Joe Rogan Experience #1551 - Paul Saladino

(drumming) Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. (rock music) Um, listen, man. I've been telling everybody that, uh, I eat mostly meat. And they look at me like I'm gonna die. And it's kinda funny. And I, I've had these conversations with people and they were like, "Oh, well, if you eat too much meat..." Jamie, can we get more waters? We only have one water out here.

Yeah, sure.

I've been telling these people, like, e- that I eat only meat and they're like, "Well, you know, if you eat too much meat, it causes colon cancer, causes this, causes that." And one of the things that I say, and, uh, is a talking point that I actually stole from you, is that most plants are inedible, but almost all animals are edible. And when you say that to them, they look at you like, "Oh, shit." Like, if you just go out and eat, like, random plants, you'll get sick as fuck. That's real. So like, when I tell people I eat mostly meat, they look at me like, like you're doing something really stu- Like, Rob Lowe started laughing at me. I said I have, like, an animal-based diet, you know? Some people are plant-based, I'm animal-based.

I love that word.

Yeah, animal-based.

Yeah.

Just steal what they're saying.

(laughs) And make it better.

But what you said, what I've, I've heard you say, that is, that's an accurate way of describing it. Most plants are not edible, but almost every animal's edible.

I mean, and I think that if people spend time in the wilderness, n- regardless of the latitude, they'll start to appreciate this.

Yeah.

And I've s- mostly spent time in, in latitudes that are further from the equator than not. But even at the equator, if you go walking around the woods and, or the, the forest or the jungle there, and you try to eat leaves or stems or bark-

You're gonna die.

... you're gonna die.

(laughs)

Really freaking fast. (laughs)

Well, how about people who collect mushrooms? Like, they make mistakes, you know, like, uh-

So easy.

I remember there was a story about, uh, a guy in a nursing home. And, uh, he had went out and picked mushrooms for the people in the nursing home and cooked 'em up, and they all died.

(laughs)

Just, like, 'cause he fucked up.

Ugh.

He probably was an older guy, couldn't see, or maybe just forgot what's edible, or maybe he was just losing his mind. But the point is, most of these things you see are not edible.

And if you think about it from the perspective of a plant, it makes more sense.

Yeah.

But we never do that anthropomorphization, and we never think about that. But as I was learning about this and thinking about carnivore diets and animal-based diets, I had to learn a lot of stuff myself. I'm a, I was trained as a physician. I wasn't trained as an anthropologist, and I took ecology in college, but when you look at, like, the, what we know about the timeline of life on Earth, 500 plus million years of plant and animal co-evolution. And there's a lot of people who have speculated this, that essentially plants evolve, animals evolve. Animals start eating plants, plants evolve defenses, animals evolve defenses against the defenses. And there's a whole series of enzymatic systems in our liver, the phase one and phase two detoxification systems, they're called cytochrome P450 and other reactionary systems in our liver that are meant to detoxify things. And a lot of people speculate, and I think this is really reasonable, that the majority of the reason we have those is so that we could eat plants from time to time so we didn't starve during our evolution. But there's a, there's a real interesting interaction here. This is warfare. This is, this is-