Transcript: What to Feed a Human — Dr. Bill Schindler #015

0:00

Why don't we know what to eat anymore?

The agriculture revolution was sort of the beginning of the end of us as a species from, you know, from a health perspective, from a connection with our environment perspective, and for all those things we are like almost trying to kill ourselves off at some level.

We're in this funny time now where the challenges that people in our environment are nutrient deprived and calorie oversaturated.

0:21

We've never had a glut of calories like this, but everybody's sort of starving to death at the same time for nutrients.

And one of the things I say at the beginning of every butchering class, and I wholeheartedly mean this, is you only need to do 2 things and you will have successfully butchered this animal.

One is that you're respectful and two, and is that you're safe.

0:38

They mess up the pig completely and we have to run the entire thing through a meat grinder.

Then we have 100 lbs of ground pork and and we're good to get.

I'm big believer in eating plants but most people think animal foods are like toxic when animal foods are the least toxic foods and then they think plants are the healthiest foods and plants are actually the most toxic.

0:55

Foods.

If all you're doing is eating the meat, then you're missing half of that animal as a food source, but you're missing more than half of the nutrition that that animal can provide.

Doctor Bill Schindler is an experimental archaeologist, chef, husband, father, and author on a mission to reconnect people with real, nourishing food by reviving and reimagining ancestral eating practices.

1:23

His work spans continents, cultures, and deep time, bringing together the wisdom of our ancestors and translating it into practical solutions for our modern world.

Bill is the author of Eat Like a Human and he's also the Co founder of the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, where he, his family, and a team of more than 30 put these ideas into daily practice.

1:45

Bill Schindler, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So good to have you again, it's been a while since we've had an opportunity to talk.

Yes, I remember the last time we spoke, you out of the blue started asking me about oxalates and.

2:02

That.

Entire.

Congressman that it seems like, it does seem like that's something that you've gone a little bit deeper on since we last spoke.

Absolutely.

They're incredibly important.

I think they're more important now in, especially in our country than ever for sure.

2:18

Let's zoom out of that for a second thought.

I want to get the big picture for people who've are new to your work and haven't heard you before, haven't seen, I think you know, any of our past interviews.

Give us the big picture overview of what's your work and kind of what's DRY, the driving principles behind what you do.

2:35

Sure, absolutely.

So my background, I'm an archaeologist and primitive technologist.

My focus and archaeology has always been experimental archaeology and I taught at the college university level for actually almost 25 years.

My research is always been embedded in the technologies of our ancestors.

2:55

And a lot of my, my training and, and research has been in things like stone tools and primitive ceramics and that and that sort of thing.

Always, you know, and part of this is drawn from my father.

You know, I was in the woods and on the rivers and on the streams and on the lakes.

My aren't my entire life.

3:12

And I'm, and I'm sure that that played a very large role in my interest in this.

But what I found is the entirety of, of my childhood and my early adult years, I had an incredibly unhealthy relationship with food.

And despite this close connection with nature and always hunting and fishing and, and camping and, you know, my connection with how our ancestors were modifying their environments and, and, and living with their environments.

3:36

I, I always had an issue with my own health.

I was always overweight, I was always sick.

I had all sorts of things that later in life when I became an adult, you know, compounded and got worse.

And when I made the link about 20 years ago, between all the work I was doing as an archaeologist and my passion for being out in, in the outdoors and health and diet, everything for, for my life transformed.

4:03

And then it also transformed for my family.

And it was so incredibly powerful that I, I literally just wanted to share it with the world.

So that's why I wrote the book, Eat like a Human.

And at the same time, there were a lot of things happening because of COVID.

And, you know, the college was shut down and we had started a food lab that was associated with the college called the Eastern Shore Food Lab.

4:24

And because there was no, it had nothing to do during COVID, we had no students whatsoever.

And it was completely shut down.

But we started producing food that we believed in out of our house, everything that we could legally produce, you know, sourdough breads and those sorts of things.

And then when COVID relaxed, we attempted to bring it back into the space that we're in now.

4:43

And it was obvious that it wasn't going to be a a good link with with the direction the college was going.

So I left the college, my wife left her job as a director of special Ed and we actually started 2 businesses at the same time with no business experience.

4:59

One is the modern Stone Age kitchen, which I'm sure we'll talk about later.

But that is the restaurant that we have that makes literally, I know the word scratch is bastardized today and doesn't it is almost meaningless.

But all of our food is made entirely from scratch.

There's no two ingredients put together outside of our walls.

5:16

Our team makes everything.

We make all of our cheese, we do all of our butchering, make all of our meats, we ferment all of our vegetables.

We have a full, you know, full sourdough bakery and we have a whole list of rules that we came up with for the way that we approach food.

So and that we've never strayed from it.

So for example, anything that has any flour whatsoever, whether it contains gluten or not, this put through a 100% wild long fermentation sourdough process.

5:40

And there's a whole bunch of other things we can talk about.

So we have a full service restaurant now open seven days a week.

And we also have a nonprofit, which is the Montesonic Food Lab, where we continue to do a lot of research and we teach a lot of classes.

Man, it must be, I'm sure that having like, you know, a job at a college gives that sense of security.

6:02

You have that regular paycheck you can rely on.

I mean, I know being out of my own, I know what that's like to to have to be responsible for making sure that you are not just getting paid yourself, but taking care of other people, other families and all of that.

But it must just be incredible to be out from that world for both of you and you know, living out this passion as work.

6:24

I mean, I'm sure, like I said, I'm sure there's times that you know, you're pulling your hair out, but at the same time, I mean, from a big picture principal perspective, especially I think with the, I saw a little like smirk in your face there.

But it's like the direction that that a lot of our schools have gone.

It must feel good to kind of be doing what you're doing now.

6:42

Yeah, and I'll say even more so.

So I was a fully tenured professor, which comes a lot away.

From a tenure.

And to make it even worse, not even worse or or more maybe dramatic, I'm not trying to be dramatic, but a little more dramatic.

All we have three kids.

6:58

All of our kids could have, I was teaching at Washington College.

All of our kids could have gone to school at Washington College completely for free.

And the college is a part of a consortium of between 300 and 500 other colleges, universities that are my kids would have been able to go to school for either free or very close to free.

7:15

When we made the decision to leave, it was so important and, and I don't, and I'm not trying to suggest leaving the college was the important piece.

The important piece was going out on our own to be able to build what we were so passionate about and, and, and and dead set on building that my oldest daughter was a senior in high school about to go to college.

7:35

So I mean, it was a tremendous decision, you know, huge decision for us as a family because my wife left her job, I was leaving my job.

We had no security.

We had no paycheck and we had no no guarantee for school, which is what we had been counting on.

I taught there for 13 years.

But I'll tell you, it's really, really cool.

7:54

At the time, under the way a lot of college universities work, this place would have never become what it has become now.

And I, and it isn't about that guy, just about colleges, universities in general.

The, the bandwidth, you know, they didn't have the bandwidth.

8:10

A school, college university wouldn't have the bandwidth to create what we've been able to create.

So I had to leave.

We had to leave to do it.

But we have in in recent years reconnected significantly and in fact I am teaching for the college now.

8:27

This is very cool.

This fall I am teaching a field to table class for credits at the college to students.

That is because we have a, there's a lot of students where we at the college that hunt a lot here, a lot of waterfowl hunting, a lot of deer hunting.

And the entire semester is on taking an animal from the field, using the entirety of that animal and they're actually getting college credit for it.

8:50

So there's been a big turn around and we've come, you know, come back together and I'm really excited about it.

Wow, OK, a lot to say there.

Yesterday I was with my producer, Grant He, he raised 50 meat birds this year and we were butchering those birds yesterday.

And I kept making this joke where I go, you know, I just feel because I eat meat, it's important that you know, at least one time.

9:12

So I'm not a hypocrite.

I go through this entire process.

And I kept saying that just because I started off saying that.

I'm sure you said that to yourself at one point, and you've probably just seen 1000 people.

That sentiment comes up for us in this modern world where it's like, oh, wait a second.

I don't even know.

9:29

Not not only not how to like identify and kill the animal, but like, what would I even do with it, right?

So, so many people for the, I think it's fair to say this and you, you as an archaeologist can give your feedback on this.

But I think it's fair to say this is the first time in human history that people haven't known how to do this.

9:46

I mean, you know, you could even imagine if we could go back thousands of years, even people in Royal Courts would have known how to do this.

It's not like you would have been like, well, I'm the king.

I don't know.

I don't need to know how to kill an animal.

It's like everybody knew how to do this until basically in the big picture of human history, it's like last week that people forgot how to do this, right?

10:06

It's like a couple 100 years maybe.

And even then, a couple 100 years ago, probably still 80 percent, 90% of the world knew how to do this.

Is it fair to say this is the first time in human history that this many people have not known like how to process an animal?

Hey wait, don't skip through this.

I've got an important message for you.

10:23

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10:45

Of course, my areas of focus are food and nutrition, self health care, and nature based healthy living.

But I'm also a subject matter expert on wild foods with a focus on getting folks started in the hunting, fishing and foraging space.

And while I'm not a therapist, I'm happy to discuss relational, spiritual and even existential matters.

11:04

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Now my time slots are limited, but I'm keeping my rates very reasonable, especially throughout the rest of 2026.

11:22

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I am sincerely really looking forward to getting to know you and seeing you achieve some of your personal goals. 100% and I would say even if you and I are slightly wrong, even if you know 1000 years ago, every single person didn't know how to do it, every single person at least had first hand knowledge of it and saw it happened.

11:49

I mean, even that is important and even that's missing from, you know, most people today as well.

So much agency is lost.

So much agency is lost with that.

You know that that ignorance or incompetence, and I don't mean either of those as value judgments.

12:06

I mean ignorance in the sense of not having the knowledge or incompetence in the sense of not having the competency.

Yet to do that is such a deeply disempowering thing for a heat, for a being that lives on Earth.

You know this, this place where like things eat each other.

12:22

To not have that knowledge is not just disempowering, but it's actually like very alienating from the experience of being a living being on this planet.

You know, I have this sense that we're being pushed more and more into the built and and digital environments and out of the natural world and, you know, with a kind of intentionality.

12:46

And like part of that is that human beings just don't even, you know, you just watch these TV shows like, oh wow, look, he killed that fish and cooked it.

Like, wow, you know, it's like this is our basic human inheritance, right?

So tell me a little bit about getting to work with people.

13:02

I know you do in person, like nose to tail butchering classes.

Tell me a little bit about the experience of watching people go from that sort of unconscious incompetence about it to developing that skill set.

13:17

And I would imagine you see people feeling elated through the empowerment that comes with it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we do a lot of classes here and those are the ones that are the most rewarding to me because just like you mentioned, it is, you know, we do a lot of sourdough bread classes.

13:33

Well, even if somebody comes to the class and hasn't done sourdough bread before, they've at least been in the room when a loaf of bread has been baked somewhere, right?

So that it isn't that big of a stretch.

The nuances of sourdough are new to them, but you know, being in a place working with flour dough or something maybe, maybe isn't.

But with the animals, for most people it is.

13:50

Now I'm going to get 3 examples real quick.

They're all completely different, but they're all equally as powerful.

So we do a lot of home butchering classes here, So and, and typically they're built around pigs and we use pigs for several reasons. 1 is it's nobody's going to put a cow, half a cow on their counter in the kitchen.

14:12

A lot of people would put a chicken there, but it isn't a big stretch or you don't have to think outside of the box much to think about a chicken on your counter.

But to slap down a half a pig on the counter in your kitchen is a little bit of a stretch for people, but it's very, very doable, right?

And the other part, a pig is so easy to use, every part of a pig that it's just a great test subject for it.

14:32

So we do a lot of, of home butchering classes, nose to tail classes with pigs and everybody in the class works through that.

And the, and the cool thing is they get to see where the bacon comes from and they get to see the decisions where, you know, in Italy, they, they cut between these two ribs because they care about these cuts more than in America, we care about barbecue and bacon.

14:50

And it's, it's a great, it's a great empowering way to get people to take a, a, a leap that isn't necessarily, well, it's a very safe leap really.

And it changes.

I mean, most people I although in every class, people go home, some people from the class go home and actually continue to do what we've done.

15:11

But at least everybody in that class knows more than they ever did about where these things are coming from.

And they're hopefully at at minimum getting their meat in a different way and being able to, you know, be informed to make different decisions.

Another So we also do a lot of classes where it's, you know, whole animal approaches to wild game.

15:31

And here we have a, you know, we're in Maryland, E shore, Maryland.

So there's a lot of duck hunting, a lot of goose hunting and a lot of deer hunting.

So we build the classes around that and it's great.

We literally start and, and, and to me, one of the parts that I think is very, very scary for people that every single hunter has to deal with, whether they're bringing the deer to get processed by somebody else or not, they still have to feel dressed the animal.

15:55

And there's a lot of fear and uncertainty around it.

And my goal is not only to show them how to feel dressed, but to feel dressed with the intent of keeping the liver and the kidneys and the heart and the cold fat and what you can do with the intestines and all the other pieces.

So you don't see that as something you just have to save for the foxes, but it's something that you're going to take home and, and be nourished with.

16:15

So we start with the whole deer and we do the, we, we feel dressed and we go through the entire thing and make everything from Pete and like and do the same thing with birds, ducks and geese and, and, and, and part of the issue here on the Eastern Shore, and you probably see it where you are as well, is everybody here is breasting out the birds like they're just breasting the birds and getting rid of the rest.

16:34

There's occasionally a bird here there where I'm like, OK, I get it.

But there are certain birds like ducks.

I mean, come on, guys.

Ducks.

And if you were to take the person?

'S going to be like, oh, I like the dark meat when they eat their chicken and Turkey, right, it's Thanksgiving.

16:51

I like the dark meat, but then they're just taking the breasts, you know, of their birds.

It's like.

There's some people probably listening to this that would completely disagree with me, but if you gave me a Canadian goose, a can of goose, and said you have to throw a part of this out, you either have to throw out the breast of the legs.

17:12

I would throw the breasts out before I threw out the legs.

OK, all right, I'm listening, but I.

Will tell you why because we have nailed down comfying the goose legs and it is truly, genuinely one of my favorite things in the world.

For people who don't know what it means to coffee, you're you're cooking it in their fat, correct?

17:30

Cooking in their fat for very very low temperature for a long period of time and I used to comfy in the oven do with.

Water, but coffee is doing it with fat instead of water.

We now do it in a sous video for upwards of 30 to 36 hours.

17:47

And I'm telling you, I'm not telling you anything you already know, but Oh my God, it's truly one genuinely one of my favorite things to do.

So and, and you know, obviously the livers for, for pates and mousses and all, my God, it's amazing.

So it's easy to breast out the bird.

18:04

And there's so many people that have never even, you know, they've been duck hunting or goose on their entire life and never pulled the feather out of the bird or maybe just pulled out the feathers on the on the breast to be able to breast it out.

So, you know, we go through that entirety start to finish with the ducks and geese.

And that's incredibly rewarding to me because, and I think we've talked about this in the past, so I'm just going to throw out these statistics for people that maybe didn't hear that or if we didn't talk about it, I forget.

18:28

About 20 years ago, I paired up with a biologist at the college and I was teaching there and and a senior, Katie Ecken, wrote a student who was a senior at the time and as part of her senior thesis.

And we were exploring for a completely different reason.

We were trying to understand how many calories worth of food are typically left on an average size white tailed deer.

18:51

When a typical hunter or game processor takes off all the meat they would typically take, how many calories are left, And I mean everything from the organs to the eyeballs to the brains to the marrow inside of the belt, the meat that's left, all that sort of thing.

And we took 13 deer, harvested 13 deer, males and females, all different ages, weighed them, took them completely apart.

19:15

And I mean completely.

We took every bit of marrow out of every single bone that contains marrow.

We all of it.

And this is after we took the meat off that a typical hunter would keep.

So it's everything that's left, right?

The average calories that were left in the field or on the carcass would feed a person for between 13 and 31 days.

19:44

That's what from Lemony Deer.

No from 1 deer.

The.

Average 1 deer and if if you accounted for the fat, the marrow, the organs, the eyeballs, all of those pieces 3rd and depending on your caloric intake, so from, you know, from an Olympic athlete to a couch potato, 13 to 31 days worth of calories and then we didn't go as far as to understand the diversity of nutrients.

20:12

That that accounted for calories are just easy currency to use or the bioavailability of those nutrients.

But you know those 13 to 31 days worth of calories is a massive amount of food.

But.

I would love to that.

I, I was thinking about actually a little bit about something like this this morning.

20:31

I was thinking about fat on the landscape.

It's just something that's always been on my mind.

And, and you know, here we have a pretty robust bear population.

So I've had the opportunity to hunt quite a few bears and render their fat, which is just like if you, if you've had it, I mean, the, the finest of cooking fats on Earth, right?

20:46

It's just like the best fat I can think of, at least I've ever had access to.

I've never had a mammoth, but but wonderful fat and I was thinking about deer and how most deer fat is is thrown out by hunters and I'm sure you've seen like sometimes I'll get a pre rut buck who's or dough who's just sitting on all of this like enteric fat, like around the kidneys and stuff.

21:11

That's not that Talui waxy fat that you're like this is good rendering fat.

But then there's all that talui fat that people throw out, which is actually a not terrible.

It's a it's AI would.

Anyway, what I was thinking about was if I like, needed to survive on it, that's a lot of calories.

21:27

So when you said this, one thing I'm thinking about is the marrow.

I'm thinking about the brain.

I'm thinking about all of that tallow because fat has 9 calories per gram and, you know, protein has four calories per gram.

So I was at first thinking how could there be that much extra food left behind?

21:45

But then when I think about it from a calorie perspective, it's like, Oh yeah, you got more than double the calories per gram and all those lipids that are left.

And, and we're in this funny time now where the challenges that people in our environment are calorie saturated, calorie over saturated, they're nutrient deprived and calorie over saturated.

22:04

So everybody's trying to like, watch how much calories they eat because we've never had a glut of calories like this, but everybody's sort of starving to death at the same time for nutrients A. 100%, absolutely.

And the very cool thing that we've noticed, we also took another source of fat from the deer is, is bone grease.

22:23

So there's there's the fat that you see when you cut it open, there's the fat and the marrow that's inside of the bones.

And then the in the matrix of the bones itself, the walls is, is the bone grease.

So after we extracted all the marrow, we broke up the bones and threw them in water and simmered them to release the rest of that fat, which would come out if you're making bone broth or whatever anyhow.

22:40

And that is another source of of calories and incredible nutrition at the same time.

And real quick, the 3rd.

So to be able to share that with people, you know, sometimes people just need to do it and get their hands in it or be standing next to you when it's happening.

22:56

Because even a YouTube video, sometimes it's like, yeah, I get it.

But you know, seeing it actually happening at their hands in it gives them the opportunity.

I think they start implementing it.

The, the final example is so the 13 years that I taught at Washington College, every fall I would teach a primitive technology and experimental archaeology class.

23:14

And every week was focused on a specific technology.

So one week with stone tools, one week was printed ceramics.

And like, so they would, we'd study the prehistory of that technology, we'd replicate very basic versions of that technology, and then we'd use those technologies.

23:30

And at the end of the semester was a meal that we created using all those technologies that we would all have together as a culminating thing.

But each week we did something.

And the week we made the stone tools, I wanted to make sure that they understood how incredibly efficient that they, they were.

So they made basic just flake tools.

23:46

And then I would get some deer and bring them to campus and they would, they would skin the deer and just do some basic butchering.

And then we'd use that meat, obviously in that final meal.

And you know, this is a small liberal arts college, which every single semester I had at least one, but usually multiple vegetarian and sometimes vegan students in the class because it wasn't a class.

24:10

You know, the, the butchering classes, people have selected to come and you don't have that.

But here you do because they're taking up primitive technology class.

They could be from any walk of life in any dietary approach.

And at the beginning of every time we were butchering the, the, the deer.

24:25

This is exactly what I said, and I meant it wholeheartedly.

I do not need you.

You know, if you don't want to butcher and skin this deer, you do not have to.

You have to make the tool.

You have to be there and be mentally engaged in class.

But you will get an A for the class if you do those two things.

24:43

You do not have to get your hands into the, you know, carcass of the deer.

You'll be fine.

It's completely up to you.

It's a safe space.

In 13 years, hundreds of students, probably dozens of vegetarians and vegans, there wasn't one time when a student who was a vegetarian or vegan weren't elbow deep by the end of that class into the carcass.

25:04

I believe that and what I think, and this wasn't an attempt to change anybody.

The and in some cases they left that experience and started eating meat.

In some cases they didn't.

The point was you have people making such a, such a huge decisions about how they feed themselves, how they, how they view their, their interaction with the world around them and, and all of that, that are making it from an uninformed place.

25:32

They never had the opportunity to understand this other side of it.

And here they are literally elbow deep and in some cases more engaged than, you know, people that have been hunting for, you know, their, their entire lives.

And that was incredibly rewarding as well.

Well, it's my birthday this week and I was just talking to my team over at surf Rival about what are my most important supplements today versus what they were when I started the company almost 20 years ago now.

25:58

And it's funny to think about it because 20 years ago I was in such a different stage or season of life.

You know, it's at the end of my 20s, my early 30s.

And at that time I wasn't thinking a lot about my hormonal levels or, or my recovery.

I just didn't need to back then.

You know, my T levels stayed high naturally, my recovery was easy and rapid because I was young and I'm now in a different stage of life.

26:22

And so how I think about my supplementation priorities has really changed.

So what we did was we took our top 4 flagship products, our colostrum, our elk antler, our pine pollen, and our medicinal mushrooms.

And I ranked them based on how I thought about them when I started the company and how I think about them now.

26:39

And what I realized is it's basically flipped.

So it used to go like this for me, it was colostrum, then medicinal mushrooms, then the antler products, then the pine pollen products.

And the reason was this, the colostrum, I've always thought of it like a sophisticated protein powder, but also an immunosupport and a digestion support, particularly good for the gut lining.

27:00

And so those were things I was thinking about back then as I was basically rebuilding and restoring myself from a childhood kind of growing up in the world of processed foods and and realizing about all the environmental toxicity and such.

Now, second to that was the medicinal mushrooms because they're immunomodulators.

27:16

And my lifestyle back then was just not as orderly or as structured or as balanced or as consistent.

And so I was always stressing my immune system.

I was traveling a lot.

I was speaking in different places, meeting tons of people, always at workshops and events and, you know, big talks.

27:32

It would be in hotels.

And, you know, I just was always thinking about my immune health.

Now it's interesting today, almost 20 years later, where I just have so much more of a balanced lifestyle.

It's much more consistent how I live and eat day-to-day.

You know, I've been married for eight years.

So I have much more stability and structure in my life.

27:50

And I still travel, but not at the same kind of pace and with the intensity that I did when I was younger.

But my hormone levels don't stay as naturally high as they did in my 20s and 30s, of course, now that I'm in my late 40s.

So the product that used to be #4 for me, pine pollen, pure Potency, that's jumped up to my #1 product.

28:09

I still take all four of these products, but this is my number one ally because pine pollen contains testosterone, but also we've tucked A stingy metal root in there, which helps to free up your body's natural testosterone that's been bound to sex hormone binding globulin.

I feel effects from this in a way that I didn't when I was in my 20s and 30s.

28:28

I would take it from time to time, but I didn't need it then the way I need it now.

And my number 3 product in the past is now my number 2, and that's our elk antler.

Again, I just didn't have issues with quick recovery.

I didn't need that anabolic support that I feel like I do as I close in on 50.

28:46

So those two products have jumped to the top now.

I still take my colostrum every day.

It's just part of my smoothie recipe.

It's just part of my life.

I've, I've taken it for 20 years, but it's moved to #3 and I've moved, moved medicinal mushrooms to #4 So here's what's interesting.

Depending on what season of life you're in, you're going to be thinking about your supplementation differently.

29:05

If you're in the season of life that I'm in or you're interested in these supplements, what I'm doing right now for my birthday month is running a sale where I've got these two products.

So our Elk Antler Gold, that's my favorite of the elk antler lineup.

And my pine Pollen Pure Potency, that's my favorite pine pollen product.

29:22

I've got them bundled together for 15% off on the website.

So if you go over to rival.com and you check the top banner, you'll see the sale there.

Just click on that and that'll get you access to that bundle for the rest of September.

So I really hope you take advantage of that and I hope you're thinking about your supplementation based on the season of life you're in.

29:41

You guys have heard me say it over and over again, but I really think that this direction we're seeing people go towards hormone replacement therapy, peptides and you know, essentially steroids.

I just think this is not the direction for somebody who's really thinking about longevity.

29:57

So I'm playing a long game and that's why I'm choosing to go a natural route.

And that's why these products are so important to me personally.

And I hope that you're somebody who they're important to as well.

So go over to surfrival.com, check out the sale and in the meantime, I'm going to get you back to the show.

30:13

There's a lot of jumping off points there trying to think of where I want to go from that.

You know, I, I do want to say real quick, I think I'll leave the vegans alone now.

I've done so much damage over the years.

And I say that as somebody who is a A10 year plus vegan.

So I, I have a, that's why I forgot about that.

30:29

Yeah.

And I, you know, I do think, like you said, it kind of often comes from an uninformed place.

I don't know how you meant that, but I'll say that I historically there's no such thing as a vegan until very recently in history, it just wasn't a tenable position to take.

30:45

Vegetarianism existed only in cultures that had dairy products.

And I can only think of one really.

And and that was a, a liquid animal tissue substitute because you, you need these things, right?

So this is kind of like a new idea.

And I understand the idea.

31:00

Like I said, I was butchering chickens yesterday.

I, I think it's funny when I hunt, I think every animal out here knows what I'm doing.

It's so obvious.

I mean, anytime I'm sure you've experienced this where you know, like there's a squirrel in the yard or something like, oh, I'm going to grab my bow or my 22.

And, and as soon as you step out there, that squirrel who's seen you everyday now knows exact.

31:20

They just instantly know by the way you're moving, what you're up to, you know, So I know the animals out there know the game and they're being hunted all day and they're hunting all day and it's just life.

But the chickens, you're like, man, you've, you've kind of like made it a, you've taken care of these guys, you know, and here we have this butchering system.

31:36

So one by one, this flock of 50s going down, down, down, down.

And like these birds are being butchered kind of right next to where they are.

And I was thinking it was funny because there was some laying hens in another area.

And I felt like, oh, this is like a class thing because all the, the butchering, all of the, the, the birds we were killing were white birds.

31:55

But you know, over here with the laying hens are all these beautiful, different colorful patterns.

And there's the rooster with all his amazing cock feathers and they're like not part of this group of chickens who's being butchered, right?

So there's this, all this weirdness.

And when we got down to that last bird, you just feel so bad.

32:12

You know, I get the vegan perspective.

Like you feel bad and you especially, you've been raised on Disney movies and all that your whole life.

Like none of this seems to make sense until you actually get real hungry and you need to eat, you know?

But I also wanted to say when you butcher, I'm sure you've seen this too.

It's like you think it's a little overwhelming.

32:29

And a schematic is only so helpful because every animals out of agriculture, you can get some uniformity.

Like you mentioned pigs, you can get some uniformity where they're almost all the same.

But you know, in the wild, they're all different sizes.

They're sometimes different, a little bit different anatomically.

The wound pattern from the hunt can change how things get butchered.

32:48

And it's a lot more intuitive than schematic.

And yet it's like in your DNA to do it.

I mean, you get in there and you're just like, oh, I know what I'm, I know what to do.

Pull here, push here, move this over, cut here.

It just sort of it comes fairly quickly.

Have you found that?

Absolutely.

33:04

And let me just say very quickly, I want to come back to the uninformed piece.

When I say uninformed, I should have said not fully informed.

You know, it's it's usually most of the vegans and vegetarians that I have coming in are literally trying to change the world and are incredibly well-intentioned.

33:20

And I've heard one side of the story or experienced one side of the story.

And it's it's rewarding to provide in an incredibly safe space the other side, but a safe space, but at the same time an incredible, you know, visceral opportunity that's using.

33:36

Literally.

Every one of their senses.

So I think it's, yeah, it's, it's better.

I, I still think if I put a video in that class instead of the experience, if I put a video up of somebody slaughtering and butchering an animal, they would have been repulsed.

33:55

But the opportunity to actually do it and see it and smell it and feel it and be a part of the entire thing and realize that this was all going into a meal that we're all sharing together and all the things.

I, I, I actually think it sounds weird, but I think that full experience was more inviting to them.

34:12

Then again, just being a, a viewer of something else.

But yes, it, it, it, it, it, you say it.

And as you were talking, I'm thinking to my, you know, about the actual, you know, being almost intuitive.

One of the things that I feel during these classes more than anything is that once we get started, once I'm explaining a few pieces, once we actually get started and there's knives and hands and things happening, it becomes so intuitive that I actually in every class, I don't know how to say this, but I get a little bit embarrassed.

34:40

Like, yeah, you guys are all here.

This is that simple.

I'm just kind of your guide here, but you can kind of figure most of this out for yourself.

So yeah, I I do think it is almost like in our DNA.

Yeah, I mean, you just kind of know what to do.

I mean, it's like with my my dog the other day, I don't know what he got into, but he goes into the woods, he comes out and he's in panic mode and he's eating grass like a lawn mower.

35:03

And I'm watching him like he's he's sucking up water.

He's my wife's feeding him bread.

It's like, what's what is he eating?

It's like he's on fire in his belly.

And all I know is he just knew instinctively.

I got to get to some grass here, you know, until he puked up this giant dragon of grass, like a boa constrictor of grass came out of him and then he was fine, you know, and it's like that.

35:27

It's like nobody teaches him that he has it instinctively in him.

And I think there's some level of this knowledge is a bit instinctive to us, which is really cool.

And I wanted to say this too.

I love how your teaching birds and mammals.

What I have found in my experience you know working with many.

35:44

I think signature of what we did with wild Fed was hunting lots of different types of creatures.

And if you can butcher duck, then you can butcher a Peacock and you can butcher a Hummingbird.

It's like birds are birds.

36:00

They have anatomically they're the same.

I mean, it's amazing.

The scale changes and sometimes little bits of proportions are different, you know, between body parts.

But essentially birds are birds.

And if you know how to butcher a bird, you can butcher butcher any bird.

And so I've had the opportunity to butcher Peacocks and I've had the opportunity to butcher very small doves and you know, songbirds even, and all kinds of different birds and they're all just the same.

36:24

And then with a male, it's like if you can butcher a squirrel, you can butcher a bison.

I mean, it's amazing.

But like your deers, maybe you're kind of optimal mid size game.

But I mean, a deer is an elk is a moose is a, you know, I, I butchered a moose last year, couple of them and it was awesome because the bigger they get, I find, like in some ways you have the challenges of weight and logistics, but but what, what to cut and how to cut?

36:50

It's a little easier with the when things get bigger, you know, but cheerleaders the same as breaking down a squirrel.

And so it's it's interesting how anatomically everything so similar.

So those you just need that baseline skill and then you actually can apply that to other animals, right?

And and even with one thing I found with the pigs people and it's and it's in in both directions.

37:15

I shared something called serial serial homology.

SERIAL, serial homology means that animals that have certain genetic relationships have the same patterning in their bones, right?

So there's a, there's a lot of bone structure even in a pig or in a deer.

37:33

It's even in a bird really.

But that's very similar to humans.

And they just again, same thing.

It's, it's the same sort of arrangements, but sometimes the ratio of length and that sort of thing are, are, are different.

And once we get into the pig, I bring the subset, this is the same, you know, the diaphragm for us is the same here.

37:48

And the ribs are very, and this is happening here and this is happening and all the, and so going through that pig helps or deer helps people understand a little bit more about their own anatomy.

But at the same time, when they get stuck, right?

And they're like, what do I, what do I do here?

You know, think about what, where you are and how these bones articulate with one another.

38:06

And then it's, it's very helpful on that side as well to then work through the rest of that, that Tigger, that deer.

So it's, it's wonderful for all the classes that I teach.

Those are the ones that are so rewarding.

Man, a couple three things come to mind.

Let's see if I can hit them all three of them and not forget.

So the first one is I had a buddy, Frank Butcher, who in his butchering school, they would do a stretch class in the morning and they would have to call out the cuts on their own body as they stretched them.

38:33

Awesome.

They So the second thing is I have a background in body work.

So even though I was a vegetarian, you know, I came with some disadvantages to hunting, having had a long time in vegetarianism.

But one advantage I had is I was a clinical body worker.

And so my human musculoskeletal anatomy is, you know, above average from that work.

38:54

And what you're doing as a body worker is essentially butchering people with your thumbs.

You're constantly separating muscles, connective tissue, you know, intercostal spaces, getting deep into hips and, you know, all these places and even muscles that are difficult to reach, you know, subscapularis and SOAS and things like that.

39:12

And so that knowledge, it translated wonderfully to butchering.

But the third thing I wanted to say, you called it serial homology.

What did you call it?

Serial homology, like the pattern of the word.

Serial and there's a lot in homologies basically means like it's very similar, right?

39:29

So the I I knew it as comparative anatomy and I remember when I first I I don't think everybody understands this.

So I'm bringing, I know you know this, but I want to say this to other people.

You know, one view is like, of course, like it's all from, you know, from evolutionary phylogeny.

39:50

The other view would be, hey, similar similarity in design.

However, you kind of want to approach that, but, but like, you look at a whale, you're like, oh, it's the same skeleton, a bat, it's our same skeleton every animal.

It's like we all have the same parts.

It's incredible.

So a bat's wings are are literally just the, the phalanges are just long and webbed or a whale's fins, you look at them, you're like, oh, there's a hand inside there, You know, it's amazing.

40:13

But like we all have the same basic structure And then, you know, it's the proportionality of the bones changes, but it's.

It's pretty useful once you know that, because you realize as you butcher, you're dealing with the same stuff and all these different animals.

40:30

Yeah.

I want 100% agree and I'll also say, you know, some people are incredibly nervous when they get in here.

They have no problem using a knife, you know, they've been hunting for 20 years, 30 years, but they're scared something is stopping them from doing something other than just breasting the animal or not bringing the deer to somebody else to have it done for them or whatever.

40:56

Sometimes it's time, right?

And I think it's going to take a lot longer than it does or they just don't have the time and their priorities are are a little interesting to me that they're going to kill something, but they don't have the time to to spend making sure you're honoring the animal by using as much as you possibly can.

41:13

Sometimes it's because they actually do not know what to do or are scared that they're going to dishonor the animal by doing something else and doing it wrong.

And one of the things I say to begin to have every butchering class, and I wholeheartedly mean this is you only need to do 2 things.

41:29

Make sure you accomplish 2 things and you will have successfully butchered this animal. 1 is that your respectful and two, and is that your safe?

And that's it.

I mean, if you mess, if they mess up the pig completely and we have to run the entire thing through a meat grinder, then we have 100 lbs of ground pork and we're good to go.

Yeah, you can't really mess this up, right?

41:46

It's not.

So you know them going through it.

The other part is, and This is why I love these classes because it is three things at the same time.

It's field dressing, it is butchering and then it is cooking.

So they're also scared.

OK, I, I know what to do with the duck breast, but I've never dealt with an entire duck.

42:04

I've never dealt with the duck liver.

I've never dealt with the legs or, or the skin or whatever.

And, you know, we go through that in a way that I already have finished things ready for them to try and we put things, other things up.

So I'm, what I'm tempting to do is accomplish or at least deal with all three of those things at the same time.

42:20

And I, I, I think it, that makes a change.

I mean, I, it's, it's a direction we really do need to go because I can stand, I can very easily stand and have a conversation with an anti hunter and say this, this is what I'm doing.

42:35

Like this is what's happening before the hunt, during the hunt and after the hunt and stand there.

And it's a, you know, I don't think anybody could poke any holes in that, no matter what their stance is.

Yeah, I want to say this too.

I, I understand that there's a lot of people, they're just not going to do this.

And that's like, everybody's got their priorities.

42:53

And so that's OK, right?

With other people are doing things that are really important.

And I would be like, oh, I'm not going to do that.

And they'd be like, what a loser.

So anyway, I get that there's like all these different things that people can do with their time and, and this isn't something everyone's going to do, but most people are going to eat meat.

And one thing that I think is really unfortunate is watching people buy, you know, two or three cuts over and over again at these exorbitant prices every day where it's like if you can just get a half a pig or a half a cow in your freezer even.

43:21

And then you have this, not only are you getting such a good value because now you're paying substantially less, you know, per pound across the board for what you have, but then you have this diversity of cuts and diversity of products to work with as well.

And so I just encourage people, if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, I don't really see myself doing that, man.

43:41

If you're just buying chicken breast instead of whole birds or you're just buying, you know, Chuck or like tenderloin all the time and you're not getting that whole animal, you're missing out on them.

Not just good nutrition, but like a lot of really just like amazing meals.

So really helpful to have some of these skills.

43:57

No, no, I, I 1000% agree.

And I'm not suggesting that every single person, whether you're just, you know, somebody in the house buying chicken or beef and trying to cook for your family or whether you're a hardcore hunter and literally don't have the time or desire to butcher everyone of your animals.

44:13

I'm not suggesting that everybody has to do this or it definitely not do it overnight.

What I'm suggesting is there's a, like you just said, there's a lot of small steps that we can take that compounded overtime make an incredible difference.

If all you do is buy chicken breast and, you know, buy the whole chicken or, or, or, or at least start experimenting with some legs or something like that, overtime, it's going to make a huge difference.

44:33

Same sort of thing like different cuts for pigs and and and and and and the cows.

But from a Hunter's perspective, and I understand especially with the birds, plucking a bird is a pain in the butt.

Now we have pluckers now at the house.

I used to dip them in wax and we we show both of them in in the class we're sitting there plucking an entire bird so I can have something on the table that looks like a chicken from the grocery store is by hand is a task is it it definitely is you're.

45:00

Dealing with like a wild Turkey.

It's a real town.

I mean, that's a hard bird to to pluck out.

We have a bird processor up the road.

And I think I might have told you this before, but when we first moved here, I grew up deer hunting my whole life and duck and goose hunting were fairly new to me 18 years ago when I came here.

45:17

Now you know, my my son, that's his passion and I and I go with him all the time.

But it was a new thing to me.

And one day and, and I was taking care of the ducks and the geese, the few that we're getting every year.

But then this that maybe the third year we were here, we had limited out on ducks and geese, my son and I and we I had to go to a wedding in the afternoon and I'm like, I might be able to take care of this.

45:41

So we were actually passing a person that processed birds commercially up here, processed while, you know, ducks and geese.

And I always saw a line out the door hunters every Saturday morning there.

And I'm like, you know what?

I've never had anybody deal with an animal for me before, but I'm going to go in and see what this is all about.

45:57

So I remember walking in and there was a group of hunters in front of me and they are dropping off the geese.

And then I walked up to the counter and I said, listen, I said, what do you want?

I don't know how to order.

Like, what do I do?

They said, well, you know, what do you want me to do to the birds?

Like, what are my options?

46:12

Because I didn't even know their options.

And they're like, well, we can either press them out or we can pluck the entire thing, give you back whatever you want.

And I said, oh, what did they do?

And they said, oh, what?

They all had them breasted.

The the whole crew in front of me, the whole hunting party in front of me just had him breasted.

46:30

I said, what do you do with the rest of the bird?

I said, we see that dumpster out there.

It goes in that dumpster.

I said, well, listen, I want you to pluck my entire bird.

I want the livers and the hearts and I want you to come all the way up the neck when you pluck it and give me the whole bird back, make sure the feet stay on it.

And I want their birds too.

46:47

And they said, no, we can't do that.

You're breaking federal law or this and that.

But they said you, you really want that and the feet.

I said, yes.

He said, I'm doing this 30 years.

Nobody's ever asked for that.

I said please and I said, what's the price difference?

And it was like $3 a bird different in price to get the breast or the entire bird.

47:05

So I'm not suggesting that every single person needs to start plucking all their birds in their garage or some some people live in an apartments and just literally can't, you know, take care of it the same way.

What I am suggesting is there's little pieces like that that make a huge difference.

And this is how dramatic or how important it is.

47:23

A few weeks later I came back and I, cuz I was, I was teaching another class of the college and I knew we were doing a big dinner.

There's no money involved in it at all.

So I, I did and I didn't mind having some, some wild game on the menu for some of the things we're doing.

The students were involved and we're making pates and, and some comfies and all these things.

47:39

So I went up to the same place and I said, listen.

And we're in the middle of nowhere.

I mean, there's 6000 people in our, in our, in our town.

And this is the biggest town in the area.

So I went up and I said, can I?

I know, I know.

I can't buy these pieces from you because it's against the.

47:57

Law because because it's game.

Because it's game.

Can I get them from you?

He said, listen, if you tip the, the high school kids he's got working for them, you know, you tip them 100 bucks or whatever, I can give you whatever you need.

I said, OK, great.

So he said, what do you want?

48:14

And I, I said, well, I want from this Saturday coming up, I want all the livers.

And this is just tucks and geese, all the livers, all the hearts and all the legs that people left behind.

And he said, Oh no, you don't want that many.

So what do you mean I don't want that many?

48:30

He's you actually, you do not want that many.

I said just save them for me.

So I came back the next Saturday at the end of the Saturday, and this is one day I had a trash bag full of livers, a trash bag full of hearts, and a trash bag full of legs.

48:48

And he told me that's all he saves for me.

There was others.

And I mean a big back trash bag.

Wow.

He has two dumpsters that leave there every week full of all these parts.

And I know there's a lot of nuances and legalities and issues and all the things with that, but there's a problem.

49:07

There's a hole in that entire system.

And I'm telling you, you want one part of a goose that you're going to keep the liver is I think that that trash bag he.

Handed you of livers contained more vitamin A than was probably consumed that week by the 6000 people that lived in the town there I mean probably right like actually.

49:26

Like that's what's so.

Crazy it's it's a hyper concentration of nutrients of lipid soluble nutrients that are people are sorely lacking in it's so all right.

You know, this gets me into another area and I do want to talk about the plant side of this as well with you a little bit, but you know.

49:47

Because you've worked with.

Indigenous groups, you know, from archaeology, you know, you're talking about ancient technologies by the way, earlier you were, you were saying using the word technology as applied to like Stone Age tools and stuff.

And I think for the uninitiated, it sounds strange to use the word technology for that.

50:03

I think, you know, we get used to it in in that space, but it does sound kind of odd when we're used to thinking of technologies in the form the kind that we see today, industrialized digitized technologies.

But but it only really.

Takes like a very short.

Break in transmission for things to be lost generation to generation and there's been this like enormous break right so that people don't know how to do this stuff and.

50:28

And actually gets to the place where people are OK, then you get to the place where people are grossed out by it.

But now we've actually.

Gotten to a place where.

People think this biologically normal thing is actually unethical, right?

So.

It only took a couple of.

Generations for that to happen, right?

50:44

I don't you and I probably pretty similar in age.

I was born in 78.

I grew up eating out of a box.

Everything came out of a box.

I mean, there was a food desert in the United States.

Now you know, any of the any city you go to, it's like this renaissance of incredible food in the United States.

51:04

You know, there's farming renaissance.

I meet all these young people that are farming today.

So many people are homesteading now.

You drive down the road in a place like where I live and there's like they'll be chickens running around on the side of the road everywhere cuz everybody's raising chickens.

When I was growing up, there wasn't a chicken to be seen, man.

51:20

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in New Hampshire and southern Maine.

And.

It was just dead at that time, and now it's like a completely different world.

But I think that's there's been a tremendous break.

And so now people like sell people.

51:37

Listening.

Everybody knows they should be eating organ meats, but from the expert tell us, tell people like why, why is liver and heart and and and maybe even feet?

Why, why should they even want to eat these things?

There's several.

Reasons.

51:53

That I'm convinced you should want to eat them #1 and and this is and and and you do you.

You've re grounded me several times.

I am not suggesting anybody's doing anything wrong.

Can I just jump in on that?

I don't.

Think you are I'm saying that because the last time we spoke the show was wild fed and that was a show for people who are into this stuff and I've kind of started this new podcast now where I'm I'm keeping it much more open and so I'm aware that there are people listening who've never put their hands in this.

52:23

I don't think you're coming across like that at all.

I just want to make sure I'm I'm easing people in who aren't familiar with this stuff.

You're you're very you're diplomatic to a you know to AT so don't you worry about that.

I just want to make sure that everybody.

Including myself can continue to take steps that make a huge difference on our health and on the world around us as well.

52:45

And this is one that is at my heart because I truly, genuinely believe this one makes sense on all the levels.

So number one, I think I'm confident that you should be eating the entire animal, including the awful, the organs #1 from, from an ethical perspective, like why would you or somebody else take the life of an animal, not use the entire thing to nourish yourself and your family?

53:09

I mean, that is, I think the ultimate payback and, and, and, and use of the animal.

A #2 from an economic perspective, it makes complete sense, right?

So whether you're buying liver and heart at the the butcher or at the store or at a, you know, or one of these online places that have an amazing commercially available organ meats or if you're a hunter, it's completely free and why you know why you're not going to take it?

53:32

It's almost free if you get it from the butcher.

I mean, it's, yeah, it's absurdly inexpensive from a nutritional.

Well, from an ancestral perspective, and this is very important, we we are confident that at 3.3 million years ago, meat enters our diet because at the same moment in prehistory, we see the first stone tool ever made.

53:54

And at the same time we start seeing butchering marks on bones of animals from those tools.

So we know they're butchering and these animals, but those animals are scavenged from, you know, predator kills.

So that what's what's leftover.

And if you see a true predator on the Africans of animals is true today, when it when a predator takes down an animal, they do not sit there and kind of gnaw on the shoulder.

54:18

They RIP that thing apart.

They dive in and they gorge themselves in the blood, the fat in the organs, the most nutrient dense bio available parts of that animal and the parts that would go bad the fastest and then go sleep off and digest that meal.

Well, scavengers, buzzards, hyenas and humans with stone tools are running in there and hacking off pieces of meat.

54:36

So meat enters our diet at 3.3 million years ago is is the current interpretation.

When meat enters our diet, we don't see a massive change in body or brain size.

It isn't until can I jump into one piece here.

Yeah, I don't necessarily believe this whole schema anymore.

54:53

I've gotten kind of jaded about all of these timelines and how much they change and everything, but let's just assume that the current timeline is accurate. 3.3 million years ago.

We're not talking about Homo sapiens.

No, actually.

In other words.

In other words.

We homo sapiens.

55:09

This has already been going on a long time when the first true modern humans exist.

Not like it's not like humans started.

Well humans Homo started doing this before sapiens exist according to the schema, so this isn't a thing.

Like there was ever the first humans and they didn't eat meat.

55:25

The first humans inherited it from before.

Give me literally less than a second I'm.

Going to, I got to grab something.

Hold on, hold on.

OK.

I'm so sorry but I it's worth it.

I got.

My friends with me.

OK, so this is this is a resin cast, an exact replica of that first stone tool.

55:45

This is called the Lamech Way tool was found just West of Lake Turkana in Africa actually fairly recently and it dates to three and almost three and a half million years ago.

We'll say 3 1/2 to make it easy.

This is who we believe made it.

And this is also Pittacus Afarenza.

So this is for anybody who has studied at all this kind of thing.

56:02

This is Lucy, right?

So this is, I mean the earliest homo sapien remains ever ever found her 300,000 years ago.

So this is 3,000,000 years before order on a magnitude.

Yes, so a great deal.

56:18

So they were.

Eating bugs and limited amounts of fruits and vegetables, wild fruits and vegetables, obviously, and probably no meat until they created this tool.

They created this tool, started eating meat and this and I'm I'm going to use the back of the heads for a second just because we're looking at skull size and it's a little bit easier so this is when we started eating meat and this is a million years later.

56:42

There's not that much of A change.

It seems like everywhere you turn, everyone's.

Promoting colostrum these days.

Endless claims not just about the effects but also the sourcing.

And I get it.

I've been using colostrum daily for almost 2 decades, and I've been in the colostrum industry now for 18 years.

57:00

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They sell a cheap, defatted, fractionated product.

They almost never sell whole colostrum, but worse, they sell it in overpriced, tiny amounts to maximize their markup and their advertising budgets.

57:23

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57:40

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57:57

Find the very best at sirthrival.com.

This is the first.

There's a lot of the bait.

This is Homo habilis, so this is the oldest, the 1st.

Species attributed to.

The genus Homo, so three and a half million years ago, first human that.

58:16

Was true.

That would be the first human right.

So three and a half million years ago, two and a half million.

Years ago, lots of things have changed in that millions of years, a lot of different tool kits, a lot of different things but meat in the form of scavenging has been in the diet for a million years between this and this now in. 1/2 a million years.

58:34

There's two major changes in this.

So this is still Homo habilis at two and a half million years ago.

This is Homo erectus at 2,000,000 years ago.

This is the same time they appear.

We start seeing the introduction of two important technologies.

One is cooking technology.

58:51

There's debate over it, but.

I do believe it's that early.

But more importantly is the introduction of hunting.

So the difference between this and this as far as animals are concerned is they're eating meat in the form of scavenging.

These guys are hunters guys and gals are hunters, and they have first access to the entirety of the animal, which means that yes, they have all the flesh, but they also have all the blood, the fat and the organs which normally were eaten by the predators.

59:19

That break, all that were gone by the time they got to scavenge the carcass, right, So to nutrient.

Density and bioavailability are two incredibly important things to focus on in in in terms of of of health and nutrition and diet.

59:36

So bio nutrient density means for a given amount of food, how many nutrients are packed into there, right?

So that that's important.

But the second part is especially with humans, because we have an incredibly inefficient digestive tract.

Just because nutrients are in a food doesn't mean our body can have access to them.

59:52

So especially when it comes to plants, sometimes we need a whole bunch of technologies like fermentation or nestatomization even to provide our digestive tracts access to that nutrition.

Otherwise it passes right through us if we're.

Looking at nutrient density bioavailability.

1:00:10

Meat is more nutrient dense and bioavailable than any plant on the planet.

But from an looking at the entirety of the animal, the blood, the fat in the organs are more nutrient dense and bioavailable than any of the meat that's on the on the thing.

1:00:25

So if that's important and and meat makes up a meat that we would keep off of.

Most animals make up about half of the weight of the animal.

So if all you're doing is eating the meat, then you're missing more than half of that.

Are you missing half of that animal as a food source?

1:00:41

But you're missing, if I'm right about the nutrient density and bioavailability, you're missing more than half of the nutrition that that animal can provide.

So that that's where the, the, the, the, the awful, the organ meats become very important because they are an incredible source of nutrition at not only in diversity and nutrient density, but also in bioavailability.

1:01:02

You don't even have to cook them.

But here's the trouble.

The trouble is that most of us, I saw, I was born in 73, you know, organ meats were not a part of my diet as a kid.

Probably, I don't know for you, but for most people, not even close.

And I'll tell you why.

1:01:17

For me most was in Mac.

And cheese.

And oodles.

And noodles.

That, yeah, no, So those textures, those flavours.

Those aromas, which are all very different, Mac and cheese is so much different than liver are something we didn't grow up with with and it's very hard to introduce new flavors and aromas and textures and food because food is so incredibly intertwined with everything that we are and all of our past experiences and culture and all these other things.

1:01:41

So a lot of us now that we, you might, you might have said, oh, you know what?

I hear what he said on that podcast and it makes sense ethically, it makes sense economically, it makes sense nutritionally, but I still can't get the liver past my nose or, or past my past my chewing processed right and cooked right.

1:01:59

Organ meats can be absolutely incredible wrongly.

They're they're, they're, they're hard.

So it is something to think about.

And if you're just starting off a couple of couple of tricks, One is remember, heart is an organ.

Heart is also a muscle, so the texture of heart is much more similar than two things that you've had before.

1:02:21

But the nutrition, the nutrition in that heart is more than the muscle.

That's that that are around it.

The heart's a great place to start as far as liver is concerned.

I love Pate.

I eat Pate all the time.

We make it at the restaurant, we make it at home.

Chicken liver Pate is probably from a texture perspective, it's made right.

1:02:40

Is is incredible from a flavor perspective.

It's not going to have that same sort of that liver from other animals.

Yeah, it's a pretty intense gameiness if you're not used to.

Liver, that's for sure.

Right.

But I want to back up what you're saying like.

You know.

The liver out of a squirrel or a chicken or grouse or something like that, so much more palatable to the average person.

1:03:00

Then, you know, you get up to a, a deer liver, bare liver, you're getting into like some much gameier, you know, more.

A cow's liver is a lot more challenging to eat for somebody who's not used to it than a chicken liver.

Like, I can cook a whole bunch of chicken livers and just like, pop them in my mouth.

1:03:16

They're really like, they go down easy.

Cow liver, It's like, OK, man, I got to get the onions out or we got to do something with this thing.

Maybe I'll be a great state of mind.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think that that.

Is like you said, I mean it's just people not being used to it.

But if you're if you're going.

1:03:32

To, you know, 11 just default that a lot of people do is they just grind it in with their meats, which is it's, I mean, that's great.

One trick though is if if you're somebody who is very visual or you have issues with texture of your food, when you grind the organs in with your meat, you still see it like you see that it's a little maroon glisten.

1:03:54

So what we started doing here?

You know, you know who you sure you know who Liver King is.

One of the things, when Liver King hit the scene several years ago, we had a huge influx of people that not only were looking to buy our organ stuff, but irony.

1:04:11

Irony there, dude.

But they also had a lot of.

Questions.

And they were like, you know what, I listen how much I get this, this guy and he's jacked online and he's doing this, he's eating all this raw liver and he's eating all these things in like 20 lbs of bull testicles that are sitting and all these things like how much liver should I eat?

And my response to them always was, whoa, calm down.

1:04:30

You know, it's weird that we asked ourselves these questions because if I can, I, I think that the moment that we were with the hots hunter gatherers in, in, in Tanzania when we're filming the show, they came out back one night with a Janet cat over their shoulders.

1:04:45

They shot and, you know, they put it down and they open it up.

We ate the organs right there.

And then the rest of the cat we ate with the rest of the, of the tribe the next day.

I remember them walking in the scene every time somebody says how much liver should I eat because they've seen something like Liver King on TVI remember that scene, them walking in with this, this cat.

1:05:04

And if I said to them, how much liver should I eat?

Like, I don't understand the question.

I'm going to eat that liver and the kidneys and the heart and the meat.

And then I'm going to go hunting again, like I don't understand the question.

But we now can go into Whole Foods and buy 5 lbs of chicken livers and no, no other part of the chicken.

1:05:21

And then we ask ourselves how much liver should I eat?

So what we do with the restaurant and I, I think this is a great sort of middle ground is we do, we have burgers and meatballs and even hot dogs that we make that are the ancestral blend.

So they have the liver and heart to keep.

1:05:37

What I did was I took a cow, an average cow, and I figured out the percentage of all the parts that I can legally get from the butcher.

So the liver and the heart and the kidney and the fat and the meat.

And I figured out what that proportion is.

And that's the exact proportion that we put in to the things.

1:05:54

So it's not like, and the nice thing is when you're at that proportion, it isn't too organy, it isn't too whatever.

But when you grind it, here's a trick that we found.

If you are very prone to being put off by that little purple spot in the thing or whatever, or the texture, we take the organs and we put them in a blender and we grind all the.

1:06:15

Meat and the fat and then?

We mix it together and it's much more homogeneous that way and you don't have those little purple spots.

And I think that's that helps a lot of people a lot.

I love the scene and Mel Gibson's.

Apocalypto, they kill that tapir and they're, I don't know if you know what I'm talking about, but they, they're, it's a, it's a hunting party.

1:06:33

They're going to take the tapir back to the village.

But you know, and they're hunting with Adalatl and, and some traps.

It's very cool scene.

But you know, there may be like 6-7 guys and when they are dressing that animal in the field, they're portioning out the organs there for the hunters.

1:06:49

You know, I've got a desiccated organ product I call the Hunter's portion and my company Sir Thrival, and we call it that cause in many cultures it's like you get to eat that in the field that you bringing all that meat back to the, to the tribe, you know, but like to the village.

But a lot of that, yeah, goes fast.

1:07:06

And, and I have this experience out in Standing Rock where I harvested a bison and they were like, Hey, what we like to do out here is we'll just cut up the liver in the field and sprinkle salt on it and just kind of like eat pieces while we're butchering.

And so, you know, we're working out down this bison.

1:07:22

It's like a major process, as you can imagine.

And, and we start putting salt on these little pieces of liver.

I swear to God, this happens.

Guys just start coming off the Prairie.

I still know where these guys came from.

Like we started eating liver and dudes start walking out of nowhere that I don't know who they are.

1:07:40

And they're like, Oh, can we have a little of that?

And it's just like what like I don't do you smell it?

Like where are you coming from?

But but it is interesting how in our culture, these are the things we almost throw away.

And then in other cultures, this is the gold, right?

So it's like we pan the gold, keep the water, throw the gold out, you know, that kind of a thing where it just makes no sense.

1:07:58

But this is the this is the valuable.

How big was the liver that bison?

I mean it, you know.

Like like.

It was armfuls, you know what I mean?

Like armfuls of it.

Have you ever seen the documentary?

The great dance.

Yeah, yeah yeah.

1:08:16

About the persistence hunt.

Yes.

I mean, it's very similar, you see.

Them doing the same exact thing at the end of that.

But let me this is only going to take a second, but I just found out a really cool story about that film.

So there's a friend of mine, I don't know if you know her name is Mary.

You describe the film for people who aren't familiar.

1:08:31

I'm familiar.

But just in case somebody's not so the and you can actually I think you can get.

It for free on YouTube now.

It is.

It is a brilliant documentary and I actually used to show it at the beginning of every archaeology class I've ever taught.

It's, it's, it's, it's that good.

It's it's depicting and, and documenting persistence hunting it with the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

1:08:56

And there there's a, there was a suggestion made by an anthropologist many years ago that suggested that humans cannot run any animal on Earth.

And I know that sounds silly, but if you know how it, if the conditions are right, if it's super dry and it's super hot and the humans are in good shape and they know how to track an animal, our ability to sweat and regulate our, our, our, our body heat is, is fantastic.

1:09:24

And there's a couple of things anatomically that are good for humans as far as running is concerned, or even something like a horse is at a loss.

So if you can push these animals and continue to push these animals, they will get to the point of exhaustion where you can finally just literally walk up to them and, and, and throw an atlatl or spear or something at them and, and kill them.

1:09:43

So the suggestion is that we were hunting animals well before we had any technology to allow us to hunt them.

The problem with that is that if you see these, you literally have gone a marathon distance from home and there's usually three or four people that are involved in the hunting party.

1:09:59

You still need a technology to finally kill it and to cut it open and to do the all the other pieces.

And then you got to carry all that stuff back 20 something miles.

But it is interesting to think about when did we start hunting and the role of, you know, how we regulate our own breathing and how our our own body heat.

1:10:15

But this follows a group of Bushman hunters that are doing this persistent hunt and there's other things happening along the way.

It's a brilliant movie.

It's actually very, very cool.

My a good friend of mine is a woman named Mary Ruddock.

1:10:32

And in the field of nutrition and ancestral food ways, I think she's one of the most brilliant minds in in the entire space she lived.

She had a house in South Africa right on on the tip of South Africa at the very bottom right by the way, on the other side of the road from the water.

Well, the guy that lived across the street from her was the producer of that, that film like the great dance.

1:10:56

Well, he came back from filming that and I get it was such an intensive experience for him as an outsider coming in that his body was wrecked like he was.

He was from a health perspective, was destroyed and somebody suggested that he start cold plunging as as therapy.

1:11:14

So he would walk out his house every day into the water, go into the water.

Do you know where I'm going with this?

And and and cold plunge every day as he was cold plunging every single day.

The same time every day in the same exact spot.

He made friends with an octopus.

Oh, yeah.

1:11:29

OK.

Yeah, yeah.

And then that is the.

Octopus film comes from that, but it.

Started with the great.

Dance.

I think it's kind of cool.

OK, that's awesome.

Oh yeah.

Because, you know, I remember it being the same guy at the cinematographer or whatever.

So.

Oh, that's fantastic.

That's a great story.

1:11:45

Yeah.

That whole idea of persistence hunting.

You know, there's some lore up here in Maine that moose were haunted on snowshoe that way because we just get such deep snow, it's very difficult to move through.

And that you could run these animals down with the technology of the snowshoe.

Yeah.

You know, I was.

This leads me to a question.

1:12:01

I was kind of hoping to draw you out a little bit into some unfamiliar waters today And and and this is one of them, but, you know, I was just running the other day.

Some at our gym we were running four hundreds and 400 meters intervals and you know, at 400 meters I can run, you know, 5 1/2 minute miles or.

1:12:23

Whatever, no problem.

You know, and, but I don't, I can't sustain that.

You know, how do you think about these people like Kipchogi who's running, you know, 4 minute miles for a full marathon where it's, you realize the human capability for running is astonishing.

1:12:39

And I know that's not the kind of speed you're talking about to run down one of these animals, but human beings really are incredible on our feet.

It's very easy to you know, you can walk into a Walmart today and survey the population and forget how incredible we are, but but we're incredible.

OK, so this actually have two questions that just spurred for me.

1:12:56

What I just want to say them both now so that I don't forget so we can come back to one.

One I want to talk about is fitness.

Generally speaking, because looking.

At you, you're obviously a very fit guy and you don't get that way from eating and, and that's something I really want to talk about.

1:13:15

You know, what's king and what's queen here?

Fitness and, and and food, they're both really important and something I've noticed over the years is that I'll see a lot healthier looking people coming out of Planet Fitness than coming out of Whole Foods half the time.

And, and I and I say that as a lifelong food guy, but eventually I had to go, hey man, there's two sides to this thing.

1:13:35

So I want to come back to that, but I want to ask you this question given everything you know archaeologically that you know from studying ancient people and then also modern people who still have some intact ancient life ways when you look.

1:13:51

At modern Homo.

Sapiens, specially urbanized ones.

You know, I made the joke about Walmart.

I know you.

You work at a college.

I'm not.

I'm not going to ask you to jump in on a joke like that, but I can get away with it.

When you see what's happening, let's say.

Reproductively, what's happening with testosterone levels, What's happening with miscarriage?

1:14:11

What's happening with sperm counts, What's happening with body composition?

What's happening with IQ, What's happening with the results of the industrial revolution, and what's going to happen with the results of this AI revolution?

How Siri I?

1:14:27

I pointed out.

Recently in a podcast, I was talking about if we looked at another charismatic species and we saw similar things happening, it would be major headlines like how are we going to save the gorillas or the giraffes or the hippos or the walruses?

If they were like, oh, wait, they can't reproduce anymore.

1:14:44

They're getting stupider by the day.

There are completely helplessly, you know, I do this thing when I give public talks, I'll go, hey, raise your hand if you feel like you're totally in control of your phone use and it's just crickets, right?

Nobody's hand goes up because everybody's helplessly addicted.

1:15:01

So if you saw this happening in other species, this would be like a major story, right?

How?

How serious?

Is.

This and and from your kind of looking at it anthropologically we've.

Created a health bottleneck for our.

1:15:17

Species, right?

Like I have, I'm, I'm feeling like this is so serious, like our species is kind of committing suicide, that you have to be out there telling people what foods we are supposed to eat is insane.

That's insane.

Right, it's it's.

1:15:33

Gotten really serious.

Do you do you think that human beings are going to make it through this bottleneck?

And second, you know how like you can look at a tree rings and be like, oh, there was a fire that year or oh, this is a year of poor nutrition or didn't rain enough.

1:15:52

Like this is going to be in our permanent record etched into our DNA that we went through this period of of decades of extremely poor nutrition, heavy, heavy inundation with heavy metal, with glyphosate, with plastic.

1:16:08

I mean, the average person's eating a credit card worth of plastic a week.

What do you make of this?

Situation and how?

Dire are the actual circumstances.

Because you and I can sit here and kind of laugh about it, but it's like it's pretty serious stuff, All right?

So wow, that that's a.

1:16:24

Lot of really good, tons of questions.

Tons.

Of just like.

What you were saying earlier, there's so many directions we can take us.

Let let me address the first thing first with the IT sounds to me like the first question was about, you know, is it more important to be in the gym or more important to be in?

1:16:42

I want to come back to that.

I want to come back.

I want to tackle this the just salt of this massive thing I just dumped in your lap first so.

It's incredibly important.

It's it's dire.

It's probably one of the most important things, if not the most important thing we need to be paying attention to at the moment.

1:17:00

I do have very high heeled.

I'm a I'm an optimist about these things.

It's definitely a glass half full.

I think for as much as the technology in the terms that you're talking about, you know, the Internet being on our phone, AI as much as destroying us at the same time, I actually think it's going to be our savior.

1:17:18

There's so many incredible minds that are trying to tackle this that now have a voice that would have never had a voice 20 years ago because it's only coming out and you know, peer reviewed medical journals or whatever.

I actually think some of us will make it through and leave genetic material to the next to the next generation.

1:17:37

So I don't, I don't think we're doomed as an entire species and evolution happens at the species level, not on the individual level, but from on an individual level.

Our species has never been in a sicker place than it is right now.

And we're killing ourselves with food.

1:17:53

It is so strange.

And, and from my own relationship with food, it wasn't until the past 15 years that I looked at food as something that nourishes me.

My entirety of my life was looking at food.

This makes me fat.

This makes me, you know, feel this way.

1:18:09

This makes me lose weight when I was wrestling, you know, or not make weight, whatever.

Now I look at food as a source of nourishment and enjoyment and health and all the things at the same time, which is how our our ancestors looked at it.

But it is something that's literally killing us now, so.

1:18:28

From a reproductive perspective, it's.

Very, you know, our bodies are incredible.

I'm truly of the mindset that our bodies are genuinely always trying to heal themselves.

We just kind of got to get out of the way to allow that to happen.

Give it the right food, give it the right inputs, put it in the right environment, and our body will in many cases work on healing itself.

1:18:48

And this is what we this is.

What we see in the in the.

Natural world that outside of the human world.

The problem with humans is that, and this goes from from a dietary perspective, but also from a health perspective, is that to be fully nourished as a human, it means so much more than just meeting our, you know, nutritional needs.

1:19:06

Because to be, you know, if we're just talking about food, to be fully nourished as a human, we need to simultaneously, and how difficult is it simultaneously meet at the same time our biological needs, our cultural needs, our emotional needs for some people, our political needs are religious needs.

All of these things have to be met at the same time to be fully nourished from that episode of of eating.

1:19:27

I mean, we've thrown culture into this, which throws everything wry.

And now we have all these issues that are food related issues that we cannot accomplish with just a GOP1 or just a dietary because there's so many other things involved with us trying to fully nourish ourselves.

1:19:47

It's incredibly complicated.

It can be done, but it's, it's, it's the superficial conversations I see all the time that don't allow that to happen.

The other problem is, you know, we have, you know.

How do I say this gently?

1:20:03

I'm trying to be.

Like you said earlier, diplomatic try to keep you from that, but you know.

Humans.

When a woman can't.

Get pregnant.

Or a man.

Can't get a.

Woman pregnant or that woman can't carry the baby to full term and produce a successful pregnancy, then it's because something is a mess.

1:20:28

Now I know we've created all sorts of medical interventions that can help with this.

And please hear me from the beginning that I am not suggesting those medical interventions shouldn't happen, but there's a larger root cause of the inability for potentially somebody.

1:20:50

And we, I mean, one thing we do talk about is stress.

All you know, can't guess, you know, how many, how many stories have we heard?

Probably our own friends, They couldn't get pregnant, they couldn't get pregnant, couldn't get pregnant.

And then when they got off, all you know, they, they, they said finally, we're not going to have a baby.

And all of a sudden they have a baby because they've let all that stress down And, and they now are biologically in a, in a place where they can, they can safely do it.

1:21:10

But whether it's something is amiss when and it's something in many cases that's environmental that we are doing to ourselves that causes again, you know, we see it.

We, you know, when testosterone is dropping and estrogen is changing and we have obesity and all the other things that are a product of the way that we're living today and an inability to get pregnant and carry successfully carry babies to full term.

1:21:37

That that is a biological response to your body knowing this isn't the right time and the right place to have a baby.

It is incredibly important.

Now there are some interesting.

That's what I'm looking for.

1:21:56

Interesting.

Things that have happened.

Because.

Of medical interventions with some of these things now I am of the mindset I would I'll say this from the beginning and I, and I've talked about this a lot in classes when I've I've taught human evolution and and and and physical anthropology.

There's a lot when we start talking about evolution, one of the and because what we're talking about actually is impacted by and impacting evolution, right.

1:22:19

So it is related to this, there's a lot of people as students in the in the classes that would say, you know what, you know, that's just nature wedding things out.

So the best thing we can do is weed some of these things out and then we won't have them in our species any longer.

And I actually, I do disagree with that.

And here's why, because natural selection, this wedding out process only works in the context of the given environment, right in this in this given moment when natural selection is operating, it's only operating because of whatever is happening around it.

1:22:53

And as soon as the environment changes, and for humans, that environment could be a physical environment change like, you know, whether it's rainfall or, or, or could be cultural.

And for us, it's both operating at the same time.

So as soon as that environment changes, a species is scrambling to find individuals that have the genetic material inside of them that allow them to now operate successfully in that new environment.

1:23:18

So to me.

The best way to ensure that what?

You're suggesting doesn't happen like we that we survive as a species and continue to go on and don't go extinct is to have at our disposal the biggest variation of genetic material in our species at any given time because when the environment cultural and or physical environment changes and what is the most fit part of our.

1:23:43

Species at this moment could.

Be the thing that allows us, you know, be our demise, then we're pulling hopefully from something that has that.

So I think so I'm not suggesting that medical interventions with some of these things and and a lot and providing successful experiences for pregnancies and getting and allowing people to to even have baby babies that genetically might have an issue.

1:24:04

I'm not suggesting that's a bad thing, but there are consequences to it.

Here's here's a great one.

Or not a great one, but here's a good example Folate.

Is something.

That is provided to women has been.

1:24:20

Provide I think since the. 70s to pregnant women because if they don't, if they're by, if they can't produce it, then it will not end in the successful pregnancy.

So there's a supplementation of this, at the time, the inability to produce this folate was very low levels in our, in our genetic, you know, in, in our populations.

1:24:41

But now it's half of the population has the inability to produce folate themselves biologically.

So they have to take it as a supplement, especially if they're if they're pregnant.

So that is a direct constant.

And again, I'm not saying it's good or bad, it's judgement free, but.

1:24:58

Allowing the genetic material.

Of a human that cannot create that folate which reels in a successful pregnancy to then go into the next generation and go into the next generation increases that, you know mutation to the point where now it's half the population can't can't produce it.

1:25:16

I would add to like you, you have a.

Historically normal.

You know, something like 50.

Percent of children born don't make it even to early childhood or adulthood.

That's the historical norm, right?

1:25:32

So you have a child mortality of like 50%, but that but now many of those children will make it to adulthood.

And so some of those traits, you know, I want to just say like, if I know, I feel like we're dancing on dicey territory here.

So let me say, my wife and I have had many, many, many miscarriages.

1:25:48

We don't have children.

We wanted to have children and we were not able to.

And now we're, you know, both kind of getting close to 50 here.

So I've lived this story and we have really good conditions, really good environment, really good health, but that's that's not happening for us.

1:26:06

And I'm so fascinated by this conversation and doesn't like offend me.

So I just want to say that really clearly.

Like, I know how it's like, it feels like, oh, who am I these days?

Who am I going to offend every time I'm talking?

It's so hard, but but this stuff is really important.

I think it's like worth taking the risks to talk about.

1:26:21

But but you are right, like if, if 50% was the, the, the biologically normal child mortality and now most of those kids make it to adulthood, they're bringing in traits that might have been weeded out.

And so some of that does have to be considered right.

And again, it's not whether it's good.

1:26:37

Or bad.

It's just, this is the reality of what it is.

It's very interesting with, with humans.

Humans are I know we have a lot of stuff to talk about, but I, I want to make sure I, I, I, I can get this out a little bit when.

Our brains, our heads started.

Growing, right I mean, over millions of years, nature figured out that exact moment where a the.

1:26:58

Maximum size.

Of the head that can come out of a female human without killing the mother and damaging the baby.

And we're right at that edge.

And the way nature figured out how to make this work is we've increased what we call neoteny, which is that period of helplessness of the child that's born.

1:27:18

So like when a horse gets born.

Domestication, I'll add.

But yeah. 100% and without domestication.

We couldn't have done this because you need to have like the grandmother taking care of the baby and all these other things happening.

But which is, you know, one, one of the questions, a famous anthropologist years ago, her name is Christian Hawks asked the question, which is a great question.

1:27:38

Why do we have grandmothers?

Like literally why we we are the only species that has females that live that far past when they can reproduce.

And what the conclusion she came to was the role of the grandmother from a cultural perspective for humans is incredibly important.

1:27:59

And it's so important that it has biological consequences, especially for these helpless babies.

So what nature's figured out is the first, you know, we we give birth to a completely helpless baby.

They're cute, yes, but they're completely helpless and we need to take care of them as their brains and skulls continue to develop outside of the womb with with another animal would have continued inside of the womb, but we would kill the mother, you know, trying to get trying to get that baby out.

1:28:24

So you're.

Yeah.

So there's a period of time where completely helpless, you know, you take half the babies are dying underage. 5 is is, you know, very big deal.

Now, some of it was through things outside of a genetic issue, sanitation and things like that, of course.

1:28:40

Yeah.

But still any, you know, just to your point earlier, cesarean sections allow for babies that wouldn't have been able to make it through the birth canal and or mothers whose birth canal wouldn't have allowed the baby through.

Those babies reproduce and that means that those genes get passed on as well.

1:28:56

And so we are trending towards a species that will require technological intervention to continue on, which is it's just weird because like there's.

No discussion about it you.

Know that's what's weird to me it's like we're we're in this like time with there's no can I draw you a little further into these waters I I I kind of like go ahead go ahead go.

1:29:17

Ahead.

All right, I was reading the other day.

That the biological normal amount of somebody's overall pie chart of life that would be dedicated to religious and spiritual things is about 20 percent, 10 to 20% of the day of the year, you know, of your decade, you're involved in ceremony.

1:29:37

And you know that obviously from anytime with indigenous people, you're like, oh, wow, it's like a major part of their life.

You know, today we are doing this like secular experiment where we've released a lot of that.

But then if you really kind of zoom out and you take like a maybe extraterrestrial anthropological look, you're like, oh, they're still doing it.

1:29:57

They've just changed what they're doing it with, right?

That's kind of how I see it anyway.

I want to know how you're viewing.

That's pre prelude to my question.

My question is why does Someone Like You or me need to exist?

And the reason I ask it is because it's like, why don't we know what to eat anymore?

1:30:17

Why is it that every institution that we look at seems to have not only been corrupted, but it's become the opposite thing that it should be?

So the medical institutions, just a great example that's become like they'll actually kill you if you turn your body over them, like they'll accelerate your death.

1:30:35

You know, if you let them take care of you.

The people who are supposed to be policing the environment are allowing the environment to be poisoned and destroyed every I don't, I won't go on and on.

Here but all any.

Institution you look at it's like they've it's become like everything's becoming anti human.

1:30:54

Then you know, add on to that something like the, the Epstein files where you're like, oh wow, wow, this is happening, right?

The fact that if you just do what you're told, you'll, you know, I saw the other day, 1945 is the year where fluoride was first put into the water. 1945 is also the year that the recommendation to drink 8 glasses of water a day happened.

1:31:20

It's like the more you dig into this stuff, the darker and weirder it gets.

And so some people will say, well, it's greed.

It's.

Just money and.

Greed is driving this and I personally have just, I can't, I can't accept that anymore.

1:31:36

It's so dark and weird that I'm at this point of like, I just believe this has got to be a spiritual thing.

And I'm curious, 'cause I'm, I'm getting real strong, you know, scientific vibes from you.

So I'm curious how you're viewing all of this because at some point it's too weird for me to just accept that it's about money.

1:31:55

But I'm wondering if that's how you see it or if you see it differently because there.

You couldn't be.

You.

It's very.

Easy to see that this is like there's something anti.

Human happening on the earth like something really strongly anti human.

1:32:12

How do you square that with the anthropology and the science and the history?

Because like most of human history is a story of humans wanting to thrive.

And then suddenly we're in like a, we're acting as a species, like a suicidal goth kid in there, you know, upstairs in.

1:32:30

Their parents house.

Who's like writing their suicide letter?

So let me just here's the not.

Disclaimer, but since everybody knows where I stand before I start, I am incredibly spiritual.

I'm not religious, but at the same time, I see the value of religion for people who do believe.

1:32:52

So I I truly especially, and it's hard.

It's hard to be an anthropologist and be religious at the same time.

It's very easy being an anthropologist and, and, and, and be spiritual.

My daughter her, she just graduated from UVA in the baton school leadership and she had to write a final essay, this kind of culminating thing.

1:33:12

And she actually made my wife and I both tear up.

She wrote it about our kitchen table and that was the focus of it.

And she said, you know, we didn't go to church with family.

I mean, we went to like, you know, christenings and baptisms and things like that and, and a funeral or whatever.

1:33:29

But we didn't go to church on Sunday.

She said that was what people get from church is what we got from that table, being together as a family.

And that was our spiritual place of gathering at which I I thought was brilliant and I wholeheartedly agree with that.

1:33:47

So I, I think we can separate spirituality and religion.

By the way, I'll just say what a success as.

As parents, to have her write that is speaks volumes about your parenting.

And so I just want to say congratulations to that.

Thank you very much.

Really good to to hear that from her.

Yeah, it it meant more especially.

1:34:02

You know, we now you know, she just took a job in BC she's a couple hours away and I mean to to get that right on the on the heels of of any ham.

Yes, thank you.

One thing we see, and I'm not trying to answer this question from a scientific perspective, but I'm going to start it that way at least.

1:34:23

The only way that.

We could make the shift.

You know, I I'm sure you're familiar with Jared Diamond's article, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.

You know the the idea of the questioning.

Why would we, you know, if we are back in time why we ever start farming and we probably shouldn't have the only way you can organize people and and and the many people, including Jared Down would suggest that you know the the agriculture revolution.

1:34:54

Was sort of.

The beginning of the end of us as a species from, you know, from a health perspective, from a connection with our environment perspective.

And for all those things like that was the beginning of potentially what you're talking about a few minutes ago with we are like almost trying to kill ourselves off at some level.

1:35:10

That was beginning.

The only way that was possible was because we had religion at the same time and we were and we were able to control people to the point to make them work harder than they ever worked with less in return because of these ideas of, you know, what you would get if you were, you know, following what the authorities were saying for you to do in that and that sort of thing.

1:35:31

So religion, good and bad, plays a lot of different roles in in our society.

Is there something else going on?

That there.

There has to be.

I don't, I don't know what it is, but I, I hear you that we shouldn't, we should have had to have this conversation like we shouldn't.

1:35:48

I'm I'm thrilled that we did, but yeah, we need to now, but.

We we need to now and we're in that place where.

We do and and I certainly I know for sure that I don't have all the answers and there's nobody we're we're deep into the ancestral food ways world.

1:36:05

We have 1 foot in the carnivore world, We have 1 foot in the keto world.

I mean there there's a lot of different places where we have a ton of friends, a ton of amazing people that mean really, really well that have healed themselves.

We just got back from the meat, Meat stock.

I don't know if you've heard of this conference Meat Stock 1700.

1:36:23

People there and I.

Know the name is a little bit cartoony.

My God it was an amazing conference.

I mean the people that have healed themselves and are on this journey.

It amazing.

Not one person that I've met has all the answers and I, and this is off topic, but I want to make sure I say it and I promise to get back one thing.

1:36:41

I would anybody on a journey now about to start a journey health journey using diet as a, as a, as a, as a way to support that journey.

I caution everyone because one of the things that I found is there are a lot of diets that can take care of the issue you're looking to address right now, whether it's obesity or heart disease or diabetes, whatever it is, there's a lot of things you can do.

1:37:09

We fool ourselves into thinking though, because our diets are so bad today.

As soon as we shift something, whether we go from a modern standard American diet to a vegan diet, vegetarian diet, carnivore diet, keto diet, whatever you know, whatever it is, we'll see results because of any one of those things is better than what you're doing.

1:37:26

Any changes I would any change?

I would caution people.

Because I've seen this over and over again that once, you know, if they've stuck to whatever it is, they've addressed the, you know, the biggest thing they're dealing with at the moment, I.

1:37:42

And then they fool themselves.

Into thinking as soon as they see some results, this is the diet for me for the rest of my life usually by now they've logged a bunch of that they've.

Written everybody about it.

They bought the T-shirt and now it's like, oops, and now they're fooling too long.

Because.

1:37:57

You know when you've addressed that.

First issue, the first thing is staring at whether it's obesity or whatever it is.

Once you've addressed that, the thing that that was masking, the next problem then appears and then you have to address that.

Now, in some cases, whatever diet you're on might also address that, but in many cases it doesn't or won't do it as well as some sort of a shift or for some, for some people, they've addressed whatever that is and they are not going to spend the next 30 years of their life eating meat and salt and water and not enjoying the food that they're eating because they think they need to be on doing just that for the rest of their lives.

1:38:29

So anyhow, I would, I would suggest, please be flexible in your thinking, Address what it is and then truly take a step back and say, OK, what's my next direction that I that I need to go?

But with that said, I forgot the original question.

I don't know if I answered you, but I think I'm trying to ask you this man, what's the beef?

1:38:45

Grape soda that they're eating, what's what?

Did you do all the reference?

I said, what's the beef jerky and grape soda that they're eating in those Epstein files?

Do you have any idea what we're talking about here?

No, I don't know.

Yeah, no, I'll.

I'll we'll leave that alone.

1:39:00

No problem.

OK, so I yeah, I'm just wondering if you think that I guess I'll just.

Pose it to you in a simple way, do you think?

Human beings are spiritually sick.

Or do you think that we are just greedy and that's how we got here?

OK, because you know a huge part of what's.

1:39:18

Going on obviously has to do with status and hierarchy which are outgrowths largely of agriculture, right.

You and I understand that I think pretty well like and you mentioned Jared Diamonds article and I think a lot of people listening will know what we're talking about.

It's agriculture that allows for surpluses of food that allows for people to climb a social ladder, to have higher levels of status and all that.

1:39:40

And so one view is as simple as, hey man, that's just been going on a long time.

There's all this hierarchy.

Dudes want Rolexes and Ferraris and and mansions.

And so they're willing to sell you poison as food to get rich.

1:39:56

And that's just going on at scale.

And then something and that allows for something almost emergent that looks like Darth Vader or something has like taken over the planet.

Is that what's going on here?

Or is Darth Vader taking over the planet?

I oh, I see what?

1:40:12

You you mean some other First of all, we are spiritually stars for sure, especially in the sense that I mentioned earlier with the article that were the paper that my daughter wrote.

I, I wouldn't.

When I think about it, I, I think it's I I do think.

1:40:27

Reed plays a very large role.

And I think it's greed that is disassociated from from real life and what it means to be human.

So here's my here's my take on it.

Are there conspiracy things that are true?

1:40:43

1000%?

I think sometimes we attribute a lot of the ills that are in society today to this larger conspiracy that I don't think always holds up because I don't think a lot of the people that are pulling the strings in some of these cases are that smart.

1:41:01

I think they're just by the way, unless they're being driven by spiritual.

Forces, unless they're being driven by spiritual.

Forces maybe?

That's the case.

Maybe that's the case the the orcs and goblins didn't know what they were.

Doing Sauron was behind it, Sir.

Maybe there's something to that for sure.

1:41:20

I I think.

People are so.

Incredibly disconnected.

And unfortunately, the conversations most people have are so incredibly superficial that these things are just playing out in the background and they just morph and become now such huge parts of our lives and so incredibly devastating that we can't address them unless we dive into a conversation deeper.

1:41:41

Like, you know what, what you and I are having now.

And the other problem is we are.

So when we try to be solution focused, we're so focused on one thing, we change this one thing and something's going to happen.

But the reality is we're so far down the rabbit hole right now.

We're so far in into the shit, excuse me, that it's, it takes a concerted effort of five or six or seven things at the same time to to pull us back out.

1:42:04

And you know, the conversations about whether we should eat, you know, Wonder bread or whole grain bread is makes no difference.

And you know, in a situation like that, all right, let.

Let's tread back over to some.

Some safer waters here.

I, I had brought it up earlier.

1:42:21

It's something that I've, I got into nutrition and exercise at the same time in my life.

I was 16 and it, you know, both just radically altered the direction my life was going.

Food's always been my first love of the two, but I as I've gotten older I've realized that I can't eat myself into excellent shape.

1:42:45

I could in my 20s and it worked pretty good in my 30s.

Now in my late 40s, exercise of various kinds are seem so crucial to me.

So I'm big into all kinds of zones of cardio.

1:43:00

I'm big in a strength training, I'm big in a mobility.

I kind of have to be just to maintain my health.

And you're obviously very fit and look fantastic for your age, by the way.

Well, just in general, but I mean for your age especially.

So obviously that's not from just, you know, eating liver, right?

1:43:17

So exercise that I'm imagining is a important part of your life.

I brought up this before.

If I go into Whole Foods, I see a lot of people whose tissues look detoxed and healthy.

But they're kind of.

Skinny fat and then I go to the gym and I see people actually look pretty awesome.

1:43:34

And then you see them like what they're eating and you're like, wow, that's just like Twinkies and and whey protein.

How are you doing this?

So part of that has to do with our perception of health.

And we've got a very superficial perception.

So you, you know, you see somebody who's on drugs, peptides and protein powder and they can look pretty good, you know, but if, if we actually like put them to the test, we'd see they're not as healthy as they look.

1:43:57

So that's a fast simile of health.

But then I know a lot of the people who try to do it all with food and I just don't see them aging super well, even though they're getting the the good nutrients and they're staying relatively low in their toxic overload or whatever.

So what do you see?

They're like who, who's king and who's queen of of or who's, you know, what's what's more important?

1:44:17

Are they equally important?

And what role does fitness play for you?

Because I know food is is your professional focus, but it's got to be exercise has got to be a personal focus, I feel.

Much safer here.

I think the the saying, and I wholeheartedly agree with this, weight is lost in the kitchen and muscles gained in the gym.

1:44:40

I I, I, I, I is, I think a very good way to think about it.

It is much so and it's so it depends on what it is you're trying again to address and but then I'll get to overall health.

It is much easier biologically easier to lose weight by changing your diet than it is to try to you can they say you can't outrun a bad diet.

1:45:04

I mean if you think it up an hour on my like my.

Rower, my exercise bike, you put an hour and you're like 400 calories yeah, it's like you ate you.

You ran an.

Hour to get rid of those two chips over 2 hands of cashews?

Really.

So the the other thing and.

1:45:20

I'm not trying to just bring up a whole bunch of, you know, sayings, but what?

Is this thing you can help me with this one I, I?

I love it.

It's.

You don't.

Work out to.

Eat.

You should.

Eat to work out.

1:45:36

You know, the idea that yeah, yeah, you aren't trying to, oh, I want to eat this whole package of cookies, so I'm going to go to the gym and and burn it off.

It's no, you should be trying to crush it at the gym.

So you're giving your body what it needs so you can work out at your optimum level.

I mean that that is, is a better way to think about it.

1:45:52

And in the the final piece, this is one thing I say and then we'll kind of tied all together.

One of the biggest differences about the way that modern Americans, and my people in the modern world in general look at food and diet and health compared to how I'm convinced our ancestors did, is if you look at all the technological developments over literally millions of years, including those thousands of years ago and hundreds of years ago, the focus was on getting the most amount of nutrition with the least amount of work possible.

1:46:20

I mean yet.

Literally the idea is how can I get the most amount of everything I need and not doing a whole lot of work to get it.

But now the focus is.

The exact opposite.

Because we would just want to eat all day long and not get fat.

So the when we go to the store and look at things, and I might have mentioned this in the past podcast, there was a great study done several years ago where the, the researcher went around to a whole bunch of modern American grocery stores and literally counted the amount, you know, the the packaging, looked at all the packaging and the marketing on, on the the packaged goods in a grocery store and looked at the number of packaged goods that marketed what it didn't have in it, like didn't wasn't marketing what it had.

1:47:01

It was telling you low calorie, fat free, low, whatever.

And some of those things we no sodium, etcetera.

Exactly.

But our mindset is I want.

To go to the grocery store, get food that has the least amount of stuff in it, and then go to the gym and run it off like it's, it's completely not to say we shouldn't go to the gym.

1:47:22

I'm not suggesting and not to say we should be putting a whole bunch of something into our bodies that we shouldn't.

But the when I shifted my mind and said I am going to focus on getting the most amount of nutrition possible from the foods that I'm eating.

And that means I'm eating nutrient dense foods that are bioavailable and that's my focus.

1:47:40

And then I'm going to go to the gym and try to take that nutrition and turn it in into muscle and all the things I'm supposed to be doing.

Everything changed from the way that we think about I want to low calories.

I mean, so, I mean one of the biggest jokes.

Biggest jokes in to me in modern.

1:47:59

Nutrition is the idea that we should be eating salads.

Seriously.

Like a salad.

Now, I love salads, but the idea that I'm going to eat a whole bunch of air and water and sell walls that I'm not going to get the nutrition out of and because of that, I'm going to lose weight and be healthy.

1:48:15

Is it absolutely silly thing?

And by the way, I'm going to leave there feeling hungry.

My body's going to work really hard to digest that meal.

I mean it, it's, it's insane.

I should be going in there and getting a meal that's packed with nutrition, packed with nutrition so that it.

Can fuel me.

1:48:31

To then go for a run or to go to the gym and actually turn that into something.

I think if if you if you are in worried about obesity, if.

You are worried about?

Diabetes or pre diabetes if you are worried about actually.

1:48:49

A lot of things.

The answers to.

Them start not.

Solely in there, but start in the kitchen.

The food you're putting in your mouth, and not just the actual food, but how that food is prepared is incredibly important.

But.

1:49:04

The people that just do.

That are the people that you're talking about that are walking out of Whole Foods, you know, like they're part way there, but there's something off, right, the gym or the track or the basketball court or whatever it is, the pickleball court, whatever it is.

1:49:20

That's where you take all that incredible nutrition.

And now this body that has access to that nutrition and now can move and do something with it that then improves your cardiovascular health and you know, all the all the other pieces.

So for me, this is what I do every day.

I get up in the morning and.

1:49:37

I run.

And depending on the time, it's sometimes it's not even that far right.

So I usually run about a mile and then I go to the park behind our house is actually a mile away.

It's perfect.

I run a mile and then I do pull ups and I do push ups and I do sit ups and I do squats.

It's a couple days a week.

1:49:52

I then walk over to the turf.

It's there and I do some sprints and then I walk home.

And that's I, I do that almost every single day.

I've been going to the gym now.

Now it depends because our schedule here is a little bit crazy, but I've been going to the gym usually three days a week just to do some, some, some heavy lifting there.

1:50:12

And that's pretty much what I have.

But I'll be honest, my sometimes, you know, that morning routine happens all the time.

Sometimes in the afternoon, you know, I'll go three months without stepping foot in the gym just because of what our schedules are.

But my ability to get outside, be outside, see the sunrise in the get some exercise.

1:50:30

Then I get some cardio, I get some strength training, I get some sprints in.

And that is awesome.

And to be honest, it takes me 40 minutes and 40 minutes is, is is nothing.

It's hard.

You know, I'm sure you've dealt.

With this and thought a lot about this, I don't want to dwell on it, but it's challenging that everything is disintegrated now.

1:50:50

So, you know, all that work you're talking about doing was the work you did in the hunt and in the foraging, and it was integrated.

And you didn't have to also go see the sunrise because that was integrated into the lifestyle.

And, you know, all of these things were just one thing.

1:51:07

It was like living on earth.

And now it's all because our lifestyle is so domesticated.

We're trying to like, do it all as pieces.

So it's like, I got to go get all the foods and do all the processing and all that.

And then it's like, OK, but I also have to go to the gym and make sure I'm doing all those things.

And it's like it's a lot, you know, to manage our ancestors had the the muscle mass of our Olympic athletes with beautiful body composition and they got all the nutrients and they weren't having to like think about how to manage all that.

1:51:35

It was just like the simplicity of living.

So let.

Me.

Let me tell you I I know we're running out of.

Time, but I, I want to just tell a very quick story that I I know happened after the last time that we talked.

So about a year and a half ago we went to Sardinia to do research and I was actually researching this ancient bread called Penispelli, which was an have you heard of Penispelli?

1:51:59

It's a there's no full documentation on how it was made.

Piney the elder wrote about it.

It was made out of egg corns with wood ash and charcoal to help detoxify the egg corns.

Anyhow, I needed to learn how to make this and it took me 7 years to actually identify somebody that knew how to make it.

1:52:17

By the time I figured out the last remaining person that knew how to make it, it turns out she was way too old, but she had taught her son.

So there was two people so her son.

And so we went there to learn how to make it from her son, which is in the neuro region of Sardinia.

So I got in contact with as a as a side note, this the egg corns were later replaced with chestnuts and then when Maze brought it was brought over to the new the old world.

1:52:44

It was replaced with Maze and is now polenta.

So this is like the earliest version.

So we went.

There and we're going to.

Learn how to do this and to make inroads with that particular guy that knew how to make it.

1:53:00

I contacted this amazing woman that was a food historian in Sardinia and Gisella Rubio or her name, and she spoke no English and I speak very little Italian.

I only speak enough Italian that is close enough to Spanish that makes sense.

1:53:17

So I mean it's very, very little.

So we brought the whole family over turns out and we met with this woman 1st and she set us up in a home in this village that she lived in.

Turns out the village she lived in is the village of Villa Grande.

I didn't know it, but Villa Grande is the first Blue Zone ever identified.

1:53:34

So we land ourselves in the middle by mistake, in the middle of the first Blue Zone ever identified with a food historian.

And we're living with this family that's like, you know, 10th generation living there.

And it was amazing.

1:53:49

We were there for a while and couple things that are really important.

First off, other than.

Loma Lindo, the limo.

Whatever that Linda, whatever the heck of the 7th Day Adventist community is every other place.

Where they're describing.

1:54:04

What the diets are for the blue Zones is 100% wrong, especially this one.

So diet is is completely the the the amount that when you learn about blue zones what they.

Tell you about these people's diets is incorrect absolutely 100.

1:54:21

Percent, except for Loma Linda, it's 100%.

Like it is literally like like this that much different we ate.

Plant or we ate food from animals.

At every single meal, massive amount of dairy, massive amount of meats.

1:54:38

Yeah, it's almost like there's a giant collective.

Global push to try to make you think animal food's bad and you should only eat plant foods.

You'd think so, right?

Maybe it's Darth Vader.

But anyway, go ahead.

Darth Jesus so.

What's cool is this not Jesus, it's Darth Vader.

1:54:55

Maybe it's Darth.

It's definitely not Jesus things describe.

For the blue zones.

Are accurate like this actually, this town has the oldest male population in the world.

There were many, many people over 100 years old and what's cool is it isn't a a a lifespan thing.

1:55:13

It is a health span thing.

I mean the the the house next to so we're we're in this little village person the side of a mountain.

There was 103 year old man living in on the second floor of that house completely independently up and down the steps every single day.

It's amazing.

1:55:28

So it was.

But here a couple things that I think are really important.

One is and this family we were living with actually was the subject of ABBC special several years earlier about the Blue Zones and they were laughing about, you know, this is what we are.

1:55:45

And the way they portrayed us on BBC was like completely full.

It was insane.

I asked them.

I said, I know this is cliche.

What?

You know what's?

The secret to this longevity?

And they looked right back at me and they said it's because we're nice.

1:56:01

And I said wait, excuse me?

He says no.

It's because.

We're nice, so there, and I thought that was a great answer, but here's the things you would expect to find and I want to tell you about one meal very quickly before we run out of time with them a normal.

Person coming from.

1:56:17

Our context, I think, would expect if you went into the oldest living population in the world, you'd expect to see a whole bunch of nutritionists, a whole bunch of gyms, and a whole bunch of nursing homes.

And the reality is none of those things existed in this village.

None of them.

1:56:33

Now, they didn't need the gyms because no, nobody here would have won a bodybuilding contest, but everybody was fit.

I know.

And you've probably seen those things where people are posting, this is an average scene of a beach in America in the 1950s and here's today.

I mean, it was like those kind of bodies, right?

1:56:50

So everybody was fit.

Nobody was going to win a bodybuilding contest, but they were fit and lean.

They walked up and down that mountain every single day, but it took us hours.

The kids, the kids were going to throw up by the time we got there because the roads and we got there, we get out, all we wanted to do was go to bed.

They're like, hey, let's go for a walk.

1:57:06

And we go up a freaking two mile walk.

It's the minute we get out of the car up the side of the mountain.

They're moving every day.

The reason they don't need a nutritionist is because they don't have any questions about their food.

So there was a meal.

We were sitting on this big long table.

1:57:23

I bet you there might have been a dozen people at the meal.

It was a huge meal.

It was a multi course meal.

I mean, it was not a plastic tablecloth and all the things, but it was a multi course, incredible meal.

And there wasn't I, I don't want to say there wasn't one thing that we ate that nobody that somebody made outside of that room.

1:57:45

Not only that, there wasn't anything there except for one thing, that somebody sitting at that table didn't raise.

Harvest, kill, butcher, cure, cook.

Every bit of it.

Including the salt.

The only thing at that entire table for that entire multi course meal that somebody at that table didn't produce 100% themselves was the wine.

1:58:09

And that came from the brother of the of the food historian who just didn't happen to be there.

So it was crazy.

The connection they had with their food was awesome.

They didn't need somebody like you or me or a nutritionist telling them anything about their food whatsoever.

1:58:26

That's the secret of the Blue Zones.

It wasn't that there was low fat or low animal or what.

It was very high, so I thought that was really interesting.

Does living like that make you nice or does being?

Nice make you want to live like that.

That's really interesting.

I don't know, but that was their answer.

It was more than what a?

1:58:42

Person told me that.

I think that's a big piece of it though.

I really agree with that.

And then I've noticed when I see it, whenever I see one of those like news segments, it's all like on this lady's 103 or whatever, they're always like, they're not like grumpy people.

Usually they're very nice people with SO who maintain social lives too, you know, but but I appreciate what you said because very often and they try to downplay the importance of.

1:59:09

It goes back to what you said before often.

It's like, oh, what are you supposed to restrict out?

Not what are you supposed to have in?

And it's like a thing that you're supposed to have in is really important.

And there's a big focus on everything you're supposed to be cutting out.

And it's like, yeah, well, you, you got to keep the bank account topped up, you know, with all these nutrients.

1:59:25

So I think that's really important.

Bill, there's so much more.

I, we, we've gone so long here.

I thank you for all your time today.

I would love to have you back on if we can.

And I'd love to do a whole thing on plants because, you know, just to queue it up for next time, if you're willing.

I, I want to talk about nixtomalization of corn.

1:59:42

I want to talk about fermentation of wheat and sourdough which is such a My wife started making sourdough and I guess it was.

The first time it really clicked all through.

History, Like that's how you make bread.

It's like a, you know what I mean?

1:59:58

It's just like, Oh yeah, that's how you make bread.

I want to talk about potatoes and their skins.

I want to talk about oxalates.

I just love to.

We did a deep dive on animal stuff today.

I would love to talk with you more because there's just so much more here.

But before we go, I just want to give you the floor if there's anything that you feel like.

2:00:17

Needs to get said to kind of complete any of the thoughts or anything else you know, we didn't get to.

Yeah, I, I.

Would love the opportunity to talk.

About plants with you, especially the right amount of time to do it.

I, I, I'm glad we're not crunching it in at the very end, end of this.

I, I'll leave it with this.

2:00:33

When you look at the technologies required to include plant foods and animal foods in the past, I know we're so disconnected now.

Agriculture's thrown a bunch of loops into it.

Our food chains are so incredibly long.

We went, I think this way, But if we go back hunter gatherers, which is the majority of our existence on the planet, we can ease and from a technological lens, we can easily separate the technologies required to include animals in our diets and plants in our diets.

2:01:00

And This is why I think this conversation that we're going to have is so incredibly important, other than persistence.

Hunting and we already talked.

About some of the issues involved with that and you're not feeding an entire population on persistence hunting over and over again.

It's not an effective way to do it.

2:01:17

He burned too many calories getting the animal, but other than that the majority.

Of the technological investment needed to include.

Animals in our diets are those that allow us to overcome our physical imitations and get the animal.

So atlatl, bows and arrows, boomerangs, Nets, fishing hooks, traps, all those things that allow us to actually get the animal is where all of our mental input and technological advancement has been placed for actually, in this case, 2,000,000 years.

2:01:43

Once you have the animal, all you need is a sharp edge and you're, you're sitting there looking at a pile of safe, nutrient dense, bioavailable nutrition.

I mean, you don't even need a fire to get a lot of the nutrition out of that animal.

Plants are the exact opposite.

And again this is pre.

Agriculture.

But to get a plant you need, you know a Digging sticks are ubiquitous.

2:02:03

They're all over the world prehistorically and currently as well.

Maybe a digging stick, maybe a sharp edge.

But other than that, we're talking about collective foraging.

You're picking this, you're plucking this, you're breaking this off.

You know, getting the plants are incredibly require very little technological investment.

2:02:20

The technology is needed once you have the plants.

So you you, you have something that potentially has a bunch of nutrition in it, but to safely and efficiently get that nutrition out of that plant and into your body is where we need major technological investment to make the plant safe, to make them more nutrient dense and to make the nutrients in the more bioavailable.

2:02:40

So things like niche tamilization or fermentation through like sourdough and you know, the list can go on and on and on.

That's what was required in the past to get nutrition from our plants into our bodies.

And now what we've done is we've increased the technological needs to get the plants right now that we're farming with a massive amount of technological input.

2:03:00

But we still haven't lost the need to use technologies, actually have access to that nutrition.

And unfortunately, in the current, you know, mindset, we have lost it, but it's still incredibly important.

So, you know, everything's like you said, from sourdough and, you know, nuts, seeds, grains and legumes require a massive amount of, of technological, technological input.

2:03:22

Maize is one of the most difficult grains in the world for the human body to derive all the nutrition from that that it can offer.

So initialization is incredibly important.

And potatoes are by default can be incredibly dangerous and require processing as well, so I'm looking forward to the conversation.

2:03:37

Yeah, they contain nightmare psychedelics.

Which is like, people don't even understand what scopolamine and these things are.

I mean, it's crazy.

It's it's amazing.

Yeah.

I you know, it's funny you say that because before I'd sort of said everything's been turned on its head.

All the institutions do the opposite of what they're supposed to do.

And similarly, we have it here.

2:03:54

People are convinced today most people think animal foods are like toxic when animal foods are the least toxic foods and then they think plants are the healthiest foods and plants are actually the most toxic foods.

I'm big believer in eating plants, but like you're hinting at here, they require a lot of detoxification many instances.

2:04:12

So it's so funny.

Just everything is just flipped upside down.

It's like almost like you want to figure something out, turn it upside down from the convention right now and and then start from there.

Start from there.

Yeah.

So hey you.

Have just some incredible offerings.

I want to give you a moment to go through some of the courses that are available.

2:04:28

Talk about your online community and your restaurant, stuff like that so that people can avail themselves to some of these services that you have.

All right.

Thank you so much so you can.

Find us online on Instagram and and Facebook at in two locations.

So I'm at at Doctor Bill Schindler.

So at Dr. Bill Schindler.

2:04:44

And we have a, a strong social media presence there.

The modern Stone Age kitchen has us at the modern Stone Age.

So at the modern Stone Age is where you can find us on social media.

But as far as the offerings are concerned here we have several different, different things and we look First off, we are in Chestertown, MD.

2:05:01

It is a beautiful, small historic town set in a beautiful rural setting.

But we're only about an hour and a half from DC, an hour and a half from Philadelphia, and about 2 1/2 to 3 hours from New York City, depending on traffic.

So we're very, very easy to get to.

We have a full service restaurant that is built on the back of everything we talked about today, but it's it's based on an ancestral approaches to food.

2:05:26

We are 100% scratch kitchen and we source most of our ingredients from local farmers and we have currently now 42 people working, taking those raw ingredients and transforming it into their most nutrient dense, bioavailable and delicious forms.

2:05:42

So one of the really cool things is when you come to our Reg.

So we flip the model on its head for a restaurant, almost every single part of that money you put down to pay for your food is going to somebody in this community, whether it's a farmer or a rancher or a person that's actually making that entirely from scratch on the premises.

2:05:58

So full service restaurant seven days a week.

And we also have the nonprofit, the educational arm, which is the modern Sunnies Food Lab.

We do every weekend that we're here, we offer in person classes, everything from home butchering to, to how to field dress and, and, and cook the entirety of of the wild game that you, that you bring in the sourdough classes, fermentation, foraging, all those things.

2:06:22

But we have an ancestral or an online community called the ancestral table.

And this meets once a week at noon on Mondays and every every day at noon on on Mondays, Eastern Time, we do 1/2 an hour cooking class that's professionally recorded that you can attend that and that gets put up into a library.

2:06:41

You can pull down at any time.

And then we do, you know, live Q&A after that.

And that also gets recorded as well.

So even if you can't make it at noon, you have access to all those, all that information.

We also have, I just mentioned very quickly, we love visceral, you know, real experiences, one of the major experiences of life changing for us.

2:07:01

We used to live in Ireland when I was writing the book Like a Human.

We lived in Ireland, use that as a home base and we're in trench.

I was teaching at University College Dublin.

We were around amazing food producers and an archaeologist and he had to make a very Long story short every year we offer and we just finished it two weeks ago this year, but we offer a amazing trip to Ireland where it's it's a it's for 8 days and you everything from seaweed foraging to seeing the oldest daring fields literally in the world.

2:07:33

You're making cheese.

We're pulling lobsters out of the North Atlantic.

I mean, it is an amazing experience that ends with a, a meal at Ireland's first two Michelin star chefs in his home cooking A7 course meal in front of you.

It's an amazing experience.

And we're also putting one on the books next year for for Kenya, where we'll be with some borough on the Masai and the whole thing.

2:07:53

So there's a lot of resources available.

So you can find out anything you need to there at at www.modernstoneage.com.

Excellent.

And hey, I'll just say your.

Book is a.

Fantastic read too.

So if this is new stuff for anybody, that's a, that's a great read and a great primer on all this.

2:08:08

So Bill, always a pleasure to talk to you really.

And thanks for playing along with some of my more obscure questions.

I appreciate it.

Stuff I'm really thinking a lot about.

So thanks for going there with me, and I'm really looking forward to Part 2.

Yeah, May as well.

Thank you so much.

It's always a pleasure.