Shawn Ryan Show - #290 Zach Lahn - Inside America’s Cancer-Causing Chemical Problem

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Zach Lahn is a first-time political candidate running in the 2026 Republican primary for Governor of Iowa. Never having held elected office, he launched his campaign from his family farm, positioning himself as a self-funded outsider independent of party leadership and corporate donors. His candidacy is rooted in a belief that Iowa needs leadership grounded in rural life rather than professional politics. Lahn’s platform is socially conservative and economically populist, with a strong focus on agriculture and land ownership. He opposes foreign and corporate control of Iowa farmland and advocates for family farms over large agribusiness monopolies. Economically, he is critical of corporate consolidation and globalism, supporting antitrust action and policies that favor small businesses. On social issues, Lahn is anti-abortion, opposes gender-affirming medical procedures for minors, and emphasizes traditional family structures and parental control in education. He also runs on a tough-on-crime platform, with a focus on fentanyl trafficking and strong support for law enforcement. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Get 30% off your first subscription order at https://armra.com/srs with code SRS. Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get 10% off at https://hexclad.com/srs! #hexcladpartner Go to https://helixsleep.com/srs for 20% off sitewide. Go to https://shopbeam.com/SRS, use code SRS. With my code SRS, you can grab Dream for 50% off. Zach Lahn Links: Web - https://zachlahn.com FB - https://www.facebook.com/ZachLahn X - https://x.com/ZachLahn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and book an assessment today. Medcan. Live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Well, I got a little question for you before we get going. really relate to what we're talking to, but I just want to knock it out. The USDA says the average U.S. farmer is 58.1 years old. In an Iowa, the average producer is 57.6.

Vice's tractor hacking coverage on farmers fighting repair restrictions went viral with a related Vice YouTube video servicing in about 13 million views. I had no idea of people are that concerned about this. This sounds like I had a conversation about this exact thing with Secretary Driscoll about right to repair for our military. I didn't even know this was going on in the farming communities. Here's some points. Producers under 35 nationally, 296,480.

9% of all producers. That's not good. Just context for the audience. That's the up and coming generation. Yeah. Iowa producers under 35, 15,782. The FTC sued Deer in 2025 over repair restriction allegations, and Rooters reported a judge let that antitrust suit proceed. Deer has denied any wrongdoing.

What do you say to the next generation of farmers watching their parents work 16-hour days to buy farm equipment and they still feel like they don't control what they actually own? Are you dealing with this on your farm? You know, we don't use, well, I use more legacy equipment, older equipment, partially for this exact reason. But what I'd say to producers, especially young ones, is I think what they need to understand is this is being done on purpose. They're doing this on purpose. And what I mean by that is that, you know, my whole life, every politician I've ever met has said, we have to support farmers, we have to support farmers. And everything's gotten worse for the actual life. producer. And so if you actually look at the past 10 years and what the agribusiness

lobby has spent in Washington, D.C., it's about a one and a half billion dollars in the past 10 years lobbying Congress, the top five companies during that same time have made about $150 billion in profit. In the same time, we've lost 100,000 farms. Family farms. A hundred thousand farms? Family farms. So who are they lobbying for? It's not the farmer. It's not the producer. This is something that sometimes is difficult to bring up.

Because, you know, right now, Bobby Kennedy is really fighting against, like, big food, for instance. And I've been told by people that taking on the fight that I'm taking on with big agriculture is much more difficult. And there's a reason for that. And the reason is big agriculture has created a careful. caricature out of farming. And they're pretending to be the people that are defending the heritage of our farmers. But actually, they're the ones extracting every dollar of wealth out of our farms that they possibly can and bragging about farm consolidation. It's like, I don't- What is farm consolidation? You know. Is that buying a bunch of family farms and putting them together

at some big conglomerate? Yeah, it's that, you know, the producers, the farms are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And so what that actually means, and we've done the opposite on my farm, and I'd love to talk to you about that, but what that actually means is every time one of these farms goes away or disappears, there's life that we lose in our rural communities. And our rural communities in Iowa, in the Midwest, they're on life support. But these companies want to work with bigger and bigger producers. And we know that. We know why they want to do that. It's easier. They have less costs when they're dealing with less customers.

They can control people easier. And so the statistics that you're talking about, about young farmers, you know, the World Economic Forum talked about that, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. This is a part of it. 25% of Iowa's farmland, at least 25%, is now owned by people who don't live in the state, out-of-state funds and investors. A quarter of my state is owned by people who will not. never go to a Friday night football game in our small town, who aren't shopping on our main

streets. Like, this is in line with Blackstone buying single family homes. The same thing is happening to our agriculture community. The thing that's so difficult for what I'm trying to undertake right now is to get to the farmers to help them understand that this is happening on purpose. They don't want more family farms. And matter of fact, if you go to the WF, they don't want sovereignty for our country. And so what's one of the ways you can strip away sovereignty is to have them have an insecure food base in the state.

You can't feed yourself how are you sovereign. And it's gotten, you know, Sean, it's gotten very bad to this point. You know, I'll be in these debates with people about the use of agrochemicals and things like that. And when I'm in them, they keep talking about this idea that, well, we need this to produce food. We need glyphosate, for instance, to produce food. And what they're not discussing is that in my state of Iowa, 0.03% of our acres are used to produce anything that will end up on your plate in its original form. Could you say that again? How much? 0.03% of our acres.

Out of 24 million acres, it's roughly 9,000 acres. in Iowa is used to produce any produce food that will end up on your plate in its original form. So it's primarily- Holy shit, it's all chemicals. It's like, so they have, they're producing ethanol. They're, like, we can talk about these things, but they're producing feed that will then be shipped out of state for animals and shipped out of our country for animals. Iowa has the best farmland in the world, I would say, and we import 95% of our food. So there's a big movement of people that want to see, you know, homesteading and smaller farms crop up.

But when you have out-of-state investors that are coming in and buying up land and jacking up the price of land, there's not one young person that can afford to get on land. Yeah. And so your statistics, I look at it from even a different perspective. I look at it from this perspective, that that aging population of farmers. They're on break-even margins now because they're being extorted by big agriculture companies that continue to raise their prices, even as commodity prices, stay the same or drop, because they've formed monopolies now. Donald Trump and Brooke Rollins are talking about this, talking about breaking these monopolies up.

And a few other politicians have talked about it. But there used to be a heritage of my state where, you know, Grandpa would run the farm, and then when he got older, he would step away. Often he would move to a different house and then son would farm and raise the family. That's what happened with my family. But the idea of supporting two incomes, two families now in Iowa, it's basically gone for the average farmer.

Damn. So we're heading towards a cliff. And, you know, just a little bit of where I come from on this is that, you know, my family came to Iowa in 1850 around then. Actually, my great, great-grandfather was one of the famed Hawkeyes on horseback in the Civil War. He was, you know, they participated. He actually fought in the battle in Nashville. He participated in Gerson's raid.

These were people that were brought in Iowa Second Calvary to go counter the opposing Calvaries that were, you know, wreaking havoc. And he was in a state that wasn't a part of this battle. It was in America, but what was going on in the country was not happening in Iowa. At the end of the Civil War, more Iowans fought in the Civil War than any other state per capita. No kidding. Yes. And there's deep reasons for that, and it's about where they came from and what they were leaving, and that in Germany when they came over, they had just left this feudal system.

They were trying to have an uprising. They were defeated. They were exiled. Iowa came online right in 1846, heavy agrarian culture. So you have these people that were fleeing a country primarily because they wanted to control their destiny. They wanted to own their land. They wanted to have the ability to build their communities. And then you see what happens with the expansion, the potential expansion of slavery.

And all these very wealthy people on the East Coast, coasts that were slave owners wanting to make the Midwest slave states so they could control it. I firmly believe that part of the reason that Iowa stood up in the way that they did was because they fled that situation in their own country and they didn't want a happening where they were. So he came over and then about 20 years later my great-great-grandfather came over on a ship from Hamburg by himself at 14, and he was in the stowage of the ship, and he made his way to Iowa. And then in 1900, they built, he and my, his uncle built our family homestead in Belle Plain. And that place was a place of deep stories for decades and decades, from the Great Depression

to World War II, to my great-great-uncle fighting in World War I going over, over the fighting in World War I and coming back to run the local newspaper, while his brother kept everything steady with the farm. And then my grandpa mowing a runway in the bean field and buying a 1942 tailorcraft and learning how to fly and starting a career in aviation and his brother flew off aircraft carries in the Pacific in the 40s. Like these are our stories of our history

and our culture and our people. And in 2005, my family, my family farm was sold, my great grandma would have passed away. And my grandma had called me at the time, and I was in college and asked me if I wanted anything to do at the farm. I didn't know what that would be, but I was out in Colorado at the time. I was like, no, I'm gone. But if you fast forward a number of years, I stopped in just to see the farm and I was going to visit a family over in eastern Iowa. And I just told them, if you're ever going to sell this place, please let me know. And then they called me a couple years later and they said hey we're gonna sell would you like to buy and

before i could even think about i said yes 100 percent i want to buy this so in 2014 i bought the family farm back and then over the past 11 years i've spent restoring that farm board by board using old pictures that i got from my great grandmother's photo collection and during that time i remember you know a story that people often ask me why did i do that And what comes to me is that, you know, I really want my children to understand their story. I want them to understand their history. Like, who built them? And that these generations before them toiled and suffered and jumped in to go to the Civil

War when they didn't have to. And, like, to protect what we have. And I wanted them to understand that deep story and connect to it. It was never because I wanted to run for office. don't even want to be a politician. But I remember after I bought the farm, I was down in the basement. I had signed the papers, came to the farmhouse, I was down in the basement, I was leaning against a wooden post in the basement. This is actually happened. And I just said to myself, what am I doing? Like, this place needs so much work. It's going to take forever. Like,

it was a stretch to buy it in the first place to get the loan. And I'm leaning on this post and I turn, And the posts are the initials, VL is my grandpa. And I just said to myself, this is why I'm doing it. Because these things truly matter. That we don't forget where we came from. And so bringing this into what you just talked about, that's what's at stake. That's what's being taken from us. And so me deciding to run for governor was a choice of wanting to throw

everything I have in to protect the culture that help build my state, build my people, and say it's worth preserving. Like this is worth preserving. It's provided for the greatest alleviation and suffering ever known to mankind our culture has. Great prosperity. And if you look back at the principles of what, of where, what they came to do, It wasn't that they came here to get rich. They came here for the basics of freedom.

And now much of that is being taken away. And so that's why I'm in this race. I often ask myself, is there room for people in politics who still actually care? That's the question of the fucking day, man. It's a question that comes up often. And here's what I love. I'm not out there talking about my opponents in a negative way at all. I won't do it.

That's not why I'm here. I'm not out trying to make people afraid that Iowa is going to become the next Minnesota if we, like, don't do X, Y, or Z. I'm here. What's wrong with Minnesota? If you're a daycare provider, nothing. Oh, shit. You know, I just believe that my job, what God's calling me to do in this, time in my life is to tell a better story about what we could be as a state,

to bring people together about that. And I will tell you, when I'm out on the campaign trail, and I'm new to all this, like, I don't, like, I've never done this before. I don't have a script that I'm going off of. I have a couple key points that I'm really, I'm really passionate about. But what I try to do is just tell the truth to people and not worry about what these big companies, lobbyists or special interests are going to think about me and just believe, like, to the point I mentioned earlier, that God's going to protect me in this whole

endeavor, and then he's got a plan for this. It's a good way to live. It's a good way to live. We track our sleep, fine-tune our macros, and try every biohack under the sun. But the truth is, your peak performance starts at the cellular level. Armora Colostrum is nature's original superfood. Colostrum is packed with over 400 bioactive nutrients that fortify gut health, strengthen immune health, fuel performance, and more. Whether you're training for a race, working to balance your health,

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That's A-R-M-R-A.com slash SRS. Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilance Elites, the watch floor, where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it matters and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Terrace, hostile intelligence agencies,

organized crime, not everything is urgent. But this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know. I don't know if I could do it any other way. I think everywhere we look, we see the opposite in politics. Like what's expedient? What will get people to donate to me?

You know, I had somebody once mentioned to me that you need to imagine every voter is walking around with little buttons on them and your job is to figure out what those buttons are, what they like, and push as many as you can so they'll like you. And I say, guys, this is not at all what people are asking for.

They want, I believe, they want people that are willing to take on the big systemic issues that they're facing. It's getting to the fucking point where I'll just take anybody with a spine. You got a spine? You have a fucking pull? Like, it's, it's, I just feel so lied to. It's, it's, I mean, we talked about it when, when, you know, when our mutual friend, Rich connected us.

Yeah. I, rich called me about you and I was like, I don't know, man. I don't, I don't know if I want to interview another fucking guy. running for office. And we chatted a little bit. And I was like, all right, I'll give, I'll give Zach a call and we chatted. And I really liked what you had to say. I mean, we talked about it. I was just like, man, I just sat in front of, I don't know how many politicians now and they just fucking lie, lie, lie. Yeah. I mean, it's so much hope, so much hope for this administration. And I don't know about everybody else, but my hope went right down the fucking

shitter in less than a year. And, you know, I know we're going to talk about this, but, you know, the fucking Maha movement, I was all about that shit. I'm scared to death of cancer. I just found out about microwaves the other day. Now we're shit can in our fucking microwave out. My wife threw ours out years ago. But, but you know what I mean? I'm all excited like, oh, they're going to clean up the food. They're going to get rid of these pesticides. They're going to get rid of all this shit. What do I see the other day? We fucking, they ran, they fucking ran hard on this stuff. man, hard on this. All the health influencers and the doctors with big names, they're all fucking rallying

around the Maha movement. Oh, let's throw a big fucking party less than a year in. I don't know if anything has changed other than I saw that they, they, Trump signed an executive order and fucking RFK backed him and said, we're going to give immunity to, was a Bayer? Is a Bayer? Whatever it is. Producers of glyphazate-based herbicides.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Trump. Thank you, RFK. Good fucking job. Way to fucking stick to your constituents. You know, shit gives me chills, man.

It's just every fucking thing that came out of these guys' mouth is a fucking lie. It just makes me think, what is the fucking point of voting? Is there a point? I think there are far too many people that, are coming to that same conclusion that are just saying, why am I doing this? You know, I... Doesn't mean you give up, but I can tell you one thing. Fucking vote isn't going to fix this shit.

Yeah, we're reaching a tipping point. And I think more and more people... Look, you look at why somebody like Nick Fuentes is getting a giant audience. Why do you think that is? What happened with a Hunter Biden laptop? Why hasn't Anthony Fauci been arrested yet? What about, like, all of these politicians that have done... been in on a lot of this, you know, this global ring of pedophilia.

Like, and then you wonder, why are young people checking out? Well, it's because they just see it all as a lie. I deal with this all the time in what I'm doing right now. Because as somebody who actually wants to make a difference and change things and the beauty of the Constitution and the 10th Amendment says that I can do that in my state, like, I have zero interest in being in Washington, D.C. whatsoever. I think it's my personal view, and people will, you know, Republicans have come after me for saying this is that it's beyond repair. It's, and let me give you an example why. Gosh, I'm getting a bit upset here, but let's go back to

farming. Over the past 10 years, the agriculture companies have spent a billion and a half dollars lobbying Washington, D.C., a billion and a half. During that same time, their profits have went up $150 billion. And at the same time, we've lost 100,000 family farms. Okay, so I mentioned that earlier. But what does that mean? It means that there's a capture of these agencies that's so deep that lobbyists are able to put in place whatever policies that they want to, basically, and we've seen this now,

like with these immunity. We've been with all kinds of shit. We see it with other countries. We see it with the glyphosate stuff. We see it with pharmaceuticals. See it with oil and gas. We see it with the fucking everywhere but the actual American people.

They give a fuck about everything else but the American people. Well, and that's when I go back to this idea that farmers in my state are starting to understand that these companies are not their friends. They're like, look, they're charging foreign farmers these three big companies in our country

are charging foreign farmers less for the same amount of product than they charge our farmers. Just like they were doing in pharmaceuticals. So they're saying, if you yield more crop, we're going to take more money because we can. And there's a complete monopoly here. Nobody wants to address it, but there is.

And so the hard part for me is that as I'm talking about these things, there's a divergence. Farmers understand these companies are extorting them. But the part that gets me is that there's such a complex of working organisms in D.C. and in lobbyists in capital, in the capitals, that have gaslit these people to make them believe that these products are safe for their health. Safe products don't need immunity from liability.

Full stop. If you want to see an example of that, look at the vaccine situation we have in our country right now. The 1986 vaccine immunity has probably caused the greatest amount of suffering of any piece of legislation that we've had. And so what happens? Well, we see. It's that $1.5 billion of lobbying that these companies do. I'm surprised it's not more than that. Well, that's just for one industry and one sector.

I mean, right now in D.C., I read that Bayer has spent nine, Bayer has two lobbyists per member of Congress right now pushing for this immunity. The average amount they spend per member of Congress is more than the members of Congress make in a year. This is the capture. And what I'll go back to is talking about what they've been doing with this immunity. And so when you look at what they're actually doing, I say this. Like right now we have these companies pushing at the state capitals. We have them pushing at the Supreme Court.

We have them putting things into the farm bill, which, by the way, I don't think you should be able to enter something into a bill in Washington, D.C. without your name being next to it, of who actually put this in. It's like we need a blockchain service that says, like, here's who put this ridiculous idea in that's going to help this one special interest. So we know exactly who to talk to about that and who to go after about that. And then you have the executive order. So what I said, this is how big agriculture wages war.

That's what they're doing. Because they continue to lose in court. And just to summarize that, when you talk about this gaslighting of people saying, what these paid people from these companies continue to say about this, is that, oh, these juries aren't scientists. Well, I tell people, say, Bayer and Monsanto can afford the best attorneys in the world. They have no shortage of cash. They have every bit of influence in the jury selection process as the plaintiffs do.

And these juries are hearing about 100 hours of evidence in each of these major trials. And they're still losing. And so why is that? because we have internal documents, for one, for one thing, that show exactly what they knew and that they knew it. There's actually things in these documents that are so egregious like this. Right now in Europe, the type of agricultural roundup that we use is banned. Yeah.

People don't talk about this. And when the industry people talk about, they say it's a lie. But what they say glyphazate isn't banned in the EU. That's true. Glyphazate isn't banned in the EU. But the formulation of Roundup that we use in the United States is banned in the EU because it's so toxic. So what did Monsanto do in, I think, 2015,

when this was coming out in the EU, they reformulated their Roundup into a formulation that by some measures is 20 times less toxic than what we use the United States. Jeez. And then there's emails. Now, has there a food production gone down? I'm just curious.

No, and you know, not there's a food production not gone down, but also they have far more stringent levels of what's even allowed as residue on their products. That's why you hear so many people saying they can go to Europe and eat bread or eat pasta or things like this, and they don't feel sick afterwards. But in these emails from what's called the Monsanto files, which are...

Oh shit, more email files. More email files. Here we go. Here we go. So in these emails, what you see is a captured agency, the EPA is captured. But you also see a lot of internal emails between Monsanto executives and people at Monsanto and each other. So for instance, when the EU was saying this formulation that you use in the United States,

we are not going to allow you to use. It's with something called P-O-E-A's, polyoxylethylated tallowinines. It's actually the product within glyphazate, within Roundup, that they formulate to have it brinkered. break down the skin, basically, of the plant to allow it to enter the plant easier. Well, it does that on human skin, too. It actually operates on fat. And so, and this is, this is, I'll get into this in a little bit,

but this is part of what they don't want people to talk about, is that they'll always say glyphosate is safe, and they will not talk about glyphosate-based herbicides, which are known to be far more toxic, because the product can actually get in your bloodstream quicker and more efficiently. So one of the emails that was shared between the Monsanto EU representative and the U.S. company, after they reformulated that to make it safer for the EU, the email went out and said, why would we continue to make a harmful product when we can make a safer one?

And they didn't change a thing. They know how to make these products safer. We have their internal communications to know that they're lying to us. But instead of owning up and putting a warning on the label, which is what they would have to do to stem the tide of a lot of this, they're going after state houses and trying to get immunity. They're putting into the farm bill to get immunity. They're now pushing the Supreme Court to get immunity.

And they now have an executive order, which, just to dispel any confusion, does not. exclude immunity at all. Meaning, there's nothing in that executive order that says that it does not apply to product liability. I mean, we just saw it. I mean, we were just talking about it before the, before we sat down here. I mean, we, was it Rusty Grills, a state congressman or something here in Tennessee?

I got, I got, I got a call by, shit, I can't, I'm drawing a blank here. But he ran for Congress. He almost fucking won. nobody's ever heard of them. And you shot me a text and, you know, told me about this, this bill that was getting ready to get signed into law. Yeah. The rusty grills, you saw the clip. Yeah.

I think. And, you know, so I call, I got that the day they were signed, I'm like, well, shit, I got like 30 minutes. He's like, well, you got an hour. I was like, okay. I was like, just give me the details and I'll get something out. And he gave me the details and I wondered, you know, you saw a little selfie video. Bill got yanked 30 minutes after that. That's what I saw.

I saw your video. But then everybody's texting me saying, no, this, don't worry, it's going to come up again. Oh, well. It'll come up again. But it's, it's, these people are fucking, they are paying attention. They know what we want, especially, especially the federal government. Yeah. I mean, country's been pretty,

loud about a lot of things. And they're just, they're just willfully ignoring everything we want and doing whatever the hell they please. It's, it's fucking insane. It's insane. Let me, let me give you an introduction here real quick, Zach. Oh, should have done this the beginning. Zach Lane, a sixth generation, Iowan, you're a regenerative farmer and businessman, running to become the next governor of Iowa independent of party leadership. Son of a Christian pastor, raised with a strong foundation in faith, family, and service, founder of Homeplace Ventures, investing in agriculture, real estate, and technology

with a focus on local ownership. Husband to Annie, you're raising seven children together, and most importantly, you're a Christian. Yeah. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I think, as I hear you read that, you know, something that comes to me is that,

as you said, most important as a Christian. that might be where in the deepest part of me this really like gets me is that, you know, my dad was a 30-year conservationist. He's a pastor, conservationist. And as I was growing up, the lessons that he was teaching me about stewarding creation, about taking responsibility and doing the right thing with your land and with your property,

that all ties back to as, Jordan Peterson would say, beauty is a pathway to God to the divine. It all connects in. And so when I take a look at what's happening around the state of Iowa, with a farmland being owned by people don't live here, which you can't steward land properly if you don't live in the state. You can't take care of it the way that you would. And you look at single-family homes being bought by a trillion-dollar, you know, Wall Street hedge funds. Or you look at, you know, you know, you know, agriculture companies extorting farmers and putting monopolistic practices in place. This comes back to like something of faith for me, meaning there is such things right and wrong.

There are things that we are called to do. And, you know, of all the laws that were given in the Old Testament, Jesus boiled them down to two. Love the Lord of God without your heart, mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. And he actually, when he was pressed on this by the Pharisees, who's your neighbor? He kind of came back. He said, no, the question is, to whom are you being neighborly? Because it's not a law of like, oh, this person, that person, like, who's within proximity of where I live.

It's actually much deeper that we are tasked with working to make life better for the people around us and the people in our communities and our state. And this key question that the Amish have asked for a very long time before they make a big decision, which is, what will this change do to my community before they make the decision, has not been asked by politicians in a very long time. And so when I'm thinking about running, that's what it comes back to for me, is this idea of when I'm gone, what are my kids going to be able to look back? You know, before I came on to this podcast, my prayer is very simple.

I want to put something into the world that my children can look back on and be proud that their dad was fighting for something that really mattered. 100% get that. And so when I look at what's going on in Iowa, and I tie it back to our heritage as a people, and I just wonder how my kid's going to even want to live here with everything that's going on. A lot of people looking at dual citizenship right now.

So I'm fucking one of it Don't come to Iowa You'd be a dual citizen of Iowa I'll give you like I would love to but I don't want to get fucking cancer I know I know you know and and let's take We're gonna come right back to farming But you brought something up just a minute ago

That I want to hit on And so I want to tie I'm gonna talk about Christianity The federal government and state governments You just a few minutes ago You had said that you think that I believe you said that you think that something along lines of the federal government is unrepairable

and that you would get pushed back from Republicans for saying that. Do you believe that? Do I believe it's unrepairable? Yeah. Yeah. I do too. This is what I think it's completely fucking gone. It's gone.

You know, here's the thing. There's this idea of the American experiment and that is real and true and good. but if you look at the deviation we've had from that, I think the most, one of the common questions that comes up for me is what do I think is the most pressing issue facing the country today? And I keep coming back to this. Our country's run by unelected people and we don't know who they are.

And so if you're in a republic... I think we're figuring out who they are. If you're in a republic, And your elected officials aren't making the decisions for you, that you have big business, that you have special-entering lobbyists, that you have undue influence from foreign governments. Like, if that's the situation you're in, like my tendency to say, let's hunker down and make Iowa amazing.

And let's get ready for whatever comes next, because I want my state to be one that's prosperous, to be one that has great education, clean water, that, like, people have opportunity in my state. But, no, I have no interest in running for office to be in Washington, D.C. And you know what? I think there are good people really trying to do the right thing. You ask my personal opinion, and I'm not a politician, so I'm just going to tell you it.

Like, to me, it's beyond repair. I think so, too. So much so that I've... Less than five congressmen, less than five people in federal politics altogether, I think are, like, true to to their constituents true to their word and they know what honor means and you know they have actual real values and I've tried to convince every single one of them

to come back to the state and come back and run our fucking state because this is the only thing we have left is the states. We don't have a federal government. That shit has run away every fucking institution, the CIA, the FBI, all of them, all of them. I mean, I just had a guy on here goes by AJ got blasted with a,

microwave weapon. Have you heard about Havana syndrome? I've heard about Havana. You know what the CIA told them? That they have to make a decision between their people and the institution. Taking care of their people or the institution. They'll pick the institution and they will willingly lie to Congress

to cover this shit up. That's our fucking now how can we trust anything at all, anything that comes out of an institution that's openly, that's I guess not openly, behind closed doors, that they will willingly lie to Congress. And that's just one institution.

Well, institutional capture has been done on purpose and been going on for a very long time. And now we're seeing, like, look, I think the people that would sympathize with what you and I are saying the most is the average voter. I think so, too. Like, you talk about the average voter and what hope they believe that we have in Washington, D.C. And like, this was something I had to think deeply about because I wasn't planning to run for this seat. This seat hasn't been open in 20 years in Iowa. The longest serving governor in the history of America is from Iowa. What I had to look at was with the issues I'm talking to you about that I'm watching every day in my state, was I willing to not do this knowing that the next governor could be there until I die?

There's no term limits. and the institutional capture is very real. I'm not the establishment candidate. But I'm also not somebody who's like here to... What I am here to do is give my people a voice to say, what you and I are talking about, they're talking about, we hear it. And they'd have to kill me to change the way I view these things, to get me to do something different that would be.

be adverse to what the state and the people need. It's like, I told somebody the other day, I heard this term, is called, somebody used the term economic nationalism. It was basically this idea that like the economy and the government of the country should be there to focus on making life better for the people in the country. And I think, like, did we ever think that there was anything else? Did like, I mean, we see something else. But like, this is what it's supposed to be.

the state of Iowa, its economy, its government, all the efforts it's undertaking, should be solely focused on making life better for the people that are living there. And let me give you one of the most egregious examples about this in my own state. Right now, there's three big companies that control 85% of the agriculture input market. When I was growing up in Iowa, there were over 300 companies. They've bought up and bought up and consolidated and consolidated. This is why farmers have the illusion of choice. One of those companies is a company called Syngenta. Syngenta is 100% owned by the state of China. 100%. And we can get into what they produce and all of these things and that, but let me just say this first. Since being Chinese owned, the state government of Iowa has given a Chinese

company seven and a half million dollars in refundable tax credits paid for by the taxpayers. propping up a Chinese company. See, oh, man. This is where I was going, too. Sorry. We see all this waste, fraud, and abuse, you know, and they always want to fucking raise the taxes.

Let's raise taxes so we can send it to Israel. We can send it to Ukraine. We can send it to fucking whoever. You know, we can, we can pay China's fucking, you know, whatever bill. You know, the taxpayers will pay it. You know, that's another, it's like, I don't even, I, why can't, I mean, we need strong, we need strong governors and state legislators. And, you know, what would it take for a state to go, fuck you, fuck you, federal government, we're not paying taxes.

We're going to raise our state taxes. We don't need your fucking funding. We don't need any of your bullshit. None of it. Fuck you. We're going to raise our state taxes. And if you send in any fucking IRS agents, we're going to have them a. arrested and put in fucking jail in the state. I mean, is that even a, is that even, is that a

possibility? Because the government is just, it is, it is all waste, fraud and abuse. Greed, pedophilia. It's, that's what it is. It is what it is. Like, you can't hide this shit anymore, you know, and so why, why aren't more, you know, why aren't more people standing up and taking control? It just, it just, you know, one of the things, I, let me say, this first, is that what you're taught, people talk to me running for governor about this idea of like foreign aid. And I say, my state doesn't have clean drinking water. Exactly. Why would I ever want to send one dollar to any foreign country when we have the fastest rate of new cancer in the history of civilization? We don't have clean drinking water. Like, no, this is, this is what I'm

talking about. This is where we expect our dollars to stay in our state to benefit our people. and the idea that we'd use refundable tax credits to support a Chinese company, when, by the way, we have homegrown Iowa companies that compete with them, that compete. One of these guys testified in front of a congressional hearing, which let me just say this, like, this goes to your example. How many times we've seen a congressional hearing about this?

Or this thing come up, and it's like Congress is talking about it. And absolutely nothing happens. Too worried about aliens right now. aliens and fucking UFOs. Like, what's the next thing? Shitting me. In this... Aliens.

Fucking aliens. That's what they're talking about. When you see that come out, it's just like, anybody that's awake is just like, I'm sorry, what? Like, we're done being distracted from the things that actually matter. We're smarter than this. But in this hearing on what's going on in the agriculture input markets, one entrepreneur, third-generation Iowa Seedsman, creating independent seeds, who's competing against these companies,

is talking about what these companies do, just a little background here. We have GMO seeds, and so those genetics have patents on them, and the patents lasts about 20 years. And once the patent runs out, they're supposed to go into a seed library. So an independent seed maker can pull that seed off the shelf, and they can use it to make their own version, and usually often, most often like generic drugs, cheaper.

What this third-generation seeds been testified about in front of Congress is that when these big companies, two companies control all of the seed genetics in our country, when one of those big companies puts that on the shelf in the seed library, before they do it, they scramble the name of it into random letters and numbers so he can't figure out what it is, and he has to continue going to them for royalties and pay royalties to get seeds. Holy shit. And so, and where's the justice system on this?

This is what people, we come back to. And so, yes, as governor, I've already said very, very openly, I plan to sue the federal government every chance I get. And just to be very clear, I actually think Donald Trump would like that. You know, the Chevron doctrine was overturned, saying that like, that if Congress didn't specifically put a regulation in place, that state we can sue now if regulators have made up their own rules, which they've made up millions and probably billions of pages of these rules.

But we have got to get back to the point where we're looking to say, how are we going to liberate ourselves from exactly what you're talking about? The first step I would do is sue. But this also just goes back to why I'm not running for Congress. It's like I agree with what you're saying about we need to go deep into our state. We need to have good governors who are willing to stand up and just put it all on the line. I've had people already asked me, Sean. Not that, you know, people just ask these questions.

Are you thinking about doing anything bigger than this? No, I'm not. I don't want to do anything different than this. Matter of fact, this isn't something I woke up in the morning and said, I really like to go do this and put my family through all this. What I said was, if I don't do this, if I don't bring this up, if I don't put my own money into this and say to these donors, I don't want your funds, how much longer is a state that I love,

that I grew up in, that my family, like, help to pioneer, how much longer is that can even be recognizable to me? Probably not very long. Not very long. But I believe that with the right governor, and here's the thing, we have things we could change in the state of Iowa that a governor could change right now to make some of the hot button issues that the voters are talking about like go away or get much better. And even on the Republican side, we're not doing it.

I mean, there's been great advancements. And, you know, we've passed school choice legislation. We've lowered taxes and all these things. But what I often say to people is like, this is not about taxes or regulations. This is about our culture and identity as Iowans and as Americans. The free market doesn't take into account culture. It doesn't fix cultural issues. Oftentimes it makes them worse.

People ask me, what do you mean by that? It's like, what's the free market solution for the declining church attendance in our country? We have to make those decisions. And that is actually the sole reason I am running is to say we have to get the culture right in our state. If we don't get the culture right, like we're going to end up like Washington, D.C., because the same people that are buying off politicians

and looking for influence in Washington, D.C., are coming to the states. They're coming less and less because more and more power is being concentrated in D.C., but that's why we have to start suing. And we have to start saying, we're going to be bringing this back into the control of our state. So to me, it goes back to culture.

It goes back to who are we? What do we want to stand for as a people? And do the traditions and the heritage of our state and our ancestors matter to us? Because I can tell you, they would have revolted for far less than what's going on right now. Oh, yeah. And they did for far less. You know, I was talking to somebody about the conditions of farming and, Iowa. And he was telling me a story that I end up looking up. And it was about, you know, in the 30s,

about how bad farming conditions were. And there was farmers from basically 80% of the counties in our state that started protesting to such a level that the sheriffs had to bring out submachine guns. And I would actually say that the conditions we have right now are worse. or to the point where you'll have people talk about farming as if it's just a hobby, meaning like you have to have an off-farm job to support your family, but you're still farming. And I've even seen agricultural establishment people bragging about that. It's like, hey, they just love, they do it for free. They just love it.

I'm thinking, you don't understand this. Like, this is a key part of our heritage and we're being poisoned with our food. We import 95% of what we eat in the state. And basically none of our land is to actually grow anything that we eat. The entire chessboard is backwards. Yeah. Let's talk about the collapse of the family farms. Yeah.

You want to? Yeah. I love to. What do they turning them into? Data centers? That's a big thing right now. A lot of real estate investors are looking for land next to power grid. so that they could build a huge data center.

Yeah, oh, yeah. We'll set out to a big data center. Let me answer your first question is what's happening is family farms. Most of the time they're being bulldozed and farmed over. So the place, like my house, I was afraid that was going to happen to my family's home. And that's why I couldn't say no when the opportunity kept to buy it for me. Because what used to be these small farm ceds dotting all these places and known by the last name of the people that lived there for 100 years, are just being bulldozed, farmed over, and forgotten.

But when you talk about bigger efforts, you talked about data centers, there's many examples of how this is happening across the country and what's happening in Iowa too. You know, if you go to the south of Cedar Rapids, so if you're in Cedar Rapids, you head south towards the airport, you will drive past what used to be farmland that had been farmland for generations and generations that now looks like a military installation is being put in. I've never seen so many pieces of heavy equipment in my life. I've never seen something built so quickly in my life.

And what it is is two companies, Google and QTS, have bought 1,400 acres of farmland and they're building data centers there. Now, I'm not going to get into, like, debate about, like, whether we should have data centers or not. I think we're being a bit premature on this, especially with Elon Musk talking about putting them in space. But there's a broader issue here

of we're not thinking through at all what AI is going to do to us as a people or our communities. It's like I could come to that discussion in a different way, but just from a policy perspective or just a principal perspective on this. The city of Cedar Rapids gave one of those data centers $529 million in tax rebates. What? Half a billion dollars in tax rebates to come to Cedar Rapids to put this data center in. And let me just say this. In the contract, they're contractually obligated to create jobs as part of this to receive these tax breaks.

For $529 million, they're contractually obligated to create 30 jobs. $17 million a job. It's a big paycheck. Huge. And what I say is like, look, you want to build a data center in Iowa? I'm going to charge you far more in property tax. And I'm going to use it to lower the property taxes of the people in the communities that you're around. We won't be taking advantage of anymore, is what I'm trying to say.

Whether it's agriculture companies that have to sue to break up their monopolies, or just say something as common as, look, $100 billion multinational tech companies are searching across the country to find land to build data centers and get approval from governments. They're the ones that should be on the opposite end of this negotiation. We should be saying to them, what are you going to offer us? Because 30 jobs and $529 million in tax breaks doesn't pencil. Wow. All right, everybody, spring cleaning isn't just for your closet, it's for your kitchen, too.

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site wide. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. Helixleep.com slash SRS. So when we go back to this idea, Sean, you know, something I give Trump a lot of credit for is pioneering the idea of America first. You know, before Trump came into the scene, nobody's even really talking about China in a major way from the political standpoint. Everything was good. Like the free trade we have with them is good, even though it's hollowed out an entire region of people who then ended up getting addicted to opioids and dying off at faster rates.

They're all saying how our partnership with China's great. And then Trump came in and said, they're taking advantage of us. We're suckers. And he was right, 100% right. So when I talk to people about what it means to be Iowa first, like this is part of my campaign, it's like, like, I want to put Iowa first, it's not just a slogan. It's saying, like, if you're a multinational, if you're owned by a foreign government, you're getting zero dollars from my state, period. Those dollars will go towards homegrown Iowa entrepreneurs to build their life, to build their company, and compete with you and hopefully make it so you have a hard time keeping up. That's what it should be.

That's the idea of putting Iowa first. It's the same thing about these data centers. It's like we have two amazing assets in our state. We have our children and we have our farmland. We have some of the best in the world. to give them over to $100 billion multinational tech companies and then pay them basically to do it, it doesn't make sense.

And here's going back to what you said earlier. Voters know this. When I talk to them about Syngenta getting refundable tax credits from the state, I don't care how many high-quality jobs they say they're creating. The voters don't want this. They don't want to support a Chinese company. and they want to support Iowa companies.

So this goes back to just, we've taken our eye off the ball. Our politicians aren't paying attention to the right things, and I believe they're not asking the right questions about what will these changes do to our community, and they do not care about the culture of our state and our people. That's what I was going to say. I don't know if they're not paying attention, but they definitely don't care.

Yeah. They just don't give a shit. Yeah. Because there's no repercussions. Yeah. There's no consequence. None. They'll get reelected. What's Congress have? Like a 95% reelection rate, something like that. That 5% approval rating and 95% election reelection rate? Yeah. Like, I mean, if you think the, you know, if you think the, the elections are, are good. I mean, that's, we're doing it. We're fucking ourselves over here. Yeah. Well, you know. And, you know, when they have, you know, they have donation limits to run for those seats, right?

Well, that just puts them in such an advantage. I actually think the limits put them in an advantage in some ways because, you know, and I'm not saying take it, take donation limits or not have donations. We don't have any in my race, which is part of the reason I can go elsewhere. Because as you could probably imagine, my message within the big agriculture community of donors isn't exactly popular. Oh, I bet. And so I'm going elsewhere to raise funds from people who want to see, you know,

the culture called the culture of agriculture in our state restored regenerative farming safer practices less cancer but if you look at congress you know finding those people if you're an upstart candidate who are going to be willing to give you the seven thousand dollars apiece i mean you have to put a lot of that money together to be able to wage any sort of battle against one of these entrenched people and so in every every part of the deck is stacked against the person that's trying to unseat somebody, every part of it. So when I look at Iowa and I look at what are we doing with our state, how can we make a major difference in our state?

It comes to the most entrenched interest for me, the people that are paying the money so politicians will look the other way. And I've just been very clear. People ask me all the time, are you accepting funds? No, I'm not. I won't. And, you know, I think for people that are principals, what I'd like to say is like, well, yeah, but I'm never, I'm not going to, I'm never going to take my eye off the ball. But I just think the average voter is so weary of seeing this group or that group support them.

And then they just realized, well, that was just the precursor to me knowing that I'm just going to get screwed over. And that when it comes down, the time of addressing the fastest rate of new cancer in the country in the world, or making sure that a big agriculture company stops losing in court, which side are they going to line up on? And so I just can't do it from a principled standpoint of saying, like, I can't look at you or in the mirror or my kids and say, well, no, that's not going to have any effect. Because these people, they know what they're doing.

Yeah. Let's move into glyphosate. But first, but first, I got a question for you. This is from a patron. We have a Patreon account. It's turned it into a community. They get the opportunity to ask every guest a question. It's from Oliver.

Why do you think so many politicians are more interested in money in special interest rather than their constituents in America's progress? Furthermore, what can we do to help remedy this issue in the future? I think we... We pretty much covered that. You know, but Oliver's question is a very big, big question, because there's many things. I mean, of course, money and special interests, but I think it comes down. You know, being on this show with you right now is a very different medium than what politics usually is.

Because people can actually see how I address these issues in a long-form discussion, and I hope they can see my spirit and they can see like my heart. Politics isn't set up for that. And so I think that if we had more of this of being able to understand where somebody comes from what drives them and motivates them, there'd be less of that. And that's probably what I go back to.

What's motivating them, truly? Like, what's the why that when everything goes wrong and a donor pulls out or whatever, that's just going to keep them saying, I don't care, I'm doing the right thing. I don't know. I love, I'm with you, but I've interviewed probably half of the fucking administration before they got elected. I was told all kinds of shit on air in front of millions of people. I don't know if any of it's done. In fact, some of it has just gone the complete opposite way, like the Maha shit that we're just talking about, which we'll get into at the end of the glyphosate.

section. But you don't, but on the other hand, I agree with what you're saying because it's hard to hide in it. But they did. They found a fucking way, man. They found a way to hide. That's fair. I think as I look at this as somebody who's new in these things and as paid attention and watch the short reels and the quick news clips that come up from politicians and you realize that like when you know, when you're in it, when you're deep in it, you understand well, hold on, you just took this vote. but you're saying this thing or you're speaking to this group. And so many times politicians will just,

either they don't go face their constituents or they come in, they talk, and they leave immediately without having to talk to them. That happens so much. So that's maybe more of my long-form point. It's just that, you know, if you're unwilling to have the deep, long discussions and own up to things that you've messed up on even,

because I don't think any of us would say, look, if you've learned and you admit that, that you're beyond repair, but none of these people are saying they did anything wrong. They're not saying they took a wrong vote. Not saying they should do this differently. But to Oliver's question, I think that's the question of our democracy in many ways. It's like, okay, well, why do they do this? Look at all the institutional capture. Look at all the money that they're being offered.

look at the perks that they're getting. We've incentivized the wrong things. Accountability needs to be what's incentivized. I don't know exactly how to do that, but it's something that's on my mind. I think we need people that will stand up to politicians too. And I understand why you wouldn't. But there are people that can. And I think that people think that politicians have a lot more power than they actually do.

Yeah. In fact, I just got to cease and desist from a congressman not long ago. and who said he was going to fucking sue me. And so I did a rebuttal video. I talked to my attorney. Turns out we could actually sue his ass. And maybe we should. But I don't like getting into litigation and all this shit.

But I wanted to prove a point. I'm not going to let a fucking congressman or any politician push me around. No fucking way. Could you imagine letting another man push you around in front of your fucking kids? Nah, buddy. and more people need to take that stance and be like, fuck you. Cease and desist, you don't want me to talk? Fuck off.

You won't silence me. And I dare you to fucking sue me. Do it. I fucking dare you. You know what I mean? And what happened? Not a damn thing. I'm still here.

I'm still doing the same show. Still talking about the same fucking things. And I did that because I wanted to set an example and show people. These fuckers aren't as powerful as you think they are. they're just pieces of shit. That's all they are. Treat them like, like, it's just, man, I'm getting, I'm getting, I'm getting, I'm getting, I'm getting angry. I'm losing my words, but it just, but that, I'm serious, you know what I mean?

And it did. It proved. It's like, look at that. Call, calling the bluff in that, and it's like, why pull that rip cord if you're not going to try to fall all the way through with it, or if you don't know what you're doing? And I think going back to, like, citizens and voters, it's like, again, people should be up in arms about what's going. on. You know, I've talked to voters about what Elon Musk uncovered with all of the Doge stuff and then that our representatives are voting to put it right back in the budget. It's like,

like, they all raw, raw to broad about it. They were all the, and you know, this is like a conundrum I have, because I would say, I don't, I don't, I'm not like that. I don't, I don't get how you could raw, raw for somebody. Like, I have like this fear of feeling like an imposter all the time about things. Like, I don't want to get into a subject I don't know a lot about. I don't want to, you know, get out over my skis on things. And so when I see people doing things like this where they're like, we're so in favor of cutting all this waste and doge. And then when it comes time to it and the party leadership says,

no, you need to have it in there. It's like, I don't know what, I don't know how you could do that. Like, that isn't a part of my genetic pool. They sold their soul. Yeah. And so I don't get it. And even as you were talking about, I'm thinking about it. I'm just like, how do you get it? Like, we have a federal government that's sent an $87 million a week in cash to the Taliban. Yeah. That's where that flag came from. The guy that broke that. He was an Afghan-American and worked in Army intelligence, recovered that in Kabul from the Taliban fucking burning it. Yeah. And then came here on the show, gave it to me and told everybody that we're funding. was like two or three years ago. Still funding them.

You know, I was reading something. Fought them for over 20 years. Me personally spent 14 years of my life in and out of those countries only to fund them as soon as before I was over. That's our federal government. That's where we are.

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and thinking about the $10 trillion we've spent on all of that. And meanwhile, we don't even have programs for our veterans when they come home. You know, my great-grandpa, when his brother was off in World War I and then that ended, and then during World War II, my great-grandpa was a bit older. He would actually sign up locally to teach veterans how to farm when they came back from World War II. And that just got me interested in like, What was it like back then for veterans coming home? Because they saw some just terrible things.

And I couldn't believe the extent of the programs that were in place to help them, well, we'll just talk about farm, learn how to farm, apprentice paid, buy a farm. We created thousands of farmers after World War II with our troops that came home. And then I look at what's happened to my friends that I came home and they're just dropped in. And then we see

like some of the highest suicide rates. I think it's under farmers now. Yeah. I think farmers has the highest rate now. I talk to people in Iowa all the time. It's like, look, in that time that we've lost 10,000 family farms in Iowa over the past 20 years, we've lost 10,000 of them, the suicide rate amongst our farmers went up 50%.

And let me tell you, I don't know of any other politician in Iowa that's talking about it about me. None. 50% in the last 20% in the last 20 years. Holy shit. And so my message to the people of Iowa is do not get distracted away from the things that actually matter, that really matter. Your neighbors dying in that way, your veterans dying in that way, all while we're being distracted by this, you know, tweak in a regulation or here we're going to get a little bit lower tax rates. You know, I tell people, we have the fastest rate of new cancer in the history of human civilization,

and our kids are leaving our state faster than 46 other states. If your kids are leaving and your people are dying, you're not winning. That's not winning. And so I look at my campaign of four things. And those two things are two of the top things that I'm focused on. And what dumbfounds me is that I'm not joined by a chorus of people that are just like, of politicians that are just like, yeah. Yes, finally we've been waiting for somebody else to talk about this because they're not talking about it.

You know, I found out that Iowa's kids are leaving the state at a rate faster than 46 other states. I found that out because I was curious as to what our rate was. And I started looking up. I found out in 2025, an extensive study was done on this. And I have actually had politicians in the state reach out to me and say, where did you get that information? I'm like, it's publicly available. And it maybe is the number one stat you could possibly track as an elected official. Are the people that are growing up here wanting to stay or leave?

And I'm having to bring this up in this way, which I'm happy to do, but it's like, we need people to focus on the big issues. And that's the reason I'm running. I mean, they don't know because they're spending all their time hanging out with lobbyists. That's, yeah. It's the truth. It's funny, but like, it's real. They don't give a fuck. Like, all they care about is hanging out with lobbyists

so they can enrich themselves. That's it. This is why I go, something as simple as, like, knowing who puts something into a piece of legislation because I know it's not the legislators. I know this stuff's not coming from them. This stuff is written far too specifically. It's coming from industry.

And that's the cozy relationship. I guess something that surprised me being in this maybe more than anything, I don't know if more than anything, but it's a big surprise, is how little research you have to do to become a very informed politician, like at the top 1%, how much you have to care to get away from the talking points of one party or the other and do your own research. Some of the things we're going to talk about with glyphosate, you know, I can't believe that they're just not on building. boards everywhere. I mean, it's so egregious of what's happened. And but when I, let me go into this a little bit, when I first was talking about these pesticides, I've been following glyphosate for years. Part of the reason was my dad was a 28-year crop consultant in Iowa. And so his job was to go into a field inspect for pests, weeds, bugs, fungus, things like that. And then write a report and send it to the farmer to say,

here's what you should apply, what chemicals you should apply, because that's just what they do, what they did. And then you fast forward to about five, six years ago, my dad gets diagnosed with non-hawd-chans lymphoma, the exact type of cancer that's implicated in all of these round-up lawsuits.

Holy shit, man. And so I'm looking at this from the standpoint of like, and I think you could probably tell already talking to me, like, well, I hope, I care about this stuff, like I really do. And so when I'm thinking about my own dad, he's like, how much did that shorten his lifespan? He's in remission, but how many fewer days do I get with my dad?

And the amount of funerals that I see for people that are dying in their 60s, when their parents live to be 80, there's a generational wisdom that's being completely lost. And so when you talk about all these things that like, are going on in the world and in DC and the government, where our money's going, all these things. It's like, there's not something more important than human life.

Mm-hmm. And when we're willing to turn our head away from that to protect industry, I mean, like, it's time for revolt, basically. And that's like, you know, with my campaign, that's like, you know, like I said, I've been told many times. I actually was told sitting, gosh, I was meeting with a high, well, with an elected official in Washington, D.C. once.

This was six, eight months ago. And in that meeting, I thought he was kind of on the same page with me on some of these things, and I think he is to some extent, but people usually don't hear somebody talk about it with, like, the passion or the interest that I have. I got done talking about what's going on in my state from a cancer standpoint. And he literally said, if you say these things on the campaign trail, they will effing kill you. And I laughed, I just like, but I looked around at the people with them and then I were laughing. And look, that could be figurative, of course, likely.

But they know, they know the power these lobbies have. And so when you look at what's at stake is the life of my people, you know, like when you go into a gas station in Iowa, and you see a collection jar for a kid with leukemia, or maybe two or three now. And all the while, you'll hear a politician say something like in Iowa. They say this all the time. Well, we need to figure out what's causing it. We don't know what's causing it.

What's causing the cancer rate? Can't figure it out, huh? Can't figure it out. And one thing they mentioned, and I kept hearing this. And again, like, it was being spouted off without any research done to it. And I thought, well, what's the situation here? Is it they kept saying, well, yeah, we have one of the highest levels of radon in the country.

And what I looked into this, I was like, well, what's the truth to this? And it's like, well, first off, radon was deposited here by glaciers. Glacier glacial activity ground this down and spread it out across the state. That's where it came from. So thousands of years we've had this. In the past 30 years, we've had a hockey stick-like graph on cancer rates in our state. And so this is part of what we've had, what I'm fighting against. And I have to continue to say this. This is not about farmers,

meaning like, I'm not against farmers. I am one of them. I love them. They're my neighbors and family. And they're getting cancer. This is about large agriculture conglomerates lying to their customers and to the people about the safety of their products and getting away with it. I mean, cancer isn't even an organic disease. So it would have to be caused by something that's not organic to earth. Glyphosate. Gee, I wonder. Let's...

So, oftentimes this conversation goes like to glyphosate, but I will just say to farmers that are my friends as well, they all know these companies are extorting them financially. They know it. They watch what's happening. They watch that they're getting

charged more than what these same companies charge a farmer in a foreign country. They know that every time there's an increase in commodity prices, their input costs are going to go up, that farm bankruptcies increased by 70% in Iowa last year and John Deere raised their prices by five. And they know that truth that they're just being extracted from. What I'm trying to bring a voice to is this idea that they're also lying to you. And they know they're lying to you. We have their documents that say and show that they're lying to you. How are they lying? What specifically are they lying about? The safety of the products, that they don't, I mean, that they don't believe it causes cancer. So let me take a step back

here and just talk about agrochemicals for a minute. You know, something that would be very interesting to know about glyphazate is from the traditional metrics that, would that have been tract for pesticides. And, you know, people talk about pesticides. Pesticides is a blanket term, and it includes herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, like different products that kill pests, and pests are defined not just as like a bug, but weeds and bugs and fungus, things like that. Glyphazate, from an acute toxicity standpoint of, like, if you get it on you is going to hurt you, is one of the safest we have. Like, one of the safest. Are you serious?

Yes, from acute toxicity. When you look at other chemicals, and I've talked about a chemical a lot that's called Paraquot. Paraquat, you've probably heard of this. You know, in the 70s and the 80s, it was used to burn down marijuana fields and the war on drugs. Also, you can, if anybody is interested in learning more about Paraguat, you can read about the Japanese Paracquot poisonings, or somebody who's putting a... a very small amount into bottles at vending machines and the people would drink it and die 48,

52 hours later. Holy shit. Parraquot is so toxic that it is actually used in research settings to induce Parkinson's and rats and mice. It actually interacts with oxygen within the plant to create something that's called superoxide, basically a highly unstable form of oxygen. And then I'm going to simplify this, but basically it burns it from the inside out. It is a product that if you ply onto a plant in a matter of hours, it's destroyed.

It is unbelievably toxic. I say that to just bring up this point. When we talk about this issue, we're going to get into the issue of agency capture of our government. Because Paraquot was actually originally formulated by Syngenta, the now Chinese own company. Syngenta sells this product still. In the country of China bans it. They won't even allow it to be sold in the country that owns the company. 50 countries ban this product.

If you want to spray this product as a farmer, as an applicator, here's all you need to do. You have to take an applicator's class, which is an online class that lasts between 30 and 60 minutes. And you can go buy and use this product. There have been stories about people in medical journals that have gotten through spraying for crops have gotten enough on their skin that they literally just died from topical exposure. And it does the same thing in our body.

What it does is it enters in and it actually accumulates in the lungs. It reacts with oxygen. And then it starts to create what's called superoxide. and it will, I'm using a simple term, burn you from the inside out. It'll just start to kill you. And long-term exposure at lower doses gives you a two and a half times more likelihood of getting Parkinson's. Because the neurons in your brain, the dopamine neurons that operate with, they operate with a lot of oxygen, it starts to kill those because it's looking for oxygen.

We know all this data. Like I said, they use it in laboratories to create Parkinson's, and it's still legal to be sprayed. It's still used on hundreds of thousands of acres in Iowa alone. So when we talk about the safety of products and whether or not our agencies are there to, like, protect us, they are not. They've been captured. And I have sympathy for farmers because they're in this cycle where they're used. using products and they're trying to fight weeds and all of these things. And they are operating on razor-thin margins where the opportunity to try some other method

of farming is almost non-existent. And so many of these people just feel stuck with that. Damn. So Paraquot is one of the most poisonous substances. Literally, you know, one, if you had a spoon and you just had enough to cover the tip of the spoon and you and you ingested it, you die. And we have tremendous amounts of evidence on this. And so when I get to glyphosate, you know, often I'll see people on X or somewhere saying, like, if you think glyphosate's bad, what about this? What about paraclysm? Like, I understand that.

But when you get to glyphosate, there's so much that's being obscured about the truth of it and what's happening with it. Just to the basic point of the two separate types, that is traditional glyphosate, the molecule that's pure, and the formulated glyphosate-based herbicides. These are the ones that are up to 50 times more toxic. The EPA does not require the registrant testing on these, just on the molecule, on the traditional glyphosate. So when the EU banned our version of glyphosate,

they did it because the formulation was so tight. toxic. It actually, pure glyphosate has trouble getting into your bloodstream without the surfactants that I mentioned earlier. But when you formulate it specifically to penetrate the dermis of a plant, it'll do the same thing to your skin. 30% of what's on your skin will enter your bloodstream. 10% of your cardiac output goes into your bone marrow. And in bone marrow, it disrupts a cell replication cycle. But here's something that I haven't yet talked about and that I, that I, that I, want your listeners to understand is that many people who avoid products that could have glyphosate in them, residues of glyphosate, that eat organic diets and all these things, they'll still show up

that they have glyphosate in their urine. And the reason glyphosate is so talked about and so dangerous is because it's the most widely used herbicide in the history of the world. It's used everywhere, everywhere, not just on ag applications. Consumers buy it at Home Depot. Glyphazate, is a chelator. It's looking to bind. It's actually one of the most powerful keylators, meaning I won't go deep into that, but it's looking to bind to things. What does it bind most closely to? What does it grab onto? Calcium. So there's actually papers coming out now that are saying, they're theorizing that the reason this is happening. By the way, 1983, Monsanto did a study, a rat study, that they did not ever publish publicly, but the

had and the APA reference so we know basically what's in it. And in that study in 1983, they were testing where does glyphazate stay the longest? What tissues? And where it stayed the longest was bone. And what the thought is now is that the reason it is glyphazate is actually going into your bone marrow, it's attaching to calcium in your bones, and it's creating basically a repository of glyphosate on a slow release cycle. And so when you're releasing it into the bone marrow in a slow release cycle like that,

and you're disrupting the cell replication cycle because this is how cancer starts, is that you damage the DNA and we know glyphosate is genotoxic. We know this. That it's creating like a bank of glyphosate in there. And that's why people who have stopped eating this stuff for a long time will have that continuing to come out in their urine. And so what's happening with this is that we know that it causes non-Hodgkins lymphoma. We have a ton of data and evidence that it's genotoxic and that the cancer that's going to come out of this is non-Hodgkins lymphoma primarily.

But when the EPA doesn't even require you to test, now, for the people out there that are going to challenge me on this, they don't require you to do the long-form chronic toxicity tests on the glyphosate-based herb. the ones that are formulated, that are way more toxic. They require that just on the product. And this is how so much of this is obscured. You can pull out study after study that will show that this product, pure, doesn't have a high-risk profile,

which, by the way, most of those are industry studies. We know this. Like the EPA, or in the EU band, this version of Life is Ape. The industry submitted 1,500 studies. studies, many of them they wouldn't even allow publicly to be released, but they're all industry studies. And so the big difference between the EU's determination on the safety and the EPA's was three primary things. Number one, the EU used, the EU used glyphosate-based herbicides,

the more toxic version that everybody's actually using. Nobody's spraying pure glyphazate. Number two, they looked at dose-dependent exposure, so not just like what's the overall cancer rate. And then there was one other category that they looked at that differentiated greatly, it's slipping my mind right now. But what the EU came to was that, yes, this is a probable carcinogen. And they have far lower levels that are allowed in their bread, far low levels, a lot in their food. So the agencies have been captured. And now we are facing a situation where in Iowa there's between six and nine agriculture chemicals within the wells in our state. Where it's everywhere.

Is it even possible to get rid of it? Yeah, it is. You know, here's the, I had somebody once tell me recently, he's like, hey, you need to be more positive. Because I mean out of the wells. Yeah, well. Can you get it out of there? Can it be? You know, I haven't done the research on wells.

In soil, yes. So like glyphosate will stay in soil for a very long time. However, there are products. There are very natural products. It's broken down by bifidotate bacteria. Very interesting. Just on the, or not bifto, lactobacillus bacteria breaks it down. And so we have amazing scientists and researchers that are helping to develop better products.

But we have such a captured agency structure. that oftentimes they're not able to get to market. Many times farmers have been lied to to say that like people that think glyphosate is bad or, you know, liberals hate farmers and all these things when we're the exact opposite. So as far as Gino-Wells, I don't know that, but I do know we can get it out of the ground. There's some really interesting studies that have been done on that and you can get 80 to 90% of it within seven months using certain natural products. You know, if I could close on the glyphosate piece on one thing, it was, it was, you

would be just to help people understand in this debate that's going on right now all over about what is happening with residual levels in our food. You know, Ron DeSantis just recently had that. His surgeon general released the findings of glyphazate and bread. And when you talk to people that are in the industry, and there's so many of these paid people that are on social media on X that are just like out there to put out this information defending Monsanto, defending Bayer, defending glyphosate defending, what they are saying is like agriculture when it's, when that's not what

they're doing, they're not defending agriculture because they're also exploiting our farmers. You know, when you, what they often talk about is that, yes, but the exposure levels are so low, they're way below the tolerance levels that are allowed. And this is something that really infuriated me as I dug deep into this. When you look at tolerance levels that are allowed in food products, you think that when you hear this, it's like, okay, well, if in wheat, five parts per million are allowed in wheat, you think, okay, well, that must be a level that's been deemed to be, like, safe. Because if you have more than that, you can actually be illegal to sell the product. You can't sell it. It's been considered adulterated.

And so I was looking into this. And what I found out was this, that level can be changed by the industry if they petition the EPA. So, for instance, in the 1990s, the allowable level of glyphazate on oats was 0.1 parts per million. When the industry started moving to desiccation, spraying this product to kill the plant at the end of the growing cycle, when they started to change the desiccation, they lobbied the EPA to change how much. what's is allowed on oats. And remember, if you had over 0.1 parts per million in the 90s, it was illegal to sell the product of oats.

They lobbied and got a 20,000 percent increase. Holy shit. 200 times what was previously allowed was now allowed, and here's why. Because that's what they needed to be able to use the product to spray at the end of the growing cycle. So they went and said, what do we need this to be allowed at? How much glyphys it is actually on the product

after we do this desiccation process? And that's what we need to petition the EPA to get. And Monsanto did that, and they got it. And so the upper level of this, you see the common question would be like, okay, well, what's the limit? Well, they use what's a reference dose modeling. Basically, the limit is when it gets to a point where they've determined that if it goes higher

and there's a buffer there, if it goes higher, it'll start causing organ damage. Holy shit, man. So there's a blank check to just say, hey, now it's five parts per million's allowed on wheat, but if we have a new practice that's going to increase that, we'll just petition the government and get them to go to 10 parts per million,

even though they just told us that if you're above five, it's illegal to sell because it's not safe. It's captured. And so the industry's running the show. And the more people dig into this, the more you're going to realize that we are being lied to and misled. And part of my mission in this is not just to become a governor. It's to give a voice to these issues to people who are talking about them and have other people that aren't paying attention to this realize just like the medical establishment captured us during COVID,

just like so many of the other lives we've seen our children. government do, we have big business running the show at the detriment of the health of our people. I mean, before we end on glyphosate, what do you think about this executive order? 18th of February invoking the Defense Production Act to boost domestic glyphosate production critical to national security. Love how they threw that in there. Section 3 of the order confers all immunity provided for in section 707 of the Act to domestic producers. The act states, no person shall be held liable for any act resulting from compliance with the order. Bayer is the only domestic producer. EWG President Ken Cook,

in quotes, Trump just gave Bayer a license to poison people, full stop. RFK Jr., who won a $289 million verdict against Monsanto as an attorney endorsed the order. claiming it's about national security. Here's some maps for you. We're going to put these up on screen. This is a map of the highest concentrated states of glyphosate. Guess what number one is? Not anything I'm proud of. Iowa. Here is another map. We're going to put this on screen too. This is a concentration of cancer. What states have the high? concentration of cancer. Guess what state that is? Sean, you're saying things that are going to get me very upset. Iowa. So, okay, so there's those. Now, since we're all

fucking concerned about national security here, in 2025 alone, 618,000 people died of cancer in the United States. Now, isn't that a fucking national security? concern, RFK, President Trump, isn't that a fucking national security concern? I mean, I don't know what fucking scientists you guys are talking to, but here's the evidence. I know, it's fucking mind-blowing, right? That's simple. We just fucking solved the problem. But, you know, national security.

What the fuck? Like, what's more? 618,000 people died in 2025, and we're going on about a fentanyl crisis. where 100,000 people died. This is over six fucking times worse than the fentanyl crisis. And I'm all about stopping the fentanyl crisis. Let's get fucking real here. So what is the national security concern?

Do you know? I don't know the national security. I mean, look, if you want to talk about specifically with the national security concern, the only thing that would ever make sense to me in this is that we're about to go to war. That would be it. Is that we're about to go to war

and that they say that if we disrupt this, and the import of it that we're going to disrupt the food production of the country. But I've heard nothing about them. Let me say, you know, I hate the politics of these things. Because when that came out, I was sitting at my house, and it just popped up and I said, what is this? Because you have to understand, like, I've been fighting these things. Like, I've read the Monsanto cases when they're in court,

hundreds and hundreds of pages because I actually care about it. I want to know the arguments. I want to know how does a jury keep finding them guilty, and I do know how they keep finding them guilty, and they are guilty. I've been talking to people in my own state about not passing these pesticide immunity bills, even people that have as their constituency the companies,

and just saying, like, look, here's what's happening, they're lying to us, and I can prove this, I know how they're lying. And I've been, I have came out as a part of my campaign to not put my head in the sand, and deny the truth that's in front of me of what's going on. So that's the backdrop of which I read this. And, you know, the most common thing I'm reading about it

is that it doesn't provide product liability immunity. That's a complete lie. There's nothing in the executive order, the Defense Production Act, or 707, that excludes product liability. If the order from the USDA, which, by the way, this is going to be managed by the USDA, is to maintain full production and availability of the product, that they're ordered to do this.

They'll use the same type of defenses that were used by Monsanto, by the way, when they created Agent Orange and poisoned so many people. They, the government in that case, now this was defense, I get that in the sense of where at war, but we invoked the Defense Production Act. But in that case, when they were using Agent Orange and there's so many harms from it

because it was a very nasty, nasty chemical. The government ended up paying $50 billion to people hurt by it, while the company's paid about $180 million. My bigger fear about this is that what we've just done is we have offloaded liability onto the taxpayer. And so right when this came out, and this is again about me not being a politician,

I voiced opposition to it. And it's not a popular thing to do. But when it comes to taking a stand for the right thing, you have to do it. And that could have negative repercussions for me, for sure. But none would be as bad as what you're saying about me going along with this. You know, Jordan Peterson said something I thought was very deep. He said, when you have something to say, silence is a lie. And that's really difficult in politics.

Because I think in something like this, the easiest thing for me to do would be to not immediately put out a tweet saying that my tweet basically said this. There's no potential ban on glyphosate. There's no pending ban on glyphosate. There's no pending shortage of glyphosate. There are only pending lawsuits of Americans who have been harmed by this product. This must be reversed. And so when I look at this and I hear all the, these people saying it doesn't provide them, absolutely will provide immunity. The word is used

right in it. That's on purpose. When they go to court after they invoke the events production act, when, when Bayer goes to court on new cases, because they're still not putting a cancer warning on the label, if they just put a cancer warning on the label, future cases would be null and void because the entire thing is about failure to warn. That's all they have to do, is admit culpability. Now, what will that do? It'll create a cascade effect of people that jump into lawsuits because, well, now you're admitting it. And so they can't to save face instead of doing the right thing. When they go to court in the future, they will hold a piece of paper that says, which has precedent that courts will grant immunity citing the DPA, they'll hold that and say,

we were ordered to do this. We didn't have a choice. The safety of the product is a assumed in the order, basically. So, you know, my belief, without going too far into this, is that I believe, and I might be naive on this, look, hold me accountable, but I want Donald Trump to know the truth about this. I want him to understand that there's lobbyists that are doing something, trying to get him to do something, doing something, that will end up harm. the people that he cares about and loves.

I mean, he, there's a big talk about his, how much he loves Iowa. And I think that, look, I would love to get an audience with the guy and just say, this is what's happening in our state. And these are what these lobbying groups are doing. But I came out right after that was released that same night before I, I mean, I had to do a lot more research on it to understand how bad it really was. but I came out and said, this has to be reversed. And that, as I told you before,

you don't need immunity for a safe product. The idea that the courts are coming to the wrong decision is completely wrong. Bayer's paid out tens of billions of dollars. They've settled over 100,000 cases. And they have the best attorneys in the world. They know what they're doing. They understand this.

Immunity is the wrong way. Like immunity for me, like, you want, The Vaccine Immunity Act caused tremendous issues. This will cause tremendous issues from a health standpoint as well. I mean, we just pulled the map up. This is what we're living in. It's not a fucking coincidence. No.

Highest concentration of glyphosate, highest concentration of cancer. Yep. That's why I'm running. Questions? I mean, you want to take a break? Sure. Let's take a break. We don't bring on new partners often, but sleep is

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go about how nobody in Iowa is talking about the cancer crisis, glyphosate, or what was the other one, polyquot? Paraquot. Paraquot. Nobody's talking about it. None of the senators, none of the congressmen, none of the people running for you. You're the only one talking about it. Yeah, you know.

And I'm just going to summarize it. We don't have to rehash it all, but I said, yeah, because they can't talk about it. We just got done talking about the lobbies. They can't talk about it. Yeah. And they don't give a shit. And I think that's where people are in disbelief that the human being that they elected into power doesn't give a shit about them. I don't think that's computing in people's brains.

They don't care. They don't care about you. They care about who's lobbying them, who's telling them what to do. Getting real. They justify it in their mind. You know, they've, they, it's all human beings do. Every time we're doing something we shouldn't be doing, you always go through, well, you know, it's, it's the mental gymnastics that people will do to justify shit that they shouldn't be doing in their head is fucking amazing. Yeah.

You know, and we've all done it. But this is just, it's another level of evil, you know, that they're justifying. Just choosing, just choosing to believe the lie. Like, that's a choice to believe the lie. because if you're going to choose to believe a lobbyist on something this important and not be willing to go as deep as I have or other people, you know, this is one thing that I've loved about Bobby Kennedy is that, you know, there's this thought all the time about, you know,

if you're elected, if you're in a position of authority, what you should be doing is getting experts around you and delegating to these experts. But the experts brought us. the COVID response that we had. And what you have to be willing to do is say, I'm not delegating the most important things. I need to be, I need to have the proper amount of knowledge to make the right decision on these issues.

So when Bobby's talking about vaccines, he understands the situation. You're not going to bring some expert in that, like, is completely counter to him when he knows the truth about what's happening. But when you say this, that the politicians aren't talking about this, it's true. It's very true. I mean, I, right now I'm on a political sense, I'm yelling into a void. But on a voter sense, I can't go to a room. You know, we've had a couple town halls of the past week. One was over 150 people showed up. Another one was close to 80 in these, in smaller restaurants, packed house. And when I get to the fourth point about what my campaign's about,

which is stopping the cancer crisis in my state, and I talk about what's going on with big companies lying to us about the safety of their products, 89% of the heads in the audience are nodding. These are Republicans. The voters know what's going on. The problem is there hasn't been... Why do you say it's just Republicans?

What do you mean? You don't think Democrats give a shit about cancer? I just mean in this room, it's Republicans. So, no, but this, no, just to clear, in this, in my rooms, I'm talking to Republicans in the primary. And so traditionally, Republicans are the ones that are not going against what some of these big companies are saying. But I'm saying the voters, they know, they know what's going on. And yes, the beauty of what I am running on and the hope that I am running on, whether it's keeping our kids in the state or saving our kids, our family farms or making our education system number one or saving the cancer, solving the cancer

crisis, is that these are bipartisan issues. I have people comment on X and things like this that are, you know, criticizing Iowa Democrats for saying, how do we let a Republican beat us to the punch on this? How do we do that? And it's both sides, on the political side, on the elected side of politicians, both sides have been silent on this completely. And then, they'll give excuses like alcohol rates, or they'll give excuses like rate on or they'll say, it's, it's, we need to have a greater tax on cigarettes. It's like, this is literally, this is, this is happening right now in Iowa. And I'm like saying to people, cigarettes have an inelastic demand curve.

Meaning, when you tax cigarettes, you're just taking more money because they're addictive product and they're going to continue using them. Meanwhile, Nevada has one of the highest smoking rates in the United States and one of the lowest cancer rates. This is about, again, coming back to being willing to tell the truth, even if it means somebody tells me that they're going to destroy me. You know, it means they're going to come out and attack me or my family or whatever it is. This is what I knew I was getting into. It's why this conversation is so important. Because the voters are talking about this. The people are talking about it. You know, right now in Iowa, we have the world's largest nitrate removal system on our water supply

in Des Moines, meaning from the runoff that comes off of farm fields, I could talk deeply about what's happening there, but the nitrogen that's ending up from fertilizer in our streams and rivers is getting to our major population center and it's so much that we have the largest one in the world to remove nitrates. And often it can't keep up, meaning they have to like put notices in that you can't water your lawn because you're stressing the system too much because we can't filter these chemicals out fast enough.

Are you serious? Yes, this is that. They happened last summer in Iowa. You know, wow. I mean, in what is the state placed population-wise? It's not a densely populated state. It's not like it's over, it's not like Florida where they're worried about flushing the fucking toilets

because so many people are moving there and they're just destroying all the farmland there and turning it into condos and apartments. It's crazy, you know. But there, but Iowa isn't like that. You don't have a house five feet from another house, five feet from another house. You know what I mean? Yeah.

It's spread out. It is. It's very lowly dense. Do you know what it is? I'll bet it's in the lowest, but probably 90% of them. It's very low population density in Iowa. I mean, our population's three, just around three million. And I don't know what the density, though, is.

But it's very, it's very sparsely populated. So that's what I'm saying. And they had the largest water treatment plant to take, what, night? What did you say? Nitrates. Nitrate out. Like, look at that shit, man. You know, it's not even that many people using the fucking water.

Do you have the biggest one in the world? Yeah. And they can't keep up. That's insane. They can't keep up. That's how many fucking chemicals are getting dumped in. We actually had this winter. So what happens is, now, look, again,

And when I look at this, I don't look at it from the standpoint of like, farmers are purposefully doing these things. A lot of times I look at the associations that know better and they know what's going on and they give cover. But like, in Iowa, what's happened to cause this is that one of the technologies that farmers have used most recently to increase yield has been field tiling. So, three feet under the ground or so, there's a perforated pipe, it takes, basically what happens when you have a really wet season, a lot of rain will come down, the water table will arise.

When the water table rises, these, it moves into waterways, areas that water goes into, and these tiles, these pipes, bring the water out and daylight it, dump it directly into a stream. And so over the past 20 years, we've started what's called PEPA. pattern tiling, which is like we are putting these corrugated tubes all over the fields, 10 and 20 foot separation, and it's to make sure that the land is farmable, so it's draining water. What's happening there is that when you have a really wet season, the water table rises, and you have an hydrosam owner, you have nitrogen that's been applied to the field, and it rains, well, it can't soak down into the soil to purify.

So it goes directly into these tiles, and the tiles drain directly into the streams, and the streams drain directly into what in Iowa is the Raccoon River, is one of them. The Raccoon River is either the most or the second most polluted tributary in the United States. Wow. Wow. And so when I look at this, I just say...

People are probably swimming, tube, and all kinds of shit. We have so many lakes that there's notices on signs, that you may you can't swim in them are you because of the because of the chemicals there's so there's so many products in there holy you could your listeners can go on and google this and you'll find stories of like a woman this is last year maybe two years ago who didn't know that jumped in and her skin got all red like it was just you know burning but we have lakes in iowa with such high levels of of nitrates and products that swimming is barred in them in iowa

The Eden of the United States. What people, this is what I go back to. I think when people look at Iowa, they think of like the Norman Rockwell painting of like the cows on the hill and you have this and the beautiful stream. And you know, when General Albert, Albert Lee was coming through Iowa, when they're first on their trek to, going up, they're actually going up the Des Moines River. When he was coming through Iowa, he actually said that in all of his travels, and mind you, he'd been all over the country at this point.

He'd never seen a place as beautiful as this. That's what we came from. Now Iowa is the most terraformed place, I believe, on the face of the earth. Meaning we've done more to our landscape. So when I talk about the water quality issue, it's a hot button issue. But I've talked to developers in Des Moines who've said, I can't even sell a house if I don't pre-install a reverse osmosis system in here. And I think when I talk about this in the campaign, I just give back to this.

I believe that Iowa families are just looking for something that they can count on. Clean water is one of them. Having a safe community is another one. An education system that's not bottom half. Like these are the common things that people are just looking for. And it's not too much to ask that your government focuses on giving you, your government focuses on making sure things that you should just be able to count on are there. Here's one thing I'll tell you about the nitrate removal system.

So it'll remove, I don't even know the exact number of how many pounds of nitrogen. Up until recently, after they removed it, they just dumped it back in the river. Get the fuck out of here. Are you, no way. I'm serious. I'm serious. They now have some biological methods to where it'll break down the products, but the way to get rid of it was to put it back in the river. So, again, we have to have clean water in our state. We have to have good education.

Our farmers have to be able to make money and not be extorted. And I believe that one of my goals I've said to people is that, look, over 20 years, we've lost 10,000 family farms. There's no term limits on the governor of Iowa. And I've made it very clear, like, this is not what I want to do for my life. But I want to make it so there's 10,000 new family farms in the state. Or that by the end of my second term, the majority of the food served in Iowa schools actually comes from our state. Common sense things that if we had our eye on the ball, we'd say, this is just good to do. We should

employ our people supporting our kids to grow their food. But it hasn't. 95% is imported. And it's garbage. Like, we know what. How many other people are running? In the primary, there's five people running in it. Five people? Yeah. Because as of this recording, today, Polymarket, are you familiar with Polymarket? They give you a 25% chance of winning Iowa, the governor of Republican primary on June 2nd. We're just getting started. That's pretty good. I think it was 6%. Then you went on Tucker and it went went up. And you know, this is all about getting a message out like this. Why do you think, why do you think Polly Market jumped that much?

I mean, nobody knows who I am. What's resonating with you? Yeah, I think the number one thing is nobody knows who I am. I've never ran for office. So one of the people on there, the only reason that they're as high as they are is because they have and they've been elected and they have name recognition. But I know that the message that we're putting forward about putting Iowa first about saving our family farms. The things I just mentioned, I know those things resonate. I don't need a poll to tell me they resonate. I hear it from my neighbors. So often when I'm talking to them, they're talking about

issues in private that politicians aren't talking about in public. They just, they're not talking about. You go to the cafe and you lean in and you hear what, what the farmers are talking about. It's the things I'm talking about. The problem is they felt like they haven't had anybody, I believe, and I'm not going to speak for them, but I, and this is how I felt. that there's nobody out there that's willing to give them a voice. It's willing to say we shouldn't give a Chinese company millions of dollars of tax breaks paid for by Iowans. That we shouldn't have a data center getting $529 million in property tax abatement. That we shouldn't allow our farmers to be exploited or let hedge funds buy our homes.

That Iowa, being an Iowan and living in the state of it means something significant. And what it means is not about an economy. It means something about culture and who we are as a people. You know, one of the things that I've had to wrestle with in this whole process is coming away from this idea of like libertarian economic thinking, which was very pervasive when I was a kid when I was growing up. And that the only thing we should care about is what the market says is good. The market will just determine it.

And I don't like, I don't know how you could look back on what's happened to our country, to our culture, to the hollowing out of our communities. I mean, look, even something as simple as, in these small towns, we've always had these country food stores. Well, they're going out of business and what's coming in, Dollar General. And who is the largest shareholder, Dollar General? BlackRock.

So the money that used to circulate within my small community because the owner of the grocery store say they're, actually, I'm very thankful we do have country foods, but Dollar General set up shop 200 yards away. The Dow was at 50,000. I don't know what you're complaining about, Zach. The Dow was at 50,000. Well, my, our communities are not there.

Our communities are struggling, like, really struggling. And there's the idea that I talked about in the economic thinking. And I called a religion of economic thinking. I think people have been captured by this religion that says, like, whatever the market says is best is best. And I'm talking mostly politicians and people. and think tanks and all these things that don't spend time in the community. And I've said something I think people think is kind of radical, is that, look, I'm going to choose community values

over shareholder value every day. Because that's what my great-great-grandfather was here for. That's why he came here. He didn't come here to make some company. And I'm not against business. But the extractive nature of what's happened in business in my state is undeniable, and it's making our state unrecognizable. just when you look at the 24 million acres of ground that's in crops and us losing 10,000 family farms over 20 years.

Like, that's life. That's stories. One of my favorite stories that I talk about this. And I'm bringing this up now because I just mentioned the idea of stories. Teddy Roosevelt famously said that I intend to be a preaching president to talk about the values of what it means to be an American. And he did. I mean, we got man in the arena from him. Something that I have to find myself reading a lot

just to remind myself. Okay. It's been a lot, a lot harder things. When I go out and I talk to people, I'm at an event. I'm at an event. I'll start to tell my family history a little bit that I've mentioned to you. There's not one person in the room, usually,

that if I didn't go back one or two generations with them and their family story, that we just don't have, an almost identical story of people who came over here looking to provide a better life and pass something on to their kids. But like, and in our case, that was farmland in a major way. And to create something that they didn't have for themselves and to build their church. We have a shared story.

And my hope is to be able to be somebody who's preaching about that. That the fact that more Ireland served in the Civil War per capita of the United States is something to be dang proud of, that we should just like, but that should be taught in every single history class in Iowa. Mm-hmm. That the people who came here before you were courageous, they wanted to build something for you, and they were never going to meet you,

and that you should be proud of your heritage. One of my favorite stories on our farm, I'm a pilot, my dad's a pilot, both my grandpas were pilots. And my grandpa in 1940s, He bought a Taylorcraft airplane for $700 and great-grandpa mowed a runway in the bean field. And he learned to fly there and that became his whole profession career, as I mentioned. And, you know, that took him off the farm. He was the first generation to leave the farm.

And he went off and, you know, he worked at Iowa companies as a pilot. He was very good at what he did. He was very proud of what he did. And I think that back then that was kind of the idea that take a step away from the farm, try something new. And I'm very thankful for what he did because he provided a life for me and my family and my grandma who's 93 years old today,

who's still living on his pension and on what he created for her. So when I look at me coming back full circle, I think about my grandpa all the time at the farm, whose initials were carved in that post and just to say, why am I doing this? I'm trying to do something that I hope would make him proud.

They'd say, see what's going on in our country, see what's going on in our world, and say, we've got to get back to these roots. So, that's my mission. I think that's a great mission, I think your message is going to resonate with a lot of people. I know it is.

Everybody I talk to is worried about It doesn't, I mean, I don't even give a shit Republican Democrat anymore. Like I said, I just want somebody with a spine that's going to stand up for the people. You know, it sounds like you might be that guy. Well, don't endorse me yet. Wait to see what I do. Oh, I'm not endorsing. Just kidding.

I've just heard you talk about the other ones. Let me go out and prove myself. I'm just thankful for you. Let me have this conversation. and hopefully bring a voice to people that have felt like they didn't have one. I must love to you. Thanks, sir. Cheers.

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