Pod Insights Endless Thread Episodes We Love: Where's the Beef? About this episode What if vegetables are poison? What if, instead, humans evolved to consume an animal-based diet of steak, liver, brain, testicles, eggs, butter, and milk?
Shirtless influencers on TikTok and Instagram have acquired millions of followers promoting the carnivore diet. They say studies linking meat consumption and heart disease are flawed — and plant foods are making people sick.
Likewise, meatfluencers say the livestock industry has no significant impact on the climate crisis despite abundant evidence suggesting otherwise.
No controlled studies have been published confirming the advertised benefits of the carnivore diet. Yet, its popularity online is undeniable.
In this rebroadcast, Endless Thread looks at how social media cooked up the anti-establishment wellness trend.
You can find our transcript, with links and additional resources, here: www.wbur.org/carnivore
Credits: This episode was produced by Dean Russell and Ben Brock Johnson. Mixing and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell are the co-hosts.
Image Credit: Peter Dazeley/Getty
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores the intersection between fashion and sustainability. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.
0:19 Speaker 01 Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.
0:35 Speaker 02 When everything feels nonstop, movement becomes the pause. So give Lululemon this holiday season. Smooth, seamless running gear builds momentum through every mile. Targeted support adds steadiness to every pulse and hold.
0:52 Speaker 02 And dynamic stretch expands presence through every pose.
0:59 Speaker 02 Give the feeling. Shop in store and on lululemon.com.
1:05 Speaker 03 WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
1:16 Ben Brock Johnson? Hey, Endless Threaders. How you feeling? Are you stuffed? Are you tryptophoned out? Have you been making your leftover turkey sandwiches or tofurkey sandwiches or whatever kind of sandwiches you want to make after all that eating and hanging with fam? We hope you're doing very well. This week, we're hitting you with a rerun because we are, you know, stuffed ourselves and hanging out on the couch, probably watching some TV, hopefully not shopping too much. In light of this Black Friday, we want to give you an episode about meat, about TikTok, about healthy diets and
2:00 Ben Brock Johnson? unhealthy diets, and how all of these things are working together to try to sell you something. So kick back, take a spin through one of our older episodes, and enjoy the ride.
2:24 Speaker 05 When I was 19 years old, I broke my back. I fell off of a second-story forklift and had a garbage dumpster fall on me.
2:34 Ben Brock Johnson? Meet Jerry Brazy, whose story is crazy.
2:39 Speaker 05 I mean, I couldn't walk out of a hospital to the parking lot without sitting down halfway because the damage to the nerves in the base of my spine was so terrible. I mean, I just lived with this pain.
2:51 Speaker 06 No one would ever describe Jerry's life as easy.
2:55 Speaker 05 I've had 17 procedures on my back since then. Been addicted to opioids three different times.
3:00 Ben Brock Johnson? But today, at least, Jerry has a sort of nonchalant charm about everything that's happened to him, all of which he shares on TikTok.
3:08 Speaker 05 What's up, everybody? Check this out. It has been one year ago, pretty much last week, that I...
3:15 Ben Brock Johnson? Jerry describes himself as an entrepreneur and self-made millionaire. It seems like Jerry's lived enough good and bad stuff for about three life stories.
3:25 Speaker 06 It's true. Aside from the thing with the forklift and the dumpster falling on him, aside from the addiction, the 17 back procedures, there is the big thing.
3:35 Ben Brock Johnson? Oh, oh, there's a bigger thing? Okay.
3:38 Speaker 06 Yes, there is a bigger thing. More than a decade ago, Jerry was diagnosed with something called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a genetic condition that makes it hard for the heart to pump blood.
3:51 Speaker 05 And all of a sudden, my heart's racing and I can't breathe. And so they put me on drugs at that point. That was at 38 years old.
3:59 Ben Brock Johnson? At the time, Jerry says, he wasn't doing great at taking care of himself either. He didn't exercise. He ate mostly fast food and processed food. He needed 19 pills a day to regulate his heart and pain. And he says, all of this took a very visible toll on his weight, which kept going up and up and up.
4:20 Speaker 05 Until I found myself in November of 21 at 303 pounds.
4:25 Speaker 06 November of 2021, that's when Jerry's life changed again. Because one day after flying home to Tennessee from a work trip, his chest started to hurt.
4:37 Speaker 05 I drove myself over to the hospital because I was having a bunch of mini heart attacks. And somehow I had lost four pints of blood inexplicably.
4:46 Ben Brock Johnson? At 52, he was admitted for what felt like maybe the last time.
4:51 Speaker 05 Laying in that hospital was kind of an eye opener for me. And I just said, I gotta get back. I'm either gonna live or I'm gonna die because I'm dying. There has to be a better way.
5:06 Ben Brock Johnson? How did you hear about the carnivore diet? How did that idea come into your world?
5:11 Speaker 05 It, uh, it came across, I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast, a doctor named, um, uh, his name escapes me, I'm sorry.
5:18 Speaker 07 So many people were like, have you checked out what this guy's doing? He's eating nothing but meat and he's a doctor and he's super healthy.
5:25 Speaker 05 I popped my phone open and, and started doing the, the research. And obviously the opportunities there to do your own research and hear people's own testimonies are limitless.
5:36 Ben Brock Johnson? The carnivore diet, if you look at a photo of Jerry a few years ago and you look at him today, it's insane. We are talking Pillsbury Doughboy to Viking Warlord. And by the way, as a perfect dad bod specimen, I am not here to fat shame. I am just saying it is night and day.
5:56 Speaker 06 Jerry credits the carnivore diet for his health 180. He says he was mostly using Twitter and YouTube to learn about it. And then he moved to Tik Tok where the carnivore diet is big.
6:08 Ben Brock Johnson? You've probably heard of its predecessors, paleo keto Atkins, diets that advocate for limiting carbs and processed foods.
6:17 Speaker 06 But the carnivore diet is different. It's a get back to our roots philosophy that literally rejects plants. No veggies, no grains, just animals.
6:29 Ben Brock Johnson? But as Jerry points out, some people do get some food diversity within their carnivore diet regimen. Some, wait, sorry, sorry, just to be clear.
6:40 Ben Brock Johnson? Those are the, literally the only things that they eat?
6:43 Speaker 05 That's it. Beef, butter.
6:46 Speaker 05 Beef, butter, bacon and eggs.
6:49 Ben Brock Johnson? Whoa.
6:50 Speaker 05 Yeah. 30 to 40 days on that and, and you won't believe how good you can feel.
6:55 Ben Brock Johnson? He's right. I don't believe it, but just like butter, this new carnivore diet is popular.
7:03 Speaker 06 The other thing that sets this diet apart, it's a lifestyle created and shaped by social media.
7:14 Speaker 06 I tried the carnivore diet for 45 days.
7:16 Speaker 07 This is my second month on the carnivore diet.
7:18 Speaker 03 I've been on a carnivore diet for a year and a half. After four years of the carnivore diet, do I ever get tired of eating steak every day? The answer is no.
7:29 Speaker 06 Jerry's trip to the ER was two years ago. Since then, he's been eating carnivore. Sausage and 10 eggs in the morning, two pounds of steak at night. He's lost about 100 pounds, cut back on medication, and despite what you might think, he says his heart is stronger.
7:49 Speaker 05 My cardiologists think I'm crazy, but they can't argue with me.
7:53 Ben Brock Johnson? And like the many, many, many people who have gone carnivore, Jerry says his experience has not only improved his health, it has altered his view of the entire medical and scientific community.
8:07 Speaker 05 I believe, and so do so many other people, and, and my proof is in the experience for me for the last 22 months is that everything we've been told about what we eat is wrong.
8:22 Speaker 06 I'm Dean Ribai Russell.
8:24 Ben Brock Johnson? I'm Ben Beef Butter Bacon and Eggs Johnson. Oh no. And you're listening to Endless Thread.
8:32 Speaker 06 Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR butcher shop with two Ps because we're classy.
8:40 Ben Brock Johnson? Today's episode, where's the beef? Where is the beef? It's everywhere.
8:45 Speaker 06 How social media gave birth to the carnivore diet, meatfluencers.
8:50 Ben Brock Johnson? And fast-spreading ideas about how ancient humans survived and thrived.
8:56 Speaker 06 And what that means for all of us.
9:13 Ben Brock Johnson? For our purposes today, the carnivore diet, as we're calling it, is a bit of a catchall for meatposting, meatfluencing, lion diet, and a smorgasbord of red meat consumption ideas that has exploded online. The idea of an all-meat diet dates, at least in the Western world, to the 1850s, when a German author wrote about his year living on only meat and dairy. But the carnivore club didn't really get going until more recently, around the same time as TikTok.
9:43 Speaker 06 Search carnivore diet, or carnivore, or meat talk on TikTok, and you will find thousands upon thousands of posts.
9:54 Speaker 06 Beef, butter, bacon, and eggs.
9:57 Speaker 05 Butter truly makes everything better. Sometimes I even eat it as a midday snack. Bison fat, goat fat, pork fat, aka lard. I got liver with breakfast, lunch, and dinner because liver is king.
10:08 Ben Brock Johnson? This is how I eat a testicle from start to finish. Sounds nuts, but some of these folks have millions of followers.
10:17 Speaker 06 People who say that what you were told as a kid, eat your veggies. That's baloney, and probably why you feel like manure.
10:26 Ben Brock Johnson? But an all-meat diet will be your cure.
10:29 Speaker 00 I lost 43 pounds in 44 days. You can heal gut damage. Get rid of eczema forever.
10:35 Speaker 06 Brain fog goes away. I had some autoimmune conditions that seemed to have gone away.
10:39 Speaker 07 It's actually going to probably help you get over cancer. The doctor said my stomach was the most beautiful one that he has ever seen. And I'm telling you, it certainly is because of this diet.
10:53 Ben Brock Johnson? A lot of so-called latest health crazes originate with a singular health nut, or at least someone who sees the light and comes down from the mountain and brings us the gospel about what to gobble.
11:06 Speaker 06 The Atkins diet had Dr. Robert Atkins, a cardiologist. The carnivore diet has this guy. My name is Paul Saladino. I'm a double board certified medical
11:16 Ben Brock Johnson? Doctor, I'm going to show you what I eat in a day.
11:19 Speaker 06 Dr. Paul Saladino, formerly known as CarnivoreMD, 1.8 million followers on Instagram.
11:27 Ben Brock Johnson? Not bad.
11:27 Speaker 06 500,000 on YouTube, another 500,000 on his latest TikTok account.
11:34 Ben Brock Johnson? The first one was banned. We are not sure why. Day in and day out, I focus on meat and organs. This is grass-fed ground beef, raw heart, raw liver, bone marrow, desiccated testicle and desiccated brain, like whole package from Hardened Soil Supplements.
11:54 Speaker 06 Dr. Paul Saladino did not invent the carnivore diet. He's more like an apostle. But the reason he caught our attention was because he's a doctor.
12:04 Ben Brock Johnson? A handsome, tan, often shirtless doctor.
12:09 Ben Brock Johnson? He should be on one of those shows with a healthy surfer vibe. He got his medical degree from the University of Arizona and is licensed in the state of California.
12:19 Speaker 06 Now he's in Costa Rica, where he ticks his talks from a beautiful, treetop bungalow.
12:25 Ben Brock Johnson? And yes, this is where I live. Meat, trees, surf-tanned pectorals. He's living the dream.
12:33 Speaker 06 Someone's dream.
12:34 Ben Brock Johnson? Carnivore dieters online vary by race, age, and gender. But the biggest influencers tend to be muscular, middle-aged white guys. And they often seem to be pointed at an audience of fellow men. Saladino is no exception. If you eat testicle, you will be getting bioactive testosterone into your body. And this diet, by the way, does have connections to the men's rights online community. We're going to get back to that. And we should also say it's not all that.
13:10 Speaker 06 Saladino stands out because of his credentials. He says his journey into the carnivorous world began by training in functional medicine, a practice that studies the, quote, "root causes of disease." He saw it as an alternative to the conventional medicine he learned in school.
13:29 Ben Brock Johnson? We have knee-jerk reactions. You got eczema, I know the drug for you. You got psoriasis, I know the drug. You got Hashimoto's thyroiditis or autoimmune thyroiditis, I got the drugs for you. But we never think, wait a minute. Why do you have eczema? What's causing it? Why do you have depression? Why does anyone have anxiety? Right? And that is where, that's, that's where I think I went left when a lot of my colleagues went right. The idea, conventional medicine reacts. Functional medicine prevents. And not by prescribing drugs. And let's pause for just a second here to say, this makes sense to me. I agree. A ton of the healthcare industry today seems to be about telling people what to do, knowing they won't do it, and eventually just prescribing them drugs.
14:12 Speaker 06 Saladino, however, is prescribing meat and other animal-based products. He doesn't shy away from technical talk. He embraces it.
14:23 Speaker 07 Butter is full of good fatty acids for humans like stearic acid, heart, the organ gifted to warriors, coenzyme Q10, riboflavin, B12, vitamin K2, choline, carnecine, carnitine, anserine, taurine, alpha-linolenic acid, linoleic, excuse me, alpha-linolenic acid, bioavailable vitamin A, biotin, riboflavin, folate, list is long.
14:45 Ben Brock Johnson? Saladino isn't the only TikTok doc in the carnivore club. There's Dr. Sean Baker and Dr. Anthony Chaffee. But Saladino is the most prominent meat M.D.
14:56 Speaker 06 And it's his use of scientific language that I found most fascinating. Here's a guy who's undercutting the anti-meat scientific establishment with, he says, science.
15:09 Speaker 07 I believe Western medicine is lying to you, that you've been misled by fallacies, parroted by your doctor.
15:15 Ben Brock Johnson? What is the sciency philosophy that the carnivore diet is founded on? Well, there's a lot to take in. We're going to carve it into three main tenets.
15:26 Speaker 06 Carnivore credo number one, evolution.
15:29 Ben Brock Johnson? Eat like a caveman.
15:31 Speaker 07 Throughout human evolution, we have probably been scavengers first and then pack hunters, with animals as our primary food, using plant foods only in times of starvation or as an adjunct.
15:43 Speaker 06 Around the same time that humans started hunting with tools, our ancestors evolved rapidly.
15:50 Ben Brock Johnson? Instead of eating the bulky, low-quality plant diet of other apes, we began feasting on calorie-dense meat and marrow. Our guts shrank, and most importantly, our brains exploded in size.
16:04 Speaker 06 Conclusion.
16:05 Speaker 07 Animal foods are what your ancestors have always sought.
16:09 Speaker 06 Meat made humans smart, so eating meat makes you smart too.
16:15 Ben Brock Johnson? Carnivore credo number two: Eat like a hunter-gatherer.
16:19 Speaker 06 Hold the gatherer.
16:21 Speaker 07 If you visit hunter-gatherer tribes, who are our best representation of where we come from as humans, their preferences for foods are crystal clear. They are hunters first and foremost. Meat and organs are their most prized foods. They don't care about vegetables.
16:36 Ben Brock Johnson? Before agriculture, we were hunter-gatherers, and some of us are still hunter-gatherers, often said to be living in secluded groups comparatively apart from the globalized world.
16:46 Speaker 06 A few years back, the Paleo Diet's founder, evolutionary nutritionist Lauren Cordain, said that 73% of living hunter-gatherer groups get more than half of their calories from meat.
16:59 Ben Brock Johnson? These groups of individuals also have lower rates of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, even acne. The people who are today living like our ancestors, they are healthy.
17:12 Speaker 06 Conclusion: Meat keeps you healthy.
17:17 Speaker 06 Carnivore credo number three: Plants are poison.
17:22 Ben Brock Johnson? Oh, man. Eight-year-old me would agree.
17:29 Speaker 07 You sometimes ask me which vegetables are okay to eat. My answer is no. Why would you eat plant leaves and stems and roots and seeds? They put defense chemicals in those parts of plants.
17:41 Speaker 06 Saladino says that because plants cannot run away from predators, they evolved defenses that slowly poison anyone bold enough to eat them.
17:52 Speaker 07 Things like oxalates, lectins, saponins, digestive enzyme inhibitors like tannins, these are gonna mess up your digestion and your hormones, generally make you feel horrible, and they're gonna make you fart a lot, too.
18:01 Speaker 06 He's even gone far enough to link broccoli with thyroid problems and spinach smoothies with kidney failure.
18:09 Ben Brock Johnson? Technically, the carnivore diet is no plants, but Saladino says fruit is okay in moderation. This newer version of his diet, an offshoot of the carnivore diet, is what he calls an animal-based diet. And it allows for some fruit.
18:25 Speaker 06 In any case, some people on Meat Talk and Meatscram seem to lump fruit in with veggies anyway. They're all bad. A lot of vegetables are poison. Most vegetables are highly toxic.
18:36 Speaker 01 Brussels sprouts had 136 known carcinogens. Peppers and tomatoes are ruining your gut health. Broccoli, it has this compound that's like really anti-thyroid. I don't remember what it's called.
18:47 Speaker 06 Meanwhile, meat? It's a heart-healthy meal with all the nutrients you need.
18:53 Ben Brock Johnson? Carnivorous conclusion?
18:55 Speaker 07 No to vegetables.
19:00 Ben Brock Johnson? So just to reiterate here, the three credos of the carnivore's diet are: Meat made us smart.
19:07 Speaker 06 Meat makes us healthy.
19:09 Ben Brock Johnson? And veggies are bad for us.
19:12 Speaker 06 Saladino sells these ideas using words like oxalates and evolution, hormones and heart disease. Science-y words.
19:21 Ben Brock Johnson? So we called up some scientists. I don't really believe that. You don't become famous on social media if you say we evolved to be omnivores.
19:31 Speaker 06 I see it as bad science being used to justify selling people something. Oh, yeah. Did we forget to mention the money?
19:42 Ben Brock Johnson? Big bucks and bad science? In a minute.
20:09 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questum School of Business. Is sustainability in fashion a selling point for consumers?
20:22 Speaker 05 I think the sustainability gets advertised as being a big driver. Of fashion, when in fact, I think it's way down on the list of purchase criteria for consumers.
20:33 Speaker 00 Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on whether consumers can be both fashionable and sustainable.
20:49 Speaker 02 When everything feels nonstop, movement becomes the pause. So give Lululemon this holiday season. Smooth, seamless running gear builds momentum through every mile. Targeted support adds steadiness to every pulse and hold.
21:07 Speaker 02 And dynamic stretch expands presence through every pose.
21:14 Speaker 02 Give the feeling. Shop in store and on lululemon.com.
21:22 Ben Brock Johnson? So how does social media fuel an anti-establishment diet?
21:27 Speaker 06 First, we have to look at those three carnivore credos a little closer.
21:32 Speaker 07 I think in the long term, it's probably not a good idea.
21:37 Speaker 06 Alice Lichtenstein talks like a scientist. And by that, we don't mean that she uses a lot of jargon. We mean that she weighs her words carefully.
21:47 Speaker 07 And rarely would I be so definitive about a specific statement.
21:54 Speaker 06 Dr. Lichtenstein is a professor of nutrition, science, and policy at Tufts.
22:00 Ben Brock Johnson? She is also a senior scientist and directs the cardiovascular nutrition lab at the USDA. We talked to her about credo number three. Veggies bad? Meet good.
22:10 Speaker 06 The hallway to her office is lined with laboratories in minus 80 degree freezers containing? Not a bunch of meat, I assume?
22:20 Speaker 07 No, no, it's in that freezer. It's a bunch of, a lot of biological samples from studies that we've conducted and these samples are archived.
22:29 Ben Brock Johnson? Alice says rejecting plant foods cuts out several key nutrients like vitamin C. Shocker. Also?
22:37 Speaker 07 It's a very low in fiber. It's not clear how the meat is prepared, whether there's a lot of sodium. There's certainly a high, a large amount of saturated fat relative to unsaturated fat. And we tend to think of unsaturated fat as good and is good for health outcomes.
22:55 Speaker 01 Where saturated fat is not.
22:58 Speaker 06 Meatfluencers reject Dr. Lichtenstein's statement, which she's basing on the more than 400 peer-reviewed papers she's co-authored, plus scores of other studies. By contrast, we couldn't find any peer-reviewed studies by Paul Saladino. In fact, no controlled studies have been published confirming the advertised benefits of the carnivore diet.
23:22 Ben Brock Johnson? Hmm, these are two very different examples of the idea of doing your own research.
23:27 Speaker 01 Well, I think you just have to go to what the evidence base is.
23:31 Ben Brock Johnson? Science is a process, and not all studies are created equal. That's why Alice says consensus, the evidence base, is more reliable than cherry-picked data. For instance...
23:43 Speaker 07 Let me tell you guys why I think kale is bullshit. Look, it's a plant leaf. It's full of defense chemicals, which chemicals? Long word, isothiocyanates.
23:53 Speaker 06 Saladino has beef with kale and Brussels and broccoli. On his website, which misspells two of those veggies, he writes that they are, quote, "bullshit" and can pose a, quote, "danger to our thyroids", causing weakness or weight gain. Then, to prove his point, he links to one paper.
24:13 Ben Brock Johnson? We contacted the paper's lead author, a biochemist named Peter Felker. He called Saladino, and I quote, "a doofus." The paper says you would need to eat two pounds of raw Brussels a day for several months to notice any issues. And I'm sure you would, because that sounds like torture.
24:33 Speaker 06 Plus, he added, "veggies are good for you."
24:36 Ben Brock Johnson? Yeah, I can't believe we have to say that out loud, but yeah.
24:43 Speaker 06 We looked at other papers floating around Meat Talk, Meets to Gram and the like. One study was called out for misreading data. Another was a case study of one person. Another had ties to the meat industry.
24:57 Ben Brock Johnson? But in the bite-sized world of TikTok, who's gonna know?
25:03 Speaker 02 If you pull from videos and you pull from the internet, you get a very different sort of interpretation than if you were to go into the academic literature.
25:14 Ben Brock Johnson? What about carnivore credo number two? Meat is healthy. Just ask today's hunter-gatherers.
25:20 Speaker 06 For this, we called Alyssa Crittenden at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She's part biologist and part anthropologist.
25:29 Speaker 02 I have spent the last 20 years working in East Africa with a community of hunters and gatherers named the Hadza.
25:37 Ben Brock Johnson? Dr. Crittenden works with the Hadza, a community of about 1,000 people in Tanzania. And by "works with them," we mean she's lived with them for months at a time. She's also done research with them in collaboration. The Hadza are famous. They're often referred to as the last true hunter-gatherers.
25:59 Speaker 02 There's this romantic fallacy that still exists, that we have communities of human beings who are living in these far, remote places untouched by humanity and are still sort of living entirely off the grid. And that is not the case.
26:15 Speaker 06 Western meat talkers talk a lot about the Hadza.
26:20 Speaker 07 So I went to visit the Hadza last year in Tanzania.
26:23 Ben Brock Johnson? Including Paul Kale is bullshit Saladino.
26:27 Speaker 07 The Hadza don't give a shit about vegetables. They don't really eat vegetables. While we were there, they never ate a leaf. They never ate a seed. The men couldn't be bothered with roots, which we don't.
26:35 Speaker 06 Saladino hunted when he visited the Hadza. He ate meat and...
26:40 Speaker 07 Baboon brains?
26:43 Speaker 07 Would you do it?
26:44 Ben Brock Johnson? This is giving Indiana Jones' Temple of Doom, which, as we all know, was a documentary.
26:51 Speaker 06 A very respectful documentary, yes. Alyssa says that if you look at the research collected by the Hadza community members, you will see that, yes, meat is hugely important, but...
27:04 Speaker 02 I would never, ever say that they don't give a shit about plants. I would never say that. So I know that it's...
27:10 Speaker 00 It's just patently false.
27:16 Speaker 06 The Hadza eat baobab fruit and seeds. They eat tubers, which are kind of like fibrous potatoes.
27:23 Ben Brock Johnson? One reason Saladino may have seen more hunting is because he was only there for two weeks. He was more likely treated as a social media documentarian or tourist by the Hadza.
27:35 Speaker 00 I've had to hide with my Land Rover behind trees and in ditches when tourists come and we're doing actual data collection. And they say, OK, be quiet now because we have to do some performative hunting.
27:49 Ben Brock Johnson? Not for nothing, a foraging lifestyle is probably more physically demanding than a TikTok carnivores and far less reliable than going to Trader Joe's.
27:57 Speaker 06 But Alyssa also takes issue with Saladino's claim that modern hunter-gatherers are representative of our ancestors, the carnivore idea that they are living fossils.
28:09 Speaker 00 To point to them now and do that is not only harmful to the community and their own sovereignty, but it's also increasingly naive and exoticizing to assume that these communities are not globalizing just like everybody else.
28:25 Speaker 06 Speaking of ancestors, what about carnivore credo number one?
28:29 Ben Brock Johnson? Meat gave us galaxy brain.
28:31 Speaker 06 AKA big brain.
28:33 Ben Brock Johnson? A theory from the early and mid 1900s, after anthropologists discovered the first fossils of human ancestors.
28:41 Speaker 02 Most of the methods that we had at the time for recovering information about past diets was biased towards meat. We could see meat more easily.
28:51 Speaker 06 Amanda Henry is a paleoanthropologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She studies prehistoric diet trends.
29:00 Ben Brock Johnson? And I would have talked to her all damn day.
29:03 Speaker 02 One of the main ways I studied diet in the past is by looking for microscopic remnants that get stuck in calculus or the plaque on teeth.
29:14 Ben Brock Johnson? Wow, so in a way, you're like, you're like...
29:17 Speaker 02 A dentist to the...
29:18 Speaker 03 The dead. Yep.
29:20 Ben Brock Johnson? Dr. Henry says that the myth of man the hunter is a common one. That's because in the early days of anthropology, they focused on animal bones, which had cut marks from tools dating back 3 million years.
29:33 Speaker 06 But bones stick around better than plants. It wasn't until new technologies rolled around that scientists got a better picture of diet.
29:42 Ben Brock Johnson? And does that better picture say they mostly ate meat?
29:47 Speaker 03 Absolutely not. Even Neanderthals didn't eat meat all the time. And especially not even early modern humans.
29:57 Speaker 06 Hominins, that is Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and other early humans. Hominin diets varied by region, species, and time. They ate different meats and plants. And it's not yet clear if they ate one more than the other.
30:14 Ben Brock Johnson? Even today, different people vibe with different foods. Some people are lactose tolerant, some have biomes that thrive on seaweed.
30:24 Speaker 03 To badly paraphrase The Princess Bride, there is no one optimal diet. Anybody who tells you different is selling something.
30:34 Ben Brock Johnson? Amanda, my ears love you.
30:36 Speaker 06 You want to talk hard science to endless thread? You do it in movie quotes.
30:40 Ben Brock Johnson? For real. But meat posters out here say there is an optimal diet.
30:46 Speaker 07 We have a pretty clear anthropologic record showing that we ate more meat. And that may have been the spark that improved our nutrition and led to increases in the size of our brain.
30:57 Speaker 06 About this meat-brain theory, Amanda says...
31:00 Speaker 03 Don't make any single thing your explanation for anything in human evolution. We're way more complicated than that.
31:09 Ben Brock Johnson? Originally, scientists thought our brains started ballooning 1.8 million years ago, after scavenging and hunting began. More recently, the data has been re-analyzed, and it is less certain.
31:24 Speaker 06 Amanda says new evidence suggests the brain gain may have come much slower, accelerating later, about 800,000 to 400,000 years ago. And what else was going on then?
31:37 Ben Brock Johnson? Fire.
31:37 Speaker 03 You've hit on a topic that is...
31:39 Speaker 02 Fiercely contentious, I would say, in the field.
31:42 Ben Brock Johnson? Yeah, seems like it. Some very scorched earth arguments.
31:45 Speaker 02 Oh, yes, indeed.
31:48 Ben Brock Johnson? Sorry.
31:48 Speaker 02 People with burning passions everywhere.
31:52 Speaker 06 Some scientists believe cooking with fire gave us the energy we needed for bigger brains. It killed parasites in meat and made plants much easier to digest. There are other theories, too, like, funny enough, carbs.
32:08 Ben Brock Johnson? And meat talk hates carbs. This isn't to say meat isn't important to our evolution. The point is that science isn't sure that it was the only thing, or even the main thing.
32:22 Speaker 06 So to base a diet on an incomplete theory?
32:26 Speaker 02 It makes me angry because I see it as a marketing ploy.
32:31 Ben Brock Johnson? Is this a marketing ploy?
32:33 Speaker 06 We reached out several times and several ways to Dr. Paul Saladino while reporting this story. We never heard back.
32:41 Ben Brock Johnson? Until just as we were getting ready to publish this episode, Paul Saladino, he did get back to us.
32:51 Speaker 07 Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you guys. I know you're a little skeptical based on the emails I've seen, so it'll be a fun, it'll be a fun conversation. Yeah.
33:01 Speaker 06 Dr. Saladino spoke to us from his home in Costa Rica. And while he is a medical doctor, he told us he is now a full-time content creator.
33:12 Speaker 07 I make,
33:15 Speaker 07 make educational content for people based on health and nutrition and illness and try to, try to put good things out in the world.
33:22 Ben Brock Johnson? Good things that, he said, have stood up to scrutiny on social media.
33:26 Speaker 07 I think that if people put ideas into the ether and they're unfounded, there will be many people who will disagree with them and will provide ample evidence of why those things are not necessarily good ideas.
33:38 Ben Brock Johnson? From our perspective, that is a pretty aspirational view of how social media contributes to, you know, fact-based discussions. But hey, he's got a right to be optimistic. So what of the ideas that are out there? We started by asking Saladino about how much meat and dairy constitutes a healthy diet.
33:57 Speaker 06 And we pointed out that his advice goes directly against the USDA, American Heart Association, World Health Organization, Harvard School of Public Health, and many others recommending limited meat consumption. What do you say to those recommendations? Do you trust these institutions? How do you view that?
34:17 Speaker 07 Do you understand, Dean, what those recommendations are based on as a consumer? Or do you look at those as bastions of quote "truth" and accept their recommendations?
34:29 Ben Brock Johnson? I think ultimately you can find it out pretty easily. I don't know that we, as consumers, necessarily always go down that rabbit hole, but I think that stuff is in public view. But it sounds like your answer is no.
34:45 Speaker 07 Well, don't put words in my mouth.
34:48 Ben Brock Johnson? Saladino said, quote, "It's not about trusting institutions. It's about, quote, 'science.'"
34:54 Speaker 07 Why would we trust anyone? Why wouldn't we think for ourselves?
34:57 Ben Brock Johnson? Well, because I'm not a doctor and I'm not a nutritionist and I can do my own research for sure, but like, at the end of the day...
35:06 Speaker 07 So who do you trust?
35:08 Ben Brock Johnson? I mean, usually I trust somebody who knows a lot more than I do about a given specialized area of anything.
35:16 Speaker 06 According to Saladino, such institutions, like, say, Harvard, may sound like places to trust, but...
35:24 Speaker 07 These are plant-based, plant-influenced institutions.
35:28 Ben Brock Johnson? That's a phrase I've never heard before.
35:31 Speaker 07 These are plant-influenced institutions, absolutely.
35:34 Ben Brock Johnson? Saladino argues that he is not biased. He makes free content and...
35:39 Speaker 07 Oh, maybe YouTube is putting ads there, but I don't have sponsors. So, yeah, maybe YouTube revenue, maybe $4,000 a month from YouTube ads.
35:48 Ben Brock Johnson? Okay, all right.
35:49 Speaker 07 Something pretty meager, yeah.
35:50 Ben Brock Johnson? To which we said, okay, maybe you're not a YouTube gajillionaire, but for a lot of people, $4,000 a month is a good chunk of change.
35:59 Speaker 06 Yes, a lot of, a lot of people, including public radio producers. Anyway, Saladino says the majority of his income comes from his business, Heart and Soil, a dietary supplement company based in Texas.
36:13 Ben Brock Johnson? Heart and Soil sells pills composed of dried animal organs. Saladino founded it a few years ago. He says that as co-owner, maybe 80 or 90% of his income comes from Heart and Soil. But?
36:29 Speaker 07 I don't even talk about it that much. I talk about it very rarely on my social media at all. Heart and Soil Supplements. Heart and Soil Supplements. Heart and Soil Supplements. Heart and Soil.
36:38 Speaker 06 Sometimes Saladino fails to mention that Heart and Soil is his company.
36:44 Ben Brock Johnson? The first supplement on the site is called Whole Package. It is designed to reinforce your manhood. The ingredients are, of course, grass-fed and finished testicle. Also, liver and whole blood extract. It costs just a measly $68 a month.
37:06 Speaker 06 Pocket change.
37:07 Ben Brock Johnson? Pocket change, baby.
37:08 Speaker 06 Its products are not FDA-approved and, quote, "not intended to treat, cure, or prevent any disease." But Saladino told us the company has a couple hundred thousand clients.
37:20 Ben Brock Johnson? Whoa, which, you know, carry the one. 70 bucks a month times 100,000 people? That, that's not bad. And this raised questions for us, particularly what is the difference Saladino sees between plant-influenced health organizations and himself? As someone who is telling you not to eat plants and then asking you to pay 68 bucks a month for a dietary supplement?
37:51 Speaker 06 You're providing advice to people online. You run a business, though, that benefits from the advice that you give people. How do you see a difference?
38:00 Speaker 07 Yeah, I think this is also kind of an underhanded association. We live in a capitalist society. In order to do this work, I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year making free content for humans.
38:14 Speaker 06 This continued for a while, so we asked again.
38:18 Ben Brock Johnson? You yourself brought up the idea of like, being skeptical of these organizations because of their funding, right?
38:26 Speaker 07 So I think that it'll be really interesting to let the audience decide whether your assertions are reasonable, or completely, or I should say, partially or potentially connected with underhanded intentions.
38:42 Speaker 06 Just about every major meatfluencer is selling something related to the diet. Steak in Butter Gal sells meal plans. Santa Cruz Medicinals sells supplements. Sean Baker sells carnivore community subscriptions. The Liver King, who was exposed for using steroids, sells supplements.
39:02 Ben Brock Johnson? And actually, The Liver King co-owns Heart and Soil with Saladino. But Dr. Saladino isn't just some random salesman. He's got credentials, which he mentions a lot.
39:13 Speaker 07 And a double-board certified medical doctor. A nutritionally trained physician. Classically trained medical doctor. I'm an MD. I used to do a lot of jujitsu when I was in medical school. When I went to medical school. We're both doctors and we're both just trying to help people understand.
39:24 Ben Brock Johnson? And it's true, he is a doctor. He told us he's never practiced in a hospital, but he's studied functional medicine, which focuses on the, quote, "root causes of disease." Functional medicine, however, is not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties and has been criticized for its, quote, "lack of evidence in treatments considered, quote, 'harmful and dangerous.'"
39:47 Speaker 06 He is also double-board certified. One certification is in psychiatry. In 2020, a couple of years after he began promoting the carnivore diet, he earned his other certification from the National Board of Physician Nutrition Specialists.
40:03 Ben Brock Johnson? But Saladino's beliefs contradict that organization, which maintains that a healthy diet is generally high in veggies and low in red meat. So why seek credentials from an organization opposed to your beliefs?
40:18 Speaker 07 And the reason I have that board exam on my credentials is because, essentially, because I went on a show in 2019, The Doctors Online, and there's a doctor on there going, "I'm certified as a physician nutrition specialist." And it's like, well, guess what? I am too. You know, like, just because you have a certification doesn't mean that someone should trust you, or that you have the ability to pontificate in a way that's any more valid than anyone else. So the certifications and a medical degree, these are essentially meaningless.
40:47 Ben Brock Johnson? So the credentials and certifications Saladino often references in his own videos are meaningless, according to him. "Do your own research," he might say, "and figure out what works for you."
40:59 Speaker 06 Heart and Soil Supplements features several testimonials of people who figured it out on its site, including one from Saladino.
41:08 Ben Brock Johnson? He's not just the founder, he's also a client.
41:12 Speaker 06 It also features a testimonial from Dr. Joseph Mercola, a well-known anti-vaxxer with multiple warnings from the FDA for false advertising. Saladino told us he was unaware of that.
41:24 Ben Brock Johnson? This is where we should point something out, about how meatposting is connected by the algorithms that drive our internetting to more problematic ideas and influencers. To say nothing of the "I'm just asking questions, man" approach Joe Rogan takes to ideas with very little basis in fact, Jordan Peterson, the infamous men's rights author and online persona who has said that white privilege is a, quote, "Marxist lie," was on the carnivore diet and promoted it. I eat a lot of meat and a lot of high-fat meat, and so I'm never hungry. One could argue that in the Venn diagram of fake, hateful, democracy-threatening groups
42:05 Ben Brock Johnson? and ideas online, you really can start at "healthy diet" search and end up at "women are less than," "white privilege is not a thing," and "vaccines don't work."
42:17 Speaker 06 Saladino has cast doubt on COVID vaccines, but men's rights are not mentioned in his content, as far as we could tell. He learned about the carnivore diet from the anti-feminist Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan. So we asked him what he made of the indirect link between those two online communities, meat and men's rights. So what I was curious about is, as a major influence in this sector, what do you make of that? Does the association bother you?
42:49 Speaker 07 Thank you, Dean. This one's gonna go viral, man. Thank you. This is an amazing piece of content, dude. Thank you. This is gonna go viral. That's amazing.
42:57 Ben Brock Johnson? A problem we kept having with Paul. When we asked him for definitive answers to our questions, he would react with his own questions, or accuse us of trying to paint him into a corner. Even if he did eventually have a response, it wasn't a direct response to the question that had been asked.
43:23 Speaker 06 Our interview with Dr. Saladino went for more than two hours, and it did get into the weeds. We asked him about some of the scientific papers he's cited to support his claims, like the claim that eating regular amounts of broccoli, kale, and Brussels can harm your thyroid.
43:41 Ben Brock Johnson? A claim that is not actually in the paper that he cites making the claim. The paper's author, you will remember, called Saladino a doofus.
43:51 Speaker 06 Can you explain why the study that you use as evidence does not say the same thing that you are saying?
43:58 Speaker 07 That's an inaccurate statement, Dean. I'm not saying...
44:00 Ben Brock Johnson? We asked him about telling his large following that spinach smoothies can cause kidney failure, a claim apparently based on a case study of one person.
44:11 Speaker 07 Does that make it invalid?
44:12 Speaker 06 We asked him about a paper he cited with questionable data, and another he publicized that was funded by General Mills and a livestock company. It got repetitive.
44:22 Speaker 07 I think that none of this is cut and dry, but as I said repeatedly, what I'm doing is drawing attention to these issues that aren't really out there in the health zeitgeist.
44:30 Ben Brock Johnson? Dr. Saladino was just as unwilling to accept that he'd mischaracterized the Hadza hunter-gatherers, despite criticism from Dr. Alyssa Crittenden, who had spent 20 years in the field. Same thing about his theory that eating meat is what helped humans evolve, and that other theories, like fire, are without merit.
44:50 Speaker 06 Do you see how this could be misleading to suggest to the public that eating nose to tail is what increased our human brains?
44:58 Speaker 07 You guys are really good at putting words in people's mouths. I don't know if your people you interview push back as much as I do. I hope they do. It's such a leading question.
45:12 Speaker 06 I'm not putting new words in your...
45:13 Speaker 07 I love it.
45:14 Speaker 06 I'm quoting you.
45:15 Speaker 07 No, I love it.
45:16 Speaker 06 Quote, "Eating nose to tail is what made us human. Eating animals, quote, 'allowed our brains to grow.'"
45:31 Speaker 06 This left us with one final searing question: Who cares?
45:37 Ben Brock Johnson? Seriously, who cares? To each their own, right? As we heard, there is no one optimal diet, so maybe an animal-based diet is the right one for some people. People like Jerry Brasey, who was in some ways pretty hard to argue with because he doesn't seem that unreasonable.
45:54 Speaker 05 No doctor ever said to me, "Hey, fatso, you're dying. You're killing yourself. You better get serious." No one ever said that to me. No one ever scared that into me. They all said, "Here's your medication."
46:05 Ben Brock Johnson? And ultimately, in some ways, it's the Jerries I am worried about. People who discover the carnivore diet on Rogan and then maybe make major life changes, including using their discovery to influence their own set of potential future bacon, butter, steak and egg eaters. Do you worry that what you are putting out into the world is something that works for you but also does not work for a majority of people?
46:34 Speaker 05 I'm betting my life that what I'm doing is correct. So I don't take it lightly, right? I'm not being paid by anybody. If you watch my videos and you see what's happened over the last two years for me, this is all my experience, to your point, 100%.
46:54 Speaker 06 In a recent survey of 2,000 carnivore dieters, most said that, like Jerry, they feel better. Maybe it's because of the meat. Maybe it's because they stopped eating processed food. Maybe it's because these are people recruited from communities like Facebook's World Carnivore Tribe. I don't know. Take the results with a grain of salt.
47:16 Speaker 05 I add incredible amounts of salt.
47:22 Speaker 06 Admittedly, after watching dozens and dozens of carnivore TikToks and YouTube videos, they had me thinking, maybe there is something to this. Because firsthand accounts are compelling, even if they aren't scientific data.
47:38 Ben Brock Johnson? Whether these folks remain feeling healthy in the future, who knows? The diet hasn't been around for very long. Still, that is their reality for now, and it's their choice.
47:48 Speaker 06 That's the thing that stands out in all of this. It's their choice because, as with most diets, it's about them. It's about the self, the me. It doesn't concern anyone else. Except that how we all eat does affect all of us.
48:04 Speaker 02 We start tonight tracking extreme heat. Unprecedented heat wave. Relentless wildfires.
48:09 Speaker 03 With major flooding. Very powerful storm surge. An above-average hurricane season this year.
48:16 Ben Brock Johnson? Last year was the hottest year on record, partly because of El Nino, but mostly because of our rapidly destabilizing climate. In 2023, there were hundreds of climate-related disasters globally.
48:30 Speaker 00 The death toll is now over 100 in Maui. At least 200 people have been confirmed dead after Cyclone Mokka. Death toll from Cyclone Freddy has crossed 400. First, more than 5,000 people, I believe, dead due to flooding in Libya.
48:43 Speaker 06 Famine is at Somalia's door. Nearly 8 million people are going hungry.
48:53 Speaker 06 The people most affected by the crisis are not the people who can afford to buy meat for every meal at the grocery store.
49:00 Ben Brock Johnson? Remember the Hadza, the hunter-gatherers that meat talkers love to talk about? The plants that the Hadza do eat are fewer and fewer because their environment is changing because of climate change.
49:14 Speaker 06 We are not trying to say that meatfluencers are responsible. That would be a ridiculous speculation, and we wouldn't want to do that. But global meat consumption is responsible for between 11 and 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, gases like carbon dioxide and methane. That's according to six separate, peer-reviewed studies. Scientists say that there is no way to get to net zero without changing our eating habits.
49:42 Ben Brock Johnson? Meat requires more water, fertilizer, and in particular, land than plants. If the whole world ate as much meat as an American, let alone a carnivore, we would literally need a second planet.
50:00 Speaker 06 I used to eat meat, and I don't anymore.
50:03 Ben Brock Johnson? And I was raised vegetarian. Now I'm an omnivore. And that's fine. As the scientists we interviewed told us, there is no one optimal diet. But they also said that Americans in general should eat less meat for the climate. Promoting an animal-based diet is, at best, irresponsible.
50:25 Speaker 06 Paul Saladino has a different take.
50:28 Speaker 07 Look at how green this grass is and how healthy this field is as the cows are doing what they're doing. And we know that the methane that they burp is just part of the carbon cycle. It has no significant impact on climate change, guys.
50:39 Speaker 06 We spoke with Saladino for a while about the climate crisis. And while he acknowledged that it is real, he also said things like this.
50:48 Speaker 07 The plants are not without, quote-unquote, "greenhouse gas blood" on their hands either.
50:53 Speaker 06 Still, the real meatfluencers aren't Paul Saladino, or Jerry, or Joe Rogan. They are the corporations that make up the meat and dairy industry, an industry that gets $38 billion a year in federal subsidies, an industry that has spent hundreds of millions lobbying against climate action in the US.
51:15 Ben Brock Johnson? The industry has a dedicated, quote, "digital command center" to track meat mentions in the media, and an online "master of beef advocacy" program for training influencers.
51:30 Ben Brock Johnson? Like big oil and big sugar, it downplays science, backs greenwashing PR campaigns. In fact, the guy who invented public relations in the 1920s is the same guy who was paid to convince us all that bacon and eggs make the all-American breakfast. Sausage too, by the way.
51:50 Speaker 06 Every scientist we interviewed brought up the climate crisis. And every scientist we interviewed saw social media meat influencers, not as people concerned about health, but as people stuck in a larger system, a cycle, creating divisions at a time where we desperately need the opposite. Again, paleoanthropologist Amanda Henry.
52:13 Speaker 03 Food is identity. And you end up, people talking about food as a way of not only expressing themselves, but of drawing in groups and out groups and using it as a way to prove they're better than somebody else or judge other people as part of that, like, group definition.
52:35 Ben Brock Johnson? And this idea really stuck with us. Because it's true, right? Food is so elemental for humans. It is life. And most of us are trying to, as we like to say on social media, live our best lives.
52:50 Speaker 06 And in our endless search for answers about how to do that, how to live, we often look back through the mists of history. A species-level "get back to our roots" nostalgia becomes our guide through the modern food industry, through conflicting reports about what's good for you and what's not. Meat influencers are capitalizing, literally, on that nostalgia.
53:15 Ben Brock Johnson? But Dean, we are technically influencers too. We are podcasters, man. I mean, we're no Joe Rogan, but you know.
53:23 Speaker 06 I don't think I can even influence my cat, but sure, okay, whatever.
53:27 Ben Brock Johnson? So I do want to push an idea based on little to no scientific evidence. Is that cool?
53:32 Speaker 06 Oh, God.
53:35 Ben Brock Johnson? I want to suggest the possibility that as we look back through those mists of history, when we sort through ideas of what made human brains and capabilities really take off, like the discovery and control of fire for cooking, or hunting big game, we might be looking at the cave paintings with a group of hunters surrounding a big woolly mammoth or whatever, and focusing on the wrong thing, on the big pile of meat, instead of the act of doing something together. Could it be a social change that we can't see?
54:12 Speaker 03 Yes.
54:13 Ben Brock Johnson? That is actually the thing that blew our brains up?
54:18 Speaker 03 There are a lot of people who agree with you on that point, that they also want to evoke a social change, but it will forever be out of our grasp, let's say, to find evidence for it, unfortunately.
54:34 Speaker 06 Dr. Amanda Henry, as a dentist to the dead, says we might never know if a social change, like cooperation, is the thing that set us apart.
54:44 Ben Brock Johnson? But what we do know is that good science is something we do together. It's an act of consensus, not a single idea or a silver bullet for your gullet. Good to remember that this year, in case while scrolling the internet, you find someone who wants to tell you about the miracle diet they have discovered, and maybe also sell you a subscription to pills full of desiccated testicles.
55:09 Speaker 06 And add to cart.
55:25 Speaker 06 Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and co-hosted by me, Dean Russell.
55:33 Ben Brock Johnson? And written, and written, and rewritten. Poor Dean Russell. Also, me, Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.
55:41 Speaker 06 The rest of our team is Samata Joshi, Grace Tatter, Matt Reed, Paul Vikes, and our resident vegan, Emery Sivertson.
55:49 Ben Brock Johnson? Who was mysteriously missing from this episode.
55:51 Speaker 06 Sorry, Emery.
55:54 Ben Brock Johnson? By the way, our full interview with Dr. Paul Saladino, if you want to hear it, we are putting a link to the full unedited version in our show notes. That's where you can find it and listen if you dare. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and beef, butter, bacon, and eggs.
56:14 Speaker 06 Mmm, the four food groups.
56:16 Ben Brock Johnson? Delicious. Yes.
56:18 Speaker 06 If you have an unsolved mystery or an untold history that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread at wbur.org.
56:48 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Moro Tri Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring fashion and culture journalist and author Dana Thomas on the origin of fast fashion.
57:08 Speaker 01 In the 1990s, during the early days of globalization, a small brand out of Spain called Zara was deciding to spread its wings beyond Spain and move throughout Europe and roll out its stores of not expensive, kind of fashionable clothes, middle-market, accessible fashion. And what they did for their business model was they would go to fashion shows and see what was the hip thing, and then reinterpret it in less expensive fabrics, just like Gap was doing. But at the time, Zara was embracing this business model called QR, Quick Response, which was in fact invented by the US apparel industry. Basically, you'd
57:52 Speaker 01 put in a few items of a collection in the store, and if it did really well, then you put more into production and you put them in the store. And if they... Didn't do so well, then you stopped it and you moved on to the next thing. It was like, almost like doing a focus group drop of clothes in the store and seeing what, what works, what doesn't, and what does. You play. So they started moving into this area of quick response and turning out more collections more quickly and getting them onto their store floor faster. And they saw that by doing this, by upping the number of times they did drops in the store to every two weeks as opposed to four times a year, that their numbers of visits from consumers went up dramatically.
58:37 Speaker 00 Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.
58:51 Speaker 02 When everything feels nonstop, movement becomes the pause. So give Lululemon this holiday season. Smooth, seamless running gear builds momentum through every mile. Targeted support adds steadiness to every pulse and hold. And dynamic stretch expands presence through every pose. Give the feeling. Shop in-store and on lululemon.com.
Previous The Unquenchable Thirst Next Stick Nation Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated