Podcast with Robb Wolf from http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/2016/04/a-day-in-the-life-of-robb-wolf/ [0:00] Introduction [0:26] Ben is eating crickets [1:46] Origanifi Green Juice [3:22] Harry’s Truman Shaves [6:25] Ben on Snapchat [6:47] All about Robb Wolf [9:08] The Lazy Lobo Ranch of Robb Wolf [12:19] Robb’s small farm setting [15:16] Flower Checker App [23:41] Robb’s experimenting with glucose monitoring [26:15] Dexcom D5 Mobile CGM [27:27] “Healthy Food” differ by individuality [31:06] Algorithm for genes [33:22] Alactic set [35:29] Mark Sisson’s Primal Endurance book [39:24] Versaclimber [42:57] Vasper exercise device [45:09] Binaural Beats app [50:16] About Aniracetam [52:10] Robb’s smart drug of choice [53:52] Nicotine gum [1:00:30] WebMD piece on nicotine gum [1:03] Paleo FX [1:03:58] Robb’s new book [1:06:43] End of podcast Introduction: You probably know who Robb Wolf is. He is the de-facto leader of the

Paleo Movement. I’m not Paleo, but still he is pretty cool. And in today’s podcast, I interview him, and we get into stuff that he hasn’t talked about before in podcast. So you really are gonna wanna listen to this one.

But first I wanna tell you about a few cool things that I have discovered lately. As I talked about on previous podcast on entomology, I’ve actually been eating crickets. Literally on my salads sprinkling whole roasted crickets. Now, if that turns up your nose and you want to ease yourself into entomology, you should try these bars that are made with a cricket-based protein bars developed by recipes from a three Michellin starred chef, and pack with real food ingredients and no crap, they’ve got coconut, apple cinnamon, blueberry vanilla, banana bread, and they’re all made with cricket flour. These things are made by a company called Exo, E-x-o. And the cool thing is that the bars don’t like taste great, but this is incredibly sustainable protein. No cows farting in the production of these bars. Now you, get a sampler pack with all their most popular flavors for less than 10 bucks. That’s free shipping included. Thirty three percent

discounts. So, you have no excuse not to at least try a cricket bar. I promise there is no like legs or antennae in these things. So, exoprotein.com/ben is where you can get this. E-x-0 protein.com/ben, they’re kind of a small nimble start-up, so you need to grab these while they’re inventory last. They fly off the shelves, and they are tasty. Hooo! You wouldn’t even know you’re eating crickets. This podcast is also brought to you by this stuff called Organifi Green Juice. Just like it sounds organi-fi, organi-fi, it’s like a mix of organic and wifi. I supposed. I don’t know what the “fi” stands for. Anyways though, the stuff is tasty. Super tasty! It’s just green juice powder, that’s all it is. You can drop it into anything to make it healthy. You probably could not put it on a big Mac to make a big Mac healthy, but you could at least let say, put it into a smoothie when you’re little low on vegetables or put it like I do into a Ziplock bag when you’re travelling on an airplane and you wanna mix stuff into say, glass of tea that you purchased from Starbucks at the airport to turn it into super food, super charged tea. It’s coconut and ashwagandha infused green juice, and it taste freaking amazing. It also got turmeric in it which is really, really good. Neuro anti-inflammatory and joint anti-inflammatory, turmeric is just cool stuff. Anyways, you can get it for 20% off if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/fitlife, that’s bengreenfieldfitness.com/fitlife, and all you have to do is use the magical discount code which is “Ben”. So bengreenfieldfitness.com/fitlife, and then Ben. And then finally, if you’re getting as healthy as possible eating cricket bars and green juice, you probably gonna grow more hair, right? At least that logic seems to make sense to me. And if that is the case, you’re gonna want to know about these German factories. So, here’s the deal. There are these factories over in Germany that have been churning out blades. The world’s sharpest blades since the 20s, grinding high-grade steel into razor blades. They’ve got over 400 German engineers and designers, and craftsmen and production workers, working on sophisticated custom equipment to produce these blades that should technically cost you an arm and a freaking leg, but they don’t ‘cause this company called Harry’s stepped in. And what they do is they cut out the middlemen and they get the blades directly to you. Straight to your front door, and they just launch a brand new handle that attached to this German-engineered blades. The handle with a rubberized non-slip grip, it’s called the Truman handle. No longer does your grip have to slip out of your hand, no longer do you need the risk of carpel tunnel syndrome, or anything else uncomfortable when you’re shaving. I like my shaving to be an experience and this is a really, really amazing deal. So, 15 bucks, you get the razor handle, yes, that’s the Harry’s 5-blade German-engineered razor attached to that handle along with their paraben and phthalate-free moisturizing shave cream made with really nice stuff like aloe vera. And they give you 5 bucks off of any

purchase from harrys.com with promo code “Ben”. So you go to h-a-r-r-y-s dot com and use promo code Ben at check out. So check all that out. And now on to today’s podcast with the Robb Wolf. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield fitness show: “… I sort of finding all these studies of the therapeutic benefits of nicotine like it was beneficial all these GI disorders and anti-inflammatory, and you know, there was always the caveat that the delivery mechanism tobacco was really problematic, but when they were using just kind of pharmaceutical type agent like gum or lozenges, something like that, then it didn’t really have any issues…” “Getting 12 hundred 2 thousand words a day was a real slug and I was super smoked from it, and I’ve been doing really consistently about 25 hundred words a day…” He’s an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America’s top personal trainer and one of the globe’s most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. “Power, speed, mobility, balance – whatever it is for you that for natural movement, get out there! When you’re working all the studies done... studies that have shown the greatest efficacy…” All the information you need in one place, right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Ben: Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield here, and actually just yesterday if you are

on Snapchat, you may have noticed me chomping down on some nicotine gum at the gym. And that was the latest tip that I picked up recently from today’s guest who actually has passions and interests and accomplishments that go above and beyond cigarette in chewable form. His name is Robb, Robb Wolf, and if you don’t know who Robb is, you have probably been living either in a cave or possibly at McDonald’s. Robb is a former biochemist. He wrote this New York Times bestselling book called “The Paleo Solution”, and he’s got one of the top rank iTunes podcast as well as one of the top ranked books out there. He has written for men’s health and his gym has been named one of the top 30 gyms in America, Norcal Strength and Conditioning. He consults for folks like the Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Program, Paleo FX, Paleo Magazine, and he also spends and has spent a little bit time in the trenches. He was the California State power lifting champion at a 565 squat, 345 bench, 565 dead, and was also a 6 and O amateur kickboxer which I actually find quite impressive having recently got my eye broken kickboxing, and now it’s a tough sport but Robb coaches… go ahead…

Robb: I got out early. (laughs)

Ben: Yeah. Unfortunately I did and I’m still singed up to step into the cage in July, and yeah, still trying to determine the pros and cons of head gear. Anyways though, Robb works with the MMA motocross rowing triathlon Olympians, Naval Special Warfare like I mentioned, NASA, The United States Marine Corps, the Canadian Light Infantry, but today we’re just gonna delve straight into Robb, and Robb’s life, and some of the cool training and nutrition, biohacking tools. He’s been messed around with ______ [08:28.7]. So Robb…

Robb: Oh man, if nothing else it will be perfect cure for insomnia. Like if it’s

totally boring people will passed out and fall asleep. So, we’ll put that that bonus.

Ben: Put this one in the sleep phone. Substitute this for the binaural beats. Robb: Right! Exactly. Ben: Which actually we’ll talk about ‘cause I know you’ll mess around with

those these days. Robb: Yeah! Yeah. Ben: Uhm, so you’re living – you’re living on a ranch, where it is, and apparently

it’s called Lazy Lobo. I’m curious, can you describe to folks what this ranch is. I mean, you like – like hundreds of horses, cowboy hat out wearing the Spurs and the leather chapsel day or is this like a small farm operation or what exactly are you up to from a living situation?

Robb: Small farm operation. So we kinda made the switch from the suburban

and kinda track home gig, and really wanted some more acreage. I’ve really been interested in this sustainability story grass-feed meat, sequestrian carbon, you know, all these type of stuff, and so we picked up a place just about a year ago, and have been installing this things called hugel mounds and getting ready to bring in goats and sheep. The area has been massively over graced for about 50 years, 40-50 years, so the soil is really compacted, it’s interestingly, I’m just starting to learn a bunch of stuff about like a permaculture and sustainable farming, and all that. And so as you learn like the type of weeds and plants that are growing there currently are actually these top root plants, and they’re trying to break up the soil and they’re part of the succession process, like they would break the soil back up and if that area got greased, perennially grasses would move in, and then if you know people won’t messing with it then you will get some like hard woods that would move in, and stuff like that. So we’re just trying to get in and have a great place for our girls to grow up, and play with chickens and goats, and sheep and you know, learn some good responsibility taking care of the animals, and also just have hopefully better quality of life. Spend a lot of time outside and the goal is to try to

raise as much of our food as possible. And so, that’s where some greenhouses, hugel mounds – Reno’s high desert so it’s kind of uh, it’s a rough goal here, like today is 80 degrees, 16 days ago we had a foot of snow. So it’s a super helter-skelter environment. You have to really watch your ass with uh you know, when you bring plants out, and make sure you protect them from the cold, and the extremes and all that, but yeah, that’s the basic deal with the Lazy Lobo Ranch. It’s a little opportunity to experiment in this sustainability story and hopefully I’ve a better quality of life with that.

Ben: Yeah, yeah we’ve had to deal with a lot of the weather changes up here in

Spokane, and so we try and grow most of our food, but we’ve had to build. I don’t know if you’ve experimented much with like hoop housing for some winter growth, and then we’ve got a lot of – as a matter of fact, laundry room looks like a marijuana growing facility right now. We’ve just got a bunch of lights in there, and we’ll the plants in and the herbs and the patio plants in when the weather kinda shifts real quickly like it does in the spring, and then sudden back out when the sun is shining, but that’s interesting about the fact that you’ve got like – what would you say, it’s like dead soil, more or less?

Robb: It’s not quite dead because it does have growth in it, so a few of our

neighbors that have been even more negligent in maintaining the soil by overgrazing, uhm, their soil is close to dead, and what happens when you remove all that ground coverage thought of their being organic matter getting produced by the plants like it’s – I think it’s interesting that again this may end up being the biggest noser podcast that you’ve ever done but uhm…

Ben: At least you’re called the farmer here as per that. Robb: (laughs) You know when the plants are growing, they actually released a

glucose and another carbon compounds into the soil that starts growing bacteria and fungus and all these stuff, and you get this really rich kinda ecological environment that goes on below the soil if the plants are gone even if it’s just what we would typically call weeds, then the soil starts oxidizing, and that’s when it literally starts dying and if you have any type of wind, any type of water on it, the top soil will just go on and it takes a long time to build that stuff up, so we’re – you know, our area was pretty negatively impacted, but it’s even just the way that we handled it last year. We have photos from last year to this year, it’s dramatically better like it’s incredible if you start giving it the things it needs and in a lot of ways it’s just kinda getting out of way, and just not abusing it then it really starts bouncing back quickly, but my wife and her dad had been giving me help because we did plant a small orchard, and we had some weeds that were growing around the orchards, some actually perennial grasses but they do compete with the trees initially. And so, I dug those guys up and I actually

took these things that anybody would call a weed, like 99% of people would spray them with Roundup and you know, I tried to kill ‘em with fire kinda deal, and I actually like transplanted these weeds out into our patio which my father-in-law was just like, I can’t even believe that I’m looking this. ‘Cause he has like the beautifully manicured backyard, flowers, and grass, and everything, and he’s out there weeding, and round-upping, and everything and we’ve had little influence on him but not a ton yet, so yeah, yeah.

Ben: Yeah. Are you gonna look much into the use of some of those wild plants

as potential edible sources like we talked about top roots for example, you know, I know that includes dandelions, and beet roots, and some of these things that are technically good for eating. Are you studying much up on that?

Robb: We’ve gone wild on that. What we did with that is – so we have some areas

that are kinda fenced off to get the rabbits and marmots, and all that stuff out of ‘em, but out in the pasture where we gonna have goats and sheep, and stuff like that, we’ve actually just been spreading seed for these top root plants and we’re just kinda get what we get, but the main idea is to increase the biological diversity, and then also start again like breaking up that ground and not having it be so impacted and clay-like so that other plants can grow in there. But ideally we can kinda turn this to I think call them Food Forest or whatever, like personally grows around here is really, really well, and so we’re helping to encourage the growth of the local edibles, and funny enough, like I ordered a huge bag of dandelion seeds and like we have dandelions everywhere, and this is again something that people usually spray those things to kill ‘em, but our girls love collecting ‘em, you can eat the leaves, the flowers, you can dig up roots and eat those, so…

Ben: Oh yeah, yeah. We use – what I do with the boys is we have this app called

the Flower Checker App. It’s kinda cool, it’s a team of live botanists that within 24 hours when you photograph a plant, they will identify it and send you the Wikipedia page for the plant along with any other interesting resources specifically only the edible, and medicinal uses of that plant. So, my project for the boys every spring and summer is once a week I’ll send them to find one new plant, and then what we do on Fridays is they have to cook a meal, either lunch or dinner comprised of the specific plants that they’ve discovered over the past few weeks. So, and we’ve got you know, personally a great one, we got a lot of dandelion up here. We found – there’s actually a batch of elderberry wine now fermenting in the garage right now because we found a big of elderberry tree at the corner of the property, and I mean, that’s one of the coolest things. I know not everybody necessarily owns acreage but I mean, you can find a wilderness in a blade of grass growing up from a sidewalk. It’s kinda cool to just walk around this app, take photos, prepare what you can eat, will it give you

explosive diarrhea, and it’s a lot of fun. And what about hunting? Are you – do you have much food on your land in terms of things that you can hunt and eat?

Robb: You know, we’re on 5 acres and so it’s not huge but I have actually

interestingly enough during water fell season, I can’t do archery hunting on my property which I have not gotten around to yet, you just told me about the turkey gig team set up, and everything which I’ll have to explore that, but just maybe a quarter mile away from us we’ve actually have put it for ______ [17:02] land where basically punch up into the Serra-Nevada m0untains, and you hunt everything from rabbit to coyote, to dear and bear, and you know, just kinda sky’s the limit from there.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. You know, the bow hunting for birds is really interesting.

Very humane way to kill a bird in a good way. Not to get a lot of lead in the meat which actually don’t want is to use this guillotine broadheads. So you get a bow like a compound bow, and you can purchase this special type of broadhead called the guillotine broadhead, and this is actually what I’m headed out to do after this podcast is I’ve got some wild turkey I’m going after, but you’ve got plenty of room for error because this broadheads just uh, my apologies to all the vegans listening in, I just cleanly slice off the head of the bird in a very humane way, and also very clean way, and then you can go about the feathering and cleaning accordingly but bird hunting with a bow is actually a ton of fun whether it’s ______ [18:00] or turkey, or whatever. So, that’s pretty cool thing up to this whole ranching thing I’m glad you’ve tap into that, and I think at least what I’ve witnessed with my own kids is for the kids it’s a hoo – I mean it’s – they learn everything from edible plants to – one other question I want to ask you before we talk a little bit more about biohacking your body. Animals. Are you looking at a specific type of goat, chicken – what kind of animals are you actually gonna grow there, and for what purpose?

Robb: Oh man, so there was a little battle between my wife and I. Like she wants

to turn the thing into a super expensive petting zoo, and I’m like – dude, we’re gonna eat some of these stuff, and so, the middle ground that we have - we’re gonna have a few goats which are gonna be long term, and then we’re gonna do dorper sheep which are a short-haired non – you don’t collect the wild, they’re not bred for wild but they’re from South Africa, so they’re very heat and desert hearty but that’s gonna be one of our primary meat sources, we have chickens, we have chickens for eggs. Currently we’re gonna do the chicken tractor deal where we move the sheep like we basically do the mop grazing using electrical fencing, so you take a group of animals, move them into a fresh part, and the problem – the way that these areas are get overgrazed is that the animals just kinda cruise around and eat whatever the tastiest item is. And so, the grass will grow up a little bit, they eat it, the grass tries to grow back again, they eat

it again, and then it basically kills grass, and then you end up with these kinda none beneficial things like sage brass and stuff like that. It kinda varies on the location but when you move these animals through an area in mass, it’s the way that they used to move in a large chard under predator kinda pressure, so it’s – you know, it’s really pulling a page out of the evolutionary biology the way that this animals are wired up, and you – what they do then is they basically eat everything in an area, then you move them to another area, and it goes beyond just simply rotational grazing although rotational grazing has an element of doubt. The mob grazing, they eat pretty much everything, and what you end up really encouraging is this kind of climax plant species which are these perennial grass which you really hold a ton of nutrients in the soil. They tend to sequester more carbon and everything, but we’re gonna – sheep and goats, the goats aren’t gonna be edible, those are gonna be pets. The sheep were definitely gonna be edible, and then next year we’re looking doing some pigs, also we’re hoping to start getting some harvest off of some of our apples and making some cider, drawing the apples, and then any of the mashed that’s left over putting in to the kinda pig feeds. So we’re trying to figure out how to make this thing recently close loop, like it’s a lot of moving parts but that’s the goal. I’m been kicking around the idea of almost like a chicken traptor for rabbits also. You know, so we would have some smaller scale grazers out there, but that’s gonna be pretty interesting when we go to harvest rabbits and the girls are kinda like, “so we’re gonna eat those right?” I said yes. (laughs)

Ben: Yeah. Your goal uh, rotational grazing thing with the electric netting. It

looks good on paper, but I’ve found it to be quite messy because I’ve got a lot of the electrical nets that we used to put small fenced areas because we have goats that we move around and chickens that we move around, and I’m actually getting rid of all that electric fencing this year ‘cause you know, I don’t know for those of you who are listening in, if you’ve ever tried to move around, electric fence netting, and we have a lot of dense rubbery up here, and not only does the netting kinda get grounded and so you gotta constantly mow everywhere you put up a new set of electric fencing, but the goats tend to pretty easily figure out ways to escape. We have Nigerian dwarf goats.

Robb: Ummm, umm. Ben: Which are great ‘cause it’ll give you about 6-8 cups of milk a day and

they’re really small goats. They’re not like meat goats or pot goats but they’re good for milk. And what I’m gonna do is just build 3 or 4 permanent fenced areas this year because that electric netting is just such a – it’s a pain in the ass to move around to take up, to unbundle, it gets all coiled up and you know, I got to have a separate solar charger for each different piece of netting, and so we have the whole mobile chicken cube thing that we move around, and then kind of a permanent chicken barn,

but the electric netting is, that hasn’t worked out so well for me, and I’m curious how it turns out for you, and yeah, it can be a mess. That’s what I’ve found.

Robb: Right, right. That’s what I’ve heard. So, we’ll see. I spent a decent amount

of time with Joel Salatin, and they really get some mileage out of it but I mean, they really have gotten their operation in the way, a legit like perennial grass scene so they’re not dealing with…

Ben: Yeah. That’s our problem. Slopes, slopes, and dense, dense. You know,

we’re in a middle of a forest basically so. Now, kinda kind of a, for the folks who are or not farmers and aren’t growing around food if they’re still even hanging around, there’s some other things you’ve been doing. Uh for example, I understand from a recent blog post that you wrote which I link to in the show notes, great blog post about some new things you’ve been experimenting with at 44 years old. You’re doing some post meal blood glucose monitoring. Tell me about what you’re using for that and why you’re experimenting with glucose monitoring?

Robb: You know, so there was a great study that came out, gosh, back in

November of just the last year, and it was a fantastic study done in Israel where they inserted a subcutaneous blood glucose monitor to 800 people to check these folks their gut microbiome, their genetics, basic blood work, and they’re able to create an algorithm based off of the response that these people had to various meals. They’ve looked how their blood glucose responded to things like bread, bread plus butter, rice, you know, just whole variety of things, and they were able to create a predictive algorithm where the end they’ve just look it, another person or group of people, their gut biome, their genetics, they can predict what these people would respond favorably and unfavorably to, and I have done some gut testing, I’ve got some decent genetic testing, I’ve not been able to crunch all these stuff the way that they did but what they really pulled out of these was that when people figured out whatever the carbohydrate types and amounts that were good for them individually, if they stuck with that over the course of time their gut health through metabolic health tended to improve, and it just kinda kept incrementally improving. And so, I started tracking my post-meal blood glucose levels ‘cause I’ve always had a reason with difficult time getting the right air feel mixture for what makes me feel good, like I cognitively feel really good ketotic, I’ve haven’t really quite been able to make that work for Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you know, I’ve fiddled with it, but I’ve kinda settled in this area of maybe around like 20-30% of my calories and carbs which really only amounts to like a hundred and two grams carbs a day depending on the activity level that day, but I just to get a little more granular I started doing a 30-minute, 1 hour, then 2 hours to try to get a little bit of an immulation of like a total area under the curve type of continuous blood glucose monitoring to see how I was actually responding to things. And some stuff that I’d always suspected that I had

some problems with like white rice, like I can eat, I don’t really think I get an immunogenic response from it but you know, if I go more than about a half a cup, quarter to a half of cup of rice, like my blood glucose just goes to the moon and stays there for a long time, and then I get a really pretty nearly throw at the end of that, so.

Ben: And are you doing uh, are you just using like an acu check like blood

glucose? Robb: Yup, yup. Ben: Are you on the full on – talking with Dr. Mercola recently who’s been doing

a lot of 24-hour blood glucose monitoring. He mentioned this thing called a Dexcom G5.

Robb: Yes. I just checked on those an hour ago. Ben: You heard of it? You have to get a script for it. If you want I can, I can uh

probably connect you to somebody who can write a script fully, you pulling know someone but apparently the G5, uhm, for people who are worried about electrical pollution, right? Like from constantly having something tracking data and producing Bluetooth and EMF on your device, probably the G4 is like a radio frequency device, but if you use this Dexcom G5 for blood glucose monitoring, like it will wake you up if your glucose drops below a certain level at night, if you want to be tracking your data or you can turn that sensor off if you don’t wanna be annoyed by low blood glucose at night, but apparently like pretty much every hour of the day with this Dexcom, you can pretty much get a value for anything. So, that’s what I’ve been thinking about looking at for similar reasons to you, you know, I noticed that – were you referring to the study that they did in Israel where they looked at different people in their glycemic response to foods, is that specifically…

Robb: Yeah, yeah specifically personalized glycemic response study. Yeah, some

fascinating things. You know, like they had one person who ate a banana and they had beautiful blood glucose response, and then another person ate the same amount of banana and it, their blood glucose you know, went to the moon and then you know, they have a hypo-glycemic drop, and then another person ate a cookie and they had good blood glucose, and then a different person ate this same type of cookie and they had a horrible blood glucose, and then so you know, there was a huge interpersonal variations on these stuff. And then there was kind of a wacky assortment of foods that were good for some people and not good for other folks like hummus which even on like the paleo guy, you know, my dude, hummus is protein and fat like you would need a private detective to find a glycemic response from that, but some people, they’re not totally sure what was going on, they don’t know of maybe these people had small intestinal bacterial

overgrowth, and they have kind of uh inflammatory response but hummus in about 50% of the people ended up being kind of a negative food for people, and it really open my eyes to is that you know we have some general guidelines you know, like sleep better, move, eat whole and unprocessed foods but even on that whole and unprocessed food story, there’s a massive amount of variation within that, and that can you know, it’s very different, you vs. me, versus my wife, but then there’s also variation baked into that cake depending on how well you’re sleeping, like if you’re a cop who does shift work, like when you’re off shift, and you have a couple of days of good sleep, your metabolism is quite different in a way that you’re gonna respond to foods is gonna be quite different than when you’re you know, you’re doing your graveyard shifts and stuff like that. So, that was definitely the impetus for me to get in and start fiddling with this blood glucose monitoring.

Ben: Yes, it’s really interesting. Now, have you looked into you know, from a

genetic standpoint, when you look at the nature obviously, things like night shift work and the gut permeability, and the potential inflammatory response to foods would affect blood glucose, but if you look much into like some of the genetics snips responsible for whether people will for example, lose weight or have a pronounced glycemic response to like low-carb high-fat vs. high-carb low-fat, like any of these snips that you can feed out from your 23andme data or your DNA ancestor data?

Robb: I haven’t looked at that for other folks at all. Like I’ve been fiddling that

for myself and what came back on that – so both my parents ended up dying from type 2 diabetes complications. If I eat a lot of carbs unlike the Doe Northern European guy, and when my data was analyzed and I actually put this through promethease to get the… (crosstalk)

Ben: … it’s the perfect one to do it. Robb: Yeah. And it indicated that I was 300% more likely than the average

person to develop type 2 diabetes based off my genetics. Ben: Yeah, yeah. I thought I was high, and I’m like 30% higher than normal.

So you’re off the chart in terms of your uh, the motivation there to control your blood glucose.

Robb: Yeah, and that toward the testing you know, I still off in times kinda

default to just get in and experiment to high-carb for a while, do low-carb for a while, see how you look, feel, and perform, and all that stuff, and I think you really end up getting a long waste down the road with that but some of these deeper testing, it really provide you know, ‘cause you’re always wondering like am I really carbon tolerant or am I just screwing somethin’ up here, and then it was just – no man, genetically you’re in the shallow end of the genes pulse, so yeah.

Ben: Yeah, it’s interesting with that promethease. I’ll link to a pretty cool

article. It appeared on a website called Rockstar Research. It’s just a very simple algorithm where if you’ve ever done salivary genetic testing which I think is well worth it for just everybody to shove over 100 to 200 bucks to do, you can export the data for 5 bucks to promethease which Robb mentioned, and then there’s an algorithm where you check for specific snips. Like you check for RS4994, and if you have the double A or double T version of that then you would check for RS1042713, and you continue to feed down through this algorithm and it spits out basically 2 things: whether you respond best to high intensity vs. low intensity exercise, and whether you respond best to a high-fat vs. a low-fat diet for weight loss, and it’s incredibly simple to just plug your values in, and it’s really interesting. For example, you know I found by using that high intensity exercise, I mean, I’m an extreme responder to it but don’t do well at all with chronic endurance exercise which is very interesting ‘cause I’ve always had my best endurance races when training with high intensity exercise, and weight lifting, and then interestingly it also shows that I would respond better to a slightly higher carbohydrate intake which I actually haven’t, you know, experimented too much with at least not a healthy higher carbohydrate intake, but for anybody listening in, by the way, I’ll keep some furious notes here. You can go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/robb, that’s 2 b’s, bengreenfieldfitness.com/robb because I know we’re covering a lot of stuff and I’ll link to that particular article if you tend to go through your results and export those, but uhm, that info and high intensity exercise, that lends me to another question I wanted to ask you, Robb, and that is this concept of this Alactic sets. I came across this idea from you that you’re now performing kinda like to get the most bang for your buck out of your training time, this alactic sets. Can you explain what those are? How they work and how you do them?

Robb: Yeah. So you know, the first time that this concept got on my radar was

from Art De Vany, and this was back in like ’98, ’97, somewhere around there. This old university kinda website for his evolutionary fitness site and he described this 2 things: one was a hierarchical set where you took uh, say like you’re doing back squats, and you would do 20 reps with an empty bar, then you’ve put a 45 pound played on it sides and do 15 reps, like you just go from 1 to the next, to the next. So, you do 15 reps with 45 pounds, and then 8 reps with 225, and put 315 on and get 3 or 4 reps, and that’s about as heavy as you gonna go that day, and you know you’ve generated a lot lactate, you’ve theoretically fatigue. All of the different muscle fibers from the slow to the fast twitch, and then you finish this thing with some jumps, so like some jump squats to really hit those high-end motor units. And so, that was one technique that I used, and then another technique goes what you called Alactic sets where you kinda warmed up, got mobile and everything, and then you put a weight on the

bar that was maybe about 80-85 presuming you have your 1 rep max, and you do 1-3 reps, and then you just kinda walk around, wait a couple of seconds ‘till you felt recovered, do another couple of sets or couple of reps. And you would accumulate you know, basically enough volume so that you just started to get a little bit of movement degradation, and then you were done, but like your deadlift session, you know, aside from warm up and mobility and everything, literally might be less than 5 minutes ‘cause you just kinda stack this stuff. And I had fiddled with that both of these – both the hierarchical sets and the alactic sets before I got into the crossfit gig. And I really liked it like it was super time efficient, you know, you weren’t gonna set in any power lifting records with it or anything like that, but it was just kinda shocking. It’s funny, Art’s an economist, he’s a brilliant guy, and so it was like the most time efficient thing that I’d ever done in my life as far as training, like it was pretty shocking in that regard, and so then Mark Sisson’s recent book “Primal Endurance”, he had kind of a takedown of this stuff and he called it something different. I’m forgetting what the…

Ben: Yeah, seems like “Sustained Power Training” or something like that. Robb: Yes! Yeah, sustained power training. They actually – the way that Mark

described it in the book, it was carrying this stuff out for longer maybe even like 5-10 minutes throughout the whole set which makes sense for what he was trying to accomplish, and uh, so I, you know, I’m super busy, I’m in the middle of writing a second book where actually we’re running the farm, but we’re also doing a house remodel which means we’re living about a mile, mile and a half way in an apartment, we’ve got 2 kids, my wife’s busy you know, so I tried to get in as much Brasilian jiu jitsu as I can and but I still wanted to lift some weights, and so I started doing this alactic sets, and I basically do some sort of lower body movement, a squat or a deadlift or some variation of that, plow through it and then do some sort of vertical or horizontal press and pull, and I hit those on separate days. So, it might be like deadlifts, standing press, and chins one day, and then front squats, bent rose, and inclined dumb bell press on the other day or like dips or something like that.

Ben: So the rest periods are pretty small between each sets. You do like 5 reps,

walk away, rest a few seconds, come back, do reps, do reps, do reps, over and over again, walking away and coming back until you get to the point where you can only do 1 rep?

Robb: Exactly, yeah. And you know, it’s so, that’s the way that Mark

recommends it. Something that I did which even a little more conservative is I just accumulate about 20-25 total reps, and then when I start getting to where I can consistently get like 5 sets of 5 with it, then I just up the weight. The weight that Mark was doing it is a little more specific for power endurance, and they carry the sets out a little bit longer

but it seems like either way would work it’s just kinda depend on which direction you wanna stir it, but I mean my whole workout aside from some mobility and warm up is literally like 15 minutes, and I’m kinda knackered from it, but it’s not like doing fran or some sort of a crossfit deal like it doesn’t negatively impact my rolling, doesn’t impact my sleep, or anything, so it’s just been this really time efficient way of getting some training in. Prior to that I’ve been following the gymnastics bodies foundations program and I really, really enjoying that, but I have none of my gear, I can only workout on a big box gym right now so I didn’t have any rings, I didn’t have stall bars, so I have to figure out something else to do to just kinda get me through this 3-4 month period, and so I gave that a shot and I’ve really been enjoying it.

Ben: Yeah, it’s especially interesting in light of the fact that there’s a recent – I

think it was in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning research, showed that diminished rest periods between sets like full body heavy sets like that actually induce probably due to the lactate buildup, a higher growth hormone response and resting obviously if you’re trying to get as freaking strong as possible, you’d rest for 3-5 minutes between the sets and really load up the bar, but for time efficiency and the hormonal response, I love this idea. I’ve been taking some notes here because occasionally I do find myself in a situation where I just have a barbell or a kettlebell, and I wanna squeeze as much strength and workin’ as possible in the shortest period of time. So, it’s called Alactic Training.

Robb: That’s what Art Devany calls it, and then in Mark’s book, it was – I think

you relate, correct like continuous power sets or something like that. Ben: Yeah. Mark’s book is “Primal Endurance”, because you want I’ll link to

that one in the show notes. Now, speaking of Mark and training, I think it is Mark who have heard works pretty positively about this Versaclimber. It’s a cardio equipment and I’ve heard you talk about it too. What is about the Versaclimber that makes it so interesting for you guys?

Robb: You know what, one thing for me is that it’s one of the only pieces of

equipment where you’re upright, I mean clearly a treadmill you are also but I’m at the point in my life now where I’m like – okay, I need to be outside even if it’s like 20 below 0, if I’m gonna be on a treadmill like I just (chuckles) but uhm, you know, it’s – you’re upright, so you’re not sitting down. It’s one of the rare things where you get some contralateral movement, you know, kinda like crawling, and you do this a ton and _____ [39:58.6] and everything, and man, the thing just crushes you like it’s – if you really tighten up the resistance on it and do short burst, it smokes you in ways that are even worse than liken in air dine or on a salt bike, I think the fact that you fully upright, and standing up like that fluid column that you’re heart and circulation needs to deal with is higher, so you know, it’s uh, just a really potent dose, and I use it everywhere from

just like my low level basic aerobic training and just kinda help with jiu jitsu and recovery, and then I – there was a great article and man, I’m completely blanking on it, but this guy got in, and really keep down on like how you should strength and condition train for Brasilian jiu jitsu and they analyzed just hours and hours of competitions at the world level, and they have broke this thing down, you know, you tended to see about every minute, about a 10-15 seconds scramble, and then you have a minute of continuous activity, and then 10-15 scramble. And so, I started doing a lot of my training kinda based around that. So actually start on the aerodiner the rower, and go for about a minute, hop off that, jump on the versaclimber where the resistance is setup, but just like I’ve got – it’s literally almost like doing a max effort to get this stuff to move like it’s super high resistance, and I’ll go as hard as I can on that for about 10 seconds, and then I’ll shift back to the rower, and essentially it’s work recovery type stuff, but I’m trying to emulate those really hard scrambles, and I kinda randomize it a little bit like I’ll do a minute and then 10 second burst and then I’ll do 2 minutes of recovery and then 15 second burst, you know, I kinda vary it based off of how if the white buffalo in the sky is coming to visit me or whatever is going on. So, I’ve just really liked it for that, you know those reasons. It’s pretty big, it takes up a piece of amount of acreage in my…

Ben: But it’s vertical, right? Robb: But it’s vertical so you know, it’s good in that regard. I had actually cut a

hole in my garage to fit this thing in there, and the versaclimber guy is always want me to ship ‘em a photo of me using it. I’m like my garage is a dump and I have to like do this crazy maneuvering to get the thing in and out of this hole in a filling, so they don’t get much in the way of photos or video of me using the thing.

Ben: Yeah, it’s really interesting that whole idea of loading up the muscles,

producing a much of lactic acid, and it’s kinda like that philosophy behind that that as seen on TV or the one you see in the airplane magazines, the 4 minute exercise machine, where you’re just moving all body parts at once, at maximum pace and there’s actually – I’ve experimented with this a little bit. There’s this machine out there called the Vasper that’s popular among folks. Yeah, it’s where they actually attach these tourniquets that are like ice based tourniquets. So, you’re cooling and causing vasoconstriction in a muscle along with compression, almost like that Japanese style Kaatzu Training where there or what’s called blood flow restricted training. So they’re basically combining blood flow restriction, cold thermogenesis, and exercise all simultaneously, and you just workout for like I don’t know for how long the protocol is. I guess it’s 10-15 minutes on this Vasper but it’s extremely, just like that 4 minute machine, it’s extremely expensive. So I’ve been messing around with just wearing compression gear, and then shoving some ice packs and a compression

gear, like they make compression gear and put ice packs into, and then just doing like a high intensity set on the bike with the legs compressed and with ice on them. And it actually is pretty interesting. You can get this huge pump in the legs and I have no clue you know, I haven’t been measured lactate buffering capacity or anything like that, but of these new pieces of cardio equipment or ways that you can use them, they’re fun to experiment with, and I agree the full body ones to produce what you called white buffalo in the sky effect, give you a lot of bang for your buck.

Robb: Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty cool and super time efficient, and

again like you made the point, like if you wanna become a champion power lifter or something like that, like it’s gonna be 2 hours in the gym, in each session you need 3-5 minutes. I think even closer to 5 minute mark more consistently between sets ‘cause you’re really training that neural element of strength, but you know, for just general health and fitness, like it’s this really short time efficient sessions that challenge you but don’t leave you completely knackered like it’s pretty legit.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask you couple other things about items I know

you’ve been experimenting with a little bit. For example, in this post about your life at 44, you mentioned something we already talked about a little bit – binaural beats.

Robb: Uhmm. Ben: Tell me about how you’ve been using binaural beats. Robb: So, I had read a little bit about this you know, the idea being that you

would listen to uhm, a gram word would send a signal to like one ear that was say like going at 12 cycles a second, and to the other ear at 8 cycles a second, and then theoretically these 2 would meet in the brain and it would produce a 10 cycle per second like brainwave state. I really haven’t gone deep down the rabbit hole of how credible the science is, but I started using it initially just kinda of a relaxation, like kind of active meditation deal, like I’m too squirrely and friggity to actually sit down and meditate and even yoga is a little bit of a challenge for me. So, I sort of fiddling with that and I was like – Wow! I really like this stuff. And then, as part of my ramp up for the book, there were different settings, and so there was relaxation setting, then there was like creativity setting. So I put those creativity setting on there and started using that, and I guess we’ll talk about nicotine gum in just a little bit, but I just found a couple of different things that if I kinda daisy-chained them together, my productivity was pretty, pretty dumb impressive like I had some ______ [46:24.3] when I was writing my first book and you know, like getting 1200, 2000 words a day was a real slug and I was super smoked from it, and I’ve been doing really consistently about 2500 words a day on this book, and I really like I’ve tried doing little blocks of writing without the binaural beats, and I

noticed a huge difference to my concentration, and almost seems like it helps my working memory, like it’s almost like my ram is better so I can keep more kinda dispirit ideas in that working memory so that I can pull ideas together and kinda make these kind of wacky connections with the stuff that I’m trying to write. So, it’s been incredibly helpful in that regard, and it’s almost become this thing where you know, if somebody, some football team, they’re winning all their games and they have washed their uniform, and so they get almost religious about it, and they don’t wash uniform like now I don’t change anything like I just keep all the exact same stuff. I did just put in an aniracetam in that whole mix, and my best writing day on just binaural beats and nicotine gum was pretty consistently around 2500 words, and the past couple of days doing these other stuff I’ve had some 34 and 35 hundred word days after droppin’ in the aniracetam also.

Ben: I’ll ask you about that aniracetam here in just a second because I’d like to

hear your thoughts on that. But so for the binaural beats, you’re using them more for focus and alertness, and I guess what would be called alpha brainwave production more than you are for say, sleep.

Robb: Yes! Yeah. Ben: Interesting. Yes, I’ve done a little bit with brain.fm when I’m writing

primarily I’ve found this especially for fiction. That helps me to block out a lot of uh – I’m writing a medieval kinda like fantasy fiction book and it’s very difficult for me to get into medieval fantasy fiction mode if there are phones going off from the background, and my kids are playing piano, and all these modern settings. So I just go into brainfm mode, but I’ve primarily used binaural beats kinda religiously and almost to the point where you know, when I’m out camping in the woods and stuff and I don’t have my phone, I miss ‘em. I’ve been using an app called the The Sleep Stream app that - and it has the ability to choose a focus function, right, or a meditation function but then it also has a – it’s got a deep sleep function and it has what I think is really cool. It’s one of those apps that has the ability to purchase things in device. And one of the things that you can purchase is an 8-hour sleep cycle where it’ll walk you through 8 hours of sleep cycling you through 5 different sleep cycles during those 8 hours of sleep, and you just put it in when your head hits the pillow. I use this soft headphones called Sleep Phones, so they don’t really dig into your ears and you listen to this app as you sleep. So blocks out ambient noise but it’s also binaural beat based. And this one you know, it takes you from beat to alpha, down to like your delta and your theta waves, and it’s really interesting. I suppose you could probably just be wearing headphones all day long and all night long if you really wanted to.

Robb: (chuckles) And just be mega optimized, yeah.

Ben: And now is the morning beat, and now is the afternoon beat, and I’ve always wondered sometimes if it does kinda like eventually mess with. I don’t know with the little hairs in your ear and all that jazz, you know, constantly vibrating them during every night of sleep, but I swear by them right now. So, that’s kinda cool that you’re using them so much for writing. So you combine them, uhm, so let’s talk about this – did you say aniracepam?

Robb: Yeah, it’s a piracetam derivative and I had tried piracetam a number of

years ago and was completely non-plus with the stuff like pretty unimpressed although now with the results I’ve had with the aniracepam, I wanna circle back around and try some of these other derivatives that I tried previously and I kinda disregarded them. The pharmacology on them, they’re modifying dopamine elements. I have not going deep on exactly what they’re doing, but you know, they’re definitely in that. It’s no joke.

Ben: And this is not aniracetam, I use an aniracepam? Robb: All right, I’ll deal with this – aniracetam, yup. Right. Ben: Okay, aniracetam, okay, I got you. Yeah, I’m somewhat familiar with that

one, yeah, you get a little bit of a dopamine dump. I talked to a guy who works with video gamers recently, and he uses that one quite a bit combined with uh, huh I have to link to the episode. I forget what he combines it with but he sent me some. It’s like a bitter tasting powder and you put like an eight of a teaspoon into your mouth if you’re not taking it in capsular form, and his only warning to me, I don’t know you think about this is he said that a lot of it was metabolized by the liver, and so it was something that he didn’t recommend using on a daily basis. Have you looked into this much?

Robb: I have not, I have not. Ben: That was my only drawback to it was apparently has a pretty extensive first

pass metabolism by the way. Robb: Gotcha, gotcha. Ben: But uhm, it does certainly pack a punch and I’ll link to that, that particular

episode, but it was aniracetam combined with… I don’t – you know, there’s always different stacks nowadays.

Robb: Right. Ben: It’s hard to keep up, you know, for me I typically go with mushrooms or

adaptogenic herbs. That’s typically my definite choice.

Robb: You know, the funny thing is this product actually has like 5 different

mushrooms, and a bunch of other adaptogens in it, so it’s more than just that and I just have no idea if it’s the singular action nor the whole product doing the magic, but it’s uh, impressive.

Ben: Which product is it? Robb: You know? Let me uh, give me 2 seconds. Let me grab it out of my

backpack. Ben: This is good podcasting folks. Robb digging into his backpack. We can do

the jeopardy music as he takes… (music playing) Robb: Okay. One second here… it is uhm, Mixel Boost. Ben: Mixel Boost. Robb: Yeah. Ben: Sounds like something for kids. Robb: Yeah, yeah it does. It does like, yeah, yeah. Mixel shield, mixel boost. I

think it’s out of the brain… what is the name of the mix? Ben: Mixel boost, uh. I can hunt it down and I’ll link to it for folks. How do you

spell mixel? Robb: M-i-x-e-l. Ben: Mixel Boost. Interesting. I’ve never heard of it. Robb: Yeah, yeah. Ben: I try and stay on the bleeding edge of smart drugs. So, that’s interesting.

Mixel is like uh… Robb: Yeah, it’s like uh, one bottle of this lion's mane mushroom, rhodiola,

ashwagandha, cumin, and the other one goes a little bit more the uh, aniracepam, alpha GPC, bacoba, but I just did like a really low dose.

Ben: You said m-i-x-e-l? Robb: Yeah, yup. Ben: Huh interesting!

Robb: Yeah! Ben: I may have to dig around for this one, but I’ll find a link to it for everybody

listening in if I can hunt it down. Now, the other thing that fascinates me, and that I just started doing after actually reading this article that you wrote. I’ve been chopping it down in the gym is… nicotine gum. I’m actually… I’m holding this stuff that I – the stuff that I’ve found to be the lowest in colors and artificial sweeteners, and it still has a little bit of acesulfame potassium in it which is uh, the stuff made by the company Good Sense. It’s uh, just take 2 mg per… but it doesn’t taste that great but nicotine gum. Tell me about the safety of using nicotine gum and why you use it, and why you found with the use and dosage of nicotine?

Robb: Well you know, gosh, it was 7 years ago I started doing work for the Naval

Special Warfare Resiliency Committee basically going in and talking to the Seal Teams, the boat teams, and also the family members of the teams and their pre-imposed deployment kinda get-together that they would have, and they wanted me to talk about sleep, and food, exercise, which the exercise is kinda goofy ‘cause these guys have that pretty wired up, and it was part of what they want me to cover. And then they wanted me to cover some lifestyle stuff like booze, nicotine, you know, caffeine, and all that because you know, hyper vigilant, environment because these guys get on flip circadian rhythms where they’ll awake all night, and they go to sleep during the day, they use sleep aids to go down, they’ll Monsters and you know, all kinds of stuff to get back up and goin’, and so, in my trying to do some due diligence when I was getting ready to talk about nicotine, I was like – Okay, let’s just do some basic pharmacology and toxicology on this so that I’m brushed up on these stuff. And as I started digging around on it, it was interesting because I started finding all these studies of like the therapeutic benefits of nicotine like it was beneficial for all these GI disorders and anti-inflammatory, and you know, there was always the caveat that the delivery mechanism tobacco was really problematic, but when they were using just kind of a pharmaceutical type agent like a gum or a lozenges or something like that, then you didn’t really have any issues when you look at the toxicology specifically of nicotine, looked alike like caffeine like you certainly could kill yourself with it but you know, every once a while some nappy headed kid will order a pure caffeine off the internet, and get a lethal dose of it but you know, it’s easier to kill yourself with Tylenol than it is this stuff. And it’s another dopamine modulator and I definitely you know, I’ve all these symptoms of kinda low dopamine, just kinda fit you to ADD like always need to project going on and stuff like that. I’m kind of happiest when I’m just barely on the edge of death by doing something not cool headed. And so, as I started really reading through this stuff, I was like – wow! This is really interesting and then I thought back about my family and thinking a little bit about my genetics. I’m like – every one of my family members smoked and you know (chuckles) and so I started noodling on this, and cigarette smoking had

always just completely repulsed me but I was kinda like, well shoot I’ll give this stuff a shot, and so, my first try with it was a 4 mg piece which was way too much, and I got horrifically nauseous, almost threw up, rooms spins for about an hour, it was terrible. So, if people play with this, I strongly, strongly encourage you start off with like a milligram or less if you’ll start.

Ben: I did, I did two. What I’ve been doing is 2 and that’s typically, because I

do a hard workout. Typically sometime between 4 and 7PM, you know, and I take a nap after lunch, right? and so I’ve woken up from my nap the past couple of days and grab a piece of 2 mg and start chomping on it, and I’ve found, I go pre-hard until about 9PM while chewing on this stuff, and I haven’t gone above 2 mg yet.

Robb: And you know, I pretty much stay at the 2 mg level. I’ll do a couple of

pieces throughout the day, and what’s interesting is nicotine is a stimulant but it works differently than the way that caffeine does. It’s not just specifically dinging the adrenals and kind of getting that epinephrine kind of release. It’s working through a little bit more of a dopamine energic activity, and what was really interesting within the military context was it uh, it will keep guys alert but if they, say like if they’re out on a patrol but they were gonna get home or get back to base and then go to bed, it seem like a better option if they needed to stay awake, but then they can sleep in pretty close proximity to their work day wrapping up because it wasn’t going to disorder sleep the way that caffeine does. It wasn’t going to antagonize melatonin release. And what was also interesting is that it didn’t tended in a wrap find motor skill, so if the guys knew that they will gonna cover a lot of ground, and they will gonna have a heavy pack and stuff like that, and I was recommending you know, like uh, something like a 50 mg of caffeine in every 4-6 hours to keep this activity, but then if they will dug into a hillside and they will waiting to take a long distance shot or something like that or even if it was as mundane as needing to stay awake to finish a report and then go to bed, I was recommending the caffeine or the nicotine for some of these other options, so they kinda have different stimulants that they could use based off of what type of needs that they had going on, and it’s just been phenomenal for me, and I used to have all sorts of colitis long, long time ago. The basic paleo eating really helped that enormously, but I’ve always had still a little bit of a touchy gut and the nicotine seems to help that quite a bit too.

Ben: Interesting! Very interesting. You know, we’re returning back to the

discussion on genetics. I did noticed when I went through my promethease gene printout, I have a 4 times higher than normal risk of being addicted to nicotine. So I supposed you know for me, this could turn into a concern or just very, very good business for whichever nicotine gums business that I choose, but I’m curious if people are metabolizing it or addicted to it in different ways, but regardless, I just did my own

personal experimentation with it and the research that I’ve done based off some of the resources that you provide in the article that I’ll link to in the show notes, it does appear to be safer than I would have thought based off of the negative perception we all associate with it probably because of cigarettes.

Robb: Yeah, you know there’s a fascinating web mdps on uh, like if you Google

WebMD nicotine gum, there’s a piece basically talking about all these forms of smokers and now addicted to nicotine gum, and it’s probably, I had 3 page ______ [1:00:46.7] all these hand wringing and these concern, and then at the very end, the guy almost as if he kinda ______ [1:00:54.6]. I don’t know where he did research in this whole cycle or who got saddled with writing this thing, but literally the last paragraph, the guy basically wraps up and he said, “you know, it’s actually hard to vilify”, like I’m left wondering if this is even an issue given the fact that the nicotine itself pharmacologically and toxicologically really is pretty dumb benign and that all of the negative effects that we usually ascribe to nicotine is a by-product of the delivery system, the tobacco whether it’s smoked or chewed, so that’s just an interesting read because these guys are really they’re talking about… well, how do we get folks off of this nicotine gum, you know, it’s a real concern, and then the guy actually wraps it up by saying, “I, medically I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with this, and that we’re wasting our time doing this.” So that, that was really fascinating piece because WebMD is about as orthodox missionary-style mainstream medicine, it’s you can get. So, and even that guy was kinda like, I don’t know that I could really say that there’s anything wrong with this stuff.

Ben: Yeah, I see that article here about… it’s called “Addicted to Nicorette”. I’ll

link to it. I’ll link to in the show notes for folks, and of course the only thing I’ve run into in addition to my concern over potential for addiction based on genes is the fact that you know, I have this healthy xylitol flavored vitamin B enriched like gluten-free, everything free, vegan sustainable gum that I chew, and whenever I grab a piece, my kids ask for a piece, and I’m relatively guilt-free but hand to him. And so, I’ve been grabbing the Nicorette and my kids like, “hey dad, can I have a piece?” and uh, so I run into the same situation I run into when either vaping or drinking a cup of coffee trying to explain to them that they need to wait a little while until they’re at appropriate age and their organs/gray matter can handle that load but uh…

Robb: It’s a concern ‘cause you definitely don’t want a kid digging into your

nicotine gum like that. That would be a disaster. Ben: Exactly! Yeah, exactly. Robb, this has been fascinating. I have so many

notes that I’ve taken as we’ve been talking about this stuff everything from uh, you know, your brainwave app you’ve talked about, to this blood

glucose monitoring, to everything else. I know that you’re going to be at Paleo FX 2016 coming up here very soon. I’ll be there as well along with my family, and so if you’re listening in and you wanna go, go hang out with Robb and I, and potentially catch us drinking a few Margaritas, you can head over to Paleo FX happening down in Austin, and then one final question for you, Robb. I know that you’re working on a new book fueled by nicotine and aniracetam, and headphones…

Robb: And god knows what else, yeah. (chuckles) Ben: And yeah, just for finishing your book, can you, for all of the Ben

Greenfield fitness listeners perhaps share something that you have not yet revealed about this book, or something that you feel would be ground breaking or quite interesting for folks about this new book that you’re working on.

Robb: Uh sure, you know that the personalized glycemic response paper I’m

actually – that’s gonna be a piece of the book. Like I’m gonna really try to help people figure out how to crack their individual code on you know, can they deal with high carbs, or low carbs, or what type of carbs, does it need to be, so that’s gonna be an important feature. You know, unlike the first book I talked a bit about the neuro regulation of appetite but I really, really go deep on the neuro regulation of appetite in this book, and do a little bit of degree related to like optimum foraging strategy, and how that’s kind of forge our genetics to try to eat more and move less, and all that type of stuff, and how that’s kinda set us up for some problems. But those are maybe the big potentially interesting points in the book, and shooting for March or April release of 2017 on that.

Ben: Very cool. I can’t wait. Check it out neuro regulation appetite, sounds like

a pretty cool topic. I’m personally quite interested in because I’m always hungry. Speaking of which, I need to go…

Robb: Nice! Yeah (chuckles) Ben: I need to go find a turkey. So anyways, Robb, thanks so much for giving

all your time and sharing your knowledge, and for comin’ on the show. And again, for those of you listening in, just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/robb, that’s bengreenfieldfitness.com/r-o-b-b, if you wanna dig in to everything that we talked about or learn more about Robb, and Robb, thanks for comin’ on.

Robb: Awesome time! Thanks for having me back on man. Always a pleasure

chatting with you. Ben: Alright folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Robb will signing off from

bengreenfieldfitness.com. Have a healthy week!

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