Greetings, superfriends!
Today, we have a huge treat for you – though it’s a paleo-friendly treat. Over the next two months, we will be doing a 3 (or maybe 4) part series on paleolithic nutrition and the paleo diet. Though we’ll be spreading these episodes apart to provide a little variety in between, we’ll nonetheless be interviewing the 3 or 4 of TOP experts on the paleo diet, each approaching it from a different angle.

This week, we start with the biggest name in Paleo, and in my mind, the guy who popularized it and made it into a movement: Robb Wolf. He’s a former research biochemist. He’s the NYT bestselling author of The Paleo Solution. He is a student of Loren Cordain, the originator of the Paleo diet. He runs one of the top ranking podcasts on iTunes. He is co-owner of one of the most influential CrossFit boxes in the world, one of the top 30 gyms in America. He serves on the board of numerous health-related companies… Oh, and on top of all of this, he’s a former California State powerlifting champion, and a recovering vegetarian. His incredible story is matched only by the massive influence he’s had on millions of lives!

So, let me fill you in on the episode a bit. First off, like many episodes, we really get into the weeds and geek out a lot. But, you guys are smart! You can handle a little sciencey stuff.

You’ll probably be able to tell that I’m a huge fan of this particular guest’s work, and so I tried to squeeze in as much good stuff as possible – and managed to get a lot of great great stuff in. You’ll immediately see that he has an encyclopedic knowledge of all things health, nutrition, metabolism, fitness, strength, and more… I also have to say that my guest was incredibly generous with his time, and so it’s a nice long episode that goes into a ton of different subjects. We go way beyond just paleo nutrition, and I know you’re going to LOVE this episode. If you do, as always, make sure to tell me what your favorite part was on twitter – our handle is @gosuperhuman.

This episode is brought to you by Udemy. Take any of our hand-picked courses for as little as $10 today with this special coupon code link.

In this episode with Robb Wolf, we discuss:

• Robb Wolf’s journey to become one of the biggest names in the Paleo and CrossFit movements
• What exactly is the “Paleo diet” and what are the broader implications on our lives?
• How “Paleo” is supported by archeology, biology, and anthropology
• Do different populations have different responses to things like rice or starch?
• Misconceptions about the life spans and quality of life of our paleolithic ancestors
• “Grandmother theory,” and why human life spans are different from other animals
• What’s the big deal with gluten and other anti-nutrients in things like quinoa, millet, or beans?
• What carbs are recommended in the paleo diet, and why?
• How should you approach the paleo diet, and how can you test it out?
• The 80/20 rule (or Pareto’s Principle) and how it applied to paleo
• Thoughts on modern, selectively-bred fruit – should we be eating it?
• Adaptability, trial and error, and how to modify the template to your own needs
• Do humans need to eat carbohydrates? Should they? If so, why?
• What has Robb learned in the 6 years since his book was published?
• Detailed thoughts on specific foods like hummus and kombucha (my favorites)
• How do we asses whether or not a specific food is working for us?
• The hormones that give our body a sensation of satiety, and how they work
• Organic vs. non-organic. What's the straight dope, and why does it matter or not matter?
• Grass-fed meat: how important is it, and why?
• Misconceptions on the “high protein” aspect of paleo
• What's the big deal with Omega-3 and Omega-6's, and what should you beware of?
• Which supplements does Robb Wolf believe everybody should be taking?
• Thoughts on Vitamin D, why it's so important, and how it relates to sun exposure
• Eating local, sustainability, and how it all fits together
• Should you be eating dairy? Is it part of the paleo diet?
• Are artificial sweeteners bad for you? If so, which ones?
• A look into how Robb Wolf works in his clinical practice with top-tier athletes and performers
• Some insights on how Robb is raising his 2 daughters
• Debunking the myths that fat and protein cause cancer
• Thoughts on cholesterol, and what you should tell your doctor to test for
• Robb's opinions on having a “cheat day”
• What is Robb's opinion on health insurance?
• Robb's #1 piece of homework that you should do this week
• What Robb is working on now

Resources Mentioned in This Episode on the Paleo Diet:

• Robb Wolf’s incredible book, The Paleo Solution
• Robb Wolf’s website and podcast about the Paleo diet (and much  more)
• Art De Vany, an early influencer of Robb’s
• CrossFit.com
• Robb’s best-known gym, NorCal Strength and Conditioning
• Future guest Dr. Loren Cordain and his blog, The Paleo Diet (highly recommended)
• Rhonda Patrick’s podcast, FoundMyFitness
• Richard Lee’s book, The !King San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society
• Weston A. Price’s book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
• The Slow Carb Diet advocated by Tim Ferriss in The Four Hour Body
• Chris Kresser, a friend and influencer of Robb’s
• Adam Richman's ice cream challenge on Man vs. Food
• The Savory Institute and Alan Savory's TED Talk
• Fish Oil Supplements
• Michael Eades' book, Protein Power
• Our episode with Nick Littlehales on sleep

Favorite Quotes from Robb Wolf:

Transcript:

Introduction: Welcome to the Becoming SuperHuman Podcast. Where we interview extraordinary people to bring you the skills and strategies to overcome the impossible. And now here's your host. Jonathan Levi.

Jonathan Levi: This episode is brought to you by Udemy, the world's largest marketplace for online courses. To get all of my top recommended courses for just $15. Visit jle.vi/courses.

Greeting, Superfriends and welcome to this week show today. We have a huge, huge treat for you guys. Although it is a paleo-friendly treat over the next couple of months, we're going to be doing a three, maybe four part series on paleolithic nutrition and the paleo diet.

We're going to be spreading these episodes out a little bit with different stuff in between to keep some variety, but we'll nonetheless be interviewing three to four of the top experts on paleo and the paleolithic diet. I know you guys are interested.

I know you want to hear different experts who approach it from different angles and we're going to handle it all on this show. This week, we're going to start with the biggest name in paleo, in my mind, and the guy who popularized it and made it into a movement. He's a former research biochemist, New York times bestselling author of the paleo solution.

A former powerlifting champion. He studied directly with Loren Cordain the originator of paleo. He runs one of the top ranking podcasts on iTunes. He's co-owner of. The most influential CrossFit Box, one of the most influential ones, at least, and one of the top 30 gyms in America, he serves on the board of a bunch of different health-related companies.

He's the CEO of something called the City Zero Movement. He's a pretty busy guy, as you can tell. And on top of all of this, he is a powerlifting champion. As I mentioned, he's a coach, he's an athletic specialist and he's just an unbelievable encyclopedia of knowledge about everything health. He's also a recovering vegetarian, which I find very interesting.

His incredible story is matched. Only by the massive influence that he's had on millions of people's lives, getting them healthy, cleaning up their diet, getting rid of inflammation, preventing disease. So let me fill you in on the episode a little bit, before we dive in first off, like many episodes, we really get into the weeds and I have to apologize, guys.

I geek out a lot. But you guys are smart and I know you can handle a little bit of the science-y stuff. You'll probably be able to tell that I'm a huge fan of this particular guest's work. I've read his books. I listen to his podcast regularly. And so I really tried to squeeze in as much good stuff as possible.

And I managed to get a lot of great, great stuff in. So I'm sorry if it feels a little bit rushed, but I didn't want you guys to miss out on any of the wisdom that this guest had to offer. You immediately see that he has an encyclopedic knowledge of all things, health, nutrition, metabolism, fitness, strength, you name it.

I also have to say. That he was incredibly generous with his time. And so it's a nice long episode where we get to explore a ton of different subjects, not just paleo nutrition. I know you guys are going to love this episode and if you do as always, please let us know what your favorite part was on Twitter or by email.

Our handle is @gosuperhuman. Okay. I know you guys are eager to know who this amazing mystery guests. Is so it's time for the big reveal. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Rob Wolf.

Mr. Rob Wolf, welcome to the show, my friend. I am a huge, huge fan. So I'm going to try and not be a complete fan boy. And welcome you to the Becoming SuperHuman Podcast. 

Robb Wolf: How are you doing cool. Thanks man. A huge honor to be on the show. Thank you. 

Jonathan Levi: So I've been reading your book. I kinda got stuck cause I'm inundated in writing projects, but I've been reading your book, listening to your show and just love all the stuff you're putting out. So I'm excited to get into it a little bit.

Robb Wolf: I will. Thank you. Thanks. You sent me the most, uh, detailed, extensive list of questions that anybody has ever done for an interview. So I'm excited. Really? I may not do any more interviews after this because this may answer every question. 

Jonathan Levi: Well, I hope so. That'd be awesome. We have an exclusive on your last ever yeah. 

Robb Wolf: Interview drop the mic out. 

Jonathan Levi: I'll have to unclip it from the boom arm, but I'll make sure. Perfect. So tell me this and I'm, by the way, going to pretend throughout this interview that I haven't read your book and listen to your podcasts and all that stuff, and I'm going to play dumb for the benefit of our audience.

So tell us the story of how you went. I know you were in the medical field, you were applying to med school, all that stuff. How did you come to become the name in paleo and, and one of the most respected names in CrossFit and coaching and tell us your journey. 

Robb Wolf: Oh, man. The best analogy I can have is, um, kind of like the Forrest Gump of fitness.

Like I just ended up being at the right place at the right time. And it is really kind of funny. And if you think about the movie key co-founded Apple and the smiley face t-shirts and all this stuff, right. And it was a Cantor and auto-immunity researcher, very interested in human nutrition and performance was having some pretty significant health problems of my own ad, mainly related to gastrointestinal issues.

And this idea of a paleo or an ancestral diet kind of got on my radar. I started researching that a little bit found this guy, art Devany another guy, Loren Cordain and started reading their research and writings on this. And it made a ton of sense. I tweaked my diet around and at my worst, I had ulcerative colitis.

So bad that I was a suffering malabsorption kind of consequences, way to 130, 135 pounds. I was a former California state powerlifting champion years before this weighing about 185 pounds and could squat almost 600 pounds. So it was a yeah. A horrible precipitous fall into illness. And this kind of ancestral way of eating really changed things for me.

And so I got into the paleo scene, literally like the cave floor, I guess, the subterranean floor at the time that I contacted Loren Cordain and went out to Colorado and started doing a research fellowship with him. There were maybe 200 people on the planet that would know what a paleo diet was. At that point, this was like 98 99.

Now, if I do a book signing in Reno, Nevada, where I live, we can pretty easily get 200 people to show up for that. So, I mean, it's really seen some pretty crazy growth. And then on the CrossFit scene, I was always poking around, looking for updates on this guy, art Devany because he had some very early influence on myself and other people in this kind of ancestral health scene.

And he kept threatening to release a book, but it just was never happening. And so I would just search for his name and see if anything new popped up. And one day there was a website. Crossfit.com that had a link to art to Vanney. And so I went to the website and it, it was a blog before people really knew what blogging was.

This is around like 2000, 2001. They were putting up daily postings, virtually identical to the format it's in today. Like I think they really have not updated much of anything on the main page, but it was blogging before blogging even had the term blogging and, uh, Yeah, lots of great information, but they had these really wacky workouts posted up there.

And I started fiddling with those a little bit and really noticed some benefit to my performance. I was doing some cop Wetta and some Brazilian jujitsu and stuff like that, and really enjoyed it. And a couple of my friends, Nick nibbler and Dave Warner. Nick is a former Mar SOC Marine, like a spec ops Marine guy.

And then Dave Warner was a seal and we were all working out together and decided that it would be kind of cool to open a gym and we wanted to call it CrossFit. We wanted to give some attribution to the parent organization. And so I wrote the, Glassman's an email basically saying, Hey, can we open a gym and call it CrossFit North?

And they were like, yes, please do that. We've been contemplating an affiliate model for quite some time. And so I wrote the first affiliate inquiry email ever. And we opened the first affiliate, which was then CrossFit North. And then I ended up moving back down to Chico California about a year after that and open the fourth affiliate nor Cal strength and conditioning CrossFit, nor Cal.

And then it's just been kind of off and running from there. 

Jonathan Levi: Incredible. And so fast forward, what is it now? 15 years in your teen years. Best-selling New York times author. You have, uh, in my opinion, one of the best health podcasts out there. Oh, well, thank you. Incredible. So let's backtrack a little bit just cause I'm not sure our audience knows what the paleo diet is and we're going to actually get Dr. Cordain on to talk about the origins of it, but yeah. Why don't we cover the basis of really what we mean when we say paleo, and this is probably the most elementary question we could ask, but no, it's great. 

Robb Wolf: And it's always great to start with those fundamentals. And for me, it really goes beyond the diet.

This paleo or evolutionary biology concept is really just taking a look at how our genes evolved over the course of time. We had a. Two and a half to 3 million year period of living as a forage or scavengers Hunter gatherers. And then about 10,000 years ago earlier in some areas later in other areas, there was this transition from the Hunter gatherer Lifeway to the agriculturalist Lifeway.

There were some anthropologically archeological either appears to be some impact to that change the Hunter gatherer groups, which largely aid. Roots shoots, tubers, fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, crickets, insects, a lot of variety, a lot of, uh, variation based off of location and seasonality, but it's a way of looking at sleep and food and exercise and socialization and gut biome from an evolutionary biology perspective.

So it's much more than just. A diet, but the diet itself is really what's positing. Is there any benefit to emulating the way that our ancestors ate and lived given that our genes might be wired up significantly in that direction? And there's some new modifications folks like a lactase persistence. Some people are able to maintain the ability to digest lactose throughout life.

Right. Malaria adaptations like sickle cell anemia is one of the most prevalent and highest penetrants of any genetic modification since a neolithic time. So, I mean, humans have definitely continued to evolve, but it's still just asked this question. Are we fully evolved for this modern Lifeway? And if we.

Are then why are we seeing the degree of degenerative diseases that we see? And if we aren't, what do we need to do to maybe effect some changes in a favorable direction? So it gets portrayed is just all kinds of crazy stuff. But when you do physics, the fundamental elements of physics are quantum mechanics and Newtonian classical physics.

And without quantum mechanics and relativity, like. We don't have cell phones. We don't have GPS satellites. None of that stuff works. If we try to make sense of the way that continents move around the planet, we need plate tectonics and some foundational theories like that. In medicine, medicine, being a subdiscipline of biology, the foundational tenant of biology is evolution via natural selection.

And so the paleo term is actually somewhat unfortunate, but it's not something that was just picked by people at random when Loren Cordain and Boyd Eaton really got in and started looking at this stuff, they found this reference to the paleo diet from anthropologists and archeologists who had observed that pre agricultural Hunter gatherer folks who ate what you would call a paleo type diet were remarkably.

Healthy that they didn't seem to suffer cancer, diabetes, heart disease in the ways that Western populations do. So it's not like a couple of, uh, this wasn't a marketing ploy. This is something that grew out of the science of anthropology and archeology naming this term, a paleo diet, but it probably evolutionary diet would have been.

A better place and it would have provided more latitude for acknowledging the changes that have happened saying like Asian populations, having increased amylase, gene frequency, and probably handling carbohydrates much better than say like native Americans. 

Jonathan Levi: Oh, that's  interesting. Yeah. Does that explain kind of the prevalence of rice and why there's significantly less healthy?

Concerns around that in Asia potentially.

Robb Wolf: Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of interesting adaptations there like into Rhonda. Patrick is a phenomenal researcher actually listened to her podcast quite a bit. And she was mentioning that there are some morphological. Changes in the gastrointestinal architecture of say like most Asian populations relative to say, like, Amerindians for example, where the Amerindians have shorter, large intestines, the Asians have longer large intestines, which means that it lends itself more to.

For minted breakdown of cellulose and fermentable carbohydrates and stuff like that with commensal bacteria. And so there are some changes and there are changes in the amylase gene frequency and the amylase gene is really interesting. And I know I'm bouncing all over the place here, but, uh, amylase is used in breaking down starch in the food that we eat.

But it's also really interesting that, that the people who have the greatest density of amylase gene activity, they break down starch very well. But interestingly, they also have a very, very healthy insulin response, too. Two carbohydrates. Oh, interesting people. I have a lesser amylase gene frequency.

Don't break down carbohydrate as well and have a poorer insulin response to carbohydrates. So there are some hard wired genetic features in there, but something that's really important to keep in mind is that even the most amylase gene deficient human has much more starch or carbohydrate digesting capacity than say like chimpanzees and something that.

Folks, particularly in the vegan scene, kind of forget when we look at our great ape cousins, is that the bulk of the calories that the great apes get from the food that they eat. Is actually from short chain saturated fats because they're breaking down the undergoing cellulosic fermentation, similar to what happens with termites.

And they're making these short chain saturated fats, which then kind of diffuse into the circulatory system. And so those animals are actually fat fueled, oddly enough, which brings us back to the paleo diet. Which kind of circles back around to the paleo diet, right? The changes that appear to have happened that may have been synergistic with our evolution is a scavenging cooking.

Uh, cooking of both meat and, uh, starchy, tubers, and the development of, uh, some rudimentary tool usage, which would allow us to open up the long bones and the brain Cate, you know, the skulls of animals that had been left, either killed outright or left from other animals, killing them. And these were huge reservoirs of.

Calories and nutrition that were largely unused by any other critter because they simply couldn't get into them. And so, you know, some interesting confluence and a suggestive of some of the ways that we evolved as humans. That's really interesting. 

Jonathan Levi: There is this impression. And one of the things that I really took away from the book, we have this idea as a society, that life was very brutish before agriculture, but in fact, they were healthier than we were, and they had less calories and better bone density and just.

Even better height. And then also we have this impression that the reason that we all get sick and we all die of all these horrible things like cancer and diabetes and cardiovascular disease is because we're living longer. But in fact, that's not true either. So that was kind of a big takeaway for me from the paleo solution.

Robb Wolf: Yeah, one of the common counterpoints is why would you want to eat in a way that the average life span of the people was 30 years? And it's complex on that a little bit. Uh, Boyd Eaton actually wrote a great response paper to that, but the bulk of the decreased lifespan is attributable to injury infection and high infant mortality rates.

And when she went death, right? Yeah. I mean, hunting and gathering and even just. Tribal warfare fair and murder were reasonably high. A guy, Robert Lee wrote a book men, women, and work in a foraging society. And he did a really interesting analysis of the rates of murder and violence within these groups.

And it was reasonably high. It was not unappreciable. And so if you remove antibiotics, you remove emergency medicine, you remove the ability to set bones and deal with, uh, uh, birth complications. You have a really high. Early mortality rate at which skews things kind of, uh, unfavorably. But when you look at the number of folks that actually lived into advanced age, if a Hunter gatherer individuals lived into their thirties, they were as likely as we are to live into their sixties and seventies.

And this is part of something called the grandmother theory, which is basically most organisms. Once they pass reproductive age, they're gone. And humans, that's not the case. They can spend upwards of 50% of their life in a non reproductive status scenario. And that's because we have very complex culture and we have an incredibly long developmental period for our offspring and part of what we need in that whole story, that economic story is that we need learned grandparents to both contribute to child rearing, but also to convey culture and information.

Interesting. So we are actually incredibly well adapted for a long lifespan. And if people are really going to get in and try to make a case that the paleo diet is suspect because the average life span was about 30 years. Once we shifted to an agricultural Lifeway, like an early Roman period, the average life span was about 19 to 20.

Wow. And that was because of living in tight proximity with other people and really heightened disease burdens and whatnot. And so if you want to follow that chain of logic, like it actually backfiring on you. Yeah. It was only, you know, the lady mid to late 18 hundreds. We started getting some early elements of epidemiology, public health sanitation that we really saw the average human lifespan start to go up.

Because we started getting a handle on infectious disease and some of these, uh, sanitation issues. 

Jonathan Levi: Sure. So essentially it's to kind of break it down. It's a diet that avoids grains and products, which we would not have access to without modern kind of agricultural techniques. So no dairy, no grains, not even keenwah, what's the big deal with gluten.

And I know in your book, you explained that dairy and keenwah and buckwheat and all these other things have similar. Contents in them that are equally as bad for the body as gluten. And I think a lot of us hear about gluten-free and a lot of people choose to be gluten free without understanding what really the issue is.

Robb Wolf: Yeah. And so, again, from kind of an evolutionary biology perspective, everything in biology has horns or thorns or teeth or poison or something like everything's trying to eat something or avoid being eaten by something else. And. You say like with King Joaquin, Y has what's called a , which are these soapy type substances, which really kind of dissuade critters from eating them and beans have some protease inhibitors, gluten and wheat, germ agglutinin.

Some other proteins found in wheat, rye, oats, barley millet, they're anti predation chemicals. And what gluten does specifically for Ciliac individuals is it can, up-regulate a protein called zonulin. And zonulin increases intestinal permeability. And this is where an auto-immune disease called celiac can occur in susceptible individuals.

Another protein called wheat germ agglutinin is just generally in immune irritant in many people. And so you can have non-celiac gluten intolerance, which is another term, and there's lots and lots of proteins in these plants that are potentially pretty problematic for humans. And if you look at some of the Western a price, Literature on this stuff, where we look at cultures that more successfully consume grains, they tended to soak these things, sprout them for mentum.

And this is all attempts to mitigate these anti-nutrients that are in these products. Interesting. 

Jonathan Levi: I like that term, anti nutrients.

Robb Wolf: Yeah. And if I were to ask somebody, would it make sense that you should be able to eat a banana peel? Right. Absolutely not. So why not? Again, I find it all of the theory and all of the battles kind of go out the window.

If we just couch this stuff from an evolutionary biology perspective. So banana peel, what's the banana peel doing right. It's protecting the fruit itself. Yeah. And even though fruits are kind of a cost benefit, trade off, like the plant is putting some energy into this stuff and there's an expectation of something eating it and then dropping those seeds off someplace else in a warm, nutrient dense compostable matrix.

There's still a time element to that. And so the plant, and I don't want to overly anthropomorphize it, but they don't want. This stuff to be consumed too soon, but the skins of different fruits, if there's a toxicant load, you'll find it in the skin or say like with stone fruits, the seed of say like a plum or a peach.

Is loaded with Sinai type compounds because it's trying to prevent itself from beaten by mold and fun guy and other organisms. So these things that are the reproductive structure of plants really get protected rather vigorously. And so this is the problem with things like. Keen wine and Millie and wheat, that really is the reproductive structure.

And so what we try to steer folks towards in general is, uh, more like yams and sweet potatoes, which themselves have anti-nutrients. But cooking tends to mitigate that avoiding the skins tends to mitigate that. And my greasy used car salesman pitch is try something that looks more like a paleo diet than not.

If you have health problems, get healthy. 30 60, 90 days later, then reintroduce these other foods and see how you do. If you do fine with millet, then eat millet. I don't have any dog in the fight, but what I've found is that a lot of people have significant health problems ranging from GI issues to auto-immunity, uh, neurodegenerative diseases.

And they really seem to benefit from. Something that looks pretty close to this paleo type diet. Yeah. If they have some insulin resistance, it maybe needs to be lower carb. If they don't have insulin resistance and they're a high level athlete, then they need more carbohydrate. Maybe they'd benefit from some white rice and white potatoes and stuff like that, you know?

And, and so if we were to use a dart board analogy, For most people, this general paleo template gets up about 80% there. And then you need to tinker and fiddle and be reasonable about who you are and what your goals are and what you're trying to achieve. And then that will kind of direct you in the customization path to get you where you it'll give you that extra 20%.

Jonathan Levi: I can tell you that hanging out with Tim Ferris recently, you're talking in 80 twenties. 

Robb Wolf: Yeah. I mean, you know, that Pareto law thing is not to wax too philosophical on this, but if people have a decent understanding in. Evolution economics and mathematics and a smattering of history. You can really make a lot of deep insights into many things.

You will know the details, but you can make some pretty informed decisions about a lot of different things in that Pareto, Gaussian distribution, 80 20 thing. It's a power law distribution, and all of nature is governed by power. 

Jonathan Levi: Totally. I live by it. I am constantly doing this 80 20 thing. Let me ask you this to mention Tim first, by the way, I tried out slow car before I went on paleo and I spent a lot of time thinking about fruit and the fact that as a Hunter gatherer, we didn't have access to huge amounts of ripe fruit year round.

Right? You can eat. A, uh, let's say cucumber or tuber at any point, you can't really eat a not right banana, as you mentioned before. So is it true that we spent less time eating fruit and are not adapted to that much fruit dose? Or is it kind of eat as much fruit as you eat vegetables and no big deal kind of thing?

Robb Wolf: That's a great question and I don't have a good answer. Really? Yeah. I really, I think that it's the little bit of an individual thing. We have, uh, Luther Burbank, our fruit to be much larger, much sweeter, much tastier, most naturally occurring fruits are pretty small and actually kind of bitter. And when you look at, uh, wild banana, You wouldn't even recognize it for a modern banana.

Like it doesn't look like it, but that said at the end of the day, are these things poor choices for food. It's kind of hard to make an argument against it. Other than if we see clinical or lab related. Indications that you're just not tolerating these foods and you're, and so insensitive stuff like that.

Exactly. I do a lot of work with police, military, and firefighters, and these people because of their shift work, nighttime operations, deployments, time zone changes, and then just general shift work stress. These people are massively insulin resistant from sleep. We're not even talking about food yet. And so with these folks, is it reasonable to feed them a really high carbohydrate diet all the time?

No. This is part of the problem that they face and why we see such staggering rates of, uh, diabesity in these folks. So the problem is that we need some heuristics, some simple, big picture stories to be able to reach a lot of people, but then people turn the heuristic into. 10 commandment laws that then make it almost impossible to have any granularity, to be able to dial this stuff in for individuals.

And so it's almost like a microscope that needs to go from low magnification to high magnification and back and forth so that we see big picture and more. Granular elements to this. And so is fruit a bad thing to eat? I don't generally think so. Although like, could make an argument again from the amylase gene story that maybe were better adapted to eat starch, like tubers and maybe even properly processed legumes or something like that.

We might do a little bit better in that regard. Lots of people that have gluten issues, they tend to have fructose malabsorption issues. And so those folks don't do well on fruit or the types of fruit that they do better with are like berries versus apples are quite high in fructose. And a lot of people with gluten issues don't do so well with apples, but this is where it becomes kind of almost mind-numbingly.

Detailed because, you know, everybody's a unique snowflake and you have to figure out what the, the logic tree for figuring out their story. But I could maybe make an argument that maybe we're better adapted towards dealing with cellular starch components. Like. Minimally processed potatoes, sweet potatoes, maybe even like lentils and legumes and stuff like that that are sprouted.

And so to end, uh, folks might end up doing better on those than what they may do on a lot of fruit. But again, I think that this has kind of these logic trees where you try a while where it's like, well, I'm going to do the bulk of my carbohydrate from seasonal fruit. How do you look, feel and perform?

Yeah, man, I'm gassy and bloated and my food looks the same coming out as it went in. Okay. Let's shift over to more of a, a starchy tuber, maybe some fermented legume type deal. How interesting. Oh man, my digestion is great. I had a couple of days of gas and bloating, but then I had these amazing coups that look like a 14 year old poop.

So I'm great. So that's where we really need to stay open to. Fiddling and tweaking this stuff in the ancestral model is really great for asking questions. It is terrible for providing definitive answers. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it sounds like it's so individualized, but coming back to the 80, 20 it's okay.

Avoid processed foods. That's already 60% of the benefit, right? You stopped getting garbage out of a plastic bag. And the other thing is, try to minimize your kind of refined carbohydrate intake, your grain intake. One thing that I took away from your book is really your body doesn't need to consume carbohydrates.

You have all these. Mechanisms, as long as you have enough fiber and enough micronutrients, you have all these great mechanisms to create fabulous energy out of fat. And, uh, at least that's how I understood it. And maybe I missed it. 

Robb Wolf: Okay. No, that's a great point. The caveat that I'd throw into that is the book six years old now.

And so I've learned some things from like Paul Jammin, a. Well, it does seem like for a healthy gut microbiota, we want a base level of some fermentable carbohydrate to keep the bacteria and the mucosal layer of our gut. Happy. What does that look like? So things like Jerusalem, artichokes, dandelion greens, chicory root.

So there's ways of doing that and you can still be on low carb diet, but you can also do potatoes or rice that have been cooked and then you refrigerate them and it increases. The resistant starch content of those items. Interesting. Green bananas have some good fermentable carbohydrate. Interesting. So, yeah, it's another layer of the onion, you know, from a metabolic perspective, do humans need to eat carbohydrate?

No, you could make an argument. They don't, but. We also, we're starting to understand it for a really healthy gut microbiota. We probably need some fermentable carbohydrates in the mix to really keep that happy. And if we keep that happy, then I think that our tolerance for carbohydrates and host of other things is actually a lot better, but this is where again, it gets really.

Complex, you take an individual, like if I'm working with some folks in the military and they're in a pre deployment scenario, they're training hard, but they generally sleep well. The read home everything's pretty good. Then when they deploy during this hypervigilant stressed environment, the run night ops.

So they're up all night. They sleep during the day, they use Ambien to go to sleep. They use stimulants. Wake up their vitamin D levels plummet because during the day they're either inside or they're in full military kit and these people will end up having a dramatic shift in their gut microbiota. Their hormonal axis will completely shift towards a catabolic state.

And so, again, Those people, I would argue that probably a generally low carbohydrate approach, maybe targeting carbs in a post-workout period would be a good way to both feed the gut microbiota, but really limit the hyperinsulinemic effects of just being insulin resistant from their lifestyle.

Interesting. It becomes really important to think of about the individualization for these folks. And again, it's super frustrating for me because for the masses. We try to get a simple story that gets as many people moving in the direction we need as possible, but then a lot of people need significant customization to really get them to the final point that really works for them.

Jonathan Levi: Right. I am glad to hear you say that we need some level of fermentable carbohydrate. Cause man, I miss potatoes. And let me tell you, it's not easy living in the middle East without eating homeless, so, right. 

Robb Wolf: So look at homicide. What's the glycemic load and insulin load off of that. 

Jonathan Levi: It's pretty low. Cause it's so high in fat. There's so much to Heaney in it.

Robb Wolf: You need a private detective to find the glucose and the insulin response to that. Right. But let's run through two potential scenarios, a one person. Has had a lot of shift work. They did four courses of antibiotics in the last five years and the ever really altered gut microbiota.

Another person has slept well. They work outside. They drink some well water that has some good homeostatic soil organisms in it. They had one round of antibiotics when they were like 10 and other NAF. They're like Wolverine, that hummus for the really healthy person is probably a phenomenal option. The hummus for the individual, with the alter gut microbiota could be a disaster because they may be suffering from small intestinal, bacterial overgrowth.

So they have abnormal levels of bacteria growing too early in the gut. They may be, have a shift in the types of bacteria. So it's more pathogenic versus beneficial. So what we need to do with that person with the alter gut is we need to figure out how to fix the gut. And usually a first stage with that is some low carb kind of eating, shifting towards less processed foods, mitigating stress, mitigating sleep disturbances, maybe really aggressively repopulating the gut with a pre or probiotics.

But even that gets a little bit dodgy because. The same things that feed the good bacteria or the same things to feed the bad bacteria. And so it becomes, uh, a challenge to get all that stuff. Right. I good friends. Chris Kresser, grace Lu, uh, Dr. Michael Ruscio who play with these things all the time. It's not for an ill individual.

It can be a really big challenge, but for somebody who say like, they want to go to the CrossFit games or they're just really active at CrossFit or something like that or jujitsu or what have you is doing some hummus, a good option. Probably. Yeah. Phenomenal option. 

Jonathan Levi: Ilove it. I'm so glad. And then you just paid all my countrymen happy.

Robb Wolf: Just to wrap that up really quick. What do we do to assess the validity of that? How do you look? How do you feel? How do you perform? Maybe you check blood work before and afterwards and you just see how you do then that way. It's not opinion. It's your N equals one experience. 

Jonathan Levi: I love that again. You've been hanging out with Tim Ferriss too much.

Yeah. So I want to ask in regards to what we've talked about, probiotics, we've talked about fermentation. How do you feel about kombucha? 

Robb Wolf: Oh, man. I have very little exposure to kombucha. It's really taken off in the States. You can buy it at Costco. Now I was hanging out with my friend John Welborn and he's like, Hey, have you tried this?

I'm like, isn't this just basically drinking a soda. And he'd like to try one. And I tried it and I was like, so do you have like 12 more of these? Yeah. The commercial stuff is really delicious. I've never actually grown it at home. It seems like a pretty good option for a probiotic infusion. There are some indications on some medical websites that occasionally these, uh, Homebrew options people can kind of screw them up or like the culture can messed up and you can get like a really pathogenic, critter growing crush.

Jonathan Levi: You gotta be so dumb though, to like, not. If you don't see black mold in your beverage, I don't know what you're doing, you know, right now brewed every week. And I drink it every day. Yeah. It's like, I gotta send you a SCOBY or something because it's the easiest thing. And it's like, uh, I drink it instead of beer.

Cause I don't drink alcohol anymore. It's anti-inflammatory massive analgesic effect, which I didn't know. And I was drinking it and I had kind of some real bad soreness from squats and all of a sudden I'm completely pain-free. 

Robb Wolf: For a few hours, this I am reasonably sensitive to caffeine. Does it end up metabolizing any of the caffeine or theobromine or anything out of the tea?

Like, can you drink it in the afternoon? Not have it affect your sleep. 

Jonathan Levi: Good question. You start out with actually pretty weak tea. And then as I understand it, it does metabolize a lot of the caffeine fuel bromine is more active in Yerba Mati. Which I mix in, in my kombucha as well, but most of the two you're using is pretty high in like L-theanine and caffeine.

And I think most of that stuff's metabolized. I can tell you when I drink it, I don't get the same buzz as when I drink a cup of black tea. 

Robb Wolf: Gotcha. Okay. Cause I can't tell you how many times, like we've had a couple of bottles sitting in the fridge. And I'll come in after being at the office all day and I'll, I'll grab one and I'm almost ready to down one.

I'm like, Oh, it's four o'clock I'm not going to sleep tonight. And so I put it back in and then I just don't feel right. Drinking it in the morning. And so I bought a couple of them sitting in there for a while. 

Jonathan Levi: So yeah, it's my afternoon. Uh, kind of dead. Just stick me up if you will. Yeah, exactly. Let me ask you this.

Speaking of drinking non-water things, which is always kind of a touchy thing for me, I think that's the only non-water thing I'll drink. What do you feel about protein powders? There's a big debate there in the paleo community.

Robb Wolf: Oh man. It really depends on the person. A lot of people that have weight issues.

I don't like seeing them do liquid food because it really doesn't provide the same satiety as solid food. Yeah. Here's my crazy greasy used car salesman. Horrible capitalist pitch. I just want to see people eat real food and chew it in somehow. Like I'm still like a huge, full first thing, but that said, if you have hard training athletes, and if you have somebody that's just really on the go, they don't have body composition issues that don't have the insulin resistance, but they're like, listen, man, if I do a shake in the morning, did I'm getting some protein, some good fat, I throw some kale or whatever in there, some getting some veggies I'm out the door.

And I feel like that's way better nutrition. And. What I would get otherwise. And it's like, fine. It's a great cost benefit mitigation deal. But I do see that there are a lot of people that will end up creating like a thousand calorie shake, they down that, and then like an hour later, they're hungry again because it just doesn't have the same.

Satiety neuro regulation of appetite affects that whole real foods too. 

Jonathan Levi: One of the things I was blown away in your book, and I actually want to plug your book because you go into such detail about each and every one of the hormones that provide the sensation of satiety. And I had no idea. I thought it was going to be one or two chemical signals, but there's different ones triggered by different things, different fats and proteins.

And. Exactly right. Like when you drink a shake, you don't get that signal to the brain. 

Robb Wolf: Right. And this gets out in the weeds a little bit, but we've been in a protein carbs, fat war for 50 years. What's the right ratio of protein, carbs, fat, and all this stuff. And really at the end of the day, For people to be healthy, we need to figure out how they can eat such that you have a group of people that say it's only about calories.

Then you have another group of people that say no, it's all hormones and insulin and stuff like that. And the only calories people will cite metabolic wards, where people are literally, they're basically locked in a hospital prison setting and every scrap of food they eat is monitored. Their poo is collected.

Their pee is collected. They know what their metabolic output is, and we are thermodynamic machines. And so the calories in calories out model is largely true, but those same people completely ignore the reality that free living humans are not in fact, living in a metabolic ward and we have to make choices.

And so if we are faced with a plentitude of hyper palatable foods, Will we eat only two satiety, almost never. There's a great video piece from the food network where he's doing an ice cream eating challenge, and he needs eight pounds of ice cream in like 20 minutes or 30 minutes or something. And he gets about four or five pounds of ice cream in and he completely bogs down.

And then he asked the waitress at this diner that he's doing this thing for some very crispy, extra salty, French fries. And he eats these now from a dietetics perspective, like a dietician. They'll just say, when your belly is full, then you we're done well, his belly was full and when he put French fries into his belly, he was even more full, but that salty, savory, crunchy pallet cleanser allowed him.

To finish the ice cream, whereas minutes before that he was dry heaving and almost throwing up the ice cream. Yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: I've seen this, I think. Yeah. Adam something, Adam. Yeah, man versus 

Robb Wolf: food. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we eat in Western societies, we eat like professional eaters. We have all these hyper palatable foods.

We eat them in a sequence where, when we get bored with one food, then we switched to another and another and another. And so, you know, whether you're talking about paleo or vegan or what have you, or even when you talk about it, people will mention the blue zones, you know, where people live longer. And they're looking at the specific type of foods that they eat.

All of the things that are. One characteristic that nobody's really talked about in all these stories is that limiting food options is probably the most successful strategy towards effecting some sort of a long-term dietary. That's my secret.

Jonathan Levi: I just don't have food that I shouldn't be eating in my fridge.

Robb Wolf: Right. It's like super simple stuff. But for most dieticians, they think that that is disordered eating. Cause there are some people that can be what's called moderators that can have a little bite and they're done. And then other people are abstainers. They just can't have any. And it's about a 50, 50 spread in the population.

And so what most of dietetics science is telling us is that if you aren't a moderator. Then you are orthorexic and you have an eating disorder, but the reality is that the information that's coming out of dietetics is dooming about 50% of the population to immediate failure. And then I would still question our Twinkies of food group are Lay's potato chips, a food group.

If we started getting some characterization of how hyper palatable these foods are, then it needs to be looked at with the, we are nervous about. Um, making opiates generally available to the populous because are very addictive and can have all kinds of downsides to them. Maybe we need a similar degree of care or nervousness around highly processed, hyper palatable.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Interesting. I love that idea. So, Rob, let me hit you with kind of a lightning round, because as you mentioned earlier, I wrote out probably way too many questions, and I think we're going to have to invite you back, although I know it's very difficult to find time. So let me hit you with a lightning round for now, and we'll kind of do some short form questions.

Sound good? Cool. Sure straight dope on organic produce versus non-organic produce. What are your thoughts? 

Robb Wolf: Organic is in my opinion, very important from a long-term sustainability standpoint, not as big a deal on a nutrient. Standpoint, but I think it's a move in the right direction, but folks should not make organic and grass fed.

Like if you have to excuse for failure, number one, I can't find organic produce. So I eat a bagel, hippy, excuse for failure. Number two, I can't find grassfed meat. So I eat a bagel. 

Jonathan Levi: So that's something I actually really wanted to ask you next up is, uh, yeah. It's actually pretty difficult to find grass fed meat where I am, because we don't exactly have huge fields here in Israel.

So what's the thing on that. I mean, is it still better to eat such a heavy meat diet or should people be subbing out a lot of that meat for fish? If you can't find grass fed. 

Robb Wolf: This is one of the kind of primary misconceptions of paleo. You can eat as much or little protein on it, as you want. You need to find your own operating parameters on that.

The eat almost 70% of their calories. From taro and sweet potato and, uh, the lot of coconut, and then they have a little bit of fish and pork in. We eat mainly animal products for like 85, 95% of the calories that they take in. So you can individualize this however you want to, and I would put your own individual health at the forefront of this.

So if you're insulin resistant, you're probably going to need a little bit more protein, a little bit more fat from animal sources. Rounding that out with nuts and seeds, olive oil, and then maybe some very low glycemic load carbohydrates like chickpeas or something like that. If you are more of a, a go getter athlete, you might not need as much protein and you might, uh, greatly benefit from.

I'm more carbohydrate. So this is one of the even Cordain's early papers on this. Like there was a spectrum where, you know, it range from a low of 10% animal protein in certain a hundred other groups to a high of 90% in other groups. And even that spectrum shifted over the course of a year. Oh, interesting.

So there's all kinds of variability in there. So don't get wrapped around the axle of thinking that there's one set macronutrient need in this whole story, 40, 30, 30 protein carb fat deal or something that you can be quite variable on that and still have great body composition, great performance. And so if you're concerned about, you know, sourcing or the economics of buying more meat or fish or something like that, just eat less.

And also, I would really encourage people to check out the savory Institute and watch Allan Savory's Ted talk on reversing desertification using grazing animals. 

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. All right, guys, I'm just going to hit pause really quickly to let you know that this episode is brought to you by you to me. Now, a lot of you guys may know that I teach some of the more successful courses on you to me, but you may not know that there are about 30,000 other courses from the world's top experts, and you can learn anything on you to me from.

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So how important then is it that our fish is wild caught and our meat is grass.

Robb Wolf: I think it's from the grass feeding standpoint, I think it's important from a sustainability standpoint and that's the Allan savory Ted talk piece where he makes the case that if we want to reverse desertification the encroachment of desert into arable areas, we actually need to use smartly applied grazing animals.

To re nutrify the soil and start sequestering carbon and increase water retention in the soil and, and whatnot. And so I think that grass fed meat is important from a sustainability standpoint, the wild caught fish. It certainly has a better omega-3 profile than farmed fish, but at the end of the day, it was not a massive difference, but a lot of the farmed fish.

Really does some pretty nasty ecological damage. The way that they basically get a monocrop of fish and the type of food that they feed them causes some algal blooms and stuff like that. So from a sustainability standpoint, I would tend to go more with sustainable wild caught grass fed, et cetera. 

Jonathan Levi: Nice. I'm glad you mentioned Omega three and Omega six, because that's actually something I learned from you quite a bit, both in the podcast and the book and this idea that our ratio of Omega three and Omega six is so wildly skewed to what it should be is the big deal there. I mean, I guess I wanted to ask you what the big deal is, but I kind of just spoiled the, uh, spoil the punchline, but is the issue there?

That is just inflammatory or are there any other kind of detriments to having this high Omega six diet that most people have?

Robb Wolf: The big deal is that it tends to be pro-inflammatory classic Hunter gatherer diet free agricultural diet was pretty close to a one-to-one omega-3 to Omega six. There was maybe a little variability in there.

The modern diet tends to be certain samplings of the modern diet can be 40. Omega six to one omega-3, which is very, very pro-inflammatory that that's one piece. And then the types of. Both omega-3 and Omega six is that folks tend to get in the modern world are these refined seed oils, which tend to be these short chain omega-3 and Omega sixes, which are very oxidizable and they're poorly converted into the longer chain EPA, DHA, and arachidonic acid that we need from the omega-3 and Omega six families.

And it's an increase oxidative load. So it's, pro-inflammatory because you're getting the wrong metabolic pathways fired up and is pro-inflammatory because these things are inherently oxidizable relative to say like olive oil mono and saturated fat. 

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. Okay. So the omega-3 eggs are one thing that I've switched to.

Definitely. Yeah. Although I heard on your podcast that a lot of these things being touted as super foods, for example, chia seeds were not actually metabolizing the omega-threes in there. We need the chickens to do it for us 

Robb Wolf: kind of thing. It's better that way. Different people have different abilities to take the short chain and mega threes and elongate them into the EPA and the DHA, which are the forms that we actually need for proper functioning.

And so having some of that in the diet is fine, but relying on that solely as your source of Omega threes can be problematic. 

Jonathan Levi: Sure. And I know you're a huge advocate of fish oil supplementation. 

Robb Wolf: Yeah. Yeah. But you know, I've got to say I've really dialed my recommendations back on that. Like I used to recommend 10 grams of fish oil a day and it's more one to two.

Graham supplemental at this point, I've really dialed my recommendations on that back. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Although I still think it's incredible. There are very, very, very few supplements that I've ever heard someone in your position or the fitness industry say just about everybody should be taking X. One of them is magnesium, which we are also a big advocate of the other's fish oil.

And I've heard just about anybody who's athletic should be taking creatine. Can you think of any others that are. Just about everybody should be X. 

Robb Wolf: Definitely. Everybody should be at a 30 to 50 nanomoles per deciliter of a vitamin D. And whether that comes from supplemental form or getting out in the sun, I would definitely make sure that your vitamin D levels are good.

That's one of the, just gimme sleep, making sure that vitamin D levels are erratic. 

Jonathan Levi: Right. I mean, as I understand it, you can't metabolize it calcium without vitamin D is.

Robb Wolf: Clearly involved in calcium metabolism, but it's one of the most potent anti-tumor agents in our body. There's a few cell types that don't have a vitamin D receptor.

I forget which ones they are, but most of our cells in our body have vitamin D receptors. It's important in anabolic functions. It's important in immune modulation, which is germane both for cancer considerations and also auto-immune considerations also for just basic like cold and flu type stuff. Yeah.

Folks that have really low vitamin D levels. You have a correlation with higher rates of upper respiratory infections and whatnot. So the vitamin D is one of these things. If you get that into a good level, it's just almost to get out of jail free card. It's very important. 

Jonathan Levi: How does that play in with the kind of importance of sunscreen?

Robb Wolf: Man or am I completely out of the wheelhouse now? It just gets really connected virtual. There was a great study. And Mike Eades actually referenced this in 2001 in his book, protein power life plan, which is an amazing book. Still the fact it was written in 2001. It has so stood the test of time. And he had a chapter in there called a sunlight Superman, where they're basically making the argument to get safe, reasonable sun exposure.

And there's some research that because of the anti-tumor effects of vitamin D, there's an argument that you could, and I completely forget the numbers on this, but it was like a hundred thousand to one or a million to one getting out in the sun can increase your risk of melanoma or other skin cancers.

But if your vitamin D levels are adequate, it is dramatically decreasing your likelihood of. All these other cancers. So it's kind of like you're taking on a tiny little bit of risk. For a huge amount of reward. And basically the takeaway of this paper was that you could really make a strong argument that if people increase their basic sunlight exposure, that we would see much better overall health outcomes and vitamin D is important in insulin sensitivity, neurodegeneration inflammation, cancer.

Auto-immunity. And again, from this evolutionary biology perspective, you just look around and we evolved outdoors. Now we definitely have different populations with different degrees of skin pigmentation. So if you are just a pale ginger of a Scottish lineage, you need to be more careful about the way that you ramp up your sun exposure.

If you are from. Somalia and you have very, very dark skin pigmentation. Then you've got much more latitude on that. But then the inverse of that flips if your grandparents were from Somalia, but you moved to the Netherlands, you need to be really, really careful about maintaining adequate vitamin D levels because the overcast, the Northern latitude and.

The shortened daylight, you're going to be an exceptionally higher risk for vitamin D deficiency. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. And seasonal affective disorder, all this, all of that stuff. Fun stuff. Yeah. So let me shift gears back. We're going to do a lightning round and then I got way too. Sorry. I didn't want you to talking about, sorry.

It's always a good problem to have when the guests are too interesting. I sit there and I'm just listening instead of hosting. Thank you. So let's see here. What are your thoughts on eating local? I know that's not typically in paleo doctrine, but I get to hear what you said on Twitter probably should be.

Robb Wolf: Oh man, I'm a huge fan of that. But what I really advocating for probably the next 15, 20 years, maybe the rest of my life is really going to be. Focused on the sustainability side of the story and really look in it at a evolutionary biology approach to sustainability, which again, like Allan savory, savory Institute, Polyface farms, we're really front and center with that.

And I really have this idea in my head of increasing. The decentralization of food production, still relying on some of the centralized distribution features that we have. But I think it makes a lot of ecological sense. I think it makes some health sense. I think it makes some palette sense to eat the stuff that's pretty local.

If you have somebody growing watermelons or cantaloupes or something like that locally, wouldn't you. Probably want to eat that versus stuff that we shipped you from Chile. Yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: And was picked before it was ripe. 

Robb Wolf: Yeah. Before it was ripe. And there are some detractors on that whole thing. There's some people that will say the middle ages, the dark ages was local.

Eating, you didn't eat for many thing that was more than like five miles away from you and stuff like that. And there's some truth to that. So again, we're not trying to completely do some sort of historical revisionist thing, but energy is becoming a more scarce commodity. There's all kinds of economic and political instability because of energy acquisition and stuff like that.

And so I think it makes a lot of sense, both from an ecological perspective and also kind of a geopolitical perspective to encourage. Some utilization of local resources in a more reasonable way. So, yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: Awesome. Let me ask this, uh, kind of jumping around a little bit now, because I know we're almost about to run long.

Robb Wolf: Let me know if you do have to go, I'm good. Whatever you need to do. I I've got an hour before my next engagement. 

Jonathan Levi: You gotta be careful offering that. As I said, I'm a huge fan. So. How do you feel about dairy such as, you know, obviously not drinking a gallon of milk every day, despite your kind of powerlifting background, but how do you feel about cottage, cheese, Greek, yogurt, butter, things like that?

Robb Wolf: Again, and it's all kind of a individual perspective on that.

Like if you do well with it, then go be achieved. Knock yourself out. Interesting characteristics of dairy and even historically collected dairy. A good friend of mine, Pedro Bastos who's at the university in Lisbon. He did a great paper at the ancestral health symposium about three years ago, where he looked at the timing historically of pastoralists when they would collect milk.

And it was fascinating, just instinctively. They collected milk when the growth factors that were in the milk were at their lowest. I don't know exactly how they figured this out or why they ended up doing this from a human health perspective. It makes a lot of sense because we do see some interesting correlations with very early rapid growth that can be spurred by things like high carbohydrate diets, dairy, IGF, one, and cancers.

If you're sending a growth signal, that growth signal goes to both healthy tissue and potentially pathogenic tissue. And so traditionally collected dairy. Was collected at two points in time when it was low in these growth factors, the process of fermentation tends to decrease the growth factor potential.

And so there was this kind of natural. History of this whole thing that really mitigated what we would consider to be some of the deleterious health effects. Whereas I remember for a while there was recombinant bovine growth, hormone type milk, and there were actually some bodybuilding circles that were trying to figure out which.

Seven Eleven's and stuff like that, stock this stuff, because there was a thought that it would be mega growth promoting. I think that the rBGH has kind of gone the way of the Dodo, but there is, I think potentially a cost benefit, trade off, both promoting elements of dairy versus some other health considerations.

If you have gluten intolerance, Or celiac, there are some proteins found in dairy that are very similar to gluten. And so there may be some cross-reactivity with that. 

Jonathan Levi: Is there a concern, because one of the things that I found so interesting in the book was you go into really how the body's breaking down a carbohydrate, like say white flour, right.

And that's a polysaccharide and the body's breaking it down into all these monosaccharides. And so I started thinking about lactose, which is really a, another form of sugar. And how, you know, if we're trying to avoid, uh, insulin and sensitivity, we should probably avoid those easy win sugars that come from lactose.

Is that a factor? And I mean, I guess it's not as much of a factor in butter or a cottage cheese, but probably in, you know, drinking skim milk. 

Robb Wolf: Yeah, that could be a factor. All the studies that have looked at milk specifically, like the full fat milk always won out over the, the skin milk, just as kind of a, an interesting aside, if we're trying to minimize say like our glucose galactose load from dairy, which is what the lactose itself is a dissect carotid from into dairy is a great option.

Because it ends up breaking it down into lactate and yeah. Greek yogurts and whatnot. So that stuff gets out into the weeds where I see dairy being really, really good important is if somebody has some sort of intestinal permeability and or if they have an autoimmune disease, which typically auto-immunity goes.

Hand in hand with intestinal permeability, but a lot of folks that have say like some sort of gut issues, some sort of say like rheumatoid arthritis, they seem to do really well with the exclusion of dairy. And yeah, if you don't have those issues and it may not be as big of deal, but it's kind of funny.

I just can't describe the number of people that are like I've had dairy every day of my life. This seems kind of crazy. And I'm like, Pull it out for 30 days. Yeah. You look, feel, and perform or introduce these folks, go through that process. And they're like, wow. Okay. The low grade sniffles I had and joint inflammation go away when I removed the dairy reappear, when I reintroduced the dairy and then the person just needs to decide what's the cost benefit story with that?

Like if they just absolutely love. The dairy that they're consuming, then they're okay with a little bit of post-nasal drip. But for me, I can't really handle cow dairy at all. I can handle sheep and goat dairy just fine. I get serious joint achiness from a cow dairy. And if I'm doing some Brazilian jujitsu or something like that, my hands are already kind of getting beat up.

Then the cow dairy will just make them. Really ache. I mean, just not good. Yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: So I really got to send you a kombucha SCOBY. I'm going to figure out a FedEx will carry it cause, uh, not to come back to this, but it's really high in gluconic and glucuronic acid. Okay. So it's essentially just like a nice, healthy dose of Glucosomine.

Nice. So interesting idea. Hookah Wolf up. How are we going to figure out if we can ship this jellyfish looking thing across the world, but if we can, I will do it for you. Okay, cool. What are your thoughts on artificial sweeteners? By the way? I mean, are they all bad? And if so, why?

Robb Wolf: I think some things like Stevia and xylitol are probably not a particularly big deal.

You know, some people have said that things like aspartame are neurotoxins and whatnot. The thing for me is what are the foods or food-like substances that we typically see artificial sweeteners. Like sodas and kind of junk food anyway. So do we really have a firm leg to stand on that that should be part of our regular diet?

I just don't think so. If I have some mixed drinks. A cocktail gig or something like that. I'll go with some diet tonic versus regular tonic, but Abbott like once a month. Yeah. But instead of just having corn syrup, which is all that you can find in the diet tonic, then I'll go with them little bit of aspartame, sweetened diet tonic, and it's no big deal.

So I think in general, those are just the things that have artificial sweeteners in it. We really shouldn't be eating them anyway. There's some data that seems to indicate that artificial sweeteners can bypass the neuro regulation of appetite. So basically if you're consuming these things, it makes you want more food.

There's some conflicting stuff where people who used diet sodas as part of a calorie restricted diet. Actually had better success than folks who didn't use the diet soda. I don't know on that. There were some people that are like, Oh, diet soda should be part of every dietary regimen. And then we had clients that just, I really feel like a huge part of their problem was that they were consuming like huge amounts of diet soda.

And then they just ate like cockroaches beyond that because their neuro regulation of appetite was not right. Interesting, very observational, not any type of solid science with that. 

Jonathan Levi: I have to admit, you've surprised me a little bit. And I think it shows how far your kind of development and understanding has come in the last six years, because part of me expected you to have these hard and fast rules.

It's very interesting, kind of how flexible and how N equals one, your approaches. Not that I'm disappointed at all. This is very fascinating because in the book you take the stance. You have to trust me, try it exactly like this for 30 days and then see how you feel. So I think that's really cool. 

Robb Wolf: Oh, thanks. And you know, in a clinical setting, like when I'm working with people in the gym, or if we have somebody come into our medical clinic, they need some lane lines initially. And so they get some pretty Tate lean lanes because people will just spin out and do all kinds of crazy stuff. And they want to ask a million questions and it's like, listen, man, just.

Do this for a period of time, and then we're going to reevaluate and we'll tweak and fiddle from there. But in a clinical application, I actually am much more of a Dick. I have much less latitude, but in trying to educate a lot of people, I definitely do want to convey that there's a lot of new ones to this.

I definitely do have kind of my safe Harbor. Like if I'm working with somebody in a busy enough now where I can basically say, Hey, if you're going to work with me, It's going to be no grains, no legumes, no dairy, no artificial sweeteners. That's what I was expecting. We're going to titrate in, uh, carbohydrates based off of your recovery.

And then we're going to monitor from there. So in my clinical practice, if I'm working directly with somebody. I do have some really tight lane lines, but there does need to be an understanding that there's a lot of latitude to this stuff. Right. 

Jonathan Levi: And  particularly when you're at home, listening to the podcast, rather than under the supervision of a professional.

Robb Wolf: Yeah. And you know, and again, if people could take away from this thing, that there are some. Starter guidelines that are think are generally very, very good, but then we need to be able to tweak and fiddle and modifying. Okay. So I have two daughters raising these girls and I'm trying to figure out how to make them functional members of society and have their own identity and all that stuff.

And in the beginning, you really need to provide some lane lines for these kids. And if you don't, they are just little animals. They are just driven by impulse and they really can't make a choice about the way that they react to things. But if you can provide some lane lines initially, and then as they grow and develop.

Then you start telling them, Hey, so these weren't actually rules that were written in stone kind of thing. These have just been things because you are a young person you're growing now into an older person. Now here's where all the nuances, but to function in society, you need to know where the lane lines are.

And then you can decide whether or not you want to stay in those lane lines and you can figure out how to modify that stuff. There've been some movies and some books written about this. What would work better taking a modern man and sticking them in a stone-age scenario or taking a stone age, man and sticking them in a modern scenario.

And the modern guy can probably. Adapt to that stone-age scenario much more easily because he's kind of like, Oh, this is the stone age. Somehow I transported through time and I need to figure out how to deal with this. Whereas the stone age guy is like the gods hate me and I've been sent to hell basically.

And that's the level of their adaptation. And when people are first starting into dietary and lifestyle changes, It's like a kid or it's like almost an animal that could become Sapient, but isn't yet. And you've got to start that person with really tight lane lines, really good parameters to be able to get them a sense of success.

And then you can kind of move them forward. 

Jonathan Levi: Great. You just brought me back to my childhood where until like age eight, I thought that it was legally required for me to call all adults, Mister, and their last name. It's like the land lines weren't removed until I was like nine or 10 and it started to become ridiculous.

Robb Wolf: Right. Exactly. 

Jonathan Levi: Awesome. Rob, I want to ask you two more paleo question, then I'll start being completely greedy with your time today. We've talked about type two diabetes and we've talked about insulin resistance and all that stuff. And yet so many people when they hear about paleo and they hear about your emphasis on fats and proteins over refined carbohydrates are inevitably going to scream heart disease and CVS.

And metabolic syndrome and all these horrible things. What do you tell these people? Because personally, I just want to grab them by the head and start shaking them. Like you're sitting there drinking a two liter Coke, and you're telling me that I'm going to die of heart disease. How do you cope with these people?

What would you do that gets thorny?

Robb Wolf: You have some people kind of see out of the Gary Tobbs camp that say that all. Insulin resistance. And what not is driven by excessive carbohydrate intake. Then you have someone like Stefan GNA, who really makes a very compelling case that it's not just carbohydrates, it's total calories and a Stefan further makes the point that it's the change in the type of calories.

The hyper palatability of our foods causing us to overeat. And I think that that's really the answer. We are still ultimately overeating, but then the question is, what do we need to do to fix that? And one of the easiest, and once you become hyperinsulinemic, what that means is that we are very poorly dealing with blood glucose and.

Elevated levels of blood glucose can be very, very damaging. So what do we want to do? We want to control blood glucose? So I look at it a little bit like a sunburn analogy. If you've gotten too much sun, if you have a sunburn you need to mitigate or decrease the amount of sun exposure you have. Similarly, if you're insulin resistant and have elevated blood glucose levels, if that was caused from too much carbs only, or too many calories in total causing the inflammatory stress.

Cascade that leads to storing body fat and elevating insulin levels of whatever the case, a really good intervention to solving that is reducing carbohydrate load. 

Jonathan Levi: Sure. And then filling it up with protein because it gives that great satiety. 

Robb Wolf: It's more satiating also where the dietary intervention that could reverse type two diabetes or pre-diabetes, isn't necessarily the way that you're going to have to eat your whole life.

If you can reverse that type two diabetic state. Or pre-diabetic state, then you might have more latitude with cellular hydrates from yams and sweet potatoes and green bananas and maybe some soaked sprouted lentils or something thing like that. Or maybe not it'll depend, but certainly it will avert the catastrophe that's going to happen.

If you do the standard model, which is eat a 60% carbohydrate diet and try to control it, all this with Metformin and insulin and stuff like that. 

Jonathan Levi: Right. And so one of the things that I really loved and actually after listening to one of the earlier episodes of your podcast, I need to go get my LDL size tested, not just the overall cholesterol, cause you've been really good about publicizing.

The fact that overall cholesterol doesn't tell too much, but this idea that cholesterol and heart disease are not really directly correlated. And if they are, it's not about overall cholesterol. Yeah. 

Robb Wolf: And in our risk assessment program that we looked at here, we look at both the size and the LDL particle count.

Yes. So it's really critical to get an LLP. You can have somebody, you can have two people with LDL C LDL cholesterol is have a hundred, one person could have a particle count of a thousand. The other person could have a particle count of 2000. The person with the. That was in count is going to die from something, but it's not going to be cardiovascular disease person with the 2000 count.

They're looking at it very high likely hood of some sort of cardiac event stroke, something like that. And then we need to figure out, well, why is that elevated? And was it sleep? Is it gut permeability or whatever. And then we start doing the kind of functional medicine to figure that stuff out, but it's really important.

You just really don't know if you're only looking at like total cholesterol, HDL. LDL cholesterol. It doesn't tell you enough to really make a thoroughly informed decision about that. 

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. Right. And it's still, there's a lot to be said about ratios, as I understand it, I mean more than overall cholesterol.

Robb Wolf: Yeah, I will bore you guys with the lipidology piece, but LDL P and systemic inflammatory markers, plus insulin resistant status, I think is really kind of where the rubber hits the road on that stuff. And the ratios do end up mattering because say like your triglyceride to HDL ratio gives you a very good indication of insulin resistance.

So the read some great information that can be garnered from that stuff, but it's a four. Pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease, that LDL P number and inflammatory markers are probably, we got a really big deal. 

Jonathan Levi: I love it. Awesome. I'm going to schedule my blood test tomorrow last paleo question, and then we'll get into a little bit more about what you're working on and how people can get in touch.

One thing that really alarmed me about your book was the idea that it can take 10 to 15 days after a gluten exposure for the body to be right again, and to get rid of this inflammation or this gut permeability issue. Does this mean that, uh, you don't really advocate a cheat day for kind of psychological health?

Or if you do, how do you advocate it? 

Robb Wolf: Well, I don't like the term cheat anyway. I mean, we don't have a covenant with food. You can cheat on wives. You can cheat on tests we eat. And so I just detest the term cheated. Part of the problem with people is that they become emotional eaters. And so we use these terms like cheat and in my opinion, it's misplaced.

If you want to have something habit, just be aware of the. Consequences. Sure. If you want to go gamble away, you've worked all week. I live in Reno and we have a bunch of casinos here. So you've worked at all week. You deserve to go take care of yourself and you drink a bunch of booze. Play the slot machines, and then take your last $200 and get a, from one of the cookers at the brothels who's was pastor expiration date 40 years ago.

Fine. That's your prerogative? What are the consequences that going to be your next two weeks until you get a check or going to completely sucks. So I just don't like any of this moralizing around it. It's like let's put on our big girl panties and be adults about it. If you want to have something, then have it.

There's all kinds of mitigation strategies too. On the gluten side. At this point, if you live in a most westernized places, you know, There are so many good options. Like you could have ice cream instead of gluten, you could have dark chocolate instead of gluten, you could have a chocolate, you know, a flower lifts tort.

Jonathan Levi: Instead of gluten, we realized dark chocolate was cheating. I've been eating a, you mentioned it on the podcast. That's okay. 

Robb Wolf: Yeah. Well, that's kind of my point, but there's all this other stuff. So if you figure out that you're reactive to gluten, it's really one of the things that, you know, I really try not to moralize this stuff, but it's one of those things where I'm like, come on and you're being a moron.

Like, this is ridiculous. It's almost, you have emphysema, but you're still smoking through a trick tube. Yeah. It's just dumb. Like if you really react to gluten and we know that a gluten exposure in susceptible people increases all kinds of different cancers. Uh non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Colon cancer, pancreatic cancer.

I mean, it's really bad stuff and we have all these other options. So why not? If you want to go out and have sushi, go have some sushi. If you want to have some Mexican food, do corn tortillas instead of flour tortillas. I mean, it's really not that big of a deal. And then from there. If you really want to kick your heels up, go do a full body strength training routine, beforehand, couple of burnout sets of squats and deadlifts and presses and poles.

And then you're super insulin sensitive. And then you get to go out of your great meal and you've totally mitigated the downside on that. And again, some people would say that that's just being totally neurotic because you're starting to pair exercise with eating. And maybe it is, but it's also a good risk mitigation kind of strategy that.

I don't know anything can be taken to an extreme, but I'll do stuff like that. If we're going to go out and get some sushi, I'll do air squats until my quads are super burning and do some pushups and go do some pull-ups and I'm like, okay, let's hit it and we'll go get some sushi. And I know that the glucose disposal is better and my insulin sensitivity is going to be improved.

And I really enjoyed the meals. So it doesn't seem like that big of a downside. That's a brilliant. 

Jonathan Levi: Brilliant kind of meet it. Halfway strategy. I don't think it sounds neurotic at all. To be honest, Rob someone on Twitter suggested that I should ask about your health insurance philosophy. Do I even want to ask?

Robb Wolf: I, uh, just really quickly, like I'm pretty market oriented. The United States is a funny place where we kind of have. The shittiest elements of everything. Like we've taken a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and we're really in a mess right now. And we have this left right divide in the United States where people can't even talk anymore.

They literally can't even have a conversation. And I tend to be kind of market-driven. But I understand that a lot of people really feel that we have kind of a social charter to take care of people and folks in the United States we'll hold up like the Northern European socialized democracies and say, Hey, this is what we should be emulating.

And I've spent a lot of time in Denmark. A lot of time in Sweden. My family is from Sweden. I really understand these places well, and they are very laudable, but they are also almost completely ethnically and culturally homogenized. Right. There's very little variation in it. Everybody follows the rules and these things have historically worked pretty well.

And all of these countries have had the benefit of a really massive demographic bubble that was very favorable in debt. There was a large number of youthful workers contributing to the social welfare pool to take care of a relatively small group of agent dependents. And that is all totally changing.

And people are kind of scratching their heads about like, okay, how will the economics of this stuff play out? And folks in the United States are just blindingly ignorant of these again, nuances. And so you have people more on the, the left leaning side that will say everything needs to be socialized. We need socialized medicine, we need free school.

We need all this type of stuff. And then you have people on the right, who will say, if you can't figure out a way to get your own job, then you should die in the street. Kind of deal. So she's really crazy polarization. And I've found a model out of Singapore, which is really interesting. It's a state mandated healthcare system that is based on health savings accounts, right?

Yeah. I was living in Singapore for a bit. Okay. There you go. So you put money into these health savings accounts. It's pre-tax dollars. All of the medical providers basically have a menu on their wall or on their website that describes what they offer and what things cost. And so there's a massive amount of competition between providers to provide the best value as far as goods and services at the best cost and even people that are very, very poor when they receive.

Money from the state. It goes into an HSA account in that is theirs to do with, as they, please from a medical standpoint, if those people die, that money is actually heritable to their heirs. It is there. And what I find is that if you have a society that is not perfectly homogenized and is not small, the United States has 12 cities that have a larger population in the Northern European democracy.

So there's just a compromise of scale here that people do not understand. And. Say Lake in Switzerland, even though again, it's a socialized democracy. Most of their governance happens on the local municipal level. Everybody in the United States wants to push everything up to a federal level so that people in Virginia are forced to, to comply with things exactly the way that people in California are.

And it's ridiculous. Like it's so ridiculous. So I really liked decentralization. I like markets and I feel like my idea, what the healthcare thing is, something that looks like the, uh, Singapore model where we've got a safety net for people, but there's actually market signaling so that we have real prices and real feedback and the opportunity for innovation and growth versus our current system, we have largely a third party payer system where like, if I go to you as a doctor, somebody else pays for that interaction.

And so as the patient, I don't really care what it costs. Because somebody else is paying for it. And then you, as the doctor are getting shortchanged because the third party payer is always trying to undercut you. So you just continually increase your prices. And there's this cat and mouse game going on there.

You know, we don't buy cars like that. We don't buy bananas like that. We don't buy automobile insurance like that. Interesting. It's fascinating. And people may have liked some of what I had to say up until that point. And then I guarantee you like people just lose their minds and it's emotionality on par with like any type of Hulu, just discussion or something like that.

Jonathan Levi: I'm glad I asked it's a unique perspective, especially as someone who spends so much time, helping people fight these chronic diseases, that health insurance is supposed to help. Against. Yeah. 

Robb Wolf: So that's interesting. The United States military and I work with the Naval special warfare resiliency program. I work with the seals and the special boat teams and stuff like that.

And I've been at a number of these military events. Will they talk about national security? But interestingly for the United States, the military looks at our healthcare crisis. As possibly our greatest national security threat really. And, uh, more than ISIS, more than this, more than that. Cause I mean, we can bankrupt our economy and if we bankrupt our economy, We're super screwed.

Like actually the whole world is screwed because we're kind of a linchpin on that stuff for good or bad, but so they're really looking at this stuff. So if you have an iPhone in your hand, that iPhone is cheaper and better than the iPhone you had in your hand three years ago, and it will be more expensive and more poultry than the iPhone you'll have in your hand in three more years.

There's this process called Moore's law, where when markets and innovation are allowed to occur, things tend to get cheaper and better. We've seen this in a number of different industries. It doesn't describe everything under the sun, but it describes a lot of things, but we know more about pathology, physiology, genetics than we've ever known in history.

And in 2013 alone, there were 40,000 publications on pub med that mentioned. Type two diabetes. Wow. But yet type two, diabetes is increasing at an exponential rate. It actually started slowing down like a sort of flattening out a little bit, but we know more about a host of disease pathologies than we've ever known in history, but yet we seem completely incompetent at dealing with them.

Wow. In my opinion, we're doing it. And it's very, very expensive to try to deal with this stuff. And my. Again, greasy used car salesman sales pitch on that is that without this evolutionary biology background, we are just lost. We're just chasing symptoms, pills, potions surgery, randomized control trials.

They're really not based from an epistemological perspective that it's going to really inform what we're up to. If we use that evolutionary biology perspective, sleep food, exercise, gut biome, socialization, and we start couching our research from that perspective. Then I think that we really have something.

Powerful. And we did a two year pilot study here in Reno with the Reno police Reno firefighters found 35 people at high risk for type two diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Put them on a paleo diet, modified their sleep, got them exercising. And based off their cardio metabolic changes, we saved the city of Reno about $22 million.

With a really conservative 33 to one return on investment. Wow. That's incredible. So yeah, when I throw those ideas out about market oriented healthcare solutions, it's not just an opinion piece. Like we've actually done something that nobody else has been able to do, not even close. And we're trying to scale that up and take it out to the masses.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Amazing Rob, last major question. What is one piece of homework that our audience should try this week? Whether it's a thought experiment. Or going and getting some blood work done, or what's a nice piece of homework for people to act on this information. 

Robb Wolf: Try to get one hour more of sleep. That's brilliant.

Jonathan Levi: I literally just today interviewed Nick little Hales, the guy who, I don't know if it's going to air before or after this episode, but he was great. He's the guy who does a sleep coaching for real Madrid arsenal. Nice. 

Robb Wolf: So, yeah. Awesome. I'm the food guide like most of my talks are about 80% sleep. 

Jonathan Levi: It makes such a difference. It's incredible. We've done literally two episodes just on sleep. Yeah. All right. So we finally made it thanks for bearing with me as I told him.

Robb Wolf: No, it was a ton of fun, awesome questions when the questions were good. I love doing it. Thank you. 

Jonathan Levi: So, Rob, what are you working on now? I know you're doing something called City Zero.

You're obviously doing the North Cal strength and conditioning. You're probably, I would imagine writing a new book. Tell us what Rob Wolf is up to. 

Robb Wolf: I have a couple of books that I've been fiddling with for a while. Those are, you know, I chip away at them, but it's not a real hot and heavy timeline on those.

My main focus is the City Zero project, which is basically taking this, uh, Reno risk assessment program and trying to create a technology platform to take this out to the masses. Like we've talk to Twitter. We've talked to Tesla, we've had engagement from the FBI from ATF, and, uh, we have a lot of interest in this program.

We just literally cannot accommodate the interests that if we were to assign a. A deal with the FBI. We would fail in the contract on day one currently because our brick and mortar clinic would not be able to handle the volume. So what we're trying to do is create a technology interface that allows us to scale what we do in the clinic and be able to put a hundred thousand people a day through this program.

And we're making some great progress on that. There will be a soup to nuts certification for strength and conditioning coaches and healthcare providers. The goal with this is to have an evolutionary health trained. Kind of medical and health system so that whether you go from the gym or the clinic or the hospital, you have people that are largely on the same page with looking at medicine, from sleep food, exercise, gut, biome, socialization, so that we have some congruence there.

So that's a big goal. The goal is to completely change the way that medicine is done in the United States. So no small goal, no small goals. 

Jonathan Levi: I love it. I love the ambition. Yeah. And so how can people get in touch with you? Obviously I've done the plugging for your book because I'm such an advocate of it.

The paleo solution. Obviously your podcast by the same name, paleo solution podcast. I'm a huge fan, but where else can we send people? And what are some things that they should check out that are more recent? Because apparently I'm a little outdated in my Robb Wolf, a chronology.

Robb Wolf: Oh, man, that just Robbwolf.com.

We have a list of kind of the most popular or most important blog posts and podcasts. Also, if people sign up for my newsletter, they will automatically they'll get a series of auto newsletters. I think it's like 20 long or something like that. That brings in kind of like, well, what is paleo? And what's the deal with carbs.

And so we ended up kind of titrating out a lot of that information that you have maybe had some different insights since writing the book. And so they go to Robb wolf.com, sign up for the free newsletter. You get some free schwag with that, and then you definitely stay up to date on all the latest Robb bull cities.

Jonathan Levi: Excellent. All right. So we will put a link to that in the show notes, but for those who don't check it out. Robb Wolf with two B’s.

And Robb, I really, really want to thank you. You've been so generous with your time, and I know that you've been so busy, so I really appreciate you making the time 

Robb Wolf: I will. Thanks, man. I really appreciate the work you're doing. And I've got to say I've had a ton of interviews. I'm always honored and grateful for all of them, but this was probably the most thoughtful, best thought out questions that I've ever had. So thank you.

Jonathan Levi: Wow. That's a huge compliment, especially coming from you. So thank you very, very much.

Robb Wolf: Thank you. Thank you. Keep up the good work. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, let's keep in touch. Hey, I'm going to figure out if I can send you a kombucha SCOBY, and I want to know about these books you're working on, so do keep in touch. Okay. 

Robb Wolf: Sounds good. 

Jonathan Levi: All right. Take care.

Robb Wolf: Take care. Bye bye.

Jonathan Levi: All right. Superfriends. That's it. For this week's episode, we hope you really, really enjoyed it and learn a ton of applicable stuff that can help you go out there and overcome the impossible.

If so, please do us a favor and leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher, or however you found this podcast. In addition to that, we are. Always looking for great guests posts on the blog or awesome guests right here on the podcast. So if you know somebody or you are somebody, or you have thought of somebody who would be a great fit for the show or for our blog, please reach out to us either on Twitter or by email or email is info@becomingasuperhuman.com. Thanks so much. 

Closing: Thanks for tuning in to the becoming superhuman podcast for more great skills and strategies, or for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode, visit www.becomingasuperhuman.com/podcast. We'll see you next time.