Eat Beef to Heal America: Texas Slim, Shawn Baker & The Fight for Food Sovereignty
Download MP3Welcome to Speaker Salon. I'm your host, Ilana Newman. Welcome to the Speaker Salon. I'm your host, Ilana Newman. The topic of this week's discussion is Eat Beef to Heal America.
Speaker 1:Our esteemed experts are doctor Sean Baker and Texas Slim and with a few of his colleagues from the beef initiative. Doctor Anthony Chaffee was scheduled to join, but, unfortunately, I got an email yesterday from him saying that his father is in the hospital. So, sadly, he won't be joining us this evening, but our prayers are with him. And I definitely direct people to to his work and his YouTube channel and podcast. They're amazing.
Speaker 1:For those joining us, for the first time, I host these spaces every other Thursday on x, and then I share them with the world as a podcast. Look for the speaker salon podcast on Apple or Spotify. The featured offer of today's episode is ParaShield. ParaShield helps to rid the body of parasites with this proprietary blend of wormwood, clove, and black walnut hole. Most people don't realize that their fatigue and hunger and itchiness and difficulty sleeping might be caused by parasites among other problems.
Speaker 1:If you're around animals handling soil or exposure to contaminated water and food, you might be vulnerable to these issues. So you can try ParaShields for only $15 using our special link, and that should be posted in the comments and the Nest. So getting started, today's panel discussion is inspired by my personal witnessing of people in my network healing of conditions that were supposed to be unhealable after pursuing the most anti inflammatory elimination diet that exists. That's carnivore. Some people call it lion diet.
Speaker 1:But whatever you wanna call it, I'm discovering that in order to heal America's Chronic Illness Epidemic, we probably should be eating beef. And there's no one I can think of that can explain this better than doctor Baker. Doctor Baker, you wrote the book, The Carnivore Diet. And if I may just introduce you, doctor Sean Baker is an orthopedic surgeon, a former world champion and world record setting elite athlete, a best selling author, and advocate for the carnivore diet. Doctor Baker, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 1:You're just a rock star in this community, and I really appreciate you being here.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, thanks for giving me the opportunity, and and thanks for, you know, getting us out there. I think the more people that are exposed to this, the better. And and you're absolutely right. I mean, we're in this sort of make America healthy again. But, one, we have the Americans that wanna get healthy.
Speaker 2:That's the first predicate there. It doesn't matter what the government does. And the other thing is if and and as I theorize or hypothesize that beef is part of that, we need to have a lot of beef. And, you know, I know we got Texas in here and some other folks. I see a couple other producers in here.
Speaker 2:We've got to come together, realize what is the source of our, you know, good nutrition. And I can remember when I first started talking about this stuff back in 2016. I think it was something like 99.9999999 of the people on earth thought I was nuts. It's now down to just ninety nine percent. So we've made some progress there.
Speaker 2:But, no, I'm I'm goofing a little bit with that, but we've definitely seen tremendous progress. And you're absolutely right. I mean, there are I cannot even at this point count not only the number of people, but the number of conditions I've seen by using a diet that they almost exclusively beef or or nearly sell. So it's definitely something we have to it's probably one of our greatest resources in this country, and we have to do something to not only ensure that it continues to be available, but but increases in many ways.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. So can you just briefly what were the circumstances that led to your departure from the hospital that you were working at and led to you becoming this huge new media influencer?
Speaker 2:Obviously, none of that was intentional. I mean, that was all that just kinda happened as it was as it did. My reason for leaving a hospital, I I left under very, very contentious circumstances. I was traditionally trained physician. I graduated with honors from medical school.
Speaker 2:I secured a very sought after residency program. You know, I was in a very, very lucrative field, practice for quite a number of years. And then just kind of by happenstance, I wanted to work on my own nutrition because as I was in my early forties, I didn't like where my health was going, so I play with diet. And then, you know, it just happened later. We ran into the situation where we had a lot of obese patients that needed knee replacements.
Speaker 2:And as a community, we realized that these patients were at higher risk for complications, and we wanted to see if we can get these people to lose weight before we operated on them. And there was no really set plan for that. And so I started having people adopt low carb and ketogenic diastasis before carnivore. And what I was seeing was that the people that would do it, many of them would obviously lose weight, but many of them reported that their knee pain was going away to the point where they no longer required surgery. I thought that was really exciting and neat.
Speaker 2:It wasn't exciting to the hospital because that meant they lost out on surgeries. And so long story short, you know, after about a two year legal battle, I ended up leaving the hospital. I ended up having my license temporarily suspended, which I had to fight to get back after an independent review showed that I was completely you know, the hospital made these accusations against me, that I was not providing appropriate care. That was shown to be completely wrong. I was given my license back.
Speaker 2:But at that time, I got so much time had elapsed, and I'd gotten so jaded by the health care system that I went off in another direction and started pursuing lifestyle where I am today. And, obviously, getting picked up on Rogan's podcast a couple time couple times about this certainly put me out there in the in the general atmosphere for people to either hate or or like whatever your opinion is. Everybody has an opinion on this. And so I've been doing this now for almost a decade, and, fortunately, I think a lot of people are are starting to realize the utility of what I've been talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You you're just a picture of health, and I love what you have to say about doctors should be, like, clearly at peak health. They should know the most they should be evidence of good health that they proof that they know what they're talking about, and you just embody that so clearly. I have a list of some illnesses that a lot of Americans deal with. Do would you mind just answering yes or no?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Do you have evidence that the carnivore diet heals or improves, one, diabetes?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah. We see that all the time.
Speaker 1:Autoimmune conditions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a whole host of those. Everything from ulcerative colitis to psoriasis to rheumatoid arthritis to hypothyroidism to myasthenia gravis to you name it. I mean, it's multiple sclerosis. I mean, we've seen in fact, probably, if we were to say what is the best use case for a carnivore diet, I would say clearly it's autoimmune disease because you can put diabetes in remission with a generalized low carb diet.
Speaker 2:But when it comes to some of these other ones, I think this is where carnivore really, really shines. And we have somewhere between twenty and fifty million Americans suffering from an autoimmune disease right now, and those numbers are increasing every year. So, absolutely, it is tremendously beneficial for that. We have a number of case series being published on that. I'm currently in negotiations to hopefully get some interventional trials to do these things.
Speaker 2:You know, they cost a lot of money and, you know, that's always, the sticking point is who wants to pay for this stuff. But, absolutely, my experience is autoimmune diseases clearly benefit from carnivore.
Speaker 1:Awesome. What about PCOS and infertility?
Speaker 2:Yep. Same thing. I mean, PC and and again, I will just say you can help PCOS with a ketogenic low carb diet. I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with kind of a consequence of insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia. And so anything that puts that improves that will be helped.
Speaker 2:But carnivore, I think, is kinda like the top level low carb elimination diet. Everything else is a little bit diluted version of it. So if you want, you know, the strongest medicine, carnivore is it. You don't necessarily always need it, but if you want that, that's where you go.
Speaker 1:Alright. I'm gonna keep going. Anorexia.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah. This is one of those things. And and, again, there's another medical case report, case series on anorexics. One of the horrible things about the way they treat anorexia, and for those who don't know, of all the eating disorders, anorexia carries a worst prognosis.
Speaker 2:Many, many, many, and primarily as women, but many of them die from this disorder. It's very hard to overcome. And the way they treat it often is they just basically force feed women junk food and tell them to not feel shame about that. And it doesn't do anything good for their physiology. You know, when they tell them you need to eat your cupcakes and your cookies before you can leave the table, you know, literally almost you know, when they're on inpatient, it's almost like they're imprisoned.
Speaker 2:I've talked to a lot of women that that went through that. And carnivore, one hundred percent has I mean, I can't say it helps a hundred percent of the people, but it clearly, clearly has been incredibly beneficial. I've seen women that have gone from weighing sixty five, seventy pounds to putting, you know, forty, fifty pounds of muscle back on, regaining their fertility, regaining their life back. So absolutely.
Speaker 1:Amazing. What about schizophrenia?
Speaker 2:Yes. And again, there's another case series that was just published. I was looking at bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder where they used a low carb animal based elimination diet, you know, basically similar to a carnivore diet to put those diseases in remission. And we were seeing a whole host of metabolically treated dietary interventions for all kinds of mental health disorders. This has been done courtesy of the Baszucki Foundation.
Speaker 2:Jen Baszucki and that group, doctor Chris Palmer, doctor George Eade, and some of the other folks that have been championing that for a number of years now. So credit to those guys for actually taking up and getting some research done. So, yes, mental health disorders, one hundred percent are affected by and often improved and and even cured by proper nutrition. I know that's been kind of something that's been controversial to say, but our brain, just like every other organ in our body, is subject to the nutritions and the nutrients we provided. So, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And that includes autism and dementia?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, again, I wanna be a little bit cautious, well, around anything. I mean, I think it's, can you cure autism so they never no longer have it? I don't know that I would ever make that claim, but I certainly know. In fact, there's a large group by a friend of mine named Tom Clark out of California.
Speaker 2:He's autistic. He has a large Facebook group of several thousand members with autism that are doing carboer dachshund, either adults with autism or parents or children with autism, and they universally see significant improvements in the autism characteristics, you know, the perseverations, the emotional liability, you know, obviously, some of the gut issues a lot of autistic folks struggle with. So, yes, they can help with that. With regard to dementia, again, it depends upon how advanced it is. But certainly, we see some of the work of guys like Dale Bredesen at UCSF have shown that dementia is definitely treatable.
Speaker 2:It's definitely modifiable by low carb ketogenic, and I would argue car more diets. And I've seen in our clinical practices, patients with dementia clearly improving. So, mean, obviously, if you catch it earlier, the better the outcome's gonna be. And you can look at, like, guys like, Hal Kramner, who runs a nursing home out in, several nursing homes out in Phoenix where he takes care of a lot of adults with the dementia. And he's he's treating them with carnivore diets in in conjunction with things like exercise and some other things.
Speaker 2:And he's seeing tremendous results to the point where people come to him, you know, basically for hospice care and then are able to go home independent again. So it is absolutely something that can be utilized in those instances and should be. It should be one of the first things we talk about is what can we do to fix this person nutrition because it is cheap. It is very effective, and it's very accessible, and there's not a lot of side effects, you know, as opposed to all these drug infusions, which cost tens, if not hundreds of thousand dollars a year. I I mean, I just talked to a woman the other day.
Speaker 2:She spent, and I'm not exaggerating, over $1,000,000 in infusion therapies for her chronic progressive neurologic disease only to have it not improve much at all. But going on carnivore and within three months, she went into complete remission. I mean, it's just amazing.
Speaker 1:Wow. You know, I'm glad you mentioned Hal. I emailed him to see if he would be able to replace, doctor Chaffee as the third seat, and he wasn't able to or maybe he's gonna be late. But Hal's doing phenomenal work, and I'll try to post something in the group for people who have elderly parents and might wanna mimic what he's doing. K.
Speaker 1:My last disease is cancer. What do we know about carnivore and cancer?
Speaker 2:Well, again, cancer is a particularly, sensitive topic, you know, but but, I mean, honestly, I will submit that good nutrition will affect every single disease and every single every single aspect of health. So we certainly you know, if you you can point to some of the work that guys like Thomas Seyfried have done over at Boston University showing that, you know, cancer does seem to respond to metabolic interventions to include low carb, ketogenic, and carnivore diets. So, certainly, I'm not gonna be the guy that says, you know, ignore all conventional treatment and just go carnivore because I don't think we can say that at this point. But, certainly, I've met a number of people that have had cancer that have gone carnivore. They've either put their disease.
Speaker 2:They've either halted progression. They've had remission. Or at the very least, as an adjuvant, it has greatly improved their tolerance for things like chemotherapy and some of those other things. So, again, I think if you ignore nutrition for any disease you're treating, you're really, really missing out. And so, yes, it has a role in the treatment of cancer.
Speaker 2:It may not be curative for all cases, but, certainly, it can change the outcome, I believe.
Speaker 1:Thank you. And I do appreciate your nuance, and you have you're not an extremist. You're you're very reasonable about this. My next question, doctor Baker, you know, the New York Times published a story, and it was widely circulated, and it said that red meat consumption causes diabetes. In fact, I had family members send this article to me as proof that, like, I'm harming myself and I'm harming the people in my sphere of influence by prioritizing red meat.
Speaker 1:So do you have something to say particularly to the New York Times or in response to that article?
Speaker 2:Well, I again, I assume that article was based upon a recent Harvard University study that was published in 2024. That article associated about a 62% increase in people that consume red meat versus those who did not. And the problem with that study, like most of these epidemiologic study was, it was, you know, based on food frequency questionnaires, which are always subject to recall bias. I mean, we don't really know how accurate those things are. They use things like lasagna and pizza and hamburgers and sandwiches as components of red meat, which clearly there's more more variables in there.
Speaker 2:But I think one of the most important things, and I listened to the head researcher of that paper talk about that study. And one of the things they failed to do was they failed to control for obesity. And as you guys probably are all aware, obese patients are at much higher risk for things like diabetes and other negative outcomes. And so when asked about why they didn't account for, you know, the fact that they were using more obese patients in this cohort, He said, well, we know that red meat causes obesity. And the second he said that, I'm like, this is absolutely insane because when I see people on, you know, carnivore diets, which are almost exclusively red meat, obesity is not the issue that we see.
Speaker 2:In fact, we often and most often see a complete reversal of obesity. So red meat does not cause obesity on its face. You could say that maybe in conjunction with other things in caloric excess, so on and so forth. But if you read the study, it'll say, well, we can't claim causation because there's a correlation here. And so they always have a little clause at the end of that to tell you this is actually not really good study.
Speaker 2:But The New York Times will take the headline and run with that like they always do. And, again, it fits into a narrative agenda that red meat is something we wanna get rid of. We wanna prop up all of these alternate proteins because there's billions of dollars that have been invested through venture capital. My friend Vinny's in there. They probably know some of these people.
Speaker 2:They wanna get their ROI. And so there's this big push to push away from meat, whether it's beliefs about the climate or misguided beliefs about health. This is why we see these articles. And and thankfully, and this is something that I found very interesting the other day, there was a survey done in in Europe looking at five European countries. And for the first time ever, I mean, this is ever since it's been done, they have seen people saying that they are intentionally going to eat more meat more red meat this year.
Speaker 2:And the reason they're giving is for health reasons. And so I think we are starting to win that narrative battle. That propaganda war is is starting to turn in our favor. So this is something we've never seen before. It's been for the last several decades.
Speaker 2:Red meat is bad. It's killing you. We're gonna it's killing the planet. Calf hearts are boiling the oceans. That type of narrative, which is obviously obviously you know, I'm saying a little bit comically, but I think that, the New York Times got it wrong.
Speaker 2:It wouldn't be the first time they got something wrong. We'll see how time goes. But like I said, this is why it's so important to fund research around this stuff. So we have I mean, not you know, I didn't need a research study to get me to do this, that, and many people don't. But I think to get it accepted in the broader context and have more physicians comfortable using this, we have to go there and we have to get these studies done.
Speaker 1:So does that mean that you're not eating bugs?
Speaker 2:Not intentionally.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Alright. So most legacy media consumers, that's what I've been calling them, they have it, like, imprinted as this sacred truth that eating cholesterol is gonna increase cholesterol in the blood and that they're gonna have a heart attack. And you were featured in this documentary film that's coming out called the cholesterol code. So you obviously are an expert on the topic of cholesterol.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you you feel this question all the time. But can you just tell us, like, what is the latest science on the topic of cholesterol and how it applies to red meat in our diet?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wouldn't call myself an expert on that topic. I mean, I know a lot because I've been forced to, but I'm certainly not a lipidologist or cardiologist. But, I mean, I think our understanding around cholesterol as it pertains to heart disease is a lot more nuanced than we've been led to believe. I mean, traditionally, if you go to the the average physician, cardiologist, lipidologist, they will say that if your blood cholesterol, your serum cholesterol, your LDL, your total cholesterol, your Apo b is high, that is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
Speaker 2:And the longer that is high for, the more likely you are to develop cardiovascular disease. And I think for many segments of the population, that may be true. But I think what we're starting to find out is most of that data was acquired in unhealthy people that have had heart attacks. You know, if you're looking at sick people, you can find variables that are problematic in sick people. But what we've not looked at before is particularly healthy people.
Speaker 2:So metabolically healthy people that are lean, that don't have all these traditional comorbidities. What happens to them when their cholesterol is high? And the really neat thing, and I think my friend Adrian Adrian Sodomoto showed this very nicely in a meta analysis that was published early in 2024. They looked at 41 randomized controlled trials. So 41 randomized controlled trials.
Speaker 2:And they looked at low carb diets and they looked at their cholesterol outcomes. And what they found was that it wasn't saturated fat or cholesterol that that had an impact on their their serum cholesterol. That had minimal impact. The biggest impact was how lean the person got. So the leaner and leaner the person got, the higher their cholesterol went went up.
Speaker 2:And the reason for that is this so called lipid energy model that was first developed by Dave Feldman, who's a who's a producer of that particular documentary. What we found is that as you get leaner and leaner and you're in a low carb state, your glycogen in your liver has been depleted to some degree. And so your cells are very hungry. They need energy. And so what your liver does is it takes peripheral body fat, repackages it in the form of lipoproteins, and then sends it out to nourish the cells.
Speaker 2:We just have this greater flux of lipid traffic in circulation. Now that is a different situation from the typical obese, prediabetic, metabolically sick person that has excess energy in the blood. That probably is an issue. Now these other people that are lean and healthy, the question is, we know why it's occurring because they're lean and they're in a low carb state. Is that actually leading to increased levels of heart disease?
Speaker 2:And based on the data that has been published so far, several studies, Matt Bootoff has published a couple of them out of UCLA, have shown that those people, despite extremely incredibly high cholesterol levels, we're talking LDL cholesterols of 300, four hundred, five hundred, six hundred, did not and were not at greater risk for developing cardiovascular disease based on high level CT angiography studies, which are really, really specific and precise. And they show that, in fact, when they compared them to another group that was equally matched for health levels, I mean, there were two healthy groups. One had high cholesterol, one had low cholesterol. The high cholesterol group actually had less cardiovascular disease than the low cholesterol group. So I think it is more nuanced than we've been led to believe, and I think more data's gonna come out.
Speaker 2:So I think as of 2025, we can start to question those things. I'm not quite ready to say we can totally ignore it yet because I think in my view, if your cholesterol is high and you're on a low carb diet, you should ask them more questions. You shouldn't immediately just say, I gotta stop this thing because it could be I cannot tell you how many people tell me that they were feeling wonderful on carnivore. They came off all their medications. They felt, you know, incredible, but their cholesterol went up and they had to stop.
Speaker 2:And I think that's unfortunately perhaps a shame that they may have done that, you know, inappropriately.
Speaker 1:That's a really good segue into this question, which is, can you describe conflicts of interest on the US dietary guidelines panel and the people who are in charge of doling out all the nutrition advice to schools, to prisons, and hospitals and stuff?
Speaker 2:Well, I you know, again and we've been having The US dietary guidelines since 1980. Every five years, they've met. Anita Tykholz has done a wonderful job examining some of that stuff, so all credit to her. You know, the 2020 guidelines, which I know she's documented very well. I can't speak directly to the twenty twenty five guidelines people, but there are some clear conflicts on this year's group.
Speaker 2:But in 2020, of the 20 panelists, 19 of them, that's 95% of them, had financial ties to food corporations. And so you can imagine how that would influence as their recommendations. I mean, USDA is captured just like every other regulatory agency like the FDA is. You know, we've got a significant conflicts of interest in there. And the fact that the USDA's job is to promote commodities, and so that's corn, that's wheat, that's soybeans, that's beets, and and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:They have to sell that stuff. And so if it's not in the guidelines, right, your 11 whole grains a day, then they're gonna have a hard time justifying what they're doing for the farmers. And, unfortunately, I mean, we're producing all this corn. A lot of it goes to ethanol. A lot of it goes to you know, there's other uses for it, but it's not compatible with thriving health in my view.
Speaker 1:Would it be accurate to say that a lot of the nutrition science is based off of religion? Do you wanna talk about the history of dietetics?
Speaker 2:Well, there's definitely a a religious influence. I mean, the American Dietetics Associates was first founded in 1917 by a gal named Letta Cooper, who was a devout Seventh day Adventist. She was an associate of John Harvey Kellogg from Kellogg's cereal out of Battle Creek, Michigan. And he went into that, and they founded that organization based on the belief that vegetarianism was the optimal diet, that red meat was associated with, you know, carnal desires, lust, masturbation, adultery, on and on and on. So red meat has, from the beginning of modern nutrition science, has always been sort of vilified and demonized.
Speaker 2:And even today, over a hundred years later, if you look at all of these large nutritional organizations, they are overrepresented by Seventh day Adventists. In fact, when the World Health Organization published their 02/2015 statement saying that red meat was a class two carcinogen, a number of the people involved in that process were Seventh day Adventists, ethical vegans, vegetarians, and so on and so forth. And that was not disclosed to anybody. That's a clear conflict of interest just from an ethical standpoint. So, yes, we have some religious beliefs built baked into our nutritional systems.
Speaker 1:You know, I heard doctor Chaffee say, once, and I bet you you know about this too, but that in military history, it has been a military strategy to cut the supply of meat to a a region in order to weaken those people so that they're easier to conquer. Is that true? Did you wanna add anything to that, or do you have anything to say about that?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, you know, obviously, with medic you know, I'm not a military strategist. I was in the military enough for a number of years. But if you compromise the nutrition, I mean, you know, like, you look at sieges of ancient castles. I mean, they would just starve them out. Right?
Speaker 2:So if they if they can't eat and they become physically weakened, then they're they're easy to to overthrow. I mean, this is the classic thing when we look at the Mongols as they took over, you know, all of Asia and parts of Europe back when Genghis Khan was running the show. You know, one of the things they noticed with the Mongols were very mobile because they brought their food with them. They brought cattle with them, and they would eat the cows and drink their milk and eat the horses in cases where they need to do that. But they were able to move very rapidly, and they were much more vigorous, much more they're better warriors than, say, when when they conquered the Chinese, were basically settled on eating grains.
Speaker 2:And and they were much slower, weaker, less robust as as athletes and and as as warriors. So yeah. Absolutely. I mean, nutrition, there was just a just a paper came out two days ago. It was published to compare it was a meta analysis of plant protein versus animal protein, and they said that plant protein was better than nothing.
Speaker 2:But it's not very good when you compare it to meat, milk, and eggs, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:Wow. Can I ask you about the difference between lectin with a c and lectin with a p and how they relate to the carnivore diet? Because I don't think anybody knows what lectin is unless they're really into this.
Speaker 2:Well, lectin is a phytochemical. So this is something that's found often in things like legumes and grains, and that is considered an antinutrient. So it has arguably deleterious effects on our human physiology and our gut. So this is something that's found in food that interferes with absorption and can cause damage to our gut. So this is what lectins are.
Speaker 2:This is something that so what's his name? Plant Paradox guy. I forget the name of the doctor that wrote, anyway, there's a physician that started talking about that a couple years ago. And, yeah, that his whole thesis was lectins were the problem. Of course, he was selling some scoop stupid supplement lectin shield to protect you from that, which is stop eating a crap and you'd be fine instead.
Speaker 2:So lectins are that. So they're components of plants or anti nutrients. And then leptin is a basically part of the human physiology and hormones. So there's this relationship between leptin and ghrelin, which control our appetite. And so ghrelin is a hormone that leads to hunger, whereas leptin is supposed to lead to some level of satiety.
Speaker 2:And there are people that are leptin resistant and therefore, they don't really feel satiety like a normal person would. So then they end up overeating and they be you know, they gain body fat in a way. So leptin and lectin are different words. You know, there's obviously one letter difference, but they have very drastically different meanings.
Speaker 1:Thank you for explaining that. In my imagination, lectin lectin poisons me, and leptin keeps me skinny.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's kind of You can look at that way. There you go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For us simple folks who don't have the fancy degrees. And talking about fancy degrees. Okay. So Harvard is Harvard trustworthy?
Speaker 1:Can we their science that they put out, do you trust them anymore?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, again, you can't paint everybody with the same brush. I think as an institution, obviously, you know, you can look at who funds these organizations. Do they have an overlying motive? I mean, I know some people at Harvard that I think are quite intelligent, trustworthy, and doing good work, and yet there's stuff that's coming out there that I strongly disagree with. And so I think you just can't broadly say what came out of Harvard is garbage.
Speaker 2:But I think you just have to look at it and see where it falls, what type of study it is, you know, what are the limitations, what are the strengths, do we know if there's an underlying agenda with these particular researchers rather than just painting the entire institution. It's like saying everybody in California is bad or or good or whatever depending on your belief system. I mean, there's you know, it's not as simple as that. So, I think you just have to look at it on case on a case by case basis.
Speaker 1:Well, I guess I wanted to pull out of you the $20,000,000 that they were with the American Heart Association. The so the sugar industry paid Harvard twenty million dollars to publish research that fat was bad.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, this is I think this is from the nineteen sixties. I think Fred Stair at the time I think it was Fred Stair who might have been the chairman at, of their nutrition center back then. And, yeah, I mean, it was shown that the American Sugar Refiners, you know, one of the sugar groups paid some money to sort of undermine research to sort of exonerate sugar and and demonize saturated fat. Yeah. That did happen.
Speaker 2:That's been well documented. I mean, again, obviously, there's more science that's just happened since that time. But, yeah, certainly, there's been some shady business. And I think that's I don't think Harvard's unique in that. I mean, if you've been around long enough, there's shady business everywhere.
Speaker 2:I mean, we're finding out what's happening in the US government. Not to anyone's surprise, I'm sure. But it's just the extent of the corruption, which is maybe, I I think more so than than more so than it happens just just to the extent that it's happening. So you can always say that, yes, there's been some shifty business there. But, again, I think you have to take everything on a case by case.
Speaker 2:I think, you know, there's a fellow by doctor, sir, Bradford Hill that came up with a criteria about, you know, how do we know if something is actually caused when we look at these relationships? And part of that in his criteria, you know, is like strength of relationship, temporal association, you know, there's a dose response. But one of the things was just plausibility. Right? Does it make sense?
Speaker 2:And I think a lot of times we lose that. Like, this doesn't even make sense. Like, red meat is killing us, and yet human beings have been eating this since we've been human beings. You know, this is inarguably in part why we are human beings is because of red meat. And now to say all of a sudden it's killing us, it doesn't pass the basic common sense smell test.
Speaker 2:And I think that's what we've lost in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1:I think we need to send those to Harvard. Wouldn't that be great?
Speaker 2:There's a lot of well, I don't know. Harvard isn't part of the US government. I don't send my taxes to Harvard as far as I know. Maybe maybe indirectly a few, but there's a lot of places I would send those to first. I mean, I I'd love to see them go through the USDA and go through some of the checkoff agencies and probably techs over there would would agree with that.
Speaker 2:If we get the checkoff needs to be revamped or or done away with or something.
Speaker 1:Yes. So I have one last question myself for you. And as you answer, I'm gonna be pulling people up. I see that you've requested to ask a question and you're you're well on your way. But doctor Baker, now is the chance.
Speaker 1:I'd love to just let you tell us about Revero and the solution that you're building with Revero.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I appreciate the opportunity. So when I was practicing as a surgeon and I started to kinda just get in a sense that, you know, what we're doing with our pills, our potions, and our procedures was missing. And as you know, I mentioned, I talked about this a little bit today. We're missing a lot when it comes to promoting health and understanding health.
Speaker 2:And as I started to realize how valuable nutrition and lifestyle was, I realized that I did not have any mechanism by which to provide that for my patients. I certainly didn't have any incentive to do that. In fact, I was disincentivized from doing that. You know, I was basically told, no. We just want you to cut people.
Speaker 2:Don't start talking about lifestyle. How dare you cancel surgeries? I mean, that was the problem. And I think most physicians find themselves in that position. If they're gonna practice in this corporate medicine world, and it's very clear that corporations are taking over the entirety of The US health care system.
Speaker 2:Kaiser Permanente in California. You've got Intermountain Health with the Rocky Mountain Station, on and on and on. And all these big corporations are gobbling up to small guys and dictating the terms of practice. Right? Either my way or the highway, you follow these algorithms or you get the hell out.
Speaker 2:Right? So that's where most people find themselves, and they're kinda trapped in that. And so what we're doing with Revero is we are providing physician oversight, physicians that understand that health is more than just what kind of drugs I can prescribe, what procedures I can do for people, what tests I can order. But it's dealing with their nutrition, their sleep, their lifestyle, their activity levels, their stress management, and giving them that guidance and that position oversight, but not only that, providing day to day feedback, support, accountability, motivation, ability to interact on a daily basis, which is what a lot of people need. I mean, it's when you're treating a chronic disease, it's more than just, I'm gonna see you once every three months and prescribe pills to you.
Speaker 2:I mean, in some cases, it takes daily guidance to help these people get through what it is because a lot of people are dealing with a lot of psychological stuff that goes with this. I mean, I think when you're when you're dealing with a chronic disease, you are, by default, dealing with some component of food pathology, whether it's addiction, whether it's just some kind of disorder, and you have to work through this. And it takes a lot of time and handling. You're not incentivized to to do it as a standard physician. It's very challenging to do, but we've got a long way to solving some of that problems.
Speaker 2:And so Rivero is so it's rever0.com if anyone wants to sign up. We have physicians in 48 of the 50 states. We'll have all 50 states by the March. And we basically this is an option to get people healthy. And my goal is not to have them be patients for years and years and years.
Speaker 2:It's like, let's get you fixed, you know, six months a year and get out of there. And you're done. And you're you're healthy and, you know, you go to the doctor for a a true emergency. And that's what health care should go back to in my view.
Speaker 1:You're a hero. I'm gonna give other people the chance to ask you questions. Ladies first. So lady in red, you got your hand up. Go ahead.
Speaker 3:Hi. While you kinda answered a little bit for me already with talking about rivero.com, are there quotes online for, like, programs with
Speaker 2:you? Sorry. Say that again. Are there what online with me?
Speaker 3:Are there quotes for somebody that might want to start your program? Or
Speaker 2:Are are you asking about prices? Is that what you're saying? So I think it is so for having a physician, having a team, having daily feedback, having guidance every day, it's $199 per month. If you buy, like if you, like, sign up for four months, I think they dropped their price to something like $1.69 or something like that. But, I mean, that's basically a cup of coffee a day to regain your health to
Speaker 4:eat.
Speaker 2:And I think, you know and, eventually, we'll probably be picked up by insurance. I mean, our goal right now is to direct to consumer. I mean, we have to pay our doctors. I mean, we gotta pay them something.
Speaker 1:So we gotta
Speaker 2:we gotta charge at least some money, and we're not and, again, our business model is not to keep people there for the rest of their lives. They may do that for six months, and then they're off their medication. They're healthy. You you think about how much money. And the average patient we're gonna be seeing is gonna be saving a hell of a lot more than they're spending with this when it comes to getting off medications and, you know, not needing to go to the ER and, you know, having doctor's visits.
Speaker 2:So I think it's a, in the grand scheme of things, it's gonna be very economical. And then our, you know, like I said, our next phase will be rolling out to different corporations and start to offload some of the costs because the average company out there is paying enormous amounts of money on health care for their employees. I I think a lot of it could be eliminated with this type of strategy.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks for that. And, I actually did carnivore for an entire month. I was too weak to keep going, which is I really wish I would have because I could not believe how much better I felt, how much water was coming off of me, how much fat was coming off of me, my sleep. Like, everything was just amazing, but I just fell back into the normal routine. So do you have support for people that have a hard time not going back to their old ways?
Speaker 3:Because it's really, really difficult for some people. I'm one of them. So, yeah, is there I mean, how can you help me so that I don't do that?
Speaker 2:And, yeah, that's a very good point. That's exactly what I'm talking about. You are assigned a health care team. You know, you have a physician leading the thing, but every single day, if needed, someone will be in contact with you. Either through text message, phone calls, video conferences, we engage our patients every single day to keep them on target.
Speaker 2:So one month is great, but I think most people by three months kind of fully adapt to something like this. And then it's just, you know, you you it starts to become an ingrained pattern. I mean, a lot like what you fell back into was because it was a habit that you built up through years and years of convenience and these types
Speaker 5:of things.
Speaker 2:You really have to change not only just your physiology, but there's a psychological change that needs to occur. And then it and then you start to you you develop this sort of virtuous cycle. You know? A lot of times we fall into this vicious cycle of continued decay and worsening, but we can turn it around and it becomes a virtuous cycle.
Speaker 3:Right. Because I found that no matter how much I enjoyed the physical changes and the physical, like, the or the feeling, I still got sucked back in, and I think that that's something I wanna try and avoid. And do you recommend only beef, like no pork, no fish? Is it just strictly beef?
Speaker 2:No. Not necessarily. I'm I'm a big fan of beef. I think beef is uniquely nutritious, but it doesn't have to be that way. I do think that most people will benefit from the incorporation of some type of ruminant meat.
Speaker 2:And, you know, in The US, obviously, beef is king. I mean, lamb I think lamb equally is just as good as beef is. And I know maybe maybe Texas over there cringing. I don't know. But I think I prefer beef beef is certainly for me.
Speaker 2:I'm wearing shirts. So beef where it'd be happy right now. You guys can
Speaker 3:What about, high fat dairy?
Speaker 2:Again, that's I think dairy in general is one of those case by case. It depends basis.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:know, like I said, for weight loss, high fat dairy is not necessarily the best strategy with with some caveats there. I think dairy is one of those things where, again, it's it's kind of an individual thing, and there's some people that do really well on dairy and there's some people that need to minimize or avoid it.
Speaker 3:Okay. And just one more. They say that you should only lose two to three pounds a week to stay safe and not burn too much muscle and your heart is a muscle. So don't you drop weight pretty quickly on this? Like because I did.
Speaker 3:I lost a pound a day, if not more, when I did it.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, you gotta remember some of that. Obviously, the first, you know, maybe up to 10 pounds or more might be water. That that's part of that equation. Right? So, I mean, water weight is just fluid shifts.
Speaker 2:Shifts. I mean, I can shift my weight 15 pounds in a day very easily just on how hydrating I am and a little bit of food in my belly. So I would be so concerned about that. I mean, I think, again, with in the context of a carnivore diet, you know, when you're getting adequate protein, that is probably the greatest impediment to losing that lean mass. And so as long as your protein is adequate, you can lose weight at the rate that that's appropriate if you need to.
Speaker 2:If you lose more than two or three pounds a week, particularly your lawn and most people, you know, they might lose the first week. Maybe they lose seven, eight pounds, and then it's six pounds and five pounds. And by about, you know, three or four months then, they're not still losing five pounds a week. I mean, you would disappear if that were the case. So you start to stall out and slow down.
Speaker 2:So, you know, if you're on a starvation diet where you don't eat anything or you're taking some of these, you know, injectable drugs or you're just dropping just weight from lack of eating, lack of nutrition, that can get you into a problem. And, yeah, you can lose too much lean mass. It's like one of the side effects of these GLP one drugs we're seeing now is a lot of women are developing osteoporosis, which is gonna come back to bite them later because when they get off the drug, they're gonna have lost all that muscle and bone, and then they're gonna regain the fat. And it takes a lot of work to put that bone back, bone mineral density back in you.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Lady in Red. Jimmy, you got your hand up. Why don't you go ahead and unmute yourself?
Speaker 6:Hey. Thanks for having me. Hey. I started Carnivore in August. I was on it for a long time.
Speaker 6:The highest I ever was two sixty five. I'm now two fifteen. I went to my doctor, did my yearly blood test, and they basically told me, hey. We noticed that you went from, like, a one eighty five to a two twenty with your cholesterol. You should stop this.
Speaker 6:And then I had a second doctor telling me, hey. Actually, continue because we love to see the weight coming off. I stopped doing it because I got nervous as you kinda said earlier that they don't really know about cholesterol, but they kinda use it as a scare tactic. I noticed though when I got off of it, Carnivore, I started getting sick again. Just, you know, runny noses, going to the doctor, not feeling good, everything I was dealing with before I went on Carnivore.
Speaker 6:And so I think it really does help. My question is is I get stuck at, like, two fifteen, though. I've tried other things. I just can't get past that. I'm trying to get down to my goal of 200.
Speaker 6:I'm looking for suggestions.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, obviously, you know, like you said, carnivore was clearly better for you from a health standpoint irrespective of what, you know, what shift you had on cholesterol. And I and I suspect if you get down to 200, your cholesterol might even get even higher based on the lipid energy model, which I discussed earlier. I don't know if you're listening when I was talking earlier. But, I mean, with regard to how do you get, you know, leaner and leaner, you know, I mean, there's a certain point that we have to say, like, I wanna, you know, take pictures for Instagram and have 6% body fat and have ripped abs. I mean, I think that is probably not normal human physiology.
Speaker 2:Let's just be honest about that. If you look at any sort of indigenous tribe, there's not bodybuilders walking around. They're not there's people that are lean, but they're not, like, super, super lean. So some of that is how lean do we actually need to be? As a male, I think you get around 15% body fat, and that's probably as lean as you need to go.
Speaker 2:And then beyond that is you're genetically predisposed to that or you're just doing things that are really hard to sustain. But let's just say you legitimately need to lose 10 pounds or something like that. Then I think you in the context of carnivore, there's a couple ways you can go. You can certainly one thing you'd have to realize, you know, you were up at I think you said your top weight was two sixty, I think, maybe or something like that. So when you were two sixty, you were a larger animal than you are at two fifteen.
Speaker 2:And so if you think you can sit eat the same amount of food that you ate at two sixty at two fifteen and still continue to lose weight, that's not gonna happen. I mean, I have two dogs. One's bigger than the other. I feed my big dog more than I feed my little dog. So I think there's some of that you just have to kinda get used to maybe eating a little less.
Speaker 2:I know some people in low carb get all upset when you talk about the fact that volume of food does matter whether it's counted in the terms of calories or not. I think you can play with the protein and fat ratios. What I have done in the past right now, I'm trying to get from two fifty five down to two forty. I'm giving myself two years to do it. You know, I'm in no hurry just because I've got certain performance calls when I hit 60.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of strategy. You can go do a relatively high protein, lower fat approach, which is I don't think it's sustainable in the long term, but it can work in the short term to to strip some belly fat off. And then you just gotta maintain that for a period of time to kinda get a new sort of level which you can kinda sustain, and and hopefully your appetite will match that. Some people do really well with a very high fat approach. And what happens is, you know, I think that works well if and only if it leads to enough satiety.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's this concept of,
Speaker 5:sort
Speaker 2:of an energy centric model of appetite where which which is, you know, kind of intuitively obvious. When you eat your food and you're full, you're not hungry. Right? I mean, it's obvious. Right?
Speaker 2:But what happens is over time, you start to go through that energy that you've eaten, and now you're hungry again. You need to eat again. Well, if you say, well, I'm just going to not eat 500 calories a day and I will lose I will go into a 3,500 calorie deficit over the week, I should lose a pound of body fat. That's on paper what should happen. But what really happens is I cut 500 calories out of my diet and then I'm hungry.
Speaker 2:Why am I hungry? Because I'm no longer meeting my nutritional needs. I'm not burning the body fat that would be required to keep me not being hungry. So some people find that when they go higher fat, what happens is they it produces a little bit more ketones and ketones allow for greater liberation of fat for fuel and therefore, you don't feel experience as much hunger. So you can go either way.
Speaker 2:I mean, one thing I would do is I call it fat cycling where I would eat leaner meats. You know, instead of eating high fat rib eyes, I might eat something leaner like a leaner cut, like maybe a skirt steak or a sirloin or even a piece of fish and then do that for a couple days. And then I would go back to the rib eyes for a day and just kinda cycle that in and out, and that was sustainable. Because if you eat lean meat consistently for a long period of time, you're gonna get hungry. You're gonna get tired.
Speaker 2:You're gonna get cold. You're not gonna wanna do anything. You're gonna have cravings. It's not sustainable. So you have to figure out how to play with that.
Speaker 2:And usually, it's like and you're absolutely right. The the closer you get to being really, really lean, the harder it gets. That first five pounds is super easy to lose. That last five pounds is a real son of a gun. Right?
Speaker 2:So you just have to realize that there's gonna be some level of that. And then it's not just diet is not the only thing. We have to realize if if we maxed out our diet lever, let's pull a lever on sleep. Are we getting good sleep? Let's pull a lever on activity.
Speaker 2:I'm a huge proponent of exercise and working out, but more importantly in that is not being sedentary. If you have a job where you spend all day on your butt in a chair, staring at a computer, get a standing desk and start moving. If you're sitting, walk. If you're walking you know, if you're sitting, stand. If you're standing, think about walking.
Speaker 2:Activity, not being sedentary is gonna give you more bang for your buck than going to the gym, quite honestly. Now after that, then it comes into and then the other thing we can talk about is circadian biology. When do you eat? Eating when you eat actually has an impact. We there are studies that suggest that if you get more of your calories early in the day versus late in the day, it's gonna have a net beneficial effect.
Speaker 2:So if you're gonna eat in an eating window, make it early rather than late, you know, for most people. I think the other thing that that's important is stress management. You know, I mean, stress is something that can lead to an inflammatory response, can lead to insulin resistance, which then drives hunger because you can't get the energy in your cells as well. And so that's something to think about. So you wanna look at all these different levers.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can only pull that diet lever so hard without affecting those other things.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 7:Awesome. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Jimmy, I'm gonna move to Scoots. Scoots, go ahead.
Speaker 8:I wondered if you had any information on anyone with a carnivore diet and polymyalgia rheumatica.
Speaker 2:To be honest, I don't remember specifically anyone with that particular condition on carnivore. However, I've seen very similar conditions. There's a lot of myalgic conditions, fibromyalgia. There's all kinds of different myalgias that are out there that I've seen respond to this. And I think if I looked, I could probably search our database because we collect, you know, all these six thousands of success stories, and we catalog them.
Speaker 2:You can search if you go to carnivore.diet, you can just type in the search bar specifically what you're looking for, myalgia, polymy myalgia, rheumatica. We see rheumatic diseases that have improved, so I suspect it would help. It it's worth doing for three months in my view. I suspect you would see a decrease in inflammation. You'd see a decrease in some of the muscle pain, that you probably or whoever's experiencing.
Speaker 2:I assume it's you. It's worth doing for three months. Again, this would be a good situation where you could have having some support is always helpful as the lady ever had. We took we discussed about that. So it's certainly worth a try for sure.
Speaker 1:Alright. Thanks, Scoots. I'm gonna move on to SLIM, if you guys don't mind. Doctor Baker, you're amazing. I hope you can stay on because I know people at the end are gonna wanna ask some questions, and then I know SLIM and you guys might wanna go back and forth a little bit.
Speaker 1:So are you able to stay on?
Speaker 2:Well, I've gotta do another podcast here in five minutes for an hour, but if you're still going, I'll pop back into into the space because I've this is my I've I've got five podcasts today, so I gotta go jump on another one. I'll come back in if you're still here in an hour, I'll come back though. Okay?
Speaker 1:Alright. Thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Alright. God bless.
Speaker 9:Thanks.
Speaker 1:Alright. I am so excited. So now that we established the health benefits of beef, now we get to talk about how we can ensure that this quality food is something that we have access to, and that's where Slim, you get to come in. So our second guest is Texas Slim, founder of the I Am Texas Slim Foundation, as well as the Beef Initiative, and he started this amazing ecosystem of resources that support health and access to high quality food, most importantly beef. So Slim, thank you for doing this space, and let me just dig right in by asking you, tell me about what Sovereign Health means to you and how beef and cowboys and cattle ranchers are helping us in our pursuit to make America healthy again.
Speaker 5:Well, just to thank you, Alana. Thanks for putting this together because, you know, it's been a long road, and I'm just gonna come off the hills of Sean Baker and say a statement. And it's the Great American Health Initiative being led by the Great American Rancher. And what we're doing is providing the cleanest beef in the nation. And so what we can do now is kinda dissect what that means.
Speaker 5:And what we've had in The United States is, as Sean said before, we've had an attack on beef for generations. And where I come from, you look at health and you look at beef and where we came from on both and look where we are. You know, we're under attack in so many different ways and so many people are confused and, you know, to be a sovereign rancher means that, you know, you get to raise that cow the way that you wanna raise that cow, and you don't have any institutional you know capture, you don't have types of associations, you don't have technology use agreements, and so if you look at where we come from and how you know we're shipping out most of our beef overseas now, we've lost a lot of independent producers from where we came from, and we can talk about that today because it's a fascinating story that's transpired in my life. And, you know, that's one of the reasons that I, you know, started the beef initiative. But make no mistake, this is about saving children's lives.
Speaker 5:It's about saving a cattle industry that's under attack. It's about saving the health of a nation, and it's a perfect storm of awareness that's coming our way. You know, I saw this back in 2017 just like what Sean said, and we've got people in the beef initiative that spent their life going through this transition from our health being ill health now and, you know, from our cattle industry where we've lost market access to it as consumers and as producers as far as where we get to and how we get to grow that cow, that beef, and where we get to ship it to. So that's a good start right there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You've been involved in like, have lived in agriculture communities basically your whole life and, you know, you're not 20 years old anymore. What's changed the, like, the most since you were a kid? And, like, how did all this happen where we've got Bill Gates owning more farmland than anybody else.
Speaker 5:Well, it's daunting. And, you know, I'm a it's hard to be in the family, sixth and seventh generational Texan. And, you know, if you come from where I come from, I come from the Texas Panhandle. It's called the Llano Estacado and you know where I come from 85% of Texas beef comes through this corridor and you know we're part of the first cattle drives and so to have that kind of DNA and where we come from well our money is broken for one, and, you know, we broke our soil. We broke, the ways that we did things.
Speaker 5:We broke our community based food systems, and if you look at Texas, you know, whenever I was younger, we have two fifty four counties, and one time we had two fifty four micro processing centers that were able to, you know, process animal protein. And so what do we have now? We have four multinational corporations that are not housed in The United States Of America as far as headquarters and they control 85% of our animal protein in The United States Of America, and they control a lot of that distribution too, and they control a lot of the protocols in which that beef and that cow is basically engineered through their partnerships with, you know, the grain companies, fertilizer companies. And so they're very complicated system, but to be that daunting, there's an easy solution. And, you know, I embedded myself in a harvest 2021, and I went all the way from Texas to North Dakota and, to go and investigate.
Speaker 5:And, you know, because I didn't get to live my adult life in agriculture, I became a research analyst in big tech. And so I started using my research, you know, skills and my agricultural skills. But if you look, you know, how we facilitate the harvest and everything that is so complex about our food systems, you have to come to an easy conclusion for the consumer and the producer. And it I came up with the phrase, and it's, you know, go shake your rancher's hand. Because if you do that, you get to eliminate so many layers of corruption with it being money, with it being labeling, with it being, you know, what is in that cow?
Speaker 5:What is that cow eating? And the best solution is really to create a personal relationship with the person that is dying to feed you. And we have a nation that doesn't understand that we have independent producers out there dying for consumers, but the consumers are still reading labels, and they're going to Walmart or Costco or all of these, you know, big old box stores that basically you know, that's where most of the foreign beef in our nation is going to. And people don't understand that, you know, we're shipping 80% of our beef in The United States is beef now. And then 80% of our consumption in The United States of beef is ground beef.
Speaker 5:And so it's a complex system and you can eliminate a lot of questions. You can build relationships. You can help rebuild communities through that handshake, and that's what we've lost in this nation.
Speaker 1:You know, my grandpa had a cattle farm. It was a hundred acres, and he usually kept about 50 head of cat cattle, and it was the most peaceful place on Earth. And when you say that, I just imagine my grandpa shaking, like, everybody's hands and feeding them, and it's such a wholesome way to make a living. And I just felt the need to say that. It's not part of my questions.
Speaker 4:I just felt the need
Speaker 2:to say that.
Speaker 5:It's it's a good point. I mean, I tell people you need to start living like your grandparents or your great grandparents, and, you know, that has meaning. You know, it makes you think, what does he mean by that? Well, it means that we gotta simplify things, and we gotta get a better understanding of what food is and what health is. We used to be a healthy nation, and we used to feed ourselves pretty damn easy.
Speaker 5:If you get away from the centralized history of things and you really do develop that type of spirit that comes with you know living back then and you know I come from a very pioneering place. It was the last place in Texas that got established after the Comanche wars and that's when our cattle industry blew up. We had to go feed a nation, and so if you can kind of look at, you know, our history and how we got here, and then you can really look at, you know, what have we lost? Well, you know, June, our producer, you know, one of the best designers I've ever met, he found out that if you leave any city in The United States right now and you drive 30 miles, you're in cattle country, and that is so true. And I think a nation has that division of understanding of what that spirit comes from of being in rural America.
Speaker 5:Just to speak of, you know, that handshake and that spirit, I've been around the world, you know, one and a half times, 300,000 miles total, 200,000 miles in a pickup truck across The United States Of America. I've been to Australia. I've been to Asia. You know, we've been all over the place, and that handshake and that spirit's the same everywhere you go. And this attack on beef is the same everywhere you go.
Speaker 5:And so, you know, we have to look at our local communities and how do we get back to that spirit, but you don't have to. And that's coming from being in big tech for so many years. I knew that we had to give a digital handshake that could create that peer to peer relationship. And so we've got it where, you know, our autonomous network that we've piecemealed together is now ready to launch to where it becomes a full platform of solutions for both consumers, communities, and, you know, there's so much to discuss here today of what the issues that we saw back in 02/2017 and where we are today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I tried to wrap my head around everything that you guys offer both to the consumers and to the producers, and I tried to invest real amount of time into it. But I think an ecosystem is definitely one way that helps make everything holistic and high quality and back to true science. But would you also say that the like the I am Texas Slim Foundation is kinda like the modern day Cattlemen's Association, like you're you're advocating for these ranchers and you're, you know, they're not in big cities. They're they're not.
Speaker 1:They don't get invited to CNN. So you're you're advocating on their behalf and fighting for policies that help everybody get their food.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And if you look at the cattle industry, we do. We have a lot of nonprofits. We have a lot of associations and cattle associations, and they come in different forms and fashions, and they're very centralized. They where does the money come from?
Speaker 5:But if you look at the reason and the why behind the I am Texas Slim Foundation, you know, Brianna Sagnal is our head research analyst and chief editor of beefnews.org. But if you look at what we're missing in those associations and, you know, Sean Baker brought up the beef checkoff mark. Let's put in some history into that. You know, our independent cattle producers have paid in $10,000,000,000 over its lifespan. And basically, the only thing that we've ever got is, hey, beef.
Speaker 5:It's what's for dinner commercial. It was a marketing plan. It was supposed to get people to eat beef, and that does a good job. It's a good symbol of, you know, standing by your rancher. But, you know, in the end, what beef are you eating, you know, and how can you find that rancher that you wanna truly support?
Speaker 5:And there's just too many layers there that these associations that we've started off with associations within financial institutions into cattle associations. We've got to get a new solution that's a more peer to peer based relief effort or think tank financial, basically, pivot points that you can come into and policy work. We're not trying to replace associations. We're just becoming that other bid instead of having to pay, you know, the certain amount that they're paying right now. Independent producers have to pay a certain dollar amount for every cow that they sell to auction.
Speaker 5:Well, if they have another bid, then they can come through a different foundation that is a nonprofit. And we've had a lot of great success, and we are writing policy. And it's gonna be that place that we get to vet new money coming in and that we can actually start really going after the beef checkoff mark and maybe just making them be honest with what they're doing because there's so much money that has not been seen. And now that Doge is out there, let's look at that. And so we're at a perfect time to really facilitate these types of maybe associations that have captured us a little bit, but now we can, like I said, make them peer to peer.
Speaker 1:So can we walk really quick through everything that has to go right in order for me to have meatballs for dinner? Like, the
Speaker 5:You just said it all right there. And let's just stop right there. Let's just start with the cow, and let's start with beef, and let's start with meat. And what does that take? Well, it takes a vertical integration of facilitation.
Speaker 5:Where does it start? It starts on the water table, and then it starts in the soil, and then starts in the forage, and then it starts with the cow. And but in the beginning of the cow, it started with the genetics. And then, you know, after the genetics, you get you get to build a herd. And then once you have your herd that you wanna bring to fruition as far as the best beef in the world, then you have to have that producer.
Speaker 5:You have, certain producers that are wholesale producers, or you have producers that take that cow all the way to the fork. Then after that, you have a processing center. And from that processing center, it gets packaged, and then it gets delivered. And who does the shipping? Who's in control of that shipping?
Speaker 5:And, you know, aggregated distribution. And so there's so many touch points that, you know, the average consumer just doesn't know. But what we saw in the within the beef initiative with our founders, Cole Bolton of K and C cattle, Jason Rick of Rick Ranches, We had some deep conversations in the beginning, and we knew that we had to basically create this parallel system that did the same, and that's what we've done. So from the beginning of the genetics of the cow to the water table, you're gonna know everything about that because we have producers, and that's who we operate with. And we have new producers coming in daily.
Speaker 5:And anybody that's selling beef from farm to table in The United States can now come through, you know, the gates of the beef initiative. And we've built that basically entry point to where they can have access to, like, our inputs that make those meatballs even better. And we can tell you how those meatballs were made. We have processing centers that do make, you know, jerky, all of the different meat byproducts, tallow skin care, you know, we're taking the whole cow and bringing it back to the consumer here in a local community based way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love it. That's exactly why I wanted to draw attention to what you guys are doing because it seems like you're you're doing all the right things. And so for me as a consumer, if I wanna support what you're doing and how you're supporting ranchers, I go to beefmaps.com and I find my local ranch when I order beef. Is that my the best way I can vote?
Speaker 5:Yeah. There's a lot of entry points, and I'm gonna tell anybody that's interested in what we're doing. And, you know, we have doctor Sean Baker on there right now. And one thing that we're missing in The United States Of America is how do you find, you know, the ranchers through website, apps, through the Internet. And, you know, Sean Baker was the first one.
Speaker 5:I said, hey, Sean. Let's start tagging the ranchers, you know, the people that are supplying your beef so everybody can know and go support that same rancher if they find out that they can establish a relationship with them. And so we have to talk about that. How do you find access to ranchers in The United States right now? Facebook is a horrible place for ranchers, but it's the number one plat platform that they have to sell beef.
Speaker 5:And so what we've done is we have a campaign, and it's gonna be a forever campaign, and it's savebeef.org. And what that does is it gives you an entry point to everything that we're doing right now, and it's a good fill out form. But we've also got of course, if you wanna buy beef right now, you go to welcome to beef.com, and you can get and by now, you can find your ranchers through that. That's kinda who we're working with independently through that vertical integration of ecommerce. And if you wanna go to beefmaps.com, we've got hundreds of, producers out in.
Speaker 5:They're that first touch point of being discovered, and then they come to the facilitation of us taking them to market in a better way. So that's right there is, you know, save beef Org is a very important campaign. We've got a wonderful opportunity, and I can talk about that here in a little bit.
Speaker 1:Well, I know that you guys are trying to buy beef.com. Is that can we help with that? Can we call Yeah. That can can that be a call to action and you tell us why we need to
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To win that?
Speaker 5:Well, let's look at agriculture as a whole. Okay. You know, where are we captured in agriculture? Where do we not have true market access to money, to software, to that platform on the Internet that doesn't get censored because they're gonna censor beef? Data attributes are changing globally.
Speaker 5:And so if you look about how they sense your beef and food products and everything, you know, we had the opportunity. It fell in my lap. And right now, I'm like the number one person that can go after beef.com. And so we had to build the team, and we're going after beef.com, and we're offering equity shares to go after that. And so if you go through our campaign save beef Org, you know, what we're doing a lot of people think that we just wanna sell beef through beef.com.
Speaker 5:No. It's bold economic efficiencies into the future. And if you look at the cattle industry and the food industry as a whole, you look at the Maha movement, we're going to be developing software. We're going to be, front leading AI into the new agricultural systems that will be built. And, you know, we're going to be providing access to regenerative inputs.
Speaker 5:Anything that touches the cow or the food industry, we will develop through four words. I call it a decentralized global treaty that we can take ownership of, and then we can give every cattle rancher and every consumer in America or across the world access to some of the best quality clean facilitation of clean food moving forward. So beef.com is a big one. It's fast moving right now. And like I said, it fell into our lap.
Speaker 5:We're encouraging everybody to be a part of this investment strategy. We're gonna have an equity type of ownership that will be a kind of a crowd source base. And then we have a lot of good discussions going on right now across the globe that people are looking at what we're doing within the regenerative inputs, what we're doing with our discussions on water and water filtration. And so there's so much interest that we're trying to build a massive team that we can kinda go after this and kinda rewrite history a little bit and turn the cattle industry into an enterprise wide solution of education for both consumers and educator. And my biggest thing, of course, is bringing in health and medical.
Speaker 5:And we've got beef now that we've been testing, you know, within universities for decades, and we're gonna redefine what you should look at as far as beef and the nutrition. You know, you have the Mediterranean diet. You have all this talk of cholesterol and omega threes, omega sixes. Well, we're gonna be grading beef a different way in the beef initiative, and that's something that I've been doing globally and locally here in The United States. And we've got all the studies.
Speaker 5:We've got the discussions going on with the right, basically, partners to where we can build, you know, the health alliance along with the regenerative input alliance, the facilitation of aggregated beef across The United States that it stays home and local. I had a post a couple weeks ago. I said, you know, we need to build out 50 USDA branded sovereign beef lines in 50 states, and we can do that now through the gates of the beef initiative in our savebeef.org campaign.
Speaker 1:Sounds like you guys are innovating. I am such a fan. You know, I grew up in Cupertino, and so we kind of worship innovation and technology, but it sounds like you're changing the paradigm. And if anybody wants to invest in beef infrastructure, where can they go? And do you do microfinancing for people who are like, you know, the silver investors rather than the gold investors?
Speaker 5:Yeah. And that's kinda where we are within the negotiations and how we're building out those layers. Once again, it's savebeef.org. We're trying to make it as simple as possible. And once you've signed up through savebeef.org, you're gonna get everything from us.
Speaker 5:But as today, if you just wanna go and buy beef, it's welcome to beef.com. And we're a startup company. And whenever I was in big tech in Austin, I was very fortunate to work for several startup companies. But one of them, we started with $1,500. I wasn't part of that team.
Speaker 5:I wish I had been. But, you know, in the end, they sold for a half a billion dollars to Charles Schwab and it was very innovative during that time. You know, if I look at agriculture and big tech from where I come from, we're in a massive transformation of technology, money, food, awareness of poisons that have been poisonous, but also health. And so if we look at this facilitation of a vertical integration, I call it kind of the spiral D. N.
Speaker 5:A. Of life in us, all of us cow ranchers and us cowboys and cowgirls. Well, we know what we're doing, and we need basically to educate you. And we want you to educate us on what you need. And we haven't had that market access and that type of peer to peer communication since I grew up here in the Texas Panhandle.
Speaker 5:But now with this transformation of all of these different pillars, I mean, this is a call to action. It is happening now, and that's why we're going after beef.com.
Speaker 1:Bravo. I'm I'm very excited for you guys. That that is gonna be amazing when you get it. I wanna bring in part of your team. I know that June, who's heading the beef initiative x page, brought up, ranch mama Shannon.
Speaker 1:I was I was hoping I could ask June a couple questions, and then we can just get to know your team, Slim.
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah. Please. I mean, because I started this in a pickup truck many years ago. And, you know, I did this with building relationships and handshakes. And this is how we've built this team, and it's the best team that anybody could ever hope for.
Speaker 5:So the more people that on this team now that can have a voice like I had in the beginning is how this gets viral and everybody really gets to spread the wealth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Saving America is gonna take a team. That's for sure. And you've attracted some amazing people starting with June. And, June, I really appreciate the fact that you're kind of this urban guy.
Speaker 1:Like, Slim is from West Texas, but you came from Philly. And I know you guys have someone, is it Ajala, you to introduce the concept of, like, what's going on in the cities in terms of their access to food in line, and how was it for you when you're growing up in Philly?
Speaker 10:Thank you, Alana. This has been such a good conversation, and it's just such a pleasure to be here representing health through beef and through the cow. And I like to say that I really didn't see a cow my entire life up until really I met Texas Slim and the beef. I like this at all being in agriculture. But something that I learned from the work that I've been doing with Texas Slim and Ranch Mama Shannon and everybody else is that agriculture is what we all share from the city to the country, from Thailand to Louisiana to the tundras in Russia.
Speaker 10:In fact, if you zoom out on beefmaps.com, you're gonna see a rancher in the middle of the tundra in Russia. So anywhere you go on this planet is cattle country, and we all have a shared agricultural heritage. And coming from Philadelphia, you know, I grew up pretty rough. My mom was addicted to drugs and had abusive boyfriends and stuff like that. My father's a very good man, but, you know, my mom always struggled.
Speaker 10:And fortunately, she passed away back in 02/2009. She passed away from congestive heart failure, which, you know, I think if you were to ask Sean Baker what that is, that's essentially a nutritional starvation. The heart doesn't just fail like that. She liked to eat a lot of processed food. She grew up eating it.
Speaker 10:As a teenager, of course, started growing up eating it. It became the norm. She didn't cook much. She made a lot of microwave meals for me as a kid. The one thing I do remember her making a lot of was those those damn cinnamon buns.
Speaker 10:They're so good though. Right? But she was really good at making those cinnamon buns. But when she did cook, she cooked with vegetable oil. Like everybody in America these days, they all cook with vegetable oil.
Speaker 10:Right? And when I met Texas Slim, I was going down a path that, you know, I was looking for solutions to why there was so much poverty around me, why my family seemed to be trapped in this cycle of illness and drugs and poverty and all the stuff that comes with growing up as a generationally poor kid. When I met Texas Slimming the Beef Initiative, he taught me about how our moms used to cook with tallow, and they didn't have to think about the poisons that they would potentially be serving their children. They didn't have to think about the food at all because it was just food. It was just real.
Speaker 10:And so coming from Philadelphia, you know, my political history, of course, is super deep left. But I started to transform when I met Slim, when I became involved with the beef initiative because I started to understand that when we removed the cow from our environment, from our communities, and from our families, that is when everything started to self destruct. And when I learned how to add the cow back to my life about two and a half years ago, my mental health, my physical health, everything changed. And so I started going back a little bit deeper. And, of course, you could probably imagine I have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder.
Speaker 10:And while Slim's out here with the message of he's gonna save some children's lives, my message is I'm gonna save the mom's life because I never got a chance to save mine. And so this is what my journey is about, and this is what I think everybody in the city's journey should be about as well. Because when you add the cow back to the environment, when you shake your ranchers' hands, all of the problems that you've ever known start to disappear. And it's not because you got a good job. It's not because you got set up in the right it's simply because you started your day with beef and not with cereal.
Speaker 10:It's the very first step. And so if to me, it fixes the body, it fixes the mind, it fixes the soul. I became close to God after I started eating more beef. It opened up everything that I thought did not exist in my life. And so that's really where my city thing comes from and where I see our rural producers as being the key to solving our city's problems.
Speaker 10:And so when I hear people in the city talk crap about rural America these days, it does not fly with me. And when I hear rural producers talking crap about the city, that doesn't fly with me either because we are all part of one nation. This is one community. And when you look on beefmaps.com and you zoom in New York City, you're gonna see about five or six ranches right outside of it. And I think that brings us up to our dear friend, Ajala Efem.
Speaker 10:Ajala, she spoke at the Metabolic Revolution Conference in DC last year. She's got an extremely powerful story. She's got the sweetest voice in the world. One of these days, we're gonna get Texas Slim from the dirt roads of West Texas and a Jala FM from the streets of the South Bronx in a conversation, and everyone's just going to have their hearts melted because it's exactly the solution that we're all looking for. We are not divided like we think we are, and beef heals.
Speaker 10:And so Ajala, she gave a great talk at the Metabolic Revolution, and I hit her up maybe a couple months later after I saw it. And I invited her to just become a little bit more deeply involved with what we're doing. And she, of course, was absolutely thrilled to start to build her end of her career out, right, as an inner city health counselor, essentially, and that's what she does on the side there. So, yeah, 2025 is going to be a very, very interesting year for all of us, and I think that there is a great awakening occurring. And the city is part of this cattle industry.
Speaker 10:Philadelphia is part of this cattle industry. North Philly is part of the cattle industry. Kensington, Philadelphia and the opioid crisis is part of this cattle industry, and beef can heal this.
Speaker 1:Amen. So I wanna just say my friend Mia is in the audience and she helps people with, using a ketogenic diet for for mental health. And so I posted in the nest tomorrow night, Georgia Eid, who's a Harvard psychiatrist. She's doing a meetup with Mia and, Steven, who's also listening right now. They've got an event tomorrow night.
Speaker 1:So if anybody's dealing with a mental health kind of issue, and I know a lot of people use carnivore and keto to heal that, and they're gonna explain the science and why, and there's a community there. So on your point about saving moms, saving moms means saving mental health, and there's, like, a mechanism to that. There's strategies to we gotta protect our moms because they raise the future. And thank you for sharing that story. It's like so many
Speaker 5:One real quick just to feed off of, what June said and what you just brought up as far as reference points. You know, through the foundation as well, we're creating something called the Wendy whispers program. It's about mental health awareness and access for, you know, those moms and those children. We're gonna have stuff like horse whispering. We have a horse that we save from slaughter that Brianna Saggdahl, and her name's Peaches, and we're gonna bring her to Texas.
Speaker 5:And so we're gonna have all kinds of different things that are mind, body, and spirit, and that's the type of things that we can do through the foundation, especially with all of the product that we have and the lifestyle. And, you know, in The United States Of America, we used to stay very close to livestock at a very young age. And listen to June, you know, he didn't even he wasn't around a cow his whole life. We've gotta get back to the farm in every which way we can.
Speaker 10:And there's a few folks in the crowd that I'd like to point out, but one in particular, someone who's really just got the passion to bring people back to the ranch and to tell the stories from the ranch. And you spoke about her briefly earlier, Alana, and that's ranch mama Shannon. Ranch Mama is from Ebersole Cattle Co up in Southern Iowa, and, she is a first generation rancher. And she has just bring so much to the table as far as how we connect to each other as humans because it's not just about buying beef. We've had a few of these conversations recently, and people are, of course, they're confused about beef.
Speaker 10:They don't know how to talk about beef. I would say that there's an attitude adjustment that needs to be made that consumers need to make themselves when approaching producers. Guys, we have lost a 41,000 family farms in the last five years. We have sixty seven years until the last family farm is gone. Are you really going to go to the farmer's market and harass your rancher about grass fed beef?
Speaker 10:Do you even know what grass fed beef means? I didn't grow up around cows. But since I have started seeing cows, I'd never met a cow that didn't like grass. So ranch mama does this fantastic job of leveling the playing field for consumers, leveling the playing field for ranchers, and really just bringing us all to the hearth, right, to the home. And that's where Ranch Mama really shines.
Speaker 10:So I just wanted to introduce Ranch Mama and bring her up to the stage to say hello and anything else.
Speaker 1:Hey. Welcome, Ranch Mama. Hey, Shannon.
Speaker 11:Hey. Thank you guys for inviting me on tonight. Like June said, I am a first generation rancher, and I think that connection is huge. We've all had our own story, how we came to this, but I also was raised in a household where Hamburger Helper was a home cooked meal. And so I've taken that through my life, and now I teach people how to cook real food in easy, simple ways.
Speaker 11:And like Sim always says, shake your rancher's hand. I help you do that virtually now. I like to tell the story straight from the ranch, share all the crazy things that happened, all the silly things that happened, and connecting with your rancher directly is something that is so fulfilling. Getting to know ranchers like me at Eversold Cattle Co and all the ranchers that are on beef maps. I think tonight we've got Red Banks here.
Speaker 11:We've got Rattlesnake, Marcy from Rattlesnake in the crowd. Getting to know all of us will make the world of difference, and you don't have to live right next to your rancher. You can get grass fed, grain fed, whatever type of beef you like. You can get it shipped straight to your door, And we make that process simple and easy. Whether you go to beef maps or whether you go to welcometobeef.com, I'm gonna take you through that journey.
Speaker 11:If you go to welcometo beef, I'm gonna teach you and show you stories from every single ranch. And you might even catch some crazy clips of me dancing in the pasture, rotating heifers and my crocs out in the pasture, just real life things that we go through. And it shows how dedicated each and every one of our ranchers is to improving our own health and your health through feeding people.
Speaker 1:I love it. I bet it's a beautiful lifestyle. It's just a very demanding lifestyle. And so to have some support and some attention and just to know that there's people out there that care whether or not you exist and just care that the about the people who are actually making the food that sustains them and that helps heal their chronic illness, I think is an important part of this.
Speaker 11:It truly is. And Walmart doesn't care necessarily when you purchase your shopping cart full of groceries each week, but literally every one of us ranchers celebrates and thinks of your family every day as we are outside when it's minus eleven like it was this morning.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah. You guys still have to work. You still have to get out there. And I do digital marketing and branding, and I am always inside if I don't go outside if I'm cool, but you still have to.
Speaker 1:But I enjoy my stakes regardless, and it just it means a lot. If you never hear it, thank you.
Speaker 5:And, you know, one thing Well,
Speaker 1:thank you.
Speaker 5:And another thing to back up what Shanna is talking about, and, you know, you look at pop culture, and I think our first team that I started with, I said, hey. We're gonna go turn pop culture on its head. Well, that means lifestyle. Let's make this type of lifestyle. What's the number one rated TV show?
Speaker 5:Yellowstone. Well, that's not touches on ranching, but it's a very shallow entry point of what really goes on out there. And, you know, when the beef initiative and June and I work in the production that we've been doing, we're gonna bring everybody within a digital production to the ranch too. Not everybody can get out of the city. Not everybody can go visit Remnos Ranch in Montana or Rick Ranches in Colorado or K and C cattle down there in South Texas or up here in West Texas.
Speaker 5:You have so many different ranches up here, but we really wanna bring people to where they can have market access. And Jason Rick, he's one of the founding pioneers of the beef initiative. Well, in the beginning, he just you know, he had a small herd and had a couple of hundred acres, and he was stewarding 4,000. Well, now he has a Airbnb lodge, a ranch house, a quarters house. He has an internship that he's building out.
Speaker 5:And so people want access to that. And, you know, we're looking at, you know, I call it the cradle of health where he's at. And, you know, that's in the Norfolk Valley Of Colorado. And, you know, a place like Rick Ranches is a perfect place for the whole world to come in and get the vertical integration of health and food and even money. And so, you know, how do you become a first generation rancher?
Speaker 5:That's what Jason Rick is. And so we have so many opportunities to do a production of this as well. And that really creates a new lifestyle for a lot of people and they're getting healthy and enjoying it as they're basically facilitating change.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll tell you, you can't really go on vacation with kids to too many places anymore because you don't know if they're gonna be kidnapped or trafficked or, you know, overexposed to kind of dangerous elements and things that they shouldn't see. And so I would imagine that to have a type of a retreat for families to go and be together and, you know, that they're safe would be like, there's so much opportunity there.
Speaker 5:Yeah. We had a definitive summit at Rick Ranches. It was our second one. And I said, hey, Jason. You wanna have a conference?
Speaker 5:And he's like, well, how? And I said, well, start cleaning up, and here we go. And we pulled it off. But the moral of the story is that we have people that come to these conferences, and we've had people get married. People have had children.
Speaker 5:People still keep in touch with us. People are, of course, buying all of their food from Jason now. And Jason drives all the way from his ranch to Denver and delivers beef. And so it's a magical time right now because everybody can now come in through our gates that we've created. Just say we need to open up 10,000 gates across The United States and it needs to happen now.
Speaker 1:Well, I support that. I wanna invite audience members to ask questions. I like to keep these at around two hours for the sake of the podcast. That seems to be a sweet spot. Roughly twenty minutes.
Speaker 1:If you guys are in the audience listening and you wanna ask a question or you wanna say hi or you wanna introduce, like, tell your story just briefly.
Speaker 5:As we sit here, you know, this is my job now, you know, the founder of the beef initiative, and to represent all of our producers, especially our founding members of the beef initiatives. We're under attack, folks, and there's a lot of confusion out there. And we've gotta understand that this is a call to action. And we have, doctor Brook Miller. He's past president of the US Cattlemen's Association.
Speaker 5:And we had a conference out at his place at Ginger Hill in Virginia. And we have deep talks. We provide a lot of beef intelligence. We have Didi. He's on here right now.
Speaker 5:He's out there in Mississippi. He's a small producer. We've got a very good chance that we're gonna lose 30 to 40% of our producers if we don't really take action right now. And so people don't understand that we've got our lowest inventory of cattle right now that we've had in over seventy years. I just say it's ever.
Speaker 5:And so how long does it take to build a herd, folks? And so if you look at our supply, when I first started the beef initiative, I said they're gonna turn beef into caviar, and they're going to basically inject a new food product. I call it a fake commodity. This is happening. They've spent billions of dollars to basically inject a new food system.
Speaker 5:It's not gonna stop just because we have a new administration. Too much money has been spent, and there's gonna be after effect of all of this. And if you look at where we are within the low supply of inventory of cattle, what happens when a nation figures out that beef is gonna be their best food product? It's time to act now to really take us serious at this point in time. Money's dried up as well.
Speaker 5:How do you build a herd with no money? And so with their plans and what they've done across this globe, they've culled herds. They're culling chickens. The last USDA person that just got kicked out of her office, miss Wong, How many birds did she kill? 300,000,000, I think it is.
Speaker 5:Something I can't even remember. It's such an astronomical number. But if you look at how they're attacking animal protein as a whole, where do we get most of our pork? Well, that's from China. What are they doing to their pork?
Speaker 5:They got vaccines in it. And, you know, you look at what we've done in the beef initiative. We don't vaccine. We don't have to use that stuff. We are separate from that system.
Speaker 5:And there's gonna be a big tsunami, like I said before, of people kind of flooding in. This is not like I'm not being clairvoyant here. This is what we report on every day within the beef initiative. We have research analysts. And so with this movement that's coming and if you can really look at the maps and kind of really understand what's going on in real time, we're gonna have a lot of changes in agriculture this year as well.
Speaker 5:And so it's time to really investigate and study the cow. And it's a fun, exciting kind of research that you can do. And it takes you into a lot of discovery that really does help your family out as a whole. And if you look at animal protein, why is the cow basically not captured the way that they have poultry and hog? Well, it's because of our producers and we stuck together and the cow is a different beast and it's majestic and this is something that is the basically foundation of our food supply in The United States Of America.
Speaker 1:It is. Amen. Noah was here first. Noah, do you wanna ask something? Say something.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Well, I've been following Sean Baker and a handful of the other carnivore people for a while. I grew up in Alaska and got spoiled with fresh wild food. And then when I was a teenager, I was in Northern California, and my parents were struggling a little bit. I fed me whatever grocery store or vegetables was convenient for them.
Speaker 7:But luckily, when I was a little bit older, in my early twenties, we had this door to door meat salesman guy who was selling us, like, a quarter cow at a time, and that really improved my diet a lot. And I've gone back and forth trying some different diets, but I always felt better on carnivore. And it's hard for me personally, just with the sugar cravings, carb cravings. I'm interested in in maintaining it, and occasionally, I'm not perfect. I do have, like, some carbs here and there.
Speaker 7:And I was looking through some of the some of your websites. I have a couple of questions about that, but I recently just started a company making egg chips. I'm in Austin. I'm very interested in, in connecting with some people around here and subscribing to some local ranches. I've been here for about four years, you know, just buying regular grocery steaks.
Speaker 7:But getting on that quarter cow or half cow subscription, I think, is a immediate plan. And I'm curious if anyone's interested in talking a little bit about eggs, considering my new company. And then, also looking at this website, it looks like on the beef initiative, you can just subscribe to some of these packages from various forms. And and is that the way to go if you're just new to this space?
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. If you've got a post where we can see your company and you can put it in the nest, you just go to the post itself. So it has to be a post if you wanna share a link up in the nest. I don't know if you can see that, but I've got a bunch of other links like the mental health link, and you go to the post itself that you tweeted out in your feed, and then there's a share button.
Speaker 1:And then at the very top, it'll say, share to it'll be like Alana Newman's space or the eBeef To Heal America space, and you put it there, and then that'll put it in the nest.
Speaker 7:Alright. I'm
Speaker 1:taking a
Speaker 7:look now. So if I go to my my feed, my post, I might have done it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the name of your company?
Speaker 7:It's margos chips or eggchips.com.
Speaker 1:Alright. Slim, do you have anything to say about eggs? I know that you represent, just a lot of people in agriculture.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, let's let's look at what they're doing to eggs and what's a real egg anymore. Right? And so there's a lot of ways, you know, to have access to eggs, but one thing to point out, you know, everything we do you know, I started with cattle. I started with beef because I come from a cattle country, but this is about purity of food and having market access to everything.
Speaker 5:And, you know, what you find is sometimes you don't have access to a rancher, but you have somebody that's making eggs in your community. And, you know, that creates a really good connection. Well, they're gonna know people that have butter. They're gonna know people that have lamb, hog, beef. And so that's the facilitation that happens, and anybody that's into this purity of food, that's what the beef initiative is about.
Speaker 5:And it's we're gonna become my dream, and, you know, it does it for a visual for people to become the Amazon of food, and that's what this is. It's a collaboration between so many cross industries, but they're all the same. It's about purity, and it's about eating the earth again, and we've forgotten that. And, you know, you look at poultry, they're a great fertilizer for regenerative grazing, and there's so much that happens within livestock itself. And people need to be close to the egg, just like we've talked about, be close to the cow.
Speaker 5:Collaboration, building, and go ahead.
Speaker 7:What do you recommend, you know, I'm just getting involved for the first time, just subscribing on the beef initiative as a as a way to kinda get started to one of the Yeah. You local ranges. And
Speaker 5:You can reach out to info@beefinitiative.com, and we can facilitate that for sure.
Speaker 7:Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Just personally, I know we buy quite a lot. My family and, egg company, you know, we just started it.
Speaker 7:We're buying fully, you know, pure eggs. You know, not we're not adding any preservatives, so it's a %. It's egg and and a little bit of no fat milk and citric acid. That's it. So it's you know, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of eggs, trying to kinda replace potato chips for, make people more healthy.
Speaker 7:That's our goal on a kinda bigger scale. But we're we have talked to a couple of people. We've got, somebody involved with, Vital Farms. And, we do wanna have, like, local farms, you know, giving us our eggs a little bit hard because USDA has to certify each production step. So right now, we're going through kind of the more, you know, mainstream channels for inventory.
Speaker 7:But it's you know, we're we are going after, like, potato chips. So I feel like that's the kind of step in the right direction even though we're not quite super local. Like, I agree with you. That is the ultimate goal. And now we're going for, halfway there if we can get to, healthy snack food.
Speaker 1:Bravo, Noah. Didi, your hand's up. Welcome to the speaker salon.
Speaker 8:Oh, thanks, Alana. I appreciate it. I just wanna give my shout out to the beef initiative and, Texas Slim, and I really can't you you just can't get run ranch mama there. How you doing, darling? I got a little different situation here.
Speaker 8:I'm a, cow calf producer is what I am. I run a certain amount of, female cattle and, we, you know, have calves every year and grow them up and get them to a weight and then, they travel home. The producer is where it starts. And, you know, a lot of people have when you say a rancher, you got people I call myself a cattle farmer. Of course, you got ranches out there.
Speaker 8:I mean, first thing I think of when, you know, I say, well, cattle ranch, and I'm thinking, oh my god. You know, the four sixes, John Chisholm, like you see on the movies and stuff like that. It's it's not like that. A little more than 80% of your total producers in The US are considered small producers, which means they have around 50 head of breedable cows or less. So abundance of where your inventory comes from is there, But what easier way to get somebody out of business than to start small with the smaller people?
Speaker 8:So I have a few things that I really get after. You know, I'm real hot about the EID tags. Slim knows this. The, vaccinations, a lot of other things that's going into it. I'm big on cool, which is country of origin labeling.
Speaker 8:The American consumer needs to know. They need a choice, and we're the ones out here that has to educate them and let them know that. So, I mean, my timeline is full of stuff like that. We held a space the other night that had a little over 600 and, I think, 69 people in it. Very educational, slim, and Brent Kenzie from our was there and educated a lot of people.
Speaker 8:But it starts I mean, the wheel of the cattle producer folks, there's no such thing as a vacation. You can forget it. Sleep's a privilege. There's nothing like having to walk out in four, five, six inches of snow when it's, zero degrees outside and and pull a cap to save the cap and save the mama. But that's what you sign up for.
Speaker 8:You know, we're a hearty bunch. I'm so proud to be part of it. I just wanted to come on and say thank you again to Texas Slim for everything he's doing to the beef initiative. Brianna Seagdale, I mean, I love that woman to death. Do anything in the world for her, but, I'm a keep harping on on, the regulation part of it, Washington part of it, the lobbyists that are trying to absolutely destroy the, small producers and basically trying to destroy the beef industry in general.
Speaker 8:It's gonna be a war. And, there's no doubt about it. But the more we educate, the more the consumer out there, the average American gets involved, and the better educated they get, the easier this war is gonna be. So a lot of thank you, darling, and, I appreciate the opportunity to talk.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. And thank you for all the not sleeping and getting up and going out in the cold. It I respect you so much. Thank you for feeding us.
Speaker 5:Let's talk about Didi, the producer, and what he's up against. He doesn't really need to take beef to market. He needs or to table. He needs to take it to market in a either a different way or a way that he's not trapped. And he talked about the country of origin labeling.
Speaker 5:Most people look at labels, and what do they see? They see property of The USA. And so that's something that nobody really understands is that they're not eating American beef. And so how do we get somebody like Didi to where he can, you know, do herd share programs, and he can already have a client base that he doesn't have to go to market the way that he has to go to market. At least have that other bid that we're we're talking about because that's where they're hitting us.
Speaker 5:It's, if you look at hog farming in United States, Tyson, I got calls one day. There were 60 families that were put out of business overnight, and that's what they're trying to do to the cattle industry. And they hit the small family farms and ranches. And we say ranch because, you know, we have to look at cattle ranching. You have grass farmers, cattle farmers, you have beef producers, you have cattle ranchers, you have ranchers, and so you have producers.
Speaker 5:We have to learn the lingo, the pattern language. Where are the pivot points for somebody like Didi? And where's the pivot point for somebody like the four sixes? You look at a ranch shape like the four sixes, they're not selling beef cattle anymore. That's not where they get their money.
Speaker 5:And XIT Ranch. You know, they're doing quarter horses. They do sell some beef, but not like they did in the beginning. So we can invert that what's been taken away from us, but it goes through basically knowing somebody like Didi.
Speaker 1:Alright. Let's do Steven, Mia, and then Republic. Steven, welcome to Speaker Salon.
Speaker 12:Hello. How's everyone doing?
Speaker 9:Good.
Speaker 1:Great. Thanks for
Speaker 12:having me. I just wanted to quickly share how beef has healed my brain. I eat beef for my mental health, and I have a unique approach that I call HFBO or high fat beef only, which is a mixture of the LION diet, which is meat, salt, and water. And it's combined with a therapeutic or a medical ketogenic diet at a four to one ratio. So that's just like what is used for epilepsy.
Speaker 12:So I aim to keep my fat at or above 90% on most days, but because I wanna lift weights and sprint and still try to build muscle even on a low protein diet, I cycle my protein and I have higher days of beef intake. And today, thanks to a high fat beef only diet, I am in remission from bipolar disorder and substance abuse. This is for four years now, and I owe it all to the healing power of beef.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. I'm so happy to hear that.
Speaker 5:And we we hear so many stories like that. People will usually find the beef initiative because of health, to be honest with you. And we have so many testimonies that we love to hear the testimonies. But one thing that people need to understand, you know, we need to look at beef and how clean is that beef, not understanding what's going on within the facilitation of that meat product in the end. Everybody that's relying on this nutrition, this newfound nutrition for many, we we need to bring awareness.
Speaker 5:You know? Everybody listens to their podcast or their influencers, their whoever it is leading the charge in, you know, nutrition and carnivore, but we need to make sure that everybody that does have a voice here that really does start pointing to where the market access is to the better beef than, you know, something at the store that we really don't know what's in anymore.
Speaker 1:Steven, you got a community here on Twitter, don't you, where a lot of people a carnivore community, do you wanna point people to that?
Speaker 12:It's not so much a carnivore based community. The one that I'm running is ketotherapy for mental health. What you'll find is people are coming to beef because it heals the body, it heals the brain. So there are a lot of carnivores in there, but it's not a carnivore focused group. The name of the group is Ketotherapy for Mental Health.
Speaker 1:Bravo. Thank you for starting that.
Speaker 12:The HFBO Facebook group, which is dedicated to a high fat diet, but predominantly people are eating beef or ruminant animals in there as well.
Speaker 1:And don't you help kids? Like, aren't you helping your daughter? You've got strategies for parents?
Speaker 12:Sure. Yeah. I have an eight year old, and she's got a lot of me and her, for better or for worse. So she's got OCD and ADHD, and we've been using a ketogenic diet on her for
Speaker 8:year and a half, and we've seen great improvements as well with her.
Speaker 9:Bravo. I'm so happy to hear that. Thank you
Speaker 1:for being on here. That's actually a good segue to Mia. We've known each other a long time. You were actually a featured guest in a previous episode. So welcome again.
Speaker 1:You got something going on tomorrow, and I posted that in the nest. Do you wanna tell us about that?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Sure. So tomorrow, it's actually about Steven because Steven has a an up and coming podcast, and he recently landed quite a spectacular guest, which is doctor Georgia Eid. And so what I've done through my meetup platform, my meetup groups, is I was just promoting his live premiere, which will happen on YouTube. And doctor Georgia E will actually be live in the chat, so people will be able to interact with her live while we're all watching this interview that Steven did with her about a month ago.
Speaker 9:We'll all be watching it for the first time, including Georgia, and people will be able to ask her questions, about metabolic therapies, specifically, usually, keto or carnivore for mental health. She's actually a big proponent of beef. I've taken her course, and she's not shy about saying how there's a big difference between having beef in your diet, going low carb or keto, and moving over to carnivore. She made a point in the course to say there's a big difference between what can be healed sometimes from just going from keto to full blown carnivore. So it's actually about Steven, but Steven and his amazing podcast featuring, this illustrious doctor.
Speaker 9:So that's that's what you're referring to. But, anyway, I have my own story that I would just like to share briefly. First, I wanna thank all of these wonderful stewards of beef in this space because for me, access to beef and beef in my everyday life is kind of life or death. Now I'm kind of somewhere between keto and carnivore, meaning I don't really eat vegetables at all, but I'm not full carnivore. But and this is six and a half years, by the way.
Speaker 9:I've I've been on a in the ketogenic lifestyle, but it's something that saved my life. But along the way, I noticed that if I did a beef heavy ketogenic diet, that my brain would function at its best. I could recall details and memories, and I wouldn't lose my train of thought. I also have a very long history of all these different learning disabilities, which I believe are trauma based, honestly. But being beef heavy specifically helps me to definitely mitigate all of that and stabilize my nervous system and gives me energy.
Speaker 9:I don't, if I'm doing my diet right, I don't even yawn, and my energy is sustainable. Now if I go to just eating a keto with, like, chicken and fish and and occasional beef, it just doesn't work the same. So for me, beef is such a cornerstone of my second chance at life, quite frankly. And so although, yes, I'm keto, sometimes you don't need to even go that far. And my son, he's 26, he's an example.
Speaker 9:So he's lower carb, so maybe under one hundred, and I noticed with him that he's always had anger issues, he's had some depression, and a tendency to dissociate. When I started to implement this kind of beef heavy diet for him, even though he was still higher carb, wasn't quite keto, kind of comes in and out of ketosis, he goes from this angry jerk, just someone you don't wanna live with, to someone who is very reasonable. He's able to watch his tongue. He's able to think before he acts and, you know, think before he speaks. So sometimes you don't even have to go keto or carnivore.
Speaker 9:If you just clean up a little bit, you lower the carbs a bit, and you add in wonderful beef, which is just a mega multivitamin. People don't understand this. They ask, well, if you only eat beef, how are you getting your nutrients? And I it's hard for me not to roll my eyes because it is a powerful multivitamin. So I again, I thank all of these wonderful people that are fighting so hard to save beef ranching in America.
Speaker 9:You really this is like I said, it's a life or death thing for me. I'm recovered from bipolar, very terrible deep depressions of suicide suicidality. Same thing with my my son, and specifically using beef as our medicine has saved us. I'm just grateful for all of you.
Speaker 1:Mia, are you saying that we don't have a toxic masculinity problem, but we have an inflammation and veganism problem?
Speaker 9:Maybe.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing your story. You guys, I have a previous episode. It's, metabolism and mental health that Mia did. You can hear, like, her whole story. It's really remarkable.
Speaker 1:And, also, if you know anybody with a mental health problem or trauma problem, I actually hired Mia as
Speaker 2:a
Speaker 1:coach for a family member, to help them with bipolar disorder, and she figured out stuff that I would have never, like, figured out on our own. And so getting people to actually get into therapeutic ketosis, she's a really wonderful resource. So recover with Mia is her handle, and I definitely, like, vouch for her. She's so cute. You're welcome.
Speaker 1:Republican, thank you for your hand up. Do you wanna ask your question or comment?
Speaker 4:Thank you so much, you guys. So singing my tune. You guys are singing my tune. So I followed you, Texas Slim and Atlanta and, of course, the beef initiative. If you see on my timeline, personally, even though I'm a coffee roaster, I actually am an old school ranch kid, born and raised on the ranch, quite literally born on the ranch, and, wrestled those cows from the time I was born.
Speaker 4:And basically, you know, we all as ranchers or farmers understand the health benefits of being of the land for the land. Right? We understand that. The the hard part of it all has been this massive effort of targeting small farmers for the sake of corporation. And so here we are, and we're having to get the word out quick, fast and strong, you know, and sometimes dirty.
Speaker 4:And, that's okay because farm kids understand dirty. And we have to get it out as loud as possible because not only the massive health benefits for the everyday citizen of our countries, and just so full transparency you guys, I am Canadian, I'm from Alberta, but have always been a massive advocate of North American farms in general. But I just want to be a massive call out to the people that are trying to get from direct from producers to your table. I think that is the most important aspect that we lost for the longest time, have we not? It's been a long time coming.
Speaker 4:Now I sound quite young, but I'm 50 years old, and so it has come full circle. And so I think that's really important for all of us to support the beef initiative, to support Alana in her health, getting that that health network out and supporting Texas Slim and others. I mean, I did put down and please please erase it. If you guys don't want it there, I'll erase it. But I did put down AJ Richards, Keely, Cavelo.
Speaker 4:These are American on one. You know, AJ Richards, of course, is from the farm Org. Him and the ex there's a bunch of information that you can get. And basically, if you can get as many eyes on many platforms as possible direct from the farm, that's the most important part because we cannot keep losing our farms. We cannot keep doing this, you guys.
Speaker 4:We're a 44,000 farms in the last couple years. A 44,000 small farms are gone, poof, just like that because of large corporate entities, because our United States government is not willing to tow the line for the small farmer. Listen, they're targeting our small farms left, right, and center. They're going after them with vicious intent, and they're trying to get rid of them, trying to put so much heavy burden on our small farms. Can you imagine, you guys, if we did not have our small farms right now, just how much people who are talking about with their mental health journeys and their health journeys, what would happen?
Speaker 4:Could you imagine what it would feel like to not be able to have access to this? If we are not loud and we don't shout loud enough and we don't make our voices heard and we don't put money where our mouths are direct to the farmers' pockets, we are going to lose our small farms. So, this is my sort of advocacy is let's not lose the small farms. We've lost, I think in North America in total, I think it's almost a million small farms over the last thirty five years, if I'm correct. Texas slim, I can't remember.
Speaker 4:It's it's a lot. Small farms over and that's a pretty short period of time. So I just want people to please, please, please do the beef initiative. Follow your health journey. See how not only do our ruminants, our beautiful ruminants, which are our cows, our buffalo, our sheep, how they actually help the soil diversity help us get better.
Speaker 4:We can't keep having this our government our Donald Trump right now. Donald Trump, man, come on. You've got this in the bag. You've got Robert Kennedy in the bag. You guys now start advocating for the small farms.
Speaker 4:You promised that you would. Now I'm gonna call you out on it, and I'm just a wee little Canadian up north that doesn't really have the loudest voice. But I will shout as high as and as hard as I can for you guys because we cannot lose these small farms and the beautiful health that comes from our beef or our ruminant industry. So thank you so much. Cheers, and thank you for letting me speak.
Speaker 4:I'm so grateful for you guys, and I'm gonna advocate for you as strong and as hard as possible because I do have family down there. So love you guys. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Thank you. That was wonderful. It's bottom line is it will be a disaster if we don't get our family farms in working order, and Trump can't do it himself. The we elected him. We elected Bobby Kennedy.
Speaker 1:The reason Bobby Kennedy is where he's at is it started with a mom who just wouldn't leave him alone, and she kept showing up with scientific papers at his door until he just couldn't ignore her anymore. And we need to be doing, you know, using everything we got. If it's a voice, if it's a cell phone, if it's money, if it's friends and networks and social skills, like, whatever God gave you, it's time to use it because there's people who like Mia said, it's life and death for them, and this fight's important. The this is the last call if anybody wants to
Speaker 5:say something. My Can I say something real quick, Alana? This is as far as the importance of this and to put perspective, how does things change? Well, we've made food very cheap and very profitable, and so our consumer demand changed thereof for a lot of reasons. So anything that changes in industry, especially food, it's driven by consumer demand.
Speaker 5:And so that comes with education and basically being in the right place. I always tell everybody you gotta change your consumption model. Well, that means audio, video, and food. And if you do that, you're gonna find the right place to be able to change that consumer demand. So it's very important to understand that perspective of where we are.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that. I am going to wrap up because I don't have any requests to speak in the pipeline, but I just wanna thank so much doctor Sean Baker and Texas Slim in June and Shannon and all the guests that came up to be a part of this conversation. You just wonderful to spend an evening with you. For listeners on x, I'd like to invite you to explore our past discussions, which are all related to human ecology by visiting the speaker salon page on Apple or Spotify. And to our podcast listeners out there, I'd like to invite you to join us live and engage with our speakers here on x platform formerly known as Twitter, where every other Thursday we discuss important topics that might just save your life.
Speaker 1:So please support our speakers by following them on social media and buying their books and products and inviting them to your conferences and events. And God bless you all. May you all have all the beef that you ever need. Have a wonderful night.
Creators and Guests
