Latest / Everyday Ancestral with James Barry / “Healthy Is Not Just for the Wealthy”: How a Sick Soldier Created a Food That Serves, Not Sells | Phillip Meece

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“Healthy Is Not Just for the Wealthy”: How a Sick Soldier Created a Food That Serves, Not Sells | Phillip Meece · Everyday Ancestral with James Barry

• 0:01
  Forget trail mix.
• 0:03
  What if survival food wasn't junk, but real ancestral nutrition in its purest form?
• 0:10
  Well, this episode is all about survival food redefined.
• 0:16
  Philip Meese is our next guest on the Everyday Ancestral Podcast,
• 0:21
  founder of the Carnivore Bar and former combat medic.
• 0:26
  joins us to share how ancestral wisdom and battlefield grit shaped a bar made from just
• 0:33
  meat, fat, and salt.
• 0:36
  We talk pemmican, purity, and why modern convenience food is due for a
• 0:42
  reckoning.
• 0:43
  I'm your host, James Berry.
• 0:44
  Welcome to Everyday Ancestral.
• 0:47
  Philip, I actually realized I don't know who was Philip Meese before you joined the Army.
• 0:55
  Oh, that's an interesting question.
• 0:58
  So I did a lot of different things.
• 1:00
  As a kid, I was a missionary kid.
• 1:03
  I went to Mongolia.
• 1:06
  What were you doing there?
• 1:07
  So my parents were missionaries and they were basically right at the iron curtain lifting.
• 1:15
  So the Soviet empire falls in the early nineties and they were going in as medical missionaries
• 1:21
  to like help and like spread the good news and then also do deliver medical care to people
• 1:26
  in need.
• 1:27
  Cause there was a lot of it, as you can imagine, you know, a government collapse, it's like,
• 1:32
  you know, especially a dysfunctional government.
• 1:35
  And there's a lot of human need.
• 1:37
  And so my parents were out there helping and they brought us along.
• 1:41
  And so it was a very interesting childhood.
• 1:43
  And then from that reacclimation to society after they finished doing, I think it's three years overseas, they came back to the States.
• 1:54
  I did Boy Scouts, I did theater, and I was a theater major.
• 1:59
  Part of my plan to get socially attuned to American culture
• 2:03
  is to learn how to speak to other people and be a theater major,
• 2:07
  and that was kind of like, that was what I did before the Army.
• 2:11
  Graduated in 09, just as everyone was losing their shirt,
• 2:16
  and I was like, well, I need a real job.
• 2:18
  I need some real experiences.
• 2:19
  So I joined the Army, got sick, been on a health kick ever since,
• 2:24
  and that's me in a nutshell.
• 2:27
  Wow.
• 2:27
  What part of the drama were you doing acting or behind the scenes?
• 2:31
  What was your focus?
• 2:33
  Mostly behind the scenes.
• 2:35
  Stage combat, violence, like special effects, things like that.
• 2:39
  That's what I love doing.
• 2:41
  I'm imagining like in another life, you know, you're the special effects guy on all those
• 2:45
  movies or something like should you have gone a different path?
• 2:48
  I can definitely see you doing that.
• 2:50
  Yeah, I mean, it was fun.
• 2:52
  It's just it's a little unstructured.
• 2:56
  and so you can make it big or you can get you know totally devastated doing that and so if you have
• 3:03
  any like health complications and you're not comfortable like sleeping wherever living
• 3:09
  wherever staying up into the middle of the night doing whatever it takes i wouldn't recommend it
• 3:14
  and so that's a unfortunate trend with people who are out there on the edges of society doing wild
• 3:23
  and crazy fun things is they often, you know, have undiagnosed illnesses or afflictions or,
• 3:30
  or, you know, they need support of the services that are in the middle of civilization,
• 3:35
  but yet they're out there on the edges where there isn't any.
• 3:39
  And so it's like part of what
• 3:41
  both of us do is to bring high quality nutrition to everyday people, you know, and so making those
• 3:47
  support structures available is really, really key and making them accessible.
• 3:53
  You really came to that conclusion after your stint in the army.
• 3:58
  Can you talk about like, what was that spark that led you from that combat medic to creating
• 4:03
  the carnivore bar?
• 4:05
  The theater stuff also plays a role too.
• 4:08
  I'd be doing like amateur filmmaking and I'd be on set for 12 hours, but, you know,
• 4:14
  and there's like free pizza.
• 4:15
  But the same is true for the story that I tell in most podcasts, which is that I was
• 4:19
  a medic.
• 4:20
  and the ER had free cake and free pizza,
• 4:24
  tiny little fridge that's basically only for doctors.
• 4:28
  So the medic, you know, is low man on the totem pole.
• 4:32
  Like, you know, I'm mostly cleaning beds
• 4:35
  and just running labs, doing the grunt work.
• 4:37
  It's the doctors and the people with tenure
• 4:40
  who get the coveted fridge space.
• 4:43
  But, you know, like all hierarchies,
• 4:45
  there's all these unintended consequences.
• 4:47
  You know, having a special parking spot, you know, it doesn't confer any like negative effects.
• 4:54
  But the fridge space does.
• 4:56
  If you are not able to like bring your own food or think ahead or prepare high quality foods, then you're stuck with a vending machine.
• 5:03
  So it's like these unintended consequences of luxury are often benefit.
• 5:09
  And so with the army, you get the same kind of rank hierarchy.
• 5:13
  So in medicine, in film and theater, and in the army, you got this rank structure where, you know, some of the privileges and perks of leadership and power and authority tend to have these unintended benefits when it comes to avoiding disease and supporting nutrition.
• 5:33
  And I think that's where we really need to make, you know, healthy eating egalitarian.
• 5:38
  Like that's really important to me.
• 5:39
  I think that's really, really critical because a parking spot, fine.
• 5:44
  A fancy costume, fine.
• 5:46
  You want a funny hat, everyone to salute you.
• 5:48
  That's cool.
• 5:49
  All that, I'm up for it.
• 5:51
  100%.
• 5:52
  But I think we make a really big mistake when we lower the quality of nutrition of the base rung and the ladder because we are promoting disease when we do that.
• 6:02
  This is a statement that I talk about a lot and I'm very mixed on it, but that healthy is for the wealthy.
• 6:11
  And here we are, two entrepreneurs who have two products that are expensive.
• 6:16
  Yeah.
• 6:16
  How do you feel about that?
• 6:18
  I think that's definitely that's at the heart of my chief concern, especially meat prices.
• 6:25
  I think just just this year went up another 10 percent after going up like 10 percent the year before and the year before and the year before.
• 6:32
  It's like since the pandemic, we've had this huge cost increase in meat and bioavailable animal based nutrition, which is kind of our stick.
• 6:41
  you know what to do about that for the average person who is trying to be meat-based or at least
• 6:48
  nutrient dense you know as those elements of nutrition are getting more and more expensive
• 6:53
  a little bit it's kind of out of our scope we can comment on it but it's like we can't fix the
• 6:59
  economy trying to be a health entrepreneur to uh sell nutrition and promote its use but i think
• 7:07
  one of the things that I would say to you, you know, just as a, you know, a brother in arms in
• 7:12
  the space of fighting for human nutrition and health and wellness is that it doesn't matter
• 7:18
  what it costs.
• 7:20
  If I'm spending 90% of my paycheck on groceries in a weird way that actually brings
• 7:27
  us back to our ancestral norm, where you're spending 90% of your time looking for food.
• 7:34
  I think that food is that important that whatever it takes to get it, you spend that time.
• 7:41
  You know, if that means like not seeing your family and hiking for months on end to go chase down the bison, it's like on foot because there were no horses on this continent for thousands of years.
• 7:55
  It's like, yeah, I mean, that sounds savage, like really, really savage in a way that we don't even realize how those people lived.
• 8:04
  Yeah, because as soon as like 1500s came, like Europeans dropped horses here.
• 8:11
  We've fundamentally changed the continent.
• 8:13
  So when we got to the plains and there were horses everywhere, we thought there were always horses, but there weren't.
• 8:20
  And so it's like, we have no idea what it was really like before we got here to write about it.
• 8:27
  And it's like, we'll never really understand, I think, globally how people really lived back then.
• 8:34
  We'll do our best with anthropology.
• 8:36
  But, you know, every indication is that they spent a vast majority of their time looking for food.
• 8:41
  I think that in a way we're kind of de-civilizing ourselves that food has become so expensive and good food at that.
• 8:51
  Nutrient-dense food is becoming even more expensive.
• 8:54
  The fresher it is, the more nutrient-dense it is, all these things are adding costs.
• 8:59
  And yeah, you could say they're luxury or you can say that people need to reorient their priorities.
• 9:07
  And I've certainly done that.
• 9:08
  And I know you have too with devoting so much of your time to promoting pluck and promoting this nutrition.
• 9:15
  It's like, you know, if you would map out how much of your time is devoted to this, it's like, what's your take home?
• 9:23
  You know, what's your profit versus how much time you've invested into helping other people?
• 9:29
  It's like, it's philanthropy.
• 9:31
  be.
• 9:31
  We in this food space, we could be selling cheap GMO wheat covered in sugar and chemicals
• 9:40
  that help make it more addictive.
• 9:42
  Sure.
• 9:42
  The same old stuff.
• 9:43
  We could be selling what the general
• 9:46
  for profit.
• 9:48
  Right.
• 9:48
  And so it's not that we are like, oh, animal based nutrition.
• 9:53
  We found this
• 9:53
  really cool niche that's like insanely lucrative and profitable.
• 9:58
  And like we we have this unique
• 10:01
  angle that we're going to make mad money.
• 10:02
  It's like, no, we've kind of taken a monastic step
• 10:06
  back into philanthropy and is saying like, well, no human nutrition and human flourishing
• 10:14
  and human health is so valuable that no matter what the cost, I'm going to pay it to provide
• 10:19
  this to the public.
• 10:20
  And yeah, I hope I can pay my rent, but like, that's not the point.
• 10:25
  The point is that human flourishing is almost like a sacred calling.
• 10:30
  And that if you feel called to provide healthy food for people, really money is a secondary concern.
• 10:37
  You want to be able to pay your people.
• 10:39
  You want to be able to support your family.
• 10:42
  But really making a product that is that's good to eat and available for everyone, even if it's not lucrative, is a calling all into itself.
• 10:54
  There's so much to unpack too around it because there's the concept that, well, at least during
• 11:00
  our lifetime, particularly from the 70s into the 90s, you know, with the subsidizing of
• 11:05
  food, we grew up where hamburgers were 25 to 69 cents, right?
• 11:11
  It's like this concept that people thought, well, really what people didn't have a clue
• 11:16
  on what the real cost of food is because we were being sold this idea that meat was
• 11:22
  cheaper than french fries right it's so skewed and if anything we're now even doubly skewed because
• 11:31
  now we're seeing some foods come out that are really basic like really bad not even meat-based
• 11:36
  i'm talking like they're single fruits you know singular ingredients and yet just because they're
• 11:43
  organic or whatever they're sourced from the way that food really shouldn't be sourced anyway like
• 11:50
  they're non-gmo they're they're organic they're on a regenerative farm like all the way that
• 11:55
  ancestrally it should have been done this way that these things are incredibly expensive yeah
• 12:02
  you get a 20 pair right yeah we're doubly screwed like so now people think they're learning the real
• 12:10
  cost of food but then we still have people taking advantage of oh yeah this concept well yeah so you
• 12:17
  at the same time you have someone going to extreme lengths to create something nutrient
• 12:23
  dense at what seems like an exorbitant price.
• 12:26
  And then you have people who will greenwash
• 12:29
  and spoof that product with something that came from Walmart and then they'll greenwash it.
• 12:36
  And then the difference will be their margin.
• 12:39
  The consumer is faced with this impossible task
• 12:42
  of trying to weed out the snake oil salesman
• 12:47
  from the true believers
• 12:49
  and then kind of parse out like,
• 12:51
  okay, well, this product is from a reputable source.
• 12:56
  I've tried them, I trust them
• 12:57
  versus I don't really know the criteria
• 13:00
  to how to examine our food
• 13:01
  because we live in a world
• 13:03
  where our institutions have let us down.
• 13:07
  The food pyramid everyone knows
• 13:08
  and has known for decades is a joke
• 13:11
  that leaves us in a place where, you know,
• 13:14
  opportunists can take advantage of us
• 13:16
  and they'll have a new fad diet,
• 13:18
  a new thing to try, a new chemical.
• 13:20
  You know, it's like, don't worry about your diet,
• 13:22
  just take Ozempic.
• 13:23
  It's like, yeah, but it now puts the entrepreneur
• 13:29
  in an uncomfortable place of having to promote
• 13:32
  and distinguish themselves,
• 13:33
  where I think clarifying what we offer is good,
• 13:38
  but at the same time, having to tear down
• 13:40
  frauds, you know, there's a huge conflict of interest.
• 13:44
  How do we ethically talk about people
• 13:47
  who are spoofing this idea or who we suspect might be spoofing it?
• 13:51
  And that's the thing.
• 13:52
  It's like
• 13:52
  when your own ego gets involved, you're like, are they really, you know, for me, I'm selling
• 13:58
  grass fed, grass finished beef.
• 14:01
  And there are these changes that happen in the chemistry,
• 14:04
  especially with the lipids, with the fats, because fats are like the cornerstone of pemmican.
• 14:09
  And so from there, I'm like, well, you know, people will say these general statements of like all grass fed grass finished fat should be yellow.
• 14:18
  And it's like, it depends on how fasted, how oxidized, how much beta carotene is in that fat.
• 14:28
  And it can come down to the legume count of the cow, of how much it ate.
• 14:34
  It could come down to like the perennial grasslands or the latitude that the cow was raised in.
• 14:39
  Because, you know, different latitudes, different fasting, slaughtering schemes are going to lead to different oxidation rates in the beta carotene in the retinol.
• 14:48
  Different outcomes.
• 14:49
  It's different outcomes because it's wild.
• 14:51
  It's a living organism.
• 14:52
  It's going to change and be adjusted by everything you're mentioning, by the land it's feeding off of, by the lifestyle, by the slaughter, by the timing.
• 15:03
  It's everything.
• 15:04
  That's a huge thing.
• 15:05
  People forget that food is not controllable in that way.
• 15:09
  It's a wild organism.
• 15:11
  And that when we talk about nutrition around food, that it's a generality because every season it's a different nutrition.
• 15:18
  Every breed provides a different nutrition.
• 15:21
  it's always fluctuating.
• 15:23
  Yeah.
• 15:23
  And it's like, well, then how do you, how do you establish
• 15:27
  authenticity and authority in a space like this?
• 15:30
  It's like, unfortunately it's like one customer
• 15:32
  at a time face to face by being consistent and providing consistent results.
• 15:38
  I wish there was
• 15:39
  a shortcut or like an accrediting body that we could trust to just put a stamp on the good people,
• 15:45
  but I haven't found it yet.
• 15:48
  So let's take a step back because we're assuming a lot of people even
• 15:51
  know what pemmican is.
• 15:52
  Why did you choose pemmican?
• 15:54
  Pemmican is one of the, I would say,
• 15:56
  closest you can get to an ancestral food out there in terms of it's been used for, I mean,
• 16:02
  well, you tell me, how many years has pemmican, what's the oldest pemmican they've found and
• 16:07
  why did you choose this as your model?
• 16:09
  We know of it from a modern interpretation,
• 16:14
  modern being 300 years ago so it's ancient it's like the bow and arrow of foods so
• 16:23
  until very recently nothing was refrigerated refrigeration was rudimentary it was a hole in
• 16:29
  the ground with ice that you smuggled from the mountains and someone had to carry a giant block
• 16:35
  of ice from the mountains all the way down to your hole and your hole would be you know 50 some odd
• 16:42
  degrees.
• 16:43
  And so it's cooler than up above.
• 16:46
  And you put the ice in there and it radiates cold and
• 16:51
  it's your cool room.
• 16:53
  And that's the best refrigeration that money could offer or money
• 16:57
  could buy back in the day.
• 16:59
  And there are evidence of people doing that in every culture and climate,
• 17:03
  even in the desert, like you wouldn't believe, which is very impressive, the human ingenuity
• 17:08
  and spirit to try to refrigerate things.
• 17:11
  But long story short, you really need a way to preserve a kill.
• 17:17
  If you are going to be animal based, if you're going to be hunting, if you're going to be
• 17:20
  a hunter and gather before the dawn of agriculture 12,000 years ago, we would have hunted and
• 17:25
  gathered.
• 17:27
  And a real big liability is that if you cannot eat the entirety of the kill, you know, it's
• 17:33
  going to spoil because there's not a good way to salvage that without preparation.
• 17:39
  And so
• 17:40
  drying meat into jerky, into strips of jerky is the first way you do it.
• 17:45
  But jerky has some
• 17:46
  fundamental problems.
• 17:48
  If you eat just lean meat, it's not satiating.
• 17:53
  So just lean meat is not
• 17:55
  satiating by itself without the fat.
• 17:57
  But if you include the fatty bits in your jerky, the jerky
• 18:01
  goes off pretty quickly.
• 18:03
  So it spoils the oxidation, the water content in the fat,
• 18:07
  it's connected, the collagen, the connective tissue.
• 18:10
  It's all very nutritious, but it's very,
• 18:12
  very perishable.
• 18:13
  And this is this paradox that we both face of high nutrition, high perishability.
• 18:19
  So pemmican is a way of separating the fat and the meat and then preparing both of them in a way
• 18:27
  that they're both going to be more shelf stable.
• 18:30
  So the collagen and all the bits of connective tissue
• 18:34
  are removed from the fat.
• 18:36
  The fat is broken down and then rendered.
• 18:39
  So under heat, preferably not too much.
• 18:42
  And that fat is rendered into tallow.
• 18:45
  Tallow is a broad term,
• 18:48
  but traditionally it would have been made out of suet.
• 18:50
  So it would have been very, very high in saturated fat
• 18:53
  and would be solid at room temperature.
• 18:55
  If your tallow is soft, it's probably more like drippings.
• 18:59
  It's not really tallow.
• 19:01
  That's kind of a misconception.
• 19:02
  But tallow is solid at room temperature.
• 19:05
  In the heat of the summer, it will melt.
• 19:07
  You know, up at 90 degrees, but in the back of a mail truck, it's more than just 90 degrees.
• 19:12
  It's good and hot.
• 19:13
  And so even very, very saturated fat, even cacao butter, which is extremely high in saturated fat, coconut oil.
• 19:21
  These things are peak saturated fat will turn liquid.
• 19:25
  in high heat.
• 19:26
  So, you know, you have this problem ancestrally of like, okay, well, it's going to get
• 19:32
  90 degrees.
• 19:33
  There's no air conditioning as well as no refrigeration.
• 19:35
  So, you know, what do you do?
• 19:38
  So you have this rendered fat, you render it down on purpose, turn it into a liquid,
• 19:42
  and then you take the jerky, the same jerky that you made, but you cut it extra thin.
• 19:47
  You cut it extra thin because you're going to break it with two rocks, essentially a mortar
• 19:51
  and pestle.
• 19:52
  You're going to break it and pulverize it.
• 19:54
  You break it and pulverize it until it's
• 19:55
  almost like a dust.
• 19:57
  Sometimes it can be a little stringy.
• 19:59
  There are question marks on how pulverized
• 20:01
  you want to go, but all the way pulverized is the best.
• 20:06
  And if you go all-
• 20:07
  What is the question around it though?
• 20:09
  Why is there a question around how far you pulverize it?
• 20:12
  So imagine it like a rope.
• 20:14
  So you have all these muscle fibers that have little
• 20:17
  myosin heads that contract and they pull.
• 20:20
  When your nerves send acetylcholine to go
• 20:22
  contract the muscle, the calcium channels open, it has a binding site, the myosin head pulls,
• 20:27
  it contracts.
• 20:28
  So essentially you have millions and millions and millions of these things
• 20:33
  like ropes and they contract and that's the contractile power of muscle.
• 20:37
  And it has a lot,
• 20:38
  a lot, a lot of protein in it.
• 20:40
  So when you are breaking this down, you look at all the physiology,
• 20:45
  it's going to turn into these tiny, tiny little ropes.
• 20:49
  And it's like, well, each rope, while connected, still has water in it.
• 20:55
  So if you have all these strands of meat together,
• 20:58
  you have water locked in each strand.
• 21:00
  How do you break it out?
• 21:01
  You kind of have to smash it.
• 21:03
  You have to dry it.
• 21:04
  And so the water that can come out will come out.
• 21:06
  And then you have to break those strands, at least a little bit,
• 21:10
  agitate them so the water can come out.
• 21:13
  So you're going to pulverize it.
• 21:14
  Ultimately, the pulverization conversation is about moisture.
• 21:17
  So it's about how far do you have to go to ensure that the pet mackin is doing the preservation job that it inherently is supposed to do.
• 21:27
  And it goes down to the two main causes of spoilage, which is being exposed to the environment.
• 21:34
  It's like 20% oxygen in the normal atmosphere, and it's slowly degrading and unraveling everything.
• 21:41
  Rust, you know, it is happening to everything at different rates and has different consequences to all matter.
• 21:49
  and at the same time,
• 21:50
  that's just what allows us to be metabolically active.
• 21:53
  We don't want this mechanism to cease for any reason.
• 21:55
  We want the oxygen in the air,
• 21:56
  but it tends to degrade things.
• 21:59
  And then the second is moisture, is biological life.
• 22:02
  So you have water and you have oxygen.
• 22:05
  So these are the two mechanisms that you have to mitigate
• 22:07
  in order to prevent spoilage.
• 22:10
  So for the fibers, you're breaking them up,
• 22:13
  you get all the moisture out.
• 22:14
  For the fat, you're doing the same thing.
• 22:17
  Collagen is really hard.
• 22:19
  It's like the chewy glycerin bits.
• 22:22
  It's very, very hard to get that dry enough without modern technology.
• 22:27
  This is kind of a liability for the fat.
• 22:29
  And you also don't want to just scorch the fat with infinite heat.
• 22:34
  Like you want to break it up mechanically, remove all the lipids without scorching them,
• 22:41
  and then preserving any of the vitamins and nutrition that's in that fat.
• 22:45
  And then you want to discard all of the collagenous bits and the fascia.
• 22:50
  Essentially, they're little packets of fat wrapped in fascia.
• 22:54
  And so that holds moisture.
• 22:55
  So you break the fascia in the same way you break the muscle strands, and then you are
• 23:01
  melting it.
• 23:02
  So only what is renderable in the fat is going to be renderable and the collagen is not.
• 23:09
  The collagen is going to turn into this little brown crispy.
• 23:12
  You're going to discard that because it has high moisture content.
• 23:16
  So you're going to get just the lipids and just the amino acids and some of their trace vitamins.
• 23:23
  As long as you didn't expose them to too much heat.
• 23:26
  You mix them together, a ratio of about 80% calories from fat, which happens to be by weight 50-50.
• 23:34
  So you take these two macros 50-50.
• 23:37
  It tends to be because of the energy density of fat tends to be way higher from fat, calories from fat.
• 23:43
  It just happens to be perfect keto macros.
• 23:46
  It's like 80-20 calorie split from 50% dry weight combined.
• 23:51
  And they would pack it in rawhide bags.
• 23:54
  so this solves the melting problem so they pack it in rawhide bags you don't want to have
• 23:59
  seasoned leather because you use bacteria and you use like urine you use a lot of like
• 24:06
  curative ammonia like use toxic chemicals to cure leather so you want to take the leather
• 24:12
  that's been cleaned defleshed and made into rawhide rawhide is a dried leather product
• 24:20
  that is perishable when wet.
• 24:22
  And so you take that rawhide, you sew it up,
• 24:26
  you fill your bag full of pemmican,
• 24:29
  and you just make these little balls.
• 24:31
  You pack them tight.
• 24:32
  Equal parts fat, rendered tallow, and dried protein.
• 24:36
  You mix them together,
• 24:38
  and then you pour a sacrificial cap of tallow,
• 24:41
  just tallow, on the top.
• 24:43
  Now that piece of tallow should oxidize,
• 24:48
  and it's sacrificial for a reason.
• 24:50
  You're going to discard that.
• 24:52
  That is your wrapper.
• 24:54
  And they would do this in colonial situations too.
• 24:58
  They would do potted meats.
• 25:00
  They would like can or pot hot stew.
• 25:04
  So it's cooked out all the bacteria
• 25:06
  and then they would put a layer of tallow on the top
• 25:10
  and then they break it.
• 25:12
  Or you can even use wax.
• 25:13
  You can use wax, you can use paraffin.
• 25:15
  And so they use wax or tallow
• 25:17
  And then they'd put a cloth, just a cloth dust covering over that and then seal it with a piece of twine.
• 25:24
  And so you have a ceramic pot.
• 25:27
  And so now you have shelf stable food for a long time.
• 25:31
  So they would use that kind of colonial art in this ancestral way, doing it with rawhide.
• 25:37
  And that rawhide bag could travel with you.
• 25:39
  As long as you didn't get it wet, it was essentially impervious.
• 25:43
  And you could get rawhide a little wet.
• 25:46
  A lot of crossing of rivers and stuff.
• 25:47
  So that must have been of concern, right?
• 25:50
  You can get it a little wet, but you just air it out, dry it out, and it should be fine.
• 25:55
  It just can't stay wet.
• 25:56
  If it stays wet, the rawhide will rot.
• 26:00
  Then your pemmican will be
• 26:01
  lost.
• 26:02
  They have found, they found like pemmican, viable pemmican, like 50 years after its creation.
• 26:08
  I was just going to ask, what's the, so how long does it last?
• 26:11
  Wow.
• 26:11
  50 years?
• 26:12
  Yeah.
• 26:12
  So essentially that's wrapper dependent degradation.
• 26:17
  So if you have a good enough wrapper, it should never spoil.
• 26:21
  It should, you know, there isn't a mechanism by which it should spoil because you have those two factors.
• 26:28
  It's like the half-life of the vitamins becomes the next most interesting concern, which I know you and I are interested in because you have to imagine that these vitamins, they're very bioactive.
• 26:42
  And if they're not being absorbed by microbes because it's spoiling or molding or bacteria getting into them, if you've successfully prevented that, there's not enough moisture for those things to grow and consume those vitamins.
• 26:54
  You've got to imagine that those proteins are denaturing at some point.
• 26:59
  But we don't know how long it takes to do that, especially in an oxygen-free environment, because almost everything is broken down by oxygen.
• 27:08
  Oxygen and water, everything gets broken down.
• 27:10
  So if you don't have oxygen, all life is predicated on their, you know, taking it for granted.
• 27:16
  It's in the air.
• 27:17
  It's assuming it's going to be there.
• 27:20
  It's like when you take something out to space, you know, how does it break down?
• 27:25
  What's going to, what mechanism is going to work on it?
• 27:27
  And it's like maybe radiation.
• 27:29
  It's going to take a long, long, long time for that to break down.
• 27:33
  So if you're on earth and you're in an oxygen and moisture-free environment, food lasts a very, very, very long time.
• 27:39
  And once you get past like the 25 year mark, it's kind of like, okay, for a human span of relevant time is pretty much it's good.
• 27:49
  We don't need to worry about that.
• 27:51
  And so the reason that I got so deep into all this science is because I didn't want to add preservatives.
• 27:58
  preservatives made me feel sick in afghanistan they fed us mres and they were just like the
• 28:04
  plastic just the worst kind of quality uh loaded with crap that tasted you know passable
• 28:13
  once but like made you terribly terribly sick and eating it day in day out it's just no way to live
• 28:19
  it made people horribly dysfunctional without getting too graphic horrible dysfunctional as
• 28:25
  far as their digestive pathways.
• 28:27
  And so, you know, I was like, I need something that's going to be
• 28:31
  ridiculously shelf stable if it's going to make it to Afghanistan and not have any of this junk in
• 28:36
  it.
• 28:38
  MREs, for those of us that don't know, what does that stand for?
• 28:42
  So MRE is a meal ready to
• 28:43
  eat.
• 28:44
  So it's a field ration.
• 28:46
  So army doctrine is set so like you're not supposed to have the
• 28:51
  field ration for more than 21 days in ideal conditions you're going to rotate back to base
• 28:58
  so it's like a they're camping trip food but that's assuming that you're in a normal situation
• 29:07
  and it's assuming that your war doesn't like persist longer than it ought to like
• 29:12
  world war ii like those guys were out there for like five to seven years before they saw their
• 29:18
  families again.
• 29:19
  It's like we go on a deployment.
• 29:21
  It was 15 months.
• 29:23
  Then they dropped it to a year.
• 29:25
  Then they dropped it to nine months.
• 29:27
  I went on the year long deployment.
• 29:29
  They started to see like
• 29:30
  degradation in the troops.
• 29:31
  And it's like, well, yeah, you're not feeding them well.
• 29:35
  Or sometimes
• 29:36
  they rotate back and sometimes they didn't.
• 29:39
  We couldn't control the circumstances.
• 29:42
  And that's
• 29:43
  because we have like basically an incompetent field ration.
• 29:46
  It's a ration that if you went to
• 29:49
  war, you wouldn't want your soldiers eating that for seven years.
• 29:53
  Why do you think the military,
• 29:57
  the hospitals, the schools, this institutional systems, why do you think they're just pushing
• 30:07
  all these kind of very ultra processed foods, these very kind of like nutrient
• 30:12
  devoid of foods?
• 30:13
  Like, do you think it's just because they're co-opted by
• 30:17
  lobbyists or big ag?
• 30:18
  Or do you think it's just absolute like ignorance?
• 30:21
  I don't understand why.
• 30:22
  Why is this system still pushing those types of foods that are not filling you guys in the way
• 30:31
  that we know you should be filled?
• 30:33
  Well, you know, it comes down to the USDA.
• 30:36
  The USDA was put in place, the food pyramid,
• 30:39
  all of this, all the subsidies
• 30:42
  that we just take for granted
• 30:44
  to make corn cheap, soy cheap,
• 30:46
  and cheaper than cheap, nearly free.
• 30:49
  This model was designed to support the American farmer.
• 30:54
  Back in a day where it was really,
• 30:56
  really important politically,
• 30:58
  they thought it was important to support the farmer.
• 31:00
  And so we put these incentives in place.
• 31:02
  We put these programs in place in a completely unrecognizable time and they've just lingered without being updated.
• 31:10
  And so you have an unequal playing field where these agro products are incredibly cheap to make and they're incentivized.
• 31:20
  There's all these different things you can do with it.
• 31:22
  It's like a million different uses for corn.
• 31:25
  You even put it in your car, you know, with ethanol.
• 31:28
  so it's like there's so many different ways that gums and products and corn solids and all these
• 31:35
  different things that you can do with corn um because it's like nearly free and so because
• 31:40
  nearly free is a great price you can add it to all these different things and then have all these
• 31:46
  different value adds you don't need to make very much on corn solids but you make a few cents
• 31:53
  and then you put it in like 5% of the food supply,
• 31:56
  okay, now you're talking big money
• 31:59
  and you don't want to switch to anything nutritive
• 32:01
  because anything nutritive would be, you know,
• 32:04
  10 cents versus 5 cents.
• 32:05
  It's like, well, so we have stacked the deck
• 32:08
  in a way that deprioritizes current concerns
• 32:13
  for historical concerns.
• 32:15
  And then when we get to the government agency,
• 32:18
  we look at them and we grade them
• 32:20
  by whether or not they are on budget
• 32:22
  are off budget.
• 32:24
  So it's down to dollars and cents.
• 32:26
  So we have set up a messed up game
• 32:30
  with perverse incentives.
• 32:32
  And then we've told our hospitals,
• 32:35
  we've told our schools,
• 32:36
  we've told our prisons,
• 32:37
  you better stay in budget.
• 32:39
  Now they are interfacing with this system
• 32:42
  that has all these old laws on the books
• 32:45
  that incentivizes cheap ultra processed food.
• 32:49
  Now you have this cheap ultra processed food
• 32:52
  You could buy this brownie, brownie A, for, you know, $1 per unit.
• 32:58
  Or you can buy this other brownie made with real eggs and real milk and real ingredients and cane sugar and all this.
• 33:07
  And it's actually like $3.43.
• 33:12
  And you're like, well, how many people in this prison am I going to feed?
• 33:16
  It's like, okay, well, I've just lost $2 in some odd sense per person, per meal, you know, for how many years?
• 33:25
  It's like, oh, well, you know, this institution's been around for 120 years.
• 33:29
  And it's like, I mean, it starts being millions and billions and billions of dollars for a brownie.
• 33:36
  And it's like, yeah, the cheap brownie's fine.
• 33:41
  You know, and you're talking about a brownie.
• 33:42
  You're not actually talking about like something that you're concerned about nutrition.
• 33:47
  This is a placating food designed to make people feel not so bad that they're stuck in a cafeteria.
• 33:55
  They can't see this.
• 33:55
  They can't see outside.
• 33:57
  They're stuck under fluorescent lights.
• 33:58
  You know, it's palliative care.
• 34:01
  And so palliative care with budgetary constraints tends to go to the lowest common denominator.
• 34:07
  And that's ultra processed food that is terrible for you.
• 34:11
  But do you think it's just budgetary constraints?
• 34:14
  Because I'm even thinking going back to where you started with like movies and craft service stations on sets.
• 34:22
  They're filled with just junk.
• 34:24
  And those people have money.
• 34:26
  They have the knowledge, the awareness.
• 34:29
  is it just like oh yeah this doesn't fit our budget or is it and we don't want to actually
• 34:37
  do the work to re-educate people on like snacking differently or not snacking like we just want to
• 34:42
  give them the status quo like hey you're used to eating this way so let's just provide it because
• 34:46
  we know it gives the illusion of quick energy even though we know there's a crash right on the other
• 34:51
  side of it is it also the psychology we're butting up against or that kind of the lowest common
• 34:57
  denominator of in terms of what people are used to or is it just budget i i don't know what do
• 35:02
  you think well i think it's both and i think you know this is more your world too it's a chef like
• 35:08
  it's like you're asked to do a spread and it's like this multi-millionaire will ask for a coke
• 35:15
  and it's like dang you know all this effort you know you could you could have the most expensive
• 35:23
  exquisite wine or whatever drafted that has low sulfite that's like you know as good as wine can
• 35:30
  get for you and then people will just have this familiarity with their beverage of choice that's
• 35:37
  cheap and effective and you know gives them the energy that they need and they become addicted to
• 35:42
  it so the way that you know and as an entrepreneur you get this too the way that you make profit
• 35:49
  is you give people the thing of the lowest value possible.
• 35:54
  You hype it up in marketing and you charge the difference
• 35:57
  and that difference is your margin and it's your profit.
• 36:00
  So if they are selling super high-end products,
• 36:05
  they need to be charging double that.
• 36:08
  Like they can't give you something of high value
• 36:11
  for an affordable price.
• 36:12
  They can only give you trash for an affordable price
• 36:15
  because the difference has to be their margin or their take home.
• 36:19
  So there's no incentive for them to deliver any kind of quality.
• 36:23
  And then once you become habituated to that,
• 36:26
  you're going to crave and want and desire and not be satisfied
• 36:31
  by anything other than that processed junk.
• 36:33
  And so if you are not the kind of pretentious person
• 36:38
  that wants fresh oysters flown in this morning
• 36:42
  that were harvested in the ocean in the morning
• 36:46
  and by lunchtime, they're 700 miles away prepared.
• 36:51
  If you're not that kind of person
• 36:53
  who wants the exclusivity,
• 36:56
  you're actually not gonna get high quality nutrition
• 36:58
  because there's not a middle bracket
• 37:00
  of sensible nutrition-based food
• 37:05
  that people widely accept and understand.
• 37:09
  I think through health,
• 37:11
  all these people getting
• 37:11
  devastatedly like ill
• 37:14
  and then realizing that nutrition
• 37:16
  is the missing link to their wellness.
• 37:18
  I think they are creating
• 37:19
  this category from scratch,
• 37:21
  but it's still nascent.
• 37:23
  It's still growing.
• 37:24
  Like people have to be more aware.
• 37:26
  And that's part of why
• 37:27
  we're doing this podcast.
• 37:28
  It's like try to help people
• 37:29
  be aware that you don't have to be
• 37:31
  the pretentious snob,
• 37:33
  rich luxury person
• 37:34
  to get high quality nutrition.
• 37:37
  Nor do you need to be
• 37:38
  just the zombie going along with the standard issue crap that makes everyone rich.
• 37:44
  It's like
• 37:44
  there is a middle way and that middle way is high quality nutrition.
• 37:48
  That's a high value product
• 37:50
  that has paper thin margins by someone who truly believes in it.
• 37:54
  It is interesting to your point
• 37:56
  that even like with our products, right?
• 37:59
  Margins aren't like incredible when you're trying to push
• 38:03
  real food with very simple ingredients as well, because clearly the simpler the ingredients,
• 38:08
  And the quality of those simple ingredients make it actually more expensive than the bar or the product that is, as you mentioned, kind of more overly processed and subsidized ingredients because those are all cheap.
• 38:22
  But what I find is interesting that if you were to price your bar too low, people would say, well, is it not?
• 38:29
  Is this conventional meat?
• 38:31
  They would think the quality of the bar was lower.
• 38:33
  and so it really is a dance of like you have to meet your needs as a business owner and yet also
• 38:41
  try to be you know true to like your mission of like hey I want to help people so I want to make
• 38:47
  this as accessible as I can to as many people as possible and yet I also have to be aware of
• 38:53
  people's psychology that if it's cheap then they think that it's cheap quality yeah exactly so
• 39:01
  say you were completely benevolent and you wanted to have zero margin or a negative margin.
• 39:07
  You wanted to give it away, but you wanted to like offset some of the costs.
• 39:11
  So you didn't
• 39:11
  give it away completely.
• 39:13
  And you sold like a $2 steak.
• 39:16
  People would be like, what's wrong with it?
• 39:18
  Why would you, yeah.
• 39:20
  Why would you give away?
• 39:21
  So people have this baked in expectation
• 39:24
  of what things cost.
• 39:25
  And it's a two edge blade.
• 39:27
  Like as inflation, especially hits food, like
• 39:30
  the hardest.
• 39:32
  You know, it's something that's not even calculated in inflation.
• 39:35
  It's excluding food
• 39:36
  and rent, the things you have to have.
• 39:38
  That doesn't seem like a good measurement if it excludes the
• 39:41
  two things I absolutely have to have, food and shelter.
• 39:44
  But nevertheless, food costs keep going
• 39:47
  up and up and up.
• 39:48
  People's expectation of that is that it should cost a lot for good things.
• 39:54
  and so on the higher end middle class upper middle class they probably will have like a dollar cut
• 40:01
  off if this steak didn't cost more than twenty dollars it's probably not safe to eat if you can
• 40:08
  get your margin so that your costs raw costs say you're a steakhouse and you're offering it like
• 40:14
  you want to get it low enough so that you have a margin but like not not cut yourself so thin that
• 40:22
  you can't sustain that or keep supplying it because that's another thing is like equipment
• 40:27
  breaks, facilities need upgraded, the roof needs fixed, you know, the plumbing needs upgraded.
• 40:33
  It's like there are all these expenses and all of these things are not on linear growth paths
• 40:39
  either.
• 40:41
  So like the HVAC guy who you could call it pre-pandemic is not going to cost the same
• 40:46
  as the same HVAC guy today.
• 40:48
  Like all the experienced people retired.
• 40:52
  They're like, ah, it's not worth it.
• 40:55
  You know, two weeks to flatten the curve
• 40:56
  turned to, you know what?
• 40:58
  Everything's fine.
• 40:59
  I'm just going to retire early.
• 41:02
  And so now there's a bunch of young people
• 41:03
  in the pipeline,
• 41:05
  not as informed, you know, as practiced, right?
• 41:08
  And there's not enough of them to go around.
• 41:10
  So there's two young inexperienced people
• 41:13
  in the pipeline of our skills trade
• 41:16
  that don't know what they're doing
• 41:18
  and there's not enough of them.
• 41:19
  So the price is going to go up.
• 41:20
  So you're going to pay more
• 41:22
  and get less quality work
• 41:25
  in plumbing, electrical work,
• 41:27
  HVAC, refrigeration,
• 41:29
  all these key ingredients
• 41:30
  to food manufacturing.
• 41:32
  And so it's like,
• 41:34
  okay, our prices are going to skyrocket
• 41:36
  because you look at a big food plant
• 41:37
  with all of this refrigeration technology
• 41:40
  and all this energy
• 41:41
  and all this hard work going into it
• 41:44
  And like even the cost of energy itself, you know, it's like all of that factors in.
• 41:48
  It's like, you know, the more green we go, the more expensive energy gets as a baseload, which means the more money you will have to pay just to eat.
• 41:57
  And, you know, not to get political, that's just a truth, you know.
• 42:01
  So if you don't have a stable baseload that's affordable, then you're going to have to pay for it somewhere.
• 42:07
  And one of the ways that you pay for it is these big food plants, they have to keep food cold.
• 42:15
  They have to keep hot food hot.
• 42:16
  They can't have hot food get cold and then reheat it.
• 42:21
  It'll grow bacteria.
• 42:22
  It'll be unsafe to eat.
• 42:23
  They can't let cold food get hot.
• 42:25
  Same thing.
• 42:26
  It'll mold.
• 42:27
  So all of that energy to keep food within these safe temperature range to defeat bacteria, they're mandatory.
• 42:35
  so no matter what the price tag is of the energy they're obligate to keep it within that range
• 42:41
  we get hit with a solar flare and it's 200 degrees outside in order to serve that steak
• 42:48
  you have to keep your fridge at temp it's like well so you do whatever you can you're gonna have
• 42:53
  stacks of dry ice and you know blast coolers going and it's like whatever it it takes you
• 42:59
  have to keep it at that temp or you cannot serve it, that'll be a million dollar steak because it's
• 43:05
  200 degrees outside.
• 43:06
  It's like there are these hard limits when you come with microbiology and
• 43:10
  physiology, biology in general, that is just not fungible.
• 43:16
  And so for me, I like to preload my work
• 43:19
  into the pemmican and have all that hard work done.
• 43:23
  It doesn't require any refrigeration.
• 43:25
  heat does not affect is shelf stability.
• 43:27
  And I know that I have a high quality, nutrient dense,
• 43:31
  energy dense meal anywhere in the world I would go.
• 43:34
  And for me, that just gives me peace of mind
• 43:37
  because no matter what kind of chaos we're going to be in war or otherwise, I know I'm good.
• 43:42
  Yeah.
• 43:42
  I got to say when I was moving from the West coast to the East coast, I bought a box of
• 43:49
  bars and I brought them with me and they saved me.
• 43:52
  No joke.
• 43:53
  I would get to towns where everything
• 43:57
  was closed except like an A&W.
• 43:59
  And I just, I haven't eaten fast food in, I mean, 30 years,
• 44:03
  I want to say.
• 44:03
  I just can't go there.
• 44:05
  You know, now that I know what I know, right?
• 44:06
  I just can't
• 44:07
  go.
• 44:07
  It's hard for me to go backwards.
• 44:09
  I would just have a bar.
• 44:11
  I would just have a carnival bar
• 44:13
  and I was completely satiated.
• 44:15
  You're avoiding all those seed oils and we make two of our bars,
• 44:18
  the zesty garlic and the honey barbecue, we make it with your spicy pluck.
• 44:24
  Because it has pluck, it has nose-to-tail nutrition, has that high energy density,
• 44:31
  and it has things that the normal bar doesn't have.
• 44:34
  I have a normal bar that's just beef tallow salt.
• 44:37
  But the beef tallow salt plus pluck has copper, it has trace minerals.
• 44:44
  There's a lot of things.
• 44:46
  Watch one of those Nutrition with Judy posts has all the different things in liver and different organs and not just liver too.
• 44:53
  Pluck has so much more than just that.
• 44:56
  It has like a full complement of those organs in it that for me, I just feel like if I'm worried about it at all, like have real organs, get nose to tail, have all your bases covered.
• 45:09
  And that way you don't have anything to worry about.
• 45:12
  What have you learned?
• 45:13
  And because you guys have been around now, how many years?
• 45:16
  So I started product development in 2018 and I launched officially the Kickstarter in 2019.
• 45:23
  What are the changes that you've learned in these seven years just around the systems of making Pemmican?
• 45:33
  It's a lot of hard work.
• 45:35
  I mean, I wish there were more shortcuts.
• 45:38
  You know, two to three years in, there'd be like, ah-ha-ha, I found a way to make this really cheap and easy and quick and everyone can do it.
• 45:45
  but it's actually mind-bogglingly difficult to make good quality pemmican and to resist the
• 45:51
  temptation to just cheap out and use cheaper alternatives the sourcing of good high quality
• 45:59
  fat and suet specifically the solid fat it has all the vitamins and minerals that that you come
• 46:07
  to think of of beef tallow are from the suet like you're getting a completely different fat
• 46:14
  like bouquet of different fatty acids in the trim fat.
• 46:19
  Like people don't realize that cow fat from nose to tail
• 46:24
  is different every single inch.
• 46:26
  Every single inch of the cow is a different amount of nutrition.
• 46:30
  Well, it's the same as why organ meats are so important.
• 46:34
  You know, liver is here and the pancreas is there
• 46:37
  and the lungs are here and the heart's there.
• 46:39
  And it's like, well, you know, if you want CoQ10, that was the one,
• 46:43
  You got to go for heart.
• 46:45
  Yeah, you got to get the heart, yeah.
• 46:46
  You know, and there are certain things that are only in the kidneys.
• 46:49
  There's certain B vitamins that are only in the pancreas.
• 46:52
  There's certain, you know, minerals that are only in the liver because the liver does different things.
• 46:58
  And so when you're thinking about the fat stored in an animal, the fat does different things.
• 47:03
  Some places you want subcutaneous fat for cushioning because you don't want to get bruised up.
• 47:09
  You know, sometimes you want to cushion organs.
• 47:11
  Other times it's a sign of ill health, you know, like the fatty liver disease.
• 47:16
  You don't want to grain finish your animal because it has all these toxins that build up in the liver.
• 47:23
  So you want to make sure that your ophal, your organs are from grass finished animals, at least when it comes to liver.
• 47:29
  Now, the heart may be unaffected.
• 47:31
  There's an opportunity there if you have grain finished hearts.
• 47:35
  It may be less affected, but grain finished livers.
• 47:40
  it's going to have a milder taste but it might have metabolites that are you know less desirable
• 47:46
  so it's like well if you have certain grass finished animals it's going to have more
• 47:51
  of these different elements so it's like you got to analyze the chemistry all the way through
• 47:57
  every single histological process as a medic i'm thinking about all the different tissue types
• 48:03
  and all the different tissue types have different nutrition types if you're going to eat it so you
• 48:07
  you can't just blank out.
• 48:10
  You know, one of the things that I love about organs
• 48:13
  is the collagen that I'm removing.
• 48:15
  And this is a big macronutrition element,
• 48:17
  the glycine and methionine.
• 48:19
  So if you're eating a bunch of muscle meat,
• 48:22
  you're not getting the collagen on purpose.
• 48:24
  You're removing the collagen.
• 48:26
  But what are organs like mostly made out of?
• 48:28
  The actual structure of the organ itself,
• 48:32
  everyone's excited about the vitamins and minerals,
• 48:34
  is like, but actually the physical body of it,
• 48:37
  it isn't a connective muscle.
• 48:40
  You know, your liver doesn't move things from A to B.
• 48:43
  It doesn't move things from distance.
• 48:45
  It's just all collagen matrix.
• 48:47
  So it's that collagen that's in those organs naturally
• 48:51
  that because you've dried it
• 48:53
  and you've done the hard work of making it taste good.
• 48:55
  And it's like, I can add that to my pemmican
• 48:57
  and I can get a whole different side of that nutrition
• 49:02
  into my bar and not compromise the shelf stability, which for me is the holy grail of what I'm trying
• 49:09
  to do is like reach back in time to my past selves, you know, stuck on set or stuck in
• 49:14
  Afghanistan, God forbid, and breathe into that nutrition and life and the healing power of
• 49:20
  animal-based nutrition, which I am a strong proponent of.
• 49:24
  How do you see the ancestral
• 49:27
  eating evolving in the next five or 10 years?
• 49:30
  I'm sure even in your seven years, you've seen
• 49:32
  the evolution, how people are kind of more keen to eating this way.
• 49:38
  They're more keen to organ
• 49:39
  meats, you know, it's becoming a little bit more trendy, but so how do you see it evolving?
• 49:44
  Well, it ebbs and flows, hesitate to mention, but, you know, I think it's worthwhile.
• 49:50
  Leverking for example
• 49:52
  the fraud of him using
• 49:53
  PEDs he's promoting
• 49:55
  these organs and pills
• 49:58
  desiccated organs and pills
• 50:00
  and I'm like
• 50:01
  at one point I'm like ah that's not how you should eat
• 50:03
  food but in the other
• 50:05
  hand I look at the reviews
• 50:08
  I look at the reviews
• 50:09
  of a lives change
• 50:12
  and I'm just like blown
• 50:14
  away like hey I had
• 50:15
  this kidney complex
• 50:17
  and this issue resolved for me.
• 50:19
  I had this heart complex.
• 50:20
  I had this liver desiccated organ
• 50:22
  and this changed for me
• 50:23
  and this changed for me
• 50:24
  and this changed for me.
• 50:24
  And like, and I didn't have to taste it.
• 50:27
  So people are so stuck on like how organs taste,
• 50:32
  which is why adding spices is such a great idea.
• 50:36
  That way you're getting your medicine with your flavor.
• 50:39
  But these pills have really been enlightening to me
• 50:43
  and just understanding the biology
• 50:45
  and understanding the changes that are happening in the human species is like,
• 50:49
  as everyone eats these ultra processed foods, we're specifically deficient in these vitamins
• 50:55
  and minerals that are so potent that even in these infinitesimal amounts, like the amounts
• 51:01
  that are in these pills are kind of, that's where the inflammation comes from.
• 51:05
  It's like,
• 51:05
  you go to your butcher and get like a whole liver and they might even give it to you for free
• 51:11
  because no one's buying it and they have too much.
• 51:14
  People are buying it, but yeah, I hear you.
• 51:44
  They are getting healthier on taking organ pills, which to me says like, okay, as a species,
• 51:51
  like whatever it takes, we need to get this animal-based nutrition into people.
• 51:55
  If these pills are helping, then God bless.
• 51:58
  Like God bless.
• 51:59
  Like seriously, that's, I mean, at the end, we want human flourishing.
• 52:03
  I'd rather them eat whole foods.
• 52:04
  But man, if that's working, then I think culturally, the more we normalize that, the
• 52:11
  more than every animal-based brand is going to take off and do better.
• 52:14
  Because I've seen things
• 52:16
  get really, really hot and excited in 2019.
• 52:20
  Things kind of surge with Liver King early 2020s.
• 52:23
  And
• 52:24
  then things kind of fall off where ancestral nutrition is a fraud.
• 52:28
  And then it's like,
• 52:30
  no, actually people are still getting healthy.
• 52:32
  He lied about a physique issue, but his physique
• 52:36
  had really nothing to do with all of these positive effects that people are getting
• 52:40
  from including animal-based foods.
• 52:42
  The fact that we've outlived the scandal
• 52:44
  and it would continue to grow
• 52:46
  and we're growing and growing and growing.
• 52:48
  And it's like, I think that really shows
• 52:51
  that we're not just a fad,
• 52:52
  that a scandal can't take us down
• 52:54
  and growth is still continuing unchecked,
• 52:57
  that people are getting healthy
• 52:59
  and that sick people are turning to carnivore in droves
• 53:02
  and animal-based in general
• 53:05
  as an understanding of nutrition
• 53:07
  and these micronutrients that are absolutely critical
• 53:11
  for your health and wellness and happiness.
• 53:13
  It's like, I think the movement has nothing
• 53:16
  but growth in its future.
• 53:18
  I think it's really fascinating that,
• 53:21
  you know, ultimately we're both in the business
• 53:23
  of helping to get people to eat real food.
• 53:26
  Both of us have very simple products.
• 53:28
  There's no additives, there's no fillers.
• 53:30
  It's like, this is all real food at its best.
• 53:35
  highest quality real food, I still get pushback.
• 53:39
  Like I still get people to your point saying like,
• 53:42
  well, this isn't going to be that, or this isn't enough of that.
• 53:46
  Or it's like questioning
• 53:48
  real food.
• 53:48
  And I find that both fascinating and disturbing that we've come to a place where
• 53:59
  we're giving real food, this scrutiny that we would give to the laboratory food.
• 54:03
  And sometimes
• 54:04
  we're giving less scrutiny to the laboratory food than we are to the real food.
• 54:10
  It almost
• 54:10
  seems backwards to me.
• 54:12
  Yeah.
• 54:13
  It's like if you have pizza and beer as your breakfast, lunch,
• 54:17
  and dinner, people aren't concerned.
• 54:20
  They'll wag their finger at you, but they won't actually like
• 54:24
  look into what minerals and vitamins you're going to be deficient in.
• 54:27
  Exactly.
• 54:28
  They won't care.
• 54:29
  Like, ah, you know, you shouldn't do that.
• 54:31
  And then they'll grin at you and say, but I understand.
• 54:34
  Yeah.
• 54:35
  Like you do you, boo.
• 54:38
  But then if you have like, let's go more traditional than carnivore, like you have a huge steak and you have like fermented veggies and you have a little bit of perennial fruit, but you're eating this huge amount of red meat and saturated fat.
• 54:56
  you know but you're eating what mainstream or paleo you know would be like okay that seems
• 55:02
  pretty healthy from an ancestral point of view and then the mainstream people are like wow what
• 55:07
  about your green leafy vegetables like what about your this or that and it's like in what world
• 55:13
  would we have had access to like exotic tropical fruits or acai berry bowls or you know giant heaps
• 55:21
  of unrefrigerated green leafy vegetables that don't have any like anti-nutrients in them it's
• 55:27
  like that's not realistic and like people have all this scrutiny for a plate that is
• 55:34
  beyond defensible as far as ancestrally and it's like why is this under this much scrutiny it's
• 55:41
  beyond it's beyond understanding there's one thing that you're bringing up that i think is really
• 55:46
  fascinating.
• 55:47
  I'm curious about your perspective on this.
• 55:48
  So, I mean, we're both clearly very pro
• 55:51
  animal-based foods.
• 55:54
  We're also pro people following their dietary preference, you know,
• 55:59
  whether it's carnivore or whatever they choose to, however they choose to eat.
• 56:03
  But one of the
• 56:04
  issues I have with any dogmatic diet, and carnivore is part of this, is that when I think
• 56:12
  of ancestrally, I believe there is no world where we would ever have focused on one thing.
• 56:20
  We were opportunistic.
• 56:21
  If there were wild strawberries growing on the ground and we're
• 56:25
  walking by it, we're going to pass those up.
• 56:28
  Like there's no world where we would not
• 56:31
  take advantage of a resource that was in front of us.
• 56:35
  I agree.
• 56:37
  But with the caveat
• 56:39
  that a strawberry is no bigger than this.
• 56:42
  Yeah, the wild strawberries particularly are very tiny.
• 56:45
  And it's bitter.
• 56:47
  So as far as would we put it in our mouth,
• 56:50
  I grew up in Missouri where it's nothing to grab a piece of clover
• 56:56
  and chew on the stem and just kind of play with vegetables
• 57:02
  and play with vegetation or honeysuckle.
• 57:06
  You bite the end of a honeysuckle and there's a little bit of nectar at the bottom.
• 57:09
  It tastes really, it's an interesting thing.
• 57:13
  I definitely think that wild humans would have put everything in their mouths just like a baby.
• 57:20
  But we have to also take serious stock going out into the woods.
• 57:25
  And most of what we call fruits and vegetables today have been hybridized to the point of unrecognizable proportion.
• 57:31
  I think we would have put everything in our mouths.
• 57:35
  but there are berries there are things that look good to eat that are deadly and i think there
• 57:41
  would have been exploration death and some acceptance in equal parts in the plant world
• 57:50
  and i think that we would have been hungry enough protein hungry enough that we would have really
• 57:57
  really looked for animals to satiate that hunger because i don't think that if you're looking for
• 58:04
  like take root vegetables potatoes are awesome people love potatoes they're medium to low on the
• 58:11
  inflammatory scale but like if you're going for like north american root vegetables you're going
• 58:18
  for something like a leek go out there and hunt leeks and get enough to make a plate of french
• 58:24
  fries it's like well first of all you know the main work of of the energy is going to be the oil
• 58:31
  it's like where did you get the oil where'd you get the deep fryer like let's pretend you have
• 58:35
  free oil and you have free deep fryer where do you get enough leaks and enough volume with enough
• 58:42
  starch to actually like fry them up to survive it's like there's just not enough volume of it
• 58:48
  i i fully agree we would have explored with anything and everything and if there was edible
• 58:52
  fruit i'm sure we ate it it's just a question of like how much heavy lifting nutritionally is that
• 58:59
  doing compared to the animal products.
• 59:01
  And I am of the opinion that eat whatever makes you flourish.
• 59:06
  And if it makes you flourish, like don't listen to anybody on the internet, talking heads or
• 59:10
  otherwise, like ignore everyone.
• 59:14
  If it makes you flourish, again, God bless.
• 59:17
  Like that's the whole
• 59:18
  point.
• 59:19
  But if you're not flourishing, you should take a look at what you're eating and say like,
• 59:24
  okay is this serving me
• 59:26
  is this making me better
• 59:28
  is this making me worse
• 59:30
  and you know for me
• 59:30
  when I eat animal based
• 59:32
  when I eat more nose to tail
• 59:34
  for me like
• 59:36
  there's a certain amount of nose to tail
• 59:37
  that's good
• 59:39
  and certain amount that's too much
• 59:41
  you know
• 59:42
  a light dusting of a seasoning
• 59:44
  is really perfect for me
• 59:45
  because I don't want to do
• 59:46
  tons and tons of offal
• 59:48
  I don't feel my best
• 59:49
  if I eat like liver every day
• 59:52
  a little bit
• 59:54
  like purposefully included in my diet.
• 59:57
  You know, you think about like special occasions, like,
• 1:00:00
  or special metabolic conditions, like say somebody who's older, like you give the liver of the kill,
• 1:00:07
  the whole tribe shares the animal.
• 1:00:10
  You give the liver to the older person.
• 1:00:12
  The older person
• 1:00:13
  literally can't absorb as much nutrition.
• 1:00:17
  So as you age, your ability to absorb all of the
• 1:00:20
  vitamins and minerals that you need to survive goes down.
• 1:00:23
  So if you give them something that's
• 1:00:25
  super dense in vitamins and minerals and their ability to create enzymes degrades, their ability
• 1:00:30
  to break protein degrades, their ability to create acid, to get those amino acids, all of that
• 1:00:35
  degrades.
• 1:00:35
  It's like giving them liver might breathe life into them or someone who's pregnant.
• 1:00:41
  You're
• 1:00:41
  building a whole new human being from scratch.
• 1:00:43
  You might be in a unique metabolic situation
• 1:00:46
  where you might need a little bit more vitamins and minerals for that short duration.
• 1:00:51
  That may not be for every time, but I think you can target this stuff sensibly
• 1:00:57
  and really make sure that you're getting this high quality nutrition
• 1:01:00
  in accordance with whatever other diet you thrive on.
• 1:01:05
  I think just adding it in, sprinkling it on top, which goes so well with pluck,
• 1:01:10
  I think is a great way to add Ophel into your life
• 1:01:13
  and just make sure you're covering your bases.
• 1:01:16
  If you're anything like the people taking the pills,
• 1:01:18
  a little goes a long way.
• 1:01:20
  It makes real change.
• 1:01:21
  Just a little bit can make a big change
• 1:01:23
  in your overall health and how you feel.
• 1:01:26
  Well, you bring up a really good point too,
• 1:01:28
  which I've actually never thought about,
• 1:01:30
  which is the protein in the organ.
• 1:01:32
  So the actual sheath that's embodying the organ
• 1:01:36
  is easier to break down.
• 1:01:39
  And you're getting more of that methionine.
• 1:01:41
  No, no, glycine.
• 1:01:42
  someone who is older someone who is uh not digesting their proteins very well is going to
• 1:01:48
  digest organ meats better i get that mixed up the methionine glycine it's a ratio and so they're
• 1:01:55
  they're a bonded pair like copper and zinc are a bonded pair you're getting zinc and the muscle
• 1:02:02
  meat but you're not getting copper unless you eat the liver organs right yeah so the methionine
• 1:02:06
  glycine is the collagen to muscle meat amino acid dominance.
• 1:02:11
  So you're right.
• 1:02:11
  They're getting
• 1:02:12
  it more bioavailable, but also joints tend to wear out.
• 1:02:17
  They have a finite lifetime if used
• 1:02:19
  under ideal conditions.
• 1:02:21
  But if you don't use them under ideal conditions or you get injured or you
• 1:02:24
  get arthritis, it's like, where are you going to rebuild that?
• 1:02:27
  That's great, man.
• 1:02:29
  It's so great
• 1:02:29
  to talk to you.
• 1:02:30
  And I hope we can do this again because there's so much more to mine.
• 1:02:33
  Always.
• 1:02:35
  We're going to put in the show notes how people can save 10% on ordering Carnivore Bars, should they want to try.
• 1:02:41
  My favorite, personally, is the Honey Barbecue.
• 1:02:44
  I think you nailed that one.
• 1:02:47
  They're all great, but I just mean that one just hits my savory and sweet notes perfectly.
• 1:02:52
  Where should people look to connect with you, find you on socials?
• 1:02:57
  Just the Carnivore Bar, or carnivorebar.com.
• 1:03:00
  And we're fortunate enough to have a fan get the domain and sell it to us for a reasonable price during the Kickstarter.
• 1:03:08
  So we are community-based, community-supported carnivores for carnivores or animal-based, ancestral.
• 1:03:18
  We love talking about organs.
• 1:03:21
  We love talking about nutrition.
• 1:03:23
  So just hit us up on social.
• 1:03:25
  Yeah, you guys are knocking out of the park, too.
• 1:03:27
  There's so much.
• 1:03:28
  I highly recommend everyone check out their Instagram.
• 1:03:31
  It's just so informative.
• 1:03:33
  You're always keeping on top of like current news as well.
• 1:03:37
  And you're a good person.
• 1:03:38
  You know, I think as you mentioned, it's like I wish there was someone out there that was kind of highlighting businesses that actually have heart, that have good people with good intentions that are really trying to help because you would be at the top of the list.
• 1:03:55
  Well, thank you.
• 1:03:56
  I feel the same about you.
• 1:03:58
  I think we find each other and we shout each other out.
• 1:04:01
  And we just point out that we can't know everything, but we have repeated experiences with this person and they're rock star.
• 1:04:09
  Thank you, Philip.
• 1:04:10
  And thank you, everyone, for joining us in today's talk.
• 1:04:15
  It means so much to have you with us.
• 1:04:18
  And please leave a message, rate us, just give us some communication of how you're enjoying this podcast.
• 1:04:25
  and most of all, stay curious
• 1:04:29
  and let's fight the good fight together.
• 1:04:31
  Thank you.
• 1:04:34
  Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral.
• 1:04:38
  If you enjoyed this episode,
• 1:04:40
  hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one.
• 1:04:43
  You can find the show notes, links,
• 1:04:45
  and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com.
• 1:04:48
  That's E-A-T-P-L-U-C-K.com.
• 1:04:53
  And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too.
• 1:04:59
  Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.