00:00:08 Speaker 1: The Hunting Collective is presented by Element. I guess I grew up on a Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of The Hunting Collective. I am Benjamin Patrick O'Brien and I'm joined by Philip the Engineer. Philip. Hello, Benjamin, Hey, no buddy, I'm doing good, doing great. Well. Uh, there's a lot of talk about I am for I would say first, a very sincere, a very serious, non ironic thank you too everybody that checked in on me over the last week that one and how I was feeling, sending me good vibes. A lot of people sending me like songs and videos to listen to, books to read, TV shows to watch. Um, so thank you to everybody that reached out via email and then reached also reached out be Instagram d m Um. Pretty cool. It makes you feel pretty warm when people out there thinking about you. Um, so thank you very much to this THHC cult out there. Um, why are you shaking your head? Phil Oh you just called it the cult. Yeah. I thought we agreed upon that. I thought that's where we landed. Check the tapes. We never actually landed there. Um. I never agreed to anything, and I'm actually I was telling you about this. I have been getting my own messages of from people who are not a fan of the name. They do not like to be associated with with with with a cult. Yeah, well, um, you know, listen, we did get a message from the leader of the cult. I thought who was going to be the leader they called you know who it is? Of course, Yes, he's not a fan of the term called either, And so I think it's an issue in the guy you're gonna tap to be like you're, you know, first in command and the cult you know, be picking out which flavor cool aid we've been drinking that kind of thing. Um, when he's not into it, he's not into it at all. Here's my favorite one. Well only because it gives you a little bit of a love here. Kyle reached out on Instagram. You said, Um, why on earth would you call your followers a cult? It seems to me that it goes against everything THHC stands for, for example, a bunch of mindless buffoons doing what they are told without asking any questions. Now, I feel you should just call us because I am a weekly listener, enjoy it muchly the collective. Here's why I'm actually referring to Star Trek the Board where a collective that continually learned from one another, bettering themselves in the process on route to taking over the universe. It's a perfect fit and phil coming from a father of four, Your kids will become better alt if you spend more time taking them outside rather than playing video games with them. Thanks Kyle from Canada. Uh do you play video games with psc said, I hope you're feeling better. I'm doing I'm doing just fine. Thank you, Kyle. Uh thoughts reaction filled? Do you feel like the collective that sounds too serious? Yeah, but I mean that already is the name I feel. I feel like this guy's got a point. Even I'll get I'll get to the last thing he said later. But let's go backwards. Say that your show is already called the Hunting Collective. You're already implying that you and the people who listen are a part of this collective. It's got a name. I mean, I think every group of people that have a shared vision evolved, right, most of them evolved into cults without saying that they do without You know, if you're in the Church of Scientology, you're in a cult. You're just drawing something different in this case where we are one of those cults that says, hey, we're a cult and we get it. We're just very open minded and we and we're different, but we're a cult. No nothing this last okay. I mean like I would like to to just um chiede your your listeners, um for you know people. I think people come to the show because you, um, you like to tout to out yourself and the and your listeners as you know, like independent thinkers, like people who hear both sides and you know, way way things and come to their own conclusions. Yet at the same time, whenever you asked them to do something, they immediately do it without questions. Right, that's right. So you know, I'd like I'd like these people to take a look in the mirror and think about what. Hey, Greg Morris, remember that time I said to make a thing about phil and then you had like a framed picture of squeakers rest in peace. Think about why you did that. You're in a cult. You're in a cult and you didn't even know it and I brought you there. So no, no, no, that can't be. That can't be. We'll have to think about this some more. We'll have to objectively look at what to call ourselves. I don't like the collective. I think it's too serious, but we gotta call ourselves something. And apparently, if Eric Hall and Kyle from Canada and even you Phil are telling me that a cult is not the way to go, then fine it. Maybe just like you know when hunters Fill tried to like really whitewash the term kill out of the the pursuit, and they said, oh, we harve harvest animals. Oh we harvest. No, you don't harvest them, you kill them. Um, maybe later you harvest the meat, but you kill the animal. Here, we're we're not going to whitewash the term. We're a call. We're proud of it. Okay, we are, but we're not mindless. We're buying full Kyle from Canada, So we'll keep talking about that. We'll keep uh analyzing. But are you mad at him for you don't play video games or your kids? Do you kids aren't old enough? Oh? Yeah they are? Are they? Oh? Yeah? Man? Not the two year old, not the two year old, but the seven year old. Oh yeah. And and and on that note, Kyle from Canada screw you boom, you're out of the cult. That's right, because in cults there's no dissension amongst the ranks. You do what me and Phil say, how is it? And and Eric? I guess it's it's like a board of three. It's me, you and Air call me, and Eric call me you and Er call He's definitely uh on the board. He might be like more of a silent partner, but he does. He does send in the weekly, weekly voicemails, which would keep me going anyway. Moving on, Listen, we'll keep we'll keep working on it. We'll keep work shopping it for now or the cult. We're gonna stay the cult. Um. You're all cult members if you choose to be. If not um, you can't leave. So what are you gonna do? You're not going anywhere. Nothing you can do about it. All Right. We gotta get a lot to get to, and one of the things we gotta get to is Anya Fernald, who is an entrepreneur in the CEO of bel Campo Farms. I had a hell of a good time talking to Anya about everything. We didn't really get too specific, um we did for the short bit about belt Campo Farms, but We've talked about Regenda BA agriculture on the show. We've talked about sustainable meat, We've talked about how we scale, we talked about plant based meat. We've talked about the the anti meat movement. We've gone through all of this stuff, and we come to Anya, who is the CEO of a company who's trying to take control of the entire process. They own their own slaughterhouses, they own their own regenerative farms, and they own the retail side of the business as well. So she has a model that's self sustaining and maybe he can get us a little bit further along the lines that we've talked in this show before, which means scaling the way we feed ourselves, UM in this country, the way that the industry at least is set up to feed us. So a great conversation. UM. As we were talking phil um Anya did it had she was home because of quarantine with the kids. And there's some noise in the background, but you'll hear Phil is going to cut it all out of there. Uh. He's gonna make it beautiful, He's gonna make it sound perfect. Anyway. You'll have to. You have to get over some stuff there. She did a little bit of noise in the background throughout the thing, but she has a lot of really powerful stuff to say. Um. And we had a great conversation and I enjoyed the hell out of Anya fernald Um, so stick and stay for that. But before we get to that, we got to announce a brand new contest, phil O. Man, here it is phil and I spent hours workshopping this last night. That's over a zoom call, zoom call, and then and then a couple of a couple of text message threads. Afterwards, we just couldn't we The ideas were flowing. Yep, and uh you ever, we took wine glasses, filled them up with watermelon white claw, uh, frozen frozen watermelon bits in there. It was lovely. It was a lovely evening. Um, candles, all kinds of things. Of course, here's the deal. We haven't done a contest in a while. It's been a while. How long has it been. It's been like till since the summer since we've done a contest. Was it was it pre COVID? No, it was during COVID, because we did the Great American Outdoors Contest. Man, God, this thing has been going on so long. I know, it's just like real life now, it's not even a pandemic. Game is just like, well, this is that's kind of what it is. Don't get close to Grandma. It's gonna be rough for a while. But we haven't really gotten dinner any contest want. For one reason, it was hard to fulfill the prizes of the contest because we had so many delays and getting stuff to people. We finally got that figured out, but we got a new contest film and we don't really know. We spent so much time talking about it. We don't really know exactly what we want. But it's one of those things where we'll know it, Phil and I will know it when we see it. You'll do something cool and we'll say, that's what we were asking, that's what we were thinking, that's what we wanted you to do as soon as we see the damn thing. And so here's the deal I have. I watched the social dilemma. You ever watched that, philm We watched a social dilemma. I've been too scared. Yeah, it scares that. It scares the living, but Jesus out of you. Um, And we talked. I talked about a little bit with Onya coming up in the episode. But I got a little bit spooked, and I don't know if I made a mistake or not. But here's what I did. I gotta I watched the social Dilemma, got scared that social media was trying to addict me and keep me on there ten hours a day, and I unfollowed everybody on Instagram, all the hundreds of people that I followed, you included, Phil, You're off. That's okay, I understand, Yeah, well we could still be friends. I unfollowed everybody except for one page, Phil, And guess what that page is. Well, it's gotta be our title sponsor Element. It's not Element. Although now I'm sorry you. I'm followed Element. Yeah I did. It was a rash decision. I know I have to build things back up, but I could. The only one I couldn't get rid of his White Claw. Okay, that's a that's great. Now. So if you go to my page on Instagram at Benny O B three oh one, you'll see that I am following only white Claw. I'm a little bit worried that I made a mistake because I got spooked by the social Dilemma documentary and next thing, I know, it's just me and White Claw and I'm refreshing and refreshing and refreshing, and it's just White Claw pictures the entire time. And I think that's not good for me, because I'm gonna just become a major alcoholic in a very short time because of this decision that I'm sorry, You're going to become a major alcoholic. WHOA, I know, I know, I'm a stereotyical Irish guy who drinks six White Claws the day I know that was that was too easy. I apologize. Yeah, I was taking the taking the bait. So anyway, here's what we're gonna do. I have a number of I'm gonna say, I have a I'm not even gonna tell you what the number is. I have a number of yetti tumblers with the THHC logo emblazoned on the side, um only available in a box in my office at my house, only available there. That's the only place to exist. So I have those, uh, And then I have a what I'll call a crap ton of element here waiting to send to loyal THHC listeners. Now that's like the material product that you'll gain from this. But if you want to know what the real what's the real prize field? You know what you want to explain to people? What the real prizes? The friends we made along the way, No, that's nope, what did we talk about? What's the real prize here? What's the real thing that people are going to be excited to get out of this? You are going to follow them on Instagram. Unbelievable. You have like some sound effect of trumpets there. It is triumph. Unbelievable. You're gonna get You're gonna be as I as I undo my mistake. You're going to be the winners of the of this contest are going to be the first people that I follow on Instagram. That way, when I refresh my Instagram, the only thing is there is you and white Claw, And imagine being an occult where you're this close to the leader. I mean, unbelievable for you guys, it's gonna I mean it's like getting a brand new robe or something. So anyway, that is the prize. You want me to tell you what the contest is, Phil, I would love to hear it. It's a The prize is amazing. I would of us do anything for this. Um, here's what you gotta do. Here's you gonna do, And there's two ways to enter. The first way to enter is to email me. The second way to enter is to tag me on Instagram so I could see it there because I got nothing else to do there, because when I go there, I got nothing to look at now. So tag me, I'll see it. Help me out. I want you this is gonna be a holiday traditions contest and it's a bit of a choose your own adventure kind of thing. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to take a photo, make a video, some kind of thing. Photo or video is pretty much the only two ways you can participate here, showing the way you do the holidays, wild game dishes, cool photos with your grandfather, well Pratt, Well, that might be less of those in COVID times. Cool meals, family traditions, things that make me and Phil laugh, drawings of Phil and Phil Junior. And Thanksgiving garb anything Thanksgiving, your Christmas related or however you celebrate it could be Kuanza doesn't really matter. Better you send us something that makes us laugh, Post something on Instagram that makes us laugh makes us feel all warm and fuzzy for the holidays season. That says th HC. That what we're all about in the cult, and that says what what you're all about it Thanksgiving. Mixed those two things together and come back with something amazing. It could be a cocktail, could take time to do a cocktail. The more intricate the thing that you do, the better, and the more funny it is the better. Does that's all make sense feel to you? Yes, I'm a I'm a big fan of this contest. Yeah, so we want to hear, we want to feel your holiday festive feelings, and we want to know that you love th HC. That's all. And we will send you element a yetti tumbler and I will follow your ass on Instagram. Now, if you don't have Instagram, this makes a whole lot of no sense to you. But you could just get Instagram. It's pretty freaking easy. Just go over there, sign up for it, and then you'll be there and you can be part of of this and you may win something. And ultimately I'm going to see at least a few of you every day. But I log on Instagram no matter what you're doing. I will see it. So, um, anything anything to wrap this up till I know you're really invested in this one. No, you know, I just uh, I mean as as one of the three board members of the cult, I I I just want to see, Yeah, just share your holiday traditions. And Ben said today like I I don't even necessarily think it has to do with with like with th HC. Something that like reminds you of the holidays that you look forward to. Uh, you know that's what That's what I want to see. Yes, something cool and why and why it's important to you. That's right, That's right. So he emailed us at th HC at the Mediator dot com or tag me at Benny O B three oh one on Instagram and we'll get to getting on. You have until you'll be listening to this hopefully on Tuesday. You have until next Tuesday to get us in. You have a one week to get in your entries and we will review some of them and podcasts to come here down the road. So I got a lot, I got a number of tumblers, I got a lot of elements, and I got unlimited amount of followers I can follow on that this here Instagram so get it together. Send us something cool and we'll give you priceless gifts this holiday season. Moving on, Phil, before we get to on you, a couple of things we gotta get to got an email from Dana Zook. Dana says she's got something. She's got kind of a This may be for you, Phil. This she's got an email, says guidance on conflict with another hunter. This may be a doctor, film, medicine, woman time. But you let me know what you think after I'm done reading this. I don't want to put any pressure on you. I don't wanna put any pressure, she says, gentlemen. So I suppose I should start out by saying, this is a quote unquote pending conflict, but one I am certain will occur when the season starts here soon. In Ohio, there is a piece of property, private property, just a few miles from my house where I have hunted waterfowl for several years. It is a nice pond, small but fun to hunt, and we have done quite well there. Until recently. I was the only one permitted to hunt it because the owner had too much trouble with other people. This year, the property sold and the new owner allows people to hunt it, which I generally have no problem with it at all. I've met a couple of hunting buddies by showing up at the same spot with them in the morning. However, during the early portion of Ohio's duck season at the beginning of October, I went to the property to check and see if there were any birds using it, as I had thought to hunt it the next day. I noticed that there was a portable blind beside the pond and a number of decoys on the water. However, there was no one there. I went back later and the blind and decoys remained, but still no one there. I called the landowner to see if he knew whose stuff it was. He says, oh, it's probably so and so here's his number if you want to call him. I call the guy and he tells me, yes, it's his stuff, and he intends to hunt there for the next day and for the next couple of weeks, and it's sort of my stuff is there, so I'm the one hunting it for now type of way. He told me he had hunted there for the past four days but hadn't seen a bird, which I know is bullshit. That's not seeing birds part. I mean he said that he intended to remove this stuff after the early season was over, which was the following week, so I didn't make too much of an issue of it. Today, seven weeks later, I went back to check the spot and noted his blind and decoys are still there, the blind half torn apart by the weather, and the decoys scattered all over the pond, with most of the goose decoys missing their heads, which were scattered about other places on the water. Again, this is private property which several different people have permissioned to hunt. The guys who left his stuff out there knows this, and it is a good spot right now down the road from my house. I also haunt other properties owned by the same person. So what's your move? Get there extra early, knowing the other guy is going to show ten minutes before shooting time, planning to crawlon, is already set up spot, pack his stuff up and put it in his blind, hunt over his spread. Call him and try to work it out from the previous conversation, the fact that he's leaving his stuff out there for the whole season on property he knows others hunt. I'm going to go ahead and guess the guy isn't going to respond real favorably to any of these options. Do I just bite the bullet and give up that spot so it's not to cause an issue and lose permission for the landowner on the other spots? Thanks? Keep up the good work, Dana. What do we do about this film? This is? This is when we've kind of run into on public land before. I think we even had a story on the show where somebody, an antelope hunter, was leaving there. They're blind on public land next to a water hole, but in this case it's private land, and so there's other things that play. Um, Phil as a non hunter, what do you think one of my least favorite things in the world is um When you go to a movie theater and you're looking for seats and there's one person there who spread like five coats across an entire aisle, They're like, uh, you know, I I do. I do not like this. What is preventing Dana from just I mean, if the guy is not there, just like setting up a blind next to this guy's blind and hunting over his his like his decoys or spread. Is that is that frowned upon? It's not frowned upon. I mean, this is a situation where you just gotta work it out. But what I would say is if somebody's leaving their decoys and blind up anyway, that kind of takes away your ability to have a set up your own decoys the way you want, the direction you want. Let's say the wind direction is shifted. Let's say you have a different style. Let's say you're gonna do less decoys, more decoys. Let's say you're gonn do a spinner. Um, let's say you don't want to put geese out, whatever, whatever your whatever the deal is. We don't really know from Dana what what exactly he's after in terms of species of ducks. Um, but it just gives you less options because you're already either pack up that guy's stuff and which seems to asshole ish, you know, on his face, just to touch another guy's property and throw it in, throw it back in the ditch or something. But regardless, he's kind of staking his claim that this is his spot by leaving his stuff there. Um, So that's no bueno. But the question really is, feel, what do you do now? I know that you love conflict, bigan. I know, yeah, you called me up all the times yelling at me about random stuff. UM. So Phil, there's two options, maybe three options here. The first one is confronted the guy and say hey, this is and take control of it and say, hey man, this is how we do things here. I'm a veteran hunter, I know the landowner. This is how we do things in general. We don't leave our stuff out like that. Um. I don't want to get your stuff sold and make it about him. I don't want you get your stuff sol. I don't want you to get your stuff damaged. Um. You know, it's just it's just not a good idea to leave stuff out there. And so you know, if you don't mind taking that up, you can hunt whenever you want. I don't want nobody cares first come, first serve in terms of hunting. Um. But I don't leave your stuff out there if you don't mind, just kind of worried about what might happen to it. And landowners hate when bad things happen on their property because the liability. So you don't want to do that. So that's one thing you could do. The other thing, as he mentioned, is you could, as Danta mentioned, as you could not go back. But um, I don't know about you, Phil, but I would definitely go back. I would definitely have this phone call and try to work it out. If I felt like I couldn't work it out, I probably would would not alert the landowner and just continue to hunt the rest of the private property add access to so I didn't get into some so I wasn't able to problem hunter for this landowner who was nice. Yeah, I was gonna that was My first instinct was like, well, this is something that you think the landowner would care about, but I guess you wouldn't want to create like a big kerfuffle where there doesn't have to be one because you might just lose access to the land. Is that kind of yeah, you just never know. You have to read the teles with a landowner. If you had a landowner who is who's like, I'll do this as long as there's no trouble. Trouble's trouble, no matter whose fault it is, and so that I've had that happened before where landers like, yeah, yeah, you can, you can trespass on my ground to get to that public spot as long as nothing happens, like a gate isn't left open, So then you know you're like, this is a very carrious situation that you're in because you've got to figure out how serious this lander about letting me do this and am my own thin ice. Should there be some sort of blow up with this other hunter and we're both calling the landowner bitch in and he's not. He don't want to deal with that problem, and he's going to kick us all out of there. So that's another thing to think of in terms of that. So I think those are your two options. I mean the third one could be just too I guess go in there and hunt it and avoid the other guys decos. But if they're spread out on a small pond, there's nothing you can do. UM Generally, waterfall don't like the land next to floating goose heads um as far as I know, And so it's gonna make it tougher, for it's gonna make it less advantage is to be hunting that spot anyway. There's a bunch of debris in the pond that you don't feel like you can touch. So Dana, I would say, if it was me, i'd call that guy and just play the veteran card. I've been around, I've seen this stuff. I just want to make sure there's no problems here. If you don't mind, just pick your stuff up. You can stash it in the woods and put it out quickly when you get there, you do whatever you want. Just leaving it out, um, it's gonna cause problems. So if you don't mind, help help her brother out and see where you get um. At least you made the effort. You know, at least you made the effort here here, here, here, Okay, that's good. That's good. Just also depends, man like wherever. If if this was here, there's so much public well I don't wanna say so much, but there's plenty of public water around Montana where I could get a good duck hunt in small water, small streams, creeks, ponds, places where I can get a good duck hunt in where I don't necessarily have to to battle for that. But if you're a guy who doesn't have a whole lot of options, you have few options. You might want to think about putting up a fight, um in the best way possible, not just yelling or coming to blows or anything like that. So that's hopefully Dana, Dr Phil and I have have helped you on that one. You know, we we'd like to resurrect Dr Phil Medicine Woman. But Phil, didn't you lose the sound effects? Yeah, yeah, I was. I was hoping you wouldn't bring it up, but yeah, the hard drive of the sound effect was on got corrupted and I could us from an old episode. But you know, I'll do that eventually if I have to. Happens to the best of us. Well, we got a really good interview this week, so we're not gonna we got you guys gotta get to work on You're awesome holiday content for THHD to make us laugh, make us think. So we're gonna keep this one short and get straight to on your fair Nald and a good conversation about regenda, agriculture, the business of meat and everything that happens at Bell Campo Farms, which is your company. Enjoy, good morning on you. How are you doing great? Thank you for having me to David Um. Well, we got a lot to talk about, but you are I could tell by we were just laughing at We use squadcast of course for the show now that we're in COVID times and so, and I'm not a sponsored squadcast, so if it messes up. We'll we'll blame them. But they show us a little map of exactly where you are, a little bit creepy. Um, but it looks like you're Brison Water. So I'm gonna guess California. I am. I'm in the Bay Area in North count you know. It's I was in l A last week and it's real different up here. And I don't need to get into my politics on it, but I don't like that I get yelled at if I'm not wearing a mask walking down the street by myself with my children. That's North Call and that's so called a very different vibe and so calm. I'm like, yo, like slaw your roll, people like give you step away. So I feel like in between the two. I'm somewhere in between the two between like East l A and East Bay, which is kind of where between you recently spend time. So yeah, it's it's it's um like everywhere right now. I think there's a lot of a lot of fear, um and concern. Yeah, a lot a lot uncertainty. Well we'll get into obviously what your businesses and and some of the really cool things that you do, but what what challenges have you seen on a professional level from this, Because I know your operations are massive or becoming so so I really see only opportunities. And I'm not just saying that to be like business speaky. You know, COVID gave me this, this moment where I was able to focus on what really mattered in many areas of my life, um and in my business in particular. I I had a rough month. I mean, I'd say the hardest month of my life was that like mid March to probably end of April. And what happened in that month. I permanently closed two restaurants, I had to fire three team members. UM. My e commerce site became overwhelmed and crashed multiple times, and our fulfillment was a mass suite came close to running out of product a few times. A lot of my expansion plans in retail were stymy. So this is something people don't understand, is that everyone was going banan. That is in the grocery stores and people are buying everything, but news stores weren't taking on new products, so they couldn't manage. They were riding the wave right, so we were hoping to get slotted in lots more stores, and we just couldn't do it because nobody wanted to take a call with a new vendor at that time. So I had a really aggressive growth plan around my grocery channel. That changed, but e commerce picked up and now groceries picking up again, and then the beautiful thing that happened is, you know, one good decision I had made pre covid was to invest really heavily in the delivery platforms. So when Covid hit, I was on every platform. I had the right software in the restaurants to like process all the orders and put them directly into the kitchen, you know, some of these kind of like functional things. I had excellent photography on all the platforms. So we've actually been in a really privileged position where the restaurants that I have remaining are all up year on year. And there's two reasons. One is that we're well positioned on digital um and and two is that we've product that's that's justifiably branded and associated with wellness and health. You know, I position my products is we're an animal wellness company, animal wellness and support of human wellness. So a lot of my clientele are people who interested in in optimal performance or longevity or all these kind of things, and that's something that we do. Then the other thing is, you know, I feel empathy for the people selling seaweed salads right now because it's like there's a moment in COVID where people are looking at their food dollar and saying, wow, do I want to spend fifteen dollars for three hundred calories? That seemed like a good idea a month ago, but right now it really doesn't, right, And so my food is high calorie, high fat, high protein. You know, we sell a lot of hamburgers, are we do salads that have like half pounds of meat on them. It's a very meaty brand, so that even though we're a premium price point, I think our type of food has been appealing because it does represent value, you know, if you're actually looking to spend more for good calories as opposed to spend on something where you feel kind of satiated but you don't get many calories, which is like, especially in California, what people were looking for prior or in a nice position right now, Yeah, I was gonna ask you, gonna answer my next question as you were talking, and I was thinking of you know, is it you have a product that as a premium price point. You know, do you feel like the market changed during COVID times to be more about access? I just wanted I wanted at my house, you know. I always thought maybe price point would come become a much more important with the economy. But it sounds like, Um, really, it's the value of what they can get and how quickly they can get it and easily they can get it. Yeah, So I've been surprised by that. I initially thought we would be in a real bind around our price point. And to that end, I've launched multiple trials with like a cheaper, non organic but still regenerative product alongside an organic product at a higher price point, and I continue to only sell out of the organic product at the higher price point. I also think this is just a bit of a kind of random factory. But this is the first year that I've been sold out of turkeys, like a week before Thanksgiving, and my turkeys started eighty five dollars. Um. So I don't know what's going on. Um. I think there's a couple of things that from where I'm sitting. One is people want things that they can trust, right everything's gone topsy turvy right now in the world. Right there's a huge amount of discompopulation. Where a brand, we stand for something, we have high integrity. I can tell you where all the stuff comes from. We've been there throughout this pandemic. We've been opened every freaking day, which has been no small feat, you know, through riots and fires and everything. It's like bell Campos doors have opened. We've sold our customers really high quality meat. We've we stayed really friendly. So I think that counts for something, you know. I gotta think that counts for something in terms of why we're showing some lift right now. The other pieces, I think a lot of really are releast stuff about the meat supply system was had some had some sort of flex during COVID. I think people started to like look in look behind the curtain a little bit and got kind of grossed out. Um, So I think there's probably a part of my customer base that's that's that's you know, getting a bit more aware of the issues and wanting to make a better choice. Right. Yeah, Yeah, it seems it certainly seems that way. It certainly seems that some of the conditions in large scale processing factories and other places, and the fact that some of these employees are getting COVID just it seemed to like pop in the news for for reasons that I can't I couldn't explain, but it's good to hear you say that. You know, people are really looking for quality and time like this. Can you quickly tell us? Not quickly, we we had plenty of time, but tell us about Bill Campo. You know how it came to be what it is because I got a ton of questions about um, you know, scale and sustainability and all those things within your business. But you know, people really need to know exactly what the vision is around Belt Campo. Sure, the company is a vertically integrated premium organic meat supply chain. In short, what does that really mean. It means that we own pastures in California, we built and operate our own slaughterhouse USDA approved, and we have a group of retail stores, but more importantly in the growth channel for the company as we sell direct to consumers online and in an increasing number of grocery stores. So my vision is to become a national meat brand that people can trust if they're concerned about issues of animal human planetary wellness, and they don't you know, right now, the brands you can find most broadly in meat without like going to a farmer's market. Um really ask you to to check your values at the door, right Um. And so I'm trying to create a brand where in a product that checks all the boxes. And what that means is that I can go in there and I say this about my product all the time. We are climate positive, we are carbon sequestering operation. We're farming regencatively. Our land has been tracking to increase carbon over the past seven years. Okay, so there's your climate piece. We are focused on animal wellness. We use only evolutionary diets. Are animals are all pastor not just free range, like they don't just have access to outdoors, but are chickens and pigs are actually live outdoors their whole lives. We are slow growing, so our protein grows at the same kind of paste at a wild animal would. Right, It's somewhere between two and five times as long depending on species as a conventional operation. And we're also you know, certified human in terms or handling, certified organic, so all those pieces are part of it as well. So what I'm by listening this off, I'm saying, okay, consumer, if you are concerned about me for any one of these reasons, don't like what does in the planet, don't like what it does to animal, doesn't like don't like what does your body, because that's something that we should talk about. You know, there's a lot of toxicity is kind of a very l a word, but like there's a lot of problems with an inflammation associated with the animals diet and how it it extends to human diets. Right, So like when we actually eat animals that are inflamed, we too get inflamed. So people who are concerned about human health and have things like ibs, etcetera, that's going to be an answer for them as well. So all of these pieces are concerns. Right. There are all things that customers and people in America say, Hey, I wish I could eat meat if it only kind of did these things for me, or wasn't this bad? And what I say is here it is, here's the product that doesn't do those things. It's gonna cost more, right, and that message and that product has been in the past, you know, eighteen months really thriving, and we position ourselves you mentioned animal wellness and support of human wellness. UM, so are you know our clientele tends to people who are as interested in planetary health as they are in their own human health. Yeah, And I did you know on this show, we've we've kind of we've doved into I feel like regenerative agriculture, and our audience understands it and they know it from a ground level perspective. They we talked to some folks from UM Impossible Meats, We've talked to the first thank you, UM. We We've we've tried to dig into a lot of what's happening here on many levels. And I like that and some of the sales pitch I've heard from some you know, sustainable meat companies or regenerative agriculture is there's this anti meat movement out there and that we're fighting. It's like kind of a building building it up as we're fighting against this anti meat movement. What I and reading about you and even listening to talk now, what I like is that you're saying, I'm building something self sustainable. I'm building something from from beginning to end that could scale. And I've read some quotes from you where you talking about scale and that's something that we've we've always kind of stopped short on this show when we're explaining these things as we try to determine. Yeah, it's regendative agriculture is great, how do you scale it? Defeat everybody? Because certainly the plant based meat company have figured out scale already and have a bunch of you know, Silicon Valley tech dollars pouring into their companies. Um, So I think one of the more important things we can talk about here is scale, Like what you know, how do you take what you have in scale it? So it really does have an even larger impact than what you already are having. Absolutely, And first I wanted to address one assumption in in how you just describe the alternative meat movement. You know, they have figured out scale, but we still see a massive negative gross margin in those products, to be clear. So I mean you can look at it in their SEC filings, right they're there. It's hypothetical that when they get to a massive amount. But right now, every you know, one of those burgers that you buy, you're getting a check from somebody in mental park. Okay, Um, so you're like your your two dollar burgers an eighteen dollar food costs, so that it's not clear that that is that there's also a lot of externalized costs in there, obviously, but actually I'm a pure dollars based citys. It also doesn't make sense right now, mat who knows once they take over China, Um that that might be different. Right there. There's a lot of doors that apparently open when you get to really massive volumes, right um. So our operation, let me just speak to the tactics of how I'm scaling. We currently have three thousand beef, about two thousand pigs, just over a thousand lamb, and we produce sixty thousand chickens a year. We also produced turkey, geese and ducks and smaller volumes. That's a small operation in America. Okay, but it's a headache. Okay, it's a lot. And the reason it's a lot is that, you know, our beef, they're on somewhere between six and fifteen different pastures during the course of their life. They're moving from pasture to pasture. Um. There there needs to be a guy who isn't just you know, showing up and dumping a bag of feed into a bucket, who's actually managing a process and and understanding and paying attention to nutrients and to sugar levels in grass. Right, there's a level all of of engagement and intellectual kind of responsiveness in that work. It's a it's a more costly type of work, and it's a more costly way of raising animals for a lot of different reasons. Um So that that process right is going to be much more expensive, but it's also more complicated to manage from a human perspective and a knowledge perspective. So my goal isn't to, um, let's say do that times three hundred, because already at the scale that we're at from an operational management complexity situation, it's it's a lot. And it also doesn't make sense to me to say, Okay, we're gonna become like a million acre regenerative farm. Right, that doesn't really align with the kind of like human touch. I mean you think about it and things like cheese. You know, you have artis and small scale the areas where they do things sort of low and slow the right way, and when you get bigger, there's a human error factor that comes in place, and so over various like safety and um complexity reasons, the processes tend to get less artisanal. Right, that happens again and again. And you look at the great artisan cheeses that scale used to cheesemaker. So I have a lot of like cheese kind of relevant information that I realized. But like the you know, like a parmesan, right, is an incredible brand, incredibly consistent product. But it's literally thousands of small producers right there isn't like Mr Parmigiano over there in Italy making all that stuff. It's a collective of small producers. And the reason they scale that way is because you can retain the artisanality of it because there's there's been you know, the you know the phrase of like management by walking around, right, there's a lot of management by walking around in regenerative egg. Um. So our plan is to verady begun this this year to scale by actually, um, you know, building partner relationships with local farms and using our regenerative practices to coach them down their regenerative path. Right, some of these guys are already pretty far there, right. And then we are processing the animals in our own usc facilities. We keep that trace ability, and then we're as we scale, will be linking the end product to the origin farm, the Origin partner farm via UPC codes on any retail products. That's the future plan. Okay. Right now of my needs are net by our own farm, and God bless it will be a great problem to have when we start to outstrip that farm's potential. But our director of our supply chain has been working. We now have relationships with nine smaller regenerative operations in northern California in beef, and these guys are looking for a way out. You know, these guys are not finding remunerative market for their incremental spend like they to do regenerative. You spend a lot more, but you're not able to capture that. What are you gonna do? Get into the pick up every Saturday and drive to San Francisco and sell me at the farmer's market. That's kind of the only way you can claim a price point like what we're able to claim. So we're able to effectively kind of reduce their marketing load as well, which is something that's typically a welcome step. Yeah, I mean, this is a It sounds to me like an and when the reason why I was excited to talk to you is like this sounds to me like I don't want to call it the holy Grail, but maybe um, because when you say on the website meat you can trust, there is always a hole in that game there, you know, And most examples I've seen, um, there's always kind of a hole in how do you get enough meat to market? How do you get it to a price point where people can stomach it? And then how do you make sure you can take that model and grow it when there's nothing really and you can correct me if I'm wrong here. As much as plant based meat might have proprietary technology, there isn't necessarily anything you're doing that's that's proprietary and can be can be you know, protected from intellect intellectual property wise. Um. And so it just feels like if you're able to box all this in and say I'm doing everything from A to z um, it can scale. Yeah, and it's gonna scale through a like a you know, tapestry, right, It's going to be a wide range. I for me personally been like in terms of the it's you know, everyone's got like there it's just scratch in their life in terms of achievement goals and and the idea of like building just a massive business that just is us and getting bigger and bigger and more cows and more farms and more cows and more firms. Like, that's not that interesting to me. The idea of, like, of providing a viable way for many many small heart of firms to pivot to the best way of doing things is super powerful, Right. That's really exciting, um, And that's you know, that's kind of like the I think that's the right direction, right. It's like because there's also a lot of you know, the other side of the coin with the ag system as it is today is the farmers themselves are not being served, right, So there's a there's a the sense that like or people sort of imagine that like corn bell Iowa producers think Monsanto and GMOs are great. Well, guess what, they're making less money than they did fifteen years ago. They're in much much more debt and they were if fifteen years ago. They don't have any control over what they do. And guess what, you don't become a farmer because you like to be told what to do, right, you know. So there's a there's a real shift, like I think in the in the perception of what these businesses are doing that acribusinesses are doing if they're in support or against family farms. So you know, we've lost like n farmers in the past couple of decades, right, this is there's a massive consolidation and people are just leaving the industry. So there's also it's not like this is a this is a Oh, it's going to be a bunch of hipsters who you know by twenty acres. It's like, no, we're actually talking to when when I say our partner firms, these are like multi generational really, you know, fantastic operators here in California, fifth and sixth generation cattle ranchers that are like yo, you know, stop this train and want to get off. We're talking about this in another sense. A couple episodes ago about generational land, UM, how do you maintain generational land those stories ultimately the animals and the agriculture that's there without having them be beholden, as you said, to industry and to to exactly um, all the problems that are happening within that industry. So it's good to hear. Have you when you think about UM, I read a quote where you were talking about alternative food. Do you think about your meat as alternative food or the approach that makes it alternative? What what's what about bell Campo is is alternative? You know, I know we got some basic high and interestion food in history. I mean, we're basic in terms of what we do. Um, but they what's alternative about it is a style of production. You know, it takes our operation five times as long to raise a chicken as it does in conventional industry. Um. So that's like and I also think Ben, it's like we're kind of like willfully anti efficiency. That's why we're alternative, right And and it's like willfully anti efficiency in the interests of wellness, you know, and health of people plant animals right there. I mean it's like it's a but to do that. It's like, you know, we've in the meat supply system. American consumers were I think don't realize how much they gave up. You know. It's like, do you want cheap meat? Hell? Yeah? And then it's like, oh wait a second, do you want like this stuff that tastes so bad You've got to soak it in a million sauces and smoke it. And by the way, you have to overcook it consistently. Because it's so likely to have pathogens. And oh, by the way, there's like lots of different types of toxicity that's implicit in that meat. And by the way, there's a lot of you know, other issues that are um you know, like there's a whole range of decisions that were made and that have really significant consequences that we didn't sign up for, right, but that by paying that price and getting those savings, we did sign up for. So you know, the question for me is like when we when we look at that three dollar a pound she impressed, we don't understand what we did to get that, you know. And then when we actually say people taste my chicken and they're like, oh, it's what how does this taste so good? Or like I don't have to use all this karayaki sauce or whatever I'm doing, and and why is it like not chewy? And and I am, well, now, does it feel so bad to pay you know, three times the price? No, It's totally worth it because this is a great experience and I'm also more full. You know. These are all things that I hear from people and that I sell myself experience, you know, And but we built the system where it's all about price and then there's a huge amount of other costs and we don't really understand what we've given up in exchange for those savings. Yeah, I like to say, you know, the taste of me too, because um, maybe we can get to gaming this at some level. But my wife is a good example of something. She's she doesn't hunt. And we first got together about eleven twelve years ago. All meat, all wild game was venison. It's like venison is a gaming or venison is this? Everything was venison, no matter what it was. And over the years she's pretty much just eaten what I've killed in terms of of red meat, and she has become a connoisseur of what what cut is? This? Is this an eye of round? Well off of what a meal dear off and elk off of you know, are we talking moose here? Because elk is my favorite. She's become a connoisseur of quality meats. And if I screw up the butchering, she lets me know about it. She absolutely lets me know about it, you know, so if I if I if it has freezer burn or whatever. She's become a critic and so well Ben made our meat into too, you know, like we've made our meat everyone's like so into I think you know a lot of the inflammation that we have in the u s. Everybody's pounding toms after almost every meal. Right, you realize that most people are, you know, having to suppress this really strong like autoimmune revulsion against our food. Why because we're pounding it with like a cocktail of canola oil, sugar and soy. Well, there's like the ultimate inflammatory trifecta. Why do we have to put that on all of our meat? Because it tastes like tofu then tastes like anything, you know, And that's like, I think what your wife picked up on is like when you actually develop when you appreciate meat that tastes like meat, all of a sudden, everything's different, right, Like all of a sudden your need for this. And by the way, you're more in tune with your secondary safety characteristics as well. You know, your secondary satiety is like your superpowers as a as an animal, right where you also eat, you don't you see for calories and fat, but you eat for micronutrients. You eat for things that are going to heal you. You eat for antioxidants. Right, we all have the capability in our bodies to eat for those things. There's lots of good research about people and animals, you know, not just eating for calories. But part of the reason we like overeat doritos, right, is that it's a nutritional waste land, right. So when we start to like re educate our palates to pay attention to flavor, we actually activate the superpower of secondary station characterists. We're eating for more than just calories and fat. And I think that's also a big part of the kind of like obesity and over eating puzzle, right, is getting people back to eating something that's real flavor. You know, the same thing as like with vegetables. If you're eating hothouse tomatoes, you sure as hell are going to want some ranch dressing on it, you know. But if you get something you grow to me in your garden the summer, you're just gonna want some salt and you're you're stoked. It's good, you know, absolutely, yeah, absolutely that that comes down to like a proximity to to to what you're eating and an understanding of what it is, um where it came from and all those things. Do you guys, you guys think about supply chain. Obviously in your business, that's obvious. Do you think about how you know how the end consumer? Obviously we talked about how it tastes, but what about um proximity? What about story? People want to know where the food comes from, but they also can't. They're also not going to come to your regenerative farm and slaughter cow with you. So how do you guys think about proximity in terms of the end consumer and how they feel about their connection to the food. I am radically transparent in our branding and our messaging. I really drive that part of the business. UM and my um, you know I I it's it's in everything that I do. I mean I was actually shut down from my PR firm. I tried to put a live stream into our slaughterhouse when the you know, the ag gag law that happened where they could film it. Like I was like, you know what, bite me? And I was like doing it in my PR firms like you gotta no, no, no, But it's like I actually think now I could do it. You know, that was like in the very early days. I think that happened in or fourteen, But like my, my, you know, I I do I tell my daughter, you know, we we kill animals for a living. Um. I would tell my son too, but he's he's really small. But you know, like we I try to be very clear about the fact that we raise animals to process them and we sell their meat. And it's like every aspect of what we do is about that, right. So the you know, the people I remember, you know, hearing somebody telling me about how squeamish it made them to see food that look like an animal like see like let's say, a chicken foot in a case or a pig's head in a in a butcher case, right, And my response was like, you should be more terrified of square ham, right in terms of your safety and like really being rational, A pig's head shouldn't discuss anybody. A square piece of meat should freak you out right, or meat that doesn't smell like meat, or a chicken nugget that's shaped like a dinosaur run don't walk right, And instead we've gone we've got it, kind of asked backwards where we are now, saying, oh wait, it's the meat is perfectly square. You know, the ham smells kind of like um, you know, like salty water. Um. The chicken is pale, and it looks like it might be you know, like a piece of tofood. This is great. We feel confident about this, but that's actually just fall the agro industrial script of what people want us to do and how they want us to behave around it. Right, So I think getting people to embrace, uh, embrace the fact that these are animals and embrace it. Now I've also learned I did. I did stupid things when I started this company. I used to have pigs head in cases and then you know, we get picked up by Peter and people get grossed out. We used to do more kind of playful stuff about that, but and I still have it now. I've got Instagram and Facebook. When we do butchering videos and stuff like it gets blocked or sensitive content, we get flagged and stuff. But it's like it's important to understand that integrity. It's radical transparency. The meat industry has convinced us, the mainstreamat industrctive incests like trust us, we got this, and I say, you totally don't have this. You're making people sick, you're putting animals in torture, and you're producing food the tastes like garbage, so you know, just you can just step aside, like if you want something different, you're gonna need to learn the whole process or not. You know, you can't. But i'f you're interested, We've got it all there for you. It's like there's an appetite for it. It's less cute than seeing somebody like, you know, snip Brussels sprouts in Santa Cruz, California or whatever, like the veggie version of this that happened in the seventies. But it's an education that needs to happen, you know. Yeah, I love that, man. I love it on a lot of levels. Because there's when you're talking about you should be scared of a square piece of meat. You know, I've butchered a lot of animals in my time. I'm never unless I made it. So I've never seen a muscle on an animal that came looking like a piece of spam. That's never Oh my goodness, yeah, exactly. And you see people saying like, I'm you're gonna, you know, pound a package of you know, square turkey slices and swhere, and it's like this is and that feels clean and safe, you know, and and but That's the thing is when I don't condemn that, you know, I actually I was you know, when I talked to our customers or influencers, are people like I get the sense, you know, people say to me, oh, I'm so afraid to eat heart, and I'm I like, am I just a woods? And I'm no, you've been you know, billions of dollars have been spent to educate you to be afraid of this. You know, billions of dollars have been spent to educate you did not touch a chicken and to be okay with its smelling weird. You know, like this this has been in public education campaign that's in the industry of an interests of big industry, and they've spent a lot of money to put us in this particular spot. And so here we are now, and and like, let's not beat ourselves up for it, but let's recognize it that it's like it's a you know, it's the same thing as like what happened with Americans deciding that eating a big bowl of hyper process grain at first thing in the morning was a great idea, right, That wasn't folk wisdom? You know, in America we used to eat protein and fat for breakfast. Right, We actually culturally used to fast until like ten or eleven am, and then we would eat something that was probably like fifty fat, right, eggs and bacon cooked in fat, so in animal fat. So to change us from that population in the nineteen thirties to a population about the fifties was was rejecting that food in fave are highly processed, you know, basically carbs and sugars like that. Took a ton of education, and so now we're starting to unwind that, right, But we've seen this cultural shift towards people saying, oh, eggs aren't going to kill me, people bragging about eating bacon again, that kind of thing. But so like keep in mind, we've we've seen this in other industries as well, where certain things that were considered, you know, like for for generations were healthy and felt good. You know, people invested money to get us to think about it in a different light, and it takes you a couple of decades to unwind it and return to some normalcy. Yeah. Yeah, but we we talked about this a lot here in terms of animals that we kill our on our own. That it's it's once you start to understand the transformation process to get it to that thing you're comfortable with. It's it's a bit of a mind fuck. It's a bit of a like you become really connected to the transformation of a dead deer to a vacuum sealed you know, sliced lunch meat um that we create here in my house. You know, we talked about that a lot. We talk about how how even just the the slicing of the lunch meat sometimes is gonna get a little bloody, a little bit messy. But the transformation process of understanding how that vact sealed lunch meat came to be in your fridge is huge. And and how it looked, how dirty, how messy, how how harry in some extension it was or maybe shouldn't have been. But that transformation is huge. And I think if companies like yours can continue to say like, we're gonna show you each step of the transformation as much as we possibly can. I love the idea of live streaming of slaughter House. I mean I don't love it from optics level, but I love it for the because people need to get proximity to this any way that they can. Yeah, I appreciate your vote. I do think my PR firm was correct and telling me probably probably who knows. But I mean, well, well, it's just that question of and I don't think I don't believe that you for me, I'm not a hunter. Um. I love cooking game. I cook a lot of it, um when I can get it. Um. I'm not drawn to hunting, but I love being friends with hunters and helping them make sausages and cook their food. Right. Um, But I I'm not comfortable with killing animals, you know, I don't. I don't think this thing of like, oh, if you're gonna eat meat, you have to be able to kill it. Um that to me, Like I'm a woman, I don't think genetically I have as much of a drive, a killing drive. Right. But like so when I go to I thought I built the damn thing, you know, like I know what I do there when I go on the floor, I still get emotional when I see animals being killed. And I don't feel like the whim saying that. And I don't think I shouldn't eat meat because of that. You know, it's like okay to outsource these things. I think in a traditional society, I wouldn't have been doing that anyways, you know. But it's not like I think, oh God, you gotta like stare the stare at the trauma in the face to be able to deserve to eat it. But I do think you need to understand. And that's like the language I use it, like, we know we we raise and kill animals, like that's what we do, and we do it in a way that's as kim passionate and awesome as possible. But the nitty gritty of it is what it is. And I don't think we need to mass that in in our in our marketing or in our language. Yeah that I love that, because that is that's what's happening to us. Over time. We're being we're being told that the complex emotions that come with killing and eating something don't matter anymore because it's not a it's not an animal anymore. It's a cutlet, or it's a piece of spam. It's no longer an animal. It's something that we've processed and distilled and handed to you neatly, neatly wrapped and looking beautiful and like all those emotions and the complexity of what you just described with your own way of thinking about killing animals. It's important for everybody to to go through but we've been told that we're not supposed to go through it because you know, that would probably lead to less people buying stuff, you know, at the store bought meat, probably what it would lead to. So I feel like there's an industrial complex of that is that has hell been on us not having this conversation one and two, not exploring our own emotions around eating things that we that had to die so we could live. But it's like it's kind of like, you know, I think that a lot of um vegetarians and vegans are motivated by this like oh it's it's it's an awful system. So I'm just gonna, you know, disengage, right, And that's and it's actually kind of understandable. You know, it's like if you if you can't, I mean, it's an industrial like it's an awful system. Animals are raised in torture, they die in torture, and you know that, you know that like something over of meat in America goes into waste, that goes into the waste tream. So it's like, oh, we raise them in torture, we killed them in torture, and then we throw you know, almost half of them away. And so it's a I think a lot of anti meat activism is motivated by people to saying a whole hard reject that system. And I get it, you know, so my option is to say, well, instead of just breaking up with it, you know, why don't you just find something that you can feel better about. Yeah? And also you know, I I each time we have this conversation people right in, people that are part of large scale farms or agri business right in and say we're demonizing, we're using a strawman theory in terms of big egg and big animal EG and factory farming, things like that that there are. There's certainly shades of gray, there's certainly nuance. There's certainly ethics and treatments of animals and large scale pork production and large scale chicken production. Yeah, they're there are groups that are trying to figure this out much like absolutely, Yeah, Yeah, I know, I I hear that, you know, I hear that I and I I think it's almost that the system is so large and entrenched that it can't change fast enough. That's where I'm getting a space to sprint, right. It's not that it's not gonna change. Um, it'll break or it will change right, um, but it's it's not going to be able to pivot hard enough fast enough just because of the size. So that's how disruptors happen, you know, That's what happened. That's where disruption comes from, right, And so I'm I'm being given an opportunity for destruction. Yeah. And as I have explored the plant based meats and looked into that kind of thing and and really talked about it on the show, I feel as though, and I feel like that that's obvious in the way that those folks answer questions and present themselves. There's a good faith and a bad faith way of of producing meat for people to eat, um, and and really fake meat this you know, meat substitutes um. It seems like you're you're engaged in a very good faith activity. So how much have you thought about you know, impossible meats and and all the other I feel like there's so many of that I can't keep trying beyond burger and things like that, and and where they've ended up in in terms of fast food, and we've seen him in Chipotle and Burger King and things like that. You know, I was initially more concerned about impossibles when they were to after more of like the high end chef and trying to position themselves as the premium product. But now I don't think that and somebody is going to invite you to their home to enjoy something that you can get on the menu at burger King, right, So from a positioning perspective, they've taken themselves so far out of the premium discussion, right, I mean, when can you imagine it's like, oh, come in my house, I got these same burgers that they started burger King, Like that would be almost like an offense right there. There's just a positioning question where I don't think for you know, my products are more for the home cook. They're really not in my corner of the pool. And broadly I see there their actual and the reason they're doing that, by the way, is that they've raised so much money and they lose so much on every single product. They're just like swimming as hard as they can to get some volume. Right. So they it wasn't like they you know, they they they didn't want to do that chef message, right, They started with that chef message, and they didn't get enough volume fast enough, right, So with that that sort of didn't work, so they had to go to and of it to another space. The other thing, I actually I'm thankful for the you know, the the what is it close to a billion dollars that those two companies, the biggest two players have deployed between the two of them in educating people about just how bad CAFOs are. Now, I'm not going to say that every impossible food graphic I've seen about big ag is correct, right, um, But broadly, I think that there's a public education and awareness around confinement meat operations that's just so heightened, and it's in good you know, in good part thanks to those to those operators, right, they've done a lot for me. UM And you know, it's I kind of don't I don't agree with the idea of we're going to um you know, rename this, you know, make them spell it m y et or something. It's sort of like that to me, is is kind of fighting the last war. You know. I don't think that a rebrand is the way to do this, or to force them to not call it meat doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I think it's like, you know, they're there's so obviously a different product. It's just not it's not something that that occurs to me as a competitive UM a competitive competitor to me, Yeah, were you? Are you ever surprised at how quickly it became acceptable and in what we'll call the mainstream you spend a billion dollars on something you can get to drink their own urine. If you spent a billion dollars on it, I mean literally, you and me could do that in in in six months, we could have America drinking it's own urine with how much those guys spent. Yeah, and and again that you know, from talking to those folks to being inside you know, to being inside their buildings and looking at things UM and reading about them, it feels to me like and at some level, UM, it's very important to talk about what is it that UM accelerated them, And it's the money and the Silicon Valley investment and the fact that that they have a proprietary technology to create these stuff and it's value. You know, what they did is they found a way to create a food product that could behave in the same hockey stick that they were accustomed to, Right yeah. So it's like, that's the miracle of what those guys did. It's like my operations. I go talk to a Silicon Valley. I mean, I had the benefit of having had very patient capital in my company. That's why we're here today. Right. But that's something that not many regenerative firms have. And and the reason why it's difficult for people in my space historically to get capital is that we don't offer quick returns and we're not very quickly scalable. Right. So those guys figured out how to offer something that kind of met many of the parameters of the type of investment that people were looking for, right. Yeah, So they've created a food product that financially, at least hypothetically behaves exactly like Silicon Valley wants, right, And that's very very appealing. You go to me and I'm like, yeah, talk to me in thirty years, right, right. Unfortunately we have a longer horizon, you know. Yeah, it's good for you to hear you say patient capital and and to think about the business side of this, because it's always a business, right And and you know, food as a business is complicated because you have to make profits. You've got a streamline. And I think that's probably how probably it is how we got to where we are today, um, and to what we're so used to. So, um, how does that work? How can you how can you look down the road and say, like, you know, we are already want to be today, but we are going to slowly and um, let's say, you know, openly move towards where this business needs to be. Because you said a couple of times, you know we're not going to be We're not gonna be a huge company, we may not go public. We mean, you know, is that how you how you feel it has to be? Um, that's a great question. I think that you know, the could there be a fast growing regenerative operation, Yes, probably now that there's more of a substrate of medium sized farms that are kind of toggling towards this UM. But broadly, you know, the expectations for capital today don't align with long term agricultural place right, And that's like where we you know, you think about short term mentality characterizes many aspects of agriculture today, where it's you're looking at you know, tilling the soil every year, disrupting the root systems. Carbon is sequestered, I mean, is let out of the earth through that tilling. So you're looking at systems that rely in their fundamental thing on a on looking at a one year horizon for return in terms of crops. Right. So that's the type of thing that I think, Um, people don't realize that implicit in in in conventional agriculture is this is a short term, one year cycle. Um. With regenerative agriculture, every day you're making short term tradeoffs. So we could get a hell of a lot more you know, alfalfa out of a field if we were to till it for one or two years, right, and then we've become pretty dependent on a cycle of fertilizers and get more costly, and there's a bunch of different things that happen and change, right, But every year, I mean, I'm gonna just ballpark. It's like a thirty haircut against potential activity by by pursuing there's a huge tradeoff with efficiency and and high output production with the way that we choose to form. Yeah, that's a great point and a point that we've made in the past that needs to be made is that the reason that we started tilling the soil and The reason we started injecting with chemicals is because we needed that we needed things to grow faster to supply our need for these for these products. And then we ended up with, especially on the agriculture side, the plant agg side, mono cultures. You know, millions of acres of monocultures that didn't that do not promote the type of habitat wild animals or domestic animals need to to thrive. UM. And that's one thing I want to talk to you, you know, see how you think about it from both you know, just a personal level and a business level is just land use. You know, how do you guys when you're when you're running your regenerate active forms, what do you think about how when this scales UM? Because I've hunted a place called Rome Ranch down in Texas, UM where there run BIS in its regenative agriculture UM basis for what they do. But they've got a lot of deer, they've got a lot of access to here. They all white tales, have got a lot of turkeys, they've got a lot of quail. UM. It's a great place to go and hunt, and it's also a regenative farm and those things seem to kind of line up. So how much have you thought about land use UM in terms of you know, both just as a personal philosophy and then it's the business of bel Campo. We have the potential in the United States to utilize livestock to be a positive player in the environment in many, many areas of the US. Right here in California. We see this with the fire management issues we have. Were we to manage land like we used to, you know, the turn of the century, last century in California, we would be using ruminants to clear out underbrush, right, mimicking the natural massive amounts of tually elkin and and deer and and all those different animals we used to have endemic in our in our in our environment here in California. Right, So we have a um opportunity to use livestock as a tool for increasing productivity and increasing land output throughout the throughout the US. Right were don't do that because we have this idea of like there's a pristine, beautiful wild environment that must be absent of animals, right, that's our thinking. It's like we are absent of animals, Like that's the way that we imagine in our mind's eye that the that nature is. It's like without animals that that we're gonna preserve something. We're taking everything out. But these systems evolved in concert with animals, right, And these the systems evolved with with animals as a natural part of of how the soils were conserved, how biodiversity was cultivated. That's part of the system. So of course we're upper Creek. Of course we are. Like we took one major element. It's like we took water out of the garden. Of course it's not gonna work. You can't just take one thing like that out. That's so crucial. Yeah, it's it's good to hear, you know, the thought process. And and one of the things that's impressed me with almost everyone that I come into contact with that knows anything about regenerative agriculture and as using it to some end, whether it's commercially or just on their own, as under has a deeper understanding of that connectivity and a deeper understanding number one, of soil as the bedrock of all that we do and everything that we eat. All the animals that people are consuming that you guys sell are are eating. Uh, I would imagine and what you can talk about this about your farms eating what they're meant to eat, right, they're eating they're they're eating plants grown in a healthy soil. And so can you talk about the soil part of of what you guys do and how that gets all the way to you know, the butcher's block and all the and then all the way to to the retail sterm Well, you know, the interesting trend in all of our food right now, and the reason that we see such a boom in the supplement's industry is that a lot of our food today is nutritionally bereft, right, it has far less nutrients. And this is like even you know, you see this like in our eggs, right, a free range bell Campo eggs has three times the protein that a caged, factory battery farmed eggs, three times same amount of calories. I actually don't know the bath of what the other calories come from, but three times the protein, right, So just you know question of like forced molting and and really you know these high production that's forced on these aniles because of what they do with you know, the factory chickens is put them into starvation and females if every species. Actually, when you're starved, you become hyperfertile, and then you become infertile because your body kind of gives it one less go. So the way they do that chickens, you starve them, they push out a bunch of eggs and then they give them food again, they start them again, so those eggs are lower quality. That's an extreme example I give you to kind of present, you know, an extreme example that illustrates the case. Right, the other things that happen there are more subtle. Carbon in soil is crucial to micronutrient capturing plants, so you can't have micronutrient rich This is why our our broccoli is less satiating and our spinach doesn't have all the same micronutrients. And some of these great studies you can read about, you know, nutrite analysis of vegetables and meats in the nineteen fifties compared today, and the trend line is just down, down, down, and something like thirty times the vitamin C in an orange that there used to be it, right, So there's this huge like decline in the in the in the nutritional balance of all of our products. Now. The carbon as part of that is because carbon supports micronutrient extraction from the soil, and then the soil that has more carbon has more micronutrients, so it's like they can get out of the soil and then there's more of it in there to begin with, and then that ends up in the plants, and that ends up in the in the products in our you know, the way that we see that in our products to day and the kind of like end different rents. It's complex because these are, unfortunately not things that are tracked, you know, the r D a panel on a on a you know, a jar of something, doesn't you know, that's what's like one percent of the picture right of the micro nutrient profile. What I hear and what I observe is um just greater satiety. People eat less. And I think you probably feel that with game too, right, Ben, is that like people can kill a sixty four ounces corn fed ribby, but it's like trying to eat sixty four ounces of elk. You've gotta be kidding me, right, Like it's it's very satiating, and that's not because of the calories. Actually has less calories, but it's got the other stuff that your body is like, oh, I'm getting all my nutrients. I can stop eating now, right, So that's your that's very functional of your body to kind of have that that feedback loop for you. Um. And then the other thing that's interesting is when you let animals forage naturally, they naturally gravitate to a lot of different types of forage. There's a beautiful study about goats that shows that when they are suffering, they would induce E. Coli in goats, and then those goats would naturally go and find these very strong bitter herbs that are a natural antioxidant that at or anti parasitic, right, that would then clear them of that disease. So there's examples of animals just you know. So there's a nice story there in terms of like ability to heal ourselves and probably some some through lines so what we as humans potentially can do as well with with our own health. But also you have an animal that's eating a wide diversity of foods and as a result, that's another part of the reason why the micronutrient load is so much higher. It's the diversity of the diet. Yeah, yeah, I mean I I I look forward to a world I think this is this we're headed this way if we keep Yeah, folks like you keep doing what you're doing. Is that you know, we went through a time where we where we current, there was kind of a small scale i would say, revolt against the factory farming industry and how MutS being produced. And then we started to see labels like you guys have, which is grass fed, certified organic, and then when animal ethics started to come around, then it aimes certified humane and these you know, these labels have become part of our culture. And when people are are looking for a fast follow is this good or bad? They go and they look for this terminology. And I'm looking forward to a world where regecative agriculture or just the term regenerative means as much as organic, or means as much as humane or or some of these other things that UM that people look for on the shelves. I know, you guys have all of those things built into what you do. Have you thought about this terminology and how people kind of make, you know, some kinds snap judgments, or at least look for UM at the grocery store, at the retail counter, look for something that that seems like it has the qualities that we've pushed as a society of good of good food. I think the attraction that consumers have to the word free range and cage phrase a good sign. You know, those terms don't actually mean very much any more. They were kind of defanged by industry tree right, and I of course worried the same thing can happen to regenerative um. But yeah, broadly, you know, labels are very important, and I really have come to embrace my organic certification, for example, and a lot of people say, well, you know I'm organic, but I'm not certified, And I'm like, well, that's like telling the I R S, Like I pay my tax I just don't file my ten forty. You know. It's like come on, like it's it's you know, and this idea of like organics extradorly costly, it's like it's I actually know, I run a multiple organic farms and it's like two thousand dollars a year. It's not that expensive. So just you know, I just encourage your listeners and people with you hear that things like oh, we're organic, but it's too much paperwork. It's like, yeah, that's actually all the paperwork that organic does. As an operator, I'd say has all been good for our diligence and rigor. That said, we also have many non organic animals that are not in our program for really kind of ethical reasons. For example, you know, we we have a type of barley that grows wild on our farms. It's a it's a bearded barley. It's got like these long hairs on it. Those those hairs are very sharp our our calves. At times we'll get into a big patch of that and scratch their eyeballs. If the weather is right and whatever else is happening, they'll get pink eye. We can have a pink eye outbreak. And if we want to keep those animals in organic, we cannot give them an antibotic for pink eye. We choose for compassion reasons, right, and also business reasons because those animals will be stressed and malnourished for months. Right, So it's ethnically complex and dubious business decision to keep to let them have this disease. Right, So we'll give them the antibiotic, you know, and they will get better immediately, and they will never be organic. Right, So I can say organic has its complexities because do I think that one eye drop in each eye of one calf, and one day of its life mayrit's losing something that can that guy can charge a premium, and when every other day is still freaking expensive, that that makes sense to me. It's like, no, that's annoying. But I give that an examp people of the real reason why many farmers don't want to do organic. You know, they say it's like it's the paperwork or it's the fees. It's really because it holds you to a rigor around disclosure that can be frustrating. It doesn't always feel rational, right, does that make sense? You know, it's like that that's that's that's that sucks. It's a bummer. It's like, come on, I should be able to charge you know, eight ninety nine and said it's it's four ninety nine. But but that animal lived for you know, like eight hundred days and all that time, it was every one of those days if that one day was organic, and so is its mom when it was in you know, destdating, right, So that's the real reason why. But I think those labels are important, and I think, you know, I now see the labels as like it's a you know, it's a proxy for knowing your firm. Here, the best thing is to hunt it yourself or to buy it directly from somebody and a lot of you know, your listeners at our hunters. It's like you can buy whole beef and whole pigs the same way you can, you know, stalk a whole elk or a whole deer in your freezer. Right, So that that's the best option, is just to buy direct and know that farm learned and in that case that that guy is not organic, but you've been to his ranch and you've talked to his kids, and you get a great sense of what he does and his integrity in the world or her integrity in the world. Awesome, do it? You know, trust your judgment, not the label, right, don't walk away from that farm gate being like, nope, you're not certified humane, right if you've observed that the practices are there, because very small operations a lot of times, so even that two thousand dollars is something that can tip somebody over the edge. Right, So there's a real but those when you don't have that mano a mano personal relationship, those certifications are a proxy and they're an important proxy. Um, So I I think that increasingly, you know, regenerative certification is going to be something that people are gonna want to see. Um. The problem in all of this, right is the cost load and the premium perception. You know, I I struggle with my My beef operation is somewhere between three and five times is expensive for one of our beef to produce compared to conventional operation. But I can charge like double, right, so there's a my incremental ability. So the way that I coop that, right, So if I you go to a grocery store and you are to see you know, like whatever Bob's um feed loot beef for sale for thound and then there's bill Camp and it's like or twelve nine pound, So it's already a big premium. But the the actual cost I should be it should be more like you know, like that they're they're at there at and I'm at fifteen, right if I actually look at the real costs of raising them. So the reason that we're able to recoup that is that we're with our grocery store partners. For example, we distribute direct, so we don't work through distributors, so we save a couple percentage points there we don't spend as much on like what's called trades spend or advertising in store um, and that allows us to recoup a little bit, so we capture mergin in other ways. How scalable is that in the long term? You know, so the challenges like all these additional levels of certification and do what's the premium that I can command? So I'd say we're generative has a chance as a certification if it can legitimately command a real premium that captures the incremental cost of that style of production. Right, It's it's really math like every like everything. Yeah, I mean a lot, a lot to cover in there. But I do think that these terms free range is a really good example of one that these terms, the terms are used to manipulate us in the same way that we're being manipulated on the fast food scale. You know that we're being commercialized into into a burger at burger King free range. When it became a a term that people at Whole Foods really that like they had to have it. If they were gonna shop at Whole Foods and they were gonna buy meat, free range had to be there. It's it's then that when the demand grows, then there's and the industry wants to then manipulate that term. So if you look at chicken in the way that producers can get around the term free range, I mean chicken could still be in a warehouse um and relatively close quarters and and still get the free range the free range label. Morgan Spurlock has a really good documentary from years ago about this exact thing that lay is this out um and so it's just another like the proximity ethic and all this just comes back to no matter what, that label, while important for people that aren't going to go to the farmer's market every day, that aren't going to kill their own elk, while important, is is manipulatable. Maybe not easily manipulated. You know more than I about that term, but it can be manipulated, has been manipulated, and as some and at some level this at this point is watered down right absolutely free range means that the animals have access to the outdoors. What that means practically is that there'll be a quantt hut that's say eighty feet long, and there'll be a door that's eighteen inches wide on one side of that quantit hut, and that door will open up onto a small run that's like you know, a couple feet wide and a couple of feet long where the animals hypothetically can go outside. And these animals are still like debaked and inside and eating a slurry and under huge stress. Right, So you know the problem is that when you let animals really live outside and be natural and relaxed, they don't gain weight very fast, right, um, And so that the real problem with free range is that it's fundamentally again when I said earlier in the conversation, were willfully anti efficient. That's what I'm talking about because think about it. For you and me, it's like, think about the times in your life when you were inside all the time, didn't get natural sunlight, ate the same thing. I mean we kind of remember like in college and stuff. It's like those are the times you gain weight under a huge amount of stress. So they you know, the weight gain in chickens in particular, because we're talking about free ranges, it's really relevant to chickens into poultry that weight gain and poultry is as tied to cortisol and in confinement as it is to anything specific in its feed you know, in the case of chickens, for example, we feed our chickens, like on paper, something very similar to what Tyson feeds them, right, which is, you know, kind of a mix of corn and and barley and wheat. I mean Tyson probably uses corn and soy. We use a little bit of corn and other grains. But let's say it's directionally, it's the same thing. It's a grain bas and so the lugoons in it. And we raise exactly the same breed for part of our chickens, a cornersh cross, and so that Tyson. So but Tyson, it takes them two and a half weeks to come to about three pounds n bell. Campbell takes eight ten weeks. And that's the difference. It's confinement. So when we talk about whether or not free range animals are, you know, how whether or not that's a legitimate turn or not. UM, it's absolutely an efficiency question, right, it's about whether or not they are um, whether or not by getting access to the outdoors, they're going to gain weight much more slowly, and so to to there's a really good reason why there's been a work around, right, which is that it's a lot more expensive to do it that way, and it's difficult, if not impossible, to pass that costs on to consumers. Yeah. Yeah, that the the more in spurlocked acumator I mentioned. It's called super Size Me too, I think, And he it's pretty funny. He um creates his own restaurant called Holy Chicken, and all the marketing is he calls authentically honest, which I think he's doing this for ironic purposes. Um, of course, but he's got all of the actual terms. They're what they mean, what he had to do to get him um. And some of the scenes with the marketing firms and that in that film are hilarious, hilarious. And so you guys are doing You're not You're not doing it for a gag like he is, although a poignant one. Um. But you guys are trying to in some ways do the same thing he's doing by tearing down the walls of marketing fluff and you know, not misinformation, but certainly certainly the twisting of information too. I will not use the word natural on any of my products. I will not use the word free range, and I will not use the word cage free. Those are all meaningless words. Yeah, Okay, so that's like my kind of wilful disobedience on those fronts. Right. I use the word pastured, um, I use the word like outdoor. Um. You know we use other words, right, But the Spins put in particular, the word natural is abhorrent. You know, that's a word that's been completely co opted. And keep in mind to Ben, when I use any word on my packages, in in my grocery products, like let's say the word regenerative, I have to document to the U s d A why exactly were regeneratives In that case, I have my independent third party analysis from the Soil Carbon Coalition. We send that to them when we say here's our documentation, we have a discussion with them. So when a company like Tyson uses the word natural, there's an implicit co option of that word. It's not just like they put it on and nobody corrects them. Now they've gone to the U. S d A and they've made a case for why it's natural. And it's probably like these chickens have two legs. I don't know what about the Tyson products is natural, right, but they're able to make a case and then at that point the bar is lowered, and that becomes the standard for the use of that word. Yeah, they are betting on the fact that we're not gonna look into it. They're betting on the fact that millions and millions of Americans aren't going to give a ship beyond just these terms that make that make us feel like antibiotic free. They say, there's there's no antibiotics unless the animals are sick. That's what antibiotic free is to find as well. Guess what if you are a veterinarian working for Tyson, you know, it's like how all the animals are sick, all the animals, and you know what, it actually is legitimate because the conditions that the ranna are so risky, they're so you know, there's a there's this really kind of chilling study from the Pew Charitable Trust about confinement animal systems and the impact on humans who work there and the animals that are there. And they show that if they ventilation systems in one of those big quantit hut factory farms goes down, that all humans and animals have to be vacated from inside within nine minutes or they will die because of the air toxicity. Nine minutes that's how long like in a natur with those animals, didn't I that didn't have that massive ventilation system going, how long you'd have to get the hell out of that building and let get any animals out for their own protocols and their own information. So that's how bad it is in there, right, And that's why you know you can say like, well, we have to preside in the bogs because otherwise they continually get sick. Well, of course they freaking do. Of course they do. You know, it's like an environment that's so heavy in toxicity that when the fans break, everything dies in under ten minutes. Yeah, that was your own house. If the air conditioning broke at the summertime, you're like, get out of here. We're all gonna die. Yeah, we imagine living in environment You're like, okay, kids, if the fans go out, we have to leave. In ten minutes, we were all dead. Like of course you'd be like and by the way, take your slightly eight times a day, you know, like im that the walls are black, but it's Yeah. The other thing I always think of is that like every single generation of modern humans, at least as we go through, we always look back a generation or two in the past, and we we either chuckle or marvel or are disgusted by some of the things we did right smoking while pregnant, being advertised in the thirties and forties, and on and on. There's some things that we know now that make what we were doing in the past look abhorrent on many many levels, um generation to generation. Yeah, we always fall for technology. We always fall technology. You know. It's so funny. I remember, like, you know, seeing these kind of like these initial ads for the fake meats and it was like, oh, it's so awesome. It's highly processed. It looks just like me. And then my mind goes to like, you know, asbestos and less draw and like there's like I've seen this movie before and it never ends great, you know what, It's always the same. It's like, hey, we figured out how to take this thing and just totally transform and make it cheaper and make it out as something that's that's absolutely no genetic you know, similarity to the original item, and it's all great, you know, And it's like, you know, there's a there's a these stories more typically and badly than well. Right, but every day is a new day for us, Right, every day is a new day, and it's it's like we culturally embrace the new in America and we embrace it with joy, and we're like, yes, problem solved, let's do this. And we but we did look at the track record for these you know, highly aggressive innovations. Um that did that don't have any long term research or you know kind of impact studies on on nutrition or wellness right for humans and for the planet. Right. But there is that thing where it's like we we tend to just sort of fall for the pitch every time and then get surprised that, you know, lo and behold, the innovation actually has a bunch of unforeseen consequences and there's no such thing as a free lunch, you know. Think about that with the lust, remember that stuff where it was like this fat that you didn't know in the low fat diet and times, and you can eat all you want of it and you're never gonna gonna uh get absorbitity of fat. And people you know, start like leaking fat out of their butts. It's disgusting. We were wearing diapers and eating chips so and there are still people who are like cool, just where my diapers and eat my chips. You know, it's like, well, what else is going in your body in that time? What else is happening there? You know, and and these kind of innovations. We of course that's what's happening. You're you're not letting your digestive track absorbitly fat or it's you know, it's it's it's kind of like eating petroleum. It's not something you can physically break down. There's this of course, there's these implications. And I think the same thing with with you know, we're making like a product it's biosimilar to meat and then putting it into our bodies. Right, It's like the same thing with genetically modified cross Like, of course, things are going to go a little bit sideways. These are levels of fabrication that we don't really understand the long term implications left or even the near term, you know, even like a year of eating that product, what's going to happen? Yeah, Yeah, I feel like this time streams are certainly shrinking for us. But my hope has always been we look back at this time generations from now. My grandkids will look back at this time and say, you know, you guys are idiot, You guys are super smart and thanks for doing you know, the internet was great. Appreciate that, but you know it's really prescription opioids and fast food that you've you've sucked us on. Um, we're going to fix it up, but we're not. We don't appreciate you know how quickly you guys fell into these traps. Do you see the future of meat somehow where we can look back at this and say, you know, the grocery stores look different, the way people eat meat and think about meat and value animals looks different, and this was just a time of great discovery, but also just you know, great great misinformation and the fulling of America can somehow be just that when we look back on it, you know, fifty sixty years from now. Wow, I think about it. Oh my goodness, Like this is this is just the next level for me. I mean I see it already in the past eight years since I started this company. Okay, so I see it already in people's attitudes shifting and a little bit of is this kind of this like you know Thermidorian reaction where we go from this super high you know, paranoia around that and now there's everybody on the carnivore diet or eating their calories from animal fat, which I think is probably might be healthy, might not be a great idea. I don't really know. Right, So we're in this moment where we're over correcting in the fringe and there's going to be a recalibration towards the center. Um So, the biggest challenge for me in thinking about what does that future look like, it's just broadly, what's our cultural prioritization of our time when it comes to food preparation. So if you look at the you know, the the great developments that in the things that we've done with the fast food less so with the opioids, um less, my areas of specialization, but we've we've really we've decided that a bunch of things aren't worth it for us to do. We decided that making broth and kind of a meat and making you know, doing anything kind of manual is not a good use of our time and we would prefer to do other things. By the time, we spent a lot more time on our phones, right, we spend a lot more time absorbing information in through different media. So there's a there's a there's a cultural shift. So I don't doubt that the health crisis is going to push us towards some really radical shifts and things. Right, That's that's happening already. Um, But then the question is like where's the where's what's going to be the crux and what's the future generation approach to time and the role then responsibility. We have to spend time on food as part of our basic health and wellness. That's what I see less of positive trends around. I do a little bit in younger people, you know, getting excited about cooking again, but something around that, you know, the the understanding of that you're gonna need to spend a little bit more time on this, but it's gonna pay off for your entire life and it can be part of like a meditative ritual and joy. That's a dot I'd love to connect for people like you have it because you hunt and you like to eat meat. But you don't hunt because you like to eat me. You hunt because if you like to get away and be out there in nature and have sort of something you're kind of you know, I imagine like goal oriented and like to be not just like going for a wanderer, but feel like you're doing something and have an achievement in a in a reward associated with that achievement when you're out there, right, and so that hunting, you know, it's like you're doing something that's really gratifying, but it also has purpose when you're feeding your family, and so it scratches a lot of itches, right and again like and it helps you on a lot of different levels. So that's a really powerful set of gratifications right there. And it's not just about the food at that point. It's about satisfying a lot of different levels. So, um, I think you know, if we were able to look at at what are some more of those examples, um, that would be really really something that people could think about as a way to culture greater you know, greater societal change. Right. So it's like not just seeing it as like bringing food to the table, but it's like for me as somebody who loves to cook, um, and who somebody who like kind of struggle with this like idea that femininity and feminism now is like you have to reject the home a little bit is implicit like or that all these convenience foods are things that are going to kind of like save us from drudgery. And I like, I don't love drudgery, but I really do enjoy the the art and the thinking around planning my family's meals and organizing that and cooking really carefully and putting things away and and I also, you know, like I love the like cooking seasonally, and I think there's a lot of health and taking care of my family's health in that. So there's a lot of meditative joy in the same way that for you and hunting, that happens right where you're like, Okay, this isn't really just about what I'm doing, right, it's a it's the act of doing, and it's part of the joy. So for me on the culinary side, there's a lot of the gratification that's like the act of doing all these things is deeply satisfying and relaxing and um and makes me feel content. And it's not just about the food that I'm making or the caloric impact of that food. It's about the whole process of delivering that, right. It's it's a lot more implicit in that, And you're never going to get that from opening a freaking granola bar. You're just never going to get that. You know, and that's where I think a lot of like emotional eating and over eating comes from, is that people are looking for more, right um. And to me, it's like I'm more of an emotional cook than I am an emotional eater. Right, that's probably good thing to promote. That's probably they be like, listen, if you're getting emotional and you're not feeling really good, go cook, don't go to the fast fature. I had a really rock today yesterday. This is a true story. I had a really tough conversation and I like, I raised a leg of lamb and I was just a beautiful piece of meat. I really thought about how I was going to do it. I you know, enjoy the whole act of my house fell amazing and it was like a healing process for me. It was a great way to kind of sell, soothe and gave me a chance while I was doing to think about that and think about what I'm gonna do and react. And it was like claiming space. And you know a lot of this stuff too, Like think about it now, in America, we don't go to church anymore. We don't have you know, face to face friendships, we don't have communities It's like there's a lot of things that are kind of shredding were und us and and so it's like a lot of this kind of especially here in California. This like you know, people go to treat yoga like it's church, right, It's because they don't have church, you know. And so what what are the what are the rituals and the and the routines that fill that space. And I think that culinary can be one of those things. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I mean I watched this so you have you seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix? Yes? I did. Everyone have rights, very compelling film, a lot of it. It really resonates with everybody that's staring at their phones a lot. But at the same time, I want to say, like, hey, guy, listen when you know they're the one character that's on there's telling us, you know, they're trying to addict you. They're using psy ops on the American public to addict you to your phones. I'm like, yeah, get in line. Everyone else is too. And an attention economy that you know, fast food wants your attention. They want to addict you to fast food. We want to be addicted to process sugars. We want to be addicted to our phones when everybody's trying to addict this. So though, like you know, magazine has never made money off of content and subscriptions. Yeah right, It's like, come on, guys, this isn't new. I think we're trying to vilify something. It's like, I mean, songs have blaming the printing precess for what's in the newspaper. But it's not that far off, you know. It's like this is just the new media, you know, and this is we've been trying to do this. Yeah, we've been trying to the you know, to act like we've stumbled onto the attention economy has something that just happened when social media became Maybe it's a more sophisticated version of that, but it's we've been doing that. Yeah. I'm sure when the TV came out, people saying, oh, we're doomed the television. It's gonna you know, it's gonna brainwash us all, you know. But we get over those things only with you know, the kind of conversations that you're having. And it's like, listen, people are trying to addict you to shitty food. They're trying to addict you to ship the food too. They can make money, that's what they're trying to do. They'll do anything to trick you into doing this. Um, that's just how they roll. You have to and and the mom. I think maybe the modern dilemma is we're away from our families. A lot of people especially you know, I would say California, but even here in Boswa, Montana, people move away from their families to be to to be in a better place, or to find a job. And then they're they're alone and the world is trying to addict them to everything. Um. And that maybe the modern struggle, um, where you're trying to fight against fast food, but you don't have a food culture. You can't go to your mom's house so she can't make you the cast or because she lives, you know, a country away or states away. Now there's that whole like I mean, that's where I just think when we when we've taken we've outsourced our food production to a couple of big companies right everywhere in the world. Is what we've done. We've in that given up a lot of other kind of lateral forms of joy and gratification and didn't really account for all that, and I think, you know, we now have like a pandemic of anxiety, right, particularly among women, with American women are like the most anxious on earth. And it's like, well, you know, there's I think that there's a there's a connection to then, like there's like lots of kind of ritual soothing, you know, caring things that we used to do in our culture that are just gone now and they're not societally approved, right and not things that we should be doing or and I I agree that there was a ball and chain, Like I'm very glad that I'm not watching you know, my clothes in the in the in the river. Right. But it's like there's all there's a there's a happy medium where some of these things could have multiple levels of benefit for anxiety, for wellness, for stability, for ourselves emotionally. Right. Yeah, food you know, if if we can get there with food, and I hope you know, I I have some of that because of hunting, but I'm not all the way there. Um, you know, I have young kids. It's like you have young kids, and it's sometimes it's hard to to really drill down on that stuff and you want it to go quickly at dinner time needs to be stress free and as quick as possible. Um So, it's not bad to have like a butcher box or something every once in a while, but you know, it's it's incrementally getting there. You know, hunting led me to gardening. Um gardening and hunting has led me to this proxy, this this like search for a proximity ethic and my food, and then that's led me to regenerative agriculture and trying to to understand the broader scale so that I can understand where I've it in. Um So, all that's healthy, but also the emotional part that you described, I think is something we've never touched on this year before. But I think that's it's it's super important because well, I guess maybe there's a question in there somewhere that do you feel like the consumers can feel emotionally connected to Bell Campo Meats because you're you're being honest in a way that other companies aren't, where they could sit down at their dinner table will be like, hey, guess what, here's the story of how this of this meat you're eating. Here's this leg of lamb, or here's this pork chop and tell the story of your company and you and what you guys do the same way as I tell the story of where I killed the antelope that's that we had for dinner. Last. What I feel like is I I enable people to feel joy around something that they like to feel excited about, but they typically feel ashamed of. Oh yeah, that's what I think the magic of our brand is. It's like, this is this thing where it's like for me, I was a vegetarian for mendas and I've never been less healthy right in in that time and overweight, and it's just it was a terrible, terrible protocol for me personally. This is in my teens, like many many young women, I was like, oh, it's bad for the planet and you know, stop eating meat, and it was it was a train wreck. And then when I got back on me living in Europe, I, um, then you know, now I probably probably six percent of my calories on average are from animal protein and fat minimum, right, um. And that's the diet that I really do great on that just really works for me. But it's for people like me, or maybe a little bit less extreme than me, it's like there's a there's this problem where you're like, God, like this food that was you know, ancestrally extremely relevant for us. It really works great for me, but I feel, you know, kind of ashamed about it, right because of because of this is the complexity of the choice. So what I think what I see are consumers embracing is they're like, oh, I love this, It's great for my health. I feel fantastic when I eat this, and now I can share are in an uncomplicated way, you know. And for many and obviously tons of America is still making whatever they want, you know, shouting for the rooftops. Right, So I'm talking about a pretty niche audience. But that sense of being like, wow, I can be super proud about my choice for something that does really well for me is really empowering people. Yeah. Yeah, and and and to know that, like we're all I think the modern sense, our diets are imperfect in so many ways. Even if you're like me food conscious and I want to be health conscious, I slip up all the time. Um, I fall into the traps. You know, people have cheat days in their diets. You know, you fall into the trap were like, I understand that those processed foods are out there I understand sugars and stuff. I love a nice doughnut. Um, I like a nice piece of pizza, and you know those just knowing that those things are out there. But if you can have a couple of days a week at least where you're doing, you know, sharing that emotionality and the way that you're describing, that's a start um And it gets addicting after a while to have that connection. Well, you know for me too, it's funny like I don't cook a massive meal every night. I do cook a lot um. But then the other thing is like when I do have like more of a simple meal, I'm really stoked to have just like cheese and you know, like some olives or whatever it might be, like a bunch of nuts. Like you also can get simpler when you're kind of your cheats are happening to write like it's a there's a mentality around it where it's almost like we we became. For me, i'd I'd much rather just eat a bunch of like brazil nuts and a couple of boiled eggs than eat a frozen TV dinner. But that looks like a square meal, you know, just rationally, that makes a lot more sense to me. Right, I would never I would never opt for a full meal that was frozen in pa prepackage against just like kind of like an abundant raw food, whole food snack of some sort. But that mentality is something that I taught myself as an adult, right. I didn't necessarily go up with that um, but it was and it was about my own kind of wellness and how I saw it. So there's a sense to where it's like, I think, when you adopt that kind of mentality, you can still have cheats and still do you know, still eat those things that are indulgent and delicious to you. But like there's also a way to frame kind of like every meal and food opportunity in that thinking, right, yeah, because there's essentially like a simplicity and an ease that comes from eating higher quality, minimally processed foods. Like everything actually does get easier, so you get a benefit for that higher price because all of a sudden, you're making roast chicken and you just throw themself on an in Stoke and it's great and you're good to go and everyone. I like you said about last year, we just moved in a new a house and I did have a garden last year when I got everything set up for next year, and I like there was something part of me that as much as I love having elk in the freezer, man, did I miss a fresh tomato and like fresh cucumber and being able to look outside and see as I'm eating it and see where it came from too. So I like, you know, I hope people can can see that. You know, some nice pink salt on a on an elk back strap can feel the same as a fresh ground pepper on it. You know, it's olive oil on a tomato or something like that. So all that stuff is connected in the and the emotion of of what you're doing and the taste of the thing um that you've cultivated. So I appreciate it well, uh I, I really I think everything you're saying on you has made some connections for me, hopefully for the audience as well, in a way where we try to think about, you know, the proximity to our food, but also what do we do on a mass scale, because that's the generational question we're gonna have to answer here, not only for ourselves and our own health, but for the environment. You know, as you mentioned in the beginning, so well, I think hunters are leading the way to you know, like to get this to scale and to make this more broadly available, we need to open the doors around people eating more cuts of meat, being more responsible about wasting. Me and I guarantee it that you're more cautious about waste and leftovers on that elk box draft that you have then you ever are from anything about from the store. Like when you have a sense of caution and creation and and pride, you're going to be more careful about the entire utilization. Right. So that's something that I think, um, you know that that consciousness about the product is the first step. And that's why I actually feel great about charging a premium price from my product, because I say, well, if nothing else, this gets people to be more cautious about waste, right, and more conscious about it going bad and maybe saying hey, I'll just take those chicken bones from the roast and I'll throw them in a potnam make some broth out of that and getting more And that's why doing that, you're extracting more nutrition out of that carcass. You're taking more of that life force and turning into nutrition, which is why we killed that animal to begin with, right in the same way that when you hunt you do that. So it's like, I think you you've got the you know in your audience and what you're doing. You've got the fundaments of what it's going to take in terms of like a wisdom and understanding around animal utilization and extracting full nutrition from life. That that's what that's the kind of We don't need all of that, We don't need people to be as like rad as you are on it, but like some of those steps right are what we need to do. And I also love it when you're hunting, you know, you're trying different cuts, you're making raises, you're making, you're smoking many many of the hunters that I know, it's like the first time they ever ground meat was because they were, you know, trying to make you know, venison sausage or something or summer sausage like. So it's like it's getting people down this pathway because they're like so damn proud of that animal they got. They want to make it into every single thing that they can eat year round. And that's part of the education as well. I mean, I definitely see hunters as part of this movement around regenerative and the progressive front on food. Yeah, I think what when you talk about that progressive food movement, I mean I think I've always said that. I think it's a there's a value base that's starting to come up that you display that a lot of hunters that listen to this show display. Vegans and vegetarians display it too. And every time I have a vegan on or an animal rights activist and we're supposed to argue, I just say, like, I'm with you, man, Like I'm with you. I want you to be on my team. But stop being such an asshole about it. Like, let's let's figure let's understand that we all have an underlying value. Say that says we we want to eat better, we want to understand where the food comes from, and we want to reject the what's becoming the norm society, which is harmful industrial food production. Like we're all trying to do that in different ways. Stop telling me I'm bad because I eat meat, and let's just hug it out and will everybody be fine? You know? But what what I'm excited about is this value system that's starting to come up and you see it in regenerative, you see it in what you're doing, you see it in lots of places our society. And if we could get everybody together and be like same team, we'd have a powerful force for not anti meat, pro meat, but just like pro proximity and pro understanding. Um. I think that's definitely could happen if we can figure out how to talk to the animal rights folks down off the ledge. Yeah, I get we made it easy for them to vilify meat, you know, like we've we have consumption patterns and production patterns that have made it easy for them to vilify meat. All right, That's that's true. It's like we've set ourselves up. We built the strong and right like we did it. So it's a and it's it's almost like we're I mean, we set it up in a situation. It's almost like you have one bad relationship and then you decide you're lesbian, you know what I mean. Like that's kind of what's happened here. It's like, but it's so bad and it's so abusive, You're like, no, I've done with men. So that's like what I feel like the voice of veganism right now is and I kind of get it, you know, I I see that, and it's it's an emotional response. It's an emotional response, and it has to do with how, you know, how how bad the system is and and how tragic and they treatment of animals is, and how much empathy we feel for animals. And I also think, because many people are very lonely right now in society, we attend to overidentify with and over empathized with animals. I think it's kind of a cultural shift that's happened. You know, there's a lot of loneliness, there's a lot of like a lot of people without children but with dog dog moms and stuff out there, and and that's a beautiful sentiment, you know, but it's also you know, a little bit um, you know, confusing to me that you can, you know, the treatment anyways, that there's like these people are still feeding their animals, you know, typically dog food made from tortured animals. But you got there's there's some contrast in there. I don't that doesn't really you know, doesn't really call into doubt on anything. But I'm saying we tend to anthropomorphize an over emotionalized animals right now. In general. So that's part of the trend as well. So it's like we got this kind of you know, conflicted, little cocktail of things going on, and when that's all together, it creates a really dangerous level of of like emotionality around this issue, you know. And that's that's how we call it. It is it's it's an emotional issue, and it really shouldn't be, you know. Yeah, And and could it could be emotional if we didn't try to just simplify those emotions into like killing bad not killing good. Um, it could be if we were like, hey, listen, like you said earlier, it's not exactly a crazy notion to not want to go out and shoot an elk in the in the heart, you know, in the modern sense. Listen, I have no desire to kill any animal, but I know that for my health it's crucial that I eat animals, right, so they don't have to be one and the same. Um. And I also think too, you know, speaking of health, and for women too, it's like all these major like fertility issues means women who can't get pregnant and they're like late twenties and thirties, and a lot of that's related to the endocrine destructors of the pesticides and things. But a lot of it that we're not eating healthy meat and enough meat. You know. It's one kind of crazy statistic that I've seen. Um. This is from a guy out of UC Santa Barbara, is that you know, the the performance on santitized i Q tests UM in the study. I think it's like sixty different countries. It's more highly correlated to your the mother's bioavailability of healthy animal proteins in her diet than it is to the country economic index. Okay, so Ethiopia versus Sweden is important, but not as important as is mom eating meat. Like, think about that, Think about that. Why isn't that statistic getting lolling up everywhere? You'll have to excuse me, I have PTSD from all to think about that political ads that. Yeah, sorry, sorry, but it's like that to me is like you let that sit it. It's like you want a Brady kid. It's more important, Like I mean, I'm saying it's more important than like water Mala versus USA. Are you eating healthy animal protein or not? But that's huge, right, And and also I just think the fertility. You know, when we when as women. When we get pregnant and carry a baby, you know, the bones of the baby start out as a collagen matrix and then that calcifies. You know, it's collagen. We get the collagen from our bodies and then it gets replenished by animal collagen. You know, like this is these are this isn't just like apologics. This is science. And and you know for females that eat meat in early childhood and then cut out meat prepubescence, right, they when they bear children later in life, there will be essential amino acids that they give to their fetuses that they've been carrying their bodies for sometimes upwards of two decades in anticipation of childbearing childbearing. That's how important. Whereas women who never have eaten meat in their entire lives don't pass those essential immuo acids onto the babies. Like that's how important is evolutionarily for women to eat meat, you know. So it's because there's so many females who are vegans out and like, oh my god, you're just like you're doing a disservice to your body and to to your to your children. Yeah, you look at vitamin B twelve and be six and ribel flavor and all like all the b complex vitamins that are in there, and just starting to look around at the science of meat and the sources of some of the complex vitamins that we need. It's like, man, this is important. Way I had. Uh guy has been on this podcast and um that I've known from the hunting industry who was dehydrating elk liver, grinding it up and put it into tablets and taking it into tablets form um. I'm like, man, you're an innovator. That's awesome. I never thought to do that. But again to point about hunters, I'm like, I'm probably gonna do that now because I want everything from this animal that I can get, and I know that that wolves, uh and other predators devour the liver sometimes first they're like five six pounds right, Yeah they're huge. Yeah yeah, at least five or six pounds. Yeah yeah, I think maybe even like ten pounds, right, because I think a cow levers is about six or seven pounds, so must be bigger than they're huge. Yeah. There he's I don't know weight wise, but when you pick one up, you're like, man, this is substantial. Same thing with an elk hard you think, man, I could get you know, I could get about six pahita meals off this thing. This is how I think about it anymore. But you know, those types of things are are very transformative in terms of how we think about these things and how we value. So, UM yeah, I think it's huge, and um audio will wrap it up here. We could probably go for another couple of hours talking about how to cook this stuff we gotta do talk about We do even more opinions about that than I do about generative. Well, I know that you cook some elk for Somebody told me that you cook some elk for Donald Trump Jr. At some point recently, I actually got meat from an elkkey shot. I worked at the journal called Field Ethos. You know that journal. Yeah, I do. I do. They're they're awesome guys, and so I do a bit of culinary content for them in exchange for them sending new game. That's a good That's a perfect exchange. I feel like we could probably work that out here. Yeah, we got lots of We got Mountain Goat, we got Mountain Lion, we got moves, we all kinds of stuff on the Mediator team. We wouldn't be mediator. Without that, I'll do I'll make you guys, sausage is a new problem. But yeah, so I did um. I really enjoyed cooking that, and I've gotten since working with them into a loop. You know, it's cool for me because you know, grasp and finished meat, like we raised about camp is really similar culinarily to shelk and all the wild game. So I suspected that, but being able to play with product that they've been given me has been really reinforced that. So I've had a lot of fun developing cities and working with that probauct just like I mean, I love cooking meat and learning from it. So it's been red. Yeah, well we'll have the next time. I'll have to get into that. And like how you feel grass fed and grass fed be an, elk similar dissimilar? All that stuff, Well screwl we still got we had the time clocked elk and and grass fed beef similar dissimilar? Where where you fall? I think they're similar if you get a full finished grass fed animals, so longer term on grass you're gonna get more that kind of like that, that the consistency of the beef, you know, the elk is more slow growing even than beef. Because keep in mind that elk have natural lean seasons as well. Right, So in an elk that you're that you're shooting is probably minimum like four years old by years old, right, Yeah, so they they're whereas you know, beef are gonna like our beef. We we saw her at twenty six months. So as a result, they're going to have more muscle, fiber is going to be lean and dense. The other thing is, you know, elk are eating very you know, grassbed beef that's finished on on pasture. It's being taken to pastures that are high bricks and high sugar content, so very mature grass towards the end of its life and elk not so much. Right, You're gonna have more exercise and slightly less sugar naturally in the in the grass that they're eating because of the seasonality of it. So because of that, you have even less intramuscular fat. So from a cooking perspective, what I think biggest tip for me is to get your hands on some beef tallow um to cook elkin. That's been something that's really transformative, I think, is to just you can just use a piece of fat from like a Ribby or New York keeping the freezer and use that on a hot pan to render it um and then then cook the elkin that fat. So it's a very biosimilar fat that the flavors are really complimentary. Um, and you know that I think elk is magnificent cooked to like a medium were that's my favorite way to do it. I love it as well, um, just with I love finishing it with olive oil, like a good amount of olive oil and like really high quality extra virgin oil and some good flaky salt. And that's kind of it. You know, it's got such like a mushroom and complex flavor, like I can finish it with like chitaky or you know, some like a mushroom kind of glaze. I'll do occasionally, but I'm not a big fan of rubs and things because I really find it's it's just so complex and interesting and delicious. If I am going to use any rubs or sauces on it, it's gonna be a sugar free, gonna be vegetable based, you mean, like a chimmy churry, so partially lemon olive oil, straight olive oil. Um, like a chopped herbs and a little bit of lemon peel. So it's gonna be very kind of vegetable, acidic and bright or mushroom. I'm not gonna want to do anything that's like soy or sugar based, mostly for nutritional reasons, but also because I think the kind of the natural flavor palette of the elk is that like what you get in the best grass fed meat, which is I describe it as like the feeling, you know, the smell when you walk through a forest in the fall, right, it smells like kind of vegel. It's like compost, but delicious, like kind of mushroom, vegetable clean, like that kind of like decayne pine cone and pine needle smell. That's the way that excellent clean elk smells. That's the way the best grass fed need smells too, And that has to do with diverse diets, right. So like to build on that flavor palate, I think if you cover it with like karayaki, you're gonna you're gonna just blanket that. So you gotta find some things that like elevate that little unique kind of mushroom deep uh kind of it's like an new mommy sent um and build that up. Yeah, and I started to you know this, this really came from my wife and being her becoming a critic of wild game where I killed it, what it tastes like, the flavor profile, and starting to kind of see what a mule deer that lived on a sage flat tastes like, as opposed to what an elk that lives up here in the in the mountains of Montana might taste like to a corn fed literally corn and soybean fed whitetail from um Iowa might taste like. Do you and in your line of work, I've always kind of guest and positive. I've never really tested this on anybody. H that gam nous is is. People will say it's basic beause a lot of hunters don't know how to treat the meat. Yes, yes, sure, that's you know, there's millions of hunters that aren't professional butcher's. That's I'm sure part of it. But I think a larger part of it is the flavor profile of corn and grain that we're used to in our meats. Do you feel like that's something that contributes heavily to when somebody tastes or cooks up a piece of venison for the first time or taste it at a friend's house that they they always note this kind of game equality. I think game equality just means it wasn't corn and grain fed. Well, I'll say, in my experience, harvest and post harvest handling is more important for gaming and livery flavors than diet um. And then I'd say, but almost at the same level. Um. That time in the life cycle is also very important. So in my experience with beef, gaming and livery flavors have to come come really from uh, adolescent animals too, so younger animals, so that's part of it. Like in some of these livery gamey flavors and musky flavors of people case and grassbed beef and my experience are universally from animals that are like eighteen months of age, which for grassbed is mid puberty, whereas for corn fed, because they eat all that corn, they go through puberty faster and they get fat faster, but they're an adult faster sexually. Right, So there's a So you catch some mid pew vessons, they are a little they're a little you know, randy with the flavors there. The other thing to note is that you know cast you know, all beef in confinement and in free range operations like mine are are castrated, right, So all the secondary sexual pheromonal activity is a really important part of that too. So if you're hunting males or females, I mean there's just way more pheromonally going on with wild animals, and there ever is going to be in the confinement animals because they are naturally constantly pursuing mates and that's all pheromonal in that pheromone is what is musk. Yeah, and they had a lot, so I guess you're saying they get a lot going against them in terms of stacking up against what folks are used to take. It seems a little bit like a luck of the draw to Ben, like I I chaste a game that's off the charts, gave me from excellent hunters, and I chased super clean stuff. And I think it's probably like was he like chasing after a lady yesterday or no? You know, like there's probably just timing issues that are really beyond your control. So then the question is like how do you manage for that? Um and as a cook, So if I was to land a really gamey animal. I'm gonna be just handling it differently in terms of how I cook it and the way I do it. Is I tend to cook that meat a little Can I ask you a question? Would you age? How would you deal with aging in that context? You know, if you get an animal, you know that was running, are you gonna age it a little bit more? Are you gonna let it hang in the garage for a couple more weeks? Is it's something that would combat some of those things? Absolutely not. I mean, based on my experience in beef aging, it enhances everything good and bad. So you know, they they and this may be something this may be my learning curve and I may get jumped on by your by your listeners on this one, but my experience like the better the meat that's more um, that's very mild but with some subtle complexity, ages very well. UM meat that is starts out with a pronounced flavor. The aging is just going to simply make that more pronounced and unbalanced um. And then additionally, you know, there may be some benefits and may become more mild over time. And there's certainly though in my experience with game, when you're aging much of it. It has to do with the just natural breakdown to make it more tender. So I would think that has more to do with like animals that are going to just be extremely extremely athletic or extreme ands you lean at that point, the the benefits of the of the enzymatic breakdown of the protein structure may trump the increas east kind of complexity of flavor that comes from that, right, and that trade off. Yeah, that's what one. I like the way you articulated that because I agree with it. Um. I certainly have. I've aged a lot of game for a long time months on end um, but I've gotten the best results with with animals like access to her, which have a mild but really flavorful profile. UM. A lot of people will say, of all the venice and access to here's the best UM. Partially in this case, I killed him in Hawaii, so it was the travel time plus where they lived and what they ate. I mean the island of le and I where I was is basically a botanical garden. Um and the bi diversity of their diet and everything. I think, really and then you tend to you tend to take a lot better care of something when you're traveling on a plane with it um and and so I think all of that led me to butcher to do more aging with with access to here and get a way better result in terms of flavor and tenderness. But then I did a few of the US with Texas white tails and didn't have as good a result exactly. So, well, you know, it's like everything people think too. It's like and lots of different Like if you have a cheese that tastes funky, back to my cheesemaking, you can't if you age, it just gets spunk here. You know. If you make jam, people think, oh, you can make jam out of Bruistreet. Actually jam out of Breustreet. We'll just have like a funky, musty flavor forever, you know. So it's like it just enhances everything. The base materials are become the end result, right, So it just enhances everything is already in it. On the cooking techniques for gaminess, I would say go more to medium than a medium rare because the combination of gaminess and the and the clammy texture can be really off putting. You know, slightly gooey texture that you get from rare meat and then I would do it really thin against the grain and and really use it like in an after cooking marinade that's heavy on acid. Um. So there's some you know, you can do like an escaveta direction with it. You could did go. I do a lot of things with like sliced whole lemon partly in olive oil. So if you're adding more that is to it, it's going to counteract that gaminess. Yeah, we've we've I have a commercial slicer at the house now and that's we you know, I'll do a lot of of some of the tougher cuts, whether it's a flank or you know, even a bottom or top round. Some of these cuts off an elk or a moose or a mule deer that traditionally might have made steaks like thinner cut steaks. I might have sometimes I would have ground them. Other times I would have used them as roast. Now I smoke them on a pellet grill, slowly smoked them on a pellet grill with with a nice rub of some kind, and then slice them thin on, you know, really thin like sandwich meat thin. And my family loves them and so like that treatment. And I I should also say reverse searing them as well and some tallow or some olive oil or something, and um, my family loves it. And it kind of transforms every type of muscle group on an elk or deer into something that I can I can give that treatment to even the eye have round or a surloing tip is a good example. Well, you know, you get like Asian cultures like in Vietnam will allow Southeast Asia there's all every cut of meat and they have a lot of very gamy buffalo. Right, there's no cuts of meat when you go to the meat shops there, it's like everything is basically just cut of the same size, cooked very well, and then slice really thin against the ring. You know, it's like the whole animal becomes that when you're dealing with that tough site. So that's a very and then the acid treatment afterwards it sounds like you're doing smoking, which is another way to soften and overcome because it's kind of two ways to approach muskiness. One is to overcome it with the flavor like smoke. You can do that, and then the other one is to complement it with a flavor, which is what acid will do. And then there's some combinations of both those that tends to be a little bit much. So like the combination of those one of the two is kind of which way you've got to choose one of those routes when you're when you're handling it culinarily afterwards. So you know, chili is an example of just like mask to flavor, cover it up right. And then the other style is like you know, cut it very very thin, add a bunch of different flavors to it, and make it into like a beef salad with herbs, etcetera. And then and then you can also you know, kind of enhance it and meet it with a with an equally strong and powerful and balanced flate. Well, those those are great foundational That's great foundational knowledge because I think from that you can do a lot of things. Um certainly for me it's been learning, you know, how to braise, like the elements of brazing. I've been brasing almost everything that I that I cook. Nowadays I'm addicted to it. And then for me it's so much collagen. You know, really nice thing about braising is you know when you when you digest, when you're just eating striated muscle, you know, you don't actually get all the nutrients that you could get out of that unless you're eating a lot of collagen as well, because collagen is is actually weight limiting and the digestion of like ludath ion from strided muscle. So if you a ton of strighted must and you don't have enough college and compliment that, you're actually not able to break down in fully and extract the nutritional load of that meat. So it's extremely helpful. Kind of It's like it's a piece that you think, that's why brazen meats. I try to eat like half of my meat is brazed, even though it's tempting to just always stick to the you know, the hamburgers and stuff. Um, it's it's a way, I think, from the health perspective to really get a lot and more value out of your nutritional load from that meat. Yeah, and I'll tell you as we're talking through this, I really do. I think back and like when I'm doing good, when I'm feeling good about family life, work life, all the balance that entails, I cook more, and I do more creative things, and I do more things like that creative. Brazing isn't creative, but I do more things where I'm experimenting and I'm free and I'm having fun with cooking, and you know, meat's always the center point of what we do, so that's how it manifests. But you know, just as you were explaining that, for some reason, I started to think, like, you know what, man. You know, I've been cooking a good bit lately because I'm feeling good. But you know, I had a couple of months when the endemic was going on where I was like just annoyed at everything and I wasn't cooking as much. So I guess that goes back to the that emotional part of the day you're talking about earlier. Absolutely, it's it's it's that connection. Um, well, we're gonna have to get you some meat to to uh play right now. We got our crew is replete with every type of wild game I can think of. I'll do some content for you, just recip hell yeah, hell yeah. We'll check out. Well, well, where can people They can find you on Instagram, but you probably prefer Bell Campo or whereking people Bell Campo Metico on Instagram or Bellcampo dot com and then I am on your for no old So just at my name on your forl on Instagram. I do a lot of recipe content, and then at Bocampo it's really about regeneral farming, a lot of recipes, products, etcetera. And then if you want to buy the meat, it's all on bocampo dot com. Yeah, and it gets it. Do you guys do? What kind of delivery do you do? We do free shipping over a hundred dollars and our meat is actually one to one Omega three, the sixth ratio for our beef. We just got it again. We get it independently verified every year, and that means it's basically nutritionally the same as wild game, which has that one to one ratio. I'm gonna make it three to six is compared to conventional beef is one to thirty. So for every milligram of oh Maga three facts that you get, you get thirty if I make a sixes and Maga sixes are the ones you want to avoid. So, if you're looking for something that from a health perspective is pretty analogous to well game, we've got it beautiful. Well, that's a good place to end it. Although like I said, we could probably go for about five hours especially I want to get you at the farm to my friend, we got to get you. Let's go, let's go. Ok. Hell yeah, now that I've had COVID, I think I got the antibodies. I could do whatever I want. I know, come on out. Yeah, I appreciate it. Well, thank you Ann for coming on a lot of good stuff and here a lot of powerful stuff um in this couple of hours. So hopefully people will listen and listen again and we'll have you back on as soon as we can. Awesome, Thank you man. All right, thanks, that's it. That's all another episode of this year program in the books to be exact. Thank you to Anya, and also always thanks to all of you for sticking and staying with us. I just want to keep this one very brief, but hopefully you have a really good holiday, you have a really good Thanksgiving. UM as as update on my health and just to let you know, I've been talking to a lot of people about this lately. Everybody seems to want to know UM, and so I'm happy to to share this with everyone. UM. You guys all know how I got COVID. I got COVID on my Missouri breaks hunting trip where we met Joe Lean. So if you want to hear that story, it's and it's embedded than the last couple of episodes. UM But I had two weeks from about last two Sundays ago until today, about two weeks and change, a pretty awful COVID symptoms. UM. Everything from fevers to body aches, to sweats to uh, you know, moments where it was tough to breathe, too weak lungs, to coughing, to headaches, to fatigue to extreme fatigue in many moments. So you know, I I a lot of my family members, a lot of my friends, a lot of my coworkers just kind of wanted to know the dope on what happened to me, UM, so they could get some perspective on this virus. And so there it is. I mean, it was too you know, to aligable little over two weeks a pretty horrible symptoms that was not fun for me. But I'm out of the woods, hopefully looking to take care of my family and keep them on the right track so we can all get back healthy and get back to whatever normalcy we can. Um. But again, I do appreciate everybody who reached out. Um. I the bottom line is COVID nineteen ain't no joke. It is not something to mess around with. There's plenty of people that are asymptomatic or not that don't share symptoms like I did. But if you get the version of the virus that I had, or get the effects that I had, you will be wishing that You'd be wishing you were safer. You'd be wishing you were more cautious. I I wish I was more cautious, even though I ended up getting it in the middle of nowhere. UM. I I have examined my actions only man, I don't I'm not I'm not into the politics side of this, but I am in the in in the side of what could I have done better to protect my family? What could have done better to protect myself? UM? You know, I I am thinking about that and thinking about what I could have done. So, you know, enjoy the holidays, but just just take take what you will from my story. It is what it is, UM. But I didn't have I didn't have fun with this at all. Um, And so I hope no one gets the version I had. But a lot of people are testing positive and it's it's we are seeing spikes in this country. So I just want to tell all of you, Um, if you don't know anybody, if you don't know anybody that got COVID, now you do and you at least heard the story. So um, that's not a really good like have a great holiday thing to end on? Fields you got anything positive for us to end us on. Uh Nope, not at all. Have a good week everybody, No man, No, Well, first first, I just want to say, I know, I think it's important that you shared that story because I mean, I I know it's this has been like Montana has been a hospot for a while. Now. I know a handful of people that I've gotten COVID, and they've all been relatively minor cases. But like I think, I think it's important that people know firsthand that it's not always a minor case. If if people already didn't know that, And I think people should really be safe over the holidays. I think that's a good I think that's a good thing to go out on. I and the vaccine is on the horizon. I think we can hold out for just a few more months. Yeah, yeah, no, I I you know, certainly I've been sick with the flu. Step throat different things like that. I've never had a serious illness, never spent a night in the hospital my whole life, never had a major surgery. I can remember. Um, you know, I might be you know that that film Bruce Willis film Unbreakable. I might be that guy. I never like knock on wood. But I've never had a serious injury I can remember in my life. I know I've never put on a hospital gown. I know I've never spent a night in the hospital since I was born. Yeah, probably a couple of nights there, but since then, I don't think I've spent a night there. I've had some minor injuries or whatever. Um, this is the worst illness I had in my life. And it's not close. And so take it from again, take that for what it is. But it is, Um, it's true. So don't get it. Be safe, Be safe with your families, have a great holiday season, have some fun, eat some turkey, eat some wild game. Do what you do, but do it safely, and get us some fun stuff on the internet for me and fill laugh at and for you to get followed by Bye me. So go forth, enjoy, say bye Phil, goodbye, because I can't go a week without doing rung oh, without rung drenking out, absolutely drinking

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