Don’t Live Like Our Ancestors (Ft’ Robb Wolf)

Genetics loads the gun, epigenetics pulls the trigger.

Which begs the serious question, if you have a bad Diet Coke habit—

If I have anything with inulin in it, like, you don't want to be anywhere near me.

It is reproductive fitness.

Evolution via natural selection is kind of the operating system under biology.

I'm getting goosebumps just listening.

I'll sleep when I'm dead. Because I was eating a vegan diet at the time, I'm looking at dying right now.

The world is set up against our genetics. Right everybody, we're back with another interview. Today we have Robb Wolf, a man whose reputation precedes him. However, if you've been living under a rock and you also don't know who Michael Jordan and Harry Potter are, I'll give you a little bit about Robb. He's a former biochemist and two-time New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, including of The Paleo Solution, Wired to Eat, and Sacred Cow. He's also co-founder of Element Electrolytes and has quite the background having coached everyone from Navy SEALs to NASA scientists, He co-founded some of the earliest CrossFit gyms and he has a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. So I don't know if we're gonna cover all his background today, but I, I do wanna start there first. Thanks for joining me, Rob.

Thanks for having me.

Pleasure. So I wanna start with a little bit of your personal background and journey. How'd you first get into paleo and ancestral health?

I, I did really similar to you. I was, looking at entering medical school was living kind of the standard grad student life where, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead, eating whatever food I would, you know, kind of shuffle down my pie hole and whatnot. And super low— looking back, super low vitamin D levels. I ended up with ulcerative colitis so bad that I was facing a bowel resection, immunosuppressant drugs and stuff like that. And it was kind of a, a moment of desperation. I, I was just casting around looking for anything that might save me from that track. I didn't know a lot about medicine yet, but I knew that the course I was on was not good for the long haul. And it was, it was odd because I was eating a vegan diet at the time, which I, I don't wanna overly ascribe the significance of that. Like I think a lot of what goes into that doesn't work well for me. But again, I wasn't sleeping well, terrible circadian biology, when I did eventually get my vitamin D levels checked a couple of years after this, I think it was like 12 or 15 or something like, it was just abysmal. So I literally, if I were to write a prescription for maybe how to precipitate a gut or autoimmune event, like I ticked every box possible, you know, but I was just looking for any other alternative. And of all things, an Atkins book made it into my, my radar and I started reading that. And what's interesting is Atkins is usually associated with weight loss. I definitely didn't need weight loss. I'm about 175 pounds right now. I was 181 pounds when I was state powerlifting champion. At the low ebb of my ulcerative colitis, I was 125 pounds. So I was a wreck. But what was interesting is Atkins talked a lot about gut and autoimmune-related issues resolving when people went on this weight loss journey using this Atkins approach, this, you know, low carb, adequate protein, higher fat way of eating. And I was just kind of like, man, I, I literally have nothing to lose. Like, if I'm gonna die from a heart attack, at least that's liable to be a couple of years down the range. I'm looking at dying right now. And so I gave it a shot. Like, my first meal was a set of beef spare ribs that I baked for like 6 hours. So, you know, it was cooked super well. And I had a little bit of melon. And what's funny is at that time, in addition to everything else I had going on, I think I was so malnourished I just wasn't sleeping well, which creates this feed-forward mechanism of poor sleep, inflammation, gut issues, you know, it's just on and on. And I never like fall asleep, you know, watching TV, driving, you know, anything like that. I literally fell asleep at the table where I ate this meal and woke up like 13 hours later and I felt pretty good, you know, like the first time in maybe 2 years, 3 years, I was like, God, I actually feel pretty good. So that, that's really what, got me embarked on this journey. I also discovered around that time that I had celiac. My mom had had a lifetime of gut autoimmune-related issues. So I got checked out for that. Definitely had celiac, definitely had the ulcerative colitis. And when I was noodling on all this stuff, I was kind of thinking about the things that I had an issue with— carbohydrates. I had some issue with dairy and I was thinking, you know, Neolithic foods. And mind you, this was 1998. So it was, it was quite, quite some time ago. And I don't know where the term Paleolithic diet had gotten into my, my brain. You know, I had always been interested since being a kid in evolution, evolutionary biology, dinosaurs, you know, just, just life on Earth. You know, it's always been a fascinating topic for me. So I put into this newfangled search engine called Google the term Paleolithic diet, and there were a couple of returns, not a lot, but there were a few things. There was a guy, Art Devaney, who's a professor of economics that had a lot to say about it. And then a guy, Loren Cordain, who had just then maybe 2 papers kind of detailing some, some big picture kind of theoretical framework around all of that paleo diet concept. And man, I was, I was all in, like I went pretty hard into the paint on that topic. It wasn't long after this that I discovered CrossFit Online. And for, for my sensibilities, like the way that I wanted to do things, a gym was really a great fit for me because you get to spend a lot of time with people. You may see them 3 to 5 times a week, an hour at a shot. And it felt like a really great place to be able to start working with folks and, and taking these learnings that I had and trying to help other people with the problems that they were facing.

It's amazing. I mean, I'm getting goosebumps just listening. I think my audience knows a bit of my backstory, but I just wanna highlight how crazy parallel our stories were. I was suffering with ulcerative colitis. I was very low weight because I was having so much trouble eating. So I didn't wanna try, you know, low carb keto paleo style diet because I was worried about losing weight. Lo and behold, I get so desperate that I try it and you know the rest. So it, it felt like I was, yeah. Hearing my own story told back at me, even the way you, you talk about it, about like, oh, maybe I'll get a heart attack. I don't know. But at this point I just, I just don't wanna suffer from this anymore. So I knew your backstory a little bit, but it is just crazy to hear it from your mouth because I feel like I'm hearing myself talk to me about my story. So maybe just a giant coincidence. Maybe there's, you know, a broader theme there. But, uh, it's nice to have some personal validation too. But it is, it, Yeah, it's, it's, it's— and it, it— to your, your whole story arc, there's a silver lining to these things. Like, they suck when they're happening, but they also have that power once you come through to redirect your whole life course in a really positive way. So what you've done in terms of turning your own life journey into a way to help people, you know, while, uh, let's say conventional medicine is a little slow on the uptake for dietary metabolic health therapies. It's amazing. So kudos on that. I want to tangent a little bit, something related, but I was just earlier this morning, for context, me and Rob decided to jump on today, today. So it was very spur of the moment, but I was listening to some of your, your old podcasts, including your Joe Rogan Experience episode. I think it was 8 years ago and you said, The world is set up against our genetics.

There's a reality that our modern world is set up to work exactly against our genetics.

I thought that was a great, concise quote. That was 8 years ago. Has your position changed or evolved in any way since then, or do you want to tell us more about that quote?

Yeah, I mean, that quote is largely informed with this idea of discordance theory that, you know, an organism to some degree optimizes for its environment, and there's lots of wiggle room on that. Like we've, we've talked a little bit about this. I think that that's a great place to start. Like when you're asking questions, if we see something weird going on, like zoo animals tend to live longer than wild animals. Why? Well, they get medical treatment. They're not predated and stuff like that, but they also get some really wacky diseases that you don't see in the natural world, you know, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and whatnot. Diet. And there's been some nominal experiments where they try to reintroduce what we would call a species-appropriate diet to these animals, reestablish normal circadian biology for them, you know, like not leaving fluorescent lights on in their, their environments, you know, 24/7 and stuff like that. And lo and behold, if we start orienting their environment a little bit closer to what we might find in the natural world, plus we can do some medical interventions and whatnot, we get this maybe a little bit of optimization where we're feeding, watering, caring for this organism, maybe close to the way it's, it's kind of genetically optimized. And we do some interventions that prevent, you know, acute disease and whatnot. So I don't know that it's, it's changed a ton since then. I do think that that evolutionary biology framework is a great place to start. Like, I, it's actually surprising to me that medicine, given that evolution via natural selection is kind of the operating system under biology. It surprises me that more questions aren't initiated with that kind of evolutionary biology framework, but where I think it kind of runs afoul, particularly on the online world, is that people will just say, well, ancestral health, well, evolutionary biology, and they, they make it a statement as if that was the end state. But you, I, the evolutionary framework is really incredibly useful, but it is useful for hypothesis generation. It's where you maybe start asking questions. It is not the end state. And I think that that's where people really run afoul using this concept and talking about this concept is suggesting that, you know, well, caveman did it, so we're done. You know, that, that's not, that's not the place to go with it in my opinion.

So you actually preempted my upcoming question and challenge, which is let's really delve into this concept of the limitations of ancestral health because I agree it makes sense to use this as a starting point. However, given that the environmental contexts have changed and our goals as organisms have changed, what are the limitations of ancestral health? And let's kind of give an example to, to hammer home the point. About like what fitness even is from an evolutionary perspective. It is reproductive fitness. So if I evolutionarily over the course of our history popped out 12 kids and died at 45, I am fitter than somebody who lived to 90 running marathons but had 2 kids. So I want to evolve this a little bit more because I don't think it's a discussion you hear on the internet about here's a good starting point, but how do we appropriately caveat it so we can make informed decisions about supplementation, medical interventions to optimize for what we're trying to optimize for today?

Yeah, I think that a way that I've tried to tackle it, I think a reasonable way to tackle it, and maybe this is, you know, just trying to steelman my own position, but I think using that evolutionary biology framework to begin asking questions. But then I, I think that more of an engineer's hat then needs to go on to start thinking about Well, what's the end goal that we do want? You know, what, what do we want to produce for our lives, for the world and whatnot? And so I think then we start working backwards from there to, to kind of reverse engineer these, these different processes instead of just saying evolutionary biology and being done with it. I, I do think it's, it's handy, like when, you know, one of the just age-old discussions that roils around the internet is carbohydrates, good or bad, you know, and, and you'll find all kinds of support one way or the other. We see these clinical interventions with carbohydrate-restricted diets really being remarkable, you know, and I think you and I, you'd be potentially hard-pressed to find two people that are probably more excited about a low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet. But at the same time, if you give a really honest appraisal of both the archaeological record, the anthropological record, humans are opportunistic omnivores and you see people thriving on a host of different dietary intervention. And I know we'll talk a little bit about like sugar and, and neuroregulation of appetite and whatnot here in a bit. But there was a great paper, 2012, and I'm gonna butcher the, the title, but it's something effective. Is dense acellular carbohydrate The root cause of, you know, Western disease. And it basically makes this case that it's not just carbohydrate, but if we process that carbohydrate, break this, the cell wall that these plants usually sequester the carbohydrates in, that maybe we promote an inflammatory gut microbiome. Maybe there's this disproportionately rapid influx of glucose and potentially other sugars into the system. And this thing was a theory-based paper with some, some, you know, animal model to support. But it was really interesting in that it, it kind of, you know, Gordian knot, like cut that, that carbohydrate, not carbohydrate question in kind of an interesting way. Maybe if we look at carbohydrates from, again, a little bit more of an ancestral perspective, minimally processed and whatnot, and it could range from rice to beans to fruits and vegetables, but maybe there's something inherently different in a carbohydrate source that isn't processed versus when it is processed. And then maybe, you know, extending this a bit further, if you get to a spot where your gut microbiome is potentially damaged in, in a pretty significant way, like I think that mine is, I've had Giardia 3 times and a couple of other interesting gut bugs. Maybe you hit this point where carbohydrate, whether it's dense cellular or not, is not really a great fit, you know, and, and you have to then cater that experience in much more of an n=1 approach to regardless of what the overarching theory of carbohydrates and processing is or is not. It's like we have a person in front of us that just clinically doesn't do well with large amounts of carbohydrate of any kind. And so then we have to orient the process to cater to that.

You parse so many things so brilliantly there, and I wanna kind of emphasize too, One is the idea of what worked preventatively and evolutionarily versus therapeutically. So you use myself as an example, and it sounds like it parallels your scenario. Like I got IV antibiotics as a neonate, so like high dose antibiotics through my bloodstream. We know that messes up the microbiome from birth, can increase your risk of ulcerative colitis by 500%. Then I grew up eating a pretty standard American diet. Like I did not live like our ancestors and then I developed ulcerative colitis. So then I found a ketogenic diet was therapeutic for me. If I have any carbs, it causes a problem. The question is, is my microbiome irreversibly damaged? I can't talk today. And do I need ketosis? Are carbohydrates a real problem for me? I don't have a clear answer, but at the n=1 level, it's actually quite difficult to like, you know, rejigger and re, I guess de-industrialize an adult fixed microbiome. So there is this preventative ancestral principle versus, you know, therapeutic. 'Cause it's effectively like, for me, I could think of it as a ketogenic diet is compensating for other deficits in my lifestyle and history. And then another question that arises is this idea of the scientific and the abstract and how we hold that against a personalized experience. And fiber and carbohydrates is a great example. This is funny. I'm sure you've experienced this. I experienced this more and more as I emerged from my interview— inter— introvert. I really can't talk today. Cocoon onto the internet where it's like, I live one way and then people typecast me as you must hold these beliefs. When I'm just like, the science is interesting. So I'll give you an example because you're talking about fiber. There was, a, a trial about like intrinsic chicory root fiber. So like the whole plant, giving it to people with diabetes and they were finding improvements in metabolic markers, improvements in insulin sensitivity, et cetera, et cetera. And then there was another paper, I was actually just reading this a couple days ago. I can send it to you because it was, usually I find fiber papers fluffy, the coolest fiber paper I've ever read. It was an animal model kind of building off these other data on inulin and chicory root fiber. But what they showed was, okay, they were playing off this hypothesis, huh? Inulin as a particular specific fiber seems to improve metabolic health markers. What might be going on? Well, inulin, what is it? It's actually a long chain of fructose molecules, and fructose can be particularly metabolically damaging at the liver. It can cause novel lipogenesis, metabolic syndrome. And so they came up with this crazy hypothesis. Is this, at least the way it's, it's posed in the, the story that is the science. Could inulin fiber immunize you against sugar? And what they effectively found in this paper, it was mind-blowing, was if you give the inulin fiber, it adapts the microbiome to better catabolize fructose. So then when challenged with high fructose corn syrup, there's less spillover to the, the colon and to the liver. And it ends up improving insulin sensitivity, improving fatty liver tremendously. And the inulin fiber, because of the way it adapts microbiome, effectively shunts the carbons from the fructose into the generation of amino acids that then are used to synthesize an antioxidant glutathione. So like high level, you just have this observation in human clinical studies and then you start to dissect the mechanisms and you find, hey, this particular fiber that's found in, you know, a lot of whole foods, Jerusalem artichokes, chicory root, can change the microbiome so that you're immunized against fructose and you're actually shunting carbons from fructose to protein generation for antioxidant defenses. Like, it sounds very esoteric, but I love the juxtaposition of that new exciting science against our understanding of like how we have evolved, how we've co-evolved with our microbiome. And you can hold that excitement for that literature And at the same time say, yeah, but I'm not gonna eat a lot of fiber because it doesn't do well with me. Thoughts?

Right. I, I'm a big fan of the hormetic stress response, just in so many features of, of our health and existence.

You define that for the audience. They don't know what hormesis is.

So it's exposure to a mild stress that then kind of immunizes us to a greater stress. And we see that. With everything from heavy metals to radiation exposure. And it, there's another great paper, Secrets of the Lac Operon, which makes the case that some amount of glucose hysteresis, like you, this is where I think that people can sometimes get into a little bit of a cul-de-sac on keto carnivore and whatnot, really makes this powerful case that you need some punctuated exposure to glucose stress to be able to then manage subsequent glucose stressors. And so, you know, you, you basically could end up in this situation where you've never experienced a glucose challenge. And so then if you ever do face it, you're in a poor position to really adapt to that. So I, I love this idea and, you know, I've loved the idea of inulin for years, but if I have anything with inulin in it, like, you don't want to be anywhere near me until it is completely southbound out of me, you know, just the gas and bloating that I get from it. Whatever other potential benefits it may confer to me are just not worth it. Like, it's, it's awful. Yeah.

The same way I love me some Brussels sprouts, but you know, it, my, my dating life will be nonexistent if I end up too often. So, right. No, it's true. It's just like, but at the same time, I think we share and, and hopefully those listening share, like you can have the excitement for the basic science literature without needing to be like, and now I'm going to implement this in my own life. And also hear other people's stories. You know, you had a journey with your diet. I had a journey with mine. Somebody else could have a journey with— I mean, you had a bad experience with a vegan diet. Somebody could have a good experience. It could be like, well, that's your journey. It doesn't detract from or even challenge mine. It is this idea, coming back to evolutionary principles, is like, we are incredibly diverse and adaptive as organisms. And I think that's cool, not threatening.

Speaking of diversity, and really quickly, just, just to put a circle back around to some of that, epigenetics are clearly such a major factor for our lives. You know, there's a saying, genetics loads the gun, epigenetics pulls the trigger. And I think within that, that paleo ancestral health space, there's been an underappreciation of the significance of epigenetics. It's kind of like, okay, you know, broadly Homo sapiens maybe lived in, in, you know, within these boundaries of like macronutrients and activity and all that type of stuff. Okay, that's, that's great. That's interesting. But then where, what is the significance of epigenetics and methylation and, and gene modification? Like, it seems like that may be 70, 80% of the story. So as important as that ancestral health model is, evolutionary biology and whatnot, I think that broadly the epigenetic consequences or, or implications have really been swept under the, the rug or not really well appreciated.

Well, let, let's delve into that a little bit more because you're 100% right. And I think it evolves the story to a whole new level because we're talking about our individual medical histories. And I could say, yeah, you know, I got IV antibiotics when I was a newborn, yada yada. But really the priming started way back when, and underappreciated's a good word because it's very hard to study these things in a human context. There are a few natural experiments like the Dutch Hunger Winter or sugar rationing in the United Kingdom in like 1953, where there's like a very acute change in a condition and then you can follow a cohort and you do find these incredible differences in populations where the offspring of, you know, mothers who were sugar rationed in 1953, they have lower rates of diabetes, obesity, X, Y, Z. Even though they might have had the same exposure later in life. Then you turn to the animal model literature and it's very cool. I was reading a paper recently where they did a similar experiment in mice and they fed the mother mice either a control normal diet or a Western diet, and they challenged the offspring with the control or Western diet. And if you give the offspring of the mothers who had a Western diet, a Western diet, they had rapid progression of cardiovascular disease. But if you gave the offspring that Western diet but their mothers had eaten a control diet, The effect was so much smaller. There really is this priming and it relates to very like pervasive ingredients, compounds in our natural world. Another example, and people hate when I bring this up, I'm going to get some trolling on this one, but I'll bring it up anyway. Aspartame. Aspartame. So one of the most compelling and interesting studies I've ever seen on aspartame was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I think it was— don't hold me to this— Jones et al., 2022. I'll pop it up on screen if I got the author's name wrong. I apologize. But they gave rodents low-dose aspartame, the equivalent to— and this is straight from the paper— 2 to 4 diet sodas per day, and increased anxiety in the animals, which has actually been documented in humans as well. But the scary thing was then they looked down the generations. This is down the male lineage. They saw increased anxiety behavior in the offspring and even the grand offspring. Which begs the serious question, if you have a bad Diet Coke habit, could you be giving your kids and grandkids anxiety? And the obvious pushback one is going to get is it's not a human trial. I'm like, yeah, but you're not going to have a two-generation randomized controlled trial on Diet Coke. So then it becomes the question, are you willing to gamble this? Like, how important is it to you? And anyway, I just had to react with epigenetics thing because it's so true. The priming happens beforehand. Another limitation or another layer of the ancestral framework.

Yeah, I know folks in the evolutionary biology scene oftentimes cite Chesterton's fence, which is this notion that if something exists, you may be a little bit circumspect about fiddling with it. And I think that that is something that we, we, you know, things like artificial sweeteners, it, you know, if it passes a toxicology test, you know, like an LD50 type toxicology test, okay, it doesn't kill things outright. That doesn't necessarily mean it's long-term safe, you know? And I think that maybe, I don't know, how old are, are most of these artificial sweeteners? Maybe 50, 70, like saccharin I think is a bit older than that, maybe 100 years old, something like that. But we don't have that much data on 'em. And because humans live a, a fair bit, you know, if, if you're, if you're really pushing the boundaries, you know, like a human generation is like 15 to 20 years if things are really, you know, turning over. But it's probably more like 25 to 30 years under most circumstances. It's a pretty long window. And you know how many generations of humans have been exposed to some of these substances. And so the, the basic toxicology we've done may not have had it, it may not have been as, as thorough as we might want. And some of this stuff is emerging later. Yeah.

Not only may not, has not, certainly has not.

Right.

And also just because something is in a population for X amount of time doesn't mean you can actually isolate its contribution. So you can just look at the population and be like, hey, Diet Coke drinkers have more anxiety. Like there's so many complicating variables in a human context. So again, it begs this question of, You know, what is the risk and what is the burden of proof and where is the burden of proof? Because you really want the burden of proof to be, hey, it's safe long-term until proven otherwise. Because even if there's only a 1 in 100 chance that chemical X is dangerous over 10 years, if you apply that logic to 10,000 chemicals, guess what happens? You can do the math on that. So like it, that, that I think is, is the strongest argument or a strong argument for living ancestrally, and then I like the idea you had about, you know, putting the engineer hat on and saying, okay, what is the problem we wanna optimize for? And let's iterate towards that. And there's a lot of really cool innovations coming through in like especially heart disease or neurodegenerative diseases. I was reading one paper recently about speaking ancestrally, uh, APOE4. So this is the major risk of Alzheimer's disease. Ancestrally, it actually had a lot of adaptability because if you have a stronger inflammatory response, it kind of boosts the inflammatory response. You might respond better to a pathogen and not die acutely, but then it increases your risk of Alzheimer's. So one group of researchers at Harvard and Penn, I think it was, this is a paper last year. What they did is they innovated a way to like bathe the brain in the complementary, like other allele APOE2. And they were able to show actually like they were able to dampen down the gliosis, the neural inflammation. And this could be a way. It's like, yeah, ancestrally ApoE4 might have been helpful. Today I don't want Alzheimer's. So we can innovate ways to optimize for new outcomes, but always keeping in mind, I think, like you said, like starting point, what makes fundamental sense.

Right.

So yeah, one more question for part 1, and then I want to jump into part 2. Which is tied into this idea of modern food ecosystems. You hear a lot of platitudes and maybe one you hear the most when it comes to diet is everything in moderation. I've heard your thoughts on that, but I want to get it from the horse's mouth again. I'm kind of setting you up here, D-Ball, but yeah.

Yeah, that is a good softball pitch. My challenge with that is just what does that mean? Like, what is Moderation. Like if somebody walks into a 7-Eleven and you're gonna, you're gonna outfit yourself with a, a meal, like what does moderation mean? Is it a hot dog and a 64-ounce Slurpee and then a Twinkie? And, and is that your, your regular dietary practice? You know, if we do 3 meals a day, 7 days a week, you know, 21 meals, are you eating 19 meals a week out of that? Like it, it's just, I think that it's very difficult to— this maybe gets really far afield, but, you know, if you're raised in a really dysfunctional family and it's like, well, just, you know, beating one's spouse once a week is, is, you know, moderate like that, that it's not over the top. And it's like, no, that's completely unacceptable, you know. So depending on what situation one is in, You know, something that, that because it's just common doesn't necessarily mean that it, it's good, you know, or beneficial or has, has great outcomes to it. And this gets into all kinds of stuff where people will get prickly about like, uh, class and privilege and everything and like that. It's not my— I know people have different situations, come from, you know, greater or lesser challenges and whatnot, but I think we have to be honest with folks. And I do think that like in the modern food environment, the way that these foods are literally engineered to bypass the neuroregulation of appetite, you almost need to think about it like a self-defense strategy. Like, what are you going to do so that you can navigate a modern food environment and not succumb to the difficulties, the downsides of it?

Yeah. Um, we'll see if you get in trouble for analogizing Twinkies to domestic abuse, but, um, right. Because it's, it's just about what is normalized. When you have something that is that fluffy and vague as everything in moderation, moderation becomes relative to what has been normalized. And if what has been normalized results in average population being overweight and or obese, you can put two and two together. So I like your idea also of like, building defense mechanisms, and then you said people tend to fold in the socioeconomics and the disadvantage. That is a super relevant point, but nothing you said contradicts that. It actually gives it a lot of credence because biology doesn't care about economics. So if we have built a society in which certain populations are extra disadvantaged by the food system, they need extra support and extra help. And we need to talk about that and the complexities of those problems rather than saying You're being elitist because you're saying that these foods could screw you up. I don't know. Anyway, it's a good open conversation. And yeah, yeah, go ahead.

No, no, it, it, I feel like, you know, if we're, if those folks are already disproportionately impacted and disadvantaged, do we want to lie about the situation they're in or do we want to lean in doubly hard in trying to alleviate the situation that they have? And if you can't even have the conversation around it and kind of describe, again, you know, big picture, the beauty of science and like going back to the Enlightenment and everything is that we started going from mysticism to testable hypotheses. It's like, well, I'm going to— I know this rock weighs this much. I'm going to put this vector on it and I know where it's going to land, you know, and biology is much more complex than pool cues and, you know, thrown rocks and whatnot. But the benefit that we have is that we have some predictable models that we can run reality through and say, hey, I think the world operates this way. And to the degree I understand it, if we have these inputs and this, you know, the system under these circumstances, this will be the outputs. And if we're getting there, you know, 85, 90%, maybe there's some wiggle room on the edges, which is where we, we keep studying, then that, that's great. That's where science moves forward. But we have to be able to just have those conversations. And ironically, it's usually the people most marginalized that are least benefited from, uh, making a topic verboten to be able to just talk about.

So you're saying have the hard conversations and don't sugarcoat it?

Seems smart. Seems smart.

Anyway, so, well, thank you so much for joining me for part 1. I want to wrap this one here, and, uh, in part 2, we're going to get into electrolytes and blood pressure. So everybody should join us back for part 2. Thank you for having this chat with me, Rob.

Thank you.