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March 8, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
48:37
Kiss the Ground and Regenerative Agriculture with John Roulac

John Roulac, co-producer of the hit Netflix documentary "Kiss the Ground" discusses regenerative agriculture, fake meat, and other topics with RFK Jr. For more info on Kiss the Ground including where to watch the important film visit: https://kissthegroundmovie.com/

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Hey everybody, my guest today is John Rulak.
As founder of Nutiva, John has sourced and formulated a billion dollars in retail sales of organic superfoods.
John is a serial entrepreneur, investor, writer, philanthropist, and filmmaker.
Most recently, he's the executive producer of the Netflix blockbuster Film documentary really, Kiss the Ground, which is about regenerative agriculture.
And we've talked about that on this podcast before then.
Amazing film.
John has founded six nonprofit organizations, including Great Plains Regeneration, Agroforestry Regeneration Communities, ARC, And four is forever.
And John, reading your biography, I could confuse it for my own because we've spent our lifetimes working on essentially identical issues, which is water pollution, big agriculture, industrialization and commoditization of agriculture and human beings and soils.
Factory farms, GMO agriculture, pesticides, and toxins to children.
Let's talk about regenerative agriculture, because that's really what we came here to talk about.
Let me ask you a question that I think a lot of people wonder about it.
I think about this every time my wife, when we go out to lunch, she always orders the Impossible Burger.
Is that a good health choice?
Let me ask you.
And is it a good environmental choice?
It is not.
That's like a softball thrown to a hitter.
Unfortunately, The industrial ag, Monsanto, Bayer, you know, the fertilizer companies, they had a real problem.
People didn't want to buy industrial foods, killing bees, destroying topsoils, you know, causing death zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
And so they came up with a new term.
How can you repackage a dysfunctional, degenerative system?
The new term is called plant-based.
As a company, I pioneered organic, plant-based, whether it's hemp seeds or coconut oil.
Many of our customers, many of the top vegans and plant-based people in the United States eat Nativa products.
We were certified organic.
And a pasta burger came along.
They're basically taking GMO soy and then a GMO fake blood.
They put in all sorts of different other ingredients from GMO corn, natural flavors, etc.
And it's not healthy.
And just to give you a sense of where, of every seed, and of course you're aware, but this, every seed, every GMO seed is dipped in neonics, the GMO corn and soy.
And that neonic, it's like as a protection.
And in France, they're banning it in agriculture like that.
And so then as that plant grows, it expresses energy.
Because it's been coated in the seed, it expresses that toxin at the gene level.
Explain what Neonix is.
Neonix is a very toxic pesticide that some say is way more toxic than Roundup.
And it kills insects and birds.
And it is a seed coating.
These are called neonicotinoids.
Neonicotinoids, yeah.
Neonicotinoids.
And it's a coating, seed coating.
So when the bees come in the morning in the dew on the plants, Or getting any of the nectar.
They're sipping one of the most toxic pesticides we've ever created.
And it is one of the reasons why in the last 40 years, a bunch of Germans decided, citizen scientists decided to go out and start testing in the fields in Germany, in forests, in meadows, in agricultural lands, in wetlands.
And they found that we've reduced 70% of all winged insects since the 1970s.
And that's been repeated all over the world now.
So we're literally losing 1% to 2% of winged insects.
I'm talking about ladybugs, bees, wasps, butterflies.
Remember when we were young boys, you'd walk out in a field and you might see 10 or 15 butterflies?
Today, if we see one or two, it's like, ah, look at that, there's a butterfly.
If you drive in an agricultural valley in California, you used to be filled with bugs.
You'd have to, you know, pull over the side of the road when you wash your car and I mean, get some gas and wash your windshield, like the bug test.
If we've lost 70% of our winged insects in this last decade they've been monitoring, and we're losing 1% to 2% a year, we're seeing a huge loss of biodiversity.
Then if you go to the oceans, we've lost 50% to 60% of the phytoplankton.
And the phytoplankton is dying because of the heat, the temperature in the oceans.
And also because of the carbon content, the acidification.
So the oceans are becoming more acidic.
They've increased 30% more acidification in the last 50 years.
And again, like the winged insects, we're losing 1% to 2% a year of that.
Shellfish can no longer mobilize calcium to create their shells.
And so you're seeing collapses in shellfish fisheries because the ocean is becoming acid.
Yes.
To me, it's the most frightening thing.
We want to kill the oceans.
And I'm one of the few people in the regenerative agriculture that speaks about oceans.
I show a picture in one of my presentations, and there's a picture of agricultural fields, and there's a picture of an ocean.
And it's like in our generic kind of top-down view, we have people who are in charge of oceans, Protecting the oceans and they never talk to the agricultural people and the people who are protecting our agricultural and soils and environmentalists and lands and and they never talk they never deal with the ocean but it's one system.
So one of the the major contributor of ocean pollution which is also killing ocean species is agriculture and agriculture Through the process of regeneration, and you may know our mutual friend Paul Hawken, who wrote the book Regeneration, and is featured in Kiss the Ground film.
Paul shows that there's all these solutions.
We can use regeneration to build healthy soil, and in the process of building healthy soil, we create healthy plants, we create healthy animals, healthy people, but it sequesters the carbon, and now even more important, it serves as a sponge.
So some of these farms, let's say it rains five, six inches in a day.
On a degenerative farm that Impossible Burger buys their soy from, the soil washes away into the ocean and into the rivers and creeks.
And in the regenerative one, all that water stays in there and goes into the groundwater.
And I'll give you an example of why this is so important.
I recently went to a regenerative almond field day.
There was 300 people there.
It was amazing.
And people, farmers, the president of the California Almond Board was there.
And some friends of mine, Rosie and Ward Burrow, they're great organic farmers, including almonds.
You know, my well, we had to issue my well.
I called the well person up because they didn't have any water.
And he's saying like, well, I thought they did all the maintenance on the well last year.
You know, I thought, you know, the pump should be good.
And then finally drilled down to the person and he said, look, I have to tell you, You're not the only one who's calling me.
All of my neighbors in Madera and Central California, their wells are dropping.
And so our water, we're draining our aquifers, not only in California, but across the Great Plains.
I work with a group called Great Plains Regeneration.
I'm a co-founder and working with farmers and ranchers.
And we can restore the water cycle.
We can restore better food.
We can do this, but we have to stop using so many chemicals But the challenge is all the money is going to plant-based.
All these private equity companies, they're putting billions of dollars.
They're losing all this money.
Now they want to make fake cellular meat.
And you know what the feedstock is?
Industrial agriculture.
It's a real challenge, but we need to focus on that and learn to respect nature.
And I wrote an article about a year ago, which you would like.
It's called Make America Rivers Blue Again.
And it's all about the role of agriculture because our rivers used to be blue.
It's actually not blue, but it's a reflection from the sky and industrial agriculture makes them green and brown.
So, you know, we can make our rivers blue again and regenerative agriculture is the pathway and people They need to vote for politicians that are going to move us that way, that we need to eat that way, invest that way, and don't buy Impossible Burgers.
You'd be much better off to, you know, eat some organic lentils or, you know, the most outrageous thing to say today is to eat an actual...
Burger from, you know, holistically grazed, regenerative beef, which is actually showing, just like the buffalo created the great soils in the Great Plains, cows mimicking the buffalo system of moving fastly, quickly moving them, can do that.
And there's a lot of pushback on that, as you know.
Most environmentalists I think environmentalists have to understand the difference between grass-fed, free-range cows.
And most of our meat now comes from factory farms, which is an intensive agriculture that is, you know, is about one of the worst things that you can do in the environment.
A hog bruises 10 times the amount of fecal material by weight as a human being.
So if you have a hog farm, which, like, I think it was a Circulo, the Smithfields farm up in Utah.
Right.
It has 800,000 sows on it.
That one factory is producing more sewage than all the human beings in New York City combined.
And New York City has 14 sewage treatment plants that cost billions and billions of dollars to build and then to maintain and operate.
But with Smithfields Farm, which is now owned by the Chinese, They just dump that waste into the environment, untreated sewage.
There's really, there's nothing different between human fecal waste and all fecal waste.
It is, you know, just as dangerous and just as putrid.
Let me ask you this.
You've explained that when my wife eats her impossible burger...
She is exterminating 80% of our insects.
She's poisoning the water and she's destroying the ocean.
I don't know if you want to tell her they're on a nice dinner with a glass of wine.
I'm not going to tell her this.
I'm going to play her this podcast and let her listen to you tell her.
But is she improving her own health by eating one of those?
No, it's not healthy for you.
I would say if you're going to choose between Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat, Beyond Meat is definitely a better choice.
But you'd be better to...
Will you explain those in detail and what are people actually eating when they eat that stuff?
Yeah, what they're eating is highly...
Highly processed foods, which goes into your body and your body doesn't recognize it as food because it has dozens of ingredients.
It has acids, it has flavors, it has ingredients, methyl cellulose, thickeners, and things to hold together.
So you'd be much better to eat a salad and eat some almonds or So I'm not a fan of this highly processed industrial foods.
There's pesticides in it too.
And pesticides.
Yeah, you're getting pesticide residues.
And even parts per billion, that just...
Reminded me, ironically, these gung-ho pro-pesticide people are creating, we are feminizing our boys and making our girls more masculine by these endocrine disruptors that are used in agriculture.
And so there's a phenomenon where in frogs, we know this, We've seen this in the last couple decades, that frogs now, it's changing at the chromosome level, and it's causing confusion of the sexual genes.
You know, there's a series of studies on atrazine.
Exactly.
Which is the most common, it's ubiquitous pesticide.
On corn.
So the entire Midwest is basically just coated with atrazine and the water supply.
There's basically no water supply in the Midwest now.
That is not heavily contaminated with atrazine.
And they can take atrazine in labs.
They first noticed this in frog buns.
They can take atrazine in labs.
And they can turn male, fully developed male frogs into female frogs that will produce viable eggs.
Oh, you're taking this chemical that can hermaphrodize reptiles and amphibians.
And we have no idea what it does to the human immune system.
But we're seeing in places where it's heavily utilized, that voice.
Have delayed onset puberty.
Girls have delayed onset puberty.
And there's all kinds of other problems, like you say, the, you know, masculization of girls.
But there's all, you know, there's endocrine disruptors.
There's what they call the dirty dozen, which are phthalates, other plasticizer stuff that's in plastic.
When you drink plastic, you're getting this stuff.
Flame retardants, glyphosate, organophosphate pesticides, and many, many others.
And we're being exposed to these all the time.
BPAs, which is another chemical in plastics.
You know, it's really, it's horrific what we're doing to our children.
If we don't take care of nature, if we don't take care of our water systems, and if we don't restore our soils and natural systems, climate change and environmental collapse is going to destroy our entire civilization and the natural world.
You and I know that.
And many people do.
That's what we need to start focusing on.
And that's what I spend a lot of my time on.
I'm actually putting in food for us with NGO groups in Guatemala and East Africa.
I'd love to talk a little about that as well.
You talked about fake blood.
That being...
Or synthetic blood.
Yeah, synthetic.
Yeah, genetically.
Let's hear a little bit about that, because I know that will at least, even while she's eating this environment-killing poison, that it will make her enjoy it more if she knows that there's synthetic blood in it.
So just tell us.
They've genetically modified some, maybe it's a yeast or something.
And the FDA wouldn't approve it because they didn't think it was safe.
And then after they hired the right lobbyists and law firms, have you ever heard about that?
I've seen it before.
Let me put it that way.
You've seen that before.
And so then they got that approved.
I do want to mention, there's one farmer that would...
I don't mean to interrupt you because I really want you to finish that.
I don't What do they do?
Do they grow it on a mesh or on a...
They grow it in a lab.
They grow it in a lab and multiply it.
And so it makes it look like fake blood and with Impossible Burger.
That's what they do.
Okay.
I'm just saying that is really...
Like, I will eat almost anything, but that is...
I wouldn't want to eat it.
Yeah.
The good news is companies like Beyond Meat or Impossible Burger, they're losing billions of dollars.
You know, they're just...
The more they sell, the more they lose.
So...
They're very poorly run.
Their cost of goods is way out of whack.
And their sales are declining.
So this eventually will collapse of its own weight.
But now they're so desperate they're going to Congress and Tufts University trying to give them more research.
They want the federal government to pay tens of billions of dollars to subsidize their destruction.
It's unfortunate.
But I wanted to mention there is some good news.
Besides all these toxic chemicals we're talking about, giving you ammunition for your lovely wife.
Don't have that guest on again, Bobby.
But there's a guy named Rick Clark, and he's an example.
He was a farmer, conventional farmer, and he decided To study nature, and he's from Indiana, 6,500 acres, and he doesn't till, and he's now figured out how to grow corn and soybeans with not one ounce of Roundup, no pesticides, no herbicides, no chemical fertilizers, working with nature.
And we can do this.
You know, Wendell Berry, you know, one of the great farmers in the 70s, talked about this.
And so we're now seeing more and more farms I was out at this 1200-acre almond farm in California, and we had someone named Jonathan Lundgren, which would be a great guest for you also sometime, and he's an entomologist.
He was forced out from USDA, and he shows that in the organic regenerative systems, there's 30% more birds.
There's all sorts of more insects, and more insects means birds can multiply because they eat all those.
The problem, destroying our environment, the solution is regeneration.
That's our opportunity.
That's our path forward.
And that's what I'm excited about.
And one of the things we're doing outside the United States is I decided to support NGOs like in Guatemala with Contour Lines and Permaculture Paradise Institute in Malawi.
And so we're planting food for us and we got a $400,000 grant in Guatemala and we're planting different nitrogen-fixing species and then we'll put in avocados and mangoes and jackfruit and then grow on an alley crop system next to the nitrogen trees, ginger, turmeric, pineapples, cassava and It's a much more productive system.
It's multi-species, and the farmers then don't want to leave and go to another land.
And we've put in 1200 food for us, and with 1200 families in Guatemala, our goal is to do over 100,000.
And when I talked to them, they said, Come on, we can do way more than a hundred thousand.
Imagine if we could do a million food forests in Guatemala and we did a webinar and eight people from USAID registered talking about this.
So I'm very passionate about this.
They don't require fertilizers and they get food every month of the year, depending on the crop.
And it's not that expensive.
So essentially what we're doing is, you're going to laugh at this, we're essentially taking money from Big corporations, including pharmaceutical companies, they're washing their guilt by giving money to organizations that end up flowing to us, and we plant those trees.
And I will take money from large organizations and help indigenous people, help become more food sovereign.
I'll do that any day.
Some people say, how could you take money from them?
Like, if I can plant hundreds of thousands of food for us and help those families.
And the other thing that we do is, We don't take any farmers in the program unless their family and their wives are involved.
And we find we're much more successful.
That's what makes me passionate about, even though the news is very, very challenging these days, as you know.
Most recently, I was surprised to see you sort of crossing the line, this very, very dangerous line, and writing about pharmaceutical products and also directly talking about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
You know, that really impressed me because we're living in a weird world today.
And I know you've spent most of your entire life as a liberal Democrat.
And yet, most liberal Democrats, as you mentioned in that article, It's kind of a bewildering phenomenon.
These are people who, for most of their lives, have understood that the pharmaceutical industry is really one of the most evil, craven, venal structures that the world has ever known, and yet they completely are subsumed in the recent orthodoxies about that pharma finally is telling the truth about vaccines and these other Remedies for COVID-19.
Talk about that a little, because you must have known it's a very dangerous choice for you to stray from regenerative agriculture and pesticides into the pharmaceutical space.
Thanks for the introduction.
And, you know, if I look back I was very fortunate.
When I was like 21, I started cramping up playing basketball.
And basketball is like my favorite sport and hobby that I do.
And I had to really think about my diet because it turned out my diet was really bad.
So I basically became a health enthusiast or a health nut in my early 20s.
And then that had an impact on me.
And then when I was 40, right when I started up Nativa, I got bit by a tick.
I didn't think much about it.
But a year later, I was having a hard time walking.
And it took me a while to figure out that I had Lyme disease.
And essentially, I was in a startup mode of a company as a semi-cripple, and it was hard for me to walk upstairs.
Before you continue, let me just ask you, were you living on the East Coast at that time?
No, I was living in Sonoma County in Northern California.
So Sonoma County, it was probably an unusual disease at that point and more difficult to diagnose.
Yeah, there wasn't as many people.
I went to a Lyme specialist.
I took every antibiotic in the book that they recommended, one after another after another.
I mean, literally just touching my leg was searing pain.
And then I came to a realization.
I was very angry about it.
I came to a realization that I could focus on gratitude for what I've had in my life.
I had 40 years of really good health.
Not everybody gets 40 years of good health.
And then out of the blue, I got a phone call of a friend of a friend said that they also had Lyme disease and they went down to a clinic in Mexico.
I talked to the doctor.
I went down there and after six days of IV treatments of vitamin C and ozone, I could run.
A few years later, I was doing triathlons.
Today, I play basketball against 20 and 30-year-old guys.
I've had a basis of being healthy and being in the food business, I dealt with the FDA. The FDA was threatening our industry saying we couldn't say non-GMO in around 2010.
When this COVID thing happened and I started to research, after about a year, I started talking to my friends who were doctors, I realized something wasn't right and I had to make a choice.
I could either just go along with the narrative and have a nice semi-retired life.
Or I could do what was right for the people, what was right for our health, and also for the environment.
I mean, COVID and vaccines are horrible.
The greenhouse gas emissions, the hospital waste, the lost lives.
And I'm like, how are they going to cancel me?
I already sued the DEA back in 2002 and won that lawsuit.
So people kind of know me as someone who takes on powerful interests.
So I made that decision.
I realized I was jumping into something where I could be harassed and attacked.
And I have.
Many of my friends won't speak to me.
They say I'm losing it, etc.
Yeah, I consider myself liberal and progressive, and I find a lot of my friends who are of similar ideology who are health-focused, who know about the immune system, We haven't moved.
We haven't changed.
And we find other liberals and Democrats have become more authoritarian.
They're actually moving to the right.
In some ways, I feel that the modern-day Democratic Party, not all of them, but some of them are actually more authoritarian in the right.
And that's kind of strange to me.
It's kind of like...
And in my article, I go into a little about how that occurred.
I think it's a tribal thing.
I think Trump impacted it.
But at the end of the day, I just chose to do what I feel is best, and that was to speak out.
I kind of have this philosophy as my personal life, as how I show up in the world.
If there's a door that people say, don't walk through that door, because if you walk through that door, you're going to have consequences.
But if I think that that's going to help people, I made a commitment when I was in my 20s.
I will walk through that door.
And when the DEA said that a hemp bar with four seeds, hemp, sunflower, pumpkin And sesame seed and honey was in the same category as heroin.
I said, that's wrong, and we should sue the DEA. I'm not going to just go out of business.
And because we won that case, and I don't know if we're going to win on this pharmaceutical issue.
You've been at this much longer battle, but I feel glad to be able to stand up.
I find it interesting, Robert, I'm virtually one of the only people in the organic natural food industry leaders who've stood up for this.
Now, I have many of them will contact me and say, I'm afraid I can't say anything.
I really like you, like what you're doing, John.
A lot of people contact me and say, Love what you're doing, really it's great, but I can't say anything personally because I'm afraid to be attacked.
What kind of world is it when leaders of the organic and natural food industries are threatened by the pharmaceutical industry and so they become silent?
That's, I think...
I think that is the big question of our times, is how is this happening in our country?
How is this pharmaceutical-inforced censorship so widespread, so acquiesced to by the champions, the once champions of free speech?
And have you had any of those conversations with your liberal friends, or have they just shut you down?
Some of them are more open, and others just want to just They don't want to hear it.
They just don't want to even consider it.
But I think over time, hopefully they will.
It's bizarre.
I think some of it is they know it's wrong, but they feel if they speak out, then that that's some way that's going to support the Republicans and Trump.
And so that's part of it.
There's also this hatred towards Trump.
One thing I had to learn as a younger man, to let go of hate.
Like, I did not like the Bushes.
And I used to think I hated them.
And I had to learn to let go of hate.
You know, Martin Luther King Jr.
spoke about that.
You know, we don't have time for hate.
So you can dislike your opponent, but when you start hating people, then that makes you kind of cross the line into a different way.
And I want to come from more of a position of truth and love and respect than hate.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you on that.
As they say, hatred is like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die.
And it's corrosive on the person who is hating.
And it's destructive, ultimately.
It turns into a kind of self-victimization that paralyzes people and distorts their view of reality.
And I agree that that's what happened.
I mean, I kind of watched this evolution in my party, in the Democratic political party, Because, you know, my uncle was leading, Ted Kennedy leading the battle for universal healthcare for many, many years as chairman of the Senate Health Committee.
And then when Obama passed Obamacare, he couldn't do it unless he got the pharmaceutical companies on board.
So he had to make a compromise.
And pharmaceutical companies have always been the enemies of the Democratic Party.
But he made the compromise with them that if they supported Obamacare, he would give them the ability to sell their drugs to Medicare without bargaining.
To basically name their price and have Medicare and Medicaid buy their drugs.
And that's what Biden was talking about this week, is we pay more for pharmaceuticals than any country in the world.
And it's because of that deal that got all the pharmaceutical companies on board with Obamacare.
And all of a sudden, for the first time, Democrats, because they were supporting Obamacare, were able to justify taking money from pharmaceutical companies.
Democrats were usually the much poorer party because the only people that Democratic candidates and congressional members, most of them, I'm talking about the general rule, Was that they couldn't take money from chemicals or oil companies or tobacco companies or pesticide companies or big agriculture.
And there are a lot of exceptions, but this was generally the truth.
And the only people they really could take big money, who could write them big checks, was organized labor and trial lawyers.
And all of a sudden they had an industry that Democrats could take money from, which is the pharmaceutical industry, without taking a lot of, you know, heat from in their own party.
And so Democrats became hooked on pharmaceutical money.
And then in 2016, when all of these vaccine mandates, you know, you had a couple of measles outbreaks and there started to be mandates in most of the states and the abandonment of religious exemptions and philosophical exemptions and medical exemptions in New York and California. you had a couple of measles outbreaks and there started The people pushing those bills were mainly Democrats, although it was still very fluid.
You know, you had Democrats and Republicans on both sides, but it was being driven by Democrats.
And then during the Trump campaign, Trump came out several times and said that he believed that vaccines could cause autism.
And for Democrats, that became a potent political issue because they could say he's as crazy on this and went in the same dumpster as his climate change denialism.
And then it became a cultural issue, and it became a tribal issue, and it was really kind of a badge of membership and of rectitude in the Democratic Party.
And I think that, you know, I watched this happen over a couple of decades.
And, you know, even when I was younger, It was the Democrats created these agencies like NIH and CDC and FDA and HHS. Those were all Democratic programs.
And the Republicans are always hostile to those agencies.
And the Democrats found themselves in kind of this permanent posture of defending those agencies from Republican attacks, from defamation, but also from budget cuts.
And so it was natural for them to take that posture of surrender, and they didn't notice.
While they were facing the outside world with the regulatory agencies behind them, the regulatory agencies were systematically being hollowed out and captured by the industry they were supposed to regulate and turned ultimately into the subsidiaries for those industries.
And the Democrats really noticed that the agencies they were defending were no longer public health agencies.
They were, you know, pharmaceutical promotion agencies.
And I didn't mean to go on for so long.
It's an interesting subject of how this happened and one that, you know, I find really fascinating.
How did the Democrats suddenly become the party of pharma?
Thank you for the overview, and I agree, and that's interesting on the details.
In a way, pharma punked the Democrats.
They're laughing all the way to the bank, and then they're going to elect Republicans in the coming elections and make sure the price of pharmaceutical drugs stay high.
That's the end result.
And the way they're doing, they're forcing the Democratic Party to take outrageous positions Which then caused people like myself and others to go, why do I want to support candidates who want to put masks on kids for years and years when most countries, they're not putting masks on kids, they're still requiring them.
Why should you have a vaccine passport?
If people want to take a vaccine, they should have a right to do that.
Nothing wrong with that.
But to say you're fired from your job You can't travel.
You're a second-class citizen.
People, many of my friends that I've surprised, they said, John, I'm never going to vote Democratic now.
And they're for gay rights and they're environmentalists, but they're just like tired of it.
And then the end result is it's going to benefit pharma.
So it's a very strange thing.
And that's why I wrote my article.
I've been getting a lot of interesting feedback.
And I appreciate your organization running it on from corrupted to trusted liberal Americans' perceptions of the FDA. So I kind of get into that.
But yeah, it's interesting.
My real passion is regenerative ag and regeneration and protecting nature and waterways.
We have a similar path there.
But if we lose on this issue, we're going to see that if we're going to create some sort of authoritarian system, they can turn your bank account off, they can turn your access To going anywhere, just with a flip of a switch.
So, you know, one day it's, quote, you know, far-right truckers, and they're bad, and we're going to go after them.
And, you know, I think, I mean, you and I, we could go down the rabbit hole real far down that, you know, maybe we don't want to necessarily do that, because it's a dark rabbit hole if you go down there.
And I had friends who were kind of, a few years ago, shared some of these things.
I said, that's kind of conspiratorial, but Or maybe I didn't say that, but I said, well, let's hope it doesn't go there.
And some of my astute scientist friends, they said, John, the conspiracies are turning out to be true.
I mean, how is it that they can say, we're going to end COVID, but anybody who doesn't have a vaccine has to wear a mask indoors?
I mean, that's what Governor Gavin Newsom is saying.
That's what the City of LA supposedly is saying.
I think LA County is not taking that position.
And that's what the CDC is saying.
And we're finding out now that if you're vaccinated, you know, they said, oh, if you take a vaccine, You're not going to pass it.
This is going to be good for your mother, you know, because you protect your mother.
Get this vaccine.
You won't pass.
And now they're fine.
It's not sterilized.
You pass the vaccine.
You pass COVID on.
You can get sick.
And now they're finding very high percentage of people in the hospitals from Israeli data or, you know, and now in Scotland, it's so bad.
They won't even Scotland won't won't report the data.
They said, because if we report the data, who's in the hospitals, vaccinated or unvaccinated, it's going to lead to vaccine hesitancy.
But it's data.
And, you know, even the New York Times reported this week, and the New York Post, that CDC has been systematically hiding data from the American people.
These are not public health agencies.
These are now subsidiaries of what essentially is a giant enterprise being run by pharma.
And it shouldn't surprise us.
I mean, pharmaceutical companies have paid $80 billion in criminal penalties since 2000.
These are...
Pfizer paid the biggest criminal penalty in the history of our country, you know, on pharmaceutical issues, the biggest.
And so, you know, what happens when those criminal companies...
Capture an agency.
They all become part of that enterprise.
And that's what I think you and I and other people are seeing that.
But, you know, I think what's happened to our party, which I think about all the time, because I've run into people who are incredibly smart, who have good hearts, who are well-intentioned, who love our country, who are skeptical of traditionally of corporations.
And they appear to be in this deep hypnosis, where if you even start questioning them about their beliefs, it's kind of a religious...
It's a religious...
You know, it's like a hardwired orthodoxy that, you know, the more that you question and challenge it, the deeper entrenched it becomes and the angrier the person becomes who's, you know, you're asking them about some of the ironies that are connected to their belief system.
Right.
It's kind of the, I joke, it's almost like in the movie The Matrix.
There'll be ordinary people walking down the street And then all of a sudden they become Mr.
Anderson's an agent.
And that's what's happened.
People literally were thinking, you know, open-minded, didn't trust pharma, and they became, you know, huge advocates for the pharmaceutical industry.
Yeah, so it's kind of ironic.
The other thing I wanted to mention, yeah, the lack of transparency is horrible.
I wrote another article called Pharma's Culture War in September.
One of the things was I kept reading about the use of, you know, generic drugs in India.
And so I started Googling and I started doing research on the internet.
And I noticed, I was like, am I just going down some Trump conspiracy?
You know, like, I can't find any information.
I'm going to Google, like, am I going to write some article and just Put up some BS, you know, and like destroy my reputation as a longtime environmentalist.
And so then I said, well, I know somebody from India.
And so he said, well, we'll call my cousin.
You know, she's going to law school in Cambridge and she's like the, you know, real smart one in the family.
So I talked to her.
And she lived in Delhi, you know, like upper middle class Indian family.
I said, so what happened?
Which is part of this, the province Uttar Prakash.
It's next to Uttar Pradesh.
It's a city state.
It's like, it's where the, you know, a lot of the government is, but it's right next to Uttar Pradesh.
So I'm going to get to Uttar Pradesh in a minute.
So I talked and she said, yeah, we, all my family, they took, as soon as they got COVID, They took ivermectin and none of them went to the hospital.
And I said, can I talk to your family doctor?
She said, great.
So I did a Zoom call with him and he confirmed the same information.
And then I said, I want to speak to a doctor though in Uttar Pradesh.
Who do you know in Uttar Pradesh?
So he lined me up with a gentleman there.
I think his name is Dr.
Singh.
I did two Zoom calls with him.
He has a telemedicine clinic and they treated 5,500 patients who had COVID. And what people were doing in Uttar Pradesh in policies in June, the governor was so concerned.
There's 240 million people.
As you know, Bobby, it's one of the biggest states, all the biggest states in India.
240, it's like two-thirds the size of the United States.
Everybody, they had a COVID kit.
You got vitamin D, vitamin C, doxycycline.
They did that.
I'm not quite sure if that's the best thing, but they did that.
And then ivermectin.
And they had 2,000 mobile clinics.
They went out to everybody's homes and...
They had massive Delta wave in May.
And by the end of June, because of this, their case were so low.
As a matter of fact, the World Health Organization put it on their website that they were outstanding effort.
But they wouldn't put what was in, they said they delivered home kits.
They wouldn't say what was in the home kit.
You know, if you ask Americans, the Americans think we did such a great job.
And I go, well, do you realize we're one of the leading countries?
Like we're in the top 10 death rates per capita.
And in Uttar Pradesh, They have like, from July on, July until the end of December, it was like 30 cases a day, not even barely one death a day.
We're 1,500 deaths a day, and we're supposedly have the greatest medical system in the world.
And the same thing if you go to Japan.
Japan got hit with Delta in August, and several doctors started prescribing ivermectin.
Now, the government didn't say you should use ivermectin.
They said it's not illegal.
And so the Japanese rate went way, way, way down.
The other thing I've discovered is vitamin D. If we're really interested, if you're pro-vaccine, And you're pro-FDA, and you're pro-Pfizer, whatever.
At minimum, everyone in America should have gotten a vitamin D. And they're finding in the tests, as you know, like from Israel, where they have tests of people's vitamin D levels before and when they came into the hospital.
The amount of people who had high levels of vitamin D, they're not getting sick, whether you're vaccinated or unvaccinated.
So that plays a huge impact.
Basically, you want to reduce viral replication.
And vitamin D really helps.
And of course, ivermectin early on, I know some people don't believe that.
It's a horse dewormer.
It's safer than aspirin.
The irony even goes worse than this.
As you know, if you're a medical doctor in the hospital today, and someone comes in with COVID, if you say, let's give them vitamin C and vitamin D, you know what happens to them?
Fired.
You are fired by giving basic vitamins that can reduce viral replication and they're giving remdesivir.
And remdesivir, as you're probably aware, in 2019 You know, from Ebola, they said it was ineffective and it shouldn't be used.
Remdesivir kills people, causes organ damage, and people, and there was hardly any studies for it.
There's been 60 studies on ivermectin, and remdesivir had a couple.
So it's just, it's ridiculous.
But at the end of the day, we have to resolve this in the best way, and then we need to get to what you and I are passionate about, and that's restoring and protecting nature.
Well, let me just comment on what you said about vitamin D. There are now numerous studies that show that vitamin D is extraordinarily effective against COVID. There's a recent study, and I'm trying to remember what journal it was published in,
but said that the correlation is so perfect that theoretically, if anybody who has 50,000 units of vitamin D in their blood, it's virtually impossible to die from COVID. You know, that doesn't mean it can't happen, but it means that statistically, it is a very remote possibility.
And of course, you know, that's what we should have done from day one of the pandemic.
And if you go in any pharmaceutical pharmacy in this country, you'll see shelf after shelf of Zycam and other forms of zinc for the common goal.
Those are coronaviruses.
And they're there because they work.
And vitamin D works as well.
The ivermectin study that you talked about, the experience in Uttar Pradesh, is really an extraordinary one.
There's a neighboring province or nearby province called Corella, which adopted the Tony Fauci protocols and banned ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
And they basically achieved the same kind of death rates that we had.
We had the highest body count of any country in the world.
So how does anybody call that a success story?
As you point out, 2,500 per million.
The crusade to discredit ivermectin as a horse medication, that's like saying that penicillin is a horse antibiotic.
You know, if it works on one mammal, it works on other ones.
And ivermectin works, it obliterates viruses and it obliterates parasites.
And it works across many, many species.
But of course, there's been billions of doses prescribed for human beings.
It is not a orest dewormer.
It functions as orest dewormer.
There's veterinary applications for most medications.
But it is primarily, it won the Nobel Prize for treating humans.
It's the only drug in history ever to win the Nobel Prize, treating human beings.
How can people contact you?
How can they follow you?
How can, you know, the listeners of this podcast support you?
Yeah, you can go to my website, johnrulac.com.
If you forget my name, you can also just Google founder of Nativa.
I have a sub stack which you can Google or find from my website.
I'm also on Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram, you know, under John Rulac.
That's how they can follow me.
And we're going to come out with another film after Kiss the Ground.
We have two more films coming out there.
And there's also another one on Bees.
So we'll have to talk more about that.
That's a new film that some of my friends, Josh and Rebecca, you may know they're the film producers of Kiss the Ground.
I do know them in that movie.
I cannot recommend it enough.
And that's what I tell people.
You have to look at one documentary that you want to have hope of.
On the issue of climate change and, you know, food and agriculture, if you want to look at a film where there is a very, very exciting solution that is cheap, that is easy, that provides, that nurtures communities of human dignity, of democracy, and it's all in that film, and it's a beautiful, beautiful film.
Kiss the ground.
Thank you so much for helping to make that, John.
Yeah, thanks.
It's on Netflix.
So, you know, we do what we can.
And I want to just say the American people owe, you know, gratitude to you for using your reputation, your family's history, To take on the pharmaceutical industry.
I know a lot of people say a lot of negative things about you, say a lot of bad things, but you and I understand we need to follow what we think is best for people and the planet.
And we're not going to listen to corrupt authoritarian figures tell us what we should say or not say.
And people don't like that.
I know some of you in your family doesn't like that.
You chose a path and I want to thank you for that.
John Rulak, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
Keep your eye out on those USAID consultants because you don't know who they're really working for or what they're up to.
Really good to have you.
I'm so happy what you're doing.
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