Gubba Homestead Podcast

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Predictive programming: Has Hollywood been programming us by showing us “the future”?

Enemy of the State (1998) portrayed government surveillance. Fifteen years later, Edward Snowden’s disclosures revealed extensive real-world government surveillance programs.

That’s one of several examples I keep coming back to. They Live (1988) showed broadcast signals controlling what people see. The Matrix (1999) put September 11th, 2001 on Neo’s passport. Eyes Wide Shut (1999) portrayed masked rituals among the ultra-wealthy that look a lot like the 1972 Rothschild Surrealist Ball, a party with dismembered baby dolls on its tables. Contagion (2011) walked through quarantines, overwhelmed hospitals, and vaccine development almost a decade before COVID.

The theory behind predictive programming is that powerful groups deliberately introduce events, technologies, and agendas through entertainment before they unfold publicly. Some say it’s preparation. Others say it’s a symbolic obligation, revealing the method through fiction so the public can dismiss it as make-believe later.

My honest take is that Hollywood would never release something the people in charge genuinely wanted buried. If it made it to theaters, it was allowed to.

Taylor Swift released the song Patient Zero while plague headlines were coming out of Russia, and I’ll explain why I now close the app instead of reporting on it. Red pill or blue pill, let me know in the comments.

You’ll Learn:



[0:00] Introduction

[3:35] They Live, and the sunglasses that reveal the truth

[5:09] Shape-shifting clips and malfunctioning frequencies on TV

[7:15] Why the fight to put on the glasses mirrors waking people up

[8:25] The Matrix and why most people take the blue pill

[12:01] Kubrick’s death and the theory of missing footage

[14:45] Rothschild Surrealist Ball compared to Eyes Wide Shut

[16:52] Contagion portraying a pandemic nearly a decade before COVID-19

[17:49] Taylor Swift’s Patient Zero and harvesting our energy

[18:50] The mere exposure effect and normalizing the unfamiliar

[21:54] Far-fetched movie technology that became recognizable years later

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You can support the show and your skin by shopping my small-batch, all-natural skincare at Arvoti.com. Every purchase helps keep the podcast going while giving you all-natural, thoughtfully made products for your daily routine. Thank you!

Your car will be able to decide when you can drive.

Section 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directs the Department of Transportation to develop a safety standard for technology in future passenger vehicles that can passively detect impairment and restrict operation of the vehicle.

People call it the kill switch provision. It isn’t a remote government button; it’s technology built into the car that monitors the driver and makes a determination about whether you’re allowed to drive. That distinction matters, and so does the broader question of how much decision-making authority we’re comfortable building into the machines we own.

This is why I’ve been looking at older vehicles differently. A new truck can reach a price that would have sounded absurd not that long ago, and that’s before a single sensor fails and a repair balloons into programming, calibration, and dealer-specific equipment.

An old truck has an ignition, an engine, a transmission, and a driver. Nothing analyzing your face, no over-the-air updates, no internet connection needed to do its basic job.

The privacy side, the repair side, the ownership side, physical buttons, and a real key still win for me. If you’ve been eyeing an old truck lately, you’re not the only one. And yes, I have thoughts on Cash for Clunkers.

You’ll Learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[2:13] Modern vehicles became computers with an engine attached

[4:06] Your new car is collecting data and watching you

[6:26] The impairment-detection kill switch provision and what it actually says

[8:56] The “for our safety” rollout pattern I keep seeing

[10:53] When repair was a normal part of owning a vehicle

[13:03] The satisfaction of turning an actual key

[15:19] Cash for Clunkers and the cars that lacked tracking

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You can support the show and your skin by shopping my small-batch, all-natural skincare at Arvoti.com. Every purchase helps keep the podcast going while giving you all-natural  thoughtfully made products for your daily routine. Thank you!

TikTok pulled my video on how American medicine was reshaped, and that reaction alone tells you this piece of history still makes somebody uncomfortable.

I'm a first-time homesteader, and the more I dug into old hospital photographs, the harder it was to ignore how much of an older approach to medicine was pushed aside within a generation or two.

Hospitals used to be built around sunlight, fresh air, and enormous porches where patients could recover outside. Heliotherapy, hydrotherapy, mustard plasters, copper surfaces, wool blankets, cross-ventilated wards. All of this existed in real hospitals and was used by real doctors, long before sealed windows and artificial lighting became the default.

Then in 1910, the Carnegie Foundation published Abraham Flexner's report, which redefined what a respectable medical school was supposed to look like.

Between 1913 and 1929, the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board poured tens of millions into a short list of institutions, enough to build the laboratories, hire the faculty, and fund the research programs that many competing schools, including homeopathic, eclectic, osteopathic, and naturopathic ones, could not match.

Those institutions trained the doctors. Those doctors became the professors, hospital administrators, journal editors, and licensing officials who decided what counted as legitimate care. 

If that chain of influence is real, the hospital you walk into today starts to look less like progress and more like a decision somebody made for you.

You’ll Learn:



[0:00] Introduction

[3:59] Old hospitals treated the environment as part of the cure

[5:41] Cleanable surfaces believed to aid healing

[7:27] Mustard plasters then, antibiotics as the first resort now

[8:34] The Flexner Report narrowed a once diverse American medicine

[10:34] Rockefeller money funneled into a few selected medical schools

[13:14] The self-reinforcing chain from funding to doctors

[15:27] Certain forms of medicine did not die in fair competition

[17:19] What a building reveals about a system’s priorities

[18:58] Progress or the dollar behind the modern hospital

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The internet calls them grandma hobbies, but most of them were never hobbies at all.

Baking bread, canning, sewing, keeping chickens, making butter, drying herbs. These were everyday skills that stopped being passed down in the span of two generations, and now they're making a comeback at a time when people seem burned out by modern life.

I want to talk about why that's happening, and what we can actually learn from it instead of treating it like another passing internet trend.

My farmhouse has a meat locker in the basement. Households used to raise and grow much of what they consumed, and their homes reflected that.

What matters even more is competence. The first time you make butter, you realize how simple it is. The first time you bake bread, you realize it doesn't have to come from a plastic bag. That knowledge builds confidence.

I also caution against turning grandma hobbies into another form of consumerism. You don't need a curated kitchen or matching linens to start. Pick one skill that would actually be useful in your life, and give it a month.

You are capable. This is your little push to go and do it.

You’ll Learn:



[0:00] Introduction

[1:58] What people actually mean by grandma hobbies

[3:41] Grandmas made clothing from wool instead of recycled plastic

[6:32] Tangible results feel different from vanishing screen time

[8:02] The competence shift that comes from making something yourself

[11:04] Gardening can be as simple as you make it

[12:41] Older household items were expected to age, not be replaced

[15:09] How communities were dismantled in two generations

[17:06] The warning against turning grandma hobbies into consumerism

[18:49] Pick one skill and spend a month learning it

Related Gubba Homestead Episodes:

Are Modern Homes Designed to Keep You Dependent?

Does Electroculture Actually Work? Natural Plant Booster

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Old farmhouses were built to solve problems that new homes can’t handle… Is it a coincidence?

I live in a 75-year-old farmhouse with a root cellar, a giant pantry off the kitchen, and an old walk-in meat locker in the basement with all of its equipment still there. The more I learn about how older homes were designed, the more I realize how much the house itself used to do the work for the people inside.

Before central air, deep porches shaded exterior walls before heat ever entered the home. Windows sat opposite each other so air could actually move. Deciduous trees shaded the house in summer and dropped their leaves in winter to let sunlight back in. Sleeping porches caught the evening breeze. Root cellars held food without electricity, and summer kitchens kept cooking heat out of the main house.

Modern subdivisions skip most of that. Homes get jammed together for speed and resale, without much thought for the position of the sun or the seasons. Then some owners move into brand-new homes and discover water intrusion, HVAC problems, and finishes failing much earlier than expected.

There's also a tangent about millennial gray, personality-free interiors, and why I'm going to paint a mural of my farm in the laundry room regardless of what a future buyer thinks.

You’ll Learn:



[0:00] Introduction

[2:37] What the layout of an old home reveals about its people

[5:14] Wraparound porches shielded the house from heat

[6:52] Sleeping porches and catching the cooler evening breeze

[9:16] The millennial gray pandemic and losing a home's personality

[11:39] Modern kitchens with nowhere to store 30 jars of peaches

[13:21] Dense materials that moderate temperature through the day

[15:59] Whether homes are optimized for longevity or resale

[17:52] What happens when a single household system fails

[21:25] Relying on grocery stores as the new root cellar

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A few years after Wilhelm Reich claimed he'd greened part of the Arizona desert, he was dead in a federal prison, and his publications were being destroyed under court order.

In late 1954, Wilhelm Reich took his cloudbuster into the Arizona desert to test whether it could reverse drought in the driest conditions he could find. What he claimed happened next is the part of the cloudbuster story that never gets told.

After building my own cloudbuster in my garden and watching haze and wildfire smoke clear within twenty minutes of powering it up, I went digging into his journal, CORE, which describes dozens of atmospheric operations: direction, duration, targets, timing. Reich wasn't only trying to make rain. He was trying to break up what he called DOR, deadly orgone energy, a condition he believed made the atmosphere stagnant, dry, and hazy.

Then he went to Tucson, where Mount Catalina grew clearer, humidity rose, and clouds began forming in areas he'd recorded as dead sky. January 1955 came in unusually wet for the region. Photographs from the expedition were even cataloged under phrases like 'The Prairie Reborn', as parts of the desert began greening.

A few short years later, Reich was in federal prison. His publications were destroyed under court order. By 1957, he was dead. That sequence is worth questioning.

You’ll Learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[3:38] Weather anomalies observed after powering up my garden cloudbuster

[5:44] DOR and the idea of a stagnant atmosphere

[7:38] Taking the cloudbuster to the Arizona desert

[9:21] The Prairie Reborn and greening desert vegetation

[11:19] Why the environment is responding is a much larger claim

[14:16] How everything around Reich began collapsing

[16:17] Operation Sea-Spray and long-hidden atmospheric manipulation

[18:06] Trying the backyard science experiment yourself

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Seedless fruit is a scam, and we made it possible.

Seedless grapes, seedless watermelon, seedless citrus... almost every fruit at the grocery store has been bred to remove the one part that actually makes it a plant.

I only started noticing this when I went to buy grapevines for my garden and saw "seedless" listed as the top selling point on nearly every variety. Growing up, I would have picked seedless every time. Now I deliberately look for seeded ones, and this episode is about why that changed.

Seeds carry the plant's genetics, the nutrients we're told to supplement with, and the option to grow food again next year without buying anything new. Grape seed extract is sold in capsules while the grapes themselves are engineered to remove the same seed those capsules come from. That contradiction runs through the whole food system.

Heirloom and traditional varieties don't get banned. They get replaced when shoppers stop buying them, growers stop planting them, and nurseries stop stocking them. A variety can disappear without anyone deciding to remove it.

I also raise a bigger pattern in the episode: Fertility is dropping in people, and it’s being bred out of the fruit we eat. Both are worth paying attention to.

You’ll Learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[4:41] Choosing seeded grape varieties over the seedless standard

[6:13] How shipping and shelf life influence which varieties survive

[8:11] He who controls the food controls the people

[10:22] The pattern of stripping whole foods into components

[11:55] Seed saving once meant genuine food independence

[13:58] Watching the full growth cycle changes how a seed looks

[15:38] Traditional food skills fade when nobody needs them

[17:50] Preserving diversity as a form of resilience

[21:11] What to notice next time seedless is printed on a bag

Go Deeper:

Want to explore more about why I'm choosing deeded fruit again?

Dig deeper into the seedless fruit conversation →

Resources Mentioned:

The Homestead Prepper's Guide To Canning Course

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I've been making my house “dumb” again, and this episode is about why.

After bringing back an old television, building a physical DVD collection, and cutting off appliances that want an internet connection, I started looking more closely at what "smart home" actually means for your privacy.

In a 2017 FTC (Federal Trade Commission) case, Vizio's software was found to have tracked second-by-second viewing across roughly 11 million televisions. The tracking pulled information from cable boxes, external streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts.

Then there's the Amazon case, where children's voice recordings were kept indefinitely, and thousands of employees reportedly had access to Alexa users' recordings without a business need.

Convenience is how nearly all of this gets through the front door. Preheating an oven from an app sounds harmless until you ask what you're trading for it, and how many points of failure you've added to your household.

People are outraged about Flock cameras on the pole, then walk past a doorbell camera and a voice assistant to get to the couch.

That disconnect is the whole conversation.

You’ll Learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[3:15] Technology stopped serving us and started learning about us

[6:32] The Vizio case and second-by-second viewing data

[8:32] How voice assistants actually record and who listens

[10:08] Amazon kept children's voice recordings and geolocations

[13:35] The strange disconnect between Flock cameras and home devices

[16:48] Convenience is how all of this gets through the front door

[19:38] Backdoor upgrades and the two iPhones that failed the same day

Go Deeper:

Explore why I’m trading smart-home convenience for more privacy

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The man who invented the cloudbuster died in a federal prison, and his research was burned, ordered by a US court.

His name was Wilhelm Reich, a physician and psychoanalyst who spent decades studying what he called orgone energy, a force he believed moved through living things and the atmosphere.

Reich designed arrays of hollow metal pipes connected to water and pointed them at the sky. He claimed they could shift atmospheric conditions, dissipate clouds, and even bring rain. In 1953, blueberry growers in Maine paid him after rain followed one of his experiments. In the mid-1950s, he ran the same tests in the Arizona desert.

Then the FDA came for his orgone accumulators, a federal court issued an injunction, and quantities of his publications were destroyed under court order. He died in prison in 1957.

I've been running my own backyard version of his work. Copper pipes in the garden. A gravel basin with water. Blackberries and strawberries responding on the copper side. Skies clearing after wildfire smoke. And posts about it getting flagged and hidden online.

If copper in a garden is harmless nonsense, why work so hard to make sure people don't hear about it? That's what this one is really about.

Explore More:

Wilhelm Reich’s cloudbuster experiments and what I discovered trying it myself

You’ll Learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[3:24] Copper in the garden and getting community noted

[5:46] Orgone energy and why modern physics rejects it

[9:43] Deadly orgone radiation and cosmic orgone engineering

[13:29] Why copper became the material of choice for builders

[15:03] The FDA injunction and burning of Reich's publications

[17:53] Reasons someone might want the cloud buster information gone

[20:36] What homesteading teaches about trusting your own observations

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Most people blame bad luck for infertility, but the research keeps pointing somewhere else entirely.

Let's explore what I’ve been reading about the modern fertility crisis, and why so many people around me are struggling to conceive. I'm not a doctor, and none of this is medical advice. It's a walk through the research in relation to what I'm observing in my own life.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA and phthalates keep coming up in reproductive research. Phthalates hide inside a single word on a label: "fragrance". That one word can represent dozens or hundreds of compounds, which is part of why many fertility clinics won't let you walk in wearing perfume.

Microplastics are another piece of this. A 2024 study found them in every human testis sample examined. Others have detected them in ovarian follicular fluid, blood, placentas, and breast milk.

Then there's food. Diets high in ultra-processed foods have been linked to lower sperm concentration, reduced motility, and poorer morphology. Similar patterns show up in women.

No single cause explains what's happening. That's exactly why I wanted to talk about the cumulative picture.

You’ll Learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[3:41] Declining sperm counts have researchers asking whether human biology itself is changing

[6:04] How endocrine-disrupting chemicals mimic hormones and why sunscreen ingredients started my investigation

[9:10] The BPA replacement pattern where each "safer" chemical turns out just as bad

[12:53] The cocktail effect of applying hundreds of chemicals to your body before breakfast

[17:42] Trust your own eyes over waiting for science, and the copper garden lesson

[21:28] Why oxidative stress damages delicate sperm cells and how antioxidants may help

[23:23] There is no single cause, so return to the fundamentals and tune into your body

Explore More:

The research behind the modern fertility decline

Related Gubba Homestead Episodes:

Your Wardrobe Is Killing Your Hormones. Swap THESE Fabrics Before It's Too Late

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