Barbell Shrugged - The Future of Paleo: Where We Got It Right & Where We Overdid It w/ Robb Wolf

Episode Date: April 29, 2015

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview the man who might quite possibly be the person that is primarily responsible for the paleo movement, Rob Wolf. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Blitz. Whoa, whoa. Standing here with Chris Moore, Doug Larson. They're about to tear our equipment apart.

Chris almost ripped all the equipment off the table. The first thing I did was don't move. We have traveled to Austin, Texas for our favorite conference slash convention, whatever you want to call it, every year, Paleo FX. Check it out. You're obviously not here this year. If this is news to you, so just sign up for next year.

We're standing here with Rob Wolf. Who last year avoided us the whole time. I did promise you guys. Your family was here, Leah. Kids. We learned a long time ago, you can't bring families anywhere no

they stayed home this time there you go we all learned to do that this year I hope my wife doesn't watch this episode now if you don't know

who Rob Wolf is he pretty much is responsible for making the whole paleo movement and the paleo that word

famous to whatever degree it sucks that's largely my doing yeah I wrote the book on it all the good parts I brought in all the bad parts doing. Yeah, I wrote the book on it. That's totally my doing. All the good parts I brought in.

All the bad parts, someone else did. Rob literally wrote the book on it. Yeah, it was apparently a solution. But you weren't the first one. But for some reason, you were able to make it popular. I was the greasy used car salesman that maybe made it palatable. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Who's this asshole suggesting we should eat bacon again? Doesn't he know that bacon's bad for you? It's madness. There's one thing I want to probably clear up on the front end, maybe. So, like, is that charging? Low battery. Your computer is not charging.

We're going to lose this audio. Here, Doug, hold the camera. Dude, I'm such a good cameraman. All right, so we'll all see. There's CTP if you've never seen him before. So if you read your book if you listen to your podcast uh largely the information you're giving out is for general health and wellness yeah and i uh i run into quite a few athletes who are trying to be really strict paleo right

and they run into some issues because it's just hard enough to get enough of the right calories yeah it's kind of funny the person that is a type 2 diabetic in a hospital bed needs different nutrition than the person that's trying to go to the CrossFit Games or be an NFL football player. It's crazy. It's crazy, yeah. The one-size-fits-all deal would be awesome, but my focus, having come from an autoimmunity and cancer research background, has always been trying to keep people from dying. Yeah, I mean, people kind of put you on this pedestal,

and then they go, this is going to, like Rob Wolf, what he talks about on his podcast, what he talks about in his book, is going to be the best for everything. Right. And, you know, I just kind of want to clear up, like, who you're directing your message at, I guess. The primary message is definitely geared for a health-centric, you know, kind of crowd, and then folks will look at before and after testimonials where people lose 50 pounds.

And then you've got an athlete. There's a guy that's like 10% body fat and he wants to get 8% body fat. So he goes ketogenic and he's doing CrossFit endurance in the morning and then power athlete in the afternoon and he explodes and his testosterone levels are gone. And he's like, what happened? And, you know, somebody that needs to lose 100 pounds, again, different tools for dealing with that person relative to an athlete. You know, if we have somebody that's training hard and we want to bring their body composition into even tighter parameters, probably high protein, moderate carbs and carb cycling, you know,

and we're going to play with that and really actually let a – You match some carbs with the amount of volume of training they're doing. Volume and intensity. I mean, it's really not a big deal. In my opinion, really try to let the training drive the body comp even more than the nutrition itself. Yeah. Yeah.

I stopped listening to your podcast a long time ago. I did too. Quite frankly, it was quite repetitive. All this talk about no grains and such. No, I'm just kidding. But at one point, I remember you talking about you adopted more aerobic training. I guess you had talked to... Joel Jameson.

Joel Jameson. Oh, yeah. And he convinced you that LSD was good. Yeah. Long, slow distance. That was good to find out. Well, that too. Yeah, that's the next talk. Oh, distance running. Got it was good. Yeah. Long, slow distance. Well, that too. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And you had adopted that and you said that your jiu-jitsu game had picked up. It's a night and day difference and, you know, I was talking to Wellborn about this too and even just general weight training, you know, if you don't have an aerobic capacity. Now, an aerobic capacity is different than being an aerobic athlete, but we're

talking about the ability to recover between sets, recover between workouts. If you've got a an aerobic capacity is different than being an aerobic athlete, but we're talking about the ability to recover between sets, recover between workouts. If you've got a baseline aerobic capacity, then you've got a lot more recovery potential. You can lift weights more efficiently. The Westside guys have talked about this for a long time. Being in shape to train. And, you know, something that was, I guess,

a little weird for me to wrap my head around, I've always been pretty fast twitch. I was a California state powerlifting champion, but I always had a base level of activity. I was doing martial arts and doing different stuff. And then you start writing books and doing blogs and you sit on your ass all day and that base level of activity is gone. And then you go out and you just fucking drop the hammer on a metabolic

workout and you have no capacity to deal with that. And then you can't recover for ages. General physical activity is really important. Hitting a lot for 30 minutes a day is not going to be... That's what I was going to say. Jiu-jitsu is my favorite way to do like a... I was going to say it's called a light day but it's not me lifting heavy. Right. And for me

doing jiu-jitsu and it's weird like my coach is a 135 pound female but we've... Jiu-jitsu practitioner? Yeah, jiu-jitsu. And she's super hot. She's super hot, too. Yeah, she's still crushing me.

Super hot, dangerous, beautiful woman. Yeah. Whoa, exciting. It's like she crushes me, but I kind of want her to. Well, and then the funny thing is that, like... That's why we're together. The small dudes in the gym are, like, 215 pounds and former defensive linebackers and shit like that.

And so, like, I'm a 43-year-old, like, 170-pound dude, and I'm like, oh, mommy, I'm going to get killed. I like to write a lot. I write podcasts. Most of my training is devolved to screaming, not in the face, oh, God, please. Oh, yeah, I totally forgot to do a proper intro to the show. So stop what you're doing right now and go to barbellstrug.com,

sign up for the newsletter. Oh, we're not doing that? No, don't do that. Keep watching. This gave people time to turn the page over to a fresh page for the next batch of note-taking. Yeah. And you know what?

Try opening those emails every once in a while, folks. Yeah. It's helpful. Rob, you compete in jiu-jitsu? I do not. I was supposed to do the old man worlds this year but

I have a bit of an extreme personality type and if I so what does it matter if I go win the 40 to 45 year old blue belt division

you know special Olympics world championship you know you get like a two dollar trophy you get to put it on Instagram and everybody thinks you're the coolest

guy ever because you won this trophy? That would have been the net result, but the cost would have probably been a relationship with my children, my wife, my business, and everything else. Yeah, crippling joint pain. I always thought that was weird that they had a blue belt world champion. It's like, you could be a blue belt and be really good, and you could win some tournaments, but I hesitate

to call them a world champion at that point. You're the best of the people who aren't quite the best yet. Who don't really know anything that they're doing. Good job. Keep going. Yeah. It's like the CrossFit scale division world champion. Right. What does that mean? Let's go to RX. If you win though, then you're a purple belt. You're not a blue belt.

You should be the least best purple belt in the world. Sandbagger. Yeah. Sandbagger. That's it. I'm going to get hate mail from the whole jiu-jitsu community tomorrow. Bring it on. I love jiu-jitsu. I do it all the time. Don't write me. So Rob, you're partly responsible for this show even

existing. Right on. I had no idea. So I was nerding out on your podcast for a long time and we had thrown around the idea of a podcast at one point and I was listening to yours and I was like, man,

this dude just unloads content all the time. I was like, no, I'm not interested. And then, it's such a snooze fest. He just talks science

and lipids. I mean, for guys like me, I'm like tuned in. This is awesome. But like, the average athlete, like,

might have a hard time. It's a bit much. Yeah, digesting it. Yeah. But I'd been listening. I was fascinated. And then CTP over there, he was interning for us at our gym. And he's like, you should check out this Joe Rogan guy.

Oh, yeah. I listened to Joe Rogan. I was like, oh, mushrooms and aliens. You can do anything. This is my genre. We can take mushrooms and aliens and combine it with what Rob Wolf is doing. We could build an empire. That was the idea.

We could do something in the middle. And then incorporate an Ayn Rand book title. That's technically true. That is true. Thank you. That's awesome. Thank you. I'm honored, man. Someone else ask a question, please. That's all I wanted to say.

I'm just going to make it awkward and look at you. Well, when I was wandering over here, I told everybody that a couple of folks wanted to stop and chat for a minute. I'm like, so basically I got the barbell shrug guys super hard last year telling them that I was going to go on the show and then never finish the job. And all their necks are bigger than my waist, so I don't want to keep them thin. Yeah, yeah. Well, this guy literally has blue balls behind the camera. I don't know how that happened. Rob, what are your top five tips for self-diagnosing an inguinal hernia?

Well, you know, I'll let Doc Parsley take that because he has very large hands because it gets invasive quickly. You and Doc just did a little talk on the stage off to our, what area is it? Over here in the other corner of the PaleoFix facility here. Right, the PaleoNerdFest, yeah. Yeah, where you're talking again about, hey, look, folks, we're not screwing around here. You really do, you really should sleep more. Right.

I mean, come on, put down a coffee and sleep more often. Chris, actually, finally I convinced him to start some habits to go to bed earlier. This is really a profound one because this probably actually changed my life more than anything in a long time. So actually I'm now getting up for the first time in my life at 6 a.m. without an alarm clock.

And I was, for the last five years or so, a guy who had maybe deluded himself into thinking he was a night owl and took pride in the late night. I mean, you write. You probably stay up late writing blog posts sometimes, especially when the kids get to sleep. Like, this is your quiet time.

The morning is actually my, you know, like 5.30 to 8.30 is my window. I thought the nighttime was like that was when I should do it. And then I realized, well, after I got the blood results back, and I realized every vital marker that's important to a human being was crashing. I go, maybe I shouldn't, like, sleep five hours a night and try to put in 2,000 words a night on the keyboard. Maybe I should flip this. So now I made the decision. I got it from Doc saying, you've got to draw a hard line and say no to things, especially when it gets to be 7, 8, 9 p.m. I got to where I was really pissy if somebody actually asked me to do something 7, 8, 9.

Hey, man, you want to help me move some stuff? No, man. Right. I got to where it was offensive to intrude upon the nighttime ritual. So now 8 o'clock, 9. Hey, man, you want to help me move some stuff? No, man. Right. I got towards offensive to intrude upon the nighttime ritual. So now, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock, lights out.

The traditional, simple thing you can do, turn off all the stimulating stuff, get in the bed, and waking up 6 a.m. and by 7, hitting it ready to be productive.

Right. Less caffeine intake. Right. Less bitchiness, which Mike will appreciate in time. Everybody loves that. Bitchy, moody, PMS

symptoms in the morning. Yeah. Once a week, there's a 30-minute call where I good to meet PMS symptoms in the morning. Yeah. Once a week, there's a 30-minute call where I have to like smooth the feathers out. It's the idea that you can, the more you get involved

in this stuff, the more you think about nutrition and training hacks and tweaks, the more you realize if you go back to the things

you started with, I'm going to sleep more, I'm going to rejuvenate more, I'm going to recover more, I'm going to be easier on myself, all of a sudden, you get a new wave of adaptations.

Like, I'm in my 30s now, I'm feeling as good as I did when I was in college. Right. Only because I stepped in and said no and started doing less. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting from an aging standpoint, like, you know, the difference between your 20s and 30s is mainly you need to periodize, plan, and recover. And if you do that, then you can have pretty much as good a performance in your 30s as you did in your 20s. Some really, really fast twitch explosive elements

of athleticism will deteriorate. You can't 100% maintain that. But you can hang on to a remarkable amount of it. And then once you start pushing into your 40s, then the fucking wheels fall off. I'm basically one foot in the grave and one on the banana peel. Hopefully you get a supplier for growth hormone in your 40s and 50s,

and it won't really matter too much. Or when they get the myostatin knockout gene therapy. When I go to Germany and I come back and I actually look like you guys, then you'll know. Can we go to Germany together and get our telomeres pulled and yanked on and extended? Well, just don't tell my wife, and we're probably good. There's a lot of wives around here that are keeping their brother down.

It's like, you want to do what substance? No, no, you're not doing that. Come on, it'll be fun. Plant medicine and a lot of steak we're going to consume in Austin. But if they ask you immediately after that, it's like, how much is your life insurance, and how do I double it? Then you're maybe like, okay, maybe it's not a good idea. Yeah, my wife's Italian.

She would cut me into pieces and bury me. If I were worth more dead than alive, I'd be gone. It'll disappear one day. Actually, I got a real question for you. I saw Paleo FX, the organization, post on Instagram a picture of Mark Sisson's talk from earlier.

The slide, even though I didn't actually attend that particular talk, the slide said the paleopendulum is swinging back the other direction. So we went too far in some things, and now we're kind of regressing towards the mean or towards the middle on a few things. I don't even remember exactly what all the bullet points were. Were you at that talk? I was not. I was not.

So I'll ask you, without referencing the slide itself, where do you think we overdid it in the last couple of years, and where are we kind of regressing back towards a happy middle ground? You know, definitely the carb deal. And even that's a really contentious thing. Like I'm on a board of directors of a medical clinic where we treat traumatic brain injury in the military with ketogenic diets. So there's some huge application for ketogenic diets.

But I really look at it like, you know, when you need a Phillips screwdriver, you really need a Phillips screwdriver. You don't need a bandsaw, you know. And so, you know, we started pitching tools out of the tool chest and also just arbitrarily, you know, my thing has always been we don't know exactly what people are going to react to. We don't know what's going to be best for them yet. We can't run blood work and just say, okay, you react to gluten, you react to corn,

or you react to gluten once every, you know, you have three exposures. I fucking love gluten. Well, it's like I react to gluten. Positively. Positively, yes. That's where I get my swagger from. Perfect, perfect.

But, you know, this greasy used car salesman deal of like pull it out 30 days, reintroduce it, see how you do. I think that that was really good. But then people just clung to that. And for me, this has always been what's the most that you could get away with? You know, what's the risk reward deal there? You know, if you're a professional athlete, then clearly your aperture closes and maybe things are a little bit tighter. But, you know, if you just want to live the best life you can, then to me, it's get away with as much as you possibly can. And so for me, I'm non-reactive to corn. I'm non-reactive to rice. I'm a little carb intolerant. So I have

to stick that stuff post-workout and like jujitsu in particular. But, you know, so like breakfast is like some meat and veggies and a bunch of fat. And then I do some jits and then I eat a bunch of carbs and I do pretty well with that. So there's definitely been some tendency to just be low carb. People really want black and white answers and I would love a world that was just black and white answers

because it's way easier for me. So often now when people ask me a question it's like, well who are you? What are you trying to do? What's the extenuating circumstances? And it gets very nuanced and it's not the easiest thing. And it totally changes. Do people who are you? What are you trying to do? What's the extenuating circumstances? And it gets very nuanced. And it's not the easiest thing. Yeah, that changes too. And it totally changes.

People get too stuck on the camp once they join it. They learn so much and invest in so much learning about a certain approach. And now all of a sudden, well, I'm in this camp. If I bailed on it and try to learn about something else, maybe I feel like I'm backtracking on something. Totally, yeah. So CrossFit is super cool for this. Paleo, there's different realms where you get a lot of community

and you get a lot of support out of that. But then if that sweater's not fitting on you, then there's some weird social shit that goes down by wanting to change that. There's some, you know, it's kind of no-joke stuff, yeah. What do you, what's advice you'd give to someone who wants to gain weight? I know a lot of guys, they don't want to get bigger and stronger, but they want to keep it paleo. Oh, man. You know.

Because that's where it's really, a difficult thing gets twice as difficult. Right. It does in a lot of ways. I mean, one thing is just like any carbohydrate source you have needs a ton of butter and coconut oil and all that stuff on it. But even with that, at some point, your digestive system is going to plateau out on the fat intake, and you're going to be, like, you know, shitting an oil slick. Yeah, I was drinking, like, a can of coconut milk. Right. Like, every morning.

And, yeah, it was ugly. It was a revolt at one point. At some point, you've got to take a lot of care in how you are digesting and absorbing this calorie amount you're not used to taking in. Yeah, because just going from your mouth and swishing through the South Gates, that doesn't really help your net metabolic state.

So do you suggest rice and stuff like that? Rice is a great place to go in. Cream of rice is actually really good in a pinch because it's low allergenic load. It cooks super quick. It's super fast digesting. So for that post-workout carb deal, and you can just, you know, they're little nice-sized boxes. Cream of rice.

Yeah, cream of rice. And so it cooks in like two minutes in the microwave, and you can get, one box is like 200 grams of carbs. Is it kind of like grits, like texture-wise? Yeah, yeah, texture-wise, yeah. So, I mean, definitely look at it, you know, but if somebody wants to get, unless they're very genetically talented, gaining weight just sucks. I think it's much more difficult to gain weight than it is to lose weight. It's the golden rule. Absolutely.

It's an all day job. If I ask somebody, do you have a moment of your day where you don't feel bloated and disgusted and you get a little mild gag reflex looking at your next plate of food? Talk to AJ about that. That was his existence for three years then you're under eating like you're not eating enough you know yeah and people are like oh you know i'm not hungry i'm like it doesn't matter yeah it doesn't matter your job is to eat if you want to get bigger and so i competed in powerlifting from like 165 up to 198 my normal operating weight, is about 172. That's a lot. I'm dead between the two weight classes.

I'm too heavy for the 165. I'm too light for the 181s. But that process of getting up to 198 was just miserable. That's my heaviest I've ever been was 198, and that took everything I had to get there. You've walked the walk, Rob. I have, or I've stumbled the fall. But getting up to 188, I had one weekend of travel, a couple of missed meals, and then I was like 182 pounds again.

So it was like thousands of dollars of food and all this effort, and it's just gone. Yeah, I mean, at some point you've got to question how heavily you committed to the task of gaining. If you're not getting the result, then that's just the answer staring you back from the dial of the scale, like you haven't really committed. If you're still feeling happy about yourself 24 hours a day, like, yeah, I could eat more. Then you should eat more.

Do you recommend people scale up and not just jump wholly into trying to bulk up and add up a bunch of excess calories? Is there a way you kind of ease into what the behavior is set in before you add too much burden? Definitely a great way to do it is to scale up and add up a bunch of excess calories? Is there a way you kind of ease in to what the behavior is set in before you add too much burden? Definitely a great way to do it is to scale up, you know, Fred Hatfield. I don't know if you guys have had one. He's so awesome. Dude, come on. I got an original Fred Hatfield bar in my garage. Oh, nice. Nice. Okay. But, you know, he had this thing, the zigzag diet,

back in the 80s, and it's actually really smart. You know, on the days where you train really hard, eat a ton of food. On the days where you train less, eat a a ton of food. On the days where you train less, eat a little less food and kind of stair-step that stuff up. If you put a little bit of carb partitioning into that and stick the carbs mainly around exercise

periods, this sounds possibly ridiculous, but I think that that's actually the totality of exercise and nutrition. Right there. He agrees with us. I really can't figure out how you slice or dice that thing any better.

In many ways, people handle that by just having an extra workout shake or two. If you train twice a day, you get two extra very carb-heavy meals in that day and then it's automatic carb cycling. Then you can keep your background food exactly the same because you know how to plan that and stick it in Tupperware and all that stuff.

I like to grow my background food the same and then just add in like a gallon of raw goat milk on top of it. Yeah. That'll make you miserable too. You have a better chance of achieving success in your nutritional strategy and training strategy, I guess, if you can look at your plan on paper and then you don't immediately get like a brain aneurysm, start bleeding out of the nose trying to figure out what you were thinking.

How complex it is. What did this symbol mean that I wrote down, and this percentage, and this macronutrient index? Fuck, I forget what I was doing. You know what's really interesting in that? We're moving. We just bought a new house, so I'm rifling through all my old stuff.

So I pulled out my power lifting logs from when I was like oh 17 to 20 and one of the big things i had a big note circled in there is that i went from three minute rest periods between sets to five minute rest periods between sets and that was a complete game changer for me to put on weight to put on weight and to get stronger and so a lot of what i ended up doing like if i you know and you would do that mainly with like your core lift, squat, deadlift, bench, and maybe some of the accessory lifts you'd have that long of a rest.

And so what you did in between was some abs, some calves, some, you know, forearms, some accessory stuff in between that. So you just don't sit around and like smoke in between sets or something? Exactly. It's a cup of coffee and a smoke. So you're able to get some other stuff done. But it's still a really long workout. It's two hours in the gym to get this thing done,

but you get all the accessory stuff done. But I was talking to Wellborn about this too, and it was really interesting. When I just extended my rest periods, that's when I went from a 500-pound squat to a 565 squat. That's when my body weight consistently went from like 180 pounds and I broke through 190 pounds and I was just recovered enough to recruit hard enough to be able to push all that stuff forward. And, and, you know, uh, all the high intensity training stuff, the, the

metabolic conditioning is great, but it's got people so focused on turn this stuff over quickly. And it's great if you're busy and you can get lean and, you know, get some good performance. But if you really, really, really want to get big and strong or just stronger in particular, you've got to take a super long rest period. And it's just these simple things. You get a higher quality of skill practice in between sets. That strategy jabs exactly, sorry, Doug,

with the guys now doing the heaviest squats in the world, these Lillibridges. And there's the class guys who train with Mark Bell's guys, who are doing all 1,000 pounds or more with just belts and knee wraps. Right. It's really, I mean, talk about things that are strong, that's really strong. That's strong, yeah.

And one thing their coach really stresses, like, we will, they train at night, so there's no pressure in the gym. Right. No distractions. And they're not really paying attention to the clock. But long, really long, like 15-minute, very deliberate rest intervals. I like sitting around just, like, laying down down, like going huffing and puffing.

I'd knock that thing over the 15th time. But no, making sure that physically and emotionally and everything, all the training partners you got, everybody has to be right there fully recovered and ready to put everything on the sink. You know, what's funny is when I was doing this stuff, so it's cassette tape still is what you listen to on the headphones. So I had the Intra set, which was like some mellow stuff. So as soon as I got done with the set, the mellow stuff came on.

And then ride the lightning. And then ride the lightning for the big stuff. And also I learned pretty early on, I had to save that for just some peaking phase. Like even the basic training, like I would get something a little bit frisky, but it wasn't like completely like headbutt the bar,

bleeding down to my face, you know, and jump into it and go. You get mostly Duran Duran. A little frisky. Go, Zoltoom! Go, Zoltoom! I have a lot of douche chills I'm giving myself when I remember what I used to do to get ready for squats. I head to the bar because I thought,

don't you do this? This is what you do to get intense? Intensity equals, you know, I get to the eight and a half pound squat and then all the chicks in here want me. Isn't that what happens? Turns out the opposite happens. And now owning a gym. If you scream like an asshole right we don't have to and now owning a gym i look back at what i did in those gyms and i'm kind of like so that's why

those guys kept throwing me out yeah i used to be the guy that was driving people out of their facility that was like feeding and watering them heavy i like to listen to chill music like the same stuff i want to listen to when I'm driving around. Right. Yeah. You can get, it works. Very, for not long though. You just can't go to the well all the time. How long can you keep it up?

As long as you're supplementing with testosterone, it's fine. It's 1997 and you're screaming in your high school gym. You're playing corn loud and you got all this energy. Like you're screaming, I got to get strong. I don't know why, but I'm just so, I'm a teenager. and you get limitless you know adrenal hormones you can pop out it's great you feel great but when you're 35 and you realize i can just relax you have to volume train a lot easier not have any joint pain still get strong still get leaner you know maybe not setting the world on fire world records but i'm happy right yeah that's a plus right yeah that's a novel thing talking about the 20 from your 20s or 30s you can also kind of no matter what you're

pursuing you kind of drift away from what got you wanting to pursue the thing right like crossfit gets so intense across that pretty soon you're like why did i start crossfit i thought it was fun and cool and somehow that got washed away and you're intense chasing for the magical thing that would let you get good at the thing. And you lost the plot. Well, and mainly I was there for the chicks and the Lululemons. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

The pants that don't quite fit just right are perfect. Right. Right. All right, let's take a break real quick. Actually, so after the break, we can think about this during the break. Earlier I asked you kind of where the pendulum is swinging back. I'm going to take that a step further and ask you to predict the future of paleo when we come back. The future of paleo.

It's all about the past, man. Doug, awesome hook, bro. I know. This is Tim Ferriss, and you are listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Barbell Shrugged is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrugged.com and sign up for the newsletter. Now it's real.

And we're back with Rob Wolf. Yeah, I wanted to ask you, I mean, I've read the book, so I've seen the story, but I'm assuming there's quite a few people who haven't read this. But what got you into the whole paleo thing anyway? And you came from, what, a vegan background? Yeah, I mean, so both my parents were super sick. Both parents had autoimmune diseases, type 2 diabetes, and I had this sneaky suspicion that if you ate a little better

that you might not die in your, like, 50s from metabolic issues. And so I've always been playing with nutrition. I was an athlete, and so I wanted to, you know, optimize performance and everything. And so I graduated high school in 90, and I think the food – so the four food groups gave way to the food pyramid in 1987. So that was kind of like right in the shift,

and then the avant-garde kind of thing, particularly on college campuses and is still probably true today, is becoming vegetarian. You know, that's where hot hippie chicks hang out. You know, so you start heading that direction. It's really identifying what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah.

Hot hippie chicks. Hot hippie chicks. I love them. It's really identifying what you're talking about. Yeah. Hot hippie chicks. Hot hippie chicks. I love them. It's a rarefied taste. It's kind of like pickled duck eggs or something. Not everybody's into

them. Rob, isn't this tofu scramble good? It is good, honey. It's amazing. It's so good. You're pretty good in the sack, too.

I got a buddy who's like, yeah, I was vegan for like seven years. He completely admits it's for the chicks. Well, if you lift weights and you're in the vegan community and you're a guy, then, you know, you're just immediately top of the food chain. Even I am.

So, yeah. But the wacky thing with this is, you know, I shifted from kind of a classic bodybuilder, you know, high protein, higher carb, but a pretty mixed diet, to a low protein, low fat, high carb, grains, legume-based diet. I started developing all kinds of GI issues. When you become religiously wed to an eating paradigm, Any paradigm. Any paradigm, then you can have some problems.

When you start getting feedback that's like, this isn't working, this isn't working, and they're not working for me. I was still eating 4,000 calories a day. I was still trying to train the way that I had historically trained, and I was losing weight like crazy. And when I finally got things together, I had ulcerative colitis so bad that I wanted to do surgery, and I weighed 135 pounds. So it was a wasting disease. The food would go in, it would go out.

Lots of people do well on those types of foods. Didn't work well for me. Started doing some research, found Loren Cordain's work, which at that point he had like three papers. This is at Colorado State, is it? Yeah, Colorado State. And, you know, one of the papers was Cereal Grains, Mankind's Double-Edged Sword, and it talked about GI issues and the anti-predation chemicals that are found in grains because it's the reproductive structure of the grain and just sort of making sense.

Plants can't run from their predators. Plants can't run from their predators, so they use thorns and poison and different stuff like that. And I went to Whole Foods and got a rack of ribs and got some salad and fruit and ate that. And the next day I felt better. Good. Nice. You know, it's just been off and running from there. You didn't have to ease back into the meat?

There was no easing back in for me. I think my body was so starved of nutrients that it was just like, yeah. Just sucked it right in. I guess for a lot of us it's been a buffer, too, where you're getting a bite, just fine. All of a sudden now you couldn't keep up. Right. Right. a buffer too where you're getting a buy just fine all of a sudden now is it couldn't you couldn't keep up right right and and moving to seattle starting a graduate program living in a basement apartment um you know so like social stuff vitamin d photo period like there was a ton of things then like i just looked at food but looking back now i had a bunch of other things broken so so now let's

say that lifestyle right yeah exactly the original and And it's not surprising that Kurt Cobain shot himself because I was totally there. But let's say I had been vegan and I moved to Arizona and I had sun and I had like a better community and all that stuff. I might've been able to ride that out. It might've worked for me, but the low the low vitamin d that that uh super sleep deprived environment the screwy photo period it was all of those things going together and and you know for a long time i just said it was just the food and clearly the food was a piece of it but there was a lot of other stuff going on too yeah it's not a smooth gradual noticing of the bad habits and the toll they take all of a sudden you wake up and you realize, oh, I'm fucking broken. Right.

Like, oh, man. Particularly when you're young because you're resilient and you can really bounce back from a lot when you get older than, you know, just trying to do the right stuff still fucks you up. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. You realize how much you got away with. Right.

As you age, you go, oh, I thought I was doing really good things. But you look back and you're like, I was just doing stupid shit. And I got away with it because I was 25. Right. It's okay as long as you go back and discover what you got away with and you tell people what now, what they're thinking they're going to get away with, but why, in fact, they won't. Right.

And hopefully they listen, but they probably won't because I never listened. I feel like there's a big chunk of the population that doesn't listen to their body. They think they're doing it right. They've read the right thing to do. And even if they're having a totally negative reaction to something they're still doing it right and so they'll they'll continue to go down the wrong path even though they're they're not responding positively at all and you know so heuristics you know simple descriptions of like kind of complex scenarios or or uh you know systems those things are really valuable for conveying information,

but they're also perfect for being turned into a religious fanaticism. And so heuristics or simple descriptions like paleo or veganism or anything, they're great because you can convey a story with a little bit of time and it has an emotive element to it and people can buy into that. But then if that thing's not working, then people are emotionally wed to it and people can buy into that but then if that thing's not working then people are emotionally wed to it right and and our emotional part of our brain supersedes logical part of our brain that's what drives sex and food seeking and everything else and so you've got a more ancient powerful part of your brain that's driving that stuff and that's what you're attaching and it wins every time it's good to have a model to hang your ideas on but if it's not working you got to

change your model you've got to change your model. You've got to change your model, but it's funny. We're funny monkeys, man. Funny monkeys. Go buy that website. Funnymonkeys.com. If that one's available, I'd be shocked. Someone's got it.

There's something awesome on there, by the way. I don't know what it is. So, yeah, you know, the heuristic thing is just interesting. It's how we convey complex stories quickly, but it's also the thing that people will totally sink their teeth into and not let go of. So people catch monkeys. They put a piece of fruit in a jar,

tie the jar to a tree. Monkey trap. Monkey puts his hand in there, can't get his fist out, and that's us. Yeah, we get attached to it. We whack him on the head and take him away. We whack him on the head and monkey soup. That's right.

So right before the break, I asked you a question about kind of what the future of the paleo world was. What's the next level? Where are we going in the next two, three, four years? Are we bringing the goons back? Hopefully, yeah. Particularly if you tolerate it. It's always been my hope that people play with as much latitude as they can. For me personally, I'm really trying to champion this diversified food production and resilient food and medical system.

So I've been working on it. What is that? So in Reno, we did a two-year pilot study with the Reno police, Reno Fire, found guys at high risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, put them on a paleo diet, modified their sleep, got them exercising as best we could. Based off the cardiometabolic changes on that study, it saved the city of Reno $22 million with a 33 to 1 return on investment. Doing good.

So pretty good. And we've been working to scale that up and do a direct-to-consumer interface. Plus these guys get to eat bacon again. Then people get to eat bacon again. Is that the key, though? You have to show that it's financially profitable for the government in a certain area for a situation like that? It's funny. We've adopted a lot of things that have clearly been demonstrated not be financially viable, but they adopt it.

But it certainly raises some eyebrows. And so we've presented to the DOJ. We've been back to the FBI six times at Quantico. We're working with the ATF. We actually have an army contract. We have a number of police and fire contracts from different municipalities. So that stuff's going well and we're working to scale that and have a direct-to-consumer piece to that. But in the background of all that, in addition to this kind of medical wellness piece, is a food production story that I'm just super passionate about.

And I really, like, if I'm in this thing another 15 years, it's going to be pushing this sustainable food story, Alan Savory reversing desertification. That is a scary topic. It's a crazy deal. What's that? So Alan Savory is a guy from Zimbabwe. He was a leader of the country. He's been involved in game management. And, you know, desertification is an area where you have,

like we have a picture of Nicaragua, I think, behind us where it's all jungle and green. I think it's supposed to be Columbia. Or maybe it's Columbia. Some place where coffee grows. Some place where coffee grows and other green stuff grows. I'm from Reno, so there's nothing green there. It's just all brown.

But, you know, these areas at one time were jungle. And then there was slash and burn. And then there's been different livestock integration in there. But it was done in a way that just really damaged the soil. And the soil goes away. And then the plants go away. And then it becomes a desert. And what he figured out through some really-

And we've done this over and over again throughout history. You look at a desert and you go, well, that used to be green. That used to be green. Why? There's probably some modern agriculture problem. Is there one theory about Egypt being a victim of this process? The Fertile Crescent.

Yeah. Perfect example. Central America going up into like the Pima Indians in Arizona used to be a fertile grassland area and they largely destroyed it. I guess California was once wetter a little bit. Yeah.

I'm feeling nervous about that one, too. Is this less and less space available for agriculture or just for wildlife in general? Well, you know, it's interesting. The way that the Savory Institute uses grazing animals, they move them over the land. The way that most grazing occurs now, they let cattle go out and the cows eat whatever is the tastiest thing. Then they move. And then when that tasty thing just barely starts popping up again, the cow comes over and eats it again. And then the thing is gone.

The root bed is dead. And then you start getting invasive species like sage and things like that that are not these perennial grasses. The way that the holistic management of these animals occurs, you move them over the land the way that they holistic management of these animals occurs, you move them over the land the way that they would move if there was predator pressure on them. Yeah. So they're tightly bunched. They move over the area.

They eat everything. And then they're gone for a while. And you don't bring them back until this stuff is replenished. And it's not just rotation. In a biodiverse way. Yeah. And it's not just rotational grazing. Like they consider the local wild animals and how it plays into their ecology and everything.

The wolves in Yellowstone, I guess, is the best common example. The video's awesome. The wolves got chased out or killed or whatever. Killed off. These wolves are bad. Now we saw the problem. Everybody give each other high fives. Right.

And then chasing off the top apex predator caused a rapid, profound deterioration the in the ecology of that park right and we brought it back i don't know how long it has taken but only bringing the predators back returned the balance right right and you know uh it's a really contentious topic because even the u.s government just came out and said we want a plant-based diet and you know veganism is kind of the the thing for the planet and uh the whole thing involved plants animals interaction one eats the other one dies that fertilizes the other and it works and it works it's worked for a long time you know yeah so i mean for to try and put everyone on a vegan diet or something like that the i think what they're thinking is we'll just have all these fields of grains and that's the only way to get the calories

there. Right. What do you say about acre for acre, calorie for calorie? What's that ratio look like? From what I understand, you're going to get more calories out of a cow than you are going to get out of that land for

any type of grain or just monocultural farming for vegetation at all. There are certain areas that are pretty amenable to agriculture, and then there's two-thirds of the planet's landmass is only amenable to large herbivores, like large grass eaters. And so it's not currently doing anything. We really can't do anything else with it. And there used to be a bison herd that extended from almost the Arctic Circle to Mexico. eaters and so it's not currently doing anything we really can't do anything else with it and uh there used to be a bison herd that extended from almost the arctic circle to mexico and it just

kind of bounced back and forth between the rockies and like the mississippi river kind of kind of gig and so i i think emulating some elements of that and it's um if i thought that pushing paleo was a uphill battle and like telling people the saturated fat maybe wouldn't make their penis fall off, then that was easy compared to getting people one, excited, and then two, educated about this other topic. So I even put you guys to sleep

and you guys are standing in the bulletproof coffee fucking stand. I don't recognize how important it was. What do you think about the corn subsidies? Do you think that's

the root of the problem? The subsidies are the driver of the whole thing. The subsidies are there. Because economics is usually what drives decision's like the root of the problem. The subsidies are the driver of the whole thing. economics is usually what drives decision making

in the beginning of something. You know, 1970s, and this gets, you know, all kinds of like Murray Roth brand, you know,

trilateral commission, crazy shit, but, you know, 1970s, we went off the gold standard which allowed us, you know,

the Fed to start printing money and doing stuff. And so we could run crazy deficits. And then we, because we were in the Cold War, wanted to solidify our food production. So we started subsidizing farmers to make lots of food. Measure our dicks against the unions' dicks. Exactly. And it's like, hey, we can make more food than you guys do. And we had a couple of years where we had tons of excess food, and it just rotted in warehouses.

So then somebody said, well, we need to do something with this stuff. And so then they went to food industry and said, you need to figure out how to turn this into long shelf life, long stability food, which was the birth of the junk food industry. And so now, you know, you have a Twinkie. Corn syrup and whatnot. Corn syrup and all the rest of this stuff. And so now a Twinkie looks theoretically cheaper than an apple, but the real costs are hidden within the taxes that are bled out of us and then put into farm subsidies and all that stuff. The scary part is the costs aren't removed. They come back on the back end in the form of the healthcare system.

And then the healthcare, yeah, yeah. So people are super sick, we're on exponential growth with that. So a Twinkie should be, like if you were to let the free- It should be like $600. If the free market was doing what it's supposed to be doing. In my America, Twinkies are wholesome, homemade by your grandma. They're delicious

and fresh. They'll spoil in two days instead of fucking like 10 years. Well, people say eating paleo is expensive, but the only reason it might be more expensive is because of the subsidies. It's totally shifted the cost of food in the grocery store. And, you know, even that said, Diana Rogers did a pretty cool breakdown.

I wrote a piece, Paleo was expensive, and I kind of did a breakdown of that stuff. But Diana Rogers did a cool thing where she compared, like, grass-fed meat versus a Snickers bar. And the grass-fed meat was cheaper per calorie. Oh, wow. You know? So it's interesting. And then when you start getting into like the liquid beverages like

crappuccinos and stuff like that like that shit's really expensive it's more expensive than gasoline per gallon and whatnot so it's anybody who might say I could do that but I can't afford it is almost certainly victim of some hidden costs in their life

that person probably still is got HBO Go and an iPhone and they got like like 100 bucks going here and there for all the things that they what that's stuff i need right i need the highest speed internet and yeah and you know i make pretty good money but i've got a car i bought in 2006 with cash i have a nice house but i could have bought a ton more house but i bought house. You got that paleo money now, son. You got a gold-plated mansion. I do, but I can do shit. Like, I have elective time, and I choose to spend my time how I want to, and I'm not

tied into having a bunch of shit that I need to do payments on. I don't have a single fucking payment anywhere. We'll pay for my daughter's education without doing payments, and I'm lucky. I've worked really hard. Like, there's some great things that have synergized there, but there's a lot of people that complain about not having enough money, and they've got new shoes all the time. They've got a super jiggy iPhone and all the rest of it.

You say, ask them where your priorities are? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the paleo thing is not just nutrition. It's lifestyle. And part of that lifestyle is not working 10 hours a day in a cubicle. Yeah. And it was really interesting running a gym during the run-up to the real estate bubble because we had a lot of clients that were very, very wealthy. At that time, we were only a personal training gym. So people were paying us $500 a month to come in and have me babysit them during this thing. And they were really wonderful people.

But we saw people who were miserable making tons of money. They were really miserable when things crashed. But then there was actually kind of a reset where they didn't have all the shit. They didn't have all the stress. They weren't trying to keep up with the Joneses. And they actually went from being miserable fuckers to be around to pretty nice people.

But the chapter six of my book was like the lifestyle and cortisol piece. And it's consistently like the most popular mo moving, meaningful chapter for people, because it's kind of like, do you own your shit or does your shit own you? Where would you start to somebody get their head around their shit? I don't know.

In the early days of me training people, they would come to me with problems and I'm thinking, this person needs to quit their job, but it's not my place to tell them that. And as more time's gone on, I'm super straightforward. You can't start with that. I'm really straightforward.

I'm like, your job is killing you. Right. If you think that you can go still work that job and be healthy, you're fooling yourself. Right. You have to quit. Right. That's it. Yeah.

You should change jobs or start your own thing or something. And that's a big scary thing for somebody to look at on paper and go, this is what I need to do? Because now you're talking about a lot of emotional barriers. Well, they feel like it's untouchable. Right. It's like, oh, that's an untouchable subject. And they've invested years in this thing.

They're sort of an investment, how it gets harder and harder to let go of the monkey trap. If you've got 10 years in that career, you're like, well, I've got to start over? Even if your health is deteriorating, you have that fear of starting over. Even though you're technically not, you're just going to leverage this experience to be better.

That's not how you see it sometimes. You know, sunk costs, throwing good money after bad, it happens on a lot of different levels. Yeah. You find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Isn't that a really common thing that people during a recession tend to take better care of their health than when there's not a recession? You know, I don't know if they take better care of their health, but they end up doing more physical labor. Food's more expensive.

Money's more scarce. And so they end up kind of getting shoehorned into some things. You don't leave the lights on as long. You maybe don't have it, you know, back before electricity. You turn the candles off because you need to save them for the next day, so you went to bed earlier. So I think kind of baked in the cake, you end up doing some stuff that ironically is actually a lot

healthier. I've heard that like gym memberships actually increased during like recession. That was an interesting thing. One of those things is like, I saw that reported. The zombie apocalypse is coming. I better get my bench up. I think what it is is it's something they can control.

The economy takes a shit, and then people go, I can't control this. What can I control? And they go, well, I can control my health. Right. And they go, aha. And for $20 a month. Searching for stability. Yeah.

And $20 a month, you go to the gym, you see some of the same faces. And, you know, there's kind of a reality. If you physically look better, the chances of getting a job is better. So, you know, there's pieces to that, too. There's nothing wrong with bust parts of the cycle, right? We have to strip things away. Absolutely. And that's probably a good strategy in business and training, everything.

Like, you assume so much is necessary after you've been doing it a while. But like I said, you've now changed a bunch. What you want to achieve has changed a bunch. The plan was great, and you did put a lot of effort into it, and you got a lot of progress. But letting go of it and pulling back and restarting might be the best possible thing now. I'm going to take us on a 90-degree turn.

What do you think about caffeine overall? Do some people have problems with caffeine? Is it good for everyone, not good for everyone? Yeah, we're in a coffee booth, so we've got to be careful with this. Stand the K-Man coffee. It's interesting. If we do a population average, the

half-life of caffeine across a population is about eight hours. If I take 100 milligrams of caffeine at noon, by 8 p.m., I've got 50 milligrams caffeine in my system, which is still enough to kind of ding the adrenals and turn them on and whatnot. It's a good bang for your drug book. Yes, it is.

Yes, it is. I thought it was faster than that. I thought it was like five hours. Well, the population average is about eight. But here's the interesting thing. Some people clear it at half-life in two hours. Some people have half-life in 38 hours. CTP is two hours.

That's just the top of the bell curve. That's the top of it. The extreme edges on that. Wow. Wouldn't have guessed that. Damn. Okay. Yeah, and Doc Parsley was actually the one that threw that one out there to me.

So, you know, asking is caffeine good or bad, you know, you look at epidemiological studies, and it seems like drinking more coffee is better and all that type of stuff. So for some people, based on what you just said, like if you drink two cups of coffee 24 hours later, you could still be one cup of coffee deep. Yes. Right. Yes. Yeah.

Which means you didn't sleep or you didn't sleep well enough. Right. You were probably drinking the whole time. You might have thought you slept good enough. You probably didn't. Yeah. If I drink coffee after noon, like that night of sleep is. Disturbed. slept good enough. You probably didn't. Yeah, if I drink coffee after noon, that night of sleep is... Disturbed.

Yeah. Not right, yeah. Okay. I drink mine about 6 a.m. and that's the one I have. You're up at 6, Chad. That's incredible. I have two kids.

You have kids. That's the difference. We go to bed at 7.30. My dog doesn't wake me up until at least 9. Mike, if you get a kid, I don't want to burst your bow, but you don't get

to fucking sleep in pretty much ever. This is why I'm not having kids. Until these kids turn 35 and move out of your house. I've got to go do my talk for the ID Life stage. We didn't get to cover all the questions. I'll come back. I'll come back.

Part two. All right. Thanks for joining us. Where should people find your? RobWolf.com, Pillow Solution Podcast. That's pretty much it. We'll link to it all, folks. You're one click away

from the world of Rob Wolf that's right after you listen to every single one of our shows then you're allowed to go listen to Rob Wolf's show that's it yeah

yeah alright thanks for joining us make sure you go to barbellstrug.com sign up for the newsletter and we'll see you next time cheers thanks guys

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