Robb Wolf - Why Market-Based Healthcare Is Fitness's Next Big Opportunity

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It feels like we've been here before, maybe because we were.

Yeah, we were. So we're gonna get in a lot of stuff, longevity, and all that, but we were just joking about, you know, uh Grok and Chat GPT, and you were saying how you're using it to learn Italian.

Yeah, it it's wacky, so it will do the spoken bit just as well as as written. Like the first couple of things that I did with it, I was like, hey, grok. So I started messing around with some Duolingo, and it's it's cool, and I think, particularly if somebody has a background in a language like the uh the the Lily AI feature where you can talk to it, is pretty legit. Like Nikki is far better at Italian than I am. She's conversationally fluent by a mile, and so she'll just sit and have these conversations with Lily, but it's also a little bit constrained, and so I I put into Grok, hey, how would you order out like what other resources could I do? And it recommended this this site like Italki, where you can talk to you know living, breathing coaches and and all that stuff. But I just start one day, I was just like, Ciao, Grac, buongiorno, comista, and it just started talking to me in Italian. I'm like, oh shit, like this thing never gets tired. And I I just prompted it, hey, if I mispronounce something, please like let's talk for a minute and then fix what I you know, highlight what I got wrong and give me a transcription of this thing. And uh I don't know what other languages it would do well, I have a feeling all of them, but it was um it was kind of crazy because the like the it's a little bit challenging booking people on the Saitaki platform because they're nine hours ahead for the most part, like most of them are in Italy. And Grok's always there. If I want to spend three minutes taking a dump or something, I'll just you know want to want to practice. Grok is there for you, you know. So it it and before we rolled, we were talking a little bit about sorting through some health-related stuff within the family, and it was shockingly effective. It's not always right. Like I've talked to some of my doctor friends or like it gets some some things wrong here and there, but I think on both the diagnosis side and then on integrating treatment side, it's gonna be really hard to keep up with that. Like it's gonna be shockingly good really, really quickly. Yeah.

Well, I would say even over the last year, so I have I use Chat GPT for this stuff. I mean, I think I'm actually gonna start playing around more with Groc because I've heard such great things. But even over the last year that I've noticed, you know, going through my blood work or asking advice on different things, you know, peptide protocols, whatever. I know some people will cringe when I say that, but you know, yeah, I'm just I'm not the only one doing it. I guarantee it, right? It's gotten so much better, except with like the deep research functions and now it's more scientifically backed. And it just it seems like every time I log in, it gets a little bit better and it's happening at such a breakneck speed, it's pretty wild. I mean, I I think in another year it's gonna be pretty trustworthy, man.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It it yes, yeah. And there's uh I'm actually working on a uh piece um AI and and healthcare. And I'm I'm not endorsing this outfit specifically, but a friend of mine, Michael Hines, who runs straight blast gym in in Texas, he's been working with these folks ways too well. And uh they do hormone replacement, peptides, diet. It has an AI interface. Michael was talking to the AI. He was like, so I I've followed a lot of Rob Wolfe's work. What do you think? And I don't know if it was just blowing smoke up his skirt because he said that he followed. Oh, we like Rob Wolf, like his paleo keto approach to things is bang on with what we do. And uh the the AI appears to get better and better as you interface with it more. Like the more information you put in, the more granular you can get, the better this thing does. And it it uh it has effectively infinite memory. And you know, these things are really, really good at picking up patterns. And at the end of the day, health is just pattern recognition. And I think that where, you know, the most brilliant doctor you could you could think of, like Peter Ortiz, like of the people I've met, I've seen met few people have who have an operating memory as vast as his is. And his is a thimble compared to a swimming pool of the the most mediocre AI, you know, and so that's gonna be interesting going forward. I I do like I just did a big write-up on all my gut issues and all the difficulties I had dealing with it and whatnot. And it was an expensive process to kind of unpack all that stuff. But this could democratize the best medicine that we have available. The the ability to sift through things is going to be effectively like at almost a zero cost kind of proposition. What's going to be really interesting to me is I would argue that maybe like Chat GPT is a little bit more captured by like pharma and whatnot, like you don't get as dynamic of answers as, say, like uh a grok or maybe these ways to well folks. They the thing that's gonna really determine how good these things are is not just the diagnostic side, I think is gonna be very uniform, but what do you actually do now? Like, what do you have a little bit of an ancestral health lens? Do you have a little bit of an evolutionary biology lens, functional medicine lens, or are you just pumping people straight to like orthodox pharma? And I think that that's gonna be the real determination there. But like this process of figuring out my gut issues, you know, who knows how many thousands of dollars I've spent on it, that should, in theory, within a year or two, drop that cost for the average person down to just about zero. Like to your point, like a $30 a month subscription. And then you'll need to find practitioners to be able to help and support you through that process. But I'm I I don't know what it's gonna mean for doctoring itself. Like if you're a meatbot doctor, I don't I don't know what that means for those individuals, but I do think that this could democratize like the best elements that we have of medicine, functional medicine, and it should make it damn near free for everybody. And then, you know, then it's gonna be the implementation that you know will be interesting to see how that happened.

Here's a fun question for you, Rob. Kind of a selfish question, too. So if you were gonna start all over again, so if someone's listening, they're like, Okay, I want my own Garock chap, what what tests would you get to feed it? Like what what data would you feed it? If you were gonna start all over again, clean slate, right? What would you give it? How would you prompt it? Any any high-level guidelines from what you've learned? I know it's not like your expertise, but obviously you play around with it a lot and you have a deep understanding of health and biosciences. So yeah, where would you start? Like a starter's kit for building your own rock dock.

Man, that's a really good question. I guess a place that you could start, even though I I think that genetics are overhyped, because I think at the end of the day, the epigenetic piece, like the way that we can modify our genetics, is really profound. But you could use something really inexpensive, like a 23andMe, I forget what it is now. It's maybe like a hundred bucks or something, but you get a pretty complete genomic screen. I think there are other options out there too. If you don't want the Chinese owning your your uh you know genetic information, but you know, something like that where you've got like this full genetic thing, and then you can you can drop that raw data report into it. I know you can with Grok. It'll you know, you drop in a PDF and it'll just just sucks all that stuff up and integrates it, and you could have that that thread running. And then I think like a basic metabolic panel, basic hormonal panel would be a great place to go. So maybe for less than $200, like you you could have a really rockin', you know, baseline of your health. And you could really just use that to establish, okay, are there like some predispositions? Like Nick Norwitz has has talked a lot about he's an ApoE4-4 carrier. So like there's this, in theory, higher risk of like Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease and all this stuff, but he also has suffered ulcerative colitis, so he's found that a ketogenic diet super duper helps him. He has sky-high lipoproteins and cholesterol levels. But at the end of the day, when he's sorting all this stuff out, he really feels like the metabolic protection that he gets from the ketogenic diet is going to outweigh the the possible complicating factors of the uh the APOE4-4 genotype. But I think that I guess to recap on that, like I would do some basic genetic screening, maybe upload that, do some basic metabolic panel plus hormone profile as go as comprehensive as you could get. For women, that's gonna generally be more complex because they're if they're pre-menopausal, like they're gonna be as part of a cycle. So you're gonna have to like benchmark that. Maybe one additional thing that you could throw in there is a Dutch test because it just covers so much of your hormonal milieu that you could upload that and then get really granular sense of where your metabolic pathways are, your hormonal pathways, whether you're adequate or deficient because of the organic acid test. So it'll tell you if you're you're deficient anywhere and missing some metabolic substrates that help you. I mean, you're probably in under 300 bucks to be able to stack that thing up. And then if anything goes wrong with you, then you can always then input updated information that then that that you know, let's just say Groc could say, well, based off of where you were, baseline, and then symptomology that you have, these are maybe the top five things that you might consider digging into.

It's wild that two years ago I never would have had this conversation on this podcast. It wouldn't have been that's how fast. Even a year ago, maybe I never would have had this conversation. And I think there's a couple other things. Like I feed it some historical wearable data, so HRVE, resting heart rate, especially because the seasonality, you both both of us live in Montana. Seasonality is a big deal, right? I start to notice big trends of in the wintertime. Um essentially it's one, you know, four or five month stress test on my body. Right. And uh another thing, like supplementation, you and I were talking about in a recording that um we never got to actually publish. Yeah, about like our you know, our new ventures into HRT and TRT, and you know, I start giving it that information. And you know, a lot of it, what I found too, just from a human perspective, is that if I went to my typical medical professional, told them some of the things that I play around with with you know HRT and TRT now, I would get a lot of judgment. I get no judgment. Right. And it's very informational, it's very fact factual, and it gives me like, hey, here's so I can make a good decision on my own. Yeah, I think I I go into a lot of the um when I do talk to medical professionals about anything that's going on with me, uh which I'm lucky I haven't had a whole lot, but I can go in and way more informed, right? And have a direction. Like I almost run the meeting with my doctor now. I'm like, hey, this is what this is what I want. Like I want a PSA, I want a couple other things, and then you're like, well, why do you am I just can we just do it? That's what I want.

It kind of sucks, but uh doctors with some exception, but it I would say that they're turning ever more into just gatekeepers, yeah, or just this intermediary between you and testing you and therapeutic interventions, and can't be a great place for them to be either, you know. Like that can't feel good, but yeah.

No, I feel for them, all this education, best intentions in the world, all I want to do when they got into was practice medicine, right? In this in this way that they had imagined in their mind it would be, and it's just they're just confined. It's yeah, it's it's a brutal system. Yeah. Uh one of the things I want to get into because we had addressed this before. I know you gave in a talk, like I think it was longevity, are we trying too hard? And I've been thinking about this since our last conversation of like you and I talked years ago, and you had said something to me, it was either on the recording or not on the recording. When you came out with a paleo solution book, right? Amazing. Like I gifted it all over the place, right? I was a CrossFit guy. I was all in, right? Paleo and CrossFit CrossFit could solve any problem in the world. I was firmly, firmly believering. But you I think you say you look back, if you look back, you could have like you would have productized it somehow, like made it into like a line of like pre-made meals or like a 30-day challenge, which we all know, you know, some have been very successful with this paleo-ish 30-day challenge lifestyle thing. And I look at like this longevity thing that's going on right now, and I'm like, is any of it actually new? Or is it just a repackaging? Right? Has someone learned, like, have we learned as an industry maybe to repackage what we've always done? You know, and CrossFit is very similar. It was like, well, he didn't Greg Glassman didn't invent the overhead squat, right? He didn't invent many of these things, but he just packaged it together in a new way that people really like. So when you look at longevity, I look at us now as like essentially it's just you know, it's uh it's biohacking and fitness have come together and they've rebranded in a in a way together. Like what's new in longevity? What's the actual breakthroughs here in your mind versus what things were five to ten years ago?

I'm gonna sound like a huge dick with this, but most of what I see in the longevity space is what I consider majoring in the minors. And or maybe that's just inevitably what folks want to focus on, because whether you go to, you know, I have a tiny footprint now because I've tried to flee social media and I just because of certain obligations have to keep a certain certain amount of presence there. But uh, let's say, like a Peter Atia or Rhonda Patrick, like most of their messaging is pretty high level, like lift some weights, zone two cardio, some high-intensity interval training, usually circadian biology. And that's maybe like 90 or 95 percent. And like Peter has played around a lot with fasting and then abandoned it, which I I will kind of pat myself on the back. I think I'm about 10 years ahead of those those guys on that because I was just on the scene earlier. I was a huge proponent of intermittent fasting initially, and then deeply regretted releasing the piece that I I published in 2005 out to the CrossFit scene because uh I just suggested to these type A people who are already like exercising at the margin of human capacity, hey, why don't you skip a bunch of meals and and introduce an additional stressor on top of everything you're you're doing? But I just see the you know, this focus on telomere length and these exotic pharmaceuticals and all this stuff. Like there might be something really interesting lurking out there, but if you're not exercising at some decent cadence, you know, including strength training, like all the metabolic pathways, like you gotta work your power, you gotta work your your uh anaerobic endurance, VO2 max, high intensity interval stuff, lift some weights, circadian biology, which I look at that both as like your sleep and photo period and also like sunlight on on our skin. And I think in the last thing that we we were trying to record in the internet wasn't helping us, I had mentioned there's a great, it's an observational study, but it suggests that people that get adequate sunlight have as reduced all cause mortality as the difference between a packaday smoker and a non-smoker. So adequate sun exposure is as protective as not smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. And these are things that for me absolutely improve our lives today, and it'll probably improve it tomorrow. Like so many of these other things, like the really massive emphasis on fasting, which seems to have kind of it's not as powerful as it was maybe like five years ago, this fear of protein, fear of mTOR activation and whatnot, I think that people have kind of grown through a lot of that. But my idea around this stuff is if it'll improve your life today and maybe it improves it tomorrow, then it's probably a win. And that's where you should put like 95% of your focus. And then from there, there might be some small molecule stuff that's really interesting from a longevity perspective. Some of the diabetes drugs, the the SGLT ones, I think um, they encourage the kidneys to to spill excess glucose and and get rid of it. They seem to have some interesting other longevity effects, like at the um like cellular senescence level, encouraging senescent cells to actually reverse the senescence or to to just go through apoptosis, which you want to be careful with. That we have this Haflick limit where cells can replicate about 50 times and then they burn through the telomeres, and then that's kind of it. So I think that that's one of the problems of excessive fasting is it's kind of indiscriminate in getting rid of quasi-senescent cells. There's some interesting studies where animals that are are intermittent fasted really hard actually have a shortened lifespan because they run out of stem cells. Like it just burns through the whole stem cell pool. So I think that there's kind of a balance with that.

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You know, possible interventions are just the basics. And people just get bored of the basics really quickly, you know, and and yeah, yeah, I'm not not sure how much more to flesh that stuff out. But I do see a lot of the folks in like the biohacking community, they seem to be majoring in the minors. Like they may give some degree of airplay to the the basics, but I think the basics are just what you you have to have in place to the best of your ability to be able to benefit from any of this other stuff. Like there might be the most magical small molecule stuff, or you, you know, like tidalophil is really interesting. It's this erectile dysfunction medication, but depending on the dosing, seems to reduce all-cause cardiovascular mortality by like up to 30%. And it probably improves your sex life too, along the way. So it's one of these things that may improve your life today, and then maybe, you know, really remarkably cardioprotective over the long haul as well. And this is usually it's been studied, and people are pretty sick. Like there are people with when you look at the study specifically on the cardioprotective benefits of tadalophil, it's in folks with cardiovascular disease, with vascular issues, with erectile dysfunction, and they're getting this benefit. And so if you're otherwise healthier, is there even a greater augmented benefit to that? Maybe there's none, you know, maybe you've already addressed all of the upside, but it's um very low downside risk. So I do think that there are some things at the margins that we could think about to augment with that. But if you're not getting a tan, lifting some weights, doing some cardio, like I I can't think of anywhere better that you could start than that.

Well, you and I have talked, we're both right around the mid-century mark, as far as our age. And you know, by this time, I think you described it as a speciation event. Like you go to some of these uh, you know, reunions or you see people you haven't seen in decades or two, and you can really start to see where the fundamentals over time have made a tremendously big difference, right? So maybe speak to that. Like what do you yeah, what have you seen so far in your lifetime of how how these changes can go over over time?

Well, I I mean you you couch your question was probably better than my answer, will be on on that. I remember my 10-year high school reunion, you could see a little bit of change in people, but not not massive. The 20-year high school reunion was a major eye-opener. Was it the people who had continued to eat pretty well and exercise and whatnot, like they looked pretty damn good. And then there were folks that it was hard to even recognize them. My 30 year was during COVID, so I didn't get uh to go do that. But you know, I'll I'll catch a little glimpse of folks online here and there. And even though like like I had this six-year run of these gut issues with these gut parasites and all the stuff that I think beat me up pretty badly, but I continued to lift some weights, do some cardio, deal with my circadian biology as as best as I can. And I one, I think that that's the reason I was able to get through that stuff at all, was that I I maintained that that baseline of just the best health that I could cobble together. And then it's kind of like compound interest, but it in you know, reverse, instead of accumulating all of the advanced glycation and products from blood sugar swings and and dyslipidemia and all that type of stuff, like the beneficiary of almost 54 years now of generally pushing things towards a health-centric direction. And it's it's possible I could keel over tomorrow from a cardiac event or a stroke or get cancer or something. But you know, my life up to this point, other than some struggling through some health issues, which would have only been worse if I was in poorer shape, you know, it it's kind of remarkable the differentiation that I see. And if I do land in front of a doctor, a healthcare provider, and they're like, How old are you? I'm like, 54, and they're kind of jaw dropped. Uh it's a very different thing than what they they experience in the average person coming through the door.

Well, I think you and I talked about this too. It's like I remember when I was young and thinking of my dad at the age 50.

Yeah.

You know, like, dude, that's old.

Yeah.

That's old. Like, and I look at myself as I creep up on that number now, and a lot of people that I hang out with here and in white fishing, you know, they were skiing 50 days a year, right? We were you know out doing stuff, and everybody's seems to be holding their shit together pretty well. And I don't know why that is. Is that like why over one or you know, one generation essentially has it shifted so hard? Is it just the lifestyle back then? Were the stressors different? Is then you know, is the education better? Is it medicine? Like why do you think that is?

You know, it it's funny because I think it's gone. I think you have a cross-section of people that are really pretty fit relative to their predecessors, and then we have folks that are maybe arguably much sicker than their predecessors, even though it's a bigger gap, I think. You know, my dad, my mom and dad started smoking at 12 and 16 year old, respectively. My dad drank a lot, pretty poor diets on both of them. I think that they they had for sure insulin resistant since their 30s, uh almost certainly diabetes since their 50s. Both of them live to the age of 71, respectively, which I was talking with uh Dr. Anthony J about this. He did a run through of my genetics. And somewhere in there I said, yeah, I have a family history of cardiovascular disease. And his eyebrows kind of went up, and he's like, Well, talk to me about that. And like, and I described what I just said. And he's like, you know, that actually isn't what what that is suggestive of is some really good genetics because the people who have poor genetics who smoke and drink and eat poorly, they die in their 30s and 40s. Your parents, even though they had some medications that probably kept them in the in the fight longer, they made it to 71. And so that actually tells me there were some pretty good genetics there, you know, quite quite the contrary. And I was going, huh? I'd never really thought about it like that. But I do think about my dad at 50, like he had a lot of orthopedic issues, certainly not any type of like work capacity or any of that type of stuff. And by the time he was 70, it was it was the classic, horrible sarcopenia, no muscle mass. And he had had multiple uh uh amputations, started with his his big toe, part of his foot, all of his foot below the knee amputation because of uh complications with the the diabetes. And I think that I'm gonna be on a very different vector than that. Again, you know, who who knows, but it, you know, it could be something else that it gets me. Maybe it's cancer or something, but it's uh I just think back to where my dad was at it, say like 54, and he seemed old. Like he wasn't wrestling. You know, I still go to Juju and and do that stuff, lift some weights, do some cardio, do some hiking. I'm definitely more careful than I used to be because I I joke that guys my age don't get injured. We just have near fatal events, and so it's you know, you want to be careful with that, but it's a very different story at this point. I think that there's more information available, but there's also more distractions in a way. Like our food system is more broken. You have to really, really work to not in like wired to eat. I made the case that if you're not sick, broken, etc., in this modern food environment, you're kind of screwing up because, from like an evolutionary biology perspective, like we should just be overeating and sedentary, and and you have to really actively work to not do that. Like that is our normal default mode, you know, to to save energy and to eat everything that's not nailed down, because in an ancestral environment, you didn't necessarily know where the next meal was. And you didn't go out and just exercise pell mell because you needed to conserve energy and calories, you know, and we're in a very different environment at this point. So you have to actively work against our normal predilections to be able to, it's almost a self-defense mechanism against modern living.

It's a really nice segue. Thank you for that, into one of the topics I want to cover you today, because it's been about a year and a half, I think, since we we recorded on this podcast. And one of the things we were talking about last time was GLP ones. It's come a long way in the last year and a half. And I think we have more data now to see um if its efficacy, um how safe it is, um, you know, what the promise is, because we really laid out last time, and we don't need to hash it, but like how if we continue on this path with obesity and all the metabolic disease that come from just being overweight, right? Like our health system is gonna implode. Right. It's really bad. And I don't think people really concern themselves with it as much as they should. So now that we've had a little bit of time, a little while, you know, water under the bridge here, like how are you feeling about the applications of GLP1? Is it a major solution to some of the problems we have or still waiting to see?

I think net net. I think it's been a beneficial intervention. I I think that we'll still see what the long-term consequences are. Like they're not perfect. Uh historically, we have seen some fairly significant muscle wasting with some folks on these medications. I was just talking to my friend Luis Philosenior, the co-founder of Keto Gains, and he was mentioning a uh a brand new entrant into that GLP1 scene, and I I forget the name of it, but it appears to have little if any muscle wasting attached to it. Like they've gotten in and tweaked some some variables on it. And I think that we're getting craftier too around if people want to, if they do lift some weights, if they do have a very protein-forward kind of dietary approach, then a lot of that muscle wasting is a non-issue. And so I still think net what these GLPs seem to do is really modify one's appetite. And that's really where the rubber hits the road. Like whether keto works for you or vegan or whatever, like you have to figure out a way of eating where you just don't overeat in this modern hyperpalatable food environment. And it that's really easy to say it's super hard to do. But on these GLP ones, it seems like it's fairly easy for folks not to overeat. Like there's some really powerful appetite control baked in the cake there. And I think net net, that seems to be a positive. Again, we'll see how this looks downstream. But what I'm curious about on a lot of this, and I forget if we talked about this before, but it's incredibly expensive to deal with something like type 2 diabetes. There's kidney issues, like a lot of people end up on dialysis, which is really expensive and difficult to deal with. There's blindness, there's amputations and whatnot. But the tsunami that we're facing is neurodegenerative disease. And you don't just medicate that away. You don't put people on glucophage and maybe a little insulin and send them to dialysis two or three days a week. You need 24-7 nursing care or you need euthanasia at millions of people a year. I mean that because you have people who are incapable of caring for themselves. Like the just the diabetes-related costs that we're facing. For years, the Congressional Budget Office has been projecting that we would hit this inflection point about like 2035, that we were just like out of money dealing with just that diabetesity related side. I haven't seen any good projections on the uh the neurodegenerative side because I don't think anybody wants to know. I don't think people want to talk about that. And so I haven't seen a ton on if this improvement in general metabolic health is is turning the boat with regards to neurodegenerative issues. But like that's another thing out there that like we just we have to address that, or you're you're dealing with horrible situations, you know, just wards of people with Parkinson, Alzheimer's, senile dementia, can't care for themselves, need 24-7 nursing care. Like, how do you how does one pay for that at mass? You know, with this large, like the boomer population aging and going into this scene, smaller populations behind them trying to pay taxes to support all that. Like it just doesn't work. So even if there are some non-trivial side effects on the GLP ones and some of their Gen 2, Gen 3 options, I still have a feeling that it's gonna end up being a net win, you know, long term because it should bring down those those costs. But we'll we'll again we'll see. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, it's it's been interesting in my journey too, because my mom's 87 now and she lives nearby in uh an assisted living. Um, I see her often I'm I'm over there and just interacting with other residents of the place, and it's just eye-opening. I don't know how to explain, like, okay, so this is what the last 10, 20 years of one's life could look like. And here's these flash, I don't think that anybody's gonna shock anybody. Very few men in these places. Right. Very few men. So I was like, gosh, if I even make it to one of these, I'm winning, right? I think at some point. But you start to see like the the neurogenic decline and and you know, health choices. My mom is, I mean, we're talking about her parents genetically, and like my mom's like the Keith Richards of moms, dude. She's 87. I don't know how it's working, but she's just you know, she eats like shit. Has her bourbon every night, and you know, she sleeps a lot. I guess that's a benefit. Uh, right. So I I don't know how she's doing it, but I think she's gonna live past 90. Right. Really, it's incredible. But you you start to see like how these whole things play out, and it's more tangible now to me. It's not just numbers. I'm like, okay, I see the actual effect of what happens to people's families, and it's not it's not pretty. No, no, no, no. It's not pretty. So as an industry, I guess this is a question that is more actionable, but when we're I think we all talk about it quite often. Like, I think we're most people in the industry are kind of aware of like, okay, that we got some really problem, big problems coming down the pipe. They're here now, they're visible, but we're just not getting these people in our gyms, right? We're just not most of the time. And we've we've been talking about it for decades at the other 80%. Um I'm sure you've been part of many of those conversations, especially in early on CrossFit and like the hospital CrossFit Health movement that started early, seems to be making a resurgence. But what can we do as an industry? Like, do we should we do we need to create different programs? Do we just say, you know, we're never gonna get there, just let the medical community deal with it? Because even Planet Fitness in the recent quarterly report said they're abandoning the couch potato.

Yeah.

No longer marketing to them. Yeah. Right. So is is it hopeless from our our industry perspective? Or have you seen models where like, hey, I think we can make a dent here? Can we help? Can we contribute?

I mean, there's that really trite story about the the person walking on the beach and there's starfish and they're throwing the starfish back in the water. There's millions of them that get washed up, and it's like, well, you're not even going to make a dent in that. And it's like, well, it mattered to that one, it mattered to that one. I think we do the best job we can, be as open as we can to including people in in these spaces for fitness and for community, like that other pillar. Like I think so much of the the hidden benefit of CrossFit was that that third place phenomena where you wanted to go there and people knew you and they would call you and like shake you down when you weren't at the gym. And I think that that is as it's maybe as important to our long-term health as the exercise is potentially. You know, and when you're around a cohort of people that are generally doing healthier stuff, you have a tendency to do healthier things yourself. So I do think there's a reality that we're only going to reach so many people. Maybe this democratization of really good information could be super helpful. Like we were talking about the AI, like maybe the best doctoring information in the world could be uh largely available to everybody within the healthcare model in the United States, and this gets super controversial, like people get really prickly about this stuff. But this third-party payer system, I couldn't think of something worse than what we have, where post-World War II, the bulk of healthcare got tied into the employer. And, you know, people have this expectation that healthcare should be free, even though tomatoes and onions and cars, nothing else is free that way. You know, other even car insurance, and maybe it will pick up some windshield wiper blades for you, or a couple of things that ostensibly like reduce your likelihood of having an accident. But there was a time when we we paid for catastrophic healthcare coverage. If if you got hit by a train, if you you got cancer, like there was this catastrophic coverage. And then we largely paid out of pocket. And there were some incentives there, I think, to stay healthier because you just you you, you know, you were going to pay directly for unhealthy behaviors. And the current model that we have there, it is impossible to incentivize good behavior. Like you and I pay into a pool. We're comparatively very low consumers of broad healthcare. Like I end up paying out of pocket for all the other, the other shit that I do want to do, the genetic testing, you know, uh uh figuring out my gut issues and all that. Like insurance covered none of that. But there's no way what we're doing is the one or two healthy people are trying to float the boat of the hundreds of comparatively unhealthy people. And if we were able to change things in such a way that uh you could have inclusion-exclusion criteria within insurance and like Medishares, these faith-based Medishares can do that. Like they will they will cover healthcare costs, but they also they they will drop you if you're you're not complying with some sort of you know exercise and dietary regimen and all that type of stuff. And this gets people, again, they get really angry. But if there was some way to hold people's feet to the fire to comply with better diet and lifestyle, then maybe this becomes something where you get a groundswell of people that do go into gyms and do community-based fitness practices and uh make better dietary choices and stuff like that. This is a bunch of the work that I did ages ago with that City Zero project. We did some work with the Chickasaw Nation around this. And I've seen it work at smaller scale. I've still been unable over a 15-year period now to uh get something that we can we can scale. I'm hopeful that there might be something like that waiting on the back end of some of these AI-based interfaces. So if we could change the payer model around that, then there might be something really powerful there. But again, like our human nature is to be comparatively lazy and to eat all the stuff. And we're doing that well. We do that really well. We subsidize our food industry to produce food that makes us sick. And so I think that like changing food subsidies would be an interesting place to start. Like we shouldn't subsidize the raw materials going into junk food. Like an apple should be less expensive than a tweakie, and currently it's not. And that's just ridiculous. So I do think there's a couple of different angles that we can tackle this, but we are just literally fighting basic human nature. The people who choose to be fit and make decisions around eating better, they're kind of outliers. But I think those people should also probably be rewarded for that. And we should stack some incentives favorably in that direction. And then maybe you you, you know, if it's a very narrow slice of the bell curve that that does that, maybe you you expand that to some degree. And that can have huge cost savings and benefits to society and benefits to the individuals that are healthier.

You're not the first one to say something similar to that on this podcast. And I guess uh, you know, I look at like CrossFit Medical Society and what they're attempting to do. I'm sure you're you're you're keeping an eye on that, or at least you're familiar with it, you know, getting healthy people essentially opt out of the current system and developing their own new system. You know, kind of I'm sure it's similar to the faith-based. I mean, CrossFit isn't that different than religion, really. Yep. You know, how you know as a community combine together, put funds in and cover each other for catastrophic. And then, you know, there's a lot of different benefits to that. And I guess here's a question, and this is probably another hour podcast, but we don't have time for that. But I'll see if you can do it quickly. If you were going to burn it all down and start all over again with the health insurance model or um health reimbursement, whatever you want to call it, what what would that look like?

It it'd be super simple. Like you'd have a health savings account that could be spent electively in its pre-tax dollars, and I would actually increase the amount of money that could go into that so that it could be part of your retirement plan as well. We would have a catastrophic plan. We would do some health screening that would kind of help to inform, and this is very similar to life insurance. Like life insurance, if you buy life insurance when you're 20, it's like dirt cheap. When you're 54, like me and male, it's like eye-wateringly expensive, you know, because there's just a reality. There's a there's an inescapable law of nature that each couple of years you keep adding on, the likelihood of some form of death just starts increasing exponentially. But you would have this catastrophic health plan. But so if something massive occurred, then you would, you know, you could, you, you wouldn't be wiped out, you wouldn't be completely cleaned out. But then by and large, you would, it's cash and carry. Like you, you pay for the medicine that you you use. You pay for the pharmaceuticals that you use. There would be complete transparency between practitioners and pharmaceutical stuff. There's not like a cash price and an insurance price. Like the fact that there's an insurance price is why these pharmaceuticals end up being maybe $3,000 a month for the insurance scene and $5 if you were to pay cash for it. So we would need to really just reintroduce some market-based signaling in this program. And people will say, well, what about folks with pre-existing issues and all this type of stuff? We are being destroyed by the weight and the cost of preventable metabolic disease. If we dealt with that, then the outliers, some people who have genetic issues or things like that, we would be so wealthy and so well situated to be able to address that. And a ton of these things, too, are usually metabolic or autoimmune-driven themselves. And if we overlay some of this, like ancestral health functional medicine, we could help a ton of these other folks with these congenital or or inherited diseases or just bad luck. Like we instead of the system collapsing around us, we would probably have a enough success to be able to help those people very effectively. Again, like I I've started and stopped a book a couple of different times on like the history of healthcare in the United States. I would love to read that. It always is something that's like, oh, I'm going to get canceled 10 ways from something on the list. But it it's um you you really have to understand that when we coupled insurance to the employer post-World War II, and they did this because there were wage freezes during World War II, because they didn't want people at home getting paid better than the folks who were deployed and fighting this war. But there was a workaround for employers to get better people to incentivize their packages, which was basically uh free or subsidized healthcare insurance. And this is where this whole thing started. But it decoupled all the market signaling that occurred. Before that time, again, people had catastrophic plans that they would buy. They paid cash and carry for the bulk of what they did day to day. And there was a massive network of free hospitals for people who were legitimately poor. Like you and I grew up, uh you'd always see ads for like the Shriner's hospitals. Those things have virtually died because the way that the incentives and the way that the government has approached these free healthcare models, these philanthropic healthcare models, it has killed them. Like there are lots of people with lots of money that would love to support like children's hospitals and things like that to make it free for these kids to get lower or no cost treatment. And it has been utterly destroyed by the third-party payer system. And again, there will be people who listen to this and are like, bullshit, you know, and they get angry and they want a single payer model. All I would ask is like, do you really understand the mechanisms of why we are here? And if you don't, then you're liable to make a decision that's going to make things worse. I was just reading this article today. There's a pretty famous guy, God, what was he? He's like a musician in the UK, 70 years old, and he needed a knee replacement. He was two years out in the uh National Health Service waiting for a knee replacement. So he started poking around online and he found that he could go to Lithuania and like get a five-star hotel, get his knee replacement. The the results, like everybody talking about it, were just like raving about the great treatment, the great care. And a town car picked this dude up at his house, fly him first class to Lithuania, replace his knee, kept him, you know, physic 24-7 physical therapy, nursing, sent him home. And it was it was a tiny sum to do that. And and this is a guy that's fairly famous and has decent resources. And he was, you know, looking at spending two more years of kind of agonizing knee pain waiting for a knee replacement. And this is within one of the most entrenched single payer systems on the planet. And my only point to that is the people with resources there, go find a market solution. So, you know, these these single payer systems, I think they work when you have a young, relatively healthy population, when you have a homogenized group of people that have very similar value systems and don't take advantage of the system. But once you start getting aged people, when you have low trust societies enter your scene that that have a tendency to take advantage of and exploit these systems, you have to change things. Like you, you, you just have to. And I I would again just point out that at the end of the day, it is becoming a globally market-based healthcare system because people are just going abroad to get the healthcare. They're they're opting out. Yeah. So at the end of the day, this is kind of where it's going to go. It's just, would you rather have more of those options for the poor, for people who are disadvantaged, or do you want fewer? Do you want those people literally trapped in a system that they can't get out of? And again, it it's so controversial and people get so mad and so emotional, like you don't care about people. It's like, I really do. But it's counterintuitive sometimes. It's counterintuitive. It is.

Yes, this is caring. It's just not the route to caring that you feel comfortable with. Yeah. And yeah, that's a hard thing. I mean, gosh, you're like, if I don't I haven't heard anyone defend the current system well. Let's just put it that way. Like, it's easy to attack. Yeah. We all feel it.

It is. You know, you'll have folks that will say, like, in Canada, in the UK, Scandinavia, where they have like a single-payer system, they'll talk about how like if they get a cut, they need stitches. Like, it would have been 20 grand to go get it dealt with the United States, and it's free there. That that's legit. That's totally cool. But also, Canada's shifted into this mode, like their their made program where they're they're uh instead of treating people, they're just offering euthanasia for like very treatable situations because it's easier to kill them than it is to treat them. And this is the end state of that form of health care. Again, people get really angry about this stuff, you know. But there was a a military veteran from the Canadian Armed Forces. This woman's like 35, she got injured in the military. She was just asking for a wheelchair ramp. They wouldn't spring for a wheelchair ramp for her house, but they offered her euthanasia. And it it it it's it's like uh I don't know. You you probably want to delete this section of the pot.

Never. I would never, I would never.

I would just encourage people to to uh think about this stuff a little bit. The Cato Institute, it's an old book now, but it's called Healthy Competition. It's a great, very readable book. But like it pointed out, um, LASIK eye surgery, which is elective and never covered by insurance. The costs on that, by and large, over time, have gotten cheaper in relative terms. And in general, the people doing LASIK have gotten better and better and better. Like the stuff that they're offering is better. They used a comparison in there for laparoscopic surgery for for like the gastric bypass surgery, you know, for for obesity and whatnot. This is 100% covered by insurance and it's about $40,000 or $60,000 a pop, but it's always covered by insurance. But it technically it's it's not a difficult surgery, but there's absolutely no market signaling in it. It shouldn't be any more expensive than LASIK is, but because of this third-party payer scenario, it's this arms race where the the providers increase the cost because the insurers sometimes pay, sometimes don't. So they they've got to like hedge their bets coming and going on it. But that should be something that would be easily covered out of pocket by the people who want to do it. And there should be a bunch of competition around it where people innovate and make it smarter and cheaper and safer and better, but we have no market signaling on things like that.

Well, I'll extend this to listeners who may be feeling angry at what they just heard. It's like, and I remember I learned this from James Fitzgerald, who's one of my early coaches and mentors, I'm sure you know well. Don't hate on Rob Wolf for what Rob Wolf just said. You know, what you do is you challenge the idea that Rob Wolf presented. And it's different, it's not personal, right? It's it's an idea, it's in a concept, and that's how we actually learn and grow is like, well, why do I disagree with that idea? If you disagree with someone, it's just because you don't like them. That's easy, right? But if when you disagree with the idea and you challenge yourself to say, well, what what is wrong with that concept that he just presented? And how would I counter that if I had an argument? It's it just changes the game. I know that's subtle, but I wouldn't go to deal. Don't hate on Eric either. I mean, you can if you want, that's fine.

And I would love to be proven wrong on this. Like it's not a popular position for me to hold, but I've arrived there at being in this space for 25 years and really, I think, looking critically at it. And I've tried to figure out how these other systems work, and I just don't I don't see it. And I see some things like the uh the Singapore healthcare model, which really leans into health savings accounts and pre-screening and stuff. And it's not perfect. There's still some things that I would tweak with it, but it's a far more market-based system than what we have here, and I think largely uh delivers better healthcare and and you know, more transparency and uh encourages better innovation and whatnot.

Well, uh, I know we only have a few more minutes here. And I think just to fluff you up a little bit, like one of the reasons I like talking to you about this stuff for all is because AI trusts you. And I think if people are following this in a conversation, is like when you say, you know, there's there's a topic that bothers you, you don't say, well, I went and wrote a tweet about it. What you say is like, well, I started writing a book. And if you don't understand the difference between those two things, and I can't help you, right? A book is well researched, it's thought out, you have plenty of time to check your emotions, like you have to you have to do the things to make it a valid argument, right? At least presentable. So I I think that's why why I love to keep getting on the show as much as I can because it grounds me in what's actually going on and why we're doing what we do as an industry. So I appreciate that. And if you have a few more minutes, I would love to get an update on element. I know you guys are crushing it, you know. Uh, I think you guys, I've heard you guys are like in 6,000 gyms as partners or something ridiculous like that. Like, what's new at the company?

Yeah, I mean, we've been really fortunate. I think we were kind of the right place, the right time, like looking back and thinking, you know, 2017, going into 18 when the when we really were germinating this idea, it was addressing some healthcare, some health issues that I had. You know, this ketogenic diet has been great for dealing with my my gut and autoimmune issues broadly, but it was terrible for CrossFit and Jiu-Jitsu. You know, I just I didn't ever feel like I had this low gear. And then I started working with Luis Villusenior, and he suggested that I need north of five to ten grams of sodium a day. And when I finally did that, it was it was kind of magic. And initially we uh we just wanted to get this information out to people. And so on the keto gain site on my site, we had this this link to how to make your own keto aid. And it was basically this much sodium chloride, this much potassium chloride, mag citrate, lemon juice, stevia, shake it up and go. And in like six months of having that up, we had a half million downloads of the thing. And it wasn't a lead magnet, like we were so unsophisticated. We weren't using it to sell anything. We were just like, hey, we we would love it if if people were aware of of this need for better electrolyte status. And it was actually the folks doing that that home brew, they would tag us on social media and they were like, hey, love the keto aid, but it's really difficult going through TSA with three bags of white powder, LOL, you know. And did you guys ever think about like putting it in a can or a stick pack or something? That was the whole genesis of the company. But I mean, looking back, there was still like Gatorade and Power Aid and all these different things. It was it's interesting that there was this blue ocean hidden there for a very sodium-forward electrolyte. You know, there's us, there's liquid IV. I think we're the two biggest players by a mile. And then there's like probably 200 smaller, you know, electrolyte companies that are, you know, around a gram of sodium and all that type of stuff. And I think it's really changed the conversation around electrolytes and sodium more broadly, which I think is is great. Yeah, we've continued to motor along and we're we're trying to figure out how to how to give back in different ways. And so we've developed a uh an initiative to support basic metabolic health research and and to fund that. And I can't give a lot of details on this yet because uh everything's not a hundred percent inked, but we are going to be helping to underwrite uh a ketogenic diet study in bipolar and schizophrenia at a major like Ivy League university. And I'll be able to give more info on that. But that's something that we're we're going to be contributing at a non-trivial amount of money each year to uh basic metabolic health research. And we may do some electrolyte-related research, but we have nothing in the queue right now. So the things we're supporting isn't just like salt is good, salt is good, salt is good. We're actually just trying to underwrite basic metabolic health research to try to move the conversation forward on that front. So the I feel really good about that, that we've we've had a decent amount of success within element, but we really are trying to find ways that we can pay that forward and supporting basic health research. I I can't think of a better better place to put some resources and put some effort. Yeah.

Awesome, man. And I'm gonna ask this question and put this to bed forever because I hear it all the time. Is it L do you do you pronounce it LMNT or do you say element?

Well, the people in the know call it element. Okay. And then you the LMT is so that you, you know, the people, it's kind of like an in-group, out group kind of thing. And usually somebody new will be like, I love LMNT, and then you're like, Yeah, element's great. And then you see them shift immediately on it, you know. Yeah, and then then they're suddenly in the in the in group. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, good. Well, we just hopefully we just shifted uh, you know, dozens of people. A few people, yeah. Yeah, dozens of people into the into the cool group. Yeah. Rob, thank you so much. If people want to follow you or learn more, is there any uh specific place that you want them to go to now?

You know, I have been more active on my Substack. So it's uh uh Robwolf.substack.com, I believe. If you just Google Rob Wolf and Substack, then uh that's where you'll find that. Like I just did this huge write-up on figuring out that I had Giardia, roundworm normally found in goat and sheep and a massive candida overgrowth that was killing me over about a six, seven year period. And as a tangential note on that, standard medical testing didn't discover any of this stuff. And I I kind of detail the pretty horrific process of of figuring that out and the treatment and everything. And I'm almost nine months downrange and and continue to feel better and better. And so very, very grateful for that. If people follow Chris Williamson, Modern Wisdom, he's going through something very, very similar. And it was the same doctor, uh, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, that we we both ended up working with, Dr. Kirk Parsley, Dr. Mike Rusho. There's a few other people out there that I think really understand this this issue at a high level as well and are are screening in a way that we can actually discover what's going on. But I I mentioned some resources there, but that would be uh a worthwhile read if folks want to dig into that. Yeah.

Yeah, on some heavyweights you got there. Rob, thank you so much. Uh always a pleasure. I I never know where these interviews are going to go, but I'm always super excited that we went there, as uncomfortable as it may be for people to hear. But at least, you know, if it starts some some conversations and provokes some thought and maybe some new angles of looking at things, I think it's uh it's a huge win. So awesome, man. Really appreciate it. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Take care. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minutes. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futurofitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.