IG Live! Cody Hopkins and Dave Asprey Talk Meat

Hey, hey. There we go. All right. Cody, it looks like you're outside right now.

Yeah. Is that okay?

Of course it's okay. In fact, I think I'll do the same thing because we're both on farms now, aren't we?

We are.

Oh, here's a question from Christy. I've been a vegetarian since birth. How do you advise I add meat products into my diet? Wow, Christy, the fact you're even asking that question earns a lot of respect. That is amazing. And, well, I don't know. Do you have some thoughts there? I mean, have you ever dealt with that?

Yeah, well, so my wife was vegetarian before at one point in her life. And we actually have several employees at Grassroots who used to be vegetarian or are actually currently vegetarian. And we're doing so much. So I would say start really slow and sort of work your way into it. And I would say start with. Or maybe like, maybe chicken. It's a little bit lighter. So I'd say pasture grass fed beef is a good place to start from my standpoint. But start slow and sort of work your way into it. You know, make it a. Always advice, meat as a, you know, it's eat better quality, but less meat. I have lots of vegetables around that.

There's a two sides. There's a health side and then there's like a spiritual side. I've had friends from India who, you know, one of them said, well, I'm, I'm vegetarian, but I can't eat eggs because they freak me out. And I'm like, but you're eating cake. And he goes, yeah, but I can't see the eggs, so it's okay, right? So it depends on whether, like, there's an emotional side to this. And one thing is gratitude. So if you're going to have, you know, a little like a bite of grass fed steak. And I've had the honor of sitting there with dozens over, over the years, dozens of people who are vegans. I was a raw vegan for a while. Or vegetarians are saying, this is my first bite of steak in 20 years and 30 years in my life. And every single time, every time the next day they reach out and go, oh, my God, I slept so well. Like, I feel, I feel grounded, like something happened that was good for me. I didn't know I missed it. So this is not a call to eat a pound of steak a day. Even though if you, if you look at what Cody's doing with his company, man, you know, Grassroots is doing good stuff, but it's not about that. In my last book I'm like, eat less meat, eat a lot less meat, spend more on it. But focus on gratitude. You can be grateful for the animal. And you guys know I eat my own animals and in the podcast we talk about that. What's it like? So I have a dozen sheep and a dozen pigs on the property right now. And I feed them and I take care of them and they have names and when they're butchered, they're butchered ethically without suffering. And so when you're sitting down, you can actually be grateful that that animal restored the soil. That's not true. If you industrial meat and just have a bite, and if that's a little too much to start, try collagen. Yes, Bulletproof is the company that put collagen on the market. Grass fed collagen, you can put some of that in a smoothie, it won't even look like meat. But look at how your joints feel the next day. And I think that that's okay. And how much meat you can have meat once a week. You can have, you know, an ounce or two every day or two. And just that it's going to, it's going to charge your energy differently. Um, so Chris, that was a long.

Answer, but another thought on that we move on is maybe start by going and visiting a regenerative farm. You know, maybe, you know, it's, that's a good way to sort of see, get a better understanding and you know, more knowledge about how the farmers are raising it and that might help you help this person make a better, better decision on that front.

It's, that's actually the one of the best things you could do. And right now Grassroots has something like 20. Actually we went to 35 now farms. How many farms do you have now?

Actually we're closing in on 45 right now.

45, okay. And so these are 45 small family farms and it's a different world. So we have like another comment here from. Let's see. It looks like a yoga person. Ahimsa Ohm. You know, when can we stop killing precious animals who don't want to die for our taste buds? Okay. That would be industrial farming and we could stop that today. Industrial farming is killing our soil. It's killing the planet. It's killing people, it's killing animals and it's making them suffer. It's not, not okay. That's not what Cody does. That's not what I do. What we're doing is we're giving animals who wouldn't otherwise exist a life. They're part of an ecosystem. They eat the food they were meant to eat, right? And then are we doing it for our taste buds? Are we doing it because our brains and our bodies require that to live? But the thing is, the planet requires farm animals to live. We killed all the buffalo, right? And they're part of life cycle, and you can't. In fact, we talked about this on podcast. But Cody, what happens on the farms to the soil when they have animals versus farms that don't have animals?

Yeah. Well, so when, I mean, cattle are like their function in the world, you know, they exist really. They're evolved to be pruners out on the pasture, right? Their job is to go out and prune, prune and trample grass down into the pasture. And you see, historically, some of the most productive and rich soils come from prairies where you have buffalo or different herbivores that are grazing and pruning this grass and then moving on to a new area and pruning that grass and letting it regenerate. And so what that does is at some point, grass gets to a mature state and it stops growing. And if you don't have those cattle come through and graze that, then it just sort of stalls out and you don't get the development in the soil of the root systems and the. The litter going back to the soil. So the cattle really help. Help create that symbiotic relationship between the grass and the soil and help the. Help create more carbon in the soil. We're actually seeing here our combination of chickens and pigs and. And cattle on pasture, that we're actually improving the organic matter in the soil every single year more and more. And so that increases the soil's ability to hold nutrients, hold water, and also capture carbon.

The carbon capture is something that a lot of people don't pay attention to. And they say, oh, meat is bad. Look, the scientists who do those papers, they say, oh, meat equals a cow in a box that ate corn and soy from destroyed prairie land. So every acre of corn and soy that's planted is a destroyed prairie. Right? And that destroyed prairie means no bunnies, no turtles, no lizards, no grasshoppers, no ladybugs, no butterflies, and no diverse plant life, no diverse microbial life, no diverse fungal life, and no animal life. These are sterile. And you take that and then use all the water and all the tractors and all the chemicals and you put it into a cow. It is stupid, it's unsustainable, and it will end the world to that Point. Oh, and then there's all the antibiotics they get that even like, spreads everywhere. So this is bad news. And that's why I have not touched industrial meat in more than a decade. So I will eat the vegetarian or the vegan meal every single time. But if you do that and raw vegan here for quite a while, it can. If you do that for a long period of time, your ability to execute as a human being, what you're here to do will go down. I have thousands of people who are recovering from a vegan diet on the bulletproof diet. So how do you ethically live with this? I moved onto a farm. I have been working on this for six years to do this, because, hey, should I know how to go to the butcher and how to actually butcher a sheep and learn how to use the bandsaw? Yeah, I did all that because this is the only way I know of to show up the way I can show up. So how do we do it ethically? How do we do it to build soil? I helped to fund the Carbon Capture X Prize, right? This is how we're going to use technology. And guess what I learned from all that soil. That's the best technology for capturing carbon right now. So you need animals to do it. And that's where this middle ground works. I have my animals. For most people listening to this, you don't have the ability to live on a farm. Or maybe you have the ability. It's just a lot of work. I could see if you said, I don't want to do that. And Cody's smiling because he has work. What Cody did is what I was dreaming about, like, how do I make it so if I still lived in Silicon Valley, I could do this right? And the answer is you have to be able to buy meat from someone who does it right. And what we talk about together and Cody runs grassroots, which is the highest end meat you can get with tracking, where every piece of meat has a QR code that tells you exactly which animal on which farm, from which farmer is all trackable, all traceable. So you know what you're getting? None of these hamburgers with a thousand cows all blended together and all that garbage. So all that is really important. But if you can't get it from a local farm, and we both tell you, if you have a local farmer who lives down the street, there's a farmer's market like the one in Mountain View I used to go to go there and buy it and look the guy in the eye, look his kids in the Eye and say thank you for your work. Right, well, wait, Farmer's market, six foot, social distancing, whatever, what's left is okay, the few farmers who can afford to do this kind of stuff, they're all banded together by grassroots. So you can get it. How long has it taken you to do this, Cody?

Gosh, we started in 2000, so it's been 13, 14 years now to get this up going. And just as everybody knows, I didn't start out as a farmer. I grew up in rural Arkansas. I'm first generation farmer and really inspired for a lot of benefits. You can just the health benefits. I had a thyroid issue.

Me too.

It helped, I think it helped, you know, put in remission, which is amazing. I have, you know, we, we also environmental reasons. And then, you know, I grew up, I'm enticing country here in Arkansas, seeing what the industrial foods, industrial meat production system does to farmers and communities. And, and so our, we're on a mission to change that.

So, and on our, our podcast we actually went on with the guy who does the meat processing for the network that you put together and what sucks? Okay, Asprey Farms, okay. I have 24 animals, right? And some of them, we don't butcher them all every year and eat them. And yes, I'm sorry, for vegans there, yes, we eat the animals. They don't know that the end is coming. They have a beautiful, wonderful life, eat the best possible food. They participate in the cycle of life. And then my children and, and I, and we know this, we eat them, right? And we give thanks when we eat them and we feel very good about that. And that's just how, that's how it is, right? And if we didn't do that, my children would be weaker than they are. Okay, that is how it is. And if you don't like it, it's okay. I would, I wish I could feed my kids gravel and sand and they would be as strong as they are and I would do it and I'd make them eat it too, but it doesn't work. Right? And so sorry, I see you laughing, Cody, you would do the same, I imagine, right?

Yeah.

All right. I had a point that I was going to there, but I just got off on a rant. Around small family farms, you can't make money. 90% of small farmers have a day job. They actually work eight hours a day and then they come home and then they flop the pigs and they feed the animals or they grow their stuff because they can't make ends meet. Right now, but by banding 45 of them together, putting the processes in place now the amount of work that I had to do to make sure that my own animals were going to be butchered properly. Because I live in Canada, I can't just join with grassroots. If I live in the U.S. i would. So you're having, you're handling the meat processing, you're handling the shipping, the stuff that's hard to do if you're actually running a farm. So now all of a sudden there's a sustainable, scalable way to help small farmers band together so people know what they're getting, who buy. And you don't have to spend all your time marketing as a farmer. Because if you're a farmer, it's like being a doctor. Doctors suck at marketing. If you're one of my many doctor friends who's on here, I love you. And maybe you're good at marketing, but you're a rare breed most of the time. You know why? It's because you're in healer mode all the time. Right. And if you're a farmer, a rancher, you know what you're in? You're in animal and land in earth mode all the time. And Cody, you know what I'm saying?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Like, the farmers, they're not thinking about like, how many followers did I have and what's my cac? In fact, they say cock. I got a cock over there and he wakes me up at 5 in the morning. Right. Like it's not the same world.

Yeah. And most farmers don't want to do that. Right. They want to take care of the animals, take care of the land. And. But the problem is there's just not very many options. I mean, either you sell through the industrial meat supply chain or you can't get to go out and find a market yourself, which is not easy. And no, it's not processing front. We're seeing that right now. During COVID that infrastructure does not exist to support small scale farms. It's all centralized where you have one facility that does, you know, 5% of the, of the pork in the nation. So there's all kinds of challenges and barriers to entry for small scale farmers for sure. So we're working to help break those down.

We'll break those down. And the large meat producers, man, what they're doing is they're requiring, usually by law, they're trying to make even small farmers do what big farmers do, which is oftentimes cruel and inhumane. And then they require you ship the animals Hundreds of miles to these giant industrial machine places, and you can't even get your animals back, right? I get my animals back. Each one's marked with which animal it was. So I could say, you know what? That pig, that was a little bit smaller than the others. It was better bacon or worse bacon. Like, what happened was that breed better, the one that was more robust and all that. But I'm seeing a comment here from Wellness Jovi. She says, we haven't bought meat from a store since we started buying from Grassroots in January. We're obsessed. And ground ground beef starts at what, about nine bucks a pound?

75 a pound? Yeah.

How much?

$9.75.

975. Okay, so if you guys are saying this is really expensive, look, crappy industrial ground meat is going to run about 3, 4 bucks, 5 bucks a pound, something like that, depending where you buy it, what volume, eat half as much, pay twice as much. Know that the animal was well treated. You're eating one animal, not hundreds. Know that you're supporting a family farm. And the type of fat that you're getting in the meat is the kind that's compatible with you. And, like, the math is very clear. If you were to eat even 2 to 4 ounces of meat a day, that's about what you need. But get the fattiest cuts you can get because the fat's good and it doesn't just taste good. The fat is beating because that's where the nutrients are. In fact, it's more important than the muscle.

It's almost salmon, really. I mean, the omega 3 ratio our pork and beef and chicken tested, and the omega 3 ratios was, for the pork, it was 10 times higher than what you would get in the grocery store. And so I think the chicken was four or five times more. The beef was three or four times or actually like seven times more than conventional. So just the. There's a lot more. It's not just what you eat. We say, anyway, it's not just what you eat, but what what you eat eats.

It's exactly right. And same is true with for your plants. If your plants ate chemicals and sewage spread outs, it's going to be a different result than if they ate animal poop from animals, didn't have antibiotics. And Robert's asking the question, is it really a benefit to eat meat at an older age if you're vegetarian, heavily government subsidized, hard to get and hard to digest. Do you have any data on that? I mean, I could answer that real quick if you want but, yeah, I.

Don'T have any data on that.

You're more on the farming. Like, how do you treat the animals? Right side of things. So, Robert, I'll tell you. Sarcopenia is a major issue. It's one of the seven pillars of aging that I wrote about in my most recent anti aging book. So, yeah, in fact, your protein needs go up when you're over 60. So there is a benefit. Collagen is going to help your joints immensely. So even if you do some bone broth or a little bit of collagen or the connective tissues, I mean, ribs have lots of connective tissue, and, man, they're really good, but you don't need a ton of it. But you're going to find that those things. It's more like the salmon type of fatty acid profile, which is amazing. You get that from beef. That fat's almost a yellowish color. It's a very different feel when you eat it. And you'll find that the benefit there that you see it in your muscles and you see it in your joints, especially knees and hips and things like that. All right, here's Dr. Sandy Zaya says same gratitude should be expended when eating plants. I think that's true. Except okra. Okra is gross. You shouldn't be grateful if you have to eat okra. You should just be angry. Okay. And kale, like, screw you, kale. Just kidding. All right, what is your favorite kind of meat, Cody? I mean, you have the exposure to grassroots. You can get the best chicken, the best everything, but, you know, you know, favorite cut, favorite kind of meat. If you could have one more meal, what would you do with that?

That's probably a rib eye or actually really good brisket. I love you're a brisket guy. Oh, really good brisket. I have this recipe where I do a sous vide brisket for, like, 36 hours. Incredible. Oh, it's so good. I love it.

Let's talk sous vide for a second. So people don't know what that is. Sous vide's a cooking technique that came out of something called molecular gastronomy. And this is when engineers like me basically said what would happen if we used weird chemistry stuff on food? And this is going back to, like, the early 2000s. It really started happening. And I at the time was into this because I'm a super weird nerd kind of guy. So I bought this sushi, like, a commercial sushi cooker from a or not sushi rice cooker and a laboratory temperature controller, and you'd like, vacuum seal your meat. And it turns out the guy who was leading all this was Nathan Mervolt, who was the CTO of Microsoft. And he had this, like, second life as, like a high end chef. And as he moved out of Microsoft, he started this whole, you know, amazing modernist cuisine. Like thousand dollars had a cookbook. So you look at every kind of protein and the bulletproof diet, you guys wouldn't know this. It is based on, okay, how where do your food come from? That's why grass fed has been something I've been beating the drum on for 10 years. The reason there's grass fed yogurt all over the place is I did a lot of that messaging. Grass fed, grass fed, grass fed. Because it matters so much for you and for the planet. But then if you take your grass fed, amazing brisket, and instead of slow sous vide ing it with this controlled temperature, you know, dipped in a water bath, or treating it gently, you just fry the crap out of it, what you end up with is an inflammatory meal. Right? So controlling the cooking of your food is the second step. So what did your food eat? How is the food treated right? And food could be an animal, could be a vegetable. Doesn't really matter. How is it treated right? The Buddhists, the Tibetans will tell you, you know, how the vegetables are treated matters too. How is it prepared? So what you're saying is you take the best meat you can get and then you prepare it in a gentle, proper way. Of course you would, Cody. We even talked about this on the podcast. All right, so you soup, eat it for 36 hours. What do you put in the bag with it?

I put just salt and pepper and a little bit of liquid smoke. Just a little bit. And. Oh, my God. I mean, it's just. And the fattier the piece of brisket, the better for me anyway. And so that's. That's probably if I have one meal right now, that would be. That'd be it. Followed closely by. I think we started doing some ground chicken sausages. And it's. Our family's been eating that like a couple nights a week for dinner. So those two things.

I love it. Can I share some knowledge with you and our listeners about liquid smoke?

Oh, yeah, sure.

I dug in on this when I was writing that bulletproof diet cookbook. Right. So you can. When you get. When you capture smoke, okay, you know, you burn some wood and you capture it. Now, most of the time, liquid smoke captures particles that you don't want from the smoke because Some smoke compounds are bad for you and some are good for you. So the fat soluble compounds cause aging and the flavorful compounds that are purely water based work. So some kinds of liquid smoke that only use water to capture it are fine and the ones that use an oil substrate to do it aren't fine. But what's always safe is if you actually take a heavily smoked salt where only the good stuff sticks to the salt. So what I would say is you can get like an alder smoked or hickory smoked or applewood smoked salt. Like the salt should be dark colored. Some salts, they just like wave it smoke over it. No, not like that. We're talking like, like you put in your mouth like whoa, that's hickory. If you try that instead of the liquid smoke, you might get a more authentic smoke flavor. But it may actually shift the health into the right way. Because some liquid smoke stuff is pretty, it's like full of advanced glycation end products and others isn't. So it depends on the brand and I'd have to like actually go to the website for each manufacturer and I'll have characterized liquid smoke in a while. But play around with that, you might find that you can like, you can get exactly the smoke profile you want because I mean if you sous vide a brisket for 36 hours, every little thing matters, right?

Yeah, that's a great idea. I love it.

All right, so let's see. Sabotivan says one day we're going to meet in Kubai in Kuwait. I was just on the phone with Abu Dhabi this morning. Let's see nearby, you're part of the world. Oh, here we go. This is great, Cody. Josie Gahan says we ordered a half a grass fed cow for the family, but we're disappointed with all the not yummy cuts we were stuck with like rump roast. She didn't say that, but I'm just guessing, what do you recommend? Okay, this is a great question for someone who knows more about cows than me. Cody, what's your take on that?

So I would say low and slow raise those cuts. I mean that's something that we occasionally see when folks will buy like a chuck roast from us. Like I mean two of my favorite cuts off of so chuck roast which is a shoulder of a steer or a just a pork shoulder roast or they actually some are called pork butts too. Except from the shoulder of a pig. Those are cuts that if you don't cook them long and slow, they're going to be really tough. But if you do Cook them long and slow. It almost like magic happens and you end up with an incredible, incredible meal. So I would say for those kind of things, long and slow, you know, I don't know, maybe they're talking about like maybe beef tongue or something. Like if they got something like that in there, you know, as part of buying half the cow, then that's something that you gotta. I think I've actually never cooked one, but I do love langua.

I was gonna say beef tongue is great. I mean it sounds gross, but you gotta, you gotta, you don't want the taste to taste you back. You gotta peel off the outer layer, but the inside of it's very tender and you know, it's a traditional Spanish food or Mexican food. I grew up in New Mexico, so lingua, tacos, it's good. What I'd recommend, since you're ordering a half a grass fed cow, you can usually say how you want it processed. So what I do is I'm like, all right guys, we just bought a half a cow from George, our friend who lives like right down the road. And in fact I'm talking to him right now. Asprey Farms only does lamb and cheap. You can only buy it in like two local stores in Victoria. We're going to actually make food at the Bulletproof cafe I'm opening in Victoria. So what I want to do is be able to include beef. So I'm like, hey George, with our half a cow, could you just grind everything that's not ribs or a high end grilling cut? And of the ground stuff, give it half of it to me and just ground 1 pound packs the rest of it. Can you put it in sausage? I'll give you the herbs. And I grow all the herbs in my own garden. So I've got a garbage bag full of rosemary and throw that in there and some smoked salt. And so you literally can say grind it or you go. For 200 bucks you can buy a sous vide device. Now it's so easy to do. They're controlled from your iPhone or your Android phone. You clip it on the side of a pot full of water and it keeps the water at exactly 127 degrees. And you put the stuff in a vacuum sealed bag or a jar if you don't want the bag and then it just bathes it. And you can take the worst, nastiest things are like short ribs or real tough to eat. And you just circulate that water and you do it for 24 hours, 36 hours. And what Comes out there, it's still pink. You know what I'm talking about with your brisket, right? And you do that and it's mouth watering. You can slice it with just like a normal butter knife. And it's wonderful and amazing. So there's your answer. Josie discovered Jen says love what Grassroots Co Op is doing. Let's see. Here we go. Some stuff. Ew. Now follow a lingua de. No, that's good. That's not Spanish. It's gotta be French. Sorry, guys. I can only say it in Spanish because you've got little tildes on stuff that doesn't belong there if it's Spanish. Okay, here we go. I feel like most people would support this, but this shit's expensive for the common person. That's Edward. Talk to me about price. How do we make this cheaper? How do we make it more abundant for the world? Because I care so much about this.

Yeah, I get it. It is expensive compared to what you buy in the grocery store. I think just to kind of draw a comparison, you know, we are like the industrial meat system is set up for the. To produce. Like their focus is producing the cheapest possible meat. You know, the cheapest meat possible. Right. So everything they do is focused on that and at the expense of the employees. You know, it's just. Sorry, I got my. One of our livestock guardian dogs is coming over here to see what I have to do. Big furry white mess.

If it wasn't raining outside, my sheep would be milling around outside. So I love it.

He goes out anyway. So. Yeah, so, you know, I think that right now, I think add more farmers across the country, more networks like Grassroots, where you have farmers working together, working in partnership with great processors like Andy, who you mentioned earlier, Grassroots partner. I think that as we increase our. The number of farmers and improve the infrastructure to support those farmers, we can be more efficient and bring down the price of this, I think over time. But I also think that one of the realities here is that it is. It's going to always be more expensive because of the. The. The commitment to paying a farmer a fair wage, paying processing employees a fair wage, and, you know, making sure that we're not degrading the environment. And so we've always said, I mean, we're not rich, we're farmers here, and we. And we eat this stuff, but we have to give up some things to do that. And that's one of those things is a lot of. We don't eat a lot of meat here actually at our. Even though we are Livestock and also that we, we eat cheaper cuts and we can take a chicken and make that go a long way, you know, three or four meals out of one chicken. So part of it's the cuts you buy and the way you cook it. And then part of it I think is just prioritizing this over other things. And if you look at a Snickers bar per pound, it's over 10 bucks a pound. And so it's, you know, a lot of it's about priorities too.

And so I, yeah, it also, it's, it's expensive. Over what time frame? Because when you include the cost for diabetes medication, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's and dying with tubes in places, you don't want it. That piece of industrial meat wasn't actually very cheap. Like, I'm sorry, you should be vegetarian before you eat industrial meat. Like your job as a human being who wants to live a long time and feel really good. Never put industrial meat in your mouth again. I don't care if it tastes good and I don't care if you're hungry.

Yeah, right.

Eat rice before you eat industrial meat. And rice is cheaper than industrial meat and you will be healthier if you do that. It's just like that. So it's the mindset that says it's no, it's not cheap, it's destructive. It's destructive for your biology and it's destructive for the biology around you, which is also destructive for your biology. So that's how it is. So it is the only meat on the planet that you can eat safely. And when you have that mindset go, I'll eat a third as much and then it's not expensive and you fill the rest of it in with guess what? Grass fed butter, which supports the soil as well. It's three bucks a pound and it's full of calories and it fills you up. It's doable, right? And you get some frozen veggies as best you can for the rest or buy some farmers markets or there's a lot of times where you can grow a surprising amount of veggies on your back deck and things like that. So I'm going to encourage you to just reassess how expensive industrial meat is. It's cheap right now and, and it's not a good deal long term.

Just referred to cheap meat is slowly, has been slowly killing us now. It's actually killing going on in these processing.

There's a cost, there is a cost to it. Now Cody, I'm going to sign off now because I've got another call. I know you've got some, some farm chores to do. Just want to encourage. If you're listening to this, Grassroots lets you look at every, every little detail on every piece of meat that you order is like that. The flavor is different, you feel different after you eat it. And this is what I want you to try. If you've never had good quality grass fed meat, when you're done eating it, there is a food high that is not from MSG or sugar or anything like that. You actually, it's like a vibration that comes through you. It's what powers me. It's what powers my family. No, it's not all that I eat. I eat a moderate to low amount of it. But it's important, and it's important that you support soil and farmers and the planet. And if $9.75 a pound for hamburger is a lot, and it is, have a small hamburger and you're still going to like how you feel. It's worth it. So try it. Cody, thanks for your work in the world. I wish you to have 100 small farmers in your network as soon as possible for Grassroots.

All right, thanks a lot, Dave. Have a good day.