The Art of Manliness Podcast #3: Primal Living with Mark Sisson

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another episode of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Now, if a man wants to get in shape physically, he’ll often do what conventional wisdom tells him to do – that’s, you know, eat low fat foods, count calories and spend hours upon hours in the gym until his body is wiped out from fatigue. But what if conventional wisdom was wrong? What if modern man’s approach to health and fitness is actually making him less healthy?

Well, our guest today argues that we should ignore the modern approach to health and fitness, and take a lesson from, get this– caveman. His name is Mark Sisson, and Mark does it all. He is a fitness coach, author, he owns a sports nutrition company called Primal Nutrition, and his latest book is called The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram Your Genes for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health, and Boundless Energy. And Mark also writes daily at his blog about Primal Living at www.marksdailyapple.com, and he lives in beautiful Malibu, CA, with his family.

Mark, welcome to The Art of Manliness Podcast.

Mark Sisson: Hey, it’s my pleasure to be here, Brett, thanks.

Brett McKay: Yeah, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. All right, so Mark, I had to say you make some pretty bold claims. You basically argue that what we’ve heard for years about health and fitness is wrong and we should actually be taking cues from cavemen. So what exactly is wrong with the modern approach to health and fitness?

Mark Sisson: Well, you know, there is a lot wrong with it, and on the other hand, people will argue, look, I mean there’s guys at the gym who are getting bust and lean and, you know, they are getting results from doing all the work they are doing so, you know, why would you argue with that? Well, my take on this is that I want to get as healthy and as lean and as fit and as productive and as happy and as functionally strong as I can on the least amount of work possible. And so there is an element of, I won’t use the term laziness, but there is an element of efficiency to what I have chosen as a path to all of these wonderful attributes that we are all seeking. I mean, lords knows, we don’t have enough time to do all of the things that tend to distract us in this day and age and there are all kinds of distraction, so my take on this is why should you waste your time running endless miles on a treadmill to try and burn off an extra few percentage points of fat when I can point you to research that shows that’s not only not effective, it may be increasing the amount of body fat that you store.

Why would you want to, you know, cut back diet down on your calories when I can show you historically through the record of evolution of man over two million years that you don’t need to cut calories, as much you need to alter the types of food that you eat. I’ve been doing this for about 25 years. I started off as a lead marathon and triathlete and I finished fifth in U.S. National Championship in marathon in 1980, finished fourth in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii in 1982.

I was the consummate fit guy, everybody in town knew me as the fit guy. But the problem was as well as I could race and as fast as I could run and ride, I was not the picture of health, I was at the effect of the kind of training I was doing. I had upper respiratory tract infections, I had irritable bowel syndrome, I had chronic tendonitis and osteoarthritis because I was doing it wrong and I was going against what my genes, my human genes expected of me, in the way of maximizing my health, my strength and my fitness.

Brett McKay: Modern health and fitness I guess takes things very specialized and very compartmentalized and what you argue with Primal Living I guess is a more holistic view?

Mark Sisson: Yeah, very much so and that’s a good point. I was a great marathon runner, but I couldn’t play basketball, I couldn’t move side-to-side because I hadn’t developed those lateral movements, those lateral muscles, I had no core strength. Again, I was very fit and on a list of somebody’s attributes of fitness certainly endurance is right up there, but I wasn’t functionally strong. I was fit, but I wasn’t healthy, and you know, what good is being fit if you can’t race half the time because you are sick from catching the cold or from getting injured. So one of things that we know about the conventional wisdom, which would say, all right if you want to be fit and healthy, you know, you want to get out there and do a lot of aerobic exercise.

Well, the research that I’ve done for the last 25 years and about which I started to write my book shows that, yes, humans evolved to be very efficient slow-moving fat burners, i.e., we can walk really well, we can run occasionally, we can migrate, forage, hunt, gather for hours on hours at a time and burn predominantly fat while we’re doing this, and we are also by the way pretty efficient very very fast sprinters for brief periods of time 10 to 20 seconds, but we were never– we never really evolved to be the kind of runners that you would see, you know, at a marathon, we didn’t evolve to go out and run our heart rate up to 80% of its VO2 max for an hour or two or three hours at a time, and it turns out that that is counterproductive to building muscle, it’s counterproductive to building good health. So, I spent years as a marathoner and then I realized I was carrying my body down and destroying my immune system. So when I went back and looked at the research, and I have a degree in biology and I was a premed candidate and I have been writing about diet and exercise nutrition for 25 years, so this is nothing that’s new to me, it’s just when I put everything together, I realized why don’t we, you know, why do we assume that as conventional wisdom says that in order to be fit, we have to spend hours on a treadmill or on electrical trainer to get this, why do we assume that we have to go do, you know, we split routines multiple times a week on these bizarre pieces of machinery that isolate certain muscle groups, but in fact it set us back because you are not– they are not using the compound movements that our genes expect us to do. Why are we eating a high complex carbohydrate diet when humans never evolved to do that, and as a result, I came out with all of these questions that I had of the conventional wisdom and it turns out that we have been doing a lot of these things wrong for the last several decades just under the assumption that because that’s the way it’s been done in the last 50 or 60 years that must be the way we should be doing it.

Brett McKay: I think a lot of I guess would have to do to with way we approach science, we’re very analytical and so though, I’m guessing scientists said, you know, well if you eat a low fat diet they saw some good results, but they didn’t really look at the negative results of that.

Mark Sisson: One of the huge assumptions that conventional wisdom made a big mistake on was exactly that, you know, there are several books written in the last couple of years, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is probably the best one which looks at the history of government recommendations about what we should eat. And the whole anti-fat lifted hypothesis of heart disease which suggested that saturated fat and cholesterol are the cause of heart disease. It turns out that they are not significant in coronary heart disease or atherosclerosis, but even though studies for the last 100 years have pointed this out a few key individuals in the science community who had their own biases convinced the policy makers that we should recommend that everyone eat a low fat diet. And the next thing you know that became a recommendation. Anybody who wanted funding for study on heart disease could only do it if they were looking to prove that a high fat diet caused heart disease and the next thing you know, we’ve got this conventional wisdom as paradigm and everybody is now afraid of that, afraid of cholesterol when in fact there is nothing to be afraid about saturated fat or cholesterol, and it turns out it’s carbohydrate, a high carbohydrate diet is really what’s driving most of the problems that you see in heart disease and certainly in diabetes, and probably in arthritis, and most likely in cancer.

So one of the things that I talk about on my side all the time and I go into very heavily in my book The Primal Blueprint is how humans for two million years lived on a diet that was largely comprised of animal product, you know, meats and fats and nuts and berries and seeds and a few vegetables and fruits, but nowhere in our history until a few thousand years ago, were there anything like grains or appreciable amounts of sugar.

So humans evolved to– our genes evolved to expect us to be eating a high fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate diet, and when we don’t do that, when we eat the way we think we are supposed to by eating complex carbohydrates and whole grains and 6 to 11 servings of grains a day, when we eat according to the conventional wisdom, we are setting ourselves up for weight gain, in some cases obesity, certainly setting ourselves up for a metabolic syndrome and possibly type 2 diabetes, setting ourselves up for increased inflammation which may manifest itself in arthritis, and may also manifest itself in heart disease and other cases. And the record is becoming more and more clear on this that things like sugars and grain-based starchy foods have no real place in human evolution, they just sort of entered the equation 10,000 years ago when our ancestors discovered agriculture and found a cheap and easy source of empty calories, you know, to keep people alive.

Brett McKay: So, okay, so you kind of outlined what’s wrong with the modern approach to health and fitness, but what are the basic tenets of primal living, how does primal living counteract that?

Mark Sisson: So a primal living counteracts because the assumption that I make is that we have mismanaged our genes. We have– our genes want us to be healthy, they want us to be fit, they want us to be lean, they want us to live a long time and be happy, and all of the things that we think we’d liked to see in our future. Our genes already want us to do, but we have programed them with the wrong signals, and one of the things you have to understand is that the human body is changing and rebuilding and repairing itself on a minute-by-minute basis every single day, and it’s your genes that are causing proteins to be made and enzymes to be made and cells to switch on or off. So if you can understand that genes didn’t stop working the day you were born, genes didn’t stop working you know that and only gave you blue eyes or brown eyes or blonde or dark hair, or fair skin or sort of determine your height, but genes are these little on-off switches that are always working on your behalf and sometimes the signals you send them are turning on genes that cause inflammation, other times the signals you send them are turning on the genes that cause your body to want to become diabetic save you from the sugar that you are eating.

So when you realized that we have mismanaged our genes, but you also realized that there are certain clues to be found in our evolution, that would show us how we can reprogram our genes to do the things that we want them to do to allow us to be healthy, that’s really what the Primal Blueprint is about. It looks back at evolution and says, okay, you know what did our ancestors do for two million years that caused our genes to arrive at the exact point they were 10,000 years ago before agriculture, before civilization, and what can we do today to cause our genes to make us healthy and it becomes a list of 10 simple behaviors one of which is eat plants and animals. Well, that means eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, berries, but it means avoid processed foods, trans fats, hydrogenated oils, it means avoid sugars, it means avoid grains which had not been and part of our diet for a while, it’s probably for many people means avoiding most dairy because dairy is only a few thousand years ago.

If you limit your diet to eating plants and animals, as the first rules says, your genes will eventually reprogram themselves to make you an efficient fat burning machine, you learn to– your body will literally learn to derive most of its energy from your stored body fat instead of depending on a regular constant supply of carbohydrate every three to four hours like conventional wisdom tells us, I mean, don’t you love the whole thing the gym mantra, the guys in the gym who are trying to build muscles and I can’t go more than three hours without eating or if I will lose mass.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve always figured that was a thing invented by protein companies to sell more protein, but….

Mark Sisson: Well, you know, it certainly was promulgated by them and promoted by them, but, you know, it’s just been the assumption that humans are grazers, and therefore, we should graze all day long, well humans may have been grazers, but we always, you know, we went days without any food for hundreds of thousands of years of our existence, there were long periods of famine and that’s why the human body in our basic genetic constitution developed a process whereby in those particular times we could take fat out of storage and burn it and we live on it without any problems with blood sugar swings or mood or depression or anything affecting us.

So, that’s part one of the Primal Book on eat plants and animals. Another one of the rules is move around a lot at a low level of aerobic activity.

So what it means is don’t go out and lace up your shoes and try and keep your heart rate at a 75% to 85% rate for long periods of time day in and day out. It doesn’t mean you can do it once in a while, sure it’s fine if you want to go out on a trail run and hit it hard for a day here and there, that’s fine, but when it becomes this chronic daily repetitive sort of activity what happens is it tears muscle tissue down so you can’t really maintain the kind of lean mass that you would like to. It requires that you consume lots of carbohydrates day in and day out because when you train at that high level of cardiac output you’re training too fast and too long to be burning predominately fast. So you have to get your energy stores from carbohydrate and that means you have to eat more carbohydrate than you burn off. And, you know, so that’s the reason a lot of times you will go to the gym and among your lead runners you don’t see a lot of body fat, but among the standard middle aged group runner, you go to the gym and how many people have seen at the gym every day or five days a week for the last three or four years on the treadmill reading those calories burned off, sweating there– sweat pouring off their brow and they still have 25 pounds to lose.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I see it all the time.

Mark Sisson: You know you see it all the time and that’s because it doesn’t work, you cannot– the human body was not meant to be burning carbohydrate entirely and then go home and the defense mechanism to the body is you get off the treadmill, you burn 500 calories, but your brain tells you to go home and eat 600 calories with the carbohydrates to more than make up for it because your brain is thinking what if this crazy guy is going to do this again tomorrow.

So move around a lot of– at a low level of work activity, it means hiking, it means walking or it might mean jogging once in a while at 70% of your heart rate or riding bike easily if you want to do that on a daily basis. And every once in a while, you can certainly go out and crank off, you know, a hard seven mile or something like that, but the idea behind the low level activity is it promotes the burning of fat and that’s really what we want to do. So it’s about parking your car far away from work as you can and walking, it’s about climbing stairs instead of taking escalators, it’s about standing up when you are doing an interview on the telephone and walking around the room every once in a while, it’s about moving around a lot at a low level or activity.

One of the other laws of the Primal Blueprint is sprint once in a while, and that’s exactly what we teach people. Once a week one of your workouts will be to do 30 seconds to 45 seconds of a very all-out intent, max heart rate sprint and it doesn’t have to be on a running sprint, it could be on a bike, it could be on the elliptical whatever it takes to get your heart rate up into the max zone for just 30 seconds, because it turns out that emulates what our ancestors did when they were in a fight or flight situation.

You know, to either kill something for dinner or to avoid being killed for somebody’s dinner. We had to sprint once in a while, and the mechanism by which the body recovered is sort of that nature, you know, old line, that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. If you survive the sprint like that because it was a life or death situation, your body produced human growth hormone, testosterone, and it built itself back even stronger so that you could withstand that same stress a little bit better the next time.

So, we tell people sprint once in a while, just once a week, you know, not– and it’s maybe six to eight of these 30 to 45 second bouts with a two-minute rest in between, but in 30 minutes, you have accomplished more than you would with a one hour jog on a treadmill at 80% of your VO2 max.

Brett McKay: And, Mark, this all sounds great, but one of the criticisms I guess I’ve heard of the, you know, the Primal Living or the Paleo lifestyle was that it tends to romanticize the life of a caveman, I mean these people argue, well, didn’t caveman lived short, hard life, so I mean why should we emulate them, you know, how would you respond to that type of criticism?

Mark Sisson: Well, I mean that’s a common line and the assumption is that they die, I think the lifespan of the Paleo lived, the typical Paleolithic person about 10,000 years ago was probably 33 years, but you have to understand that that’s an average lifespan and that includes death during childbirth, death from traumatic infection, death from, you know, being killed by a beast or falling off a cliff, and when you realize that when you look at any hunter-gatherer from modern times and going all the way back the science is pretty solid on this, and you examined the skeletal structures, you find 65, 70, 80-year-old people who were very robust, very healthy at the time of their death, who you know could withstand stresses far greater than we could today. So they were generally healthier, stronger, leaner, we don’t know if they were, you know, happier or more productive, but we can assume that they probably were. So the average– in fact there have been some scientists who have done some extrapolation and suggests that the maximum possible lifespan of those ancestors that you talk about was probably 92 or 93 years old. So they could have lived that long if they had avoided, you know, the massive all of the stuff that we take for granted now, you know…

Brett McKay: Like getting eaten by a saber-tooth tiger something like that?

Mark Sisson: Bingo. I mean, you know, or to put it another way, I’m 56, two years ago, I injured my knee in an ultimate Frisbee, in a stupid catch if I had to tell the truth. Had I not gotten surgery on that knee and had just been 10,000 years ago, you know, I would no longer be able to run away from danger. So I was probably dead meat at the age of having survived quite nicely to the age of 54, you know, I probably wouldn’t have been long for the world because of that trauma. So it was all of this collection of all these possible ways of dying traumatic death that lowered the average lifespan, but certainly did not alter the maximum possible lifespan, and yet as we say today and we find in hunter-gatherer societies today, you know, a 7-year-old or a 75-year-old hunter-gatherer can still scamper up a tree and catch food and can still, you know, have all the sex he wants and can still do all of the things that a 25-year-old can versus looking at our society today where a 75-year-old man is– the typical 75-year-old man is, you know, a far cry from that sort of robust health, all of which shows just to sort of point out that when we talk about emulating our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we are just looking at ways to maximize the best possible gene expression, and when we get around to diet, you know, one of the things that we talk about as one of the rules is avoid poisonous things that was one of the things that kept our ancestors alive, I mean if you– they had a very keen acute senses of smell and taste.

We certainly have the means with our ability to literally to vomit if we eat something that’s bad or our kidneys or liver can filter out certain poisons, so we have that going for us, but and that’s what our ancestors rely on, but that– but today, we have all these other poisonous things that we still need to avoid, so does you know hydrogenated oils, processed food with chemicals names that you can’t pronounce and they have long-term potential consequences for injecting them. Those are the sorts of things that we want to avoid and that’s why we say that it really is imperative to kind of emulate what our ancestors ate, and that means if it typically if they have a nutrition fact labeled on it, it probably isn’t worth eating.

Brett McKay: And going back to that, you know, you say you eat meats and vegies and avoid grains, but how do you do it practically– a lot of our readers are younger men, they’re in college, so they don’t have a lot of disposable income, it just seems eating just vegies and meat, and that can get expensive when the cheaper alternative is go to the supermarket shelf and get whatever has grains in it, you know, everything these days seems to have wheat or corn and it’s cheaper than the healthier option, you know, how can you make the primal living lifestyle affordable?

Mark Sisson: We have a lot of– my readers at Mark’s Daily Apple who make a science of going to the butcher and getting end cuts and getting organ meats and getting the cheaper cuts of meat that are that don’t sell as well because they are fattier when in fact here I’m suggesting that the fattiest cut of meat is the best cut of meat you can get. We have people who’ve converted themselves into what we call modern foragers and who are, you know, buying the value pack of the chicken legs, and instead of buying the skinless chicken breasts, which are twice as much as the ones with skin, they get the full-on chicken breast with the skin because (a) it’s better for you (b) it’s cheaper and (c) it tastes better.

When you kind of cut to the chase and all of these things and do a little, just a little bit of homework, you realize that we waste a lot of money on processed foods that are actually not only not good for us, but aren’t inexpensive as we think they might be. The first thing people knows about switching to a primal-type diet when they cut the carbs, they realized that they are not as hungry as they once were because carbs, carbohydrates do drive hunger they drive appetite, they drive up insulin and insulin is involved in storing fat and basically storing everything as fat. When you reduce the amount of insulin you secrete because you reduce the amount of carbohydrate you don’t store as much, you take more fat out of storage and burn it on a regular basis, and as a result, you don’t need as many calories to get through the day with full energy as you did when you were a carbohydrate-consuming beast. The end result of that is it doesn’t take as many calories as many, you know, if you’re doing a cost per calorie analysis, it doesn’t take any calories to keep you going and there are all sorts of options, people look at how much they spend on diet soda thinking that they can live without diet soda, but thinking that they are doing themselves a huge a favor because you are not drinking real soda.

Well, diet soda is just as bad or worse than real soda. If you could wean yourself off of diet soda and get a simple filter for your cap and drink regular water instead of diet soda, and by the way they both have zero calories, you know you might save yourself 15 bucks a week just doing that, you know, all these little areas that we can look at and go wow I just didn’t realize how much I spent on my Starbucks latte or my mid-morning Cola from the vending machine or, you know, whatever else my snacks. And it– I mean I’ve got people living on three, four bucks a day and eating lot of meat and, you know, getting their produce from a farmers’ market or trading it for something else, it’s part of the fun as living primal you’re figuring out ways that you can, you know, do this on a budget and be healthier than the guy next door.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it also looks like there is, you know, some hidden ways you save money, I mean according to you, if you live the primal diet, you are getting sick less often, so that’s a less you have to spend on medicine, on doctor care, on…

Mark Sisson: By the way that’s huge.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Mark Sisson: That’s huge, I mean I tell people, you know, if you start going primal now and you don’t get type 2 diabetes as a result of that, you don’t develop in your 50s or 60s some kind of heart condition or you don’t develop some form of, you know, got to be some form of cancer, you could be looking at that as a better investment than a 401K is, I mean especially today, but, you know, you can say that, you know, it’s a cliché, you know, when you are investing in your health and when you have your health you have everything, but you know ask some 75-year-old just getting out of the hospital having a had a, you know, a quadruple bypass and had a $250,000 bill to face, you know, what he’d rather be facing a little bit of a change in lifestyle 20 years earlier, or you know the bills and all of the hearthache and sadness that comes with and the loss of function and everything else, it comes with not having taking care of yourself.

The thing about the primal lifestyle it’s so easy to incorporate, and then to realize that you can live this way for the rest of your life, it’s not like you said 60-day diet or 30-day regimen or a two-week cleanse that you are going to do and then you are going to go back the way it was, most people who adopt this style of eating and exercising and sleeping, in other words living, the biggest testimonial I get are from the people who go, look, I’m not only had a weightlifted from my gut, I have a weightlifted from my shoulders because I can see clearly that I can live this way for the rest of my life, and not only not get sick or not only not worry about getting some disease, but literally for the next couple of decades, I can improve my strength, I can improve my endurance, I can improve my mood. I mean it’s really exciting for a lot of people.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And, Mark, it sounds like the primal lifestyle is going to be a big change for a lot of people, you know, they are used to eating carbohydrate-based diet, they exercised on the treadmill, you know, every day for 30 minutes, and for a lot of people, this could be a big lifestyle change. So what is your advice, should people make the changes all at once or should they do it little by little?

Mark Sisson: Oh, I think people historically would be doing this for three years now on a site and we get a lot of feedback, thousands of people have taken this program on. I guess we only hear from the ones who are successful. We don’t hear from many who have said I tried, it didn’t work, I’m out of here. So there is a little bit of a filter is going on there, maybe they aren’t heavy, I don’t know, but the most part– the way they do it is they usually start with a diet and it usually starts with cutting sugars and grains, and they begin to feel better, and they realize wow, you know, I just– all I did was cut sugars and grains, Mark said I could eat all of the lamb chops and pork chops and fish and salads and eggs and meat, nuts, and you know, all those other stuff that I want, but turns out I don’t even really want to eat that much because once I cut the carbs, you know, my appetite went to a realistic appetite that was all I needed to maintain. They report that they lose a couple of pounds a week steadily for weeks at a time or months at a time depending on how much they need to lose, and then they go, whoa, if the diet is working I’m going to try the exercise regimen, and the exercise regimen is– it’s actually simpler than what they’re used to, because if they are used to working out 6 or 10 hours a week, now they are working out 3 or 4 hours a week total and they are still getting stronger and they are still burning the fat, they can see their abs, you know, they are getting the whole what’s for thing going, and one of the things that I– one of my 10 laws is play, and I’m really adamant about that, we don’t play enough, it has stress-relieving qualities, it has qualities that incorporate a lot of the strength that you build in your workouts, now you can use it when you play, pick up a new sport, and so a lot of people find that they are able to get out and play with their kids or they are playing with their college buddies, they play and touch football or soccer or ultimate Frisbee or whatever it is, they are able to do something that they couldn’t do a few months ago because they might have injured themselves, but now because they are learning how to spend more time working on their core or they are learning how to actually train their feet in the mode of barefoot training, which is one of the new offshoots of the Primal Program, they are not getting the muscle pulls anymore and their speed has picked up, and it sort of snowballs that it turns into this the thing where the more they take the lifestyle on and the more they realize it is easy to do, that the zero sacrifice involves is anything or doing, you know, they are eating better than they were when they were and they are enjoying their food more when they were on their conventional wisdom diet that they’re working out, they’re spending less time working out, yeah, it has got a couple of workouts and ballbusters here and there, but that are actually doing the building phase, but it doesn’t take that much because once you cut the carbs you don’t need to burn the fat off, your body is already burning– in a fat burning mode whether or not you exercise, so exercise just becomes then a functional strength building routine, which doesn’t take very much time at all.

The next thing you know they’re looking into their sleep and I realize now that I hadn’t been catching up with my sleep and I know how important sleep is, they are getting more sunlight because they realize that this whole conventional wisdom advice to stay out of the sun is antithetical to health that one of the biggest factors in increase in cancer in this country isn’t because we have spent so much time in the sun, it’s because ironically we haven’t spent enough time in the sun, and each time in the sun it causes the body to make vitamin D, and vitamin D is one of the most important elements in our immune system, and particularly that part of the immune system that kicks cancer out, and it’s snowball, it becomes a great lifestyle, and as a result, people wind up going on to my forums and my comment boards and now they are doing these primal meet-ups in different parts of the country where they will get together and they will have a barbeque and exchange ideas for new primal recipes and they will play, you know, some kind of obviously between you and me we know ultimate Frisbee is the best game on the planet….

Brett McKay: Yes, of course.

Mark Sisson: It’s just kind of a lifestyle that’s easy to undertake, to embrace, and then certainly to support with other people.

Brett McKay: Wow, well, this was a lot of great information today, Mark. Thank you again for speaking with us today. It’s been a pleasure.

Mark Sisson: My pleasure indeed.

Brett McKay: Our guest today was Mark Sisson. Mark is the author of the book Primal Blueprint and you can order Mark’s book at www.primalblueprint.com, and make sure you check out Mark’s blog, www.marksdailyapple.com for more information about Primal Living.

Well, that wraps up this edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast, and before we leave, I want to make a plug for a book. Yesterday was the official launch of The Art of Manliness book, and thanks to you all, it was a big big success. Thank you to everyone who went out and bought the book, thank you to everyone who helped spread the word about The Art of Manliness book, we really really appreciate it. And if you haven’t ordered the book yet, we really encourage you to go out and do this week, because we got a great deal going on.

If you order a book before October 12 from www.amazon.com, from www.barnesandnoble.com, and you followed us the email receipt you get, we will email you a link to download a free copy of our Man’s Guide to the Holidays. It’s a cool e-book we put together to help make your holidays manlier and filled with tips like how to cut down a Christmas tree or how to start a roaring fireplace fire. So do that before October 12, and we’ll get you a copy of that free e-book. And that’s it, we really appreciate it, and till next week, stay manly.