Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #401 Embracing Eco-Consciousness: The Path to Truly Sustainable Living w/Daniel Firth Griffith

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

Welcoming back Daniel Firth Griffith, an author, poet, father, and agricultural expert, for their third conversation. The episode delves into Daniel's personal journey from debilitating illness to thriving health through food and agricultural practices. They discuss his deep connections with indigenous wisdom, agency in ecological health, the importance of consent in the process of animal harvesting, and Daniel’s innovative concepts of concentric wilding. The conversation highlights the significance of understanding and respecting the natural world, embodying ancestral practices, and the impact of stress on the nutrient density of meat. Additionally, Daniel discusses his educational courses on field harvesting and butchery, emphasizing kinship and reciprocity with nature.   Connect with Daniel here: Instagram Website Books   Episode Mention: It didn't start with you   Our Sponsors: Let’s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. Go to Lucy.co/KKP and use promo code (KKP) to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers FREE SHIPPING and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. If there’s ONE MINERAL you should be worried about not getting enough of... it’s MAGNESIUM. Head to http://www.bioptimizers.com/kingsbu now and use code KINGSBU10 to claim your 10% discount. Beam Kids is now available online at shopbeam.com/KKP. Because you’re a listener to my show, you can take advantage of their limited time pricing of up to 35% off PLUS 2 free gifts using code KKP. For the best possible footwear, go to EarthRunners.com and use the code KKP at checkout for 10% off.   Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. Today's guest is the return of my brother, Daniel Firth Griffith. I think this is podcast number four with Daniel. He has been a mentor of ours at the farm, but he, his knowledge goes way beyond that. As I've spoken with him at many times, he's a true Renaissance man, uh, not just in his intelligence, but in the breadth of his wisdom and how that stretches across so many different categories. It's really phenomenal. He's a poet, and author, a father.

He understands agriculture in ways most people that are leading in the field do not. He's worked with some of the best in the world like Dr. Fred Provenza and Alan Savory and just has so much to offer. He's also worked with a lot of indigenous elders as of late and really speaks to the wisdom in ways that are akin to hearing an indigenous elder speak. And I've worked with many, like from Chase Iron Eyes has been on the podcast to my, my, my boxing coach, Wheatsey has passed away, Arturo Mata, who was an Aztec, Mestizo, and

bring us out for sweat lodges and Indian Canyon in Northern California and really teach me about intention, respect, reverence, the sacred hoop, what all my relations actually means, you know, and how we are related to everything. And so I really love the nature of this conversation. Dana was doing some super cool shit, which we talked to in the end about some of the events he's putting together. And I feel in my heart of hearts that one of the biggest ways

we can reconnect to nature. And this goes for all the spiritual people out there that are wearing Aladdin pants and fucking going to Burning Man and having, you know, deep dive, explorative, you know, really exploring the cosmos. How we ground that is in nature, we bring it back home, we bring it to our connection and our relationship with all things. And what Daniel's putting together is exactly one of the first ways in which I did this. It's one of the ways in which I honored what I ate. It's what I, when I figured out that the thing I was consuming had a life, it had its own destiny. And I played a part in that, hopefully, in a good way. And it's just a rad, we had a rad conversation. So there's something for everybody in here.

I really told Daniel, let's make it less about farming. I don't think those podcasts are doing well. They're not doing well. Let me just be perfectly honest. And this year, I really want to take it back. I've had a lot of long conversations with my wife, who I'm going to have back on the podcast. I really want to bring this back to the threadline

of optimization. You know, health is the undercurrent of all things. You can stretch that anywhere though. And I certainly have physical health, mental, emotional, spiritual health. But really how do we, how do we harvest, you know, from these conversations, different ways that we can change our lives for the better. And so I'm going to put that at the forefront. There still will be other, you know be other guests and things like that that maybe

don't fit the mold, but the majority will. And so I just want to let you guys know that that's where we're headed. Support this podcast by supporting our sponsors. We'll have ads throughout the thing. There's four sponsors today. You can skip along if you don't want to listen. But again, these guys make this show fiscally possible.

And I'm deeply in deep gratitude for the fact that they keep the show alive. All right. And without further ado, my brother, Daniel Firth Griffith. All right, we're back. Daniel Firth Griffith back on the podcast. I don't know what this makes three, four, somewhere in there, maybe five, but this is one link in the chain of many.

You know, I'm very excited that you're in the middle of your trilogy as an author. Um, we first had you on back in the day when we were out at your place in Winshina, Virginia, right after we got the farm in Lockhart and realized, I don't know a damn thing about this. Maybe go learn from the pros and see if we can immerse ourselves in what we can learn. And, uh, you've been a mentor from the start for us here. We've learned so much from you continue to learn from you. We had you out last year, face to face interview and did a live q&a and you taught for about half the day and that was really cool. Also took a deep dive into

the first of your trilogy, Stag Team and now you know, the plane of pillars is either out or on the way. How are we doing on that? Is that available for people? Yeah, it's available if people are interested in a concentric mythological fantasy This year I got to dive into becoming an author from a novelist storytelling perspective. So it's it's out Yeah, it came out March 20th. So awesome and rolling right before the birthday. Well, I'm sorry. I haven't gotten to it. I've gotten hooked on I'm still stuck in fantasy is actually fits, you know, so it actually fits them all that it's not like I have to read a book on melatonin or something like that. I can just, I'll stay in the same realm, at least, you know, I love it. I love it. I'm

always blessed by you. So whenever you get to it, it'll be the right time. Beautiful. Well, let you know, too, because I gotta I gotta keep I gotta keep these ups that way I can. I've been so excited sex scene was was awesome. It was so well done. And it really I was really excited to see it continue to you know, like one of those ones were like, it was like perfect in that it just primed me for the rest of them. You know? Yeah. Yeah. So excellent. Excellent work there. Tell us what you have. So excellent, excellent work there. I appreciate that.

Tell us what you have, you have some stuff coming up. I'm really excited to share about because anything you do is exciting for me. Having been a part of your events in the past, you know, to say it was worth it is an understatement. You know, and a lot of people listening to this probably aren't gonna be farmers, but maybe want to change their relationship to nature. How does that look? Maybe somebody wants to start a garden or maybe somebody

wants to understand where they get their food from and what kind of practices do these people run and just a better consumer awareness over what is the best thing to put in their body and things of that nature. I guess to recap, your very first podcast who really unpacked your health issues growing up. And so if you want to bolus point us through that, which obviously led you to the where you're at now, I think it's a fantastic story because it really makes sense.

And the more I've done a deep dive in my own health and wellness, food really does come back to the forefront. Being in nature comes back to the forefront. Being outdoors becomes back to the forefront. So bring us through that. And then let's talk about what you've got coming up here. Yeah, I appreciate that. I'm, this is this is different. We've done this. I think this, I think I was, this is the fourth conversation we've had on your podcast and the first virtual one. So this is fun. Again, I really appreciate it. Yeah, my god, I mean, there's so many places to start. And I mean, I think the whole first

podcast was just basically about my journey. And so I will, I'll just bullet point it, because you're right, it's important to understand it's important to feel our way through this and how we got to where we are. Because you really can't understand a lot of our work without doing that. It's how my book, Stag Time, begins. It's how a lot of our work begins is in the storytelling phase, which becomes quite central at the conversation at hand. But really, long story short, was raised as a homeschool family in Northeast Ohio. Dad was very entrepreneurial.

We as kids always had the ability to explore. Today the language I would use around it is the genius creator's gift to us, what we were put on earth to do. There's this marvelous story that my friend, his name is Foro, he was a pipe carrier of the Alakota people. He always tells me the story of Sitting Bull, Tataoka Iotaki. At the end of his life, I realized in telling my story, I'm telling somebody else's, but I think it's really important.

Tataoka Iotaki, he was more or less the prophet or medicine man of his people, if I can use that language, to carry them through their end times, as a pure people of the plains. And for a generation, at least many decades, he'd led his people away from the reservation system of the 1860s, 70s and 80s. They escaped up to the Canadian plateaus with black feet and were nurtured by them for a period of years as they ran away from

the reservation system. There was plagues and famines and deaths and starvation and genocide that the Tathagio-Tacanese people of Lakota had to deal with and many other Plains peoples as well, many other indigenous peoples of this era. Of course, we know that history. At the end of his life, when the majority had either been starved to death, killed because of the bison, et cetera, or just enslaved into the white man's reservation

and educational systems, he was asked, he said, he was asked why, why did he dedicate his life to fighting a pointless or futile battle? Why did he fight against the encroaching, you know, manifest destiny of, you know, settlers and federal political systems that wreaked genocide and colonization over his people? Why did he fight when he knew the end was what the end was going to be? They were going to lose. Why did he fight? In Sitting Bull, Totankyo Otake, he looked at the reporter, this journalist, this newspaper reporter, and he says,

in very simple language, he says, because I'm human. And that's it. And that's the last words we have of Sitting Bull. The story is told to me. It's iterated by my friend, as I said, the Al-Ghla'la pipe carrier. But it's also held in the Ernie La Pointe, Sitting Bull's great-great-grandson. He wrote a marvelous book. I think it's called Sitting Bull and His Legacy, if anybody's interested in this story. But I think we are put on this earth to do something. I think that's very important. In understanding what that something is, it goes by many names, our calling, our vision, our energy, our spiritual connection, the resonance, whatever language you want to throw at it.

For Sitting Bull, Tateyuki Otake, he said it's just him being human, right? What creator gave him purpose to do. I didn't know this was my purpose earlier in life. I was highly athletic, Division I college football player, kind of like that, national champion wrestler. And then in my high school years, my senior year in high school, I was diagnosed with some pretty debilitating and to some degree life ending diseases. And for a period of about five, six years, lost the ability to walk, had many surgeries,

all my limbs taken off my body. You know, everybody connects to the story in different ways. I was constipated for two months, was hospitalized. Imagine not being able to poop for two months. That was a fun experience. And then I don't know which was more painful going to the bathroom after that. Oh man, you're gonna be like passing kidney stones out of your ass. Like I can't imagine how hard that would have been. Rocks.

Yeah. I was on like a full grown horse or mare's prescription of diuretics. So anyways, you get the story. Many painful years. Went to college, basically failed out, left with a 2.0 GPA because I just couldn't attend class. I remember laying in my dorm room just crying and crying and crying. I was so alone and I was so in pain. It's interesting, my family and I, we just traveled back to that university this fall for the first time in 17, 15 years, whatever

it's been. And we went to my dorm room. I asked a student to let me in, which they shouldn't have done, but they did anyways. And I got to go to my dorm room and I stood right there. And then I walked from there to where my classes were, which at the time felt like across the world. I mean, I was in that much pain. I was that low and I was in such a dark place. It took three minutes to walk from my dorm room to that classroom building. And I remember this previous autumn when we were there with my three children and my wonderful wife. I just broke down in tears. I mean that time was such a dark, dark, dark place of just degenerative illness and trying to survive and not making it and felt like my class was forever away

and it was just three minutes. I mean it was just the space I was in. Well anyways, that's not the space I currently occupy and you know I moved back home with my family, my mom and my dad. I got married to my wife who I've known for longer in my life or have been romantically engaged with in my life for longer than I haven't. She's been with me throughout all of this. Morgan is her name, you know her well. Marvelous, marvelous girl, my girl. We got married and slowly started to realize the role food was playing in our lives. You know, I had been literally all over the world

in surgeries. I lived at the Cleveland Clinic for six months up in Northeast Ohio, relearning how to walk again, just every single day being carried and moving slowly and I'll be laying on this table and the doctors would touch my quad and say, move this, tense this, do you feel this? And it's like, no, you know. And just really being in the lowest, lowest, lowest state I thought I could possibly be in. And then we started to look at food. We started to find that the local foods were best. We started to fall in love with local farmers

producing those foods. We started to actually become nurtured by the environment. And then we felt called to start participating in that environment. And now 15 years after that moment, which was five or six years into the darkness, the winter season, right? That death period of my life.

Now I'm more or less shining health. My wife and I, we farm full-time 400 acres. I travel all over the world teaching agriculture. I write about agriculture. Find myself more of a storyteller than anything else, which I think is really interesting. If you think back at my story, and this is I think what makes Staghtine so powerful.

I mean, I just taught a course this previous weekend and one of the students at the course made the comment that Staghtine is the most pivotal book, the most pivotal moment in his life up until this point in terms of experiencing my story written as it is written and how that story actually affects his life. And that's why, you know, in my culture, the Saniki, the bard, the storyteller is that highest level of social, not dominance, but it's the wisdom carriers, the storytellers, they hold the power because it's them who do that two-way dreamwalking. I think it's really important to see it this way.

I think a novelist is like the bastard child of an oral storyteller. It's like the best we got today. And so I'll happily be the novelist, if you will, the storyteller of the modern era. But storytellers, be them Sarkis or novelists or oral storytellers or bards or fantasy writers or whatever they are, poets even. I mean, anybody who tells story has to both see what everybody doesn't see yet and then provide a pathway for people to follow. And so in some sense, it's a two-way dream walking where we have to look back, we have to acknowledge and dine and feast with our ancestors, while also looking ahead and paving a pathway for our grandchildren to walk in, ancestors while also looking ahead and paving a pathway for our grandchildren to walk in, maybe even to run in. And that brings me great joy. And as I look back

at my own story and my own evolution into agriculture, you see this evolving and deeply evolutive story going from food as health selfishly, because I think that's very important for us to start there. We have to start there. I need to eat better foods to heal myself. That is a very selfish concept. And I think that's a fine thing. That's a beautiful space to begin with.

And then as soon as you get there, if you experience what I experienced and you can commune with the kin that I've got to commune with, what you start to realize is it can't stop there. All of a sudden it starts to ask you of things, right? So you go to the local farmers market, you go to the local farmer, you go to Whole Foods, whatever it is, and you start to experiment with better foods and more whole foods and more nutrient rich foods.

And wherever your journey leads, of course, and it might be into plant medicine or more yoga or more, you know, meditation or breathworks or what have you start to experience with that and it starts to heal you and then it, on some point, it reverses and it says, now, now I need you. And invites you into that sense. And that's what I write about in Stacton about that concentric worldview. It's that pre-colonial worldview, view, it's that pre-colonial worldview, which is obviously held in modern times by Indigenous wisdom holders, traditional ecological knowledge, etc. They hold that wisdom. People like you and I were remembering that wisdom. We were reawakening that wisdom both in contact and in kinship with those who currently hold it, but also in our own internal self-work, which happens to be also, I think, some sort of ancestral connection, that dream walking that I'm talking about. And I think in the beginning, my health, and emerging from a state of trying to stay alive into a state of thriving,

I think is first recognizing that the first step is, or at the beginning, recognizing that the first step is going to food and taking, right? Go get that better food, demand that better food, heal your body, you know, start to do these practices again, whatever they might be, and heal yourself. And then become open and ready and willing for when the time comes, and don't push it, but when the time comes to then step into that system, to step into relationship with that food and to start giving back. Because it really is a two- into relationship with that food and to start giving back. Because it really is a two-way relationship. That's that kinship, that concentric element

that I write about. And that's really been the last maybe five years of our life professionally, has been writing books, speaking, podcasting, teaching, living, developing these pioneering techniques here at the Wildland, our farm here in Wunjana, living, developing these pioneering techniques here at the wildland, our farm here in Wunjana, Virginia, about how do we as humans actually undomesticate ourselves and step into the wild all around us while facilitating that gift back to our kin, right, to actually start to have this animistic and very intense relationship with the land as

the land, not an extension of the land that needs the land's help, but as the land itself. And so Yeah, I love that. I love that brother a couple things pop into my mind. One, you know, the, the, you know, the intro part that may be selfish and like, this is what I need. I'm going to take this for me. It reminds me of I don't know if you've read it but the the raw contacts the law of one It's a book of five five book series channel done. I think in the early 80s or something like that on, you know, the the ancient The people of raw, you know, it's a group they speak as one and there's some pretty cool things in there, you know But one of the things they say is there's two paths You know a friend that soul can take service to self or service to the y'all say is there's two paths, you know, a friend of that soul can take service to self or service to the y'all.

But if you're truly in service to the y'all, you must be in service to self in addition to everything else because without that, you're a martyr. It's unsustainable, right? So we talk regenerative, you know, like if you have all the food you get, you're just giving it out, you know, like I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take any for myself.

I'm just gonna give it out. Right. That's an unsustainable practice. So I think, I think it is cool that we start there, but I also love that invitation. And so one of the things they say in that book as well is that there's this reciprocity throughout existence of teach, learn, learn, teach. And that teach, learn, learn, teach goes back and forth over and over again. And I love the idea, you know, when we think animistically of, you know, our relations to the land itself, as

Oh, shit, listen to me. Yes, I'm listening, you know, and then we get we get to that. And it's like, okay, now, teach, you know, and so there's the reciprocity of, of bringing forth that concept to begin with, you know, like, hey, this consciousness is surrounding us always, right, we have have we have relationships with everything. And the acknowledgement of that with permission and with reciprocity allows us to work with these things on a deeper level. And then, you know, the ask of that to say, like, OK, now that you know this, share,

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Get your Beam Kids and your free gifts by heading over to beam.com slash KKP and enter the code KKP, that's beam.com slash KKP and use code KKP for up to 35% off. I think at the beginning of our journey in that beginning selfish state, which again, I'm using the word selfish as neither moral or immoral here, it's just is what it is, we have to heal, right?

We have to take, we have to become, you know, to some degree, the first steps of that journey. That's perfectly fine. But in that beginning state, you know, my wife and I, we were totally bought into this regenerative narrative that speaks that the soil is in trouble and we must save it. The biodiversity is in trouble and we must save it. The cow is in trouble and we must save it. In order to produce the food that we need to live, we have to also utilize the cow to save the soil. And it's that early, very young, in my opinion, morality of animism. It's an ethic of animism, it's an aspect of animism, but to some degree, it's still one way, right? And so as you start to feel that invitation to teach, as you're saying, learn and teach, teach and learn, as you transition away from just taking what we found, and I think a lot

of the people that we are surrounded by that either have co-developed these thoughts with us, taught me as mentors, or have read our work or heard me speak, what we're all realizing together is that there's a particular level of agency that this conversation is lacking. And that is to say this, if you need nutrient-dense beef to heal your body, that's what it is. Don't complicate the fact, right? Just start to make better decisions, start to eat more organs, start to make more bone broth. I mean the concept is very simple and let's not make it too complex. It's early in the stage, so let it be simple. But as you emerge from there, what you start to realize is that there's an entire agency component missing. So for instance, in order for a grass, okay, because you can't have nutrient dense beef without good grass, let's say. Let's make this very simple for the conversation at hand.

Try to take out as much biology and ecology as possible because I can get lost there. Yes, you can. And in a good way, in a good way, in a good way, in a best way, but maybe not, maybe not applicable for the conversation at hand, but at a very high level in order to have nutrient dense beef, we need to have nutrient rich forage. So for this case, let's call it grass because we can all see a piece of grass in our head, a blade of grass. We're told in biology class in our sophomore year, freshman year of high school or whenever you took biology,

that grass photosynthesizes to produce itself, to produce energy. We're told that grass when it photosynthesizes uses water and oxygen and sunlight to produce energy and that's not false. But really what's going on is it goes through that photosynthetic process, right, through cellulose and its solar panels and its leaves, etc., oxygen or atmosphere, sunlight and water. But it doesn't actually produce that energy. What it does is it takes the energy that's...I'm sorry, let me say that differently. It doesn't use the energy that it produces. It produces energy as a glucose molecule, what we today call a carbon packet. So you're listening to this, you've heard of carbon sequestration or the carbon cycle, maybe in the

news, this is what's going on here. So that plant through photosynthesis produces a carbon packet. That plant then takes that carbon packet, that glucose molecule, and it sends it through the rhizosphere, its root system, which is high up in the soil profile. So take your finger, you know, stick your fingers about two or three inches into the soil. That's generally the rhizosphere, depending on where you are in the world. Of course, sometimes deeper, sometimes shallower. But again, just think about sticking your hand just a little bit into the soil and those carbon packets, that glucose molecule, the plant places there and then sends a beacon out to the underground world and it says I have food who wants it so then we have mycorrhizal, sacrophytic depending on what the plant is the system fungi let's

say mycorrhizal fungi they swim into the aqueous or through the aqueous solution of soil organic matter which is why water is so important in the soil and it says okay great I'll take this carbon packet from you it's a trade right so they're gonna make trade and I'm gonna go get what you need. What do you need? And the plant says, well, I need calcium, right? And so the fungi says, cool,

I'm gonna take the carbon packet and I'm gonna go swim over there to another plant that has calcium, let's say, or another aspect of the soil that has calcium. And I'm gonna trade, basically make trade. It's a massive bartering system, a little economy. Some call it the wood wide web, some call it the soil food web, etc. There's many names for this thing if you want to dive into it even more. Well, the interesting thing is that fungi, that carbon packet, and that plant

are all completely unable to produce calcium or I should say to procure calcium from the soil without a third or fourth or fifth thing happening. And one of those things that need to happen is there needs to be a predatory nematode waiting in the soil. So just think of it as like a microorganism, waiting in the soil like a prey, I'm sorry, like a predator, just kind of lurking like a lion

in the bushes. And when the fungi goes swimming by with a carbon packet in its arms, just however you want to, you know, see this in your mind like a lion in the bushes. And when the fungi goes swimming by with the carbon packet in its arms, just however you want to see this in your mind like a cartoon, it then jumps out and eats the fungi and the carbon packet. It digests it like a worm and it poops out plant available calcium

or phosphorus or whatever it might be. And long story short, that plant available calcium that comes out of the backend of the nematode after it predates on the prey, which is the fungi holding the carbon packet and the carbon packet coming from the photosynthetic process, that entire system is the only way that calcium or phosphorus or iron or all these other macro and micro, you know, primary compounds, these minerals can actually be ingested by the plant. So in order for the plant to have nutrient richness, so

when the cow eats the plant to have nutrient density, so that when Kyle eats the cow he has a nutrient-dense healthy diet, nematodes need to be in the soil deciding to prey or predate on the prey of the fungi. And in order for the fungi to even be in that spot, they need to be traveling with a glucose molecule. So in order for that to happen, fungi and plants, or really the plants roots have to be connected in some sort of concentric relationship. There's a lot of relationships that have to occur, but none of this is predetermined. So I've said a lot.

There's a lot of ways we can go down that I have no interest in a lot of biology and ecology, as I said. And if you are interested in this, you can dive down a thousand page books on all the different things that I've mentioned, you'll realize that I'm speaking quite topically and quite generally. But the idea of agency needs to center upon us again, which is this, that predatory nematode absolutely does not have to eat that fungi. That predatory nematode has the full agency decide to not eat that fungi. That fungi has the agency to not trade with that plant. And even today, while our indigenous elders around us will tell

us that they've known this, and it's about time science caught up, the science is actually finding that there is some plant to fungi relationships that seem to not work simply because the plant is just rude or something. Like it's not a nice plant. So the fungi don't want to trade with a plant and the fungi don't have the carbon molecule and so there's nothing actually being produced in the soil because the predatory nematodes have nothing to eat. Maybe there's no predatory nematodes in the soil or maybe the predatory nematodes in the soil have no interest in the fungi because they're all assholes. The point is the entire system of nutrient-dense food is built upon the idea of agency.

And that agency I'm just looking at from a microorganisms perspective, and there's so many different aspects, so many veils we can peel back to start to understand that ecosystem function is not a product of science and predetermined linear systems, right? So you put fuel in a tank of, you know, in some engine, you turn the key and the full fuel goes into the pistons and it explodes and it drives your car forward.

Never once when you got in your car did you have to ask permission to turn it on, right? That is a complicated system. That is a linear system. Then I'm not saying it's a bad system, but we can't take that same system, placing it over to the ecological world around us and still expect to have the same result. And that's what a lot of regenerative agriculture, that's what a lot of science, that's what a lot of modern linear thinking is trying to do. And how this relates to the conversation at hand is, while we have long talked, and while there are many indigenous mentors and elders all around me that have long talked for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years about the relationship between all of us kin, so the plant kin and the tree kin and the nematode kin and the bear kin and the bison kin, and it's all coming together in this concentric way, and that's the only way it works,

very little has been done in the processing component. And this is something that means a lot to us. I know this conversation is gravitating in that direction, so let's just jump into it. In order for us to respect, to admonish, to acknowledge, to adhere, to have reciprocity, to have relationship to this system as this system, that is earth, to become an earthling once again. It's another way of saying that very simply. We can't give the nematodes agency and think that the cow is going to be fine if we take the agency away from the cow. Any aspect of this journey, any aspect of this circle that we denude and the circle breaks. And so while my work over the last five or six years to some degree has been as an animistic ecological consultant where I go into land bases and I talk to the nematodes and we experience these things and we start to

realize why your good regenerative practices trying to produce nutrient rich you know grasses for nutrient dense beef aren't working, it was because your nematodes are angry. So let's meditate and talk to the nematodes, for instance. We are now continuing that work, but also transitioning over to really training and working with people in the processing component, the field harvesting, etc., working through that, actually taking a cow in the processing component, the field harvesting, etc. Working through that, actually taking a cow in the field and turning it into beef to allow that agency to still develop, to still manifest itself in an actual way, in the actual world of things. Because agriculture, I mean, God, to some degree, we can waste our time talking about nematodes for as much as possible because in agriculture, 99% of the time, I don't know the number, it's a very large

number and it's obviously not mathematical. It's just to some degree the fullness of agriculture. A cow is born, its nuts are immediately cut off, it suckles on mom for as little as possible because while it's suckling, she really can't get pregnant again and I only make money when she's pregnant so then I'm gonna wean it as fast as possible so I'm gonna cut its nuts off I'm gonna separate it from its mom as fast as possible for production sake even if I still like the idea of nutrient dense beef and I still like the idea of biodiversity and carbon sequestration in the water cycle and because I still

need to produce this meat and and when that animal is born and I cut its nuts off and then I start to separate it or wean it from its mother, that animal is automatically predetermined to be meat. And now I have to go to a USDA facility, I have to schedule its death at a USDA facility, its harvest in a predetermined way in the sense that, right now it's the middle of April. So May of 2026, about a year from now, let's say we're going to finish this steer off

that's been castrated and weaned. And so that's its death date. And in no time between it being born and it being killed, are we ever asking that animal, is it ready? Does it consent to this process? Never are we acknowledging its animacy, that is to say, never are we actually attuned to the agency that it has over its own life. And that sounds crazy from an agricultural perspective. I understand this. I mean, I

understand so fully that what I'm saying is crazy from all sorts of viewpoints coming from any sort of agricultural paradigm. Like what do you mean a cow has to give consent before you harvest it? Scientific materialist, even if they're not in agriculture, you know, like any materialist that has that is a hard time grappling with, you know, the intelligence that's inherent in all things, they don't realize that and man is, you know, the apex and everything else is just here for our taking. And the men of his destiny is still running right through their veins. They're going to have a hard time grappling with that. But I love that they brought it to this because the fact

that if we don't have the conversation, no matter how crazy it is, people won't come to that understanding. And for, I think there's so many great things that you've done from first and foremost, like right when we got there, we harvested an animal. Like when we did it in a sacred way, right? When I got into hunting, I went hunting with good old boys and there's nothing wrong with that. It was cool, you know, like fucking kill him. You know, he was excited, right?

And I was like, oh, all right. And they saw us kind of doing things a little differently and doing a seven directions prayer. And I remember one of the first animals I got on a hunt like that. I said, Fuck man, I forgot my tobacco, how do I want to honor this animal? And he said, Well, the Europeans would sometimes put grass in their mouths to give them you know, one last meal before they send

them off. And I said, Perfect. Just a way to show respect, you know, and to say thank you. And even though the good old boy, he got on some level, you know, he understood the respect and the reverence that we had there Yeah, and and and how that needs to be shown obviously is is different and in in no way shape or form Do I believe that I walked the one and only path? I think there's many paths I think there's as many passes there are people to some degree in this regard when I say people what I mean is life Living life not just homo sapiens But people in general the plant people and the tree people and the cow people and everything else.

And I think what we have to be, what we have to do in the beginning, and I'll say this as a white person talking here, is we have to realize that to some degree homo sapiens are to our ancestors. Let's just be very frankly, homo sapiens are to Neanderthals, what poodles are to wolves. And so we have a long way to go, right? I think we really have a long way to go in truly trying to re-understand, to re-awaken this pre-colonial concentric or kinship worldview that again, so many of our surrounding elders and mentors mentors these indigenous wisdom holders to traditional ecological knowledge holders of today are waiting

for right so that that needs to be said and well said and after that is said I think what we have to do and this is my opinion is we have to meet the grief where she lives. We have to understand what it means to be a human. That is to say, what does it truly actually mean in today's world in this very modern and commercial and fast paced and technological and control and, I don't wanna say colonization very weakly here, but what I mean is that in every aspect of our life, to find more surety, to find more peace, to have more money or more money saved or whatever it is, more convenience.

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I like a 12-mig pouch, mint flavor, nothing fancy. Try out whatever you want to try. And you'll be sure with the right dose to find something that works for you. It's very easy to colonize that which you don't see. And we do this a lot in our lives and we do this a lot without realizing it in our lives. And so I realized the conversation at hand is very large.

And what I'm going to ask us to do is to make it very small and very personal. And as we make it small and very personal, and we deal with the understanding that in order for me to live, something else must die. And when that food gets on the plate, it becomes real live and again, that is to say that when we intake food into our bodies, just like when we breathe the breath and the oxygen in the atmosphere and the ether into our bodies, we become new. And so when we meet that death, we're meeting our future. And when we meet that death, we have to go through that grieving process.

And I always talk about grief and the blood around that grief as like glitter. You know, I have two young daughters and not that I play with glitter that often or that they play with glitter that often given our life, but glitter is something that is very hard to wash off. Like anybody who's ever been around something glittery, like once it gets on you, it's just so hard to wash off. That's the grief I'm talking about. Something that is so outrageous that just sparkles all over your body, but it's so hard to get off. To degree the harvest process partaking in an agency rich animistic sacred and ceremonial harvest process of the food that you see as commonplace in the grocery store is That first entrance of that homo sapien poodle

remembering the Neanderthal wolf That we used to be and then as that memory is awakened wolf that we used to be. And then as that memory is awakened, not only is our relationship into the world becoming more like relationship as the world, not as some colonizing dictator over the idea of ecological health, but entering into the exact the the circle of ecological health as the circle of ecological health, we are the circle, we are in the circle, we are wrapped in the circle, ecological health as the circle of ecological health. We are the circle, we are in the circle, we are wrapped in the circle, but we also wrap our arms around the circle. It's just like this state of oneness that is hard to see until you actually become it.

And I think something that the harvest, something that field harvesting, something that realizing firsthand and dealing with the grief of the thing firsthand, that death is actually not the end, but really actually a moment of a rebeginning, both for the one still living in the one that appears to be dying, not living. For both of these entities, it is a state of rebirth. That can only happen though given the conversation you and I have thus shared, if and only if there was consent,

that is to say agency in this process. Right? So for instance, if a cow is born two years later it dies and no moment in between to that cow have the ability to get off that track. This is just predetermined slavery in my opinion. I realize that's an outrageous word or an outrageous phrase but I don't feel like it's untrue. When an animal is born it has agency to eat what it eats, to think what it thinks, to run with the herd that it wants to run with. In agriculture you have to put limits on it. I understand this. I'm not lost to my own philosophical delusions, property boundaries,

fences. I don't own the world and God forbid a future where I ever could own the whole world. So they can't migrate, you know, these animals in agricultural environments, etc. I mean, there's a lot of particulars. Read my books and we get in all these particulars. I mean, there's a lot of particulars. Read my books and we get into all these particulars. Those things aside, because I don't think it's up for this generation or even the next few generations to break down property boundaries. I think maybe in the future we'll become smart enough and maybe the Indigenous voices around us will become powerful enough and strong enough in our society that we actually

might be able to start as a people listening to them and understanding what communal land ownership and the idea and the strangest around the eye, even the concept, the word of ownership over this thing called land as it's not a thing is even strange. But for now, these are hurdles that we can't cross immediately. But what we can cross is turning agriculture into a state more of hunting. Right? So if anybody's ever gone hunting, this is easy for us to visualize. When you go hunting, a dear mentor of mine, I hunted with him my whole life. Every morning we would go hunting. He would wake me up at like 5 a.m., you know, this old man and I was 7, 10, whatever I was, and he would say, okay, we're gonna go hunting. This is great. Let's go.

He goes, but never forget, it is called hunting, it is not getting, never think that you're going to go hunting thinking you're going to get because if that's the case, then it's just predetermined slaughter. And that's not hunting at all. But agriculture is predetermined slaughter. And so if we can find ways to take an agricultural system and turn it more into a hunting system, that is to say, if the hunter became the husbandman and the husbandman became the hunter and now we just have the hunting husbandman or something like this. To me this feels much more concentric. I call it concentric rewilding. And we can work through this agency and we can work through this consent which is something that we need to talk about here, we actually can meet the grief where

the grief lives. And it's at that death moment as people. And so we've been teaching courses. We just finished up a course last week. We're teaching another course in the middle of May, May 16th, I believe, where students, they come out. And for about three or four days, we commune with the herd. We commune with each other. If the opportunity arises, and 100% of the time it always has, but it has to be open to it not arising. But if the opportunity arises, we harvest a beef. We harvest it in the field. The beef, that cow, so whatever that animal is named.

Just this past weekend, we harvest a cow named Sybil, son of Suri. I could tell you everything you want to know about Sybil, just the most amazing, amazing cow. Her time, but amazing. And then we go through the finer processing. So the students come out and they get to experience this grief, they get to experience that blood,

they get to make it visceral, right? Instead of trying to feel from a distance, it truly becomes a feel sense, right? A world sense, if you will. Not like a worldview is such a very dull way of looking at it or talking about it, as if the only thing that you can view with your eyes is what's real around you, but they get to feel it viscerally in all of those senses, the smells of fresh blood, the sight and the feeling and the vibrations of an animal giving consent because something that's different in all of our courses and this to some degree is what makes it escalates the moment from being purely mundane from a modern human perspective. And it just transports it, in my opinion, for my people, Western European people, 15,000

years into the past. There's nothing that holds this animal in place. So for instance, this past weekend, we were going to harvest cybill. And we go out to about 172 acre field. It's a massive clear cut. You can't see, but 20 feet in front of you. And we line up, we pull the gun out, we start to work with Sybil, we're communing with Sybil, we're asking permission with Sybil.

And the thing with, this is a little bit strong, I realize, but there's a lot of conversation today in the spaces that you and I run in about asking permission. You know, when you go to harvest a plant or something, you always ask its permission. There's very little being done or talked about that we're like, if the plant says no, you have to now leave. Right? That's a part we never talk about. Right? That's the most important part. And not many people get to actually experience this, right? When you're hungry, my kids and I be foraged, wild foraged for, you know, berries and herbs and fruits and nuts and herbs and things for about 50% of our diet. And so we wild forage basically every day of our life. And when we go out, we ask permission. And we have an open, you know, bucket, a little basket, whatever it is, a little side pouch, whatever we're going

to be foraging into. And we ask, we say, can we harvest you? And sometimes the answer is no, and you have to move on. Like you don't get to eat that today, right? And we miss that aspect of the conversation. We want to believe that nature is animate, but we actually don't want to believe that she can say no, right? That's another part that nature has in a really diversive or divisive way with agriculture.

Agriculture to some degree is asking permission and then closing our ears and going forth anyway. Like we want to make it seem like we're living in reciprocity, but that actual act of reciprocity petrifies the shit out of us. And so with the harvest process, there has to be a moment of consent given. And so you have to ask and then wait.

And I will tell you, there has been harvests where people have flown in from California to these courses. They're standing there. The consent is asked for, and it's not given. And the gun drops, and the cow walks, and we all go home. And it is the most paralyzing, the most emotional. I've seen people fall on the ground and start crying for it

because for the first time in their life while the animal is still living right I'm not that's not even that they're you know it's not that the harvest was overpowering it was that they were for the first time in their life operating within a real earth where they recognize like I can see you now, in front of me on this digital screen, they recognize that the agency of an animal's decision at self understanding and self directive capabilities and capacity is as real as our own. Is as real as our own.

And they recognize that to the point that they had to meet themselves there in that moment, so much so that the entire reason they came here across an entire Turtle Island continent is now for naught and they put the gun down and they watch this animal walk away because it has the freedom to just like the nematodes just like the fungi just like the plants just like the Sun etc all this animate all has agency this cow is also included. It just walks away and they break down. They break down in complete. It's not sadness.

It's, it's, it's, um, it's their own essence. If you can imagine a human being boiled down into its own essence, it's that that they find themselves boiling and bubbling in. And if I can ramble, I'll tell one little short story, then you can direct the conversation as you see. This past course, this past weekend, just two days ago, in all of our courses, there's a small ruminant harvest, and then a cow harvest. And we do this on purpose for many reasons. We can get into that if needed later. But this small ruminant harvest, so that morning, that Saturday morning, we all woke up as a course. There was about 10 students and everybody had been prepared that I was going to ask this question the night previous. So I told them to dream on it, to sleep on it, to meditate on it, to breathe on it, etc. I need an answer to this question in the morning. So everybody was prepared for

the question but I asked because we were going to be harvesting a ram, a male sheep. I said, who gets to do the harvest? I need one person and immediately this gentleman was not a farmer. They live in the city. He has a full-time white collar type job, doesn't have experience with animals. He raised his hand so quickly and he said, me, stunned me. Kyle it stunned me. This was the last person in the group that I thought would be jumping forward to take the life, to be the one of the 10 that got to actually take this animal's life and be

there in that moment and feel their essence just boiling and bubbling. And he said, it's me and when he said it was me a tear literally fell from his eyes like he met himself at the very beginning most real stage right and I told him and everybody was prepped for this it's a course right so I'm an educator I'm teaching I'm walking through it and I said listen I need you to feel the weight of this that you're about to do but I want you to feel none of the stress the stress is mine I will make sure that this animal is respected and cared for. I've done this a thousand times. I've taught this course a hundred times. I don't want you to feel the stress.

I need you to feel the weight. Okay, and I'm going to be with you in this, but I guarantee you you're gonna fail. And you're gonna experience what that failure feels like because you are a poodle You are not a wolf. You are a homo sapien. You're not a neanderthal anymore Right. Well, anyways, we get out into the field I bring the lamb to him and I say hold the lamb and the lamb it's a ram, but it's a lamb It's standing up and I ask him to get on her back or his back But not to sit on it not to put pressure on it but to unite with it I say touch your heart

to hit his heart he bends over they touch hearts he puts his hand on his sternum the sheep sternum and I say stay there until you feel like the lamb gives you energy there's gonna be an energy transfer at first you're gonna shake at first the lamb is gonna shake you're. At first, the lamb is going to shake. You're both going to say, what the fuck is going on? And then you guys are going to connect. And I said, you might sing a song you've never heard. You might hum a tune that you've never come up with before.

You might sing something that your grandmother used to sing you in the cradle. Something is going to come to you. Do it. And he starts to do it. I've asked his permission to tell the story. I'm not going to say anything more about what happened. You be there, come to these courses, feel this with us. A lot of people are crying. His wife is there. She's in just tears. I mean, just crying and feeling the moment and the realness of the moment. And then I say, as soon as you reach a point where you feel

like that lamb has given you permission and you're going to feel it, it's going to be an energy transfer. Remember in the beginning of this conversation, I was talking about how in the beginning of our nutritional journey, we're pulling in, we're selfish, and then we're going to give. We have to go through this in the death process. At first it's selfish. We take the lamb, we hold it. That's the taking, right?

That's the selfish component. And then it has to be the giving components. We give back. The energy transfer, the song, the tune, the breath works, the meditation, the two hearts that start to beat as one, and it's true, your heart will actually become its heart. Its heart will actually become your heart.

They will beat together. It is a truly beautiful moment. And and then I say when that's ready and if you feel in your soul of souls and your boiling essence and your shaking body at this point truly truly when your face has met your own face for the first time in your life tell me and I will give you the knife and I will tell you the knife. And I will tell you this, in these moments, in these courses, generally speaking, there's a huge moment of faltering. Never before to most humans alive

has a human taking a 12 inch blade and actually touched it to living flesh. Our ancestors, ears and eyes, absolutely, right? Anytime we harvested anything, we had to feel hairs and skin and ligaments and muscles and fascia and bone scrape that blade's edge, right? That was a vibrational energy. That was a physical, physiological energy that we feel against that knife's tip, right? Like our ancestors lived in this world. We don't. And I told him, I said, it is perfectly fine. You're going to take the knife. He understood how to go

through it. There's a whole process. It's not completely skillless, right? We work through the motion, stick it in this way, rotate your wrists, come out, come back, get the vein, get the artery, bleed it out. Wait, we have a process. He practiced that process with us. But I said, you will take this knife and you will stick it to its neck and everything will stick it to its neck and everything will go black. You will feel the tip of that knife, cut the tip of the most furthest hair

away from that big ram's neck and you will pull away. You will be incapable of doing it and you're gonna come back in and then you're gonna come back out and you're gonna come back in and then you're gonna come back out. And every single time you come in, you're to get one step closer little baby steps to truly becoming that wolf to truly becoming the ancestor living in your bones that I believe is still there

and then at the last moment you're finally going to get in that last state of what I believe is full consciousness and the knife's going to go through and when it goes through immediately, you're going to start to shake, adrenaline even now I have goose pimples, you're going to start to shake, the adrenaline is going to start to rush and you're going to make the cleanest, most beautiful cut that your hands never knew was possible and then the lamb is going to drop to its legs, it's going to be fully submitted and he'll bleed out and that's the death process. It could take five minutes and it can take 30 minutes. This gentleman took about 20 minutes, maybe 15 to 20 minutes.

And he came out and he came in. He started to cry. He came out. I took the knife. I had to give it back to him. He met himself and still he called me this morning, days later, still reeling from the activity, still trying to find himself in this grief and saying how they sat down last night to have a particular

cut of pork. And it was just a totally different meal. The meat sitting on his plate was speaking to him. He understood that this death process is not necessarily a forced death, but an invited death that the animal had free ability to leave. this death process is not necessarily a forced death but in an invited death that the animal had free ability to leave. Free ability to leave, right? He as an individual, as the human partaking in this process, had to undergo that vibrational switch that giving and taking, the taking and the giving he had

asked for permission. There are times I go out there to harvest a lamb and it doesn't happen. Because the lamb says, no, it's just not gonna happen today. And that has to be fine. That has to be fine. Else it's just taking. And his life was changed. Then we went through the rest of the course.

We harvested a cow, there's more stories there. We then spend days breaking the animal down to learn the finer arts of butchery and how to take the whole animal, to half it, half it to quarter it, quarter it to primals, right? And then actually go in there and find the rib eyes and find the New York strips and find the round roasts and find the eye rounds, right? And understand how to actually take the meat and respect 100% of the process. Because what has to be understood in the processing world is you take out all of my philosophy,

all of my agency, all of the animism that we've been you take out all of my philosophy, all of my agency, all of the animism that we've been talking about, all of the experience, the essence that this process boils us into, the consent and all of that. And what you have to realize is every alternative to this is going to be highly wasteful. Even if it's respectful, it's still going to be wasteful. So in a regular facility, if you're buying meat, the only legal meat that you're able to buy in the United States today is if it's USDA processed. So in a USDA processed facility you have live weight, you have hang weight, and

you have packaged weight. Live weight is about a hundred percent, right? That's what the animal weighs alive. After processing it goes down to hang weight and you lose about 40% of the animal. And then in the processing process, so as we're taking out the roasts and as we're taking out the steaks and as we're grinding, we go from hang weight to package weight. So you buy packaged ground beef, you buy packaged rib steaks, etc. The hang weight to package weight process loses another 40%. And so if you go from what the animal is to what you're actually able to eat from that

animal in the conventional system, even the regenerative, local, etc. conventional system, anything that's a part of the legal system where you're not processing in the field with this gentleman on a Saturday morning with a knife and you're hugging the lamb and you're asking for that consent, you're getting that consent and you're just finding your essence there and crying and bawling. And he journaled for like an hour after this next to one of the oldest trees and the property of this great mother oak, she's 400 years old. Even if it's the best possible modern alternative, it's still only about 36%

of what that animal used to be. And so it's incredibly wasteful. So the whole last two days of the course, we get into how to utilize a hundred percent of that animal. From the hide to the tongues, to the into how to utilize 100% of that animal, from the hide to the tongues to the cheeks to the ligaments to the tenons to how we can actually sculpt the primals down into a much more unified or much more holistic way of consuming that meat, you know, and in broths and, I mean, freeze-dried goods and, I mean, all sorts of things.

And so you get the emotional, you get the harvest, you get the consent, you get that side, but then you also get you know the like now we have to actually eat this thing and actually let that life pour back into our bodies and remake us and live together with it. And how do we respect 100% of that animal? I love that brother. I mean, I'd love for you to finish with something that you brought up, you know, last time we were face to face and you taught here was the thing that, um, uh, you and Fred Provenza had just gotten into, you know, on a study of, of what happens when an animal is, is killed in the wild versus killed, you know, in an unnatural setting, right? And, and, uh, you know, what that actually looks like from a bioavailability standpoint

through the pH balance of the animal. I'd love for you to break that down because for me, I always supported what got me into regenerative was understanding this total picture. It's going to be healthy for me, it's healthy for the earth, it's healthy for the animal, that kind of thing. All right, I'm in. And, you know, but through, you know, working with you and different people and now doing my own farming, you know, we've, there's been times where we have like 30 ram lamb taken to the USDA that way we could sell it, that kind of thing. You know, and then since that conversation, we haven't gotten to the USDA once. Well, Eric and I harvested something like 35 ram lamb this earlier last year, you know,

it was just like what we did every, every week. We do three or four every week. We do three or four until, um, until we had processed them and understanding that, you know, we didn't know who we were going to take. You know, that was again, like whoever shows themselves and is ready is who we'll work with and, um, they're actually the last five we let go back in with the females. So like, they were like, we didn't have the okay with them. So we let them back in with the females until a lot

longer and then and then it was their time. But the nutrient density is a big one in the health and wellness field. And it's a big one when we talk about, you know, the why on why you would spend more to go on a hunt, why you would spend more to have this education, why you would spend more on the meat that was, it's going to cost more maybe at the farmers market than it does at Sprouts or Whole Foods, but you know what you're getting when you go to the farmers market, where it comes from and how it was harvested. So I'd love to get that study that you guys were going over because it's really, really potent for me.

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which is in Born to Run. The Taro-Umaro tribe had this old school design, and it's actually a really cool, really comfortable way to wear shoes. What I love is my feet are still getting sun while I'm still connected to the earth. And being on a farm in Texas with Mesquite and a bunch of shit I don't wanna step on,

the soles are actually strong enough that it won't pierce through and jab me when I step on something I shouldn't be stepping on so it's actually quite comfortable walking on gravel hiking doing a lot of things I got a buddy Nate Smith who runs, you know long distances and trails wearing these earth runners Go to earth runners comm and use the code KKP at checkout for 10% off. That's E-A-R-T-H-R-U-N-N-E-R-S.com and use code KKP for 10% off. You know, a lot of people listen to me and they think I'm entirely against the USDA and I kind of am and they kind of know it. I'm good friends with the chief scientist of the USDA.

I've sat down with her. I've keynoted the USDA's animal conference at the Capitol building. There's a lot of stories there. I've met with Secretary Vilsack, Virginia Secretary of Agriculture, many times. There are really wonderful people, really wonderful people who work in the upper echelons of these organizations. Zachary Dasheneau, he's the head of the FSA. really wonderful people who work in the upper echelons of these organizations. Zachary Dashenow, he's the head of the FSA.

He's a Cheyenne River Sioux, which is really cool that a Cheyenne River Sioux elder is the head of the FSA, you know, in the USDA branch of the federal government. A good friend, I've talked to him about this, actually got to speak with him at the USDA conference. And there's a lot of really honest and really honorable people working on these issues. But the society and the culture and the money that surrounds it is truly the problem. And I like to say that in these moments because I think it's easy for us to look at federal

systems and federal governments and politics and the USDA and different agencies and especially in today's world, especially post-COVID and everything else and generally classify those organizations in one way. And I think you and I would agree that what that one way is, but the people who work in those organizations and not everybody, of course, and it's not many, right? But their hearts are like yours and I's hearts. And what we have to do as people, as humans, as Homo sapiens living in the modern world, especially Homo sapiens that come from backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, like you and myself, is start to realize what this means and what is the next step

here for us to actually do. And I think participating in a harvest, coming out to a course like this, coming out to a course like you guys got to do when you guys came up to the wildland here, I think is an amazing first step in truly actually feeling yourself there, right? Not having some federal agency process your meat for you, but you actually being in that process and communing with it. Because no matter how it happens, if you're there, it's different. It has to be different, right? That's the idea of the circle.

The circle changes, right? My friend, she's related to Zaina, she's a Maori, uh, uh, wisdom holder. She's a mother of the Whitehawks people. She always talks about the circle in the sense that we live in the circle. We are the circle. And as soon as we remove ourselves from that circle, the circle changes. And this is why the forest is sad, because we left. So just come back. That's all. Just come back and the forest will revive itself. Now, how we come back? What do we do when we come back? How do we... There's so many details, but the point is just

come back. And that's what these courses provide is just the opportunity for people to come back, come back into the circle, feel this grief. Half of the students that come what these courses provide is just the opportunity for people to come back, come back into the circle, feel this grief. Half of the students that come to these courses that feel this with us, that process this grief and walk through this trauma that we've lived with for thousands of years, it's not a modern problem. They will never process another animal in their life. They're not going to farm, right? The other half might, but at least half won't. But they've taken that step, right? They've rejoined the circle and their life is now different. Their life that they live in is different and the community that surrounds them is different. And that's the key. That's the impetus to change. So I want to be clear about that. Anyways, the studies, the actual science that we've got to participate in, probably a

good half of my book, Staghtine Tyne talks about this and it's probably the most loved aspect I think of the entire book maybe that should have been a whole book in and of itself now looking back I think but if this is interesting get the book read it talk to me I would love to hear your thoughts but long story short so there's been plenty of studies for about 1995 to 2022, I think is the latest study that I've pulled from. Many 20, 30, 40, 50 studies, I don't know how many, a large amount of them looking at the federal USDA-based slaughter system. And when I say USDA, you can stick in EU or many other governing bodies all around the world. So commercial,

politically organized food processing from a meat perspective. And what they're going to do in these studies is look at the cortisol content of the meat following really previous and then following to that process to understand the adrenal processing of the processing system within the own animal's body, how cortisol, that is to say the stress hormone is processed in the animal's body, that is a say the stress hormone is processed in the animals body that is a say dealt with within the animals own operating system during the processing cycle how does it affect the meat following that process and so the term we use is post mortem. I'm carcass installation post mortem carcass insulation of cortisol or cortisol balancing and And the reason that post-mortem installation of cortisol in the muscle fibers is important to look at is two first things we have to understand. Number one, it's a little bit ridiculous to think that you can study cortisol content in the muscles

in a living animal because the second you walk up to a living animal, doesn't matter how domesticated it is, and you stick a needle into it, its cortisol has changed. Cortisol to some degree is a very, very, very fine and wonderful and holy chemical in the body to help regulate your fight or flight response, to help regulate your survival instincts. Cortisol is a very good thing, but it has to be processed well in the body, right? You have to produce it, then you have to dissipate it. If you produce it, produce it, produce it, now we get chronic inflammation, we get chronic disease, we can, you know, vagus nerves that are just pounding and fight or flight responses

that exist that have no actual relationship to the world around us, etc. So we can't study post-mortem or we can't study the installation of cortisol in living meat. And so post-mortem, that is to say dead cows, right? So the meat of dead cows, processed meat is to some of the way, a very fine effective measurement of how much stress accumulated in that body that was in process during the processing process or dealt with within the processing process. Long story short, no matter how it's processed, halal, kosher, standard, EU, USDA, we see cortisol balance just spike, cortisol levels just spike during the USDA processing system. USDA processing system, the system, however you want to call that.

On the reverse, right, there's something really interesting. There's a study done in the Daeneric region of the Alps, the Daeneric Alps in Croatia, where a team of scientists studied about 5,000 different hunts of roe deer, red deer, and wild boar. Now, the region makes sense. The reason that I use the region, the Daeneric region of Croatia and the Alps, is because in that area,

not only are those three species native and fully functioning, the two types of deer, roe and red, and then the wild boar, but we also have a full cacophony of the apex predators in concentrations that really speak to a pretty ancient prehistoric period. So, you know, mountain lions and different cats to grizzlies and everything in between, that when I say grizzlies and everything in between that. When I say grizzlies, just bears in general, I don't know the exact species, but just apex predators in their fullness. And so what you have in this region is a beautiful circle. You have native prey and you have native apex predators, right?

So like in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s, Yellowstone had a prey problem. And so we bought some wolves and we threw them into that and now we have more problems but that's beside the point. The point is we don't have to bring any predators back into Yellowstone, not in terms of the Danarque region of the Croatian Alps. And so the scientists, it was a joint team of international scientists from about seven or eight different nations, if I can remember correctly, who studied about five different hunts, 5,000 different hunts of these prey species through the study of many different variables.

So what they wanted to know is what variable in these hunts contributed to the highest cortisol, that is to say the highest post-mortem insulation of stress in that final product of meat. They studied gender, they studied age, they studied time between the initial kill and the final death, which is by the way, if anybody has to guess, usually when I have people guess at courses, that's what people pick on. Like if you shoot a deer and 20 minutes later it finally dies, you would think that it's pretty stressed.

Right? So they studied that, they studied the age, they studied the gender, they studied different hunt types, so drive hunts, they studied select hunts, they study what is called quiet hunts, that is to say that the animal had no knowledge it was going to happen. Select hunts is the animal did acknowledge it was going to happen, but in the very bow type hunting sense where you're stalking through the woods with a long bow, you then follow the deer, but at the very last second the deer realizes what's going on and you might even connect eyes, if you will, and then the arrow was released. They studied so that's select hunts. Strive hunts is

where you just break out a team of dogs or human beings and we just chase the deer down until it's tired enough and then we kill it. And what they found was the only time that the post-mortem installation of cortisol in the meat was not identical to the USDA system. There was only one metric, one variable that produced this end and it was the select hunt. That is to say when the animal connected with you and said, huh, and then died or at least started the death process. When it recognized that it was now meeting with a narrow-eyed predator, just like you and I, we have narrow eyes, we're predators, and it looked at you and said, shit. And then it maybe tried to start to run, but it had the

freedom to run. Right? So in the book, when I talk about this, I talk about the definition of what I call concentric rewilding, which is the autonomous acceptance of the basic conditions as they are. It's not to change the conditions, it's not to fight the conditions, and that's not to say not to survive, but it's to accept the basic conditions as they are. A drive hunt, right, where the animal is just driven into the ground, high stress. Just bring it to a USDA facility. A silent hunt where the animal has no idea that it's coming, high stress. Bring it to a USDA facility. A silent hunt where the animal has no idea that it's coming? High stress. Bring it to a USDA facility. An animal that takes 20 minutes to bleed is no

different than an animal that takes zero seconds or one second, two seconds to die for its soul to leave its body. It's not about anything other than the recognition between the predator and the prey that says, okay, you're the predator, I'm the prey, I might try to run, but at the same time, we might have to accept something here. It's that consent, it's the agency. And over 5,000 hunts, this is the only thing this team could prove, that agency matters when it deals with stress. Now, the outcome of this conversation, a question could be, Daniel, this is very interesting. This is the question you're getting to, why does this matter? Why does the post-mortem insulation of stress or cortisol matter?

The really interesting thing is modern science has concluded that highly diabetic cows actually can give the consumer diabetes. There's been studies published by the BFA, the Biological Food Association, in conjunction with Stefan Lundvillet, a Swedish scientist who actually now works at the University of Utah and Fred Prevenza, that have actually found that marbling in beef, something that the consumer has always looked for, is actually early stage ketoacidosis in cattle and can actually give the consumer ketoacidosis, like early stage diabetic state. And so what we're learning is that the state of the

animal is also going to be given to you as a finely packaged deliverable as nutrients or disease to the consumer. And so if your cows are unhappy, or if your cows are diabetic, or if your cows have marbled meat, and they're in an early stage ketoacidosis, an early state of ketoacidosis, or whatever it might be, you as the human consuming that meat are inheriting that, right? We also know an intergenerational trauma and inheritable genetics and memory and all sorts of things. Rachel Bowers and Stephanie Yehuda, I think are the names, two scientists from the University

of Stanford, Stanford University. Long ago in the early 2000s, they published paper that changed the world that more or less proved that if a mother through mitochondrial DNA experiences trauma, let's say a survivor of Auschwitz and 20 years later, she has a daughter, that daughter will inherit the effects of the trauma. So maybe the PTSD when that daughter smells. I was gonna say there's a fantastic book from Mark Wolin called It Didn't Start With You.

If anybody doubts the statement you just made there on the science of Stanford, that book is so fucking illuminating. I think it can go three generations deep, but it's remarkable. And there's some really cool tips there. I'm like, hell, my grandmother went through hell and back. Like, is that with me?

Yeah, that's with me. All right, how can I me? Yeah, that's with me. All right. How can I start to work on that? Mark does a great job of giving us tools on a how-to guide on how to work with that. But yeah. Your podcast is good. Put that in the show notes because Bowers and Yehuda's work from Stanford is highly

academic. And so if you're interested in this, probably read that book. Don't read their articles because you might get lost. And it's interesting in the way that the mitochondrial DNA, the MTDNA actually gives you the effects of the trauma but not the trauma itself. One last quick break to tell you about BioPtimizers.com. Hey guys, are you ready? I want to give you the world's shortest biohacking biometric test. This is going to blow your mind and

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I use it my family use it every expert I know uses it all of my clients that get results use it when people ask me if there were just one supplement you could recommend This would be it hands down and I'll tell you why you'll feel it right away supplement you could recommend, this would be it hands down. And I'll tell you why. You'll feel it right away. Don't mess around with experimenting. For an exclusive offer, go to bioptimizers.com slash Kingsboo and use promo code Kingsboo10 during checkout to save 10%.

That's K-I-N-G-S-B-U-1-0, all caps during checkout to save 10%. And if you subscribe, not only will you get amazing discounts and free gifts, you will make sure your monthly supply is guaranteed. If you were a survivor of Auschwitz and then 20 years later you had a child, that child would actually inherit the trauma itself,

not the effects. And so the difference between DNA and mitochondrial DNA, females and males passing on trauma, it's different. There's complexity there. It's just absolutely, I mean, gorgeous from some perspective in the sense that we can communicate with our descendants long before we actually even produce their great great grandparents as ovaries as eggs. I mean it's just it's it's unbelievably I mean it's stunning. It's it's it's mind-boggling. It's wonderful but it has negative outcomes if we

don't walk through that. That's why trauma and grief has to be felt and experienced, which is why I think these courses are so important. Regardless, back on track, if diabetes can be transferred in the meat, if happiness, that is to say trauma or the lack of trauma or the effects of trauma, we know can be passed between genetics and it also can be passed between the meat, can high stress meat be leading to high stress people? Right, so that was the study that we embarked on with Fred Prevens and many others. Fred wrote the foreword to the book. It's a marvelous part of the book, Fred's foreword, almost worth buying the book just to read.

Fred's foreword in my opinion. And what we found, a lot of other scientists have found is that when the stress, that is to say, the post-mortem insulation of stress or cortisol in the meat is high, right? We see the pH of the meat drop. And as the pH pH of the meat drops what happens is what's called dark cutting. Right? So the lactic acid builds. You can kind of see it in this way. And the lactic acid builds and the pH drops. Which by the way in every meat ever

studied coming out of a USDA system. So if you go to the grocery store, you go to the local farmers market, anything that you can buy legally, any meat that you can buy legally, ever been studied is following this parameter, by the way. It all has a pH less than a certain degree. That pH is what's what issues what's what affects what's called dark cutting. Dark cutting is a meat's color. It affects the meat's flavor and taste.

It also affects the meat shelf life. So a meat that is going to be darkly cut, that is to say, it has high stress and thereby low pH, is actually going to be unable to prevent bacterial infestation in the same timeline as it should. And so it's not going to be, you know, I'm going to call it shelf stable, although it's obviously frozen. It's not going to be able to last in its package

or be shelf stable for as long as you should expect, which is why the FDA over the years has gone from 30 years ago, and this is rough, it could be 32, it could be 42, I don't know, but around 30 years ago the FDA said that you're allowed to freeze meat for two years and it's still edible. Today it's one year. Right? So we're seeing the same trend that meat doesn't even last in the freezer as long according to the FDA's perspective because in some degree, it's not only this degree, but to some degree, dark cutting because of the stress in our system, the stress in our animals, the stress of the animals in the fields, et cetera. These are animals that have high cortisol. They're in a constant state of fight or flight. They're in a constant

state of no family units, no kinship, no relationship, no animacy, no ability to express their agency, et cetera. You can dive into all of these different aspects. In the book I do, and in the podcast, it's just inaccessible to us. It'll be 10 hours long. But the resultant of that is as it progresses through this dark cutting phase, I don't want to get too lost here, but there's a lipid state that it is unable to go through and it can't do what it needs to do in this lipid state. It's called the oil phase. But passing through that, if it can't actually do that, it makes the meat about, and it depends on so many variables, so many variables, but up to 50% a lack of bioavailability of the nutrients. So what I'm saying is that taking all of the journeys, all the pathways, all the connections, all the science, lingo and mumbo-jumbo out, high stress meat equals less bioavailability in the nutrients to a very large degree, up

to about 50%. So if you take an animal to a USDA facility, it experiences stress. Maybe your animal was raised in a stressful way, where it separated and castrated and had no family units and never was able to express its animosity or agency, et cetera. Or maybe it did have the ability to do that. And then you took it to the USDA facility where it was stressed, where it was locked in a concrete windowless room all by itself for 12 hours riding in a two hour trip

on a clanking, cladding 80 mile an hour trailer, right? With horns honking and I mean, like all of these things that make no sense, right? Just imagine that like you were buried alive. Like that to some degree is what the cow was experiencing in this system, right? It's been alive in its life, all of its life in a field, able on grass, the grass isn't moving and all of a sudden you put it in this clanging metal trailer for two hours and it's in a concrete stall and then it's pushed by zappers into a guillotine system that squeezes its neck really loud and it's

like and the cows freaking out cows die by the way I've taken us cows USA facilities in the past where the owner calls me and says your cow died but it didn't die in the harvest it died from stress before the harvest I mean these are serious situations you're looking at a significant reduction just from a stress perspective in the bioavailability of that meat. So let's pretend that you're looking for truly bioavailable nutrient-dense meat. And to be very clear, you might not realize you're looking for bioavailability of nutrients in that meat. And you might not even know that you're asking these questions.

But if I were to tell you to eat a pound of beef, but I'm only going to give you 50% of the nutrients in that meat, and now you need to eat two pounds of that meat. That's what I'm talking about. Your body's ability to actually grab the nutrients in its food and take those nutrients and pull them into your own body is the reason we eat. And so if I'm telling you that stress alone is indicating up to a 50% drop in bioavailability in the nutrients in that meat, you all, if you're eating legally, right, if you're eating according to the system, if you're not participating in the system

and you're not respecting the animus in the agency and the consent and everything else we've been talking about for the last hour and a half, you need to be eating twice the amount of meat, twice, in order to get the same nutrients. And by the way, a cow today, it doesn't matter which state it's in a living cow, that is to say, it's not been reduced, it doesn't have a high pH, it's not stressed has about 51% of the iron that it used to have in 1970, I believe is the number. So automatically, you should be eating, you should be eating twice as much meat as it is just to get the same nutrients that your parents were born into, not

your grandparents, not your great grandparents, right? Not some pre-war, pre-industrial era. I mean your parents. When they had one burger, you need to eat two. And now if I'm telling you that that animal was processed in a stressful system or raised in a stressful system, you not only need to eat two, you need to eat four. Get the same amount of iron from beef that our ancestors, that is to say, your direct parents were getting getting this is insane absolutely insane and if I'm telling you that beef today is

inaccessible financially to the people that surround you maybe even you yourself and you can't even spend eight to sixteen dollars a pound for good nutrient rich beef and I'm telling you now to spend four times right right? As much as that. And you can't even afford the one time. I mean, this is a huge problem that no one outside of a select group of my colleagues are talking about. And the reason that no one is talking about it is this.

Number one, in order to start the conversation, we have to recognize agency. We have to recognize that we are not king dick over the operations of the earth. We have to recognize this and are not king dick over the operations of the earth. We have to recognize this and we have to do more than simply recognize it. We have to act on it. And so when you're starving and you're hungry and you ask the dandelion if I can pick it so I can eat it and it says no you move on, right? That is what this means. That is what this looks like. You fly in from

California to harvest this cow to be a part of this process, and the cow says no, and you fly home. That is what this means. It doesn't happen often, but it needs to be open to being had, to being seen, and that is the process. And so, number one, we want to believe in agency, but we don't actually want to actually live in that agency. And so in order to facilitate this whole change, in order to have this conversation widespread, we have to understand and then live in the animistic and agency-filled world as that world.

We need to become an Earthling, period, right? And then number, and that's very difficult. I think the courses that we hold, the number one reason we do those courses is to give and provide a safe space for people to begin that process. Not for them to walk away understanding the difference between a bone-in and boneless chuck roast, although you're gonna learn that too, I promise you'll learn it, but to provide a safe space so that you can actually celebrate that

agency, live in that animacy without carrying any of the stress. I will carry your stress. You need to carry the weight. That's what those courses are for. The second side is everything that I'm saying is illegal. The chief scientist of the USDA over a bagel in the Capitol building last year told me that it shouldn't be illegal. There's no science to support the legal, here told me that it shouldn't be illegal. There's no science to support the legal, the the illegalization of on farm processed meat. It doesn't have any sort of legalistic, I'm sorry, scientific basis. But the the people in Washington are, you know, good at their jobs and good at getting what they want is basically what she told me. And you can imagine

what that might might or may not look like. And so it's illegal. And so our life's work over the last five, six years, our life's work moving forward is to provide people access to these systems so that we can kickstart, I mean, a new human race. When I say a new human race, what I mean is an ancient human race. That is to say us Western European travelers travelers on Earth, especially and everybody else that wants to join, to relearn this pre-Columbian, pre-colonial, concentric and kinship worldview where food is not nutrients on a plate, but it's life co-creating itself. And when we partake in that plate, we partake in the operations of the planet. And as we partake in the operations of the planet,

we become the planet once again. We leave our stasis as poodles and we become free-ranging wolves once again, slowly and surely. And everything else has to follow, right? This is not a one-stop stop to actually renovating your life or anything like this. But it's a good first step. And I think even for people who listen to my words, and they say, great. But I just want nutrient rich beef. Like that's really just what I want, like animism agency, whatever. I think this course is still for you. Because at the end of the day, if the meat that you're eating has 50% of the nutrients. Like I don't know a single person who ever eats a whole meal and then says cool now let's have a whole other meal so that we're healthy. Like that's certain point you just get constipated if you know what I mean. And so I think it's a fine place for

humans to meet. So like again I'll end with this. The last course we taught we always get feedback from the students at the end and in this, it was so interesting just two days ago when everybody was leaving, flying back to their places, driving, wherever they were going. They said, I came to learn how to field harvest, and I just made a bunch of friends. And I'm not saying come to the course to make friends, but what they meant by that and what we got to talk about is for the first time in their lives, for most of them, they met themselves. Like actually. Not in some sort of reactive way. And I'm not saying don't do plant medicine, I'm saying do plant medicine. But this is different. It's I need you now to step forward. Right? Like and maybe you need to do something before

you come. Right? And there's a lot of diversity and succession and evolution in our own journeys. But when you step forward, you're forced to meet yourself, right? Like you have to trust that process. You have to trust that knife. You have to trust that feeling that the animal gave you consent because it didn't vocally say, yes, go ahead. And so you have to be so attuned to the moment and the energies and the vibrations and the spirits and the smells and the sounds and the sights and the twitch and the cows ear and everything in between that you are sure that it said yes, because you will never hear it actually say yes. And when you're so attuned to that moment and you're so attuned to the consent and that agency, you break down and you meet yourself.

And then now in that state of that essence boiling and bubbling as I've said multiple times, you realize that when you meet yourself you meet the ourself all around you. And it's a lot. It's a lot. I mean everybody journals after the fact. Everybody goes for walks. Everybody does tree sittings. And I mean it's just there's a lot to handle. Even if like two courses ago we had a full-time USDA butcher that came. I mean, they kill five, 10, 20 cows a day, and they came out and they lost it.

Because it's not the same process. It's not the same process at all to do so in a completely free, completely wild, from a modern perspective situation, framework, landscape, where the animal had the free ability to say no. I see you, but no. That was beautiful, brother. I really appreciate every minute I get with you.

And I'm excited to make my way back out to see you at some point. I got to get it on the schedule because it's just be a great, it's been a few years. It was awesome having you on our land. And if you're going to make your way out to speak at Texas A&M at any point, it'd be a great, it's been a few years. It was awesome having you on our land. And if you're gonna make your way out to speak at Texas A&M at any point, I'd love to have you here again. But thank you so much, brother. Absolutely.

May 16th, is that the date for when your course launches? Yeah, so May 16th is the next group course. I don't know if we'll throw another one this year. We're doing a lot of private courses for people who are ready to take that next step in a much more familial way, if that makes sense. They want to bring their families out. And so I think this will be the last group course. So if this is interesting, you've listened to the

last hour plus of this podcast, check that check that course out. The tickets are priced pretty efficiently. We serve some amazing foods, we try our best to make it as comfortable as a course as possible. There's scholarship options. Reach out if you need them. Awesome, brother. We'll link to everything in the show notes, um, your books, the website, all that good stuff. Thank you so much, brother.

I love you brother. Give Morgan and the kids big hugs from me and we'll chat soon, brother. Absolutely. Thank you, Kyle.