Farmer Spent $1M on USDA Compliance for $200K Meat Company: Polycropping & Regulatory Reality

Jason Mauck [00:00:00] Now they're farming one field. They're leaving a field bear because they have one fourth of the water pressure that they had 40 years ago. That's the mindset that we gotta have with poly cropping. I met a man named James Fates and he was a plant breeder in Hawaii and he was noticing the same thing that plants get defensive in the heat of the summer, in the heat of the afternoon. So he started putting up different ways to block the sun and he noticed that the crops wouldn't wilt as bad in the hours of two to six. Do you think,

Vance Crowe [00:00:32] You know, a farm is gonna be able to grow and be profitable by

Jason Mauck [00:00:35] Doing this sort of renaissance thing? He thinks they can be profit the other way around unless your grandpa has a shit ton of equity.

Vance Crowe [00:00:44] I'm Chris Haworth, a grain originator and accountant living in Pocahontas, Iowa, and you are listening to the Vance Crowe podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. Jason Mock returns longtime listeners of the podcast will know I've had Jason on a couple times the first time it was became very clear that he is a mad scientist farmer. He's a guy that is pushing the envelope on what can be done. And sometimes when you hear him talk, you think that's crazy. I do not believe that what you're saying about light and how plants grow is gonna work. But I have now had the chance to both visit his farm and visit the farms of people that Jason has influence. And I can tell you firsthand that what he's talking about is real. We're gonna get to that interview in just a moment. But first I have a request for listeners. I've been putting together these communications videos. They've been shorts on YouTube and we've started putting them out on Instagram and they're about how to communicate better, how to build better conversations, how to engage people that sometimes don't want to open up. And I had an idea that maybe we could get some situations from you, the listener, that can prompt me to come up with some better ways of explaining communications. So if you find yourself in a situation where you're struggling to communicate something to your mother or your dad or your spouse, or maybe you just want to get along better with the people you work with, send an email to stories at Legacy Interviews dot com and tell me a little bit about your challenge. If we can, we will put them on the YouTube reels as me trying as best I can to give you an answer about how to communicate more effectively.

Vance Crowe [00:02:22] And if you're interested in having me sit down with your loved one to record their life stories so that future generations can know their family history, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with Jason Mock. Jason, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having

Jason Mauck [00:02:40] Me over.

Vance Crowe [00:02:41] Yeah, man, glad you could make it. So you are well-known for all of your crazy farming things. And I can remember four years ago when we sat down, you talked about being trusting and putting ideas in people's hands and then you took a big jump at the world. You said, Hey, I want try and put together the meat production system that the world wants. Everybody knows that they need it, but it isn't there. You've done that, it didn't work. And I'm interested in hearing what you learned through that adventure.

Jason Mauck [00:03:15] Well, let's sum it up. Maybe people

Vance Crowe [00:03:19] Are a little less

Jason Mauck [00:03:22] Predictable as plants as far as arranging. Now I had a lot of really good folks and I'm, and I wish I could keep them engaged in something and they've moved on and I'd really try to, to give them opportunities. But to, to sum it up, you know, we, we, I thought we needed to have A-U-S-D-A. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:03:42] What were you building, first of all? What were you trying to build?

Jason Mauck [00:03:44] Okay, so during COVID, the store shelves were empty as far as meat. The price was through the roof. The price that the farmer was receiving for commodities was an all time low, especially with inflation and all that stuff. So we, we just called around some meat places to see if there's any opportunity in this. This older gentleman, I think he's about 68 years old, Raised his hand and said, yes, please come, come take over my business. I'm wanting to retire a company called Muncie Meets that had been there since 1957. They're right going into downtown Muncie. And basically a short story. He had worked there since high school. His, all his clients, he had, I don't know, 250, 300 restaurants that he served he portion control meat to. So we were able to purchase the company at a very low price. I didn't think it was a very risky venture, to be honest with you at the beginning. Come to find out, the treadmill went up in speed very quick.

Vance Crowe [00:04:55] Once

Jason Mauck [00:04:55] We figured out kind of the, how the game works with inspection and, and you know, every single nook and cran and corner of our facility was now really scrutinized as that guy was kind of grandfathered through and the new owners us kind of took over

Vance Crowe [00:05:15] With a different vision. So you took over and then all the rules and regulations that this guy had been able to use, whatever the older regulations were since it was being updated. Now all of a sudden everybody in a government bureaucracy is coming along being like, ah, but these are the new rules that you have to follow.

Jason Mauck [00:05:33] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:05:34] Like what?

Jason Mauck [00:05:35] Well, our first thing that we had to do was grind hamburger. 'cause we were getting all this steak and we had all this trimmings and the company that he had been giving the trim to, they had lost someone in their family and they were going outta business. So we could no longer get like 68 cents per pound for all this trim. So at the time the market for hamburger was $4 a pound and we're cutting up tons of ribeyes and sirloins and we've got this premium product that we can't do anything about. So we said, Hey, we want to grind this hamburger, what do we need to do? And it was, you know, A, B, C or D or all of these hoops, well come to find out a would take us two months and $200,000. Then once we figured that out, then we had B and it took like 15 months from when we bought the company when we could start grinding hamburger. And we spent over a million dollars on a company that I bought for less than $200,000. Like

Vance Crowe [00:06:34] What kinds of things were they asking you to do?

Jason Mauck [00:06:35] So first off every nook and cran and corner of the thing, if it wasn't covered with aluminum, we had a freezer that didn't go up to par. We just had to just one by one revise what we did. We had to, you know, figure out we had to go by this, this HASA plan to the tee. And a lot of things weren't there. I mean on and on and on. It, it was a challenge to just be able to, something that I thought would be simple and it was killing us. 'cause were

Vance Crowe [00:07:07] The regulations, did they make sense?

Jason Mauck [00:07:09] You know, it's for the greater safety of the public and I get that. But the, the problem wasn't so much I disagreed with any of that. It was the ability for them to give a rat's ass about my company. The inspector was an alcoholic. You could smell it as soon as he came in the room and there was just zero follow up or care, you know, we would get something and, and we would, I would call, you know, demanding a meeting and it might be six weeks. And again, I knew that there was multiple hoops and we're trying to, you know, sales are, are going up as restaurants are coming on board, but if you can't solve the entire riddle and you have a waste and part of that stream, it's hard to become whole and, and, and, and, and just kind of carrot it is put out in front of you. Like, if we can just solve this, then we'll be whole. But we just, you just can't go rogue when

Vance Crowe [00:08:10] You're, this is what people that aren't like property owners or aren't running a business don't see is that like basically every aspect of our economy is like this. I talk to people that are, you know, buying old dilapidated apartments and they're bringing them up and they're making them better and they're creating places for people to live. And the inspector just doesn't show up when he says he is going to, I'll be there between 10 and two and then like at four 30 when you've driven across town to do something else, he calls, Hey, I'm waiting for you. Yeah.

Jason Mauck [00:08:38] And

Vance Crowe [00:08:38] Like it doesn't cost him anything to miss a meeting to cause a problem to like, you know, not full, full of wood through with whatever they did. But they can ding you so hard that it can wreck you. Yeah. And like they're completely unaccountable.

Jason Mauck [00:08:52] Yes. To your point. It's not the same amount of rules we're scrutinized, but they can get away with. Yeah. Incompetence.

Vance Crowe [00:09:00] And so at what level was this? This is like state, this is USA,

Jason Mauck [00:09:04] This is A-U-S-D-A.

Vance Crowe [00:09:06] So you're dealing with the federal government.

Jason Mauck [00:09:07] Yes. And that, and that's the only way that anyone can create a brand. You know, my idea was to be a facilitator for other farms that wanted to create their brand, to have distribution across the United States. And you can't do that if you're state inspected. You have to stay in your little fishbowl.

Vance Crowe [00:09:25] And this is to clarify, if you are just gonna butcher meat and sell it in the state of Missouri, then you get a state inspector and they say, yes, we agree that you follow all the state rules, but if you travel over to Illinois and start selling that Missouri inspected me now somebody's gonna come arrest you 'cause you've broken the law.

Jason Mauck [00:09:44] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:09:44] And so then you have to get the USDA in order to be able to serve it throughout the country, but their bar for what you've gotta get past is higher.

Jason Mauck [00:09:54] Yeah. And the reality situation with COVID and everything else, small business continues to dwindle down. So our customer base, yeah, we could go to Bob's bar, but that wasn't a very big market. We needed to sell to the, to the Chili's and Applebee's and all that stuff through distributors, Cisco and all these people. So we kind of became the packager of the stakes that went into Indianapolis and beyond in Cincinnati, Louisville, you know, different cities. So you have to have that, that regulation.

Vance Crowe [00:10:24] Was the stakes that you were gonna be producing, were they different than the people that are selling to JBS or

Jason Mauck [00:10:31] Not at first? So at first we didn't have the, the facilities and the infrastructure, we had to buy box meat. But the whole reason I bought it to begin with is to empower the farmer. So we, we, we, we had a a, a processing facility in mine. We started working with him. That was local about 50 miles from my house in Fairmount, Indiana. We were working through get it USDA certified as well. Something that we thought think would take three months, took 18 months on that. So to fill that void and start butchering carcasses, I had a relationship with three or four different places that would kill and chill. So we would take cattle from farmers and this main farm, 10, 12, 15 per week at different places. They would harvest the animal, put it in these boxes, and then we would go get those boxes and bring it to Muncie Meats. And we were, we were, we, we had some capital during COVID to buy the, the, the packaging machines and stuff like that. But a lot of that got ate up by the USDA wanting us to renovate, you know, the back corner with aluminum wrapping with had nothing to do with our, you know, upping our capacity. So that gunpowder quickly was eroded. And you know, it, at the time I thought that this would all work out because we were constantly progressing, getting together with people, getting new things.

Jason Mauck [00:12:03] But it just seemed like it was never ending the anchor I was trying to drag as far as the timeline. And

Vance Crowe [00:12:11] What was your dream? What did you like if this would've fully gotten up to where you thought it could get, what would've changed about the world?

Jason Mauck [00:12:20] Man, the dream would be that if you live in Gaston, Indiana or rural Illinois and you drove by a farm, you could go to the local grocery store or go online and it was readily available to purchase meat from that farmer. Just more of a, not only transparency, but a actual, tangible product that was more local.

Vance Crowe [00:12:49] But I mean, that is like genuinely pushing back against gravity or something because like, because the centralized system, I mean their economies of scale are so massive while you're trying to get 12 steers brought to a production facility to kill them and then bring them over, they're, they're producing 12 steers a minute or something cra you know, like they, they, they're just, you know, truckload after truckload after truckload and like they, they have enough money built into their budgets to cover all the inspections and

Jason Mauck [00:13:20] They own the shelf space, you know, pretty much, I

Vance Crowe [00:13:23] Don't know about this. And that's, that's

Jason Mauck [00:13:24] Huge you mean? Yeah. So like, you know, all these bigger companies now, not only do they sell the, the, the farmer fertilizer, they own the slaughterhouse, but they also, you know, they're in the, the Walmarts of the world and all that stuff and they, they hold the, the whole power. So if, you know, one part of it doesn't work out, they can put the math in, you know, at the, at the end part of it.

Vance Crowe [00:13:53] When did it become clear to you that like, this is not gonna work?

Jason Mauck [00:13:58] Not really until I was basically outta spit. And when I started uncovering some sheets, there were some things I didn't know about, but kind of the thing that opened my eyes. We went on spring break down in North Padre Beach, Texas and went on the west coast and I was driving through southwestern Texas and there's a spot there where there's six railroad tracks that are parallel and the flies would hit your window, you would just have to turn on your wipers. 'cause these feedlots are just enormous. So you would pass by this huge packing company, you would see huge feedlots and there was just commerce going so quickly and of so much scale. And at that point, you know, we weren't, we still hadn't had a viable business. There was a few hurdles in front of us and I'm like, I cannot outra this machine. And, and you know, and part of the, the thought was with kind of the footprint with social media, maybe I could, that would help with the facilitating, I could collaborate in the pet food space and create value in the whole carcass riddle to make this work, to overcome that with the transparency and all that stuff. And we had the technology to, you know, to, to track each carcass and all that stuff. And it was working, but it just, you especially, you know, the thing that killed us more than anything was the inflation of everything and, and trying to do logistics on the road and pay for tires.

Jason Mauck [00:15:33] And the biggest racket was the refrigeration business. If, if your cooler went out, you know, you called one guy, there was no competition, and something that you think would cost a couple hundred bucks would be $7,000. And you've got, you know, 10 trucks on the road and you're just constantly just getting kicked in the nuts.

Vance Crowe [00:15:53] So you're like an incredibly optimistic, upbeat guy as you're starting to have the, the blows rain down on you and you come to the conclusion like, the blows aren't going to stop. How did this, how did you handle this?

Jason Mauck [00:16:10] Well, it was pretty tough for a while. Just a pride issue, honestly. I just kind of tried to shut up and just work and, and then eventually you kind of get through it and, and then you're like, you know, this wasn't my plan and you and you and you're fine with that. You know, and you know, I I, I don't like to give up. So that was hard giving up. 'cause you know, my dad was pretty hard on my, my sister one time she, she was playing sports and she's decided to be a manager on the sports team. Nothing wrong with that, but just the idea of quitting bothered me. It be, you know, I lost my father, so I felt like I was letting him down. I was letting the community town, but got over it. So, and I'm, I acquired skills that I didn't know that I had. I was very assertive in board meeting situations, getting together with companies much larger than me to get what I want. I would tell them exactly what I wanted no matter what. And, and really proved a lot of it people that I was worthy to get together with our company or, or our people to do that. So even though it didn't work out, I feel like I'm, I'm polished somewhat, I'm, I'm capable. So I don't have any big objectives right now, but, but I feel comfortable that once I, whatever it is next, I'm capable of, of doing something.

Vance Crowe [00:17:43] If you could take all the knowledge that you have now, but you were able to rewind the clock back to like the starting point,

Jason Mauck [00:17:49] Would

Vance Crowe [00:17:49] The outcome have been different?

Jason Mauck [00:17:55] Probably not.

Vance Crowe [00:17:56] So this is inevitable, you're saying

Jason Mauck [00:17:58] It's, there's a lot of dead roadkill on the side of the road in the meat company. You just outrun your headlights. And I, I, that was never the objective. My, my grandpa always said this said a a dog that shit's fast doesn't shit long. There's a lot of truth to that. 'cause if, if, you know, there, there's, there's two things to it. You lose your authenticity when you scale. The market is only so big that will appreciate something. And then once you outrun your headlights and you lose that, now you're playing ball with the big boys and you can't play that game. So I think, I think a lot of people take that, take that pill and it's not a good outcome.

Vance Crowe [00:18:45] Yeah, I mean I think the amount of time it takes information to spread for people to like really buy into what you're doing is so much longer than you imagine. And it's probably harder if you start off with a group of people cheering for you and you're like, look, all these people get it. The, the, the circle outside of those people, they're just right behind them. All they gotta do is hear about it and they're gonna get on board. But in my experience, you know, doing the Legacy Interviews business, when I first started I thought like, look at all these people telling me, yes, it's awesome. They love it. Well just outside of that circle, there's no cheering, there's nobody that cares at all about what you're doing and they don't even have time to learn about what you're doing. So like, my imagination always ran, ran wild thinking that it would be,

Jason Mauck [00:19:30] You hit the nail on the head, you have this group of friends and it doesn't matter what it is, is whether you're trying to exude some new idea or business or some group that believes in something, it's kind of the same group of people get together until they kind of get burned out about yelling to the same pe you know, preaching to the choir. And in, in the smaller town you have your cheerleaders and then you almost have the opposite where there's, I don't know if it's jealousy or what, but I, I think there's an underlying thing where people maybe don't want to see it take off. So they're gonna, they're just gonna say there's a thing in the symptoms Simpsons, where it's like, let's not listen.

Vance Crowe [00:20:12] That's, I mean, I think like I can relate to the people that don't want to see somebody succeed because there's sometimes when you're looking out at the world and you're being like, well that guy success, how does he get to be successful? And I've now like taken on the meditation, if I ever find myself rooting against somebody, then you're like, whoa, what's going on with me? Like, what's my failure? But I think it's, it's a natural human reaction to see somebody doing something different that's difficult. That is like reaching for, for something that doesn't exist right now for you to be like, no, I can't be done. And the reason it can't be done is 'cause I know better. And it's like this weird part of human psychology. And I think you're right, it exists. There's no way you're gonna get away from having not, they're not even always haters. Sometimes there are people that are really close to you that are like, I couldn't do that. I couldn't imagine a way that I could do that. So I'm going to assume

Jason Mauck [00:21:09] Yes

Vance Crowe [00:21:10] For your sake that you can't do it.

Jason Mauck [00:21:11] And I don't want to tell anybody that they can't be successful in the me company, but you're, you're not gonna take on and take on the, the big machine.

Vance Crowe [00:21:23] It just, it, it certainly has to be some way where you are not turning what you're doing into a commodity. 'cause as soon as you get into the commodity game, now you are playing for what is the lowest amount of, of waste we can have. What is the, you know, we, we, because it's going to take the margins all the way down to as close to zero as possible because everybody's gonna compete. So you have to be something that's not a commodity, but like to get up to scale where you can make money. Like it's hard to make money as a craftsman.

Jason Mauck [00:21:53] And then it comes down to a gill's game, if you will, like a pearl diver. If, you know, the inflated price was so high, Cargill made hundreds of billions of dollars that they had enough retained earnings that they could literally go to the bottom of the ocean, let things go down as they have control of that, and just let people die. You know? And that's, that's a big luxury that you have when you're that big.

Vance Crowe [00:22:20] Yeah. People often ascribe, you know, if you watch on ag Twitter, particularly the cattle markets, like they ascribe a lot of mal intent by the meat companies. Right. Do you think that the people running these meat companies have mal mal-intent? Or are they just, is there something else going on there?

Jason Mauck [00:22:42] I, I don't know. I don't know. I just think that there's, just there, the naiveness that I had three or four or five years ago was I thought I would find these people and there are people out there that want to push a better way, but a lot of these people are just screwing a corpse for money and it's all about profit motive. So that's about all I can say about that.

Vance Crowe [00:23:17] Yeah. You, you mentioned inflation, right? So things got more expensive. You've seen that firsthand. Where do you think the world of meat goes? Do the, does the price of meat just keep going up in, in our inflated world?

Jason Mauck [00:23:30] I, I think so, yeah. You know, I, I know that the, the, I don't know who the powers would be of the deep blue state is, but you know, if you have your seed, your semen, your, your your things, you know, a farmer, you can kind of control your circle around you. But, but the, the bigger picture is all those are all those prices like for me are gonna go up and a lot of things like that, you know, it's, it's a lot cheaper to, to make it, to, to fry some, some corn and, and produce Cheetos that it is to make a pound of, of steak.

Vance Crowe [00:24:10] No doubt about that. So let's talk about the current food system. What, what's your take on it? I mean, I know you spend a lot of time railing against it. You're also, you know, a participant in it. What do you first of all tell people that don't know you very well? How, how do you make money now? What is your role?

Jason Mauck [00:24:29] So I, I farm, we farm about 3,100 acres between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne and Indiana. My, my grandpa's dad moved to my house in 1940, so we're relatively new as far as the generational, I don't know what that makes me. But we, we farm corn, soybeans, wheat, we've got a bunch of pigs that we raise for Tyson. So we've kind of got a unique farm that we own a lot of the ground. Grandpa, I'm so privileged that he was all about making our farm debt free before he passed. So we own quite a bit of ground. We have manure for fertilizer. And myself, I grew up with an imaginary friend in my belly button named Poy. And I've always relied on him when I was little and maybe social media is my new Poe po but I, I think everything has a mind, including my pets, my plants, everything is thinking, it's perceiving its environment. So when I was really young, I, I would steal seeds out of the grain bin and I had like 50 fields throughout where I live today. I would plant a little piece of corn here and I'd take some cat shit right next to it and I'd grow plants. And you know, when I was going through school and graduating high school and going into college, my, my mom, you know, I did pretty well in school and tests and stuff like that.

Jason Mauck [00:26:01] And she's like, there's just no money in farming. You've got to do something else. As we were our family, our family farm is fine, you know, we were gaining wealth, but the commodities beans were like $4 a bushel. Corn was a dollar something, you know, this is like the mid nineties and

Vance Crowe [00:26:19] You were raising hogs, right? So the price could drop right

Jason Mauck [00:26:21] Outta those. Well we had our own hogs at that time and talk about the gill mentality. Pork went down to less than a dime. So all private pork pretty much died at that point. And my dad was a board member of the local feed mill. He was interested in these new pig barns that were being built. So we were one of the first farms in the state really to build a confined feeding operation for our farm. He wanted the manure, we built a big investment at the local feed mill to feed pigs. And that grew, we were feeding like a quarter million pigs outta the feed mill. So we've got 12,000 hogs and, and that's just kind of what started that. I don't know where I was going.

Vance Crowe [00:27:07] So we're talking about the food system?

Jason Mauck [00:27:09] Yes. And, and so, so I'm different. I am, you know, after I went to school, I got a marketing degree, I sold things. I got to meet all the matadors that were awesome at sales. I didn't like to lie to people, I didn't like to create some need to buy right now. I thought it was total bullshit. So I started knocking on doors of past customers and that pissed off all the sales guys 'cause I was selling their guys, but they weren't seeing these customers. And they got mad. The owner of the company loved me. He was paying all this commission and I'm like, I'm not dealing with this shit. I'm gonna start my own business. 'cause I learned how to get people on paper. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:27:55] We talked about this. Then you did landscaping and then you found,

Jason Mauck [00:27:58] So I didn't wanna have a suit and tie. So then I just went out and I started, I I built a half million dollar landscape business in two years. And my thing was I would go to a place and I would like pull a weed outta their place. I'm like, who's taking care of your place? And you know, it was really easy to, to get ink on paper in the landscape business. I had a, a college air ball state. I played basketball and recruit athletes that could run a weed eater when it was hot. And we just had like a dream team of landscaping and that was going well. I go on vacation all the time and then my dad got cancer. So just at the thing, I went from kinda living kind of a playboy life in my twenties where there's tons of cash flow, good team to dragging dead pigs out of the hog barn every morning. So that was my morning. I went from like talking to rich guys about their bass bow and what they were gonna do and, and, and I had all these customers too, waking up in the morning. We had, at the time we had like 8,000 hogs and I was walking through the barns of the feed bell and there would always be 3, 4, 5, 6 15 pigs that, especially during heatwaves that I'd have to drag up and take to the compost bin. So it was just like, and then my dad just had passed so my life just went dark and it sucked. I had some, you know, from, from landscaping, like I smoked weed to, that was just what you did, you know, in the mornings to get things ready to where it went to like a dark place.

Jason Mauck [00:29:37] Like my girlfriend didn't like it. So I was getting like the K nine shift from the gas stations and that stuff would mess you up. And I'm dragging out dead pigs. I'm in a toxic relationship and the best thing that ever happened was I, we had a party and she was cheating on me upstairs. And it came to, I became aware of it. I was in a hot tub and, and it was like this bad, bad thing, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. And, and honestly the turbulence and shit that all happened right then is what soothed me going through the shit of the meat company. Because I knew at that point if that wouldn't have happened, I would've never cleaned myself up. Met became a human being worthy of meeting my wife because there was like a gray area. There were six months where I hadn't improved as a person and I intersected some people that were better than me and I just stopped it because I'm like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna waste their time 'cause I'm not worthy. So I, I don't know, like I look at that as very important in my life. So I met my wife, she's an amazing human being. You've met her,

Vance Crowe [00:31:02] She's awesome.

Jason Mauck [00:31:03] We have two fantastic kids that are great and incredible. So life is fantastic. So any venture that I have that might be a little bit audacious, I know that I get to come home to, you know, heaven.

Vance Crowe [00:31:20] Yeah. And so you talked about the things that cause you to change, right? It's like hitting this kind of rock bottom or having this, do you think people can change when they don't hit rock bottom? Do you have to have some cataclysm?

Jason Mauck [00:31:37] I don't know. I think, I think you can, I don't know the reason to. Maybe you intersect someone's that you're hung hungover that morning and there, which goes back to there's, I think there's gotta be something that you don't like that you have to change like it. But you know, I was telling them before, they're like, what do you eat for breakfast? I'm like, nothing. I like, I like the pain of, I, I do intermittent fasting now. I like the hunger. You know, it, it, it makes you sharp. I like being sober and hungry. You know, you never think better than when you don't really don't have anything to lose. So, you know, it really does make people soft when they've got plenty in their banking account. Some friends that do good times and not much reason to change then,

Vance Crowe [00:32:32] So you've got two boys. And I think when you have kids you start looking around to be like, what am I gonna feed my kids? What is the right way to do things? You're a part of the food system, you're feeding kids. What do you think of the, the food that's available to them?

Jason Mauck [00:32:48] I think 99% of it's terrible for them. And I don't mean to make anyone upset, but when I'm tired of holidays, I'm tired of all these reasons to buy gords of shit for my, for my kids myself. I hate having it around. But when I drive, I travel a lot and speak and I drive and is no options. And that was the reason why I bought Muncy Meats is because if I go to the gas station I can get funs, I can get maybe some salami or something like that. But I was very proud that we were distributing fresh cut meat to all these places that that was not an option for.

Vance Crowe [00:33:34] Yeah, it

Jason Mauck [00:33:35] Is biggest.

Vance Crowe [00:33:36] That's obstacles. That's where I encounter the, like what is the food system that everybody's exposed to? Like, 'cause in my house, like we know what we buy at the grocery store, we, you know, we stay out of the middle of it for the most part. But then when I would travel all the time, you'd be like, literally there's nothing here to eat. Like I can drink water, I could have beef jerky and that's about as good as you can do, right? Yeah. Like if you ever buy a piece of fruit from a grocery store or from a, from like a, you know, rest stop, it's terrible. Like you don't want it. Why is the system this way? Nobody wants that.

Jason Mauck [00:34:11] It's all about distribution and profit. You know, would they pick strawberries? Have you ever noticed you get a package of strawberries if you don't eat 'em that day, they're just shit the next day. I mean everything is picked before everything is, you know, they call it inside the box and the pig industry where they want pigs at 290 pounds. So it just fits in the robot. Like everything has to fit in the little thing so we can scale it and be efficient and competitive and there's just no room for the nuance. And quite frankly, as we've just become accustomed to the taste of, of seed oils of salt, you know, a lot of people like they, they give grass fed beef a bad name because it just doesn't have the fat. Well like why? And I am very rare there. I don't really look forward to eating so much. I don't like, you know, I like grandma's home cooking, I like that kind of stuff. But you know, we've just been so competitive in the food space that we're kind of in this world of okay, who can make it the biggest whopper and most things of bacon or most spices on the Cheetos. It's just always what's new, what's what's gonna to, it's where we're at.

Vance Crowe [00:35:37] Yeah, I think there's a reason why every religion has dietary restrictions. And I think that like if you go back and look at like either cultural, like this is the way we eat culturally or this is the way we eat religiously. You may not agree with the religion or the culture, but there's often a lot of wisdom in it. And like the, one of the most amazing ones is when you start finding out about like blood glucose for example, right? So if I eat something sweet for lunch today, an hour and a half later I'm and a half trouble staying awake. And this is something that like I've had to come to the conclusion like, I may not be clinically diabetic, but something weird is going on with my blood glucose. Well you go and you find out, well there are a lot of cultures where they have you eat like a really small salad, what's on that salad? Oil and vinegar. What turns out vinegar levels out blood glucose. So one of the reasons that people were doing these little salads before you'd eat was so that that way you would ingest some vinegar and then if you ended up taking on some carbohydrates, your blood sugar wouldn't spike and you wouldn't have this like, I'm, I'm falling asleep in the middle of the day thing. Oh.

Jason Mauck [00:36:49] And I

Vance Crowe [00:36:49] Think that there's all sorts of religious and cultural traditions that we pushed aside. I I had one time this guy on that ran a country club, but he started out as a chef and then he worked his way up to being like a really high end chef and he was the first person I'd ever heard say, I hate fusion cuisine. Fusion cuisine is destroying everything because you're like taking the best of these different types of foods, but you're forgetting why did they build the food the way that they did? Why did they have the appetizer course the way that they did and the main course the way that they did. And he is like all that knowledge that was hidden within the food system that we just did. We didn't always know why we were doing it. Ended up having all these positive benefits for us, but we threw it out in favor of new, quick, cool, fashionable.

Jason Mauck [00:37:41] A lot of truth to that. We've, we've just divided almost everything now and everything's taken outta context. Whether you're talking in ppol political realms to, you know, I am so glad we had a primary in Indiana, I'm kind of changing subjects here, but I'm just get so sick of how people can cut and paste things to make their point and it's just making us dumber by, by the day it seems like.

Vance Crowe [00:38:09] So a couple of weeks ago I saw our joint friend Zach Smith, one of the greatest guys out there, an exceptional farmer, really very innovative guy. He posted a video of, of the water coming out of his, you know, is pattern tiling. And now I was not making a comment towards Zach, if I have a problem with something Zach's doing, I'll just call him and tell him, yeah but I don't have a problem with what Zach's doing. I just made the observation, look how much water is coming out of these drain tiles in, in the United States. So for people that aren't in agriculture, it became very, very popular for people to farmers to go through their fields and put in this drainage tile that made it so the water that was sitting at the top of the, of either on the soil or ponding would go down to the drain tile and flow out. So you could get into your field maybe two weeks early. So that meant you got, you know, 14 more days of sunshine, which meant your crop could be much, much bigger and you could even drain out, you know, ponding. Well I made the observation that done on any one individual field, no big deal done across the continental United States, you are literally changing the watershed. And people

Jason Mauck [00:39:24] Went flipping

Vance Crowe [00:39:25] Ballistic on me, you know, saying like, you don't know anything. We were stopping all this erosion. I think there's probably good cases for this, right? There's positives to it, but you can't tell me that there's not major drawbacks to draining the entire continental United States early and way faster than it's ever been done before.

Jason Mauck [00:39:44] Yeah. So I'm gonna touch on this, I'll get to it here in just 30 seconds. But let's say we had four minutes last time we were at your place, I asked, you asked you, you were doing juujitsu and I said, how would you kill me right now? And what'd you tell me?

Vance Crowe [00:40:06] I probably try and take your back and how

Jason Mauck [00:40:08] Long it take?

Vance Crowe [00:40:09] Probably about four minutes.

Jason Mauck [00:40:10] So what is the most important thing in existence in that to kill me? We gotta cut off air, right? So besides air plants need light, they need water. Water is our big factor. So the problem is, is we have scaled everything to dummy it down to grow one freaking crop. So as soon as the crops are off, guys are getting in their 700 horsepower tractor, they're disc ripping to get the ground black to warm it up. They put the pattern tile in. Grandpa put it in 80 feet, we're gonna put it in 40 feet, we need to split the forties and put it in twenties 'cause we gotta warm the ground up and we gotta get the water out and then we can plant our corn and Dave hula, he grows 600 bushel corn. If we do that, we can get close to Dave Hula. The problem is, is we're so unconnected to what is happening in nature to the water, to what grows when we don't touch it. You got the trees and the grass and the cornal shrubs and all this stuff. When it rains then everything will grow at the same time. Look at the understory of a forest when it's trying to photosynthesize and depending on gdu late April, the understory is gonna beat it to photosynthesis about three weeks because it knows that that top canopy will win.

Jason Mauck [00:41:50] So it needs to get its photosynthesis going ahead. It's just all perception, everything's perception. So the problem isn't so much the drain tile in itself as if we're just looking at growing corn and beans. So we've murdered sunflowers and oats and all these crops that used to make sense when the farm had livestock. You know, they had the pasture, they, they plowed under the clover, they had the oats for the horses. They had 10, 15 different crops, five or six different livestock out there to make it work. We've just eradicated it all to grow as much corn as possible because industries like we can grind the corn up and turn it into this and this and this and this. Everything's just a bulk industrial bulk commodities. So the Idiocracy isn't in the lack of nuance in drain tile is it's bad or good. It, there are things that are good. A if I want to grow a cereal out there and I get a bunch of precipitation in the winter, I can keep the cover crop growing in the field. So I don't have ponding. So it just lowers the water table in itself. But the idea of relying on horsepower, which requires a lot of weight, which creates its own compaction to disc grip to have a dead soul with nothing growing it. So we don't have any roots to actually take off compaction.

Jason Mauck [00:43:23] We're just constantly itching poison ivy to maximize one crop, which in itself is the most special needs way of, of managing an acre of land because it only photosynthesizes. I mean I drove here from Indiana and I got in southern Illinois, nothing growing because it's been too wet there. One's out there trying to dis mud right now getting their crop in. You know, there's tons of crops that could be planted in the fall and they can grow in unison with the summer crop and their, their, the photosynthesis and all that stuff can be nonstop. So when it rains a bunch, yes it's good to have some tile out there, but it needs to have layers, it needs to have crops that are always growing.

Vance Crowe [00:44:11] Yeah. If I were gonna restate for somebody that doesn't, you know, isn't really acquainted with agriculture, what you're saying is, look the, we used to have all kinds of things that a farmer would grow on their fields. They wouldn't just say all 200 acres that I'm farming are gonna be straight corn. And instead he had to raise something for his horses because he was gonna have to pull a wagon behind it and he was gonna have to, you know, keep other grains out there because presumably there wasn't a market just for corn. And now what we're doing is we're maximizing for just corn, which means that all of the equipment people are buying the structure from the way that they're even going over their fields is just focused on this one thing. And not only is that, you know, not in tune with nature, but it also is not progressing agriculture forward in some important way.

Jason Mauck [00:45:06] Yes. But it became, it, it makes us reliant on industry to supply us with everything. You know, you had to grow clover because that was a legume that would create nitrogen for corn. But after the war we had all this, these STAs. So what are we gonna, what are we gonna do with all this stuff? So a lot of these things that were invented in wars, we, we use those resources

Vance Crowe [00:45:30] Like to Haber Boash. So now people can go over the field and spray liquid nitrogen on their fields because we now have a way to do that. And the ag companies would say, look, the invention of liquid nitrogen is what empowered us to have billions and billions of people because we're able to do this at a scale that if you're trying to do it with just clover, you may not be able to get enough nitrogen on there.

Jason Mauck [00:45:51] Yes. So the way, so, so to back up a little bit again, I was pretty studious. I got a marketing degree and I don't watch TV so much for the program. I watch it for the commercials and their motive. And I've just noticed that bigger people drive really small cars, short people have lifts on their trucks. America has created all of these holidays and everything to corral people to create scarcity, you know, watch the day after Thanksgiving and people just fist fighting for the Nintendo. We've become so materialistic and corral people that we create price elasticity or that's not the right word, but they, we elevate price. But what happens July 5th to fireworks?

Vance Crowe [00:46:47] Yeah, they go the price drops.

Jason Mauck [00:46:48] So they were at 400% profit margin and then they're 80% off hell of a deal. Christmas wrapping paper. So what has happened in agriculture is we're all grown corn. We have, we have, I watched, what was great was there was some corn planted, you could tell in April and they were full of pig weed. 'cause the soil is so heavy with nitrogen on the top that noxious weeds like pigweed want to eat that potash and nitrogen. So it's just carpets of weeds. And the farmer has to use some manifested chemical to not kill her corn but kill all of these weeds. They have to buy nitrogen because they no longer have any crop rotation and and they can grow it in their own form. They don't have any livestock. So they don't have any manure. So it's like when COVID happened, it was great if you ate Cheetos, you were a hundred pounds overweight, you were gonna go to the hospital, get on a respirator and cha-ching money. But they weren't getting the guy that could do a hundred pushups. That was, you know, healthy 'cause he's fine. He has his own microbiome going on. So why I mentioned the marketing degree is I look at plants the same way that marketers look at the general population. And when I plant wheat and strips at one eighth, the seeding population, I know that the plant will perceive it like I'm selling water to someone that is thirsty much differently than some guy that's drowning.

Jason Mauck [00:48:26] But the industry wants everyone to stay drowning and be dependent. And if you think holistically and think through more of curves, you know that plants will adapt and perceive their environment. And now that we can use different plants, we can start layering the photosynthesis. I know that when the plants,

Vance Crowe [00:48:45] Let me stop you 'cause I wanna, I wanna like try and keep help. Sure. Make sure people are keeping up. Yes. So in a traditional farm, people go and they put a 24, you know, row planter, they take the tractor down and they plant rows of corn all the way down and then they turn around right next to it they plant rows of corn.

Jason Mauck [00:49:03] And we do that too. We've got a 36 row planter.

Vance Crowe [00:49:05] 36 row. So

Jason Mauck [00:49:06] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:49:07] So, but you have started to, I think there were other people doing it even before you, but you've, you've pioneered in the relay cropping system. Yes. Which is to say in between, instead of planting the rows of corn, just, you know, 16 inches apart, we're gonna plant them even further apart. But in and in between those rows, we're gonna plant things that can now have a synergistic relationship with our corn. Yes. So it is wheat in between your corn, what's going on in between your corn? I

Jason Mauck [00:49:34] Don't do a lot with corn per se. Now Zach Smith, the stock cropper is inter grazing, which is instead of putting another cash crop in there, he's putting animals and they're moving and eating pasture to prime the nutrients for the next year's corn crop. So that's kind of its own rotation and diversity. What I do primarily is we plant wheat because our soybeans, when we were talking about pattern tile, they really like their feet to be dry, especially in the early part of their life cycle. So it's v it's very hard to avoid heavy rain in the spring. So the, the beans don't grow very well, they turn yellow. So I had a lot of pain when my dad died and in my first crop, 2011, we had a just full out monsoon. We had like 15 inches of rain in the month of April and then May was wet. And I kept trying to plant in the mud. Our crops were terrible. The next year was a drought, 13 was wet, 14 was wet, 15 was epic wet, like 50 inches of rain. So I experienced a bunch of paint from either too much rain or too little rain. So I looked at wheat as a landscaper as a way that I could control canopy. My grandpa farming saw weeds or wheat or anything other than what he wanted to grow as a threat. Where when I was a landscaper and I do a design, I have 20 plants, I thought about their shapes and sizes when they bloom and all this stuff.

Jason Mauck [00:51:14] So I started experimenting with wheat and soybeans because they came out with a soybean that you could spray herbicide, the same herbicide that I would use on grass. So the wheat control was very easy. I was familiar with canopy. But what I learned after a couple years of experimenting with wheat and soybeans was every plant. And I knew that from being a landscaper and growing up getting seeds, the plants had mines, but I didn't really understand. I didn't, it wasn't 150% mine, it was 1500% of a mine. So I would do experiments, like I dug a corn plant out when my kids were little and we made a corn plant put 31 years on it because that plant, it's fractal in nature and each leaf has the opportunity to either, you either put it in a field with 40 other thousand plants and it has to grow really high to just get a glimpse of sunshine in the field. Or if you put it out on its own, all 28 leaves can accept light and the more light that it perceives early, it says I can cons, I can support another plant. So it'll have a thing called a tiller come out. So identical plant comes out. So you might have two and every plant comes out and then if the ear comes out and it can perceive light, then leaves grow on the ear. So it's this mathematics of like Warren Buffet, you know, he's got gazillions of dollars because he had $50,000 when he was 16 and he continued to invest it.

Jason Mauck [00:52:54] That's the way plants work. So when we're in a one crop annual thing, the flywheel, the, the industry all works on just minions. They want a lot of plants out there, all dependent on industry to feed it. Where if you can have something like wheat and only put nitrogen underneath the wheat and allow each plant that comes up to perceive light, then it will grow in the shape of Phi. The Fibonacci, everything is designed our fingers, knees, and toes, our weather systems, everything is designed, not linearly, but in the shape of phi. So the, the plants grow outward like a day. Lily bush, that shape in itself is not rectangular. If it was a rectangular and I had light, the edges would block the light. But since it's round and I split them out just wide enough, now the light isn't intercepted by the wheat, it can get down to the soybean. And what I figured out is I can only have so much yield or draw down of the water to when it starts affecting variable B. So I started jacking with spacing how fat, this is density distance between the soybean and the wheat to where I found a relationship where if I was about nine inches off the wheat, that if I got a shit ton of rain, it was kind of the gills for the soybeans to breathe.

Jason Mauck [00:54:29] And if I have a plant here with a lifecycle that starts in the fall, grows a lot in March, April and May, then it has no competition with this other crop because it grows in June, July and August. So you can have different life cycles and there's nothing against the whole regenerative farm movement whatsoever. But if I have a lot of cover crops out, I've got to kill the cover crop. So I've got to get Roundup and that's another expense. I'm, I'm planting a crop that has zero revenue, I have to kill the crop and then I have to delay my cash crop. And then the cover crop may be great if it rains a bunch this year, but if it rains below normal, then my cover crop drink all my water. So now my cash crop goes down. And that's just the reality of the situation. So if we can look at it like a marketer and say, we're gonna look at the slope curve of this crop and instead of doing exactly like wheat pea or fill need 'em, these wheat gurus that want you to plant this many seeds and have a perfect linear sun capture and then it dies. And then we might go out and plant beans in July, then they might make like 30% what regular beans is, but it takes five times as much seed. We're going to take the slope curve of this crop, we're gonna let each plant yield a maximum amount, but I'm not gonna write as much of a check for my nitrogen or my seed.

Jason Mauck [00:56:00] And now I can start using proxy. I know that there, that there's no way that weeds will grow in this space. So why would I spray herbicide on the whole field when I could just spray herbicide on 30% of the field? And it's just the beginning, it's the easiest thing that there is. But things like that help inspire people like Zach Smith who had a similar mind as myself and his friends to do things like inner grazing. And that's where we need to go is to tune in to the minds of the plants themselves and layer things whether we're grazing, you're, we're just in time applying manure and get out of this one thing, you know, why don't you just do this and be done with it because you're competing. Well, so, and everything's competing.

Vance Crowe [00:56:54] It, it's interesting, like I I can tell your enthusiasm, you know, your, your audio levels are off the charts here. This is great. But one of the reasons that people plant all corn is it's really valuable. Right? And and like it's a little bit like the, the parents that say I'm gonna get my kid in basketball camp and then he is gonna get done, he is gonna do regular basketball and then he is gonna do traveling basketball and then we're gonna do more basketball camps. Yeah.

Jason Mauck [00:57:23] Because

Vance Crowe [00:57:23] We want that kid to be hyper specific in basketball. And for a kid that is doing a bunch of different sports, none of them all that hardcore, it's very difficult for that kid to keep up, right? That, that one, if you just put this kid in all basketball for his whole career, like it's easier to raise a kid like that than it is to give a kid some experience with track, some with high, some with basketball and still give him the skills to be a successful athlete, to be able to, to be a, be an income earning athlete because instead of being a specialist. He was a renaissance man. Do you think, you know, a farm is gonna be able to grow and be profitable by doing this sort of that things they'd be like, you won't

Jason Mauck [00:58:15] Be profitable the other way around. Unless your grandpa has a shit ton of equity, which I'm fortunate to have. We own a lot of ground so we can make money. If I was a new farmer right now and I was the best corn farmer known to man, but I put those same amount of nitrogen, same amount of seeds, that whole farming cash rent is a, a break even profit proposition at best. And you have to back up to grandpa's equity or some kind of manure that you can feed something or the market is always gonna fluctuate.

Vance Crowe [00:58:53] Yeah. And like we talked, if you're in a commodity, it's gonna bring you all the way down to making as little money right as possible.

Jason Mauck [00:58:58] So the idea that that if my kid doesn't play travel ball and all this and does nothing but that one sport, maybe he can be in the NBA one day. That's how the industry works, is guys like Dave Hula. I love Dave Hula. Nice guy, really good. But it's the dream that this one year that we put corn out, it's gonna rain a quarter inch every two days and we're gonna raise 450 bushel corn and maybe them guys in Nebraska will burn up and corn will go up a dollar and we're gonna make all this money. That's the carrot. And that's because we're so indoctrinated in what we do and we have such a hard on when we buy this new John Deere equipment that can go another mile an hour faster, it's 10 foot wider. I'm up here, it's cool, but we're not getting anywhere.

Vance Crowe [00:59:51] This is the first time in all the years I've known you, I've ever heard you make this pitch for, hey young guy, if you wanna figure out how to play in this game, this is the roadmap for you to use your mind to make your crops better as opposed to trying to play the margin game better. Because the margin game, the strategy that they're being taught is go be a better neighbor to all your neighbors so that maybe he'll lease your ground to you instead of somebody else. But I've never heard, maybe you've been saying, and I just wasn't listening, but this is very appealing to me. 'cause I know a lot of people that want to, to get into farming and the idea of like, Hey, if you could be the guy that figures out in this area, what's the sun doing? You know, what's its tr You know, how's it tracking across the field? What crops can we plant here? And if you can come up with a better way now you're able to create margin on those two crops in a way that you'll never be able to do if you were doing the traditional corn, corn, corn, corn

Jason Mauck [01:00:54] Power is in the elimination.

Vance Crowe [01:00:55] Okay?

Jason Mauck [01:00:56] It's in eliminating so much of this, this, and this, and still arriving at a similar revenue standpoint. That's everything.

Vance Crowe [01:01:06] So you and I, a few years ago when we were first talking, these concepts of light and curves meant nothing to me. But I have since become obsessed with planting trees. And the crazy thing about planting trees is you get to watch in slow motion what's going on. Like I didn't realize that a tree trunk will twist in order to be able to expose the branches and, and it will do all kinds of things. But

Jason Mauck [01:01:32] 137 degree angles, the, the golden angle.

Vance Crowe [01:01:37] Tell me more.

Jason Mauck [01:01:38] Yeah, all your trees, if you don't know where you are, the boy scout says find the moss. That's the north side. You can also find the Fibonacci because it's gonna strive towards the south side. If you cut it down, it's gonna fall on that side.

Vance Crowe [01:01:51] It, one of the cool things that Kate Crosby has taught me is that for the most part, plants really only grow when they're being exposed to the infrared side of the light spectrum, which is the much slower part of it. And that as the sun becomes more direct, as it tracks, you know, higher and higher in the sky, most plants actually have to put on defense mechanisms and shut down. They aren't producing, you think like, oh, it's the, it's the middle of it's noon and July 15th that that corn plant has just absolutely gotta love that it's getting beaten down with sun. But the reality is it's growing mostly in the ear in the early morning hours and then it gets some growth in the afternoon that changed the way.

Jason Mauck [01:02:36] So that's one thing you notice as a landscaper when you're trimming the bushes, all your light green stuff is happening up until, you know, July in that more favorable growing condition. But to your point there, that's the mindset that we gotta have with poly cropping. I met a man named James Bates, and he was a plant breeder in Hawaii and he was noticing the same thing that plants get defensive in the heat of the summer, in the heat of the afternoon. So he started putting up different ways to block the sun and he noticed that the crops wouldn't wilt as bad in the hours of two to six. And he also understood the plasticity of plants. So what he started doing was planting little groups of corn that would do what I talked about earlier. They would perceive the extra light, have multiple ears, milk the elasticity of the curve, and use them to block the sun's direct sunlight. As the sun changes positions through the day, the shadow changes on the ground floor. So you could have an understory of another crop that could provide nitrogen to the corn. You could milk the curve on this side and have a complimentary relationship with the corn and the beans or whatever it is.

Vance Crowe [01:03:51] Well, and this is the, the, the craziest thing I've ever seen when I like was shocked into understanding what you are talking about is when I went to see Zach Smith's field day. And so like you were already describing, you know, he plants rows of corn and then in between he's got pasture. And then in that pasture he runs this thing called the stock cropper, where he is got goats in the front, then pigs and then sheep and chickens in the back. And it just moves throughout the day. So the goats eat the first thing that, you know, pigs eat next and then it's right in between these rows of corn. But when you go look at the rows of corn, the ones on the outside are significantly taller. No,

Jason Mauck [01:04:31] The other one than

Vance Crowe [01:04:31] The ones on the, well, I mean, whatever your

Jason Mauck [01:04:34] Perspective is, the ones at the center are competing for light. So they're gonna grow up high. The and ones on the end are pacified. So they're gonna grow outward to collect light. So all you watch

Vance Crowe [01:04:46] This arch, so

Jason Mauck [01:04:47] It doesn't matter if it's two rows, four rows, eight rows, it's going to create an arch and the the more narrow or less rows of corn, the more steep the elasticity or plant yield of the corn will be. So I can raise 500 bushel corn if it's only an outside row because all of the leaves that come out are plugged into the wall, if you will. So it's more energy. It's like taking a Chevy Chevette that weighs a thousand pounds that you have a little rice burning three cylinder engine in and putting a V eight in there and it'll go zero

Vance Crowe [01:05:22] To

Jason Mauck [01:05:22] 60 like that. I go, what the hell's in this tte? Same thing with plants.

Vance Crowe [01:05:28] What's your vision on this? Like if, if, if this caught fire, if people were like, all right,

Jason Mauck [01:05:33] It's just a matter of time.

Vance Crowe [01:05:34] You think it's a matter of

Jason Mauck [01:05:35] Yeah, the the problem is is our shit is so big. We have X nines, we have such a hard on about horsepower and it is fun, but you're trying to grow plants so you don't need something that weighs a hundred thousand pounds to get across things. The problem is, is no one lives in rural America anymore. There's no labor. So you have to be this amazing person that can get, you know, farm 5,000 acres by yourself. It's just the reality of the situation. But what is coming to agriculture?

Vance Crowe [01:06:04] Oh, robotics and ai.

Jason Mauck [01:06:06] Robotics and automation. Yeah. So if I have that, that's where we need to revise things. If now this is an option, it is again not very smart or a good use of technology to have a robot pull a field pollinator, you know, that robot could be harvesting one crop that's different than this to try to figure out how to do big is difficult because now I have to raise it up high or change the rows or something like that. Small makes everything easier to pull off.

Vance Crowe [01:06:40] That's wild to imagine. And a totally innovative idea.

Jason Mauck [01:06:43] That's what I'm waiting on is I'm just getting the interest and the science down to a path knowing that that is a reality of what's come.

Vance Crowe [01:06:53] It's wild for me to think about that you'd be to have this diversity of crops because you have robotics and you, because you'd be able to analyze the field and say these two crops could go well together. And there's a market not too far from here. I mean one of the biggest challenges with doing what you're talking about is right now if you harvest corn or soybeans, there are grain elevators to take those, right? If you start harvesting sunflower seeds, where are you gonna take them? Right, right, right. Like where, where are you gonna take? But there's

Jason Mauck [01:07:22] No reason why you can't grow what they do just in a different arrangement of venue to get the maximum amount of the inputs.

Vance Crowe [01:07:28] Say that in another way.

Jason Mauck [01:07:29] There's no reason why you can't take the elevators that want corn and beans and wheat and grow them in a different arrangement to be much more efficient by using proxy to eliminate inputs and maximize plant yield and lower the amount of energy needed. Because you're arranging it in time sequences for things to die and dry, consume water, become a wick when they die, the next crop's roots to live in a corpse to block the wind. Like you can do linear math. Absolute. But it's nothing is absolute. There's two sides of the coin. I know that my wheat, well you're getting a thunderstorm right now. I know that if I have wheat and I have a side slope in the hill, if I have a clean tillage field where nothing is growing, or even if it's no-till, it might absorb the first five minutes of a thunderstorm. But after that, where's the water going? Just

Vance Crowe [01:08:25] Right over the top

Jason Mauck [01:08:26] To the,

Vance Crowe [01:08:26] To the lowest possible

Jason Mauck [01:08:27] To the low point which you need tile. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:08:30] Right.

Jason Mauck [01:08:31] What if I had something that had grown in the fall is now hip high and is going to physically stop and absorb that water? Am I gonna make the side of the hill have more water in it in the summertime? Because you might have got 50 inches of rain that year, but only 10 of it stayed on this part of the, of the soil and you had no photosynthesis going on on 300 days over the year. Now that might be a hundred day hybrid, but until it comes up it might be this tall, but that leaf is a fuzz on an elephant's nuts later on it, it ain't jack shit. And you know, they say nehi by the 4th of July kneehigh is when you actually have canopy and corn. So you are July 4th or June 15th.

Vance Crowe [01:09:19] Yeah, but at this point J July 4th is not when it's Kneehigh, it's Kneehigh May 15th. Right?

Jason Mauck [01:09:25] No, no, no, no, no. That never happens. Well

Vance Crowe [01:09:27] I'm being, we're like

Jason Mauck [01:09:29] This year it might be June 4th, it's still got June

Vance Crowe [01:09:31] Fine. It's not July though. But

Jason Mauck [01:09:32] The point is it goes to senescence in September.

Vance Crowe [01:09:36] Okay.

Jason Mauck [01:09:36] So you're also,

Vance Crowe [01:09:37] I don't even know what Senes is

Jason Mauck [01:09:38] Really post to synthesizing for like 70 days. What

Vance Crowe [01:09:41] Is senescent

Jason Mauck [01:09:41] Outta the three six die dead.

Vance Crowe [01:09:43] Okay.

Jason Mauck [01:09:43] You know when things we're both gonna, and, and we see every day we're like getting gray and the plant dies. So my point is, is you need multiple life sequences out there that you don't need to terminate. Why grow a cover crop to this high and have a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 12 to one? Have you ever put cotton candy in your mouth or Cheeto? What happens? Just

Vance Crowe [01:10:11] Disintegrates.

Jason Mauck [01:10:11] Disintegrates. It's nothing. Yeah, you got roots down low. But if I can get a cereal out there to 80 to one carbon and nitrogen ratio, now I have a steak, I have carbon, I changed the soil tilt and structure. I change on the landscape. All this rain doesn't go in the field tile or off into the river. So grandma's house doesn't get destroyed when St. Louis, you know when Minneapolis gets a shit ton of rain and St. Louis is dry and you lose your house and it didn't even rain this much. Why is that? Because

Vance Crowe [01:10:49] Just 'cause it all floods down. Yeah.

Jason Mauck [01:10:51] 'cause it all flood, it doesn't get it. And people, we have all kinds of fears, whether it's climate change or obesity or COVI or whatever it is. Our water cycle is probably the most important thing that's not talked about. When I drive out west and I have to speak the next day I'll go to a bar and I'll sit next to a farmer and I'll ask him, what's your water situation? And you know, if he's in his sixties or seventies, he'll say, you know, it was like me when I was five, I could pee and hit that door handle. I had pressure out the wazoo. Now they're farming one field, they're leaving a field bare because they have one fourth of the water pressure that they had 40 years ago. So if I have, don't have the water anymore and I don't have the plants to translocate and sweat and, and keep that water cycle up and it's bare. If I keep it fallow and I work it and it's hot and it's fallow, it's gonna change the weather when we go and cut rainforest down for soybeans to be in your wife's fancy bar or what? I don't know if she just has barb, if my wife has fancy brands that she uses, these affect our weather. They affect the big cycle of water. And that is what's going to hurt us more than anything is the heat, the water cycle, the urbanization. If we don't have a landscape that absorbs water, that has living plants in it, and this is like a kindergarten move to use the commodity crops that you can sell to an elevator in a different arrangement to just have more photosynthesis.

Jason Mauck [01:12:34] We need perennials out there. We need all these different things. The problem is the industry has nothing to sell. If I can propagate a perennial root stock and growth things and I can have mama cows and, and bulls and I can share their semen and have then I am, I am doing a beautiful thing. But I am extinguishing an industry.

Vance Crowe [01:12:59] So one of the big challenges with making changes like, hey, I'm gonna do poly cropping, right? I'm gonna put more than one crop on there. Is that somebody, like you said your grandpa who would say, nah, we're we want this thing to look like a carpet of wheat. We don't want there to be anything in between there. What do you think? I mean like change is very difficult. Farmers now are farming way longer than they ever did before. So if you're the landowner at 60, you could probably keep farming at 80, 85. You're the one that gets to control those decisions. What are your thoughts on farm succession and change?

Jason Mauck [01:13:35] I mean, you get up and walk or run in the morning sometimes, you know, what's the difference between you running and riding a bike? You know, the only thing is you're three times more efficient with your movement. So you can still drive the tractors, you can still do all this. We're just gonna redesign it with some thought and some proxy and some some different mathematics for, so they can still do it. It's,

Vance Crowe [01:14:02] I'm talking about mentality, right? Like, you know, there's, there's like a, an old political philosophy that's like basically the, the only way that you make, you know, we talked before about nobody likes to change unless you hit rock bottom. Right? Right,

Jason Mauck [01:14:13] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:14:14] Well if you're not hitting rock bottom, you don't want to change. You're successful doing what you're doing. Change isn't going to happen until those people die.

Jason Mauck [01:14:21] Right. Well there is some boredom to it as well. It's pretty boring. But, but I, I guess I'm going back with, but the reason I went to it was pain is just shitty crops and I have way too much pride. I, I want to have beautiful landscapes and I want to be proactive on my design of that landscape. But that's what the beautiful thing about podcasts, I think you were talking about last time about the printing press and how that scaled learning and think about what we're able to do now. You can listen to a podcast while you're plowing or doing something old, learning about that new thing. I can get on Twitter or x and show people exactly how it's done, journal every day of the process. We share interesting ideas and we can really close that gap between something that's extremely intimidating and fearful that it won't work out to Johnny Bill. Tim does it this way. Exactly like this. I can call him whenever I want and we can make this, make this work. The the excuses are getting shot by the day.

Vance Crowe [01:15:29] You recently lost your grandfather.

Jason Mauck [01:15:30] Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:15:31] What will change now that he's not making the decisions?

Jason Mauck [01:15:37] Huh? Well the thing is, is he didn't really make the decisions. My my I lost to, to precursor my dad. My dad passed. That's the reason I came back to the farm. So there was kind of a power struggle there, but he was almost 90 when he passed. So as I became interesting and believer in things, I went by the idea that it's much easier to just do it and ask for forgiveness than permission. And that kind of creates your own resume to build some trust. Even though, wait, wait,

Vance Crowe [01:16:12] Wait. So you were going out there being like, I'm gonna sneak some wheat in between this. Oh

Jason Mauck [01:16:16] Yeah. I mean the, the best thing is, is when everyone goes to bed because I just, everything I can hop in, turn the key and just do whatever the hell I want. That's the best part is the corn will come up and they're like, what the hell were you drinking last time?

Vance Crowe [01:16:34] You

Jason Mauck [01:16:35] Missed two rows out there. And you're like, you really think that just accidentally it's perfect 60 inch corn out here. But yeah, that just, that that's kind of, that's kind of how I, I roll if you will.

Vance Crowe [01:16:49] Is that you think an effective strategy for a lot of people just go out there and

Jason Mauck [01:16:53] No, and

Vance Crowe [01:16:54] Not ask for permission, ask for forgiveness because

Jason Mauck [01:16:56] That thumb, you know, my grandpa, he had the checkbook right here and he used that and you know, he would, he, he would have different moods. Like if I grew a lot of crops, you know, the way that he wanted. I'm a relatively good farmer, timely. I don't sleep. I make sure everything is done exactly when I can. So he'd pat me on the back and then when I do something weird, if you will, you know, I'd be mad. But then if it works out this year and then next year and you do that 6, 8, 9, 10 years in a row, eventually he shakes his head. But it's not no longer, you know, this, this won't work.

Vance Crowe [01:17:42] So a young person that's trying to elbow their way in and they, they wanna get a start, what's the way that they get people to take these chances?

Jason Mauck [01:17:51] You just gotta push it. You gotta, you gotta have some confrontation. You just gotta do it. I made a post on X four or five days ago. You know, there's, and and I do respect elders, but there's a point to where they don't want to give up even the smallest portion of any control because the old

Vance Crowe [01:18:10] Adage,

Jason Mauck [01:18:11] If you give him an inch, they'll take a mile. So the question is, if you don't give your son or grandson an inch, how is he ever gonna learn if he doesn't make small mistakes, wouldn't you rather control the fire of mistake now than how mean is it to just be in full control and pass and or do you want them to fail or do you want them to fail small so we don't burn down all of California

Vance Crowe [01:18:45] Thi this is so common

Jason Mauck [01:18:46] That's happening.

Vance Crowe [01:18:47] It's, it's everywhere. I mean, so I go give talks on having better conversations with people how to, how to overcome like conflict and particular situations like, you know, the family farm where somebody's still making all the decisions even though somebody else is putting all the labor in. And man over and over and over again you'll hear, I'm not allowed to change anything. I've gotta do it the exact way that it was done before. Do you think you will have the wherewithal to allow your sons to try things?

Jason Mauck [01:19:18] Yeah, I hope, I hope they're interested in farming. I don't know what that will look like when they get old enough. My youngest is pretty interested, but yes, definitely. And I am a big proponent of of, of turning kids in on entrepreneurs. It doesn't have to be farming, it can be just as simple as selling girl scout cookies or I had a sweet corn stand when I was eight and I took that thing, you know, in three or four years I was saying, Hey, instead of just planting behind the tool shed three acres, let's go plant over here and over here. And by the time I had my driver's license we were handpicking, you know, 10 acres of sweet corn. We had like six different vendors had a hat. I, when milk had their got milk campaign, I would go to Lowe's and get gallons of paint and it was got corn. And I would, the state police would always stop me and be like, you gotta move that sign down at the intersection. But you would see signs everywhere. But you gotta give these kids an opportunity to be an entrepreneur. 'cause that feeling of a fulfillment when you have an idea and you turn it into cash and you go to the county fair and you can throw seven baseballs at a beer bottle knowing that you got a thousand dollars under your mattress at home, you can't beat that.

Vance Crowe [01:20:36] Yeah. My my some and some kids have it like my little three-year-old daughter who is a girly girl, like, like princess out the wazoo. One day I was dropping her mom off at the airport, so it's just me and her in the car and she says, dad, I really want some pink sparkle sunglasses. And I was like, oh that's great. Well your birthday's in August so that's how many months away. And like we counted it off how many months away. And she was like, that's a long time. And I was like, you know, there is another way. And she was like, what's that? And I'm like, well you could, you know, do some work around the house that's a little bit more than what you're expected to do by the family. And that little girl, like when we got back home was like, what can I do? Let's go, what can I do? And now anytime she sees the fireplace with ashes in it, she's like, dad, I got the bucket. And like this is a

Jason Mauck [01:21:24] Three-year-old. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:21:25] I, when a kid gets that itch because the day she got her pink sparkle sunglasses and the thing that she got that went right along with this, you'll appreciate this with two boys, is in our family we're basically inside the family socialists or communists because after you've had your toy for about 24 hours, it's everybody's toy. Right? Yeah. If you didn't put it away, it's, but those sunglasses, if her sister has them, we take them away from her. Those are violet sunglasses 'cause she earned them. And now she has realized if I buy this with my own money, then I also get the law on my side. So turning kids into entrepreneurs Yeah. Is awesome.

Jason Mauck [01:22:02] So that kind of goes to to saying like, what rock my grandpa had to stand on, you know, he, he done it this way. He bought the grain bins, he did the combine. He had the saying my combine my rules. So I went to the auction, I bought the cheapest most piece of shit combine possible just to pull off my thing. And I had my own little section of the barnyard where I had a little planter and a little combine, a little cultivator to do all my weird shit however I wanted. Because you know, if if the great thing, if, if you're gonna set a rule, then if you have do the same thing that they did then they can't call you out on it.

Vance Crowe [01:22:49] I love it. I mean I love it. And particularly if you're a parent, like there's nothing you want more than a kid that's doing their own thing to be able like

Jason Mauck [01:22:57] Yeah. Buying

Vance Crowe [01:22:58] Their own equipment to do whatever. You know, one thing I think that is really important, you've instilled this in me, me, I remember seeing your field day right around COVID and then going up and seeing Zach Smith's is getting to field days where there are people that are trying the edge of things. Like it's not so much even like what are you gonna learn by the, like we're gonna, you get to see all these cool stuff because people go around and say, hey, this is how you make it. So the stock cropper can go in between the rows of corn or in your case like this is what relay cropping looks like. Zach's gonna do his in August, I wanna say like somewhere around the 20th. And I think people should definitely go to that. Are you gonna put on another field day?

Jason Mauck [01:23:42] I think so. I don't have a date yet. I'd like to time it to where I harvest my wheat. Like live, I did that like six years ago before you came.

Vance Crowe [01:23:52] Yeah. 'cause it's nuts to watch harvesting wheat right next to soybeans, right. Because you're like, how can you possibly get a, a combine in here? But yeah, I'd like to see that.

Jason Mauck [01:24:01] See there's a traffic and you push it down.

Vance Crowe [01:24:03] And what about other field days that you think if people can't make it to your one in Indiana or Zach's up in northern Iowa, where any other interesting field days out there?

Jason Mauck [01:24:13] Hmm.

Vance Crowe [01:24:14] I'd go see whatever John Kemp was doing.

Jason Mauck [01:24:16] Oh, John Kemp is a genius. Let's

Vance Crowe [01:24:18] Talk about John Kemp. Yes. How did you encounter that crazy Amish farmer?

Jason Mauck [01:24:22] How did I think the first time was I was speaking at no-till on the planes and he said, Hey Jason, come here and sit on the couch. And I, and I didn't know it was John Kemp 'cause his voice and his content sounds like, like the wisest man ever. And he's younger than me by seven years or so. And we just developed a relationship. I I went over to his house and, and he's just, he's, he's earned a spot to where, you know, he stepped down from being the CEO and he is the, well he still has the largest role, but he's able to read books every day, interact with people in his podcast. He's built a network, it's shared learning and he's just demonstrated how much more efficient of a human being you can be when you give others the permission to be weird, to learn their own and share and create that community. And, you know, I've got on X and kind of made that, but man, he's, he's just on a completely o other level of his capability and knowledge. And, and, and going back to my talking earlier about looking, thinking outside the box or more holistically. I mean, he's done the work with all these growers and I'd love to have that, you know, a meeting with him and some other people that I have interesting.

Jason Mauck [01:26:00] In other industries and think like he does.

Vance Crowe [01:26:03] Yeah. I mean I I I I've proposed to him and I think maybe we'll try and do I wanna do a more regular podcast with him.

Jason Mauck [01:26:09] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:26:09] Because the way that his mind works, I think in large part is because he doesn't have the decay that comes from being constantly stimulated by social media and all the things that, that I'm stimulated by. He reads all the time. I mean, his knowledge is just amazing.

Jason Mauck [01:26:27] He's got bees.

Vance Crowe [01:26:28] Does he?

Jason Mauck [01:26:29] Yeah, a lot of honey. His wife is electro. I I can't, but it's a, it's, it's a, it's the, I can't even think of the word, but it's the energy in the body looking at medicine that way. And, you know, he is just, he's so ahead of the curve.

Vance Crowe [01:26:46] I think that this is such an awesome time. And COVID I think had a really positive impact on this, where the spell was broken by the propaganda of we know how to market this, you know, way of life to you so that like, so that it feels like this is the only option or the best option or the highest option. And, and COVID people got to see like, oh wait a second. The people that are selling me things, their interests in my interests are not aligned in the same way. And so you see people trying different forms of medicine. I I've had an eastern medicine guy on in a way that I probably would've scoffed at him before and now I'm like, max, I'm really interested in what you have to say. And I think that this is something that's really changing in our culture in a very deep way.

Jason Mauck [01:27:34] Yeah. And when you talk about like what's the future of the meat company or anything like that, I think people are going to gravitate more and more now. Not, I won't, I won't say that the general public, but I think the interest of a group to grow their own food to garden, to kind of create their own sense of community to kind of get away from the mainstream. I think that's gonna continue to grow and grow and grow because of COVID. And there's a lot of these people that lived in the city, they might've made a half a million dollars, but going through that they had to stare at four walls. Their life was so awful with everything shut down. So they valued being next to the nice restaurant and this, and COVID maybe forced them or gave them freedom and bandwidth to get the hell out of the city and listen to the birds and bees and they're like, man, this is awesome. And I think there's gonna be this new kind of slug more and more of people that want to be more connected

Vance Crowe [01:28:37] And the people that are expecting this will happen fast, are gonna be disappointed. But the but the slow moving changes, I think that are gonna have real inertia when they get going. I mean, I know in my own hometown they started their own school like a religious group did. And that school is becoming huge, right? They, because they started offering the things that the people in that community wanted. They wanted to have real welding classes, teach people how to drive trucks, teach people about plumbing. I know that for myself and my wife, we're looking around at our school options and what we have right now for our kids is great, but you know, a couple years from now that that school option isn't available to 'em. So what are we gonna do? I I am tempted to start my own school, right? And to figure out, 'cause it wouldn't take that much, right? If you have, you know, four families with two to three kids and they're already gonna pay 10 grand to be able to send their kid to private school, well you just pile that money all into one pile and you have one teacher and you bring back the one room schoolhouse, but you do it using, you know, all the access that that teacher would have to new information. And having parents, this allows you to do things that you couldn't do before you. And so to me, the education system will likely start changing and

Jason Mauck [01:29:55] It has to vance, I mean talking about like revising the, the cropping stuff. Like if, if my, both of my kids are very good with their smartphone and if I gave them a phone in the back and they went to like a trivia, like they would win just with their device. So like, why are we still teaching these kids to just remember information that they can look up? What is the true skill that our kids need to have to be successful in the real world? Is it what's being taught in schools or is it more the things that you work on like the, the the way to, to socialize with friends and, and you know, peel the layers of onions and really get to know people and create community and, and have the skilled trade? The, the, the thing that bothers me the most with the use, I, I do a lot of coaching besides the diet and just the general health is the lack of just that old generational knowledge. Read a map. Just, we we're so dependent on our device where we don't think we kinda goes against what I just said, but we're so dependent on our device for everything that we don't know anything.

Vance Crowe [01:31:15] A couple of years ago, I, I challenged people listening to the podcast, a group of people I was with, like, just don't use your navigation on your phone for a month. And I thought that this was kind of unfair because I live in St. Louis, like I go to the same places all the time. But I realized like really fast. I like within a week I was like, this is really fucking hard because if, if I don't know exactly where that place is, I am so unused to pulling up a map. I don't understand how the streets are laid out as a grid. I don't know which, you know, really east and west here. Like

Jason Mauck [01:31:55] It's a real problem. That's the problem is once you force yourself to do that, then you start understanding the patterns. A lot of people don't realize that the interstate system is numerical this way. When you go out in the country, it's 500 north, 500 west, it means it's five miles west of this. You know, you get a town, you get either numbers or letters and you start recognizing pattern if we don't have any pattern recognition.

Vance Crowe [01:32:24] And that's probably what the smartphones do is that they keep you from seeing the larger picture, right? You can get the exact answer, but the context that that answer sits within is, is very, very difficult to understand. It's like, it's like the difference between saying, well, I can look up any poem I want, but like, do

Jason Mauck [01:32:43] You

Vance Crowe [01:32:43] Really know the poem? Like the time it takes? I, I I think I only have maybe two poems memorized, but those two poems have probably played a, played a larger role in my life than almost any other piece of literature I've ever read. And certainly more than any novel, you know, poem that I'm gonna read because you've internalized it in some way, right? There's a pattern that gets embedded.

Jason Mauck [01:33:06] I think we are, we we're not being fair to our kids. You know, there's a saying that if you wanna be a good parent, just be a little bit negligible. You know, don't be the helicopter mom, but a, you know, I get a nervous wreck when we go boating because I know they can fall out and drown or get hit by the owner.

Vance Crowe [01:33:25] That's real.

Jason Mauck [01:33:26] Then I don't care if they fall five feet and break their arm like they'll live. So being a little negligent, don't help them, let them figure it out. But we are, we are hurting our kids' future more than anything when we don't allow them to fall in love and have that visceral feeling of whether like earning that girlfriend or not, or I just think all of these apps, the social medias of the world, you know, I don't think these kids need social media until they're outta school.

Vance Crowe [01:34:00] Outta school. You're saying like 18.

Jason Mauck [01:34:03] Yeah, I mean it is weaponized. You see, you see how these kids are killing themselves or you know, all this stuff when they're in school, I, that's gonna be tough to do, but sex in itself is becoming so cheapened and used as a way to maybe, like, I just, I think, I think we're down a really dangerous path right now because of how we're using technology for these kids.

Vance Crowe [01:34:34] Well,

Jason Mauck [01:34:35] I'm not allowing them to live, you know, that.

Vance Crowe [01:34:37] I'm, I'm with you on that. You know, we talked about the dietary restrictions I think, and Yosha Bach talked about on my podcast a couple weeks ago about how the Christian cult, which is what it was when it first, you know, began to grow, started as a result of people being lost as the Roman Empire went into decay, right? It was was like, hey, this is not working for us anymore. What's gonna work for us? Hey, well it's, let's synchronize our minds by having the same belief set and this will allow us to have the same values and the same interests and work together. I mean, I could, Ima I think we, I am already seeing it, right? You already see some people going and wanting to have this trad life, which is really LARPing on what you think the old ways were like. But I think there will be religious cults, and I don't mean that necessarily in a negative or positive way. I just mean groups of people that are completely devoted to the synchronization of their minds with other people's minds and they don't think for themselves because the chaos that is coming from you can have sex with anybody you want with no consequence. And you know, all the transactional relationships that are built through social media. I, I think like we will watch an explosion of religious cults and, and these young guys, I don't, I don't, maybe young women too, but the young guys that are feeling lost in this world, they're gonna be given gurus that give them meaning because the life right now in this social media high tech world is meaningless.

Jason Mauck [01:36:11] You used two words there

Vance Crowe [01:36:13] That

Jason Mauck [01:36:13] I didn't recognize. There was a, a lar what was

Vance Crowe [01:36:18] LARPing

Jason Mauck [01:36:19] LARPing and what was the thing before that?

Vance Crowe [01:36:21] I'm, And as you're LARPing is live action role playing. So this is where like those people, they're like, I'm a knight. And they like run around and they're, they're playing like a night and they talk like a night. And, and there's a guy named Eric Weinstein that talks a lot about how our politicians are LARPing, right? They're like dressing up like a leader would and they're standing up at a podium like a leader would and they're using their hand motions. But the reality is they were not leaders before they came there. You know, it used to be people don't understand this about our, our political system in the United States. It used to be that the members of the House of Representatives were voted on by the electorate, the, the popular vote, right? But the senators were not, the senators were appointed by the state houses.

Jason Mauck [01:37:08] Okay? So

Vance Crowe [01:37:09] Your state house would say, Hey, we are going to go out and find somebody that's led something before they have something they're giving up. Maybe they're a judge or an attorney or a banker or an accountant, but they or, or a farmer. We're gonna take this guy and as a state house we're gonna vote on it. So it's not gonna be popular vote, it's gonna be this representative vote and we're gonna send them away for six years to Washington DC And the reason that it was six years is 'cause that's how long they could go away from their business and then come back and they'd send a new one. And this person was not treated to the whims of mob like culture, right? So just by changing who we sent to the White House or to, to the, to Congress as a senator, now you start having these senators that are voted on by popular vote. Well so who they are and what they need to be to the mob, which is what direct democracy is, is the mob rule. Now you're electing people that look like leaders, but they never ran a business, they never like built something. They, they aren't like foundational key members of their community. They're lifetime politicians. And so we have a, a whole House of Representatives and a whole house of Senate that is just people pretending like they're leaders, but really all they are is politicians, which are not the same thing.

Jason Mauck [01:38:27] Yep. That's, and that's probably the number one reason why ideas like mine or Zach's aren't mainstream, you know, with the, when Biden just continues to print money for these initiatives, you know, the, the, it was already baked in the trillions of dollars for this climate, this infrastructure bill all went to the industry themselves to just continue status quo and just change it slightly to pacify, you know, the people because I mean, you we're just saying what we already know, but because we've changed the way that they're elected, the whole reason why a pol politician gets into that is they have 10 friends with cords of cash that said, if you get in can change this and this is yours. It's just the, just how it works.

Vance Crowe [01:39:23] Well man, we could talk all afternoon. This has been great. If, if people wanted to follow along with you and they wanted to know when your field day will be, they want to participate in the community, how should they go about tracking you?

Jason Mauck [01:39:36] So the best way I'm most active on X, so it's Jason Mach one that's M-A-U-C-K one. Track me on Facebook. But yeah, just look out for my field day, probably in June. Late June here.

Vance Crowe [01:39:52] Oh that's great. Really?

Jason Mauck [01:39:53] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:39:54] Oh fantastic. Well let me know about that as soon as possible. I'll put it out there. Yeah, so, alright man, thank you so much for doing Yeah.