Gubba Homestead Podcast

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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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