#6: James Connolly (@jamescophoto): Producing Sacred Cow, the Future of Regenerative Farming, and the Case for Eating Meat.
Summary
In Episode #6 of The Meat Mafia Podcast, we are joined by the producer of the documentary Sacred Cow (https://www.sacredcow.info/), James Connolly. James discusses his childhood as a teenager working in a butcher shop and how that evolved into a passion for food. Prior to his experience producing Sacred Cow, James founded a non-profit in NYC and traveled the world working in various kitchens as a chef. His new project, Death in the Garden, is expected to be another masterpiece! Get full access to The Meat Mafia Podcast at themeatmafiapodcast.substack.com/subscribeHello, and welcome to the Meat Mafia podcast. On today's episode, we are lucky enough to be joined by the producer of Sacred Cow, James Khan. James is a chef, an artist, a nonprofit founder, and a documentary film producer. He has a new documentary about to come out called Death in the Garden. He's a very well researched individual and just an incredibly smart and fun guy.
Speaker 1:We can't wait for this one to come out, so please sit back and
Speaker 2:enjoy. Clemens, how are you doing, man?
Speaker 1:Doing fantastic as always.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We got a we got a really good guest lined up today. Mister James Connolly, we actually had a great connection off Twitter. We're talking about Kellogg's killing boners, and then here we are. Got you on the on the plane with fire podcast.
Speaker 2:So thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker 3:That's my introduction.
Speaker 2:I I mean, I thought it was not bad. Right?
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. No. That's great.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I I I looked at your string. It was actually, like, really stunning. And, you know, there there is a lot of there's a lot of people who've kinda gone into John Harvey Kellogg, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, that whole sort of General Mills, breakfast cereal, sort of history. And you did this brilliant, sort of, like, lead into understanding who who this guy was, and how his history was has been kind of, like, for lack of a better term, whitewashed.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And I think I'd like what did I DM you? And I was like, yeah. Like, great start, but it's so much worse than you can imagine.
Speaker 2:A hundred a %. Yeah. And that's and that's how the relationship started. And I forget I I think I actually might have heard I think I might have seen one of the quotes about him on Twitter a few years ago, and I remember thinking there's no way that this story is actually true. It's gotta just be a fabrication.
Speaker 2:And and it's like you do all the research and it's right there. And that's the amazing thing about this, like, nutritional Twitter space is it gives you the the ability to put together threads, and it seems like a lot of people are really gaining a lot of value from that. So I'm glad that we were able to use that as our connection point. And, and to be honest with you, James, this is, this podcast for us means a lot because I don't wanna speak for you, Clemenza, but we're both massive fans of sacred cow. We've read the book and also seen the documentary multiple times.
Speaker 2:And the thinking in the way that that documentary is portrayed really helped us both shape our thinking around regenerative agriculture and meat. And I think at the time period that we discovered it, we were both onto this ancestral animal based way of eating, and it really helped us take it to the next level and incorporating regenerative ag into, like, the core mission. So just, first of all, wanted to thank you for doing that, and we're we're pumped to dig into it all with you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thanks. I I came into, Diana Rogers' sustainable dishes documentary, probably about a third of the way through, and I reached out to her just to have a conversation. I had found her on an ancestral health podcast, and it was it was she was speaking about these things in those sort of multilayered terms that when you talk about food, you talk about everything. Right?
Speaker 3:You talk about politics, you talk about family, you talk about history, You talk about geography. You talk about, you know, the the war in Ukraine right now. You talk about all of these different things are all centered around what was an agricultural revolution that we're actually still living through. And so when you study ancestral health, you start to realize, like, for 98%, ninety nine % of our existence, we did not live the way that we live now. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so can we use that as a key factor in understanding what the world is? And so when I'm talking to Diana about it, who who like, I'm I'm actually reading a book right now, and, you know, they're talking about the paleo revolution, as, as a way of life, as a way of understanding, like, you know, how much we've altered our environment so that now we're afraid of the sun. We're afraid of we're afraid of water. We're afraid of the foods that we've eaten, you know, for two point three million years. And so I reached out to Diana, and I was like, listen.
Speaker 3:I would love to be part of this project. My, the film company, was had, been doing documentaries for a number of years, and we had a basic constitution of what we would fund. Most of it had to do with, like, the environment environmental issues, social justice issues, cycles of poverty, all of that stuff. And Diana was actually talking about all of those things, on a regular basis, but hers was mostly focused on health. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so what we saw, happening in real time was this transition from vegan documentaries that were centered around, health related issues, because I think a lot of the, the stuff that we grew up with I'm 48, so the stuff that I grew up with was really centered around saturated fat and cholesterol and all of these different factors, to push people to move away from especially red meat consumption. And so what I saw was a transition into talking about the climate. So now the excuses were going away on the on the health side, or at least it wasn't as damaging as they they could make it out because this was the worst thing you could ever eat. So now it's the worst thing you could ever eat because of its effect on climate change, whether its effect on the environment or deforestation or any number of different things. And so we had to alter the documentary in real time while we're in production and talk to to those people and essentially dismantle a lot of Cowspiracy, you know, all of these different environmental docs that are you know, we have one on zoonotic disease, by, Joaquin Phoenix that he's trying to fast track now to get out as quickly as possible.
Speaker 3:So when when you're talking about the sort of vegan ideology, everything is centered around animal agriculture. And so it doesn't matter what the issue is. It's always gonna be come back to it's because we eat animals is is the the biggest problem, you know, that that that human humanity has ever done. Right? The original sin.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 1:Where does where does that misconception come from? It's just it seems like it's one of those ones that's pumped out there so, so hard and everyone sees it. Right? Like, beef is bad. But where where is it coming from?
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 3:mean, it it I think it's evolved over a long enough period of time and a trajectory to not really be able to pinpoint it down to one thing. Mhmm. You know, I'd actually read a lot of, animal rights activist books and animal agriculture books coming from the vegan side. And so what you'll find is that the American vegetarian movement, even in the beginning of the twentieth century, was centered around this idea that if they could reduce meat consumption in humans, that you would lower the virility of human beings, and so therefore, war could not become inevitable. It was centered around this idea that that if you if you produced virile human beings, then those peoples would, in essence, sort of go go to war with each other.
Speaker 3:Which is I mean, utter bullshit. Right? Mhmm. You know, I I think, so some of it has to do with that. A lot of it has to do with ideologies that were coming out of the century, which we we hinted at in Sacred Cow.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. As you move people further and further away from farming systems and agricultural systems into the city, what you started to get was generations of people who are so divorced from where their food were coming from was coming from, that you would see a fundamental change in the way that they viewed food. And so you'll get like, when you talk about mother culture now, when you get, like, say, Michael Bloomberg is considering running for president, he'll say, you know, the, the farming community, there was a huge brain drain in the farming community because all the smart people moved to the city. Right? So he'll say something like that, and then it it it falls upon deaf ears.
Speaker 3:The reporters are like, yeah. Right.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 3:you get this sort of total removal of people from the agricultural environment where their food is coming from. And then that divorce leads into this idea that we can actually subsist without all of the stuff that's associated with it. Then you get the sort of religious ideology that interprets, the Genesis story as the original Garden of Eden diet, was eating from the fruit of the tree, the seeds, and all of that stuff. And so it's a literal interpretation of this Garden of Eden that somehow if we redesign the diet to move towards vegetarianism, that we would create, a new Garden of Eden, and then therefore, be able to open up the pearly gates and get back in again. So you have all of these different factors that are kinda going into it, and then you get Ancel Keys who is then saying saturated fat and all of these different things.
Speaker 3:So you have a scientific community that is building upon this this relationship with food that is then vilifying, something that we've eaten for two point three million years. So then it becomes scientific dogma, ideological dogma, religious dogma, and all of this stuff, like, revolves around this. Then you start to get the UN and a number of different organizations that are kinda ushering us into the twenty first century who are saying that the this new sort of Garden of Eden is also built upon this sort of vegetarianism, as we move, to this future perfect. Right? This utopia.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. You know, all of the stuff that's associated. That's now coming out of the kind of tech industry, right, which is saying, we can we can we can not only get rid of animal agriculture, we can get rid of agriculture altogether. And we're just gonna create all this stuff in bats, you know, and powders and soylent. I don't know if you guys ever heard of soylent.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. All of the stuff that's so associated with that. Like, it's this future futurama. Right? This idea that we're now we're no longer, dependent upon the earth because we're no longer subject to its rules.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a scary it's a scary proposition there because I think you come you you, can be devoid from, you know, the natural laws and the circle of life, and that I think it distorts, like, what it means to really be a part of this whole system that is working around us. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And what we've done is structured the agricultural system so that the downstream effects of it are never really felt, by the actual grow growing itself. Right? So the water systems have have been altered, were you know, all of the stuff associated with our our general war with nature, which was sort of based on this, ideological thinking about science, which was, a total war with nature. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so we'd essentially just kill everything on the land, deforest it, grind it up, pull all of the soil up, you know, take all of these nutrients like nitrogen fertilizers, NPK fertilizers, re you know, sort of lay that at back out onto the ground and then grow all of this food and then just start start the cycle every every year. And so all of that stuff was sort of centered around this this movement. And the environmentalist movement that kinda came out with Silent Spring in the seventies, which, you know, Silent Spring is about all of the, the reverberative ramifications that, in essence, killed all of all of the bugs surrounding farmland, all of the birds, all of the, you know, all we were starting to to not hear the normal, you know, sounds of spring anymore, the cicadas, the this, that, whatever. You know?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And that's where I think Sacred Cow is so powerful, and I know Clemenza and I just love the emphasis on regenerative agriculture, and that's like, you know, it's it's part of the the ethos of the film. And I think especially if you are an advocate for a meat based diet, people just kind of lump you into big food like that. We're pro, you know, slaughterhouses and these massive processing plants. So I think just being able to to I almost love to point people in the direction of sacred cow to just say no.
Speaker 2:Like, look. You might be plant based. You might be vegetarian, but we're really all on the same team. Like, we're anti that stuff as well. We're advocates of a regenerative approach.
Speaker 2:Check out this documentary and just learn a little bit more about it and just see what they have to say.
Speaker 3:So Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I I think that there's, the idea that somebody who eats meat, is not thinking about it from a moral perspective. I think it's it is one of the things that actually genuinely pisses me off.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. You know? Having having spent most of my life in and around food, I started at a master I studied apprentice under a master butcher when I was 14 years old Mhmm. Until I was 18, until I went off and and joined the military. And then in my late thirties, I'd I'd moved to England, and I did the same again with these Irish butchers who were located in London, who were part of this sort of cooperative, and they were raising, Irish beef.
Speaker 3:They were getting, pigs from Spain. I mean, some of the most beautiful meats you've ever seen in your life, that these guys didn't care about where their food was coming from. Like, we were being protested by, by vegans, like, outside of our door. They'd show up every Saturday and disrupt the this small sort of community just a little bit north of London. And they would protest, you know, all of all of the stuff that was going on.
Speaker 3:And we'd invite them in and try to have a conversation with them. But, but they were just young, sort of revolutionary kids who were looking at a future, and trying to figure out a way that they could advocate for a change, and not really understanding anything about what they were talking about. You know? So it was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:Did you find them to be informed, or or would you be met? Because you you're a very informed guy with the information that you have. I'm sure, you know, when you started speaking some of the truths, like, what sort of responses were you getting from these protesters?
Speaker 3:I mean, it was it was tough to have a conversation, because I think when, when you, when you create a level so when like, if they had just sort of come in and to to have a conversation about, animal agriculture, we would have sat down, and I would be like, listen. Give me, like, four hours. Let's talk for four hours. Right? Because I need like, I need to just dig into all of this stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:What happens when you set up a protest is the protest now becomes the thing. You're you're you have an audience, and change is really hard under an audience. You can't really have a conversation. And so, you know, it's sort of a back and forth. But then the winter kinda set in, and and vegans would get really cold really quick, so they stop coming.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:I'm curious. Where would you start with that four hour conversation? Like, you're talking to someone who you're trying to you know, obviously, you have sacred cow out there as a piece of work that you can point them to. But, like, if you were trying to get the point across around the good that beef can do for the environment, where would you start?
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, I would, I would try to start with so I think I think the the the level of, sort of paradigm shift that happens in the twentieth century, surrounding food is so absolute and yet never talked about within this, historical historical perspective. So, here, I could probably do this in about, like, ten minutes. You know?
Speaker 3:Because you're a try.
Speaker 1:Let's do
Speaker 3:it. Okay. So, a a long so if you look at it from the nutritional the nutritional realm, you get you start to get the discovery of vitamins in and around the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You'll start to get this idea of, like, you know, the British talking about scurvy, you know, any number of different things. We have nutritional deficiencies that people are generally working on. And the discovery of vitamins then creates this sort of twentieth century, you know, worldview that we actually still talk about today. Right? We still talk about vitamins as, as nutritional therapy.
Speaker 3:It's it's like we we we're able to dissect, food into these component parts. And then what you what you find with nutritional wars and diet wars nowadays is that we're still talking about these things that is in essence sort of became these, early twentieth century dialogues around what is healthy and what is what provides health with people. And vitamins were were essential part of that. The same thing happened with agriculture when you started to look at the level to which, you would have, these we were functionally changing, what were the sort of agricultural environment of the world. And so you get, the destruction of the buffalo, bison herds, in the states.
Speaker 3:You start to see, the US government's policy to, in essence, destroy the the autonomy of, Native Americans' ability to feed themselves, and the knock on effect of that, which in essence sort of changes, which in essence gives us a dust bowl later on. Mhmm. And so what you start to see is in the early part of the twentieth century, you start to see this real frenzy around this idea that we're not gonna be able to feed ourselves. Malthus comes along, and he talks about population dynamics. And so he uses this metric, to talk about the fact that we're gonna start to run out of land, agricultural land, and people are gonna starve.
Speaker 3:And you can see this now. We're talking about this all in real time now. Mhmm. This is all happening in and around, the early part of the twentieth century. And a lot of it had to do with, in the soil.
Speaker 3:So you'd have to do crop rotation with the lagoons.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 3:know if this is a little getting into the weeds, so I'll jump in and out on this.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 3:So, nitrogen is it it's like the the golden, part of this. Can we get enough nitrogen in the soil to grow the food that we need to grow? And so with the discovery of the idea of nitrogen, phosphorus, NPK fertilizers, and potassium, those become the three things that you're gonna use to grow, in essence, most of the food that we see nowadays, especially the monocultures. If you just have the minimum requirements of what you need, you're gonna be able to grow. And so we functionally changed the landscape of agriculture altogether.
Speaker 3:But so we have this huge fear, that we're gonna run out of food and the population is going to explode. And what you have is, this huge push to sort of colonize these, all of these different parts of the planet that have these huge nitrogen rich sources. These, atolls and islands, the Atankama Desert, they're essentially just bat guano and, bird guano. And that's where the term bat shit crazy comes from, because we created a whole new slave environment. So we we kidnap people and force them to go out to these places and dig up nitrogen.
Speaker 3:And it's just, you know, like, tons and tons of nitrogen that is built up over tens of thousands of years, and within a generation, we're running out. And so you, like, enter into the twentieth century. So you start to get, you get Haber Bosch. Right? So you get this German Jewish scientist who then figure out because nitrogen is very plentiful in the air.
Speaker 3:He they figure out how to take this nitrogen that's inert, take that, and, and create ammonia fertilizers. Mhmm. They win the Nobel Prize. They're feeding the world. Like, they're Germany at this point is, like, the most educated place on the planet.
Speaker 3:If you wanna learn, you go to Germany. Haber Bosch, they they create all this stuff, but Germany is a new state created in the eighteen seventies, and they don't have colonies. They barely have any colonies all over the world, and they're living under that same fear that they'll never have enough farmland. So you get people like Hitler talking about farmland for Germany. You talk about, you know, taking over the Ukraine, the bread basket of Europe.
Speaker 3:You have all of these different stories because you have this malthusian idea that population is gonna grow beyond our food and that certain nations will survive afterwards, others will not. Right? Mhmm. And so Haber Bosch, part of the reason why he's not actually they're they're not particularly known nowadays is he also start he creates mustard gas in World War one. So you get the beginning of the sort of, like, military industrial complex.
Speaker 3:So the same ammonia that you can use to grow things is also the same ammonia that you can use to blow up the fucking world. Right? And so, like, after World War one, the, the companies that were part of creating all of these, munitions weren't allowed to build these bombs anymore, but they were there's a theory that they were doing it anyway underground, and there was this one explosion, that happened at one of these nitrogen fertilizer plants that blew up everything within, like I mean, five miles away, the birds would, like, lose their feathers and fall to this to the ground. That's how powerful this stuff is.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:So yeah. So for an example, Timothy McVeigh blew up, the Oklahoma, FBI using fertilizers. Right? Right. It's right?
Speaker 3:So this is incredibly powerful stuff. And so you start to get into this idea of, like, alright. So we have we have these crisises that are happening, which if you watch now in the twentieth century, we're still talking about all of that stuff. We're running out of phosphates. We're running out of, nitrogen fertilizers require so much energy to produce all of the stuff.
Speaker 3:We're running out of farmland. We're running out of all of this stuff. And so what we're having, we're we're creating these crises of of that the experts are saying that we're we're going to reach a point of food insecurity. And so it's part of the zeitgeist now, which is the same zeitgeist that was happening back then. Right?
Speaker 3:And so the the world world war two after world war two, what we start to do is we start to take all of those munitions, and create this environment now where we're using the munitions, the fertilizers. We're using tropical def defoliance that we used. All of that stuff, we're using that now to alter our environment so that we can feed ourselves again. And so we had those food crises after World War two, and so what we did was we took all of the technology that we produced during war, and we said we're gonna feed ourselves with this stuff. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so what we're dealing with now is the the, the same sort of, colonial environment that the nineteenth century built, right, with, like, just, you know, colonizing the earth and trying to extract all of these different materials, in going into the twenty first century, we're doing, in essence, the same exact thing. But we just don't call it colonialism anymore. You know? We call it sustainability, you know, environmentally sustainability goals. Right?
Speaker 3:Right. And so, like, I just like, if I was talking to somebody who wasn't born and raised in the agricultural environment, I would want them to understand where their food was coming from. Like, I would want them to understand that there is there's a huge story here, and that most of the wars in the twentieth century are centered around that. They're centered around food. They're centered around ideology, and they're centered around this idea of, like, what what happens when you take a populace and say that that they're going to start within a generation unless they alter, you know, go to war, unless they they find ways, to to feed themselves.
Speaker 3:You create this frenzy. And because we don't in in historical, terms, we only really ever talk about famine. We don't talk about the fact that we have to feed ourselves 365 out of the year. So for me, the the ideology kinda comes in in a weird way because what I don't want, as we transition to what we say is an a a sustainable environment for food, What I don't want is ideology to kinda take that over. Right?
Speaker 3:So what we have is right now is plant based, is the future. Right? That's what everybody said. Vegan is the future. And that really scares me, you know, because it seems ahistorical, it seems anti science in a way, and it also profoundly disregards all of the effects that livestock can have in a positive way.
Speaker 3:So when we create monoculture, either through plant based or, like, almond farming in California Mhmm. Or we take, pigs and all of that stuff in North Carolina. Right? When we create monoculture, what we do is we take a huge natural, like, you know, resource, like, fecal waste, like poop, and we concentrate it, and then we make it into an environmental toxin. So how do we, like so what we've done is we've done that.
Speaker 3:We've done that on both sides.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:So, like, how can we say that one is moral when both of them are actually creating this environment that is monoculture, that is so destructive to everything that's around us, we need to transition out of that into something new. And that's where regenerative agriculture kinda comes in. Mhmm. And it and I'll say, like, you you had a question for me. It's like, it's really hard to define what regenerative agriculture because it's region specific, it's altitude specific, it's what does the land look like?
Speaker 3:Is it rocky? Does it change elevations? Do you get, monsoon rains versus steady rain seasons? Do you get, like, any number of different things? So that's why every single time they try to do a study on regenerative agriculture, it's really hard to quantify, the gains or the losses that you're gonna lose on that because everything is functionally changing all the time in those environments.
Speaker 3:And so what you need are farmers who are willing to kinda roll with the punches, who are changing things based on the season, based on drought, based on all of this stuff as opposed to what has happened in our agricultural environment now where you get companies like Monsanto who buy geosynchronous satellite, you know, like, weather prediction algorithms and tell you when to plant and tell you when to, harvest your crops, what percentage of fertilizers to put on there, what percentage of pesticides. Like, all of that stuff, we've that Monsanto has says that says that things are not, consolidated enough in the way that we grow. You know? What they want is more and more. They want John Deere, you know, with their 80,000 tractors, that are linked to satellites in space, you know, that are controlled by they want all of this ultimate control over that.
Speaker 3:In in essence, turning farmers into tenant farmers. They probably won't even own the land anymore. They just rent it. Right? So that's sort of a really long winded idea of, like, you know, like, what is soil?
Speaker 3:Soil is it's dead things. Right? It's dead plants. It's dead bones. It's bone meal.
Speaker 3:It's blood meal. If it's organic, it's utilizing those inputs in a way. All of that stuff when we functionally moved agriculture away from all of those things, we then created harms by taking all of that stuff, and then in in essence sort of dumping it everywhere in different places. So we need to go back to some sort of system that I think actually, like, quantifies the environmental aspect of how our food is made. And then can we recreate topsoil?
Speaker 3:Can we build topsoil again? We've had generations of just drawing it away. Mhmm. And just it'll lift up. You know, you get enough of a windstorm to come in in these planes, and all of that topsoil just goes up, like, you know, hundreds of feet in the air and just goes away.
Speaker 3:It just flies away. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's amazing having spoken to some of these farmers who have restored their land after using conventional practices and just hearing about the flood of bio biodiversity that comes back to the land and the content of the soil just looking so much different
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Then they're actually able to start cutting back on all the chemicals that they're using over time. It's it's one of these stories where it really starts to make you think, like, maybe we should be listening to these land stewards a little bit more closely about the right way to pay attention to the land as opposed to kind of the more institutionalized, education of, you know, funneling chemicals into the the soil and and how how they've been taught to raise, or or run a farm versus how they've learned over time, which is ditch the chemicals and start promoting biodiversity on the farm. Mhmm. We've had a few really interesting conversations with people that have just had success with it, and, that it's always left me thinking that we need to be promoting these stories much more.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Yeah. And I think the, the, the general well, health aspect of it, I I really wish I could get as many low carb people involved in, understanding where their food come comes from as possible. Yeah. I think the barrier for change now is people seeing real definitive changes in their lives because of what they eat, then recognizing that they can be part of a movement that actually restores the health and the biodiversity of the planet.
Speaker 3:And that's where the art moral argument for me comes in. It's like, you know, look at what these farms are doing. Look at how much they're sort of creating an environment. That is that sort of old McDonald's, you know, like, children's book idea of a farm. You know, and I don't wanna glorify any of that, and I don't wanna vilify farming because, what has happened over the past, because we've become so unreasonable.
Speaker 3:The the the food crisis that happened after World War two was centered around feeding the world, and we knew that the population was gonna explode, because we because of the horrors of World War two. The horrors of World War two were centered around this idea of, like, you know, any number of different things to do with the way that people can feed themselves, and that population growth. And so what we saw after World War two is the population explosion, that came in, and then farmers were told that they had to, in essence, sort of grow as much as possible to feed this sort of growing world. And and I think they did a actually really wonderful job of doing it, given the science, and the the the political, will at the time. So, what ended up happening, I think, is and I've been trying to get sort of the fifties on into a greater understanding, is that once those, things once those monocultures, in essence, became commodities Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Then they became beholden to, the stock market in a capitalistic system that could then excise as much wealth away from farmers as possible and put them into the cycle where they had to produce as much as they possibly could. And it made it made commodity brokers enormously wealthy, off of the back of farmers. Meanwhile, they were going bankrupt or forced to, to consolidate. And so we had a governmental policy that actually tried to take away power as much power away from farmers as possible, under Nixon and his secretary of agriculture, to keep, food prices as low as possible. But what it really unintentionally did was create a market for these commodity brokers to functionally change the entire agricultural system, in their favor.
Speaker 3:And that's, I think, what has happened since the seventies on. And now since 02/2008, all of those guys have started to go more and more into owning farmland. Mhmm. So they used to leave farmers alone at their fence post, and now they wanna own the land. They wanna know they wanna own the water that's underneath it, and they wanna own the land itself.
Speaker 3:And that is happening globally. So Sub Saharan Africa, developing countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, every single part of that is now part of this sort of commodification system. And look look, do you would you care about the environmental effects of all of this stuff in a country you've probably never even been to halfway around the world if you're making profits off of it? You know? Right?
Speaker 3:So as you move people further and further away from that, everything just becomes numbers, and the and the story is lost, and the downstream effects of that is lost. And so, like, I remember talking to a Malaysian farmer, who had come to a regenerative agriculture conference, and he was really emotional about it. He got really what he saw happening in this country was were farmers who are exporting everything that they worked so hard to make, halfway around the world to the global North, and never feeding their community anymore. And what they got at the end result of that was packaged processed goods that were sold back to them that they couldn't afford. And so the suicide rates within these countries was so high because, god, like, if you're not producing food that you're seeing the person and the families, you you're just part of this economic system.
Speaker 3:And, you know, you're you're watching people, like, die of, you know, high ultra processed foods. Mhmm. All produced by you. Right? You know.
Speaker 3:And so it was it was really hard to watch. I have to tell you. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:That it kinda leads me into something that we wanted to ask you too because something Clemence and I talk a lot about is, like, if you walk into the modern a modern supermarket, if you're not in the outside perimeter, if you go into the inner guts of the of the supermarket, it's pretty much just loaded with these hyper processed products, loaded with, you know, sugar, seed oils, corn, etcetera. Can that can all those products be traced back to that scarcity mindset of World War two as well from your perspective?
Speaker 3:It's hard to get a sense of, when the processed food environment really started to take over. I think it was, maybe '78 with the nutritional guidelines. Mhmm. And so what it what you would saw what you saw in real time was, a functional shift from, people who used to cook at home. I mean, really, you saw that with Kellogg.
Speaker 3:Right? So Kellogg used to market his breakfast cereals as saving women from the the the chore of, like, cooking eggs in the morning. Right? Right, you just open up a box. Right?
Speaker 3:Just pour some milk into it.
Speaker 1:%.
Speaker 3:But as as we moved further and further away from actually cooking our own foods, the processed food industry really sort of came in. They were heavily influential in, obfuscating the role of sugar, very early on. They used all of the same tactics that the cigarette industry has used, to obfuscate their role in nutritional stuff. They started to they'd started funding, ILSEA, which is the International Life Sciences Institute, which is where you get that marketing of, like, people are not moving enough and are eating too much, blaming the consumer for an environment that is so toxic that, you know, like, you know, that, you you really you really can't remove yourself from it nowadays. It's really hard to remove yourself, unless you functionally understand all of this stuff.
Speaker 3:So they started funding this. We we've seen with, with Harvard, you know, donations and grants, to, to talk about, animal fats and blaming animal fats for what sugar was doing. So the nutritional wars were kind of hard to get a sense of, when they really started to take over the nutritional guidelines Mhmm. In a way that, that, because we we did see an explosion in obesity, right, that coincided with a number of different events. The, food recommendations, the food pyramid, the nutritional guidelines, all of that stuff.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Did those nutritional guidelines tell you to eat a lot of sugar and hyper processed foods? No. Of course not. But they did say to have, what, five to 10 servings of grains per day.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Right? And then I do think in some ways, it started out with, like, they were trying to solve a problem. Ancel Keys was such a dick, though. You know?
Speaker 3:I mean, he was he was the original, like, you know, nutrition Twitter bro. He was, like, debating. So he he would just lambast anybody, destroy their career, go after them if they question any of his scientific dogma or, if you if you guys don't know who Ancel Keys is, I'm I'm sure you guys do, but Yeah. Ancel Keys was, Eisenhower has a heart attack in in, in the presidency. Heart disease is starting to blow up, as as an, a a cause of death, in in The States and then anywhere the western diet was, sort of exported to.
Speaker 3:And so there was this huge freak out, like, what is heart disease and why where is it coming from? And there was a lot of nutritional, work that had been done in the early part of the twentieth century, especially in Germany that was talking about, a lot of, the, carbohydrates and sugars and all of that stuff, but nobody wanted to listen to Germany after World War two. I wonder why. So Ancel Keys comes in. He says, I've got the answer.
Speaker 3:I did this epidemiological study. I studied these eight countries. It seems to be saturated fats. He totally doctored the data. He, you know, he, excluded countries where his data wasn't didn't fit with his ideology.
Speaker 3:And then he essentially bullied, anybody, in the USDA and sort of enforcing this idea that that was the problem. And they really held on to it, and I I think, I think it's really hard for a governmental institution now to admit that they were wrong. Mhmm. But they did bury data. They the sort of Minnesota coronary heart study, that showed, consumption of vegetable oil, and all of these the low fat diet was actually more associated with coronary heart disease, and so they just they just shoveled it away, you know, and buried it in a basement for thirty years.
Speaker 3:You know, so and look, I grew up with all of that stuff. I grew up with powdered milk. I grew up with skim milk. I grew up with Cheerios. I grew up with all of the ramifications from that.
Speaker 3:You know, we're everything was better living through science back then. If it was canned, if it was, like, you know, Tang, all the astronauts ate that stuff. Right? Yes. Right?
Speaker 3:So all of that stuff was part of that paradigm back then. And, you know, you'd you'd see people eating bran muffins the size of their head. Right? Yeah. But it has
Speaker 2:a heart but it has a heart healthy label on it.
Speaker 1:Right? Right.
Speaker 2:People think that they're fine. And Eisenhower has spoken four packs a day, and he follows the mental keys low fat diet, and he ends up dying of heart disease. But no one no one knows this, but you can like, to your point, I feel like what what we've learned from you too is, like, just do your like, just track the history back. It's all out there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But, like, did you ever see, Diana just posted this thing? If you go on to Google and you say and you write in meet is, the auto, sort of fill in for that is is pretty, I mean, pretty scary. Right? Bad for you, destroying the environment, any number of different things.
Speaker 3:Doing your research now, because of paid content, because of all of the stuff associated with this, because of, the the, the level of, sort of fuckery that's going on with, a number of sort of vegan aligned animal activist organizations like Physicians Committee Committee for Responsible Medicine, you know, any number of different groups that are wholly devoted to a massive reduction, I mean, they they've just controlled the narrative for so long. Mhmm. And
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Ancel Keys story is one that I think it gets replayed in our corner of the world, but I feel like if you ask most people, they don't know about it. And then if if Ancel Keys is Batman, then Earl Butts is Robin with how he, like, he's a guy who was also just this strong character who wanted to weaponize food. And and I think it we probably benefited from it too because, you know, I think it's probably been this geopolitical tool that's been used for a while. But also, I think there's huge ramifications long terms to what he was doing in the seventies too.
Speaker 1:So, I mean, you touched on that already, but it's just those two have had a profound impact on where we are today.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I think part of the reason why, I think this stuff isn't talked about, it it like, I find it sort of interesting how we can't talk about the thing that we eat three times a day. Mhmm. Right? So this is something that you have to do your own research on.
Speaker 3:You don't necessarily understand where this is all coming from. You see an overarching message. Right? It's coming out of Hollywood. I mean, try to talk to anybody in Hollywood about meat consumption.
Speaker 3:You know, it's you have all of these influencers, social media engines, the, all of the stuff that's associated with this. The overarching message now, is to relinquish control to these multinational corporations, to allow them under the guise of agricultural production, that is then part of the processing, transportation, the advertising, and, the sort of government governmental support. Right? So the three largest industries involved in, lobbying in Washington are, food, pharmaceuticals, and fossil fuels. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so that apparatus is part of it as well. So we've essentially given up control of these multinational corporations. And I know you guys are doing deep deep research into that right now. So we have we have four seed companies left for the most part. They've all consolidated.
Speaker 3:Global seed companies. So that that is sovereignty. Right? So, you know, the degree of sovereignty you can have over what you grow. The fertilizer companies, there's probably about four or five that are left, that are totally consolidated in and around this.
Speaker 3:The pesticide industry is in league with them, and then the machinery companies for agricultural development have all been consolidated as well. And they all communicate with each other. They all work with each other. So you'll see when pesticide, you'll see price changes that sort of happen, in real time associated with all the factors that go into the food that ends up on your plate. And when you get something like the war in Ukraine happens, you'll see what in essence happened in 02/2008 as well.
Speaker 3:You'll see price manipulation that happens, before the war starts. So these guys are totally hooked into everything that's happening. Right? So, troop deployments near the border, all of that stuff, they're they're hedging bets. They're they're, you know, manipulating the price of grain, feed stuff, feed stock, all of that stuff.
Speaker 3:They're looking into Russia has some of the largest, fertilizer companies in the world. So what happens when we cut off that production? You know, any number of different factors. There there are people at play, in manipulating the price so that those foods, in essence, sort of, like, there's profit to be made at every aspect of that. And it just feels so parasitic.
Speaker 3:Right? Mhmm. You're just trying to feed your family. Right. You're trying to, like, you're trying to be healthy in this environment.
Speaker 3:You're just, like, you're trying to, you know, do any number of different things. And the every single one of these guys, has got their hand in your pocket, let's say. Right? Mhmm. Because because you subsidize a huge portion of this through your taxpayer dollars.
Speaker 3:Right? Yeah. So you ensure a lot you ensure, crop, production. You ensure, all of the environmental downstream damage of that. You pay for the clean up cost for that.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. You know, any number of different things. So for me, like, the messaging was around me was so absurd, that I, like, I couldn't get my mind around, like, what the fuck was going on? Mhmm. Because, like, alright.
Speaker 3:So we're gonna focus on the environmental environmental footprints of all of these different things. Right? Say, be going into the twenty first century before we started, the Ukraine war, everything was an environmental sustainability. Right? So if you follow me on Instagram, what you'll see is, like, a weird it's it's just a totally weird fucking conglomeration of, like, different things.
Speaker 3:I'll tell you what amazing. Great Instagram. So so so my Instagram is about this. Why don't we look at the environmental footprint of pharmaceuticals? Why don't we look at that?
Speaker 3:Like, if we're looking at sustainability, why don't we look at the all of the downstream effects of how toxic our food environment is so that all of the stuff that is associated with that from insulin to all of the diabetes medications, all of that stuff, why is that not factored into our worldview if we're actually moving into the twenty first century and talking about sustainability? Mhmm. Our weapons industry. Why is the why is our defense industry, not part of environmental sustainability? Right?
Speaker 3:Why don't we talk about that? Right?
Speaker 1:It should be part of the conversation.
Speaker 3:I mean, it should be. At least, like, let's talk about it. As an as a military veteran, like, when I'm looking at the downstream effects of all of the stuff that is tested on army bases to the water table, that then makes ranchers who are downstream of that not be able to sell their meat meat or their milk anymore because their cows are now sick because of that. Right? So, like, all of the stuff that we don't deal with, like, why are we not focused on that?
Speaker 3:You know, concrete production. Right? Concrete production, globally is a huge greenhouse gas emitter, more than, animal agriculture. Yeah. Sort of more than more than you US concrete production is more than animal agriculture in The US.
Speaker 3:So why don't we talk about that? Like, I don't I don't give a fuck about concrete if I can't feed myself. Right? So, like, I all of these things need to be factored into the environment if we're functionally going to shift everything that we do, to move into this idea of sustainability. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And food is the thing that should be the last on the table. Right? It should be. It because everything that we have from guitar picks to satellites to Elon Musk's, you know, fucking tequila, every single one of those things is built off of the agricultural revolution. Right.
Speaker 3:That's that was started ten, twelve thousand years ago. Everything is built off of that. Mhmm. And if you fuck with food, like, things get bad pretty quickly. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So so what would your sort of you food utopia look like if you were to be able to
Speaker 3:build the
Speaker 1:perfect world?
Speaker 3:So let's have let's talk about the entomology of utopia. I think it actually translates as does not exist.
Speaker 1:Hey. Let's hope let's hope that your version of it actually does one day. Because I think
Speaker 3:So, yeah. I mean, it's it's really hard to make prescriptions. I'm really talking about, what I want people to do is educate themselves on what they would consider to be a utopian existence. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I think that, I think we need to move away from, the level of stress that we put on, ourselves in general that makes for us not to have to have a really challenging environment. So, so we we funded a Michael Moore documentary one, a few years ago. It's called where to invade next. And he was just say he was generally just talking about, like, the level to which, The US has some of the lowest vacation rates, in the Western world, has some of the worst food, any number of different factors. Our prison system is, has been privatized to the point where it's like, all we do is just want more and more people in prison.
Speaker 3:We imprison more people, than China, than any any other place in the world as a percentage of population. All of those things are kinda factored into this idea of, like, we have an environment, that is so nonconducive to overall health and mental well-being that we need to functionally change the the way that we even work to get people to stop destroying themselves so that they have they have no ability at the end of the day to make right choices. They're exhausted. Right. So for me, a utopia is is centered around that.
Speaker 3:The second part of it is most people don't wanna work in a fucking cubicle for the rest of their lives. You know? People really enjoy being outdoors. People, you know, like, don't want to be part of this system where they're just a cog in a machine. And so giving people autonomy over, like, making farmland, more open so that we can have indigenous farmers, black farmers.
Speaker 3:We used to have a million black farmers in America. Now it's, we've lost 95% of that. Most of that was taken away by, like, racist policies by the USDA.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have 2,000,000 farmers total, which is, like
Speaker 3:It's insane. Crazy. It's, like, less than 2% of less than 2% of the of people in this country. And most of it was because families couldn't afford, to feed, their children on what they were making, and so they forced them to go into these urban environments. And so we need to bring people back onto the land, not only for, like, food quality and for all of that stuff, but for our for themselves.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. They're just a huge portion of people who don't do well in school, under the current way that we educate people, which is, you know, I ran a nonprofit in New York City for close to a decade, mainly working in inner city schools. And these kids are, like, dropped off at, like, seven in the morning, eight in the morning, and they get picked up at, like, six or seven at night. Like, the school has become the de facto parent for these kids. And so and these are parents, like, either single parents or parents both working jobs.
Speaker 3:And so the downstream effect of that is just so, like, awful. You know? Mhmm. So we need to restructure our environment to get people so that they're not killing themselves to just make a paycheck so that they can you know like, when you walk out of, say, East Harlem and you wanna feed a kid that you haven't seen all day and he hasn't seen you all day, and you show up with, like, broccoli, you know, and, like, celery and all this stuff, and Right. You've got a $5 pizza with a two liter Coke for $4.99 Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And you wanna give, like, love with food, like, I'm not blaming the consumer at the end of this anymore. Like Oh. You know, it's it's just so ridiculous, the way that the processed food industry has been able to make us feel like it's our fault, that the obesity epidemic happened. You know?
Speaker 1:And the inequity there in terms of just nutritional quality is insane. I mean, we talk about it all the time. I mean, it's lots of, like, even just a little bit of you know, we're so we're fortunate enough to be focused on, like, how to optimize, not even get to a point that's just, like, functionally okay where a lot of people are just always you know, they don't have options. They they have much, much tighter, limitations around what they can get access to in terms of food. So I think that's just, it's terrible.
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 1:mean, it it sort of sets a ceiling on a lot of different aspects of life.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And, I guess, you know, I mean, I I think for for many of us, and if you read, like, Gary Taub's work, he he actually talks about it. I think the metaphor for, for walking through an air airport. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Whatever you fly, it it's just absolutely stunning the the level of, you know, destruction we've done to to people, like aunts and uncles, grandmothers, children, all of that stuff who I will sit in an airport, and I'll watch somebody eat, like, every fifteen minutes. Right? I'll watch somebody, like, who, you know, gets to the port. It's, like, 7AM. I've got, like, two books to read for a five hour flight, and 70 of the plane has just fallen back asleep again.
Speaker 3:They're like, we have an exhausted populace of people who, like, for, like, a fourteen, you know, hour day are just wiped out all the time. And a lot of that is metabolism. It's a it's a metabolic disease, right, that doesn't allow, fat stores to recycle that energy so that you're constantly moving from just grazing and snacking and, you know, all of that stuff because, god forbid, our blood sugar gets too low, which is just find absolutely amazing. You know? We're like
Speaker 1:Go ahead.
Speaker 2:No. I was gonna just say that's something I think the three of us are really passionate about is just having a level of understanding of what what the feeling is like to eat dense foods that actually nourish you and give you this constant buzz of energy throughout the day. I think most people just never really had that feeling. They're just used to this sluggishness or wanting to crawl under their cube desk after a meal. They don't understand what they could possibly feel like, and that's why it stems back to just the how much power there is in being able to make good decisions as a byproduct of your diet and feeling like the most optimized version of yourself.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I I wanted I, there's a really wonderful book. It's called the, invention of capitalism, and he's got a chapter in there. He kinda talks about, the closing of the commons, in England.
Speaker 3:And so what what you have, what we have known for a very long time and the ruling class is known for a very long time is that, people who have autonomy over their own lives are very hard to control. Mhmm. Right? So you had moving people into the industrial revolution was not a smooth transition. You had people who had to pay their taxes to their local, lords and then to the king once a year.
Speaker 3:But for the most part, they were left alone. They'd work the lands. They grow their own food. They're a part of the animal husbandry environment and all of that stuff. You had to take away their autonomy, in order to force them, to work in factories.
Speaker 3:Nobody wanted to do it. Mhmm. And so there were concerted efforts to go and you actually see this among the ruling class at the time, complaints, about trying to get people to work, to force them into this environment. And a lot of our educational, system or compulsory educational system was was designed around that. So you get people like Woodrow Wilson and John d Rockefeller and Carnegie.
Speaker 3:They're very transparent about what they wanted. They wanted a working class people who were not given a true education, and then the the ruling and elite classes who were were going to be given a liberal education. And a liberal education means that the hierarchy in the classroom is built upon a system by which you don't take the teacher's, word for it. You debate it out. You question where that dogma is coming from.
Speaker 3:Right. You question all of these different ideas. Debate is, you know, is personified in the classroom. And what we have in it is an educational classroom that's built on hierarchy, that was built off of the industrial revolution. So, you know, the class bell rings.
Speaker 3:Well, what is that? Is it what's the difference between that and the industrial whistle that, you know, has you moving into the coal mine? Right? So all of those things are still there. Right?
Speaker 3:They're sort of codified in culture. They've just been they they've lost their history, and so people, think that it's normative. And the danger is that you see a degraded system that's built off of malice, and you think that that is normative. You know? And you can see in the sixties, various, specific psychological programs that saw the trauma that was happening in in public schools and and and compulsory education, you saw them talking about, medicating children because they knew the damage that they were doing.
Speaker 3:You know? And so then you start to move in the pharmaceutical, like, pathologizing of of childhood. Right? So, oh, this kid can't sit in class?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, let's medicate him. Right? Let's make him hyper focused or drown out all of his energy. You know? Like, what does that mean?
Speaker 3:Like, you know, to take especially boys, like, you're in class for twelve hours a day? Yeah. You know? It's an absolute insanity. You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I can't believe it's hard to imagine that our generation has lived through that, and and this whole this whole experience of prescribing ADD medication was something that happened. I I just think there's so many better ways to go about fixing the problem. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And, you know, the if you ever look into the history of the guys who created the DSM, diagnostic and statistical manual for mental, disease, it it was like 12 old white men, you know, who in essence sort of pathologized everything. You know, and there's, like, one story where they're sitting there and they I think they were talking about, like, something like obsessive compulsive disorder, and they're trying to come up with all of the, all of the symptoms of OCD. And one of the guys is like, well, no. You can't put that in there.
Speaker 3:I do that. And so they just excise it. You know? Really? So, like, it's completely made up.
Speaker 3:I mean, when they tried to create all of this stuff, you see a functional shift in the nineties when we started to pathologize what is normal for children. Right? Which is, you know, kids are tripping all the time. They really are. Like, I you know, I've got three of them.
Speaker 3:When they go off into some other universe, like, they're not there anymore. Right. You pathologize all that. We we've, I'll send you guys a a video after this. It's, in China, these they've inserted these headsets into children.
Speaker 3:They can tell in real time whether or not they're paying attention, and it'll alert the teacher on the screen if the child's not paying attention. And I don't wanna say it's like, oh, that's an authoritarian government and look at how horrible it is because The US is doing that just with medication. Right? Mhmm. And so they're doing that in a way that is very similar.
Speaker 3:It's like, you must pay attention to this because our kids are falling behind to some nebulous race to nowhere. I can't really understand it. You know? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I was just gonna say, James Clemenza and I are both in that age group to what he said. You know, we were in elementary school when you started to see a lot of our friends get prescribed ADD and these other these other drugs. And now they're at a point where they're pushing 30 in corporate jobs, and they can't even fathom doing work without this medication because it's all they've ever known. So it's interesting how you have this you know, so we feed our kids pop tarts and Cheez Its and Eggo waffles, and, you know, they're naturally struggling to pay attention. And in the first course of action, it's just, oh, do they you must have ADD or ADHD.
Speaker 2:We gotta get them on medication, and then you will see what it's created.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And it's a I mean, I and I don't like, I I always wanna kind of preface everything that I say with, like, you know, like, yeah. It sucks. Like, I don't wanna, like, build a worldview that, like, looks so shitty that you can't, like, figure out a way around it. You know, I think the sort of romantic side of me, like, part of the reason why I produce Sacred Cow and I do the film work that I do is because I wanna create a world view that has people looking at this and create a, like, a vision of what the future could be.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. You know, I mean, I think there are is you know, I have a a discord group with a, a bunch of different, most of them are within their twenties and thirties. They don't want, you know, a four zero one k. They're not looking to own, you know, property in New York City and get onto this rat race. They want an alternative future.
Speaker 3:They're looking for that. And for me, like, farming, animal husbandry, being part of that system just seems like man, it's like, you know, I mean, I I think it's a huge dream. And and when you look at hunting community, you know, the low carb community, all of these people have functionally, like, changed their life and their lifestyle, you know, who will never go back to what they were before or how they felt before, you can see this real paradigm shift. Shift. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You know, and I think that that is the message that we're trying to put out to the world. It's like, you know, that's why we finished sacred cow with all of these young farmers from all over the world who are, like, raising chickens and, you know, raising cattle and Mhmm. You know, every single place looks different, and every single place is thriving, and they're producing food in these environments that are feeding their communities and all of the stuff. It's amazing. You know?
Speaker 3:Do do you
Speaker 1:think it has to be this grassroots movement for that change? Because that Discord group sounds really interesting. I'm sure it's probably grown over time if I'm guessing. But, you know, I think that our generation has some intrigue with this whole alternative lifestyle.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. No. I I I mean, I think I think Joe Rogan is part of that grassroots movement. You know? I mean, I think I think the legalization of marijuana is at least, you know, the majority contribution from him and the talks that he's had over the last fifteen years or so.
Speaker 3:I think, the vilification of psychedelics and any number of different, drugs that actually are were are used now clinically to treat depression, PTSD, soldiers coming home, suicidal tendencies, any number of different, those things are are part of an, and a conversation now, that Joe, I think, actually originated many different ways. He brought on people who've been fighting his fight for, you know, thirty, forty years. I think those things are functionally changing that. But what I've seen on the other side is nearly $5,000,000,000,000 in wealth being transferred, during the pandemic to billionaires. And that is not it's not a one off.
Speaker 3:I think they have functionally changed the environment since the eighties, to move towards a system where we're given the impression that we have a lot of choices. But, really, it's them who are kinda controlling the show and the narrative, from the World Economic Forum to Klaus Schwab to, you know, Gunhild Sordalan, Eat Lancet studies, all of those that are trying to move us into a planetary health diet. He's totally out of touch billionaires who, you know, fly in with 300 private jets to Davos, Switzerland every year and talk about the future of humanity. Mhmm. I'm like, fuck you, dude.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know?
Speaker 1:You guys didn't do that on Zoom? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I I do think that that is the war. I think that's the war is between, the the ruling class now and the populist movement that's just saying no. You know?
Speaker 3:We don't want part of your future. This is bullshit. Mhmm. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that big things that Clemenza and I have taken from you is just your understanding of the history and just how well researched you are. Do you have any, like, typical recommendations or just, books, podcasts, things that have really given you information or maybe changed the way that you thought about nutrition system, etcetera?
Speaker 3:I think, so the the way that I am the part of the reason why my memory works the way it does is because I attribute it to, an emotional response to an idea. Mhmm. And it creates these causal connections in my brain, that are so strong. And it it would not have happened with me growing up on Cheerios and all of that stuff. But when I functionally shifted my diet, my memory just exploded.
Speaker 3:I think giving yourself a a methodology to view the world, in a different way? Because you you have had, since you were four years old, a cultural system and an educational system, that did not value dialogue and debate and, you coming to your own conclusions on things. So how do you take somebody who is part of a cult and sort of deprogram them? I think Daniel Quinn's work is really interesting. He wrote a book called Ishmael.
Speaker 3:It was I think it was in the seventies. Ted Turner had given a prize for the and today even to to today, I think it's the largest prize that's ever been awarded for a single work of fiction. He wanted a book that was a fictional book that would tell people about how to save the world. Mhmm. And so this first time writer, wrote this book called Ishmael, and it's a it it's a real treatise on sort of understanding, from a hunter gatherer perspective and anthropological perspective, what mother culture is and what the world is.
Speaker 3:He wrote a book, years and years later. It's a huge cult following all over the world. I don't like following people, but I I like this guy's ideas. He wrote a book. It's called, If They Give You Line Paper Write Sideways.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And it's sort of a a bullshit detector. It's like how to think like he thinks. Uh-huh. And it's a yeah.
Speaker 3:It's a series of q and a. Somebody comes who wants to understand how he views the world. And so it's just sort of a back and forth, and he makes her, he draws her to this idea that he's not gonna give her answers. Like, she has to sort of figure this out on her own. And these are hard questions.
Speaker 3:Like, I've listened to it on Audible, like, six times, and every time he asked a question, I still don't know what the answer is. Like Mhmm. He had this ability to see what the world was by really deeply thinking about, all of the things that, sort of, if you if you're a human being and you're pulled out of this environment, never raised in this environment, and then shoved back in here, what are the absurdities that is the human condition? You know? Like Where
Speaker 1:do you start?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, all of that stuff. And, you know, just seeing what that looks like. Like, how does that, you know, like, can because I think the only way to coexist with this is one, to be able to make fun of it. Right?
Speaker 3:Right. So because it is so oppressive, to be able to, like, recognize when somebody is trying to put something upon you, and it and it it it won't like, you have to develop a world view that I think is impervious to that. And I think Quinn is a really, really good way of sort of understanding all of that. I think, there's a book called, The Wizard and the Prophet. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's by Charles Mann. And he he separates the twentieth century between this idea of, the sort of futuristic idea of Norman Borlaug who won the Nobel Prize for the Green Revolution, that, that, ushered in the monoculture that we have today. Mhmm. So corn and soy, everything has grown with his breeding practices. So that and then the the legitimate fear of the future that I think a lot of people had that said we need to go back to something else.
Speaker 3:And so it's the the the fundamental war of the twentieth century was we're going to create crisis. Can science always get us out of it? And I think that that is a really interesting book, because he'll go into Haber Bosch. He'll go into agriculture. He'll go into all of the things that are kinda surrounding that, but give us a geopolitical context to everything that was happening at the time.
Speaker 3:And nobody's a villain in that. Like, they're you're not really seeing a villain. You're seeing two people two competing world views, and, you know, see how you feel at the end of it. You know? It's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna have to pick that one up. That one sounds that sounds phenomenal.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And he he wrote a ton of books about, like, the, you know, The United States before colonialism, you know, the the world before, you know, hunter gatherer societies. He's he's a brilliant, brilliant, historian. Really interesting guy.
Speaker 1:Are you a big podcaster at all?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Totally. What
Speaker 1:what's your daily consumption look like?
Speaker 3:So I I consume so much information. It's pretty insane. Mhmm. I mean, behind the bastards is one of my favorites. I don't know if you guys ever listen to him.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 3:I would say he's a he's an anarchist more than anything else, but he's he's a conflict journalist. He's a really interesting guy. And you guys would love the episode. He calls it, it's John Harvey Kellogg, America's cum doctor. It's a two parter.
Speaker 3:That's So you guys
Speaker 1:That sounds like it's, the onion article. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, really funny guy, really deep historian on a number of different things. He talks a lot about, like, dictators and all of the weird shit that they do. I would, also, I I I'm hoping that you guys can find it. He has this one on phrenology that that'll actually get you to, seven day Adventism. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:He's got a two parter on phrenology, which was, I don't know if you'd these are, like, all these sort of weird, esoteric stories that are kind of associated with. But it's the American vegetarian movement, was associated with phrenology, which was the the scientific dogma at the time. So do you guys ever watch Django Unchained? Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:You know that scene with Leonardo DiCaprio where he's taken the skull and he's talking about the backside of a slave skull Yes. And how the thickening around the back is associated with docility and the need to be controlled. All of that is phrenology. So phrenology was the, the scientific dogma of the nineteenth century. It had sold by the end of the nineteenth century five times more than on the origin of species.
Speaker 3:Wow. So it's a it's a really interesting idea. And it was mainly based on this idea of, like, bumps on your head would tell who a person was, and tell about the character of an individual. And so phrenology was associated with, Sylvester Graham, who then gave rise to, the Graham houses that Ellen g White, went to when she got knocked in the head, and had to recover. That's where she learns her ideas about health, which is based on phrenology, which is the science, that then moves into Seventh day Adventism in Battle Creek, Michigan, that then gives rise to John Harvey Kellogg.
Speaker 3:And so the the transition to that, has this sort of weird arc of vegetarianism, that is based upon this idea of of control. Right? It's control of the character of of people and developing individuals and child sexuality and all of the stuff that's associated with that, these sort of purity complexes. Right? So you then you get Kellogg who changes he wears a white suit, and he looks all cute and you know?
Speaker 3:But he, like, changes three times a day because he has to be pure and, you know, all of the weird shit. We should do a whole episode on that.
Speaker 1:That's part two. Part
Speaker 2:two of this podcast?
Speaker 3:Part two.
Speaker 1:Let's do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But, yeah, I don't I don't know. I mean, I don't wanna keep you guys too long. I'd you had a couple of questions. I think I answered some of it about regenerative agriculture, utopia.
Speaker 3:Anything else?
Speaker 2:I think that was it. Yeah. I feel like we I feel like we could talk to you for hours, honestly, and we wanna obviously let you get back your day. And there's there's so many different topics and themes that we unpacked here. But, I mean, I know that in the you know, through even just discovering you first from Sacred Cow, I know I personally learned a ton from you.
Speaker 2:Clemenza's learned a ton from you. So we'd love to have you back on in the future and just keep the conversation going, but just really appreciate you you coming on and and, you know, all the insight that you provide. I'm looking forward to doing it again soon.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's an absolute pleasure meeting you guys, and great podcast. Like, good questions. Like, I know I threw a lot at you, you know, so, it's a lot of weird, you know, stuff. So, I really appreciate the the invite as well.
Speaker 3:I love talking about this stuff.
Speaker 1:It's fun stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Love it. Love it. Yep.
Speaker 2:Alright, James. Thanks so much, man. Appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure. Pleasure.
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