What do you get when you mix a rebellious heart, a deep-rooted love for real food, and a personality bigger than life itself? You get Benji—and if you don’t know him yet, buckle up.
In this episode, I sit down with the founder of Yellowbird Food Shed, a man on a mission to radically rethink the way we eat. From slinging chickens out of his garage to building a full-blown grocery revolution, Benji’s story is wild, inspiring, and refreshingly honest.
We talk about why most grocery store food is an illusion, how he raised his kids inside the business (literally), and what it really takes to build a family-first, food-conscious life from scratch.
We get into:
- The wild story of how Yellowbird started
- Homeschooling, screen time, and raising kids inside a business
- How Benji’s wife Sarah is the real MVP of their food-first lifestyle
- What it actually looks like to build a home around intention, not convenience
This conversation will have you laughing, thinking, and maybe even questioning everything in your fridge.
🔗 Learn more and shop Yellowbird: https://yellowbirdfs.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey there you beautiful badass.
Welcome to the Keri Croft Show.
I'm your host, keri Croft,delivering you stories that get
you pumped up and feeling likethe unstoppable savage that you
are.
So grab your coffee, put onyour game face and let's do this
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Don't say I've never doneanything for you.
You are such a Benji.
If ever anyone was a Benji,you're a Benji.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yep, always have been .
I mean my full name's Benjamin.
But my mom always said eversince she was a kid she wanted a
Benji.
And I was her first son and shewas never a doubt.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Well welcome to the Cary Croft Show.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Glad to be here, Cary Croft.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So we went to the Yellowbird Puked.
Yeah, we went to the YellowbirdPuked.
Yeah, we went to Yellowbird.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
It was a whole thing.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
And then we saw you and your environment and then we
pulled you back.
We brought the country mouseinto the city and brought you
into our environment.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
How did you feel about us when we first pulled up
?
I mean, we have to set thescene, though, because we pull
up to Mount Vernon.
Kate is puking on the way there.
I thought we were out of thewoods.
I'm going to introduce myselfto you, basically walking up to
you to give you a hug and Kateis in the bushes puking.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Oh, stark white.
I knew it was over because ofthe way she looked, but then she
came back full of color and itwas like you know.
I've got a daughter who is 19who has had a whole life of
since she was in the car seat inthe back puking up oatmeal.
I know motion sickness and sowhen I see it it's easy to see
and it goes away quickly If youcan puke.
(02:31):
you know there's times when shecan't and then it's like another
hour before she kind of calmsdown.
But yeah, that was thebeginning of a beautiful
friendship.
Yes, it was, and yeah, then yougot to see our place.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I loved it.
Yeah, and tell the folks athome, like, tell in an elevator
pitch, yellowbird.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, we are a food company that carries a whole
line of groceries, but imaginethat you could know the producer
, the person who milked the cowor grew the zucchini.
Those are the people that we'vegone to directly and figured
out, in my opinion, where thebest products in Ohio are and in
(03:08):
the Midwest, and we buy it fromthem and then we make it
available through an onlinestore, just like you're shopping
for a sweater from J CrewMostly central Ohio, but also
I'm from Finley.
So once every two weeks weshoot up to the northwest corner
of Ohio, to Finley Lima Bluffin that area, and deliver up
there, just because we stillhave a.
It's like a.
(03:28):
You know we're a band thatstarted in Finley and you know
if we go there we still sell outour show.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
So uh, well, because when you got Benji, how do you
not?
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:38):
right, yeah, headliner, you know and your son
, his.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
You know you no one can see this, but his son's here
too, sitting here absorbing itall.
I'd love to know how cool youreally are in his eyes.
He just turned 17.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Imagine this.
Not cool at all, but here'swhat we've done, um, over the
course of our of our life.
We decided, my wife and I,early on that we were whatever
we were going to build.
We were going to do it with thekids.
And so we homeschool and I'vesat in the highest level
boardroom of the biggestcompanies in Columbus for a
(04:10):
meeting to pitch Yellowbird insome way, shape or fashion and,
from the beginning, dance.
My daughter or AC or Wes orMoses now my nine-year-old have
always been with me.
I've never gone partially outof my own squirminess and like I
need somebody with me, like mybinky.
(04:31):
But also they've now grown upand seen the inside workings of
it all from day one and it'sfascinating to just watch that
experiment unfold as they turn13, 16, 19, and what they do and
how they're doing their life.
It's incredible.
(04:51):
So, if anything you know, thegreatest achievement so far has
been, you know, head andshoulders, the kids and they're
watching them do life with us.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
AC.
Have you ever been on a podcast?
I have an extra microphone.
If you want to come, Okay, cool, I'm just making sure I didn't
want to.
You know, pass up.
Do you want to pass up theopportunity I get that?
You're too cool.
When I was 17, man, I rememberthinking I was like the coolest
thing ever.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Well, I don't know if I thought I was cool, but I
definitely thought I knewsomething.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
And I was like well that you know, the older you get
, the more you know that youknow nothing, that you know
nothing.
Right, where's your passion forfood come from?
Um, it started with having kids.
We, um you know my wife is veryintuitive, uh and um, very
connected to the universe, andthere was something that was
(05:47):
nagging at her that was tellingher when I stop breastfeeding
this child, I'm going to need tofeed it food, and the food that
we're eating something isn'tright.
And so we just started lookinginto stuff.
Well, the very first thing wasraw milk.
In Ohio, which is an illegalproduct, you can't sell raw milk
(06:08):
and there's reasons for that.
But we figured out that wethought that was the best thing
for this child, and so westarted drinking it, we started
getting it, we started feedingit to dance, we started building
a diet around raw dairy.
We were making our own yogurt,our own cheese or you know all
that stuff that comes in thatvein.
(06:29):
And then we went to sourdoughand sourdough starter for bread.
And then we went to gettingsome chickens and having our own
eggs and then growing our ownveggies, and then finding out
that we wanted to find pastureraised or grass fed animals.
Eventually, that then turnedinto other people mostly because
(06:51):
I wouldn't stop talking aboutit wanting to eat that way as
well, or at least try that.
And so when we would go out toa farm to get, let's say,
pasture raised chickens chickensthat were eating grass and
pecking through, you know, dirtand scratching, and that's not
the conventional way to raisechickens, because it's not, it's
expensive we started bringingback chicken for other people
(07:13):
and selling it out of our garage.
Hey, we got a whole cooler ofwhole chickens here.
There's 15 of them.
We're going to take eight ofthem for our family.
But then somebody wanted two,so we got them two, and you know
, you start slinging food aroundand then pretty soon you're
like well, I mean, I'm going toneed a refrigerator or a freezer
or whatever.
And then that then morphs intothe next thing, to the next
thing, to the thing that you saw, which was the Bedouin tent of
(07:36):
thousands of square feet ofrefrigerated space and freezer
space, because we're now feedinghundreds, if not thousands, of
families that way that also wantthat and are also figuring out
how to get it but can't get tothe farm.
Who in their right mind andschedule has the time to go to
six farms every week to pick uptheir groceries?
(07:57):
Not many.
That was a very old school wayof doing food.
And then when the newsupermarket came in Piggly
Wiggly was actually the firstsupermarket it was like, oh, all
of that food can come into onecentral location.
And in the beginning itprobably was a lot of farmers
bringing their food to a centralhub in the middle of a city or
(08:20):
a town that they could say, well, here's Gary's milk.
Instead of going out to Gary'splace to get your milk, you can
just come here and get it.
It's right here because he'sbringing it here and now it's
closer to home.
Jump ahead 50 years and you'vegot, of course, big corporate,
big ag, big pharma, big,everything that's just out for
that capture of the market andthe food integrity along the way
(08:45):
has been sacrificed and slicedand paper cut 8,000 times to be
able to get to millions ofpeople in supermarkets all
across the country.
And along the way, I think thething that has been.
Well, there's many things thathave been sacrificed, but one of
them is nutrition and healththe health of the land, health
of the animal, ultimately thehealth of the human.
(09:06):
Because of it, you can'tdivorce all those things.
It's a trickle up or downeffect and so, knowing that,
it's a little bit of a veil.
You know, over our eyes it's alittle bit of a catch.
Or you know kind of ignore the.
You know snapping fingers overhere because I'm doing a little
something shady over here.
You know snapping fingers overhere because I'm doing a little
something shady over here, andif I know that that's happening
(09:30):
in anything in life, I'm goingto be, I'm going to point my
finger at the thing and be likeno, everybody, look at the thing
.
And that's what happened withfood.
It was the thing that I justwent so deep on that I got to
the point of well, there's noturning back, this is the thing,
and I'm going to shout it fromthe rooftops and I guess I
probably better figure out howto get people the food that I'm
talking about, because that'sgoing to be the next step.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, walk the walk.
Something tells me you're apretty influential guy, though.
So just your energy in general,I feel like you have a
believability about you andyou're a charisma.
Have you always kind of beenlike that where, like if you got
on to something, yeah, I traceit back.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
The only thing I can remember is one time in eighth
grade I was going on a trip witha youth group or something and
we had those little cards thathave the stickers inside of them
that if you buy a Domino'spizza you get a free Domino's
pizza, and you sell the card for$5 bucks and there's like $50
worth of value in there.
(10:28):
I don't remember the trip, butI remember that I was relentless
with those cards.
My friends, my friends,families, my friends, whatever
it was like the thing, and Idon't even know now that I even
cared about the trip as much asI cared about like, can I sell
these cards?
And that was the buzz.
And so I've always been thatway.
My mom says you know, if I getsomething in my head, I'm
(10:50):
relentless, and until I get itor achieve it or find it or
whatever it is, there's no, youknow, and my daughter and I
wouldn't have believed her, or Ikind of would have believed her
, except that now that you raisea kid that does that, my
daughter's that way and my son'sthat way too, but dance
especially.
And I'm like, oh, that must beme.
And my mom telling me, I'mtelling now that to dance and
(11:14):
she's like, no, I'm not.
And I'm like, oh, that's me.
That definitely is me.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
I have such the reason why we went to you in the
first place.
Besides that, you were justcharismatic.
I'm like this guy.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I'm going to love this guy.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
But aside from that, I'm always curious about the
food that we eat and I'm justI'm a busy person, so I don't
cook, and so I'm always like amI just that person?
That just kind of doesn't.
I push it aside.
But even when I go into WholeFoods or Giant Eagle or whatever
and I'm like the produce islike meh, where is this coming
from?
If I'm getting the salmon itsays like farm raised.
(11:53):
You know, I just almost feellike shackled to the food system
.
What would you do if you wentinto Giant Eagle and you had to
shop there right now?
Like, would you just be like.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
So how would you?
Speaker 1 (11:59):
even go through the produce section.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah, it's.
It's really really hard, reallyhard.
I mean when we travel we takeall of our own food because I
can't trust being somewhere elseand being able to find what I
know is clean somewhere else.
I mean it's nearly impossible.
You know there are.
It's really a marketing game inthe supermarket, right?
(12:29):
You're looking at signs, labels, ingredient lists and people
know the food manufacturers knowthey know how to get you
addicted to food through crunchand flavor, and a lot of it's
fake flavor and these arescientific studies that have
been done that target addictive,you know, whatever it might be,
(12:51):
because they want to sell thatproduct.
Now let's just skip the wholeinside of the grocery store and
pretend like we're not going togo down those aisles.
We're just going to stick tothe outside and look at produce,
look at meat or fish orwhatever it might be.
The problem is is that once youknow something about any of it,
it automatically in my mind isgoing to be a well, there's, no,
(13:12):
there's.
If that's corrupt, then it'sall corrupt, like if the if you
know if they're cutting cornersand I know what they're doing to
put those eggs in that cartonto make it seem like those
chickens are living the lifethat I, that life that I know
they should be living, andthey're not.
Which they're not?
Because I've seen it with myown eyes.
Then I can't trust any of thisbecause it's all the same
companies.
I mean, you've seen the chartswhere there's like 8,000 brands
(13:35):
and they all flow up into fivecompanies.
It's Pepsi and Unilever andJohnson Johnson, whatever it is.
It's all these big giantwhatevers and they buy all of
the.
You know, pepsi just boughtSiete, which was a great brand
that was started by a familythat was like we're going to
start an avocado oil, cassavaflour, you know, gluten free
(13:56):
chip.
Well, they got huge and theycreated a great line of product.
And of course, pepsi buys themfor a billion dollars.
And listen, if somebody offeredyou a billion dollars, would
you not sell your company aswell, no matter how you started,
with whatever mission youstarted?
So I don't blame them.
But you know, now Pepsi ownsSiete and it's like well, am I
still getting the same product?
Because I know that Pepsi isnot great.
(14:18):
So I don't go into the grocerystore to answer your question.
But if I do, I'm there forbananas and I just get organic
because I'm like well, I don'ttrust it, but I still want
bananas for muffins or smoothiesor whatever we're making
Avocados.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Isn't it helpful that they have like the hard
exterior?
Isn't it kind of helpful?
Yeah, maybe, at least mentally.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Yeah, maybe that could be it, but you know, I
don't ever buy meat.
I don't ever buy salmon.
I don't eat meat from anywhereIf I, if it isn't from one of my
farms.
If I go to a restaurant, Idon't eat meat.
Haven't for years.
If I go to the grocery store, Idon't buy meat there.
I really don't care what thelabel says.
I know what's behind that labeland that's the hardest part.
So, to answer your question ina in a full fledged way, you are
(15:07):
.
If you are not as as I don'tknow if what the word is um,
sold out or sold to, as I am orsomebody like me is to that
process, you're going to find itincredibly difficult to eat.
You can eat healthy.
It's not like you're.
It's not like everything inthere is like complete garbage.
(15:27):
But I don't trust it.
It's like it's kind of a, justlike you said, you're always
going to have that feeling inthe pit of your stomach.
That's like I don't know aboutthis.
It's just something justdoesn't seem right about this.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
How do you manage, though, like just the day-to-day
life of having kids Like AC ifyou guys wanted to get a pizza,
or let's say he's like, I reallywant some Skittles.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
They don't eat Skittles.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
They don't no Ever.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
No, never.
I mean.
I have a nine-year-old who,during soccer season, won't
touch anything that has sugar init white sugar or like added
sugar and he'll look at, he'llknow.
And he'll look at, he'll knowand he'll.
Whatever he eats, a whole fooddiet, it's his choice, it's not,
I'm like listen, moses, take abreak.
Bud Like there's.
This is bare, like you know,this has barely sugar in it and
he's in and he won't eat it.
Now I'm like, okay, you know,whatever they, they've never
(16:27):
been to fast food restaurants.
The first time that AC went toget fast food with a friend from
Wendy's he was probably 13.
And he's describing theexperience to me like I wasn't
raised on fast food and it beganlike this Dad, we pull up to
this building and there's a,there's a, a faceless voice
coming out of a box asking uswhat we want.
We tell it what we want andthen we pull up to a window and
an arm reaches out and takes ourmoney.
And then there's another windowand immediately when we pull up
to the next window, it's almostlike the food was already made.
(16:48):
It's in there, ready to go, andthey just handed it to us and I
said, well, was it any good?
And he's like, no, it wasdisgusting.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
See, this is fascinating and like also makes
me feel like I'm such a failure.
No, you're not.
You're just not crazy.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
I'm such a failure?
No, you're not.
You're just not crazy.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
So can you walk me through a typical day of eating
at your house?
How does that go?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
You know, the morning looks like this we get up, we
go do.
We get up early and we dowhoever you know, ac and I do
yoga and then do a workout or gorun in the woods or something
before everybody gets up in thedark Usually in the summer it's
nicer because it's light earlierGet home, we start doing chores
.
Chores are not crazy.
It's like now it's go out andlet the chickens out or feed the
(17:33):
chickens, put water in the andI'm not talking about hundreds
of chickens, I'm talking aboutfive chickens, just our family's
worth of eggs, really, althoughwe eat way more than that.
We have to get sweet grass,dairy eggs, but everybody else
starts to get up and starts toget around and get their stuff
in order and then we make eggs.
So it's going to be full fatbutter on a pan and we all know
(17:55):
how everybody likes their eggsdifferent.
We have a couple.
My wife at the same time ismaking gluten-free oatmeal-based
muffins and also scones for acoffee shop in town.
Three or four days a week she'sdoing this, so we're also now
eating her oatmeal-basedgluten-free muffins, maybe with
(18:17):
it.
If we like those, which we do,of course, they're the best.
We're having coffee, then we'redone and breakfast is over.
And you know, sometimes I meanon a weekend we'll make oat
flour waffles or you know, bytaking oats and putting them in
a grinder and grinding oats andmaking oat flour and then using
that to make a gluten-freewaffle.
(18:38):
A couple of people in our houseare gluten-free they have to be
and so we make most everythinggluten-free.
If we're thinking about pizza,let me just pretend like we're
having pizza for dinner.
If we're thinking about pizza,my wife the day before has fed
the sourdough starter that's onthe counter so that it will grow
and be ready to rock and roll.
So that looks like giving aliving bacteria culture, flour
(19:00):
and water and it starts to growand bubble and create science.
That she then has ready andkind of multiplies it out,
depending on how many crustswe're going to make.
And, um, that's kind of sittingon the counter percolating.
We go through the morninglunches, leftovers from the
night before, the night before.
Our kids have a joke where wewere every night.
(19:21):
They say what's for dinner andwe say it's something new
tonight.
Guys, listen, here's what we'regoing to do.
We're going to get a pan outand we're going to chop up
veggies.
We're going to make veggies,we're going to make rice, we're
going to make eggs.
Maybe we're going to put that.
We're going to like fry thatkind of stir it and fry it, add
some sauce to it.
We're Ooh, something new stirfry veggies cook veggies and
(19:51):
meat and rice.
So you know we've got someversion of leftovers for the
next day because we've madeenough that we can eat lunch the
next day.
So we get all that out.
I go home every single day forlunch.
We get all that out and wereheat it and we make it.
And you know, at the same timesomebody might be getting
creative and they're like oh,I'm going to throw a tortilla
which we buy there's goodtortillas.
We don't make our own tortillas.
There are ways to cut corners ina good way and I'm going to
make a cheese quesadilla or achicken and cheese quesadilla
(20:13):
with chicken leftover from thenight before.
Or you know, we do all kinds ofstuff with leftovers.
I've made the craziest mashupsof an, you know, emptying the
fridge out, essentially into apan, warming it up and then
eating that on a chip or aquesadilla or whatever.
So that's lunch.
It's always leftovers.
Then through the afternoon, youknow whatever.
(20:36):
And then into the evening.
At this point you've got to getstarted at four o'clock.
Let's say, if you want to eatat five 30, you need to, really.
And we're going to make pizzasthat night.
Sarah probably gets started atabout four starts to get the
dough out and work the crustsout, and roll and stretch and
whatever you know, somebody isgoing to need this version and
somebody is going to need thisversion.
(20:57):
I don't eat nightshades, whichis tomatoes, peppers, whatever.
So I'm not going to have a redsauce pizza, I'm going to need
garlic butter.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Okay, hold on a minute.
I love you.
So that's the Tom Brady thing.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Well, for me it was a heart thing I had for two years
I had an irregular heartbeatthat I could feel.
I could feel the irregularityof it and I went in and got
tested.
I wore monitors, I did allkinds of stuff and I was having
10,000 occurrences a day.
To put that in perspective, youhave a hundred thousand
heartbeats a day on average.
So one out of every 10heartbeat for me was like boom,
boom, boom, real hard delay.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,boom.
(21:37):
They did the test and they'relike listen with your heart,
it's either plumbing orelectrical.
That's what they, that's whatmy guy said.
He's like if it's electrical orif it's plumbing, it's
dangerous.
If it's electrical, it'susually not.
For me it was an electricalthing.
I tried everything.
I mean I'll, I'll, you know, ifyou tell me that I'm going to
feel my best if I stand on myright foot and rub my tummy and,
you know, recite verses fromthe Bible, I will.
(22:00):
I tried everything food, wise,you know, exercise wise,
breathing treatments, all likeyou know, breath work.
Nothing worked.
And so I kind of just was likewell, I'm just going to live
with this because you could.
The next stage would be likesurgery, like get an ablation
and they can do things which I'msure help a lot of people.
I really wasn't ready to gothat down that path.
(22:22):
Somebody started telling meabout histamine intolerance.
I began to do a deep dive onthat and what I found in some
medical journals late one night,just up reading, was there was
a correlation between with apatient, between nightshades
(22:42):
which is plants that basicallygrow at night, so think tomatoes
, potatoes, peppers, eggplantand histamine reactions.
And so I thought you know what?
I have a bunch of customersthat can't eat nightshades.
They put it on their like whenthey sign up.
I'm allergic to nightshades,which I never one, I never gave
any credence to.
I'm like, well, that's kind ofcrap.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
It's a vegetable right.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
It's fine, that's crap, they just don't like them.
But number two oh well, I'venever tried that, let's try that
.
And within two weeks I wentfrom 10,000.
I could feel it every singletime to nothing, yeah, and I was
like, well, I don't know ifthis is real or whatever they
(23:26):
call it.
Like you know the placeboeffect or whatever.
I don't really care.
I'm going to stop eatingnightshades.
And you know, there's timeswhen something will be in
something or it's not.
Like I have.
You know I die if I have them,but for two years I've lived
without the.
I mean, it's torture.
If you have a heart situationlike you know, it's bad, it's
(23:47):
not fun, and so I'll do anythingto avoid that.
And if it means I can't havenightshades, then I can't have
nightshades so that's the nosauce thing on the pizza.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Alright, so keep going back to the pizza.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
So you got no nightshades.
You got a lot of shit going onin the house gluten free,
nightshade free.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Okay, so your wife's name is Sarah.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Yep, god bless her.
She's serving it up.
She is absolutely a saint.
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Speaker 2 (25:59):
So my son Moses is nine and he has this little sore
under his eye.
So my son Moses is nine and hehas this little sore under his
eye and kind of like he'sbreaking out.
You know, and Sarah tells methis is over the last couple of
weeks, this is how new this is.
She's like, she's like I thinkit's viral because he gets it on
his mouth too.
And she's like, but she's like,babe, he gets it every July and
(26:21):
I'm like, well, I do recognizeit, but that's weird that you
had correlated that specificallyto a month.
So she starts going through herphone and goes back he's nine,
goes back to when he was two.
Last night we're literallysitting in bed, I'm reading and
she's looking through her phoneand she starts showing me July,
june, july of 2000,.
(26:41):
You know, when he's eight,whatever year, that would be
2015, let's say 2016, 2017.
He's growing same sore everyJuly under his eye and gets it
in his mouth a little bit and itgoes away.
She's convinced it's viral.
It may or may not be, I don'tknow what it is, but that type
of thing, how does a woman, orher in particular, maybe men do
it too, but I notice it more andseems like in women, have that
(27:13):
intuition and that recall andthat gut, whatever to connect
the dots in a way that brings itback to.
She can show me on her phone,every year but one, that that
exact same thing pops up onMoses's eyelid.
So she's dialed into everyhuman in the house just like
that, including me.
So, um one, a tremendous burdento carry.
Um, I wouldn't wish it onanyone.
Number two she steps upunderneath of it and carries it
(27:37):
like a fricking rock star, ofcourse, and is figuring out
through herbs and sleep andexercise and sunlight and food
and allergies and whatever, tocoordinate this thing that we
call a home.
Right, it's unbelievable, butthat's to give a little insight
(27:58):
into Sarah.
So, as I'm talking aboutbreakfast, lunch and dinner.
Imagine, though, that it's anongoing process that is never
closed.
There's never a closed likewell, now we start from scratch.
There is no scratch.
We started from scratch 15years ago, and this is an
ongoing, perpetual thing thatfeeds into the next day, the
next week.
(28:19):
We know that if we wantsomething I can't think of an
example off the top of my head,but let's say sauerkraut, and we
want sauerkraut, in which wehave a great producer for
sauerkraut.
So we don't do this anymore,but we've done it before to know
.
Sauerkraut doesn't happenovernight.
It's a long process offermenting cabbage in salt
underneath a brine that iscreated.
(28:39):
The cabbage creates it on itsown when you put salt on it and
smash it and that's then whatferments and the bacteria
happens and you get sauerkraut.
So if you want sauerkraut andyou don't know who to get it
from Wholesome Valley YellowbirdFood Shed, then you've got to
make it yourself.
And in doing that you betterhave started that weeks ago,
(28:59):
right?
Because it takes weeks to make.
So it's these ancient crafts,these ancient arts that actually
give the food its nutrientvalue that you can't duplicate
just because you want sauerkrautin an hour and you thought
about it five minutes ago.
It doesn't happen like that.
People have made it into a jarthat you can get it like that.
(29:21):
But if we were 50 years ago,that isn't how it worked.
So that's happening, right.
Stuff's always brewing, bubbling, growing.
It's all over the place andwe're harnessing it and we're
creating product from it,whether it's cottage cheese or
and I don't mean the balmerfamily, I mean somebody cottage
cheese, sauerkraut, anythingthat's fermented.
(29:42):
You know, uh, every version ofbutter, buttermilk, heavy cream.
It's all coming from a productcalled milk out of a cow.
A mom has to have a baby toproduce milk.
Same in cows.
So a misnomer would be in mymind.
I would think it's likethinking that the pig is all
bacon.
The bacon is just the belly ofthe pig.
A cow giving milk all year,every day.
(30:04):
No, a cow has to have a baby toproduce milk.
And then, in order for us todrink that milk, what are we
doing?
We're taking that baby awayfrom the cow to take some of
that milk that would be going tothe baby to put it in a gallon,
to take it home to drink it, towhatever.
All of those things.
I'm not saying any of it'sright or wrong or ethically.
You should be deciding.
I mean you can decide foryourself.
What I'm saying is let's justknow.
(30:26):
Let's just know where it's allcoming from.
Because then when we do sit downnow for dinner, we've chopped
onions, we've cooked sausage orbacon or whatever we're going to
put on the pizza, we've, we'vegrated cheese, literally, you
know, hand grated.
The kids take a grater and sitin.
Great, you know, we buy cheeseand horns six pound horns that
we go through weekly.
So that's how much cheese we'regoing through, that's on the
(30:49):
pizza, whatever else it might be, any veggie that's in season,
anything you know, cooked raw.
We like it every way, we'vetried it every way.
But when you sit down afterstarting at, let's say, four
o'clock, at five, thirty or six,and you're eating that pizza
that you just made, that youknow what's gone into every
single cell of that thing.
(31:10):
Now you're honoring something.
When you sit down, you wouldnever eat that on the fly in a
fast-moving scenario, anddisregard it, and disregard your
relationship to it, becauseyou've put so—and nature has put
so much into it to just bringyou to that table.
(31:31):
Like the miracle of the factthat there's six people around a
table, that all are presentingconsciousness and are aware that
they're sitting there and thatthey're interacting with all of
these things that have had tohappen to get that food to the
table.
At that moment, all of a sudden, you're in.
What are you in?
You're in worship, you're inreverence, you're in awe, you're
(31:52):
in wonder.
And we call it pizza and wecall it dinner right, we call it
family and each other.
But what's really happeningthere?
And so doing that a coupletimes in a row, a couple times
in a row you begin to sacrificeeverything in order to have it.
(32:12):
Because now time doesn't meananything, because it's like,
well, what would we besacrificing so that we can get
somewhere else other than this,other than right here doing this
with this food?
Now, I'm not saying, you know,we're monks, we still go to
soccer practice right after, andthen from 630 to 930, you know,
(32:35):
crank at the fields with soccerand Sarah coaches two of the
boys and now AC's a varsityplayer.
You know, you can be ahomeschool kid and still play
for your varsity high schoolteam.
I didn't know that when westarted homeschooling, but it's
part of the system.
So he plays for the MountVernon High School Yellow
Jackets varsity soccer team.
(32:55):
So he's there five nights aweek doing that most of the year
, on and on and on.
We live a regular life.
I think in the beginning people,and even me, with homeschooling
, we're like well, are you goingto socialize your kids?
Like that was the big thingwhen I went 20 years ago and
probably still is for people whodon't know what homeschooling
means.
And I'm like, first of all, ifyou call sending kids to public
(33:17):
school socializing them and thatthat's a good idea.
Take a look at the publicschools and those children and
tell me that that's a good idea.
The result speaks for itself.
Um, you know, and I'm not thesmartest one in the room to talk
about it, but there arepsychologists out there who have
written the books calleddopamine nation or whatever it
is, and it's like, what are wereally doing?
(33:37):
And as a society, and that'sthe question that I continue to
ask.
It started with food, it wenton to family, it went on to
school, it went on to whatever.
It won't ever stop, it will bethe next thing and the next
thing.
I wish that I could not burnfossil fuels and not wear
clothes that probably wereinvolved with child labor.
(33:58):
It just really is really hardto be that conscious and still
function right, and so there areplaces where I've tried to
change my clothing and, like youknow, to first of all, just to
all fiber, so no plastic, so 100percent cotton or wool or
(34:20):
whatever it might be.
You know we're wearing plasticevery day and I don't want to
get down that tangent, but it'slike that's just another layer
of when you know, you know, andonce you, once you know, and
people are like hey, by the way,everything that's polyester,
spandex, any of the materialthat's in any of the sporting,
anything that you wear, isplastic.
It's fossil fuels, it's oilthat got turned into a material
(34:43):
that got made because it's softand easy and doesn't stink when
you sweat, it's easy to wash, etcetera, et cetera.
But then you listen to a podcastwhere there's a doctor on there
that's like hey, by the way,we're finding microplastics in
our hearts and in our brains.
Like I'm not going to make thedirect correlation that it's the
clothing we're wearing, but I'mwearing this 24 hours a day,
(35:05):
directly with the biggest organon my body which is permeable in
my skin.
You, directly with the biggestorgan on my body which is
permeable in my skin.
You know it doesn't take arocket scientist, and so all of
those things are happening allthe time.
Now, do I have to turn some ofthat off and just ignore it
Sometimes?
Yes, I don't do it with food.
Usually, 99.9% of the time, Idon't do that with food, but
(35:27):
there's just too much, it's toooverwhelming, it's too you know
what's the 0.001%?
that I ignore clothing.
No, when you say, oh for food.
Um, if I'm in a pinch like the,the most desperate I could be
where I'm like, oh, I'm um, likeI'm my blood sugar's out of
whack and I've gotten access tonothing, I'm going to walk into
(35:48):
a gas station and find sunflowerseeds.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
And I'm like.
I know those sunflower seedsare genetically modified, I know
they're grown with pesticides,herbicides, fungicides, et
cetera, but I'm in a desperatesituation and everything else in
this space is worse.
Yeah, so I'll take it.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
What about screen time for the kids?
Do you guys have TV?
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Yeah, oh yeah, we screen time for the kids.
Do you guys have tv?
Yeah, oh yeah, um, we watch alot of soccer, um.
So ac has a phone.
Uh, ac has a phone that henever uses, never picks up,
never takes in anywhere that wewould ever want him to be
accessible.
Like, hey, we need you to beaccessible.
Here's a phone.
The joke in our house is well,don't call ac because he won't
answer.
So.
But listen, ac's grown up onandrew huberman and on, I mean
(36:29):
he knows that answer.
So.
But listen, ac's grown up onAndrew Huberman and on, I mean
he knows that he knows what'shappening.
You know, he's listened to the,to the, the rich roles, the
Hubermans, the Peter Attias, thethe guys that we trust and um
and gals, and knows what it'sgoing to do to his brain and for
him he's not willing to makethe sacrifice.
Now Wesley, who's 13, justalmost 14, just got his first
(36:51):
phone.
There's nothing on it otherthan texting and you can call.
Now he'll walk in the door andhe'll look.
He'll pick his phone up andtake a quick look to see if he's
got any messages.
He likes to be dialed into thegroup chat and to the whatever.
But he also will tell us hey,you know, I'm averaging 32
minutes a day screen time andmost of it's brawl stars or
(37:13):
something that's like.
I don't know what it is, butwhatever it is, ac's approved it
, which for me, ac's thegatekeeper.
Now AC's already proved hismettle.
He's the one that now will thengo to the boys lower than him
and talk about like, hey, thisis what we're going to do and
what we're not going to do.
I believe this, knowing who Iwas and I didn't have a phone
(37:36):
because it wasn't part of mygeneration, but I was going to
tell my parents anything thatthey wanted to hear so that I
could do whatever I wanted to do.
I'm not going to regulate theirphones, anything that I figure
out how to do search, find andwhatever.
They've got the next step aheadof me or they're already five
steps ahead.
I don't have the margin in myown life to try to figure out
how to track their phone usage.
So forget about it.
(37:56):
You're not going to have it inyour room.
That's a rule.
You're not going to have itanywhere.
You're going to have it in apublic setting, which is our.
We have a big open living room,dining room, so all the screens
are going to live in that spaceand you're going to.
If you're going to be on them,that's fine, but you're going to
be on them with the rest of us.
You're not going into seclusionto do whatever you want to do
with them and there's noobjection to that.
(38:17):
My daughter maybe would havebeen the one to object to that,
but I wasn't going to pick thatfight with her.
I was already fighting with herin eight other places.
I'm not going to also try toregulate all of this stuff on a
screen.
So her screen time would beworse than the rest of us, but
at the same time she alsocarried a full I mean near
full-time jobs and she's 16, ata coffee shop and has more money
(38:40):
saved than I've ever had savedin my life at any one time,
including right now, and livesin her own apartment at 19 with
a roommate and is a nanny, andyou know she's killing it and it
, and so I'm like, well, if allthe things you could be doing,
all the things I was doing, andyou have a four hour average
screen time, like the rest ofyour life is pretty regulated,
(39:01):
I'm, you know, you, I was doinga lot worse and I didn't have a
screen.
Yeah, so you know, you justkind of got to pick and choose
all those different things andand really it's.
You know, in the beginning ofhomeschooling I was, I was
reading and studying about likeJeffersonian learning, which is
like you know, thomas Jefferson,these guys that were brilliant.
You know what were they doing.
They were teaching themselveshow to learn anything.
(39:24):
I'm not going to teach, I meanAC, and he's an exception and
he's very special in this waynot going to teach, I mean AC,
and he's an exception and he'svery special in this way.
But you know we had, we had acurriculum.
You know we had online programsand books and we would change
it every year.
We would get this, we'd getthis, you'd try this, you'd do
this.
I mean, he's going to go intothe last two years of his high
school.
He'll do a college career plusthing at our like our career
(39:47):
center in Mount Vernon and he'llgraduate high school with his
high school degree and anassociates in like a college
degree in business, becausethat's the program and it's free
and it's available and anybodycould do it.
You have to apply to do it but,like you know, he's going to
come out with two years of paidcollege for for nothing.
(40:07):
I mean, you know, pick a, eventhe average price of a school.
Let's say it's $30,000 a year.
That's like he's making 30grand a year to go to junior and
senior year of high school, andso he's taught himself how to
learn anything.
So if it's algebra, it'salgebra If it's reading and
critical thinking based uponquestions being asked about what
(40:29):
you read, et cetera, et cetera,et cetera.
He didn't sit in a classroomand learn that from a teacher.
He taught himself how to dothat and so if they needed help
and came to us, we would do thatand of course, you have to
teach them how to read and allthat kind of stuff in the
beginning, but ultimately Ithink that most kids are ready,
(40:49):
but you can't force them.
What do you remember from highschool?
Most people would say almostnothing, and there are certain
skills that you get and whatever.
There's all kinds of argumentsto be made, but what I'm saying
is that you remember the thingthat you're passionate about.
And so if they were passionateabout World War II, we went and
(41:09):
got every book and every movieand every model and everything
that you could get on World WarII and we went crazy on World
War II until they were done withthat and decided they wanted to
move on to the next thing, andthat included full regalia and
costumes and carving stuff andbuilding stuff and going outside
and having wars and whatever itmight be, however deep they
(41:33):
wanted to go.
All I really was here to do andam here to do, is to say
whatever you're excited about,I'm going to go so deep on that
with you that you're going tonot even think that there's
anything odd about this, when infact, there is something really
odd about this.
Nobody, next to nobody's doingthis, and this is what we're
(41:53):
going to call school.
It it's weird and it's crazyand it's fun and sometimes it
works and lots of times itdoesn't work.
We're the same as anybody else.
We fight and argue and, youknow, get on each other's nerves
and push each other's buttons.
Especially, imagine living.
You know, most kids leave forthe day and go and go and you're
only with them in the evenings.
Imagine all of us being alltogether every day, all day, on
(42:17):
and on.
But what?
I look back now and I didn'teven do it on purpose, but
looking back now at the way youstudy ancient cultures or, like
you know, you think about otherparts of the world where grandma
and grandpa live with you.
You know, and you watch yourfamily die.
Back in the day when you had ahouse, there was a funeral
parlor, there was a room in yourhome that you had that was for
(42:39):
your family, when they died, tobe able to put them there, to
have everybody over, to do theritualistic things that you do
when somebody dies.
You weren't separated from it,they didn't go somewhere else,
they didn't die somewhere else,they died in their home and then
they were buried on their landand et cetera, et cetera, all
these different things.
Now, again, you're like hey,you're living in the 1600s, are
(43:01):
you saying we should gobackwards?
I'm not saying we should gobackwards.
I'm saying, though, that thereare things that we've lost.
Maybe for not the better thingsthat we've lost, maybe for not
the better that we can harkenback to and then build our lives
now around rituals and thingsthat, for since a million years
ago, have meant something to theway that we developed as humans
(43:23):
.
And maybe it wasn't good that.
I just look around and I'm likewe're not doing so hot, and so
you know why don't you have apodcast?
Speaker 1 (43:31):
I don't like like a hand who needs me.
You really should have amicrophone in your office.
I'm sorry that I'm just and Idon't remember where we started.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
It's so good, but I'll circle the whole thing back
and I'll, I'll, I'll tie up allthose bows back to the pizza at
the dinner table and ultimatelyit's an absolute, radical
lifestyle change.
I'm not saying everybody shoulddo what we're doing.
(43:59):
It would be nearly impossible.
There would be lots of thingsthat don't get done functionally
, that probably need to get donein society, I'm guessing.
But at the same time, all we'vereally done and to kind of then
jump back to Sarah with herinstincts and her intuition and
(44:20):
the things that she feels likeare super important.
We've tried to listen to thatand I do too.
I have that same thing the gutfeeling or the whatever.
We've tried to listen to thatand and I do too, I have that
same thing the gut feeling orthe whatever.
We've tried to listen to thatand to respond in obedience to
whatever that would mean.
Because I think what we're doingas a society is we're
responding how we feel likesociety wants us to respond, in
(44:47):
terms of the speed at which welive, the tasks that we take on,
the things that we do day inand day out, without thinking
about it, when it's like, well,no, we should be thinking about
it, and when you think about it,you might change your mind
about something.
And then, when you change yourmind about it.
That's not even the hardestpart.
Changing your mind is not thehardest part.
The hardest part is, onceyou've changed your mind, is
(45:10):
changing your actions.
Because we are people of habit,we are part of the.
You know an object at rest,unless acted upon by an outside
influence, will stay at rest.
It's not easy.
It's not easy Everything that Ijust described to you.
It might sound like I'mdescribing it like it's easy.
It is.
It doesn't get easier.
(45:31):
You get little tricks and tipsalong the way that make it so
that you can continue to do itand not be completely consumed
with making food every day, butit is still a commitment to that
food and that process.
And we slip.
We're Costco members.
I walk into Costco and get bagsof snacks that are they're
(45:54):
fairly clean, but it's like Igot three teenage boys.
I mean, moses isn't a teenager,but he might as well be.
That's like locusts on fields,biblically.
I mean they are devouringcalories at a speed at which no
human could ever imagine and youcan't keep up with it.
And so you got to go get a bagof heavenly hunks to be like
(46:17):
listen, we didn't make our owngranola bars today, which we do
lots of times, but sometimes wedon't or we're behind on it
because we did something elseand like open this bag of
heavenly hunks.
That's the point.
Yeah, one percent, or whatever,of like we need a break to like
mom needs a break, mom needs abreather.
You know, she just cleaned upthe kitchen for the 90th time
(46:39):
this week.
Stop asking for another thing.
Stop asking for more granola orwhatever it is that you think
that you want in this moment.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Well, I think, personally people that are
meeting you for the first timeon this platform they're going
to want to buy from Yellowbirdjust because of you.
Like, I mean so.
So I, I know I do, but how,let's talk through that, like
speaking of getting new peoplethrough the door, because it's a
very complicated ecosystem.
(47:09):
I witnessed it.
I figured before I came in I'mlike this is going to be a
complex scenario.
You've got farmers, who are theopposite of tech savvy,
probably, if I'm going to guess.
You've got weather.
You've got logistics.
There's a whole thing thatyou're doing for the greater
good of decentralizing the foodsystem.
(47:30):
So for that alone, I feel likepeople that are listening to
this show should like get theirlittle fingers to Yellowbird and
start subscribing.
What does that look like forsomeone?
So if they're interested, wewant to get them through the
door.
What are we doing here?
Speaker 2 (47:47):
It's just like Netflix.
You're going to go on to ourwebsite, yellowbirdfscom, and
you're going to click shop nowand then from there you're going
to pick what you want.
You're going to put your creditcard information in.
We have a.
You know, we use a giantmulti-billion dollar security
system that everybody uses likeyou know, nike uses it so that
(48:10):
nobody's information getscompromised, and then you just
start ordering.
So here's the most complicatedpart of it.
We're buying your food withyour money.
We're grocery shopping for you,and so if you're going to do
that and you want a bunch ofproduce and some eggs and some
meat and some milk, you're goingto put it in your shopping,
your virtual shopping cart, andyou're going to leave it there
(48:32):
and then Sunday night atmidnight, every single week,
like clockwork, we stop that,that shopping window, we cut it
off.
So you're not checking out,you're not clicking pay now and
you know a receipt shoots to you.
You're just leaving your cartfull of your groceries and if
you come back tomorrow and it'snot Sunday yet and you want to
take eggs out, because you don'tneed eggs anymore, but you want
to add strawberries, because wejust added them, because we
(48:54):
just found out that they'restrawberries, great.
Keep changing your cart throughthe week.
Sunday night at midnight thatcart gets cut off and that's
what you're going to get thenext week as a delivery.
At the same time,simultaneously, the new cart
opens for the following week, soyou can begin to fill up your
shopping cart for the next week.
Let's say, you get yourdelivery on Wednesday and you'll
(49:14):
know there's a thing that youchoose, and you can choose a
home delivery, which we bring itto you on our own refrigerated
vehicles, or a truck pickup,which is our refrigerated trucks
in and throughout the city ofColumbus.
So we're sitting at Flanagan's.
We're sitting at Hills parkinglot up on 315.
We're sitting at theUniversalist Unitarian Church in
(49:36):
Clintonville.
It's all scheduled.
You see it, when you're pickingyour account information, you
can go to those trucks, yourfood's on them, because you
picked it, and so you go.
Timotheus is our driver.
You go meet Timotheus, you tellhim your name, he hands you
your order If you ordered allthose things I just said.
What had happened, though,between Sunday, when your order
got cut off, and Wednesday whenyou came to pick it up, is that
(49:59):
we had reached out to the milkproducer and the meat producer
and the egg producer and theproduce producer, and we had
said hey, by the way, carrie,although we don't say it
individually, we've collectedyou with the hundreds of others
of people who have ordered oncemilk, eggs, cheese, all these
different things.
Here's our order to you we want150 dozen eggs, or we want 200
gallons of milk, or we wantwhatever it is, because that's
how many people ordered thosethings.
(50:20):
And then on Tuesday, ourdrivers go out to all those
places and they get it all.
We're going to grab the milk,the eggs, the meat, the cheese,
whatever.
Whatever.
We're not storing in-house asinventory.
We're going to bring it back tothe warehouse that you were at
and then we're going to putthose orders together.
So your specific order youdidn't order 200 gallons of milk
, you only ordered one gallon ofmilk, but 199 other people
(50:45):
ordered milk as well.
So we're going to pull yourmilk, put it in with your order,
pick and pack, put a sticker onit.
Your name's on it.
You've already been charged.
That week, on Monday, we ranthe credit cards and your
information was all up to dateand good to go.
You paid for it.
It was anywhere between $20 and$220, depending on how much
groceries you bought, and thenyou show up or we bring it to
your door and there it all is.
(51:06):
All that food that we've justspent an hour describing
metaphorically, physically,actually, spiritually, all the
different things that we've said, is in that box, ready to go,
and it's to you.
And now you've got yourgroceries.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
So why would we want to do anything else?
Speaker 2 (51:26):
That's the question I keep asking myself.
And what I do know is is thatwe've got to make it so seamless
and flawless and reliably quickto some degree because,
including myself, everyone nomatter how much like me or how
much like anybody else you arewe are programmed to think that
(51:50):
if I want that computer overthere, that's on that desk, or
if I need it and I click rightnow on that little screen that's
sitting on that table overthere, that by tomorrow, at this
time, that should be arriving.
That's magic, that's voodoo.
And so, unfortunately, we alsotranslate that to food and we
think well, I don't have tothink about food, it's, it's
(52:12):
everywhere, it's sitting inevery brick and mortar place
that's within five miles ofwhere we're sitting right now,
and if I want food I can go getit.
I don't have to worry aboutstarving, it's right there.
And so until we begin to thinkabout every single thing that
we've talked about that getsthat food to that point, to
think about every single thingthat we've talked about that
(52:32):
gets that food to that point,we'll make the same decision
with our food that we make withthat computer, which is I'm
going to click right here andknow that perhaps, within hours
or minutes, I'm going to havethe thing that my body's telling
me that I need, which isnutrients.
And so I'm just asking numberone so I'm just asking number
one rethink it.
Number two allow us to be alittle bit slower than that, not
(52:57):
archaically slow, but a littlebit slower than that.
And number three, we're goingto do our best to bring you
marketing in a way that isn't ahard, gross sell, but is also I
need you to buy that food.
I don't exist, we don't existIf you're not buying and eating
this way to some degree,whatever that commitment level
(53:18):
is in your own life.
And so I'm going to try to putit into 30 second chunks or five
second chunks or cute littlethings that pop up on your
screen, cause I know you'rescrolling and you're going to
see it, or whatever it might be.
I'm not saying, like you know,put a handwritten order and mail
it to me.
I'm just saying we're trying tobalance.
(53:38):
This level of food is slow andwe live in an instant society.
How do we marry the two?
Cause there, there is a way, Ithink, but it isn't quite Amazon
, we don't have the ability todo that.
Speaker 1 (53:53):
Yeah, well, I mean, listen, I feel the same way I
felt when I was with you before.
I feel like you're all aboutthe right things.
You make me feel a little likeI need to be, like I'm feeling
some I need to do better.
Yeah, but that I think that'swhat's important.
Speaker 2 (54:09):
Right.
Speaker 1 (54:09):
So I think, for the people out there listening, if,
if it's tugging on you a littlebit, like yeah, I do want to do
better, maybe I will like take astep back and plan my meals a
little bit more and like get ina rhythm where, like, I can
order from Yellowbird and get alot of my good stuff from
locally sourced farmers.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
Yes, yes, I mean, you're talking about being and
in some degree the ugliest wayto say it is to be offended.
And I've said for 20 years,ever since somebody else said it
to me, if you're not offended,you'll make no lifestyle change,
and we need to make lifestylechanges.
And so please offend me, Pleaseshow me where I can do better.
And that has been what I'vetried to do in my own personal
(54:54):
life.
I think it gets harder, I thinkas you get older.
The more you try to identifyand detach from ego, the harder
it swings and the sharper theclaws and it's the ultimate
enemy in some regards.
Ego is good in some ways, butin other ways it's detrimental,
(55:16):
because you know I'm holding onto my own identity and it's like
, well, what if somebody showedyou a better way, and would you
be willing to make a change?
And so I've just tried to staypersonally in the space of when
we know something new.
Even if it's difficult, even ifit's challenging, at least try
(55:39):
to figure out what that couldlook like in your own life.
Speaker 1 (55:42):
Yeah, and I think Yellowbird would be a great next
step for people from a foodperspective.
Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (55:48):
It's a tool, and that is all that we want to be.
We want you to trust us withyour grocery money, some of it,
and let us go find those things,because once you eat a carrot
or a tomato, if you ask somebodywhat's the best tomato you've
ever had, they're going to say,well, my grandma used to grow
(56:08):
tomatoes in the backyard.
Eat you've ever had.
They're going to say, well, mygrandma used to grow tomatoes in
the backyard.
Or I grow tomatoes, I grow thebest tomatoes and they're right
outside my door.
And the answer to that isabsolutely, and please do that
as much as possible.
Also, if you can't or don't ordon't know how and you want that
best tomato, that's the tomatowe're finding.
And so when you've eaten thecarrots that were grown the way
(56:31):
our growers are growing carrots,you're going to, your brain and
body are going to taste thatcarrot for the first time,
potentially, and be like, oh,this is carrot.
The thing that I'm eating in thegrocery store is an
impersonation of a carrot.
It's an imposter, it's animposter, it's an imposter.
And so, once that happens,we've had hundreds, literally
(56:54):
hundreds, of customers say thisexact line we can no longer eat
the carrots at a grocery storebecause we've eaten the carrots
that were grown by Three Creeksor Creekside or that one farmer
guy Literally, that's the nameof the guy.
His farm is called that onefarmer guy, and we will settle
for nothing less, because we nowknow what a carrot tastes like.
(57:14):
And then to me then it's well,that's it, the job is done.
You've already made thetransition.
Let us keep bringing youeverything that is this carrot,
because it all is like that.
Speaker 1 (57:26):
Yeah, All right.
I mean listen, if he hasn'tconvinced you, I don't know what
will.
Benji, you are the best.
Speaker 2 (57:34):
Thank you.
Like beyond the best, this isgreat.
And ACU too, it's so fun.
Yeah, thank you, it's so great.
I just like to sit here withyou and do this.
You can come back.
Speaker 1 (57:46):
I feel like, All right, If you're still out there
following your girl, follow meon YouTube, Spotify, Apple or
wherever you get your podcasts.
And until next time, go checkout Yellowbird and keep moving
baby, Keep moving baby.
Hey there you beautiful badass.
Welcome to the Keri Croft Show.
I'm your host, keri Croft,delivering you stories that get
you pumped up and feeling likethe unstoppable savage that you
are.
So grab your coffee, put onyour game face and let's do this
thing.
Baby, ready to elevate yourself-care game?
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(01:13):
Croft Show for $100 off yourMoxie treatment.
Don't say I've never doneanything for you.
You are such a Benji.
If ever anyone was a Benji,you're a Benji.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yep, always have been .
I mean my full name's Benjamin.
But my mom always said eversince she was a kid she wanted a
Benji.
And I was her first son and shewas never a doubt.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Well welcome to the Cary Croft Show.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Glad to be here, Cary Croft.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So we went to the Yellowbird Puked.
Yeah, we went to the YellowbirdPuked.
Yeah, we went to Yellowbird.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
It was a whole thing.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
And then we saw you and your environment and then we
pulled you back.
We brought the country mouseinto the city and brought you
into our environment.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
How did you feel about us when we first pulled up
?
I mean, we have to set thescene, though, because we pull
up to Mount Vernon.
Kate is puking on the way there.
I thought we were out of thewoods.
I'm going to introduce myselfto you, basically walking up to
you to give you a hug and Kateis in the bushes puking.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Oh, stark white.
I knew it was over because ofthe way she looked, but then she
came back full of color and itwas like you know.
I've got a daughter who is 19who has had a whole life of
since she was in the car seat inthe back puking up oatmeal.
I know motion sickness and sowhen I see it it's easy to see
and it goes away quickly If youcan puke.
(02:31):
you know there's times when shecan't and then it's like another
hour before she kind of calmsdown.
But yeah, that was thebeginning of a beautiful
friendship.
Yes, it was, and yeah, then yougot to see our place.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I loved it.
Yeah, and tell the folks athome, like, tell in an elevator
pitch, yellowbird.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, we are a food company that carries a whole
line of groceries, but imaginethat you could know the producer
, the person who milked the cowor grew the zucchini.
Those are the people that we'vegone to directly and figured
out, in my opinion, where thebest products in Ohio are and in
(03:08):
the Midwest, and we buy it fromthem and then we make it
available through an onlinestore, just like you're shopping
for a sweater from J CrewMostly central Ohio, but also
I'm from Finley.
So once every two weeks weshoot up to the northwest corner
of Ohio, to Finley Lima Bluffin that area, and deliver up
there, just because we stillhave a.
It's like a.
(03:28):
You know we're a band thatstarted in Finley and you know
if we go there we still sell outour show.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
So uh, well, because when you got Benji, how do you
not?
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:38):
right, yeah, headliner, you know and your son
, his.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
You know you no one can see this, but his son's here
too, sitting here absorbing itall.
I'd love to know how cool youreally are in his eyes.
He just turned 17.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Imagine this.
Not cool at all, but here'swhat we've done, um, over the
course of our of our life.
We decided, my wife and I,early on that we were whatever
we were going to build.
We were going to do it with thekids.
And so we homeschool and I'vesat in the highest level
boardroom of the biggestcompanies in Columbus for a
(04:10):
meeting to pitch Yellowbird insome way, shape or fashion and,
from the beginning, dance.
My daughter or AC or Wes orMoses now my nine-year-old have
always been with me.
I've never gone partially outof my own squirminess and like I
need somebody with me, like mybinky.
(04:31):
But also they've now grown upand seen the inside workings of
it all from day one and it'sfascinating to just watch that
experiment unfold as they turn13, 16, 19, and what they do and
how they're doing their life.
It's incredible.
(04:51):
So, if anything you know, thegreatest achievement so far has
been, you know, head andshoulders, the kids and they're
watching them do life with us.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
AC.
Have you ever been on a podcast?
I have an extra microphone.
If you want to come, Okay, cool, I'm just making sure I didn't
want to.
You know, pass up.
Do you want to pass up theopportunity I get that?
You're too cool.
When I was 17, man, I rememberthinking I was like the coolest
thing ever.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Well, I don't know if I thought I was cool, but I
definitely thought I knewsomething.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
And I was like well that you know, the older you get
, the more you know that youknow nothing, that you know
nothing.
Right, where's your passion forfood come from?
Um, it started with having kids.
We, um you know my wife is veryintuitive, uh and um, very
connected to the universe, andthere was something that was
(05:47):
nagging at her that was tellingher when I stop breastfeeding
this child, I'm going to need tofeed it food, and the food that
we're eating something isn'tright.
And so we just started lookinginto stuff.
Well, the very first thing wasraw milk.
In Ohio, which is an illegalproduct, you can't sell raw milk
(06:08):
and there's reasons for that.
But we figured out that wethought that was the best thing
for this child, and so westarted drinking it, we started
getting it, we started feedingit to dance, we started building
a diet around raw dairy.
We were making our own yogurt,our own cheese or you know all
that stuff that comes in thatvein.
(06:29):
And then we went to sourdoughand sourdough starter for bread.
And then we went to gettingsome chickens and having our own
eggs and then growing our ownveggies, and then finding out
that we wanted to find pastureraised or grass fed animals.
Eventually, that then turnedinto other people mostly because
(06:51):
I wouldn't stop talking aboutit wanting to eat that way as
well, or at least try that.
And so when we would go out toa farm to get, let's say,
pasture raised chickens chickensthat were eating grass and
pecking through, you know, dirtand scratching, and that's not
the conventional way to raisechickens, because it's not, it's
expensive we started bringingback chicken for other people
(07:13):
and selling it out of our garage.
Hey, we got a whole cooler ofwhole chickens here.
There's 15 of them.
We're going to take eight ofthem for our family.
But then somebody wanted two,so we got them two, and you know
, you start slinging food aroundand then pretty soon you're
like well, I mean, I'm going toneed a refrigerator or a freezer
or whatever.
And then that then morphs intothe next thing, to the next
thing, to the thing that you saw, which was the Bedouin tent of
(07:36):
thousands of square feet ofrefrigerated space and freezer
space, because we're now feedinghundreds, if not thousands, of
families that way that also wantthat and are also figuring out
how to get it but can't get tothe farm.
Who in their right mind andschedule has the time to go to
six farms every week to pick uptheir groceries?
(07:57):
Not many.
That was a very old school wayof doing food.
And then when the newsupermarket came in Piggly
Wiggly was actually the firstsupermarket it was like, oh, all
of that food can come into onecentral location.
And in the beginning itprobably was a lot of farmers
bringing their food to a centralhub in the middle of a city or
(08:20):
a town that they could say, well, here's Gary's milk.
Instead of going out to Gary'splace to get your milk, you can
just come here and get it.
It's right here because he'sbringing it here and now it's
closer to home.
Jump ahead 50 years and you'vegot, of course, big corporate,
big ag, big pharma, big,everything that's just out for
that capture of the market andthe food integrity along the way
(08:45):
has been sacrificed and slicedand paper cut 8,000 times to be
able to get to millions ofpeople in supermarkets all
across the country.
And along the way, I think thething that has been.
Well, there's many things thathave been sacrificed, but one of
them is nutrition and healththe health of the land, health
of the animal, ultimately thehealth of the human.
(09:06):
Because of it, you can'tdivorce all those things.
It's a trickle up or downeffect and so, knowing that,
it's a little bit of a veil.
You know, over our eyes it's alittle bit of a catch.
Or you know kind of ignore the.
You know snapping fingers overhere because I'm doing a little
something shady over here.
You know snapping fingers overhere because I'm doing a little
something shady over here, andif I know that that's happening
(09:30):
in anything in life, I'm goingto be, I'm going to point my
finger at the thing and be likeno, everybody, look at the thing
.
And that's what happened withfood.
It was the thing that I justwent so deep on that I got to
the point of well, there's noturning back, this is the thing,
and I'm going to shout it fromthe rooftops and I guess I
probably better figure out howto get people the food that I'm
talking about, because that'sgoing to be the next step.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, walk the walk.
Something tells me you're apretty influential guy, though.
So just your energy in general,I feel like you have a
believability about you andyou're a charisma.
Have you always kind of beenlike that where, like if you got
on to something, yeah, I traceit back.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
The only thing I can remember is one time in eighth
grade I was going on a trip witha youth group or something and
we had those little cards thathave the stickers inside of them
that if you buy a Domino'spizza you get a free Domino's
pizza, and you sell the card for$5 bucks and there's like $50
worth of value in there.
(10:28):
I don't remember the trip, butI remember that I was relentless
with those cards.
My friends, my friends,families, my friends, whatever
it was like the thing, and Idon't even know now that I even
cared about the trip as much asI cared about like, can I sell
these cards?
And that was the buzz.
And so I've always been thatway.
My mom says you know, if I getsomething in my head, I'm
(10:50):
relentless, and until I get itor achieve it or find it or
whatever it is, there's no, youknow, and my daughter and I
wouldn't have believed her, or Ikind of would have believed her
, except that now that you raisea kid that does that, my
daughter's that way and my son'sthat way too, but dance
especially.
And I'm like, oh, that must beme.
And my mom telling me, I'mtelling now that to dance and
(11:14):
she's like, no, I'm not.
And I'm like, oh, that's me.
That definitely is me.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
I have such the reason why we went to you in the
first place.
Besides that, you were justcharismatic.
I'm like this guy.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I'm going to love this guy.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
But aside from that, I'm always curious about the
food that we eat and I'm justI'm a busy person, so I don't
cook, and so I'm always like amI just that person?
That just kind of doesn't.
I push it aside.
But even when I go into WholeFoods or Giant Eagle or whatever
and I'm like the produce islike meh, where is this coming
from?
If I'm getting the salmon itsays like farm raised.
(11:53):
You know, I just almost feellike shackled to the food system
.
What would you do if you wentinto Giant Eagle and you had to
shop there right now?
Like, would you just be like.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
So how would you?
Speaker 1 (11:59):
even go through the produce section.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah, it's.
It's really really hard, reallyhard.
I mean when we travel we takeall of our own food because I
can't trust being somewhere elseand being able to find what I
know is clean somewhere else.
I mean it's nearly impossible.
You know there are.
It's really a marketing game inthe supermarket, right?
(12:29):
You're looking at signs, labels, ingredient lists and people
know the food manufacturers knowthey know how to get you
addicted to food through crunchand flavor, and a lot of it's
fake flavor and these arescientific studies that have
been done that target addictive,you know, whatever it might be,
(12:51):
because they want to sell thatproduct.
Now let's just skip the wholeinside of the grocery store and
pretend like we're not going togo down those aisles.
We're just going to stick tothe outside and look at produce,
look at meat or fish orwhatever it might be.
The problem is is that once youknow something about any of it,
it automatically in my mind isgoing to be a well, there's, no,
(13:12):
there's.
If that's corrupt, then it'sall corrupt, like if the if you
know if they're cutting cornersand I know what they're doing to
put those eggs in that cartonto make it seem like those
chickens are living the lifethat I, that life that I know
they should be living, andthey're not.
Which they're not?
Because I've seen it with myown eyes.
Then I can't trust any of thisbecause it's all the same
companies.
I mean, you've seen the chartswhere there's like 8,000 brands
(13:35):
and they all flow up into fivecompanies.
It's Pepsi and Unilever andJohnson Johnson, whatever it is.
It's all these big giantwhatevers and they buy all of
the.
You know, pepsi just boughtSiete, which was a great brand
that was started by a familythat was like we're going to
start an avocado oil, cassavaflour, you know, gluten free
(13:56):
chip.
Well, they got huge and theycreated a great line of product.
And of course, pepsi buys themfor a billion dollars.
And listen, if somebody offeredyou a billion dollars, would
you not sell your company aswell, no matter how you started,
with whatever mission youstarted?
So I don't blame them.
But you know, now Pepsi ownsSiete and it's like well, am I
still getting the same product?
Because I know that Pepsi isnot great.
(14:18):
So I don't go into the grocerystore to answer your question.
But if I do, I'm there forbananas and I just get organic
because I'm like well, I don'ttrust it, but I still want
bananas for muffins or smoothiesor whatever we're making
Avocados.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Isn't it helpful that they have like the hard
exterior?
Isn't it kind of helpful?
Yeah, maybe, at least mentally.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Yeah, maybe that could be it, but you know, I
don't ever buy meat.
I don't ever buy salmon.
I don't eat meat from anywhereIf I, if it isn't from one of my
farms.
If I go to a restaurant, Idon't eat meat.
Haven't for years.
If I go to the grocery store, Idon't buy meat there.
I really don't care what thelabel says.
I know what's behind that labeland that's the hardest part.
So, to answer your question ina in a full fledged way, you are
(15:07):
.
If you are not as as I don'tknow if what the word is um,
sold out or sold to, as I am orsomebody like me is to that
process, you're going to find itincredibly difficult to eat.
You can eat healthy.
It's not like you're.
It's not like everything inthere is like complete garbage.
(15:27):
But I don't trust it.
It's like it's kind of a, justlike you said, you're always
going to have that feeling inthe pit of your stomach.
That's like I don't know aboutthis.
It's just something justdoesn't seem right about this.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
How do you manage, though, like just the day-to-day
life of having kids Like AC ifyou guys wanted to get a pizza,
or let's say he's like, I reallywant some Skittles.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
They don't eat Skittles.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
They don't no Ever.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
No, never.
I mean.
I have a nine-year-old who,during soccer season, won't
touch anything that has sugar init white sugar or like added
sugar and he'll look at, he'llknow.
And he'll look at, he'll knowand he'll.
Whatever he eats, a whole fooddiet, it's his choice, it's not,
I'm like listen, moses, take abreak.
Bud Like there's.
This is bare, like you know,this has barely sugar in it and
he's in and he won't eat it.
Now I'm like, okay, you know,whatever they, they've never
(16:27):
been to fast food restaurants.
The first time that AC went toget fast food with a friend from
Wendy's he was probably 13.
And he's describing theexperience to me like I wasn't
raised on fast food and it beganlike this Dad, we pull up to
this building and there's a,there's a, a faceless voice
coming out of a box asking uswhat we want.
We tell it what we want andthen we pull up to a window and
an arm reaches out and takes ourmoney.
And then there's another windowand immediately when we pull up
to the next window, it's almostlike the food was already made.
(16:48):
It's in there, ready to go, andthey just handed it to us and I
said, well, was it any good?
And he's like, no, it wasdisgusting.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
See, this is fascinating and like also makes
me feel like I'm such a failure.
No, you're not.
You're just not crazy.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
I'm such a failure?
No, you're not.
You're just not crazy.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
So can you walk me through a typical day of eating
at your house?
How does that go?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
You know, the morning looks like this we get up, we
go do.
We get up early and we dowhoever you know, ac and I do
yoga and then do a workout or gorun in the woods or something
before everybody gets up in thedark Usually in the summer it's
nicer because it's light earlierGet home, we start doing chores
.
Chores are not crazy.
It's like now it's go out andlet the chickens out or feed the
(17:33):
chickens, put water in the andI'm not talking about hundreds
of chickens, I'm talking aboutfive chickens, just our family's
worth of eggs, really, althoughwe eat way more than that.
We have to get sweet grass,dairy eggs, but everybody else
starts to get up and starts toget around and get their stuff
in order and then we make eggs.
So it's going to be full fatbutter on a pan and we all know
(17:55):
how everybody likes their eggsdifferent.
We have a couple.
My wife at the same time ismaking gluten-free oatmeal-based
muffins and also scones for acoffee shop in town.
Three or four days a week she'sdoing this, so we're also now
eating her oatmeal-basedgluten-free muffins, maybe with
(18:17):
it.
If we like those, which we do,of course, they're the best.
We're having coffee, then we'redone and breakfast is over.
And you know, sometimes I meanon a weekend we'll make oat
flour waffles or you know, bytaking oats and putting them in
a grinder and grinding oats andmaking oat flour and then using
that to make a gluten-freewaffle.
(18:38):
A couple of people in our houseare gluten-free they have to be
and so we make most everythinggluten-free.
If we're thinking about pizza,let me just pretend like we're
having pizza for dinner.
If we're thinking about pizza,my wife the day before has fed
the sourdough starter that's onthe counter so that it will grow
and be ready to rock and roll.
So that looks like giving aliving bacteria culture, flour
(19:00):
and water and it starts to growand bubble and create science.
That she then has ready andkind of multiplies it out,
depending on how many crustswe're going to make.
And, um, that's kind of sittingon the counter percolating.
We go through the morninglunches, leftovers from the
night before, the night before.
Our kids have a joke where wewere every night.
(19:21):
They say what's for dinner andwe say it's something new
tonight.
Guys, listen, here's what we'regoing to do.
We're going to get a pan outand we're going to chop up
veggies.
We're going to make veggies,we're going to make rice, we're
going to make eggs.
Maybe we're going to put that.
We're going to like fry thatkind of stir it and fry it, add
some sauce to it.
We're Ooh, something new stirfry veggies cook veggies and
(19:51):
meat and rice.
So you know we've got someversion of leftovers for the
next day because we've madeenough that we can eat lunch the
next day.
So we get all that out.
I go home every single day forlunch.
We get all that out and wereheat it and we make it.
And you know, at the same timesomebody might be getting
creative and they're like oh,I'm going to throw a tortilla
which we buy there's goodtortillas.
We don't make our own tortillas.
There are ways to cut corners ina good way and I'm going to
make a cheese quesadilla or achicken and cheese quesadilla
(20:13):
with chicken leftover from thenight before.
Or you know, we do all kinds ofstuff with leftovers.
I've made the craziest mashupsof an, you know, emptying the
fridge out, essentially into apan, warming it up and then
eating that on a chip or aquesadilla or whatever.
So that's lunch.
It's always leftovers.
Then through the afternoon, youknow whatever.
(20:36):
And then into the evening.
At this point you've got to getstarted at four o'clock.
Let's say, if you want to eatat five 30, you need to, really.
And we're going to make pizzasthat night.
Sarah probably gets started atabout four starts to get the
dough out and work the crustsout, and roll and stretch and
whatever you know, somebody isgoing to need this version and
somebody is going to need thisversion.
(20:57):
I don't eat nightshades, whichis tomatoes, peppers, whatever.
So I'm not going to have a redsauce pizza, I'm going to need
garlic butter.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Okay, hold on a minute.
I love you.
So that's the Tom Brady thing.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Well, for me it was a heart thing I had for two years
I had an irregular heartbeatthat I could feel.
I could feel the irregularityof it and I went in and got
tested.
I wore monitors, I did allkinds of stuff and I was having
10,000 occurrences a day.
To put that in perspective, youhave a hundred thousand
heartbeats a day on average.
So one out of every 10heartbeat for me was like boom,
boom, boom, real hard delay.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,boom.
(21:37):
They did the test and they'relike listen with your heart,
it's either plumbing orelectrical.
That's what they, that's whatmy guy said.
He's like if it's electrical orif it's plumbing, it's
dangerous.
If it's electrical, it'susually not.
For me it was an electricalthing.
I tried everything.
I mean I'll, I'll, you know, ifyou tell me that I'm going to
feel my best if I stand on myright foot and rub my tummy and,
you know, recite verses fromthe Bible, I will.
(22:00):
I tried everything food, wise,you know, exercise wise,
breathing treatments, all likeyou know, breath work.
Nothing worked.
And so I kind of just was likewell, I'm just going to live
with this because you could.
The next stage would be likesurgery, like get an ablation
and they can do things which I'msure help a lot of people.
I really wasn't ready to gothat down that path.
(22:22):
Somebody started telling meabout histamine intolerance.
I began to do a deep dive onthat and what I found in some
medical journals late one night,just up reading, was there was
a correlation between with apatient, between nightshades
(22:42):
which is plants that basicallygrow at night, so think tomatoes
, potatoes, peppers, eggplantand histamine reactions.
And so I thought you know what?
I have a bunch of customersthat can't eat nightshades.
They put it on their like whenthey sign up.
I'm allergic to nightshades,which I never one, I never gave
any credence to.
I'm like, well, that's kind ofcrap.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
It's a vegetable right.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
It's fine, that's crap, they just don't like them.
But number two oh well, I'venever tried that, let's try that
.
And within two weeks I wentfrom 10,000.
I could feel it every singletime to nothing, yeah, and I was
like, well, I don't know ifthis is real or whatever they
(23:26):
call it.
Like you know the placeboeffect or whatever.
I don't really care.
I'm going to stop eatingnightshades.
And you know, there's timeswhen something will be in
something or it's not.
Like I have.
You know I die if I have them,but for two years I've lived
without the.
I mean, it's torture.
If you have a heart situationlike you know, it's bad, it's
(23:47):
not fun, and so I'll do anythingto avoid that.
And if it means I can't havenightshades, then I can't have
nightshades so that's the nosauce thing on the pizza.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Alright, so keep going back to the pizza.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
So you got no nightshades.
You got a lot of shit going onin the house gluten free,
nightshade free.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Okay, so your wife's name is Sarah.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Yep, god bless her.
She's serving it up.
She is absolutely a saint.
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Speaker 2 (25:59):
So my son Moses is nine and he has this little sore
under his eye.
So my son Moses is nine and hehas this little sore under his
eye and kind of like he'sbreaking out.
You know, and Sarah tells methis is over the last couple of
weeks, this is how new this is.
She's like, she's like I thinkit's viral because he gets it on
his mouth too.
And she's like, but she's like,babe, he gets it every July and
(26:21):
I'm like, well, I do recognizeit, but that's weird that you
had correlated that specificallyto a month.
So she starts going through herphone and goes back he's nine,
goes back to when he was two.
Last night we're literallysitting in bed, I'm reading and
she's looking through her phoneand she starts showing me July,
june, july of 2000,.
(26:41):
You know, when he's eight,whatever year, that would be
2015, let's say 2016, 2017.
He's growing same sore everyJuly under his eye and gets it
in his mouth a little bit and itgoes away.
She's convinced it's viral.
It may or may not be, I don'tknow what it is, but that type
of thing, how does a woman, orher in particular, maybe men do
it too, but I notice it more andseems like in women, have that
(27:13):
intuition and that recall andthat gut, whatever to connect
the dots in a way that brings itback to.
She can show me on her phone,every year but one, that that
exact same thing pops up onMoses's eyelid.
So she's dialed into everyhuman in the house just like
that, including me.
So, um one, a tremendous burdento carry.
Um, I wouldn't wish it onanyone.
Number two she steps upunderneath of it and carries it
(27:37):
like a fricking rock star, ofcourse, and is figuring out
through herbs and sleep andexercise and sunlight and food
and allergies and whatever, tocoordinate this thing that we
call a home.
Right, it's unbelievable, butthat's to give a little insight
(27:58):
into Sarah.
So, as I'm talking aboutbreakfast, lunch and dinner.
Imagine, though, that it's anongoing process that is never
closed.
There's never a closed likewell, now we start from scratch.
There is no scratch.
We started from scratch 15years ago, and this is an
ongoing, perpetual thing thatfeeds into the next day, the
next week.
(28:19):
We know that if we wantsomething I can't think of an
example off the top of my head,but let's say sauerkraut, and we
want sauerkraut, in which wehave a great producer for
sauerkraut.
So we don't do this anymore,but we've done it before to know
.
Sauerkraut doesn't happenovernight.
It's a long process offermenting cabbage in salt
underneath a brine that iscreated.
(28:39):
The cabbage creates it on itsown when you put salt on it and
smash it and that's then whatferments and the bacteria
happens and you get sauerkraut.
So if you want sauerkraut andyou don't know who to get it
from Wholesome Valley YellowbirdFood Shed, then you've got to
make it yourself.
And in doing that you betterhave started that weeks ago,
(28:59):
right?
Because it takes weeks to make.
So it's these ancient crafts,these ancient arts that actually
give the food its nutrientvalue that you can't duplicate
just because you want sauerkrautin an hour and you thought
about it five minutes ago.
It doesn't happen like that.
People have made it into a jarthat you can get it like that.
(29:21):
But if we were 50 years ago,that isn't how it worked.
So that's happening, right.
Stuff's always brewing, bubbling, growing.
It's all over the place andwe're harnessing it and we're
creating product from it,whether it's cottage cheese or
and I don't mean the balmerfamily, I mean somebody cottage
cheese, sauerkraut, anythingthat's fermented.
(29:42):
You know, uh, every version ofbutter, buttermilk, heavy cream.
It's all coming from a productcalled milk out of a cow.
A mom has to have a baby toproduce milk.
Same in cows.
So a misnomer would be in mymind.
I would think it's likethinking that the pig is all
bacon.
The bacon is just the belly ofthe pig.
A cow giving milk all year,every day.
(30:04):
No, a cow has to have a baby toproduce milk.
And then, in order for us todrink that milk, what are we
doing?
We're taking that baby awayfrom the cow to take some of
that milk that would be going tothe baby to put it in a gallon,
to take it home to drink it, towhatever.
All of those things.
I'm not saying any of it'sright or wrong or ethically.
You should be deciding.
I mean you can decide foryourself.
What I'm saying is let's justknow.
(30:26):
Let's just know where it's allcoming from.
Because then when we do sit downnow for dinner, we've chopped
onions, we've cooked sausage orbacon or whatever we're going to
put on the pizza, we've, we'vegrated cheese, literally, you
know, hand grated.
The kids take a grater and sitin.
Great, you know, we buy cheeseand horns six pound horns that
we go through weekly.
So that's how much cheese we'regoing through, that's on the
(30:49):
pizza, whatever else it might be, any veggie that's in season,
anything you know, cooked raw.
We like it every way, we'vetried it every way.
But when you sit down afterstarting at, let's say, four
o'clock, at five, thirty or six,and you're eating that pizza
that you just made, that youknow what's gone into every
single cell of that thing.
(31:10):
Now you're honoring something.
When you sit down, you wouldnever eat that on the fly in a
fast-moving scenario, anddisregard it, and disregard your
relationship to it, becauseyou've put so—and nature has put
so much into it to just bringyou to that table.
(31:31):
Like the miracle of the factthat there's six people around a
table, that all are presentingconsciousness and are aware that
they're sitting there and thatthey're interacting with all of
these things that have had tohappen to get that food to the
table.
At that moment, all of a sudden, you're in.
What are you in?
You're in worship, you're inreverence, you're in awe, you're
(31:52):
in wonder.
And we call it pizza and wecall it dinner right, we call it
family and each other.
But what's really happeningthere?
And so doing that a coupletimes in a row, a couple times
in a row you begin to sacrificeeverything in order to have it.
(32:12):
Because now time doesn't meananything, because it's like,
well, what would we besacrificing so that we can get
somewhere else other than this,other than right here doing this
with this food?
Now, I'm not saying, you know,we're monks, we still go to
soccer practice right after, andthen from 630 to 930, you know,
(32:35):
crank at the fields with soccerand Sarah coaches two of the
boys and now AC's a varsityplayer.
You know, you can be ahomeschool kid and still play
for your varsity high schoolteam.
I didn't know that when westarted homeschooling, but it's
part of the system.
So he plays for the MountVernon High School Yellow
Jackets varsity soccer team.
(32:55):
So he's there five nights aweek doing that most of the year
, on and on and on.
We live a regular life.
I think in the beginning people,and even me, with homeschooling
, we're like well, are you goingto socialize your kids?
Like that was the big thingwhen I went 20 years ago and
probably still is for people whodon't know what homeschooling
means.
And I'm like, first of all, ifyou call sending kids to public
(33:17):
school socializing them and thatthat's a good idea.
Take a look at the publicschools and those children and
tell me that that's a good idea.
The result speaks for itself.
Um, you know, and I'm not thesmartest one in the room to talk
about it, but there arepsychologists out there who have
written the books calleddopamine nation or whatever it
is, and it's like, what are wereally doing?
(33:37):
And as a society, and that'sthe question that I continue to
ask.
It started with food, it wenton to family, it went on to
school, it went on to whatever.
It won't ever stop, it will bethe next thing and the next
thing.
I wish that I could not burnfossil fuels and not wear
clothes that probably wereinvolved with child labor.
(33:58):
It just really is really hardto be that conscious and still
function right, and so there areplaces where I've tried to
change my clothing and, like youknow, to first of all, just to
all fiber, so no plastic, so 100percent cotton or wool or
(34:20):
whatever it might be.
You know we're wearing plasticevery day and I don't want to
get down that tangent, but it'slike that's just another layer
of when you know, you know, andonce you, once you know, and
people are like hey, by the way,everything that's polyester,
spandex, any of the materialthat's in any of the sporting,
anything that you wear, isplastic.
It's fossil fuels, it's oilthat got turned into a material
(34:43):
that got made because it's softand easy and doesn't stink when
you sweat, it's easy to wash, etcetera, et cetera.
But then you listen to a podcastwhere there's a doctor on there
that's like hey, by the way,we're finding microplastics in
our hearts and in our brains.
Like I'm not going to make thedirect correlation that it's the
clothing we're wearing, but I'mwearing this 24 hours a day,
(35:05):
directly with the biggest organon my body which is permeable in
my skin.
You, directly with the biggestorgan on my body which is
permeable in my skin.
You know it doesn't take arocket scientist, and so all of
those things are happening allthe time.
Now, do I have to turn some ofthat off and just ignore it
Sometimes?
Yes, I don't do it with food.
Usually, 99.9% of the time, Idon't do that with food, but
(35:27):
there's just too much, it's toooverwhelming, it's too you know
what's the 0.001%?
that I ignore clothing.
No, when you say, oh for food.
Um, if I'm in a pinch like the,the most desperate I could be
where I'm like, oh, I'm um, likeI'm my blood sugar's out of
whack and I've gotten access tonothing, I'm going to walk into
(35:48):
a gas station and find sunflowerseeds.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
And I'm like.
I know those sunflower seedsare genetically modified, I know
they're grown with pesticides,herbicides, fungicides, et
cetera, but I'm in a desperatesituation and everything else in
this space is worse.
Yeah, so I'll take it.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
What about screen time for the kids?
Do you guys have TV?
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Yeah, oh yeah, we screen time for the kids.
Do you guys have tv?
Yeah, oh yeah, um, we watch alot of soccer, um.
So ac has a phone.
Uh, ac has a phone that henever uses, never picks up,
never takes in anywhere that wewould ever want him to be
accessible.
Like, hey, we need you to beaccessible.
Here's a phone.
The joke in our house is well,don't call ac because he won't
answer.
So.
But listen, ac's grown up onandrew huberman and on, I mean
(36:29):
he knows that answer.
So.
But listen, ac's grown up onAndrew Huberman and on, I mean
he knows that he knows what'shappening.
You know, he's listened to the,to the, the rich roles, the
Hubermans, the Peter Attias, thethe guys that we trust and um
and gals, and knows what it'sgoing to do to his brain and for
him he's not willing to makethe sacrifice.
Now Wesley, who's 13, justalmost 14, just got his first
(36:51):
phone.
There's nothing on it otherthan texting and you can call.
Now he'll walk in the door andhe'll look.
He'll pick his phone up andtake a quick look to see if he's
got any messages.
He likes to be dialed into thegroup chat and to the whatever.
But he also will tell us hey,you know, I'm averaging 32
minutes a day screen time andmost of it's brawl stars or
(37:13):
something that's like.
I don't know what it is, butwhatever it is, ac's approved it
, which for me, ac's thegatekeeper.
Now AC's already proved hismettle.
He's the one that now will thengo to the boys lower than him
and talk about like, hey, thisis what we're going to do and
what we're not going to do.
I believe this, knowing who Iwas and I didn't have a phone
(37:36):
because it wasn't part of mygeneration, but I was going to
tell my parents anything thatthey wanted to hear so that I
could do whatever I wanted to do.
I'm not going to regulate theirphones, anything that I figure
out how to do search, find andwhatever.
They've got the next step aheadof me or they're already five
steps ahead.
I don't have the margin in myown life to try to figure out
how to track their phone usage.
So forget about it.
(37:56):
You're not going to have it inyour room.
That's a rule.
You're not going to have itanywhere.
You're going to have it in apublic setting, which is our.
We have a big open living room,dining room, so all the screens
are going to live in that spaceand you're going to.
If you're going to be on them,that's fine, but you're going to
be on them with the rest of us.
You're not going into seclusionto do whatever you want to do
with them and there's noobjection to that.
(38:17):
My daughter maybe would havebeen the one to object to that,
but I wasn't going to pick thatfight with her.
I was already fighting with herin eight other places.
I'm not going to also try toregulate all of this stuff on a
screen.
So her screen time would beworse than the rest of us, but
at the same time she alsocarried a full I mean near
full-time jobs and she's 16, ata coffee shop and has more money
(38:40):
saved than I've ever had savedin my life at any one time,
including right now, and livesin her own apartment at 19 with
a roommate and is a nanny, andyou know she's killing it and it
, and so I'm like, well, if allthe things you could be doing,
all the things I was doing, andyou have a four hour average
screen time, like the rest ofyour life is pretty regulated,
(39:01):
I'm, you know, you, I was doinga lot worse and I didn't have a
screen.
Yeah, so you know, you justkind of got to pick and choose
all those different things andand really it's.
You know, in the beginning ofhomeschooling I was, I was
reading and studying about likeJeffersonian learning, which is
like you know, thomas Jefferson,these guys that were brilliant.
You know what were they doing.
They were teaching themselveshow to learn anything.
(39:24):
I'm not going to teach, I meanAC, and he's an exception and
he's very special in this waynot going to teach, I mean AC,
and he's an exception and he'svery special in this way.
But you know we had, we had acurriculum.
You know we had online programsand books and we would change
it every year.
We would get this, we'd getthis, you'd try this, you'd do
this.
I mean, he's going to go intothe last two years of his high
school.
He'll do a college career plusthing at our like our career
(39:47):
center in Mount Vernon and he'llgraduate high school with his
high school degree and anassociates in like a college
degree in business, becausethat's the program and it's free
and it's available and anybodycould do it.
You have to apply to do it but,like you know, he's going to
come out with two years of paidcollege for for nothing.
(40:07):
I mean, you know, pick a, eventhe average price of a school.
Let's say it's $30,000 a year.
That's like he's making 30grand a year to go to junior and
senior year of high school, andso he's taught himself how to
learn anything.
So if it's algebra, it'salgebra If it's reading and
critical thinking based uponquestions being asked about what
(40:29):
you read, et cetera, et cetera,et cetera.
He didn't sit in a classroomand learn that from a teacher.
He taught himself how to dothat and so if they needed help
and came to us, we would do thatand of course, you have to
teach them how to read and allthat kind of stuff in the
beginning, but ultimately Ithink that most kids are ready,
(40:49):
but you can't force them.
What do you remember from highschool?
Most people would say almostnothing, and there are certain
skills that you get and whatever.
There's all kinds of argumentsto be made, but what I'm saying
is that you remember the thingthat you're passionate about.
And so if they were passionateabout World War II, we went and
(41:09):
got every book and every movieand every model and everything
that you could get on World WarII and we went crazy on World
War II until they were done withthat and decided they wanted to
move on to the next thing, andthat included full regalia and
costumes and carving stuff andbuilding stuff and going outside
and having wars and whatever itmight be, however deep they
(41:33):
wanted to go.
All I really was here to do andam here to do, is to say
whatever you're excited about,I'm going to go so deep on that
with you that you're going tonot even think that there's
anything odd about this, when infact, there is something really
odd about this.
Nobody, next to nobody's doingthis, and this is what we're
(41:53):
going to call school.
It it's weird and it's crazyand it's fun and sometimes it
works and lots of times itdoesn't work.
We're the same as anybody else.
We fight and argue and, youknow, get on each other's nerves
and push each other's buttons.
Especially, imagine living.
You know, most kids leave forthe day and go and go and you're
only with them in the evenings.
Imagine all of us being alltogether every day, all day, on
(42:17):
and on.
But what?
I look back now and I didn'teven do it on purpose, but
looking back now at the way youstudy ancient cultures or, like
you know, you think about otherparts of the world where grandma
and grandpa live with you.
You know, and you watch yourfamily die.
Back in the day when you had ahouse, there was a funeral
parlor, there was a room in yourhome that you had that was for
(42:39):
your family, when they died, tobe able to put them there, to
have everybody over, to do theritualistic things that you do
when somebody dies.
You weren't separated from it,they didn't go somewhere else,
they didn't die somewhere else,they died in their home and then
they were buried on their landand et cetera, et cetera, all
these different things.
Now, again, you're like hey,you're living in the 1600s, are
(43:01):
you saying we should gobackwards?
I'm not saying we should gobackwards.
I'm saying, though, that thereare things that we've lost.
Maybe for not the better thingsthat we've lost, maybe for not
the better that we can harkenback to and then build our lives
now around rituals and thingsthat, for since a million years
ago, have meant something to theway that we developed as humans
(43:23):
.
And maybe it wasn't good that.
I just look around and I'm likewe're not doing so hot, and so
you know why don't you have apodcast?
Speaker 1 (43:31):
I don't like like a hand who needs me.
You really should have amicrophone in your office.
I'm sorry that I'm just and Idon't remember where we started.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
It's so good, but I'll circle the whole thing back
and I'll, I'll, I'll tie up allthose bows back to the pizza at
the dinner table and ultimatelyit's an absolute, radical
lifestyle change.
I'm not saying everybody shoulddo what we're doing.
(43:59):
It would be nearly impossible.
There would be lots of thingsthat don't get done functionally
, that probably need to get donein society, I'm guessing.
But at the same time, all we'vereally done and to kind of then
jump back to Sarah with herinstincts and her intuition and
(44:20):
the things that she feels likeare super important.
We've tried to listen to thatand I do too.
I have that same thing the gutfeeling or the whatever.
We've tried to listen to thatand and I do too, I have that
same thing the gut feeling orthe whatever.
We've tried to listen to thatand to respond in obedience to
whatever that would mean.
Because I think what we're doingas a society is we're
responding how we feel likesociety wants us to respond, in
(44:47):
terms of the speed at which welive, the tasks that we take on,
the things that we do day inand day out, without thinking
about it, when it's like, well,no, we should be thinking about
it, and when you think about it,you might change your mind
about something.
And then, when you change yourmind about it.
That's not even the hardestpart.
Changing your mind is not thehardest part.
The hardest part is, onceyou've changed your mind, is
(45:10):
changing your actions.
Because we are people of habit,we are part of the.
You know an object at rest,unless acted upon by an outside
influence, will stay at rest.
It's not easy.
It's not easy Everything that Ijust described to you.
It might sound like I'mdescribing it like it's easy.
It is.
It doesn't get easier.
(45:31):
You get little tricks and tipsalong the way that make it so
that you can continue to do itand not be completely consumed
with making food every day, butit is still a commitment to that
food and that process.
And we slip.
We're Costco members.
I walk into Costco and get bagsof snacks that are they're
(45:54):
fairly clean, but it's like Igot three teenage boys.
I mean, moses isn't a teenager,but he might as well be.
That's like locusts on fields,biblically.
I mean they are devouringcalories at a speed at which no
human could ever imagine and youcan't keep up with it.
And so you got to go get a bagof heavenly hunks to be like
(46:17):
listen, we didn't make our owngranola bars today, which we do
lots of times, but sometimes wedon't or we're behind on it
because we did something elseand like open this bag of
heavenly hunks.
That's the point.
Yeah, one percent, or whatever,of like we need a break to like
mom needs a break, mom needs abreather.
You know, she just cleaned upthe kitchen for the 90th time
(46:39):
this week.
Stop asking for another thing.
Stop asking for more granola orwhatever it is that you think
that you want in this moment.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Well, I think, personally people that are
meeting you for the first timeon this platform they're going
to want to buy from Yellowbirdjust because of you.
Like, I mean so.
So I, I know I do, but how,let's talk through that, like
speaking of getting new peoplethrough the door, because it's a
very complicated ecosystem.
(47:09):
I witnessed it.
I figured before I came in I'mlike this is going to be a
complex scenario.
You've got farmers, who are theopposite of tech savvy,
probably, if I'm going to guess.
You've got weather.
You've got logistics.
There's a whole thing thatyou're doing for the greater
good of decentralizing the foodsystem.
(47:30):
So for that alone, I feel likepeople that are listening to
this show should like get theirlittle fingers to Yellowbird and
start subscribing.
What does that look like forsomeone?
So if they're interested, wewant to get them through the
door.
What are we doing here?
Speaker 2 (47:47):
It's just like Netflix.
You're going to go on to ourwebsite, yellowbirdfscom, and
you're going to click shop nowand then from there you're going
to pick what you want.
You're going to put your creditcard information in.
We have a.
You know, we use a giantmulti-billion dollar security
system that everybody uses likeyou know, nike uses it so that
(48:10):
nobody's information getscompromised, and then you just
start ordering.
So here's the most complicatedpart of it.
We're buying your food withyour money.
We're grocery shopping for you,and so if you're going to do
that and you want a bunch ofproduce and some eggs and some
meat and some milk, you're goingto put it in your shopping,
your virtual shopping cart, andyou're going to leave it there
(48:32):
and then Sunday night atmidnight, every single week,
like clockwork, we stop that,that shopping window, we cut it
off.
So you're not checking out,you're not clicking pay now and
you know a receipt shoots to you.
You're just leaving your cartfull of your groceries and if
you come back tomorrow and it'snot Sunday yet and you want to
take eggs out, because you don'tneed eggs anymore, but you want
to add strawberries, because wejust added them, because we
(48:54):
just found out that they'restrawberries, great.
Keep changing your cart throughthe week.
Sunday night at midnight thatcart gets cut off and that's
what you're going to get thenext week as a delivery.
At the same time,simultaneously, the new cart
opens for the following week, soyou can begin to fill up your
shopping cart for the next week.
Let's say, you get yourdelivery on Wednesday and you'll
(49:14):
know there's a thing that youchoose, and you can choose a
home delivery, which we bring itto you on our own refrigerated
vehicles, or a truck pickup,which is our refrigerated trucks
in and throughout the city ofColumbus.
So we're sitting at Flanagan's.
We're sitting at Hills parkinglot up on 315.
We're sitting at theUniversalist Unitarian Church in
(49:36):
Clintonville.
It's all scheduled.
You see it, when you're pickingyour account information, you
can go to those trucks, yourfood's on them, because you
picked it, and so you go.
Timotheus is our driver.
You go meet Timotheus, you tellhim your name, he hands you
your order If you ordered allthose things I just said.
What had happened, though,between Sunday, when your order
got cut off, and Wednesday whenyou came to pick it up, is that
(49:59):
we had reached out to the milkproducer and the meat producer
and the egg producer and theproduce producer, and we had
said hey, by the way, carrie,although we don't say it
individually, we've collectedyou with the hundreds of others
of people who have ordered oncemilk, eggs, cheese, all these
different things.
Here's our order to you we want150 dozen eggs, or we want 200
gallons of milk, or we wantwhatever it is, because that's
how many people ordered thosethings.
(50:20):
And then on Tuesday, ourdrivers go out to all those
places and they get it all.
We're going to grab the milk,the eggs, the meat, the cheese,
whatever.
Whatever.
We're not storing in-house asinventory.
We're going to bring it back tothe warehouse that you were at
and then we're going to putthose orders together.
So your specific order youdidn't order 200 gallons of milk
, you only ordered one gallon ofmilk, but 199 other people
(50:45):
ordered milk as well.
So we're going to pull yourmilk, put it in with your order,
pick and pack, put a sticker onit.
Your name's on it.
You've already been charged.
That week, on Monday, we ranthe credit cards and your
information was all up to dateand good to go.
You paid for it.
It was anywhere between $20 and$220, depending on how much
groceries you bought, and thenyou show up or we bring it to
your door and there it all is.
(51:06):
All that food that we've justspent an hour describing
metaphorically, physically,actually, spiritually, all the
different things that we've said, is in that box, ready to go,
and it's to you.
And now you've got yourgroceries.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
So why would we want to do anything else?
Speaker 2 (51:26):
That's the question I keep asking myself.
And what I do know is is thatwe've got to make it so seamless
and flawless and reliably quickto some degree because,
including myself, everyone nomatter how much like me or how
much like anybody else you arewe are programmed to think that
(51:50):
if I want that computer overthere, that's on that desk, or
if I need it and I click rightnow on that little screen that's
sitting on that table overthere, that by tomorrow, at this
time, that should be arriving.
That's magic, that's voodoo.
And so, unfortunately, we alsotranslate that to food and we
think well, I don't have tothink about food, it's, it's
(52:12):
everywhere, it's sitting inevery brick and mortar place
that's within five miles ofwhere we're sitting right now,
and if I want food I can go getit.
I don't have to worry aboutstarving, it's right there.
And so until we begin to thinkabout every single thing that
we've talked about that getsthat food to that point, to
think about every single thingthat we've talked about that
(52:32):
gets that food to that point,we'll make the same decision
with our food that we make withthat computer, which is I'm
going to click right here andknow that perhaps, within hours
or minutes, I'm going to havethe thing that my body's telling
me that I need, which isnutrients.
And so I'm just asking numberone so I'm just asking number
one rethink it.
Number two allow us to be alittle bit slower than that, not
(52:57):
archaically slow, but a littlebit slower than that.
And number three, we're goingto do our best to bring you
marketing in a way that isn't ahard, gross sell, but is also I
need you to buy that food.
I don't exist, we don't existIf you're not buying and eating
this way to some degree,whatever that commitment level
(53:18):
is in your own life.
And so I'm going to try to putit into 30 second chunks or five
second chunks or cute littlethings that pop up on your
screen, cause I know you'rescrolling and you're going to
see it, or whatever it might be.
I'm not saying, like you know,put a handwritten order and mail
it to me.
I'm just saying we're trying tobalance.
(53:38):
This level of food is slow andwe live in an instant society.
How do we marry the two?
Cause there, there is a way, Ithink, but it isn't quite Amazon
, we don't have the ability todo that.
Speaker 1 (53:53):
Yeah, well, I mean, listen, I feel the same way I
felt when I was with you before.
I feel like you're all aboutthe right things.
You make me feel a little likeI need to be, like I'm feeling
some I need to do better.
Yeah, but that I think that'swhat's important.
Speaker 2 (54:09):
Right.
Speaker 1 (54:09):
So I think, for the people out there listening, if,
if it's tugging on you a littlebit, like yeah, I do want to do
better, maybe I will like take astep back and plan my meals a
little bit more and like get ina rhythm where, like, I can
order from Yellowbird and get alot of my good stuff from
locally sourced farmers.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
Yes, yes, I mean, you're talking about being and
in some degree the ugliest wayto say it is to be offended.
And I've said for 20 years,ever since somebody else said it
to me, if you're not offended,you'll make no lifestyle change,
and we need to make lifestylechanges.
And so please offend me, Pleaseshow me where I can do better.
And that has been what I'vetried to do in my own personal
(54:54):
life.
I think it gets harder, I thinkas you get older.
The more you try to identifyand detach from ego, the harder
it swings and the sharper theclaws and it's the ultimate
enemy in some regards.
Ego is good in some ways, butin other ways it's detrimental,
(55:16):
because you know I'm holding onto my own identity and it's like
, well, what if somebody showedyou a better way, and would you
be willing to make a change?
And so I've just tried to staypersonally in the space of when
we know something new.
Even if it's difficult, even ifit's challenging, at least try
(55:39):
to figure out what that couldlook like in your own life.
Speaker 1 (55:42):
Yeah, and I think Yellowbird would be a great next
step for people from a foodperspective.
Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (55:48):
It's a tool, and that is all that we want to be.
We want you to trust us withyour grocery money, some of it,
and let us go find those things,because once you eat a carrot
or a tomato, if you ask somebodywhat's the best tomato you've
ever had, they're going to say,well, my grandma used to grow
(56:08):
tomatoes in the backyard.
Eat you've ever had.
They're going to say, well, mygrandma used to grow tomatoes in
the backyard.
Or I grow tomatoes, I grow thebest tomatoes and they're right
outside my door.
And the answer to that isabsolutely, and please do that
as much as possible.
Also, if you can't or don't ordon't know how and you want that
best tomato, that's the tomatowe're finding.
And so when you've eaten thecarrots that were grown the way
(56:31):
our growers are growing carrots,you're going to, your brain and
body are going to taste thatcarrot for the first time,
potentially, and be like, oh,this is carrot.
The thing that I'm eating in thegrocery store is an
impersonation of a carrot.
It's an imposter, it's animposter, it's an imposter.
And so, once that happens,we've had hundreds, literally
(56:54):
hundreds, of customers say thisexact line we can no longer eat
the carrots at a grocery storebecause we've eaten the carrots
that were grown by Three Creeksor Creekside or that one farmer
guy Literally, that's the nameof the guy.
His farm is called that onefarmer guy, and we will settle
for nothing less, because we nowknow what a carrot tastes like.
(57:14):
And then to me then it's well,that's it, the job is done.
You've already made thetransition.
Let us keep bringing youeverything that is this carrot,
because it all is like that.
Speaker 1 (57:26):
Yeah, All right.
I mean listen, if he hasn'tconvinced you, I don't know what
will.
Benji, you are the best.
Speaker 2 (57:34):
Thank you.
Like beyond the best, this isgreat.
And ACU too, it's so fun.
Yeah, thank you, it's so great.
I just like to sit here withyou and do this.
You can come back.
Speaker 1 (57:46):
I feel like, All right, If you're still out there
following your girl, follow meon YouTube, Spotify, Apple or
wherever you get your podcasts.
And until next time, go checkout Yellowbird and keep moving
baby, Keep moving baby.
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