Best Of 2022

Use cash. A 1% change can exponentially improve your life. Avoiding artificial scents in skin-care and household cleaning products can relieve our toxic burden. These are simple lessons from today’s BEST OF 2022 episode that highlights segments from our most listened-to episodes of the year!

Justin Rhodes of “The Rooted Life,” Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari, and Emilie Toups of Toups and Co. emphasize simple steps we can take for a healthier, wealthier life.

Visit Justin Rhodes Show YouTube channel

Go to solariadvisors.com for more from Catherine Austin Fitts

Check out Toupsandco.com for info on Emilie Toups’ products

Go to our website for more resources: westonaprice.org

See our sponsors: White Oak Pastures, Marithyme Seafood Co, Optimal Carnivore

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Listen to the podcast here

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Justin Rhode, Austin Fitts, and Emilie Toups.

Happy holidays and happy new year. Wherever in the world you are and however you celebrate, this year-end show is our gift to you. This is episode 399. We have three guests because this is the Best of 2022 episode. In it, we highlight segments from the most popular interviews of the calendar year. We’ve covered so many topics and there was so much good stuff from how to build resilience and how to take care of your mental health and your physical health. There are tons to comb through in our back catalog, so feel free to read if you have any downtime before 2023.

In the meantime, enjoy this sampler episode with excerpts from the episodes you may have not read before, or if you did, you get a chance to enjoy them once again. In this episode, we will hear from Justin Rhodes, the homesteader and author of The Rooted Life who reminds us to embrace what’s possible wherever we live and whatever our ability to grow food.

Next up is Catherine Austin Fitts, the President of Solari and the publisher of the Solari Report. She offers insights into health and wealth. Batting cleanup appropriately enough is Emilie Toups of Toups & Co. She calls us to nourish our skin from the inside out and the outside in. You’ll see what when you get to read her segment.

Before we get into the show, I want to implore you before the year ends to join hands with us. If you’ve enjoyed this show and appreciate the health information that this program and The Weston A Price Foundation Organization provide, become a member now. Use the code POD10 and you can join for only $30 a year. You’ll get your perks like the quarterly journal, the shopping guide, and more. Most importantly, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you are supporting the initiatives of this nonprofit that have the power to change lives. Go now to WestonAPrice.org and click on the Become a Member Tab. Use the code POD10, and that’s it. Welcome to the family and thank you in advance.

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First up, we’re going to read excerpts from Episode 346, Homesteading: A Rooted Life with Justin Rhodes. Justin gets super candid sharing the ups and downs of what it takes to produce your own food. He also explains why it’s worth it.

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A lot of people now are thinking and toying with the idea of starting their own homestead. They need to go into it with our eyes wide open. What’s one thing you would say they need to know besides what you said, that it is a grind?

Don’t let the grind deter you because this is what happens. We had a lady come and she said, as we were about to go milk, “I can’t wait to have a family cow. I am going to have my own raw milk.” I hope I wasn’t rude, but I had to say, “You better fall in love with the chore as well, or you’re going to burn out.” At some point though, it’s me collapsing on the floor with grief. I ended up going and putting the chickens up that night, pushing through the calloused hands, sore back, and walking pneumonia you caught from milking the cows in the pouring rain for an hour.

When you do sit down to that glass of milk, not only do you know the story. You could buy milk locally and know the story, but there’s something very special about being part of that story. A story is not special and epic unless there’s a super grind. In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo takes the ring to be destroyed. It’s all those obstacles that make that so victorious. When you finally sit down to that glass of milk and you remember squeezing the tiny teats in the cold rain, the time you collapsed on there, then that meal is so victorious.

Your new book is coming out, The Rooted Life. In it, you mentioned starting small and right outside the door. Talk to us a little bit about those two ideas.

WT 399 | Health Lessons — *The Rooted Life: Cultivating Health and Wholeness Through Growing Your Own Food*

To continue to bring it back, we were talking about the struggles. Now, it sounds like we’re going to talk about the possibilities. Anybody can do this. A lot of times, as me being somebody who’s teaching this, they’ll say, “Where do you start?” Do start a permaculture principle, which I’ve studied. Permaculture will tell you it’s a design idea to start right outside your door. Don’t be overwhelmed by all your grand idea. You’ll get a lot of ideas. As somebody who’s wanting to get into this, maybe you want to grow some eggs, grow a garden, have honey, get bees, have devil eyes, which is what I call goats. You want to do all these things and you can’t because you only have so much time, money, and energy.

Start right outside your door. If you can’t cultivate and develop right outside your door, who says you can do 8 acres? You work full-time on 8 acres. Seriously, start outside your door. This is what I see a lot of people doing. Don’t say, “If only.” If only’s will kill you. “If only I had 5 acres, if only I had a half-acre, if only I had a yard.” Start outside your door. If there’s nothing outside your door because you’re in an apartment complex, please tell me you have a window. Go to Walmart, Target, Amazon, get you a 5-inch terracotta pot. Buy what you call potting soil, put it in that. Buy a basil plant, buy some basil seeds at the grocery store, and plant that in there and put it in the windowsill. You can do that.

You mentioned the 1% rule in your book. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Talking about overwhelm and being overcome and having all these ideas, you never get to the end of that. You never get things accomplished. Every night, I help the boys clean their room and get laundry started. I feel like we’re chipping away at it, but there’s always more. Our farm is not as organized as I would like it to be. We have arrived as far as we’ve got all the animals we want. We’re doing as much gardening as we want, but let’s take your organization for example. You guys might imagine starting from scratch, doing with growing with food. It seems overwhelming as you get into it. There’s so much to learn. There’s so much to do. Do 1% every day. Make a 1% change and you have the rule of compounding.

If you change 1% every day, it doesn’t take 100 days to double. It takes only 72 because that’s the rule of compounding. By 72 days, you’ve doubled. One percent is better than nothing. If you’re doing nothing on overwhelm, which is what I find a lot of people doing, do 1%. Sometimes, that 1% is finding out a little more information, “I’m going to find out a little more information on how to garden,” then you find the Square Foot Gardening method and say, “Tomorrow, I’m going to order that book.” You ordered the book, Square Foot Gardening or my book, The Rooted Life.

1% is better than nothing. If you’re doing nothing on overwhelm, just do 1%.

That comes and you figure out, “I want to build a raised bed.” That was your 1% that day, “I’m going to order all the supplies for the raised bed.” The next day, you’re going to find the soil to fill in the raised bed. You don’t have to be a hero and do it all in one weekend. What’s going to happen? You’re going to get overwhelmed, burned out and do nothing. It’s better to chip away at it.

Do some people get so overwhelmed that they decide, “Forget it, I’m not going to homestead after all?”

I think so. Joel Salatin was saying in his book, Polyface Micro, that the average homesteader doesn’t make it to seven years. It’s probably because not all people come for the glory, but they come for the finished fill, the milk, the meal, and the plate at the end of it, then they realize there’s this process or journey to get there. They don’t realize that part is so precious and it is crushing. It can be crushing and intimidating. Your friends and families are not doing this. They’re going to thank your bats.

Remember, we talked about it being lonely. Not everybody is doing this. You think, “What do you mean? You’re going to be a weirdo for putting a basil plant on your window sill?” No, you might be pretty cool to your friends and family, but what’s going to happen is you’re going to have that pizza, that basil leaf on your pizza. You’re going to think, “What else is in this pizza? I could make my own tomato sauce.” Before you know it, you’re like, “I could have made my own cheese. I need a cow.” All of a sudden, you’re moving to the country. You could go down that route. “There’s a weed in it,” if you have a crust on your pizza or whatever. You could grow that too. You’re going to end up growing your own pizza.

They’re going to think you’re crazy, but they might also come running into you in times of crisis. People keep saying, “There’s going to be trouble with the supply chain. Our infrastructure is going to fall apart and people are going to be looking for food.”

I think we should go ahead and let them know that now. Go ahead and sell shares in our farms because that’s not fair. We’ve had people say to me, “I’m coming to you if the crap hits the fan.” I’m thinking, “Where’s your share money because I’m putting it all in now?” I’m getting my pastures totally more productive every year by moving the cows every day, even if it’s raining and cold. Where were you? You better be putting some skin in the game if you want to be showing up.”

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A quick shout-out to one of our sponsors, White Oak Pastures. Radical traditional farming best describes White Oak Pasture’s philosophy for land management and animal impact. At White Oak Pastures, they are making a bold return to giving a darn through regenerative farming, which restarts the cycle of nature and the result is abundance. They pasture raise and hand butcher ten species of livestock in Bluffton, Georgia. White Oak raises livestock to produce products that taste as they mean it.

White Oak Pastures invites you to get to know your farmer and to go ahead and visit them in Bluffton, Georgia. I’ve been to their farm personally I can vouch for the regenerative nature of the farming practices and the quality of their meats. go visit or shop online at WhiteOakPastures.com and use the code WISE for $20 off of your first purchase of $150 or more.

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Next up is Catherine Austin Fitts from Episode 352, Protect Your Health and Wealth. Catherine discusses what’s at stake in the world regarding freedom and finances. She explains recent events and their implications for our wallets and our health. Plus, she puts in a good word for paying for goods and services in cash.

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We are fans of yours. I love your holistic approach to health and wellness, finances and how it is all of a piece. Talk to us about how each person is, in and of themselves, an asset.

I’m a retired investment advisor. I no longer do individual investment advisory but when I look at you or anyone from an investment advisory position, the first thing I see is you are the asset and your family. You are the asset. The whole point of any financial assets or real assets is to nurture, support, protect and serve your purpose. These assets are designed to support you.

The question is, “How do you get the best result?” Increasingly over the years, the best result comes not from maximizing your income, minimizing your expenses or maximizing your savings in the traditional sense. It comes from lowering and mitigating your risk. I discovered early and fell in love with all the different things that Weston Price does. I read Wise Traditions Magazine. What I found was the number one cause of financial insecurity and loss was healthcare problems.

I had a lot of clients who had experienced vaccine injury or chronic illness in their children and it had devastating financial consequences. It is one of the reasons I believe in the rise of tremendous financial inequality. What I discovered is it was much more important for my clients to be smart about health proactively than to get the best investment return. Even the most phenomenal investment return could not make up for the money flowing out the back door as a result of health fraud.

I wanted your insights on some of the things that are happening that affect all of the things we have already been talking about, our finances, bottom line, health and wellbeing and our happiness. This term is called The Great Reset. Can you tell us about its implications and when that term was first coined?

The reset that you and I are dealing with, I think of this as a war. We are in the middle of a war and the war began with a vote taken on August 22nd, 2019. There was much preparation before then but the final vote came on August 22nd, 2019 by the G-7 Central Bankers. It was called the Going Direct Reset. John Titus did a great write-up of the Going Direct Reset at Solari. I asked him to write a summary of what the central bankers did. They voted on August 22nd, 2019 and then that September, the Fed proceeded into the market and a variety of events unfolded.

At the same time, the World Economic Forum put out what I would call a marketing plan for non-financial people, particularly young people, called The Great Reset. It was a way of marketing the Going Direct Reset to non-financial people. We proceeded with the COVID-19 Economic Restrictions, which were an integral part of helping the Going Direct Central Banking teams to dramatically centralize control and ownership in the economy.

Isn’t banking already centralized?

Banking is already centralizing but they are significantly increasing ownership and control. During the pandemic, you have put a million small businesses out of business. You have been able to consolidate their market share into the big publicly traded businesses and we now have 500 new billionaires.

They were getting a bigger share of the market, basically.

If I shut down to 20 small grocery stores in a neighborhood, everybody has to go to Costco and Costco’s stock goes up.

Was this a plan?

This was a plan.

Did you say it was the World Economic Forum that signed off on this?

The World Economic Forum described what was happening as The Great Reset. If you look at the simulations done, after the Central Bankers voted on the Going Direct Reset, Bill Gates and members of the Intelligence Community had a simulation. It was in New York. It was called Event 201 where they simulated the use of a healthcare crisis to institute totalitarian controls.

When the feds started in September, they started to print what has been almost $4 trillion, which has been injected into the economy. If you have $4 trillion to go on a shopping spree, you can buy a lot more land and real estate if everybody you are buying land and real estate from has been fired or their business has been shut down and they are in a debt squeeze and a debt trap. It makes it much easier for you to buy things up and it also makes it much easier to stop inflation from going wild from all the money printing.

By shutting down the small business and community economy, you are creating a deflationary offset. Think of this as war. “I print money and give it to my pals. At the same time, I devastate you and shut you down. You have to sell assets cheaply. Now, I can buy them with free money.” I’m grossly oversimplifying but that is essentially the essence of what they have been doing.

You have given us the idea on a macro level of what is happening with the world’s finances. What should we do on a micro level? You have advocated for CashFridays, for example, that we should use cash only. Why is that? How would that help?

One of the most important things to understand about your micro strategy is you always want to use strategies that not only help you be free but help other people be free. That is the only way we are going to get to be free. It has got to be collaborative. I call it Net Energy Plus. The second thing is you have got to use strategies that give you energy because the more energy you get, the more strategies you can implement. We want to always be doing what works for you.

In a decentralized world, everybody is unique and different. There are no magic formulas. Always do what gives you energy. Here is what you want to do, if you look at your income statement and your balance sheet, the number one thing you want to do is radically reduce risk. Somebody who allows their 10-year-old child to be injected with a poison that is going to cost them $1 million to $5 million is going to devastate their finances. If you look at all the vaccine injuries and death we are experiencing, each one of those is often a family bankruptcy.

In a decentralized world, everybody’s unique and different. There are no magic formulas, so always do what gives you energy.

You want to conduct your life so that you radically reduce the risk of being poisoned or wasting time. One of the reasons I encourage people to homeschool is you cannot afford your child to go to school and get brainwashed, and then have to un-brainwash them on the weekends or get them to do stupid things that put the whole family and the family finances at risk because they are totally brainwashed. You want to pay attention to reducing risk.

The smartest investment in this environment is to do anything that dramatically reduces your expenses and improves resiliency. We published an article by Pete Kennedy on how to find local fresh food systems. The number one thing is to sign up for Weston Price and get their information. Anything you can do to reduce expenses permanently or increase resiliency will protect you against inflation and all supply problems, engineered or natural.

A friend of mine said, “When we know our farmer and have food growing in our backyard, we are less dependent on any larger scale infrastructure and we are ungovernable.” He meant that in a good way. In other words, we do not need to worry about what is going to happen economically in the bigger picture because we have got what we need or what our family needs.

You want to make sure that you are investing in the local fresh food systems you need whether it is your time or money. You need them to be there before you need them and you are going to need them. It is not just food. It is energy, health, and all these different things. Those are, by far and away, the best investments.

If they haven’t joined Weston Price, they have to do it. Not only because it is one of the most valuable networks in the United States and internationally to stay current on health, but the other thing is it is a fantastic network to find other people. When people say, “How do I find the people in my place?” I said, “Find out if you have a Weston Price chapter and find the Weston Prices.”

I have never heard that before. That is so cute. That is going to catch on.

You want to support the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund because unless we finance an army to fight for what we need, we are not going to make it. You have to fight. This is a war. Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund is a fighting capacity. It is an army that goes in there and fights for our local fresh food. Without those fighters, we are not going to make it.

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We get to learn from Emilie Toups of Toups & Co Organics. Emilie was featured in Episode 353, Nourish the Skin. Ditch the Toxins. In that episode and in this segment, Emilie doesn’t just talk about skin care. She sheds light on how to live a life free of toxins, sharing ideas for simple swaps so we can protect our health from toxic overload.

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I understand that when Elise was little, she had some eczema that was all over her body and you all were at a loss as to what to do. Is that true?

Yes. She was maybe a year to eighteen months old. She had awful eczema, bleeding from cracks in her elbows, behind her elbows and knees. We were at a loss at what to do. As with any mom, I dug down deep and I was like, “We’re going to figure this out. We’re going to look for other solutions besides the solutions that were being offered to us.”

That is usually steroids and certain creams that might help with the symptoms, but not stop the root cause.

First, they’re offering steroids and all these things. Things helped for a little while and they don’t clear it up. We were not very knowledgeable at the time about how important the things we put on our skin or in our bodies were. That was when I started to do a lot of research and came across some excellent documentaries. We flipped a switch in our family. She was our first child. We did a 180, both with the things we put on our bodies and in our bodies.

What was the first thing that you put on her that showed some promise?

At first, we changed her diet and we went through our house with a black garbage bag. We went through the cabinets, the pantry and the refrigerator. My husband and I went and looked at every ingredient. If it wasn’t what we wanted, it was in the garbage. We looked at each other and we were like, “What do we eat?”

Through that eye-opening example, we went to the grocery store. We were like, “The first thing we want to do is eat clean, nourishing foods. We still had very basic knowledge at that time. We came across The Gaps book. That was what we used to go to the grocery store and buy food to come home. We were like, “We’re going to heal her.” The first thing we put on her skin was tallow.

I had done a lot of research on things, what to put, not to put, petroleum products. I contacted someone local. It was a local grass-fed farm and asked for some tallow. They didn’t even know what it was. She was like, “What?” I was like, “Tallow, beef fat.” This was years ago. “Let me contact our butcher and I’ll get back to you.” She called me back one afternoon and was like, “We weren’t getting it back before, but we can if you would like some. How much would you like?” I was like, “I’ll take 5 pounds.”

She met me on this side of the road one Sunday afternoon after church. We did an exchange there. She’s like, “You’re the first person that ever asked for this.” We went home and rendered it. It was probably not the very best way. I used it and it worked anyways. It didn’t smell the best. How to render tallow properly came later, but it worked so well that we were instantly sold.

We were immersed in the standard American diet. What we thought was healthy then, I would not even consider healthy now. You can imagine we were on the oatmeal and rice cereal train with her. She was our only child that had formula. It’s not only us, but she was also eating things as an infant that I wouldn’t consider healthy. All of that together was the reason that we were seeing unhealthy symptoms in our and her health.

Good health and glowing skin come from the inside out.

People ask me, “What is your number one tip for glowing skin?” They automatically assume that I’m going to say, “One of our Toups & Co products.” The first thing I always say is, “Are you drinking enough water? What foods are you eating?” They’re like, “What? That’s not what I want to know.”

Speaking of glowing skin, your skin is so beautiful. Did you ever struggle with acne or certain skin conditions?

When I was eating a standard American diet, my skin was much more prone to breakouts and I had oily skin. At that time, I was using conventional skincare products, stripping all the oils off my skin, not moisturizing with oil, but oil-free was all the rage back then. You don’t want to put oil on your oily skin. I struggled with some skincare issues that were the result of not knowing how to properly care for my skin.

When you changed your diet, your daughter’s skin showed improvement because of the tallow. Did you also notice, “Something’s different for me, too?”

It took me a little while to decide that I was going to throw away what was in that makeup bag. That’s always the last thing to go. When I talk to women, especially women who are changing their diets, eating well, and making lifestyle changes, you ask them, “What’s in that makeup bag?” They’re like, “I don’t want to show that.” It affects me.

When we were pregnant with our second child, and I looked into the makeup bag and into my skincare, I was like, “Do I want to put this on my skin now that I’m pregnant and it is affecting someone else?” It often takes us affecting another person that we love to make changes for ourselves. We always want to do the best for everyone else, but mom is last, right?

It takes us affecting another person we love to make changes for ourselves because we always want to do the best for everyone else.

It’s true.

When you add up the little bit in each product times the average of 12 times 365, it adds up to a lot. We’re using them every single day. I don’t think we realize that our skin is our largest organ and barrier, but it’s also very permeable and there are transdermal patches and things where we can take medications through our skin. It’s important to realize how quickly the skin absorbs things and how those synthetic chemicals and things can make it into our bloodstream quicker than we think.

If you are picking up something in the store that says all-natural or you’re reading on the back and there are these huge words. I don’t like to say that chemicals are bad because everything is a chemical. We’re talking about chemical exposure to toxic chemicals. A lot of the top chemicals are going to be unpronounceable or a super long list with hormone disruptors and endocrine disruptors. They’ll be phthalates. Fragrances are number one. If a company is putting artificial fragrances in their product, 9 times out of 10, they’re not caring about all the other ingredients in the products as well.

Synthetic fragrance is one of the top air contaminants. We also don’t realize that it’s not just in our personal care products. Fragrances, parabens, phthalates, propylene glycol, all of those things are in the products we use in our bodies, soaps we use to wash our dishes and laundry, and products we use to clean our homes. We think, “It’s this one thing and this one product,” but every single product that we bring into our house is multiplied on top of each other times every single day.

It’s like we’re stacking up the chemicals. It’s more than one little phthalate or something in one of the products. We’re using soap. Our clothes have been washed in laundry detergent that has some of these hormone and endocrine disruptors. We put on some cream. Emilie, how toxic are these chemicals? They’ve approved the use of these products. They can’t be that bad.

A lot of people don’t understand that personal care products are not regulated by the government at all. A company can produce a brand-new product, put whatever ingredients they want in there, ship it out to the stores and sell it. There’s no one coming to these companies and saying, “Let’s test this product and see if it’s suitable to put on the shelf.”

There are people that say, “We need more government regulation. We need the government to step in and regulate these products that are being put out on the shelf.” That’s a two-edged sword because most of your options for organic, clean, great products, not greenwashing, but clean, nourishing products for our entire home come from small businesses. They are people who care more about their product and their consumers than they do about their profit margin.

If the government’s stepping in and regulating, you’re going to put those little businesses out of business because they don’t want them in business. These big companies want to sell more deodorant. If you walk down your local big-box store, you’re seeing more and more options in one product. You’re seeing more natural deodorants on the store shelf.

Flip them around and look at the back and look at the ingredients. There’s fragrance and oxybenzone and other things like that in there. They’re magnesium-based or baking soda-based on the forefront, but they’ve also got these other ingredients in there. I like to warn people to be careful of greenwashing. I don’t even like the word greenwashing, but it means companies that are trying to sell you a product to make you think that you’re buying something healthy for your body, but under the cover, in those ingredients, they’re not healthy.

What should we be looking for? What ingredients would we like to see in the products that we use?

Some amazing ingredients are animal fats. Thankfully, the anti-fat charade is being torn down. The truth is coming out about fats are essential for us, both in our diet and on our skin. When you’re looking at ingredients, you want to see low ingredient lists, 5 to 15 pronounceable ingredients that you can look up. If you don’t know what something is, type in an internet search, read about it, and inform yourself before putting it on yourself and on your children and making sure that it’s something clean.

If you don’t know what something is, type in an internet search, read about it, and inform yourself before putting it on yourself and your children.

I love animal products. I hate that they get a bad rep in the skincare world. Everything is vegan. I often hear people say, “I switch to this product line and they’re vegan.” I ask them, “What does that mean that they’re vegan? Why is that something that you would want?” Usually, they can’t answer that question. I like to give them little educational animal fats and tallows, emu oil, and things like that, and tell them how anti-inflammatory they are. They’re full of fat-soluble vitamins that are great for us on the inside and outside and how important it is to nourish our skin from the inside and outside.

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Our guests were Justin Rhodes, Catherine Austin Fitts, and Emily Toups. Justin Rhodes is on YouTube. Look for the Justin Roads Show. Catherine Austin Fitts can be found at SolariAdvisors.com. Emilie Toups can be found at ToupsAndCo.com. We’re going to wrap it up with a big thank you for reading. Help us spread the word by sharing an episode with a friend or family member. This one might be ideal to start with and may your new year be filled with good health. Feliz año nuevo. Hasta pronto.

About Justin Rhodes

Justin Rhodes teaches and inspires millions of people to grow their own food through his popular YouTube channel, “Justin Rhodes Show”, his streaming platform Abundance Plus and his number one best-selling book, “The Rooted Life.” He and his family of seven are the 4th generation to sustenance farm on their beautiful 75-acre homestead in the mountains of Fletcher, North Carolina.

About Catherine Austin Fitts

Catherine is the president of Solari, Inc., publisher of the Solari Report, and managing member of Solari Investment Advisory Services, LLC. Catherine served as managing director and member of the board of directors of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. Inc., as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration, and was the president of Hamilton Securities Group, Inc.

Catherine has designed and closed over $25 billion of transactions and investments to-date and has led portfolio and investment strategy for $300 billion of financial assets and liabilities.

About Emilie Toups

Emilie Toups is the creator of Toups and Co Organics, a company dedicated to clean and natural skin care and makeup. She began Toups and Co right in her own kitchen with a passion for high quality products with recognizable ingredients. Emilie also has a passion for teaching holistic skincare practices and the reasons why using natural products is beneficial.