The Meat Mafia Podcast

364 - Jared Pickard
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[00:00:00] All right, brother. Thank you so much for being here, man. Dude, I'm excited. We uh, we delighted. Yeah. I gotta get, what would you call that shirt? Tunic? It's a, it's looks sweet. Tunic. I could sure. Tunic. Yeah. I'll take tunic. Yeah. It's got a hood. Yeah. I think that qualifies it as something. Yeah. So I got it out of my style game.

So I love it. We can go with two and I got plug my friend Jake house. He's a very talented clothing designer in New York who, who made this. That's awesome. Yeah. It's cool when you have, um, like actual real relationships with people that either make your food clothing, you know, it's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about the last couple of years is just kind of getting out of this, like, outsourced model of just trying to optimize for the lowest margin thing and really buy from those local artists and people that you trust.

Yeah. I mean, that's our, that you're speaking my language here. I say stuff like that all the time. Yeah. Um, we talk a lot about the fact that our products are made by hand. So that kind of, [00:01:00] I mean, for the listener, we make some skin care products, um, so that kind of sounds like, Oh, maybe that's just some romantic ideal or that's not scalable or what's the big deal.

It's made by hand, but there's a real serious difference between handmade and machine made and nearly everything we interact with, like you were just saying, it doesn't matter if it's clothes or food or supplements or whatnot. Nearly everything is machine made, right? Except this tunic. Yes. Um, and so when you when you have The most common example, right is your grandmother's home cooking, right when you have something like that There's a little bit of something extra Especially if it was made without like have you ever seen like your grandma like working something with their hand?

Oh my gosh Yes, like with the actual hands And so if you take the same ingredients the same recipe And you say, grandma, make this pie according to this recipe, these ingredients. And then you [00:02:00] have a machine make it, and then you put them both in front of yourself. Let's even say blindfolded. You're going to be able to tell immediately which was grandma's pie.

And that's the imprint of the maker. So there's an energetic imprint of the person's love, et cetera, that pours into, I actually, let's just call it mystery. I don't know exactly what it is, but there's certainly an imprint of the maker. And so, I theorize that That is also true when a machine makes our products and that we're all more or less attuned to the energetic imprint of machine made goods and foods and medicines.

Um, so when the most common thing, you didn't say this, I'll just point that out for the listeners, but the most common thing that people say when they smell one of our products Is something like, is something related to vitality, which is not even really, that's a hard quality to put your finger on, but the more or less say it smells alive, you know, and sometimes you could smell like a natural wine versus [00:03:00] a more mass produced wine.

Yes. You have this sense that it's alive. Um, and it is obviously. Yes. Yeah. So yeah, I full wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment around the artisan. Handmade processes being, you know, something to go out of your way to find. I love that terminology, the imprint of the maker. I've, it's something I've never been able to put words to, and you just did really eloquently.

And I agree with what you're saying about vitality or virility or whatever terminology you want to use. And I think the problem is it's almost, you can't quantify it. It's just a feeling, even with like grandma's pie versus machine made pie. Traditional science would just be like, well, the micro, the macronutrients and the micronutrients match one to one.

So what you're saying is pseudoscience, but it's just a feeling that you have. Um, we had on this guest, Dr. Bill Schindler, he's an anthropologist and archeologist. You guys would actually get along super well because he has a restaurant in Maryland called modern [00:04:00] stone age kitchen. So they make every single ingredient in the restaurant from scratch.

So like every sauce, all the dough, it's, it's incredible and the food's amazing. And one of the things that he talked about is that there's this, there's like a degree of nourishment that's partially like the, I think the person that makes your food or the people you're sharing your meal with to where like, even when I was fairly strict carnivore, I, you know, I'd go back to New Jersey and have like a high quality local pizza with my family.

And even though that meal didn't fit my diet. I weirdly felt good afterwards and I think that kind of supports what you're saying, too. I always forget that we're both from jersey. We got that jersey connection. Yeah. Um, you know how when they say like, uh, I forget what the word i'm looking for, but maybe it's like, uh causation or something like that But you know when they say like, oh, you can't trust that statistic because just because those people live longer, you know They're also likely to sleep better and be more active So there's all these [00:05:00] compounding risk factors or whatever that that equal I feel like that's the same with, um, with handmade small batch scratch products, somebody who is doing that is more likely to be doing a whole suite of other things, you know, making different decisions that a mass produced production, you know, system all the way across the board.

In their business, uh, like with their packaging and their treatment of employees, the impact to the environment that they're, wherever their resources come from to make their products or the ingredients and materials, raw materials, they're making decisions all the way down the chain, forwards and backwards.

And so, So we talk a lot about upstream thinking and downstream thinking from the point of usage of a client engaging with our product. So like, you just put on one of our products on your face. Yes. It's called the Summer Solstice [00:06:00] Serum. So after that, obviously I want your face to feel good. I want your skin condition to improve.

I want you to, you know, have a sense of care and nourishment. All that stuff. And, you know, maybe you feel more connected to nature and to the process because I told you a little bit about how it was made. So that's all downstream, but like upstream, where did every single one of those ingredients come from and how are they grown and how did that impact the land that it was grown on and the people who grew it and that's the end of the chain in our case, but if this was a more mass produced product, you'd have to start asking like, and how was it transported and where was it stored and how is it.

Preserved and is there anything added to it? And so it gets more and more complicated when you look at a label at a store that has like 15, 20 things on it and you can't read half of them, it's almost impossible now to sort of have expected anyone to have had quality [00:07:00] control on every step of that process.

So the more you move away from small batch scratch cooking and artisanal production, the less and less ability you have. to have any certainty over the quality and control even if you feel like you're dealing with a otherwise reputable brand because at a certain scale I mean let's just say beyond your own production if you're if you're using ingredients that you didn't produce already now you have to have a one on one relationship with a bunch of other producers who you know exactly what they're doing for you to have any sort of certainty over what's going into your product yes but once you go beyond that scale you Now you're buying from like third party wholesalers online and you're learning things like country of origin.

You know, this came from Kenya, this came from Bulgaria. You're like, wow, that's not much information. And yet that's the level of information that's available to the overwhelming majority of products that end up as [00:08:00] let's say supplements or skincare products or even health food snacks and uh, cooking oils and spices and all that.

We have almost no information or ability to, to believe, um, based on looking at a label, what the quality control or practices were all the way along the way. So for me, I try to seek out artisan producers producing things from scratch and whole foods and You know, even this tunic, this tunic was probably like a rug or a window curtain, like 35 years ago.

And this is probably some old material that he repurposed. And so just knowing the story and the lineage, or sometimes I think about it, like the etymology of our products and the systems they come from. So it's like, what is organic farming? What does that even mean? Like if I'm trying to be healthy and do right by my family, I might start sourcing organic products as opposed [00:09:00] to what they call conventional products, which I mean, that's a weird word.

I think that's a marketing term because it's like really chemical agriculture is what they're talking about. So that's the overwhelming majority of food, right? Chemical agriculture, industrial chemical monoculture agriculture. And so this is nearly everything that's produced for food fiber and otherwise.

is grown in chemical, industrial, monoculture, agriculture. So for people who those words aren't hitting for, that means one crop, just one thing. Like let's just say almonds. One thing in a tremendous field to the horizon with nothing else growing in it and the soil looking pretty shabby. Just sort of like stripped of any life.

And that's the whole point. They want to kill everything in the field except the cash crop. Because I suppose everything else would be a competition or somehow potential [00:10:00] disturbance to the cash crop. And so that's industrial monoculture agriculture. But the sort of,

like, word game that is now played is that But there's also industrial monoculture, organic agriculture. And so, you know, punchline is organics, not necessarily the end of the road. If you're trying to find something truly fresh and healthy with a quality control and trackable sourcing that, you know, I was just talking about because there's these same almond orchards probably neighboring that field, probably even owned by the same company.

With slightly different chemical choices in terms of what they're applying to the field. They're not using the harshest chemicals known to man They're using certified organic organic chemicals, but of natural, you know origins There's a which [00:11:00] encompasses a lot of things a lot of things are of natural origins But you just have to look at the name of these products organic pesticide organic herbicide organic fungicide So you get hung up on the organic part and you think that's good.

Just like when I first learned about organic food, I used to eat organic doughnuts and wonder why I wasn't getting healthy. I was like, but they're organic. So organic isn't, you know, the end of that conversation, the side part at the end, that's the part that kills things, you know? So it doesn't matter what you call it on the front end.

The name of the game is kill every living thing in this field. Except the cash crop. Yeah. So that means that scale and methodology in this case, industrial farming seems to be maybe the most important thing because at a small scale on, let's just describe it as a family farm, you're not going to mechanize to that level.

There's no reason. So you're already back down to my level where you have your hands on everything. And that's kind of, [00:12:00] that's such a major game changer. Yes. And then, there's, there's a, there's a philosophical difference between I'm going to kill everything in this field except the cash crop, versus I'm going to create lush biodiversity so that there's sort of a balancing of, of my garden.

And that would be loosely described as regenerative practices. And so when people are focused on regenerating the land that they're working through their work and increasing biodiversity and increasing habitat for, for insects and other local wildlife and the whole, the whole food chain from there, um, that results in everything below the ground being equally as biodiverse.

And so now we have a healthy living soil and that produces the healthiest crops. Right. And so it doesn't matter what type of food or animal, like if you're talking about grass fed beef or whatever, like if it's a [00:13:00] part of an integrated diverse system, it's going to have more highly realized nutrient profiles.

It's going to be expressing itself to its fullest potential. Just like these eggplants that I just gave you right before we record it. Like You know, you're saying I've never seen an eggplant like that. It's like the food at the grocery store doesn't even stand a chance compared to food coming up fresh out of a garden down the road.

It's not even the same type of eggplant. You know what I mean? Like they're only growing crops in the grocery store that can survive that whole insane process of getting on a huge truck and driving across the country and surviving for weeks in cold storage, or sometimes months, depending on the crop, like carrots.

You know, some of these foods could be months old by the time they get to us. If you look sideways at this eggplant, it's going to start wilting in like half a day. Like you should eat this tonight. Like these, these varieties aren't for the shelf. You know what I mean? Like these are very delicate. Keep [00:14:00] it in a dark, dark room and eat it tonight.

And so there's just certain things you can and can't do at scale. And that's sort of for me as a consumer, what really drives my decisions. Like if I'm at the grocery store, I know pretty much I'm in that industrial model. Sure, there's some great grocery stores that feature small farmers, but overwhelmingly true.

And so, the thing that I'm left with is farmers markets and CSAs. And these were, this was a life changing place for me. To join a CSA and to get food of that freshness, redefined what food was for me. And to join a CSA and to get food like I just gave you, Of varieties that you have never seen before including types of vegetables that you've never even heard of Well now you got to like look up a recipe and figure out what to do with it and get more engaged And so there's this whole lifestyle that comes around Interacting [00:15:00] with fresh food because now I got to go to the market on the weekend And now I got a fridge full of fresh food Now I got to i'm not going to go out to eat that much that week because i'm going to cook all this fresh food I have so connection with A small, as we were saying, artisanal garden, whether it be your own or a community or via the farmer's market or by joining a CSA to me is like the number one life hack of people who want to have health in their lives or in their family's lives.

Because you gotta, you gotta realize that otherwise you're essentially building yourself out of this industrial process that has good marketing in terms of the buzzwords of organic in this case. But, if you just pull the curtain back a little bit, you'll see that they're, they're producing shells of what, what could be produced in terms of nutrient density and cleanliness, which I mean, those two things, whether you're talking about an eggplant [00:16:00] or the skincare products here, nutrient density and cleanliness is really what a healthy person is looking for.

You know, at the end of the day, those usually result in, in the case of skincare products, efficacy. And so To start with ingredients of that nature, our whole process then is to do as little as possible, basically get out of the way. When you have ingredients that are as nutrient dense as possible and as clean as possible, you don't have to do very much at that point.

Like, you know, you go to a restaurant, the best chefs, they'll serve you like two or three, four ingredients on the plate. And you're like, this is the best. Best thing I've ever had. Yeah. Best thing I've ever had. Yes. And it was just super, super high quality ingredients that they didn't mess up, you know, and they seasoned properly, of course, but that's our whole game.

So the way these things are made is by growing them properly. That's how our skincare products are made is growing or finding people who are growing the most unbelievably clean, [00:17:00] nutrient dense and passionate. Like there's a difference between botanicals that come out of like a production farm. That is selling at the farmer's market every week.

And like, you know, uh, that's their, their main revenue sources to sell these various, very popular crops. And they, they just so happen to have some other flowers that I might be interested in though, but that's different than let's say like a wild forager, whose passion is to go find a couple of our wild ingredients and this, their whole lifestyle, or that's different because those plants are, they're not even grown in, they're grown in the wild.

I mean, that's where super foods come from. So. So even though regenerative farms and biodynamic farms are the best we can do in terms of coming up with growing systems that emulate nature, they're certainly not nature. You know, we're irrigating them, we're manipulating the soil, we're adding compost, we're growing crops and taking them away as opposed to letting them biodegrade in place.

And so all of those things mean [00:18:00] we've kind of like stepped away. a little bit, um, to do it, uh, in a way that's emulating nature is as close as we can get. You know, there's so much good truth to unpacking what you just said to you basically just had this massive mic drop moment and you're getting my gears turning because when you were talking about the zoo, the zucchinis that you graciously brought here and these and the skincare products from your brand be here, it made me realize that number one, The exchange that we just had and also the way you live your life and everything you do is like the antithesis of the industrial model.

And I was also thinking that most people think they know what zucchinis are, what chicken is, what strawberries are, and really probably 99 percent of Americans have only had one particular strain that's meant to be mass produced, resilient, probably devoid of flavor. So there's this, um, this great book, maybe you've read it, it's called the Dorito effect.

And it's a book that we've. Probably talked about the most on this [00:19:00] podcast is written by this Canadian author, Mark Schatzker, and he talks about the story of the chicken of tomorrow contest, the whole contest that they did after world war two to create like the best Franken bird that could be industrial produce, industrially produced after the war.

And the book starts off with this guy who was trying to get his wife to make chicken the same way his, uh, his either his mom or grandma used to make it. And so she looked up all these recipes, she can never replicate it. And then finally, all she did was she went to a local rancher, got a chicken, um, and then made it for him this particular way.

And he started crying when he ate it. Cause that was the only difference was like, the chicken that he ate as a kid was sourced from a local farm that his grandmother used versus, um, what his wife had been buying for him at the time. So it's so interesting how we think we have this concept of food, but what you're serving, the way that you've chosen to live your life is actually like the embodiment of what real food actually is.

Well, I mean, I, [00:20:00] I agree in the sense that I've seen it happen so many times where people come into our garden, and they'll say, I don't like tomatoes, or I don't like this, and I'll be like, just try one. And their eyes will roll back in their head, they've never had a peach like that, they've never had a carrot like that, whatever the, the thing is that that person doesn't like.

And uh, you know. Just think about like the, so even within organic now hydroponic farming is, is certified as organic. And so just think about the difference between a biodynamic garden where there's none of those inputs that we were even talking about in organic. So there's no organic fertilizer, there's no organic herbicide, organic fungicide, none of that is used.

Just biodynamic preparations which are homeopathic remedies that the farmer makes him or herself by Composting essentially various herbs and minerals and things underground in very specific, let's call them [00:21:00] almost ritualistic ways, meditative ways. That's the biodynamic farming method, okay? So I didn't mention any store bought chemicals of any kind.

And they, um, compare that to hydroponics where there's not even a sunshine and moonshine. It's indoors. The, I mean, like maybe they have some hydroponic systems outdoors, but they're, that system is generally designed to be like in a warehouse. And so now we're in a warehouse under artificial light bulbs that are.

LED and of a particular frequency that has nothing to do with the dynamic, ever changing frequency of the sun. The sun is, you know, never the same on any given second of the day. Every day, every day is slightly different. Every moment of it. And that now we're in a warehouse and we don't even have soil, forget about worms and fungi and all the other things that are going on in the soil.

We just have water and this packet of nutrients that I don't know, some scientists is some soil scientists has said, [00:22:00] this is what the plants need. And lo and behold, the plants grow and you look at it and there it is. There's spinach, there's a plant, but it's just, you know, you are what you eat. Right. And so the difference between that thing.

Which is more or less like a human hooked up to an IV bag. Like there's just the nutrients are going straight in water, soluble right into the system. You know, there's no intelligence, there's no hunting for the food. There's nothing right. There's nothing required. It's just going straight in versus a plant.

That's growing in like, you know, rocky soil fighting off pests and birds landing on it. And the wind blowing and the rain thundering and all these, It's complex, different interactions happening and that thing has got to use its brain to figure out how to survive in the wild, its brain being its roots.

And so its roots are down there just trying to figure out how to turn rocks into food. You know, it's like digesting the [00:23:00] ground with the help of bacteria and fungi and relationships and communicating with its surroundings. It's unbelievable, magical, mysterious process of how a living plant does what it's doing underground.

It's And of course then cattle, if we're talking about meat, are grazing these incredible beings and bringing them into themselves and humans are then eating the cattle and so you want to be a part of that system. Um, but to call one thing spinach and another thing spinach and one's grown inside a warehouse to, in fact, to call them organic spinach and have one in a warehouse under LED lights with packets of nutrients.

And then they have one growing out in a beautiful field surrounded by hundreds of other, you know, types of plants and wildlife and insects and all that kind of stuff. They're just, they're horses of different colors. And so that's really, that's like when you look at our ingredients on our products, you're going to recognize the names of these things.

Chamomile, [00:24:00] lavender, you know, tulsi. These are things that you've heard of. The manner in which they've grown, however, means that you very well may never have encountered anything close to this by hundreds or thousands of, of percent. Like you have to, there's a, an organization called the Bionutrient Institute, which has done like spectrometer studies on different food crops from different farming systems.

And what they found is that you would have to eat several hundred pieces of lettuce to get the antioxidants present in one properly grown piece of spinach. I meant to say spinach. Wow. You would have to eat several hundred carrots to get the polyphenols present in one properly grown carrot. So we're talking about bushels of carrots, you know what I mean?

And so, that's the difference between Uh, a properly grown raw material and a mass produced raw material. That's really well said. Uh, when you're thinking, when you're [00:25:00] speaking, it's making me think that probably one of the worst things that we've done in regards to our food system is this over optimization on macronutrient levels of, and just focusing on calories, the protein, the carbohydrates, the saturated fat consumption.

And people just think, Oh, well, because the macronutrients might match up between, um, spinach grown on your farm versus something you would get at a mass chain grocery store It must be the same product and what you're saying is that there are so many inputs that truly determine the nourishment and nutrition You can derive from that Yet, no one's talking about it at all.

I'm also fine if it's completely beyond science to quantify these differences. Yes. I don't, I don't, I'm, I'm fine if it's beyond any headline article saying that organic food's the same as conventional or biodynamic as phooey or anything like that. It's completely fine. Just walk onto about an emerald garden look around open your eyes.

Yeah, like you it's have a direct experience Yes with properly grown [00:26:00] food from a beautiful loving garden and you know Like the people I was talking about earlier your eyes are gonna roll back in your head. You might get emotional You've never seen anything like it. And so it's so worth going out of your way to find that kind of stuff You know, there's more than this going on because not everyone's certified, but 0.

002 percent of U. S. farmland is certified biodynamic. So, that's a very low number. 0. 002? 0. 002. Mm. And like, arguably around 1 percent is certified organic. Sometimes they say as high as 2 or 3 or 4. Call it 4. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's shocking. And so, the good news is that I guess there's a lot of farmland out there because I find it all over the place.

So, you could Google, Biodynamic or regenerative or certified regenerative or regenerative organic. You can Google any of these words in your zip code and, and, or, you know, towns near you and you're likely to find somebody [00:27:00] who, uh, you can connect directly with and experience what I'm talking about. If this does, if this all sounds like phooey, but to me, yeah, I think you could almost eat to a certain, you know, within reason you could eat almost whatever you want, as long as it's of an extremely high quality and grown properly.

And like, It's a little antithetical to how I actually live my life. So, you know, maybe that sounds like an exaggeration, but the proof is kind of in the pudding. Like, like we were in Italy and with Eben and a couple other folks, we had, we had an event in Italy. We host events around the world, different nature and wellness immersions through our brand as well.

And so we were in Italy for a week with this group of people. And for the first time in like 12 years, every single day, I had bread, pasta, cheese, and wine. I haven't had a s like, I barely eat grains. I haven't had gluten in over a decade. Every single day, when I was there, I had absolutely, you know, sure, maybe I felt a little bit tired after I went.

It's, you know, we ate loaves of it. There's one meal. [00:28:00] We're not talking about one piece. Yeah. But yeah, we loaded up. Yeah. We really loaded up. But even with the load up, it was like absolutely fine. You know, probably lost two pounds on that trip. It's like, and you hear that story all the time, people go to Europe, eat whatever they want, um, come back 10 pounds looking ripped and, you know, it's a combination of stress, water, quality, food, quality, time outside, moving, walking, access to sunshine.

There's all these different compounding things that go on when you're in Italy, Yeah, when you talk about macro and micro and counting calories and whatnot, I think counting the quality of sourcing of the ingredients, you know, I would almost rather fast than, than eat low quality food grown through the industrial system.

Um, and, you know, it's kind of a bummer to think that I'm trying my best and I am at the grocery store and I'm buying organic food. And it's still kind of falling in this bucket that I'm [00:29:00] talking about, you know? So it's kind of a bummer because we've been a little bit duped as consumers to think that that's a great choice, but it's probably not the freshest.

It probably has, you know, some cross contamination from neighboring fields, at least some of the time. It probably has rather relatively lower nutrient profiles because It wasn't grown in this super complex regenerative system. It was grown in more of a large scale industrial monoculture system, despite having organic chemicals.

And so, yeah, not to be like, Oh man, what am I supposed to buy? The, the takeaway should be like, wow, I really should prioritize farmer's markets and talking to these farmers to find out how they're growing their food and what scale they're growing at. And if you. People are sometimes a little bit afraid to ask farmers at the farmer's market for specifics about this kind of stuff.

And it seems a little bit intimidating for whatever reason. But the truth is, is [00:30:00] people who are doing interesting stuff that's pro health, they love being asked about it. They want to be asked. Yeah. So if you ever, you know, if you ever asked somebody and they're pretty tight lipped with their answer or they seem sort of disgruntled about having been asked, then you've, you've gotten your answer.

Yes. You know, if they don't know the answer, you've gotten your answer. Yes. And so I met some great, um, ranchers at the local farmer's market that will. you know, and you ask them if it's grass finish, they'll give you, you know, full transparency that, you know, sometimes they have to supplement a, supplementally finish their cows with grain.

Here's why they do it. Here's the type of grain that they're doing. Um, they're using for as inputs for the cattle. And a lot of times I'll still buy that meat and I'll feel great. Cause there's just this level of trust that I feel like I bought a lot of grass finish meat for a hundred percent of the cow's life.

And I've also, purchased, um, local grain finished meat too. And I actually feel great eating both of those things. And so my default is very similar to you [00:31:00] instead of over optimizing around carnivore, animal base, plant based, grass finished, green finished. I'm like, if I can just trust the person that I'm buying food from and cook those meals and share those meals with people that I love, my health is going to absolutely skyrocket.

And I think what you're saying, I think the greenwashing of organic is that I think when someone sees organic at Whole Foods. They think that organic means what you guys are doing at be here farm. Like that's I think that's a subconscious thought that people have Yeah, you think about you think about the regenerative small scale family farm and it's not at all It sounds like it's just devoid of certain inputs and it's a lot of greenwashing that could label something as organic So you're saying be autonomous and don't even Don't even you only you don't even have to worry about verifying if you just buy food from a CSA or you have a Couple local ranchers or farmers markets that you really trust you can take all the questions off the table Well, like at any given farmers market still probably a lot of the vendors are maybe Growing their [00:32:00] food in a way that I wouldn't do in my own backyard, but inevitably at any given farmers market I'll find one or two who just got like hitting it out of the park with their answers You know you and you love talking to them and you gab it up and you buy a little bit of everything they have But a CSA, you know, you're, you're not going to join a CSA if you didn't already vet that that's the farm that you really want your food coming from.

And if you, the farm, if you find a farm that you love and they have a diversity of options and they have a CSA, some of them even have meat and milk and stuff like that. Like that's, that's a home run. And then you just start basing your life around, Oh, what else do we need besides what's coming this week in the basket?

Yeah. Um, With, with the knowledge you've accumulated, I think it's, um, I think people would, would be surprised that you're, you're first generation farmer, right? Well, yeah, and I don't even really consider myself a farmer. Um, the, I was a farmer's apprentice for a couple years back in 2012, and that [00:33:00] was absolutely the first foray into agriculture in my family's history.

Um, and, you know, except in the known history, I'm at a certain point, everybody was farming. Yes. You know, in some capacity. Just the way that it was. In some capacity. Um, but, uh, the 10 or so years that we were in California, we were actually developing a small hotel. That was the be here concept was originated as a hotel.

And so we were on, um, we developed the farm, we developed some roads and trails and we were under construction on this hotel building, uh, when we had some really large wildfires at the end of 2020. Um, and so just, we could circle back to those wildfires, but in terms of the agricultural side, during that time, we actually had a farm director who was working in the farm every single day.

And we had a couple of farm hands who were working with him. And I was. [00:34:00] Executive producing that situation. I was by no means farming it. I was talking to lawyers and engineers and architects and city planners and neighbors, and I was developing a hotel. And so it was under my vision and direction. Um, and it was all my passion that started that project, but I wasn't actually doing it hands on now that we live in Texas.

And we're not developing the hotel and we're not commercializing our property and we're just talking about our homestead I'm actually doing 100 percent of the gardening for really the first time ever because the last time I was gardening this much I was an apprentice so I didn't know anything and um So i'm actually in a whole new phase of my life down here now where i'm gardening every single day and i'm absolutely just loving um, you know Being absolutely a hundred percent in charge of the entire garden is something that's new for me and, uh, is, [00:35:00] is wonderful.

But yeah, I learned all of this by doing at first, just by engaging with butchers and farmers, um, as a consumer. And then I quit my job on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. You were a trader, right? Well, yeah, I was working for a trading company, um, on the floor of the Stock Exchange. Basically executing trades for clients who were hedge funds and mutual funds.

And so, um, I was like, You know, fresh out of college. That was more, that was, that would be more of the family business working on wall street. Um, and so it was sort of what, it was the path that I thought made the most sense for me. And pretty quickly, I mean, about two years in, probably I was recognizing, first of all, I met a Czech practitioner, somebody trained by Paul Czech.

Um, I learned about organic [00:36:00] food for the first time. I learned about mindfulness. I learned about having a dream, and the importance of having a dream in your life. And the combination of those three things, what Paul calls a dream line, mindfulness practice, and an awareness of food, or applying my mindfulness to food, uh, those were the three really, you know, life changing things for me.

I, of course, have my parents to thank for, like, various things they instilled in me my whole life. They're Marathon runners and my mom was a personal trainer and like, so they're always very focused on what they're eating and like a huge diverse range of physical activities constantly. But I myself actually became like 250, 260 pounds super chronic recreational drug and alcohol user, fast food and cigarettes and just everything all throughout college.

And for these couple of years after, as I was on the stock exchange before I sort of learned about these things and It was just an absolute [00:37:00] watershed for me. Um, it was frankly the first time in my life, thanks to the mindfulness practice, that I was able to even apply any sort of thinking to what I do and don't like.

I was more or less just floating through life at that point. I was a younger brother, I did everything my older brother did growing up my whole life. Then, you know, including going to college and getting fat on drug drugs and alcohol. Yes. And fast food. So we both did it and you know, now I was just recognizing this passion and awareness I was having about organic food and cooking.

The farmers and all of that was just so compelling to me. It became my absolute passion. Like if anyone's at home, who's like me at this time, just realize like you're on the verge of a career change, because if you're basically what I was doing is all day at work, I was looking up recipes when my like boss wasn't around.

And as soon as [00:38:00] the bell rang at the end of the day, Um, I would go to the butcher shop and spend like an hour there buying interesting cuts of meat and offal and different things. And then I'd go to like this other little artisanal grocer shop and get all my produce. And I'd go home and I'd cook for hours.

I'd make a blog post about it. I'd write about it. I had this website called I'm High on Cooking. And For a couple of years I was doing this realizing that I was actually really only enjoying the time I was not at work and I was leaving work to go do the things that I was actually passionate about and that if I didn't start now, I was like 28 or something at the time if I didn't start now, but I did what my plan was.

Which was to just work on wall street for the next 30 years, make a bunch of money somehow, some mysterious magical way. I wasn't even sure how that was going to play out, but that was the plan. And then I'd retire and have a second career of these more interesting things that I was passionate about.

Maybe I'd open up a restaurant on a farm and do all this stuff. Right. And I [00:39:00] just sort of had this absolutely on like, Impossible to ignore feeling of if I don't start now, I'm never going to do it. I'm talking about learning how to farm. Like if I don't start now, I'm not going to learn this. I'm not going to start in 30 years.

And so that was, that was, it really came out of like a guided meditation. I was, I was, I was receiving a guided meditation and you know, how these things go, like you're walking through the woods or you're walking down the stairs, you're on the beach, you look out there, you know, she guided me down to this place where I was able to sort of access my subconscious.

And she was like, on the horizon, you see something, something's floating out, out in the water. Like, what is it? It's your future, like you're, you know, the, the, the thing you really want to do, like most in life, like what is floating out there? And since I had no background in farming and like no sort of authentic archetypal imagery to pull from, out in my mind's imagination, out on the ocean, this like [00:40:00] kidder, pea buddy, plastic red barn is floating out in the ocean, like a toy barn from my childhood.

And I opened my eyes and I said, I think I'm going to quit my job and learn how to farm. And that was pretty much it. Once I said it out loud. I was, you know, I told my wife, she was like, let's, let's think about this over the weekend. That's Thursday night. She's like, let's talk about this over the weekend.

And the next morning at like 6am, I told my boss, so I'm going to quit my job and learn on a farm. And it was just like a light had switched. I was just completely compelled to, to make that dream a reality. Um, and there have been a lot of ups and downs to that, including the wildfire. So we were referencing.

But the important thing is that the dream. Really actually hasn't changed at all. So the motivating factor, like my North star on this process has been to connect more with nature and to share that with people, share that the joy and the health benefits and all the things that I get out of [00:41:00] connecting more directly with nature.

And so the hotel was our vehicle for doing that. We were going to have people come stay at the hotels on 300 acres. They're going to eat food from the farm and have this, you know, direct experience with nature. The hotel burnt down. We're not doing that, you know, so these products, these live events, the different, um, the podcasting and different things that I do around the brand.

These are all aimed at trying to live a life in connection with nature and to share that with people. So the vehicle has changed to the skincare products you're holding as opposed to a hotel that we're developing. But this underlying passion, the thing that gets me up in the

Looking back on the fires, I look back on them, frankly, with like a sense of gratitude and relief almost is the hardest thing in my life. And I'm just like, man, thank God that happened. And it led you to do exactly what you're supposed to be doing. Thank God. Like, could you, it's hard to imagine living [00:42:00] on that mountain facing constant threat of smoke and fire, having invested everything into building these buildings in that location and then having to occupy it.

70, 80 percent of the time, 365 days a year with like very high expectation guests where anything can go wrong. And any, it was going to be a nightmare really. And I was just absolutely so blinded, um, by my desire to, to do it, that it, uh, the fires woke me up to another, to other options. And I'm super grateful, uh, for all the, the hardships that, that happened then.

I mean, it just feels like necessary. Yes. Yeah, necessary is a good word to describe it. And also when you were speaking about your time in New York, working on the stock exchange, you were just making me think about how many people are not actually pursuing their dreams at all. They're just going down this path.

That's [00:43:00] practical, conventional, makes sense. And then you have goals associated with that profession and maybe you get a dopamine hit from achieving those goals or making a certain amount of money. But like that red barn that popped up in your subconscious mind, That was a dream that was kind of just smacking you in the face, which is why you were spending hours sourcing your food and cooking all these different meals and writing these blog posts.

And it's funny how I feel like a lot of times God almost smacks you in the face with the thing that you're supposed to be doing. But the difficult part is really mustering up that courage to just pull the rip cord in it. It's a really simple decision. It's just very difficult to do. And I do think the learnings that you had from that Czech practitioner, that's really the ethos of our show is that it's not.

healthy for the sake of being healthy. It's building this like incredible body of confidence. So you have the courage to be able to make those decisions or start that business or just live fully in alignment with who you're supposed to be. And I feel like you're such a good example of that. I really do have, um, Paul's [00:44:00] dream line teaching to thank for that.

I mean, especially after the fires, cause if you looked at me after the fires, you would have been right to think like, well, this guy just lost everything. Like people were sad for me, you know, like they felt bad for me for sure. Like, they're like, Oh my God, this guy's been working on this for 10 years.

Like that was his whole dream. And what was your mindset when that happened? Um, I felt like that for a minute. Um, and then I actually felt sort of confused for a while, um, like bordering on depressed. Um, but that was because the actual sort of like couple days, uh, like I was immediately on it. I was like, the, for the first 24 hours, like, Oh my God, we're going to get emergency permits from FEMA.

They're going to, we're going to expedite everything. We're going to build the hotel even quicker now. Like this is all still happening. Transcribed Within 24 hours, I realized that that was, for a variety of reasons, that was not happening. For sure not [00:45:00] happening. And yet, we thought we were still going to restore that property and live there and come up with other revenue streams for doing so.

Agricultural, other ways of working the land and trying to make money besides developing a hotel there. And so I had all this confusion about how to do that, what that would look like, but ultimately we decided that we wouldn't be staying there, and that we'd be relocating to Texas. And even still at that point, I had this sort of confusion, and the confusion was around the fact that I didn't wake up on my own, you know?

The confusion was like, well, if not for these fires, I'd still be doing all of that. And yet, after the fires I now feel like this is the best path for my family. Granted, it was like perhaps the only path, but I sort of was in a place where I was feeling like happy that we were out of California, happy that we were living in Texas, happy that we were starting over without the hotel [00:46:00] project.

Like I had kind of come full circle on a lot of stuff. But I was still just hung up on this idea that like I was heading down the wrong path and not picking up on the signs until I got smacked so hard by the wildfires that I finally listened. And so, I just had to have a little bit of grace with myself around that.

Yeah. Um, and it kind of like dissolved. Like, once I kind of finally put my fingers on it. Actually, I called my brother and I just said, man, I'm just so cloudy headed. I have no idea what to do next, you know? Like, uh, the hotel was no longer, and the skincare business was essentially in its infancy. I mean, it still kind of is, but even more so.

And he's like, well, why don't you just lean into that cloudiness? Maybe there's something there for you, you know? Don't resist it, just lean in. And so I took that day to just be cloudy. And I went on slow walks, and I read books in the bath, and by the end of the day I was feeling back to my normal self.

Just like, totally. You know, ripped [00:47:00] into the next phase of my life down here in Texas, um, and having looked back, but the, the, the, the comp, your question was like, well, what was my mindset? The difference of my mindset between people being like, Oh, poor Jared, he lost the farm or whatever. You know, the hotel is no longer.

My mindset was like,

I want to, the thing I was upset about is that we had already achieved the quality of life that we wanted for ourselves and for our daughter, but the, before the hotel existed, you know, the point of developing the hotel was to live on land like that and be out on the farm and be out in nature in order to build the hotel.

We had to do all those things that, so we already had the quality of life we wanted. So. My sadness was like, well, how am I going to possibly deliver this quality of life to my wife and daughter who had become accustomed to it? And like, this is what we poured everything into living like [00:48:00] this. How am I going to possibly give them that without this property?

So that was sort of a sadness that I had. And it was, it goes back to this quitting your job for your passion kind of thing. Like I had already had the things that I was passionate about. And then I developed, uh, A mechanism for trying to achieve them professionally. And so now that I lost that mechanism, I basically had to come up with other mechanisms because I didn't want to change my dream and I didn't want to change my passions and I still wanted to try to get paid for doing what I love because otherwise I was going to go back to that scenario where I'm just looking up recipes during work and go into the gym at 4 a.

m. and go into the butcher at 5 p. m. And it was just like, you know, I wanted to spend. More time out of the day, um, engaged in meaningful work, um, that I was passionate about then like any nine to five job in hospitality or any other way I could have put my [00:49:00] skills to work at that point, after having spent 10 years developing a hotel, I imagine I probably got to talk my way out to some luxury hotel property and tried to get a job there and work my way up the ladder and just forgotten about this whole thing.

But that would have been. To me, the absolute, that would have been the walking dead, you know, like to live for me is to identify what your dream in his life and to go live it. Like that's, that's what I think, you know, life is for living. Yes. Um, and so I would have just, you know, you would have thought that the hotel burning down, the thing that brought me a lot of peace actually was there's this story about Rudolf Steiner who developed this, um, like their headquarters, let's call it called the Gertie on them.

And it was one of the most incredible buildings ever designed, like architecturally speaking. Um, and it was all out of wood and an arsonist burnt it down. And so sidebar, they rebuilt it out of concrete and it still exists. And [00:50:00] it's awesome to go visit, which I had the opportunity to do last year in Switzerland.

But the, when Rudolph Steiner, after the wooden one burnt down, um, he basically had

That whole, that whole group is called Anthroposophy, the Anthroposophical Society, but Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's body of wisdom. He said after this, the, the spirit of Anthroposophy is now in the ether, you know, that building burnt up, the smoke went up, and now it's in the ether of the entire planet.

And he said, I predict in, I forget how many years, but 2050 or whatever, I predict there will be versions of this Gurtianam. All around the world in various locations. Um, and so I found a lot of peace in that. Like I feel like when the hotel concept burnt down, the spirit of it expanded, you know, it went from this unarguably [00:51:00] large 300 acre property, which felt large when you're standing in the middle of it, but compared to the whole rest of the world, I mean, we're now, we now sell skincare products to people all around the world.

And we host events all around the world and we talk on podcasts to people all around the world. And so the, the spirit and the essence of our dream actually sort of expanded, um, when the physical challenge of it, uh, the physical ability for us to even execute on it, quote unquote, burnt down. And it's also clear when you're speaking to that, one of your gifts is you are either, whether it's natural or you've cultivated it, you're an amazing teacher and you're so passionate about this.

So I do wonder. What would the version of Jared look like had that hotel been thriving and flourishing? I'm sure you would have found a way to continue to teach, but I'm sure not to the extent the way, not to the extent that you have now, the ability to share the message and have conversations like this and host these events and be able to educate through your products.

There's a, [00:52:00] there's a whole version of you that might've never come to fruition. It's possible. I think that these are the types of things that we would have put on showcase at the hotel. Um, had it come to fruition. Like the event program, the Italy trip, the event we're hosting, um, in two weeks here in Texas, uh, these are the types of activities you could have imagined doing had you come stay with us in person.

Really what we did is we flipped the business model on its head. Instead of people coming to the property, uh, or people coming to us, like we now go to people. Um, and so the products can. Like there's people in Germany, there's people all over the place who email me and they say, you know, uh, really beautiful, moving feedback about what the products mean to them and how it, you know, is a big part of their day and a big part of their life.

And, um, the hotel experience would have been like very expensive and hard for [00:53:00] the overwhelming majority of the world's population to ever come to. It was a nine room hotel in Sonoma, California. I mean. But it's a lot easier to ship these products to people around the world. So there's ways that it changed dramatically, completely everything in surface reality changed except the dream really remained the same.

And so. To, to have what Paul called, like, just to speak to it for a second, in his language, if the dream is a bullseye on a target, and you're, uh, archer, and you shoot a bow and arrow at it, the line between you and the bullseye, that's your dream. And the way you walk down your dream line is by having values that you create for yourself, in his case, in four categories, Dr.

Diet, Dr. Quiet, Dr. Movement, and Dr. Happy. And so, there's a whole process to that. But to have a system in place for making decisions moment by moment that are dream affirmative and allow me to walk down my dream line. The important thing being I have a dream and I've identified where it is. Otherwise I'm [00:54:00] just walking in circles.

So that fact that I had a North star that I wanted to keep making dream affirmative decisions and walking towards, you know, I'm not saying that I was suicidal, but in a loose sense of the word, like, I feel like it saved my life. Um, cause I don't know. I would have just been so absolutely depressed if I thought that my dream burnt down in those fires.

Um, so yeah. Yeah. It's like the, the dream was constant. It was just the actual vision changed and you're probably giving your wife and your daughter a, maybe even a better quality of life than what you would have had in California too. Yeah. In a lot of ways. I mean, um, California is not a super friendly place during and after COVID.

I'm sure. Um, so, uh, at least for people like us. Definitely. Yeah. Texas is where you should be. People are kind of beautiful. Yeah. Uh, we had already sort of fully committed to homeschooling at that point. We didn't even have an education opportunity in, uh, [00:55:00] California. Um, we had, uh, Been involved in some like health freedom, homeschool cooperative type situations where people were gathering and doing stuff with their kids.

But, uh, after the fires with the hotel not being possible, there was just no chance that we could, we, that project was what was that piece of land was what was attached, what was what I was attached to, you know, being on that piece of land and having that relationship. Uh of stewardship. Yeah with a piece of land was like Felt like a lifetime commitment for sure I mean we were living as if we were going to be there and buried there, you know, 75 years from now um, so I think i'm just rambling now.

No, it's been a dude. It's been an incredible ride and um, it's really cool for me and I think the listener too just to hear this full context and I think people will be able to [00:56:00] take your story and probably implement it to the specific topic Perceived adversities or trials and tribulations that they're going through, but everybody's got a fire.

Everyone's got a fire That's what I found since the fire people will say shit to me. I'd be like, well, you know that reminds me of the actual fires we had The metaphorical fire and the actual fire are not that different Yeah, I would love to tell the listeners about the um, the event that you guys are going to do on the farm in two Weeks.

Yeah, so it's actually at ebbons ranch. It's not at our property. Yeah Um, I've just got a rented a great place down here in Wimberley, which is where we both live about 45 minutes outside of Austin. And we have a handful of, I'm just going to say world class facilitators, um, offering a whole melange of self care and wellness and joyful nature connection based activities for two days, Saturday and Sunday, September 21 [00:57:00] and 22.

Um, um, It's the fall equinox, which is a balance point of the year, equal day, equal night. So how to bring that, uh, balance that we see reflecting outside of us, how to bring that inside, um, and how to enter into this season in balance in preparation for, you know, the winter and the new year ahead. Um, so we have Cal Callahan, uh, coming, uh, to record a live episode of his podcast, the great unlearn, and we'll sort of be a studio audience.

We have Eben leaving, uh, Eben Britton leading his signature movement and breathwork class called the Eben flow. We have this guy who's, um, was in our men's group called be here, man, which is a 12 week, like self mastery program we did online last year, coming in from Australia to lead a sound and breath experience.

He created all this custom music for, for this weekend. Um, and he'll be, um, doing breath work over it. And then we have chef Aaron [00:58:00] Goldstein, who is the chef for all of our events and an unbelievable, super highly trained chef who just absolutely gets Weston a price principles and regenerative health, holistic health.

And so he's cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner snacks. And in between for everybody on both days and, uh, on the second day. We have all that stuff going on. Plus this woman, Tina Rodriguez, who's doing a, like a sound experience with sound baths, and she does this vocal channeling that it's hard to describe.

And, um, and then Shiva Rose, who's this, uh, a woman who actually owns another beautiful skincare company, makes super high quality products, but. Locally here. She's very well known for leading these beautiful tea ceremonies. And so we'll be doing sitting with the tea ceremony with her and variety of other unnamed activities.

So Two days that are going to leave you feeling Like you just had, you know, the best week's vacation of your life. You should be fully revitalized and centered inspired Great [00:59:00] networking. Everybody who's coming is awesome. Everybody who's presenting is awesome And uh, you guys are we're featuring your smoothies.

Yes at the on the menu I'm so pissed I have a wedding that weekend. Which is awesome. Yeah, it's alright, we'll drink your smoothies. We'll have to go to, I'll have to go to another one to make up for it. That's for sure. The reason why, when you called me and told me about it, is um, and you used the word restorative, it made me think through, just, just fully transparent.

I don't think a lot of things that I'm doing right now are restorative. It's like I'm, it's going towards my dream. But at the same time, a lot of my day to day is, you know, coffee, gym, work. Um, you know, like a lot of just high pressure stuff, which I enjoy, but also I, it just made me think like how many, How much effort and time am I putting throughout my week or going to an event to do things that are truly restorative?

Because at a certain point, if I keep doing what I'm doing, you're just going to have to pay the piper, which is why I think events like this can be so impactful as like. To actually, it forces you to [01:00:00] experience and then be like, all right, well now I'm going to take this thing that I love from this event and then incorporate it into my daily, weekly routine.

Absolutely. I mean, there's a couple ways to look at that, but one that jumps to mind is the, the image of your stress cup. Have you ever heard this visual? Like, so you have a cup, right? And every little bit of stress you have, sometimes it's good stress. I'm getting married, whatever, right? But any stress you have, you could picture a little bit of drop of stress going in the cup.

Eventually it's going to fill up and so at that point it just takes one drop for the cup to overflow Yes, you know what I mean? So the name of the game is to kind of keep the cup a little bit less full and so these restorative things What paul calls doctor quiet what paul calls working in as opposed to working out Working out is activities that expend more energy than they generate and working in is activities that generate more energy than they expend And so that restorative like you were just saying You You have to, in my opinion, do those things so that you don't burn out and so that your stress cup doesn't fill up.

Um, [01:01:00] and the, the other way of looking at it is really like yin and yang. If you're just doing yang activities all day long, I mean, you're gonna be completely burnt out. Uh, same as if you're just doing yin activities all day long, you're gonna be a sloth. And so you got to have a nice balance between, you know, the masculine and the feminine, the out and the in.

All these things. And so our events are balanced by the four doctor principle that I was sharing from Paul. So Dr. Quiet, Movement, Happy, and Diet are balanced within the event, as well as Yin and Yang. So there's going to be, you know, an up and a down, and an up and a down, and people are going to feel very balanced and revitalized and restored.

Uh, as opposed to like, You know, sometimes you can go to an event, uh, at a, a wellness based event and the schedule is so full and hectic that you're actually exhausted at the end. Absolutely. I've been to those events before. Yeah. So I mean, that's not really the name of the game for me. [01:02:00] Yeah. So it sounds like it's a very curated particular experience.

That's what be here means. It's the lens of mindfulness, you know, we're trying to call it a presence. So we're basically saying, okay, I'm here. Let me do this as best I can. Yes. I actually, you know, it's funny you say that is I actually, um, buddy pushed me to do a hot yoga class with him this morning and there was just something in my gut that was like, I think you need to do this.

I think it'd actually be a really nice change of pace for you. And I was noticing at the start of the class, I was thinking about a hundred different things, prepping for this podcast, setting up the noble investor deck meetings I had today. I was just so in the future. And then just by starting to regulate the breath and really immerse myself in those poses and the overall experience and the gratefulness that I had just to be able to take a Friday morning and do that, how amazing that is, um, I just felt my, the, the change in the way that I was thinking, you know, like those future thoughts almost just gradually [01:03:00] got a race and I was just fully immersed in that experience and just felt with, I just left with that restorative, refreshed, you know, Once you get there, I mean, there's an incredible ability to make gains.

You could have monkey mind your way through that class and left thinking like, that was a good sweat. Yeah. But to have internally come to a balance point of quiet is something that you could take off the mat with you for days and really weeks, months and forever. Because once you're in that state, you're more likely to then.

Do something later today or tomorrow that brings you further into that state of balance and so You know not too much not too little. Yeah. Well, it's a good reminder for anyone that's listening I'm sure there's people that are listening that probably feel like this is a push that they need and sometimes, you know Hey, you know whether you live in Texas or you live in a different state if you if you feel that feeling that maybe [01:04:00] you're craving that restoration An event like you're doing is just an amazing way to be that catalyst and get there and actually be there in the moment.

And I think some amazing things will happen. Just absolutely. If you're down this road already, this is the kind of stuff that you enjoy. You're absolutely going to enjoy yourself. If you feel like you've never done anything like this, you're absolutely going to enjoy yourself. It's completely approachable and you're going to get presented with like 30.

Different smorgasbord displays of things that you can incorporate back into your life. Inevitably, a few of them will hit for you and make a real difference. I'm certain of it. Well, brother, I'm so appreciative of the conversation, the friendship. I'm going to link to the event in the show notes, these incredible products.

I'm going to bring those zucchinis home and I need to cook them tonight, right? I got to cook them tonight, but yeah, except don't be surprised when they taste like eggplants because they are the eggplant when I say that's how little I know about the food system, right? That's why I need more of your teaching.

But uh, but man, it's, it's been really cool for me to learn new things about you that I didn't know. And I think you just bring such a good perspective into this whole discussion around [01:05:00] food, health, restoration, et cetera, man. So thank you so much. Of course, man. You're the best. I love you guys, that's why I'm here.

I love your product and, uh, I loved meeting you at Ebb's thing and I'm looking forward to connecting more. A lot of good memories to come, right? Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, brother. Yeah. Cool.