2. Daniel Vitalis: Farming and the Fall of Man

I'm Luke Story, a former celebrity fashion stylist and founder of School of Style. For the past 20 years I've been relentlessly dedicated to my deepest passion, designing the ultimate lifestyle based on the most powerful principles of health and spirituality. The Lifestyles Podcast is a show dedicated to sharing my discoveries and the experts behind them with you. Don't forget to turn in tomorrow for episode 3, surviving the city through spiritual science with Jack Cruz. Well here we are together again on the Lifestyles Podcast. I'm your host LukeStory from LukeStory.com. Here to bring you another thought-provoking episode. Creature in my friend and confidant Mr. Daniel Vitalis. I've been a huge fan of Daniel's work for many years so it was a real treat to get him on the show and be able to really dive deep into the topics of human domestication and rewilding. We take a time trip back into man's origins as hunter-gatherer peoples all the way up through the advent of agriculture and leading us up into our current disaster of factory farming and the industrialization of our food chain. And we really explore where we might have taken a wrong turn and then of course offer some great solutions on how we might be able to undo some of the negative habits that we've developed as a species. So I invite you to sit back, open your mind and take a trip with me and Daniel Vitalis as we discuss farming and the fall of man. Before we jump into this amazing episode with Daniel Vitalis, I want to let you know about your free episode upgrade. Well that's right, we've got an amazing download available to you for free which includes all of the links, notes, everything mentioned in the show as well as my featured favorites of the week which in this case will include my favorite products from Sir Thrivell. To get your episode upgrade all you have to do is text lifestyleist 2 to the number 444222. Or you can visit this link, LukeStory.com/Lifestylist2 and you will get an instantaneous free download of this week's episode upgrade. I'd also love to ask that if you're enjoying this podcast on a weekly basis or if you enjoy this episode to support us by going to iTunes leaving us a rating and review and absolutely by subscribing to this show so that it's automatically downloaded to your app every week. And by all means if you hear something that a friend or loved one would enjoy or benefit from in this episode, share the love with them and let them know so they can become a listener too. That said, without further delay or further ado my friends, I'm going to deliver to you Mr. Daniel Vitalis. Daniel Vitalis is a writer, podcaster, public speaker and lifestyle pioneer in the sphere of human health, personal development and strategic living. He is the host of the podcast, rewild yourself as well as the founder of Sir Thrivell, a fresh and unique high-end natural supplement boutique. Welcome to the show Daniel. Hey, thank you Luke, good to be here with you man. Glad to get a chance to be on your show. Right, and thank you for having me on yours that was fun and as a result I've connected with all kinds of amazing people in the world that heard me on there which was cool. That's awesome, man because I think that that was the only show I've ever done that was a two-part show. You and I have so much to talk about man, so it's good to be here with you. Yeah, you too. So I mean I just want to get right into it, but I thought it might be beneficial to just let people know that maybe haven't heard about you and who you are, you know how you got your start in this game. How did you come to be Daniel Vitalis? All right, I'll give you the abbreviated version. I have kind of been on a quest throughout my entire life. It goes all the way back to my earliest memories. Some of my earliest, you know, the earliest things I remember are like pouring through these dinosaur books as a little kid, but not because I'm like, wow, these are so cool. Look at how interesting these animals are, but because I was like, there's something buried in our past that's so important and we seem to have forgotten about it. And then I remember, you know, as I got a little bit older and thinking, oh, these people who are going back and digging up the past, they must be the most important people in our civilization because something, it was clear to me, even as a really little kid, something was missing, something was lost. And I remember the day my mother told me that paleontologists and archaeologists didn't really make much money and I was so shocked by that. They seemed so important. I just kind of had it buried in me from early on that there was some relic that needed to be found. As I grew up in a fairly kind of traumatic and twisted upbringing that really left me in an isolated situation. So I had to self-educate and it allowed me to go down kind of an alternative path to the one that most of us were, I guess, corralled down where I got to really follow my own interests. And I was always looking around me and noticing that people were sick, people were unhappy, people were doing things that they were clearly didn't want to do. And I always was like trying to dig up what is going on around here. Why is everyone acting like this? And over the course of, you know, 20, 30 years of asking those questions and doing a lot of self-education and introspection, I kind of stumbled on to understanding that human beings had biologically domesticated themselves in the same way that we've domesticated so many plants and animals and that we don't talk about it. It's taboo to look at and most people don't understand their biology. In other words, we spend a lot of time looking at ourselves as a species like angels, like aliens, but we spend very little time looking at ourselves like apes. And it's understandable to some degree, but we are in fact a type of great ape. And if we can't admit that to ourselves, it means we'll probably not really take good care of our biology. So over the years, I've kind of developed this way of thinking, something I've called rewilding. And the idea is essentially that we can start to become caretakers of our inner ape. And we can start making sure that we are caring for our biology in a way that our culture and our civilization isn't. I don't think I ever could have arrived at that if I'd been through the standard indoctrination, the sort of standard school system, standard medical system, standard dental system, standard sort of psychological imprinting. But it's one of those sort of blessings that came from a dysfunctional reality early on, but it really allowed me to in a kind of freedom pursue the things I was interested in. And now it's a point for me where I get the opportunity to share that back with other people. I so relate to that. I think you and I have a lot in common, you know, based on our friendship and just things that I've learned about you in terms of our childhoods and ways that you might be able to look at that as being a misfortune. And I think a lot of people would if you got into some of the gory details. But I totally get that you had a feeling when you were younger of like, what the fuck is going on here? Exactly. What is wrong with us? What is wrong with me? And I really relate to, I always tell people they said, like, you know, where were you raised or where did you grow up? And I say, well, first of all, I don't think I ever did grow up. And I really wasn't raised. I was raised by wolves. I mean, I raised myself. And that, of course, led me down some paths that were, you know, not very successful, needless to say. But one thing that it got from that, like you and something I just love about your work is I have this deep curiosity about what makes people tick and the way things work and why we are the way we are. And the things that seem to be broken in society or broken in me and in my relationships, how can I fix them? And so I just, I just love that that that kind of came out of, you know, it's like the Phoenix Rising where you have this really traumatic kind of shitty childhood, like I did. But out of that came, I think your biggest gift. And mine too, as it turns out, and that is seeking a deeper understanding of our human experience. And how we might be able to fully optimize. And so it's just, it's super cool. I just, I love what you do. And I too, I'm just so fascinated by people that haven't been influenced by our modern culture. And I'm just like so on board with your whole thing. So going back. I just, well, I actually would like to comment on that. Yeah. One of the things is that, you know, people talk about it, you know, you just said a deeper understanding. And I, you know, people say things like deep and profound. And here I think you mean that actually as I would mean it, often people don't really mean deep. So we look out at the world and there's all of these problems that we can see on the horizontal sort of laterally. But my interest has been what happens if we go like vertically, like if we descend down, what's the root issue? That's what I really want to get to. So it's not interesting to me to deal with all the surface problems. Like right now we're hearing, oh, it's immigration stuff and border stuff and gun control and all these kind of things that are in the media right now, all these surface problems. And they are problems. But like it's so much more interesting, you said before about getting to know how people take. and how we took as a species. And what is the core problem? Like if we were gonna brush everything aside and go deep, go profound all the way to the bottom. Can we find that root problem and can we deal with that problem? And my opinion is that problem really is our own domestication. And I think that's something that people are so afraid of addressing. And it's also so outside of people 'cause people have been so busy looking at the surface. There's this high coup that I love. It's all day we walk around on the roof of hell gazing at flowers. (laughing) And I think that's most people's world. They're so busy looking at the stuff on the surface. They never really dare to look at what's beneath it. - Wow, so that's kind of where the whole domestication thing leads then. So I'd like to talk about what that means. And to me, it's one of these things where as you start to become free or in my own subjective experiences, I've started to become more free emotionally. Freedom of thought, freedom of mind, freedom of movement, body, not trying to follow the norm, not caring what people think, just being my weird self and loving myself and accepting myself as that. I always get the feeling like I was at one point, many years ago, unplugged from the matrix. And as I started to, the matrix of media, of my own matrix, of my own ego and my feeling of separateness and unworthiness and all of this, these kind of positionalities and viewpoints on myself in the world, I just get further and further unplugged from that matrix. And the more I unplug and the further I back up, the weirder it gets. And it's like, you couldn't make it up. It's like everything's almost backwards. It's Alice in Wonderland, this existence we have. And it's an awakening. It's an awakening, I think to who we really are. And part of that is accepting and acknowledging the animal, the animal part of us and the animal body and what that needs. So what does unplugging look like? Where does this domestication go back to? Did it start with agriculture or what we do for work? What did it look like before this modern paradigm hit however many thousands of years ago? - Okay, well, I think it's important that we get a sense of who we are. First thing I want to say, just going back to what you were just saying, this is in a big way, it's like kind of about making peace with the werewolf, right? It's like making peace with the, we have that jekyll and hide mythology in our culture. We have this idea of this dichotomy between the civilized part of ourself and the wild part of ourself. And if you look through our culture, you'll see all these places where wildness is demonized. So it could be the wolf represents that in little red riding hood, right? That story of he represents wildness and heard needing to escape and flee from wildness, right? We have that kind of a theme that Jekyll and hide the idea that there's the civilized person and beneath it lurks the beast that's ready to come out. That's the werewolf mythology. That's the incredible Hulk modern mythology. This idea that we must suppress wildness. And we see this in psychology as well. We see the Freudian psychology is deeply infused with this idea. It was really big into this idea that there was this lurking wildness that must be suppressed less civilization come undone. So where does this go back to? Well, it's important to understand the timeline. And one thing I sometimes, I forget that I have the luxury and many of the people I hang out with have the luxury of understanding the human timeline a little bit. And most people do not have in their mind a timeline. So imagine the timeline of your own life, you sort of your birth, you know, when you, your little landmarks throughout your childhood, you know, you're sort of you turned 18. And then all those things, that's your personal timeline. Now imagine our timeline as a species. We come onto the scene 200,000 years ago, somewhere in that vicinity. I love how scientists love to try to nail this stuff down. But let's say 200,000 years. That's a pretty long stretch of time. But we come from other species that were very similar to us. In fact, species we still call humans. And those humans go back three and a half million years or so. So we're a very old species. But 10,000 years ago, which is so recent. And you know, I think Luke, since you were talking about kind of going through the looking glass, this is going to get pushed back. I think we're going to understand there's ancient ruins around the world that probably go back further, maybe 14, 15, 16, 20,000 years, something like that. Right now we say it about 10,000 years ago. And if you think about that, just for our modern form, that's only 5% of our entire evolutionary period. Some people in one part of the world started farming wheat. And that fundamentally changed how we lived. So prior to that, prior to 10,000 years ago, human beings and all species on the planet were wild creatures. We ate from the wild. We ate wild foods. We lived in the wild. We lived immersed in ecology. It wasn't humans and the rest of the world outside of us. Humans were woven, deeply woven, into the tapestry of ecology. We were part of the schema of life. 10,000 years ago, we decided to do something different. Farming, most of us think of it, especially right now, there's like a farming renaissance. And so there's a tendency to see farming as this beautiful kind of return to a more graceful period of human history. And in a way, it sort of is. That's so great. Because farming is kind of trending now, like being a homestead. I mean, it's amazing because I get to get a really wonderful bacon and things like that. Oh, yeah. I love it too. But you get a flannel shirt. You grow a cool curly mustache. You get some tight sheets. And you start working the farmer's market. And it's like you are-- Well, OK, so let's talk about what farming actually is. And I'm so grateful for those farmers, really, truly, because so much of my food comes from there. And we need to kind of retrace our steps a little bit. And this is an important part of it, because we've been on industrialized human kibble for a long time. So we do need to sort of move back through the farming world. But essentially, the planet has its own agenda for what ecosystems look like and what food webs look like. And there's no place in there for growing crops. There's just isn't. And there's no place in there for raising livestock. There just isn't. So homosapiens as a species, what we come from, is hunting and gathering. So we gather plants, obviously, shoots, roots, tubers, fruits, seeds, things like that. Obviously, lots of foliage. We gather fungi like mushrooms in their mycelia and their sclerosis. We gather things like honey and things like insects, actually, which have been a food throughout the world for all of human history. We hunt things, in other words, fauna. So we hunt small and large gain, very effectively, in fact, which is unusual for apes. Now, that's how we've always eaten. But farming is this different approach, rather than going out into the environment where wild things grow themselves and simply choosing and selecting foods from that palette. Instead, what we do is we clear an area, either by burning it or by cutting it or slashing burn. But we first damage an area of an ecosystem. And then we tear up the soil. Now, when you do that, nature doesn't like this idea very much because the soil is obviously filled with literally trillions of microbes with whole mycelial internet-like networks. And that stuff does not want to be turned over and shown to the sun. It's covered by the crusty skin of the earth. Now, we tear a hole in that. And then we plant in there plants that are annuals or biennials. And those plants, their job in nature would essentially be to sort of repair damaged land. That's why we, before a forest could come back, let's say a landslide happens somewhere naturally. Annual and biennial plants will come in and they'll sort of knit the soil back together. So trees can return, ecosystem can come back online. Well, what we do with farming is we create an artificial natural disaster, if you will. So we create an artificial tear in the earth. And then we plant these different crops. Now, in order to do that, we have to first displace the organisms that grow there. We have to displace the animals that live there. And the thing is, this takes a lot of work. So anybody who thought farming, like we were joking about a few minutes ago, farming is really trendy. And people thinking, oh, I'd love to get involved in that. Because it looks so fun. And then they go do it. And it's like, oh, wow, you start working early. And you don't get done to late. You're exactly right. I had an urban garden a couple of years ago. And I was like, oh, I'm going to grow my own squash. And whatever it's like, not only did I kill them inside of two months, but it was so much work. It was crazy just to have a couple little pots. And oh, my god. Right. So the average person thinks, wow, whole foods is so expensive. It's barely worth it. It's like, well, try growing that stuff yourself. And you'll see it's actually probably the better deal. I don't think farmers get a very good deal. So the idea here is that it is so backbreaking to farm that we actually see that in the fossil record of human beings when this starts. So 10,000 years ago, we see this tremendous reduction in our bone mass and in our muscle size. In other words, our bodies instantly start to atrophy. because farmed food in this may surprise some people. but farm food is actually less nutritious than wild food as well. So people were getting less nutrients and they were doing this back breaking labor. So our bones actually shrunk a bit. We lost density in our bones. We lost a bunch of muscle mass. There was a period where our brains actually started shrinking from this, which is kind of shocking. And we start to develop all these chronic diseases. So another myth that people have is that, oh, nature is filled with all these diseases and we're so lucky to be civilized now. Well, it turns out this isn't really the case. In fact, dental cavities, arthritis, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, these are all diseases that don't afflict hunter-gatherers. They are diseases of civilization. So all these diseases start to emerge as well. So point is, this has been going on about 10,000 years and it's been like a domino effect. It's led us to today. And modern anthropologists have been scratching their heads now, trying to figure out why human beings in any part of the world would ever leave hunting and gathering to replace it with farming because it's so backbreaking, debilitating, and bad for our health. But the answer may be a bit of a surprise and that's that it leads to a kind of hierarchy. And I think that's the thing most people don't really want to look at. Right. We want. Yeah. People don't want to look at the idea. I've noticed that perhaps income tax is not even a legal enterprise. I mean, I don't want to go down the conspiracy trail. But this part of the story, I really love. This is the big hook and the domestication thing. It's like, okay, cool. I'm on board. I get it. This is kind of the forming of the current matrix that we have in our modern culture. And it's a very new phenomenon. Something that happened in the lifespan of the human very, very recently, 5% of our existence. And so then the question to me is like, well, if this farming lifestyle, the domesticated lifestyle sucks for people who doped the hunter gatherer people of the world into this system. Like, that's what I want to know. How did we end up going along with this? Well, okay. Things going on here, one is I just want to say that while this started 5% of our human species lifespan ago, which isn't much, that's like, you know, you've been alive for 100 days and five days ago, you made this dramatic change. But that's only for those people that started it. There are parts of the world where people are still hunting and gathering. So this manifests destiny, this conquest of civilization. And is a word that means city builders and city builders are agriculturalists. So when I say civilization, it refers to the people doing this paradigm of agriculture versus the people who are hunting and gathering. Well, there are still hunter gatherers. And civilization is almost wiped them completely out, but that's not, it's not being completed yet. So for some people, they are still in those ancient times, if you will. They are still in the Stone Age. And I think it's worth noting that North America was a Stone Age continent 400 years ago. So actually, it's not for all of the world. It's not 5% to go. Some of it, it's like a few seconds ago, you know, if we looked at our species lifespan. Wow. Okay. Now, one thing that emerges for me is this. I've been asking this question a long time. If we are domesticated, who is the domesticated? In other words, did we auto-domesticate? Or because we tell the story of humanity from this interesting perspective. It's always we. It's always we did this and then we, you know, we, we discovered farming and then we, we, we developed agriculture and then we built the first towns and eventually the, and it's always this we thing is it, and this is called forced teaming, right? Like the idea that you're, when you say we and you don't invite the other person to be part of the way, you just sort of forced them. Like for instance, you can think of maybe certain minority groups in the United States who got here through slavery, who might find the term we a little bit offensive in certain contexts. Because it's like, hey, wait a second, we weren't part of that, right? So that's kind of, I think, how a little bit of this is gone. It's like, when we say we, we're talking about all of humanity, well, I don't know that the hunter-gatherers of Indonesia would really want to be part of that we. I don't think the Native Americans to this day really want to be included in that we either. So it's interesting we sort of have this way of talking about ourselves like we all chose this together. My question is, did we all choose it together or was some of this foisted upon us? And I guess here is the important bit of context. Contrary to how a lot of people imagine a tribe to work, because what we end up doing is we transpose the British empire onto tribes. So we assume that that style of hierarchy worked in tribes too. So we just assume that the chief is like the king. And he has his throne where he orders around all the other hunter-gatherers who are below him because he's the supreme ruler. Well it turns out that human beings in nature and their natural setting as wild humans, hunter-gatherers, they are largely considered by anthropologists to be egalitarian. Both across the sexes and across social class. In other words, they don't have a socially stratified hierarchy the way we do. We have a sort of system where you have the sort of very elite at the top and it filters down to the poorest at the bottom. Or you could think of a system like an India where there's sort of a caste system in place, a sort of ranking system. Well, that doesn't exist naturally. And that's one of the reasons if you've ever, if you're listening to this and that ever felt uncomfortable to you, the idea of inequality, it's because it's not natural to you. If it was natural to you, it wouldn't feel awkward. It would feel right. Because nature feels right to us. What's natural to us feels right. The reason it feels uncomfortable is because it's not what we do as a species left alone. We don't do that. Now if you and I were left alone, we might do that because our brains have been programmed with this hierarchy over the course of many thousands of years. But for hunter-gatherers, not so. The other thing is they're egalitarian across the sexes so men and women are considered equal opposites. And I love that idea because right now what's very popular is the idea of the sex is being equal and it doesn't leave room for polarity. And I think what's more fair is that we tend to be equal opposites with some exceptions. So when human beings live naturally, everyone's equal and the chief has to participate like everyone else in all the tasks that the tribe does. So the chief doesn't get to hang out and enjoy the fat of the land while everybody else works. He's gathering. He's leading by example and he's not a ruler. He's just a spokesman that the tribe can off or kick out or kill if he starts to act megalomaniacal. If he starts to act like a king, if he starts to act like a president, they don't put up with that. Now once you start and the reason is this, Luke, that there is nothing really left over in the hunter-gatherer world. You use, you consume what you produce and you have to carry everything with you because these are semi-nomadic people. But once you start farming, you stay in one place and you start to create these huge surpluses of food which creates wealth and then money sort of springs into existence and economy. And what happens is you very quickly end up with somebody who rules over the surpluses. Now that person who rules over the surpluses needs to then defend those surpluses from the other people who are feeling subjugated. So then they need sort of a military class. They need to control the minds of the people too. Now they need a priest class. So what you end up with is this stratification of a ruling elite who have priests and military to control the people and those people work like a serfdom to do the labor. They're the labor force, the slaves, if you will. So I've kind of joked in the past. We look back and we think the Pharaohs built the pyramids. It's like no. The Pharaoh had nothing to do with building the pyramid. He watched while the slaves built it. That's how that works. So throughout time starting 10,000 years ago, what's happened is this rise of a hierarchy and an elite. And if you ask yourself, like why do we trace America, the United States of America back to the English Empire which we sort of trace back to the Roman Empire which we trace back to the Greek Empire which we trace back to the Egyptian Empire which we trace back to the Sumeria. Why? Because that's where the farming started and it's likely that this method of ruling people has actually translated itself across time and across civilizations and goes all the way back to that first kernel of wheat that was put in the ground. Wow. That's a really good job encapsulating that. When you were explaining sort of the story of how this came to be, I was imagining one of those sort of little fast motion cartoons that you see sometimes in documentaries. You know, like I see a little cartoon and it becomes the king and now he's like, oh shit, we need to like tell these people that to reach God, they need a priest. Okay, we throw a priest in and then you can see the army amassing and the structures being built and the forming of cities and towns and then of course when they're running out of resources in that town, then I'm assuming they have to go conquest and go conquer other undemesticated cultures, grab those people and slave them or take over that other territory and then slave those people and build another city in another town and another and another and another until eventually we're getting to where we are now where there are very few natural indigenous people living undisturbed anywhere on the planet because where those indigenous people tend to congregate is where I'm assuming resource rich areas of the planet, right? Right, you got it. Okay, so city state civilization, remember means comes from the word civility, you know, that refers to a city. Cities cannot feed themselves, they must get their resources from outside. It's possible in the future cities might be able to feed themselves, but never in history is that happened. A couple other things I want to point out, we've probably all heard by now. It's kind of a meme and it's quite common to hear it, at least when these kind of discussions come up, civilizations, all civilizations in the past have done one obvious thing, they've collapsed. So we know that hence that sort of tracing ourselves back thing I just did there where it's like, well, you know, this is the current empire because the English empire collapsed and before them, the Roman empire collapsed and the Greek and you know, no, no, no, no, no, they all collapse. Well, one of the major reasons is because they deplete their ability to grow the crops that they need because they destroy their soil and they destroy their soil because farming destroys soil. Right, we have some modern practices in the permaculture world which appear to be more sustainable, but I just want to point out that the old farming, the farming that destroyed civilizations in South America, civilizations in the old world as well, these were organic farming practices. I mean, nobody had until after World War II, we didn't even have an organic farming. So for people who think, oh, we just got to go back to organic farming. It's like, no, get your head screwed on straight, look at this issue. These were, you know, the Egyptians were organic farming. They organically farmed their way into the desertification of the Nile. But what about Egyptian roundup, haven't you? Old school roundup. Well, it's interesting. I love the story you told two of like, you know, how we have, I just love that the idea of the earth has this skin that's protecting this living soil and the process of farming is destroying that, you know, destroying the skin essentially what's underneath the skin and that we have to rip that up. And when you were going there into the whole, you know, when we planted weed and what has to happen to the actual geography of an area in order to make it hospitable to plants that we want to control is that in order to do that, you know, because I'm always looking at, I don't want to get into a political like vegan paleo war, by any means, I have like no position on what anyone should do. I just like to look at different size of things and it's interesting because like in the vegan movement oftentimes there's a very sort of strong, almost violent political agenda that people have that if you got a hunt a deer, for example, that you're literally satanic. And I'm thinking about what farming and agriculture does to the plants and animals and how many living organisms have to die to create an acre of kale. I'm like, most vegans are eating like, you know, most of the vegans I've met are eating pastries a lot of the time. And so we're talking grains and this is really destructive, very destructive agriculture. There's been a movement back toward, you know, eating like you said, like the kale and things like that. But again, let's look at, let's say for instance, California's kale crops. You know, we imagine our kale being grown on these beautiful little old MacDonald farm, but if you went out and saw the kale farms, this is habitat that used to house literally, you know, millions of animals and now it only produces the monocrop of kale. This is not the solution. That's so interesting to think about in that way. I love just reframing things for myself to kind of expand my awareness. So if I want to, you know, plant 40 acres of kale, I'm going to have to kill thousands and thousands of rabbits, gofers, shrews, mice, grasshoppers, worms, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And potentially, just potentially cause the extinction of some animals. That's I think a really important understand. And, you know, think about North America, which used to be richly populated in Buffalo. And it wasn't just the bison that we're here, but all the animals that were associated with the ecology of the bison. And now that's where we're growing, that's the bread belt, right, where we're growing corn and wheat. And this is interesting. If you look at, I love Michael Paulin's perspective. If you've ever read a botany of desire, that would an incredible book. There's a great film as well. The idea that maybe some of these domesticated crops have an agenda of their own. I mean, they are living beings. They are essentially sentient creatures. And what if corn and wheat had their own agenda? Corn is obviously comes, it was maize, and obviously comes from South America. And wheat comes from, you know, that area of turkey where early civilization started. And now we're growing those two products of civilization, those two grains, where all of our bison here used to live, that have been murdered off, essentially like an entire species on the brink of extinction. And in place of it, we're planting all this other stuff. Now, I also want to point out, we did turn the bread belt into a dust bowl. And the only thing that saved us from the collapse of our own food supply was applying industrial chemicals to the soil. That sort of allowed us. It's kind of like, you know, I've worked on ambulances and I've seen what happens when somebody has died. And you're able to revive them with CPR, defibrillation, and drugs. And you can get them literally back to life. Somebody who had no heartbeat in their back to life. But you know often they're not going to live that long, but they get another chance. We destroyed off our soil. We went from, I don't remember the numbers exactly, but we had something like 12 feet of topsoil. And now we're down to inches of topsoil. Well, we destroyed that and we've been able to apply, essentially, drugs to it, industrial post-war. I mean, these were, these were chemicals used in munitions manufacture. We apply them to the soil and it's allowed us to keep our soil sort of going, but it's not a sustainable practice and we're not going to be able to do it for very long. So we are a similarly, we are the next civilization on the verge of collapse and we're going to have to be very thoughtful to get our way out of this thing. So if, yeah, I just, I didn't want to have a show like about farming, but I just, I just think about this stuff and it's so interesting. So if, if farming plants, growing plants is that destructive, plants animals. Right. So, so what about, what about the capos, what about the industrial meat factories that are, you know, just so horrendously cruel to the animals that are being formed. And I think as destructive to the environment, I mean, both those domesticated models of this commodity animal food and commodity plant food being produced, do you think there's any way to do that that could possibly feed our exploding population? Like, does all of this come down to just population? There's just too many people. I mean, because we, even if everyone's growing biodynamic, biodynamic, you know, farming practices and they're all doing like Joel Salatin and really doing it right, I mean, is there even enough space to even kind of farm right? You know what I mean? Yeah. I don't believe we can. I think it's silly. I think it's, I think that we're, we have a fundamental mental illness that makes us think that we should be growing our population like this. Some, for some reason, we have a belief that every human must survive no matter what at all costs. And we must do whatever we can to make sure that everybody gets the opportunity to have so many of children and to make sure they all live and, and that might sound sort of strange to people to hear, but when you look historically, human beings often die in childhood and that's part of what kept our population in check. A second thing that keeps the population in check is that we eat, when we eat wild foods, there's not enough surplus to grow ridiculous amounts of people. Now, what we're doing by kind of, what farming is doing is it's sort of like a kid who got a hold of their parents bank account and starts spending at a rate that's greater than the money is being replaced. What we've done is we've been spending the, the productivity of the land to grow humans at the most, at a breakneck speed, but nothing is filling in behind so it's not replenished. So now we have seven billion plus people, but we don't have any plan in place for how we're even going to take care of that. So I know, I don't think there's a way. We could certainly sustain a population of a healthy population of people doing permaculture type practices, but we're not going to take care of seven billion. That's just ridiculous. The other thing I want to say, Luke, and I think this is really important. Can we, as a culture end this fricking debate about plant and animal agriculture, like they're the different things, this idea that, because like you've got, like you said, the vegans are all like, oh, it's, oh, it's animal agriculture is the problem. No, it's agriculture is the problem, including the plants that you're eating and paleo people. It's not just the, it's like enough with this Democrat Republican story that we're doing like plants and it's just farming of plants and animals that's so destructive. This idea of like blaming it on the animal is, it's so silly. Animal and plant, what do, what do vegans think that their food is fertilized with? Either they want their look, either they want their food fertilized organically, which means animal poop, domesticated animal poop, or they want their food fertilized industrially, therefore commercially, which means basically artificial nitrogen and phosphorus. They want commercial-grade food. Okay, that doesn't make any sense. If we want to do it organically, we need poop, and that poop is going to come from animals. And those animals are going to forge on plants. And the whole thing is a system. So it's not, it's such an artificial distinction between the sort of, and for me, by the way, there's nothing less ethical about the corn monocrop than there is about the CAFO farm. There just one is a plant monocrop, one is an animal monocrop. But the idea in both of these cases is some species was domesticated from its wild counterpart and turned into a slave that human beings control and raise indiscriminately in massive monocrops covered in poisons that they then distribute out amongst themselves to eat. So weird. And then, I used to be a vegetarian. And I didn't know this was going to go here, but whatever you let it go, where it's going to go. But I was a vegetarian because I really love animals, man. Like my dad is a real mountain man, like in Colorado. He was a rugged ass dude. I mean, when I was a kid, I mean, oh my God, he used to take me hunting. And, I mean, it was just, it was gnarly. I'm like a kid who smokes weed, listens to black Sabbath, lives in California with my mom. They ship me out to see my dad. He's like, cool, we're going bare hunting. Put radio collars are like 12-hound dogs. And then he, it's illegal and I can't do this, but he would, you know, from former deer that he had killed in the wild, he would take their guts after he, you know, cleaned them to eat them. And he'd hang their guts up in these burlap sacks all around the woods, you know. And that would attract bears. And then you'd go in with the dogs and the dogs, it's called tree in a bear. And so all these hound dogs will, you know, find a bear. They chase it up a tree and then basically you go up and you shoot the bear out of the tree. And then you skin it and you hang the rug on your wall because it's a cool decoration. And I'm a, you know, I'm a kid which, you know, humans have been doing things like this for, you know, ever since there were humans in animals, right? But as a kid, I just, it broke my heart, you know, I really felt for, I felt for the bear. It's like, God, leave the fucking bear alone. What did he do to you, you know? And I, I never could identify with that. Because of, I don't know, how is raised and I just, I was a really big, hard, kid, I was very sensitive, you know? So it's funny because it's, it's like you love forests, I assume. And you don't feel good about forests being cut down. But you don't boycott living in a house because it's made of dead trees. They were, they were out of forest around. Totally. So it's like, it's just funny to watch how we do that, you know, because the animal thing, because we're mammals and we have such a well-developed limbic system, it allows us to really empathize with other mammals. You note too that people don't care too much about all animals. It's just certain types of animals. And the more anthropomorphic the animal is, now a bear, and it, it sounds like you've seen a skinned bear before. Oh yeah. You know that when you look at a skinned bear, it could be a man. Yeah. The head is different, but the body is like, whoa, that looks like a, that looks like a human being. Yeah. So the more an animal is like us or like the cute ones we, we have kept neateness in our homes, like puppies and kittens, the more they're like that, the more we can look in their eyes and feel emotion, the worse we feel. But I don't see a lot of vegans boycotting cars because they kill so many grasshoppers. It's not all animals. It's the animals that remind them of themselves. Wow. I think there's a fundamental selfishness going on here. I also think it would be silly to tell species that are obligate carnivores, like no one goes around with a campaign to stop lions from eating antelope, because we know that lions are obligate carnivores. Well, it turns out human beings are obligate carnivores as well. And we need things from animal food. That's why we're hunter gatherers, right? We know that chimpanzees do the same thing. We know that orangutans need that. We know gorillas do. They, we eat insects primarily or one of our most important animal foods. So yes, you can give up like large animals, but you need animal food to some degree. And insects are a way to do that. I don't see vegans out there trying to stop chimpanzees from eating insects. And the other thing is is that we'll often hear from that camp. They'll tell us about how all, you know, all our closest relatives are vegetarians. It's like, no, they're actually not. That's not true. That's actually a lie. And they are insectivores in addition to the fact that chimps do eat meat. But the point is we tend to get really hung up on, and I think a big reason for this is because we didn't grow up doing it, but we did grow up watching TV shows where animals are human characters. So we grew up with bears that talk and dogs that talk and, you know, panda bears that talk. And they have human lives. And so they've been anthropomorphized. And then we have a hard time because we were, we were eating meat, but we were kept from seeing what it really was. Holy shit. So your average person can't really deal with seeing where their meat comes from, but they can certainly deal with eating it, right? So I think, you know, grow up watching cartoons of talking animals and never seeing animals killed. And then when you see it, it's really shocking. But for our ancestors, there was a gratitude there. There was a deep gratitude, whether it was plant or animal, there was gratitude because it meant that the continuation of your people and your community. And so, you know, that's something we've lost. We're all isolated away from that. And we have lived in a kind of Disney-based fantasy land for a really long time. That's, I never brought in the narcissism piece there. You know, that's, I have definitely looked at, you know, even someone that eats meat, it's like they have no problem having someone kill a cow for them and then they eat that cow, you know, myself included. But the idea of like eating a dog is just unfathomable, right? You know, they'll make fun of like these other cultures. Oh, well, you know, if you go eat Vietnamese food, there's probably dog in it. You know, you hear these sort of racist memes going around. And it's like, well, what if cows were, you know, smaller and could be potty trained, then we would have cows in our house and we'd be appalled by the idea of eating a cow, but if dogs were like really delicious and fatty and yummy and grass-fed running around on a farm, we would be eating the dog, you know, it's like, it's- How do the people of India, who for whom the cow is not eaten, but is instead sacred, how do they look at us? I mean, we must look like goblins and gremlins over here, consuming the sacred animal. And then we're doing the same thing, oh, the Chinese are eating dogs. It's like, well, we're the ones eating cows and that really grosses out one of the largest populations of the planet, the people of India. So it's so relative and I hope for a day where we see all life, all life as sacred equally rather than stratifying it. So here's what I think we've done. We've created an unnatural hierarchy of animals at which we are the top of and the more close, like it's- like for most people, it's worse to kill a chimpanzee than it is to kill a cow and it's worse to kill a cow than it is to kill a mosquito, but it's worse to kill a mosquito than it is to kill a plant because there's like a hierarchy of life value and we consider ourselves to be the top of that. So that's really skewed, right? So you have this one population that thinks killing plants is okay, but it's not- so then- and I'm curious so like, okay, what about killing fungi? Is that okay? They breathe oxygen like us. They're more closely related to us than plants. Does that count? Is it not- it's like this needs to go away and we need to understand that all life forms are sacred, all. We don't even- we have no idea what caused life to come into existence. It is the great mystery. It's the great mystery and it's all sacred. Man, it's so sacred. And all eating- all eating is killing something and eating its body or body parts. That's what eating is. There's a few exceptions. That's when you enslave an animal and drink its milk. Otherwise- otherwise you're eating the body of something. So, ultimately we're all consuming from death and that's one of the other great mysteries of life is that in order for you to move forward in your life, whether you are a human being or you are a fish, you know, it doesn't matter what kind of animal or plant you are, you have to eat other things. Now, you have to consume other things and you also have to be networked into an ecology. And most of us are so divorced from nature that this is all like news for us. There's two things that come to mind on that point. One is, you know, as you know, I've been practicing Kundalini Yoga for many years and it's just sort of a tradition there that most people in the room sit on a sheep's skin, you know, like a wool kind of fuzzy little blanket as it were. And it really is just like a scanned sheep and it's super cozy and nice and when you have to sit in an uncomfortable position and do meditations for 20 minutes or however long, much longer in some cases. It's just like a nice handy little thing to have and what's interesting is that most of the people that practice that for my understanding are vegetarians and no one has a problem at all sitting on the skin of a dead sheep. And one day this was actually brought, and these are just things that I tripped out on, you know, it's like, I'm not right, they're not wrong. I mean, I don't believe in that dualistic way of viewing things. I just want to have a really open mind and look at all of these things we do and believe from a really broad context, you know, from 30,000 feet up, what are we weirdo humans like doing and where do these things come from? So one day my teacher, Tej, says, she says, yeah, you know, someone was new in the class. She said, you know, most of us we have like these sheep skins we sit on. If you don't want to use the sheep's skin, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, Skin we totally understand but my teacher Yogi Budgeon who's the guy that you know brought this form of yoga to this country She said yeah, he said one day and she was with him for I don't know 25 years or something She said yeah one day he made this one interesting comment about that Even though he was a vegetarian he said that You shouldn't have a problem sitting on your sheepskin because That animal being killed allowed that animal to move up the evolutionary chain to become a higher Consciousness animal and so it was a gift to that animal and this could sound like a really gross Rationalization to some but from one perspective it made sense to me to almost sounded like a really native American way of viewing An energy form like that and I just really liked that perspective that I don't know if that's true because I'm not God But it makes sense on some level and I don't know what the vegans in the room thought about it But no one really stopped sitting on a sheepskin as far as I know But it's just another of those Good life. Well if life needs to feed on life and that's and and I ask the listener You know please take some time with that idea life feeds on life Examine this idea so over the next course of the next week really think about it really look at what things eat This is really important that you understand that it is something dying that allows you to live that is one of those poignant beautiful things about the mystery of life now if you Feel that you must interrupt that then what we have is a kind of self-abuse that I must suffer so that others don't have to suffer and That is not the imperative of nature nature's program due to survive at all costs and created a sort of strange competitive slash synergistic environment in which organisms eat each other and If we decide that we want to interrupt that because we don't like that then we are actually turning our back on nature So we are going deeper down the domestication path Remember that domestications what divorced us from the ecosystem in which we hunted and gathered and we Where we were lived and meshed in that now we've been removed from that keep in mind that there are no vegan Hunter hunting Sorry no vegan indigenous cultures anywhere because hunting and gathering must be done because there's not enough Plant or animal food alone in the wild they must be combined they must be done together Everybody hunts and gathers in the natural world The only thing that allows veganism is the massive domestication of landscapes in other words To grow enough plants to feed people exclusively on plant food We must remove huge swaths of ecosystem in other words Displace all the animals that were there that should be there and then replace that with the food We want to grow for ourselves. It's actually more selfish to be on that paradigm Then it is if you really want nothing to know animals to suffer than you probably should commit higher curry So that you don't draw from any resources because ultimately you are going to be eating something and if it's plants only Those plants are still coming from a landscape in which animals should be living So the whole thing starts to unravel when you dig deeper and again It's what we started talking about which is we got to go to the core. We got to go deeper Yes, I know it looks like all this cruelty on the surface But actually it's not just cruelty to animals It's cruelty to all life right now domestication creates cruelty to all life And we need to like address the real big issue and not just deal with the surface issue and trying to Well, I've certainly and I was a vegan a long time So I should say that I was a vegan for 10 years. I like understand that mentality Inside and out and up and down and left and right and every which way been there Done that had a bunch of the t-shirts. So Now I can kind of see though that that was me really that was me wanting to see justice in the world But not seeing the big picture of how it all worked because I just simply didn't know enough about the world yet I didn't know enough about nature, but from where I sit now the whole thing seems a little bit silly Because it doesn't really deal with the suffering at all. It actually still creates more of it Well, that's one realization I had when I was a vegetarian I never could quite make it to vegan although I I wanted to like I aspired at one point to be a totally raw vegan and eat everything that's alive and You know, I have my eyes light up Like some some people that seem to do that did at the time But one thing that dawned on me I mean in addition to just being starting to get really fat and tired all the time because I had to just I lived on like legumes and you know dairy and Gluten and just all these really inflammatory foods. I mean I was a disaster physically at that time But it did occur to me one day too that you know I cared about animals and so I didn't want to eat them Because I wouldn't want to go kill a poor little animal. I mean they're they're just cute You know, I just when I see a deer I don't get the impulse like yeah, I'd like to slice it's throat and eat it right now It's just I just want it to run across the field and look beautiful. So that was kind of my My feeling on that but in addition to just being really ill from that that diet I realized that the animal products that I was eating in the form of milk butter cheese yogurt etc Actually came they're like weird fluids like They're their fluids that come from the procreation of those animals and those animals are actually imprisoned and kept pregnant Lactating and then they're just like drained and used kind of as a machine and I think that was kind of the breakdown of that for me I just started to look at it from that point of view like it's almost more fucked up Yeah, but keep think about this think about why because think about this like this is really fascinating because it was the people of India who started to milk cows And they start they they became vegetarians and switched to milk from meat because they thought that was the kinder option So it's so weird because like you're so right we have turned Cow's into machines where we literally pump them of this pussy milk now. It's disgusting what we're doing But that was originally in India at least that was originally done to get people off of meat because they thought meat was so cruel And they were worried about the karma and so they switched to milk thinking this is at least we're not killing the animal That's fascinating. Yeah, they did say hey, let's become vegan. They said let's go to milk I mean listen Daniel if I was producing milk right now and and some soldiers came in and captured me and wanted to keep me in a little You know six by six cell and milk me or I had the option of just being killed and eaten for my muscle meat I would probably opt to be killed and like make me into a steak or a Luke burger I don't want to be trapped and milked for the next five years and then killed you know It's like let's just get over with guys So it's it's a really interesting way to look at if you put yourself in the shoes of you know a cow in India It's like I don't know the one getting milk kind of got the raw deal So what if you're what if you're corn and you've been genetically modified and your grown Covered in pesticides that you've been genetically altered to be able to withstand and then all of the Beneficial soil microbes and micro-risal associations you're meant to have with the soil and all the other species that would grow around you I'll have been completely eradicated by industrial chemicals and then you're just this massive monocrop of an inedible corn like Is that good? It's so crazy. This is there's such a tendency to because because Animals are more like us than than plants. There's just such a tendency to not even Look at what we're doing to plants as well and how we've altered them and I think that that's because we are so narcissistic we believe that human beings are the reason the earth is here and we believe that all consciousness only is really seated in the human brain and The closer you are to us the more value you have and the further you are from us the less value you have And so we constantly hear this argument about you know animals But very little conversation about plants and I find that really Strangins and kind of sad that we have it's like I heard this saying the other day was As we evolve our gods need to evolve as well, you know because it's like that idea of sometimes You know you look at the god of certain religions and you're like whoa I've kind of evolved past where that god is supposed to be at that's crazy. How can that be right like and so similarly It's like are have we still not evolved enough to understand like when are we gonna see life as life and not make just Distinctions of value based on kingdom. Yeah, it's almost like it's like a species ism It's it's like we've we've had this mental construct of of value. It is it's really really strange and I like the perspective of you know that You know it takes energy to keep us going right in this meat suit that we're walking around and and on the planet There's all these other forms of energy and we've taken these forms of energy and added value or importance or Reference to them according to our own Ideas from our mind that has no basis in reality. It's totally based on our subjective point of view So you could like bring an alien from another universe here and they might find you know one stock of wheatgrass That has more value in energy to them Spiritually than a giraffe, you know what I mean? It's like it's totally just made up and and the fact is is that from from my point of view from a spiritual Metaphysical point of view you actually can't kill energy you can't stop it it changes forms from one being one creature to another, but you can't actually eradicate energy. It just exists in the universe, and there's no getting rid of it. There's no killing it. It's totally impossible. And I think if you ask anyone that's, you know, I've never seen it happen, but I've talked to many people that have watched a human being die and, you know, say grandmother, you know, in the hospital and you're holding her hand and I always ask like, what happened? And they go, just her energy was gone, you know, it's a way that it's explained that she was gone. But the she, we think of as that body laying there and they said, no, no, her body's sitting there, but she had left the room. Right? That's because you can't kill grandma, you know, when you took off life support, you didn't kill grandma. Her energy just left that meat suit that she was riding around in and went somewhere else. Where it goes, we don't know. Maybe it goes into, you know, a womb somewhere across the planet and it pops into a new little meat suit and comes back out in the form of reincarnation. You know, these kind of ideas are where all of the spiritual teachings in our history point to, but they all basically agree that everything is made of energy and it does change forms. And so the idea that you can actually eradicate one form of energy permanently by killing it or eating it is kind of silly. And at the, and I would agree with that because, you know, the sort of fundamental wild human religion, we actually know what it is. It's animism and it's the idea that all, all creatures and all non-creatures all matter everything. All of the universe is being animated at the atomic level, if you will, by the same spirit. We're all being energized by the same spirit. And I want to go back to your nows you about an alien arriving here too. One interesting thing is that like for instance, right now there's a holy war on, right? It's the Muslims versus the Christians right now. It's like that's all over the news. Right? It's happening right here on American soil. It's the jihad, you know, and all this stuff is going on. But if aliens came here in hostility, that would go away immediately, right? All the sudden Muslims and Christians would be on the same team because the alien is more different. They saw themselves as different and then when something more different shows up that's hostile, suddenly they become friends and they're going to want to fight that thing together, right? So similarly, there's the racism works this way. Well, that guy's the same color as me, we're more similar and that other person who's a different color is the outsider. That is the same thinking we've applied to all of life and that's this hierarchy I'm talking about. It's like racism. You just call it speciesm. I'd call it kingdomism too because we think that the kingdom of animals has more value than the kingdom of plants in some weird way because they're more or less different. But it is the same thing that informs racism. It's the same thing that's leading to holy wars. It's this idea that we must band together with things that are like us and push away things that aren't like us. And if we're going to have that perspective, you just shared, which I think rather eloquently, that we are all sort of of the same energy, then all that stuff, all those perceived boundaries start to go away and again, everything becomes sacred and not just the world of plants and animals, but maybe the world of minerals too and maybe the world of archetype and maybe the night in the day and the sun and the moon. Everything becomes part of one interconnected, interwoven tapestry of sacredness rather than this idea of lots of things with price tags on them. I love it. We've covered a lot of ground and we're moving toward the end of the episode here. We've created this kind of bleak picture today and I don't want to leave the show. It's like, oh my god, we're screwed. I think the things that we've covered are amazing and it was unplanned, which is great. And I think we went off the beaten path a little bit. I would like to just round this out with some recommendations on, we've covered opening your mind and I think this is really a thought-provoking thing to just like, let's all step back from our experience a little bit here and re-examine who we are, why we're here, what we're doing. I think we've done a great job of kind of maybe opening up some people's minds. I know it has to my own, but what are some practical things that we can do to really get back to nature, to get back to our innate sense of being a human ape to, you know, like me, I live in the city as you know and it's like, I do everything I can to kind of mimic nature in this totally domesticated artificial environment, whereas you live in Maine, you can like walk outside and you know, you're in the woods. But what are some things that we can eat or do? What do you recommend in terms of just, you know, getting in touch with who we really are? Yeah, a great question. And let me just, you know, wrap a bow on everything we've been talking about to and just say that sometimes the thing we need the most is to just come to terms with what's actually happening in our life, you know, you can kind of imagine when somebody, it's like somebody who's been ill for a long time, but they've been so afraid to go get checked out because they are so afraid of what the diagnosis might be. And so they let the thing get even worse and worse, worse because they're so afraid of looking at what it might actually be there. And actually, if they would just look, they could deal with it, but maybe it gets worse because they're just afraid to look. You just described my dental records. I'm like, I'm literally missing two teeth right now. It's like, I can't chew on either side. I'm going to run a smoothie diet until I get some teeth put in my head. So yeah, I get it. It's called denial. Exactly. And denial is not just the river where a lot of this domestication started. So, I never got to make that joke before that. Thank you for that. Yeah, you're welcome. Didn't see that come in did you? Okay, so I would just say that, you know, yeah, maybe this stuff all comes as a little shocking, but it's like, I think we just need to come to terms with it. So we can start to make real changes and not these band-aid fixes like we've been kind of talking about so far. The real changes, I think, to it, this point due just to the nature of the world we're living in at this point, it's got to start with individuals. And so, hence this idea of rewilding ourselves. And this concept is essentially saying, look, let's imagine that you were a, that you were an animal that had been, that had a woken in captivity. And there was no longer any kind of zookeeper or there was no longer any kind of farmer over you, but you were now sovereignly in control of yourself. But you've lived this domesticated life all along. What would you have to do then? Because you're ready to step outside the confines of your cage. Well, you'd have to sort of rewild yourself. And there's a lot of really simple things we can do to get started. And I've spent so much time thinking about how do I simplify it? And one way to simplify it is this, is this. I'd say we can start to expose ourselves to the elements again. The word domestication means of the house. And we go in the house to remove ourselves from the elements. And so it seems kind of obvious if we're going to undo some of that damage. We need to expose ourselves to the elements again. And when I say the elements, I literally mean earth, water, air, and fire. And so we need to think of those four categories as where all of our life support comes from. A great analogy would be an aquarium. In aquariums, an artificial habitat, an artificial sort of ecosystem. But its life supports based on four things. It's based on the food you put in, the water that's in there, the air you bubble through, and the light that comes out of that sort of lamp at the top, that full spectrum lamp. So we could think of the food as earth. We could think of the water as of course water, the air of course as air, and the light as fire. Well, we're like that. And we need all four elements to really, I guess, as life support. So we need to start thinking about the food that we eat and creating a diet for ourselves that at least harkens back, at least sorts of replicate the one that we had in nature. We need to create a modern form of the hunter-gatherer diet for ourselves that's biologically appropriate for us, not for everybody for us as individuals. We need to really think about the water and the quality of the water and the source of the water that we drink. And we are with water currently where we were with food and let's say the 1950s. Like we don't know much about water and we're just starting to realize there's a whole lot more going on there and the kind of water we drink might really matter. Air is this one because it's invisible. Many of us think of it as empty space and don't realize that it's an actual fluid of gases that contains lots of things that can be harmful to our health, especially today and especially in our homes. So we need to think about the air that we're breathing in the quality of it. And then of course fire, that's that nutrient we need blazing down upon us from our great parents star, the sun. So we need to expose ourselves to the light of the sun, not just to tan our skin, but to regulate our sleep and wakefulness hormones. And so we require nutrition, not just from the food we eat, not just earth, but earth, water, air and fire. And when we start to expose ourselves to those four elements and take care of our own life support, it's likely become slowly and over time less dependent on the zookeepers, less dependent on the farmers that have sort of cared for our needs while we were busy on iTunes, right? While we've been sort of busy watching Netflix, we weren't really taking care of ourselves. And we didn't realize that was even what was going on. And then we have this awakening. So we're like this ape that wakes up. And we realize we're domesticated and we realize, wait a second, I need to start taking care of myself. Well, the first place we do that is we step out. the front door and we start to expose ourselves to the elements again. And slowly we develop those as practices. So we develop our, you know, you were talking about Kundalini Yoga before. I wish people would really think of their diet as a practice. I wish they'd think about the water they drink and that they gather as a practice, the air that they breathe and they're, you know, as a practice. Like, so we're always improving how we approach these things so that the food, the water, the air we're breathing and the sunlight we're getting constantly improves. We constantly build that part of our life. And through building that, we let that push out all of that artificiality that we were consuming before. You know, most of us are, it's been a gluttony of artificiality to the point that most of us feel almost nauseous from it. And so there's this opportunity now for us to start to step away from that table and step back to sort of nature's table and start to feed ourselves on things that actually nourish us rather than things that sort of appear on the outside to be what we need but are actually empty. So I would say expose yourself to the elements. That is a beautiful bow, my friend. Thank you for that summary and I wholeheartedly agree. And I'm becoming more and more free as a result of that very practice. In closing Daniel, I'd like to ask you a question. You've been teaching us some stuff here today. I always learn a lot from all of our conversations and text messages and all the ways in which we hang out and share our views and information. But who are three teachers or three books or philosophies that you could recommend to our audience that they might go check out? Like, who's your go to if you are our go to? Wow, I was really influenced by this guy Daniel Quinn and was so blessed to have him on my show recently now that he's in his 80s. But he wrote a book called Ishmael that had a tremendous influence on me philosophically helping me to understand that everything I'd been taught about wildness was was was inverted. I've been taught that the effects of domestication were what wildness was and that the effects of wildness for what domestication was literally I'd been tricked and he helped me to understand in the most beautiful, simple, fictitious metaphor, a really fun story book called Ishmael that just completely transformed how I saw the world and I'm like eternally grateful for that. The dentist, Weston Price and his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration were crucial to me and in fact this is why I stopped being a vegan in the first place was because I read his book and I realized that people around the world who lived in nature who were the healthiest who had the best teeth and dental arches best formed skeletons the least disease were people that were eating closest to their wild form diet and I had really not understood that before. So that for me was really important and it gave me the scientific backup for what I had gotten from Daniel Quinn's book. Today I would say one of my greatest mentors and it's strange to say that because he's also one of my best friends and when we are together or when I have him on the rewild yourself podcast it's not a it's not a thing where he comes on as my teacher and yet he really is probably one of my greatest teachers in this point in my life is Arthur Haynes another maner up here a Renaissance man one of the great foragers in the United States one of the really incredible scientist and botanist and taxonomist but also a primitive skills sort of master as well sort of jack of all trades incredible guy and he's really helped me to go even further into the science he brings the science to it and so all of these things that I've been talking about today and as outlandish is some of the claims I've made probably sound if you're not familiar with this information just please know that I'm I I'm very careful to only talk about things that I know we can dig the studies up for and Arthur's sort of the guy that I've fed information through so those three people have probably had the the I mean there's been so many teachers but those three have probably when I was headed in one direction they sort of bumper-carted me into another direction that I never saw myself going that at radically transformed the way I saw the world and like I'm internally grateful to all three of them and there's a common theme I think if someone were to go look through the work of those three people they would find themselves with a radically transformed but very healthy worldview thank you for those recommendations and we'll of course you know lead to those in the show notes and I would highly recommend I just listen to your episode yesterday I forgot to give you feedback on that on Arthur's show that he did with you on sleep and I actually fell asleep to it last night and I just a double whammy there it was so good I fell asleep no I fall asleep to podcast every night voices put me to sleep and I just love to I kind of that's one way I learn this subconsciously I listen to stuff when I sleep and just you know it makes me a genius no but I would recommend anyone like absolutely check out that episode and the other episodes in which you've featured Arthur I really love listening to him too he has a very just he just seems like a really sweet soul he's one of these guys that's intellectual but also has a lot of heart so I'd recommend everyone to check check out your show and specifically those episodes now on that note I would like to find out where people can find you lead us to your various websites your company your podcast like we want more where do we find it awesome well Daniel Vitalis calm is like my main hub website and of course you can get access to the podcast there or also on iTunes of course you can find me with my name Daniel Vitalis all over social media so can dig around there but I also have a company called Sir Thrivell S U R T H R I V A L so like survive and thrive and that's a product line I've developed with with all of these ideas in mind products that really help to restore some of the lost wildness in people's bodies and then I also have a website called find a spring calm and that's a free resource to help you find wild water where you live in the form of springs that you can you know you can most of them you can literally drive your car right up to get out and fill your bottles and get wild water from nature and that's a whole nother topic but something I'm really passionate about but you can access all that stuff through Daniel Vitalis calm amazing thank you so much and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the work you've done and you've just inspired me and taught me so much over the years and also just been really supportive of my mission and making the decision that it did recently to go ahead with my dream of entering into this field and and these areas of research and just sharing this message and this lifestyle with the world so thank you as a guest and thank you as a friend and we will bid you farewell and that brings us to the end of another episode of the lifestyleist I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for joining me on another episode and as a token of my appreciation here is the information you need to download your weekly episode upgrade as promised earlier in the show text the word lifestyleist to to the number 44222 that's lifestyleist the number 2 24222 for instant access to this free download you can also go to Lukestory.com/lifestyleist2 for the same deal now the episode upgrade as all of the notes and links and everything that Daniel and I talked about during the interview as well as my weekly featured favorites which in this case would be my favorite products from Sir Thrivell so there's some really good information in there and it's a great recap and summary of the show so that you don't have to take notes it's going to be shot right to your email so thanks again for joining us and don't forget to please subscribe to this show so that you don't miss any episodes they're going to be automatically downloaded to your app every week once you've done all that don't forget to always drop into iTunes and leave us a rating in a review it really helps the show grow our audience and get up in the ratings which is really important if you're a podcaster so thanks again for joining me this week and until we meet again my friend you be well