I have this cousin... who has hogs...

This week on 4RYL Talk, I’m sitting down with my cousin Kimmy we come from the same giant family but live on completely different planets.I live at the beach in Florida. She lives on a 144-acre farm in Ohio. I spent COVID floating around the Bahamas on a boat. She spent part of it camping in a pasture waiting for cows to get “slimy” so they could be bred. We have very different politics, very different lifestyles, and apparently very different ideas about what constitutes a normal amount of money to spend on shampoo for a hog.We go all the way back to growing up as two of 28 cousins, childhood trauma involving scorpions and playing doctor, Boone’s Farm at the family lake house, getting married young, working 25 years in respiratory care, raising farm kids, oil and gas literally running through your backyard, and why two people can disagree about some pretty big things without deciding they hate each other.Then Kimmy introduces me to the completely foreign world of county fairs: $280 bags of feed, livestock glamour shots, buyer letters, $50 cow shampoo, showmanship, five-figure hog and one particularly dumb hog.It’s funny, very unfiltered, and probably the best evidence that loving someone does not require agreeing with them... although apparently it requires bringing your own noodles to Thanksgiving.CHAPTERS00:00 — Cousins, technical difficulties & pig glamour shots 02:00 — Meet Kimmy: Two of 28 cousins 03:00 — The scorpion that started a lifelong phobia 04:15 — Who was little Kimmy? 07:10 — Same family, completely different childhoods 08:30 — Bahamas vs. breeding cows during COVID 10:30 — Growing up in a huge Ohio family 11:25 — Boone’s Farm & the family lake house 14:10 — Growing up working-class & getting married young 16:00 — 25 years in respiratory care 16:40 — Fourteen years on night shift & raising kids 18:40 — How different are we, really? 19:40 — Politics, oil, gas & understanding where people come from 23:00 — How we disagree without hating each other 26:25 — Welcome to county fair insanity 28:15 — The money behind showing livestock 29:00 — $50 cow shampoo & $280 pig feed 31:20 — How a pig can sell for thousands of dollars 33:30 — Is showing livestock actually profitable? 34:20 — Fair week: weigh-ins, showmanship & livestock everywhere 36:35 — What Kimmy would tell her younger self 37:45 — The Great Florida Thanksgiving Noodle Crisis 38:45 — What the next five years look like 40:00 — Why family needs to actually stay at your house 41:45 — Good luck at the fair