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April 24, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

01:17:32

Wild foods foraging expert Daniel Vitalis talks with Mike Adams about food sustainability...

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	Alright, welcome to today's episode on BrightTown.com.
	I've got a very special guest for you today.
	A friend of mine going way back, Daniel Vitalis.
	He is such a pioneer.
	He's got an amazing show on the Outdoor Channel and he's also an amazing innovator of Welcome to the show, Daniel.
	It's just great to have you back on.
	It's awesome to see you, Mike.
	And like I said, you look fantastic.
	It's cool to see 10, 15 years later how all the people in the health space look when time goes by.
	You sort of see the results of the program that they've been pitching for years.
	That is so true, but you look really stout and really healthy too, and I know, I mean, you're active so much, you're outdoors doing what you're doing.
	I try to get, you know, outdoors and work on the ranch as much as I can, but not as much as you.
	But tell us what you've been up to for the last few years, because we haven't spoken in a while.
	Yeah, I just started filming the fifth season of my TV show, so it's a funny time to be on cable, you know, because everybody's like, oh, I don't have cable anymore, and it used to be a big deal to be on cable.
	But yeah, I am lucky to be on there working on my fifth season of Wild Feds, so every episode I'm out in the field procuring wild foods.
	I tell people it's a culinary adventure series, so We hunt.
	We forage.
	So that could be plants, algae, mushrooms.
	We bring those ingredients back, usually to a chef or sometimes to my own kitchen, produce meals, and then get everybody who was involved in harvesting those foods together to share in that meal.
	So there's a nice community piece at the end.
	And it's just been an awesome process for me.
	I think this is, I just shot my 41st Wow.
	What a great training it's been for me to deepen my knowledge of wild foods and living off the landscape.
	I would imagine there's got to be a lot of show prep where you have a basic idea of what you want to do, but then you need to dig into the details and make sure that you're covering all the bases if you're going to present that on the show, right?
	Yeah, especially working with local people who already do these things where they are.
	I film quite a few episodes here in Maine where I have some expertise in the New England area, but when I venture outside of that, I'm always trying to connect with people who do what I do in different regions because now I have the opportunity to gather wild foods from anywhere in the world.
	It's awesome to lean on the people.
	It's cool because you meet people all the time who share your passion.
	There are people into wild foods everywhere I go.
	So it's cool to seek those people out and see what kind of incredible things are on their landscape and come face to face with the things that I'm going to actually eat.
	Well, I'm so happy for you that you're able to share your extensive knowledge base with a very broad audience today.
	People probably, if they don't know you, they don't know how, you know, you're like a walking encyclopedia of food knowledge.
	Seriously.
	And, in fact, last night I was thinking about the interview here today, and guess what?
	I was able to collect, just very simply, just walking around my property, a giant bowl of dewberries.
	Oh, cool.
	That are just ripe right now.
	The rain was just right this year.
	I was like, do berries.
	And I was telling my own audience, I said, you know, look, this is spontaneous food.
	Like, I didn't have to plant it.
	I didn't have to irrigate it.
	I didn't have crop rows or a tractor or anything.
	I just allowed it.
	You know how I got these berries?
	By not spraying 2,4-D herbicide.
	Right.
	That's how I got the berries.
	And there's wild food all over the place if you stop poisoning your property.
	True?
	True.
	Yeah, true.
	And you can't match the nutrition.
	In the same way that somebody who grew up with a difficult childhood is probably going to have a stronger constitution than a person who grows up with a trust fund in a really cozy environment where parents take care of everything, that's what happens with food.
	So when we fence everything off and we fertilize it and we fluff the soil and we water it every day, what we end up with is foods that don't have to defend themselves.
	and with plants, they defend themselves chemically.
	Right.
	And those chemicals they defend themselves with are those phytonutrients we need, not just for nutrition, but also for, you know, antioxidants, so for protection from radiation and sun and things like that.
	Well, whenever we get wild foods, those things have so much more of that phytonutrition because they're surviving in the wild.
	And so, you know, a cup of dewberries versus a cup of, let's say, store-bought equivalent, which would be probably like a blackberry or something like that, or a raspberry.
	You're just going to always have more nutrition in the wild food.
	And so it's not just that it's spontaneous, fun, and free, which it is all that, but it's actually a superior nutrition source.
	And we've kind of turned our noses up at it in our obsession with domesticated crops.
	Absolutely.
	Well said.
	Let me give out your website, DanielVitalis.com.
	That's V-I-T-A-L-I-S. It's spelled just like it sounds.
	DanielVitalis.com.
	And there you are with Wild Feds Season 3.
	But like you said, Season 4 is coming out.
	And by the way, to your point, we have a lot of wild grapes here in Texas.
	We have the muscadine grapes, I believe they're called.
	Oh, yeah.
	And they are really sour, man.
	You talk about acidic.
	whoa, but they're loaded with anthocyanins and they have resveratrol.
	And of course you and I both know that resveratrol in wild grapes is much higher when the grape plants are attacked by mold.
	So the plant generates the resveratrol to protect against the mold.
	And then, so if you harvest those leaves or those grapes where the resveratrol is, you know, it could be 50 times higher in the wild plant compared to some store-bought empty, you know, like, empty shadow of grapes.
	Right?
	Yeah, I always say to people, it's like a spectrum.
	You've got to start where you start.
	So you start at the supermarket.
	But when you can, you know, for me, it was the process of working from the supermarket to, you know, organic foods to eventually to the farmer's market and then kind of being like, wait a second.
	What's the wild progenitor of these species and kind of branching out?
	And I've had this into the wild.
	I've had this idea for a long time that human beings, homo sapiens, are a really lonely species because our only companions on the earth are like dogs and cats and domesticated houseplants.
	And there's all of these species that live in the wild, and we don't know them.
	So we're like an astronaut that showed up here afraid of the environment.
	When we go out in it, we need all this gear and equipment, and we get all dressed up like an astronaut just to go on a hike in the woods.
	And everything we see is like a wall of green.
	We don't know what anything is anymore.
	That's right.
	If you contrast that with, let's say, a hunter-gatherer who grew up in the traditional way on the landscape, you probably couldn't find something they wouldn't know a name for.
	And, you know, even with all the experience I have, if we went out in my woods, you could point at things all day and I'd say, I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I know a lot of things, but there'd be a lot I don't know.
	But that's not a normal condition for people living on a landscape.
	We are meant to know all the creatures that are here.
	I mean, that was our first job was naming everything, right?
	Well, right.
	But to your point, you're nailing it here.
	When I first moved to my ranch in Texas that you know about, I didn't know anything that was growing.
	I didn't know what the trees were doing.
	I didn't know what were these brush leaves over here.
	What is this stuff?
	I had no idea.
	Now, 15 years later, oh my God, I look at it, it all makes sense.
	This is where water wants to be.
	This is a source of food for the deer.
	The north side of here, this is where there's less sun.
	This is where the berries are going to grow next year.
	It's like you can read it, right?
	You now understand the code of nature.
	I'm not an expert in other areas, but in my area, I'm an expert now.
	I can read it and I can tell you what's going on.
	I can tell you what the soil is like by what's growing there.
	Yeah, and that wall of green disambiguates into individual species.
	And so I think of it like if I was in a new town, I would look around.
	I wouldn't know anybody.
	So I might feel a little insecure there.
	I don't know my way around.
	I don't know who's who or what's what.
	Versus your hometown where you're walking down the street, you know that person, you know that person, you know that building and where that store is and where all the resources are.
	So when I go into nature, it's not just like, oh, that's a birch tree.
	It's like, that's a birch tree.
	But what kind?
	Well, that's a gold birch and I get my chaga from that and I tap those trees in the spring and I know that bark is really good for You know, kindling a fire.
	And I see the oak tree and it's like, okay, that's where my acorns come from.
	But also, that's where I'm going to find the deer and the turkeys and the bears.
	And as I go through, the more things I know, the more connected I am.
	And so we're learning a lot about human longevity and the importance of interpersonal connection and how that plays into somebody's longevity.
	And I would argue that over time we're going to come to understand that an ecological Isn't it fascinating how the so-called environmental movement has become so one-dimensional, just focused on eliminating carbon, but not knowing anything about the world?
	I would really argue that the crisis we're dealing with ecologically is not climate at all.
	It's actually biodiversity and habitat.
	And what's interesting is you don't want to bring that up politically because it's corporations, military-industrial complex that are destroying habitat and environment and biodiversity.
	And they want to blame the people.
	So that's why they bring up carbon emissions.
	So they can blame you and me.
	They don't want to have to look at what impact the military-industrial complex, the chemical industry is having on the environment.
	So they just bring up carbon.
	Then they can carbon offset and they can be squeaky clean and we can pay the bill.
	But the funny thing is we weren't mindless consumers 100 years ago.
	This was foisted upon us by Edward Bernays, who had learned psychology from his uncle Sigmund Freud and who worked with corporations and government to turn us, even those of us that resisted it, into consumers like we are today.
	And that was documented really well by PBS in their three-part documentary series called The Century of Self, which is like watching an Alex Jones documentary, but it was made by PBS.
	You know what I mean?
	It's incredible.
	And it details how that was done.
	And so here we are today.
	We're being blamed to ask to pick up the bill for this while we continue to lose species and biodiversity.
	So like as somebody who lives in Maine, when I was a kid, if you drove from northern Maine to southern Maine in the summer, the entire front of your car would be caked in a one-inch thick layer of dead insects.
	Right.
	Today you can make that drive, and if you saw a fifth of those insects on your car – You know, it'd be incredible.
	People don't realize because of shifting baseline syndrome, they don't realize how much biodiversity we're losing, and they're all thinking about climate and temperature, which is not the real issue.
	Well, absolutely.
	We're suffering really a great extinction of the insect biomass you just mentioned, but also in aquatic ecosystems.
	We're poisoning the planet and we're cutting down The forest to plant GMO soy, and we're polluting everything.
	Those are the real crises.
	We could spend a whole episode on that.
	Maybe we'll talk about that another time.
	But I want to talk about what you brought to us, what we're partnering on right now, because you're really good at wild food sources, of course, but also in...
	balance hormone systems, not just for men, but also for women as well.
	So let me just mention this right up front.
	HealthRangerStore.com slash Vitalis gets you to this page, where we have now the black walnut protein powder, which is wildcrafted from Daniel Vitalis' companies for Thrival, as well as now various forms of the elk antler velvet product, which is just truly revolutionary.
	So Daniel, I want to say, I mean, this is a dream come true for me, because I know your whole history of food and nutrition and longevity.
	And I've spent a considerable amount of time with you.
	We even filmed a couple of episodes on my ranch years ago.
	I remember you were making kindling with a bushcrafting knife.
	We were doing stuff like that.
	Let's start with the black walnut protein powder, because that's unique in the industry.
	Yeah, I've been in this industry now, I want to say, 16 years.
	Yeah, 16 years I've had Surthrival, and I've been really blessed.
	We've been a profitable company from day one, and we've made really unique products.
	We've done it in a really different way than most of the companies launch.
	And most of the supplement industry is sitting on a lot of dark secrets.
	You know, if people really knew, I mean, you know because you test these products, but If people knew what was really in a lot of these health food products, I think they'd be pretty shocked.
	So when I created this product, this black walnut protein powder, and I got to say, I couldn't have done it without the company that I'm partnered with, Hammond's Black Walnuts.
	We created what I've been telling people is a perfect product.
	What I mean by that is there's just no secrets.
	There's just nothing to hide.
	It is the greatest story I've ever seen in a health food.
	The product is really fascinating.
	It starts with black walnuts, which are endemic to the United States.
	This is the wild walnut of North America.
	When people think walnuts, the walnut they're picturing is the English walnut.
	And those of course are really easy to crack because they're domesticated.
	They've been bred like the way we've bred dogs.
	They've been bred to have a lot of nut meat and a really small thin shell that easily breaks off and you get this very high yield of nut meat.
	Well that's great but like we talked about before, You end up losing nutritional value.
	And in order to have those, we got to cut down a lot of habitat to plant orchards for those nuts.
	And when you do that, of course, now you need to fertilize, you need to irrigate, you need to bring in workers and all these kind of things.
	Well, all that while that we've been doing that, black walnuts have been wild here on the North American landscape.
	They've been here the whole time.
	They were an important food crop for Native American people, and they were an important food crop for early colonists as well.
	And they've sort of fallen out of favor.
	One of the reasons is they have a very small nut-to-shell ratio, so you end up with a very small yield.
	7% nut meat out of the shell would be awesome.
	So a very small yield, and they got a very strong flavor like a lot of wild foods do.
	And so the only people really buying them today are folks who remember them from the past and use them for baking and ice creams and things like that, particularly around Christmas.
	When you say they have a very strong flavor, you're absolutely correct, but I just want to point out that's the medicine.
	Yeah, you're right.
	The strong flavor, your tongue is detecting those medicinal chemicals that are in the nut.
	Correct.
	It's one of the reasons I'll tell people if you really want to improve your health, one thing you can do is develop appreciation for bitter flavors.
	Yes.
	Because once you're used to bitter flavors, and by the way, the research does show that if you expose children when they're very young to bitter flavors, they'll like them more as adults.
	And so a lot of us who grew up in that era of everything came out of a box and was made ultra-palatable, these highly processed, not even processed, industrialized foods...
	Now when we taste stuff that's bitter, we kind of recoil when in reality that's really what we want to be chasing down.
	And the other thing I'll say about that is when you crack open any pharmaceutical tablet and taste it outside of that Candy-coated shell.
	It's bitter inside because medicine's bitter.
	And that originally came in our plants primarily.
	But anyway, so black walnuts have kind of been forgotten about.
	Well, there's one company still involved in the black walnut harvest and in the market called Hammond's.
	They've been doing it for 75 years.
	They're a beautiful Christian family, American, you know, completely American owned.
	And this is how they get their nut meats is they send out 200 hulling stations in 13 states in the Midwest.
	And every October, people who have black walnut trees in their yards, on their land, they go out and they pick these nuts up and they bring them to these hulling stations where they're run through a huller and then people are paid by the pound.
	So this is like a volunteer workforce, Americans, completely decentralized, local, not not a food factory.
	Decentralized.
	And so if you had a ranch like you have, you could say, you know what, I'm going to host one of these hauling stations.
	They bring it to you.
	So it's a lot of Amish get involved in it, a lot of people with hardware stores, farms.
	They'll hold one of these hauling stations in October, and then anybody comes in.
	I spent a day filming at one of these, and it was so cool to talk to the people who came in because...
	They were either, you know, families who used to still do it with grandma because she did it when she was a kid.
	It was, you know, parents who were teaching their kids about how to make money.
	It was kids who wanted archery equipment for hunting.
	So they were like, you know, I just want to get arrows and so I'm bringing these in.
	It was cool to see what kind of people do it.
	But yeah, totally decentralized.
	Then when they get those nuts, they bring them to their factory where they shell them and process them into nut meats.
	But like I said, not so many folks want to eat those nut meats anymore.
	So what we're doing is taking those and running them through a CO2 extraction, which I'm sure you're familiar with, Mike, but I'll kind of explain to the listener.
	Carbon dioxide, you know, the villainized carbon dioxide that plants breathe.
	If we were to compress it, it's a gas, compress it hard enough, you'll turn it into a liquid.
	That liquid can be used as a solvent to extract things, kind of like how alcohol is used in a tincture.
	But then when you take the pressure off, it turns to a gas again and evaporates and leaves no residue.
	So you can have extremely clean extractions.
	So that's how they're doing the medical cannabis extractions.
	But you don't typically do it for a protein extraction because it's expensive and time consuming.
	And so you'll rarely see that for the protein.
	Most proteins from plants are going to be extracted with expeller pressing, which is a higher heat process, and it cooks the product as it happens.
	We're using the CO2 extraction.
	The reason is simple.
	Let's imagine a hemp protein.
	What you have there is there's a desire to get the oil out.
	They want to sell the oil and what was left over used to be fed to livestock until somebody realized, hey, there's a lot of protein in what's left over.
	Let's turn it into people food.
	So it's a byproduct.
	But with our black walnut protein powder, it's not a byproduct.
	We actually are after the protein fraction, so we do that more expensive but cleaner and more raw extraction with the CO2. What I love about this is that we have Wild trees on the landscape left intact because we're giving value to those nuts.
	So if you had one of those trees, let's say, in your front yard, and in the past you might have thought, man, maybe we'll cut this thing down.
	It just drops these nuts every year.
	They're really hard to get into.
	But now there's value on them.
	So you know what?
	You leave the tree intact, which is habitat for birds and for squirrels, and those nuts are food for wildlife.
	At scale, the way we're doing it, we're preserving habitat.
	We also don't have to water those trees.
	They're watered by the rain.
	We don't have to fertilize those trees.
	They're fertilized by just natural processes.
	And we don't need to bring in a labor force.
	So you think about how orchards are picked.
	Typically, you're bringing in a workforce.
	There's a lot of issues with that labor.
	We don't have any of that.
	We have volunteer Americans going out and picking these things up.
	All of that goes to a three-generation family-owned business who breaks those nut meats down, passes them to us.
	We do that extraction.
	And what's cool is because this is a wild nut, the black walnut has the highest protein content of any tree nut crop.
	That is so cool.
	So you end up with 17 grams of protein per serving, which is typically in a plant-based protein going to be 14 or 15 grams per serving.
	So at the same 30-gram serving, we have the highest protein of any plant-based protein, very high quality, still have some of those residual medicinal benefits of a wild food in this really excellent American-sourced protein product.
	It's very smooth, and you can taste the black walnut properties in it, so it retains the benefits of wild food, like you said.
	And by the way, our store, we sell hemp protein, and there's a lot of pea protein formulations, and that's all fine.
	Everybody's got a little different taste.
	Personally, I don't like the taste of hemp protein.
	I've never liked it.
	Some people do, which is fine.
	But I tend to use whey protein, and now I'm mixing your protein.
	Thank you for sending some samples.
	I'm mixing your protein into my smoothies here.
	And every time I'm drinking it, I'm picking up the black walnut flavor.
	And I'm remembering that my grandmother, who lived on a farm in the Midwest, used to make black walnut cookies.
	And I'm remembering that as a kid, because I was consuming so much processed food and so many sweets that were served by the school and so on, that I didn't like black walnuts as a kid.
	But now I do, because I appreciate it, and my taste is very different today.
	I mean, I drink turmeric, for God's sake, right?
	But as a kid, I wouldn't touch this stuff.
	How crazy is that?
	Yeah, it's a nut that is a lot nicer when you have the whole nut meats.
	They're nice cooked.
	I had them in a lot of savory dishes when I visited the folks out at Hammond's because they just eat these things constantly.
	So they showed me a bunch of their dishes.
	But people are used to eating nuts out of the bag, and it's a strong flavor.
	So I understand where people are coming from.
	So what I'm excited to be able to do...
	Is put this into a protein format because modern Americans know what to do with protein powder.
	True.
	And they don't know what to do with those nut meats.
	They're not, you know, unless they're familiar with cooking with them.
	So this puts it in a format that can preserve the food culture around it.
	I've got a friend, Sam Thayer out in Wisconsin, who's probably the best known of the wild food foragers in the U.S. and probably the most researched and educated on the topic.
	And he wrote a fantastic essay about what he calls ecoculture, which is the wild food equivalent to agriculture.
	So that's creating food systems around wild foods.
	And he points out, everybody always says, 8 billion people can't eat wild foods.
	And I agree that they can't, not currently.
	But he's like, it isn't impossible.
	It just takes tending to wild crops in the way that native peoples did on this continent, which was much more heavily populated than we used to think.
	Right now we understand when Europeans got here, from one coast to the other, this whole continent was peopled.
	And they were eating primarily wild foods, but they had developed eco-culture.
	They had got these wild food crops producing huge amounts of food, and they'd mastered the technologies of working with those foods.
	Now, that's a long way off.
	I'm not trying to say that's where we're going to get to, but it's really exciting to me when there is a wild crop like this one that we can work with to create a food system around it because it's our food heritage here in North America.
	It's something we should be really proud of, and unfortunately, most Americans aren't aware that it's even there.
	So by putting it into a protein, I'm hoping I can really get it in front of people who otherwise would never know about black walnuts or at least never eat them.
	Well, I've got to just tell my audience here, you've got to try this because it's a very rich but also smooth protein powder.
	You can add it to smoothies, you can add it to the existing recipes, or you can blend it with whey protein like I'm doing.
	It's at healthrangerstore.com slash vitalis, and there's a product right there.
	Now, of course, look, this is not a low-cost, cheap protein powder.
	Yeah.
	Look at what it takes to get this, but this is a real treasure of North America, and it's a native food, and you're helping to support the decentralization of the food supply.
	Hand-foraged by Americans.
	Right.
	I mean, that's just a really cool story.
	You know, it's such a cool thing because even the shells are used in industry, so they're used as a metal polish.
	The Statue of Liberty, last time it was polished, was polished with Hammond's black walnut shells.
	No kidding.
	Yeah, very cool story.
	There's a lot of depth here and a lot of meaning.
	I also want to add that because it's a fine flour, it's really excellent for baking.
	Anybody who's used to using alternative flours and they are used to cutting in spelt or quinoa or any other of those kind of almond, this is one of the best baking flours that we've used because it's such a fine texture.
	It's really excellent.
	If you want a protein-fortified cookie, muffin, pancake, waffle, anything like that, you can add a scoop in.
	My wife's a coach at a CrossFit gym here.
	We often will bring in the protein cookies and everybody gets so excited.
	I'm sure.
	They're like, okay, well, it's a protein cookie.
	I guess I can have it.
	So it's a way to fortify things.
	It was really nice to have this around for Christmas and Thanksgiving because we could really kind of fortify foods with more nutrition, more wild nutrition.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Amazing.
	And by the way, I just want to mention, we're all living in the post-COVID era, at least those of us who didn't die from it.
	Yeah.
	And if you eat wild foods, folks, guess what?
	Your immune system works better.
	You're going to be more resilient against everything that might assault you, just like the plants are more resilient because that's why they create those chemicals, as Daniel said.
	You know, a plant can't run out to a pharmacy and get some synthetic chemical.
	It's got to make it itself, and that's what plants do.
	They make their own defense systems.
	So when you take those in, you get the benefit of those defense systems It's done.
	I mean, why should this even be an aha type of topic?
	It should be like this is the natural knowledge of every human being.
	But it shows that we didn't grow up in a natural environment.
	We grew up in a built environment.
	And one reason I make Wild Fat as a TV show, I tell people all the time, I mean, I want people to eat wild foods.
	I want people to have meaningful connections to nature.
	But ultimately, for me, it's a Trojan horse.
	I do it as an antidote to the metaverse.
	And so I see it like this.
	We've spent so many generations in the built environment, and each generation has been sequentially more and more removed from the natural environment.
	But now we're about to move into the digital environment, where a person could, in 50 years, conceivably never even experience nature.
	And that, to me, is unacceptable.
	And so by connecting people to wild food, I'm trying to create an inroad.
	Because...
	Because when you go into the built environment, everything's made by people, but it's made out of stuff that you could ultimately trace to nature.
	But when you go into the digital environment, mankind is kind of God there.
	They created that universe.
	And you could essentially miss the fingerprint of God.
	That's how I see it.
	So nature, at least when you go into nature, you go, hey, whatever did this is beyond humanity.
	And it's so important that we have a connection to something bigger than ourselves.
	True.
	And especially something that's not named Mark Zuckerberg.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Which means giant block of sugar, I believe.
	Does it?
	Does it now?
	Zucker.
	Yeah, Zucker.
	Oh, Zucker.
	Oh, okay.
	I was thinking a giant block of something, but not sugar.
	A berg of something.
	Okay, let's move on.
	So now you've also got your elk antler velvet antler.
	products under Surthrival which I know you've been working on these formulations for many years and we're really honored to be able to carry these at the Health Ranger store now and speak about this because a lot of people don't realize you know this is a renewable source and it's very humanely harvested from the elk by the way for those who are concerned about well how are the animals treated well guess what they keep making you know more antlers by the way but tell us about the velvet please Probably one of the most unique and
	exciting organs in the animal kingdom is the antlers of cervids.
	Cervids are the deer family.
	Think deer, but also remember elk are a big deer.
	Moose are the biggest of the extant currently living.
	I sometimes fantasize about that elk from Europe.
	I forget what it's called, but its antlers were I don't know, 15 feet across or something, you know.
	There's been a lot of big deer throughout time.
	But all those deer species, they don't have horns, they have antlers.
	So horns are like a hollow keratin, like what a cow has.
	But antlers are more of like an osteus or bone material, and they grow out every year, and then they fall off in the winter.
	So anybody who's ever been shed hunting or walking through the woods and found antlers, well, that's because those animals drop the antlers every year.
	So they're renewable in that sense.
	The males will continue to grow them every year.
	Well, that was observed by people all over the world throughout history who said, wait a second, what's in those that they grow that fast?
	I mean, if you think about an elk's antler, which could be four, six feet long, those are growing at times two inches a day.
	What?
	What?
	It's unbelievable.
	That's crazy.
	If you can get up to those, and all that growth's happening at the tips.
	So those tips are just rapidly growing, and in the beginning it's like a bulb, like a circular almost kind of lumpy bulb that then differentiates into all the tines.
	If you can get up and ever put your hands on the antlers, the velvet antlers, so late in the season when hunters go out or, you know, in the fall when you see deer, that's ossified and turned to bone.
	but in the spring and summer when it's growing if you can get your hands onto it it's got a pulse in it it's warm wow those are living organs i'm sure you've got thermal optics mike and if you look at those through thermal in the summer and you'll see that they're just hot living tissue black hot white hot whatever you're looking at living warm tissue
	well that has skin that has hair that has veins and arteries that has lymphatic tissue rapidly expanding osteus tissue so for that growth to happen at that speed because that's going to go from a nothing to a six foot antler in just a Wow.
	For it to do that, the substances that have to be present in the growing tip are extremely androgenic.
	If you're going to ask yourself, I'm 45 now.
	I am really not wanting to have to experiment with pharmaceutical drugs to maintain my anabolism.
	I want to continue to work out at the gym, hold lean body mass, have a high rate of metabolic activity.
	I want to be able to train hard.
	I want to do that as naturally as I can.
	You ask yourself, what are the most steroidal substances in the natural world that aren't illegal, that don't have damaging side effects?
	Well, the rapidly growing antlers of all of the deer species have always been considered that in China, especially, and later in Russia.
	In fact, the Russians got really into this in the early 1900s, and they started to ask themselves, how can we get the most out of these antlers?
	And they developed what's called the Russian method of extraction.
	So prior to that, the Chinese would get these antlers, and they would boil them down and make something called pantocrine.
	It's part of traditional Chinese medicine.
	Yeah, very traditional Chinese medicine.
	But a lot of the substances, the delicate substances, were lost.
	And those delicate substances are growth factors.
	And growth factors are really cool substances because these are proteins that regulate tissue proliferation.
	Probably most famous would be IGF-1, which is a precursor to human growth hormone.
	people, anybody who follows fitness accounts on Instagram, it's just a nauseating stream of people on drugs, you know, amazing, but they're all on drugs.
	And one of the drugs they're on is human growth hormone.
	And it will have negative side effects because all tissues are growing, right?
	So you're, you're growing when you're on a pharmaceutical HGH, your guts are getting bigger, your skull's getting bigger, like not necessarily the results everybody wants.
	And so very specific, right?
	So I want some of those benefits, but I want them milder and sustainable over time in a way that's not going to have a negative impact.
	And I get that through, through elk antlers.
	So Again, we're talking about elk because they're a North American species.
	They're known around the world also as Wapati, which is the indigenous name for them.
	Elk or Wapati are an indigenous to North American deer.
	They have bigger, more powerful antler sets.
	And they are being farmed in the United States.
	But the thing is, is you can't really domesticate them.
	So if you've got an elk farm, chances are you're taking the antlers off either way, whether you use them as a renewable resource or not.
	And that's because you'll have loss in the herd.
	Out in the wild, those animals are going to lock up and fight around the rut as they compete for females.
	But if they're in a fenced-in area, they will kill each other.
	And so farmers have always removed those just so that they can keep their herd alive, you know, so that they don't lose animals that way.
	But eventually it came to be understood that there was a And it incentivizes keeping big, powerful males alive and not using them for venison because each year they'll reproduce their antler set, but bigger.
	Every hunter knows that.
	A three-year-old animal is going to have nice antlers, but a four-, five-, six-year-old animal, they start getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
	Well, that's what the farmers have learned.
	What we're doing is taking those antlers, but just the tips, the undifferentiated bulbs at the tip.
	That's really important and one of the reasons our product is so premium.
	Most antler products are coming out of China or they're coming out of New Zealand where they have different laws and rules about how they do it.
	We have, and where there's contamination of some pharmaceuticals as well that they give these animals.
	So we're working with clean North American herds.
	We're taking just the antler tips, and here's why.
	As you go down the antler, you have ossification happening, so it's turning to bone.
	And that bone material is good as a supplement, actually.
	You know, there's chondroitin in it and glucosamine, but you don't have those growth factors.
	Those are in the tips.
	And what we're doing is taking those tips, freeze drying them, which reduces them about 43 times in weight.
	And so they're going from wet organs that have blood and all that connective tissue, and they're being dried out like astronaut food.
	And then we grind that down and we use ultrasound in a very high quality organic grape ethanol.
	So imagine you make a vodka out of wine, a very, very high end alcohol product.
	That way you have no concerns about the GMOs and grains and things like that.
	Very clean alcohol.
	We use this amazing ultrasound technology to extract those growth factors and all those other substances out into the alcohol.
	And then we bottle that in mirror on glass, which is impenetrable to visible light, so that light degradation is not happening.
	We're not getting any of that oxidation from light.
	So we've taken what was called the Russian method and improved it in multiple ways.
	We improved it with the quality of the raw material going from New Zealand deer to elk.
	We've got a higher grade of alcohol.
	We've got a better extraction method and the best glass that this has ever been put in.
	So we think when it comes to natural anabolic products, like something you want to take for improved lean body mass, for improved metabolism, even for all of the different collagens that are in there for tissue growth and repair, and then of course those all-important growth factors, like it's never been done to this level before.
	So we're really, really proud of that.
	That product's all being sourced right here in North America.
	Wow.
	That's just extraordinary.
	Thank you for walking us through all of that.
	I was reminded of, you know, I did a video about ultrasonic extraction of rosemary herb.
	And the ultrasonic extraction is by far the most efficient way to do this.
	And if you have the right solvents, like you said, then you can do a really potent extraction, which gives you a real high...
	It's fast.
	That's the thing.
	I've heard people say, oh, I have this alcohol and herbs.
	It's been sitting on the shelf for eight months.
	It's getting stronger.
	I'm like, you could have done that in 17 minutes with the ultrasonic machine over here.
	But then you're talking about just using the tips, and I think this is really important because I've seen a lot of lower cost, lower grade deer antler velvet and elk antler velvet.
	You're right.
	It comes out of China, and it's pretty much just like ground-up bone.
	Yeah, that's it.
	Yeah, you're buying basically a dog chew toy that's been extracted, right?
	So you now see all these antlers.
	So these farmers who raise deer species, any of the cervids, they're looking to maximize all of their profit from all of their different resources.
	And so they're saying, hey, let's use these lower parts of the antler.
	We'll use that for dog chew toys.
	Those will be sold cheap.
	Then the mids get put into capsules.
	And then Very few companies actually, I don't actually know of anybody who competes with us in this market, to be perfectly honest with you.
	Mostly what they're gonna do, even if they have tips, is they're gonna cut mids and bases into it.
	And that's because if you go to a farmer and you say, hey, I want to just get tips, they need to now find a market for the lowers and the mids.
	And so they need to charge you quite a bit more for that.
	And so it ends up pushing the price point of our product up.
	But that means we're going to have more of those growth factors.
	And in fact, I bet you could find a lot of products on the market that don't contain any of the growth factors because they're made either with dead material, necrotic tissue.
	Some places, the way they harvest, they actually end up with necrotic tissue, which is really disgusting.
	I mean, you're talking about this isn't like a bone when you take it off.
	It's a living organ.
	It's more like your arm or something like that.
	So you want that thing alive and fresh and immediately frozen.
	So if you're getting this, you know, we could go down to Chinatown right now and we could find deer antler slices, but they're going to look like bone.
	They're going to be hard.
	They're not going to have any of that living material in there.
	So you want all that stuff in there.
	Because again, those growth factors are what's stimulating tissue regeneration.
	And by the way, I want to address something.
	I've had folks say to me, hey, IGF-1, well, is there a concern about tissues you don't want to grow?
	Right?
	Because if somebody had a A tumor or something like that.
	Do you want to feed growth factors?
	But there's also a tumor necrosis factor in there as well, which is really cool.
	So there's this natural balance of things in there.
	Another one I'm really excited about for folks to know is that there's a nerve growth stimulant factor.
	I'm a huge fan of medicinal mushrooms.
	There's been a big push for lion's mane and other heresium mushrooms because they have a precursor to nerve growth stimulant factor.
	In antler products, you have legit nerve growth stimulant factor.
	So if I had had a spinal injury or if I had had any kind of injury that compromised nerve tissue, if I had had an amputation, if I had had an organ replacement, if I had just had a surgery, anything like that, I would be really thinking about a product like this that could feed me those kind of growth factors that could be Pretty important to rapid healing.
	So it's not just for people who are into exercise, anybody who's had an injury, anybody who's looking to hold lean body mass, anything like that, the suite of 24 growth factors that are found in there are very comprehensive, and you don't have the side effects or problems that are associated with taking a pharmaceutical version of these growth factors.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	Okay, you may not know this, but I've shared this story with my audience.
	I'll keep it really short, but it was about a year ago that I nearly lacerated my trigger finger.
	I almost lost the finger.
	It was that bad.
	Yeah, it was an accident on the ranch.
	And the fingertip went numb.
	I lacerated all the lateral tendons, blood vessels.
	I mean, it was bad.
	It was like I didn't know if I was going to keep the finger.
	Can you imagine trying to go through this world without your trigger finger?
	Use it for all kinds of things.
	Yeah, exactly.
	But I determined that the bone wasn't broken, and I didn't even go to the emergency room.
	I said, look, I know how to stop bleeding.
	I did that.
	I know about nutrition.
	So over a period of several months, I used lion's mane mushroom.
	I used a lot of topical...
	Items on it and never even got stitches.
	And it has healed up to such an extent now that it's almost unbelievable.
	And it came back with extra sensitivity.
	So I ended up with like 200% of fingertips.
	Are you a superhuman trigger finger sensitivity?
	No, I have like this braille reading finger now.
	Wow.
	Yeah, it's super sensitive for trigger control as well.
	It's really odd.
	I didn't realize that if all my fingers had been regrown the nerves, it would be super sensitive.
	Maybe that's the way it was when you were five.
	But now I have this one finger that's extra sensitive.
	Yeah.
	Because I had to grow back the nerves.
	Good outcome.
	So that's really interesting.
	I don't think we've explored nerve regeneration nearly to the extent that we could.
	And I mean, I'm so impressed with, I feel like we're at a mix right now.
	We have a medical system that in some ways is like Civil War era.
	And in other ways, you know, especially on like at the plastic surgery level, reconstructive surgery, it's pretty impressive what we're capable of.
	Right.
	I would love to see more in that area where we get the finesse down.
	For me, like you, I'm the type who's going to avoid going into the hospital almost every time.
	It has to be something pretty severe for me to think.
	That's where I want to go.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I'm going to lose something if I go in there.
	They're going to take something from me.
	I'm going to lose something.
	No, they're going to say that you have COVID and then boom, you're on a ventilator, right?
	Yeah, who knows what, right?
	Right.
	You just want to avoid it.
	But anyway, I think that we've thought for a long time that once nerves were damaged, they were just damaged.
	And now we're learning that actually there's quite a bit of repair and regeneration possible.
	Absolutely.
	And, you know, so I just think that's exciting terrain.
	And I think Because, of course, we know that a salamander can regenerate a limb or a lizard, right?
	But with mammals, you just don't typically see it.
	And what's neat about antlers is they're the only mammalian organ that regenerates completely Like that every year.
	There's really nothing else like that.
	And so that's where we need to be looking.
	And in fact, there's so much cool science now.
	I've got a fantastic book here, Antler Science and Product Technology.
	And in it, they're talking about actually using early stage antler as a lattice for bone implant.
	Some really cool stuff that can be done here.
	There's unfortunately not a tremendous amount of science that's been done on the kind of extracts we're talking about.
	I'll give you one really cool study I just pulled up recently.
	This was done by the Benedictine University.
	East Tennessee State and University of Florida combined on this.
	But they were doing one rep max weightlifting tests.
	They had folks on 1350 milligrams of powdered antler a day, which to me is like not even the strong stuff, right?
	You're going to break most of that down in the gut, like as if it's just meat or something.
	So not even a very powerful...
	They're not looking at alcohol extracts like we're doing.
	They're just looking at the raw material.
	But here was their outcome.
	They got...
	4.2% increase on bench press over their control group.
	9.9% increase strength in the squat.
	Wait, over what duration?
	This was done over...
	I'll have to look it up, but I'll look it up for you.
	I don't remember offhand.
	I just grabbed these notes today.
	But they got a 9.8% increase in VO2 max.
	So when you're looking at longevity, a couple things you're looking at are strength as a proxy for longevity and VO2 max.
	That's essentially your ability to do cardiovascular work and how much oxygen you can process.
	Those are...
	You probably know, Mike, getting a 4.2% increase or a 9.9% increase in your strength training, that's pretty awesome.
	I would like an almost 10% increase in my squat.
	That would be great.
	An almost 10% increase in your VO2 max, It's pretty impressive.
	Absolutely.
	I think that what we need is more studies being done on these extracts because unfortunately that torch was dropped by the Russians and it hasn't really been picked up.
	So we've got a lot of studies on the individual constituents, but I'm really excited to see where antler products take us in the next decade as it's looked at a little bit more because just a lot of great opportunities in the longevity space.
	You talk about muscle mass and cardiovascular potential, but there's also a lot of hormonal balance that takes place from this or hormone augmentation.
	Because I think people's bodies are so messed up today with all the exposure to plasticizer chemicals and hormone mimickers and hormone disruptors.
	It's all throughout the food supply and the environment and all the chemicals that are in your body.
	Your carpet glue and everything else.
	You move into a new home and it's like this toxic stew and they've sealed the whole thing up in order to make it green and ecological so there's no not one cubic meter of air ever leaks out of the home.
	So where do the toxins go?
	Oh, you're breathing them in.
	Yeah.
	I had one of those days this week where I had to go into like Lowe's and Home Depot.
	And in addition to the fact that it felt like Costco in the movie Idiocracy, I felt literally poisoned by the time I left.
	The VOCs in there are so intense and it just makes you think, wow, all new building.
	There's a new restaurant in the town.
	I live in a really small town and we got a new restaurant recently.
	So you go in to check it out and you walk in and just hit with a wall of volatile organic compounds.
	So yeah, all that stuff's in us.
	The amount of plastics.
	I mean, I think back, Mike, I remember the very first plastic peanut butter container commercial.
	Because I remember it was a person opened a high cabinet, and the bottle of peanut butter comes falling out, tumbling out in there.
	And you're watching it, and as a viewer, you're like, oh no, it's about to smash, because I grew up with all containers like that were glass.
	So you think, oh, it's about to break, and then it hits the counter and bounces, and it was like, oh, wow, cool, new idea, plastic containers for regular everyday foods.
	I'm only 45.
	This is new stuff.
	We've We've been exposed to so many new chemicals and there's so many new chemicals coming out every day.
	And at my age, I'll just say it's a lot of people in my circle who are struggling with fertility.
	And while we were wondering if there was going to be this Orwellian depopulation strategy, it turns out, no, it's a new world.
	It was like a brave new world strategy instead.
	You ate all the plastic.
	It already happened.
	We're just not reproducing.
	People are living in gender-bender chemical toxic stew.
	Yeah.
	So anything we can put into our diet that can help to bolster, you know, and it's so interesting because you look at like, well, what is the precursor to our hormones?
	Well, it turns out it's cholesterol.
	What was everybody told not to eat anything of?
	You know, it's really interesting, right?
	Get off fats, get off cholesterol.
	And it turns out, whoa, we need some of that stuff.
	What's really exciting about antler products, too, in addition to what we were talking about before with lean body mass and metabolism, is that this is an animal that's getting ready for the rut.
	What it's about to do is go from its regular life, which is like eating grass and sneaking around the woods, to now it wants to fight Other males and then reproduce.
	So the hormones and hormone precursors are very dense in that material.
	And so it's another product that you can kind of add into your arsenal.
	I first got excited about this, you know, with my pine pollen products because of the, you know, testosterone and other things that are found in those.
	And so I've been chasing this theme of hormones for a long time.
	And yeah, antler's probably one of, I'd say antler, pine pollen, and just making sure you have those bases in your diet that are important.
	I think there's a lot of lifestyle factors as well that really matter.
	I think fitness is a really big piece of that.
	Maximal strength efforts and things like that are really important for your hormones.
	Ultimately, you want a diet that supports it because right now, whether you like it or not, almost all of us are eating a diet that does the opposite because we all have these plastics and these endocrine disruptors and all these things in our diet that are always chipping away from Yeah, it's nice to have a supplement that you know is helping with that.
	So true.
	So true.
	Okay.
	So again, folks, healthrangerstore.com slash Vitalis takes you to the page here and you can get the elk antler velvet products as well as the black walnut.
	And remember, like everything that we sell, we are also subjecting the survival products to our laboratory testing.
	So we're doing all the heavy metals.
	It's very, you're really the only one that I know of.
	When we bring a product to you, you run it through your lab.
	Just so people are aware, that's not a normal thing to do.
	It's very unusual in this industry.
	In fact, it's an industry that thrives on a lack of deep introspection into these things.
	And so what you're doing is so novel and so important.
	And I've watched you over this last, I don't know how long you've been, how long have you had the lab now?
	Since 2013.
	Yeah, so over a decade.
	You've put the industry on its toes, man.
	People know now, like, oh, I better be careful because it'll come out if there's metals.
	I remember you broke some stories early in on some companies that everybody assumed had all this dialed in.
	It turned out they didn't.
	And so it was a real wake-up call to the industry.
	So for us, to have you sell our products means a lot to us because we know that you're doing the deep dive.
	And the questions you guys ask I'll just say are a lot deeper than we're used to being asked by other companies.
	Oh, there's no question about it.
	I mean, it takes us a long time to even bring in a new product, as you know, because we have to go through all of this due diligence of lab testing, and that all takes time.
	And by the way, Daniel, if you ever get to Central Texas again, I'd love to personally take you through our lab and just give you a tour because we now have, I think it's seven mass spec instruments now.
	Yeah.
	It's really amazing.
	And we're going to be testing.
	The newest one we have is a triple quad gas chromatography instrument at GC where we're gearing it up to run dioxin testing.
	Oh, wow.
	Nobody tests for dioxins in their food products because it's a major hassle to do it.
	Sample prep is a huge pain.
	Wow.
	Yeah, and I just...
	What you might uncover could be frightening.
	Yeah, I know.
	We have a slogan like, never test what you eat.
	It's like, that's for the other people at the lab.
	It's like, hey, you eat at this restaurant?
	Yeah, bring some of that in.
	Let's test it.
	And then they test it like, I'm never eating there again.
	Probably like greenest people.
	You got to be cautious.
	But changing the subject, though, something that you would be interested in, and I got to show you this just because I know you'll appreciate it.
	You know, you and I have both done a lot of things over the last decade or whenever since we...
	We're visiting last.
	One of the things that I did, I worked with this Dawson Knives out of Arizona, and we have our own line of magna-cut alloy corrosion-resistant knives with G10 handles and oversized Features, like the finger guard, and then three points here where you can use paracord and you can make a spear out of it.
	So this is a bushcrafting knife.
	I've got to get one of these to you because you, among all the people, would appreciate it.
	I would love that.
	I just want to point out I see right in the blade profile that belly that you have.
	I end up doing a lot of skinning and so a lot of knives that are good everyday carry knives don't have enough belly to skin and you end up damaging hides and so that knife looks like it would really be good.
	I could see I could get my hand up pretty high on that blade and really use it for that job.
	This is a multipurpose bushcrafting type of knife.
	Of course, I mean, I'm not here to plug these knives, but this is more of a combat knife.
	Oh, yeah, I love that.
	I love a draw point like that.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I just got to tell you, you know, I mean, what I love about...
	Connecting with you on this is that you and I have, for many years, we've always, you know, deepened our knowledge about prepping and you, especially with wild foods and nutrition and nutrition science with my lab and so on and so forth.
	But, you know, year after year, continue to innovate things that work, things that work for people.
	Because this is what we're using every day.
	I mean, when you're out in the wild, not only are you nailing down wild foods, but I'm sure you're also realizing what gear doesn't work and what gear does work very quickly.
	Yeah, and trying to find that balance, too, because I always have this sense of I want to have...
	Again, I used the analogy earlier, but I have a slide that I use in slideshow sometimes where I'll show a picture of an indigenous person and an astronaut, and then I'll show a hiker.
	And I'll be like, which looks more like the indigenous person?
	Which does it look more like, the astronaut or the indigenous person?
	Because we do tend to go into our environment a bit like we are from somewhere else.
	True.
	That's why we have so many shows.
	It's funny how we watch shows where people go into the wild.
	Well, they're going to survive.
	It's this poor and hostile world.
	We didn't have all of our...
	We didn't become a species here or something.
	It's incredible.
	So there's such a balance because you need really excellent gear, and then you can also over-encumber yourself with it.
	So I love that game of finding what I really need, what I really use.
	I want stuff to be light, but I also don't want it to break.
	So I love the game of...
	Absolutely.
	Every year improving my kit, you know?
	And, you know, there's also...
	I got a lot of flack recently because I was filming a Rubik's Cube video and my hands were all muddy because I was just working in the dirt.
	I was doing some irrigation pipelines to grow food.
	And to me, like, having mud on my hands is not a weird thing, but people freaked out.
	Oh, my, your hands are covered with dirt.
	And, like...
	Well, some of the research on the microbiome and the impacts of...
	That's one of those things.
	You get your hand in the soil and you inevitably get that soil into you.
	And then you get that flora.
	And so if you're in healthy soil, it's so important because...
	We have a different gut microbiome if we spend all our time in the built environment, right?
	And there's been some cool research on...
	That's one of the things I love about wild foods is you get exposed to a lot of these microbes that are meant to be in your gut.
	And as I'm sure you've educated your audience on probably ad infinitum, it's like antibiotics really crush that native flora.
	If you weren't breastfed, you have less flora.
	If you spend a lot of time in chlorinated water, all these things are always chipping away at our health.
	You do want to get your hands in the duff or the soil because you need that stuff for your gut.
	And that turns into better digestion and better immunity.
	I think that was one of the big wake-up calls with COVID, too, is like, oh, a lot of our immunity is in our gut.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	All right.
	One other question I really want to ask you, and we're almost out of time.
	Are you doing okay?
	Can you do another five minutes?
	Okay.
	I appreciate your time here.
	Isn't it shocking that, like...
	Knowing what you know about wild foods and how abundant they are, especially in tropical type of environments, isn't it shocking to look back at, let's say, the American soldiers in World War II were facing starvation when they were on Pacific islands and they ran out of army rations, the American soldiers in World War II were facing starvation when they were on Pacific islands and they ran out of army rations, which were just heavily processed food, and they had no knowledge of what to eat locally, where the indigenous people, wherever There's food everywhere.
	But the soldiers would die from lack of knowledge about the food all around them.
	Isn't that just wild?
	My people die for lack of knowledge.
	Yeah, this is a classic case.
	And I've also seen headlines before where it's like, local people reduced to having to forage food.
	Like it's a horrible thing?
	Reduced?
	I don't know.
	They're getting better nutrition.
	They're getting to know their environment.
	Because another big component is when you extract wild food out of an ecosystem, suddenly you care about it in a whole different way.
	If that's where I get my reishi mushroom and then I find out there's going to be a development there, it's like, oh man, I kind of want to say something because I have a meaningful connection to that place.
	But back to your point, Even though everywhere you go that you need local specific knowledge, you can figure...
	Once you kind of dial it in in one area, it's not hard to figure out what's food in another area.
	So yeah, that stuff's a little shocking because the fishing on those islands, the coconuts on those islands.
	But it happened here in North America too when Native people kind of had to save colonists here who were dying in the wintertime because they didn't know where there was food.
	And so...
	We want to be careful not to eradicate all this knowledge too quickly.
	That's one of the unfortunate things that's happening.
	And I've been thinking a lot about how, for instance, we – I always wanted when I write something now to be like hashtag written by a human because we're entering into that AI era where all the media is going to be potentially AI generated.
	But then all the books are kind of molding and they're not available the way they were.
	Like my library is precious to me because I don't think there's going to be all that many books around, right?
	So what you could end up with is really quickly – because I had somebody send me an article recently.
	It was an article about foraging fern fiddleheads written in the voice of Daniel Vitalis by an AI.
	Uh-huh, right.
	It was shockingly similar to my voice.
	It was a bit of a caricature of me, but there were details about the foraging that were wrong, just straight wrong and even dangerous.
	So you're like, man, is this?
	And there are a lot of foraging books on Amazon now that are written by AI. They're not real.
	They're fake authors.
	So we need this real knowledge to be preserved because 20 years ago when you and I were telling people that there could come a time where you need to know this stuff, it sounded silly to people.
	I don't think it sounds that silly to anyone anymore. - Yeah, not anymore. - Everybody remembers empty shelves now, they know how precarious the food situation is, and they're looking at who's buying up the farmland, and they're hearing about the World Economic Forum's plans for us, and they're seeing the instability in the system, and it's like, wait, maybe this stuff Maybe I either need an agricultural plan or a wild food plan or a combination of both or connections to people who have food or some meaningful thing like that.
	And I do get concerned that this knowledge could almost disappear in a generation.
	So we need to be really careful about that.
	We need to guard it.
	So it's not a bad idea to get some good wild food books in your library.
	It's not a bad idea to sit on this knowledge.
	Even if you don't ever need to use it, it's a good investment.
	Daniel, I'm so glad you brought this up.
	Let me give you our answer to all of this.
	This interview that we're conducting right now will be transcribed, and it will be used as training material to go into our AI language model at brighttown.ai.
	And we just started releasing...
	Yeah, we have our language models.
	You can show my screen to my producers here for just a second.
	There it is.
	Brighttown.ai, free, open-source, non-commercial models that are trained on nutrition, herbs, permaculture, food production, food extraction, natural off-grid medicine, emergency first aid, and coming up, survival and prepping skills.
	So, Daniel, we've taken...
	I thought about that.
	Man, we've taken the beast technology, and now we're reprogramming it to work offline.
	Like, it doesn't work online.
	You download it, you run it locally, and you can ask it anything about food.
	Turning the lion into the lamb.
	I'm telling you, man.
	And we're the only people in the world doing this.
	Nobody's doing it.
	That's really unique.
	It's completely non-commercial.
	So...
	I've got to tell you, there are efforts like this underway to preserve human knowledge.
	Our model is called NEO, and I call this NEO's ARC. It's like endangered knowledge, just like you were talking about.
	We need to preserve all the indigenous knowledge, the indigenous tribes in the Amazon, indigenous Native Americans, indigenous Filipinos, indigenous Taiwanese.
	We've got to take all that knowledge from the Tibetans and everywhere around the world, and we need to preserve it because all big tech is just wiping it out.
	They're in extermination mode on human knowledge.
	Wow.
	Yeah, not just human knowledge, but on humans.
	On humans, yeah, exactly.
	So there are ways.
	I just want to say there are ways, Daniel.
	We can use some of their weapons to fight back with human knowledge.
	Yeah, you just gave me a little optimism boost right there.
	Well, you give me an optimism boost and I'd love if you have any articles or anything that we can contribute to the training of the model, we'd love to do that, by the way.
	Okay, great.
	I'll dig some stuff up for you.
	Absolutely.
	I'd love to be able to say the latest update has survival articles in it from Daniel Vitalis.
	That'd be freaking awesome.
	But anyway, in the interest of time here, we're about to wrap this up.
	I just want to say you're doing amazing things, Daniel, and you're helping a lot of people.
	I love the fact that you've got this very successful show series.
	And I just think that events are going to happen where half the country is begging to know what you know.
	Yeah.
	Well, I appreciate you saying that.
	It's been an awesome journey.
	And the thing, as you know about it, is doing this, you get to give back, but you also learn yourself.
	And so it's just a beautiful, reciprocal journey.
	I want to thank you for your courage over the years, man.
	I've stayed abreast of what you're doing.
	And your boldness and your fearlessness, because I know you personally, has always really inspired me.
	You've dared to say and do things at times where everybody else was hiding.
	And I've just been really impressed with that.
	Yeah, I'm not one to self-censor.
	We'll definitely put it that way.
	I appreciate that about you.
	I appreciate you, too, so much, Daniel.
	We should do this again more often and talk about what's going on.
	And, of course, if you're ever in Texas, you've got to swing by and show you our whole operation here.
	Let me just give out your website again.
	DanielVitalis.com is the website.
	And then also SirThrival is your brand name, and the SirThrival product line is available now.
	HealthRangerStore.com slash Vitalis.
	And Daniel, again, you're doing amazing work.
	Keep educating people.
	And you're always welcome here anytime.
	Thank you.
	I'll look forward to getting out to Texas again.
	And just want to say folks can find Wildfed on Amazon Prime as well if they're looking for a place to watch it because it is on cable.
	So I just want people to be able to find the show.
	It's an incredible archive of wild food wisdom.
	I would love to.
	In fact, you know what?
	Let's do this.
	After we get off air...
	I would like to talk to you and whoever's buying your show to see if we could get transcripts or just videos of your show to train our AI model off your show.
	That's a great idea.
	That would be a great way to do it.
	Wouldn't it?
	And even to help publicize the show, too.
	It'd be like, hey, guess what?
	This show's knowledge has now been put into this Neo's arc.
	I love that idea.
	Super cool, man.
	Let's see if we can make that happen.
	In any case, you're doing great work, so just keep it up, and thank you for joining me today.
	It's been a pleasure.
	Thanks so much, Mike.
	All right.
	Thank you, Daniel.
	Alright, there you go.
	Daniel Vitalis, folks.
	When it all goes to hell in this country, you want to know Daniel Vitalis.
	He is not going to be overrun by zombies.
	I absolutely guarantee that.
	Not only is he very proficient in wild foods, but of course he's also highly proficient in multiple modes of self-defense, and we'll leave it at that.
	Maybe we can talk about that later.
	A good guy to know.
	So check out his show on the Outdoor Channel or Amazon Prime.
	And then also check out his products at HealthRangerStore.com slash Vitalis.
	And thank you all for watching today.
	I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com, joining you here from the great state of Texas.
	God bless you all.
	God bless Texas.
	Take care.
	Alright, let's talk about some solutions for preparedness and survival based on what's happening in the world.
	Things are getting completely out of control, as you know.
	And some of these are sponsors, some of these are free.
	I'm going to give you some free tools here as well.
	First thing, show the camera on my desk here.
	This is all collapsed currency from all over the world.
	Trillions of dollars.
	Dollars worth of collapsed currency and then here's fake Hollywood currency of $100 bills.
	This is all going to zero.
	I mean, some of this is already zero.
	But even dollars are going to zero.
	This is the solution.
	These are called goldbacks.
	This is a 50 goldback bill.
	It's 51 thousandths of an ounce of gold is embedded in the bill.
	And that's why it's so thick.
	And they have smaller denominations like the one goldback here.
	I could hold it right side up.
	This is one one-thousandth of an ounce of gold, and we've done the laboratory testing, and you can find it at our affiliate website called verifiedgoldbacks.com.
	If you want real, physical gold that's highly divisible and has high utility, this is the solution, verifiedgoldbacks.com, and if you scroll through here, you can see all of our lab testing that we did.
	We actually melted them down, and we did all kinds of tests for the purity and And the mass of the gold that's in these bills.
	And check out the different designs here.
	Let's see if you can show that.
	You've got different designs of different amounts of gold that are embedded in the bills.
	There's a 50 that I showed you, and then there's a 25, a 5, a 10, and 1s as well.
	Really an amazing solution.
	Now, other things to keep in mind.
	We've got storable food right now at HealthRangerStore.com.
	I've got some on my desk here showing you also the IOSAT iodine, the potassium iodide, excuse me, prevention of the radiation damage to your thyroid.
	That's all FDA approved there, the IOSAT product.
	We've also got dietary supplement iodine there as well as the We've got the heavy cream, all certified organic, laboratory tested, back in stock, plus the red miso, the yellow miso, and white cheddar cheese powder, which is just pure organic cheddar cheese.
	No fillers, no colors, no garbage in it of any kind.
	You can find all of that at healthrangerstore.com.
	Now, continuing with our topic of preparedness, our sponsor in the satellite phone space is the Satellite Phone Store.
	You can find them at sat123.com.
	Connects you here to the Satellite Phone Store.
	And these are emergency backup comms devices that work even if the cell towers go down or if the power grid goes down.
	And they have packages with the bivvy sticks, with Faraday bags, and pre-installed software on a mobile device.
	That protects your privacy because it doesn't talk to cell towers.
	It just talks through the satellites.
	You can send and receive text messages and you can let people know you're okay or you can have emergency contacts that are successful through that mechanism.
	Here's something that I don't talk about enough, but there's a company called ShieldArms.com that has a new product, which is the S10 Grip Chop.
	And as you can see here, this is a chopped-off grip of a Glock 43X. Now, show camera one.
	This is my Glock 43X right here.
	Let's see if I can get it on camera.
	And so as you can see, the magwell, you know, this is a pretty long designation right here.
	You know, it can stick out if you're trying to do concealed carry.
	But if you go to shieldarms.com, they have their Grip Chop S10 firearm, which is available right now, and it's a shorter grip that allows it to be more easily concealed, but yet it takes full-size magazines.
	And then Shield Arms has their custom steel mags.
	Actually, that's what I've got right here.
	This is a...
	Here it is.
	This is the Shield Arms magazine.
	It's vastly superior to Glock mags.
	It holds more rounds.
	And it's more durable.
	So this is the best setup.
	You can get these mags and you can get these grip chop pistols at shieldarms.com.
	Of course, all federal laws apply.
	You have to transfer through an FFL and so on.
	Obey your local and national laws in order to do this.
	But this allows you to be ultra-concealable in carrying this outstanding firearm, the Glock 43X. And I think you can use discount code RANGER there to save 10% off that firearm.
	They may still have that code active.
	I'm not entirely sure.
	Now, continuing with some more preparedness items.
	Right here, brighteon.ai.
	This is our free downloadable artificial intelligence language model.
	We are training this on an extensive amount of information on food, herbs, nutrition, off-grid living, but also survival and preparedness.
	It's non-commercial, it's open source, it's free to use.
	You just enter your email address here, click register, and you'll be given access to a download page, and we're releasing new models all the time, including a 7 billion parameter model that is trained on all of this survival and prepping and nutrition content.
	Nobody else in the world has models like this.
	In addition, we have a backup comms social media platform that we've just launched called Brighttown.io.
	And if you go to that website, Brighttown.io, you can sign up.
	You can see that it's a big social media type of site.
	The thing is, see, it's got free speech videos.
	Here's a flat earth video.
	That's pretty funny.
	There's all kinds of videos here, all kinds of different viewpoints and opinions.
	Here's Dave Hodges here with a video.
	You can go there and you can share videos and content, and there are no central servers.
	It's all peer-to-peer, decentralized, and it runs on blockchain.
	It has its own blockchain coin here actually called Pcoin, which is modeled after Bitcoin, and it's kind of a reputation coin on the platform.
	Anyway, you can find out about that.
	Just go to brightown.io.
	If you download the app and run it, then this will even survive the internet kill switch because it doesn't need to resolve domain names in order to function.
	So that's brightown.io.
	And then, in terms of products that we have, guess what?
	We also have the knives that we've custom designed with Dawson knives here.
	This is one of our combat knives, and they're made with magna-cut steel, incredibly durable, high Rockwell hardness, they're flexible without shattering, they hold an edge, and they're almost corrosion-proof.
	That's the advantage of MagnaCut steel.
	So yeah, if you see this, this is a G10 handle with an oversized finger guard here.
	This is a really incredible knife.
	And because it's got three holes here...
	Show camera one.
	Let me show you this.
	Because it's got these three holes...
	See if I can get the light just right.
	Yeah.
	It's got this hole, this hole, and then this hole.
	You can use paracord and you can strap it to a stick and make a spear out of it.
	So this can be made into a spear relatively easily.
	We've got multiple knives from Dawson.
	That, of course, I'm the co-designer, and it's got a special wedge end here as well for escape and evasion.
	We are out of the Escape from L.A. knife, but we do have this Tonto version that we're working on right now that we may come out with, and then we've got some other really amazing...
	This is...
	Oh, that's another one of our combat knives, but we've got a bushcrafting knife as well that you can check out.
	Find all that at HealthRangerStore.com.
	Bottom line, folks, we have a lot of preparedness solutions for you.
	Some of them are free, like Brighttown.ai or Brighttown.io, or you can use Brighttown Social or just Brighttown.com.
	And then some of them, of course, cost money.
	Like if you're going to get your hands on gold, you know, it's going to cost you.
	You're going to pay for the gold.
	You're going to...
	Not everything is going to be free, obviously.
	So iodine, storable food, weapons of self-defense to defend and protect innocent life, these are the kinds of things that we are advocating very strongly right now at this time in history because of what's happening in the world, what's happening with the open borders, where we are domestically, with chaos and lawlessness getting worse in most cities across America, more illegals invading more states and counties.
	So be ready to defend yourself.
	And then, of course, the collapse of the dollar coming as well.
	It's accelerating every day.
	You're seeing it with food inflation.
	Now look at the cost of your car insurance, by the way.
	Look at that.
	It's skyrocketing.
	Health insurance, it's all skyrocketing.
	Things are getting more expensive because your dollar is worth less and less.
	Meanwhile, gold is absolutely skyrocketing.
	In fact, let me just bring up where gold is right now.
	23.84.
	Show my screen.
	I want to show the trend here.
	If you look at gold prices here, just over, what does that go back to?
	Like the end of October last year, gold was $1,837.
	Now, now it's almost $2,400.
	Look at that rise right there.
	Gold is skyrocketing in dollars because dollars are losing value.
	So people who are smart, who want to maintain their value of gold and silver...
	Well, it's doing exactly what it's designed to do, to hold value.
	Oh, I should mention, by the way, if you go to metalswithmike.com, this is our gold and silver coin sponsor, Treasure Island Company.
	And you go there and you can request to talk with them or you can check their real-time prices right here.
	They'll give you the price quotes here.
	You can look at gold coins like U.S. Mint coins.
	Real-time pricing online.
	And they have discreet, secure, guaranteed delivery, insured.
	So check them out at metalswithmike.com.
	They are our gold and silver sponsor for the coins.
	So those are some of our sponsors, some of the solutions that we offer, some of the free things that are available to you.
	Whatever you do, make sure that you're getting prepared for what's coming.
	Grow more food.
	Save your garden seeds.
	Get more items at the grocery store that you can even stockpile that will last a longer period of time.
	Try to get out of the dollar into things that will hold value, whether it's gold and silver or something else.
	Maybe you're going to buy a piece of land.
	Maybe you're going to stock up on ammo or diesel fuel or something that holds value.
	But take action now because the world is becoming more chaotic.
	Time is running out.
	Thank you for supporting our sponsors and supporting this platform.
	We appreciate you.
	That keeps us going.
	It allows us to build the free tools that we're giving back to you, such as the AI tools as well as the BrightTown.io platform.
	But together, we can make it through all this, and then we'll be the ones who get to help rebuild society on the other side of the collapse of this current system.
	And it is collapsing.
	But get prepared now while you can, and thank you for all your support.
	I'm Mike Adams here of HealthRangerStore.com, as well as Brighteon.com.
	Take care.
	A global reset is coming.
	And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook.
	It's called The Global Reset Survival Guide.
	You can download it for free by subscribing to the naturalnews.com email newsletter, which is also free.
	I'll describe how the monetary system fails.
	I also cover emergency medicine and first aid and what to buy to help you avoid infections.
	So download this guide.
	It's free.

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