Still no mention of HEALTH? | Salty Talk 039 | 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:

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/01/our-failure-to-grapple-with-the-obesity-epidemic-pumps-diabetes-crisis-to-new-heights/

https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/28/he-lost-more-than-100-pounds-before-catching-covid-it-likely-saved-his-life/

James Lindsay screenshot Nicki mentioned: https://twitter.com/conceptualjames/status/1488694489686368263

Sponsor:

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Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

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’s 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 co-founded 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.

Nicki: Health rebels, this is Salty Talk. 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: Welcome back, folks. Hopefully your world smells as good as mine does.

Nicki: I did not pass gas if that’s what y’all are thinking.

Robb: Kind of.

Nicki: I burped. I burped, and it was a fragrant one.

Robb: I think you had some … a taco meat scramble.

Nicki: I had leftover taco meat with eggs and salsa.

Robb: And I comment, I’m like that smelled exactly the way it smelled when you cooked it like 45 minutes ago, which I guess is kind of impressive and odd and horrifying all at once.

Nicki: Yeah. Everybody’s like … they’re, what’s the word? Not revulsed. Repulsed.

Robb: Repulsed?

Nicki: They’re repulsed and-

Robb: “Revulsed”?

Nicki: … we haven’t even gotten started yet. Anyway, welcome everybody back to another episode of the Healthier Rebellion Radio, this is a Salty Talk and we are going to just be talking about a couple of news pieces and just this crazy situation where the messaging from all of our media overlords and health experts is still completely devoid of anything to do with bettering your health.

Robb: There’s one solution. And one jab to rule them all, apparently.

Nicki: So anyway, before we jump into all of that, I just want to share a couple things from inside the Healthy Rebellion. As y’all know, we are in the middle of our 30 day rebel reset. This is sleep week, but I wanted to share a post from one of our members, Sydney. She posted this last week.

Nicki: “So every time Robb and Nikki would talk about people not getting enough protein on the podcast, I would be like, ‘Yeah, but not me. I get lots of protein.’ Four days in on measuring macros. No, I was not eating enough protein. It must be annoying for them to be right all the time.”

Nicki: So anyway, we hammer this all the time. I know all of you that listen to this podcast have heard us talk about protein probably to the point where you are rolling your eyes in your heads every time it comes up, but just like Sydney here, you might not be getting enough. And so if body composition is something that you are focused on and for whatever reason things aren’t budging, you might want to track your macros, at least the protein macro. And see what’s goin on.

Robb: We’ve found that just tracking protein for 95, 98% of people, it takes care of al the needs. And if it doesn’t, then you can step up the rest of what you need to do. But it’s pretty damn easy to have a food scale and just weigh and measure your protein and then just portion everything else out. What people find is that they get the carbs right, they get the fat pretty much right, although not always, which leads us into another update.

Nicki: And we got an update from, if you guys remember a couple episodes back, episode 99, we had a question from Dave who was struggling to meet protein requirements and he wrote back in and he said, “When they talked about this a couple weeks ago, they asked for an update, so here it is. I hadn’t realized how much fat I was eating, but cutting back has made all the difference. It’s now fairly easy to get plenty of protein without feeling over full. Sometimes I’m even a little hungry after meeting my protein goal. And after being stuck at the same weight for weeks, literally without even a single pound of variation day to day, in the last 10 days, I’ve dropped four pounds. I don’t expect it to continue at that rate, but clearly I’m on the right track. So thank you.”

Robb: So get enough protein. And then don’t overeat the fat along with the protein, which is kind of the holdover from our very effective, but oftentimes broken and misrepresented low carb and keto approaches and-

Nicki: Fat bombs, all the time.

Robb: All day, all the time, Dave Asprey buttered coffee, all that stuff can be good in the right context. But the thing is, is that the right context almost never happens with the vast majority of people. It’s kind of selling a hope and a dream. And as you know, giving acknowledgement to the people that I learned from, big props to Tyler and Luis at KetoGaines, this is following their lead and really watching them coach people through this stuff in a highly structured, but like day after day, just grinding away, getting the work done. This has been their message, make protein the focus, fat is optional, carbs are typically kind of limited in their approach. But there’s variations on that. But the main thing is get that protein. And don’t try to out compete protein with fat. Particularly if body composition is the goal.

Nicki: Okay, let’s jump into our sponsor ad. The Healthy Rebellion Radio and this Salty Talk episode is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company LMNT. And I have a couple of rebel member messages that they posted inside the health rebellion this week that I felt were just kind of perfect for … They read like an ad, actually. So this first one is from Sarah. She says, “I’m fighting hard against FOMO on the chocolate mint LMNT. I have six boxes still unopened, maybe seven. I do not need more. I do not need more. I do not need more, but I want more.” So I thought that was just hilarious. And if you haven’t tried mint chocolate, or you are like Sarah and you have some FOMO around it, I believe we have about one week of-

Robb: Maybe at this point.

Nicki: Maybe by the time this episode comes out, maybe just a week or slightly shy of a week of inventory left. So you might want to get on it if mint chocolate is your thing. Another one from Maria, she says, “I really got to get more of my husband’s quotes on here, husband, ‘I put my phone in my mouth walking down the stairs because I was out of hands and it tasted like all the different kinds of LMNT mixed together.'” There are worse things your phone could taste like, I’m sure.

Robb: I can imagine so many worse things.

Nicki: Anyway, those were fun. As always folks, you can grab your LMNT at drinkLMNT.com. That’s drinkLMNT.com/ROBB. The value bundle is your best value for your buck. You can buy three box of your choice of flavors and get your fourth box free. Again, that’s drink L-M-N-T, LMNT.com/ROBB.

Robb: Excuse me. So we were noodling on what to do with today’s show. And I, although I’ve been mainly off of social media, there’s kind of a hangover from a couple of weeks ago where I had posted a Vinay Prasad piece that covered a lot of different things. And in the opening of his piece, he talked about the relative non-utility of mask wearing, and he’s done multiple pieces on this.

Robb: And again, for folks just as a reminder, Vinay Prasad is a practicing physician. He’s in the Bay Area. I believe he’s at Stanford, but don’t 100% quote me on that, but a pretty well respected guy. And I’m amazed that he hasn’t been canceled harder and more often because he’s really … It’s so funny. He’s said things that I agree with so I think that the guy is smart and balanced and everything. And isn’t that what we always do?

Robb: But he’s said things that I haven’t wanted to hear, but I ultimately have, I think been born out by this weird thing called fact and science, and then he says things that we’re both seeing the same congruence on this stuff. It’s so weird for me right now, because everybody speaks in such certitude that it’s … I’m trying to figure out how to sneak up on this stuff.

Robb: But anyway, so there was a multi-part piece that Vinay had released. And in the beginning, it was talking about earlier … an earlier couple of articles that he had written, where he really dug into the mask wearing and the efficacy around that.

Robb: And I did post this on Facebook, but usually I just pump and dump on this stuff. I never go back and look, but for whatever reason, I forget what it was. I don’t think it was around my birthday, but I looked back and God forbid that I looked back, it was generally pretty favorable, but there was one person. This person has a master’s degree, if I recall, in engineering and in computer science. So a math savvy science educated individual. And what the person’s said in response, so there was this long article, and it was just the few things in passing about masks. And this person with the computer science background said … he took the quote from Vinay, basically saying, “Masks are ineffective.” And then this person who, again, has good science and math background, like better than 99% of people on the planet.

Robb: And this person said, “There’s a study that shows that places that wear masks had lower transmission rates than places that don’t.” Didn’t cite the study didn’t … I mean, and it’s like, it’s another one of these things where it’s … there are all these crazy correlational things that exist, like release of Kevin Bacon movies relating to tanking of the economy-

Nicki: Shark attacks.

Robb: … and shark attacks.

Nicki: Something like that. Yeah.

Robb: All this stuff. And it’s like, okay, sure. I have no doubt that we could pull something like that together, and that’s probably something worth looking at, but the piece that Vinay is actually talking about is when these things, a gold standard randomized controlled trial, and it suggests that cloth masks do literally nothing, maybe worse than nothing, because people fart around with them. They fiddle with their face and they touch their face. And there’s all this fixation-

Nicki: Or they get shoved in your pocket or in, like I mentioned before, in your purse next to your phone, and most people’s phones have like, not LMNT mixed on them, but in germs.

Robb: Well, and we’ve been out and we’ve seen people take their masks and use it to wipe down a table and then put it back on. It’s just like, fuck. And this is masking writ large. And then there was the point around properly worn N95 masks may mitigate COVID transmission by about 30%, but again, you got to wear them exactly right. And you can’t pull them on, you can’t pull them off.

Nicki: This is where there’s a study to prove every point. And so unless you’re really trying to dig down and get what is the truth of the matter and you’re reading all of the sides and all of the studies, I’m sure that guy’s study the conclusion was that masks reduced transmission, but-

Robb: Well, that there were places that wore more masks-

Nicki: But how is this-

Robb: … and had less transmission potentially in-

Nicki: Exactly. What were all the factors in that study design? There’s so many variables in these things. And most people, you read the conclusion or the abstract or the sensational headline that is in the Washington Post or whatever, and end of story. And so any counter position just gets met with the other counter position, and you’re at a gridlock, you’re at this stalemate of, well, my study says this and well, my study says this and we’re fucked.

Robb: And to that end, I didn’t really get super involved in this exchange. It was on my personal Facebook deal. And I just kind of watched. There were a lot of people and they were actually kind in the way that they handled this, but they said, “Hey, I’d love to see that study.” And this person refused to produce it. One. And then they said, “Well, here are further analyses on this mass topic.” And so all of those went up. And then this person shifted gears and started saying, “Well, it’s not about the masks at all. It’s just that people don’t want to do anything. People are just refusing to do anything. And that’s overwhelming our hospitals and they’re jerks and horrible people.” And it just kind of went from there.

Robb: And so I did get pulled in on that. And I said, “I think people by and large are very willing to do different things and a whole host of things. I know that we’ve been willing to do a variety of things along the way.” We talked about at the very beginning of this whole thing when nobody knew what was going on. Nicki and I were out on a walk with the kids outside in Texas, because that’s where we were at the time. And we were fortunate to have that as an option. We had friends in Spain and New York and different places where they couldn’t even leave their homes for weeks or months on end. So we were really lucky and we basically had conversations around, hey, if I die, then here’s maybe a game plan. And if Nicki dies, here’s the game plan and-

Nicki: Yeah, we took it-

Robb: … we took it-

Nicki: … extremely seriously-

Robb: … super seriously-

Nicki: … in the beginning, as I think most everybody did, in the beginning.

Robb: Yeah. And then over the course of time, just watching things, the fear porn and the narrative around what we need to be doing to address all this stuff didn’t really match up with reality. And one of the main things that I kept noticing, and this goes all the way to when the Princess cruise ship had the folks on it that were, some were sick, some died. And it looked like all of them that got severely ill and all of them that died had significant comorbidities, sometimes three or four of them.

Robb: And as we’ve motored along, we’ve seen the median age of death, at least initially, and that maybe has changed a little bit over time. But initially the median age of death was 80 years old, which means half of the people that have died are over the age of 80 and, no, it doesn’t mean that it’s okay for old people to die, but they’re already past-

Nicki: Life expectancy.

Robb: … life expectancy for fuck’s sakes, and like any bad flu season is liable to go through that. And we had had in 2017, 2018 comparatively mild flu season. So there was the potential around a lot of “dry tinder being available” and all kinds of stuff around that. But what I pushed back on this person with was that our public health officials have said nothing about health, about getting metabolically healthy, about losing weight. And-

Nicki: Especially since fairly early on, it became clear that comorbidities were a factor in death, specifically obesity.

Robb: Right. Blood sugar-

Nicki: Blood sugar dysregulation-

Robb: … dysregulation. Blood pressure, all of that stuff.

Nicki: If blood sugar was out of control, that seemed to be sort of a marker that COVID was going to be a more difficult ride. Vitamin D, it wasn’t that maybe summer of 2020 when it started, when there were doctors that were saying all of my patients that are severely ill have like bottomed out vitamin D levels?

Robb: Well, and when we look at influenza, it’s exactly the same story. We see exactly the same thing. Early in this thing, again, didn’t necessarily mean that we were going to have the same kind of slam dunk here, but in that cost benefit deal, we know from a public health perspective that getting people topped off on vitamin D at a reasonable level, literally no downsides. Very, very difficult to overdose.

Robb: There is some misconception around the vitamin D fat soluble vitamin overdose story that is applicable to vitamin A, not vitamin D. Vitamin D has all kinds of feedback mechanisms to prevent an overabundance of vitamin D in our system. But it’s one of these … it’s almost free money, do it, lose some weight, whatever you do, paleo, vegan, low carb, high carb, whatever. Just get-

Nicki: Well, and the-

Robb: … metabolically healthy, exercise to the best of your ability, take some vitamin D.

Nicki: And amazingly, so even in the absence of COVID, we’re a fairly unhealthy, sick population. So, add COVID to it and we’re-

Robb: And we’re kind of a hot mess.

Nicki: And I’m speaking for America here. We’re a fucking hot mess with regards to our health. So doing these things like, messaging from our health agencies like, “Hey, this is the time to get in shape, do some exercise of whatever flavor that you can do given your current physical state, move your body and cut out the junk food. Take some simple steps. As a nation, we’ve got to lose some weight. We’ve got to get ourselves healthy.” In the absence of COVID, our medical system … you’ve done Salty Talk on this-

Robb: Multiple times.

Nicki: … I think a year or two ago, is already a …

Robb: It’s already stretched to the brain.

Nicki: So stretched because of metabolic health issues, and then add COVID to the mix. But I feel like it would have been such a rallying cry, such a unifying, like national, like we can do this, let’s get healthy, the ripple effect from that, just in families and in kids and society, from mental health to just physical health, to positive outlook, just, it would’ve been this amazing cultural transformation of health.

Robb: Well-

Nicki: And instead, we’ve got more division, more distrust of authority. MSM is wondering why people don’t … people listen to Joe Rogan over them. And it’s no wonder.

Robb: I don’t remember the guy’s name, but he’s a popular journalist. He said, “Maybe if we did our job better, then people would trust us more.”

Nicki: Well, he gets it.

Robb: And whatnot.

Nicki: Most of them don’t.

Robb: Most of them don’t. So again, just close our eyes for a minute and imagine a world in which Fauci at all said, “Hey, we’ve got these vaccines in the pipeline. We’re really optimistic about them, but we can’t be a one trick pony, we’re America. We’re more sophisticated than that. We’re more nuanced than that. We know without a doubt that these comorbidities around metabolic disease are crushing us anyway. Other than age, it is your greatest exposure to serious illness or death. We’ve got to get healthy, America, and here’s how we’re going to do it.”

Robb: Pick a diet, doesn’t matter which diet, we’ll give out diet books. The government will buy diet books from used bookstores, we’ll get health coaches. You can close your eyes and you can think about all the fear mongering, all the finger wagging, you get vaccinated, you bad dog, get vaccinated, and instead like, hey guys, you can do it, lose that weight, take a walk, which in the age of healthy at any size, kind of hard to say lose the weight because apparently you’re fat shaming people, but also maybe you’re saving their lives by encouraging them to get metabolically healthy, which is a whole other just …

Robb: When I start thinking about stuff like that, I’m just kind of like fuck it. I am literally going to turn everything off, turn completely inward and just forget it. But this isn’t a crazy world that we’re painting here. During World War II, there were all them we can do it, Rosie the Riveter, posters and stuff like that. And we had meatless Mondays and well, we’ve got to send food to the troops and we do this and we do that. And we rallied together and there was actually positivity around it.

Robb: There was positivity during an existential threat called World War II, where we rallied people together instead of sewing divisiveness and having a singular answer to the whole thing. But that isn’t what we got. And so I pushed back hard about this whole narrative that this person was pushing, because the vaccine only answered … I just became aware of this. It was April of 2021 that there was actually a CDC backed initiative to start looking at our pharmacopeia for drugs to be used to treat COVID. And there’s almost no work that’s been done in it and they’re not-

Nicki: And it’s like-

Robb: … looking at Ivermectin and-

Nicki: … why did we not do that-

Robb: Why did we not do that on day one?

Nicki: … month one when we didn’t have-

Robb: There should have been a multi pronged … should have been a multi pronged approach. And we talked about that ages ago, ages ago, and this is one of the things that was super suspicious to me. If this is an existential threat-

Nicki: Why are we not using every fucking tool that we can-

Robb: Turnover every stone.

Nicki: … can find?

Robb: And America should have led the way. We should have had the definitive studies on Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine and Fluvoxamine. And instead, it had to be done everywhere else. Right or wrong, we should have been investigating every one of these and we should have been leading the way. And the fact that we didn’t is suspicious as hell, just shockingly suspicious.

Nicki: And so to that guy, it’s not that people are unwilling to do things. People who are looking at what’s been recommended and are looking at this landscape and are looking what’s being pushed and what’s not being pushed, more importantly, what is being omitted from the conversation? It is suspicious.

Robb: It’s super suspicious.

Nicki: And then it’s like, well, you’re not going to just follow lockstep with something that doesn’t sniff right, something that doesn’t sit right in your gut, that’s something that doesn’t make sense.

Robb: Can I go to crazy town just a little bit? This is crazy town for at least some people, I think, most the five people left listening, this is all still pretty pedestrian stuff.

Nicki: All the crazy things from 2020 have turned out to be true. So I don’t know.

Robb: Turned out to be true.

Nicki: So, I don’t know what you’re going to say, but …

Robb: So our friend who has worked at a three letter organization with the government pinged us and was like, hey, you’re onto some interesting stuff here. And, here’s one of the challenges we’re going to face, trust in public health is nuked, it is gone. And all of this stuff, including Omicron, could have been staged out in such a way to nuke trust in public health, so that the really bad virus, when it comes through, people don’t actually do what they should do. When it is that 10%, 30% infection fatality rate, a civilization ender. And we have some push backs on that.

Nicki: I don’t know, my pushback on that is maybe initially there might be a little bit less like, huh, I don’t know, is this another … But people are smart enough to see.

Robb: When you start actually stacking bodies up in the street and-

Nicki: I think people are smart enough-

Robb: I get it, but it’s-

Nicki: … to see through it.

Robb: Yes, but it’s interesting, and this is where it starts feeling like an Inception movie where you’re how many layers deep and am I in the acid trip or the dream, or whatever. But the long and short is that there were huge opportunities to address health. And just from a messaging perspective, hey, we’ve got this vaccine. We really encourage you to do that. Here are the age groups that we feel are most appropriate. Here’s how we would triage it. And, oh, by the way, what are the … how can we help you get metabolically healthy? How do we make sure that you have vitamin D in access? I believe in India and Mexico, they were giving out zinc and vitamin D and vitamin C, developing countries are doing this, and it’s maybe not illegal here, but it’s verboten.

Nicki: There’s nothing proactive in that regard.

Robb: Yeah. There’s nothing proactive in that regard. So there’s an article here that kind of digs into this from the Federalist, Our Failure to Grapple with the Obesity Epidemic Pumps Diabetes Crisis to New Heights. And so I think that one is really worth reading. It’s something I’ve talked about for a long time. If folks have followed my work, I think it was 2012, Ancestral Health Symposium, maybe 2013 that I talked about the congressional budget office predictions from that, from actually around 2004, was where that study had been generated. And it was suggesting that by 2035, the US would be bankrupt from diabetes related costs. Like every nickel, dime and penny that we produced with GDP would be consumed-

Nicki: 2025?

Robb: 2035.

Nicki: 2035.

Robb: 2035. It’s only Al Gore that makes predictions that New York will be under water in-

Nicki: 12 years.

Robb: It was supposed to be 12 years ago that it was supposed to be under water, I think. But so that’s a thing to look at. So I threw out a bunch of this stuff to this person on my Facebook page. And they came back again. They’re like, “You’re dancing around the issue. People just don’t want to do what they should do,” which I said, “You’re saying that vaccine, everybody should get a vaccine. That is the one and only thing. Our public health officials are not on the line for talking about public health.” And I haven’t, to this point, not really gotten a response around that, but there’s another piece that, again, from the Federalist-

Nicki: Well, first of all, so as we were talking with regard to this first paper that you’re linking to here, the diabetes crisis is now significantly greater than it was-

Robb: Oh, this was a great-

Nicki: … in 2020, at the start of the pandemic.

Robb: This was a great piece too and I forgot about this. This guy very emphatically said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about here. You don’t know what you’re talking about. People haven’t gained weight during the pandemic.”

Nicki: That was where I was going with this.

Robb: And he said that.

Nicki: With certitude.

Robb: With absolute certitude. I’m like, “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” And I just posted about the COVID 15. And I think that was written like a year ago. So it’s now probably like the COVID 25. I’m like, “If you are this unaware or if your sociopolitical view is so constrained that you can’t even dig up information that people have gained significant amount of weight,” and people have, because of all these different things that have gone on, we’re just now starting to see this excess death stuff pop up, children missing mandatory childhood vaccinations. And there seemed to be some problems there.

Robb: People missing cancer screening, people who had a heart attack who didn’t get treatment, people missing-

Nicki: Because they were afraid to go to the …

Robb: Because they were afraid … either afraid to go-

Nicki: ER.

Robb: … or they couldn’t get in, because of the impact of all this stuff. And it becomes a circular thing where it’s like, well, if people would just get vaccinated then … well, but the vaccines aren’t sterilizing and they don’t prevent you from getting the disease.

Nicki: Don’t prevent you from transmitting the disease.

Robb: They may actually make the transmission worse. They may, in some populations, attenuate the total severity of the disease. But even that is a little bit up in the air, and it certainly is inappropriate the cost benefit. We were just looking at the number needed to treat to prevent one bad outcome in young men is massive. And then the amount of myocarditis by comparison that it produces, it’s like you’re literally burning down the village to save the tribe or something. Some terrible analogy with that.

Robb: So I came back to this person like, “So you’re really telling me that you’re unaware of all this weight gain that’s happened? And how should I take anything you are saying credibly? And all I’m saying is if you want a vaccine, by all means, get a vaccine. And let’s talk about who is the most risk stratified-“

Nicki: And even if you had the vaccine, still doing things to improve your metabolic health is important. And that message should be there.

Robb: Well, and here’s the funny thing, and we know this from influenza, RSV and a bunch of other vaccines, if you’re metabolically unhealthy, the vaccines don’t fucking work very well. They just don’t take, you don’t get a proper immune response. And so either way, and I’ve said this one a bunch of different times over the course of the last two years, whether you want to vaccinate or don’t want to vaccinate, being metabolically healthy stacks the deck in your favor, having adequate vitamin D stacks the deck in your favor, inadequate vitamin D means that vaccines don’t work as well. And again, this is well established.

Robb: It’s well established within the COVID literature. It’s well established within influenza literature and a host of other vaccines, because it is all predicated on the immune response. And if you don’t have proper vitamin D status, we have an inappropriate immune response. It’s not made up shit. People do all kinds of made up stuff, but I mean, this stuff is very well documented. I don’t want to say the science is settled, but this is well established stuff. It’s not outside-

Nicki: And more and more research is coming out that is aligned with that.

Robb: It continually aligns with that. So, thank you for reminding me about that. But then there’s another Federalist piece here, He Lost More Than 100 Pounds Before Catching COVID and it Likely Saved His Life. And this is just a story about a guy that early in the pandemic, he was very overweight and he realized that, oh, everybody’s going to get this ultimately. And he kind of did the cost benefit analysis of like, well, even if I … whether I get vaccinated or not, if I’m overweight, my risk is much greater. And so we took it upon himself to change his diet and started exercising and he lost 100 pounds and he still got pretty god damn sick. It’s an interesting story, but he almost certainly saved his life by doing that. The thing is though, is that it was just because he had his eyes open and kind of followed fringe recommendations. This wasn’t mainstream, this didn’t come from St. Fauci, the good, which-

Nicki: St. Fauci the good?

Robb: Of course, he couldn’t be anything else. He is science.

Nicki: I guess no saints are like saint so-and-so the bad.

Robb: I don’t know.

Nicki: My Catholic elementary school education is failing me.

Robb: That only happens a few times a day, babe. So don’t worry about that. I don’t know, anything else that we want to say on that? My point again is, I’ll make a quick point and then you can wrap up too. If there had been a cohesive story here, if there had been a diversified risk approach tackling public health, looking at our pharmacopeia of drugs to see if there’s anything that we could do there, really trying to risk stratify, like who really needs a vaccine and who can wait? And if there had been some nuance there, if there had been anything other than just-

Nicki: There would’ve been a helluva a lot more buy-in with everything.

Robb: Yes. And there’d be a lot more trust.

Nicki: And a lot more trust. And this ties into-

Robb: And ironically, I think a lot more people would’ve gotten vaccinated-

Nicki: Totally.

Robb: … for fuck’s sakes.

Nicki: 100%.

Robb: If they hadn’t-

Nicki: The mono message-

Robb: … forced us.

Nicki: The mono message and then the continuing to push, I think the instinct on behalf of a lot of people, especially when taking in the totality of everything we’ve just talked about is to dig in your heels. And we wanted to mention and just touch on quickly the Rogan, Spotify drama. And it ties in perfectly.

Nicki: Rogan is an inquisitive person who brings on a variety of guests and has conversations and is digging at the truth. He doesn’t have an agenda. And the reason why his platform is so huge and the reason why we have the mainstream media freaking out over him-

Robb: Can I back you up a little bit?

Nicki: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Robb: I think it’s going to be hard for a lot of people to believe that he doesn’t have “an agenda.” Joe’s agenda is that he’s legitimately curious and he’s not above sticking his finger in an ant nest and just kind of stirring it up to see what’ll happen as an experiment. In my opinion, I’ve spent a little bit of time with the guy and have chatted with him a fair amount, but that … everybody, so many people and we’re so polarized, people can’t conceive of person who doesn’t have an end goal. I don’t know that I would be above having an end goal. I would certainly have some type of an agenda. I would however, say that Joe certainly has beliefs. And I think that he would have end stages that he would like to see. But I think the most legitimate thing as his agenda is legitimate curiosity.

Nicki: 100%. And throughout the whole thing, he has talked about the importance of getting healthy and losing weight. So instead of a mono message from our big … and also, who are his corporate overlords? Spotify, and-

Robb: Which that’s in relation-

Nicki: … his advertisers. Those are relationships, versus all of these media outlets are owned by huge corporate entities that do have agendas, that are influenced by corporations like big pharma. And so, this is where I feel like people are … the reason why mainstream media is I think falling apart and scrambling is because it’s been this singular message. There’s been no nuance. There’s been no inquiry into anything. Everything has always been, this is settled. It’s not the lab leak. It came from nature. Every little thing along the way, there’s been a single answer with no room for questioning. And somebody like Joe, he’s asking questions.

Nicki: He’s just having a conversation and trying to dig in, he gets different people from the whole variety of spectrums, beliefs, politically and medically and whatnot. People like that. They don’t want to be forced fed something. We are adults. We want to think something, we want to be able to listen, think it through and come to our own conclusion. And the fact that that’s not okay in this current landscape and that people are putting so much pressure on Spotify and Rogan, it’s mind boggling.

Robb: Well, it’s suspicious, again. It’s like why-

Nicki: Well, then when you look at Neil Young, what was the tie? Blackstone owns his music-

Robb: Owns his music.

Nicki: … via some other third party. And so, that’s fishy.

Robb: And I have no doubt that Neil Young’s sociopolitical leanings are such that they are what they are, but Blackstone, how many other artists do these guys own? And they just kind of went through, “Hey, what are your thoughts on this?” “Oh, I think Joe Rogan’s a piece of shit for doing what he’s doing.” “Perfect. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to create this drama and …”

Nicki: And-

Robb: And that’s great if Neil can’t conceive of being on a platform that is allowing someone else the ability to both articulate their position and let other people access it. But there’s just so much irony there.

Nicki: And this is going to tie into the Canadian convoy in Ottawa, too. Kind of going-

Robb: Back to that.

Nicki: … on a nice, little, nice, little journey here through all these topics. But the Washington Post just had some opinion piece that was, we need to talk about this toxic movement that’s happening in Canada.

Robb: This toxic freedom movement was the headline.

Nicki: Yeah. Toxic freedom movement, which is … Wow.

Robb: That was the headline-

Nicki: Freedom is toxic.

Robb: … we need to talk about this toxic freedom movement.

Nicki: And so people who are reading mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post and taking in the fact that there were like one or two people with a confederate flag and so clearly everybody there is a racist and a Nazi. Again, I don’t know. I feel like people see through this bullshit. We have so many Canadians inside the Healthy Rebellion, people that actually went to Ottawa on Saturday, people that live there.

Nicki: One woman is pregnant and she is from Serbia. Her parents fled Serbia and moved to Canada. And now all of this stuff is happening in Canada, which is just heartbreaking. And she went and talked to all of these, there were Serbian truck drivers that were sharing food and just the vibe and the positivity and other person was like, this is the most positive thing I’ve ever been to. There was not a single ounce of violence and people are really, truly there unifying together. It’s all colors, all religions, all … it’s a beautiful thing. And if people are actually looking at that like …

Robb: Let me throw something in there just really quick, and this will get us in trouble, but I’m at the don’t really care point. At least up till this point, what was the tagline out of the summer of 2019 or ’20? I’m a mainly peaceful protest? This has actually been 100% peaceful, so far. Now, bad actors could be there-

Nicki: I think as of this morning-

Robb: … infiltrators could get in there.

Nicki: … there maybe have been two arrests in all of Ottawa.

Robb: Oh, okay. But nothing’s getting burned down. People have not broken in as in attempt to solidify their freedom. They have not broken into Walmart’s and stolen every god damn thing out of there, which I still can’t figure out how that is liberating anybody, or illustrative of anything other than douche baggery. But, I don’t know. But that is not happening here.

Robb: And I, again, interesting comparing contrast, and what is the one thing that is being requested? It’s actually very interesting because it’s a very specific ask, whereas the ask that kind of came out of the aftermath of some of the George Floyd stuff, I’m still not entirely … defund the police? Okay, that worked great. Cities went to hell and now they’re walking all that back. There wasn’t actually a specific ask. There is a specific ask here, remove the vaccine mandate, make it optional. That’s it, that’s all that people are asking for. I don’t want this to be forced upon me. I don’t want my life-

Nicki: And it’s about-

Robb: … predicated on whether I-

Nicki: … far more than just the vaccines too. But they do have a specific ask.

Robb: That is the choke point, because-

Nicki: But they’re rallying around like, hey, this is Canada. Our government should work for us. The government should serve the people, not the other way around.

Robb: Well, and just as a side note around that, and most folks are probably aware of this, but maybe not. But one of the only surviving framers of the Canadian constitution is suing the government and making the case that they’re in violation of six different … it would be different bill of rights points. And so, we’ll see where that goes.

Robb: So a lot of people are aware of, I think the … seemingly the good intent here. There are people that are not though. We had some people that were like, my friends who were in such and such community think that these people are all racist. And so that’s all I’m going to believe. And that’s all I’m going to get into. Oh, what’s my point about that? Do I even want to make a point about that?

Nicki: We’re just massively divided, but the thing that’s happening there, and you can see on all of these different Instagram channels about the freedom convoy, the unity that is taking place. If you actually take the time to look, it’s bring tears to your eyes beautiful.

Robb: And here’s a funny thing, Bad-Gato had some great stuff. And so for all the kind of bougie, communist, socialist workers of the world unite, and he’s like, “They fucking united,” and they’re like, “No, not like this.”

Nicki: Oh, and that reminds me. I actually took a screenshot of something I read this morning and I’ll read it because it ties perfectly into that. So this is James Lindsay, he’s the author of Cynical Theories with another co-author and he tweeted this thing, cognitive dissonance. And it’s a screenshot from a Reddit thread, workers are uniting in solidarity against an authoritarian government, and the left is against it.

Nicki: “The trucker convoy is the closest thing to a working class uprising I’ve seen in my lifetime. I wasn’t around in the 60s, and yet the left is somehow against it. Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing the left should be supporting? Are there even any working class people on the left anymore? Why do they all seem to be Zoom tech workers or unemployed? Why is the actual working class overwhelming … Why is the actual working class overwhelmingly not on the left? It’s really unsettling to see actual working class unity taking direct action against fascist mandates and the left is taking the side of the fascists.”

Robb: There you go.

Nicki: It’s a crazy world we are living in.

Robb: Can you forward that to me?

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: And maybe we can get a link to that in the show notes too.

Nicki: Absolutely.

Robb: So as always, I’m not entirely sure if anything that we’re doing here ever does any good, but we’ve been getting a lot of emails from people just saying thank you. I have to say, following some people like the Bad-Gato and even Alex Berenson, although Alex is a little acerbic for me at times, a little over the top, but certainly dark horse, Jordan Peterson, which, I mean, these are all horrible reprehensible people that are just asking for freedom, that we continue to improve western liberal democracies, that we don’t burn it down with no viable option in hand is really like-

Nicki: That’s really what-

Robb: … the charter of these people.

Nicki: I mean, Brett Weinstein has made the case, fixing something that’s already in existence is a hell of a lot easier than burning something completely to the ground and trying to start from scratch.

Robb: And my vindictive self, part of me is kind of like, fuck it. Let’s just let it burn down, because it’s going to be more other people that are affected than me, but it’ll for sure affect me and it’ll affect-

Nicki: No, we’re all going to be affected.

Robb: We will all be affected.

Nicki: That would be a fucking terrible situation.

Robb: And both Heather and Brett had a piece talking about spite, and what spite is, is willing to take damage to yourself to make sure that damage is inflicted to someone else. And I’ve reached the spiteful stage of my life where I’m kind of like, I’ve been warning and begging and cajoling, hey, can we do this? Can we do that? And it’s like, no, man, your book didn’t cover every nuance of bipock farming. And so that means you’re a racist, sacred cow, which we got a bunch of stuff like that. And you just, you get several years of an onslaught of stuff like that. And you’re kind of like, fuck all of you guys, but that’s not everybody. It is still a vocal fringe-

Nicki: It’s actually a very small-

Robb: It’s a very small group. It is a small shit-headed group.

Nicki: In the words of Justin Trudeau, it’s a small fringe minority.

Robb: Is that while he is wearing blackface or not, or both?

Nicki: He wasn’t, but those words will come down-

Robb: Echo through history.

Nicki: … through history, for sure.

Robb: It is true. And that is part of what keeps me in the fight. And we do get some good feedback from folks. And I do honestly, like some days I’m kind of like, is doing this podcast doing any good? Should we just keep our head down and sell salt and call it a day? But, I do-

Nicki: How much value do you get from listening to Brett and Heather, from reading El Gato Malo and other people? It-

Robb: It’s probably some of the more enriching elements of my life.

Nicki: It helps when we’re going through this period of time as a country, as a global population, and I see it in some of the comments on Gato’s things, like you’ve got, or Eugyppius, you’ve got people all over the world in different states of lockdown and different states of mandate and these sort of-

Robb: It’s a lifeline.

Nicki: It’s a lifeline. And even people in the Healthier Rebellion have said as much. So I know that sometimes you get a little …

Robb: I just-

Nicki: You question whether or not we’re … is this helping? But I feel like we’ve seen enough and heard enough that it does. And also, we get value from other people. And so, some people get value from us.

Robb: Yeah, I’m sure. Well, I think some of that I think is good, healthy questionings. I’ve had two significant mentors who ended up being complete narcissist shit bags and terrible people. And so I try to keep a toe or two on the ground with that regard. I will say that the by and large, the stuff that I’ve followed and the stuff that I think about, I don’t want to have control over or dominion over anybody. I want to do my own thing and I want to see everybody else thrive and do well. I am-

Nicki: You would’ve never been Genghis Khan.

Robb: I would’ve never been Genghis Khan. I would’ve been a terrible conqueror. Until though, and I will say this, until you reach a point of frustration with people where you’re like, these people are too dumb to help themselves. I forget the period of the crusades where it was a kill them all, let God sort them out. And it didn’t matter if they were Christian or infidel or whatever. I could see where one could reach that stage of jadedness, and I hope to avoid that, but I don’t know.

Nicki: I feel like there are-

Robb: I should probably-

Nicki: … world leaders who have that mindset potentially.

Robb: I do too. I do too. And I guess that’s kind of my point, is …

Nicki: And we’re the ones that are too dumb. We’re the ones that-

Robb: Naive and gullible and well, why wouldn’t you want power? It’s there for the taking.

Nicki: We’re the surfs.

Robb: We probably are, but I guess some of the stuff to push back on, and I don’t see a ton of success with this, like with this person that I was having the back and forth with on my private Facebook page. But I’ve really dug my heels in on, I just want people to have an option. I just want people to have their choice, and I don’t want control over folks. If we’re addressing a complex problem, probably-

Nicki: We should have a lot of conversation with a lot of different people. No voices should be silenced because we don’t know if we’re going to be right. And it may-

Robb: It may not be right for every one person or maybe different-

Nicki: But had there really been a round table of medical doctors at the beginning of this thing, it would’ve played out entirely different.

Robb: I would make the case even from, if Fauci could … Let’s say that there is this kind of cabal of people that just wanted everybody vaccinated for whatever reason. And it was like digital mandate or whatever-

Nicki: A digital passport, social credit score.

Robb: … digital passport, social credit score, all that stuff. Had you wrapped it in the guise of a balanced, reasonable approach, hey, we’re also going to look at natural immunity and we’re also going to … everybody needs to get healthy. I think overall, they would’ve ended up vaccinating more people had they kept it optional and pushed for, everybody get healthy, we’re looking at repurposed drugs. Ironically, if they had just been more honest about trying to get people healthier, they could have probably had a more successful outcome on this.

Nicki: 100%.

Robb: And they would’ve-

Nicki: Because the trust factor would’ve been better, so much higher.

Robb: Ironically.

Nicki: So much higher.

Robb: I’ll wrap up on that, unless you have something else to say?

Nicki: No, I think that’s a good stopping point for today. So anyway, folks, thank you for listening, one of six. We appreciate you.

Robb: As always, give us feedback, let us know what’s helpful, what’s not. We’re just kind of making this up as we go sometimes, looking at things that we think are important and that might be helpful for folks in kind of an anchor to reality, a lifeline, because folks may be in a very difficult, stuck situation. And then also the folks that can be reasoned with, and that should be us too.

Robb: If there’s some new data that comes along, we need to be open to pivoting on a dime and responding to that. But I think also maintaining this position of, hey, the thing that I really stand for is freedom and options. And I know that there’s trade offs within that. We live in a collaborative society. I can’t be so free that I just decide to drive on whichever side of the road that I want at whatever speed and do whatever the fuck I want to. I get that. This is some of the silly representations of libertarianism is like Mad Max. It’s not, but anyway. Nicki’s like, shut up. Let me talk.

Nicki: Yeah, I guess we’ll just end it there, folks. Thank you so much. Be sure to check out our show sponsor LMNT at drinkLMNT.com/ROBB. It’s sleep week in the rebellion. So I’m wishing you all restful sleep, and get outside and get whatever vitamin D you can get at whatever latitude you are. I know we’ve got what, 30 something days until we can make-

Robb: 21 days.

Nicki: 21 days till we can make my vitamin D here in Northwestern, Montana.

Robb: That’s assuming it’s not cloudy, which …

Nicki: Yeah, it could-

Robb: -is clearly not the case.

Nicki: … happen. It could happen.

Robb: It could happen.

Nicki: Anyway, folks, have a wonderful weekend and we’ll see you next week.

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.