E510 Nate Halverson

Shopify Representative
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specialoffer. All lowercase. That's Shopify.com specialoffer. Today's guest is an independent writer, journalist and reporter. He contributed to the documentary the Grab, which is all about the money and power controlling the food industry in America and beyond.

Theo Von
Outside of that, he writes for the center for Investigative Reporting. I'm really fascinated to spend time with today's guest, Nate Halverson. Shine that light on me, I'll sit. And tell you my story.

Nate Halverson, thanks for coming, man. Dude, you kidding me? Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. I watched the grab, which is the documentary that you guys are putting out.

And just so I'm clear, what was the goal of the documentary? Cause to me, it seemed like you're trying to show that a lot of land, or arable land, is that land that can grow crops. Yeah. Okay. A lot of land that can sustain crops is being bought up by different countries that it's kind of like a land grab for that land right now because they're not making more of it.

Shopify Representative
That's it, man. I mean, it is. In the 21st century, it's looking more like oil was the commodity of the 20th century. Gold, diamonds, these things. But in the 21st century, it looks like the rich and powerful are increasingly turning to control food and water as the basic necessities.

And we're just seeing a ton. Whether it's foreign governments, you know, wealthy Wall street corporations are all beginning to turn to it. You know, I think now Bill Gates family, they're the largest farmers in the US, right? Like, they have. They're now the largest farmland owners in the US, right?

Theo Von
And that's interesting because he's obviously a guy with a lot of foresight, a guy who's able to kind of envision the next step, obviously, from his past, from his history of being able to, like, acquire companies that are doing that in different realms. You kind of broke this story that this was happening years ago. Yeah, because before this, I mean, before I started working on this, dude, I knew nothing about any of this. Right? Like, I came into a cold turkey and I was asked to look at China's largest meat company, buying the world's largest pork company, which was based in Virginia.

Shopify Representative
And at the time, Congress was kind of freaking out, you know, like, is China buying, you know, our meat supply? And so I was asked to look into it because I had this background and digging into Hong Kong financials, where this meat company was publicly traded. And I went to China. I talked to folks in the US. I talked to people in us intelligence, and it turns out, yeah, the chinese government was behind this purchase.

That's effectively one in four american pigs. And the reason is because the chinese government kind of clued into something before other folks, which is that in the 21st century, food is power. Right. Like, you need to control food to control your political future. And so the chinese government began putting into these five year plans that they put out an effort to go overseas and begin buying up food and water resources so that they could control it.

Theo Von
So it's a strategy that was happening, definitely, right? Yep. And so they want to get the pigs because that's a source of food. Yeah, it's a source of food. And that's a source of, you know, for China, political stability.

Right. If you have food, then the people will eventually follow you. It's like, yeah, you'll do anything to eat. Yes, that's exactly it. And, you know, like, I've now traveled the world.

Shopify Representative
That was, like, the first one that. The first food story that I looked at, you know, and I thought, like, okay, it's a story about food. It's a story about farming, you know? So I was surprised when all, you know, then I'm talking to us intelligence people. Right, right.

And then I'm talking to, like, people in the Defense Department. Right? Like, all of a sudden, food is this, like, big national security. And so as I began traveling the world, I mean, I began going to other countries where those governments were using the food supply to control the population. Right.

And I think that's what people are worried about going forward into the 21st century, is that by controlling the food, you can control the people. Right. They're just thinking, okay, how do we need to control the people next? How do we still have control over people? And they start to look at what could become a scarcity.

Yeah, yeah. And they believe it's food. Yeah, exactly. And so, like, the country I had gone to was Venezuela, and Venezuela at the time was having all these food riots. Right?

Like, people, you'd go and you'd work your nine to five job, and then you'd come home and there'd literally be a 1 mile long line to get into the grocery store. And there's no way you're gonna work, like, a ten hour day and then stand in line all night, right? And then go back. And so, you know, I was talking to these guys that were working class, that had jobs, and they were literally eating out of dumpsters. I saw these dudes eating raw meat, right?

And he's like, I've got a job. He's like, I just can't afford food. And so then I went to this, you know, like, secret location, this warehouse full of food. After watching people, like, starving people, people scraping by, trying to survive without food in Venezuela, I went to this government warehouse full of food on a Sunday when it was supposed to be closed. And who was there?

It was a bunch of venezuelan military and police. The government was opening it up. And these guys, these big buff dudes were wheeling out cart fulls of food that, like, I hadn't seen in, like, my one week there. And they were giving the author, like, the authorities were giving the police and the military, the guys that were knocking down the population food so that they would, of course, continue to control the population. Wow.

Theo Von
But how do you start to see that it becomes a bigger story, though? I mean, it was crazy, man, because I just started seeing these dots, like, these stories that you would see around the world. Like, oh, this country is running low on food, and its people are migrating out. Or this country just bought up half the farmland in Madagascar. When I think Daiwu out of South Korea bought up, made a secret deal for half the farmland in Madagascar.

Shopify Representative
And then the people rise up and overthrow in the countries in civil war. You begin seeing stories, and then you begin being like, oh, my God. All of these seemingly separate stories are all connected as part of this bigger trend. And that's when I began tapping into people who were beginning to follow it in the shadows. The government, the intelligence community, others were beginning to sort of piece this together.

But for my reporting, anyway, it appears that it really was. The chinese government was probably the first to wake up to this, to really tap into it. And there's a reason for that. I mean, the leadership of China went through the great famine, right? Like, Xi Jinping has told stories about living through the great famine, which was the late fifties, when estimates are that, like, man, 37 million people died as a result of starvation in China.

In China. Wow. Yeah. And so when you go through a period where you're looking around and, dude, I've heard, I mean, like, stories, I don't even like, to tell, because they're so awful about what it's like. If you have 37 million people that actually died as a result of starvation, that means you got, like 100 million people that are close.

Right. And people are just, like, doing desperate, crazy things. And so when the leadership of China can remember that, like, they are more keyed in when that trend starts poking up its head, when there are these, you know, when there are these forecasts that things are going to get more and more dire in the future, they moved quickly to begin to sort of control food and water supplies for their population. Right. So they're kind of like, obviously they're a little more sensitive to it, but you notice that they were kind of at the head of the trend.

Theo Von
Yeah, yeah. My father grew up in Nicaragua and he grew up there, like, in the 1910s. And so he would tell me stories about people starving and kids in his village and stuff eating dirt and, like, their stomachs becoming distended. That's right. Literally making dirt, like, people say mud pies and stuff that kids make, like.

But literally making mud pies and eating them, you know, just to, like, be. Able to put something, like, feel like you're putting something in. Yeah. Where in Nicaragua was your dad? He's from Bluefield to Nicaragua.

Shopify Representative
Oh, sure. Out on the coast. Yeah. So I'm not. I know his, some of his family was down there being missionaries and that's how his parents met each other.

Theo Von
But, yeah, he would just tell me stories like that when I was a kid, and it was just. It was unbelievable. I mean, I've even thought, I've been on a fast for a couple days and seen, and this is a little off topic, I guess, but I seen a guy at Best Buy. I had been on a fast for four days. I seen a guy at Best Buy.

Shopify Representative
Yeah. And I was like, I will. I could. I could eat that guy.

Yeah. It wasn't, it was like I'd never had a thought boat like that before. I've been to best buy probably 70 times, and I'd never thought, you know what? I could eat one of these sales attendants or whatever, but it was just in my head. It was like a little bit of that hunger was like, what are we gonna do here if this guy looks the other way?

Yeah, dude. Yeah, I know, man. It's weird. And that's what it comes down to. And that's the thing that, like.

And then people are surprised. They're like, why are all these Venezuelans coming to our border? And you're like, because they're hungry. They've been staring at other people, thinking about eating them. So they're like, maybe it's time to leave.

Theo Von
Yeah. You don't even think that that's one of the reasons why people were coming up. What are some of the other dots you start to connect? Cause I see in the documentary there's, like, land that's bought in Arizona. There's a huge focus on land that's bought in Africa.

What are some of the other dots that you start to connect that really make this in your mind? Like, bring it to a boil? Kind of besides just paranoid Chinese with forethought. Yeah, right. I mean, dude, you're right.

Shopify Representative
It was all over the place. It was like, I began thinking, okay, so if China's focused on this, like, what other wealthy countries are focused on this? And lo and behold, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was one. Right? Because believe it or not, even though it's a desert country, it had these huge underground water reserves, aquifers underneath the desert.

And that's why, like, there are springs flowing to the surface of the desert that are mentioned in the Bible. 2000 whatever years ago and started in, like, the nineties, they began using their oil derricks to tap into that water and actually use that water to grow wheat in the desert. So this, like, wheat country, by the nineties was the world's 6th largest exporter of wheat. Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia.

But, dude, that water doesn't last. Right? And so they drained it. And so, like, those springs that are mentioned from 2000 years ago, they wouldn't dry. Gosh.

And so then it's like, where are they gonna go? And that was, like, the question I had in my head. Okay, so, like, if they drained their water with this program, like, where are they? Yeah, man. That's when I found them in, like, the Arizona desert.

I'm talking, like, saguaro cactuses. Wiley coyote. Like desert. Desert. And they were doing the same thing, pumping up this ancient water that doesn't get replenished from rain.

Cause it's there from, like, the last ice age something. And then they use that water right there to grow alfalfa. And then they ship the alfalfa from Arizona, basically, to Los Angeles, put it on a ship, and then ship that alfalfa, which is hay, all the way back to Saudi Arabia, because that's how you move water. Like, you couldn't fill enough oil tankers full of water to effectively move water. What you do is if your water's short, you use the water, wherever it is to grow the crops.

And then you ship the crops, because we use 70% to 80% of the water, fresh water, around the world. We use it for food. That's what we need fresh water for. Okay, so if one entity shows up in another space and you and grows a crop, really what they're using is water. That's the real resource.

Theo Von
Because they could grow it at home if they had the water. 100%. China doesn't have the water to grow enough food to feed its population. Wow. And even with the pigs, does that come back to water, too, or.

Shopify Representative
No, even more so, because. Right, like, you can grow alfalfa in the Arizona desert, and then you can ship all that alfalfa back to Saudi Arabia. Or, like, in the case of pigs, you can grow all of the grain, right, that the pigs are going to eat here in the US, and then you feed that grain to the pigs, and then you ship the pigs back. And so, like, a pig is an even more concentrated form of water. They call it, like, virtual water is what an economist would call it.

Theo Von
Wow. So, wait, explain that part to me one more time about the pig. Yeah, yeah. So, like, yeah, so you would grow. The grain here with the water here.

Shopify Representative
Yep. And then you would feed the pig here. Yep. And then you slaughter the pig here, and then you send the meat back. Right.

And so now you've used the water to grow the grain here. And animals require a lot of livestock feed, so it takes even more grain than if, like, you were just eating, like, a meat free diet. It takes just more water to eat a meat, meat filled diet. Right, okay. Yeah.

And so then you grow the grains here, you feed it to the pig. The pig craps all over the place. You end up with these, like, giant manure lagoons, which are toxic. Those are here. And you slaughter the pig, and then you ship the meat back.

So you get stuck with the shit, and they get the meat. Wow. And so how does, like, for the example in Arizona, how does that affect, like, Americans? Like, how does that affect us? Totally.

So, like, when I broke that story about the Saudis in the Arizona desert in 2015, the locals didn't know, right? Like, they knew that their groundwater, the water that they relied on for their homes, like, it was getting lower every single year, right? What they didn't know was that some other country had run out of water and had come here to grab that water, right? And so when I broke that story, people are like, yeah, it's like, our water's been going down, and it's just been getting worse. And so what ends up happening to the people here is, like, I talked to people, and they were like, one woman, she was a nurse from California, worked her whole life, wanted to retire somewhere more affordable.

The desert's beautiful, man. It's beautiful out there, right? And so she and her husband get this, like, little, like, ranch, you know, small piece of property, super modest, like, double wide trailer. They drill a well, and now they got water, and they got their lives. They're gonna retire there.

They're gonna, you know, the grandkids can come visit. Well, what happens is these big international farmings move in. They keep drilling deeper and deeper and pumping more and more water up. And pretty soon, these families are going like, dude, I can't pay half a million dollars to drill a well deep enough to find the water that's still there. And so they're at risk of losing, like, everything, like, all their life savings that they put into their homes, right?

Theo Von
Because now their land has been sold out kind of from under them, really. Or their water's been sold out from under them. But isn't there an agency that would protect the homeowners there. Isn't there some sort of. No, I mean, the law is, is that if you.

Shopify Representative
It's different in every region, but in this part of Arizona, if you buy a piece of land, you can pump out as much water as you want. Doesn't matter how it impacts your neighbor. Wow. Yeah. So, like, if you're, you know, a multibillion dollar corporation, you can go in there and buy up land, put in the deepest well, and just suck out as much water as you want.

And, you know, the folks living modestly around you, their water goes away. And that's just tough, you know, that's how the law is written, right? Yeah. It says right here, according to United Nations World Water Development Report 2024, 2.2 billion people will still lack access to safe drinking water, and 3.5 billion will not have access to safe sanitation by 2024. But that's about drinking water, I think.

Theo Von
Cause drinking water. Is it the same as water for that you're talking about? Well, like, if you're pumping water to grow crops, you're eventually gonna. You could have the potential of taking away somebody's drinking water. And that's what I see.

Shopify Representative
Right. But when it turns to, like, quantity, like, what we're actually using water for. Cause people will say this to me, like, oh, nestle bought up this aquifer. They're gonna bottle it. They're gonna use it up.

And I'm like, okay, but put it in perspective. One 10th of 1%. One 10th of 1% of the fresh water we use is for drinking. 70% to 80% is for growing crops. Wow.

Right. And so when you're talking about somebody tapping an aquifer to bottle water, like, one 10th of 1% is how much we, as humans drink. It's nothing. It's nothing. We're pumping water out of aquifers for, at, like, huge, huge rates.

Huge amounts is to grow food. Right? Yeah. And so these are. And, like.

And if, you know, like, if it were just drinking water, that was an issue. There are ways to move around enough water to get everyone drinking water in theory. Right. But when you start talking about food, that's when you're talking about, like, what people really need to move water, and they really need water for. Is for food.

Theo Von
Yeah. So drinking water, we can we have enough water for that? Pretty much, man. I mean, like, the vast amount of water like, you use as an individual is the food you put into your body and not the water that you drink. Got it.

Shopify Representative
Like, vast. Understood. Yeah. So, okay, so you start to connect some of these dots. You see the.

Theo Von
The issue in Arizona from Saudi Arabia. Are there other things like that happening around America, or is that just kind of a one off? No, no, it's happening around America. Right? Like, it's going through this pretty big transitionary period where, like, I think, like, and maybe, you know, you and I are roughly the same age.

Shopify Representative
I think, like, a lot of people still kind of have this view of, like, farmers as, like, you know, Willie Nelson's farm aid. Right? Like, small, medium sized farmers. Like, both of my family were all farmers in Minnesota and Iowa. My dad grew up barefoot on a farm.

We kind of envision it as these smaller farms, but increasingly what they are, are these really large farms increasingly owned by Wall street pension funds or foreign governments or foreign corporations? That's been the trend line is that these smaller farmers, these medium sized farmers, are getting bought out by bigger and bigger conglomerates. And so, like, we're in this transitionary period in the US as to, like, how food is getting made. I see. And so not getting made by smaller farmers, but getting made by larger corporations that could have other interests in the farm as just a pass or just a placeholder.

That's it. It's another profit mechanism. Because if you're a country and you're like, we need to buy up food and water resources to make sure our people get fed and that they don't overthrow us, if you're Wall street. And you're looking at that, you're like, oh, if there is a crunch on food in the future, food prices are going to go up. And if food prices go up, that's a profit margin.

I've read these reports put out by some of the biggest investment banks, and they're just saying, water is the new oil. Food's the new gold of the 21st century. This is where things are going to happen. He says right here. As of December 31, 2022, foreign entities owned about 43.4 million acres of us agricultural land and forests, which is about 3.4% of all agricultural land and almost 2% of all us farmland.

Theo Von
I wonder if it's grown since then. Well, there's two things about that is. Because that doesn't seem like that much. No, it's a trendline. But the other thing was, as I pulled all of that data, and when there's an old law in the books that says if you're a foreign company, you need to register, if you're going to buy us farmland, some states just ban it outright.

Shopify Representative
But I looked and I was like, I know that this farm is owned by a foreign corporation, and it wasn't in the database. Yeah. And so the government wasn't really following up and making sure. And so I have. Great.

Those numbers, to me, come with a huge asterisk, which is like, it requires them to report it. Not everyone's reporting it, and the government doesn't seem to be following up to make sure. Right. Understood. Yeah.

And then the other thing is you have huge amounts of foreign wealth that are then put into intermediaries like Blackrock or something. Right. Like these huge asset management. What does Blackrock got? $9 trillion that they manage.

And so you'll have a sovereign wealth fund from another country that'll put money there. And then, so then Blackrock or some subsidiary of Blackrock, or subsidiary of a subsidiary of Blackrock, might own the land, but the financial backing is a foreign government. I see. So just like, a lot of loopholes and, like, hidden llcs, that sort of thing. Yeah.

Theo Von
Well, how much of the land in America can be used? And even on the planet, if, you know, it can be used to grow crops. Oh, that's interesting, man. I don't know how much of the land. I mean, like, what you see in the Arizona desert, it's like, it's desert, but if you pump up the water, then you can grow alfalfa.

Shopify Representative
Right. And so it kind of comes down to, like, do you have the water there to do it. What we know is what they'll say is that, like, some huge percent, 40 or 70%, I can't remember off the top of my head, some huge percent of the world's remaining available farmland is in Africa, right? And so that's why there's this huge push now for corporations to go down and to try to grab up land in Africa, because now they'll say, oh, Africa's gonna feed the world. Africa is gonna feed the world.

Theo Von
But I'm not saying no, but I remember 20 years ago when we were having to do. They had the. Wasn't there the annual music every year to feed Africa? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shopify Representative
And again, man, the problem with that thing is, so then I went to Africa. I was like, okay, so where's all of this vacant land? And it wasn't vacant, man. People had ancestrally been living on that land, and they'd been farming for their needs, for their families, right? And what had happened was these huge international corporations had come in and just moved people off.

And so I was visiting these places where people were literally dying, having had their land taken from them by one of these international corporations that then could ship the food to a wealthier country, whether that was Europe, China, or Saudi Arabia. They were literally had their land taken from them. Everything taken from them. And you saw it firsthand? I saw it firsthand, yeah.

Theo Von
There's a really tough part in the documentary where there's a woman crying, really breaking down because of the fear of losing their land. She was really having a tough time with it, you know, that was pretty hard to watch. Yeah. I mean, that stuff's a downer. And what's, you know, and when I showed the film to people there that are fighting back against this, what they didn't see is that it's part of this, like, giant international trend, right?

Shopify Representative
Like, it really is where you've got, like, again, like, intelligence communities, governments all kind of behind this big push and this big movement, right? And like you said, it's like when you don't have access to water because somebody upstream, let's say, has dammed the river to grow food, and now you don't even have drinking water. Oftentimes the thing that's going to get you is your body begins to just slowly get sicker and sicker from not having food or good water. You just. You pick up a parasite, you pick up a disease, your body just becomes way more vulnerable, you know?

Theo Von
Yeah. Oh, you even. Yeah. You pet a strong shrimp and you could be done, you know? I mean, a lot of things could happen.

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Don't blend in with the crowd. Stand out with chubbys. So in Africa, it's even more prevalent, you're saying. Yeah, and I think what I think, you know, it does seem to be. I talked to a bunch of african investigative journalists at this thing in DC and they saw the documentary and they came up after and they're like, dude, I've been seeing this in my country.

Shopify Representative
I didn't realize it was part of this, like, giant international trend, right? Like, it's all sort of tied in. And that's how that was. Like, the same revelation that I had as I started digging in deeper and deeper was just how interconnected these things are. Right?

Because, like, you know, when you say. That, like, yeah, what do you mean when you say that? Well, I just mean, like, I think the dude was from Sierra Leone, and he was talking about a big rice farm that had come in and plowed down the forest and moved people off their land. And then they were exporting the rice to wherever, a wealthier country. And he's like, how do I contextualize that?

It's obviously an injustice, right? Their ancestral land has been taken from them, but where does that fit in? And you see, oh, it fits in that people in Arizona are basically dealing with the same thing. Maybe not to the same degree, but all of a sudden they're finding what was once theirs being taken by somebody else. I see.

And I think. And so that's what I mean, it's just like, there is this big low push. And yes, I do think it's probably happening. And these kind of numbers are super hard to get. And this is the only reason I hesitate.

Anecdotally, I would say, yeah, it appears to be happening most prevalently in Africa, but, like, getting any good numbers on that? Like, nobody. The un, they're not going out and nobody's going out and, like, documenting every single instance. So as a journalist, I always hesitate. Right.

So, like, in the documentary, you've seen it.

Just to give you a sense of what we go through. I took every single fact that's mentioned in that documentary, and I put it into a spreadsheet. And then me and a woman who's now a fact checker at the New Yorker, we went through every single fact that's in there. And then we put three sources making sure it was true. And then we hired an outside fact checker to fact check our fact check, you know?

And so, like, I always. And that's, like, that's the value to me of good investigative journalism is like, we're going to put in that extra effort so that everything is documented. And so I love this format because this is how, when I'm hanging out with friends, this is how we talk, right? And we're sharing knowledge. And as humans, we sit around the campfire.

This is how we've been telling stories, and I love stories, but I'm always a little hesitant because I'm like, I don't got a fact checker behind me to whisper in my ear, like, oh, Nate, you screwed that fact up. And she doesn't have a fact checker behind her to be like, oh, no, you screwed up the fact check. I need to fact check, you know? Right. So, yeah, you're just having a.

Theo Von
Yeah, you're just doing your best. Yeah. You know, but you obviously spent a lot of time investigating it. Yeah, yeah. And what, at what point do you start to go down a trail with investigative journalism where you're like, I've already gone too far.

I have to fluff this thing up to at least make it hold the value of the weight that I've already put into with my time? Is that a weird question? Well, I think. Or does that ever happen? You know?

Shopify Representative
Well, you made me laugh when you said fluff.

Theo Von
Do you ever get going on a story? Yes. And you abandon it? Yes. And you're like, there's not enough here.

Even if you spend a long time. Yeah, what often happens, man, is you'll be like, huh? This is what happens to me. I'm like, huh? I'm curious about that.

Shopify Representative
Right? And then I'll start, like, digging into that. And that thing that I started digging into. I'll be like, oh, no, actually, that makes sense. I don't think the world needs to know more about that.

I don't think it's going to make anyone's lives better. I don't think it's going to change anyone's perception on how they interact with the world. But as I was doing that, I started seeing this other thing. Then I start looking into that other thing, and I'm like, well, that is pretty interesting. But in the process of looking into that, then I'm like, holy shit, look at that thing over there.

Then I'm moving in. These things are, sometimes they can be totally unrelated. Oftentimes they're somewhat related. And then it's that thing that I end up really going after. Right.

And so I would never. I don't want to waste my time. I don't want to waste your time. And I don't want to do an injustice to a story by being like, well, I spent time on looking into a, and now I have to do something on a because oftentimes it's just a slowly shifts into b, and the next thing I know, I'm like, dude, I think people need to, would want to know about C, right? Like, I think people should take a little break from their lives, and lives are tough.

Lives are complicated. We've all got so much going on. I want to, like, you know, I want to honor people's time, but I'm like, but I think C is probably worth their time, right? Yeah. What parts of this, as you went through this, did it start to, like, be like, okay, this is something that makes me realize I have to keep going here.

Oh, I. You know, with this one, I think it was. It was kind of early on, because, again, man, it's like, when. When. You know, before this, I'd been doing organized crime, and now I'm doing food, and I was asked to do it, and I'm like, okay, it's a food story.

You know? Like, it's not gonna blow my mind. It's like Papa John almost his story. Yeah, dude. And I was just like.

But then all of a sudden, I'm like, wait a minute. You're an intelligence officer for the CIA, or you were. And you're, like, telling me x, y, and z, like, that's pretty interesting. Well, let me go talk to somebody else to try to corroborate that or get, like, another hot take on it, you know? And it just kept building, and I'm like.

And then I started seeing the stakes, right? But the number of people that it was going to impact, and we're talking about, like, billions, you know, like, we're talking about, you know, when you have Wall street saying this is gonna be the biggest trajectory, when you have the World Economic Forum saying, this is one of the top five existential threats to our species, you start going, like, food and water, you know, and you're like, this is probably worth my time and a lot of sleepless nights. At some point, you just realized, I. Just think, this is this story. This is what.

So can I tell you? Like, so we made a film, right? And I'm super lucky. Cause I worked with this amazing director, Gabriella Cowperthwaite, you know, and she knows how to tell an amazing story. The grab.

Theo Von
The documentary. Yeah, she made this thing like an international ripper, right? But when we're going out and we're pitching it to the studios, they're all like, well, what do you want to come of this? And I wanted. I wanted what I wanted to happen.

Shopify Representative
When people see this documentary is the same thing that happened to me when I started working on this stuff. It shifted my perception of how I see the world. Like, I fundamentally see the world differently now, having worked on this story, and so I wanted people to have access to that same information, because I think when you begin to. When you see this, and I don't know if this was your experience or not, but when you see it, you're like, oh, shit. Like, food isn't just food.

Food has become, like, a weapon. Food has become, like, a power tool for governments to control people in other countries. Like, it becomes way bigger. Like, how? Yeah, how would we see that start to show up in our daily lives?

Food prices, right? Go to the grocery store. Right? I mean, do you remember during COVID when they were like, oh, everybody can stay at home except people that work in slaughterhouses. We got to get everybody that works in slaughterhouses back because we're really worried that there's not going to be meat on the shelves.

Well, dude, as I recall, during that time, pork exports to China increased. So the executives of these big meat companies are like, oh, we got to get everybody back. We're worried about getting meat. And then they were shipping more meat to China. Well, it might have even been their farms.

Well, yeah, they own. They own this company that's in China. That was this deal that was backed by the chinese government. They control one in four american pigs. Wow.

Yeah. Can you bring up that article that we're talking about, if you can? On April 28, 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order invoking the Defense Production act to keep meatpacking plants open. The executive order exempted plants from state and local orders to close non essential businesses, but did not solve plants problems with sick workers. Wow.

Theo Von
It's interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's just interesting because people are going to need to eat. People are going to need meat. You're going to need people to be able to continue to eat, or they're going to freak out. So even if they're stuck at home, as long as they can get a burger, then they're going to keep going till their next burger.

Shopify Representative
You're right, though. I mean, you kind of, like, put your finger on it, man. It's like, food is that one thing that people want to keep going, right? Like the chinese government, everybody. And that's what takes you to the Arab Spring, right?

Like when you saw all of these middle eastern governments getting toppled, right? Like the Arab Spring, it was like. What do you mean, the Arab Spring? Arab Spring was, like, a little over ten years ago now. And it was that period where you just saw civil wars breaking out across, like, North Africa and the Middle east.

And those things never happen. It's just like one single issue they're, like, super complex. People don't like their leaders. They don't feel like they have hope. But increasingly, the thing that the intelligence community is saying is driving those issues is food prices.

You were talking about food prices here, where we were talking about food prices here in the grocery store. But Americans, man, we only spend about 7% of our income on food. On groceries. Other countries, they spend like 50%. So whatever they're making, like, half their paycheck is going to food.

And so when food prices go up for us, it's only going up on, like, 7% of what we're spending on. Right, right. So it's not hitting us overall as much. Exactly. Why do they spend so much on food?

Because, I mean, we're just a wealthy nation, you know, and so we have bigger incomes. Oh, I see. So we have larger income. Yeah. So, obviously.

Theo Von
Obviously, yeah. If you're making $100 a day, then that's just $7 a day. Where if you're making $100, if you're making $10 a day, that's it. Then $7 is 70% of your income. A lot of people, we're buying food that's finished.

Shopify Representative
We're buying processed food. We're buying things. You can open a package and eat. But a lot of people in these other countries, they're just buying commodities like grain and they're baking their own bread. So when those prices basically double, all of a sudden those people are seeing 50% of their income almost eat up their entire income, and they can't feed themselves, they can't feed their kids.

And I think that's what it comes down to. Right. So in the Arab Spring, there was a ton of that. There was a ton of that. Food prices shot up, they went to historic highs, and that sustained.

And people started taking to the streets. Right. Whole grievance issues. But this was a big one, and you saw it move just across these countries. Yeah.

Theo Von
And how was it alleviated? How did they, like, what kind of catharsis did they get into? Is catharsis the right word or. No, a lot of them just took out their leaders. Oh, yeah.

Egypt overthrew their leader, didn't they? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And so you just saw. Yeah.

Shopify Representative
So you saw, like, man, you saw. And this is the thing about the 21st century is like, that was probably the first blip that we saw like that. And the forecast is for an increasing number of those. And when countries fall apart because of civil wars, oftentimes their people then migrate out. Right.

And then they put pressure on the countries around them because now they've got to feed more people because now you've got a failed nation next to you. And it became almost like. Almost like a domino effect. Wow. Yeah.

Theo Von
And are the forecasts saying that there is going to be, like, less water, that there's going to be less food? Like, where are we getting those forecasts from? Yeah. So we could pull something up, but it's like 70% of the world's population or some number is going to be living in some form of water scarcity by, like, 2050. It's like a huge number.

Shopify Representative
Right, of people that are dealing with water shortages. And again, like, usually you can eke out enough water for your drinking water, but can you, do you have enough water to grow the foods you need to eat or for somebody else to grow the foods you need to eat? And so, and then the other thing we're looking at, it's like some places are going to have, you know, people are going to have droughts, of course, but then some places are going to have flood floods, and too much water can have the same impact as not enough water. Right. Like, we just saw this in Pakistan where, like, their crop was wiped out by these massive floods that just kill off the crops.

Theo Von
Yeah. I used to work on a soybean and corn and cotton farm for a couple years, and it was amazing how, like, water was just, I mean, you would stand around and talk about it. You would go look at a radar, you'd ask somebody if they'd seen any water. Totally. It was just crazy.

It was unbelievable how that was the biggest thing. Yeah, that was the biggest thing. It was like, is it going to rain? Is it not? How are you going to manage your crops if it doesn't?

And then how are you going to get subsidized by the government if it doesn't happen at all? Yeah, that's right. And what happens is, in those countries that are dealing with all these economic hardships, these dictatorial leaders weren't subsidizing the farmers. Right. And what's worse is they were given, like, their buddies access to whatever better.

Shopify Representative
And so this is what you see. In cities in Venezuela when you say you open the. And you see that the people who are going to maintain the status quo of keeping starving people at bay or getting full groceries. Yes. That's crazy how quick you will become the Gestapo in that moment.

Yeah, yeah. Food becomes the ultimate currency. Yeah. What else were you gonna say? I interrupted you.

Well, I was gonna say something similar in Syria, where a drought hits Syria and all these farmers are losing their crops, people are having to move into the cities, food prices are going up. And rather than being like, okay, the government being like, okay, we need to make sure everyone's taken care of. From what I've read was an, in Syria at the time, but it was like Bashir was just giving subsidies to his buddies. And then you're building up. You're just building up a lot of anger and you can't feed your kids.

And this is what the. When I talk to people that are in these intelligence community, this is the thing they say. It's not when this. And this sounds shitty, but this is what they say. It's not when the lowest income, the people that are the poorest can't eat that you see a country topple.

Because unfortunately, those people have already adjusted their mental mindset to just being shit on. Yeah. It's when the middle class can eat people that are used to being comfortable. People with Honda Accords. Yes.

And then when they can't afford to eat and when they're. They're having to tell their kids, sorry, we can't eat today, we gotta wait till tomorrow. Right. Those people take to the streets. Fuck, yeah.

Yeah. And then they overthrow governments, you know, and sometimes the government turns out better, and sometimes the government turns out worse, and people live in violence and bloodshed for years, you know, so it's. Yeah. And this is kind of the trend line that. That we're seeing.

Theo Von
And you believe it's an overall trend. After all your research and all your digging, you believe that it's an overall trend that's gonna continue? It's totally. It's. I think personally, I think it's solvable.

Okay. Right. I think it's solvable, but it is. It is the trend line that we are on that, like, if we don't get into another lane of traffic, this is the direction that this road is heading. Got it.

Shopify Representative
And this is straight up from, like, the. The us government. I keep saying intelligence community. Right. But there is the ODNi, the office of director of National Intelligence that oversees the CIA, the DIA, the NIC, all of these intelligence agencies.

And the highest level work product they do is something called a national intelligence estimate. And they did a national intelligence estimate on water in the year 2012. So basically they came out and the guy who was spearheading, and this is like the highest level work product, the intelligence. Us intelligence community does said business as usual, you know, is going to be a catastrophe. Right.

Theo Von
That was their prediction. Basically, yeah. And they lay out solutions. Like, we can move things. Right.

Shopify Representative
But, you know, it has. That's going to have to happen on an international level. And, like, we look at our domestic politics and we're like, there's a mess. And you look at international politics and you're like, there's a real mess. So, you know, we all going to keep doing what we can and we got to keep live in.

But, like. But still, this is. I mean, having foresight is super important, especially in a time where it's like, we don't even. There's so much artificial sight that you don't know what is foresight anymore. You know, there's so much manipulation.

Theo Von
You just. It's so hard to know what's real. On March 22, 2012, the National Intelligence Council, which you're saying is a conglomerate of all of those. The nick exists underneath the odds. Okay, yeah.

Shopify Representative
Odni, but yeah. Released the unclassified report, the intelligence community assessment on global water security. The report concludes that several regions of the world, such as North Africa, the Middle east, and South Asia, will face major challenges coping with water problems. And that during the next ten years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems that will increase the risk of instability and state failure, exacerbate regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States. Unemployment, important policy objectives.

Theo Von
Yeah, I guess how you barter and trade and deal with things is going to become a lot different. Wow, you mentioned Africa, and you guys go into a lot in the doc.

Why does Africa always get screwed? I mean, since the beginning of time, whether it's the British coming in or a foreign entity coming in and enslaving or claiming, whether it's them enslaving each other, whether it's the tribes that just can't get along, whether it's a government that starts up and then sells out, like, why do they have so much trauma there? Yeah, man, it's a good question. And, you know, I always try to operate from, like, a place of historically informed journalism, right. Because some of these trend lines are massive.

Shopify Representative
And, you know, what we saw was that western Europe for some centuries just had this intense power as they sort of globalized the world. And Africa had a lot of resources that they wanted, and they went in there and they grabbed them, and they created artificial boundaries and borders around, you know, that suited western Europe. Like, Africa got carved up into territories that suited Western Europe and their treaties so that they wouldn't fight with each other in Europe. Right. And that wasn't always the boundaries of the governments and the nations that had lived there.

And you go back even farther than when Western Europe was sort of the international dominant player, right? You look at Genghis Khan, right? Genghis Khan, born in the central steeps of Asia, the dude became a slave, then went from being a slave to controlling, like, the entire mongolian empire. Then they went into China, and they took over China. Then he pushes east and starts taking over eastern Europe, and then he drives down into southern Asia.

You know, the Middle east. Dude controlled the largest empire of any human in history, right? And when he. This is the thing. And I'm getting a lot of this.

Yeah, totally. Denver nuggets. It's like the kind of. In one person. Yeah, man.

Theo Von
But go on. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. And he gets to Europe at that time. And I'm getting this from this guy, Jack Weatherford's book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the modern world.

Shopify Representative
He's a historian in Minnesota somewhere, at one of those colleges. And when Genghis Khan gets to Europe, he's looking around, he's like, these people are too dumb and too poor for me to bother conquering. They didn't even have pants at that point. Pants are an asian invention, right? Like, pants came from Asia.

At that time, in Europe, people were just wearing cloaks. Like, they didn't even have pants yet. They didn't. You know that gunpowder came from China. Movable type from China.

And so Genghis Khan gets to Europe, and he's like, these people are too dumb, too poor and too ignorant. And he just drove south into the Middle east where people were doing, like, algebra and advanced math and, like, had all of this technology, right? And then that set up these trading routes. And those trading routes connected some of these. These great advanced technologies from the Middle east and from Asia, and they started working their way into Europe.

And then, boom, Europe has the renaissance. And boom, the renaissance blows up into the industrial revolution. And then that industrial revolution. Now you have, like, the pope carving up the entire world between Spain and Portugal. Like, Portugal gets one half, Spain gets the other half, and then they're going down and they're carving up Africa, right?

And then you. You just. You get to where we are today, which is that, you know, Africa never. Had a strong say. Yeah.

Yeah. In how they were and what went on. Yeah. In the last few centuries, what things. Did you notice when you started to explore some of the stuff happening in Africa?

Issues in what sense? Like, I guess, like, the ownership, like, who was doing the, like you say, land getting bought up that had ancestral value. Of course. Who was doing that? Like, who was, is it hard to know who was doing it?

Well, oftentimes it's really hard to trace back who's doing it because you can be like this rush. It can just be these layers of llcs. And who ultimately is behind this llc can be really tough. Like, I can go there and be like, okay, so this is the white south african dude or white zimbabwean dude who now is in, like, Zambia, and he's, you know, moved people off their historic ancestral land, and he's doing this super modern farming. And these other people that had been there, the families have been there for centuries, are now dying because they don't have access to even enough drinking water, much less enough water to grow food.

I can see that. But then I look at the property ownership, and it's just a jumble of llcs, and that can be pretty tough. But in the film, one of the things we, we got this trove of information, documents, we see that in some cases it's the leaders of foreign governments that are paying essentially mercenaries to go in and gobble up these resources. One of the ways they do it and these emails that we get, we see, they just talk about giving gifts to the chief, essentially bribes is how I'd interpret that. And what is a mercenary?

Theo Von
Just so everybody knows. Well, a mercenary is effectively somebody who can provide military logistics on behalf of another government. Okay, so, like, how would I use a mercenary? Well, you could use a mercenary to. Go into, are they good guys or bad guys?

Shopify Representative
They can be. This is interesting. You brought up Rwanda just a minute ago, and I'm trying to remember the name of the actress that was gonna hire a mercenary outfit to go in. Like when no one on the international level was stopping the rwandan genocide. This Hollywood actress wanted to hire a mercenary group to try to go in and stop it.

Right? So she was using it potentially. Like, she thought of using it as this force of good. But so there are these examples of people wanting to use these types of groups to quell violence, to bring stability, to move food into areas that are being controlled by warlords. Sometimes people make an argument that you need to meet force with force to do good.

Then you also see them being used by corporations to make deals with warlords, to extract resources. Those tend to have a more deleterious or make life shittier for the people who live there. Did you see some of that? Like, what were some of the things that you saw, like, people struggling with? Oh, dude, just feeding themselves, having shelter, you know, like, super basic stuff.

Super basic stuff. And it sucks. It sucks to see that stuff. I don't want to see that stuff, you know, and then I got to carry it home, you know? And then, you know, it's like, it's that thing they always say, like, you see these people who have done nothing wrong, who are just, like, struggling to survive.

Theo Von
Yeah. You know, and I go in there as essentially, like, a storyteller, and I'm like, you know, and they're like, dude, like, we need food. We need water. And you're like, well, you know, like, what can I, what can I do? That's not my role.

Shopify Representative
My role is to tell people about what's happening to you. And then I fly back to San Francisco, and I turn on the faucet. I can drink fresh water, you know, and you're like, you know, so these are the, these are, these are some of the challenges of going in. And anyways, I went off a little bit, but, like, yeah, I've seen this, you know, and, like, there's, you know, there are stories I've heard and there are things that I've seen that, you know, like, I wish didn't happen to people, and then I wish that I didn't have to experience firsthand, you know? Do you feel like we're doing the same thing in other countries, though?

The us government or, like, us corporations? Yeah. Like, are we doing the same thing that's happening here in other places? For sure. For sure, yeah.

Theo Von
So is it all just even out? Well, no. I mean, I would say that if you're like, if you're looking at it like, oh, China's a bad guy or the Saudis are the bad guys, but the US is okay. It evens out in that sense. We have massive corporations that are going in and are contributing, I think, to this pattern of people who are living on land, losing their land, or people whose water supplies are being taken from them.

Shopify Representative
And it's destabilizing the world is the short of it. And then you end up with a destabilized world, and you end up with mass migration and you end up with countries being like, we don't want any more immigrants. And you're like, yeah, but they left because they were hungry. And like, why were they hungry? Like, what was happening to them?

Right. And so you, right, you're not getting just immigrants. You're getting starving in some cases. Increasingly, that is the case. Like, at one point, the State Department said the number one reason people were leaving Guatemala was because they were hungry.

And think about Guatemala, man. Like think about that region of the world. What have they given us? Avocados, chocolate? I think tomatoes come from that region, right?

Theo Von
Yeah, like that thing called when you go under the stick or whatever. Under the stick. The limbata or whatever. I don't know that. The limbo.

Limbo. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like those countries have given us so much food. Like, how is it possible that a country that is the source of so many, like, you think of tomatoes, you're like, oh, Italians must have invented, right? You're like, no, man, that came from the Americas.

Shopify Representative
Potatoes came from the Americas. Chocolate came from the Americas. Avocados came from the Americas. Right? And how do you have now a region like that where half of the children are stunted because theyre not getting enough calories or nutrition, right.

And so like people are leaving Guatemala because theres not enough food. And thats crazy because this place is growing plenty of food. So whats happening to the food? Its just being exported, exported to wealthier countries. So do you think that some of the reason for Chinas low water supply is because of us?

No, I don't think that's the case with China. I think China's a really interesting example. Right, because we manufacture a ton over there. Yeah, yeah, totally. No, China is an interesting case.

Right, man? Because this is like, I don't think this is well enough known, but one of the greatest achievements, in my opinion, of the 20th century was what China accomplished, and that was pulling 400 million people out of poverty in like three decades, right? Like you'll hear people talking about all of the great achievements of our species over the last, whatever, 50 years, and they'll be like, you know, we've reduced, we reduced poverty and hunger by this much. 80% of poverty reduction. As I understand it, 70 or 80% of poverty reduction in the world is what China accomplished.

One country, 400 million people, they pulled out of out of poverty in like two or three decades. Gosh, they now have the world's largest middle class, right? I think their middle class might be bigger than the entire population of the US. The challenge there, man, is that they want to eat diets more like our diet, right? Like in the 1980s, you basically had a country full of vegetarians because they couldn't afford meat.

Now you have the world's largest middle class and they want to eat more meat, right? They want sausage patties. Yeah, exactly, man. And to have meat, you have to grow more grains, more feeds for the animals. It's kind of an inefficient way to develop a calorie.

And they don't have enough water to grow enough grains to be able to feed all of the animals that the people want to eat. Right. So they're doing it over here. They're doing it over here. They're doing it in Brazil.

They're doing it across the world. Oh, so they're doing it in a lot of places. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Probably this might even be one of the fewer places. It's just that the US is an agricultural superpower. We are one of the largest exporters of food in the world. And this then takes you to, who are the other ones? And you're like, well, it turns out now Russia is.

And that's not by accident. Putin has built the country up over the last 15 years to be a food superpower. Right? And then you're like, well, huh. So if Russia is becoming a food superpower, what does that tell me about, you know, the Ukraine war?

Because you know, what Ukraine's been known for, man? Ukraine is the breadbasket wheat of Europe. Yeah. It has for, you know, for centuries been considered the breadbasket of Europe. And when the Nazis, they invaded Poland, but what do they do right after that?

The first place they invade, when they. Go into the stop over to Ukraine for a little bit of bread. Exactly. And Hitler said it, we need to control food to keep our soldiers fed. And people don't realize, but the Nazis had what they called the hunger plan.

And by controlling Ukraine, they intended, according to these little known documents that historians have unearthed from the Nazis, they intended to starve 30 million people to death by controlling Ukraine. And if you're the leader of, like, Russia and you're trying to build a food superpower, and just below you is the most fertile soil. Right. And that country was deeply aligned to your country until, like, 2010. Right.

And now all of a sudden, it's moving its way to the west. Right. It was thinking about going into NATO, right? Yes. Ukraine was.

Yeah. And moving in closer to Europe. And that food supply, you know? And so that historically, that food supply has been used as a weapon against Russia. Right.

It's been used as a weapon against others. Right. It's a huge strategic asset. It's Ukraine's biggest strategic asset. And so you think that that basically for water is one of the reasons why we're.

Theo Von
Why that war has gone on. I think all of these things have many facets and are super complicated. But when you're saying, what is Ukraine's strategic importance? And it's food production of food. And you see Putin saying, like, in the film, because I went to Russia, in the film, I go to Russia, and we sit down with the largest.

Shopify Representative
The CEO of Russia's biggest beef company. He says, yeah, Putin came to me. He said, whatever you guys need, because food and water are going to give us more strategic power in the future than all of our weapons and oil does. Right? Yeah.

Theo Von
I mean, some of my fattest friends have the most guns, too, to be honest with you. Cause they want to keep eating. I think they just, you know, if you're fat and happy, you'll start shooting, I feel like. And if you're not happy, you'll start shooting. So it's really kind of a.

Yeah, right. The circles meet in the back. Yeah. It's like, on this end, it's kind of fireworks, like. But on this end, it's like I need to survive.

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Shopify Representative
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Theo Von
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Shopify Representative
And so I just think you start seeing, like, a bigger picture, you know? Like, you start seeing how these things interplay with each other. Yeah, no, look, that's what I mean. Yeah, that's. Cause I was watching the documentary.

Theo Von
I was like, well, is this just kind of fear? Is this creating fear? And then that's why I wanted to get to talk to you. I was like, I was just. I was like, is Nate, like, just creating fear here?

Is the director, or is this just a trend that they're seeing and is this, like, something that they really believe in and notice? Yeah, dude, that's a great question. Thanks for that. Cause it is like, it doesn't do anybody any good to just be afraid, right? Just to, like, stress people out, bum people out.

Shopify Representative
But no, I mean, I think fundamentally, when the landscape is shifting in front of us and the most powerful people are shifting with that landscape, I'm a big advocate of the everyday guy, and I'm like, dude, we got to empower ourselves with that same information. We have to know how this thing is shifting, because otherwise, those people in Arizona, they just see this big farm come in and they're like, well, okay. What they don't know is that it's part of this big international trend and they're coming for the water. Right. They don't know that their own government is allowing that, which in some ways are nice things that America does allows, you know, and that we've also.

Theo Von
We've done a ton of, like, of open handedness, you know? But there does become a point where, yeah. If it gets back to survival, that you're gonna change your tune. Yeah. And America, I don't know if you'll do it as a country, but you as an individual, you won't have a choice but to do it.

Right. I think for some people, yeah. Food prices will probably continue to climb. Right. And people are going to have to make, like, real lifestyle decisions based on that.

Shopify Representative
You know, we'll probably see food potentially becoming a bigger and bigger percentage of our, like, take home incomes, you know, potentially, you know, like, that's the trendline especially. Yeah. So I think, you know, I think. I just think information is power. And what I'll tell you is that the most powerful have access to better information today.

I think the disparity of information between the powerful and the everyday person has just grown. Like, we always talk about income disparity, and it's a real thing. Totally. I get it. But information disparity, man, it might even be worse.

Theo Von
100% even. Just to go to accredited news sources online on the information, you have to pay for it. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Even to get what used to be just a newspaper. Right. Yeah. You have to pay for that information. So whether you even believe it, it's gonna be true or not, to have information that's even kind of sourced.

Shopify Representative
Yeah. You know, that's put together, that's formatted, that's not done by AI. You're having to pay for that. Yeah. And I hope that we get back to more of that, man, because that's how it used to be when we were kids.

Right. You'd pay of a newspaper subscription. Right. I think people decided they couldn't trust the news anymore. I think a lot of that has occurred in the past ten years, for sure.

Theo Von
I think I feel like the news, every time I turn it on, I feel like it is. There's some lobbyist behind it. There's some, you know, I mean, people say big pharm all the time, but we have so many drug ads on our television. It's like, you know, it just feels. I wouldn't be surprised if it's compromised.

That's what it feels like. The news industry is in a tailspin, man. I'll give you my two cent for what it's worth, because I've been a journalist now for, like, 25 years. Some insane amount of time. I can't believe that.

Shopify Representative
But when I started as a daily newspaper reporter, we had a nice, big staff, man. We had librarians on staff, we had researchers on staff. We had photographers, a sports desk, a business desk. And I think. I don't know, man.

Was it like, there's, like, a third as many journalists as there used to be, right? Like, if there's fewer people doing anything, it's gonna be a shittier job. You're gonna get a crappier product, right? And so. And the trend line that gutted journalism wasn't initially that, because I totally agree.

All the stats say what you're saying. People don't trust the news like they used to. But it wasn't. The trend line wasn't that people stopped subscribing. What happened was, is that newspapers used to make huge profits from things like classified ads, right?

Like, we used to read the classified ads in the back, right? You could meet a woman or even adopt a pet, get a new bmx. Bike or, like, a dirt bike, like, a new car. It was all back there, right? And that stuff, man, that subsidized the journalists.

And so, of course, that went away. And that was like a lion's share of the profits, right? Craigslist kind of killed that in time. Totally. And it's fine.

The technology's gonna do. And the newspapers didn't react in time. They lost this big thing. And so you just started seeing the industry shrinking and shrinking. And now the layoffs in the last two years have just been brutal.

But the problem there is, man, is I could quit journalism, and I could go become a private researcher doing the exact same thing I'm doing now as an investigative journalist. But instead of giving it to the public, I would be giving it to hedge funds. I'd be giving it to super wealthy people that would literally. I'm not shitting. You would pay me four to five times what I'm getting paid now, right?

And that's actually what's happening, right? And so, like, you have the public who is increasingly just getting not as good much information, especially if you're in, like, a local news market, right? Like, you're not getting information. People aren't paying for it. There are fewer journalists, and then the wealthiest are paying for it still.

And they're getting incredibly in depth information. Right. And now you're starting to see privatized spaces have the journalists almost on their side, working for them to give them information that better helps them to market to the everyday person. Yeah. And I wouldn't say call that person a journalist, but that same, like deep research or investigative project, especially in tech, man.

Theo Von
Well, I think it's like, you know, they had, even if you look at the case of the opioid epidemic, right? And there was a documentary, there was a television show. I can't remember the name of it all. The beauty and the bloodshed was a doc that came out that looked super deep at the opioid, or I can't remember. Alex Gibney, maybe on HBO looked at the opioid epidemic, too.

This one had Michael Keaton. Okay, you know, Mike, is that a real person? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know Hollywood, so I don't know actors and I don't know the space as well, but yeah. Yeah, they had this.

There you go. Dope sick. They had this. This series came out. It's unbelievable.

It's how.

It's how the opioid companies basically hired people that had been working on the Food and Drug Administration to come and work for them so they could work the loopholes. Totally. And I'll just tell you my two cent. The reason that we often know stories like this, like how FDA former employees were then going, is because a journalist went in and dug it out and published it, right? Like, these types of fictionalized versions get written off of, like, hard work of investigative journalists.

Shopify Representative
And there are fewer and fewer people pulling out stories like this. And I'll tell you, man, as a journalist, like, my problem 20 years ago was that I was always worried that some other journalist was going to scoop the story and get it before me. Today, my problem is that people are coming to me with important stories, and I don't have the time to work on them because I'm already working on something and I don't even have another journalist I can tell them to go to. Right? Like, we're just not getting out as many important stories like that as we used to because there's just fewer of us.

Like, and there are more people working for the lobbyists, there are more people working for the PR firms that are spinning stuff. And so this is, we're getting into this really imbalanced place of information and the dark time. And that's why conspiracy theories rise. I totally agree. Because it's like, well, people are going by their gut, people are looking to fill a void, and people want some truth.

Theo Von
I think if you don't have truth, you can feel it. Yeah, I think so. And I always say, and this is the other thing, man, is for me, journalism, it's okay. So, like, take a football, right? Like the surface of a football is imperfect, right?

Shopify Representative
It's why a quarterback spirals the ball. Because if you, if you throw the football without spiraling it, because the surface of the football is fancy. Yeah, yeah. It's like imperfect. It just flops around.

But you spiral it and all of those imperfections get smoothed out. And journalism is the same way. Like no journalist is the voice of God. But when you've got ten journalists covering the same thing, you're going to get as close to the obtainable version of the truth as possible because you have ten different people that are competing to get it out. They're going to check each other.

They're going to point out if somebody else misses something or screws something up, and you get at the closest possible obtainable version of the truth. Now, when you just have one person, it's like a football that's not spiraling anymore. It just gets totally off kilter. And I think we're getting closer to that. And I think that's like in a democracy, when we're supposed to be an informed group of people that are going to go to the ballot box and vote, it's a problem.

If we were in China, it wouldn't matter because the government's going to tell us what to do anyway. But in a country where we're like, no, no, we need to be informed so we can go to vote. That becomes, how does that end for us? Was that football analogy the dumbest analogy you've ever heard? It just kind of came to me.

Theo Von
No, I thought it was pretty good. Okay, cool. Yeah. But I'm also dumb a lot of times, so it's like, I wouldn't have asked me, but I thought it worked for me. All right, cool.

I'm easily, I'm easily susceptible to just whatever, but, yeah, I wonder, what does that look like for us if we, when you get to a place where you don't trust? I wonder if it's that we don't trust authority now. But I never trusted authority. Right? I never trusted authority either.

But I always thought there was this level of integrity maybe in the distance that I, maybe I thought it's so hard for me to figure out what I feel like is missing these days. I feel like, as individuals, a lot of us are missing purpose, and our purpose is being farmed out to technology and to big corporations instead of things that are meaningful. I think we're losing community. Yes. And then that's gonna happen, too.

You have no purpose. You don't have a local newspaper. You don't have, like, a local place where everybody can even go meet up. People aren't going to church. So there's.

At that point, you're just a lot of strangers living near each other. I think that's it, man. I think that's a huge problem in this country. And how does that change, I wonder? What does the future of that look like?

Do we just turn into, like, these lemmings just waiting for the next cheeseburger? Like, you know.

Shopify Representative
I've done some investigative reporting on big tech, and that's a space, you know, like, that I. Reporting has shown me, like, things that just, like, as a human, as a person concern me, you know, like, it's, like, really cool because they become these beautiful, creative spaces, right? And as people that are artistic and like to share their stories, people get on there and they can connect with communities, and there's all these great things that happen. But I increasingly see those spaces as a hunting ground for big tech companies to target specific people and take them down. And I'll give you one of the examples I'm talking about is that I did this investigative where I got this investigation where I got internal emails from inside of Facebook, and I got documents from inside of this company that was like a social casino company.

It was essentially like you could play games on your phone that looked like a slot machine, and you would never win any money. Like, you just gotta understand it. You would never win any money back. And if you used up all your coins that they get in the day for free, you would then have to buy more coins. Something like 99% of people never pay for coins.

It's like 1%. And then it's something like one 10th of 1% drive, like, 97% of the revenue at that company. And those companies that, again, you can never win your money back. We're now generating more revenue than the Las Vegas Strip. Billions and billions of dollars.

So who were the people that were spending money? Well, I found one of those women. She was living outside of Dallas. She was living modest, middle income. She spent $400,000 buying virtual coins that she could never win back.

So who does that? Right? Well, it turns out that a certain slice of people, a very small slice, have a type of brain that can get super fixated on this. Like, they compulsively can't stop. And the technology companies devised algorithms.

They used artificial intelligence, where the CEO of one of these companies said, the first time somebody opens that app and starts playing, they can identify them from all of the little habits and immediately mark them as what they would call a vip or a whale, right? And they would put them down this path where they would actually get a special representative, like an actual human, who would call them this woman outside of Texas who lost 400,000 when her mom died. They sent flowers to her mom's funeral, right? Like, they immediately identify that you have this type of brain that's gonna keep spending money that you can't. A, you can't afford, and b, you'll never get back.

And they just target you and they push you and they pull as much money out of you as they can. That's what I see, man. I see this, like, I see now, like, people are spending their time on there, but people are watching you spend your time, and they're building your behavior, and they're looking for your weakness. And as soon as they can exploit your weakness, man, they are gonna grab everything they can. Wow.

Theo Von
It's really the. It's the devil. It's what you would think of as the devil. Using yourself against you, even. I mean, look, what if your own shadow could fucking pick your pocket?

What would your life be like? You know what I'm saying? Like, I mean, maybe that's a crazy thing. That's almost as bad as your football thing, but.

But no, bro, it's the dark arts. It's like the algorithm. Learning you and learning you and learning you, massaging you and all that matters. But is it for profit or is it for control? I don't understand.

Shopify Representative
I'm guessing it's probably both. I just don't understand how that behooves anybody, like, who closes their eyes at night and was like, yeah, dude, those. Companies that I just talked about went from nothing in, like, 2009 to 2010 to being billion dollar companies, and they were owned by a few dudes who started them up. Like, it behooved those dudes. Those dudes are killing it.

I found one of the women who worked at one of these companies who was pushing this woman outside of Dallas to spend all of this money, right? And I got on her instagram, that girl was just flying around the world, living it up. Egypt. Oh, look how cool I am now. Oh, look at me.

And I'm photos in front of the Sphinx now. I'm in Italy, eating in Tuscany. Right, right. Living this life. And in the meantime, she's just encouraging people to lose their money.

Theo Von
Wow. And can we name these people, or is it kind of private information? Well, I can, you know, I mean, I wrote my story. Suzy Kelly is the woman outside of Dallas. Let's see, product madness.

Shopify Representative
Is that the name of the company that was targeting? I want to pull up this story to make sure I was getting this right, because this is the challenge I have as an investigative journalist. I misspeak just a little bit. I can get sued. Get sued?

Theo Von
Yeah, for sure. We can get sued as well. And so I always want to be accurate. Right. And so, you know, we can pull up the story.

Shopify Representative
And because I did this story now, what was that, six, seven years ago? These are companies where you can't win. Really? No, you can't win your money back. But you people have, like, figured out that there's a type of person with a behavior that can, that is basically a definitive victim.

Theo Von
Right here it says, social casinos now use behavioral analysis software to quickly identify people who are likely to become big spenders. Behaviors like increasing your bet or playing frequently are signals to the companies, and they target these players with heavy marketing and label them proto whales. As bro tons explained to a roomful of game developers back in 2015, if. I remember correctly, that guy Jose Broton, was like a Stanford graduate in computer science or something, took that knowledge. They pair it up with essentially behavioral scientists, psychologists, and then they just start getting better and better at focusing on these people who they can extract from.

Yeah, man. It's like you're up against it. And sometimes, though, there's a part of people that go to gamble like that, there's a part of them that wants to.

Sometimes I think that there's a part of us when I'm amazed that we don't stand up sometimes as a population. Right. I don't think we always know. That's the problem, man. I don't think we have the information to know this story.

Shopify Representative
Like, how many like that, to me, that story is mind blowing that that's going on, right? Yeah. How many people are gambling on their phone or looking at playing solitaire, and then it turns into a finite. Yeah, right. Or how many of us are just aware in which the patterns of ads that we see are like, oh, because they have your behavioral profile.

Right. Like, you're getting a pattern this way. Or your newsfeed looks this way or you're getting content this way. And how is that affecting you? Right?

Like how is that affecting your everyday decisions? And in Susie's case, it was affecting her everyday decision to the point where she was lying to her husband. She was taking out, if I recall correctly, second mortgages on her homes and spending $400,000 that she did not have. I had the emails or the messages back and forth with her and the rep from that company and she was begging them to cut her off. I've spent $4,000 last night.

Please don't let me cut me off. Oh, Susie, no. Susie, we love you. We'd hate to see you leave. Here's a billion free coins.

You know, if you still want to quit when you're done with that drug dealer. Well, that's what's interesting to me too. It's like when would we stop allowing certain things you would think, like even pornography, right? Like I've fallen victim, victim to it, obviously. And a lot of people use it, right?

Theo Von
But it's like at a certain point I recognize, oh, I'm not using this safely, right? Like I go use it when I'm feeling down or when I'm agitated or something. It's like, and then just like it's bad. We know it's probably bad for us, right? I'm not disparaging any of the people that use it or that, that perform it.

I have friends that are in the industry. It's not anything against any person. But I wonder if overall sometimes we know that it hurts us or like they just had that documentary on Ashley Madison, right? Yeah. And it was so strange.

You had this couple pushing the company and they're married and the husband was the owner and they're saying, well, we don't cheat, but you might need to, right? Life short, have an affair. Just like, it's just evil. It feels like, I mean, like why would we allow that? Like it seemed like if you took a vote amongst people, would we, do we want this in our lives, right?

That most of them would probably say no. But if you are tempted with it, if it comes in, like if a cat comes on your, if you tell me, hey man, do you want a free cat? I'll tell you, dude, honestly, you can fuck off, right? Yeah. I'll tell you straight up, but if a cat keeps coming on my porch, dude, I'm gonna go out there and touch it.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like at some point, even if I might be like, man, fuck this thing I might be out there petting it at the same time. Yeah, yeah. So it's like, you know, and is that our responsibility or is it now.

Shopify Representative
The cat's in your pocket. Yeah. Around in your pocket with you all the time. I guess you can get a baby cat, but, yeah, it's like, I guess I often wonder, like, is that just our responsibility and. Or is there.

Theo Von
Should there be a. Yeah, I guess you can't depend on the government, but you would think as a society, we wouldn't want these things. Does that make sense to you? No, dude, totally makes sense. And I think part of it is, like, these things are being developed in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, wherever, faster than, like, we can learn about them and adjust to them.

Yeah. The government's always a fears behind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, like, I mean, I don't. I mean, obviously I'm biased cause I am an investigative journalist, but, like, this is the role that I think we're losing in our society as journalism keeps going away is because, like, in that story that we were just talking about with Susie and the social casinos, those dudes would sue me if I got it wrong.

Shopify Representative
Right. They are going to ask for a correction if I got something wrong, and they didn't. In the end, Suzy and a bunch of other people got $155 million back from them. Really? Yeah.

Theo Von
Fuck, yeah. Right? And I don't have it out against anybody, man. I just want good information out there in the public. It empowers all of us.

Shopify Representative
Even if, like, dude, it could be the same piece of information and from that same accurate good piece of information, you might decide that a is the best course and I might decide that b is the best course. But to me, that's a democracy. Because now you and I are hashing out whether a is better or b is better, but we're operating off the same good information. Right? Yeah.

Theo Von
And if you're saying that other. That information is also becoming, like, what's valuable and what isn't and that there's better information out there that obviously corporations can afford, that they can afford the researchers now to privatize them and put them to work for themselves, then, yeah. For the regular person, it just gets a little interesting. Dude, I'm never going to have good enough information to tell you who are the people most likely to compulsively spend on something. Right?

Shopify Representative
Those companies do. But if I'm given enough time, I can probably find out what the companies are that have that information that are targeting people like Susie. And I can at least make us aware of it. We probably, as a society, will never have access to that. We probably don't want all of us to know who the compulsive gamblers are.

Right? But at least we want to know who the companies are that are targeting people who have that behavior or targeting people for whatever their weaknesses, because we all have them, man. We all have our weaknesses, right? Yeah. And they can all just be.

Theo Von
They can almost be mathematically equated now. Are mathematically equated now and then that's used to attack us. I mean, that's the scary part. It's like. It's like.

I want to say, it's like our reflection is using the fact that it's our reflection against us. I don't know. I can't know what I'm trying to say. No, you know what it is, dude? I think you're right, man.

Shopify Representative
It's like they're creating a data profile, like a virtual one of us. Like evil Kirk from Star Trek. Right. And then, like, that person telling them our weaknesses. Right.

It's like you're looking in, you're like, God, that's like a version of me they've created, and that person is ratting me out, and they're coming at me with that dude's info, and it's getting stronger and better, that technology. Yeah. And then it also makes you a little bit upset at yourself because you're the one feeding into the same thing that's beckoning you with things that'll end up being painful to you. Yeah. And look, I have a stoic philosophy on these things.

Like, I believe that we can't control what happens outside of us, but we can control how we react to it. Right. And I think this is something like you and I were talking about cold plunges or, like, you know, just like, how you can reset, like, and it's super uncomfortable, but, like, you can control your body, and your body's like, dude, I do not want to go in that cold water. And you're like, no, no, I control you. I'm gonna dip you in there for two minutes, because I know that when I get out, I'm gonna.

Gonna feel better, right. And part of it is personal responsibility. Part of it is being like, I control me. I'm gonna set the phone down, right? I'm gonna delete that app.

Theo Von
Right. Like, we do have personal, but we also shouldn't be targeted in that way. Right. It's crazy to let somebody continue to be targeted. It's like, at a certain point, you would stop a pedophile from coming near a child, you know?

Shopify Representative
Yes. At a certain point, if somebody had a hatchet and somebody was just trying to sit there and eat a sandwich, you would stop the hatchet guy from bothering the sandwich eater. Yes. You know, it's like, yeah. Could the sandwich eater get up and leave the restaurant?

But maybe the solution is just getting the hatchet guy out of the restaurant. Right? Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Theo Von
Instead of making this huge hullabaloo, like, now every sandwich eater can only eat sandwiches in this area. Or. Yeah, it's just. Cause some sandwiches are good, man. You just want to sit there and finish your sandwich.

Yeah, yeah, dude. Yeah. In the end, it comes down to our own personal responsibility. For now, that's it. I think that's a piece of it.

Shopify Representative
And I also think we should be demanding better environments for ourselves and our children. I don't have kids, but, you know, I always bring in kids because people seem to be more responsive, you know? But I think kids are living. People have them. Yeah.

And they're living in that environment. Right. And I don't know that that's, you know, I think we just need to be more proactive about what are the environments we want as a society. Right. You know, but how do we get this?

Theo Von
Because it feels like everybody has kind of the same things in mind, but we never seem to get them. And it feels even more like the voting is coming from the other side like that. It's big business, like, you know, like tech is the new fossil fuel. I've said that for a long time where it's like, that's the thing. That's power.

It's like, you know, they control everything. It feels like they have a lot of information, man. They do. They do what? Trump's information.

Then I wonder. Well, I think people, if all of us have better information, again, we can push the documentary, man, you were talking about it earlier. Do you think there's stuff in the documentary that's going to freak people out? It freaked me out when I learned about it. At the end of the day, is the point of it just to freak people out?

Shopify Representative
No, it's to be like, we have no national water policy in the United States. You know that we have no national water policy. So that means that people from anywhere or any country whatever can move here and use our water to grow their crops. Is that true or no? It's true.

In some places, like, different states, different counties have different laws. Right. Okay. But we have no, we have no national water policy that just says like, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Water is a big deal. Let's make sure that we're not using it for just like, like any old thing. Let's make sure that just like, as a general rule of thumb, we're using it for like the best purpose. Right? Right.

And let's help states and counties and these places come to the decision. What's the best purpose? We just don't. Other countries do. Right.

Other countries have put that in place. But if water is such a solid, like a, if it's so important for the future, wouldn't that be one of the first things we would do? Probably, but this goes back. It's like, I don't know that people know. I don't know if just like when I go to, when I, you know, when I go to family reunions, I don't know that all my family knows.

And a lot of my families, they're like farmers, but I don't know that they know that this is the trend line that's happening. And so you put this documentary out there not to freak people out, but so that we all just have this baseline of information, right. And then we can push our elected officials who, and, man, you hear about all the different lobbies that push the government around. The agricultural lobby is one of the most, if not the most powerful lobby in the, the country, and in part for really good reasons. Man, you screw up farmers like, you can really jack up a country.

We need to support farmers. Growing food's great, right. And they should have a voice. But at the same time, like communities that are around the farms and others and who's coming in and who's controlling it, that needs to make sense too. Right.

And so it needs to be a conversation. And until people have good information, it's tough to have a good conversation. So whether or not we're talking about tech and people targeting you because they're a big technology company and they know that you're going to be compulsive about this one thing and they can extract something from you, whether it's how you choose to behave or how you choose to spend or whether it's foreign countries coming in or Wall street coming in and pumping out water in places that really need that water right there. We just need good information. Yeah.

Theo Von
Yeah. Because the days are over where people have anybody else's best interest, a lot of overhead, like it's where companies certainly don't because they're not an individual. It's a spreadsheet. They're thinking with a different yes, they are. They're thinking it's a spreadsheet.

Trying to have a brain. Yes. And so, like, how if you're China, right, and you now have, like, some of the biggest sovereign wealth funds, you know, which is. What does that mean? Oh, man, it's.

Shopify Representative
It's crazy because, you know, I have friends I grew up with. Some of them got advanced degrees from college, and some of them barely graduated high school. I mean, I was somebody that barely graduated high school, but they didn't go to college. I have a huge spectrum of people I love, and some of them will tell me about the Illuminati. The illuminati or control and things.

I'm like, dude, no, but go look at sovereign wealth funds. Sovereign wealth funds are countries like China that are pooling together these huge pools of cash, trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars, and then they can use that strategically to buy things to drive the markets how they want. Now, here in the United States, we just believe that the profit is how everything. So, like, oh, if you can make more money doing a than b, then you should go do a, because that's how our system operates. But China goes, no, no.

We want to create the most jobs we can for the country, and therefore, we're going to take all of our assets. We're going to try to create the most jobs, not the most profit, but the most jobs. Right? And so then what happens is you have Smithfield Foods, one in four american pigs, and you have a chinese company, and they go, like, we don't care necessarily about, per se, driving the maximum profit. Right?

Like, our government is saying to us that we need to go overseas and buy up food and water. So we'll pay you a 30% premium over the share price. Well, for the american company, that's like 30% premium over the share price. Like, I have a fiduciary responsibility to my share. Like, I have to sell the company.

I have to give you guys the company. Otherwise, I could actually legally get in jeopardy here for saying no to that offer because I am legally obligated to return profits to the shareholder. Well, the chinese company is operating under a completely different system. That's where you begin to see, gosh, this is probably super in the weeds, but that's where you begin to see this international power play. And you're talking about where the US is so focused on profits.

China's like, cool. You're super focused on profits. We're focused on the future, and we. Can manipulate you because you're super focused on profits. Oh, because if they own a fourth of the industry.

Yeah. Or they just know, like the american company is always going to do whatever is most profitable so we can buy that. They know how our system works and they're getting better at manipulating that system is like right out of the gate when I started looking at it saying. So instead of this american company saying, hey, this is an american company, let's keep it here, let's keep it american. It's part of like, you know, it affects our GDP, all these sorts of things.

Theo Von
They just think, oh, for profit. And China knows that. So it's like, let's just pay more and we'll definitely get it. That's exactly, that's it. Because the way that the american companies built, their shareholders would get upset if they didn't.

If they took a vote, the shareholders would be like, why didn't you do it? We would have made dividends or whatever. Not only why we didn't do it, but we could sue you and probably win if you didn't return us the max profits. And so China has sovereign wealth funds, which are literally trillions and trillions of dollars of pools of cash. Whose money is it?

Theirs. It's their money. Individuals or the government? The government's. And the government can decide how to allocate that.

Shopify Representative
Right. And so if the US had that, you'd always be allocating it for whatever's going to make you the most profits. China's going to be allocating it potentially for whatever gives them the most political strength, whatever makes them the most powerful country. It's very different. And that's what sovereign wealth funds are.

And they've become huge. They're like, as I understand, I wouldn't talk to this professor, this academic at Stanford, who's one of the foremost experts in the country on these things. As I understand it, it's a fairly, they're fairly new, the middle eastern countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, they also have really big sovereign wealth funds. China's got really big sovereign wealth funds. Surprisingly, Norway has a really big sovereign wealth fund, but they can use these things strategically, especially against a profit driven country like the US.

Theo Von
Wow. So it's crazy to think that being profitable could be your weakness. That's interesting, right? Yeah. Wow.

The world's largest sovereign wealth fund as of December 2022, was China Investment Corporation, managing assets reaching around $1.35 trillion. Where do we rank in that? Pull up like, the top ten list of sovereign wealth funds. Norway, Qatar, GIC, the one we just talked about, National Welfare oh, no. China Investment Corporation.

Shopify Representative
Tamasek. That's Singapore Public Investment Fund. Could be us, but who knows?

Theo Von
Saudi Arabia. Huh. So those are the big ten biggest sovereign wealth funds. So those can really. Somebody's gotta have a list for how much assets each of them have at 1.7 trillion.

Seems small to me, but we're not even on the top ten list. We don't operate a sovereign. As far as I know, the US doesn't operate a sovereign wealth fund like this because. Not how we think. Got it?

Shopify Representative
Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. You start to. Yeah.

Theo Von
You don't. You don't think about how perspective and mindset affects how an entire country operates. Really? No. The United States does not have a federal sovereign wealth fund, but several states do.

These funds are usually smaller than international swfs and can serve different purposes. For example, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, established in the early 1980s, has roughly $67 billion in assets and was created to ensure that alaskan citizens benefited from oil extracted from state lands. Wow. That's some forward. And that's like Norway, too.

Shopify Representative
Norway's is very similar to Alaska, where it's like, they are an oil wealthy nation, and so they created a sovereign wealth fund to benefit the citizens. That's smart. Texas also, it says, has two sovereign wealth funds, including the Texas Permanent school fund, which was founded in 1854 and manages 46.55 billion in assets to benefit public schools. Wow. That's pretty incredible.

Yeah. Just to think that they had that forethought. Yeah, yeah, totally. And they're gonna think, maybe I'm gonna own the land the school's on. Just different things like that.

Yeah. And then. So these foreign countries have these massive pools of cash that they can use strategically. Yeah, it started. It gets interesting, man.

You start, like, seeing the chess players on the board, like, moving in different. Ways, what states are. Are looking out for their land, what states are kind of at the head of the forefront. Were you able to notice any of that? Off the top of my head.

I think Iowa has a law that foreign companies can't own farmland in Iowa. It's off the top of my head. But is it. The question is, does it really matter if it's a foreign company or a domestic company if they're doing good by the local people? Right, right.

Ultimately, in that, like, who cares? Are you doing well by the local people? Is there enough water there? Are you creating jobs? Is it local people prospering?

That's on it. At the end of the day, what people are going to care about, I think what becomes dangerous is when you see these things that are just highly extractive to the detriment of the local folks who are seeing their water disappear, who aren't seeing a lot of job. Creation, there's no return on it for them, and especially if it's their space. I even pulled up on that saudi farm. I remember, I think I pulled up visas and they were bringing in workers, if I'm recalling correctly, from the Philippines.

So they'd be like, well, we're creating jobs. And I'm like, man, you guys are pulling visas, so you're bringing in workers for. From the Philippines to work on your farm? Yeah, you know. Yeah, you probably have.

Theo Von
Yeah. You probably have farmers right in the area that would do it. Yeah. So, yeah, so these things are complicated. There's so many loopholes and stuff.

There's so many tricky ways out there. Yeah. So when you look at, like, places not having enough water. Right. America has a lot of water.

Shopify Representative
Totally. Right. And a lot of land and a small population. Okay. So we're probably in a really good spot.

Theo Von
Space. We're in a good space, right? Yep. What places aren't in good spaces? And we're in a good space except for, like, these, like, regional examples.

Shopify Representative
Right. Like places in the west and the southwest, places that are going to get potentially a lot hotter, you know? So I got these classified cables answering your question, like, what places aren't in a good space? I got these classified cables, and I'm from the us embassy that had cables. What does that mean?

Like diplomatic cables that the State Department, it was sending back from its embassy in Switzerland back to the us government here. Sometimes that stuff goes to the CIA, the State Department, other. But cables, what's the term? It's paperwork or information. Yeah, it's like a report they'll send back.

Yeah, got it. And so some folks from the US embassy in Switzerland had gone to the headquarters of Nestle, and Nestle's, like the world's largest food company. And the chief economist at Nestle sort of gave him a tour and a pursuit perspective from the world's largest food company about how screwed up everything was. And they talked about the regions that were going to get hit hardest by not having enough water. And so that's like China.

It was like India, the Middle east, but it was also the western United States. You know, like, the western United States is in a pretty tough spot when it comes to having enough water to keep doing all the things they're currently doing. And so. Yeah, and that was like, the hot take from Nestle was like, you know, forget about it. That time, it was like, it was 2009.

It was the great Recession. And Nestle's just like, forget about it. That's going to resolve itself. The world is running out of enough water to feed everybody, right? Yeah.

Theo Von
And so do states start to plan ahead, you think some of them would. I think some of them do these things like water. People will always tell you water is super local. And so some counties, some regions within states, and some states themselves are doing better than others, and some countries are definitely doing better than others just in terms of, like, planning ahead, you know? And it is solvable, man.

Shopify Representative
That's, like, the thing with, with a lot of the issues that we face, you know, like, we can do. We're a super smart species, you know? Like, we've. We've done a lot of stuff. We could still do a lot of stuff.

We just have to move off of the trend lines that we're currently headed on, you know? And those trend lines are more like me, me, me instead of us. Is that it? Or is it like, because is there enough water for everybody? There is enough water to grow enough food that everyone in the world could eat.

Not even, like, today, man. Which we, what are we, 7 billion people or so? Like, there's enough water to grow enough food to feed 10 billion people. You know, like, it's not just a population issue. It kind of goes back to what I was saying about China, where it's like, they just, now they're just wealthier, man, and they're eating more meat.

And Nestle in that classified cable said, like, if everyone in the world ate as much meat per capita as Americans do, we would have run out of fresh water in the year 2000. Wow. Right? And I'm not a vegetarian. I'm not a vegan.

Right? I'm just like, this is what the world's largest food company is saying, you know? And I know people love beef, and I know people love steak, you know? And, like, it's there, but, like, nuggets, all of it. But when it comes to, like, how can we shift?

How can we take some personal responsibility to putting us in a place we want to be? That's one area we can look at. And it's not even saying, like, you need to become vegetarian or vegan. It's just like, how much meat do you need to be a healthy human? Right, right.

And you got people with obesity and heart attacks, you know, and all these issues. Oh, you got people. Damn. Snorting meat out there, dude. You got some real.

Theo Von
Yeah, mammal pervs out there, you know, people who will just cook anything that wandered up on their porch even, and eat it and won't even share with their spouse either. I had a buddy that had a t shirt, and this is in San Francisco, so he definitely, definitely pissed people off. But his shirt said, meat is murder. Delicious, delicious murder. Just trolling people.

Yeah, that's definitely, definitely. People love it. Well, you do have businesses like, Bill Gates is starting, like, a. Beyond meat. Is that his company or.

Shopify Representative
No, I can't remember if he invested in that one. There's like. Yeah, beyond meat. Impossible burgers. Yeah, I think it's impossible burgers, maybe.

Yeah. A lot of those guys got really, they got funding, and again, those were like, that's a way to replace meat with a less water intensive meat substitute. You know, something that tastes like meat. Right, right. So that's one way that people could preserve water, probably.

Theo Von
We used to have to grow the. Yeah, it just requires a lot, lot less water to eat a grain than it does to feed enough grains to eat an animal. Got it. Yeah. And what about other methods that people.

You hear about, like, desalinization? You hear about cloud seeding? Yeah, I'm not sure what other methods they are. I believe cloud seeding is very expensive. Yeah.

Shopify Representative
And I don't know as much about cloud. And I remember, like, one of my buddies, he learned I was doing this, that I'd moved off organized crime, and I was looking at, you gotta look at cloud seeding. And I was like, dude, that's some conspiracy shit you read online. And I looked at it, I was like, oh, no, people do really do cloud seeding. Like, I think the ski resorts are doing cloud seeding.

I think the israeli government was doing cloud seeding, but, yeah, I think it's expensive. It hasn't really found a practical application as far as I know. This isn't my area of expertise. Desal I'm more familiar with. Cloud seeding is a weather modification technique that improves a cloud's ability to produce rain or snow by introducing tiny ice nuclei into certain types of sub freezing clouds.

Theo Von
So you have a cloud that's already there, and I guess you. Then it looks like just fire ice. Particles into it and precipitates the rain out or something. Four hour operation. A four hour operation that seeds 24 clouds can cost around $5,000.

Wow. So rich people could have rain or something if they wanted to have, like, a Noah's ark party or like a.

Like a. The perfect storm. If they want to do a perfect storm reenactment of that movie per acre cloud seeding operations can cost around forty cents per planted acre or ten to $15 per acre foot for additional water. That's in Utah. Well, that's actually not, you know, this is not my area of expertise, but ten to $15 for an acre foot of water, that's a lot of water and that's a really low price.

Shopify Representative
So if that, you know, and that's in Utah specifically. Right. So they're going to have their own, like, climatology, their own hydrology, like, so it can be super specific. But ten to $15 for an acre foot is really cheap for water. Yeah.

Because you start talking about desalination plant and now you're talking about $2,000 per acre foot. Really? Yeah. So that's very expensive. Yeah.

And like, we're growing tomatoes, typically with like $50 per acre foot water and an acre foot just. It's actually super simple. It's how an acre foot is the equivalent of flooding an acre of land with 1ft of water. Okay. Yeah.

Theo Von
The global cloud seeding market is estimated to have a valuation of $131.4 million in 2023. Over the forecast period from 2023 to 2030, it is projected to experience substantial growth. Growth with an estimated compound annual growth of 5.8%. By 2030, the market is expected to reach a value of 194.4 million. So it's getting more popular.

They're saying. This is a market Insights website. So if. I don't know if that's legit or not, but what else does it say? Anything else on there?

Here's an article right here. Not since. Not since Charlemagne was crowned Holy roman emperor in 800 ad has the American west been so dry. A recent study in Nature climate change found the period 2021 was the driest in 22 years in more than a millennium, attributing a fifth of that anomaly to human caused climate change. Hmm.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell have reached their lowest levels ever, triggering unprecedented cuts in water allocations. Cloud seeding operations have also expanded in water stretched regions outside. Let me see. Within the past two years, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and California have expanded cloud seeding operations.

So they're trying it. Yeah. And I mean, I know, I remember the ski resorts doing it and people are doing it. I wonder how much water, ultimately, you're going to be able to squeeze out of the atmosphere by shooting these minerals up into it. But, yeah.

Ian, how effective is it? Like if you, if you spend the money to shoot the water to put the particles out there. But cloud seeding should not be thought of as a response to drought. Experts agree. For one, in a drought, there are likely to be fewer seedable storms.

That's a good point. And when there are storms, even the estimates from cloud seeding companies themselves show the practice increases precipitation by only around 10% in a given area. That might be worth the effort when every acre foot counts, but it's not going to end a drought across an entire region. So you have to have a storm already there. I see.

Shopify Representative
Yeah. So that's kind of interesting. Oh, super interesting. You can't just completely create a storm. Not yet, anyway.

Right, right. It's like terraforming the earth at that point. Yeah, yeah, that gets. Yeah. When it becomes like air sims or whatever, it's gonna get weird.

Theo Von
And what about desalinization? It's super expensive. Okay. Because, like, basically it takes a ton of energy, like electricity, to basically push water through what's just like a giant filter and pull out the salt or whatever it is that's contaminated the water. And so it ends up.

Shopify Representative
The water ends up costing, you know, 100 times what, you know, farmers can, are paying for it now, and oftentimes it makes crops unaffordable. So it's good for, like, drinking water. Dude, people use desal all the time for drinking water and for some industrial use, but at the price, it becomes very difficult to create food with that expensive of water. Are some countries saying you can't buy land here? Some countries are like that.

Theo Von
Right. For sure. Right, yeah, yeah. And they're saying you can't grow that type of crop beer because it requires too much water. Right.

Shopify Representative
Other countries are getting really selective as to how their water is going to be used and what it can be used for. It's so tough for us to think because we've manipulated so many other markets and done things ourselves. You would go upstream from your neighborhood and split that river, that split that creek that's headed your way if you had to. And that's what. That's what you're seeing.

And that's, you know, people are just seeing, like, the river their village relies on all of a sudden now is diverted, and it's for a palm oil plantation. Right. And that's more and more what you're. Seeing in Africa and places like that, you mean? Yeah.

All Central America, like Guatemala, I think, has one of the largest expanding palm oil plantation in the world. Yeah. What do you think there's a way, a solution, like, yeah. What do you look at is. Well, first off, I think people just need to know what's happening.

There's like, bottom line. Like you're saying. Yeah, bottom line. And then. And then, dude, we just need to empower and push our government to putting forward, like, the best minds, you know?

I think, like, right now, basically, the laws that we have on the books for water around this country are from like the 18 hundreds. Yeah, right. Like when water, when there were few people, people. There was. Water was plentiful.

Theo Von
Yeah. No gargling water in church and stuff. You're like, that shouldn't be in the state doctrine. Yeah. And now water's tight and there's a lot more people.

Shopify Representative
And so they need to go back onto the books and revise the laws to be like, okay, so what do we want our water laws to look like in this place, given the realities we have now in the 21st century and not the 19th century? Right. Like, it's kind of, it's like all these stuff, man. It's kind of common sense, but we're just not getting it done. Yeah.

Theo Von
And it's like, how is it tough to get it done when a lot of the great minds, it feels like, are working on the other side of popular sentiment? Yeah. How do you mean? Like, which? Like, that the best researchers and a lot of great journalists and.

And lobbyists even are working for bigger companies or in the private sector more to garner information and learn information, to give that to the private sector to better do the doings that they're doing. Does that make sense? It does. I think journalists are always going to try to give the information to the public. There's just fewer of them.

Shopify Representative
And, yeah, I think the private sector has a lot more resources to manipulate the markets to what they want, which oftentimes can be quarterly profits or annual profits. And we need our government to be like, okay, okay, okay. But what's in our long term best interest, right. Like, what do we want for your kids and your grandkids? And I think that's where we really need to be pushing folks.

Theo Von
Yeah, and some of the companies are doing it not because they're beholding to their stockholders, who are the very people who are wishing they wouldn't, that companies wouldn't do this sort of thing. That's really crazy, isn't it? I mean, dude, you see in the duck, and it's like, in the duck, man. It's like, so Holly Irwin is the county supervisor in Arizona that we follow. And what county is that in?

Shopify Representative
It's in La Paz county. Right. And that's like a deeply red county. You know, Holly is a Republican. Like, a conservative Republican.

And now she's. She's fighting for what people might be like. That's an environmentally. She knows she's fighting for the water of the country, of the county. Right.

And she's working with Democrats, which is great. Like, you got Republicans and Democrats coming together finally to, like, work on something and come up with solutions. But what I showed to Holly was. And she didn't know this. You know, she's like, oh, the Saudis have come.

They're taking our water, you know? And I said, but, holly, look here. This is your pension fund from the state of Arizona. Look what it's invested in. That farm right over there.

That's shipping hay to China and the UAE that was bought with your pension fund money. Like, it's your own pension fund. Your retirement fund is helping export the water that you need to be here and for people to retire here. But how. I'm not following that.

Yeah. Right. So, like, how they use the money. So they had a pension fund. Yeah.

Theo Von
But the Saudis came in and bought the land. So that's a separate one. Right. So you got the. The Saudis are there, but there's another big farm owned by a company out of North Carolina.

Shopify Representative
And the Arizona state pension fund gave a bunch of money to that. To IFC, this company out of North Carolina. And then IFC rented it to a company from the United Arab Emirates that's controlled by the brother of the ruler of the country, that's controlled by a guy whose job it is to control national security in the country. And so they're shipping it overseas. And so, like, at the end of the day, Holly's pension fund, she's, like, fighting so hard to keep the water there in her county so her people can stay there.

And then her own pension fund is financing a deal that's shipping water overseas. Right. Cause it's more short term profit than it is a long term vision. Yeah. And so how do you try to align those things?

How do you align with Hollywants money to retire? Chiron? Holly wants water for her county to live on for the next 100 plus years. Right. Wow.

Theo Von
Interesting, man. What were some other. There were some other stories that I was investigating that I was researching that you had looked at. One that I found was interesting was this somali pirate scenario. Yeah.

Shopify Representative
Isn't that interesting? So this was a guy from the intelligence community who told me this and wasn't the only person that told me this, but he just said, look, somali pirates, we think of them as pirates. They took to the high seas. But what they were, they were fishermen. They were just fishermen along the coast and foreign trawlers from other countries.

I think his example was primarily China were coming in and just depleting the fishing stocks, right? So these guys that are on the somali coast, they got pretty basic systems for fishing. And then these big badass boats come in with these super deep nets and they just scoop up all the fish. So what do the dudes do? The same thing you and I would do if somebody was doing that to us.

We come together, we sit around, we have a drink, we're like, dude, how do we stop that? And we're like, dude, next time one of those things comes through, we're going to go out there in our shitty little boat with some guns and take it over and tell them to stop doing it. And we create, like, a little small coast guard. Well, that sounds like what they kind of did, right? And so then they have a little coast guard and they're trying to fight back against these trawlers.

And then they take one hostage and they're like, dude, you guys have been taking all our fish. Give us money and we'll give you your boat back. Cause you've been taking all our fish. And they do, right? And then they're like, well, that kind of escalates because maybe we should get a bigger.

We should hijack a bigger boat next time. Cause now we don't have any fish. Like, we're not selling anything. We can't buy our kids books. Now they're in the boat abduction business.

Theo Von
Yes. Right? And so that's how these things evolved. It started as some dudes just being like, we just wanted to protect our fishing stock to being like, now we're taking over huge oil tankers and demanding. And then one ended up happening.

Shopify Representative
Then the oil tankers hire mercenaries or private security corporations to come in. Oftentimes former, like, special forces guys or guys that have a background working for a national military service, and they come in with guns and they're blowing everyone up. And you're like, these dudes. In the beginning of this story, these dudes just wanted their fish. Right?

Theo Von
They just wanted their food supply. Yes. Which is so ironic because it's really the same other same thing we're talking about. It is, man, it's like they just wanted to eat. Yep.

Shopify Representative
It's super basic. And when they did, when you're not eating two months later, you are a pirate. Yeah. It turns out, man, if we solve, like, something super basic, like, just making sure everyone around the world has enough food. We're gonna see.

Because this is the other thing is, like Boko Haram again. I mean, I could go on with these stories forever, man. And what is Boko Haram? It's a terrorist organization in Nigeria. And in that region of the world, well, that was where Lake Chad was.

And if you look back on maps, satellite maps of Lake Chad, like, 30 years ago, it was the giant lake, and now it's just like a pond. It's shrunk way down because people have been diverting the rivers that flow into it for farming fields. And the people that lived there that were fishing out of that, it was a huge lake. They lost their livelihoods. And then people start getting pissed.

They start getting radicalized. People are hungry. Then, like, some. Some people with crazy ideas start being like, well, you join my group. I'll feed you.

People are taken from us all of a sudden, you know, just like. And it just spirals, man. And then you just end up with these crazy groups that are abducting children, that are blowing things up. And, like, the beginning, like, the origin of that story, was, like, people got thrown into shit by not having their basic necessities. He's met, like, food.

And then things spiral out of control. Right. A little, like mad Max kind of style. Yeah. You know, I mean, it could get really weird everywhere.

Yeah. So that's what, like, that's what we're hoping doesn't happen. Right. But then, you know, it's life. It's always gone on.

Theo Von
Society has always gone on in some form or other, whether we end up in tribes or whatever, you know? Yeah. It's like, that's humanity, you know, you start to get this idea of what humanity is based on your own childhood and things you've heard and also the safety that we feel in America. Don't you feel like we've lost our tribes, our community, though? Like, everyone's got their little, like, suburb.

Shopify Representative
They don't have to interact with anybody anymore. And, like, 100%, everybody's just like. Like, yeah. And it's. I feel it's like a country of loneliness, man.

I feel like half the problems we see is just because people feel isolated and lonely and depressed and they're not, like, they're not, like, in a community anymore. They're not seeing the same people every Sunday, or they're not going out. Like, dude, I play ice hockey, right? I play ice hockey, and those dudes are awesome. And I am so lucky to be able to go and see that same group of cool dudes and just play hockey and have that community.

And, like, I think a lot of us and so much of our communities around what, going out to the bar and getting drunk and, like, I used to drink a lot, and now I think alcohol is a shitty drug. Right? Like, I think it's bad medicine. Like, you know, I think. I view, like, you know, a lot of this stuff.

I think they should be viewed medicinally. And. Yeah, it's just like, sports piss, almost, really. I mean, yeah, I don't drink. I mean, I prefer cocaine, probably, but that's not even that good for you.

Theo Von
And it's like, I think. Yeah, I definitely feel you, though. It's like, where do you meet up with people? I mean, I go to a recovery meeting, so I've seen people there all the time. So you have, like, some semblance of groupness, but, yeah, it's like everybody gets their food delivered a lot of times, the family, it's just you're staring at.

Shopify Representative
A phone, your food's getting delivered, you're not going outside, and it's like, how do we reinstall, like, a stronger community in the US? Right? Because, like, I. Okay, dude, I have a little cabin in a teeny town, like, 100 people, and those people are across the board, politically on the spectrum. And it doesn't matter if somebody's voting one way and somebody else is voting the other way.

If somebody's like, house floods, people are going to show up. People are going to help each other out. That's what it is to be a good person. It's not who you vote for or what you necessarily, like, your political ethos. It's like, dude, did something bad happen to you?

Does your community come out and support you? That's community. And that's what I feel like we're losing. We're so distracted about. I feel, like, petty crap right now that we're forgetting it's time we just need to show up for each other.

Theo Von
Yeah. I wonder if you're going to see more of an influx towards, like, religious services, even. Not even entirely for religion, but for community. It's like, some of the first places you go back to for community. Like, yeah.

One thing I always loved about church was just seeing, like, the kids play together. You're all sitting there in peace, even. It's like if you're just in your own thoughts, like, thinking of something bigger than yourself, no matter what your denomination was or whatever. Yeah. So I grew up.

Shopify Representative
My dad was a lutheran pastor. And I don't go to church anymore. I don't follow those beliefs anymore. But I missed that Sunday get together, man, because you would show up and there would be a tax preparer there, and you knew you'd see them every Sunday, and you could rely on them. There was a mechanic that was there, and you knew that they'd show up every Sunday and you would rely, and they weren't going to screw you.

And there was a sense of community. In that community were people that had vocational trades across the board, and you. You could trust each other, and you could know each other, and you could ask them questions. You could get knowledge, you could share experience. You could carry each other.

Right? Like, showing up to that one place every week and having that community, that's what I feel like so much is what that's been lost. I feel like it'll be a few generations, and I feel like there will be a rebellious generation that will throw off the VR headsets and masturbate naturally. If there's a way to do that into the ocean or whatever and reclaim what it feels like, or at least go in search of what it feels like to be human. Yeah, man, that's what I.

Theo Von
I think would probably happen. And are you talking about this with other buddies, too? Because I feel like I have in this conversation more and more. Yeah. With buddies.

Shopify Representative
Like, dude, how do we create community again? Like. Like I said, it can be as simple as, like, finding a good hockey team, right? And just like. Because after every game, man, it doesn't matter if that game starts at 10:30 p.m.

at and we're not in the parking lot until midnight or, like, 01:00 a.m. dudes are gonna stand around and drink a beer and just catch up. Have a blast, have a nice time. It's the same after any real get together. People always kinda mill around, see what's going on.

Theo Von
You and one buddy or two guys might stay late if one of them's having a problem, and they'll talk about it. If everything's cool, that you're out of there. Kind of like one of the first couple of guys out. But you're joking around. Yeah, I think that thing is.

I feel like we would find ways in the end. I feel like you just believe enough something that we can't create outside of us, that's inside of us, that would lead us to victory in some sense, like some human spirit or something, that will prevail. It always kind of feels like that. I think it just feels like, we're down maybe two rounds to one right now. Yeah.

Shopify Representative
I feel like it's tough for that human spirit to connect through a phone. Yeah, I think it's hard, man. And I think there's a lot of, like, I have to be doing something all the time. There's a lot of factors in it. It's interesting to think about before you leave.

Theo Von
I know you worked in organized crime. You mentioned that a little while ago. Yeah. And was you. What'd you do in it, bookies or what was it?

Shopify Representative
Pretty close, man. It was a lot of casino work. It was a lot of asian organized crime. I went over to Macau, which became, like. Played this by Hong Kong, huh?

Theo Von
Yeah, I went there once. Hong Kong or Macau? I went across the ferry there. That's a fun ferry ride. Yeah, it was nice, dude.

Some lady, I think, was either flirting with me or trying to tell me I had something on my shirt or something. Yeah, it's a wild place, man. They do more revenue than Vegas does now. It became massive when I was there. It had become just like, in a very short period, it'd become massive.

Shopify Representative
And I was over there because we were looking into how what the us government, largely considered was organized people, connection to triads, et cetera, were working inside of the casinos to bring money from mainland China that could be gambled in Macau. Cause at that time, there was, like. I think it was a $5,000 cap, right? Like, this was the law. Like, you could only bring 5000 from mainland China into Macau.

But then you'd go. And you'd go into the casino, and people are betting, like, 500,000 US per hand. You're like, well, how is that money? And it was basically this informal credit network where. Which is like, we know you're good for it in China, so we'll spot it for you in Macau.

Right? But if you don't pay your debts, you're probably going to be found burned up and shot in your car. Wow. You know, and so, like, that was the ecosystem. And then these big us casinos were operating in that ecosystem.

And so how does all of that. So I went over there and, like, my job was to try to get these guys to go on camera to open up to me and to tell me about this operation. And as one of the US, you know, casino bosses, a white guy from America, said to me, he's like, man, that dude whose casino you're staying in for the six weeks you're here is known if people say stuff he doesn't like for hanging them out their window, you know, and, like, that's where I was staying. And. Yeah, and it was, gosh, that's a rough start.

Yeah, yeah. And so it was. So you just down there looking, we say triads. What does that mean? Triads are like a british word for what they would describe as asian organized crime networks.

And the triads actually have this super interesting history that go back to martial arts, to the Shaolin temple, and all the way back to the overthrow of the emperor, man. That's why the triad guys are known for being such badasses with regards to martial arts. I still get calls from federal prison pretty frequently from a guy named Raymond Shrimpboy Chow. Shrimp boy. Shrimp boy.

Yeah. And, dude, just crazy badass martial arts guy. But, yeah, he'll call, you know, and I went to him because I knew I was going to Macau and he hadn't been arrested. Now he's in prison doing, I think, multiple life sentences. Yeah, but that's just a different world, man.

Cause you're operating in a world of violence, right? Yeah. That's how they solve it there. If you. Yeah, that, you know, things are punishable by real violence.

Yes, exactly. And it's kind of organized. So it's difficult to go in, as an investigative journalist, into that, you know. And so the first thing I'd always do is just tell people right away, like, I am an investigative journalist. I'm looking into this, you know, that's my role.

And I don't necessarily need to push people for answers right away, but, like, I don't want anybody thinking that, like, I'm sneaking around behind their back or. Like, trying to be transparent about it. Transparent. So there's a different level of respect if you come in like that over there. Yeah, and I do that with everybody.

Like, as a journalist, if I'm working on a story, I always identify myself as a journalist right away, you know, like, this is what I'm working on. This is my interest, you know, and then over there, it's like, we don't got to deal with that right away. You can just identify me as a person, you know, in parts of China that I've traveled to. One of the things people want to do when they're going to get into business with you is they just want to get hammered with you. They just want to get hammered because they want to see what kind of drunk you are.

Are you going to be a total dick when you're drunk? Or are you going to still just be, like, kind of funny and happy and upbeat and honest? Or what kind of drunk are you? And so there are just different ways. And so sometimes you identify who you are, and then you just kind of a human for a little bit.

Just like, just hang out. Yeah. I never wanted to be chinese that much. Really? I mean, I haven't not wanted to be it, but I haven't.

Theo Von
I'll be honest. Yeah. I haven't really wanted to be it. I guess I would be willing to be it, but I don't. I would probably think about it a lot more than I have recently.

Why do chinese businessmen insist on getting you drunk? That's interesting. In a culture where relationships can make or break you. In business, getting drunk with a potential business partner is often viewed as a crucial way of solidifying that relationship and showing that you are, in fact, friends. Huh.

Let me think. Did you say anything about the liquor? Anything more about booze? Alcohol is a very long tradition in confucian society. Confucius, who advocated only eating at mealtimes and not in between, made an exception for wine.

He said only wine drinking is not limited. So Confucian really liked to have that. He liked to have a little sip in the daytime, huh? No shade. No shade.

Before you go, have there been stories that you wanted to go to and you just didn't have the time? Oh, dude, that's all the time. That's, like, the thing that haunts me most right now. Just like, really important stories that people come to me and they want me to look into. And it's just like, it's super tough to find the time, you know?

Shopify Representative
There's just too many things that I would love to be able. I wish, you know? Yeah. So it happens. Yeah.

Theo Von
And who funds, like, investigative reporting? Who funds, like, guys like you? So I work at a nonprofit called the center for Investigative Reporting. It's like a super old nonprofit. It's been around since the seventies.

Shopify Representative
It was a bunch of Rolling Stones reporters. When Rolling Stones used to be based in San Francisco, they ended up moving it to New York. And a bunch of the reporters didn't want to move to the east coast. They liked San Francisco. And one of those guys was one of my mentors, Lowell Bergman, who, I don't know if you ever saw the movie insider with Al Pacino, but Al Pacino was playing Lowell.

Lowell was the one that got the documents from inside the tobacco companies that showed that they knew that it was a carcinogen, they knew it was addictive, and they were hiding and not being straight up with Congress. I work at a nonprofit, which is a super fortunate place to be because we're not profitable. You know, I worked on this documentary. That documentary could make a gazillion dollars and I'm not going to make it dime more. Right.

It's just not like what the drive is, right. You know, like. And so. And it's also because investigative journalism isn't profitable. Really?

Yeah. No, dude. Letting me spend a year and a half diving into like, is Facebook and this social media company targeting your weakness. It is not profitable. And so we have to.

To get foundations and others to give us money to give us the time. And people, people donate to us to give us the time to look into this stuff so I can just share it with the public. It would be hugely profitable if I wanted to take that my same skills and go work for a hedge fund. I can make four or five times what I make, right. But people are willing to pay me to do it.

Like a modest salary. I'll do it, man. Cause I love stories. I love stories. I used to sit and I was a little kid and I used to tell my grandma, my mom's mom, just tell me a story from your mind.

And she would just wax. And now meeting people, I just like to hear their stories. What's their background? Where'd they come from? It doesn't have to be totally revelatory.

It's just we're all so complex. We're all so interesting. But when I can spend time diving into something like Susie Kelly story where, like, this crazy technology company identified that her brain had this weakness and targeted her, then I want to spend a bunch of time and share it with people. Right. Because we know it's not just happening to Susie.

Theo Von
Yeah. I mean, and it's so sick that that would happen. It was almost. If you saw someone who was disabled and somebody. Someone had a broken leg and someone kept kicking a minute, you know?

Shopify Representative
Yeah. And dude, I think that's a really good analogy. And, like, they were kicking him because it was making him money, right? Yeah. And you're like, what are you doing?

How are you? And I don't. I don't get it. I'll just tell you that, like, fundamentally, on a personal level, I don't get it. Cause I couldn't do that.

Theo Von
You know, like, yeah, that's the thing. That's tough. It's like. And then sometimes I feel like, am I normal or am I the weirdo that gives a fuck about stuff? You know what I'm saying?

Is that ever crossing your mind? Yeah, dude, it does. It does. And I don't know. I think.

Shopify Representative
I think whatever. I think we're all broken in our own way and whatever. My little broken ways made me an investigative journalist. But whatever. It feels fun, though, to be Paul revere or whatever.

Theo Von
Even though somebody said he was trying to meet men, that's the only reason he was going through. Is that true? That's what I've heard. But to be that kind of guy who's trying to. Yeah.

We've always loved the underdog, dude. Underdog. That's who you want. The underdog. Everybody's like.

Everybody wants a nude picture of, like, Pam Anderson or something, you know? I wanted a new picture of Aaron Brockovich on my wall, you know? No kidding. Yeah. Yeah.

Shopify Representative
That was a bad ass. That uncovered a lot of stuff and got a lot of good out there in the world. And pretty daimy, too. Entertain. I'll say that.

Theo Von
And I think it's a compliment, Aaron. But what else do we have anything else that I wanted to talk about? I don't. I feel like we covered a really good bit, Nate, so we could. People can donate to the center for investigative Research reporting.

Shopify Representative
Yeah. So the center for Investigative reporting, that's a legitimate company? Yeah, man, it's a legitimate nonprofit. And, you know, people can even just check it out. We got a.

We got a radio show we do. That's just all investigated journalism, really? Yeah, we print. You know, we work with other folks, and we have the documentary. I mean, at the end of the day, dude, just trying to get good information into people's hands and, like, call to account, like, people that are targeting other people.

Theo Von
Yeah. If you don't have food, you'll get so caught in the moment, you don't even have a chance to look ahead at that point, it's gonna be moment to moment. That's all right, dude. That's totally right. So then it's a wrap.

Shopify Representative
Then. Then you're just trying to get food for you and your family, and you start doing weirder and weirder stuff. And even people that, you know. Do you ever recall McCarthy? He wrote, like, the road?

Theo Von
Yeah, dude. He wrote some real. No country for old men. Strange stuff, and I love it. But, like, the road, he basically breaks it down to, like, are you willing to kill if, like, if it comes down to it, would you kill somebody else to eat them?

Shopify Representative
Right. And, like, you're a good person if you're willing to just, like, be like, damn, I'm just gonna have to starve to death because I'm not gonna murder somebody else to eat them, or are you gonna murder somebody else to eat them? Like, kind of bifurcates humanity along that track. Yeah. And people get weird, man.

People get weird when the basic necessities aren't there. Yeah. You'll say that you wouldn't, right? But you would also say you would. I wouldn't eat out of a dumpster.

Theo Von
There's a dumpster outside right now. I would not go eat out of it. But give me three days without food, right? If you're about to eat a dude in best buy, right? Like, yeah.

Shopify Representative
You're getting eat out of that dumpster. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's what's crazy. You would eat that alley sashimi, baby.

Theo Von
You'd eat whatever out of there. Yeah, for sure. And he'd be stoked. And, dude, you know, like, yeah, those are crepes. That's what I keep yelling.

Those are crepes. I'm gonna go foraging with you. Yeah. I'm gonna be in just garbage you make. Dude, that's a crepe.

Shopify Representative
And I'll be like, really? I think you gotta trick yourself. It's all crepes. Yeah. Yeah.

We're both just going to, like, mentally just redesign whatever garbage we're eating. That's a wet napkin, homie. What are you talking about, brother? Don't tell me that. Yeah, it's gotta be nutritional value.

Theo Von
That's a damn crate. Nate Halverson, thanks so much. The grab, it's coming out on Netflix. No, it's coming out on June 14 in theaters, and then people can rent it online, and then. And then it'll be on one of the streaming platforms in the fall.

Okay, so the grab, it's coming out on June 14 in theaters? Yeah. It's really interesting, man. Just thought provoking to get me to start thinking like, yeah, what are. Because you just think, oh, that's just a farm in my neighborhood.

Or you just think like, oh, that's just the way things are. That's just the way things go. You don't sometimes see, like, maybe the chessboard that's being put together or that's already been, you know, the plays that have already been played. Nate Halverson, thanks so much for being an investigator and for spending time with us. Hey, Theo, thanks so much for having me on, man.

Yeah, you bet, man. Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these. Leaves I must be cornerstone but when I reach that ground I'll share this piece of my life out I can feel it in my bones, but it's going to take a little.

Shopify Representative
Leaves I must be cornerstone but when I reach that ground I'll share this piece of my life out I can feel it in my bones, but it's going to take a little.

E510 Nate Halverson

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