Modern Wisdom - #320 - Robb Wolf - Eat, Sleep & Train Like Your Ancestors

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

Robb Wolf is a former research biochemist and one of the world’s leading experts in Paleolithic Nutrition and Ancestral Health. The world which our genetics evolved in is very different to the one we exist in now. Rob's work tries to undo this by applying an evolutionary lens to our training, diet, recovery and socialisation. Expect to learn why the Guinness book of world records has banned unbroken sleep challenges, Rob's best tips for easily getting more protein into your diet, how losing just 1 hour of sleep can ruin your relationship, how Rob approaches his training methodology after 20 years in the CrossFit world and much more... Sponsors: Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Robb's website - https://robbwolf.com/ Follow Robb on Twitter - https://twitter.com/robbwolf  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen boys and girls welcome back. My guest today is Rob Wolfe He's a former research biochemist and one of the world's leading experts in paleolithic nutrition and ancestral health. The world which our genetics evolved in is very different to the one that we exist in now. Rob's work tries to undo this by applying an evolutionary lens to our training, diet, recovery and solution relends to our training, diet, recovery and socialization. So today, expect to learn why the Guinness Book of World Records has banned unbroken sleep challenges. Rob's best tips for easily getting more protein into your diet, how losing one hour of sleep can ruin your relationship, how Rob approaches his training methodology after 20 years in

the CrossFit world, and much more. Something I found really interesting when speaking to Rob is that the paleo, keto, ancestral health world is quite ideologically intense. There are some incredibly full-on debates that occur on the internet. And Rob, who is kind of the figurehead, one of the foremost intellects in this movement, is just so easy going. He's just really flexible and wants people to do whatever makes them feel good. And yet, a lot of the people on both sides of the aisle are kind of firing these huge arrows and dropping atomic bombs

and Rob's just stood in the middle chilling out. So yeah, this turns to take away from this, especially if you have not swallowed the red pill on sleep yet. I think some of the statistics that he drops today will really remind you that getting your eight hours is super important. But now it is time for the wise and wonderful Rob Wolff. Rob Wolf, welcome to the show. Hey, Hugh Johnner to be here, thank you. Thanks for tolerating the many reschedules that we had with my moving and everything. Absolutely fine, so you've just made the move to Montana.

How come? A variety of reasons, primary to it, I have eight and six year old daughters and they grew up in this northern Nevada area and four seasons. It snows. They played in the snow. We had nice summers and stuff also and then we moved to Texas, which was cool in a lot of regards, but it snows there about once every 35 years and they wanted to murder me for doing that to them. So, um, the moved them on Tana, brought us closer to family. It also, uh, definitely, we just, I didn't realize it like we grew up in the the mountainous area and as cool as the whole country of Texas is just very, very different. And then there's also a straight-blast gym here in Calispell, Montana. It's just phenomenal. And the whole family does Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

And it's an amazing community here. There's actually three gyms within the Greater Flathead Valley area. So within 30-minute drive of my house, I have three different gyms that I could go do Jiu-Jitsu with. So multiple factors, but those are the biggies. Yeah. It's so interesting as someone from the UK to hear you essentially say the weather wasn't bad enough.

Yeah. We, you know, it's funny because the bad weather is kind of relative like a and we lived in a part of Texas that was that is understood to be very mild weather wise comparatively. It's not the heat and humidity of say like a Houston or a Dallas or like a Corpus Christi or what have you, but unlike a Christmas day, you know, Celsius, it would be 32, 35 degrees Celsius or something like that, you know, and we're sitting outside, you know, barbecuing. And it was interesting, like, I think most places, if it's like cloudy outside, you have the sense that it's going to be cool, like you might need a sweater. And in Texas, if it's cloudy outside, it means the humidity has come. And it's actually

hotter than what it is normally. It's like putting a blanket around like a baked potato or something. And again, where we were, it's not that bad, but the kids would go outside, they would ride their bikes and they'd run outside. And then they'd come back in and they were just like, bedraggled and hot. So like bad weather was relative and kind of what we've noticed is cold weather. You can always put some clothes on and kind of deal with that a variety of ways. But if it's hot and in particular humid, you just, there's not a lot of escape. Like you just kind of sit inside and hope that the air conditioning doesn't break or something like that.

And it's definitely cool in some ways. Like the kids spent the whole year swimming. Like the kids were swimming in November and December in the backyard pool. You know, it was cold, but they were still able to do it. We definitely don't do that in Montana. So yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting one, man. The UK kind of doesn't really have weather.

I mean, we just have an absence of anything on the extremes. It kind of gets a bit cold and a bit gray in winter. And then it kind of gets a bit less cold and a little bit less gray in summer. And then it vacillates back down again. But yeah, man, some of the, some of the, the, the buddies that I've got that spend time in Montana or go out there hunting or do whatever It looks absolutely spectacular So it does not surprise me that you've decided to go there. I wanted to go through

Ancestral Health today which is one of the terms that kind of swims in the circle that that your work sits in the epicenter of For people that aren't familiar with it. How do you characterize the foundations and the fundamentals of ancestral health? It's really taking a perspective that if we buy into this notion of evolution via natural selection, that most organisms end up being fairly well suited for the environment that they're in, and that changes in the environment could be either beneficial, neutral, or negative for the organism. And when we look at modern human existence, nobody's really quite sure what the year was or what the date was, but somewhere around like 2004, 2005, humanity made this really fascinating shift where more people started dying from chronic degenerative disease then from infectious disease and starvation. And this is the first time in our history,

2.5 million years of human pre-human history, it's always been infection and scarcity that were the main killers and nowits as diseases of abundance. And so this is kind of a primary example of where an evolutionary or ancestral health perspective could maybe be really valuable in how do we approach this stuff? Like simply telling people eat less, move more, we've had 60 years of that and it just fails because it actually goes

exactly contrary to the evolutionary wiring that every organism has, which is eat more, move less, because this is the way you survive in a world absent significant technology and the benefits of being able to share information, you know, if you're written and spoken language and all that stuff. So it's an idea that we don't like go back to trying to reenact the way that we lived or live under a bush or anything like that, but just where we see problems, particularly with regards to human health. Maybe we could look back a couple of generations or a couple of hundred years even. We don't even have to go like caveman era to get some really interesting insight.

The development of the electric light bulb is one of the most amazing things that ever has been gifted to humanity, but it's got a cost to it, too. And I think that that's one of the big things that isn't properly discussed within medicine at large, and like this age of COVID is a pretty good example of this. Folks present things as if there is only a benefit or a negative and never that there's usually a risk profile associated with that and that maybe we don't know exactly what the story is, but if we have a discussion around this, maybe we can fair some stuff out. It's pretty clear now that shift work is as injurious to health as, you know, like a pack of day smoking habit. It's, you know, recognized by the World Health Organization

shift work as being a known carcinogen because of the metabolic dysregulation that it imparts on us. Why is that? Because it's a really remarkable departure from the way that we've lived historically. And so what do we do about that? I'm not entirely sure, but if we're not having a conversation about it, we're certainly not going to find any answers. You know, if we're just kind of doing these very myopic, you know, views about sleep and circadian biology, gut health and what, what not. So I don't know if I properly answered the question around what ancestral health is, but it's really just, one thing it is not, it is not an answer. It is a question and hypothesis

generation engine. It's a place that we begin asking questions to try to get to answers. And sometimes it can point a likely direction of investigation, but I think that that's where folks in the paleo-dieter ancestral health seen ran a foul of the more established scientific community by saying, well, cavemen did X, so our response should be Y. And it's like, no, cavemen may have done X. What might those implications be for today? And what are the studies that we're going to do

to try to fair it out, whether or not that's true or not true or some other detail in there. Are there broad buckets that you focus on in the ancestral health sort of paradigm? Yeah, and I guess I kind of broadly drop things into food, movement, sleep, and community. And you know, within the community, I get kind of cheeky, and I dump the gut microbiome in that

because we're collaborating together. I'm more of a lumper than a splitter, so I think about like we evolved in extended small family groups and whatnot, and there seems to be some real power to the benefit of having adequate community. But those are kind of the broad buckets. And again, I'm really, I stick a lot of stuff

under those umbrellas for sure. Yeah. It's funny that you talk about shift work and the effects on health. So my background for the last decade and a half, I've run nightclubs. So I'm a club promoter. I'm a director of one of the biggest events companies

in the UK. So I've stood in the door of more than 1,000 club nights. In between the age of 18 and 33, I've lost 1,000 different nights and then the subsequent slow reset back to something that resembles normal. And the matter thing about COVID was for the first time in my entire adult life, I had a stable sleep and wake pattern. First time ever. Wow. Since I was a legal child.

Right. Right. And what was the impact on your life with that? I mean, clearly it's hard to fair it out because it's got all these other knock-on effects of like social isolation and whatnot, but what did sleeping well do for you? It made a profound difference. I'd already started to take the red pill, I suppose, with regards to sleep. Matthew Walker was a big, a big impact on that. Joe Rogan podcast, I

would, I would guess that it's added thousands of years of collective life onto the entire human population, people realizing, oh, God, just the effect of suboptimal sleep is catastrophic. And it was the same for me, and I was like, okay, I need to prioritize this. But really, if you're working a typical week for me might have been a Tuesday night, Friday night, Saturday night. So I would have worked until about 3.34 AM

on each of those, and then tried to fit training in and such like around that. But there is no mitigation strategy. Do you want to try and stay on that schedule no way? I don't want to stay up until 4 o'clock in the morning on the night so I don't need to. Obviously. But then you also still need to get stuff done. You've got to be up, you've got to go to the office, you've probably got a meeting in the club. Also the thing, the insidious thing about being a promoter is the most cognitively demanding part of the night at the very end when you count the cash and you complete the sheets and

do the accounts. That's the thing that you do at the very end just before you then about- And you spoke. Precisely. You're also really hungry, incredibly hungry at that time, so if you're trying to die, I mean, essentially a calorie deficit whilst working those shifts is borderline impossible. And the only place is that are open at that time, are takeaways. And it's just, it is a catastrophe. And then

it comes to, you know, whatever, 14 months ago, all clubs are shut down. We still haven't been back into a nightclub in normal process since then. And I found the main changes that I found were with my mood and with my calorie consumption. So my mood was so much more stable, I was able to actually know, and a third one would be consistency of habits. What you're doing, what you're doing when you have shift work is you're programming inconsistencies into your life, which means that if you're trying to do something hard, like build new myelin down somewhere,

I wanna wrap myelin around this meditation habit or this walking after I eat every meal for 15 minutes habit or whatever it might be, it just makes everything harder. I always wanted worse food and more of it when I was tired and my mood, I found, and all of these as well will have contributed to each other. If I was eating better food, I would be in a better mood,

which would mean I would have more discipline and resilience to do the habits and it became this. And man, I've made more progress over the last 14 months than in a significant period of time before that. And I thought I was working pretty close to capacity beforehand. So yeah, the foundation that's stable sleep and I've got buddies that are doctors, nurses, firefighters, policemen. And I really, you know, I feel for them because there is a cap being put on what you can do outside

of your life, outside of work with your life because it's just, it's so suboptimal. Yeah, yeah it is. And it's something that societally we need to really figure out how do we take care of those folks. And to some degree, how do we protect them from themselves? It's ironic that within medical circles in particular, and it's tough because folks will work multiple shifts and they, to make more money, this is kind of how they plan for retirement and stuff like that.

But after that first eight hour shift, or 10 hour shift, they're garbage. Like they are as cognitively impaired as somebody who has a blood alcohol level of like a point one. Like they're legally drunk. We're this caused by ethanol, but it's caused by sleep deprivation. And we're paying them more to remain in the hospital or whatever. And again, it's tough because folks will be like, oh, I'm fine.

And for super repetitious skills, you can get through it like you, you know, this is where surgeons can be super sleep-to-pride, but they've tied those knots a million times. But if you're faced with a novel situation and you need to make a decision, that's where things can go horrifically wrong. And we have to kind of wrap our heads around societally. What do we do about that? You know, yeah? Did you see I think it's Matthew Walker's site this study about the significant proportion of doctors or surgeons or nurses who after working an Over exaggeratedly long shift then end up back in the same hospital having had a crash on the way home.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's remarkable. Yeah. And then there's another one about when daylight savings comes in, 25% increase in, is it stroke or heart attack or something? It's all, it's motor vehicle accidents.

And I mean, it varies, but it's remarkably stressful just that one hour shift, you know, and then I think about all the travel that I did where I would wake up and I'm like, I don't even know which state, country, or continent I am on currently. Like I would take me a minute grab, oh, okay, I'm in Germany or I'm here or whatever in that You know just a one hour shift we see it at a I guess kind of a systemic level and then you can extrapolate that down you know doing east coast west coast in the United States it's three times as worse, you know and and

Yeah, I I wonder how much time I took off the end of my life by just my travel schedule in the past, you know, and yeah, I wonder how much time I took off the end of my life by just my travel schedule in the past, you know. Yeah, well, I mean, that's the same if you're talking about smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Well, that's it. I could have just not worked a night life and decided to sit at home and blaze up for the entire day. Have you got any of the statistics or sort of crazy stories that you've come across in

your research to do with suboptimal sleep or sleep deprivation? Well, I've stole most of my stuff from Dr. Kirk Parsley. He's a retired Navy SEAL and then he ran the West Coast kind of medical concerns for the SEAL teams for about eight years. Here's just an interesting side note. The Guinness Book of World Records will let you jump a rocket car across the Grand Canyon. You can juggle flaming chainsaws. You know, there's all the stuff you can do. You cannot go for an unbroken sleep deprivation challenge. Because the last three people that have tried it, they get between 9 and 11 days, they tap out, they go to bed, and they die. And they have no idea why they die. But it's like, it's virtually a given. There's some other interesting stuff. There have been studies where a couple is, they get a group of couples. One of the husband or wife is sleep deprived, one hour.

One of the husband or wife is sleep deprived one hour, and then they survey the folks like how loving and carrying and affection it is your significant other. If one spouse is sleep deprived, both report that the other one is a bigger dick than what they normally are. It just kind of spirals down from there. One hour of sleep deprivation accumulated daily by the end of a week leaves an individual as cognitively impaired as if they were like a blood, you know, point one blood alcohol content. But the really insidious thing about serial sleep deprivation is you habituate to it and it becomes your new normal. You don't, when you've been sleeping well and then you have a super bad night's sleep,

you get up the next day and you're like, man, I really feel that. But if that goes on, you don't really feel quite as bad. So you aren't even as aware of how your reaction time is off, your critical thinking skills. And you alluded to a bunch of the problems around the rest of, you know, like diet and lifestyle, your decision making is poorer.

You crave saltier, sugarier foods, you know, hyper-palatable foods, your willpower is gone. Like it just, it's like doing a willpower, you know, excision process. Like you literally have a willpower, you know, excision process. Like you literally have no willpower, the tendency to be cranky and have overly emotional responses are dramatically increased. Something like 85% in the United States,

85% of excessive force cases within policing occur within 24 hours of a significant shift change. And I think about myself, like if I have a really bad night's sleep and somebody cuts me off, my kids are kind of being problem like my reasonable response is very difficult to reach. You know, and so you think about police work, which is challenging under the best of circumstances, and then they're subjected not just to the shift work itself, but it's typically a shift change, where they've gone from day shift to night shift or vice versa.

There's some significant delta that occurs that really messes with their ability to do that executive functioning and the, you know, the more emotionally intelligent type response. So is this a case for when you do a shift change, like the cop is on desk duty or light duty or they've got somebody who hasn't been off of a shift change. But this again, like we've got to pay for that stuff. But societally, how much would we save by taking care of these people and understanding the risk exposure, we place them in with the shift work and the shift changes and do some backstops to try to prevent that. You know, in the United States, the George Floyd thing is just

created so much, much chaos and drama and loss of life, loss of property. And I don't know if Derek Chauvin had just gone through a shift change. But exactly what I was thinking. You know, it's like, you know, how much other stuff might we mitigate if we use some of this to inform like public policy? Yeah. It's, um, the interesting thing about sleep specifically is The externalities and the costs inevitably even for the individual is some hyperbolic discounting right we think about how far

We're going out into the future before the inevitable onset of Rapid onset of Alzheimer's or perhaps some sort of other Other cognitive decline, but because you can't see it, right? You can't see something happening to a person. For instance, if there was a substance, some sort of toxic substance that a particular portion of the workforce had to deal with, and what that substance, exposure to that substance caused to occur were the same effects as this deprivation of sleep. We would be up in arms. Look, you're destroying these people's marriages.

You're forcing them to eat this food that they need to eat because they've been exposed to this particular substance, the cranky, and then we've got this problem with the police because the police need to deal with it as well. The issue is that it is so closed doors, we don't see the effect and we don't see the actual occurrence. And the main thing actually, I think, that I realized when I'm going back to when I first saw that Matthew Walker podcast on Rogan, it's so front and center of all of our lives, it's so ubiquitous

that you can't see the wood for the trees. It's a huge place. Yes, you don't realize that it's a thing. You just, especially if you're a hard charger, right? If you're a Taipei, go get a sleep is just the thing that gets in the way in between the two periods of waking and working. Right, right. Yeah. And I mean, look at a lot of the, you know,

the, um, the folks that we really idolize, you know, surgeons, Navy SEALs, they're selected for the ability to deal with sleep deprivation. There are some outlier characteristics, like SEALs generally walk around with a neuropeptide PYY that's like 600% higher than the rest of the population. Nobody's entirely sure exactly what it does, but it seems to be very key to stress inoculation, resiliency, and whatnot. Is that highly irritable?

I believe so. Yeah, I believe there are some heritable characteristics there. I'm only familiar with it within these kind of seal populations, but is the difference between somebody who makes it through surgical residency or not because they've got this, you know, particular polymorphism or whatever, that's all well and good. But you can break those people eventually. They will break at some point. Like there's this isn't an infinite well that they can go to, but we really do hold them

up in high esteem. Southern rights, ability to motor through and beat off and all that type of stuff. And there are, you know, it's funny just when you think about a swam almost 50, I have an eight year old and six year old daughters, very grateful for when I did have kids in my life, just like kind of un-fucking my own mental baggage, and you know, different things like that, more financially sound. But man, when I was 20, I could deal with sleep deprivation a lot.

You're speaking to me, so I'm 33. I don't have kids, I'm not engaged, I'm married or anything. And this is in the back of my mind. I can't wait to be a dad. I'm so excited to be a dad. I've spent all of this time sorting my shit, right? Making me the sort of, I would have been a shit dad at 23. I would have been able to deal with the sleep deprivation, but I didn't sort it myself,

I still haven't sorted myself, but you know what I mean, I'm better. And um, but it does make me think, you're going to be, you're going to be dealing with up and nappy changes and all that sort of stuff when you're in your 40s. And yeah, I might have to message you and try and get whatever the tips are. The main tip is just grab what you can and it's funny and I don't want to drive this into like being a dad land, but it was interesting when they were kind of newborn up to about, I don't know, maybe two years, two and a half years. Both of them slept pretty well.

Like we'd put them to bed, they'd go to bed about six, six, thirty, they'd sleep 12 hours. So we still had kind of an evening, we'd watch a little TV, hang out, chit chat and everything. And now as they've gotten older, they want to do stuff. They've gotten in the way, asking for activities and attention. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they went to Jiu-Jitsu yesterday.

They had jumped on the trampoline all day. Then went to Jiu-Jitsu, did a bunch of matches because kids got new belts and they iron man the kids so everybody, you know, it was all the stuff. We got home, we fed them and then they went back out on the trampoline and get this. They turned the sprinkler on the trampoline and it was still chilly here, but throughout jumping in their swimsuits on the trampoline in Montana in the spring, you know, and I'm just like, I don't know that I ever had that much energy, but I guess maybe I did. Maybe they've got that PYY six and a half.

I don't know, man. Thing, what is it? One in the same number of people that get struck by lightning twice in the lifetime have that genetic modification that allows them to go on, whatever it is, four or five hours sleep. You should get them right. You should get the kids tested, man. You might have two double lightning strikers there.

I think part of it is that I'm old and they're young and well-fed. And that's really just all the reason to it. This is just biology, it's like I'm ready to die and they're just in the budding part of life. So yeah. So yeah. So okay, so we've scared people straight

about what happens when sleep's bad. What would you say are your highest three priorities for improving sleep quality? Or what are some of the things that you focus on? Man, proper glycemic load is really big. Like some people do well on high carb, some people do better on lower carb, but I do find that sleep disturbances

oftentimes relate back to. So like some people on very low carb, they can have sleep just problems. And they actually need to address some electrolytes to usually get that fix, like sodium ends up being a piece of that. But I do notice that if folks are eating in overly refined diet, too many carbs for their constitution. It can kind of disturb

their sleep. That's definitely something that can wake them up. Man, I gotta say that this gets into personal stuff. I think it applies to everybody, but I pulled all social media off of my phone like six months ago. I will do some via the desktop and even from there, I write stuff now and then I send it to my assistant, my assistant post it and I don't really go on like Instagram or Twitter very, very rarely. Like I have somebody else do that, but my sleep improved dramatically just decoupling

from social media. Why do you think that is? I think the base level stress of just all the shit that's going on, and it may be different for somebody if they're just kind of like, my stuff was always, like there's always a battle I've got to fight, whether it's like the knuckleheads within ancestral health. It's like, well, 30 grams of carbs is keto and 50 grams of carbs is not keto and they're

bickering over that. And while that's happening, I also have folks saying that animal husbandry, like cattle or the singularly largest contributor greenhouse gases, they're going to destroy the world. And so I'm trying to tackle that thing. The largest contributor to greenhouse gases and they're going to destroy the world and so I'm trying to tackle that thing. There were a lot of different things that I was trying to address and what I started doing was just

looking at what the concerns are doing broadcast only, whether it's a written piece or like a podcast, and then that's it. Then I don't interact after that. That was huge for me. Like they're just the stress level dropped. And I discovered that doing that freed up about three to five hours a week of time that I was previously like interacting with people, which some of

that I really enjoyed, like there I learned a lot interacting with people on social media. Like I can connect with somebody in the UK or anywhere in the world at any time of the day. It's, there's some really cool elements to it, but I think it's safe to say it got pretty toxic. And so I think looking at glycemic load, I think looking at just kind of tech in general, like how much you're doing, when you're doing it. Isn't interesting one, Phoebe that you might not have seen.

I looked it into some papers that studied the equivalent effect on melatonin release and circadian rhythm from e-readers versus kindles. Mm. And they actually said that even the normal paper white, so you don't need the fancy oasis that's got a warmer light on it. Um, basically the effect of the light is negligible on a night time, which for those of us that are part of the Kindle Club bowing at the altar of Amazon, that's really good news,

because it means you don't need to have a paper book and you big light on or even a reading light on, you can go really dim and you know, you can have it as far away from your face as you want and then you kind of turn over and go to bed. So that was an interesting one that I discovered a couple of months ago that if you are wanting to read on a night time, the optimal solution it would appear is to go kindle, turn the brightness down and get away. Yeah, in a mean, I also do the little extra bit. I'll put on some blue blocks with it. Yeah.

And I mean, what do you blue blockers? What do you blue blockers have choice? I've had Matt Marouka from raw optics on here. If you're familiar with those guys, that's awesome. Oh, I have a pair of those. I have a pair of I suspect just about everybody's and my kids steal them. And they end up in weird places like on their animals and stuff like that. Of course.

And of course. I'm just at the spot where any port and a storm, you know, it's, I, no joke. I took some play glasses that my kids have and took a red Sharpie marker and put that on the lens because it was a clear lens and I used that for like three days because I couldn't find any of my other stuff and so I'm very none. I'm kind of like the guy in the bar that it's like 3 a.m. and I'm just kind of looking around like who am I going home with and so with my blue blockers like I am very undersurring that. Yeah. That's so funny man. That's so funny. I had so moving on to diet, we talked about sleep, one of the big ones, hopefully given people

some good bits of advice there. I had Diana Rodgers on the show a few months ago, and I asked what most people get wrong with the diet, and she said insufficient protein. I'm gonna guess that your answer would be the same. Absolutely, yeah, and I mean, I've been around the horn on this where, I mean, just really looking at it clinically,

like there's great data from a research perspective that really supports this position, but we have a community called the Healthy Rebellion where we do these resets three or four times a year, folks are trying to lose weight or get improved their physical capacity, a whole host of things. And what's fascinating to me is folks in there will say,

man, I've been following your work for 10 years, 12 years, it really helped me. But I've still had this problem, like losing the last 15 pounds or whatever the case may be. And then when we get in and really weigh in, measure their food for a couple of days a week, they're 25% to 50% under eating protein. And it shocks them.

And you know, for us, we have never yet seen somebody have body composition issues that was overeating protein. They have always been under eating protein. Now, every once in a while, somebody will be overeating in general, but it's kind of like, okay, well, shift the rib eyes into something that's maybe a little bit leaner or something. But even then, I mean, that's like a fewer than 1% of people, like everybody's under-eating protein. And you get that protein dialed in, and it's somewhere between like a gram of protein

per pound of lean body mass up to a gram of protein per pound of body weight. So there's a pretty good spectrum there. And then you figure out, do you run better on fat or carbs or maybe a little bit of a combo? So you figure out kind of your glycemic load. Like I just seem to do better on on kind of lower carb, higher fat. Not everybody does, but once you get that protein part buttoned up, then you figure out, you know, how much of the other stuff do you need? And then you just go out and kick ass and rock the world. And it is so easy if you can just get people to eat that adequate protein. And like I, just emphatic, like it's got to be from whole real food. Like shakes don't cut it. I

wish they did. In a pinch for some people, okay, but like even my, I don't do a ton of work with athletes, but it's rare even with athletes that I find that a shake trumps real whole food that you got a chew and like the satiety and the nutrient density of it and whatnot. But yeah, that protein piece is is huge. And Diana, the clinical practice that she does, she just sees this again and again and again, folks are just like chronically under-eating protein, like shockingly. The problem is, especially if you want to go

one gram per pound of body weight, I'm around about 200 pounds. There is no chance in hell that I am accidentally eating 200 grams of protein per day. No one in history has acted, unless you went to one of those buffets and decided that you were not going to look at any of the carbs and just went through the meat. So give me some advice. How can people consume more protein, get more protein into their diet, especially if we're not permitting them, the allowance is taken away with bars of protein and with supplements of protein. How do you advise someone hit that 200 gram or that 180 or that 160 per day?

Yeah, I think a couple of different angles on this. One is definitely looking at your seasoning, like seasoning sauces, things like that, like kind of switching that up because it can get very monotonous just eating. Tell me through some of your favorites, or chicken thigh. I like, so if we do kind of a matrix where we've got like garlic, ginger,

black pepper, paprika, and then we have three different fats, say like olive oil, coconut oil, and beef tallow. You've got 15 different kind of flavor options there, you know, so you could do chicken in garlic with beef tallow, chicken in garlic with olive oil, and it's a very different flavor experience. So this is a thing called the food matrix that I developed a long time ago.

It was pretty prominent in my second book, Wired to Eat. So just a little bit of variability there can really help getting some different flavor experiences there. Something we've noticed too, and this takes a little bit of planning, but if folks cook, say like some beef, some chicken, and some shrimp, and they have a little bit of planning, but if folks cook, say like some beef, some chicken, and some shrimp, and they have a little bit of each, or maybe the meal is mainly beef with a little bit of chicken and shrimp. So one of the ways that we help limit people from overeating is actually limiting

limiting palette options. We have fewer options there. So from a caloric control perspective, that's a great strategy, but from getting a protein in, like you start, you're like, like, rib eye is great, but by the time you get past your six or seven thounds of rib eye, you're kind of like, oh man, this is getting to be a lot.

But if you add a little bit of chicken to break it up, a little bit of salmon or shrimp or something to break it up, so it takes a little bit of planning, but if you can get two or three proteins at a given meal, then that can certainly help. And those have been two of the main strategies that we've recommended within our community. And people really do well with it. And sometimes it's just, you got a piece of steak, and then you've got a can of salmon, and you put some mayonnaise in the salmon, and like you do half of that, and and save half of it for the next deal. And then that rolls over to your next day and you scramble

the salmon into some eggs and then that flavor combination is different than just salmon by itself or eggs by itself. So you start getting some of these combos going. That is because you're coming at the meals from a protein base, whereas most people would maybe look at it from either a carb base or a vegetable base. If you were to say, here's your meal and all the vegetables in it are spinach. You're like, well, so you tell me I've got 150 grams or 200 grams of spinach in this one meal

and you want me to just eat that. We'd say that was crazy, but it's very rare unless you get the seafood platter or a surf and turf or something at a restaurant. It's very rare that you go in and you get, I'll have the chicken with beef please. That's just not what happens. And I think that that's now been replicated when we cook for ourselves. The number of times that I have two different meats that I've made for myself in one meal is almost zero. So that's, I mean, that's a really good suggestion there. I'm going to guess that if you were to do eggs on a morning, then putting some

ham in with that or put young some tuner in with that is another good way to do it. How are you cooking? Have you got any advice about sort of expedient ways to cook multiple different meats or what are some of your favorite ways to get the beef going if you've got seafood going and chicken going at the same time? Yeah, so having kids like that complicates it a little bit. It's like one kid like this. So I try to find things that pretty much the kids do eat what we put in front of them,

but at the same time, like just seeing your kid kind of pushing the same piece of meat around the plate and like trying to hide it. like I try to take cater to them a bit. So like shrimp is something that both girls eat really well. Sam and it's something that both girls eat really well. The shrimp we can get frozen, like we can get wild caught frozen, and it's really easy to measure out how much we want. And that one lends itself to cooking like I could cook it in butter. I could cook it in

olive oil, like a cook it in butter and garlic. I could do it olive oil and garlic. I could do some Thai seasoning. I could do some Indian seasoning. So again with the and so maybe I have some beef that's left over like we have a trigger. It's like a pellet fired kind of kind of grill. pellet fired kind of grill. It's pretty big and so I will cook three racks of ribs, eight to 12 hamburgers and then like a couple of steaks. And then we freeze some of that and we'll rotate that stuff through. So and really for me, I'm able to kind of grind through stuff.

Like if I've got three quarters of pound of meat, I'll just eat it and I just get it done. And you know, I just do it, but for other folks, that's where they could have, say like some ribs. And then if they don't have the shrimp prepared, like some frozen shrimp, you throw it in a pan, put some olive oil and a little bit of seasoning on it, then just put a lid on it and it's gonna kind of steam.

It's not gonna be the best shrimp you ever had in your life, but it's going to be pretty damn good and it's hard to screw it up. And it required two minutes of time, you know, just don't burn it and it's going to be edible and pretty good. And then I've got my two protein combo there, you know, 30 grams of protein from the steak, 30 grams of protein from the shrimp. I'm good to go. What are the insights around the amount of protein you can absorb per meal? There's some rumors around it's 35 grams, it's this sort of a ceiling within one sitting, anything on top of that,

just gets excreted out. Have you looked into this? Yeah, and you can absorb a lot. Now, you do start getting from an anabolic signaling perspective. It does start kind of plateau diminishing. Yeah, you do get diminishing returns on that, but you do also generally get really stable blood glucose levels. You still have the new, the fact that protein, dense protein sources are nutritionally very dense. So you're getting all these vitamins and minerals and what not that

comes along. So I think it's a little myopic to just focus on like the anabolic response of the protein. This is where I think like the one meal a day, the omad stuff is really problematic. It's really difficult to get enough anabolic signaling with one meal a day. Like two meals, two meals in a snack, like it makes it much more reasonable to support like maintaining muscle mass and whatnot. But yeah, yeah. Go at you. How about treats and sweet things

when you're trying to control sugar? What do you go to? I have some dark chocolates. And again, like kind of catering to the kids. We've found some dark chocolates that they like, but what I try to do is find things that the whole family can enjoy, but they self-regulate. I don't want to be the food cop at all. So we have some keto ice creams that are called Rebel. I'm not sure if you have this over in the UK, but it's good. The best we've got sort of a low carb ice cream,

but it's not gonna be the same. Hours would be a halo top or something like that. It's gonna be nothing similar to keto, I don't think. This stuff is definitely better than a halo top, but it's good. But what's interesting, the kids will finish dinner, they'll be running around. They're like, hey, can I have some Rebel?

I'm like, absolutely. So they go pull it out and they scoop it up, they self-regulate, they self-serve, they have a bowl and they're done. And every once in a while, there's a local ice creamery, sweet peaks here in Montana. The ice cream is amazing. It is not a self-regulatable deal.

You know, like the kids will have a much bigger bowl that they scoop for themselves. And then they finish the bowl and then like 20 minutes later, they're like, can I have some more of that? I'm like, tomorrow you can have some. Let's save some for tomorrow. So again, I try not to super be the food police guy,

but I had some keto ice cream, some dark chocolate, stuff like that. I try to find things that the kids, the kids really like chicharones, the fried pork skins that are flavored. Definitely a kind of a southern thing, but my mom was from Arkansas, so I've, no, so it's a salty, crunchy thing. Instead of like a potato chip. Kids love them, but it's also interesting. They'll get a bowl of them and they eat them. And then they go put the bowl on the counter and they're done. And so that's the stuff that I, I try to find that the kids enjoy it, but it's not that cocaine like the old words,

like I need more. And so then they can start self-regulating. And we just have open discussion with the kids. We're like, yeah, this other ice cream tastes really good, but like, we would eat the whole thing in one sitting, right? And like, yeah, okay. And this is all the work that mom and dad do is trying to help people like save their own lives from this amazing tasting food. And so we just are really honest and open with them about that. And we're like, someday you're going to make your own decisions. And you can do whatever you want to do. But a simple thing you can do is get the ice cream that's pretty good, but not so good that you're going to eat the whole thing in one sitting. And I'm like, okay, that makes sense. And so that's kind of how

we we monitor that across the board. Like we try to have a variety of options, but stuff that all of us can self-regulate on, like there are some kind of keto granolas, and they're really good, like to the tune that my wife's like, hype this, you know, because she'll just go back and go back and go back, and so it's funny even with some stuff like that, they put a little honey glaze on it and they've got the mouth feel, the crunch and everything, it's got some cinnamon, it's really good and a big ass bag, you could crush the whole thing easily, just each time you walk by, heck man, a quarter cup, super easy to do and each quarter cup is 200 calories or whatever, you know. So yeah, yeah. That's awesome. What about training? How does ancestral

health get applied to training? I know that you were the co-founder of the first ever and the fourth ever CrossFit affiliate. What's the paradigm? Draw me on a spectrum from why CrossFit's art, to sort of where you see health and training and physical fitness and stuff now. Oh, man, that's a really good question. I think the most important thing is whatever folks are going to stick to, like that. That's definitely, if your gig is walking, your gig is yoga and you just hate everything else.

Fine, fine. But the one pitch that I would throw out to people, though, is that as we age, we all have a potential for cancer and for heart disease and for neurodegenerative disease. But we all have a risk value of one. We have 100% risk of sarcopenia as we age. A age-related muscle loss. Like, we will lose muscle strength, power, volume as we age, age-related muscle loss. Like, we will lose muscle strength, power, volume as we age.

Now, we can dramatically change what happens with that based off of some smart training. And doing like a full body strength training session, two times a week, can dramatically mitigate the loss of muscle mass as we age. And so even if you have somebody that really hates strength training, they don't like being in the gym or whatever, join one of these key in 24 hour fitness places that has a bunch of machines.

And you go and you hit one machine, say like it's a bench press and you find a very light weight, you do it nice and easy for 15 reps Increase the weight do it for eight or ten reps increase the weight to what for five? Increase the weight grind out two or three and you're done now do a poll and then you do your poll and now you do some sort of a leg movement Maybe do a little bit of buys and tries delts do some abs and low, and you're done. You're in and out of there in 15 minutes doing this super set type format. You're never gonna be a body builder, you're never gonna be a powerlifter doing that,

but a really time efficient workout, minimum investment, maximum return. I think stuff like that is incredible. Some crossfit type stuff can be a little bit like that too. like that is incredible. Some crossfit type stuff can be a little bit like that too. But I just almost beg people to do, particularly out of that kind of like yoga and endurance athlete scene, it's like running's great, cycling's great, but let's do something to fix your posture.

Let's do something to keep some muscle mass in that upper body. So when you crash your bike, hopefully your collarbone doesn't sound like it. You don't get chocked in. Yeah, exactly. Split in two. What about for yourself then? Obviously, you're having had all of this time and exposure to CrossFit from nearly 20 years, now two decades of exposure to that. Where do you or how

do you try and optimize your training as someone who obviously did enjoy the high intensity, the heavy weight, the loading, etc. I do. Everything physically now is geared towards just doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I try to do that two to four times a week, usually more like two for the most part. Then I do two days a week of strength training. It's a press, a pole, a hinge, a lunge, a squat, something like that, tends to be more like a five sets of five, eight sets of three, kind of heavier. In between, I do a lot of mobility work from the Kin Stretch FRC world because I noticed

that because I sit a lot and whatnot and the Jiu-Jitsu, that mobility piece is another part. The strength is really important, but also, mobility isn't just stretching. It's actually figuring out how the joint articulates and all that type of stuff. I remember I had to swerve to avoid hitting a deer and a hit kind of a curb. And it knocked my car out of alignment and took me like two days to get to the tire place and the, you know, the auto repair place. And the tire that was kind of just a little caddy want this, it was destroyed. Like, it, and I didn't drive it that much, but properly aligned tires, like they wear very, very slowly.

And then you get it just a tiny bit out of alignment and it just shredded this thing. It stripped the tires off and that's where like if you're doing any type of repetitive movement, your shoulders, your hips, you know, your knees and things aren't tracking well, that's where you end up really destroying the joint surfaces. So some amount of mobility work, I think is really important. So I mean, my main focus is jujitsu. I do a couple of days a week of some dedicated strength training. Usually about one day, sometimes two of some low intensity cardio, just kind of recovery stuff.

Sometimes that's just wearing a weight vest and taking the dog for a walk. Sometimes it's putting on an episode of the expanse and getting on my airdine and just kind of going at a nasal breathing pace, but that's most of what I do. And one thing I started doing in the evenings, instead of doing any TV, we listened to some books on tape for the, for the kids. And I just do stretching. Well, that's going on. I get my phone, I set a timer, I hold each position for like four minutes and, and you know, I do almost an, I hold each position for like four minutes and you know, I do almost an hour of stretching each night, but it's what we're hanging out as a family. It's crazy when you try and socialize something like that.

Assistance, recovery work, some sort of accessories, stretching. If you're just chatting away, I went to CrossFit Recivic in Iceland a couple of years ago. Have you ever been? Yeah, so I don't know when you went because this thing grows extra limbs, like an octopus. And when I was there, the warm-up and cool-down area, which is fully matted and looks like a BJJ gym, it's kind of recessed right in the middle of a lateral gym. And from that viewing platform, you can see everything that's going on. So everybody arrives and rather than standing by the reception desk, talking shit, they

sit on the mats and talk shit. But while they're sitting on the mats, they're doing stretching and they're rolling the rams out and maybe they've got a massage gun in themselves And then everyone finishes and they go back there and everyone's finished and they're still doing the same and it's it was crazy While I was out there training you realize just how much more you get done and how much How much less painful it's the same as listening to an audio book while you go and do some steady-state cardio or you've got a Listening to an audio book while you go and do some steady state cardio, or you've got one of your favorite TV shows on, or something while you're on a bike.

We had a walk-by throughout lockdown. My buddy's Jim Jordan very thankfully gave me a walk-by, which I think saved me from probably about five kilos of body weight gain. And yeah, I do podcast research. I'd be like, right, who have I got coming up next? I've got Rob Wolf, right. I watch Rob Wolf on the like HMVN podcast or whatever it might be. And I'd just pop it on and you think, right, it's a podcast at one and a half time speed. And before you know it,

you think, let's 45 minutes of cardio I've got in. I needed to watch this thing in any case. So, yeah, I'm a big, big advocate of trying to dampen down some of the inevitable boredom that comes from the repetitive, less exciting stuff of exercise by trying to pair it with something that's a little bit more exciting and interesting. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And it frees up that it's very time efficient. Like you're getting some multitasking in, but multitasking in a way that doesn't make you crazy.

It's not chaotic. It's not chaotic. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good way to put it. Because you're already in this, presumably, what you're not gonna be doing this while it's a cognitively demanding task, while you're trying to learn a new BGJ move or something like that,

you're not gonna be watching something. So you're already probably somewhat parasympathetic. You're already a little bit calm. You may be focusing on your breathing. You said moving it sort of a nasal breathing pace when you're on the airdine. And then you're watching this thing. And it's kind of a nice experience. So you've maybe got to either do a little bit of research or watch your show or listen to your audio book. But you

don't have any of the guilt of having just spent the last hour on YouTube or audible or whatever, because you're, God, I also got my training in, yeah, I think, I think that's a really good way to do it. Talking about supplements, what is a supplement which people rely on too much in your opinion? I think probably like a multivitamin, like these high dose multivitamins.

When you look at like the amounts and the ratios of B vitamins in particular in these things, they're way, way higher than what we would get from any type of food source. And- Is that dangerous? I think it could be. I think it could be.

These things are really important in methylation pathways, which are important in cancer regulation and whatnot. And an interesting aside, like the studies looking at, see like vitamin supplementation use, it really doesn't, there doesn't seem to be much upside generally. Now I do think some folks end up with some legitimate deficiency scenarios and whatnot, particularly if you're kind of more vegan or vegetarian, like B vitamins, B12 in particular, really, really important to supplement. But I'm kind of underwhelmed on that.

Like if somebody wanted to do a multi-vitamin is just kind of hedging their bet, I would find one where they recommend like six tablets a day and you only take one and maybe you take it every other day or something like really just kind of a Really baseline kind of hedging of your bets, but I'm gonna think about that Like I think like just the general multivitamin is probably one of those things that I think is overused and and could Lauren Cordane ages ago made made the case that these super high levels of B vitamins could be problematic with different types of cancers.

And it was really speculative, but I mean, there's some mechanistic stuff there that's kind of like, I could see where that could maybe be problematic. Yeah. What about a supplement which is too underused? Maybe vitamin D, I would say actually creatine maybe because like it seems like everybody should do creatine, like it seems like no, no downside, it's neuroprotective, it's nanny oxides. Even non-athletes. Yeah, even non-athletes. Yeah, yeah. So maybe creatine, but man, if we could get everybody

with a spurty vitamin D lamp, I think that that would solve so many problems. Like if we had community vitamin D lamps where you could just go walk and strip down, zipper something closed, do three minutes front, three minutes back, and then go about your day. I think that that could be amazing for seasonal effective disorder, all these other things that we know are definitely vitamin D

driven. But the bugger there is that supplementing, say, liquid vitamin D, it doesn't seem to do quite the same thing that getting it from the sun dies, but it definitely seems to confer a benefit. So that's where like, if we could rig up some sort of a smart UV supplementation process to generate that vitamin D, it would be pretty cool. How much better is the smart UV versus a oral supplement? I don't know, but it just, there are some folks. Pedro Bastos, he's in Lisbon, Portugal. He's really smart on this stuff.

As are some other physicians that are kind of tight with him. They understand the research on this much better than I do, but kind of the limitations about how they are looking at vitamin D. Oftentimes, also these vitamin D. Oftentimes, also, these vitamin D studies, they're supplementing with really poultry amounts. It's like 400 IUs a day, and you should be doing like 5,000 IUs a day to really start moving the needle at all. So there's a lot of challenges within interpreting what's going on there.

The stuff that we can hang our hat on is that it seems like when folks have adequate vitamin D levels, particularly from sunlight. There's all this other stuff that happens. It releases nitric oxide. It's immune modulating, kind of baited and dorphin activation. So you just kind of cognitively feel better. We have more that we can hang our hat on with that. And then the supplementation side is just harder to kind of fair it out. Like what exactly is going on here? Yeah.

Mm. What you thought's a nicotine? I like it. I'm seeing more talk now about people reducing their caffeine intake and then using a nicotine gum or something else as a short-wrecking stimulant. I like it in a, What are you holding up? It's the Nicaret.

Okay. Is that gum? These are mints. I like the mints because the gum, I start getting like TMJ from chewing it too much. This first got on my radar when I was doing work for Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Program back in 2008, 2009. And what they wanted me to talk about was sleep, food, booze, caffeine, and nicotine to different Navy SEAL groups, which was really cool and super interesting, and trying to do my diligence, I wanted to look at the toxicology of nicotine, and when I really started digging in and looking at it, it was really interesting.

I was like, man, the problem with this is the delivery system. Tobacco was really, really bad for you. It's terrible carcinogen, whether you're chewing it or smoking it, but just nicotine as a standalone item. Can't quite call it a vitamin, but it does some really interesting stuff. And one interesting thing is when you look at neurodegenerative disease among smokers,

it's shockingly low. And this is kind of mind blowing because neurodegenerative, the brain is so exposed to like oxidative stress, to microvascular stress. Like, you know, it is so kind of exposed in that regard, but yet whatever it is that nicotine is doing, which it seems to be modifying like the dopamine release and then clearly the nicotinic receptor sites, it's so beneficial that it, like I forget the exact numbers,

but I wanna say that among smokers, the incidents of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's is like 40% less, 60% less, it's stunningly less. And it's one of these things that medicine is just kind of like, nobody talk about this shit, you know? Because it's too confusing, but then it's fascinating. They're when you keep digging and digging, you find some articles that are like,

how do we get our patients who have successfully quit smoking off of nicotine gum? And there's all this like back and forth and hand ringing. And then you get to like this final page, there's a WebMD article that's like three pages long, it's remarkably long, and then it finally wraps it up, and it's like maybe this isn't that big of a deal, it's almost like the person started the process like I did,

and they kept working their way through, and then they get to the spot. And they're like, at the end of the day, there's none of the health, detrimental health effects that we see with the nicotine gum and mints relative to tobacco ingestion. So maybe it's not that big of a deal, but I can ping you that article. It's really, it's kind of interesting.

It's like it was a journal, a journal or a train of consciousness thing that they just wrote, because it clearly had one orientation at the beginning. And then this thing, WebMD articles are not typically four pages long and this thing kept going and going. So yeah, I'm a big fan of stuff.

What do you use it for? What do you use it for? I just use it for kind of focus. And interestingly also, although my gut health issues have improved a ton over time, it just seems to improve my digestion and my gut health. This is another interesting thing when you look at ulcerative colitis, Crohn's, those things tend to improve if people begin smoking and tend to worsen if they stop smoking. And so it is just another one of those.

Definitely the digestive part and then also kind of the neuro-cognitive part. So he is a new tropic. What's dosage in timing? I take a four milligram mint and I bite it in half, so it's two milligrams and then I just stick it between my lip and just let it dissolve. Is it sublingual? This one is yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, something that you might be interested in Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex Do you feel it? Okay, so he's now on What's he on sub stack as Astral Codex 10 he just released within the last

just released within the last 220 no tropics. Yes, have you seen it? Did you watch it? I have not watched it yet. I watched it, read it. I listened to it on the podcast that an Australian dude does of it, which was actually totally awful to listen to because he's just describing what's in a bar chart.

So that was a really awful one to listen to, but I was listening to it earlier on today. He was like torture. But yeah, they go through, they go through all sorts. There's probably 50 plus compounds in there. He gets rid of a few that have got such a small number of suggestions that it kind of wouldn't make sense to put it in there. But it's, there's people talking about microdosing LSD where that ranks micro-dosing still ascibe and fanny but like, NMD, NAD, everything. And that was fascinating. I'm gonna, it's saved to my pocket to watch later. So yeah, I'm gonna have a little look at that.

I thought that was really, really interesting. When I look next to the screen that you are in, I have a tab open with that Astral Codex topic, right, right? Ready to roll. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How funny. That guy's brilliant. That guy is brilliant.

He's operating on a whole different level. Like, dude, yeah. I don't know if I would love hanging out with that guy or I would want to like throttle him. He's so smart. Like, it would be either or I don't think it would be any middle ground. The thing that I think is most terrifying about Scott

is his ability to write clearly. Yeah. He has the least barriers that the fewest restrictions from brain to fingertip of potentially anyone that I know. So you had, who did who did doors of perception? Aldous Hooksley, right? So what you did, what we did in the 60s and the 70s was we needed somebody with the linguistic capability to describe this incredibly complex experience. So what happens? We find like the writer of the era, right? And we call him in like the

champion to come slay the dragon and we say, right, okay, you're gonna experience this thing that basically few people struggle to put into words. Try your best, tell us what you see. And what Scott does for free every single day for 15 years is trying to wrangle the chaos of the entire world and all of his inner sort of vacillations as well. And he puts them, dude, he did one, have you read one called Untitled? It was about feminism. Yeah. Yeah. Man, that is, it's a

a magnum opus of someone being able to go from, to just see clearly, he sees what's going on. And then he's able to repurpose it into words. The man is phenomenal. I love him. Yeah. I'm terrified of him at the same time. He only got on my radar maybe about nine months ago. Somebody forward a piece that he did. The only thing I can't tolerate is intolerance. And it was so, I thought it was completely in response to the current cancel culture scene. It was written in 2008. And I was just like, oh my God, like this is amazing.

And so prescient, like really, really incredible. And then I was, oh, I just went so far down that rabbit home, like who is this guy? It's endless. It's one of those people, it's the fortune, I'm sure that you down that rabbit hole. I'm like, who is this guy? It's endless. It's one of those people. It's the fortune. I'm sure that you have it with your show as well. And now this will be episode 320, something.

It's great because when you find a new creator that you really like, and then you realize that they have this sort of Alexandra's library of past content. And you think, God, I can, I don't need to listen to anyone else or read anyone else for the rest of my life. I can just go through this. A couple of other blog posts of his that I absolutely adored. So meditations on molloc is the single best thing I've ever read. So it's about 25,000, 30,000 words. So it's a couple of hour read, but it's outstanding. It's absolutely amazing.

It's very profoundly sort of changed the way that I see the world. And then he did another one about, is it the only thing I can't bear is the outgroup? And it's talking about in group outgroup differences. And that's really interesting, because I had a sociologist on recently, and he was talking about the fact that before 2012, both Democrats or specifically Democrats, they preferred their

own party, members of their own party, to their hatred of the other party. But in 2012, the reason that Democrats voted Democrat wasn't that they loved other Democrats, it was that they hated the opposite side more. So their hatred was a motivation greater than they're like. And that's simply understanding that, which is explained in in group versus out group by Scott explains so much of what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. And it paints a really dangerous and kind of depressing picture because it's going to be very difficult to unfuck and walk all that back. Like it's bad news. Like it is really really bad news. Yeah. Rob, man, thank you so much for today. It's been a while

coming. I'm very, very glad we managed to finally get it done. At the huge honor being here that it really enjoyed the time and thank you for putting up with the multiple schedule tweaks we had to do. Do not mention it. So, drinklment.com slash modern wisdom. I was chatting to Blake earlier on, so we've got something set up for the listeners for that. Awesome.

Where else should people go? They want to find out about this, the health revolution stuff. The healthy rebellion is joined. The healthy rebellion.com. And they can check out the podcast, same title, healthy rebellion radio. And you kind of get a sense of a lot of what we're up to. We kind of describe what goes on in the healthy rebellion. And also we just do a lot of Q&A.

My wife and I do that. Yeah. And that's most of where I'm at. I'm not on, I have stuff that looks like me on social media, but it's mainly me writing stuff in my assistant posting it. You won't get a response on social media from me. That's for sure. Well, if it's helping you sleep, I think it's worthwhile.

Rob, brother, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, take care. Offends, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah