The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Giving spotlight to a game-changing snack company that’s literally saving our livers one chip at a time (while tasting incredible) — Ancient Crunch. Founder Steven Rofrano started his journey with a simple question: why are we still putting seed oils in everything? This led to Steven challenging himself to create chips that actually nourish, rather than destroy cellular health. Remember: Americans used to spend 30% of their income on food in the 1950s. Today, it’s just 11%. We’ve sacrificed quality for quantity, and our health is paying the price.  MASA CHIPS - GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER: https://bit.ly/40LVY4y Join the Ultimate Human VIP community and gain exclusive access to Gary Brecka's proven wellness protocols today!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Connect with Steven Rofrano: Instagram: https://bit.ly/435ybxf TikTok: https://bit.ly/4j0p9WP X.com: https://bit.ly/3GSTZmS LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/454xu8v Thank you to our partners: H2TABS - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg BODYHEALTH - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV BAJA GOLD - USE CODE "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa EIGHT SLEEP - SAVE $350 ON THE POD 4 ULTRA WITH CODE “GARY”: https://bit.ly/3WkLd6E COLD LIFE - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp WHOOP - GET 1 FREE MONTH WHEN YOU JOIN!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW VANDY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/49Qr7WE AION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD HAPBEE - FEEL BETTER & PERFORM AT YOUR BEST: https://bit.ly/4a6glfo CARAWAY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3Q1VmkC HEALF - GET 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S BIOPTIMIZERS - USE CODE “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4inFfd7 RHO NUTRITION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: https://bit.ly/44fFza0 GENETIC TEST: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 Watch  the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X.com: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2 Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:20 Steven Rofrano’s Story and Journey to Masa Chips 08:23 Why Remove Seed Oils in Our Diet? 19:27 Non-Organic & GMO-Foods Toxicity  20:34 Founding of Ancient Crunch (Masa Chips) 28:08 Nutrient Density in Foods 32:41 From 30% to 11% Household Budget for Food 35:02 Masa Chips Production vs. Big Snack Industry 39:28 Avoidance of Using Artificial Additives & Preservatives 49:20 Where is Ancient Crunch Going? 52:53 Sourcing of Raw Ingredients 57:07 Final Question: What does it mean to you to be an “Ultimate Human?” The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor/patient relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user’s own risk. The Content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frito-Lay, North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lay's, etc. People buy $30 billion worth of that a year. So when we say massive problem, food in general is big. The organic and the non-GMOs, that industry is one of the most toxic sources that supplies our food system. If we understand that fixing food is the way to fixing our health, then I think we need to be focusing more on this area. Is there an antidote to our current incredibly unhealthy snacking habits without just killing your snacking habit,

but replacing it. Tortilla chips, they're junk food, right? It could have good tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made well. We make moss chips, which are tallow-fried tortilla chips. So the fact that you have something here that's healthy enough for me, the health freak, and also delicious enough for the people

that don't care about health at all. But where is the brand going? I mean, is this an expansive snack category that you actually want to expand into? People buy $2 million in Doritos a year. So like, hmm, obviously people want Hey guys, welcome back to the ultimate human podcast. I'm your host human biologist Gary Breckow, where we go down the road of everything anti aging biohacking longevity and

everything in between. And today's guest made his way into my house through my kitchen. And you know, with with one of the best products that I have in my kitchen, one of the best products on the market, and this is never a podcast about products and services that you guys know, but one of the best products that I have in my kitchen, one of the best products on the market, and this is never a podcast about products and services, as you guys know, but in this particular case, I wanted to go deep down the rabbit hole food safety on the backs of the Baja movement and what we can do and add to our kitchen to maybe replace

some of the toxic compounds that our families and our kids are eating. Great ways to add snacks to your daily routines. And you know, I have an episode called What's in Gary's Kitchen, and I do lateral shifts where we take all kinds of different foods that you love to eat and swap them for things that are more nutrient dense, that feed your cellular biology.

And so if you're into that, today's podcast is going to be a must watch. So welcome to the podcast, Stephen Raffrano. Thank you is going to be a much must watch. So welcome to the podcast, Stephen Raffrano. Thank you. So what's your role with masa? And then I want to take a step back. And I really want my audience to kind of get to know you and know a little bit about your story and what actually brought you sure you here. I'm the CEO and co founder of ancient crunch. We make masa chips, which are tallow fried tortilla chips, and also Vandy crisps, which are tallow-fried potato chips. And I started this with a friend

about almost three years ago at this point, two and a half years ago. We, one of my friends was eating a bunch of Tostitos one morning, I think this is after. This is college? This is after college. This is like a New Year's trip, actually in Fort Lauderdale. Okay.

Not too far from here. Yeah, so. We're just in Fort Lauderdale this morning, so. Basically, New Year's two years ago plus a month, my friend eating Tostitos, and this is after the whole seed oil summer, I like to call it 2021, when seed oils really became mainstream.

Yes, when the news about them became the issue. Yeah, when the news about them. Right, right, right, they've been out there for a long time, but people started exposing the toxicity. The term seed oil is like people started talking about it then, and so I was just kind of going on a rant to my friend about, why are you putting this in your body? Seed oils are poisonous.

This is toxic. What are you doing? And he's like, I'm just trying to eat. Like, I'm hungover. I'm just trying to eat my breakfast. I'm like, oh. Which is worse because he's like, he's already recovering from alcohol.

Now he's going to back in the seed oil. Yeah, and it's like the liver thing too, right? Because alcohol and seed oils are processed with the same liver enzymes. And so it's like this is, yeah, already a horrible horrible situation anyway. So I'm not helping it by lecturing him about why he's making poor dietary choices. But ultimately we get to talking about how there could be, you know, he's like, um, tortilla chips. Well, there's junk food, right? And like, no, no, you could have good tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made

well. And I started describing ingredients that could be made to put into tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made well. And I started describing ingredients that could be made to put into tortilla chips that would actually be healthy for you. And he starts listening, he's like, okay, intrigued. All right, well, where can I go buy these? And I said, well, that's the thing, you can't, they don't exist. This is in theory in my mind.

This is in my mind, literally in my mind. Yes, I just come up with a recipe on the spot. And then, so he basically challenges me like, hey, why don't you go make them? You know? If I can't buy them, go ahead. Yes, I just come up with a recipe on the spot and then so he basically challenges me like hey Why don't you go make them, you know, right if I can't buy them go ahead and so I'm like, all right challenge accepted And then a few months later I I got a turkey fryer a box of tallow and some corn tortillas and fried up the first prototype in your in your house in my parents back yard actually Yeah, so you got so first of all, where'd you just go get beef tallow?

You went to Whole Foods and you bought? I think I got it online. I forget which brand it was, but I think it was Amazon. I just found some like grass fed beef tallow, bought it online and the turkey fryer, I think was Costco. Okay. Thanksgiving turkey fryer is I think RFK's video.

Yeah, a lot of people blow themselves up doing that. Yeah, exactly. Turkeys are much harder to fry than tortilla chips, I'll say that. Yeah. You know what's crazy, not to get off topic, but I actually, I heard that you can't put the turkey into the fryer when it's frozen or it can literally explode.

Oh yeah, yeah, I think so. It has to be room temperature. Yeah. And like every year around Thanksgiving, thousands of people that are actually frying these things for the first time take an own frozen turkey and drop it in there and the whole thing blows up. Yeah, and they do it fast. And I mean, if you put frozen turkey and drop it in there and the whole thing blows up.

And they do it fast. And I mean, if you put ice cubes into a deep fryer, like that's not fun. Cause like the act of frying is basically rapidly boiling the water. And so if you have like the ice, I don't know, it's denser or something, cause it doesn't spread out. Whatever, yeah, it's not a good time.

So don't do that. It's not a good time. Don't do that. So you're in your parents backyard and you take flour. I got tortillas actually. I found a guy who made organic corn tortillas and ordered a case from him. He's based in Massachusetts or something. They're flexible at that point.

Yeah, they're flexible. It's like you go to a Mexican restaurant, the tortillas, they come in that little bowl with a weird little lid with the paper. That kind of thing. I chopped them up on a cutting board into triangles and I tossed them in the fryer outside of course not indoors and the first thing I noticed about them was that they didn't taste beefy or anything which would kind of surprise me at that point I was expecting yeah I was expecting hey if we if we use beef tallow

it might taste meaty or greasy or kind of weird but I was very happily surprised that they were neither greasy nor beefy and so the ultimate test came this is that might taste meaty or greasy or kind of weird, but I was very happily surprised that they were neither greasy nor beefy. And so the ultimate test came, this is actually at Easter, my extended family was over, the ultimate test came when I brought them inside and started feeding them to my extended family,

a lot of whom are not interested in health. And so these are the type of people who, as a lot of people are out there, who might say something like, I'd rather enjoy my life than be healthy I'm sure you heard this billion times. Yeah billion times. Yeah, and so yeah healthy is nice But they want to eat what tastes good and right and other sort of things So you expect the same people that have made fun of me for eating beef liver

Yeah, and you know, I kind of envision you out there in your backyard You know with the fryer and like being like hey anybody want to invest this is my startup and like being like, hey, anybody wanna invest? This is my startup company. Right? Not yet, that would come later. Your seed round starting like right out there in the backyard with your Uncle Joe, you know? Yeah, I have my PowerPoint, my business plan.

Yeah, business plan. No guys, really, this is gonna be a big thing. Who wants to get in now before we launch? Well, no, I didn't even know any of that yet because again, I had just found out five minutes prior that they didn't taste beefy. So it was like news to me. So yeah, I fed this to my family members

who ate them and were like, wait, this is actually pretty good. Because I have a lot of, you know, these are people who if I fed them liver, they would freak out. You know, or they would not want any part of what would normally be considered health foods. And so the fact that they liked them,

that set a light bulb off in my head because most health foods as At least people think of them taste bad. It's kale smoothie. It's chia seed pudding. It's like gross And on the contrary most things that taste good are considered unhealthy You know McDonald's fast food chips, you know candy whatever so the fact that you have something here That's healthy enough for me the health freak at this time And also delicious enough for the people that don't care about health at all. That's a pretty novel thing.

And that was the idea that I was like, wait, this could actually go somewhere. This is actually impactful because I think one of the reasons we were talking about this before the show, one of the reasons why a lot of people don't adopt health is because they perceive it as either unpleasant or inconvenient. And so people like us, you know like us will go be healthy either way, but if you want to eat things that taste good and you're prioritizing that enjoyment, which I'm not saying there's anything wrong with,

that's 95% of people, if the health foods are unenjoyable, you're not gonna eat them. Right, yeah, so true. And I mean, you and I see eye to eye on seed oils. In fact, before we got on the podcast, you were talking about how you were watching my Rogan podcast when I was actually a guest on Joe Rogan. And I was talking about seed oils

and that was going back a little while. And Paul Saladino was really, I think probably one of the earliest movers in our space that I recall anyway, talking about seed oils because he was actually breaking down the different forms on these polyunsaturated fatty acids and talking a little bit about the history of it. And I remember being suspect

of the seed oil history being so sinister. I was like, there's no way that these are machine lubricants. And here we go with the next conspiracy theory, right? It's a machine lubricant. And then after the war, we had all of this excessive machine lubricant. We didn't know what to do with it. And so we started actually putting it into food supply.

And knowing what I know now, nothing surprises me. We do it with fluorosilicic acid as fluoride. We use commercial bleach, chlorine to, you know, chlorine to water, and then we don't filter it back out, which I'm okay to sanitize with chlorine, but then filter it out. But so for the few folks of mine

that are listening to this, that aren't really sure what a seed oil is, why are they so damaging? And maybe why such a high percentage of our snack foods are deep fried and everything you find in the grocery store is deep fried in seed oils or even not fried in seed oils. They're just a part of the base ingredients,

one because they're dirt cheap. But give me your take on seed oils, why they need to be removed from our diets, especially from our kids' diets. Yeah, I think a good entry point into this discussion is the history of seed oils. So the first commercially available food seed oil for consumption was Crisco. And Crisco is hydrogenated cottonseed oil.

And it was, I think, first sold in 1924 or 1912 or something in the early 1900s. And the issue was the Procter & Gamble had a lot of cottonseed oil left over from something. I forget what industry it was that they were in. What were they using of cottonseed oil left over from something. I forget what industry it was that they were in. What were they using the cottonseed oil for? Well, so it was a waste product. So you had the cotton gins and you would pull the seeds out because the cotton gin separates the cotton fibers because that's what you use to make clothing and you separate the seeds out of it. And so you had all these seeds left over

and it was a waste product they didn't know what to do with. And if you are in industry, you will have mountains of waste of whatever kind. Uh, if you can sell that, that's new revenue line and you want to do that. So I think for a long time they had been trying to sell it for something, but it had never worked because at that time Americans did not eat oil. Like literally olive oil wasn't a thing. The Italian son brought it over. They were not, you know, Mediterranean culture hadn't shown up yet. Uh, coconut oil was certainly not a thing, uh Italians hadn't brought it over. They were not, you know, Mediterranean culture hadn't shown up yet. Coconut oil was certainly not a thing, even though it's solid room temperature. Avocados no one had even heard of an avocado in the US in the early 1900s.

So there were, and there were no vegetable oils. There was the only fats that Americans, and I think I heard Max Lucavera talk about this on your podcast too. I think 90% of fat consumption was animal-based fats. That's right. Butter, lard and tallow. So Americans didn't eat oil at all. And so, what should we call it?

Procter & Gamble was unable to sell a liquid oil product to American consumers. So it kind of sat on the shelf for a few decades until some guy invented a process to turn the liquid oil into a solid fat. This is called hydrogenation. Anyone who lived through the 90s knows about hydrogenated fats.

Margarine. Yeah, all that stuff. And so that guy invented this process that allowed them to turn cottonseed oil into a solid. And now all of a sudden people, because it was consistent with American culture, hey, we can eat this. It looks like lard. It looks like tallow. It's a solid thing. I can scoop it out. That's familiar to me. And so they began selling that, and it was obviously so cheap, right? Because you're taking this waste product, it's basically free. Or you'd even pay to get rid of it in some cases.

So you have this thing that's basically free, and now you're selling it to compete with something that actually costs money, whether it's Lard or Talo or something. So you can undercut it on everyone else on price, and a lot of their marketing at the time was touting this whole like futurist modernist idea

of like develop technology. Like it's sort of that dirty animal fat with those smelly farmers who have pig poop on their boots. You know, eat this thing made by science in a lab with guys in white coats. And that sort of idea, which is kind of the opposite today, most people think if it's made in a lab, I don't want it. Back then it really resonated with the American culture who was like this forward looking

like scientific like we want this kind of technology in our lives. So that's kind of how it got started and then that was a very, very big success for them obviously because the inputs are so cheap and ultimately led to them starting to sell liquid seed oils starting in the 50s and beyond. So anyway, all of that's to say that this entire category of products was invented. There was a point in time in history when people did not eat this at all.

That's not true about corn, that's not true about wheat, well, at least in recent memory. People have been eating all these things, you know, butter, they've been drinking water, for example, they've been eating sugar for at least hundreds of years, if not thousands. Seed oils were not eaten in any form or fashion, like these types of oils, the industrial processed ones,

prior to, say, the early 1900s. So I think understanding that history makes it a lot easier to understand why we shouldn't really be eating them. Because anyone who understands this idea of like, you know, how we're evolved, right? We talk about we're evolved to get sunlight. You talk about how we're not supposed to be wearing sunglasses outside because we want to get the sunlight in our eyes and that helps us

make the melanin that we need to protect our skin. All these things like live, how we're evolved. Same thing with food. No one has evolved to eat C2O. It's not possible that anyone's evolved to eat C2O. Yeah. So it's kind of like this shocking. And the last piece I'll say about this, and I've been talking for a minute is that it went from zero, literally zero, to 25 to 30% of the average American's calories. Calories. Wow, a quarter of their calories.

Yeah, or more. And by the way, those types of fats should be 2% or less of your total dietary intake. Exactly. Just as a matter of reference. So if it's 10, 11, 12 times that, there's a whole other cascade of issues. And the challenge with a lot of these

is that you don't get sick right away. If you ate some of these highly processed foods and it instantly made you nauseous, that would be its own self-correcting error. The problem is that it makes you chronically ill. And chronically ill is just a moderate rate of suffering over a prolonged period of time. It's not extreme suffering because that would drive you to the ER, the urgent care, and you know it's just a sort of a low grade.

And even worse, extreme suffering would drive you to go sue the person who caused your suffering. And so then,, if seed oils were that acutely toxic, then the product will get sued and then they would stop making them. Yeah, I talk about this all the time, the difference between cumulative dose toxicity and single dose toxicity. Single dose toxicity theorists say, all right, well, the dose determines the poison. Okay, so, but I always use the analogy, well, nobody got mercury poisoning

from a single piece of tuna fish, right? But if you had some mercury in tuna fish and you ate it every single night over a long period of time, you could end up with mercury toxicity. It wasn't the single dose, it was the cumulative dosage. And I think the awareness now of the amount

of cumulative toxins that are in the toxic burden, fluoride, chlorine, microplastics, pharmaceuticals, glyphosates, herbicides, sexicides, pesticides, preservatives, that all of these quote unquote generally regarded as safe, toxins that have safe levels in a single dose, accumulate and they like exhaust, right? They back up and they blow the engine.

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or many of these things might be processed by the same biological pathways overloading them. So when you do the test on, oh, I'm gonna feed the mice this one toxin and it takes this much to kill them or this much to cause them harm. Well, what about, like you said, all the toxins going through the same pathways,

it decreases the amount you can be exposed to any one of them because you add all of them up together The total quantity of toxins whatever they are will overwhelm the liver or the kidneys or whatever the detox pathways are talking about I mean we mentioned this before The same enzymes that process ethanol and the liver is called aldehyde dehydrogenase that processes polyunsaturated fats, which come from seed oils. So it's quite likely that your total dose of both alcohol and seed oils should be lower if you have both than it would be one or the other. And so I think there's a pet theory I have, I've not confirmed this, but I'd be interested

to hear your take. There's a common thing on the internet about how the founding fathers, after they signed the Declaration of Independence, rented out some bar in Philadelphia and just drank. Obscene quantities of alcohol, even for the most alcoholic of modern, say frat bros or whoever, just handles of whiskey per person, like this kind of thing.

And I can't help but wonder, and I know people used to drink a lot more in the past, actually, like if you go to the cafes and bars in Europe, you have these big giant shelves of liquors and stuff. No one's drinking that anymore. And people talk about how Gen Z doesn't drink that much, yada, yada, yada. I wonder how much of that is due to the fact

that we literally can't process alcohol in the way that our ancestors did because our livers are so tied up with, I'm sure, seed oils, but I'm sure other things too, but predominantly seed oils. And that's another thing, you know, we talk about the toxic burden in a lot of these snacks. It's not just the seed oils.

I mean, what originally drew me to ancient grain, you know, a friend of mine told me about you named Ben Greenfield, who I'm a huge, huge fan of. And he brought my attention to you guys. And I started looking at your ingredients, you know, I'm non-gmo corn Organic grass-fed beef tallow at sea salt, you know spices I could recognize I think I think in your traditional ones that's that's all you got in there was the grass-fed beef tallow and So tallow organic corn and then the salt or organic or better spices Yeah, yeah, and that's the organic and the non-GMOs

is another one because that industry as a whole, in my opinion, is one of the most toxic food sources, you know, sources that supplies our food system. And what happens is as a base ingredient, it makes its way everywhere. Yeah. Like it's like, you know, seed oils are kind of like the root and they go into this trunk and they just branch out

into all these different, you know, if you pick up a salad dressing on the, you know, on the grocery store shelf, you know, very likely it's basis. Corn and soy are basically in everything. Even things that aren't food, right? There's corn in your gasoline. I don't know how many people know that.

A lot of plastic, especially the, a lot of degradable plastics made of corn. Soy protein is pretty much everywhere. Clif bars, even people like, normal people think that's like a healthy protein thing. Clif bars, it's like soy protein. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's everywhere.

Yeah, it's literally everywhere. So, you know, it sounds like just a really interesting journey. And so you get your family to love these chips and you really, you know, the light bulb goes off in your head, ding, you know, I'm onto something. And how did this transition into an actual operating business?

Because I'm always fascinated by people that, and I'm making an assumption about you, so tell me if I'm wrong, but who don't have any specific expertise in a certain market, I assume you didn't have any. Yeah, absolutely. I have zero professional experience in food or anything. And, you know, but I also find,

and I say this all the time on my podcast, you know, some of the most passionate, driven, purposeful entrepreneurs I've ever had on this podcast, including yourself, they solve some kind of problem in their life. And they're actually solving a big problem for other people. I mean, you're solving a massive problem

and that is, is there an antidote to, you know, our current incredibly unhealthy snacking habits without just killing your snacking habit, but replacing it? You know, I call this lateral shift and the answer is clearly yes. I mean, so it's a massive problem. And so talk a little bit about this transition from backyard turkey fryer to when it became a real thing.

Yeah, just a point about the massive problem, just for some context, Frito Lay North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lay's, et cetera, people buy in North America, people buy $30 billion worth of that a year. Wow. Yeah. So when we say massive problem,

this particular, like food in general is big. Snack foods is huge, food is even bigger, but like just this one tiny little industry, tortilla and potato chips, basically. Wow. 30, and that's just Frito-Lay. That's one company. I found fascinating that you,

I heard you on another podcast talking about this, and one of the things you said, it was just a podcast, it wasn't video. And one of the things you were talking about how the manufacturer actually manufactures possibly for multiple brands, maybe 10, maybe dozens of brands. And so you're essentially getting the same source, different labels, but you're essentially

getting the same ingredients. Right, exactly. Different packaging around it. So and that's one of the things we had to navigate. So to your question before about how we turned turkey fryer chips. So the first thing we realized was that it tastes good and it's healthy. So it satisfies these two competing, often competing interests, in a way that's helpful to everyone.

The second thing we did was like, OK, how are we going to go make it? I can't be turkey frying on my backyard and sell that on the internet. So we hired a food startup consultant. These are characters that basically come in and say, you don't know anything about the food industry, but you have grandma's recipe or your recipe. How do we turn into a business? The first thing he told us after thinking about it for two weeks, he comes back and says, yeah, this isn't going to happen.

You can't make this. I'm like, well, what do you mean? Why not? And he said, there are no factories that exist that will make your product in grass fed beef tallow for you. And like, okay, interesting. So what are we going to have to do? And he said, well, you could use coconut oil or avocado oil if you want to avoid seed oils, but that's pretty much it. If you want to get a factory to make it for you, you have to do one of those two things. And I said no to that pretty quickly, because I don't think coconut oil, well, first of all, I don't like the fact that you have to import coconut oil from across the Pacific Ocean. It's just like a wasteful

thing. It's like costly, burns a lot of energy. You have to deforest rainforest. It's just, it doesn't seem right to me to like sell a product in the US that's heavily dependent upon some ingredient from very far away. Possible, but not ideal to me. Avocado oil also is like fraught with, you know, issues that whole industry. 85 or 86% of avocado oil in the market was tested to either be fake or rancid by some people in UC, I think... EWG, I think. UCSD?

Environmental Working Group? No, this is University of California. Okay, maybe EWG, not published, but broadcast this stuff. Anyway, avocado oil is the whole issue, and then drug cartels own avocado farms in Mexico. So whatever. I was like, I maintain that tallow is the best frying fat, not only because it's high in saturated fat, it's not seed oils, it's also nutrient dense on like plant fats. So it does have vitamins It has fat soluble vitamins in tallow and the last thing is it doesn't make stuff greasy

I've I've fried some coconut before it comes out greasy shiny, you know, you gets on your fingers like I don't know Yeah, I don't like that. So tallows the ideal frying fat. We couldn't get someone to make it for us Then we're like, okay crap. So we're gonna have to come make it ourselves That was the next fundamental realization and so we thought about like how we're gonna do this We're gonna rent a commercial kitchen because you have to have you know, a food safe place to make your products We ended up finding one not too far from as I said my parents house, which is where the prototype was made So this is where I grew up. So I know the area well. We found a kitchen.

We had to go buy a fryer. We had to get people. We had to buy a machine to get the pouches. We had to do all that stuff. And we were like, as we were planning this out, we quickly realized, this is going to cost a lot of money. Yeah, yeah. This is going to cost a lot of money.

I assume you weren't just independently wealthy on your own. No. No, still I'm not. OK. Such is on your own. No. Okay. No. Still I'm not. Okay. Such is the life of an option.

Such is the life. Yes. So we realized it was going to cost a lot of money. And so we were trying to figure out how this was going to work. I looked at the price on the shelf of Doritos and I'm like, this doesn't even make sense. Not even about the ingredient quality, because of course, towel is way more expensive than the seedles. Organic corn is way more expensive course, towel is way more expensive than seat-holds, organic corn is way more expensive,

the salt is way more expensive. Even ignoring all of the cost of the ingredients, the mass still wasn't adding up. We could use Frito-Lay quality ingredients, and still it was going to be too expensive. So we figured that, we learned more about this, we realized that the reason why Frito-Lay is cheap is not merely because they use bottom barrel ingredients.

Frito-Lay, as I mentioned before, this is like 30, people buy $30 billion worth of this a year in the US and Canada. Frito-Lay has 30 factories in the country. 30. That's about like one factory for every two states. They have a giant factory with like robotic equipment and giant fryers and you know

assembly lines and all that stuff. 30 factories they have 200, 250 distribution centers. Wow. Around the country that's like five on average per state for utilities facilities. They have I don't know tens of thousands of employees all all this stuff they also have negotiated special deals with grocery stores that allow their products to appear on shelves with lower markup than other people's products. So like for example, if I'm on the shelf at Publix, or a similar, I'm not naming Publix specifically,

but that kind of store, if I'm on a shelf, Publix might take 35 to 45% of the sticker price for their margin. For Frito-Lay, they might take 25% because Frito-Lay has this massive volume, they negotiate this better deal, yada, yada, yada. So, so many structural reasons why, oh, and the last thing,

and Frito-Lay's bottom-barrel ingredients are not only cheap inherently, they're even cheaper because the government subsidized them. Right, yeah. AKA your tax dollars. Sweet soy corn, yeah. AKA the listeners' tax dollars subsidize this. So there's a lot of reasons why it's cheap.

And so thinking about this, it's like, obviously we're going to have to make this more expensive in order to survive in particular, to survive without accepting a ton of outside investor money, which we didn't really want to do because we intend to control and own the business for a long time. Yeah.

So we realized that the products are going to have to be expensive, which I think all things considered, right? For me personally, if I'm not eating most chips, I'm just not going to eat them. Right. They're more filling. I would probably... People... They are actually more filling. So are the Vandy chips, by the way.

Oh, yeah. Like you really can't overeat them, which... You know, one of the things I talk about a lot on the podcast is nutrient density. And, you know, I mean, chips and snacks really shouldn't be the main source of our meal. You know, that shouldn't be the main thing. Yeah, it's an accessory.

And nutrient density is what our GLP-1 responds to. You know, now we have all of these, those MPEG, guagiovi, and mangiaro, essentially trying to mimic what we already make in our gut. And we make more GLP-1 in response to nutrient density. If you actually look at side-by-side trials with, Mark Hyman talks about this all the time, side-by-side trials of highly processed diets

versus deeply nutritious or whole food diets that have nutrient dense foods, you'll find that even when they gave the exact same amount of calories, highly processed calories versus nutrient dense calories, the highly processed group got hungrier more frequently and hungrier faster. And so the important point about that is

that when you eat satiating nutrient dense foods, you have less of a tendency to overeat. It's really hard to overeat ribeye. It's hard to overeat avocados. You're not gonna sit down and eat five avocados because they're just too nutrient dense. I feel the same way about these because there are a lot more nutrient dense. I feel the same way about these because,

they're a lot more nutrient dense and caloric and fat dense than their counterparts. So you're not gonna sit down and eat bags and bags of these things. Hi guys, Gary here. I wanna take a few minutes of your time to invite you to my ultimate human VIP community. This is a private community with front row seats

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That's theultimatehuman.com forward slash VIP right now to become one of my ultimate human VIPs. This is your fast pass to better health. So don't miss it. Now, let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. There's an interesting layer on this in addition to the vitamin content because you know vitamin A we talked about the nutrient density But the the saturated fat versus seed oil thing is interesting. There's a guy Dr. Michael Eads, I don't know if you're familiar with him, he talks about, there's a very, very cool study where they took a bunch of kids and they said,

hey, like it was lunchtime, whatever, I think it was a school lunch related study. They said, hey, we're going to feed you kids, we're gonna split you into groups and feed you as many calories of a particular meal that you want until you stop eating. And, you know, eat as much as you want, we're to measure how much you ate. And when you're done, we're going to, we're going to figure out the calories you consumed. There were a few different groups.

They were all variations of a carb of a carbohydrate plus a fat, seed oil versus saturated fat. And I think most of the carbs are potato. So basically we had a baked potato with butter versus like seed oil,, french fries, this kind of combination. And the seed oil plus carb group ate on average 250 to 300 more calories in their meal. Wow. In a meal? In a meal.

Wow. And their kids and their children in one meal. Wow. Eating several hundred more calories until they were full. And like you said before, who knows? I'm sure they're getting more hungry faster than the kids that ate the saturated fat. And so there's an added layer. And Michael Eads talks about the whole metabolic reason

for this. There's FADH and NADH ratios involved. It's all very complex. I think you'd really like it. I'll send this to you afterward. Yeah, send it to me. I would really love it. Yeah, it's a very interesting framework like our cells telling us when to stop eating based on

Chloric density from yeah, satiation nutrient density of Chloric density. Totally agree. I said you will eat more calories when you're eating sea dwells Mm-hmm, and obviously people count calories. I'm not a big calorie counting fan myself But I think it's somewhat helpful I'm not a big calorie counting fan myself, but I think it's somewhat helpful for some people. But yeah, people will eat more calories when they're eating seed oils as their fat instead of tallow. So there's, yeah, and then the other thing about cost,

which I think is very interesting, is something about expectations, right? So in the 1950s, 30% of our household budget went to food. Yeah, that's- Yeah, like a third of people's income, food. That's a sizable amount of money. Sizable amount of money, right? Nowadays, it's 11%.

Wow. So it's a third. A third of what it was in the 50s. And 100 years before that, it was like your entire life was a farmer because 97% of people in our world were farmers. So like the- So you worked to eat.

Yeah, you worked to eat. So it was like 100% of your income, basically, or your time or whatever, equivalent. So over the past like 200 years, we've progressively gone from our entire lives were dedicated to food to now 10% of our income is due to food and we complain about it. Obviously financial circumstances are what they are. However, people's diets, like the quality of the food that your dollar purchases has suffered because of this. Right. So if we're thinking, if you're of the mindset,

we're like, okay, food actually affects health. If you understand, oh, I'm going to be, I'm going to save money in food now and I'm going to be sick later and that's going to cost even more money. In addition to the suffering, like what about suffering? Like money is one thing, but like being physically healthy and vibrant is worth more than money in my opinion. So if you add up all these factors, we actually are spending, I think, way too little money on food collectively. And I'm not just saying that because I sell expensive snacks.

Don't even buy my snacks. Go to the farmer's market and buy grass-fed beef instead of going to Costco and getting whatever the heck they're importing from God knows where, right? Like if you increase your, if you're an average American and you spend 11% of your budget on food, if you were to increase your food budget by 50%, that would only have a hit to your overall budget of 5%. Oh yeah.

Right, cause 11% turns into 15. But that's the 50% growth. It's like a relative risk. Yeah. So it's like, if we understand that food is the, fixing food is the way to fixing our health, then I think that's certainly, like we need to be focusing more on this area.

Yeah, you know what? I love that we were starting to talk about it, before the podcast, we were eating lunch. And you talked about constantly pushing in the capacity of ancient grain. And I'd love for you to talk about that. How you will, you are eventually looking to get the price point down

and dramatically increase production. I think you told me you're having 20 people involved in making 2,000 bags, and eventually you'll have eight people involved in making 10,000 bags. Yeah, that's insane. And that will eventually bring the price front down. Going back to that Frito-Lay discussion,

so one of their factories is like a massive automated machine. In contrast, because we didn't have a factory, we couldn't, going back to that story, we couldn't find a factory, we had to do it ourselves. These factories that make everyone's, these are factories that make everyone's food for them. And so they have, I don't know, they're 400,000 square feet. They have huge amounts of equipment. 400,000 square feet? Yeah, we know of one. Some people, the guys that are making our potato chip equipment for an upcoming factory

that we're building, they have an installation in Pennsylvania, 400,000 square feet. It's like casual, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Massive, massive operations. And so there's like, I don't know, a dozen, a hundred, maybe, maybe, probably whatever, a thousand, a very small amount of actual food factories in the country that make the vast majority of packaged foods, your protein bars, all the main same factory or same handful

of factories, candy is same handful of factories, your chips, snacks, cookies, crackers, all of its same handful of factories. And so when you go to the grocery store and you look at this, uh, apparent diversity of options and you think, Oh wow, we really got all the bases covered. I have 20 different cookies that I can choose from. They're probably coming from like three different factories. And so that's just like the reason for this is that food production lends itself to scale.

And so for costs to come down, it's like you really want to be making large quantities at once. And so this was our problem from day one and it's still our problem today. Vanny is a good example. So the potato chips sitting over there. quantities at once. And so this was our problem from day one and it's still our problem today. Vanny is a good example. So the potato chips sitting over there, we make those, we make that eight hours a day on our second shift and we have about 24 people in that crew.

And we make 2000 bags in that shift. So it's like, what is that? Like, why can't I do math? That's like a hundred bags per person. And you're going to transition this to much, much bigger scale. I mean, talk a little bit about how you're going to do that. Yeah, exactly. So you think about, and the reason for this is we have a row of deep fryers and we have baskets and we have like a few like glorified salad spinners

and like pots where we spray filtered water to rinse the potatoes. We got, we have this little potato slicer device, but we have 24 people basically manually frying, like dipping a tray in. And if we're not watching a video, it's like making the frying motion. And then you pull them out, your quality control, you're putting salt in them by hand with a salt shaker, sticking them in bags by hand, sealing them with a machine by hand. And so that is a very labor-intensive process, and that greatly contributes to the expense

of the products. So in contrast, we're looking at some equipment right now. I just got back from visiting the equipment vendor. It's a whole production line for potato chips. This set of machinery does the same process with our same ingredients. And it will, you know, we have to modify some things for tallow compatibility and whatever, but same ingredients.

And it will make, I think, what did I say? It's about 10,000 bags of those chips in an hour. Wow. And eight people run the line. 24 down to eight. Yeah, 2,000 in eight hours to 10,000 in one hour. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, so that's the type of thing that you get

when you're big in the snack industry. And part of the issue is that most startups have some amount of access to that type of scaled manufacturing capacity, because they go to one of the thousand, they're called co-manufacturers, these companies that make food for a lot of different brands. If you can go to one of them, you can benefit from their machinery,

and you can benefit from their economies of scale. But if you're us, and you're over in a commercial kitchen with a bunch of manual fryers doing this by hand. Turkey fryers. You don't get the benefit from any of that. But again, the reason why we do this is because the big factories, they're seed oil factories.

They don't like working with new fangled ingredients, which is ironic because the entire industry of food production 100 years ago was frying everything in tallow. I mean, I completely agree with you. So how do you avoid using artificial additives, preservatives, or other compounds? Because when you look at a commercial chip,

I'm not gonna name any brand names, but everybody knows the brand names. You don't just have the seed oil. You've got the MSG, the monosodium glutamate. You've got the multiple red dyes and other dyes, orange dyes, yellow dyes. Just look at the number of dyes. You often have something called carragean.

You have quote unquote natural flavors, which can be fine, but most of the time, it's sinister cover up for shouldn't be there. And then you have the food dyes. And so when you think about the kind of bomb that you're putting in your body between the seed oils, the eye dyes, table salt, the food dyes, and the monosodium glutamate,

I mean, these things substantially add up, not setting aside the fact that they're not only not organic, but they are GMO, they're part of that, genetically modified. Well, that's a great question, and it often goes under looks, and I think C-dolls are easy to talk about because it's so obvious, they're 20% of calories, I think it's a very high impact thing to look at,

but if we're optimizing, which of course you do, we're looking at everything, right? We want to look at every single thing on that label needs to justify itself, and the short answer how we do this is it's a lot of freaking work, that's how. And that's why no one else does it. Well, it's like very, it's very labor intensive, right? Well, I'll tell you a story.

So our lime chips, which were our second flavor that we ever came out with. And the reason why is because, you know, everyone knows Tostitos lime, hint of lime or whatever. Like it's a very common tortilla chip flavor. So if we're going to make flavors, we're going to branch out, obviously we should go with lime. I thought, okay, that seems easy, it's just one thing,

right, can't be that hard. So I started looking around for lime powders on the internet to try to find a supplier. And I couldn't really find anything. Everything was not organic, and if it was organic, it had maltodextrin or some other filler or whatever. I'm like, huh, that's weird. How do these other people do it?

So then I went to a grocery store, and I went through all, I went to the chip section to look at all the lime chips and we're trying to find out on the ingredient label what they used. Maybe I could copy that. So I forget the exact full list, but basically there's two camps.

You get lime juice powder, which has maltodextrin in it and lime juice. And I think that's probably what Tostitos uses. And then there's, this one shocked me actually. This is, and then the health, some health Yeah, and I think that's probably what just it is uses and then there's this one shocked me Actually, this is and then the the health some health brands, which I don't want to name Yeah, their lime ships were lime oil and citric acid Mmm citric acid as I'm sure we know comes from like these giant bioreactor farms in China It's like black mold basically produces citric acid

So citric acid was there for the sourness and the lime oil was there for that like fragrance of lime But there was no there was no lime in any of these chips And I was just like sitting there like thinking like the healthy chips and the junk chips all the lime flavors There's no limes where the freaking limes and we actually ran a few ads Actually like a while back just where the headline was where is lime? And we showed like our ingredient label and other ones. And so in order to make this work, I had to, I was like, hey, we have to go get some limes. We got some limes, sliced them up with a deli slicer by hand after washing them, organic limes, of course. And then we stuck them in a dehydrator,

like in rows of like little lime disks, like you would see in like a, sometimes you go to a bar, you'll see these dehydrated lime disks. And then we ground them up into a powder. And that was our lime chip for like six months. Wow. Was some guy's full-time job slicing and dehydrating and grinding limes. Yeah, this is a super labor-intensive process. Super labor-intensive.

And then ultimately, we found a guy who has a freeze-drying factory. And I learned about freeze drying. It's better than dehydrating because it preserves the vitamin content. It doesn't likely lead to oxidation because dehydrating, it's not high temperature but it's high enough that it causes oxidation. So like the dehydrated limes,

the slices will be a little brown. But then when we freeze dried them, they remained like pale green. And so vitamin C content is preserved and all that stuff. So then we started freeze drying. And then we kind of outsourced that. But still, the lime powder today remains our single most expensive spice ingredient.

Really? Yeah, it's like $40 a pound. Because you're buying actual? Yeah, because we're buying pounds of organic limes and then grinding them up into a slurry and freeze drying. And freeze drying itself is expensive. Right. So yeah, our lime powder is $40 a pound,

which like that's just a lot of money for spices. But like we said, eventually this is working its way down. Yeah, I think- Because you're going to automation. Yeah, I mean, you get to buy your own freeze dryers. And to be fair, the seasonings themselves, like of course they contribute, but like the seasonings are relatively a relatively small percentage of our overall Like yeah, we look at things that are in some of these other ingredients like MSG

You know which is also seasoning you know the one that's not even glutamine You know very often you'll see carragee in or or other other kinds of binders like a Soy less of thin or yeah, you know something even in Snack foods that are competing with this category. Yeah, well, MSG, that's an easy one. That vegan companies use that to mimic the flavor of cheese because cheese naturally has MSG, it's like the umami flavor or whatever they call it.

And so you'll have, again, don't wanna name names, but you can easily find this if you go to a healthy grocery store. A lot of the vegan cheese or vegan queso this and that whatever like it'll have either MSG right in the label or they use the term yeast extract because yeast extract yeast produce MSG and so if you take an extract of yeast yeah it's MSG it doesn't sound as sinister like yeast that's in bread or that's like that's natural yeah it's like when we put folic acid in the food supply, we call it fortified or enriched, you know?

Ooh, that sounds like a vitamin. Yeah, it's fluorinated water, but it's really fluorosilicic acid water, but if you said fluorosilicic acid, people are like, wow, that sounds... Sketchy. That sounds sketchy. Yeah, so a lot of vegan foods will use, like for example, I actually don't think Doritos, their nacho cheese flavor has MSG. I'm pretty, like they actually have cheese in it. I'm pretty sure.

One of them, one of them does. I'm sure one of them does. It's gotta be Cheetos or can we look that up? Yeah. But, but, but yeah, you'll see yeast extract. And so I think that's a big one. The food colorings, I think there's just no excuse for that. Yeah.

Like I think our cobanero chip is spicy. It's like, I don't know, tomato. Yeah, you've got red and salt. Yeah. You've got, yeah. Yeah, there's tomato powder. There's beet powder for a little bit of sweetness. And that creates a pretty nice color, honestly.

Like, I don't even. Not only does it create a good color. See, I think this, I think the disuniformity brings us back to something that's more in its natural form. Like avocados are not perfect when you cut them open. One of the things I notice about seed oils, for example in the grocery store, you ever just notice how you go down the aisle

and the Wesson oil or the vegetable oil, they're all exactly the same color, exactly. And they're exactly the same consistency. They have that beautiful yellow hue to them. They got the heart healthy label on there. And that's not how things occur in nature. I mean, if you compressed 100 or 1000 seeds and produce the oils and you put them in all these bottles,

they'd be all kinds of different colors. Yeah, it should be natural variation. Some would be light, some would be gray, some would be darker. We have this with our potatoes, for example. We have two harvests. There's two different suppliers, one's in Idaho, the other's I think Florida, I forget. So we have potatoes for six months. They're stored well, but because we don't use toxic storage methods, so there's this

thing called CIPC, I actually forget what it stands for, 85% of potatoes in the US are sprayed with CIPC, and it prevents the spores or the eyes from sprouting. Because obviously there's only two potato harvests. If you want potatoes all year round, you got to store them somewhere. And so we have to prevent them from sputting. And so if you just like gas them with this toxic crap, like yeah, you can prevent them from sputting. And so if you just like gas them with this toxic crap, like yeah, you can prevent them from creating eyes, but we can't, we won't use that stuff.

So yeah, you can do things with temperature and humidity and keep them dark, right? Potatoes actually are sensitive to light, like literally, they will wake up. So you have to trick them into thinking they're underground, all these things, but even still, they will change. And over time, some of the starch is turned into sugar in potatoes. And so that creates like, there's

about a six month cycle of variation or potatoes where you'll see brown spots and whatever stuff. But it's like, you want a potato chip that's not made with crap. That's what you're going to get. It's actual potatoes. It's like french fries in a bag. I think someone said that earlier today. Like that's what it tastes like. That's what it is. It's not like Frito like lays where everything is the same shape and color and texture and size and consistency. It's like, that's not, that's not how food works.

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feel the difference. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. Now for you, where is this? So Ancient Grain is the parent company. Ancient Crunch. Ancient Crunch, sorry, is the parent company. And I almost, and I like that because I identify most with your Masa brand, and then when I started, you know,

eating the candy and feeding those to my kids, to my family, it's actually a great way to make, I used it this season when I made party platters before for the holidays, because people are always like, how can you make a healthy platter for the holidays? And the interesting thing is you can actually recreate it

in a way that is really nutrient dense and healthy and kind of guilt free. And it's not like any compromises, like it's actually good. And it actually looks really good too. It's aesthetically pleasing, you can lay it all out on there. I get a lot of these raw cheeses from my local farm here and local Amish farm, which I love, and yours make a nice mix with that. But where is the brand going? I mean, is this an expansive snack category that you actually want, you know,

Ancient Crunch to expand into? Are you going to get into other? Yeah, so we started out with Masa. That was, And back when we started, I was like, this is literally, we're only doing original, one flavor. I didn't even have ambition for other flavors. I'm like, what other flavors do you need? Yeah. Tortilla, that's it. But then I'm like, oh wait, people buy like a billion dollars of Doritos or God knows

what, $2 billion of Doritos a year. So I'm like, hmm, obviously people want the spices. And the fun thing about the spices is that there are no artificial flavors in the sense that like the flavor like there are artificial substances that create flavors But the flavors are all real there's vanilla in which creates a vanilla flavor, right? There's lime oil and citric acid which creates a lime flavor, but none of the flavors It's like is there a fake color all the colors exist like they're just real colors Yeah, it's like so the the fun thing about spices is that any flavor that exists in the junk food world

We can just make with real stuff in any in most cases It'll taste even better because we're not using the reason why they do their fake stuff is not because they want a fake flavor They just want to save money And so if we're not beholden to this idea of like we have to get the cheapest thing Possible in every single way because we don't single way, because we want the realest thing possible, not the cheapest thing. We can make better flavors, right? Like the cheese that is going to go into

the one day mosa nacho cheese flavor is going to be better cheese than the cheese that goes into Doritos, right? And it's still going to taste like cheese, it'll just taste better. So we realized we could do the flavors. So then we got to thinking with this whole, the whole long-term idea here is that there's a certain,

like American snacking is like a big part of American culture. You go to the center of the grocery store, there's like four aisles dedicated to these things comes in bags and boxes that people snack on. And that's what makes up a lot of our calories, for better or for worse. And so our goal is to... For worse. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not as so yeah. The snack is also an activity is like, yeah.

I mean, I actually don't really snack on these things. I eat them as part of my meals. It sounds like you do too. We had lunch earlier today. But regardless, Americans buy this stuff. They want this stuff. And so my job is to go in and say, all right, that's next. We're gonna do that, but like make it real.

If it's bread, it's going to be sourdough. It's, you know, you got the idea. So our whole goal with Ancient Crunch is to like have a portfolio of these mini companies, brands of a classic American snack product that people really enjoy. That's not going anywhere anytime soon. We're just making it, like turning up all the dials on the real food level

and making it as best as it possibly can be. Yeah, and talk a little bit about the sourcing of the actual raw ingredient, the corn, and what are the detriments of, I've talked about this before, but I love your opinion on the detriments of the genetically modified corns, and this area of snack foods, wheat, soy, corn,

these are some of the most, not only pesticide-laden and chemical-laden crops, but also the majority, if not all of them, are genetically modified. Why is that an issue? So I think the main issue from my perspective understanding with GMOs is that it's not to say because a lot of people are like, you don't believe in science, like GMOs, it's like, what's wrong with that? And it's like, and then some people say you're playing God. And it's like, that's not the strongest argument. In my opinion, the problem with GMOs is not

that they're modified. It's that what are they modified for? And the vast majority of cases, GMO crops are modified to be more resistant to pesticides. And that's pretty much it. Round up ready. So more resistant to pesticides means that the farmers can put more poison on it, and that means you can eat more poison and the crop doesn't die. So it's not like if someone were to GMO something

and like make it more nutrient dense, I'd say maybe, but also food when properly grown is as nutrient dense as it needs to be. Like it's already there for us. Like nature put it there. Like you don't need to make it better. Like we're not going to put more vitamin A in beef liver, right? There's enough where it is. So I think that's the main issue with GMOs and corn is an especially nasty crop. Like parts of the Midwest are just like the groundwater is literally polluted with atrazine and like glyphosate is everywhere. And it's like, it's not just the food. It's also the like corn farmers have a lot of get

cancer at higher rates than, you know, other professions. It's like absolutely devastating. And I think it's either only 1% or 7% of corn in America is not GMO. And among non-GMO corn, a lot of it's still not organic. And so I think for us, organic corn is like the absolute bare minimum standard. Over the next two, three years, I was mentioning this before, I want all our corn to be regenerative organic, which is possible.

Yeah, I love that. You're going for organic and then eventually regenerative organic. And a lot of what we talked about before the podcast was what you're doing with your factory in Pennsylvania, you know, and the automation really getting the labor costs down, which is your highest cost, cost of goods sold now. And once this happens, do you foresee, you know, price points in your products dropping? Yeah, I mean, across the board.

And availability increasing because you're actually producing more. I think the main thing, yeah, I mean, it's kind of supply and demand at this point, right? Like, we're really tapped. I think we made, we can make, I don't know, 100,000-ish approximate bags a month, and you know, we can get a little bit more out of that

with our manual methods. However, the real issue is that we, like why are we not on shelf at some big grocery stores? I don't have enough product to put there. Right. Right. So I think that's the real thing is like the more availability is like the laws of supply and demand just kick in.

As of right now, it's like, oh, why is it, you know, why is this flavor out of stock or whatever? It's like, I can barely keep up. I think so today's Friday. High class problem there. Right, today's Friday, we're making chips that were likely sold, I think, Wednesday, and we're shipping them today.

So it's like a two day kind of backlog. So it's like, I can't keep up. I mean, I'm trying. That's great though. You know, it's amazing to see products and services like this getting back into demand. And, you know, I'm a huge fan, my audience is a huge fan. I love that you're on the seed oil bandwagon

and the artificial ingredients bandwagon and the non-GMO bandwagon because you didn't just fix one of the problems, you fixed all the problems. And, you know, and first of all, and I really wanna, I appreciate you coming on the podcast. I'd like to actually do a follow up with you as you start to expand, you know, your lines and whatnot.

But every guest that I bring on to the podcast, I sort of wind things down by asking them the same question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this question. But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I can't, I'd be lying if I said I didn't prepare for this because I was listening to your episodes in the car and I'm like, oh, okay, that one. I actually think I thought about this before though, in my head, even when I heard the question for the first time, I was like, I know the answer, my answer. It would be potentiality.

So I think organisms are designed to be able to do a certain set of things inherently. And as humans, we can typically stretch the amount of things that we can do. But at the same time, we can also shrink them, right? If you're sick or you have brain fog or you're overweight, that limits, say, your ability to play with your kids or go climb a mountain, or go mountain biking,

or do whatever. Like, if you have brain fog, it limits your ability to, like, I don't know, read books, or do play chess, or any sort of, you know, mental physical activities kind of things. And so, I think as we're talking, especially in the realm of bio, hacking, health optimization, all this stuff,

the goal, of course, we're always talking about how to make ourselves healthier, but for me, it's like, once I'm healthy, then what? I don't just, not just, I want to be healthy just to sit around and be healthy all day. I want to go do stuff, you know? Right, right, sit around and be healthy all day. Right, and so I think we want to be

maximizing our ability to go do stuff, basically, and that's what I think, it's easy to forget in the health space where I was talking about trends and how to optimize this variable, which is all important. But then at the end of the day, how can we take our health and mental acuity and all the stuff that we have that we're frankly blessed with relative to the standard state of health

in the modern world and do that and do something useful with that. So that's how I answer that. That's amazing, brother. Steven, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. I'm excited to see where this journey goes for us. I'm a big fan of what you're doing. My audience is a huge fan.

I appreciate more and more companies like yourself coming in and being diligent about their ingredients, being diligent about the way that they're sourcing their nutrients and actually making nutrient-dense foods. Because what's really, really ironic about what you're doing is you're just circumventing the system and just going back to the basics. I literally invented nothing.

Yeah, that's what I mean. You're just going back to the basics. Yeah, it's like I am a time traveler from 1940 and I make tortilla chips and potato chips and here they are, present day humans. Yeah, yeah. Well, brother, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. We're going to have you back again.

And until next time, guys, that's just science.