Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 322 Pt. 1 - Eating Meat Will Save The Planet? ft. Shawn Baker and Paul Saladino

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

Eating meat is better for the planet? We have a special four part series for you featuring Shawn Baker and Paul Saladino! These two are leading the way in the Carnivore Diet Community and argue that following a full carnivore diet is better for the environment than a vegan diet and more sustainable. This is part one of a four part series so please stay tuned for the next episodes! Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Visit our sponsors: ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/powerproject Use Code "POWERPROJECT10” at checkout for $10 off $40 or more! ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject  ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject   ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok ➢Power Project Alexa Skill: http://bit.ly/ppalexa FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

What up Power Project, we have an awesome series for you. In part one of a four part series, we have Sean Baker and Paul Saladino, two guys that are leading the way in the carnivore community. They're talking about how the carnivore diet is actually better and more sustainable for the environment over a vegan or vegetarian diet.

Again, this is part one of a four part series, so please make sure you stay tuned for the additional three episodes. This episode is brought to you by Perfect Keto. When we're not chowing down on a bunch of steaks, we do like to enjoy the finer things in life, such as Perfect Keto's MCT oil powder. We utilize this for our fast or when we want to just add something a little extra to our coffee, get a little flavor in there. Head over to perfectketo.com slash powerproject at checkout, enter promo code powerproject10 to get $10 off any order of 40 or more.

And if your order is $100 or more, use promo code powerprojectbundle for $25 off. Again, $40 or more, use promo code powerproject10 to get $10 off. And use powerprojectbundle to get $25 off any order of $100 or more. Enjoy the show. Oh, my God. Another carnivore podcast. Here we go. Another carnivore podcast.

It's almost like this is all we talk about all day. That's right. Bunch of meatheads. Who are the carnivores? Yeah, I don't know. We're all carnivores. Somebody asked me how long I've been a carnivore, and I said, well, since birth.

I started eating the correct way when I turned 50. Right. Well, you had several years where you were uh competing in like highland games and stuff like that and you were a little chunkier right i was yeah i was about 300 yeah i was too 80 but i was a little guy in highland games at that weight you know because most of these guys well you know you know these giant people yeah six foot nine 350 because the throw the highland you've had matt vincent on there yeah absolutely to throw that 56 pound weight there's something like 800 pounds of torque on your arm so you gotta be able to channel it counter it and i've seen guys spin around that we're 300 pounds it knocks them on their ass so you've got to have the strength and actual the size to to be able to do those implements and most of those guys are monsters so even when i was 290 i was like you know one

of the smaller guys out there but let me ask you guys this because we've had both of you on the podcast before. Let's just go over a little bit of like some cooking skills, and let's talk about the type of meats that you like and why you like those types of meats. What are some of the ways that you guys are cooking up these meats, and what are some of your favorite cuts? Man, I guess I probably do things a little different than Sean. I just use a stainless steel pan.

So I think that the cookware that we use is pretty important. It's not a super sexy conversation, but man, I freaking hate Teflon and I freaking hate PTFE and I freaking hate any of the synthetic nonstick stuff. So I've got a... You certainly don't need it for steak anyway. No, I mean, even a grass fed, grass finished steak, which is what I prefer exclusively, in fact, is going to have some fat. It's not going to stick to the pan. And so I'll just cook that in a stainless steel

pan. Super simple, super easy in terms of that. If I want more of a sear, I'll make the temperature hotter. But generally, I feel like the steak tastes great and I don't oversear it. I like my steaks rare, medium rare and that. And then people may know this about me. I like organ meats and I just eat all those raw, which is crazy town. Just eating some heart and some brains and that. And then, you know, people may know this about me. I like organ meats and I just eat all those raw, which is crazy town, but it's just eating some heart and some brains and stuff. Yeah. Brain is really good. Raw. It's just found them all to be so much easier to eat. Raw liver and heart and spleen. I had some pancreas today and you know, testicles really good. You haven't eaten testicle with me yet. Yeah. I like raw. I like raw balls. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe I will. Let's do that together sometime.

I had my friend Furious Pete. He's been on the podcast before. He's a professional eater. And he's like, I've eaten dicks. I've eaten balls. And he's going over all this stuff that he's eaten. And he said the worst thing he ever had was an onion. A raw onion sucks.

Yeah, what's an onion? Is it a fruit? Or is it a vegetable? I think it's a tuber. I think it's a vegetable. It's a tuber. It's a root. It doesn't have a seed, so it has to be. Yeah, what's an onion? Is it a fruit? Or is it a vegetable? I think it's a tuber. I think it's a vegetable. It's a tuber. It's a root. It doesn't have a seed, so it has to be.

Yeah, not a fruit. You ever have raw garlic? Horrible. Yeah. It'll make your stomach burn. It's poisonous, man. It'll make your shit garlic forever, too. Yeah, it's horrible.

That's not a good smell, the smell of poop and burn at the same time. When I went hunting, so I went hunting a couple of weeks ago. It was awesome in West Texas. And we got two deer on the first night, and then I got a deer with my bow on the second morning. And the first night that we got the two deer, we butchered them, and we were kind of just really in a pretty respectful space and grateful that we got the deer.

But we wanted to, having the fresh deer, we wanted to eat as much of it as we could. So we kind of all ate as much of the deer as we could in sort of curiosity but also reverence. And I ate deer testicle and ate a deer eyeball. That's got to be different eating meat that's that fresh. It's warm. That's got to be crazy. From the animal, yeah.

We took the liver out and all had a bite of the liver and the heart. Wow. I mean, you know, it sounds gross, but that's just our human conditioning. This is pretty much exactly what our ancestors were doing, you know. And people will say, oh, a carnivore diet is totally crazy. And I think, well, what's really crazy is their standard American diet. It's much more ancestrally consistent to be eating an animal and eating the whole animal. So I think we actually ate the deer penis.

That was just kind of chewy, not very exciting. The eyeball was kind of chewy, too, a lot of collagen in there. Yeah, the eyeball must have been weird. Where in West Texas were you, Paul? So I was outside of Junction. Junction. I didn't think they allowed you to eat penis in Texas, to be honest with you. In Texas, if you're a vegan, it's actually considered a misdemeanor, actually, if you didn't know that.

So there's a really good book. It's Empire of the Summer Moon, I think. Oh, yeah, yeah. Joe Rogan had the guy in the podcast. Comanches and stuff, and these guys and that's part of where they used to roam and and it's kind of interesting that comanche apparently were like these neanderthal not neanderthal but these early prehistoric human that were never really evolved away from their stone age thing and then they got horses and they were just these crazy

beasts of people that were in there they're pretty if you read the book they're they're pretty savages but i mean they were they do say through buffalo they just they're just going to mow through buffalo. Of course, we know about all the buffalo drops and running the buffalo off the cliff and then just going in there and eating a bunch of buffalo. What do you do for steaks? Well, I mean, I eat a variety of steaks. I mean, I eat a lot of ribeyes.

I really enjoy cooking them, and so it's kind of an experience for me. It's the only foodiness I do. I see you out there on your grill going live on IG. Yeah, I mean, I've got a grill that gets really hot. And the nice thing about the super hot temperature is you save all the juice in there because if you cook it a little slower, particularly searing, the juice gets away. So I get it hot, hot, hot, sear it two minutes on each side, flip it, and that's pretty much it. Salt.

Yeah, I'll throw pretty much it. Salt. Salt. Yeah, I'll throw a little salt on there. If I get a big tomahawk steak, I usually sous vide it first because I like it. Like I said, I like it probably closer to medium rare. And if I take that tomahawk, it sears so quick that it's so cold on the inside. I don't like cold meat, quite honestly. And I know there's some people that will just eat a ribeye raw, cold out of the fridge. I can't do that.

It just doesn't appeal to me. So that's what I like to do. But I still have a pretty good variety. I eat both grain-fed and grass-finished. You know, it depends. You know, this is something you'll appreciate. I did a podcast with the guys from Alderspring Ranch, and they're up in Idaho. And they've got these cattle that they give this real wide variety of range. Because we talk about what is a natural diet for a cow.

And we're like, what's grass? Obviously, we're like, these cows came from China. And were they eating the grass that grows in the U.S.? Maybe not. So he's got this huge variety. And what they see, and this is the exciting part for me, because he can run 500 head of cattle where he used to could run 200. So he's doing regenerative ag.

He's putting carbon back in the soil. cattle where he used to could run 200. So he's doing regenerative ag, he's putting carbon back in the soil. But the exciting thing is, is they're putting, they're putting on three pounds of weight per day, which is what they can get in a feedlot. So he's getting weight gain on grass fed animals at the rate of what feedlots are doing, which means a fattier animal, which is, you know, you and I, we know we prize the fat and that's why we want the fat on the animal. That's why, you know, if you're doing a lot of lean grass-fed, you're often adding whatever, suet, tallow, things like that, kidney fat. So that's just an aside. It's exciting.

Hopefully we can kind of get that to happen in more places. You're also not afraid to roll through In-N-Out Burger and stuff like that, right? You know, I – and Paul may disagree with me on that. But I think we have a huge, huge problem in western society in the United States and I think even though you know people will say well the grain fed animal has you know a different omega 6 the 3 ratio it's really not

there's not much in there anyway you get more of that you know by eating just a piece of fish quite honestly you know you know the hormone issue is really not that big of a deal because the hormone levels are so minuscule either way. You know, if you're worried about the hormones, don't ever eat an egg because it has like 10 times the hormones that beef will have regardless. So having said that, you know, the story of regenerative ag, you know, going to that I think is an important ethical and environmental story.

I think we need to push that. You know, we do have to separate, because what vegans do is they get this ideology and they mix everything together. And I think it's important to really be honest about the nutrition differences. So the average American, that may be what they have access to or they can afford. And it's not like, yes, you can go to a rancher

and maybe get your beef for four bucks a pound if you take the whole animal. But that still, people may not be willing to do that. It might be a big investment, yeah. But they might be willing to say, I'm going to go get some hamburger from the store. I'm going to go get some steak. I might even roll through in and out.

And they're going to be still 100 times better than the standard American diet eaters. So I think we have to be, in my view, my mission, if I want to call it a mission, is to make it as accessible, as inclusive to as many people as possible. And then when you get them there, then for those that have the financial means or the desire, then you can kind of get them along this line to maybe we need to make a difference on the environment. But I'm not eating to save the environment, quite honestly. I'm eating for my own personal health. And I think most people are going to do that.

Now, should we do those other things? Probably yes. I mean, there's a lot of ways you can protect the environment. You can drive a car, a smaller car. I mean, there's a lot of ways to do that. But that's how I look at things. The conversation around the environment is so fascinating to me, and I can talk about grass versus grain-fed meat as well, in my opinion.

But this idea of regenerative agriculture. So I was talking to my friend Anthony Gustin. We've got to rebrand this. It's too many syllables. Perfect keto, right? Yeah, yeah. But, you know, regenerative ag has been one of the things that I'm most excited about recently. And people may not know what it is.

I don't really know what it was until I started digging into it and learned about farms like Valcampo here in California and White Oak Pastures in Georgia. You know, you think about the way the bison used to move on the plains. There were a hundred million bison and another hundred million elk, deer, antelope in the United States. So there were 200 million ungulates. They would run and probably migrate and all kinds of things. They'd eat a bunch of grass and they'd move on after the grass was eaten down to the stump, but they didn't kill the grass, right? And while they were bunch of grass, and they'd move on after the grass was eaten down to the stump, but they didn't kill the grass. And while they were eating the grass, they would pee and poop there, which is natural fertilizer, and then they'd move on.

And then what happens a few days later or weeks later, boom, that field where they were eating is just blooming with life. It's blooming with life. It's regrown because they fertilized the grass. And so what we're doing with regenerative agriculture with these farms is doing rotational grazing. They'll have multiple paddocks. White Oak has 130 acre paddocks and they'll move the cattle, they'll move the lamb, they'll move the animals every day. So they'll move them one day, they'll move the sheep, you know, they'll move them every day. And so they'll keep them somewhere for a couple of days and then move them and they'll impact the land hard and then they'll move them somewhere else. And in a few weeks, days, it's come back and it's greener than it ever is.

And what's so interesting for me, and this has been a revelation, you know, training as a physician doesn't prepare you to learn about being a farmer. But now I think I really just want to be a farmer. It's all about the soil. And I think that more than any other metric, we did some stuff for YouTube before this podcast, we were talking about LDL and triglyceride. But the metric that I'm most excited about right now is soil organic matter. The amount of organic matter in the soil, I think, is what will determine our persistence on the planet as a human species. Homo erectus lived 1.8 million years. Homo sapiens will probably not make it that long. We've only been around 400,000. The only chance that Homo sapiens has to make it as long as Homo erectus or to persist on this planet is increasing the amount of organic matter in the soil.

And I'll tell you why. Because when we get more organic matter in the soil, the soil holds more water. For every 1% increase in the amount of organic matter in a piece of soil, it can hold more than 25,000 gallons per hectare, which means when it rains, the water doesn't run off. You don't get topsoil erosion. This doesn't sound sexy until people see it. But you have to realize that your food is grown in soil. But you can't grow food in shitty soil, right? What does tilling the land do? Tilling is when we pull a knife through the ground. It turns the soil over and all that topsoil with all that organic matter that's taken years and years to form because animals have been

living there and dying there and shitting there is immediately oxidized and the soil dies. All the fungal networks die, all the bacterial networks die, and a bunch of carbon is released when you till the soil. Plant-based people never talk about that, right? They never talk about how much carbon is released by tilling the soil for monocrop agriculture. So when we do regenerative agriculture, at White Oak Pastures, they've been doing it for 20 years. When they started, they were around 1% soil organic matter. Now they're at over 5%. So Will Harris, the owner of that farm,

has taken a sample of his soil and a sample of his neighbor's soil 35 feet away. They're completely different colors. His is deep, dark brown. It's like a dark chocolate. The other one is like light, light brown, kind of like a weird brown, almost like the color of your shirt. Dry, probably.

Yeah, and the difference is between 0.5 or 0.7 organic matter and 5. And that is a huge difference because of the rainwater sequestration and the plants can grow more in 5% organic matter and they sequester more carbon. And then they are bigger plants and you can feed more cattle. So what's really cool about this is that if humans want to continue on this planet

we are going to have to raise animals in the right way on this planet. We really have to bring back the buffalo and the best way to do that is to do regenerative agriculture. The other cool thing about this and this comes up all the time

and this is one of the things I learned when I was out at Rome Ranch in Texas where they actually have bison. I got to stand as close as I am to you to a bison. That must have been cool. It was freaking awesome. I was like, what if I die? This is a good story. Carnivore doctor gets killed

by a bison. That's poetic justice, right? How big was this thing? 1,300 pounds. Holy shit. When I learned out there, you look at the ground out there. That's in central Texas, Fredericksburg. You look at the ground out there. That's in West, that's in sort of Central Texas, Fredericksburg. You look at the ground out there, it's been destroyed. Europeans came in.

There used to be bison there, and they moved them all out. Scrub brush comes in, and the ground is now mostly barren. You don't get a lot of grass. You look at a square foot, maybe 96% of that is just dirt. And then there's 5% that's like little sprigs of grass. So estimates are that if we can increase the amount of organic matter in the soil, there's more grass on that square foot,

which means there's more grass on the field, which means you can put more animals in that field. So people always say you can't scale grass-fed agriculture, which is bullshit, because you absolutely can't. The estimates now are that if we can increase the carrying capacity of the land by 30%, meaning that if we can increase the carrying capacity of the land by 30%, meaning that if we can increase the soil organic matter content and we can get 30% more grass growing on all this land

that was destroyed by monocrop agriculture previously, we could take every single feedlot cattle in the U.S. and replace it with a grass-finished animal. And that is going to improve carbon cycling, regenerative ag, right? It's going to increase the carbon in the soil. It's going to increase the organic matter in the soil. And when I realized that, I thought, man, that is incredible. If we can raise...

So that might be a reason to invest in grass-fed other than just your actual health. I think so, that you kind of vote with your dollars. And if you support farms like that, that, to me, is the persistence of the human race, which some people might care about, some people might not. But if you want your kids' kids' kids to have an earth, we've got to really step back and see the cycle here

and realize that monocrop agriculture is not sustainable. It's destroying the earth. Tilling is really destroying the topsoil. And our most valuable resource is absolutely soil organic matter. And again, that doesn't sound sexy. That's not an F1 car. It's not a freaking Lamborghini.

But man, our ancestors knew that. There were all sorts of proverbs and parables about how we are a piece of the land. We will return to the land. When our bones become a part of the land, we'll realize that we're absolutely from the earth. And if we do not care for that soil, and animals are a critical part of that, we will perish because we won't be able to grow anything. And it works in terms of agriculture and cows as well, because you can raise more cows, you can raise healthier cows. Everything works better. We don't need to grow anything. We've got impossible burgers. Yeah. I mean, just to echo what Paul's saying, you know, there's a difference between a grass fed animal and a regenerative raised animal. There's a lot of people, a lot of animals that are grass fed that they just pass them the way they do everywhere

else. And that's not really helping the soil. And so that's a confusion. People are like, I'm just going to buy this grass fed burger from wherever. That may not be doing any better to the environment than anywhere else. So there's places like the Savory Institute on my website,

meterx.com. We've got a list of all these regenerative farms, all the places where you can go to get that stuff. And I think that what Paul is saying is incredibly important for the environment. And I think that that should be something we do emphasize. You know, again, I still separate out the nutritional component on that. But, you know, if we are going to survive as a species, that is where it has to be. And it would be nice to take the corn and wheat and soy subsidies and subsidize this type of thing. Because you could, if these ranchers had incentive to do it, more of them would do it. Right now, it's a tough thing to go from a standard conventional rancher to a regenerative thing.

It's a leap of faith. You may not make it. You may go out of business. You might lose a lot of money. If you can make it, you can do really well in this situation. You'll restore your land. You'll be more productive than you ever were. But there's still that kind of question. Am I going to quit my job and do another career? That's kind of the roll of the dice I had. Now, if we were to get away and we would piss off every Iowa, Nebraska, Midwest person if we took away soy subsidies and corn subsidies.

So that is a political battle. And it's who's going to have the most money, who's going to have the most influence there. And I can tell you it's not the cattle ranchers, unfortunately. And it's going to have to come from the consumers that are saying, this is what we want, vote with our dollar if we can. And that's a caveat I've got to say. First, we talk about environmental impacts. The health care system is 10% of our greenhouse gases right now.

Animal agriculture is 4%. You know, beef cattle are 2%. So it's like if I'm sick, I'm contributing to environmental damage. If I get healthy, then I'm no longer contributing to the 10%. I might be contributing to the 2%. So you have to frame these things. You know, you have to frame these things correctly. And if you're these things correctly and if you're sick and unhealthy you're going to be passing those genes on for sure multiple generations in some cases right yeah being

sick is not environmentally sustainable sick people is not environmentally sustainable so there's a like I said there's a lot of ways to frame this argument and we're hearing one side we're hearing the impossible burger the beyond meat side. And that's what there's a lot of money out there. This is projected to be a $100 billion industry. And they have $5.7 trillion in investment capital buffing that up, trying to create that industry. That's why you see all these athletes, movie stars, you know, this propaganda that's nonstop because they want this industry to come through.

They want you and I to give up meat. And instead we're going to eat pea protein with canola oil. I mean, this is what we're fighting. So it's a very important part. Can I break that down a little bit? See, this happens a lot. Everybody, I think that a lot of the numbers get conflated and confused. And I want to try and simplify this for people or demystify it.

Because a lot of the plant-based people will point to an FAO study from 2016. I hope this won't be too esoteric, but there's a bunch of data out there regarding greenhouse gases and how much cows actually produce. It hurt my little big carnivore heart when Joaquin Phoenix is at the Golden Globe saying, thanks for being plant-based. Cows are the biggest contributor. That's just crazy. That, to me, suggests a deeply rooted misunderstanding. But people get behind it because they want to save the planet. So this is the deal for people that are listening and care about what is actually going on with greenhouse gases, as far as I understand it. There's an FAO study from 2016. That FAO study looked at global livestock, so all livestock all across the world for the whole

life cycle, and it compared that as a percentage of anthropogenic emissions to tailpipe emissions in cars, transportation, which is apples to oranges, right? Because you're not just looking at what comes out of a cow, and we're going to talk about the carbon cycle and methane and how those are different from carbon dioxide that comes out of a car. But the FAO 2016 report looked at the life cycle of all the carbon emissions from a cow. How much carbon it takes to move the cow into the pasture, how much carbon it takes to butcher the cow, how much carbon it takes to move the cow to the market, and how much methane is out of the cow during the cow's lifetime. And then it compared that to only the carbon dioxide

that comes out of a tailpipe of an automobile. And this always gets cited. People will say, plant-based advocates will say, livestock in the world produces as much greenhouse gas as transportation, right? And that's a false statement because it's life cycle for all livestock globally to tailpipe emissions.

No one has ever done a life cycle analysis that I'm aware of, of global transportation. And if you- Right, and there wouldn't be any, right? Because it's not part of the natural cycle of being on this earth. Well, it is- Like it's gonna disrupt the natural,

it's gonna disrupt anything that's natural. Well, what I mean by life cycle of carbon emissions from cars is not just what comes out of the tailpipe, but how much carbon does it take to make the road that the car goes on? How much carbon does it take to make the car? How much carbon does it take to recycle the car or trash the car? How much carbon does it take to do upkeep on the car, right? If you look at the FAO data and you compare apples to apples,

if you compare tailpipe to tailpipe, for instance, and you compare emissions of methane to apples, if you compare tailpipe to tailpipe, for instance, and you compare emissions of methane to transportation, all global livestock is about 5% to 6% versus 14.2% of anthropogenic emissions. So that looks very different than equivalent, right? So they're conflating the numbers. There's another set of data from the EPA that you'll see Sean and me repost and Diana Rogers repost, which actually looks at, quote, tailpipe, right? They're looking at how much methane does a cow produce, how much methane do all livestock produce, and in that situation, cows produce about 1.8% of the greenhouse gases. Again, methane is very different than carbon dioxide, and transportation produces 30%, right? So for people to say that cows are contributing a lot to greenhouse gases is,

again, misunderstanding, and the data gets all confusing, right? The last piece of this equation is the carbon cycle and the fact that the methane that a cow produces, mainly from burps, has always been on the earth. So methane is CH4. It has a carbon in it. That carbon has always been on the earth, and what it does is it goes up into the atmosphere. It becomes carbon dioxide, gets fixed into plants as carbohydrates, into the root systems, and then cows eat it and it circulates, right? So all that carbon as methane that cows produce is not new carbon. But when we take fossil fuels out of the ground and we combust them in tailpipes, electricity generation, this is freeing new carbon that was previously sequestered in the ground, right?

So if we look at the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, I think it's increased from something like 280 to 415 ppm. Well, that's not methane from cows. That carbon has always been there. It's always been circulating. That's new carbon from burning of fossil fuels, right? So people who are, it's just so ironic, and Sean and I have both pointed this out, that all the guys at the Golden Globes flew there in private jets. That's new carbon, right? That's not the same thing as carbon in a methane cycle. And Elon Musk tweeted about this recently, and it was just so cool to see him say this, that even if everyone went vegan, it wouldn't solve the climate issues, because that wouldn't change a thing. You know, we all know that. The real problem or the real production of new carbon is burning fossil fuels. So that's where the new carbon is coming from. And then the last part of this

equation that makes it even more complex is that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are a fraction of the total. I think they're only 15%, meaning that 85% of greenhouse gas is part of the normal cycle of the earth right what produces the most methane termites where else does methane come from bogs in africa natural wetlands the ocean produces a lot of greenhouse gases right so there's all sorts of sources of greenhouse gas that have always been a part of the earth's atmosphere and that are the vast majority of the greenhouse gas we are producing a small amount and then you can expand in that amount, and people can move the numbers around

and try and say this is influencing climate change. But to say that cows are causing climate change, to me it's just lamentable. It's just such a misunderstanding. And they're using FAO data, and then they're mistaking the way they're presenting it, and then we're mixing it with EPA data, and then we're completely ignoring the fact that, like we're talking about,

these regenerative farms can be carbon negative, and they can fix more carbon than they can produce. So to me, I wanted to clarify that for people because I wanted people to understand what the greenhouse gas emissions from cows are in the global context. Yeah, and I think to add to that, I mean, just to put it further into impact, the calculations based on EPA data in the U.S. So if every one of us decided we would become vegan and all the animals would just magically disappear at the same time, all 95 million cows would just disappear off the planet, all cats and dogs and horses. By the way, there's more horses and dairy cattle in the U.S. than most people just totally ignore.

Cats and dogs eat probably the equivalent of 30% of human food. They would eat enough for 70 million people, basically. They just kind of ignore those facts. But if all of those things were to disappear, the net effect on global greenhouse gases would be something like 0.4%, not even 1%, for all of us to go vegan and all the animals to disappear. That's how much impact it would have on the world if every American did that. The other thing that is kind of interesting is world cattle population over the last 30 years has decreased by about 100 million. We have 100 million cattle less than we used to 30 years ago, and yet methane has gone up. The other thing, if we look at methane, when we look at methane in the atmosphere, it's called top-down.

So there's things that produce methane that ends up in the atmosphere and you can take isotopes and label that methane and you can figure out where it came from. None of that methane that is accumulated in the atmosphere is coming from cattle. And when we do bottom-up measurements, what we do, we can say a cow farts, it's actually a burp, and we can measure how much methane comes out. And we say, okay, that's how much methane a cow produces.

We're going to times that by 1.4 billion cattle. That's how much methane the cattle are making. But what they don't do is they can't measure how many termites are there. They can't measure the ocean methane, you know, like Paul pointed out, accurately. There's all these new sources we're continually finding. So we don't even know where it's all coming from. And yet we're going to blame it on the cows because we can measure it. Whereas when we look at the atmosphere, it's not there.

So it's another, again, this is a story they want to tell you. They want to promote an agenda. And the agenda is buy more pea protein, quite honestly. Are either of you aware of like Impossible Burger or any of these other companies? What's their footprint? It's positive. So there's a graphic from White Oak Pastures I can show you. And I think for every pound of beef they produce,

they sequester like three pounds of carbon dioxide. And I think that the units might be – I think that that's the correct unit. So three pounds carbon negative for every pound of beef. And Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger are about three to four pounds positive for every pound they make. Yeah, so they're worse. When we compare it to a regeneratively raised animal, a regeneratively raised animal is going to make carbon go away from the atmosphere. They're going to put it back in the atmosphere. They're better than the feedlot cattle by quite a bit.

But like I said, some people like Diana Rogers like to say it's not the cow, it's the how, and we have to focus on the how. But Impossible Burger, I mean, it's basically synthetic slop. I mean, it's a protein that humans have never even eaten before, the soy-like hemoglobin. I don't know if you call it a protein, but it's a molecule we've never been exposed to. It is, I mean, it is, I think their ingredient is coconut oil, and then they have soy isolate as their other protein source.

You know, 2020, I think they've got like 15 or 16 ingredients, and so it's clearly not health food. And most people recognize that. There's a few vegan advocates who think it's healthy for us, which I think is beyond crazy. But anyway. And the carbon, that's the other thing is it's different carbon, right? So the carbon produced from a Beyond Burger is carbon dioxide, new carbon dioxide, because you're burning fossil fuel and electricity to make it.

And the carbon from, whether it's feedlot cattle, which I'm not a huge fan of, or regenerative ag cattle, which is being fixed, is all methane. And again, like Sean is saying, there's a lot of methane from the ocean. There's a lot of methane from termites. That's really always been there. And there's a lot of methane in – there's a lot of carbon dioxide in the ground. And like I said, when you till the ground, you release the carbon. And nobody's talking about all these carbon sources and methane versus carbon dioxide.

It's very different. And if we didn't have greenhouse gas, the surface of the earth would be freezing all the time everywhere. It would be like being in Chicago in the winter all the time. So greenhouse gas makes it so that we can walk around in shorts in Los Angeles and go on the beach and get bikinis, you know. And it's always been a part of our environment. And, again, most of it comes from the oceans and moves around. And to point the finger at cattle is just completely myopic.

Yeah, I think it's important to point it. There are a lot of people, and it seems to be a political ideology. Some people think greenhouse gas is overrated and we don't have climate change. And there's other people that think it's dramatic and we've got to do something right now. I don't get into that argument

because I'm not the expert on that. But what I will tell you is even the guys like Michael Mann who are radical, we've got to do something right now, are saying it's not cows. So even the top climate scientists that think greenhouse gases are a huge problem, they don't think it's cows. And as Sean suggested, if you eliminated all the cows and all the animals, you wouldn't get a real change in greenhouse gas, but there would also be a complete ecosystems collapse. you wouldn't get a real change in greenhouse gas, but there would also be a complete ecosystems collapse.

You know, if anyone has listened to this ever had a garden, you know, how do you get a good garden to grow stuff? You've got to put poop in it. You've got to put worm poop, human poop, cow poop, horse poop. Why do they put horse manure for fertilizer? Or, you know, when they do landscaping, because you've got to put some poop in the soil to get the nutrients it needs to get good soil. And so you take away ruminants, man, we're completely done.

Then we're just forced to do factory farmed meat because we're not going to grow anything in the soil. What up, podcast? It's me again. Just want to sneak in right here at the very end to remind you that this is just part one of a four-part series. So please stay tuned to the next episodes. Real quick, thank you again to everybody that's been rating and reviewing on iTunes. This does a lot for the podcast. We sincerely appreciate it, just like our friend A.L. Cohen did.

And she says, yes, she says, a true bro. Quote, I'm a bikini competitor and health and fitness nut. I listen to these guys every single morning because it starts my day off right and sets my mind in a positive way, as well as gets me laughing before I even head out the door. Recently, my boyfriend overheard me listening in the morning, looked at me and said, quote, you really are a true bro. Might be the greatest compliment he's ever given me. We really appreciate having you as a listener, bro. Thank you so much for taking the time to rate and review us like that.

If you guys want to hear your name and your review at the end of a podcast, head over to iTunes right now, leave us a rating and a review, and you could hear your name at the end of a podcast just like A.L. Cohen did. We'll catch you guys on the next one. Peace.