Doomer Optimism

Ashley Fitzgerald sits down with Elizabeth Oldfield to explore how we can foster genuine connection across ideological and cultural divides and why it matters more than ever.
Drawing on Elizabeth’s experience leading the Theos think tank, hosting the acclaimed podcast The Sacred, and living in an intentional community, they discuss the power of combining rigorous research with compelling storytelling to actually shift culture and change minds. They dig into why demanding ideological purity fractures movements and how to build real coalitions across genuine disagreement instead. Elizabeth shares her hard-won insights into the neurobiology of listening, understanding our fight-or-flight responses and the human tendency toward homophily, and how this knowledge can help us create spaces where people can actually hear each other.
The conversation takes a deeper turn as they wrestle with the surprising case for institutions. Even imperfect ones like churches, schools, and intentional communities are essential scaffolding for human flourishing. Elizabeth shares her own journey from childhood cultural Christianity through atheism and back to a grounded, mysterious faith, and reflects on the spiritual hunger she’s been witnessing emerge over the past several years, even among those who thought they’d moved beyond religion.
Throughout, they keep returning to the unglamorous, essential work of showing up locally: sitting on school boards, knowing your neighbors, breaking bread together. In a time of fragmentation and uncertainty, they suggest this might be the most radical and necessary act of all.

Surviving Consolidation, One Pig at a Time

Greg Gunthorp, a fourth-generation Indiana hog farmer, joins Nate for a wide-ranging conversation about survival, stubbornness, and adaptation in the American meat industry.
Greg grew up raising pigs on pasture as part of a diversified family farm, using livestock as a tool to care for the land and keep the operation afloat. But by the early 1990s, the writing was on the wall. In 1994, Greg’s father, Theodore, told him that the era of the independent hog farmer was over. Greg didn’t accept it. Determined not to be the last Gunthorp to raise pigs, he bought the sow herd from his father and struck out on his own on 65 acres just down the road.
Then the market collapsed. By 1998, Greg was selling pigs for less than what his great-grandfather had earned during the Great Depression. Walking away would have made sense, but instead, a chance conversation after a conference changed everything. Someone suggested he call a Chicago restaurant that was buying whole hogs. Greg picked up the phone, not knowing who Charlie Trotter was. “Bring me a pig,” the chef said. That delivery, into one of the most celebrated restaurants in the world, marked Greg’s entry into foodservice and a niche that would keep the farm alive.
As farm-to-table gained momentum in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Gunthorp Farm grew rapidly, at times doubling year over year. Greg talks about what that growth felt like, and why it eventually slowed as larger brands entered the space and redefined what “farm-to-table” meant. “The big guys woke up,” he says. “Most of it comes from them now.”
The pandemic brought another shock, especially as downtown Chicago restaurants shut down and office workers disappeared. Greg speaks candidly about the fragility of restaurant-driven farm businesses, thin margins, and how quickly demand can vanish.
Throughout the conversation, adaptation is the throughline. From expanding into poultry, sheep, and on-farm processing, to developing fully cooked products and partnering with other farmers, Greg shares how flexibility, and a refusal to quit, has sustained the operation. Today, Greg, his wife Lei, and son Evan farm 240 acres with a growing team, raising and processing pigs, poultry, and sheep using practices rooted in past generations and refined with modern tools.
This episode is an unvarnished look at modern meat production, the limits of food trends, and what it really takes to keep farming on your own terms when the odds aren’t in your favor.
You can find Greg at Gunthorp Farms, a family-run pasture-based livestock and USDA-inspected meat processing farm in LaGrange County, Indiana.
https://gunthorpfarms.com/

Nate sits down with Jason Mauck to discuss his hard-won experience running Munsee Meats, a small-scale meat processing operation in Indiana. What started as an opportunistic response to empty shelves during COVID became a two-and-a-half-year battle with regulatory bureaucracy that ultimately revealed the deep structural problems plaguing America’s food system.
Jason estimates the regulatory burden cost him over a million dollars in inefficiencies, despite buying the facility for just $200,000. Meanwhile, imported beef faces far less scrutiny than his local operation ever did.
Jason and Nate explore what a revitalized rural food system could actually look like—one built on diversified farms with animals integrated back onto the landscape. They discuss Jason’s innovative relay cropping systems that capture 80% of corn yields with 40% of the seed, while simultaneously raising chickens, pigs, goats, and sheep in the same fields.
They examine the creative marketing strategies that worked, like automated fundraisers that gave 25% back to schools and churches while capturing retail margins, and freezer kiosks that allowed convenient pickup. Rural America has been systematically hollowed out over decades of consolidation, with farmers forced to compete against one another rather than collaborate.
Jason argues that the same regulatory frameworks supposedly designed for food safety have become firewalls that protect corporate interests while making it nearly impossible for small operators to succeed.
Bringing animals back to the land could restore soil health, replenish aquifers, revitalize rural economies, create meaningful employment opportunities, enhance human health through improved nutrition, and break the corporate stranglehold on our food supply. The technology and knowledge exist; what’s missing is the regulatory reform and political will to let it happen.

One Farmer's Battle Against USDA BureaucracyNate sits down with Jason Mauck, a 44-year-old Indiana farmer who dove headfirst into local meat processing during COVID and lived to tell the tale. Jason shares the raw, unfiltered story of purchasing Muncie Meats, a historic meat-processing facility, with the dream of connecting local farmers directly to consumers.What started as a $250,000 investment quickly spiraled into a $1.25 million odyssey through regulatory red tape. Despite explosive sales growth, from $12,000 to $250,000 per week, Jason spent two and a half years unable to grind hamburger while watching thousands of pounds of premium trim go to waste. His butchers could safely process meat blocks away at state-inspected facilities, but USDA certification remained frustratingly out of reach.Jason pulls back the curtain on the real challenges facing anyone trying to build local food infrastructure: the impossibility of competing with vertically integrated corporations, the Catch-22 of needing capital before you can prove your concept, the monopolistic equipment suppliers, and a regulatory system that seems designed for industrial-scale operations only.This conversation explores why we desperately need more local processing capacity, yet why jumping into the arena might leave you roadkill. Jason offers hard-won advice for aspiring meat processors, discusses whether the PRIME Act would actually help mid-scale operators, and explains why the answer might be starting small and staying “under the radar.”A must-listen for anyone interested in food sovereignty, agricultural entrepreneurship, and understanding why rebuilding local food systems is so much harder than it should be.Jason Mauck farms in Gaston, Indiana, with his family. Jason is passionately curious when it comes to everything Ag. His company, Constant Canopy, is looking at agriculture through a different lens with the next generation in mind. He believes that the sharing economy will transform every industry, including agriculture, in the next few years. He wants to create more regenerative solutions to produce and share food, energy, and nutrientshttps://www.notill.org/jason-mauck

Antitrust attorney Basel Musharbash discusses recent political whiplash in beef markets and the broader question of how actually to enforce anti-monopoly law. The conversation covers why ranchers erupted over being blamed for high beef prices, the history of promises versus lackluster execution going back to early 1900s meatpacking cases, and how the Packers and Stockyards Act was supposed to regulate these companies but never really worked except briefly in the 1940s, Reagan's 1982 announcement ending merger enforcement and the five year transformation that followed, the difference between free markets and accessible competitive markets, why monopolies arise even without government help through predatory pricing and exclusive contracts, the paradox of needing to use power to break up concentrated power, Robert Jackson's 1937 speech on economic democracy without bureaucracy or regimentation, concrete immediate actions like debarment from government contracts versus multi-year DOJ investigations, why Congress could pass a breakup bill instead of waiting on agencies, the political opportunity for either party to outflank the other on this issue, Dan Osborne's economic dictatorship framing, and why economists should maybe just be ignored entirely when they dismiss rancher testimony with modeling exercises.

Basel is Managing Attorney at the Antimonopoly Counsel, specializing in antitrust and trade regulation with a focus on agriculture, rural economies, and consumer protection. He has represented farmers against meat processors, defended workers from illegal noncompete agreements, and advocated before the FTC, DOJ, and USDA. Basel authored the landmark 2024 report “Kings Over the Necessaries of Life” on monopolization in American agriculture. His work has been featured in Reuters, AP, Time Magazine, CNBC, and other major outlets.