[00:00:00]Luke Storey: I'm Luke Storey. For the past 22 years, I've been relentlessly committed to my deepest passion, designing the ultimate lifestyle based on the most powerful principles of spirituality, health, psychology, and personal development. The Life Stylist podcast is a show dedicated to sharing my discoveries and the experts behind them with you. Daniel Vitalis, welcome back to the show for your, I don't know, fourth or fifth visit here. It's great to see you again, dude.
[00:00:34]Daniel Vitalis: Thanks for having me, Luke. Man, it's been awesome, just, your journeys are so cool, bro. I'm really impressed with where you've taken the show.
[00:00:41]Luke Storey: Thank you. It's been a wild ride, man. The evolution, I remember when I—God, it must have been almost five years ago when I spoke alongside you at one of Neil Strauss's intensives for his mastermind group. And you, and David Wolfe, and Jack Kruse, and Ben Greenfield, and all these people that I followed and looked up to were the speakers, and I kind of weaseled my way into being a speaker at that event and it was the first time I'd ever spoken publicly about health or anything like that. I'd been speaking like in the fashion industry and things like that.
[00:01:18] So, it's not like my first gig ever, but I remember being so nervous, and I went up and did my talk, and it was so cool when I was done. I remember coming and sitting down with you. I think David Wolfe was speaking right after me, which was really nerve-wracking because he's the guy that I've been watching at all these big conferences and stuff from the audience. I'm like, I remember just being kind of mortified, like hoping I did a good job and having this whole impostor syndrome kind of sense.
[00:01:46] And I walked off and you tapped me, kind of hit me, elbowed me, and was like, "Hey, do you know you could be doing this?" Like why isn't this your thing? And that really was so meaningful to me. It really stuck with me as someone who had been in the game a long time yourself. So, I never forget where I came from and I appreciate your encouragement. You probably were just like stating something that wasn't a big deal to you, but it really stuck with me, so I appreciate it.
[00:02:13]Daniel Vitalis: Oh, I really remember that really clearly, though. And a couple of little anecdotes, too. First, it's always better to have David Wolfe follow you than to follow him because he's got that mesmerizing charm on an audience that then you get up after him, and I have a memory of giving a talk at a hot spring in the desert following him, he had had people for like three hours. And I think people really wanted to hear me, but like, I came in, and it was just like, me.
[00:02:44] And I had to send everybody out for a break for a while, actually, just so they could like reset. But the other thing that's funny is I'm thinking back to that event at Neil's and I think it was two or three days, and it was the wrap up. It was like the final thing. We were all on stage. All of the speakers were there together. I think Jack had left, but the rest of everybody was there. And it was kind of a recap.
[00:03:06] And I remember that he was asking like, hey, what do you guys have to sort of give these guys as a final wrap up? And you went into talking about elimination. And it triggered me to start talking about bowel movements. And it was like not the time, like that would have made a lot of sense the day before, right? Because that kind of thing was coming up. But I start talking, and then I sort of look around and all the speakers are looking at me like, what are you doing?
[00:03:36] And Neil looks over and he goes, okay, we'll call that taking a Vitalis. And I was so embarrassed then because Neil's also such a charming guy, he's got that sort of magnetism about him, and I just was like, oh, I was crushed. And when I looked back, it's like one of my most embarrassing memories, is that moment. Yeah, like one of the most embarrassing stage moments I've ever had.
[00:03:57]Luke Storey: That is funny. I don't remember that at all. And I had totally forgotten about that panel that we did at the end too. That's funny. Yeah.
[00:04:06]Daniel Vitalis: It was supposed to be like tying a bow on the big picture, 50,000 feet, and I like zoomed into toilet level, all the way.
[00:04:14]Luke Storey: Another thing I remember about that that was also encouraging, and I wouldn't share it with any of the other speakers for obvious reasons, but after I spoke with you when I got offstage, I ran into Jack Kruse whose work I've been following and didn't have any relationship with him really at that time, and he pulled me aside out in the hall, I think, like midway through David Wolfe's talk, and he's like, hey, come here for a sec. And he literally like poke you in the chest, he has a pretty straightforward, if not aggressive communication style, and he said, "Listen, I just want to tell you something. You and that Daniel guy were the only ones that weren't totally full of shit."
[00:04:53]Daniel Vitalis: That sounds like Jack.
[00:04:56]Luke Storey: Just talking all this shit about—well, I don't want to talk shit about him, but I mean, he would say it on Twitter right now. He has no qualms with like speaking his mind, but I was like, I kind of felt bad because he was, in a sense, like saying everyone else sucked, but I was glad that you and I were included.
[00:05:12]Daniel Vitalis: We're in his side.
[00:05:15]Luke Storey: Shit. But you and that Daniel guy, I think, because we're talking about just, fundamentally, that relationship with nature, and coming from that perspective, and knowing that we, of course, don't live in a natural world, no matter where we are on the planet at this point. And that was and continues to be the basis of all of my shit. As weird as it gets into the biohacking world, it's all coming back to at least mimicking what would have happened for us and to us living as natural humans. And I know that's been your perspective and I've learned so much of that from you. So, anyway-
[00:05:51]Daniel Vitalis: It's complicated trying to rebuild the natural environment outside of the environment, because I've joked with people, if you took all the ingredients, let's say, you took like everything that we know is in an apple. So, you had like malic acid and you had the amount of water and the amount of vitamin C, and you had all the enzymes that you know were there. You took all the components, you put them together, you shake them in a bag, it's not like an apple comes out, right?
[00:06:16] So, you go into the natural world. Everything's integrated and very simple. You have the fresh air and the sunlight that creates that reaction in your skin for vitamin D. And you have the electrical grounding of the earth beneath you and you have the ions in there. All those things are present. But if you're going to like, I'm going to bring all that into my health, like as you know, the amount of stuff, and then the sum is not necessarily like equaling what it is you're trying to recreate, although it helps, but it can be, and I've joked with you and we've talked about on the show, but I have found that a little cumbersome, trying to recreate the natural world outside of the natural world.
[00:06:53] So, it makes me think a lot about last night, my wife, Avani, and I were watching, we just watched Alien the other night, and we watched Aliens, those old Sigourney Weaver movies. So, it's 1979 and 1986 that these movies were done. And it's fun to watch sci-fi from the past because it's like 1970s, but we're in space, like they're trying to project out what technology will be like in the future. It's quite funny.
[00:07:17] But when I think about people trying to go to space, which we seem to be looking at projects beyond outer Earth orbit, where our space station now is just orbiting the Earth. I never really think of it as in space. It's not really in space. It's a plane that's really high up. It's just like a satellite. But if we want to push out past that, the idea of trying to recreate conditions that humans can actually live long-term in, and I don't hear them talking about that either, so it's like, how will that work?
[00:07:48]Luke Storey: We can't even do it here.
[00:07:50]Daniel Vitalis: No, I know. In our cities, like how are we going to do that? So, I could imagine somebody going on a short-term mission, even, let's say, that we can make it work, and you go to Mars, and back, but the idea of like staying out there long-term and maybe even reproducing out there, it just is like we're going to have to become something different if we're going to do that because there are a lot of factors here on Earth that we are adapted and evolved for that we just wouldn't have out there.
[00:08:15]Luke Storey: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:08:16]Daniel Vitalis: Like a mall in space.
[00:08:17]Luke Storey: Yeah, I don't know. Sometimes, when I look at the state of the world affairs, I want to go to another planet. We got that space launch the other day, I was like, can I go because it's fucked up?
[00:08:34]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
[00:08:35]Luke Storey: Yeah.
[00:08:36]Daniel Vitalis: I want them to take everyone and I'm going to just stay behind, like, see you when you get back, we're going to be cleaning up down here.
[00:08:43]Luke Storey: Exactly. Exactly. Oh, man. So, one thing that is interesting about our prior conversations, the number of times that you've been on the show, I think maybe in the very first time you came on, which I believe was episode two, I think you're really my first guest if I'm not mistaken because my first show was a solo show where I just kind of introduced myself and told my story. But we talked a bit about agriculture, and the state of our food, and nutrition, and stuff in that first one. But things have evolved. You learned more. I've learned more since then.
[00:09:15] And I've been always, since that time, wanting to have an updated conversation, tapping into your knowledge base and just the fundamental principles that you understand from the natural world of plant and animal foods, and how we derive nutrition from them. And additionally, those things that are now considered supplements that were once considered food, speaking in terms of the world of fungi, and herbalism, and things that have been historically just part of the human diet. And now, we're kind of segregated into what we call a supplement to add into the diet because they're not there anymore and they once were.
[00:09:57]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. And of course, to add to that being that the word supplement is such a huge spectrum of things that it can be everything from, like now, we're seeing supplements at convenience stores, and at Walmart, and stuff that wouldn't be at your standard. And so, some people have that in their head. And then, companies like mine that produce really, really high—we're in the supplement industry. I don't like thinking of myself like that, but I wouldn't say I'm in the food industry either. So, that word supplement has some negative connotations, along with some positive connotations, too. And that's one of the things I've struggled with being in that industry for a while.
[00:10:34]Luke Storey: Yeah. And on that note, a missing link, I think, in our past conversations has been totally ignoring the fact that you have a really amazing company called Surthrival, and I don't even think we've ever touched on it except at the end, where I'm like, where can people find your website? And I've always respected that about you. You're extremely classy and non-salesy, but I think as your friend for a few years now, almost to the point of your detriment, because I'm kind of like, dude, like promote your site. Your shit is awesome. I've been using, I don't know, how long you guys have been around? Eight years or something.
[00:11:16]Daniel Vitalis: Twelve years.
[00:11:17]Luke Storey: Oh, that long?
[00:11:17]Daniel Vitalis: Twelve years, man. Yeah.
[00:11:18]Luke Storey: Cool.
[00:11:19]Daniel Vitalis: Twelve years.
[00:11:19]Luke Storey: I remember, I think when I first met you was at your booth at one of the David Wolfe like Longevity Now conferences, and I remember even then, I was pretty discerning about supplements and things like that that I was into. And I remember like just looking at your ingredient decks and kind of grilling the brand for efficacy, and legitimacy, and purity, and all that. And I was like, holy shit, these guys are like hardcore. They're doing it right. So, I was like a fan of the brand, I think, as I started to uncover your work. So, thank you for-
[00:11:52]Daniel Vitalis: I'm not a great marketer of myself. It's been a challenge over the years because of the, you know how it is, it's like, what I don't like is when you're listening to something, you're really grooving with it, and then all of a sudden, you realize, oh, it's a sales pitch. I thought I was getting clean information and I don't know how to balance that exactly. I do want to promote my company. I really love my products. In fact, I, like recently, had another like falling in love with my products because it's been 12 years.
[00:12:19] You go through a lot of cycles and stuff. With everything that's been happening lately, I feel like the renewed relevancy of what I do in that space, because I do the supplement thing, but then I also teach in a way that isn't related to supplements. And so, trying to balance those things, and now, making my show, WildFed, do my own podcast. Trying to find an integration point has always been a challenge for me because I don't want to tarnish what I talk about by people thinking like, oh, it's a sales pitch.
[00:12:47]Luke Storey: Yeah, yeah. I relate as a podcast host.
[00:12:51]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
[00:12:52]Luke Storey: Many of the people that I want to interview because of their knowledge base, wisdom, experience also happen to be associated with a product. And I also want to support them doing great work and great products that are awesome in helping humankind, but also don't want to have a podcast that sounds like a giant commercial either. So, it's like, I don't know, I think the way that I've navigated that is just really focusing on the value and the education piece.
[00:13:22] And it's like if something is promoted and if it's something that I have an affiliate relationship with, it's in my store, I mean, it's like quite obvious, and I state it all the time, anything on my web store, well, probably 90% of it, if you buy something from that store, I get a small commission, which is wonderful, and I feel it's a really integris business model of affiliate marketing because the brand wins, they get a new customer, hopefully, for life.
[00:13:48] I win because I'm able to pay my team to produce higher-quality content all the time and keep up-leveling that, and, of course, like feed myself. And the customer wins because they're getting educated on what I believe to be the best products. And also, in most cases, getting exclusive discount codes and saving themselves the time of having to like go and vet every product in every category because they don't want to do that. They just want to know like, what stuff works, Luke? And I'm not always right, but I do my very best to find the best of the best out there. And once I find something is not the best, then I remove it from my promotions, actually because it's happened with like air purifiers, I've promoted-
[00:14:33]Daniel Vitalis: That's an interesting space, right? There's some scammie stuff going on in that. I just bought three new air filters that are, I don't remember what they cost, 60 bucks a piece or something. And when I was doing my research, it's like, oh, you could spend 2,000 on something that has magical qualities. But when you drill down on what they are, you're like, scam.
[00:14:54]Luke Storey: Yeah. Well, that happened to me recently. I mean, I never really heavily promoted it, but I did some research and it seemed like the kind of the best one on the market, this one called Molekule.
[00:15:04]Daniel Vitalis: That's the one.
[00:15:07]Luke Storey: I don't know how I stumbled across it, but I came across some website that it wasn't from a competitor that was saying like, Molekule sucks, but it seemed to be an independent third party that tested the claims of how this particular machine worked, and said that, not that it was totally worthless, but just that it didn't do everything that it's-
[00:15:26]Daniel Vitalis: Didn't do, doesn't do a lot. I watched a great video where what they were doing was they sectioned off a room with plastic so that they had sealed the space, and then they burn something in that space that they can consistently repeat. So, they burn something in that space, and they run the air filter in there, and how long does it take to clear the air? So, pretty scientific experiment. They just run the different filters in there.
[00:15:47] And that one did the least of everything that I watched tested, including up against products that were like a fraction of the cost, a tenth of the cost or something. And so, it's really interesting, high-efficiency particulate air filter, you want something that removes air particles, not just like spits out electricity and kind of like zaps everything in the air, just doesn't actually work, which is not to take away from ozone machines and all that.
[00:16:13] I have that, too. But the problem is that most people don't understand atmosphere and what they're trying to recreate. So, going back to what you were saying before about, you try to recreate these natural conditions in your house, you got to understand a little bit about what you're trying to create. And unfortunately, like turnkey solutions are often what ends up happening, is you end up getting something that's not really what you think it is.
[00:16:34]Luke Storey: Yeah. Well, unfortunately, that one, when I found that out, just that there was any legitimate skepticism, I just immediately had it taken off my site. And I haven't had to do that too many times, because usually, I really look into something before I put it on there. So, anyway, I think a lot of people that listen to podcasts might not even be aware how these things are funded as sponsors-
[00:16:55]Daniel Vitalis: Okay. Got you. I think people are starting to get a lot cooler about it because I remember when I first started podcasting, the space was still pretty young. And now, where it's kind of like everybody has a podcast, including, let's say, like all the news pundits. Their show is on cable still, but then it's also a podcast. It's like everybody's in the podcast game. If you anything public, it's now on the podcast sphere.
[00:17:17] And I think people are getting used to sort of like, I remember when I was a kid watching TV, I wasn't like, oh, God, a commercial, yeah, oh, my God, now, you're trying to sell me something. It's just, you got used to that's how they fund these things. I think that the really important thing as content creators is that we aren't focused more on selling the product than the content we create. And that's what started to happen.
[00:17:36] I mean, TV, as somebody who's now producing my own show and talking to networks from time to time, just seeing that they have gotten so focused on the sales part that they don't think that the quality, the content matters anymore. They're just trying to sell the ad space. And it's like, you destroy yourself that way. The content has to be really, really good, and then people might buy into your ads. But if you are just running ads and you have crap content, it's like, see you.
[00:18:05]Luke Storey: Yeah. I think luckily, before I started my podcast, I had a pretty fundamental understanding of content marketing and that it's not based on the old system of ten asks to one give. It's the inverse of that. So, it's like nine pieces of value for free, asking for one piece of value in return, whether it be a podcast, a blog, a vlog, that it's way, way, way more giving than asking. And that goes back to that model of reciprocity, and fairness, and equality for all parties involved so that it's a win-win.
[00:18:47] It's more of an egalitarian kind of form of marketing in that sense. And thankfully, one of the people that's able to participate in that for the time being, and I feel really good about it, now, would I prefer to not have any ads on my podcast ever? Yeah, but like, it literally costs a couple a few thousand dollars a month to run this shit, including me spending, that I spend doing it, which I think people often negate, as people that are critical of that model, I think, negate the amount of time, and energy, care, and love someone puts into actually creating high-quality content. They're just like, oh, no, you should work for free.
[00:19:25]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, or like the thing where you're like, look, I just need you to leave me a review and a rating on iTunes or whatever. Just please just do that. They're tuning in week after week, three years, 52 times a year, they're listening to you for an hour, and they won't even do that one little thing. And then, I'll catch myself doing that and I'll hear the person put the call out. I'm like, oh, I'm that person now. I need to do that too.
[00:19:49] But yeah, I don't think people understand or I mean, I think we're going to end up with an inverse problem, which is that before, like I said, it got to where it was all ads and the quality of content came down. I think what we're going to end up with now is that the expectations for free content are going to be so extreme. You're going to be expected to do so much and ask for so little. We're going to have to figure out how to navigate that part of it, because I mean, as you know, this kind of thing, you look at it from the outside and it looks like such an attractive life.
[00:20:17] Like, oh, you just do a podcast once a week, and you blog a little bit here and there, and you put up a social media post, but as you know, you're running on a treadmill every week, all week, just trying to get it all done. Mondays for me are insane. Tuesdays are like—and then, by Wednesday, I kind of feel like I start to get control again. But just putting content out, and I don't put out a ton, I put out high-quality content. I might post on Instagram once a week, but when I do, I write 300 words and I really, really edit, it's really, really clean, that takes time. And then, responding to everybody and all of that stuff, people would be surprised, I think, at the amount what a podcast takes to put out, et cetera, you know all that.
[00:20:56]Luke Storey: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that that I have the opportunity to do it. I'm very fortunate. And yeah, it's a lot of work, but it's, thankfully, work that I'm passionate about. And to be honest, I probably would do it for free. You know what I mean? I mean, I've got to eat, like I have different ways that I make money and I still own my other business, School of Style, and there are great things there and all that. But I would have a conversation with you for a couple hours, even if it wasn't recorded, asking you the same shit that I'm asking you on a podcast. That's the truth of the matter.
[00:21:34]Daniel Vitalis: Well, as you said before, like I've always been really bad in advertising my own products, which means I've done a lot of this kind of stuff for free over the years. So, I can relate. For me, one of the most exciting things, I think you have the same kind of kink that I have, is like if I get a new piece of information that kind of overturns a whole bunch of assumptions that I've had in my head, I'm enthralled by that.
[00:21:57] Like the idea of like discovery of new information is just like, for me, that's the drug. And then, communicating that back out and helping people have—when you see someone have like an aha moment, some of the stuff that I've got to talk about over the years, I've been really blessed like, for instance, I get to talk about human domestication as part of my job. And when I see that click for somebody and they come to understand, like, oh, wow, I've been domesticated like a dog, or like a cat, or like a cow, and that there are ways that I can reorient myself in how I move through the world with more personal sovereignty, and like you see that click for somebody, I do that for free every single day.
[00:22:34] I mean, it's so incredible to watch that kind of change. So, that's a huge motivator. And I think you can tell when somebody doesn't have something similar, where they don't have the same passion for it. They come across with that used car salesman vibe, where you're like, no offense to any used car salesman up there, I'm not talking about you, but the stereotype, but when you feel that vibe, it's really obvious. But when you know when somebody is passionate, you feel that.
[00:22:59]Luke Storey: Yeah, that's true. Well, let's go ahead and dive into the topic of choice here. And I mean, because I could just shoot the shit with you forever, but I do have an agenda, as I stated earlier. Let's start out perhaps with the difference in an overview between wild foods and domestic foods that one would get from even the highest-quality grocer or even farmer's market.
[00:23:26]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. Well-
[00:23:28]Luke Storey: Nutritional density and the ability to support life.
[00:23:33]Daniel Vitalis: Right. Okay. Well, the thing that I think is really apparent is the stuff in our supermarket has been produced by people. And it took many, many, many, many hundreds of years, in most cases, for us to draw those things out of nature and turn them into what they are. And I'll go back through and explain what I'm talking about. The foods that we find in nature aren't really necessarily meant to be foods. We live in an ecosystem of all of these organisms who have this desire to reproduce, to survive into adulthood and to reproduce, spread their genes around, to grow out their niche, and to live on planet Earth.
[00:24:12] And every other organism needs to eat one or more of those organisms in order to really be able to stay here and fulfill their mission. So, it's not like a grocery store where every organism's like, how can I produce the food for everybody else? In a lot of cases, they are the food. But then, they're also eating things, too. So, what's happening in the natural world, these things are made up of all these nutrients, really high-quality nutrients because that's what they make their bodies out of.
[00:24:40] What's going on with us is that we have called out of the natural world all of these foods and we've been producing them for years, and years, and years. And in the process, we've dumbed down their genetics. We've dumbed down the amount of nutrition that's in them. We've depleted our soils. We've removed the medicines out of the foods because we don't usually like the flavors of those things. And what we have now is a diet that verges on the cardboard.
[00:25:05] It's like, if you think about cardboard, it's fiber, it's paper fiber, it's cellulose. That's like what's leftover when you run kale through the juicer, right? You've kind of squeezed out most of the nutrition, and now, you just have the fiber. We are eating a diet that's like that. Now, you've got the full spectrum from folks who are eating the best-quality diet they can to people who don't care. People who don't care are, let's say you're going to McDonald's every day and you're getting this burger, looks like a burger, but it wouldn't taste like that if they didn't add in all those synthetic flavors, right?
[00:25:40] They're adding all these synthetic flavor agents. So, if you could have the burger without that, it wouldn't taste like a burger. It wouldn't even taste, it's not any of those things anymore. It's been like sort of manufactured. And as you move up the scale towards higher and higher-quality food, you are getting more and more nutrients, but you aren't getting what's in the natural world. So, like really good examples would be, let's say that you were to take just a basic salad. You're taking like some kind of lettuce.
[00:26:08] It could be a green-leaf lettuce, or a red-leaf lettuce, or iceberg lettuce, or romaine lettuce, if you could see the wild plant, first thing you would notice is, well, the leaves are much smaller. And then, if you tasted it, you'd be like, wow, this thing is much more bitter. And then, if you broke a leaf, you'd see, oh, it exudes a white latex. This is a different thing. Now, the lettuce that we eat today comes from that plant, but it has lost a lot of these qualities.
[00:26:35] Well, it turns out those qualities are super medicinal and even drug-like in some cases. So, with lettuce, we have like a very subtle opiate replacement. That's kind of fascinating. Wild lettuce was used throughout time all the way back to Egypt as an opiate replacement. It was used as a sleep agent. It was used to put crying babies to sleep. The latex in lettuce. Now, that latex incidentally tastes bitter, so we've bred it out, right?
[00:27:00] We've removed it by breeding the sweetest lettuce with the next sweetest lettuce and continuing to do that until you eventually have something that no longer resembles the wild progenitor. The problem is then you start to be deficient in medicine. This is like just the most fascinating idea to me, that we have created a diet through domestication that's so deficient in medicine that we are now having to take all these medicines externally to try to replace what's missing in our diet.
[00:27:29] But the other thing that happens is, let's take blueberries as an example. So, if you have a wild blueberry, which is going to be the size of a pea; and you have a domesticated blueberry, let's say it's more like the size of a chickpea, it's two, three, four times the size, well, all those antioxidants in the blueberry that are the sunscreen that you eat, right? It's that these antioxidants that get in our bloodstream and actually protect us from UV damage, they protect us from neurodegeneration, they repair DNA, all that kind of stuff.
[00:28:01] We really need a lot of that. We need that more now than our ancestors did, but we have way less of it now than they did. Like we're dealing with way more significant forces now than they were that are degrading our body. So, we really need those things. Well, if you think about a small blueberry, it has less internal mass and more skin than if you think about the bigger blueberry, it has actually more internal mass and less skin area, which means you have way less of the pigment because the amount of skin to meat is reduced compared to the smaller one.
[00:28:37] Also, you're going to have more of the blueberry flavor in the smaller one. That's all those phenols, all of those plant chemicals that all are nutrients to us. Many of which don't fall neatly into categories like vitamins and minerals. That's a pretty rudimentary understanding of nutrition. We now understand there's all this vital chemistry that we need. Well, that starts to be bred out when we have these domestic plants. So, what you end up with is a lot more water, a lot more sugar, but a lot less of the stuff that you need.
[00:29:03] And we could go on and on like this. The stuff that's in our diet today is, I don't want to say, nutritionally bankrupt, because there are high quality permaculture operations, organic farming operations, and things like that, but almost in every case, if we compare the nutrition of a wild food to a domestic food, we find that a wild food is significantly higher in nutrients that we need, significantly higher in the vital chemistry that is everything from UV-protective to gene-protective to immunostimulating, or immunomodulating, or whatever it is we find that we have all that chemistry that we need.
[00:29:39] And it's really, really reduced in the food that we grow. And then, when we look at animal products, of course, we run into a whole other suite of issues. In particular, I think, is the disease complexes that develop in the animals that are raised for meat in most cases versus wild animals where we see just this very robust health. So, I feel like we're feeding on the most corrupted diet ever. And the problem is that the environment around us is the most toxic it's ever been and the most aggressive to us that it's ever been. And so, we don't really have what we need to protect us. And we're sort of eating our way into degeneration right now.
[00:30:19]Luke Storey: Thank you for that. And I think the fascinating piece there that stands out to me is how you illustrated that because we've taken the medicine out of food, which, if you're talking about vegetables, for example, would be those bitter medicines that require us because of the degradation that naturally ensues as a result to then later go to the doctor and get those bitter-
[00:30:47]Daniel Vitalis: Prescriptions of those medicines.
[00:30:48]Luke Storey: However, if you chew up any prescription medicine, which I've done for reasons we won't—to this conversation—by the way, if you chew up medicines and put it under your tongue, it hits you faster. Just a side note. But they're always bitter. You take an aspirin, you take any kind of drug no matter what. I mean, I've never chewed up an antibiotic. But generally speaking, most medicines are bitter. And I always say that all medicines are plant medicines ultimately.
[00:31:15] Even if they're synthetic, they're nearing something from the fungi or the plant world at some point that's kind of where science got the idea to begin with, was from the intelligent design in nature. And it's crazy what we've done in that regard. Something I've heard you talk about in the past that's been really fascinating and you just kind of did the diagram of the blueberry, for example, but I remember you talking about, back in the day, how when you go to the grocery store, even a ridiculously expensive grocery store like we have here called Erewhon, which is kind of the gold standard of health food stores where you go and you have 10 bucks to spend and you come out $300 later.
[00:31:59]Daniel Vitalis: Ten bucks will get you a smoothie there, for sure.
[00:32:03]Luke Storey: But you go into even like a very well-curated vegetable section of a grocery store like that and you think that you're seeing a hundred different vegetables or whatever the number is, but in fact, it's basically like 10 vegetables that are kind of representing themselves individually. So, could you break down that a bit for people because I think a bit diverse because although I ate broccoli; today, kale; and tomorrow, I'm going to eat radishes, so I'm getting like a diverse range of vegetables.
[00:32:33]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. I mean, I think we all understand that we want a lot of variety in our diet, and that's really important. And when we look at indigenous peoples—and let me backtrack a minute, why I bring up indigenous peoples. This is outside of all of the conversations we're having about sort of, it's getting like too sensitive to even say that. So, let me just say, well, when you look at people who hunted and gathered traditionally, who represent the wild-type human, the human before agriculture, who were living before sort of these artificial foods were created, they have tremendous variety in their diet over the course of their year.
[00:33:05] I like to call myself a modern-day hunter-gatherer, but in reality, it's like a hobby of mine. Okay. I still eat food from the supermarket. I still eat food from the farmer's market. I don't eat 100% wild foods, and I don't know anyone that does, and I think that would be really, really cool to be able to do. And every year, I have a lot more, I should say, not even a little, like a lot more every year. We eat wild foods in my house every single day and not out of some kind of ritual, but because it's what we have on hand all the time.
[00:33:36] It's always kind of working into our meals, which means that even as a modern-day person who grew up eating Velveeta cheese and like I don't know what else, cup of noodle was one of my favorites, growing up on that kind of standard white bread diet and kind of turning to wild foods as an adult who really didn't grow up with that skillset, even still, at this point in the year, we're in mid-June right now, I have probably eaten more species this year than the average American will have in 10 years.
[00:34:11] Because the average American is really eating probably about 30 foods, max, when we talk about them at the genetic level. So, let's just imagine, for instance, you were an eater of dogs, like that was like your main staple was you ate dogs. And so, today, you had a Great Dane for lunch, and then tomorrow night, you're going to have a Chihuahua, and then the next day, you're going to have a St. Bernard, and then you're going to have a German Shepherd. And you're like, man, I got a lot of variety in my diet, should see all these dog breeds I'm eating.
[00:34:47] And then, somebody comes along and they go like, no, man, they're all dogs, species, Canis lupus familiaris. They're actually just the same species. You're not getting variety. You're just getting variety of morphology. If you were a cannibal, you could be like, well, I ate a Black dude yesterday, and a white girl for lunch, and then I had an Asian for breakfast the other day, like I'm getting a lot of variety, right? It's like, no, we're all humans. We're all the same species, right? We have morphological differences that we can point out, but that doesn't change that. We're just all human. We're all the same. Does that make sense?
[00:35:21]Luke Storey: Yeah.
[00:35:21]Daniel Vitalis: You go into the supermarket, and we go, oh, like, look at all this variety. What we don't realize is that a lot of these things, like the different races of people or the different breeds of dogs, are actually all the same species. So, probably, the one that stands out the most to me is this plant called Brassica oleracea, which comes out of Europe, in the UK. It's a mustard, a crucifer. And if you saw it at certain stages and I really pointed it out to you, you might notice characteristics of certain foods you eat, but you probably would just walk by it.
[00:35:55] But that plant has been bred into a whole bunch of plants today that we think of as being different. So, its leaves have been turned into Brussels sprouts, its leaves have been turned into all of the cabbages, all the different colors of cabbages and types. It's been turned into collard greens. It's been turned into all of the types of kale. Its flowers have been turned into broccoli and cauliflower. That's the same plant. Just a mutated flower of the two. It's been turned into the storage organ we call kohlrabi. That's the same plant. It's been turned into broccolini and broccoli rabe.
[00:36:33] And we could go on, and on, and on, and on. There's actually many more in this one species. So, you go into the supermarket and you see them all laid out there. They appear to be all really different, sort of in the way that lots of different types of humans look different, tall, and short, and stocky, and thin. And we all look different, but we're all the same species. So, that's going on with our foods. Some other examples would be beets are the same plant as Swiss chard.
[00:37:02] Turnips are the same plant as Napa cabbage, which is not like Brassica oleracea, but different type. And it's also where we get canola oil. That's all one plant. So, when you start to break it down like that, you realize there's a lot less variety. And then, also, you start to run into problems of overeating one type of plant all the time. So, let me give you an example. This month, we have a plant growing here. This is a cosmopolitan plant. That means it's found all over the world.
[00:37:31] So, those who don't know, the cosmos is my city, that's what cosmopolitan means. So, polis first was city and cosmos, right? So, around the world, we find this plant. It's called Bracken Fern. And it's quite popular in Korean cuisine. Now, this plant is a fiddlehead. When it's a young fern, we take the sheet of it. It contains a carcinogen. And we need to leech that out in order to turn it into food. Otherwise, it's a bit toxic. Now, there's always going to be traces of it, and that's okay, but we don't want to overeat this plant over time.
[00:38:04] And in fact, it might be related to certain stomach and throat cancers in Korea, where it's consumed really regularly. So, we can tolerate stuff that's toxic to us if we have a lot of variety in the diet because we never end up with too much of it. But one of the things that's emerged about Brassica oleracea is it has a goitrogen in it. It damages the thyroid gland. Now, that's okay if we don't eat it every single day, all day.
[00:38:31] But if every day, you're eating kale, and then collards, and then cabbage, and then broccoli, and then Brussels sprouts, and then cauliflower, and you keep eating this vegetable over and over, particularly, if you eat it raw over and over, like the kale salad, and the cauliflower rice, all the stuff people are doing, they're over-consuming a goitrogen. So, in nature, what we're doing is we're constantly shifting from food to food to foods seasonally. This is called phonology, right?
[00:38:59] Because in phonology, it's the study of the cyclic changes in the seasons, particularly, how it relates to plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms. So, for me, this plant, bracken fern, is only available for about a month, which means that even if I ate it all the time, eventually, it's gone, and I'm on to the next food. Now, nature had that kind of built in for us. But now, because we have the ability to grow our food all over the world where there's always a climate that can produce it and we're able to create artificial conditions, we can eat the same foods every single day.
[00:39:32] So, in addition to the problem that you have with just a lack of variety, you also have the problem that in that lack of variety, you might be over, you might be missing out on a whole bunch of nutrients by not having a variety, and then you might be over-consuming something that's not really that good for you in too much quantity. Just to kind of finish out that thought from before, you have a lot of alliums, which are fantastic. I'm a huge fan of alliums, but you have your onions, your leeks, your garlic, your chives.
[00:40:01] This is just like this one family of plant as it looks like a bunch of variety. The same with citruses, the same with our apples. And then, it also gets weirder because a lot of these things aren't even natural-born, but they're clones. And so, clones have been part of our diet for a really long time. All the wheat growers out there know that, there's probably 97% of the people listening right now, I think, in this country are professionally growers at this point.
[00:40:25] I know, my state, that's about all that they're doing now. So, you understand about this cloning idea. It's kind of strange to me that we've been living on clones. So, one of the things that's really neat about wild foods or when you start to ask yourself how you can replicate a wild diet in an urban environment, is looking at this question of like, hey, can I get foods that haven't been cloned?
[00:40:47]Luke Storey: Wow. That's really entertaining—exactly—how that all works and I'm glad that we got to get that information out of you because I've tried to explain it to people and I'm just not that good at it. And you have a very eloquent and informed way to communicate that. So, the thing that I find interesting just subjectively is in regard to eating a variety of foods, as you've indicated, that humans have evolved to do. I mean, I'm sure that in certain places, the Inuits might not have eaten many vegetables.
[00:41:20]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. But a surprising amount of them. I just actually want to interject that. So, when you look at people of the north, so Inupiat, and Inuit, and such, they have a 24-hour sun period for a part of the year. And so, there's a growing season, right? So, during that time, they're eating the crowberries, and the cloudberries, and they're able to gather algaes, marine macroalgaes. And there's all kinds of plants that they're able to access. We imagine them only in their winter period, which is a mistake, right?
[00:41:53] That comes from just a crazy caricature of who they are. There's a documentary series that is just incredible. I really like watching it particularly in the winter, but it was made, I think, in the 1940s or 50s when there were Inuit people who still had—there's no metal in this show. Everything that you see in this series is their traditionally-made tools and garments. So, they are wearing polar bear pants, and seal skin coats, and bone harpoons. And I mean, it's incredible to watch. And it goes through their foraging year.
[00:42:30] And you're like, oh, yeah. It's only winter half the year. They have this period of time where it's all 24 hours of light and they're able to do things that you wouldn't normally think about. So, they do have extremely reduced access to resources. And that's one of the things about it, but they have more variety still than the average person would. And some of the things that they can eat, you wouldn't necessarily think of. Like there's the lichen that we call—and just a little side note about lichen, I did a podcast on this recently. Are you familiar with what I mean when I say lichen?
[00:43:01]Luke Storey: Some kind of sea vegetable.
[00:43:03]Daniel Vitalis: Lichens are this really interesting composite organism that you'll see growing on rocks as a crust. You'll see them on trees as like a sort of rosette. Sometimes, they're hanging down from trees as filaments. These organisms, they don't fit neatly in any category, but they are part-fungi, part-algae, and sometimes, part blue-green algae as well, or cyanobacteria. So, they are multiple organisms that work together in order to become one organism. It's quite strange and category-defying.
[00:43:39] Anyway, they're not usually very edible to us, but caribou eat a species of it and the Inuit hunters would then eat the contents of the stomach of that animal where it had been predigested. So, in cases where you might think like they would have a reduced access to non-animal foods, there are rather ingenious ways in which they would get them. Now, keep in mind, as you go toward the equator, you kind of have an opposite issue.
[00:44:05] Now, you have, rather than this really extreme summer to winter thing that's going on, right? 24-hour sunlight, 24 hours of darkness that you have there. As you go to the equator, as I'm sure you're aware, it's just 6:00 AM sunrise, 6:00 PM sunset. It's 12-hour day, 12-hour night, 365 days a year. The sun just goes like direct overhead, right? It's the strangest thing to me to be down there. You have so much plant life there that you're—I mean, you look at the shamanic traditions of, let's say, the Amazon jungle.
[00:44:39] I think you've probably been down there for some of that and experiencing a little bit of that and the amount of plants that they have access to in their pharmacopoeia compared to if you went and worked with Inuit people, where their shamanism, it's going to be much more animal-based, right? Because they simply don't have that incredible plethora. Why I bring this stuff is just to say human beings are really unique, in that we are so cosmopolitan that we can't really pin down the natural human diet as one thing.
[00:45:12] I personally think like if I was from the north, if I was an Inuit person or an Inupiat person, I would find veganism sort of offensive, where it's like, hey, man, we've been around up there for 14,000 years and we can't be Vegan up there. Similarly, if I lived in the Amazon, I think I would be like slightly turned off by the whole like Carnivore diet, where it's like, hey, man, we live in the jungle, there's a lot of plants down here, then we've been doing this a lot longer than your diet has been around. You know what I'm saying?
[00:45:46] So, people love to do this thing, where they go like, oh, the natural diet for people is veganism. Like, oh, the natural diet, we're naturally carnivores. It's like, no, we're not. Human beings have been dispersed around the world for tens of thousands of years, right? Out of the Africa, how long we go? I mean, I can't remember exactly. It changes all the time. But I think that they know that the folks in Australia, the Aborigines of Australia have been there like 60,000 years out of Africa. Sixty thousand years.
[00:46:15] I mean, that's a pretty long time to be adapting to the landscape, right? So, coming in and being like, no, no, we figured out the human diet. It's like, you maybe want to ask some of these folks first because they probably have a better handle on it, just given the multiple zeros and commas in the number of years that they've been out there. But yeah, the human diet is hard to pin down, but what we know is that humans basically eat anything in the environment they can render edible unless they have a taboo against the food.
[00:46:43] I'll just say, like as a hunter for me, here is something interesting, I don't have a lot of taboos. Like if it could be done sustainably, I would go whaling. Just putting that all the way out there. If it could be done sustainably, I would hunt elephants. And I know people are like, oh, my God, I'm losing my freaking mind, how can you say that? It's like, hey, man, I come from mastodon hunters and so do you. A lot of us have mastodon hunters, elephant hunters in our lineages.
[00:47:10] Now, that's how we're here today. Now, today, hunting elephants is not a sustainable thing. This isn't something I'm saying I would be involved in today. But I'm just saying, I don't have a lot of qualms about it. But I cannot hunt a crow, man. I don't know what it is. I bought a bunch of decoys. There's a little crow season here in Maine and I felt like, I'm going to hunt crows because there's a window of time where I can't really hunt.
[00:47:29] And I thought that would be really cool, but it's like I have like a taboo against it. I want to, have tried, but it's like there's something about that animal that I'm like, I just can't for some reason. And it's not about being grossed out by it. It's about like some emotional connection to it. So, you'll see that in a lot of cultures where there's certain things they don't eat, but not because they're nutritionally bad for them because you'll go to another culture and they eat those there. So, what we see is that there are taboos, but otherwise, people eat everything. Everything.
[00:47:58] And the challenge that we're having today is we live in an environment where not everything you can eat is good for you anymore. That's the problem. So, it's kind of like if you've ever traveled in a place where people are in a transition from a nature-based economy to an industrial economy, we, sometimes, call it the third world ,or the developing world, or something like that when you're in a place like that, you'll see like a propensity towards littering that seems really bizarre. Like why would you litter all this stuff like right in your own village and right along your own streets? But it's like you think about the past, when everything you throw on the ground decompose or biodegraded back into the landscape.
[00:48:34]Luke Storey: Wow.
[00:48:34]Daniel Vitalis: Now, we're in this environment where the stuff that we have doesn't do that anymore, but the habits of hundred thousand years of being able to do that are still in place. Similarly, we're in this environment now where if you find—see, in the past, if you found something sweet, you ate all of it. You don't pass up sweetness. You find fat in the environment, you don't pass that up. Like those two things, sweet and fat are crucial. Same as salt.
[00:49:01] Especially if you weren't a coastal people, very easy to take salt for granted if you're a coastal people. It's like in the water. But if you're an inland people, those salts are missing in your diet. So, any time you find something salty, it's like you eat that. Well, here we are now in this environment, just loaded with fat, loaded with sugar, loaded with salt, we still have 300,000-year-old taste buds in organoleptic experiences in the mouth that go like, oh, I need more of that. I need more of that. I need more.
[00:49:29] That's your ancestors going, yeah, get more of that. But the problem is we have too much of it and we've twisted it. So, we don't just have our regular fats anymore. Now, we have trans fats we have to think about, right? We don't just have natural like fructose, or glucose anymore, or sucrose. Now, we have these like high-fructose corn syrups, and agave nectars, and things like that. So, we have toxic versions of the sweets, and the fats, and the salts, and we have too much.
[00:49:59] But this stuff all comes from a natural desire. I think that's important to bring up because I think a lot of times, you feel slightly guilty. It's like, oh, man. Well, if you think about it, you don't have to feel guilty. You just have to learn self-control around these things and figure out a relationship to it. It's kind of like how it is with alcohol in our culture, because historically, we find that people are really interested in alcohol if they can make some, but they usually couldn't make it very frequently because they didn't have access all year to the things that could be fermented until agriculture started.
[00:50:31] And then, suddenly, you had like wheat. You're like, what can you turn wheat into?1 Beer. It's like, oh, we're planting vineyards out. Can we turn grapes into wine? Right? You suddenly can produce alcohol. We start farming these. What can you do with honey? We can make mead. So, now, we're in this environment where we always have access to alcohol. So, I'm always fascinated, I read about, sometimes, what is going on in the desert southwest with the saguaro cactus and all this iconic cactus down there and its fruits.
[00:50:58] And there would be like a wine that would be produced from the fruits in the season and there would be like a three-day just drinking bender that would go on with the tribes there, making it into a wine and drinking it until it was gone. But then, it's gone and you got 360 days probably, 340-something days or whatever it is until it's around again. So, you get this like nice window of sobriety, right?
[00:51:22] But now, everybody has to figure out what's my relationship going to be, the ethanol environment, in my environment, what's my relationship going to be to the drugs in my environment because they're so readily available? So, we've carried our ancient tastes for things and our cravings for things that were good into a world where there's too much and too many twisted versions, and that's the problem. The problems aren't really us, the problem is the environment we've created for ourselves.
[00:51:48]Luke Storey: Dude, holy shit. That was so dope. Wow. Wow. I got to process that for a second. So, being someone who was dependent on alcohol, and let's just blame it on the fact there is too much around, for many years to the point of almost to my demise amongst other medicines that were around that were a prevalent too, I wonder what poppy seasons are like. But anyway, they seem to grow a lot of poppies in Mexico all the time.
[00:52:26]Daniel Vitalis: Afghanistan, too.
[00:52:28]Luke Storey: Funny how that works, but it's interesting.
[00:52:31]Daniel Vitalis: Oh, we had troops there, but I guess, somehow, they're still able to do that.
[00:52:34]Luke Storey: Yeah, right. Yeah. Flourishing nonetheless. But it's interesting to think about, historically, alcoholism in relation to that concept that you just brought forward, I wonder if alcoholism was virtually non-existent or extremely rare prior to the agricultural revolution when we became sedentary, and claim plots of land, and started to grow shit year-round that we could make booze out of. I wonder if it just like was a non-issue, historically, prior to that pivot that humankind made.
[00:53:09]Daniel Vitalis: I'd like to expand on that idea that you have there. I mean, it's funny, too, when you look at, have you ever seen the show, Human Planet? Did you ever watch that? It's like a David Attenborough-style documentary series, but instead of being about animals, it's about Homo sapiens. So, it's an anthropological following in that nature documentary style, looking at tribes of people around the world. And there's a fantastic episode taking place in the jungle where this guy is going to go get honey, pull down honeycomb for his family. But I mean, he's something like 80 feet up a tree. So precarious. I mean, you're watching this climb and it's like, I don't know if you watch that free solo documentary. Did you see that dude who climbed El Cap?
[00:53:53]Luke Storey: I haven't seen that yet.
[00:53:54]Daniel Vitalis: Okay. I'm not a heights person, so when I watch that, it's like my heart's in my throat the whole time. And so, this is like that. This guy's climbing this tree, but then when he gets all the way up there, he's now got to take his axe and cut a hole into the tree to start pulling out honeycomb and bringing it down to his wife, and kids, and village friends were down below. And he's, of course, being stung. I think he might have like a smoking, a little bundle of firebrand smoking or something.
[00:54:21] But you're just looking at this like, okay, you're not making mead every day. You know what I mean? Right? But I want to add, there's a question that exists in anthropology which goes unanswered. And it's not just kind of obscure folks who are thinking about this, Jared Diamond, who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, he's quite a celebrated writer on anthropology, this question too, why did we ever leave hunting and gathering for agriculture when agriculture actually brings with it so many problems, health problems, social justice problems, physiological problems to include arthritis, back pain, and all the things that come associated with working the land as opposed to foraging, which is a really gentle, fun activity.
[00:55:07] I mean, foraging like, I've been foraging all the time. You'd go out with my wife, it is the funnest and most diverse activity, like CrossFit's harder on your body. It's pretty gentle and it's diverse in how you move. And sometimes, we're grabbing stuff high; and sometimes, we're grabbing stuff low; and sometimes, we're paddling. It's always different, right? So, you're not getting repetitive stress problems. You start like turning soil over every single day.
[00:55:35] Now, you start getting the back problems and all those kinds of things. There's been a lot of question like, why did we do that? Well, from what we understand currently, the very first domesticated food was wheat in Mesopotamia. That's where the first crop that was domesticated, oh, by Gobekli Tepe. Personally, just as a side note, for anybody who's kind of followed along any of that Graham Hancock stuff or watching that on Rogan, where they're always talking about Gobekli Tepe and trying to figure out what this place was.
[00:56:04] In my mind, this was the beginning of agriculture, happened there from my sort of analysis of the research that's been done. Of course, from my armchair, not over there looking at the stuff. But what's really interesting about that site is that it was built by hunter-gatherers. And previous to that, we didn't think hunter-gatherers ever built these city states, these citadels like this. We thought only agricultural people did.
[00:56:28] Well, turns out that wheat was domesticated like 20 miles down the road. And what my kind of hypothesis is, is that wheat was initially domesticated to feed the slaves that were building that site. That's how I analyze that. We started planting wheat over there. I say, we, I mean, humans, right? We started planting wheat there and everybody assumes like, oh, wheat, food, bread. And it's like, well, get it wet and leave it in a bowl for a minute, because then, it's beer.
[00:56:59] And there is an argument being made amongst some anthropologists that it might have been the desire for alcohol that actually fueled domestication as much as having surplus food. Because hunter-gatherers had food, right? But like if you've ever drank sake, you're drinking the fermented product of rice grains. If you've ever drank, what is it, in Mesoamerica, that they make out of maize? I'm trying to think of it, chicha.
[00:57:31] And being down in Peru, I'd go to these chicha bars at night where these women were fermenting corn in basically big rubber-made garbage cans and giving you this chunky, funky alcoholic porridge, right? So, that's coming from maize. Pulque, I think, I want to say, from agave, don't quote me on that, wheat, of course, beer. So, what it looks like is if you look around the world, alcohol might have been the reason for domestication as much as anything else.
[00:58:05] So, I kind of have this sentiment that civilization—and let me back up. Civilization, we use it today to just refer to like things being orderly, but civilization has a really specific definition. It refers to agricultural peoples who build city states. So, when Europeans came to North America, for instance, for the first time, they weren't encountering significant city states. Now, that did exist in Mexico and it did come up through the Mississippi Valley.
[00:58:40] There were some city states there, pretty significant ones. But when they came up to places like where I live, in New England, for instance, these were mostly hunting and gathering peoples with very limited agriculture. We don't call those civilizations. They're societies, but not civilizations. So, a civilization would be Greece, would be Rome, would be England, would be the Chinese dynasties. Those are civilizations where you have a hierarchical structure with somebody ruling at the top and you have these different classes. That's a civilization.
[00:59:13] Okay. So, I have this thing, I say, civilizations and alcoholic. And that's because from the very beginning of civilizations, they were fermenting the grains that they grew. So, civilizations and grains are deeply intertwined. Grains or the fruits of grasses. So, again, if you think about the fruits of grasses that we grow, it's corn, wheat, barley, rice, all of those are very easily converted, because they're carbohydrates, they're very easily converted into alcohol.
[00:59:43] So, going back to what you just said, it's highly likely that alcoholism was really not an issue. And again, when you look at hunting and gathering peoples of North America, for example, it's kind of well-understood to have a very strong sensitivity to alcohol, because genetically, they hadn't encountered nearly as much of it as people who had created these city states, where they had all these grains that they could ferment. So, Europeans came over and they were like, yeah, we've been drinking forever. Like, what's up? Right?
[01:00:13] And native people were kind of decimated by alcoholism because they didn't have the kind of resistance to it, right? They hadn't developed the ability to process it because your body goes through a fairly complex process of turning ethanol into vinegar. That's how you detoxify it. So, for instance, like you probably know this, if you take psychedelic mushrooms, right? And you urinate and you re-drink your urine, like you re-expose yourself to the psilocybin that's in there. That's a traditional thing people would do, right? You've ever heard of that?
[01:00:49]Luke Storey: No, dude.
[01:00:50]Daniel Vitalis: Okay. Anyway, it's like, you can get a bump, let's just say that. But if you drink alcohol, it's not like you pee alcohol out, you pee out vinegar, it's acidic acid. So, that's what you break it down into. So, anyway, you can imagine in places where they had been fermenting grains for a long time, their liver has gotten good at that process, right? And so, you see when indigenous groups, particularly, like in places where people hadn't been previously contacted, and then they come in contact with civilizations, and then those civilizations give them alcohol, it can have a pretty intense effect on them.
[01:01:25]Luke Storey: Wow. Damn. That's wild. It also-
[01:01:28]Daniel Vitalis: But yeah. I mean, really think about domestication and alcohol. Like that's probably the reason.
[01:01:34]Luke Storey: Right. And an interesting element in terms of those civilizations being centered around the discovery of our ability to grow food in one place and stay there, as you started to indicate, was that the hierarchical system of very few at the top controlling the many at the bottom, to me, it's the link or the—how do I explain it? It's like, I mean, coming from like this Friday, it will have already aired by the time your show comes out, but David Icke is on my show, who talks a lot about this.
[01:02:12]Daniel Vitalis: You've already sat with him and recorded?
[01:02:14]Luke Storey: Yeah. He talked about unconditional love and consciousness for the first hour or something. It's not going to be as controversial as one might think, more of a metaphysical teaching. But, of course, people like him, even people that are kind of less conspiratorial have indicated that, really, so many of the problems we face as a human culture and society at large stems from that original domestication and the need for then a police state, a military force, all of the ills that we see today being played out can kind of be traced back to that time, men has decided, this is our land. It's so interesting. And I'm not-
[01:03:02]Daniel Vitalis: Sorry, go ahead.
[01:03:03]Luke Storey: No, that's it.
[01:03:05]Daniel Vitalis: It's a very delicate needle to thread to talk about some of these components. But right now, the conversations that are happening in the United States and at large about how society should be shaped, unfortunately, these anthropological understandings of our origins is not being factored into the conversation. So, it's the obvious elephant in the room, to me, watching it from the outside as this conversation takes place, particularly around things like policing and all of that because it hasn't been done before to have a civilization that sees its individual citizens as sovereigns, the closest experiment to that is the United States with its Bill of Rights and Constitution.
[01:03:51] I mean, my wife's from Canada. It's an amazing place. I mean, they don't have free speech there. They don't have a right to assembly there. They don't want the Second Amendment there. I mean, the idea of those things is a really, really new idea. But we still have that structured hierarchical society. It's just that it comes into existence when you have surplus food. Just so people, catch everyone up to what we're talking about here, it's like if you are a hunter-gatherer, typically, you can only produce as much food as you eat because it's like you have to go out each day, and hunt, and gather that food, and bring it back.
[01:04:29] Now, that doesn't mean it's all immediate-return subsistence. In other words, it's not like you just go out, catch something, bring it back, eat it. The next day, you wake up hungry, and you got to go out again. Obviously, a lot of cultures learned to store food and processed food into things that they could keep on hand, but it was very difficult to produce surpluses of food. But when you do agriculture, you end up with surpluses of food.
[01:04:50] See, going back to Gobekli Tepe, here's the thing, they knew it took like 500 people working for—I think it was five to 10 years in order to build that site. Five hundred people around the clock. Well, how did they feed those people. Well, in order to feed those people, if you're a hunter-gatherers, means that five hundred hunter-gatherers have to produce twice as much food. That's not realistic. Hence, why I think that the growing of wheat in that place probably was used to fuel that workforce.
[01:05:20] When you start to domesticate grains, you start to produce surplus food, which leads very quickly to surplus people. And that's one of the things that's like if you take a tank full of mice and you put enough food in there for 100 mice, you're always going to have right around 100 mice. But if you suddenly add to where there's enough food for 200 mice, how long until you have 200 mice? It's not going to take that long. This is why there's a huge fundamental misunderstanding amongst most folks.
[01:05:46] If you ask the average person on the street, is there enough food being grown in the world for all the people that are here? Most people think no. And I'm always like, well, then what are all these people made out of? Just straight up, what are they made out of? Good luck? They're made out of food. Therefore, we must be producing surpluses of food if we keep growing the population. If we're going to get to 12 billion people, it's because there's too much food.
[01:06:16] I mean, if you just scaled the food back, you would have less people. It would take a little time, but the population would diminish to the amount of food that's available. Is that making sense? Soon as you have surpluses of food, you get surpluses of people. So, one of the things that happens when they first started to grow food was you had this surplus of foods so the population starts to explode. The other thing that happens is, now, you're not on a migratory circuit where you follow these animals at this time of year.
[01:06:43] You go over here to forage this at this time of the year, then you got to move over to this river because that's where the fish run that you harvest that time of year. And you end up with this migratory cycle. I experienced that in my own hunting and gathering where it's like each part of the year, I'm in a different place for a different food. That just happens naturally. But what happens with agriculture is you become sedentary. You stop moving around because you're going to all be hoarded around your wheat plantation, whatever it is you're growing, or your livestock, or whatever it is.
[01:07:10] So, now, you stay put. Well, because you're staying put, you can't let anybody else come there. So, really quickly, this is my land, right? So, now, how are you going to keep anybody else from there? Well, now, you need some kind of class of people who are going to protect that, right? So, now, you need kind of like armies. And then, you have surplus food. Well, who decides who gets the surplus food and how it's distributed? Because surplus food starts to work like a money.
[01:07:31] So, how does that work? Well, now, you need some class of accounting. Well, who's going to watch over them? Well, now, you need some kind of ruling class, right? Like legislative class and all this. Before you know it, you're in this hierarchy. So, right now, we're seeing this rebellion against the hierarchical systems, which is understandable because hierarchical systems aren't natural to humans, but the problem is no one's addressing the fact that they want to erase hierarchy, but still have all the conditions that lead to hierarchy.
[01:07:57] So, it's going to be really difficult to just trust everybody to just handle everything, there's not going to be any crime and there's not going to be any—I mean, how is that going to work? Because those are the reasons that hierarchy came into existence. I don't believe that hierarchies are good for the soul. You look at how hunter-gatherer peoples lived and they had an incredible degree of egalitarianism beyond anything that we can even really conceive of today, where each person really is a sovereign, where the person who is in a leadership position is in a leadership position, but they don't have authority over you.
[01:08:33] You go along with it because you agree and think they're a good leader, but not because you have to, right? That was a very different world that we lived in for 300,000 years. We've only been living like this for 5,000 to 10,000. This is all very new to us. But the idea that we're not going to discuss these conditions that lead to hierarchy and we're going to try to buy abolish hierarchy, it's a fool's errand. So, sitting on the outside, watching people and watching the conversation that's taking place right now, it's like it's hard when you know there are missing details, that the conversation is incomplete.
[01:09:02] And until we really address where we come from, and that's the thing, is there's such a push today, too, to like erase the past. That's a delicate thing, you kind of need to know the past in order to make the decisions about the future. And I think we need to be really careful about that because learning from the mistakes of the past is really important. So, yeah, I think that we're having a half-conversation about a lot of these things and it's not really productive. We need to ask ourselves why hierarchy exists, not just how to abolish it.
[01:09:32]Luke Storey: Wow.
[01:09:33]Daniel Vitalis: And then, we're going to have to really reflect on where our food comes from because that's what people don't understand, that hierarchy and food—alright. We'll put it in another way. Policing and food are so intertwined. It might sound ridiculous to somebody if you just bring it up like, oh, policing and food are intertwined, but it's like policing emerges out of agriculture and the desire to protect the labor that you put into the ground.
[01:10:01]Luke Storey: Damn, dude. Totally unexpected turn, but that is really fascinating. Yeah. That's wild, man. That's wild. I love talking to people that have a basic understanding of of history. I find that that particular area of interest seems to be fading generationally. It's like we get so myopic because we're so inundated with data and events, and we have so many different forms of media flying at us that just trying to keep up with what's going on right now is so energy and time-consuming.
[01:10:37] Who really has time to go, hey, I wonder what it was like 20,000 years ago. I mean, it's a specialized minute group of people that, for whatever reason, have a curiosity and a vested interest in looking backward. But I think that's really sage advice for everyone to examine that. The question I was going to kind of ask before when we were talking about the food element and the diversity of what we eat. And then, I want to get into some specific because I know you've like kind of honed in on some of your favorite nutrient-dense herbs, foods, and things like that.
[01:11:14] But in terms of diversity and the extremism of like being a carnivore, or vegan, or whatever it is, I personally am not in line with kind of following any trend, but I can't solve this particular riddle, and maybe you can, I feel the absolute best if I just eat beef every day and pretty much don't eat anything else. And I'm not like on the carnivore diet or anything. I do eat other stuff. I just noticed like, why do I have a runny nose?
[01:11:49] And then, I think, oh, what have I been eating? And I go, oh, yeah, I had some of this or some of that. It's like a joint pain or I don't know, it's almost like I get the sense that some of us, maybe myself included, have, in some ways, become kind of allergic to foods, maybe because of so many years of a lack of diversity, that now, we're kind of like in this lane where the less diverse our food is, the better we feel. And that's definitely true for myself. Like I feel great if I-
[01:12:23]Daniel Vitalis: Let me ask you this because I know you like to do therapy here in the show. If this was 10 years ago, or 12 years ago, or 15 years ago, would there have been a moment where you could have been on a show like this telling somebody how when you don't eat meat at all and you just eat vegan, you don't know why, but I'm just saying I feel way better, I don't get runny noses, and I feel like I don't have joint pain, like has this ever come out of your mouth, but in reference to, if I don't eat meat, only eat plants because you're saying exactly what vegans say.
[01:12:54]Luke Storey: I know. Well, here's the thing. My experience of my 10 years or so as a vegetarian, I actually never felt good. And I had even more-
[01:13:03]Daniel Vitalis: Not even in the really beginning because I felt great in the beginning.
[01:13:07]Luke Storey: In the beginning, I did, but that's when I was getting sober. And so, I'm coming off-
[01:13:11]Daniel Vitalis: Confounding factors.
[01:13:13]Luke Storey: I'm coming off a diet of like malt liquor, crack, and heroin with an—you know what I mean? So, it's like in a vegetarian and kind of understanding to start eating organic food, and juicing, and things, yeah. I mean, I felt better. But my point of reference was like at the gates of death. So, anything would have been a step up. And I'm trying to be sensational. I mean, it's just the way it was in my 20s. So, yeah, I mean, there was a period of starting to detox, and do colonics, and try some herbs, and juicing, and making my own Kombucha, and doing saunas, and all the things kind of in the late '90s that I got into, my health improved.
[01:13:50] But then, it definitely flat-lined and there were things that just persisted, just pesky physical issues, digestion, skin, sleep, energy, anxiety, depression, whatever that I couldn't overcome until I really started going down the kind of more hardcore, committed biohacking path that I started on a few years ago. But I don't know, I'm just curious about that. Like why if I eat a bunch of kale or something, I'm probably going to like have a sore elbow the next day or it's just weird. You know what really, really messes with me, is if I eat—well, gluten for sure. And it just does not like-
[01:14:32]Daniel Vitalis: That's kind of its own story, which we can address. But yeah.\
[01:14:34]Luke Storey: I've done whole shows about that, which people can find. But I find even if I eat gluten-free stuff, that's like fake grains meant to taste or have a mouthfeel of gluten, that that almost fucks me up as bad as real gluten. So, it's like, pretty much every day, my girlfriend would be like, honey, you want a salad, or some of this fruit, or this, or that, I'm like—I bought a quarter steer from a local rancher that's humane, and grass-fed, and pastured, and just amazing ranch up north of Bakersfield, and I went, and picked it up, and it's in my garage in a freezer, part of my kind of Doomsday prepping thing. Oh, yeah. Actually, I remember I reached out to you for some advice on the chest freezer. Thank you for that. I got one.
[01:15:16]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
[01:15:16]Luke Storey: Smaller one too. But yeah, every day, I'm just like, I don't know, honey. I think I'm just going to grill up some steak or some meat, and I tend to just feel less inflamed, and I have energy, and I sleep well, and I feel balanced. But at the same time, I'm like, no natural human from which I have evolved in my European mutt self would have ever just eaten cows all the time.
[01:15:41]Daniel Vitalis: Right.
[01:15:41]Luke Storey: Why is that working for me? It's just weird. I don't think about it too much-
[01:15:46]Daniel Vitalis: But how long is your sample size of time, too? Because that's kind of what I'm trying to get at from before, is typically, if you put somebody on any kind of restricted diet for a period of time, they're going to have a lot of really positive results. And then, down the road, and this is why I was bringing up vegans, raw foodist, or whatever it is, the typical cycle goes, I feel amazing, I feel amazing, I feel amazing, now, I'm just in the habit of saying I feel amazing, but I'm starting to get symptoms. I'm ignoring the symptoms, still telling people I feel amazing.
[01:16:16] And then, eventually, you are writing me, DM'ing me on Instagram to say, hey, how do I come out to my followers that I'm not vegan anymore? You know what I mean? I get a lot of those folks. So, I think that that might be how you feel today, but it'll be interesting to see if in ten years, you're like, no, man, it's weird, I still just feel great if I just eat cows because like, how long has that been? Also, I know that's a very popular trend right now.
[01:16:41] Again, when we look at people around the world who had very restricted access to plants, we still see them eating as many—it would be interesting for you to come hang out here, and eat some wild plants, and see how they impact you. I think and I know that there's folks out there right now who are promoting this idea of like no fiber in your diet. I just think this is really dangerous territory because your microbiome really depends on your fiber intake.
[01:17:07] And our fiber intake is at its lowest that it's ever been. It's just absurd to me, the idea that you don't need fiber. And I'm not saying that you can't live, survive that, but I personally just don't see it. Now, that doesn't mean that there's not a lot of inflammatory foods in the supermarket. Vegetables that you are eating, particularly, things that might be high in Omega-6 fats, you might be sensitive to that or like you brought up gluten, which is like just, it's not that there hasn't been gluten in wheat all along, the wheat that people eat today was made through gamma-radiation bombardment in the earliest days of genetic engineering before we had crisper technology and gene-splicing stuff that we can do today.
[01:17:50] What they were doing is just taking wheat seeds and blasting them with gamma radiation to cause genetic mutations, and then growing it and seeing what they got. And they ended up producing the dwarf wheats that we have today with their very high-gluten contents because that glute, that glue is the stuff that binds together all the stuff that we like wheat for. And so, we've produced the sort of a Frankenwheat. Now, everybody goes around talking about how bad grains are, but it's like, man, I don't know, come out in the canoe, wild raisin with me, and try that grain because that's a grain, a wild one, and it doesn't have those effects on you.
[01:18:23] So, I don't know. I can't speak to what your personal physiological experiences, but I'll be interested to see year by year by year if that holds to be true or if you find yourself where most human beings find themselves, which is like, hey, if I have like a little bit of meat on my plate, and like some steamed vegetables, and some raw vegetables, like, oh, that all kind of comes together to be a really holistic approach where I still get the proteins and the aminos that I need, right?
[01:18:48] But I'm also in the vitamin D, and the vitamin A, and the vitamin K, and all these things that are poorly represented in plants, but I'm also getting all that phytoprotection because here's the thing, like you live in in the LA area or Southern California, so when you eat beef, you're not getting UV protection. You're not eating your sunblock, right? You're not getting that glutathione boost. You're not getting that superoxide dismutase that's going around helping to repair genetic damage that's happened from environmental toxins. So, those things might take some time to emerge for you, the symptoms of that, but I'm suspective of this approach, but I've tried the approach, too, so I mean, I say that from having tried it.
[01:19:37]Luke Storey: Well, I am, too. Because, again, I look back and I go, it makes sense because I feel pretty good. And like I said, I'm not carnivore. I mean, I eat salads, and spirulina, and wild blueberries. I mean, I eat all kinds of other stuff. I just notice like if I get a flare up of any kind of symptom, it seems to coincide with me having more diversity.
[01:20:00]Daniel Vitalis: It would also be interesting to really, really like specifically look at it to where it's like—there's one thing like if you kept a food log versus like what you tell yourself in your head you had.
[01:20:12]Luke Storey: Yeah.
[01:20:12]Daniel Vitalis: Do you know what I mean? Like if you could really peer into what you had because a lot of us aren't—well, you know this, man, we're so good at lying to ourselves, it's incredible. It's incredible, our ability to sort of deceive ourselves. Like, no, I had kale today. It's like, really? Just kale? Like, what else? Oh, it was actually kale chips. Okay. It was kale chips. What was on the kale chips? Well, like an exorbitant amount of salt and nutritional yeast.
[01:20:36] Oh, nutritional yeast, where did they get that yeast from? Did they scraped off the ground or did they grow it in a lab? Like, what was it? Right? What was this stuff that you had? It's not just kale. You know what I mean? And so, it's like, oh, I just stopped by and got a salad at the salad bar. Oh, did you have dressing on the salad? Well, yeah, a little bit. Well, what was the dressing? Oh, genetically-modified canola oil. Like, okay, now, I'm not saying that's you, but I'm just saying it's really easy to be like, oh, it was the broccoli. It's like, really? It's the broccoli?
[01:20:59]Luke Storey: Yeah.
[01:21:00]Daniel Vitalis: Be interesting to see what it really was, or is it the glyphosate, or is it the radioactive Fukushima dust that got on the truck while it was driving down the highway? It's like I'm suspective of it being the plants. I've really come to this place where I think that, and this is something, I think, we've probably brought up on the show before, but it's like I really think we should look at the environment as being made up of all of these interlocking kingdoms of life and we should consider eating from those different kingdoms.
[01:21:31] And so, when we look at those kingdoms, we go, okay, there's Animalia and there's Plantae or plants, right? So, there are animals, there are plants, there are Kingdom Fungi, all the mushrooms and yeasts. There are the protists. That include the macroalgaes. There are bacterial kingdoms where we get all of those probiotics. And something that's really become interesting to me with this recent plandemic happening is that this idea of a virome, and that there's a human virome, your personal virome, and then there's the human-shared virome.
[01:22:09] So, for instance, this new coronavirus is a new addition to the collective human virome. We've not been exposed to it. It's novel, whereas many other viruses like, let's say, the influenza viruses, they've been in our virome for a period of time. So, we're also consuming viruses and they're getting into us, too. I recently had a guy on my show. It was interesting because I wanted to talk about viruses. I didn't realize that this guy was going to be connected to—it's a small world in virology, obviously. I asked him a couple of questions that he gave me answers to that were like, oh, man, you're on the payroll, bro.
[01:22:45]Luke Storey: Oh, shit.
[01:22:46]Daniel Vitalis: Oh, yeah. It was really embarrassing. I didn't realize like I thought he would give me an honest opinion of how things were being run by the WHO, and Fauci, and all those folks, and I mean, it was like might as well have been Fauci himself we had on the show. But most of the show is really, really incredible because he was just talking. I mean, the guy was passionate about viruses. And one of the questions I asked, are viruses ever beneficial the way we used to think all bacteria are bad? We didn't know bacteria existed.
[01:23:17] Then, we discovered bacteria, realized that some infections were caused by them, and then went to war with bacteria, until finally, we started to go like, oh, wait a second, some of these are good for us, oh, my God, how did we survive this whole time here? So, similarly, we're thinking right now of viruses as negative, negative, negative, but it turns out that without viruses around, probably life on earth would end. Viruses are crucial to many, many things.
[01:23:43] So, we have viruses functioning in us that we don't even know fully what they do, but we're learning that they're also symbiotic. So, my point is we want to be consuming from all of these kingdoms. You want to be, my opinion, eating animals. And a variety of animals, some that fly, some that walk, some that swim, some that slither. We want to be eating their organs, and their eggs, and their skins, and all of these associated parts, their bones as broth, all of that. We want to be eating plants.
[01:24:13] And that includes root structures and aerial parts, leaves, fruits, seeds, right? All of these. The oils that are in those plants, all of that. Fungi, we want to obviously be eating mushrooms. A lot of people have a lot of fungi in the form of yeasts and beverages that they consume, which can be nutritious, but we also want to be getting those micronutrients, which is why the medicinal mushrooms are so valuable to our immune systems and things like that.
[01:24:43] We want to be consuming bacteria in the form of foods that are fermented or foods that just have naturally-occurring bacteria on them, right? We want to be getting those viruses. We want to be getting algaes, like seaweeds and things like that. So, I personally think we should take a kingdomist approach, looking at all the kingdoms of life and making sure—rather than just like, this four food groups thing we grew up with was like so simplistic and it wasn't ecologically based.
[01:25:08] But I think like an ecologically based one where you go like, okay, let's eat from these six kingdoms of life and make sure that we're balancing our diet amongst those kingdoms. And so, what we're seeing right now is the diet wars play out between these different kingdomists, right? Like one group is like, no, you can never eat from the animal kingdom and the other group is like, you should never eat anything but the animal kingdom, and all kind of like goofy stuff when it's like, I imagine sort of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, just like looking down like, oh, man, these guys—like eat anything, bro, that you can.
[01:25:43] So, anyway, I think we need that diversity and that's what's really lacking. And so, when you're looking at it from that big picture perspective, and as we talked about before, you zoom into the supermarket level, you're like, oh, there's not a lot in here. It's mostly wheat. Most of the supermarkets, just wheat, corn, rice, turned into a thousand boxed products, like a thousand food products, right? Turned into different shapes and stuff.
[01:26:08]Luke Storey: I remember a documentary, I think it's called King Corn or The King of Corn. It blew my mind. They go through the grocery store and they're just like, corn, corn, corn, corn, like 90% or something, every single thing in there is just made from corn. It's like, wait. All we eat is corn. Weird.
[01:26:27]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. And if you drive through the Midwest when the corn's grown, that's not like all that's destined for the grill or everyone's going to eat it as corn on the cob. Most of it is not edible anymore. It's a variety of corn that had been bred to be disassembled into all the parts that go into the food processing and to become high-fructose corn syrup, or corn solids, or corn starches, or all these different things, right? It's not even an edible form of corn. That idea, I don't know if it was in that film, they're talking about like, hey, these farmers couldn't live on their own crop. It's not edible.
[01:26:57]Luke Storey: Wow.
[01:26:57]Daniel Vitalis: It's made for industrial processing.
[01:27:00]Luke Storey: In reference to coming to stay with you for a bit and eating the wild foods, dude, every time I watch your show, which, by the way, has an amazing web series, really high-quality web series called WildFed that follows Daniel's adventures out in the natural habitat, hunting, foraging, fishing, et cetera. But at the end of those episodes, typically, they'll culminate with this really like foodie, high-level cuisine made from those foods. And I'm not a foodie at all.
[01:27:30] But at the end of every one, I'm like, oh, God, I want to taste that, because you get to see the adventure and the exploration within the natural environment that went in to pull in all of those ingredients together. And I love that. And every time, I'm like, man, I got to get out, to, man, I want to taste that because that's really weird stuff that people nowadays don't commonly eat, but it's also just prepared in a way that makes it look so delicious. I mean, it's like true cuisine.
[01:27:59]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, it's not. People need to understand that our hunting and gathering ancestors were not starving. They weren't struggling to like scratch meals out of the environment. Like the food is incredible. And obviously, they were well-fed or we wouldn't be here. We're not the product of starving people, right? We're the product of nourished folks. This week, we're eating a plant. We're eating the flowers of the black locust tree. And the black locust tree is invasive up here, leguminous tree produces a bean pod as a fruit.
[01:28:31] But prior to fruiting, of course, it flowers. And right now, these trees will be 60, 70 feet tall and they'll be just covered in these drooping white and yellow flowers that smell like a mix between like Oriental lily and Jasmine. And you'll smell it driving down the road, like I always smell it before I see it. It's just this incredible perfume. But when you take the flowers, and you strip them off the stem, and you eat them, they taste like fresh peas. There's a little bit of that floral hint, but they're not all like perfumie or something.
[01:29:07] They taste like peas. They're beautiful. And they'll become the base of our salads this week. And so, you use it like you'd use lettuce, except your salad is made of the flower. And then, that's gone in two weeks. You can't do it again. It's over until you got to wait a year, right? So, that's that diversity. So, earlier, when I said I probably ate more foods this year already than the average person eats, I'm not trying to brag or something, it's just that we had a salad the other day that was the base and I had cattail shoots in there.
[01:29:36] Most people never had cattail shoots. I had balsam greens in there. Most people never had that. I had pine greens in there. Most people never had that. Wild strawberries. Very few people ever try them. We start to just assemble a salad. You're like, okay, I got like six novel foods right in the salad that most people have never put in their mouth in our generation. And so, what's really fascinating, too, is the emerging science that shows that the genetics of those plants that you eat actually impact your epigenome.
[01:30:03] So, your gene expression is influenced by the plants you eat pretty significantly, very significantly. And it's kind of like if you imagined that the genes that you eat are like information that your epigenome uses to determine what genes you turn on and off. So, it's like education. So, when you eat foods from the environment, it's like you're educating your epigenome. Well, similarly, it's like, the way most people's diets are would be like if you only read first-grade books your whole life and you never graduated to second-grade reading, and third-grade reading, and fourth grade until now, where you're like able to comprehend complex information.
[01:30:43] Most people's diets is made out of like first-grade, second-grade-level reading foods, right? Like foods that have very little genetic diversity and information in them. Whereas, when you start to eat things out of the environments, like you're getting all this information and it shapes you into a different type of person. And that's more true with plants than with animals. And I think it's probably even more significantly true with mushrooms. So, I haven't seen specific research on that.
[01:31:05] But the impact of mushrooms on your body, the impacts of marine macroalgaes, these lichens, like I was talking about before, these very strange foods that we don't think about, we've just gotten to—yeah. It's like celebrate diversity in your diet. I'd like to see more of that for people because I'm actually really concerned about our species, man. I don't feel like there's any kind of real conversation taking place about what we've done to ourselves. There's more conversation about what we've done to Pugs and German Shepherds genetically than about what we're doing to ourselves.
[01:31:40] That, I think, is a mistake because where do we want this to go? Do we want it to be like on Elon Musk's ship in Mars, where we're reproducing in Petri dishes because we're sterile and we can no longer reproduce? And our lifespan is diminishing and we are becoming stupider. I mean, that's the path that we're on. And there's really no discussion about it. And there's almost like an assumption that we all got on board somewhere because I'm always like, where did I sign up for this? I didn't sign up for this.
[01:32:16] Yeah. I didn't agree to any of this. Like, wait, we're going to Mars. I didn't sign up for that. Like who decided that? We aren't being really honest about what we're doing. So, it's almost like, if we can go fast enough, we can beat what's chasing us. Like if we get to Mars fast enough, we can get there before we genetically degrade into blobs on the floor and before our ecosystem completely breaks down. So, rather than like stop and face what we've created, and deal with it, and fix the problems, we're just going to run to the next place.
[01:32:54] That just, I think, is such a huge mistake in thinking. And I've used the analogy before about relationships because it's what so many of us have done over the course of our lives by running from relationship to relationship. It's like not facing the problem. You see this in the recovery world, where people are like, well, I'll just switch to a different drug. Okay. I'll switch to a different drug. It's like, well, you're not really addressing the issue.
[01:33:15] And I feel like we need to address the issue. And the issue is like we need to get our bodies right with the environment. It's not just about like reducing our carbon emissions. That's a symptom of the problem. The problem is that our bodies are no longer a reflection of the ecosystem. The average person's body is made up of water that came from they don't know where, their blood's all some plastic bottled water from who knows where, their cells are nourished by foods from halfway around the world that were grown in super poor conditions.
[01:33:46] We know that breast milk is filled with something like 50 industrial pollutants, like we need to deal with this stuff because I don't think that—we understand when we raise animals that if we don't take care of their genetic health by making sure that we are not letting them breed themselves into total submission, like it's understood like with chickens that you need to bring in more diverse genes from time to time to keep the flock healthy. We're not thinking about these kinds of things right now. And we're doing serious damage to ourselves environmentally and with pollution. We're not asking the right questions. I mean, I'm frustrated with the discussion that's taking place because it's a fractured discussion. It doesn't have all the details that need to be addressed.
[01:34:35]Luke Storey: Hot damn.
[01:34:37]Daniel Vitalis: I'm off the deep end right now.
[01:34:38]Luke Storey: No. It's a great end to be deep into because I'm all about root cause versus symptom relief. And the interesting thing about that approach to the diversity, and getting back to our roots, and thinking about the way that you eat, and these meals that I see you eat on your show is that you're not eating that way because you're rich. I'm like, you're eating that way because you educated yourself on what shit you can go out and eat, and you spend your time and energy going out and getting it instead of slaving away at a corporate job or whatever one might do to try to get the money that they believe is going to lead them to access to life-sustaining foods. That's what's so funny about it. It's like the shit you're eating is actually free.
[01:35:24]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. And I get a lot of flock from people about my privileges of getting to do that. Now, it's a privilege. And I think about that a lot. Like it's fascinating because it's biologically normal to do, so it's sort of strange to hear that, but I understand where people are coming from. But at the same time, for those of us living in the United States, I mean, you don't have to be wealthy to do this and you don't have to have land.
[01:35:51] I mean, you have access to public land, an incredible network of public land that every single person who lives here has access to, particularly like this hunt—I mean, I know that most people are never going to do this. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to go down this selling this hunting and gathering idea to people. I think it's pretty obscure. I think it's important that people like me keep it alive and keep a connection to that. I think that's really, really important.
[01:36:15] But I mean, people don't realize what they have access to here. Like you're a public land owner and you own a lot of land. You know who owns Yellowstone? You do. You do. You're actually the owner of that. And so am I. Like you own collectively all the game in California. Like you own a share of all the wild animals. Like I'm saying legally, like actually legally on the books, you do. So, sometimes, people are like, oh, it's a privilege you have the ability access that.
[01:36:49] It's like, well, I mean, I've kind of spent the last couple decades learning how and really like positioning myself to do it. I guess it's a privilege, but like, it's also what my ancestors did. Was it a privilege then or is it just a privilege? It gets like kind of complicated. But to me, it's just like, man, somebody needs to do this. I think it's important. People seem to think it's important that people run around on a field and catch balls.
[01:37:10] People seem to think that it's important to like go round and round a circle in cars. Like I think it's important that maybe we keep alive the food tradition that stretches back 1.6 million years. Like maybe somebody wants to keep that alive, too. I don't know if we're going to catch balls and drive cars in circles. Just like grown men in pink shirts like hitting balls into holes in the ground with a—and driving around in little mini cars, like what is this like? What is this pursuit?
[01:37:41]Luke Storey: Oh, man. Well, it's recreation, right?
[01:37:44]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, recreation. That's it. Yeah.
[01:37:48]Luke Storey: Of the games that would have been played living on the land.
[01:37:52]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. So many sports and everything are that, yeah.
[01:37:56]Luke Storey: It's, I think, fulfilling that instinct to be active in that way. We have those instinctive drives to chase shit, and be chased, and win, and have a goal, and a target, and achieve it. And it's never been something I personally have been, in any way, attracted to, per se, but the last thing that I wanted to get into here was just a couple specifics. And as we indicated earlier in the conversation, you are kind of just not naturally a shill for the problem.
[01:38:30]Daniel Vitalis: For my own company.
[01:38:33]Luke Storey: Shill for your own company. But a couple of things that you guys do, I've been really into for many years and continue to be. And just in general, I think for those of us that don't have the opportunity to go out and be a hunter-gatherer, and we're still getting our food from the farmer's market or the grocery store, there are ways that we can supplementally get some really potent, nutritious compounds into our body.
[01:39:04] And so, one of them I wanted to touch on, which I think many people are becoming aware of, but it's still relatively obscure, and that is the supplemental form of vitamin D3, which I think most people are somewhat unaware that it's not so much a vitamin, but more of a hormone. And also, its relationship to K2. And those seem to be things that are difficult to get from a diet. And if you live somewhere where there's not tons of sun, difficult to get from the environment. So, let's just start with that one and maybe we can just do kind of short breakdowns of a few of these things that I want to cover.
[01:39:44]Daniel Vitalis: Vitamin D3 is really fascinating. And the reason we're talking about D3 is because vitamin D2 is not the bioactive form. And so, D2 is used in a lot of supplementation, but it's a really poor substitute for the actual thing, Vitamin D3, the hormone form. Your body has to transform vitamin D2 into vitamin D3. And it does that through UV light, right? So, as you brought up before, if you look at milk products in the country, it's interesting how we fortify them with vitamin D, and that's because vitamin D was being poorly represented in the diet.
[01:40:18] And as I understand it, the cities had become like artificial canyons and the children that were playing in the city streets were not getting sunlight in the same way. It's like if you've ever been in the Grand Canyon, another place you own. If you've ever been in the Grand Canyon, the sun kind of goes over that little window at the top, and then it's gone, right? So, you have light in there, but you don't have that direct sunlight on your skin as much as you should.
[01:40:43] So, the cities can be like that. So, less so in places like LA, which are more spread out, but more so in places like New York. And so, what happens in children who have a vitamin D deficiency is they develop rickets, so their bones can't ossify properly. They don't get enough calcium laid down in the bone. And what happens in adults is called osteomalacia, which just means like bone pain, which a lot of people are living with because there's like a silent epidemic of vitamin D3 deficiency right now, so a lot of people have chronic pain.
[01:41:10] I mean, it's like, you start drilling in on people, it's like chronic pain is very, very common. For some people, that's because of a lack of vitamin D. And one of the reasons is because the places where like vitamin D, your body, where you store it is in your liver. So, most people aren't eating very much liver anymore. And that's one of the places that you'd get it. And another place that you get a lot of vitamin D3 would be from like deep-sea fishes, the livers of those animals, or there's an interesting fact with polar bears.
[01:41:39] You have to be extremely limited in the amount of polar bear liver you eat because there's so much vitamin D3 that actually, it's toxic, the quantity, right? Because D3 is an oil-soluble vitamin, so you don't excrete it. Like vitamin C, you can overdose and you pee it out or people who've taken large doses know it will come out the other way, too, just flushes out of you. But fat-soluble vitamin store up, so you have to be kind of careful, right?
[01:42:02] But those things aren't in people, that most people don't eat polar bear liver anymore, or cod liver anymore, or that's less common. So, we're not seeing as much vitamin D in people's diets anymore. And then, despite what people think, they're not getting as much sun exposure as they should be. And the darker your skin is, the more important this is. So, for instance, here in Maine, we have a significant population of folks from Somalia, let's say.
[01:42:27] So, they're living here in Maine and we don't have enough sun here for them to actually—with all that melanin in their skin, they kick out a lot of UV light because they come from a place with massive amounts of sun. So, their bodies have adapted over the course of time to extreme amounts of sun with basically what's a built-in sunblock. You sort of think about that beautiful melanin-rich skin that some people have, it's like that's a sun block. And the reason that people who have much paler skin or paler is because they come from a place where there was less sun.
[01:43:00] So, anytime there was any sun, you needed skin that would let it right through. So, White people skin is like a window that lets vitamin D, and because they come from places where it's often cloudy. Like I think of northern Europe, very little sunlight, long winters, not enough sun. So, you have to have kind of clear skin to let that in. But then if you think about if you were in Africa where you have reliable sun just about every single day, places that were like a really nice day is a cloudy day because it's something different, right?
[01:43:30] It's a reprieve from the sun. It's like, oh, wow, we're having a really beautiful day today because it's cloudy. So, you need skin that can kick out a lot of that, right? So, here's what happens, people who have really light skin move to a place, because we're now we're global, so somebody with really light skin moves to a place where there's lots of sun, they get skin cancer. But somebody with really dark skin goes to a place like Maine where we don't have a lot of sunlight and they actually, suddenly, and over time develop a vitamin D deficiency.
[01:43:55] So, this is becoming kind of a problem. The other thing is people are always wearing clothes. People now are always wearing sunblock. They're not getting enough vitamin D3 in their diet and they're not producing enough. So, you need it in your life. And the thing is that vitamin D is protective against something like 70-plus cancers. That's pretty significant, including like colorectal cancers. So, that's like a really big issue. And then, the other thing is the ability to lay down calcium on the bones.
[01:44:23] Now, without K2, the problem is if you lack K2, the calcium doesn't get to where it needs to go. And you don't want calcium just sort of randomly in your body because that's what arterial plaque is. So, when people are having like a buildup of arterial plaque, they have a heart attack or a stroke, the calcium is implicated in that, calcium that should be in your bones. So, you need K2 to make that happen. So, yeah, we produce a vitamin D3, K2.
[01:44:48] It's very inexpensive, too. I think it's $29 a bottle. But it's like several months' supply because the dose is two drops a day because vitamin D is a thing you don't want to—it's not like the more the better. It's that you have to limit your intake of it. But we get our vitamin D3 from lanolin, so from the wool of sheep and we get the K2 from natto, that Japanese—there's another one. It's like K2 is really important in the diet, but most people aren't digging on natto these days. You ever eat that?
[01:45:16]Luke Storey: I like natto.
[01:45:17]Daniel Vitalis: You're the weirdest guy.
[01:45:19]Luke Storey: Good luck living with a partner who will allow you to open the canister while they're in the house.
[01:45:24]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. And just looking at it, too, it's got that like snot, saliva look to it. So, anyway, our vitamin D3, K2 is coming from sheep and coming from natto. But anyway, the combination of the two gets you. And the other thing, I think, where it's really relevant is because I believe there is a respiratory disease going around. I don't think it's nearly as prevalent or warranted some of the response we've had to it, but I do think that is going around.
[01:45:54] And as is flu, which is always going around, which we we've become pretty adapted to and we're familiar with. But our ability to fight off respiratory diseases and vitamin D3 are very interlinked. So, I just think everybody should have a D3. And the other thing is I think right now, it would be as smart to get grandma, and grandpa, and aunts, and uncles, and mom, and dad on vitamin D3 as it is to avoid them altogether. I mean, I think everybody needs to kind of decide where they are on those things.
[01:46:25] But high-risk individuals should be on a vitamin D, particularly if they have limited sun exposure. But in addition to that, I mean, it's important that we get good sun. That is important. And the darker your skin is, going back to what I said before, if you come from African descent or if you're a brown-skinned person, you need way more sun to produce vitamin D than somebody who's, say, red-haired and freckled. That person needs very little, like 12 minutes of sun on their forearms is probably enough for them to get their vitamin D3 needs.
[01:47:01] Whereas, if you have very dark skin, you might need a couple of hours of good, solid sun exposure on a much more significant part of your body. So, everybody needs to determine that. And then, that kind of ties into what we were saying before because if you don't have the phytoprotective qualities that you get from colored pigments, and fruits, and berries, and things like that, sun can be pretty hard on your body. So, it's comprehensive. I don't mean like vitamin D3 is like the panacea for everything. But if it's missing in your diet, boy, that's a problem.
[01:47:30]Luke Storey: Well, that brings me to the next common supplement or one of the pillars of the Chinese herbal system, and that is the chaga mushroom. And I wonder if you could explain some of its benefits, but also, the piece of the—I think it has D2 in it, the element that makes it kind of an internal sunscreen.
[01:47:54]Daniel Vitalis: Oh, it's interesting. With a lot of mushroom fruit bodies—and just a clip, chaga is more known in the Russian system of traditional medicine and stuff.
[01:48:05]Luke Storey: Being more in the Chinese system.
[01:48:09]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, but mushroom. I don't know if this is true with chaga, actually. So, let me just say this about other fruit bodies like Reishi. If you take Reishi mushrooms and you put them out to dry in the sun, they produce vitamin D2. And again, before, I said, like vitamin D2 is not as effective as vitamin D3, but you'll convert some of it over into vitamin D3. So, that UV response, just like in our skin, we get into our oils, we get this vitamin that is converted to the vitamin D that we need by UV, that happens with mushrooms, too.
[01:48:45] So, for anybody who harvests their own mushrooms, you can dry them in the sun. Now, normally, I would avoid drying things in the sun because sunlight tends to break things down, breaks nutrients down. But with mushrooms, you actually end up with this more vitamin D. So, that's really interesting. But medicinal mushrooms, man, the biggest thing for me is that they modulate your immune system. And this is just on some other level. To me, this is like some sci-fi stuff, because if you just took an immunostimulant, that would make your immune system—kind of picture an aggressive force, like let's say, a military force.
[01:49:22] Depending on the mission, you don't always want them cranked up and ready to do battle. Like sometimes, they have a peacekeeping role where they need to be chilled way down. But sometimes, they need to be really aggressive about what they're doing. It depends on the mission, right? So, if you were in immunodeficient, let's say that you had a significant immunodeficiency, your immune system is weak. It's like the troops are in that peacekeeping mission when they should be in a more aggressive war footing.
[01:49:54] Conversely, if you're autoimmune, it's like your immune system's on such a war footing that in the absence of an enemy, it attacks your own tissue. That's also a huge problem, right? That's what we see in things like lupus. We see this autoimmune response. So, the really cool thing about medicinal mushrooms, and they do a lot of different things. I mean, you could do multiple three-hour shows just talking about what they do, but probably, the most interesting thing to me is immunomodulation, which takes that strong immune system and brings it down, takes that weak immune system and brings it up.
[01:50:26] So, what's cool about that is you don't have to worry like, oh, is this going to overstimulate my immune system? It's not. Somehow, intelligently knows where your immune system needs to be. I think of it as an education for your immune system. So, you don't want to just, it's not like you don't want like coffee to the immune system all the time. Sometimes, that's going to be really dangerous to some people. But what's cool about medicinal mushrooms is they'll help to tune that for you. They're also really protective against cancers.
[01:50:54] And, boy, there's a lot of reasons, I think, for why we have such a prevalence of cancers today. A part of it is that we live longer, so we have more time for cancers to develop. But really, I think while we're introducing 70,000 new chemicals into the environment, that kind of thing is a huge problem, all these environmental pollutants. Something that I found really interesting is the idea that there may be viruses that have contaminated our blood supply and vaccines that might be cancer-causing viruses, so that's like a potential to—we have all these different things that are causing cancers.
[01:51:32] We really need things that can protect us against that. And so, medicinal mushrooms are just this incredible ally for that. So, they have all kinds of really, really cool uses. And those are just some of them. But I just think, as I said before, you want to have foods from all of the different kingdoms in your life. And I'm not talking about white button mushrooms, right? The white button mushroom or the portobello, bro, those are the iceberg lettuce of the mushroom world, right?
[01:52:01] These are not what I'm talking about. You need really strong, powerful, potent medicinal mushrooms in your life. And just incidentally, the way we make them is—and this is really important. When you choose a mushroom product, if you're going to use one as a supplement is that you want these two extracted portions of a mushroom. There's one fraction that comes out in alcohol. Because Reishi mushrooms, you've seen them. They're not food. It's like a woody, hard structure.
[01:52:30]Luke Storey: Yeah.
[01:52:31]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. So, you want the alcohol fraction, the part that comes out in alcohol and you want the part that comes out by boiling in hot water. And I think also what's really important, all of the survival medicinal mushrooms, we make them with fruit bodies. We are not using Chinese mycelial mass that's coming out of, grown on corn, or wheat, or whatever it is, barley that they're growing it on. We use wood-grown fruit bodies. And our chaga is all wild, actually, right from here in Maine, which is really cool.
[01:52:58] So, we have foragers who actually gather that for us, but we're using the real mushroom. Most of the mushroom products that are out there right now are mycelial products, but all the research on medicinal mushrooms is done on fruit bodies, not on mycelia. So, a lot of people like to say, oh, our mushrooms do this and they do that. It's like, well, maybe they do, but that has not been researched. What's been researched for the fruit bodies, you want wood-grown fruit bodies that are extracted in alcohol, and hot water, and mixed together because that water portion is where you get that immunomodulation I talked about before.
[01:53:31] Well, what's really cool, too, is that out of the alcohol portion, you get all these terpins, which are super good adaptogens. And I just think, like, that is so important right now because our environment is rapidly changing. Like I live in the Gulf of Maine where we have the fastest warming waters in the world. It's changing so fast that our lobsters are moving north a couple of kilometers a year. And all these fish that have never been here before coming up from the south, like it's completely turning over. It's causing chaos in our fisheries. We have Tautog and black Sea bass coming up, they weren't here before.
[01:54:03] And our lobsters are headed to Canada. Things are changing. This environment is changing. And most of us recognize that. Mushrooms help you adapt to changes in your environment. They help you adapt to physiological, emotional, psychological stresses. Reishi as you know has got this long history from meditators who are using it. Why? Because it creates sort of this plasticity in your mind, allowing you to sort of adapt better to the stresses that you're under. So, when I look at, overall, the impacts of domestication, and then how rapidly our environment's changing, you want adaptogens in your diet. It's just really, really important.
[01:54:38]Luke Storey: Yeah, as someone who has never, for some reason, enjoyed the taste of culinary mushrooms, you might be able-
[01:54:44]Daniel Vitalis: Oh, yeah? You got some food stuff, huh?
[01:54:47]Luke Storey: Troll issues. No. There are two foods that like almost make me gag, the flavor. One is eggs like cooked eggs of any type, just like cooked culinary mushrooms. It's just weird. But anyway, I do eat egg yolks and I eat tons of mushrooms, but it's like ever since I found out about chaga, Reishi, lion's mane, Cordyceps, it's just like my body just gives me such a huge green light when I put them in my mouth, like there's this relationship I have with fungi. I just don't particularly like the taste. And even in the realm of psilocybin, of macro or microdosing.
[01:55:31]Daniel Vitalis: Oh, yeah. That's gnarly, right?
[01:55:33]Luke Storey: Everything in my being, just like, ding, ding, ding, yes, they are friends, like mushrooms to me, to me-
[01:55:38]Daniel Vitalis: When I was a kid and I remember like when I first tried mushrooms like that where I'd be like, I'll just eat these like out of like a baggie, so gross, and then you're like, you're just going to puke. I noticed with our Reishi product, the flavor is really intensely bitter. But in this way where, like you said, you kind of like. And I haven't ever tried to doctor up the flavor of it because it's bitter. It's like there's nothing I'm going to add to it that's going to like—to me, like trying to cover bitter with sweets is even weirder.
[01:56:10] But chaga that you brought up before, what's so fascinating about it is that it tastes so good and it does not have any mushroomie flavor. It's not really a mushroom. It's a sclerotium. So, it's a fungal storage organ. It's this big black mass that grows on birch trees, but the flavor is like vanilla and it's very mild. And so, our chaga product compared against our Reishi, both are really potent, but the chaga formula, we have a little vanilla in, and we have a little maple syrup in it, and it kind of ties together this—I mean, it's a very dessertie flavor. So, for people who are like sensitive to that mushroom taste, in the Reishi, you're going to get like, that's probably a mushroom; in the chaga, you're like, that's candy, what is that? So good.
[01:56:50]Luke Storey: The problem with your chaga is that it's hard for me to make it last.
[01:56:56]Daniel Vitalis: No, I know.
[01:56:57]Luke Storey: It's more like, okay, cool. Because you feel the medicine in it. But with the chaga, not so much because it is-
[01:57:05]Daniel Vitalis: It's so good? I know I've thought a lot about doing it in like one-liter bottles, but I think that requires different licensing.
[01:57:13]Luke Storey: Yeah. That's funny. I remember, dude, when I first started using your mushroom products, this is—I mean, God, I guess it must have been, yeah, going back 10 years or something, and I was so prudent about my contact with alcohol, I don't know if-
[01:57:28]Daniel Vitalis: Oh, right. Weren't we cooking it off?
[01:57:31]Luke Storey: Before I even met you, I think I emailed the-.
[01:57:33]Daniel Vitalis: Remember.
[01:57:33]Luke Storey: I'm really resonating with medicinal mushrooms, but your tinctures have alcohol, because as you indicated, to get the medicine out or at least part of that medicine, you have to use alcohol and that grain alcohol is still left in the tincture. And I was so paranoid. I mean, wisely so, considering my history that what I used to do is I would take the bottle and put it in a pot of water on the stove and like-
[01:57:57]Daniel Vitalis: Boil off the alcohol.
[01:57:58]Luke Storey: ... evaporate the alcohol and be left alcohol-less tincture. Now, I know it hasn't been a problem after many years of taking as much of those.
[01:58:06]Daniel Vitalis: But that's a really cool point that you bring up because alcohol boils off at a lower temperature than water, that if somebody has that issue, they can cook the alcohol off before you damage the product itself because the water content will still be there protecting the product from getting too hot.
[01:58:22]Luke Storey: Yeah. I mean, I still got the benefit from it. And it was just I ended up just realizing that I was safe and it wasn't going to trigger any kind of either a craving or anything. And it was-
[01:58:31]Daniel Vitalis: I have seen it, though. I've seen a person relapse into a very significant alcohol problem by starting off with tinctures. Yeah. And I know one person who did that.
[01:58:41]Luke Storey: Word to the wise.
[01:58:42]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
[01:58:44]Luke Storey: Something I haven't asked you about, and that is, does it not like vasodilate under your tongue when you put a tincture that has alcohol? Does that not also assist in the absorption of it or am I imagining?
[01:58:57]Daniel Vitalis: Certain things, it does.
[01:58:59]Luke Storey: Okay.
[01:58:59]Daniel Vitalis: Certain things it does, but it depends on the size of the molecule. But certain things will absorb through the mucosal membranes along with the alcohol. But I don't know about the big complex carbohydrates that are the valuable portion of medicinal mushrooms. I doubt that. I think they probably end up being absorbed in the digestive tract because the beta glucans, or sometimes, we'll hear them called polysaccharides.
[01:59:24] A polysaccharide just means many carbohydrates, a big complex carbohydrate, not like the kind that's in potatoes and bread, but these medicinal sugars that are not sweet. Those are some of the active components in the immune side. So, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the terpins are absorbed in the mouth, I'm speculating, but I don't think that those carbohydrates are. I think that's probably a digestive tract thing.
[01:59:48]Luke Storey: Oh, okay. Maybe this feels like it because it has that little stinging sensation. I'm like, oh, there.
[01:59:52]Daniel Vitalis: Like with our antler products, like some of those growth factors get uptake in the mouth. So, in some cases, that is true.
[02:00:01]Luke Storey: Okay.
[02:00:02]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, where alcohol becomes like a carrier into the bloodstream.
[02:00:05]Luke Storey: Right. Like, I noticed even the cacao will have that effect also, it works as a good carrier. It's like a different experience. For example, going back to psilocybin, if you eat some psilocybin mushrooms, just gnarl through them and chew them up, you're going to have a little bit of a wait. But if they're in some chocolate truffles, like in 15 minutes, you're like, okay, here we go. It's weird.
[02:00:29]Daniel Vitalis: It's true. Like a potentiator, they call that.
[02:00:32]Luke Storey: I like the alchemy of different things like that. And on the chaga piece, and then I want to get into just a couple more there, one thing I really love to do is I'll go on eBay and I'll order very carefully. I mean, I have a couple sellers that I'll buy like five-pound bags of chaga and it often is from Maine, actually, that's been wild-harvested, and then sun-dried. And I would make these big batches of it in my crock pot. And then, I would put it in the refrigerator in a jug and use it for the base of my coffee because it has that nice vanilla flavor.
[02:01:06]Daniel Vitalis: It goes perfectly in that flavor.
[02:01:08]Luke Storey: And also, it seems to be very alkaline. It seems to cut the acidity of my coffee, especially if I put some shilajit or something really acidic in there, which I often do. But then, I realize I'm not getting the alcohol extraction, so I'm kind of like, in a sense-.
[02:01:23]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. Still really good for you, man. In addition, like I mean, I have it right here. I take this all the time, right? So, I take my own product, but I'll be honest, my wife boils it for me. Avani is really good to me like that. So, it's like we have little things we do for each other. And one that she does for me is she boils my chaga, because every morning, when I get up, it goes in my smoothie, instead of water, right? And it's always a bummer like if I run out of it, it's like, water. I like to put chaga as the base of my smoothie, so I use it really, really regularly.
[02:01:55] You're still getting those immunobenefits. And the interesting thing about chaga is it needs to be boiled for like two hours before you start to extract the stuff that you're trying to extract, but I'll make real concentrated batches of it and leave it in the refrigerator. But I still take my own product because it is the terpin extract as well. So, those adaptogens, that I want those things that help me better utilize oxygen, for example, and things like that. That kind of stuff is in that alcohol fraction.
[02:02:22]Luke Storey: Got it.
[02:02:23]Daniel Vitalis: And actually, just back to what you said about the uptake with the alcohol, another example would be, in our pipe pollen product where there's testosterone in that, if you think about testosterone, that's a small enough molecule that it's usually given to people transdermally. So, you never really see like, oh, rub this Reishi on your skin. Like it's not going to be absorbed that way. Hormones are absorbed that way. So, typically, you'll see them given as a transdermal. So, obviously, in alcohol, it's very easy to get it to uptake directly into the bloodstream. So, in some instances, the tincture is the delivery mechanism. But in other instances, the alcohol is just the extraction medium.
[02:02:58]Luke Storey: Okay. Cool. That brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about, and that is pine pollen.
[02:03:03]Daniel Vitalis: What a thing that is, huh?
[02:03:05]Luke Storey: That stuff is just-
[02:03:07]Daniel Vitalis: So interesting.
[02:03:07]Luke Storey: I've been talking about, well, yours in particular, because I've tried like, I don't know, different brands over the years, people would gift me or something. I don't want to be disparaging toward other brands, but some of it, I'm just like, I don't know, this doesn't do anything. But specifically, the liquid tincture that you guys have and I've recommended it to so many guys for libido and just that testosterone like it's like an aphrodisiac kind of thing.
[02:03:34] And I don't really ever believe in that kind of stuff for some reason. I'm like, I just don't think it's going to work in that capacity. But I've had so many skeptical friends because I'm almost 50. Most my friends are a few years younger, but they're like, man, hey, Luke, you know anything for—actually, dude, pine pollen, on it for two and you're going to wake up with a pup tent in your bed.
[02:03:58]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
[02:03:58]Luke Storey: And universally, say, 100% of the time, but more often than not, friends come back and they're like, dude, you were right about that, it's crazy. It really does increase your libido.
[02:04:15]Daniel Vitalis: We got some pretty high-profile folks in that town on that product, I can't say their names, of course, but it's like there's been some pretty high-profile people who are using it instead of hormone replacement. So, it's super common now to see guys over 45 on testosterone-replacement therapy. And I think with hormone-replacement therapy, it's quite a technology. You look at the benefits of it, it's pretty incredible. But my question was like, well, if this issue of andropause, which is a word we don't hear much, we hear menopause a lot.
[02:04:50] We don't hear it because with menopause, you have something that's so visually obvious that change. It's very obvious, right? It's very objective. Whereas, with andropause, which is when a man's body starts to reduce its production of hormones like testosterone and other androgens, it's not something that's as obvious. So, guys start to notice less of a pup tent. They start to notice less motivation because testosterone, and motivation, and especially goal-oriented stuff is really tied. That's all tied together.
[02:05:21] So, they start to not have that anymore. There start to be like emotional flatness and it's from that reduction, and people think back to how they used to feel, it's like, wow, I don't know what's happened to me. I used to feel so good. It's like we had way more testosterone then. So, what's just amazing to me is that pine trees, in their pollen, which is the plant equivalent of sperm. So, pollen is the male part of the reproductive cycle in plants, right?
[02:05:49] So, that pollen gets into the flower, which is the ovum, which is the female part. So, that's sort of how plants have sex. So, pollen is the sperm of flowering plants and pine sperm or pine pollen has testosterone in it. And it has also a whole bunch of other phytoandrogens. So, these are other male hormones. So, it's not just testosterone. It's actually a pretty complex and well-rounded suite of male hormones. Obviously, these are hormones in women, too, just like estrogen is in male bodies as well.
[02:06:29] But we tend to think of it as more of a male hormone. But also, it has all these phytosterols, which are plant steroids. So, all that stuff is in pine pollen because pine pollen is sprinkled out over the whole environment. And that stuff gets into the soil microbes. It gets onto other plants. It gets into animals. So, pine trees I just think of as like this benevolent entity. I mean, I'm like, I've got pine trees all on here on the land.
[02:06:58] And we'd just come through this season where everything is just covered in a yellow dust every morning when you wake up and they're just spraying this testosterone out on everything. So, your ability to absorb that hormone is somewhat diminished with just the pollen. We sell the pollen as a powder and we sell just a pine pollen tincture, but the product that I think is the most exciting is we call it P4. It's our Pine Pollen Pure Potency.
[02:07:23] So, that product has something special there. That's pine pollen. It's also got stinging nettle root in it, which I'll explain why in a second, and then we do it with a little orange peel that's got vanilla bean and it's got a little maple in it. And it's pretty delicious, right? It's like we call it the orange cream sickle. But the reason that you want the alcohol extract of the pine pollen, there are hormones in the meats that we eat. There are hormones in our environment.
[02:07:49] And if they were easily absorbed, they would have impacts on us physiologically that maybe we don't want. So, your body breaks hormones down in the digestive track. That's why they don't usually give you a testosterone pill, they'll give you a cream, and the same with female hormones. So, you need a carrier into the blood. And so, the alcohol becomes that carrier and it gets that testosterone into your body. So, pine pollen will bring your testosterone levels up when used in an alcohol extract.
[02:08:15] Another thing that happens, though, is that people will have testosterone in their blood, but it's not available. It's not freely available. It's not what's called free testosterone. And there's a sex-hormone-binding globulin. It's this thing that attaches to your testosterone and keeps it from being accessible by your body. I'm not sure why, but stinging nettle root, so the underground part of that plant contains a molecule that will free that testosterone. It will bind to that sex hormone globulin and it will free up the testosterone.
[02:08:42] So, those two things together in that product, that's pretty powerful. And then, we put Siberian ginseng in there, too, which works on the hypothalamus and helps to regulate your natural hormone production. So, those three together become the powerhouse, that we call Pine Pollen Pure Potency. And I developed that going like, hey, I'm going to need this one day. And I had learned from this herbalist, Stephen Harrod Buhner about pine pollen.
[02:09:05] And I thought, man, I need to like figure out how to make sure that I don't need to be on synthetic testosterone down the road. So, developed that product. And what we recommend to people who want to use it for that is that you take it at times where you have natural testosterone spikes because your body, three times a day, cranks up the testosterone. So, that's just before you wake up, which is that thing you were talking about.
[02:09:29] So, that's like first thing in the morning, right around noon, you have another spike, and then you have another spike after you go to sleep, like 2:00 AM. So, you want to take it at times where it will naturally elevate the already-high amplitude in your blood volume. So, you either take it first thing in the morning, take it at noon, or take it before bed, or twice a day, or three times a day.
[02:09:52] But it's at those three times, first thing in the morning, noon, before bed. So, most people, I just have them keep it at the bed stand and just take it when they first wake up, when they go to bed or both. But that's one of our best-selling products because we have so many repeat customers where that's become the cornerstone of how they're sort of dealing with hormonal changes in their life.
[02:10:13]Luke Storey: Well, I mean, I've tried all your stuff over the years at various times and I go through phases of like when I want what, but there's two things that I've always had in my house, and right now, in the other room, are there in abundance, and that is the Pure Potency Pine Pollen one, and also, the colostrum. Those are just like-
[02:10:30]Daniel Vitalis: The colostrum is crazy, right?
[02:10:31]Luke Storey: It is non-negotiable. And I want to cover colostrum and I feel like we've been on this for a while. Thank you for your generosity of time. As you know, I'm a very curious person and I won't stop until I feel like I know everything this person knows now. And hopefully, our audience hangs in and feel the same way. No, I know there's one thing I want to cover first. I think a lot of people, as you indicated that testosterone is present in both males and females, as is estrogen, but I think that women underestimate the value of having balanced and proper levels of testosterone because it is perceived as such a male-centric hormone.
[02:11:18]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, which is changing because this was something that started to happen early in—because I think we've probably been producing our pine pollen product for 10 years now. And initially, we thought it would be a product primarily purchased by men. And then, when we started seeing women buy it, we assumed women were buying it for men. And then, we started to find out and I just was ignorant about, I didn't know that a lot of women are being prescribed testosterone now.
[02:11:42] So, low testosterone problems are an issue in some women. So, if that is you, then this is a product that could potentially be valuable to you. And my suggestion would be, anytime you start messing with your hormones, probably good to have a baseline, use the product, figure out where it takes your blood levels and all that. And if you're working with a clinician, that's something—I mean, I say that. And then, I'm not really the type who likes to go get blood tests all the time, but I say that just to sort of—I think it's a delicate thing, women certain to put heavy amounts of testosterone into their blood stream without sort of knowing what they're trying to achieve.
[02:12:21] But if you've been diagnosed as a woman with low testosterone, this product could be really, really valuable for you and give you the ability to work with nature instead of working with synthetic hormones, if that's something you're interested in. But, yeah, it's becoming more common. And I think the other issue that a lot of people are dealing with is just a massive imbalance of estrogen, because for whatever reason, I'm sure you've noticed this, Luke, it's like, it seems like so many toxins in our environment behave like estrogen in our body.
[02:12:48] None of them are behaving like testosterone in our body, which is kind of a bummer, right? So, plastics, they function like xenoestrogens. A lot of plant compounds function as phytoestrogens. Now, we're learning about metalloestrogens and heavy metals can function like estrogens in the body. So, they bind to estrogen receptors and the body perceives them as estrogen, so we start to create this excessive amount of estrogens. So, the androgen-estrogen balance gets thrown out of whack. It'd be cool if it was like, oh, yeah, I used the Ziploc bag and it attracts like testosterone, like that would be cool, but it doesn't.
[02:13:22] And so, we're sort of in this sea of manufactured xenoestrogens. I talked earlier at length about the problems with eating the same stuff over time, because you can end up with too much of a phytochemical, and phytoestrogens are an example of that. So, that's something we have to think about. So, I think having a phytotestosterone is really valuable because it can help to restore some of that balance because we're not meant to be this skewed towards estrogens. And I know that's obviously not meant as, estrogen is really, really important, it's just that there's a lot, as you know, estrogens around.
[02:14:03]Luke Storey: Alright. Cool. On the colostrum tip, for people that have not heard about this particular substance, give us a breakdown of what it is because this is, like I said, I don't know, I eat what my body wants. I mean, I guess I eat more stuff than I indicated earlier. I'm noticing that I'm potentially allergic to a few things, but I do eat more than just beef. Let's just get the record straight. In my morning elixir, I never really read what the dosage is on stuff and I don't recommend that to people.
[02:14:37] It's just, I don't know, I'm just that way. What feels good. And so, I have one of those huge kind of, it's not a ladle, it's a spoon, like a stainless steel spoon, a giant spoon that's, I don't know, maybe if you have a heaping—one of my heaping spoons is probably like ten, I don't know, maybe 20 tablespoons. But the colostrum, like the powdered colostrum you guys make, it's a little sticky. So, if you put that spoon in there and take a big, it doesn't fall off like a flap.
[02:15:08]Daniel Vitalis: It's got full oils in it. That's why.
[02:15:09]Luke Storey: So, it has these fats that kind of hold it together. So, I'm just going in there, and I go, ah, it looks about right, and I'm throwing that at my morning coffee. And one day, my girlfriend, Alyson, comes in, she's like, wow, you put a lot of that, you don't really even know what it is. She goes, wow, you put a lot of that. Yeah. And she goes, oh, how much are you supposed to use? I say, I don't know, who cares? Just feels good, do it. And she looks on the bottle. I get the big, I think it's—what is it, five kilos?
[02:15:33]Daniel Vitalis: The Darth Vader helmet, we call it?
[02:15:36]Luke Storey: Ordering shit every week, so I just stock up on stuff. I'm kind of a hoarder. And she looks on the thing and I think it said like one teaspoon. It's like, she's like, dude, what are you doing? But I don't know, just like I love the flavor of it, and it's got this really soothing effect on my gut.
[02:15:57]Daniel Vitalis: Well, that's one of the principle. I tend to think of it as an immunomedicine because it really is and as a food. But I mean, wow, its ability to restore the gut track is pretty revolutionary. Like for anybody with IBS, or Crohn's, or any other digestive problem, especially leaking gut, anything that has to do with the lining of the digestive track, you should look—one of the things that is really cool about colostrum, and I'll back up in a minute here and explain what it is, but it's got more scientific research behind it than most any supplement.
[02:16:31] I mean, I think at last count, it was over 4,000 studies on colostrum. And so, it's been looked at very, very extensively. I mean, because we've had this stuff with us for 8,000 years. And so, we know a lot about it. So, what colostrum is, is the very first product that mammals receive from their mother. So, the first thing a mammal gets from its mother is not milk, but it's colostrum. And then, milk fills in the mammary behind colostrum after the colostrum has been used up.
[02:17:02] So, this colostrum is bovine, it comes from cows. And cow colostrum uniquely works in people in a way that sheep and go, a lot of people will say, hey, I do better on sheep milk, or sheep cheese, or goat cheese. And for a lot of people, that's true. However, the colostrums from those animals work differently. But cow colostrum, because of the way that immunity is passed on to calves, it's bovine colostrums, what you want. So, the thing is that the udder initially fills with colostrum, and then as the calf drinks that colostrum, milk fills in behind it.
[02:17:40] So, what you want is the very first milking off of a cow after calves. Now, a lot of people are like, well, if you do that, what about the calf? And that's like, well, the thing is that the cows produce—they've been bred over the course of eight thousand years to over-produce. So, a calf needs one or two liters of colostrum, but a cow produces many more liters than that. So, you can't really restrict a calf from colostrum because if it survives, it won't do well. It needs colostrum.
[02:18:09] So, it's never taken at the expense of the calf. You can't do that and have a productive dairy. But anyway, this product is how cows pass their immune system on to their infants. Humans get colostrum from our mothers, too, but we get most of our immune system through the umbilical cord. So, we're not getting it all from the colostrum. And that's why the sheep and goat thing doesn't work as well because they're similar. The cows pass on the immune system through the colostrum.
[02:18:37] And it's kind of like this weird science in how it works because there's something in there called transfer factor. And somehow, that transfer factor actually takes antibodies and makes them functional in your body. So, it becomes this antiviral food. And I always reference the study because it just blows my mind that this is in PubMed, so that's like a fantastic sort of medical library of peer-reviewed science. And there is a study in there where they took individuals who are high-risk for flu.
[02:19:05] So, just like we've been hearing so much about with COVID, you've got these high-risk individuals. So, they took high-risk individuals, one group is a control group, one group is vaccinated for flu, one group is given colostrum. And what they found is that the colostrum group had three times less flu symptom than the vaccine group. Because I'm one of these people where it's like I'm not going to call myself an anti-vaxer. I'm also not pro-vax. I'm like sort of like, hey, man, I think minimal amount of injections, please, for me.
[02:19:40] And I want to know what they do. And I want to know what's in them. And I believe that vaccine theory can work, but I don't think it's nearly as effective as we've been told, right? Especially when it comes to flu, where you have these rapidly-mutating viruses. So, it's interesting to me that colostrum is three times more effective than the vaccine itself. And the article notes, and it's also very affordable. So, you start to look at this like, why don't people know this? People are getting these vaccines every year, or sometimes, multiple times a year.
[02:20:17] And then, high-risk individuals are getting those, I think what they call, the super potent ones where they get the like the jumbo vaccine. They do. But colostrum is three times more effective against the flu than the vaccine. So, it's like, wow, are you kidding me? I'll take that, please, because it's delicious and it goes to my smoothies every morning. So, yeah, it's a really powerful immunofortifier because of this transfer factor.
[02:20:41] Whatever viruses that animal's been exposed to, it can pass that immunity on. It also has, because it's for infants, it has all of the known the mammalian growth factors. It's a complete food, so it has all of the amino acids, all of the lipids, and all of the glyconutrients or sugar nutrients that are required by the body's immune system. So, it's just like the most complete food in the world for mammals and it's delicious.
[02:21:06] So, for me, it's in my smoothies every day first thing in the morning. I do something with chaga, and blueberries, and my colostrum, and my maple syrup that I make here on the property and everything. And that's just sort of part of my immune strategy. But just going back, because it does a lot of other things, like if you're somebody with digestive issues, you really should be looking at colostrum at least as being part of your approach to healing. I mean, again, with supplements, like it's not the sole answer, right?
[02:21:36] Just like with testosterones, like pine pollen really helps. It's an ally. But if you're not exercising, and you're not eating well, and you're not sleeping, and you're not getting sun exposure, like it's going to be less effective. You need the whole lifestyle piece. But I mean, I just can't imagine a gut-healing program that doesn't include it or at least look at it significantly.
[02:21:59]Luke Storey: This is a personal question, I guess I could have hit up customer service, but I noticed on the bottle, I think it says cold-processed on the colostrum. And then, I realized one day, I'm like, wait, if they took the care to process it, which I'm assuming is like the drying of the liquid and-
[02:22:15]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, the spray drying.
[02:22:17]Luke Storey: Am I ruining it by putting in a hot ass coffee elixir?
[02:22:21]Daniel Vitalis: Man, it's not like your coffee 450 degrees. I wouldn't worry about that. Anything in liquid water is restricted to 100 degrees Celsius. It's just not really that hot.
[02:22:32]Luke Storey: Oh, okay.
[02:22:33]Daniel Vitalis: And then, it's like you take it off the boiling water, and immediately, the temperature's dropping down. And by the time you're actually blending, like if it's not melting your blender, I wouldn't worry about it.
[02:22:42]Luke Storey: Cool. Good. Because I'd be so like heartbroken because it's not cheap in the amount that I use.
[02:22:49]Daniel Vitalis: No, it's not.
[02:22:49]Luke Storey: Like followed like a normal person's, the dietary serving recommendation, it's like doable, but-
[02:22:59]Daniel Vitalis: My use is also multiple times, like I put a scoop in mine, so I'm probably using whatever the general supplements scoop is. But yeah. So, functionally, I use much more than the recommended dose, which is a teaspoon. But when we started selling that product, it came in a six-and-a-half-ounce container, and then we were like, oh, man, people really going through this stuff, let's do a liter container or a kilo.
[02:23:25] And now, we're up to that Darth Vader helmet size one. That makes me laugh because it's got that, when I see those—I mean, I must show it again. It is ridiculous, right? When I see these, I think like GNC protein weight powder or whatever. I wasn't super excited to go to that container because I found it a little obnoxious. It's like just the little idiocracy-looking to me, but that's the one that I use, too, because I go through them pretty efficiently.
[02:23:52]Luke Storey: Yeah. Well, the thing is, too, I'll be at the health food store and I see colostrum like, oh, what's that? And it's like a tiny ass little bottle with capsules in the rack, it's like take two capsules a day. And I'm always saying, what's that going to do? I mean-
[02:24:04]Daniel Vitalis: A lot of those, too, though are, if you pull those capsules apart and you look at the material, they've been defatted so that they had this long-term shelf stability. So, they're denaturing the product quite a bit or a lot of them are being made to be instantized so that you can easily blend it into, like dissolve it into water. Because you know with this, if you put this, like a spoonful of this on top of some water, it's just going to like float on the top because it's fatty, so you need to blend it.
[02:24:30] But that's because we're not extracting those fats out. Whenever you have lipids present, now, you have to be more careful with heat, and light exposure, and all of that, but you have a more nutritious food. So, it'd be like if I gave you salmon, but I took all the fat out first. You're not going to have to worry about the salmon getting rancid, but where's the benefit now? You've taken all the good stuff.
[02:24:50]Luke Storey: Right. Alright. Last thing I want to ask you about, because I haven't tried this yet, is this Taboo-Aphrodisia.
[02:24:59]Daniel Vitalis: Dude, it's no joke. That's just no joke, bro. We haven't—
[02:25:06]Luke Storey: Texted me about it, he's like, you've tried that, right? I was like, no, I actually didn't even know-
[02:25:09]Daniel Vitalis: Oh, you got to try it.
[02:25:11]Luke Storey: But is it on the site?
[02:25:13]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. Oh, that's a really unique product. So, there's a proprietarily large dose of antler velvet in there. We don't really reveal how much because I don't want people comparing it to our other antler products, but it's a lot. There are two nutraceuticals in there. One is a nutraceutical extract of, so these are like scientifically-validated, researched extracts, one from Tribulus and one from that plant we call horny goat weed.
[02:25:44] So, those are two nutraceuticals that are in there. And then, this heavy dose of really rich cacao and in that alcohol base, right? So, when you shake this thing up and you squirt on your tongue, it's kind of like liquid chocolate bar, like there's also more plama in it, so you get these like bitter aphrodisiac herbs in the back. What it does is causes engorgement in your erectile tissue. So, that one's like one I'll take before we head into the bedroom, and, dude, it's both partners because all genders are benefited by this.
[02:26:24] Everybody with erectile tissue benefits from this. So, that's lips, nipples, clits, penises, everything that gets you erect, right? So, it flushes that stuff with blood and creates long, sustained erectile flushing, we'll say. But the flavor of it is it's so rich in cacao that it's erotic just to taste it, if you will. I don't know if that makes sense. But when you taste it, you're like, oh, jeez, kind of like almost puts you in the mood.
[02:26:56] Anyway, that product was initially when we worked with a formulator on it and they really liked it as a woman's hormone balancer. And I was like, I don't know, guys, that's not what I'm finding. Like maybe, but I find this thing to be very—and the problem is this, when you try to market like because we'll have people be like antler velvet. Yeah, buddy, why don't you just sell rhino horns and shark fins? And it's like, hey, dude, you don't know you're talking about, it's a very different thing.
[02:27:24] You start to promote the idea of aphrodisiacs and I think people are really jaded about that kind of thing. But they're not jaded about Viagra because Viagra causes erectile tissue to flood, right? Women take it, too, sexually for that reason. So, anyway, I recommend that people who have or maintain an active sexual practice give this stuff a try then, because, wow, it's significant. It has a significant impact on me. I really, really like it. And it's really delicious.
[02:27:53]Luke Storey: I'm sold.
[02:27:54]Daniel Vitalis: It's exciting.
[02:27:55]Luke Storey: I'm on it. I want to get some.
[02:27:57]Daniel Vitalis: We'll send you out a bottle, dude. It's incredible. I think my brother might have sent you out a bottle of it.
[02:28:01]Luke Storey: Oh, cool. Okay. Good.
[02:28:02]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
[02:28:02]Luke Storey: Well, shout out to Caleb. Dude, I said it was the last one, but you mentioned elk antler. And I think a lot of people have either never heard of that, or if they have, they envision what you just-
[02:28:18]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, rhino horns.
[02:28:20]Luke Storey: Yeah, that you're like ripping the horns off this innocent deer, or elk, or something like that. And there's a lot of deer antler on the markets. So, give us a breakdown of like the difference between those two animals, how it's harvested the right way, the wrong way, and why someone would want to put an extract of an antler in their body.
[02:28:38]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. Well, elk or deer as well. So, deer is a big family of servant mammals, right? So, like for instance, here in Maine, we have moose. That's the largest of the deer species.
[02:28:50]Luke Storey: Oh, shit.
[02:28:50]Daniel Vitalis: So, yeah. So, you could theoretically make this out of moose elk, any of the deer species. These are animals that produce antlers. So, not what a rhino has, which is a horn, or a cow has, which is a horn, or like all those African plains animals that we see with all of the really amazing head ornaments, that's just horn, but antler is something different because antler grows every year and falls off at the end of the year.
[02:29:18] So, like here in Maine, we have a lot of—all over the country, especially in the hunting world, you have this whole thing I've called shed collective, where what people do is they go out into the woods to find antlers that have been dropped by the animal in the early winter. They actually break right out of the skull and fall off. And that's why, like in the spring, I'll see deer out in the fields here and I can't tell if they're males or females because they don't have antlers. So, once an animal grows horns, it always has those horns, right?
[02:29:43] So, if you think of like a ram, like a mountain sheep, like every year, that thing gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger because it just keeps growing. They don't ever come off. So, deer, elk, moose, they drop those every year. So, if you think about that, that's what's fascinating because that means they have to regrow them. And when you think about mammals, we're not really good at regrowing body parts. There are animals that are, right? Like if I take a lobster and I break its arm off, the next year, it's going to molt and grow a new arm back, right? We have species of crabs that we go crabbing for where you just break off their two arms, put the crab back, crab regrows those arms, you bring the arms home and eat them.
[02:30:23]Luke Storey: Wow.
[02:30:24]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, it's a pretty cool way of sustainably crabbing for certain species, right? Because they can do that. But with mammals, as anybody who's had an amputation knows, we don't have the technology right now to regrow a lost limb. So, why I'm fascinated by antlers is that they regrow and they regrow bigger than they grew the year before until that animal reaches its sort of peak of maturity. So, what happens is in like three months' time, it goes from little bumps on the skull to those fully—now, anybody who've seen elk compared to a deer, like here, we don't have elk here. We have white-tail deer.
[02:31:02] And their racks will be about this big. But then, you see an elk and that thing's four, five feet long with all of these tines coming off of it, growing that in a couple of months. And when it's early in growth, it's quite soft to the touch and warm because it's vascularized. Blood is pumping through it. And there's a layer of skin with like fuzzy hair. Everybody's seen that. That's why we call it velvet. So, in the beginning, when they have all that, they are filled with all these steroidal compounds because it's in this rapid growth phase to get that thing to grow and it's growing up to two inches a day.
[02:31:38] So, in order to do that, it has to—right? Think about that because it's not just like a bone either. It hardens to bone, but initially, it's got skin. It's got hair. It's got veins, arteries, lymph. It's like an arm growing two inches a day. So, if you think about what's going on with the stem cells and the steroids in that material, that's something that people have looked at for thousands and thousands of years, especially in Asia and in Russia. And we're like, well, let's eat, can we eat that?
[02:32:13] So, yeah, you can. And if you produce it right, you can actually absorb those molecules. I'm not at odds with the Chinese method, but I don't understand it because they cook it, and cook it, and cook it into like a broth which destroys all those growth factors. But the Russian method, which is what we've adapted for our product, is where you actually do it in alcohol raw, and you're able to extract all that stuff, and then absorb it that way.
[02:32:40] So, my opinion is that I have yet to see something from the natural world in the way that like if you wanted to replace testosterone-hormone therapy naturally, pine pollen is where I ended up. It was like this thing does that better than anything I've seen outside of the pharmaceutical industry. If you're looking for like what works best steroidally for recovery, so that could be from your workouts, but that could also be from a surgery or something like that, if you're looking for regeneration, or anti-aging, or any of those kinds of things, I haven't seen anything better than this because that's what that is.
[02:33:13] It's a rapidly-growing, youthful tissue that contains all of the things that get mammal tissue growing. So, anyway, that can be extracted in alcohol. Ours was all coming from the United States, and basically, big free-range ranches, where once a year the males have their antlers clipped when they do like an annual vet checkup, basically. And when they do that, they tourniquet those off and cut them off, which they originally did just because, initially, they were venison farms.
[02:33:42] And they would remove those antlers because they were dangerous to the farmers there, the ranchers. But over time, they've shifted. Now, they don't do any slaughter at all. Where these come from, they're only raising the animals for the antler because it's become such a valuable commodity. So, once a year at the routine checkups, those are basically just clipped off. They first anesthetize the nerve that feeds it, so there's no pain, and then they clip them off, tourniquet them, and then later that day, the animals back out. So, it's a no-kill method to get them in any way. I mean, we've seen over the years, like the NFL has banned it. Yeah. We've seen like-what's that?
[02:34:22]Luke Storey: It's like considered doping?
[02:34:24]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. Because it has IGF-1, and IGF-2, and all of these growth factors that you're not allowed to take individually. So, we've seen all kinds of issues. We've seen big scandals over the years, where some athlete is caught using it or whatever, it becomes a big scandal and all these questions emerge. Our sales of it usually crank during those times. It's quite funny to watch because people are like, oh, they're doing that, I want some.
[02:34:47] But anyway, if you're looking for something to give you an edge, it could be athletically, it could be in the aging area, it could be in regeneration, it could be just in skin maintenance because there are six types of collagen in it, very absorbable collagen. That product, as you've seen, too, when you look at the color of it, it's that bright, brilliant pink, like almost like the inside of your lips, or on your eyes, or something where you have that really rapidly-turning-over tissue.
[02:35:15] That's the color of it. And, man, it's very absorbable. So, it's just been one of our flagship products. And like I said, over the years, people kind of give us a hard time because they can't imagine something like that can really work. But when you look at the history and look at the science, it's like it's really impressive. In fact, I think it's probably very underutilized, particularly in athletics and things like that.
[02:35:36]Luke Storey: Who are the first people on record to turn antler into a medicine? Was it the Chinese?
[02:35:41]Daniel Vitalis: I would think it's the Chinese. Their tradition is many thousands of years old. And from my understanding, the Russian tradition, where they call it horns of gold, is like maybe a thousand years old. So, less time over there. But that's also hard to say because it's not like we have good evidence of that. I would assume, this has been done for a long time. But the ability to do the extract that we do requires ethanol, and ethanol didn't exist until fairly recently in history because that comes out of the ability to distill alcohol.
[02:36:10] And so, the Russians figured it out when they were doing their Cold War super soldier, super athlete programs, and that we utilized the method that they developed because they did a really scientific approach, looking like how do we get the most benefit out of this for our athletes and for our soldiers. And so, we've used that research in the way that we put that product together.
[02:36:30]Luke Storey: Cool. Well, hot damn, dude. I think we've covered everything I wanted to ask you. It's so funny because when we started today, I was like, yeah, I got a few questions, probably we'll be good an hour, we'll probably just wrap it up, the shorter ones. But looking back historically, when you and I get to running our mouths.
[02:36:49]Daniel Vitalis: It's a long one, yeah.
[02:36:51]Luke Storey: So, there's a lot to talk about. So, man, I appreciate you taking the time. And again, back to what I said at the beginning, thanks for being here with me on the beginning of my journey and always being so supportive. And I hope that I'm able to return that to you by getting your message out and sharing with people what you're up to. Before we close it out, who had been three teachers or teachings that have influenced your work that people might be able to go learn from?
[02:37:20]Daniel Vitalis: Man, you always ask me that and I always feel so put on the spot.
[02:37:23]Luke Storey: Maybe someday, I need a new question because you've been on so many times now.
[02:37:27]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah. Well, I never have a good answer for you. It changes for me all the time. Ask me kind of a different question.
[02:37:34]Luke Storey: Alright. I'll let you off the hook because you've been on so many times.
[02:37:38]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
[02:37:38]Luke Storey: Not many influences can you have. Just tell us where we can find you, the WildFed project, Surthrival, various social media and stuff for people that want to go check you out right now.
[02:37:48]Daniel Vitalis: Well, yeah, the company we've been talking about, Surthrival, S-U-R-T-H-R-I-V-A-L, so it's like thrive in the words survive, so Surthrival. The term comes from me being like, hey, the world's going to get really weird, we're going to need products to thrive in a time of kind of survival, and it's like, well, that's starting to happen. So, that's surthrival.com. And then, WildFed is at wild-fed.com. That's my TV show. And I'd love for people to check that out.
[02:38:14] We actually made a coupon code for your listeners, by the way, Luke15, we'll get people 15 percent off the entire season, episode one through eight, of the WildFed TV show. I'm on Instagram @DanielVitalis where I really do right. So, I think of my Instagram like as if I have a column for a newspaper or magazine. I really put some heart into writing there. So, that's a place. And then, my podcast is called WildFed. So, you can find that as well anywhere you get podcasts.
[02:38:46]Luke Storey: Awesome, man. Yeah. I love your TV show, honestly.
[02:38:49]Daniel Vitalis: Thank you. Thank you.
[02:38:50]Luke Storey: I like the adventure, but like I said earlier, at the end of it, I'm always just like, ah, I want to taste that food.
[02:38:56]Daniel Vitalis: We're editing season two right now, so we've got eight more episodes in the pipe.
[02:39:00]Luke Storey: Yeah. It's fascinating, man. And I think the work you're doing with WildFed is really important, too, as someone, as you know, who was raised half of the time by my dad, who was, his entire life, an avid fisherman and hunter. I don't think he did much foraging, but definitely, his main passion in life was hunting, and fishing, and just seeing the reverence and respect that he had for the animals and for the land on which those animals live, I think it's something that people outside of the world of hunting and fishing don't understand.
[02:39:37] Many people, I think, that have not had that direct experience perceive people that hunt as being some oafs, that just like go out on the land, they just trash it, and kill a bunch of animals, and are not reverent and respectful in that practice. And I'm sure there are people that are that way as well. But in my experience of knowing a few folks like you with that passion, it's the converse. And I would say, you probably have a more intimate relationship with and respect the environment than do many "environmentalists".
[02:40:09]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
[02:40:09]Luke Storey: And so, one thing that I've really enjoyed about the WildFed series is just seeing the care with which you guys interact with the environment, and the leave-no-trace, and you go hunt for leaks, and you want to make sure that there's enough for the next season for that particular species to—what's the word?
[02:40:31]Daniel Vitalis: Proliferate.
[02:40:32]Luke Storey: ... proliferate, and come back again, and leave some for the next people. And it's just this beautiful symphony of interacting with the natural world. And it's really entertaining and it's really inspiring. And it's like every time, it's like, I want to do that, and then I'm like, well, yeah, I'm in LA.
[02:40:51]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, we're trying to make it like a culinary adventure series so that it's just interesting to watch whether you do it or not, but then we're also trying to always create inroads for people who maybe do want to try it as well. The thing is, sometimes, people criticize my work and say, well, seven billion people can't do that. And I'm like, when did I say they could? I never said that. Seven billion people can't play golf either. Nobody criticizes people who play golf over that.
[02:41:20] The point of the thing isn't that everybody can do it, but there's a lot more room for a lot more people to do it. And those of us who are doing it, and this is true of a lot of modern-day hunters, too. I think that stereotype is partly based in truth, but a lot of it comes from Elmer Fudd, and Bambi, in places that hunters were intentionally misrepresented. And then, the foraging piece alters the whole game a little bit. It's like, oh, wait, they care about plants, too? Oh, they care about mushrooms, too?
[02:41:53] So, we're trying to really bring this unifying theory of wild food together in that show, but we need more people on board because we're stewards, we're citizen ecologists and we're stewards of the landscape. And so, for people who feel any kind of calling there, one thing I'll add, too, is that in addition to the show, each episode has a two-hour director's cut that goes with it.
[02:42:17] If you're inclined to see those, too, if you want to go deeper, so the show is just great entertainment, but if you're like, hey, I want to learn, like how did you do that? Where do you look? What tools did you use? How does it all work? We've made director's cut so people can kind of get started, too. So, that's really important to me. So, yeah. And the thing is, I brought this up last time we're on your show, but a lot of it, just the other day, I had a guy on, he's an actor by trade, he's an actor in New York.
[02:42:43]Luke Storey: Oh, I heard that. Yeah.
[02:42:44]Daniel Vitalis: You heard that episode? So, yeah, he's got this project where he's taking people in New York City, just outside the city to hunt and to forage. You wouldn't think, you'd think you'd have to be in a rural place, but you'd be amazed at what you can accomplish even when you're in an urban environment. So, to me, the real project is about creating a bridge for human beings to reverse a little of that domestication and make their way back into, not the wilds like deep out in the Yukon, but more like the wildness that's really all around you.
[02:43:18]Luke Storey: Well, you inspired me, I'll share this with you, and we'll call it a day, but in the midst of the lock down shit and all this stuff, I've just kind of hunkered down and made the best of it, but I did manage to escape the city for a few days. And I went up to Yosemite and rented a house up there. And the backyard of this house, it's called the Forest House, which a fellow podcaster, Lacy Phillips, owns. And Lacy rents it out on Airbnb. Beautifully, like really well-done, like remodeled home, and the backyard is the forest.
[02:43:52] It's probably on a half an acre, but it's enough for us to go out, not see neighbors, and really interact. And I went up there and there's a creek running through her backyard there. And I went up there and did a very heroic dose of mushrooms and just spent the whole day crawling around in the forest and it was, dude, oh, man, it makes my heart just burst open. It was so beautiful. And it wasn't because of the mushrooms. I mean, they just give you that childlike fascination with every single thing.
[02:44:24]Daniel Vitalis: You start to notice things.
[02:44:26]Luke Storey: I mean, and I'm just like I'm pulling up rocks, and playing with salamanders, and just looking at spider webs. And I mean, it was just a-
[02:44:34]Daniel Vitalis: And just going like, what am I doing all day? How am I not noticing this stuff? Right?
[02:44:40]Luke Storey: And in the spirit of integration, to be honest, because you can't live like that every day, these experiences aren't meant to be, at least, in my opinion, an everyday occurrence, so they lose their specialness and could be ultimately distracting, if not destructive. But I have found myself noticing my natural environment in a different way since that weekend. Even in my own backyard, I'm like, whoa, and I just sit and stare at the tree or I just watch the way the wind interfaces with the trees and that.
[02:45:10] But anyway, the point of the story is at one point, I made my way down to this creek, probably it was maybe 50 feet down the hill. It took me about four hours to get that far. But I finally got down on the creek and I realized the whole creek is a salad. Other grass in there. There are all these different types of mint, like that lemony kind of mint and these other kind of mints. And I spent a couple hours down there just gorging on this creek salad. And it was one of the most special experiences in nature I've ever had because there was this visceral past-life memory of like, wait, this is who we are. And it was so beautiful.
[02:45:55]Daniel Vitalis: If you know the names of every Kardashian and you don't know any of the plants on your lawn, it's time to get like reoriented to nature.
[02:46:02]Luke Storey: Hey. So, I'm sitting there, and I'm eating this watercress, and I thought of you because I'm like, this shit is spicy. This is not like the water. I mean, it's like, I don't know, it's like eating a concentrated radish or something, just really peppery and delicious. And I'm just eating, I'm balancing out with my different mints. And I'm sitting there and I thought, man, Luke, you've got to get out into nature more. And that thought kind of came to me. And then, immediately, as does when you're having assistance from those other realms, immediately, this realization came to me that it was like, you don't need to get in nature. You are nature. It was just like, oh, shit. And I also need to get into what I-
[02:46:45]Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
[02:46:49]Luke Storey: So, speaking of nature, our leaf blower has just—my neighbor is like, I'm sick of these guys. Guys, we've been going for three hours, but, man, thank you for all the work that you do. Thank you for being a great friend. And just bless all of your ventures and let me know what I can do to support. I'm really excited to share your body of work and wisdom with the audience for those that didn't know you and remind those that did. So, with that, I will bid you farewell, my friend.
[02:47:18]Daniel Vitalis: Thanks, Luke. Stay sane, man.