Organic Wisdom: Joel Salatin on DarkHorse
Episode: The Inside Rail
Published: September 13th, 2026
Host: Dr. Bret Weinstein
Guest: Joel Salatin
Podcast: DarkHorse Podcast / Inside Rail
Recorded at: Polyface Farm, Virginia
Runtime: 1:23:20
Transcript source: SRT transcript file, corrected
Video: Watch on YouTube
Rumble: Watch on Rumble
Audio: Listen on Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Summary
Bret Weinstein speaks with Joel Salatin, whom he calls “one of the wisest people” he’s ever met, on the subject of soil, stewardship, and the kind of knowledge you can only get by doing.
Recorded at Polyface Farm, the conversation opens on American politics and turns quickly to a deeper claim: that the governing error of modern life is treating living systems — soil, animals, bodies, children — as machines with interchangeable parts. Salatin traces the habit to Justus von Liebig, who reduced plant life to nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus; Weinstein reaches the same conclusion from evolutionary biology, distinguishing the complicated from the complex. From there the two discuss dominion and stewardship, the abundance of the pre-colonial North American landscape, soil carbon as the point both sides of the climate argument already concede, why self-worth depends on completing real tasks, and why Salatin cannot legally sell a picnic table milled from his own trees. The final section sets out his central argument: that every regulation, whatever its intent, is easier to satisfy at scale — and Weinstein’s inversion, that the hazards run in exactly the opposite direction.
About the Guest
Joel Salatin owns Polyface Farm in Virginia, where he raises cattle, pigs and pastured poultry without chemical inputs, and where he and his wife Teresa also own a small federally inspected slaughterhouse. Michael Pollan spent a week at Polyface while researching The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Salatin is the author of Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front and, most recently, Food Emancipation: Unshackling America’s Sustenance. In this conversation he describes himself as a Christian and a literal creationist.
Find Joel Salatin on X at @JoelSalatin and at thelunaticfarmer.com.
About the Host
Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and host of the DarkHorse Podcast, which examines science, institutions, politics, culture, and the challenges facing Western civilization. The Inside Rail is his long-form interview series.
Sponsors
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Mentioned in This Episode
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front (commission earned)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (commission earned)
Greening the Desert Project (Geoff Lawton)
Join Us
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Key Questions Answered in This Episode
What does Joel Salatin mean by “scale prejudicial” regulations?
That compliance costs the same regardless of volume, so the burden per unit falls hardest on the smallest producer. At 01:18:40 Salatin says: “All regulations — and right now, I’m not going to argue there shouldn’t be any, I’m not going to [take a] purist libertarian standpoint — but all regulations are scale prejudicial, all of them, as far as application.” His example at 01:19:19: he and his wife Teresa own a small federally inspected slaughterhouse, and “it costs us $600 to do to a steer what Tyson does for 150 bucks,” because both must file the same HACCP paperwork and maintain the same inspector’s office and bathroom, while Polyface processes 50 head a week and Tyson processes 5,000 a day.
Why can’t Joel Salatin sell a picnic table made from his own trees?
Because finished goods are not permitted in an agricultural zone. At 01:04:55: “This picnic table came from our woods. We made it. We can’t sell this picnic table because that’s a manufactured item and illegal in an agricultural zone.” He gives the same account of cured ham at 01:13:34 — Polyface raises a thousand hogs a year but cannot legally cure ham where the pigs are raised.
What do Bret Weinstein and Joel Salatin say about climate and soil carbon?
Salatin declines the warming-versus-cooling argument and points to what both sides concede. At 00:49:39: “The commonality is carbon that’s supposed to be in the soil is now in the atmosphere. That’s what the two sides agree on.” He then claims at 00:50:19 that if American farmland soil organic matter were replenished by “one percent, just one percent — not full until it’s full — one percent would bring us to the atmospheric carbon level of pre-1960. That’s how solvable this is.” Weinstein reframes it as a systems problem: the carbon flow is a leak, and a leak is reason enough to act without settling the forecast.
Why does Joel Salatin say he can’t hand a teenager a cordless drill?
Child labor rules bar under-18s from power tools on the farm. At 01:07:54: “We can’t take them till they’re 18 because it’s illegal. It’s illegal for us to put a cordless drill in the hand of somebody that’s under 18.” He contrasts this with a 16-year-old legally driving 3,000 pounds of steel at 70 miles an hour. His argument is developmental: the window of curiosity closes before the permission arrives.
What does Bret Weinstein say about young people and political radicalization?
That the grievance is real even where the politics are destructive. At 01:02:16 he argues at least half of young people “correctly know that in a meritocracy, they have not been armed with any of the tools that would allow them to succeed,” and concludes at 01:02:45: “Yes, these people are crazy and they have to be stopped. They’re going to destroy civilization, but they’re not wrong to feel betrayed.”
Is life biological or mechanical?
This is the organizing question of the conversation, posed by Salatin at 00:24:03: “Is life fundamentally biological or mechanical?” He dates the mechanical assumption to Justus von Liebig, who in the 19th century reduced plant life to nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. Weinstein makes the same argument from evolutionary biology, distinguishing the complicated from the complex: “Any complex system is fundamentally unpredictable.”
Did North America produce more food before European settlement?
Salatin claims it did. At 00:39:35: “Most people don’t realize pre-European North America produced more food than it does today.” He cites bison herds, two million wolves, 200 to 300 million beavers, Lewis and Clark encountering a bear every mile, and Audubon losing sight of the sun behind a passing flock. His policy question follows at 00:41:01: not how to transition farms to organic, but “how do we turn the North American landscape to the abundance of 1500?”
Where does self-worth come from?
Salatin at 00:59:43: “Self-worth comes from successfully completing meaningful tasks. Successfully completing meaningful tasks. All four of those words are important.” He contrasts a high score on Angry Birds with tanning a deer skin and making a pair of gloves. Weinstein connects it to a course he and Heather Heying taught called “learn a skill,” whose only requirement was that success or failure be objective.
Episode Chapters
00:00:00 One of the Wisest People
00:01:15 Trump Spent His Political Equity
00:03:37 Sponsor: Sundays for Dogs
00:05:26 Sponsor: Van Man
00:07:19 Who Benefits? Bayer, JBS, & Trump
00:11:37 There Are No Global Problems
00:15:24 The Farm You Can Feel
00:19:30 Sponsor: Redmond Re-Lyte
00:24:03 Biological or Mechanical?
00:28:13 Where Hubris Should Be Humility
00:31:32 Dominion Is a Destructive Idea
00:37:55 Petroleum Was Our Chance to Repair
00:39:35 North America Grew More Food in 1500
00:43:35 All True Stories Must Reconcile
00:48:35 Ice Age or Crispy Critters?
00:55:08 Bret’s Stadium of What He’s Burned
00:57:31 Learn a Skill
01:01:54 Not Wrong to Feel Betrayed
01:03:46 Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal
01:10:23 Who Should Inspect Your Carrot?
01:18:28 All Regulations Are Scale Prejudicial
01:21:04 Food Emancipation
Search Keywords
Bret Weinstein, Joel Salatin, DarkHorse Podcast, Inside Rail, Polyface Farm, regenerative agriculture, food freedom, food regulation, scale prejudice, soil carbon, soil organic matter, stewardship, dominion, complex systems, Justus von Liebig, NPK, raw milk, HACCP, Tyson, JBS, Bayer, beavers, bison, land restoration, permaculture, homesteading, local food, Food Emancipation, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Brownstone Institute, transhumanism, youth and meaningful work
Related DarkHorse Episodes
Beavers? Bret Weinstein Speaks with Jakob Shockey — referenced at 00:41:42, on beavers and North American water
[Second Jakob Shockey beaver episode — add from your archive]
[Add 2-3 more transcript pages on food, health or institutions]
Transcript
[00:00:00] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast Inside Rail. I am sitting today with Joel Salatin on Polyface Farms. I couldn't be happier to be here and to be sitting with you. You and I have met each other now twice last year at the Brownstone event and then this year again and you are definitely one of the wisest people I have ever met. So welcome to DarkHorse.
[00:00:26] Joel Salatin: Thank you. It's an honor and a privilege to be with you, Bret.
[00:00:30] Dr. Bret Weinstein: All right, so I'm not exactly sure where we should spend our time today. I have the sense that we could go a hundred different places and my feeling is we should really just let the conversation go where it feels like. But let's just start with you're a guy who has a deep understanding of the at many different levels. You seem to understand the way people function. You are a keen observer of politics. You also know how the systems involved in farming, the natural systems and your interference in them work and all of those things I think sounds to me like they come together in one kind of model of the world. So let's start with the political dimension. Where do you think you are?
[00:01:20] Joel Salatin: In the political dimension? I mean, to cut to the chase, I think Trump has gradually eliminated his equity, his political equity. And I don't think it's just because I spent a lot of time with, you know, greeny foodies that I say this that I'm, I feel like the Republicans will get shellacked at the midterms, which then will mean the next two years will be impeachments and all sorts of things. I think in general, politically, I think where we are is the average American has come to believe that the answer to society's problems comes from the government. And they've actually been conditioned to believe that of all the institutions from church to business to farm to whatever, of all the institutions in society, the government is the least corrupt. Or, you know, in other words, it's the most trustworthy. And so, so here we are. That, of course, showed itself in COVID, how quickly people were willing to swallow the, you know, the mainline narrative.
[00:02:54] Joel Salatin: And so this is really disheartening. So when people ask me, you know, where do you think we're going? You know, my quick answer is I'm not optimistic about where the culture is going. I'm very optimistic about what you and I can do as individuals within that culture. We are not helpless. We're not hapless. We have a lot of things going for us individually and in tribes, you know, communities of thought. But the culture writ large is I'm not, I think it's going to have to get a lot worse before it gets better.
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[00:05:15] Dr. Bret Weinstein: That's 50% off your first order at SundaysForDogs.com slash darkhorse, SundaysForDogs.com slash darkhorse, or use the code darkhorse at checkout. Our second sponsor is Van Man. Here at DarkHorse, we love Van Man's products and are certain that you will too. Absolutely everything we've had from them has been exceptional. From their Pearl Eye Cream to Tallow and Zinc sunscreen, from coconut and magnesium deodorant to their remarkable remineralizing chewing gum. All of it is superior. Today, however, I want to focus on their Tallow and Honey Balm in particular. Tallow is the best moisturizer on Earth because the fatty acids in Tallow are nearly identical to the oils in your own skin. One use and you'll feel the difference. Your skin will be soft and smooth and a little goes a long way. This stuff lasts and it's fantastic for you. And Tallow Balm isn't just a moisturizer.
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[00:06:55] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Van Man's will never sell out. Ready to ditch the corporate chemicals? Go to vanman.shop slash darkhorse26 and use code "darkhorse26" for 15% off your first order. That's vanman.shop slash darkhorse26 and use code "darkhorse26" for 15% off your first order. Van Man, real ingredients, no exceptions. All right, there are a couple threads I want to pick up on in there. One, I agree with you completely. I see Trump effectively torching his coalition and his legacy. And the thing I struggle with is I think Trump is unambiguously a political genius and a political genius would not do this. I can't imagine what the upside is. I just don't think that a very wealthy man, becoming an ultra wealthy man, would be worth being recorded as some kind of a madman. So that leaves me groping for other explanations for why someone who does understand how he will be remembered would do this.
[00:08:03] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Do you have a sense of what might be going on?
[00:08:08] Joel Salatin: Well, 53 of his, I think it's 53 of his, whatever, inner sanctum, have worked and gotten a paycheck from Bayer Corporation. His biggest campaign contributor was JBS Incorporated, the Brazilian meat packing company, one of the big four. And so I just, at this stage in my life, I've been invited, invited peripherally into some of these kind of powerful circles. And man, it's not good. I mean, the powers that be, the crony capitalism and the capture of the industry to the government and the government to the industry has just created a power that's unprecedented. And that's why I keep coming back to the individual.
[00:09:24] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah.
[00:09:25] Joel Salatin: And the truth is, here's the truth. We probably have a better chance, this has just occurred to me, this is a brand new thought. We probably have, if you were a betting person, there's probably a higher bet that we can break the oligarchy with individual market decisions than with governmental legislative change.
[00:09:56] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I agree with that. And it sort of functions at two levels. There's a question of what is it that we should do? How should we allocate our effort and our resources? And then there's also a deeper philosophical question. So I come from the left, I still consider myself on the left, although that confuses everybody I say it to, because frankly, I agree with the conservatives on almost every point. But I just don't think we can conserve our way out of our puzzle. It's too novel. We have to do some progressive things to fix it. Not the things that the other progressives are advocating, mind you, but progress is necessary. But one of the things that has changed as I've gotten older and hopefully wiser is that I now understand loud and clear why the conservatives have the relationship to personal responsibility that they do. When you're young and liberal, you hear that as excuse making.
[00:10:48] Dr. Bret Weinstein: They don't want to fix the fixable problems. So they'd like to just say, the right thing to do is buckle down and do what you can do for yourself, etc. But the real answer is that is always the best use of your cards. We do have to act collectively, but your ability to move the needle at a global scale is essentially zero. Your ability to move the needle in your own life and for the people that you care about is tremendous. And so you don't want to squander all your efforts on some global vision when you haven't taken care of what's local to you. So I hear exactly what you're saying. There's a lot we can do if we don't focus on what may be an unsolvable puzzle. On the other hand, I think the unsolvable puzzle is going to kill us.
[00:11:37] Joel Salatin: Well, you know, you know, Wendell Berry, the iconic sustainable ag writer says there are no global problems. There are only local problems. The Chinese have a saying, you know, if everybody swept their own doorstep, the whole world would be clean. And so, and Stephen Covey, famously in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People said that the more you spend time on things that are beyond your influence, the smaller your influence is. The more time you spend on things that are within your influence, the larger your influence is.
[00:12:21] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Interesting. Now I want to add something that I bet you'll resonate with this. It is also true that if you are dealing with things beyond your sphere of influence, you are inherently disconnected from the feedbacks that will make you smarter about how they work. In other words, you're affecting some policy, it gets instituted, you don't have a controlled experiment to even know whether what you thought was going to happen did happen or failed to happen for whatever reason. So you don't become smarter as a result of that exercise. But if you're acting locally, then every time you have a thought that you think is smart and it turns out it wasn't, you get an immediate feedback and you realize don't do that again.
[00:13:03] Joel Salatin: Right, right, exactly. If you're picketing in Washington instead of getting the weeds out of your green beans in your garden, you don't realize how important the weeds in the green beans are. And that's as well said, it's a very visceral participatory feedback loop. And I think that's right. And so I have purposely, I don't know, aloof maybe is the, I don't know if aloof is the right word, but I've purposely aloof, I'll just use the word from politics. I mean, I've had leaders of the Republicans, the Democrats, the libertarians, the Greens and the socialists all have over years have tried to recruit me to run for something. And I just find it for me, and I'm saying I hate people who do run, don't read into that. But for me, it's not the best use of my talent and my interest. And so what I've tried to do is create a model, a model of credibility and integrity that shows we can feed the world without chemicals.
[00:14:27] Joel Salatin: We can have nutrient dense food. We can take care of our animals as if they actually matter. We can take care of earthworms as if they actually matter. And we don't have to sacrifice the ecology or the economy to do it. I mean, this idea that in order to have ecology, you have to sacrifice the economy. In order to have the economy, you have to sacrifice ecology is simply not true. But somebody, what all movements desperately need is they need a model. They need a model. And that's what we've tried to do here is, can we create a model of soil building, hydration, nutrient density, ecological synergy, and even patron fulfillment that can be a model that then can be duplicated?
[00:15:24] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I don't exactly know how to convey this to my audience. I'm going to try you correct me where I go wrong. But there's something, in fact, I was just having a text exchange with a good friend of mine who was here last year, not here this year. And we were talking about, for lack of better terms, the spiritual effect of being here on your farm. It was profound for both of us. We didn't mention it to each other, but when she said it, it was like, "Yeah, I felt that right away." And it has something to do with the fact that, A, this farm feels good to be on. When I go to another farm, I'm constantly thinking about what was sprayed here, you know, and what, where am I exactly? I'm on in some sort of novel experiment that isn't safe. Here, I walk around and I hear crickets everywhere. If I go to your pond, I see an ecosystem that's actually thriving.
[00:16:30] Dr. Bret Weinstein: You know, I see that there are invasive species here. This is one of the bigger problems we have, and it's a cryptic one. Most people don't know when they're looking at an invasive species, but your farm is a tangible testament to a kind of wisdom. And if you get a chance to come to Polyface Farm, you'll feel it. I highly recommend the experience, even if you don't know exactly what you're coming to find out.
[00:16:59] Joel Salatin: Well, thank you. That's a great affirmation. I deeply appreciate it. You know, when Michael Pollan was here and spent a week and then wrote "The Omnivore's Dilemma," I think one of the most profound statements he had, as he was describing his experience here, was that he just found around every corner he found life. And if you're here in the summer, in an evening, it's like we've got fireworks. The fireflies are everywhere. But you know what's interesting is, because of the chickens and the eggmobiles, we don't have ticks. We don't have ticks. So there is a healing that comes. It doesn't mean that you don't have an invasive weed. It doesn't mean that you don't have whatever, getting in the chickens that you've got to deal with. But it does mean that overall, there's a sense that there is a balance. There's a balance between the physical, the spiritual, the mental, the emotional, so that there is almost a tactile balm, a salve.
[00:18:20] Joel Salatin: And we don't, like with our team, our stewards and our apprentices and stuff, we don't say, you know, we're growing chickens. We don't say we're growing beef. We say we are caressing a gift into greater flourishing and abundance, so that we leave a legacy of soil and hydration and clean air and immunological function that is superior to what we inherited. And I look at them in the eye, I say, that's what we're here for. So we spend a lot of time messaging way up here. You know, the average farmer, we grow eggs, we grow apples, whatever. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if you don't take it to a higher level, then you almost become a quasi-mercenary instead of a participant in a great cosmic orbit.
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[00:21:56] Dr. Bret Weinstein: That's redmond.life slash darkhorse with the code darkhorse for 15% off your first order. Or click the link in the video description, scan the QR code on the screen, or check the pinned comment. Well, I was wrestling as I was listening to the talks at this conference and talking to people in between them. There's something going on in this conference that's, it's ill-defined, but it's, it's powerful. And what I started to think about was the Brownstone group is unified around the discovery effectively that what we have understood about health, even people who've spent years in medical school, what we have understood about health is fundamentally wrong. Right. And that the state of health is something and it is achieved through processes. But if you're, if your approach to thinking about health starts with, you know, the doctors where you go when stuff has gone wrong and they've got things that make it go right, you're never going to get there.
[00:23:03] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right. Same thing with farming. And that's the thing is that the state of health of the farm and the state of health of a person are analogous in the sense that, you know, when I, when I heard you talk last year, some of what you said, I've never heard anybody say before, but it's completely obvious from my biological complexity orientation. Obviously this is true, right? You're dealing with equilibria, more of them than you could possibly imagine, more than you could name. Yeah. But the equilibria are out there. And the point is every time you disrupt one, and it's not in a position to recharge itself, you've added some kind of burden to your farm. And so, you know, what I hear you talking about, which when you say it, it sounds like common sense, but it's amazing how uncommon it is, is, well, you know, of course the chickens are following the cattle, because don't you see the chickens are taking care of this part of the process so that when the cattle get backed around to that piece of pasture, it's restored.
[00:24:01] Joel Salatin: Now it's hygienic. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what you're, what you're really jumping on here is one of my pet, you know, whatever themes is, is life fundamentally biological or mechanical? That is a real powerful question because it goes, I mean, when you talk about, you know, doctors and medical, you know, if you are simply an organization of interchangeable parts, you come at it from one angle, one, you know, one direction. If you are instead a an amalgamation of, of dynamic thinking, speaking exchanges of beings, cells that are making, I mean, there's, there's something like, what is it? It's been computed like a quadrillion decisions being made by ourselves every half second. I mean, they're just, they're just numbers go clear. Inconceivable. Yeah. Inconceivable numbers. All right. But, but that is actually happening. It's happening in the leaves of this tree and the grass and the ground and the worms and the, you know, the, the, the mycorrhizae, the Azotobacter.
[00:25:18] Joel Salatin: Biology is, life is fundamentally you know, this table here, you know, if I, if I, you know, rub on it and caress it and say, you're a good table, it doesn't respond. It's inanimate. But if I do that with a cow or a pig or a cat, goodness, a tomato, I would suggest, we're learning more and more about, you know, this dialogue. It responds. It responds. And, and that's the, that's the beauty of life, but it's also the fundamental, I don't know, requirement. It's like the most foundational worldview to approach life in. And if we don't, you know, Justus von Liebig in 1837, for the first time in human history, in 1837, he was Austrian biochemist, and he was trying to figure out how to keep soil fertile. And he'd use these vacuum tubes, you know, and he came up with this idea that all of life is simply a rearrangement of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, NPK.
[00:26:30] Joel Salatin: And his heart was right. He was trying to solve the fertility issue. I don't take that away. But for the first time in human history, life was, was, was dumbed down to a completely thoughtless inanimate arrangement of protoplasmic objects.
[00:26:50] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right. It's the, it's the desire to reduce the system to make it comprehensible. Yes. That causes you to blind yourself. Yes, that's exactly right. And so what you've just said, my audience will be familiar with because Heather and I talk frequently about the distinction between the complicated and the complex. And these things sound like synonyms. They are, of course, not right. Any complex system is fundamentally unpredictable. And so you have to approach them differently. It doesn't mean you can't be, I don't want to use the term experts, the wrong term. It doesn't mean that you can't be a virtuoso in that realm, but it's a different approach. I've started to think about, you know, the surfer, the extraordinary surfer who, you know, beautifully surfs the wave. That person is not thinking about pushing water around. No. Right. They are understanding where they are and they are making use of it.
[00:27:49] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It's the most delicate process. And I guess the idea.
[00:27:53] Joel Salatin: And think of all the nuances he's tuned into.
[00:27:57] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right. I mean, he couldn't even name.
[00:27:59] Joel Salatin: Yeah. Yeah. That he doesn't even name, but, but by experientially, an expert, it's intuitively within him to see that ripple and that little swirl and all the things.
[00:28:11] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. It's a problem with our models for farming, for environmental stewardship, for health, all of these truly complex systems where we have something we want from them is that we have this interventionist mentality. Right. And you and I were talking yesterday about a term that has suddenly in the last few weeks started popping up in a dozen different seemingly unrelated places. It's humility. If you look at the farm as something that you're never going to completely understand, but you can, you can coax it into doing what you want it to do, then there's all the opportunity in the world. If you look at it as, you know, well, that pastor is deficient in this thing and I can buy it down at the store and dump it on. Well, okay. Now you're an interventionist and I know how it's going to end. It's not going to be good and you may get sick doing it in fact.
[00:29:03] Joel Salatin: Right. It's the difference between hubris and humility. It's the difference between manipulation, manipulation and exploitation versus nurturing. In nurturing, if I'm nurturing you, I am, my first thought is, well, what do you need? Not what can I do for you or what can I do to you or what can I get from you? And so our first question is, you know, I walk out the back porch every morning to come and do chores and you know, what, what I look at the farm, I look at, I say, what do you need? What do you need from me today? And that's, that's as opposed to, here's what I'm going to do to you. I'm going to grow this and this and this and I'm going to grow it this way and that so very, very different thing. But, you know, I back, back early, many, many years ago, I did a, started a routine called Sissy Farmer. And, and, and the problem is that men, you know, it's not machismo to, to be a nurturer.
[00:30:13] Joel Salatin: Men like to dominate and fight and, you know, intervene. Intervene. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so, and so I had this little five minute routine, you know, when I did presentations, I've done it some, it's become a little out of vogue now with all the trans stuff and all that stuff. But, but I would say, you know, it's just not, it's just not manly to come in. And, and, and the wife says, Oh, my, you know, wonderful husband, what have you done today on the farm? And the husband says, Oh, I, I made the cows happy. That's just not, that's not what men do. No, men want to come in, man, I smell the diesel fuel, you know, I, I rode on pig iron all day, man, you know, and that's, that's the difference. Now, now do we have tractors? Yes, we do. But, but this is a, this is a mentality that we, that we come to our, our stewardship with that we are stewards from something bigger than us that we don't ultimately own that we're on a pilgrimage passing through.
[00:31:12] Joel Salatin: And, and, and we're not a, we're not a conquistador. And this is the difference between, between caretaking and conquistadoring. And I think our culture, certainly our agriculture in America is still essentially a conquistador mentality.
[00:31:32] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I think you're, you're dead on. And the, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, I'm atheist adjacent, I don't call myself an atheist because I'm so angry at what the atheists are done, but I'm not a believer. And yet I know that if I look around my pretty large friend group now, I might say, well, you know, you know, are the atheists the smart ones? No, most of the smartest people I know are believers. And that's, that's telling me something. But so it has me thinking about what, what are those, I don't want to call them stories. I don't want to call them anything that would be pejorative, but what are those structures, these ancient structures that get handed down generation to generation that are playing such a profound role in our lives. And I heard you say something at lunch yesterday, which I'll get back to in a second, which struck me like a bolt of lightning.
[00:32:29] Dr. Bret Weinstein: But I've been thinking about that there's something actually incorrect about the religious stories, the way we're passing them down, that has us misunderstanding the problems and I'm very interested in fixing that puzzle if it's fixable, because I don't think we can afford to misunderstand these problems. We have to, we have to address them because they're, they're going to be fatal. So they come down to issues of free will, the question of evil, and the question of dominion. This is the third one on that list. And the idea that we have dominion over the earth, because of the way it's interpreted, I think is a very
[00:33:14] Joel Salatin: destructive idea. Couldn't agree more. I mean, when those conquistadors came in and murdered civilizations and exploited the resources in the name of God and the queen, I mean, this, the crusades, I mean, I mean, the fact is that a lot has been done wrong in the name of God, or any religion for that and certainly not just God. All of, I mean, name your, name your divinity. Plenty has, has, has gone wrong in that. And so, and so, so it is the, it is the right, it is a right understanding, I think of our role as, as stewards, as, as, as caretakers of something ultimately that is not ours, that is kind of a starting point across religions, across all beliefs, is where you start. You don't start with I'm in control. You start with I'm a, I'm, I'm a seeker and a learner, teach me what I need to do to help. That's a very different thing than saying, I'm going to come in and do this, this, and this, and it's going to, it's going to do this, this, and this for me.
[00:34:41] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, I have a sort of top level principle. It's not that I couldn't find one that's more important to me, but the one that has that position for the moment is that we are the product of a three and a half billion year trajectory of emergence of evolution. And it is not ours to check out of that project. So the most, the deepest obligation I would argue is for us to make it to the next round of the game and to leave the planet in as good or better condition and I'm not saying that that's possible for every generation to live up to that. There may be moments at which you cannot do that. The only thing you can do is get to the next round, but then you've got a debt that has to be corrected. Right. Right. So
[00:35:39] Joel Salatin: that's such a good thought. Just for the record, I happen to be a pretty literal creationist. So I'm a kind of early earth guy. But, but it's such a good thing because as I, as I look at, let's take agriculture right now, farming, what we've done. I look at the, the exploitation that we did up until petroleum. So, you know, here we're using draft power and, and, and desertification and land destruction did with Monsanto and DuPont. I mean, Libya, think of it, Libya was the supplier of baboons to the Colosseum of Rome. I did not know that. During the Roman empire. Well, where do baboons live? They don't live in a desert. They live in a jungle. I mean, you know, they're, they're numerous now new archaeological finds throughout, you know, the Middle East Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, that, that, that indicates how much things changed. Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey said that he walked across the North of Africa, which is now the Sahel, and he said, "I never left the shade of a tree."
[00:37:07] Joel Salatin: And so, you know, we've, we've found, you know, lime, lime granaries in the Rajputana Desert of India. Right. That were granaries. And one of the most interesting experiments I ever saw was the climate, the weather, the weather department at University of Wisconsin. This is several decades old, but they went to India to the Rajputana Desert and they, and they just fenced out like 10 square miles to keep the nomads and the sheep and the goats and all that out. And within five years, clouds began forming, vegetation started coming. The work that Geoff Lawton has done throughout Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Lebanon as a permaculture were, I mean, it's pretty dramatic what you can do. So, so I'll cut to the chase. I think that the discovery of petroleum, you can call it, God gave it, the cosmos gave it, you can call it wherever you want to, but the discovery of petroleum of cheap energy was, was almost like mankind, humankind was being offered cheap energy for the first time in history to remedy all the things we've done.
[00:38:28] Joel Salatin: We could have made ponds and swales and, and all sorts of cool hydrologic, you know, and, and, and, and planted trees, you know, with, with diggers, we could have become beavers. We could have on a scale, you know, beavers only build dams, you know, in running water, but with an excavator, you can build a dam before it even starts to run way up higher on the mountain. And so, so it was like we were offered, offered here's, here you go humanity. Here's a chance you've got machines, you've got petroleum, you can fix everything you've destroyed in pretty short order.
[00:39:07] Dr. Bret Weinstein: You can return to the garden.
[00:39:08] Joel Salatin: You can return to the garden. Absolutely. Absolutely. You can do this, but what would we do? No, we took that and we made a food system that the average morsel travels 1500 miles. We, we, we made bombs. We made, you know, all sorts of things, but, but we, we definitely did not, we did not bring back the functional landscapes of yesteryear. Most people don't realize pre-European North America produced more food than it does today, more food than it does today. That was without John Deere's chemical fertilizers. Now it wasn't all eaten by humans. There were, um, so we're between a one and 200 million bison. There were, um, 2 million wolves that ate 20 pounds of meat a day. That's a lot of meat. Yeah. Uh, there were, we don't know, 200 to 300 million beavers that ate more vegetables because they're, they're, they're not carnivores or they're not even omnivores.
[00:40:12] Joel Salatin: They ate more vegetable material than all the people in North America today. Um, uh, the Lewis and Clark expedition, when they went out West, when they left St. Louis heading to the Pacific, they said they could not go one mile without encountering a bear. Now that's just the ones they saw. I mean, imagine how much, and bears eat a lot of food. What I'm getting at is an Audubon, Audubon sat under a tree in, uh, the early 1800s and he recorded in his diary. He said, he said, I couldn't see the sun for three days because the flock of birds flying over blocked out the sun.
[00:40:49] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah.
[00:40:50] Joel Salatin: I mean, that's before Tyson that's before, you know, all. And so, so the abundance of the early American landscape is just almost incomprehensible. And so, so for me, when I look at us farm policy, USDA policy, the question is not, well, do we, do we help farmers transition to organic or do we, you know, provide some extra money for school lunches so they can buy from local farmers? Um, as, as nice as all those might sound, the question of the day is how do we turn the North American landscape to the abundance of 1500?
[00:41:33] Dr. Bret Weinstein: This is a beautiful vision and coming from somebody who knows a thing or two about transforming a landscape. It's, it's very powerful. And I should tell you, I've done two podcasts now with a former student of Heather and mine who is a, uh, beaver conservationist and he is, he understands beavers as deeply as anybody I've ever encountered. Yes. And he transformed my understanding of the role they played that basically the North American continent, absent, ubiquitous beavers is a different place.
[00:42:03] Joel Salatin: Right. It was, it was 10% water, 10% water today were less than 4%. And this, and these, these, uh, beaver dams all over, um, stop silt and, and, and they created these wonderful fertile, uh, you know, fertile areas. If, if you want, if you want a, a functional landscape, what you want to do with water is three things. You want to stop it, you want to spread it and you want to soak it in, stop it, spread it, soak it. And beaver dams did that. Also the millions of bison wallows, you know, these, these bison wallows, they were about the size of a, of a small backyard swimming pool. You know, bison had horns, they'd get in there. There was like dust baths. Anybody's ever had chickens, you know, you see dust, chicken dust baths. Well, imagine, you know, a hundred bison making a dust bath. Okay. So they'd make these wallows. Well, here comes a rain, a blizzard, a snow storm, and these would fill up.
[00:43:04] Joel Salatin: Guess what? That water stopped there. It's spread and it's soaked and that's kept the aquifers running. But what does American water policy do? All American water policies, we ditch it, we drain it, we move it. We try to move it as fast as we can offsite. It's completely inverted from everything that nature tells us it wants and it needs.
[00:43:34] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It's completely inverted. I mean, my second tier principle is that all true stories must reconcile. Universe doesn't have paradoxes in it. So everything that's true reconciles. The religious viewpoint is obviously true at some level. It is a powerful facilitator of human flourishing. So it's true. I'm pretty sure the evolutionary story is true too. It almost can't help but be true. So I believe those two stories actually are reconcilable in a way that we haven't gotten to. But you said something yesterday that, well, so what I was going to say right on your point is that a misunderstanding of dominion is exactly what you're describing. Yes. This is an offense to God. Yes, absolutely. That you're taking the most beautiful planet conceivable and you are narrow-mindedly intervening in a way that leaves the next generation a less good planet.
[00:44:31] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Who gave you that right? That's right. That's obviously in conflict. But the thing you said yesterday that struck me was, I will tell the story briefly, correct anything I get wrong. We were talking about how you come to deeply understand something and you and I are both of the belief that is not an abstract process. You can understand certain things abstractly, but it's people who do things that get the feedback from trying something and discovering it doesn't work that gets smarter over time. And we were talking about how much of your, what I'm calling your wisdom, you've passed on through your books and you told me a story, which is that somebody who was an avid reader of your books had believed that he had taken on the wisdom that you had conveyed and wanted to show you his farm. And when you went, it did not look like what you thought you had conveyed in those books.
[00:45:27] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And what you took from that, that it was fascinating. Do you want to say
[00:45:32] Joel Salatin: well, what I took from that, that was fascinating. So he thought he had adhered and he had actually veered and opposed. Okay. And what I took from that being a Christian myself was, wow, if a guy who lives 20 miles from me, my age speaks English as a native tongue and lives concurrently in time in the same region as I, if he missed it that much, when I read the Bible for me, written at a different time to a different people in a different culture, not in my time. In a different language. In a different language. What am I missing? What am I missing? And so are there, I absolutely, I think there are absolutes. There are some really clear absolutes, but there's a lot of fringe stuff that people get all been out of shape about that aren't clear, that aren't, especially when you realize, well, when you realize our own, our own failties of perceiving what actually is there.
[00:46:48] Joel Salatin: It was a real wake up call for me. I've become much more charitable, I think, in general, as a result of that experience. And I hold some stuff pretty close, but I also have a...
[00:47:05] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Invasive. That's why I killed it.
[00:47:06] Joel Salatin: Yeah. I have an invasive, I have an open hand too, on a lot of things.
[00:47:13] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Well, see, I think this is marvelous because it connects this humility principle, right? The idea that, yes, these are maybe the most profound, important teachings of all teachings, but they're passed by humans as a game of human telephone at some level. And therefore, you not only have a right to question whether or not what you take from this is what was put in there or what somebody thought was in there that actually wasn't. And I think in that, there is great hope for us to reconcile stories that seem like they can't be reconciled. Like, for example, the view of Earth as a creation and the view of Earth as a product of natural emergence. I think those are actually weirdly the same story. You know, there is an ultimate question. Is there an intentional creator? But my feeling is that actually, once you reconcile the stories that we can reconcile, I don't want to say that doesn't matter.
[00:48:18] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I'd love to know if there is one. But the what you are supposed to do with the creation actually becomes the same answer, whether or not you think that's because of an intentional creation or because of a process that nets to the same thing.
[00:48:35] Joel Salatin: Let me I'm going to I'm going to take off on that just a moment with I think a one that's very, very practical. I'm a little older than you are. When I was in grade school, all the science, the science was by this time, you know, looking 70 years down the road, by this time, we were all going to be in an ice age. Right. Because all this pollution was going to block out the sun. Earth was going to get really cold. And we're all going to be in ice age. We're going to be frozen by, you know, by the 2000. Well, of course, we know what the narrative is today. Today, the narrative is we're all going to be crispy critters, you know, in fact, I don't know become crispy critters already. And so so so we agree, we've got two very different narratives here. One we're going to freeze one we're going to cook. So I look at something like that. And I say, so is there a commonality in that story?
[00:49:37] Joel Salatin: You know what the commonality is? The commonality is carbon that's supposed to be in the soil is now in the atmosphere. That's that's what the two sides agree So for me, I don't have to get all pants in a wad about whether we're getting colder or getting hotter. What I take from that is the agreement is the carbon should come out of the atmosphere into the soil. And Bret, if we took if we took all the farmland in the US and increased it, the organic matter in the soil, which has been depleted by about six to seven percent, since Europeans came here, if we if we replenished it, one percent, just one percent, not full until it's full, one percent would bring us to the atmospheric carbon level of pre 1960. That's how solvable this is. And that's where I think your idea that's where I think there's power in trying to get to the point of two seemingly completely opposing stories.
[00:50:45] Joel Salatin: Where's the common thing? And then let's attack that. That's the that's the question.
[00:50:49] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I love it, actually, because really, if you think about it, you know, the way we were talking about farming and health, what we know is that we've got a disequilibrium, that we've got a net flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Right. That is inherently not good. Right. That is a radical change. Absolutely. And it's not that we didn't get something for it. We've obviously gotten a lot for it. We've misspent it. As I think I understood you to say, that we could effectively make the earth a quite glorious place, a gift of fossil fuels. And instead, we've turned it into a kind of, you know, increasingly a hellscape. Yeah. Right. So that wasn't ours to do. And we did it anyway. And in the process, we got a symptom, which is, yeah, we've liberated a bunch of carbon that's supposed to be in living things and in soil. Right. And so the point is, if you understand these as systems, you got a leak.
[00:51:44] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right. That's not a long term thing. It's going to create an issue somewhere. Right. So the point is, the leak is in and of itself a reason to think you've got a problem that needs addressing. And you don't have to make up a story about an ice age or a crispy or whatever, whatever they're doing. Yeah. But because, I mean, and I'm increasingly troubled by, so in your terminology, we are not machines. That's right. We are biological. That maps onto, we are not complicated. We are complex. That's correct. That's correct. And the transhumanism that has overtaken the elites is very much of, and we've seen it many times in history, this belief that we now finally know enough to live forever. Really, do you now? That A sounds like you're wrong. And B, have you thought about what you're actually saying? It's not that I wouldn't like to have a much longer life, but the idea that they think we now have enough mastery to do insane things, we don't.
[00:52:58] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And it is the hubris where there should be humility. And the problem is, it is causing, frankly, because people are afraid to die, they hear those stories and they think, well, I don't think they consciously think it, but somewhere in their minds they think, well, if there's a 1% chance these people know what they're talking about, I'll gamble on that because maybe I'll live to 500.
[00:53:21] Joel Salatin: Just a really practical example of how you use a resource. For example, let's take plastic. Generally plastic has a bad rap. You know, but just imagine if all of the petroleum that's gone into shipping winter lettuce in the winter from California to New England, if that petroleum were used to make plastic to have a solarium on the south side of every house so that New England grew its own lettuce in the wintertime, just sit and imagine a minute. Every, I'm saying every, it wouldn't be every, but you know, every building in New England, having a solarium on the south side, growing lettuce, and now suddenly all those trucks don't have to be fueled. You don't have to build roads for them. All that just shuts down and guess what? California can now feed itself. It doesn't have to import anything from any place else because now it's not trying to feed New England.
[00:54:41] Joel Salatin: I mean, these, it's not that we're saying we don't like technology or do we don't want to use anything or the resources are not here for us to develop, but the humility is the beginning of how you use the gift correctly. That's the beginning of it. And if you don't start there, there's no way you can end there.
[00:55:08] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I used to play a little game with myself where I imagined that I was at the center of a football stadium surrounded by all of the resources that I have used in my life that cannot be recovered, right? Anything that's recovered doesn't count, but just the accumulated stuff that's going to be burned on my behalf. And then you ask the question, did I do anything that justifies that amount of cost to the world? And it's not impossible to do enough that you justify that amount of cost, but the idea that everybody's generating this gigantic stack of unrecoverable stuff and they don't feel an obligation to equal it with, at least just be neutral. Get to the point where you've made that much of a contribution. Come to a break even. Well, this isn't going to work out. So, you know, I think we're getting dumber. I think in 1950 that, you know, between home and shop class, everybody understood the net impact of something.
[00:56:09] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And it's like net impact is a foreign concept to us. People can't imagine how you would even think about such a thing. And I don't get it. Like, we're burning up the place. And how we're here so temporarily, how do we get that right to burn it up?
[00:56:26] Joel Salatin: Yeah. Well, I think it's accelerating today because we live in virtuality. We've got kids that instead of stocking store shelves, chopping wood, gathering eggs, you know, running a food mill to can applesauce, you know, picking green beans in the garden, they're all in the basement on video games. And so this feeds are hubris because you come into adulthood thinking, I've got this world by the, all I got to do is push these buttons. And if my tree falls over, the game gives me a new tree. If my car wrecks, it gives me a new car. I've got the world by the tail. All I got to do is wiggle my thumbs. And the world's my oyster and I can do whatever I want to with it. And that is a very terrifying way to bring in a generation that thinks that everything is that easy to manipulate.
[00:57:31] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Heather and I used to, we had the world's greatest teaching position because we were literally entitled to teach any way we wanted, anything we wanted. There was no administrator could tell us to do it differently or teach something else. And we used to teach something we called learn a skill. And the idea was pick anything. The only characteristic that is required is that it has to be something where success or failure is objective. It's not a matter of somebody telling you that's a good poem. It's a matter of
[00:58:00] Joel Salatin: the ultimate meritocracy. Right.
[00:58:02] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Just something with a physical feedback that tells you, you built the tower and it stood up or you built the chair and somebody sat and fell down, that kind of thing. And what I was shocked by, I think I speak for Heather here too, was how many young people, and we're talking about intelligent, engaged people, were not remotely realistic about what it would take to learn a skill. Right. That they had this idea that, oh, well, there's a thing and it doesn't look very hard. And so I'll just do that. And then they got their comeuppance and it was the sense of failure they had. And it's like, well, you haven't even, failure is part of the process that's going to get you to success. Right. Right. And so, you know, I've told my kids prototyping, right? You've got an idea about something. You could make prototyping. You'll be amazed at how much you learn that you didn't know.
[00:58:57] Dr. Bret Weinstein: There's no other way to learn it.
[00:58:59] Joel Salatin: Yeah. Yeah. I think that much of the emotional mental issues that we have with our young people are there. I mean, we have a real serious self-image problem in our teenagers today. I mean, you can make fun of them and call them snowflakes or whatever, but ultimately, I mean, you look at every surviving school shooter, for example, and they all say, well, nobody liked me. I didn't fit in. You know, it's some sort of self-confidence, self-worth, self-image permutation. And I'm not a psychologist. I'm not nearly as far on that, but my own just practical observational thing is I think self-worth comes from successfully completing meaningful tasks. Successfully completing meaningful tasks. All four of those words are important. In other words, you don't get the same self-worth if you're the top points getter on Angry Birds that you get if you tanned a deer skin and made buck skin and made a pair of gloves for yourself.
[01:00:13] Joel Salatin: Okay. And so I think that we've taken this child abuse to such an extent that we're now abusing children on the other hand of depriving them from visceral, real life, adult interaction, world interaction, life skill interaction, you know, micro dirty jobs. We've deprived them of the very thing that is their experiential, well, I'll check this, I'll check this, I'm good at this, I'm not good at this. This is how you know who you are. And as adults, you know, I'm Joel, you know, we introduce each other. Well, what's the first, what do you do? Well, I'm an accountant or I'm a farmer or whatever. And so we know that our, our, our work, our, our, you know, our occupation is wrapped up in our identity, in our, our sense of self-image and self-worth. And we have deprived our young people from being able to, to interact, we've called it, you know, exploitation.
[01:01:27] Joel Salatin: When, when actually, that's the very kind of growing up environment that gets them to feel like, hey, I can do stuff. Yeah. That's the ultimate, that's the ultimate self-image builder, right? I can do stuff.
[01:01:45] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And instead, we'll, we'll intervene with an SSRI because we'll blame the genetic thing that couldn't possibly be the right. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Now I think this is true. And actually, this is one of the points that I want to get through to folks on the right. This is one of the places I think they get it wrong. Yeah. You've got effectively a communist revolution. I can't believe I'm saying that, that it's actually happening in my lifetime, but you have a communist revolution and actually they're increasingly just labeling themselves. Right. Right. Okay. Why? Well, one of the reasons is that at least half of our young people correctly know that in a meritocracy, they have not been armed with any of the tools that would allow them to succeed. So they can already calculate, whatever this game is, I'm on the losing side of it. What is my incentive to preserve it?
[01:02:35] Dr. Bret Weinstein: And in fact, look at all the wealth that's been generated by predatory industries. Maybe that wealth actually does belong to me. And so let's just transfer it. And so the point is, yes, these people are crazy and they have to be stopped. They're going to destroy civilization, but they're not wrong to feel betrayed. Yes. They were. Yeah.
[01:02:54] Joel Salatin: I agree. That's, that's really, I hadn't put it together just like that, but yeah, that's really prescient. They've been deprived. They've been deprived of the ability to flourish in their skin. Yeah.
[01:03:12] Dr. Bret Weinstein: They've been deprived of just the basics to navigate a life at every level, right? They've been, they've been interfered with right down to the hormonal level. And so yes, everything feels and you know, it's not surprising that they would have this reaction.
[01:03:27] Joel Salatin: So then, so then you want revenge.
[01:03:28] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah.
[01:03:29] Joel Salatin: You want, you want justice through, through resentment, through resentment and, and revenge. And, and that's, that becomes a societal, I mean, then you end up with Jacobins and off with their heads and
[01:03:43] Dr. Bret Weinstein: that's right where we're headed in there and we can afford it. All right. I want to switch gears a little bit. You wrote a book. I hope I won't butcher the title. Approximately everything I want to do is illegal. Yeah. Okay. What the hell is that? Why is everything that one should be doing illegal? This seems like utter madness. And yet, when you actually check your claim, it's amazing how many things you're not allowed to do that seem like God given rights.
[01:04:14] Joel Salatin: I wrote that book, what, you know, 12 years ago or so. And I've had people come up to me, electricians, plumbers, well, different vocations and say, well, that could be written about my vocation. That could be written about my vocation. And, and what it is, is we have become a technocracy where every human action is surveilled and regulated by some bureaucrat. And, and so, you know, here, for example, for example, we can, we can cut a tree. We have a sawmill. We can cut a tree. We can mill the log into lumber. We can't make, so this picnic table came from our woods. We made it. We can't sell this picnic table because that's a manufactured item and illegal in an agricultural zone.
[01:05:10] Dr. Bret Weinstein: That doesn't make any sense.
[01:05:11] Joel Salatin: No. Yeah. Where, where's the best place to have the sawmill? Well, next to the woods. But we, we have fundamentally segregated. We have segregated all of our various things, you know, nothing is integrated anymore. Health, health is not integrated with food. Food is not integrated with the soil. The soil is not, you know, nothing is integrated. And so what happens is you have these, you have these, these blindered, blindered bureaucrat regulators that, that, that come in and, and make their, make their bailiwick some sort of control. And, and, and those of us who are entrepreneurs just want to do stuff with our stuff, we can't do stuff with our stuff.
[01:06:04] Dr. Bret Weinstein: You should have to get to some fairly exotic place before anybody thinks it's their business, whether or not you can do this thing. Sure. Right. I mean, these people didn't invent the exchange of goods and services. No. Where do they get the right to tell you that you can't make a thing and sell it to somebody else? You know, I hope I'm not going to end up on a rant here, but I increasingly wonder if the, the concept we need to become focused on across the political spectrum is natural law and natural rights, right? You can call them God given, but if you just say natural, we should all be able to agree that there are certain things that you should just simply be able to do because you're born a human being, you get one life and it's, you know, it should take a lot for the government to decide to regulate you out of normal behavior. Yes. And we're in exactly the inverse place.
[01:07:04] Joel Salatin: And, and, and it used to, it used to, you know, when the country was founded, nobody gave a thought to the federal government. Yeah, it's out there in Washington, but it was, it was a pretty, there was no IRS there. There was no, I mean, we didn't even have a, we didn't have a federal government until Abraham Lincoln was president. There wasn't even a federal reserve. I mean, just think of the level of, of freedom that the average person had. If you wanted to, if you wanted to milk a cow and your neighbor wanted some milk, well, you could sell milk. I mean, if, if you wanted to hire a neighbor kid, I mean, here, you know, we've got, we've got 15 and 16 year olds who would love to come here and, and apprentice and, and learn. We can't take them till they're 18 because it's illegal. It's illegal for us to put a cordless drill in the hand of somebody that's under 18.
[01:08:02] Joel Salatin: They're underage. Now, you know, a 16 year old, it's fine to put them behind 3000 pounds of pig iron and hurdle and let them drive 3000 pounds at 70 miles an hour down the interstate. That's perfectly fine, but a cordless drill? No, that's a, that's a power tool. That's a power tool. That's illegal. So you can't, so, so here, here we have to wait when these, a lot of these kids, you know, they're 14, 15, they can do a lot. 14, 15, you know, somebody that's bright eyed, bushy tailed and ready to roll. Well, so we, we push them back, push them back, push them back. And by the time they're 18, suddenly that window of curiosity, that window of, man, I'd like to, I'd like to, you know, butcher a chicken. That window closes because they've, they're now 18 and they're, they're stilted in. Well, you've got to go, you know, get in a Dilbert cubicle at the end of an expressway and punch numbers into cyberspace for the man.
[01:09:02] Joel Salatin: And, and so, so we just have, I mean, if, if we had done what the government said we should do here and hadn't defied them or non complied, we wouldn't exist. Our farm wouldn't exist.
[01:09:19] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right. You have to violate the law, which then diminishes respect for the law where it needs to exist.
[01:09:25] Joel Salatin: Yes. Yes. Yes. That's right.
[01:09:27] Dr. Bret Weinstein: That's right. I mean, I'm, I'm struck by the same thing I've been struck by over and over again. Yeah. We know how to raise young people. We know how to have a farm that is productive, right? Sustainable. Yeah. Yeah. We know how to do all of this stuff. And the idea that, oh, there's a, you know, there's something wrong with that. So we're going to just tack on a regulation to solve that one little problem. And then you have, you know, this immense collection of regulations that, you know, nobody could possibly know them all even that is wrongheaded to begin with. But if you just could reboot, right? The idea that yes, the neighbor kid who wants to have the drill put in their hand should have it put in their hand. And yes, there is a small amount of risk in that. Sure. There's an awful lot of risk in life and they're only going to learn to manage risk if they make a few errors.
[01:10:17] Joel Salatin: Yes. That's how, that's how you build wisdom and discernment is, is, is decision making. Yeah. But we've become such a paranoid, fearful culture. I was speaking at a college out in California a couple of years back during Q and A, the, the, the discussion kind of moved into a direction. I said, I'm going to, I'm going to ask here. I said, I'm going to ask, you know, had 300 kids in a, you know, in a lecture hall said, I'm going to ask, how many of you think that in order for you to eat a carrot out of your garden, a government agent should have to come and check it and make sure that it's safe food to eat before you eat it out of your own I kid you not. 30% of the hands went up. Really? One third of the hands went up. And what's the new word? Gobsmacked. Yeah. I was gobsmacked. I mean, I was speechless for a moment. What, what do you do with that?
[01:11:12] Joel Salatin: But that, that, but that's where we've come. We've become so segregated, disconnected and, and, and whatever viscerally disempowered from life that, that, that we're fearful because we fear what we don't know. And so when there's this level of ignorance in a culture about anything, it moves you toward fearfulness and the fearfulness makes you want to have a proxy called a government agent to come and allay your fear by being the expert to this is okay. You know, I was, I was in the, I was in the farm store and, you know, we, we built it with no building permit. We didn't ask permission. We didn't do anything. Guy came in and he was, he was starting to talk about building inspectors and things. He says, well, I, I certainly wonder, wouldn't want to go in a building that didn't have a building inspector. And so when you're standing in one and our house was built in 1790, it's still standing.
[01:12:19] Joel Salatin: I'll bet it'll stand longer than some of these inspected building codes, stick houses we've got today. And, and, but this notion that, that the only trustworthy thing, it would kind of come full circle in the discussion here, that the only trustworthy thing in a culture is, is a government agent expert. And, and, and we can't, we can't know enough about anything to make a decision about it. I, I, you know, I just, I just don't know enough about this to make a decision about it. We've just become incredibly disempowered and fearful, you know, about, about everything. And we got trees here, kids climbing these trees. Some people, oh no, I can you let kids
[01:13:05] Dr. Bret Weinstein: well, how can you not let kids climb?
[01:13:06] Joel Salatin: Yeah, how can you not let kids climb the trees? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah. So, so I wrote this book. Everything I want to do is illegal to just, to just each chapter is a different story of a battle that we've fought or, or something that the battle was too strong to win. And so we didn't fight it and just didn't do it over and over and over. It's not just, it's not just food. It's, I mean, we, we'd like to cure ham here. We have, we raise a thousand hogs a year. We'd like to cure ham, but that is a, that, that's a manufactured product. That's illegal in an agriculture zone. Well, we're better to cure ham than where the pigs are raised.
[01:13:51] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Right.
[01:13:52] Joel Salatin: So, so, so, so here, here we've, we've created this, this, this completely segregated. Now the trucks have to go there and the trucks have to come back and the trucks have to go there and come back. And so, you know, everything, everything becomes disconnected, unrelated. And as a result, the knowledge level of those various chains and, and, and procedures gets lost and then people get scared. And scared people will swallow anything that offers them safety and security.
[01:14:29] Dr. Bret Weinstein: I think that's exactly what's going on is that there is just a sense of, oh my God, there's so many things that could go wrong. I want it certified that they want. And the problem is if you scrutinize, like take the building codes, I get stuck on the windows. I have to put windows in that are double- paned and have been purged. The gap between them has been purged with something that gives you a high R value to reduce the expenditure of energy. Okay. Where is the analysis that says that a window that has a finite lifespan, because those seals break and the window is no good once they've lost their seal vacuum. So I have to pull that put in a new window. There's a lot of energy spent in that process, manufacturing that window, transporting that window, installing that window. Where's the net analysis that tells me that actually, even from an energetic perspective, that these better insulated windows are actually not good over their lifetime.
[01:15:35] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It doesn't exist. And it's like this. So, you know, there is this instinct and I think this is where the conservatives are exactly right. It's like, well, okay, any fool can see how far off track we are. We should go back to the last thing that actually made sense, right? And if we're going to make progress, let's start from there because, you know, we left the trail. We're like bushwhacking out here and not doing well at it.
[01:15:58] Joel Salatin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's well said. And, and we've, we've completely veered from logic reason and, and as a culture, we've just been, we've just been tick-tocked, tick-tocked away from reality. Yeah.
[01:16:22] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yes. And, you know, everything's atomized. So you don't do a whole thing. Right. And you don't have the interaction with some system that penalizes you when you're foolish. Right. And so we have a, we have a civilization of foolish people, you know, and it's not entirely their fault. It's just the system led to that. And, you know, look, there are two great examples here. The one you just gave about the kid who wants to come and you can't put a drill in their hand. It's like, you're actually denying the right to give a child something that could turn them into a healthy func— This isn't a four-year-old. Right. No, a 15-year-old can handle a drill.
[01:16:59] Joel Salatin: Yeah. Absolutely.
[01:17:00] Dr. Bret Weinstein: For sure. And if you, they don't do it, the developmental window isn't, you know, it's not that long. So they lose the ability to become rational in this way. Yeah. That's right. You'd be crazy to give up the opportunity. The other one is something you said last year that struck me like like a ton of bricks, which was the regulations around processing your cattle are such that you can't actually bury, you can't compost the remains of the cattle that aren't used, that aren't sold as beef here on the farm, which is an obvious way to close the equilibrium cycles. How could you possibly be forbidden to do that? The animal, you know, was raised here returning the nutrients that it literally took from this patch of territory to this territory is an obviously right thing to want to do. And, you know, some, this over eagerness about bureaucracy has forbidden, has forbidden to close the loop.
[01:18:01] Joel Salatin: Well, that, I mean, the justification is, you know, is pollution. Oh, it's going to leach. It's going to have, you know, some virus, some bug that's going to leach into the groundwater and then we're all going to die, you know, because of something. And a lot of this develops out of industrial systems that do create problems. This is the great, this is, this is the thing that I think is probably a paradigm shifter for a lot of people. All regulations, and right now, I'm not going to argue there shouldn't be any, I'm not going to purist libertarian standpoint, but all regulations are scale prejudicial, all of them, as far as, as far as application. I'll give you, I'll give you one that's not. Not all laws are scale prejudicial, but the bureaucratic regulations are scaled. When you have to get, when you have to get licenses and you have to comply with a set, with a code of regulations, it's always easier when you're big than when you're small.
[01:19:19] Joel Salatin: For example, Teresa and I own, we own a little federal inspection slaughterhouse up 20 miles north of us. And, and it costs us $600 to do to a steer what Tyson does for 150 bucks. We have the same amount of paperwork for HACCP plans. Oh, I see. We have the same, we have to have an inspector's office. We have to have an inspector's bathroom. We have to have all the same stuff, overheads, that, and we do 50 a week, and Tyson does 5,000 a day.
[01:19:56] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah.
[01:19:57] Joel Salatin: And so, so this, this is a prejudicial cost. And, and so, um, so you say, well, do you give exemptions for, for scale, you know, for smaller scale? And so where I've come down is, let's just agree that two consenting adults exercising voluntary freedom of choice, wanting to engage in a food transaction should not have to ask a bureaucrat's permission. Yes.
[01:20:29] Dr. Bret Weinstein: If I sign the waiver, I am aware that that regulation is there to protect me. That's right. I take the risk on myself. Can I now transact?
[01:20:36] Joel Salatin: And if you want it, you can, if you want that, if you're scared, you can go to Walmart. Yep. But if you're not, and you want to give yourself agency to, to, to, to, to buy my backyard butchered pig sausage, whatever, or, or homemade chicken pot pie or quiche, we should be able to do that interaction. So, so that's why, you know, my latest book that just came out is food emancipation, unshackling America's sustenance. Because to me, I can assure you that if, if we had this kind of freedom, there would be thousands and thousands of small scale farmers and homesteaders that started using their kitchens and their, and their expertise, culinary expertise, curing, preserving, uh, butchery expertise to get convenience food to neighbors and make a living on their small acreages and suddenly put, uh, put the brakes on Bill Gates, Vanguard, and BlackRock buying up all this American farmland.
[01:21:42] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Yeah. And the externalities, the kids who grew up on those farms wouldn't need SSRIs and they wouldn't be threatening to overthrow it.
[01:21:48] Joel Salatin: The kids would be involved. They'd be helping mom. They'd be helping dad. They'd be, uh, involved in this as a familial project. Totally.
[01:21:55] Dr. Bret Weinstein: Now I want to point out something else. You, you, I forget your exact term, but you said they were a scale prejudicial, scale, the regulations, the hazards are the exact inverse. So if you think about what happened to raw milk, right? Raw milk, oh, very dangerous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. No, no. That was a matter of trying to produce raw milk at scale. It's not inherent to the production of raw milk. And so the problem that is cured by the regulations ostensibly is caused by the attempt to scale this process up beyond any reasonable point. And then the regulations that come from it hurt the little guy vastly more than they hurt.
[01:22:33] Joel Salatin: Which is the, which is the actual antidote to the original problem that created the fear in the first place that demanded, you know, a consumer advocacy.
[01:22:44] Dr. Bret Weinstein: It's, it's really simple when you see it. And you know, if only we could get enough people to understand what the fundamental problem is, we wouldn't have to address each little argument. That's right. Well, Joel, this has been a wonderful conversation. I hope it is the first of many. Likewise. I really, I love what you're doing and I love the impact that you're having on people. And I love your approach to them. People sense your genuineness and your integrity and humanity from the get-go and they're not wrong. So anyway, thank you. Thank you.
[01:23:20] Joel Salatin: It's a pleasure.
Credits
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