Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #319 Feed The People By The People w AJ Richards

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

AJ Richards is a seasoned expert in agriculture and food supply chain management. He brings a combination of experience and passion to his work, driven by his goal to improve the world. With a background in family ranching in Southern Utah, AJ has a deep appreciation for nature and a commitment to quality. He has devoted himself to exploring the current food supply chain model, recognizing the negative impact of centralized meat processing plants and food logistics on farmers and consumers. To address this, he has established a team to create a SAAS marketplace connecting consumers directly to producers nationwide. By empowering families with control over their food supply, AJ aims to enhance food security and reduce the carbon footprint associated with food imports. AJ's ultimate goal is to bring locally sourced meat, produce, dairy, and eggs to tables across the US while transforming the food supply chain and benefiting the local communities and the environment. With steady growth and your support, we are well on our way to realizing this vision. - AJ and I dive into some of his family’s background in agriculture as homesteaders in southern Utah and his growing up in a small rural community. He gives us a short history of his successes and failures in the industry, lessons learned and where he’s at today. His website, Feed the People by the People, is aiming to connect people all across the country with their local food providers. Not just with their discord group, but with some really cool tech AJ lays out for us in the pod. We’ll run it back, but enjoy this one for now. - ORGANIFI GIVEAWAY Keep those reviews coming in! Please drop a dope review and include your IG/Twitter handle and we’ll get together for some Organifi even faster moving forward.   Connect with AJ: Website: Feedthepeoplebythepeople.com  Instagram: @a.j_richards    Show Notes: KKP #317 It’s All Nonsense w/ Dr Thomas Cowan Spotify Apple     Sponsors: Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! New Biology Clinic coming to you from the mind of Dr Thomas Cowan, New Biology will bring Dr Cowan’s approach to health and wellness to yall! Head to newbiologyclinic.com and get your health right! Cured Nutrition has a wide variety of stellar, naturally sourced, products. They’re chock full of adaptogens and cannabinoids to optimize your meatsuit. You can get 20% off by heading over to www.curednutrition.com/KKP  using code “KKP” PaleoValley Some of the best and highest quality goodies I personally get into are available at paleovalley.com, punch in code “KYLE” at checkout and get 15% off everything! To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome back to this week's exciting show. Oh God, it's exciting. I'm so happy I got AJ Richards on the show finally. AJ is on a mission to fix our broken food supply chain. I love it. I love it. Whenever there's a problem, I've been trying to say this,

this is one of the best takeaways that I've come to understand in the land of duality and polarity. The moment there's a problem, the solution already exists. It must. This is the law of duality and polarity. The moment there's a problem, the solution already exists. It must. This is the law of duality. In order for something to be wrong,

the thing that makes it right exists in tandem at the exact same moment a problem is created. And I think a lot of us have seen problems in the last three years. And it's easy to fixate

on those problems and get hung up about it. It certainly has kept me awake at night as a dad wondering what's going to happen if supply chains shut down and we can't get food. What's going to happen if X, Y, and Z happens? What's going to happen if there's no power or water for three days?

And you can, in third world countries, these are very easy to answer questions. If you have not, you can read some of my buddy Clay Martin's works on such topics, such as prairie fire and concrete jungle, and they'll give you an idea. And it's not pretty. And all that said, I don't foresee us walking and living in that future. I do foresee us having to take a hard look at the shit pile we've made for ourselves and course correcting. Some of that course correction is in the decentralization of everything, but that is the recentralization or the localization

and the local empowerment of our own food supplies, our own energy supplies, our own water supplies, our own everything, and our own community, right? How we work together to create such a balanced and powerful infrastructure from the inside out, out of local level, takes communication and cooperation. And AJ is working on much of this. He is a fantastic dude, city slicker turned farmer, just like myself and lots of cool shit. I think his family has been in the game for five generations of farming. So I could be off on that, but he's doing some great stuff. I have been looking forward to having him on the podcast.

We've had, I think we've got a couple of mutual friends, Mike Bledsoe and another one of my homies who's been on the podcast. Can't think of him, but yeah, he had started this company, Stay Classy Meats, was a sponsor years ago and was doing really cool stuff with that. Now he's looking into something called Feed the People by the People, and he'll speak to that on this podcast. But AJ is doing some really cool shit. He's a very, very motivated and thoughtful guy and a great speaker. So I had a blast having him on the podcast. We'll certainly have him back on the podcast down the road. There's a number of ways you can support this podcast. First and foremost, share it with a friend.

Somebody who's been looking into this, you ever get the guy who complains about everything and has no solutions? AJ Richards is a solutions-oriented guy. So send in this podcast. If you've got the chicken little who tells you the sky's falling and there's no way out of it,

AJ would be a good guy to send it to. If they listen to podcasts, you know, you gotta have somebody, otherwise they're gonna be sitting there going like, is there a YouTube for this? I don't get it. I don't have the app. I have to download something

and then I click over here. Don't worry about that shit. To your friends that you know who listen to podcasts, share them this podcast if you think they'll listen to it. Word of mouth, super easy. Shoot fish in a barrel. Secondly, leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the shows help you out in life

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I fucking love every one of these companies. I've brought them in because I sought them out and thought all these guys are awesome. They're all worthwhile. And I'm mission aligned with what they're aligned with. In fact, Drew Canole, the founder of Organifi on this podcast multiple times, been on his podcast as well. Organifi.com slash KKP. Run over there and grab a sunrise to sunset kit to be covered with the red, the green, and the gold. And you'll get 20% off at all with using the code KKP at checkout. That's your starting point. Then you'll

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I don't know what that means, but that's my coupon code for paleovalley.com. Don't forget it. All right. We're talking beef sticks. This is my go-to anytime I travel. It's my go-to in every bag that I have. I have an amazing backpack that I got. It holds a really great gun that I just got. That's awesome. That fits in the backpack. It also holds my podcast gear, fucking badass harmonica in the side sleeve that holds water. Cause my, I have a gallon Yeti and I can't fit a bottle of water into the side.

I drink too much, but that's where I stick a pack of these beef sticks. The beef sticks go with me everywhere. Jalapeno is my favorite flavor. I've been talking about that from day one. It's the perfect amount of spice. Some people that won't be enough spice, but there's nobody that is going to say it's too spicy. I think it's just right. It's awesome. It of spice. Some people, it won't be enough spice, but there's nobody that is gonna say it's too spicy.

I think it's just right. It's awesome. It won't burn coming out, but it's enough to wake you up. You know, I'm picturing Macho Man saying, beef and spice right now. That's the combo we're looking at here. They also have a maple bacon pork one

that is so good, it'll change the game. I oscillate between these two as my two favorites, but they have garlic summer sausage, teriyaki, a whole host of different ones. Trust me, you want this in your apocalypse pantry. You want this in your travel gear. You want this in your kids' lunchboxes. It's the only snack that I've had in the game where I'm like, first of all, ketogenic. Second, I'm supporting regenerative agriculture and the health of our soil. Thirdly, I'm supporting my body with no shortcuts. Absolutely no shortcuts.

100% grass-fed beef has higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, glutathione, CLA, conjugated linoleic acid, which is the fat that burns fat. Also highly bioavailable protein. It's keto-friendly and it's the very best protein-rich snack to grab on the go. As a brand, these guys refuse to cut corners.

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They are incredible. Check out paleovalley.com and look at everything they have in their list they don't just have beef sticks they've got amazing organic food bars they've got acv encapsulated which is a phenomenal thing to travel with if you get run down when you travel or you're changing time zones often so many good things paleovalley.com that's p-a-l-e-o-v-a-l-l-e.com. Discount code K-Y-L-E for 15% off everything in the store. And without further ado, my brother, AJ Richards. AJ, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, brother. Thanks for having me, Kyle. Absolutely. Well, we were just talking about the synchronicities that led us to meet each other. And obviously it's just online. Unfortunately, I know that'll change at some point, but yeah, we had just had Zach Hansen on the podcast who you had met and more through Black Rifle Coffee. And somehow my assistant gets involved with you and it was like, immediately he knew, you know, he's out because I've got him on the hunt for great guests. And so he immediately,

he's like, Hey, check this guy out. Let me know what you think. And I started looking through the website and I was like, he's fucking perfect. What do you mean? What do I think? Sick. So awesome. Yeah. Hell yeah. We'll talk about, talk about life growing up. Um, did you farm? Where'd you grow up? What was life like play sports, that kind of stuff. And then what led you into, into what you're into now? Yeah. So I grew up in a small town, used to be a small town, St. George, Utah, just outside of Zion National Park. You know, my grandpa lived in a tent with 12 kids before there were houses there, literally. And family homesteaded what's called, we call it the Arizona Strip. It's just south of St. George, north side of the Grand Canyon.

So in Arizona, it was some of the last homesteading available in the, in the lower 48, 1916. And it was so like rugged. They're like, it's there if somebody wants to make a go of it. And so my, uh, my family said, you know, hold my, hold my coffee or whatever they were drinking at the time and watch this. So they went out there and started homesteading. And so I've been part of five generations of ranching since then. The family itself is the Bundy family. If anybody goes and does a quick Google search Bundy ranchers, you'll find out that we've been fighting for our right to grow our own food for a long time. 2014, they went head to head with the Bureau of Land Management. It was all over the news, if you ever remember any of that. And then again, in 2016, they were trying to make a stand

again in the way they believed they needed to. So yeah, I've been involved in agriculture for my whole life in one capacity or another. I did grow up playing sports. I hated practice. So I was always like naturally good at all kinds of things, but I never excelled because as a young man, I just didn't have the ability to sit down and focus. And so, uh, fortunately my genetics just kept me naturally talented and everything I did. But,

uh, you know, maybe, maybe personally had to overcome some judgments of not being a finisher because I just didn't, but I'm also, I can touch something and like run with it for a long way. So, hated guys like you, you didn't have to try. You're good at everything. I got a buddy of mine. Who's a, who's a Czech practitioner. Alex Ruchinsky has been on the podcast and literally

I watched the dude throw a Frisbee for the first time. And it's like a hundred yards. I'll watch whatever he's doing for the first time, you know, we were doing putt putt golf and I'm like, yeah, you've never done this before. Like what the fuck's wrong with you, dude? Yeah, man, I've been up, I went to school at Arizona state. My wife went to NAU. Okay. We finally made it, you know, seven years of being in Arizona, never once went to the grand Canyon, but we brought our kids there and they didn't give a shit, which is funny

because they're just too young. Yeah. I know that strip very well. Having driven through there, I did an ultra marathon with my wife in Zion, Utah, which was fucking – if it wasn't that beautiful, I would have just quit. It was too hard. But it was gorgeous, so I just kept going. But that strip of land is no fucking joke.

I look at that and just having dipped my feet in the shallow end of regenerative agriculture and biodynamic farming now with 118 acres. You know, we have a somewhat brittle territory and savory gets into that brittleness versus, you know, how wet it is and how nice it is. And I can't imagine like saying finding that spot and being like, yeah, we're going to fucking do this here. You know, it is it's like rock and tumbleweed and snow. You're not getting a ton of rain. Yeah, it seems like a gnarly bit to say, yeah, we got this. It definitely is. And I'm sure we'll touch on it here in a minute, but that's in the ag space, regenerative agriculture. I'm trying to go back and help them see another way of doing that because of savory, right? They are in a brittle environment and we have historical journals that said grass was stir up high and they could throw seed in the

ground and grow dry land crop. Five years later, they couldn't grow anything and they had to move back to town. And so understanding savory and the regenerative movement and those kinds of things, I'm like, okay, I have this desire to get back to there and help educate on a way that we can restore what was and even make it better because we have the knowledge. But yeah, it is that way. And so it's just a misunderstanding of the environment. So where you're at, because you understand, you're like, well, we can actually do something with this, even though others may think this is trash land. So, yeah, so that's kind of how I grew up. You know, I joined the military at 18,

the national guard for Utah. That was so great for me because we, I was in a bubble, right? I only knew what I knew in this small town. I go to basic training and now it's a melding pot of cultures and people from, you know, all over the country. You know, even people from like places like Puerto Rico and Guam, other U S territories. So. So that was that was like an introduction to people aren't just white Christians and awesome. So now I get to see Mormon. Yeah. Or Mormon. Exactly. And so I went to the military, did that, came back. You know, that was National Guard. I ended up deploying with the National Guard to Iraq in 2005. But, you know, important story of my life, but a small part of what I'm up to now.

So, yeah, that's kind of what it was. Then I ended up moving to Phoenix, Arizona, opened the first CrossFit gym in Mesa. And about 13 months in, I started this head to head fitness competition where I where I put CrossFit athletes head-to-head in weight divisions to earn a title belt like if they were in the UFC. It was still CrossFit, but it was head-to-head weight classes. We programmed the workouts specific for the size of athletes. So if you were a big monster, you did heavy weights with some gymnastics. If you were small, you did a lot more gymnastics with moderate weight. Grew that. We were broadcasting a quarter of a million people live, 900 people in-house with tickets. I could see the future. And then CrossFit sued me and said, you can't play in our sandbox. And that slowly went away. But that was my fourth foray into thinking bigger beyond just where I lived. So that was awesome, valuable.

I learned, I understood and learned the power of getting people excited about what I was doing, how to work with others that really started learning the power and influence of social media or people who had influence on social media. Because we did that, my marketing budget to get a quarter of a million viewers was $3,000. So if you've got a small budget like that, how are you going to do it?

And that's where I teamed up with people like Christmas Abbott and athletes like Derek Wida and just people that others knew. I had Mike Bledsoe. He's a mutual friend of ours. I had Mike and the whole Barbell Shrug team back then come out and they were co-hosts on the show. And so, you know, it cost me flights and hotels and they helped me get exposure and grow the brand and that kind of stuff. So played in that space. And frankly, when that went bankrupt, I found myself, you know, wondering what the hell is my purpose now? I got to start over, you know, going through that whole roller coaster of self-discovery and development. But all of those contribute to who I am today. You know, we have to have those experiences so we know who we are and what we're capable of. And so then I moved back. So before I left, ended up having to close my CrossFit. Actually, when I got sued, CrossFit said,

keep your event or keep your affiliate. And I said, take my affiliate. Actually, when I got sued, CrossFit said, keep your event or keep your affiliate. And I said, take my affiliate. And so I de-affiliated. We became the Rush Club Human Performance Center. Our event was called Rush Club. So we became the Rush Club Human Performance Center. Kept going for about a year, but really just it started tanking down just because the wind got taken out of my sails. I was really trying to help encourage this idea of CrossFit because it was changing so many of my members' lives. Our average members were older people. They weren't the athletes, but it was sort of the excitement that got people involved.

So anyway, ultimately ended up having to file bankruptcy, and it moved us back to St. George, Utah. During that time, I was studying things like Landmark Forum. Good friends like Mike introduced me to plant medicine. Ayahuasca was my first plant medicine experience in 2016, I believe. And then psilocybin and those kinds of things came into my life and really helped propel me forward in terms of what I believe I was capable of. And actually, ayahuasca is what opened my eyes to nature because I was a typical conservative or maybe what a typical conservative would have been back then in, you know, 2015, 2016, which is we have zero impact on the planet. All of this stuff is complete bullshit. And, you know, whatever we did, this is what we do. And all that's everything else is just make any sense.

And that's my own experience of that. But mother, I was like, you know, you are, you are connected, you are part of nature. And then I found myself really worried about what we were leaving for my kids. Like, keep me up at night. All I'm seeing is desertification stuff, and like we're screwed and didn't know that we could do anything about it. And so that was all happening during that time. But in the self-development side, and because of plant medicine and sort of the landmark education, I became a self-development coach after my gym closed for a guy named Chris Powell. Not for Chris, but for his clients. Chris ran a show called Extreme Makeover Weight Loss.

So I would have, you know, 40 or more people that had, you know, maybe 30 pounds to lose, but all the way up to 130, 150. And my conversations were rarely about diet and exercise with my clients because that didn't matter, right? I could ask any one of them if they knew how to lose weight and they had some variation that they could tell me from an experience they had with a coach who focused on diet and exercise. And those were all right. All of those would have worked at some capacity, but I worked with them more to have them discover who they were as people, right? It's like, if you're an athlete, you don't drive to McDonald's because I see myself as an athlete. If I see myself as fat, I'll drive to McDonald's because I see myself as fat.

So we really worked on changing who they, how, how, and how they perceive themselves to change those other behaviors. And it was a trickle-down effect. So I did that for a little while. And then all the while trying to figure out what I could do with the environment, having the knowledge of my family and their ranch and what was happening there, worrying about my children and their future and having access to food and just kind of stewing and all that. Well, here's the thing I do, but here's the stuff that keeps me up at night. And then I came across Alan Savory's TED talk. And my whole life just shifted. I mean, it just went, boop, here's where we're going. And, you know, I didn't know what it was going to look like, but it just took a 180. I was like, yeah, I just got to do this. And at some point I said, you know what? I've been trying to get into agriculture. Like everything I did prior was to earn enough money to buy a ranch because I'm the

city slicker cousin of these ranchers, right? I did the brandings. I did the cow, the cattle drives, but it wasn't my lifestyle and it's what I wanted so badly. So, but my uncle always said, if you want to be a millionaire rancher, start with 10 million. So that's the joke. You're going to lose it all because that's kind of what's what this is like for us in our country right now, which is also a big part of what I'm doing now is that comment. So Rush Club was like, if I can make Rush Club super successful and I'm Dana White, I'll buy whatever ranch I want and I can ranch, you know, and I did. I had this vision in my head, like I'm going to be on the ranch. I'll come out of the woods to go do a show and I'll go back into the woods to ranch.

That's what I wanted to create for myself. But it was always around getting on the land and working in agriculture. So when everything wasn't working out, I'm like, well, fuck it. I'll just go do agriculture. So I called. I'm literally pulling inventory from Walmart distribution. Like this is the, you know, the rollercoaster life took me and this is during COVID. So I'm in there with a mask on driving down these massive aisles of, of shit, like thinking like we are such a wasteful society.

I mean, like the, the, the warehouses are like 30 acres of just junk, you know, that's going to end up in the landfill. And I'm pulling these boxes of stuff going who knows where. Ultimately, we know where it's going to go, which is the landfill. And just listening to podcasts because it was COVID, so I could hide my shit behind a mask, you know, and it was just education for 12-hour shifts. So I called my cousin. My timeline might be a to sell, uh, my timeline might be a lot off there, but I started selling meat for my family's ranch in 2019. And then we started

building up our business and COVID hit. And then I called to schedule our next round of slaughter for, for beef production. And they said, we can get you in, in 12 to 18 months. Like the system just broke. And most people don't know how integrated we are now and how like we as if you live in a city and you're buying food at the grocery store, what it takes to get there is complex and all centralized. So if you fuck with the center, it messes everything else up. And we haven't done a thing since, well, I shouldn't say nobody has, but the main people haven't done a thing since COVID to fix it. It actually looks like they're doubling down to take more control, which means we're more vulnerable. So took a step back and like, well, if I'm going to do this, I need to own the slaughterhouse. The only way we can be self-sufficient is where we're vertically integrated.

We own the ranch. We own the processing. And as long as UPS or there's a way to get it to somebody's door, then we're good, right? So found some guys. We invested in a meat house up in Cody that's moved me up to Cody. And so that's where I live currently is Cody, Wyoming, to do this vertically integrated. Those kinds of things happen. The right partners didn't work out.

They didn't get it. It broke, and so I'm finding myself shifting again, but I'll kind of hold off right there because I just like said a whole bunch of stuff your way, bro. That was great. That was great. Yeah, you've been touching on a ton of shit, and I'm just keeping mental notes of what I'm going back to. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, uh, when we went to Daniel, Daniel Griffith spot out in Wingina, Virginia, out in the cuts, it's like a three hour drive from Richmond. Um, so, you know, we had a flight connecting flight. We make it there. We're

going to another three hour drive. We get out to his spot. It's a gorgeous place. And, um, you know, Daniel's an author. He's been on the show a couple of times. He's one of my mentors in this space. They were, they're an Alan Savory hub. And in my opinion, he's taken a lot of what Savory's done and he's expanded on it. You know, I love people like that, you know, that are young and passionate and just live the fucking thing. Um, and dive into that. That was a real eye opener for me for me when he talked about you know even the best you know even the you know your pick your favorite regenerative place if you're buying it in a store it went through USDA processing and this is what that actually looks like you ship an animal and I talked about that because we ship you know we moved any animal we brought to the land

outside of chickens or like a bird that was a little baby and didn't know any better, like you move an adult donkey with her kid, which we did, they're frazzled for a week. And they're like a people-friendly animal. You can pet and love on and tell them it's okay and feed them by hand and that kind of shit, and they're still fucked up. Other animals you bring in, and they're skittish for a long time. And I was thinking about that. You spend your whole life on the land. And you go to Whole Foods, you got like step four, spent their life on the entire land up until they went processing. You can't find level five where they're processing

the same on site, right? Level five is hunting. That's where you go find an animal there and fucking take it right where it lives. Right. So they got it. They get shipped off somewhere. They're kept in the dark for 72 hours. They they're smelling smells they've never smelled before they're not by their family by a bunch of animals they never heard of before never smelled before standing in their own shit and piss in the dark to calm them and then they get squeezed in this machine that holds them on all sides so they can do the fucking no country for old men thunk right in the back of the brain that's that doesn't seem that humane to me. It doesn't seem like we've advanced our technology. You know,

it seems like if they had a mouthful of grass and it got shot in the head and just went straight down like a ton of bricks, that that would be the best way to go. Like if I had to go, I'd want to go quick, you know, I'm hanging with my family. I don't know any better. I'm dying with a fucking belly full of food. I've seen all my friends, my friends, you know, so friends, depending on which animal it is, they may come on her. If I was a bison, they might come stomp the shit on me to let the rest of the herd know who's the fucking new head honcho. It is different for each one, right? The thing is, the USDA thing has many cracks in it.

It has cracks in it from a humanitarian standpoint, from an animal welfare standpoint. It has cracks in it really to the things you mentioned, right? And I think, you know, no matter which side of the coin you're on or which side of the fence you're on politically or any of this stuff, in the last three years, all this shit's become exposed to us, right? It's become exposed to us that there are really serious cracks in the system. And similar to you, I had a lot of fear propelling me into this space. How am I going to feed my kids? What if grocery stores close? What if I need a digital

ID or a Vax pass to get into fucking Whole Foods, right? These are all, you know, they got the hand scanner at Whole Foods now. Social credit scores become a thing and they're just fucking baiting us into it, right? Like there's a lot of things there to be concerned with. And so fear in a good way lit a fire under my ass to jump into the same things you are. But, yeah, just to circle back on that, most people, including – I had no idea. You know, you get the best food, spend its whole life on the same farm. It was grass-fed, grass-finished, all these good things. And it didn't go out well.

I mean it's one of the first things you learn in hunting is you want an ethical kill for multiple reasons one for the animal but two because the meat you consume is not going to be full of adrenaline and fear and neurotoxins and all the pain and anger you know the cortisol of holy shit i'm gonna die right it just if it's immediate there's none of that right but that means that every animal we're buying in a grocery store had that in it. It was like, where the fuck am I? What are these smells? Holy shit, I'm getting squeezed.

Ah, thunk. It's like the exact reason you'd want an ethical shot. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I agree with that 100%. When I was working with my cousin's ranch, we had a butcher that was local that did field harvesting. And that was the first time I'd seen that other than hunting. And the cow's sitting in the crell, just looking at us, chewing its cud. And then the rifle set on the, you know, we just set it on the bar right there.

And he's still looking at us because he doesn't know what a rifle is. And then, gone. And I was like, damn, if I didn't know what a rifle was, that's how I want to go because peaceful. He was just completely at peace or she was just completely at peace and then it just was over. I was like, wow, what a great way to have that end.

I mean it. If I didn't know what a rifle was, I might pay a guy, hey, you're a sniper. When I give you the signal, I'm going to have a family member give you the signal. Just make it happen. Cause, cause how, how nice would that be to just not know? Like, I mean, really it's tragic for families that have people with aneurysms, but for that person now, if they're young, that's obviously very different. But if I was an older person and I could choose an aneurysm, I was just over how that would be how I would choose no suffering. And everything you just said beyond that about the, the, uh, adrenaline in the meat

is all true. And so, you know, at the USDA level, because the only way we can feed the populations that we have, we have to do it in a large system, some sort of a large system, and it's got to be quick and it's got to, you know, you got to get them there. We can't really send trucks all over the valley or all over the state just to go harvest. It just doesn't work that way with the number of consumers, which is why most consumers, if you can change your own ways or if you have that access, do it. It takes less pressure or takes more pressure off the system that's doing it. So yeah, that is the case. I have friends working on technology that maybe can assist in some of that. I have a friend that's

developed a light that actually sends certain frequencies through the eyes into the hyposaphthalmus that can actually release melatonin. So they're testing this in feedlots and other places where cattle are, even in trailers. When they haul their cattle down the road or livestock down the road, they've got these lights in the trailers that releases melatonin in the animals so they're not stressed out when they get to where they're going. And they've got the data to show that. So maybe we can use technology for some of those things to help reduce that.

But, yeah, we are in a modern world and that insists on a food system that's going to have not the highest level at the end of that. We as humans just have to do the best we can to try to encourage or incorporate that everywhere we can. So like I'm now in a place called Richfield, Utah. So things didn't work out in Cody, but I got a ton of education because I'd never run a USDA plant. Now this software that I'm building to connect consumers with, with their local producers, I needed to know every step of that, which I had this vision, this idea in 2020. And that's where I, what I've been up to. But I'm like, okay, I need to understand every aspect from start to finish so that when I build

this, we have every chance of success possible. And one of the things I didn't know was how a meat plant operated. And actually, most people that raise your food have no clue. This is something that I really learned because we would have ranchers show up and drop off their livestock for processing. They have no idea what happens from the door where they drop it off and at the door where they pick it up frozen. And so we started incorporating tours just to be like, here's what happens. Not that they needed to know or wanted to know, but it actually helped us on customer service side for them to be like, you know, this is what that looks like. I told the people I went up there with, you have a good plant manager, right? Because I'm not

running a USDA plant. Like that's not what I'm up to. And they're like, yeah, he's good. Everything's good. So I move up there. I had to fire him in three days, in three weeks or something like that. I'm like, ah, shit. You know, of course the universe is like, no, no, no, bitch, you got to learn this. And so ended up running the USDA meat plant for a couple of months. Obviously I leaned heavily on the people that were already there and been there for a while, but I oversaw the whole operation. And that was a massive positive experience because now I can help this guy that I'm with now in Richfield, Utah, who is doing this for the right reasons. He's like, listen, our food supply chain is broke. Nobody's doing it. It's about it. There's no money available. He's a successful contractor.

He's like, I'll do it myself. And he's dumped millions of dollars into building a plant that can support a ton of people, like millions of people in Utah and beyond. And so met with him. Our vision and purpose is aligned. So we go there. I'm headed down there to help him get this open. It'll be open by the end of the year.

He's been working on it silently for a year and a half. When I got the phone call about this guy, I'm like, what? This guy's building it. Because I'm listening everywhere. This is my world. I'm trying to make sure I understand, have a pulse on what's happening all over my region. And here's a guy that's building a plant that has the capacity to process 150 animals a day. That's actually considered small in the processing world.

The big plants are doing 6,000 head of cattle a day. It's wild. And it's, but when you get that big, there's no consideration for the quality of the animal, right? You don't even know what you're going to get. That's the other thing. Like, as a guy, I send in my regenerative stuff and i don't know if they handed me it back yeah exactly you could have been you know joe's grain fed gmo stuff down the street you know yeah yeah so so now because this guy is and he's invested in regenerative agriculture he gets

that he wants to make shifts in his his farms and stuff to that he wants to make sure that we have a direct connection back to the source of our food. Like all of the things that I was hoping that I was creating and Cody now exists down here, but I get to focus on what I'm doing, what I do, and he's focusing on what he does. So it's a, it's a great partnership. Um, and he went and met with this woman named Temple Grandin. I don't know if that name's come up for you in your world, but Temple Grandin is an incredible woman that is all about humane handling of an animal at the processing level. And she's, I think she's focused on that level because that's the area that needs attention. It's not probably what she prefers to do or her, you know, her outside of that. I don't know a ton about her personally, but she teaches processing plants how to build their plants. So it's in, it's in alignment with the way

the brain of the animal works. So we have pens where there's no 90 degree angles, like everything is designed to, to mimic the way the animal would move naturally anyway. Right. And so we follow as many protocols as we can to keep the stress down as much as possible, but there's still going to be, there's still going to be some stress. It has to be, because like you said, they've been in a trailer, they show up, they go, they're in holding, they're out of their natural environment. We just do everything we can. And you can still taste the difference in the meat, our meat versus a massive processing plant meat. And also how the animals raised plays a big part in that as well.

Oh, no doubt. Yeah, no doubt. Yeah, Daniel, I love what you guys are doing because it's exactly what, and I told this to my assistant, David, I said, what you're doing now and trying to create is exactly what Daniel Firth Griffin said

the next letter is going to come from, right? He's been really heavily influenced by Ishmael, the story of B and my Ishmael, those three series from Daniel Quinn. And so just to give a very loose overhead of that, you've got what he calls mother culture, which is what we've created, you know, for all of its peaks and valleys. And then you've got mother nature, which operates completely differently. And so if we're to work with mother nature, what that will require is decentralization, you know, and decentralization of food,

vertical systems, and really empowering everything at a local level. That way we, it's not, you don't have to go out of your way to eat local. Like it's just more available to you. And you're connecting, you know, he said,

he said the next big farms, they're not going to be even the big name, brand name farms that we see, you know, like a poly face. And I had Joel Salatin. I think what they're doing is great. Yep.

It won't be them. It won't be white Oaks pastures. It won't be 4,000 acres. It's going to be 40 to 400 acres. It's going to be the very small that have one or two niches that they're really good at. You know, they might only do chicken eggs or I got a buddy out in Jesse Elder who in Bastrop is doing a free range pig and free range meat birds. And we've got, we're not doing meat birds, but we've got eggs, we've got lamb, we've got sheep, we've got cow, you know? And so thinking about that, it's like, well, if we just connected the two of us, we might have damn near everything

we need. Right. So I think of things like that. And I think that, that, that, that is such an important piece. So when I got turned on to what you're putting together, I was like, this is exactly what Daniel was talking about. Somebody's thought of this and is actually going to connect people. So I'd love for you to, to, to keep diving into that. How, how did this progress with where you're at now into really being able to connect people from the ground up, connect small farms and things like that? Yeah. So, you know, like I said, in 2020, I started getting really – I was already concerned about the environment prior because of what my mother ayahuasca put on my heart. And then it just progressed over time.

And then COVID hit and I'm driving down the road and the news is talking about no meat in the store shelves, but I'm seeing cattle everywhere because of where I live. And I'm like, well, we have food. We just have a broken system because if the guy in LA or New York City or Chicago had a handshake relationship with the people on the outskirts of the city, he would know that there's nothing to worry about, that somebody's out there doing that. And for the person doing it, they would know that they don't have to take that animal to an auction being manipulated, prices being manipulated by the controlling majority, which is four companies. Cargill, JBS, National Beef, and Tyson control 85% of the beef market. And so they go to the auctions and they've got buyers in there buying up all the livestock

at whatever's good for them. So they manipulate these prices. And so we lose over 14,000 small farms and ranches a year disappear because they can't afford to be in business. We've lost 40% of our small farms and ranches since the year 2000. So we are in an emergency. Like if you go look at our – we have a website, Feed the People, Buy the People. The logo is a rancher on horseback, and he's carrying an American flag, and the flag is upside down. And if you look at the U.S. military code, the U.S. code on flags, upside down means threat to life or property. We're there. And one of these days we will flip that flag around, but it's a symbol of where we are and make no mistake, we're there. I'm in

South Dakota right now, Rapid City, South Dakota at a conference called RCAP USA. It's a lot of traditional producers. You know, they may have heard regenerative agriculture. They haven't gone that way yet, but this is my family. This is like the starting point. So I'm here just learning and listening. I'm worried. Like you hear it through the crowd, the people speaking, we're on really dangerous ground as an American society for our food growers. Like we are not far away from a hundred percent of our stuff coming from foreign produced entities. And so driving down the road, I'm seeing cows everywhere. And I'm like, we have food. We just have a system that only works for four people. So that's it. That's the problem. And then it reminded me of an experience I had in Iraq.

We took, we had a bunch of people send packages, care packages to us. And then we took a convoy into a small village and we handed out these packages to these families in Iraq. Best day of my, my entire experience, right? Cause you know, I I'm a, I'm a warrior, but I'm a lover. And so to be able to give was an opportunity that I really cherished while I was there because everything else didn't feel that way. And I have a picture of me playing soccer with one of the little kids, but I've got my M4 with my 203 grenade launcher, my helmet. I'm trying to play soccer with these kids, and it was such a great experience. But I remember it didn't land for me at the time Because I had other things I was aware of and doing. But in 2020, all of a sudden, I'm picturing this dad standing off the side watching us take care of his family. And I'm like, no fucking way. I will do everything I can in my power that my kids don't have to, that I can't be the provider for my children. And so I have this idea. All I've got to do is connect the two. If I can get consumers to know who their producers are, we can create a synergy.

And now the producers can be successful enough to, they're not trying to be rich. They're just trying to keep doing what they're doing. For them, it's not about the money or they would have stopped forever ago. Suicide rates in the ag community are higher than the veteran community because these are people who are so connected to what they do as their identity, just like veterans. Veterans die because their identity was combat, was being a veteran, and they have no purpose after. Producers, ranchers, farmers are the same thing, especially when it's generational. And when they lose that, they never did it for the money. They did it because that's what they are born to do,

essentially. So if we can help them keep the lights on and keep the farm and ranch, we now have a stable community raising food for us so that we can all go do the other things. The hardest thing about this is everybody is so busy in their own lives doing their own thing that all of these things that are affecting our food, they don't hear it because there's so much going on. They just don't, they don't have time to go and do the years of research that I've done and the thousands of conversations that I've had for them to know like, oh, I better not buy this from the store. I absolutely should buy this from the farmer's market, from the guy right down the street, because if he goes away, I don't get a say in what this is in the store. You don't get a say. It's going to be there however it shows up. mRNA vaccines in our meat is something I get questioned about all the time, because I actually heard it

from, I don't know the person, from the mouth of a guy sitting on stage at the World Economic Forum. And he said, we're creating the ability to do, this was prior to it coming out where everybody was aware of it, to give an animal an injection that will then make people allergic to meat, or it will do, we can put the MNR into the meat and it will get in through the blood, the barrier of the gut into human beings. I heard it. It's not, it's not from the guy who's creating it. It's not some fictitious conversation. Small farms and ranchers will not do that. They won't. But when you go to the grocery store and it came from a commodity location, those people are in the pockets of whoever's controlling it and if they say use this they're

not questioning it they're just going to do it so if you don't if you want a say in your food you need to keep these guys around so i have this idea what if i create a software that's like airbnb but instead of short-term rentals you open this map and it's everybody around you that's raising food locally so hyper locallocalization, because again, I'm worried about the environment. I don't believe in climate change as the major narrative. I absolutely believe in desertification caused by the way we grow our food, right? So there's a distinction there. And so if it's hyperlocalized, the emissions being used to get it from Paraguay across the ocean to the Packer from the Packer to the rest of the country, those that's, that's where the

climate issue is, is the emissions from, you know, a super tanker is equal to 40,000 cars on the highway. So you send a super tanker from South Africa, I don't know how many times, full of beef. It ain't the cow. It's the how. It's what we did to get it here, right? So if we're hyper localized, we've reduced those emissions. The average steak I read one time travels 3,000 miles before it gets to somebody's plate. And you drive outside of Chicago or any major city, you just drive one hour outside, there's animals, there's food, right? Now, we do live in a world that since the 80s, I mean, it's been happening longer than that, but since the 80s, the real accumulation of all this has started. Reagan relieved some antitrust laws that were in place that allowed

for the consolidation of businesses to buy each other up. That's why we're in the four big that we have now. So we can't change this overnight, but we need to start that way. So that's what happened. So I have this idea, we need to connect local consumers with local producers. And so I go to work, I start researching, how do we do this? Plus I'm also like, who the fuck am I? I don't know anything about tech, you know, so I had to over some of the delay was me trying to deal, develop my own self-confidence that I could do this. Sorry, guys. If I, if I had more confidence, we might've been out already, but, uh, you know, it's a journey. So, uh, uh, I'm going through the process of figuring out what the food supply chain looks like. What could this look like if it worked?

So we're building a software. It's about four weeks in actual coding now. We'll release our MVP at the end of the year so we can make sure it's all working out properly. And then we'll release it nationwide. But essentially, a farmer, rancher, producer, homesteaders, like what you guys are doing, what Zach's doing, what my family are doing. I have this belief that the future generations of food producers are the first generation homesteaders that are getting into it. Now we'll be largely supported by the legacy ranches that are around because they've been

doing this a long time. And the new homesteaders, first generations, can learn a lot from them, but vice versa, right? All these small acreages like Daniel has been talking about, like you're talking about, in volume can secure our food chain. So if you buy 10 acres and you want to make a little bit of money on that, we're building a platform where you can jump on there. If it's a, if it's eggs, great. If it's produce, great, whatever it is, doesn't matter. At some point we'll have the ability to add anybody on there that's growing food and connect. There's a lot of logistics behind that. Like how do we verify who's on there? Well, we're, we're working through all of that as well. So that, so that people will know like, okay, this was company verified.

They meet certain criteria because we've got to be safe there. I mean I've seen fruit stands. I was on the Black Rifle podcast with a guy named Mike Glover, and he said he stopped by a fruit stand, picked up an orange, and there was a Costco sticker on the bottom. So he sets it back down. So there's that happening. You know, there's this black market grocery store stuff going on, which is funny as hell. But so we'll have some verification protocols and things like that to make sure that it is what it is. But ultimately, here's what people should know. If I shook, if you're raising food, Kyle, and I shook your hand, I now know I have a relationship. So if everything broke,

if everything broke and now it's like, it's a trade system, at least I know the guy that I can maybe have something to trade with. And maybe it's just my time and labor. Maybe I'm like, listen, bro, what can I do for you? I mean, I'm obviously talking like worst case scenario. Right. I mean, I haven't thought about any, I haven't thought about that at all. No, not at all. Why would you be buying a place in the middle of nowhere? What,

what, what's a good thing to trade? Well, if cash is worthless, ammo is a pretty good thing to trade. Maybe I should talk about that. That's really good. Useful.

What else is good to trade? You know, I have some extra things lying around that are good for empowerment of the neighbors, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Whatever anybody's addicted to, you should some extra things lying around that are good for empowerment of the neighbors, that kind of stuff. Whatever anybody's addicted to, you should have extra on hand. Well, dude, that's the thing. I don't drink, but I was like, I got, you know, I've had a couple alcohol sponsors over the years and they are fantastic. I mean, once or twice a year, I'll throw down some organic tequila.

Yeah, cool. De Snuda is my buddies and Dry Farm Wine, absolutely love. Yeah. But on a general basis, like I am just stockpiling the stuff and dry farm wine. Absolutely. Love. Yeah. But I, but on a, on a general basis, like I, I am just stockpiling with stuff and I'm like, this would be so valuable. So valuable.

Who needs that? You know, like that's their, if that's their entry point into making sense of the world, like, yeah, man, that's going to be better than gold.

Yeah. I don't chew tobacco, but when I was in Iraq guys and guys, cause, uh, I was raised LDS raised mormon i don't practice anymore but that's who i deployed with because i was with the utah national guard so what was funny is families would send logs of tobacco to iraq you'd sell a log for five hundred

dollars i'd pay for it and a fucking heartbeat yeah i'm right there and that's my shit exactly exactly so it's gold i mean so what we're So it's gold when you can't get it. So anything that somebody is addicted to, have a little cash of that on hand, and that will be more valuable than the dollar. People talk about gold. Well, gold's only value is that we agree there's a value. At the end of the day, it's still just a rock, you know what I mean, of some kind. You can't eat it. You can't smoke it.

You can't drink it. No, no, right no if i've got food and nowhere to spend gold and you come up with a whole bucket full of gold i'm like that's not worth anything to me i need you know i might need water or something so anyway so yeah so we're building this uh this platform and its other purpose too is is because people are so busy they need a place they can trust to hear what's actually happening with the food supply chain. What decisions are being made for them, right? So we get 10 million users on there or whatever at some point.

And we can send out a message to everybody like, hey, here's a snapshot of the decisions that are being made for your food. Do what you will. Where are you going to go that you can count on that right now? That's the hard thing, right? So at some level, it's a messaging platform to build a community. So we can just kind of stay, keep each other informed on what's happening and really support. I love that. And that was something, you know, I've read this in a couple of different places.

I had to verify it the first time I read it because the book i was reading was was quite doomsdayish it was called battle him and uh you know hymn you know and uh uh there's a lot that went into that you know and and much of it i had already parsed out or heard about and read about from different sources so it really tells this thread of like holy shit um But one of the things they mentioned there that just seemed like not a big deal, but it was a huge deal when I read it was that twice in both terms during Obama's administration, they tried on some way, shape or form to illegalize growing your own food and take that power away and put it in the power of larger companies. Right. And this, I think, is what you're talking about in the very beginning, you know, with, with what, uh, your, your, your family and the Bundy's were up to what we're up against. I don't think people realize how big of a deal that is. You know, like it's, it's like,

well, what do you mean? I can't grow food in my backyard. You're going to make it illegal for me to have fruit trees for me to fucking have a little, a little market garden with some raised beds. You know, like that's exactly what they were trying to do. Yeah. Just like it's illegal now in most cities, like Austin, I can't do rainwater collection. Why can't I do my own rainwater collection? Because the city needs it, right? It's going to go back to their little thing and it's going to filter in. It's bananas to me what they'll make illegal.

There's no fucking rhyme or reason to it. If it's falling on my house, it should be mine, right? If I own the land and up, then I own what's falling above it. But the food piece is incredibly important, especially from an educational standpoint, because I can talk until I'm blue in the face about the shit that they're going to add to the food, the things they're trying to do. And really, I mean, in all the things that we see going on in the world, it's a simple know politically of collectivism versus individualism right and you can call collectivism socialism communism any of the things you see even

how that panned out especially if you're in the military you fucking know how it's panned out through military history if you look at individualism are there you know especially talking to somebody who's who's sat with ayahuasca like you can't go to the collective at the expense of the individual, right? We are all interconnected and we're all interdependent on some level, but we have to honor the individual, right? To keep that, our individual rights in place and to keep the ability for us to, for all the reasons, for entrepreneurship, for innovation, for personal sovereignty, for all those things. And then still know we're integrated.

We're all interconnected at the same time. But to move beyond that, you know, we've seen Mao Zedong. We've seen all the Stalin. You know, we've seen all that before. So I think people have very, you know, short term when it comes to that. But that's politically, right? Collectivism, individualism. In many of the things we're looking at, whether it's food or finance, there's centralization and decentralization. And that's really what is decentralization. It's empowerment from the

ground up. That's the vertical integration. It's making each little node, each little city and small town fully capable of standing on its own feet. And where it's not, it's integrated with next door neighbors, right? if i'm in lockhart and there's something i don't have luling better have it right yeah the next town over better have it right and then we can work in that way now we're secure now we've created something that's sustainable that doesn't need a whole 3 000 you know 3 000 miles of travel to get me a steak that's right that's right and i like what said, because you said a couple of times now is it, it, the ability for people to, to work with one another, to get with everything they need versus trying to do it on your own. And we, we moved to Cody and I was like, super excited

because I bought this place, seven and a half acres, got a live, live Creek running through it, which is amazing. You can't find that in Utah, like actual year-round water. I mean, fishing it, I'm like, geez, this is heaven. But then I'm like, okay, we're doing chickens and goats, and at some point we're going to get cows, and that's a lot of damn work. So I'm like, okay, actually what's sustainable is I'll do these and find a neighbor who will do these and another neighbor that will have these animals because then we have everything we need because one guy with two kids and his wife can't do

all of that and still do the other things I'm doing and so it was just it was a lot it was a ton now that we're moving we're we're selling off our little paradise which is which is sad but we're going back to where more family are and, you know, and Utah is still a beautiful place and has a lot of resources that, that we can work with. But my lesson from that is, okay, I'm going to just focus on what I can and I'm going to find other people, you know, where I move, if nobody's doing pasture chicken, I'm going to do the pasture chicken. Cause I know, I know there's beef around, I know there's lamb around and other, other species, but I'll take care of the chickens if nobody has the chickens because then we can just focus on that and get really good at that. And by really good, I also mean the quality of life for the chicken. Not really good at production, really good at holistically integrating our life to include the chickens. So, yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a cool thing that I think, I mean, the, you know, leaning, standing on the shoulders of giants,

right. Cause I don't have 30 years in this space. I mean, I've been shopping in this space for my family for quite some time, but really only deep diving it, you know, head first in the last couple of years, um, is that there are guys like Richard Perkins, you know, there are guys that are like, he wrote the Bible on regenerative agriculture. There's a whole chapter in his book. It's really a textbook. There's a whole chapter just on key lime plow. Yeah.

Just the whole fucking, all of chapter five, right? But mobile, you know how you might have a buddy, Tucker Mex, that built out some mobile chicken coops that are light enough, out of PVC, they're light enough for his son and his daughter to pick up and move. Awesome. So they can move the mobile chicken coops as a part of their daily chores and the chicken's getting on fresh land every single day and and and with that they're regenerating the land right

i think of this like my buddy shirt on uh the holistic ob gyn dr nathan riley oh what is holism right it's it's the idea that i can contribute something that's good for the all right It's not just good for me, but it's good for the chicken. It's good for the land. It's good for the grass. It's good for the soil. It's good for everything that it's going to touch. And I think that's what's beautiful about regenerative agriculture is that these are the things that we're looking at. What can I do that will affect everything better?

And there's very few things in the's, you know, there's very few things in the old way where that's possible. It's almost a teeter-totter. I'm going to get X in production, but I'm going to lose Y on the back end, like sustainability or the health of the soil, right? And we've seen that for long enough. You know, we've been so many generations, you talk about 80, I think 80% of the magnesium that was in our soil has been lost in the last hundred years, you know, and 60 in the last 50, something like that. So, you know, these declining numbers and corn and you look at, um, what was it? Uh, interstellar, you know, where they can only grow like one type of corn and there's dust clouds everywhere. And it's like that, fuck,

that's not going to be my future, but that is one potential if we weren't to listen and change. Right. And even with, like you're saying, I'm not the climate change thing. I think is, is it's so obvious. I mean, the guy who was the guy from trying to think of his name now, not James. He did the exposure. Yeah. James O'Keefe. Yep.

James O'Keefe did that. He's talking about how COVID was the narrative. And the next thing, the next big thing, well, this guy's at dinner with some presumably hot lady. The next big thing will be climate change. Yeah, it's all we're going to put on, climate change, climate change, climate change. So at the same time, there are pros and cons to everything. If we have more carbon in the air, that means better food production food production that means better plants that means the ability to heal the soil quicker as long as we're getting it back into the ground and and you read you watch kiss the ground rylan

inglehart's a good buddy you read uh the soil will save us you read uh sacred cow diana rogers been on the podcast rob wolf like all this is is, it's not a hypothesis. We know it works, right. And it's just a matter of actually changing and doing the thing. And I think it's going to be a lot easier to shift the people's minds, especially young people who aren't attached to the old way and say like, all right, I got 10 acres. How should I do this? Right. Oh, there's a model that actually helps and is sustainable and is going to work. And then you get enough of these people doing that. That's the Voltron effect. You know, we're going to build something greater than, than, than any of the, some of its parts. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I connected with Ryland,

you know, again, just the way the universe works. I connect with Ryland because my landmark forum leader, which it's a self-development program that I took a long time ago, ended up becoming a consultant with, for his own company once he left Landmark. His name is Jeff Wilmore. And Jeff, for me, is like he's almost like a guru. It wasn't his intention. When I took the course, it shifted the trajectory of my life so profoundly. I mean, I'm a CrossFit gym coach, owner, and I would spend the first 15 minutes of class evangelizing this program because I believe it's literally responsible for saving my marriage and probably my health and a lot of things.

So I couldn't help but talk about it because it just sort of peeled back this layer of my view of the world that I was kind of born into. I have so many incredible parts of me that came from that. But when it's an automatic operating system and I have no choice, it's actually less valuable what I've been taught as a kid from my upbringing, right? But now that I know I have choice and I can pull in those things where they matter, that's such a much more valuable asset now because, so this, this program pulled back these layers and I was like, oh, I can use what I learned where I, where I choose versus this, just how I move through the world. Anyway, I just would evangelize the crap out of this. And my members were like, what the hell? I thought we heard for CrossFit, you know? And so but but a lot then i had so many of them go through the same

thing and have many profound experiences so i'm not i'm not apologetic for that but turns out he ended up becoming a an early i think an early stage coach for rylan and finian and dude so crazy so i uh he actually reaches out to me so i i saw the doc uh the uh the ted talk by alan savory and i was like oh what there's a choice and so now i'm just frantically googling anything i can and then right about that time kiss the ground came out and then it was just fucking game on like that's and i told rylan my first time was well it's your guys's fault i'm here so how can we work together you know and? And I was joking, of course, I was so grateful for what they put together. So I've actually been able to stay connected with those guys. I think there's

going to be some ways that we can work together with the software. I, you know, our software is going to be any food growers. I'm not here to tell somebody who likes corn and grain finished beef or who raises corn and grain finished beef, but they shouldn't. That's not my, that's not what I'm here for. I'm here to just create the marketplace to cut out everybody except for the grower and the consumer. And then I'll let everybody else work out their own future. You know, I think a lot of producers that are doing it the traditional corn and grain way, they're going to,

they're going to learn from traditional producers who have made the shift. You know, I got a friend, Braden McMurdy. His family is McMurdy Ranch in Tremont, Utah. They made the shift a few years back. They don't need to pay for inputs anymore. That, man, these guys that are barely making it, if you could save $100,000 in fuel and fertilizer and put that in your family's pocket

and increase the herd density on your land, which that means more pounds of protein to sell. I think there are going to be a lot of people that go that way naturally. You'll find people that learn how to raise, they still want that corn and grain flavor. So they'll raise regenerative corn and feed it to their cattle on land or on pasture somehow. And then you've got a regenerative corn and grain operation. So we're not saying you can't have it. It's individual choices, regardless of what you believe about the health impacts of those kinds of

things. And so kiss the ground is unbelievable. It's, it was the right time in the history for that to come out this new documentary common ground that they're going to be releasing. I'm super excited for to see, I excited to see so when i i think i was talking to gabe brown because he's in those documentaries uh gabe brown wrote a book called dirt to soil he was a conventional farmer conventional rancher that made the shift and they're like we that documentary was made seven

years before it was released we didn't stop doing what we were doing so here made seven years before it was released. We didn't stop doing what we were doing. So here it comes out and it was like, oh, there's all this cool things. He goes, we've already regenerated thousands and thousands of more acres since that. So I'm excited for common ground just so we can get this update on. Yeah. It's like, it's like if they released planet earth one and planet earth two back to back, but they spent just as much time on planet earth one. So in two two you're just like oh this is this is the update you know they've

had all that time to do that yeah and you know that that time span you know the seven years does seem to kind of it does seem to kind of correlate you look at savory's work you look at sep holzer a lot of these people i mean it nature moves at the speed of nature but nature responds so quickly when you start to do it correctly. And I think so much can change. I mean, one of my favorite things in reading Savory's books are the pictures of Zimbabwe where it's a desertification spot. It looks like all hell's broken loose. It's unsavable.

You know, seven years later, ten years later, you get to see the difference and it's fucking lush. And you're like, wow. And there's eight inches of hummus and there's tall grasses and all the animals have come back um it's it's proven right and that's the thing that gets me so excited is because it's it's here for us to do it's something now and now it's you know it's not enough to know we must do right so we're back in that position but it is a it's a really cool thing to be a part of yeah yeah. Yeah, it is. And you know, it's interesting because ultimately what I was, all I was trying to do, well, I should say it this way. All I believed I was trying to do was help my family make the shift. So I see the kiss the ground documentary. I know the articles written in journals about grass being syrup high, and then it dries up

and they couldn't grow anything. And I was trying to encourage them to make this shift and I'm not being heard. What, what, what's the city slicker cousin going to be able to tell us about production? And so kind of a lot of this came from just thinking about how I can help them see it. And what stood out for me was the revenue. And I was like, oh, okay. And so I'm going like this huge way and to give back to them to then encourage it because I, you know, I grew up, it's called again, the Arizona strip. It's home for me. Like I go out there and all my best memories are from there. You know,

being a little kid going out with grandma. I mean, my grandpa used to, and grandma used to drive us out there and they had pick a pickup truck way back then in the 80s, 90s. The cattle trailers were just a gate that you sat inside, you know, the holes at the top of the trucks where you mount things. Fifteen little kids hanging on the side of those metal rails going 50 miles an hour down a dirt road. Like, that's how I grew up, bro. I mean literally like people are like that's crazy. You get in trouble for having my kids just sit in the back of my truck now. But we're hanging on these cattle guards literally with our heads over the top,

flying down the highway, catching bugs in the face, you know. And all my best memories are out there. And what I see is this future where that's a massive area of production that's restored that brings stability back to our family. And so – but sometimes you just can't go right at it. You have to figure out – I had this psilocybin experience once where I witnessed communication. I witnessed conversation. It was during my Rush it was during my rush club days. Right. And I had, I was, I was really hoping that one day I could get the rock to be a financer and a supporter of this because then it would just

take off. So, so I'm, and that was just kind of on my mind. So of course it shows up in this, this experience and I'm with some really close friends and I have this vision where I see this big long conference table and at the head of the conference table is Dwayne Johnson and right next to him are two other people and they're pitching him right but what I was witnessing was lineages of people behind each of them and I knew they were lineages and I knew they were family because I'm in that you know that's that that psychedelic realm and I was watching epigenetics. That's what I was witnessing was epigenetics. And so they were communicating to the rock from their

epigenetic lineage, trying to get him to buy into what they were doing. But what they were missing was also behind the rock was his lineage. And if the rock, his production company is called Seven Bucks Productions because he had $7 in his pocket and his family were, you know, some come from poverty and they were missing the communication to him, what mattered to him if they wanted to get him on board. So, you know, aside from what that was there for the whole Rush Club deal, it was this experience of what people care about. They make decisions from certain areas based off of their epigenetic profile or whatever their past was like because they're trying to accomplish their goals and those kinds of things.

And I'm like, OK. So bringing all that in, that was a valuable lesson to like, OK, I understand why they can't see it yet. So what do I need to speak to? Well, if my uncle wants my cousins to take over and keep this going, then what matters to them is going to be, you know, if my cousin gets married and they're like having to do all these other jobs just to make money and just to afford the ranch. And then all of a sudden taxes are due. And this is what's happening with our production land. It's either sell the ranch for millions or lose it because you can't afford the property tax. Right.

I don't know a producer anywhere that would ever sell it. And neither would their family if it was financially viable to keep. Right. They just don't exist. So I'm like, OK, how can I help them make this profitable? And then all of these other things started coming into my mind. And I believe those all contributed to what ended up becoming this idea for this software is just to help bring value back to being a small farm and ranch or now homesteaders or those things. People buy land. Land is very

expensive right now. So they're wanting to find any way they can to keep the land, whether it's the job they have to keep the land. Many people I know are buying homesteads. They're like, shit, if I could just be out there full time, how would I do it? Well, if I could make this 10 acres pay for itself, maybe I can get out there. Well, if you could raise a few different food crops on there, now you can get out there. So that's kind of all of the things that have contributed in this journey to get here and, and, uh, and try to, to, to help bring it together and make a difference. You know, one of the things that we, you were, you brought up with like the Obama administration and, and just the government and specifically is this control.

That's truthfully our biggest threat, even to what I'm doing, right? When people have power and they have the money, they don't want to give it up. And one of the largest lobbying groups in our country is the food lobbying group. I mean, look what they did with sugar. I mean, there's no arguing that the sugar industry lobbied to change the reports so that sugar looked like it wasn't as terrible for us as it is. And that was done through lobbying, through money paying to manipulate data so that we can do that. So when people ask me, like, what's my biggest threat? It's going to be regulatory. And so we have to have a loud voice because that's happening now. It's still

happening. You can't catch rain in Austin. I bought 60 acres of real shit land in a place called the Escalante Desert in Utah. You go out there and it is desolate. You've got greasewood, whatever can grow with very crappy soil and minimal water, grows. And that's it. And everybody has written this place off as worthless. Two years ago, it had enough rain come through that knocked over a locomotive train that went by on a rail coming off the watershed. And I'm like, there's water.

We're just not, the land isn't prepared to use it. So it comes down, settles, and goes up in the air, and we lost it. At the same time, the aquifer that's under that ground is drying up because the dairy down the road is pulling it all out. So we don't have the water penetration happening to keep those aquifers filled. The reason I bring that up is i can only capture by law 2500 gallons of rainwater per per parcel is how it's worded per parcel because they somehow think that this flat ground and what it is it's laziness and policy it's like we're going to make this a statewide policy when in reality there are there are areas that it's not contributing to any other water

system it just sits and then gets evaporated but if i could utilize that to increase livestock that then increase soil organic matter that we know one percent increase in soil organic matter holds 20 000 gallons of water which then eventually will work its way down into the ground get into the aquifer so now we have water in our aquifers again like it's so it's these policies that are just made by people in position they don't know how to weed out the wheat from the chaff in terms of the information they're given because it's an elected role they they you know they might have been a school teacher before now they're making decisions on important environmental policies and they, cause they, they wanted to run for a position, you know, or whatever. And then they're influenced by lobbyists

who are like, Hey, we'll pay you a little bit or, or what's that thing you really care about? Oh, we'll handle it. You know? And so that's, what's happening. And so our biggest threat will be regulatory. I mean, this conference I'm at right now, everybody here is suffering because of regulation. And I think that what we're taking on are the two most corrupt organizations in global history. I believe personally that the food industry is the greatest lead generator for the pharmaceutical industry. They're hand in hand. You go make them sick and we'll sell the solution. And I would not, I mean, we already know that through certain organizations that they own majority shares in both. And so that's the issue. And so the only way it changes

and the only way it's ever changed throughout history is when the people have had enough. You know, that's why our messaging platform is feed the people by the people. That's not the name of our software. That's just the messaging we're putting out there because that's what it has to be. So absolutely, brother. How long do you expect? I know you guys talked about four weeks into the coding and stuff like that. Do you have an estimate on when this is going to come out. Like I have this grand vision, the finished product, and I have to be willing to not let the finished product keep me from going to market.

The finished product will be complete transactions, delivery and fulfillment methods that make really simple processes. So those will be iterations down the road because we just need to start connecting right away. So we'll launch with the ability to do transactions, but probably nationwide we'll roll out by March or April.

I'm trying to time a few things to maybe benefit the release of the new documentary Common Ground. We're working on just knowing what they're working on there, try to do the same thing because the thing about people, they're doing it different. They're willing to do everything different. And so it's harder for me to get traditional producers to come on board because they've got to change some of their operations, but everybody that's already shifted to regenerative agriculture or this massive homesteading community, that's, those are, those are our people right now, you know? And in the meantime, we're connecting and educating. Like I'm meeting all these guys here that are all traditional. I had a chance to stand up and introduce myself and what I was up to. And I've had tons of people come up. So they're, they're

done. They're over it. So that's, that's what that'll look like. Right now we have a discord group that we've set up because I wanted a platform where we could start connecting. It's called, if you go to our feedthepeoplebythepeople.com, you'll sign up for an email list and you'll get an automatic link for Discord. We have people, we've got, it's small. It's not that big yet. There's over, there's about 2000 people in there now

all across the nation asking, I live here. Who do you know here? So, you know, they're starting that interaction. I wanted to start that because everything's so crazy right now. If I ever was prevented from going live, I just still wanted to serve and give place for people to start connecting. So we've, we've, we've started that. So that's where people can get started. Now. The other thing too, is there's four or five other people out there trying this. Uh, when I first had the idea, I didn't

hear anybody else talking about it. And, you know, people ask her, well, that's competition. I said, so what? Like, I shouldn't be the only one. I believe in abundance. There are 327 million Americans in this country that eat food. Like I'm going to be the only one. No, that's, that would be ego. You know, that would be the same thing as the big four in control. So I hope every one of these guys are super, super successful. They'll operate a little differently. It'll make sense for certain people that mine doesn't. So go for it. Keep going. So I think if your listeners are out there worried about this, just know there are people making changes. Like this guy, Utah Beef Producers in Richfield, this guy's putting his own capital with no financial backing to build a meat processing

plant so that he can get food to people's tables throughout that whole region. People are making a difference. And so if you're worried, just what did Mr. Rogers say? Look for the helpers. Just look for the helpers. They're out there and people are out there making that difference. I love it, brother. Well, it's been excellent having you on. We'll run it back when you guys go live early next year. I'm happy to have you back on.

I love the mission you guys are standing for and it's been great to get to know you, brother. Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me, Kyle. Bye.