The Rich Roll Podcast

“I think, a lot of people don't really understand, like, the biological and physiological factors that make us x x versus x y. We know that most of the research in health and sports science has been done on men and generalized women, even small things like aspirin for heart attack. There were no women who were in the original study. So they're looking at men and generalizing to women.”

“If you're going to create a stress without food, you're not going to create a really strong stress. You feel like you are. But from the body, from a cellular level, it's not as strong of a stress to create the adaptation that you want. You're gonna have more catecholamine, so that's your cortisol and your breakdown hormones that are being produced so that it can fuel your workout. Let's just take that negative stress away by putting a little bit of food in before you go training.”

“We also see that about four years before that one point in time in menopause, there's an incredible decrease in our gut microbiome diversity, which then exacerbates the body's ability to store body fat because we start having an overgrowth of the phyla that is obesogenic or prefers to grab all of the energy out of all the food they're eating and make you crave simple carbohydrates.”

“If anyone's ever been to an f forty five or an Orangetheory, I know they already have targets on me, so I'm happy to just talk about them now. You're sitting forty five minutes at an intensity that isn't high intensity. It feels that way because we've all been conditioned to come out of a workout feeling really sweaty and wasted, but that's not effective. So it's not hard enough to be hard to invoke change. It's not easy enough to be easy for recovery.”

“We see from a randomized controlled trial that came out last month that those people who lift on the heavy end, both men and women, lift on the heavy end get more prefrontal cortex neuro conductivity. So that means they're actually empowering the neurons in the prefrontal cortex more so than those people that are lifting moderate weight or body weight. Only the heavy end of lifting really does affect the prefrontal cortex.”

“If we want to improve bone density, we need a multidirectional stress coming up. When I talk about jump training, so many people, especially perimenopausal women, like, I can't my joints hurt. It's like, I'm not talking about plyometric high box jumps. It could be something as simple as a toe raise and a hard heel slam because you're dropping hard and absorbing all those forces. That's a multidirectional force to the skeletal system.”

“Cold plunge. Oh, yeah. I caused an international shit storm with this one. The ice water, the ice bath that comes along is way too cold for women. It causes more of a sympathetic drive. And once we get over that sympathetic drive, then the responses for parasympathetic still are not as robust as we see for men. So we're looking at 55 degrees Fahrenheit, around 14 to 16 degrees Celsius. It is in the research.”

“There are a 153 studies in the systematic review. Of it, the conclusion was women 18 to 60 should be using three to five grams of creatine supplementation to optimize and improve overall health. Anything about the brain, the heart, the gut, the bone, everything requires creatine. For women, by the nature of being women, we have less lean mass than men, so we have less stores.”

“When we look at wearables, the algorithms are based on male data. There are a lot of women who are like, what's going on? My Garmin's yelling at me. You're in the red. What's going on? You're sick. But, actually, they just ovulated. And these algorithms are not picking up the fact that when we look at physiology for women, there's an inherent change across the menstrual cycle with regards to autonomic nervous system.”

“When I was back in the day when Interbike was in Las Vegas, I was sharing a cab back to the airport, and this guy got in and he didn't look healthy at all. And he was talking about how he's gonna go on a bike ride, but he had to use his beta alanine and beet juice first. And I was like, what are you talking about? He goes, oh, yeah. Well, that's how I can go hard on my bike. I was like, have you tried training without it? He goes, why would I do that?”

“There's an evil-gazing self-obsession that comes with the self-improvement, personal development space, and self-obsession is an antagonist to personal growth. And so the narcissistic, kind of ego-centric aspect of being in this state or in this pressurized situation where you feel like you always have to be improving yourself, I don't think it's necessarily healthy and I plead guilty. Not only am I participating in this, I'm a purveyor of it.”

“So many of the podcast hosts who are in my genre, not all of them, but I'm saying there's a lot of them. These guys are dorks. It's just gotten so boring where everybody wants to improve you, or it's become uninteresting. Now, there's so many of them and everyone wants to improve you, and it's almost like, you know what? Why don't we just all relax a little bit? Maybe the improvement we all need is to stop thinking about ourselves for a little while.”

“Zoom and I do breakfast bros on the weekends. We were sharing a blueberry muffin waiting for our plate of food to come. I just got struck with one of those lightning bolt moments, we all have them, where you realize, actually, this is the only thing that matters. Everything else I'm obsessed with in my life makes no difference at all. These moments, this moment here, I'm going to be thinking about this moment. I don't think I'll ever forget a moment like that.”

“Ed O'Brien from Radiohead. When you listen to his solo album, you really understand his contribution to Radiohead. He's the guy who's creating the entire sonic vibe of the band's sound. He's the sound designer behind the scenes, and he's somebody who has always been comfortable, kind of receded into the background. If you watch concert footage or see performances of them, he'll be leaning down, turning knobs, and playing with wires and stuff like that, but less comfortable being forward-facing.”

“Mike D from the Beastie Boys, proud citizen of Malibu, sort of an icon in Malibu. He has an album coming out soon, Mike D5D, and he did a live performance in Malibu last Thursday. They took over that whole parking lot, and he performed an unpublicized, if you live in Malibu, you know kind of thing, like all of Point Doom showed up for this. There's probably like 300 people.”

“Dean Potter, the great climber, free soloist, bass jumper, wingsuit pilot, and it's his whole story. What you don't realize is that Dean was 6'6. So there's a scene of him soloing a root on the top of L-cap, that root that Alex has to wedge his body in and shimmy up that crack. He's 6'6, doing that. Dean is climbing from a lot of pathos, even in his early climbs when he does this amazing route, he's up there like, howling like a monkey and making it very, very much, there's rage involved. Alex, he climbs from a place of joy. He just loves it.”

“They risked their lives. It was a one in 20 chance that those heat shields wouldn't work on the way back because they were flawed heat shields and they'd had in the test flight. This crew of four people still did it. What you realize is these people will go for it because if this didn't happen now, it would happen two years from now and these astronauts might not get the chance again. They had CO2 scrubbers that were getting, it's like a rebreather.”

“It does take incredible guts and strength and focus, and I appreciate those things too. But I think to be really strong, you have to have humility. I think often force is mistaken for strength. Strength is something totally different than that. It includes humility. So that's my only concern, my only note. My only note for NASA is make sure we're humble about this.”

“It is the consistent refrain of every astronaut who has had that experience when they come back, when you have that perspective of the Earth from such a distance, you realize, oh, it's a spaceship, we're all on it together, it's so small, we have more in common than our differences. They repeat that, and we understand that intellectually, but there's something so experiential about that, because it's so moving for them, like it changes them. I wish we could be changed just by hearing them reflect that back to us.”