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Freeman Beyond the Wall dot com, forward slash support and
do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
back to the Pekingona Show. John Moody's here. How are
you doing, John? Good?
Speaker 2: How are you doing?
Speaker 1: I'm doing good? Doing good first time on the show.
Please tell everybody a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2: Oh goodness. So I'm a husband, dad to six kids.
My wife has been trying to figure out for twenty
years of marriage what I do vocationally, So we'll probably
get into some of that on the show. You know,
I've started a number of businesses over the years. I've
been involved, especially with kind of food freedom type activism,
you know, land rights, access to food, being able to
choose what you actually eat, which, strangely enough, people in
the government don't think you should actually get to choose
what you and your family eat, local economics and things
like that. And then you know, we homesteads. We live
on thirty five acres a bit outside of Louisville, Kentucky,
and this, you know, the theme of my life is
wanting to leave my community children in a better place
than where I started. So wherever I have opportunity to
make those kinds of inroads and progress for my kids,
I'm trying well.
Speaker 1: And the whole idea of leaving a better life for
your kids, that's up to you, isn't it. I think
a lot of people can make excuses about, oh, the
government's interfering with this, The government's interfering with that, and
you know that does play into it. But really, if
you make the decision that you are going to push
through no matter what obstacles are put up in your way,
and for the majority, the overwhelming majority of people, I
mean we're talking about a fractional percentage there. The things
that they always worry about when it comes to like
state overreach or things like that, really don't come to fruition.
So it really is up to you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, one reason we are where we are
is you've had a few decades of people who've complained
about the direction things were going.
Speaker 1: The direction I was raising my hand saying I'm one
of them.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, you know, people complained for you know, a
few decades in a row. The government's growing too quickly,
the government is interfering in too many things, the government
is taking on too many powers, writing too many rules,
spending too much money. But then you ask them what
did you do about it? And they look at you
like you're an alien, Like I have a I should
have done something about this other than watched you know,
Fox News or watch whatever TV show and yelled at
the screen like I had a duty and a responsibility
to actually do something. And I don't understand how those
few decades of people operated, you know what got them
to that point of thinking they had no duties and
responsible abilities civically to stand up to run amock government,
to check tyranny, to reign in corruption and other things,
when it would have been so much easier for them
thirty and forty years ago.
Speaker 1: No less. Yeah, and it really is easy to fall
into the whole victim thing. A few years ago, a
bunch of years ago I started talking about I was
living in Atlanta when I started this podcast, and that
was in twenty seventeen, and twenty twenty rolled around and
I was like, I got to get out of here.
I can't know this is this is no place to be.
And you know, I got out and I'm pretty rural
where I am, and I think that that's where you can.
Sometimes you have to retreat in order to make your
in order to be able to survive and to make
a better life for yourself and be an example to
other people. And I understand that there's I'm also someone
who believes in tradition and believes in family, and believes
in the legacy of family, and at times that you
could basically be telling people to well, leave your family behind.
If you're in a city and you've been in a
city for generations, you know, my family was in New York,
was in New York City for generations. Also Pennsylvania for generations,
but way more rural in Pennsylvania. And yeah, you just
have to make that decision because even if Trump is
able to dismantle a good portion of this administrative state,
the cities still are going to be Unless the cities
are attacked, they're still going to be centers of power
for old regime forces. And unless you have a real
good way of you know, you have a plan for
attacking that, and you also have a patronage system set
up like your own USAID to fund that, then you're
pretty much at their whim until you know, they either
collapse on their own or someone really attacks them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, cities are an interesting problem in modern American politics. So,
you know, I live in a slightly more rural area.
We're an outside our outside of Louisville roughly, you know,
thirty minutes to the Louisville metro. And I think one
thing conservatives don't appreciate is you know, the reason cities
have become such a problem is they've gobbled up all
the population and all the economics of rural areas.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: So I'm helping a few people with political campaign runs
coming up the next couple of years, and I helped
them with messaging and talking points. You know, how how
do you speak to some of these problems without needlessly
alienating possible coalitions? You know, because when you're running for office,
you need to not needlessly drive off somebody who might
vote for you through through just you know, attacking things
in the wrong way. It's like, you know, most of
my neighbors who are farmers, none of their children. You know,
they're more conservative people. They hate the dominance of these
major cities over their entire state's political lives, and they
hate that their children can't stay near them. You know
what grandparent wants to go to bed at night with
their grandchildren anywhere but close to them, where like the
only way you can see your family. And so much
of this is a political problem in the sense of
why don't we have why has so much of the
population been sucked into the cities, Why do rural areas
have collapsing population levels and so little economic influence. It's
these layers and layers of regulations that have only made
it viable to build a lot of businesses or actually
be able to realize the profit that exists in the
economy by putting yourself under the thumb of these big cities,
having access to these government resources and inspections and whatnot.
And that's really you know, one of like the key areas.
We can make so much project progress so quickly if
people saw like there's these little places you can poke
holes in the dam or take bricks out of the wall,
that we can it so substantially so quickly.
Speaker 1: Have you heard of the idea of the IQ shredder?
Speaker 2: I have not.
Speaker 1: So Basically, like places like San Francisco and New York
and these big metro centers that the people from rural
areas who are high IQ are they get recruited. If
you're going to make money, if they're going once they
get educated, if they're going to make the kind of
money they make, they get drawn into San Francisco, they
get drawn into the And so you the best and
the brightest leave rural areas. You know, you know, I'm
not you know, I think of you know, like Marc
Andreessen is from like rural Wisconsin or Minnesota, I can't remember,
and you know he's in he's in San Francisco. He
would obviously be drawn drawn out. And I'm not blaming him.
I understand why he did it, but yeah, you have
all these people who are in rural areas who formerly
who through the centuries, stayed in those areas and made
those areas great and made those areas prospers where it's
made him what they were, and now they're drawn out
into you know, the the zip code that every that
you're supposed to be in because you know, that's where
you make the most money. So yeah, I see a
lot of that too, you know that.
Speaker 2: You know, my friend Congressman Thomas Massey, him and his
wife are from you know, very rural eastern Kentucky. They
got scholarships to go to MIT, and then they were
in Boston for a while, you know, because they started
a tech company where you're going to start like a
tech company, their venture capital was in Boston. That's where
they went to school. And he's one of the rare
examples of somebody who starts on that trajectory and does
make good money, but he uses it to come home
and help rebuild the area he's from. You know, so
there's an opportunity to pill the Egyptians there for right,
people from rural areas to go and you know, basically
be you know, exiled in Egypt for a season, build,
build companies, build valuable things, and then come back home
to begin to decentralize some of these things and to
bring some of the benefits back to where you're originally from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the one of the things that you know, basically
they went to Boston and they didn't forget who they were.
The problem is is a lot of these people they
moved to these places and they in order to fit in,
they start adopting the beliefs that are there, and you
know it really it really changes them. And so people
who formally grew up in a more conservative or have
a more historical way way of living historically was taught
to them growing up, they become direct fascinated from that
because well, they're going someplace where if they keep and
they hold on to those values, it's a mark against them.
So they they're either pretending or they truly do change
their minds. And when they change their minds, that means
they're not going to be going back to where they're from,
because those people are now backwards. And you know, I'm
with my people here in the IQ Shredder.
Speaker 2: They're definitely you know, tribalism. That's what I love about
Thomas and a few of my other friends, or even
you know, my friend Joel Salatin. Joel is still just
Joel no matter how many people he hob nods with,
no matter how many big events he does, he knows
who he is and where he's from. He has that
like deep sense of connection that you really need to
sustain a culture and civilization. You know, the more you
break down those types of identities and loyalties, the more
we get you know, what we see today where everything
is reduced to you know, crass economics. What is in
it for me, even at the expense of everyone else
around me, including the future generations of my family.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we see that a lot. So tell me
about tell me about local politics. Tell me about Kentucky.
You know, it would seem that Kentucky would be one
of those places because it's a red state, it's a
bright red state. I think it's always the first state
that's called for the president for the in the presidential election,
it's like Kentucky is going to the to the Republican.
But you know, I've been through Kentucky. I've been through Louisville,
I've been through Lexington. Yeah, it turns out that you
have a lot of people who flock to the cities
go in there, and it's also read.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Kentucky suffers from bipolar disorder. So nationally, Kentucky
for the presidential election, and I think generally speaking for
its Senate seats, has been reliably Republican since the seventies,
I believe, I remember my you know number is okay.
But at the state level, so the whole time Kentucky
nationally is voting Republican. At the state level, I think
we've had one Republican governor in the past twenty five years,
and I think it was maybe twenty sixteen was the
first time in twenty years that Republicans controlled both the
House and the Senate. So people who think of Kentucky
as a conservative state solely based on national election data
don't understand how confused the people who live in this
state really are when it comes to politics. And you know, Kentucky.
Kentucky is like prime rhino hunting land if you're somebody
who wants to hunt rhinos. One of my favorite jokes
about Kentucky is, you know what is a Republican in Kentucky?
It's a Democrat who puts red on his campaign signs.
Because the vast majority of state level Republican senators and
legislators in this state govern and vote almost indistinguishably from
their Democratic counterparts. It's it's always just stunning to sit
in a room with them and ask them questions, how
they how they think about the world, how they the
role of government, you know, all all of these different things,
and they don't at a root level, sound different than
their Democratic counterparts. So they still see, you know, they
see government as the solution rather than the problem. You
know that they see, you know, they appeal to this
thing called a level playing field, which really just means
certain players can afford to comply with these rules and
regulations that others can't. You know, But Kentucky has been
undergoing you know, our conservatives have we have more conservatives
who are truly conservative than ten years ago actually in
our state level politics, which has been great We've had
quite a few rhinos fall before the big hunting guns
because they finally ran a foul.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Republicans, almost to a certain extent, demand to be
at least a little bit libertarian, and they tend to
run as libertarians then govern a Democrats because I mean,
it's just the way it is. I think. I think
a lot of that just has to do with a
lot of people run for office thinking that things are
a certain way, and then when they get in there,
they realize things aren't a certain way and they just
become a part of the swamp. I've heard that story
over and over again from people who've got who helped
people run their campaigns like a senator, a house national senator,
house campaign from a state and then got that person elected,
and then when they go to DC, they like change
overnight because they get there and they're just basically told,
you think it's going to be one way and it's
not that way. So yeah, I mean you see that
a lot. I mean, even even here in in Alabama,
it's uh, you get people who are just I mean,
you get the Republicans here adopt the a lot of
the neo con positions which are just classically leftist positions,
and you can't yeah until that, until that changes, there
are a lot you know, you're not going to see
an insane amount of change. You may see some, but
not not a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and that's where, you know, I think one
reason a lot of people do that is the dominant
messaging on the conservative think set tank side is very
deeply rooted post war consensus type messaging. And you know
Reno's book, Return to the Strong Gods, You're finally starting
to see a better historically informed can conservative messaging. And
some of the problems are no, you know, like forty
trillion dollars in national debt. You know where I think
now that interest on the debt is it seventy percent
of the discretionary budget or something. You know, you can
only ignore these things for so long. You could ignore
them under Bush, you could ignore it through Obama. But
some of these things now they can't sweep under the
rug that we can't afford this anymore. And they also
can't sweep under the rug. You know. One reason neocon
type messaging used to be very popular in red states,
especially rural red areas, was the natural deference to LEO
and military but the last decade has so heavily eroded that,
you know, so conservative circles I run in. There are
more and more churches, more and more conservative voices who
are very anti interventionist military. They you know, they are
widely discouraging serving in the military. You know, our constant interventionism,
the loss of lives, the loss of resources to keep
up these narratives, and I think you're going to see
that continue to erode and change state level politicians and
how they actually operate as more and more of their
constituents are no longer beholden kind of to some of
this messaging in some of these myths.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can encourage people to join the National Guard
because you know, you're protect in your state, but until
they until the guards the states decide that they can't
be taken out and go it sent overseas. You know,
a friend of mine was in the Coast Guard and
during the War on Terror he ended up fighting Somali
pirates off of Somalia in Coast Guard vehicles in cutters.
It's like, okay, well, what did I sign up for that?
I sign up to protect our coasts and you know,
protect pollution in the Great lakes or protect you know,
drug running coming into the keys or something like that,
or why am I over in Somalia? And the same
thing for somebody who joins, you know, the Kentucky National
Guard is like, well, I'm joining this because this state
may need to be protected at some point, we may
need to protect ourselves. Oh oh, I'm in Afghanistan. What
the hell am I doing here? I don't even know
where Afghanistan is.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I love that. There's an exchange in the movie
Thirteen Hours where they're sitting on top of the building
and they're talking about just like why what on earth
are we doing here? You know, why? Why am I
on the other side of the world most likely going
to die and widow my wife and leave fatherless my children,
like to what end? And you know, and again this,
you know, helping people with messaging. We need more conservatives
constantly bringing up these issues, you know, we in our
in our local areas. You know, this is what helps
us change state level politics and national politics because again,
you know, a lot of the National Republican party platform
and approaches are built on you know, again, like men
over the age of fifty, you know, generally viewed their
sons going into the military as wuha, such a great thing,
especially for rural Going back to the economic issue, what
else are your boys from rural areas gonna do if
they're not like a tech genius or this, that or
the other. The only viable career path a lot of
them thought their sons had was military service. And so
so many of these things hang together. And the more
we show people, hey, these things hang together, you know
there are other futures for your son that don't involve
dying in some third world country so that your tax
money can be more efficiently laundered to terrorist groups.
Speaker 1: What were the circumstances that got you acquainted with Thomas
Massey and other political figures.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I started a local food buying club in
two thousand and six in Louisville, Kentucky. So I almost
died in two thousand and four because of some significant
health problems I developed. I was able to heal myself
solely through using real food, rediscovering like, this is what
food actually is, this is how you prepare it, and
like Hippocrates said, your food truly can be your medicine,
and your medicine can be your food. So I was like,
this is amazing. I want to help other people get
access to good quality food, and I wanted to make
it easier for me to get good quality food because
I basically reinvented hunting and gathering, you know, because we
went from shopping at Kroger and wal Mart or wherever
where you just go once or twice a week you
get everything you need. It's like now, on Monday night,
I have to go to a dark alley somewhere in
Louisville to get my raw milk because at the time,
the state was very, very aggressively anti raw milk. And
then on Tuesday I have to go meet my CSA
farmer for my CSA box. And on Wednesday I still
have to go buy Kroger because it's not like I
can get everything from those two places. And then on
Thursday I'm at a farmer's market, and on Saturday and
I'm at a different farmers market because the good farmers
who sell the things I need aren't at both markets.
I'm just like, who has time for this? Who has
time to spend all of their non working time hunting
and foraging for decent quality food? So I started a
local food buying club. And I realized that the problem
was because of the regulatory environment. You can't offer people
real food and it not be a charity if you
are a registered food business. You know, if you look
at grocery stores, if you were to get rid of
everything but the real food in a grocery store, the
grocery store would go bankrupt in days of sales. Almost
all of their profit is from all of the processed stuff.
And even now to get more profit. When you walk
in the grocery store, the very first thing they're selling
you our vaccines. And there's now banks in grocery stores.
They've almost gone the McDonald's route of becoming landlords, where
they're making money off owning the land and the space,
and the food itself is an incidental part of the
business model really. So my background my undergraduate was mathematic, business,
finance and economics before I did my graduate work, so
I always had the kind of this math economic mind
ability to look at things. I'm like, I want to
help people with food. I could never do this having
a store model. It's just impossible. The numbers don't number.
So I was I looked for a way to get
food to people without being a food handling business, and
I decided on a model of a membership prepayment service
type group. So you become a member of the buying club,
you give me your money up front, and we go
get you the things you want so you don't have
to So I'm not buying stuff and reselling it. I'm
not a reseller. I'm not a grocery store. Not anybody
can just walk in off the street and get things.
We're not open to the public, you know that kind
of statutory language. So we started that in two thousand
and six, started with ten families in the living room
of our apartment, and by two thousand and nine we
had about one hundred and twenty families, and by two
thousand and eleven, I think we had about one hundred
and eighty families, and we're doing about half a million
dollars of local food per year. And also in twenty
and eleven, the Kentucky State Health Department decided to raid
my buying club. So they showed up on Memorial Day weekend,
which was like one of the worst decisions they could
ever make, a total gift for me, tactically speaking, that
they chose that weekend to do this, and they served
us cease and desist in quarantine orders. You know, so
anybody who violates this will face a five of not
less than five or ten thousand dollars and no less
than thirty to ninety days in jail. And I'd already
known your listeners may not be familiar with this, but
starting in the late nineteen nineties, the federal government, at
the behest of industrial agriculture interests, started a widespread, coordinated
crackdown on independent farmers and local food. And there's a
really good documentary, kind of a cheesy title called Pharmageddon.
Speaker 3: That highlights that that radicalized me, Like, I mean, yeah,
I saw that when it came out, and even.
Speaker 1: More so than food, more so than food inc. Farmageddon
was absolutely insane.
Speaker 2: Well, and the worst part about that movie is as
egregious as those I think she does eight stories, maybe
there were easily fifty more that were ten times worse
what the government did, and another four hundred that happened
over those years. You know, there's a farmer here in Kentucky,
I think it was Gary Oakes. He was swat raided,
So he was swatted, you know, guys wearing the full
swat tactical gear. While he was delivering milk up to
northern Kentucky, the Kentucky side of Cincinnati. Vernon Hirschberger in
Wisconsin was charged with like four felonies overfeeding his community,
more charges than literally domestic terrorists like during BLM or
other stuff. He's an Amish ex Amish farmer, dad of
eleven and so her movie is like a like a
little scratching of the surface of the amount of energy
and money the government put into trying to make sure
people could not access good quality local food.
Speaker 1: Well, here's the thing. So you mentioned a swat team.
Is is this a local or a county doing it
on their own or are they acting at the behest
of the Feds. Because the way to stop this is
you have a sh You know, I've been saying this
for years. The sheriff is the most powerful person in
the country, the most powerful position. They can choose not
to cooperate with the Feds. It happened at Waco, and
I mean they actually didn't even ask the sheriff Harwell
for help in Waco. They just went by. They just
bypassed him and see what happens. They lost They lost
four of their quote unquote heroes. On the first day. Yeah, So,
I mean I think that's what it is is this
is local and county police cooperating with the Feds. Why
are the hell are you doing that?
Speaker 2: Exactly? This is why I love Sheriff Max Constitutional Peace
Officers Association because, you know, so what we found out.
You know, so we were raided in twenty eleven, and
up until that point, pretty much everybody else who had
been raided by the government in the local food wars
had lost. So Rassam in California rated twice, totally shut down,
man A storehouse in Ohio, Athens locally grown down in Georgia.
All of these different farmers, all of them just got steamrolled.
And so we were raided and we were the first
group in the country to walk away winner. So and
that started this trajectory where I ended up meeting Thomas
Massey probably a year or two later at a food
freedom focused event. It's still one of my favorite memories
of Thomas ever, because he walks into the Stonewall Jackson
Hotel in Staunton, Virginia because we're doing this event near
Polly Face Farm and Joel Salatin for obvious reasons, and
you know, Massy walks in, and I was kind of
like overseeing certain parts of the event. So Massey walks
in and I stand up to grim like, Hi, I'm
John Moody. He's like, hey, I'm Congressman Thomas Massey. I go, yeah,
I go, you look like your picture. So he shakes
my hands and then he looks at me. He goes,
do you want some eggs? I'm like, he's a sitting
member of Congress who's offering me eggs. I just met him.
I probably shouldn't say no, So I'm like, sure, I'll
take some eggs. He's like, let's go back to my car.
So now we're going to this underground parking lot with
a man I do not know, and I have this
existential crisis moment where I'm like, I'm about to be abducted.
My wife and children are never going to see me
again because this Thomas Massey look alike got me with
an offer of free pastured eggs. But we get down
to his car in the parking lot and one side
of the bumper of his car is all local food
stickers like grow more food, food freedom, eat what you know,
like all local food steward the environment. Bumper sticker slogans.
Then the other side and this is like, you know,
this is twenty thirteen or fourteen. He's driving this little red,
totally beat up car as a congressman, just like almost
a piece of junk car. The other side is all
firearms stickers, like you know, just as pro firearms as you.
And I'm sitting here looking at the two sides of
the car imagining somebody in Washington, d C. Being stuck
in traffic behind Massy, trying to reconcile these two usually
opposed world views politically. But he gave me some pastured
eggs because he told me Ronda would kill him if
he came back home not having gotten rid of all
of these pastured eggs they'd built up.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you. One time I left the
United States and I went to live in eastern European
country that was could have been a borderline third World,
but more like second World at that time. And when
I started eating over there, it seemed like the first
four or five days I was going through a detox.
My body was completely emptying through my skin in every orifice.
I don't even know what. Why was that? What the fuck? What?
I'm sorry what's in our food?
Speaker 2: Oh, you just can't even begin to imagine that. There's
some good videos on YouTube where people will show the
exact same product in Europe and in America, and then
they'll just turn to the ingredients. You know, you know,
so these are theoretically identical companies, identical products, and the
ingredient list in Europe will be you know, like this long,
and the ingredient list in the United States will be
like this law and you're just like what, like how
you know? In the United States there are thous zens
of chemicals and food additives that are allowed to be
added into our food or used in growing our food
or raising our food, that almost no one else in
the world allows to be used. And it's baffling to me.
I mean, obviously it makes sense. They merely bought off
the FDA and the USDA.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's start right there. Why is it cheaper or
is this nefarious?
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know if it's you know, obviously, as
a Christian, I think there's like an overarching evil power
at work in the world. But he can use stupidity
just as easily as he can use malice, And there
is a measure of malice, but a lot of it.
In my experience actually dealing with these people, it's really
just a combination of greed and stupidity. You know, it's
you know, it's just greed and stupidity. Though what's that quote,
It's like, you know, at a high enough level, the
difference between malice and stupidity is indistinguishable, because you know,
you look at like what some of these large companies
did with I think it's pfo s's like poly fluorinated
putting into the water supply in West Virginia in similar places.
You look at one of what these companies did with
like radium, or you look at you know, the tobacco
files and stuff for tobacco companies. You know, there's definitely
a degree of malice in the sense of we really
do know this is bad, but we're gonna do it anyway.
But but it's you know, it's a type of malice
where they're not doing it because as they're trying to
depopulate the world. But it's the type of malice where
they really don't care how much it harms people because
they rationalize it away.
Speaker 1: It's the same kind of rationalization or malice behind you know,
sending American troops to Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere where
they know they're going to get killed, or I mean
even bombing other countries where you know, I guess because
they're not because they're not American, they're they're humanity doesn't matter,
or you just make all these rationalizations for you know,
oh well, I mean, they're the terrorists are using them
as human shields. Have you ever notice when you when
the United States kills or Israel kills a bunch of
kids or something, it's because they were being used as
human shields. And I mean apparently nobody except me and
maybe you know a bunch of other people demand proof
of that. But it's like, oh no, here, here's the proof.
Here's an Israeli newspaper saying that they okay, well, so, yeah,
I mean believing that they would put stuff in food
that's just really going to make us sick and which
you know, in turn benefits pharma because now they get
to the curate of the sickness is to take pills
and shots and everything.
Speaker 2: That.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't see a problem
with it being nefarious or stupid, or the fact that
they know that it's making people sick when they're willing
to just kill kill kids and women and innocent people
and send our people off to wars for wars for
nothing other than to oh, I don't know, you know,
settle some ethnic blood feuds from five hundred years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm sure we're going to be very successful at finally,
you know, remedying. Yeah, it's and you know, this reminds
me of the old phrase. You know, one death is
a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic. And there's
definitely that because a lot of these people are then
the same people who will use a one off shooting
where a child dies. That's why we need to abolish
the Second Amendment while they're profiting from killing thousands of
children through diabetes and cancer and other stuff. And you're
just like, you know, human inconsistency and hypocrisy and stupidity
are the are the only infinites in the universe outside
of God? I always let you know, Einstein was I
think Einstein has a thing where he's like he was
once asked, you know, what is infinite in the universe?
And he goes, He's like, what are the only infinites?
We know of, and Einstein responds the universe and human stupidity.
But there's only one of those. I'm not sure about
referring to the universe. He's not sure if it's infinite,
but he's pretty sure human's stupidity is unbounded.
Speaker 1: The Well, here, let's let's go in this direction since
it's something that's you know, people have been talking about.
Robert F. Kennedy Junior, Maha. Do you think if he
goes as hard like I mean, I guess we found
out last night. I saw reports that USAID is officially
closed down, that they're gone, they shutter the offices, everybody's
everybody's on leave or you know, send home. Do you
think that if somebody has the will and the power
to do it, that that they can turn this around?
That they can not only pharma, which is something that
if you keep yourself healthy enough, you don't ever have
to deal with, but I mean, if the food supply
is poison, then we're just doomed. So do you think
he Do you like what you're hearing from him? Does
it give you hope? Do you think that that this
is going to happen? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Well, I think you know, as I said, at the
fall at the Rogue Food Conference, Joel Salatin and I
put on this is a once in a century opportunity
to fix a bunch of problems. RFK cannot do it alone.
So if you're somebody who cares about the future of
your children, the future of your county, the future of
your state, the future of your country, this is the
opportunity to get into the game, and you know, fixing
the food system that it. Honestly, you know, some of
these problems are theoretically theoretically daunting, but you could fix
some of these problems within a decade just by addressing
a handful of major policy areas. You know, what turned
all of America from western Ohio all the way to
Colorado into a ceaseless field of corn and soy that
is sprayed with the leftovers of World War Two and
is financed with an energy policy that has to be
upheld by our military. Like what did it? It's it's
all a very narrow range of government policies. I don't
know if you've ever talked about Earl Butts on your
show or familiar with him. You know, because because people
look around and people like, oh, this just the way
it's always been like Earl Butts was head of the USDA,
and his entire USDA motto and policy was get big
or get out. So, you know, if you want to
understand current American history and you've never heard of Earl Butts,
you need to go read him because he solves so
many like gaps in understanding why we are where we are.
So if you just undo a lot of his policies
and how they kind of work out through the farming sector,
through the economy into the grocery store, if you have
the wisdom and skill to unwind some of these policies,
you can in again in like a five, ten, fifteen
year window, you can quickly move us back to a
measure of sanity. And you know, New Zealand's obviously a
tiny country. It's probably GDP is less than Texas. But
New Zealand did this I think like fifteen years ago.
Where where they they? You know, they had created a
farming economy completely dependent and distorted by government subsididation and interventionism,
and they as a nation, I don't understand how they
even pulled this off. At the time, they just went
cold turkey. They told they told farmers You'll have three
years to transition or to get out of farming. So
during these three years you need to find ways you
can be profitable without us having to prop you up.
And now New Zealand has a very, very profitable, healthy
farm economy that actually functions in a market rather than
being dependent upon taxpayers because people are doing dumb things.
So I overall love everything I'm seeing coming out of
RFK in terms of health policy, farm policy, and how
these things kind of nest together the quote, you know,
the challenge I think for Trump's entire administration is will
they be able to get Congress on board with making
substantive legislative changes that free the executive branch to undo
some of this stuff? And that's you know, So I
think RFK will get done everything he can given the
limitations of a hostile, activist judicial branch and a Republican
Congress that is deeply beholden to special interests, especially agricultural.
Speaker 1: Do you think there's an issue there with the way
farming is set up now where the farmer, you know,
so like in in Alabama, most of the people who
have egg have chicken chicken houses. They are basically doing
business with the Coke with with with Coke. I mean,
they're all their eggs go to Coke there, it's a partnership.
And yeah, there's a lot of that all throughout the country.
And it makes people good money. It definitely makes people better.
It makes farmers better money, or people who are willing
to do this better money than if they were selling
it locally or they were trying to do business with
different companies. It seems to me like you're going to
have to convince farmers and you know, and dairy dairy
people of this as well, because they've basically been set
into this almost like an automatic kind of way of
operating that if that is, if that's interrupted, I mean,
it interrupts their cash, interrupts their income.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm gonna ask you why. You just said that
it's more profitable for them to sell into these systems
than sell locally. And I just asked, well, I mean,
you're getting that that data from.
Speaker 1: Just some numbers that I know. I don't think and
I actually think that if they were selling locally, the
you could make you definitely have a bigger profit margin
because you're keeping it, You're doing more for yourself. But
I guess it comes down to where a lot of
this is where it's like, Okay, well, I don't know.
It just seems like a structure that has it seems
like one of those structures that's been created to keep
people enslaved to a certain way of doing things, and
for them to go outside of that and to abandon
it completely and go to another model is going to
be very painful on a personal level for the person
who's engaging in it.
Speaker 2: So my thought on this is the model you're appealing
to is not profitable for the vast majority of farmers.
If they were not getting government subsidies directly and indirectly,
none of them would farm that way. And if some
of the costs of farming that way they actually had
to bear drift over spray water, table pollute, air pollution,
in terms of just how noxious KFO raising of animals is, smells,
and otherwise. You know, that system only exists because we
the taxpayer, subsidize it to the tune of over probably
one hundred billion dollars a year in direct and indirect subsidies,
and then the government legally protects those farmers from any
actual liability for harms they do to adjacent property owners.
And again, yeah, the other reason I don't think a
lot of the farmers actually like these systems is because
none of their kids generally want to take over, you
know that. I think the average age of farmers in
America now is approaching something like seventy two years old. Like,
none of these people have what child grows up dreaming
of caring for a barn full of one hundred thousand
trapped chickens, you know, something like out of the horror
movie Saw. You know, it's this isn't a system that
appeals to almost anybody, but especially the families that are
trapped in it. But they truly are trapped in it,
you know. So take Kentucky. I think it was in
nineteen ninety six the state of Kentucky had over eight
thousand family dairy farms. In two thoy and sixteen, the
state had eight hundred. That is a ninety percent loss.
So and the reason I know this is I was
working on a piece of legislation in Kentucky and we
were sitting down across from the Kentucky Dairy Federation representatives
talking about this legislation, and we looked at them and
we said, do you think you truly are representing the
interests of your members when ninety percent of them have
gone out of business or quit under your leadership, Like,
can you really sit there with a straight face? But
the you know, so, the reason people are selling eggs
to the Koch Brothers is because of the subsidies and
because of the regulatory protections and scheme. You know why
is almost all milk and America pasteurized because until recently,
almost every single state in the nation and this only
started I think in the fifties, so this is very
very recent. I think Kentucky did not pass its pasteurized
milk ordinance. Many states sit in pass pasteurized milk ordinances
until the seventies, so making raw milk sales illegal for farmers.
It is a is a completely historically new thing. It's
only been around, you know, forty to fifty sixty years
in most places. But once you pass that one regulatory change,
there's now nowhere else for farmers to sell their milk,
and they're caught in the system. And that's why, you
know again, it's it's not that we have to change everything,
but if we're if we're strategic, and if somebody like
RFK is strategic, and you change some of the most
important things. It's like flicking over dominoes that other things
are going to naturally fall. It's going to naturally move
a lot of the board, and that's what me and
other people are really focusing on doing. You know, one
of the highlights of the past ten years has been
the number of states that have adopted wide ranging food
freedom legislation, and I think even a few states have
gone the constitutional amendment route. And what's amazing when you
go visit those states is just how much that is
changing things on the ground that you can make food
in your house again and sell it to your neighbors.
And you're like, oh, John, well, what are you talking
about here, Like, that's just a mom and her daughter
selling thirty thousand dollars a year. What does that matter? Well,
it may not seem like a lot, but that's a
mom who can actually now stay home and homeschool kids
and they can still afford it and standard of living.
But that's not one mom. That is ten thousand families
doing that. That is thirty million, three hundred million, three
billion dollars quite quickly. You know, think of things like yogurt.
Yogurt in America, I was I was doing the numbers
on this recently, thinking through a couple product categories. I
want to say, yogurt in America is an eight billion
dollar industry. Just yogurt. Imagine if because we change the
regulatory environment, instead of it being twenty companies profiting from
eight billion dollars, it was twenty thousand farms. How and
so there's so many against small areas where if you
tweak these things and you let farmers, you let local
economies be free again, you can very very quickly, you know,
reset the playing board.
Speaker 1: No, I'm one hundred percent for farmers being able to
do whatever they want for there to be an open market.
I just have to play Devil's advocate, because you know
that's what people are. People are going to people immediately
go to the negative when you've been losing for so long.
Speaker 2: Well, so, yeah, and the people just have to understand,
like that farming model is not something farmers willingly chose,
you know, just like immigration in our nation. None of
us were sitting around thirty years ago saying we need
to let millions of people every year be allowed to
come to this country at our expense. We didn't choose this.
It was engineered and foisted upon us. And again people
are waking up to this. You know, this is a
reason for Trump's election, why JD. Vance's messaging is so popular.
That this didn't happen naturally. People didn't naturally choose this.
Moms in the nineteen seventies didn't in a vacuum stop
breastfeeding their children. There were, you know, huge forces deployed
to create these outcomes. And the great thing is seeing
more and more people begin to realize that. And I
want them to realize that about food and farming. You
know the reason You go back and look at pictures
in the nineteen seventies and you just can't find fat people.
You know, finding a fat person in the nineteen seventies
is even harder than finding where's Waldo in one of
those Waldo books. It's just like, you know, pictures of people,
it's just like they barely exist. And now sixty percent
of Americans are fatter, obese, or more. So. You know,
these are things that were engineered that we now live with.
And because they were engineered, you can engineer escape routes.
We really can strategically attack policy areas, economic areas. And
the big thing probably for your listeners to realize is
doing these things has beneficial political ramifications that your listeners
probably care about, like blue cities dominating otherwise red states.
If you can restore more economic power to rural areas,
that attracts more businesses and people to stay in them.
And as we talked about earlier with culture shaping, when
you keep people in those areas, they naturally trend and
stay more conservative. And so we want to think through
how these things interplay and where do we get a
lot of bang for our buck. Where can we make
a lot of progress that's really permanent progress towards long
term things we care about. And food and farming and
those types of issues are one area that when I
started in this area twenty years ago, all the conservative
people thought I was crazy, and all the liberal people
thought I must be a liberal being a guy running
a food buying club in two thousand and six in Louisville, Kentucky.
But now it's changed. You have the New York Times
running pieces defending processed foods, you know, because they have
to counter signal you know, Trump and RFK and company.
Speaker 1: No, that's you put it perfectly. You know, you're saying
something that I haven't been able to say when I
talk about local politics, is that when you when you're
empowering these local businesses, and that's what a farm should be.
It should be a local business that may do business
with national companies whatever. That you're taking power out of
the city. You know, You're also you're also saying, you know,
you can also tell the city, you know, we grow
your food, well, we can choose not to do business
with you if you if your power is encroaching too
much upon us is you know, I've always when people
bring up New York, New York City, you know, I
hyperbolically say, just build a wall around the city and
let them meet each other, or just stop delivering stop
delivering to it, you know, stop delivering food to them,
because they're psychotic. They're going to take us down. I mean, Washington,
d C. Is going and it's surrounding counties have been
trying to get us into a nuclear war for the
last three years. So it's like, what do you think
you're going to be able to do? The only way
you can defeat them is you have to figure out
how to take their power away from them. And it's
a lot easier to do from the outside than it
is to do from the inside, and entrenched as entrenched
as they become unless you can figure out ways. And
hopefully this is something Trump's doing and doege is doing
with taking away so many of the trying to take
away these agencies that fund them, that that's the way
you take away their power. But in the meantime, you
have to make your stand somewhere else, and making your
stand somewhere else takes away their power.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and I think it's going to be interesting
thing depending on how much Trump and Elon are able
to turn off that tap of water, how much that's
going to trickle into local and state level politics, because
my personal theory is one reason that Democrats have been
so effective politically is so much of this money was
being laundered. It freed It freed them up to do
far more because the vast majority of this money was
being laundered back to liberal organizations. And if they're losing
hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, they're either gonna
have to you know, they're gonna have to spend more
money to get that tap turned back on. But if
they can't get that tap turned back on, for a
number of years. I wonder how much we're going to
see that at the state level in terms of nonsense
messaging and so much else they won't be able to finance.
But but you know, interesting aside on just how the
next four years is going to play out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've already started hearing out of Birmingham here. Montgomery's
our capital, but but Birmingham is the biggest is the
big city people complaining their you know, oh this Trump
has shut down this thing and this is what was
financing this here. And I'm like, I'll get a violin
for you. Yeah, I mean I don't care. I don't
care you. I can just look at the look at
the messaging you're putting out there, and I know that
I want you weakened. So yeah, yeah, hopefully they are
getting something done. But really, the I think people don't
understand that the health issue is how important that is.
I mean, you're just if you're if you're not healthy,
if you don't have access to it, at least have
access to healthy food. If you want to have a
choice between garbage and something, that sure give people that choice.
Just like if people want the choice and taken vaccines
or whatever, give them that choice, but there should be
there should be a choice. And if that's all we're
given is a choice between one and two, I'll take it.
And I don't think I don't think a lot of people,
even even on you know, the even the extreme right,
realize just exactly how important that is to the future
going forward.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, Well, you know, just one interesting piece
of information. You know, men who are overway to have
poor diets have far lower testosterone levels. This is something
all over the media the past ten years. How men
testosterone levels in America have just been plummeting average test
sauscer and levels. And at the same time, when you
look at research on how male hormone health affects their
political patterns. You know, if we could find a way
to sneak TRT into the entire nation's water supply before
midterm elections, we probably have the entire country go Republican.
Like you know, there's you know, your health impacts your politics.
Like a weak man who has not cared for his
body well and not managed his money well. Once protected
from those choices, and that protection comes in the form
of government imposed no you can own guns and government
police and government insurance, whereas a man who stewarts his life, well,
he wants to be protected from the government. So you
kind of see this. You know, there's this nature of
one group of people want to government to protect them
from themselves, and one group of people want protected from
the government because they're able to protect themselves. And that
dynamic is a very you know, dangerous one we now
have in our country where we have such a large
class of people who don't want to live. They don't
want to reap what they've been sewing. They don't want
to live with their decisions. They don't want to admit
I should have got up off the couch, I should
have quit drinking beer, I should not have been eating
out of a clown head four days a week. And
everybody knows these things are bad. Like you don't need
somebody up on a television it. You know, it always
amazes me. You know, nobody wakes up obese overnight. It
always amazes me the human capability to purposely ignore warning signs.
You know, when the first time you have to let
out another notch in your belt, and that alone is like,
you know, when I noticed that. For me, I'm just like, no, dude,
let's cookies. Let you know, more time on the assaulting,
but the second notch. But then when you can no
longer see your toes, like, isn't that a five alarm
fire to you? And so partly too, we did. We
need to recover a robust idea of being personally responsible
and accountable. No longer passing the buck, no longer blaming mom, dad,
my third grade teacher, this, that and the other, but no,
like I'm responsible for these things.
Speaker 1: I can't think of a better message to end it on.
So tell everybody where they can find your work, you're writing, whatever,
whatever you want to plug right now, go right ahead
and do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Joel and I do a conference called Rogue Food.
We're doing one in Florida two weeks from today actually,
so we'd love to have you join us for that event.
It's going to have real food meals, outdoor workouts in
between teaching and other sessions. And then I'm on I'm
on X. I think my handles like resists is fertile,
so short for resistance is fertile, which is kind of
my my personal life slogan. And then I'm on Facebook
when I'm not under ban, which is pretty often on Facebook.
Speaker 1: So yeah, well I appreciate it. I appreciate everything, and
have you back on sometime soon. Yeah, I thank you.
Speaker 2: Great to meet you. I've heard great things about the
work you're doing, so I appreciate you having me.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that, John, thank you very much.