#251 - Bryan Callen

Just think of, like, heavy guitars and wind blowing my hair back.

It's the fucking podcast.

Brian Callan's on the podcast with Joe Rogan. That was a very interesting dance right there.

Yeah, I'm bringing it back.

It was like a gay kenyan dance.

I'm bringing back some shit from, like, the 70.

Some cast iron. If you cook in cast iron, it's an excellent way of getting iron into your diet, which I didn't.

Yes, yes. They say steaks in cast iron, too.

Much ferrous oxide in your diet, and you have to be careful. So Tim Ferriss says in his book that a lot of these guys will actually take a day and eat no iron.

Really? Yes.

To bring their iron levels down. So there it is.

Wow. Yeah, Ferris is fascinating. We've been going back and forth. He's going to come back. Well, let's do it. Let's hook it up. He's a great guy.

I got to get him on because I had a conversation with him after I read his book, and I loved him, and he just knows so much.

Yeah, he's apparently got a lot of stuff cooking, and he's in the middle of writing a book as well. But, man, I love talking to him. I just love talking to dudes that are just filled with information. Like Rob Wolf, the Paleo solution author.

What was that like?

Fucking great, you know, because I'm reading. The guy's filled with information. It's controversial.

Well, but I just read the China study. I talked to you about it, which is about. He's a very credible science, and he looks at a lot of science that says whole food. A plant based whole food diet is the best way to go. Problem is that I think, like we talked about, if you're doing sports and lifting, personally, I went, like, about a week eating just a whole food plant based diet. I ate a steak the other day. I woofed it down, I inhaled it. It was literally like. I was like. And I've never felt better, man. I mean, I just need some meat sometimes.

I don't think that you can have the same diet for every person. I don't think everybody needs. Everybody needs a steak. There's a lot of chicks out there that don't need a steak. They really don't. There's a lot of dudes that don't need a steak. Jamie Kilstein's coming on the podcast tomorrow. He's a vegan he's healthy, he's happy, and he loves it. It's real fitness. He's always constantly doing martial arts, jiu jitsu and shit. And he's a vegan. Weighs eight pounds, but he's a vegan. I'm not kidding. He weighs eight.

You can't find too many Olympic athletes who are vegan.

No. Well, Mac Danzick, who's also going to do the podcast, we're going back and forth. I love that dude. He's a really interesting guy. He's a UFC fighter who's a vegan. He's also a photographer. And his reasons are that he loves animals, and I respect that as well. Look, I love animals too. There's a cycle of life. And I think factory farming is horrific, but I think wild game, I think that's where it's at. I think in a perfect world, we would buy meat from hunters and that would be a new fucking industry. We'd have to make sure that people weren't poaching. Buy meat from hunters. I think you should be able to hunt a lot of them because deer are fucking everywhere. The idea that there's a.

They're glorified cows, dude.

Yeah. And we can grow more of them too, by the way. Absolutely, we can grow more of them. But my point is, when they're wild and they're running around and then you just hunt them and kill them. I think, first of all, the whole thing is way more humane because they lived the real life. They lived a real life. The deers never lived a better life. They have one life, that life. Forage for food, stay alive. If you do that, you've won.

They're also, by the, also they are food in the wild.

Of course, that's why they're there.

One of the, Joseph Campbell always said that one of the problems with the original sort of peoples and their mythology was that they would look around at nature and realize that life ate life. And if you look at a lot of, like, whether it's Native Americans or whatever, the traditions of killing animals, they were always fairly, most cultures were always fairly very uneasy with killing an animal, which was why when you killed an animal, there was a ritual around that. There was usually prayer said, there was rituals, because human beings were like.

They felt the connection.

Yeah, we're taken. And when you actually have to kill something with a spear or a bow and arrow or a knife and you feel its heartbeat and you smell that animal. That's very intimate. It's physically intimate. And almost all original aboriginal cultures had and all that I can think of had sort of a ritual around that. They would say prayers, they'd do all kinds of things because it makes sense. What we've become is so removed from our food. We're so removed with factory farming and things. It feeds a lot of people, gets a lot of protein in people. People don't go hungry anymore. I always remind people, 30 years, 30 years ago, I mean, half of. Half of India, a lot of China went through major famines and certainly most of Africa. But now that's becoming more and more a relic of the past. It's because we become very efficient at getting food to a maximum number of people.

But there's a disconnect.

There's a huge disconnection.

Yeah.

So when you eat a pig, when you eat bacon that's been in a gestation crate and goes crazy because it's chewing on the bars, you're not really thinking about it, man. I'm just hungry. You're not thinking it's a pig, you're thinking it's just a piece of ham. We've actually given these really euphemistic names to meat. Having said that.

Right? Isn't it cute?

Yeah, it is. We do that. Beef, ham.

You don't think of veal.

Veal. If you ever go to a farm, though, and you're like playing around with the lambs and the goats and fucking. I mean, and playing around with them, but you realize, oh, wow, man, that thing is a living, breathing creature that is reacting to me and reacting to its environment.

I got to lock this door. I forgot to lock this door. Keep talking.

Yeah. And it's an interesting thing if you talk to farmers who are around animals. They're very tuned and keyed into animals and nature on a way that most of us are not. They just have to be. They're very aware of the cycles. They're very aware of all the things you talk to dairy farmers. There was a mad cow scare, and this woman was being interviewed because they had to kill all our cows in front of her and then they had to burn the cows. That was a government policy in Britain at the time because these prions were very dangerous. So they took out the whole herd. And she was so devastated because she knew her cows. Every one of her cows she knew had its own personality, had its own name, and she had her own relationship with it. For me, I went, it's a fucking cow, really? And it was devastating for her.

Well, she was going to butcher those cows. Or were they dairy cows?

No one of them had mad cow disease. And the law at the time, this is about ten years ago, they had to put down the whole herd.

Right. But was she raising these cows for butchering?

No dairy. They were dairy cows? I believe some of them were for butchering as well, but this was a dairy farm for the most part.

So did they feed the cows fucked up things. Did they feed them like cow meat?

Apparently. What happened with the development of these prions in the central nervous systems of cows? I'm not a scientist, but from what I read, I remember you could eat if you had a cow that had mad cow disease, it wasn't eating the muscle meat that fucked you up. It was when you ate the brain tissue. Yeah, the brain tissue, spinal cord. And they would ground that up into hot dogs and things like that. And you can take those prions. They're called prions, I think, and you can heat them up to 500 degrees and they still don't die. And you can still get the mad cow disease. So it's not the steroid. You can't.

I think it's like it's more than 1000 degrees.

It's crazy. Apparently that came from the fact that you had cows cannibalizing their own tissue. Because when you slaughter cows, there are certain parts, I guess, that you don't necessarily need. You take 5% of that, you put it into the slop and they'll eat it. They were doing that with chickens.

Fucked up.

It's become illegal now.

But what's fucked up about it is if they could do it with pigs, that's okay. Pigs actually are omnivores, but you're doing it with cows. Like you're just jacking his whole system.

But not just that. The reason you don't want an animal cannibalizing itself is because it leads to these really weird pathogens.

Yeah, it's why actually, in the Book of Leviticus, which prions or prions, I.

Think it's called prions. But the Book of Leviticus you were talking about in your show. Yeah, the Book of Leviticus is actually a book in the Old Testament that goes into really stark detail about what you can eat and what you can't. And in the Old Testament they always talk about the fact that you can't eat animals of prey. So you can't eat a leopard or an osprey, an eagle. Why? Because those animals eat other animal protein and you still don't find people eating leopard meat even in.

I think they eat mountain lions. I think mountain lions steak, bear and stuff like that.

But you wouldn't do it. There's a reason. It's a rarity. And we say, I think they do, because for the most part, no culture has ever eaten the protein except for fish. But a lot of animals that eat other animals, apparently it's not healthy.

It kind of makes sense if you think about it. Well, they probably taste creepy.

Yeah, I've heard that when you eat bear meat, it's really oily and really, like, gamey and oily. But bears are mostly herbivores, actually, unless you're talking about polar bears, which are complete meat eaters.

Yeah, we were actually just talking about this, about going hunting. We were saying that Steve Ranella asked me to go hunting with him to go bear hunting. And I was like, I don't want to kill a bear, man. I don't want to eat it if it's not something that I really want to eat. Like, I like venison. I'll kill a deer. I like mouth waters when I see it.

My dad and I went to Alaska, okay, to go hunt bear. He goes, I want to hunt bear. I go, I'm not one bear. He goes, why not? I go, well, because I don't want to kill a bear. Oh, and by the way, either do you. Somebody talked you into it. He goes, well, I'm talking to a guy. I go, well, what do you do? He had already bought a rifle. That's how susceptible he's like, the guy was like, come buy. I'll buy a rifle. He bought, like, literally, like a $12,000 rifle. Some crazy with the scope and everything. So we go there, and I go, I'll go to Alaska with you, but we'll go fishing. He goes, I'll call you right back. Calls me. Yeah, you're right. I don't want to kill a bear