Monday Mayhem on The Survival Podcast – Episode-3905

The Survival Podcast

The episode covers a wide range of rapid-fire topics, beginning with the economic pressures on the American beef industry and meat processing monopolies. The host then

Key takeaways

• Four major companies have historically controlled much of the US beef processing industry.
• A USDA initiative is attempting to expand meat inspection programs to more states to increase competition.
• Diesel prices spiked due to a significant refinery shutdown in Joliet, Illinois, following flooding and electrical issues.
• Ukrainian drone strikes on a Russian refinery have introduced new volatility into the global fuel market.
• Investigations revealed EBT fraud in Texas where shops were used to exchange food benefits for cash.

Main topics

• Beef prices and meat processing monopolies
• Diesel fuel price fluctuations
• Ukraine-Russia conflict impacts

Notable quotes

The more on the dole, the more you control.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a critical commentary on government dependency a

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:03) way to do this. Speaker 3 (0:22) because you're truly accidentally laying his arm down the wrong way and yanked the cord out of my microphone. And when you do that, you have to back out of the conference room and come all the way back in. StreamYard, get your shit together. It's 2026. You should be able to swap a mic, no problem. All right. Anyway, what are we going to talk about today? Well, it's Monday Speaker 2 (0:42) Mayhem. Speaker 3 (0:43) So there could be anything going on now. If you pay attention to the run-up to the shows, and you check out TSPC Live where you can find out about the next upcoming live, you know, some of the stuff we're going to talk about. But if you don't do that, you have no idea. And maybe I don't either. Who knows? Maybe I had somebody make this list for me, and I just have to wing it as I go. Nah, I curated this stuff for you guys. These shows, if you're new to the Survival Podcast, harken back to like the 2008 to 2010 years where I did this show in my car. Now, it's not exactly the same, but it's a kind of rapid-fire, high-energy. Lots of different subjects in the show, that type of thing, lots of current events, things going on. And today we are going to lead off with a story that is actually a good story, but it's one of those, it's good, but yet I remain skeptical. So we all know that the cost of meat has gone through the roof and specifically the cost of beef, which is the most nutritiously dense food on the planet. The other red meats I would put up there with it, but we just don't have the quantity of them. Probably the other commercial meat that's up there with that kind of nutritional density is lamb or sheep, mutton, et cetera. I would also put venison, buffalo, et cetera, on that same list, but none of those are mass market available in every grocery store everywhere across America. Beef has gotten stupid. Recently, I was at a grocery store, and I saw a guy with a... a shopping cart full of brisket. And I thought, dude is loading up on some brisket. They must be on sale. And I realized he was actually an employee. He was stocking the brisket. And I said something to him. He's like, yeah, they're on sale. I don't remember what it was for. It was like four bucks a pound. And I'm like, geez, at that price, it's worth taking home and grinding. And he made one of those looks that everybody makes when you say anything about a brisket other than I'm going to make corned beef, I'm going to smoke it, or I'm going to slow roast it or something like that. Speaker 3 (2:43) So I walk over to the meat counter and I'm like, this is 80-20 for nine bucks a pound, dude. That's less than half of this. Oh, okay. My point here isn't that the brisket was on sale. My point is we're paying eight, nine bucks for freaking 80-20 ground beef in America. Like the place with probably more pasture to graze cattle on than anywhere else in the world. And we all know why. We all know the real problem with the beef prices. It's not because of the diesel fuel, which we will talk about today. It doesn't help, but that's not the real fucking problem. And we all know that. Okay. We know that. It's because Speaker 2 (3:20) of the gas. Speaker 3 (3:21) It's because Speaker 2 (3:21) of Trump. Speaker 1 (3:22) It's Speaker 3 (3:22) because four companies have controlled the meat. and specifically the beef processing industry for over 100 damn years. Well, Trump recently said we're going to do something about that. It remains to be seen how much, but we just had USDA launch a new initiative to bring more states into the meat inspection world. Now, here's the good news about this. This is a program that already exists. They're trying to expand it. And that's always easier to do for a government than to try to create a new program where you have to get buy-in from every stakeholder in the situation. All you've got to do is fight for budget. And the budget's what concerns me here. Generally, I am not for the government spending more money because it's always wasted. But there are certain things, if you actually want to get them done, you have to put enough fuel in the engine to get a result that you're looking for. The USDA is this new initiative. They're going to spend $50 million. Now, for me and you and probably everybody in this live stream together, if we split that $50 million, we're in pretty good shape for the rest of our lives, right? However. To do something like this is incredibly expensive. And so this program already exists and these states could all be participating in it already. So have we actually found the problem? Would the $50 million be better used to lobby state governments at the legislature level to freaking do something about this? Because they already can do this. And if you divide it up against 50 states, it's a million dollars a state. You start to see where it doesn't really move the needle much. But what this program does is it allows states not to have a meat processing facility and have the federal government come and inspect. The state will run its own program. This already exists for 30 states. Big, long list. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont. Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. All right. The problem is those states are all participating in a kind of, well, most of them in a kind of a tepid way. If you are in any of those states, at minimum, what you can do as a rancher, you can have an animal processed, and then you can sell it in a grocery store, et cetera, if you can get one to stock your product. Because the big packers have a monopoly on the control of the distribution system into retail for major retailers, too, like Albertsons and, you know, H-E-B and all of that. But you can't sell across state lines. Now, there's another program called CIS, where state Speaker 2 (6:10) inspected plants can sell across state lines under the USDA mark of inspection. In Speaker 3 (6:15) other words, the federal government says your state's doing things right enough to qualify to sell anywhere in the country, which is how it should be. Only 11 states participate in that, and not mine. Indiana, Iowa, Georgia, Maine, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin all are all participating in that program. This is my issue. I am not a doomer. I'm not the person that wants to say it'll never work over and over again. But I am an innate skeptic. OK, and I have a reason to be an innate skeptic. And it's, you know, 50 odd years of observation, especially when it involves government. But when I look at the mechanics of this, it looks like more theater than reality to me. But there is an upside. And it is for those of you who are politically motivated, that like to take political action, specifically at the local and state level, like the county and state level. There is something this gives you. If you leverage it properly and it's not my wheelhouse, so I don't know how to do it, but this might be a place for someone to form like a grassroots activist organization that shares data with each other and approaches so that they can go in and lobby their state governments to say, we want this. And the beauty of it is now you can point to this and say, hey, your citizens are pissed off at the cost of beef. We have beef right here. We don't have enough processing facilities. If we can process more beef, the cost of beef, at least in our state, can go down. Here's a program. There's some government, federal assistance available. And I would just pick the state that your state naturally would bristle against. Like if you want to get people in Texas motivated, say, they even have this in California. Now, that doesn't work if you're asking for gun control in Texas, okay? What I mean is something the average person would go, yeah. We should have that. Why don't we have that? And you say they even have this in. So of those 11 states. Right. That are in this CIS program, especially, but certainly in those 30 states, any state that is not in this at all, you could say, hey, they even have this in blah. And whatever most bristles people without alienating them completely against the idea would be a pinch point, a leverage point. But the other thing is, you guys that are on that list of 30 states like my state, why aren't we doing the CIS program? If we're doing the CIS program, not only can the farmer that's in Denton, Texas, selling to Oklahoma or Louisiana or Arkansas with a USDA certification so that it opens up all markets. No, it's more than that. Speaker 3 (9:10) they now have that same USDA certification to work their local markets because the other program that's in-state only, yes, you can sell like down at like a little boutique farm to table market or something like that. But what you can't do is put the USDA symbol on it. And that's how you get into Albertsons. That's how you get into HEB. That's how you get into Kroger's, right? Tom Thumb, whatever it is, right? I don't know all the grocery stores. But that's where you have to get the supply into to make a difference. So one way or another, there seems to be an opportunity to me here to begin to lean on state governments and to identify who's the enemy in your state. Now, I know the state itself is the enemy. That's not what I mean. What I mean is this. Big sugar is the enemy of the reform of the EBT system, which we're also going to talk about today. What I mean is. The state of Texas, like the states have some autonomy over how they administer programs like EBT, even though they're federally funded. And in Texas, we had this idea like maybe you shouldn't be buying fucking Twinkies and Coca-Cola with your EBT cards. So there was proposed legislation in Texas to make that law and make this list of things that didn't qualify under EBT because this is supposed to be for sustenance. Speaker 2 (10:30) And Big Sugar spent over $4 million Speaker 3 (10:34) in one day lobbying the Texas legislature to kill him. And they didn't go after everybody. They just took all the people they knew would already say no, figured out how many more they needed, made a list that was a little bit over the number they needed to swing on the other side, target those individuals, and execute it perfectly. That's how they were able to do it for only $4 million. This is what we're competing against. So you need to identify who is connected to the car gills, etc. Who doesn't want this done? And I'm going to tell you the first place I'd look in Texas is fucking Lubbock, where the giant CAFOs that process 10,000 animals a day are. They're the ones that don't want this. They're the ones that don't want this. They have factoryized the beef. The farmers and ranchers have to send the animals there. They go through six to 12 weeks of misery before they go off to a federal improved packing plant. That's who would be holding up in my area, along with Cargill, et cetera, et al., right? But there is an opportunity to leverage this. But if we don't leverage it, it won't mean anything. All right, moving on. Let's hear about our sponsors of the day real quick. Sponsor of the day number one today is the Wealth Steady Podcast with John Pagliano. John is a great dude, man. I first met him in 2010 at a convention in Salt Lake City. I was there promoting my podcast, which was very early on at the time. He came up, spoke to me for only a few moments, wanted to meet me. And I didn't learn this until only a few years ago. He then went about, you know, 50 foot away and stood there and watched me talk to other people. And when he finally told me that, I said, well, why did you do that? He said, I want to see if you were the person that you seem like you were. And when I figured out you were, I told my wife, okay, we can leave now. He didn't even go look at the rest of the convention stuff. And he contacted me after that. We started working together, had him on for some interviews, and helped him launch his podcast by telling him, quit asking, don't do it. And, man, he's just an incredible dude. This guy is an investment manager. He runs an investment management firm to manage clients' money. But before he touched a dime of a client's money, he made himself a liquid millionaire. as a blue collar worker first. That is not a typical story for how investment managers become investment managers. And he'll tell you exactly what he's doing with his money and his client's money on his podcast every week called, or every week to every other week called the Wealth Setting Podcast. Next up today, J.M. Bullion. Hey, John will teach you about wealth management, but it's also important in your wealth management program to have some level of hard assets. I really believe that. To me, The hard assets of choice for people, real estate, especially real estate somebody else is paying for, silver and gold and Bitcoin. All of them probably have some place in your portfolio one way or another. The hardest to skin, obviously, is real estate, but there's ways to do that holding other instruments. However, silver and gold are easy. You order it, they ship it to your house, you stick it in a safe, you own it. You can put your hands on it anytime you want. Thousands of years of history of both metals being sound money. They've had really great runs recently. It's not over. The same pitch I make for Bitcoin applies to silver and gold. And that is the plan for fiat is there is no bottom. So for silver, gold and Bitcoin, there is no top. In fact, for all assets, there is no top. That's what the value money brings you. Anyway, you should use Jam Bullion versus anybody else when you're buying your silver and gold, especially online, because they have supported the show that you tune into mine for over 13 years now. They give you a discount if you're an MSB member. All orders ship free. Why would you buy from anybody else? All right. So now I want to let you guys know something that as far as I know is still true. It could have changed in the last 15 minutes. We still have two tickets to the fall workshop. Now, if you're listening to this at 530 at night on your drive home from work, that may definitely not be true or it might. I don't know. But we sold 48 of the 50 seats. on Saturday, and we didn't sell any on Sunday. And I want to just make sure that you guys know they're available, and we would love to have you come. So if you have not signed up yet, if you have always been like, I want to come to one of Jack's workshops, get over to the Survival Podcast, scroll down a little bit, you'll figure out how to do it. If you can't figure it out that way right now, if you're watching the live anyway, then I don't think you'll be able to get here. So it doesn't really matter. If you don't know what I'm talking about, because you're new, I do a big, giant festival at my home once a year, generally the week of November 11th, and we usually sell out very quickly. This time we almost sold out very Speaker 2 (15:11) quickly. Speaker 3 (15:12) All right, moving on. Let's talk about – I just have a question for you today. No news story, no nothing. Just an observation, a jack-stervation, right? I don't know what you would call it, right? A jack-observation. There's like – There's going to be something that sounds foul in there if we try to make that a word. So let's just call it a Jack observation. Speaker 2 (15:34) So I Speaker 3 (15:34) have noticed a huge number of, I don't know what you would call them, mouthy, whiny, bitchy people, right? Is there a collective single word name for that? Who bitch about everything, but are generally not libtards. They're more toward the conservative or even libertarian space. Some of them full on libertarian. And there's a whole mosh pause of people in this group for this particular thing. And the bitch of the day goes like this. They're Speaker 2 (16:05) selling off the farmland and you're turning it all into data centers and solar Speaker 3 (16:10) farms. And we need more farmland. That person, right? You guys know who I'm talking about. Maybe you are even that person at times. I want you to rethink that a little bit. Why don't these fucking people go farm? Huh? Right. You're bitching because Farmer Tom, who worked his whole fucking life and he's 66 years old, he's like, you know what the hell with this? I'm done. It's cold as shit here. I work my ass. I barely survive. And there's a guy sitting here with a fucking 50 million dollar check. I owe 30 million dollars in all my debt. I can take the check. I can dissolve my debt, and I can move down to Florida with $20 million in my pocket and live the last 25 years of my life. You're like, he Speaker 2 (16:52) couldn't do that. That's wrong. Speaker 3 (16:55) Why didn't his family take over? Why don't you do it? Now, I'm saying it that way for a reason, because I know the initial response from a thinking person who even a little bit sides with the complaint. Well, it's very expensive. No shit. No shit. Huh. It's really hard. No shit. So that guy that owns his property, that slaved away for 30 or 40 or 50 years of his life, he doesn't have a right to decide what to do with his property at the end. And then, you know, you get the deer in the head like, well, of course he does. But there's got Speaker 2 (17:32) to be someone who wants to. Why Speaker 3 (17:34) not you? And every reason you give will be a valid reason. I'm not saying it's not valid. I'm saying that that's why nobody wants to step up and do it. They barely make any money. They barely survive. They remain completely controlled by the federal government. All of the farming is out in the middle of nowhere. Right. The farming we're talking about here. And by the way. They're not replacing all the fields with solar panels. This is a dumb ass statement. The person that says that has no spatial perception concept at all. Like this is a person, if you showed them a cube and said, what would it look like if you opened it up like an unopened box, couldn't draw it for you. Because if you have any concept of spatiality and scale, you know that somebody saying something like they're replacing all the farmland with solar panels is so. abundantly retarded, okay? You've got to build a subdivision there. Then why don't you farm? Why don't you go to the government, ask for a shitload of money, go buy this guy's farm, and get some combines, and start growing soy and wheat that you seem to be so concerned about? Am I saying I don't think this is a problem at all? No. I'm saying the people that bitch the most about it, they're offering no solutions. They just want to complain about another thing. And what they're really saying is that the person who killed themselves their whole life doesn't have a right to decide what to do with their property when they don't want to work anymore. How would you like it if I said, you know, that's a big 401k you got there. How much is in that? Two and a half million dollars. Speaker 3 (19:12) What are you going to do? I'm going to retire. No, you shouldn't retire. No, there's not enough money in that 401k. But there's enough money for me. No, there's not enough money for other people. You need to keep working because we want you to keep working and you have no right to sell off your assets inside your 401k or your IRA and go retire. You should keep working. And if you're not going to keep working, you owe it to society to go make one of your children take over for you and do your job and keep contributing to that 401k. And by the way, that 401k, 80 % of what goes into it. Doesn't it come back to you? It goes to everybody else because that's what farming in America is today. You want to fix farming. We are overgrowing staple crops that we do not need. We're turning half of the food into freaking ethanol and we're not producing enough meat and we don't have a processing capacity. There's your answer. You fix those things. You know, maybe people will want to farm more, but everything is stacked a deck against the farmer and then complain when a farmer doesn't want to farm anymore. If you want farming, go farm. Sorry. All right. Moving on. Let's talk about diesel. Diesel fuel. Speaker 3 (20:29) Right now is higher for my Gen X bros and sissas. Diesel fuel right now is higher than Cheech and Chong collectively in up and smoke. That's how high diesel is right now. Now, of course, what are we hearing? It's all Trump. He's at war in Iran. OK, I agree that was a stupid war that we should have started. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that there's. A bunch of bullshit on both sides of supporting or opposing that one right now. I'm going to let it go. I'm not saying it has no impact on fuel prices because we all know that it does. It's not like gas is down here where it's a little bit high and you're a little bit pissed off, and diesel is like 2x gas a gallon right now. That's not why. Does anybody here, before I tell you, know the real reason that diesel made such a huge run-up in cost to the United States in the last few weeks? Does anybody know why? I'm just interested. I'm going to tell you about another thing and see if anybody else figures it out, right? Okay, but dude, dark horse again, man, stop it. Just, you're going to go 100 % Bitcoin. Again, you remind me of employees I had, like they asked me for a day off. Speaker 3 (21:48) And I'm like, what happened? You know, like, they're like, you know, my mom's dead. My mom died. I'm like, your mom died last year. Anyway, going back to this, I want to know if anybody knows, if anybody knows why diesel ran up in the United States, the real reason for it. It's not anything that was summer and winter blend. It's a much bigger problem, much bigger problem. But I'm going to tell you something that happened in Russia that is going to make it worse. So the Ukrainians, in an attempt to disrupt the parliamentary primary elections in Russia, launched a swarm of drones at Moscow. This is Putin kind of pissed, by the way. Very little of what they did as far as disrupting the elections worked. But this is something that you got it. You got it,