Ep.511 ~ Building a Business Around a Trend from the Man Who Made Crossfit & Paleo Cool ~ Robb Wolf
in three two one entrepreneur new york times and wall street journal best-selling author paleo expert and former research biochemist rob wolf is on the podcast today you may have heard rob's name before from his books the paleo solution and wired to eat rob is the former california state powerlifting champion and amateur kickboxer and jiu jitsu enthusiast he is also the executive producer of the film sacred cow the host of healthy rebellion radio he has served as a review editor for the journal of nutrition and metabolism and as a consultant for the naval special warfare resiliency program rob has successfully turned his passion for food health and paleo into a successful online business and personal brand that has led him to create multiple books online courses in products around health and nutrition eventually leading him to a seven-figure book deal we're going to learn how rob built his business nerd out on some high performance health topics and throw out some controversial questions adam about health diet and paleo rob how you doing man welcome to the show really good uh honored to be here and we'll see how my backwoods montana internet connection holds up on this it's barely above dial up so we're across the world crossing our fingers you know we've interviewed people in brazil and singapore and in myself being there as well from some of the most remote places on earth and it always seems to work out one way or the other um i i did this interview i interviewed um bobby edwards who is the founder of the squatty potty and at the time i was in i was in rio de janeiro and i was at this co-working space and the co-working space started to get really busy so i had to go to a back alley to do the interview where i barely like got connection from the co-working space and bobby had just come off the view so the the number one show for uh daytime show in the united states he just come off the view hopped into his hotel room and then he came on to my podcast where i'm sitting there in the back alley of rio de janeiro uh interviewing him and i thought to myself oh my god like how's it but it turned out great it turned out fantastic so if we can handle brazilian internet we can handle uh montana internet just for a little bit of posterity some of the cable or the wire that carries this signal was installed in 1895. whoa did they even have i mean what kind of cable is it it's just copper cable it was used for like telegraph at that point and so i have some some telegraph century old yeah so some some of this signal is being carried over a copper wire that is wrapped in paper and lead and was installed in 1895. wow that can carry an internet signal wow so i would go out on a limb and say the uh the brazilian internet was probably better than mine but yeah fair fair so did you i know you just moved up to montana um and and did you refurbish a house there is that why you have the telegraph cable going no no it's just a very rural area and the population density is so low that there's no incentive to do anything additional on on the like infrastructure front and so i'm uh waiting with fingers crossed for starlink to to maybe try to pull me back up to like 50 meg download or something so yeah yeah you got to love that there's still places like that because you know a lot of i mean so much of the world is just so technologically advanced you know with what we have going on but then there's places literally even in the united states where you have telegraph cable that's bringing the internet to you right right right and i mean when it goes down i'm like okay my work day is done so that's it yeah when i when i lived in latin america same thing i would kind of hope for the rainstorm or the rainy season because i knew the power would go out a few times a week and it would give me an excuse to like take a full break and not like have to do more and more more so yeah cool man and um so i'm super glad to have you on the show i want to dive into um kind of because this is a business podcast you building this business around this movement and a personal brand before we dive into the nuts and bolts of health and in high performance because i'll nerd out on that the whole show and forget about the business part quite often when i get guys like you on the show or people like you on the show um so where did so i know you were california state uh powerlifting champion and an amateur kickboxer when did it kind of come to fruition that you could realize you could take this passion that you had for health and and start creating a business out of that oh gosh that's a really good question i really always thought that i was going to be kind of in academia or kind of more mainstream medicine so i did an undergrad in biochemistry and was in queue to to pursue either a medical degree or a phd or possibly a combined md phd course and um right around that time i actually had a really severe health crisis i i developed all sort of colitis so bad that they wanted to do a bowel resection and all kinds of terrible stuff i'm about 165 pounds right now i'm five foot nine um at the low ebb of my ulcerative colitis i was about 125 130 pounds so i i was if you imagine 40 pounds less of me right now like it was a disaster you know and and so in figuring out that situation which is what got me into like ancestral eating and the paleo diet like that really resolved my ulcerative colitis issues when i started putting on this evolutionary biology template like like viewing the world through this evolutionary biology lens i i was just like i can't do standard medicine like i can't do eight years of learning about chronic degenerative disease emergency medicine which is all cool stuff but it wasn't really where my heart lied it you know lies with this stuff like i really like to get out ahead of what the the problem is and and do something about it so i was honestly kind of casting around for what i was going to do i just couldn't imagine doing a a medical degree at that point the research opportunities in this space were really limited now there are some really amazing people like dom d agastino and a host of researchers that if i wanted to plug in and do say like metabolic driven research that is really where my my heart is there are opportunities now at that time it didn't even exist like people weren't even they didn't even have a box to put this type of stuff into with the kind of research and academic level so i really didn't know what i was going to do and i part of what i did do was poke around on the internet looking for training information and stuff like that because i kind of split you know half of my time in the gym and half of my time in a lab and i found this weird workout called crossfit and this was around 2000 2001 and i showed my buddy dave warner who's a retired navy seal and uh he's like this looks cool let's start working out in the mornings and you know we refurbished his garage into a gym and hung up gymnastics rings and all that stuff within about three or four months i we had 15 people that we were training like we just talked to co-workers and his neighbors would be walking their dogs while we're working out they're like what are you guys doing well we're working out if you want to join us you know before we knew it we had a kernel of what would be uh you know a a garage gym setup and i reached out to the greg and lauren glassman they said hey we love the methodology that you guys have put out uh my friend dave and i would like to open a gym we'd like to call it crossfit can we do that and they were like yes go be achieve and the crazy thing there that that was crossfit north which was the first crossfit affiliate gym and then i had an opportunity to move back down to chico california not long after that and i opened a crossfit norcal norcal strength conditioning which ended up being the fourth affiliate gym we were open for maybe four years before there was an affiliate agreement or any type of like legal binding documents like i mean it's interesting it was so wild west and and kind of uh a handshake and good will in the beginning of that but that is where like the gym interface was absolutely where i i knew that i could affect change that i believed in you know we could get out ahead of the type 2 diabetes neurodegenerative disease start rebuilding muscle mass on people to prevent age related sarcopenia muscle mass loss and which feeds into all these other problems you know and so that's where i started all this stuff so it was uh a health crisis that you know led to a solution and the solution opened my eyes that the mainstream route through this this you know problem is not where i want to go and so i didn't i wasn't one of these i was a little bit entrepreneurial as a kid like i would mow lawns and stuff like that but i wasn't one of these you know where it's like i'm going to be a businessman like and you you know it was just in my dna i kind of i i fell into it and if anything i really even 23 years downrange doing this stuff i really like helping people and i really like having a sense that what i do matters and that you know it'll leave the world a better place and everything and i knew that if i could bend people's ear about this ancestral health model get them moving a little bit in that direction make them aware that their sleep is important and their food is important and community and all these things and help them to foster that that it could really make profound beneficial changes for them and so i i kind of stumbled into it but it's really been a a boon for me for sure i i love that it came out of the total desire to help people right and and we get we find so many people you know they'll read the book the four hour work week and they'll want to create an online business and no one to live some like location independent type of life where they could work from anywhere in the world but they just don't know where to start and and often like we'll talk to individuals like yourself that it all started from a desire to really help people and so for those individuals listening out there maybe that's a really good idea to to look within yourself it's like how do you how can you best help people how can you best serve people and when you serve people then the evolution of the business can can form around that foundation as opposed to the foundation of just creating a business to to give you freedom and figuring out then what to do sometimes both work right and they both create amazing things um but i love i love listening to to your story and how that all came to fruition through you and i'd like to ask rob like in the structure of the business is there has there ever been a part of it so you went from basically creating gems to to what was the next part like creating gyms uh becoming a quote unquote similar like a personal brand whether you were trying to or not right uh and then and then what was the next part of the business growth for you and your team yeah and you know it's it's interesting i i would say even though i put up a web page rawwolf.com very early on i would say that i've been very um slow in like developing a specific like personal brand like it is like yeah i'm rob and this is my website but here's all this information like don't worry too much about let me like here's the stuff that's that's going to help you so i didn't go really for the jugular of like hey i'm this like on not online you know fitness celebrity thing and honestly at the time that we did all of this that wasn't even quite really a thing so my first book was released in 2010 i started a podcast at that time to support the book and honestly the the podcast was a a response to the just unbelievable amount of inbound emails that i would receive with questions so many interesting questions but i type at about 15 words a minute and i i speak at you know 400 and so i i you know there was this new thing called podcasting at that time it was recently new in 2010 and so i spun that up and it became one of the top podcasts for quite some time within that that kind of health and wellness space i think we have 28 million or 38 million downloads of the first show and and so again this was a very organic process and it was mainly the format of the show initially was just q a like people would would uh write in questions and then we would do our best to to answer the questions and it was super popular but again it was just mainly trying to figure out a way to to help people and looking back there were all these opportunities for me to monetize a whole host of different things and i i really did a terrible job of that you know looking back from a business perspective but i i always um i was kind of like well if i provide enough value then there will be something you know like people will buy enough enough of the books and do some of the other things but the book came out and then um i started doing a a eight-hour nutrition seminar around all over the world and i did that for probably four years three and a half four years and uh that was a ton of fun and i i just continued to learn a lot and i i built a lot of i guess goodwill and kind of social capital around that and uh that progressed into maybe 2014 i started getting an inkling for writing a a second book like a god bless barry sears i really like him like the guy that wrote the the zone books like they're really influential very very good stuff but barry created like the zone and then it was mastering the zone and then re-entering the zone and then the green bean zone and the soybean zone and i i just couldn't do that you know and my publishers were like there's so much opportunity here but if if i i realize this late in the game but i i might i guess i'm a little bit of kind of an idealistic artist in this regard where if i don't have a passion for the thing even if there's a really good potential payday for it it's hard for me to motivate myself to do it whereas if there's something that i enjoy doing there's you could stick me in a box in siberia and i'll figure out how to do it you know so it it's uh yeah it's kind of interesting but i i wrote that second book we had the podcast and this is where we started to spin up some things like uh i developed an online course called the keto master class and we just started getting into some of the online marketing we kind of we missed the golden age of online marketing like we did very well with it but if we had released that two years earlier um we'd be having this conversation from like my private island in the bahamas you know it there was a time where you could put cat feces in a bag and sell it on facebook and you know so long as you just you figure out the algorithm and you put one dollar in you get three dollars out and you just like bam you press play on that and we we got into it where you had to really be crafty about how you you got a positive roi and that thing has kind of a life cycle to it and interestingly also it was around 2016 um google had updated its algorithms multiple times over the years and so i would get a very high ranked podcast and then it would get cratered like they would rejigger things and then you rebuild back up but uh google did this owl update around 2016. myself and a good number of other people in this low-carb space like i i lost 97 of my site traffic overnight it just went effectively to to zero and we were experiencing some really significant problems on facebook also like it we hired the best facebook ad agency in the world or like we can sell anything and they're like we can't sell your stuff like you're getting shadow band and there's a whole kind of long history behind all that stuff but i just realized that i am 100 beholden to these you know tech you know giants being able to reach my audience and so this is where we we spun up the healthy rebellion this kind of private community and we we did a pivot on the podcast and went back to our old email list like we'd always kind of grown and cultivated that we will prune it so that we get good open rates and and that type of stuff but it's a really engaged group of people it's not massive but it's it's also non-trivial in size and so we we went back to to a spot that almost ironically looks like early you know mid 90s you know it's almost like going back into an online forum or something from the mid 90s you know and just really did everything we could to decouple from social media the google algorithms and all that type of stuff and i honestly wasn't sure if that was going to be the end of the road for us and i was going to have to pivot and do something entirely different but fortunately so far it's been a really really good move for us but i i if i've had one kind of superpower i've been able to see pretty far down the road like um i told greg glassman 10 years ahead of when he would have his 10 000th affiliate and i missed it by like three months i'm like you're gonna have a lot of state and it actually took them a little bit longer i'm pretty good at seeing these trends and i really had a sense back in 2016 that um folks kind of in this uh contrarian medical and health perspective particularly on kind of the low carb paleo keto space they were going to run afoul of whatever the the internal you know goals are of outfits like like facebook and google like their i think that it challenges a lot of the accepted health dogma there's a lot of of drama around the the perceptions of animal husbandry and climate change which is right i did the book and film sacred cow which really tackles a lot of that but i had the sense that there was going to be an expiration date and how long and how effectively i could reach people online and so i really decoupled from that and and plugged into this thing that i had an ecosystem that i had pretty much total control over um as much as possible and uh we went with a platform called mighty networks and uh gina bianchini who's ceo and founder of mighty networks she the stuff that she said and and written about strikes me as being fairly libertarian and and kind of like standing up for people having the opportunity to say what they want to say and and do it in a way that you know if you say something stupid okay there are consequences to it but if you say something just contrarian should you be de-platformed should you should you have you know your the bandwidth to your stuff like pinched off because uh you know the power brokers don't agree with it or don't like the message or whatnot but i saw that stuff very early on and tried to warn people about it and also really um tried to firewall myself from all of that influence and knock on wood but i think we've done a pretty good job with that nice um can you tell us rob 2016 sounded like a transformational year for you i'd like to know a bit about maybe maybe some time in growing the business in the earlier days when um you were you were you were concerned with whether the business was even going to make it or not you are having financial troubles um how you kind of either dug yourself out or figured or or just stayed committed to the path of serving people or and helping people during that time and and it sounds like 2016 was part of that because you were questioning questioning whether that was even going to continue or not but how about in the earlier days was was there a time that came up for you and and if so what did you do to to keep going man uh yeah i mean and and this is it's a long story i'll try to be really concise with it but the the first two years that my wife and i ran the brick and mortar gym we worked a part-time physical therapy assistant job also to support the gym like we were putting money into the gym because we had absolutely no idea what we were doing we had no systems um this is an interesting like kind of how the sausages made backstory on crossfit lake greg glassman deserves a lot of hat tips for changing the face of fitness but he also had this weird paranoia that if people learned how to develop a business system around crossfit that the folks would then take the methodology add it to a business system and then go out and basically like supplant crossfit and i guess that could have been a possibility but he did just about everything in his power to keep the gm owners as ignorant and incompetent as they possibly could so anybody that suggested systematizing the business having some software like mind body online or something like that to run it like any yoga studio any um any facility that deals with youth sports where you're checking people in and you've got this high throughput anybody with any sense does stuff like that but when we plugged into that scene um nobody had any type of you know systemization with what they were doing we actually did a mind-body university uh seminar which was very oriented towards growing a yoga business but we learned a ton from that like we need a beginner program we need to emphasize personal training you know and we started building all of that out but the first two years of running the gym i i still have our our tax records on this we made less than ten thousand dollars a year total as a couple those first two years and the only reason why we were able to make it is that we were in a totally shitty little you know 400 square foot apartment both of our cars were paid for and fortunately nothing on them broke during that time and and i just knew that there was a way to make this thing go like i knew that the transformative power of that methodology was awesome but we had to figure out how to scale this thing you know and and fortunately my my wife has a great background in economics and and just has a great business sense and so she sat down and kind of okay well how much money do we want to make out of this place and she'd put a you know kind of a benchmark in the sand and then she just back engineered okay that means we need this many people and if we assume this churn rate we want to always work to reduce the churn rate but we're going to need this many people going through the gym and so we you know we just started building out that that process to do that and it uh there's the the somewhat of a heartbreaker is you will put as much energy into a brick and mortar facility like a gym or i guess it could be a coffee kiosk or whatever and you're gonna put into like a technology startup like you were going to work your balls or ovaries off i like that mentality yeah yeah but the thing to keep in mind is there is not remotely the potential upside of something that could potentially scale now that doesn't necessarily mean you you don't do it and i i have a friend that opened kind of a coffee kiosk and it grew into a small you know roadside coffee stand and he absolutely loves it and he makes a decent living doing it and he just loves the community and he's he's good like he he likes all that but if you have some but he's also wedded to that you know he's at a spot now where he can take vacation and go out and do some other things but it is not the four hour work week it is not a set it and forget it you know business where you run it from you know the back alleys of of rio or something like that you know it is completely dependent on his at least intermittent check-ins with this thing to keep the thing going like he establishes the culture and so you know it's it's uh you know from like the e-myth perspective it's not this this um franchisable replicatable kind of entity i guess it could be if you really got in and did something with it you know but yeah but it's just something to keep in mind like if if money is the primary driver i'd be a little bit careful about what you plug into like you need some thought about what might be scalable but sometimes you don't know like you know it's it's a lot of these service-based businesses i think because i know i'm bouncing around here a lot but i think customer service experience continues to get worse and worse and worse whether it's going to like a big box home depot type thing and you want to ask somebody a question about like well you've got 50 different barbecues here like why should i pick this one versus that one and the guy's like i don't know that one's nice and it sucks it's like it's totally ridiculous there's there's not that sense of going into your old hometown you know uh uh uh mom-and-pop pop shop yeah shop and having some oh well what do you do what do you want to do and he asked me five or ten questions he's like this is the one you want and here's the list of reasons why and you're like okay and now every single thing i'm ever going to buy is going to come from you you know so i think that there is an interesting opportunity even though tech has tried to algorithmize customer service because they don't want to pay people to provide that interface it's so frustrating and it sucks so bad on a an experiential level that i think there are even brick and mortar type things or or you know higher touch uh interfaces the electrolyte company that i'm a part of element we really have doubled down on the customer service side we're not outsourcing it everybody's native english speaker um you know and and uh we pay them very very well to do outstanding customer service and so we if we drop the ball on something we fix it we we fix it by three you know and then people are like wow this is outstanding customer service you've got a customer for life so i do think that if people look at business opportunities where they could plug the whole of shitty customer service like the product's got to be good but then when you when you actually start thinking about like how much user interface so like if it's a supplement company or something like that like you're gonna have some sort of inbound to buy well what are you know is your stuff uh usp or you know what do you do to validate the purity and everything really have outstanding customer service on that and i think that that is going to be a comparative advantage going forward and again maybe it doesn't scale the way that facebook and twitter and all that stuff scales but also i'm kind of beginning to wonder if facebook and twitter won't be a a blip in the history books because i don't know that those things are long-term sustainable the way that the interface is you know and the yeah the way it it just kind of uh creates a very frustrating experience in that whole whole ecosystem it's very possible i i wanted to ask you here on the topic of customer service um you said you fix it by three with your your company element what does that mean by 3 pm or times 3 or what does that mean exactly it's not a real number but let's say a a box arrives and in the the it gets mashed in shipping and let's say it wasn't even our problem we're like no problem we're sending you out a replacement box use that one or give away the samples don't worry about it yeah and and it there's not even a hesitation there's not like well did you do something there you know it's like no problem bam done you know and so uh we that that's just the way that we address it if the thing is late we'll we'll send the person like a credit for a free box or like a discounted box or something like that okay when you run out here's your next one it's on us or like it's super super uh discounted and we just um we don't nickel and dime on that customer service interface i mean costco is a little bit this way if like you've had a coffee maker for six months and it breaks you take it back some people if they've had the coffee maker for six years and it breaks they take it back and costco is like fine whatever you know some degree that's the you know how many people buy something from costco because they're like well if it breaks i'll take it back like that isn't a and there's no drama you don't have some ridiculous person like well do you have your receipt it's like well you've got a documentation of everything i bought you know so it's just easy and that customer service experience is really really nice yeah it really makes it so nice to have that type of experience because then you get this this this ingrained loyalty to like hey you know i bought some elements and and the package didn't come came two weeks later and and instead of going to another company you're giving me you know you say you're going to give me a free a credit and then send it out like the next day sort of thing and it's like oh okay like they really want to make up for that i heard the story i think this is one of the reasons why walmart has has um scaled the way it has and been in business so long i heard the story that an old man came to return his tires that he he bought at walmart and um and so the customer service department um didn't argue or anything they just they just gave him the money back and um it turns out the tires weren't even sold at walmart and it was oh wow he just got confused you know as an older guy and he just got confused on where he bought it or something like that and walmart's like that's okay we'll give you a refund and um and give them a refund um and and also on this i've seen this in a lot of gyms and in jiu jitsu gyms where on an earlier topic we're talking about bringing in the the online platforms and online marketing um to gems to to help them scale and grow and and tenth planet uh did that um but it's it's it's kind of neat like i i like to go into a jiu jitsu gym or even a yoga studio now and then and see if they have systems set up for their their customer acquisition and i've even been to jiu jitsu gyms where like if you sign up for the first month you get a free t-shirt sort of thing and then they they have continual emails that go out to you automatic emails to get you to come back in and my yoga studio down here does that really well and it's it's cool to see that integration because then you can see the scalability of these companies more so to keep um like to sustainably grow over the long term right um but i want to ask you rob uh before we dive into some some fun health topics you you said that you have good insight and see in the future for for business or for fall in following trends and um and i'd like to know if that was natural or you feel like that's something learned and then also maybe uh how your your mindset or thought process behind that so we can learn from that so other entrepreneurs out there can figure out like how we can be better at following trends and and um getting into the future or understanding the future of our business and predicting it more accurately man that's a good question i i think it's a little bit in innate a little bit inborn but uh a lot of the way that i i we all have filters for the world like the way that we kind of make sense of what's what's going on in the world and i'm a i'm a big fan of using evolutionary theory like this kind of big you know darwinian evolutionary box as a a way to look at things because uh you know we're in this covet pandemic and like there's all kinds of of implications about what we should or shouldn't potentially do based around evolution like um throwing a a vaccine at a virus that is super specific like we're only encoding the spike protein of the you know instead of coating all the proteins in in the the genome of the virus it's brilliant on the one hand in that it's very targeted and it's very dangerous on the other hand in the if that virus evolves around that spike protein we're screwed right so there's a major danger in doing that from an evolutionary perspective time will tell us whether or not that gamble was worth doing but this is something that almost nobody in the medical scene mentioned evolutionary biologists mentioned it they're like hey super cool technology but there is this danger here you know so a lack of evolutionary understanding costs a huge amount of money in lives every single year because even like our health epidemic like we keep see telling people eat more or eat less move more eat less move more this is completely at ox with our basic evolutionary biology every organism on the planet is evolutionarily wired over multiple billions of years of evolution to eat more and do less to be as efficient as possible okay but now because of technology and whatnot we're in a situation where we produce far more calories than what we would ever need and we do far less than what we've ever done in the past and so we need a strategy other than just admonishing people like you know push away from the table and and all that so i evolutionary biology is a really powerful tool for for looking at things um basic economics which is just resource allocation you know where do different resources go and how do they get shuffled and and reallocated i i think is an indispensable tool for making sense of the world and kind of making predictions about um energy flows and and goods and services flows and then the actual energy side itself which is thermodynamics which is this branch of physics where we consider the energy inputs and outputs of a system so like ethanol as a a like green biofuel is this a good idea and some people say yeah it's great it's replacing gasoline well when you look at the process of producing ethanol it costs more energy than what you get out of it the ethanol farmers don't run their factory machinery on ethanol right because it would consume all of it and leave nothing left for them to sell at this government subsidized price and so you know economics evolution and thermodynamics i think are these things that really it doesn't always provide you the answer you need to be able to ask the right question and sometimes that that's really challenging but in my opinion if somebody doesn't have a basic steeping in economics evolution and thermodynamics like the world is literally magic and i don't mean magic in like a whimsical kind of cool way it's as in you are ignorant uh to the point of being illiterate you in this [ __ ] happening around you is you are not a you have no agency in the way that things are playing out around you like you are so ignorant of the way that the world functions and i know i sound like a dick saying this but um if if you don't have the that basic background and i mean uh there there are uh great videos you know like thermodynamics for kids that's all you need you don't need all the the math you need the conceptual basis you know and like uh thomas soule has this thing um economics in one lesson that's all you need and you need to really then stu you know stew and noodle on it and start playing with it and these things can really enlighten someone and interestingly like when i uh gave greg glassman that prediction around like when he would hit 10 000 affiliates i did a little bit of market research and this was back like 2002 2003 so very early in this this whole i guess 2003 2004 now that i think about it um but i looked at how many strip mall taekwondo studios are there in the united states and where do they tend to cluster with regards to population density and how long did it take for them like even back then i believe there was a google trends analysis and i just kind of did a little bit of a regression analysis on that i was like oh if we extrapolate this out we'll probably put it right around 2010 2011 and that was right right when crossfit hit its you know 10 000 affiliate so you know i i think having some of those global um heuristics to look at the world that you know provides a really good opportunity to then take different market segments or pieces of information and do something interesting with it versus just getting way laid by that by you know the way that the world's rolling out what were those three things that you mentioned rob evolutionary biology economics and there was something else thermodynamics thermodynamics what are good resources for all three of those that you would recommend so literally like thermodynamics for kids okay and there are some videos out there and then economics for kids or or there's a piece from a really world famous economist thomas soule s-o-w-e-l-l and it's economics in one lesson okay and and then on the evolutionary biology side like uh evolutionary biology for kids like this is a great spot where you uh you know go on to youtube and just put in like evolutionary biology for kids and okay and uh you're off and running on that and if you want to go a little bit deeper on it that's great but again um all of those things get pretty math heavy pretty quickly and if you have that background that's great it's helpful but it's not necessary like it's a very concept-based idea you know like on the evolution side um if there is a pressure applied to a living dynamic system and there's you know things will tend to try to adapt around that pressure or that choke point and the the the coronavirus is a really good you know timely example of that where the virus itself has a good number of proteins in it but that spike protein is really important it's the way it makes access into the body so it makes sense to make a limited uh vaccine just coding for that spike protein but the problem is that the virus doesn't need to do a whole lot of shuffling or changing so that that if that spike protein changes enough the vaccine potentially no longer works right so this is some comparatively easy stuff to to start looking at different challenges and evolution doesn't just apply to biological systems it applies to any complex dynamic system economies online markets you know like if if uh what what are we seeing even on the censorship side like as some of these kind of tech oligarchs kind of pinch folks in some areas we see you know evolution and innovation in other areas it's hard to predict exactly where it's going to go that's where some of the wild cards come but you can fairly safely say okay if if people want to express ideas and have outlets and whatnot but they're being suppressed there's going guarantee going to be evolution attempts at evolving around that choke point right so i'm guessing based on how you described evolutionary biology and the covet vaccine that you decided that you probably didn't get the vaccination or i didn't um i uh i actually had covid in november of last year okay and so i uh and and i'm pretty metabolically healthy and so i i was uh i think that these mrna vaccines are going to be amazing tools going forward like the potential that they have for cancer and neurodegenerative disease like it's such an amazing technology i do however one of my predictions is that we're going to find it specifically going after the spike protein may prove to be an absolutely catastrophically huge error and and not out of malfeasance or anything like there was there was good thought that went into it but they maybe should have done the spike protein and one or two other proteins so that there was a broader complement of things that that the the virus would need to adapt around it doesn't need to adapt around a singular thing there might be three things it needs to adapt around instead yeah does the flu vaccination do that does it as opposed to being focused on one spike protein does it not quite in the same way because and you know maybe something like uh measles would maybe be a better example if you can vaccinate a population ahead of exposure to a a pathogen then that immunity can get set up and there's basically a wall there but when you were vaccinating amidst a pandemic and emits people being exposed to the pathogen the pathogen may be active in a person or multiple persons while they get vaccinated and so now you've got this process where the body is trying to wrap up ramp up immunity stimulated by both the the pathogen and also the vaccine but in that time there's an opportunity for some genetic shuffling to occur and the opportunity for this thing to evolve around that and and the uh the influenza viruses tend to have a higher mutation rate anyway and so it's kind of expected that like every year there's going to be a different variant um coronaviruses generally are not super high mutation rate viruses not compared to influenza so this is where like if we could have known about this knew it was coming had a vaccine ready and then vaccinated the whole population then we we would have in theory had this very solid unified wall of of uh immunity and then it would have it would have been like a a wave hitting against a really big you know brick brick wall breaker would have just kind of fragmented it and been done yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it's so such an interesting time right things that are happening right and we're liable to get cancelled for just mentioning these peripheral things it's like that's not even the focus of the show you know but this is kind of the weird the weird time that we exist in where um information itself is is uh viewed as being really dangerous and and hazardous and yeah yeah especially if you're you're passionate about it have you ever experienced being cancelled i know canceled this quote this term is just relatively new but i mean that or having your community or haters um you know really come down on you and getting negative press so maybe in the earlier days like did you ever have cancel culture or haters or or negative press come out that was that was hard for you guys to deal with yeah and i mean the irony out of uh crossfit originally okay just to to air some dirty laundry out of that again a great glassman brilliant guy and i owe a ton to him for doing what he did but um he didn't tolerate or accept independent thought within the organization and if you didn't totally toe the party line um big big problems happen and like i alluded to um people that suggested that we needed some business systems and there needed to be a graded on-ramp to beginning crossfit and maybe all these movements aren't totally applicable to all people it got them super angry and we really dug our heels and the big challenge that occurred for us is our gym compared to any of the other gyms in the crossfit community was disproportionately successful like we were really just like orders of magnitude more successful just based off of income the ability for us to pay our trainers the ability for for us to pay for basic things like health insurance and whatnot for our trainers like this was unheard of in that scene right but we didn't run our brick-and-mortar day-to-day facility at all the way that crossfit hq suggested you should do it and so we were trying to educate people about well if you want the success we have yeah use this methodology but here are the ways that you need to to change all this stuff and we ended up getting kicked out eventually we got kicked out in in 2009 in a pretty pretty you know spectacular fashion and greg enlisted lots of people within the community and it would basically be a phone call like hey you need to go jump on these people with both feet and then these folks would show up online and like oh rob and nicky are horrible people and you and you know it was uh several years of drama around that stuff and the kind of ironic thing is that a number of other people in that early crossfit scene got caught up in this they too caught some of the collateral damage and they experienced some of that like er cancel culture before cancel culture was really a thing and these people have kind of gone on to be uh significant participants in the cancel culture phenomena themselves which i find fascinating because they experienced it like they were at the pointy end of the stick and experiencing it but they've found topics that they feel morally justified in in you know participating in this stuff and i just don't know if they they see the parallel there or or what but it it was interesting but yeah we we had that early on and i mean to some degree just doing what we're we're doing i mean it hasn't been like full on cancel but like we uh we were sponsoring jp sears you know as part of element for a period of time and and uh and honestly i i love jp like his stuff is amazing and i think he you know and i i think um comedians should kind of be given a pass they should be allowed to say just about anything that they want to say and if you don't like them or whatever then you ignore them or maybe you make your own point counter to that but when you start shutting down comedians and you look back at the long arc of history and the other people that that shut down suppress comedians artists satirists those aren't good people you're keeping company with you know and but uh we we had a pretty dedicated campaign when a group of folks went after jp they also went after anybody that was sponsoring jp and they they started going after us pretty pretty strongly too and they wanted us to throw jp under the under the bus and and you know we were we were in the process of just ending the business relationship with him but we weren't going to do this extra step of like tap dancing on his grave i i was like if we burn the business down then we burn the business down but i'm i'm not i am not going to participate in this additional step of all this stuff so we've we've had brushes with it and again me even talking about it on here is labeled to ferment the the fires of these yeah so um but i think that this is important stuff for people to contemplate because if you believe strongly in it you know that somebody is saying something that's not true certainly don't patronize their stuff maybe even spin up some material in like detail where you think that that they're wrong or or whatever but um creating a mob to like de-platform them and and whatnot i i just it's amazing to me that people don't realize that that can be weaponized and it will leave nobody left there is there is no one who is so clean and so pure that they won't at some point end up on the bad side of that and we've we've seen this in these really totalitarian regimes you know like pol pot in cambodia the you know the marxist leninist revolution and it ends really badly and i'm i'm still continually stunned by these uh seemingly well-meaning progressive-minded people who don't you know if you've got something you want to rail against by all means rail against it but i don't know that trying to cancel the person the way that is available now with like cutting off their their um de-platforming them and whatnot like i i just find that so dangerous and uh it's happening on medical topics on kind of social political topics and i've always been the the person that's like hey let's get in and debate and and yeah you know if you disagree with me make the better argument and then i will change my mind like i will you know and then you've you've got an advocate now instead of an adversary but god damn if somebody comes and just starts trying to de-platform me and everything then it's like okay you've got an adversary now and now you've got another adversary another adversary we may be quiet for a long time but then maybe we band together and and you know now that she was on the other foot you know and now we're back into some sort of weird um oh god what what was it like uh what was the term like uh blood packs or whatever it's like oh you killed my brother so now i need to kill your brother you know and it just goes on forever so yeah yeah well that's the the the truly progressive way would be to before you shout out and start to tear people down online um or on any media source um is to one try and understand why this person has a different frame of thought and two have a conversation with him and when that happens most of that reptilian brain triggering the amygdala right is quite often diffused and then you develop empathy and that's progress and that's really the progressive way not um shouting out it's somebody because of toxic masculinity or um you know they believe in a diet that you don't believe in and yours is better than theirs that sort of thing or whatever it may be right right right and that's that's true progression there um okay uh i'm loving this by the way like i'm i'm loving picking your brain awesome and if you want to delete any of this i don't blame you i'm deleting i know it's okay no no no no not hardly uh okay so i learned something about uh i was going through your website and and podcast and doing some some research about your stuff before i came up you came on the show um and i heard a term that i had never heard before and it's testosterone crash and um you know as a male like i want to make sure i have healthy testosterone levels i have a friend who's in his 50s who is contemplating and he's been contemplating for a couple years now getting testosterone injections because he wants to continue to have that drive and i i hadn't heard this term before so and you just released a podcast on it i think a couple episodes ago i would love to learn more tell us what a testosterone crash is and and how it's affecting us um as men and as people yeah and you know the the term was actually part of the question so i didn't turn coin that and it's not something i usually use and but but the folks the person that that submitted the question put that in but if if most people are familiar with the idea that like if you do some really hard training um androgen levels can drop both testosterone and estrogen so this makes it applicable to both men and women and the phenomena is similar and and uh because of uh you know testing around olympic sports and athletics and whatnot people understand that good hormone levels are actually beneficial for performance so there's you know and there was a there's another funny thing within mainstream medicine for 70 years they're like oh this doesn't really matter even though we're banning anabolic steroids and no anabolic steroids don't really work and you know it's just kind of ridiculous this this weird uh blind spot there but aging in general can and typically does reduce testosterone and androgen levels but there's an interesting caveat to that when we look at the testosterone levels and i will focus more specifically on on men here just because it's simpler like i did a okay a podcast on on the hormone replacement therapy with my good friend dr kirk parsley and he'd be a great guest uh entrepreneur retired navy seal um amazing guy but we focused on men and then we got some hate mail they're like well why didn't you talk about women and i said one i don't understand female endocrinology remotely as well and the reason why is it's at least 10 times more complex so i'm actually commenting on something i understand versus getting out over my ski tips and saying stuff that may be totally wrong you know so um but the testosterone the average testosterone levels of our grandparents or our grandfathers was about three times greater than what it is now at like any given age oh wow interesting so so you know the 70 year old grand grandpa great grandpa had shockingly higher average testosterone levels than people do today that's a problem when when mainstream medicine looks at testosterone levels they take what happens within the norm so like a population of people going through the front door they check their testosterone levels and the normal ranges go from as low as 200 up to as high as 1100 within say like uh you know 18 to 25 year old population i guarantee you the life experience of the guy that's 25 years old and has a 200 total testosterone is shockingly less good than the person who has an 800 or a thousand total testosterone levels so this is another problem is that normal is a meaningless term what's optimal for you and this is where would be really handy if folks 18 20 years old could get a baseline you know total testosterone free testosterone sex hormone binding globulin estrogen estradiol growth hormone cortisol because that is your youthful profile so your friend who's 50 years old 50 plus years old he's thinking about going on hrt well how much does he need what types and you know how should it be administered and if you don't have a youthful profile it's kind of hard to to figure out what's going on there but all that stuff said so as a background there seems to be a lot of pressures pushing testosterone levels down and we don't know exactly what it is maybe it's poor sleep maybe it's poor diet maybe xenoestrogens in the environment like a lot of the the constituents of plastics are these uh estrogen mimetics which may be causing problems with uh testosterone metabolism nobody knows exactly what the the the primary driver is or if it's you know multifactorial that's going into it but it for sure like men are experienced and women are experiencing significant hormone dysregulation on a lot of different levels and uh hard training can can crater testosterone uh i think when when some research has been done on seals before they go through buds like the the hell week where they they keep them awake for for a week and they go through the selection process their testosterone levels can go from like a thousand to 150 like basically hypogonadic by by the end of the the one-week period they're burning through all of them yeah just production crooked plummets you know it just just gets crushed yeah that okay that super heavy duty stress just ends up smashing these folks and um female athlete triad where they over train under consume calories and then experience hormonal dysregulation this is very similar like they're they're pushing their body too hard in too many different directions at once and the hormones end up kind of create areas as a consequence so there's a lot of thing and again i don't i don't actually really like the term like testosterone crash but it you know there's there is this different situations where baseline testosterone or androgen levels can plummet like if we uh new parents like they feel like garbage for a host of reasons and the sleep deprivation causes a lot of different hormonal changes not the least of which is is testosterone right um well i have a theory i want to run by you this is absolutely fascinating i love this um and and so and and maybe it's this theory and i've been thinking about it for a while maybe this theory is backed up by the fact that grandma and grandpa or grandpa had much more testosterone than kids these days do right um and i was thinking about this and and there's this there's movement of uh men are being emasculated um and maybe this is why we have less testosterone and a lot of people will blame it on a feminist movement or or whatever but i was thinking about that i was like and i was thinking about you know my grandparents and and my great uncles uh and great aunts and i thought like like people pre really 1950 but even pre like 1920 or 1900 um they like men were men and women were women because quite often survival depend on dependent on that that was their jobs right my grandpa was a purple heart um in world war ii right he fought a war he worked in a factory at general motors he was around men a lot doing a lot of manly things manual labor right my dad too was a construction worker um and doing building things right doing male type of dominated jobs and um and you think about the even my generation so i'm 40. um and even my generation was much more about being indoors sitting behind a computer getting to understand the computer even more so for kids that are under 40 and even under 30 and under 20 now right and so the they're not doing primal things that a human is kind of designed to do right and right in in one that could very much be the reason why a lot of boys are emasculated and two it could be the reason why testosterone levels are so low and even estrogen as well because females are like well all we're doing is sitting we're all doing the same thing sitting at computers and doing stuff and pushing buttons and and playing on their phones and and that is dominating the vast majority of our day right and i'm just curious like i mean what are your thoughts behind that because it kind of for me it makes sense i i think it makes a lot of sense uh what would i haven't dug into this literature in a long time so you know the internet will find out whether or not i've got this right but traditional cultures that follow more traditional um sex or gender roles don't seem to have the same decline in uh androgen levels that we see in more more you know westernized developed countries androgen meaning sorry androgen meaning testosterone and estrogen yeah okay gotcha yeah being the biggies yeah yeah that's my catch-all and you know so that we're getting both male and females kind of kind of uh tick both those those boxes but then there's a lot into that like these folks eat generally a less processed diet they tend to get more sun on their skin they do more physical activity there's clearly a relationship between physical activity and um like too little physical activity in in testosterone estrogen don't do as well as they could too much you know that's a problem too so there's kind of a sweet spot in there um and then like community and and having that community i like having female friends but i mean honestly like i have my wife and then i have a few female colleagues that i do some work with but then mainly my circle of friends the people that i spend time with are are males and yeah when i was younger and um my female friends were potential sexual conquests then i had a lot more female friends and now that i have an italian wife who would bury me in a shallow grave if i had any dalliances my pool of female friends became very skinny after that you know because it's like yeah this like i i had nefarious designs on on this thing you know if we're just completely honest about that and so i think that there is something to that and you know that psychological sociological piece of this where um this is again where that evolutionary biology story is really valuable you know and like jordan peterson has talked about some of these studies like in in sweden where they really develop some interesting social systems so that women could men and women could kind of pick the stuff that they wanted to do and what they were trying to do was equalize access for women to go into science and engineering and and you know traditionally male uh dominated professions and what they found is the exact opposite happened women disproportionately went into caretaking roles not universally not uniformly and men tended to go more into deep seed welding and engineering and and science and and stuff like that uh uh and and uh and a lot a big part of that appears to be like personal preference like when you ask these people the the women everybody who went into caretaking whether whether they were male or female they're like i derive a huge sense of satisfaction from the caretaking of others i would probably put myself in that like i could have probably really enjoyed being a nurse or like a physical therapist or something like that because that caretaking piece was probably really relative particularly as a male i think that i derived disproportionate satisfaction feeling you know doing that that kind of caretaking piece and then in general uh uh lots of males like they like that concrete like engineering math science that that type of stuff like they they like dealing with the concrete they like having a discreet problem that they can get in be challenged by and then have a discrete endpoint to it you know and i do derive some satisfaction from that too so i try to balance both those things but i think that you're on to something there and this is where stepping back and looking at that bigger evolutionary biology picture like there's a ton of factors that are changing there and probably all of them play a role like our environment is dirtier there's xenoestrogens we've dramatically altered kind of the uh the social contracts we have about what being male and what bein
2021-07-09 05:00
