E56: How Life on the Land Changes Your Perspective | Dr. Robert Malone

In this episode, physician and scientist Dr. Robert Malone—known for his early work in mRNA vaccine technology—shares the story behind his journey into homesteading. From early farm work to rebuilding a farm in rural Virginia after significant financial setbacks, he reflects on how life on the land has shaped his perspective. Join us for this episode to hear more about his story, his farm today, and why homesteading remains central to his life even alongside a demanding public career.

In this episode, we cover:

Robert shares the story behind his homesteading life: early years working on farms and learning practical skills long before his scientific career
The financial setbacks that impacted him along the way, including major losses during the Great Recession and the decision to start over again
Finding their current farm in rural Virginia and slowly rebuilding the property from raw hay land
What life looked like in the early days: living in a construction trailer with no power or water while restoring old farm buildings
A look at Robert’s current farm today, including horse breeding, orchards, poultry, and a growing collection of livestock
Why homesteading remains central to his life despite a demanding public career and frequent travel
How the farm provides perspective and a mental reset from high-pressure work
Reflections on the values behind homesteading, stewardship of the land, and building a life with intention

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About Dr. Robert Malone

Dr. Robert Malone, MD is an internationally recognized physician and scientist with decades of experience in vaccinology, molecular biology, and clinical research. He is widely known for his early foundational work on mRNA and DNA vaccine technologies and holds numerous domestic and international patents related to gene delivery and vaccine platforms. Dr. Malone has authored nearly 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications, served on U.S. government advisory committees, and was previously considered for a Nobel Prize nomination for his work in genetic vaccination.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he became an outspoken advocate for early treatment strategies, medical ethics, and physician autonomy, raising concerns about regulatory processes, data transparency, and vaccine safety. His public positions have made him a prominent voice in global discussions around public health policy, medical freedom, and informed consent. Currently, he is the vice-chair of the CDC’s ACIP committee and the medical advisor for the MAHA movement.

Dr. Malone received his medical degree from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and completed additional scientific training at institutions including Harvard Medical School, UC Davis, UC San Diego, and the Salk Institute.

He and his wife, Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone, have chosen to homestead and create a farm and botanical garden carved out of an old quarry in the hills of Virginia. They share the land with a herd of Lusitano horses, nine peacocks, four guinea fowl, too many chickens to count, miniature jersey cattle, a goose named Gonzo, and an emu named Gizmo. Their three Australian Shepherds consider themselves the Chief Operating Officers of the endeavor and specialize in groundhog eradication, deer chasing, and early-morning alarm calls. Jill and Robert are committed to raising their own food, and their extensive fruit orchard and gardens provide them with healthy provisions most of the year, although both admit to a fondness for Snickers bars.

Resources Mentioned

Explore Dr. Robert Malone’s website

Check out his books:

Follow his latest work on Substack

Connect

Dr. Robert Malone | Website | X | Media

How Life on the Land Changes Your Perspective Transcript

Amy Fewell Welcome to the Homesteaders of America Podcast, where we encourage simple living, hard work, natural healthcare, real food, and building an agrarian society. If you’re pioneering your way through modern noise and conveniences, and you’re an advocate for living a more sustainable and quiet life, this podcast is for you. Welcome to this week’s podcast. I’m your host, Amy Fewell, and I’m the founder of the Homesteaders of America organization and annual events. If you’re not familiar with us, we are a resource for homesteading education and online support. And we even host a couple of in-person events each year with our biggest annual event happening right outside the nation’s capital here in Virginia every October. Check us out online at HomesteadersofAmerica.com. Follow us on all of our social media platforms and subscribe to our newsletter so that you can be the first to know about all things HOA (that’s short for Homesteaders of America). Don’t forget that we have an online membership that gives you access to thousands—yes, literally thousands—of hours worth of information and videos. It also gets you discount codes, an HOA decal sticker when you sign up, and access to event tickets before anyone else. All right. Let’s dive into this week’s episode.

Amy Fewell Welcome back to the Homesteaders of America podcast. I am your host, Amy Fewell. I have a super cool guest with me this week. I think all of our guests are really amazing, but this week I have Dr. Robert Malone. Some of you guys in the homesteading world, actually, I think a lot of you in the homesteading world know who Dr. Malone is. But Dr. Melone, for those who don’t, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are?

Dr. Robert Malone Well, what matters here, I mean, usually it’s all blah, blah, blah about RNA vaccines and that kind of stuff and things that I did when I was in my 20s at the Salk Institute. But rarely do I have an opportunity to discuss… I mean, like all of us, my life is a little complicated and it’s not so two-dimensional as the New York Times would have you think. I actually started off as a small farmer and a carpenter back when I was a teen. And in particular in the central coast of California, that was about lemon and avocado orchards. So I don’t know how many thousands of avocado trees I’ve planted. I’m quite adept at drip irrigation systems and all of that nuance. Of course the avocado industry in California has been decimated by Phytophthora root rot and also, frankly, by the impact of the Mexican cartels on the overall avocado industry. But since then, my wife and I have had, I think it’s five small farms now, that we’ve rehabilitated to various extents. And the one that we currently reside on here in Madison, Virginia—which is kind of a fascinating place, Madison County is up against the Shenandoah National Park. We’re only an hour and a half from Dulles Airport, which is one of the great airports in the world—but we live in a county that has the same population that it had in World War II. And we farm a little over 40 acres. We own 29 of those, the rest we lease. And we bought all this for sale by owner because we lost all our equity in the “Great Recession” in North Georgia on another farm. And so we bought this place from owner as raw hay land. And on it were three buildings of which this is one that I’m sitting in, the old pig barn. It’s a cinder block structure that was built in 1945. It’s still the same trusses and purlins that you’re seeing there. We bought it about eight years ago and moved an office trailer onto it. It was literally a construction office trailer, quite illegal. And about 400 square feet, my wife and myself and four dogs lived in that for a while. We used a porta potty, we had no power, no water, no fences because we breed a high value horse breed called the Lusitano and that’s kind of the revenue generator for the farm operation. And then we’ve kind of just gradually rebuilt it now over the years and what’s the lovely thing about having homesteaded like this, and scraped by for a while is we own it—lock, stock, and barrel. So, for those that are familiar with my history in molecular biology and virology and immunology and blah, blah, blah, and RNA vaccines and working with the government and all that, and my outspokenness regarding my concerns about the mRNA products and their safety and the ethics of mandates, which I’m strongly opposed to, I don’t think I would have had the ability or the courage to speak so plainly about those things if I had not been free of debt and living in this kind of entirely independent, really libertarian existence here in this part of Virginia. So the homesteading is an integral part of who I am and how my wife and I live and how we’ve lived for many years. As I said, we started off as small farmers. I worked for her father. That’s how I got myself through school on his avocado farm. And I also worked as a carpenter when I was young. Those skills have kind of expanded. As you know, Amy, small farming is a challenge in constant problem solving. And you have to have a broad range of skills to do it. And you to be willing to get your hands dirty. But I love it. It’s a great break from all the other stuff.

Amy Fewell I can only imagine. I mean your mind must be going all of the time.

Dr. Robert Malone My wife’s mind is going all the time.

Amy Fewell And I mean, it’s just, it’s got to be incredible. I mean, homesteading and farming in its own way has your mind going all of the time. But okay, so let me back up here: what brought you to Virginia specifically? You’ve had all of these farms, but why Virginia? What was here that brought you here?

Dr. Robert Malone So we had previously had a farm of 50 acres that was really rough when we bought it. It had been inhabited by a motorcycle gang from Baltimore, and it had a big two-story farmhouse, but I like to say, you know, people will think that’s, “Oh, how neat. You lived in an 1800s farmhouse.” Yeah, well, there’s farmhouses built by rich people, and there’s houses built by poor people, and we were living in the latter. So we had that place, which is beautiful, up near Point of Rocks, near the Potomac in Frederick, Maryland. And we had to sell that for me to follow a job down to Georgia. So we lived in the Northern Georgia Hills and kind of made that work until the real estate collapse. And we literally lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in that real estate collapse. And of course, Obama’s solution was to protect the banks and let folks like me hang out to dry, and probably a lot of your listeners also. So we stuck that out. Back in the day, we were like, oh, it’s not right to jingle the keys and we were obligated to the banks and we need to fulfill our obligation and all my neighbors were like, I’m out of here. Right? But we thought we were doing the right thing, not realizing that we were really caught in much larger tides. Eventually, we did a Deaton-Lew, and we went for a drive… You know, we still had our horses. Back in the day of that, we still had all our carriages and horse-farming equipment, harness, and everything. We were breeding Percheron. Just transitioning to Lusitannas, because we bred Percheron for quite a long time. These are the big black draft horses, and worked the land with them. I’m quite a competent teamster. I’m second in the World Percheron Congress, driving a team of homebreds, back then.

Amy Fewell You’re full of surprises.

Dr. Robert Malone But yeah, we took first for one of our Philly foals in the Royal Winter Agricultural Fair up in Canada. So we were producing high-quality Percheron, but when all this hit, the Percheron market collapsed. The Amish had overbred them, etc., etc. So we did the mail-in-the-keys kind of thing, deed and lieu of foreclosure, and took a drive up the coastline. My wife and I are native Central Coast California people. We’d been brought out to the East Coast by University of Maryland Baltimore as a recruitment package. That’s what got us here. So we took a drive up the coast. Point of Rocks in Maryland up towards Hagerstown in Frederick, it was a little cold for us. We wished to be a little further south, south of the Mason-Dixon. So when we hit Charlottesville, we looked hard at North Carolina because there’s a strong horse community there, many of them, but it was too far to DC. I was still doing a lot of D.C. Consulting work. And we got up to Charlottesville and we’re like, well, this is really pretty. We love the Shenandoah in particular and the valleys around that. And of course, this area is kind of in many ways the birthplace of the nation. James Madison’s farm, for which Madison County is named actually after his brother, is just a few miles from where we live now, and of course, Thomas Jefferson’s place, and it’s down in Charlottesville. So long, rich farming history. And so when we found Seaville, we were just like, okay, this works for us. And we just picked up our stakes and put the horses in the trailer. And took a few trips up here with the dually and we leased another 50-acre parcel with a huge barn that was right along the James River and then from that, another small farm, and then from that… You know, the banks, they blacklist you when you do this for some reason. You’re like put in purgatory, bank purgatory for a number of years, but as we were getting out of bank purgatory, we started looking around for land and my wife found this place and that’s how we ended up here.

Amy Fewell So you’re not far from me. I’m in Rappahannock County. So I’m just the county over from you. And so people don’t get it. People always ask me, “Why do you live in Virginia?” Especially with the policy changes that are coming up. And I’m like, “Virginia is beautiful.” It is one of my favorite places. And I am probably partial because I’ve grown up here. I’ve been here my whole life.

Dr. Robert Malone No, I agree. We’re constantly because we travel internationally all the bloody time because of COVID and all that, and increasingly, I work a lot right now with HHS and the State Department. But you know, so we travel to Italy all the time. I love Italy. I love Portugal. I love France. Not so much the UK. But we come back and every time we’re kind of scratching our heads and we’re going through that now with our new lovely governor about whether or not we want to go down to Florida and Ocala. But every time, it’s hard to make a case for relocating anywhere, even though we could live almost anywhere in the world. It’s just really nice here and the people are lovely. Our county, Madison County, is just fantastic. It’s conservative/libertarian, it is a strong community, they appreciate us, we appreciate them. You know, you build all these links once you kind of sit down, you build your links into the community in the local southern states and the guys at the loading dock and my hay supplier are all really good people and I value those relationships.

Amy Fewell Yeah. And this is something I say to people all the time: the politics in your state can change. It doesn’t matter what state it is—I mean, certainly there are much better states and Virginia with politics and all of those things…

Dr. Robert Malone I will say that we’re busy trying to figure out which guns we want to purchase before the legislature.

Amy Fewell I think you and everybody else in Virginia, and there are so many Virginians that are… Do you know, Tim Anderson’s doing a Utah concealed carry permit class, and there’s just all kinds of things that people have on their list here to get in order before these things start.

Dr. Robert Malone Before the storm hits, right? It’s kind of the way it is.

Amy Fewell Yeah. Yeah. And that can happen anywhere.

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Amy Fewell Okay, so let’s go back a little bit even more. You could do anything in the world. You’re super smart, you have all of these government connections. You are part of the MAHA group, right?

Dr. Robert Malone Yeah, full disclosure, I’m very much a part of MAHA Action, which is the 501(c)(4), and Tony Lyons, who runs that, is a close friend. Gavin de Becker, who funds that and funded Bobby’s original campaign, is close friend

Amy Fewell Yeah, and so you have your hands kind of in everything. What brings you back to homesteading? You know, what brings you to the farm? I’m sure rest is a big major thing.

Dr. Robert Malone No, there’s no rest. Rest is not the thing.

Amy Fewell Well, maybe resting your mind from the normal things.

Dr. Robert Malone Staying grounded. The love of the animals and of course, the famous Winston Churchill saying, “There’s something about the outside of a horse that’s good for the inside of a man.” My wife and I have always been equestrians. It’s part of what brought us together when we were young teens. We’ve been together for over 50 years. We just celebrated our 47th wedding anniversary. And it all started riding in the foothills of Santa Barbara and Galita on two old, well, I won’t say that word “so old,” but two geldings. Where my folks lived and where we used to ride in the hills is about five miles as the crow flies from Ronald Reagan’s ranch. So if you’ve seen the Reagan movie with Dennis Quaid in the closing scene where Reagan is riding along the foothills looking out over the ocean, that’s basically where my wife and I used to write all the time. Many stories. That’s kind of our origin story. The farm creates a center and it also reinforces… You know, we’re very much committed… You speak about MAHA. The idea of eating real food, of producing your own, we have a local leader in farmsteading that lives just a few miles from us that we get raw milk from every Tuesday. They put it in a little jar and Jill drops off her money and we get enough milk for the next week. It’s just a lovely way to live. It’s a lot healthier. It keeps you sane. It allows you to kind of step outside of the internet and all of the kind of urban world. The thing I love about living here, and part of the logic of why we’re here, is that I can scoot up to DC and do the DC stuff, and I’ll tell you, Amy, I really don’t like DC culture.

Amy Fewell I don’t either.

Dr. Robert Malone I do not like all that goes on in the government culture and everything. So I can kind of parachute into that and do what I need to do and then get out and come back here where things are a lot more centered and sane. So it’s that combination of the, really, mental health of working with your hands, being able to see something productive from your efforts. As I mentioned, I did a lot of the work here in rebuilding this. It was a falling-down cinder block building, which literally, where I’m sitting, was about a foot and a half of old pig manure, when we came here first. And now it’s a nice structure and the studio. We’ve got a green room next door. We’ve got a split unit that keeps the temp from being too frigid. And across from here is a very nice two-story that’s well over 100 years old that was falling-in, full of bugs, that we’ve rebuilt. We’re not allowed to use it as a house according to our county. And so, one of the things we had to do was arm wrestle with the county to get designated here in Virginia as a farm. Once you have farm designation, then you can pretty much run wild with building structures, doing your own electricity and everything else without a permit, so long as you call them farm buildings. And so what some people might think is a 100, 150-year-old house that’s been totally rebuilt is not a house, it’s an agriculture center.

Amy Fewell There you go. That’s how you work your way around it, right? Okay, so you do the horses. What else do you guys do on your current farm?

Dr. Robert Malone So we have quite a menagerie. Back in Georgia, we had mini cows—Jerseys—for milk; and we now have two heifers, one’s still too young, that are well-bred, registered, A2/A2 Jersey mini cows. My wife loves birds. And she was an avian science major at UC Davis for a while. So of course we always keep chickens, and they’re a mainstay. I think, even with our small number of chickens… I think one of the lessons of raising chickens is don’t have too many. You don’t need too many. Particularly if you’re just a couple, so we have an excess of eggs. We have peacocks and the peacocks kind of run the place except for the fact that the Australian shepherds are the bosses of the peacocks. So I think you could make a case that we have a farm for the Australian shepherds and we just inhabit it. So there’s the Aussies, we have a pair of emus that produce, we’re hoping we’re going to get eggs this year. We raise the peacocks, and sell the chicks. I bought Jill a really good incubator. We’ve still got a bunch of roosters in the freezer from last year. So we slaughter those ourselves. We’re trying to build this as a little bit of a botanical garden. So we have a ton of fruit trees. Peaches really thrive here. Apples not so much, because apples get rust from the Virginia cedars, which we have some significant cedars on the property, so that’s a problem. But the stone fruit seems to really do well. So our stone fruit orchard is really maturing nicely now. So it’s orchards and birds and the horses are the main product. And we breed a really absolutely world-class Lusitanos now, that the foals, when they’re weaned, start at about 10 and go up to about 20. And then they increase annually as we raise them up. Because the problem with the horses that a lot of newbies fall into is it’s real easy to end up with a very large herd that will eat you out of house and home. So you have to constantly be deciding who gets to stay and who gets to go, and the marketing and all that kind of stuff. So the foals—the absolute best return on investment is to sell them as weanlings—and so we’re kind of constantly evaluating who gets to stay and who gets go, and training the ones that are staying, and all that kind of stuff. So that’s another component of what we do: is not just the breeding, but also the training.

Amy Fewell Yeah. So now you’re stepping into kind of a new phase of life. You’re teaching a little bit about homesteading, right? You have some projects in the works. Do you want to talk a little about that?

Dr. Robert Malone So the thing that supports this really these days is our substack, which is Malone.News. And that took off during early COVID days, and then particularly when I did that first Joe Rogan interview, just the day before that Rogan Interview—I’m sure it was a coincidence—I got deplatformed from both Twitter and LinkedIn. And so people were searching for me and they found my substack, particularly after Rogan. And so we got an explosion of subscribers then. So substack kind of pays the bills now. So we have to produce our substacks on a daily basis. And the scope, you know, we do a lot of what you’d really call investigative journalism and focusing on government corruption and things like that, and then we’ll take on other topics. But there’s two things that remain really popular… With our substack, we try to keep in mind our rural roots and the fact that the notorious “flyover states”—the folks that live in rural America—are often demeaned and disrespected in many ways, particularly by the urban, by-coastal elites that run all the media. We treat them with respect and recognize that they’re a key part of our readership and our audience. Sometimes my wife cautions me that I’m giving out too much technical stuff, and so we try to temper that, the kind of hard-edged government corruption and all that kind of stuff that we put out. We try to balance that. In particular, there’s two things, the Friday Funnies and the Sunday Strip, which is our memes roundup from a conservative angle. People absolutely love that. And then our homesteading articles. In particular, we focus on regenerative farming and living naturally—issues relating to pesticides, the kind of what used to be called “organic farming logic” and cooking. We did a whole series with Epoch Times called “Fallout,” in which we had segments focusing on life here at the farm. I had the Washington bureau chief of Epoch Times down here numerous times with the camera crew, taught him to drive my Kubota and do some plowing. That was a fun segment. And then now we’ve taken a lot of those essays in our prior two books published by my wife and myself through Skyhorse, which was “The Lies My Government Told Me and The Better Future Coming” was the first one, and the second one was “Psywar Enforcing the New World Order.” Those were really kind of compilations of things that we’d written in substack and then rewrote and restructured in book format. And we’ve done the same thing with our homesteading articles now and just submitted that book, which is also quite substantial for Skyhorse consideration for publication. I’m not allowed to talk about the title yet. But I hope that folks enjoy that. It’s a very different take on, just like with this podcast, on what our lives are like and what our values are and what matters to us. And Jill did a great job. She was really the primary author on that. She did a job creating line drawings of photographs that go way back into time for us of working with the Percheron and just a lot of different illustrations that I hope people enjoy. So we’ll see how that goes.

Amy Fewell Yeah. So the one thing I love about this interview is, you know, I have so many people that reach out to me and many of them can be big names or whatnot. And so many times I’ve talked to people or gone to their farms actually even, and they want to talk about homesteading and being in the movement, but they actually don’t homestead. They just have a farm and they don’t actually do anything on it. But what I love about this conversation is people can tell, especially rural people, when someone is actually doing what they say they do. And so it’s really neat to talk to you and hear all of the things that you’re doing. I mean, you must be one of the busiest people in the whole world, and you’re still choosing this way of life on top of all the other things, which is even more busy. And so that’s really encouraging to our listeners who might be similar to you, who can do this and can focus on centering their lives on homesteading and coming back to the farm and bringing all of these things back home. And so I love that you can encourage people in that because you’re actually living it. You’re not just talking about it. You’re actually living it.

Dr. Robert Malone No, it’s essential, absolutely essential, and I don’t think I could maintain a balance psychologically and otherwise. I mean, I’ve been, not to whine, I try really hard not to do that, but I have taken a few arrows and spears over the last few years and it all… you know, you go and hang out with your horses, it all washes away.

Amy Fewell Right. Yeah, it brings you back to realizing you’re just a blip on a map in time, right? You know, it’s just… this stuff doesn’t matter.

Dr. Robert Malone Yeah. Well, and you’re a steward. You’re a Steward of the land. You don’t own the land in a way that land owns you, as well as the dogs, but…

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Amy Fewell So I started following you back at COVID. That’s how I first started following. And so I’m an herbalist and of course, in this season of life of raising babies and having a little tiny baby and all of these things, I’m not doing a lot of that right now, but that’s how it first discovered you and started following you. And of course I had no idea back then that you were a farmer and a homesteader and doing all of these things. And so how does your life look different now? You were nonstop doing live streams and interviews. Is that still your life or have you decided to pull back and focus on maybe more things like the MAHA agenda or writing or all of those things?

Dr. Robert Malone So when I made the decision to… you know, I could have worked in the government. I’ve kind of been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and I don’t like it very much. And I really did not want to be a government administrator. A lot of people that live in this region that you and I live in—and particularly Rappahannock County—are expats or they have… you know, they’re wealthier and they have the big mansion up in Alexandria and then they come down to Rappahannock to hobnob with locals. But I made a decision that I wanted to support Secretary Kennedy, but absolutely did not want an administrative position, which would require me to move down to Atlanta or take an apartment in DC, or shuttle, you know, live in DC four days a week and then come back to the farm or my wife. I just thought, forget it. One of my core rules is that Jill and I travel together, we stay together, we live together, and we are as one, you know, as the Bible talks about.

Amy Fewell That’s incredible, yeah.

Dr. Robert Malone So I do have more because I’m working with both HHS and the State Department now. The State Department role is more focused on the Bio-Warfare Convention and treaties and trying to move towards a ban on gain-of-function research as a treaty organization, and the high-tech of applying artificial intelligence to—blah, blah, blah. But with that, I had to accept that as part of the deal, that there’s stuff I can’t talk about. I can talk about what I encounter in my activities supporting the current administration. And I have to be more cautious about criticizing certain people, including the president. So I had to give up a little bit of liberty in terms of what I can say—my freedom to operate as a commenter and kind of journalist—and it does suck up time. Last Monday I had somebody coming down from HHS who’s at the main headquarters and spent the day here with me kind of mentoring and coaching. And so it sucks up time. I do still travel too much. I keep trying to dial back on that. Fortunately, we have a local person that we pay full-time to work Monday through Friday, and then she takes care of the farm when we travel. So life is still pretty schizophrenic. I’m really trying to dial back on the travel. It waxes and wanes. Like, I thought this month was gonna be fine, and then the ACIP meeting got moved from February into March, and then I traveled to visit the governor of Louisiana. And I have CPAC coming up in Dallas towards the end of the month so it just kind of goes on.

Amy Fewell So when these government people visit your farm, do you ever take that advantage and say, “Hey, look at this lifestyle. Could you live a better lifestyle like this?” Do you try to encourage the people around you?

Dr. Robert Malone Well, yes. But I don’t say it quite that bluntly. That would put them off. But like with Jan and Fallout, they love to do the walkabout. They love to pet the horses. They love to feed the emus. It’s a little bit like a petting zoo escape for D.C. Folk that come down and they stay in… we have a guest house plus that one I was discussing. So they stay in one of these places overnight and do a walkabout and I think that it—especially for the younger ones—it shows them that there is another way to be and they don’t have to live the Alexandria/D.C. apartment lifestyle. But also emphasize that, you know, so like with the suburban ones, we talk about this all the time: it’s easy to start with chickens and raised beds. You don’t have to go buy a 70-horse diesel tractor and be facile in using it and swinging a hammer and everything else. If you don’t have those skills, you need to start small and work up to it. But the core message is: you can do this. I did it. Jill’s done it. You can do it. But don’t think that you can just sell your place in an urban center and just go by 40 acres and make a go of it. There’s a huge burden of skill. That’s the other part of this and all of the disrespect that folks that live this lifestyle get. Yeah, if you think that we’re all a bunch of bumpkins, you try doing this.

Amy Fewell Right? Yeah, we have this conversation with a lot of people. Well, it sounds like you are living your life and making disciples of homesteading at the same time, but just by being you, which is incredible. You know, you have all of these accolades, right? And all the things that you’re doing. And at the same time, you’re just being you which is incredible. And it’s inspiring and it’s encouraging—even to people who do not have the life that you live, which is so broad—to just encourage other people to look at this way of living, and truly look at the food system and the fragility of it really, and that they can do it. There’s so many people who think, “I can’t do that. I didn’t grow up around farming. I’m not that person,” but like you said, you can start with chickens. You can start with little things first, even just going to the farmer’s market and supporting your local food system is incredible.

Dr. Robert Malone Basil in flowerpots. Basil grows in Virginia like a weed.

Amy Fewell It really does. It’s one of my favorites. I have a massive basil plant and it just reseeds every year. Yeah, it’s great. So yeah, we have all kinds of things here. Of course, this podcast episode is not about me, but we have so many things, milk cows and… We do so much even on just five and a half acres that you don’t have to have 40 or 50 or 80 acres, right? There’s so much you can do. And so it’s just really encouraging to hear your story and your journey, and what you do together with just the job that you have (I’ll call it a job)—your career.

Dr. Robert Malone Whatever it is.

Amy Fewell Yeah, whatever it is. But then also just your life, and actually doing what you talk about. And so I just want to thank you for that, and for being a pioneer and leader in both worlds, you know, because you are encouraging others to do that too, especially with this podcast when people start hearing it.

Dr. Robert Malone Thank you, Amy, and thank you for the opportunity to speak to your audience. But as you say, this comes from the heart, and it’s a central component of what my wife and I are, how we live, how we see the world. One of my core principles is that we all create our own heaven or hell on earth. And it’s up to you. You make the decisions. And in this case, we’ve created this. We didn’t declare bankruptcy, but we were essentially bankrupt after the Great Recession. We built this through perseverance and being open-eyed about things, deferring the goodies until using our little bit of capital we had to kind of gradually build and build, and did a lot of this ourselves—putting in the fences, and I do a lot of electrical work. It’s not always perfectly up to code, but I get ‘er done. And, you know, built the water system and the pressure tanks and, you know, just one step at a time. Which, Amy, for us, one of the key things in our story was when we decided to start breeding draft horses and learn how to work the farm with horse labor—it brought us into the community of old, basically mid-Atlantic farmers, dairy farmers in particular, that had lived that lifestyle earlier in their lives. They were kind of like one of the repositories of knowledge, and a lot of those have died off, but it gave us a chance to hang out and learn from them. And then also gave us a chance to spend a lot of time with Amish and Mennonite people, and learn how they make small farming work. And one of their keys is that they don’t have a source of revenue like us, because we model after them. They have many sources of revenue. The way to make a small farm work in this economy is to be really agile and constantly looking in an entrepreneurial way for little things that you can make a buck at—whether it’s hatching chickens, or emus, or peacocks, or producing foals, or whatever the thing is, or producing organic veg that you can sell locally. I think that’s kind of at the core of how we approach things is trying to be a little more Amish in terms of how we live and how we think about things.

Amy Fewell Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay, I won’t keep you much longer except at the end of every episode, I open it up for our guests to share anything. It could be related to what we’ve been talking about, it could be completely different—just what is burning in your heart that you would like to say to our audience that you think would be really good for them to hear?

Dr. Robert Malone Okay, my usual, when I get this open mic moment, is because we’re usually talking about stuff relating to COVID crisis, and what happened with that, and censorship, and defamation, psychological warfare and that kind of stuff—

Amy Fewell Yeah, fun stuff.

Dr. Robert Malone —is I really like to emphasize to folks to think for themselves and to not self-victimize. That’s one thing that I just see so much of is narcissism, and self-victimization seems to just be bred by the internet. Get off the bloody social media, and get off of your little handheld computer device that we call your cell phone, and live your life—get out there.

Amy Fewell Yeah. Alright, Dr. Malone, thank you so much for joining me this week. You guys, we’re going to put all of the information in the show notes: links to his books, links to his website, his Substack—all of these things—so you can find them easily. And as always, if you have any questions, certainly send them our way. Dr. Malone, thank you again and you guys have a great day.

Dr. Robert Malone Thanks, Amy, and you too. Let’s enjoy the weather that we’ve got right now.

Amy Fewell Yeah, absolutely.

Amy Fewell Hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to this week’s Homesteaders of America episode. We really enjoyed having you here. We welcome questions and you can find the transcript and all the show notes below or on our Homesteaders of America blog post that we have up for this podcast episode. Don’t forget to join us online with a membership or just to read blog posts and find out more information about our events at HomesteadersofAmerica.com. We also have a YouTube channel and follow us on all of our social media accounts to find out more about homesteading during this time in American history. All right, have a great day and happy homesteading.