Latest / The Aaron Day Show / S2E45 THE FINAL BETRAYAL - From Farmland to Digital Prison
Transcript
- Welcome back to the Aaron day show. This is season two, episode forty five. We have a completely packed episode tonight. We actually have not one, not two, but three guests. And so I'm going to dispense with some of the normal stuff that I would do at the beginning, although there's so much news. I mean, I could probably talk for two or three hours just about what's going on in the last, you know, forty eight hours, frankly, with the Epstein files and everything else. But We'll save some of that for later if there's time in the Q&A and definitely for Thursday. But for tonight, we're going to actually have two segments. I'm going to bring on Craig Wenkelwitz and we're going to talk about the effect of agriculture or technocracy and agriculture. So the intersection of those two concepts, which is something that's critical for people to understand, obviously, with OSARA. We're focusing on solutions for health care outside of the existing system and parallel solutions there. But there are some ideas as well that Craig is going to discuss. And as I've mentioned a long time ago, next up is food freedom. and how we can create private solutions for that. So that's going to be the first part of the conversation tonight. Then we're going to have Patrick Wood and Courtney Turner on for the last half of the show to discuss their new book, which I've been recommending and I can't recommend enough. I've read the whole book. It's actually not a very long book. It's very impactful, very concise, and very relevant to what's going on today. The book is called The Final Betrayal, How Technocracy Destroyed America, and we're going to have them on to discuss that book as well. And so that's the show for tonight. Just recapping the last few episodes. Last week, I guess it was on Monday, we didn't have the show on Thursday. I announced the launch of the Technocracy Atlas, which was great. I actually had the opportunity to announce it live on The Alex Jones Show, hosted by Mike Adams. So we've had thousands and thousands of people to the website. People are already using it. And I did a big upgrade over the weekend to the technocracyatlas.com. I added all of the Epstein information, all of the DOJ files. all of the House of Representative emails and information that came out last week, all of that plus much more has been added. We now have three thirty eight point three million words in the database. It's got all of the stuff you would ever want on technocracy. Patrick Wood's information, Courtney Turner, Many others, the book Hijacking Bitcoin is in there. The Brownstone Institute stuff is there. All of my podcast transcripts are in there. So we are really ratcheting this up. And I'll talk about that shortly. But there have been some revelations on that regarding Bitcoin that are critical for people to understand. And I want to say the whole purpose of the site, where this is going is I view this as a combination of kind of Wikipedia plus open source Palantir meets the ability to fund people to do investigative journalism using privacy coins. It's going to morph into that. There's a bigger plan for this. But the whole point of it is... to expose technocracy. They know everything about us. We know nothing about them. And we have a whole bunch of people siloed into, you know, a narrative about who's behind everything. And the only way to know who's behind everything is to put it out there in the public and to map it publicly and to rate the sources and quality of information. So that's what we're going to do. The episode before that, uh, was on with Mike Adams. Mike was on my show and we talked about bright you.ai, uh, and excuse me, AI in general, which we're going to continue to do more interviews together on this. This was a very popular episode. We're opening up and showing people that we don't have to submit to a digital prison, that there is a private version of this. There's a decentralized version of AI that's empowering. And I use it all the time. This is how I've been building a lot of these sites. This is what Mike Adams has been doing. He's actually launching Brighteon Books, where you can actually generate your own custom book on any topic. And it's based on his system. And I've talked to him at length. I scoured the world for information he already had obviously his information from natural news and all of the information he's been collecting over the decades but he has invested a massive amount of time and money to collect data and so these books that are being generated are based on actual data that he has stored on his hard drives that does fact checking based on primary sources this is a really Big deal. So I'm not sure what the launch date is for that, but I'm going to have I'll have him on and then I'm sure I will be demonstrating it live before that if we can't get him on right at the launch. We have OSARA launching. I actually realized I think I scheduled that to launch on Thanksgiving. It's going to launch the day after to launch on Black Friday, but that will be just for early registrants. The official launch date is going to be January the first. But if you want to be one of the early people to actually test and give feedback on the system, you can sign up at OSARA, O-A-S-A-R-A dot com. As always, I recommend, I'm going to continue to do this, that I'm going to continue to push that you actually watch this show. through um theerrandayshow.com as opposed to other channels i think it's only a matter of time before this content gets shadow banned and there's other there are other features on the site and a lot of other things that we're going to be able to do with the site in terms of you know you can search all of the past episodes i'm actually going to put a ai chat bot on there you can listen to all of the songs you can see memes you can actually interact with other community members there's a lot more functionality but in order to preserve censorship resistance i want people moving to that because i i truly think that uh you know we're not going to be very long for these platforms because all of these platforms are run by technocrats. So again, tonight we're going to be talking about the final betrayal, how technocracy destroyed America. You can get that book at technocracy.news or you can get it on Amazon. So I've ordered a hard copy and also have read the Kindle version as well. You can get Mike Adams AI at brightu.ai. You can either access it on the web or you can actually download it to your device so that you don't even need to be connected to the internet. use it now this is a big thing so i've written articles about this it's part of my book it's been part of every talk that we've done in twenty seven states and four countries i've tried to tell people that bitcoin was hijacked i've told people that epstein was involved i've told people that not only was it hijacked but the very same people that hijacked it through mit developed all three us cbdc pilots and we now have last week emails that have come out verifying this i wrote a brownstone article about it where i connected the dots but i said hey listen we know epstein invested in the mit multimedia lab at this time But I said, I was very honest in the article. I said, we don't have the smoking gun, but here's this other information where Epstein was interviewed about Bitcoin, so on and so forth. We now have the smoking gun. He definitively funded MIT and funded Bitcoin core developers. This is a big deal. And on Thursday, I'm going to go through all of it. But I am sick and tired of the propaganda and the censorship. I am sick and tired of the people in the Liberty community that claim, oh, this is old news. Oh, this isn't a big deal. For the people that are investing their retirement savings, buying Bitcoin ETFs, thinking it's this frankly bullshit freedom money, that it's not, they would like to know this. Because in all of the talks that I've given, all of the podcasts that I've given, Outside of the people that maybe already listened to this and some people like Kurt Wuckert and others who's involved with the BSV community, there are others that have been ahead of this. The general public knows nothing about this. And the general public will be horrified to learn about what's going on here. So I'm going to lay it all out. No more excuses. No more holding back. This has to get out. I'm already scheduling podcasts all over the world to talk about this yet again. But we have to get this out there because we have to fight technocracy. And you have a bunch of pseudo libertarians who know better, who are lying to people about Bitcoin so that they can pump their bags and get more fiat currency. And it's disgusting. So very clear. That is going to be a show. you are not going to want to miss. I'll skip through the rest of this so that we can hop right in. I'm going to get Craig on. Hopefully, we'll have the audio issues worked out. Hey, Craig, how are you? Can you hear me? I can't hear you if... Oh, there we go. How's that? Can you hear me now, Aaron? That's good. Someone in the comments wouldn't mind if you hear any echo. I'm seeing sounds great. We might have actually cracked the code finally. so um let me see if i can there we go i've got that all figured out so uh so craig and i've been working on this this is mostly craig who's uh who's put everything together for for tonight for this part about um agriculture by the way i really like this song i think one of my favorite songs is the last song that i played before this started i put one i put one together on this whole agriculture thing it was uh that's what it's got to be in my top three at this point um So anyway, we've been going back and forth. Craig hasn't seen the slides, but he put together all the information for the slides. So this should go well. And actually, we're five minutes ahead. I figured it would take me until six thirty to get this off. So we're ready to go. So I've got my notes, but I've just got the slides. So if you just we can just kind of kind of wing this. We've got all the all the info. But yeah. I laid the groundwork earlier. It's technocracy is everywhere. And when you research what's going on, it's a big deal in food. And so we're going to walk through tonight what that's all about, how the agricultural industry works. how truly devastatingly bad it is if you're not already aware of it. And then Craig has some ideas for what we might do about that. So do you want to start here? I've got this. I'm just following your notes, kind of the agricultural machine, kind of the opening gambit here. Yeah. Yeah. So, so recently in the news, we've seen the stuff going on with the beef. And so, you know, it's been getting a lot of attention, but this has been going on for a long time. It's really been building since the nineteen sixties through the nineteen eighties. And we're going to probably get into a little bit of that. And and it's this technocracy, right? You know, Patrick Wood's been talking about this for a long time. This isn't anything new. This has been building for what do we say here in a hundred plus years? Would you say this technocracy wave that we're in? And it feels like we're getting, you know, deeply, I don't know, how far would you say we are into it, Aaron? I know you're saying things are moving really quickly now. From an agricultural perspective, I think we're getting pretty close to, right, if you're looking at all these different components of technocracy and you look at them in parallel, I don't know, this food thing feels pretty far along to me, especially from the cattle rancher perspective. And that's what's been in the news. That's kind of what we want to get into, at least historically. Highlight that tonight. What are your thoughts on that, Aaron? How far along do you think we are on things and with the food part in mind? Well, with the food part in mind, I think it's a similar thing. I mean, if you go to technocracyatlas.com, we have a tab called threat level. And what we've done there is we've analyzed what's going on globally with respect to digital IDs, digital currencies and AI surveillance. And when you really dig into where we already are, not where it's going, it's pretty bad. Sixty percent of Americans already have Real ID, which is digital in eleven states, twenty more within the next few months. We have the Genius Act and tokenized assets. I mean, I'd argue we're eighty percent of the way there, plus on essentially what people worry about with CBDC programmable money. And I've got, and you can see the breakdown, that we're about seventy two percent of the way there on AI and surveillance. And this is looking at Palantir OpenAI and all of the other stuff, the NSA programs that are going on. And so from what I've seen with the food, it's the same thing. We're basically dealing with now four companies that control everything. And from when you dig into this more and more and more, you find that it's already consolidated and it's already supply chain. Everything's already tracked. So, I mean, I'd say we're seventy, eighty percent of the way there. When it's funny, you have those numbers, eighty percent, because it's pretty, pretty. We're pretty solid on the fact that those four, those four numbers. You know, Packers, the four that we're going to talk about tonight, you know, as we get into this, it's about eighty to eighty five percent. They have control of eighty to eighty five percent of the market. So it fits right in line with what you're talking about here and on these other fronts, you know, so no surprise there. And so what does this mean? It means that we have consumers on one side, right, purchasing beef, meat, chicken, pork, all these different things. And then we have the cattle ranchers on the other side, okay? And they've been pressed for a long time. And, you know, we'll talk about how they got there and how this whole thing evolved. But they're not getting fair prices, even though live cattle... So we measure cattle in two different ways, right? We've got... Basically, the way I like to think about it is we've got cattle up until the... So from the time they're born until they're teenagers, let's just say, right? You have that. And then usually what happens is the cattle usually get turned over at that point. And they take them from teenagers into adult. And the whole goal at that point is to basically fatten them up. So the first goal is to make sure they're healthy, keep them disease-free. Then you get it to that certain point where they're teenagers, and the goal is to fatten them up. And a lot of farmers, that's their goal, is to fatten them up as quickly and get them to market as quickly as possible. The problem is that even though we're at all-time highs on both of those forms, we look at those in terms of live cattle and feeder cattle and live cattle, And both of them are at all-time high prices. But ranchers are about ready to go out of business because they're getting press from every single angle. They've been under pressure for a long time. And this last government shutdown actually hit them pretty hard because they need funding. And a lot of the funding they get is through government-associated banking. you know, government backstop banking. And so when they, when that shuts down, they don't, they're at harvest time, right? So they're harvesting, they're doing the things they need to do, you know, to end their growing season in a lot of the U S and they get pressured even more. So it's really, they're really under pressure and it's been hitting the media in a lot of different ways. You probably have seen something on this. If you're, I would imagine, right. I don't know if you've seen it out there in two, or is it, is it, have you seen the, the, this getting covered or, or not so much? Well, I've seen it start to get covered. But I mean, I follow this. I follow food freedom. So I don't know if that means it's hitting the general public or not. I don't know. But I know I see it. Yeah. So what this boils down to is we have food. All of it's been high, right? We've been going through this for at least the fourth last. So up until about two thousand and twenty, we had two thousand nineteen, two thousand twenty into that covid window of time. You know, we were at one point eight, two percent inflation. And then we really skyrocketed with a lot of things like and some of the things that got hit the hardest were food. Right. All food gone up pretty extreme. But beef, beef is high on the list. Huge, huge, extreme inflation. increases in price same thing with frozen juices overall grocery bills and dining i mean i'm sure anybody who's been out dining i mean your bills it seems to me like double what it used to be and then obviously we've seen housing go through this motor vehicle repair insurance right some of the largest spikes in the last five years of all time and cigarettes obviously you know not something we should be probably you know doing too much with but nonetheless the price has been high on that as well And again, it goes back to tobacco. So again, it's still an agriculture component, right? And so the question is, do we really think that all these high prices are an accident? So I think of energy, gasoline as an example. There were times where we were told we were running out of gasoline. We're going to run out of gas. We're going to run short on this, right? They did this thing. They measured this thing called the Henry Hub, where we thought we were at the hinge point where we'd gotten to the peak amount of oil and we were on the downward hill of this. And they were saying three hundred dollars a barrel for oil. But now we see, you know, these different industry groups, I guess, the IEAE. Right. They're in the energy space and they measure this and they say that they think we're going to be oversupplied for years. Right. So the question is, we have every reason to believe that we can feed the world, and we can feed it efficiently, okay? It's geopolitics and the control factors that get in the way. And some of this is economic, some of it's geopolitical, tariffs maybe a little bit. Some of this is definitely technocracy, and some of this is just evil, right, to prep society and weaken them for universal basic income, I think. And so... What we want to go into tonight is this technocracy and agriculture. And technocracy, technology, okay, can be our friend. And Aaron does a nice job of always trying to differentiate these two, technology and technocracy, right? Technocracy is using technology to manage and control societies and industries by elite classes, so-called technical experts, okay? And so that's what we're talking about here tonight is using this technology to pervasively control this space. And when we see that the cattle and beef industry is controlled by four players in the field. This is what we're talking about, right? This is, it's become pervasive. All right. And so do you have any of those clips Aaron, by chance, or. I do. And before we get into this, I'm just trying to look at the notes that you sent over. But just to frame this a little bit of data, agriculture employs nineteen point seven million people, but only one point four percent of them actually farm. The rest just manage the machines. John Deere collects five gigabytes of data per hour, uploading everything to corporate clouds that farmers don't even access. Monsanto Bear controls twenty three percent of global seeds. The system processes nine point five billion animals annually through industrial facilities. And the supporting infrastructure includes three point four trillion dollars in equipment that farmers lease but don't own. And so then this farm credit system holds three hundred seventy four billion in agricultural debt, keeping farmers essentially perpetually leveraged and enslaved. so um so anyway what just to just and i and i'm trying to try to see your notes because i don't i don't want to steal your thunder on this and i want to make sure we've got the red no we're in it together there's no thunder you i know you put this together i don't know if i'm if i'm actually taking your stuff or not but anyway good run with it no it's good we'll just back and forth through this whole thing let's just work through it together it's perfect yeah so i've got these three clips which uh do you want me to play them all or do you want me to start with a particular one i think it was the second one that i sent you the one will it's the one about ten pound ten dollars a pound uh for meat and supply constraints it's the i think look domestically we need to get our arms around it last time we got together we talked about how the herd is at a seventy year low demand is at an all-time high and the net result is prices are through the roof so There's this concept in the industry called heifer retention. And it's a decision that the rancher and the feedlot operator make to hold back the female animal to build the herd as opposed to send it to market. Now, that's a double-edged sword. We've started to see good signals that that's happening. But that means that the supply is going to continue to shrink as fewer cattle are going to market. So we are headed for what I'm calling, Maria, the ten dollar a pound reality. By third quarter of twenty six, families are going to see ten dollar a pound ground beef in the grocery store. So we're in for a bit of a haul here. I don't believe we'll see price come down in any meaningful way until sometime in twenty twenty seven. Okay. So the question is, do we think that's an accident, Aaron? Well, I don't think we think it's an accident. I actually just saw that somebody died from that alpha gal tick, this new tick-borne disease where people become allergic to red meat and someone just died from that. So that's a little bit off topic, but somewhat on topic. I don't think that any of this is a mistake at all because, again, part of the transfer, transition to technocracy is to create an emergency situation where people feel they don't have any choice but to take what it is that they offer. And so obviously, food inflation is one of the biggest areas of concern for everyone. Yeah. Well, and that's the – and so the beef's caught in the headlines lately, and I think what we want to do is go through and just talk a little bit about farming in general. Some of this is pretty obvious, but at its core, the U.S. agriculture is a massive system for producing food, fuel, and raw materials. Now, what people have probably forgotten, in two thousand and eight, we got into a period of time where, again, a lot of it was political. But we started using a lot of food for fuel, and that became the headlines on a lot of magazines, right? Is corn food or is it fuel? And it's really become both, right? They use it for ethanol and so forth. And we also use corn. Well, we'll get into that. But farmers, essentially, it's those three things, right? Food, fuel, and raw materials. And farmers... Obviously, we have the farmers, right, who grow the crops and raise the livestock. And then we have processors, okay, who turn the raw products into things like flour, cheese, from the cows, right? Or they turn into biofuels and then mix it with different types of petroleum products like what's called RBOB gasoline. And that's what we get when you go to the gas pump and you see the ten percent ethanol and so forth. And then we get distributors. These are the people who move the food across the country and the world. And this is ripe for technocracy, right? This whole logistical supply chain. And then we have the retailers who sell it to the consumers. And then we get supporting systems like Aaron was talking about with John Deere, right? The equipment makers, the seed companies, the Monsantos, the bears, then all the research that goes into this. And then there's a lot of government agencies that surround this whole space. Obviously the USDA is the one that pops to mind. Okay, so again, we talk about this government, we talk about big business, And then the combination of those things and the technocracy. And so we can think of this as a giant network designed to convert land, water, sunlight, and labor into reliable supplies of foods and goods. And these are all things that we talked about, right, Aaron, whether it's on the technocracy roundtable or wherever, or these natural asset corporations, all these things that technocracy would like to tokenize. Yeah, I would like to tokenize and are actively tokenizing. And, you know, I mean, to this point, as far as centralization is concerned, I mean, we produce one hundred nineteen billion pounds of corn, four point one billion bushels of soybeans and slaughter of thirty four million cattle annually. But four percent of farms control forty eight percent of the production value. And so it's grown by corporate systems that are running on a combination of algorithms, debt, and government subsidies. The government subsidies for this are forty point five billion dollars this year alone. So just to put all that into perspective. Yep. And in that space, you know, we've got the U.S. happens to be one of the biggest world producers and a lot in South America, right? We know Ukraine, huge breadbasket for Europe. And then Europe, of course, you know, we've got, we get into things like corn, right? Used for livestock feed, sweeteners, corn syrup, which, you know, obviously isn't always the best product, but it's used significantly across a lot of the processed foods we get. And then the ethanol we were talking about, soybeans used for feed, oil, and exports. We just went through the trade deal. The big deal was trying to sell twenty five billion dollars worth of soybean per year to to China. And with that becomes in this stuff becomes a weapon, too, because, you know, China's been trying to exert again. You know, it's who who is China and what is the U.S.? What is China? But the point is, it's a lot of South America has been. sort of hijacked and held hostage a lot from an agricultural perspective. So this isn't just, I guess my goal in all this is to at least open up the idea, the lens of looking at this from a worldwide perspective and how people use agriculture to exert pressure Again, upon different geographical regions of the world, okay? And then we get wheat, we get rice. Those are pretty common things. Beef, pork, chicken, dairy products, cotton, specialty crops like fruits, nuts, and vegetables. And then we get soft commodities, things like coffee, cocoa, orange juice. Mostly orange juice in that space is to be concentrated, you know, that comes out of Florida and so forth. Then we get sugars. And so as we look at this across the U.S., of course, we get the Midwest specializes in grains. The West, California, dominates the fruits and vegetable space. And then the South focuses a lot on cotton, poultry, and a fair amount of livestock. A lot of this livestock, not to get too complicated here, but Texas does a lot of the reporting on the prices of the beef. And so... Just because it's kind of the center, not necessarily, but it gets considered as the center in terms of when we go to price these things in the market, Texas becomes a big component. I'll just leave it at that. Texas is very important when they're pricing beef, when beef is getting priced. And let's see, we've got this here where anything you wanted to add to that, Aaron? Nope, that's good. Okay. And then we've got this next slide, how the industry works. So we've got the inputs. We have seeds, fertilizers, equipment, feed. Then we have production. We have farms that grow crops or raise animals. Then we have the processing of it. The raw items get cleaned, they get milled, cooked, and packaged. And then obviously the distribution, right? The trucking, the rail, the ports. And a lot of this stuff is even air. You know, you think of certain things are... very time sensitive, like fish or something. Right. We forget that we don't include that in here because, but you know, there is fish harvesting and so forth, and that'll come, you know, from the coastline and it'll get shipped in by air. So air becomes, so we got those four forms of, of transportation. And then of course, then we get the sales, we get grocery stores, restaurants, and then a lot of this stuff goes to export, the export market. And, um, And again, this gets into tariffs, right? And tariffs play a big role. Currency plays a big role in this as well, right? The currency conversion. And so again, that gets us into the form of currencies and the digital currency at some point. I don't know. Do we want to blend any of that in with this, Aaron? Or do we want to kind of keep this on that? Is anything you want to blend in there with? You did a little bit. Anything with the digital currencies or tokenization currency? Not yet on this. I mean, I think it'd be good to do a general overview on this, but maybe towards the end. I just want to make sure we don't run out of time because I know... Courtney and Patrick will be on soon, so. Okay, how much time do we have? We got about forty-five minutes. Okay, good. All right, so let's keep rolling with this. So then we've got on this next slide, examples of data-driven farming, right? Precision agriculture. I just wanted to add one thing to that, just about that from a technocracy perspective, if you look at this from going from seed to shelf, there are something like one thousand eight hundred and forty-seven steps through the supply chain. And it's so complex that when there was a ransomware attack on one of these big companies, JBS, in twenty twenty one, it shut down twenty percent of America's meat supply in forty eight hours. So just as a kind of a data point about how how interconnected uh these things are technically and and how the supplies supply chains are structured because this is going to be a big point when you start looking at you know the choke points in this entire system when you have that you know when you have the market consolidated into that few players but then you have all these steps and then it's then it's all centrally controlled electronically a lot of the stuff is in the cloud um a lot of big risk factors there And that's a good point because you don't think that agriculture would have any connection with a cyber attack or something, but it would be significantly damaged with a cyber attack, right? Oh, yeah, completely. Completely devastated. I mean, again, you know, one company and then all of a sudden, twenty percent of the entire supply of beef was shut down in forty eight hours. So when people talk about the impact of these cyber attacks, I mean, you could imagine how a well-coordinated attack and of course most of these guys are using microsoft or they're using you know the same big tech companies so if there's some big exploit that affects all of microsoft or all of oracle i mean it could take down not just agriculture multiple supply chains yep And that's what we think of as a logistical side, but there's a lot that goes into farming that people may not be aware of. So a lot of the tractors are now GPS-driven, and they'll actually, when they're harvesting or when they're planting, they'll run all night long. And so they're running off of GPS and essentially just set the coordinates, and there's not much to do. And a lot of these things can even be controlled remotely. So you get drones monitoring crop health. um and uh obviously you know predictions on yield as well so a lot of the pricing that goes into the corn during the growing season is monitored by someone either people drive along the side of the road they stop they check out the corn they see okay it looks like we're going to get and they start making estimates on how much how many bushels per whatever you know and same thing with these drones they'll monitor the crop health and so forth then we get sensors that are telling farmers when to water Not only that, we have remote controlled irrigation for crop circles. So I'm sure people have seen a lot of the aerial photos of you'll be out in this desolate area somewhere out in the Great Plains or something like that, for instance, like Nebraska. And then you'll see this green circle. Well, that's a crop circle. So they're sitting on some kind of an aquifer. So that aquifer has a certain water table in it. Again, this is all resources. Again, it goes back to resources and controlling the resources and the technocracy and the efficiency of all that. The key is that a lot of the farm ground and the pricing of it is based on what kind of water tables in some of these areas because they don't get a lot of natural rain. Certain parts of the country don't get that, but they do sit on these aquifers. so what they'll do is they'll actually run these crop circles from a distance and they can run these irrigation this irrigation circle that just goes around in waters and that can all be controlled remotely as well but obviously it breaks down but generally speaking if everything's operationally correct it runs you know pretty much um human free so then we get into algorithms that decide the best planning times um not so much the harvesting times but they do measure the you know the moisture content and the agriculture but that's that's still pretty I think the planning is more algorithmically driven than the harvesting. And so what this does, it shifts the farming from traditional intuition, which has been going on really for twenty to thirty years, into more of a measurable optimization. And again, this leads us right down the path to the technocracy. And if you want, Aaron, we could probably run this one here. Let's hold off for a second. Let's go through the next slide. I want to run this next clip with Josh Hawley. Let's wait for a little bit longer on that. So the next thing to talk about is the supply chain coordination and how the food moves through tightly timed nationwide logistics systems. And again, this is based on efficiency, resilience to shocks, weather, pandemics, and then the allocation of the resources. Okay. And again, And then we get into things like environmental resource management, right? Agriculture uses significant amount of land, water, and energy. And the technocratic approach looks at a lot of different little factors, right? Like sustainable yield models, carbon emissions, water efficiency, and soil health metrics. So there's a lot of inputs that go into this, a lot more than I think what people really consider with this. And then just to keep rolling through this, we've got the government's component to this, right? So in policy, it goes into all this stuff. And so we have government programs and the way that this was set up initially was obviously we had homesteaders, right? That went out, they got their forty acres, their eighty acres, whatever it may have been, and then it got passed down through generations. And the goal was to create a very diverse ownership to keep corporations from coming in and taking over huge swaths of land and running this like a big technocratic operation. But that sort of broke down. But the way that they protected it was the government backstops farmers. So if someone has a hail damage to a crop or they have a wind damage or flooding or a drought or something like that, what the government steps in and then they they sort of provide insurance to them okay and but if you start to if you're a single landowner and you get more than a certain amount of acreage then you exceed the limit on the the insurance and this the whole concept of this is to keep it from backstopping a large corporation so you can't stop the corporations or outside entities from owning the land right and running these operations but what you can do is you can curtail the amount of benefits they get insurance backstop government backstop that goes into this stuff okay and the um and the what was i going to say else about this um anything you wanted to add to that aaron any thoughts with that Well, one step back when we were talking about resource extraction metrics, this is something that's probably worth pointing out is what's going on with some of the approaches and technologies that are being used. So for instance, Iowa's lost fifty percent of its topsoil in the last one hundred and fifty years. California has depleted a significant percentage of its water. You have nitrogen runoff going on that's created a six thousand square mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In terms of pesticide resistance, now you have two hundred and fifty weed species that are now resistant to herbicides and require now stronger chemicals. If you can imagine what the implications of that might be. and then you have uh forty percent of bee colonies die annually from agricultural chemicals and so people talk a lot about you know the importance of bees but people don't talk about the fact that it's these agricultural chemicals that are a big part of it so there's a lot going on here and it's it's one of those things where you you have these corporate practices that are causing some of these problems. And then of course, what is the solution to the problem that they've created? More chemicals, more technology, and more things that are actually reducing the quality of our food. One of the reasons that we have the health problems that we have is that our foods are just simply not nutrient dense anymore. And they're not nutrient dense anymore because a lot of these large scale corporate farming practices. Well, that's what I was thinking, too. You know, when you did the health care thing, you know, and you walk through the Rockefellers and the whole engine, right? It's this engine, you know, fix, keep people, just keep fixing people, but don't really make them healthy. And that's the thing, you know, as we, as farming, you know, and some of it's just mistakes, you know, when we had tractors, just tractors. They weren't that powerful. And so what happened is people would, farmers would go out and they would till. And then they would come back and then they would plant, right? And then they would come back and they would spray and then they would harvest. Now they have the combines that are super powerful and they can just do no till. So they just roll through and they basically, you know, essentially one swoop through and they've prepped it and seeded and they move on. So that creates less of the depletion of the soil like you were talking about. So that's a good thing. but then we start getting into the chemicals and we get the GMO seeds, right? You know, these genetic genetically modified seeds that are wheat resistant, that are weather resistant, or, you know, that's a big thing is drought resistance. I think that's probably one of the primary focal points is drought resistance. And again, this stuff's engineered in labs, right? And it's, it fits right into this whole techno technocratic movement. And, um, But the big thing is, like Aaron was saying, I think the quality of the food goes down because it's all about getting yield, right? It's all about yield. And why is that? Because it's all about trying to maximize the profit and not necessarily maximize the health of the person that's consuming this food. And so that's that part of it. And then we got through a little bit of the government, you know, the government programs like the crop insurance and so forth. And then so just taking a big picture on this, we've got the U.S. agriculture industry is therefore, because of all this, highly productive, highly technological, deeply interconnected, okay, and influenced by science, economics, and policy, okay? And so from a technocratic viewpoint, right, it's essentially a giant – nationwide operation that goes on. And so the question though is, so that's all great, right? We go down this path of increasing the efficiency of farming, adding technology, adding economic factors to it, how are we gonna manage this? How are we going to provide loans to these farmers so they can buy? So it's very difficult anymore with land prices to actually go in and buy a farm and get enough acres. And a lot of times, you know, we get this urban creep. So you start creeping into the farming, a lot in the farming sector. There's still a lot of farmland out there, but we are creeping into it. And it drives, all this stuff drives the price of the land up. And so it's very difficult for new farmers to enter this market. And what does that do? It just leads to corporations who are more sophisticated, have bigger balance sheets to roll in and pick up some of this land. Some of this land and, you know, I live in Ohio and some of the land here is going for twenty five thousand dollars an acre. So you think about like what how much yield does it take to get on corn or soybeans or wheat or something to actually make it a profitable endeavor? And so that's where it goes back into the control, right? You can see when this stuff, I feel like the farming's getting out of control from the perspective of, you know, the cost to enter the market and then the cost to actually survive, okay? Especially when the government isn't necessarily working on your behalf. And we'll get into that in a few minutes here with these big four and what they've done from a lobbying standpoint. But it's a very difficult endeavor for the farmers in many different ways. Okay, and then... So with that, if you want, Aaron, you could probably run this one on Josh Hawley talking about monopolies. You see that one? Yeah, yeah, let me run that. In my last remaining seconds here, Mr. Medder, let me come back to you. You've said that big is bad, which I completely agree with, and that we need to consider structural remedies. Is that true outside of the tech sector? I know you've said that about tech. Is that true more broadly? I believe the competition concerns that have been most recognized in the tech sector are common in many other sectors. We need to enforce antitrust laws evenly across the entire economy. Good. Let me just give you one example here. Four companies currently control over eighty percent of beef processing. in this country and very similarly high shares of poultry and pork. In Missouri, just in the last year, we have had two poultry plants closed by the dominant poultry processor, Tyson Food, canceling contracts with farmers, putting hundreds of people out of work across my state, really acting with total impunity. Why? Because they are essentially a monopolist. Is this the kind of thing that the FTC could take action on? Yes, with the small caveat that the Department of Justice typically handles the packers, but the FTC sees this at the retail level as well. When there are a smaller number of packers, retailers pay higher prices, and then consumers pay higher prices, and then retailers want to merge and consolidate their own part of the supply chain to counteract that, and then it's sort of an arms race to see who can get the biggest the fastest. I'll end with this. Right now, beef processing is just one example, but it's a perfect example for a state like mine. The only people who win are the monopolists. If you're a cattle rancher, you're not getting paid for your product. If you are a consumer at the grocery store, you're paying an arm and a leg for a hamburger. And yet the consumers are paying more, the farmers are getting paid less. Who is really making out like a bandit here? It's the monopolists. It's the four people, the four companies that control eighty percent of beef processing. That is not competition. We need more competition in this country, economy-wide. Thank you. Okay. Do you have any comments on that, Aaron? Well, the one thing I want to say about this is I think antitrust law is largely BS. The reason that we have the problem that we have with these four players controlling the market is government itself. So, for instance, while the original ideas were, as you said earlier on, restricting the amount of acreage, antitrust enforcement, price transparency, and so forth, What's happened in agriculture is the same as what has happened with big pharma and healthcare. It's a revolving door. A hundred and twenty seven USDA officials joined agribusiness companies since two thousand. So this is just like Scott Gottlieb being the head of the FDA and then going and being on the Pfizer board. The top ten percent of farms receive seventy seven percent of all subsidies, which is an average of two hundred and almost two hundred fifty thousand dollars annually. So, again, why are these companies larger or why do we have such a small concentration? In part, because they're being subsidized. If you actually had a market, it's unclear that you would have that kinds of kind of concentration. But literally, the capture is so great. that we're actually giving the larger players money and we're giving the larger players an advantage in the marketplace. Then you have the other one, which is always the case, which crushes small business always, which is compliance costs. So food safety rules cost a small processor a hundred dollars per cow. But a large one, it only costs ten dollars per cow. So once again, the government is coming in and favoring the larger player or making it impossible almost for the smaller players to exist. Big Ag has spent three quarters of a billion dollars on lobbying in just the past decade. So that's my high level comment on that is just that I think it's funny listening to these congressmen talk about antitrust. and talk about it as if the government wasn't the one aiding and abetting the unnatural monopolies that have formed. yeah no i think you're spot on there and so you know with these big foreign mind we have jbs right brazilian based cargill which is a private company national beef tyson okay names most of us know national beef most people probably don't know but what they've done is they've found a way to corner the beef market okay and they've gotten a lot of the government look at either looking the other direction or subsidizing it okay and like aaron was saying You know, we've we've seen this. This isn't anything new. This has been going on for a long time. These ranchers have been struggling for for really decades. And so what brought that on? Massive automation of slaughter facilities, investment in the nineteen sixties through the nineteen eighties. And then they standardized it as an assembly line style of fabrication. Then they go to refrigerated and boxed beef technology, shipping the stuff in boxes, not whole carcasses. So again, there's an efficiency component there. But here's what's going on is these innovations, while they lower the per unit cost, And you have these smaller, older regional plants, they just can't keep up with this. They don't have the pre-cut, the vacuum pack, the reduce. And a lot of that leads to reduced labor needs. So again, it's an efficiency thing. And we're gonna see more and more of that with this AI and the reduction in need for this, especially robotics and things like that. So this isn't going away. This reduction in labor needs, is is and when they measure the the farm numbers you know at the first friday of every month the non-farm payrolls that's what they do they figure the non-farm payrolls okay so there's a reason they break that out but the but the the key is for these big operators they get transportation advantages right and they're able to cut out the cost and the spoilage okay and so they adopted this model early and not only that and um this uh this box um boxed beef process, okay? And that made a big difference for them. But here's the thing, is that the government looked the other way in terms of mergers and acquisitions. And so what it did is allowed them to get scale. And while the small guy has no balance sheet, has a very difficult time growing a farm operation, especially as they see land costs going up, this keeps slipping away, right? There's a divergence between these corporate operations like this and the little guy, okay? Especially from the rancher perspective. You get these mergers like Tyson buys out a big operator called IBP. JBS acquires Swift, Smithfield Beef, and others. Cargill and National Beef consolidate multiple plants together. So they get this scale, right? And the government looks the other way almost all the time, right? Why is that? Because they get the lobby. So... As it was said in that clip, the FTC, right, they're involved in this, but it really comes down to the DOJ. And so we have these acts in place, right? The Sherman Antitrust Act of eighteen ninety was built to try to help help protect these, you know, these operators. Clayton Act of nineteen fourteen is one of them that also factors in. And then you get this one called the PSA, the Packers in the Stockyards Act of nineteen twenty one. And so the lobbying has been so significant shaping the outcome. In allowing this oligopoly to form, and you get these groups that form, like this NCBA, AMI, these large packer coalitions, and they lobby against this Packer and Stockyards Act. And not only that, we see this in politics all the time. We see it in pharmaceuticals. We see it everywhere where people will migrate in, they'll become part of the government, and then they migrate out to private industry. And it's the same kind of thing that happens in this agribusiness, right? The interests help shape the legislation and the agency oversight. And as soon as they get that shape, then they're valuable out on the open market. They go out there, they know how the system works, and then they exploit it, right? The farmer... He's just been on – he grew up on that farm. It got handed down to him. It got handed down to his – from his gran