Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Mark McAfee

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Mark McAfee is the CEO and Founder of Raw Farm, the largest raw dairy operation in the world. On his family-owned farm, McAfee, a fifth generation farmer, works to offer nutrient dense dairy products that are unprocessed, living, and retain their beneficial bacteria. As the Chairman and President of the Board of the Raw Milk Institute, McAfee’s leadership is based on humane care of his cows and upholding high safety standards for raw dairy products. Off the farm, he lectures on the gut biome benefits of raw milk at Stanford, University of Southern California, and medical schools in the United States, Australia, and Canada.  ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------ Lucy https://lucy.co/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra

Tetragrammaton. I grew up on a dairy when I was a child for a few years. And I milked cows when I was 12 and 13 years old. But my dad was not a traditional dairyman, and his father was not a traditional dairyman. My grandfather was actually a school teacher, the son of a Presbyterian minister. So dairying was kind of in my blood a little bit as a child, but it wasn't something that was traditionally a multi-generation thing at all. When did you first come to realize the benefits of raw milk?

Did you know that your whole life? No, not at all. Not at all. You kind of have to get a perspective of my whole pathway of how I got to where we are today to understand why raw milk is so near and dear to me and what's going on with raw milk. I grew up on a farm and then first thing out of high school, I worked in a mine up in the mountains and I saw this guy that was almost killed.

A timber hit him in the head. It's way up in the Sierra Nevada. It's a Teledyne tungsten mine. And a helicopter was called to pick him up and take him away. This is like 1980. And I just couldn't get over the rotor wash and the paramedic that jumped out with his orange jumpsuit and the nurse with him, saving his life. I thought, you know what?

I got to be that guy. I got to be that paramedic. And I went off and I got my pre-med done. I became a certified paramedic and I graduated top of my class. I spent 17 years as a certified paramedic and a preceptor and a medical educator. As a medical educator, I taught paramedic medicine. I had 15,000 paramedic calls over that 16, 17 years. And I taught paramedic medicine. I was an operations director, did everything you can imagine.

ACLX instructor, everything in paramedic medicine. It all came to a screeching halt in 1996. My grandparents had passed away and the farm ground, we had a thousand acres of land out here near Fresno, California was available. And my brothers were off doing things in Silicon Valley, doing other things off farm and they didn't wanna farm. And I was kind of over dead bodies and shootings.

It was exhausting, 24 hour shifts and the emotion of dealing with children with asthma and the compassion they needed, the wounds in your heart as a parent-maker, pretty tough. So I said, you know, chapter over. So we took the family farming operations and I said to myself, I want to be consumer-connected, not processor-connected. I don't want to sell to a processor, I want to sell to people. And that went through various different iterations

for about three years to figure it out. And Rick, the most compelling thing that drove me to become a raw milk dairyman was we were producing organic alfalfa, selling it off to be used by organic dairies. I said, well, why don't I feed my own cows? I did it as a child. I said, well, why don't I feed my own cows? I did it as a child. I said, great.

So we started our own little organic dairy here, selling our milk to be pasteurized. But my brother Adam worked for Apple Computer. He was right down the hallway from Steve Jobs. He said, let's put up a website. And this is like in 1899, 2000, which is very early in the internet. So he put up a story about what we were doing here

at McAfee Farms. And lo and behold, people looked at that and said, we want your milk raw. And I said, I'm all ears. I want to hear it. And what really transformed my soul was I got a call from a guy named James Stewart. He's in LA with the garage, the Rossum story. He said, how fast can you drive down here with a bunch of ice chests at the back of your car with a bunch of raw milk for us because Alta Dena just went out of business in Los Angeles in May of 1990. We need raw milk. We don't have any. So my wife and I, Blaine and I got in our Suburban and put a bunch of ice chests at the back with a bunch of milk we bottled out of our bulk tank. No labels on it or anything, all hand capped, just

you know very illegal. We drove it down to LA and we drove into this back alley in Venice Beach called The Garage. It was a place that you could buy everything you couldn't get in the store. Amish food, you know various different things. And there were movie stars there, there was all kinds of people there. I don't know how many people, I didn't count, but the entire alleyway was packed with people. I would say 100 people, 80 people, I don't know. But we drove in and people started to cheer and jump up and down and go crazy because raw milk was there. And they opened up the back of our Suburban and started grabbing raw milk out of the back of these ice chests.

Just throwing 10 and 20 dollar bills into the car saying, please come back tomorrow, you're out of milk, you're out of the back of these ice chests, and just throwing 10 and $20 bills into the car saying, please come back tomorrow, you're out of milk, you're out of milk, these 150 half gallons are gone. My wife's a nurse, she has her master's degree in nursing, and she delivered babies, labor and delivery for many years. So here you got my wife who's a nurse and myself as a paramedic,

and we see all these people grabbing milk, and this one woman came up and the milk was all gone. And she said, Oh my God, I have to have some milk. My child has this problem with her brain. She has a seizure disorder, and she has to have the raw fats for her seizure disorder. And Altadena's been out of business for a while,

and we haven't been able to get raw milk, and she's having a hard time. Her medication's not working anymore like they should. And my wife went up to this gal who grabbed like eight gallons, who took back three or four, and she gave it to this woman who was crying, saying for free she gave him this milk. She said, take this home, you need it. Gave back the money to the woman who'd taken eight.

And that was very compelling to myself and my wife. And we got in our car and we said, we'll be back. We'll be back with more raw milk. We left, we said to ourselves, what the hell just happened? And it was transforming to me because as a caretaker, as a paramedic, as a nurse, my wife's a nurse, we were bringing people food as medicine. They were passionate about it.

They couldn't get it in the pasteurized form. And the stories each of those people were telling us went right to our heart. So on the way home, we got on our cell phone, which was pretty primitive at that time in 1999, but got ahold of my son and said, let's build a creamery right now, get ahold of the state of California, get a permit for a processor's license to make bottling and everything happen on the farm.

So we got ahold of the state. They said, yep, you can do it. It's legal. No problem. Althena did it for 50 years. And so we bought a big, huge reefer van. It had a chiller on one end. We put a wall in the middle. We bottled on one end. We stored it on the other end. And James Stewart, the Rossum guy, came by with his truck and picked up our milk twice a week. And we built a million dollar market the first year. So that's the genesis of the beginning of Raw Milk, but then I became very good friends with the Stuvies, which owned Altadena and they told me their trade secrets.

And I hung out at the farmer's markets and talked to the moms with the heavy accents from Germany and Russia that said, we want our milk back home. And we started serving people and that was very, very transformative. I used to shop at Rossum myself. Oh boy.

And it was such a great scene. What do you know about what happened? I've only seen videos of what looked like a SWAT team with machine guns coming in, but it wasn't a drug bust, they just took the milk. I know the story extremely well. I was down there within a few hours after that event happened.

James Stewart and I were very close during that period. And it was a raid. It was a raid to send a message to those that didn't line up with what conventional thoughts were supposed to be. And James was basically kind of operating outside of normal. And they didn't like that. They didn't like it for lots of reasons. The transactions were taxed. They were't like it for lots of reasons.

The transactions were taxed, there were this, that, and things going on, and they didn't have the proper labeling, and raw milk was going across state lines from the Amish, all kinds of stuff. And so what better way to send a message than stick a gun in your face, right? That's exactly what they did. And it scared him to death. He eventually was incarcerated, and I was the one who posted his bail to get him out.

It wasn't just one gun. It was a whole fleet of people with machine guns. I've never seen anything like it. It was a raid on a small town guy providing a healthy service. You had to join the club to be able to buy anything. You couldn't just walk in off the street, you had to be a member,

and he followed all the rules of doing it. Well, what a way to send a message to those that are operating a little bit out of the side of the systems and have 20 guys with AR-15s poking at your head, right? Yeah. And the video surveillance cameras of the Rossum facility captured it all.

And it really showed the onerous scare tactics at the extreme to control choices we make in food. And everything he was selling was super fresh and super healthy. It was the best of the best. Yeah, yeah. And didn't something recently happen to Amos the Amish farmer?

Yeah, the story is, you know, he refused to get a permit to produce raw milk. There are 150 or 160 permits to produce raw milk in Pennsylvania. But he had some issues with his religious convictions about not doing the permit and all that stuff and decided not to do it. And again, government saying, you will comply,

you will have a permit, you will be within the conf have a permit, you will be within the confines of our regulatory structure or you're out of business. And so that's what they did. I've met Amos, I've been on his farm, I know his story well. But what's interesting about our perception, our way of going forward and making tremendous progress is I've studied the rules very, very well. And I said, I'm gonna comply with every one of those rules perfectly.

And I'm not gonna fight with anybody because fighting with government regulators, they have massively deep pockets and they've got AR-15s and lots of guys with bulletproof vests. So I've always said, they may have the guns and the money, but I got the truth and the moms. And so if you want to really avenge correct, proper whole food nutrition, what you do is

you teach raw milk, you don't sell it, you teach it, and then you build a hell of a market. And in building a big market, the other side's voices become irrelevant. You've got CHP officers drinking our milk. You've got judges drinking our milk. You've got school teachers. You have the state of California guy drinking it. Jerry Brown was drinking our milk. You become so powerful because you are the brand

that supplies nutritiously dense foods with all its bioactives intact. It gives you that incredible immune system boost. And that is transformative, and you don't need to fight anymore with all its bioactives intact, it gives you that incredible immune system boost. And that is transformative, and you don't need to fight anymore because you've won by building the market. Tell me some of the hurdles that you had to jump over to do it legally.

Well, legally it wasn't that hard to do because there was a permit you went, there's five producers of raw milk in California, but we're probably 95% of the market share. And certainly on the store shelves, we're probably 95 or 98%. But here's the thing, you get a permit, you're inspected on a monthly basis, you have to submit for pathogen testing and do all that kind of stuff. And the hurdles are not easy.

They're not easy. But what you do is you challenge yourself to be excellent. And you say, that's the challenge I'm going to focus on and always be excellent at it. And the problem is, we didn't get any help. That was the hurdle. We didn't get help. Everybody wanted us to fail. I shouldn't say everybody, but the regulators went on our side, at least for the first 10

years, they were like, fail, fail, fail. You have to stand up, stand up, stand up. You get hit in the head, stand up again. And you have to learn from whatever you failed on and get better. And that's what I think we did really, really well is always stand up and always own it and always get better, always engaging better science, better technology to test your milk, do this, do that, and learning it better. Now we've come through that tough valley, like 25 years, and we've earned ourselves deep respect from the CDFA,

California Department of Food and Agriculture. They treat us with incredible respect now. We're losing a dairy a week in California because the low milk prices paid for pasteurized milk. They're getting 18 to 20 bucks a hundredweight now. They need 28 to 30 to break even. And we're getting much, much higher than that because of the cost of production. And we also get to set our own prices. And we're serving people, not a processor. So we've earned the respect of the regulators because we've stood up, we've respected them, we haven't picked fights with them.

We've said, what can we do to be compliant? What can we do to be better? And they've helped us a little bit in the last few years. And we actually collaborate now. But we earned that position by standing up repeatedly over 25 years and not being disrespectful for saying, I own it, let's get better, go forward. And now it's interesting to hear the inspector say, I sure am glad you're in business because all the other dairies are going out of business.

We got a job with you. Walk me through from taking the milk from the cow every step in the process. How does it work? We call that grass to glass. And I teach that. We've taught thousands of farmers around the world, including 175 farmers in Great Britain a few years back. That's amazing.

The Raw Milk Institute was founded in 2011 to teach farmers how to produce raw milk for human consumption, not raw milk for the processor, which is filled with pathogens. It's literally excuse for filth is what it is. But we teach how to produce very clean, safe raw milk. And the process goes something like this. The right conditions, so the cows are laying down in the right environments, they're not laying down in a bunch of mud.

If they're laying down a manure, it's dry manure that's been cultivated and it's a dry pack or pasture or other bed pack where the cows are comfortable and they're not in mud. Nutrition of the cow. Make sure they have a little micro minerals. Nutrition is very important. Are the cows all outside? They're outside, but they also have shade. Right now we're at 110 degrees today in California, and they don't do well in the heat. So you want to protect them in the winter from the rain and the summer from the sun. But seasonally in the fall and spring, they'll be outside and they're out today,

but they'll be out only in the morning and the night. During the day, they're going to be protected in the heat because they just don't do well at 110 degrees. But the water has to be clean. Make sure the water isn't filled with pathogens like in the 1800s when it did. So the nutrition of the cows, excellent to make sure they have the micro elements and micro minerals

to make sure that they're really healthy cows. And then you go on further to where you milk the cows to make sure the udders are impeccably clean. So you're getting milk only, not manure and milk. And then make sure that the milking machines are well maintained, that the milk pathway to the bulk tank is very, very clean. They don't have biofilms in it. You can easily have biofilms in the milk and actually contaminate your milk easily.

All you want is that clean, delicious milk coming out of the udder to a place we call a rapid chiller or a plate chiller. And that milk from 99 degrees, body temperature of the cow, down to about 35, 36 degrees, just three degrees above freezing, in literally two minutes. And then it goes to a bulk tank where we send samples off to be tested to make sure there's no bad bacteria in it. And then we take that milk to our creamery where we bottle it, we make butter, cream, cheese, all these products here, you know, wonderful products you see in the stores.

And then we rapidly send it off to the stores and it's on the store shelf within a couple of days. And it gets a nice 21 day shelf life because it's done clean and it's rapidly chilled. Now, if I was to describe to you, and that milk by the way, is never commingled with any other dairy, it's our dairy, we take whole responsibility for it. If I was to compare that grass to glass ideology

of what we do, that principles of practices with what pasteurized milk is, it's a whole different world. Describe it. Yeah, it's not even the same solar system. That milk is produced rapidly on a conventional dairy that goes to pasteurization, where the concern for the health of the cow is not that high, because everything gets in the milk can, gets pasteurized, who cares. So the milk can come from 50 different dairies and commingled all together. You're paying the guy minimum wage to

throw a machine on the cow that may or may not have a clean udder. So the milk filter is just covered in manure sometimes. And by the way if you spend a lot of money to have super clean milk you're actually a fool because it gets combined with everybody else's milk, which is dirty. So where's the incentive to do a great job of cleaning milk? The pride is lost of having excellent milk because it's all combined. The milk is then collected into a bulk tank and guess what?

You don't have to chill the milk immediately. Per the pasteurized milk ordinance, the FDA rule, up to two hours to get below 50 degrees. Milk doubles its bacteria count every 20 minutes in body temperature. You're going to get yourself some really high bacteria count, not tasting very good, short shelf life. Milk has got all kinds of problems because you don't care about the cow's health. So they never test for pathogens ever.

We test for pathogens every day in our milk. So that milk goes to a big creamery where it is then back to food gated. It is pasteurized, it's homogenized. It's then made into milk, butter, cream, cheese, all this stuff. But there were no bioactives left at all. The bioactives are the lactoferrin, the alkaline phosphatases, all the enzymes,

the peptidases, proteases, lipases, all day long. There's thousands of bioactives put there by nature to build an immune system as the first food of life for babies. That's all gone. And it's actually rendered, if you look at the FDA, to be the most allergenic food in America, pasteurized milk, number one.

And it doesn't taste very good, because it's been pasteurized to death, literally, I mean that, and to render it safe, but also makes it very hard to digest. It's sent out onto a generic brand to shelves where it's in decline at 2 to 10% per year because people can't drink it because of allergenicity and the digestive problems. And they're going to everything but milk, almond milk, soy milk, macadamia milk, almond milk, you name it, everything but milk.

But now with what we're doing at Raw Milk Institute, what we're doing as raw milk producers, we can get back to the real stuff. The milk that's co-evolved with mankind for 15,000 years. I've been saying, oh, raw milk is such a fad. It's such a fad. I'm sorry, 15,000 years is not a fad. Let's re-characterize this. It's pasteurized milk, which is the excuse for filth from the 1800s.

Yeah, it may have saved some lives by killing the stuff with killing people in the 1800s in certain dairies, but pasteurization has probably met its doom because of a quote from Dr. Bruce German at UC Davis. He's the international milk genomics expert in lactation, he said, pasteurization is an 18th century solution to an 18th century problem. We can do a hell of a lot better. Well, that's exactly what we're doing. Clean raw milk with testing and conditions, it's phenomenal and people love it. And so raw milk is absolutely back and it's back better than it's ever been. L-M-N-T, Element Electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun?

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system so you can perform at your very best. Element electrolytes are sugar-free, keto-friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmnt.com slash tetra and stay salty with Element Electrolyte. LMNT. If I was traveling and I wanted to find raw milk, how would I go about finding raw milk wherever I am? This is breaking news, my friend.

Breaking news. Amazon has raw milk now. No, really? Yeah, as of about a month ago. Wow. And you know what? It's interesting. We didn't have a whole lot to do with that.

They recognized the growth trends and all the things we were doing all around everywhere. And they just grabbed the data on how popular raw milk is when you look at the spins data and you look at the analysis, how we're growing at 35 to 40% per year, year over year. They said, well, why shouldn't we carry that as a key product for us?

Is it difficult to find clean, healthy cows? We have to actually have them ourselves. We have to create them ourselves. We buy the best cows, not the worst. We never go to an auction to buy our cows. We always buy the very best cows. And then we quarantine them for a month, month and a half. We do all kinds of testing on them to make sure that their

milk is perfectly fine before they're ever going to a bulk tank. So there's a lot of investment in making sure that our herd is really sharp. And you know what? If they're not, they make fantastic ground beef. You only create milk from your own cows. You don't take milk from other farmers. Never, never. That's like religion. If you were to do that, you'd bring on a wave of problems in terms of the pathogens are known to be there. Listeria, E. coli, 157H7, Campylobacter, Salmonella, even tuberculosis and brucellosis issues could be a problem there. Those are generally relegated. They've already taken care of those problems. But you want to make sure you know what you got.

And you can only know what you got in your own herd. If that's the case, does it limit how much you can ever make? Or is it something that you can scale with your systems? We are building a brand new creamery. And if you've done any research on us, we lost our creamery and if you did any research on us we lost our creamery two and a half years ago from arson. Somebody burned it. On purpose? We don't know who it was because they never found them but all three investigators said it was arson for sure. It wasn't you guys but somebody burned your creamery and they were

never able to find them. So we lost our creamery. We're building a brand new one, a 28,000 square foot mega beautiful thing that has a lot of agritourism where you can observe all the products we made with school buses coming in with school kids and everything, an educational site, a mecca of raw milk with all the best food safety stuff we've ever been able to put together that we've learned over the years. Has anything ever happened like this with arson of a creamery? Yes, in the last couple of years, three, four years, four years, there's been three or four arson,

there was one in MacMindale, Oregon, there was one in Reno, Nevada, of creameries that were burned. Very suspicious, don't know why kind of a thing. Azure standard had a big fire, so we don't know, and I'm not gonna point fingers, we just go forward, but I'm saying going to point fingers. We just go forward. But I'm saying on the scaling question you made Rick,

we started dairy number two already. And we took some cows out of dairy number one, bought some additional cows, quarantine them, put them in a dairy. It's in Kings County and that dairy is also inspected. It comes back to our creamery again. We actually rented a creamery immediately after our fire because we had to have a place. And within seven days, it was a miracle.

We worked our butts off 24 hours a day, probably made 25 hours a day. And we were up and running within seven days bottling milk. And we did not miss a beat in our markets. But we found a creamery that had been vacated for a couple of years, an old cheese plant. And we moved in and we just started scrubbing and cleaning and painting and investigating and doing all the things we needed to do to change and brought in the bottle fillers and

plastics and labels and everything. And we made it our own immediately in seven days and were able to get up and get going. So yes, we can scale what we're doing, but it must be under operations we control, operating under our standards with incredible ethics, responsibility, testing to make sure that's high quality going to our cremary, so you control that. If you let it go out to any old person, you get all kinds of problems. Now, I will say that in the future that may change a little bit,

but that's in the future. You have to incentivize the dairymen, they have to be fully committed, and they have to be set on a benchmark of perfection. And they have to have consequences for not achieving that. We're not there yet. And that's possible maybe someday, but not now. And you have no problem selling the milk you produce. There's demand for what you're making, correct?

We're producing about 85,000 gallons of milk a week, and we're short. We're short. We're just meeting demand right now, but I know with our interstate commerce of raw pet food products, I have a feeling we'll be short. So growth has been phenomenal. I would say that one of the greatest things that happened,

two things, is influencers like Dr. Paul Saladino, and the fact that COVID was a wake-up clarion call, a clarion call, that you are on your own to create your own immune system in your gut. That 80% or more of your immune system is the diversity of bacteria and the ecosystem, the biome in your intestines, the gut. And so when you've got Paul Saldino, a distinguished doctor,

who's all about nutrition as an example and speaking the truth to people, and other influencers doing the same thing too, not just Paul. But then you've also got the FDA and the White House and everybody on the COVID thing in March of 2020 saying, I'm sorry, we can't help you. Don't come to the hospital because if you're

immunocompromised, you might die. People say, OK, quick Google. How do you build an immune system? Well, let's talk about the bridge of peace here. Let's talk about the détente of a little bit of negotiated agreement. Breast milk is raw milk, guys. And there's no contest anywhere. The FDA, CDC, NIH, World Health Organization, every physician's organization,

all say breastfeeding is fantastic for babies because it's got all these bioactives. They do these fantastic things to build your immune system. Decreases asthma, colds, ear infections. The studies out of Europe are phenomenal on this whole thing. Well, guess what? Dr. David Dallas at Oregon State University at the International Milk Genomics Consortium in Cork, Ireland said last year, and we know this, but he said it, he said, quantitatively, various elements found in raw milk between breast milk and cow's milk, quantitatively,

are different. That means you have more fat or less fat or more proteins, but qualitatively, it's practically identical. So that's why we can consume raw milk for the last 15,000 years. And when mom finished breastfeeding, the baby got raw milk from a cow, goat, sheep, horse, camel, reindeer. And so we are literally looking at Mother Nature's blueprints here, the blueprints of life.

When a baby is born, comes out of the birth canal, what's the first thing it does? It suckles on mom's breast, and it gets colostrum for the first few hours, and then it gets raw milk to build an immune system that did not exist before birth. A perfect food to start off, including a biodiversity of bacteria,

the food to feed that bacteria, prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics. It does three things. It nourishes, it directs and protects, three things. So when people post-COVID saw that and people weren't stupid anymore, they could read PubMed, right? And if not, they can listen to Paul Saldino

who does read PubMed. And you find out that raw milk is the most powerful immune system built on planet earth on purpose for mammals because it protects babies from dying. You saw a wave of interest. We've grown 35 to 40 percent per year every year since COVID, three years in a row, because people want to have a strong immune system to deal with the future threats. Now, a little flu vaccination dealt with about 25 percent of last year's problem.

Not a future threat. So if you want an adaptive and resilient immune system, you better work on your gut and raw milk and a whole food diet will help you earn that wonderful. And I say earn because you got to work at it. Build a fantastic immune system and be adaptive and resilient to the future threat. Tell me about how you built your distribution network. That's a team effort.

I can't claim it as my own, that's for sure. It started out with Rossum, 25 years ago. You were right there at Rossum. They were the first to sell our milk, but then it branched out into the Whole Foods and then branched out into Sprouts. And then it went to farmers markets and grew and it grew. And with more and more interest,

people talking to one another saying, you got to get on this stuff, it's delicious. And my God, my kids don't have allergies anymore and their asthma's got better. And you know, when that happens, you got this person to person, mom to mom, dad to dad talking about this, and kids love it. How do you build your distribution system? Well, you get the call.

People say, hey, the store wants this product, so, KE, HEB, they say, we've got to serve people because they're barking up the tree saying, we want raw milk. So then you get those relationships and Josh has worked really, really hard. My son-in-law, I married my daughter, worked really hard working with those distributors, getting that milk cold, fresh and fast, two stores across where it needs to be. And we're 500 stores in California

and 1,000 stores in more nationally. And it's a top seller. The data is very clear. With pasteurized milk in decline, we're growing like crazy. And so the truth is self-evident, and the market is driving this because consumers are having a very, very good experience with raw milk.

It's delicious, and the way we're producing it, it's very, very low risk. You check the news every day, the top line is some new recall being, whether it's onions or pasteurized ice cream just this last week, a massive recall on that. A cantaloupe killing people. I mean, if you were to eat by recall,

you better just stop eating. Just stop eating altogether. There's been water that's been recalled. So bottom line is, when you're looking at that world of food that has a threat or could, what the most scary, most unsafe thing to do is to have a compromised immune system yourself. So in this world, we must take responsibility

for our own ecosystem, our own internal microbiome, and build an immune system. What better way to do that by leading off with raw milk and whole foods? Whole foods. That means the foods that don't have a long ingredient list with sodium benzoate and every other color preservative and crap in there with lots of sugar.

No, no, no. We're talking about the ingredient list that has three or four things, tops, or maybe one or two things. Or in case of our raw milk, one thing. So yeah, it's a paradigm shift and it's happening right now. In the pasteurized milk, do they also put preservatives in it? Not that I'm aware of. Now I'm not talking about all pasteurized milk, do they also put preservatives in it? Not that I'm aware of. Now, I'm not talking about all pasteurized milk.

There may be some that do, but I do know that pasteurized milk is highly processed. And if I was going to drink a pasteurized milk, I would not ever go above just the minimum pasteurized milk. I would not go to anything ultra-pasteurized. Ultra-pasteurized milk, there's a big study that just came out, it was done internationally, on HAAs. That's the heterocyclic aromatic amines. They're found in ultra-high-temperature pasteurized milk. Unfortunately, that's the little boxed milk that doesn't need to be refrigerated, given to kids. That stuff's associated with cancer. So if you're going to give

pasteurized to anybody, which I don't recommend, I recommend a strong raw milk, it should be a cultured pasteurized, like a kefir that's cultured, because some of the life's been put back into it, or yogurt, because it's more bioavailable, because it's had living organisms put back into it, it's not dead. But if you're going to drink a pasteurized milk, have it minimally pasteurized, like low and slow, or just HTSD, because when you go above 200 degrees, you start cooking stuff, you start having some serious problems with un-poor side effects that are not good for your health.

What is A2 milk? A2 raw milk is fantastic, nothing wrong with it. But there's, interesting, there's a lot of technology, a lot of science about this whole thing. But I'm not a huge A2 supporter. If you think about A2, the corporation A2, it started out in Australia, New Zealand, and it was all about ultra-pasteurized milk, not raw milk. And yeah, there's a difference in the protein, the amino acid, the 60-centiglutrile is a little different, doesn't have the casomorphine.

I'm the only farmer in the room at the International Milk Genomics Consortium conferences every year for the last 12 years. I attend, surrounded by PhDs, they're way smarter than me, and I listen to all this stuff. And the studies have not been replicated. They only had a couple studies done in China that were pretty out there and weird.

And remember that if you have A2 raw milk, great, fantastic. It doesn't go wrong with it all. But there's also nothing wrong with A you have A2 raw milk, great, fantastic. There's nothing wrong with it at all. But there's also nothing wrong with A1, A2. What might be the problem is the fact that our gut as a human, a host, is very permeable with today's diets. And when you allow some of these proteins to get in your bloodstream and you've got autism or something, you can really have a problem because the case of morphine could make you kind of loopy in your head.

But here's the thing, when you pasteurize even A2 milk, you destroy the proteins and the A2 is irrelevant. You cause the car wreck in the milk. So I'm not a big A2 guy, but if you've got a cow with A2 characteristics and she's healthy and she's great, great, knock yourself out, wonderful A2 raw milk. But A2 is a pasteurized product, it's a car wreck. And they've been sued multiple times, they've been in bankruptcy, their claims cannot be validated. Again, there's a reason why A2 is a pasteurized product, it's correct. And they've been sued multiple times, they've been in bankruptcy, their claims cannot be validated again. There's a reason why A2 actually exists and A1 actually exists.

Mother's breast milk has a combination of both. It's not pure A2. Because if you ever had children and you've been married, A1 is a marriage saver. Because it's called a milk coma. The baby gets nursed and goes to sleep. It makes them feel good. They go to sleep.

That's part of nature's blueprint for babies to rest after they've eaten to go to sleep and mom and dad can have their time. If the kid is constantly alert and oriented because they have none of that caseomorphine that's in the milk, which makes you feel good and relaxes the muscles and calms you, it's the feel good thing in milk. So I don't think we want to take that out of milk.

We want to let nature's blueprint be normal. And so in our dairy, we're probably 85% A2, but we left the A1 in there because we think it's part of the bigger picture of what's natural and normal. How does raw milk interact with other foods? It is synergistic. It makes the compost pile work. milk interact with other foods? It is synergistic.

It makes the compost pile work. You take food that is not bioactive or not bioavailable and you put raw milk with it, you now have the biodiversity of bacteria and the bioactive elements in it. They start interacting and start making the vitamin D and C all bioavailable so you can absorb it. Bioturic acid found in the butterfat

makes the lower gut properly and rebuilds the mucosal lining, which is where foods get digested. So raw milk makes your diet more bioavailable. It makes it more bioactive. So the foods you may be eating, which aren't particularly whole, you'll be able to extract the value from it because you've got activity in raw milk. It's almost like it turns it into a liposomal

mixture. Yeah. Well, you know, you think about the evolutionary pressures generation by generation for, let's pick a number, how about a million years to bring it to where it is today? Only the good survived. The pressures are incredible that the bad die off and feed the bacteria and other predators, and only the good survive. Well, raw milk is one of those foods which evolved those pressures and survived so we can thrive in our most vulnerable state, which is being a newborn. And we long ago, as cavemen, figured out that, you know what, I'm starving over here.

And you know what? That animal over there is suckling on that teat. I need to go over there and do the same thing and started to domesticate that animal, wherever it was, reindeer, cow, goat, sheep, horse, camel. And wherever mankind was able to domesticate an animal, guess what? They thrived, because they had portable milk.

They had portable food supply, and if they got really hungry, they could kill the animal or this offspring. You see the Maasai in Kenya, rive on raw milk. World-class long-distance runners, tall, strong, strong teeth, Maasai, they're black as coal, right? They're black. They come to America and they all have lactose intolerance. They don't have the problem.

They have no problem at all. The problem is in the processing of the milk. The bioactives are gone. You can't digest it anymore. The same with those in Asia. You go out to outer Mongolia, Manchuria, there's more horse milk being consumed than you can shake a stick at. They have no problem with lactose intolerance.

They don't have the lactase persistence gene. But if you go into China, they have lactose intolerance like crazy. But it's the problem with the processing, not the milk. So I'm a big proponent that pasteurization is actually very racist because of the fact that it sorts people out saying, you're not good enough, you're not white enough, you're not northern European enough to drink milk, when raw milk is good for every body around the, because it brings with it its own bioactive elements for

self-digestion and assimilation. So it's the food of the ages. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus, so your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with Fluid Engine, so your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with Fluid Engine, a highly intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

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Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today. So many people talk about being lactose intolerant now. Have you had experience of people who have a history of lactose intolerance trying raw milk? That's a core concept here. I would expand it to say it's not just lactose intolerance people thrive through with raw milk. They have no problem with raw milk, but it's also something we call maldigestion of milk.

Maldigestion is those things beyond lactose sugar. It's the proteins. It's the other things found in milk that have, in raw milk, the proteins have an accompanying enzyme, the proteases, the peptidases, that are destroyed in pasteurization to extend shelf life so it doesn't break down. Well, you want milk to break down quick. When it gets warm in the gut, you want it to go now. And that's exactly what raw milk does. We know that for a fact. And there's a study done by Dr. Chris Gardner at Stanford University. He went out into the public and he said, anybody with lactose intolerance that can't digest milk, let me know, we want you to be a part of a study. This happened back in 2015 or 16. He got 400 people, plus or minus, that responded.

I can't remember the exact date. It was about 400 people that responded saying, I have a hell of a time with pasteurized milk. It causes pain, gas, everything else. You know how many people survived to get into the actual analysis of the lactose intolerance test? With 16 people got into the actual survey. 16. Because they were the only ones that actually blew a positive HBT or hydrogen breast test

were clinically diagnosed as lactose intolerant. Whatever happened to the other 400 people or 390 people that couldn't digest milk? They have no problem on raw milk. So I think it's fascinating to know that it's much broader than just lactose intolerance. It's maldigestion of a highly processed food that people's gut can't handle. But they can handle. Everybody does great on their mom's breast milk. No problem at all. But I tell you what, you started doing highly processed milk that doesn't have the accompanying enzymes and bioactives available and probiotic bacteria. By the way, there's not that many people that have lactose intolerance with yogurt. There's a reason. Even though it's been pasteurized, it's had some CPR done on

it, right? It's been brought back to life somewhat by the addition of bacteria, and it's been cultured. So cultured dairy products do not have the prevalence of as much maldigestion and lactose intolerance. It still has some because the bioactives are missing, but still has some life put back into it. So it's very interesting to see that raw milk has not only all the yogurt bacteria, but also much more than that with the bioactives that are destroyed by pasteurization. So these are the foods that have been accompanying mankind and co-evolved with mankind for 15,000 years at least. Do you know anything about the main ingredients in popular baby formulas today? Maldodextrin?

I can't even spell it. It's fake sugar. It's not lactose from mama. It is all kinds of weird things. And you look at the ingredient list, they're too long to memorize. And that ingredient list is not something you want to have in a baby's belly. And it wouldn't be something you find in raw milk. And it's interesting, our sales jumped tremendously a few years ago when there was a national baby food shortage. Everybody said, get on raw milk, get on raw

milk. Kids thrived on our raw milk during that period with the baby food shortage. So yeah, well, anytime you try to extract something out of raw milk and make it a pill or a potion or a formula afterwards, it's missing its matrix of whole. It doesn't act the same way when it's extracted and it's treated in some funky weird way to put into some other food. It's meant to be in its blueprint matrix of the evolutionary solution of food. And it's proportionally perfect. Everything's about it.

When you put it in a baby formula, it's mankind in a lab trying to fake mother nature and don't work very well at all. If you freeze raw milk, does it hurt it? No. We have to remember that frozen eggs and sperm make life. You can create a baby from a frozen sperm and egg. So there's very, very little change.

Over time, over five or six months period of time, we know that there's slight changes, absolutely some nutritional values change, but the bioactives are still there, the bacteria are still there, enzymes are still there. We know this from all the tests done on breast milk bake. Breast milk baking is all frozen milk, and that's meant to preserve what's coming out of mom's breast

for a month or two or three. But we don't suggest like six months. We suggest two or three months, not a problem at all. There's no change. Tell me the difference in shelf life between pasteurized milk and raw milk. Raw milk, when done expertly and rapidly chilled, gives you three to four weeks if you keep it cold.

Or else it becomes another food. It doesn't ever become dangerous. It just co-evolves by kind of souring, fermenting, lacto-fermenting to become its own natural form of kefir. It wants to become kefir. So pasteurized milk, 18 to 21 days. It's actually a little shorter than raw milk. That's unbelievable.

That's the low temperature pasteurized milk. That's 145 degrees and 30 minutes. That's called low temperature pasteurized milk. That's 145 degrees in 30 minutes. That's called low and slow. 21 days. And it doesn't taste very good. But let's go to the higher temperatures. You go to 175 in 15 seconds. You go to 220 in four seconds.

You go to 282 in two seconds. The ultra-high temperature pasteurized with a culinary steam injection. Now you get 60 to 90 day shelf life, or even a year shelf life, but it is completely dead. Completely dead. It's like water, it's just white water. It's toxic because remember it holds the HAAs,

it's got this aromatic amines which are actually oxidated which causes and triggers and are associated with cancer. So that highly cooked stuff is quite dangerous really. Although it's been the greatest savior of organic milk because you can send it around all the places that want this wonderful milk, but the shelf life completely occludes and shades the gut life.

And what we're looking for gut life if we wanna build the immune system. Remember that the Department of Energy started doing research in 1990s and was actually mature and actually reported to Congress about the human genome. And that whole study revealed that we have to have a biodiversity of bacteria for our genome to work properly. We may get 23,000 genes from mom and dad to make us look like we do, but I tell you what, the way we function is driven by bacteria and viruses and the DNA of the bacterial biome and virome that we are in and on. That has not been a very popular discovery

because it really flies in the face of overdoses of using antibiotics all the time and preservatives in food. And so it's a very, to quote Al Gore, a very inconvenient truth to say, yeah, antibiotics are great to save a life, but boy, they destroy the immune system and you better not use them very often because if you do, then you have antibiotic resistance

and you also destroy your gut microbiome and become compromised in your immune system and you can get sick from anything. So let's be very, very cautious with modern medicine. It should be used very sparingly. We should be relying much more on nutrition and avoiding all this stuff, and only use it as a last-ditch effort.

So I am a big believer in synergizing, putting together modern medicine, but having it be 10% of the solution. And 90% of the solution is literally farmers over pharmacies and looking at what they're doing in France and Italy where they're just pushing farmers markets and getting fresh, good food for people, farm direct foods. But the problem with that in America

is the processors don't win, the farmers do. The farmers and consumers win. Processors, they have to kind of take a different position because they have to start thinking about nutrition versus profits. Why do you think there's a fear around raw milk when there are other foods like fresh fish? If you buy fresh fish, you know in a few days, it's liable to be a problem.

There's two things. You're right on, Rick. You're right on. I stood in front of farmers' markets tables for years of my life in L.A., and I heard, I don't know how many thousands of people speak about their story as we were talking back and forth about raw milk. And, you know, you have this beautiful young lady

coming out of the Ukraine, coming to you with this broken Russian accent, with gorgeous children and straight teeth, and she's not obese, and she's looking great. And she's saying, please I want four gallons of raw milk like I got back home in her broken. And I say, you know, wonderful.

And you get this mom that comes up saying, I don't wanna have anything to do with raw milk because isn't that stuff kill people? Isn't it really dangerous? And she's obese, she's diabetic. Her kids are running around with ADHD, going crazy. Her teeth are falling out of her mouth. And a few times I was at that farmers market table, I said, will you two moms go have chit

chat together? Because you guys got to straighten this out. You look at yourselves, look at how you're presenting here. So it's very much that we've had it driven in our brain that raw milk is absolutely dangerous. It's a marketing campaign by processors and the FDA, the processors are one in the same. And the reason that's the way that is, I've been there, I know.

The NCIMS, the National Conference of Interstate Milk Shippers is the party, it's the group of processors that get together with the FDA every year, and they talk about the science of processing. And they talk about the pasteurized milk ordinance. They talk about they should do, they shouldn't do. One time in 2007, the raw milk guy, I was there

and I did a presentation in front of that group of people. And I tell you what, the quote afterwards was, you could have heard a pin drop, and it was like saying there is no God at the Vatican. That's what they said my speech sounded like to everybody in the room. Because I was saying, we don't need you. We need to go farm to consumer direct because your processing is screwing up the milk and all they were with processors.

So this is very much driven by the FDA in a scare tactic. And they do it continuously. They'll find any excuse they can to scare people from raw milk. And they absolutely refuse, refuse to ever meet with me and look at our science and look at the Raw Milk Institute science, and there's all kinds of stories I have about that. The bottom line is they are stuck in their paradigm.

And if you tried to make raw milk fit their paradigm, the processors wouldn't fit. Their paychecks depend on supporting processors. It has been cherished in tribal wisdom traditions for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples the world over have used this plant-based compound in spiritual, healing, and ceremonial rites and rituals for centuries. More recently, it has been shown to increase alertness, improve focus, elevate mood, enhance cognition, heighten reward sensation and more. We are talking about nicotine. Nicotine is about nicotine. Nicotine is a wonder worker. Inspired by indigenous practices throughout history and guided by a wealth of contemporary research, the team at

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or containers from cows, goats, sheep, horses, camels, reindeer, donkeys, water buffalo. Anybody that's got a teat got milked, right? It got milked into something that was not clinging. It held milk from last week. And that milk had cultures in it, bacterial cultures that were local cultures that were inoculum, the mother culture, the Messiah have it, you know, they literally have the mother culture in their gourd,

and they'll milk directly into that, which immediately causes the culture of milk to be created, which is a local kefir, which has a very long shelf life. And then you can take that milk, that clabbered milk, and you can put it through a cheesecloth and create farmer's cheese, add some salt, add some herbs, and you add food that would last months, if not years,

it got better with time. That was 15,000 years ago. We were literally starving and hunter-gatherers said, I see a cow goat sheep on all these animals and I want to get some milk out of that because I'm hungry. And you don't have to farm anymore. You don't have to wait. You don't have to fish. You don't have to hunt. Sometimes the hunted got hunted themselves. The hunters got hunted. So it's much safer to have a domesticated animal. And that happened all over the world. Not everybody had that, but it was a lot of people that thrived had those things.

All the ancient cultures, Romans, land of milk and honey. Land of milk and honey wasn't pasteurized, guys. What would Jesus eat? You think about that through history. Coming through to modern times, the first settlers in America, no pilgrims stayed in America before the arrival of the first cows.

Jamestown had cows. Everybody had to have a musket and a cow or you died. That's the history. So we were founded in America and Canada with cows and goats as part of our literally our living environment. We live by them or our neighbors next to them. So the bacteria they had, we had, and the milk they had, we consumed. So let's look at the very interesting time period

of 1860s through 1890s. Well, we were starting to build bigger cities, and people were bringing their cows into the city and out of the environments in the countryside, which was clean, fresh water, the streams, and grass and sunshine. And that environment, you could actually co-exist in a biome that worked. You're okay, you could actually coexist in a biome.

It worked. You're OK. You're good to go. You didn't get diseases or problems with the cow. But you take the cow into a downtown area in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Moscow, and even Great Britain and England. It happened there too.

And you started feeding those cows what was available, which was the byproduct of breweries, which is distillers mash, and no more green pastures and no more clean waterures and no more clean water and no way to clean the milking systems because you milk by hand and it was really cold in the morning so why not put your feet in the milk because it warmed your feet. Freaking disgusting, okay? So that milk was called the milk problem and there was two solutions that were proposed. Dr. Henry Quite said clean up the milk, go out to the farm and get it, do some testing and it's great for kids and fantastic and that milk was going

to Mayo Clinic to heal people. That was in 1893. Dr. Henry Quite, the American Association of Medical Milk Commissions and by the way, Aldedena was the last AAMMC certified dairy in America and they closed in 1999. The other solution was proposed was Nathan Strauss. Nathan Strauss brought in called the poor powder boiler, which was early pasteurization technology from France. He said, just cook the hell out of it. And what he did, 40% fewer people died because you killed the milk.

Yeah, it was a solution for filthy milk. But also during that time, the water quality was very poor. And so water was causing a lot of disease and illness as well. So you had water and cleanliness together cause the problem with this milk problem. And so raw milk as the AAMC Dr. Henry Coyt and the Nathan Strauss pasteurized milk kind of lived in semi harmony for about 40 years until 1930s and 40s. You enter World War II, we didn't have any money and DDT was good for your skin and smoking was good for your lungs and nuclear bombs solved social problems. Okay, so we were not really embracing mother nature at all in

the 1940s. It was an ugly time, nutrition was to the back. You know, we had margarine, terribly oxidative, horrible, vegetable oils, baking fake butters. I mean, it was disgusting. That is when pasteurized milk kind of won over raw milk because raw milk was kind of a processor's dream to get rid of raw milk so they could own it all and they could use their technology to take care of bringing milk in cheap, really cheap from all these dairies and not worry about quality, because you're going to cook it. So raw milk kind of died off in the 40s, and it kind of petered out to the end with Altadena,

with the certified raw milk. We captured on a new phase of raw milk, a whole new world, an evolution, a generation of raw milk, where we kind of embraced the AAMMC and the conditions and the health and nutrition. But we also married in modern technologies, the PCR and other testing to find and make sure there was no pathogens.

Because remember, remember this in the modern raw milk, we no longer have the immune systems that we had in the 1800s, which is very strong. The biodiversity, eating whole foods only without modern processing. So we can endure a bug or two without getting sick. Yeah, people died of illness. There's no question they did. But the fact that they could tolerate the environment around them and thrive was something that came from the 1800s. We do not have that anymore. Now we have compromised

immune systems because we embrace wholly, terribly processed foods with lots of preservatives, sterilized foods that don't have the biodiversity, and antibiotics. I think one of the most telling things, and I tell them as a paramedic saying this, one of the most telling things, incredibly inconvenient truth in modern medicine. A person is on their deathbed in the ICU with Clostridium difficile, C. diff, which kills tens of thousands of people a year. When you've exhausted all the antibiotics, what's the therapy that literally saves 92% of people's lives is fecal transplant.

Fecal transplant. Going to a nurse that is eating a West Indy Price diet and drinking raw milk or whatever, got a fantastic gut microbiome, and taking her feces, her fecal, having her take a poop in a bag and taking it down to the lab and putting some water with it, making a solution and flushing the lower gut saves 92% of people's lives.

What the shit, right? That's the shit. The bottom line is that tells you a whole lot about what's needed in the gut. It's not antibiotics that are needed. It's whole food, nutrition, the bioactives, the bacteria, that's what heals the lower guy. That's extremely telling about modern medicine kind of hitting its dead end in terms of,

in the ICU, doctors are literally exodus to heaven. That's it, they're dying. And it saves their lives. When you've run out of modern medicine, you go to fecal transplants. So that's really telling. Tell me about Weston A. Price. They, Sally Thelen and Weston A. Price,

and the Price-Potterger Foundation before Weston A. Price were all foundation until the core of the educational programs and the studies that Dr. Weston A. Price did around the world. He studied the nutrient-dense foods in the Maasai, he studied those in Switzerland, he studied all over the world, and discovered that these nutrient-dense foods

with raw fats and these raw proteins and these nature's wonderful bounty that comes from the soil and the animals were literally the reason why they had straight teeth and well-formed bones and lived healthy lives and didn't get sick. And so, yeah, they're the core of what we all started. We've gone beyond that in terms of the broad spectrum and the mainstream now,

but they were the beginning for us for sure, absolutely. They always stay in our hearts. They're the core. What were the specifics of the Weston A. Price diet? What was good and what was bad? It wasn't the same around the world. The Eskimos didn't eat the same things as the Maasai, but they had common things. They all had raw fats. They all really embraced organ meats.

They always had nutrient density, which is very high. They also did some other things. They really learned from the ancestry coming forward what their grandparents had done. So they always did multi-generational education. The water was excellent. The nutrients education. The water was excellent. The nutrients found in the water was excellent. So that was the common thing around the world,

was nutrient density, and from different sources. A raw fish in the Eskimo diet versus raw fats in the raw milk in the Maasai diet. So it's very interesting to see that common, the raw fats and the raw fish and the nutrient density and the biodiversity, the vitamin D, vitamin K, grass-feeding, all those things came together, were found as a common theme,

although they all eat different foods. Would you say raw milk is alive? 100%. It's absolutely alive. And in fermented form, it's even more alive, because you've taken it and allowed it to grow and just prosper and flower and bloom because the bacteria grow like crazy and they become extremely probiotic, extremely prebiotic,

which is the food that feeds bacteria, and also postbiotic. Postbiotic, some people don't know what that word means, but that's the bacterial waste products that are building blocks for other things to grow. So with this metabolism that occurs where prebiotics are being consumed by probiotics, postbiotics are actually creating the building blocks for more life. So raw milk's got it all. It's got to have it all because without it, babies would die. Nature's blueprint says all you have to have is raw milk for the first six months of life as a baby, no water even, and you thrive. I know of people that literally ate a lacto-vore diet

when all they drank was raw milk. I said, isn't that kind of boring? He said, nope, I love it. I said, okay, great. Extreme diets are kind of interesting around the world, but some people just absolutely love raw milk because it's so delicious. What are all of the healthy natural foods

downstream of raw milk? What do you make raw milk into? Kefir, number one. Raw milk, kefir, low pH, easily digested because it's already pre-digested. I would say that beyond kefir, you're looking at cream. There's a reason why cream is so valuable is because raw milk and raw milk kefir

have maybe four to five percent butterfat. Sixty percent, six zero, sixty percent of the bioactives found in raw milk are carried on the butterfat globule. That says a lot about homogenization. You're destroying the butterfat. You're getting rid of the good things without any real purpose. It's not pasteurization. It's homogenization, crushing butterfat. So cream is very, very bioactive because it's 40% butterfat versus four. So you've got 10 times more bioactives in raw cream. And raw cream is incredibly important in terms of being anti-inflammatory, very good to help

the Schwann cells and the nerves be better insulators for your brain. It's just really a superfood, raw cream. Butter has 86% butterfat and it hasn't been pasteurized. So the bioactives in it are off the frickin' charts, right? You got 4, 40, and 86% of the carrier, the butterfat, is carrying these bioactives. Cheese is good if it's truly raw cheese. There's a lot of fake raw cheeses running around, and I'm not going to take it away from the guys who are doing the other raw cheeses. It's fantastic if it's truly raw cheese. There's a lot of fake raw cheeses running around and I'm not going to take it away from the guys who are doing the other raw cheese. It's fantastic if it's raw. But there's no real definition of raw cheese. There's a definition of pasteurized

cheese that's taken to 145 degrees in 30 minutes. But below that by two degrees it's considered raw or if you don't have a pasteurizer license, you can take it to whatever temperature you want and call it raw cheese. This is not regulated. So a lot of fake cheeses masquerading as raw because it's a better market. We make a truly raw cheese that is literally never taken above body temperature of 100 degrees. Truly raw cheddar cheese. It's delicious. We can't keep it in stock. People buy it like crazy. So it's a nibble food for babies. Kids love it at six months, they just eat it. They eat it like crazy. So butter, cheese, kefir, cream, and we have some of those products labeled as for pets.

Have you experimented with an ice cream? We make raw ice cream all the time, but the FDA will not allow us to make raw ice cream because it's a multi-ingredient product and it's not pasteurized. So the influence of the eggs or whatever, there's a little bit of value to understanding that it can make somebody sick

because you're putting raw things together. But we do it all the time. We use raw eggs and raw cream and honey and all kinds of stuff to make a fantastic raw ice cream. And it's very, very popular, but you have to make it yourself, unfortunately. Is mad cow disease still a thing? No, mad cow disease was over 10 years ago.

And it was not really ever a problem with raw milk. That was the prions in the brain matter of certain cows that had this disease. And I'm not suggesting it wasn't dangerous, it probably would really was, but I'm sorry, we're not cutting out the spinal column of cows and eating it directly. That came out of processing plants

where they had mechanical processing of cows and making ground beef that was getting it into the food stream. When you slaughter cows more directly by hand, you actually don't get into the spinal column at all. But that cow has been dispensed with many, many years ago. Historically, people think of milk as a mucus-producing food.

What's been your experience? Well, the interesting thing is mucus is a mucine response. Mucine response is part of the immune system. Well, guess what? When you have the most allergenic food in America that triggers mast cells to release histamines, you get all kinds of mucus. And that's one of the reasons why people are shucking

and avoiding pasteurized milk. Raw milk is actually the opposite. The raw whey protein stabilizes mast cells and keeps histamines in check. Raw milk is one of the most anti-inflammatory foods on earth. It keeps the cytokine storms in check. It does all kinds of things.

So you don't overreact. You don't over-respond. You do a response and you're back to normal. So it's a very anti-inflammatory food. So our experience with raw milk is it doesn't create mucus at all. In fact, it's contradictory. It keeps your runny nose from running. It keeps your ear infections in check

because you don't have the mucus build up or the inflammation. So it's a wonderful food that doesn't have anything to do with mucus at all. Tell me about the difference between cow milk, goat milk, sheep milk and camel milk. Sheep milk has fat globules at about one third the size of cow's milk. Their casein proteins are slightly different.

Camel's milk actually has been researched in Europe and they say it's fantastic for kids with autism. The elements of the protein found in it, I'm not sure exactly what they are, but I've heard speeches, presentations at the International Mouth Genomics Consortium from researchers in Europe that talk about how fantastic camel's milk is for autistic kids.

Water buffalo milk has 10% butterfat, great for making cheese and mozzarella. Every one of these species of animals has their own levels of fat and levels of protein, and mankind has done very well on all of them, as seen by the history of 10,000 to 15,000 years. So there are differences, a little bit flavor difference, a little color difference.

Jersey cows have more creamy, yellower milk and butterfat than a whole seed. But all of them, like I said, are qualitatively very similar, but quantitatively different. We are mammals ourselves. We can't forget that. We're mammals ourselves.

Tell me about colostrum. Colostrum actually is not milk. Remember that colostrum comes from the arteries, the veins. They're blood constituents, a lot of fats and antibodies that come from the blood of mom. They're stored right before delivery of the baby. They're stored in the areas inside of the udder or inside the breast. And that is suckled by the baby as the first food of life to take the antibodies from mom

to go into the very permeable gut of the baby, that's very leaky gut is normal for a baby, to absorb those antibodies into the baby's bloodstream. Because remember, the mom and the baby don't share the same blood. The placental barrier separates the two and the baby could have a different blood type than the mom. So the blood is not shared between babies,

but the colostrum is a representative of mom's antibodies, the good stuff from mom's antibodies in her bloodstream being shared into the baby's bloodstream through digestive tract and absorbed through the leaky gut. That only lasts for a few hours, maybe a day or two. And then with the pitocin response and the other hormones that are exchanged in the breast and the brain and the pituitary,

you start to see a letdown of milk and lactating the lacteal glands, which lactate, create milk and release milk. And that washes out the remaining colostrum. So you have high levels of colostrum becoming intermediate levels becoming no levels. And then raw milk coming in to wash it. And then raw milk nourishes all of that

first initial inoculum that was put into the gut. And then you start putting sugar in there and you're putting bifidobacteria in there. You take all the bacteria from mom's nipple or the breast or the teat of that animal being put in the gut, which gives the biodiversity of bacteria in the gut of the child,

which is the first experience it has with the outside world. But then you remember the babies put everything in their mouth. What are they doing? They're crawling around on the floor. They're sucking on kitten paws and they're picking up dog food and they're putting everything in their face because they're sampling in their ecosystem to build that diversity of bacteria to have an immune system that works in the environment they're in. They're not in a sterile bubble. They're very much wanting to participate and

interact with their environments. But raw milk is what feeds them through that process. Welcome to the house of macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood, sustainably sourced directly from farmers. Macadamias, a rare source of omega-7, linked to collagen regeneration, enhanced weight management, and better fat metabolism. Macadamias, are healthy and brain-boosting fats. Macadamias, Art healthy and brain boosting fats. Macadamias. Paleo friendly. Keto and plant-based. Macadamias. No wheat, no dairy, no gluten, no GMOs. No

preservatives, no palm oil, no added sugar. House of Macadamias. I roasted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate. Coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacadamias.com slash tetra. If you can remember, tell me from that first time that you drove milk down to Rossum,

the systems, what were the first things that changed? Well, initially we didn't do any product testing at all. We just got the milk and I made a couple of kids sick. I was like, whoa, that was a screw up. What do you mean? I was like, why? Here I am a paramedic, right? I don't wanna make people sick, I wanna make people healthy.

So they didn't die, they recovered fully and all good. But it's like, wow, what a learning opportunity for me. So I started testing our milk. And I started using more and more advanced technology, started learning what practices created what kind of milk. And so it's constant tweaking of those practices to make better and better milk with less and less bacteria that might compromise somebody who's got a compromised immune system.

Remember that when I sell milk in a bunch of stores here in California, I don't pick my consumer, they pick me. I don't know who they are exactly. I think I reach out and I can talk to them, but it's an unbelievable how many people have compromised immune systems, which could get sick from a bad bug, because they want to build a strong immune system.

So I've got to be game on for the worst-case scenario at all times, which is zero pathogens in our milk, but all the biodiversity, all the bioactives to help whoever is consuming our product, be as strong as it can be and recover from chemotherapy, right? Recover from antibiotic abuse, recover from a compromised immune system, heal their gut from Crohn's disease and irritable bowel and IBS.

So, we evolved over 25 years to using very advanced technologies and different kinds of protocols. For instance, we test every subset of 20 cows, it gets tested separately at our dairy. We're milking 1800 cows in two dairies, but we treat those cows like they're 20 cow dairies because you can have a bad bug in your milk tank and actually not find it when you could actually find it

in the non-diluted samples of 20 cows mixed together. So we treat our dairy like a 20 cow dairy with intensive testing of 20 cows. That's something we learned just the last couple of years. So it's been an evolutionary process of me becoming sharper and sharper and better and better. like a 20 cow dairy with intensive testing and 20 cows. That's something we learned just the last couple of years. So it's been an evolutionary process of me becoming sharper and sharper and better and better for the last 12 years hanging out with the International Meth Genomics Consortium, PhDs at UC Davis around the world.

I've been to Arhus, Denmark twice, Sydney, Australia, Quebec, Canada. I just got back from Cork, Ireland. I'll be going to UC Davis again this year to learn more. They always say, if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room. And so I always try to get myself in a room that I'm always wondering, how do I figure this out? Because I want to learn to be the best I can possibly be

as a lifelong learning kind of thing. And why not hang out with really smart people that can't really speak because the grants they get come from the FDA, NIH, that are from processors. So I allow their research to become real in our world. Do you teach the practices that you've learned to other dairies and other farmers? Yes, we do. I realized many, many years ago, 15 years ago, that raw milk would not emerge gracefully

and with purpose if it was chaotic. If we didn't all understand how to produce raw milk well, if you intended to serve people not processors. So Raw Milk Institute was formed in 2011. We have board of directors. We have a PhD from Rutgers University on there. Dr. Heckman is fantastic. In the past, we've had Dr. Katerina Berg from Belgium was on our board. Veterinary and epidemiologist from California. She formed us from the first seven years of our lives.

So the best brains at the Raw Milk Institute serve on our board. And we have, now we have Sarah Smith, we've got Kelsey Barefoot. They actually train farmers around the world. We've exposed farmers, 50 farmers we've actually certified, but we trained 175 farmers in Great Britain alone in 2018. 175 in Great Britain where they have raw milk that's legal on the farm.

So we've trained and exposed to training thousands of farmers around the world. We have a four and a half hour video series that talks about all the elements from grass to glass that you need to do to have raw milk that's low risk. We've also come up with a pamphlet to send to the Amish that can't have access to online. So we actually put this stuff consolidated down, a big old document, to give to the Amish that can't have access to online. So we actually put this stuff, consolidating down, the old document to give to the Amish. So we've done our very best to penetrate. We've trained farmers across Canada.

We've trained farmers in South America and Argentina. We've trained farmers in New Zealand and Australia. We've trained farmers in India. We've trained farmers all over the world, but they have to reach out to us. We can't reach them. And so farmers that want to learn, it's readily available. And yes, we have absolutely learned that we us. We can't reach them. And so farmers that want to learn, it's readily available.

And yes, we have absolutely learned that we need to have training for all farmers. In fact, we have two PubMed articles out now, two that are in the literature by two international researchers. One is Whitehead and the other one's Dr. Berg from International Resources that took our data because we collect data on the testing

of the milk of these farmers. And it's so different than what you get from farmers that are pasteurizing or will be pasteurizing. It's filthy milk versus clean milk. And what we've done is we put that in PureView journal and it's now at the NIH, it's FDA. You can see it at PubMed, these two articles we have now about how when you do three things, you use very high standards, you train the farmers in those standards, and you do routine testing. When you do these three things, you have world-class, very low-risk of all milk, and we've done that very effectively for everybody. Because this is a we project, not a me project.

And I'll tell you what, we share our customers. Somebody that's been trained, Rick Englund down in Arizona, phenomenal product at Fond du Loc, serves the customers in Arizona. Guess what? His customers come to California, they get a wonderful product from us. Our customers come to California, they get a wonderful product from us. Our customers go to Arizona, they get a wonderful product from him. We're using the same kind of standards,

not exactly the same, but very close. So it's a wonderful sharing of people that move around. It's also a great driver of jealousy. When you go to a place that doesn't have raw milk, people say, why can't I have it? And they get really pissed off. And so it's really driven the market to train farmers so that we can share customers.

But also when you go to a place that doesn't have raw milk, people ask, why can't I have it here too? Are there any places in the US where raw milk is illegal? Yes. Where? Hawaii, Nevada. Wow. And there's a lot of places where it's illegal.

However, the laws have changed in the last few years to make it legal to buy on farm or buy as part of a cow share where you buy the cow and therefore the farmer doesn't get paid for the milk, gets paid to care for the cow. I'm very proud that the raw milk Institute was very foundational and the change of laws in Delaware. There was a change of law in Delaware. The governor is about to sign it. It hasn't been signed by the governor, but it passed 39 to 2 in favor of raw milk

because people in Delaware, they've lost so many dairies in Delaware. They're down to 13 now. They used to have hundreds. 13 dairies are surviving. They said, we have to have raw milk or we're going to be dying as a dairy. And instead of people driving from Delaware down to Pennsylvania to get their milk and drive back four hours round trip or more, now they're gonna have world-class raw milk with on-farm testing. The secretary of ag up there, Michael Skuse,

said in my raw milk in Delaware, we're gonna have world-class raw milk with the best there is, and we're gonna have on-farm labs for every farmer to test their milk every day. It's $2 test, cheap. That's the kind of wonderful leadership we bring to a place that can visualize having the best raw milk instead of saying, no, no, no, no, no. You can say, yes, let's take care of our farmers and our consumers with world-class raw

milk. So it's happening. It's happening now. If you live in the other states where it is legal, can you usually find good quality local raw milk? If you really want to find it, you can. You have to search for it. I was at a National Farmers Union Conference a few years back in Hawaii, in Maui. There was raw milk a mile and a half away, you just have to know where to go get it. Yeah.

You gotta know a guy or a gal. So that's kind of what's going on. You have to know somebody or ask. There's a website called realmilk.com and realmilk.com has a search bar. You can find raw milk everywhere in the world. And sometimes it's not called raw milk. Sometimes it's called theopatras bath milk.

Sometimes it's called pet milk. Some kinds of stuff, herds here. Sometimes it's something else, but it's raw milk intended for human consumption. And that raw milk finder doesn't really talk about the quality of the milk, it just shows you where you can find the milk around the world. Tell me some of the legal hurdles you've had to jump to do this. Raw milk's always been legal in California.

And I have to give credit to Alta Dena, who stood as a guardian at the gate to make sure the laws didn't change to make it illegal. In areas that did not have good legal raw milk, sometimes the pasteurizers, as a guardian at the gate to make sure the laws didn't change to make it illegal. In areas that did not have good legal raw milk, sometimes the pasteurizers as a favor to themselves changed the laws to make raw milk illegal. Some of those laws changed back in 1930s and that's why it's so hard to get laws changed as they're indoctrinated literally a 90 years old law. But as far as legal challenges are concerned, we've been sued by the FDA law. But as far as legal challenges are concerned, we've been sued by the FDA because we don't fit their model very well and they bark up a tree all the time and with the FDA we say we want to meet, we want to talk, we want to work

together, we want detente, we want you to learn from us, we want to learn from you, we want to have relationship. They refuse to have that. They go to their friends at the Department of Justice, the DOJ, to have their attorneys talk to us because they don't want to talk to us. Because by talking to us, they admit they must receive information when you communicate. Communication means two ways back and forth.

You and I are talking right now. They refuse to talk or communicate with us. They want to be at an arm's length or through an attorney because they don't want to deal with us because we are absolutely upset in the paradigm. They have a set, which is that excuse for filthy milk of the 1890s. Tell me about milk consumption in other parts of the world. You know, here in the United States, we kind of made milk kind of a flashpoint topic.

There's a lot of indoctrination about milk and pasteurization and raw and all that kind of stuff. In other parts of the world, raw milk is not a big deal. Or it's not considered a flashpoint or a really big divisive or big issue. It's like, oh, you want raw milk, you want pasteurized milk, you're called, no big deal. So it's the culture, it's the indoctrination, it's the role of the processors, and also the advertising, the role of the regulators and those

that inspect milk and production. Germany has the Pforzuch milk very readily available. In Italy, there's raw milk available. In France, there's raw milk available. You just have to look for it. Sometimes it's more convenient than other places. Almost all those places have really, really good raw milk cheeses and oftentimes have a lot of raw milk kefir

because the kefir is easily made because it's fermented and then it has a long shelf life. It doesn't require a lot of refrigeration. But raw milk will sour quickly. So I know when I was a child, I was a representative of the United States in Russia in 1977. I went to ARPEC, the International Peace Camp there, and I represented, I was one of 12 students. I was the only farmer in the group, but they had a raw milk kefir. It was delicious and we all drank it. I didn't know what it was, but it was delicious and I drank it every day.

So I think it's culture by culture, place by place, kind of a reflection of the history and processing. I know that right now, Europe has really taken a very good responsible position saying, we want to know the bioavailability of food. We wanna know the carbon footprint of the food. We wanna know how local your food is. And we certainly want people to easily get whole foods

at a farmer's market, this Farm Direct. And I think you see that in the pictures of people and how obese they are walking down the streets in the United States versus in Europe. And I think you see that. Unfortunately, it's slipping a little bit in some areas which are embracing more of an American diet, which is, please detour, go back.

That's a bad sign, don't do America. You might want to wear our blue jeans, that's fine, but don't do America, the way we eat sucks. In the US, 50 or 60 years ago, the milkman would deliver a glass bottle and put it in a cooler outside of your door. Was that pasteurized milk? Some of it was raw, some of it was pasteurized.

Well, you had to have a certified raw milk dairy. You had to have, it was certified. It was the AAMC milk. And that milk was very popular. Altadena built a huge market for themselves in LA. Other dairies like in Atlanta, Georgia, there was a dairy there. There was dairies all over America. There was the Gordon Walker, the Walker Gordon dairy in Virginia. It was extremely popular from 1906 to 1971. Had a thousand cows. They were operated as 100 cows subsets with literally 10 farmers that managed each farm and they're all milked at the same facility.

And that milk went to the Mayo Clinic. It was on the Titanic. It was at the White House. It was presidential food. It was considered excellent, beautiful, delicious food. Rapidly chilled, all that stuff. So raw milk is not as easy to do as pasteurized milk. And so if it's more difficult, it's more expensive.

And so it's not as readily available as you're gonna see for pasteurized milk, that's for sure, including today. ["Pasture Milk"] ["Pasture Milk"] What may fall within the sphere of tetragrammaton? Counterculture? Tetragrammaton. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammaton.

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Upon entering, experience the beauty of the world. TETRAGRAMMATIN The power of the mind. TETRAGRAMMATIN The power of the mind. TETRAGRAMMATIN The power of the mind. TETRAGRAMATIN Muscle cars? TETRAGRAMATIN Ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn. Any feelings about milk in plastic versus glass bottles? We started out for the first three or four years in glass bottles. It was very, very difficult.

There's nothing wrong with it. It's wonderful. Except that there's a deposit of two dollars for every glass bottle. So you give it to the store, the store gives it to the person that takes it home, consumes it, brings it back to the store. They want their two bucks back. Well, if it's got a chip on the top of the glass bottle, the store has to give back their two bucks. The store takes it. The store is stuck with the two bucks now. And you get there, you got to take it back, and you can't use it. You also have the state testing the glass to make sure it's clean. You have to make sure the milk is clean, and you have to have an extremely sterile bottle. When plastic, and we source our plastics very specifically to not have any isoestrogens

and not have any of those things are going to leach into the milk. And when you kept cold, there's no leaching at all. But if you were to heat the plastic, absolutely it will leach. So you don't want to have any leaching and heating is what brings that on. So we're very cautious of that. But we did glass for the first three or four years.

The other thing was that when you put the glass in your truck, the glass weighs a lot. Bringing it back from the marketplace with heavy, heavy trucks that are filthy with all these glass bottles, was very hard on the delivery drivers, as well as the diesel consumption for the trucks with heavy trucks coming back. Where you're not carrying food,

you're carrying package for the food. I'm a big supporter of glass, but I tell you what, it's very, very hard to do. Would there be any benefit in having a glass option that costs more, but for the people who care about that? Maybe, and we might do that. But we always advocate for people, if you want it in glass, pour it immediately into glass and keep your glass away.

And that way it doesn't spend three weeks in the plastic. And some people do that. But we have grown so incredibly ferociously, you know, just incredible demand, that some of these things we had to kind of put on the back burner, because just getting the milk in a plastic bottle to get out to the stores is enough to feed itself when you've got 35-40% growth year over year going from COVID forward. It's just having enough milk to get to anybody, anywhere we can to make sure

it's safe is the biggest challenge we have at this point. And we're doing better and better and better with it. But at the same time, being glass would be kind of a distraction from that. And it has a different kind of bottle filler, has a different kind of transfer. You have to bring the glass back. You have to wash the bottle. Be very tough. We may do it someday, but not right now. How many years do cows produce milk for? That's kind of an indefinite number.

They started two years old and they go 12, 15, 20 years, depending on how healthy are and what the environment they're in. Unfortunately, the way the CAFO operations, the confinement animal feeding operations are now, they don't make it beyond four and a half years. Cause it's kind of like a race car. You know, you blow the engine up on a quarter mile sprint. And that's what they're doing, pushing them

with everything they can to get as much milk as they possibly can, including hormones in some cases, antibiotic use, inflammation, lots of really high rich foods to get 12-15 gallons of milk a day, but that cow burns out. That's not our cows. Our cows are using a moderate diet. We want to have a long healthy life. We're not looking for a race car effect. We're looking for a really sustainable, moderate production cow that's in peace with herself, is doing well, that can sustain over the lifetime. Because that's the cow that's gonna give you really healthy raw milk.

A cow that's a race car, she could have problems, a lot of problems and many different kinds of problems. Do your cows only eat grass and food on the pasture or do you give them additional feed? They absolutely need additional feed. They get pasture, yes. And seasonally more than in the summertime, when it's super, super hot, they don't get that much

because at 110 degrees, cows don't do well. But in the spring and fall, yeah, they get a lot of pasture. But we also supplement with all kinds of things. Like what? Alfalfa. We actually have certified organic alfalfa on our farm that we produce for our cows. Our farm is certified organic.

Our end products are not certified organic because we couldn't do local sourcing of cows or additional feeds. We're bringing in organic cows from literally two states away. We're bringing in organic feed from three states away from Colorado with 300 gallons of diesel to get it here. So if you wanted to get organic milk, you could go down the local store. It's ultra high temperature pasteurized. That's not us. So right before COVID, I just come back from a National Milk Genomics Consortium conference in Aarhus, Denmark, and they're talking about how local is your food, what's your carbon footprint, what's your nutrient density.

And I was like, well, that's not very good bringing feed in from four states away. So let's be local. And so we shifted from certified organic on the end product to non-GMO project, which is wonderful, no roundup and pesticides in our products, and be local. So we have a 10 gallon ride from a neighbor that loves us and takes good care of the feed and brings it right here. So we became much more local doing raw

with a low carbon footprint, extreme bioavailability of our foods and kind of more aligned with what they're doing versus what's being promoted in the United States. So a lot of things to talk about here. you