NBSV 214: Life is an improvisation: Bob Wiseman on music, mortality, and veganism
Release Date: 01/20/2026
No-Bullsh!t Vegan
Dotsie Bausch went from hospitalization due to an eating disorder to standing on the Olympic podium as a fully vegan athlete. She was the oldest in her discipline to ever take the Olympic podium, and she gained ten pounds of muscle for the switch from road to track cycling (all powered by plants, of course). We trace that arc, then get into how an anti-dairy ad that the dairy industry got pulled from NBC sparked her nonprofit Switch4Good, and the fight she's leading now to get plant milk into US school lunches (including the wild stat that nearly a third of school milk cartons get thrown out...
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Zineb “Zizi” Hattab set out to open a restaurant, not make history. A month before signing the lease, the trained chef had a change of heart and decided her new venture, KLE, would be fully plant-based. Today KLE holds both a green and a red Michelin star, making it the first vegan restaurant in Switzerland to do so. Zizi has since opened two more concepts on the same Zurich street: DAR, inspired by her Moroccan and Spanish roots, and COR, a wine and pinchos bar. In this episode, I speak with Zizi about the engineering background that led her to veganism, how her team builds trust with...
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Kaylin Foisy has been part of the K.I. team for five years — podcast production, social media, and now stepping into a bigger coaching role. In this Coaches' Corner chat, we get into Coach Kaylin’s 20-year vegan journey (which started with ethics at age twelve, long before she'd heard the word "vegan"), what it's actually like coaching clients online versus in person, and how a chronic illness diagnosis three years ago forced her to rethink training entirely, including why she'd rather "level out" than "level up." We also cover raising vegan kids, the senior fitness class she teaches,...
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Growing up in a farming community in Southwestern Uganda eventually led Nabaasa Innocent to animal welfare work, and to organizing the country's first vegan festival. Founder of Uganda Vegan Society (now transitioning into Humane Shift Alliance Africa) and senior co-manager of Thrive Africa at Thrive Philanthropy, Nabaasa joins me to talk about why veganism gets dismissed as "a Western concept" in Uganda even though plant-based eating has always been the norm there. We also discuss how her organization is shifting its language from "vegan" to "plant-based" to reach more people, getting kids...
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Dr. Phil Narini spent decades hunting, fishing, and eating meat-centric Italian home cooking before a single lecture on fish and mercury changed his and his wife's eating habits overnight — no cravings, no willpower. Fifteen years later, he's a reconstructive plastic surgeon who insists he's not a nutrition expert (and thinks you should be suspicious of anyone who claims to be), co-founder of a whole-food plant-based café built on the idea that healthy food has to taste good first, and an outspoken advocate for scientific skepticism over Instagram influencers. We get into the "trifecta"...
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Gym culture likes to pretend it's apolitical: just protein, PRs, and personal responsibility. My guest this week isn't buying it. andrea bennett is a senior editor at The Tyee and the author of several books, including Hearty: On Cooking, Eating, and Growing Food for Pleasure and Subsistence, which won a Taste Canada Gold Award. andrea also happens to be my open water swim buddy of several years, and the author of a recent Tyee piece on how MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) is trying to co-opt fitness culture, and why progressives shouldn't let it. We get into the difference between training...
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Co-founder of Clean Food Dirty Girl and certified life coach, Molly Patrick, joins me to talk about why knowing *what* to eat is only half the battle. We dig into the mindset work behind lasting behaviour change, why abundance — not restriction — is the real engine of sustainable eating, and how dismantling shame-based diet culture is just as important as knowing what to put on your plate. Molly also gets candid about her decade of sobriety, and why the best thing you can do for the non-vegans in your life is to stop lecturing them.
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I'm turning 40 in a few days, so (obviously) I’m hosting an online taco party Hope to see you there! Cook along with me, or just watch and hang out. We’ll do a book giveaway, Q&A, and share vegan intel with likeminded folks. Join me on Wednesday, June 17 at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern. It’s free, it’s going to be a super-fun community event, and I’d love to celebrate with you. Grab your spot at !
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Five years after her first appearance on the show, Nana-Serwa Mancell returns to share her journey from running a vegan African food business in Dubai to building a sustainability-focused retreat and community space in Ghana. We discuss West African vegan food traditions, overlooked plant protein sources, ethical tourism, sustainable fashion, environmental challenges in Ghana, and why she believes Africa’s future is full of innovation, creativity, and hope.
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I’m announcing the brand-new Patreon for the No-Bullsh!t Vegan podcast and giving you a peek at what’s inside. Check it out at patreon.com/noBSvegan! If the podcast has helped you feel stronger, more informed, more connected, or more confident in your vegan life, this is one way to help keep it growing, while getting some fun (and possibly unhinged) bonus content and behind-the-scenes access along the way. Thank you for being part of my little corner of the internet. Whether you support on Patreon, listen every week, or just send me memes occasionally, I appreciate you!
info_outline5-time Juno Award winner and founding member of Blue Rodeo Bob Wiseman joins me for a wide-ranging, thoughtful conversation about music, aging, and what it actually looks like to live vegan for decades—long before it was mainstream or convenient.
Bob and I talk about his early days with macrobiotics and touring as a long-term vegan, why grocery stores matter more than restaurants on the road, and how the West Coast quietly led the way on plant-based food culture. We dig into improvisation—not just as a musical practice, but as a way of understanding life itself—and why the idea that music isn’t improvised is philosophically questionable at best.
We also get into aging and mortality: how perspective shifts in your 40s, 50s, and 60s; what it means to start losing people you love; and why long-term health habits matter, even though nothing is guaranteed. Along the way, Bob shares stories about teaching beginners, learning accordion on a whim, raising a vegetarian kid in a mixed-diet household, and why trying to force change on other people rarely works.
This episode is funny, reflective, a little wackadoodle, and full of big ideas about creativity, compassion, and playing the long game—on stage and in life.