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On this episode of the podcast, Brett and Casey Ruff's discuss Brett's story from putting his Ulcerative Colitis in remission to starting the Meat Mafia and launching Noble Origins. If you haven't heard Brett's full story, he lays it all out in this conversation, enjoy!
This was from Brett's appearance on Casey Ruff's podcast The Boundless Body Podcast. For more on Casey, check out his site for his personal training here called The Boundless Body.
Intro:
The hosts introduce guest Brett Ender, co-founder of the popular Meat Mafia podcast and new supplement company Noble Origins. They provide background on Brett's journey from being an athlete struggling with autoimmune disease to finding health through a carnivore diet.
This was from Brett's appearance on Casey Ruff's podcast The Boundless Body Podcast. For more on Casey, check out his site for his personal training here called The Boundless Body.
Intro:
The hosts introduce guest Brett Ender, co-founder of the popular Meat Mafia podcast and new supplement company Noble Origins. They provide background on Brett's journey from being an athlete struggling with autoimmune disease to finding health through a carnivore diet.
Brett's Healing Journey:
Brett shares how ulcerative colitis derailed his college athletic career. Despite medications, he still experienced flare ups. In 2019 he tried the carnivore diet on the advice of Dr. Paul Saladino's appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. Eating fatty cuts of meat dramatically improved his symptoms and inflammation. Brett eventually stopped all medications under doctor supervision, realizing food can be powerful medicine.
Brett shares how ulcerative colitis derailed his college athletic career. Despite medications, he still experienced flare ups. In 2019 he tried the carnivore diet on the advice of Dr. Paul Saladino's appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. Eating fatty cuts of meat dramatically improved his symptoms and inflammation. Brett eventually stopped all medications under doctor supervision, realizing food can be powerful medicine.
Starting Meat Mafia:
After college, Brett reconnected with his old baseball teammate Harry. They shared interests in fitness, nutrition, and carnivore. Training for an Ironman triathlon cemented their bond. This inspired them to start the Meat Mafia brand on Twitter in 2021, writing educational threads on the food system. They built an audience of 130k followers. In March 2022, they launched their podcast which now has over 200 episodes.
After college, Brett reconnected with his old baseball teammate Harry. They shared interests in fitness, nutrition, and carnivore. Training for an Ironman triathlon cemented their bond. This inspired them to start the Meat Mafia brand on Twitter in 2021, writing educational threads on the food system. They built an audience of 130k followers. In March 2022, they launched their podcast which now has over 200 episodes.
Food System Revelations:
Brett explains his learnings about the corporatization of food. A few big companies control most brands, using cheap processed ingredients to maximize profits. Government subsidies exacerbate this issue. It has come at the expense of small farmers and makes consumers disconnected from their food. Brett recommends seeking out local ranchers and building personal relationships.
Brett explains his learnings about the corporatization of food. A few big companies control most brands, using cheap processed ingredients to maximize profits. Government subsidies exacerbate this issue. It has come at the expense of small farmers and makes consumers disconnected from their food. Brett recommends seeking out local ranchers and building personal relationships.
Visiting Regenerative Ranches:
Brett describes visiting regenerative farms and seeing farmers' passion and care. The symbiosis between the animals and land was eye-opening. Local community-supported ranches provide nutrient-dense foods and value beyond just food. Brett encourages listeners to visit local ranches and see the effort behind quality regenerative products.
Brett describes visiting regenerative farms and seeing farmers' passion and care. The symbiosis between the animals and land was eye-opening. Local community-supported ranches provide nutrient-dense foods and value beyond just food. Brett encourages listeners to visit local ranches and see the effort behind quality regenerative products.
Introducing Noble Origins:
Brett introduces his new company, Noble Origins, created alongside Meat Mafia co-founder Harry and friend Colin Stuckert. They wanted to produce a physical product representing their nutrition philosophy. Noble Origins makes powders containing beef organs and collagenous animal parts like bone and blood. This provides nutritional density lacking in muscle meat alone. The powders aim to conveniently deliver benefits of nose-to-tail carnivore eating.
Brett introduces his new company, Noble Origins, created alongside Meat Mafia co-founder Harry and friend Colin Stuckert. They wanted to produce a physical product representing their nutrition philosophy. Noble Origins makes powders containing beef organs and collagenous animal parts like bone and blood. This provides nutritional density lacking in muscle meat alone. The powders aim to conveniently deliver benefits of nose-to-tail carnivore eating.
Building the Brand:
Brett discusses their modern, mainstream branding for Noble, unlike many primal/rustic brands in the space. This attracts a wider audience beyond just hardcore carnivores. They want to keep the product line simple, focusing on creating the most nutrient-dense powders possible. The positive feedback at KetoCon was rewarding. While building a successful business, their mission is spreading regenerative nutrition.
Brett discusses their modern, mainstream branding for Noble, unlike many primal/rustic brands in the space. This attracts a wider audience beyond just hardcore carnivores. They want to keep the product line simple, focusing on creating the most nutrient-dense powders possible. The positive feedback at KetoCon was rewarding. While building a successful business, their mission is spreading regenerative nutrition.
Corporate vs. Entrepreneurship:
The hosts ask Brett about transitioning from corporate life to entrepreneurship. Brett weighs the trade-offs. He advises assessing your risk appetite and timeline for generating income. Finding a meaningful mission is key to overcoming uncertainty. While difficult, for Brett the fulfillment of pursuing his passion outweighs corporate comforts. He encourages those feeling an entrepreneurial “itch” to take the leap.
Connect with Meat Mafia:
Instagram - Meat Mafia
Twitter - Meat Mafia
YouTube - Meat Mafia
Connect with Noble Protein:
Website - Noble Protein
Twitter - Noble Protein
Instagram - Noble Protein
SPONSORS
The hosts ask Brett about transitioning from corporate life to entrepreneurship. Brett weighs the trade-offs. He advises assessing your risk appetite and timeline for generating income. Finding a meaningful mission is key to overcoming uncertainty. While difficult, for Brett the fulfillment of pursuing his passion outweighs corporate comforts. He encourages those feeling an entrepreneurial “itch” to take the leap.
Connect with Meat Mafia:
Instagram - Meat Mafia
Twitter - Meat Mafia
YouTube - Meat Mafia
Connect with Noble Protein:
Website - Noble Protein
Twitter - Noble Protein
Instagram - Noble Protein
SPONSORS
- Fond Bone Broth - 15% OFF - REAL bone broth with HIGH-QUALITY ingredients! It’s a daily product for us!
- Fold App - Earn Bitcoin on all of your purchases by using the Fold Debit Card - it's simple, easy, and a fun way to earn bitcoin as you spend money on healthy foods! Use code MEATMAFIA to earn 100,000 sats when you sign up for Fold's FREE bitcoin rewards debit card & spend $20 with the card.
- NOBLE ORIGINS Complete and simple, animal-based protein powder with an organ blend for additional nutrition!
AFFILIATES
- LMNT - Electrolyte salts to supplement minerals on low-carb diet
- The Carnivore Bar - CODE MAFIA for 10% OFF - Delicious & convenient Pemmican Bar
- Perennial Pastures - 10% OFF - Regeneratively raised, grass-fed & grass-finished beef from California & Montana
- Farrow Skincare - Use the CODE 'MAFIA' at checkout for 20% OFF
- Heart & Soil - CODE ‘MEATMAFIA10’ for 10% OFF - enhanced nutrition to replace daily vitamins!
- Carnivore Crisps - 10% OFF - Carnivore / Animal-based snacks for eating healthy on the go! CODE: MEATMAFIA
- Pluck Seasoning - 10% OFF - Nutrient-dense seasoning with INSANE flavor! CODE: MAFIA
- We Feed Raw 25% OFF your first order - ancestrally consistent food for your dog! CODE 'MEATMAFIA25'
Creators & Guests
What is The Meat Mafia Podcast?
The Meat Mafia Podcast is hosted by @MeatMafiaBrett and @MeatMafiaHarry.
We're two guys who walked away from the typical path to carve out something different. Based in Austin, we’re on a mission to figure out what it takes to live a fulfilled life in a world that often pushes us away from meaning.
We have conversations with people we believe can help us, diving deep into the pillars of health, wealth, and faith, as the cornerstones of our mission.
Whether it's challenging the modern food system, questioning conventional health advice, or building something from the ground up, we're here to explore the tough questions and share the lessons we’ve learned along the way.
If you're tired of the noise and ready to find meaning, tune in and join us!
Hey, what's up, Casey? What's up, Brett? How are you? Good, man. How you doing? Good. Good to see you again. Good to see you. I know we didn't get to catch up too, too long at KetoCon, but I was glad that we at least got to put a face to a name, so. Well, I was going to tell you on the, I'm still going to tell you on the air.
I only got to meet you in person on like Sunday afternoon because you guys were so fucking busy. Like the whole time, I kept passing by your booth. There's always like two or three deep, like waiting to talk to you. So. It took a while. I know what it was like. We had, um, we hosted that Regen Ag panel, and then I was on like a healing stories panel too.
So I'm like prepping for those. We're, we're launching Noble. So it was just a lot for one weekend, but it was really fun at the same time. I was going to say launching your product to that day too, would have been a huge challenge. A hundred percent, but it was great though. It's like we need those conferences.
I feel like we've forgotten how important the in person connection actually is. So. I'm sure for you, it's like, there's so many guests that you've had on that you've never gotten to meet. You just go up to them, you have conversations, it's great. Yeah, no, it's amazing. Like, walking into the conference, the first person I see is Sally Norton.
And so I just tap her on the shoulder and I'm like, Hey Sally, I interviewed you last year. And she goes, Casey! And gives me this huge hug. And it's like, people like that, like, fuck. Everybody in this space is so cool, so approachable, so fun to talk to. And I, I think it really builds that sense of community.
Especially in Austin, there's something special about that place. Yeah, definitely, man. Yeah, it's like there's no reason for Austin to be the hub that it is. It's like 110 degrees in the summer, middle of Texas, no ocean, but the people are so amazing. It's what makes it like an oasis that people are flocking to, you know?
Yeah, for sure. I left there feeling very optimistic, like, okay, we're gonna be okay. Like, if there's places like this that exist, we'll be all right. Totally. Casey, remind me again, where are you? I'm just outside of Salt Lake. Okay, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet. Yeah, suburbs there. Um, cool, man. Well, thanks again for doing this.
Um, is there anything in particular you want to make sure that we hit? I'm just basically gonna blob you, you know, easy, easy pitches here. No, dude, I think that, um, no, I feel like whatever you want to talk about, whether it's like, you know, my healing story, me, the brand, I'm, I'm, I'm an open book. If you want to talk about Noble, we could plug Noble.
Absolutely. Yeah, I'm an open book brother. Cool, we'll hit all of that. Um, let's see, I think we're scheduled about four weeks for release, um, on the podcast. We do as many as you do. Um, we do three days a week. Um, but I'll have this all done by today. So, all the editing, processing, um, all of it I'll have done today, social media stuff.
So, there's zero obligation whatsoever, but I'll send you everything today. And just know that if there's something that you want to do with it, if it has use for you, you can edit it, you can cut me out completely, you can use the video for whatever, like, you can use any of it whenever you like. There's, again, no obligation, but if it, you know, is, is good for like a bonus episode on your show, or you want to use it for marketing somewhere else for Noble, that's, it's just totally fine.
Perfect, I appreciate that, man. Cool. Um, and then, yeah, we don't have bosses or sponsors or anything, so say whatever, you can cuss, you can just do whatever, we'll make sure we plug, uh, yeah, let's make sure we plug Meet Mafia and Noble. Cool. Done. Done. Cool. Awesome. Um, so everything that I do is live. So my intro music will play live.
Um, so it'd be an awkward, like 25, 30 seconds on your end. I'll fade it down, get you introduced, and then we'll just go from there. That sounds great, dude. Appreciate it, Casey. All right, brother. Any, uh, hard stops? No, probably like an hour ish would be good. Yeah, that's what I was planning. Perfect. Okay.
Awesome.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Balanced Body Radio. I'm your host, Casey Rust, and today we have another amazing guest introduced to you now. Brett Ender is the co host of the Meat Mafia podcast, one of my favorite podcasts to listen to, which addresses fundamental problems in our food and healthcare system.
Their principles are simple, eat real foods, buy locally, and cook your own meals. Brett is an advocate, uh, an advocate of carnivore and animal based forms of eating. Brett embarked on a healing journey in 2016 that would see him hospitalized from a debilitating ulcerative colitis and taking an extremely expensive drug once every six to eight weeks.
Wow. He eventually changed his approach and evolved to having zero signs of inflammation or microinflammation, mostly due to adopting an animal based diet. Brett ended up going full carnivore and within two weeks saw a complete abatement of symptoms. His journey led him into a deep exploration of health and nutrition, food systems, and regenerative agriculture.
Today, he is half of the Meat Mafia duo, alongside his friend Harry Gray, where they explore nutrition and food with guests on their podcast. Brett is incredibly inspirational, and throughout his journey, he has made catalyzing change simple and actionable. Brett Anderwin, absolute honor it is to welcome you to Balanced Body Radio.
Hey, Sam, so pumped to be here, man. Thank you for having me on. It's such an honor to have you. I kind of butchered your introduction there a little bit, but we're going to roll with it. Not at all. I think that's what makes it genuine. I think about that sometimes when we record the intros to our show. It's like.
You stumble over a word or two and you're like, well, damn, should I release it? And it's like, yeah, you sounded great. It's genuine. It, you know, it just makes it more authentic to the audience. So I love it. So you do about as many podcasts as we do. We've done it just a little bit longer than you have. Do you still get a little bit of, I don't know if it's imposter syndrome or just a little bit of like, what am I doing here?
I don't have a voice. Like, do you ever get a little bit of that nervousness? Every week, I would say, honestly, and I think because, you know, you were saying you've been doing the show a little bit longer than we have. We started the podcast in March of last year. So March of 2022. But for us, it was, you know, similar to you.
It's like, we just wanted to kind of answer this fundamental question of like, what's gone wrong with our food system. And, you know, Harry, who I co host the show with, we played collegiate baseball together. We're best friends. We're business partners. We joke in like the stepbrother scene with the bunk beds.
That's kind of what we're like, because we spend so much time together, but you know, we're not nutritionists, we're not doctors. We don't have degrees in exercise physiology. You know, we're just two guys that are just curious about like, what's gone wrong. We both had our own health journeys. You know, the only way to kind of overcome that imposter syndrome is like you have to speak to these experts and ask the questions that you want to know to just try and spread this information as far and as wide as possible.
So for me, it's like I try and take the emphasis off of myself and just realize like, look, I'm trying to do a show because I'm trying to help people. And if I can lean into that, just trying to be confident, ask good questions, someone's going to gain some type of value out of it. So I focus on that versus like.
You know, imposter syndrome, or what am I doing here? Because it's so easy for that to happen, especially in your first couple years of creating something from scratch. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's your favorite author, and one of my favorite authors, Stephen Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art, and really talks about the difference between being an amateur and being a professional.
And, you know, whether either one of us is a professional or not is debatable, but we are showing up and doing the work, which you have to do. Like, if you're an I'm an amateur cyclist. If it's raining outside, I don't have to go cycle. Like if I was a professional, it, it wouldn't matter what the weather is.
I would have to go cycle. It's a totally different thing. No, it's, it's such a good point. And I've been thinking a lot about, you know, 'cause in his book it's easy to read it and be like, all right, well what am I actually a professional in? You know, am I a professional in cycling, in my professional and podcasting?
Am I professional And. You know, carnivore expertise. And I feel like it's easy to just take the pressure off and be like, just be a professional in life in general. And, you know, I see that happen every day where it's like amateur version of Brett is like, okay, I know I'm going to record at least three episodes a week.
You know, I'm trying to scale a media company. I'm trying to grow a supplement company. I'm trying to build our brand. There's a lot of things that are part of that process every single day. And so I know that if I don't go to the gym at 6am every single day, I'm just not going to do it. I'm going to get out of the office around like six, seven o'clock.
I'm going to cook a meal. I'm going to be on the couch. And it's, you know, as much as I want to fantasize when the alarm goes off and be like, Oh, I can go at night. That's never going to happen. So it's like that professional mindset of like, no, we get seven, eight, seven hours of sleep. Maybe we're not going to get it every single night, but when the alarm goes off, I'm just going to go to the gym.
I'm going to get my workout in. And even in just doing something, even if it's just walking and getting a little sweat on the treadmill for 20 minutes and stretching, that's going to set my mind to kind of be that professional for the rest of the day. So it's like catalyzing that change day in and day out.
Yeah, no, I absolutely love that. And there's nothing wrong with being, you know, amateurs in certain parts of our lives. And I do think if you as a professional podcaster, I think you guys do such a wonderful job. There's that interesting stat that there's like 40% of podcasts only have like 10 or less episodes, meaning people start one and stop one.
You've been on both sides of that coin. Haven't you started a podcast? They didn't have very many episodes that eventually kind of sizzled out. You do your research here. I'm impressed. I'm really impressed by that. No one's actually asked me that before, but yeah, so, um, you know, I think with my story, it's like, I've always kind of had this burning desire to create something of value.
Um, you know, I come from a corporate background. I was in sales, uh, graduated college 2017, went right into my first sales job, and I loved it because I was competitive, and I think sometimes we conflate passion for being proficient at something. And so for me, it was like, I really did enjoy building relationships with people, but I think I just trained myself to get good at it, but I wasn't.
Incredibly passionate about it. You know, in college I was listening to the Jocko podcast. I was listening to Tim Ferriss. I was listening to Joe Rogan. I started getting into carnivore. I started seeing all these nutrition brands pop up. And I remember thinking in the back of my mind, it would be so cool to just have, like, even like carve out my own little small piece of the pie and have my own following.
So in the middle of COVID, everything was uprooted. My buddy, um, Eddie, who I played baseball with in high school, we decided, we decided to start a show called the arena podcast. Great name, by the way, great name. Thank you. Maybe there could have been, there could have been something there if we didn't stop.
But, you know, like, like you said, the statistic is that 90% of shows don't make it past the fourth episode. So I think we maybe made it to episode five. And then we recorded a bunch of episodes and backlogged it. He was, I was doing more of like the guest outreach. He was doing more of like the back end editing.
Our schedules got really busy. We ended up having a backlog of like six episodes that we recorded. And then we kind of sat there with this overwhelming backlog. And to be honest with you, it was like, we just didn't want it bad enough. And the podcast kind of just died and fell by the wayside, but there was still a lot of benefit that came from that because it put me in the arena.
No pun intended of like actually had to create something and at least go zero to one. And it ignited that spark that always stayed with me. So that when me Mafia was really a thing, I was like, look, I've done this before. I've learned from my mistakes and now like, let's put everything into this and just see what we can do in a year.
And just that effort alone. It's like, dude, you can change your month in three to six, three to six months. You can change your entire life. I really believe that. Cause that's what Harry and I have done. That's what you've done. And countless of other creators have done the same thing. Yeah, that's amazing.
I was just thinking like all of those episodes that you made before, even though that show wasn't allowed to continue, you, you, that wasn't a waste, right? You've got some experience and, you know, created that spark. Like you said, you guys came onto the scene. I feel like I've been pretty plugged into the low carbohydrate ketogenic carnivore space for several years.
I've been carnivore for over four years now, all of a sudden in 2022, I started seeing these anonymous guys. Meat Mafia, who the hell are these guys? They're doing these great podcasts, these great posts on Twitter. You guys came out of nowhere. Yeah, we did, and I think that just shows, it's like, the internet has kind of like, taken down all these barriers to entry, where it's like, you don't have to be super plugged in, you don't have to be super connected, it's like, if you write really good content in a way that appeals to people, it's like, anyone can scale and grow following.
And to your point, Casey, you know, Harry and I have been practitioners and really dialed in with nutrition carnivore animal protein for a few years. Um, when I graduated college in 2017 like I'd mentioned, I had some pretty serious health issues I had an autoimmune disease called ulcerative colitis. And essentially my colon, my GI tract was so inflamed from, you know, partially genetics, partially the food I was eating, the lifestyle I was eating, drinking too much alcohol, chronically stressed out, you know, I ended up losing 30 pounds, I was shitting blood 20 times a day, and I was on these medications, um, that cost, 400, 000 per year.
Um, it was like 80 K a pop per infusion that I would get every eight weeks. And I was told I was going to be on those medications for the rest of my life because autoimmune diseases are quote unquote incurable and, um, started coming around to this carnivore diet in 2019, you know, cooking my meals, eating really good quality, fatty meat, saturated fat, and staying consistent with it.
And lo and behold, my stomach starts to get better. My inflammation goes away. My skin gets better. My anxiety goes away. And I'm going to point, you know, I got a colonoscopy in 2021 where my doctor was like, look, your inflammation is gone. Your micro inflammation is gone. You clearly take care of yourself.
You're a young guy. You know, I trust you to go off of these medications and continue the lifestyle that you're living. And so that for me was like, all right, food really is medicine. And I am a direct example of someone that doesn't have a degree. But I'm a practitioner in this movement. I've proven that the body can heal.
There are millions of people out there that have autoimmune diseases or different types of chronic diseases that don't think it's possible to heal these things through food, diet, lifestyle, all these different levers that we can pull. And so Harry and I basically said, you know, we have an obligation to just.
Go on Twitter and start just creating some content and see how it resonates with people. And our medium was writing these informational threads where we would write stories essentially about the food system. You know, I told my story about how I helped heal my stomach. I told the story of like, you know, Ancel Keys.
How did raw milk become demonized? How did saturated fats become demonized and seed oils became so popularized? Things like that. And people really started gravitating towards the stories. And, you know, now we're at a point where we have 130, 000 followers. I think on Twitter, we have 221 episodes of the podcast recorded.
And I'm not saying that to brag about what we're doing. I'm just saying that like, when you actually have that passion and you apply your attention and intensity towards something, and you put out really good quality content, people will gravitate towards it and you will scale an audience and you can do that full time as well.
That's why it's so powerful. Yeah, that's amazing. I definitely want to deep dive a little bit more into your personal story. I couldn't agree more and you never know what doors are going to open up eventually because you at least made a start. We both found out about the carnivore podcast or the carnivore diet the same way through the Joe Rogan podcast and Sean Baker.
And I remember an episode that somebody else, I can't remember who the guest was back in 2018 saying like, look, it's 2018. There's not a lot of rules. There's not a lot of limitations. Like if you want to start a business, You can watch YouTube videos on a Saturday or on the evenings in the evenings and start a business like you can learn these things.
You can put out content. You can start shows. There's nothing really stopping you. And so I really love how you guys were able to create that content and start with you. Um, what you created, which is absolutely amazing. Um, I do want to ask who came up with the name, meet mafia. Oh, it's such a good question.
So the story is that Harry, Harry was the, Harry quit his corporate job in the fall of 2021 and started taking this like Twitter writing course. And one of the things that the course recommended is to kind of pick a like anonymous name. And he initially picked the name Cannoli Clemenza. I don't know why he picked this like Godfather.
I don't know why he chose Cannoli. And then when we started realizing that we were going to be writing about nutrition, we're like, well, probably Carney Clemenza is a much better name. And I'm like, well, I want to, I want to start writing about this too. So I was like, what's another good godfather name that has pop.
I was like, so lots. So that's it. So I picked a lot. So, and then the initial, the first name was food mafia and we were like, that's okay. But meat mafia has way better pop. So we were like the food mafia for a couple of weeks. We changed the meat mafia. And it was kind of just a joke, but it was really like this creative outlet where like I'm working this corporate job.
I'm really passionate about nutrition. I was almost like just bursting at the inseams just to be able to share some of this stuff and create something. So for me, it was like for the first eight months, we didn't make a dollar off of Twitter. It was like, we were just, we just had this desire to create and share information.
So I basically, I basically dedicated myself to writing threads as if it was a second job. It was like, I would take my sales calls. either before work, after work, or during work, I would write threads, I would do research, or I would record podcasts. Like June of 2022, I looked this up, we did 35 shows in a month, so I was like making up all these excuses to my job, why I couldn't make meetings, I was like faking doctor's appointments, and like, you probably thought I was like, chronically ill, but um, you know, you gotta do what you gotta do to build something out from zero to one, and that's really what we did.
So another, another lesson too is like, There wasn't a ton of thought behind it. It was like the brand is just something that's really developed organically over time. And you don't have to be perfect. Just be good enough and start putting something out and just trust that if you put the reps in, you're going to iterate, you're going to improve and you're going to end up in a point that you're really proud of.
I love that. I've never heard you talk about that, actually, so I really appreciate that. It was an honest question. Let's go back and talk about your personal history. You grew up very athletic. You played baseball. What was it like to feel like you were living a fit life, what would seem like a healthy life, but also have a debilitating condition?
Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. And I think that I just justified everything that I did under the alien, like under the identity of I'm athletic, I'm a high level athlete. So therefore it's like calories in calories out, it's all going to fuel my performance. And so didn't know how to cook anything, was taking like these synthetic pre workouts, post workout drinks, you know, ordering pizzas at two o'clock at night after getting drunk on a Saturday, because that's like, the college lifestyle is probably the unhealthiest lifestyle that you can live.
And I think about just like the shape that we're in now where You know, kids are spending, going into debt, paying 85k a year for some liberal, liberal arts degree where they're essentially just binge drinking on the weekends, they're not really learning anything, um, and they're kind of leaning into a lot of these unhealthy experiences, and I think that was really what kind of like, was representative of my collegiate career.
So yeah, it was a calories in, calories out thing. You know, I looked aesthetic enough on the outside. You know, I was a high level athlete. I had, you know, I think I had 12 division one scholarships. You know, I first played baseball at Seton Hall, which was a division one school in New Jersey. I transferred to BAPS, which is a small division three business school based out of Boston, Massachusetts.
And I kind of went from. because I loved it to mor like the type of
person, my gen stress in my stomach, whe speaking, whether there's issue that's going on. It to the signs of wh
And when I was interning in 2016, I was 21 years old. I started noticing blood in my stool for the first time. And I just, you know, I didn't think anything of it. It was probably just a dumb, naive kid that thought he was invincible. And I just kept pushing those symptoms off, pushing those symptoms off.
And it was like, the urgency to go to the bathroom was more extreme. There was more blood. It just, it just kept progressing really quickly. The last day of my internship, I ended up getting rushed to the hospital in New Jersey, um, and I was going to the bathroom like 20 to 30 times a day at that point, and I was down 30 pounds.
I was, you know, I was walking around at like 180, 185 back then. I got down to like 150, essentially looked like a skeleton of myself, and went to the hospital, got diagnosed with UC, put on all these drugs, and that was basically That was essentially my destiny. And I think someone that's listening to this is like, well, how could you let it get to that point?
And the issue is that especially young men, we're not taught to have this intuitive sense of like what actually makes our body feel good. We just processed foods are everywhere. We eat for convenience. We eat for indulgence, enjoyment. We don't have this internal sense of like what foods actually work for my body.
What's going to heal me? What's going to make me feel good? What's going to give me those incredible energy levels, make my gut feel really good? And I just fell into that camp of like, well, I'm just going to do what everyone else does. And I literally can't do what everyone else does because I have like a genetic deep.
disposition to some of these autoimmune conditions, and I just found myself in a really bad place. What is your personal life at this point? So my personal life is, you know, I'm 21, I'm single, I'm in New York City for the first time interning in a financial services firm, and I'm like going on dates, basically making up reasons for why I have to go to the bathroom for the third time on the date.
So I'm like, this girl probably thinks I have like a coke addiction or something because I'm going to the bathroom. Three, you know, but it's like, it's embarrassing for men. It's like your, your life basically becomes revolved around where is the nearest bathroom Like I remember when I would intern from, uh, I was living with my parents in Jersey and I was working in the city.
That train ride is like an hour and a half. When you're inflamed, that's a long time to not have access to a toilet. I remember one time I was literally on the toilet for like the entirety of the train ride, which was an hour and a half because I couldn't get off because my stomach was so inflamed. I get off the train.
I go immediately across the platform and I just take the next train back home in the opposite direction. Cause I'm like, I literally can't function and do my job. And so it was at that point, I was like, all right. You're clearly past the point of repair. And then it was like a couple of days after that, I ended up just going, you know, right to the hospital, but it was almost like it took, it took such an extreme circumstance to understand, like you need extreme change to be able to reverse that.
And these are the things that you need to do to get yourself into that, the life of the health that you deserve. Yeah, that's such a great point. So you started to get on the medication. Did that work initially? It did. It did work initially. And that's, that's actually a good point. Casey is like, I'm not anti biologic.
I'm not Western medicine because there are some cases like myself where it's like you, you've essentially gone past the point of repair and you now need pharmaceutical intervention to be able to get yourself out of the state of being so chronically inflamed. I mean, maybe back in the day, there were cases of people that, you know, went on a carnivore diet or something like that.
I know, um, I know James Salisbury in the late 1800s, who the Salisbury steak is named after people with IBS, IBD, he would have him go carnivore and black coffee. And that really helped a lot, which is interesting. But, you know, for me, where we're at now, I was like, I just needed drugs to get myself out of that point of chronic inflammation, but the drugs still only took me to like 80% where it was like, I got out of the hospital, I put weight back on, I was living a fairly normal life.
But I would still feel the urgency to go to the bathroom. I still didn't feel like I was a hundred percent. And, um, I remember I had to, I started doing triathlons in 2019. And I ended up having to miss a race because I had my first flare up since getting out of the hospital in 2016. And that was kind of where the bells and whistles went off where I was like, Alright, what you're doing is only work to a point.
And if you want to get to that next level, it's really leaning in on cooking your meals, eating real foods, truly being diligent and laying off all this process shit that's around everywhere. Like you really need to take autonomy and control of the food you're putting into your system. Otherwise you're going to live the rest of your life dependent on these drugs.
And it's like, who wants to live dependent on these drugs? It's like everyone that's listening to this has the ability to live a badass, healthy, energetic, joyful life, free of these medications. And so much of it is possible by putting the right foods in your body, living the right lifestyle, you know, having a spiritual practice, believing in a higher power.
There's like these levers that we can all pull that will give us a life. That's greater than you could ever imagine. Yeah, that's amazing. So when did Harry come into the picture? When did you guys start doing karate in the garage? That's, I love that. Yeah, so he was, he's actually a year older than me. So he graduated 2016.
He took a corporate job up in Boston. He was doing private equity and corporate real estate. And I went to New York, like I mentioned, and tech sales. And we didn't realize this at the time. We kind of grew apart after we graduated from school. And no, no reason for that. It was just kind of like, you know, he was a grade older than me.
We were fairly close in school, not best friends like we are now. But we both kind of have this similar interest in fitness and nutrition. So he was doing triathlons. He was doing marathons. I was doing the same thing in Boston. And then we reconnected right at the beginning of COVID. And I was kind of telling him my experience going carnivore, the benefits that I got from it.
He had, he had separately done like a paleo diet. He'd done a keto diet. He had just bought the carnivore code by Paul Saladino. So he was getting into a carnivore diet. So we realized that we had a lot of these same passions and we had just lost touch. And it's like, you know, when you're in New York, so much of your lifestyle is revolved around like going to happy hours, people are just interested in money and finance.
It's really connect it difficult to connect with people have that have these shared interests. So for Harry and I were like, all right, well, we're two guys that are passionate about the same things. We should be spending more time together. And, uh, we ended up signing up for Ironman Mont Tremblant up in Canada.
And that was kind of our way to put a really big race on the calendar and just shake up the monotony that COVID really brought on a lot of people. A month before that race, because Canada was so strict with lockdowns, they cancelled the race, which sucked because we had invested so much time and energy training for this thing.
But the good thing that Ironman did is they offered you a race credit to roll into another race. And so we were like, all right, we're either going to Texas or Florida because at that time, we know that those states are the only races that probably aren't going to get canceled. And we just wanted to do this thing so badly because we had made such a long time investment into this thing.
So we signed up for Ironman Waco. Small town, hour and a half outside of Austin. It's where Baylor university is. And then we got an Airbnb in Austin just to check out a new city. He was tired of Boston. I was tired in New York. We wanted to switch it up and just living together with someone that shares that same passion, energy, intensity, it pushes you to a level that you're never going to get to on your own.
It's why gym partners are so effective. It's like, you're not going to hit your max on your bench by yourself. You're going to hit it with someone that's spotting you. That's pushing you. That's pushing you to go for that extra rep. And that was essentially like a metaphor for what it was like living with him.
And so we trained for this race, we crushed it. It was an amazing experience. And we kind of left that three months stand at that Airbnb being like, we don't know what it is, but we need to find a way to work together. That same time he was doing that Twitter writing course that I was telling you about.
And that's really where we were like, fuck it. Let's just do it. Let's go on Twitter. Let's create this brand. Let's start writing about nutrition as an experiment and let's see what happens. But we think really good things are going to come from it. And that was the whole genesis of what Harry and I are doing with the brand.
Very serendipitous that you guys would find each other later in life when you had so much more in common, having gone through separate journeys. His was more, um, kind of a journey for improving his overall like fitness and health, where yours was more like when pain increases, hearing improves, you had to do something.
So what was that first like when you first transitioned over to carnivore diet? Did you notice immediately that things were better? Were you skeptical? Was it difficult for you? What was that process like? Yeah, I remember listening to Sean Baker on Rogan, like you had mentioned, and that episode was recorded in 2017, but I actually didn't listen to it to 2019, partially because I think it took me, it was that period of time where I was like, all right, I'm ready to cook my own meals.
I want to learn more. I actually, I don't believe that I need to be on these drugs for the rest of my life. Are there any holistic options that are available. And you know, he very, Sean, very clearly in that podcast lays out what to eat on that diet. You know, it's all animal products, primarily. Steak, chicken, if you like it, fish if you like it.
Pork, eggs, some dairy. If your stomach can tolerate, tolerate it. You know, some people drink coffee maybe with some cream. I didn't, I didn't swear off coffee. I still, I still had some coffee, but I remember going to Whole Foods for the first time and loading up on all these steaks, ground beef, chicken thighs, butter.
And I remember thinking the first time I, I ate two steaks a day, it was two ribeyes. And I cooked it in my tiny little shitty apartment in New York, set off the smoke alarms about to smoke out the apartment. And I remember is this going to kill me? Like, am I actually like, am I actually going to die of a heart disease if I eat it?
Because that's how much misinformation has been literally bled into people's brains by the standard American diet, this paradigm that we've been falsely led to believe for 70 plus years. But I'm like, you know what, he's talking about all these people that are getting healthy. He's clearly in amazing shape.
He's a surgeon. There's a reason why he's leaning into this stuff. You don't feel as good as you can feel, so you have no right to criticize it until you do this thing. And I remember, man, like the first couple days, like just cooking my meals. I would make a pound of ribeye. I would chop it up. I would bring it into the office.
It's in a glass Tupperware container. And it was like, lo and behold, like my energy felt really good. My stomach felt really good. I didn't feel this urge to have to go to the bathroom. I was effortlessly putting muscle on at the gym. My skin was getting clearer. I had more vitality. I was bursting out of bed at 5 30 in the morning to go to the gym.
I was like, I've never felt this before. And I know it's because of the foods that I'm eating. And so that was the first time where I was taking like, in like an, almost like an internal scan of how my body felt and realized that it was responding so naturally to these foods. And like anything else, you just start to lean in more.
You start to look into regenerative agriculture. You start to connect with ranches. You start to make your own bone broth. You start to cook with beef tallow. And it's like, it's this process. But for me at the time, I was, you know, 23, 24. Yeah, I would go to Whole Foods, but I would also go to the grocery store because my budget afforded me.
20 bucks worth of meat a day. And guess what? That's still really helpful. So I think there's a lot of misinformation out there that can be overwhelming for people. Like people look at like a Paul Saladino and they're like, holy shit. If I'm not eating grass, finish regenerative beef and, you know, organic honey and bone broth and I'm boiling myself, I'm not going to be getting really healthy.
And it's like, I don't think that's true at all. I think at a minimum, if you just stop shop, if you start shopping at the outer aisle of the grocery store and where the real food actually lies, get out of the inner aisles where the process shit is, where the margins are really good for these companies.
That's an amazing starting point. You're going to feel really freaking good and you're going to progress over time and eventually get to the point where you want to be at. And that's exactly what happened to me. That's amazing. Yeah. I love the way Sean Baker approaches it. And I love the way he presented it at KetoCon where I was able to meet you in person where he asked the question, like, okay, yes, we're very confident in this space.
That cholesterol does not cause heart disease. The LDL cholesterol is not harmful. My own wife has an LDL cholesterol above 200. So that's a little bit alarming. Like we have to be fairly confident about these things. You know, to allow that to happen. But, he'll still say, what if we're wrong? What if you do die of a heart attack?
Because of cholesterol, because you're eating a carnivore diet. And it's still, like, 90% of people say, Well, I don't really care, because I feel so good. Like, I don't want to go back to having anxiety. I don't want to go back to having alternative colitis and going to the bathroom 20 to 30 times a day. Like, it's totally worth it for the way that you feel.
Yeah, I actually, I really love that you brought this up because it's like there's so many people that are singularly isolating for this cholesterol variable and they're not paying attention to other metabolic health measures like waist size, which is the biggest predictor of your overall health. It's scientifically proven.
It's literally your waist size, you know, blood pressure, resting heart rate, HDL to HDL triglyceride ratio. There's all these other metrics that are overall determinants of your health. And there's so many people that are so scared of saturated fat, because they think it's going to jack up their LDL, that they start eating all this processed shit.
They're eating Cheerios for breakfast, oatmeal for breakfast, refined grains, sugars, orange juice with fucking English muffins for breakfast. And they wonder why they feel like shit and they're overweight. And that's actually, those are actually the triggers that are going to cause them to actually have heart disease and die of a premature death.
Not a pound of ribeye from a grass finished ranch. Um, and the beautiful thing about your wife's story is now there's these movers and shakers like, um, Dave Feltman and, um, I forget the kid's name, Nick. He's, uh, he's in medical. Dr. Nick Norwitz. Yeah. Yeah. There are these incredible people that have like these lean mass hyper responder theories where it's like, Maybe you have lower body mass and eating saturated fat jacks your LDL up, but as long as these other metabolic measures are in order, you're going to be in really good health and be amazing.
It's like, it's incredible all the research and data that's coming out to actually point people in the right direction because for so many middle aged men, it's like, oh, your LDL is high, we're going to get you on a statin, you can't eat saturated fat. You can't eat the really foods that are actually g sucking all that out of t
on this, putting them on merry go round that's nev And as you're listing all standard american diet, I myself thinking like a ca diet, like really? No, 10 this yesterday, whether i carnivore, keto, low carb, the Atkins diet in the 90s and 2000s. It's like, we can brand this shit all we want, but it's like, it's just eating real foods that we've been designed to eat for 2.
5 million years. So it's like, I really defy you to show me the way that a food that we've been eating for 2. 5 million years is all of a sudden. Yeah. increasing our cholesterol levels and essentially killing us last 80 years. I just, I don't believe that. Like just use some logic is in some common sense.
Yeah, absolutely. I love the journey that you've been on through meat mafia. You guys interview tons of different people and cover lots of different topics. What have you learned as far as what you mentioned earlier, like misconceptions or myths as far as our food systems goes, maybe you can just pick out like some of the more important things that you've learned going along that journey.
Yeah. I think someone that Loves capitalism. I think it was, it was kind of a punch in the gut. Just understanding the corporatization of food that has gone on, like really opening my eyes with the fact that, you know, for years, you're just kind of trained to go throughout your day, shop at the inner aisles of the grocery store.
Like I mentioned, and you see all these different logos, you see these colorful boxes, packages, designs, and not understanding the fact that like there's 37, 000 products in the, in the average grocery store, but they they're controlled by a really small handful of companies. You bet. It's about 10 to 12 companies.
They're almost all publicly traded. And as a publicly traded company, it's like your fiduciary responsibility actually is to maximize shareholder value. So if you're maximizing shareholder value, you're trying to get the best margin that you can possibly have. So what do you do? You switch from real sugar to high fructose corn syrup.
You sub out animal fats, which are more expensive for highly processed industrial seed oils. You swap in refined grains, which the government is literally subsidized to grow corn, wheat, and soy. You mass combine these ingredients, you add ingredients and flavor additives, and you create these huge flavor labs.
And you create this processed food that's very cheap, it's highly addicting, and then you can, you can have marketing, but massive insane marketing budgets to really drive people towards this food. And I think the more that you start to understand the economics and the behind the scenes decisions that have happened in the last 50 to 80 years, you start to come away to the fact like, okay, this actually makes sense why 70% of Americans are overweight or obese.
And it's like, you know, we've really broken the, broken the backs of our small farmers. Like The average size of a ranch is essentially just done this, um, like almost like hockey stick growth, uh, yeah, average size of a farm has gone way up in the average number of farmers is absolutely plummeted in a similar trajectory.
And it's like it's not, you know, it makes complete sense when you start to look at those things from that perspective where it's, you know, we've really lost our connection to our food source like you're buying meat at the grocery store. Some of that meat could have 30, 40 plus touch points before it actually gets to that package.
It gets onto your plate and the best investment that you can make that I've learned is like seeking out personal relationships with your rancher in your area. You can literally go to eat wild. com. You can pop in your zip code. It'll give you dozens of ranches where you can buy meat, eggs, milk, cheese, pork, chicken, fish, and just start to connect with them.
You know, know their names on a first date, first name basis, build relationships with them. And buy those products from them and start cooking your own meals and just get off this fucking processed food cycle that we found ourselves sucked into. Yeah, no, that's such a great point and I've heard, I've asked this question a lot and I've gotten lots of different answers and I think I know how you're going to answer it but I want to get your opinion on this.
Last year I was able to meet a rancher, his name's Brennan, HTTL Farms in Nevada. I was able to buy a quarter cow from him, I got to meet his whole family. Dude, they're all like... accidentally kind of on carnivore and all these kids are like super well behaved like energetic but like great attentions and they're like polite and kind and like it was really fun to actually like see these guys and you see the pictures of the kids playing with the cows in the pastures and like the cow was born there lives there it dies there it never even leaves the property and it's really amazing and the quality of the meat was Really great.
And I will buy that quarter cow and I will also go to the clearance section of my local grocery store and I'll grab a tri tip or chuck steak that's on sale that I know I can throw on the Traeger and have really good food there as well. Where do you do you draw a line between different types of quality as far as meat goes?
Yeah, I love this question. And you know, the quarter cow is tricky because like you said, the best investment that you can make is building that relationship with Brennan, getting to know his family. He can tell you the exact lineage of the cow. It never leaves the property. It's grazing on his grass for the entire life cycle of the cow, butchers it at a local facility, processes it, gives it to you.
It's the cleanest, simplest transaction ever. At the same time, the issue with the quarter cow, especially if you're animal based or carnivore, and you really like steak is you're going to get a ton of ground beef. So I like ground beef, but I love steak and I don't want to just buy up all the price cuts from the rancher too.
So it's like, you know, I've gotten, I get quarter cows, I get half cows, you know, there are creative ways to make ground beef. You know, I never get tired of burgers and things like that. But for me personally, my stomach does feel the best when I eat those fattier cuts of steak, not necessarily the ground beef.
So it's like. I think you kind of just have to do like the good, better, best approach, where it's like good is just eating red meat in general, getting off the shit in the interiors of the grocery store, getting off the processed food, buying meat at your grocery store, even if it's grain finish at an industrial feedlot, regardless of the incentives, what it's doing for the environment to fuel you, to fill you with energy.
That's an amazing starting point. It's going to clear that brain fog. You're going to start to wake up. Your metabolic health is going to, is going to significantly improve, and you're going to really start to think clearly for the first time better is buying like the grass finished meat. So meat that's actually, owls that have been fed grass the entirety of its life.
There are a lot of labeling loopholes that have gone, gone on. So you can actually. There was something that was called the cool act, which was the country of origin labeling act, and that required you to actually state if it was a product of the USA or state the prop, the country that it was actually grown in.
So like if the meat was actually harvested in Brazil and had to put that on the label, Tom Vilsack, who is the head of the USDA under Obama, Joe Biden brought him back. He repealed the cool act in 2016. So what that means is that. An animal can be raised, harvested, killed in Brazil, processed in Brazil, but as long as it's shipped over to the U.
S. and packaged in plastic in the U. S., it can still be labeled as a product of the U. S. A. Um, also, like, there, it's, you're legally allowed to label, uh, beef grass fed. If it's been fed grass, it's some point in its life. So, it's like, You can still get meat that's labeled grass fed, but it has been finished on grain.
Um, you know, we can go into the disputes of like, what's more nutritionally dense, but I would say better is actually getting like grass fed, grass finished meat. And the best is buying like grass finished regenerative meat from a farm, a local farm, like your buddy, Brennan, tilling.
It's basically like this incredible biomimicry, like Joel Salatin almost describes it as like an orchestra that goes on between the animals and the land, and they're able to like sequester carbon back into the soil, they'll be able to create this incredible nutrient dense soil that's like chocolate cake, they restore the ecosystem, all these new animals, all these new species, um, kind of pop up on the land, and then you're able to get the benefits it's like,
I don't view any meat as bad. We can talk about the incentives behind those things, but it's like the good, better, best approach. And like we mentioned, my, my starting point was the good meat. You will get the good meat when it's on sale. I'll get the good meat. Sometimes when it's on sale, it's like every once in a while, the whole foods in Austin will have these incredible grain finish ribeyes that are like 12 a pound.
I'm not going to pass up on that. Right. I'm still a little bit budget sensitive, but if I can, I'm trying to get that best quality meat from the local rancher in Austin where I can verify it. I know it's regenerative. I know it's never been injected with hormones or antibiotics, and I can really verify where it's coming from.
So it's a, it's I love that answer. That was very thoughtful and well explained. I can see how shipping meat from Brazil would be very problematic. Selfishly, I used to live down there and the best picanha I've ever had in my life from Rio to Costco. Dude, I kind of, I'm hoping to encounter some Brazilian meat in my local grocery store.
I wouldn't complain. Dude, the picanha is like, there's, that's the other thing. You bring up a great point. It's like, when you start to really like lean into your food and you start to build relationships with your butcher and rancher, you figure out all these cuts that aren't conventionally sold at a grocery store that are so good.
And like you mentioned, the picanha, it's a Brazilian cut, but it's really like the cap of the sirloin and they cut it. So you get that nice fat cap on the end of it. It's really cheap. And it cooks, like it basically cooks like a strip and it's like 10 to 12 a pound. Like the Denver cut is the same exact thing.
It's like, I'm going to my rancher, give me that Denver cut all day long because it's like 10 to 15 bucks. It cooks like a strip. It's super fat. It's super tender. But there's all these things that you start to learn about when you really start to lean into your diet and understand that like, it's so much more than just like ribeyes and strips and chuck roast and things like that.
Yeah, sirloin is one of my favorite steaks to have with my eggs and I lament the fact that like, ah, this is missing the cap. You took the cap off of this. This could have been the con. Yeah. Ah, such a bummer. Such a bummer. Yeah. Well, okay. I really go ahead. No, no. So I was going to say the last thing is like, it's a good point.
It makes me think your question makes me think about like, All these other ways to stretch a budget. And obviously, you know, the ribeye is like this prized part of the animal and it's so delicious. It's so good. It's also super expensive. There's things that you can do to these other cuts that make it taste just as good as a ribeye.
Exactly. Like you can buy a regenerative truck roast for 10 to $12 a pound. You can do these very simple things to it that make it taste just like a rib eye. If you literally dry Brian that sucker, so get your chuck from your regenerative chuck. Throw some salt on it, put it on a plate, let it sit out in your fridge.
The salt's gonna like really tenderize the meat and then you can reverse sear it. So you basically just put it in your oven. You cook it like kind of low and slow for like 20, 30 minutes, and then you sear that on the cast iron to finish or carbon, steel, whatever you like to cook with it. Literally, you basically have a ribeye for like 10 bucks.
So good. Chuck steak. I just made one the other night. It's such a great way to have a really good quality meat to taste like, like you said, almost exactly like ribeye. That's so great. You're making, you're making all our listeners hungry, man. I know, dude. But also like, it's, this is a tough point to tread on because people are going to push back on me, but I'm like, I've always lived my life just being like, I'm okay investing a significant part of my income to my food because it's going to, it's going to taste delicious, but it's going to give me the function that I ultimately desire.
And something you've probably heard us say on the show is like, we really try to not focus so much on the upfront price of the food. It's obviously easy for me to say this being a single guy, but it's like, I'm not making a ton of money. But I focus on the holistic asset that that food actually is. So for me, I'm like, I know that if I'm eating some really good quality meat, maybe having some berries, some cheese, cooking my stuff in ghee, um, really good quality, like olive oil, dressing, stuff like that.
I'm going to feel so good that it's actually going to make me more money in the longterm because I'm going to operate on such a higher level. Like if I can have more energy to write a couple more Twitter threads a month, record a couple more podcasts. have more money to invest into more energy to invest in a noble that can make me millions of dollars over the long term.
And we can make it even more priceless. If you're a parent that's listening to this and that diet fuels you with more energy to play with your kids, play catch with your son, that's a priceless investment. So we're talking about millions of dollars, if not a priceless investment in your own health that comes from spending more money on the food that you're putting into your body.
I could not agree more. I absolutely love that. When people tell me that this way of eating is cost prohibitive, first of all, I say, well, no, it's not. It absolutely is not. And second of all, let's check out your car. Let's check out the house you decided to live in, and let's see what toys you buy. Like, what are you prioritizing?
Yeah, it's a matter of choice. It's a matter of perspective. It's a matter of just like priority, where you actually choose to spend your dollars. And if you actually did a monthly budget of what you're spending your money on, There's there are for sure ways that you can cut corners on what you're spending and reinvest that into the food you put in your body.
Yeah, absolutely. It occurs to me also that like when I picked up my quarter cow, it is a 30 minute walk from my house. It's his mom that lives here in my neighborhood and I'm able to walk over there. Every time they get a delivery of eggs, I go over there and buy a bunch of eggs and just walk them back home.
But I'm not actually visiting the ranch itself. I've never been there. It's in the middle of nowhere in Nevada. You've been able to experience lots of different ranches. What have been some of your observations of like actually going to some of these places? Yeah, so I've been fortunate, right? I've been to white oak pastures in Bluffton, Georgia twice, which in a lot of ways is like the gold standard of farming polyphase farms in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, gold standard of farming.
I've been to a regenerative ranch in Crawford, Colorado. I've been to a regenerative ranch in San Diego. I've been to a bunch of ranches in Texas, in the greater Texas region. And I just like just hearing these farmer stories, you know, everyone comes from a different background, whether it's like a Will Harris, who is a fifth generation farmer, three generations before him, they did things conventional.
He started learning about regenerative practices, how to actually restore the land. And he made this business decision in the, in the early nineties that he was going to swear off these. industrial fertilizers and conventional practices that have basically fed his family for generations doing this risky regenerative model.
And the businesses flourish because of it. And it's like, it's just so inspiring to hear these stories. And you also hear these stories like in Texas, you know, we went to this, uh, this raw dairy farm called the Jersey Barnyard. It's a fifth generation dairy farm and their margins are razor, razor low. And it's, it's so interesting because you meet a lot of these ranchers.
And if they just sold their farm, they could be getting millions of dollars. So they're asset rich, but a lot of them are super cash poor because the margins are so low and so many people don't think about food as a holistic asset. I think we're starting to see the right side of that trend where people really are starting to dig into this stuff and want to build those personal connections.
And I'm hopeful that those ranchers are going to be in a much better financial situation in the next 5 to 10 years. But You realize that like it's so important for them to, to provide their community with the most locally, the most nutrient dense foods and really maintain their family legacy that they're literally been living on razor thin margins for decades after decades.
And me personally like I don't know if I would have had the stomach to do something like that but they're so committed they're so passionate about what they do. They look like a lot of these branches, they love connecting with customers they love to do farm tours they'd love to have you out there to walk you through the ranch to walk you through their practices.
and I would encourage any eat wild dot com and just just take a little tour a and just learn more about Once you actually see that there's really no going back and it really will, it will, it will almost push you to always support your rancher because you understand how much effort and intensity is required to give you that really good nutrient dense product.
And like, you know, a lot of times with this processed food, everything is optimized for convenience for the conservation of effort or ranching is the opposite of that. It's like the investment in energy is actually what makes that beautiful product at the end of the day. That's amazing. So cool that you are able to visit there.
Um, how are these ranchers dealing with the, um, extreme amount of methane that's coming out of these, uh, cows? Are they treating their cows in any special way to not blow up the, the earth? Well, you go out there, like you said, and you see these like You know, Texas is a different story because there's so many droughts, but you know, a lot of these ranchers, you see, there's like this beautiful green grass, you see these happy cattle, you see all these animals out there like that, that orchestra, that biomimicry that we were talking about, all these, all these different animals interacting with the land in their own unique way.
You see happy ranchers, you see people that are, that are working on the farm, like White Oak Pastures is in Bluffton, Georgia. It's this very rural town in South Georgia. There's 150 people in that town. Will Harris employs 120 people on his ranch. And he's effectively feeding the entire community. So something that he talks a lot about is like, Cliche.
The cliche question is like, is regenerative agriculture scalable? Which is the wrong question to ask because you're essentially being like, can we compare regenerative agriculture to the conventional industrial meat industry? Which is like just not the comparison, and it's more about. Getting back to these local systems where back in the day, there were a few ranches per county.
There were a few processing plants per county and people in the local community would go to those ranches, they would flock to those ranches and the ranches would be able to fuel the local community. So it's really like Localization at a larger level is going to give us that quote unquote scalability that everyone likes to ask about.
Yeah, that's amazing. Okay. We got to talk about noble. Um, what problem were you two trying to solve when you created this product and what is it? Yeah. So noble is the first product that Harry. Myself and our third partner, Colin Stuckert launched, and we actually launched it in April of this year. So it's a very new product.
It's been around for about three months. And we started thinking about, okay, the podcast, the Twitter, the newsletter, those are like, that's our form of medium to have the change that we want, but what's like a, what's something physical that we could put into the space that's kind of like a reflection of our ethos around nutrition.
And I was thinking to myself, what are the foods that I've really gravitated towards that have given me the ideal health, obviously beef. organ meats, right? People thrives, tribes have thrived on these foods for thousands and thousands of years. We no longer eat the organ meat, we only prize the muscle meat.
So beef, grass fed organs, colostrum, which is the first milk of the mother cow, it's super nutrient dense, there's all these digestive enzymes to really help that baby cow thrive, very similar to bre to human breast milk, breast milk that mothers give to their children. There's all these digestive enzymes that the baby needs to give it that happy and healthy gut.
Grown adults can be drinking that first milk if there's extra, and actually get a lot of those same benefits. And then also like these collagenous parts of the animal, right? These, these tendons, these joints, these things that give you the, your, you know, your beautiful glowing skin, your hair, your skin, healthy gut.
A lot of it's found in bone broth. And we were like, is there a way to maybe do that? Can you turn these foods into a powder that maybe would replace, like, conventional protein powders that are either plant based, or using really cheap quality whey and casein protein, where they're dehydrating this milk, they're adding additives to it that are really going to disrupt your gut.
Is there a way that we could take these nutrient dense foods and turn it into a powder? And that was really the, uh, the genesis behind Noble Origins. So what Noble is, is it's the most nutrient dense powder that you can possibly put into your body. So what we're doing is we've taken all these cows from, from grass fed farms in New Zealand and where the protein is coming from beef, from the muscle meat of the animal, the collagenous parts of the animal.
We're throwing organs in there, heart, liver, spleen, spleen, pancreas, bone, blood, and colostrum. And we've turned it into a single scoop that you can take every single day. So it's all these nutrient dense foods that might not taste good, but through the freeze drying process, you really dull a lot of that taste.
And we do add some stevia to it. We do add a little bit of cocoa powder. We do add some vanilla bean to it, but it's a shake, right? It's like you can drink it with water. I love it with raw milk. You can throw it into coffee, kind of that animal, almost like the animal based version of athletic greens.
That's something you have to give credit to Athletic Greens where it's like, regardless of how you feel about the nutrition, the ingredients that's in there, they've made it a part of everyone's habit. So for us, it's like, well, if you can make these foods drink good, taste good and drink really well, it's like the perfect bridge product, right?
We're like guys like us, we'll go, we'll, we'll eat raw liver. But there are sometimes where it's like, dude, I get out of the gym. I need those nutrient dense foods quickly right now. I'm traveling. I'm on the go, but also like, what about my sister? What about my mom? I want them to be healthy. They're probably not going to eat organ meats, but they'll take, they'll, they'll drink a powder that tastes really good.
That's giving them a lot of those same properties. And it's an amazing, amazing bridge product to get them to listen to the boundless body radio, to get them to listen to meat mafia, to start buying regenerative meat. So for us, it's like, this is really our baby where it's like, we're going to take a powder with all these nutrient dense foods, but we want it to be the bridge product into this world.
That is the meat mafia, regenerative agriculture, and like just the right path that everyone should be on. That's amazing. We pay a T $20 commission anytime somebody mentions our podcast on our podcast. So I'll send you a check for that. Thank you. Please do Happy Pay . So I was able to meet you at Keto Con, and I was telling you at the time, or before we started recording that, like I only got to meet you on Sunday afternoon when everything was kind of winding down because your booth was crazy busy all weekend.
In fact, it was so, it was so not busy at the time that I was finally able to meet you that I think Sean Baker wandered over and we got a chat with him. And he didn't have his, like, normal entourage of, like, 30 people following him, wanting his picture and everything. And my observation of KetoCon was very much, um, it was very much carnivore driven.
The keto products, the greens, um, the biohacking kind of stuff, I know the conference is shifting in that direction next year anyway. I didn't notice that those places were very busy in the vendor area, whereas anything carnivore, the carnivore speakers, the carnivore, um, you know, chats are actually done, the panels, like that was driving the conference, in my opinion, that's just what I observed.
And so I was able to witness how many people were interested in your product. How has it been received so far? Yeah, man. First of all, KetoCon has a very special place in my heart. I've gone to two of them and they're really launch pads for the Meat Mafia brand and Noble in general. And what I mean by that is we went last year, last August, the first time, and we were really just bystanders.
And we, we were thinking to ourselves, there's going to be a lot of great people to connect with a lot of podcast guests. We want, we want to just get people's sense of like this keto movement, this carnivore movement. How are people actually thinking about implementing these practices in their day to day lives?
And it was such an amazing, valuable experience. I think we ended up getting 20 podcast guests from it. So that was like a launching pad for our show. And I think people, why people were responding to our noble booth outside of it being a brand new product is like, people are, people are waking up and understanding that, like, we've really been sold the false narrative, which has been a lot of the, if you were to summarize the show, it's like, we've really been sold the false narrative for a long time.
We can no longer demonize animal products and we need more convenient ways to be able to get these things into our diet. And I think people were really seeing that with our booth, which is why we were getting great traction at KetoCon. So it was an amazing proof of concept for us, but you know, having Sean interested in something like that, having some of these other speakers interested in that and having the participants interested in Noble and what we're doing was amazing.
And it's like. You know, we've done about 50 K in sales in the first three months, which is great indication that like the market is really ripe for something like this. It's funny because I have like 50 bags of product at our apartment in Austin. And I just, I just handed it out all over the place because, you know, obviously we want to build a super successful, financially viable product.
But even more than that, it's like, I just want to put this thing, I just want to give people the most nutrient dense foods and have them taste it, have their eyes light up, have them feel how they should be feeling when they put the right foods into their body, and that's really why we're doing this. We want to just have this thing everywhere, we want to make it super convenient to order, where it's like, you can go to nobleorigins.
com and get yourself a couple bags of it, have it show up at your doorstep every single month, and like, Give it to your friends, give it to your family, give it to your coworkers, use it for yourself and like start to spread the message. And one of the things that you'll notice is, um, we were pretty intentional about the branding.
There are a lot of brands in the carnivore animal based space that kind of have this like rustic primal feel to it, which is great. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it starts to, it kind of pigeonholes your customer base where it's like, you can still build a big brand doing that. But if we want to use noble to be the catalyst to maybe fix the food system.
We specifically went with like more modern, clean, neutral branding where it's like a man can order this, a woman could order this, a guy that just wants to get more protein into their diet could order this. They're not going to be off put by like the really modern, uh, sorry, the really like primal rustic branding.
And for us, it's all about like being as genuine as possible. And how do we cast as wide of a net as possible and pull them into our world? I love that. What is your plan for the future? As far as that goes, are you going to expand into different products? Are you going to kind of just focus on the one product?
I see lots of supplement companies that end up getting, you know, so in the thick of all kinds of different products, it's almost like. Cheesecake factory. You can have Mexican. You can have sushi. You can have Italian and none of it is any good. I think we just lost Cheesecake Factory as a sponsor, potential sponsor for the show.
But what, what is your plan? What are you going to do with the, with the, with the brand line? I think it's so easy in the early stages of products to kind of have the shiny object syndrome. And I, and I, and I find myself falling into it all the time where I sometimes think like, damn, like a refrigerated, ready to drink option of noble mixed with grass fed milk at a grocery store would crush or like our brain is always spinning with new product ideas, but we also really like the concept of keeping it very simple.
Like when you go to the website right now, there's three products. There's the chocolate protein, there's the vanilla protein, and then there's like a bag of just straight organ powder. So it's like, that's more of like a boost where you could put it in your smoothie, you could put it in your bulletproof latte, you could sprinkle it into ground beef and make like primal meatballs.
You could put it on your steak, but we like the simplicity of those things. And we want people to know us as the people that are creating like the most nutrient dense powders that are currently on the market right now. So, you know, we could potentially expand to new things in the future, but. I think we want to really own what we're good at and have people know Noble for like that one thing.
Yeah, I love that. Okay, dude, I didn't want to miss this point. And so the last thing I really want to ask you about, um, and I'll set this up by saying we were visiting some families, some family was in town actually visiting us. And we were, I want to say it was like the Saturday before Memorial Day, which is my wife and I, you know, kind of take Saturdays off.
We were working the other six days. And the family member asked us like, what are you guys going to do on your days off for the rest of the weekend? We're doing Sunday, Monday. And it was weird because it hadn't even occurred to me, like, we've got clients, we've got our business, like, we're working Sunday and Monday and seeing people.
And, you know, we worked for a long time in a corporate office doing what we love to do, which is personal training, nutrition coaching, but with a big box gym that all ended during COVID and we had to start our own business. And I, you know, I was reflecting on the drive home with my wife. I was like, you know, what would it be like?
I wonder what an alternate life would have been like where we're working a corporate job, we're getting a salary, you know, we're making good money going on vacations, getting PTO, you know, I don't have my 401k match anymore. All that stuff we kind of lost when we lost our job at the corporate office at the corporate gym.
What would it be like to, you know, kind of work and then maybe have like your weekends or free times or vacation to kind of follow your passion. You have been on both ends of that spectrum. You've had the corporate job and chased after that. You've also left that corporate job to start your own thing and really follow your passion.
I don't know if there's a right or wrong, but can you comment on what your experience has been like? Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me was like, you know, I had the good salary young age. I had great benefits. I lived a great life in New York. Um, you know, I liked, I enjoyed a lot of what I did. And then there were also, there was also a lot of what I, uh, what I didn't like what I did too, but for me, the biggest thing that I kept coming back to is this voice in the back of my mind that kept leaning.
It kept like, Lightly pushing me towards this path of creation. And when you lean into the path of creation, it's everything that you just talked about. It's long days. It's a seven day a week thing. There's not weekends. There's not benefits. There's not these 401k matches. There's not this big salary that's consistent.
It's predictable. It's a safety blanket. But on the other side of that is. The incredible reward of doing something that you truly love and the ability to actually make something, make money off of your passion. And as you mentioned earlier in the showcase, it's like, now is the time to do it. There's websites like Shopify that literally allowed you to spin up a product where you can be making money off it at the same day.
A podcast, nothing is presenting you from downloading Zoom for free, hitting record, posting it on Transistor, a number of free services that exist, and now you have your own thing. So it's like the barriers to entry to create something and monetize something online have never been lower. But you have to understand where you're at in your journey.
And for me, it took about six months of pursuing meat mafia on the side of working a corporate job, saving up, realizing that I was ready to make that push. Other people like Gary had the risk tolerance where they were willing to go cold Turkey, pull the pin, start doing meat mafia without making money on day one.
I think you would need to do some really hard reflection on what's your pain tolerance. What's your risk adversity? What's the amount of money that you've saved up? Were you willing to invest in this thing? How many months are you willing to do this without making money before you throw in the towel?
Those are all questions that you need to answer. And look, dude, I have fucking difficult days every single day. I have days where I'll have the best podcast I've ever recorded. We'll make great money with Noble. And then I'll think about the 15 other things that I could have done or the uncertainty that comes from it.
But my mission of wanting to really help fix the food system and do something that I'm truly passionate about, that's a goal and a mission that's so strong that that's my anchor that pulls me towards everything that I want to do. That almost pulls me out of the uncertainty in the, in the, and, and that thing.
Um, so I think you have to understand the way that you're wired and find something that really acts as that anchor that will push you through all the uncertainty because. It's super difficult and I don't think we've made it out onto the other side of that where we've had like a Marxist and tight primal kitchen exit where he's made 300 million and he's on the beach in Miami.
But I do know that he really enjoyed that process, it took him a really long time, and he wouldn't regret any of it. So, Getting to speak to people like that and being in the midst of the process ourselves, not even have fully monetizing this thing, it's still worth it, even in midst of all the uncertainty.
So if there's someone that's listening to the show that really has that itch, like I would encourage you to lean in and put your head down and see where you are in six months. I would guarantee you your life is going to be changed. I love that. What an amazing answer. And let me join the other thousands of people to tell you that your episode with Mark Sisson was all time, dude.
That was so, so good. You guys had a wonderful conversation. I just so much appreciate that answer and appreciate your time coming on our show today, Brett. Where do you want people to go to find you and connect with you and your work? Yeah, so I would say Twitter is probably the easiest way to connect with me personally.
My handle is MeetMafiaBrett and my partner Harry is MeetMafiaHarry, so really simple. Um, our show is called the meat mafia podcast. So youtube, spotify, apple podcast, pretty much any streaming platform you can find the show. And then if you are interested in ordering some noble and connecting with us further, um, noble origins dot com, really simple landing page and um, you know, chocolate protein, vanilla protein and then unflavored organs as well.
And we are coming out with an unflavored version of the protein powder. If you are a purist, And, um, you know, you don't really want that sweetness or that stevia. And they were working on that too, but I would say that those three things are the best. Awesome. We will link all of that in the show notes.
Brent, like I said, thank you so very much for all of your content. I was so grateful to be able to meet you in person and tell you, thank you for all the work that you and Harry have done. I've really appreciated all the content you've been putting out in the last year and a half. And thank you so very much again, for taking time out of your very busy day in your very busy life to come on our show today.
We really appreciate you. Casey. Thanks so much for having me, man. Absolutely. It was an honor. And this has been another episode of Balanced Body Radio.
Dude, that was awesome. Dude, that was, you crushed it, man. That, uh, the level.