About AJ
AJ Richards is a visionary consultant in the meat processing industry, known for his strategic and innovative approaches across various projects. With a focus on sustainability and efficiency, AJ has been instrumental in guiding meat processing facilities towards state-of-the-art operations.
Recording Date: March 19, 2024
AJ's Links
Farm App: https://fromthefarm.io/
Instagram: @a.j_richards
X (Twitter): @AJRichards
Clayton’s Links
Instagram: @claytoncuteri
X (Twitter): @ClaytonCuteri
Support the Show & Become a Podcast Producer: https://patreon.com/travelingtoconsciousness
Description Of Episode
In this conversation, Clayton Alexander Cuteri interviews AJ Richards, a rancher and farmer, about the importance of regenerative farming and the problems with current agricultural practices. They discuss the intricacies of the food chain, the impact of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), and the need for regenerative practices. AJ explains the process of getting beef to the grocery store and the issues with feedlots and slaughterhouses. They also explore the connection between regenerative farming and climate change, the role of nature in agriculture, and the impact of polluted food and water on health. The conversation highlights the need for conspiracy realism and the importance of nutritious food and clean water for human well-being.
Timecodes
(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:00:20) - Who is AJ Richards?
(00:12:30) - COVID's Impact on Food Supply Chain
(00:29:29) - Regenerative Agriculture for Better Land Management
(00:39:27) - Impact of Regenerative Farming on Society
(00:49:51) - Importance of Healthy Soil
(01:04:43) - Regenerating Desert Land with Biocarpeting
(01:13:25) - First Generation Farmers and Ranchers' Evolution
(01:20:25) - Ego, Nature, and Relationships
(01:32:20) - Nutrition, Gut Health, and Agriculture
(01:40:06) - Protecting Food Freedom and Local Economies
(01:48:53) - Agricultural Policies and Market Influence
(02:00:42) - Revitalizing Agriculture with From the Farm
(02:14;46) - Political Beliefs and Divine Guidance
(02:22:37) - Discussion on Leadership and Intellect
(02:28:38) - Revolutionizing Agriculture Through Storytelling
(02:42:18) - Navigating Current Political and Environmental Challenges
(02:50:48) - Deep Insights and Gratitude
Intro/Outro Music Producer: Don Kin
IG: https://www.instagram.com/donkinmusic/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/44QKqKsd81oJEBKffwdFfP
Super grateful for this guy ^
Clayton's Campaign: Clayton24.com
FREE 999 Meditation Challenge: Sign Up Here
About AJ
AJ Richards is a visionary consultant in the meat processing industry, known for his strategic and innovative approaches across various projects. With a focus on sustainability and efficiency, AJ has been instrumental in guiding meat processing facilities towards state-of-the-art operations.
Recording Date: March 19, 2024
AJ's Links
Farm App: https://fromthefarm.io/
Instagram: @a.j_richards
X (Twitter): @AJRichards
Clayton’s Links
Instagram: @claytoncuteri
X (Twitter): @ClaytonCuteri
Support the Show & Become a Podcast Producer: https://patreon.com/travelingtoconsciousness
Description Of Episode
In this conversation, Clayton Alexander Cuteri interviews AJ Richards, a rancher and farmer, about the importance of regenerative farming and the problems with current agricultural practices. They discuss the intricacies of the food chain, the impact of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), and the need for regenerative practices. AJ explains the process of getting beef to the grocery store and the issues with feedlots and slaughterhouses. They also explore the connection between regenerative farming and climate change, the role of nature in agriculture, and the impact of polluted food and water on health. The conversation highlights the need for conspiracy realism and the importance of nutritious food and clean water for human well-being.
Timecodes
(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:00:20) - Who is AJ Richards?
(00:12:30) - COVID's Impact on Food Supply Chain
(00:29:29) - Regenerative Agriculture for Better Land Management
(00:39:27) - Impact of Regenerative Farming on Society
(00:49:51) - Importance of Healthy Soil
(01:04:43) - Regenerating Desert Land with Biocarpeting
(01:13:25) - First Generation Farmers and Ranchers' Evolution
(01:20:25) - Ego, Nature, and Relationships
(01:32:20) - Nutrition, Gut Health, and Agriculture
(01:40:06) - Protecting Food Freedom and Local Economies
(01:48:53) - Agricultural Policies and Market Influence
(02:00:42) - Revitalizing Agriculture with From the Farm
(02:14;46) - Political Beliefs and Divine Guidance
(02:22:37) - Discussion on Leadership and Intellect
(02:28:38) - Revolutionizing Agriculture Through Storytelling
(02:42:18) - Navigating Current Political and Environmental Challenges
(02:50:48) - Deep Insights and Gratitude
Intro/Outro Music Producer: Don Kin
IG: https://www.instagram.com/donkinmusic/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/44QKqKsd81oJEBKffwdFfP
Super grateful for this guy ^
Clayton's Campaign: Clayton24.com
FREE 999 Meditation Challenge: Sign Up Here
Traveling to consciousness, exploring spiritual journeys to find answers in uncertainty.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for being here, man, I appreciate it, and thank you for your service. So, yeah, honored to have you.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I'm excited for this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm really excited as well because, as the audience knows and as you're briefly aware, running for Congress and so I there's a piece of me that knows local regenerative farming is like the pathway forward. I've seen a couple just micro videos on it, some reels on Instagram and just I don't know. I'm very beginner, very entry level, but just there's something about this thing that's just like telling me this is the future and like this is what is going to save our food supply. And I'm just, I know it's there, but I don't know what it is. So it's a very interesting place I'm coming from.
Speaker 2:And then I saw one of your reels pop up on my page on Instagram and I was just like, oh, this dude, you know it looks like a rancher, a farmer, like he knows what's going on, he's got this weird hat, and so I'm just like, okay, let's see if he wants to talk. And so then you were down, we're here, and so I would love to start off. Just how did you get into ranching? How'd you get into farming? You know, I'm such a newbie, I don't even know the difference between the two. So just like, what's your story? How did you get? How did you get here, and why are we talking about this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, great questions. So start to guess. To start off, I was born into this. My family are fifth and sixth generation ranchers. I, however, am the city slicker cousin.
Speaker 1:If you've ever seen the show city slickers, it was something I was teased with as a kid growing up. You know it's cultural really. Farming and ranching is a cultural thing and typically in that culture, at least back in the day, whoever the woman marries, that's what the family does, right? Because the dad is the provider. And so my dad was from the city and worked in construction and my mom came from ranching. If my mom was my dad, I would have been in ranching. I would have not been a city slicker cousin, right? So mom grew up in the ranching family, dad grew up in the city family. They met and got married and now mom follows dad because he's the breadwinner. So that's how I'm the city slicker cousin.
Speaker 1:But the blessing of that was that I grew up doing the cattle drives and the brandings at every opportunity and loved every second of it and hated being teased as the city slicker cousin, because that's definitely, you know shots that my cousins would make at me whenever they you know, whenever they wanted to. However, as an adult and in the role that I'm in now. It was a blessing because I don't have blinders on for one way of life or the other. I'm very acutely aware of the ag space and the challenge that are there because of what the environment I grew up in watching and observing. But I also lived in Phoenix, arizona, for 12 years and so I also understand the urban mindset in some level right and what it's like to live in a city and, most importantly, the disconnect in the urban environment from where food comes from and really how. If you live in a city, you are wholly dependent on so many crucial components working for you to even have food, which means you are in a very vulnerable state.
Speaker 2:Go ahead, let's dive that apart. Sure, I'm still fascinated by your background. Maybe more will come up. But what do you mean by that? Right Like I? You know I'm very insulated if you will grew up kind of like in the suburbs of the city. So you know I'm always going to the grocery store, just coming back. You know, you assume everything's going to be there. So what are some of those intricacies that, let's say, the average suburban city person is reliant upon in order for the food chain to work?
Speaker 1:If you have not shaken the hand of the person raising your food. There are dozens of people between you and sourcing that that you are counting on doing their job or being there just for you to eat and you have no attachment to that Like. Imagine if you had to go and shake each of those people's hands personally just to do the transaction of putting dinner on the table and so how many?
Speaker 2:how many people is that though? Right, because I guess, in my mind, right. If and again, this is my ignorance showing I assume that the farmer just sells it to a company, that company puts it on a truck and then it ends up at the grocery store. Is it more than that?
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a lot more than that. So the farmer, I know this is a long podcast, that's probably good.
Speaker 2:Go for it, man. Yeah, we got time.
Speaker 1:So the current industrial food system, let's go with beef. That's what I know the most and, frankly, all other, all other beef is the last frontier. The Western cattlemen, specifically the beef rancher, they are literally the last frontier. Every other food on our plate has been completely taken over by corporate structures. I mean everything lamb, pork, chicken produce, dairy they've all been completely absorbed by large corporations. You can find raw milk from your local person that might have one or two cows yes, that's possible. But we have 327 million people to feed your local person that's got two cows can't pick up the slack if something breaks right. So let's take beef because it's what I know most Right now.
Speaker 1:Most operations they are what's called a cow calf. So your first person in the chain and we're just going to talk American process first and then we'll go national, international you have your cow calf operator. That means a ranching family has mama cows that then have baby cows and then they carry those baby cows until they hit a certain weight and they call it like a weaning weight. I guess means they no longer need the mom. So they pull them off and then they move into the next process of the system. That can be what's called a backgrounder or a feedlot, and sometimes there might be a couple of those in between. So my cousin has a calf. They raise them till 450, 400 to 450 pounds and then they sell them at auction at 450 pounds at about, let's say, six months old.
Speaker 1:Okay, that goes to auction. Somebody at the auction I don't know why these automations happen that goes to the auction and then at the auction somebody buys them that has a feedlot. They might have open range that they're going to carry them on further and it might be somebody like you know, maybe I go buy a ranch and I'm going to go. I'm not going to run mama cows, but I'll go buy calves and finish them on my operation and go direct to consumer. That's very rare. What actually happens is they go to a feeding lot and they get increased in weight and they'll finish them until 800 pounds, 900 pounds maybe in some cases. That's the end of the line and they'll fatten until they're, you know, 12, 1400 pounds, whatever that that particular goal is, and then they'll sell them to a wholesale and then that wholesale somebody's going to buy them, finish them out for a minute and then slaughter them and then they're going to wholesale that to a wholesale buyer, like a grocery store, and then that grocery store is then going to bring it into their store for you to buy, and we might see that add two or three more steps in between, just depending on the chain. So that's why it isn't just the rancher who had them originally, finishing them out and selling them to your grocery store. It is feed lots in between auction houses, in between slaughterhouses, in between wholesale buyers, in between, and even in wholesale buyer you might have one person buy it at this weight or buy it for this, and then they're going to turn around and repurpose it and sell it to this. And so for you in a suburb or a city, if you don't know who your farmer and rancher is to get your food, you had all of these pieces that had to work in order to get it to you.
Speaker 1:If you think back to COVID, store shelves went empty. The store shelves went empty because the supply chain, those processes, broke Right. Specifically during COVID, the slaughterhouses closed because people were sick and so there were no workers. And so you have one of these massive, large scale commercial packers, jbs Cargill National Beef, who was bought by Morfrig, which is a Brazilian company. Jbs and Morfrig are two Brazilian owned companies and Tyson. So those are the four largest meat packers in the nation. They control 85% of our meat supply chain in our country, and two of them are Brazilian owned companies and one of them is multinational. So investments that is where our meat supply chain is currently controlled.
Speaker 1:In 1980, before Reagan changed the antitrust laws, only 25% of our food, our meat supply chain, was under the control of corporations. The other 75% was small. The same idea that you thought existed. That was what existed Local farmer and rancher finish them out, get them to the local slaughterhouse and they go to the grocery store Corporations. Their job, their fiduciary responsibility, is to maximize profit. So the more they bring the entire supply chain under their own roof, the more profit they make, and by law they're required to do so. But the consequence for us as the everyday consumer is the fragility of our supply chain, because now we depend on way too many things working and somehow we expect them to work in our favor and not the profit center's favor. That's not how business works most of the time. So that's the system as we know it. So the slaughterhouse is closed. I was selling beef for my family's ranch. I started selling beef in 2019 for my cousin, because I, for me personally, I didn't. I wanted to be an ag and I'd but to buy ag.
Speaker 2:What's an ag?
Speaker 1:agriculture. I wanted to be in agriculture.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you stopped me there. I wanted to be in agriculture because I want to work with animals. I want to be in nature. It's where I feel most at home. Right, I'm not. I'm not. 12 years in Phoenix was really challenging for me emotionally and mentally, because I hate the city. Like, if you love the city, awesome, I have no problem with that. I don't have a problem with you. I don't like the city, I like being in the country, you know. So I was trying to find all these ways to be in agriculture and I thought I had to go make a bunch of money, because one day my uncle told me a long time ago if you want to be a millionaire rancher, start with 10 million. You'll lose it all and have a million.
Speaker 1:And so okay, fine, it's not profitable, but I'm still going to find a way to get there. Went through a bankruptcy from my business in Phoenix and ended up back in Utah and I'm like you know what I'm trying to do all of these other things to get into agriculture. Why don't I just go get into agriculture? So that's why.
Speaker 1:I called my. Yeah, I called my cousin. I'm like, hey, can I sell beef for your ranch? And he's like, yeah, he's too, I'm too busy to do all of that extra stuff, let's do it. And so we were selling towards the end of 2019. And then, when COVID hit, business started taking off because people were like crap, I need to make sure I know where my food's coming from. Well, I called my slaughterhouse to schedule my next round of processing the small local slaughterhouse and they said we can get you in in 12 to 18 months. Prior to that, it was like yeah, Real quick.
Speaker 2:When you say get you in, do you mean get in your cattle into?
Speaker 1:their facility.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I mean. Yep, so I have cows that I need slaughtered so that I can get them to my customers, and so the local slaughterhouse can get me in on their schedule so they can be processed. Previous to COVID, it was like a phone call and I've got openings next week. After COVID, it was 12 to 18 months, like by April, may of 2020, it went that fast. Now what's happening is all of those efficiencies that the big companies put together have a downstream effect, right, so the slaughterhouse is one of those, but if you saw a video of millions of gallons of milk being dumped, or, in some cases, they were digging giant mass graves and slaughtering thousands and thousands of pigs, because they couldn't get them into a slaughterhouse.
Speaker 1:So they just killed them and buried them. They couldn't get them into a slaughterhouse. These things are going nuts, man Anyway so if you're just listening, yeah, I can be okay with it. If you're just listening, there's like this AI, there's thumbs and fireworks and all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1:So I don't know who agreed to that thing, but here we are, yeah, so they're burying these things because they can't afford to just feed them and hang out until they get slaughtered, and they've also got a bunch of babies waiting to come in. Like it's everything is just in time delivery essentially and when one part of that ends, whatever's behind that has to bear the consequence. And so the way that the local slaughterhouse is filled up is all of these guys who are backgrounding small family owned feedlots there, or the people that sometimes like if I own a feedlot and you have cows, you might contract with me to finish out your cows for you on my feedlot, right? Well, now everybody's like crap, I can't afford to just feed these suckers.
Speaker 1:And so they went to the local slaughterhouses that they would have otherwise never gone to, because it's cheaper to store frozen meat than the cow standing on its feet. And so they just filled up the slaughterhouses, and so now I couldn't get in. So now I have a business selling meat direct. People are expecting a monthly delivery, and I can't get you your beef because I can't get it in for 12 months. So for a little while I drove all over the state of Utah. My cousin would deliver the live animals and I would show up to pick up the frozen meat and we were going to every slaughterhouse we could squeeze into just to keep it going.
Speaker 2:Yeah, real quick. Sorry to interrupt because you just tilt your hat up just like an inch. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sorry. Your eyes keep like going in and out and I'm just like if we clip this later.
Speaker 2:it's not going to be that great. Got you? Yeah, perfect.
Speaker 1:And so you know, we went to every slaughterhouse that we could possibly schedule just to keep our customers happy. Well then I ran into all kinds of other issues. For one, we didn't have a freezer truck, so we would wrap, I would wrap everything in the back of my, my pickup, with blankets to try to keep it as frozen as possible, which meant I was. I was having a lot of loss. So, basically, any meat on the outside of the boxes would be too thawed to sell by the time I got home, and there's already not enough margin in beef to really have a bunch of waste. I mean not good. So that was a challenge. And then every slaughterhouse would cut the beef slightly different, label it slightly different and package it differently. And so my customer is like what is going on?
Speaker 1:Like I mean one week you'd get beef wrapped in paper, and the next week it would be vacuum packed, and then another week it would just be, you know, something totally different, and so it just proved to be not viable for myself or my cousin to keep going at it. So that's, that's how the supply chain is currently affected, and yeah, so what do you?
Speaker 2:what do you think would be an optimal? So let me at least let me kind of like just repeat back to you what I understood, that right is. You as a rancher, you grow the cattle, you have a mom calf situation. So once the calf is I think you said about six to 12 months old, or like there's probably a certain weight you sell it off. That goes to a feedlot. The feedlot then sells it to a slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse then packages it, ships it off to a grocery store. Gets to us. We on the same page here.
Speaker 2:So where I'm coming in from this right is trying to find the balance, because I feel like there's in this conversation there's a whole bunch of different elements going on. Right, we have number one, getting so many people involved in the simple process of getting me a beef, let's say. The other problem we have is capitalism. Right, and I'm a huge capitalist, but I have a feeling whenever it comes to certain things like politics or our food or certain elements, we probably shouldn't let that get monetized completely and just have profit as the top priority, and I think politics and food are probably two of the best examples medication as well. Like we should have health as the top priority, we should have the public interest as the top priority, not to make this a political part.
Speaker 2:But where I'm getting to here is whenever it comes to, let's say, the feedlots or the slaughterhouse right, because I think this is then where it gets into, let's say, like the humanity aspect of it or the caring for animals right. Whenever it comes to feedlots, are these essentially what I think? I've seen videos of these where it's like just giant kind of mud pens where they'll just pack as many cattle into one area and then just feed them grain. Is that what I'm seeing there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is. It's called a CAFO concentrated animal feeding operation.
Speaker 2:A.
Speaker 1:CAFO yeah, cafo is the term, and so basically anywhere that a large number of animals and by large I mean it could be 100. It could probably even be 75 if the pen was tiny. I mean I wouldn't call that a CAFO personally but anywhere there's a large congregation of animals that can't move anywhere and they're standing in their feces all day and then just going and moving very minimally because they got to keep the weight on. They're there to add weight right. It's a process of efficiency. What these corporate Listen.
Speaker 1:I used to be a complete evangelist for regenerative agriculture, and I am, but I did it in a way that was also making our current system very wrong, and it is, but we need it. We cannot change what exists overnight because we have too many people to feed. But I used to be. I get rid of them. They're done like move on. It's going to take a long time to change this. If we engage in soil health principles at every level of our foods, of our beef supply chain up to CAFOs, I think we would be okay If everything leading up to the CAFO was working to maximize the environment in terms of how nature works, like manure feeds the soil, the soil feeds the microbes. The microbes feed good forage that then contributes to the animal, that makes them healthy, that creates local water cycle. Like all of that. If we focused on that, and in order to feed 327 million people in America, they then went to a concentrated animal feeding law in a certain area. We offset all of the damage in one area with all that good happening in another area. Now, just strictly environmentally. But the other problem is antibiotics, vaccines and all the other things necessary to keep an animal alive when it's standing on a mountain of feces. So it's. You have both of these right. Food is cheaper when you can produce it cheaper. Well, when you can produce thousands of head of cattle fattening very quickly, because this is very. The guys that do this are very scientific. They know the exact amount of weight an animal will gain every single day and the precise proportions necessary to put that gain on so that they can feed us.
Speaker 1:If you go to a steakhouse, you are eating K-Fo beef and the only reason that steakhouse exists is because K-Fo beef exists. That's just the reality, because one steakhouse even in the small town in Cody where I live, one steakhouse will sell through more steak than most individual ranches can provide Because there's only 12 rib-eyes and 12 New York's on a cow. I'm sorry, 24, 12 on each side, that's it. And you go to a steakhouse in the city that sells through hundreds Geez, you just wiped out a whole herd in beef in steaks. So K-Fos are necessary to enjoy the things that we can enjoy as Americans, but we should maximize those other areas.
Speaker 1:Now you might listen to this and think I'm pro-K-Fo. I'm not. I'm actually pro-regenerative agriculture. The reason for that is that the system that we've created has created dependency versus independence. So when we talk about food sovereignty, our ancestors that raised food did all of that without having to expect a train of supplies to come in, a semi-truck of supplies to come in. They raised what they raised on their farm. They didn't require inputs. As soon as we started requiring inputs, we lost our independence.
Speaker 2:We're going to be requiring inputs, as in money.
Speaker 1:Could be money, but more fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, insecticide.
Speaker 2:Oh, as in requiring that those things need to get placed on the land.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in order to grow your food.
Speaker 1:Or in a K-Fo. I need grain imports, not necessarily imports from out of the country, but yes, I need grain to show up to my feedlot so I can fatten these things I call corn. If I'm using corn antibiotics, that's an input. Our ancestors didn't run antibiotics through their entire herd. They didn't run what's called dewormer like an ivermectin. Ivermectin clears out the worms in the body. The problem is that ivermectin also kills the beneficial insects that took that manure and drilled it into the soil to add more biology. Now you'll go out and find cow pies that are rock solid because insects couldn't go to work on it, because it's been poisoned, because they had to treat the animals with ivermectin so that they dewormed them, so they didn't get any worm issues in concentration.
Speaker 1:So, like nature works as a hole and if you remove one piece of the hole, you've broken that system and now that's why I did a tweet this morning and it was like some here in Wyoming, somebody's trying to raise money to build these carbon silos that they're going to put all over the landscape and they're going to pump carbon down into the soil. And I'm like engineers should not be allowed to touch anything in nature, because engineers think linearly. Their brain is their unique geniuses. We need engineers, but their brains are designed to maximize efficiency. Point A to point B. When you do that in nature, you screw it up big time. And so here they're talking about these silos.
Speaker 1:Well, wyoming used to have 60 million bison roaming through the countryside, regenerating the soil as they moved. We should put bison back on the landscape, not stupid carbon silos, because we need food. Like we are at the lowest number of cattle in our country since 1950, with 2024 population. That means we are wholly dependent on foreign imports to feed our nation. It's not if we are there. If boats and trains stop bringing food to our country, millions of people will starve to death. We don't have the food anymore.
Speaker 2:It's so wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got a lot of visuals when you were kind of talking there, because my mind's thinking there's a lot to unpack, which I love.
Speaker 2:It seems to me that there's a combination here of all of the, let's say, manmade chemicals, slash vaccines, slash treatments that we're putting into these cattle to keep them alive. There's a part of me that feels like, obviously that has to get into the meat that we're eating, which then deteriorates our bodies as well. If, right now, we need, let's say, X number of cattle or beef in order to feed people, if we were to go back, let's say, to move away from CAFOs because this is what we're talking about specifically it would make the beef more nutrient dense, thus requiring people to eat less. Is that again? Of course, I'm sure this goes against the capitalist ideology, but let's kind of put that to a side for a moment. How viable is that of us moving back to, let's say, regenerative practices, which again another part of this that we should talk about? But if we move back to regenerative practices, how responsible or how plausible is it that we could completely move away from CAFOs if our beef wasn't being pumped with chemicals that were man-made?
Speaker 1:Very. It's like I said it would take a lot of time and there will have to be some major policy changes at the federal level and state level in order to do this?
Speaker 2:What policies would that require?
Speaker 1:Abolish the Bureau of Land Management.
Speaker 2:Completely abolish. What do they do? Why should we abolish them?
Speaker 1:So the Bureau of Land Management and I probably can't go into all the details of the whole organization, but this is my experience of the Bureau of Land Management. If you look at a map of the United States and you look of east of the Mississippi versus west of the Mississippi, in terms of vegetation the west is desertifying or is a desert and it's what they call a brittle or what is known in some circles as a brittle environment. So the more dry it is, the more brittle the environment is. You take a stick and break it because it's brittle. You go east, there's a lot more moisture, so you take a stick that's fallen and it kind of bends a little bit before it breaks because it's non-brittle. In a non-brittle environment you have more moisture that breaks down the organic matter. So it can, like a stick or leaf that falls on the ground, it decomposes and it goes into the soil because of the moisture, the natural moisture. In the west the only thing that does that are ruminating animals, the rumin of an animal's stomach, because it's so dry. So when the BLM says you can only have one cow-calf pair per 100 acres of land and the only thing that's going to contribute to the soil. Organic matter on that land is the manure from that animal's stomach. It's a needle in a haystack. There's not enough biology being returned to the soil to create that cycle.
Speaker 1:The desertification that we are dealing with is a management issue, a policy issue. It's not an environmental issue. The decisions that were made, first of all to annihilate all the bison, to push Native Americans onto reservations because that's what they did it was a decision made so that they could basically starve them onto reservations. 60 million bison were almost completely wiped out, and so we had grasslands that were highly productive. There are old journals and writings talking about so many. I wish I could remember who said this. There were so many birds. Now, people inflate things in writing, of course, but there were so many birds flying in migratory patterns that they blocked out the sun for three days. That was what the West was. If you were trailing behind a bison herd on your horse, your horse would starve to death because the vegetation was gone, because there were so many of them. But what happened is the bison didn't come back for another year because they were on a normal cycle. So they ate the vegetation, but as they were moving, they were pooping and peeing across everything re-fertilizing the soil. So by the time they came back it was lush grasslands again. The restrictions that are being placed on the management are preventing enough livestock from being there to restore these lands.
Speaker 1:I have friends that do this. I have personal friends that I've talked to that do this. There's a gentleman named Alejandro Corriot. He is out of Chihuahua, Mexico, the Chihuahua Desert in Mexico. We call him the rainmaker of the desert because he is now moving his animals in confinement concentration, but they're on a moving cycle. So you have a concentrated animal feeding operation, but now you have a Real quick, let me break down that concentrated movement feed animal feeding operation.
Speaker 2:Does that mean keeping them in one area and controlling their movement patterns?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm kind of describing a CAFO with integrity. So you have a CAFO where they never move because it's infrastructure that had to be built.
Speaker 2:There's steel beams that are keeping them, steel fencing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you can drive feed trucks up and down and do it that way. But in holistic land management or regenerative agriculture, you put them out on pasture, put an electric fence in a small area so they cannot move until you move them. Well, depending on your forage levels and all these different, you know the different contexts of where you're at.
Speaker 2:Factors.
Speaker 1:You'll move them faster or slower, but usually within a day they're off one section and you just move them to the next. What that's doing is it's mimicking what nature used to do before we intervened, and what that was is you had tons of predators wolves and bears, coyotes, that kept the herd bunched together and always on the move.
Speaker 1:They never hung out because they couldn't, otherwise they would get caught and so they stayed together, always moved. Because animals are like people. If it's Brussels sprouts or ice cream, I'm going to eat ice cream. If you're a, if I'm a kid, right, animals are going to do the same thing. I like this better than that. It doesn't mean I don't benefit from that.
Speaker 1:So in confinement or in In Confinement's a bad word to describe regenerative. But in this system now, you and I are standing shoulder to shoulder and this is all we have to eat. I'm eating everything in front of me, because it's competition as well. So I'm going to eat what's in front of me, whether it's Brussels sprouts or ice cream, so I can fill my belly because you're next to me doing the same thing. And then we defecate over everything and then we move to the next one, and then the insects come in and they drive all that manure into the ground and the birds come and peck out the worms and does what it needs to do, and then the birds drop seeds where they came to feed and that creates more native grasses right where I was at previously, and then I'm not coming back until the next season, when the grass is up again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I saw you posted a video or you recommended this. There was a documentary called Kiss the Ground and so I think they did something like this and this is the visual I'm getting to help people get a picture right. Yes, is it's almost like it was like a grassland and they had it like there was different quadrants. So it would be like if Pennsylvania is quadrant A and Ohio is quadrant B you know they were much smaller than this, but you basically keep the cattle in quadrant A and then, once all the grass is gone, you move them to quadrant B. So this way their manure you're talking about. This ties in how you were saying about the wetness I forget the words you were using, but making a wet, a dry climate more wet, with their stomachs moving it around. So that way it actually creates a landscape. It creates nature's best way for it to produce what it's doing and this is what you're saying is that mimics kind of the natural pattern of things, of how predators would naturally move these herds because of their patterns.
Speaker 1:Yeah, correct. And when you go through like. So to your original question, like, can we raise food without CAFOs? Like, and is that possible? And the answer is yes.
Speaker 1:Like when I'm in, I'm from St George, utah, and when I drive from St George to Salt Lake, it's a four hour drive, and I can make the same argument for driving through Wyoming as I'm driving through these states that have vast open lands. We should see livestock everywhere and we don't. You can drive for an entire hour and see these wide open vistas of these Western lands and not see a single ruminating animal. That's unutilized land and lost opportunity for us as Americans to secure a food supply chain that makes a difference. Now here's the thing, though it's going to take a long time because historically there would have been more springs and rivers and and creeks to provide water for these migrating animals that don't exist anymore because they dried up, because we broke the cycle. So the argument people have, like ranchers when I talk to them and it's not an argument for an argument's sake, just the question is yeah, but how do I water my animals? That's the pushback. Like I've got to have water out there, and they do. And drilling a well is very expensive. It's not feasible because we broke I mean, we broke things. We used to not need them. So you see these wide open lands and you're like, yeah, there should be ruminating animals on there. But also, where are they going to get water? Now the water's gone.
Speaker 1:I've seen documentaries of places in like, like Africa, where it was a desolate wasteland. They apply these principles and practices. One in particular it was just mind blowing and it showed the before and after photos and they're standing in a lush grass fields with trees and you're like, holy crap. And the only reason you know they're in the same spot is the hill that they're standing by and that this guy was in Africa and he went up to this spring that was bubbling out of the ground literally just out of us. It just picked a spot and came up and he goes this was never here until this year.
Speaker 2:What are some of these documentaries? I love watching documentaries and this is going to fit perfectly.
Speaker 1:So the first do you know who Alan Savry is?
Speaker 2:No, I do not.
Speaker 1:Highly recommend Alan Savry. Alan Savry's TED Talk was the one that shifted my entire life and purpose.
Speaker 2:Okay, a-l-a-n-s-a-v-o-r-y.
Speaker 1:Yep, okay, he's from South Africa, so Alan's TED Talk is great, and then any other content you can find with him. You mentioned Kiss the Ground. Kiss the Ground has had a documentary come out a couple of years ago, very good. There's a new one that's circulating that it was a kind of a follow-up, called Common Ground. It's a good documentary. It's a little more left-leaning for my liking, so just go into it with open mind. This is something I think is valuable for anybody to maybe consider. Don't write something off. Don't write off an entire hour and a half documentary, whatever the length is, because there's moments that piss you off, like there's going to be gold in there that you can benefit from, even if the gold is learning how to be less like what's bothering you.
Speaker 2:You know what?
Speaker 1:I mean. So Common Ground is phenomenal and really Common Ground for me was I. If I watch it from my crunchy conservative, that's what I call myself a crunchy conservative. If I watch it from my crunchy conservative perspective, I'm annoyed. But if I watch it from the value of helping people in urban environments understand the importance of our food growers, our farmers and ranchers and now homesteaders, they nailed it, they did such a great job. If every documentary was made to speak to the ranchers, well, we already know there's a problem.
Speaker 1:We need the people in the cities to hear about it. This book right here is one of the most important books for anybody to read. It's called Red Famine.
Speaker 2:Red Famine by Annie Applebaum. And Applebaum, that's pretty thick.
Speaker 1:Yep, it's a pretty thick book, but it's about the Soviet halodomor during Stalin's reign and what Stalin pushed for, what was called the collectivization of farms, and in which led to the death of seven and estimated seven million people, most of them being producers, because they wouldn't join the collectivization. The policies being made in our government is collectivization. This is exactly what's happening when you read this book, like I'm reading this book. I'm almost done with it.
Speaker 2:I'm like shit.
Speaker 1:If there was ever a hill to die on, because the old adage is true, and it came from this if you control the food, you control the people. It's from examples of this, and we are right at the precipice of having no more say as a society in where our food comes from. I mean, we are right at that door, and so Common Ground's a great one. There's a gentleman named Neil Spachman.
Speaker 2:Neil, Spachman, it's kind of a funny story.
Speaker 1:Yep, kind of a funny story If you look up on YouTube. The albida and don't ask me how to spell it the albida project in Saudi Arabia was kind of where he got his start and now Not Neil Spachman. Neil.
Speaker 2:Neil, neil Spachman, not Spachman. Neil Spachman, let's see if I can. Spakman. Yeah, oh, S-A-C-K. Maybe Neil Spachman. How to achieve sustainable food.
Speaker 1:SPAKMAN Yep, that's him. Okay, I'm the founder and CEO of Regenerative Resources Co. Okay, so, neil, it's funny because, neil, when I came across Alan and then I was Because, when I first came across Alan Savry, I was like, in this mindset of like I'm going to watch my kids starve to death, this was 2014. I was worried about, like I'm not an environmentalist, but what I was watching was clearly not sustainable. Right, like I am an environmentalist, but I'm not the liberal term of environmentalist. Like I believe in eating meat, I believe in transportation. I think that what we could do with Regenerative Agriculture would offset our carbon emissions from our transportation needs. Like, we don't need to go EV. I don't think we should see millions of acres of ground be turned into freaking solar panels and wind farms. Like, the.
Speaker 2:Well, that was a crazy thing that they pointed out in Kiss the Ground that I never realized. Right, to kind of give you a little background on me, when I was in, I think, second grade, so this would have been like the early 2000s. Who was it? Al Gore came out with his documentary about global warming and I remember talking to my dad about it. Right now it's climate change. So this was in the 80s or 70s, I think. They called it global cooling and then they called it global warming. Now it's climate change.
Speaker 2:And so my parents being conservative, more specifically, my dad told me that it was a giant hoax created by Al Gore to tax us and take our money. And so that was kind of the mindset that I always had. It was like, okay, it's all bullshit, it's lies, yada, yada, yada. But then actually seeing in Kiss the Ground how they were explaining how regenerative farming can actually pull the CO2 out of the air, stuff it into the ground and we'll actually have more prosperous nature, more prosperous foliage Because of all the CO2 that we've put in the air, it'll actually create a much bigger benefit. And it was so wild to me because I was like, oh my God, it just clicked. It was like I always knew we can't just tax carbon, because everything we're looking at has carbon in it. You have carbon, you're a carbon being, so we can't just tax people. That doesn't make sense. That's crazy. I guess that part of my dad's theory was true. But then, once seeing Kiss the Ground and realizing that regenerative farming can solve our not only solve our food crisis, but also solve the whole climate crisis, I was like, oh my gosh, this makes so much more sense. Why aren't we talking about this? And then now you're putting this out here about how all of our practices are into control the food supply, and I got flashbacks from the guy.
Speaker 2:There was one guy within the Roman Empire who there's a documentary on Netflix about him, who was the son of Marcus Aurelius, and he ended up taking over and he liked all the luxuries of being the emperor, but he didn't want any of the responsibility, so he like left it off to his best buddy. Well, what one of this guy did was is he decided to control the food supply. He stopped all the wheat that was incoming, all the grains that was incoming from Egypt and basically cut his civilians off from it, creating a huge famine, a huge drought and his objective was going to be to then give it back to the people and be the savior. Like, oh, I fixed the problem whenever he created it in the first place. And then I watched Kiss the Ground and I'm like, oh my gosh, is this happening again? Are we actually going through the same process that happened in the Roman Empire?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we are. We are right now. There's a bunch of policies being pushed through in the cattle space specifically, but in agriculture in general. But, like and when you understand collectivization, you just change in the terms. So, for example, rfid ear tags. So they're talking about putting ear tags in. They put ear tags in cows. As it is, they're usually just numbers to identify. You know certain things about them. Rfid tags would give the ability to track every single movement of that animal. Now what happens if a policy changes that somebody doesn't like about how I'm managing my animals? And now they can actually watch and see and then implement whatever policy they have on me because they can see everything about my livestock. That's collectivization.
Speaker 1:Carbon credits is a new one and everybody's all excited about carbon credits to make extra money or to create a whole new economy Carbon credits. We just interviewed a guy named Jim Mundorf on our podcast and he has this speech called Lies Agreed Upon. In other words, the carbon issue is not an issue, it's a lie, and every time we agree on that lie, we solidify its existence in our life. For example, I'm a rancher. Let's say I'm a rancher and I've got a bunch of ground and somebody comes up and says Microsoft shows up and says we want to buy your carbon credits to offset our carbon.
Speaker 1:First of all, that's stupid. That makes no sense whatsoever that you're going to keep polluting but somehow, by paying me to manage my animals, it's making up for. Now it does go back to what I was saying about CAFOs, but if you're going to blame the ag industry for being the largest which this is totally false but if you're going to blame the ag industry for being the largest contributor to climate emissions, then how about I just manage my own animals to offset our industry's own carbon emissions? Good luck, transportation industry. Figure your own damn shit out. You're not getting our credits because they're offsetting our own.
Speaker 1:But even that's just stupid, because this isn't even an issue. But if I all of a sudden start agreeing like, okay, I'll sell you my carbon credits because it's free money, that's pointless. I've agreed on a lie that makes it last longer. In our society that shouldn't even exist. It should not be here, so we shouldn't be doing carbon credits because there is no carbon to worry about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it seems like the visual I'm getting now is. It reminds me of what we're talking about with the. Whenever COVID happened and there was the whole backup within the food, you miss one of those, one piece of the puzzle goes out of place and then it creates a whole issue because everything gets stopped in one area. So in case of COVID, all the pigs got stopped at the farm. I think I saw a video where it was a bunch of onions and cabbages where the guy just had mountains of them because he couldn't get them to people, and so it seems like something similar.
Speaker 2:Like that is what's happening with our CO2 in nature, where it's just getting stuck in the atmosphere and we don't actually have the ground to kind of pull it back down to keep the cycle going Right, like okay, it gets released into the air, it gets pulled back down to the ground, released in the air. We don't have that cycle and it sounds like that's related to this desertification, the lack of grass that's happening. So I mean I guess can you expand a little bit more on that, because I know maybe let's talk a little bit about the solution then, because I think I saw maybe you posted something or you talked about desertification and how you can turn deserts into like grasslands, how I mean, it sounds impossible to me, like how do you actually do that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this is where I started. That's why, when I saw Alan's Ted, because I'm like we're desertifying, because that's what everything was in the 2014, 2016 timeframe all the environmental stuff I was seeing they weren't even talking about carbon and carbon credits. Then it was just desertification and I'm like crap, this is a problem. Because I was the same way. I'm like this, you can't fix that. And then I saw Alan's Ted talk and I was like holy shit, you can fix that. We're just, we're totally wrong. It goes to I mean, this is I'm glad we have time, because this is such like a this is so indefinite.
Speaker 2:Take a deep breath. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm good, I'm just like where do I organize?
Speaker 2:my thoughts to go first.
Speaker 1:So let's start here. Healthy soil is the root of all living things and life on the planet.
Speaker 2:It's in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, it's the root. It's, it is the beginning. If we focus on the health of the soil, everything else exists from there. It doesn't matter if your Elon Musk go into Mars. If Elon Musk doesn't have food to eat in an environment that's sustainable for him to live in to accomplish what he's trying to do, it doesn't matter. And the food he eats is coming from the soil, unless these big fake meat corporations have a say about it. But I guarantee whatever inputs they're using still require soil at some level. Right, yeah, so it starts with the soil, and there are. We know so little about. We have explored everything in our universe as much as we possibly can, except for the ground we're standing on. There are more organisms in it I think it's like a teaspoon or a tablespoon of soil than all of the stars that you can see if you look up into the sky. Okay, that's a lot.
Speaker 1:And we know nothing. We have not bothered to understand it. So, with healthy soil brings vegetation. With good vegetation brings what's called evapotranspiration. That means grass that sweats. You probably saw this. It kissed the ground and it creates a local water cycle. Another water cycle in our country is 60% from the ocean, 40% localized.
Speaker 2:When you're saying water cycle, we talking about rain.
Speaker 1:Rain, yeah, rain or snow.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Just yeah, whatever brings moisture in an area, right. If you implement practices that cause the soil to die or degrade and the vegetation to stop growing, you've now stopped that 40% of the local water Like that kept coming on a regular basis. Okay, then you look at what we do on the coasts. Where does everybody want to live if they're ocean loving? People Ride along the coast.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:And so what borders are coasts that used to be nature, cities, infrastructure Right.
Speaker 2:Houses.
Speaker 1:Houses. Have you ever walked down a city street and it was hot, and then you walked through a park and all of a sudden the temperature drops drastically? Yeah, yeah. That temperature drop is the evapotranspiration creating moisture in the environment. City streets and city roofs and tile roofs and concrete jungles send up massive heat waves off the ground and so now, when you have the water cycle trying to come in off of the ocean, it hits a wall of heat.
Speaker 1:And so there's a guy named Zach Weas. Water stories is his company. He does a really good. I mean, this is I'm sharing like pieces of all my people I love to follow and educate me, but they go in way deep. But basically he did a video talking about now that moisture from the ocean hits this wall of heat and it builds up and it builds up and it builds up until it's got so much pressure it just comes in with a vengeance and causes flooding and wreaks havoc because it couldn't move through naturally. So soil creates vegetation, creates evapotranspiration, creates moisture in the environment, creates regularly reoccurring water cycles, which then creates more moisture for the soil. That creates more vegetation, that creates more forage, and it's this cycle. But the soil needs fed and in order to feed it it needs ruminating animals, it needs the micro gut biology of these animals to feed the soil. It's nature, it's all working as a whole.
Speaker 1:You pull the cows off. I've got this mountain by this hometown. I grew up in St George, utah. The mountain's called Pine Valley Mountain. Pine Valley Mountain is under government control. It's like Forest Service National Park B elements one of those, and so they have the same restrictions.
Speaker 1:You have to pull your cows off this time. You can only have so many. They try to manage for wildlife and livestock. There's X amount of deer up here so they have to have forage. Blah, blah, blah. Well, their numbers are wrong, they're just dead wrong. That mountain has almost completely burnt up.
Speaker 1:Wildfires. My entire life as a child, never the amount of wildfires that they're up there now it's burning up because of poor management. I mean, the forest is just. It's so sad, it's just devastated. It's the same thing in the California wildfires. You see it all over the place. It's the same thing because we don't do what's necessary.
Speaker 1:Part of it is because our country is completely run by corporations. It is not even run by federal government anymore. They're bought and paid for by lobbyists. I believe with all of my being that we live in a country that is not run by anything other than corporate money. We know who the corporations are BlackRock, vanguard. They're invested in everything. Big Food is the largest lead generator for Big Pharma, because if I can make you sick, I can sell you the pills to keep you alive because of chronic health and they are all. They're stakeholders in all of it. Oh, and now they're all jumping ship from natural food to fake food, because I think the ultimate play is if I just like pharmacy, if I own the intellectual property for the only food you're allowed to have access to, then I own you. My profit margins are huge. We are moving towards what I believe is a massive control play of intellectual food property. If, beyond, burger's ingredients are mine, you don't have the right to make it, and so-.
Speaker 2:And didn't this somewhat happen at a seed level, where they would genetically modify seeds and then, just because nature naturally moved seeds from one farm to one farm, they then confiscated farms because of this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it happened in the Midwest somewhere. One farm did not use Monsanto Roundup Ready seeds. They blew over in his property and grew, got sued by Monsanto or whoever it was, and won.
Speaker 2:So crazy, yeah. And then they have to sacrifice their farm because of that. And then this seems like it's also connected to how, I guess, bill Gates and China are buying up all of the farmland in the US.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those situations. I don't know what the agendas are. There are certainly agendas there. Okay, I do wear tinfoil hat, but there's areas that I won't go just because I don't know. I wear the tinfoil hat and say what I say because I've done the research and I'm not saying that I'm never wrong. I'm happy to be wrong, because then I just-. Well, if you don't know about it.
Speaker 2:We can stay away from it because I completely respect that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm just saying that, whatever the agenda is, I don't know fully what it is. Would it surprise me if Bill Gates was controlling farmland because he's invested in fake meat and it gives him the ability to control that marketplace more? No, it wouldn't surprise me at all. Or it could just be that it's land is a good investment, because it is. You know what I mean. But yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 2:And speaking of, let's say, quote unquote conspiracies, I know that this was also and this is it's reminded me that this, I think, was the video I saw of yours, which was of food, or Texas farms were getting basically lit on fire, and I think this happened. This also happened several years ago, where a bunch of farms kept getting lit on fire and there were a lot of conspiracies around whether or not that was government agents, whether it was this, whether it was that. But, like you're also saying here with the farm or with the mountain that you grew up near Utah, it could have just been poor management. So what's your opinion? What have you researched? What have you seen in regards to these fires that are plaguing, it seems like, local farms?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's far more the result of morons leading policies than it is intentional attacks. I could be wrong, but I think it's far more just idiots in office making decisions that shouldn't be making decisions than it is those kinds of things. Now, do I believe those things are happening 100%? They absolutely are. I don't know where or which one specifically, but a lot of the things I'm seeing is just you just have people making and now that's not to say that they're not making these decisions to benefit the large corporations. But the fires if we're talking about fires specifically, those just might be a byproduct of very poor management that was made a long time ago, not even now Like decisions made forever ago. I don't think when Reagan made the decision to change the antitrust laws that the ancestors of the current CEOs of these corporations influenced it. This was in the 80s.
Speaker 1:Whoever was involved back then. They're dead and gone, but that decision led to the ability for people to take advantage of a loophole. That's what I think. I think there's far less conspiracies in a lot of this. The reason I wear a conspiracy tinfoil hat is I'm just reappropriating it because it needs to be. I know far more conspiracy theorists who've been dead on about everything that has been coming around than aren't, and so I'm like, yeah, well, you can call me a conspiracy theorist and I'm gonna hold it.
Speaker 2:Maybe you can help me out with this, because I'm trying to reappropriate that term as well, because a theory we break this down. Conspiracy just means people working together to have an outcome. Right now, you and I are conspiring to make a great podcast. That's right. And then a theory is a hypothetical, so it's an idea that's not based in reality. So I'm trying to switch this to being conspiracy realist, exactly Because there are certainly conspiracies that are occurring that have been proven to be true, and not even just proven to be true, but powerful people have admitted to those things being real. So I think there's definitely a term of conspiracy realist that needs to start getting some more attention.
Speaker 1:Yep, so maybe you can help me out with that. Well, that's why the stuff I will speak on, I consider I'm a conspiracy realist because I have seen the reality. But if we're talking about why China and Bill Gates is buying land because they're trying to control our food, that's where the theory comes in, and until I can prove it otherwise, then at which point we can't prove it then it is conspiracy realism.
Speaker 2:I like it. That's a perfect example. Right, yeah, exactly. The conspiracy realist is China and Bill Gates are buying farmland. Then we can make up conspiracy theories about why they're buying up all the farmland.
Speaker 1:Exactly, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. That was a perfect example.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, because someone called me a conspiracy theorist the other day and I'm like. I sat with it. I was like, but there are conspiracies that are occurring that are real. We need to change this language here. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:And so kind of guess. Back to the desertification question. When you go watch Neil Spackman and what he did in Al-Baeda, saudi Arabia, and what he's doing in other areas now with his new company where they're restoring main groves along coastal lines, that then they're restoring main groves. But it's not as simple as just. This is kind of what I learned from him watching and what I'm attempting to do and not attempting. But what we are doing with from the farm in American agriculture you have to solve for the economics of the people first before the mission or the true intention can be realized. So in these third world countries where everybody's poor, they do whatever they can to survive, whether to cook their food or to sell firewood. So the main groves got wiped out because there was no other way to survive. Well, you can go in and plant millions of main groves, but if the people are still poor and there's no economic value or economic development, they're going to just cut them down again. You didn't fix anything.
Speaker 1:You gave them next year's harvest. So what Neil came to realize was whatever project that and I'm putting words in his mouth, but whatever project we do needs to also have an economic impact for the locals and put the care of this system in their hands, because this is where their money comes from, this is how they feed themselves, and so what he did was they're building these main grove farms that then create shrimp, feed shrimp. The manure from the shrimp feeds the main groves, and it's a cyclical system, but they're shrimp farmers essentially.
Speaker 2:So are you saying shrimp as in, like sea shrimp, or are there land shrimp, sea shrimp? Yep, manure from wait then maybe I don't know a mangrove, I thought it was a tree. Is mangrove something else?
Speaker 1:Mangroves are like, they're like the, really thick, like Rodbook, like in. Yeah, look them up real quick.
Speaker 2:So like.
Speaker 1:Florida, for example, like you can't even walk through there or boat through there, because they're growing out of the ocean and they're typically on the coastlines when the main groves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, is it not a tree, or is it like a? Oh, okay, but it's like a water tree.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And so then oh, gotcha now.
Speaker 2:So then the shrimp and the water can do. They eat the roots, or how does that work?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Two part. That's his look.
Speaker 1:Okay, I know, cal's not shrimp, but that whole ecosystem is self-serving, and so then they harvest the shrimp and that's where the food and the economics comes in. But they're going to protect the main groves because that's what's feeding the shrimp Now it's now he's kickstarted an ecosystem that can then expand into other areas, like riparian areas, like where the water comes down off of mountain ranges. The Al-Baeda project is the first one that he demonstrated that this is what it works on. So water would rain up in the high mountains and it would flush down and just wash out, like in Saudi Arabia, you know, just like in lots of the West.
Speaker 1:We have monsoon season, so we get major dumps of rain at one time and then it's gone. Well, that rain, if it can't be slowed down, if the water doesn't get slowed down, it washes away and then it evaporates and disappears. If you can slow that down and give it time to infiltrate the soil, now you're re-percolating the aquifers and adding more water to the soil, and that's something else with organic matter that shouldn't be skipped over. For a 1% increase in soil organic matter, 1% manure vegetation is decomposing that soil can hold 20,000 gallons of water per acre. So that means during the next rain event, like I have. I bought a piece of property in this place called the Escalani Desert in Utah, and I bought it because I'm going to demonstrate that it doesn't have to be a desert. It could be the Escalani grasslands, but because of poor management, it is a desert when it rains. Two years ago it rained enough that a train, a locomotive, was driving down the track that runs through that desert and the water coming off the mountain knocked the train over.
Speaker 1:There was that much rain, but yet it's a desert. Well, why is it a desert? That's a lot of water, because it's not infiltrating the soil, and so the next rain event, if we increase 1% of organic matter, we will hold every drop of rain that comes down and it won't wash away or evaporate, which means now we're starting to create the environment for native grasses that are waiting for the right environment to come back. Seeds will they have found seed banks that are 1000 years old, grass that, just the seed is just sitting there hanging out until the right environment to express itself and come back to exist.
Speaker 2:And you're saying, just like in the sand deserts, there's seeds laying underneath them everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, waiting for the right condition.
Speaker 2:What's the name of this? Look up which one, I guess, the place that you purchased.
Speaker 1:It's called the Escalani Desert. Look up Burl Utah.
Speaker 2:B-Y-A-R.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh, b-y-r-e-l.
Speaker 2:E-L Burl Desert.
Speaker 1:You can just look up Burl Utah and you'll find it Burl Utah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the seeds are there, the water's coming down. What is it that you're going to do that makes grass grow? Is that the intention? To make grass grow? What's the process? Look like Cows.
Speaker 1:Cows Get ruminating animals on there. We're going to test a system that actually Alan Savory's brother, roger Savory, talks about, and it's called biocarpeting. So because our ground is so degraded and we're looking to kind of kickstart it quickly, it'll take a little bit more inputs to get this going, but it'll be a faster recovery, I believe. And so biocarpeting is essentially, instead of leaving your animals there just long enough to spread a little bit of manure to start working its way in, you leave them in there long enough to where there's an inch of manure across the whole surface, so it's a carpet and then you move them.
Speaker 1:That way you've now covered. So like I've got 40 acres right and let's say I turn all those into one acre paddocks smaller out of 40 acres, I make one acres out of them. I put a ton of animals in them. The inputs that I have to bring in is I have to roll out hay, because there's no hay for that many animals, especially that many days, and I have to haul water. But if we do that and this project is called the Escalante Land Trust you can find it on Instagram. It's being overseen by my partner out there his name is Jim and so they biocarp it, they put the manure out, and then we move them and then we let the land rest for a year and let that organic matter work its way into the soil. And we believe that, because we've seen it done before, that in a year you come back and there will be grass where there wasn't any.
Speaker 2:I hope you guys are taking before and after pictures of this.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, for sure he's doing some great drone footage and things out there. That's awesome. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, escalante Land Trust E-S-C-A-L-A-N-T-E underscore land, underscore trust. Yeah, man, it looks just like a desert man. There's not much here, and so, basically, what you're saying is you're going to do that cross-sectioning where you can block off an acre or something and then move the cattle, move the animals throughout it and in order to get them because this is what I was thinking of, right, if there's nothing there, they're not going to go to the bathroom, they're not going to do what they got to do, so you got to lay out hay for them to consume, so they're going to eat the hay, they digest it and then it goes all over the ground and then you move on to the next part. Is that as simple as it is? Is it really that simple?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of labor to it, right, you got to sit down. I'm not trying to like, no, no.
Speaker 2:I'm just meaning like in theory, like that's how simple it is.
Speaker 1:That's it. Yep, that's it. Have water there, put your animals on there, let them poop and pee all over everything. Oh, and the saliva too. They found that when a cow reaches its tongue out because what they'll do is they'll wrap their tongue around the grass and basically pull the saliva from the animal communicates with the mycelia network and also the plant life and it also creates, like nature. It's crazy, we have no clue. And also, when animals walk around, there's this if you have a really healthy ecosystem, there's a palpation that's happening with the weight of the animal. That's kind of like a pump that's also sending nutrients out through the mycelia.
Speaker 1:I mean, dude, we are so stupid as people because we tried to brainwiz, are an engineer our way around nature versus understanding nature. I was listening to this rancher. His name is John Griggs. I don't know if he still is, but he was the head of the Nevada Cattleman's Association and he did some. It was rare, but he did some work with a conservationist. Like usually, ranchers and conservationists are like this.
Speaker 1:And when we get, when we actually put our differences aside and communicate, we find out we both want the same thing. We we differ in how we think we got to get there and that's the issue. But we both want a healthy, vibrant environment and ecosystem. That's what everybody wants, right, anyway? So they basically decided to come to the table and, like, I'm going to do my thing, you guide me, but we won't make decisions without each other and let's see what we can do.
Speaker 1:And it was this repairing. It was like a river, like a dried up river in Nevada repairing area. And, long story short, they did the process and it completely regenerated this whole area and the river became a year round running river again. It wasn't stopped and it became a running river again. But beaver showed up, whoa, out of nowhere, and somebody at the end of this, at the end of the court, because John was during the conversation. This was a question at the end during Q and A, but during the conversation she kind of skipped. He didn't skip over. He was like beaver showed up and I called her and I'm like the beaver here, I need to trap him.
Speaker 2:And she goes no, don't do that.
Speaker 1:And, and and he goes. If you would have asked me why, I couldn't tell you I was. This is how I was taught, and so why he would trap them yeah. Yeah, like why he shouldn't be there and so he left him. That's so funny Wait it's doing what we want.
Speaker 2:Stop it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so he left him and I mean a ton of credit to him to, kind of, one of the biggest challenges in agriculture is we have such we're we're, we're taught and raised to have such a tremendous amount of respect for our elders, especially our parents, that to then question them is a sin, and so one of the phrases in, in, in, in traditional agriculture, the the you know historical producers, is this is how it's always been done, or this is how we've always done it.
Speaker 2:Drives me crazy.
Speaker 1:Right, which is why first generation farmers and ranchers people they're like, somehow they got connected to this lifestyle and they wanted to get into it and they're doing it, even if they've never had any connection. Some of them have, like I'm a city slicker cousin, if I started I mean I have a homestead but if I started branching I would consider myself probably first generation because I didn't grow up doing it right. But first generation farmers and ranchers, they don't have that blockage because they're trying to figure it out, which does give them the advantage of a wider field of view to figure out what's working, what's not working. Now they should not forsake the experience and the knowledge from the people that have been doing it for a long time. But I think if the two could come together we would make incredible momentum.
Speaker 1:So anyway, at the end of this conversation somebody said well, where'd the beaver come from? And he goes I'm so glad you asked. We have no idea. The closest water was 300 miles away, over a mountain range. We have no idea how they got here. And he says I think nature works in a way that we don't even know how to comprehend and somehow they knew there was water here again and that their services were needed to build the dam so that that water could spread and infiltrate further out to create this grassland that we now benefit from. So we we, I think can gain a lot of ground as a species when we recognize that that is all. We are One of the species that exists on this planet.
Speaker 2:Completely agree, man, I completely agree, yeah, and I think that's, you know, that's even a big thing. That I've been talking to with people like from a political front even is, like you know, to kind of tie that in here is my whole goal with the politics is to serve nature to. You know, there's something about it that just seems there's been a lot of corruption in regards to a lot of programming, even and I've seen it through spirituality, because this was primarily a spiritual podcast for a long duration and it's starting to shift a little bit. I love talking about it, but I've just noticed so many programming that has kept spiritual people out of politics, kept them out of things. And you know, there's a piece of me, like what you're saying, where nature has just been poking me and it's like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's bad programming here, there's been bad policies, there's been bad conditioning, and so I think that's absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 2:Right Is like there has to be this like underlying mechanism, and I not to get too religious here, but I feel like that's what people refer to when they talk about God is like there's some undercurrent that we as humans, maybe we're not tapped into anymore, and my belief is that we're not tapped into it because of the food, the chemicals we're putting in our body the air is polluted, the grounds polluted, everything's polluted.
Speaker 2:And if we're able to just get back to the ways, let's say, of these regenerative practices, get back in more tune with nature, is that we could really open ourselves up to understanding and, quite frankly, in my opinion, evolving into like the next level of what we could be as humans being more integrated with nature and learning from it, as opposed to all these things where it's like overengineering the nuances of how to do agriculture right or put this stuff in the soil. It's like it's this whole idea that I think we know best and I don't know. A piece of me thinks it's probably just like the human ego has just ran too rapid, thinking that we can overengineer and scientifically do everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree 100% and, like I'm all, I'm all about going into the spiritual, because that's what that's what's called me anyway. I mean, I don't think God and, and like I'm, I'm new to trying to really understand the Bible, so somebody can definitely question me on this and I'll listen and learn, but I don't think God looks at our species and favors it over others and in fact we probably have a lot more to earn because we have these overactive minds that can be dissuade and pulled away from our creator and believe that it's us, like you said, the ego. If we don't understand the, the, the power of the ego, and learn how to put it in its place, like the ego can be valuable. There's a book I read called Ego is the enemy.
Speaker 1:It's been a while so I couldn't really paraphrase much of it, but what it taught me was to be aware of the ego as a tool, but not let it to control me, and so I'm always trying to understand in a decision is it my ego making this decision and would I make the same decision if I put the ego aside is really maybe the best way to say that Would I make the same decision, would I act the same way without my ego, my personal desire for this? And so I try to just analyze the way I, who I'm being, from that perspective, because the ego has value, I mean, but unchecked, like I'm a huge Trump supporter, but that guy is a perfect example of the ego and his mouth putting him in so many bad situations like policy wise.
Speaker 1:I felt like he made a lot, so many great this. Not felt like he made so many great decisions for us, but damn it, somebody needs to take away his Twitter because because it's so divisive, and I think part of that is not understanding the ego. Now, I mean, it worked. You got a lot of policies done, but but if you could bring more people to the table from both sides, based off of how you chose your words, we would cover a lot. We would get a lot more done.
Speaker 2:I completely agree, man, I completely agree on all of that and and I think something you said valuable there is is the idea of realizing that the ego is a tool, because if we go back to spiritual things, I see that as being a another bad programming is where spiritual on average, not all of them tend to think oh, I don't have ego anymore, I got rid of my ego and I'm kind of sitting here like it's not exactly something you can get rid of, it's not, yeah, and it's probably your ego talking if you got rid of it Exactly.
Speaker 1:It's been very clever to make you think it's not. Oh, that's funny yeah totally.
Speaker 2:But yeah, to your point. Like there are useful things, right. Like you want to create something great. You want to create something, like you know, as much as I want to serve nature. If I'm trying to be honest, like I guess there's a piece of my ego that like wants to get us rejoined with nature so that I can be a part of that process to help and people can be like oh wow, clean did a great job of rejoining those things Like.
Speaker 2:I'm sure at some level my ego is playing a role there. But it comes back to like what you're saying with intention, like I've lived enough life, I've, I've had enough of the commodities right from from money to women to realize, like these physical pleasures they're all going to go away at some point. This isn't, this isn't the big thing, right? And it seems to me that when your ego is aligned in that route, it can sway you from making decisions that are going to last a generation or many generations, right? And and I see that a lot, I think with the policies, right of people, they just get the money.
Speaker 2:Oh, a corporation wants me to make this policy. Okay, I'll make this policy, because now I get $100 million and I can get a beach house and everything's good, and it's like, it's like, but how like, how happy are you going to be about that? Think that through. Like you're just going to be that happy until they give you another $100 million and then it's like, great, you're making the world a worse place, like, like you know. You come back to ego. It's like your, your ego is pretty short sighted. If you ask me, you should have a bigger time horizon here. If you really want to. You really want to juice up that ego long term.
Speaker 1:Man and social media and and media in general, has done a phenomenal job to bolster the desire of people to build their ego and not, in some cases, not even know. I mean the company that I had in Phoenix that went bankrupt. I look back and it was all ego. Now I did not see that. It's kind of I open to look back and be like, no, I, I was sure that it wasn't about me. And I look back and I was like, oh man, there was a lot of stuff that was about me, you know, and I think that the, the, I'm, I am grateful that the bankruptcy happened, because the path I was on I wouldn't be with my family and the thing that matters to me the most is I'm married to my wife of 21 years and we've got three daughters and and we're still doing that. I mean that's not, that's not easy, especially in a world where the ego's on full flow, because you know there's options both in career and in women and if you are not present to.
Speaker 1:I mean, I went through plant medicine experiences. I'm a combat veteran and so some of those were very I believe plant medicine brought. God brought plant medicine to me. I didn't. It's not a replacement of God. Now, it wasn't maybe the case when I first went through it. It's been brought back into context for me now, in my older age and I'm like no, it was absolutely brought to me by God. Probably if how I was introduced to it was introduced to it that way, I would have never put it out of context of being brought to me by God.
Speaker 1:But what I get to experience in my life through natural medicine that healed the soul, that healed the spirit and didn't require me to take an antidepressant or some sort of drug, the rest of my life, that grow in nature, that didn't need any extra help, that is a God-given medicine and if you're familiar with psychedelics, set and setting is a significant part of that, and so the mindset is that this is a medicine by my Creator, by God, that's made available for me. I'm going to go into this experience for this thing that I'm struggling with, because the ego gets moved out of the way, so that I have this direct link, communication with source energy, with God. I'm a Christian with God, who made this available in a way that I can't even explain, but now I can process this so that I can become a better husband and father and man for my community. How is that not a medicine from God? But if it's provided to me with the wrong context, I become me. It's me that did all this. I am the God, I am the. You know I mean anyway.
Speaker 1:So 2014 was my first experience with psychedelics, and that was ayahuasca, and that's where I started caring about nature Prior to.
Speaker 2:that. Ayahuasca was your first psychedelic. You went off strong man, you just jumped in.
Speaker 1:I didn't know any better than it should have.
Speaker 2:You were like okay, let's go big.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it was definitely three nights of a lot, but I left there attached to nature like I had never been. I was a typical conservative in the sense that we weren't doing anything to nature, like it was all bullshit. We just weren't we weren't affecting it at all. There was nothing we could do that was going to affect it, and so I get that. I totally understand it was more just naivety, just not caring to look into it, because the evidence is pretty clear that no, we do affect it.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Not to this whole global warming agenda, but we do have an effect. If I'm emptying the oil in my pickup out on my ground, I'm causing a problem in the ground Right, like simple stuff like that. Or if I'm going to go burn a giant mountain of plastic in my backyard, like I'm causing a problem for my environment. But I didn't think about any of that back then and then I got this soft introduction through.
Speaker 2:Ayahuasca Soft.
Speaker 1:And funny too, because I was there to be a better businessman, to be a better leader, to see how I could make that company the global sensation it was meant to be.
Speaker 2:That's the program, right, that's the program we're brought in here. Yeah, mother, ayah is like that is not what I heard, anyway, so Listen up, yeah, so that was kind of the journey. Was there a specific experience that you had there that really opened your eyes to mother nature, or was it kind of the whole thing, dude?
Speaker 1:that's what's weird is like the connection in nature was almost like a bonus prize, because it was an emotion that came up later that all of a sudden, things that were being said were concerning. That never came, that never occurred to me prior. But for me, ayahuasca was more about my wife and my relationship with her. I became her and had to experience me as her.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, that's tricky, yeah, yeah. Bring that down for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I definitely learned that I had an ego. You know, I'm an entrepreneur, I am a very, my wife's an introvert, I'm an extrovert and so, previous to Ayahuasca, I would something I would want to do and I believe I also live in a marriage that's where a team or a partnership. There are certain decisions that maybe I need to make that I need to make without consulting her first, and I use that very loosely, because most of the things I do, but my job is to still protect, provide and preside. I do believe that is my role as a masculine male figure in my household. But I would basically say I want to do something, anything, and she would not agree and I would just circle her with different. Basically, I would probe the perimeter with different angles until she would say yes.
Speaker 1:Well, the previous me was hearing her, yes, as yeah, okay, cool. But the person that experienced me in Ayahuasca was like whatever, none of my opinions matter, why are you even bothering? Like I have no value in this relationship and it's almost degrading that you would even ask, because I know you're not going to listen anyway. And so I purged every night for three nights, very violently, and I think I was experiencing what she had experienced being my spouse.
Speaker 2:How did she do this journey with you too, or was it just you?
Speaker 1:Just me, yep, just me. She's never participated in Ayahuasca. She has in psilocybin, but not Ayahuasca.
Speaker 2:What was it if you're comfortable sharing? What was it like when you went back to her? Did you ask her if this was the real perspective she had?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and actually I didn't even know that was the experience I had until I was back home, driving down the road. It was a Tuesday. I got home Sunday, it was a Tuesday. I was driving down the road and all of a sudden just I mean, for no reason, I'm literally just driving in traffic in Phoenix and just a rush of memory and I was like holy shit. And I called her because I was like sitting there, like why don't I have anything? That was profound, like I had crazy visuals and I was purging. I was the guy. If you watch a documentary there's the psycho rolling on the ground screaming out loud for mercy. That was me begging for mercy for it to be over.
Speaker 1:The shaman came over. I'm so grateful for who my people were the shaman. But they came over and the prayer is called the echodos, right, the singing, and I thought they were going to come to help. We'll leave it, and they don't. They know what's going on.
Speaker 1:They know if they're very well trained, they know they're connected to it because he drank and went into the spirit world essentially with me, and so they didn't ease up and it was just, I mean, the first night I purged so violently that I threw my back out and fortunately I was with the world I was in previous was the fitness world. I owned a cross to gym. I had a sports entertainment company that was broadcasting a quarter of a million people live, like it was. So I had some really solid people around me to help me work through the physical side of what I experienced. But I threw my back out because I was purging so violently, and so I'm driving down the road and it just came back and I was like, why did this? And so I called her. I'm like, hey, I need to because I'm not even home. I'm like I just experienced memories and I need to share them with you. And I explained it to her and she goes yeah, welcome to my world.
Speaker 2:And I'm like.
Speaker 1:I'm like man, I get goosebumps. Now I'm like you're never going to have to experience that again. Now I am mortal and it's taken me some time, but we're there yeah.
Speaker 2:New patterns can be a little bit to learn.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. But the value is it was put on my radar to even be aware of before. The ego was so good at making me think that I was good, she was good, everything was fine, but to have it highlighted it's like that's what I explained about the because I used to. I even worked in self development for a while. I coached for a guy named Chris Pal. Extreme makeover weight loss was his TV show.
Speaker 1:I had 40 clients that had a lot of weight to lose and my experience was that the weight is a byproduct of something deeper. It's not Now, today, because of our food system. I don't think that's the case anymore. But 10 years ago if you were significantly overweight, you were covering up trauma, and so the coaching I did was more around mental, emotional and trauma work, because I can teach you how to eat healthy, I can teach you how to exercise, and all of those things will lead to weight loss. But what won't is your decision, when you're feeling like shit, to make the decision to eat that food. You know you're not supposed to eat anyway because of how you view yourself, and that we can't heal that in the gym, we can heal that in conversation. So you can at least become aware of oh man, that's why I'm deciding to eat like shit, oh my gosh. And then you can at least have a choice in the matter.
Speaker 2:Man, that's a huge thing too, right? I see that you briefly touched on it, but I think it was the main core of what you're saying, right? This ties it back to the food. It's like our food is just so our food, our water, our air is just so poison that it's difficult, like it's very difficult, in order to say fit and healthy.
Speaker 2:And you know, I had a bodybuilding phase when what would have been like four years, four and a half years ago ish, and I truly think that, you know, even at the pinnacle of my physique, I remember thinking like it doesn't make sense, that it's you have to like, put yourself into this much pain to look good, like and don't get me wrong like difficult stuff.
Speaker 2:It should be difficult, it should be painful, but it didn't make sense to me that, like our human bodies, you know, you look back at medieval times, or even like the Romans we were talking about them earlier they all had beautiful physiques and you think like how and why, and like you know, it didn't seem like they had a whole bunch of different diet regimens and you got to eat this, don't eat this.
Speaker 2:But then you look into our industries that have been completely corrupted by corporations and terrible politics. And you're like oh, there's no nutrients in food, so we have to eat so much to feel food, to feel full, and then all of that is just excess garbage Our body doesn't know what to do with. And then our hearts can't pump it pump functionally, we can't think straight, so then we get medication to fix that and it's like that's making the problem even worse. And so now it's like oh, like you know and I'm not going to be very careful here, like I'm not giving it as an excuse to be fat and overweight, but it definitely puts us at a disadvantage in order to get the physiques that are we probably more desire and would more readily have if we had more nutritious food at the very basic level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, when you understand the micro gut biome and all of its effects I mean, the micro gut biome is the first brain, Like I don't know how many people are whether you've heard of it or even just aware of it. It's truth. You have all these organisms in your stomach and when you piss them off, they basically send signals that say we are unhappy. And so then you're depressed and unhappy. And so, yeah, we. So then I'm depressed and unhappy and I'm not okay with things that are going on. So now I'm driving by McDonald's and let me just swing in and grab a parfait, or I don't even know what that is.
Speaker 2:That's probably not the bad choice.
Speaker 1:I scream and something yeah, so maybe that's not a bad choice, but but like a big Mac, I'm just going to drive in and grab a big.
Speaker 1:Mac. Well, that's because I'm feeling depressed and it's like this self fulfilling problem where our gut, our gut, is unbalanced. And so I had a client once. This was such an eye opening purse because I'd read about it. Right, as a trainer, you read different things and you learn different things. But so I had read about this but I'd never experienced myself until this client and what happened was she. I said, listen. So her daughter died of a rare cancer and she was the manager of a hospital, and the cancer was so rare that she was a star athlete on the Canadian volleyball team. One day she passed out at practice. Friday she was gone, oh wow.
Speaker 1:And so she, this, this woman, is telling me all this and it's heartbreaking and I'm like when, I'm so sorry, when was this? And she's like seven years ago, and I was like seven years, like the way she was describing it. I thought it was like last week. You know what I mean, and not to say that seven years things get easier or whatever. I mean they do get easier, but the way she was so connected to it I was like wow. And so, anyway, I was working with her for a while and I'd read something about your micro gut health and depression and I could tell that's what she was dealing with, right, of course, that's why she was still in that level of sympathetic nervous system with her daughter's passing. And so she was.
Speaker 1:I said I want to try something with you no grain, no dairy for 30 days. What I was really speaking to was the grain and the inflammation caused by grain and the effects that that has, and so forth. And also, when you have inflammation in your gut, you're now not absorbing as many of the other good nutrients that you are eating, right? So, and there's a lot to it, and we won't go into detail there, I guess, and what I mean by a lot to it, like it's how the grain is made or how allergic you are versus somebody else. You know that kind of deal.
Speaker 1:So she's like, okay, we went and I said just 30 days, let's just see what happens. And she's like I've got a vacation, I'm going. She was in Canada. She like I'm headed down to New York City for vacation, I'll be gone for three weeks. And I'm like, well, good luck, it's really hard to change these, you know, to do an elimination diet on vacation. She called me three weeks later and she goes AJ, I just cleaned my daughter's room. I have not been in her room since she passed away and I was like now I'm like, oh shit, too soon, too soon, you know like you're now.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking you're moving too fast.
Speaker 1:This lady's going to have a major breakdown and I'm like, are you okay? And she goes. I have never been more clear. I cannot believe how long I've been attached to that. All she did was fix her micro gut bio and it transformed her psychological state. And so now I get to take that experience with me the rest of my life, because I experienced it firsthand and share it but also live it myself. I mean, it's just powerful and it's food, I mean. And it's also interesting that our micro gut biome affects that much of our brain, when our soil microbiology affects that much of the world we live in.
Speaker 1:Like the connection is not coincidence. We have a creator who has created all things and there's network and connection and realization when we open our hearts and our minds to it. Where we are, nature, nature works this way. Well, what if I work this way? What if my body is similar to this nature? And if I restore all those things? I get the same experience of Shangri-La, you know, of the Garden of Eden. I've got a healthy gut feeds a healthy brain. I feed that with healthy food from a healthy soil that's grown by people who believe in the importance and the value of what they're doing and how they're raising it for me, and it's all connected, it's all cyclical.
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, I mean beautiful, I mean thanks for that chair. That's an incredible story and I could not agree more. And that's truly the vision I guess I have, and even just the American Congress Party in general has, is of like, okay, how do we get back to what our ancestors, ancestors of ancestors of ancestors had with just natural water sources, you know, clean food, fruits, vegetables because, like, even those are just absolutely chock-full of pesticides nowadays. If you were, I'm very curious of just in general, right, you can kind of just ramble if you want here. But just when it comes to policies from a political perspective because like that's really what's motivating me at this point in my life is, like when in office, what needs changed? Like, because I have an idea, but I don't know all of the things that are currently in office that need changed. I'm sure it's a lot. But like from a ranchers perspective, like what do we need to change to make our soil clean and to make our water clean? Like, what are the biggest policies that are hamstringing our local agriculture?
Speaker 1:We need a competitive marketplace. We need a place that is as easy for me as a producer to sell my product direct to the consumer as it is for the large corporations who have designed everything to work for them. In fact, the policy should be that we, as Americans, should have the right to choose, to buy and purchase and consume the food from whatever place and source we choose, without any government intervention. I can go buy cigarettes, I can go buy as much soda as I want, as much sugar as I want, I can go and do all these things that are so unhealthy for me, but you're going to tell me I can't buy raw milk from my local dairyman. Like that's the arguments you're going to have with me and you're going to tell me, because you're protecting me, to keep me safe, no bullshit.
Speaker 1:You're doing that because the lobbyists that work for Big Dairy have paid you to do that so that they can keep their profits. It's the same with dairy, it's the same with beef, it's the same with lamb and pork and chicken and produce. I mean, you name it. We have lost complete control of our food system and it's gone into the hands and the control of the large corporations through lobbyists. So that's the other thing get rid of lobbyists. If you can stand for the removal of lobbyists, that one move. Lobbyists and term limits, I think fix our country.
Speaker 2:I'm here for that, definitely support those two.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but yeah, specifically the food. It's this collectivization of our food supply chain, but doing it through a pen stroke on a policy versus a bullet in a gun. I mean this guy, amos Miller I don't know if you've seen his stuff the Amish farmer.
Speaker 2:It's in Pennsylvania, yeah.
Speaker 1:That should not be happening.
Speaker 2:Seriously Well fill this in If people don't know, can you fill this in?
Speaker 1:I'll fill you in on what I know. So Amos Miller. He's an Amish producer and sells all kinds of product. Right now, my understanding is what he's dealing with is the dairy specifically, not his beef or anything like that. But because he's not processing his product through a federal facility, there's all these policies and procedures that he's not following, and so they have now confiscated millions of dollars worth of his inventory because the state my understanding is the state claimed that people had gotten sick. But in court my understanding, from what I heard the attorneys for Amos say of over 400 people that have written letters or showed up in support of him, not one person has ever been sick by Amos' product. That's the gist of it. That's as bad. As much as I know from observation.
Speaker 1:What I'm saying is I, as an adult American, should have the right to choose to buy from Amos whether it makes me sick or not, and I bear the consequence if I get sick because I made the choice as an adult. Just like if I make the choice to go have a drink at the bar and I have too many and leave, I bear the brunt of the consequence. But the cop wasn't standing there in the bar cutting me off telling me you've had too many. The bar didn't tell me I couldn't have another one. I mean, I know in some places they do that, but for most part they just serve them and then I suffer the consequence of that later. Our food should not be more regulated than alcohol. You know what I mean, and so I mean that's a big blanket sort of like example.
Speaker 1:My cousins are the Bundy ranchers and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail because it would not be right for me to do that when they should. My understanding is I mean, they had two major run-ins. The first one was in 2014, when they were trying to take their cattle and their land that they had the right to graze on since the late 1800. They had grazing fees on Bureau of Land Management ground. My understanding is my uncle discovered that the grazing fees that he was paying were then being used to regulate them out of business, Just like the taxes we pay are being used against us as Americans, Like that's the same thing, right?
Speaker 1:So he made the choice to not pay the feds and instead paid the state because, according to the Constitution, the federal government was only supposed to have any level of control over the western states up to the point that the states were established. That's my understanding. If I'm wrong, somebody tell me I'm wrong and I'll read up on it more. But my understanding is it was a temporary situation. We have not settled the west. So we're going to say that basically the west is under the federal control until states are established and then we're going to hand control over to the states West of the Mississippi. Something like 60 to 90% of the land is still under federal control National parks, blm land, all of these things right, and that's kind of a two-edged sword. Nice thing about coming out to the west is you can literally drive into a park and find a place to camp for the most part and throw up a tent. You go to the east coast. Everything's privately owned. My understanding is really hard to find open land to go camping on because it's all private land. So it's a double-edged sword, anyway.
Speaker 1:So he stopped paying his grazing fees to the feds and started paying them to the state and my understanding is they took a couple of those checks and then they stopped. Now why would you stop? My conspiracy theory is that somebody in the federal government said, stop taking that money, we're building a case. And so they stopped taking it. My understanding is he kept sending the checks every year. It was not about paying the fee. It was about not paying the fee for somebody to then turn around and regulate him out of business. Well, in the end it was discovered that Senator Harry Reid was working on a deal to sell that land to a Chinese solar company.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh yes.
Speaker 1:And so that's what ended up coming out on that particular case.
Speaker 2:Oh jeez.
Speaker 1:So yeah, man, I mean we just we do not have. We don't live in a country anymore that is for the people, like the government we have does not exist for the people. It's gone. It's corporate interest only, and if you are somebody who likes to sit inside and play video games all day long and consume junk food, you live in the right country, at least for now. Hopefully we could take it back for all of us.
Speaker 2:But we're working on it. We're working on it. Yeah, that's absolutely insane, and where my mind goes to was something you said at the beginning right, all for free and open market. The problem, I see, is that the free and open market has created this issue that we have today, right where we have these corporations infiltrating politics. We have the Chinese government obviously infiltrating our politics. That's a conspiracy, realist. That's not a theory anymore. There are bottom paid for president. The current president's a perfect example of that. It was getting a million dollars a year from China.
Speaker 2:So how do we? Because I want the free market, I love the free market, I think it's absolutely beautiful. However, we have an issue now where it's almost like we need to prune some of the free market branches. Right, we can't be in politics and we can't have corporations or even foreign adversaries, foreign countries, buying a farmland. So, from your perspective, specifically speaking, with local farming, let's say, or local ranching, what have you? How do we keep the free market alive for local economies but prevent large corporations from carrying out the atrocities that they're doing on the American people?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I apologize, you froze for a second there, but you were asking about my thoughts on the localization of farms and ranches and how to maybe help it be a better environment for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, your picture is starting to get a little laggy. Let me pause the recording and then we'll pick it right back up. Okay, all right, there we go Beautiful faces and lagging anymore Perfect Back at it. So I'll repeat my question. It was essentially I'm 100% for free markets, 100% in on that, because capitalism has provided a bunch of technological achievements that have been incredible and there's no way we would have gotten here without capitalism.
Speaker 2:The problem is, is I'm seeing, is that it's infiltrating politics, obviously. This is why we need to ban lobbyists. This is why we need term limits. This is why we need to prevent politicians from even placing stock trades or put orders in the stock market whole different conversation. We also apparently need to do something within agriculture and preventing corporations from influencing these markets. So what's the balance here From your perspective? What policies would be good for preserving local regenerative farming? What policies make it free and open market? Because maybe that's what's happening I know I'm rambling here a bit is that these corporations are no longer making it truly a free market. They've almost created this monopoly or over constriction on the local farms and obviously it's infiltrated many other sectors. So, in short, how do we make it a competitive free market while not having politics get into the and controlling the local farms. What do you think are good? Policies that we need to get rid of or we need to add in order for that to be a reality?
Speaker 1:One policy in particular is called the M-Cool mandatory country of origin labeling. Now, that was, it's kind of a moving conversation. So M-Cool was passed years ago and then Canada and Mexico complained due to I mean, there was some trade laws and stuff that they said were that America had gone against in order to implement mandatory country of origin labeling. And let me just explain what that means. It means if you go to the store and you buy a product that says USA on it, it actually was born, raised and slaughtered in the USA. It's an American animal. America country of origin labeling was passed so that the only place that could put product of the USA was that place it was born, raised and processed here. Mexico and Canada complained about that and that was repealed.
Speaker 1:So now what's happening? Or what? Yeah, it is still happening. It was just changed last week. If I'm raising beef in South Africa and I slaughter it in South Africa and send it frozen on a ship in large chunks and it gets to America and then gets further processed into individual steaks and ground beef and roast, I now can put USA on the package because all that was required was that value was added in this country.
Speaker 1:And so you, the average consumer that have no clue because you're busy with your life and everything you've got going on and we are so disconnected from our food supply. You go to the store and you see USA and you're like, okay, cool, you buy it, thinking it's USA. That shouldn't be the case. If it's from Brazil, it should say Brazil. If it's from South Africa, it should say Africa. You, the consumer, should have the ability to choose and have the knowledge to know. You can still choose Brazil, you can still choose Africa, you can still choose Paraguay, uruguay, wherever it's coming from, choose it.
Speaker 2:It adds a little bit of spice to it too Sure yeah, you might be that's what you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, exactly. You might be like okay, cool, I'm gonna try this. Paraguay and beef, you know. Problem is, do you know how it's taken care of in Paraguay? Because, I promise you, our regulations here are far more robust than any other country. Matter of fact, right now there's a big fight with Paraguay and beef. Paraguay and beef has been outlawed for the last 25 years because 25 years ago they brought foot and mouth disease into the country and they haven't fully eradicated it, even though they say they have, and so there's some deal trying to be pushed through that Paraguay and beef is allowed to come back to the US.
Speaker 1:I don't know enough about foot and mouth disease to really go into too much detail, other than to say that the veterinarians that I've heard talk about this. This is the worst case scenario. An outbreak of Paraguay, an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, would devastate the cattle industry, and when we are already at 1950 levels of cattle, it is not worth the risk, and so there's a big push. Right now there's an organization called RCAFUSA. R-caf-calfusa Highly recommend RCAF. All of the other organizations that were established to help the American producers have been bought and paid for, so they're no longer for the producers Like the NCBA, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, is a corrupt, bought and paid for organization the Farm Bureau.
Speaker 1:I was listening to Thomas Massey and he says at the local level, your cattlemen are great. At the state level, maybe at the federal level, completely corrupt both the Farm Bureau and the NCBA and these were organizations established to help the cattlemen. I think it's kind of. The issue is we see it, does this over time. You do something that you wanna have make a positive impact and then it's almost like business. They say the first generation builds it, the second generation runs it and the third generation loses it. It's like that for our organizations too. It seems like the beef check-off, the beef check-off. Most people have no clue what that means. Every single time an animal, a cow, is sold, the rancher pays a dollar and it's a law. It goes into this program. The check-off was originally established to promote the value of eating beef. Have you ever heard the beef? It's what's for dinner.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:That's a slogan that was created 30 years ago by the check-off beef it's what's for dinner. It was on commercials. It was being advertised to promote it. They are failing miserably. I think it's either willful neglect in other words, they're just not gonna do it because they're supporting other organizations that they're part of, or in their back pocket like fake meat potentially or they have no clue how to market in our day and age. They don't know Instagram, they don't know TikTok, they don't know X. They just don't know how to reach people. I doubt that. It's that, I think it's because they've been bought off.
Speaker 1:So mandatory country of origin labeling should be a given. We as consumers should know the source of our food and that shouldn't be an argument. The beef check-off the beef check-off should be. I think it's a great program. I think every cow sold in the United States a dollar going towards marketing is a great idea. But it's not doing that anymore. They're not doing what they should be doing anymore, and my understanding too is that 50% of what's so the beef check-off is a federal program and then they issue that money out to people to manage the check-off, to do the job of what the check-off was established for. The largest organization that receives the largest amount of those funds is the NCBA, and then their job is to go and promote beef 50% of what they get. I was listening to a podcast and I think it was something like $13 million. 50% of it went to servicing In other words, that was their profit. Other people, comparatively, that were awarded some of that money to do something with 18%. So they're just packing their pockets full of it. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:I went to, I did a video about this on Instagram and then I went to a Utah Cattleman's Association meeting Dude. They had my number, they knew I was coming. It was wild, I can't tell you. This is the first time I'd ever gone to one of these and I just wanted to check it out. And so the Utah Cattleman's the Cattleman's associations around the nation are under the NCBA, they're like chapters, and so they all support the check-off and that the check-off's a good deal. We gotta pay into the check-off and keep supporting the check-off.
Speaker 1:It's a big rallying campaign for the check-off. It's like why are they talking about this so much? We should be talking about water. We should talk about regenerative agriculture, how to rely on less inputs. You should be talking about things that are helping the producers a lot more, and they've got massive lobbyists that work for them in Washington. And so the amount of people that came up and talked to me about the check-off just independently, I was like this is so weird. This is my first time here. I'm a nobody other than a somewhat of a decent social media following.
Speaker 1:Well, the last day I'm on my way out and I just happened to stop by a group of producers that were talking, and one of them was an older gentleman and he was talking to the younger guys about the importance of the check-off go figures and I just stopped.
Speaker 1:So they didn't set themselves up for me, although some of the other earlier meetings in this thing was like man, they sought me out to have this conversation and this guy looked at him and this guy, I was just like injecting myself into the conversation, just listening, and they were fine with that. And he told one of the younger guys he goes yeah, you know, back east at the training center they have a monitor. Now I don't know that this is true, but this is what he said and it kind of made sense for the rest of the weekend. He goes, they have this monitor that has the names and faces of everybody in the country who's ever who's have a social media following and have talked bad about the check-off On a screen in the training and I'm all holy crap, these dudes knew I was coming.
Speaker 2:Your sniz on it.
Speaker 1:As soon as I registered my name on the attendance list. I must have popped up somewhere. Now again, I have no idea if that's true. The coincidence was just pretty interesting and I was there-.
Speaker 2:There was such thing as coincidences.
Speaker 1:Dude, I know, and I was there with the gentleman that I was consulting for who's building a new slaughterhouse, and even he was like I'm like, was that weird to you? And he goes yeah, Because this guy's building one of the most important projects in the state of Utah, a brand new slaughterhouse at this scale. And they didn't even want to talk to him. Every conversation seemed to gravitate towards me and the check-off. And I'm like I'm here for him to talk about this slaughterhouse. It's gonna help everybody and you all just want to talk to him.
Speaker 1:And in these conversations they would like literally just be looking at me, talking to me, and I'm like Henry's right here. This dude's doing some incredible stuff for you all.
Speaker 2:You just want to talk to me about this. Jeff Should be like what meetings you guys have about me before this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's just so much. It's sad because the producers are so busy. Like I asked one of my cousins, I'm like dude, I'm kind of on a soapbox right now about the check-off. How do you, what do you think about the check-off? And he goes. Aj, there are so many other things that come my way that I have to put money into that. A dollar per animal is not worth my attention. So they have so many distractions to try to raise food they don't have the time to dig in and realize they're being screwed, so they just pay it. He goes. I just got a bill for no.
Speaker 1:He goes. I just got a bill for raising cows in Nevada that was like $680 that I didn't know I was gonna receive and he goes and I don't even know where that goes or what that's for.
Speaker 2:So he goes.
Speaker 1:All I can do is put my head down and try to raise a few more head of cattle to cover the bills, like this is what a lot of these guys are dealing with. And so when you talk about a career, a job that they would never give up so I'm not saying this to complain for them, because they're not complaining it's just an observation Sun up to sundown, 365 days a year, that's what they do. And then you add all the other shit on top to fix it, to try to be aware of, to fix it, like where do you have the time?
Speaker 2:And then you yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1:And then I said then you wanna talk about a competitive marketplace, how to give them that advantage. Well, if you're gonna go and market your own cows direct to consumer, you're gonna have to learn how to be a marketing and sales person on top of being a cattleman. And that's why we created from the farm. I went through all this. I got enough exposure, enough experience to be like okay, in order for my kids to not starve to death because we have independently run farms and ranches across the nation, we have to create a revitalization of our agriculture industry and it's gotta be one that's so incredible that it does to agriculture what Airbnb did to short-term rentals. Like, look what Airbnb did to short-term rentals.
Speaker 1:How many people started a side job for extra money, running out of room, parking a trailer on their side of their house or investing in a rental property nationwide? Now I'm not saying there hasn't been some consequences and unforeseen consequences from that particular model of business. What I'm highlighting is how the technology that they created and their investment into marketing this platform created opportunity for thousands of people nationwide to make extra income and maybe even make it their whole career. That's what we did and are doing with from the farm, somebody has to take care of the market. I lived enough of it to know. In order for this to work, here are the things that need to be done so that they can go to market and so the customer can find them.
Speaker 2:So then it's from the farm kind of handling the marketing, are you almost replacing what the check off is supposed to do for your farms?
Speaker 1:Yes, we are Airbnb for food.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 1:That's it. It's as simple as that. We are Airbnb for local food.
Speaker 2:What states do you operate in?
Speaker 1:Well, we just launched our MVP yesterday. It's been four years in the.
Speaker 1:This has been my whole life's journey, for since I started selling beef for my family's ranch in 2019, had to shut it down. I'm driving down the road during that time. It's April 2020. And the news is talking about empty store shelves in the cities. And I'm in the country and I see cows standing all over the fields and I'm like we have food. It's right here. You just gotta find us. And I'm like producers don't know how to talk to people in the cities. There's a disconnect there. No, communication.
Speaker 1:We don't know how to talk to each other and there's a lot of steps, all those people we talked about in the beginning. There's a lot of steps in between that have to be solved for to make this work. And you know, I'm like, yeah, somebody should do that, Not me, you know.
Speaker 2:But somebody.
Speaker 1:Somebody should do that, and I couldn't stop thinking about it because it was. I mean, there was a lot of things too. I served in Iraq. One of my favorite days in Iraq was we went to a village and took care packages that were sent to us from home, and I was 23, 24 years old. So my experience while I was there, my view, all of that was not what I'm now experiencing in 2020. You know, I was there for a much different purpose, but I keep seeing this man's face the dad of the family. We were taken care of standing off to the side while we were doing this, and I would lay down at night and just see his face and I'm like why I didn't even hardly recognize the guy, Hardly noticed the guy. I mean, I did, but hardly noticed him when I was there in real life in 2020. I'm pulling up a picture to show you. This was the moment actually.
Speaker 1:So this is me playing soccer with his kid.
Speaker 1:Oh we brought that ball into the village as part of the care package. Now I'm 38, covid's going on living in Southern Utah, and I'm seeing this guy's face and I'm like I do not want to be that man relying on another foreign entity or person to feed my family and this is where we're headed and so, but I mean, at this time in my life I was working, doing concrete working Walmart distribution, because I had just gone through the bankruptcy, just trying to figure out what was next for me and trying to maybe build this direct to consumer beef business for my cousin's ranch. And I know nothing about software, nothing. And so I called a buddy of mine I even found the old audio of me on LinkedIn. Hey, I see you just graduated full-stack software developer school. I have an idea for you that will be really valuable.
Speaker 1:Got on the phone with him and he's like nope, not interested. Like I know, I was called by God to do this. That's just that simple no argument. That's why I'm doing this. And so I just I couldn't sleep because he said no and I'm like okay, nevermind, and I didn't bother. And I just couldn't sleep, I just couldn't put it out of my mind. So I'm like, okay, what do I need to do? Maybe I should just go find out if it's even a good idea to start with, because if somebody tells me a terrible idea, then maybe I can let it go. So I found this gentleman who is now my partner. I mean, god has guided this thing from day one. I mean, as I'll say, as simple as it has been, it's the only answer. Now, it hasn't been simple. It's required a lot of time, a lot of faith, a lot of work, but the right people just keep showing up the right. It's amazing, definitely a true testimony builder to when you know you're doing what's right, you're on the right path. And so I presented it to him and he goes it's a good idea. I have some ag background, I have family that do this, but you need to do some research, and this was, you know, april May 2020.
Speaker 1:Fast forward, I keep asking the questions, keep doing the research, keep asking, keep paying attention to what's going on with our food supply chain, all of these things, and end up meeting some people that now I'm in Cody because I'm running a. I came here to run a USDA meat slaughterhouse because I was asking these questions, like if we're gonna create a business. We need to create a vertically integrated business where the ranchers are partnered with the slaughterhouses at the local level and then the slaughterhouse gets it out to the consumers. Like, then you won't have the problem I did, which is I have no room in the slaughterhouse. So even though I have the product and I have the customer base, I can't get it processed. So let's vertically integrate, which essentially starts moving you down the same path. The ultimately ends up into massive vertical integration and feed lots and big four again. You know, like.
Speaker 1:So I was also kind of hesitant. Like how do we make sure this doesn't get bastardized from its true mission and is there to serve the producers? Anyway, long story short, I call him and I'm like hey, I'm now running a slaughterhouse in Cody Wyoming. I had talked to him like six months prior in an update and he's like you're doing what? I have no experience, like there's no reason I should be here. This is where, you know, again, god comes in because I needed to be here. I'm like yeah, I'm running a slaughterhouse in Cody Wyoming and I'm telling you I don't need to do any more market research. We gotta get this thing done. Like we're running out of time, yeah, and he's like, okay, now I need. And he's like, okay, great, let's get started. Then you need to do a wireframe and I'm like what is a wire?
Speaker 1:Like he keeps probably these things in front of me that need done anyway.
Speaker 2:So we figured it out. So there's, you don't know wireframes like a mockup of the app, of like what the screens look like, and then when you click this button, it goes to this page.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, if you want to build a house, you need blueprints. If you want to build an app, you need blueprints, and that's essentially what it is, and I ended up hiring some kid from Pakistan and paid him 640 bucks and he had it done in three weeks.
Speaker 1:And when I went to present it to Isaac, who's my partner, who just had a massive, successful exit of a software company. I presented it to him and he goes. I called him. I said, hey, I'm ready to present my wireframe. And he's like what, already? And I'm like, yeah, so I think he expected something way less than what he got. And I presented it to him and he starts laughing and I'm like and I don't know anything. So I'm like what's funny? And he goes AJ, when I built a wireframe for my company busy, busy it cost me $25,000 in 12 months of development.
Speaker 2:Because in 2011, in 2011,.
Speaker 1:Figma didn't exist or Wix, where you could drag and drop they had to code every line of just doing a wireframe. And he goes dude, I am envious of the time you live in he goes. It's gonna be way cheaper for you to do what we had to do because technology so, anyway, so presented the wireframe and he liked it.
Speaker 1:And he's like, okay, well, now you gotta raise capital so that you could build it. And I was like, oh crap, long story, not so long. We raised the capital. A local hometown girl, my co-founder, brooke, and also a superstar in the CrossFit space it's how she got her sort of rise to start. I'm not in the CrossFit space anymore, but she's from St George, utah, where I'm from. She came in with the initial capital to get go. I mean, I had people with and I don't know her financial situation, but I had people that were very well off. Tell me no. And she saw the vision and said I'm in, what do you need? And just went to it. And so she invested, got it going. Now she's my co-founder and we just went live with our MVP yesterday.
Speaker 2:We're working all the bugs out.
Speaker 1:Within a couple hours, we had our first three transactions from three different consumers at three different parts of the country, from three different ranchers. So we are building, and I'm also happy to say that I am not the only one doing this. In this process, I have met five or six other people building similar marketplaces and I support them 100%. I am not worried about the competition. We have 327 million Americans to feed and behemoths of companies that need to be knocked down a few notches. I don't think they should be go away. Like I said, if they went away, we started it. The system that exists. We need them, but it shouldn't be 85% of our marketplace under four companies, and so that's only gonna happen if I'm not the only one. Because our biggest three threats for what we're doing first, they're gonna try to buy me.
Speaker 1:I'm not for sale. We're building a. We built a legacy company. There was a time in our country where people built companies to hand them down. I think that's a big thing that will save us again, people being committed to the long-term development of something they're doing. So we're not for sale. I'm not taking any venture capitalist money. I don't want anybody to be in my circle when JBS comes along and says we'll give you $10 billion for this thing. I ain't for sale. So then what? If you're not for sale? Then what's the next recourse? Oh, we're gonna lobby you out of business. We're gonna make it illegal for you to buy from your local farmers and ranchers if it didn't come through a federal facility, pennsylvania, where you are from. They just said that in this whole Amos Miller argument.
Speaker 2:Don't worry, we'll fix it. I'll fix it. That's where I come in. This is where I come in Exactly Good, perfect.
Speaker 1:It's gonna take a village right and that's your role. So that'll be the next thing. Or they're gonna try to slander me personally. They're gonna try to come up with some thing. I'm an open book. Somebody's gonna try to come up with something to make me the bad guy, so that people want to not support.
Speaker 2:No worries, no such thing as bad publicity, that's right.
Speaker 1:Keep on awakening, that's a thing, and I'm not worried because I'm called on the mission by God. I'm not a bad person. You're not gonna find any skeletons in my closet that there's just not any right there might be some embarrassing moments that I might have to own, but there's nothing.
Speaker 1:I have no bad skeletons that are gonna get me in trouble, so I'm not worried about it and, frankly, the more people doing similar things to what I'm doing I mean look how hard they went after Uber and the taxi industry was tiny compared to big food and big farm.
Speaker 2:For sure, for sure.
Speaker 1:Look what they did to Airbnb in the hotel industry, and it's a fraction of what big food and big farm is. I can't do this alone. I want my friends at Crofter and Farmish and Rico and all these other apps and services that are coming online. I want them to be successful, because we as Americans should have choice. And the producer? The goal is this every producer sells out of everything that they can raise right to the customer. That's the mission. If I'm not executing on that, be on every other platform until it's gone, because that's the mission, right. And so then the third thing is they'll try to kill me. If they can't buy me and they can't slander me, they'll try to kill me.
Speaker 1:I'm not worried about the federal government when I say that I'm not like the government's after me. No, the Batista brothers, who owned JBS. They were in prison in Brazil because they are Brazilian mafia. They bribed 18 federal officials in Brazil to get their company going, including the president of Brazil. So the threat is a hitman for a corporation. Not the government, but also God has called me to this. My message is far beyond me as an individual, so taking me out will do nothing for you. This will continue and in fact you will make it worse for you as the corporation if you take me out, because then it's no longer AJ's conspiracy theories, you have just proven its reality. So good luck with that. I am here for my kids and my grandkids to have food. I am not here for me, and so there's no recourse other than we just keep showing up every morning, I ask God where I'm supposed to be. I go there and I take care of it, and we do it again the next day, and we'll keep doing it until he's done with me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you're divinely led, and this was something that I had a hiccup with as well in terms of political assassinations and sassions in general, and just in my, let's say, communications with nature, with God, is like, as long as you're serving nature, serving God, serving source, serving spirit, it'll all work out. We all have an expiration date at some point, and so it was a big hiccup for me to get over, but at some point I realized it's just going to play out exactly as it needs to play out. I'm here to do as much good as I can as long as I can, and I think it's great. I mean, we're doing you're especially doing the work that you need to do. You've been led to it.
Speaker 2:And especially what you're saying with how people just keep showing up when they need to show up I've experienced this as well myself is like you think, how am I going to possibly some no-name political party, how are we going to get into Congress? And just people keep showing up of like, oh, I want to run, oh, I want to do this. We're going to be announcing our presidential candidate soon and I'm just sitting here like how is this even happening and you take a step back and realize how much you've accomplished and you're like there's no way a divine source or nature isn't working its magic behind the scenes that I have no awareness of well, at least some awareness of, let's say, that isn't guiding this right. Right, and you're doing it for your family, you're doing it for the next generation, You're doing for life, you're doing it for sustainability and, the way I see it, as long as you keep those, as you're driving factors right, it's not about money, it's not about profit. You know that there's a bigger picture here. You're going to be protected.
Speaker 2:And I think that when you look at people who have been assassinated in the past, their motives haven't been for nature. It hasn't been for the higher calling. There have been other alternative motives that have. Maybe it was ego, maybe they got to a place where they thought they were the supreme. They started thinking that they're the end, all be all, and that's whenever it lets them open up for devastation, if you will.
Speaker 1:That's cool yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I mean, I've even seen it to the point where I've gotten visions and this scares me to death. But I've gotten visions of once I'm in a place of political power, I'm not even needing Secret Service or bodyguards, and that scares me shitless. But I've even gotten visions of, yeah, you won't need these, these aren't. You're going to be serving people, people are going to love you, you don't need to protect yourself from anything, and I'm like that feels right, but that also scares the shit out of you.
Speaker 1:I was in Flying Home. I don't know if you saw the picture I posted, but I was flying home from a trip to Austin on Saturday, sunday, and we're sitting in the terminal waiting for our flight and this guy sits down next to me. I look over and it's RFK Junior no way. Just right next to my wife and I'm like and it took my brain a second only because he's in the normal terminal that we're all in and he's running for president, he's a presidential candidate.
Speaker 1:I mean like well yeah, but I'm also aware of the of the Biden administrations that they declined any Secret Service for.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, you know what I mean. So I'm like holy crap, that's wild. Here's this guy who's a major running candidate for presidency and he's sitting right next to us in the airport, not because it was, not because we're commoners, but because you would expect a level of security that didn't exist for him, and so maybe he's, maybe he's operating on the same premise. You know, like I'll just, I'll just do what I got to do and be protected.
Speaker 2:And you know, I don't know I guess I've never personally met the guy, but like, yeah, I mean, it seems like majority of his policies, things he's putting forth, seem in alignment with what the common person wants. So the average common person is going to protect them, right, like they're not going to go out of their way to devastate them. Yeah, but that's crazy. Did you? Did you say hi to him or talk to him at all? I did, oh no, I sure did.
Speaker 1:And, like I just said, hey, I just read it. I said, hey, I want to. I want to shake your hand and say hi, I appreciate what you're doing, I. There's some things about his policies that you know. Frankly, you're going to just prevent me from voting for him. It's it's the Second Amendment For me. If you're shaky on the Second Amendment, you don't get my vote. That is the most important thing, I believe, in our entire country of everything that there is, is that we have to maintain our Second Amendment rights, and so he's too shaky. You know, when he talks about assault rifles, gosh dang man, I like so many other things about you, yes.
Speaker 1:Yes, so I'm like so, but. But here's the thing people like as soon as I posted this picture, people just went nuts Like both sides mostly, actually mostly the, the, the Trump side. I lean more towards Trump, just personally, than any other candidate. I really Like what RFK is talking about with taking on corporations because they're a massive threat. If if Kennedy was all in on the Second Amendment and had no problem with assault weapons and all this crap and was taken on the other platforms he did in the vaccine issues and big corporations, he'd have my vote. He would, just because those are so important right now. But it doesn't matter if you're against corporations, if I'm losing my Second Amendment, if I lose my ability to defend my family and myself and our rights, right, so anyway, so kind of I'm like. But my point is like dude people, he's a nice guy, he's a nice person. It's OK to say hi and take a picture with somebody who you don't agree with on everything, because they're good people.
Speaker 1:I promise you you whoever's chewing me out for taking this picture I bet you have friends that you have beers with that. You do not agree with everything and you're not this big of an asshole. You know what I mean. So it's like, but I just reached over and I said, hey, appreciate what you're doing. This is what I'm up to. I was wearing my you know my shirt, but I didn't have this hat on. I had it in a carrying case. Can I travel with it? And he goes. Do you want a picture?
Speaker 1:And I said, yes, can I put my special hat on? And he said, yeah, I don't think he knew what he was saying. Yes too, but anyway, whip this sucker out, threw it on and got a picture with our family in the airport. So I think we, as a nation, we win, no matter what if it's between Trump and Kennedy in the twenty-two years, in the twenty-twenty-four election.
Speaker 1:I don't know that we'll see that, but I think we as a nation, either option is way better, a way better opportunity to pull out of this shit with one of those two as our options. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:So we definitely need, definitely someone in the place that's going to restore common sense. I think we need, like, a more intellectual president at some level. I think that there's. I think it's language right. Like you know, I had my time as a very diehard MAGA reporter and you know I think there's a lot of things again I agree with. There's things he's done I've disagreed with. I think his whole thing with the vaccines has been awful.
Speaker 2:But without getting into specifics, I think, just like cognitive thought processes like you know, you hear people like Vivek Ramaswamy speaking, you hear people, like you know, rfk speaking and they really dig into the issues and go deep on it, as opposed to keeping it high level, just kind of blanket statements. And I think that's something really deeply we need as a leadership, right, is people who are thought provoking, who can at least really dive into the nuances of conversation and the nuances of issues, kind of just like we were doing here. Because I think you know, and I've seen this at a high level, right If you have a president not going to name names here but if you have a president who's on the verge of mental instability, who isn't able to formulate sentences, it's as a precedent for our entire country that we don't need to have mental capacity, that we don't need to, and I think it's subconscious programming that that happens, right. It's like, oh, our president can't formulate sentences, so we don't need to. You know, and I think there's a kind of a bit not a bit, but like a serious issue, I see, with like the war on language and we briefly talked about it with assault weapons or assault rifles, and it drives me crazy because it's like this microphone could be an assault weapon If I just pick it up and throw it at somebody. So there's a war on language as well. That's going on, that's being used to deteriorate our minds and being used to weaken us from an intellectual space.
Speaker 2:And I think you know this conversation was from a food perspective, but there's a linguistics angle as well where we can't have a conversation right, like and I don't want to go too deep into this because I know this will trigger people but just high level, a lot of people can't answer the question of what is a woman Like? There was a whole documentary about it and people give circular answers and can't even have that conversation. And I think that's a huge problem that we just can't even articulate or have like deep thought. And I think a huge reason of that is the leadership right Is.
Speaker 2:You know, I've read that. You know, for the sake of Trump, I've read that they teach people in business to have, you know, speak at a third grade level, because that's what the average person speaks at. But at the same time, we need to be raising our standards as people. You know, I've been seeing like I think in California. They're like banning recess and gym class because it's like promotes fat shame. And I remember speaking of RFK, jfk, you know his uncle, you know the Los Los Sierra, I'm mispronouncing it.
Speaker 2:I think the Los Sierra school standards of, like push-ups and pull-ups and gym excellence, and these people were freaking, absolute machines in high school and I'm looking like I was, like I thought I was like an athletic kid, but these kids the average was like absolutely insane. And so I see that as, like you know, coming back to physical fitness, our intellectual fitness is completely getting subverted and you know you could have your theories about it. Conspiracy realists is, we're being completely deteriorated from the inside out. Our bodies, our minds are getting destroyed. I have a bunch of conspiracy theories about why that's happening, but the conspiracy realist is like this is what's happening.
Speaker 2:And I definitely see that we need leadership that at least, is going to push those things forward. And it starts with the food, where you think and you know, and that's why I very much wanted to have you on and to have this discussion because, like man, it's like dude we can't think straight If our stomachs aren't thinking straight, right. And so we definitely have an issue with corporations and the money system getting influenced of, like, what we put in our stomachs, what we're allowed to put in our bodies, and I just you know, for you know I'm sure we got more time to talk here, but just I just want to commemorate you on like, at least providing that knowledge, for you know the audience and like for the audience, or you know the audience and like for myself as well, just to learn from your experience and how we can fix these things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that, you know it's. It is interesting to. I mean, you can have, I have confidence in what I'm doing and what I've learned. But it's also interesting to look back at the guy I was before I started this and realize, like holy cow, how deep into this I have gone and committed my life to. It's crazy because you know, I still have friends from my old life, which was this sports entertainment deal, and they're like what are you doing?
Speaker 1:Like, especially if I haven't been on the radar for four years and they're like we're over here and now you're over here and I'm like yeah, believe me, I know it's what it means to have a when you got ADD, you can go anywhere you needed to be, you're needed and make it work.
Speaker 1:So but it, but it's a man. The thing I just, I really wish I could get people to understand the way that the Red Famine was executed. Was they pit? Or should say the way that the whole lot of more was executed, and that's the term means death by starvation. That's what happened in Soviet Russia 32 to 33. The government Stalin did a great job educating the, or convincing the people in the urban communities that the people in rural communities were not normal, they were not human even, that they were weirdos, that they were yeah, they were.
Speaker 1:They were sub, they were not at the. They were just not the same. I mean, in the book they talk about people that were interviewed after that were part of Stalin's side, and they're like when all of the craziness went away, like the COVID vaccine, when we as non-vaxxers were being told that we, they wish, we would like, like nighttime comedian TV show people saying we, they hope we should just die, like we went through that in this country, wow. And they they're interviewing these people and they're like after the fog lifts and the truth comes out, they're like they look back at themselves and they're like I cannot believe I thought about these human beings as not human beings. And so they pit urbanites against rural communities and convinced them that they were not the same.
Speaker 1:And so what Stalin did was send teams of urbanites to the rural communities to execute the grain wet requisitions and in some cases, in many cases, to even murder them for trying to feed themselves with what was left over. I mean, it's no different than, I'm sure, what happened to many of the people that worked for Hitler. You know, it's like. So I'm finding myself really trying to reach people in the urban community. That's why I love common ground so much, as much as it's kind of they missed them Like. Their goal is a hundred million acres restored, regenerated.
Speaker 2:Their common ground is the documentary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the documentary common ground. It's a follow up of Kiss the Ground, their overall mission at Kiss the Ground and I know the people that run that organization personally I think the world of them. For me, I saw Alan Sabry's TED Talk and then, right after that, I saw Kiss the Ground. And Kiss the Ground I'm like this is where I'm going, I'm all in, and so they've since become friends. The people that created that and, matter of fact, I was at his name's, Rylan. I was out at his and his sister Melissa's farm in Texas just last week, but in common ground.
Speaker 1:So Kiss the Ground as a whole. Their goal is a hundred million acres regenerated, which is a phenomenal goal. But the people that are going to do that are the ranchers and farmers that are already managing hundreds of thousands of acres each, and if you make them wrong for what they're doing, they're not going to hear you. And some of the editing in the beginning of that movie is about colonialism and the white man is the problem. So somewhat there's a tone to that. So it's like oh man, and it's only in the first 15, 20 minutes. After that, the whole rest of the movie you're like dude, let's get this done. You know what I mean. They just want to push everyone away Like I don't think, yes, Well okay.
Speaker 1:So here's the thing, though I should say, and the people that are going to hear that movie in the urban communities, that isn't going to turn them off, and a lot of them have been fed that. So it will. Slowly, it will in the beginning it will send them into a movie that then, as they finish out the movie, they're going to go. We need our farmers and ranchers.
Speaker 2:I see.
Speaker 1:So I'm like, okay, look, everybody's going to look at my app and be I would have done it this way. You should have done it this way. This is how you know that's going to happen, and I'm that too common ground.
Speaker 2:Gotcha.
Speaker 1:Totally fine, because, in the end, what I am so glad that they accomplished because we were at a screening in Texas, that's why we went out there for common ground and the people in that crowd are not raising anything. Let me just tell you that they're the urbanites that need to hear how important their farmers and ranchers are, so they're not just lining up for insect burgers and fake lab grown meat Right. And the only reason these people would do that is because the news that they're consuming is telling them that the cows are the problem, that they're destroying the environment and we should switch and go over to this industrial, hyper industrial, which is lab grown stuff. So that's who's listening to that bullshit?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, we need to bring them into a common ground so that they can be like oh, wait a minute, that is a load of horseshit.
Speaker 2:We need a lot more horseshit, we need those. That's funny. That's making me think they should have made two movies or two documentaries and then just changed the first 15 to 20 minutes on both of them. So like that, one talks about how it's the white man's fault and then you could have the other one where it talks about I don't know something about how Al Gore was the problem. Global warming was a complete fake. But wait, this is actually happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was talking to my business partner because she was there with me and we were both like we're going to make one and we're going to make one that speaks to the producers to help them, because regenerative agriculture to the producer side it's the hippie movement. It's like it sounds a little out there to the traditionalist and I get it. I'm from that family, I'm from that world.
Speaker 2:What would be an example of producers real quick?
Speaker 1:Farmers, ranchers.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, yeah produce any, oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So then you introduce this to them and they're just like oh, this is like new age bullshit. They tune it out, gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly so, and I get that like kind of what put me on this journey really is. At first it was all about regenerative agriculture. Before I even had a thought of this whole software, it was regenerative agriculture. I'm going to move back to town. I'm going to get my family to see the value of regenerative agriculture. Covid hadn't even started yet. I was just worried about the certification. Right, we need to fix the way that things are being managed so we can bring back the local water cycles, blah, blah. So I started talking about it. And from their perspective, what does our city slicker nephew know?
Speaker 2:about ranching.
Speaker 1:And now he's trying to tell us that he knows better right. And so I get that, I totally understand how I came across and like ugh. But in my conversation what I observed is what I was saying earlier, what I learned from Neil Spackman Unless you can answer the economical challenges, they're not going to fix the other challenges. And so just from that space, I'm like I was prepared. I was being prepared for the inspiration that came for the software. My goal is still absolutely regenerative agriculture across the nation.
Speaker 1:That is ultimately, what we want to see happen is land being managed holistically, regeneratively, so that we can produce all the food we need in nature, reverse desertification, restore local water cycles. I can do that better if I have hundreds, if not thousands, of sellers in an ecosystem where, like one of our big wins for our software is, white Oaks Pastures is one of our first sellers. They're on the path, they're on the platform, if you've heard of them, but Will Harris and Jenny Harris phenomenal people. White Oaks Pastures is just an incredible operation when I can bring somebody from the world of non-regenerative agriculture in the same ecosystem of somebody who is, and they can learn that Will is capturing far more revenue that's going into his account because he's not paying for all these inputs. I am not a rancher. A rancher is not going to listen to what I have to say. They're going to listen to what they're, just like any of us. They're going to listen to what their cohorts have to say. What's the word? They're colleagues.
Speaker 1:They're far more likely to hear from a colleague who was spending $100,000 a year in inputs now put $100,000 into his bank account because he's been there. Done that, dude, I did it your way. Hey, clayton, listen, I've been there, bro. This fertilizer is $1,600 a ton. Whatever is doubled, I don't have to use any of that anymore. You're going to be like what you don't use any fertilizer. What the hell are you doing? Now? We've opened up a dialogue. That's what's going to happen with this.
Speaker 2:I think there was a guy in the Kiss the Ground documentary who there was a really great. When I saw this I was like I need to go back through and take notes on this. There was a point where he said that whenever he was getting subsidized by the government in creating corn and wheat, I think he was generating I don't know exactly the acreage, but maybe he was getting like 10 cents per acre. Then, since doing local regenerative farming, he was making like a dollar per acre.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's Gabe Brown. That's who you're talking about. Is Gabe Brown, North Dakota? I'm glad you mentioned that because it brought my thought back around to what I was going to say about these carbon credits. The carbon credits are the same thing to the ranchers that subsidies were to the crop growers. You get on welfare and now you're dependent on following those metrics. If I can put an ear tag in your cows ear and start paying you for carbon credits to do it a certain way to where now your revenue is dependent on this system. I've captured that Right.
Speaker 1:Subsidies did the same thing to the soy farmers, to the corn farmers, to the wheat farmers Subsidies they put them on welfare. That's exactly what Gabe was speaking to. If we go this route of the carbon credits, they have now found a very clever, bullshit way to capture the ranchers the beef ranchers, cattle ranchers.
Speaker 2:Dude, I'm very excited, I'll be honest. I mean I know we're running close on time here, but I'm just so excited that we got to meet each other because I know that this is a huge education's huge. We're talking about how we need to get our bodies and our minds in alignment through just pure, clean food and water. The next step is education. Part of my policies is Indigo Education, which we need to implement at a school level. No one's taught about economics. Nobody has talked about balancing a check account. We don't understand how money's created. We don't understand breathing. We don't understand. There's so many things.
Speaker 2:I know a huge push in this, even just from a public school perspective, is going to be education. Even what I saw within that movie is educating the farmers, getting information out to understand how you can grow your acreage in profitability from five 10 cents per acre up to a dollar, which I'm sure is tremendous amount of revenue generated. Then you sit there and you're like wait, I don't have to rely on the government. It's wild. I think that's so dope that you're putting this stuff together and just amazing. I just want to commemorate you on that and just really want to put that out there. That this is. I want to talk about the Vine intervention. People are seeing it live right here. Yeah, awesome that's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, thank you, I appreciate you having me. This is the longest podcast I've been on and I'm grateful for it because, as we discussed, there is so much to unpack. That's why people just blindly go about their lives, thinking that somebody else has their best interests in mind In the most important area of your life, which is your food. People need Well in that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that also reminded me of something we were talking about earlier, because I recently I was watching on the news right now that the bill with TikTok is getting thrown around and everyone's giving their input on it. The way that people were speaking about it, I just assumed that these bills weren't available online for people to just go and read themselves. Because you were mentioning earlier about how farmers would just pay certain things because they didn't really know they would just pay the check off, they would just pay these things because they don't have time to investigate it. I realized I thought that you couldn't review the bills anywhere. I made something on my Instagram. I was like, whenever I become a representative, I'm going to make it that they have to throw these bills online. Someone popped in my DMs and was like hey, you can find these online. I'm sitting there like what, what's going?
Speaker 1:on.
Speaker 2:I'm going to go and start reading the bill myself. Some of the most important things about this bill nobody's talking about. I'm just like I'm mind blown. I'm like wait, wait, wait, wait. Why is everyone giving their opinion on this when we can go and just read it ourselves? It inspired me to make a whole podcast about just this bill, going through it, explaining I talk about the war online. I just bring that up of just the insanity because you brought it up here again of just like people don't have time to educate themselves on these things. So, yeah, I'm super grateful you were able to take the time out of your day. We can dive into these things. It definitely seems like there's even more to dive into here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I think it'll be ever-evolving. There's policies. The policies never end. I mean, this is the one thing I'd say to your listeners. Kind of to your point too. You can go and read these, but if there's so much to be aware of like I'm reading a new book right now that just came out because I need to know it because it's about the food system I don't have time to go read documents about TikTok.
Speaker 1:I sure as heck hope that somebody else that really cares about free speech and what this would do to that and all these other things is doing that work so that I can stay focused on mine. I hope somebody's doing the work on the second amendment so that I can stay like listen, people pick a hill they're all around us. Find one and stand on it with your fellow Americans that are fighting for it, because this is where we're at. This is what they call America, one of the greatest experiments in history. We're still in the experiment. The experiment is does this fall, like every other empire in history? Does this fall? Because that's where we're at. We're going to either see it fall or see it prevail, and it won't if people don't get involved. I don't know who's hearing this and who's going to do it. But you got to get loud and vocal and do the research, that, whatever matters to you the most. Get on top of that and get invested.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got to say that.
Speaker 2:My unfortunate prediction is that things that still need to get a little bit worse before people start actually realizing what's happening, and I don't know exactly how that's going to manifest.
Speaker 2:I have a couple ideas, but I don't want to wish any of them into existence. So I think the unfortunate news is that people need to realize that, or you're going to realize that neither whether you vote blue or red I don't see that at scale they all have our best interests at heart and, quite frankly, I mean and from being brutally honest like the number one goal of this, other than winning the election, is showing people that there is another party out there that actually cares about the people, showing people that there are people like you and like me that want to restore, let's say, our connection with nature, restore the beauty of the humanity, and I think there's just too many people right now who think things are going too well for it to fully happen just yet. So I hate to say it, but there might be a little bit darker times ahead. So just hopefully, hopefully, we can just keep this energy going and keep going in the positive direction even when those dark times come.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. I, unfortunately, I do agree with you. We are prepared for that. Here in my home, we, you know, there has been times where I'm like, does it even matter what we're doing? Like, is it, it's probably too late.
Speaker 1:Faith is what has me keep going and has me continue to go. I ask myself what, if what we are doing for the food supply chain, when we look back after whatever we're about to go through, we say, man, it's a good thing, that thing, that software came around so that we could find our farmers and ranchers, because that's the only way we were able to find food. So I'm like, okay, it's worth it to see if that's what we're for. I don't believe personally. I don't believe we're creating something that's going to be an easy windfall, that's going to have us whisking around on a jet, which is not my lifestyle. Anyway, it would just be me buying a ranch and disappearing, but I don't, unfortunately. I don't see that as what we're doing. I think what we are doing is simply a necessity to make it through what's coming, and so, therefore, we show up and I mean, I'm a vet, vets come home and what kills us is not having a purpose. So this is what's keeping me alive, and I'm so grateful for it.
Speaker 2:I think that this would kill so many people. And I mean, again, I'm just going to sit here and just say kudos to you, man, like I think even that power of you you've shown it a couple of times of being able to look back on your life and realizing like, oh, this is what's like when you look back and like, saw the kid, you know, seeing that picture being like, oh, this is like the motivation to keep it going forward. You know, and there will be, I think, external world, there will be dark times ahead. I think, just, whatever you can do, feel free to reach out to me, but whatever you can do to keep, like, staying tuned in to nature, to source, to God, because you know, I can already kind of see, like you know that the things I'm doing now I'm going to look back and be like, oh, like, that's why. So just keep following that intuitive nudge, because I can just, I can tell, I can just feel it.
Speaker 2:you know that you're in that, you're in that pocket of doing what you need to do right now, and I don't think you run into a presidential candidate at the airport if you're not doing what you need to do.
Speaker 1:I have a lot of people say that they're like there are no accidents. I'm like, okay, I agree with you, I agree with that. So anyway, man, I really enjoyed this. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:It's been nice to really dive deep on that. We're going to have to do it again, because I know I still have a ton of questions. You have to be my at least rancher resource when you see like certain bills or something that you need a politician to speak on, shoot me. Shoot me a quick text.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll be watching and see what unfolds for you and I'm here to serve. If you need any help, let me know.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it, brother. Thank you so much. I always love leaving a little bit of time at the end. I guess we got a little bit of time Just if you want to speak directly to the audience. I know you collect some of your stuff, but you're just any wisdom, or? Advice or plugs or anything. The spotlight's for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would just let you all know that everything that you're working on accomplishing in your life, or everything that has you want to wake up in the morning, it is possible, and if you don't understand the importance of your sustenance to fuel you, to have those things happen. We talked about it on the podcast already. But if you're not connected to the importance of sustenance, it fuels your body, it fuels your brain, which then fuels your actions, and who you're being and being is such a significant part of who we are. We often get mixed up between being and doing. What I do comes from my being, and my being is fueled by a clear mind and a clear spirit, and that is affected based off of how I'm nourishing the vessel that I live in. That's the spiritual, physical side. On the other side of it, if you are well-fed and I mean healthy well-fed nobody can control you. You are independent.
Speaker 1:There's a book by Victor Frankel, man's Search for Meaning, and it really highlighted the significance of our food for me. When you are, people would always ask Victor, why didn't you guys stand up against your captors? There were so many more of you in the camp than there was of your guards, and his response to that was when you are starving to death, your brain turns off and goes purely into animalistic survival. The only thing that is processing it's literally repeat Food, food, food, food. Nothing else. No other inputs are going through your brain, so you're shoveling your neighbor's ashes out of the kiln.
Speaker 1:We have to protect our food supply chain at all costs. So our slogan is shake the hand that feeds you. If you take that literally, I promise you there may be parts of your life that you don't even know are attached to the concern about your food. That when you know exactly where it's coming from and it's not just a store but a name and a face and a family everything else that you're working towards gets a little easier. So in closing, I would say shake the hand that feeds you. Beautiful AG.
Speaker 2:Richards, thank you so much for being here, man Thanks.
Speaker 2:Link I truly appreciate it. Gem of wisdom, we got a lot more to unpack at some point, but thank you, guys. Thank you so much for listening. If you tuned in for this entire thing, you're a special being and if you have any questions, shoot AJ a message. I'll put his EIG and different contact information down below. Shoot me a message. Or if you don't feel like shooting a message now, I know that we'll talk to each other when we see each other in the sixth dimension.