On Health And Freedom | Salty Talk 037 | THRR

Salty Talk is a special edition of Healthy Rebellion Radio. Each week on Salty Talk Robb will do a deep dive into current health and performance news, mixed with an occasional Salty conversation with movers and shakers in the world of research, performance, health, and longevity.
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Show Notes:

 

Vinay Prasad MD How Democracy Ends

Florida Dept of Health https://mobile.twitter.com/healthyfla/status/1466174868764958728

 

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Transcript:

Download a copy of this transcript here (PDF)

Nicki: Welcome to the Healthy Rebellion Radio. This is an episode of Salty Talk, a deep dive into popular and relevant health and performance news pieces mixed with the occasional salty conversation with movers and shakers in the world of research, performance, health and longevity.

Nicki: Healthy Rebellion Radio, Salty Talk episodes are brought to you by Drink LMNT, the only electrolyte drink mix that’s salty enough to make a difference in how you look, feel and perform. We cofounded this company to fill a void in the hydration space. We needed an electrolyte drink that actually met the sodium needs of active people, low carb, keto and carnivore adherence without any of the sugar colors and fillers found in popular commercial products. Health rebels, this is Salty Talk.

Nicki: And now, the thing our attorney advises. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. And given that this is Salty Talk, you should expect the occasional expletive.

Robb: Howdy folks.

Nicki: Hello, hello.

Robb: We are back. Hopefully, you’re making your health an act of rebellion, wife?

Nicki: Yes.

Robb: Are you doing that? Are your rebellious, wife?

Nicki: I am, I am. And we were just commenting when we were testing our audio before this that we needed to watch some movies for just some fun, good humor and…

Robb: Escapism.

Nicki: What happened? Something happened and I said, “You want to fuck on me.” And I couldn’t remember the name of the movie and he’s like, The Hangover, and we should watch that again because there’s so many good tidbits in that movie.

Robb: There are.

Nicki: Very enjoyable, like tigers. Love cinnamon. Right? It’s pepper they don’t like.

Robb: It’s pepper they don’t like. Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. Anyway.

Robb: There are some goodies.

Nicki: Yes, folks, we have a kind of a random Salty Talk for you today. We’re going to just be chatting about some topics related to health and freedom. But before we get into that, I have a couple of announcements with regards to things going on inside the Healthy Rebellion. Our fresh Start Cold Shower challenge kicks off on January 3rd. We did this last year. One of our rebels, Ash Higgs led it last year. It was fabulous, very well received. People loved it. And we’re doing it again this year. And that again starts on January 3rd.

Nicki: Our next Healthy Rebellion 30-Day Rebel Reset kicks off on January 14th. Robb and I will do that kickoff call. And then that following week is the optional seven-day carb test for folks who are interested in tracking and measuring to see how their blood glucose levels respond to a variety of carbohydrates. And then, the actual 30-Day Reset itself starts on January 24th, which happens to be…

Robb: The day that gold was discovered in California, and also-

Nicki: And also.

Robb: … that I was hatched in 1972.

Nicki: You hatched?

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Okay. Does that mean you’re like part dinosaur?

Robb: I’m feeling that old, for sure.

Nicki: It is actually going to be a big birthday for you.

Robb: Reasonably big, 50.

Nicki: It’s a milestone. Yeah.

Robb: Maybe it’s a half milestone.

Nicki: Yeah, yeah. Hopefully, it’s a half stone. Hopefully, we got another 50 in yeah?

Robb: I’d love it when people are like, “Oh, you’re only middle aged.” And I’m like, “I’m going to have to do really well if I’m legitimately middle aged.” Like the buzzkill for many years about 35, 38 is actually middle aged, if we’re being completely honest about it. Al, Dave Asprey living to 150 years and Peter Attia taking resveratrol aside, we’ll see how long this range is.

Nicki: Maybe the missing thing is just the oxygen canister up the hoo-ha.

Robb: That was what Dave recommended early on for ridding oneself of COVID.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: I would have loved to have applied that oxygen canister up Dave’s backside. And I would have gone light on lube also, but…

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: Anyway.

Nicki: Anyway.

Robb: So, that maybe is reflective of at least my mental state. I always feel bad dragging you into that. I don’t want to say our mental state because, well, I don’t know you’re probably even more unhinged than I am at some of the stuff. I’ve just been kind of casting around like we planned on doing our standard Q&A and I’ve got to be honest with a lot of what’s going on. I kind of look around what we are doing and I look around at what most folks are doing and a lot of people are doing some amazing work. Like there are people fighting the good fight and doing a good job.

Nicki: Amazing people doing-

Robb: From my perspective.

Nicki: … much needed work, yes.

Robb: And not the least of which is just people working, like going to their jobs and being there to do things all the way out to having an opinion about the state of affairs online and whatnot. But I see a lot of stuff on say, social media that I’m like, this is just so trite. It’s so fucking trite. And maybe that’s true all the time.

Robb: Maybe that’s a truth of the privilege that we have living in a modern western liberal democracy that we’ve all, for the most part, got it pretty goddamn easy, especially compared to many other people. And so, maybe I’m late to the game. Or maybe it’s just the reality that I’m seeing that slip away. And so, maybe it’s becoming more front and center important to me.

Robb: But today, we’re going to talk about some health considerations and some freedom thoughts. Probably will be a disaster saying we probably shouldn’t do this. But it’s kind of the only thing that I feel like is important right now and just feel like sharing kind of a flow of consciousness, I guess, that has been going on between my ears and to some degree with what we’re we talked about at home.

Nicki: And before we go there, just because your comment about what the bulk of what happens on social media, I just have two things that popped into my head. They’re not in our notes, but I just wanted to drop them. I read this week, there’s a, I think it’s a cosmetics brand.

Nicki: I don’t follow a lot of cosmetics brands, but one called Lush and the CEO canceled all, they deleted all of their social media accounts, even though it’s supposed to cost them something like 13 million pounds, I think it’s a British company in revenue, because of the damage that social media is doing to young people. And it’s not worth like feeding into that fodder, which I thought was such an amazing stand.

Robb: Remarkable ethics.

Nicki: Remarkable ethics and I’m just wondering if this might be something that catches on. And then the second thing that ties into this is I haven’t watched it yet, but Kresser pinged us and he had recently listened to the Tristan Harris on Joe Rogan about social media and we’ve heard Tristan Harris. He’s one of the people featured in The Social Dilemma, that movie that we’ve talked about before. And I’m sure many of you have already seen it. If you haven’t, it’s great. Definitely make some time to watch that.

Nicki: And he’s been interviewed by a host of people, I think even was … I don’t know if he’s been on Joe Rogan, before he was on the Dark Horse, I believe. Or maybe Brett interviewed him. But anyway, phenomenal. And so, anyway, Kresser was like, “You guys have to watch this or listen to this interview.” Basically, we’re fucked was the takeaway. And it all comes back to social media. So, definitely some stuff for that we’ll be digging into more. But anyway, that just popped in my head when you-

Robb: Do you want to share 1/3 kind of social media story, Zoe. You want to mention that?

Nicki: Oh, yeah. Okay. So, I was wondering how it kicked off, just came to me. So, last week’s episode, we spoke about that mass formation topic. There was a question in our fifth question of the episode. We’ve got lots of good feedback from y’all listening regarding Professor Mattias Desmet. He’s been in numerous interviews. I think Chris Martenson just interviewed him as well this week for Peak Prosperity.

Nicki: But there’s a video that the academy of ideas put out and it’s animated kind of hand drawn one of those like, what do you call them? We did one for Wired to Eat for the release, but one of those like hand drawn animated videos, explainer video kind of things. And it’s a 21-minute video called the Killing of the Mind, believe is the title. And we watched it with the kids. Sagan wasn’t really interested. She was doing something else in her room. Zoe, who’s nine, sat there and watched it with us.

Nicki: And the imagery that the person uses and we can include a link to this video in the show notes. I think it’s one of the most accessible kind of well-done videos explaining the concept of mass formation and how it’s happened and namely like our addiction to our phones and the ability to scroll and get all of this fear-based messaging directly from our phones. And the imagery the artist used was really compelling in that regard.

Robb: And I’ll throw something in there, the day before watching this, Zoe had asked, “What does iconic mean?” And so, Nicki and I kind of flailed around giving a very non-Webster’s definition of iconic, but we had also just wrap up-

Nicki: A couple weeks ago-

Robb: Wrapped up watching-

Nicki: … we watched the Lord of the Rings series.

Robb: … the Lord of the Rings series. And so, the Eye of Sauron and that was one of the key images that, Zoe saw that and then we paused it and I’m like, “What do you think that means?” And basically she said, this is people monitoring you and-

Nicki: Control.

Robb: Controlling you.

Nicki: The ability to control.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: And then, that Eye of Sauron was there. And then, you have all these people kind of glued to their heads down, glued to their phone-

Robb: And I made the observation-

Nicki: Like puppet strings and-

Robb: … that in addition to that, right next to the Eye of Sauron was cell phone towers. And then in almost every slide after that, there was a cell phone tower, which to me that is the Hobbit in analog to the eye. But the day after watching this, we watched it and then, I don’t know, we stretched, we went to bed. I don’t know what else we did that evening.

Nicki: And she said, she’s like, “Mom, I don’t want to do any devices. I’m going to do a challenge for myself and I don’t want to do any screentime for a month.” It was completely unprompted. I was tucking her into bed and I was like, “Okay.” And I mean, we’ll watch some television, some movies. They get a little bit of phone time.

Robb: Non-networked phone time, where they play-

Nicki: Minecraft or something.

Robb: … like Minecraft and stuff, yeah.

Nicki: And she hasn’t asked.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: It’s been about a week. And she’s like, I don’t want it. And we talked about. It’s like she recognizes that the phone … She made that connection as a nine-year-old. So, I don’t know.

Robb: And I just kind of offhand them, how are you doing? Saturday morning, we’ll let them watch some cartoons and stuff like that. And I was like, how are you doing with that? She’s like, “I actually feel like I’m happier.” So, that’s cool. Little bit of a parenting win. So, maybe we’ll go into what’s probably going to be a parenting fail here.

Nicki: Well, you’ve talked about this piece before. You wanted to revisit this as a opening.

Robb: We have mentioned Vinay Prasad, MD’s work. And I do believe we mentioned this particular one. And I’ve had a tab open in both computers that I use for three months since he published this, and it said, how democracy and just Vinay is so interesting to me because he’s this very young, very accomplished physician. Believe he works in the Bay Area. I think he’s part of one of the like San Francisco. healthcare networks, which pretty progressive. I think we’re not ruffling too many feathers to say that that’s an area that is very much into the mandates and the masks and all the stuff.

Robb: And Vinay has been just interesting in that, he’s been unafraid to speak what he sees as being the truth. And I think he does a pretty remarkable job of sussing through the information at hand. Like he had a piece where he talked about the claims around mask wearing and COVID disease transmission and cloth masks are effectively worthless. If you wear an N95 mask exactly the way you’re supposed to all day, don’t touch your face, don’t do what everybody does with masks, that it had maybe a 30% risk reduction and that was being a bit on the generous side.

Robb: And I’ve just been amazed by both the things that he produces, the fact it doesn’t get censored, the fact it’s been on MedPage today, although MedPage has plenty of just absolute bollocks in it. But this piece struck me. And so, it’s really good. I would recommend folks read it in its entirety. I’m going to dig into this and then we’re going to talk about some other things and the other things that we talked about, I would just encourage you to look at those through the lens of what Vinay puts forward here.

Robb: So, it starts off the pandemic events of 2020, 2021 outline a potential pathway for a future democratically elected president of the United States to systematically end democracy. The course of events leading to this outcome need not be a repeat of the direct assault on the Capitol, but a distortion of risk of illness as a justification for military force and the suspension of democratic norms. I would say we’ve already been here.

Nicki: We have a distortion of risk of this particular illness.

Robb: And we have trod this path thoroughly. And I think just horrible precedents have been set. I’ve talked about this before, but just as a context piece, my whole life, I’ve kind of seen myself as this kind of center left libertarian.

Robb: And mainly, I would characterize myself more left because I’ve been progressive in a lot of social issues. If somebody were to ask me in one sentence or two sentences, how would you define your politics and it’s like, I hope my married gay neighbors can protect their pot plants with semi-automatic weapons, and they can drive their hydrogen-fueled car because we have a nuclear power plant that provides the energy to split water and produce hydrogen for their vehicle. That energy, social stuff, right to bear arms. That’s kind of the whole deal.

Robb: And I remember, post 9/11, I was super concerned about the United States going into Iraq. I was apoplectic over what came out of the Patriot Act. I just felt like it was virtually the destruction of the Fourth Amendment and all kinds of bad stuff was coming out of that and kind of the scene that we were in then, like the early CrossFit scene was beginning to make money hand over fist from getting folks in the military certified within CrossFit. And so, CrossFit wasn’t super excited about hearing any rhetoric like that. Many, many people were just like, “You’re un-American. You’re terrible. Your left wing pink or whatever.”

Robb: And then you fast forward to today. And we’re at this spot where apparently now this same basket of relative politics. My politics haven’t really changed but apparently now, I’m a right wing, conservative, whatever, whatever, whatever. So, the long and short of all that is just that I think, and I think it’s a credible position or maybe just a hypothesis to throw out there, I think we’ve gone down bad paths. I think that horrible precedent has been set and people have been willing to dismiss all this stuff out of hand. And I think that it’s dangerous. And I think that we’re really playing with fire on that stuff.

Robb: So then I guess we move to the Florida-

Nicki: Well, let me just touch on that a little bit. I believe someone in the Healthy Rebellion shared this little clip of Jordan Peterson from his recent appearance on Joe Rogan. And I think it kind of ties into what you were just sharing there. And the clip was like, I think Joe basically asked, “How did we get here? How is this happening?” And Jordan said, “Well, here’s how it happens. We push you. I’m going to push you a little bit just to the point … I’m going to keep pushing until you get to the point where you’re just about to start to protest. And then, I’m going to sit back and I’m going to wait awhile. And then I’m going to push again.

Nicki: And I’m going to encroach just again up until where your feathers are getting ruffled and you’re going to start to protest. And then I wait.” And this keeps happening, this process of like pushing just to the point, and then sitting back and it’s like this very patient exercise. It kind of takes place over time. But by the end of it, you’ve taken so many steps backward, steps where you said, “This is my line, I’m standing here,” but then you take half a step here, two steps another spot and before you know it, you’re a mile behind the line that you-

Robb: Thought you were going to stand.

Nicki: … thought you were going to hold on. And so, I will find that clip and put that in the show notes as well but kind of ties into to this. It’s sort of this gradual encroachment that it’s analogous to the frog boiling in water. The water is tepid. It’s warm. And then it gets a little warmer.

Robb: Maybe it’s self-serving, but we’re just throwing this out there. Again, this is just kind of what’s been on my mind and I’m doing this. For the people who may be push back or somebody new listening to this or like these guys are conspiracy theorists, wackos, whatever, our lives would be easier if we just kind of like tow the party line. There’s really not upside here. We haven’t turned this into like a monetization scheme.

Robb: We, speak for you and if I’m speaking inappropriately, you can tell me to bugger off, but we’re really concerned about where things are going and the kind of danger that we are in in this situation. And this is maybe a self-serving statement, but I’m going to make it in this process that Jordan describes here. There’s a group of people that really want control over other folks. And so, they push. And then when the people on the other side get ready to push back, then the instigators kind of back off.

Robb: But the people on the other side are mainly like you do you and let me do me. And so, there’s not the backlash, yet. There isn’t the backlash yet. There isn’t the move to retake real estate that has been lost, kind of acquiesce, kind of acquiesce. And what I’ve said for a long time is that you will push people, and in this case, it’s going to be more right leaning, more conservative folks.

Robb: You will push them until they decide to take back real estate. And that’s going to be a fucking disaster. And nobody on the progressive side of this thing seems to get it. They will say it’s a potentiality. Some people kind of allude to that, but they don’t get that they are going to be the instigators of this process.

Robb: In the piece that Vinay Prasad mentioned, he’s like it could be the totalitarian individual could be left leaning, it could be right leaning. And he describes two different paths where these people come into power and they’re able to use the precedents of the previous pandemics to justify whatever it is that they’re wanting to do.

Robb: And so, many people on the left like when The Handmaid’s Tale came out as a series, and it really was quite well done. A good number of people have followed that book. They’re like, “See, see, this is what I’ve always said. The religious right are going to be these people that take away all have our freedoms.”

Robb: I would say though, by and large, within this context, folks have been like, if you want to get a vaccine, get a vaccine. If you want to do this, do this. But they’ve been kind of hands off. But there’s this push and push and push. And then, there’s a response. And I guess that actually kind of dovetails a bit into…

Nicki: Your next.

Robb: … the next piece, which is, well, this sets it up.

Nicki: You want to go here?

Robb: Yeah, we’ll go here first.

Nicki: Okay. Really great piece that came out from the Florida Department of Health. This past week, there was a video that was shared via Twitter that features the Florida surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, talking about keeping Floridians healthy. And it’s a short video. It’s showing people living an active lifestyle, talking about the importance of early treatment, which is never mentioned in mainstream-

Robb: And they mentioned getting vaccinated, too.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: It’s not absolute vaccine.

Nicki: Vaccine is mentioned there.

Robb: That’s part of the strategy.

Nicki: But it’s the first piece of kind of, I don’t know, the news, the first piece shared from a state or kind of government-

Robb: A governmental agency.

Nicki: … entity, agency that actually focused on the underlying theme was maintain a healthy immune system and stay active. And vaccination was on that list, exercise and activity nutrition. They mentioned vitamin D, vitamin C zinc, and the early treatment portion of the video. They talk about monoclonal antibodies and a couple of the other early treatments that people are seeing success with. And then the final thing was this Florida surgeon general saying let’s live.

Nicki: And it’s very well done. The message is hugely positive. It provides agency for people. There’s not a scrap of fear in there. It’s like here’s what we’re doing. Here’s how we as-

Robb: Here’s what you can do.

Nicki: Yes.

Robb: Here’s the power of you have.

Nicki: Yup, yup, as citizens of the state of Florida, this is how we can tackle this. And it was so positive, so encouraging. And it’s like why the effing F has this not been the message from the federal government from day one and to all the other states out there like Florida is I think doing a phenomenal job leading in this regard. All the states should be following their lead with regards to this.

Nicki: People need to get healthy. They need to boost their immune system. There’s no reason why we’re not talking about vitamin D on a more global level. People who know about vitamin D are following people like Kresser and Chris Masterjohn and it’s not been that widely addressed.

Robb: No, not at all.

Nicki: And it’s critical for COVID outcomes. So, I don’t know. Bravo to Florida. If you live in Florida, go Florida.

Robb: Well, it was interesting. So, this was on Twitter. And for the most part, the response was very favorable. Interestingly, non-Floridians were about the only people who got their bridges bunched over this. And there was some-

Nicki: Somebody was like, “Well, why don’t you emphasize the vaccine and boosters more, because then you wouldn’t even need to worry about your immune system,” which is like, this is why you don’t go on Twitter. The comments are-

Robb: Yeah, and it explains so much because we know whether you’re going to get the vaccine or you experience dealing with the virus via your own immune system, the healthier you are, the better your vitamin D status is being topped off on zinc and vitamin C, these essential cofactors in mitigating the cytokine storm and the inflammatory process that is a consequence of both vaccination and viral infection, things are better.

Robb: And this maybe goes into some of the kind of woke pathology around the healthy at any size stuff. A teenage boy who dies from malnutrition from anorexia was not healthy at any size. And neither is the individual that is five foot four and 400 pounds healthy at any size. It’s just not. And this seems to be in this same category where there are folks that are dead set now.

Robb: And it’s so fascinating, again, considering kind of like the political background there, they have wholly abdicated health to medicine, to a medical intervention. We’re going to get a vaccine. We’re going to get a booster. We’re going to mask. We’re going to hide inside. And those are our strategies.

Nicki: And people that previously, pre-2020 would have been skeptical or critical of big pharma in all of its largess and the commercials on ask your doctor before trying this side effects include blah, blah, blah. There was healthy criticism about the role of big pharma and advertising to people and all this stuff. And now, it’s sort of like, that piece is gone. There’s no critical thought there at all. It’s just this is the one true saving product.

Robb: Right. Do you want to do your…

Nicki: Yes, let’s go into our-

Robb: … Salty diversion really quickly.

Nicki: Yes, this Salty Talk episode of the Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by LMNT, our Salty AF electrolyte company. And tis the season for warm beverages. We’ve had our first significant snow here this week, and the girls have been out rolling ginormous snowmen. And then when they come in, they’re cold and chocolate salt hits the spot. It’s a great hot cocoa alternative. Lots of element flavors can be enjoyed hot.

Nicki: As I’ve mentioned before, lemon habanero is my favorite. But chocolate salt, mint chocolate salt are great again as cocoa alternatives. Mint chocolate, remember is here just for a limited time. And Robb has a particular fondness for his raspberry added to hot tea.

Robb: I have to say maybe the orange I like even better than the raspberry, but they’re both really good. I’m maybe 80-20 on that at this point.

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: All righty. So, you can grab your LMNT. Again, it’s important to hydrate even though it’s winter, it’s cold outside, at least in the northern hemisphere. Electrolytes are just as important. You can grab yours at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drink L-M-N-T dot com slash R-O-B-B and remember to grab some for yourself and anyone on your holiday gift list.

Robb: Cool.

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: Okay.

Nicki: This is where you’re getting into the…

Robb: This is where it gets sketchy.

Nicki: … danger zone.

Robb: Yeah, this is where it gets full on sketchy. But again, the context here, just I know the bulk of our listeners are super smart, really grounded, but I’ve been kind of horrified. I’ve been horrified for a while, but I’ll post something on Instagram. I’ll be like, okay, this is worth actually downloading the app and putting it on my phone and doing this thing.

Nicki: FYI, anytime Robb posts something to Instagram, like our podcast clips and whatnot, Jessica handles that. But anytime it’s a news type piece and that Robb is posting it, he literally downloads the app, does the thing and then deletes the app.

Robb: Julie do the thing.

Nicki: Yeah. Do the thing, Julie.

Robb: So, we have the hypothesis or the premise that Vinay Prasad shared with us that we’re heading in a direction that could be the end of democracy and it’s overreach of everything. But basically, this governmental overreach, this inappropriate tying of medicine into pandemic response and that we’ve in a similar way to the way that freedom was damaged due to 9/11. Arguably freedoms have been damaged here. Maybe people don’t agree with that. I definitely think that that’s true. I think it’s a real problem.

Robb: So, then we had Florida pushing back against the just doom narrative, that you can’t do anything, that the only things that we have are these highly medicalized interventions. And Florida is like, no, you can eat healthy. You can get healthy. You can have community. You can go outside. Check your vitamin D, zinc, vitamin C. These are all viable. And also, for some of the folks that are pushing back on this stuff, there is literally no downside to any of that. The risk-reward deal is phenomenal and-

Nicki: Improves health, it improves mental health, it improves-

Robb: And for people that push back on that, just take any of those topics and search for influenza and vitamin D, influenza and zinc status, influenza and vitamin C. It’s very well established. So, Florida’s pushing back on one level with just a health narrative. And Florida is also in a position where they’re looking at pushing back in another way because the federal government has so overreached itself, in my opinion and the opinion of many other people.

Robb: And so, from Governor DeSantis on the formation of a potential state of Michigan militia, I’m proposing more than $100 million for our National Guard active duty military and veterans to reestablish the Florida State Guard to assist our National Guard in state specific emergencies. I’m committed to supporting our military and keeping our state safe.

Robb: So, for some people, that’s a real taint puckering situation. Like, oh, gosh, and there’s a guy, Jackson barber, who was in this thread who said, it’s not about protecting Floridians, he is himself not a Floridian. It’s about controlling Floridians and protecting a certain governor. And there were a lot of comments like this. One of the people basically said, “So, this is Ron DeSantis’ SS group,” basically, which the Hitler and Nazi analogies just fly like snow flurries on a Montana mountain.

Robb: But it’s interesting. If you’re going to really make that analogy, I think you have to anchor that with who is trying to force some agenda on someone else who is unwilling, uninterested in that agenda. Is the supposition here that this group is going to go around and prevent people from getting vaccines? I mean, it is preposterous at this point. And this is where the, I think, the kind of moral compass and whatnot is just fascinating, but I am a big states rights person. And for the folks listening in Europe, they’re probably like, “What the fuck are these people talking about?”

Robb: But this is one of the still unique features of the United States. I know people in Australia and New Zealand probably just think that this is absolutely crazy. Or maybe they don’t, maybe some people don’t. But there’s been a longstanding struggle between folks who want to centralize power in the United States and those who want to keep more of the action on a government’s perspective happening at the local level. And the irony with that, and Dan Crenshaw, and some other people have done wonderful pieces on this.

Robb: When you look at Europe, the bulk of the governance actually happens at the local and technically the state level. And most of these countries have much smaller populations than the United States does. So, it actually ends up parsing out more on what we would consider to be the state level, like Switzerland does the bulk of its stuff at the municipal level as far as governance and whatnot.

Robb: But there’s a transparency with this more local governance. There’s a better understanding of what the needs are in this situation. When I look at this, what has happened thus far in the United States, if a governor pulls up the National Guard to do XYZ, that National Guard can then be redirected due to actions of the president and the federal government. And so, basically pulled off the task. There’s been some discussion around this within Texas and border issues and whatnot.

Robb: And so, part of the Constitution of the United States and Constitution is funny because we have this thing called the Constitution, which is this document. But there is the constitution of a nation, the constitution of a person. There is the constitution of a cup of coffee. It is warm with a ceramic. It is what this thing is built from. And part of what the United States is built from for right or wrong is that if individuals at the local level are sensing this notion that there was tyrannical overreach from centralized governance, then there are options for recourse. And one of those options is the formation of a state militia.

Robb: And so, think of this what you want. I think that this is probably a good thing. But this is also one more step down the path to a civil war. And I’m not really sure what more to say about that. The writing seems so on the wall, but yet, there seems to be no give. Every turn, you’ve got the Omicron variant.

Nicki: Well, you have to ask why is this even on the table. It hasn’t been on the table-

Robb: Ever.

Nicki: … ever, and so now-

Robb: Since World War II. And it’s interesting there were some slam pieces on this like The Daily Beast had a piece that talked about previous iterations of these state militias, the first being during the Civil War and because Florida is a southern state, then at that point, these militias were protecting then slave state. And so, okay, yes, super fucked up, a terrible, terrible part of history, but then it kind of sidestepped the whole process of these things being spun up during World War II when the National Guard was brought into the main army to fight abroad.

Robb: And we needed some degree of security here. And so, the state militias were formed. And god, I don’t even know what my point is above and beyond. At some point, individuals at a city, like what you heard about Oroville, California, basically proclaiming themselves a-

Nicki: A constitutional republic.

Robb: … a constitutional republic. And this is the beginning of this pushback. And part of me is at a point where I’m so frustrated with “the other side.” And if people have followed me long enough, I’m kind of a fuck it, burn it all down type of person. Now, I know that my life would suck during a civil war, pretty good chance I would die. Possibly my children will die either through violence or starvation or something else.

Robb: But I’m reaching a point where I’m kind of like, whatever difficulties I have are going to be minimal compared to most of the people that I think are just like huge assholes at this point. And some folks listening this are going to be like, “Okay, Robb’s totally crazy,” and maybe I am. But the deeper thing here-

Nicki: Well, people died for freedoms-

Robb: Before.

Nicki: … before. And medical freedom is one of those hills to die on.

Robb: And particularly, when medical freedom has been turned into something that now you maybe can’t travel, now, you can’t shop, now you can’t meet with friends and family and coworkers. So, it’s medical freedom that has been coopted into a variety of totalitarianism that like the Nazis could only dream of having something that’s effective in corralling a whole population.

Nicki: And the campaign of fear has been so successful that you see people where the sister won’t allow the 95-year-old double vaxxed mom, the triple vaxxed sister won’t visit the 95-year-old double vaxxed mother because-

Robb: She doesn’t have the third one.

Nicki: … she won’t get the third one, but the mom is over it at this point and is like, “Fuck it. I did the two. I’m not going to do any more. This is bullshit. I’m seeing this for what it is now.” And so, you’ve got these family rifts and these huge polarized … It’s literally tearing families apart, relationships apart, friendships apart. So, all of the mandate kind of stuff coming from on high is one piece of it, but that the fear campaign and just it’s been so, so successful that-

Robb: In dividing people against each other.

Nicki: … in dividing people against the people that they love, the people that they might not see again.

Robb: So, again, I don’t know if this was at all helpful as a podcast. Our charter was to make your health an act of rebellion. This seems kind of under that charter, but the bigger picture here for me is I’m pretty good at seeing long-term trends. And I remember telling Greg Glassman, “Hey, you’re going to have 10,000 affiliates at this point.” And really the only thing I missed on that was it took longer than I expected because the model that CrossFit rolled out business wise was so terrible that there was much higher attrition than what I really factored in.

Robb: But I told them 10 years in advance of where they would go. And I’m not Nostradamus. I’m not prescient. But I’m pretty good at catching some long term trends. And we are absolutely in the crosshairs of a legit civil war in this this nation. And there are lots of people internal to the United States that hate the United States and think it’s terrible and would love to see it burn down. There are lots of people external to the United States that agree with that.

Robb: And the ironic thing is that, for the most part, if the United States finds itself embroiled in anything above a very regional conflict, it’s going to be a disaster for the world. And I really don’t want to see that happen. But I’ve got to be honest, at this point, I’m kind of like, okay, the people that I’m growing to strongly disliked myself, I know what’s going to go worse for them. It’s going to go worse for the people in cities. It’s going to go worse for the people that are kind of in the woke mobs. And there’s a certain amount of schadenfreude that I’m kind of becoming okay with that eventuality.

Robb: And my only point to this, and some people may be like, “Well, Robb’s a lunatic and fuck him and I regret ever listening to any …” Okay, fine, if you want to take that. All I’m offering up here is I feel like I’m a fairly reasonable person. I really try to think things through, to let the true follow me, lead me where we’ll go. I’ve changed my mind on all kinds of different stuff with nutrition and different lifestyle things. I’m open to changing my mind on this. But I just see this trend, and this trend is going in a horrible spot.

Robb: And all that I’m making the case about is if I am a reasonably smart, reasonably balanced person who seeks the truth, what are the things being thought to the people less stable, and less secure, and don’t have the good relationship, and don’t have the internal fortitude to continually ask questions and whatnot. There’s a whole bunch of people to the side of me who are thinking similar thoughts, but they’ve been arrived at, at much less analyzed perspective.

Robb: And the world doesn’t want that to manifest. And I’m not really sure how to unfuck this at this point. To your opening, if we all got off social media, that would probably be a big deal. I’m really thinking about spinning up a substack and maybe I shut all my social media down, maybe I just turn the comments off, and I just post what I do with the substack there and we do the podcast, and we call it good. It is interesting that if enough people just today, tomorrow, just turn off their Twitter, turn off Instagram and just opted out, there seems to be done. They really would be done. But it’s…

Nicki: How do you get enough track.

Robb: Critical mass.

Nicki: Yeah, there’s a critical mass that needs to happen.

Robb: What do you think about what I’m thinking? I did a lot of jabbering. But you’re married to me. And of course, because I call you wife, then that means that I’m physically and emotionally abusive and all this other stuff. Clearly-

Nicki: I call you, hubbs, so what does that mean?

Robb: Clearly, if I treated you poorly, you wouldn’t shiv me in the liver and kill me and stick me in the front yard because you’re so incapable of defending yourself and everything. So, what do you think? Am I crazy? Is this madness?

Nicki: I don’t think you’re crazy. I do think it is absolute madness. I think medical freedom is for sure a hill that I would die on. The slope is slipperier than our driveway with a sheet of ice on it. COVID vaccine aside, medical, it’s not a far stretch to imagine some other thing that comes along and some other medication that everybody must have. And there was a woman that was just featured on the Dark Horse podcast, who is Australian. She has, six years ago, diagnosed polyethylene glycol allergy. She gets anaphylaxis from it, from a whole host of things.

Nicki: She’s highly allergic to practically everything under the sun, even like the skin prick test for polyethylene glycol gave her an anaphylactic reaction. And she could not get an exemption. It was just this run around dealio and in Australia, in Melbourne where she lives, that state made it a rule that you could not work without the vaccine, even though she works on her own and she’s in catering or something.

Nicki: And so, it was this huge process. She finally did a video online. And her story has become kind of went viral and has become well known. And she was finally able to get her exemption. But there are lots of people unable to get these exemptions who desperately need them. So, in the name of like … So, we can’t have even a single COVID death. But then we’re potentially vaccinating people with known allergies to the excipients in these products. We have a friend in Canada who’s an ER doctor who can’t get an exemption is likely going to be terminated from his job in January.

Robb: And he’s an ER doctor who serves rural areas, so rural that they have to stick him on an airplane or a helicopter to fly him around to different communities and they don’t fucking have anybody else to plug into that. And it is so goddamn important to get this one guy vaccinated that how many other people are going to die or suffer because they don’t have a fucking doctor.

Nicki: Yeah, I just feel like obviously, there has been so many people who have gone above and beyond in the medical community throughout this whole pandemic. But there are also a lot of people who, whether it’s ego or whatever, are really failing people. Yeah, there’s a story, but I don’t know that I’ll go into that right now.

Nicki: So yeah, I think this medical freedom piece is a hill that a lot of people would die on. It’s just what kind of life is it to be constantly put on house arrest or told you can’t go eat in a restaurant. You can’t take your kid to go to swimming lessons because she’s three and you can’t get vaccinated for whatever health reason or even for personal choice, you don’t want to get vaccinated. So, your three-year-old can’t go to swimming lessons. Your children can’t play hockey in Canada. Your family can’t go out to eat as a family. You can’t go to the movie theater.

Nicki: Well, and into that killing of the mind piece, which again, we’ll link to this, one of the ways around a totalitarian kind of state, like what it seems like the world is becoming is to create these parallel structures. So, you find ways within the physical totalitarian world to have some normal interactions and you kind of get together with other like-minded people and kind of have these sort of, they call them parallel structures that operate within kind of the grander, totalitarian regime. But it’s not living. If this just keeps coming up-

Robb: It’s not living free.

Nicki: … it’s not living free. And what kind of life is that, no innovation happens, there’s not as much joy. It’s like, fear, fear, fear. We had one of the guys that we do Jiu-Jitsu with, his best friend’s son killed himself before Thanksgiving. There’s the suicide situation is very high right now, even though the headlines say that suicides were lower last year than in 2019. I don’t know, it’d be interesting to see what they are for this year.

Robb: Well, they probably just counted as COVID deaths.

Nicki: I know. Well, there are lots of knock-on effects to this whole thing that are not being properly accounted for.

Robb: One final thing that I’ll throw in this, I know this was kind of a wandering grab bag of terribleness. But climate change has been woven into COVID, is woven into animal husbandry, is woven into all kinds of social justice issues. And I’ve been warning about this for at least six years, since Yael gave me the rundown on when I suggested that we should have a more nuanced look at…

Nicki: The eradication of mussels.

Robb: … the eradication of mussels in this overall climate change thing. And she was like, “Well, if anybody who says we need a nuanced look at climate change is also a Holocaust denier.” And I was like, there you go. All of this is going to get wrapped into that. And this was way before COVID. But all of these things have been mixed together in a way that even when you look at some of the lake state-sponsored material, you could just pull out social justice, climate change, COVID. And it doesn’t really matter which word you’re talking about, they’re all somehow the same.

Robb: And so, this is a hill I would die on because the next step is really limiting access to food, possibly limiting the ability to produce food that we would like. And the food that they’re going to produce is owned by Bill Gates and multinational corporations. It’s not an organic farm out your back door that is beans and pulses. It’s industrial real crop food systems. And so, I don’t know. It’d be interesting to know what people think about this episode, think about these topics at large.

Robb: I guess my whole point of this is there are some canaries and some coal mines that are sounding an alarm. I would put Vinay Prasad in that. I will put this attempt at this podcast in that. And I would also say that from this hypothesis generating perspective, people are saying, if ABC occurs, we can expect XYZ as results. And with the increased attempts at totalitarianism, you will see more and more pushback and more violent pushback. And we are seeing the seed stages of that.

Robb: And so, if and when these more gnarly things come to pass, you don’t get to act surprised. Maybe you get to be remorseful. But I’ve been hamstrung about what next to do. Because even just doing this, maybe we get canceled, maybe we don’t. I don’t know. But yeah, I should have probably finished on a different note. But that’s what I’ve got. Do you have any other final closing thoughts?

Nicki: I don’t.

Robb: Okay.

Nicki: I don’t.

Robb: Well, folks. We’re almost through this year.

Nicki: Yes, we are. And yeah, I think that’s all for this week. But we’d love some feedback.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Love it, hate it, whatever you can-

Robb: Because at the end of the day, we really just want to provide value to people. And if this is just Nicki and I jabbering into the ether and people are mainly annoyed and you don’t get value with it, then we don’t-

Nicki: But it’s also our attempts at doing what we feel is needed. Because again, one of those ways of kind of combating a totalitarian system, at least as put forward in that video the Killing of a Mind is talking about this type of thing, so that people hear it. And there are a lot of people that are kind-

Robb: What was one of the biggest things that was critical to do?

Nicki: Ridicule and humor.

Robb: And humor.

Nicki: And humor, yeah.

Robb: And I just want to circle this back around to the early phases of the pandemic when a good number of people, people in the ancestral health community went whole hog after JP Sears and I knew that they were horrible people for doing that then and I doubly find them to be just absolutely reprehensible turd to this point.

Nicki: He has been just a phenomenal like … As far as ridiculing-

Robb: The establishment.

Nicki: … the establishment and making fun of it because that is one way to … There’s no sense of humor on the part of establishment.

Robb: In every totalitarian regime, whether they were right wing, fascist or left wing like communist or whatever, who were the first people to go?

Nicki: The comedian.

Robb: The comedians and the satirists. Anybody doing satire is gone. From the newspapers, standup comedians and whatnot. And this is another thing that still it just is such a … I’m so fucking disgusted by how all that played out and god bless JP for hanging in there. And if you don’t agree with what he says, then do satire of him. But this is an ironic piece to this. And I know this just diverting off into a somewhat tangential point.

Robb: But if you can make good satire on something, it usually means there’s something fucked up about it. And if you can’t make good satire on something, then it usually means that that thing is fairly buttoned up. And you could argue with that. Do some satire around whether or not that’s true. So, I guess that is something like we’re certainly not remotely as funny as JP Sears, but we do try to inject a little bit of humor into-

Nicki: Sadly, we are not.

Robb: But we’re not gingers, so-

Nicki: That’s true.

Robb: … we don’t have that superpower. What do I always say?

Nicki: It’s always the ginger.

Robb: It’s always the fucking gingers. Yeah. So, I guess that that is a thing to wrap up on. Part of what we’re trying to do is to the degree we understand this stuff, bring some commentary and some thoughts. And we do poke some fun, have some satire at various points. And again, if there was anything that folks took away from this, I guess two things that there are some people predicting some pretty gnarly things out there and maybe keep your eyes open about whether or not there are some goose-stepped marches towards this problem.

Robb: And then the other side of this is this notion around the sanctity of satire and humor. And that if you are of a mind that a satirist or comedian needs to be cancelled, shut down, deplatformed, you’re probably the fucking problem.

Nicki: It means you can’t take a joke.

Robb: You can’t take a joke, so fuck off. Okay.

Nicki: All right, folks. Thank you for listening to another episode of Salty Talk from the Healthy Rebellion Radio. Please check out our show sponsor, LMNT at drinklmnt.com slash R-O-B-B. Again, that’s drinklmnt.com slash R-O-B-B and we’ll see you next time.

Robb: Bye everybody.

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Robb Wolf

Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat, is a former research biochemist and one of the world’s leading experts in Paleolithic nutrition. Wolf has transformed the lives of tens of thousands of people around the world via his top ranked iTunes podcast and wildly popular seminar series.