Todd Becker transcript

Written by Christopher Kelly

Dec. 15, 2016

[0:00:00]

Christopher:    Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly, and today I'm joined by Todd Becker. Hi, Todd.

Todd:    Hi. How are you, Chris?

Christopher:    I'm great this morning. Thank you for being on. I'm super excited to have you. I was first introduced to Todd at the Ancestral Health Symposium in 2014 where I saw you speak about myopia or nearsightedness for the rest of us that don’t really understand the problem very well. And I really, really enjoyed that talk. You have this brilliant knack -- and maybe it's not a knack, maybe it's just something you've worked on very carefully -- of presenting really new information that helps us understand things and at the same time you provide a solution. You're really helping me understand the world and the way it works and providing solutions. So I think it's so cool.

    And then I saw you again at the Ancestral Health Symposium in Boulder talk to about altitude, and that, again, was the same thing. You're helping me understand the world and you're providing me with solutions, which I think is so cool. So thank you so much for that, Todd. I will of course link to your presentations in the show notes for this podcast.

Todd:    Thank you, Chris. I'm glad that the talks resonated with you. I think the other thing is that I always try to relate it to my personal experience. The myopia talk was really built off my own experience reversing myopia, and the altitude talk was, again, built off my experience hiking in the Rockies. There's always this starting point and then there's exploration, and then I try to come up with bringing the pieces together and something practical at the end.

Christopher:    Your own personal self was a really great place to start. I love starting there too. Why don’t you tell us more about that? So I really want this podcast to be a general introduction to hormesis because I know it's a word that not everybody has heard of. So tell me about how you became interested in hormesis in the first place.

Todd:    Sure. Well, just a brief definition. Hormesis is your body's natural response to stress. It's an adaptive response particularly to low-dose stress. And people think of stress as something bad. It's the modern world impinging on them. But the reality is -- and this goes into, I think, the connection with Paleo -- is I think our ancestors were exposed to daily stresses that we somewhat tried to protect ourselves from. And there's a downside from staying away from those stresses. So that's hormesis.

    But going back to how I became interested in this, it was really through several completely independent experiences and then making a connection between those. I think the very first one was probably low carb. And that might seem strange. What does low carb have to do with hormesis? But I think low carb and then also intermittent fasting -- I think we're not designed as organisms to be flooded with this frequent experience of consuming food multiple times per day. This is the kind of the new thing. We should be grazing several times a day or at least having three meals a day. And our ancestors didn't always have that kind of access to food. In fact they could go for most of the day or even sometimes several days without having that. And then of course the modern diet is much higher in available glucose and starches. I think there's a response as the bloody turns flooding of extra nutrition trying to shunt it various places and then always there's always negative health effects that come along with it. So that's the connection.

    But I think when I went low carb and I cut back on eating I found that I did perfectly well. In fact I was a bit sharper mentally and more physically fit. And that was a little bit of a paradox to me. How is it that by cutting down on nutrition which in a way stressing the body, is not getting what it wants -- there's an adaptive response that allows us to utilize energy more efficiently. That was one connection.

    And the second completely connection was having good vision. And this was, again, purely by accident going on vacation on holiday for a couple of weeks and forgetting my glasses. And I had developed a mild about 1.5 to 2 diopters, which is not nearly as strong as a lot of people have it but it required the use of glasses for distance vision. And I found that after the first week going without glasses I was able to start seeing in the distance a bit better. And that was curious to me, how can I be responding in that way. So I did some research and found a couple of lines of evidence that incremental defocus using a technique a print pushing could actually reverse myopia. And again, this is applying a gentle stimulus or stress that nudges eyes to adapt to their normal state. And so I did some research. And that led to this whole interesting myopia. And that's just two out of many instances.

[0:04:56]

    I think that probably where I should've started is the most common hormesis which is exercise. If you think about it what you're doing -- and this is very well understood by a lot of people. When you go to the gym and lift weights you're applying, hopefully, a certain degree of stress to your muscles that in fact induces damage microtrauma. It tears the fibrils of the muscle and then there's a repair process that takes place which overcompensates for that damage and leaves you stronger.

[0:05:25]

    Another example of hormesis is the immune system. We're assaulted by foreign substances and organisms and we develop a response to that. So again, in case after case there's a stress that your body is able to adapt to. And of course it's not just humans. It's all organisms have this. In fact, if you think about it, we wouldn't have made it very long through evolution if we didn't have some ability to bounce back to the stressors in the environment, and that includes lack of nutrition, lack of nutrients, that includes the stress to the bone, to the muscle, to UV, to all sorts of insults.

    And what's really interesting is that we often overcompensate. We become stronger in that specific direction against which we have a stress. And I think this the beautiful thing about how our organisms is designed is you're born into the world and you don't know what environment you might be growing up. It might be a cold one. There might be more or less of a certain nutrient. They might be heat. There might be psychological stresses. And we're born with that ability to adapt and in fact to overcompensate to handle that particular stress better. And it's really an efficient way that biology has evolved so that only that amount of energy that's needed or that amount of structure that's needed to handle a particular stress goes there. This is really well-known in exercise physiology. It's the SAID principle, Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. We adapt to handle the particular stress. If you're a weightlifter, certain muscles grow. If you're a cyclist, your cardiovascular system adapts in a certain direction. And I think when you understand that, you work with the stress. Rather than seeing stress as a bad thing, you can expose yourself to just that right amount of stress.

    Another great example of that is the immune system, but I think about things like lactose intolerance or the ability to digest milk. You have an enzyme, lactase, that's induced only when you're exposing yourself to lactose. And if you go without milk for a long period of time, you lose that ability. So we're extremely adaptive, and so I see the environment not as a series of stressors but a series of stimuli, and when you learn to approach those stimuli, you can them to your benefit.

Christopher:    I think the sunlight exposure is a really, really beautiful example because you can see it. You go out into the sun, and by the end of the summer your arms have turned brown. You can actually see the adaptation. And so I think it's one of the most visible things there are.

Todd:    That's really true. I think we've all been cowered by the sort of view that sun is somehow to be avoided. Of course excessive exposure to UV and under the wrong conditions can lead to skin cancers. So people overcompensate by slathering on sun protectants, UV protectants, and you see people going around holding umbrellas, avoiding the sun. I think the key thing that sun tanning illustrates if done properly is that you want to build up gradually. So if you're in all winter and avoiding the sun and you go out the first warm day and get a sunburn, I think there are some evidences that a series of sunburns can lead to melanomas. But if you build up gradually melanogenesis is wonderful. It actually protects against UV. And there's a lot of benefits of the sun too in terms of the natural process for developing vitamin D. It works with starting with sun exposure and then it goes through a process in the liver and there's a whole series of metabolic reactions, but it really takes advantage of UV light.

    But I think one of the mistakes people make is they go whole hog for something and go to an extreme and cause damage. So that can be the case with UV exposure. It can be the case with exercise and weightlifting. You can overdo it and cause injury. And it's even the case with the type of exercises that I found are useful in reversing myopia. You have to expose yourself to stress right at the edge of benefit. And this is the whole concept of hormesis. A high level of stress can be damaging but a low level is sufficient to provoke a compensatory response but not cause permanent damage.

[0:10:01]

    So with tanning, you go out and get a little bit of sun exposure and build up until you're protected. With weightlifting or with exercise, start out gradually and build up. Don’t overdo it and cause injury. And the same thing with print pushing or the visual exercises. People assume that "Oh, the way I should correct my myopia is to just get rid of my glasses." But then you can't see anything. So you need to do it in a graduated fashion where you're constantly undercorrecting or pushing the eye or you're using plus lenses to provide a stimulus so that you're reading right at the edge of blur, which induces small changes in the scleral tissue and your eye is remodeling itself. But in all these cases, you got to operate in this very narrow window. I think that's probably where a lot of people make the mistake is they overdo it. They don’t realize that stress is beneficial only in the right dose.

Christopher:    Absolutely. So I know that everybody listening to this podcast will be in greater danger of overdoing it than not doing it at all. So I wouldn't be surprised if people listening are checking all the checkboxes like calorie restriction, doing it, carbohydrate restriction, doing it, exercise, doing it, getting a sun tan -- all of these things, they'll be doing everything. And I worry that people, if anything, are overdoing it especially the athletes. So do you have any general principles or tools that you use to find that sweet spot where you're seeing an adaptive response to where you're getting stronger, but you're not going too far over the other side of the hump and causing damage?

Todd:    Very good question and it's one I get a lot. How do I know what that right level of stress is? Part of it is listening to your body, listening to yourself. I will answer your question, but let me just take a little aside here. One good example of this overdoing has to do with fasting or intermittent fasting, and I've heard this from a lot of people. "Oh, I've tried fasting and I just became hypoglycemic and I fainted or I felt miserable." And the way they're approaching it is they're eating a certain powder and all of a sudden they go cold turkey and try to go all day without eating. It doesn't work. Well, it might work for some people.

    And I have a post on my blog called Learning to Fast, and the whole idea, again, is gradualism. Just start by cutting out snacks until you got that down. And then think about maybe delaying breakfast and then gradually just going two meals a day. You might even supplement here and there with some high fat snacks or tea and coffee. It's kind of getting into the water slowly.

    As people who've done keto adaptation now, it can be very difficult, and you have to approach it gradually. It takes awhile for these adaptations to occur. So listening to yourself and not pushing it too quickly is one thing. But there are some tools you can use, and particularly in hormesis relating to fitness, I found that heart rate variability or even heart rate is a really good indicator. And athletes who have kind of become [0:13:06] [Indiscernible] to this understand that heart rate variability, if you can increase that, it's a sign of better fitness and a decrease in heart rate variability is a sign of reduced fitness.

    So you can measure that after a workout and perhaps the next day, and if your HRV is going down then maybe you need another rest day. You've perhaps overtrained. But if it's slowly increasing, then you go out and you can work out harder. I find that actually resting heart rate is almost as good as HRV. And if you're finding that your resting heart rate is going up, then probably you need a bit more rest.

    It also is a great measure of the response to other types of hormesis. I found one type of hormesis that really helps improve or increase HRV or reduce heart rate, and that is cold showers and cold exposure, and the response is amazingly fast. So if you get into a cold shower, a really cold shower, and you stay in there for five minutes and it's uncomfortable, your heart rate actually goes up briefly and then it starts to go down. Your body is sort of responding to that stress. Then you get out of the shower. And I found that my heart rate will go down by about 10 beats per minute and my HRV will go up, and I see that as a sign of beneficial response to that stress.

    Conversely, I found one thing that made my resting heart rate go up and my HRV go down, and that is alcohol at more than one beer or one glass of wine. I could easily tolerate one drink, but if I went to two or three it would impair my HRV. I know that's really interesting because, again, it's a pretty clear indicator that you've overdone it. I think there are some physiological responses that are good indicators. But still to me the best is being more psychologically attuned to how you're feeling.

[0:15:05]

Christopher:    Do you think that alcohol then is still a beneficial hormetic stressor in the appropriate dose?

Todd:    I do, yes, and I enjoy it. But I think it's something you have to watch. Hormesis is an interesting thing in that occasionally giving yourself a little bit of a high dose of stress, maybe more than you would normally tolerate might not be a bad thing occasionally. It's nudging you to be able to handle that range of stress. And this is also why even though I can appreciate low carb and keto, and I do that for periods of time, I also flip the other way and I'll enjoy carbs for a few days. I like the idea of not becoming overly dependent in one direction or the other and being able to handle a wide range of inputs.

Christopher:    Metabolic flexibility is the term you're looking for here, I think.

Todd:    Yes, exactly. Another term is allostasis, this concept of homeostasis which is the body always returning to some norm. There's a related concept of allostasis which is the ability of the body to adapt over a wide range of stressors which is that metabolic flexibility that you're talking about.

Christopher:    But what about things that people usually consider to be universally bad? I'll give you an example. We just moved into the house in Bonny Doon, and it's freezing cold this morning in the Bay Area. It's like 7 degrees C where I am. And the house is maybe 15 degrees C, maybe a few degrees colder. And so it's pretty cold. We don’t have any other type of heating apart from this wood burning stove. For the most part the wood burning stove is great, I love it. So we cut down some trees and I'm splitting the logs with a sledgehammer and I'm cutting up the kindling with an axe. And I have to get off my bum and go down to the end of the garden and get the logs and bring them back up.

    So I think for the most part, it's all to the good, but the thing that I really don’t like is the smoke. You can smell it in the room. You get a good huff of it when you're trying to put another log on. So most people will consider that to be universally bad, and I'm sure that people listening can also think of some examples where it's generally considered to be all bad. But do you think the same principle applies here that it's a hormetic stressor and as long as I don’t overdo it I'm going to get stronger?

Todd:    I think you're right about that. The key to me is is it a stressor that you would have encountered, that our species would have encountered in evolution in some degree? So certainly putting wood on the fire and being exposed to a bit of smoke, there's a long history. Something that really bothered me was this sort of phobia about burning food, and you find this in burning meat. You find this among a lot of Paleo advocates.

Christopher:    There's the smell of colon cancer, your steak on the barbecue.

Todd:    Yes, exactly. There's concern about HCAs, the heterocyclic aromatics and the PAHs and the acrylamide that form. And there's actually mice studies showing that if you take those substances that are formed when you burn meat and you overfeed them to lab rats that they'll develop cancers. But still, it bothered me that it must have been through evolutionary history that people cooked meat on fire. They always cooked on the fire and that it burnt. We didn't carefully sous-vide.

Christopher:    I'm just laughing at the idea of a caveman with a sous-vide.

Todd:    Yeah. So I came across this book by Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire, and he presents a lot of good evidence that humans evolved to become meat eaters and we diverged from chimps and gorillas, and you can see this in, for example, the remodeling of teeth, the shorter gut. There are a lot of features just in how our body evolved. You can look at archeological evidence for it.

    But to me, what was really interesting and what led to a post on this -- I think I have a post about whether burnt food is bad for you -- is it also changed our toxicology and we have these phase 1 and phase 2 detox enzymes. In phase 1 system there's the cytochrome enzymes that are really important in detoxification in the liver and they're actually more widespread than that. And there's a particular detox enzyme that's called CYP3A4 that humans have at very high levels, much higher in our primate ancestors. And it's very important in detoxifying these compounds that are found in charred meat, and it detoxifies them, neutralizes them and passes them on.

    And also there's a series of phase 2 enzymes. These are superoxide dismutase and these are basically antioxidant enzymes. And they are induced by eating, believe it or not, phytonutrients that are in veggies. If you think about it, broccoli and kale and peppers produce these compounds which are essentially toxins. The sulforaphane in broccoli is a toxin, but our livers have adapted to produce a remedy for that that neutralizes it and at the same time induces this whole antioxidant system that protects us more generally.

[0:20:13]

    So what we've learned to eat over the millennia, the body has adapted systems to handle them and in fact, again, to overcompensate not only to handle the toxicity but to upregulate systems that generally protects us against us toxins. So I think there's this kind of idea out there that we're these fragile beings that any little smoke or burnt meat is going to cause a huge stress. And to me the thing I always think about is "Hmm, is this a novel stress, some chemical that's just been developed in the last 50 years which we had no way of handling or are these chemistries and chemicals that we've grown up around and that we have natural systems that can detoxify or that might even be beneficial for us?"

Christopher:    Right. You are the perfect person to ask this. So you have a background in chemical engineering and you really understand hormesis. So do you have any chemicals that have been introduced to environment recently that you worry about?

Todd:    This is a very interesting one and it gets controversial sometimes. There is this whole issue around dioxin which is a fairly novel chemical. And yet, interestingly enough, there are that studies show at low dose it does provoke a hormetic response. So there are novel chemicals that we might be able to handle. And again, what's novel? Novelty is the way that different [0:21:45] [Indiscernible] are put together so there's usually some resemblance.

    There might be some hormone analogs that disrupt out hormone sensing system and that are present at levels that are much higher than we can handle. So it's also a matter of dose too. We're exposed to certain chemicals at much higher levels than previously. Maybe we should worry about this. An interesting one, and this is one I haven’t written on because I'm still thinking about and researching it, is gluten.

Christopher:    That's a real hot button for me as well. It seems like no amount of exposure -- I can't go to the gluten gym at all and get any good results.

Todd:    Here's kind of the way I'm thinking about gluten. Of course it can be thought as an allergen but it's more than that. But let's look responses to other allergens. So the allergic response is an interesting one. It's in a way the IgE response is an emergency response. It's kind of an overcompensation for -- and there's a really good book on this called An Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velasquez-Manoff and he looks at why is there this explosion of allergy and autoimmune disease. And his argument is that modern humans have lost this ability to handle a lot of these compounds and organisms and substances because our immune systems are undertrained and that there's exposures particularly in childhood and even in infancy that by growing up in a more hygienic environment we've sort of deprived our immune systems of. So then when we encounter them later on at the wrong time and in the wrong way and we don’t have that response, we overreact with our emergency immune system, IgE or whatever.

    And one really interesting example of that is the allergy to peanuts. It's exploded. There are a lot of allergies that have really exploded. So he goes through and traces -- he looks at populations where that's happened and he does some really interesting comparisons. So if you look at Finland, there was a part of Finland that became part of the Soviet Union and that's now in Russia called Karelia. And in that region, the Finns who live there, they're genetically the same as modern Finns around Helsinki or whatever but there's much lower prevalence of allergy there. And he, I think, did some really good detective work and found that Karelians didn't modernize at the same rate as the western Finns and they still lived on farms and were exposed to farm animals and mites and dusts and their immune systems developed well, and so that they don’t have these adult allergies that we're all exposed to. I grew up myself with animals coming and going in the house. We lived in a house where there was dirt all over the place, and we don't have any allergies, thank God. Again, I can't prove that there's a connection in my own personal case, but I certainly was exposed to a lot of nature as a kid.

    So I think this book, An Epidemic of Absence, has some clues there. There are some really interesting studies to reverse peanut allergies using immunotherapy where the peanut allergen is introduced in minute quantity sublingually and the immune system can be retrained. Again, it's hormesis. It has to be very gradually under supervision with all kinds of periodic measurements taken, and people have been able to reverse those allergies to peanuts.

[0:25:17]

    Poison ivy, which is something that some people react to or poison oak quite severely, the native Americans have a practice where early in the spring they would take young leaves from those plants and chew them and then develop sort of a tolerance for those kind of contact dermatitis.

Christopher:    You live in the Bay Area and so you're seeing a lot of poison oak. So don’t you think that usually it goes the other way? So I came here 15 years ago and I've got other British friends that did the same. And initially the Brits, they didn't even know what poison oak was. They'd be walking into the bushes to take a piss and all the locals would be laughing at them, and nothing would happen. And then ten years later you get your first patch of poison oak, and then you talk to people that have grown up in this area and they'll get poison oak just from a dog running through it or being in the dust that's in the wind and stuff like that. So don’t you think in that case it seems to go the other way?

Todd:    Those are good questions. I don’t know the details, but I think that the key thing is, again, going back to the Native American experience, they would do this every season. They would take the young leaves and chew them in their mouth. I think there's another thing that Velasquez-Manoff brings up. He goes, "How does this peanut allergy work and what caused it?" He has some really interesting observations that mothers started using diaper creams that had peanut oil in it I think in the '60s or whatever. This led to this spate of peanut allergy. It may be the way the immune system works is that sometimes you need to have an oral exposure before you have an external exposure. So the order of exposure and how you encounter it has an effect on how the immune system develops. By getting that exposure to the skin before getting it orally could lead to this dermatitis.

    Again, I don’t want to oversimplify it because there are a lot of specific details of how immunity develops. I think the other thing is what age you encounter that. So there's a lot of interesting stuff about the connection between, for example, Epstein-Barr virus, exposure to that virus at a certain age and certain windows of time and the later the development of autoimmune such as multiple sclerosis, whether you were or were not exposed to Epstein-Barr virus. So it's fairly complex. The general mechanism is something that's fairly universal. You need an exposure in order to develop a particular response to it.

Christopher:    Let's go down and talk about altitude because I know that all of the athletes listen to this podcast will be really interested to hear about it. So tell me about your experience with altitude and what you've learned with it.

Todd:    Yeah. So again, something that started with a personal experience, several times going to the Boulder area to visit my son and going hiking in the Rockies, eating well and coming back to find that I'd lost 5 or in one case 10 pounds and thinking how can that be? I did some research and found that Boulder had the lowest obesity rate in the nation, and in fact I think five or ten lowest obesity in locations were in Colorado. And then finding that it's not just Colorado and being outdoors, but there's a general -- if you look at maps of the world, there's a pretty good correlation between those who live in high altitude and having low rates of obesity, low rates of diabetes. We look at even different elevations in Tibet, different elevations in Europe, and the same principles hold.

    And in fact if you even look at -- there's a part of the Appalachian Mountains which generally is in the southeast where there's very high obesity, the highest altitude of the Appalachians. Again, a protective effect. So after looking at a lot of other possibilities, I found that it's actually hypoxia. It's the lower oxygen levels that are most likely responsible. And there's been some experimental tests with animals and with humans showing that reducing the saturation or the relative concentration of oxygen does upregulate mitochondria and it leads to this whole cascade through what's called the PGC-1 alpha cascade that induces mitochondrial biogenesis and induces changes in certain muscle hormones like [0:29:38] [Indiscernible] and improves insulin sensitivity. So it's really interesting. It's this whole cascade and it's adaptive. But where I went with that talk -- and this is what I thought was particularly interesting is that this PGC-1 alpha cascade response not to just hypoxia but to fasting, exercise and to a lot of other external types of hormesis. So I thought that was pretty interesting.

[0:30:03]

Christopher:    Absolutely. It's very interesting. And just to connect the dots a little bit for people listening here, this is the master switch PGC-1 alpha that Barry Murray -- Barry Murray is a sports nutritionist who's been working with some ProTour cyclists recently. And he was talking about all the same stuff. Specifically he was talking about fasted state training. So go out to do your long ride or run or swim first thing in the morning without having breakfast and then enter into that somewhat glycogen depleted state and then you activate this switch PGC-1 alpha. And then he also talked about cold thermogenesis. And so there's a great deal of overlap with what you're saying and what Barry is saying. And Barry's goal is endurance specifically but you have so much overlap. It's really interesting to connect the dots.

Todd:    Yes, it is. And I think what's particularly interesting is that it makes evolutionary sense. You're exposed to these stresses. And cold is another one that you mentioned that is true. It also works through a similar type of cascade. It's only when you're exposed to these stresses that you develop the response. And it makes sense that you increase mitochondria in response to an environmental need to do so. You put the whole picture together and I think it's pretty gratifying to see how first it appears as a bunch of separate mechanism that are really tied together.

Christopher:    Right. Is there any way that an athlete can simulate altitude. So obviously it's quite inconvenient for most of us to get to somewhere as beautiful and as high up as Boulder. So what about these masks that you sometimes see? Are they going to work to simulate altitude?

Todd:    Yes. There was a whole fad of these hypoxic masks. Maybe it was 10 or 20 years ago. Unfortunately, the studies on them show that they're really not that effective in that the hypoxic response becomes beneficial only after consistent exposure for probably a couple of weeks. And athletes who are doing training have also discovered this. There are some interesting studies about whether how long you have to be training and at what location, whether it works better to train high and perform low or to train low and perform high. But I think that it was shown that the hypoxic masks, the exposure is just too brief to have a sustained effect.

Christopher:    Which is a shame. So there's no way to fake the real thing. I had Jeremy Powers who's the National Cyclo-cross champion on the podcast a few weeks ago. And just after we recorded that show he was off to Boulder to do his training camp. Is that the only solution? There's nothing cheaper that people can do?

Todd:    I think you can expose yourself to these other stresses. So you can take cold showers. You can do intermittent fasting. You can do high intensity workouts. And they cause the same kind of signaling.

Christopher:    Smoke a few cigarettes.

Todd:    I guess so.

Christopher:    That causes hypoxia, right?

Todd:    Well, one of the confusions with hypoxia is that you also see it show up in people who are very ill, who have COPD or sleep apnea, but there is a consequence of an illness rather than something that’s used as a stimulus.

Christopher:    Well, this has been fantastic, Todd. I really want to be respectful of your time. I know you have to jump off and get on to another call, but I have one last question. Is there a book, and if not, when will there be a book?

Todd:    Yes, there are chapters of a book written. I've been fairly busy with other activities but it will happen at some point. But right now I had this discussion with myself probably ten years ago when I started the blog. Should I do a book first and then a blog or a blog and then a book? And I'm really glad I chose the blog first because it's a way you can explore -- I haven’t realized too that that's an amazing way to network and to get ideas from other people. Your ideas are evolving.

    So the problem with a book is it's kind of the spinal statement. Once you've written it, you realize that as soon as it goes to press probably 10% of it is wrong. And so I continue to develop my ideas and their visional hypotheses.

Christopher:    Yeah. So this is a really interesting subject to me actually. Going back to the computer science world, they just don’t do books anymore. They see that media as being dead. So maybe you shouldn't do a book. Maybe you should do something else. Maybe you should do a training course or something else that you could charge. I just want to give you some money for the information that you've given me basically. It's this task I'm trying to achieve.

Todd:    Well, I think a book can at least stay to the main principles and illustrate them, and it's a great way when you go to conferences to have something to hand out or something. But I think you're right. I think the social media and with the way networks work that maybe we don’t need books as much anymore.

Christopher:    GettingStronger.org is the name of Todd's blog. And it's fantastic. I've really been enjoying it. In fact, it crashed over the weekend because you had so much traffic. That's how good it is.

Todd:    Well, I've enjoyed talking to you, Chris, and I like your site too. I think all of these different websites and podcasts reinforce each other. So it's great to have this discussion.

Christopher:    Thank you. I really appreciate that. And hopefully I'll see you again next autumn-ish for the next Ancestral Health Symposium.

Todd:    Will do.

Christopher:    Cool. Thank you very much, Todd. Thank you.

Todd:    Bye-bye.

[0:35:11]    End of Audio

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