Robb Wolf | Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat | Wellness Force #Podcast

This again, is all an artifact of our current food system and the subsidies and the way that the, you know, the tax breaks and everything hide the real costs. So again, this is like this systemic brokenness. And the unfortunate thing is that the only answer that we're, we're really left with is eat less or no meat. And that's not addressing anything. There's a debate out there about whether or not we should be eating meat. Red meat is now worse for us in our minds than fat ever could have been, because there are so many more reasons to avoid red meat, not only for your health, but also now for the goodness of others, including not killing animals and for the good of the planet. You can't blame people for being confused.

They're trying to make really important moral.

And ethical decisions about what they should.

Eat and how they should live.

It's easy to fall for extreme, simple answers.

The majority of meat produced in this country is under such abhorrent conditions. We both are making reactions to the.

Same evil, if you will.

They're just different choices of how to do it.

But what if we're arguing about the wrong thing? There are tractor trailer loads of crops that are grown with big machinery and petroleum fertilizer and pesticides that are destroying the earthworms and creating monocultures that, that birds have no habitat, pollinators have no habitat. The agricultural revolution has been transitioned into the processed food revolution. When we highly process these foods and start creating amazing flavor combinations, people find it very difficult to avoid overeating. What if the very animals we're fighting about are a key piece of, of fixing what's broken?

The animals are going to die and.

Your only choice now is to do it well. That is the only choice left. Are we going to be the death that's killing everything or are we going to be the death that's part of the cycle of life that actually makes life stronger? Those are really our only options.

Hello, everyone on Facebook Live is Josh Trent. I'm here with an extra special guest. You just saw the clip. He is a star in. He is the co writer of Sacred Cow, the one and only Rob Wolf. Rob, welcome back to the show, man. It's been three years.

Huge honor to be here. Thank you.

I remember the last time we did our podcast, I felt like I was a rookie and, and you know, I think that's the sign of like somebody who's a true master. They're able to really stay humble. That's something you always do. How do you maintain this humility with the Health space being so much ego driven. And really, can you share with us what sacred actually means? You know, Sacred Cow is a unique title.

Oh, man. I have an Italian wife, so if I get too big for my britches, I'll just end up in a shallow grave and that'll be that. So that definitely keeps some feet on the ground. And, you know, that question about sacred. So, you know, within the context of the book, Sacred cows are these things that are perceived to be unassailable truths, but oftentimes have some. Some deep flaws, you know, with the epistemology or the thinking or what have you. And we. We honestly debated between the. As a title, Sacred Cow or Scapegoat. And we actually, I think a title maybe of a chapter, maybe Scapegoat or we certainly mention that, at least in the book. But it's interesting. There are strong religious and social connotations around, like guilt and shame and. And what's good or bad, dirty or clean. And it oftentimes gets delineated around food. And when we look through history and some really horrific situations that have occurred, you know, Nazi Germany, stuff like that, that started in large part with delineating self versus non self around what foods were allowable to eat. And the Jewish kosher practices and whatnot were painted in a very negative light by the early propagandists. And we see similar stuff today where there are these just absolutely stark us versus them. You're either for us or against us. And this is really where the dehumanization process begins, so that you can start fighting a war and not feel bad about the collateral damage that you're about to inflict. And so we unpacked a lot of that in the book. When we first turned in the manuscript, it was about 600 pages long, and it got whittled down to about 300 pages. So a good amount of some of that stuff didn't fully make it. It was both lengthy and also pretty controversial. But, you know, that was kind of the impetus for the title. Sacred Cow is this idea that seems unassailable, but maybe needs a little bit of further review.

Wow, Rob. Yeah, because I think about the word sacred, and most people might have it in a religious context, but sacred, I mean, everything in this world is sacred. You know, the plants that we grow in our gardens, the animals that we ethically harvest, the relationships that we have. I think back to what I read in where to Eat three years ago. You talked about these four pillars of health for all of us, and community was in there. We're going to talk about this and how sacred, sacred cow and eating animals in an organic and ethically harvested way can actually bring us closer together as a community. But one thing I love most in the book, man, you said in our polarized world, because that's exactly what you're describing, where it's typically like all or nothing. I'm pro choice or not, or I'm Democrat, I'm Republican, I'm a vegan, I'm a carnivore. It's like, can we just put down the weapons? This is one of my intentions with this conversation. Like, let's put our weapons down. Let's just come together as brothers and sisters. You said this book is here to provide some much needed nuance. What do you mean by that?

Well, it's really easy and I don't want to paint this in unfair light. So we're starting off with saying, hey, let's be brothers and sisters and hug and, you know, find some commonality. And then I'm going to start throwing some people under the bus. But it's out of this kind of vegan centric worldview. There are some really compelling memes and stories, you know, that come out. Meat will give you cancer. Meat will destroy the environment. Cows are the greatest producer of greenhouse gases on the planet. Like, these things are thrown out there and they appear to be unassailable. And they really need some deeper scrutiny. Like the topics that we're trying to unpack, the things that we're dealing with, the industrial food system, climate change, human health. For the first time in history, we have more people dying from overfeeding disease than malnutrition disease globally. That actually marks a really interesting point in human history. But it's something that may have even more catastrophic problems and consequences than the underfeeding side. So we really need the ability to unpack topics like climate change and like greenhouse gases. Folks will lump the greenhouse gas emissions that come out of ruminants, in particular cattle, as the same as everything else. And where this leads us is really fascinating things. It's been discovered recently that shellfish produce enormous amounts of methane and greenhouse gas. Wow.

Who knew?

Termites? Well, nobody knew because nobody was looking.

Yeah.

And. But some of the. You wouldn't believe the recommendations, but people have recommended that we should expunge the ocean of shellfish to prevent climate change. And what we're suggesting here is that we need to expunge life to protect life. You know, it just doesn't make sense. And when you start unpacking this, we do need to be concerned about greenhouse gases, but we need to look at things in their proper context. Biological systems produce what we would call biogenic greenhouse gases. The fact that you and I are still breathing, we're releasing carbon dioxide. So we're, we are greenhouse gas emitters. Ruminants tend to release both carbon dioxide and methane. Methane is more of a potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it also gets degraded fairly quickly and it's part of a carbon cycle. Improperly managed animals and grasslands actually can sequester more carbon than what these things release. And interestingly, this is why we're lucky that there are things up until we develop the ability to use fossil fuels. We're lucky that there are things like volcanoes that re release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Otherwise life could actually lock up the bulk of the carbon dioxide carbon on the planet. And you know, that itself could cause some problems. So we need a nuanced discussion around this because if we just use this kind of linear logic, greenhouse gases are bad, you know, and they must be reduced at all costs. Then you end up in a scenario where we start thinking things like maybe we need to eradicate all termites, maybe shellfish need to be expunged from the ocean floor. The Green Party in Sweden had almost passed a bill that people would have gone out and eradicated their native moose herds because the moose produce methane as part of their normal life cycle. And this is kind of the. I want to use an emotionally charged word like insanity, but the mis directed good intentions. People want to do something good and that's great. Yeah, we. But I'll share an example. The unintended consequences story in India, as India was, was industrializing in the 1970s, 1980s in particular, it's still a very wild area. And one of the wild critters there that is ubiquitous are cobras. And cobras are very dangerous. They're incredibly poisonous or anti venoms. But I mean, they're really a significant problem for human health. And so the government incentivized people to kill and harvest these cobras, either the head or the skin, or the head and skin. I forget the exact details. And so this worked pretty well for a while. And then people realized, hey, cobras breed faster than rabbits and all we need to feed them are like mice and rats, which we have a lot of those around too. So people started breeding cobras and turning into bred cobras for a reward. And then the government realized that they were kind of getting had and so they halted the program. So now there were people who had been breeding these cobras, who. They don't want to maintain these things, so they just released them outside. And the cobra population was literally an order of magnitude greater than what it was before. And this is. I love these kind of economic stories of unintended consequences. Somebody wanted to do something good, yes. And they went into it with the best of intentions. But the world is complex. And this is, you know, it's funny in this, this era where the terms conservatism and progressivism are weaponized topics. But, and I'm going to get myself in trouble here, but conservatism, as I've seen it, has been kind of like, hey, we kind of see that the way that things are, and it's not that we don't want anything to change, but maybe you should be careful about how you change stuff, like, because there's unintended consequences. And sometimes those unintended consequences just are worse than the problem that we had initially. So that, that's kind of, you know, so much of the driver of this desire around a nuanced conversation around the ethics, the health and the environmental considerations of a meat inclusive food system.

It is incredibly nuanced because there is no such thing in nature as 0 or 100. There's always shades of gray. And I think one thing I've always loved about you, Rob, is you never attack people, yet people attack you all the time. Specifically, like the vegan community. So, yes, you're right. This isn't like, let's sit around the fire, sing Kumbaya, and all the vegans and meat eaters are welcome and everything's going to be perfect. We know there's going to be sparks that fly. But one thing I love that you said about the unintended consequences is we're seeing the exact same thing now with forced mask wearing and having people locked down at their homes. And my question to you is this. As we go into this nuanced conversation about ethical meat consumption, look at the lens that we have when it comes to health freedom right now and the freedom of choice around taking care of yourself or, quote, doing everything that your government tells you. How can you contrast what's happening right now with COVID and mask wearing with the same kind of mentality around eating meat. How do those two things interplay?

Oh, man, it's, it's interesting. And some people far smarter than myself have talked about the these things. And there's, man, this, this gets in a little deep. And I don't want to beat up on millennials. Millennials are awesome. I'm only like seven years off of being a baby boomer, so I'm 1980.

I'm like one year millennial, one year.

Not nice. Nice. So you're right. You're on the cusp. But there's some observation that, let's say kids or young people, you know, these days, they have profound rates of anxiety and depression and kind of listlessness and real difficulty navigating the world. I would venture a statement of these people are not very resilient. Like, if they're presented with a bit of a challenging situation, it crushes them. They don't know how to deal with it. And there's some thought that the helicopter parenting is a big feature of this story. That, you know, that people with good intentions, again, wanting to help people, particularly their kids, so coddled them that these kids are incapable of doing anything on their own. And it is morphed into this societal wide sense. Like, I remember when I was growing up, playgrounds for kids had like monkey bars and rope swings, merry go rounds and, yeah, all kinds of stuff. And now you look at it and you're like, I don't even know how you would play on this stuff that's available there. Because every once in a while, a kid will be playing on something that is potentially dangerous and they get hurt, possibly severely, possibly fatally. And then across the board, we make this blanket statement of like, okay, teeter totters are gone. They are too dangerous. One child died and no more can die. And what we're discovering is that risk assessment, the ability to look at a situation and assess, is this risky or not? And this could be physical, psychological, emotional. But we learn it first as children with physical tasks. How many. What kid doesn't think about, like, they get up on top of some high spot and they're like, I want to jump off that. It's like, well, let's see how that turns out. And you begin developing risk analysis. What's being found is that kids are. And young people, young adults now have horrible risk assessment. So, like, if they're sitting down and thinking about a college path, or should I take on a bunch of debt to go to school, or should I have universal mask wearing, you know, as this. This uniform policy to try to protect everybody at all costs, there's no sense of the consequences. It is assumed that just because there is a perceived good outcome, reducing risk, that there's no downside anywhere else. And that is just. There's a saying, the path to hell is paved on good intentions. And I Think that this is an example of good intentions, that the knock on effects, the collateral damage are absolutely, you know, staggering. And we're just barely starting to see the front end of that. There was a report a few days ago that 31% of all house payments in the United States last month were missed. Now that's a mix of both rental and mortgage. And people will say, well, the people who own properties, they just need to deal with that. Well, the people who own properties owe money to the bank too, and they may have some buffer of reserve. But at some point this, these knock on effects, like if we had a banking collapse on top of a pandemic in the midst of the most contentious, you know, political run up that we've ever seen. You've, you've got the makings for like civil unrest and like societal collapse. And this is why there's so many.

Preppers right now, because they're afraid of that. And I think we've all been warned of this, Rob. And your intelligence is so profound, man, because I look at the way you and Diana even wrote the book Environmental and understanding that this isn't just an ethical thing, this is also like a health piece. This axis that you guys wrote about. And the exact same way of the enforcement of mask wearing is also the same way where people are being taught at a very young age that they should be eating lab grown meat and not be eating animals, because eating animals is sad. Yet I ask you this question. When we look at the closed organic cycle and we understand that the sun feeds our plants and those animals, they actually eat the plants and we eat the sunshine and the vitamin D and all these nutrients through the animals, whether it's a sacred cow or not, aren't we missing something? If we decide that we're so cocky and we have so much of an ego that we want to meddle with the closed organic system as a race.

Yeah, it's, it reminds me of some of these 1950s, like Walt Disney esque, you know, like newsreels where it's like science better than nature, you know, and it's like no science studies nature. And we've had about a 60 year run where, you know, it's incredible what humanity has achieved over the last, you know, couple of decades. This is kind of a mind blowing reality. It's this Moore's law concept. But 90% of the information that we have today has been developed within the last two years and two years from now, and that amount is growing exponentially. Like every two years. There's an order of magnitude more information that we have. We have just made such amazing strides. But to your point, it did kind of make us cocky. And this is where like some of the, the classic economists, when they look at things like the industrial food system, they see it as being incredibly efficient. You know, you take some fossil fuel and you use that energy and you make synthetic chemical fertilizer and you put that on these crops and they grow like gangbusters. Oh man. But it poisons our waterways and it destroys the bee and insect populations. Oh, and that, that topsoil that is critical for them to grow in that is releasing carbon dioxide like crazy as it oxidizes and breaks down. We can't fix that in an industrial row crop food system. So we're just now starting to do some things like full system life cycle analysis, all of the inputs, all of the outputs, and we're discovering that it's not a free lunch. We do have an infinite energy source. It's the sun. And if we figure out ways of harnessing that mainly via biogenic processes, growing critters, whether it's plants or animals, that's going to be a really viable way for us to motor forward. But you know, we can't circumvent the laws of nature any in this food story any differently than thinking that an airplane somehow defies the laws of gravity. Doesn't. It's, it's using aerodynamics to fly, but it is still beholden to gravity, you know, and, and that's kind of the situation we are in. We are using technology to kind of float a way of doing things that looks pretty cool, but it's really brittle, very fragile. It would take very little perturbing of that system to bring it toppling down.

Yeah, we're on a house of cards. And the house of cards started. This is really fascinating. In Sacred Cow you talk about Earl Butts and the way that he was brought into the agricultural system by Nixon. I think it was in the Cold War era. 4791. Yeah, I don't know exactly the year that he came in, but he was the one that really pulled the lever on that ego and said, well, we're going to use science to actually go against nature and we're going to have mono crops, which is like literally millions and millions of acres of corn, soy, canola and wheat. And that's when things started to shift. And that's when really the conversation based on financial interest went over to, oh, sugar is great and carbohydrates are great and you Know, we really need to have less animals at this time. And Meatless Mondays and all this stuff started from the Cold War, which blew me away. Can you bring us to that? Because it's a really big context for the rest of our conversation.

Yeah, you know, I. I suspect that the folks that follow you will be familiar with some of the background story of, like, Ancel Keys and the seven country studies and how it was suggested that fat generally, and animal fat in particular, was the root cause of cardiovascular disease. And Keys presented some data that was kind of suggestive of that. But then it turned out that he left out a lot of data points. The scientists at this time were not remotely in consensus on this. There was a lot of pushback, but Keys was a super charismatic, very pugnacious individual, and he was able to really ram this stuff forward. And then it turned out there was this Warren Commission on. Or was it the Warren. Yeah, Warren Commission. McGovern Commission. Sorry, the McGovern Commission. Warren Commission, I think was John F. Kennedy assassination. McGovern Commission on Nutrition. And originally, this commission was tasked with preventing nutrient deficiencies in the United States. They had largely succeeded in that. Instead of dissolving this entity, they had to figure out what their next project was going to be. And they decided that they were going to try to improve the health of the American populace. And so an aide to McGovern, who was vegetarian, caught wind of Ancel Keys work. And this really got shoehorned into kind of a governmental level recommendation that we change our dietary guidelines. And then right around this same time, Richard, this is where, you know, there's kind of a stepwise process. So you had Ancel Keys, so some doubt around the role of animal products in our diets and fat in particular. And painted carbohydrates is this very benign entity. And all carbohydrates, no real distinction there. There was a governmental commission that wanted to do something and be big movers and shakers, and they found something to do. And then unbeknownst to him, but Richard Nixon provided the final piece for this perfect storm. He was facing reelection, wasn't doing so well on the polls, needed a really solid conservative base to support him. And In World War I and World War II, the United States and other places around the world had enacted subsidies to incentivize farmers to produce as much food as possible. Most of those subsidies had been done away with Post World War II, because this fiddling of markets is understood to be very dangerous. Again, unintended consequences can occur, occur from this. But Nixon Rolled out these farm subsidy programs. And this was, this created the ability to produce enormous amounts of what is the substrate for the modern junk food industry. Seed oils, cheap grains. You could argue that it subsidizes the production of meat and dairy also, Although the subsidies that go into meat and dairy are in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, whereas the subsidies that underplay grain and grain like products are in the billions of dollars. So it's an order of magnitude different. Not that either one of them is, is good, in my opinion, but there's a massive disparity there. But all of these things came together in such a way that we started demonizing animal products. We, we felt that we needed to do something different. Our farmers started getting paid to produce huge sums of food, and sometimes they got paid to produce no food, as luck would have it. And we had to figure out something to do with all this excess food. And right around this time, a process out of Japan, which had been known for about 50 years, the ability to convert corn into high fructose corn syrup, got refined to a degree that you could do it cheaply and at industrial scale. And so all these things kind of came together. And this is where conspiracy theories are, are dangerous. There's no central cabal, you know, twiddling their fingers, fiddling mustaches, thinking about how to control the world food system and destroy human health and whatnot. But some really bad luck, you know, kind of, kind of came our way and some, some poorly thought out decisions. Decisions with good intentions, I believe, but that had some terrible knock on consequences.

Do you always believe that it's good intentions? Because I don't think that there's like one group of people, but there's definitely something about human nature. And we talked about this three years ago, where we are emotional beings. We also contrast emotion with logic and, you know, looking at what the world needs. I think about the decisions that were made back then with Earl Butts and with Nixon and along the way, and then, you know, demonizing fat and demonizing butter. Do you really believe that to be true, Rob, that those people meant the absolute best for humanity? Or do you think that human greed, which is a dark energy, got in the way of that?

Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. I think reasonably, it's a bit of both. I think you have a lot of foot soldiers that really believe that they were, you know, advocating for more of a vegan or vegetarian friendly dietary practice. Like there were thoughts around the ecological effects and health effects and then just kind of some moral considerations of consuming animals. So I think it's a, it's an interesting mix. But it is fascinating that what this shift allowed for was the consolidation of our food system to be held by a very few people and for pieces of it, for the intellectual property rights of our food to be owned by supranational corporations. And this is part of what has really enamored like Silicon Valley and the venture capital scene with things like beyond burger and impossible foods and whatnot, because it walks and quacks like a technology startup, you know, so they're, they're like, oh, wow, this is great. We can own all the IP on it and whatnot. But that's in really stark contrast to a system that is based around millions of small family farms, what used to be rural America and, you know, rural planet Earth. You know, really, when you get right down to it, you can't. No single entity can own all of that. No single entity can manipulate all of that. And so we used to have a very decentralized, arguably very robust and resilient system, and now we have something that is quite consolidated and very brittle. There was a 2015 report that made the case that our food system, because there are these major consolidation points where meat and plant materials all go to be processed, it's a huge point of national security risk exposure because a very modest terrorist attack could take a huge amount of our food system offline. And we saw an element of that just with the COVID pandemic where these, these very few. There's about 150 major processing plants in the United States for animal products. The workers got sick, the plants got shut down, and we ended up in a meat shortage in some ways. But ironically, even in that story, there are four entities that own about 90% of the meat production in the United States. Two of those are foreign owned, one Brazilian, one Chinese. Smithfield is the Chinese owned entity. Those folks managed to keep their processing plants open, and the bulk of that pork was exported to China during this whole pandemic, even though the United States was facing food security issues. So we have some real, like, there's a lot of interesting stuff there, like food sovereignty, and it. Does it make sense to have foreign elements own huge swaths of our industrial base or food base, things like that?

It's a good question, Rob, and it's a great question for all of us that are listening here and that are watching on Facebook. If you have questions for us, please leave them in the comments for Rob. Rob, when I think about really financial interests, I don't think fundamentally that capitalism is evil or it's some kind of tool that's meant to bankrupt everyone. But I do think, man, that one thing I've been feeling for a long time that we've had many people talk about on wellness force, including Dr. Zach Bush and Dr. Perlmutter and Dr. Lynch. We're all looking at a big mirror right now of how we've treated the planet, how we've put profit over people, and how we've really just put human greed as a forefront and quoted it as progress. You know, progress. Let's just make progress happen in the name of everything else. We're in a return process. And you're a leader for this. You're a voice for this. We're in a return process. Back to loving the soil, back to loving animals, including ethical harvesting, and back to treating each other with respect, and back to not putting money really in front of all things. How do we do this, though? How does the. The sacred cow lens see this economic and this regenerative agriculture really coming together right now? How does this work for us?

It's kind of crazy, Bill. Like, kind of crazy train where I would ideally drive the boat. I do think that those economic incentives are critical. I would argue that they become dangerous when we have monopolies, when. When we have singular entities that own every part. You know, the vertical and horizontal integration of a system and there's no competition, then that's super dangerous, and we are there. By contrast, I've advocated for everything from governance to food systems, that more of the power, more of the decisions must happen at the local level. And it sounds kind of crazy for people. People will say, well, what about Europe? And what folks don't understand? I don't think people travel enough. Like, in these European, like, socialized democracies, the bulk of their decisions happen at the municipal level. They happen locally, and they try to push as little as possible to the more centralized level. And there's so many factors to this that are beneficial. One, the people locally understand what their needs are so much better than somebody 1,000 or 10,000 miles away. Like, it's impossible to get that same type of feedback.

Yes.

And. And then I think that there's also another kind of more like, raw reality that if somebody screws you over, who is your neighbor, you know where they live, and you can go break their knees, you know, it's. It's like there's some real accountability. And if the people you are representing are your neighbors, they're the people that your kids go to school with, you're going to act in a very different way than a hidden commission of senators and congresspeople, you know, making decisions that they're just like, well, this is going to affect people, how it affects them and really spreadsheets. Yeah, yeah. So I, I'm a big fan of the markets and kind of capitalism, but I would really, if there was a role for government, I see it as being okay, we've, we've let things run like this is all the, the Teddy Roosevelt era, like trust busting stuff. Like they ended up breaking up a bunch of things like Standard Oil and things like that. And it was really good for the world. And I think that we've gone way too long without a revisiting of that. Like we should probably see that applied to the technology giants. We should certainly see it applied to. I would love for there to be 10American medical associations and each one of them competing against all the others. And we would sort out cancer and diabetes and cardiovascular disease really quickly. If there wasn't a monopoly on that stuff, you know, it would only take one group to break from the ranks, do something innovative and crush their peers and then those best practices would have to be adopted. But when you have a monopoly, then it just makes it so easy for that largesse to flow to a very small group of people. But we are collectively really afraid of self governance. We are terrified of taking the reins for ourselves and handling our own shit. You know, like we wanting just the tendency that I, that I see or that I feel is that people want more decision making to happen at kind of like a federal level. They want the federal government to enact these broad, broad reaching, you know, we're all going to eat this way, we're all going to live this way. Instead of maybe at the state and local level more of these decisions are made and maybe that makes some places less desirable for people to live and other places more desirable for people to live. And that seems like a really good thing to me. Then people with different value systems, different ways of looking at things, can find common ground instead of what we're doing right now. And social media is like a major driver of this. And it's ironic. This is the way that we're going to connect. But it may also be our are undoing. But we are in a situation where we have a culture war occurring where it's going to be my ideas versus somebody else's ideas and it's going to be winner take all. Like it has taken on the feel of team sport. And in team sports, you know, what's the saying? If you're not cheating, you're not trying. And, like, bad stuff comes out of that. So, yeah, I mean, I've advocated for more decentralization, pulling more power and productivity down to the local level for a very long time, but it's not a. It's not a super sexy topic. And it's intriguing to me. Like, it seems like this should be obvious. Like, don't you want the people, you know, being more involved in the decision making versus some largely unknown entity very, very far away that may or may not, you know, understand what your particular needs are?

There's so much to unpack there, Rob. I mean, I look at personal responsibility. I look at the way that really, like, oligopolies, monopolies have been running everything. I mean, food is just one piece. There's the pharmaceutical wing. There's everything in our world that's being run by money. So with COVID and with everything that's going on right now, do you have practical advice you could give us about navigating? Really, man. The infowars out there. And I've never been a huge Alex Jones fan, but sometimes when I've listened to his stuff, I'm like, some of this makes really big sense. Like, we're in an informational war, dude. How do we navigate the infowar when it comes to meat consumption and really just policies about food and agriculture in general?

Yeah, well, you know, on the Alex Jones topic, even a broken clock is right twice a day. So it's. It's the funny, funny parts that occasionally have some insight. It's interesting, you know, with Sacred Cow, it's near the end of the book, and Diana and I turned in this manuscript nine months ago. Eight months ago, nine months ago. Way before COVID Way before COVID But then when you look at what our action plan is, have some food on hand, have a couple of weeks of water stored, don't carry any debt, have an emergency medical kit. Like, it was basically this prepper's guide. And this was in a time when unemployment was lower than it's ever been in history. The economy was going faster and stronger than it's ever been known. And still, though, you know, for me, I've been cruising around since like 2009, 2010, expecting the world to collapse. And so I have all my doomsday bunker stash. And then Covid hit, and I'm like, oh, I'm finally the smartest guy in the room. You know, I was just 10 years too early on this. But you know, the, specifically to the, to the meat story, there are kind of three elements that get thrown out there, which is meat is damaging to our health, it's unethical to eat meat, and meat is injurious to the environment. And there are truths and falsehoods to all of that. And the irony is that the health piece is probably the most dubious, like it's the easiest one to unpack. And a good example of that is that most of the rest of the world, Europe in particular, they consider it child abuse to feed children or infants a vegan diet because they recognize it as being very dangerous for developmental milestones. Once you are finished growing, once you're pretty much an adult, that they're like, okay, do whatever you want to do. But in the United States, the American Council of Dietetics says that vegan and vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle. And there's really no data to support that. Like there's no good reason to support that, particularly for children. So, you know, I think it's important for people to just recognize that it's almost this game of whack a mole. The ethics will be brought up, you start addressing ethics and then the health will be brought up, you start addressing health and then the environment is brought up and then you have to address that. But interestingly, they all kind of dovetail together. And once you understand, assuming that we're right, like assuming that what we're saying in the book is correct, that it's going to be very difficult to properly feed humans without animal inputs, we're going to tend to overeat other things because of lack of protein. Huge tracts of the world don't have a CVS that they can go to to get iron supplements and supercritically extracted algal DHA so that their brains develop properly animal sourced food is the way to do that. Once you understand that nutrition side and then once you appreciate the potential that properly raised grazing animals could actually reverse climate change, could expand our grasslands, could reverse desertification. Like in the film Sacred Cow, Diana details this story of several ranchers in the Chihuahua Desert that have reversed a million acres of desert and converted them into grassland. And I mean like it's grass I eyebrow deep and folks who are native there who have lived in the Chihuahua area for eight generations, they had no idea that grasses could grow there because they've been using kind of these, these conventional methods of grazing which, which lead to desertification. But interestingly, if you do Mob grazing and move the animals in a specific way, then we can actually reverse desertification. So not only can we produce a lot of food, but we can produce more and more food as we reclaim areas that have been turned into desert. Once you look at the health part and you look at the environmental part, then the ethical consideration starts getting interesting because it looks like we have a singular tool that could both feed humanity and potentially protect or save us from, you know, out of control climate change. And then when we juxtapose this ruminant centric grass centric model versus the industrial row crop model and the death that occurs on both sides of that, more animals, more insects, more beings are killed in the industrial row crop model than they are in this regenerative ag model. There's death that occurs on both sides. But in this other situation, the regenerative model you could argue, could go on indefinitely tens of thousands of years. There are examples of regeneratively practiced sheep herding in farms in Great Britain that are 1000 years old. Even for those folks, they're learning, oh, we could have done this and this and this differently and been even more productive and even better stewards of their land. But the industrial row crop food system, it's got an expiration date on it. It is not going to be here 100 years from now, to say nothing of a thousand years from now. So if humanity is still here 1,000 years from now, we're not going to be growing meat in a vat. It's not going to be hydroponics for four miles. It's going to be something that looks like a mid 18th century farm with drones and satellite imaging helping to inform the way that we actually graze animals on that land.

Yeah, it's like making technology the servant mother nature, Earth. Nature is the master. And it's the same way with technology, with human being beans. We're seeing the same way that technology takes over people's minds. You know, Near Ayal talks about this, how we're slaves to technology, we've become slaves to cheap food. But food ain't cheap. You know, we are the country that spends. I believe. Rob, quote me if I'm wrong because you've done an incredible amount of research on this. We spend almost the least amount on food. If you look at the per capita based on Europe and other countries, that some of these countries, including Italy, I believe, spend up to 30% of their monthly income on food. There is no such thing as cheap food, yet it's subsidized. We're still in this broken model. And this is actually what's bankrupting us. No matter if you're vegan or not, we are being bankrupted by convenience. We want convenience and we're willing to trade really our connection with nature for it. How do you see that unfolding and changing in the next five, 10 years?

Yeah, you're spot on. It's really interesting. 1940s, 1950s, we spent about 20% of income on food and about 8 to 10% of income on health care. Now we spend about 8 to 10% of income on food and 20 to 25% on healthcare. So we just kind of traded those things. Like there's going to be some costs. But when people say well, it's too expensive to eat well, if we didn't have an exponentially increasing healthcare costs that we had to deal with because of illness because of the third party payer system, which is a whole other thing. I think I mentioned it briefly in the book, but it's been one of these things I've been passionate about a long time. I would go out on a limb and say that people would be more comfortable with paying more for their food if it was understood that they weren't going to be crushed under health care debt. You know, when it would free up the resources even for people living more at the, at the margin. Like, you know, there are ways of subsidizing those programs and making sure that asking at risk families, people, low income, you know, we can take care of those folks and help them to, to get a proper leg up. But we do need to understand that there's just not a free lunch in this, this story. And it's interesting because I am kind of, kind of libertarian at heart and I'm kind of reticent because of those unintended consequences to get in and start regulating things. Like it's been kicked around that there should be a butter tax, that there should be a meat tax. It's also been suggested that we should have a soda tax. In the case of soda, I could kind of get behind it. In the case of meat and butter, I'm not, you know, I'm like, I don't know if that's moving the needle in the right direction. But I do think at a minimum, if we were to gut the farm subsidies system that we have in the United States, it would make it such that we have a system in which Twinkies are no longer cheaper than apples. That is insanity. That is pure insanity.

Yeah, this is something people, I don't, people don't know. McDonald's I believe purchases the most tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce or they're definitely in the top three to five and they set the prices to these growers who are for, who are forced to spray these chemicals like Roundup and all these things and glyphosate. Everything's so broken, Rob. The only way around it is we eat real food, including organic, you know, grass fed animals. The challenge and what I'd love for you to share with us man, is how do we overcome the financial gap between the people that are probably the most burdensome for the healthcare industry, the ones that are skyrocketing the cost, that are eating the twinkies and the 72 ounce Big Gulps and all this stuff. They literally based on their own life choices cannot afford organic foods. Like what do we do to turn the table on that aspect? I think that's in the back of everyone's mind, man.

I don't know if we talked about this on the previous shows but eight years ago when I longer than that now, when I moved to Reno, Nevada I got hooked up with a medical clinic and they had just finished a pilot study with the Reno police and fire department where they identified 40 people at high risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. We put them on kind of a low carb paleo diet, modified their sleep and exercise and based off the changes in all their health numbers, it's estimated that pilot study saved the city of Reno about $22 million with a 33 to 1 return on investment. Pretty impressive. And I cock surely thought that I was going to transform health care within like five years. Like this was going to be Moore's law applied to health care. It's further than five years down the road and clearly healthcare has only become more of a disaster and not, not has not really improved. But we have made some headway. We've grown that business self insured captives, companies that internally fund their health care. They're reaching out to us because these exponentially increasing costs are impossible to stay ahead of. Drug cartels can't deal with exponentially increasing costs. Here's a. I'll try to be quick about this drug exponential is really difficult for people to wrap their head around. And this was one of the dangerous elements of COVID when we were thinking wow, there could be exponential growth and this thing could have like a 10% fatality rate, like this could be really catastrophic. But if you imagine like a big baseball field like Yankee Stadium or something like that and you're handcuffed to the top deck in one of these places. And then at, at noon, one drop of water is put on home plate. And then at 12 1, 2 drops of water are put. 1202, 4 drops of water and it become, begins an exponential growth. How long do you have to get out of there before you drown? What's your guess?

Half an hour?

Months?

Hour? I mean based on what you're saying, when I'm thinking about the domino explanation, I've seen 30 minutes, 45 minutes.

You're very spot on. So, so at, at 9:50 you're underwater. But what's fascinating about this is at 9:45 there's only a couple of inches in the infield. And this is the crazy thing about exponentials. Like it takes a long time for them to get going, but man, once they hit that J curve, it's really off to the races. And the Pre World War II people had catastrophic health insurance and that was it. They paid out of hand, out of pocket for day to day stuff. And we had the best, cheapest health care in the world by a mile. And then During World War II we enacted wage freezes because they didn't want people here making more money than our gis that were putting their life at risk. And so as always, people respond to incentives. And what the unintended consequence was that businesses recognized that they could add things to the benefit package that circumvents the salary. And so hey, we'll give you free health care if you come work for us. And that's better than the guy that, that you know isn't going to give you free health care. And, and this is where health insurance got tied to the employer and it created what's called the third party payer system. So if you're the doctor, I'm a patient and somebody else is the insurance carrier, each one of us has completely at odds goals. You want to get paid the best that you can as a doctor, I want to pay as little as I can as a health consumer. And then the insurance provider wants to charge me as much as possible and pay you as little as possible in this whole story. And this has, has led to what is basically exponentially increasing healthcare costs. And people will say, oh, it's administrative costs and it's this and it's that. It's none of those things. It is the structural formation of the third party payer system. Car insurance does not endeavor to replace every single thing on the car because they know that that would be a disaster. They'll buy you some Wiper blades, sometimes they might fix a windshield if it gets to. Because all those things help to prevent you crashing the car and having a catastrophic outcome. But it's very different than saying, hey, every dent we're going to cover, every time you pop a tire, we'll cover that. Because what that starts doing is misaligning incentives. If, you know in the back of your head, if I drive my car out of alignment and pop the car hitting a pothole, that's okay, the insurance will pick it up and then people will start fucking up their rigs. You know, this is the rental car deal. This is why you never buy a used rental car. Like people have destroyed it, you know. And so this project I've been working on and I learned a bunch working with the Chickasaw Nation. I spent two years working with them helping develop some of the infrastructure of this risk assessment program. And what I learned from, from those folks is that we need a payer solution. And I've been working on putting together this thing called a medishare, which historically has only been available to religious entities. It's a, it's a medical share sharing cooperative where people pay money into a, you know, an account and we agree up front on what things will be covered and won't be covered and then the medishare actually pays that stuff. They don't try to shake down doctors and hospitals, but they do negotiate a good fair cash price because they're like, we will pay, but you guys don't mess with us. Like, give us make enough money to stay in business but don't, don't fleece us. And so the costs typically associated with many shares are like 60, 80% less than standard insurance. So this is again where, you know, people are talking about all kinds of kind of peripheral stuff. It's like, well, we need minimum wage increase or we need this or we need that. And these things are, in my opinion, are very similar to going after symptoms of disease versus root cause. Yes. And like in the, in this health scenario, the third party payer system sets things up so that we're not incentivized to take any personal, you know, accountability in our health. We're actually disincentivized in some ways just on a psychic level because it's like, well, I take care of myself, so why do my insurance rates keep going up? Because you're subsidizing people who are not, not taken responsibility. So this is again where I would love for there to be 10American medical associations and each one of them has A network of healthcare insurance providers. And not really insurance, but more these medishares where those things compete against each other and you are incentivized for good health. We do some health screening. If you look good, great, we'll give you some rewards. If you don't look great, we'll give you some health coaching and all the help and guidance we can to get you better. If you don't get better, we're either going to charge you a huge amount of money or we're going to kick you out. And the interesting thing, people say, well, what about pre existing conditions? Most pre existing conditions have a metabolic underpinning to it. There's very few that are like 100% genetic and would not respond from better diet and lifestyle cystic.

I don't, I don't know anyone that, that thinks that that oligopoly or having like four food companies or six media conglomerates or whatever it is. But we're in this kind of duality, Rob, and this is a metaphysical proposition based on the health component you're talking about. How do we adjust here beyond having these conversations, sharing these conversations. How do we adjust from the oligopoly model where it's so few make all the decisions? Is it literally just okay, I'm going to go out and I'm going to have a field and I'm going to grow my food and I'm going to.

Get away from everything?

Like, not everyone can do that either. Either they don't have the education or the inspiration. What would you say if you had a wand, you know, and you could wave that wand and how does Sacred Cow play the book and the movement really play a role in that because not everybody can afford organic food. And these changes, like turning a battleship, it's going to take a while for these changes to take place.

Yeah. You know, and on the organic food front, like even some people will say, if you can't afford grass finished meat, meat, don't eat meat at all. That's a pretty elitist position to take. Like imagine a family of four, they're, they're ethnic minority, they're trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And they know enough that the nutrition of their children is critical to their children's success or failure. So they want to feed these kids as well as they can. Conventionally raised meat is going to be far more beneficial than any plant material that you could feed those kids. Like at some point you can't put more grapes or bananas or watermelon or sweet potatoes or Whatever, down the person without getting nutrient deficiencies relative to just giving them some, some good quality meat and potentially some dairy and seafood and stuff like that. So that, you know, a doctor would never say, well, eat organic broccoli only or nothing. It's like, well, some conventional broccoli may have some challenges. Rinse it off, we'll deal with that. But I think that one part of this thing is that the people who are educated and kind of elite in this scene are elitist. They make the standards so high that then stuff that's kind of good enough, like even conventionally raised beef spends 70% of its life on grass. Now there's a couple of interesting observations from that. Conventionally raised meat is pretty much as nutritionally dense as grass fed meat. The ethical considerations, the environmental considerations are very, very different. But if we just compare them side by side, there's not a huge difference in their nutritional quality.

What about the mycotoxins found in the fats from all the pesticides that the animals are eating? How do we weigh that into the decision?

Bioaccumulation is a legit concern, but it's separate from nutrition. When we talk about just nutrition, it's the essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals. And so if we look at those, that's pretty solid. Start talking about bioaccumulation, we've got a different story there. And the irony within that is that the aflatoxin problem is mainly from feeding the animals grains. The grains end up getting infected with, with mold. And the aflatoxin is incredibly injurious to both the animal and the humans. But, but we kind of separate those out. In the book where we talk about nutrition and then we talk about, you know, like some of the sustainability and then some of the bioaccumulation stuff separately just to, to keep it very crystal clear. We would have loved for there to have been a massive difference in the nutritional profile of grass fed meat versus, you know, conventional meat, because it would have played to our story much better. Like we have people angry at us for, you know, sharing this information. But that topic, I even was triggered.

Too when I read the book. I was like, what are they talking about? Like I. Because I've always seen CAFOs and there's CAFOs here in NorCal or Norco. I'm sorry. And I'm like, I'm looking at these animals standing in their feces and I'm like, I'll do whatever it takes to not eat them. I'll do whatever it takes to not eat them. You know, I guess you could say that I'm in that elitist group, but I don't feel like it's elitist. I feel like it's more just I have a heart and I care about people and I care about things done the right way.

And you do, and you should. And we should, in my opinion, also leave a little bit of room in there that again, the folks that don't have the financial means to do this, that we should be. Here's the reality. Where is the only place in the world that grain finished meat is cheaper than grass finished meat?

Tell us.

The United States. We're it. You go to Australia and they will highlight it. It's like grain finished meat, and it's like 30% more expensive. Wow. So this again is all an artifact of our current food system and the subsidies and the way that the, you know, the tax breaks and everything hide the real cost. So again, this is like this systemic brokenness. And the unfortunate thing is that the only answer that we're, we're really left with is eat less or no meat. And that's not addressing anything. The big food manufacturers make more money off of the grains and grain products than they do off the meat and dairy products by an order of magnitude because it just lends itself so much better to processed foods. I mean, it's like. And now animals can be used in a whole variety of interesting things. Like, there's a lot of different things that come out of them. Leather and, and cosmetics and different things like that. There's kind of a reality like turning, turning corn or potato chips into like, Lays and Pringles. Like, dude, the margins on that are just incredible. And they're addictive foods. Like, people love them. You know, you can't. What does lay's potato chip say? Bet you can't eat one. You know?

Yeah, and I, I look at the, the lens of how people make their food choices, and it's typically, number one is price and then number two is everything else. So the argument, when it comes to even eating the meats that aren't 100% grass fed organic, the argument that you talk about in your book is, you know, the 12 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef. And I've heard this too. I've even heard that it's thousands of gallons of water to do this. But we're not talking about the way that you rotate the animals properly, like salatin or like animal husbandry. We're not talking about that. People just lump everything in to one channel. Can you expound upon that a little bit.

Yeah. And this is where it. It's really funny money accounting. So a ton of the great. And the supposition here is that we're stealing food that could be fed to humans and we're giving it to animals. And it's inefficient. The bulk of the grain, grain that is fed to. To cows specifically, is leftover products of the ethanol industry. So it's already been turned into alcohol. Either to go into a gas tank, which is a huge boondoggle, takes more energy to produce that than what you get out, or as part of like beer and wine and spirits and stuff like that. But nobody is saying, hey, we need to shut down the ethanol industry. But it's something like 80% of the grains that are fed to cattle are leftover residues from processes like that. So that's a huge misrepresentation. And then we look at like the water usage story. They count the water that falls on the earth that, that waters grass as water used by cattle, and it's going to fall on the earth, hopefully it grows grass. But it's presented as if we are stealing water from somewhere else. Now, there are examples. So there's green water, which is water that falls on the earth as rain or other precipitation. There's blue water, which are rivers, lakes, streams, and below ground aquifers. And then there's gray water, which is the effluent product of different processing methods. There are some areas where they are pumping groundwater to, to grow animals, but it is actually significantly less than say, like the almond industry, which is. You could really make the case the almond industry is taking this finite resource of California water, growing food with it, and then they export 90% of the almonds that they produce. So we're exporting the groundwater within California in particular. And there are places where the companies that raise the almonds own the water rights outright. The local municipalities have no water and have to truck water in while these, these, you know, these almonds are being raised. So these are important discussions to have to look at what the real story is on these different resource allocations. But the, you know, something that people forget again and again. And it hits both kind of the climate change and also the general sustainability story. These grasslands existed with enormous herds of raised grazing animals for hundreds of millions of years. Like there were dinosaur iterations of it. There were Pleistocene woolly mammoth iterations of it, and now we have our current iteration. And these things were stable over. Over eons. They didn't just, you know, destroy the planet. So there's, there's some accounting there that needs to be taken very, very differently than when we look at the, the industrial row crop system.

There's bees also that are being trucked in as well because, because of the pesticides. Yeah, Rob, it just seems like there's, you're a voice of positivity and you're bringing solutions. But man, when I feel into it sometimes it's just overwhelming for me. And I know I'm speaking for so many people. It's like the bees are dying because of pesticide, because of Monsanto's interests in bear. We're getting people that are sick from that. Then we're also seeing people spending more money on healthcare than food. It seems like everything is tumbling to the fucking ground right now. And that's what it feels like, man. And so I'm like, all right, let's talk about this with Rob about how even if we do eat meat that's not 100% organic, that's not $12 a pound, how we're still contributing to part of the solution. I'd like to go into that just a little bit deeper.

Yeah, so you know, there, to the degree that there are still small time like family owned operators in this scene, many of them are already savvy to this regenerative practice. And the main reason why, ironically is economic. When they figure out that if they can grow more grass, they can grow more animals and they're like, oh, you know, Alan Savory will say to a group of ranchers, would you like it if I could give you four times more land? Everybody's like, hell yeah, sign me up. And he's like, I can't do that, but I can teach you how to grow four times more animals on the land you have and do it in a way that you could come back again a thousand years from now and it still works. So there's not a non trivial number of people who raise meat regeneratively, but because of the limitations in processing, like a very few large entities own the processing in the United States. These family owned entities will sell the animals to the CAFO feedlot finishing part. And just economically it works out better for those folks. But this is great. Pastured meat that was grown in a regenerative process and it ends up in the general CAFO system. Some of the CAFO system is regeneratively raised, some of it is just kind of more letting the animals do what they do, which oftentimes can, can damage the environment.

Is there labeling there to Differentiate that when people purchase.

There's not. There's not. And this is where some interesting stuff like blockchain could, could solve this. You know, blockchain could easily track from, from the birth of an animal all the way through to its, its processing and consumption.

Yeah.

And you know, they're used at pre 1950s, I want to say there were a couple of hundred thousand meat processing centers around the United States. Now there's like 150 big consolidated entities. And so this again circles back to that. That point about decentralization. So I live in Central Texas and it's growing like crazy. And you know, it's a mixed bag of the populace. Like, there's a very conservative scene here. There's a more progressive, you know, new, new to the scene environment. But there's a lot of people doing regenerative ag around here. And it's interesting. They will joke and they'll say our soil type is bedrock. Like, you go out there and it's just like rock. But you see the areas where they've started moving cattle through and they'll show you pictures and like in four years where there was a section this big, you know, in it, in its hundreds of square meters, now it's this big of barren rock. Like the grass is regrowing. The re. They're creating topsoil by, by properly managing these animals. And so this is, I guess my clarion call again is that if we fire people up to work at the local level, this will happen. Like, it will just change things, you know, and by the time it percolates its way up to the federal government, the job will be done. And I would encourage people to. Until I can get my Medicare put together. On the health care side, I would kick the tires on some of these Medicares like Liberty Health Share and whatnot. Usually you have to claim a religious practice. There are some provisions now to create secular Medicares, but some of them make it much more broad. It's like if you believe in the spirit of nature, then you're good to go. So it depends on the. The way those things are set up. But these MEDI shares are operating in a very different way than the standard insurance model. So I would kick the tires on that. I would really look at trying to support your local food producers as much as possible. And as they say, the change happens at home. And that is really where we've got to make it happen. And we can do pingers out to the bigger universe doing shows like this where you can literally reach people anywhere in the world. We can gain some support, we can gain some inspiration from people doing good things, but we really do just have to grab a slice of personal accountability and figure out, what am I going to do today that's going to make a difference? And, like, we've really been helping our local regenerative farmers that we know. Like, we'll even go out and, like, dig fence posts for them and stuff like that. Like, it's, you know, one thing. Anything that gets me off the computer, I'm like, me, too. That's incredible. Me, too. But then the other part of it is, is just that they need some help. And if I can help, you know, install that infrastructure, then that's going to be part of my legacy. Like, a hundred years from now. Hopefully, that fence post is still there, and it's still helping to hold up an electric fence that's helping regeneratively grazing animals, you know, continue to improve. Central Texas.

We live in Southern California here in Encinitas. And, you know, I get to go to the ocean, I get to go in nature, and we have mountains, and snow is a couple hours away. So I have all these things. But the more that I start to feel what's really happening and really the ethos that you stand for and that sacred cow was built upon, that is, can we grow our own food? Can we eat real food? And can we make the sacrifices and can we let go of some of these things that we actually don't need anymore so we can take both the energy and really, our psyche and finances and put those towards a sustainable lifestyle for ourselves and our families. And we covered a lot of ground on this podcast so far, man. And one thing I've always respected about you is that not only are you a businessman, but you're a father. And it's something that is in my future. I know it's there. And one thing that you talked about in the book, you actually. It was in the first couple pages, and it just. It just floored me. You said, this is for our children. May they steward this world better than those who came before them. What are you excited about for your daughters and for even your friends and their children? What are you most concerned about as well? When we look at this new way of eating that's not really new, it's actually a return to how we've always done it. But what are you most excited about for your daughters? And what are you also most concerned about when we look at this future of regenerative agriculture and eating sustainable harvested meats?

Man, Unfortunately, I'm going to do the concern first. And it's not even just the regenerative AG or the food systems. Like, if we don't do something different, our health care system is going to implode. If we don't do some different things. Things on like a global economic level, our economic system's going to implode. Like, there's some existential threats out there. But the most concerning thing that I see right now is our complete inability to have conversations about things. And these social justice topics, these equality topics, they're really important, but it's presented as, if not dissimilar to the climate change topic. You know what's kind of the catchphrase on that? The science is settled. What do you mean? Which science are you talking about?

Science. Science is some kind of God. It's like science has become the new God for some reason.

Yeah. And science only works if you hang a sign on it. Good. Until further notice. Like, this is our best understanding of what we've got today. There's some things like gravity and quantum mechanics that we have some pretty good understanding. Like, there's probably not going to be a lot of gotchas there, but our ability to predict the weather is pretty good at like a day or two starts really degrading at like five to seven days. And this is again, like, we don't know where any of this stuff is going to go. And so making decisions around it, we need to be careful with it. Like, we need to just be careful, you know, careful of those unintended consequences. But even beyond that, like, at a societal fabric level, I wouldn't be surprised if we're not in some sort of a medium to warm, like civil conflict within 10 years, like, if we don't change what we have going on. And I know a lot of people are almost kind of like, fired up for that. They're like, yeah, bring it. You know, we can set everything right. I would just encourage those folks to do some, some digging on, like, the history of the Khmer Rouge and, and Cambodia, Pol Pot, the killing fields. This was an example of a society that fractured along some really interesting lines. And be interesting in the context of what's going on right now in the United States. And tens of millions of people died, and it set their culture back irreparably. And the horrors that were visited upon this population are just unbelievable. And it's not a singular example. You know, the Hutus and the Tutsis and in Africa, like, there's just example after example after example. And I'm really scared that we're heading into a direction like that where we are so polarized, where we're so incapable of finding common ground, that we're going to start trying to kill each other. And the potential for real tyranny to come in in that situation where, like, people think we're under tyranny, tyranny right now. Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. But tell you what, it can be far worse than what it is. And if society starts coming unraveled at the seams, then everybody wants that strong individual to come in and set things straight. And, man, it's really dangerous. And I. I'm sorry. Super worried about that. And even us having this conversation, like, even while this is going live, there are probably some people that are like, fuck that asshole, you know, and are. Are upset at the notion that our inability to find some common ground or even just say, hey, man, you do you and I'll do me. And so we don't necessarily have common ground. But I'm not seeking to force my worldview on you at gunpoint, and I feel like that's the direction that things are going. I hope that this is just a case of me becoming old and crotchety and this is just kind of a get off my lawn, old man moment, but I really don't think it is.

Yeah, I don't think it is either. And I can echo this because in the past two months, specifically three months with COVID we've done a featured series with many health experts, not just one. I mean, I'm talking, like six people with medical backgrounds that have come on the show to talk about, you know, what does it really mean when wearing a mask and what is the actual science around, like, the particulates in the air and really going into these nuanced topics. Just like we're talking about sacred cow and animals that are harvested in an ethical way. But it's almost like people have this cognition bias, this pre cog where they're like, I'm only going to go on social media and I'm going to be in a blast echo chamber and gather only the things that really resonate with what I already believe. It's almost like, rob, we've lost our ability to listen. We've lost our ability to listen to one another. And I don't think everybody should go out and buy a bunch of CAFO meat and stock their freezers and be in this reactive mode. But I do think, and one thing that I love about your work and how you've written this book is you just spend the time to listen. You did the research, you went to the farmlands, you interviewed people, you created a film with this thing. Like you spent the time. And I would just implore everyone to go out and do something where you spend the time listening and less time pointing the finger and trying to attack others when their opinion is different than yours. Rob, we have really done a great job about talking about the social impact. We didn't get too much into nutrition because I want people to read the book. And also you're well known for being a nutrition expert in the world. But when we look at the morality behind this thing, the real moral lens, how does eating ethically harvested cows, these sacred cows, how does this help us 10 years from now, 20 years from now, so that we can have this correction of the broken system?

Man, you know, if we can wrap our heads around the need for a system that looks more like ecology, like nature, then I think that we're moving into a good direction. One of the interesting rays of hope in all this, the Audubon Society, which has historically been very antagonistic towards ranching, has been wholesale endorsing these savory institute hubs because the bird populations are exploding there because these it. What, what's so interesting is holistically managed land. When the, the rancher looks at it and he's like, I need to do this and this and this to improve the, the habitat for this bird and that bird and the other bird, it's good for the cattle, it's good for the sheep, it's good for the goats, it's good for everything. And this is the interesting thing, is that in the industrial system we don't get multiplicities of use. It's completely extractive. Like the only thing we get is like nutrient poor, high calorie density kind of food like substance, but that's it. But in this regenerative scene, we have habitat restoration. We improve the carbon capture of the soil, we improve the water retention capacity of the soil, we extend the soil microbiome below ground and diversify that. We enhance biodiversity and we produce nutrient rich food in a way that again could go on basically indefinitely until the sun runs out of nuclear fuel. Like this process could keep going. So that's the opportunity that we have. And circling back to the, the current system, cows are really demonized. I do want to mention that chicken and pork are about 100% dependent on grain and soybean inputs. So a lot of the slings and arrows that are Leveled at cows aren't really appropriate there. And they're wholly appropriate in the chicken and pork area. And over the last 30 years, we've dramatically reduced our consumption of beef and dramatically increased our consumption of chicken. And used to. Chicken was a background feature of a farm. It wasn't the primary staple. And so this is another example of kind of goofy thinking. Poor, poor thinking, not good systems thinking, you know, changing our relationship. Large grazing animals have always been kind of the keystone food source for omnivores like humans. Like, they, they are the prime. They're kind of the primary global food source. Whether we're talking about, you know, consuming plankton in the oceans or, you know, whatever that that trophic scale represents, where a huge amount of energy is consolidated and turned into food that then spreads throughout the, the food web. So if we can head down this direction, like, it wouldn't be that hard to take the entire current CAFO feedlot beef system and convert it over to 100% regenerative. They already spend 70% of their life on grass. Just make sure that the time they spend on the grass, it's holistically managed. And why don't we generally bring them pretty much all the way through on grass? There's some areas, like northern Canada, that you got to have some grain residue and maybe a little bit of grains to be able to get the animals through the winter. And that is completely sustainable. People did it hundreds of years ago. So, like, there are practices that can fit that, but that system is, oddly enough, not that far off of actually being far, far better. And then our antibiotic usage would drop. Like, all kinds of really beneficial things would change.

Man, the benefits so outweigh anything else that could ever get in its way, including this perceived cost of, quote, cheap food. Rob, like, our wellness depends on this. This is way bigger than just a conversation about vegetarian versus carnivore. And we started it without that, by the way. We're all around the fire. Maybe some people got thrown under the bus. I don't know. I didn't feel like they did too much, man, but. But we are kind of coming to home. We're coming back home. When I, when I first even found the Paleo movement, it was like you and Mark Sisson and a few people in 2008. And I, and I was so attracted to it because I thought, oh, well, this just makes sense. I don't actually need an explanation. I just. It makes sense to me because it's how I see everything actually working in harmony with one another. The closed organic cycle, the way that we're in community, the four pillars of health you talk about. But how do you define wellness? You know, three years ago, we talked about wellness on Wellness Forest. Now, this is your third book, right? Sacred Cow is the third book. Your third book. A lot more experience. A lot more experience being a father. A lot more experience being a businessman. With all this experience and with everything that you've learned and all your research now, how would you define wellness?

Man, I still am not going to have a particularly good. You know, these big, big topics are tough. I really don't know, man. Like, I wish I had something pithy there. Like, I knew that this was going to be something that would probably pop up, and I floundered around trying to pen some stuff. You know, definitely thinking about one's place in the world and being comfortable with that is, I think, a really powerful piece of wellness. Maybe it is not wellness itself. Maybe it's a derivative of this next order thing that is wellness. But understanding that we are a piece of nature and that, that, that, you know, nature is where we belong, I think is a very comforting thing to understand. That would certainly feed into wellness.

Well, yeah, nothing plethy about that. I mean, that was very true, no matter who you are. And the book is Sacred Cow. I think if people are watching now, there's still two or three more days where they can get 200 bucks of bonuses. After that, we're obviously going to be giving away, as I mentioned earlier, five copies. So, Rob, we're giving away five copies of your book. So thank you for writing this book. Everybody just go to wellnessforce.com review. Leave us a podcast review. If you share this conversation and if you let Rob and I know, like, hey, this is what I enjoyed, and you share that with other people, you never know. We might make a big dent in the house of cards that's essentially falling down. Rob, where can people get the bonuses? And we already talked about where they can get the free book, but where can you get the bonuses?

If they go to sacredcow.info book, then that's where all that stuff lives.

Awesome. Well, man, thank you again. This has been three years in the making, and I'm just super honored. I'm honored that you choose Wellness Force to come and talk about your mission on. I'm honored that in 2008, I read your book and I started to understand this whole world of, like, ancestral living and seeing life through a lens where it's not just about me. And I think that's come up quite a bit in this podcast, man. So thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Thank you. And let's do this before I do another book, let's. Let's do a between book show as well.

Are you already writing the next book?

No.

Okay, now you can be a little rest after this one.

Yeah. It's kind of like having kids. Each time you do it, you're like, I'm never doing that again. And then six months go by and you're like, ah, wouldn't be that bad. So. Yeah.

All right, man. Well, thank you again for coming on the show. And until Rob and I see you again, until you see Rob across the world, we're both wishing you love and wellness today. We'll talk to you soon.

Absolutely. Thank you.