RFK Jr. The Defender - Kiss the Ground and Regenerative Agriculture with John Roulac

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, my guest today is John Rulak.

00:00:02.000 As founder of Nutiva, John has sourced and formulated a billion dollars in retail sales of organic superfoods.

00:00:10.000 John is a serial entrepreneur, investor, writer, philanthropist, and filmmaker.

00:00:17.000 Most recently, he's the executive producer of the Netflix blockbuster Film documentary really, Kiss the Ground, which is about regenerative agriculture.

00:00:27.000 And we've talked about that on this podcast before then.

00:00:31.000 Amazing film.

00:00:33.000 John has founded six nonprofit organizations, including Great Plains Regeneration, Agroforestry Regeneration Communities, ARC, And four is forever.

00:00:46.000 And John, reading your biography, I could confuse it for my own because we've spent our lifetimes working on essentially identical issues, which is water pollution, big agriculture, industrialization and commoditization of agriculture and human beings and soils.

00:01:05.000 Factory farms, GMO agriculture, pesticides, and toxins to children.

00:01:12.000 Let's talk about regenerative agriculture, because that's really what we came here to talk about.

00:01:18.000 Let me ask you a question that I think a lot of people wonder about it.

00:01:23.000 I think about this every time my wife, when we go out to lunch, she always orders the Impossible Burger. 0.95

00:01:31.000 Is that a good health choice?

00:01:33.000 Let me ask you.

00:01:35.000 And is it a good environmental choice?

00:01:37.000 It is not.

00:01:38.000 That's like a softball thrown to a hitter.

00:01:44.000 Unfortunately, The industrial ag, Monsanto, Bayer, you know, the fertilizer companies, they had a real problem.

00:01:53.000 People didn't want to buy industrial foods, killing bees, destroying topsoils, you know, causing death zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

00:02:01.000 And so they came up with a new term.

00:02:04.000 How can you repackage a dysfunctional, degenerative system?

00:02:09.000 The new term is called plant-based.

00:02:13.000 As a company, I pioneered organic, plant-based, whether it's hemp seeds or coconut oil.

00:02:23.000 Many of our customers, many of the top vegans and plant-based people in the United States eat Nativa products.

00:02:31.000 We were certified organic.

00:02:33.000 And a pasta burger came along.

00:02:34.000 They're basically taking GMO soy and then a GMO fake blood.

00:02:41.000 They put in all sorts of different other ingredients from GMO corn, natural flavors, etc.

00:02:47.000 And it's not healthy.

00:02:49.000 And just to give you a sense of where, of every seed, and of course you're aware, but this, every seed, every GMO seed is dipped in neonics, the GMO corn and soy.

00:03:01.000 And that neonic, it's like as a protection.

00:03:04.000 And in France, they're banning it in agriculture like that.

00:03:07.000 And so then as that plant grows, it expresses energy.

00:03:11.000 Because it's been coated in the seed, it expresses that toxin at the gene level.

00:03:18.000 Explain what Neonix is.

00:03:20.000 Neonix is a very toxic pesticide that some say is way more toxic than Roundup.

00:03:27.000 And it kills insects and birds.

00:03:29.000 And it is a seed coating.

00:03:33.000 These are called neonicotinoids.

00:03:35.000 Neonicotinoids, yeah.

00:03:37.000 Neonicotinoids.

00:03:38.000 And it's a coating, seed coating.

00:03:39.000 So when the bees come in the morning in the dew on the plants, Or getting any of the nectar.

00:03:46.000 They're sipping one of the most toxic pesticides we've ever created.

00:03:51.000 And it is one of the reasons why in the last 40 years, a bunch of Germans decided, citizen scientists decided to go out and start testing in the fields in Germany, in forests, in meadows, in agricultural lands, in wetlands.

00:04:08.000 And they found that we've reduced 70% of all winged insects since the 1970s.

00:04:16.000 And that's been repeated all over the world now.

00:04:18.000 So we're literally losing 1% to 2% of winged insects.

00:04:22.000 I'm talking about ladybugs, bees, wasps, butterflies.

00:04:29.000 Remember when we were young boys, you'd walk out in a field and you might see 10 or 15 butterflies?

00:04:34.000 Today, if we see one or two, it's like, ah, look at that, there's a butterfly.

00:04:38.000 If you drive in an agricultural valley in California, you used to be filled with bugs.

00:04:44.000 You'd have to, you know, pull over the side of the road when you wash your car and I mean, get some gas and wash your windshield, like the bug test.

00:04:50.000 If we've lost 70% of our winged insects in this last decade they've been monitoring, and we're losing 1% to 2% a year, we're seeing a huge loss of biodiversity.

00:05:01.000 Then if you go to the oceans, we've lost 50% to 60% of the phytoplankton.

00:05:07.000 And the phytoplankton is dying because of the heat, the temperature in the oceans.

00:05:12.000 And also because of the carbon content, the acidification.

00:05:16.000 So the oceans are becoming more acidic.

00:05:19.000 They've increased 30% more acidification in the last 50 years.

00:05:24.000 And again, like the winged insects, we're losing 1% to 2% a year of that.

00:05:30.000 Shellfish can no longer mobilize calcium to create their shells.

00:05:35.000 And so you're seeing collapses in shellfish fisheries because the ocean is becoming acid.

00:05:42.000 Yes.

00:05:43.000 To me, it's the most frightening thing.

00:05:47.000 We want to kill the oceans. 0.83

00:05:50.000 And I'm one of the few people in the regenerative agriculture that speaks about oceans.

00:05:54.000 I show a picture in one of my presentations, and there's a picture of agricultural fields, and there's a picture of an ocean.

00:06:01.000 And it's like in our generic kind of top-down view, we have people who are in charge of oceans, Protecting the oceans and they never talk to the agricultural people and the people who are protecting our agricultural and soils and environmentalists and lands and and they never talk they never deal with the ocean but it's one system.

00:06:22.000 So one of the the major contributor of ocean pollution which is also killing ocean species is agriculture and agriculture Through the process of regeneration, and you may know our mutual friend Paul Hawken, who wrote the book Regeneration, and is featured in Kiss the Ground film.

00:06:40.000 Paul shows that there's all these solutions.

00:06:42.000 We can use regeneration to build healthy soil, and in the process of building healthy soil, we create healthy plants, we create healthy animals, healthy people, but it sequesters the carbon, and now even more important, it serves as a sponge.

00:06:59.000 So some of these farms, let's say it rains five, six inches in a day.

00:07:03.000 On a degenerative farm that Impossible Burger buys their soy from, the soil washes away into the ocean and into the rivers and creeks.

00:07:12.000 And in the regenerative one, all that water stays in there and goes into the groundwater.

00:07:16.000 And I'll give you an example of why this is so important.

00:07:19.000 I recently went to a regenerative almond field day.

00:07:23.000 There was 300 people there.

00:07:24.000 It was amazing.

00:07:25.000 And people, farmers, the president of the California Almond Board was there.

00:07:30.000 And some friends of mine, Rosie and Ward Burrow, they're great organic farmers, including almonds.

00:07:36.000 You know, my well, we had to issue my well.

00:07:38.000 I called the well person up because they didn't have any water.

00:07:42.000 And he's saying like, well, I thought they did all the maintenance on the well last year.

00:07:46.000 You know, I thought, you know, the pump should be good.

00:07:48.000 And then finally drilled down to the person and he said, look, I have to tell you, You're not the only one who's calling me.

00:07:54.000 All of my neighbors in Madera and Central California, their wells are dropping.

00:08:00.000 And so our water, we're draining our aquifers, not only in California, but across the Great Plains.

00:08:05.000 I work with a group called Great Plains Regeneration.

00:08:07.000 I'm a co-founder and working with farmers and ranchers.

00:08:10.000 And we can restore the water cycle.

00:08:13.000 We can restore better food.

00:08:16.000 We can do this, but we have to stop using so many chemicals But the challenge is all the money is going to plant-based.

00:08:25.000 All these private equity companies, they're putting billions of dollars.

00:08:28.000 They're losing all this money.

00:08:30.000 Now they want to make fake cellular meat.

00:08:33.000 And you know what the feedstock is?

00:08:35.000 Industrial agriculture.

00:08:36.000 It's a real challenge, but we need to focus on that and learn to respect nature.

00:08:43.000 And I wrote an article about a year ago, which you would like.

00:08:47.000 It's called Make America Rivers Blue Again.

00:08:51.000 And it's all about the role of agriculture because our rivers used to be blue.

00:08:56.000 It's actually not blue, but it's a reflection from the sky and industrial agriculture makes them green and brown.

00:09:02.000 So, you know, we can make our rivers blue again and regenerative agriculture is the pathway and people They need to vote for politicians that are going to move us that way, that we need to eat that way, invest that way, and don't buy Impossible Burgers.

00:09:17.000 You'd be much better off to, you know, eat some organic lentils or, you know, the most outrageous thing to say today is to eat an actual...

00:09:25.000 Burger from, you know, holistically grazed, regenerative beef, which is actually showing, just like the buffalo created the great soils in the Great Plains, cows mimicking the buffalo system of moving fastly, quickly moving them, can do that.

00:09:43.000 And there's a lot of pushback on that, as you know.

00:09:45.000 Most environmentalists I think environmentalists have to understand the difference between grass-fed, free-range cows.

00:10:04.000 And most of our meat now comes from factory farms, which is an intensive agriculture that is, you know, is about one of the worst things that you can do in the environment.

00:10:14.000 A hog bruises 10 times the amount of fecal material by weight as a human being.

00:10:22.000 So if you have a hog farm, which, like, I think it was a Circulo, the Smithfields farm up in Utah.

00:10:31.000 Right.

00:10:32.000 It has 800,000 sows on it.

00:10:36.000 That one factory is producing more sewage than all the human beings in New York City combined.

00:10:44.000 And New York City has 14 sewage treatment plants that cost billions and billions of dollars to build and then to maintain and operate.

00:10:52.000 But with Smithfields Farm, which is now owned by the Chinese, They just dump that waste into the environment, untreated sewage. 1.00

00:11:01.000 There's really, there's nothing different between human fecal waste and all fecal waste. 0.95

00:11:07.000 It is, you know, just as dangerous and just as putrid. 0.90

00:11:11.000 Let me ask you this.

00:11:12.000 You've explained that when my wife eats her impossible burger... 1.00

00:11:16.000 She is exterminating 80% of our insects. 1.00

00:11:20.000 She's poisoning the water and she's destroying the ocean. 1.00

00:11:24.000 I don't know if you want to tell her they're on a nice dinner with a glass of wine.

00:11:30.000 I'm not going to tell her this.

00:11:31.000 I'm going to play her this podcast and let her listen to you tell her.

00:11:36.000 But is she improving her own health by eating one of those?

00:11:40.000 No, it's not healthy for you.

00:11:42.000 I would say if you're going to choose between Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat, Beyond Meat is definitely a better choice.

00:11:48.000 But you'd be better to...

00:11:50.000 Will you explain those in detail and what are people actually eating when they eat that stuff?

00:11:55.000 Yeah, what they're eating is highly...

00:11:59.000 Highly processed foods, which goes into your body and your body doesn't recognize it as food because it has dozens of ingredients.

00:12:08.000 It has acids, it has flavors, it has ingredients, methyl cellulose, thickeners, and things to hold together.

00:12:17.000 So you'd be much better to eat a salad and eat some almonds or So I'm not a fan of this highly processed industrial foods.

00:12:30.000 There's pesticides in it too.

00:12:32.000 And pesticides.

00:12:33.000 Yeah, you're getting pesticide residues.

00:12:34.000 And even parts per billion, that just...

00:12:37.000 Reminded me, ironically, these gung-ho pro-pesticide people are creating, we are feminizing our boys and making our girls more masculine by these endocrine disruptors that are used in agriculture. 1.00

00:12:56.000 And so there's a phenomenon where in frogs, we know this, We've seen this in the last couple decades, that frogs now, it's changing at the chromosome level, and it's causing confusion of the sexual genes.

00:13:12.000 You know, there's a series of studies on atrazine.

00:13:15.000 Exactly.

00:13:16.000 Which is the most common, it's ubiquitous pesticide.

00:13:21.000 On corn.

00:13:22.000 So the entire Midwest is basically just coated with atrazine and the water supply.

00:13:29.000 There's basically no water supply in the Midwest now.

00:13:32.000 That is not heavily contaminated with atrazine.

00:13:36.000 And they can take atrazine in labs.

00:13:39.000 They first noticed this in frog buns.

00:13:41.000 They can take atrazine in labs.

00:13:44.000 And they can turn male, fully developed male frogs into female frogs that will produce viable eggs.

00:13:53.000 Oh, you're taking this chemical that can hermaphrodize reptiles and amphibians.

00:14:01.000 And we have no idea what it does to the human immune system.

00:14:05.000 But we're seeing in places where it's heavily utilized, that voice.

00:14:11.000 Have delayed onset puberty.

00:14:14.000 Girls have delayed onset puberty. 1.00

00:14:16.000 And there's all kinds of other problems, like you say, the, you know, masculization of girls. 1.00

00:14:21.000 But there's all, you know, there's endocrine disruptors.

00:14:24.000 There's what they call the dirty dozen, which are phthalates, other plasticizer stuff that's in plastic.

00:14:33.000 When you drink plastic, you're getting this stuff.

00:14:36.000 Flame retardants, glyphosate, organophosphate pesticides, and many, many others. 1.00

00:14:45.000 And we're being exposed to these all the time.

00:14:48.000 BPAs, which is another chemical in plastics.

00:14:52.000 You know, it's really, it's horrific what we're doing to our children.

00:14:56.000 If we don't take care of nature, if we don't take care of our water systems, and if we don't restore our soils and natural systems, climate change and environmental collapse is going to destroy our entire civilization and the natural world.

00:15:12.000 You and I know that.

00:15:14.000 And many people do.

00:15:15.000 That's what we need to start focusing on.

00:15:17.000 And that's what I spend a lot of my time on.

00:15:19.000 I'm actually putting in food for us with NGO groups in Guatemala and East Africa.

00:15:26.000 I'd love to talk a little about that as well.

00:15:28.000 You talked about fake blood.

00:15:31.000 That being...

00:15:32.000 Or synthetic blood.

00:15:34.000 Yeah, synthetic.

00:15:35.000 Yeah, genetically.

00:15:35.000 Let's hear a little bit about that, because I know that will at least, even while she's eating this environment-killing poison, that it will make her enjoy it more if she knows that there's synthetic blood in it.

00:15:47.000 So just tell us.

00:15:50.000 They've genetically modified some, maybe it's a yeast or something.

00:15:53.000 And the FDA wouldn't approve it because they didn't think it was safe.

00:15:58.000 And then after they hired the right lobbyists and law firms, have you ever heard about that?

00:16:03.000 I've seen it before.

00:16:04.000 Let me put it that way.

00:16:05.000 You've seen that before.

00:16:07.000 And so then they got that approved.

00:16:09.000 I do want to mention, there's one farmer that would...

00:16:13.000 I don't mean to interrupt you because I really want you to finish that.

00:16:17.000 I don't What do they do?

00:16:18.000 Do they grow it on a mesh or on a...

00:16:20.000 They grow it in a lab.

00:16:21.000 They grow it in a lab and multiply it.

00:16:23.000 And so it makes it look like fake blood and with Impossible Burger.

00:16:27.000 That's what they do.

00:16:29.000 Okay.

00:16:29.000 I'm just saying that is really...

00:16:32.000 Like, I will eat almost anything, but that is...

00:16:35.000 I wouldn't want to eat it.

00:16:36.000 Yeah.

00:16:37.000 The good news is companies like Beyond Meat or Impossible Burger, they're losing billions of dollars.

00:16:43.000 You know, they're just...

00:16:44.000 The more they sell, the more they lose.

00:16:46.000 So...

00:16:46.000 They're very poorly run.

00:16:48.000 Their cost of goods is way out of whack.

00:16:51.000 And their sales are declining.

00:16:52.000 So this eventually will collapse of its own weight.

00:16:54.000 But now they're so desperate they're going to Congress and Tufts University trying to give them more research.

00:17:01.000 They want the federal government to pay tens of billions of dollars to subsidize their destruction.

00:17:07.000 It's unfortunate.

00:17:08.000 But I wanted to mention there is some good news.

00:17:12.000 Besides all these toxic chemicals we're talking about, giving you ammunition for your lovely wife. 1.00

00:17:20.000 Don't have that guest on again, Bobby.

00:17:24.000 But there's a guy named Rick Clark, and he's an example.

00:17:29.000 He was a farmer, conventional farmer, and he decided To study nature, and he's from Indiana, 6,500 acres, and he doesn't till, and he's now figured out how to grow corn and soybeans with not one ounce of Roundup, no pesticides, no herbicides, no chemical fertilizers, working with nature.

00:17:50.000 And we can do this.

00:17:51.000 You know, Wendell Berry, you know, one of the great farmers in the 70s, talked about this.

00:17:55.000 And so we're now seeing more and more farms I was out at this 1200-acre almond farm in California, and we had someone named Jonathan Lundgren, which would be a great guest for you also sometime, and he's an entomologist.

00:18:08.000 He was forced out from USDA, and he shows that in the organic regenerative systems, there's 30% more birds.

00:18:16.000 There's all sorts of more insects, and more insects means birds can multiply because they eat all those.

00:18:24.000 The problem, destroying our environment, the solution is regeneration.

00:18:28.000 That's our opportunity.

00:18:29.000 That's our path forward.

00:18:31.000 And that's what I'm excited about.

00:18:32.000 And one of the things we're doing outside the United States is I decided to support NGOs like in Guatemala with Contour Lines and Permaculture Paradise Institute in Malawi.

00:18:43.000 And so we're planting food for us and we got a $400,000 grant in Guatemala and we're planting different nitrogen-fixing species and then we'll put in avocados and mangoes and jackfruit and then grow on an alley crop system next to the nitrogen trees, ginger, turmeric, pineapples, cassava and It's a much more productive system.

00:19:07.000 It's multi-species, and the farmers then don't want to leave and go to another land.

00:19:14.000 And we've put in 1200 food for us, and with 1200 families in Guatemala, our goal is to do over 100,000.

00:19:21.000 And when I talked to them, they said, Come on, we can do way more than a hundred thousand.

00:19:25.000 Imagine if we could do a million food forests in Guatemala and we did a webinar and eight people from USAID registered talking about this.

00:19:35.000 So I'm very passionate about this.

00:19:37.000 They don't require fertilizers and they get food every month of the year, depending on the crop.

00:19:43.000 And it's not that expensive.

00:19:46.000 So essentially what we're doing is, you're going to laugh at this, we're essentially taking money from Big corporations, including pharmaceutical companies, they're washing their guilt by giving money to organizations that end up flowing to us, and we plant those trees.

00:20:02.000 And I will take money from large organizations and help indigenous people, help become more food sovereign.

00:20:10.000 I'll do that any day.

00:20:11.000 Some people say, how could you take money from them?

00:20:13.000 Like, if I can plant hundreds of thousands of food for us and help those families.

00:20:17.000 And the other thing that we do is, We don't take any farmers in the program unless their family and their wives are involved. 0.98

00:20:24.000 And we find we're much more successful.

00:20:26.000 That's what makes me passionate about, even though the news is very, very challenging these days, as you know.

00:20:32.000 Most recently, I was surprised to see you sort of crossing the line, this very, very dangerous line, and writing about pharmaceutical products and also directly talking about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

00:20:49.000 You know, that really impressed me because we're living in a weird world today.

00:20:54.000 And I know you've spent most of your entire life as a liberal Democrat.

00:21:00.000 And yet, most liberal Democrats, as you mentioned in that article, It's kind of a bewildering phenomenon.

00:21:09.000 These are people who, for most of their lives, have understood that the pharmaceutical industry is really one of the most evil, craven, venal structures that the world has ever known, and yet they completely are subsumed in the recent orthodoxies about that pharma finally is telling the truth about vaccines and these other Remedies for COVID-19.

00:21:37.000 Talk about that a little, because you must have known it's a very dangerous choice for you to stray from regenerative agriculture and pesticides into the pharmaceutical space.

00:21:49.000 Thanks for the introduction.

00:21:51.000 And, you know, if I look back I was very fortunate.

00:21:54.000 When I was like 21, I started cramping up playing basketball.

00:21:59.000 And basketball is like my favorite sport and hobby that I do.

00:22:03.000 And I had to really think about my diet because it turned out my diet was really bad.

00:22:08.000 So I basically became a health enthusiast or a health nut in my early 20s.

00:22:14.000 And then that had an impact on me.

00:22:16.000 And then when I was 40, right when I started up Nativa, I got bit by a tick.

00:22:22.000 I didn't think much about it.

00:22:24.000 But a year later, I was having a hard time walking.

00:22:27.000 And it took me a while to figure out that I had Lyme disease.

00:22:30.000 And essentially, I was in a startup mode of a company as a semi-cripple, and it was hard for me to walk upstairs. 0.99

00:22:38.000 Before you continue, let me just ask you, were you living on the East Coast at that time?

00:22:42.000 No, I was living in Sonoma County in Northern California.

00:22:47.000 So Sonoma County, it was probably an unusual disease at that point and more difficult to diagnose.

00:22:54.000 Yeah, there wasn't as many people.

00:22:55.000 I went to a Lyme specialist.

00:22:57.000 I took every antibiotic in the book that they recommended, one after another after another.

00:23:02.000 I mean, literally just touching my leg was searing pain.

00:23:06.000 And then I came to a realization.

00:23:08.000 I was very angry about it.

00:23:10.000 I came to a realization that I could focus on gratitude for what I've had in my life.

00:23:14.000 I had 40 years of really good health.

00:23:16.000 Not everybody gets 40 years of good health.

00:23:18.000 And then out of the blue, I got a phone call of a friend of a friend said that they also had Lyme disease and they went down to a clinic in Mexico.

00:23:26.000 I talked to the doctor.

00:23:27.000 I went down there and after six days of IV treatments of vitamin C and ozone, I could run.

00:23:35.000 A few years later, I was doing triathlons.

00:23:37.000 Today, I play basketball against 20 and 30-year-old guys.

00:23:43.000 I've had a basis of being healthy and being in the food business, I dealt with the FDA. The FDA was threatening our industry saying we couldn't say non-GMO in around 2010.

00:23:58.000 When this COVID thing happened and I started to research, after about a year, I started talking to my friends who were doctors, I realized something wasn't right and I had to make a choice.

00:24:07.000 I could either just go along with the narrative and have a nice semi-retired life.

00:24:14.000 Or I could do what was right for the people, what was right for our health, and also for the environment.

00:24:22.000 I mean, COVID and vaccines are horrible.

00:24:24.000 The greenhouse gas emissions, the hospital waste, the lost lives.

00:24:28.000 And I'm like, how are they going to cancel me?

00:24:30.000 I already sued the DEA back in 2002 and won that lawsuit.

00:24:35.000 So people kind of know me as someone who takes on powerful interests.

00:24:39.000 So I made that decision.

00:24:41.000 I realized I was jumping into something where I could be harassed and attacked.

00:24:46.000 And I have.

00:24:47.000 Many of my friends won't speak to me.

00:24:50.000 They say I'm losing it, etc.

00:24:54.000 Yeah, I consider myself liberal and progressive, and I find a lot of my friends who are of similar ideology who are health-focused, who know about the immune system, We haven't moved.

00:25:07.000 We haven't changed.

00:25:08.000 And we find other liberals and Democrats have become more authoritarian.

00:25:13.000 They're actually moving to the right.

00:25:15.000 In some ways, I feel that the modern-day Democratic Party, not all of them, but some of them are actually more authoritarian in the right.

00:25:25.000 And that's kind of strange to me.

00:25:28.000 It's kind of like...

00:25:30.000 And in my article, I go into a little about how that occurred.

00:25:34.000 I think it's a tribal thing.

00:25:35.000 I think Trump impacted it.

00:25:37.000 But at the end of the day, I just chose to do what I feel is best, and that was to speak out.

00:25:44.000 I kind of have this philosophy as my personal life, as how I show up in the world.

00:25:49.000 If there's a door that people say, don't walk through that door, because if you walk through that door, you're going to have consequences.

00:25:56.000 But if I think that that's going to help people, I made a commitment when I was in my 20s.

00:26:01.000 I will walk through that door.

00:26:02.000 And when the DEA said that a hemp bar with four seeds, hemp, sunflower, pumpkin And sesame seed and honey was in the same category as heroin.

00:26:12.000 I said, that's wrong, and we should sue the DEA. I'm not going to just go out of business.

00:26:17.000 And because we won that case, and I don't know if we're going to win on this pharmaceutical issue.

00:26:22.000 You've been at this much longer battle, but I feel glad to be able to stand up.

00:26:30.000 I find it interesting, Robert, I'm virtually one of the only people in the organic natural food industry leaders who've stood up for this.

00:26:40.000 Now, I have many of them will contact me and say, I'm afraid I can't say anything.

00:26:44.000 I really like you, like what you're doing, John.

00:26:46.000 A lot of people contact me and say, Love what you're doing, really it's great, but I can't say anything personally because I'm afraid to be attacked.

00:26:52.000 What kind of world is it when leaders of the organic and natural food industries are threatened by the pharmaceutical industry and so they become silent?

00:27:04.000 That's, I think...

00:27:06.000 I think that is the big question of our times, is how is this happening in our country?

00:27:11.000 How is this pharmaceutical-inforced censorship so widespread, so acquiesced to by the champions, the once champions of free speech?

00:27:25.000 And have you had any of those conversations with your liberal friends, or have they just shut you down?

00:27:31.000 Some of them are more open, and others just want to just They don't want to hear it.

00:27:37.000 They just don't want to even consider it.

00:27:40.000 But I think over time, hopefully they will.

00:27:44.000 It's bizarre.

00:27:46.000 I think some of it is they know it's wrong, but they feel if they speak out, then that that's some way that's going to support the Republicans and Trump.

00:27:56.000 And so that's part of it.

00:27:59.000 There's also this hatred towards Trump.

00:28:01.000 One thing I had to learn as a younger man, to let go of hate.

00:28:05.000 Like, I did not like the Bushes.

00:28:07.000 And I used to think I hated them.

00:28:09.000 And I had to learn to let go of hate.

00:28:11.000 You know, Martin Luther King Jr.

00:28:13.000 spoke about that.

00:28:15.000 You know, we don't have time for hate.

00:28:16.000 So you can dislike your opponent, but when you start hating people, then that makes you kind of cross the line into a different way.

00:28:24.000 And I want to come from more of a position of truth and love and respect than hate.

00:28:30.000 Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you on that.

00:28:33.000 As they say, hatred is like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die.

00:28:41.000 And it's corrosive on the person who is hating.

00:28:45.000 And it's destructive, ultimately.

00:28:48.000 It turns into a kind of self-victimization that paralyzes people and distorts their view of reality.

00:28:56.000 And I agree that that's what happened.

00:28:58.000 I mean, I kind of watched this evolution in my party, in the Democratic political party, Because, you know, my uncle was leading, Ted Kennedy leading the battle for universal healthcare for many, many years as chairman of the Senate Health Committee.

00:29:17.000 And then when Obama passed Obamacare, he couldn't do it unless he got the pharmaceutical companies on board.

00:29:25.000 So he had to make a compromise.

00:29:28.000 And pharmaceutical companies have always been the enemies of the Democratic Party.

00:29:32.000 But he made the compromise with them that if they supported Obamacare, he would give them the ability to sell their drugs to Medicare without bargaining.

00:29:43.000 To basically name their price and have Medicare and Medicaid buy their drugs.

00:29:48.000 And that's what Biden was talking about this week, is we pay more for pharmaceuticals than any country in the world.

00:29:56.000 And it's because of that deal that got all the pharmaceutical companies on board with Obamacare.

00:30:02.000 And all of a sudden, for the first time, Democrats, because they were supporting Obamacare, were able to justify taking money from pharmaceutical companies.

00:30:13.000 Democrats were usually the much poorer party because the only people that Democratic candidates and congressional members, most of them, I'm talking about the general rule, Was that they couldn't take money from chemicals or oil companies or tobacco companies or pesticide companies or big agriculture.

00:30:33.000 And there are a lot of exceptions, but this was generally the truth.

00:30:37.000 And the only people they really could take big money, who could write them big checks, was organized labor and trial lawyers.

00:30:45.000 And all of a sudden they had an industry that Democrats could take money from, which is the pharmaceutical industry, without taking a lot of, you know, heat from in their own party.

00:30:56.000 And so Democrats became hooked on pharmaceutical money.

00:31:02.000 And then in 2016, when all of these vaccine mandates, you know, you had a couple of measles outbreaks and there started to be mandates in most of the states and the abandonment of religious exemptions and philosophical exemptions and medical exemptions in New York and California. you had a couple of measles outbreaks and there started The people pushing those bills were mainly Democrats, although it was still very fluid.

00:31:28.000 You know, you had Democrats and Republicans on both sides, but it was being driven by Democrats.

00:31:33.000 And then during the Trump campaign, Trump came out several times and said that he believed that vaccines could cause autism.

00:31:43.000 And for Democrats, that became a potent political issue because they could say he's as crazy on this and went in the same dumpster as his climate change denialism.

00:31:56.000 And then it became a cultural issue, and it became a tribal issue, and it was really kind of a badge of membership and of rectitude in the Democratic Party.

00:32:08.000 And I think that, you know, I watched this happen over a couple of decades.

00:32:12.000 And, you know, even when I was younger, It was the Democrats created these agencies like NIH and CDC and FDA and HHS. Those were all Democratic programs.

00:32:26.000 And the Republicans are always hostile to those agencies.

00:32:31.000 And the Democrats found themselves in kind of this permanent posture of defending those agencies from Republican attacks, from defamation, but also from budget cuts.

00:32:43.000 And so it was natural for them to take that posture of surrender, and they didn't notice.

00:32:49.000 While they were facing the outside world with the regulatory agencies behind them, the regulatory agencies were systematically being hollowed out and captured by the industry they were supposed to regulate and turned ultimately into the subsidiaries for those industries.

00:33:06.000 And the Democrats really noticed that the agencies they were defending were no longer public health agencies.

00:33:12.000 They were, you know, pharmaceutical promotion agencies.

00:33:15.000 And I didn't mean to go on for so long.

00:33:18.000 It's an interesting subject of how this happened and one that, you know, I find really fascinating.

00:33:24.000 How did the Democrats suddenly become the party of pharma?

00:33:30.000 Thank you for the overview, and I agree, and that's interesting on the details.

00:33:34.000 In a way, pharma punked the Democrats.

00:33:38.000 They're laughing all the way to the bank, and then they're going to elect Republicans in the coming elections and make sure the price of pharmaceutical drugs stay high.

00:33:49.000 That's the end result.

00:33:50.000 And the way they're doing, they're forcing the Democratic Party to take outrageous positions Which then caused people like myself and others to go, why do I want to support candidates who want to put masks on kids for years and years when most countries, they're not putting masks on kids, they're still requiring them.

00:34:13.000 Why should you have a vaccine passport?

00:34:17.000 If people want to take a vaccine, they should have a right to do that.

00:34:21.000 Nothing wrong with that.

00:34:22.000 But to say you're fired from your job You can't travel.

00:34:27.000 You're a second-class citizen.

00:34:30.000 People, many of my friends that I've surprised, they said, John, I'm never going to vote Democratic now.

00:34:35.000 And they're for gay rights and they're environmentalists, but they're just like tired of it. 0.99

00:34:41.000 And then the end result is it's going to benefit pharma.

00:34:44.000 So it's a very strange thing.

00:34:46.000 And that's why I wrote my article.

00:34:48.000 I've been getting a lot of interesting feedback.

00:34:49.000 And I appreciate your organization running it on from corrupted to trusted liberal Americans' perceptions of the FDA. So I kind of get into that.

00:34:58.000 But yeah, it's interesting.

00:35:01.000 My real passion is regenerative ag and regeneration and protecting nature and waterways.

00:35:07.000 We have a similar path there.

00:35:10.000 But if we lose on this issue, we're going to see that if we're going to create some sort of authoritarian system, they can turn your bank account off, they can turn your access To going anywhere, just with a flip of a switch.

00:35:27.000 So, you know, one day it's, quote, you know, far-right truckers, and they're bad, and we're going to go after them.

00:35:33.000 And, you know, I think, I mean, you and I, we could go down the rabbit hole real far down that, you know, maybe we don't want to necessarily do that, because it's a dark rabbit hole if you go down there.

00:35:45.000 And I had friends who were kind of, a few years ago, shared some of these things.

00:35:50.000 I said, that's kind of conspiratorial, but Or maybe I didn't say that, but I said, well, let's hope it doesn't go there.

00:35:55.000 And some of my astute scientist friends, they said, John, the conspiracies are turning out to be true.

00:36:01.000 I mean, how is it that they can say, we're going to end COVID, but anybody who doesn't have a vaccine has to wear a mask indoors?

00:36:11.000 I mean, that's what Governor Gavin Newsom is saying.

00:36:14.000 That's what the City of LA supposedly is saying.

00:36:16.000 I think LA County is not taking that position.

00:36:19.000 And that's what the CDC is saying.

00:36:21.000 And we're finding out now that if you're vaccinated, you know, they said, oh, if you take a vaccine, You're not going to pass it.

00:36:28.000 This is going to be good for your mother, you know, because you protect your mother.

00:36:31.000 Get this vaccine.

00:36:32.000 You won't pass.

00:36:32.000 And now they're fine.

00:36:33.000 It's not sterilized.

00:36:34.000 You pass the vaccine.

00:36:35.000 You pass COVID on.

00:36:36.000 You can get sick.

00:36:37.000 And now they're finding very high percentage of people in the hospitals from Israeli data or, you know, and now in Scotland, it's so bad.

00:36:44.000 They won't even Scotland won't won't report the data.

00:36:47.000 They said, because if we report the data, who's in the hospitals, vaccinated or unvaccinated, it's going to lead to vaccine hesitancy.

00:36:55.000 But it's data.

00:36:56.000 And, you know, even the New York Times reported this week, and the New York Post, that CDC has been systematically hiding data from the American people.

00:37:06.000 These are not public health agencies.

00:37:09.000 These are now subsidiaries of what essentially is a giant enterprise being run by pharma.

00:37:16.000 And it shouldn't surprise us.

00:37:18.000 I mean, pharmaceutical companies have paid $80 billion in criminal penalties since 2000.

00:37:25.000 These are...

00:37:26.000 Pfizer paid the biggest criminal penalty in the history of our country, you know, on pharmaceutical issues, the biggest.

00:37:36.000 And so, you know, what happens when those criminal companies...

00:37:43.000 Capture an agency.

00:37:44.000 They all become part of that enterprise.

00:37:47.000 And that's what I think you and I and other people are seeing that.

00:37:52.000 But, you know, I think what's happened to our party, which I think about all the time, because I've run into people who are incredibly smart, who have good hearts, who are well-intentioned, who love our country, who are skeptical of traditionally of corporations.

00:38:13.000 And they appear to be in this deep hypnosis, where if you even start questioning them about their beliefs, it's kind of a religious...

00:38:21.000 It's a religious... 0.94

00:38:24.000 You know, it's like a hardwired orthodoxy that, you know, the more that you question and challenge it, the deeper entrenched it becomes and the angrier the person becomes who's, you know, you're asking them about some of the ironies that are connected to their belief system.

00:38:42.000 Right.

00:38:43.000 It's kind of the, I joke, it's almost like in the movie The Matrix.

00:38:47.000 There'll be ordinary people walking down the street And then all of a sudden they become Mr.

00:38:52.000 Anderson's an agent.

00:38:54.000 And that's what's happened.

00:38:55.000 People literally were thinking, you know, open-minded, didn't trust pharma, and they became, you know, huge advocates for the pharmaceutical industry.

00:39:05.000 Yeah, so it's kind of ironic.

00:39:07.000 The other thing I wanted to mention, yeah, the lack of transparency is horrible.

00:39:11.000 I wrote another article called Pharma's Culture War in September.

00:39:16.000 One of the things was I kept reading about the use of, you know, generic drugs in India.

00:39:23.000 And so I started Googling and I started doing research on the internet.

00:39:27.000 And I noticed, I was like, am I just going down some Trump conspiracy?

00:39:33.000 You know, like, I can't find any information.

00:39:37.000 I'm going to Google, like, am I going to write some article and just Put up some BS, you know, and like destroy my reputation as a longtime environmentalist.

00:39:45.000 And so then I said, well, I know somebody from India.

00:39:48.000 And so he said, well, we'll call my cousin.

00:39:51.000 You know, she's going to law school in Cambridge and she's like the, you know, real smart one in the family.

00:39:55.000 So I talked to her.

00:39:56.000 And she lived in Delhi, you know, like upper middle class Indian family.

00:39:59.000 I said, so what happened?

00:40:01.000 Which is part of this, the province Uttar Prakash.

00:40:04.000 It's next to Uttar Pradesh.

00:40:06.000 It's a city state.

00:40:07.000 It's like, it's where the, you know, a lot of the government is, but it's right next to Uttar Pradesh.

00:40:13.000 So I'm going to get to Uttar Pradesh in a minute.

00:40:15.000 So I talked and she said, yeah, we, all my family, they took, as soon as they got COVID, They took ivermectin and none of them went to the hospital.

00:40:22.000 And I said, can I talk to your family doctor?

00:40:24.000 She said, great.

00:40:25.000 So I did a Zoom call with him and he confirmed the same information.

00:40:29.000 And then I said, I want to speak to a doctor though in Uttar Pradesh.

00:40:32.000 Who do you know in Uttar Pradesh?

00:40:34.000 So he lined me up with a gentleman there.

00:40:36.000 I think his name is Dr.

00:40:38.000 Singh.

00:40:38.000 I did two Zoom calls with him.

00:40:41.000 He has a telemedicine clinic and they treated 5,500 patients who had COVID. And what people were doing in Uttar Pradesh in policies in June, the governor was so concerned.

00:40:54.000 There's 240 million people.

00:40:56.000 As you know, Bobby, it's one of the biggest states, all the biggest states in India.

00:40:59.000 240, it's like two-thirds the size of the United States.

00:41:03.000 Everybody, they had a COVID kit.

00:41:05.000 You got vitamin D, vitamin C, doxycycline.

00:41:09.000 They did that.

00:41:10.000 I'm not quite sure if that's the best thing, but they did that.

00:41:12.000 And then ivermectin.

00:41:14.000 And they had 2,000 mobile clinics.

00:41:16.000 They went out to everybody's homes and...

00:41:18.000 They had massive Delta wave in May.

00:41:22.000 And by the end of June, because of this, their case were so low.

00:41:27.000 As a matter of fact, the World Health Organization put it on their website that they were outstanding effort.

00:41:32.000 But they wouldn't put what was in, they said they delivered home kits.

00:41:35.000 They wouldn't say what was in the home kit.

00:41:36.000 You know, if you ask Americans, the Americans think we did such a great job.

00:41:41.000 And I go, well, do you realize we're one of the leading countries?

00:41:44.000 Like we're in the top 10 death rates per capita.

00:41:46.000 And in Uttar Pradesh, They have like, from July on, July until the end of December, it was like 30 cases a day, not even barely one death a day.

00:41:59.000 We're 1,500 deaths a day, and we're supposedly have the greatest medical system in the world.

00:42:05.000 And the same thing if you go to Japan.

00:42:09.000 Japan got hit with Delta in August, and several doctors started prescribing ivermectin.

00:42:15.000 Now, the government didn't say you should use ivermectin.

00:42:21.000 They said it's not illegal.

00:42:22.000 And so the Japanese rate went way, way, way down.

00:42:26.000 The other thing I've discovered is vitamin D. If we're really interested, if you're pro-vaccine, And you're pro-FDA, and you're pro-Pfizer, whatever.

00:42:36.000 At minimum, everyone in America should have gotten a vitamin D. And they're finding in the tests, as you know, like from Israel, where they have tests of people's vitamin D levels before and when they came into the hospital.

00:42:50.000 The amount of people who had high levels of vitamin D, they're not getting sick, whether you're vaccinated or unvaccinated.

00:42:57.000 So that plays a huge impact.

00:42:59.000 Basically, you want to reduce viral replication.

00:43:01.000 And vitamin D really helps.

00:43:03.000 And of course, ivermectin early on, I know some people don't believe that.

00:43:07.000 It's a horse dewormer.

00:43:08.000 It's safer than aspirin.

00:43:10.000 The irony even goes worse than this.

00:43:13.000 As you know, if you're a medical doctor in the hospital today, and someone comes in with COVID, if you say, let's give them vitamin C and vitamin D, you know what happens to them?

00:43:24.000 Fired.

00:43:26.000 You are fired by giving basic vitamins that can reduce viral replication and they're giving remdesivir.

00:43:36.000 And remdesivir, as you're probably aware, in 2019 You know, from Ebola, they said it was ineffective and it shouldn't be used.

00:43:46.000 Remdesivir kills people, causes organ damage, and people, and there was hardly any studies for it.

00:43:52.000 There's been 60 studies on ivermectin, and remdesivir had a couple. 0.93

00:43:56.000 So it's just, it's ridiculous.

00:44:00.000 But at the end of the day, we have to resolve this in the best way, and then we need to get to what you and I are passionate about, and that's restoring and protecting nature.

00:44:11.000 Well, let me just comment on what you said about vitamin D. There are now numerous studies that show that vitamin D is extraordinarily effective against COVID. There's a recent study, and I'm trying to remember what journal it was published in,

00:44:28.000 but said that the correlation is so perfect that theoretically, if anybody who has 50,000 units of vitamin D in their blood, it's virtually impossible to die from COVID. You know, that doesn't mean it can't happen, but it means that statistically, it is a very remote possibility.

00:44:52.000 And of course, you know, that's what we should have done from day one of the pandemic.

00:44:56.000 And if you go in any pharmaceutical pharmacy in this country, you'll see shelf after shelf of Zycam and other forms of zinc for the common goal.

00:45:05.000 Those are coronaviruses.

00:45:06.000 And they're there because they work.

00:45:08.000 And vitamin D works as well.

00:45:11.000 The ivermectin study that you talked about, the experience in Uttar Pradesh, is really an extraordinary one.

00:45:19.000 There's a neighboring province or nearby province called Corella, which adopted the Tony Fauci protocols and banned ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

00:45:32.000 And they basically achieved the same kind of death rates that we had.

00:45:36.000 We had the highest body count of any country in the world.

00:45:39.000 So how does anybody call that a success story?

00:45:41.000 As you point out, 2,500 per million.

00:45:45.000 The crusade to discredit ivermectin as a horse medication, that's like saying that penicillin is a horse antibiotic.

00:45:54.000 You know, if it works on one mammal, it works on other ones.

00:45:58.000 And ivermectin works, it obliterates viruses and it obliterates parasites.

00:46:05.000 And it works across many, many species.

00:46:08.000 But of course, there's been billions of doses prescribed for human beings.

00:46:11.000 It is not a orest dewormer.

00:46:14.000 It functions as orest dewormer.

00:46:16.000 There's veterinary applications for most medications.

00:46:19.000 But it is primarily, it won the Nobel Prize for treating humans.

00:46:24.000 It's the only drug in history ever to win the Nobel Prize, treating human beings.

00:46:29.000 How can people contact you?

00:46:31.000 How can they follow you?

00:46:33.000 How can, you know, the listeners of this podcast support you?

00:46:37.000 Yeah, you can go to my website, johnrulac.com.

00:46:41.000 If you forget my name, you can also just Google founder of Nativa.

00:46:45.000 I have a sub stack which you can Google or find from my website.

00:46:48.000 I'm also on Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram, you know, under John Rulac.

00:46:53.000 That's how they can follow me.

00:46:54.000 And we're going to come out with another film after Kiss the Ground.

00:46:57.000 We have two more films coming out there.

00:46:59.000 And there's also another one on Bees.

00:47:01.000 So we'll have to talk more about that.

00:47:03.000 That's a new film that some of my friends, Josh and Rebecca, you may know they're the film producers of Kiss the Ground.

00:47:10.000 I do know them in that movie.

00:47:12.000 I cannot recommend it enough.

00:47:14.000 And that's what I tell people.

00:47:16.000 You have to look at one documentary that you want to have hope of.

00:47:20.000 On the issue of climate change and, you know, food and agriculture, if you want to look at a film where there is a very, very exciting solution that is cheap, that is easy, that provides, that nurtures communities of human dignity, of democracy, and it's all in that film, and it's a beautiful, beautiful film.

00:47:43.000 Kiss the ground.

00:47:43.000 Thank you so much for helping to make that, John.

00:47:46.000 Yeah, thanks.

00:47:46.000 It's on Netflix.

00:47:47.000 So, you know, we do what we can.

00:47:49.000 And I want to just say the American people owe, you know, gratitude to you for using your reputation, your family's history, To take on the pharmaceutical industry.

00:47:59.000 I know a lot of people say a lot of negative things about you, say a lot of bad things, but you and I understand we need to follow what we think is best for people and the planet.

00:48:10.000 And we're not going to listen to corrupt authoritarian figures tell us what we should say or not say.

00:48:16.000 And people don't like that.

00:48:17.000 I know some of you in your family doesn't like that.

00:48:20.000 You chose a path and I want to thank you for that.

00:48:24.000 John Rulak, it's been a pleasure talking to you.

00:48:26.000 Keep your eye out on those USAID consultants because you don't know who they're really working for or what they're up to.

00:48:34.000 Really good to have you.

00:48:35.000 I'm so happy what you're doing.

RFK Jr. The Defender - March 08, 2022

Kiss the Ground and Regenerative Agriculture with John Roulac

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