The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1185: Local Politics and Our Food Supply w/ John Moody

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

72 MinutesPG-13John Moody is a husband, father of six, and one of the greatest voices for food freedom in America.John and Pete discuss how we got to where we are now and the history of our food supply.  He also discusses how the nation's reliance on large cities is lessened when attention is directed toward local, rural politics and our food supply.The Rogue Food ConferencePete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

Ready for huge savings, we'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. distinctive by design they move you even before you drive the new cupra plug-in hybrid range for mentor

leon and terramar now with flexible pcp finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro search cupra and discover our latest offers cupra design that moves finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from vows wagon financial services arland limited subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Great to see you back at Spex Savers. Okay. Could you read out the letters on the wall for me?

Yep. D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals. Oh, right. Yes. Our Black Friday deals are eye-catching. But the letter chart's over here. Oh, sorry. At Speck Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals. Like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025.

Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. If you want to support the show and get the episodes early and add free, head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support. I want to explain something right now. If you support me through Substack or Patreon, you have access to an RSS feed that you can plug into any podcatcher, including Apple, and you'll be able to listen to the episodes through there.

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Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingona show. John Moody's here. How are you doing, John? Good. How are you doing? I'm doing good. Doing good. First time on the show, please tell everybody a little bit about yourself.

Oh, goodness. So I'm a husband, dad to six kids. My wife has been trying to figure out for 20 years of marriage what I do vocationally. So we'll probably get into some of that on the show. You know, I've started a number of businesses over the years. I've been involved, especially with kind of food freedom type activism, you know, land rights, access to food, be able to choose what you actually eat, which strangely enough, people in the government don't think you should actually get to choose what you and your family eat. Local economics and things like that. And then, you know, we homestead, so we live on 35 acres a bit outside of Louisville, Kentucky. And this, you know, The theme of my life is wanting to leave my community, my children in a better place than where I started.

So wherever I have opportunity to make those kinds of inroads and progress for my kids, I'm trying. Well, and the whole idea of leaving a better life for your kids, that's up to you, isn't it? I think a lot of people can make excuses about, oh, the government's interfering with this, the government's interfering with that. And that does play into it. But really, if you make the decision that you are going to push through no matter what obstacles are put up in your way, and for the majority, the overwhelming majority of people, I mean, we're talking about a fractional percentage there, the things that they always worry about when it comes to like state overreach or things like that really don't come to fruition. So it really is up to you.

Yeah. One reason we are where we are is you've had a few decades of people who've complained about the direction things were going. The direction. I was raising my hand saying I'm one of them. Oh, okay. You know, people complain for a few decades in a row, the government's growing too quickly. The government is interfering in too many things. The government is taking on too many powers, writing too many rules. spending too much money, but then you ask them, what did you do about it? And they look at you like you're an alien. Like, I have a,

I should have done something about this other than watched, you know, Fox News or watched whatever TV show and yelled at the screen. Like I had a duty and a responsibility to actually do something. And I don't understand how

those few decades of people operated, you know, what got them to that point of thinking, they had no duties and responsibilities civically to stand up to run amok government, to check tyranny, to reign in corruption and other things, when it would have been so much easier for them 30 and 40 years ago, no less. Yeah, and it really is easy to. to fall into the whole victim thing. A few years ago, a bunch of years ago, I started talking about,

I was living in Atlanta when I started this podcast. And that was in 2017. And 2020 rolled around. And I was like, I got to get out of here. I can't know. This is no place to be. And, you know, I got out and I'm pretty rural where I am. And I think that that's where,

you can, sometimes you have to retreat in order to make your, in order to be able to survive and to make a better life for yourself and be an example to other people. And I understand that there's, I'm also someone who believes in tradition and believes in family and believes in the legacy of family. And at times that you could basically be telling people to, well, leave your family behind. If you're in a city and you've been in a city for for generations, you know, my family was in New York was in New York City for generations, also Pennsylvania for generations, but way more rural in Pennsylvania. And, you know, you just have to make that decision because even if Trump is able to dismantle a good portion of this administrative state,

the cities still are going to be unless the cities are attacked they're still going to be centers of power for old regime forces and unless you have a real good way of you know you have a plan for attacking that and you also have a patronage system set up like your own USAID to fund that then you're pretty much at their whim until you know they either collapse on their own or someone really attacks them? Yeah, cities are an interesting problem in modern American politics. So, you know, I live in a slightly more rural area. We're an outside, our outside of Louisville, roughly, you know, 30 minutes to the Louisville metro. And I think one thing conservatives don't appreciate is, you know, the reason cities have

became such a problem is they've gobbled up all the population and all the economics of rural areas. So I'm helping a few people with political campaign runs coming up the next couple years. And I help them with messaging and talking points. You know, how do you speak to some of these problems without needlessly alienating possible coalitions? You know, because when you're running for office, you need to not needlessly drive off somebody who might vote. vote for you through just, you know, attacking things in the wrong way. It's like, you know, most of my neighbors who are farmers, none of their children, you know, they're more conservative people.

They hate the dominance of these major cities over their entire state's political lives. And they hate that their children can't stay near them. You know, what grandparent wants to go to bed at night with their grandchildren anywhere but close to them? We're like the only way you can see your family. And so much of this is a political problem in the sense of why don't we have, why is so much of the population been sucked into the cities? Why do rural areas have collapsing population levels and so little economic influence? It's these layers and layers of regulations that have only made it viable to build a lot of businesses or actually be able to realize the profit that exists in the economy by putting yourself under the thumb of these big cities, having access to these government resources and inspections and whatnot. And that's really, you know, one of like the key areas we can make so much project progress so quickly.

If people saw like there's these little places you can poke holes in the dam or take bricks out of the wall that weaken it so substantially so quickly. Have you heard of the idea of the IQ shredder? I have not. So basically like places like San Francisco and. York and these big metro centers that the people from rural areas who are high IQ are they get recruited if you're going to make money if they're going once they get educated if they're going to make the kind of money they make they get drawn into San Francisco they get drawn into the and so you the the best and the brightest leave rural areas you know um you know I'm not you know

I think of, you know, like Mark Andreessen is from like rural Wisconsin or Minnesota. I can't remember. And, you know, he's in, he's in San Francisco. He would obviously be drawn, drawn out. And I'm not blaming him. I understand why he did it. But, yeah, you have all these people who are in rural areas who formerly, who through the centuries stayed in those areas and made those areas great and made those areas prosperous, made them what they were.

and now they're drawn out into, you know, the zip code that every, that you're supposed to be in because, you know, that's where you make the most money. So, yeah, I see a lot of that too. You know, my friend Congressman Thomas Massey, him and his wife, are from, you know, very rural eastern Kentucky. They got scholarships to go to MIT. and then they were in Boston for a while, you know, because they started a tech company where are you going to start like a tech company?

Their venture capital was in Boston. That's where they went to school. And he's one of the rare examples of somebody who starts on that trajectory and does make good money, but he uses it to come home and help rebuild the area he's from. So there's an opportunity,

to pillage the Egyptians there for bright people from rural areas to go and, you know, basically be, you know, exiled in Egypt for a season, build companies, build valuable things, and then come back home to begin to decentralize some of these things and to bring some of the benefits back to where you're originally from. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range for Mentor, Leon and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro.

Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera, design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services, Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Broke wagon financial services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs. When the doors open,

the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. Great to see you back at Specsavers. Okay, could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S.

Deals. Oh, right, yes. Our Black Friday deals are eye-catching, but the letter chart's over here. Oh, sorry. At Speck Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals, like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025.

Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. Yeah, the, um, one of the things that, you know, basically they went to Boston and they didn't forget who they were. Problem is is a lot of these people, they move to these places and they, in order to fit in,

they start adopting the, the beliefs that are there. And, you know, it really, it really changes them. And so people who formerly grew up in a more, conservative or have a more historic way of living historically was taught to them growing up. They become deracinated from that because, well, they're going someplace where if they keep and they

hold on to those values, it's a mark against them. So they're either pretending or they truly do change their minds. And when they change their minds, that means they're not going to be going back to where they're from because those people are now backwards and, you know, I'm with my people here in the IQ Shredder. They're definitely, you know, tribalism. That's what I love about Thomas and a few of my other friends or even, you know, my friend Joel Salatin.

Joel is still just Joel, no matter how many people he hobnods with, no matter how many big events he does. He knows who he is and where he's. from he has that like deep sense of connection that you really need to sustain a culture and civilization you know the more you break down those types of identities and loyalties the more we get you know what we see today where everything is reduced to you know crass economics what what is in it for me even at the expense of everyone else around me, including the future generations of my family.

Yeah. Yeah, we see that a lot. So tell me about local politics. Tell me about Kentucky. You know, it would seem that Kentucky would be one of those places because it's a red state. It's a bright red state. I think it's always the first state that's called for the president, for the, in the

presidential election. It's like Kentucky is going to the, to the, to the. Republican. But, you know, I've been through Kentucky. I've been through Louisville. I've been through Lexington. Yeah, it turns out that you have a lot of people who flock to the cities go in there, and it's not so red. Yeah. Well, Kentucky suffers from bipolar disorder. So nationally, Kentucky for the presidential election, and I think generally speaking for its Senate seats, has been reliably Republican since the 70s, I believe. If I remember my, you know, numbers, okay.

But at the state level, so the whole time Kentucky nationally is voting Republican, at the state level, I think we've had one Republican governor in the past 25 years. And I think it was maybe 2016 was the first time. 20 years that Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate. So people who think of Kentucky as a conservative state solely based on national election data, don't understand how confused the people who live in this state really are when it comes to politics. And, you know, Kentucky is like prime rhino hunting land.

If you're somebody who wants to hunt rhinos, one of my favorite jokes about Kentucky is, you know, what is a Republican in Kentucky? It's a Democrat who puts red on his campaign signs because the vast majority of state-level Republican senators and legislators in this state govern and vote almost indistinguishably from their Democratic counterparts. It's always just stunning to sit in a room with them and ask them questions how they, how they think about the world, how they view the role of government, you know, all of these different things. And they don't at a root level sound different than their democratic counterparts. So they still see, you know, they see government as the solution. rather than the problem. You know, they see, you know,

they appeal to this thing called a level playing field, which really just means certain players can afford to comply with these rules and regulations and others can't. You know, but Kentucky has been undergoing, you know, our conservatives have, we have more conservatives who are truly conservative then 10 years ago actually in our state-level politics, which has been great. We've had quite a few rhinos fall before the big hunting guns because they finally ran a foul.

Yeah, Republicans almost to a certain extent demand to be at least a little bit libertarian, and they tend to run as libertarians and then govern as Democrats. Because, I mean, that's just the way it is. I think a lot of that just has to do with a lot of people run for office thinking that things are a certain way. And then when they get in there, they realize things aren't a certain way and they just become a part of the swamp. I've heard that story over and over again from people who've got, who helped people run their campaigns like a senator, a house, national senator house campaign from a state. and then got that person elected, and then when they go to D.C., they, like, change overnight because they, you know, they get there and they're just basically told you think it's going to be one way and it's not that way. So, yeah, I mean, you see that a lot.

I mean, even here in Alabama, it's, you get people who are just, I mean, you get the Republicans here adopt a lot of the neocon position. which are just classically leftist positions. And you can't, you know, until that changes, there are a lot, you know, you're not going to see an insane amount of change. You may see some, but not a lot. Yeah. Well, and that's where, you know, I think one reason a lot of people do that is the dominant messaging on the conservative think tank side is very deeply.

rooted post-war consensus type messaging. And, you know, Reno's book, Return of the Strong Gods, you're finally starting to see better historically informed conservative messaging. And some of the problems are no, you know, like $40 trillion in national debt, you know, where I think now that interest on the debt is, is it 70% of the discretionary budget or something? You know, you can only ignore these things for so long. You could ignore them under Bush. You could ignore it through Obama.

But some of these things now, they can't sweep under the rug that we can't afford this anymore. And they also can't sweep under the rug. You know, one reason neocon type messaging used to be very popular in red states, especially rural red areas, was the natural deference to Leo and military. But the last decade has so heavily eroded that. You know, so conservative circles I run in, there are more and more churches, more and more conservative voices who are very anti-interventionist military. They, you know, they are widely discouraging, serving in the military, you know, our constant interventionism, the loss of lives, the loss of resources to keep up the

these narratives. And I think you're going to see that continue to erode and change state-level politicians and how they actually operate as more and more of their constituents are no longer beholden kind of to some of this messaging and some of these myths. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast.

Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range.

For Mentor, Leon and Teramar, now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria.

Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Great to see you back at Spegg Savers. Okay. Could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-S?

Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals. Oh, right. Yes, our Black Friday deals are eye-catching, but the letter charts over here. Oh, sorry. At Spec Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals. Like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses.

Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. Yeah, you can encourage people to join the next. National Guard because, you know, you're protecting your state. But until they, until the, the guards, the states decide that they can't be taken out and got, it's sent overseas. You know, a friend of mine was in the Coast Guard. And during the War on Terror, he ended up fighting Somali pirates off of Somalia. In Coast Guard vehicles, in Cutters.

it is like, okay, well, what did I sign up for? Did I sign up to protect our coasts and protect pollution in the Great Lakes or protect drug running coming into the Keys or something like that? Or why am I over in Somalia? And the same thing for somebody who joins the Kentucky National Guard is like, well, I'm joining this because this state may need to be protected at some point. and we may need to protect ourselves. Oh, oh, I'm in Afghanistan.

What the hell am I doing here? I don't even know where Afghanistan is. Yeah, I love that. There's a exchange in the movie 13 hours where they're sitting on top of the building. And they're talking about just like, why? What on earth are we doing here? You know, why am I on the other side of the world most likely going to die? and widow my wife and leave fatherless my children, like to what end?

And, you know, and again, this, you know, helping people with messaging, we need more conservatives constantly bringing up these issues. You know, we, in our, in our local areas, you know, this is what helps us change state level politics and national politics. Because again, you know, a lot of the National Republican Party platform and approaches are built on, you know, again, like men over the age of 50, you know, generally viewed their sons going into the military as woo-ha, such a great thing. Especially for rural air going back to the economic issue, what else are your boys? from rural areas going to do.

If they're not like a tech genius or this, that, or the other, the only viable career path a lot of them thought their sons had was military service. And so many of these things hang together and the more we show people, hey, these things hang together,

there are other futures for your son that don't involve dying in some third world country so that your tax money can be more efficiently laundered to terrorist groups. What were the circumstances that got you acquainted with Thomas Massey and other political figures? Yeah. So I started a local food buying club in 2006 in Louisville, Kentucky. So I almost died in 2004 because of the first.

some significant health problems I developed. I was able to heal myself solely through using real food, you know, rediscovering like, this is what food actually is. This is how you prepare it. And like Apocritis said, your food truly can be your medicine. And your medicine can be your food. So I was like, this is amazing. I want to help other people get access to good quality food.

and I wanted to make it easier for me to get good quality food because I basically reinvented hunting and gathering. You know, because we went from shopping at Kroger and Walmart or wherever where you just go once or twice a week, you get everything you need. It's like now on Monday night, I have to go to a dark alley somewhere in Louisville

to get my raw milk. Because at the time, the state was very, very aggressively anti-raw milk. And then on Tuesday, I have to go meet my CSA farmer for my CSA box. And on Wednesday, I still have to go by Kroger because it's not like I can get everything from those two places. And then on Thursday, I'm at a farmer's market. And on Saturday, and I'm at a different farmer's market because the good farmers who sell the things I need aren't at both markets. I was like, who has time for this?

Who has time to spend all of their non-working time hunting and foraging for decent, quality food. So I started a local food buying club. And I realized that the problem was because of the regulatory environment, you can't offer people real food and it not be a charity if you are a registered food business. You know, if you look at grocery stores, if you were to get rid of everything but the real food in a grocery store, the grocery store would go bankrupt in days of sales. Almost all of their profit is from all of the processed stuff. And even now to get more profit, when you walk in the grocery store, the very first thing they're selling you are vaccines. And there's now banks in grocery stores. They've almost gone the McDonald's route of becoming

landlords where they're making money off owning the land and the space and the food itself is an incidental part of the business model really. So my background, my undergraduate was mathematics, business finance, and economics before I did my graduate work. So I always had kind of this math economic mind ability to look at things. I'm like, I want to help people with food. I could never do this having a store model. It's just impossible. The numbers don't number.

So I looked for a way to get food to people without being a food handling business. And I decided on a model of a membership prepayment service type group. So you become a member of the buying club. You give me your money up front. and we go get you the things you want so you don't have to. So I'm not buying stuff and reselling it. I'm not a reseller. I'm not a grocery store.

Not anybody can just walk in off the street and get things. We're not open to the public, you know, that kind of statutory language. So we started that in 2006, started with 10 families in the living room of our apartment. And by 2009, we had about 120 families. And by 2011, I think we had about 180 families. And we're doing about half a million dollars of local food per year. And also in 2011, the Kentucky State Health Department decided to raid my buying club. So they showed up on Memorial Day.

weekend, which was like one of the worst decisions they could ever make, a total gift for me, tactically speaking, that they chose that weekend to do this. And they served as cease and desist and quarantine orders. You know, so anybody who violates this will face a fine of not less than five or $10,000 and no less than 30 to 90 days in jail. And, and, and, and, and, and, And I'd already known, you know, your listeners may not be familiar with this, but starting in the late 1990s, the federal government at the behest of industrial agriculture interests started a widespread coordinated crackdown on independent farmers and local food. And there's a really good documentary, kind of a cheesy title called Farmageddon. that highlight. Yeah, that that that radicalized me.

Like, I mean, yeah, I saw that when it came out and even more so than food, more so than food ink, Farmageddon was absolutely insane. Well, and the worst part about that movie is as egregious as those, I think she does eight stories maybe. there were easily 50 more that were 10 times worse what the government did and another 400 that happened over those years. There's a farmer here in Kentucky. I think it was Gary Oaks.

He was SWAT rated. So he was swatted, you know, guys wearing the full SWAT tactical gear. while he was delivering milk up to northern Kentucky, the Kentucky side of Cincinnati. Vernon Hershberger in Wisconsin was charged with like four felonies over feeding his community. More charges than literally domestic terrorists

like during BLM or other stuff. He's an ex-Omish farmer, dad of 11. And so her movie is like, a like a little scratching of the surface of the amount of energy and money the government put into trying to make sure people could not access good quality local food. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back.

We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye.

Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance, and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves.

Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Great to see you back at Spegg Savers.

Okay. Could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals. Oh, right. Yes, our Black Friday deals are eye-catching,

but the letter charts over here. Oh, sorry. At Spec Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals. Like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. Well, here's the thing.

So you mentioned a SWAT scene. is this a local or a county doing it on their own, or are they acting at the behest of the feds? Because the way to stop this is you have a, you know, I've been saying this for years. The sheriff is the most powerful person in the country, the most powerful position. They can choose not to cooperate with the feds.

It happened at Waco. And, I mean, they actually didn't even ask Sheriff Harwell for help in Waco. they just bypassed him and see what happens. They lost four of their quote unquote heroes on the first day. So, I mean, I think that's what it is, is this is local and county police cooperating with the feds. Why are the hell are you doing that? Exactly. This is why I love Sheriff Max's Constitutional Peace Officers Association.

because, you know, so what we found out, you know, so we were raided in 2011. And up until that point, pretty much everybody else who had been raided by the government in the local food wars had lost. So Rossum in California, raided twice, totally shut down, man a storehouse in Ohio, Athens locally grown down in Georgia, all of these different farmers. all of them just got steamrolled. And so we were raided and we were the first group in the country to walk away winners. So and that started this trajectory where I ended up meeting Thomas Massey probably a year or two later at a food freedom focused event. It's still one of my favorite memories of Thomas ever because he walks. into the Stonewall Jackson Hotel in Staunton, Virginia, because we're doing this event

near Polly Face Farm and Joel Salatin for obvious reasons. And, you know, Massey walks in. And I was kind of like overseeing certain parts of the event. So Massey walks in and I stand up to I'm like, hi, I'm John Moody. He's like, hey, I'm Congressman Thomas Massey. I go, yeah, I go, you look like your picture. So he shakes my hands and then he looks at me. He goes, do you want some eggs? I'm like, he's a sitting member of Congress who's offering me eggs. I just met him. I probably shouldn't say no.

So I'm like, sure, I'll take some eggs. He's like, let's go back to my car. So now we're going to this underground parking lot with a man I do not know. And I have this existential crisis moment where I'm like, I'm about to be abducted. My wife and children are never going to see me again because this Thomas Massey lookalike got me with an offer of free pastured eggs.

But we get down to his car in the parking lot. And one side of the bumper of his car is all local food stickers. Like grow more food, food freedom, eat what you know, like all local food, steward the environment bumper sticker slogans. Then the other side, and this is like, you know, this is 2013 or 14, he's driving this little red, totally beat up car as a congressman, just like almost a piece of junk car.

The other side is all firearms stickers. Like, you know, just as pro firearms as you. And I'm sitting here looking at the two sides of the car, imagining. somebody in Washington, D.C. being stuck in traffic behind Massey trying to reconcile these two usually opposed worldviews politically. But he gave me some pastured eggs because he told me Ronda would kill him if he came back home, not having gotten rid of all of these pastured eggs they'd built up. So let me ask you, one time I left the United States and I went to live in a Eastern European country that could have been borderline third world, but more like second world at that time.

And when I started eating over there, it seemed like for the first four or five days I was going through a detox. My body was completely emptying through my skin in every orifice. I don't even know what. Why was that? What the fuck? What is, I'm sorry, what's in our food? Oh, you just can't even begin to imagine. There's some good videos on YouTube where people will show the exact same product in Europe and in America.

And then they'll just turn to the ingredients. So these are theoretically identical companies, identical products, and the ingredients. and the ingredient list in Europe will be, you know, like this long. And the ingredient list in the United States will be like this long. And you're just like what? Like how, you know, in the United States, there are thousands of chemicals and food additives that are allowed to be added into our food

or used in growing our food or raising our food that almost no one else in the world allows to be used. And it's baffling to me. I mean, obviously it makes sense. They merely bought off the FDA and the USDA. Okay. Let's stop right there. Why?

Is it cheaper or is this nefarious? Well, I don't know if it's, you know, obviously as a Christian, I think there's like an overarching evil power at work in the world. But he can use stupidity just as easily as he can use malice. And there is a measure of malice, but a lot of it in my experience, actually dealing with these people, it's really just a combination of greed and stupidity. You know, it's just greed and stupidity. though what's that quote it's like um you know at a high enough level the difference between malice

and stupidity is indistinguishable because you know you look at like what some of these large companies did with i think it's pfoses like poly fluorinated putting into the water supply in west virginia in similar places you look at one of us what these companies did with like radium, or you look at, you know, the tobacco files and stuff for tobacco companies. You know, there's definitely a degree of malice in the sense of, we really do know this is bad, but we're going to do it anyway. But it's, you know, it's a type of malice where they're not doing it because they're trying to depopulate the world.

but it's the type of malice where they really don't care how much it harms people because they rationalize it away. It's the same kind of rationalization or malice behind sending American troops to Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere where they know they're going to get killed. or, I mean, even bombing other countries where, you know, I guess because they're not, because they're not American, their humanity doesn't matter. Or you just make all these rationalizations for, you know, oh, well, I mean, the terrorists are using them as human shields. You ever notice when you, when the United States kills or Israel kills a bunch of kids or something, it's because they were being used as human shields. And I mean, and apparently nobody except me and maybe, you know, a bunch of other people demand proof of that. It's like, oh, no, here, here's the proof. Here's an Israeli newspaper saying that they, okay.

Well, so, yeah, I mean, believing that they would put stuff in food that's just really going to make us sick and which, you know, in turn benefits pharma because now they get to, the cure to the sickness is to take pills and shots and everything that yeah i mean i don't i don't see a problem with it being nefarious or stupid or the fact that they know that it's making people sick when they're willing to just kill kill kids and women and and innocent people and send our people off to war for for wars for nothing other than to oh i don't know um you know settle some ethnic blood feuds from 500 years ago. Yeah, I'm sure we're going to be very successful at finally, you know, remedying. Yeah, it's, you know, this reminds me of the old phrase, you know, one death is a tragedy,

a thousand deaths as a statistic. And there's definitely that because a lot of these people are then the same people who will use a one-off shooting where a child dies. as why we need to abolish the Second Amendment, while they're profiting from killing thousands of children through diabetes and cancer and other stuff. And you're just like, you know, human inconsistency and hypocrisy and stupidity

are the only infinites in the universe outside of God. I always let you know, Einstein was, I think Einstein has a thing where he's like he was once asked, you know, what is infinite in the universe? And he goes, he's like, what are the only infinites we know of? And Einstein responds, the universe and human stupidity. But there's only one of those I'm not sure about referring to the universe. He's not sure if it's infinite, but he's pretty sure human stupidity is unbounded.

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The, well, here, let's go in this direction since it's something that's, you know, people have been talking about. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Maha, do you think if he goes as hard, like, I mean, I guess we found out last night, I saw reports that USAID is officially closed down. that they're gone. They shuttered the offices. Everybody's on leave or, you know, send home. Do you think that if somebody has the will and the power to do it, that they can turn this around, that they can not only pharma,

which is something that if you keep yourself healthy enough, you don't ever have to deal with, but, I mean, if the food supply is poison, then we're just doomed. So do you think he, do you like what you're hearing from him? Does it give you hope? Do you think that this is going to happen? Yeah.

Well, I think, you know, as I said at the fall at the rogue food conference, Joel Salatin and I put on, this is a once in a century opportunity to fix a bunch of problems. RFK cannot do it alone. So if you're somebody who cares about the future of your children, the future of your county, the future of your state, the future of your country,

this is the opportunity to get into the game. And, you know, fixing the food system, it honestly, you know, some of these problems are theoretically, theoretically daunting.

But, you could fix some of these problems within a decade just by addressing a handful of major policy areas. You know, what turned all of America from Western Ohio, all the way to Colorado, into a ceaseless field of corn and soy that is sprayed with the leftovers of World War II and is financed with an energy policy that has to be upheld by our military. Like, what did it?

It's all a very narrow range of government policies. I don't know if you've ever talked about Earl Butts on your show or familiar with him. You know, because people look around and people like, oh, this is just the way it's always been. Like Earl Butts was head of the USDA. And his entire USDA motto and policy was get big or get out. So if you want to understand current American history and you've never heard of Earl Butts, you need to go read him because he solves so many gaps in understanding why we are where we are.

So if you just undo a lot of his policies and how they kind of work out through the farming sector, through the economy, into the grocery. store. If you have the wisdom and skill to unwind some of these policies, you can in, again, in like a five, 10, 15 year window, you can quickly move us back to a measure of sanity. And, you know, New Zealand's obviously a tiny country. It's probably GDP is less than Texas. But New Zealand did this, I think like 15 years ago, where they had created a farming economy completely dependent and distorted by government subsidization and interventionism. And they as a nation, I don't understand how they even pulled this off at the time.

They just went cold turkey. They told farmers, you'll have three years to transition. or to get out of farming. So during these three years, you need to find ways you can be profitable without us having to prop you up. And now New Zealand has a very, very profitable, healthy farm economy

that actually functions in a market rather than being dependent upon taxpayers because people are doing dumb things. So I overall love everything. seeing coming out of RFK in terms of health policy, farm policy, and how these things kind of nest together. The challenge, I think, for Trump's entire administration is, will they be able to get Congress on board with making substantive legislative changes that free the executive branch to undo some of this stuff.

And that's, you know, so I think RFK will get done everything he can, given the limitations of a hostile activist judicial branch and a Republican Congress that is deeply beholden to special interests, especially agricultural. Do you think there's an issue there with the way farming is set up now where the farmer, you know, so like in Alabama, most of the people who have egg have chicken houses, they are basically doing business with the Coke. With with Coke. I mean, all their eggs go to Coke. It's a partnership. And there's a lot of that all throughout the country.

And it makes people good money. It definitely makes people better. It makes farmers better money or people who are willing to do this better money than if they were selling it locally or they were trying to do business with different companies. It seems to me like you're going to have to convince farmers and dairy people of this as well. Because they've basically been set into this almost like an automatic kind of. of a way of operating that if that is if that's interrupted i mean interrupts their cashful interrupts their income well i'm going to ask you why you just said that it's more profitable for them to sell into these systems than sell locally and i just ask where you're getting that

that data from just some numbers that i know um i don't think And I actually think that if they were selling locally, you can make, you definitely have a bigger profit margin because you're keeping it, you're doing more for yourself. But, you know, I guess it comes down to where a lot of this is where it's like, okay, well, I don't know. It just seems like a structure that has, it seems like one of those structures that's been creating. created to keep people enslaved to a certain way of doing things. And for them to go outside of that and to abandon it completely and go to another model is going to be very painful on a personal level for the person who's engaging in it. So my thought on this is the model you're appealing to is not profitable for the vast majority of

farmers. If they were not getting government subsidies directly and indirectly, none of them would farm that way. And if some of the costs of farming that way, they actually had to bear, drift, overspray, water table pollution, air pollution in terms of just how noxious CAFO raising of animals is, smells and otherwise. You know, that system only exists because we the taxpayer subsidize it to the tune of over probably $100 billion a year in direct and indirect subsidies. And then the government legally protects those farmers from any actual liability for harms they do to adjacent property owners.

And again, the other reason I don't think a lot of the farmers actually like these systems is because none of their kids generally want to take over. You know, I think the average age of farmers in America now is approaching something like 72 years old. like none of these people have who what what child grows up dreaming of caring for a barn full of 100,000 trapped chickens. You know, something like out of the horror movie saw. You know, it's this isn't a system that appeals to almost anybody, but especially the families that are trapped in it. But they truly are trapped in it.

So take Kentucky. I think it was in 1996, the state of Kentucky had over 8,000 family dairy farms. In 2016, the state had 800. That is a 90% loss. And the reason I know this is I was working on a piece of legislation in Kentucky. and we were sitting down across from the Kentucky Dairy Federation representatives talking about this legislation. And we looked at them and we said,

do you think you truly are representing the interests of your members when 90% of them have gone out of business or quit under your leadership? Like, can you really sit there with a straight face? But the reason people are selling eggs to the Koch brothers is because of the subsidies and because of the regulatory protections and scheme. You know, why is almost all milk in America pasteurized? Because until recently, almost every single state in the nation, and this only started, I think, in the 50s.

So this is very, very recent. I think Kentucky did not pass its pasteurized milk ordinance. Many states didn't pass pasteurized milk ordinances until the 70s. So making raw milk sales illegal for farmers is a completely historically new thing. It's only been around 40, 50, 60 years in most places. But once you pass that one regulatory chain, there's now nowhere else for farmers to sell their milk and they're caught in the system. And that's why, you know, again, it's not that we have to change everything.

But if we're strategic and if somebody like RFK is strategic and you change some of the most important things, it's like flicking over dominoes that other things are going to naturally fall. It's going to naturally move a lot of the board. And that's what me and other people are really focusing on doing. One of the highlights of the past 10 years has been the number of states that have adopted wide-ranging food freedom legislation. And I think even a few states have gone the constitutional amendment route. And what's amazing when you go visit those states is just how much that is changing things on the ground, that you can make food in your house again and sell it to your neighbors.

And you're like, oh, John, well, what are you talking about here? Like, that's just a mom and her daughter selling $30,000 a year. What does that matter? Well, it may not seem like a lot, but that's a mom who can actually now stay home and homeschool kids and they can still afford a decent standard of living. But that's not one mom. That is 10,000 families doing that.

That is $30,300 million, $300,000, $3 billion quite quickly. You know, think of things like yogurt. Yogurt in America. I was doing the numbers on this recently, thinking through a couple product categories. I want to say yogurt and number, America is an $8 billion industry. Just yogurt.

Imagine if because we change the regulatory environment, instead of it being 20 companies profiting from $8 billion, it was 20,000 farms. So there's so many, again, small. areas where if you tweak these things and you let farmers, you let local economies be free again, you can very, very quickly, you know, reset the playing board. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal mustabs, when the door

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Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Doonbiog, Kush Farage. No, I'm 100% for farmers being able to do whatever they want for there to be an open market. I just have to play devil's advocate because, you know, that's what people are, people are going to, people immediately go to the negative when you've been losing for so long. Well, and so.

Yeah, and the big thing, people just have to understand, like, that farming model is not something farmers willingly chose. You know, just like immigration in our nation, none of us were sitting around 30 years ago saying, we need to let millions of people every year be allowed to come to this country at our expense. We didn't choose this. It was engineered and foisted upon us. And again, people are waking up to this. This is a big reason for Trump's election, why J.D. Vance's messaging is so popular.

This didn't happen naturally. People didn't naturally choose this. moms in the 1970s didn't in a vacuum stop breastfeeding their children. There were, you know, huge forces deployed to create these outcomes.

And the great thing is seeing more and more people begin to realize that. And I want them to realize that about food and farming. You know, the reason you go back and look at pictures in the 1970s, and you just can't find fat people. You know, finding a fat person in the 1970s is even harder than finding where's Waldo in one of those Waldo books. It's just like, you know, pictures of people.

It's just like they barely exist. And now 60% of Americans are fat or obese or more. So, you know, these are things that were engineered. that we now live with. And because they were engineered, you can engineer escape routes. We really can strategically attack policy areas, economic areas.

And the big thing probably for your listeners to realize is doing these things has beneficial political ramifications that your listeners probably care about. like blue cities dominating otherwise red states. If you can restore more economic power to rural areas, that attracts more businesses and people to stay in them. And as we talked about earlier with culture shaping, when you keep people in those areas,

they naturally trend and stay more conservative. And so we want to think through how these things interplay and where do we get a lot of bang for our buck? Where can we make a lot of progress that's really permanent progress towards long-term things we care about? And food and farming and those types of issues are one area that when I started in this area 20 years ago, all the conservative people thought I was crazy.

And all the liberal people thought I must be a liberal being a guy running a food buying club in 2006 in Louisville, Kentucky. But now it's changed. You have the New York Times running pieces, defending processed foods, you know, because they have to counter signal, you know, Trump and RFK and company. No, that's, you put it perfectly. You know, you're saying something that I haven't been able to say when I talk about local politics is that when you're empowering these local businesses, and that's what a farm should be. It should be a local business that may do business with national companies, whatever, that you're taking power out of the city.

You know, you're also saying, you know, you can also tell a city, you know, we grow your food. We can choose not to do business with you. You know, if you, if your power is encroaching too much upon us is, you know, I've always, when people bring up New York, New York City, you know, I hyperboically say, just build a wall around the city and let them eat each other. Or just stop delivering, stop delivering to it. you know, stop delivering food to them. Because they're psychotic. They're going to take us down. I mean, Washington, D.C. and its surrounding counties have been trying to get us into a nuclear war for the last three years.

So it's like, what do you think you're going to be able to do? The only way you can defeat them is you have to figure out how to take their power away from them. and it's a lot easier to do from the outside than it is to do from the inside and entrenched as entrenched as they become unless you can figure out ways and hopefully this is something Trump's doing and Doge is doing with taking away so many of the trying to take away these agencies that fund them that that's the way you take away their power but in the meantime you have to make your stand somewhere else and making your stand somewhere else takes away their power.

Yeah. Well, and I think it's going to be interesting, depending on how much Trump and Elon are able to turn off that tap of water, how much that's going to trickle into local and state-level politics. Because my personal theory is one reason the Democrats have been so effective politically is so much of this money was being laundered. It freed, it freed them up to do far more because the vast majority of this money

was being laundered back to liberal organizations. And if they're losing hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, they're either going to have to, you know, they're going to have to spend more money to get that tap turned back on. But if they can't get that tap turned back on

for a number of years. I wonder how much we're going to see that at the state level in terms of nonsense messaging and so much else, they won't be able to finance. But, you know, interesting aside on just how the next four years is going to play out. Yeah, I've already started a hearing out of Birmingham here. Montgomery is our capital, but Birmingham is the biggest, is the big city. people complaining there, oh,

this, Trump has shut down this thing and this is what was financing this here. And I'm like, I'll get a violin for you. Yeah. I mean, I don't care. I don't care. You, I can just look at the messaging you're putting out there and I know that I want you weakened. So, yeah, yeah.

Hopefully they are getting something done. really the I think people don't understand that the health issue is how important that is. I mean, you're just, if you're, if you're not healthy,

if you don't have access to it, at least have access to healthy food, if you want to have a choice between garbage and something that, sure, give people that choice, just like if people want the choice had taken vaccines or whatever. Give them that choice, but there should be, there should be a choice.

And if that's all we're given is a choice between one and two, I'll take it. And I don't think, I don't think a lot of people even on, you know, the extreme right, realize just exactly how important that is to, you know, the future going forward. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, just one interesting piece of information, you know, men who are overweight to have poor diets have far lower testosterone levels. This is something all over the media the past 10 years, how men's testosterone levels in America have just been plummeting, average testosterone

levels. And at the same time, when you look at research on how male hormone health affects their political patterns. You know, if we could find a way to sneak TRT into the entire nation's water supply before midterm elections, we'd probably have the entire country go Republican. Like, you know, there's, you know, your health impacts your politics. Like a weak man who has not cared for his body well and not managed his money well wants protected from those choices. And that protection comes in the form of government imposed.

Nobody can own guns and government police and government insurance. whereas a man who stewards his life well, he wants to be protected from the government. So you kind of see this, there's this nature of one group of people want to government to protect them from themselves and one group of people want protected from the government because they're able to protect themselves.

And that dynamic is a very dangerous one we now have in our country where we have such a large class of people who don't want to live, they don't want to reap what they've been sowing. They don't want to live with their decisions. They don't want to admit, I should have got up off the couch, I should have quit drinking beer, I should not have been eating out of a clown head four days a week. And everybody knows these things are bad. Like you don't need somebody up on a television.

It, you know, it always amazes me, you know, nobody wakes up obese overnight. It always amazes me the human capability to purposely ignore warning signs. You know, when the first time you have to let out another notch in your belt. And that alone is like, You know, when I noticed that for me, I'm just like, you know, dude, less cookies, let you know, more time on the assault. But the second notch, but then when you can no longer see your toes, like, isn't that a five alarm fire to you? And so partly, too, we need to recover a robust idea of being personally responsible and accountable. no longer passing the buck, no longer blaming mom, dad, my third grade teacher, this, that, and the other.

But no, like, I'm responsible for these things. I can't think of a better message to end it on. So tell everybody where they can find your work, you're writing, whatever you want to plug right now, go right ahead and do it. Yeah, Joel and I do a conference called Rogue Food. We're doing one in Florida, two weeks from today, actually. So we'd love to have you join us for that event. It's going to have real food meals, outdoor workouts in between teaching and other sessions. And then I'm on I'm on X.

I think my handles like resists is fertile. So short for resistance is fertile, which is kind of my personal life slogan. And then I'm on Facebook when I'm not under ban, which is pretty often on Facebook. So. Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate everything and have you back on sometime soon. Yeah, it's great to meet you. I've heard great things about the work you're doing, so I appreciate you having me. I appreciate that, John. Thank you very much.