Principle Investigator at the Anne Andrews Research Group at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences Psychiatry is the study and treatment of mental illness, emotional disturbance, and abnormal behavior Leads research on anxiety & depression Trying to understand how neurotransmitters are used in …

From abalone hunter to national park service law enforcement to viral video cat rescuing star, Shannon Jay is the kind of guy you just love to sit down and listen to. A fantastic story teller, he is one of my favorite people to catch up with. In the podcast he talks about hunting giant red abalone on the Lost Coast, what he learned in 31 years of l…

Stan Graham sticks out in any crowd. At 6'5" with a shock of white hair, he's a physical presence. He can also move that mass pretty quickly. In October of 2019 he's aiming for a world record for the 50 and over crowd. We talked about running a bit in the show, but went more deeply into his beliefs, how he got into running, and why he started Eleme…

Scott Mann shares his journey from revenge-driven Green Beret "putting scalps on the barn" in Afghanistan to creative storyteller helping guide other veterans through the process of transitioning from the military to civilian life. Scott takes us through his career including why he turned down a military command opportunity 3 times: "I joined to be…

Been working on this piece of writing for a while, thought I'd share one of the first drafts with you. As you'll hear, this comes from my experiences riding earth energy, would love to get your feedback on it. Rock on! For more info go to nikhawks.com -NFH

After a chance meeting while coaching young athletes I stayed in touch with Eric Bostrom for two reasons. First, he had a clean energy. I know that sounds pretty damn woo-woo, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve just learned to trust my gut more when it comes to meeting people. Eric was soft spoken but from the moment I met him there was an obvious inten…

What does it take to shoot a pistol faster than pretty much anyone else in the world? Mastery over awareness and attention. Whether you're a pistol wizard or a paraglider pilot, this show goes deep into how to improve at anything you do. Brian Enos is a well known pistol shooter who quit competing after 20 years of winning at all levels. He built a…

This is classic podcast material: A dive into a fascinating topic that you wouldn't normally hear about. Jeff Shapiro is a well known climber, base jumper, wingsuit pilot, hang glider, and paraglider but for this show we focused on his passion for falconry. Jeff is a Master falconer and has been working with raptors since becoming an Apprentice 200…

This episode with Massimiliano (Max) de Zambotti came about when I found his paper on comparing the Oura ring against the gold standard of sleep assessment, polysomnography. Being the curious type, I clicked his name on the Pubmed link and found a whole list of papers he's worked on. As it turns out, he studies insomnia up at SRI and is deeply and …

This one covers one of my favorite stories, Ralph A. telling us about the opportunity of a lifetime. Enjoy the wanderings, for how often to lift weights on a maintenance plan to the latest hobby and books I'm reading. I finish off with a reading of the Letter to Jake. Yaww! Head over to https://www.patreon.com/nikhawks and support the show, thank y…

Random thoughts, recent news, and books I'm reading. Capacity for luck, creating a long term high, towels vs toilet paper and what happens when you're not prepared for the best day ever. Let's do this!โดย Nik Hawks

These are all the thoughts for the podcast gathered since mid-way through November, from wild ideas about waves and tides to the idea of 1st vs 3rd world consequences and finishes up with what books & movies I'm recommending. Enjoy!โดย Nik Hawks

This show with Roy Harris skips most of his (DEEP!) martial arts history and jumps into two things he's passionate about and equally stoked on: Teaching and Human Movement. Roy has the kind of resume you might build if you were writing a character for Hollywood that needed to be able to fight anybody, anywhere, with anything, but never needed to. H…

Thanks for the push, Jamie A! This one's for you. For the rest of ya... I had a rad guest lined up who got themselves in a spot of trouble stealing deer stands in Utah. Suffice to say there's more to the story than has been generally reported, but since he's gotten death threats I figured adding information to the internet about him probably wasn't…

Charlie is my kind of adventurer. Father, husband, pilot, sailor, and general fixer of anything broken, Charlie's been a mentor and example to me for a long time. Listen in to hear how a regular guy has lived the life you probably dream about. More at nikhawks.com

This is a short spoken word piece, less than 5 minutes. It came to me the other day in my truck and I recorded the initial effort. Over the following few days I wrote it all down, refined it, pruned it, made it closer to what I was hoping it would be. It ended up (as of 26Sep2018) in this format. Enjoy! -NFH…

As you've noticed if you've followed along lately I've seen the stats: I get twice as many downloads for solo shows as I do for interview. It's been 6 episodes since I did a solo show so I've got a bunch of notes from driving around that we have to catch up on; here they are! As always, the Nik Hawks Notes are available for you Deep Divers. For the…

In this episode I interview Barb & Doug Garrott, owners of Orphan Espresso. B & D first attracted my interest when I went down the coffee rabbithole and discovered the importance of grinding coffee to A) the correct size and B) making sure ALL the grinds were the same size, and not having some large, some small. Their Pharos has become a part of my…

There are some folks out there who are a little scary in their pursuit of excellence; they have an intensity about them that is damn near palpable. Randy Leavitt is one of those people. Randy is known as a climber, one of America's best. With just a little bit of Googling you'll see just how good he is, but this podcast ain't about climbing, it's a…

“If you insulted Mackay you could expect to get in a fistfight.” My good friend and author Greg Crouch comes back on the Paleo Treats podcast to discuss the story of John Mackay, one of the four Bonanza Kings who ran the massive profitable Con. Virginia mine on the Comstock Lode. Greg talks about how the digital age has transformed writing about hi…

Carla Naden talks about her world of edge cases in the larger world of animal rescue and how she's helping to build a community of people who work together to make animal lives better. From the way she shapes her language to reflect the world she wants to build, to her demonstration by living her principles of what it means to commit fully, Carla i…

On the surface, the story is straightforward. 2 guys become friends, start a company, decide to donate a percentage to charity. It's when you dive deep that a story gets interesting. TJ Ferrera and Sean Lake talk about the (way) back story of how they got into BUBS and what shaped them not just as entrepreneurs but as men. These two guys define smo…

-importance of experts, addressing the last show Email from Mike in Flagstaff: “I basically agree with everything you say, but want to push back just a little on your comments about experts. I don’t take issue with what you say as far as it goes. But, I do feel the general theme of not needing experts and that a generally competent person can learn…

John Gierach has long been a fly fishing hero of mine. What I didn’t know, but came through clearly in this Paleo Treats Podcast interview, is that he’s also a writing hero. We start the interview by talking about one of his major influencers, his Uncle Leonard. Leonard was “just good at things in a duct tape and baling wire kind of way. He didn’t …

I’ve been driving around lately listening to all my usual podcasts and going off on my quests down various seams of curiosity and thought I’d share some of my convos with myself, with you. This is the first solo-cast I’ve done, let me know if you’d like to hear more or if you’d rather get back to the interviews with another person. In this episode …

I spoke with Joshua Cooper Ramo in this podcast interview, partly about his latest book, The Seventh Sense and partly about his overall life and pursuit of excellence. Mr. Ramo started off as a journalist, working at Newsweek then for Time Inc back when, as he says, “it mattered who The Man of the Year was.” He worked as both senior and as foreign …

Dr. Amy Kruse began tearing things apart as a (very) young girl, ripping apart her first typewriter at 5 years old. Raised as an only child by high school English teachers, she ended up in neuroscience working in the defense industry helping soldiers learn to shoot faster, more accurately. Of course. She currently works at the Platypus Institute, w…

"The more we understand, the more rational we are and the more courageous we can be." In this conversation with Prof. Dr. Chahan Yeretzian, a Syrian born Armenian physical chemist based out Switzerland, we dive deep into where the arenas of science, academia, industry, culture, and coffee meet. From the advice he gives his students to why undergrad…

Ready to listen to the embodiment of curiosity? Bob flew around the world two and a half times in a plane about the size of a Ford F-250. He’s visited a few hundred countries and the “accomplished” side of his bucket list reads like a compilation of any 5 normal people. “At a project up in Spirit Lake, Iowa, in a bar, a drunken popcorn seed salesma…

Every so often you come across a dude who appears normal but turns out to be a real gem. Brad Barlage is one of those guys. At 5'9 and all of 150 lbs, he's a rangy, stringy dude with bright eyes and a stoked smile. How you do one thing is how you do everything. A superb climber (redpointed 5.14), a real adventurer (kite skiing Baffin Island with An…

I first heard about Gavin when I watched The Rocky Mountains Traverse. The possibilities of paragliding immediately captured me, specifically the vol-biv work he and Will Gadd were doing. If you're into adventuring, whether it's kayaking, sailing, kite surfing, or paragliding, you'll probably dig Gavin's take on the world. Whether he talks about hi…

Upon getting back into rock climbing after a 17 year hiatus, I quickly discovered Mark & Mike Anderson's contribution to training for the sport in the form of The Rock Climber's Training Manual. After reading through it I realized that these guys were demonstrating more than just an interest in training, this is total "pursuit of excellence" materi…

I've been curious about AI, or Artificial Intelligence, for a few years now. I read with interest the opposing points of view in Pedro Domingos The Master Algorithm and Nick Bostrum's Superintelligence regarding how quickly machines are approaching human capacities for general intelligence vs what's called "narrow learning", or the ability to opera…

Peter Defty from Vespa Power rejoins us and shares the life that brought him to be on the leading edge of fat burning performance. From his early days hunting and butchering animals on the farm to flying a biplane all over Guatemala as a young man to his current day job working to bring Vespa & OFM to performance driven athletes, this is a deep div…

David Easton builds "museum quality, visual masterpiece walls that happen to support the roof." His medium is rammed earth, he's been doing this for 40 years, and if you've ever loved any kind of architecture or building you'll dig this show. This is closer to Paleo than many of our other podcasts in the sense that rammed earth building is a "locav…

Charlie Glass is an American journalist who has covered some of the most fascinating and horrific stories of our time. While you might not think a journalist has any connection to Paleo, these story tellers are vital to one of what we believe are the 7 Pillars of Paleo, and that's Community. Without someone to tell our stories we remain individuals…

Of all the paths to excellence, perhaps the most reliable is one based on the importance of personal responsibility. In this podcast, Brian Mackenzie from CrossFit Endurance shares with us what drove him from being a broken down ex-swimmer getting crushed on the run sections of the triathlon to one of the foremost minds in cross training for endura…

Peter Defty of VespaPower goes through the OFM (Optimized Fat Metabolism) pyramid in this fact-packed podcast. Peter is a long time student of endurance performance and specifically the effects of nutrition and goes through the whole process of transitioning from being a carb burner to a fat burner. Whether he's talking about who OFM is for (everyb…

Ian Dunican joins us today to talk about one of his favorite subjects (other than jiu-jitsu and ultra running), which is sleep. He's currently working on a PhD at the University of Western Australia (UWA) focused on the question, "Can you use sleep as a performance enhancer?" Starting off in the Irish Army as an infantryman, after five years he lef…

One of my favorite guests, Roz Savage combines the fierce heart of an adventurer with the ability to describe beautifully the wildest & loneliest places on the planet.As a Guinness World Record holder (first woman to row solo across 3 oceans), Roz is a shining example of someone following her dream. She started out as a money hungry young professio…

Greg Skomal is the classic adventurous scientist; driven to discover all he can about his subject and willing to go anywhere to slake his thirst for knowledge. "Not all science is boring." He is the Senior Scientist at the Massachusetts Shark Research Program and works closely with both the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and OCEARCH to study Grea…

"I never thought I would look forward to getting an email again." Dave is a news junkie and the author of daily email newsletter NextDraft, which he describes as a "modern day news column". He organizes the newsletter into the 10 most fascinating news items of the day, works on it for 3-4 hours in the morning and blasts it out around 1 pm PST. Dave…

When Nick Sloane got the call to refloat the Costa Concordia in 2012, he was in New Zealand wrapping up another job and dreaming about playing golf back home in South Africa. When he said "yes" to the job he couldn't know that it would take 30 months, 500 team members, 26 nationalities and 130 divers a day in the water to get the big cruise ship of…

If you've paid attention to anything beyond the pages of paleo desserts on this website you won't be surprised that we've brought on another dog trainer to the Paleo Treats Podcast. The folks who are good, really good, at communicating with dogs HAVE to be in pursuit of excellence; they've developed skills the rest of us don't even know we have! Th…

Mike Friton has been working as an innovator for over 30 years. Known for his shoe designs and his extensive work with Nike, he's also helped smaller companies like Soft Star Shoes design minimalist shoes that support a healthy foot. Trained as an anthropologist, Mike focuses on bringing together many elements from the "fringes"; as a paper folder,…

"You must believe nothing." So says Tim Noakes, one of the most well respected exercise scientists in the running world. Author of Lore of Running and Waterlogged, Tim has radically changed his beliefs throughout the course of his 30+ year career, always in response to his own questions and the answers (or lack thereof) found in scientific literatu…

Barry Murray is a sports nutritionist and coach for elite endurance athletes. His main focus is on adapting athletes to burn fat instead of carbs, and his work with Tour de France cyclists along with his own performances (several wins in ultra marathons) lend credence to his ideas. In this podcast we discuss how long it takes to fat adapt, how fat …

Phil Maffetone is back on the Paleo Treats Podcast, though this time we swing well away from athletic performance and into the realm of Purpose and Music. Phil has had 2 major epiphanies in his life, the first took him down the path of becoming a world class coach and doctor. The second drew him into the world of music and songwriting. In this epis…

Our guest on this podcast is Dr. Phil Maffetone, coach of legendary athletes Mark Allen, Stu Mittelman, and Mario Andretti. Phil has worked with more than just sporting greats, he's been an adviser to the military on how to make B2 bomber pilots more effective, has worked with NASA and has even helped race horses improve their performance via heart…