Why "Woke" Thinking Steals Gratitude + Resilience From Humans | Robb Wolf

We've heard in throughout history, never waste a good crisis. How do you lead the healthy rebellion community? And then also how do you lead yourself and your family from that lens of mental health?

I think one of the big pieces of mental health is that the most stressful environment you can place someone in is one in which they have no agency or a sense that they have no agency. If you can convince people that they have no options, no agency, no control over their lives, like, it's horrible for them. I think that this modern kind of woke mentality, it steals the ability for people to have gratitude. No matter how shitty our situation is. If we can cultivate a sense of gratitude, then that gives us the option of agency. I can be grateful for the challenge that I have, and then you can start moving forward.

Rob, it's such a pleasure to have you back. This is our fourth time together on a podcast. You are the fourth. Pete, my friend, thank you for being here again.

You would think that you would have learned your lesson and moved on to greener pastures or something.

No, I'm here because I have more lessons to learn. And I was telling you before we hit record, this was a book that changed my life. If you're watching with us on YouTube, this was a book wired to eat. One of them Paleo solution was the OG man, this is 2010. When I met you at one of the first ancestral health symposiums, I had all my food in a little bag next to me and it was like Melissa Hartwig was just starting with her whole 30. And it's like, I'm pulling the E brake right now. But you've had such an incredible run since Sense then, and I've always looked to you for really just how do we make sense about all the confusion that's going on with our food, with our health, even sometimes with what you're exploring now in the rebellion community, around money and around sovereignty and around off grid like, so, man, from my heart to yours, thank you for coming back on the show. I was asking you before we hit the red button, what's top of heart for you? And you were talking about energy. And I think this is a good jumping off point because whether it's Klaus Schwab in the economic forum or whether it's, hey, the fact that cows are sacred and meat is sacred, there's so many different discussions around what is real energy, how does energy help us and what is the do gooding that possibly is causing us harm around the conversation of energy. So, man, let's. Let's Jump off to begin, what do you see as the issue in our world right now when it comes to people even understanding what energy is and then how energy is really dispersed and how it can be useful?

So I'm going to sound like a little bit of a dick here, but unfortunately I think far too many people. So this is like a power strip deal. And I think literally a ton of people in the world think that energy and electricity happens like this. You just plug this fucker in and it works. And there's been some jokes and some memes where this thing's plugged into itself and then you plug something into the other end and that it's like, this is like. And I'm not picking on any specific political party, but they'll say like, this is Gavin Newsom's view of energy and stuff like that. But it's a major distinguishing factor between our current civilization and say the 1800s is that we have much more energy in our world, in our environment that we've figured out how to extract out of our, our world around us. And we've been on this vector, the estimates put it that we're 20 years away, 25 years away if we don't screw things up, that every person on the planet will be lifted out of abject poverty within 30 years if we just allow economic engines to go. And that whole thing is driven by energy. And there's concerns around climate change and pandemics and this and that and the other. And at every turn, when you look at this stuff, if we have an energy rich world and economy to live in, then things can go really well. And if we make poor decisions around that stuff, then things can go really, really badly. And before we recorded, I was mentioning some of the decisions that have been made in Europe and some of those things actually have been happening in the United States as well, but to a lesser degree. But one of the big concerns that I have is that some people are making big decisions both at like a governmental level, but also just kind of at a more societal level that is very heart driven but really absent any understanding of the way that the world works. And folks are excited about like nuclear energy and wind power and all that stuff and, or sorry, they're excited about solar energy. I'll get to nuclear energy in a minute. And all that stuff's great, but there's just, there's some really stark realities around what goes into all of that. And then interestingly dovetailed into that is our food system. And you know, this hanging of all of the ills of climate change on grazing animals and that sector of the food system. So, I mean, just broadly, this is where my head has been for the past couple of years. And it's just been, I would say I've been ringing an alarm around the impending problems that we're seeing because of folks making these kind of naive decisions around both food and energy. And it's gotten worse. It's accelerated. Decisions that are being made are going to cost people their lives because of not having enough energy to transport food, to heat their homes and things like that. So you ask somewhat before we recorded what was top of mind. That's the stuff that's like, really, you know, in there.

Yeah, I'm right there with you. I have made decisions in my life with greater wisdom. After I've had greater experience where I look back at myself with compassion and I'll say, wow, Josh in 2019 or Josh in 2017. He did the best he could with the information that he had and he thought he was doing the best he could. And so this Do Gooding, we just had a rap with JP Sears where we did like a almost a three hour podcast on the whole gender dysphoria conversation and how, you know, in the hand that reaches out to do good with the wrong bias or. And when I say wrong, I just mean uninformed. Right. So with an uninformed bias, you can actually reach out to do something, quote, good for someone else, but you could actually be harming them. And I think that same thing applies when it comes to energy and also when it comes to meat consumption, where we have this narrative that says meat is going to kill the world and the gas from cows is going to kill the world. It's really at this point just kind of talking heads out there in the floating cyberspace. But when it comes to the actual information, like, this is why I'm excited to bring you back on the show, man, because this is your life's work. You spend all day, all month for the majority of the past decade plus talking with people, interfacing with government agencies and Navy special warfare and like the top people in the world. Give us the truth about what you see. The real conversation when it comes to what do we do with the energy that we have and how can we do good for others but still be informed, man.

It sounds kind of trite and again, like, I'm a fan of solar energy, I'm a fan of wind energy and stuff like that, but they're really intermittent, they're transient. Like, if it if it's cloudy, you don't really get much energy out of solar. We have a energy storage issue. Like when your part of the world is in the dark over nighttime, you have to supplement the infrastructure of energy. Our battery story has improved a lot, but we may not have some magic battery thing to be able to make that stuff work. In Europe, they have shifted a huge amount of their infrastructure towards what they call renewables. This includes wind, solar, and ironically, firewood. So when the solar and wind have failed, like in Germany and France in the last couple of years, and by failed, I just mean it hasn't met the need that is there or like a weather pattern will pop up. These folks are now burning wood pellets from wood that was harvested in North America, trees cut down, processed into pellets, shipped across the Atlantic to facilities that used to burn coal, and then it burned natural gas. And both coal and natural gas actually have a lower carbon footprint than the process of cutting down these trees, turning them into pellets, and shipping them across the Atlantic. But because it's called it's renewable, because technically it is, these trees will grow back. It's. It somehow is grandfathered in thought to be a good idea. You know, it's again, this kind of greenwashing. It seems like a good idea, but where I'm really. I've been a fan of nuclear energy since like high school when I first started reading about this stuff. And I've just been so perplexed that people weren't more excited about it. But I understand there's like, you know, Three Mile island, which happened when I was growing up, Chernobyl which happened when I was growing up, and then more recently, the Fukushima, you know, kind of disaster. And so those things are definitely big concerns. But everything we saw in the failures of those Gen1 nuclear facilities, we now have Gen4 and Gen5 nuclear reactors. And these things aren't pressurized. They operate in completely different ways. You can't have the failure mechanisms occur in these, these small modular reactors that we historically have seen in these larger facilities. But it's been really difficult to get people excited about this stuff. And it's interesting to me. It's always fascinating to me when you have people both on the right and the left that are equally against what I would consider to be a good idea. Like, it's kind of like, huh, why is it that everybody hates this thing?

That's the true definition of losing the forest through the trees when you can't agree on what's best for all because of your bias on where you sit.

Well, yeah, and maybe even more than that, it's just intriguing that both sides of the political divide seem to dislike nuclear energy equally. And now the one story may be that, well, it's a really dumb idea and I'm just an idiot and you know, I'm barking up the wrong tree. The other may be that this is literally the solution that could liberate all of us. And a bunch of the control that both the right and the left want to exact upon us would be mitigated if we adopted this wholesale. And you know, a bunch of the, the drama that we experience in the world would, would be mitigated. And that's actually kind of my, my view on this stuff and I don't want to do that. Maybe we could, we could circle back another time and really go into what the difference is between like a gen 1, gen 2, gen 4. Yeah, gen 5 reactor.

We'll link a resource down here. Is there somewhere you go to get educated on this yourself? And we'll link that for everybody.

I'll pull some up for you. I've got it off the top of my head. I would want to. Most of them are pretty engineering heavy, but they do have some, some good like, you know, public facing stuff just to explain. So like as an example, people are oftentimes and rightfully so concerned about the nuclear waste from these Gen 1 reactors. The interesting thing though is that the spent plutonium and uranium that is oftentimes used in the Gen 1 reactors can be the input fuel for these next generation reactors. So the problem of dealing with spent nuclear fuel is now getting mitigated because of ways that people have figured out how to use that. If you are a fan of solar energy, that's great. But one of the primary byproducts of mining the rare earth minerals that are necessary in making the solar panels is, is that we find huge amounts of this radioactive product called thorium. And thorium could in theory be used in a special type of nuclear generation facility out in the Nevada desert. There's something like 5,000 years of global energy need buried there in the form of thorium that nobody is using. And there just hasn't been the motivation to get in and develop this stuff as a resource. And the main sales pitch that I would have around this stuff is so many of the things that we would want to do from basic economic infrastructure all the way to. If you want to do these carbon capture projects and get carbon out of the atmosphere and stick it underground you need huge amounts of energy to do that. And the ironic thing, somebody shot me a news piece the other day like, there's an outfit in Wyoming that's going to be running this carbon capture facility. And although it's generally going to be run with the excess energy generated from solar and wind, when the solar and wind is not available, they're going to be burning natural gas to run this thing. And when I started poking around and asked about this thing called a life cycle analysis, like how much energy goes into it versus how much carbon do they take out of the atmosphere. This thing over its life cycle will end up putting more carbon in the environment than it takes out. And so it's bullshit.

I feel like the further we get from nature, like even if I think about the closed organic cycle in nature, sun, plants, animals, defecation, soil, new plants, we eat the animals, we get all the things that the ruminant digests. And I think it's the same construct we could apply to energy where if we go too far away from the energy that it takes to yield the energy that's produced. Why would you do it if the energy that it takes is more? Right. It's the same type of model.

Well, and it's, if you, if you want to go to a more biodynamic model, then this is where like the pastured meat grass centric kind of food system is really powerful because it can sequester and capture huge amounts of carbon. We can reverse desertification and take areas that have turned into desert and turn it back into arable land that produces food and creates a lower heat footprint and starts sticking more carbon underground. So, so you can do it that way, and I think we probably should do it that way. But then if you still want to do climate mitigating activities of like sequestering carbon, then you need a really robust energy source. And solar and wind are not going to cut it. And this is where like folks need to really lean into the idea of nuclear energy. And the funny thing, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and he's like, in your gut, do you ever see like the solar and the wind stuff, like really supplanting all this stuff? Like, no, it's just not going to work. Like, it'll be a piece. We're going to have more of a mosaic energy future than the very fossil fuel centric stuff that we've had in the past. But at the end of the day, when you have enough people starve, when you have enough systems fail, then people are going to demand something different. My only anxiety around that is when enough people starve, when enough systems fail, you're in a beautiful situation for legit fascism, totalitarianism to come in and fill that power vacuum. And I don't want to overly politicize this, but folks more on the left side of the scene, they've been worried about Donald Trump type people and calling them totalitarians and fascists and all that type of stuff. If we, if we screw things up enough so that people are hungry and desperate, you might get a legit right wing fascist that comes in and like restores order. And it would suck. And it would be all the stuff that people are fearing. And it would come about because we make dumb decisions that end up damaging our food and energy infrastructure in a way that breaks our societal systems so that people are clamoring for some strong individual to come in and set the world right.

I can unfortunately see that happening pretty clearly. And you know, we've heard in throughout history, never waste a good crisis crisis, whether it's the Great Depression or anything else, it's when everything's for sale, people's power, people's self empowerment, real estate. Everything is cheaper because people are willing to give it away because they're in chaos, they're in survival mode. And I think it's a perfect segue to really the core of what I've really always looked to you for. I know it's been a food conversation, a sustainability conversation, but it really centers around mental health. So a lot of what we've done, and I don't know if you know this, but this year we rebranded, we, we killed the word force and we replaced it with wisdom. So now it's the Wellness and Wisdom podcast. And the reason I did that is because I'm seeking wisdom that I don't have to be so forceful in my, in my search to attain it anymore. And I think so many of us where we want, like, what's the right answer? Or what's the five steps? Or Rob, just tell me the thing and I'll do it. It actually takes away our empowerment when we just look to someone else for all the answers. But I will say that you do have some wisdom when it comes to mental health, because how do you navigate it? You know, the last time we talked, I think you had just moved to Montana. At that time you were living in Texas and with this crazy theater that's been playing out, like, how do you, how do you lead the Healthy Rebellion community? And then also how do you Lead yourself and your family from that lens of mental health. In other words, what are the ingredients for that for you, for your community and your family right now at this time?

The cool thing about the healthy rebellion is that. And I suspected that this would be the case, but I put out an invite. I'm like, hey, why don't we get together and we have kind of. And I hate the term safe space, but it's, it's safe in that people can we have some very.

Why do you hate the term safe space?

Because it's been turned into this thing where it suggests that being exposed to uncomfortable ideas is somehow damaging to you.

Which I think is probably just a freedom space.

Maybe, maybe freedom space is a better term. But we have some really spicy debates in there and really the only, the only rules that we have is that there's civility. You don't call each other names. You document your case. If you have some emotional stuff around it, that's cool. But it's like, okay, that's feelings and now here's where we're going to deal with facts and we're real heavy into. If you're making a case, document the case and everything and it's good. The cool thing about that is I think I did sow that seed in a way that there was this, this sense of propriety and kindness, but honesty. But then that group has self organized in a way that like if I die, like that thing's going to continue and go and thrive and it's not going to end because I end like the ethos of this kind of freedom oriented, fact based, but also acknowledging emotions and mental health and all that stuff has been huge. And so people just being able to have some degree of community, particularly like we have a lot of people from Canada in the rebellion and my God, the lockdown issues that those folks have had, absolutely unreal.

I can't imagine, I can't imagine living there.

And I mean it's doubly so. Like had I been in California or New York, I guess it would have been a big step closer. But I was like rural Texas, then rural Montana, you know. So like my relative experience of this stuff has been really benign and relatively easy. And the stories that we hear from people, like I think for a lot of these people, serious mental health or like suicide and things like that would have been a factor in this had they not had this, this group of people to be able to rap with and interact with and everything. And I think one of the big pieces of mental health and this goes back to like Viktor Frankl man's search for meaning. But whenever we have some sense of agency in our life that we have some degree of control over what's going on, some ability to make a decision that's incredibly important. And I'm not a therapist, I don't understand this stuff at anything other than a pretty superficial level. But my understanding is that the most stressful environment you can place someone in is one in which they have no agency or a sense that they have no agency. If you can convince people that they have no options, no agency, no control over their lives, like it's horrible for them. And so this, this community has been really powerful for folks in that they can talk, they can share. We actually have people meeting up in real life, you know, to, to cement those, those.

That's very old fashioned.

It's pretty old fashioned but you know, even as good as that connection is online, it's still. I liken social media of all kinds to, to social media is to food what junk food is to social media is to real community as what junk food is to food. You know, it's like it'll go down the pie hole, it'll fill your belly for a while, but it doesn't really nurture you the way that real stuff should.

We're missing the physiological component, the way that we trade energy together, the six foot radius, the all the microbes in our body, all the little muscles in your face. Like we can't, you can't cheat nature otherwise there's going to be a cost of some kind.

Right. So it's been huge in that regard and it's. Nobody has benefited from it more than me, you know, just it kind of a psychological perspective because it's, it's. One thing is it's forced me to not go too far off the rails and so really like remain grounded and ask questions because it's funny, I think there are so many conspiracies that are fact that like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one of them. But that can turn into this thing where like you go a little bit crazy because everything is a conspiracy and you start, yeah, not doing diligence and like vetting out stories and stuff like that. And so because I'm kind of ostensibly like the lead of this community, I've got to keep my feet on the ground because I can't give bad insight, bad information to this group. I guess I could, but I'm really trying not to. And so it's been good in that Regard. But then also when I have my days of frustration and difficulty, like, I can turn to the group and be like, hey, this happened today, or this thing went down. And oftentimes just relating stories of people that we know again, like a lot of folks in Canada, you know, people who've lost, lost children due to suicide and stuff like that, because the kids felt like their, their lives, although just beginning, were effectively over because of the way that the, the world has changed and being able to just kind of ground out some of that energy and get some support for it. Like, that's, that's been, it's been everything.

When I think about, when I think of. Dude, thank you for sharing that. Because when I think about the real underpinnings of anger and rage, it's just sadness. If you look at Hawkins scale or if you look at any model of psychology, it's really like, anger is more powerful than despair. I think it was actually a quote by Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the Terminators. He's like, anger is more powerful than despair because. Because when you're, when you're angry, there can lead to just apathy. It can lead to apathy and you could lead to just giving up and just stopping. And a lot of people, unfortunately, are making that decision. And you talked about the, the kids from Canada, which honestly just fucking breaks my heart. Like, I think about where I came from. And you, you grew up in reading.

Yep.

And you. This is interesting. I was going through my old copy right here. You can see all my little tags from 2010, and I was looking at the first 20 pages of this when you told your story. And I thought, huh, even though this is 2010 and you're reflecting back on your life, it still, it still applies to right now because you asked your mom a question. You said, what would it be like to be 100 years old? And her answer to you was, oh, goodness, I hope I don't live that long.

Right.

So it wasn't like you came from this, like, super empowering, like, situation. I think you even said my mom was sunny. Even on, even on days with no clouds or a bunch of clouds or something. That was a joke you put in the book. But. But it's like the reason I bring that up is because you, you have not been gifted since the get. Since the jump with a situation where you had everything laid out for you in the most healthy way. Your parents were smokers. They led a pretty unhealthy lifestyle, which then gave you a lot of gut issues and kind of in a way pulled back the arrow of Rob Wolf and allowed you to serve in the way you serve now, which is beautiful, although painful. Back then what's. What's the arrow? You can connect between back then and your upbringing to what kids are facing now and young men and women are facing now that you were.

What's.

What's the similar narrative and what's something that we can overcome together?

So I mean one of the things in SO one acknowledgment. I was born white male in America at the end of the 20th century. So I won the lottery. You know, done like compared to everybody else on the planet that's ever lived won the lottery. And my family was by most standards pretty poor. Like we were on government assistance for a huge chunk of my childhood and adolescence. When I was 14 I started working to help supplement income for the family. My dad went on disability. My mom had all kinds of health issues, not the least of which was some pretty severe mental health issues. But I still. Somewhere over here I have a printed. Looks like a dollar bill but it's a food stamp. It's a food stamp that looks like a dollar bill. This would be for EBT cards and all this stuff because they wanted to make that stuff. They didn't want to make it easy. Like when you pulled out that billfold with this shit that kind of looked like money but was orange instead of green. Like there was some social stigma attached to that.

And I was raised on welfare. I know you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah. And so one of the things that I think has changed is that where in that time and it didn't affect everybody this, this way some people stay. And this is one of my concerns around. I'm not against social welfare program but I think they can turn into multi generational traps. And I think again people leading from the heart and not enough with their head don't give enough acknowledgment that like you can end up with multiple generations trapped in that scene and how you need to provide incentives and almost like a firm foot in the ass to get people out of that because it can steal the human soul, you know. And I think that one of the big things that has changed is that adversity now has become a badge of honor that you don't overcome but you just sit back and wait for somebody to serve you up your adversity acknowledgment and then you get to kind of wallow and revel in that. And I think that that's a big Thing that has changed where, whether it's sexual identity stuff or race stuff or whatever, there was a. I feel like when I was growing up, there was this sense of, like, you can be anything that you want to be. You just got to work hard. You got it, you know? And like, yeah, some people come from a wealthy family, and I didn't feel like that mattered as much. It was like, if you get in and work, then you can kind of get the American dream. And I had a really good friend. I lived with a Cambodian family for close to a year, and they had escaped out of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge, like the, you know, the communist takeover of Cambodia. And if people have ever watched the movie the Killer Killing Fields, they killed a third of the population of Cambodia. Anybody with even a grade school teacher education, they killed Pol Pot, wanted to bring the whole country back to this agrarian utopia, and so they killed anybody with an education. And my friend Sela, he and his family escaped out of that. And it was so fascinating because they arrived in the United States not able to speak the language, with effectively no money. But they got plugged into the existing Cambodian community here, and that culture is very intact, and they take care of their own. They give loans within the Cambodian community to help people set up shops and get going. So when I met them, they owned a donut shop, a Chinese food place, and cleaners, and they were all in a strip mall. And what was one interesting thing about that? I was there with them during kind of like the Rodney King riots. And when those riots started breaking out, they had this bunker that they opened up, and like, all of the kids, all the parents were up on the roof with, like, ars and defended their area. And I'm like, wow, talk to them a bunch. And basically his dad was like, I'll never live somewhere that I can't defend myself with a firearm ever again. Because he saw, literally, like, their neighbors would get rounded up out of their. The whole family taken, and they'd be taken out in the jungle and killed. Like, that was the story of the Killing Fields. He's like, I'll never experience that again. But these folks who started with nothing other than having an intact culture that had a work ethic, that believed in the nuclear family and all this type of stuff, like, they've succeeded. Like, all of their kids went to school, all of their kids did well, and the parents ended up doing pretty well, too, by absolutely working their asses off and kind of believing the American dream and everything. And they faced racism and they faced all kinds of challenges, but they weren't murdered by their government in the country of their origin, which is a high likelihood of what would have happened had they stayed there. So this is definitely a thing that I think has changed dramatically since my childhood to now. And I think that you mentioned the despair piece, and I think that this modern kind of, I don't know a term better than this, and I know it's controversial, but like the kind of woke mentality, it steals the ability for people to have gratitude and to. No matter how shitty our situation is, if we can cultivate a sense of gratitude, then that gives us the option of agency. I can be grateful for the challenge that I have, and then you can start moving forward or you experience despair, which means that your progress has stopped and you're done. You're either going to die now or you're going to die later, but your situation isn't going to change, and that's it. And I think that that's. Clearly, this isn't universal, but I think that that is a major change between my childhood and now. And I think it's a major source of just my massive mental health issues. For kids is, is that they. Whatever difficulties they're facing, instead of people saying, you can get through this, people are saying, damn straight, you've been victimized. But they give them no route out. There's no, you know, it's. Then just begins this downward spiral. And ironically, what it becomes is this virtue signaling Olympics. It's like, well, you maybe lost your mom and you're maybe trans, but you're still a white male. So this person, I heard about this.

Recently where if you're, if you're gay, that's not enough. You have to be gay and black and you have to be like losing a parent or something in order for you to be actually justified in your suffering, justified in your life having it so hard. And I think about in my childhood too, like, I'm right there with you, man.

When I was 5 or 6, my mom was buying some food and she pulled up some food stamps and some guys said some pretty mean stuff to us and it sucked. That's not cool.

Sure.

But what it did in me is it made me say, I'm never, ever, ever going to rely on this. And I had the fires of hell behind me on that. So. So there's, there's two things. Like, was it cool that these guys, like, shamed us for the situation we were in? No, not necessarily cool. Wouldn't advocate for that. But at the same time, like, that, that discomfort that I experienced changed the vector of my life. I could easily, and a lot of my family did stay on that track and never escaped out of the dole. And now we're looking at it, you know, multiple generations of people who. Who've been trapped in that scene.

So, like, the only one, you know, in the Matrix, they call it the one where, like, Neo is the one. And I've even heard, like, Patrick Bet David talk about this, and I've heard Jordan Peterson talk about this in his own way. Every family in somewhere in the generational pattern, they have a human being that just decides no. They just. They just put their hand up and they say no, and the bullets fall. And would you say that in your family you are that person?

Yes. So I guess so. Yeah. First one to go to school.

Yeah.

You know, first one to really get out of that. That area. Yeah.

And the reason I asked that is because in this same vein of mental health, you posted something that I thought was really beautiful, and it was about your daughters. You posted it on Instagram about four or five weeks back. You said, if I can help my girls understand this one thing, a few decades later, they will be set. And we'll put this right here in the show right now for everybody to see. If I can learn to enjoy repetition, you can achieve what normal people think is impossible. And I think in the construct of, like, okay, what is mental health? What does it mean to be mentally healthy? What is antifragility? What is emotional resilience? Man, Rob, I think that sums it up. If I can do stuff that sucks with repetition and maybe not necessarily enjoy it, but still do it anyways and have the resilience and the fortitude to finish the tasks, to eat the thing, to lift the weight, to pay the bills, you know, to go to work, to do everything that maybe isn't sexy or that isn't glamorized in the immediate gratification world that we're kind of in. Is that why you posted that? I mean, what was the. Did you have a conversation with your girls about that? Or was that something that was coming through you as a father? Like, why'd you put that out?

All of that, like, both internal facing and external facing. So, you know, like, we have discussions around this all the time. And, man, I. The die is not cast as to whether or not I will end up being a good parent. You know, there may be some tell all story that's like, oh, he ruined my life.

That's in my consciousness too. My son's 15 months old. I'm like, I really hope I don't screw him up.

Yeah. Yeah. So. But. So, you know, we've been homeschooling for the past couple of years. We started, like, six months before COVID and then just kept. Kept doing it. And there's highs and lows to it. And, like, writing has been kind of a bugaboo for both girls because it's hard. There's all, you know, learning grammar and syntax and punctuation and everything. It can be really dry. And both girls were kind of having a little bit of a poopy pants moment. And I told them about this exercise that I did where we were. It was actually a really beautiful setting. We were outside. Like, it was a creative writing class. We went outside and there was a brick wall, like, tall brick wall. And the instructor was basically like, write 10,000 words about this brick wall. And people were like, are you fucking kidding me? You know, and. And. And so I really got into it and I was like, okay, so I've been tasked to write 10,000 words about this brick wall. And the first thing I'm going to do is look at how many bricks do I think are in this thing? And so I went through, like, an estimating thing where I physically counted, like, two strips and then estimated the other thing. And so I did that. And then I talked about the chemical composition and I talked about how much bird shit there was on it. And like, I. It was easy to get 10,000 words out of this thing. Like, you couldn't believe it. And I was describing this to my daughters, and both of them, there was kind of a light that clicked. They're like, huh, okay. And I was like, my point here is that you could be tasked with something that seems so banal and so like a brick wall. And I'm supposed to write, like, five single spaced, you know, pages about this thing. And it ended up being easy. And it's like, yeah, because I reframed that, that whole process. And it's funny. So Zoe is 10, Sagan is 8. Just the other day, they got a postcard from their Texas cousin, Hallie, and they were like, can we write her a letter back? I'm like, absolutely. And both of them wrote, like, a five page letter, and they used parentheses and great grammar. And their spelling is getting pretty good. And they had a blast doing it. And they were actually. I was like, do you want to send it as is, or do you want me to spell check it and punctuation check it to like, no, I Want this to be perfect. So we went back through and spell checked it, punctuation, checked it and everything. And they had cultivated. One is that you can't always, especially with kids, is just give them that beat down. Like, there is something about being like 18, 20 years old that you can write the 10,000 words about the brick wall, but this was something they were motivated to do, and we've been able to goose them hard about. You got to do the fundamentals to be able to do the good stuff. Like, if you're just learning Jiu jitsu, you get the shit kicked out of you for a while before you can do some cool stuff. If you're just learning guitar, your fingers are going to bleed and you're going to look like an idiot for a while before you play your first song. You know, there's just some, you know, climbing the hill. And usually, you know, the beginning is the hardest part. And then once you get into it a little bit, it starts getting fun. Like, you've done the bulk of the hard.

You get a little reward here and there. You get a little momentum.

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, and I see that. I saw that, you know, both with my. My kids and then a lot of the world out there, like, a lot of my peers are very smart, talented people that I see just absolutely spinning out about the world, you know, and in part, like, the. The ability to build something online now is so kind of up from my perspective in that, like, for the algorithm to give you, oh, you're doing good. Like, you need to be so over the top and so provocative and, you know, that I think that people have kind of lost their way in that regard. And so they kind of sell out because just kind of. And this is part of the reason why I've largely abandoned social media, because it's just like, I'm not going to play that game. So if I'm going to be a nobody, that's fine, but I'm going to be a nobody on my terms, and that's okay, you know, and then there's this other piece that I think this broader scene of people that just. It doesn't matter what your situation is, you can improve it. Like, I don't. I don't. I have a. You know, Kyle Maynard, my. My good friend, he was born with no arms below the elbow.

He hung out with Kyle before. Yeah.

And he climbed fucking Kilimanjaro. And he's a New York Times bestselling author, and he's a great human being. And I'm sure he has days that he absolutely struggles, but he gets back in and he just does it. And he has a sense of agency always, you know. And what's kind of heartbreaking to me is that I think that people are arriving at this kind of woke scene with good intention. Like there is inequity in the world there, there's racism, there's this, there's that we should fight against that. But I think so much of the way that people tackle it ends up hamstringing and worsening the situation. Like it is the multi generational trap of like welfare. The way that this stuff is being sprung because it's not really empowering people, it's just creating division and really making the minute differences between all of us the only thing that matters instead of making the minute differences inconsequential.

I feel like this is a great way to distract people, honestly. And I'm curious how you feel because if you have conversations about 0.0002 which in the DSM that's the whole gender dysphoria percentage, it's to 100th or to 1000ths of 1% of people. So we're not talking about a major thing here. But it becomes major when all the news networks and the majority of people continue the conversation. And I just feel deflated by our peers that are in the health and the wellness and maybe even in the personal development world that continue along these dialogues because it just gets clicks and it gets messages and it gets attention. A lot of the content that we've been putting out lately, you know, I'm just speaking my truth and I'll have someone on like yourself or JP or any of us that we're just trying to get down to the truth and the heart of the matter. Like what's the natural way of being that best suits us in the world? And I feel like we have strayed so far. There are some people out there, Rob, that they feel like it's past the point of no return. Like society is a big experiment and the experiment got botched and then that there's some people like me. This is how I feel. I feel like we're a 13 year old behind the wheel of a Ferrari. Humanity being a human being, the evolution of consciousness, the evolution of being a human. We're pretty young, we're very naive, we're learning as we go along. I don't think it's doom and gloom. I don't share that. I don't share that mindset. I think that we're in a really hard struggle right now. I think if you look at the fourth turning and if you look at expansion and contraction, we're kind of in that fourth phase, we're in the contraction phase. But, but after this there's something beautiful that's going to come. I do believe in that. It's not some. I don't feel like it's naive, but I'm curious how you feel. Where exactly are we in our evolution as human beings and everything that you've learned and what you see around you. Where do we go from here? Not like you're the orator of the crystal ball that's going to solve the world's problems or something, but.

No, but I can have an opinion on it.

Yeah. Where do we go from here? Like in our, in our daily actions and in our thought processes about the state of the world, the state of contraction we're in.

Here's my not optimistic angle on this, my cautionary tale like, oh, we could be kind of fucked. Western liberal democracies as we've experienced them are a thus far once in history event. They never happened before and to our knowledge, we don't know for like if they go away, if different flavors, like if Chinese Communist Party flavors, social credit score, control of the populace becomes the norm globally. Don't know that it could ever happen again. And my God, if you want to crush the human soul, pit people against one another, really. See, like think about the Muslim population within China and they harvest them for organs to sell on the black market because they're not seen as human. You know, I mean it's like that is an eventuality that we lose all of Western liberal democracies and it just gets paved under with this kind of combination of Orwellian and Aldous Huxley brave new world, you know, self medicating and you know, self censoring because I, I'm carrying my monitoring device with me, you, you know, and I pay money to have it. That's a possibility. Like that's a legit possibility. And humanity could go on indefinitely under a circumstance like that. But there may never be a resurgence because the control would be so tight and so profound. But I don't think that'll happen. But it's one of these kind of cautionary things that I think is a possibility. I do think there's going to be big dislocation. I think that we're have embarked on stuff with this pandemic and economics and energy and food policy. So our economic system is this train that is rounding A corner. And it's barely on two of its four things. And it's a fucking miracle that it has stayed on the track as long.

As it's just about to tell.

And the thing, it's been just about to tilt for 30 years. And the crazy thing is it might go on 30 more seconds or it might go on 30 more years. That's the crazy thing. But at a fundamental level, our economic system is so broken because of this debt driven kind of process. And Chris Martinson talks about this a lot and he'd be a great person for your podcast. He's just a brilliant guy.

What is he all about? What's his angle in the world?

He looks at energy, the economy and the environment and very similar framework to. He's a PhD in immunology, but got into this kind of sustainability shtick about 15 years ago. And he's just a brilliant guy and he's been super. It was interesting the fact he has a PhD in immunology, but he's been really into energy and oil and declining productivity and all this stuff. But then when Covid popped up, he's like, oh, I have a PhD in immunology. I'm actually very well. Yeah, people will listen to me speak on this thing. Yeah. And so there's going to be a comeuppance on this stuff. There just is. And there's going to be some pain. And like the. One of the ironic things is that the places are going to experience the most pain are going to be urban centers because of the way that they're built, the way that they are, are structured, the nearly universal lack of a coherent culture that ties them together like people are going to depending on how bad it gets, whether like energy failures or food system failures and stuff like that. It's going to be really bad there. And but the, the irony is that this has been brought about from these, these kind of woke progressive leaders of these cities trying to do whatever the fuck it is that they're doing. But yeah, I'm getting out in the weeds on.

Is that kind of why you guys moved to Montana? Because of what you're speaking about now?

It definitely didn't hurt. Like it's super low population density and there is a very integral culture here. People take care of each other here. Particularly if you're just sincere and hardworking and you want to help and contribute. I had some cabinets in my garage when we moved in that I didn't need them, didn't want them. And so I'm like, hey, does anybody Want his cabinets? I feel bad just like junking them. This guy was like, yeah, I'll come over and help you move them. And so we moved them and then he was building a greenhouse. I'm like, you need some help with this? He's like, my God, if you could spend an hour here holding this and that. And so I did that. And like, we hadn't been here two weeks and we had five neighbors that helped us and we helped them. And like, if we were really in a pinch, they would, they'd have our back. Like, they would. And you know, vice vice versa.

On, that's not what happens in these hundred story apartment towers. No one knows their neighbors. I barely know neighbors in my neighborhood. And we're kind of like North Austin suburbia, you know, with like larger places. It's, it's really. It brings up sadness in me, but it also brings up a solution. Like, what is the solution to all this? Because I know where you're going. At least I kind of feel where you're going with this. What's the solution with knowing each other again? And. And is that even going to matter when the push comes to shove?

I think it'll matter. I think it'll matter. I think that there is going to be a lot of dislocation. I think that when you look back at the 1920s, 1930s, there was a lot of suffering. It's one thing to look back at that. And for this 15 year period, a bunch of Americans starved to death. A bunch of them didn't have work, a bunch of them were homeless. But then things got better. That's that fourth turning thing.

Yes.

That's a long time for the suck to happen. It's probably what we're just going to live through. But I think that this is one of the things that we just have to come to terms just with the possibility of it. And like you mentioned the mental health piece when Covid really started ramping up, what I was emphatic about with our healthy rebellion community is like, you just have to understand what the potentials are here. We could have food distribution interruptions, we could have massive economic dislocation, and we may have none of that. But you just need to understand that it's a possibility. So if it happens, you're not spending days or weeks paralyzed because of the shock, you know, and I think that that's one of the big things. Like you don't want to live your whole life. Doomsday bunkering. To the degree, like I've missed some opportunities being A little overly conservative about, like, oh, I think the economy is going to collapse and stuff like that. Like, I really had some cool opportunities that I should have done and didn't.

You mean like investments or investments and.

Even just like, life stuff? You know, I could have been a little bit more whimsical and enjoyed myself while. While mitigating downside risk. But. But also when, when Covid started ramping up, I didn't miss a step. I wasn't surprised. It didn't affect me at all. We had food, we had water, we had this, we had that, we had community. Like, I was like, yeah, of course the pandemic's going to happen. That's been on one of my, you know, my top five list of things that could be existential threats to. To society, you know, like EMP polls, pandemic, economic collapse, you know, the totalitarian regime takeover and stuff like that. Like, that was completely in the. In the wheelhouse on that stuff. So it wasn't that anxiety provoking. It did change what I was doing. But I'm like, well, yeah, of course this is a possibility. Like, pandemics happen. Like, I get it. This is in my list of things. I've thought about it and had some. Had a little bit of preparation behind that stuff. And I, I think that more. There will be a lot of dislocation, there'll be a lot of pain. There will be a lot of people. The people are going to suffer the most are the ones that didn't realize that this was an eventuality. They didn't realize that there was a possibility of a really rainy day and maybe a rainy month or a rainy decade. And so they're going to be surprised and they're going to be bitter, and that's going to make them really ineffective at just being able to bootstrap themselves and lean into the community that they have and help each other. But I do think that the backside of that is that people will be more networked in the real world. We will take more care of each other. I think that, like, a lot of the broken elements of our food system, whatnot, that ship might get righted because people are like, I'm not going to starve to death. So.

Because things get so bad.

Yeah. And so my state governor is going to make it legal for lots of people to have mobile slaughter units so that we can process meat and move the units to the places that need to be processed to mitigate this potential of, like, food insecurity and stuff like that. Like, there, there may be some really great things that come out of this stuff. But there's gonna. There's a pain of birth, you know, and I think that there is going to be some element to that.

There's so much there. We could do an entire podcast on what you just said. I look at. I always go back to nature for everything because I think nature is such a potent teacher. And I think about the rings on a tree. You know, some of these huge trees that are in Northern Cal, and they're like the great grandfather tree where it's like almost 2,000 years old or something. Maybe not 2,000, but it's up there.

Some of them are 2,3000.

Some of them are up there. And then there's also the Petrified forest. There's that one by Death Valley where it's literally the oldest trees, like trees when supposedly Jesus is walking the earth.

Right.

And so some of the years are really fat and juicy with water. When these trees fall down and they cut the rings, some of the years there's like no water at all. So nature, in her infinite wisdom, has prepared roots in the ground and a strategy that isn't out of scarcity, it isn't out of reaction. It's just a loving awareness of what nature has and its unpredictability. And I think, think we're the same way. So, you know, prepping and having water and firearms and doing all these things, I don't think it's a bad thing. I actually think it's just a representation of us being nature and of us living in an environment that's totally unpredictable. And then honestly is being meddled with so far out of the realm of nature now by the ego of man, really, that it's in our best interest, Rob, to have a recipe of like, okay, let me cover my bases.

Let me.

Let me be the tree with the big deep roots. What does covering our bases actually look like? And you don't have to go into hardcore detail, but, like, what's the general, you know, two handfuls of things that everybody needs to take an honest look at when it comes to the unpredictability of the world.

You know, I think it's the same stuff. It's like energy, food, water, community, but no firearms. Maybe firearms too. Like self protection. Sure, sure. Self protection would be a good one to. To put in there. That's going to be different for somebody who lives in like an urban high rise versus and there are people that, like, that's just their jam. Like, they love where they live or like, that's the job. That's the industry they're in. And they're not, they're not moving to rural Montana. Like it's not going to happen. That's cool. So I think you also don't want that much snow. Right? Right. Yeah, but so is there any way that you can get some redundancy in like heat and electricity and stuff like that and it'll depend on your situation? Like sometimes. Yeah, sometimes no. I remember during the snowpocalypse in Texas, like people started using barbecues inside and stuff like that and they fucking killed themselves. Like they, you know, monoxide poisoning and stuff like that. So, so having a little redundancy in, in some stuff like that, you know, is, is really handy. Having some redundancy in water, like most people can last a long time without food, like literally weeks, but without water can get dodgy. So even if you live in an apartment, like having a couple of five gallon bottles of water that are in the closet, so you've got some little. Yeah, just a little hedge and then you've got some canned food or freeze dried food or you know, something. And so you, you, you buy a bunch of canned salmon and you've got like eight sleeves of it. Like Costco sells these like double sleeves. So you've got six there. And once you eat one, you buy a new one in like a store shelf. You put the new one in the back and you just rotate that stuff through and you've got a bunch of almonds. You got this, you get, you've got maybe like a month, month and a half of food. Wouldn't be great dining, but it's a lot better than starving. Like I did that I caveman show, you know, where I starved for two weeks and it, yeah, and you hit.

The, you, you got the ATL and you threw the atl, Got, got the.

Elk with it and the woman cried.

It was like this emotional experience that was like the guy that did the McDonald's documentary, that Morgan Spurlock, right? Yeah, yeah, that was a blast. We're going to link that. You guys have to watch Rob kill the animal with the outlaw. You were starving. You're like emaciated.

Yeah, I lost £20 doing that. And so that's where I'm like, I never want to do that again. So you know where we are here we have kind of a cool situation where we have this big crawl space under the house and it never gets too hot in the summer and it never freezes in the winter, but it's cool.

Yeah.

So like we've been stashing some stuff down there, you know, and we brought a freeze, freeze dryer. So when I make a meal, maybe three meals out of four, I make enough for another plating of it and Nikki will put it on the freeze dry tray. We stick that in the freezer, we get four of those and we freeze dry that stuff. And it's part of the homeschool for the kids. So they weigh them and measure them and document them and everything. And then that goes in some of our like doomsday bunker stuff.

What about the nutrient value of the freeze dry?

Does that change dried is amazing. Yeah, it's, it's from like a nutrient absorption perspective. Uh, it's great because you even like frozen berries typically are more nutritious than fresh berries generally because they pick them, freeze them, ship them and the nutrient quality doesn't decrease during that time. So like you lose a little bit. But again, like, compared to starving, doesn't really matter.

Yes.

Yeah. If I'm down to, you know. And part of the thing is also like, we try to take some yearly camping and hiking trips. So what we do is we grab the front, you know, our old bunch of those and that's the food that we take out. And so we've got that stuff on kind of a rotation now. I've got a little bit of resources, I've got a little bit of space, and so I, I take a little bit more care of those sorts of things. I bought an air rifle. It's a 357 air rifle and it shoots just about as fast and hard as like a regular caliber gun. But because it's not technically a firearm, you can have it fully suppressed and there's no drama with it. And so we have deer and elk and turkey all around where I live. And if push came to shove, I could shoot those things and nobody would be any of the wiser, you know. And so I did a little bit of stuff like that. And to your point, like with the firearms, like I've been investing in some, some basic firearms training and I would consider myself a novice heading into intermediate with that. And I think if you're going to own a firearm, you should learn how to use it and how to maintain it and how to store it and all that type of stuff. But definitely that self defense piece I think is another important aspect to all this stuff. But you know, we, we took care of some redundancies on energy. Like we have a backup generator, we have a small solar panel that we could Flip out. If we wanted to do some stuff, we've got a pellet stove which needs electricity to run, and then we installed a small wood stove that has a cooktop on it and some stuff like that. So we don't really use that, but if everything else went sideways, then we could do that. We live at a cool spot where we are about 50 meters away from a lake, which is cool, but the lake has a bunch of geese and ducks and all that stuff in it. So, like, harvesting that water would require processing.

Yeah.

So we have a well, and on that well, we installed a simple pump where I can pump water out of the well any time of the year, and I can plug that actually into our house and pressurize our pressure tank so that we could run stuff in the house. Not everybody has that infrastructure, but it's life.

You designed.

Yeah. Yeah.

You've chosen this route.

Yeah, I've kind of chosen this route. I drive a very modest car. I don't, you know, drive a Subaru stuff. I'd still drive a Subaru, you know, I mean it. But I've put emphasis into other things. But even if I like. We have members in the rebellion that live in a apartment, that live in, you know, kind of an urban area. But they just thinking about energy, food, water, like, maybe basic security, they've been able to take some steps. And also they reach out to people around them. Hey, reach out to some neighbors. Find some people in your neighborhood. Find some people in the rebellion that live near you, and you guys get together and do this stuff.

Yeah.

So now they've got legitimate community. They're talking about this stuff. And there's just that sense of like, okay, I've got some bases covered. Like, if a hurricane comes, if a fire comes, like, we live in wildfire country, so it doesn't need to be economic collapse. Like, this shit burns down every once in a while. I mean, when it burns down, it burns down. And I was in the Northridge earthquake when it happened. And so there's always arguments for just having a little bit of redundancy, a little bit of resiliency there. And I don't think you should remotely live your life completely based around that. But for a month, you spend 5% of your time, 10% of your time shoring up energy, food, water, maybe personal security. You're really good. Like, you. You've done some really great diligence, and then you just invest a little bit of time into maintaining it and updating skills and all that. Yeah.

I think if you do that, then you're honestly more or less likely to be taken advantage of or to be in such a dire strait that you would go and kind of trade your freedom or trade your agency for the food that you need or for the water that you need or anything else.

Yeah. So there's this guy, Selko, his last name is Selko, and he was in the Serbian Civil War. And he has a couple of books, like what to do when the Shit Hits the Fan. And it's interesting because. Because Serbia was a first world country when this happened and they had civil war and everything. And he has some lists of things to have on hand, like to buy a flat of Bic lighters and toilet paper and different things, even tradable items. And this sounds kind of crazy and this is maybe getting a little bit down the little bit. Yeah, it's a little fringe. But we did some stuff like that. Like, he had this list of things that totally makes sense. People are always. If supply chains kind of break down and stuff like that, like, people are going to want ways to start a fire and do different things. We bought a ton. This is just kind of an interesting little aside. A ton of the little 1oz alcohol things, you know, like you would get on an airplane. Yeah. Because in good times people drink. In bad times people drink more. And, like, the alcohol never goes bad. And so I bought a couple of flats of that and like, if we were ever in a situation where we needed to do a little bartering, like, I've got these really fungible, you know, one ounce. Like, having a liter of tequila doesn't really help you that. Right, right, right. But like, there's 1oz fungible things. It's like, okay, I'll take your chicken and you've got two of each, you know, or whatever.

So. Yeah, NFT ain't gonna help you when you need to eat, right? No, no, I trade you this NFT for a steak. It's like, no, you can't. But I'll take that tequila. You have that. That would be pretty good. Okay. Dude, I can't let you go unless we talk a little bit about money. Specifically, you had mentioned. Mentioned on one of your pods. I think it was the precursor that you did with Diana Rogers. And you said that Nikki was listening to this bankless podcast. And I think it was the. The CEO who used to be the CEO of Coinbase, he wrote a book and it was all about ways that potentially this is all for our good. This unraveling of finance and this unraveling of money. And especially with being a public author and seen that whole world, which, you know, I'm in the process of writing a book now and I'm looking at like how much percentage is taken and I'm hearing stories from friends. It's kind of a dog eat dog world in economics in general. And I think it always has been that way. How do you make sense of money yourself? And then also what is inspiring to you about what the previous CEO of Coinbase is doing with his new book and talking about how actually the unraveling is of finance might, might be a good thing. Can you enlighten us a little bit on that again?

Like Chris Martinson would be a great guy to get on the show. He, he has it. So his website is peak prosperity.com and he has this thing called the Crash Course and it, it's great. And it'll also kind of pucker your giblets a little bit. You're kind of like, oh fuck, like the, the world. It is kind of on that, that you know, the two wheels. And, and so he looks at energy, the economy and the environment. And on the economic side, it's kind of funny people in finance in some of These Ivy League PhDs in Finance or whatever, they look at modern monetary theory where we just kind of keep printing money, keep printing money like, oh, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. And it's not the same as running a deficit in a household. Some people will say you can't just run a deficit forever. But the thing is our debt driven economy, what happens when we get a chunk of debt? And what has been happening since basically World War II is there will be a chunk of debt, then we take out loans to pay that debt and then we're paying debt with debt. The thing about that is that you need a certain rate of economic growth to keep that system going. It's literally like a rocket trying to take off. But if you don't have a certain rate of economic growth, then the whole system collapses. And I'm doing a super terrible job of explaining this, but this is where we had super low interest rates for a long time and then all of a sudden interest rates they went from when we bought our house here it was 2.38% interest, which is absolutely ridiculous. It's totally amazing. And now it's nearly 8% interest which more than doubles what you would pay for a house. And there's all kinds of implications around that. When I was growing up, certificates of deposit, CDs paid 15% interest because to buy a house, you were paying 23% interest on the fucking house. And that was in response to dealing with this stagflation deal from the, from the 1970s. This was in the 1980s when I was growing up. But our monetary system, because in 1971, Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. And when you look at civilizations that have a non debaseable currency, they tend to do really well. And then when they start loaning against their currency, you basically have set a timer, you've lit a fuse and at some point then that system is going to implode and collapse and our system will collapse at some point. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be like the road warrior and all that, but it can wipe out whole fortunes. It could. People who are banking on their 401k being there and stuff like that, it may or may not be there. There's a lot of implications around that stuff. And a financial implosion in some ways is scarier to me than like outright civil war because there's nowhere to. Unless you're really wealthy and really well connected and have a lot of resources so that, so that you can plug yourself into like land and industry that can be, you know, resistant to these processes.

Why community so damn important? Forget about just the fact that we need it on a nutrient level, but just also on like a human survival level too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know I'm kind of bouncing around, but. No, it's good. The financial system will end up having to come up at some time and it will be a big deal. And what we've tried to do with that is to build infrastructure around us. Like we're, we're looking at having animals and doing some different things. I would like to. We have access to some fruit trees. I want to start pressing the fruit trees and making cider and you know, I don't have a great skill set like building and swinging a hammer, but there's a little bit of stuff that I could do. But I'm thinking about some things that I can do in those other things. And it's fun and it's good homeschool projects. So it enriches our life today. That's one of the criteria that I use whether or not we do something like does it enrich our lives today? Is it something that'll be helpful? And it could be helpful down the road, but the money and economics thing is a really funky gig because crypto got absolutely crushed I got crushed in crypto. Yeah. The standard stock market got absolutely ham boned. And this is one of the bastards of this current system. When you really dig into this, it's crystal clear that things are being manipulated historically. If the money system starts getting dodgy, then people could go into gold, silver, precious metals, and that's a safe haven to go. It's not necessarily a place to make money, but at least you don't lose your value. But the big institutional players, and again, Chris Martenson is a great guy to talk to about this. He really understands at a much higher level than I do, the big players will lose some money today to hammer you and I for trying to go into gold and silver. So they'll drive the price up and then they'll gut it and, and dump things. And what it does is it forces everybody into basically like the stock market. Like that seems to be. They want everybody in that scene. But the stock market itself is inherently volatile and unstable. And I'm not saying don't have anything in it, but the shitty thing is that they've created a situation where it's very, very hard to get out. It's very, very hard to have a legitimately stable, safe place to be.

Well, we did an episode with Robert Breedlove and he's one of the biggest crypto experts in the world and he was saying that the majority of transactions that are done, Rob, they're done in microseconds by AI, right? So all the money that's transacting hands isn't actually the old school, you know, guy with a tie on the Wall street trading floor yelling and scribbling, that shit ain't happening. This is artificial intelligence robots that are competing against other robots for months micro fractions of a second to buy and stop and buy and stop and buy and sell. So it's not the world that people think it is as far as investing. And you're right, anytime that a huge whale wants to push a button on a keypad, they can dictate literally hundreds of millions of lives with the touch of a keypad. So I don't necessarily feel, and I'm not giving financial advice and neither are you. I don't feel like it's smart to put all your eggs in a stock. Stock market, right, because, you know, to put all your eggs in any basket really. But, but from a sound financial advice, do you, do you have like a diversification? Even if somebody's starting out and they're just beginning to invest, you know, multiply it to what you're doing now, I know you've probably been investing and being financially literate for a long time. Maybe speak to somebody who's just starting out. We'll definitely link peak prosperity. I know you've mentioned that multiple times. But you know, for people that really want to. Honestly, what this podcast has been for me is just how do we supplement and how do we put scaffolding around the health of our body and mind. And that's really where I'm coming from.

I think a big thing. And this is something that Nikki and I did really early when we literally didn't have two nickels to hardly rub together. But she was just emphatic. Like 10% of what we earn by hook or by crook goes into savings. And then within that we can diversify it into different stuff that we do. And then I could make the case that you buy a little bit of precious metals and if you're barely making any money, you can buy some silver. If you're making some more money, maybe you buy some gold. Silver is interesting in that you and I are talking on these computer screens. They're made with silver. That is a commodity that is never going to go away and is always useful and whatnot. A little bit of precious metals. I think putting a little bit into the stock market, maybe you do an index fund or something like that where somebody just aggregates this stuff and when you do it, just stick it in there and leave it. Trying to play things is where you get absolutely murdered. I do think investing a little bit in crypto and again, if you're taking 10% of your income and then maybe you do 33 and a third, like precious metals, stock market, some crypto, or if you're in a position to buy land, I think that land, particularly if it could be leased or used for lumber or farming or ranching or something like that. And again, this depends on where you are, but even if you're a 20 year old college student who's working part time at a bookstore, if you can start doing a little bit of this stuff just instead of being totally over barreled debt wise, you know, if you're actually in a position where you're like debt free and saving a little bit, totally different mental space, you know, just so entirely different. And it's not easy to get there, but you know, if you can do it. But depending on where you're at, I think just some of that diversification and then really investing big, and you've mentioned it multiple times in social capital, like having Legitimate community, you know, people that you care about and that care about you and that can come together in a moment of crisis. When we were running our CrossFit gym during the 2008 financial meltdown, we were earlobe deep in real estate agents that had been killing it. And then they went to making basically nothing. And then all kinds of people in construction and stuff like that. People stayed members in the gym because they found jobs and they found community within the gym. And just the fact that they had somewhere to go where people cared about them, it was kind of like cheers. Everybody knew their name, they're glad they came, they got a workout, they got some exercise, like all that stuff. So those, those brick and mortar interfaces are pretty important. And you know, being part of like a jiu jitsu, yoga, CrossFit type of obscene would be huge because of the, the connectivity that you've got there potentially.

It's also being a person that is resourceful, like being in an environment that you help to create where everybody gets, gets to eat and everybody gets to be part of the, the trough and everybody gets some benefit of that. And I think that's like so, so much of what you and I have talked about today, which has been so practical and so good. It's because none of this stuff, Rob, the majority of what we've spoken about does not get taught in traditional schooling. It just doesn't. Right, right. And some of these skills, like, you know, you talked about your girls learning to write. Like, yeah, we gotta, we gotta learn how to write. We gotta to learn how to do basic, basic arithmetic, but problem solving and thinking outside of the box and an entrepreneur mindset or just a mindset that likes to ask questions. I think you even mentioned that in your book. Like, my favorite question was why? I would just continue to ask why? And look where it got you. Is there, is there a part of you that now being a father and now being at the stage in your career that you are, if you could go back, and I know we're kind of like pulling a crazy time machine maneuver, but if you could go back and just put like a little seed of wisdom in the pocket of yourself when you were like 18 to 25, that might have given you more peace back then or might have given you more grace back then, what would you tell yourself now at that age that that wisdom only knows through experience?

I definitely, I think being raised poor, like there was a lot of baggage with that. And so there was, you know, my 20s were spent in large part just trying to prove to myself and prove to the people around me that I mattered, I was smart, that I could be successful, you know, And I think that. That even if you come from not a poor family, I think that that's a common period of your life where there's this, I'm going to prove it to the world kind of thing.

Yeah.

And that could. There's some power to that, too, though. Like, it's a. A pretty good fire under your ass, you know, to. To get in and do it. But there can be some. I wish I had been a little less broken in the process of that. Like, I might have made some better decisions. I might have been just more comfortable in my own skin.

How so Broken?

When you.

When you say broken, what do you mean?

Needy? Like kind of codependent needy type stuff, but alcoholic parents, you know, I don't know. I don't know how much of that, you know, just advice could have fixed. We develop, I think, particularly like, family of origin type stuff. I think about it like gears meshing to make a mechanism work. And I had gears that meshed with my family that, although dysfunctional, worked within that context. Then you go out in the world and you find people for those gears to mesh, and lo and behold, they're dysfunctional people because that's the gears that I've got. And it took a while to figure out, oh, if I want to interface with somebody who's not broken, I need that different set of gears. And so I don't know if advice or anything would have necessarily changed that. Like, I just had to. I had to go through struggle and decide that I wanted something different and something more. I will say this. There were multiple points along my trajectory from, like, grade school to high school, college. There were some key people that took an interest in me and loved me and saw something better, something different. And they held me to a higher standard. Like, when I would be doing knuckleheaded stuff, they're like, you're better than that dude. They would, with tough love do that. And so I guess maybe not advice to my. I don't know. That advice would have helped me at that point. But what it's made me keenly aware of is when I see people like you, like, I acknowledged you long ago as being one of my favorite people in the space. When I see talent and I see potential, to really lean into that and acknowledge it and let the person know, hey, you matter and what you're doing matters and everything, because sometimes you're just sitting there and you're Like, I don't know if anybody cares. I don't know if what I did today mattered. Like a bunch of electrons spun around the interwebs and I don't know if that amounted to, to a hill of beans. Yeah, but it does, like, it does end up mattering. Like having that key person take a, a bit of interest in you is, is life transforming, you know.

Thank you for sharing that, man. That's huge. I can't imagine how many people just need somebody to come around that has some wisdom and knowledge to share and really give that to people that are authentically in the quest of it. And I guess that's the key. In order for you as a mentor, in order for anybody as a mentor to give knowledge or to give wisdom that's meaningful, there has to be a natural vacuum inside of the recipient. The recipient themselves has to have a genuine desire for greatness. Not that they want to get rich or they want to be popular or be fucking famous. None of that shit really matters when apocalypse happens. Like, right, we want to be in a community where like I'm going to a guy's wedding, wedding here in a few days and his name is Mike Dillard and he's very well known in the space. Maybe you know him or you.

I know the name. Yeah.

Okay. So he, he shares a lot of the similar values that you've shared. And so he's created a community here where we've gone shooting together, we've gone and talked about meetings where we're going to be self sustainable as a community together. Like I'm engaged in those conversations. But it's not because I want anything from these people. It's because I want to be plugged in, plugged into a system where we can all give to one another. And I think whether it's your wisdom or whether it's us being a community, that's what I'd love to leave people with. And I also love for you to leave people with maybe any part of this conversation. When it comes to the scaffolding and the strength that we give our mind and our bodies, when it comes to what's ahead, which is totally unknown, what do you think we missed? You know, we started the conversation with energy. We went into a lot of different nooks and crannies. But is there anything that you think we missed when it comes to the scaffolding that supports our mind and our body?

I don't think so. I think that it. One thing I've. I've done an overly good job of Prepping for the downside. And again, I think that this is coming from kind of a poor family. You get really good at just making do with what's in front of you. Like, I can. Yeah, I can spin something up out of nothing, you know, but then being comfortable with a little bit of success, being comfortable with, like, okay, you took care of some downside, risk mitigation, but now just live. You got one life. I'm 50 years old. I've got more years behind me than in front of me. So it's like, live, be in the moment. Live, be invested in my family. Take care of myself. I've done some diligence around the downside. I think that there are a lot of folks that. That are afraid of facing some of these darker realities because of the anxiety it can produce just thinking about economic stuff and global upheaval and everything. And I get that. But a little bit of investment and just downside risk mitigation really helps you sleep at night. But then for the advice I need, and what I've been realizing is I've done too good at that. I've invested too much in that. I've been preparing too much for the end of the world instead of preparing for a better world. You know, it's like, yeah, have the water on hand, have some food on hand, have. Have your Bic lighters for trading and all that. But. But then it's like, get out and live. Get out and enjoy.

Like.

Like really enjoy that. And that's something that I've realized that I've. I've overly invested in, like, the. The. The end of the world thing.

That's honest, man. I really appreciate the honesty. And I think about, you know, 2010 Paleo Solutions 2017ish. Wired to eat, right?

Yep.

And then 2020, sacred cow. Is there another book that's. That's brewing in you about some of the things we've talked about today?

Very insightful. Ish. I'm working on something. The working title is the Consequence Economy.

Okay.

And it's basically talking about COVID and energy, just where these good intentions can go horribly wrong and how a lack of understanding of the way that the world really works can make things far, far worse for folks, man.

Okay.

That's gonna be a ways down the road, though.

Yeah. So that's like, some time. Hopefully by then the world is standing, which I think it will be. You prepared enough? That's for sure. So, man, as we say goodbye, just answer this question, please, about, you know, this. This wisdom that we're all seeking this wellness that I think is mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and financial. That's what I've learned over these past 15 years. It's like, how do we fill those on a consistent basis? But how do you see wellness now? You know, your girls have grown a little bit. You're living in a new space. You've. Your life looks and feels different. So does the question of, hey, I'm Rob Wolf. And wellness to me feels and looks and defines in this way. Has that changed? Is it the same? You know, what is. What is living well actually mean to you?

Living well for me now is definitely doing, prioritizing the things that I really want to do. Like, I, I. Nikki bought me a guitar ten years ago and I had not picked it up. And then last year, right before Christmas, I was like, I'm 50 years. Like, I'm gonna turn 50 in January. Like, the time is nigh, you know? And so I started doing some online courses with it and I can play a couple of songs now. And, and, and that I'm very fortunate that I can, amidst doing my career stuff and family and all that, that I can carve out some time like that. But it has just been this thing that I've wanted to do forever. And so, you know, if you want to do something, get in and do it. And also, I have said no to more things in the last two years than I've ever said in my life. Like, I would love in some ways to get back out and do the in person stuff, but I did so much travel, I'm just done. Like, what I would like to do is start doing some events, have them here in Kalispell.

That's what you do.

Then all of y' all can come visit here and I don't have to travel and then we can get together. Yeah.

I need to link you up with my buddy. We just did a huge podcast right behind in the studio. He lives in Montana. I'm not sure the area. I think it's close to you. And I don't know how far you are from George Bryant out there. You're pretty far from George.

George. No, no, George is in Big Fork. I think I've seen him at the gym I go to a time or two.

Oh, cool. So you guys are all in, in that triangle. And, and I really feel like there's some great energy moving out there about self empowerment and not like Tony Robbins, rah, rah, rah, but like, hey, practical, realistic ways that can really help people and so they can make People depend on one another in a healthy way.

Right?

So I would be. I would totally be there, and I think there's a lot of good stuff going on in Montana, man. So, dude, just super grateful for you coming on the show for the fourth time. I believe you are the only guest that's ever come on the pod four times, so that's an honor, and it's. But I really enjoyed where we went today, and I think people will get a lot out of the scaffolding that was built for this mind and body, man. So super appreciate you, Rob.

Thank you. Can't wait to see you in real life again.

Let's do it. All right, you guys, until Rob and I see you again, make sure you go to Rob's website. It's just robwolf.com is that the site? And also, if you want to be in his community, it's the Healthy Rebellion community, where I'm sure you guys go into deep dives on all the stuff that we've talked about today. Cool. All right, guys, well, until we see you again, we're both wishing you love and wellness. Hey, thanks for watching the podcast. I appreciate you being here. If you haven't done so already, click the subscribe button and the little notification. Notification bell. So you never miss any of this free weekly content delivered from my heart with care right to yours. If you love this video, you'll love any of the videos on this page. Just click the one you want to watch next.