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Jan. 11, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

01:48:28

Sidebar with American Farmer, Lecturer & Author Joel Salatin! Viva & Barnes LIVE

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	All right.
	So this is the man.
	I don't know what his name is.
	He owns an art gallery.
	I think it's San Francisco.
	That's the man who is the, in the eye of the storm, in today's caught on camera, a man at their, probably at their lowest or at their worst of their life, and destroy, destroy, annihilate, you know, brutalize, end this person's social media existence, business existence, just end everything because it was caught on camera.
	Because a man lost it, and a man was caught at his worst moment, and it's going to live forever now.
	This is what went viral today on the Twitterverse.
	This guy is a shop owner.
	He owns a gallery.
	Someone in the chat, remind me where it is.
	FairFrozen55.
	I'll give you a little optimism after all of this.
	The man owns a gallery.
	Apparently that homeless person...
	Squats out in front of his place.
	In the interview of an apology, which no one, no one is going to listen to.
	The irony is that the same people clamoring for the utter annihilation of this individual, his past, his present, and his future, are the same ones clamoring for criminal justice reform, rehabilitation of violent criminals, the racist system that punishes people who deserve second chances.
	This guy, no second chance, and no one's going to listen to the apology.
	And as bad as it is, not to say it could be worse, it's the dehumanizing aspect of this video.
	It's what you'd expect prison guards to be doing to prisoners as they dehumanize them for whatever the reason.
	But total annihilation.
	The guy makes an apology, explains the circumstances, trying to run a business, homeless people everywhere, this particular person, from what I understand.
	There might have been waste on the sidewalk that the individual was trying to hose off and asking the person to leave, and then he says something about her speaking in tongues.
	This is what happens when the basic fabric of society breaks down, when government doesn't look out for people, doesn't look out for the homeless woman.
	It's not a question of looking out for the shop owner, which they're also not doing.
	Not looking out for the homeless people, not looking out for the vulnerable.
	And people snap, and that's not the justification, that's just the explanation.
	People snap, and I guess touch wood, spraying someone with a hose is a form of assault, but at least it's not, you know, a more violent type of assault, which we also see when people just snap.
	It's not the same type of vigilantism that we see when people snap, because the government is simply not protecting the property of the citizens, despite the people paying out the wazoo for them to protect their property.
	And so he did an apology.
	It will fall on deaf ears, and he explained the situation, but that's it.
	Now, what's the silver lining?
	Because, hold on.
	Super chat right here.
	Wow, thank you, David.
	You just completely ruined my entire night with that clip.
	You know what the silver lining of that is?
	I don't know.
	There's not a silver lining.
	Don't judge someone by the worst minute of their life caught on camera.
	Or at least judge them, but allow them the window of opportunity to repent and atone and ask for forgiveness and be forgiven.
	All right.
	Barnes is in the backdrop.
	I don't yet see Joel.
	Hold on.
	Uh-oh.
	Do we have a no-show?
	Robert?
	He needs Zoom.
	He needs Zoom?
	We need to set it up by Zoom.
	Chat?
	Give me a second.
	Let me see if I can do this.
	Give me one second, Robert.
	While I have the pause, are you familiar on how to do it with Zoom?
	Oh, no.
	I had no idea.
	You need to do it with Zoom.
	He just needs to click on the link.
	His streamer doesn't work for him.
	Cripe.
	Okay.
	Hold on.
	Let me see if I can do that while we talk in real time.
	I'm going to bring you out.
	Chat.
	Let's see if I can do this in real time.
	I know that I've got Zoom.
	I don't believe I've ever set up a Zoom meeting.
	Zoom.us.
	Oh, if I set up a Zoom meeting...
	Hold on.
	I think there's a way to do it.
	Okay.
	I'll screen share with the Zoom.
	Join a meeting.
	Sign in.
	I don't have an account.
	Okay, let's just...
	People?
	Okay.
	Let me see if I can do this in real time.
	I forgot my password.
	Of course I forgot my password.
	See how fast I can do this.
	I am not a robot.
	Chat, in the meantime, what else is going on?
	Okay, we're going to do this in real time.
	Oh, I see the email now.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Hmm.
	Okay, click here to change the password, everybody.
	Maybe I'll just bring Robert in.
	Robert, I'll bring you back in.
	Do you want to entertain the crowd while I do this?
	Sure.
	Talk about what happened today.
	They passed the package deal.
	Entertain the crowd.
	I'll be back in a second.
	For those folks out there, our sidebar author tonight that we'll be talking to wrote a great book called Everything I Want to Do is Illegal.
	It connects to the Amos Miller case.
	It connects to a range of cases.
	Which is the issue about who controls how we grow our own food and what we put in our own bodies.
	Does the government get to dictate the terms for that?
	Or do we get to determine that?
	And so he's been on the front line of a wide range of those issues.
	So that's the conversation that we're going to be having with Joel tonight.
	And about not only his book, but about a wide range of these connected topics connected there, too.
	So you've just got to get the Zoom set up to make it all work and function smoothly, as the case may be.
	In the interim, I mean, some of the news today that was up in the Barnes brief at vivabarneslaw.locals.com concerned that there was some belief that what we talked about on Sunday has already come true by Wednesday.
	Which is that, as we discussed on Sunday, it was my belief that they would, in fact, pass the rule reforms to the House Committee, to the House Rules, that they would, in fact, add the Freedom Caucus members to the Rules Committee, which has a major import on what legislation gets proposed, that they would re-democratize the House of Representatives so that ordinary House members...
	Could propose votes, could vacate the chair, could remove the speaker, could propose legislation, could propose amendments.
	All of those passed as well.
	Not only that, there was some skepticism out there that they would actually create the committees that were part of the negotiated outcome for Kevin McCarthy to get the votes that he needed to become speaker.
	It was my prediction on Sunday that in fact those committees would in fact be formed.
	There was a lot of people who were skeptical, and understandably so, given the recent history of the House of Representatives.
	But both of those committees were formed.
	First, the big, important committee, the Church Committee 2.0, to investigate the weaponization of the federal government for politicized purposes by the open lawfare by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency.
	The Pentagon and other aspects of the federal government.
	And that committee has now been formed.
	Jim Jordan will be the chairman of it.
	And in fact, it has its marching orders and its jurisdictional authority to move forward.
	In addition, the committee was also formed to investigate strategic relationship and conflict with China.
	In fact, only about 50 or 60 Democrats oppose that committee.
	That committee as well has been formed.
	So what we talked about on...
	Sunday has now already occurred as of Wednesday.
	So both of those things are promising aspects as we move forward.
	The additional information that came out this week that turns out has been known since before the election is that Vice President Biden, when he was Vice President Biden, after he left the White House with Trump's inauguration in 2017, He took with him a bunch of classified documents.
	And unlike President Trump, he does not have the authority to declare those records declassified.
	Unlike President Trump, he does not have the authority to declare those records, personal records or private records rather than public records.
	How are we?
	We're going to see if this works.
	People are calling me a boomer.
	We're going to see if this works.
	Can I share?
	No, no.
	There has to be a way to be able to share screen with the Zoom link.
	Okay.
	I think I can do it.
	Okay, Robert, I think it's going to work.
	Joel, you can see me.
	Give me two seconds or give us two minutes.
	In fact, because before we do anything, Robert, I was going to do the sponsor before we bring in the guest because I hate doing sponsors in front of the guest.
	Robert, let me take you out for a second and we're going to...
	I need all the windows to do this.
	So I'll be back in a second.
	Everybody, I don't know why my screen looks like it's fallen down.
	Before we get into this, we're going to see if the Viva hack works.
	And it's a fitting topic because we're going to be talking about natural germs, what your body needs, how to make your own food.
	EnviroCleanse, people, is tonight's sponsored video.
	And oh my goodness, before I even move, did I put on customization?
	Hold on, hold on, hold on.
	Show more.
	Click paid promotion.
	Okay, there you go.
	Everybody, tonight's sponsor is EnviroCleanse.
	I'm going to share the screen with that because we're going to need the screen in a second.
	EnviroCleanse air filtration systems, everybody.
	It's that white box that I have in my house.
	I tell everybody it's very easy to sponsor products that I believe in that I actually use.
	They're used by the Department of Defense on submarines.
	In as much as we don't necessarily trust the Department of Defense, what we do trust them to do is look out for their own best interests.
	And they wouldn't be using it if they weren't good.
	Sorry.
	Okay, sorry.
	I hear something in the background.
	But no jokes.
	We don't trust them except to preserve their own self-manage interests.
	So we know that they're using the best to make sure they have clean air on their submarines.
	When they go and raid the President's Palace and do all sorts of things, at least they're doing it.
	With clean lungs and clean air.
	Patented technology, not in the HEPA filters, but in what they call the purification filter.
	It's like minerals that actually destroy flu viruses.
	If you have filthy, disgusting, germ-infested kids, it'll help you keep clean from them.
	ekpure.com.
	Promo code Viva will get you an air-purifying thingy thing and 10% off the unit.
	And there's financing because they are expensive.
	But for anybody who knows you need to breathe clean air, and it's among the cleanest things, the most important things you need, we're going to talk about this also, the idea of breathing in fecal matter, which I was watching Joel on Joe Rogan talk about this.
	We're going to talk about it.
	Sponsor, thank you very much for having the courage to sponsor the hinged, fringed minority holding unacceptable views like making their own food, growing their own food, and being healthy.
	Now, moment of truth, people.
	I'm going to bring Barnes in.
	Present.
	Share a screen.
	I may not be able to read the chat as we do this stream, but...
	Okay, so now I see that.
	If I go here, what is this going to look like?
	Oh my goodness!
	Joel?
	Can you hear us?
	All right.
	I'm sorry.
	I had some stand-up comedy in my intro.
	Let me just go to the webs and see what this looks like.
	I couldn't hear them, though.
	You can't hear Joel?
	No.
	Hold on.
	Oh, is that going to be a pain in the neck?
	Okay, hold on.
	Joel, let me...
	I thought I was so smart for a second.
	Darn it.
	If I go to chat, can't hear Joel.
	Okay, Joel, let me think about how to do this.
	Now, you're coming in there.
	If I go to computer settings, and I'm going to go to audio.
	Mic, default speaker.
	How about if I do MacBook?
	Okay, mic check.
	Joel, can you give us a mic check?
	Okay, and let me see if...
	I can't hear him now.
	You can't hear him now.
	That's because it's going to go the speaker on my computer.
	Okay, default.
	We're going to go back to the headphones.
	Let's see if the chat can help me because right now I'm screen sharing with Zoom.
	But the audio doesn't seem to be working.
	You can hear him, but we can't.
	Is that it?
	Yeah, I can hear him.
	Now, if I take this out, Joel, now we're going to be able to hear you.
	Can you do a mic check and we're going to see if there's an echo?
	I can't hear him.
	Now I can't hear him.
	Okay, so hold on.
	Oh, okay, hold on.
	MacBook, so speaker.
	Okay, now, Joel, let's try this one more time.
	All right.
	Are we good?
	I can hear him.
	That means the chat can hear him.
	And now the only question is whether or not there's going to be unreasonable echo.
	We might just leave this format the entire night.
	Chat, can you hear Joel speaking without insufferable echo?
	Too low.
	It was, yeah, just low is all it was.
	Chat, we might have to not let the perfect get in the way of the good because I think...
	If we figured this out, jack up your volume.
	I don't think I can do more on my end, but maybe I can.
	Let's just see.
	Edit stuff.
	Volume too low on...
	Nobody can see that I'm sweating like an absolute pig right now.
	Sorry.
	Sweating like an animal that sweats.
	If there's a way...
	I don't know that there's a way to do it, so we might just have to have Joel...
	We might have to leave with that.
	Settings.
	Okay, here we go.
	No, the settings are for me.
	I don't want the settings for me.
	And I don't think I'm going to be able to bring up the volume.
	Why can't I edit?
	Oh, because it's on the screen and screen.
	Okay, so we might...
	Joel, you might just have to talk loud to make this work.
	Sure, I can do that.
	Okay, and I think it's going to be...
	We're going to do it.
	We're going to do it and chat.
	They say it's fine.
	Tell them to yell loud.
	One thing's for certain.
	We're going to be doing this on both platforms.
	We're not cutting the feed on YouTube.
	We're not tinkering with this.
	Joel, first of all, thank you very much.
	Sorry for the techno stuff.
	I've never set up an interview on Zoom, so it's a first for me.
	Joel, I think everybody knows you, actually.
	Not actually.
	I think everybody knows you.
	People have been clamoring for you for a while.
	But for those who may not know you, 30,000-foot overview before I get into some of your childhood upbringing stuff, because I've...
	I didn't get that from the interviews that I watched today.
	And then we're going to get into what's going on now.
	30,000-foot overview.
	Who are you?
	Who I am.
	I'm a Christian libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer.
	Our family co-owns Polyface Farms in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.
	And we raise pastured livestock.
	So we have beef, pork, chicken, turkeys, rabbit, lamb, ducks.
	And we direct market everything to all around 10,000 families and numerous institutions.
	Everyone knows that I like this.
	I won't go too far because I don't want to get too far into the history.
	But born and raised, where are you from?
	Where are your parents from?
	How many generations American?
	And how did you get into this?
	Sure.
	So my parents were both Midwesterners.
	Mom grew up in Ohio.
	Dad grew up in Indiana.
	They met at Indiana University.
	After Dad came back from World War II, flying airplanes in the Navy, World War II.
	And he always had a dream to go have a farm in a developing country.
	He saw the United States as already kind of, you know, over the hill, whatever.
	He was always the new, the new place.
	And so he was looking at Central and Latin America as a new frontier, a new place to go and be an entrepreneur.
	And so he got on with Texas Oil Company as a bilingual accountant and went to Venezuela.
	And in seven years, was able to save up enough money to buy a thousand acre farm in the islands of Venezuela.
	We began raising chickens and three years into it, there was a junta, a junta, a coup d'etat.
	And the...
	And we had a lot of enemies because Dan took away the local chicken market from the local farmers because our chickens were clean and the Venezuelan chickens were dirty.
	We're coming to Dad to buy, and he just consumed that local chicken market, and the other farmers thought we were doing witchcraft and voodoo to have these clean chickens, because that's the only way you can have clean chickens.
	And so, you know, when anarchy came, and we were, you know, we were, basically, we fled the back doors, and machine guns came in the front door.
	They got their score settled.
	We lost them.
	He was 39. I was 4 when we left and lost everything.
	Came back to the United States Easter Sunday of 1961 and settled here in Virginia, not out in the Midwest where their families were from because Dad's heart was still in Venezuela.
	He was there 12 years, loved the people, loved the culture, loved the language.
	I mean, he was truly, you know, Venezuelanized.
	And he still hoped to go back when things settled.
	And so he wanted to be within a day's drive of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C., so that if things settled, we could get paperwork done quickly and get back to Venezuela.
	Well, of course, that never happened, but that's why we settled in Virginia and didn't go back to where, you know, both of their families were in Ohio and Indiana.
	So your dad lost everything.
	You leave with nothing that you had?
	I mean, what's the monetary value in as much as that matters?
	It's probably more psychologically damaging, but gone.
	Everything.
	Well, I mean, yeah.
	I mean, he was 39. You know, he owned this farm and put all his life savings in the land.
	And so, you know, lost all of that.
	I mean, we brought back a couple of barrels.
	We had a couple of little tools and some clothes.
	But, you know, pretty much everything was, you know, was gone.
	And did you get into...
	I remember when I hit 39 and thought, if everything was taken away from me tomorrow, would I start over?
	And, you know, I'm one of those that the older I get, the more appreciation I have for dad's tenacity.
	Perseverance and faithfulness in that kind of situation.
	So I actually spoke Spanish before I spoke English, you know, as a little, very little child.
	Now, again, we left the farm when I was three.
	We actually left Venezuela when I was four.
	So I actually don't remember the farm because we stayed another year in the country as Dad tried to meet.
	He met with, you know, the Interior Minister, the Department of Defense, the Department of...
	He met with all the, you know, the federal, you know, commissioners in Caracas trying to get protection to stay.
	But, you know, things were so out of kilter, out of hand, that we couldn't have gotten protection.
	So now looking back on it, looking back on it now, our family, while it was devastating to Dan, I don't think he ever got over it.
	And died young.
	He died at 66. So he had a lot of stress there that I think he never shared with us.
	Our family, looking back, we realized that that was a blessing because if we had stayed and been very successful, we would have still lost it under either Chavez or Maduro, and we wouldn't want to be in Venezuela today.
	And so we count that as good.
	We got stopped in the embryonic stage.
	Not after we had been successful.
	I was told to back off my mic to balance out the mics.
	Your dad was a farmer.
	What did you study?
	I've been watching you all day, and I didn't get your education, but you're incredibly educated or well-informed on things beyond what one would typically understand as the scope of farming.
	What did you study?
	I was an English major.
	And so I learned to read.
	I am a voracious reader.
	And so I read.
	You can see the bookshelf behind me.
	I'm a voracious reader.
	And throughout high school and college, I was on the debate team, the intercollegiate, interscholastic debate team.
	And so, you know, enjoyed research, enjoyed...
	You know, the two sides of an issue.
	And that has stood me well, I think, today, because unlike some of my farming friends that are in the ecological farming movement who demonize Monsanto and demonize the opposition, I don't.
	I think...
	Well, I don't agree with what they do, but I don't think that anybody that I disagree with is evil intended.
	I think they're sincere-minded, sincere intended.
	I think they're very wrong, but I don't impug their intentions.
	And I think debate helped me to do that because, you know, you go to a tournament, you have a topic, and you debate affirmative three rounds and negative three rounds.
	So you debated both sides of the issue.
	And I think that that has helped me to make more bridges than barriers, and it's been good.
	Now, how did you get into farming yourself?
	So, yeah, so we came to this farm in 1961, and it was a gullied rock pile.
	It was the cheapest farm in the region.
	Because it had been so abused.
	I mean, there was no soil here.
	There were gullies.
	We measured one gully 16 feet deep.
	That'd be, you know, five meters from, if you're on metric, five meters from, you know, from bottom to top.
	That's a deep gully.
	That's a, you know, that's a big cavern.
	And so, you know, we started back in in 1961, and Dad...
	Dad, I remember, so I was four and a half, five years old, early memories, and I remember experts coming.
	Dad got these experts.
	Some were government experts, some were private experts, and his question was, how do I make a living on this little farm?
	And every single piece of advice was plant corn, use chemicals, build silos, plow more, graze the forest.
	You know, it was all that.
	And my grandfather, my dad's dad, grandfather, was a charter subscriber to Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine when it first came out in, what, 1948?
	And he, up in Indiana, he always had this great big compost pile.
	He had an octagon full chicken house.
	And he was quite a tinkerer and had, you know, walking garden sprinkler and had this beautiful garden.
	And so a lot of people don't realize how recent the whole chemical juggernaut is.
	It really gained steam after World War II with all the stockpiles of leftover nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus that were used for making bombs.
	So NPK fertilization got a real jumpstart from the defense spending war effort to mine it, market it, You know, a stock pilot.
	And, of course, farmers, right, post-World War II, many of them had sons that they had lost or gotten injured in the war.
	And so here are all these farmers looking forward to the second generation coming back and being, you know, a second pair of hands on the farm, and they don't have them.
	And so I'm pretty gentle on old Grandpa there.
	You know, you being in the same position in, you know, 1947, 48, you know, you're expecting your sons to come home from the war and help you on the farm.
	They don't come home.
	But somebody comes along and you've shoveled all your life.
	All you've done is shovel, shovel, shovel, shovel, shovel.
	And somebody comes along with a little bag and says, you don't have to shovel anymore.
	You can just put this little bag on and it'll grow, you know, it'll grow stuff.
	And, you know, you and I being in the same position, we might have done the same thing.
	And so, you know, be gentle on the old guy.
	But my grandfather, not being a farmer, he was more a suburban, large-scale gardener.
	He had like a quarter-acre garden, which is a big garden.
	He sold strawberries, and he had honeybees and sold honey and different things.
	Dad got his, you know, kind of ecology bent from him, and I got it from Dad, and so...
	Dad was a trained economist.
	His degree was in economics and business administration.
	And he saw the chemical approach as basically a drug addiction.
	You know, it was a treadmill.
	You had to get more toxic stuff.
	It was more expensive stuff just to stay even.
	And so a lot of his aversion to chemicals was not so much ecological as much as it was economic.
	He said you can't spend yourself...
	Into abundance by being dependent on earthworm killing chemical fertilizers.
	And so we went into the farm with that mentality.
	He did.
	And so the first 10 years, we're doing a lot of experiments.
	And within a couple of years...
	He went out to work.
	Mom went out to work.
	And they're off-farm jobs.
	Mom was a schoolteacher.
	Dad was an accountant.
	And the off-farm jobs paid for the farm.
	So that's how the mortgage got paid.
	And that took about 10 years.
	By that time, I'm a teenager.
	And I'm really taking an interest in it.
	I got my first chickens when I was 10 years old.
	And really, really got the farm bug.
	I truly got the farm bug.
	And then the question was, so...
	Okay, so now I'm the next generation.
	The land is paid for.
	How do I make a living on a farm?
	So that was the next question.
	That's an interesting thing.
	I never even thought of that.
	The idea of farming with nitrogen.
	What was it?
	Phosphorus and NPK?
	Potassium.
	Potassium.
	And that was not a thing until after World War II.
	And then it became a thing.
	And that is presumably at least part and parcel of where farming sort of got industrialized, mass scaled, and started heading downhill, so to speak.
	Yes.
	Well, the NPK formula really was a product of Justice von Liebig, the Austrian biochemist who in 1837 brought to the world.
	He used vacuum tubes.
	He was trying to figure out what's life made out of.
	What is a tomato plant?
	What is it made out of?
	And he used these vacuum tubes.
	It's 1837.
	It's crude.
	And he determined that all of life is simply a reconfiguration of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, NPEK.
	And again, his goal was, how do we maintain fertility?
	You know, in America, you know, we were burning out soils as fast as we could settle them, and all over the world.
	And there was a huge concern about how do we maintain fertility?
	And so his intentions were good.
	And he brought to the world this basic NPK philosophy.
	If we can just figure out how to mine or create nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus and dump it on the soil, we'll be fine because that's all of life that life is.
	And so that kind of languished along partly because...
	We didn't have good mining technology.
	The Faber-Bosch system of taking nitrogen out of the air had not yet been invented.
	And so it kind of languished along until World War I or World War II.
	Historically, it's interesting to realize that civilizations make massive advances in technology during war because war focuses everybody's attention.
	On fairly basic survival things, and so it actually fuels and unleashes, and I'm not a fan of war, don't read into this, but what I am suggesting is World War I, World War II, that...
	Massive, massive war effort.
	And you make bombs out of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus.
	That's what you make bombs out of.
	And so all of that war effort funneled billions and billions of dollars into NPK development.
	And that's where we actually went to the availability, accessibility.
	And the price tipped over.
	That's when it tipped over.
	Before then, it was pretty competitive with manure and basic soil management techniques.
	But after the war, there was no contest.
	And what's interesting to me is that in 1943, Sir Albert Howard, whose career was in India, He developed, over his career from 1920 to 1940, he developed the scientific aerobic composting process and brought it to the world in 1943.
	So I find it fascinating that the scientific recipe for efficient composting and the availability of cheap chemical fertilizer, the chemical approach, both of those came at about the same time.
	Around the World War II effort.
	The problem with Sir Albert Howard's composting method was that it required a carbon economy and carbon handling.
	And we did not yet have the infrastructure and the equipment to efficiently handle carbon.
	But we did have equipment to efficiently handle bags of NPK.
	So NPK won the day.
	And it wasn't for another 15 to 20 years until front end loaders, black plastic pipe, chainsaws, chippers, and all the infrastructure to make efficient carbon economies work until about 1960, until all that finally came together.
	But that 15 to 20 year head start with chemical NPK...
	If you were having a race, it gave like a two-lap head start to NPK.
	And now, of course, the biological approach spins circles around the chemical NPK.
	But our land-grant colleges, I call it the U.S. duh, the agri-industrial complex, all of that is still fueled by the NPK mentality.
	And they just don't realize that biology is going to win the day.
	Can you explain for people, if you went to a local grocery store and you got your USDA-approved, labeled, inspected meat, or other food products, how much chemicals are in there from fertilizer to preservatives before it got sent out?
	Most Americans seem unaware of how much chemicals are in our food today.
	That weren't, say, a century ago.
	Oh, yeah, it's almost immeasurable.
	I mean, obviously you have the chemical fertilizer, but then you have, of course, the herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, fungicides.
	For cattle, you've got grubicides, paracinicides.
	C-I-D-E is the Latin suffix.
	All of these things that I've just described are all about debt.
	And so anyway, you have all that.
	Then, today, this has all progressed even to the point of highly processed food.
	70% of the food Americans eat is processed.
	And processed food...
	Typically, the whole idea of processed food is to stabilize it and maintain its texture and freshness basically indefinitely.
	And so what you have is you have dead food that is stabilized, emulsified, texturized.
	And for taste and appearance with, you know, food colorings and all this sort of thing, with generally recognized as safe, G-R-A-S, materials that the government agencies don't even know what the materials are because it's all the company.
	And so the amount of...
	Foreign material and unpronounceables is just beyond comprehension.
	You know, I'm kind of with Michael Pollan, who's, you know, the writer that wrote Omnivore's Dilemma, and he says that we probably shouldn't eat any food that wasn't available before 1900.
	Like, 1900 was kind of a tip-over point.
	And I kind of agree with that.
	You know, if it wasn't available in 1900, it probably is suspect.
	And we can all be thankful that hot dogs were introduced at the 1890 World Fair.
	So they just squeaked in, you know, right there under the deadline of 1900.
	Well, sausages.
	I mean, hot dogs are just sausages, which is using over meat.
	But actually, flesh one thing out, because I think I know the answer to some extent, but processed.
	Like, we say the word processed foods.
	I imagine Twinkies.
	But when it comes to, like, meats, farm products, which are processed that you might not understand as being processed, what are we describing?
	What are we understanding by that term as to when something goes from unprocessed to processed?
	When it goes from unprocessed to processed is when you start adding ingredients to it.
	So if you get a pork chop, it's just pork.
	But as soon as you turn that pork chop into a stable TV dinner, that label is going to have everything from salt to monosodium glutamate, which is a taste enhancer.
	It helps to maintain flavor.
	You start getting all of these things.
	So unprocessed material is just that.
	It's a tomato.
	It's an apple.
	It's an orange.
	It's a T-bone steak.
	It is a single ingredient thing.
	But as soon as you start stabilizing, increasing shelf life, I mean, for example, milk out of a cow.
	Milk out of a cow is milk out of a cow.
	But when you ultra-pasteurize it for shelf stability, So that it can stand ambient room temperature for six months without going sour.
	That's a highly processed product.
	And processing is what kills a lot of the enzymes, kills a lot of the nutrition, and creates a lot of the stabilizing additives that are necessary to maintain shelf life.
	Can you describe for folks, this is a question from our live chat at vivobarneslaw.locals.com.
	If I was to be here in Tennessee and say, I'm going to have a little farm, give me a cow, make some steak, and let's say some folks up in New York think, hey, they've had the steak once upon a time and thought, hey, you make really good steak from your cows.
	How easy is it for me to just...
	Chop up the state, butcher it, and send it and ship it to them for sale.
	You know, set up a little website.
	Say, hey, if you want the Barnes Famous T-Bone, here's how you can order it.
	Can I just set that up and do it?
	Or what kind of limitation?
	How hard is it to do that these days?
	Oh, boy.
	That's a real thread there that you've just opened up.
	And so in the United States, you cannot sell amenable meats.
	That is beef, pork, lamb, goat.
	You cannot sell meat unless it is inspected.
	And so it has to have a USDA inspection sticker on that package.
	You can't just butcher that animal in your backyard, cut out the T-bone steaks and send them to your friend in New York.
	I mean, you can send them free, but your friend can't buy them.
	Now, that's the great hypocrisy of the whole food safety laws is that you can give it away.
	Well, if it was really hazardous, you shouldn't be able to give it away either.
	And so there's nothing about exchanging money that suddenly turns a pork chop or a T-bone, you mentioned T-bone steak, that suddenly turns a T-bone steak from hazardous or from benign or healthy to hazardous just because you've exchanged money.
	So that's the great hypocrisy of our food safety laws.
	They have nothing to do with food safety.
	what they have to do with is controlling market access to limit competition.
	Now, nobody in the inspection service will admit that.
	They'll all say, "Oh, we have to do this to protect people from getting bad food." But that is, again, that is patently untrue because they're perfectly happy for you to give it away.
	Gentlemen, if it looked like I was distracted, it's only because I got a pop-up that said...
	Unless I upgrade, our Zoom meeting was going to end in 10 minutes, so I just had to go buy an annual subscription.
	So we'll use this again, Joel, when we do this.
	I was listening to that.
	The question I was going to ask you is, the processed food is one part, but getting into the FDA, USDA, organic, the beef that we think is certified and therefore healthier, or therefore more trustworthy than unlabeled, unstamped by government entities.
	I never fully appreciated just how disgusting it was.
	But you talk about herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and whatever.
	But then I was listening to you and you were talking about animals being kept in nasty conditions where they have to be jacked up with antibiotics so that they don't die.
	And that all this gets into the meat.
	And this is the meat that we're led to believe is the healthy meat because it's government approved and it's got a stamp on it.
	Flesh that out a little bit for those who...
	Yeah, so the government label does not check generally for the kinds of things that scare you.
	Now, they do sometimes check for things like E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter, you know, occasionally, not very often, occasionally.
	Most of it doesn't get checked.
	And so...
	Mainly, the inspection is not about quality.
	It's about infrastructure.
	It's about protocol, like temperature change.
	Both hot or cold, as the case may be.
	Those kinds of things.
	For example, eggs.
	You know, government-inspected eggs, they don't check for salmonella, E. coli, or anything in eggs.
	They're only checking for, if you call it a grade A, they're looking at the viscosity of the albumen and the air cell on the obtuse end.
	How big is that air cell?
	That has to do with, is it a grade A or not?
	It has nothing to do with nutrition.
	It has nothing to do with pathogens or toxicity or anything.
	It's a check on, if you say it's a large, well, are your scales correct?
	Is it actually a large or is it a medium?
	Again, it's not checking for pathogens and toxicity or even nutrition.
	It's just checking for, are your scales credentialed?
	And so it's important to understand that the primary goal of the government certification program, inspection program, certainly doesn't have anything to do with nutrition.
	It has arguably once in a while something to do with...
	With pathogens, you know, microbes and things, but very, very little.
	Mainly it has to do with, do you have a certain tonnage of concrete, a certain lumens of light bulbs, a certain temperature in your cooler?
	The point I'm making is that you can do all of this in your backyard and be way cleaner.
	More hygienic, more sanitary, safer in that respect, especially if they're not grown in a concentrated animal feeding operation, a factory farm where the animals are ingesting fecal particulate all day and abrading their mucous membranes, their respiratory tracts.
	And so your ability to actually bring a clean, safe...
	Animal to slaughter or an egg to the carton is much easier and simpler at a smaller scale than it is a larger scale.
	But the problem with the inspection services is that it's very prejudicial against small-scale producers.
	And it is concessionary toward large-scale producers, which is inherently...
	Unfair in the marketplace.
	It is inherently wrong to have any regulation that is easier to comply with if you're big than if you're small.
	That is a scale prejudicial regulation that is inherently marginalizing to smaller competitors.
	Which are the key to market competition, to holding the big guys' feet to the fire, to entry-level entrepreneurs, and to localized, neighborhood-friendly places.
	I'll just ask you a question.
	We've all been through COVID.
	We know what happened when COVID hit.
	All the store shelves went empty.
	Everybody panicked and went crazy.
	And so I would just ask you this.
	What if our country was serviced?
	Instead of being serviced by 300 5,000 person mega processing facilities, canneries, slaughterhouses, things like that, if instead of being serviced by 300 mega centralized facilities like that, if instead we were serviced by 300,000 50 employee neighborhood processing facilities, would we have had as big a hiccup?
	I submit that that's a rhetorical question that doesn't even require research.
	We would absolutely have had a much smaller hiccup had we been serviced by a decentralized, democratized, neighbor-centric, smaller-scale processing platform.
	One thing I was intrigued by when I was in France is that they still have a lot of small local farmer operations.
	Like, I could go to the butcher.
	And if I trusted a particular farmer from the south of France, I could order the steak or the burr food from that farmer.
	French cheese is still not even available in the United States, not in its true French form, under the guise of safety issues, etc.
	My understanding of the USDA's original import, back to its foundation and Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle and the Rest, was based on the informed It
	was not to make them the US farmer in chief.
	Dictating how food would be made, how food would be produced, how food would be distributed, and controlling and dictating to us what food we could purchase as long as we are an informed consumer in the process.
	How much in your professional experience as a farmer have you seen?
	It seems like with the Amos Miller case and other cases, we're seeing an aggressive effort by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
	To usurp its authority to now tell us what we can eat.
	It's no longer about informed consent.
	It's not about what I want to put in my body.
	It's about what the U.S. government says should go into my body.
	What are your thoughts on that?
	Well, you know, I wrote a book, I've written several books, and one of the titles is Everything I Want to Do is Illegal.
	And it documents the battles that we've had on this very front that you're describing.
	There are lots of things that we would like to do that we can't because we're criminalized if we do them.
	And of course, you know, making homemade bologna or charcuterie and selling it to a neighbor, that's illegal.
	So yes, you are exactly right.
	These regulations...
	We could argue whether they were good or bad when they started, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
	And so these regulations started, like you said, but they have gradually morphed into, you know, bureaucracies don't stagnate.
	They grow like a cancer.
	They grow like a cancer on society.
	The number of regulations have just continued to escalate, escalate, escalate, escalate.
	And I would suggest that the paranoia.
	I heard a phrase yesterday for the first time, and I'm trying to use it so I'll remember it.
	A lady used the term fear porn.
	Like fear pornography.
	We live in a time of fear pornography.
	We're peddling fear porn like it's the latest fad.
	And so what happened?
	Here's what happened.
	The regulation of the food supply criminalized or marginalized many of the small processing facilities, like small neighborhood slaughterhouses.
	And made concessionary abilities to the big guys.
	And so over the course of time, the food system has become more and more centralized and more and more opaque.
	So the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker of yesteryear scaled up, and today they're behind razor wire and guard towers.
	Well, what happens in a civilization...
	When opaqueness comes into the marketplace, you have ignorance.
	What's going on behind that razor wire fence?
	What's going on in those opaque buildings?
	The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker of yesteryear were village scale.
	They lived in their shops.
	They went to church with everybody.
	Their kids played soccer with everybody else.
	And so there was an openness and a relational transparency just because of the scale and the relational nature of the village butcher, baker, and candlestick maker.
	But when they scaled to industrial scale behind razor wire and guard towers, people began getting paranoid and fearful about what was going on behind those fences and asked for government oversight.
	That fence on our behalf to tell us if it's okay or not.
	That's the rationale here.
	But what happened was that the regulatory bureaucrats and the industry got cozy.
	You know this.
	I mean, they're reviving gore.
	It's the famous revolving door.
	You know, the industry.
	They all go to the same school.
	They drink the same Kool-Aid.
	They go to the same parties.
	They all play golf together.
	And so you have this coziness between the big regulators and the big industry.
	And so what happens is they work out things together, and everybody else gets summarily pushed, whether consciously or subconsciously, I won't say.
	But gradually it gets harder and harder for the little guys that aren't at that scale and playing that game or newbies that want to get into the game.
	It becomes harder and harder for them to be able to get access to the market and they gradually get pushed out, pushed out, pushed out, pushed out.
	Now, what's happened, what's exciting now is that with the internet...
	And with the democratization of information and the ability to self-audit, we now can have an Uberized food system.
	And so I promote, we need an Uberized food system, an Airbnb food system.
	You know, 30 years ago, somebody said millions of people around the globe are going to travel and jump into a car with somebody, they don't have a clue who it is, who hasn't been certified by anybody except a rating system on your computer.
	You just said, you're nuts!
	I'm going to only get in a chauffeured, licensed, you know, somebody's been to extra school, whatever, right?
	But the reason Uber worked and the reason Airbnb worked is because the internet has democratized real-time village voice so that the transparency of yesteryear on the village scale for the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker is now duplicated at a global scale.
	With the real-time democratized dialogue via the internet and real-time auditing.
	And so I would simply say that the industrial inspection service, as we know it, the food safety, the bureaucracy of food regulations, which was started to control the industry and ended up pushing out the non-industrial,
	unorthodox neighborhood outfits, It is now obsolete in the Uberized, Airbnbized marketplace of today.
	So, well, it's an interesting analogy, actually, because people will then say, well, you have some problems with Uber crime and you have some horror stories with Airbnb.
	And I flagged this comment just so we could actually, it's a legit question, who picks that?
	So, you know, analogize those problems with that democratizing of car service and Airbnbs to food.
	Who picks up the bill when Bob's Bologna from down the block kills somebody?
	But I think that question presupposes a conclusion, or that conclusion is based on a premise which is erroneous, that the un-government regulated food industry is itself inherently more dangerous, which I think is a misimpression if I'm not mistaken, Joel.
	When you have recalls and you have mass illnesses arising out of bad meat, bad milk, bad whatever...
	Does it come from the mom-and-pops, or does it come from the mass-regulated industrialized production centers?
	You have an extremely intelligent, reasonable head under that wonderful pearly hair.
	Thank you.
	You hit the nail on the head.
	Yes, that is exactly correct.
	So here's the fact.
	The fact is, there is no perfect system this side of eternity.
	You're always dealing with some sort of risk.
	I mean, people, everybody's not, you know, not an angel, okay?
	And sometimes they're not angels.
	A, accidents can happen.
	B, you can have, you know, bad intent, all right?
	So there's all sorts of things that can happen.
	But to think for a minute that bureaucrats are A, not political, and B, more honest and honorable than your neighbor,
	than your neighbor who mits a cow next to your house, to say that the federal government bureaucratic system is more honorable than that neighbor.
	It's not a reasonable statement.
	And so the fact is that farmers like me, who are direct marketing into the marketplace, we don't have a bunch of Philadelphia attorneys on retainer as a veil between us and our customers.
	So we are far more careful.
	And I would suggest that our farming techniques...
	I'll give you an example.
	We had some empirical tests on microbes on our chickens, for example.
	We use no chlorine whatsoever.
	The industry uses as many as 40 chlorine baths on their chickens.
	And that chlorine, of course, goes into the meat and all that.
	So anyway, we had a test done measuring bacteria on the skin of our chickens.
	And the ones at the store, the USDA expected, averaged 3,600 to only forming units of bacteria per milliliter.
	And ours averaged 133.
	Now, we still had some bacteria, but we were 25 times cleaner than the ones in the store that had chlorine.
	But you've got to realize ours are coming in from the pasture.
	They don't live in fecal particulate dust.
	They're out on pasture.
	And they're not in big, you know, 15,000 bird houses.
	And so, you know, this is the kind of thing that these regulations do not recognize and do not pick up.
	The fact is that, you're right, scale.
	Scale is not everything.
	You can certainly be dirty and be small, but the chances of being clean and small generally are easier than trying to be clean and be very large.
	If the USDA disappeared tomorrow, would our food supply be more nutritious and safer?
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	If there were one thing I could wave a magic wand and do, it would be simply to abolish the USDA.
	It is simply a mouthpiece and has done a lot to promote the mechanistic view of life, that life is fundamentally mechanical.
	I believe life is fundamentally biological.
	Now, are there mechanical things in life?
	Absolutely, there are.
	But first and foremost, Life is fundamentally biological, not mechanical.
	And so the entire cultural theme is predicated on this mechanical view of life, which the USDA pushes.
	If there were no USDA, then people like me could duke it out, if you will.
	We could duke it out in the marketplace with Purdue and Cargill and Tyson.
	And we can duke it out in a marketplace at our own level.
	But what farmers like me now have is we have a stacked deck.
	Not only are we duking it out with Tyson, we're duking it out with all of the credentialed PhD experts at the USDA that speak to me condescendingly, marginalized, and tell me that I want to, you know, whatever, destroy the world.
	And so...
	And so it's a stacked deck.
	You put us one-on-one, toe-to-toe, and we'll be glad to compete in the marketplace.
	But right now, it's a two-on-one.
	You know, when I asked the question about who gets sick from the bologna, I am prone to these types of things as well.
	Growing up, you just think things are better and cleaner and more safer at scale.
	And I remember I used to always eat gas station sandwiches because I was like, oh, if they're at a gas station, it has to be safe and it has to be good.
	And then my father-in-law told me about Listeria and I never ate another gas station sandwich again.
	But I heard you say it on Joe Rogan and I love it because it's very Heideggerian where, you know, you say let your animals be animals and it respects the life.
	It's more sustainable.
	It's better for the product.
	You let the chickens be chickens.
	You let the cows be cows.
	And I think it was Heidegger, being in time.
	Let the thing be the thing.
	But with scale, you scale production, but you also scale problems.
	With more smaller factories, you have redundancy, and redundancy probably isn't as good as it comes to it.
	But the question is this.
	We heard during COVID that they were slaughtering pigs.
	Because for whatever the reason, they were dumping milk.
	I couldn't believe it, and I still don't really understand if I understand the reason why.
	Is it true, and why would, in a time of food shortages on shelves, why would farmers anywhere be slaughtering pigs and dumping milk when people need that food on shelves?
	What a great question.
	I'll try to be very clear and very succinct on the answer.
	The answer is...
	The farmers were producing it.
	Consumers needed it on the other end.
	But between them, there was an extremely centralized supply chain that was highly fragile.
	So that fragile supply chain during COVID, you know, people were getting COVID.
	They were shutting down.
	Oh, you know, John, over in Section D got COVID, so we better let all the people in Section D go home for two weeks in quarantine.
	And so the larger the facility, the more vulnerable it was to the fragility or to the whatever, the attack of COVID, all right?
	And I don't want to get into a big debate about what, you know, I'm a...
	I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole.
	But my point is that when you're in a disruptive place, when you're trying to navigate rocky shoals, you don't want to be in an aircraft carrier.
	You want to be in a speedboat.
	And so when you put 5,000 people in a dark, damp, cool place, pay them very little, treat them like dirt.
	In a time of disruptive immunological breakdown, you don't want to be large.
	You don't want to be an aircraft carrier.
	You want to be a little speedboat.
	And so people like us, nothing happened here.
	Nobody got sick.
	We just went on about our business.
	It was no problem.
	What happened was that you have these pigs and milk and stuff going into these processing facilities that are humongous.
	The processing facility has to shut down for a few days or quarantine everybody for a few days.
	They can't function.
	And so you've got all this stuff coming in a pipeline.
	Well, milk, you know, you can't say cows.
	Would you just not give any milk here for two weeks till we can get this figured out?
	The cow's going to give milk, right?
	And that milk has to have some place to go.
	And if it doesn't have any place to go, it's going to get dumped.
	Pigs!
	Pigs!
	You have all these pigs, you know.
	Millions of them a day are going to the slaughterhouses.
	You can't tell the pigs, quit eating, stop growing, wait three months and we'll see you in three months.
	No, those pigs are continuing to go.
	And so chickens and pigs, the reason they didn't slaughter and throw away very many cows was because beef is the biggest of the animals and it has the largest amount of flex.
	And it's grow-out time.
	So if you keep a beef a couple extra weeks, they'll be okay.
	But you keep a chicken a couple extra weeks, and it's not a chicken anymore.
	And so the problem was not the farmer.
	It wasn't the consumer.
	It was the middle of the supply, the processing chain.
	And it was exacerbated because that processing chain is centralized and huge outfits as opposed to decentralized and smaller outfits.
	And so those aircraft carriers got stuck up on the rocks, ripped holes in their sides, and showed the fragility.
	So, you know, what's fascinating now is that we're seeing brand new terminology.
	Within the supply chain.
	It used to be just in time.
	Everything was just in time inventory.
	Just in time.
	Just in time.
	You know what it is now.
	It's just in case.
	Just in case.
	So we have people trying to stockpile in case there are disruptions in the supply chain.
	And of course, you know, we've grown up for all of our lives hearing efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.
	Now guess what the word is?
	The word is resiliency, resiliency, resiliency, because people realize If we're not first resilient, we don't have anything to be efficient about.
	Efficiency can only come after resiliency.
	And so that was the fact that we had an efficient, fragile, centralized chain of custody between the farmer and the consumer is what broke down.
	And that's why, yes, we dumped milk, we slaughtered chickens, turkeys, pigs.
	By the millions were just thrown away, thrown away, incinerated, whatever, landfill, thrown away during that very critical time.
	You know, the first time I had raw milk was I represented the Stubbe family of the Altadena dairy farming operation out in California, and they had many long fights over raw milk.
	And when I got the first, my mother had always said it's great.
	The first time I got a chance to drink it.
	I told the Stubbies they could just pay me in the future with just deliveries of raw milk because of how fresh and how great it was.
	Can you describe for people the degree of it's been like a continuous battle now for the better part of a couple of decades simply to drink milk the way we've been drinking milk for centuries that now has been so strictly prohibited and precluded.
	What is your take on the entire sort of raw milk legal process and the attempts to effectively ban it and the successful efforts to some degree of people being able to fight back and be able to allow people to purchase what they want and to put in their bodies what they choose?
	Oh, there again, such a great issue.
	So, of course, I'm a raw milk drinker.
	I grew up on raw milk.
	I still drink raw milk.
	I mean, it's not illegal.
	I can't buy raw milk, but I can buy a portion of a herd.
	So I have a herd share from a guy up the road, and we get our raw milk from a herd share.
	And you're right, it is like ambrosia.
	I mean, there's nothing like raw milk.
	Where things went south was in the late 1800s, from about 1870 to 1920.
	We had urbanization.
	Urbanization went through the roof during the early Industrial Revolution.
	People left farms, went to the cities, went to the factories, started manufacturing.
	And all that migration from country to city was ahead of...
	The infrastructure necessary to metabolize that many people living on top of each other.
	And so you have cities without houses, open sewers, no pipes, no refrigeration, lack of water.
	People bathe one day every two weeks.
	And the two main food industries that require refrigeration and are liquid, Beer and milk.
	Beer and milk.
	And so those had to be situated in the urban centers because it couldn't be transport.
	It's heavy to transport.
	You can't, you know, a liquid is heavy.
	And before automobiles, when you're transporting it with, you know, mules and horse trailers, you know, you couldn't take it very far.
	And so as these urban sectors built up, you had these beer, these breweries.
	Situated in the city.
	And they had a byproduct waste called distiller's grains.
	Distiller's grains were the fermented leftovers of the beer making.
	Well, so what are we going to do with that?
	Well, we can't afford to transport anywhere.
	So let's hook up a dairy next to the brewery.
	We'll feed the dairy cows the distiller's grains.
	It's called swill.
	And these were called swill berries.
	And when you feed an herbivore that distillers grains and swill, it makes acidosis within the rumen and creates concentrations of pathogenic microbes that the cow would never have otherwise.
	And so the problem with milk, you know, tuberculosis and all the things that were alleged to be in milk.
	Those things were a very short period of time, about a 50-year period of time, during early urbanization, prior to sanitary piping, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, stainless steel, and all those kinds of things that were all a part of making a hygienic urban living experience.
	You know, milk can be obviously, you know, misraised, mishandled, that sort of thing, like it was done in these swill dairy.
	So the easy thing to do was to just say, let's just cook it.
	Kill all the pathogens, and then it'll be safe to drink.
	The problem is when you cook it, you lose half of the nutrition.
	It completely changes.
	Now it's a processed product, right?
	It doesn't have all of its natural enzymes, fatty acids, and nutritive ratios in it.
	And so it's not good.
	And you've killed a lot of the natural pathogen-fighting microbes that are there to protect it so that it doesn't make you sick.
	And so that's how this whole, you know, thing came about.
	But it's like once there's a regulation, you know, you can never, you never turn the clock back.
	You know, by the 1940s and 50s, when we had refrigeration, we had stainless steel, you know, we understood the danger of swill dairies.
	And so the dairies and the breweries separated, and it was a different ballgame, but the regulations remained the same.
	And that 50-year history of potential hazard stayed as a literature data foundation for the regulatory climate.
	And so the regulatory climate did not adapt to the new knowledge, infrastructure, microscopes, little test strips now that you can dip in to do testing.
	All those things have come in the last half century, but the regulations remain.
	That's where we are.
	So my position on all this is that That one of the most critical decisions I can make for me is how is the fuel I'm going to feed in my microbiome.
	And what's happened is that as the government, as society has determined that I'm responsible for your health and the government has gotten into healthcare business.
	Instead of me being able to say, well, if I want to eat high risk and ingest things that you don't think are healthy for me, it's my body.
	I can do what I want.
	But as soon as we have government health care, now suddenly I can't make that decision because if I practice risky behavior, that creates an economic problem to all of society.
	But then you have to pick up the tab.
	So suddenly it's not, I can't make a choice of what I ingest or what I feed my microbiome.
	No, actually you own a part of me because you're going to have to pick up the health tab if I make risky choices.
	And so the whole health care, food freedom, you know, discussion is heavily intertwined.
	From a policy philosophy standpoint, it's not just, you know, if I want to hurt myself, I should be able to hurt myself.
	That used to be fine.
	If I hurt myself, then I got to pick up the tab for fixing myself, okay?
	And so I can hurt myself, that'll be fine.
	But if you're going to pay for my health, then you're going to have a say in whether I can hurt myself or not.
	And what hurting myself means...
	It's different for different people.
	I mean, I think Coca-Cola is not healthy, but that's perfectly safe.
	You can feed your kid, you know, five jugs of Coca-Cola every day.
	That's perfectly fine.
	They can get type 2 diabetes, and my taxes have to pick up the tab for feeding your kid Coca-Cola.
	But I don't have, by the same token, the same right, if I'm going to feed my kid raw milk, to take the risk of the child having raw milk.
	So safety...
	The thing I'm pointing out is safety is highly subjective.
	Safety is not an empirical objective science.
	I think people engage in very unsafe behavior all the time.
	And it's okay to engage in unsafe behavior if you actually are responsible to pick up the tab for your own negligence and lack of safety.
	But as soon as you pick up the tab for me or I pick up the tab for you, now I have a philosophical And an economic and a social imperative to intervene in your decisions to make sure you don't do something that I consider risky.
	Joel, I was going to say, I've only had, I've never had raw milk that I know of, but I've had milk from the source of two entities.
	One was a goat and the other was my wife when we were breastfeeding.
	Because I needed to know what it tasted like.
	And it tasted a little different.
	The goat was interesting.
	But a question that I have.
	And people in the chat are rightly pointing out that you can't get raw milk, but the government can compel you to inject something else into your body that has not been around for as long as raw milk.
	But we'll set that political discussion aside.
	Is it true, the rumors, Bill Gates, some private interests acquiring massive amounts of land in America, is the risk as big as we think it is?
	And what is the solution to that risk if there is one?
	You know, I try to stay a little bit, whatever, separated from things that I can't influence.
	And so, yes, Bill Gates now owns, what, 280,000?
	I mean, he's buying land all the time.
	And, of course, he's heavily invested in fake meat and pseudo-lab-grown material, which, by the way, requires a lot of antibiotics.
	Antibiotics injected into the solution to kill competing microbes.
	So here we are trying to take antibiotics out of livestock agriculture.
	A lot of awareness about that.
	But here we are promoting fake meats and lab-grown stuff that requires antibiotics to destroy the competing microbes for the strata that they're trying to make.
	It's just, you know, it's insane.
	So the question is, well, you know, is it real?
	Yes, it's real.
	And I don't know.
	I mean, there's a lot of land.
	And so I'm not ready to panic over it.
	But when you ask, what's the solution?
	Well, the solution is to free up entrepreneurial farmers to be able to access their communities with their food.
	I call it a food, what we need is a food emancipation proclamation.
	Right now our food system is enslaved to these capricious, nefarious...
	You know, regulatory requirements that don't actually measure anything that's important and deny people like me access to the marketplace.
	And so if we actually unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of farmers that wanted to participate in the marketplace, we would...
	We would have a safer food supply.
	We would have a more affordable food supply.
	And we would have a more abundant food supply within the marketplace.
	And so, instead of seeing...
	Too many people think that the answer is some sort of additional agency, a tax subsidy.
	Let's help these poor people.
	Let's help these...
	No, no, no.
	Just quit fighting me.
	Just unleash me.
	Give me some freedom.
	And we'll compete very well.
	Thank you very much.
	What do you think about various right to farm, right to grow, some of that legislation like in Maine and some other places that people are proposing?
	How much could that be part of a solution?
	Yeah, well, the right to farm and right to grow laws are primarily...
	We have been put in by the industrial food sector because industrial farms stink to high heavens, and they're noisy, they're dusty, and they're unsightly.
	And so the right-to-farm laws were put in to protect farmers from nuisance, from the nuisance suits of city people who move into the country and say...
	Man, I don't like that stinky farm.
	I'm going to sue them.
	And then the farm gets embroiled in a bunch of litigation and all that.
	So basically, if you farm the way the conventional orthodoxy says is an acceptable way to farm, then you don't have to worry about being sued by nuisance suits.
	So that's fine as far as it goes.
	But what we need is a right to sell from the farm because, because, Because basically the right to farm bills laws are, I call them right to stinking up the neighborhood laws.
	You know, that's fine.
	But what we really need are, like in Maine, they started the food sovereignty laws and where a locality says, you know what, in our locality, If you and your neighbor want to get together and trade money for quiche or money for bologna or money for raw milk, we're not going to get involved in that.
	And of course, several townships in Maine have passed these food sovereignty ordinances.
	But they've now been determined illegal.
	The federal government comes in and they say, if you do that, we're going to deny the state inspection and the state won't be able to sell anything across its border.
	And so there are a couple of really, I think, doable remedies here, or let me say sellable, idea sellable remedies.
	And one of the problems is that we don't have the ability to experiment.
	For example...
	One time I was down in Richmond testifying for a cottage food bill, and the head of Virginia Department of Agriculture took me aside during a break, and very sincere, nice guy, you know, I'm sure he's got kids that play soccer and, you know, well-intended.
	He told me, he said, Joel, he said, we can't let people choose their food.
	If we let people choose their food, we won't be able to build enough hospitals to house all the sick people.
	That are choosing bad food.
	And the problem is, I can't look him in the eye and say, actually, it wouldn't happen that way.
	I think food would be more abundant, more affordable, and higher quality if people could choose their food.
	But the problem is...
	The way the regulation laws are, the inspections, a locality can't even experiment to try to see if that kind of freedom would work.
	He might be right.
	Maybe it would fill up the hospitals.
	I have a sneaking suspicion it would help empty the hospitals.
	But I don't have a way to argue the point with him empirically because...
	He won't let my locality do an experiment to find out if it's actually true.
	So it seems to me like a saleable option would be a federal, you know, we have a right to farm.
	How about we have a right to sell and we offer, it doesn't require anything except if a locality, if a locality wants to have an unregulated food commerce.
	We're not going to interfere.
	Okay?
	We're not going to interfere with them.
	And let them try it.
	And let's see what happens.
	The problem is, as we have federalized everything, as we have taken everything to the centralized federal level, we have eliminated the ability to diversify our experiments.
	And even try innovative, creative solutions to the biggest problems of our day.
	Joel, everyone in the chat is going to realize there's some benefits to being my wife and letting me drink milk from the source from time to time.
	She had a couple of questions, Joel, and she said she wants to know what type of meat we should buy because we buy most labels say no antibiotics, no hormones, and we're not allowed apparently growing chickens.
	We're not allowed having a chicken coop here.
	So what can people do locally?
	But more importantly, what should people look for?
	Before I ask you, what are the big problems and what are the big solutions?
	But what should people look for when buying meat?
	Well, where I start on the answer is don't go to the store.
	You're going to circumvent the store.
	You're going to go outside the store.
	You're going to find your local sources.
	And now today, there are thousands and thousands of farmers doing Grass-finished, compost-grown, non-chemical approaches in all the different livestock.
	There are lots of them.
	Generally, you're not going to find...
	Authenticity in the supermarket.
	Now, you might find it in a little specialty gourmet shop, a little specialty butcher shop, that sort of thing.
	Absolutely, you can find it there.
	In fact, we supply a couple of those in the area.
	But generally, you're going to find it outside the conventional supermarket channels.
	It's another whole discussion as to why that is.
	Just realize, again, the big centralized supermarkets are in cahoots with the regulators, the industrial food system, and they're all fraternity.
	It's a fraternity of ideas and a fraternity of protocol.
	And so to get the real stuff, you have to start looking outside the system.
	You've described something called open farming.
	Could you describe that for folks?
	Open farming?
	Yeah.
	I'm not sure what I mean by open farming.
	If somebody wanted to come by, take a look from you.
	We have an open door philosophy here.
	Anyone can come visit the farm 24-7-365 from anywhere in the world, unannounced.
	And see anything they want to while they're here.
	That's our open door policy.
	And we believe that that buys us the credibility in the idea marketplace to be able to push for the kind of liberty, freedom, libertarian ideas.
	The choice, the freedom to choose among consenting adults.
	We want the government out of our bedrooms.
	We want the government out of our womb.
	But we don't have a problem with the government being in our mouths.
	And I suggest that that's as important a personal decision as anything.
	And so in a day when consenting adults are seeking a choice in many areas of their life, let's extend that choice to the most intimate thing we do, and that is feeding our microbiome.
	That's just a good consistent thing.
	So when I say, and people say, oh no, but there might be dirty farmers.
	Oh no, somebody might get sick.
	There might be bad food.
	Yes, that's certainly a possibility.
	That's certainly a possibility.
	But what if you granted that?
	What if part of that freedom were if a farmer wants to do this and come out from under government oversight?
	The trade-off is the farmer has to whip down all the no trespassing signs and have an open door policy that anyone can come and inspect anything on that farm unannounced anywhere in the world.
	That's a trade-off I'm willing to make.
	I would love to have that kind of trade-off.
	And I think that having that kind of open door policy gives us credibility in that idea marketplace that we're willing to go to that point.
	Joel, one question, I guess maybe it might be a big one, but in terms of the biggest problems facing people in the near short, medium term, is sustainability the issue?
	Is pricing the issue?
	And what is the biggest problem facing people in the short to medium term?
	And what's the solution?
	The biggest problem facing people is The fear is inertia.
	I'll just say inertia.
	You know, there is plenty of good food out there.
	I mean, you know, we now ship nationwide.
	We would love to see additional sales.
	We have capacity to double tomorrow.
	On our land base, our weak link is the market.
	Well, why is the market?
	Well, it's because everybody's going to McDonald's.
	They're going to Hardee's.
	And we've talked everything from Burger King to whatever.
	And nobody's interested in quality.
	And people don't care.
	People don't care about nutrition in general.
	And I'm not trying to be too broad a brush here.
	Certainly some people do.
	But in general, People care more about the health of their dog and their cat than their own kids.
	They go get really high-quality food for their dog, take their kids to Happy Meals and McDonald's.
	This is intellectual schizophrenia.
	It's intellectual schizophrenia.
	And so the biggest problem that people face is thinking intentionally about About what they're doing, about their activities.
	And not just, you know, going with the flow.
	The hardest thing to do is to, you know, go against the flow.
	And, you know, people want to be...
	I heard this quote just yesterday.
	It was really interesting.
	The old Indiana University basketball coach, Bobby Knight, said, everybody wants to win, but who is willing to do the preparation in order to win?
	So everybody wants to be healthy, but who's willing to do the prep work and the intentional choice work, the sleuthing work, to be healthy?
	And so as much as we've, you know, lambasted the regulatory environment, we've lambasted a lot of things here tonight, you know, the biggest impediment facing all of us, you and me too, is that we get stuck in our rut.
	We get stuck in our routine.
	And we tend to just want to keep doing what we're doing and hoping for a different result.
	And we're stuck there.
	So, as my son says, our biggest weak link is between our ears.
	Our weak link is between our ears.
	And if we can get through that, then we can make big changes.
	Could you describe for people, like, do you butcher meat on location at your farm and what some of the hurdles are for farmers to do that?
	I mean, the Amish community has been doing it for a long time as part of the whole Amos Miller case.
	The government doesn't want him to do it because they have their own protocols and procedures and they want him to make it and process it differently than his customers want and that he traditionally does.
	Could you describe some of the...
	I think the ordinary person thinks this still happens.
	You have the farmer butchers the cow right there and chips it, but that in fact, increasingly, that's no longer the case due to the...
	Well, that hasn't happened for a long, long time.
	So in order for me to sell you a T-bone steak, we'll go back to your T-bone steak.
	In order for me to sell you a T-bone steak, I have to take the beef to an inspected slaughterhouse.
	The closest one that we have is 30 miles away, and there it gets processed, and I bring home USDA inspected packages that I can then sell to you.
	Legally, that's the only way I can sell meat in the United States.
	And so you can't butcher it in the backyard.
	You can't even take it to a neighborhood custom butcher house.
	You have to take it to an inspected facility.
	And because the regulations are scale prejudicial, small facilities like we use...
	The compliance cost is up to five times as much as it is for a great big processor that's doing 5,000 animals a day.
	The same thing is true with chickens.
	Same thing is true with pork.
	All that has to go through an inspected facility.
	And so what that does is it removes all this from the farm.
	It removes...
	It removes all of the waste product, you know, the feathers, the hide, the guts, all that that could be composted and returned to the fields and returned to the farm which they came.
	Instead, it's lost and rendered and generally, you know, it certainly isn't used as any kind of fertilizer, generally.
	But that value is lost and segregated.
	Rather than being integrated, it's fundamentally segregated.
	It's important to understand that our food system right now, if I was to give one word to describe it, it is fundamentally segregated.
	Nature is fundamentally integrated.
	You see things live, grow, die, process, decompose, and add fertility in proximate.
	It's an integrated system.
	Whereas what we've created...
	The fertility comes from oil wells, the corn is grown somewhere else, to be fed to animals somewhere else, to be slaughtered somewhere else, to be sown somewhere else.
	None of this is connected.
	It's all segregated.
	It's not integrated, it's segregated.
	And ultimately, truly sustainable ecological systems have to start by being integrated, which is why being able to process the animals on a farm and sell them to our neighbors is such a critical component, not just of economics and not just of sanitation, hygiene, and safety, but a primarily concern of closing the ecological cycles, the natural ecological cycles that make
	Yeah, in that respect, is it an example where specialization and scale...
	That has happened with globalization of the economics was not such a good idea when it comes to food.
	Yeah, well, here again, you know, we go back to this discussion of is food primarily biological or mechanical?
	And, you know, when Joel Arthur Barker wrote the book Paradigms and introduced the term Paradigms to the world...
	One of his axioms of paradigms was that every paradigm eventually exceeds its point of efficiency.
	In other words, you start down a paradigm, and you refine it, you tweak it, you tweak it, tweak it, and you scale it, and you scale it, and you scale it, and eventually it outgrows.
	I mean, a great example was the...
	The supersonic Concorde, you know, the fast jet, the great big luxury jet that made it from whatever Paris to, you know, to JFK in whatever it was, two and a half hours or something.
	That's a perfect example of something becoming too big, too fast.
	It was too expensive.
	And the stodgy old, you know, 747 is actually a much more...
	It's an efficient thing to run.
	That's an example of a paradigm exceeding its efficiency.
	And so, yes, you're right.
	The specialization and the scale, viewing food as fundamentally a mechanical thing rather than a biological thing, viewed food as a factory.
	We got inputs going in the back door.
	We got outputs coming out the front door.
	It's a flow-through thing.
	But nature isn't flow-through.
	Nature is not linear.
	Nature is cyclical.
	Nature makes circles.
	It doesn't do linear.
	The factory does linear.
	Raw ingredients in the front, you know, finished out the back.
	So that's manufacturing.
	That's inanimate objects.
	You know, E.F. Schumacher wrote about this in Small is Beautiful.
	And he pointed out that...
	That living things have a spontaneity.
	John Eichert, the professor emeritus of University of Missouri, he was an ag economist, and he points out that the foundations of industry are specialization, simplification, routinization, and mechanization.
	Four pillars.
	But life is completely opposite these.
	Life is not simple.
	It's complex.
	It's not specialized.
	It's diverse.
	It's not routine.
	It's dynamic.
	It's not mechanical.
	It's biological.
	And so in all four respects, food, which is fundamentally life, is fundamentally different than non-life, non-living things.
	And you can't just...
	Because it works in mechanics, make it work in life.
	In mechanics, if your wheel bearing goes out in your car, you can stop and you can ask it forgiveness.
	You can give it a squirt of oil.
	You can apologize.
	You can do all sorts of things.
	When you get in that car, you can say, oh, do you need to rest a while?
	I'll rest you.
	Are you stressed?
	But you get in that car.
	And that wheel bearing is not going to be healed.
	But when it comes to life, we can say an unfitting word and ask for apology and it can be healed.
	We can skin our hands and the skin heals up and comes over and heals.
	The fundamental difference between living things and non-living things is living things can heal, non-living things can't.
	That is about as fundamentally...
	You know, as basic as I can get and why you can't simply transpose inanimate manufacturing principle to animate living biology.
	You know, Joel, I was going to ask you for a white pill to end the show.
	That would have been good enough, but I'll regret it if I don't ask this.
	I saw you mention it on Rogan, and you had a great philosophy about health, but it was beyond physical bodily health.
	It was spiritual health.
	And I don't know if you're going to remember what you said, because I'd love to end the show with it, but the idea of being healthy, sleeping well, and forgiveness.
	If you could leave us with that, a white pill for people.
	And I think a lot of people are inspired, based on reading the chat, that Rock's name already says, this is motivational.
	But give us the closing white pill, physical health, spiritual health, and what your key and trick and recommendation is for it.
	Yeah, so, wow, that's a pretty big pill.
	I would say that a lot of your soul-level satisfaction, contentment, enjoyment in life comes from sacred mission-driven activity.
	Sacred mission-driven activity.
	And if you have sacred, mission-driven activity, it gives you a true north.
	It gives you a true north to go.
	So many people are struggling with resentment.
	Vengeance, all that sort of thing.
	And I would just say that if we wanted to make a list of things we can be frustrated and angry about, we can make a pretty good list.
	Any of us can make a pretty good list.
	But the key to life enjoyment, happiness, and satisfaction is to take that anger and frustration and turn it on itself and say, What's the opposite of this?
	What can I do to change this?
	So that when everybody else is hopeless and helpless, I can offer hope and help.
	So instead of being negative, we become positive.
	Instead of seeing the dark, we see the light.
	And as we develop that sacred mission going toward that light and that hope and that help.
	What happens is that we find purpose.
	We find purpose-driven activity, and we're so caught up in positive, purpose-driven activity that we don't have time to dwell on fear, porn, hopelessness, anger, and frustration because it gets overridden by the fact that we're making progress in being a hope and a help.
	Can you tell people where people can find your farm, where people can find the content you produce?
	You mentioned your great book, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, one of the greatest titles of all books ever.
	Can you describe where people can find some of your farm and other content?
	Sure.
	Well, our website is polyfacefarms.com.
	Just, you know, put in P-O-L-Y.
	It'll probably pop up.
	polyfacefarms.com.
	We're in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
	We do numerous gatherings, health summits, farm tours, seminars.
	BioFIRP seminar.
	I mean, we've got lots of things going on.
	Jump on the website if you want to catch me at one of my speaking engagements.
	I travel widely and speak.
	My speaking schedule's on there.
	You can come and visit the farm.
	We do hayride tours all during the season.
	Not now.
	It's in the winter, but during the summer we do that.
	And if you want to get any of my books, you can get them there as well as you can on Amazon, but we make more money when you buy them from us.
	So anyway, yeah, the website there, Polyface Farms, is pretty comprehensive.
	And if you want food, we'll be glad to.
	If you don't know where to get it, if you're stymied, I just don't know where to start.
	Well, you can start with us.
	We'll be glad to supply you until you can find your local producer.
	And we're glad to jumpstart that.
	Jumpstart that.
	Because of shipping efficiencies and logistics that we've had developed in the last 10 years, now I can honestly say nobody has an excuse to not get authentic food.
	You don't have to be tied.
	You know, the logistics now of shipping capacity have completely revolutionized that whole, you know, that whole thing.
	And so, you know, so you can avail yourself of a lot of options.
	There are a lot of options, way more options than you had a long time ago.
	So it's an exciting time to live and it's a disruptive, for sure, disturbing time to be alive.
	But there's also...
	A lot of things we can do at our fingertips.
	I'm not sure where the world is going, but I know where you and I can go if we have intentional purpose and an exciting outlook for the future.
	I'm excited about what we can do individually, despite whatever happens out there.
	I love it.
	Joel, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes after we end this, and I'll post your link in the pinned comment both on YouTube and on Rumble.
	It's a miracle that this worked with the audio, but...
	Miracles happen.
	So Joel, stick around.
	Robert, as always, we'll see everybody tomorrow.
	Thank you all for being here.
	Sorry for the audio issues, but it was fantastic.
	And Joel, we'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone on the chat, have a good night.

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