Neil Dudley: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Pederson’s Farms Podcast. We are so excited you’re here. We appreciate you joining us. And we look forward to sharing these conversations with thought leaders from our industry. They’re going to paint a picture from every perspective – consumer, customer, vendor, employee, and peer – that I think is going to be super valuable and we’re really excited to share. So, thanks for tuning in. Remember don’t tune out and grab life by the bacon. 

Hey, everybody out there that has joined this episode of the Pederson’s Farms Podcast. I am super excited, I cannot wait for you to get to know Robb Wolf and all the things he does. He’s written books. He hosts a Healthy Rebellion podcast with a lady named Nicki who we’ll certainly talk about a little bit. And shout out to Elizabeth for kind of helping us organize all this stuff. Hi, out there to YouTube land, we’re certainly filming it. And Brittany, welcome to the show. This is her first time to be on and help me make sure that I don’t leave any meat on the bone with some of these questions that we end up exploring. Robb, thank you, sir.

Robb Wolf: Huge honor to be here. Thank you. 

Neil Dudley: So, first things first, tell us a little bit about the Healthy Rebellion. Look, I’m not going to go into a big, long bio about Robb. If you don’t know who Robb Wolf is, go to Google, type in R O B B W O L F, and you will be able to find a lot of information about him. So, I don’t want to spend a lot of time telling you everything he’s done. Go buy some LMNT electrolytes; they’ll be great for you. I’ve been using them daily. So, I just want to go right to it. Tell us about the Healthy Rebellion. How can people start learning more about their nutrition and how it affects them? You’re a biochemist that I think just brings that perspective to nutrition that’s so valuable. 

Robb Wolf: Oh, well, thank you. So, I’ve been in this health and wellness space for I guess about 23 years. Like I was a cancer and auto-immune researcher first and then had a pretty significant health crisis. I had ulcerative colitis so bad that I was facing a bowel resection. I’m about 170 pounds, and if you could imagine, at the low ebb of my ulcerative colitis, I was down to about 125-130 pounds, so if you imagine about 40 pounds less of me. I was in pretty rough shape, and it was tracking down this idea of foods that may be problematic for a host of issues, autoimmune, gut related, that really put me on the path that I’ve been on for the past 20 years. We, I guess, big picture kind of call it a paleo type diet or an ancestral health type diet. But it was lifesaving for me. And this has been the work that I’ve done for, again, the past 23 years. And I have a website that historically has been one of the higher ranked websites around particularly within health and wellness, very good Google rankings. And around 2017, I got up one day and about 97% of my organic traffic was just gone. I had no idea what was going on, started getting some phone calls and emails from other people in the health and wellness space, and they had faced the same situation. And this was one of the early Google algorithm updates. It was called the Owl update, and it was one of the early iterations of this kind of cancel culture plus curating the message that Google and the powers that be want you to see and want you to hear. And so, they had reshuffled the way that things are ranked such that only outlets like WebMD, these things that have very tight pharma and corporate connections, those were called the authorities. And clearly, they do have authority in many regards, but one of the fascinating elements of the interwebs has been that people outside of the mainstream can establish themselves as experts and provide value to folks. And sometimes that’s an absolute hot mess. And sometimes the people on the outside end up, I think, bringing some really great insight. But it was this inability to really do business as we had historically done that forced me to open this thing called the Healthy Rebellion. Like we couldn’t advertise on Facebook any longer. People could no longer find the material on the website. The website was still there. It wasn’t de-platformed. But where historically, if somebody had put in low carb diet type one diabetes, like I was a number one search return, and I had hundreds of different pages I had developed over the years on different topics, regenerative agriculture, and climate change, a bunch of different things like that. You just couldn’t find it. Like it was unfindable, which is just one step removed from de-platforming. And so, I decided that I needed a way of reaching people, building community and doing it in a fashion that hopefully I couldn’t be canceled. Hopefully, my work couldn’t be pulled off the internet. And I’m a real big fan of markets and decentralization. I’m kind of the opinion that if I help enough people, I will figure out a way of making a living from that process. I’ve been doing all this stuff for 23 years. So, I’m not looking to strip mine this area and then run for the hills. I’m invested over the long haul. And similar, like if you’re running a food operation, like you can’t do a short-term play and expect anything good to come up that. So, we launched this thing called the Healthy Rebellion, which was on a separate platform called Mighty Networks. And the CEO of Mighty Networks Gina Bianchini is pretty outspoken about- she is kind of libertarian in the orientation, I think. I don’t want to put words in her mouth. I’ve never talked to her, but just my sense of like interviews and stuff like that, she’s very into the ability for folks to create and curate the information that they want to and have it be protected at that kind of fundamental First Amendment level. And so, we started the Healthy Rebellion ironically maybe about eight months before COVID and we were doing pretty well. And I think that part of what was going on is that the insanity of social media, the fact that the algorithms on social media pit people against each other – folks, aren’t aware of this, like maybe about 10 years ago, Facebook and some of these outfits started realizing that the way that they made the most ad money was from the greatest engagement from people, and people were more engaged about outrage than they were over progress. 

Neil Dudley: What’s that TV show? There’s a show out there that’s about this.  

Robb Wolf: The Social Dilemma, yeah. 

Neil Dudley: We’ll put that in the show notes. 

Robb Wolf: Yeah. And so, a bunch of things happened around that time. I became aware of the way that these algorithms are tweaked and whatnot. But I found this Mighty Networks platform, and we moved to the Healthy Rebellion there. And it’s just a place where- kind of a core competency, I guess, is that we help people get healthier, and we use this kind of ancestral health template. We do three times a year resets, but then we have strength and conditioning programs, lots of community support. And as COVID kind of spun up and the volume and intensity of just kind of insanity dialed up, people really wanted a place that they could go and talk, not a safe space, but a space where they could go and have a reasonable discussion and like, hey, my understanding of the world is this, what do y’all think? And we could have a discussion around that and kind of move things forward and a big chunk, I would say maybe 40% of the discussion that we have, is around resiliency and regenerative food systems, because the people who are showing up there, they really are kind of ears forward. They recognize supply chain issues, all kinds of things could really have massive impacts on our ability to access food in general. But food that we want to feed our families in particular, there’s been a huge messaging around this notion that animal products are the most injurious or causative element to the climate change situation, which is absolutely patently false, but you’ll be called everything from an idiot to a racist for suggesting grazing animals, which co-evolved with two thirds of the Earth’s landmass is grassland. These animals co-evolved with these grasslands and suggesting that that is an important system that we need to protect and cultivate, not remove, there’s messaging out there that suggests that that’s absolute heresy. And so, this is a place that people are able to get together, compare notes, discuss things, and do it in a respectful but rigorous way. And that’s really what the Healthy Rebellion is all about. 

Neil Dudley: That’s one thing I love about you and just following you and knowing you and watching you from a distance. Now, we’re not best friends or anything, but I feel like I know you. You’re passionate. You have a position, which is, what’s kind of scary about the world these days is nobody kind of feels comfortable taking a position. It’s like, uh-oh, I’m not going to stand for anything because I could get canceled for it. I really appreciate your total willingness to take a position that’s not just fabricated. That biochemist part of you really, I think, comes through in that regard. Like, man, I’m taking a position and it’s a well thought out position. So, people, I don’t know how many people are going to just now learn about Robb, but if you are, please go check him out. He’s wrote a couple of books. He’s got this Healthy Rebellion podcast. There’s a lot of ways you can go, I think. And Robb would even, I think, allow somebody to– I don’t know where I was going with that thought, but I just jumped to another one. One thing that you do great on your podcast is take questions. So, I think people should, if they disagree or what, that’s always a thing that Rob allows, and I appreciate that about him. 

Brittany Hayes: I’ve really enjoyed your content and definitely appreciate you’re really willing to answer and engage in a question even if the answer is very gray. A lot of people will shy away from that, and unless there is a black or white answer, they just won’t engage in the conversation at all. And I think you deliver that in a way that’s very respected, and I really, really enjoy your content. 

Neil Dudley: By the way, everybody, welcome Brittany Hayes to the show. That’s her first kind of time to enter, and let’s just say Brittany’s joining us here to make sure that I don’t leave something on the table because I get to- my little brain is already chasing 29 things I want to talk about, because Robb’s a great entrepreneur. There’s so much about this guy that is potentially valuable to our listeners. I want to talk about the LMNT, you can see the logo behind his head there. I mean, we’re not going to get it all covered in 30 minutes. Britt’s going to try to help me catch something if I miss it. And we just really need to let Rob talk. 

Robb Wolf: Usually one of my answers is about 30 minutes long, so folks that do shorter podcasts, I usually just drag them kicking and screaming up to at least an hour. So, I’ll just let folks know it’s probably going to be closer to that. 

Neil Dudley: Personally, I love the longer form. Like I just like to get in depth into whatever kind of topic we’re talking about. And you did a great job with Healthy Rebellion. Tell us where LMNT Electrolytes come from. Let’s explore that a little because I think it’s a great product and story. 

Robb Wolf: I’ll try to be brief on this. But I’ve eaten this kind of low carb way for 22, 23 years, and it’s just what works for me. It’s not the way that all folks should eat, but up until finding this way of eating, looking back, I had just spent my whole life on like a blood sugar roller coaster. Both of my parents were type two diabetics, developed it fairly- like in their thirties, late thirties. And they smoked, they drank late, like not great lifestyle. But in doing some genetic testing on myself, it’s pretty clear that me and carbohydrates don’t do well together, not insignificant amounts. But when I figured out this low carb way of eating that was great on the one hand, but it really stymied my ability to do the things that I typically do, like Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Thai boxing and whatnot. And I kind of thought that it was just the way my life was going to be, but if I’ve done one good thing in my life, even though I have an area of expertise, I’ve always tried to seek out people who are smarter and more knowledgeable than myself. And I kept looking at trying to figure out how to crack this nut of eating lower carb but also doing some things like Brazilian jiu-jitsu and wrestling and whatnot. And I found these two guys, Tyler Cartwright and Luis Villasenor, that are the founders of an online platform called Ketogains, and it’s a couple of hundred thousand people, really successful. And man, the people on this platform were just crushing it, like great body composition changes, good performance. I saw some women mainly actually that were competing at high levels in Brazilian jujitsu and eating this way that I’m eating, but they had that low gear that you really need for grappling. And so, I started chatting with Tyler and Luis. And kind of long and short of that whole thing was that I wasn’t consuming remotely enough electrolytes, specifically sodium. And I haven’t ever really been afraid of sodium. I did a deep dive on the literature regarding sodium and cardiovascular disease years ago and was totally unimpressed with it. Like if you’re eating a super processed diet and you are insulin resistant, you got a lot of sodium in the mix, that’s not good. But the sodium was kind of an unfortunate bystander in a way; it was really all the bad processed food that was the main problem. And then when people shift to a lesser processed diet, they tend to reduce the sodium intake that they have in their diets, and that ends up causing a lot of problems, particularly if folks are eating a little bit more on the low carb side of things. So, I fixed that after flailing for 20 plus years in this space, and it was just magic for me. I couldn’t believe the change that I had in how I felt. Like the mid-afternoon, I would be like, oh, I need another cup of coffee. And what I needed was like some pickle juice or some salami or LMNT or something like that. My body needed sodium. And when I started looking at the community that I serve, 85-90% of the problems that people were facing was, as I was realizing, likely electrolyte driven. So, we spun up this free downloadable guide called Make it Yourself Ketoade. And it was take this much table salt, this much potassium chloride, which is no salt, some magnesium citrate, some lemon juice, some Stevia, put water in it, shake it up, drink it. And within about six months of releasing this free guide, we had like a half million downloads of this thing, and it was clearly addressing this huge need. And then folks started mentioning, they’re like this stuff is awesome. But whenever I travel, I’ve got three bags of white powder in my carryon bag, and the TSA really doesn’t like that. They literally asked us to produce this product and we did, and it’s just gone like crazy. So, we’ve been officially launched for, I guess, three, three and a half years now, and the company is growing like crazy. But we still have this free downloadable guide. Most of our education is around trying to encourage people to eat a minimally processed whole food-based diet, and then by hook or by crook, make sure that you get enough electrolytes, specifically sodium. So, we educate people about olives and pickles and pickle juice and sardines and salami and all that as mainstays to try to get that sodium piece addressed. And again, it seems counterintuitive for a lot of people that sodium would be this linchpin piece of the story, but other than folks that are insulin resistant, kind of type two diabetics, hypertensive, virtually everybody else besides that really does need some additional electrolytes. And even in those situations of the overweight insulin resistant individual, what we need to do for them is get them to eat a less processed diet, typically eat more protein from whole food sources, and then they get healthier, and then what they find is that they need more electrolytes, specifically sodium. So, it’s hard to tell that story briefly, but we absolutely did not set out to be salt moguls. Like five years ago, I would have never told you that I would be a co-founder of this electrolyte company. But we did a freemium offering, which is, hey, here’s this problem, here’s this free way to address it, and a ton of people responded to it and basically asked us to make this product. So, it’s ironic given the number of electrolyte products that are out there in the world that there would be an opportunity to launch this thing. But what we did then is we really circle back around and gave a critical eye to the science. And it’s kind of like our dietary recommendations are at large where we really do, if you look back at like 1930s, 1940s, and the way that Americans ate and how healthy folks were in general, and then we compare and contrast that with where we are today and what we’re told to eat, the science really doesn’t support what the public health message is. And, oh man, how many places do we see that right now? So holy smokes, you can’t swing a dead cat and not hit a topic related to that. And sodium is right in that ballpark.

Neil Dudley: I so wish I could get a little screenshot while you’re talking because me and Britt look like bobbleheads. We’re just shaking our heads like yes, yes, this is so right, it’s so perfect. I want to needle on the entrepreneurial success you’ve had, and let’s say, using LMNT specifically. And I think we will have people listening who are interested in nutrition. We have peers in our industry. We’ve got consumers of our products. And Britt, don’t let me forget, I want to come back to our products a little bit because Robb mentions whole foods, minimally processed, and we sent Robb some products, and I want to kind of just see- Some of that was sausage, some of that was hot dogs. I know that’s probably not right in your wheelhouse of your diet. And here I go. See, let’s just chase that rabbit first.

Robb Wolf: Oh, it is actually.

Neil Dudley: Let’s talk about that a little bit. I perceive, based on your content and your thought process, that sausage and hot dogs probably don’t lay in your wheelhouse. So, explain if I’m wrong about that, why. 

Robb Wolf: So, there’s a perception that when we look out at the research around say like meat in general and then processed meat in particular that it’s in theory associated with all these chronic degenerative diseases, cancer, type two diabetes and what not. All of these studies are based on what’s called food frequency questionnaires. It’s where they ask folks what did you eat yesterday, last week, last month, last year? One of the most prominent studies in this scene asked people to recall what they ate up to 20 years ago. And what we know about these studies is that people have terrible memories. Like there’ve been great legit scientific studies where they will set people up in a lab setting, and then they have almost like a mock crime scene happen, and there will be a bunch of observers. And the whole thing is video recorded, so we know what really happened. And then you compare what really happened versus what people think happened, what they remembered happening. What people say when there’s an expectation that, well, maybe everybody else is saying that this happened, so I’m going to go ahead and say that. So, the long and short is that the science is garbage, and I so hesitate saying that; I really like to flesh things out more than just dismissing it out of hand, but I’ve done other podcasts where I really go through and break down like the failure of this science. It looks like really good science. There’s lots of charts and graphs and numbers and everything. But a guy much smarter than myself, Dr. Ioannidis, has been incredibly outspoken on this topic, and he’s one of the best regarded epidemiological scientists in the world. And he made the case that the government should not fund any more of these nutrition research pieces like this based off of food frequency questionnaires because they just tell us nothing. There’s this thing called the healthy user bias, the unhealthy user bias. So, in general, when we look out at the world, people who eat meat also generally tend to smoke more frequently, they tend to drink more frequently. There’s all these other confounders there. And one of the interesting studies that is still kind of in this food frequency questionnaire genre, but they went into like a Whole Foods market type setting where people ostensibly are already eating better and maybe are a little bit more health conscious. And what they found in that scenario was that people who ate meat tended to be healthier and live longer in that circumstance. So removed a bunch of these healthy or unhealthy user bias type things, but meats like salami and hot dogs, what we would generally call processed meats, typically fair very poorly when we look at these food frequency questionnaires. But when we look at traditional cultures, Italy, Portugal, Native Americans, like smoked, salted, preserved meats. We don’t know how old this technology goes back, but it is at least tens of thousands of years old, and it may be much, much older than that. And when we look at the cultures, again Italy, France, these places are generally eating minimally processed foods, other than say like these traditionally preserved meat products, we don’t see these outrageous rates of diabetes and cancer and the things that we see in more like the UK, United States, and whatnot. And so, when we start trying to triangulate in on all these stories, I just am so unimpressed with the science that suggests that these foods like the sausage and salami and whatnot is damaging or injurious to health. Do I think that one should build every meal lock, stock and barrel around hotdogs and sausages? No, like I think that we should get a variety of stuff. We should get a wide variety of things. But like with my kids, it’s worth mentioning one of the big challenges with kids is to get them to just plow through a meal and enjoy everything that they have. And I’ll Traeger up some steak or some chicken or this or that. And they do pretty well with it, but they’ll kind of bog down. And where I really find the things like the sausage and the hot dogs and stuff like that beneficial is instead of doing a protein, we’ll do a couple of proteins. So, we’ll do chicken and hot dogs. And then the kids crush that. For breakfast, we’ll do some bacon, some of y’all’s sausages and some pasture raised eggs. And so, they get a couple of different protein sources there, and then it’s not an arm-wrestling match to get the kids to eat that. 

Neil Dudley: It’s so funny you mention that because that’s half of my attention every morning is what can I do that the kids will eat? And what is kind of lucky for me and my kids, I would say, is we’re testing products all the time, so they’re getting a lot of different- a lot of times it will be, matter of fact, this morning, it was one of our test smoked sausages, a bacon and apples, and they just loved it, and they walk out the door-  

Brittany Hayes: I caught another one of your podcasts, Robb, where you were mentioning that sometimes the ground meats are a little bit more approachable than the whole muscle meats to kids, etc., as well, or even elderly, it starts to get hard on your teeth, etc. I also caught that your kids referenced crispy or not crispy bacon with a very cute term – crispy or slippery bacon.

Robb Wolf: Slippery, yeah. It’s not the end of the world cooking a plate of bacon where you have to pull things off at different times, but I’m like of course both of you kids couldn’t like the same variety of bacon. And of course, each of you have to be different on that. But with having stuff like this, even just learning knife skills, like teaching six-year-olds how to cut a piece of steak, it better be a buttery piece of steak, or you better have like a surgical quality cutting tool or it’s kind of tough. Yeah, and they better not slip up. But what we’ve found even on that like basic dinner table skills and learning to use the knife to cut up food, things like sausages and hot dogs are way more accessible. And so, they start learning some of these basic kind of fine motor skills with foods that are a little bit softer, a little bit easier to manage. We do jujitsu. The whole family does jujitsu, but when my wife and I go to a jujitsu class, then something like the hotdogs are an amazing option because they store well, the kids like them. They are able to put their lunch together. They go cut them up ahead of time, and there’s a microwave at the gym. So, we put it in a little pint Mason jar, and maybe they add a little bit of other stuff in there, and then they can heat it up and have a hot meal and everything. So, this is where do I wish every single meal they had was like a piece of grass fed steak or a hamburger or something? Yeah, but also, they wouldn’t eat it as well because they get burned out on stuff and they want some flavor variety and just some of that convenience. 

Neil Dudley: It parlays also to the you said my way isn’t for everybody; it’s for me, it works great for me. My kids teach me that. And wanting the bacon cooked differently – I’ve got one kid that loves ribeye, one kid wants a filet because she’s just adverse to the fat. So, I think everybody listening, you should be your own person. Like Robb’s painting you some great insights, some great education, but we’re not saying this is the only way. Everybody should go find their own thing that works for their body, and that requires a little testing. 

Robb Wolf: And I just have to mention, so like y’all’s andouille sausage, we usually do a cioppino, it is like an Italian seafood stew. And usually, we do some sort of a spicier sausage with that. So, we cube that up and put that in it. And the kids lost their minds. Like they love the cioppino as a baseline. But when we threw that in, they were like this is the best one we’ve ever had. And I’m like, well, we better stay on good terms with those guys. 

Neil Dudley: Yeah, that variety is always a lot of fun. So, talk about jujitsu a little bit. Like what makes a guy want to get beat up like that? Or do you beat up the other people? Like am I just the only one that gets beat up? 

Robb Wolf: Well, maybe it’d even be better looking at my wife. She’s 44 years old now, and she’s been doing jiujitsu for about three and a half, four years, and initially she wasn’t super interested in it. And as my coaches and I would hang out and we’d chat, and Nicki would be there, like she started hearing more and more about kind of the chess player element of it, that there’s a lot of strategy. Clearly, it’s very, very physical. And what ended up getting her into it was a women’s class first. And then she got some exposure in a pretty safe environment. And then as she went into the regular class, I was her partner for a good period of time. And then we really curate who she rolls with. And I’ll be 50 in January, so I’m not a spring chicken. I hang in there pretty good, but it’s the place I get community, it’s the place I get some exercise. For me being an entrepreneur, all I do is make decisions all day long, and I just don’t want to make another decision on anything. I want to be a student of something. I want to go learn and have a coach and have somebody else who is in charge and is in charge of me getting better. Now I have to take personal accountability on all that type of stuff, but this person is like, hey, Robb, I have these expectations on you and here’s where we’re going to go with this. For me, that’s the value of jiujitsu. And like having some self-defense awareness and all that stuff, that’s great. But it’s just, it’s a lot of fun. The community that we’re a part of is fantastic. I will say jiu gyms are a little bit like CrossFit gyms. Like they can really vary in the quality of the coaching. If you roll into a gym and it’s got men and women, it’s got some old beat-up has-beens like me, and it’s got a wide variety of people, it’s probably a good gym. If you go in there and it’s all 22-year-old guys with no neck and ears that look like something that should be on a buffet salad bar, that’s maybe not your gym, or maybe that’s not your class at a minimum. But yeah, I mean, jujitsu is just this- I don’t know, like I finally got into some meditation about three years ago. Like I think my life had reached a point of stress that I needed to do something, so I do some twice a day, 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the afternoon, some meditation. But the whole time I’m at jujitsu, I don’t think about work or the kids or the world burning down around me or anything. I’m just a hundred percent engaged in that moment. And when I’m done, I feel wonderful. And I mean, it’s rough, it’s hard work. I’m a brown belt now, so in theory, I know a little bit about this stuff, but I get my tail kicked all the time. But the environment that we have is very safe, very supportive, and it gives so much more than it takes. Those are the reasons why we do the jiujitsu. And the kids do it too. 

Neil Dudley: Well, it’s a family thing. It’s exercise. I think any entrepreneur or person in business, like I say entrepreneur a lot, but there are people that work for somebody else that just need these releases. I think go find those things. And real quick, let’s touch on a couple of things, then I want to let you go because I know you’ve got other things to do. But I do want to say I see you process through benefit and risk ratio a lot and whether or not you should eat salt or not, whether or not you should eat meat, whether or not you should whatever, pick anything. Have you heard of cold plunging? And what are your thoughts on that? 

Robb Wolf: Oh, man, I have, and I hate it personally. I just don’t like it. I’m way more of a sauna guy. Like give me a 180- or 200-degree hot, hot wooden box and stick me in there until I want to kick the door down to get out. And I think that these temperature extremes, I think, are really beneficial for folks. We live in the most amazing age that we’ve ever lived. Like we have more food than we know what to do with, we very rarely have cold or have extreme heat. And as good as that is, I think it also has some downsides for our health and being exposed to these temperature extremes can be really beneficial. It inoculates us against other types of stress. But I’ve got to say at just a personal level, the cold-water plunges and stuff are not my cup of tea. Like I way prefer the heat exposure, the sauna. You end up getting somewhat similar adaptations and benefits, and it could be a deal where if I just eased into it, if I started with some 72-degree water and I did that for a couple of weeks and then some 68 degree water, and I kind of stepped my way down. But that’s something worth mentioning in this whole story is any water that’s in that like 75 degrees or cooler level provides benefit for folks. So, you don’t need to do the like take a hammer and break the ice on the horse trough and jump in while it’s 18 degrees outside. Like you do not have to do that. If you want to work your way up to that, that’s wonderful. But there is benefit to be had from less extreme exposures. 

Neil Dudley: I don’t even know why I came to that. Like sometimes I don’t know where the question comes from. It was just interesting. I do a little CrossFit, about three times a week. I’m not- I just get injured and that kind of thing. So, I try to go light, try to do something that I’m really saying I’m there for the sweat, that’s really why I’m there. And then I go take a cold shower, and I really love that cold shower. I don’t even know what temperature the water is, but I like it. So, it’s interesting. There’s a great example of a couple of guys that just different ways to do it.

Robb Wolf: Yeah, my wife is pretty adept at doing the cold showers and seems to enjoy it. But I just about prefer a gun at the head over like a super cold shower, just not a huge fan. And I live in Montana. Like I’m pretty cold tolerant. I go hunting, I’m able to keep my body temperature up in cold environments and everything. But that just neck deep immersion in cold water is not my cup of tea. 

Neil Dudley: Awesome. Okay, so we’re wrapping this thing up. Was there anything that’s hot topic, on top of your mind that you just want to say, he, people, go pay attention to this right now in today’s world? If not, that’s fine. And Brit, is there anything that we’ve really just kind of flew by that could be really valuable?

Robb Wolf: Britt, you go first.

Brittany Hayes: I don’t think so. I mean, we’ve touched on a lot of really interesting topics. I guess I would just say what’s next for you, Robb? What are your plans with LMNT, and do you have any other books in the works? 

Robb Wolf: Nope, no books. Well, you know what, that’s a lie. I’m noodling on something, and it actually dovetails, Neil, a little bit into your question, kind of what are some things that folks maybe should be aware of? I do look at the world a lot through this lens of like cost benefit analysis and like risk reward and whatnot. And the last two years- for a long time, I’ve felt like folks – and this is going to sound arrogant, but I’ll just spit it out there – but I feel like folks don’t do a great job of doing cost benefit analysis when they’re thinking about health or a whole host of things. And so, I have been noodling on a book that a possible working title is the Consequence Economy. And it’s basically looking at things like COVID, the COVID response. I mean, it’s becoming pretty obvious that the United States government via the NIH, NIAID funded gain of function research, and the theoretical upside there was that we would learn more about potentially infectious diseases to be able to better manage them. But everybody, other than a few people who were involved with that, suggested that the risk was not remotely worth the reward. I would be completely in agreement to that. It seems like absolute madness. And there’s a whole host of topics that I think that, in general- gosh, I don’t want to divert this too far off, but there was this thing called the Cuomo Test, New York Mayor Cuomo. And he basically said if shutting down society saves one life, then it’s worth doing. And this was kind of the justification around like the whole COVID response. And this is an absolutely well-intentioned but absolutely, it’s just so divorced from reality position. I don’t even know where to start with that because if we really took that at face value, then we wouldn’t drive anymore. 40 to 60,000 Americans a year, mainly kids, die due to motor vehicle accidents. So, okay, now we don’t drive so that we save lives. Well, now we can’t work, and now food can’t get delivered. So now people are going to starve to death in the masses because we made this terrible decision that started with good intention. But there’s just a reality that our world is fraught with a certain amount of risk. And we try to mitigate that risk I think where and when we can, but we’re entering a phase of our cultural development where people have been duped into this idea that they can make risk disappear entirely. And there are ways that you could kind of do that. We could lock people in a room, let them go nowhere, deliver food to their door. They can’t have sharp objects. That sounds remarkably like prison though. And in that scenario, I guess in a lot of ways you’re going to be remarkably safe, but I don’t know what that means for life. And like how do you run a society around that? Like just life is an inherently risky thing. And again, we should be smart about how we mitigate risk. And I have seven- and nine-year-old daughters, I think about the stuff that they do all the time. And I try to say, okay, is this just an emergency room visit potentially? Or is this- our rules are kind of like you can’t do anything that has super high probability of taking out an eye or damaging your brain or damaging your spine. Like outside of that, we’re pretty good – a broken arm would suck, a broken leg would suck, but it would be a great learning experience, and we will recover from that. So, I guess that that’s just kind of the thing that I- And I think a lot of people get that, but there are folks out there that are so terrified by life that they are making decisions that, unbeknownst to themselves, are going to feed into far worse scenarios. 

Neil Dudley: Yeah, you’ve got to think about mental health. Like just it’s got to be bad to your mental health to be totally isolated and safe. I mean, I enjoy the risk, and it could be argued that I don’t mitigate it enough. And for sure, in my younger years, and maybe that’s a male thing, maybe that’s a cowboy thing. I don’t know.

Robb Wolf: Biology makes a few more boys than girls because we don’t all make it. 

Neil Dudley: I think that’s a great segue into thank you so much for being here. Folks, go follow Robb, checkout LMNT, be a part of the Healthy Rebellion. I think you’ll learn a lot. And Robb, if there’s anything we can ever do for you, we would love a chance to help and just return this favor. 

Robb Wolf: Thank you. It’s a huge honor being on the show. If you ever want me back, I am honored to bring down property values, so just let me know. 

Neil Dudley: Great. All right, cool. Everybody, thanks for joining us. And we’ll be back again in another week or month and have another person that I guarantee will have good information for you hear and roll around in the old noodle. 

Hey everybody. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Pederson’s Farms Podcast. It’s been a blast bringing this to you, and I sure hope you enjoyed it and found value. If you did, tell a friend, share it out on social media, hit that subscribe button or go check us out at pedersonsfarms.com. We sure hope you do. And thanks for being here.