Robb Wolf

Dad, husband. 2x New York Times/WSJ best selling author. Biochemist.BJJ Black Belt. Freedom To Transact. Co-Founder LMNT

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

What has generally passed for "Western Liberal Democracies" will largely live or die by which approach dominates.

WLD's are a once (thus far) in history event. there is nothing to guarantee they go on, nor that something like it would ever happen again.

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

https://t.co/RhIwSC3LAe

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Biosphere 2 had livestock, and the crew ate the pigs first.

Zazu and Quincy were Ossabaw dwarf pigs. In the first year one of them produced a litter of seven, which inside a sealed glass building where every calorie was counted should have been the best news anybody had.

They killed them anyway.

The chickens went too. Mrs Fruitcake and the rest, slaughtered because they were eating more than they were laying.

Neither animal was killed for meat. They were killed for competing.

A pig and a chicken have one stomach, and it wants exactly what a human wants: grain, roots, beans, anything starchy or dense. Inside Biosphere 2 there was no outside, no feed lorry, no surplus. Every mouthful a pig took came off the plate of one of eight visibly starving people. The crew did the arithmetic and reached for the knife.

Now notice which animals survived the cull.

The goats. Milky Way, Stardust and Vision, three African pygmy goats, milked daily for the full two years. And in the crew's own scientific write-up, published in Advances in Space Research in 1995, they recorded that the goats were the most productive domestic animals in the entire system.

The most productive thing in a building where the humans lost a fifth of their body weight was the ruminant.

It is the four stomachs. A goat is a fermentation vat on legs. She runs on stalks, leaves and crop residue, the fibrous rubbish that comes off any farm and that no human gut can process, and turns it into milk. She was never taking food off the crew. She was manufacturing food out of what the crew threw away.

So that sealed box did test the great modern argument, the one about feeding crops to animals being a waste of land and calories.

It found the argument correct for pigs and chickens.

It found it wrong for the animal that eats grass.

Biosphere 2 gets quoted endlessly as proof we should grow plants and drop the livestock. Eight people with the most productive farmland on earth ran that experiment properly, went hungry for two years, and kept exactly one kind of animal alive throughout, because she was the only one paying rent.

They killed the pigs to feed the people and kept the goat to feed the people.

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

@pvcgunner Oh, I’m doing great, just not online much ( which might be why I’m doing well…)

Should have a podcast soon.

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

A just about 100% overlooked piece to the calorie restriction=health span myth is that it works when one is swapping out processed food. When animals are feed something akin to a species appropriate diet, this signal vanishes and CR+appropriate diet= early death.

I dug into all this a number of years ago: https://t.co/32F2SiXene

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world's press.

Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.

It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.

Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life's work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.

So he called it a health programme.

The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat's milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.

The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.

Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.

The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.

Walford's verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.

He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.

He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.

Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.

Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.

The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

Quick IQ test and if one has any notion of toxicology: is nicotine inseparable from tobacco?

Nicotine Pouch Panic: How Government Keeps People Smoking https://t.co/JCZrcWETgH via

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

@TheGStagg @Cernovich I know a guy who knows a guy…

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. Everyone is sharing this study as a skin story. They're burying the part that matters.
Scientists took the aorta of a 75-year-old donor, applied a single engineered enzyme, and stripped away more than 70% of the molecular damage — bringing it down to the levels you'd see in a 30-year-old artery.
Published five days ago in Nature Communications. Revel Pharmaceuticals, with Calico and the University of Colorado.
Here's what they erased.
Sugar reacts with proteins in your body the same way heat browns bread — slowly, over a lifetime. It leaves behind a residue called CML, the most abundant advanced glycation end product in aging tissue. It welds itself onto collagen and elastin in your skin, your eye lens, and your arterial walls.
Two things follow. Your arteries stiffen. And CML latches onto a receptor called RAGE, which drives chronic inflammation — the exact fire I've been writing about for months as the engine of heart disease.
Since the 1980s this damage was considered permanent. Your body has no enzyme to remove it. Every existing approach only slows new damage from forming. Nothing touched what was already there.
So they built an enzyme that doesn't exist in nature. They screened 45,000 protein structures, then ran five rounds of directed evolution across more than 500 million variants until they had CMLase — a molecular lawnmower that oxidizes the CML off the protein and restores the original, healthy lysine underneath.
Not patched. Reversed.
Over 70% cleared from elderly arterial tissue. Over 55% from elderly skin — below the levels found in 31-year-old skin. 45-78% in lens proteins. The CEO said they expected 20% and were floored.
Arterial stiffness drives systolic hypertension, heart failure, and stroke, and I have no drug that reverses it. I can slow the process. I cannot undo it. This paper says undoing it may be possible.
The caveats are real and I won't skip them. This was done on donated tissue in a dish, not in a living person. No functional data yet — we don't know if that artery got measurably more elastic. Delivering a large enzyme deep into human tissue is a hard, unsolved problem. Clinical trials are years away.
But something considered permanent for forty years just came off human tissue.
We spent a century learning to slow aging. Someone finally figured out how to erase it.
Thank you @theallinpod @friedberg @chamath @pesottas

[I love Tesla 🔋🚀 @JC70769]

"A guy looked at my airplane the other day and said I wonder how many people I could have fed for the price of that airplane...

I replied I am not sure, it fed a lot of families at the Dassault factory where it was built. I’m sure it fed a bunch of families that rolled the aluminum at the Alcoa factory. It surely fed a lot of people at the Honeywell factory where the experts built the turbines. It fed a whole company for a few weeks when I had them build me a new interior. It feeds the families of the linemen that fuel it.

That’s the difference between capitalism and a welfare mentality. When you buy something, you put money in people's pockets, and give them dignity for their skills.

When you give someone something for nothing, you rob them of their dignity and self worth.

Capitalism is freely giving your money in exchange for something of value.

Socialism is taking your money against your will and shoving something down your throat that you never asked for."

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

The Story Behind America's Most Offensive Anime Dub https://t.co/Ume3bQQcPQ

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

Take a break. Listen to Charlie Munger.

[Save Standard Time @SaveStandard]

@Breaking911 TERRIBLE. Permanent DST means 8:45am sunrise in most states. Tell the Senate to amend to permanent Standard Time!

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

Great Moments in Unintended Consequences: Yosemite Permits, Italy Superb... https://t.co/q34CFIGOq1

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

the american story: a republic if you can keep it, by @boriquagato https://t.co/QjypaSjcE5

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

@RevShark @Mangan150 We cover all angles on that both in the book and film:

https://t.co/Iy0ubdYHs9

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

Happy 250th USA! Let’s remember this story so there might be 250 more.

The Economic Lie That Brought Down a Superpower https://t.co/2FxEYKnFaC

[Amy Peikoff @AmyPeikoff]

My latest, at MS NOW, explaining why the majority in Chatrie v United States reached the right result using the wrong reasoning—and why that matters. At link below.

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

Likely more hype than substance, but directionally, a good move.

Advancing Regenerative Agriculture and Strengthening American Farm Resilience https://t.co/SMg4w8LAu9

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

@C_King_Evidence @foundmyfitness I wasn’t going to say anything….

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

https://t.co/pdz7EOXTxL

This is fascinating. Why the forever war model may be winding down.

[Robb Wolf @robbwolf]

@TuckerGoodrich Color me shocked