Charles Mayfield is a regenerative farmer from Eastern Tennessee and the founder of Farrow, a skincare company that produces chemical-free products made with regenerative farming practices. This rip is part science lesson and part exposé on the ills of government regulation driven by corporate greed and malfeasance. Farrow's origin story is a fascinating case study in the power of scratching your own itch and stumbling into a viable business.

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Timestamps

o:oo Intro, boostagrams and sponsors

8:02 - Opening riff
11:54 - Intro to Farrow
16:58 - Why lard
20:16 - Making the first Farrow cream
24:35 - Science behind animal based skin products
26:32 - Sunburns and sunscreen
36:00 - Why is skincare important?
38:05 - Perils of mainstream skincare
43:23 - Fossil fuels
47:38 - Regenerative farming
54:30 - Ignoring the nature of complex systems
1:01:44 - Scalability of regenerative farming
1:04:13 - Red tape
1:12:30 - Vilification of healthy food
1:17:53 - Seed oil origins
1:23:01 - The power of marketing
1:24:39 The call of nature
1:26:26 - Catching on to the lies
1:31:44 - Humans have the power to reverse their destruction
1:33:41 - Allan Savory
1:37:13 - Fixing the money
1:41:12 - More mechanics of regen farming
1:48:43 - Respecting the animal
1:51:30 - Plugs
1:53:57 - Adaptability
1:57:34 - Wrapping up

Transcript

Marty: [00:00:00] House with a sauna.
Charles: Dope. So they got a heated sauna, like the steam sauna, and that's next to the salt pool, which is in front of the pickleball court. I played pickleball for the first time yesterday. How was it?
I've
Marty: never played pickleball. I'm addicted. It seems like an addicting
Charles: sport. I played a little tennis growing up, uh, love ping pong.
And it, it just sits firmly right in the, in between those two. So you're
Marty: saying the meat mafia guys had the best bachelor pad in, in the Austin area. Charles: for now. Um, they're, you know, they're, they're, they're, uh, tenants , but, uh, no, it was, it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. I'll, I'll be there tonight. We've got, this is my last night in, in the central Texas, Austin area.
And you've been here for a while. God, Lord, yeah. Got here a week ago tomorrow. Yeah. So where are you from originally? Uh, east Tennessee. Little town called Athens. [00:01:00] that is, uh, halfway between Knoxville and Chattanooga. Most people know those two cities,
Marty: so mm-hmm. . Yeah. We, uh, we're doing a lot of Bitcoin mining up in northern Tennessee by Palm Mall.
Oh,
Charles: yeah. Yeah. Yep. Um, yeah. Power's, you know, pretty efficient in East Tennessee. We've got TV a a lot of nuclear energy produced and, um, I, I would imagine, yeah. I've been to bi Bitcoin park over in Nashville a couple times. It's an incredible place. Oh, it's so cool. Yeah. It's an, it's a neat spot. Um, Matt and Crew have done a great job.
Are you, you involved with that? Uh,
Marty: not directly. Tangentially. Yeah, sure. I go, I was there two weeks ago now. Okay. At their mining and Energy summit participating. I was there the month before. I forget what that was about, that, the focus of that event. But yeah, I've been to tennis or. Bitcoin park three times the last five
Charles: months.
So yeah. It's a, it's a sweet setup. I, [00:02:00] I, uh, I was, I met Slim over there. They did one of those micro summits. Mm-hmm. , that's where
Marty: I was there in December. Okay. They did, uh, another micro summit there. Oh,
Charles: nice initiative. Nice. Yeah. It's a, it's a neat spot.
Marty: And that's where we first met was
Charles: in Kerrville. We met in Kerrville.
That's right. Yeah. Coming up on a year. When did he, when, when, when was that? June of last year.
Marty: Could've been June. Cause I would've been in Jersey. So it was like, I think it might've been like maybe earlier.
Charles: Yeah, a little bit earlier. May. Yeah. Cuz the Colorado deal he put together was July. July and then Georgia was September.
So, yeah. And
Marty: we were on a
panel
Charles: together. Well, I was moderating the panel. Yeah. Just, just trying to keep you and, and slim going, you know, , uh, that was fun. No, it was good to meet you. That was, uh, that was a drink in front of the fire hose kind of day for, for me, for sure. Mary Care was there. I'm trying to think of who else.[00:03:00]
Um, uh, uh, song Tommy, uh, Jimmy Song. Jimmy Song, yeah. Jimmy Song was there. He's a cool dude to meet. He is,
Marty: um, he's doing a cool thing right now. He's traveling the globe with his family. Is he? Yeah.
Charles: Where are, where are they now? I don't know
where
Marty: they are exactly. I think they might be somewhere in the Middle East, but, um, no, it's funny.
I saw them on the first leg of their trip for the, uh, their leg started at the Riga, Bitcoin, uh, the Bolt to Honey Badger Conference, and I was on the same flight as them. From New York to Riga and it was hilarious seeing him and his wife and their six children home alone through the airport to make the
Charles: flight six kids Wow.
Goals. Good for him.
Marty: So, I mean, the reason we're here, we're here to talk about what you're doing, which is something
scare some [00:04:00] people. Scared my wife, I'm not gonna lie. Oh, fair enough. Is that fair enough? I'm gonna come back with a bunch of skincare products that are made from, um, from Pilar.
Charles: Well, we don't have a bunch of products, but you don't need a bunch when they work really good. Yeah. So
Marty: how'd you get into this?
What do you do? I guess I'm sitting down with Charles Mayfield from Farro. Farro. Pharaoh. Pharaoh? Yep.
Charles: It's the northeast. Uh, it's all good,
Marty: dude. It's a northeast accent coming out. I appreciate it. Uh, how'd you get into this
Charles: man? Uh, the, the short version of the long story is, uh, I made a transition from. , uh, fitness, health and fitness in a gym to promoting health and fitness through food.
And that attracted me to farming. And then I had the shit. Can we, can we curse on this show? Yes. Yes. My apologies. Um, I got a really bad sunburn in 2019, [00:05:00] um, having, you know, a decade plus experience and sort of health nutrition and, um, and seeing people make dietary changes and, and, and have physical changes manifest, lose weight, this goes away, you know, various, we were, we were talking about, you know, certain skin conditions this morning before we hopped on.
And so anyway, I had this experience of, um, being experimental and also really paying attention to the, um, To what happens. And so, yeah, I got really re really sunburned Marty and I came home, my, my now ex and I were going through our divorce. So, um, sort of house is empty. I'm sunburned. I live in a small town, really small town, so all the drug stores are closed.
It's, you know, one of those late nights. And I have, you know, over a decade experience, uh, cooking, healthy cooking and lifestyle stuff. [00:06:00] And I had a jar of lard and my refrigerator that I had rendered from my pigs that we raised. We raised, you know, uh, pasture pork, beef, chicken, uh, micro on a micro scale, but you know, probably about 45, 50 customers that sort of leaned into us for meat.
Anyway, yeah, I got a really bad sunburn. And then sort of an active. Desperation and, uh, trial and error. I lathered up with his stuff and a couple days later the sunburn was gone. That was really cool. But I never peeled. And that's, you know, you learn to, when your health and nutrition, you sort of, when, when something happens, you, you pause and you pay attention.
You start taking notes. And so yeah, I watched my skin for probably two or three weeks thinking at some point, you know, the, the snakes got peel, never happened. And so started [00:07:00] experimenting with making skincare products out of pastured pig fat . And uh, here we are three, two and a half, three years later.
Wait,
Marty: so two questions. Number one, how'd you get the sunburn and number. , this act of desperation to start rubbing lard on you. Was there something that you've heard in the past like, ah, it's good for your skin? Or were you just like, oh, this looks like it would be soothing?
Charles: Well, so, so what was I doing? Uh, we had, we started a hemp company in 2019.
Uh, in fact, part of our skincare bundle is, um, we, we use, I call it a skincare elixir. So we're sort of highlighting the benefits of C B D ingestion, um, as it relates to skin. But we, so we were in the middle of the throes of jumping into the, um, almost like the gold rush, but the hemp rush of 2019. And, uh, we had on, again, I'll never forget the day [00:08:00] on July the fourth, uh, go America, on July 4th, we had planted about 20 acres of hemp.
We ended up planting al almost 300, but in that day we got 20. Acres in the ground, uh, drip taped the whole nine yards. So Reddit, Reddit, a rock that evening we flipped the switch on to irrigate it and the irrigation's not performing. And so me and one guy stayed up all night fixing the irrigation o otherwise sun comes up the next day and 20 acres of hemps dead, like it needs a lot of water.
Mm-hmm. early. Mm-hmm. . So anyway, you know, you just, you just forget to go back to the house or put sunscreen on or any of that stuff. And so I was, I was out in the fields for two straight days effectively. And um, so that's how I got sunburned. And then, um, I'm [00:09:00] almost 49 years old, Marty. But I grew up in small town, Tennessee, but we would go to the beach every year.
My mom's from mobile and I have fond memories of my mom got buying aloe vera and putting it in the refrigerator. Mm-hmm. I do as well. Right. And cuz it, cuz if you're sunburned it's cool. And so there were a bunch, there were a bunch of things that pointed me to maybe I should try this pig fat. It's in the, in the refrigerator cuz it's cool and it'll be soothing.
And so, um, so yeah. And, and you know, , at some level it's kind of intuitive, right? I mean, like, I know enough about pigs, like we trained surgeons on pigs. I don't know if you knew that or not. No, I didn't know that. Pig pigs are so genetically similar to human beings that we train our surgeons on them. And, uh, Phil Ova, do you know.
Dr. [00:10:00] Ovadia, he's got a great book. I fix hearts. I know Phil very well. He's a heart surgeon. Mm-hmm. . And, um, I've heard of that book. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's great. Great book. Stay off my operating table is the, is the title of his book. But anyway, I, I've known Phil for a long time. I was on his, I was on his podcast early in, in Pharaoh's journey.
And, uh, you know, they're asking about this, asking about, I was like, Phil, you train, you know, he's a heart surgeon. I was like, you train on pigs. It's like, actually I used the, the valve from a pig heart two weeks ago to repair the valve in a human heart. So the biology there is so aligned. Yeah. This
Marty: is, uh, might make people a bit queasy, but my brother, uh, played college lacrosse and he once took a, a very hard shot to the nether regions.
Mm. And had to get a surgery down there, and now he's part pick. Oh, nice. Yeah. They sewed up one of his, uh, one of his guys with some [00:11:00] pigs. Good.
Charles: That, that again, that, um, my condolences and and uh, and they still work. Uh, yeah. Yeah. That's, um, so yeah, the point is, uh, pigs are, pigs are four-legged humans in, in many, many respects.
So if you raise a healthy, happy, I'd been cooking with lard for a number of years, you know, again, this is the, this is the background in sort of paleolithic nutrition, things of that nature. So there were a lot of signs pointing to why, why wouldn't you try it? I, um, you ever hunted been hunting? I'm,
Marty: uh, embarrassed to say
Charles: it.
No. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I've grew up hunting and, um, the, you know, again, you think about all the things that sort of go through your head, that point you towards a jar of lard in your refrigerator. You know, if you've ever, um, uh, gutted and cleaned a deer after you've hunted. , you know, if you don't have gloves on, which, why would you wear gloves?
You're [00:12:00] covered in like this sin, youi, subcutaneous fat cuz of skin and the animal out. Mm-hmm. , you know, we've all got this fat. And so there were a lot of signs that sort of pointed me towards give it a whirl and I mean, hell, it worked. So, and you made a whole company out? Well, yeah, so that was in 19, it took about two years.
So , it's funny. So yeah, the, we say it, Farrah the lard works some mysterious ways. Mm-hmm. . Um, so I, you know, I have this little epiphany and this I didn't peel. And so what do you do? You go to the internet machine and how do I make cream out of fat? So, Earl, a lot of the early stuff we did was for, for your listeners that don't know, go to any drugstore and buy any sh any cream off the shelf.
First ingredients water. Then there's another 40 ingredients. , um, of which will include a fat, and it will include an emulsifier cuz you have to bind the water to the, to [00:13:00] the, you know, oil and water don't wanna mix, so you gotta emulsify them. And so, you know, again, I had this epiphany moment. So for, I probably spent already six months in my kitchen, emulsifying lard with water, uh, to use bees, wax.
I used a couple of different emulsifiers just tinkering. That's, I spent my entire childhood in my dad's workshop and my mom's kitchen. So I'm really at home and happy when my hands are busy. Mm-hmm. . And so, yeah, I was just playing around, playing around. I could never keep the early creams from, from not going rancid, you know, I'd make it, I, I'd make this lusciously amazing cream and five, six days later it's full of molding bacteria.
So, Add antimicrobial essential oils, add this, add that still couldn't keep 'em shelf [00:14:00] stable, put 'em in the fridge. And, uh, it finally occurred to me, two things occurred to me. One is I'm, I'm not a chemist, and I really . I don't, I I've got this 10 year, 15 year background in telling people, if you can't pronounce the name of it, don't eat it.
Mm-hmm. . So again, looking at these labels, like, I don't wanna research which paraben based, you know, preservative. So, um, the light bulb went off again, you know, it's the water, it's feeding the mold, bacteria get rid of the water. So at that point, um, kicked the water out, brought in some beef tall. For your listeners that don't know, the, so the all natural skincare market, which is still just a, a fraction of, a fraction of the.
of the overall skincare industry is dominated by beef tall. Mm-hmm. . Um, so beef tall is the rendered kidney fat from, from, from a cow or [00:15:00] steer or bull. And I love tallow. We use tallow in our products at room temperature. Tall is heart. It's, it's very balmy. And so at room temperature, lard is very creamy.
And so you've, I know you've opened sort of the stuff I brought you today, but, so I, I kicked the water out and brought some tall in and started playing with like the ratios. Cause people like a creamy mm-hmm. , um, uh, they like cream. And so, uh, so yeah. Started, uh, kicked the water. You've cooked bacon before, right?
Yes, sir. Yeah. What do you do when you finish cooking the bacon? You take the drippings and you pour 'em in a cup. Yeah. We
Marty: have a nice, uh, copper cup that we pour cup. Ooh.
Charles: big
Marty: time. We pour our, uh, our
Charles: bacon grease into it, bacon grease into, and then it can sit there, right? Mm-hmm. for weeks, months, and not go bad.
There's no water in there. It's just fat. Yeah. We let it build up. Oh, yeah. Actually, the best part, you [00:16:00] let it build up, and then you've got like this layer layered effect of like, well, here's the bacon drippings from a month ago, and here's last week and here's this morning. So, um, our products don't smell like bacon now that unscented they're unscented.
Um, we have a scented product, but, uh, but yeah, so I, I, I don't where we start here with this last
Marty: question, why you put, why you decide to put lard on you. Oh, yeah. Well, it works. Yeah. Well, and if you go to your site, Farrow Life. Yep, yep. Um, it seems like there's a lot of science behind it too. I mean, we talked about like the pig.
uh, being very similar to human body. Surgeons practice on pigs, heart valves, testicle, en casings, whatever it may be. Mm-hmm. . And that's one thing you say the skin of a pig is most sim like that's human skin is most similar if you're looking at another animal too. Pig [00:17:00] skin.
Charles: Yes. So pigs metabolize vitamins, a, e and d mechanistically the same way humans do sun exposure and proper diet and, you know, uh, environment.
And they store those vitamins in their subcutaneous fat, which is where we render for lard. And, um, yeah, it's on on many, in many respects. It's hyper intuitive what I'm doing and in at the same time, everyone's like, what the hell man? You want me to put wood on my face? So, um, yeah, it's, um, pigs are an amazing animal.
You know, I've spent a little over six years in the regenerative. Farming side of the house. You know, Pharaoh really represents a, a, a convergence of healthy eating lifestyle, healthy farming lifestyle. Um, I would even add into that sort of [00:18:00] anti, um, preservative chemical. Mm-hmm. . Um, so all of that sort of converges and, uh, and the products are amazing.
So we, I've been in town, I'm in town for the, we just wrapped up the John Bush's live free Academy thing. Um, so I was presenting there. I'm hanging out with you today and, uh, back home tomorrow. But, uh, been spreading the Lord man. Just, that's why we're
Marty: here. It seems very important cuz we mentioned like, as a nutritionist, you recommend don't eat anything you can't pronounce, and.
Similarly, like I, that's one thing I think I've become more attuned to like probably the last five years, cuz I go to the beach every summer, spend three months there from Memorial Day to Labor Day. I'm a pale Irishman, uh, who does not react well to the sun, get similar that I get a base burn. [00:19:00] I call my base burn every year.
Yep. Like early June, I peel, get a bad sunburn. I don't like to put sunscreen on even though my family, it's been beaten into us. You gotta do it. You're gonna get melanoma if you don't runs in our family. And I've become convinced in the last five years it's actually the laddering of the sunscreen that is, uh, and all the chemicals involved in it that are probably worse for you.
And just figuring out a way to protect your skin in a better way. And one of the big memes right now is like seed oils. If you stop eating seed oils, your skin will, uh, not burn as much if at all. And then now something like this, you were using the lard to sort of cool down your summer. Does it prevent it at all as
Charles: well?
Well, you can, you can get in a lot of trouble in my line of work making claims about your products. Oh, okay. But, uh, oh, listen, I had, when we built the website, I had a products liability attorney review all the [00:20:00] copy, right? Mm-hmm. , because you, you can say soothes, you can't say heals, you can say relieves, you can't say treats, you know, it's all this, all this, uh, vernacular out there.
Um,
Marty: in your experience, what has happened, what's that in your experience? Has, have you had a bad, maybe that's the question. Have you had a bad sunburn since?
Charles: Well, so the, I guess the original, no, I have not. Um, we have a com a a whole lot of stuff that kind of sort of compounds up into sunburn. . Um, like I, I tell, so in your, in the example of you, if you, you've got a lot of Irish genes, no question.
You're, you're way more sensitive. I'm, I'm, I've got a lot of, uh, Spanish blood in me. And so, uh, you know, those are two different lineages of sun exposure, right? Uh, I tell people to generally be smart. Our ancestors hundreds of years ago, [00:21:00] uh, didn't have sunscreen. They were also smart enough to stay the hell out of the sun from 1130 in the afternoon until two or three.
Mm-hmm. , you know, they, I'm not saying they weren't working or doing something, but they weren't out. They certainly weren't out with their shirt off by the pool. Right. That's a fairly new human phenomenon. Uh, we're, we're, uh, totally addicted with like the sun and the lifestyle and getting that copper tan.
Uh, I get all that, but just people being smarter about. About, um, staying hydrated. You know, first and foremost, uh, the rule of thumb for your, for your listeners out there is if your shadow is taller than you are, say it another way. If your shadow is shorter than you are, then that you are, uh, at a time of day and a place on the earth where you can get sunburned.
I've never heard that one. Yeah, like that. It's, it's a good rule of thumb cuz you know, you're not always, [00:22:00] the sun's not always gonna burn you if it's low enough in this sky. Like right now, you know, it's winter here, uh, the sun really never gets high enough in the sky for you to get the, the intensity required to give you a sunburn.
And so that's, that's some helpful information. If your shadow is shorter than you are, then you are in sunburn eligibility zone. Um, I don't, I don't use. Sunscreen anymore. Uh, they're made with seed oils. They're made with preservatives. Uh, this is a phenomenon. So the microbiome is another phenomenon we're learning about.
Um, it's sort of the new frontier. All the little bugs and critters that live on and in our skin, well, they're there for a reason. We're not necessarily sure the reason, but we co-evolved with this five to seven pounds of microbiotic creatures, uh, living in and on our skin. And again, my creams, when I mixed them with water, they would [00:23:00] get moldy and grow bacteria.
Okay, well, if I have to put something in a cream to keep bacteria from growing and then I spread that same cream on my skin, I'm effectively napalming these microorganisms that live on my skin. You know, why are they there? Well, I don't know. , but they're there and we've been around for a while. Um, why do we, why do we have such an increased incidence of skin cancer, melanoma, sunburn, uh, in the, in, in the same 30 to 40 ti year time period where the SPF level on sunscreens has, uh, quintupled.
Mm-hmm. , you know, when I grew up again, I was spending time with the beach, with my, with my family. I can still smell it. I can close my eyes and smell the Panama Jack banana boat, like coconut smelling suntan oil. There, there, when I was a kid, there was no such thing as [00:24:00] sunscreen oil. There was, there was number four, number six, number eight, number 10, and number 12 oil.
And the higher the number, the more the protection you had. So the darker you wanted your skin. My, my dad was a number six Panama Jack. , like, you know, and I can still smell it, but, so, you know, that was 30, 30, 35 years ago. And look, look at the, you know, the constant upgrades of spf, sun protection factor.
Yeah. The Irish are like
Marty: SPF 50 Maximalist, .
Charles: I'm sure they are. They should be . They should be. But as, as, as sunscreen use has gone up as sun protection factor has gone up. So have the incidence of skin care, uh, skin cancer that shouldn't be happening. Yeah. So,
Marty: yeah, that's, it's funny cuz it, it is this like meme in the, in the Irish beach going [00:25:00] community that like, you need to put it on, you're gonna get cancer.
Why my grandmother died of melanoma. Um, and that freaks obviously my family out. When they look at all of us, they're like, you gotta lather up. She got skin cancer from being in the sun, going to the beach. It's like, ah. for most of my life I was like, yeah, lather up. And now more recently as I've become more attuned too,
Charles: just be smarter.
Yeah. I mean, you know, here's some advantages today. Uh, we've got all this tactical, lightweight clothing that can locked sun. That's what
Marty: I do. The SPF F shirts.
Charles: Oh yeah. The fishing shirts. We're just wearing hats and just being smart. I mean, look, you need your 15 minutes of sun exposure every day, just like the rest of us.
Um, you might only need about 10 or 15, some other people with darker skin. You know, me, for me it's maybe 30. I enjoy a couple hours though. Absolutely. Right. But enjoy it wisely. Yeah. You know, instead of SPF creams put on a tactical shirt that's lightweight, breathable, you can go in and out of the water. [00:26:00] I mean, we've got so many tools at our exposure now, uh, at our disposal, um, to just to, uh, allow us to be smarter about.
our relationship with With the sun? Yeah.
Marty: No, not only the sun. Just like going back to like, I don't wanna say vanilla, but like, just typical skincare. Like everybody rubbing all these Olay potions on themselves. And um, I was telling you, I, I haven't with my eczema, like I, I really can't wear deodorant cause it flares it up and there's, you look at the back of like Old Spice and it's same thing.
Can't read Yeah. Half the
Charles: ingredients. All, all of them. Yeah. It, it's if, if you're buying it off to, I mean, so we, so we make these creams sort of fresh, like ready to order and, and, and, and then I've sort of done the math. We can scale, you know, I mean, you know, we'd like to scale our company, but we can, we can, I mean, look around, we've figured [00:27:00] logistics out.
You can click a button and order from Amazon or, uh, Uber Eats or, I mean, you know, like, and like it's there. Look at these splits. So the logistics side of the house, we've got figured out. Globally really. But you know, so I can make, you can order a, a, a product from us on Monday. It might not ship till Thursday, but, but you're, what you're paying for with, with supporting a brand like Pharaoh is, you know, we're gonna hand make this, you know, it's gonna get to you as, as fresh.
Mm-hmm. as possible. Um, I mean, you can eat our creams . This is kind of fun. We have fun with that. You know, this large tall leaf lad honey essential oils in our, uh, in our incentive. We've got our own little proprietary blend of everything. But, um, you know, at the end of the day, you, you shouldn't be putting stuff on your skin.
You wouldn't eat anyway, cuz that's what you're doing. Your, your skin is your second stomach. It's your largest organ.
Marty: Yeah. So what's, [00:28:00] what's happening when you put this stuff on, whether it be traditional skin creams or the Pharaoh stuff, like why should somebody actually use skincare products?
Charles: As opposed to the right thing at all.
Question? Yep. Great question. So, uh, and, and you know, again, if anybody asks me, I tell 'em, make sure you're getting enough water. You know, try to remove, uh, the, uh, pro-inflammatory, uh, foods from your diet. You know, the, the seed oil, you mentioned seed oils earlier. Earlier. Seed oils are highly oxidative. Uh, they're, they have a really whacked out ratio between omega six and omega-3.
For your listeners that don't know, omega-3 is the anti-inflammatory fatty acid. Omega six is the pro-inflammatory. You don't get one without the other. They come in tandem. However, the, the, the more stressed an animal is, or the more refined, uh, uh, various seed or plant-based oils are, then you, you're, you, you have a huge ratio.
Um, wild caught salmon, which is, you know, [00:29:00] in the, in the food world, is propped up as a highly nutritious form of. Uh, fat, uh, has a great ratio of omega six to omega-3 fatty acids, pasture raised, regenerative raised. Beef has a much better ratio than the industrial, uh, feed lot raised, um, beef, just because, again, the stresses that, that the feed lot can put on the animal among other factors.
But yeah, we want to, we want to keep, uh, omega three as high as possible in omega six as low as possible. And
Marty: if you're not using skincare, does, does that ratio get out of whack?
Charles: Well, so f so the skincare industry mm-hmm. , um, this is another one of the intuitive beauties of, of our product. The skincare industry is a relatively new creation.
Um, I would, I would make the argument that 200 years ago, we'll just go back 200 years, which, [00:30:00] what do you figure is that four generations, five generations, tops. . Okay. So, um, 200 years ago, 99.9% of the people that inhabited this planet on a weekly, certainly monthly basis, uh, certainly if they were an adult, uh, had their hands, uh, elbow deep in the carcass of an animal on a weekly, monthly basis because somebody go out and hunt and gather mm-hmm.
someone would bring it home and have to skin it and prepare it for consumption. And, and, you know, you can go back thousands of years. This has been happening for thousands of years, but, but certainly 200 years ago, this is pref refrigeration. Um, you know, you, you had to get that meat prepared quickly and cooked quickly or salted [00:31:00] and cured quickly.
And so, Yeah. Everybody was elbows deep in, uh, in animal fat. Yeah. On a con except the elitist of the elite. Of the elite. Uh, I was, you know, again, at this conference here that this past weekend, and I, there was probably 400 people there, and that same question, feeling the same question I was like, 200 years ago, 399 of the 400 people that are in this room would've had their, their hands skin cut.
They're covered in animal fat, and then we cooked with it. I mean, if you think about all the situations where our skin 200 years ago came in contact with animal fat, we didn't have sunscreens 200 years ago. If it was 1230 in the afternoon, Marty, 200 years ago, uh, if you were outside, you had a hat on, you were fully cl like long sleeves, you know, working out in the fields or working in the garden or working in the woods.
Um, [00:32:00] You know, this, it's a, it's a fairly new concept of like taking half your clothes off and hanging out by a swimming pool. But the point is the skincare industry has evolved and its, its need has, has increased because fewer and fewer people come in contact with animal fat on a regular basis.
Marty: Ah, this goes back to like the microbiome living on,
Charles: on your skin.
So, so this, okay, so the skincare world is dominated by three things. First and foremost, water. And again, I will challenge any one of your listeners going to any drugstore, anywhere in the country. There is not a shelf, there's not a product on the shelf. That's first degree is not water unless it's a oil based serum.
That's, you know, but, but your deodorants, your, your shampoos, your any, any skincare cream, medicated and not if it's a cream. [00:33:00] First ingredients, water. Mm-hmm. . Okay. Then on the other end of that is an oil. So you got water and oil, and if you're in the skincare industry, the oils that they're using are the cheapest, nastiest.
In some cases, the, the, the most widely available unusable derivative from the petroleum industry, you know, and then in the middle of all that are all these chemicals that, um, that, so, so it's water, it's seed oil, plant, oil based fats. And then in the middle are all these chemicals that, that, uh, preserve and bind them.
Yeah. Bind them and preserve them. And, you know, we don't, we don't really know what some of these endocrine disrupting parabens is, is one that comes under, uh, constant scrutiny. And should we, we don't know the impact long term of. [00:34:00] Of these compounds on our skin. Um, the consumer protection side of skincare, the foundation for that started in 1938.
It's called the Food and Cosmetics Act. And this is sort of the precursor to the FDA and a lot of other stuff. But, so in 1938, they came out with this legislation sort of governing consumer protection. And at the time, the only ingredients in skincare that required pre-market testing for safety were color additives.
Now, this is 1938. Mm-hmm. , right? So we're getting pretty good at making diesel gas and pulling out of the ground and all that. But from a, from a, from a consumer derivative product, petroleum industry, we're in our infant stages. Right? So, but that's the, that's the preeminent act governing consumer protection for skincare.
They updated the act in [00:35:00] 1974, excluded cosmetics from the act. Hmm. Right. So, so the legislation on the books governing consumer protection in the skincare industry was written in 1938, excludes, or includes color additives as the only requirement for pre-market testing. Right. And so think about what we've been able to do technologically speaking with all these hex sans and gas derived things in terms of all the stuff we can turn gasoline into.
Mm-hmm. . Right. These mics,
Marty: everything,
Charles: 90% of the room we're sitting in is a hundred percent of the room we're sitting in is petroleum derived. Yes. Because you're, you're burning it to mine something, or whatever the case may be. I mean, the carbon. Society we live in this, I get a little lot out outta sorts with the environmentalist sometime with like this zero carbon [00:36:00] neutral footprint.
I'm like, listen, that's, that's crazy. It's not possible. Let's, let's just get really efficient at using these amazing assets we have because, so solar power is, is only gonna get us so far and it's awesome and we should pursue it. Nuclear power is amazing. Yes. Um, you know, if you follow the work of like a Robert Loberg or any of these sort of global economies based smart people that can look at the climate and look at carbon and look at and, and look at population, you know, like what, what are the real issues we're facing today?
Um, I'm getting a little tangentially off, off track here, I feel like, but
Marty: No, but I think what you're getting to is like, The conflation of carbon production with pollution, you should really focus on the pollution and being as efficient as possible. Oh, yeah. And, and waste, [00:37:00] that's a good thing that the environment environmentalists dos, they conflate it.
They say, if you come out and you're like, no, I think hydrocarbons are good, but we should be efficient with it. Yeah. Like I'm a, I'm a pro fossil fuel fuels guy that hates pollution and waste. I like to consider myself an environmentalist, but if I mention that I'm pro fossil fuel and I can't be an environmentalist, you have
Charles: to be pro fossil fuel if you're pro-human.
Right. And, and, and, you know, it's, it's like, um, well
this drives me nuts. The, um, you, you have to be pro fossil fuel. If you're pro-human, we have an obligation to be as efficient. and, and, and smart with these amazing gifts we've been given. I, I like to look at the, so I'm, I'm in the farming world, you know, and, uh, I don't know if you've read, um, sacred [00:38:00] Cows a good book for your listener.
Uh, Rob Wolfe and Diana Rogers sort of cover cows get a lot of flack. Okay. They're, they're ruining the environment. Mm-hmm. according to, um, people, some people, they're ruining the environment because they burp and fart . Right. And that emits methane into the air. And I, listen, we're, we're, we live in a day and age now where we're, um, addicted to air quotes, the science.
Right. Well, let me, let me give you, uh, everyone in the, in the audience a science lesson. Uh, science is amazing and if you reduce. Complicated processor system to a fraction of its cycle and use science to analyze a piece of that. Um, you're not, you're not being honest with the science or your audience.
And so cows emit methane, [00:39:00] and if you follow that methane across a 10 year cycle, it goes up into the atmosphere and eventually turns into water. And that is a, that is a closed loop system that takes of roughly 10 years to happen. Well, if you analyze the first two months of that 10 year closed loop system, all you're talking about is emissions from a cow.
Not, this is part of a1 year, life cycle of this animal building. and enhancing the atmosphere.
Marty: Yeah. And not only the atmosphere, but even the soil on the ground, like the regenerative farming movement has really highlighted the, the benefit of grazing cattle, their ability to, to regreen areas. Um,
Charles: the, the deepest, richest soils in our country [00:40:00] that we've about mined down to nothing, uh, is in the corn belt.
This is the Iowa Nebraska. If you look at where we grow all of our crops, um, you're talking about soil that was built over millennia by herding bison, followed by migratory birds. And so if I could surmise, summarize what we try to do with regenerative farming, it's just mimicking a system like that, which is, um, short, high, intense.
Uh, grazing periods, uh, followed by long periods of rest, right? And so that's a lot of what, uh, the holistic land management ethos of like an Allen Savory or the, um, regenerative farming ethos of like a white oak pastures or polyface. What they're trying to do is, is mimic and also leverage, leverage natural systems.
So [00:41:00] in a natural system, you've got predators, right? The wolves, the, the bears, that's, that's what keeps herding animals together tight. And also moves them, pushes them around. So now we have modern, lightweight, poly wire fencing and portable electric energizers and all these. So we effectively become the predator, the gas pedal in the break for these animals.
And the coolest part about that is, This is a situation where you take a natural system and enhance it, like enhance the efficiency. Mother nature is very efficient.
Marty: Yeah. Less investment. And that's right. Heavy industrial. Um, like machines that are necessary like the, the White Oaks. Um, who runs that? His name's Will Harris.
Will Harris? Yeah. I mean his Rogan episode where they, they show how [00:42:00] his regenerative farming affects the water system compared to the farms. Yes. Like adjacent to him.
Charles: So the, the, the most compelling story about white oak. So you're familiar with some of these, uh, plant-based meat companies, right? And they claim like zero carbon emission, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Or, uh, carbon emissions. And so the, huh? So there's an independent third party lab that did the. Carbon emissions, um, program test analysis for beyond, beyond meat, beyond Burger, whatever. And I, and I may be getting this wrong, but one of these plant-based meat companies that can claims, you know, carbon neutral well, so Will Harris had that same third party lab come down?
I think they spent like six or eight months at White Oak measuring how much carbon was either emitted or sequestered [00:43:00] from his beef. Right? And what did they learn? They learned that every pound of beef that rolls off the off the shelf at, at White Oak is actually a net carbon sequester. Huh. So, so they're net net putting more carbon back in the soil.
So for your listeners, You know, we've got carbon dioxide in, in the air, and plants breathe carbon dioxide and turn that into, you know, photosynthesis. They bring all that together and turn it in the grass. And so, you know, cows come by and mow the grass, and when they mow the grass, they move on. But that grass has to regrow.
And so, um, if you think about like a, a pasture for your listeners. So let's say you've got pe people associate it with like, their, their lawns. But when we say grasses, we're talking about feet. Mm-hmm. of, of pastured grass. So imagine like, uh, three [00:44:00] feet of grass above the ground. Well, there's also three feet of grass below the ground.
It's all these roots and which are, which are carbon, right? That's carbon that's been pulled out of the air, turned into roots, and stretched. And stretched and stretched. So when that cow comes along and takes that three foot plant and turns it into a one foot plant, Moses. Well, here's what happens. So plants want symbiosis, they want homeostasis.
And so a plant that's gone from three feet to to one foot will now lop off the roots under the ground. It will take that carbon, that living, and it will store it. It will, it will get rid of it. It'll sh it off. Cuz it has to reestablish equilibrium. There's only a foot of biomass above the ground. I need to, I need to shuck off other, otherwise I'm out of balance.
Planted amount. That's right. I have, I have to, I have to come back into [00:45:00] balance, right? Mm-hmm. plants are so smart and so and so then what does it do? Well, I, I gotta grow again. And so then it pulls more carbon outta the air and builds more roots and you just rinse and repeat that. So technology, excuse me.
Allows us to take a natural system like herding bison and migratory birds and ramp that, stack that up more and more and more. Like we can, we can control the rest that this little spot of land gets. And if we have a lot of rain, we can, we can put the cows back on it faster. If it's drier, let it rest a little bit.
But you, you get to evaluate and play puppeteer to how fast can you, we re regenerate and build top soil.
Marty: Yeah. And then the positive externalities from treating that soil correctly, doing it the way it's been done for [00:46:00] millennia, like again, going back to like the water, like it acts as this natural filtration system for water systems as well, where absolutely places like Iowa, Nebraska, where we're completely decimating the soil.
Not only do you have bad soil, but probably have bad water. as well, cuz it's not being filtered as much. And
Charles: there's a bunch of published data out there that we will run out of topsoil. I think the year is 2060, so that's like less than a generation from now. And if we run outta top soil, we're done. Sorry.
You're done. So we've got, I forget how many, uh, cubic, tons of topsoil that washes, you know, washes down the Mississippi, end of the Gulf of Mexico. Every year we've killed, we've killed, uh, effectively a, a, uh, swath of the Gulf of Mexico, the size of Rhode Island with all of the runoff, pesticides, and [00:47:00] herbicides and fungicides.
Um, well, you know, again, there's a lot of synergy between the lack of consumer protection and complete. missing the boat between farming, uh, glyphosate. That's the one that gets all the press. You know, this roundup. Ready? Glyphosate. Okay, so glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup. It's 51% of the recipe.
Okay. And when they ran the test to see if this was safe for humans, they only tested glyphosate. Not, yeah, the 49, the concoction. That is roundup. They tested glyphosate. They did the same thing with vaccines. They, they test the standalone, you know, anyway, not
Marty: really, uh, indexing for the combination of,
Charles: they don't count for that.
And, um, what, what does glyphosate, what does Roundup do? Kills weeds, kills plants, not just weeds. [00:48:00] It's, it's like napalm. It kills almost anything that's, Photosynthetically inclined, we'll say, okay. So one of the early conclusions they drew is because humans don't metabolize energy through photosynthesis.
We're blocking this photosynthetic, uh, system. Mm-hmm. , right? That's what kills the plant. So, well hu humans don't do that. So it's, it's intuitively safe for humans right now, we'll do all our tests anyway, but we're just gonna test glyphosate. We're not gonna test Roundup. But here's, here's again, we're at the, we're at the precipice of this from a scientists and pointing attention towards it.
But all those little bugs, again, that live on and in our skin, um, that's exactly how they metabolize energy and, and thrive. [00:49:00] You know, they're, they have a photosynthetic process that they rely on to survive. , some of them, not all of 'em. Yeah. So again, doesn't hurt humans, but we forget that humans have this relationship with all these little bugs.
Well,
Marty: it's like a system, right? People talk about like the microbiome in the stomach. It's extreme. It's all the same. It's extremely important. It, it is. I mean, one can make a very strong argument, and it is part of the human is these, this sort of cooperative, uh, collection of, of different species. I don't know species the right
Charles: word or different.
There's way more DNA that doesn't belong to us living in our bodies than DNA that belongs to us. Yeah. Um, yeah, I, you know, again, you get back to sort of this, it's kind of intuitive, right? So why did they get here? How did they get here? I, [00:50:00] I, I don't need to answer those questions. to tell you that they're here.
Yeah. It just is. And they wouldn't be here if there weren't some, you know, overarching crazy reason why I have a funny, uh, hypothesis that I've, that I've thrown out to, uh, folks over at the Dark Horse Podcast. I don't know if you're familiar with Brett Weinstein, Heather Hying. Mm-hmm. . Love them. Love them.
Uh, evolutionary biologist. So I got, I got, um, poison Ivy, bad Case of Poison Ivy about six, seven months ago. I'm around that stuff all the time. But I had, long story short, I had gotten tick bites about three or four tick bites over the course of, of about a week and went to see the doctor. I was like, eh, you know, this one's a little red.
And so we, he prescribed a, a, a fairly aggressive, um, antibiotic protocol for me just to make sure Lyme diseased didn't. happened to rear its ugly [00:51:00] head, right? Mm-hmm. . So I'm about 10, 12 days into this 21 day prescription. Again, I'm around poison A all the time, never get it, and all of a sudden crops up like all over me.
And so here's, I'm taking this antibiotic orally, but I've got this microbiome living on my skin, protecting me from the sun protecting. We don't know Marty, but it's there. Mm-hmm. . And, um, I had this like epiphany. I'm like, I wonder if we as a species have co-evolved to live with these bugs. And one, I mean, if you think about like natural occurring in nature, noxious things, there aren't many, I mean, you got ro you know, flesh and this, but from a plant standpoint, I mean there's lots of noxious plants, but um, in terms of just our ability to.
be in contact with these [00:52:00] plants. I'm thinking, well, of course, over hundreds of thousands of years, we would have maintained a healthy relationship with something on our skin that helps prevent this oil. Cause that's all it is. Poison ivy. Poison oak, poison sumac. It's an oil from the plant. Mm-hmm. . Well, well maybe, maybe I remove the protective layer.
Yeah. And allow that in. I don't know. It's, and food for thought. It's
Marty: uh, it's a very compelling hypothesis cuz Yeah. That's when I've, I've never had poison ivy before and I'm pretty sure I've come into contact with it. And my son on the, uh, the Lady Bird Trail here in Austin, we walked out quite often and they have signs like poison ivy and my son's about to be three.
Oh, that's good. He's at the point where we let him out and like run around and he has no concept [00:53:00] what poison ivy is, so he'll like run up in the brush. We always like, oh, you're gonna get poison ivy. He never does though. Hmm, that's good. Yeah, so cuz some people are naturally, um, averse to, to actually getting in.
Other people are more inclined to get it as well.
Charles: Oh yeah. Humans are fun cuz there's always a spectrum. Mm-hmm. and, uh, and, and you know, we, we spend most of our time on the extremes of every spectrum in terms of that's how we view, view the world is, uh, is on the extreme. So you either super allergic or you don't get it.
But, um, well that
Marty: actually is a good segue into like bringing this back to like regenerative farming and fixing the top soil. Uh, that's one of the, I mean, regenerative farming has been a big. growing movement over the last five, 10 years. And I think more people are becoming aware of the fact that it is probably an ideal way to [00:54:00] steward the land that we're using to feed our local communities.
But the one knock is that it's not scalable. Would you say that's true?
Charles: Well, you know, you gotta, you gotta start defining your terms, right? What does scalable mean? Um, I, I would, I would point your listener to the, to the work of the Savory Institute and, and Alan Savory, white Oak Pastors happens to be a savory hub.
And we have, we have this mindset, we have this idea that it's our responsibility to feed the world. And that is bullshit. You know, the world was doing just fine, you know, a couple hundred years ago, uh, and, and certainly longer ago, but you know, when, when did it become the South Georgia Peanut Farmer's responsibility to grow peanuts for.
Or the entire country or the, you know, or Taiwan or Germany. You know, I, I don't, I don't buy into any of that. Um, I, I do [00:55:00] believe that the way that farms like White Oak Polyface, um, farm, I do believe it's scalable to a point. Uh, but more importantly it's repeatable. Mm-hmm. , you know, um, Microsoft is scalable but not repeatable.
Yep. And, you know, one thing, and we're, we're, we're living through this now specifically around our food supply. One thing that you, we, we, we've, we've, uh, we've handed the keys to the food production castle to a very few players. I mean, I think with meat in this country, There's four companies, five companies that, that control 85% of, of the meat that we eat.
And when do you do that? When you concentrate that much, you know, the, the, the, if a cog in the wheel gets screwed up, you know, you've got [00:56:00] serious problems. Um, and we found that out in the last year. Yes. And we found that out. Absolutely. So, so, you know, take your, take your will Harris, white Oak Pastures as an example.
You know, you could drop two or three white oak pastures into every state in the country at, at their scale, at their size, at their ability to serve the consumer. You know, part of white Oak pasture's problem. And, and all the problem is why are, why are they shipping food to ca. Hmm. They shouldn't be. No.
You know why, uh, and, and again, I'll just, I'll just use them as an example. You know, they're three hours south of Atlanta population. Good god. 5, 6, 7, 10 million depending on where you want to draw the line. Um, white Oaks, a 2220 $5 million a year top line revenue company. Um, I, I'm, I know Will and them very well.
I've known him for years. And, um, I'm not saying anything out of outta [00:57:00] sorts. I mean, he's, he's talked publicly about this, but, but the point is, how in the hell can't, why, why is he shipping to California when you've got 10 million people that live three hours up the road? Right. Right. And so, uh, so you take that, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, duplicatable, scalable to a point.
I don't, I don't, I can't envision what the next step above like a white oak would be cuz they've got their own. for, you're a listener that doesn't know they, so they raise it. Gosh, tens of thousands of different, uh, animals, you know, beef, pork, poultry. Um, they've got their own on-farm, U S D A, red meat and poultry slaughterhouse.
Um, again, for your listener, if , if you're gonna sell, uh, meat by the cut to a, a consumer, it's gotta have a U S D A stamp on it. Um, there's some, there's some workarounds for that. But at, at a micro scale, if you're gonna be as big as white oak, you gotta have the U S D A [00:58:00] stamp, right? Which is an n another one of these government requirements perturbing the market.
Yep. Yep. Gotta control the supply side. Um, I'll tell you a quick funny story. So early in the pandemic, you know, this is, this is white oak pastures. They grow meat and feed their community. Uh, but they're U S D A. And so early in the pandemic it was, government employees don't show up to work. You know, we gotta, let's flatten the curve.
Let's, let's, let's flatten that damn curve, y'all. Well, if you don't have a U S D A inspector in your U S D A plant to check the U S D A box, you can't sell any beef. You, you're not moving any, you're not moving any product today. You're not, you can't slaughter. Most of the U S D A regulations are around slaughter and evis evisceration, uh, past that into the butchering side of the house, you get into food safety.
Mm-hmm. . But, [00:59:00] um, but the, the big control, uh, the big lever with U S D A is that slaughter, end evisceration, uh, anyway, but yeah. So if, uh, if the U S D a's telling their employees that, um, you're not to go to work today. then, um, no food, huh. And so anyway, early on I, I, I remember talking to Mr. Harris about, I, you know, I had to pick up the phone and call the governor and be like, uh, not so fast my friend.
And, you know, and it happened. The, the inspectors came back to work. But, you know, it's that kind of shit that just drives you nuts, right? But anyway, so yeah, you drop a, drop, a white oak pasture's drop a white, you could probably have a dozen white oak pastures in Texas, man. Oh, you could have one north of Austin, one south of Austin.
Again, I mean it,[01:00:00]
what's your average family of four spend on meat a year, whatever that number is, multiply that by a thousand families and, you know, work backwards. Yeah. So,
Marty: well, another thing to highlight too is, the top soil problem and conversations going on, like you said, by 2060, uh, a lot of studies are predicting there won't be any more top soil and people immediately go to a state of fear and desperation.
But I think that's one thing about regener farming that it, it shows that within a relatively short amount of time, you can begin to heal the soil. So,
Charles: well, back to the, back to the technology piece. Like we, we, we ha this has been proven out. Salatin's done it. Uh, will Harris is doing it. There's a bunch of people doing this at micro scales, but with the technology we have at our hands in disposal now you can, you can accelerate these natural systems [01:01:00] in a very healthy way.
You know, nature's nature's really good about not getting over at skis. Mm-hmm. right. It, it'll, it'll take that accelerated impact. It'll take that accelerated nurturing up to a point, but then it'll, it'll give you very clear signals. Too fast, too much, you know, you just gotta listen. Um, here's another one, Marty.
75% roughly of the agricultural land in, uh, in this country is what's considered marginal land. You know what that term means? Uh, have
Marty: an idea,
Charles: but I'm not exactly sure. Okay. So, marginal land from an agricultural standpoint means you can't plow it. Hmm. So it's either too hilly, too rocky to this, to that.
You can't plant grains on it. That's what marginal agricultural land in this country is. Well, what can you put on it
Marty: legally or physically? Like, is it just like a, a government like, designated as [01:02:00] marginal land. So you can't farm on it or is just, it's a, it's a, it's a term Farmers recognize. They're like, oh, I'm not gonna grow here because it's marginal land.
It's not.
Charles: Well, again, back to a bunch of different factors. So look at the, uh, farm subsidy system in this country and where we put most of our government dollars. It's all grain production. So why is marginal versus arable? Arable is the opposite of marginal. Arable means I can run a plow through it, it's deep soils.
I can do all the things. The big difference between those is where, where does the, so where does the government point its money. Where it can grow the products that it promotes. Soy, corn, wheat, oats. Right. Oops. Here's a funny aside. You're familiar with the food pyramid? Yes. Yes, yes.
Marty: They just redid it too.
Charles: They they did, they did frosted. Many wheats are, uh, apparently healthier than eggs and eggs and beef [01:03:00] and, and beef and, yeah. So, so,
Marty: um, clown, it's insane that we're sitting in twenties 23 and they're still trying to force that food, period, narrative down people's throats.
Charles: Well, we're two and a half years into, uh, the largest, uh, genomic syop on the planet, CYOP experiments.
Uh, and, and the data's already clear, and yet they're still pimping that. So, um, you know, we hold on to those sacred cows hard and fast. But, uh, no, this is a, again, I love the intuitive side of this. So, in, in a world where you have the Food and Drug Administration, okay, who writes the, who writes the policy?
Who writes the, uh, who tells us what to eat. Where did the food pyramid come from? Lobbyists. Who publishes it?
Marty: Uh, the
Charles: government, right. Which, which section? U S D A or the fda, not the Food and [01:04:00] Drug Administration. Mm-hmm. , our healthcare policy in this country is written by the US Department of Agriculture.
What do we grow? Corn, wheat, soy. So the, the people holding the keys to our nutritional guidance are also the people holding the keys to corn, wheat, and soy production. And we're really good at it. Yeah. So it's also destroying . Oh, for sure. Or metabolic health. And, well, uh, here's another fun one. Uh, so about three quarters of the grains grown in this country are grown to feed cattle, cattle.
Prefer grass. They're not even biologically able to assimilate grain even with all their stomachs. Even with all those stomachs and the ruing and everything else, they don't like it. And it's, they don't, I mean, it makes them [01:05:00] sick. It's hyper caloric. It's inflammatory, inflammatory it fat. Fattens them up quick.
Yeah. But, um, so, you know, sort of circle back around to, I think you could drop a white oak pastures almost anywhere. Uh, I think you could drop a polyface farms almost anywhere, you know, um, the food, you know, again, may halt the keys to the castle. You wanna buy a steak from me? It's gotta have this stamp on it.
And, you know, for the people I've known, I know that, um, have had success, if you wanna call it that, in sort of the, like a private membership association so you can. Sort of circumvent some of these rules. Yeah. The Amish do this in Pennsylvania. Absolutely. Well, and we had that case recently in Pennsylvania where, you know, the guy got mysterious, ugh,
Marty: with the raw milk.
All the things, if you look into that story too, this goes back to like 2016. Mm-hmm. . It was like a woman that bought raw milk from this farm. I forget the name of it, it was in Lancaster somewhere. Uh, and then went back to her [01:06:00] house in Florida and died a listeria. But they were never able to like directly correlate the, the milk to the listeria.
And she was also like 96 years old.
Charles: Yeah. But she's, she's a poster child for you gotta, you gotta pasteurize and homogenize and I mean
Marty: that's, it's become a meme on rabbit hole recap with Matt, Matt and I. Matt said once, like, it was never raw milk. It was just milk for thousands of years. .
Charles: Well, you know, again, this back to intuition. I look at people, I'm like, if, uh, raw milk were bad, , none of us would be here.
Right? If, uh, if eating meat were bad, none of us would be here. Eggs. That's a, that's the best one. You, you look at the 40 or 50 year track record of eggs, you know, it's like, look at the cover of Time Magazine over every decade. It's like, eat 'em, don't eat 'em. Uh, eat 'em, but only twice. Can't get [01:07:00] enough.
Don't eat the yolks. Don't eat the yolks. Oh, that's the favorite one. Don't eat the most nutritionally dense part of this thing. That is almost a perfect food. Like you could li you could literally live off of eggs, raw eggs. Oh,
for
Marty: sure. It's been a big theme here in the Commons. We have, oh yeah. We
have,
Charles: uh, eggs slugging 'em down.
Egg s flunking meetings. S sling.
Marty: Yes. Yeah, we slunk some eggs back, uh, back in the kitchen. I appreciate
Charles: that, Marty. Yeah. It's,
Marty: uh, no, it's hilarious. You have this whole like egg white omelet movement where people are like, oh, you can't eat the yolks, but it'll eat the whites. And it's like, uh, you're not getting any.
Well, yeah.
Charles: So that, that, that started gaining track, you know, again, the sat vilification of saturated fat. And, you know, the, the most frustrating thing, especially about dietary policy is, um, the, the cheating that Ansel Keys did. Mm-hmm. . Okay. So Ansel Keys is sort of the godfather of, uh, saturated fat vilification.
[01:08:00] So he, uh, did this huge meta study on a bunch of bunch of countries, and then throughout the ones that didn't, there, there were two prevailing theories. You may have covered this with your other guests, but there were two prevailing theories way back when, which was, heart disease is caused by either sugar or fat, sugar or saturated fat, sugar, saturated fat, and.
Uh, th this is all in the historical record. You can pull this out, you can look this up. You can put, put your fingers directly to all of the lobbying and paid off scientists by the sugar lobby to vilify saturated fat. This is all documented. Um, in fact, it looks a whole lot like the same lobbying that Big Tobacco had only decades prior.
Mm-hmm. in terms of, uh, it's not that bad for you. It's actually good for you. And , three out of four doctors appro, you know, smoke, smoke Newports when you're pregnant because the menthol helps with your breathing. You know, I [01:09:00] mean, it's just, you can look all this up. So anyway, yeah. So in the seventies, eighties, you, you see this massive vilification and, um, we get fat phobic.
Fat phobic. And if you take the fat out of food, not
Marty: fat people phobic, but not
Charles: fat nutritionally. Fat nutritionally, uh, yes. Dietary fat, phobic dietarily, fat phobic. And, um, even back to the origin story of Crisco, you know, Crisco, I'm a large guy, right? Uh, when I got into this, you know, one of the things I eventually did was, was sort of go down the rabbit hole of how'd we, how'd we get here?
You know? And, um, you know, the Procter and Gamble story. So I had, I had always assumed I had this background in sort of paleo and nutrition. You know, I pointed that what to eat, what not to eat lens over here on skincare, right? And so I had always thought that seed oils [01:10:00] and all these refined oils were the, were, were naturally manifested through food.
Turns out it was actually skincare. Uh, and soap and Procter and Gamble turn of the century, uh, started, started making, uh, soap and candles out of, uh, cotton seed oil. They figured out how to make it non-toxic ish and, um, and so they, they bought a bunch of mills in Texas, ironically, and scaled up their cotton seed oil manufacturing capability and then all of a sudden turn, so candles and soap, candles and soap turn of the century, electricity comes along, light bulb candle sail aren't looking so hot.
So they team up with the German scientist, figured out how to hydrogenate this, this, uh, cotton seed oil and convince the world that it's better for you than the [01:11:00] preeminent, predominant cooking oil of the time, which was lard and beef towel, right, and, and tall. But lard was. the go-to, the large works in mysterious ways, Marty.
And, um,
Marty: that's funny cause I've, uh, I'm a nineties kid and I've, uh, very f uh, it's funny how like this seeped in the pop culture. Like Rugrats. Stu uh, the dad, he was a large salesman and he had tough, I didn't know that. And he had a tough life because like lard was so hard to sell. It was so hard to sell.
Um, but like, that was like one of like, he was like, uh, a lard salesman that had a really tough job. Cause lard was so, um, I did not know
Charles: demo best at the time. I have a, my, my, one of my closest cousins is, uh, is sort of a antiquer. Mm-hmm. , very, very good eye gifted, gifted antiquer. And, uh, they have collected [01:12:00] countless old large tens.
and I, I've got pictures of pic upon pictures. They find them everywhere. 120 pounds of lard in one vessel, right? So, so lard is white, lard is the, for your listeners, lard is the rendered back slash belly, ergo subcutaneous fat of a pig. And, uh, so belly fat, back fat, we have, we have effectively two types of fat in our body.
For people that don't understand this subcutaneous fat, which is belly fat, back fat, it's just under the skin. And then we have visceral fat. So, uh, fat that, uh, is there for padding in internally. This is, uh, kidney fat. Uh, beef tall is rendered kidney fat from a, uh, from, from a bovine species. Um, but anyway, yeah, lard, lard is white.
Uh, Crisco is not . They, they, they bleach it or color it white because they [01:13:00] were literally competing with lard. . And again, I've got all these old, I mean people. That's what you did. You went to the store and you bought a five gallon bucket of lard and spooning in the spooning out. Get after it man. Get
Marty: after it.
Yeah. There's this incredible clip of Julia Childs. It's funny. It's like we get back to like the food pyramid. They just updated it and you have Rachel Levine who's like the head of the healthcare system in the United States, or the hell czar, whatever the title is, looks like shit coming out and telling you like, this is what you freaks need to eat.
Charles: And there's a bunch of memes that float around. I think there the the He Minister of Health in the Netherlands Yeah. Is like 450
Marty: pound. Well it's like, it's a whole, don't believe you're lying eyes situation where you have all these unhealthy people telling you like no lucky charms are better than eggs and steak.
Then you go back. And then going back to [01:14:00] like the Julia Child's clip, it's an incredible clip because it was, I think it was in the eighties or early nineties when McDonald's shifted there frying from beef tall to 90 64.
Charles: 92 94, somewhere in there. Yeah. Hell, I grew up on McDonald's, man. Yeah. And she fries are delicious.
What is
Marty: this clip? She was like, I'm never eating McDonald's again. Oh. They, they went from beef tall to, to seed oils and fried tastes worse. It's not as crisp as it used to be and it's probably not as healthy. She said that as well. And like she's a preeminent chef who's been working with food, knows what good taste is, good nutrition is, and um, for some reason or another we've just been siop into, to cooking with these poisons that are, are
Charles: killing us.
Sure, sure. Well, I mean, again, back to the intuitive nature. animal fat for our skin. It's, you know, I can sit here and tell you, well, it's, it makes sense to me, [01:15:00] you know, but I've, I've, I've also sort of ejected myself. Uh, you know, the, the paleo journey for me was really interesting because you get behind the curtain of, of looking at what's projected on the public, the food pyramid, and, you know, sh uh, sugar fr you know, uh, high fructose corn syrup, that's way better than sugar.
And then artificial sweeteners are even better than that. And you just think of, well, you know, intuitively, no. But anyway, sort of, you get behind the curtain and you see that. And of course now skincare, it's marketing's a powerful
Marty: thing. It is. And it's so ingrained, like, I think it's slim, and I have talked about this before, but it's like the marketing and the supermarket, like all the colors, like the, uh, the cartoons on the.
the cereal boxes and the where things get placed in a supermarket makes people more likely to buy [01:16:00] 'em. But then going, like, going back to like the trends changing, I do think I have hope in the mothers of the world, particularly my wife, shout out to my wife. Love you baby. She came back from, uh, the grocery store last week and like cheered when she walked in the door.
She's like, I got everything in our, our weekly grocery run. Nothing nice. Nothing has seed oils. Like they're moms are beginning to come attuned to this.
Charles: Can I hit the head? Yeah. How does this work? You can hit the head. All right. I gotta do that. Okay. You're okay. You hit the head. I'll be right back. Yeah,
Marty: we'll just cut the like,
Charles: um, I figured you had that ability.
I'm just,

Charles: I'm back Marty feeling, uh, relieved. You know, uh, it's one of the things that travel really screws me up with. I don't, I, I've got a really good routine at home in terms of like coffee entering the body at this time. Yes. This amount of water consumption by this time. Yeah. The,
Marty: uh, traveling messes me up a lot.
Yeah. I have to travel a lot.
Charles: I do not. and I'm sort of an obliger by nature, so I'll sit here and hold it and hold
Marty: it. Don't ever feel compelled to hold it. Okay. You gotta go. You gotta go. I'm
Charles: holding nothing back with you today, Marty. We're talking about nature. When nature calls you Absolutely . Absolutely.
So nature called and I, I answered and I appreciate your, uh, your understanding. No, it's, uh,
Marty: like I was telling you, we've been, uh, we've been potty trading. So I've, uh, been very intimately involved with nature's calling over the last three days. It's been a, it's been a, an experience. How old? Uh,
Charles: almost [00:01:00] three.
Okay.
Marty: Yeah. We ask maybe, maybe a little late on the potty training, but
Charles: we're getting there. Uh, you know what I discovered with, uh, with Scott, he's my, he's 10 now. Uh, the best way to potty train him is just to send him to the bathroom with some young kids that are already potty. Let 'em watch. It's like, oh, I wanna be like the cool kids.
Yeah, the peer pressure. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah.
Marty: It's, uh, as of is today's his first day, uh, at school with the potty training wheels half off. So we'll see how it
Charles: goes. That is exciting. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you So gentle enough for the kids. By the way, the, uh, the Pharaoh, the Lord,
Marty: I wanna be lathering them up.
Well, speaking of kids, that's what, before you hit the head, that's what I was talking about was I'm extremely optimistic. Like a lot of the topics that we cover on this, whether it be like monetary policy, state of global economic, um, landscape privacy [00:02:00] in the digital age, like it all in 2023 seems to be coalescing, coalescing in this weird, dystopian nightmare.
But we do have to highlight like the, the optimistic trends. that exist, highlight them and try to um, try to hold them up and amplify them. That was right before you hit the head. That's what I was saying. I was like, I think there is something naturally occurring in the mothers of the world that exists out there, at least some of them that are beginning to realize, like looking at their children and I know my wife's looking at her, or two boys like, what the hell am I feeding you?
What am I, what am I putting in your body? How's it affecting your. Your temper from a day-to-day experience. And that's one thing my wife has taken the ball and run with like cutting seed oils out and cooking at home and trying to, to make it so like the kids are eating healthy. Yep.
Charles: Well, I mean that's, you know, I've got eight and 10, uh, daughters, the [00:03:00] eight year old, and they're, they're a big part of the muse, you know, again, so I took.
Took this lens of if you can't eat it, you know, if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it. Don't eat preserve foods, you know, it's not good forest, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You take that lens and you shine it over on skincare and it's like, what the fuck? I mean, it's bad. It's, it is actually, it's actually worse than food because it, we don't, we don't perceive that our skin eats things, right.
So again, back to this consumer protection, but. But yeah, I mean, the mama bears, mama bears are standing up and, and speaking up and, you know, one of the silver linings, uh, JP Sears was one of the closing, closing deals with the, I love JP P'S work. Uh, he was one of the, uh, closing acts at, uh, this conference I've been in town for, and he's, he's talking about like having gratitude for the World Economic Forum , or having, you know, like find finding the [00:04:00] silver linings.
And all that. And you know, one of the silver linings to all this madness for the past two or three years is, um, it, it, it, it's woken a lot of people up. And, you know, again, I've said, I took this lens over here in, in the food world and all of a sudden shining on skincare, well now shine that same lens on big pharma, shine that same lens on the Fed.
Just the list goes on and on and on. Um, people are waking up and it's harder and harder to hide the truth. Uh, now, especially when people
Marty: are dying suddenly all over the place.
Charles: Yes, due to climate change. apparently due the
Marty: cows. Oh yeah. We're
Charles: just gonna kill all the cows. Cows. The cow farts. You know, causing heart attacks.
That was another,
Marty: there was a, a clip that came out of the World Economic Forum last week, and I had the epiphany when I saw the clip. It was, I [00:05:00] believe the CEO of Siemens was telling a very, uh, uh, very heart-wrenching story about how his daughter said, you need to go vegan because the cows were destroying the world.
And he basically went on this long ramp. He was like, we need to. Stop eating meat, uh, to reduce CO2 emissions. And I had this epiphany where it's like the act of eating meat does not produce emissions. It is the front end of that supply chain, which is the cows actually living their lives. And so like if you take that statement like, we need to stop eating meat meats, reduce emissions, these people literally would a mass genocide, all bovine creatures, because they view them as the, as the product of these emissions.
And that's really what they're saying when you get to the crux of it.
Charles: We have a saying in the South, bless, bless their hearts, . And, um, you know, again, it's just back to what people know and what they think [00:06:00] they know and what they've been talked into. I mean, you know, this, this, this lovely country that we inhabit had a.
The, the records show that it had, uh, herds of bison, uh, that that would, uh, that would make our current domesticated bovine population look, look very small, minuscule, hundreds of millions of, of herbivorous ruminant species. When you, when you add in the bison and the elk and the deer, um, we, we are at a fraction.
Today, uh, the population of animals in this country that we were 500 years ago.
Marty: And it's funny when, uh, people first came here and they started moving west the great frontier. Mm-hmm. , describe how beautiful it was, the landscape, how luscious it was. , [00:07:00] it was roaming. Bison had something to do with it.
Charles: Well, so the fertile crescent in Africa, where, where humanity.
you know, effectively was born, uh, as a damn desert. Now. Yeah. This is, again, this, you gotta, you gotta think about these silver linings, like humans are destructive creatures, right? We're, we're really good at cutting trees down and killing off animals. I mean, we've, we've advanced as a species pretty well.
We're winning, right? Well, that same, that same capacity can. There's, there's a, there's an over application of the humans rape and pillage mindset. We also repair and build and, and, and so you know, what a blessing. These opposable thumbs and a developed prefrontal cortex and all the various things, [00:08:00] pigs, cans, sweat, I love.
but like pigs don't sweat. We get to sweat, which means we get to do all these other cool things. Um, I'm going crazy here tangentially, but, um, yeah, there's, we, we have the capacity to reverse a whole bunch of stuff. Agreed. Isn't if we just farm correctly,
Marty: farm correctly, and get out of this narrow framework that people like the US federal government, Those who are speaking and leading the World Economic Forum have put people into, I give you this weird binary option of it's this way or that way.
And I think that's why like sitting down talking to people like you is like, eh, maybe it doesn't need to be either of those options. Maybe we just think differently about how we're producing food, what, how we're regenerating land using raisin cattle to, to green areas like you talk. [00:09:00] Uh, the Fertile Crescent, that was like, probably one of the only good TED Talks I've ever watched was, I forget his name, but he was in like 2012, 2013, being like, Hey, if you wanna solve climate change, like we need to.
begin roaming herds of cattle.
Charles: That might be Alan Savory. That might have been, I think it, I think, yeah, 2012 sounds about right. He, his TED talk, and it's one of the, still to this day, one of the most downloaded T Ted, Ted talks of all time. Yeah. And
Marty: then you had the, because what was so powerful about that was the pictures.
It's like, look, this was a desert. I brought in some roaming bovine creatures, and it greened up. And then a couple years,
Charles: his story is so unbelievably tragic. , I don't know if you know his backstory. So he was a f basically an effective uh, African fish and wildlife kind of person. And they, they were seeing desertification.
So the desert was getting bigger and looks around, sees all these elephants. And as a young [00:10:00] environmental protector, he draws the conclusion that it must be the elephants eating the grass that are caus. This desert expansion. And so he was part of a team that came to an ultimate decision. I forget how many thousands of elephants they called.
Right? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think this was actually part of his Ted Talk. I it, it, it was, but it's just, it's, it shows the, the, the, the, I mean, his journey is powerful because it's like, let me go do this. This is gonna fix the. problem got worse. Oh. And now I've got these, I think I'm, man, I think it was like 10,000 elephants they called.
Right. So I've got the death of these 10,000 creatures on my, on my resume. And it did. It got worse. Yeah. And so, No, Alan Savory is, uh, the Savory Institute. They're doing great work. They're [00:11:00] good on him for course correcting. Oh, hell yeah. It's a rare trade. The ego is, uh, is is tough to Right. Like we're humble pies not tasty.
No,
Marty: because song cost fallacy comes into play. He'd be like, ah, no, I, I banked my career on this. Like, it has to be Right. And then those people try to, um, find. Uh, data that supports the hypothesis that they put forth. A lot of that's going on right now.
Charles: Well, you start with, uh, what, what do we want to know?
What do we wanna prove? Yes. This is, this is the answer we want. And then you work backwards.
Marty: Yeah. That's individuals like Alan are able to actually be up upfront and confront the fact that they were wrong and recognize that they were wrong, and then try to course correct from there. It's, we need more of those humans in the world.
Especially today. I mean, what's going on with it's economic policy, food policy, the, the COVID policy? A lot of people just [00:12:00] double, triple quadrupled down. Like, no, we were right.
Charles: I really enjoy your show. And, and, and you know, I'm, I'm fairly new to the, to the Bitcoin space. We, we take it now for our products online, which is really cool.
But, um, I have a lot to learn. I recognize it's importance. That's why we're sort of taking. , you know, leveraging it as a, as a means for, for payment. Um, but man, like getting to know you and, and Slim and Adam Curry and some of the other folks in the, even Odell and, um, y y'all say this all the time, but fix the money, fix the food.
Mm-hmm. , right? Uh, I'm gonna say fix the money, fix a whole bunch of stuff. , right. Fix the skincare. You know, wires wire are preservatives and chemicals and um, and um, seed oil so prevalent in our cosmetics market. Well maybe it's because we make them [00:13:00] unbelievably cheap cuz we print money and give it to farmers and, you know, whether they grow good corn or bad corn or good wheat or good wheat.
Uh, we do the same thing with all these petroleum, you know, there's just this system that's this fiat system that's set up. incentivize crap. Yes. Like non-efficient. I mean, hell without farm subsidies, I don't think anyone would grow corn in this country. .
Marty: Yeah, maybe like South Jersey just cuz you get that sweet corn, but
Charles: Well, when I say corn, you know what I mean?
Yeah. Like we wouldn't, we wouldn't, and, and you know, again, just back to the ass backwardness of the system. We spend more fossil fuels growing corn to make ethanol to put into gas. Then we save in the carbon emissions from the ethanol that goes in the gas. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. It. It's a negative.
Feedback's. Literally loop. Literal loop of insanity. Yeah, insanity. So, yeah,
Marty: no, we have it out [00:14:00] here. Fix the money, fix the world. Yes, it's uh, I truly believe that people think we're crazy, uh, part of a cult. I do think a lot of this stems from perverse incentives introduced by easy money.
Charles: Cults are short for culture, man, , they can be.
You know that, that, that's the beauty of uh, waking up a little bit, not woke, but awake is you understand that, um, there's two sides to every pillow, you know, and there's two sides to every coin. And so, you know, it's like pigs. Pigs, I love pigs. Pigs get a bad rap cuz they're destructive. Well leverage the destruction you.
destruction's what the soil needs. It's what the, you know, disturbance. I, we, we like to say disturbance, not destruction. Mm-hmm. , you know, because there's a fine line and, and, um, so again, you know, cults are awesome. Yeah. Cults are also really terrible . So, which, which side of that [00:15:00] coin you want to be?
Marty: Yeah.
You gotta, you gotta pick the right cult. Got it. I think I, I think I picked the right cult. Now we're going back to like pigs. Not destructive but disturb. Like my partner, one of my partners is standard Bitcoin. He actually owns a farm in northern Tennessee and the last time I was there, he was excited cuz they were getting, uh, a mama pig and some piglets, uh, the week after I left.
But it was literally just to plop 'em down by like the, the edges of his farm so they could run through all the brush and just clear it out.
Charles: It's pig pigs are amazingly impactful. to the land. And so again, you want to, you wanna harness that and also use it wisely. You know, if, for, for your listeners, a lot of people I know know at least what backyard chickens are like.
You know, I, I, I have a different circle than most of the world, but, at my age, a lot of people can reminisce about the the chicken coop they had behind their [00:16:00] house. And if you know anything about a chicken coop, even the one I grew up around, when you walked in the chicken coop, there was no grass. It was dead pan dirt, and you go get the eggs every day.
Well, chickens are highly destructive and if you leave them one place for very long, they're gonna eat everything. And then you got a moonscape. So even poultry product. Um, animals move, they don't spend very much time in the same place. So leverage, leverage, leverage all that, stack it all up and, um,
Marty: no, that's why I think it's very important the things that you're doing.
A savory will, Harris and others in this move is educating people, um, about things that are relatively simple. Like once you understand the base concepts of this, I. , you, you like fence cows into like a certain square to eat all the grass. They eat all of it. You move that square [00:17:00] Yep. Into another one. They move to that.
They eat all of it. They poop while they're eating and it adds to the soil. It's very intuitive.
Charles: Well, yeah, and, and you know, again, back to the leverage, right back to using these gifts we've got, you know, in, in nature, you, you're looking at like a one time pass. , right? So here come the bison, they eat the grass, they pee, they poo, they move on.
Well, a month and a half, two months later, that grass is back and it's ready to go again. Um, but the bison, you know, in a, in a natural setting, many times the bison have moved on. They're, they're. Well, they're, they're on to the next, onto the next grass. So in, in our systems, again, we just we're, we're, we're able to responsibly push the, push the gas and push the brake on ecology building.
Um, that's, it's, it's truly remarkable. I mean, you know, again, Measure it by [00:18:00] topsoil, measure it by carbon content in the soil, measure it by, uh, the microbial, you know, every, every, uh, percent, every 1% increase in organic matter in the soil. Uh, you're, you're, you have an increased carrying capacity per acre of water.
Like 22, 20 3000 gallons. Holy shit. Right? Because organic matter needs water and it binds to it, and it holds onto it. And so, you know, when we plow, you know, back to arable versus uh, marginal land, when we break the soil surface with a plow, We open the bear soil up to the sun, um, you know, that sun gets really hot.
It kills all the organic matter. You know, you're, you're the soil's surrounding. As an example, will Harris, as we've talked about him quite a bit today, the soils surrounding his farm from [00:19:00] the peanut farmers and the soy farmers, you know, we're averaging like half to 1%.
organic matter. So you get a, you know, 2, 3, 4 inch deluge of rain over the course of a day or two flooded out. It, it, it runs off. That was one of the videos. Yeah. Uh, we were talking about earlier. It runs off Well again, think about that's, that's a half inch of rain. 20, I think That's right. It's either an inch or a half inch of rain.
22,000 acre, 22,000 gallon. Per acre, I can't remember. But either way, it's a lot of damn water. So every incremental increase in organic matter, the water stays there, you can absorb it, it absorbs. Um, there's a whole new thread coming out now. I think the meat Buffy guys just, uh, interviewed a guy, or maybe they're about to on beavers.
and the impact of beavers to our environment. [00:20:00] That's a little farfield from our cows and pigs conversation, but just how we relate to the water system in this country. Um,
Marty: go back to wolves. There's that famous video that's like very viral. It's been around for years, but reintroducing rule wolves to Yosemite Park in a completely changed l.
The land because you had
Charles: force the herbivores, the elk and deer force them to, to reacquaint themselves with the natural systems, which was, you can eat down here to right now, but you better get your ass back up that hill. Otherwise you're getting hunted, otherwise you're getting hunted. And so they didn't overgraze all the lands and the grasses holding up the banks of these rivers.
For your listeners that don't understand how this works, , uh, ruminant species, elk, deer, cow, sheep. These are all ruminant species. They graze on grass and where. [00:21:00] Tasties grass grow right down by the river banks, and if there's no predator, a k, a wolf to keep them from just hanging out there all damn day eating grass until the grass dies.
We talked earlier about the symbiosis, right? You eat that three foot plant down to a one foot and it breaks everything off and regrows and all that. Well, if two days later you come back to that one foot, one inch tall plant and you eat a six inches off of it, you've effectively killed the. . Mm-hmm. . So Overgra, this is the power of overgrazing.
And so these wolves come into the park. The river had been, you know, altered forever because the grasses have roots that hold the banks together. No grass, no roots, no banks. And so in a matter of like very short order, um, they, they started reestablishing the banks at this river because grasses were actually able to grow.
Here's an even better one for you. Where's the richest? down by the [00:22:00] river. Mm-hmm. , how do you take, how do, how do nutrients, soil, nutrients cycle back uphill. Gravity ain't gonna happen. Yeah. Right. So here's this symbiotic roll of these herbivore or bi or bi species. So I, I spend a little bit of time down in the valley eating the lush nutrient dense grass.
Along comes the wolves. I gotta better get my ass up the hill. So I'm going to eat. I'm gonna head up hill, take a dump up, down, I'm gonna take a dump and a pee at the top of the hill so they're cycling nutrients back up hill. You know, the rains come and bring those nutrients back down and you got this again.
Clearly the circle of that, it's, it's beautiful man. We talked about it early on, like we take this little snapshot of methane coming out the butthole of a cow, and all of a sudden that's a problem. We gotta kill all the cows. We gotta kill all the cows because they're emitting methane. Did you know that your average everyday run of the mill dozen oysters emits as much, uh, methane [00:23:00] into the air as carbon?
I did not know this. They're not, they're not protesting oysters Rockefeller, are they? I hope they don't. I love oysters. Oh, oysters are, I did not know this. If you're slogging oysters with eggs, S sling, excuse me, I always say slogging Slog. Slunk.
Marty: Yeah. Tomato, tomato. ,
Charles: that's, that's, that's some magic sauce there.
Oysters, raw oysters and raw eggs. Just knocking 'em back. Yeah.
Marty: That's, uh, oysters are super food. Mm-hmm. , and I always tell myself I'll never eat seafood more than a hundred miles from the coast. But even down here in central Texas, I, I cave and eat oysters pretty quite often.
Charles: Well, again, you know, Pharaoh works because we've figured out the logistics you.
I, again, I, I'd love to see more local, I'd love to be more centralized, you know, white oak pastures doesn't need to be shipping food to Washington state. Right. But someone in Washington state, if you really want to order Pharaoh, I pro, I'll ship it to you [00:24:00] with no regrets. But, um,
Marty: I was just gonna
Charles: check time up, but we figured out the logistics right. And. Uh, seafood. You can get really fresh seafood. I know. Pretty much anywhere in the country.
Marty: I know. Yeah. There's a little, I'm used to growing up, like right on the coast where it comes right
Charles: in. That's my, my mom's from mobile and so yeah.
My fond memories of like fresh.
Marty: Yeah. We used to, when we lived in South Carolina, we, like in the back Bayes, you used to just go put your hand in the muck, pull out a bunch of oysters, shock 'em, go shrimping back. Literally from the back bay too, to your plate.
Charles: Oh, it's, it's fantastic, man. Yeah. I mean, farming's the, that same thing for me, like, you know, there's this reverence, it's a little bit different, I think fishing and, and, and acquiring.
Um, you're not cultivating as much [00:25:00] in, in the aquatic. Um, they're doing it with the oysters now. Are they? They are. Oysters aren't. They are absolutely. But there's a, there's a connection that comes with raising them, you know? Yeah. Um, you know, people always ask like, you know, how can you raise this animal and then take its life?
And it's like, you know, it's hard. There's a reverence. I mean, so many people are disconnected from food now. They don't, they don't appreciate that, you know, G go hug a damn farmer. It's, it's not fun and, and, and reward and it's very rewarding. It's not a lot of fun. Mm-hmm. all the time. And, uh, but there's a reverence there.
You know, our pigs, our chickens, our cows have one bad day, one bad day. And, uh, the rest of their life is full and filled. And, and, and we absolutely, you know, Pharaoh is an offshoot of really honor, That sacrifice. That's thing, I mean, it's a waste [00:26:00] product in many respects. Part of the reason being that we've moved away from animal-based oils and for cooking and various other things, and moved into these, you know, cheap, ubiquitous, government sponsored, fiat supported commodities poisoned.
Yeah, I'd say something, I, I think you're right. Seed
Marty: oils literally affect people's
Charles: Oh, yeah. Genetic method. No, it's awful. It's awful.
Marty: No, it's like you're respecting the animal, right? I mean, you hear the, uh, you hear the phrase like, tail to nose, nose, tail. I mean, you're, you're taking the, the fat pie product of making, making, oh, it's great.
You
Charles: can use it. Yep.
Marty: So this has been a fascinating conversation. Um, where can people find out more about Pharaoh?
Charles: Our website, Pharaoh, f a r r o w, dot [00:27:00] life is our website. Um, got a FAQ section, everything on there best to the best of my abilities. And, um, we're, we're still small. This is our first year in business.
We just rolled over 12 months and, uh, things are going pretty well. So thank you to everyone that considers giving. giving, giving the lard cream a try. What, what
Marty: is your go-to response to the person that says, I'm not putting lard on my face. Okay.
Charles: Okay. Just, you know, you're, you're not push, you're not pushing, you're missing out, bro.
you know, um, I, you know, we say it, uh, it's our tagline. The Lord works a mysterious ways that. . Yeah. I don't, I don't know what the orange pill stuff is. I'm, I, I'm trying to lard pill people, . But, uh, you know, you, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make 'em drink. Yeah. And so I, I, I will tell you, I had a milestone this weekend before we close off.
I had a first milestone this weekend. [00:28:00] I had a woman come up to me at this conference, Susan, no last names. I don't want to outer to her friends, but she comes up and she. , right? Matter of factly. So I'm a vegan, right? And I want you to tell me about your product. And I'm like, this is gonna be awesome . And, uh, for those of you that don't know what a vegan is, they don't, they're not big into the animal.
They're
Marty: only not eat animal products. They don't wear them. They don't,
Charles: they, they, yes. They, they. , they don't contribute to the death of really, really furry, cute animals called cows, pigs and chickens, they don't like those animals dying. They're okay with mice and snakes and birds and crickets and all these other things.
Dying to grow soy and corn. Anyway, I sold my first Pharaoh to a vegan this weekend and we [00:29:00] hugged it out and she loved the story. She was very excited about the honor that we show these animals because we're nose to tail. You know? I'm not gonna stop eating pork, you know? And so I had pork ragu for dinner last night.
You're a wise man. You're a wise man. I love pigs, man. They're, they're, they're my favorite farm animal. I mean, I love chickens. I love cows. Pigs are like omnivorous and gregarious, like everything's a potential meal. And so they're always curious. They're smart as hell.
Marty: Well, it's crazy, like, When they become undomesticated out into the wilder physiology literally changes too.
It's crazy.
Charles: Yeah, it's absolutely insane. They say, uh, so pigs are, you know, this is why pigs are a problem in Texas. So pigs, uh, the gestation for a pig is three months. Three weeks and three days. And so, uh, mama Sal can get pregnant and have three litters a year. Yeah. And, uh, they've taken pigs. They've taken wild pigs, put 'em in capt.[00:30:00]
And two generations later, they're domesticated. They've taken domesticated pigs, put 'em back in the wild, and a generation or two later, they're back to long hair, big Fang, you know, tusks in the whole nine yards. It's crazy. That's insane. They're an amazing species. Very dynamic. Unbelievable. You know, one could argue almost as adaptable as humans.
Yeah. To the environment. You know, it's a, it's a blessing for us that we're so adaptable. I think we've reach. Nutritionally and skin care wise and environment, I think we've reached a tipping point with like, we're a resilient species, but god damn man, we're pushing it pretty hard now. All the seed oils, all the, you know, toxins, all the BPAs, all the this, all of that, and we're a shitty diet and, uh, toxic, uh, you know, toxic environment and a fiat money, like we're, we're at the tipping point.
So,
Marty: yeah. Then you. , like the mental, like the [00:31:00] dopamine hits from social media and attention spans. We, uh, I mean, and it does show that humans are extremely resilient as well, despite the fact that we have gotten extremely fat from eating all this stuff. But it does seem like people are waking up and even with the onslaught of the digital age, we are adapting, maybe not incredibly well in most people's minds, but I do have faith that we'll figure it.
Charles: Totally agree. Marty, I, again, there's two sides to every coin, right? I, technology, handheld devices, amazing technology and power in our hand. Also, a place where you can waste your entire goddamn day. Yes. Looking at stuff that. Designed to get you addicted to looking at it. Right. The gatekeepers never understand as much as the developers like big food weighs, no, knows way more about how to get your pallet addicted to stuff [00:32:00] than big food regulators.
You know, big social media. Big tech knows way more about how your brain works than people regulating now. That's a revolving door more and more now. But yeah, we we're. The hyper palatability of our entire environment, media, food, skincare. You know, again, I'm still, I'm still scratching the surface on understanding this.
Would it surprise me that there are scientists at Clinique or any of these big, big, big cosmetics retailers that are designing chemical scent? In their products that are highly addictive based on their understanding of our refactory system and how we, how our brain works. Of course they are. They're doing it with food pheromones and stuff like that.
Oh, of course. Yeah. So beware
Marty: freaks
Charles: stuff's going on. This has been fun, man. Thank you for having me. Well, thank
Marty: you for coming on on such short notice. We threw [00:33:00] this together, what, Thursday or Friday? Oh
Charles: man, you know, you gotta ready, shoot, aim. Right. Yeah,
Marty: no, I think I, I mean I certainly learned a lot. I hope anybody listening did as well.
It's incredible story from sunburn to, to skin products. Yeah, man. Solving your own problem. That's when some of the best products come out
Charles: of Absolutely. I, well listen, I, it's, it's, uh, I've enjoyed our interactions. This is the second, second time we've met in person and we've got a bunch of mutual friends and.
applaud and appreciate everything you guys are doing to, again, to spread messages about farming and diet and sound, money and all, all the things, man. It's,
Marty: uh, it's a team effort. The the feeling is mutual. Thank you for doing what you're doing to educate, get these products out there. Um, yeah, you can read every ingredient on, on these skincare products.
Um, oh yeah. You know exactly what they are. You're not gonna get. [00:34:00] Met or the ditra,
Charles: whatever, I can't even ti tetra, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can't pronounce it. Yeah, no. Yeah. You can read this. You can read it. And I've said from the very beginning, so ear you'll, you'll appreciate this. Like, I'm the only lard guy in town, right?
And so early on we were trying to figure out the branding and all of this. And you know, I had a team and it was that moment where the team was like, are you sure you want to. be the Lord. Yeah. Put be the put. Put. Like, like we have to put it on the ingredients, but do we have to? , do we have to tell people?
I was like, we're leading with lard, . Like complete transparency, embrace it. Uh, but I, what I've said from the beginning, and, and again for your listeners, uh, I know you've tr tried it before, this shit works and the one thing I sort of hang my hat on with regards to cosmetics is how damn vain we are.
Mm-hmm. . And I know a lot of people, when they find [00:35:00] something that works, it doesn't. They're, they're, they're in. Yeah. And so, um, I know it works. I stand by it. Uh, we're gonna lead with Lord, we're gonna be, we're gonna talk about the pigs. We're gonna highlight how amazing they are. Uh, we're gonna hope the vegans actually come after us, cuz no press is bad press when it comes to the stuff like that.
You know? Come on, bring it on. I'll have a conversation about real animal husbandry and, and, uh, you know,
Marty: Well, it seems like you're able to turn them, so bring 'em on as I I, it's
Charles: a good sales phone, man. You freaking mental man. man. You freaking mental day. I, I, I, I was all cloud nine the rest of the day. I'd see Susan at the conference.
I'd come and give her a big hug. I was like, I can't wait to hear about this from you, so.
Marty: Oh, she'll be, she'll be tweeting about it in a week. Damn right. Skin's never been better. Charles, it's been a pleasure, Marty. Thank you. Safe travels back to t. That's all we got today. Freaks. Peace and love ticky.
Charles: Boom, [00:36:00] girl.