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

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 #paleo #ancestralhealth #robbwolf - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome back. My guest today is Rob Wolf. 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 socialisation. 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.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  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, there's tons 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.

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• 2:45Chris Williamson?

  But now it is time for the wise and wonderful Rob Wolf.

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  Rob Wolf, welcome to the show.

• 3:09Speaker 06

  Hey, huge honour to be here, thank you. Thanks for tolerating the many reschedules that we had with my moving and everything.

• 3:16Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely fine, so you've just made the move to Montana, how come?

• 3:20Speaker 06

  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, you know, 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 the move to Montana brought us closer to family, it also definitely, we just, I didn't realise it, like we grew up in the mountainous area and as cool as the hill country of Texas is, just very, very different.

• 4:00Speaker 06

  And then there's also a straight blast gym here in Kalispell, Montana, that'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.

• 4:25Chris Williamson?

  It's so interesting as someone from the UK to hear you essentially say the weather wasn't bad enough.

• 4:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, we, you know, it's funny because the the bad weather is kind of relative like, 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 and we're sitting outside, you know, barbecuing and and it was interesting. Like, I think most places, if it's if it's like cloudy outside, you have the sense that it's going to be cool, like you might need

• 5:15Speaker 06

  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. You know, 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 and hot. So like bad weather was 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 and hope that

• 5:58Speaker 06

  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 we, 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.

• 6:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's an interesting one, man. The UK 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 grey in winter, and then it kind of gets a bit less cold and a little bit less grey in summer, and then it vacillates back down again. But yeah, man, some of the buddies that I've got that spend time in Montana or go out there hunting or doing whatever, it looks absolutely spectacular. So it does not surprise me that you've decided to go there. I want you to go through ancestral health today, which is one of the terms that swims in the circle that your work sits in the epicentre of. For people that aren't familiar with it, how do you characterise the foundations and the fundamentals of ancestral health?

• 7:00Speaker 06

  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 than from infectious disease and starvation. And this is the first

• 7:43Speaker 06

  time in our history, you know, 2.5 million years of human pre-human history, there's always been infection and scarcity that were the main killers, and now it's 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

• 8:26Speaker 06

  significant technology and the benefits of being able to share information via written and spoken language and all that stuff. So it's an idea that we don't 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...

• 8:46Speaker 06

  Problems, particularly with regards to human health, like maybe we could, we could look back a couple of generations or a couple of hundred years even, we don't even have to go like, you know, 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, has, you know, been gifted to humanity, but it's got a cost to it too. And I think that that's one of the, the big things that isn't properly discussed within medicine at large. And like this, this age of COVID is a pretty good example of this. Like, 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

• 9:31Speaker 06

  story is, but if we have a discussion around this, you know, maybe we can ferret some stuff out. It's pretty clear now that shift work is as injurious to health as, you know, like a pack a 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

• 10:13Speaker 06

  and circadian biology, gut health and what, whatnot. So I don't know if I properly answered the question around what ancestral health is, but it's really just, it, 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 diet or ancestral health scene ran afoul 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

• 10:55Speaker 06

  we're going to do to try to ferret out whether or not that's, that's true or not true or some other detail in there?

• 11:01Chris Williamson?

  Are there broad buckets that you focus on in the ancestral health sort of paradigm?

• 11:08Speaker 06

  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 like we're collaborating together, you know, I'm more of a lumper than a splitter. So, you know, but I think about like our, 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, like I'm really like, I stick a lot of stuff under those umbrellas for sure. Yeah.

• 11:47Chris Williamson?

  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 a thousand club nights in between the age of 18 and 33. I've lost a thousand different nights and then the subsequent slow reset back to something that resembles normal. And the maddest thing about COVID was for the first time in my entire adult life, I had a stable sleep and wake pattern. First time ever.

• 12:22Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 12:23Chris Williamson?

  Since I was a legal child.

• 12:26Speaker 06

  Right, right. And what was the impact on your life with that? I mean, clearly it's hard to ferret 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?

• 12:39Chris Williamson?

  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, 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, right, okay, I need to prioritize this. But really, if you're doing, if you're working, a typical week for me might have been do a Tuesday night, Friday night, Saturday night. So I would have worked until about 3:30, 4:00 AM on each of those and then tried to fit training in and such like around that.

• 13:25Chris Williamson?

  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 nights when 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're then about to... And you're smoked. Precisely. You're also really hungry, incredibly hungry at that time. So if you're trying to diet, I mean, essentially a calorie deficit whilst working those shifts is borderline impossible. And the only places that are open at that time are takeaways. And it's just, it is a catastrophe.

• 14:11Chris Williamson?

  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, you 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,

• 14:50Chris Williamson?

  I want to wrap myelin around this meditation habit or this walking after I eat every meal for 15 minutes habit, or what, reading, 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, right? 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.

• 15:37Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 15:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, it is. And it's, 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? You know, it's ironic that within medical circles in particular, and it's tough because folks will work multiple shifts and they, you know, 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 would be legally drunk were this caused by ethanol, but it's caused by sleep deprivation. And we're paying them more to remain in the

• 16:33Speaker 06

  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 deprived, 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.

• 17:02Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, I think it's Matthew Walker cites 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?

• 17:20Speaker 06

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's remarkable. Yeah.

• 17:23Chris Williamson?

  And then there's another one about when daylight savings comes in, 25% increase in, is it stroke or heart attack or something?

• 17:32Speaker 06

  It's, 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, it'd take me a minute, grab, oh, okay, I'm in Germany, or I'm here, or whatever. And that, you know, just a one hour shift, we see it at a

• 18:04Speaker 06

  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, uh, yeah, I, I wonder how much time I took off the end of my life by, by just my travel schedule in the past, you know?

• 18:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, that's, that's the same if you're talking about smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Well, that's it. I could have, I could have just not worked in nightlife and decided to sit at home and blaze up for the entire day. Have you got any other statistics or sort of crazy stories that you've come across in your research to do with suboptimal sleep or sleep deprivation?

• 18:42Speaker 06

  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 a unbroken sleep deprivation challenge because the last three people that have tried it, they get between nine and 11 days, they tap out, they go to bed and they die and they have no idea why they die. But it's

• 19:23Speaker 06

  like, it's virtually a, a given. There's some other interesting stuff. There've been studies where a couple is, um, they get a group of couples, one of the, the husband or wife is sleep deprived one hour and then they, they survey the folks like how loving and caring and affectionate is, 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. And so it, uh, it just kind of spirals down from there. Um, one hour of sleep deprivation accumulated daily by the end of a week leaves an individual as cognitively impaired as

• 20:07Speaker 06

  if they were like a blood, you know, point one blood alcohol content. But the, the really insidious thing about Sleep deprivation is you habituate to it and it becomes your new normal. You 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, you know, your reaction time is off. Your your critical thinking skills and you alluded to a bunch of the the problems around the rest of, you know, like diet and and lifestyle. Your decision making is poorer. You crave saltier, sugary foods, you know, hyper palatable foods.

• 20:51Speaker 06

  Your willpower is gone like it it just it's like doing a willpower. You know, excision process like you literally have no no willpower. The tendency to be cranky and 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.

• 21:36Speaker 06

  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. You know where they've gone from day shift to night shift or vice versa. You know, there's some significant delta that occurs that really messes with their ability to to do that executive functioning and the, you know, the

• 22:02Speaker 06

  more emotionally intelligent type type responses. So is this a case for when you do a shift change like the 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 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 if he was,

• 22:45Chris Williamson?

  Exactly what I was thinking.

• 22:46Speaker 06

  You know, it's, it's like, you know, how much other stuff might we mitigate if we, we use some of this to inform like public policy?

• 22:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's, um, the interesting thing about sleep specifically is

• 23:03Chris Williamson?

  the externalities and the costs inevitably even for the individual, there's 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 with 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

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  to this particular substance. They're cranky and then we've got this problem with the police because the police need to deal with it as well. The, 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, the main thing actually, I think that I realized when I, 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.

• 24:17Speaker 06

  It's hidden plain sight.

• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  Yes. You don't realize that it's a thing. You just, it's especially if you're a hard charger, right? If you're a Taipei go getter, sleep is just the thing that gets in the way in between the two periods of waking and working.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  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 their ability to, to deal with sleep deprivation, you know, and, and there are some outlier characteristics like SEALs generally, um, walk around with a, a neuro peptide PYY that's like 600% higher than the rest of the

• 24:59Chris Williamson?

  What's up?

• 24:59Speaker 06

  population. It, it's a, I'm not, it, it, nobody's entirely sure exactly what it does, but it seems to be very key to stress inoculation, resiliency and, and whatnot.

• 25:11Chris Williamson?

  Is that highly heritable?

• 25:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, I believe so. Yeah. Yeah. I believe there are some heritable characteristics there. And I'm only familiar with it within these kinds 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. Um, 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, you know, in, in high esteem.

• 25:45Chris Williamson?

  Celebrate it, right?

• 25:46Speaker 06

  ability to motor through and be tough and, and all that type of stuff. And, and there are, you know, it's funny just when you think about, so I'm 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 unfucking my own mental baggage and, you know, different things like that, more, more financially sound. But man, when I was 20, I could deal with sleep deprivation a lot better than at 15.

• 26:10Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you're speaking to me. So I'm 33. I don't have, 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 hadn't sorted 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

• 26:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I might have to message you and try and get whatever the tips are.

• 26:48Speaker 06

  The main tip is just grab what you can and, you know, it's funny and I don't want to drive this into, you know, 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, we'd put them to bed, they'd go to bed about six, 6:30, they'd sleep 12 hours. So we still had kind of an evening, we could watch a little TV, hang out, chit chat and everything. And now as they've gotten older, they want to do stuff.

• 27:24Chris Williamson?

  Getting in the way, asking for activities and attention.

• 27:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they went to jujitsu yesterday. They had jumped on the trampoline all day, then went to jujitsu, did a bunch of matches because kids got new belts and they iron man the kids. So everybody, you know, it was all this 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 they're out 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 at some point.

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  Maybe they've got that, that PYY600.

• 28:02Speaker 06

  I don't know, man.

• 28:03Chris Williamson?

  Thing. What is it? One in, the same number of people that get struck by lightning twice in their lifetime have that genetic modification that allows them to go on whatever it is, four or five hours sleep. You should get them tested. You should get the kids tested, man. You might have two, two double lightning strikers there.

• 28:18Speaker 06

  I think part of it is that I'm old and they're young and well fed. And that's really just all there is to it, you know? This is just biology. It's like, I'm ready to die and they're just in the budding part of life, you know? So, yeah.

• 28:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So, okay. So we've scared, we've scared people straight about what happens when sleep's bad. What, what would you say are your highest three priorities for improving sleep quality? Or what are some of the things that you focus on?

• 28:46Speaker 06

  Man, um, 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, um, 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, that fixed, like sodium ends up being a piece of that. Um, but I do notice that if folks are eating an overly refined diet, uh, too many carbs for their constitution, it can kind of disturb their sleep. That, that's definitely something that can wake them up. Um, man, I gotta say

• 29:28Speaker 06

  that, this is, this gets into personal stuff and I don't know, I, I think it applies to everybody, but, um, I pulled all social media off of my, my phone, like, like, uh, six months ago. Um, 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 posts it and I don't really go on like Instagram or Twitter, very, very rarely, like I have somebody else do that, but, um, my sleep improved dramatically, just decoupling from social media. Why do you think that is? I think the base level stress of, 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

• 30:13Speaker 06

  always a battle I've gotta fight, whether it's like the, you know, the, 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, um, animal husbandry, like cattle are going, are the singularly largest contributor greenhouse gases and are gonna destroy the world. And so I'm trying to tackle that thing. So like, there were a lot of different, you know, things that I was, I was trying to address and what I started doing was just, um, Looking at what the concerns are, doing broadcast only, whether it's a written piece or like a podcast, and then that's it. And then I don't really

• 30:56Chris Williamson?

  Hands off, yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 06

  interact after that. And that was huge for me. Like, the, the, 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 it I really enjoyed. Like, I, I learned a lot interacting with people on social media. Like, I can connect with somebody in, in the UK or, you know, anywhere in the world at any time of the day. It's, there's some really cool elements to it, but it, I, I think it's safe to say it got pretty toxic. And so, uh, 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, um.

• 31:37Chris Williamson?

  Here's an interesting, here's an interesting one for you that you might not have seen. I looked at, into some papers that studied the equivalent effect on melatonin release and circadian rhythm from e-readers versus Kindles.

• 31:51Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 31:52Chris Williamson?

  Uh, 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 nighttime, which for those of us that are part of the Kindle club, bowing at the altar of Amazon.

• 32:09Speaker 06

  Right.

• 32:10Chris Williamson?

  That's really good news because it means you don't need to have a paper book and your 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, that was an interesting one that I discovered a couple of months ago, that if you are wanting to read on a nighttime, the optimal solution, it would appear, is to go Kindle, turn the brightness down and get away.

• 32:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I mean, I, I also do the little extra bit. I'll put on some blue blocks with it. And I mean.

• 32:42Chris Williamson?

  What are your blue blockers? What are your blue, blue blockers of choice? I've had Matt Maruka from Rar Optics on here. If you're familiar with those guys, they're.

• 32:48Speaker 06

  Oh, I, I have a pair of those. I, 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. And so. I'm just at the spot where any port in a storm, you know, it's no, 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, I'm very non, I'm kind of like the guy in the bar that it's like 3am 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 undeserving.

• 33:35Chris Williamson?

  That's so funny, man. That's so funny. I had, so moving on to diet, we've talked about sleep, one of the big ones. Hopefully giving people some good, good bits of advice there. I had Diana Rogers on the show a few months ago. I asked what most people get wrong with their diet and she said insufficient protein. I'm going to guess that your answer would be the same.

• 33:52Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, I've, I've been around the horn on this where,

• 33:59Speaker 06

  I mean, just really looking at it clinically, like there's great data from a research perspective that really supports this position. But we, 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, get, improve 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 you know, whatever the, whatever the case may be. And then when we get in and really weigh and measure their food for a couple of days a week, they're 25 to 50% under eating protein and it shocks them. And, and you know, for us,

• 34:43Speaker 06

  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 ribeyes into something that's maybe a little bit leaner or something. But even then, I mean, that's, 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, pretty good spectrum there. And then you figure out, do you run better

• 35:25Speaker 06

  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 gotta 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, 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

• 36:09Speaker 06

  real whole food that you gotta chew and like the satiety and the nutrient density of it and whatnot. But yeah, that, that protein piece 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.

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 37:12Speaker 06

  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 like

• 37:25Chris Williamson?

  Talk me through some of your favorites.

• 37:26Speaker 06

  Chicken breast 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.

• 37:45Speaker 06

  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, you know, 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 each, or maybe the meal is mainly beef with a little bit of chicken and shrimp.

• 38:28Speaker 06

  So one of the ways that we help limit people from overeating is actually limiting palate 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, ribeye is great, but by the time you get past your six or seven ounce of ribeye, you're kind of like, oh, man, this is getting to be a lot. But if you had 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.

• 39:10Speaker 06

  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 then 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.

• 39:34Chris Williamson?

  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, like 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 like 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 like the seafood platter or a surf and turf or something at a restaurant. It's very rare that you go in, 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

• 40:16Chris Williamson?

  myself in one meal is almost zero. So that's, I mean, that's a really good suggestion that I'm going to guess that if you were to do eggs on a morning, then putting some ham in with that or putting some tuna 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, to get the beef going if, if you've got seafood going and chicken going at the same time?

• 40:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. So having kids like that complicates it a little bit. Um, you know, it's like one kid likes this. So I try to find things that pretty much the, 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, I try to, to cater to them a bit. So like shrimp is something that both girls eat really well. Salmon is 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. I could 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 that,

• 41:29Speaker 06

  and so maybe, um, I have some beef that's left over. Like we have a Traeger. It's like a pellet fired, um, uh, kind of, kind of grill. It's pretty big. And so I will cook three racks of ribs, uh, eight to 12 hamburgers and then like a couple of steaks. And then we freeze some of that and, and we'll rotate that stuff through. So, um,

• 41:54Speaker 06

  And really for me, I'm able to kind of grind through stuff like if I've got a three quarters of a pound of meat, I'll just eat it and I just get it done. And you know, I, I, 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 going to kind of steam. It's not going to 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, you know, and it required two minutes of time, you know, just don't burn it and it's going to be edible and, and pretty good. And then I've got my, my two protein combo there, you know, 30 grams of protein from the steak, 30 grams of protein from the shrimp, I'm, I'm good to go.

• 42:40Chris Williamson?

  What, what are the, um, the insights around the amount of protein that you can absorb per meal? There's some rumors around it's 35 grams. Is this sort of a ceiling within one sitting? Anything on top of that just gets excreted out? Have you looked into this?

• 42:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. And it, you can absorb a lot. Now you do start getting from an anabolic signaling perspective, it does start kind of plateauing out. 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 whatnot that, that comes along. So I, I think it's a little myopic to just focus on like the anabolic response of the protein. Um, this is where I think like the one meal a day, the OMAD stuff is really problematic. You, it's really difficult to get enough anabolic signaling with one meal a day, like two meals, two meals and a

• 43:39Speaker 06

  snack. Like it makes it much more reasonable to, to support like maintaining muscle mass and whatnot. But yeah, yeah.

• 43:47Chris Williamson?

  Got you. How about treats and sweet things when you're trying to control sugar? What do you go to?

• 43:54Speaker 06

  I I have some dark chocolates and and again like kind of catering to the kids. We've found some dark chocolates that they like, but they and and 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, you know, and 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

• 44:18Chris Williamson?

  The best we've got sort of a like a low carb ice cream, but it's not going to be the same. Ours would be a like a Halo top or something like that. It's going to be nothing, nothing similar to keto, I don't think.

• 44:28Speaker 06

  This stuff is definitely better than a Halo top, but I it's um it's good. But what's interesting, the 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 they go pull it out and they scoop it up, they self self regulate, they self serve, they have a bowl and they're done. And every once in a while, like there's a local ice creamery, a peak Sweet Peaks here here in Montana, their 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.

• 45:13Speaker 06

  So again, I try not to super be the food police guy, but I some keto ice cream, some dark chocolate.

• 45:22Speaker 06

  Stuff like that, I I try to find things that the kids, the kids really like chicharrones, the fried pork skins that are that are flavored. Definitely a kind of a southern thing, but but uh my mom was from Arkansas, so I've I've eaten those. 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 deal where it's like, I need more. And so then they can start self regulating and we just have open discussion with the kids who were like, yeah, this other ice Ice cream tastes really good, but like we would eat the whole thing in one sitting.

• 46:07Speaker 06

  Right? I'm 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, 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 they're 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, 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

• 46:50Speaker 06

  tune that my wife's like hype this, you know, because she'll just go back and go back and go back. And, and so it's funny, even with some stuff like that, they put a little honey glaze on it. And you know, they've got the, the mouth feel, the crunch and everything. It's got some cinnamon, like it's really good. And a big ass bag, you could crush the whole thing easily. Just each time you walk by like, heck, man, like a quarter cup, you know, super easy to do. And each quarter cup is like 200 calories or whatever, you know? So yeah, yeah.

• 47:22Chris Williamson?

  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, what's the paradigm? Draw me on a spectrum from where CrossFit's at to sort of where you see health and training and physical fitness and stuff now?

• 47:43Speaker 06

  Oh man, that's a really good question. Um, I, I think the most important thing is whatever folks are going to stick to like that. That's stuff. If your gig is walking, your gig is yoga, and you just hate everything else. Fine, fine, but.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  The one pitch that I would throw out to people though is that as we age, there is, 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, 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 some smart training. And doing like a full-body strength training session two times a week can dramatically mitigate the the loss of muscle mass as we age. And so, even if you

• 48:42Speaker 06

  have somebody that really hates strength training, they don't like being in the gym or whatever, you join like one of these key in 24-hour fitness places that has a bunch of machines, and you go and you you hit one machine, say like it's a bench press, and you you find a very lightweight, you do it nice and easy for 15 reps, increase the weight, do it for eight or 10 reps, increase the weight, do it for five, increase the weight, grind out two or three, and you're done. Now do a pull. And then you do your pull, 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 back, and you're done. Like, you're in and out of there in like 15 minutes doing this kind of superset type format. You're never going

• 49:26Speaker 06

  to be a bodybuilder, you're never going to be a powerlifter doing that. But like a really like 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. 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 your collarbone doesn't snap like a twig and stuff like that.

• 50:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Split in two. What about for yourself, then? Obviously, 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.?

• 50:21Speaker 06

  I do, everything physically now is kind of geared towards just doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So I try to do that two, two to four times a week. It's usually more like two for the most part. And then I do two days a week of strength training and it's a press, a pull, a hinge, a lunge, you know, a squat, something like that. Tends to be more like a five sets of five, eight sets of three, like kind of heavier. Yeah. In between, I do a lot of mobility work from the Kinstretch FRC world because I noticed that, you know, because I sit a lot and whatnot, like in the demands of Jiu-Jitsu. That mobility piece is another part, like the strength is really important, but also

• 51:06Speaker 06

  mobility isn't just stretching, like it's actually figuring out how the joint articulates and all that type of stuff. I remember I, I, I had to swerve to avoid hitting a deer and I hit kind of a curb and it knocked my car out of alignment and it 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 cattywampus, 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

• 51:51Speaker 06

  up really destroying the joint surfaces. So some amount of mobility work I think is really important. So I mean, my, my main focus is Jiu-Jitsu. 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 a, an episode of The Expanse and getting on my, my Airdyne and just kind of, kind of going at a nasal breathing pace, but that's most of what I do. And one thing I started doing in the, 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 while that's going on.

• 52:34Speaker 06

  I get my phone, I set a timer, I hold each position for like four minutes and, and you know, I do almost an hour of stretching each night, but it's while we're hanging out as a, as a family.

• 52:46Chris Williamson?

  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 Reykjavik in Iceland a couple of years ago. Have you ever been?

• 53:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so I don't know when you went because they, this thing grows extra limbs like, like an octopus. And when I was there, the warm up and mobility, 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 their arms 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

• 53:44Chris Williamson?

  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 audiobook while you go and do some steady state cardio, or you've got a, one of your favorite TV shows on or something while you're on a bike. We had a Watt Bike throughout lockdown. The, my buddies Jim Jordan very thankfully gave me a Watt Bike, 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've I got coming up next? I've, I've got Rob Wolf. Right. I'll 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, it's a podcast at one and a half

• 54:28Chris Williamson?

  time speed. And before you know it, you think, that'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

• 54:40Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 54:49Speaker 06

  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.

• 55:02Chris Williamson?

  It's not chaotic, you know? Yeah, that's a really good way to put it because you're already in this presumably, you're not going to be doing this while it's a cognitively demanding task, while you're trying to learn a new BJJ move or something like that, you're not going to 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 at sort of a nasal breathing pace when you're on the air dying. 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 audiobook, 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 like, God, I also got my training. And yeah, I think, I think that's a really good way to do it.

• 55:45Chris Williamson?

  Talking about supplements, what is a supplement which people rely on too much, in your opinion?

• 55:51Speaker 06

  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.

• 56:10Chris Williamson?

  Is that dangerous?

• 56:11Speaker 06

  I think it could be. I think it could be like we're really, these things are really important in like methylation pathways, which are important in like cancer regulation and whatnot. And interesting aside, like the studies looking at, say 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 are really, really important to supplement. But I'm kind of underwhelmed on that. Like if somebody wanted to do a, a multivitamin is just kind of hedging their bet, I would

• 56:55Speaker 06

  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, a really baseline kind of hedging of your bets. But trying to think about that, like I think like just the general multivitamin is probably one of those things that I think is overused and could, Lauren Cordain 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, I could see where that could maybe be problematic. Yeah.

• 57:33Chris Williamson?

  What about a supplement which is too underused?

• 57:39Speaker 06

  Maybe vitamin D. My, 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 an antioxidant.

• 57:51Chris Williamson?

  Even a non-athlete, even someone that's

• 57:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, even a non-athlete.

• 57:54Chris Williamson?

  Yoga.

• 57:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So maybe creatine, but uh, man, if, if we could get everybody with like a spurty vitamin D lamp, I, I think that that would solve so many, so many problems. Like, you know, just if we had community vitamin D lamps where you could just like go walk and, you know, strip down, zipper something closed, do three minutes front, three minutes back and then go about your day. Like I think that that could be amazing for seasonal affective disorder, all these other things that we know are definitely vitamin D driven. Um, but the, the bugger there is it like supplementing, say like liquid vitamin D. Um, it doesn't seem to do quite the same thing that getting it from the sun

• 58:37Speaker 06

  does, but it definitely seems to confer a benefit. So that's where like, if we could rig up some sort of a, a smart UV supplementation process to generate that vitamin D would be pretty cool.

• 58:47Chris Williamson?

  How much better is the smart UV versus a oral supplement?

• 58:53Speaker 06

  I don't know, but it just, um, there were some folks, Pedro Bastos, he's, he's in Lisbon, Portugal. He's really smart on this stuff, as are some other physicians that are kind of, kind of tight with him.

• 59:11Speaker 06

  They, they understand the research on this much better than I do, but you know, kind of the limitations about how they are looking at vitamin D. Oftentimes also these vitamin D studies, there's supplementing with really paltry amounts. It's like 400 IUs a day and you should be doing like 5,000 IUs a day to really start moving the, the needle at all. So there's a lot of, 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, from sunlight, like there's all this other stuff that happens, like it releases nitric oxide, it's immune modulating, um, kind of beta endorphin activation. So you just kind of cognitively feel better. Um,

• 59:56Speaker 06

  we have more that we can hang our hat on with that. And then the supplementation side is just harder to kind of ferret out like what, what exactly is going on here? Yeah.

• 1:00:05Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What are your thoughts on nicotine?

• 1:00:07Speaker 06

  I like it.

• 1:00:09Chris Williamson?

  I'm seeing more talk now about people reducing their caffeine intake and then using a nicotine gum or something else as a shorter acting stimulant.

• 1:00:19Speaker 06

  I, I like it and I,

• 1:00:21Chris Williamson?

  What is that? What are you holding up?

• 1:00:22Speaker 06

  It's the Nicorette.

• 1:00:24Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Yeah. Is that gum?

• 1:00:26Speaker 06

  These are mints and I like the mints because the gum, I, I start getting like TMJ from chewing it too much, but um, I, this first got on my radar when I was doing work for naval special warfare, uh, resiliency program back in 2008, 2009. And it, what they wanted me to talk about was, uh, sleep, food, uh, booze, caffeine and nicotine to uh, different Navy SEAL groups, which was, was really cool and, and super interesting. And in trying to do my diligence, I, 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,

• 1:01:07Speaker 06

  man, the problem with this is the delivery system, like tobacco is really, really bad for you. You know, it's terrible carcinogen, whether you're chewing it or, or smoking it, but just nicotine as a standalone item, can't quite call it a vitamin, but it, it does some really interesting stuff. And, uh, one interesting thing is when you look at neurodegenerative disease among smokers, it's shockingly low. And this is kind of mind blowing because neuro, the brain is so.

• 1:01:39Speaker 06

  Exposed to like oxidative stress, to microvascular stress, like 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 want to say that among smokers, the incidence of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's is like 40% less, 60% less, stunningly less. This is one of these things that medicine is just kind of like, nobody

• 1:02:20Speaker 06

  talk about this shit, you know, because it's too confusing, but then it's fascinating there. 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 wringing. 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 nicotine gum and mints

• 1:03:02Speaker 06

  relative to tobacco ingestion. So maybe it's not that big of a deal, but I can paint you that that article'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 they clearly had kind of one orientation at the beginning. And then this thing, WebMD articles are not typically like four pages long. And this thing kept going and going. And so yeah, I'm a, I'm a big fan. What do you use it for? I just use it for a 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

• 1:03:42Speaker 06

  gut health. And this is another interesting thing when you, when you look at like ulcerative colitis, Crohn's, those things tend to improve if people begin smoking and tend to worsen if they stop smoking. And so it's just another one of those, definitely the digestive part and then also kind of the neurocognitive part. So you use it as a nootropic. What's dosage and 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, my lip and just let it.

• 1:04:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, is that how it works? Is it sublingual?

• 1:04:18Speaker 06

  This one is, yeah.

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Got you. Okay. Yeah.

• 1:04:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Something that you might be interested in Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex. Do you, are you familiar with this book? Okay. So he's now on, um, what's he on Substack as Astral Codex 10? He just released within the last.

• 1:04:37Speaker 06

  200 or 20, uh, uh, no tropics.

• 1:04:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Have you seen it? Did you watch it?

• 1:04:44Speaker 06

  I have not watched it yet.

• 1:04:45Chris Williamson?

  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, that was a really awful one to listen to, but I was listening to it earlier on today. It was like torture. But yeah, they go through, dude, 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, microdosing psilocybin, fennybutt, like, uh, NMD, NAD, everything. And, um, that's, that was fascinating. I'm going to, it's saved to my pocket to watch later.

• 1:05:28Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to have a little look at that. I thought that was really, really interesting.

• 1:05:32Speaker 06

  When I look, uh, next to the screen that you are in, I have a tab open with that Astral Codex, uh, topic. Right, right.

• 1:05:40Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:05:41Speaker 06

  Ready to roll. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  How funny.

• 1:05:43Speaker 06

  That guy's brilliant. That guy is brilliant. He's, he's operating on a whole different level.

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  Dude.

• 1:05:51Speaker 06

  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 I, it would be either or. I don't think it would be any middle ground.

• 1:06:01Chris Williamson?

  The thing that I think is most terrifying about Scott is his ability to write clearly.

• 1:06:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Chris Williamson?

  He has the least barriers, the fewest restrictions from brain to fingertip of potentially anyone that I know. So you had, um, who did Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley, right? So you, what, what you did, what we did in the sixties and the seventies 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 said, right, okay, you're going to experience this thing that basically few people struggle to put into words. Try your best. Tell us

• 1:06:48Chris Williamson?

  what you see. And what Scott does for free, every single day for 15 years is try and wrangle the chaos of the entire world and all of his inner sort of, uh, vassalations as well. Um, and he puts them, dude, he did one, have you read one called Untitled? It was about feminism. Yeah.

• 1:07:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:08Chris Williamson?

  Man, that is, it's a, a magnum opus of someone being able to go from, uh, to just see clearly. He sees what's going on and then he's able to repurpose it into words. The man is, is phenomenal. I love him.

• 1:07:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Chris Williamson?

  But I'm terrified of him at the same time.

• 1:07:29Speaker 06

  He only got on my radar maybe about nine months ago. Somebody forwarded a piece that he did, um, "The only thing I can't tolerate is intolerance." And it was so, I thought it was completely in response to like the current cancel culture scene. It was written in like 2008 and I, I was just like, oh my God, like this is amazing, you know, and, and so prescient, like really, really incredible. And then I was, oh, I just went so far down that rabbit hole. I'm like, who is this guy? You know?

• 1:08:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Endless. It's one of those people. It's, it's the fortune. I'm sure that you have it with your show as well. And, and, 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, I can just go through this. A couple of, a couple of other blog posts of his that I absolutely adored. So Meditations on Moloch 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

• 1:08:43Chris Williamson?

  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 out group? And it's talking about in, in group, out group differences. And that's really interesting because I had, 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 their like. And that, simply

• 1:09:25Chris Williamson?

  understanding that, which is explained in In Group Versus Out Group by Scott, explains so much of what's going on.

• 1:09:33Speaker 06

  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, it's, it's bad news. Like it is really, really bad news. Yeah.

• 1:09:51Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:09:57Speaker 06

  Huge honor being here. Really enjoyed the time and thank you for putting up with the multiple schedule tweaks we had to do.

• 1:10:05Chris Williamson?

  Do not mention it. So drinklmnt.com/modernd wisdom. I was chatting to Blake earlier on, so we've got something set up for the listeners for that. Where else should people go? They want to find out about this, the health revolution stuff?

• 1:10:19Speaker 06

  The Healthy Rebellion is join.thehealthyrebellion.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 and 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 and my assistant posting it. You won't get a response on social media from me, that's for sure.

• 1:10:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, if it's helping you sleep, I think it's worthwhile. Rob, brother, thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:10:53Speaker 06

  Thank you. Take care.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Ravenhead.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9