Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1213 - Dr. Andrew Weil
Uploaded: 2018-12-12T20:54:48.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1213 - Dr. Andrew Weil' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-12-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1213 - Dr. Andrew Weil' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-12-12. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1213 - Dr. Andrew Weil

four three two all the way from Tucson Arizona Dr. Weil how are you sir I am
good thanks for doing this man appreciate it pleasure you come highly
recommended by many human beings that I know I glad to hear it how do you how
do
you get such a fine reputation well I've been doing the same things for a
long time just putting one foot ahead of the other and saying what I know to be
true and and push matcha everybody likes matcha who doesn't like matcha tea
this
is your stuff yeah but you know a lot of people don't have only tasted really
bad
matcha okay enlighten me what's you know it's powdered tea and it's very very
finely powdered and it's very labor-intensive to prepare and it's got
such a huge surface area that it oxidizes very quickly so if it's not properly
packed and stored it loses its brilliant green color it turns yellow green or
gray green it gets bitter and loses its taste and I got to say most of the
matcha that I see served in this country is of that sort and many people have
never had the good stuff what's the benefits of matcha I know there's first
of all it's beautiful I mean I've never seen a green color like that it's just
amazing and the flavors amazing but it's the only preparation of tea in which
the
whole leaf is consumed and and it's grown under special conditions the leaves
are
shaded uh deep shade for the last three weeks before harvest so the in response
to that the leaves produce more chlorophyll more antioxidants more the good
stuff so it's got uh you know much more of the things you want and this has
like a
pop top like Pringles yeah is that so the matcha's in there it's got to stay
fresh and
after you open it you want to keep it in the freezer and and yep you got a
freezer and you
get should sift it so it doesn't form lumps and then you whisk it with that
traditional bamboo whisk or you buy a little electric whisker and you can whisk
it in
hot water or cold water and it's very yummy and what what does it do for you
like what's
the good well you've got it's got caffeine of course so you get stimulated by
it but
it's also got l-theanine which is this relaxant compound that modifies the
effect of caffeine
and produces a state of relaxed alertness so it doesn't have the jangling
effect of coffee
right and uh you're getting all of these antioxidant benefits that are well
documented in tea anyway
i love it it's a great thing anytime you get one of these little whisks it's
cool it's like
a real bamboo made from one piece of bamboo it's a miracle of uh japanese craftsmanship
it's beautiful it's beautiful so um how often do you drink this stuff i have a
bowl of it every
morning and so yeah and sometimes i have a glass of iced matcha later in the
day especially in warm
weather you're just a matcha fiend i love it it's a good thing i first tasted
it when i was 17 i was
an exchange student in japan uh 1959 i lived with a family outside of tokyo we
had no language in
common and on the second night i was there the mother took me next door to her
neighbors who
practiced tea ceremony and they did this thing for me and i was fascinated by
that whisk and the color
of the matcha and i thought it was great you know i never thought i'd be able
to get it over here
yeah well so you you import this stuff yourself is that what you're doing i
started a company called
matcha kari we've got the url matcha.com and i went to japan to uji which is a
little town outside
of kyoto where which is the center of the best tea production in japan and i
sourced really good
matcha you know there are many grades of matcha the most the highest are too
expensive to use for
everyday use they're really yeah i mean phenomenal expensive like truffles or
yeah yeah really
expensive so you i've tried to find the best matcha that is affordable and make
it available to people
here so like the highest level stuff how much would it cost for a cup of tea
hard to estimate for a
cup you know it possibly there's a preparation called thick tea in japan where
they use three times the
amount of powder and probably one bowl of that stuff which is shared by several
people i don't know it
could be a hundred dollars a bowl whoa yeah really yeah tea yeah why why did it
catch on in japan like
that it's always been you know it has been in japan for a very long time and
and uh this powdered
tea preparation was originally taken up by zen monks uh to help them stay awake
during long hours of
meditation it was also associated with samurai and became the tea ceremony
developed around that
is there anything that uh is similar to it is like yerba mate or guarana or any
other well these are
all they're all caffeine plants but in my experience tea i think and it's
primarily because of that l-theanine
content uh the effect is mellower of caffeine so you get stimulated you get
alert but it doesn't have
the jangling effect of a lot of these other caffeine beverages do you drink
regular coffee as well no i've
never drunk coffee wow i think i was turned off because my parents when i was
growing up drank really
strong black coffee with no sugar or cream i couldn't imagine why people would
savages yeah those
people there were different people did you grow up in a northern climate i grew
up in philadelphia
yeah see when it's cold outside people they drink that black coffee oh it makes
you angry at the world
yeah dark black burnt coffee i like bright green shining masha isn't it
interesting that things that
are good for you many things that are good for you like bell peppers or
something like that they have a
beautiful color to them well you know all these uh the health benefits of
fruits and vegetables a lot of
them have to do with these pigments uh and the pigments the plants produce they're
part of their
own defensive system and they do good things in us and one piece of advice that
i often give people
is you should try to eat across the color spectrum every day think about you
know what did you eat today
that was red what was purple what was green what was right all of these have
different benefits is that
uh a scientific perspective absolutely really yeah yeah these are categories of
phytochemicals or
protective phytonutrients and a lot of them are these pigments that give fruits
and vegetables their bright
colors do you think that people should vary those colors on any given day or i
think i think as as
much as you can across any day try to eat across the color spectrum that's a
good thing to aim for
okay so just just get as many of them as in as you can yeah yeah yeah so do you
you take this approach
with fruits with with all sorts of different things yeah yeah brightly colored
stuff is good do you eat
meat or chicken i don't i'm fishing vegetables just fishing vegetables yeah um
now when you you
you the one of the things i'm super concerned with and i've been more concerned
with the more i pay
attention to it is sustainability when it comes to fish absolutely it seems
like uh especially ocean fish
where you know human beings are just terrible monsters you know there's a
famous oceanographer in this
country sylvia earl who was the woman that held a record for the deepest uh
dive and she came up to
me at a meeting once and pleaded with me not to recommend that people eat fish
she said there just
aren't going to be any in the future and that's probably true uh you know
probably the future is
going to be farmed fish and that can be done in a responsible way yeah you can
get the good guides one
is put out by the monterey aquarium you can get a wallet card that lists that
lists fish and shellfish
and rates them both by toxicity and sustainability and that's a good guide to
follow yeah um mollusks
you mollusks i do i eat yeah i i eat uh i like oysters uh and scallops i eat
them what is what has led
you to not eat chicken or fish or beef rather it's been a long time and uh let's
see i was i think 28
and i was interested in yoga and people that i knew who were doing yoga had
become vegetarian and
i saw friends of mine that had become vegetarian i thought well i'll just try
it for a little while
and it agreed with me i didn't eat fish for a number of years and i found that
made international
travel very difficult especially to japan and uh and then i was reading about
all the research on
good stuff and fish and i started eating fish and that that way of eating
agrees with me real well
yeah um it is a thing that agree with you thing right yeah it really depended
upon the person's
very individual so you know it's hard to give blanket rules except i have no
problem telling
people to stay away from refined processed and manufactured food that's the bad
stuff yeah that's
a really good clear thing that everybody can kind of apply in their life but as
far as like what is
going to work for you there's a lot of trial and error involved absolutely you
got to
do experiments pay attention see what works for you yeah now you practice what
would you how would
you call it integrative integrative medicine yeah well how would you define
that well it's medicine of
the future and uh you know and the short answer in the future short answer is
it's the intelligent
combination of conventional and alternative medicine but really it's it's a
system that focuses on the
body's ability to heal itself that looks at people as whole persons not just
physical bodies
uh that takes account of all aspects of lifestyle and understanding health and
illness values the
practitioner patient relationship and makes use of all therapies no matter
where they come from that
show reasonable evidence of efficacy and are not going to hurt people so i am
absolutely convinced this is
the way out of the health care crisis i've been training doctors and other
health professionals in it for
many years now now when you say the body's ability to heal itself how would you
accentuate that with
this to me is the thing that's most missing from medical education uh i i i
think the only time i heard
the word healing used in medical school was in the in wound healing which in my
first year course in histology
to me the most marvelous thing about our bodies is that they have the capacity
to heal themselves you
get a cut you can watch it heal and that that happens throughout the body you
know the dna molecule
this is just a big molecule on the border of life and non-life it has within it
the ability to know
in quotes when it's been injured of a cosmic ray knocks a part of it out
instantly it begins to
manufacture repair enzymes that that duplicate the missing piece and paste it
in and you can see that same
thing at any level of biological organization and to me that's where good
medicine should start that the
body has within it the ability to maintain equilibrium heal itself now knowing
that the body has this
ability what what do you do to accentuate that well if i when i listen to a
patient and hear their story
at the back of my mind i'm thinking why is healing not happening here what can
i do from outside that can
facilitate that i can't put it into somebody but i can help it along by either
supplying energy missing
materials remove obstacles to it you know like you have a wound that doesn't
heal maybe there's a
foreign body in it you remove that heals now um when you have people that come
to you that have issues
like say if someone comes to you and they have a back issue yeah i got a little
bit of lower back pain
do you approach that from in terms of like how they're eating how they're
living their lifestyle first
i would question them about lifestyle for sure but uh you know i'm a great
follower of a man who died
recently named john sarno who was and you know about his work sure uh he has
some great books mind over
back pain healing back pain and his main belief which i totally agree with is
that the vast majority of
back pain is muscle spasm which originates in the mind uh and it may localize
at an area of physical
injury but it the the injury is not the cause of it you can live with a