a day. You really don't. Yeah. You don't need more than 150 grams of carbs. And even if you did, it would mostly be on the form of vegetables. And if the rest is fat, we're talking about less than 2,000 calories a day. So most people could live on, and I could live well and maintain my mass and my energy on 1,750 calories a day and working out for an hour a day. And I could live well and maintain my mass and my energy on

1750 calories a day and working out for an hour a day. I can get away with more And I do and I eat more but I eat cyclically so some days I don't eat that much some days I eat not twice as much, but I eat more right right right, but you're not eating for emotion But I'm not and and and again I'm back to this notion that if you appreciate when, first of all, if you understand that you don't need to eat that much to maintain all this stuff. So you don't need to. That's not a requirement. And so what it becomes is a luxury like, okay, how much can I eat and not gain weight and how much can I eat?

And so most people find out that the 3,500 calories a day that they're consuming, breakfast snack, lunch snack, dinner snack, they would be well served at 2,200 calories, you know, 30% less than they're consuming if they were just a little bit more judicious about their choices, which also means more nutritious food. So when you're judicious about your food choices, you're not eating the bag of Doritos or the ding dongs, the hoes or the or the whatever and you eat food that is nutrient dense as they say now you wind up not being that hungry anyway. Well yes but also there's a different thing need and want like I know I don't need to eat that much but I want to because also I think the what you're what you're saying also the treadmill

situation that let's just use that whole conundrum, because the more you work out, the hunger you get, too. Yeah. That's an issue. That's an issue. It's an issue. So what I've had to do, and this is like a trick, I guess, that I've, you know, if I work,

if I like run super hard, like I do like hard sprints, I end up eating way more during the day, because I'm starving, versus if I went like kind of slow and more moderate, I won't eat as much. So it actually makes more sense for my body to go slower, so I won't have that appetite, that's like ravenous. I get it, I get it.

But again, we talk about genetics. Yeah. As Blake Schulte would say, you're so little. You know what I mean? So you have the genetics that allows you to get away with that. And you say, mm-hmm, but you do. I mean, it's like, you know, how it can manifest itself. In some people, it's pretty impressive how quickly people can gain weight with just a

little bit of extra food daily over time. Over time. So maybe now we're talking about some mental adjustment to your emotional attachment to food and what does it mean that you have to feel like you have to finish what's on your plate or you look at a size of, you look at the buffet which has 12 slices of cheesecake and you picked the biggest one because it's still one serving. 100%. This is like a therapy session now, you're 100% right? That's exactly what I do. Yeah. But it's so true. It's all, a lot of its behavioral and also psychological. As you know, I always strive to become better and bolder every day. And this has been my motto

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and head to airdoctorpro.com and shop using the promo code hustle23. That's airdoctorpro.com and shop using the promo code hustle23. What about your supplements? Like are you taking, are you on, I want to add, are you, you know, I've heard you also talk that you're not until the biohacking nonsense, right? So does that mean you're not, like, are you, are you doing doing the sauna you're doing the cool plunge? What are you doing in terms of the dualities? Yeah, okay, so in terms of supplements, I I do take testosterone and I've been doing testosterone. Okay, you know, DRT. Yeah, for almost 10 years. Just a, a, a, a, a, a, a, interesting, only for 10 years. So we're 60. I started on a 60. Yeah, little after 60. Yeah, so it's like, you know, that's become a huge craze now.

Like, people in their 40s, even the 30s are taking it. But you said you didn't start until you were 60. No, no, no. I didn't start until I felt, like I held off as long as I could until I thought, all right, now I'm at a point where if I don't do this, my muscle mass will decline at a rate that I can't keep up with. And it had more to do with the practical application of my being able to go play ultimate frisbee or ride, you know, with the guys and to be competitive still in that regard.

So did you see like your ability kind of getting less and less? And that's why you decided to succeed. Yeah, I just, I saw my muscle mass go, my weight dropping a pound a year, something like that. And I knew it was all muscle because, you know, I've had the same body fat since I was 19. Wow, so you knew, so that's why you went on to, so you started that and then what did you see happen? Did you like become like,

because now you look very muscular again, did it make a big difference in your life? Five pounds. So, so over the course of a year, I put on, I put on five or six pounds, I worked hard at it, and then I just now have maintained that for almost 10 years. So you've been doing that for 10 years, and you do a shot yourself every day, I guess? No, no, once a week. Once a week, yeah. Once a week, okay.

And then I do collagen, because I'm a big fan of collagen. I make a collagen supplement. The reason I make a collagen supplement was because I'm such a big fan of it, and I think everybody ought to supplement the collagen. Is it the one that you just wait? Primal Kitchen, but you sold that like you said four years ago. So, but you're still, so even though you exited, do you still, do you have, do you have another line of supplements that you just do? No, I, Primal Kitchen makes calls and stuff. Oh, you're still, so you're still taking that Primal Kitchen that you create. Why would I not? Well, no, because you know what, a lot of times what happens is people get bought out by big companies and they change the formulations. No, no, no, no.

So, I mean, this is, I get this all the time, like, oh, you sold out to craftimes, you sold out the big food. I would do the same thing and most people would, honey. Well, big food, God bless them. They're obligated to improve their shareholder equity. In our case, craftimes is a company that owns 50 different brands and their brands are legacy brands. You know, Jello, Kool-Aid, Crystal Light, Oscar Meyer,

Orida, Planners, peanuts. They've owned all these brands, Jell-O. They have no, brands have no relationship to each other. They're just a collection of great, or not so great companies. And so they saw what we were doing and they said, that's a company we'd like to acquire and we'd like to expand it and grow it.

Because some of the other legacy companies are contracting over time. Not that many people are consuming Jello anymore. So they bought us not because they wanted to change us, but they're like, oh my God, these guys know what they're doing and they're changing food. We've already spawned, I don't know, 50 other companies that are in the same space

that we're in right now that are using better for you ingredients the way we are. So my mission there was to change the way the world eats and we've done that. You have, so wait, when you sold it four years ago, how big was the company before you sold it? Like how many employees, what was the revenue, what was all that?

Okay, so I don't know if I can even say this, but we were like, you know, 47 million in revenue or so like that, you know, 47 million in revenue, so like that. Okay. So for 200 million and wound up and we had a hundred employees at the time, all the employees are still with the company. We're even. Yes, it's still the company's still based in Oxnard, where we had our original plant and warehouse,

you know, it's grown exponentially since then. We're in, I don't know, 60,000 stores around the country of 85 skews. I would not have been able to do that myself. There was a point at which a founder has to go, how willing am I to personally guarantee every freaking loan against this company, securing my house and the mortgage of my house and my 401k against the potential loss. We had some unique situations where I was at the time, probably the largest buyer of avocado oil in the world.

So I had to be buying avocado oil a year in advance around the world to be able to make the products that we make. So it was unique in that regard. So when craft acquired us, they were like, and we had other suitors, but craft was like, I see what these guys want to do. I see how the resources they offer, whether it's distribution, whether it was warehousing, certainly funding. I mean, they've funded us. The marketing budget went way up quickly.

I would never have been able to do that. No way. So was there marketing budget? I'm not, I can't, I mean, I guess you could look it up. I can look it up. They went to like 20 million or 25 million a year and you know, in Marching Budget. And how much was it before they invited?

Oh, three, two, three. I mean, I was like, I'm like writing every check before that. I know. Wow. I had no investors in Primal Kitchen. So I was the, you know, I was the sole source of financing until about a year or 18 months before we sold, I allowed some of my close friends to acquire

a small piece in exchange for cash that I literally kept in the bank and didn't touch, but when I went to increase my line of credit, the cash was there. You know, yes, of course. So you didn't have any investor, how were you able, because you said to me,

when we said you were always very entrepreneurial, right? Because you can't make money being endurance, you know, runner. So where did you get the capital even to start primal kitchen? What were you doing prior? Were you a successful entrepreneur already?

I know the daily apple. I mean, that was a very popular thing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I started a supplement company called Primal Nutrition in 1997. Okay. And I'm just saying, okay. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, year and taking home three million from that company. So that was like really, you know, close in kind of stuff. And this was before the internet. This is before people are doing 150 million in sales, but they're spending 175 million in advertising. So that's why one people that understand people who don't know because before internet social meeting, all that other nonsense, you were like to me, I remember like your rise because I was like, I was

like watching because I was like, oh my God, look at this guy, the letter, and he's like, you're always doing all these walks and your bare feet and you're doing, I remember the primal nutrition. And you were the poster child of fitness and health naturally. And when I say naturally, out in the world doing it, right? And I always was wondering, did he come from money? Did you, how did you start?

It was just, I grew up, I mean, it's a classic story. I grew up in a poor fishing village in Maine, right? And in a little fishing village in Maine, and we were poor, but we didn't know it, kind of, that old story. So I started age of 12. I was working 40 hours a week in the summer's mowing lawns. And then I started painting houses at the age of 14.

I put myself through prep school and college painting houses. And then I was going to be pre-med, but I was making enough money. And I was training for the Olympics at the time, so I put off going to med school for a couple of years, which is now 50 years. Best thing I ever did was not going to med school. And then, you know, and I had a, and I had a frozen yogurt shop in 1981, 82, which was the first early days of frozen yogurt. I had a publishing company in the 70s and 80s,

started writing books long with four of the books that you're familiar with. I had written a couple of self-published a couple of books. So I was, and anyway, I started, I started a supplement company in 1997, called Primal Nutrition, and I grew it on my, appearances on television, not home shopping or QVC,

but I would be on these little cobbled together, cable, like faith and family networks, where I was, I was just, I was, I was buying time, but from one show, this guy, Doug Kaufman,

to this day, where great friends, he had a show called Know the Cause. And I would sponsor his show. He would buy time on a Christian Broadcasting channel called Family Net. And then I would buy time on his show. And we just talk about, before podcasts,

we talked the same way we're talking now. And oh, by the way, I have these great supplements. And if you're interested, call this number, operators are standing by, because that's the only way you could buy in those days. And so it grew nicely for a number of years. And then 2004, internet started becoming a thing. Dish and direct launched with 300 channels. So in the old days, it was ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS. And it was always on a Saturday, you could see one infomercial and they were pretty interesting.

You could watch it infomercial and you could see. Totally. Well, now all of a sudden with 300 channels, there was infomercials everywhere. And so the call of infomercial world dropped down and in the old days, you used to be able to buy like for $1,000 of local time on KTLA or something like that here, you could do five thousand dollars in business. It was great. But over the years, you got less and less. And then eventually a thousand dollars worth of ad spend got you maybe two hundred dollars of actual revenue. And so you had to make it up with upsells and, you know, a continuity

or, you know, auto ship. So in 2004, that whole model that I'd been counting on dried up. And so I took one year 2005 and I produced my own TV show. It was called Responsible Health. I shot 51, half-hour episodes of a health show on a set with guests. It was a great show and I thought it was going to like self-liquidate. In other words, I was going to be my own sponsor and I thought I was gonna like self-liquidate. In other words, I was gonna be my own sponsor and I bought time on travel channel. I was on every morning at 8.30 on travel channel, but it did not, it failed to materialize. I lost, I don't know, a million and a half dollars doing that. A million and a half bucks that I did not have, by the way.

Wow, so how did you even, yeah, what did you do? So in 2006, I said, I'm good at the content part of this. I'm gonna start a blog. Like this new blog thing sounds kind of cool And you know, I thought I'll start blogging and within a year I'll have a hundred thousand followers This will be amazing, you know, and well within a year I had like you know a thousand followers a day or so a thousand views a day And but over the years it became within five or six years It became the most popular and s popular ancestral blog on the internet. And we rose up through the ranks,

I don't know if you remember Alexa, which was the original ranking system. We got up to 3,200 on Alexa. I don't know if you remember Alexa, it ranks from one to 350 million. I remember. And we were 3,200, yeah. And the first 50 were like, you know,

Google Russia, Google France, Google, any of that. So, so. What ever happened to Alexa, does it gone now? I think it's gone. I haven't heard about it for a long time. Except Alexa, like that Alexa. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The weather.

So you mean so you just start. So you're like an early adopter of this idea. So, so then like, by the way, how many people now are do you have like, so I, you know, we, I think we hit our max at probably three and a half million a month, unique to a month at one point. But then what happened was,

Mark's Daily Apple spawned thousands of other similar websites. And so the attention span of the average viewer who used to only go to Joe Mercola, Mark's Sisson, and whatever, Marx Daily Apple, now had all these other choices. So we sort of declined in that area. But based on that platform that I built,

I was able to have a best-selling book. The prime of Blueprint went to number one on Amazon of all books worldwide one day on Amazon, on a push that I did that year. Did you know that? Bible, because everything now, so you don't have a newsletter that you can't start to sell and create a community. So you have, you had to build in community to sell whatever the hell you want. And so that primal nutrition, those supplements, you had a direct vessel.

It's just settling so much. And what happened was because I was writing so much about food and doing things naturally and not taking supplements. Yeah. My supplement business sort of fell by the wayside. And so in 2014, I thought to myself, I'm writing about food. I'm writing about, you know, how food is the way to change your health. Every Friday, we have a recipe, often it's for a sauce or a dressing or something like that.

People who recognize it once they give up the pies, the cakes, the candies, the cookies, the sweeten beverages, the pauses, whatever. It's a pretty small grouping of food that's left and the only thing you can do about is put cool stuff on it, sauces, dressings, toppings, herbs, spices, the methods of preparation. And I realized that there was nothing in the regular grocery aisle that would fit my criteria for a better for you, good for you, healthy mayonnaise or salad dressing, even Newman's own. So, that's how Primal Kitchen got started. Selling a little or a lot. Shopify helps you do your thing however you are. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.

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I had it for less than that, yeah. Yeah. We started in 2014. We didn't launch our first product until February of 2015. And by the end of 2018, I had a firm offer to buy. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was one of the fastest growing food companies. And what would have happened if you held onto it

for two more years? Well, two more years we had COVID. We had the COVID net. I mean, so, you know, we have, there were a lot of timing things where I'm like, what would have happened is, you know, I probably would have, you know, I don't know what I would have done.

It was a stressful time for me. So it worked out just to wait. Just fine, thank you. So that's hold on. So it worked out just fine. Thank you. So that's hold on. So the supplement, like finished the loop on the supplement company. Did you just shut it down?

The priority was the transition? So craft bought the supplement company along with. So you still have the case of, there's still primal kitchen supplements. They got sort of rebranded from primal nutrition to primal kitchen. But you were selling the primal nutrition supplement at the same time nutrition supplement from 1997.

Yeah, so here's to close that loop on financing a business. Yeah. So I had this supplement company that was generating a good income for. Yeah. And I said, I'm going to start a food company, but I'm not going to start a separate food company because that would mean I'd take for every dollar I make

in California and take out of the company. I have to, I'm, I literally wind up with 40 cents that I can put over here to start a new company. So I started adding products to the old company. Yeah. So Primal Kitchen never existed as a company. It, it was owned by Primal Nutrition, LLC. And the brand became Primal Kitchen, and so we wound up doing business as Primal Kitchen. But so I was using pre-tax dollars to do the R&D, to hire the new people, to test the concept, and ultimately to grow the company.

Oh my gosh, so what was your first product you came out with for Primal Kitchen? The mayonnaise, what we call the OG mayonnaise. The mayonnaise with the first, not the ketchup? No, God, the ketchup was way late. The ketchup was years later. The original product was primal kitchen regular mayonnaise, avocado oil based mayonnaise.

And we had a chipotle lime. We had a garlic a-oli mayonnaise. So we had three mayonnaisees within a year. We broke every rule. I mean, some of our mentors would say, you can't be in more than one aisle. Well, at the end of six months, we had two flavors of mayonnaise,

two bars in the bar aisle, collagen bars. Right, I remember that. And then three salad dressings in the dressing aisle. And we were crushing it. We were just like rushing it. Yeah. Yeah. I can't even believe that.

So basically, not until recently, you weren't really this rich until recently. Yeah, correct. That is amazing. I really thought that it was more, I didn't really this rich until recently. Yeah, correct. That is amazing. I really thought that it was more, I didn't realize that you- It's a hobby of mine. Yeah, exactly.

Rich kids floating around. Well, you look so like- Working out all day. You look so debonair exactly. And you're like doing all these fun things. They're like, I heard you're like, same parts here, saying doing this and doing that. So this is like a new lifestyle for you in a way.

Yeah, I mean, look, we lived well, my wife and I. Yeah, and you've been married for like a hundred years, too, right? Close, we've been together 35. I just had my seven-year birthday in France and it was the first time she kissed me was on my birthday when it was 35 years old. So she's been with me more than half my life. Wow, that's crazy.

Yeah, so but we've, you know, we've taken nice vacations, we've lived in nice homes, we've driven nice cars, nice restaurants, we've had a nice, I mean, you know, I mean, I was making between two and three million a year with my little supplement business, and as we say in Malibu, some people can live on that. Exactly. So, it's horrible to say, but, you know, it's so true. It's like, it's hilarious. It's like, it's different here. It's just unbelievable. But, you know,

other aspects of my life, I've always been very, very minimalist guy, like my- That's your whole brand, of course. My, you know, my daily uniform is some Louis Lemon shorts and a t-shirt. Tell me about it. And some Paluvas now. And yeah, exactly. But so, so anyway, so yeah, what's happened in, since the sale of the company is the vacations have become spectacular adventures. So and I take 20 family members with us

on these on these trips. That's amazing. Congratulations. That's like that's really amazing. So then because of the newsletter, are you able to push through the polluvas? Like basically anything that you create in a way, you have a direct vessel to millions of people to buy your stuff. So does everything become an automatic? Is this the first thing that you started after Primal Kitchen was outsold? Yeah, now I also have a health coaching business, Primal Health Coach Institute, which is a, it's been around for 10 years.

We've trained 5,000 coaches. It's completely an online learning experience. It's the most robust health coaching program in the world that I've had many doctors take it and say, geez, I wish I'd learned this in medical school because I reconfigured my entire practice around these principles. And it's the principles of the primal blueprint. It's literally going back and looking at the root cause of disease and illness and working with the patients to fix it, not to put a bandaid on it.

So, anyway, I have this, I have the Primal Health Coach Institute. Okay, and how many people do you have? We put 5,000 people to that. So what are the prerequisites? Can any, you know, Tom Dicker-Herry just start to do it? Pretty much, although it helps to have basic college education. Okay. You don't need to.

We've had a couple of people with a basic high school education go through, but you need a college education, but you're going to learn, you know, biology and you're going to learn biomechanics and you're going to learn, learn, I mean, in addition to all of the science and all the stuff, my idea was because my original plan was I wanted to change the lives of 10 million people around the world. That was my original mission at Mark's Daily Apple. And then a couple of years in, I added a zero to it. So I wanted to to be a hundred million people. Certainly, my books have had some effect on that.

Podcasts, obviously, the blog itself. Can you give a podcast too, right? I mean, we do. It's a primal kitchen. Kitchen podcast, but my co-founder, Morgan, at Primal Kitchen, who's still now, she's a CEO of Primal Kitchen, and she's, you know, she's a dynamo who runs Pramokitchen for craft. So she's, yeah.

So you had a co-founder? Yeah. Oh, okay. What was her role in the beginning of this whole thing? So initially, she was a marketing director at a sparkling probiotic company called Kavita. Oh, I remember them. And that's where I met her. And they, Kavita. Oh, I remember them. That's where I met her. And they, Kavita, sponsored an event that we had that I, my company had, we used to hold these events called PrimalCon.

We do a three-day experience at a resort. And we, for three days, people would come in from around the world and they'd learn how to, Olympic lift and how to sprint right and how to move right and how to do, throw an out of the ladder. I mean, it was crazy. And we had guest speakers who would come in. And so all the original early guest speakers, Rob Wolfe and John DeRant and people that you now

have probably listened to for a long time. Doctors would talk. Is it so long ago that you don't do it anymore? No, we did about 15 of them over the years. We usually have anywhere from 100 to 150 people for three days. It was great. But anyway, so Morgan on behalf of Kavita, they sponsored an event, and Kavita was located in Oxnard, and we were having an event at the Embassy Suites on the beach in Oxnard.

So she wanted to meet me. She was a fan, so she brought the product over and we wound up hanging out for dinner that night And then she drove my wife and myself home and said oh by the way, here's my card thinking about leaving Kavita if you ever need any help in marketing So literally like six months later I just decided to do this this food company and I called her up and I said you know what do you what you up to? So for a year she worked for me You know as a consultant as a marketing consultant hourly. Long story short, I had had earlier partners that just didn't work out and I bought them out.

And so I said to the morning, let's just do this. We're waiting too long to get stuff to market. Let's just make this happen. So she came on and she got awarded some equity. So she was a co-founder in that regard. Yeah. So basically, that's interesting. was a co-founder in that room, right? Yeah. So basically that's interesting. I didn't know that. Wow. And so that's the girl who does the Primal Kitchen podcast. Podcast. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay. And by the way, I think we didn't talk about you. You were talking about stuff. We got like totally signed. I know because it's so fascinating to me. But what supplements are you said,

collagen is the supplement that you believe is a lot. Yeah. You take the Primal Kitchen one, or primal nutrition. I primal nutrition, yeah. Okay, what other ones are you believer in? Vitamin D. Vitamin D, okay. Yeah, everyone, I feel like everyone, like me, everyone that takes this vitamin D,

it's become very common. Yeah. What other ones? Have you, do you take like, NAD, like, no? No. You don't take like a fish oil. No, not anymore. Why?

I just, I've come down to this, again, we're talking about minimalism. I know minimalism, I know. And a term that was sort of, I think popularized by Tim Ferriss' minimum effective dose. Like what's the minimum effective dose of food? What's the minimum effective dose of exercise that I can do? Yeah. Get away with it and not beat myself up, but still benefit from? And I think what's the minimum effective dose

of micronutrients? And this gets us into that whole carnivore, Paul Saladino discussion about, if you get rid of grains, grains are such absolute leachers of everything in your body. Like the original RDAs, which were created in the 40s, I think they were based on a grain-based diet.

So, yeah, you had to have all of these high levels of vitamins and minerals to keep up, because the grain was sucking it all out of it. When you get rid of grains, for the most part, and you cut back on sugar and you get rid of seed oils, and you just have these nutrient-dense foods that are in my case, meat-based, animal-protein-based, there's all the nutrients you need in those, and I remember getting in trouble a little bit in the past when I was thinking, like in this 70s or Training for my first Iron Man. I was getting sick all the time. I up my vitamin C to 25 grams a day I mean that that's just unbelievable, you know like that the RDA is 60 milligrams

I was doing whatever that is, you know a 500 times 500 times of at least yeah, so and I. So, and I got sick from doing that. And I thought, well, I've just thrown the entire balance of my body off thinking that I needed all these things or even some of these things. I mean, the worst is thinking, some of these things are like one of these things is going to cure it. I mean, you hear a lot of people talk about like electrolytes now. And so, magnesium is a big thing.

But if you don't balance out the magnesium with potassium and sodium and then then you have other issues Well, that's the problem right because everything now is especially a social media people are so confused Yeah, and so they hear one person say one thing another person say nothing and then they end up taking everything and not knowing what they're even Deficient in right as opposed to like, but then how do you know? How did you figure out what is the minimum amount of this minimum amount of that that I can do? That I can get away with to be as efficient as possible. How do you even figure that out? Yeah, so the two things that I look at are first of all on the terms of collagen collagen should be a fourth-matte Chronutrient. Yeah, there should be protein fat carbohydrate and collagen and collagen is different from protein because it's different

They're different configurations of dientripeptides Yeah, and you can't you can't get them from like organ meat. You can't get them from chicken breast, you can't get them from lamb, beef, pork. You have to either eat the gristle, the skin, bone broth, chicken stock, and since we don't do that regularly anymore, I mean, we did a generation ago or two generations ago, but we don't now.

I mean, there's a whole generation in the 80s of people, bodybuilders, we have skinless, boneless chicken breast, the white rice. Do you remember that? Oh my God, that was like, by the way, people still do that, you know that. I know, I know. So collagen, I think, is important as a,

and you need to get like 10, 20, 30 grams a day in my estimation, because it's, the only thing that really supports connective tissue and so much of your body is collagen. It's the most prevalent actual protein in your body between fascia, ligaments, tendons, cartilage. So what do you do then? You just, you supplement for it? I soys supplement. Sure. So that's a supplement. So I take the collagen supplement. But the supplement wouldn't be better for you to actually do the other natural things,

but you sure you want to come over my house and make some bone broth and do some chicken stock and stand over that stove. I'm day in my spare time. I'll be more than happy to do it. Right. So you do that. How many you take? How many spoonfuls of that 20 grams a day? Because they say that doesn't like they I don't know who these they are. But like that it doesn't actually help. It doesn't kind of penetrate properly or get like into the system., you don't believe that. I believe that there's some utility in doing it because I had my own experience of coming back

from a debilitating injury that I thought was gonna end my running jumping career. Was it like Achilles? Achilles, yeah. And I came back from that like 100%. So I'm like, okay, I get that. Then I've seen a couple of studies where they label collagen peptides

and they have people do a six minute, they drink 15 grams, 15 minutes before a jump rope session and then they label the uptake into the Achilles after the, it's pretty cool. And you can show the increased uptake of the collagen peptides. Yeah. This is a job.

This is a job. Yeah, that's something you really believe in highly. Okay, what else then? And then vitamin D. And vitamin D, as I've said for 20 years, shouldn't be considered a vitamin. It's more like a hormone. And it's a pro-hormone. So because it regulates your hormone.

Right. So I'm still not supplementing with one particular vitamin because vitamin D should be a hormone. So that's it. And that's so far, so good that I've cut back in the last maybe five or ten years to just that. How about peptides? Are you a big believer in peptides? You do the sauna, do you do the cold plunge, do you all do that?

Yeah, so I don't do peptides. My wife loves them, so Carrie does. And she believes in them, and I can't argue with the results. But I've tried a couple times and didn't see anything. I didn't work for me. I was an early adopter of the cold plunge. Okay. I started doing it probably 15 years ago at our house in Malibu, and this was, this was completely unrelated to the latest science, but I was, as a triathlete, I was probably the best runner that ever crossed over into triathlon. I became a very good cyclist and it was a shit swimmer.

Like, I have a record at Iron Man that will never be broken and that's the slowest swim time for a top five finisher. Had I learned how to swim, my life would have changed because I would have been probably one of the best in the world and it would have shifted all my choices. So glad that didn't happen. But over the years, I'm like, I hated cold water, I hated cold water, I hated swimming, I didn't want to learn how to swim, I only did it because I had to, it was like, again, pain management, right, discomfort.

So at one point, in Malibu, I'm like, this is ridiculous, like I squeal, getting into, you know, an 81 degree public pool, what the hell is that about? So, I said said I'm gonna I'm gonna deal with that so I We kept our pool unheated and Malibu and so sometimes it would get down into the high 40s and low 50s Because you know when the sand and a wind blow yeah the the the warm water no matter how cold it is the relative warm water Comes as top and then the the winds the 30 mile our 40 mile an hour cold winds blow it off Yeah, and so it's super cool.

So we would have this ritual every night where I'd go out the backyard, naked, walk into the pool with zero affect, just thinking to myself, it's not good, it's not bad, it's just a sensation, walk into the pool, dunk myself down, hang out. And after as long as I could stand it, which is anywhere from two to five minutes, I would join my wife in the jacuzzi, where she was hanging out comfortably. And so we did that for years. Then we moved to Miami.

We have a spa there with a coal plunge. But I think what I found for myself is that I never really got the so-called the purported benefits of brown fat activation or decreased inflammation. It was just a head trip for me. It's all it's ever been is like, okay, I'm gonna go do a cold plunge.

I know I'll feel good, I'll feel refreshed after I do it. I mean, it was great, but I wasn't doing it for some long range, longevity strategy or for reducing inflammation. It was more like do something every day that makes you uncomfortable. And I stopped running a long time ago and I stopped, you know, whatever.

So, so this for me was my discomfort. What I found happening was it became, then it's just so many people started doing it and I encouraged other people to do it at my, at my building that I live in in the gym and the spa. And then, you know, they'd say, how long did you spend in the cold plunge today? I'm like, well, I did four and a half minutes.

Well, I did five and a half today, Mark. I'm like, oh shit, now I gotta go to seven just to show you can be done. And it became this ridiculous, and then I got sick a couple of times, spending too much in the time of the cold plunge. Really? Oh, of course, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a cause a positive adaptation. But they become, but the hormetic stresses become bad quite rapidly.

It's a, it's a, it's a curve. And at the other end of the curve, it might cost you a couple of days in recovery. Whether it's, whether it's too much time in the sauna, whether it's too much time in the cold plunge, whether it's too long a run on a hot day, or you know, like if you were, like I was an athlete, I know I left some

of my best races on the track two weeks before the race thinking, I got to, you know, I got to dial this in, I got to do one more half mile it, you know, 214. So it was, I've also recognized that in this risk management stage that I'm in of my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That there's some, there are some things I just don't need to do. And I'll get in the plunge once in a while. We have one, we have a plunge on our roof in the palisades. So when we're staying in the palisades, I'll get into the plunge pool. And it's great.

Do a couple of minutes. I don't, I don't need to break a record. Right. You know, it sounds to me you're very, like you're like a very practical person. You're not very, I mean, you're extreme, you maybe you were extreme with your exercise, but like everything else seems like you have a very common sense, practical approach to it.

Like I know I heard you also talk very much about, again, like you're not into wearables, right? Again, like, and the truth is, and there's like, they're not even accurate. I mean, you put, you put 12 on exactly. I used to believe that I get everyone sends me all their wearables. I wear them for a couple of months and I'm like, what am I doing? Like, they don't even like, what's the point?

Like, I need somebody to tell me if I'm sleeping well, not sleeping well. Like, I know if I slept well or not. Right. And as, as I will go one further and say, bad data is worse than no data. Yeah, that's true too. Okay, so we played Ultimate Frisbee on Sunday, and we played for an hour and a half, and we played Man on Man.

And so, I'm being very economical with my running. I don't make an end zone run every play. If I'm guarding my man, I'm keeping him within a distance. And at the end of the game, the guy I was guarding, he asked everybody around, he just started to watch today, and everybody started to watch. Well, mine says I burned 1,320 calories. I'm like, Jesus, man, if you burned 320 calories, I would be surprised. Even that's a lot. Your watch is lying to you. Well, you know,

it's set it every week. Okay, well, you're still fat. You know, it's so funny that you just said that because it's true. I can run like my ass off for an hour and you look at my wall. I'm like 346 calories and like, people overestimate the amount of calories that they actually burn. That's what they say, oh, you know what, I could eat this piece of cake now, but if they actually knew how much that cake had, it's like 50 runs, not one run, right? Exactly. It's so crazy. But our brains play tricks on us. But I find also when you wear all these wearables, it actually gave me anxiety. Like, look at, I got a look. I might sleepy not well. And it becomes like this game of fine thing where it actually like did me worse than if I just like like you know how I say I know

How I slept did I see from 12 to 7? Do I feel rested? Do I not like whatever it is? You know what I mean? No, there's something disconcerting about waking up in the morning and going I slept great and the watch goes no You didn't exactly right, but it's so why do you think all of this? Do you think it's just gonna keep on going like this? No, but I think you said the word the gamification of life. Yeah. People are they're into their devices. So, you know, I when we're in the south of France, where

we spend summers, we were there for three months this year and so you're so fancy now. Pardon me. Oh yeah. You know, and I do carry my phone with me, and we walk a lot, you know, but it's interesting that how different my phone shows the steps I did with my wife's phone who walked the whole way with me. Right, isn't that correct? Wow, it's very different, right? It's so off that it just, it makes you think, why am I even paying attention to this?

It's like, but it's a game. So as some people would say, the treadmill at the gym shows you a relative number. It's only relative to you. So if you think that you were burning 700 calories, but you only burned 400, if that's 700 is more than the 600 you burned yesterday, that you've, right? Exactly. Then you're still, it's still going gonna be a benefit to you as a game as a game Right, that's why like I use my I wear the Apple watch for the steps like did I do 10,000 steps I mean it doesn't make a difference he can wear when you can wear and not like your wife

We all have different steps doing the exact same thing, but at the end of the day I mean, I'm not using it for anything beyond that even that's me's a lot Well my wife did a yoga class every day. So we had our yoga teacher come to our house in France. Yeah. And she would have, we always had entertaining guests. So we had anywhere from two to eight people that would be staying with us.

And so the yoga teacher would come and do a yoga class in the morning. And Carrie would look at her watching the light and 2,500 steps during yoga. Exactly. It makes no sense at all. No. I want to take a quick break from this episode to thank our sponsor, Therasaj.

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It isn't grained in me to never miss a workout. I know I show up better as an entrepreneur, a business partner, a mom, a friend, a wife, and actually for myself when I get my daily workout in. I just feel more confident. I also feel physically and mentally stronger and I'm so much more energized as I go conquer my goals. But I get it. Not everybody has the motivation to show up daily. But that's why I really recommend trying co-pilot for your workouts. If you really struggle to be consistent, co-pilot is an app that links you with an

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Okay, so as you get older, you know, like, I think I heard you mentioned somewhere that as you said also in this podcast, you don't want to, you want to have a whole thing against running into the walking. Yeah. Can you talk about that? Yeah. And I also want to ask you, because you are a runner, you're, the runner is high. Like I'm trying to stop running.

I'm sure a lot of people do, right? When I'm in your 40s, whatever. My body is like, it's killing me. Yet, you don't get that same height. What can you substitute it for? Because nothing I've found does that at like a runner's high. Yeah, it took me five years after I retired to stop training as if I was still competing. Really?

Yeah. Okay, so what do you do? How did you do? Well, eventually it went away. The mojo went away. So, and for example, I ran a hundred miles a week for seven years at the heyday. And then I kept, that was as a runner,

and then either as a triathlete, even though I was injured, and I had running issues, I still ran 30 to 40 miles a week. I just couldn't run them. I have run a mile and 25 years. So, yeah, them. Right. I haven't run a mile and 25 years. So yeah, but I have not run a mile and 25 years. I haven't put on shoes to go run.

I've sprint, I'll do beach sprints and I'll play ultimate where I'll apparently, you know, do 13,000 steps or something. Yeah, exactly, right? But it's not the same, but do you get the same, where do you get that same indoor friend rush? So the indoor friend rush, I really want to do a study on this at some point, because I think the endorphin rush is the same as if, I don't know if you subscribe to any of these nature

as brutal kind of things on the internet, but where they, where they'll, you know, people on Safari will show a lion eating a zebra that's still alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went on a safari myself, a fascinating by all of that. I think the same thing happens to a runner in that this is a life threatening situation. You're running, you're putting your body through this every day. And so there are certain receptors in the brain, they call them, you know, the endocannabinoid receptors, they call it endorphins or ancafalins, the natural morphine-like substances that your brain produces. And I think what they're doing in an evolutionary context

is they're just keeping you euphoric in an otherwise life-threatening situation. Yeah. And so we tend to seek these out because we can. Like our ancestors would not have run 10 miles a day every day. That's just stupid, as a waste of resources and everything. Our ancestors based on their native fitness were able to run 10 miles, maybe 20 chasing, you know, an antelope and tracking it and chasing it and sprinting and whatever, but the idea of running daily

didn't exist for a lot of reasons. Cut to modern life where we think that running is good for you and therefore we do it and we do it because we can do it and we can do it because we carbo load every day to be able to go out and do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. And then we have these cushion shoes, these high tech running shoes that encourage us to heel strike. And so we become terrible runners because we're heel striking. Look, humans have two basic gates, maybe a third in between, but the basic gate is walking, which is a heel toe, land on the heel, push off on the big toe, land on the heel, push

off, and a sprint or a fast run, which is typically a barefoot run because that's how we evolve, which is landing on the midfoot, not on the heel, not striking on the heel, but landing on the midfoot. Now, you can run slower than a sprint or faster than a walk and do a combination of those. But if you were to do that on the planes of Africa or some of the tundra in northern Europe and your barefoot, you'd still be able to feel the ground underneath and you'd still be able to land. Your brain would get all the sensory input of how to wait, how to bend the foot, how to bend the knee, how to torque the ankle, how to twist the hip, and how to absorb all that

shock with every footfall. You take that all away when you put on thick cushioned shoes, and now there's no sensory input in the foot. Now the shoes are encouraging you to run heel strike, heel strike, heel strike. And so so many people are running like when I started running in the 60s, I ran a Chuck Taylor's and I could run 40 miles a week max. And it's my feet that would say, I'm out, you're done. You're done for the week. And then along came on at Suicert Tigers, which is the first sort of racing flat.

And you could run 40 miles a week or maybe 50. And then when Bill Bowerman went to Phil Knight and said, Hey, I got this guy at this Tigers, which is the first sort of racing flat, and you could run 40 miles a week or maybe 50. And then when Bill Bowerman went to Phil Knight and said, hey, I got this guy at this runner, Kenny Moore. He could be one of the best in the world. But his shoes won't let him run more than 80 miles a week. Can we build a shoe that'll let him run 130 miles a week? And that's the origin of the thick running shoe was this thing that would let some of the

early Nike runners put in more miles and train harder and be able to race against world-class athletes. Well that's if you're a great runner, but then as the rest of the country began jumping on the running boom and thinking that because Ken Cooper wrote a book in 1968 called The Robics, the more you run, the better it is for your heart. So everybody became a runner in the 70s. And they became pretty bad runners. And they started doing, and so this, this heel running, landing on your heel and rolling over became the way most people sort of learned how to run. So what that does is that encourages bad

form. It pushes all of the stress away from the foot and up to the knee and up to the hip and lower back. And in my case, the hip, so I have bone on bone in my hip now from all of the years of running. Never gonna hip replacement? I'm thinking about scheduling one fairly soon. I'm putting it off as long as I can. Yeah. Wow. I heard they're really easy now.

Yeah. I just not had good experience with medicine at all. Yeah. I don't blame you. So I guess where were we with the cushioning and the... No, I was gonna say, well, my first question was, how do you replace the endorphins? So the endorphins, so the endorphins,

so we got to the point where people are running daily because they got this endorphin, that they thought was good for them. And the classic example is the X heroin addict who becomes a running addict because he's replacing the one form of morphine, a workout addict with, you know, with the other. I see what you're saying.

So it's not necessarily even good for us to have that indoor forever. No, it's not. I would say it's not even good to have that. It's not necessarily good. It's fine, but I think evolutionarily, it's not serving the same purpose we think it is. Oh, I see what you're saying.

But if you're so used to it, so you said that over time, you won't need it as much, the less you do it. Or you find other, you get in the cold plunge, you know. Oh, I also like you. I'm not crazy. Or you do the sauna, or you do a heavy lifting day, and you get the same. But heavy lifting to me doesn't give me the same,

I still do it, I don't get the same thing. So this is going to be a therapy session as well. But what is it about the running? What do you think you crave about the running? Because the rush is not, that doesn't cut it with that. I think it's a sweat. Like when I sweat, like that sweat when I do weights like that or whatever else. And like just be able, it's my form of meditation, right?

Because I'm not a meditator. Yeah. But that's how I think of my best things when I'm running. And I feel because I'm like doing something at my heart rate, it's hard for me still to do it. All those reasons. Right. I think walking, I love walking and I walk a ton, but it's not the same. It doesn't, it doesn't like give me that feeling like, oh, I, you know, the psychological thing, like I did something. Yeah. So let's talk about that. So now running versus walking. Dr. Mark. It doesn't, it doesn't like give me that feeling like, oh, I, you know, the psychological thing, like I did something. Yeah, so let's talk about that. So now, running versus walking.

Dr. Mark. No, no. So walking is probably the best thing a human being can do. The best, the best exercise. Look, we're bipedal. We are designed. We're built to walk. Yeah.

I'm thinking about writing this book, born to walk instead of born to run. Why don't you do that? Well, we are. So, but the idea is that like, how fast can you walk? If you're walking normally, and somebody says, okay, let's walk to Century City, you know, I can walk to Beverly Hills from here in 30 minutes.

Okay, what, how many miles is that? Two. Yeah, so you're walking 16-minute miles. Was that bad? No, that's great. 16-minute miles is pretty fast. And I can probably go faster if I wasn't on my phone and distracted not much Let's just say you could yeah, let's say you let's say you could walk 15 or 14-minute miles Yeah, can you run seven-minute miles for that long? No, why not I could it's only twice as fast It's that's my point is Most people can only run at best,

only twice as fast as they can walk. Not three times as fast, not four times as fast, at best, only twice as fast. So if I said instead of a half hour run, why don't you do a one hour walk, cover the same distance, burn the same calories, zero chance of injury. In fact, when you're a runner and you get injured, walking is how you get back from an injury. Walking is the least injurious activity that you can do. It's the best for your posture, for your gate. Now, you need to do it barefoot or in minimalist shoes.

Barefoot doesn't make sense. Walking in a barefoot really hills, you got it. But so that's where the whole idea of minimalist shoes, wide, thin, flat, flexible shoes come in you want to feel the ground You want to feel every time you step on a route or a rock you want the toes to articulate you want the toes to yeah You want to feel the ground underneath you so that shoe you have right there is only point It's it's point nine centimeters nine millimeters thick So that feels it's got just enough cushion so that when you walk on concrete, you don't

get a bone bruise. And that was one of the first things I looked at when I was creating these shoes was how could we make these suitable for walking 10 miles in the urban jungle? Because I can walk to Beverly Hills. Absolutely. And I want you to. I'm going to do it today, but I can't get my toes in here. Well, we're going to have to work on that.

The reason you can't get your toes in there is because you've scrunched your feet together for so many years in those hot little heels of yours and those running shoes and everything else. And so we need to work on the toes play. Because if you can imagine, if you took it to its logical conclusion, a shoe this high off the ground

and with a narrow base is not far off from a stilt. Like would you wanna walk on stilts to, a shoe, this high off the ground and with a narrow base is not far off from a stilt. Like, would you wanna walk on stilts to, you know, and how much you know. But as opposed to if you walked barefoot or you've walked in minimal shoes and you were able to display your toes out and feel everything and feel every toe working

and work all the small muscles of your feet, your feet would get stronger, your ankles would get stronger. She'd be less inclined to roll them. And then one of the great comments we're getting from a lot of people is how all the muscles up the leg, up the kinetic chain of the leg, are benefiting more from the ground field.

Really? Yeah, especially weightlifters. Guys lifting deadlifts and lunges and squats in the gym are saying, look, my legs are benefiting from my wearing the polluvers because of the toast play. Because the... 100% in fact actually when I do my weight and stuff like that, I take off my shoes

and I do my dead lips and my things and my feet are so weak, like my, the wobble, my ankles are wobbling. It's terrible. So I can just wear these. I totally, and the idea behind these is don't run in them yet, I mean, years down the road you could, but walk in them, spend the day in them.

And we have different models for driving, for doing errands, for picking the kids up at school. For going out to dinner. These are the leather lace-ups for weddings and funerals. Can you please send those to me? I'll be aware of those. Those are the nicest ones I've seen. Okay.

I mean, these ones though, so you're telling me, it's more, again, it's all psychological. Like, I have to get used to the feeling that I don't have that support in the arch, right? Like, yes, you do. It's all psychological. It's all psychological. So you spend, you know, you, you, you,

you wear these around the house the first day for an hour and then you take them off and then the next day for two hours and then the third day you walk to Beverly Hills the two miles in them. Yeah, you know, I'm gonna do that tonight. Okay. So where are they being sold? Are they just on your website? Just on the website for now. Through the newsletter? No, so Mark Stanley Apple is owned by Kraft. So, stop it. Yeah, so I still write for it and I still, but Kraft acquired, you know, they acquired the food company, they required, they acquired the, I bet you they bought you because of that newsletter.

I don't know about that. 100% that data, that newsletter, that database, so they got all the names of the people. That was so smart. That's what everyone's doing. No, I know, but understand, they're not a direct response company. No, I know, but that's what's valuable, right? Like that's what makes someone valuable. You have like, they have a direct way to sell to people now. That's what your big, that secret sauce. Yeah. Wow. So if you, if you still write for them.

No, we've, we've done pieces on it a little bit. Can you go, you put something in there? Sure. But not every day, you know, not, not often. It's gotta be, you know, it's, it's a newsletter and there's not a lot of advertising to begin with. Are you actually still between you and me? And maybe a couple people, are you really writing that newsletter?

I have a team of researchers and writers and I write some of the stuff and some of the stuff is, you know, that can be done by other people, some of the heavy lifting by other people, that's what's done. Wow. Okay, so then what else are you working on? So this has been out for how long this pulloo bus? We launched in March of this year. Okay, so you're pretty are you working on this kid? So this has been out for how long this Palluba we launched in March of this year, okay, so you're pretty brand new. Yeah, really no. Yeah, all right

So this what else so you besides be going this out the France of course What else are you doing besides that this what else are you up to the book born to run a born to walk? Yeah, are you really working on it yet or you're so I'm always working on a book always yeah, and so I've got a Sort of a longevity book that I'm working on that is the anti Hubertman atia approach really which is what tell me what it is it's it's more like Don't do all these things. How do you feel? Yeah, it's it's really it's based on common sense and Being attuned to the body and how you feel versus how a device tells you or a blood test or a...

How do you, okay, so I love that. So like, how do you, because people like magic pills, right? Yes. And that's why a lot of these people are very popular and these things are popular because people want to, you know, say, oh, I can try this to get my secret body that I always wanted, or I can shave 20 years off with my age if I do this secret thing. Once you tell people, I wrote, not to bore you with my whole story, but back when,

my first book was called No Jim Required, and I did a shoe that was a weighted shoe, right? And my whole thing was basically giving people these simple solutions to be healthier and fit. Which would really like basic stuff. Like I would say like kind of similar to you. That's why I really like, you know, you resonated with me. I was like, do a squat, a push up, a lunge, a pull up, whatever. Basics, like you don't have to rely on these crazy machines. You don't have to rely on this. Like you can do all these things. People didn't care. Yeah. They wanted the people., they were very interested in all this other kooky stuff that was not even helpful,

really, it's just a money maker. So how do you expect now, you know, 20 years later to try to tell people, that's all nonsense. You can just listen to yourself and use common sense. People don't want to believe in it. I'm not into the magic pill money maker. Me neither. But people like it. I understand know when when I made a mayonnaise at retail for 9.95 for 12 ounce jar

People said you're crazy. No one's gonna buy it. It's like that they want crunchy salty fatty sweet They want cheap. They want you know, they want and and I'm like yeah a lot of them do But I bet there's some people who want who want this so I write and I make product for the some bet there's some people who want this. So I write and I make product for the some people. For the some people who are willing to suspend disbelief maybe a little bit and put on a five-toe shoe or who are willing to give up their wearables for an experiment that lasts a couple of weeks and really forces them to look inward into how they feel or their thought process. I have all the money I need to live the rest of my life luxuriously and I don't need to leave it to kids or grandkids. I'm just I'm living my life,

but I'm going to do it on my terms. And so, you know, I've always been ahead of the curve in some of this stuff, but one of my problems has been timing. I've been I was, you know, 10 years ahead of the curve on the seed oil thing. I started talking about it in 2007. Well, had I launched Primal Kitchen then, it would have been a failure. Because it took 10 years of educating the world to get there, to be accepting of a very expensive mayonnaise that was demonstrably the best on the shelves and better for them because of the knowledge base

that I'd built and the credibility and all of the other educational aspects of that, it worked. And do you think now people are ready to hear the next evolution of like, don't worry about wearing that hoop and that aura ring or whatever. I'm not, I'm just, whatever. You don't need that. Listen to yourself. Some people are.

Some people. Some people. All I need is some people. All you need is some people. But like, like, as I said on a recent podcast, I like, there's in the US, there's 330 million people or whatever the number is, and they all need shoes. And some people are gonna need polovas.

And I only need a million people to be a very successful company. I love that line, some people. It's so true, right? You just need some people. And I want people, I want my people. I don't want the people who don want my people. I don't want the people who don't want to listen and don't want to, you know, they're not willing to educate themselves.

And they're still stuck in in the old mentality. That's they're not my people. They're not. And I don't, I'm not, I don't even pretend to want to convince him to come over to my side. I want to talk to people that want to listen. I totally agree with you, but I'm wondering, what do you think it is about you? Because a lot of people can talk stuff and people don't listen, right? Like obviously they're listening. She, like, at the beginning of everything,

like you did the letter, I mean, the news letter, like what was the quality that you think got to build a community in the first place, right? Because even though you were an early adopter, why else do you think that you had the success that you did? I mean, I think it was real authenticity. We did research and we didn't make outlandish claims without at least backing it with research. But I mean, I was one of the early guys, you know, fat is not bad. Saturated fat is not the reason for heart disease. Collestoral

is not the bad, the guy, people think it is. And people appreciate it that I stuck with a lot of that over the years. Change my mind in some areas, they appreciate that I changed my mind in the face of new evidence or new information. Are you a big smoothie guy? No, never. Really? Yeah, because that's another one of these big trends that are, do you think it's a myth

that they're so healthy for you? No, because I get to think that's another one of these big trends that are, do you think it's a myth that they're so healthy for you? No, it's a myth. Yeah, so I would say, you know, it's a convenient way to get calories in. Great, I'd rather eat my calories. I'd rather chew and crunch and get the mouth feel and get the experience. And one of the things, again, we talked about like,

when is it time to finish eating? Well, when I've had the full gustatory experience and I'm no longer hungry for the next bite, if I'm slamming down a 20 ounce smoothly and I'm in my mind, it's like, okay, this is a, there's an intention behind completing the consumption of this smoothie, so I'll just whether or not I'm any thirstier

or hungry, I'm gonna finish it. And so you lose touch with the reality of like when is it time to stop with a smoothie. And a lot of people live by their smoothies. They have a breakfast smoothie. A lunch smoothie. Yeah, very popular. If you ever go to a sunlight for organics. For a $20 smoothie.

Yeah, I'm just saying for the better. And Khalil's a good friend of mine. And it's a principle alone that I'm just saying for the bigger. And Khalil's a good friend of mine. And I'm like, I've, I've, I cannot, it's the principle alone that I will not allow me to do that. Like I would have mastered something in a stake for the same price. It's like Arrow one. Yeah.

Right. Like Arrow one's like a $25 movie. Me and my girlfriend laugh, we went there last night because we had dinner, I had dinner with my friend. And we walked to Arrow one and I very rarely do this because it's like insults my intelligence. $47 for my friend, and we walked to Arrow One, and I very rarely do this because it's like insults my intelligence, $47 for my dinner, which was a little thing I had to help noodles and some sweet potatoes and a little salmon bite

that was like this big. Anywhere else in the world that would have been a $9.99 dinner, $47, I thought I was like, I couldn't believe it, I could not believe the, like the audacity that they have. And the place is full like I couldn't believe it. I could not believe the like the adacity that they have and the places full. You can't know my son ate their lasty. We brought something home from here one last night.

Same thing, yeah. And like the adacity and the people are like standing in line. Like you think they're giving something away. By the way, I didn't mean to diss Sunlife and Khalil. No, you're not dissing anything. No, he's done a great job and he's a great friend of mine. But I just thought there's an example of like,

and I don't even care what the price is on it, it's just that amount of sugar, but dates and whatever it is. Do you remember John but juice? Of course. Okay, it's basically a fancier John but juice with like, you know, or get the word organic and some healthier things, but you can still od on healthy foods

with calories and sugar. Especially juice, especially juice. 100% like these are all just fancy jama juices. No, we were in the primal blueprint, which came out, written in 2009, came out in 2010. When the opening scenes is, you know, going to jama juice, the Cindy Corg getting, getting off the spin bike and going to jama juice and having 200 grams of sugar to replenish the, you know, the one gram that she actually burned off. She actually burned off, yeah. It's so true. and having 200 grams of sugar to replenish the, the one gram that she actually burned off.

She actually burned off, yeah. It's so true, it's so crazy. Anyway, I know that we've been going on, I don't know how long this podcast is, but I have to say that I am going to try these shoes. I am going to walk to Berlin House. Oh, trust me. And I'm going to make sure you send me those.

So we both can follow up on each other. And where do people find more information about you? Okay, so you know Mark's daily apple is the blog been around for a long time. Yeah, can they go to craft calm for? No, no, no, no, it's Mark's daily apple and wear Palova W E AR P L U V A Okay, is the Instagram site for the shoes and then Palova dot com is where they can buy the shoes by shoes Well, this is great. Would you come back on the podcast sometime next year in L.A.? Of course. This was amazing. I want to, I would say let's work out

together, but you don't run anymore. You don't do, I don't have a fat bike. So, unfortunately, I guess we'd have to do dead lifts or something. Yeah, like a dead left or something. Exactly. This has been so fun. I really appreciate being on the podcast. And I think we're done. You can go home now. Thank you. Thank you. Not indulging this time of the year can honestly feel like a crime.

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