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March 23, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:54:39
Joe Rogan Experience #935 - Robb Wolf
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joe rogan
01:07:44
r
robb wolf
01:43:05
Appearances
j
jamie vernon
01:12
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Speaker Time Text
joe rogan
Four, three, two.
Yes, Rob Wolf!
What's up, buddy?
You look great, man.
You look super healthy.
robb wolf
Oh, thanks.
joe rogan
What are you doing?
I know you're doing a lot of jujitsu, but you look like leaner and hotter.
robb wolf
They took the pineal gland out of a small child and then implanted it in me.
joe rogan
Is that all you need to do?
robb wolf
Pretty much, yeah.
joe rogan
Imagine if that was the case, people would run around with like helmets on their kids.
robb wolf
It's illegal here, yeah.
joe rogan
Where'd you go to get it done?
robb wolf
I can't really divulge that.
joe rogan
Oh, cool, cool, cool.
Wherever it was.
As long as it wasn't America.
robb wolf
Right, right.
joe rogan
So you're balls deep in jujitsu these days, man.
robb wolf
Trying to.
Trying to.
Yeah.
joe rogan
But you could see that in you.
Like, you look different.
You really do.
You look like...
robb wolf
You know, when I was on here last time, I was at the end of a pretty big travel cycle, like doing military gigs and stuff like that, and I was pretty beat down.
And we've had...
Two kids since I think I was on the podcast.
And although that has beat me down, it's beat me down in a different way.
So I've just been at home and I can train, don't travel as much.
And so yeah, everything's been pretty good.
I do this gymnastics bodies programming a couple of days a week, a little bit of squatting, a little bit of deadlifting, pretty on point with the food, and then just getting the dog piss beat out of me at JITS like two to four days a week.
So yeah, yeah.
joe rogan
What got you into that?
robb wolf
Oh, man.
I've always been interested in martial arts.
Like, as a kid, I had a brown belt in, like, the Ed Parker Kempo system.
joe rogan
Ah, old school.
robb wolf
Yeah, old, old school.
joe rogan
Elvis Presley style.
robb wolf
Yes.
And, you know, like, I knew that Parker had some connections with, like, Bruce Lee and JKD, and I was always really interested in that.
So I went down to Long Beach, California and ended up tracking down some folks at the Inesano Academy and went and sparred with a kid that had been doing Thai boxing for like six months.
And he was 60 pounds lighter than I was, not particularly athletic, and he beat the crap out of me.
I mean, it was just like a man fighting a boy, only I was bigger and stronger and faster and he just destroyed me.
So I went back home, and I burned my brown belt, and I started studying some Thai boxing.
And it wasn't long after this that I encountered Brazilian jiu-jitsu for the first time.
And I had a little bit of a high school wrestling background, and I was a California state powerlifting champion, so I was a strong, athletic kid.
And again, like, this guy, like, submitted me 50 times in, like, two minutes.
And I was just kind of blown away.
But this was back in, like, 92. And unless you were in a major metropolitan area, you just couldn't find jiu-jitsu.
So I did a couple of weeks of it then, you know, around, like, 92, 93. And I didn't have a second jiu-jitsu session until, like, 2003. And again, it was, like, a month or something because...
At that point, the folks that were usually running these schools, like, they could barely keep them open.
They were at, like, 9 o'clock in the back of a karate school or something.
So it's only been the past couple of years that I've been able to be pretty consistent.
joe rogan
So you just found a great gym out where you were at?
robb wolf
Yeah, yeah.
I've kind of bounced around a little bit.
Kelly Farrell at Conviction Martial Arts, and then also the Gorilla Jiu-Jitsu affiliate there in Reno.
And then I get out to Elko to the guys at Straight Blast Gym in Elko under Chris Meyer every once in a while.
joe rogan
So are you out in the Reno area?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Dude, I didn't know what Reno was like.
I went to Reno this past August and maybe had passed through once when I was younger.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
But we went through Reno into the mountains in Nevada.
It's fucking beautiful.
unidentified
It is.
robb wolf
It is.
Yeah, it's four seasons, like the summer's great, winter was really cool this year, good snowboarding and all that, so it's pretty cool.
joe rogan
And it looks like Colorado up there.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like you think Nevada, you think desert, you think barren landscape, not very pretty, or pretty in sort of like a, hey, better bring water sort of a way.
It wasn't like that at all.
It was gorgeous.
robb wolf
Yeah, yeah.
It's kind of funny when people, you know, like if I'm being interviewed or something, they're like, you live in Reno, really?
Is that part of a parole violation or something?
No, we really like it.
Yeah, totally.
joe rogan
The thing that is sad, though, is the casinos in Reno.
They're weird.
robb wolf
It's a really weird mix because you have like Tesla and all these tech companies that have moved into town and it's really got this new vibe going on.
Yeah, like the big Tesla mega plant is out there kind of east of town.
So you've got this kind of technology scene.
There's a whole startup row in downtown Reno.
And then you have the casinos and that whole underbelly element to it.
And so these two things are like literally, you know, you change corners downtown and you're in either the like...
Super depressing, you know, like failed at the casino deal, or you go around the corner and there's a bunch of guys with a technology startup.
joe rogan
Do you think the technology startups will overwhelm the shitty casinos?
robb wolf
It's still, you know, like tech in general, and this is maybe getting off in the weeds, but there's so much stuff that's just been built on speculation and eyeballs and nothing real that I'm still curious if like tech in general is going to make it.
What?
Yeah, it's...
joe rogan
How so?
In what way?
robb wolf
You know, there was so much speculative money that went into that scene, and there's only a few entities like Facebook and Google and stuff that have really turned it into a money-making venture.
And a lot of these technology startups, there was a lot of money going into them, but it was just kind of predicated on growth or eyeballs, but they never really had a strategy towards profitability.
And so I'm just kind of curious how many of these things are really going to Yeah, I've always thought that was weird about Twitter.
joe rogan
That Twitter has so many users and there's so much activity.
There's something going on there, right?
But then they have to figure out how do you generate money from that.
robb wolf
Right, right.
joe rogan
It's worth a lot of money, but for no reason.
It's like, God, everybody's using it.
Yeah, but what do you do with it?
I don't know.
I feel like someone's going to figure it out, but I felt like that two years ago.
How do they stay open?
robb wolf
I have no idea.
I have no idea.
I don't know.
I don't know.
joe rogan
I keep hearing that I'm on a shadow banned list.
Have you heard of that?
I don't believe it.
I think it's horseshit.
robb wolf
You did have Jordan Peterson on, so that probably got you on some sort of a short list really quickly.
joe rogan
I've had a bunch of people on.
Gavin McGinnis is more egregious, probably, and more ridiculous.
And Steven Crowder.
Alex Jones is the biggest one, for sure.
robb wolf
Did you see what that list means?
What it means to be on that list?
joe rogan
No, not exactly.
jamie vernon
You just get your tweets reviewed by a person before they make it out to your feed or something.
joe rogan
Get out of here, really?
unidentified
Yeah.
robb wolf
Is that real?
unidentified
That's what it said.
I don't know if it's real, but that's what it said.
joe rogan
Well, most of my tweets will make it out there.
And the ones that don't, thank you.
Thank you for cutting those off.
robb wolf
Some kind of oversight?
joe rogan
Yeah, if I'm hammered at the comedy store at 2 o'clock in the morning and want to rile some people up for no reason, yeah, thank you.
Thanks for protecting me from myself.
I'm kidding.
I'm not in any way advocating censorship.
And I'm not necessarily sure I believe it either.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
Sorry about that deviation off the path.
robb wolf
Not at all.
Not at all.
Yeah.
joe rogan
So I've been following your Instagram feed, and you and your wife have been doing some crazy blood sugar tests after foods, post-carb meals, like beans and a bunch of other different high-carb foods.
Yeah.
What are you trying to do there?
Are you on a keto diet, or what are you doing?
robb wolf
I generally run really well keto or pretty close to it.
Fueling jujitsu is a little rough with that, so I maybe do about 75 to 100 grams of carbs on harder training days, and then other days it's pretty low carb.
My wife, though, is kind of like Wolverine.
Like, you just can't kill her.
And this is some of the stuff that I've learned in the past couple of years, this personalized nutrition, where there's a huge variation from person to person in how they respond to carbohydrates, foods in general, but in particular carbohydrates.
There was a study done at the Weizmann Institute in Israel a couple of years ago, and they basically put a continuous glucometer on folks.
It's a little disc that you pop on the back of your arm.
They did a full genetic screen on them, a gut microbiome test, and then they started feeding these folks different meals.
And the blood glucose responses were all over the place.
Like one person would eat rice and they would have a barely perceptible blood glucose increase.
Another person would be near diabetic from eating that rice.
joe rogan
And do they believe this is a genetic variability?
Is it location?
robb wolf
Both genetics and gut microbiome seem to drive it.
And so if the gut is unhealthy, then that seems to make your blood sugar response worse.
And then conversely, if you eat in a way that makes your blood glucose response look pretty good, then the gut microbiome seems to shift towards what they consider to be a healthier profile.
joe rogan
So now, is there anything you can do to your gut biome to change the glucose profile?
robb wolf
Yes, but exactly what to do is pretty complex.
Like, you know, some people can have a condition called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth where the bacteria are basically growing too far north in the gut, essentially.
And then whenever you eat something with carbs in it, it makes those bacteria grow in an inappropriate place and inappropriate way.
And it's kind of difficult to basically starve the bacteria in the foregut and then feed the bacteria in the hindgut.
And there are some...
Yeah, Chris Kresseron, he's one of the best people in the world probably in dealing with stuff like that.
But it's...
I'll put it like this.
In the last five years, we've learned more about the gut microbiome than we knew in the previous 50 years.
And like literally every month that goes by, we learn more and more and more.
But the clinical application of doing something to help somebody that's sick is not easy.
It's a pretty complex process.
A lot of people...
We'll experience a lot of improvement from just kind of a low-carb diet, but it doesn't work for everybody.
A lot of people may need some herbal interventions like garlic and different antimicrobial agents that help to knock that bacterial overgrowth back.
And it's a pretty challenging process, particularly if the person is really sick.
joe rogan
Does fasting have any effect on it?
robb wolf
It can.
It can.
Just like reduced meal frequency seems to improve the gut microbiome and the overall gut health.
So this is some of the stuff that I think is going on with intermittent fasting, where instead of eating like six or seven meals a day and just constantly kind of keeping the gut inflamed, instead doing maybe one or two meals a day, pretty broad spacing, seems to have some great benefits for folks.
joe rogan
I've been doing that thing where you only eat for 10 hours a day.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
I did a podcast with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, and she was explaining it to me, and I said, let me give it a try.
And I've had some really great results.
I lost a lot of body fat.
Almost immediately, I started losing body fat from it.
But I didn't lose any energy, and I feel great.
Everything feels really good.
But it's challenging, because I would come home from shows late at night, and I'd be hungry.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And all I'm supposed to be drinking is water.
Like you're not even supposed to have anything that your body has to metabolize.
robb wolf
Right.
Yeah.
Even coffee will kind of cause a little bit of a adrenal response.
The liver kicks out some glucose and then it basically presses the reset button.
joe rogan
What about herbal tea?
robb wolf
I would think that that would probably be okay.
But I mean, the folks that really know a lot about it, like Rhonda Patrick, Walter Longo, they're really pretty adamant that in that fasting period, like you're doing nothing but water.
Yeah.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Water is delicious when you're thirsty.
robb wolf
And not so good every while.
joe rogan
Every other time, you're like, ah, it's boring-ass water.
robb wolf
That's why I grabbed one of these guys when I came here.
joe rogan
Those are great.
Zevia, for people who don't know, is not a sponsor.
It's just we drink it.
And it's stevia-flavored soda.
So it's really like a guilt-free soda.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Which is crazy.
Like soda that's sweetened with plants.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And not sweetened in a way that affects your blood glucose level at all.
robb wolf
Stevia can reduce blood glucose.
So in some people, because of the sweet taste, they actually release insulin in response to that.
joe rogan
Really?
Can you grab a couple of those, James?
I'm getting thirsty.
robb wolf
But the downside is that if you have somebody that has kind of an insulin roller coaster, it can actually make that problem worse.
So the Stevia is super good.
I think it's a lot better than most artificial sweeteners, but there are folks that can kind of get themselves into a bad spot with it.
joe rogan
That's interesting.
I did not know.
So is there a recommended daily allowance of Stevia?
robb wolf
No.
Again, this is just a really individualistic thing.
If somebody is a health coach or a doctor or healthcare provider and they see somebody that's struggling with something...
And then they're like, okay, so how are you eating?
They're like, oh, I'm kind of eating low carb.
Okay, so are you doing any artificial sweeteners or, you know, what have you?
And if they're doing something like this, then it could be something that is kind of kicking them out of the, you know, the insulin regulation that would work better for them.
joe rogan
Now, what do you think about colonics?
Is that in any way related?
unidentified
No.
joe rogan
No, but I mean, because I feel like it was a thing for a while.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
A lot of people were talking about cleaning out their intestinal tract and, you know, you just got to get water up there, flush everything out, and people would, like, literally watch the tube and go, oh, I know what you're eating, and I'm like, what?
robb wolf
It always seemed odd to me.
Very.
That seems like generally an exit-only kind of process.
joe rogan
Unless you're trying to do certain drugs.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Certain drugs apparently are best when you stick them up your butt.
There's a girl named Neuro Soup.
I don't know if she's on YouTube anymore, but she had this whole detailed story about a DMT trip that she did where she took DMT up her butt and Went on like some five-hour journey into the netherworld because it goes directly in your bloodstream from there, right?
Yeah, it's that base and so you've got a non acidic deal like with your hand that base Kind of an asshole were we talking about you're making that hand signal, but I always wondered if it was good for you I'm like I just feel like you should leave that area like flood and water up there.
It just doesn't seem like the smartest move.
robb wolf
Yeah, I It seems like just skipping a meal here and there and just kind of letting it do its natural business seems like a pretty good thing.
The people that I encountered that did colonics, they seemed to be on kind of a merry-go-round with it, and they also were into some other really squirrely stuff.
Like healing?
Yeah.
unidentified
Psychic healers.
robb wolf
Psychic healing and chakras.
It just seemed like they were always moving towards something and never really getting there.
And so it just seemed odd.
There was never a resolution to the situation.
And I kind of like having some endpoints and then move on and do something else.
joe rogan
Well, I always get very curious of something or very...
I guess skeptical is the right word, but of something that doesn't have any research behind it.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
So that's why I wanted to know.
How much research is there behind colonics?
I never hear about any.
robb wolf
I've never dug into it, so I honestly don't know.
I do know that there have been some studies looking at the gut microbiome like when they do a colonoscopy.
So they'll kind of flush you out and they'll give you some stuff to move everything out.
And there is some research that suggests that's not great for the lower gut microbiome.
That there's actually some pathological changes from that.
So going in and getting a colonoscopy and all of the, like, strafe-bombing that they do to move everything out may not be that great.
joe rogan
That's a great way to put it.
Strafe-bombing.
I'm thinking about fighter planes.
unidentified
Totally.
robb wolf
Agent Orange.
unidentified
Just...
joe rogan
Well, I know that people that have antibiotics, like people that are battling staph infection, have a horrendous time sort of reconstructing their gut biome.
And Rhonda Patrick detailed that on one of the podcasts that we did.
She had a tremendous staph infection, and it wouldn't go away.
And she actually wound up, one of the things that really helped it was the topical application of garlic.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
Which is really interesting.
robb wolf
Yeah.
Garlic, oregano.
There's a lot of these traditional...
unidentified
Oregano oil, right?
robb wolf
Yeah, oregano oil.
And like the oregano oil and the garlic are really potent in general.
They kind of spare the healthy bacteria or what we would call the more beneficial bacteria.
But even that's not a universal story.
Like it can suppress some of the more beneficial bacteria in some situations.
So again, this is where...
If you think you've got something going on, it's probably smart to work with somebody that knows a little bit about what they're doing so that you've got a protocol, you can test it, see what the results are, and then we can make some decisions based off that.
If you're already in a compromised state and then you throw something like that in, you can end up worse.
joe rogan
Now, for people that are listening, who would someone go to?
Like, say, if you really wanted to get your gut biome checked out.
robb wolf
I mean, someone like Chris Kresser.
There's a gal in Austin, Amy Myers.
There's a Dr. Ruscio up in the Bay Area.
Chris Kresser also has the Kresser Institute where he's certifying healthcare practitioners.
These are the folks that you want to check out.
Also, the Institute of Functional Medicine is a really good place.
Most of the doctors and healthcare providers that go through that functional medicine training are really well versed in looking at the This whole gut microbiome story.
But interestingly, they kind of pull it back and they've got this kind of evolutionary biology picture that they look at.
So they're thinking about sleep and your food and stress levels, social connectivity, and they really put all that stuff together in a pretty good way.
And they're not chasing symptoms or really trying to figure out root cause and then try to address that root cause and move forward.
And they're pretty good at figuring out, like, you've got 18 things going on.
Which is the one thing we need to address first?
And then we'll knock that out and go to the next one and the next one.
joe rogan
And now, when they start applying, say, probiotics, are all probiotics created equal in terms of foods?
Not in terms of supplementation, because I know there's some really intense probiotic supplements that you can buy that you have to keep performing.
Right.
robb wolf
No, I mean, again, there's huge variability in that.
You have some people that when they add probiotics, like just like kimchi or sauerkraut, they improve immediately.
Like their clinical symptoms improve.
They feel better.
Maybe depressive symptoms improve.
They get leaner.
And then you have other people that everything they have going on gets worse.
And these are the folks that you start wondering if they have some small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
Do they have some reactivity to these things called FODMAPs, which are fermentable carbohydrates that can, you know, make the gut microbiome kind of freak out.
And there's another layer to this, which is called small intestinal fungal overgrowth.
So there are people out there that have some sort of a persistent fungal infection, which doesn't get picked up on the general gut microbiome screening because they're looking at bacteria, not fungus.
So this is a whole other layer to the story that people may have had a years-long, decades-long fungal infection in the gut that is then disordering everything, causing inflammation.
And those are really, really difficult to deal with.
joe rogan
What does one do when they have a fungal overgrowth?
robb wolf
You can do some of the antifungals like Diflucan and again, some of the herbal preparations.
But this is another layer, you know, kind of peeling the onion that there aren't that many practitioners that are even looking for that as an option.
And then the treatment protocols are not super well vetted out.
So there's a lot of experimentation that happens there.
joe rogan
Do they know what is there a dietary cause?
robb wolf
I mean, there's always an influence on the diet, but, you know, you could, you know, refined carbohydrates makes all this stuff grow better, and it disrupts the normal gut flora, it causes inflammation, but, you know, oftentimes people will go on a round of antibiotics,
the bacterial population gets pushed down, and then the fungal population, which is always there, but usually it's in some sort of a symbiotic balance with the other microbes, then the The fungal infection or fungal population can increase.
And this is where some people will go on a round of antibiotics and then they end up with some sort of a legitimate fungal infection, you know, like they can see it on their skin and the doctor will prescribe some antifungals for that.
But you can also have this happening kind of a low-grade subacute level where it's not bad enough where they're getting rashes and hives, but it's bad enough that it's making them sick and not kind of optimized.
joe rogan
Wow, it's just so hard to figure out what's going on with you.
I mean, it seems like for the average person that has a full-time job and family and all that jazz, it's probably incredibly difficult to get to the bottom of what your health issue is.
robb wolf
It definitely can be.
You know, the average time for diagnosis of an autoimmune condition or something like celiac disease is like 12 to 15 years.
So people are suffering.
They're suffering for a long time, and it's not the easiest thing in the world to pin down because the symptoms are so variable from person to person.
Now, if you go to a good doc, particularly someone, again, kind of functional medicine training, or they've got a little bit of this evolutionary biology perspective, they usually ask a set of questions and more questions so that they can kind of narrow down what's going on.
But if you're Kind of doing the Doc in the Box deal and you've got five minutes with this person, like they're just trying to figure out what's the script I'm going to write so I can move this person out and get to the next person.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's unfortunate.
robb wolf
And you're just not going to, unless you get lucky, you're not going to figure out what the issue is.
joe rogan
Yeah, it would seem that the amount of time required to figure out what's wrong with a person would also be very expensive and likely not covered by a whole lot of health care plans.
robb wolf
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
Like, some of these functional medicine docs do a lot with pretty little, you know, but...
Some of what they're doing is a time investment.
Like, they'll do a two-hour history.
And if they can get the information, they'll ask, so, you know, what was your in-utero environment like?
Like, did your mom eat well?
Did they smoke?
When you were born, was it a vaginal birth or C-section?
Were you breastfed or not?
When was the approximate age of your first round of antibiotics?
Did you ever go on tetracycline for extended period of time for acne?
So they'll build a really comprehensive early life history and then try to march this thing forward.
And they'll ask you questions like, did you ever travel out of country?
Did you get some sort of a gut bug while doing that?
So there are some really important pieces, but a well-trained practitioner will rely a lot on the intake and then that will kind of inform where they go with the testing and And so the testing might be a little bit expensive, but you're not just casting around blindly.
Like because of that really thorough intake and kind of understanding the early life history and trying to ferret out if there's ever been like a big event that could be linked back to this health crisis, then they can really dial in the testing.
Then depending on what they get from that, they can make a treatment protocol, try the treatment protocol.
If we have success, then good to go.
If not, then we start modifying from there.
joe rogan
When you say eating foods out of the country and catching some sort of a bacterial infection, that is one of the scariest things in the world to me.
Because I've watched that stupid show too many times.
robb wolf
Oh, right.
joe rogan
What is it, The Enemy Within or something like that?
Yeah.
It's hard to think of your body as being like not just an organism, but a whole ecosystem.
robb wolf
Right.
Right.
And stuff can come in and take up residence and you didn't really want it.
unidentified
Yeah.
robb wolf
I've had Giardia twice.
joe rogan
Oh, really?
robb wolf
And it's bad.
It's bad news.
joe rogan
How'd you get that?
robb wolf
The first time I was snorkeling in Mexico.
joe rogan
Oh, Jesus.
robb wolf
And so everybody in the main snorkeling group was kind of out in the salt water.
And then there was nobody over in this other area.
And so I was like, ah, I'll swim over here.
But apparently...
And there was a...
It was an estuary.
Like, there was a saltwater, freshwater interface.
And so I started swimming in the freshwater.
And then they were like, yeah, you're really not supposed to swim in there because it's water out of a cenote.
joe rogan
What's a cenote?
robb wolf
The underground kind of freshwater springs that come out of the limestone there in the Yucatan.
joe rogan
I interrupted you when you're saying people take a dump in that water.
Oh boy.
robb wolf
Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan
I know you get Giardia from beaver poop.
robb wolf
That is another place, yeah, and I don't know that there are beaver in the Yucatan, but there are some other carriers.
joe rogan
We were in Prince of Wales Island once, about a year and a half ago, two years ago, and it's really high up, and it's above the line where beavers are, and so you could take a water bottle and dip it into a lake.
unidentified
Mm-hmm.
joe rogan
And just drink right out of the lake.
It's so dangerous feeling.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
But they assured us.
They're like, you could absolutely drink right out of that lake.
robb wolf
Oh, man.
That just gives me a little gut rumble even thinking about it.
joe rogan
We had a float plane land on that very lake.
And I'm like, what if that thing's leaking in the lake?
I'm drinking diesel water.
And they're like, there's millions of gallons of water in this lake.
Whatever it is is not going to affect you.
I'm like, it says you.
What if I scoop it right where the thing dropped off its diesel fuel?
I don't know, but it just seems weird that you can do that.
And then it seems even weirder when you think about the fact that you can't do that everywhere.
Right.
Even though a giant percentage of us is water, really you can't drink most water.
robb wolf
Right.
My professor, Loren Cordain, the guy who kind of founded this paleo diet concept, he used to be a lifeguard at Lake Tahoe, you know, 30 years ago, 35 years ago.
And they would jump off the pier, dive down where it was super deep, really cold, open up their water bottle, fill it up, swim back up, drink it.
And you can't do it now because the lake has Giardia in it and a bunch of other weird things.
joe rogan
What happened?
robb wolf
Well, for him, nothing.
joe rogan
No, but what happened to the lake?
robb wolf
More people moving in and just, you know, it's just kind of a volume of poo input at some point kind of overwhelms the natural system.
joe rogan
We suck.
We fucking ruin everything.
Goddamn people.
unidentified
Yeah.
robb wolf
I mean, most indigenous cultures were savvy to the idea that you didn't take a dump in your own water system.
So, yeah.
joe rogan
Well, they knew about parasites for sure.
I mean, that was always the whole idea about not eating pigs.
All the religious...
Excuse me, all the religious rules about not eating pigs was the big part of it was because pigs eat almost everything.
They eat everything that's on the ground, and they would eat something that has trichinosis in it.
People would get really, really sick from eating pigs, so they sort of determined that pigs were evil.
robb wolf
Right, and shellfish, similar.
A good friend of mine, John Durant, did a book called The Paleo Manifesto, and he actually has a really interesting background, has kind of a pretty deep kind of religious studies background.
And he would talk about some of these food prohibitions in different religions and then what we know about it today.
And so things like shellfish, every once in a while we get something like red tide or, you know, the diatom, you know, overgrowth and these filter feeders would pull all this stuff in and then get loaded up with a toxin and it would kill you if you ate it.
And so these food prohibitions really had some pretty good wisdom to them in general.
But then there's also some super goofy things.
But it's pretty common across all cultures.
Like people would, you know, kind of build into their systems these prohibitions against different foods.
And oftentimes because of this kind of bacterial or parasitic deal.
joe rogan
I wonder what like the kosher ones for like milk and meat together.
Like you can't have milk and meat together.
I wonder what that's about.
robb wolf
I would have to ask him about that.
I've never heard anything about that.
And then it's interesting in Islam, then there's not that prohibition.
And I don't know if that was just kind of like a fuck you to the Judeo-Christian deal or what, but yeah.
joe rogan
Now, what about eating fats with complex carbohydrates or fats with sugars?
Does that affect your glucose levels and how it's absorbed by the body?
robb wolf
Yes, but again, like from person to person, it really varies a lot.
So for some people...
You know, if you did something like a white potato and you're going to have a certain blood glucose response from it and you put a good whack of butter or olive oil or something in it, for one group of people, it would actually reduce and spread out the total glucose load.
So your blood sugar wouldn't go as high.
Your total insulin load would be lesser as a consequence.
And then there are other groups of folks that they will see an increase in blood glucose response and a really pronounced increase in insulin response.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And is the amount of fats that are in, like the olive oil and the butter that's in the potato, is it uniform?
Are they measuring it very carefully?
robb wolf
The studies that have been done, they're quite uniform.
Yeah, like they get in and do a pretty good job.
So they're, you know, person eats X amount of carbohydrate, they add X amount of fat, they're kind of standardized for body weight so that you're diluting the glucose about the same amount from person to person.
And so the The best understanding that I've seen out of this is just that there's a pretty good variability from person to person as to how they're going to respond to that.
So it's not always a case where adding fat to a decently dense carbohydrate source is going to buy you anything.
For some people it is an improvement and for other people it's actually more of a problem.
joe rogan
So you'd almost have to do the kind of experiments that you're doing with your wife, where you take the blood levels.
What are you doing?
What time periods are you doing?
robb wolf
For the recommendation, it's called the 7-Day Carb Test.
You do 50 grams of carbs, and that's the net carbs.
So all the fiber is subtracted out.
And so if you're doing something like black beans, it's a huge pile of beans because they have a lot of protein and fiber.
So those things are hard to do.
something white rice or, you know, like gluten-free bread or something would be a lot easier to do.
But you consume that.
You set your timer for when you're done with the meal.
Two hours later, you check your blood glucose.
And for my methods, I'd like to see that two-hour mark probably under 150 milligrams per deciliter for folks, which is pretty conservative.
But when we look at, again, some pre-agricultural people, they tend to have some really, really nice blood glucose responses sometimes.
And again, from this Weitzman paper, what we saw from that is if people control their blood glucose effectively over time, their inflammation drops, their gut microbiome improves.
And so you could have two people that have a very different response to, say, like rice or potatoes or something.
And one person, like my wife, it's kind of crazy.
She can just crush this stuff, and she does great.
And interestingly, she can eat a ketogenic diet and do great.
She can switch whatever fuel she wants to eat, and she does fine with that.
But if we keep that gut microbiome or the blood glucose response I don't know exactly what is wrong with me, but I don't handle carbs that well.
If I eat in a way that my blood glucose response looks like my wife, then my blood lipids look good.
My gut is healthier.
Everything else pulls into a good spot.
So even if you're not You know, from that genetically talented side of things, if you can make your blood glucose response look like that genetically talented person, then you should get most of the metabolic benefits.
You don't have as much latitude in your day-to-day eating, but I mean, you know, not everybody can flat-foot dunk a basketball or something, so you just have to take what you get, yeah.
joe rogan
That's interesting.
So you just have to kind of figure out what it is that your body requires, and the main goal is staying inside these parameters.
robb wolf
Right, right.
And, you know, it's a tough thing for someone like me who, you know, like, I love the paleo diet.
I love that basic concept.
And I don't, in general, if you throw out the following, you say, most people should eat whole, unprocessed foods.
Not a lot of contention there.
But when you get a little bit granular with that, whole unprocessed foods could be beans, it could be potatoes, it could be sweet potatoes.
And for me, it's interesting.
Lentils, I do great with.
I can do a lot of lentils, do a decent amount of carbohydrate from lentils.
My blood glucose response is great.
If I do rice, white potatoes, sweet potatoes are better, but the rice and white potatoes, I look like a diabetic after eating that stuff.
So...
Even though that general recommendation of eat whole, unprocessed foods is generally spot on, there's still a lot of details and granularity in that.
You could be following a whole food diet, and for you, because of your genetics or the epigenetics, like your gut or maybe taking antibiotics in the past, you still may need to be really careful about the amounts and types of carbohydrates that you eat.
joe rogan
That's crazy, taking antibiotics in the past can affect you that far in the future.
How much of an effect, like time-wise?
robb wolf
Well, so there's two levels to this, in my opinion.
The one level is the gut microbiome.
There's another level to it.
Certain antibiotics, the way that they work, they interrupt the transcription and activity of the ribosomes in Bacteria.
But our mitochondria are effectively a bacteria, like they have bacterial DNA and ribosomes.
And even though in general, like mainstream medicine says that antibiotics don't affect mitochondrial function, there's some pretty good papers that suggest that antibiotics can disrupt and damage mitochondrial function.
And when your mitochondria get sick, you die.
Like this is so much of what Rhonda Patrick Talks about with, you know, the benefits of fasting and having really good micronutrient density and whatnot.
And, you know, Tim Ferriss pinged me a question about why has Lyme disease gotten so much worse for people?
You know, used to it was kind of like catching a cold.
You know, he lived in upstate New York.
Everybody seemed to get it.
It wasn't something that would cripple people over the long haul.
And now you're seeing a lot of long-term problems, but my question was, is it really the Lyme disease or is it the damage to the mitochondria from being on antibiotics long-term?
Because the Lyme disease requires a really long treatment protocol with antibiotics.
joe rogan
That's fascinating, but isn't it even worse for people that go misdiagnosed?
And so they don't get on the antibiotics for a long time and the Lyme disease gets deep, deep, deep into their system.
robb wolf
Yeah, honestly, I don't know much on that side.
I've been looking so much at this kind of mitochondrial dysfunction side, I can't really comment much on the long-term untreated Lyme disease.
joe rogan
Lyme disease is a scary thing because there's so many ticks that have it now.
I mean, I was talking to some people this weekend and they were like, yeah, my mom's got it, my dad's got it, I got it.
How many goddamn people are getting lit up by these ticks?
And catching this little freaky disease.
And where was it 20, 30 years ago?
robb wolf
You know, it's funny.
NPR just had a piece on this, and it was some of the modern farming practices has killed off the predators that would normally knock the tick population down.
joe rogan
Like what?
robb wolf
I forget, you know, I literally just kind of scanned it, but somebody that commented on there like, oh yeah, this is why we have free-range chickens on our property to basically keep the tick population down.
But part of what is suppressing that is that the free-range chickens are eating mice and stuff.
So the mice are a vector that allows the ticks to grow and populate.
Right.
You know, I just scanned this thing, but it was interesting, but it was suggesting that the kind of monocropping process of what we've done with modern agriculture has created this gap where we now have pests, like mammalian pests, like mice and moles, that are a vector for the ticks, and so they've just got more surface area, more real estate that they can live on, and so their population has grown.
joe rogan
That's a really important factor for people that don't like coyotes.
Like, there's a lot of people that are very angry that coyotes say, the coyote ate my dog.
Like, I understand, and it is terrible.
However, the coyote also eats every rat that you can find, and that's one of the reasons why rats aren't everywhere.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And if you go to New York City, you see very few coyotes and a fuckload of rats.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And what would you rather have?
I think I'd rather have a few coyotes every now and then, an occasional lost cat than fucking Black Plague running through your neighborhood in the suburbs.
robb wolf
It's true, but they have eaten three of my cats in Reno, so I do smoke a coyote every once in a while.
unidentified
Do you?
joe rogan
How do you get them?
robb wolf
Archery or with a suppressed rifle out of my back door.
joe rogan
Do you know that when you kill coyotes, you actually increase the population?
robb wolf
I know.
joe rogan
Yeah.
robb wolf
It's really counterintuitive.
You cut its head off, and yeah, I know, but...
joe rogan
It's the reason why there's coyotes in every single state.
And we have a podcast coming up with a guy named Dan Flores, who wrote a book called Coyote America that I read.
It's fucking amazing.
But coyotes, when they yell out what they're doing, like...
All that stuff is they're doing roll call.
And they all chime in and when one is missing, it triggers a response in the female to produce more cubs.
robb wolf
Interesting.
joe rogan
So in healthy conditions, when they're not being pressured, the female will produce like three or four cubs.
But when they're being pressured, they'll produce like a dozen or more.
robb wolf
It's crazy.
joe rogan
And they spread out, too.
They'll change their area.
robb wolf
Humans will be long gone, and coyotes and cockroaches will still be here.
They will inherit the earth.
joe rogan
Well, it's also amazing how many Native American myths and stories evolved about the coyote.
And about how the coyote was this sort of god that was kind of watching over everything and was responsible for creation and a lot of other things.
It's really weird.
It's a freaky, smart little animal.
And it is a wolf, too, by the way.
robb wolf
Yeah.
So I had read some stuff about the coy wolf where the wolf populations have been really pushed back.
And so they started crossbreeding with coyotes.
And so now where coyotes were maybe about like 25, 30 pounds, now they'll be 70 or 80 pounds and they hunt in packs.
And so they've got these characteristics of wolves and coyotes.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
There's quite a few of them, but one of the things that's important is that coyotes, when a coyote and a wolf breed, they're basically the same animal.
So even though there's variations in the way they behave, particularly in that coyotes can hunt alone and they can hunt in packs, whereas wolves almost exclusively hunt in packs.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
They share DNA, so when they have babies, they're viable.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
So it's not like a hybrid.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
They're basically the same animal.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's really weird.
They're everywhere.
Apparently they're having a real issue with them in New York City.
They have them in Central Park, they have them in Queens.
robb wolf
Yeah, the urban areas are some of the most vibrant locations for these coyotes.
Yeah, I mean, they just crush like...
The pet population.
If you let your pets out at night, it's Russian roulette with that.
joe rogan
It's even in the day, man.
I have chickens, and one of my chickens got stolen by a coyote, and I watched him hop the fence within his mouth, and I was like, wow.
It turned out her mouth.
It turned out she was a female, and she had cubs.
robb wolf
Oh, wow.
joe rogan
Yeah, and I was trying to figure out what to do.
I just kind of let it alone.
I was going to kill her.
I was going to figure out a way to kill her, but then I thought, well, if I kill her, Part of it, I don't want the babies to grow up and kill my chickens more, but then the other thing is I don't want to stop a mother from feeding their babies.
I felt like I fucked up.
I didn't secure the yard enough.
It was my fault.
There's a game being played, and the game is stay alive, and the chickens are playing a way easier version of stay alive than the coyote is.
So I felt like I had to give her that point.
Like, alright, you got that one.
It's on the board.
Don't eat my fucking dog.
I'll kill you all.
That's where it crosses the line.
My appreciation and love for my chickens is a one-thousandth of my cat.
You know what I mean?
It's just different.
robb wolf
Well, my wife convinced me to get a Rhodesian Ridgeback for a dog.
And he's a great dog.
He's about 105 pounds and like 2% body fat and I wouldn't want him getting mixed up in a pack of coyotes, but I think he could probably hold his own for a good bit if something went down.
joe rogan
Coyotes are sneaky, though.
One of them will come out and they'll taunt him, and then they'll chase him, and then the other ones will ambush him.
robb wolf
Or if the female coyote is fertile at that point, and they're pumping out the pheromones, it'll lure the dog away, and they're like, yeah, you didn't get any action, and we're going to eat you.
joe rogan
There's a great story that this guy told me who worked at my pet food store.
And he also works as a nurse in a veterinary office.
And they brought this pit bull.
And it was one of those freak pit bulls that people breed and get it to like 120 pounds.
Have you ever seen those?
There's a company called Land of the Giants.
I think they're in Massachusetts.
And they make these pit bulls that look like bodybuilders.
They don't even look real.
Anyway, this guy had a pit bull like that, and they brought it into the vet's office, and it was just covered in massive cuts.
It required something in the range of a thousand-plus stitches all over its body.
And they're like, what happened?
He goes, I don't know.
The dog got out of the yard, and he's just covered in cuts.
They figured maybe it was a dogfight or something.
They didn't know.
But there was just a trail of blood that led from his house up into the hills.
Where he found nine dead coyotes.
robb wolf
Holy smokes.
joe rogan
Yeah.
So they just laid a trap for him, and he just fucked them all up.
Like, what a huge mistake!
He brought this freak, this Brock Lesnar pitbull into our midst, and he just mauled them all.
robb wolf
And the whole family is gone now, yeah.
joe rogan
Everyone's dead.
He killed them all.
He tore them apart.
Like, and they, apparently, they just kept fighting.
I don't know what happened, but he said it was spread out.
You know, the carnage was spread out over several yards.
But this pit bull just went to town.
robb wolf
Pit bulls are, I mean, they're just amazing animals.
I mean, they are incredibly strong.
That jaw power is just off the hook.
They're really smart.
So yeah, that would be a handful, especially if it's like 130 pounds and jacked.
joe rogan
They say that the thing about the pit bull is that it's not worried about dying the way a coyote is.
Like coyotes, because no one's feeding them, their whole thing is like stay alive, survive, you know, attack and kill something, but don't fight to the death.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Whereas a pit bull is essentially bred to fight to the death.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
And the ones that didn't, they were removed from the breeding population.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Is like that Michael Vick story where the ones that would quit or the ones that would turn, that wouldn't engage in the fight, they would kill them and torture them.
It was horrible, horrible, horrible stuff.
But because of that really nasty, cruel, vicious way of approaching the dog breeding, what they get is this bloodline of ferocious warriors that just have no fear of death.
And when you get one that's 120 pounds like that, like, fuck, man.
What a giant mistake.
I don't know if it was 120 pounds.
I might be making that number up.
It's huge.
Huge pit bull.
robb wolf
I mean, pit bulls are supposed to run like 60 pounds, I think, at the upper end.
So when you start doubling that, that's a lot of dog.
joe rogan
Well, the real fighter ones are 35 pounds.
robb wolf
Okay.
joe rogan
And when they fight them, they're small.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Like when people have this idea of a pit bull in their eyes, they have this idea of a guard dog.
But it's not really...
The ones that they fight, they're really not that big.
Right.
Their physical muscles aren't that big.
Because really, it's all about...
Having the endurance and having the gameness to attack and kill.
Pull up this website, Land of the Giants.
Land of the Giants Pit Bulls.
Because, like, a friend of mine sent it to me.
I was like, what in the fuck is this?
Like, they've just figured out a way to do the same thing that the poultry industry has done.
Just breed bigger and bigger chickens until you have this freak chicken that can barely walk.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
These guys have done that with pit bulls, where it's just like, it looks like they're breeding it with, like, something else, but it's really just taking the biggest one.
robb wolf
Or maybe some anivar in the puppy chow or something like that.
joe rogan
Can you do that?
Would that work?
I wonder if people have done that, like inject steroids in your dog.
robb wolf
I guarantee you somebody's done that.
joe rogan
Oh, yeah.
I'm sure, right?
Yeah.
Pit bulls have an incredible bite, but what's really crazy is that a wolf has a bite that's five times stronger than a pit bull.
robb wolf
Really?
joe rogan
Yeah.
A wolf has a bite that's, I think it's 2,500 pounds per square inch versus 500 for the pit bull.
Look at that thing.
jamie vernon
This isn't quite the same one, but these are big blue giants.
joe rogan
What the fuck is that?
Look at the size of these things.
That is so ridiculous.
robb wolf
That's a lot of dog.
joe rogan
It's such a ridiculous dog.
Did you see that Land of the Giants website?
Did you find it?
jamie vernon
I typed it in and just like a Facebook page popped up.
joe rogan
Oh, really?
Maybe they went under.
robb wolf
There's a bunch of forums asking about them.
joe rogan
They might have went under.
Who knows what they did.
robb wolf
The DEA raided them.
joe rogan
Yeah, who knows?
Yeah.
It's really crazy that all these dogs, whether it's a Chihuahua or an English Bulldog, all of them came from wolves.
unidentified
Came from wolves.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
I'm like, what?
robb wolf
My four-year-old daughter asked me about that.
She's like, Dad, weren't all dogs from wolves?
And I'm like, yeah.
And she's like, how?
How does that work?
And I'm trying to explain genetics and genetic variability and everything.
If you can explain something to a kid, then you've got a pretty good grasp on it.
I think that she kind of got the gist of it.
joe rogan
The way I tried to explain it to someone was that it's it's kind of like people because people you know you have like Bridget the Midget and then you get Shaquille O'Neal.
They're both people.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
But you know one of them obviously has a genetic disorder but you could sort of breed for that genetic disorder.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And well the guy like Shaquille O'Neal like me and Shaquille O'Neal are in the same species.
Like how is that even possible.
You know, like, they look so different.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And that's sort of like dogs, that we, by preference and breeding and, you know, and I guess geography as well, that's a huge factor as well.
unidentified
Right.
robb wolf
But it is interesting, like, the wolf, coyotes, I guess, like, dingoes, like, there's a real uniformity there.
Like, nature ended up pushing some things where they've got this kind of snoutiness and they've got good hearing and good smell, but not like a hound dog, which has better smell, you know, it's interesting.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
There's also interesting genetic variabilities in terms of what kind of temperature their body has to be involved.
Like, for certain mammals, when they grow farther north, they become much, much larger.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Like, white-tailed deer in, like, Alberta can get to around 300 pounds, whereas in Texas, they're only, like, 100 pounds.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Like, maybe 150 is, like, a big deer, you know?
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
It's fascinating that their body just decides that, look, the best way to stay warm is to be enormous.
robb wolf
Right.
And they get more round and shorter limbs and all that stuff.
joe rogan
Whereas polar bears are some of the largest bears.
Sure.
Or Kodiak, Alaska bears, which is sort of a perfect example.
Because in Kodiak Island, those brown bears have access to massive amounts of protein in salmon and beached whales and deer and fawns and things like that.
Because they're just such a genetic...
They're such a genetically powerful creature as is, a brown bear, but then you give them all this massive amounts of protein and incredible food, and then on top of that, it's freezing fucking cold.
So they just become these enormous behemoths.
robb wolf
Right, right.
joe rogan
Yeah.
unidentified
Did you see what came out about dinosaurs today?
You were just talking about the wolves.
joe rogan
Dinosaurs aren't real, bro.
Didn't you watch that podcast?
robb wolf
It's not about that.
jamie vernon
Some scientist did a bunch of research.
He did like three years of research on himself or on his own.
He said he went into museums and was studying the bone fragments and he put all of his information into a computer program and after five minutes it spit out something that said that like All of the two major dinosaur family trees are different.
This little sum is up here.
This is something like telling you that neither cats nor dogs are what you thought they were, and some of the animals you call cats are actually dogs.
robb wolf
This is what Discovery is sort of like.
unidentified
Oh, that it's like that.
joe rogan
It's like that, yeah.
Oh, okay.
So for a dummy like me that doesn't know much about dinosaurs, theropods, all of them, the classic tree, interesting.
So what are they saying, though?
robb wolf
Where they're from might be different.
jamie vernon
They thought this particular kind came from South America before, and now it might have come from Norway.
joe rogan
Dinosaurs came from Norway?
robb wolf
Yeah, that's one of the things it's saying.
jamie vernon
This is one guy, and this news hit the waves today.
It's making big headlines all over about what does this information mean.
I was just thinking, as you guys were saying that about wolves, what if they find out next week that all dogs didn't come from wolves and they came from cats or something?
unidentified
Wow.
joe rogan
Wow.
How strange.
robb wolf
Yeah, super strange.
jamie vernon
Their diets are a little different.
They had some real small ones that had different kinds of teeth that proved that they were omnivores and not necessarily like carnivores or herbivores or whatever.
robb wolf
And that's a good...
Lesson in like all science should have a sign hung on it that says good until further notice.
And you don't like turn it into religious doctrine and assume that it's 100% factual.
You know, we create models and hopefully those models help us kind of predict and model the world.
But, you know, when you get better, newer information, you may have to scuttle that whole thing.
joe rogan
Yeah, there was an article that I tweeted, and then a follow-up article earlier today, or last night rather, about scientific journals, about some scandals that are emerging from scientific journals, where scientific journals are essentially operating on a pay-to-play basis, and some of them, they're publishing these things without really vetting the information that's inside the papers.
And it just seems like any time money gets involved in stuff, people become assholes.
Sting Operation Reveals Science's Insane Fake News Problem.
I love the term fake news.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
It's just such an anti-intellectual.
It's so anti-intellectual, you know, like fake news.
It's fake.
Like when Donald Trump says that you are fake news, like how are you allowed, like there should be like a list of things that would disqualify you from being the president.
Like as soon as you say that, you're like, okay, did you say that?
Yeah?
Okay, you got it.
You got to step down.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
You can't call CNN fake news.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
You are fake news.
No, they are the news.
You might think they're biased.
You might think that you might be able to point out some inaccuracies and make them, you know, make printer retraction.
But yet calling them fake news, like that just that term that anyone can use and it's such a small mouth noise to make.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Fake news.
Fake news!
And you say it.
Yeah, next.
Like, whoa, buddy.
You're fucking with the entire information process.
Because of your own power and the inconvenience of someone telling you challenging things, you're fucking with the entire process of getting information to people.
Right.
robb wolf
This last election cycle was really interesting.
That's a good way of putting it.
Man, I don't know.
It would be, I think, kind of cool to be 50 years down the road and look back at how all this plays out.
I don't know that it's going to be great living through it.
I have these thoughts that there's going to be the great North American states at some point.
The U.S. is like five different sub-countries after some horrific thing goes down.
But people are so...
entrenched in their ideology.
And it's just, it's virtually impossible to get somebody on the opposite side of a fence to have a discussion about anything and any meeting of the minds.
And it's interesting to me, I really think social media has kind of facilitated this.
Historically, you had like print paper for, you know, maybe a couple of hundred years and people would have, you know, community gatherings and they would talk about different topics.
But that meeting in person and the potential of pissing somebody off and having them like try to beat you to death or vice versa, there's a certain civility that occurs with that.
And within social media, you get those same deep held beliefs, but then you don't have the ramification of somebody wanting to kick the shit out of you if you, you know, start upping the ante on something.
And so like the discourse is just crazy.
Like, Like, there's just no discussion.
There's no middle ground.
There's no understanding.
And this last election cycle was really crazy.
And, like, it kind of broke me in some ways.
Like, I am way less inclined to invest in much of anything now.
Whereas before, I would kind of bleed a little bit for some social causes and trying to put some thoughts out about something.
It was just kind of like, fuck it.
I just don't care anymore.
joe rogan
Well, there are a lot of people that invest tremendous amount of time, a tremendous amount of time just engaging with people and fighting and arguing and insulting and attacking people online.
And I have gone to a bunch of different Twitter pages where I go, how many hours is this guy on?
And then I like check to see like, when does he start his tweets?
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And there's people that are tweeting 12 hours a day.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And it's all mean, nasty, attack shit.
Like some mentally ill person has a computer and nothing's preventing them from just going after people and trolling people and attacking people.
What disturbs me is not just that, but also this natural human tendency that we seem to have where you have an idea in your head and then that idea is not just an idea, but it's your idea.
And you have to defend that idea, even if it's a preposterous idea like the Earth is flat.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
And what you find out is that these people form groups, and other people who have also sort of adopted this preposterous idea and refuse to look at all at any evidence that points that that's a silly idea, and instead they dig their heels in and get confirmation bias from all these other people, and then they form these social media groups, Facebook groups, they go to websites, they get on web forums, and they start interacting with each other, and exclusively interacting with each other, and then Also, enforcing each other's beliefs.
Great job, man!
Good job attacking those shills!
Do you know if you think the Earth is round, you are a globetard?
That's the newest.
Jamie literally cringed.
Took him.
He had to step back, blink his eyes.
Yeah, you're a globetard.
That whole thing is because these people, someone said something that someone went...
People love to find secrets.
They love, like, this dinosaur thing is cool because it seems to be real.
robb wolf
Did you see the gal that said that all the fossils were basically people doing, like, kind of Michelangelo deal and chiseling them out of rock?
Because the fossils came out of Iraq, oh, you got...
And she actually...
joe rogan
What?
robb wolf
She has some pretty nice boobs, too.
unidentified
Does she?
robb wolf
Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan
Maybe that's why people are listening.
She's like, I've got a platform.
No, you've got tits.
robb wolf
It's really good.
I mean, so she's basically like, okay, so these things come out of rocks.
And so these anthropologists, because there's millions of dollars in anthropology or archaeology, they're just chiseling these bones out of rock.
And yeah, here we go.
joe rogan
Is that her?
unidentified
About fossils that are found in the ground.
joe rogan
What's that?
You don't want to play it?
robb wolf
I mean, it's against dinosaurs.
joe rogan
We need to play some of this.
unidentified
Okay.
The composition and what they end up being when everything is said and done.
So a fossil is not actually a piece of bone.
A fossil is actually a bone that was once in the ground that has been then filled with Limestone, calcium, and other kind of stone-like deposits over the course of many, many years.
joe rogan
What's going on with her left eye?
Is that a patch?
unidentified
And at the end of the day, it ends up looking like a ball.
joe rogan
I know.
unidentified
Glass eye.
joe rogan
Like, why is she doing that?
robb wolf
It's really rock inside of rock.
joe rogan
Push your fucking hair out of your eyes.
unidentified
So, you have a rock this big.
And you say, okay, inside this rock this big, there's a bunch of fossils.
Here you go.
joe rogan
Okay.
unidentified
And you hand the rock off to a paleontologist.
And the paleontologist takes a little mallet and they chip away at it and...
At some point they come out with something looking like a bum.
joe rogan
This is a problem.
Hold on.
This is a problem.
Just pause that.
The problem is some fucking idiot like this gets to talk about a subject that she's not educated in and no one is over her shoulder going, eh, that's not true.
Eh, that's not true.
And here's the thing to people that, you know, someone out there who buys into a lot of this stupid shit, you must be an expert in something.
You know, think about what you do for a living.
You know, like, think...
Here's a perfect example.
Like, if someone tried to tell me that...
Like, a lot of these chi-touch martial arts guys are too deadly to fight in the UFC. And if they make a video, they make a video about this, and I'm not there while they're making this video, so I can't talk to them, like, and stop them and pause them and go, nope, that's not true.
Nope, that's not, nope, that's not correct.
Nope, no, here's actually what happens when you get knocked out.
No, it is not a fucking chi-dispersion or dispersion technique.
You're not really interrupting the chakras flow.
No, it's a fucking concussion, stupid, and we can measure concussions.
We know about all the different variables in the blood when you can prove.
There's some new tests that I wanted to get into as well.
There's an institute now that's checking concussions, and they're doing blood tests on people to find out about concussions that they've had in the past and how those concussions have healed.
Obviously, I'm deviating from the path, but the point is, I know a lot about martial arts.
So if someone wants to do a video about martial arts, well, I am an actual martial arts expert, and I can talk to you about what you're saying that's incorrect.
I know about the history of it.
I know what works and why it works.
I know about torque and leverage and all these different variables.
But you could make a video without me being there, and you could ramble on, or not even me, any martial arts expert, and you could ramble on, and if someone doesn't know, they watch that, and they go, wow, that guy's dropping some truth bombs.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
This is amazing.
robb wolf
You know, I don't know if you saw this, but Matt Thornton, he's the Straight Blast GM founder, really brilliant guy, and they put together this...
I forget who it was, but it's kind of a philosophy department, and they put together this kind of white sheet on using Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in particular as a means of teaching critical thinking to students.
Because there's this really testable, verifiable process.
Does it work or does it not work?
And you can define what working means versus this kind of like, you know, chi, dim, mock, death, touch type stuff.
And so they've actually developed this curriculum around using this physical process of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and I think also mixed martial arts in general, but specifically jiu-jitsu as a means of teaching critical thinking skills.
And it's a...
I'll noodle on what the search terms for it would be, but it's really interesting.
It's something that I think helps pull this stuff together because you've got that kinesthetic element of people being able to feel.
Okay, you know, somebody gets mounted onto you.
Can you get them off?
No.
Well, look at this 110-pound chick.
She can dismount this person because she's using these techniques of leverage and balance and timing and all that stuff.
And so then you can throw these things out about, is this a verifiable process?
Yes or no?
And it is.
And so then you start laying the foundation of being able to create a good critical thinking process.
joe rogan
One of the things that I really love about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in particular is that it seems to be a study in variable absolutes.
Meaning that there's so many variables involved in like two people engaging with each other.
Say if two people are blue belts and they engage with each other and one person dominates that person with superior technique and knowledge and gets the tap over and over again.
You could take that same person who dominated that person and then put him in there with a guy like Jacare.
And he would just get manhandled, and it would look like he knows virtually nothing about Jiu Jitsu.
Because one person's, the variables, the understanding of all the complexities of the techniques, they have mastered them, and they have also built their body to a much stronger physical unit.
So all these are variables, but the absolute is getting the arm bar, getting the choke, putting someone to sleep with the choke.
Like those things are absolutes.
Like when you tap out, If you're not just like a person who gets scared really quick and taps out for no reason, which does happen, but you're thinking about someone who has some experience.
When you're tapping out, you're essentially saying, you've got me into this absolute position.
I'm at the point of death or massive injury, knees tearing apart, arms breaking.
So...
In doing those you encounter these variable absolutes in a way that is really kind of uncommon in our world outside of fucking car accidents and someone hitting you over the head with a baseball bat.
And you encounter the consequences of actions and movements in a way that sort of makes you really appreciate The overall variables of life and how important it is to take care of your health.
How important it is to know what you're talking about.
You know, if fighting, I always try to talk about fighting as if it's a language.
And if one person has like one word they yell at you, and they're like really good at going, shut the fuck up!
Like one expression.
Like that might work with some people.
It's not going to work with someone who's got a really good grasp of the English language.
Shut the fuck up.
And why should I shut the fuck up?
Because you would like that?
Why would you like that?
Because you're too stupid to have a conversation about something you don't know what you're talking about?
And that person's like...
It's really like drowning, which is the same way you would feel if Damien Maia was on top of you trying to choke you.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
It's a lot like a language.
Like you don't have enough variables to respond to this particular thing.
And then there's also the strength factor and all those other factors.
I think it teaches you critical thinking in a way that is almost unavailable outside of like...
War and, like, real physical trauma.
Because the beautiful thing about jiu-jitsu is, although you can get injured, most of it is pretty safe.
robb wolf
Right, compared to boxing or kickboxing.
Yeah, you've got a much more forgivable kind of margin of error on that.
joe rogan
Yeah, much more.
And I think the environment that it establishes, that it creates, and the way that effect that it has on your mind, where it's forcing you into these extreme problem situations and solving those problems, then understanding, where did that go wrong?
What can I do to my body to maybe strengthen myself so that I can stop that from happening?
Or maybe understand the position.
So two steps ahead, I recognize that if I go left, I run into that.
And if I go right, I run into this.
What I need to do is be patient, use my hips, hip escape, do this, do that.
And those variables and understanding those variables and having that database in your mind and recognizing that there's analogies that you could make in all sorts of avenues in life that where that would be greatly beneficial.
robb wolf
Well, and again, just another hat tip to Matt Thornton.
Like, he's just made this point that these alive arts, whether it's wrestling or boxing or Thai boxing, jujitsu, judo, there's kind of an authenticity with that.
You really can't bullshit.
It's kind of like, can you speak Spanish?
Okay, well, let's have a conversation in Spanish.
Let's read a Spanish newspaper and tell me what was going on with it.
Can you swim?
You know, Sam Harris, I think he wrote that piece, you know, Jiu-Jitsu was like drowning.
For a non-swimmer looking at someone treading water, it looks inconsequential, and you throw them in the water and they're going to die.
And so there's a real authenticity there that when you get in and do that, compared to some of the fantasy martial arts where there's an assumption that just going through some sort of paces is going to get you somewhere.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that it does.
And so there's this whole great feedback loop, and it crushes your ego.
And you have to really stay grounded if you're going to maintain through that process.
But it has so much value with every other facet of your life.
It's fascinating.
joe rogan
Yeah, if you can keep from being injured.
And I think one of the things that really helps to keep from being injured is I think it's very critical to strengthen the body.
And I think there's a lot of people that don't like to do that.
They just like to train.
And I was guilty of that for quite a while until I just mounted up a series of injuries that I almost couldn't deny anymore.
Particularly back injuries, but strengthening the body and sort of strengthening the overall structure in which you engage in these sort of things, meaning not just like strengthening the body by lifting weights and doing squats, but also by yoga, also by...
Doing really unusual exercises like kettlebell windmills and stuff like that really puts a very bizarre load on the spine in weird ways and it really strengthens the core in a substantial manner that allows you to deal with the pressure of certain positions without succumbing to the attempt by your opponent.
robb wolf
Right.
You know, it's an interesting topic because you have someone like Marcelo Garcia that he's like, I just roll.
And clearly that works.
joe rogan
Yeah, but he's injured now.
robb wolf
Is he injured now?
joe rogan
Yeah, I mean, he's definitely, you can just roll.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
You definitely can do it.
robb wolf
Until you can't.
joe rogan
Yeah, as good as technical as him.
He also has weird genetics.
Like, if you look at Marcelo's body, his legs look like a man who weighs 300 pounds.
unidentified
Right.
robb wolf
I mean, he has cankles.
joe rogan
Yeah.
robb wolf
Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan
Giant calves, giant legs.
And that's one of the reasons why he's so good at controlling the back.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Is he's using his legs and smashing you with these huge legs.
robb wolf
Well, let me ask you about that.
Like, I've been a big fan, again, of kind of this straight blast gym stuff of, you know, like, non-attribute-based training.
Like, how do you break that up?
So, like, if you're flexible or you're explosive or what have you, how much of that do you rely on versus trying to develop this stuff where you've got a game that you could do whether you're 40 years old or 80 years old?
Like, how do you play back and forth with that to, you know, optimize that process?
joe rogan
That's a real good question, and I think a good study is Roy Jones Jr. And Roy Jones Jr., in his prime, was probably the most attribute-based fighter of all time, with substantial attributes.
His speed and his style, the movement in which he used inside the ring, was really very difficult for people to handle.
But as soon as that went away, his physical attributes sort of started to deteriorate.
His career declined substantially.
He went from being the best in the world to two years later people wanted him to retire.
And there's a bunch of variables that could have happened in that effect.
I think some manipulation of hormones.
I'm just speculating, but I believe steroids are probably involved in him moving up from light heavyweight to heavyweight, where he beat John Ruiz for the heavyweight title and was jacked at 200 pounds, shredded.
And then went down and fought Antonio Tarver and looked listless and soft and didn't look as fast.
And I think a lot of that was his body responding to the fact that his hormone levels were off.
And I don't know if he was checking that stuff and I bet he probably wasn't.
I bet he just had lost too much weight and dehydrated himself too much getting down to that 175 pound limit again.
So Tarver knocked him out and then Glenn Johnson knocked him out after the Tarver fight and it was bad.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
I think that when Roy was in his prime, though, he did some things that were so hard to handle, so unconventional because of his ridiculous speed.
Like, very rarely did he throw the jab.
Instead, he would throw a lead hook.
He would throw a lead hook and it was as fast as a jab, but it would knock people the fuck out.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
You know, he would just leap in on you and plop, and you'd see guys get hit, and then boom, the right hand would be behind it.
He was so fucking fast.
So when he was young, he beat Bernard Hopkins, and he beat him pretty handily.
When he was older, Bernard Hopkins beat him, and beat him pretty handily.
And Bernard Hopkins was always older than him.
So when he was young, Bernard Hopkins, who had that very defensive-based style, keeps his hands up very high, very technical, couldn't deal with the speed of Roy Jones Jr. He just was ridiculous.
But as soon as Roy lost a step in his speed, then his style's not really the best style.
The best style is the most technical style.
And you can do that most technical style with extreme attributes.
So I would agree with them that the best thing to learn is the proper way.
Learning all the techniques, like learning good defensive posture, good hands up when you're throwing strikes, good movement and footwork, and not just relying on freak athleticism.
I think it's probably the best way to attack it.
robb wolf
What do you think about the really grip-dependent games, you know, like all the Spider Guard and all that stuff?
Like, I see these guys doing really amazing stuff, but it seems like their hands are broken in a pretty young age.
And, I mean, maybe that's something that you burn just because you've got a competitive career and then you've got to kind of shift games.
But then you have someone like Kron who really...
He has an interesting open guard game where it's a lot of collar control and stuff like that, and he's not getting in and doing spider guard and inversions and whatnot.
And you could argue he's maybe not as successful as a lot of other people in that really competitive circuit, but he also seems to be motoring along pretty well, reasonably injury-free and still has a very powerful game.
joe rogan
Well, he has an incredibly powerful game.
You also have to think, well, his dad is the greatest jiu-jitsu player of all time that had to play a factor.
Although he didn't really train much with his dad, which is kind of unusual.
He doesn't have that...
He doesn't...
His dad, and when I say the basics, when I mean the basics, I don't mean like it's a simple game.
His game's very complex.
But he doesn't do any weird sort of De La Riva stuff or weird spider guard stuff.
His game is basically the same kind of jiu-jitsu you used to see in 1994 when Hickson was the king.
But...
It's just super tuned in and high level and razor sharp.
One of his best submissions is the guillotine.
Another best submission is the rear naked choke.
And if he gets you in those positions, you're fucksville.
And it's really just that his technique is so fucking sharp, and there's levels to that sharpness of technique.
There's some guys that just have a technique that is so goddamn sharp it's impossible to avoid.
Like on a lower level, but there's a guy named Paul Sass who used to compete in the UFC who used to fucking triangle everybody.
He won something like nine or ten matches by triangle.
It was ridiculous.
He just would pull guard and then you'd be fucked.
He would just figure out a way to wrap your neck and arm around his legs, squeeze the shit out of you, and next thing you know you're tapping or you're blacked out.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And people knew what he would do.
They knew that that was his game, and they would still get caught in a triangle.
It's like, what the fuck?
It's because his technique was so razor sharp.
So I think there's a lot of people that get caught up in those grabbing games, those grip-dependent games.
And maybe they would go, well, let me try it on you.
I'll fuck you up with it.
And maybe they would fuck me up with it.
But I honestly believe that...
The best jujitsu is jujitsu that you can do with a gi or without a gi.
And a lot of those guys, where they get into MMA, they don't have any handles to grab.
And so no-gi jujitsu is much more like Greco-Roman wrestling, whereas Eddie Bravo and his Tenth Planet jujitsu system, what he's done is sort of incorporate much more no-gi, like Greco-Roman control.
And you can do that.
I still roll with the gi, but when I do gi I very rarely grab the gi.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Everything I'm doing is like under hooks, over hooks, I'm getting gable grips, and I'm using no-gi techniques with the gi.
So, for me, what I like about the gi is defensively, I can't fuck around.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Like, I can't just yank out of arm bars and shit.
Like, if you're in there with a good guy and he's got you in his guard and there's a gi, there's so much friction that you have to really be careful.
But I think offensively, you have to be very careful to not use that gi.
Right.
The good thing about learning how to use the gi is, like, say if you get in a fight with someone and they have a winter coat on, they're fucking dead.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
You know, some guy, some drunk wants to kick your ass, and you just get your hand inside his collar, and they're like, oh, look at you, you're a dead man.
You don't even know you're dead.
Like, if you get a guy who's, like, got a good Ezekiel choke or something like that, and he gets a hold of you, and he's on top of you, and he gets his own collar and wraps around, chokes you to death with his own arms, you know, it's...
robb wolf
That's good stuff.
joe rogan
Yeah, like a judo player.
If someone like Jimmy Pedro gets a hold of your leather jacket, you're fucked, man.
He's going to hit you with the world.
Essentially, when someone's throwing you on the ground like a real world-class judoka, they're hitting you in the head with the world.
They're going to throw you on your head.
You're going to go unconscious.
robb wolf
Have you guys had Henry Akin on?
joe rogan
No, I haven't.
robb wolf
Henry's amazing.
joe rogan
Such a good guy.
He's a black belt under Hickson as well.
I know Henry very well.
Hickson's black belts, there's a few black belts like, whoa, you got a Henzo Gracie black belt?
That's fucking legit.
There's a few of those like that, and Hickson is one of the most legit of those.
robb wolf
Right, yeah.
Henry's just a great guy, and his game is really interesting.
The Gi and the Nogi game are virtually identical.
I mean, you do a little collar stuff for the collar chokes and whatnot, but otherwise, it's...
It's just completely uniform from gi to no gi.
And so it's interesting for me, too, being 45 and trying to motor through this stuff, and I'm really not that bright of a person.
It's like, I need transferable job skills.
Like, I want to learn something once and not need a million nuances for things.
joe rogan
Do you know how many dummies right now are listening to this going, you're not bright?
What am I? Am I a fucking chimp?
Shit!
He's not bright?
unidentified
Fuck!
robb wolf
Could be.
Could be.
joe rogan
Now, what are you doing to regulate your hormones or check your hormones?
robb wolf
I check them about yearly.
And the main deal with that is just keeping a really good eye on my sleep, my nutrition, my recovery.
I do some HRV monitoring.
What is HRV? The heart rate variability.
So you check that in the morning.
And basically, HRV was studied, developed, discovered by the Eastern Bloc countries.
And it was part of the space program.
And it's looking at the total allostatic load or the stress load on an individual.
So the heart, if you have 60 beats a minute, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's beating once a second.
You may have three beats that go really fast, and then there may be a long pause, and then two beats, and so there's variability to it.
It's basically chaos mathematics that describes this stuff, but if you are not under significant stress, if your parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and restore part, I've found that if I keep an eye on my heart rate variability in conjunction with my
food and my sleep and all the rest of that stuff, then the hormones tend to stay pretty good in line.
But if they start pushing anything, if I start compromising sleep, For me, if I go too low carb, too long, particularly with some really hard training, then I will kind of get adrenalized and I get all the signs and symptoms of testosterone kind of dropping down and whatnot, which is interesting because I know you've played around with that and seemed to have some pretty good success at keto-fueled rolling.
joe rogan
Yeah, well, what fascinated me is I'm on testosterone replacement therapy, and when I took my diet away from a high-carbohydrate diet to a much more high-fat diet, ketogenic diet, my testosterone levels went way up.
robb wolf
Interesting.
joe rogan
And not just me, but a bunch of my friends who are also on testosterone replacement therapy reported the same thing.
Where they said, like, my friend John, his stuff doubled.
His levels doubled.
And he couldn't find any other variability, any other thing.
robb wolf
Was that just free testosterone or free and total?
joe rogan
Good question.
I believe it was free.
robb wolf
Okay.
joe rogan
But what it is apparently is, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the precursors For testosterone are the saturated fats and cholesterol and your body produces testosterone from them.
When you have an abundance of them and you're in a healthy balance, it's not like you're consuming unhealthy foods.
When you get a healthy balance of those, your body produces more testosterone naturally.
robb wolf
Okay.
unidentified
Okay.
robb wolf
Well, and it's interesting, and this is where this stuff gets really complex, but usually when people are on a lower carb diet than this hormone called sex hormone binding protein or sex hormone binding globulin, that increases.
And what that can do, it can reduce the level of free testosterone.
So your total testosterone may look good.
The free testosterone may look great.
That's a not uncommon thing to happen on low carb diets.
But then the interesting side to that is that the receptor sites, which are really what matters in this whole story, the receptor site density for testosterone increases.
So you may not need as much to get the same effect that you would otherwise have.
Or if you have a little bit more testosterone, then you're going to get an even greater effect.
joe rogan
No, receptor site density.
What is causing that?
robb wolf
I don't fully know.
But when people are on a lower-carb diet, it does appear that anabolic hormones have a more pronounced effect than what they would have during a higher-carb period.
And I don't really know the mechanism behind how that works.
Definitely, if you have 100 units of testosterone or estrogen in one person and they have a certain number of receptor sites and then another person, same hormonal level but more receptor sites, then they are going to get a more potent anabolic response out of that.
Yeah.
joe rogan
There's so many variables.
And then when you take into account what we've discussed already about genetic variables, different people respond differently to carbohydrates and fats and proteins, it is so difficult for people to find the thing that works best for them.
robb wolf
Right, right.
joe rogan
For me, it seems like...
Keto or maybe a little bit more carbs than keto is the way to go.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
You know, but what I do is one of the big things that I do is I supplement with exogenous ketones.
robb wolf
Okay, yeah.
joe rogan
And that seems to have a big effect on me.
It definitely puts me into a state of ketosis.
I use something called Kegenics, but I believe there's some other stuff on the market.
But Dom D'Agostino, who is a professor in, what is it, University of Florida?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And he is one of the foremost experts on keto.
And he's coming on the podcast soon.
We're working on finding a date.
But in the meantime, his interview with Tim Ferriss is amazing.
I think he's done twice, maybe more, on Tim's show.
But when he discusses it, you kind of understand what the benefits of being on this high-fat diet are.
And then you also realize...
What the compromises that your body has to make when you change it to a high carbohydrate, high sugar diet.
And one of the things that is a new study that Dr. Rhonda Patrick sent me recently was the dangers of Saturated fats have been sort of overstated, and a lot of it because of that.
I'm sure you're aware of that New York Times article about the sugar industry literally bribing scientists to lie in the 1950s and say that heart disease is being caused by saturated fats and taking the blame off of sugar.
And they altered data and really fucked with generations of people's ideas to change the information that we receive and fucked with people's heads.
Processed sugar mixed with saturated fat is actually not healthy at all.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And it actually perhaps could be more unhealthy than processed sugar alone.
robb wolf
Right.
And it really makes sense because if we over consume carbohydrates in general, then we fill up the liver glycogen and then the liver starts converting this into palmitic acid, which is a saturated fat.
And that palmitic acid tends to make us insulin resistant.
And there's good mechanisms behind that.
Like there's good kind of engineering there if we're eating a little bit more of an ancestral type diet.
But when you throw a modern processed diet and sedentism and messed up circadian rhythm, you know, not going to bed on time, not getting enough daylight sun, then the whole mess ends up being really pro-inflammatory and very much moving you towards this insulin resistant profile.
joe rogan
Now what is it about sugar where when you are not consuming it on a regular basis and then you take some time like I've gone like really strict ketogenic for four or five months and then I'll go off and have like a milkshake and fries and I can't fucking believe how bad I feel.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And I've got to think that there's my body just doesn't know what to do with it anymore.
robb wolf
It doesn't.
During the state of ketosis, so, you know, and you say normal, it's like normally the brain runs off glucose, but what's really normal?
Like for me, normal is trying to look at this from this ancestral template, you know, and so for eons, humans and every other organism on the planet didn't have consistent food.
And because our brain is so big and it's so metabolically active, even though I think it's like 2% of our body weight, but 20% of the energy use, it's really important that we protect that.
And so the process of ketosis is a workaround so that we don't have to break down protein to convert it into glucose to feed the brain.
We can break down body fats.
The body fat gets turned into ketone bodies, which are water soluble and can go through the blood brain barrier and it can fuel the brain in a really effective way.
But when you do that, what you are trying to do is spare glucose just for the brain, just for the red blood cells, the few tissues that have to run on glucose, like they have no other workarounds.
joe rogan
So red blood cells...
robb wolf
And then some parts of the brain.
joe rogan
So some parts of the brain, if you're on a really restricted sugar diet, they will suffer.
robb wolf
Initially, until you get ramped up into ketosis, and then you're fueling more of the brain.
And the numbers vary.
Somewhere between 70-80% of the brain can shift over fully to ketone body metabolism.
joe rogan
But the other 20 can't.
robb wolf
Can't.
20 to 30. And we always, even in ketosis, we still have a blood glucose level that's being metered out by the liver.
unidentified
Mm.
robb wolf
But what the body does is it creates what's called metabolic insulin resistance where the muscles become insulin resistant so that we don't use glucose in the muscles.
We're using free fatty acids and we're using ketone bodies.
So then you go and you've been ketotic for a while.
You have physiological insulin resistance to support and maintain that ketotic state.
That's totally fine.
But then your first meal out of that is like the milkshake, you know, fries, you know, 200 grams of carbohydrate.
And because you're physiologically insulin resistant, it takes a massive amount of insulin to be able to push that stuff into storage.
And it will make you feel like death.
joe rogan
I feel terrible.
I always need a nap.
I have headaches.
And I'm like, what kind of a pussy have I become?
Like, what's happening here?
Because it used to be easy for me.
robb wolf
Right.
And, you know, that...
It's an interesting trade-off because you could make an argument that we should be able to live like a cockroach.
You bounce back and forth.
Under ideal circumstances, we would be resilient and we could be able to shift these fuel substrates.
And this is some of the argument for intermittent fasting, where you force your body to run off of fats and maybe you do...
carbohydrates every couple of days or maybe earlier in the day.
And then later in the day, it's just fat and protein.
And then you fast through part of the next day so that you're forcing your body to run off fats, produce some ketones, maybe not at a level of full nutritional ketosis.
But then also when you do drop in some carbs, your body can handle that.
And it doesn't put you into that kind of like diabetic blood sugar levels.
And it's all really speculative.
I don't really know what the right answer is with any of that stuff, but it is interesting, and it does kind of call into question how useful is chronic ketosis relative to being able to cycle in and out of it.
I don't have a good answer, but I definitely feel best when I'm ketotic.
joe rogan
You feel best when you're ketotic, but you tend to do a little bit higher carbohydrates to fuel the jujitsu.
And that doesn't knock you out of a state of ketosis as long as you've been fairly consistent?
robb wolf
It does.
So when I'm fully keto adapted, the blood ketone levels are higher.
And also, if I needed to miss a meal, if I just didn't get breakfast, lunch, dinner, and I want a full day, it would be inconsequential.
I would be a little hungry, but it really wouldn't affect me at all.
joe rogan
That's the biggest benefit, in my opinion.
robb wolf
Yeah, it's huge.
And so when I do that 75 to 120 grams of carbs to fuel the jujitsu, I can't do that as easy.
Like, 10 hours in, 12 hours in of, you know, so I sleep through the night, so I've got a 12-hour fast, then I get up, and if I tried to go to 6 p.m.
that day, I'd be hungry.
I wouldn't be totally broken down, dysfunctional, like I was when I was You know, insulin-resistant sugar burner, but it's not the same as being keto-adapted.
joe rogan
Now, do you mess at all with exogenous ketones?
robb wolf
I do a little bit, but the ketone salts give me the trots.
joe rogan
Oh, no.
robb wolf
Yeah, so those are kind of rough.
I do a lot of the caveman coffee and then their MCT oil, and I'll actually mix that up with peanut butter and then either soy lecithin or sunflower lecithin because it kind of emulsifies all that stuff, so I'll mix it up.
And then I'll eat that.
And I get a decent, like a 0.5 millimolar blood ketone level off of that, even though I'm eating some carbs with it.
joe rogan
That's interesting.
So now your peanut butter is a sugar-free peanut butter, a natural peanut butter?
robb wolf
Yeah, just basic peanut butter.
joe rogan
Yeah, you say peanut butter, people think, oh, Jif, I'm going to just eat it by the tub.
robb wolf
Right.
Well, and then in Paleo land, peanuts are legumes, and so there's a bunch of super hardcore Paleo folks that are freaking out and dying right now that I'm eating peanut butter.
joe rogan
Now, why don't Paleo people like...
Peanuts.
What the fuck's wrong with them?
robb wolf
So legumes do have some what we call immunogenic properties.
They can irritate the immune system.
And if you improperly prepare them, then they can make you really sick.
Like if you cooked some black beans or kidney beans or something, you didn't cook them enough and you ate them.
It can give you gastritis, like where you're shitting blood, essentially.
It's pretty nasty stuff.
And these are the anti-predation chemicals that are in grains and legumes.
But if you soak them overnight, you pull off the rinse water, maybe sprout them for a day, and you don't even have to do that involved.
Or if you cook them in a medium that has a little bit of acid in it, then it tends to break down these anti-nutrients and they're not nearly as immunogenic.
But somebody who has serious GI problems, and this circles back again to that small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
Somebody who has SIBO, somebody who has some other GI problems, if they have an autoimmune condition, grains and legumes may be something that you want to minimize because it is immunogenic for a lot of people.
And this is the success that we've seen with this autoimmune paleo approach.
So I think that the unfortunate thing is, on the one hand, there are a lot of people who dismiss the power of limiting these foods in people that it would benefit.
They're like, there's no science to support it.
And they've never invested a minute towards researching it.
So they're ignorant about that.
But then on the other side, there's a whole group of people that maybe they had success with this autoimmune paleo protocol.
They had ulcerative colitis, they had multiple sclerosis, they had success for it.
Now they say that nobody can or should eat these foods.
And I've gotta throw myself under the bus.
I've probably been that person for a decade or longer, you know, but over the course of time, just life, it's that jujitsu thing again, you know, where it's like the truth will pound you and at some point you either get it or you just become this like calcified old turd and you can't learn or grow.
And over the course of time, it just became obvious that if your gut's healthy, if all the cylinders are firing, doing some grains and legumes is probably not going to be a negative problem for you.
But if you are a cop or a firefighter in the military and you've historically been able to eat these foods and then you go to a shift work schedule and you're under a massive amount of stress because of an altered sleep-wake cycle, those foods that may have been okay may no longer now be okay.
And so that's another piece that people just need to remain open that something that's working for you today may not work for you tomorrow.
And then, you know, something that worked for me may not work for this other person.
It's kind of common sense, but people just desperately in this health, wellness, nutrition realm, they want black or white, yes or no, binary stuff.
This is good.
That's bad.
And as much as I would...
It would make my life way simpler if that was the case, but it's just not.
There's all this variability in there.
Are you familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect?
joe rogan
Yes.
robb wolf
Okay.
So yeah.
So Dunning-Kruger effect, if you do like the XY axis, the X axis is going out and this is time and the Y axis is your perceived knowledge on a topic.
When you don't have any time in a topic, then you assume that you know everything about it and they call it Mount Stupid.
And I spend a lot of time in Mount Stupid.
As we all have.
As we all have.
And then there's this low ebb, the dark tea time of the soul, you know, where you've been in it.
Yeah, there we go.
And so as that stretches out, then you get some, hopefully, some degree of aptitude.
But the As you learn more and more and more, your confidence about any given topic just starts going down more and more.
And I'm at this point now where I'm like, I don't know if I know anything about any topic.
And I guess that that's kind of a good process.
Ten years ago, I was much more confident about a whole host of things.
It's like there's a right answer and there's a wrong answer.
And today, I just really don't know.
joe rogan
Yeah, there's a great expression about that.
As the lake of knowledge increases, the shoreline of ignorance grows as well.
I think Dennis McKenna had a take on it too, that as you increase the bonfire of knowledge, it exposes the greater level of ignorance, as the light does.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
But it's a natural human tendency for some strange reason to want to know everything or to want to pretend you know everything.
It's like a defensive mechanism or something.
robb wolf
It definitely is a defensive mechanism and it's just so appealing to basically put a fence around what your current knowledge state is and be like, there it is, we're good, you know?
And it's a really tough deal to just kind of dangle in the breeze and to hang that sign, you know, good until further notice, yeah.
joe rogan
And that's why today it's so weird, because you can find other people that agree with you on that, and they pump you up, and they give you that confirmation bias, and they support each other, and they get together and make fun of everybody who's not in the know, who's not hashtag woke.
robb wolf
Right, right.
Oh, God.
Yes.
And, you know, I had a lot of that, like running a CrossFit-type gym.
I would recommend this low-carb, paleo type of approach.
And for people that were insulin resistant, overweight, it worked amazingly well.
And then when I started working with more MMA-oriented folks and CrossFitters, It took a long time in breaking a lot of people to figure out, okay, these people need some more carbs.
They may not need as much as what they've historically done, but this fully keto-fueled process is probably not going to work with them.
And it broke some people, including myself.
joe rogan
Well, it's very hard for people to wrap their head around the idea that eating fruit is not a good idea.
Like, eating too much fruit could be bad for you.
People are like, what?
I can eat a banana and some strawberries and some grapes and an orange, and I feel great.
robb wolf
And some people might, but there's a lot of people that can get in the deep end of the blood sugar management story.
joe rogan
That seems so counterintuitive to what we've been told as kids.
Like, have some fruit.
It's good for you.
It tastes good and it's good for you.
Like, oh, okay, great.
It's good for you.
robb wolf
Well, and it's interesting.
We have these old variety crab apples on my property.
unidentified
Oh, those are nasty.
robb wolf
Johnny Appleseed kind of deal.
And that's what apples effectively used to be.
joe rogan
We used to throw those at each other.
Yeah, yeah.
robb wolf
We make cider out of it, and it turns pretty good for that.
But if you pull up like an image of what an original banana looks like.
joe rogan
Oh, they're ridiculous.
robb wolf
It's like a thumb.
Yeah, it's tiny and it's all seeds and there's hardly any edible structure to it.
And so if you look at most of the fruit that was available kind of pre-agriculture and that selective breeding of fruit, like it was much smaller, wasn't as sweet.
And again, it's not to say that you shouldn't have any of that stuff, but it's just, there was an interesting piece that came out of the UK where it was looking at feeding kids fruit.
They were like, let's recommend that these kids eat fruit.
And the kids already had a hypercaloric diet.
They were eating too much.
They were eating too many carbs.
And then they threw fruit on top of it.
And they're like, wow, adding fruit to this already shitty overeating program made it worse.
And it was like there was going to be some sort of magic that came out of adding some fruit to this story.
Whereas the kids just needed to pull more of the junk out and get some sort of both caloric control and some carbohydrate control.
joe rogan
Is there any fruit that is in its original state?
Like maybe pomegranates.
robb wolf
Berries are pretty, you know, blueberries, blackberries, those sorts of things.
Especially wild ones.
Yeah.
They're pretty similar to the original.
joe rogan
Have you had wild blueberries?
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
Not that sweet.
robb wolf
Not that sweet.
joe rogan
No.
Different flavor, you know?
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
I've picked them, like, in the wild, like in the backcountry.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Like a blueberry, and it's just like, hmm, this is a...
robb wolf
It's not bad, but it's not spectacular.
joe rogan
It's not what you're used to.
robb wolf
Yeah.
Yeah.
joe rogan
But oranges, clearly, they've been fucked with.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Yeah, apples.
Like, we were on a trip once and bought these apples, and they were literally like the size of a softball.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And you bite into it, it's like the most delicious dessert you could ever have.
I'm like, this can't be a fucking real regular apple.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Something's been going on.
robb wolf
It's Chernobyl apple.
joe rogan
I mean, how much of our food, I mean, especially our fruit, how much of it is genetically altered?
It's got to be massive amounts.
robb wolf
Yeah, and you know...
That GMO story, I'm in a spot where I usually piss everybody off about it because I am way less concerned about genetic modification of these things and more concerned about some of the business practices that happen.
Like, we've been doing selective breeding for thousands of years, and that has modified the genetics.
Back to the wolf-turning-into-dog story.
joe rogan
Tomatoes, everything.
And without...
I mean, the classic thoughts of frankenfoods.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Meaning laboratory...
Some sort of injection into...
That's not what's going on.
Selective breeding, for the most part.
robb wolf
Yeah, most of it's selective breeding.
And the thing about GMO, too, is the apologist for it, like, when you look at the results that you get with the GMO, the genetic modification, it's really unimpressive.
I mean, it's not, like, dramatically increasing yields.
What it inevitably is doing is creating something that's usually more resistant to Roundup than what the last thing was.
Yeah, which is legitimately some pretty nasty stuff.
And so it doesn't really seem to be working any type of magic as far as feeding the world or anything like that.
It is creating a funnel where in order to grow this thing, you need more chemical fertilizer input.
You need more pesticide input.
And it just seems to be this feed-forward mechanism on that.
And so I'm really, from a health standpoint, I'm not that freaked out about GMOs just as a baseline.
But from a really shady business practice, I'm not a big fan from actually moving the needle on food production.
It's really unimpressive to me.
So my position on GMOs usually just makes everybody mad because I'm not really jumping into either one of these camps whole hog.
joe rogan
Well, food production in general, when you look at these gigantic large-scale farms, that is one of the most unnatural things you're ever going to see in life.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
These giant cornfields.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
It's so unnatural.
robb wolf
Right.
Monocrop.
joe rogan
Yeah.
And not only the monocrop, but those are genetically modified monocrops, and you want to kill off all the weeds.
Right.
So you're spraying your genetically modified monocrops with some shit that kills off everything but your genetically modified monocrops, and who knows what that consequence is on the human body.
unidentified
Right.
robb wolf
Well, you know, so Roundup is now being suggested or has been suggested for a long time as a mitochondrial disruptor, similar to that antibiotic story.
So this is where people, you know, the last questions about like, well, what about this gluten intolerance thing?
Like people didn't have it 50 years ago.
Why is it going on now?
And we really don't know, but maybe it's antibiotics.
Maybe it's changes in the gut microbiome.
But a lot of this stuff seems to have a mitochondrial dysfunction piece to it.
Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes, they all seem to have mitochondrial dysfunction elements to them.
The mitochondria is not producing energy the way that it should.
And back again to that point about being flexible with our fuel systems, people seem to be becoming inflexible in their fuel systems.
And this ketotic state may be the default that we're able to go back to to be able to maintain some degree of health.
And it also seems to press a reset button in the mitochondria where we get apoptosis and cell death.
And abnormal cells, but the need for people to shift towards a lower-carb diet may be reflective of some changes in the environment where we're being made sick by things like glyphosate or maybe over-aggressive antibiotic use, and then the thing that we need to default back to to be able to be healthy is some sort of a low-carb or ketogenic diet.
joe rogan
Now, when you're talking about foods and foods that people eat and breads and gluten deficiencies or gluten intolerances, what about sprouted breads?
And what are the difference between something like an Ezekiel bread and say like a Wonder Bread?
robb wolf
Yeah.
So with an Ezekiel bread, they soak these grains, pour off the water, let them sprout.
And in that sprouting process, the enzymes that are released tend to break up the gluten and gliadin proteins.
And for a lot of people who are gluten intolerant with like a piece of Wonder Bread or, you know, standard French bread, they could eat something like the Ezekiel bread.
Not everybody can.
I can't.
joe rogan
You can't eat it?
robb wolf
If I had a piece, when I hit your bathroom, it would need a priest and an exorcism afterwards.
Really?
And you would brick it over and never use it again.
joe rogan
So do you have a gluten intolerance?
robb wolf
You know, I was never...
We've looked at, like, is it celiac?
Is it gluten intolerance?
But if I get some sort of a wheat exposure, and it's to the degree that, like, if a steak is grilled on a grill and somebody grilled French toast on the grill the day before, I'm going to be sick from it.
So I'm like the canary in the coal mine on it.
It sucks.
It's amazing.
joe rogan
That's fascinating, but does it have any effect on nutrient absorption?
Because of celiacs, a big part of it is when you're exposed to that bread, it's not just that you go to get diarrhea, but the nutrients are not getting into your system.
robb wolf
Right, because of the intestinal permeability.
The way I got into all this stuff, I was really, really sick and had ulcerative colitis.
And I'm about 175 pounds right now.
When my ulcerative colitis was at its worst, I was 130 pounds.
unidentified
Whoa.
robb wolf
So I was 40 pounds skinnier.
joe rogan
How old are you?
robb wolf
I'm 45 now.
joe rogan
But how old were you then?
robb wolf
At that point, I was like 27, 28. Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
joe rogan
So you looked like death.
robb wolf
I look like concentration camp deal.
Yeah.
And it was just malabsorption.
Like I couldn't absorb anything.
I was shoveling food down.
And for me at that point, it was a high, it was a grain and legume based kind of vegan diet, which for me was just not working for that point in my life.
Living in Seattle, not having any sun, that was a really, really bad move for me.
But I will say this, this was also on the heels of getting and resolving, at least to some degree, Giardia.
So I think that parasitic infection, low vitamin D levels, bad sleep, bad circadian rhythm, all that stuff fed into it.
joe rogan
Powerful combination there.
robb wolf
Yeah, if you want to get taken down at the kneecaps, that was a good way to do it.
unidentified
And to cure Giardia, what did they give you?
robb wolf
Mitranidazole, which is an antimicrobial that they use for things like Giardia and then also some of the, like, Archibacter bacteria.
So these kind of parasitic bacteria type things.
joe rogan
And does that have an effect on mitochondria as well, the same way that antibiotics do?
robb wolf
It's not the same way, but it is a mitochondrial disruptor as well.
joe rogan
What is a pro-mitochondria supplement?
Is there anything that...
robb wolf
Oh, man.
So like resveratrol, fasting, ketosis, those things all tend to flip some switches in the mitochondria that make them healthier and more robust.
joe rogan
I've heard varying things on resveratrol being absorbable.
robb wolf
It's very difficult to absorb it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
joe rogan
What is the best way?
robb wolf
Usually it's some sort of an emulsification with fat and, you know, litholized.
And so it's quite fat soluble.
So if you can get it mixed into a fatty matrix, then it enhances the absorption.
But it does seem to...
And, you know, most of this data is Petri dish type data.
So we really don't know if it's having great effect in...
And then there's another layer to this.
A ton of these polyphenolics don't really enter the body or they don't enter the body as the original chemical.
They get modified by the gut bacteria and then either the gut bacteria manufacture a completely different chemical or some sort of downstream chemical is what enters the body or it may just interface with the gut lining and then the gut sends out different signaling molecules that then affects the rest of the body.
joe rogan
Wow, so depend upon the healthiness of your gut bacteria.
That's a massive...
It has a massive impact on whether or not that resveratrol or other similar nutrients get in your system.
robb wolf
It's just pharmaceuticals in general.
Like when you look at people going on a heart med or, you know, different things.
Like, something that they're understanding is not only do we have genetic differences, but the differences in the gut microbiome may have a really profound influence in the way that people respond to supplements, pharmaceuticals.
Yeah.
Yeah.
joe rogan
There's just so much to take in for the person, the average person who's listening to this that wants to...
Sort of optimize their health.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
There's so many – there should be like – it's kind of amazing.
And I guess a lot of this is because this is a fairly new discipline in terms of the last few decades.
And guys like you who are on the forefront of it have done some – and Chris Kresser, who's gone through his own deal.
He was a macrobiotic vegan at one point in time.
And now he tells you to eat liver.
robb wolf
And you should see pictures of it.
He ended up getting a really nasty gut bug traveling in, I think, the Philippines.
And pictures of him before, he was, like, jacked.
Super thick legs, like thick neck, Thai boxer.
And now he's pretty weighty, and he's never really been able to put all the weight back on and kind of get back to as robust as what he was before that.
But it was another situation where maybe some irritation to the gut because of the diet.
And then definitely this infectious agent, whatever the bug was that he caught, just crushed him.
joe rogan
There should be some sort of a place that you could go, like a string of places, you know, where you can open them up in major cities, in metropolitan areas, where someone can go and find out, like, what is the right stuff to do.
I went to this one, they did some blood work on me, and the lady told me, avocados just don't agree with you.
I'm like, fuck off.
That is so dumb.
I eat avocados all the time.
They're great.
She's trying to come up with some sort of ridiculous blood test that shows that avocados...
I'm like, that's not real, right?
That can't be real, can it?
robb wolf
There's not much...
Again, that stuff gets really...
joe rogan
Especially avocados.
unidentified
I know.
robb wolf
It's like, damn, avocados.
So if somebody has intestinal permeability...
For whatever reason, then you can become reactive on like the IgG antibody testing.
But the problem is not the food specifically.
The problem is that you have gut permeability.
So if you fix that gut permeability, then you're no longer really going to react to the food because the food doesn't get into your body then.
Break it down into the amino acids and fatty acids and the constituent carbs.
And so the immunogenic properties that it had before don't really matter because it's in your gut.
And when the contents are inside the gut, it's outside the body.
joe rogan
Is there any test that they can do with your blood that would show that in any way?
And is there any way that avocados, one of the healthiest foods known to man, could possibly be something you should avoid?
robb wolf
Avocados are a not uncommon allergen.
So some people do develop allergies to avocados.
They're a seed, essentially, with that fruit around it.
So there are some immunogenic proteins to it.
joe rogan
But you would have a pretty obvious reaction, then, if you were allergic to avocados.
robb wolf
Typically, yeah.
And this is where...
joe rogan
The reaction wouldn't be grabbing another chip and dipping it in the guacamole because it's awesome.
Yeah, exactly.
robb wolf
Yeah, and usually it's something like foggy-headedness or a GI issue or joint creakiness or something like that.
joe rogan
Creakiness?
Like the joints actually physically make noise?
robb wolf
No, they just don't feel so good.
joe rogan
Oh, okay.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
So it feels like...
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
Now, what about sugar causes that inflammation?
Because that is a big factor with people that have injuries.
Even if it's not injuries, if they have...
Joint pain, like knee pains, back pains.
I've had this conversation with people and I got it from a chiropractor.
She said, believe it or not, like gluten insensitivity, just reducing gluten and becoming gluten-free will change the way injuries hurt, like back injuries.
And I thought, well, that sounds like some hippie bullshit.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And so this was many years ago when I started getting into this idea of inflammatory foods affecting the way your body and your joints particularly feel.
But she only took it to the point of gluten.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And then it wasn't a sugar thing for her.
And then once I started looking into sugar, I'm like, oh, these are all foods that cause inflammation.
Right.
But what is happening?
Like, what causes, how does sugar or high sugar, processed sugar diet, how does that cause inflammation?
unidentified
Right.
robb wolf
So a couple of different mechanisms that can happen here.
We definitely understand that the sugar can feed bacteria, both good and bad bacteria.
Most of the bacterial mass, though, should be occurring in the colon, like pretty far south.
And if we eat a diet that's really deficient in fiber, high in refined carbohydrates, All of carbohydrates get absorbed early, and so there's not actually any food for the bacteria that should be living in the colon.
So these bacteria tend to move more upward in the GI tract, and this is where we get small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
SIBO is a pro-inflammatory process, so that's one way that we can get inflammation out of that.
Another way is just when we get really wild swings in blood sugar, That tends to be a pro-inflammatory process.
So just the upregulation of insulin, particularly if it's over a chronic process, that can be a pro-inflammatory experience.
And then the other piece is, you know, if you start getting cortisol released in response to blood sugar crashes because you get hypoglycemic and you're trying to ping the liver to release some more glucose, that can be a pro-inflammatory process.
joe rogan
And what is the inflammation?
What's the physical reaction?
Like, what is happening when you say inflammation?
robb wolf
So there's a bunch of different mediators there.
So you've got different cytokines, these chemicals like interleukin-1, interleukin-6, that are turning on typically immune cells, and then other cells in the body are being affected as well.
But it's usually some sort of immune cell response, which then they, in their process in doing what they do, they tend to release chemicals, cytokines and similar chemicals, It can turn into a feed-forward mechanism.
So, you know, it's ultimately chemical messaging that can turn on other inflammatory processes in cells that are nearby and also the immune cells themselves.
joe rogan
So that is causing these joints to be painful?
robb wolf
Oh, and then back to the joints.
So whenever we do anything, any type of workout, even just exercise.
So this is an important point to make too.
Inflammation in and of itself isn't necessarily bad.
It's the amount and type and placement and all that type of stuff.
So exercise is a pro-inflammatory process.
It's what we call a hormetic stress.
So we get a little bit of this stress, ideally an appropriate dose, and the body senses this stress, and then it makes us stronger so that we can cope with a subsequent exposure to this.
But if our system is already pro-inflamed from poor diet, inadequate sleep, gut permeability, what have you, Then these little, you know, tears and bumps and bruises and adhesions that we get from physical activity, they never really heal because our body is allocating resources to deal with the inflammation in the gut and our kind of over-hyped up inflammatory response, and it doesn't have the resources to deal with the inflammation in our joints and our muscle and whatnot.
joe rogan
Interesting.
So what are the best anti-inflammatory supplements or foods that people can take?
Because ibuprofen is something you should pretty clearly avoid now.
robb wolf
Use it sparingly.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And this is for people that are listening to this that are not aware.
It's been shown over the last few years in particular that ibuprofen is actually pretty dangerous and can cause a host.
robb wolf
Heart attack.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
robb wolf
It increases like 60%.
joe rogan
Potential strokes.
A good friend of mine, Cameron Haynes, who's a marathon runner and an ultra-marathon runner, used to take it every day.
And he was always in pain.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And what's fascinating was I did a podcast with Rhonda Patrick where she talked about the dangers of it and talked about how horrible it is for your gut bacteria.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And that that could, in fact, be causing the actual inflammation that you're trying to fight with the ibuprofen.
Right.
This continual cycling loop got him off of it and his joint pain went away.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Which is just insane.
You think, how does this happen?
How does this guy has joint pain all the time?
And he's taking ibuprofen for the joint pain.
He thinks it's just a fact of life.
robb wolf
Well, and the joint pain is an inflammatory process.
And he's taking an anti-inflammatory, which you would think, oh, this is probably a win.
But, you know, and the complexity is kind of crazy.
But, yeah, and interestingly, it seems to be gut bacteria mediated.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Now, what...
When a person does have some sort of an issue, like a headache or some sort of a swollen joint or some pain, is there anything that you can take that has anti-inflammatory properties that doesn't have the negative health consequences?
robb wolf
For me, this is my own...
I'll maybe give you some of my own triage with this stuff.
I had an L4 or L5 disc injury about 15 years ago doing CrossFit at CrossFit HQ of all places.
It was pretty catastrophic.
joe rogan
What was the disc bulging?
robb wolf
So, the first workout was 75 glute ham sit-ups, which, you know, you're on like a glute ham developer and you're doing this super long range of movement sit-up.
And I ended up with abdo.
Like, basically, my stomach was inflamed.
It was inflamed for like 12 days.
It was about 13 days later, we're pulling abdo instead of rhabdo, like the rhabdomyolysis that people get.
joe rogan
Rhabdomyolysis is when you overtrain, your body literally starts breaking down your muscle tissues.
robb wolf
And it can plug up your kidneys and you can die.
unidentified
Yeah.
robb wolf
So I had kind of a compartmental syndrome with this.
It was just in the abs, but it was bad.
So you just overworked your abs?
Massively overworked.
I mean, there was no scale-up, no ramp-up.
This is the first time I've seen this movement, and I did 75 reps up.
Yeah, it was ridiculous.
So 12, 13 days later, we were supposed to pull max deadlifts.
My abs were still not healed.
And I had like 465 on the bar.
I was just passing my knees and my abs just failed.
And so I had this like flexion injury with a lot of load at a very precarious spot.
And I had an L4, L5 disc injury.
It's bulging.
It's not ruptured.
But if I don't mobilize, if I sit too much, if my hip flexors get tight, it will get super cranky.
So I will get to spots, like if I'm working a lot, where I have to take some ibuprofen and I'll So you have this injury still to this day?
Oh yeah, yeah.
Like it's way better in general, but every once in a while I can piss it off pretty good.
joe rogan
Have you ever used a reverse hyper?
robb wolf
Yes.
Yeah, and it definitely helps.
Yeah, it definitely helps.
I mean, when I stay on my mobility maintenance cycle, I am good to go.
But when I get super busy, when I'm traveling, you know, if I have to sleep in a weird bed or something, like, it tends to be a cumulative thing that adds up over like two weeks, and then I can get kind of a backfire.
joe rogan
For people who, someone just asked about this on Twitter yesterday, the Reverse Hyper is a machine created by a guy named Louie Simmons, who is a really famous powerlifter and a completely insane person.
If you want to listen to the podcast Jamie and I did with him at his place, West Side Barbell, he's a fucking nut.
But genius in making this machine that allows active decompression of the spine.
I'm a big fan of it.
Do you do any sort of spinal decompression exercises?
robb wolf
Yeah, so both, you know, kind of the inversion board and then also just hanging.
I'll actually use some, you know, weightlifting straps and go out on a pull-up bar, hands together, and I'll hang for like three minutes at a shot.
So I'm getting like thoracic decompression and then also...
joe rogan
Oh, so it's not grip dependent.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
I do that, but I do it with a grip.
I just, because I feel like for jujitsu and for all the other things, I need strong hands.
So I'll just kill two birds with one stone.
unidentified
Yeah.
robb wolf
Yeah, for that, I'm wanting such a training stimulus for loosening my thoracic girdle and everything that it's going to wipe out my grip.
My grip would fail way before I would get that kind of thoracic opening.
joe rogan
Did you ever think maybe you should work your grip to balance that out?
robb wolf
Pretty good grip, but I mean, we're talking about it's a fairly fat bar also that I have at home.
And so I'm just using that as a little bit of a bridge for that.
joe rogan
There's a real benefit in having a fatter bar, right?
Because you can get strength from here rather than strength from this closed.
robb wolf
I think, again, like this variety, you know, like getting as much variety as possible.
I love rope climbs.
Like if I had one pulling movement I was going to use, it would probably be a rope climb.
unidentified
Really?
joe rogan
That's interesting.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
How come?
robb wolf
You get this unilateral movement, but you're also, like, you get pec involvement, lats, serratus, the whole thing.
And as you pull it in, it tends to look a lot like a lot of the positions and the strength in jujitsu.
And so you also, as part of it, you can work these lock-offs as part of the transition.
So for me, it just ends up getting more development across my back, my arms, my shoulders.
In one movement than I can get from any other type of pulling activity.
joe rogan
That makes sense.
Now, as far as lower back decompression, do you ever do that one where you're hanging from your waist only, from the waist down?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
I love that one.
That one seems to isolate the lower spine.
What is the name of that thing that we have in the back, Jamie?
The one that does that?
There's that one spinal decompression machine that we put together back there?
unidentified
The one with your feet?
The hang-ups thing?
joe rogan
No, not the hang-up one, but the other one.
The one that you kind of...
Oh, I know what you're talking about.
It looks like a Roman sit-up chair, but it's just for decompression.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And you just lean forward, and it seems to target directly the lower back much better than just the ankle ones.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
The ones from the ankle, I feel like my legs are holding a little too much stress, and I'm controlling it a little too much.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Whereas this one, I can completely let go.
unidentified
Right.
robb wolf
Well, in some of the gravity boots, they were finding that people were getting laxity in their knees, like the knees were giving way before you really decompress the back.
joe rogan
That makes sense.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But also some of that laxity in the knees probably relieves some knee pressure on some folks as well, sort of like how shoulder hangs releases a lot of shoulder pain in some people.
robb wolf
Right, right, yeah, totally, totally, yeah.
But, you know, back to your question about the anti-inflammatories, like, if I get a really spicy backflour, I will do 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, but I'll hit it once, and then I'm good.
joe rogan
And do you feel any adverse effects because you don't do it a lot?
Do you feel it, like, do you take it and then feel any health consequences?
robb wolf
I don't, but I mean, one of the primary health consequences is keeling over from a heart attack or stroke.
So it's, you know, but it's one of those things where I've played with it.
And once it gets in that, you know, I can ice it and I can do stem and all that stuff helps.
But it's just like, man, if I can get one targeted bolus of ibuprofen, 800 milligrams, I hit it once.
And it just drops it down.
And then, you know, it changes the whole thing from being a two-day issue to like a 12-day issue.
Because otherwise, it'll just kind of drag on.
And I've just gotten to a point where if I really get myself into a bad spot with my mobility or just getting this thing pissed off, then it's like, okay, I've just got to do this.
But beyond that, there's this product from a new chapter called Zyflamend.
And it's really, really pretty slick as far as an anti-inflammatory.
It pulls some ginger extracts, curcumin.
They do a supercritical extract on it.
And that stuff is pretty legit.
And that can, for a lot of people, like I haven't found that it works as well on that.
Pain and inflammation reduction when my back gets really spicy, but it's pretty darn good.
And everything that's in it, you can make some arguments it would be pretty beneficial over the long haul, like it's these COX-2 pathways modifiers, but it does it in a different way than what the ibuprofen does.
joe rogan
Is it dose dependent?
I mean, is there like a point of diminishing returns where you get, you know, 800 milligrams is like the magic number for ibuprofen.
They say you shouldn't go over that.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
But is it something like that with this stuff?
robb wolf
I don't know.
I don't know.
Like they have a recommended dose on it, but I haven't really played around with that.
But I mean, everything usually has some sort of a, you know, kinetics, like dose response curve with it.
So I would assume so.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's why I was wondering, like, what if you took, like, hyper doses?
robb wolf
I haven't tried that.
I have not tried that.
joe rogan
Because it's all natural stuff, right?
Yeah.
Curcumin is not really dangerous in larger doses, is it?
robb wolf
I don't know about the toxicology on that.
You know, like...
Just because it's natural doesn't necessarily mean that it's non-toxic.
joe rogan
Strychnine.
robb wolf
Strychnine, arsenic.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's interesting.
That is an interesting idea.
I haven't really thought about going beyond what the recommended is on that.
joe rogan
Yeah, I would wonder if that would ramp it up.
Now, other than that, what about aspirin?
Aspirin has some benefit.
robb wolf
Aspirin has some benefit, but it's kind of an interesting mixed bag, too, to take enough of it to get a really potent effect like you would if somebody had a back spasm or something like that.
You're looking at the potential of GI bleeding.
You have a really potent blood thinning effect.
So, I mean, aspirin's a little bit dodgy in that regard.
If you have that really acute deal that you're...
You're trying to manage.
But it is a possibly interesting side note.
Aspirin, like a baby aspirin a day, there's some studies that have suggested that women taking that baby aspirin a day, it could reduce breast cancer potentiality by like 70% because of the anti-angiogenic effects of the aspirin.
joe rogan
Now, I've read some things about the ketogenic diet and cancer, and that is very fascinating to me, about having these high fat, low complex carbohydrates, low simple carbohydrate diets can have a great benefit on reducing the fuel that cancer needs to stay alive.
robb wolf
I would say it's at least two-fold.
It's probably multifactorial there.
So on the one hand, certain types of cancer tend to preferentially run on glucose.
And so if you can limit the glucose, they don't really do well with fats or proteins as a fuel source.
So you can limit that.
Not all cancers fall into this category, though.
Some cancers are super metabolically flexible and they can use just about anything as a fuel source.
So there's a benefit for potentially breast, colon, prostate, glioblastoma, a couple of other endothelial-derived cancers that just directly that reduction in glucose level may be really beneficial.
There's another layer to it, though, that that low glucose environment and that shift towards ketosis tends to set up this kind of stress response.
So we actually have a little bit of oxidative stress occurring in the mitochondria and normal tissue do great with that, but canterous tissue does not.
So it's a little bit of an irritant.
And what they're doing right now, what they're studying is getting folks ramped up on a ketogenic diet so that you get that hormetic stress response.
You're limiting glucose and then they will have people fast immediately before chemo or radiation.
So this is still doing some conventional therapies.
But that fasting state that while you're also in ketosis, it reduces your pool of this substance called glutathione, which is our normal antioxidant defense network.
So interestingly, and maybe counterintuitively, they're trying to reduce your antioxidant pool and get it down to a bare minimum.
Then when they whack you and the cancer with the chemo and the radiation, the cancer is more prone to die because it doesn't have antioxidant defense mechanisms to keep it going.
So it's an interesting thing because a lot of...
People in the kind of alternative cancer treatment scene, you know, they'll start dosing people on super high antioxidants with the thought that some of the etiology of cancer may be driven by free radicals, by oxidative damage.
And there may be some truth to that, but it's kind of like the horse is out of the barn at this point.
They're kind of tackling it in the wrong way.
When they're using high dose vitamin C, they're using it intravenously, and even though vitamin C is touted as an antioxidant, it can be a pro-oxidant at high concentrations.
So it may be a situation where you get the glutathione pool depleted, you hit these people with high dose vitamin C, and then they maybe do hyperbaric oxygen.
Where they go into a pressurized canister and they do pure O2, and that increases the oxidative stress, and that may be another adjunctive treatment to this.
But that's all of these different mechanisms that are kind of an outgrowth of the ketogenic diet going on in the background.
joe rogan
Wow.
Do you mess around with cryotherapy at all?
robb wolf
Not a ton.
I mean, I live on a little three-acre farm in Reno, and so it's cold frequently, and I have like a tub of water, and every once in a while when I stack up, I'll go out there and sit in it, but it's rough, man.
joe rogan
So it's just cold water.
It's not like you don't throw ice in there or anything.
robb wolf
Well, I mean, there's usually, for much of the year, there's a little layer of ice on the top of it, and so I've got to like chisel that out.
joe rogan
And then you climb in?
robb wolf
And then I climb in.
joe rogan
Do you measure the temperature?
robb wolf
No, I mean, it's somewhere slightly above freezing because, you know, it's got an inch or two of ice on the top of it.
But after you had Rhonda Patrick on here, I kind of opted more for the hot sauna kind of deal because I'm like, dude, that's a lot more fun.
joe rogan
That's way easier, and it seems really positive, too.
robb wolf
Way easier, yeah.
And I've been doing that after jiu-jitsu, and on the days when I can pull that off, My recovery is amazing.
It's almost like I pressed a reset button that day.
And although I got the benefit of jujitsu, I didn't have any of the downside.
I mean, it is crazy.
And I didn't experience that when I would do cryo-immersions after exercise.
Like, I felt better kind of, you know, in the first maybe hour or two after a hard workout.
Doing the cold water immersions.
But then a day or two later, like I was still sore and joint creaky and all that stuff.
Whereas with the sauna, you get...
And it's not an infrared sauna.
It's just like this hot as balls sauna, 140 degrees plus.
And I would sit in there as long as I could, 15, 20 minutes.
And man, when I finally break and I want out, it's like if there was an old person in front of me getting out of there, I would push them down.
I mean, it's panic getting out of there.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Now, is there a differentiation in your body between a steam shower and a sauna?
Like when you get into one of those hot steam showers and it's 135 degrees and you're...
robb wolf
That's a good...
joe rogan
Because it's heat response, right?
robb wolf
It's heat response.
That's really what's going on.
joe rogan
It's heat shock proteins.
robb wolf
Yeah.
Rhonda Patrick would know that one.
I do not know.
It seems like, for me, that air...
can be hotter.
And it's interesting, though, because water confers or removes heat like 30 times faster than air does.
So you could heat or cool the body much faster with water than you can with air, clearly.
And so I'm wondering, would you need water that's as hot as the air to get the same type of temperature elevation in your body?
Or is just the skin being exposed to air temperature that's like an oven?
Is there something kind of cool with that?
I don't know.
joe rogan
That's a good question.
I'll have to forward that one to Rhonda.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
I'll make a note of that.
Yeah.
What about other forms of recovery post-workout?
Have you found anything to be beneficial?
Are you messing around at all with those hard balls, like those wad balls?
robb wolf
I do some stuff like that.
So I follow this Gymnastics Bodies programming.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
joe rogan
I wanted to ask you about that.
robb wolf
Yeah.
And it's really good.
And they have...
So they have the strength work as part of this whole thing, pressing and pulling and all kinds of trunk work and everything, but each strength movement has a mobility movement paired with it.
So it's really interesting because as you get stronger doing this stuff, there's a tendency to get tighter.
So they just kind of bake the mobility movement into the cake with that.
But then they also have a three-day-a-week stretching sequence.
One's the front splits, one's the side splits, and then the other one is thoracic mobility for like a backbend.
And so I just kind of...
Punch the time clock on that.
Like each day I have some strength and mobility work that I do with that three days a week.
I do the dedicated stretching sequence.
I tend to do it with my daughters.
They're like three and five.
And so we just get in the floor and, you know, it's just a shit show in there with them also.
But it's a ton of fun.
And I'll hit that like three days a week.
And that's been really good.
A meditation app, like doing something like Brainwave, like the binaural beats.
I'm so wound tight and kind of type A that if I can just like sit down, go outside, look at the trees, do five minutes on that thing, do some kind of cyclic breathing, that's amazing for me.
Like that is a really, really good system reset for me.
joe rogan
Have you done any isolation tank work?
robb wolf
I have done some isolation.
You tried to get me to go out to Torrance last time when I was here.
I couldn't make it happen.
joe rogan
But you've done that since?
robb wolf
I have done that, yeah.
joe rogan
So tell me what you've been doing and how often.
robb wolf
I don't do it often.
It's usually when I'm traveling.
There is a place in Reno now.
It's just kind of getting into Reno.
joe rogan
It's taking off all over the country now.
unidentified
It is.
joe rogan
It's amazing.
robb wolf
I had a guy approach me with an idea for a pretty legit business model around this.
And we were kind of looking at some people putting some money into it.
And then I heard that Massage Envy was going to open up the float tanks.
And they're everywhere.
There's a Massage Envy on every corner.
joe rogan
So you backed out of it?
robb wolf
Yeah, I backed out of that.
joe rogan
Because you didn't think that it would be profitable that way?
robb wolf
I thought it would be really easy to get outmaneuvered by a multi-offering kind of location.
joe rogan
Right.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
Massage and float all in one location.
Yeah.
And if they sell weed, too.
There you go.
Because float tanks plus weed is the greatest thing in the world for relaxation.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Yeah.
robb wolf
Yeah.
And Reno now, Nevada, is now on board with that.
joe rogan
Thank God, Nevada.
For the longest time, Nevada was one of the strictest places in the world.
If you got caught with a joint, you went to jail for something like seven years.
It was really crazy.
robb wolf
It's an interesting environment, because you have brothels around there, you have the gambling, but then there was this pretty draconian approach to really minor drug offenses, that they should be offenses at all.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.
Now, have you messed around at all with CBD oil or CBDs, which is non-psychoactive but has tremendous beneficial properties for anti-inflammation?
robb wolf
I have not, and it's one of those things that's like on the list to do.
joe rogan
You need to get on that.
I would think that when I was asking you about anti-inflammation things, CBD apparently has profound effects.
robb wolf
What's interesting about CBD is that everything that you would think is good about a paleo, ketogenic diet, sleeping well, exercising right, CBD does it effectively.
Now, it doesn't work the same in every single person, and you need to kind of play around with that.
So there's some caveats with it.
But when you just look at the pharmacology, you look at the research on it, and you look at all this other cool stuff that's been done by dietary interventions elsewhere and lifestyle interventions, then the CBD oil hits all of those pieces.
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's kind of amazing that that plant was illegal for so long.
It still is in a lot of places and still is federally.
There's so many benefits to it.
Non-psychoactive benefits, folks.
It doesn't have anything to do with your mind.
unidentified
Well, you just want to find an excuse to get high, fucking loser.
joe rogan
It really doesn't even get you high.
CBDs don't do a damn thing.
It does apparently alleviate anxiety in some folks.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
But I wonder how much of that anxiety is dependent or caused by inflammation.
robb wolf
They just had some great studies that were looking at alterations in gut microbiome and inflammatory status and depression and anxiety.
And it was basically if they shifted things such that the gut microbiome looked healthier, the depression and anxiety basically disappeared.
And then, you know, it could shift the other way.
And it's interesting, again, where if you add something...
So not everybody's going to change their diet.
And I advocate for that and push and shove, but the reality is our world is sent up and incentivized to not do that.
The big junk food manufacturers, they study how to make this stuff addictive.
What's the Lay's potato chip line?
Bet you can't eat just one.
I'll take that thing to the bank all day long.
So you can ridicule people.
Fat, shame, do all this stuff.
But there's a reality that our modern world is set up to work exactly against our genetics.
joe rogan
Yeah.
robb wolf
So what do we do then?
Well, you could have something like CBD oil where you put it in a little bite of chocolate and the person has it one or two times a day or whatever the dosing regimen is.
And maybe it puts their ulcerative colitis into remission.
Maybe their depression is gone.
And then maybe if we get them moving in a good direction, they don't feel like shit.
Maybe we can say, okay, let's now get some diet changes in there.
Let's get you going to bed earlier.
If you are going to stay up and work, put on some blue blockers so it doesn't mess with your sleep patterns as much.
But it's a really accessible, inexpensive, no-risk proposition that could add some really huge benefits for people.
joe rogan
Yeah, I think what you said, too, that this system is sort of set up to get people to eat these crappy foods and make them incredibly available and very difficult to pass up.
And once you start eating them, you consume them on a daily basis, your body starts craving them, you get addicted to them.
I was at the supermarket the other day, and I was under the influence, and I was always wandering through the aisles.
It was one of those weird moments where I went, has this always been like this?
I was just looking at these cans of food.
Everything's canned.
And I was thinking, this is all food, but it can last forever.
And food's not supposed to last forever.
The whole idea is you're supposed to grow it.
You take it out of the ground, it's alive.
You eat it, and then you're healthy.
And then I was looking at this food that was just filled with preservatives and canned.
These packages and plastic bags of it.
And I was like, it's so strange that this is the prevalent food because it's so easy to store.
It's so easy to ship.
It's so easy to have for sale.
You put a barcode on the package and you're good to go.
But this is not really...
I mean, you can eat it.
It's food, kinda.
But it's not really food.
The real food is on the edges.
The real food is where the vegetables are, where the meats are, where the eggs are.
That stuff in the middle in those aisles where you just see these bright colored cans, it was so weird.
It was like a little kid's toy store.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Because I was high.
So I was wandering through the aisle and I'm looking at all these different colors.
This is so weird.
It's like trying to draw me in with smiley faces on the cans and on the plastic bags.
Right.
Unless you're going to a really good natural food store, you're probably inundated with that stuff.
If you go to the regular Vons and just walk down the aisle, man, you're going to get hit with so much of this shit.
robb wolf
Right, and it's interesting because...
The folks that make these foods, they study neurophysiology, they study evolutionary biology, they study how to make things addictive.
So it's kind of funny on the one hand where the gatekeepers, the medical establishment, a lot of the media, if you talk about this ancestral health template or what have you, there's still a bunch of pissing match and contention around that.
Whereas the people who are making these foods addictive, they fully get it, but they're using it in such a way that they're like, okay, here's our predilection to eat more and move less.
Here's how we're going to make that happen.
And we have these really interesting flavor combinations and different experiences.
Do you want to run that video?
So here's a really interesting example of this.
Where, you know, you could get bored of even a really tasty food, but then you can figure out a way to bypass this whole process.
unidentified
I cautiously eat a few fries.
joe rogan
The strategy works.
For now.
unidentified
And I resume my epic ice cream battle.
robb wolf
Okay, so what's going on there is Andrew Zimmerman, or no, Adam Rickman, Man vs.
Food, he does these eating challenges.
And he's in this thing called the Kitchen Sink Challenge.
It's an eight-pound ice cream sundae.
And I think anybody would say that...
An ice cream sundae is pretty tasty, you know, and it's hyper palatable.
Like, it would make you want to eat it.
But what happens to him is he gets completely bogged down in this process and can't go on until he orders a plate of extra salty, extra crunchy french fries.
So he's actually gagging on the ice cream.
Can't go on.
He's not going to win this thing.
And the way that he gets out of this situation is by eating more food.
He would not have finished the sundae were it not for eating the french fries.
And so you have this situation where woven into our genetics is this process called palate fatigue, where even if we have a really tasty food in front of us, we will get bored of it and then we'll want something else.
And if you have that other thing, that something else immediately available, and it's different enough from the thing that you just got bored with, You can eat more in total, and it's just so interesting.
He would have failed eating this ice cream sundae were it just the sundae.
But not only did he eat the sundae, he ate probably about 1,500 calories of extra salty, extra crunchy french fries.
joe rogan
How did he know?
Did someone explain that to them?
robb wolf
So if you go to professional eating websites, like people who go do these things where they, like, eat hot dogs and, you know, whatever.
Competitive eater, bro.
Yeah, competitive eater.
There are pairings.
So it's like, okay, so with hot dogs, you need something like gummy bears because the hot dogs are salty and meaty and umami.
So you need something kind of sweet and fruity and light.
And so there are all these pairings that you do.
And so with ice cream, because it's cold, creamy, sweet...
The perfect complement to it is this salty, crunchy umami that you get out of the french fries.
joe rogan
That's fascinating.
You know, I've always found that if I'm eating something and it's really good, like a steak or something, and I'm stuffed...
Even if I don't want any more of the steak, if I have fries and I taste those salty fries, I'll start eating more fries.
But I know I'm full.
Why am I stuffing my fat face with these stupid fries?
robb wolf
It's that novelty.
And from an evolutionary biology perspective, it's great wiring.
It's great engineering because we didn't have guaranteed food all the time.
You know, like you had to eat when you could get it, and then, you know, you might go a long period of time without having that food.
But now we're in a situation where you have infinite variety.
There's 50,000 different food-like items in an average supermarket.
It's 10,000 or 11,000 new food-type items that are released each year.
They're engineered to be hyperpalatable, to bypass the neuroregulation of appetite.
And it's super easy to just go fill up your pantry with a wide assortment of these things.
So then you can do what he ended up doing here.
You can eat one meal.
You're like, man, a little sweet thing would be really good.
So you have that sweet thing.
And then, gosh, a little salty crunchy would be nice.
And so you have the salty crunchy.
And you can just keep eating through this whole process.
And it really makes...
Most of the standard dietetics recommendation of eat less, move more, everything in moderation, there's no moderation in that environment.
It doesn't exist.
It's a hookers in cocaine experience.
These things spin the dopamine centers in the brain.
They are addictive.
And if we are surprised by that process at all or feel bad about it, it's kind of crazy.
Like, it is not your fault if you find yourself entrapped in this world of hyperpalatable foods.
And I don't suggest that people just roll over and expose their belly to the world and let the world have its way with you.
joe rogan
But understand why it's so difficult.
robb wolf
Like, you should not feel guilt.
There shouldn't be any drama.
There should be no morality around it.
Like, if we just understand this is your basic biological wiring.
And if you understand that, and it's not your fault, but let's do something, then we can at least decouple ourselves from the emotionality and the drama and the guilt that we've had around this, and we can start making some changes.
But so many times, the reason why I've heard from people that they peel out of some sort of a new way of eating or lifestyle is Is it they're motoring along, they seem to be doing well, and then they're like, they're just gone.
And then you talk to them and they're like, oh, it was just hard.
It's like, yeah, it is hard.
But it wasn't just that it was hard.
They usually start getting some sort of internal dialogue where, well, I suck.
I must be weak.
I can't do it.
It's easier for that guy than it is for me.
So they bail on it.
And when I started putting this kind of...
Spin of this evolutionary biology and this neuroregulation of appetite into working with people, particularly people who had had difficulties with eating over the long haul and maybe like some, you know, weird relationships with food or what have you.
There was like this light that went on.
They're like, okay, so it's not my fault.
I'm like, no, man, it's not your fault.
We still need to do something.
And it's not necessarily going to be easy, but we can do this.
And if you aren't beating yourself up about the fact that this thing is a difficult process, then we're going to be able to get a lot further down the road.
joe rogan
Are there any foods that when you do go off the rails, like say if you have a cheat day and you have a, oh my god, I'm going to eat a whole pizza and a bowl of spaghetti and some fucking ice cream, is there any foods that can counterbalance the damaging effects or the addictive properties?
Because the worst thing you want to do is have a cheat day and go, oh fuck it, I'm just going to be a slob.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
I do enjoy a cheat day, by the way.
robb wolf
You know, it's um...
joe rogan
Don't you?
robb wolf
You know, so instead of calling it a cheat day, I usually just say, kick your heels up, do whatever you want to do.
I've seen a little problem when people set it up and they're like, okay, Saturdays are my cheat day.
joe rogan
And you start gearing up towards Saturday.
robb wolf
It's like a heroin user who, they get the box out.
They flip it open and they're getting all their gear set up.
And that anticipatory process for most of these people is better than actually having the thing.
And that anticipatory process is getting the dopamine going in the brain and it just gets you all wound up into it.
So...
Ideally, you know, let's say people eat three meals a day, seven days a week.
It's 21 meals.
Let's just say 19 of those meals are pretty on point and two of them are kind of kick your heels up to whatever and do it whenever you want to do it.
The caveat to that is, are there things that are going to flip you out and you're not going to come back from it, you know?
joe rogan
Are there?
robb wolf
It depends.
It's really an individual thing.
joe rogan
So it could be a heroin food out there.
robb wolf
Well, so my heroin food is sea salt and vinegar potato chips.
joe rogan
Oh, I love those.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
I always felt like they're kind of healthy, though.
There's vinegar, there's potatoes, there's salt.
What's bad about them?
robb wolf
Well, when you eat like a five-pound bag of them, which I can do in the blink of an eye.
joe rogan
How big is a five-pound bag of potato chips?
They're pretty goddamn light.
robb wolf
Possibly facetious, but...
That would be a big size bag.
Okay, let's say a 16 ounce bag of potato chips.
joe rogan
Even a 16 ounce bag?
What kind of a slob are you?
That's crazy.
robb wolf
I'm that type of slob.
You know, whereas my wife, she'll eat a little bit of potato chips, but she's more of a sweets person.
Whereas I'll have a little bit of dark chocolate, but literally a good brick of dark chocolate will sit in the cabinet for a month.
And I'll chip away at it a block here, a block there.
But if we have potato chips in the house, I will eat all of them.
joe rogan
I'm a dark chocolate and peanut butter dude.
robb wolf
Okay.
joe rogan
I dip the dark chocolate in the peanut butter.
Because you know, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter.
Remember those commercials?
And it tastes delicious.
Guess what?
Reese's Peanut Butter Cups can't fuck with an actual candy bar and actual peanut butter.
That's way better.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
They fucked up with that commercial.
robb wolf
But it's still a really good idea, though.
joe rogan
They shouldn't have done it, and that's why they stopped doing that commercial, because people said, fuck Reese's, I'm just going to buy a chocolate bar and a big-ass tub of peanut butter and have a party.
robb wolf
Right, right.
joe rogan
It's way better.
robb wolf
It's way better.
But, you know, and that's interesting, too, like, thinking about the palatability thing.
How much chocolate can you eat by itself?
joe rogan
Right.
robb wolf
How much peanut butter can you eat by itself?
joe rogan
But together.
robb wolf
Together, you can eat more.
joe rogan
Fuck them up.
Yeah.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like Ghirardelli's chocolate, like one of those big-ass, thick chocolate bars.
unidentified
Oh.
robb wolf
Right.
And it's, you know, for me, I'm not trying to moralize it or say this is right or that's wrong, but just being aware that, like, stacking those flavor combinations, like, in general, if you can make your meals enjoyable but not over the top to the To the point that you're overdoing it.
And it's just different for everybody.
joe rogan
That sounds like you're saying enjoy it, but don't enjoy it too much.
robb wolf
That's pretty much it.
joe rogan
God damn it!
But what about someone who wants to enjoy it?
What about someone who wants to have that delicious taste of the sea salt and vinegar and the potato chips?
robb wolf
What I recommend is generally you have that out of the house and you don't have it hanging out in your pantry.
joe rogan
You gotta go to the woods.
Remember when we used to find porn when we were kids?
You find porn in the woods?
You gotta bring potato chips in the woods.
Eat them in a dangerous environment so you're constantly looking over your shoulder for wolves and shit.
robb wolf
Right, right.
That's a good strategy.
I was thinking more just kind of like go to the mini mart and eat it in your car.
Oh, God.
joe rogan
Then you feel like a real junkie.
Like you're in a bad neighborhood shooting up in a parking lot.
Oh.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
So for you, it's just that.
That seems like a good, healthy heroin food, though.
As far as like heroin foods, I mean, it's just a potato or root vegetable.
unidentified
Yeah.
robb wolf
But I mean, you can really...
I track my blood sugar on it.
When you eat a bag of, you know, like the sea salt and vinegar potato chips, my blood sugar was like diabetic levels.
unidentified
Really?
joe rogan
Yeah, it's bad.
unidentified
Oh, wow.
joe rogan
So you have weird genes.
I would like to track it.
robb wolf
I can get you squared away with a CGM if you want to do that, a continuous blood glucose monitor.
joe rogan
Okay.
robb wolf
You put it on and it...
joe rogan
How's it doing?
It's doing it through your skin?
robb wolf
It's a tiny hair-sized probe that goes through the skin.
And then it samples the blood, the interstitial fluid once a minute for the duration that you have this thing on.
Usually wear it two or three weeks and yeah.
joe rogan
I was using one of those ketone monitors where you have to cut yourself, but it doesn't make me bleed, because I have too many calluses in my hand, so I'd stick it in the fingers, and my fingertip skin is too thick, so I'd have to go to the side of my hand, and it's fucking gross to jab myself in the side of my fingers.
I got annoyed by it.
robb wolf
This is pretty mellow.
I was even able to roll with it.
I just took some rock tape and put over it.
unidentified
Oh, wow.
joe rogan
It's that small?
robb wolf
Yeah, it's like a 50 cent piece kind of deal.
It's low profile and pretty flat.
joe rogan
So you rolled with it on your body.
What if someone put you in like a bicep crusher on that arm?
robb wolf
That would have sucked.
That would have sucked.
So what did you do?
joe rogan
You tap out before it gets to that?
robb wolf
I mean, that one did not come up during that.
joe rogan
Where do you put it?
robb wolf
Usually right there.
joe rogan
It's right where I'd get you.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
Look for that spotlight.
I know he's got that thing on.
I'm gonna fucking attack that thing.
That's so funny.
For me, man, it's linguine with clams.
That's my heroin food.
I love linguine with clams.
Is there any benefit to having gluten-free linguine versus regular linguine?
robb wolf
Definitely if you're reactive to gluten, then yeah.
joe rogan
It seems like my body processes it a little easier.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
But it doesn't seem as satisfying either.
robb wolf
And it's been prepped pretty much the same way?
joe rogan
It's a little less substantial.
There's something about real linguine from a good Italian restaurant that has that al dente bite to it.
It's very hard to get that with gluten-free pasta.
robb wolf
I mean, there's a textural element to it.
There's clearly a flavor element to it.
Gluten's just really interesting, like the type of protein that it is.
This is why it makes pasta and pastries and everything so unique.
Like, we don't make pastries out of corn because it sucks as a medium like that.
joe rogan
It's not bad for tortillas.
robb wolf
It's not bad for tortillas, but you're not going to make like...
joe rogan
A sandwich out of it, yeah.
robb wolf
So, I mean, you've got those flavor elements, and then for some people, they do get a little bit of an opiate response off of wheat.
joe rogan
And you were saying that for you, you have a tremendous intolerance to wheat, so you cannot fuck with that.
But for the average person that doesn't have this tremendous intolerance, is there a benefit to eating sprouted bread over regular bread?
robb wolf
I would say generally, yes.
joe rogan
A nutrient-based?
robb wolf
Not necessarily nutrient, but potentially this inflammatory process.
joe rogan
Because of the enzymes.
robb wolf
The enzymes break down the gliadin.
In part, it's just partially digested, so it's easier to digest and absorb.
To the degree that there's some problems with like gliadin, wheat germ, gluten, and those proteins get broken down.
So I would say that there's a lower likelihood of those foods being pro-inflammatory.
So if somebody's like, dude, I want a sandwich, then doing the Ezekiel bread and doing it on that, to me, would be a pretty good wing compared to doing like Wonder Bread.
joe rogan
Now, is there any nutritional properties or benefits to eating that bread?
Is there anything like you could say, like, I'm eating something good?
robb wolf
The fact that it's a whole grain and it hasn't been super denuded and processed, you're going to have more B vitamins, you could have more minerals.
So in general, like if we were to weigh out, you know, say 100 grams of this, 100 grams of that, there's going to be more vitamins, minerals, antioxidants in the Ezekiel bread than in the white bread.
Even though the white bread gets enriched, With iron and some B vitamins, I would say that the Ezekiel bread is still probably a win.
joe rogan
I never buy that enriched shit.
robb wolf
Right, right.
joe rogan
Enriched flour.
Why are you enriching it?
What are you doing?
robb wolf
Because if you eat it without that, then you get super, super sick.
joe rogan
That's crazy.
Is that why they enrich it?
robb wolf
Yeah, because there were nutrient deficiency diseases like, you know, 1920s, 1930s, as we really started industrializing the food system.
And, you know, there's a good argument for changing wheat flour to white flour when you remove that protein and fatty element.
That's in the whole wheat flour, it goes rancid much faster.
So white flour is much more shelf-stable.
It lasts a lot longer, and also it has a different flavor profile and everything.
It's a little more mild.
But there's a good argument again, but, you know, it's like that shelf-stability thing.
This is part of the hallmark of something that's maybe not a great option, other than chicharrones.
Chicharrones could last a million years, and they're still amazing, but...
There's an exception to everything, but there was economic and pallet incentives for why you would want to make this white flour, but also people started getting more nutrient deficiencies because the amount of B vitamins and whatnot that usually come in that whole grain were gone.
joe rogan
That makes sense.
The Ezekiel bread is notoriously poor as far as shelf life.
It gets moldy.
robb wolf
Almost immediately.
You have to keep it in the fridge and all that.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's one of the few breads that I always keep in the fridge.
So it's not necessarily good for you, though.
It's better for you than, say, a processed wheat bread, but it's not really good for you.
I'm going to take that as a no.
robb wolf
No, I don't know.
I mean, that's a really good question.
I've never really thought about it like that.
You know, like, is a blueberry good for you?
Yeah.
Is a piece of, like, steak good for you?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Like, again, so if we did a nutrient density kind of story, and we looked at that Ezekiel Bragg compared to...
Good types of fruit, vegetables, squash.
I think that the Ezekiel bread would look pretty skinny.
Like if you had 100 calories of this versus 100 calories of these.
But again, we looked at the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants that both of them had.
I don't think the Ezekiel bread would be a real rock star, but I bet it would be better than white rice.
It would probably be as good or on par with something like lentils or something like that, again, as far as vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, all that stuff.
joe rogan
So that's weird to me because I would think that lentils would be vitamin rich.
robb wolf
Not huge, but they're not terrible either.
I mean, it's just all this kind of relative thing.
And, you know, Rhonda Patrick is really good about this stuff.
She's really geeked out on what are the most nutrient-dense foods out there and trying to really make an emphasis of eating those.
And so, like, sprouts tend to be at the top of the list.
And then, interestingly, things like organ meats are super high up on the list, and it starts kind of stratifying out.
Herbs and spices tend to be off the Richter high in nutrient density, but we tend to not eat a ton of them.
But, you know, like ginger and basil and garlic and all those things are really, really nutrient-dense.
And they also seem to have medicinal qualities and antimicrobial qualities.
So there's some interesting stuff there.
But, you know, at the end of the day, You know, you could.
People do try to do it.
It's like every meal is going to be blueberries and, you know, wild-caught deepwater fish and, you know, a mountain of greens.
And God love you for doing that, I guess.
But, you know, every meal does not have to be that way.
To be pretty damn healthy and, you know, all that.
So that's where the Ezekiel bread, I think it's probably not like a terrible, by no means is it a terrible option in the story.
joe rogan
So it's not a terrible option, but it's not necessarily the most nutrient-dense thing you could eat.
robb wolf
Right, right.
But you could do way worse.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Now, getting back to what I asked you earlier, is there a food that you would recommend for a guy who did eat that one pound bag of potato chips?
Is there anything, or is fasting maybe the best option?
unidentified
Yes.
joe rogan
That's the best option.
robb wolf
Yeah, I mean, something like that, or just some period of less intake, and so...
You know, but then that gets, like, I hear people screaming, like, you know, disordered eating now.
You know, it's like, oh, it's food, you know, eating disorder.
joe rogan
How is fasting considered an eating disorder?
It's not eating.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
An eating disorder seems to me to be, like, maybe bulimia.
robb wolf
So many people start associating with, like, anorexia.
joe rogan
Yeah.
robb wolf
And potentially the bulimia deal.
joe rogan
But anorexic people don't fast.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's what's bizarre.
unidentified
They just don't eat.
joe rogan
They just don't eat.
robb wolf
Right, right.
Well, it's interesting, again, like the only thing...
So you could eat like a cockroach.
Like you could walk into a work environment or, you know, like post your photos on Instagram about eating, having a big gulp and donuts and all this other fucked up stuff.
And most dieticians won't really bat an eye at that.
They're like, yeah, you should eat better, but they're not going to say anything.
But if you post some stuff about a low-carb, paleo kind of looking deal, then you're a disordered eater.
Or if you eat gluten-free, then they call it disordered eating.
Intermittent fasting is being called disordered eating.
joe rogan
But who is being called it by?
robb wolf
Generally, like the dietetics, healthcare, you know, kind of mainstream.
Like, I get assailed by these people all the time.
And the intermittent fasting thing is really fascinating because...
Again, just a very brief historical step back.
It's like, have humans always had three meals a day?
And most people don't even eat just three meals a day.
They just eat all day long, you know?
And there's some clear problems with that from an inflammation standpoint.
They've done some studies where they had people eat a caloric-restricted diet, which should be anti-inflammatory, but the one group of calorie-restricted folks eat consistently throughout the day, Yeah.
unidentified
Yeah.
robb wolf
So, you know, there's some really, really strong evidence and suggestion that some sort of punctuated eating pattern would be really healthy.
But it's interesting on the one hand, just being really aggressively researched in the kind of cutting edge communities like Rhonda Patrick, Walter Longo, Dom talks about this stuff a lot.
But then when you get into kind of this mainstream dietetics, Story.
They're just freaked out by this stuff.
Like they really can't wrap their heads around it.
joe rogan
Those same people probably aren't even freaked out about those lap bands.
Those disgusting bands that they put around people's stomachs.
They call them lap bands, right?
robb wolf
Tummy bands?
joe rogan
That's one of them, yeah.
I saw some guy arguing for a vegan diet and then I found out that he was a surgeon that performs stomach-shrinking operations.
I'm like, what the fuck, man?
Are you trying to get people healthy or are you just trying to make money?
With some folks it's the only option.
Bullshit.
It's never the only option.
Does your mouth work?
Do your hands work?
Can you put food in your mouth?
Then it's not the only option.
And disempowering people or saying that it's the only option for some folks to get them healthy, that is insanity.
Right.
Coddling them to the point of you're willing to diminish their overall physical structure of their digestive system.
I mean, that's what you're doing, right?
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
I've read some horrendous things about the consequences of these stomach minimization activities.
Right.
Surgeries, rather.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
Really scary stuff.
You have to completely limit what you eat from now on.
Your stomach is about the size of my fist now.
It's this little tiny thing, and you get full quicker.
So that's the psychological mechanism behind it.
You get full quicker.
Yeah.
robb wolf
So the interesting thing is, almost immediately when people undergo these procedures, if they were a type 2 diabetic, they come out of it and they're no longer a type 2 diabetic.
Almost immediately.
It's really, really interesting.
So there's that upside.
But then also the long-term, you know, two years, three years, four years, almost inevitably they get themselves back into the situation they were in.
And part of what's interesting is because they have such a small stomach, they can't hardly eat anything.
So there's a tendency towards eating more refined food because that's, you know, they just can't eat that much.
So it's...
joe rogan
I know a guy broke his out.
robb wolf
Oh, really?
joe rogan
Yeah.
robb wolf
Oh, wow.
joe rogan
Yeah.
He got his stomach shrunk, got an operation.
He's a big, fat guy.
And got his stomach cut and then broke it out and had to go in and get a second surgery.
robb wolf
Yeah.
It's where I'm very glad I didn't go into medicine specifically.
Like, that's just such a quagmire.
I would probably shoot myself being in it.
joe rogan
I just get infuriated when someone says that that's the only option for some people.
That is not true.
That is just absolutely not true.
There are always options.
If you have willpower, if you have a mind, if you have a support system, if you have people that can coach you, if you're willing to listen, if you're willing to understand and believe the consequences of your actions, you can change your diet and your behavior.
You can.
And it doesn't matter if you're 600 pounds or 60 pounds overweight or 6 pounds overweight.
You can make changes.
robb wolf
It's interesting because insurance will reimburse for these, like, lap band and gastric bypass surgeries, and they're $30,000, $40,000 to pump people through it, but it's really difficult to get them to reimburse, like, a gym membership, a health coach, you know, that type of stuff, which...
joe rogan
Well, it's got to be some collusion between the healthcare providers and the medical industry.
I mean, that's the only thing that makes sense.
Or that people demand it so much that they can't deny it from people.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
It's just very, very frustrating for me when you tell people that they don't have any other options and that this is the best option to cut you open and cut your stomach and stitch it back to a smaller version of what it is.
robb wolf
Well, and did you see that thing where they now have a stomach pump?
Oh, God.
They basically put a tube in there.
You can eat the food and then pump the food out of the stomach.
And this thing is awaiting FDA approval.
So they used to, in Roman times, this is where, like, you know, the bread and circus just keeping everybody entertained and the whole thing collapses.
But they used to have the vomitoriums where people would eat.
joe rogan
Do you know that that's not true?
robb wolf
Really?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Not only is it not true, vomitorium doesn't mean that.
robb wolf
Really?
joe rogan
What vomitorium means, it's the entrance and exit to an arena.
unidentified
Really?
joe rogan
Yes.
This is something that I've gone into in great detail, and I went to the Colosseum in Rome, and they were explaining the vomitorium, and it's just a misnomer.
Joe, you're crushing my whole- Yeah, you shouldn't be saying that.
robb wolf
But- But this is crushing my whole, like, Rome fell, we're gonna fall, these guys used to throw up, and now we're doing it too.
joe rogan
They may have done that.
They may have thrown up, but it wasn't at a vomitorium.
unidentified
Okay.
joe rogan
But a vomitorium is, here, pull it up, Jamie, so you can see what a vomitorium is.
What a vomitorium is, is the actual structure of an arena, like where the people come out and go through this area.
And it has nothing to do with the word vomit.
robb wolf
Okay, how am I going to tell my post-apocalyptic story about Rome got fucked, we're heading to the same deal?
joe rogan
That's a vomitorium.
That's what a vomitorium is.
robb wolf
Okay, but how do I tell the story?
joe rogan
Well, you fucked up.
You should have Googled it, man.
Dude, I guess so.
You should have done what we did.
You fucked up.
You tried to pass away some bullshit.
robb wolf
Man, I'm so chagrined.
joe rogan
But it's important because I've had a lot of people tell me that, and educated people like yourself have said that.
It's just not true.
robb wolf
Okay.
joe rogan
Go back to that.
robb wolf
Aspire assist, yeah.
joe rogan
These vomitoriums exist in every arena.
That's what they are.
The stairways come down, and then that opening at the bottom of the stairway, that is a vomitorium.
What is the origin of the word?
No, they threw up.
They threw up.
A few of them did really rich people.
They wanted to eat and keep eating.
They threw up.
But that's not what it is.
Like, go larger, please, so I can see that.
A series of entrances or exit passages in ancient Roman amphitheater or theater, a place where which, according to popular misconception, the ancient Romans were supposed to have vomited during feasts to make room for more food.
Not true.
There you go.
unidentified
Damn.
joe rogan
Sorry, dude.
robb wolf
Oh, man.
joe rogan
It's important that you know about it.
robb wolf
No, I am properly chagrined.
joe rogan
Thank you.
Yeah, it's just one of those things that people repeat, and then they never bother looking it up.
With that pump, though, go back to that fucking disgusting stomach pump.
This is so nasty.
So this is, hi, I'm fat, and my brain is stupid, and I just love to eat, so I can eat now, and yay, eat normal, healthy meals!
Hey!
The girl in the middle is triggered.
I can tell.
And then you stick this pump through a fucking hole in your bellybutt and it sucks out the food.
robb wolf
Because nothing could go wrong with that.
joe rogan
Look at her.
Honey, go outside.
Go running.
Stop.
Look at me.
unidentified
I put the food in my mouth and it sends a signal to my brain.
joe rogan
It's a simple procedure.
Low risk.
Completely reversible.
Takes just 15 minutes.
How about fuck you?
Twilight sedation.
Back in home in just a couple of hours.
Look at that cartoon.
The cartoon people.
That girl needs it?
That girl's hot as fuck.
She's skinny.
Even cartoon hot.
This is ridiculous.
You don't need it, honey.
Stop.
robb wolf
Well, I think this is her afterwards.
joe rogan
Oh, that's her.
robb wolf
Yeah, this is her afterwards.
joe rogan
Oh, there's all these people that have shrunk down from having...
Wait, go back to that.
Go back to that.
Here's the thing, folks.
All you people that have benefited from it, you could do another thing.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
You could just change your diet.
And one of the most powerful benefits of the ketogenic diet is appetite suppression.
And that appetite suppression is fantastic.
It's amazing.
Even for a person like me who's never really struggled with their weight, I find that going without food is not only is it easy, but it's really inconsequential.
Right.
It's not an issue at all.
I can go without food five, six hours, you know?
It doesn't bother me at all.
Right.
robb wolf
Yeah, it's super liberating.
And, you know, as powerful as it is, it can also be where people get themselves in trouble.
A lot of the problems that are ascribed to just low-carb, I think, is an outgrowth of it being so satiating that you under-eat.
So, if you're hypocaloric for too often...
Too long, then that can be a big problem.
joe rogan
I don't have issues with that.
I eat like a pig, but I've definitely lost weight by changing my diet to that ketogenic diet.
And I've met so many people on the road, so many people while I'm out and about that come up to me and they say, thank you.
I've lost 60 pounds.
Thank you.
I've lost 80 pounds.
Thank you.
I've changed my diet.
I drink kale shakes in the morning and now my body is just a completely different thing and it just feels different.
It works better.
It's so important, man.
It's just so important to take care of this meat vehicle that you're driving around.
And so many people are falling prey to that supermarket line of cans with shiny colors on them and labels.
And you get roped into this idea that just because you put it in your mouth, it's food.
And your body is just sludge.
It's just slugged down with all this nonsense.
robb wolf
And ketogenic diet is interesting.
Some people that seem to never really be able to get anything else to work, it's possible they may have some damage to the hypothalamus, the energy regulating centers of the brain.
It's unclear what's going on, but we know that a ketogenic diet has some really great benefits for neurological conditions in general, like epilepsy, there's some Parkinson's, Alzheimer's research that's going on.
joe rogan
Thyroid conditions.
robb wolf
Thyroid conditions.
But it's possible that these ketones may be altering the physiology of the hypothalamus in such a way that we get normal energy regulation of metabolism and appetite, more importantly.
joe rogan
Cognitive benefits as well.
It's another thing where people don't have that lazy, foggy feeling after meals.
robb wolf
Right.
joe rogan
And that foggy feeling is pretty substantial and really important if you're someone who has to think for a living.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Which hopefully is most people.
Most people.
Hopefully.
Think in some way.
But, you know, your brain running on ketones, that's one of the things that people are always scared about.
Like, oh man, your brain runs on sugar.
You need glucose to run your brain.
That's not really true.
Right.
robb wolf
Right.
And again, like, 70-80% of the brain tends to shift to just ketone body metabolism when you're fully keto adapted.
There's still some of the brain that's going to run on glucose.
There's some red blood cells that are going to run on glucose.
But the interesting thing, though, is that if you just look at blood glucose over time, there's a pretty cool...
A guy went on a medically supervised fast for 382 days.
And you look at his blood glucose levels and his beta-hydroxybutyrate levels and whatnot.
joe rogan
How does someone do that?
robb wolf
He just drank water.
He drank water, had some electrolytes.
For 300 days?
382 days.
joe rogan
How does he stay alive?
I don't even understand that.
His body fat.
unidentified
What?
joe rogan
How fat was this guy?
robb wolf
Fat.
Yeah.
It should have a picture of the guy when you track him down.
unidentified
How much did he lose?
robb wolf
He was over 400 pounds.
He went from over 400, I think close to 500 pounds down to like 180 pounds.
joe rogan
13 pounds.
robb wolf
I think he finished off like 180 pounds.
joe rogan
This guy didn't eat for 382 days, didn't poop for almost two months.
Whoa!
Hold on.
He fasted for over a year and somehow lived.
How far can you go without risking your health?
Whoa, is there before and after photos of this gentleman?
robb wolf
This is...
It was...
If you go to this and just go to the images, then you'll probably see like...
Go to images and then we'll have something with the beta hydroxy.
I'm not seeing it.
Huh.
joe rogan
That's incredible.
Imagine if you knew this guy and you didn't see him for a year.
robb wolf
Could you throw ketosis in there also?
joe rogan
It's amazing.
Oh, there it is.
robb wolf
The fifth one over.
Nope, that one right there.
joe rogan
So blood glucose, free fatty acids, and ketone body levels during his fast.
robb wolf
So his blood glucose, that second from the top line, the triangles, it dropped and then was just rock solid.
Beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is the main ketone body that gets used as a fuel substrate.
That goes up to a pretty high level, higher than what you would get under a nutritional ketosis typically, because this is a starvation deal.
Free fatty acids elevate, acetoacetate elevates, acetoacetate kind of interconverts with the beta-hydroxybutyrate.
But what's interesting to your point about the mental state If we were graphing someone's blood glucose over time for this period of 40 days and they were eating normal mixed meals, that thing would be seesawing all over the place.
joe rogan
I don't understand how he has any glucose.
robb wolf
Because of gluconeogenesis in the liver.
So he's even eating absolutely no carbohydrate at all.
There's a glycerol backbone of fat that can get converted into glucose.
And then also certain amino acids, which are gluconeogenic, can get converted into glucose.
And so the body will use those because we still need, like just making DNA, the pentose phosphate pathway, we need some glucose to be able to do that.
So like cellular replication and whatnot, but you can do that with effectively no carbs.
joe rogan
So without dietary glucose, the body converts fat to glucose.
robb wolf
Some of the backbone of fat, the glycerol part, and then also proteins.
joe rogan
But with this guy, it's not even proteins unless his body's eating his meat.
robb wolf
Which they probably did to some degree, but this is part of the benefit of ketosis is that it really reduces the breakdown of lean body mass.
But if you think about it, like there are people who end up with these huge...
Mm-hmm.
that need to get surgically removed, there's a pretty good argument that had they used a fasting protocol instead of like a low fat, higher protein protocol, if that protein is still being supplied in the diet, then even though the fat goes away, you still have the protein matrix of the skin and the interstitial connective you still have the protein matrix of the skin and the interstitial connective tissue that isn't going But when we're in that fasted state or intermittent fasting or maybe ketosis, the body is turning over that protein base.
And that's really important.
That's this apoptotic process.
But you could potentially have a scenario where people who are losing a lot of weight, if they use these fasting protocols, aren't going to need that cosmetic surgery at the end to get rid of these sales of skin.
joe rogan
Is that possible?
Is that really possible?
Yeah.
But has anyone done it?
robb wolf
I mean, it's anecdotal at this point.
joe rogan
Well, that seems like someone should do it if they've done this.
Well, what happened to this gentleman?
robb wolf
Well, this guy looked totally normal.
That's the thing.
I mean, he was huge, and then he looked totally normal.
joe rogan
So he didn't have ridiculous loose fat, like, flying squirrel skin?
robb wolf
Right.
Whereas, like, a lot of the people that you saw in, like, The Biggest Loser, like, they had that stuff, and they were using a higher carb, moderate protein kind of calorie-restricted deal.
joe rogan
Sorry to interrupt, does your body have the ability to understand that the skin that's hanging loose is not necessary?
robb wolf
Yes.
Yeah, just kind of mechanoreceptors, this piezoelectric effect, the feedback of all that, yeah.
joe rogan
What about people that have lost all the weight in another fashion, and now they've gotten themselves into this really thin body with all this extra skin, could they go on a fasting protocol then, and would the body absorb that skin tissue first before it started eating up the muscle tissue?
robb wolf
I... Possibly, but the challenge with that is that because they've already decreased their fat mass, like are they now leading this into an unhealthy state?
joe rogan
So what if they decided, let me fatten up again?
Like maybe the move would be to fatten up again and get yourself obese again and then go on this...
I mean, you're laughing, but honestly, wouldn't that be the move?
To get yourself fat again and then going on a fasting...
Like, this guy's medically monitored fasting.
And then your body would absorb the fat again and the skin tissue.
robb wolf
Maybe.
It's interesting.
I would have never thought about doing that.
I would maybe think about like two or three days a week of fasting.
So some intermittent fasting.
And then you get into some normal eating.
And then even what you could do is you could go two or three days of fasting or a very low calorie intake.
And then at the end of that period, you could just be very low protein.
unidentified
Yeah.
robb wolf
And then maybe four out of the five days, four out of seven days, you're low protein, and two or three of those days, you're super low calorie.
joe rogan
What if you tried that and it didn't work?
You still got that floppy skin.
robb wolf
Then it would suck.
You'd be suffering.
joe rogan
This guy's got it nailed.
This guy might have it nailed.
robb wolf
Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan
Fuck, you gotta get fat again, folks.
Don't get the surgery.
Just get fat again.
Don't say that to people, though.
It's hard to say because nobody wants to do that because it's so hard to lose that kind of weight once you lost that kind of weight.
But when people do get that operation, when they cut their skin, I mean, it's really dangerous, right?
robb wolf
It's super dangerous.
There's a high risk of infection, high bleeding.
Yeah, I mean, it's not...
joe rogan
It looks horrendous.
robb wolf
Yeah, it doesn't usually finish off that well.
joe rogan
You look like a guy who got attacked with a knife or something, you know?
He's covered in these massive swords.
Yeah, yeah.
Scars, scars, rather.
You have a book out.
robb wolf
Yeah.
joe rogan
What's the book?
robb wolf
Wired to Eat.
joe rogan
What's it about?
robb wolf
It's about the neuro regulation of appetite.
joe rogan
Oh, we've been talking about a bunch of it.
robb wolf
Yeah, yeah.
So I mean a bunch of the stuff like the ice cream deal, like I talk about that stuff in the book.
It's, you know, it's steeped in this evolutionary medicine perspective, but I'm really, if I'm effective with this, I'm really trying to decouple people or like unpack all the emotionality that they've got around food.
Like if they've found challenges around changing their diet and lifestyle, It shouldn't be a surprise, and it's not their fault.
But at the same time, I don't want them to just roll over and give up.
Like, we've got ways to move them through a process of discovering what works for them, what doesn't work for them, and we can motor forward.
But I would say, like, 50-60% of the people that end up failing in this process, it's kind of emotional baggage type stuff.
And also, there's this sense...
So when people are at jujitsu and they're like, man, this shit's really hard, it's like...
Yeah.
unidentified
Of course.
robb wolf
If you want to keep doing it, then do it.
But it's hard.
It's always hard.
And similarly, doing diet and lifestyle changes frequently is pretty difficult.
And so if you can just understand that and understand that that's normal and you're not beating yourself up about that process, then we really stand a much better chance of turning that corner and making these effective longstanding changes.
joe rogan
Alright, so the book is out right now.
robb wolf
Right now.
joe rogan
Rob Wolf.
They can get it.
Amazon.
robb wolf
Anywhere books are sold.
Yep.
Yep.
joe rogan
Alright, dude.
Well, thank you very much for being here, man.
robb wolf
Dude, thank you for having me.
unidentified
Great to see you again.
Thank you.
joe rogan
Rob Wolf, ladies and gentlemen.
Alright, this show's over.
Go do something else.
unidentified
Bye.
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