In this interview, Tucker Max talks about eating paleo.
Once I started doing this, I started feeling so much better. My brain felt like it worked better. Everything about me improved. So I kinda went down the rabbit hole, and I started reading up on diet and nutrition from alternate sources. Art De Vany, Robb Wolf, and Loren Cordain, they didn’t invent it but they kinda popularized the concept of paleo eating. I realized that if you’re just a normal person, and you have the normal ideas about diet and nutrition, everything you know is wrong.
If you ask me, Tucker’s enthusiasm/support for paleo is huge. Max Planck said progress happens funeral by funeral. I say it happens keg party by keg party — college students, more than anyone else, have open minds. A friend told me that when she was a freshman in college, her sociology professor criticized the textbook. Whoa! she thought. Textbooks can be criticized!? She had thought they were beyond criticism. As far as I can tell, American college students respect Tucker more than they respect anyone else. (My Tsinghua students may favor Nassim Taleb.) For example, this recent tweet: “ TuckerMax is my idol. and he’s on this paleodiet…so i think im going to do it too.” I found no tweets about the dietary influence of Michelle Obama (“ coolest First Lady ever“).
In spite of what the interview was shortened to say, Tucker got the idea of eating flaxseed oil from this blog, especially Tyler Cowen’s experience. He wrote to me about it at the time. I posted his comments about dental health (here and here) and sports injuries (here, here and here) under the name Anonymous.
I am pleased to announce that Tucker will be talking at the upcoming Ancestral Health Symposium at UCLA. The title of his talk is::
From Cave to Cage: Mixed Martial Arts in Ancestral Health
Sorry Tucker Max fans, symposium tickets are sold out. But after the conference you will be able to see the talk on the website.
Tucker’s latest book is Assholes Finish First.
Never seen so many f-bombs and “dude”s in an article about diet and health. Great stuff!
So if we want to popularize the Paleo diet all we need to do is convert a few celebrities. Awesome. That should be a way easier job than a grassroots movement. I’m going to see if I can get started on that…