165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder

North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lays, etc., people buy $30 billion worth of that a year.

So when we say massive problem, food in general is big.

The organic and the non-GMOs, that industry is one of the most toxic sources that supplies our food system.

If we understand that fixing food is the way to fixing our health, then I think we need to be focusing more on this area.

Is there an antidote to our current incredibly unhealthy snacking habits without just killing your snacking habit, but replacing it?

Tortilla chips, they're junk food, right?

Could have good tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made well.

We make moss chips, which are tallow-fried tortilla chips.

So, the fact that you have something here that's healthy enough for me, the health freak, and also delicious enough for the people that don't care about health at all.

But where is the brand going?

I mean, is this an expansive snack category that you actually wanted to expand into?

People buy $2 billion in Doritos a year, so like, hmm, obviously, people want.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Breca, where we go down the road of everything: anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between.

And today's guest made his way into my house through my kitchen.

And,

you know, with one of the best products that I have in my kitchen, one of the best products on the market, and this is never a podcast about products and services, as you guys know, But in this particular case, I wanted to go deep down the rabbit hole of food safety on the backs of the Baja movement and what we can do and add to our kitchen to maybe replace some of the toxic compounds that our families and our kids are eating.

Great ways to add snacks to your daily routines.

And you know, I have an episode called What's in Gary's Kitchen, and I do lateral shifts where we take all kinds of different foods that you love to eat and swap them for things that are more nutrient-dense, that feed your cellular biology.

And so if you're into that, today's podcast is going to be a much, must-watch.

So, welcome to the podcast, Stephen Rofrano.

Thank you.

Great to be here.

So, what's your role with MASA?

And then I want to take a step back, and I really want my audience to kind of get to know you and know a little bit about your story and what actually brought you, brought you here.

I'm the CEO and co-founder of Ancient Crunch.

We make MAS chips, which are tala-fried tortilla chips, and also vanny crisps, which are tala-fried potato chips.

And I started this with a friend about

almost three years ago at this point, two and a half years ago.

One of my friends was eating a bunch of Tostitos one morning.

I think this is college?

This is after college.

This is like a New Year's trip.

Actually, Fort Lauderdale.

Okay.

Not too far from here.

Yeah.

It was just in Fort Lauderdale.

Basically New Year's two years ago plus a month, my friend eating Tostitos.

And this is after the whole seed oil summer.

I like to call it 2021 when seed oils really became mainstream.

Yes.

And when the news about them became

out there for a long time, but like people started exposing them.

Yeah, the term seed oils, like people started talking about it then.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I was just kind of going on a rant to my friend about why are you putting this in your body?

Seed oils are poisonous.

This is toxic.

What are you doing?

And he's like, I'm just trying to eat.

Like, I'm hungover.

I'm just trying to eat my breakfast.

Which is worse because he's like, he's already recovering from alcohol.

Now he's going to back in the seed oil.

Yeah, and it's like the liver thing, too, right?

Because alcohol and seed oils are processed with the same liver enzymes.

And so it's like, this is, yeah, already a horrible situation.

Anyway, so I'm not helping it by lecturing him about why he's making poor dietary choices.

But ultimately, we get to talking about how there could be, you know, he's like,

tortilla chips, well, they're junk food, right?

I'm like, no, no, you could have good tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made well.

And I started describing ingredients that could be made to put into tortilla chips that would actually be healthy for you.

And he starts listening.

He's like, okay, intrigued.

All right, well, where can I go buy?

Where can I go buy these?

And I said, well, that's the thing.

You can't.

They don't exist.

This is in theory in my mind.

This is in my mind.

Literally in in my mind right yes i just come up with a recipe on the spot and then so he basically challenges me like hey uh why don't you go make them you know right if i can't buy them go ahead and so i'm like all right challenge accepted and then a few months later i i got a turkey fryer a box of tallow and some corn tortillas and fried it the first prototype in your in your house uh in my parents backyard actually right yeah

yeah so you got so first of all where did you just go get beef tallow you went to the whole foods and you bought i uh i think i got it online i forget which brand it was but I think it was Amazon.

I just found some like grass-fed beef tallow, bought it online.

And uh,

the turkey fryer, I think, was Costco.

Okay.

You know, Thanksgiving turkey fryers, I think RFK's video.

Yeah, a lot of people blow themselves up doing that.

Yeah, exactly.

Uh, turkeys are much harder to fry than tortilla chips.

I'll say that.

You know, it's crazy not to get off topic, but I actually, I heard that you can't put the turkey into the fryer when it's frozen or it can literally explode.

Yeah, exactly.

It has to be room temperature.

Yeah.

And like every year around Thanksgiving,

thousands of people that are actually frying these things for the first time take a own frozen turkey and drop it in there and the whole thing blows up.

Yeah.

And they do it fast.

And I mean, if you put ice cubes into a deep fryer, like that's not fun.

Yeah.

Right.

Because like the act of frying is basically rapidly boiling the water.

And so if you have like the ice, I don't know, it's denser or something because it doesn't spread out.

Whatever.

Yeah.

It's not a good time.

So don't do that.

Don't do that.

So you're in your parents' backyard and you take like

flour.

I got tortillas, actually.

I found a guy who made organic corn tortillas and like ordered a case from him.

He's based in Massachusetts or something.

And they're flexible at that point.

Yeah, they're flexible.

It's like you go to a Mexican restaurant, the tortillas that come in that little bowl with the weird little lid

with the paper.

Yeah.

That kind of thing.

Okay.

I chopped them up on a cutting board into triangles and I tossed them in the fryer outside, of course, not indoors.

And the first thing I noticed about them was that they didn't taste beefy or anything, which kind of surprised me at that point.

I was expecting, I was expecting, hey, if we use beef towel, it might taste meaty or greasy or kind of weird.

But I was very happily surprised that they were neither greasy nor beefy.

And so the ultimate test came, this is actually at Easter.

So my extended family was over.

The ultimate test came when I brought them inside and started feeding them to my extended family, a lot of whom are not interested in health.

And so these are the type of people who, as a lot of people are out there, who might say something like, I'd rather enjoy my life than be healthy.

I'm sure you've heard this a billion times.

Yeah, a billion times.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, healthy is nice, but they want to eat what tastes good and other sort of things.

So you expect the same people that have made fun of me for eating beef liver.

And, you know, I kind of envisioned you out there in your backyard, you know, with the fryer and like being like, hey, anybody want to invest?

This is my startup company.

Right.

Not yet.

That would come later.

Your seed round starting like right out there in the backyard with your Uncle Joe, you know?

I have my PowerPoint, my business plan.

Yeah, business plan.

No, guys, really, this is going to be a big thing.

Who wants to

get in now before we launch?

I didn't even know any of that yet because again i would i had just found out five minutes prior that they didn't taste beefy so it was like news to me um so yeah i fed this to my my family members who ate them and were like wait this is actually pretty good because i have a lot of you know these are people who i if i fed them liver they would freak out yeah you know or like they would not want any part of what would normally be considered health foods and so the fact that they like them that set a light bulb off in my head because most health foods as at least people think of them taste bad it's kale smoothie it's chia seed pudding.

It's like, eh, gross.

And on the contrary, most things that taste good are considered unhealthy.

You know, McDonald's, fast food, chips, you know, candy, whatever.

So the fact that you have something here that's healthy enough for me, the health freak at this time, and also delicious enough for the people that don't care about health at all, that's a pretty novel thing.

And

that was the idea that I was like, wait, this could actually go somewhere.

This is actually impactful.

Because I think one of the reasons, and we were talking about this before the show, one of the reasons why a lot of people don't adopt health is because they perceive it as either unpleasurable or inconvenient.

And so people like us, you know, will go be healthy either way.

But if you're, if you want to eat things that taste good and you're prioritizing that enjoyment, which I'm not saying there's anything wrong with, that's 95% of people.

If the health foods are unenjoyable, you're not going to eat them.

Right.

Yeah.

So true.

And I mean, you and I see eye to eye on seed oils.

Affect, you know, before we got on the podcast, you were talking about how you were watching

my Rogan podcast when I was actually a guest on Joe Rogan.

And I was talking about seed oils and I was going back a little while.

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

And I remember being suspect of the seed oil history being so sinister.

I was like, there's no way that these are machine lubricants.

And, you know, here we go with the next conspiracy theory, right?

It's a machine lubricant.

And, you know, and then after the war, we had all of this excessive machine lubricant.

We didn't know what to do with it.

And so we started actually putting it into food supply.

And

knowing what I know now, nothing surprises me.

We do it with fluorosalicic acid as fluoride.

We use commercial bleach chlorine to

chlorinate the water.

And then we don't filter it back out, which I'm okay to sanitize with chlorine, but then filter the chlorine out.

Yeah, cut it out.

But

so for the few folks of mine that are listening to this that aren't really sure what a seed oil is,

why are they so damaging, and maybe why

such a high percentage of our snack foods are deep-fried and everything you find in the grocery store is deep-fried in seed oils, or even not fried in seed oils.

They're just a part of the base ingredients.

One, because they're dirt cheap.

Give me your take on seed oils, why they need to be removed from our diet, especially from our kids' diets.

Yeah, I think a good entry point into this discussion is the history of seed oils.

So the first commercially available food seed oil for consumption was Crisco.

And Crisco is hydrogenated cotton seed oil.

And it was, I think, first sold in 1924 or 1912 or something in the early 1900s.

And the issue was that Procter ⁇ Gamble had a lot of cottonseed oil left over from something.

I forget what industry it was that they were in.

What were they using the cotton seed oil for?

Well, so it was a waste product.

So you had the cotton gins and you would pull the seeds out, right?

Because the cotton gin separates the cotton fibers because that's what you use to make clothing and you separate the seeds out of it.

And so you had all these seeds left over.

And it was a waste product they didn't know what to do with.

And if you are in industry, you will have mountains of waste of whatever kind.

If you can sell that, that's a new revenue line and you want to do that.

So I think for a long time they had been trying to sell it for something.

But it had never worked because at that time Americans did not eat oil.

Like literally olive oil wasn't a thing.

The Italians hadn't brought it over.

They were not, you know, Mediterranean culture hadn't shown up yet.

Coconut oil was certainly not a thing, even though it's solid room temperature.

Avocados, no one had even heard of an avocado in the U.S.

in the early 1900s.

So there were, and there were no vegetable oils.

There was the only fats that Americans, and I think I heard Max Lugever talk about this on your podcast too.

I think 90% of fat consumption was animal-based fats.

That's right.

Butter, lard, and tallow.

So Americans didn't eat oil at all.

And so,

whatchamacallit?

Procter ⁇ Gamble was unable to sell a liquid oil product to American consumers.

So it kind of sat on the shelf for a few decades until some guy invented a process to turn the liquid oil into a solid fat.

That's called hydrogenation.

Anyone who lived through the 90s knows about hydrogenated fats or margarines.

Yeah, all that stuff.

And so that guy invented this process that allowed them to turn cottonseed oil into a solid.

And now all of a sudden, people, because it was consistent with American culture, hey, we can eat this.

It looks like lard.

It looks like tallow.

It's a solid thing.

I can scoop it out.

That's familiar to me.

And so they began selling that.

And it was obviously so cheap, right?

Because you're taking this waste product.

It's basically free.

Or you'd even pay to get rid of it in some cases.

So you have this thing that's basically cheap, that's basically free.

And now you're selling it to compete with something that actually costs money, whether it's lard or tallow or something.

So you can undercut it on everyone else on price.

And a lot of their marketing at the time was

touting this whole like futurist modernist idea of like develop technology.

Like it's sort of that dirty animal fat with the smelly farmers who have pig poop on their boots.

You know, eat this thing made by science in a lab with guys in white coats.

And that sort of idea, which is kind of the opposite today, most people think if it's made in the lab, I don't want it.

Back then, it really resonated with the American culture, who was like this forward-looking, like scientific, like we want this kind of technology in our lives.

So that's kind of how it got started.

And then that was a very, very big success for them, obviously, because the inputs are so cheap, and ultimately led to them starting to sell liquid seed oils starting in the 50s and beyond.

So anyway, all of that's to say that this entire category of products was invented.

There was a point in time in history when people did not eat this at all.

That's not true about corn.

That's not true about wheat.

Well, at least in recent memory, people have been eating all these things, you know, butter, they've been eating, they've been drinking water, for example, eating sugar for at least hundreds of years, if not thousands.

Seed oils were not eaten in any form or fashion like these types of oils, the industrial processed ones, prior to, say, the early 1900s.

Wow.

So I think understanding that history makes it a lot easier to understand why we shouldn't really be eating them.

Because anyone who understands this idea of like, you know, how we're evolved, right?

We talk about we're evolved to get sunlight.

You talk about how we're not supposed to be wearing sunglasses outside because we want to get the sunlight in our eyes and that helps us make the melanin that we need to protect our skin.

All these things like live how we're evolved.

Same thing with food.

No one is evolved to eat seed oils.

It's not possible that anyone's evolved to eat seed oils.

Right.

Yeah.

So it's kind of like this shocking.

And the last piece I'll say about this that I've been talking for a minute is that it went from zero, literally zero, to 25 to 30% of the average American's calories.

Calories.

Wow.

A quarter of their calories.

Wow.

Or more.

And by the way, those types of fats should be 2% or less of your total dietary intake.

Just as a matter of reference.

So

if it's...

if it's 10, 11, 12 times that, you know, there's a whole other cascade of issues.

And the challenge with a lot of these is that you don't get sick right away.

Right.

You know, if you ate some of these highly processed foods and, you know, it instantly made you nauseous, you know, that would be its own self-correcting error.

The problem is that it makes you chronically ill.

Right.

And chronically ill is just a moderate rate of suffering over a prolonged period of time.

Right.

Right.

It's not extreme suffering because that would drive you to the ER, the urgent care.

And,

you know, it's just a sort of a low grade.

And even worse, extreme suffering would drive you to go sue the person who caused your suffering.

Right.

And so then

if seed oils were that acutely toxic, then Procter ⁇ Gamble will get sued and then they would stop making that.

Yeah, I talk about this all the time, the difference between cumulative dose toxicity and single dose toxicity.

Single dose toxicity theorists say, all right, well, the doses determines the poison.

Okay.

So,

but I always use the analogy, well, nobody got, you know, mercury poisoning from a single piece of tuna fish.

right?

But if you had some mercury in

tuna fish and you ate it every single night over a long period of time, you could end up with mercury toxicity.

It wasn't the single dose, it was the cumulative dosage.

And I think

the awareness now of the amount of cumulative toxins that are in the toxic burden, fluoride, chlorine, microplastics, pharmaceuticals, glyphosates, herbicides, sexicides, pesticides, preservatives, that all of these,

you know,

quote-unquote, generally regarded as safe

toxins that have safe levels in a single dose

accumulate and they like exhaust, right?

They back up and they blow the engine.

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That's drinkh2tab.com and upgrade your hydration today now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast the biggest problem is that all of these things or many of these things might be processed by the same you know like biological pathways overloading them so when you do the test on oh i'm gonna feed the mice this one toxin and it takes this much to kill them or this much to cause them harm well what about like you said all the toxins going through the same pathways it decreases the amount you can be exposed to any one of them because if you add all of them up together the total quantity of toxins, whatever they are, will overwhelm the liver or the kidneys or whatever the detox pathways we're talking about.

I mean, we mentioned this before.

The same enzymes that process ethanol in the liver,

it's called aldehyde dehydrogenase, that processes polyunsaturated fats,

which come from seed oils.

So it's quite likely that your total dose of both alcohol and seed oils should be lower if you have both than it would be one or the other.

Right.

Right.

And so I think it's, there's a, this is a pet theory I have.

I've, you know, not confirmed this, but I'd be interested to hear your take.

Um, there's a common thing on the internet about how the founding fathers, after they signed the Declaration of Independence, like rented out some bar in Philadelphia and just like drank obscene quantities of alcohol, even for like the most

alcoholic of modern, you know, say frat bros or whoever, just like handles of whiskey per person, like this kind of thing.

And I can't help but wonder, and I know people used to drink a lot more in the past, actually.

Like if you go to the cafes and bars in Europe, you have these big giant shelves, shelves, all the liquors and stuff.

No one's drinking that anymore.

Yeah.

Um, and people talk about how Gen Z doesn't drink that much, yada, yada, yada.

I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that we literally can't process alcohol in the way that our ancestors did because our livers are so tied up with, I'm sure, you know, Cedols, but I'm sure other things too, but yeah, predominantly Ceduls.

And that's another thing.

You know, we talk about the toxic burden in a lot of these snacks.

It's not just the Ceduls.

I mean, what originally drew me

to Ancient Grain, you know, a friend of mine told me about you named Ben Greenfield, and who I'm a huge, huge fan of.

And

he brought my attention to you guys, and I started looking at your ingredients, you know, non-GMO corn, uh, organic grass-fed beef tallow, uh, sea salt, you know, spices I could recognize.

I think, I think, in your traditional ones, that's that's all you got in there is the grass-fed beef tallow and sea salt.

Grass-fed tallow, organic corn, and then the salt or organic or better spices.

Yeah, yeah, and that's that, the the organic and the non-GMOs is another one because that industry as a whole, in my opinion, is one of the most toxic food sources,

you know, sources that supplies our food system.

And what happens is as a base ingredient, it makes its way everywhere.

It's like, you know, seed oils are kind of like the root and they go under this trunk and they just branch out into all these different, you know, if you pick up a salad dressing on the...

you know, on the grocery store shelf, you know, very likely it's basically

corn and soy are basically in everything, even things that aren't food, right?

There's corn and your gasoline.

I don't know how many people know that.

A lot of plastic, especially the biodegradable plastics made of corn.

Soy protein is pretty much everywhere.

Cliff bars, even people like normal people think that's like a healthy protein thing.

Cliff bars, it's like soy protein.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's everywhere.

Yeah,

it's literally everywhere.

So,

you know, it's, it's, it sounds like just a really interesting journey.

And, and, so you get your family to love these chips.

Um, and

um you really, you know, the light bulb goes off in your head.

Ding, you know, I'm onto something.

And how did this transition into an actual operating business?

Because I'm always fascinated by people that, and I'm making an assumption about you, so tell me if I'm wrong, but

who don't have any specific expertise in a certain market.

I assume you didn't have to.

Yeah, absolutely.

I have zero professional experience in food or anything.

And,

you know, but I also find, and I say this all the time on my podcast, you know, some of the most passionate, driven, purposeful entrepreneurs I've ever had on this podcast, including yourself,

they solve some kind of problem in their life.

And they're actually solving a big problem for other people.

I mean, you're solving a massive problem.

And that is, is there an antidote to

our current incredibly unhealthy snacking habits without just killing your snacking habit, but replacing it?

You know, I call this lateral shift.

And

the answer is clearly yes.

I mean, so it's a massive problem.

And so talk a little bit about this transition from backyard turkey fryer to when it became a real thing.

Yeah.

Just a point about the massive problem, just for some context, Frito-Lay North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos,

Lays, et cetera, people buy in North America, people buy $30 billion worth of that a year.

Wow.

Yeah.

So when we say massive problem, this particular, like food in general is big.

Snack foods is huge.

Food is even bigger, but like just this one tiny little industry, tortilla and potato chips, basically.

Wow.

30.

And that's just Frito Lay.

That's what I'm talking about.

I found fascinating that you, I heard you on it on another podcast talking about this.

And one of the things you said, it was a, it was just a podcast.

It wasn't video.

And one of the things you were talking about, how's how the manufacturer actually manufactures possibly for multiple brands, maybe 10, maybe dozens of brands.

And so you're essentially getting the same source, different labels, but you're essentially getting the same ingredients.

Right, exactly.

Different packaging around it.

So, and that's one of the things we had to navigate.

So, to your question before about how we turned, you know, turkey fryer chips.

So, the first thing we realized was that it tastes good and it's healthy.

So it satisfies these two competing, often competing interests in a way that's helpful to everyone.

The second thing we did was like, okay, how are we going to go make it?

Right.

I can't be turkey frying on my backyard and sell that on the internet.

Right.

So we hired a food startup consultant.

These are characters that basically come in and say, you don't know anything about, you know, food, the food industry, but you have grandma's recipe or your recipe.

How do we turn it into a business?

The first thing he told us after thinking about it for two weeks, he comes back and says, yeah, this isn't going to happen.

You can't make this.

I'm like, well, what do you mean?

Why not?

And he said, there are no factories that exist that will make your product in grass-fed beef tallow for you.

And I'm like, okay, interesting.

So what are we going to have to do?

And he said, well, you could use coconut oil or avocado oil if you want to avoid seed oils.

But that's pretty much it.

If you want to get a factory to make it for you, you have to do one of those two things.

And I said no to that pretty quickly because

I don't think coconut, well, first of all, I don't like the fact that you have to import coconut oil from across the Pacific Ocean.

It's just like a wasteful thing.

It's like costly, burns a lot of energy.

You have to deforest rainforest.

It's just, it doesn't seem right to me to like sell a product in the U.S.

that's heavily dependent upon some ingredient from very far away.

Possible, but not ideal to me.

Avocado oil also is like fraught with

issues, that whole industry.

85 or 86% of avocado oil in the market was tested to either be fake or rancid by some people in UC, I think,

EWG.

UCS.

The environmental working group?

No, this is the University of California.

Okay, so the EWG published, not published, but broadcast.

Yeah.

Anyway, avocado oil is the whole issue.

And then Druck Cartel's own avocado farms in Mexico.

So whatever.

I maintain that tallow is the best frying fat, not only because it's high in saturated fat, it's not seed oils, it's also nutrient-dense, unlike plant fats.

So it does have vitamins.

It has fat-soluble vitamins in tallow.

And the last thing is, it doesn't make stuff greasy.

I've fried stuff in coconut before.

It comes out greasy, shiny.

You know, it gets on your fingers.

Like, I don't know.

I don't like that.

So, tallow is the ideal frying fat.

We couldn't get someone to make it for us.

Then we were like, okay, crap.

So, we're going to have to go make it ourselves.

That was the next fundamental realization.

And so, we thought about like how we're going to do this.

We're going to rent a commercial kitchen because you have to have, you know, a food-safe place to make your products.

We ended up finding one not too far from,

as I said, my parents' house, which is where the prototype was made.

So, this is where I grew up.

So, I know the area well.

We found a kitchen.

We had to go buy a fryer.

We had to get people.

We had to buy a machine to get the pouches.

We had to do all that stuff.

And we were like, as we were planning this out, we quickly realized this is going to cost a lot of money.

Yeah.

This is going to cost a lot of money.

I assume you weren't just independently wealthy on your own.

No.

Okay.

No.

Still not.

Okay.

But such is the life of another.

Yes.

So we realized it was going to cost a lot of money.

And so we were trying to figure out how this is going to work.

I looked at the price on the shelf of Doritos and I'm like, this doesn't even make sense.

Not even about the ingredient quality.

Because of course, towel is way more expensive than Cedroll's.

Organic corn is way more expensive.

All the salt is way more expensive.

Even ignoring all of the cost of the ingredients.

The mask still wasn't adding up.

We could use Frito-A quality ingredients and still it was going to be too expensive.

So we figured that

we learned more about this.

We realized that the reason why Frito-A is cheap is not merely because they use bottom-barrel ingredients.

Frito-Lay, as I mentioned before, this is like 30, people buy $30 billion worth of this a year in the US and Canada.

Frito-A has 30 factories in the country.

30?

That's about

one factory for every two states.

They have a giant factory with like robotic equipment and giant fryers and assembly lines and all that stuff.

30 factories.

They have 200, 250 distribution centers

around the country.

So that's like five on average per state for Rital A's facilities.

They have, I don't know, tens of thousands of employees, all this stuff.

They also have negotiated special deals with grocery stores that allow their products to appear on shelves with a lower markup than other people's products.

So like, for example, if I'm on the shelf at Publix,

or a similar, I'm not naming Publix specifically, but that kind of store.

If I'm on a shelf, Publix might take 35 to 45% of the sticker price for their margin.

For Frito-A, they might take 25% because Frito-Lay has this massive volume.

They negotiate this better deal.

Yada, yada, yada.

So so many structural reasons

why.

Oh, and the last thing, reasonable.

And Frito-A's bottom barrel ingredients are not only cheap inherently, they're even cheaper because the government subsidized them.

Right.

Yeah.

AKA, your tax dollars.

Yeah.

AKA, the listeners, tax dollars subsidized.

So there's a lot of reasons why it's cheap.

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

Yeah.

So, we realized that the products are going to have to be expensive, which

I think all things considered, right?

For me personally, if I'm not eating monster chips, I'm not just not going to eat them.

Right.

You know, they're more filling.

I would probably, people.

They are actually more filling.

yeah so are the vandy chips by the way oh yeah like you really can't overeat them which which you know one of the things i talk about a lot on the podcast is nutrient density and you know i mean

chips and snacks really shouldn't be the main source of our meal you know it shouldn't that shouldn't be

yeah it's an accessory and nutrient density is what our GLP1 responds to, you know, and we have all these Ozempe, Guagovi, and, you know, Manjaro,

essentially trying to mimic what we already make in our gut.

And we make more GLP-1 in

response to nutrient density.

If you actually look at side-by-side trials with, and Mark Hyman talks about this all the time, side-by-side trials of highly processed diets versus deeply nutritious or whole food diets that have nutrient-dense foods, you'll find that even when they gave the exact same amount of calories, highly processed calories versus nutrient-dense calories,

the highly processed processed group got hungrier more frequently and hungrier faster.

And so the important point about that is that when you eat

satiating nutrient-dense foods, you have less of a tendency to overeat.

It's really hard to overeat ribeye.

It's hard to overeat avocados.

You're not going to sit down and eat five avocados because they're just too nutrient-dense.

I feel the same way about these because you know they're they're a lot more nutrient-dense and caloric and fat-dense than than their their counterparts.

So you're not going to sit down and eat bags and bags of these.

Right.

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Now, let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

There's an interesting layer on this, uh, in addition to the vitamin content, because you know, vitamin A, we talked about the nutrient density, but the saturated fat versus seed oil thing is interesting.

There's a guy, uh, Dr.

Michael Eads, I don't know if you're familiar with him.

He talks about there's a very, very cool study where they took a bunch of kids and they said, Hey, like it was a lunchtime, whatever, I think it was a school lunch-related study.

They said, Hey, we're going to feed you kids.

We're going to split you into groups and feed you as many calories of a particular meal that you want until you stop eating.

And, you know, eat as much as you want.

We're going to measure how much you ate.

And when you're done, we're going to, we're going to figure out the calories you consumed.

There were a few different groups.

They were all variations of a carb, of a carbohydrate plus a fat,

seed oil versus saturated fat.

And I think most of the carbs are potato.

So basically we had a baked potato with butter versus like seed oil fried, french fries, this kind of combination.

And the seed oil plus carb group ate on average 250 to 300 more calories in their meal.

Wow.

Over in a meal.

In a meal.

In a single meal.

And their kids and their children in one meal.

Wow.

Eating several hundred more calories until they were full.

And like you said before, who knows?

I'm sure they're getting more hungry faster than the kids that ate the saturated fat.

And so there's an added layer.

And Michael Eads talks about the whole metabolic reason for this.

There's like FADH and NADH ratios involved.

It's all very complex.

I think you'd really like it.

I'll send this to you afterward.

Yeah, send it to me.

I would really love it.

Yeah.

It's a whole, it's a very interesting framework of like our cells telling us when to stop eating based on caloric density from association, nutrient density, caloric density, totally agree.

That's it.

You will eat more calories when you're eating seed oils.

And obviously people count calories.

I'm not a big calorie counting fan myself,

but I think it's somewhat helpful

for some people.

But yeah, people will eat more calories when they're eating seed oils as they're fat instead of tallow.

Yeah.

So there's, um, uh, yeah.

And then the other thing about cost, which I think is very interesting, is something about expectations, right?

So in the 1950s, 30% of our household budget went to food.

Yeah, that's.

Yeah.

Like a third of people's income, food.

That's a sizable amount of money.

A sizable amount of money.

Yeah.

Right.

Nowadays, it's 11%.

Wow.

So it's a third.

A third of what it was in the 50s.

And 100 years before that, it was like your entire life was a farmer because 97% of people on earth were farmers.

yeah so like the so you you worked to eat yeah you worked to eat right so it was like a hundred percent of your income basically or your time or whatever yeah equivalent so over the past like 200 years we've progressively gone from our entire lives were dedicated to food to now 10 of our income is due to food and we complain about it um obviously financial circumstances are what they are however people's diets like the quality of the food that your dollar purchases has suffered because of this.

And so, if we're thinking, if you're of the mindset where like, okay, food actually affects health, if you understand, oh, I'm going to be, I'm going to save money on food now and I'm going to be sick later and that's going to cost even more money.

In addition to the suffering, like, what about suffering?

Like, money is one thing, but like being physically healthy and vibrant is worth more than money, in my opinion.

So, if you add up all these factors, we actually are spending, I think, way too little money on food collectively.

Yeah.

And I'm not just saying that because I sell expensive snacks.

Don't even buy my snacks.

Go to the farmer's market and buy grass-fed beef instead of going to Costco and getting whatever the heck they're importing from God knows where.

Right.

Like

if you increase your, if you're an average American and you spend 11% of your budget on food,

if you were to increase your food budget by 50%,

that would only have a hit to your overall budget of 5%.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

Because 11% turns into 15.

Yeah.

But that's the 50% growth.

It's like a relative risk.

Yeah.

So it's like, if we understand that food is the, is the, fixing food is the way to fixing our health, then I think that's certainly like we need to be focusing more on this area.

Yeah.

You know what?

I love that we were starting to talk about it, you know, before the podcast, we were eating lunch.

And you talked about constantly

pushing the limit, you know, the capacity of ancient grain.

And I'd love for you to talk about that.

How

you will, you know, you are eventually looking to get the price point down and dramatically increase production.

i think you told me you're having um

you know

20 people involved in making 2 000 bags and eventually you'll have eight people involved in making 10 000 bags yeah it's insane and that would you know that'll eventually um yeah going back down going back to that free-to-lay discussion so one of their factories is like a massive automated machine in the contrast because uh we didn't have a factory we couldn't you know going back to that story we couldn't find a factory we had to do it ourselves um these factories that make everyone's, these are factories that make everyone's food for them.

And so they have, I don't know, they're 400,000 square feet.

They have huge amounts of equipment.

400,000 square feet.

Yeah, we know of one.

Some people, the guys that are making our potato chip equipment for an upcoming factory that we're building, they have an installation in Pennsylvania, 400,000 square feet.

Wow.

It's like casual.

Yeah, they're casual.

Yeah.

Massive, massive operations.

And so there's like, I don't know, a dozen, a hundred, maybe, maybe,

whatever, a thousand, a very small amount of actual food factories in the country that make the vast majority of packaged foods.

Your protein bars, all of them made the same factory or same handful of factories.

Yep, yep.

Candies, same handful of factories.

Your chips, snacks, cookies, crackers, all of its same handful of factories.

And so when you go to the grocery store and you look at this apparent diversity of options.

And you think, oh, wow, we really got all the bases covered.

I have 20 different cookies that I can choose from.

They're probably coming from like three different factories.

And so that's just like

the reason for this is that food production lends itself to scale.

And so for costs to come down, it's like you really want to be making large quantities at once.

And so this was our problem from day one, and it's still our problem today.

Vanny is a good example.

So the potato chips sitting over there.

We make those,

we make that eight hours a day on our second shift.

And we have about 24 people in that crew.

Wow.

And we make 2,000 bags in that shift.

So it's like, what is that?

why can't I do math?

That's like 100 bags per person.

And you're going to transition this to much, much bigger scale.

I mean, talk a little bit about how you're going to do that.

Yeah, exactly.

So you think about it, and the reason for this is we have a row of deep fryers and we have baskets and we have like

a few like glorified salad spinners and like pots where we spray filtered water to rinse the potatoes.

We got we have this little potato slicer device, but we have 24 people basically manually frying, like dipping a tray in.

And if we're, you know, not watching a video, it's like making the frying motion.

And then you're pulling them out, your quality control, you're putting salt in them by hand with a salt shaker, sticking them in bags by hand, sealing them with a machine by hand.

And so that is a very labor-intensive process, and that greatly contributes to the expense of the products.

Right.

So in contrast,

we're looking at some equipment right now.

I just got back from visiting the equipment vendor.

It's a whole production line for potato chips.

This set of machinery does the same process with our same ingredients.

And it will, you know, we have to modify some things for tallow compatibility and whatever, but same ingredients.

And it will make, I think, when I say, it's about 10,000 bags of those chips

in an hour.

Wow.

And eight people run the line.

So 24 down to eight.

Yeah.

2,000 down to 2,000 in eight hours to 10,000 and one hour.

Yeah, that's incredible.

Yeah.

So that's the type of thing that you get when you're big in the snack industry.

And part of the issue is that most startups have some amount of access to that type of scaled manufacturing capacity because they go to one of the thousand co-man, they're called co-manufacturers, these companies that make food for a lot of different brands.

If you can go to one of them, you can benefit from their machinery and you can benefit from their economies of scale.

But if you're us and you're over in a commercial kitchen with a bunch of manual fryers

doing this by hand,

you don't get to benefit from any of that.

But again, the reason why we do this is because the big factories only are seed oil factories.

They don't like working with new fangled ingredients, which is ironic because the entire industry of food production 100 years ago was frying everything in tallow.

I mean, I completely agree with you.

So, how do you avoid using

artificial additives, preservatives, or other compounds?

Because

when you look at a

commercial chip,

I'm not going to name any brand names, but everybody knows the brand names.

You don't just have the seed oil.

You've got the MSG, the monosodium, glutamate, you've got the multiple red dyes,

and other dyes, orange dyes, yellow dyes.

Just look at the number of dyes.

You often have something called Kerragean.

You have quote-unquote natural flavors, which can be fine, but most of the time it's sinister cover-up for

shouldn't shouldn't be there.

And then you have the food dyes.

And so when you think about the kind of bomb that you're putting in your body between the seed oils, the iodized table salt, the, you know, the food dyes, and then the monosodium glutamate, I mean, these things substantially add up.

Not

setting aside the fact that they're not only not organic,

but they are GMO.

They're part of that genetically modified.

Yeah.

Well, that's a great question.

And it often goes underlooks.

And I think sitals are easy to talk about because it's so obvious.

They're 24% of calories.

I think it's a very high impact thing to look at.

But if you're, if we're optimizing, which of course you do, we're looking at everything, right?

We want to look at every single thing on that label needs to justify itself.

And the short answer, how we do this is it's a lot of freaking work.

That's how.

Yeah.

And that's why no one else does it.

Well, it's like very, it's very labor intensive, right?

So well, I'll tell you a story.

So our lime chips, which were our second flavor that we ever came out with.

And the reason why is because, you know, everyone knows Tostito's lime, hint of lime, or whatever.

Like that's a very common tortilla chip flavor.

So if we're going to make flavors, we're going to branch out.

Obviously, we should go with lime.

I thought, okay, that seems easy.

It's just one thing, right?

It can't be that hard.

So I started looking around for lime powders on the internet to try to find a supplier.

And I couldn't really find anything.

Everything was not organic.

And if it wasn't organic, it had maltodextrin or some other filler or whatever.

I'm like, huh, that's weird.

How do these other people do it?

So then I went to a grocery store and I went through all, I went to the chip section to look at all the lime chips and was trying to find out like on their ingredient label what they used.

Maybe I could copy that.

So I forget the exact full list, but basically there's two camps.

You get lime juice powder, which has melted dextrin in it and lime juice.

And I think that's probably what Testitos uses.

And then there's, this one shocked me, actually.

This is, and then the, the health, some health brands, which I don't want to name,

their lime chips were lime oil and citric acid.

Citric acid, as I'm sure we know, comes from like these giant bioreactor farms in China.

It's like black mold, basically produces citric acid.

So citric acid was there for the sourness, and the lime oil was there for that like fragrance of lime, but there was no, there was no lime in any of these chips.

And I was just like sitting there, like thinking, like the healthy chips and the junk chips, all the lime flavors, there's no limes.

Where are the freaking limes?

And we actually ran a few ads actually like a while back just where the headline was, where is the lime?

And we showed like our ingredient label and other ones.

And so in order to make this work, I had to, I was like, okay, we have to go get some limes.

We got some limes, sliced them up with a deli slicer by hand after washing them, organic limes, of course.

And then we stuck them in a dehydrator, like in rows of like little lime discs.

Like you would see in like a, like sometimes you go to a bar, you'll see these dehydrated lime discs.

And then we ground them up into a powder.

And that was, that was our lime chip for like six months.

Wow.

Was some guy's full-time job slicing and dehydrating and grinding limes.

Yeah, this is a super labor-intensive stuff.

Super labor-intensive.

And then ultimately, we

found a guy who has a dehydrated freeze-drying factory.

And I learned about freeze-drying.

It's better than dehydrating because it preserves the vitamin content.

It doesn't lead to oxidation.

Because dehydrating, it's not high temperature, but it's high enough that it causes oxidation.

So, like the dehydrated limes, the slices will be a little brown.

But then when we freeze-dried them,

they remained like pale green.

And so, vitamin C content is preserved and all that stuff.

So, then we started freeze-drying.

And then we kind of outsourced that.

But still, the lime powder today remains our single most expensive spice ingredient.

Really?

Yeah, it's like $40 a pound.

Because you're buying actual.

Yeah, because we're buying pounds of organic limes and then grinding them up into a slurry and freeze-drying.

And freeze-drying itself is expensive.

Right.

So, yeah, our lime powder is $40 a pound, which like that's just a lot of money for spices.

But, you know, like we said, you know, eventually this is working its way down.

Right.

Because you're going to automation.

Yeah, I mean,

you buy your own freeze-dryers.

And to be fair, the seasonings themselves, like of course they contribute but like the seasonings are a relatively a relatively small percentage of our overall uh like yeah but when you look at things that are in some of these other ingredients like msg um you know which is also seasoning you know the sodium glutamate that you know very often you'll see kerogen or or other other kinds of binders like uh uh soy lecithin or yeah you know something even in um snack foods that are competing with

healthy yeah well mistry that's an easy one that um

vegan companies use that to mimic the flavor of cheese.

Because cheese naturally has MSG.

It's like the umami flavor or whatever they call it.

And so you'll have, again, don't want to name names, but you can easily find this if

you go to a healthy grocery store.

A lot of the vegan cheese or vegan queso, this and that, whatever, like it'll have either MSG right in the label or they use the term yeast extract.

Because yeast extract.

Yeast produce MSG.

And so if you take an extract of yeast,

it's MSG.

It doesn't sound as sinister.

But it doesn't sound as sinister.

Like, oh, yeast, that's in bread, or that's like, that's natural.

Yeah, it's like when we put folic acid in the food supply and we call it fortified or enriched, you know?

Ooh, that sounds like vitamin.

Yeah, it's fluorinated water, but it's really fluorosilicic acid water.

But if you said fluorosilicic acid, people are like, wow, that sounds sketchy.

That sounds sketchy.

Yeah.

So a lot of vegan foods will use,

like, for example, I actually don't think Doritos.

uh their nacho cheese flavor has msg i'm pretty like they actually have cheese in it um i'm pretty sure one of them one of them does.

I'm sure one of them does.

It's got to be Cheetos, or can we look that up?

Yeah.

But yeah, you'll see yeast extract.

And so I think that's a big one.

The food colorings, I think, there's just no excuse for that.

Yeah.

Like, I think our Cobanero chip is spicy.

It's like,

I don't know, tomato.

Yeah, you've got Redmond salt.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's tomato powder.

There's beet powder for a little bit of sweetness.

And like that creates a pretty nice color, honestly.

Like, I don't know.

It only does it create a good color.

Yeah.

See, I think this,

I think the disuniformity, you know, brings us back to something that's more in its natural form.

Like, you know, avocados are not perfect when you cut them open.

You know, one of the things I notice about seed oils, for example, in the grocery store, you ever just notice how you go down the aisle and like the Wesson oil or the vegetable oil, they're all exactly the same color.

Like exactly.

And

they're exactly the same consistency.

They have that beautiful yellow hue to them.

They got the heart healthy label on there.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, that's not how things occur in nature.

I mean, if you, if you compressed

a hundred or a thousand

seeds and produced the oils and you put them into all these bottles, they'd be all kinds of different.

Yeah, it should be very

gray, some be darker.

Yeah.

We have this like with our potatoes, for example.

Like our potato, we have two harvests.

There's two different suppliers.

One's in Idaho.

The other's, I think, Florida.

I forget.

So we have potatoes for six months.

They're stored well, but because we don't use toxic storage methods, so there's this thing called CIPC.

I actually forget what it stands for.

85% of potatoes in the U.S.

are sprayed with CIPC, and it prevents the spores or the eyes from sprouting.

Because obviously, there's only two potato harvests.

If you want potatoes all year round, you got to store them somewhere.

And so we have to prevent them from sputting.

And so if you just like gas them with this toxic crap, like, yeah, you can, you can prevent them from creating eyes, but we can't, we, we won't use that stuff.

So, yeah, you can do things with temperature and humidity and keep them dark, right?

Potatoes actually are sensitive to light, like literally.

They will wake up.

So you have to trick them into thinking they're underground, all these things.

But even still, they will change.

And over time, some of the starch is turned into sugar in potatoes.

And so that creates like, there's about a, you know, six month cycle of variation in our potatoes where you'll see brown spots and whatever stuff.

But it's like.

You want a potato chip that's not made with crap.

That's what you're going to get.

Right.

It's actual potatoes.

It's like french fries in a bag.

I think someone said that earlier today.

Like that's what it tastes like.

That's what it is.

Yeah.

You know, it's not like frito lay, like Lays where everything is the same shape and color and texture and size and consistency.

It's like, that's not, that's not how food works.

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Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast.

Now, for you, where is this?

So Ancient Grain is the parent company.

Ancient Crunch.

Ancient Crunch, sorry, is the parent company.

And I almost,

and I like that because I identify most with your Masa brand.

And then when I started, you know, eating the fandy and feeding those to my kids, to my family,

it's actually a great way to make um i used it this this season when i made um party platters for uh for the holidays because people are always like well how can you make a healthy platter for for the holidays and and the the interesting thing is you can actually recreate it in a way that is really nutrient dense right and healthy and kind of guilt-free and it's not like any compromises like it's actually good And it actually looks really good too.

You know, it's aesthetically pleasing.

You can lay it all out on there.

I get a lot of these

raw cheeses from my

local farm here and local Amish farm, which I, which I love.

And yours make a nice mix with that.

But where is the brand going?

I mean, is this an expansive snack category that you actually want

Ancient Crunch to expand into?

Are you going to get into other?

Yeah.

So we started out with Masa.

That was, and back when we started, I was like, this is literally, we're only doing original, one flavor.

I didn't even have ambition for other flavors.

I'm like, what other flavors do you need?

Yeah.

But then I'm like, oh, wait.

That's it.

People buy like a billion dollars of Doritos or God knows what, $2 billion of Doritos a year.

So I'm like, hmm.

Obviously, people want the spices.

And the fun thing about the spices is that there are no artificial flavors in the sense that, like, the flavor, like, there are artificial substances that create flavors, but the flavors are all real.

There's vanillin, which creates a vanilla flavor.

Right.

There's lime oil and citric acid, which creates a lime flavor.

But none of the flavors, it's like, is there a fake color?

All the colors exist.

Like they're just real colors.

Yeah.

It's like, so the fun thing about spices is that any flavor that exists in the junk food world, we can just make with real stuff.

In most cases, it'll taste even better because we're not using, the reason why they do their fake stuff is not because they want a fake flavor.

They just want to save money.

And so if we're not beholden to this idea of like, we have to get the cheapest thing possible in every single way, because we don't,

we want the realest thing possible, not the cheapest thing.

We can make better flavors, right?

Like Like the cheese that are going to go into the one-day moss and nacho cheese flavor is going to be better cheese than the cheese that goes into Doritos.

Right.

And it's still going to taste like cheese.

It'll just taste better.

So we realized we could do the flavors.

So then we got to thinking with this whole, the whole long-term idea here is that

there's a certain, like American snacking is like a big part of American culture.

You go to the center aisle of the grocery store.

There's like four aisles dedicated to these things.

It comes in bags, comes in bags and boxes

that people snack on.

And that's it makes up a lot of our calories, for better or for worse.

And so our goal is to...

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, not necessarily.

So yeah.

Not with the snacking as awesome activity is like, yeah.

I mean, I actually don't really snack on these things.

I eat them as part of my meals.

It's not like you do too.

We had lunch together today.

But regardless, Americans buy this stuff.

They want this stuff.

And so my job is to go in and say, all right.

that's next.

We're going to do that, but like make it real.

If it's bread, it's going to be sourdough.

If it's, you know, you get the idea.

right so so our whole goal with ancient crunch is to like have a portfolio of these mini companies brands of a of a classic american snack product that people really enjoy that's not going anywhere anytime soon we're just making it the like turning up all the dials on the real food level and making it as best as it possibly can be yeah and and and Talk a little bit about the sourcing of the actual raw ingredient, the corn, because, and what are the detriments of, I've talked about this before, but I love your opinion on the detriments of

the genetically modified corns.

And this area of snack foods, you know, wheat, soy, corn, yeah,

these are some of the most not only pesticide-laden

and chemical-laden crops, but also they're the majority, if not all of them, are genetically modified.

Why is that an issue?

So I think that the main issue from my perspective, understanding with GMOs is that

it's not to say, because a lot of people are like, you don't believe in science, like GMOs, it's like, what's wrong with that?

And it's like, and then some people say, you're playing God.

And it's like, that's not the strongest argument.

In my opinion, the problem with GMOs is not that they're modified.

It's that what are they modified for?

And in the vast, vast majority of cases, GMO crops are modified to be more resistant to pesticides.

Right.

And that's pretty much round-up ready.

Yeah.

So more resistant to pesticides means that the farmers can put more poison on it.

And that means you can eat more poison and the crop doesn't die.

Yes.

So it's not like if someone were to GMO something and like make it more nutrient dense, I'd say maybe, but also food when properly grown is as nutrient-dense as it needs to be.

Like it's already already there for us.

Like nature put it there.

Right.

Like you don't need to make it better.

Like we're not going to put more vitamin A in beef liver, right?

There's enough.

There's enough where it is.

Yeah.

So I think that's the main issue with GMOs.

And corn is an especially nasty crop.

Like parts of the Midwest are just like the groundwater is literally polluted with atracine and like glyphosate is is everywhere yeah and it's like it's not just the food it's also the like corn farmers have a lot uh get cancer at higher rates than you know other professions it's like absolutely devastating and i think um it's either only one percent or seven percent of corn in america is not gmo and and among non-gmo corn it's a lot of it's still not organic and so i think for us organic corn is like the absolute bare minimum standard uh over the next two three years i was mentioning this before i want uh all our corn to be regenerative organic which is possible.

Yeah, I love that.

You're going for organic and then eventually regenerative organic.

And a lot of what we talked about before the podcast was what you're doing with your factory in Pennsylvania, you know, and the automation, really getting the labor cost down, which is your highest cost cost of goods sold now.

And

once this happens, do you foresee

price points

in your products dropping?

Yeah, I mean, across the board.

And availability increasing because I think the main thing, yeah, I mean, it's kind of supply and demand at this point, right?

Like, we're really tapped.

I think we made, we can make, I don't know, 100,000-ish approximate bags a month.

And, you know, we can get a little bit more out of that with our manual methods.

However,

the real issue is that we, like, why are we not on shelf at some bigger grocery stores?

I don't have enough product to put there.

Right.

Right.

So I think that's the real thing is like the more availability is, like, the laws of supply and demand just kick in.

As of right now, it's like, oh, why is it,

you know, why is it of, why is this flavor out of stock or whatever?

It's like, I can barely keep up.

I think, so today's Friday.

It's a high-class problem there.

Right.

Today's Friday, we're making chips that were likely sold, I think, Wednesday.

So and we're shipping them today.

So it's like a two-day kind of backlog.

So it's like, I can't, I can't keep up.

I mean, I'm trying.

That's great, though.

Yeah.

You know, it's amazing to see.

products and services like this getting back into demand.

And, you know, I'm a huge fan.

My audience is a huge fan.

I love that you're on the seed oil bandwagon and the artificial ingredients bandwagon and the non-GMO bandwagon because you didn't just fix one of the problems, you fixed all the problems.

And, you know,

and first of all, and I really want to, I appreciate you coming on the podcast.

I'd like to actually do a follow-up with you as you start to expand

your lines and whatnot.

But every guest that I bring on to the podcast, I

sort of wind things down by asking them the same question.

And there's no right or wrong answer to this question.

But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

I can't, I would be lying if I said I didn't prepare for this because I

was

honest enough.

He was like, I was listening to some of your episodes in the car.

And I'm like, oh, okay, that one.

I actually think I've thought about this before, though.

In my head, even when I heard the question for the rest, I was like, I know the answer, my answer.

It would be potentiality.

So I think

organisms are designed to be able to do a certain set of things inherently.

And as humans, we can typically like stretch the amount of things that we can do.

But at the same time, we can also shrink them, right?

If you're sick or you have brain fog or you're overweight, that limits, say, your ability to play with your kids or go climb a mountain or go mountain biking or do whatever.

Like if you have brain fog, it limits your ability to like, I don't know, read books or do.

play chess or any sort of you know mental physical activities kind of things and so i think as we're talking especially in the in the realm of bio hacking health optimization all this stuff the goal of course we're always talking about how to make ourselves healthier but for me it's like once i'm healthy then what i don't just not just i want to be healthy just to sit around and be healthy all day i want to go do stuff you know right sit around and be healthy all day right and so i think uh i think we want to be like maximizing our ability to go do stuff basically and that's what i think uh it's easy to forget in the health space we're you know always talking about trends and how to optimize this variable which is all important but then at the end end of the day, like, how can we take our health and mental acuity and all the stuff that we have that, you know, we're frankly blessed with relative to the standard state of health in the modern world and do that and like do something useful with that.

Yeah.

So that's what, that's how I answer that.

That's amazing, brother.

Steven, I, I, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.

I'm excited to see where this journey.

you know, goes for us.

I'm a big fan of what you're doing.

My, my audience is, is, is a huge fan.

I appreciate more and more companies like yourself coming in and being diligent about their ingredients, being diligent about the way that they're sourcing their nutrients and actually making nutrient-dense foods.

Because what's really, really ironic about what you're doing is you're just circumventing the system and just going back to the basics.

I literally invented nothing.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

You just

basic.

Yeah.

It's like I am a time traveler from 1940 and I make tortilla chips and potato chips, and here they are, present-day humans.

Yeah.

Well, brother, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks, man.

We're going to have you back again.

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