That’s right folks, it’s the final episode of The Paleo Solution Podcast! The end of an era. We started the podcast in 2009 (almost 10 years ago), and made 444 episodes!
But don’t fret, we have something new for you six listeners! Come check out our new podcast, Healthy Rebellion Radio! You should see our first couple of episodes of it posted here as well at about the same time this goes up.
Transcript:
Download a copy of the transcript here (PDF)
Robb: Well hello there.
Nicki: Hi.
Robb: How’s it going?
Nicki: I feel like we were just here.
Robb: I do feel like we were just here. It’s very odd. Time on the interweb-
Nicki: Maybe we were.
Robb: … happens in a different way than the rest of the world. So what’s happening?
Nicki: So Robb, this is kind of a bittersweet episode.
Robb: Are you going to get misty-eyed on here?
Nicki: I don’t know. No, no, it’s just.
Robb: It’s okay if you do. It’s okay if you do.
Nicki: The end of an era.
Robb: It is the end of an era. So what do we have cookin’?
Nicki: Well, after 10 years of-
Robb: Literally 10 years.
Nicki: … literally 10 years.
Robb: Almost to the date.
Nicki: Yep. November, let’s see, November 10, 2009 was the first Paleo Solution Podcast episode. So, and this is the 444th episode.
Robb: Too bad it wasn’t the 42nd or something somehow.
Nicki: Get your Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-
Robb: Reference in there.
Nicki: … in there.
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: But we’ve been talking about a podcast rebrand for a long time, so we’re not going away, nobody freak out.
Robb: This is the last edition of the Paleo Solution Podcast, but we will be popping up with a new podcast, a new platform.
Nicki: And we’re going to be talking about that in this episode. But yeah, so I just thought it would be kind of fun to walk down memory lane a little bit with the Paleo Solution. So when you launched it, you had Andy Deas as your first cohost, right?
Robb: Six listeners can’t be wrong. We had a pretty awesome intro music setup that somebody did like spliced together some Battlestar Galactica music and stuff like that. It was pretty legit. It was pretty good.
Nicki: And then after Andy, you brought on our good friend Craig Everett of Catalyst Athletics. He was a partner in CrossFit NorCal in the fourth CrossFit Affiliate with us. So you ran with Greg for a long time, and then-
Robb: Started shifting to interview format.
Nicki: Solo interviews and interviewed a lot of different guests ranging from-
Robb: Dude, everybody.
Nicki: Everybody, everybody in the ancestral health space.
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: Authors, researchers. And that was fun.
Robb: That was cool.
Nicki: You had a good stand with that.
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: And then we had a lot of people saying they missed the Q and A, so then we brought it back.
Robb: With my current cohost, and folks have enjoyed that. So we will definitely be keeping this Q and A format. And then if you folks have been following us on the social media, we are also tinkering with a-
Nicki: Live call-in show.
Robb: Live call-in show, which we did one of those.
Nicki: We actually recorded one of them.
Robb: And it wasn’t too big of a train wreck.
Nicki: Yeah. So we’re going to play with a mix of that. But you know what, I thought we could do something kind of funny here, if you are up for it.
Robb: A whoopee cushion?
Nicki: I don’t know if it’ll be funny. But I thought that especially for the six listeners, for the people that have listened all the way along, I thought maybe we could sort of, not crank call, but surprise-call Greg.
Robb: Oh, nice. Okay.
Nicki: What do you think?
Robb: We’ll see if this works. This will also be a-
Nicki: We’ll see if he even answers.
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: The call is coming from me, so he might not even answer for me. He’d answer for you.
Robb: Would answer for you.
Nicki: Uh, let’s see. I have two numbers in here for him. I think it’s, let’s try this one. I’ll put him on speaker phone.
Voicemail: Please leave your message for-
Nicki: Okay. That didn’t work.
Robb: That one didn’t work.
Nicki: Let’s try this other number.
Robb: I think we have to tell him immediately that he’s being recorded or that’s illegal or something.
Nicki: Okay. Well if he answers, we’ll do that. It’s ringing.
Robb: I don’t think Greg would sue us, but.
Voicemail: Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice messaging system.
Robb: Okay. Swing and a miss.
Voicemail: 2-0.
Nicki: Dang it.
Robb: Well we tried to call Greg.
Nicki: I didn’t want to give him the heads-up ahead of time.
Robb: We wanted it to be spontaneous and-
Nicki: Be on you’re … just be ready for a phone call. I didn’t want to do that, I wanted it to be totally a surprise.
Robb: How do you think Greg would have answered the phone?
Nicki: Uh, he would have said, “What’s up bitches?”
Robb: Definitely.
Nicki: Well, maybe we’ll try … He might call me back, actually.
Robb: He might call you back.
Nicki: Let’s just leave this here.
Robb: Yeah, we’ll leave that as an opportunity.
Nicki: We’ll see if he returns my call. Okay.
Robb: Speaking of that, don’t turn … oh, my phone is off.
Nicki: Well, my volume is off, but I’ll see it if it flashes on the screen. Okay. Let’s talk about what’s next. We’ve been talking about a rebrand.
Robb: Mm-hmm (affirmative). In some thought-
Nicki: Why a rebrand?
Robb: Some thought around that when we launched, paleo wasn’t a thing, and arguably we kind of made it a thing. My book was the first New York Times Best Seller to be in that genre. If you go into a Barnes & Noble or a bookstore or look in a category on Amazon, there is now a paleo diet list, in addition to low carb and keto and all this stuff. But there was a time when people really looked for paleo as a moniker and now there is a time where people have all kinds of crazy misconceptions around it. And also we’ve grown and evolved and this ancestral health template is always going to be my guiding light. I don’t think evolution via natural selection is going to be found to be lacking. There’s a lot of nuance and a lot of detail and a lot of ways that we can address the health needs that people have that are not specifically nested under paleo and paleo can give people a rash.
Robb: And so that’s been a thought and we’ve been thinking about a rebrand for a long time. But we also, with some of the later more recent developments with Google, basically curtailing 70, 90 plus percent of the site traffic to places like my website and other websites because we’re in these certain genres. We feel like if we’re going to stay in this mix, we need to do something where we have better autonomy over our information, distribution and control and whatnot and provide a place where we can have better community.
Robb: When I … It’s interesting because, and I think everybody’s kind of felt this, but for a couple of years I’ve been perplexed with say like the experience on Facebook, where it was like I can’t reach anyone, like there’s no middle ground, there’s no nothing. And then I saw some of the reports that they tweak the algorithms to make it such that you were highly likely to be in argumentative debates on there. Like it was not fostering community, it was fostering-
Nicki: Angst, tension.
Robb: Angst, tension, antagonism.
Nicki: Frustration.
Robb: And you know, if … Greg said, he’s going to call us back.
Nicki: He said, “Let me call you back in a few minutes. I’m out at breakfast.” Great.
Robb: Cool.
Nicki: So we’ll have that to look forward to.
Robb: Which if the U.S. ever descends into civil war, I hope that the Zuckerberg and some other people have some reflective moments on what role they played in the unraveling of the social fabric of our world. But you know, we love doing what we’re doing. We love providing value to people. We love community, we love supporting folks. I learn new things every single day, both in my general research and also in interacting with people.
Nicki: You’ve been hungry for a little bit more interaction. Because clearly social media, whether you’re talking Facebook or Instagram, is really limited in like, I mean this morning we were kind of chatting about this and Robb was like you can’t even-
Robb: Instagram is appalling for trying to make a case about something or have an interaction. Like somebody makes a comment and then you comment and you’re like. It is so ill-suited for having a conversation. Like it is ridiculous.
Nicki: And it wasn’t intended for that. I think it was more picture sharing and it’s become.
Robb: Right. But I just find the whole experience toxic and annoying. And maybe this is career suicide. I don’t know. Maybe this whole thing-
Nicki: when we’ve talked about that.
Robb: … flops.
Nicki: Maybe we’re doing something that is a little different and it could end up biting us in the butt big time.
Robb: Right. But we’re.
Nicki: But we’re also in this phase where we’re like, if it’s not fun, if it keeps drawing more, then it’s not worth doing.
Robb: It’s def- … yeah.
Nicki: We want to make this fun.
Robb: So currently, it’s not really fun on our side and we don’t really feel like-
Nicki: We don’t think it’s fun on the other side either.
Robb: … the current medium that we generally have access to is not facilitating the type of relationship and interaction that we want to have with you guys. So do you want to mention a little bit of where we’re pivoting to?
Nicki: So what we’re doing is, first of all, the podcast is being rebranded to Healthy Rebellion Radio. And we kind of got this idea from the Albert Camus quote that was like, “the only way to become … to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” So we’re kind of playing on that with regards to health. So the only way to deal with an unhealthy world, which clearly we live in on a lot of levels, is to become so absolutely healthy that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Nicki: So we’ll have the Healthy Rebellion Radio, which will be a mix of both standard Q and A, like what we’ve been doing here on the Paleo Solution Podcast, as well as some live all-in shows. So like recorded the other day, as long as people-
Robb: As long as it doesn’t turn into a disaster, yeah.
Nicki: As long as people call and I think it’s just … it’s actually really interesting when we did that, we actually recorded it yesterday. You do get that ability to ask follow-on questions and to engage with people and just hearing people’s voice and their intonation when they’re describing what they’re going through or what their question is, it adds-
Robb: We had some great a-ha moments that would have been impossible in the standard Q and A format. And I think both of them are valuable. Some of the call-in stuff can definitely be longer format.
Nicki: One of our, one of our … It’s going to be a learning curve for us and one of our challenges is going to be to how to get people to ask their question and provide the answer-
Robb: And move that stuff along.
Nicki: … and move it along so that people aren’t waiting in queue for-
Robb: A long time, yeah.
Nicki: … 20, 30 minutes. So that’s something that we’ll have to get better at and we will as we do this.
Robb: But it was cool. It was cool. Like we definitely, I think that we rooted out some stuff that folks are like, Oh that totally makes sense and they’re going to circle back and so we can have that continuing engagement. So we will continue the Q and A as it’s historically been done. And then we’re also going to-
Nicki: We’ll mix it in with some live calls.
Robb: Mix in with live calls.
Nicki: And then we’re also, Robb is going to be … Robb does … One of the compliments that people pay you a lot is that you’re so accessible, as far as the people that are out there, kind of doing the work that you do and helping and sharing information about health. You are really accessible. People can ask questions on Instagram and Facebook and you are the one who answers them. It’s not … we don’t … I mean on our ads sometimes Chris or Squatchy will answer but like-
Robb: Who is super good at stuff too. So you’re getting great quality.
Nicki: But all of the main page stuff, you answer. And you spend a crazy amount of time doing that. But again, it’s a frustrating experience for you because you aren’t able to engage the way that you want.
Nicki: So we were looking for a place to do this that’s not on a social media platform and we’ve found a platform called Mighty Networks, and so we are going to be opening, actually this podcast is airing today and the first three episodes of Healthy Rebellion Radio are also live today. Not the day that we’re recording, but the day that you’re listening to all this.
Nicki: And so the Healthy Rebellion is a community, a network, that is our own space where people who care about the same things that we talk about and want to learn more from Robb. That is where you will be spending your time-
Robb: Dude, all of my time.
Nicki: … engaging people. So we’ll still use social media to the degree that we think it allows us to broadcast stuff, but it’s not going to be a spot where you engage.
Robb: I won’t be hanging out on the ‘Gram or Facebook really at all now. And again, maybe this is career suicide, but I’m cool with that. I’ve been threatening the coconut farm for a long time and we have a lot of things that we enjoy doing and can provide value in a lot of different directions. I do still feel like we have some really strong work to do and I think this Healthy Rebellion idea could be pretty amazing if folks have followed us for any period of time. They might recall the risk assessment program that we have with the clinic in Reno. We did a pilot study there that ended up saving the City of Reno $22 million with a 33 to one return on investment, and I’ve spent almost 10 years trying to build that into something that could be scalable and take it out to the masses.
Robb: We are hopeful that we’re on the cusp of being able to wed that process into the Healthy Rebellion overall. Our goal with the Healthy Rebellion is to help 1 million people exit the sick care system and we have some quantifiable metrics for what that means and how we would help people. A bit of our focus is on the U.S., but we have some strategies for how people internationally can exit the sick care system. That story changes a little bit based off of the type of healthcare system you’re in and the opportunities or challenges that you have there. But we’re going to be doing largely what we’ve historically done, but the goal is to have better engagement and for folks to be able to go deeper and also-
Nicki: And being a kind place where we can exchange information and share ideas and experience, but not be bombarded with a bunch of negativity.
Robb: And we really don’t want it to just be the Robb Wolf show. One of the fatal errors that CrossFit made, and there’s all kinds of interesting backstory around that, but you couldn’t have found someone who loved a concept more than what I did, but because of some of the pathology in that scene, they were completely unwilling to accommodate any deviation in thought, and I’m not really good at keeping my mouth shut when I feel like some things need to be said and done.
Robb: And back in 2009 I suggested that they should split CrossFit into a fitness track and a wellness and medical track, and I was laughed at, and now what have they done? They’ve basically killed the fitness track, which has had all kinds of interesting knock-on effects with the affiliate, and now they’re trying to do a wellness track and I’ll Godspeed to them, but I think that that ship has sailed and they should have had some thought around the opportunities that they hadn’t from them.
Robb: But the point to that is that I’ve honestly been uncomfortable with the Robb Wolf Show. I want this Healthy Rebellion … I will definitely offer all the stewardship that I can and whatever guidance, but I want this to be something that goes way above and beyond just me, which is why I’m hopeful that you folks aggregate your knowledge and your experience and your stories and participate so that this thing becomes something that is more than any singular person.
Robb: If I croak, these ideas of ancestral health and of the opportunities of some kind of market transparent health initiatives and regenerative agriculture and stable food systems that could last for thousands of years, need to be championed and need to be motored forward, and these are the things that matter to us. And again, we are continually perplexed by this stuff, because if we just shifted gears and did the like, we’ll get super lean, we’ll get super jacked, here’s our course on how to get abs or whatever, we could probably do pretty well with that. But that is just … I just don’t fucking care.
Robb: I literally would rather be a farmer and there’s so many other things that are so much more appealing to me than doing that. For the people that do that, great, that’s awesome. But for me, that doesn’t feel like meaningful work at all. That is not something that when I’m laying on my death bed and I look back at my life and I’m like, fuck yeah, I sold 6 million copies of six-minute abs or whatever.
Robb: And so this is definitely kind of gamble, but we’ve also been really early in a lot of different things and I think that there will be an exodus out of these really toxic platforms. I think there will probably be some good options that pop up, but I’m hopeful that this community provides value to people and people want to jump in and experience it and all that stuff. So yeah, we’re cautiously optimistic, I guess I would put it, but we’ll see how it goes.
Nicki: Yeah.
Robb: Yeah. Are we just stalling for Greg-
Nicki: Anything else you want to say until Greg calls us back.
Robb: … to call back?
Nicki: Great to call back and tell Greg calls us back?
Robb: I don’t think so.
Nicki: Let’s talk a little bit about how we might change the show format for the Healthy Rebellion. So we’re definitely going to do the Q and A, like we mentioned. But in the beginning we want to do a little bit of a relevant news topic-
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: … just a current event-type thing that relates to the topics that were covering in Healthy Rebellion.
Robb: So we might spackle in a little bit. So I’ve got a paper here, Lipid Findings from the Diabetes Education to Lower Insulin Sugars and Hunger, the (DELISH) Study. I’m just going to start pulling sometimes like a relevant news piece, research article, and sometimes funny shit, that is just kind of like, I can’t believe that this is going on or whatever. So I’m hoping to pull in a little bit of a grab bag of stuff ranging from research to topical news pieces that again, anything within the ancestral health umbrella, sleep, food community, gut microbiota. But then also kind of digging into the regenerative ag and some of these other things that I think are definitely important. Yeah.
Robb: I don’t know if we’re going to stall long enough for Greg.
Nicki: I don’t know. Greg, you’re-
Robb: Greg’s out to breakfast, so that’s okay. That’s okay. So do you want to remind folks where to go?
Nicki: So, yeah. So as you’re listening to this, the first three episodes of Healthy Rebellion Radio are already live on iTunes. Excuse me. And so we’d love it if you would go there and download and subscribe. We’d love for all of our subscribers from the Paleo Solution to migrate over and start listening to Healthy Rebellion Radio. So please do that. That way you won’t miss anything. And if you’re interested in joining the community and being part of the Healthy Rebellion platform, just go to join dot the healthy rebellion.com.
Robb: Cool.
Nicki: Cool.
Robb: Thank you guys for the ride that we’ve been on.
Nicki: I know.
Robb: I am getting a little misty-eyed.
Nicki: Are you getting teary?
Robb: Yeah. When we wrapped up the Paleo Solution seminar, I might have got a little misty-eyed in Boston when we wrapped that up and you know, so this was 444 episodes, certainly over a 10 year period. So an average of 44 episodes a year, approximately. And the reason why that is what it is, like there are many people who have produced many, many more shows, but I’ve always tried to do things that were quality and then at the points where I needed to sit down and write a book, actually write my own shit, and Oh, here we go. We stalled long enough.
Nicki: We stalled long enough.
Nicki: Greg, before you say anything, I just need to let you know that you are being recorded on the air for the final episode of the Paleo Solution Podcast.
Greg: The final episode? Thank God you’re putting that to bed.
Nicki: Yup.
Greg: I’m just kidding. Well, I’m driving so hopefully it sounds okay.
Nicki: Yeah. Well I have you on speaker phone up to the microphone. So who knows-
Robb: He took out his jerry-rigged the deal.
Nicki: Yeah, who knows if it’s going to record, but this is the final episode. We’re rebranding to something called Healthy Rebellion Radio. So we figured it would be kind of fun to not crank call you but just kind of call you and get your voice on the final episode.
Greg: Okay.
Nicki: Any parting words of wisdom for the original six listeners out there?
Greg: Oh man. Are they still listening?
Robb: About six people are, yeah.
Greg: Oh God, I don’t know. Keep listening to old Robbie Wolf, because he’s got the goods on everything. How about that?
Nicki: Awesome, Greg.
Greg: He’s the go-to guy for anything nutrition or health-related, in my humble opinion. If you can’t get a hold of me, of course.
Nicki: Of course. And if you have any training-related questions, especially with regards to Olympic weightlifting, Greg is your guy, and you should be following him at @catalystathletics.
Robb: Shoot, Greg is so good at it, he’s your guy and your gal.
Nicki: There you go.
Greg: I can be anything you need me to be for the right price.
Nicki: Awesome, Greg, thanks so much. And you know, end of an era.
Greg: It is the end of an era and I wish I could say I missed it. I’m just kidding. That was a lot of fun. It was fun while it lasted, but let’s all move on.
Nicki: Let’s all move on.
Robb: I like it.
Greg: Move on to more rebellious podcasts, what-have-you.
Nicki: There we go. There we go.
Greg: All right, guys.
Nicki: Awesome. Thanks, Greg.
Greg: I love you guys. I’ll talk to you soon.
Nicki: Love you too, bye.
Robb: Bye.
Greg: See ya.
Nicki: Yeah.
Robb: We got a Greg Everett-
Nicki: He made it happen.
Robb: … appearance. Awesome.
Nicki: Awesome. Cool guys. Well-
Robb: Before Nicki breaks down-
Nicki: I’m not going to cry.
Robb: We will wrap this up and, but again thank you guys.
Nicki: We’ll see you guys over at Healthy Rebellion Radio.
Robb: Yep. Take care.
Nicki: All right.
Robb: Bye-bye.
Nicki: Bye.
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