Mollie Engelhart: Why I Left Veganism For Regenerative Agriculture | MMP #351

Ex-vegan Mollie Engelhart is the chef and founder of Sage Regenerative Kitchen in L.A. Initially committed to proving that a vegan farm could thrive without animal death, Mollie's journey led her to embrace regenerative agriculture, recognizing that nature's cycles of life and death are integral to supporting biodiversity and soil health.

She transitioned her vegan restaurants to Sage Regenerative Kitchen, where she prioritizes serving whole, single-ingredient foods sourced from regenerative and wild-harvested farms. Despite facing challenges, including backlash from the vegan community and financial hurdles, Mollie remains dedicated to promoting regenerative practices, highlighting the critical role of animals in sustainable farming, and fostering a deeper connection between people and their food sources.

Key topics discussed:

- Mollie
's transition from veganism to regenerative agriculture and why she now believes humans should eat meat
- The role of regenerative practices in enhancing soil health and biodiversity.

- The importance of seasonal and local food consumption.

- Ethical and sustainable meat production.
- Consumer responsibility in supporting sustainable food systems.

Timestamps:

(00:02) Regenerative Agriculture and Food Sustainability
(12:30) Awakening to Regenerative Agriculture
(22:28) Nature, Keystone Species, and Sustainability
(36:12) Plant-Based Dilemma in Restaurant Business
(39:43) Food Philosophy and Ethical Choices
(52:50) Ethical Choices in Sustainable Dining
(01:03:37) Supporting Regenerative Agriculture Through Consumer Choices
(01:06:28) Investing in Resilient Food Systems
(01:22:10) Diverse Food and Regenerative Farming
(01:31:20) Corruption in the Food System
(01:46:12) Empowering Health and Wellness


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Molly audio clip
===

[00:00:00]

imagine thinking That your Tesla truck is the answer, and my cows are the problem.

Think It's insane. No, it's insane.

But

To set the stage

I am a vegan chef from Los Angeles.

I decided I'm going to set out to have a vegan farm. And I'm going to prove that no animals need to die.

And I realized

that nature is far more brutal than anything that I was ever going to do to an

animal.

People don't like it but I, Know that

regenerative agriculture supports more life in the world it's our nature to cultivate animals and hunt

Molly, welcome to the Meat Mafia podcast. Pleasure to have you. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. I love meat and mafias. So we're starting off good. Oh, and you know how to bring gifts correctly. You brought the best spread of all time. [00:01:00] You brought all these amazing products from your farm. There were what were all the products that you brought?

There's eggs, eggs. I brought eggs, I brought pickled jalapenos, fresh jalapenos, tomatoes, eggplants, two huge watermelons, and I brought persimmons vinegar, it's half vinegar, half persimmons from California, from our farm there, and half Texas persimmons, um, and then I also brought some hot sauces, a zucchini hot sauce, and a cherry tomato and jalapeno hot sauce.

And onions, yellow onions and white onions, and our meat rub, our salt with juniper berries. Uh, wild juniper berries, and it has salt, pepper, garlic, and Himalayan crystal salt, and the ground up juniper berries. Oh my gosh. There's nothing better. Which out in Texas, they call it cedar. It's technically a juniper, but here in Texas we call it cedar.

There's nothing better than a spread like that from someone's ranch and you know like exactly how you're [00:02:00] sourcing it and I, we can't wait to dig into it. It's going to go to good use. I promise you that. Well, I like that. I hate when I bring people food and then I go back like some a week later and this is like shriveling on the counter and they didn't eat.

Like, I could have sold that at the farmer's market or given it to someone who valued it. That's why I called you guys, like, do you guys eat vegetables or just eat meat? Yeah, well, especially like, I mean, the watermelon is like seasonal. This stuff's so fresh. Like, it would be such a shame not to have that stuff while it's ripe on the vine.

Oh yeah, I think seasonal fruit, I was telling you this before the show, like, I love eating fruit when it's in season and I can feel my body. wanting it. And pomegranates are an example. I never think about eating pomegranates, but when we were growing them, when they were in season, I couldn't get enough.

The kids couldn't get enough. But as soon as they're out of season, it's never think about it again until the season rolls around. I think there's something in fruit of [00:03:00] the season that's supporting us. And that's obvious, like, if you look at animals, they're always eating the fruit of the season. Totally.

Yeah, it's sometimes amazing to just think about the fact that we really have no concept of seasonality at all at the grocery store. Uh, I talk, I think about this all the time. We think that it's reasonable to have broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots 365 days a year. For example, here in Texas, it's a very short season that you could grow broccoli and cauliflower and it's a cool season, um, plant.

So. Uh, a diet in Texas, if you were an indigenous person living in Texas, broccoli and cauliflower would not be a diet. In your diet, um, carrot and some root vegetables maybe, um, in the fall and the spring. But it's not normal to just eat the same food 365 days a year when it comes to vegetables and fruit and herbs.

Those are seasonal things that are supporting different parts of the year and [00:04:00] different, uh, parts of your body and what's going on. And we're completely, I mean it's not just seasonality. Human beings are so disconnected from their food that we've become just these kind of robot eaters. We want food to be exactly the same.

We want to eat the same things all the time. We want stuff to taste the same all the time. And we have zero relationship to how food is produced, what effort goes into it. We let so much food go bad in our fridge. And if you grew it, you would Take better care of it because it's so much work and nobody thinks about calories in calories out when it comes to like, how many calories did it take to produce your food?

How much effort went in and Vegans love to talk about, you know, calories into a cow and the calories that come out and how wasteful that is. Well, how many [00:05:00] calories go into a cabbage and then how much calories are actually coming out when you think about diesel and tractors and if you think about every, make everything in demand hours of calories.

A grass fed cow on pasture, one person can move them daily and they're gonna eat grass and they're going, that we cannot eat on rangeland that's likely not ideal for growing vegetables and so the calories in, calories out are not, it's not actually, uh, uh, like a reverse pyramid or whatever they say where it's getting smaller.

It's actually taking calories that are completely unconsumable to us. And sunlight and turning it into something that is consumable. Mm hmm. I had a good friend who, she's worked on a number of farms around Austin. And I think she was vegan beforehand. She went on this like wilderness trip where the whole point was to just forage for all your food or hunt for your food.

And [00:06:00] her big takeaway after that was there's no way that you would survive just foraging. Like, really, or like, you would expend more calories like just trying to find nuts or seeds or berries. Like, you would need to hunt. Need to hunt. Yeah. I, I talk about this. I set, so I don't know, to set the stage, like, I am a vegan chef from Los Angeles.

I, was raised in a not ve I mean, vegetarian household, basically. My mom one time tried to feed me, uh, margarine, I guess. She tried to make cookies and it turned to plastic. She was melting it in the oven. And then she's like, we're never eating margarine. And so we were vegan, but we ate butter. So that was my growing up.

And so I was very, believing in this diet and believing, and I started my restaurants with the most pure intentions of that. This is what was best for the planet, the whole food vegan. I never served impossible burgers. I've never served, uh, I never served [00:07:00] any kind of like beyond me or any kind of fake meats in my restaurants ever in 13 years that we've had vegan restaurants.

I never did that. But. 2013, I listened to a podca a TED Talk with Max, uh, I don't know, with Graham Sait. And I thought, wow! Food waste is, is really the problem. Cows are not the problem. And I'm running this restaurant. We're throwing away so much food into the food waste and there's no composting in LA at this time.

And so I decided I'm going to set out to have a vegan farm. And I'm going to rescue animals. I'm going to do regenerative agriculture. And I'm going to prove that you can do regenerative agriculture and no animals need to die. And I'm going to grow all the food for my family and I'm going to grow food for the restaurants and it's going to be amazing.

Well, I got, I proved myself wrong. I proved myself a hundred percent wrong. The first thing is if you're growing all your own food, it's so hard to [00:08:00] grow enough calories for your family with just fruits and vegetables and nuts and berries. Like I I remember sitting there breastfeeding my now four year old, I guess.

Might have been my now 7 year old, I'm not sure which one. But I'm breastfeeding them and I'm looking at my next older one drinking a tetra pack of some kind of oat milk or whatever. And I have a cow on the farm that we got from my dad that was pregnant when we got it. It's two quarters of the breast, the calf is not drinking and so we're milking the raw milk onto the ground to to express it so she doesn't get mastitis.

And I'm thinking to myself, This is crazy is If my breast milk is gold and has all the microbiology for this whole environment, that cow, Una, I still have Una. When you guys come to the ranch, you can pet her. Um, Una's [00:09:00] breast milk has to be gold as well. It also has to have all the microbiology and all the fighting of this environment, but a dirtier version of this environment.

So why am I letting my kid drink oat milk from Costco? This is crazy. And I was like, that's it. No more milk in a box. Mommy says no more milk in a box. We're drinking raw cow's milk from now on. Right. And then, so that was the first like, uh, one cow can give you three, four gallons of milk a day. That's so much calories that if you were just going to be only surviving yourself, That's it's so much calories like where you're just like, what can I do making cheese making yogurt?

Okay. I got this that I'm making way I'm dehydrating way in the phrase dryer, you know so much calories that are coming from one cow Milking and so this idea that we could just easily grow vegan food for the whole planet, it's It's crazy, [00:10:00] and what would the inputs be if, let's say, this hypothetical world where we're going to all just eat pea protein burgers?

And bugs. And bugs. No, bugs are not vegan, but okay, yeah, so the powers that be are interested in the bug thing though, for sure. I just saw a thing about maggot milk, have you seen the maggot milk? It's like, you make, it makes a dairy substitute by boiling these, these larvae of some kind. Who is, who is spearheading that project?

I don't know, but you can see it on Instagram. We need to get them on the podcast. It's terrible. It's so disgusting. Um, back to the thing is right now, all of our inputs. For vegetables, and I'm not anti vegetables. I'm a vegetarian, like I'm not anti vegetables just to say this, like, but all the inputs from vegetables are coming out of the meat system, bone meal, blood meal, manure, chicken shit.

[00:11:00] I mean, these are what's cut. These are the things that are the inputs for growing all organic vegetables. And so, when we think about this, what are the inputs going to be? And then people say, oh, you can buy hay, and you can compost it, and you can mulch it. Okay, so what are the inputs for the hay? If there's no, we're getting rid of all the farm animals.

You're just gonna have a couple in a zoo for people to look at. Like, remember when cows were here? Like if that, if this is like, where are the inputs coming from? And then people send me, oh, I found this vegan farm. And it's like, they're harvesting bat guana. They're harvesting guana from seagulls. Okay, well, there's a few places in the world where there's inputs that you could just go and scoop up for sure.

But having animals on a farm and then utilizing those inputs on that same farm is obviously not good. The most sustainable, I hate that word, it means to sustain [00:12:00] and stay the same, so we don't want to do that, is obviously the most logical thing. We've gotten so efficient in our agriculture that we have pig farming over here, cow farming over here, corn farming over here, vegetable farming over here, and now these guys need fertility and these guys have a lagoon that's killing, they need so much manure they don't know what to do with it.

We have to go back to a system where everything's working together. Yeah. So it sounds like, so you essentially have this almost like. light bulb moment or epiphany where you have this perfectly healthy cow that's got, you know, this, this nutrient dense milk that's loaded with saturated fat, fat soluble, vitamins, digestive enzymes, everything that we know, raw milk.

And you're like, I'm squeezing this into the ground and then giving my kid this like 16 ingredient oat milk to, to fit the box of a plant based diet. And that that's kind of when everything clicked for you. Well, it was multiple things, but that was the big [00:13:00] moment. That was a big moment. Um, Another big moment is, um, two other big moments.

So I had a bunch of ducks and I was just letting the ducks make more ducks and I was not calling any of the boys Drake's because I'm a vegan and so I'm not gonna kill nothing. Okay. This was the mantra nothing We don't kill anything on the farm if it dies of natural causes, right, but we don't kill anything on the farm Meanwhile cognitive dissonance just for the record My husband's like going to Vaughn's and buying meat like my husband still eats meat every day My husband's like going to the taco truck down the street But anyways, nothing dies on my farm my vegan mindset and So The Drakes are re I mean, every time there's a clutch of eggs hatching, half of them are boys and half of them are girls, give or take.

So, in the wild, this would never happen. They'd get pushed off, and there would be one boy, and he would have a [00:14:00] territory, and there'd be some females, and there would not be a thousand boys. And then I got these new ducks, and they were like, little babies. I raised them up by the house on the front porch.

And then there were teenagers and I brought them into the avocado orchard and I was so excited. And they were going to eat all the snails and do their regenerative thing. And I'm getting ready to go to work and I let them out and it's raining. I remember it was so, and I was like, Oh, they're so happy in the rain.

And then, and my husband calls me, he's like, you're not gonna be happy about this, honey. I say, what happened? And he said, All your ducks got raped to death. I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, there was too many boys, and they just were so excited about these teenage girl dra Uh, khaki Campbell ducks, and they just continued to bred them.

And by the time I got over there, there was just two that I had to put down. And they had just gotten They were still humping on them when I got there. And, and I realized that my interference, me thinking that I could somehow say, that, that I could make a decision and less death would happen, that I [00:15:00] could say, no, nothing's gonna die on my farm.

And then what happened was 19 female ducks got raped to death when they were very young because I didn't manage the male to female ratio in a proper way. And so, and I, that was the first time that I allowed something to be killed on my farm the next day. I said, somebody do something about those boys.

And my husband's like, do what? And I was like, I don't want to know about it, but we need those boys to be gone. And then my husband harvested them and. Took all the feathers out and froze them and put them in a freezer away in the barn So I didn't have to look at them because this is the I mean, I'm just giving you a sense of where my mind was and then we had seven sheep no eleven sheep and They were grazing at a neighbor's house and two German shepherds killed all of them got into the pen and [00:16:00] killed We had a mobile pen to put him at nighttime Killed all of them and didn't eat a single bite of the sheep And we're just sitting there, good dogs, nice dogs, the next morning.

And two were still alive, two were totally bloated and passed. And my husband was like, but there was nine that were salvageable. My husband ran and got a gun at the neighbors where the sheep were, there was a neighbor between. Our house and where they were, and he grabbed a gun from the neighbor, he shot the two that were suffering, their necks were all ripped out, and he went and got the tractor, he threw them all in the bucket of the tractor, and he ran back to the house, and he got his knives, and he got the forklifts, and he skinned them all, and he harvested, and he was like, call people, he's like yelling at me, like, call people, like, we don't have freezer space for all this, like, call people, we're not letting this all go to waste, and I'm like crying, my pets are dead, and he's, just jumps into action, And, everybody I called, truth is, every white person I called was like, I don't want any meat with trauma in it.

And I remember thinking, it's [00:17:00] weird, they think there's no trauma in the current meat system. That's interesting. That's interesting that they think that the meat they're eating is free of trauma. But anyways, but all the Latinos, you know, Farm worker families, families from the restaurant, all came, car after car, and we handed them five gallon buckets of meat, five gallon buckets of meat, and we're like, and my husband was like explaining, like, when you get home, rinse it all off, put salt on, in the water, and then freeze it, and then, you know, take it out as you need it, and he's explaining what to do with everything, And I remember late that night, my husband came in and he had blood all over him and he got in the shower and he was like, I gave away, I don't remember, but, you know, 15 buckets of meat and we have this much in the freezer and I looked out my window and Lorenzo, one of our employees, was still with the, uh, cow, the, in English, what is it, uh, What do you use for pickling lime, you [00:18:00] know?

Was cleaning all the organs and the stomachs and everything for haggis and all that and was clean and separating all the organ meat and I thought two things I thought in that moment. My husband and Lorenzo lived in a world where there wasn't enough food and understood the value of what was there and nature is far more brutal than anything that I was ever gonna do to an animal.

to kill all those 11 sheep and not eat a bite just for fun. Those, and I don't fault those dogs. Those dogs are come from wolves and it's their nature. But it's also our nature to cultivate animals and to cultivate farms in the way that we have and hunt and that is our nature. And so I had that realization and I had the realization that, and this was kind of in the beginning of that whole privilege, like there was a lot of people talking about privilege, privilege, [00:19:00] privilege, and I remember thinking, Veganism is such a privilege.

And it doesn't mean it's not a valid choice. People should do what's best for their body and what feels good for their body. But carnivore is also a privilege to eat only one kind of food. is, is a privilege that is only afforded to very few countries in the world. Like, like, and so this idea that everybody should do this thing that is a, n extreme privilege to say, I'm only going to eat this kind of food and I'm only going to eat that kind of food.

And people will turn around and say, well, you only want to eat food without poison in it. And that's a privilege. And I would say, yes. But, it's also a privilege to eat cheap food that someone else exposed themselves to toxic chemicals in order to grow for you. Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And so, they're both privileges.

But, um, so I just realized that the ideology that I had grown up in [00:20:00] was not necessarily accurate. And at the same time, we were just regenerating the soil like crazy. Like, we went from 0. 01 percent to 0. 01%. organic matter to 20 percent organic matter in five years. We were just growing massive 500, 000 worth of produce on 17 acres, just growing massive amounts of food.

So I was watching regenerative agriculture just explode with fertility on my farm. And all of that led me to believe we cannot live outside of nature. And we can think we can, we can pretend we can, we can live in apartments and sterilize everything and get more and more autoimmune diseases, but the reality is we're part of it.

Yes. And that I made a conscious choice that my My diet, my, what I was committed to as far as food for my family was no longer going to [00:21:00] be about a specific thing like vegan, but it was going to be about, am I supporting more life or am I supporting less life? And I'm clear that regenerative agriculture supports more life.

People don't like it. People want to argue with me. But I know that regenerative agriculture supports more life in the world and conventional agriculture supports less life in the world. More biodiversity, more soil health, all of that comes from regenerative agriculture. Can you, can you explain this spiritual awakening you had, understanding that death needs to be a part of this whole Like, just, I, I, I, it's always curious to me trying to understand how you remove death from the food system and still have a fully functioning food system, which I think a lot of people believe could exist, like, but I think the regenerative model is you need death.

Death needs to be a part of the process. [00:22:00] So, I don't know exactly when that happened. Moving out of LA and onto a farm, even though I grew up on a farm, moving out of LA. I was there since I was 17. So like moving to the farm in itself was a spiritual awakening, was a realization of how disconnected and how different it feels to be in nature, that there's something on a cellular level that happens in your body.

And People say, Oh, we're in the matrix. It's a, what did people say? It's like a simulation. It's a simulation. And I always say, if you go look at nature and you think it's a simulation, then okay, maybe you see something I don't see, but nature is so incredibly intelligent and nothing is ever wasted. And it's all just constantly consuming itself just constantly.

And so being in nature, um, I [00:23:00] realize that there is no life without death and we can say that we think a cow is more important than a rabbit and an accidental death and I say that with quotation marks because it's not really an accident if you combine harvest a field you know there's going to be some animals getting grinded up in your combine harvester.

And so, and I'm not, I'm not. I eat grains. I have, you know, I'm not saying anything about that. I'm just saying that it's accidental death versus intentional death. This is a silly thing. Because in nature, things die and it gets consumed. And in nature, lions, tigers, bears, coyotes kill things. Yes. And it gets consumed.

So there is intentional and accidental. Unintentional death all the time. And nature in people's mind, like what people think nature is, is like this beautiful field and like chirping and creak and like what, and that is part of [00:24:00] nature. But also a polar bear ripping something apart while it's still alive and eating it is also nature.

And we never say like, Oh, it's so messed up that the lion is eating the gazelle. Hmm. We never say that. In fact, we understand that without a predator prey relationship, all of nature can be destroyed. That without, that, and we understand that there is a keystone species in every ecosystem. And if we, if that keystone species gets taken out, it all falls apart.

Yeah. But I assert, on a biblical level, and if you don't believe in the Bible, I assert, that's probably in your text of whatever you do believe in, That we are meant to be the Keystone Species on the planet. And there's, each different environment has a Keystone Species. It might be a polar bear, it might be a beaver, it might be a whatever.

But [00:25:00] we are not taking our rightful place as the Keystone Species and working with nature. And we have in the past. There's tons of evidence that shows that the rainforest is a co create, like the. Brazilian and Ecuadorian rainforest is a co creation of man and nature. It's not just like some monkeys pooped out some seeds and we got a rainforest.

That there was a co creation. There's lots of evidence to that effect. And we have the ability. And people talk about the buffalo and that indigenous people were chasing the buffalo. Maybe. But maybe indigenous people were burning prairies to get new fresh grass and bringing the buffalo in. Like, the, I think you could look at it both ways.

So I think that we are meant to [00:26:00] work with nature to create more abundance. Yes. And I think that that is what the indigenous people did with the buffalo. And to bring up the buffalo and the whole carbon conversation or methane conversation. Mm. There was far more buffalo in the 1400s and 1500s on the United States than there was, than there is cows today.

And there's not a single ice core sample that shows there was some huge methane situation happening. And there's emerging evidence that cows on pasture And I don't, I say emerging evidence because I think it's obvious that a cow on a pasture can not be bad for the environment, but, um, there's a lot of people who think it is.

So, but there's emerging evidence that there's something called methanotropes, which are microbiology in the soil that are actually absorbing methane when they're on grass. [00:27:00] But for sure having a bunch of cows in a consolidated feedlot system Shitting on top of shitting on top of shitting that shit is gonna putrefy and turn into methane Yes, go up just like your food waste number one cause of methane is food waste That's what led me down this whole thing because I wanted to compost this The cauliflower butts from my restaurant.

This is how we got to where we are today. Is I didn't want the methane from my cauliflower going into the landfill, so I bought a farm so I could compost my cauliflower so I could, and that's what's led us down this whole journey. So of course, cows pooping on top of pooping on top of pooping is gonna cause that.

A cow poops on a pasture and doug beetles show up out of nowhere and And they make balls and they bring it down into the ground or they roll it away. I mean, if you don't think, like, I always say, if you don't believe in God, check out dug beetles because like, they just love shit and [00:28:00] they show up and then they bring it down into the ground and put nutrients where the nutrients need to be.

It seems like a, I mean, it seems like this perfect design. And so think about the psyop to make us believe that cows eating grass. Is rooting the environment. I know. Oh, I think about it every night. Like, if, if you, think of, and then, like, tech has a total pass. Like, everybody and their mother has an iPhone.

Yeah, let's talk about the cobalt. The cobalt and the other kind of things, other mines that are being, uranium. Like, all these things are being mined by children in terrible conditions. But the tech industry, or what about the computing power? of AI. How many computers? There's not enough carbon credits in the world to offset how much electricity is being needed to compute for this [00:29:00] new AI technology.

And I love Bitcoin. I'm a Bitcoin maximalist, but like, it's using lots of power and mostly they're going to places where that power is excess and it can be used in places like Texas where there's tons of solar during the daytime and nothing at nighttime and so they can use that but I mean these are tons and tons of power but the idea imagine thinking That your Tesla truck is the answer, and my cows are the problem.

Oh, there's so many people that think that. No, I know, but I think It's insane. No, it's insane. But how disconnected from nature do we have to be to think that a solar panel that has a shelf life that does not disappear into nothing. Yeah. A cow disappears to nothing. It goes in, back in. Nothing is wasted in nature.

People tell me like, Oh, cows use more water than humans. pea protein burgers. I, I, I want to see the study [00:30:00] that, and does, is the, is the study intelligent enough and honest enough to measure all the inputs that went into the You know, everything that went into the pea protein, like everything to get there, gasoline and this and that and the packaging and da, da, da, da, or, and the fertilizer and blah, blah, blah.

But I haven't, I don't see the study. You could wipe your, you could wipe your ass with this study. I'm pretty confident. I'm pretty confident. Um, but my point is, if, how disconnected from nature do we have to be to think that that, my cow is worse than the, truck that is going to leave a battery that's not recycled, that's just like the worst, like all the things that that truck is going to leave behind.

And here's the thing, I'm not anti a Tesla, I'm not anti a solar panel. I have solar panels. I have a generator, I'm a prepper, I want to have off grid capability, [00:31:00] like, um, but do I think that solar panels can replace fossil fuels that we're going to a future that can do that? Yeah. Do I even think fossil fuels are really from fossils?

Probably not. But that's another topic for part two. But people always say to me, the water, the water, where do people think the water is going? When a cow drinks water and then pees it out onto the pasture, it's part of the small water cycle. Like, do people not understand people, people who take out their lawns and put in rocks and I'm like, we're just like, and then they're like, the planet is heating.

Yeah, because you have astroturf because you, you don't have to grow grass. Grass is dumb, but grow something. Why are you have astroturf? People, it's like, I don't, people are so disconnected from nature. We don't understand the simplest things. [00:32:00] I've always like, where do they think the water is going? Yeah.

It's not going anywhere. I think that people that are talking to you about these studies have never actually been out to a ranch before, which is the biggest thing that Harry and I talk about is like, it's so important to just find some rancher in your area and go out there, shake their hand, look at the land, look at the cows grazing in the pasture, talk to them, And then I defy you to tell me that those cows are actually bad for the environment, right?

Please! I mean, show me that they, it's, it's, it's so, it's mind boggling. Yeah. But I'll tell you what, the algorithm on Instagram does not want you to say this. Absolutely not. I literally made, like, my reels, like, whatever the average amount of views or whatever, I made a reel the other day, And I, I think it was like collaborate with my son, but it said like, if it was just my cows in the pasture and it was like, if you think that these, if you [00:33:00] think my cows are the problem and your Tesla is a solution, you're disconnected from nature.

Did you get flagged for that? No, I didn't get flagged, but it's like, Oh, we got like 200 views and the real before it got 17, 000 in the real after it got 12, 000. And so. And then I did another one on my ranch's website and it only got 600 views and it was just like cows moving on to new grass and.

They're so happy or something. Yeah. Well, this is all really important context. We actually, we didn't get into this when we introduced this, but everything you're talking about, in my opinion, is like just your willingness to really change your perspective and accept and see with your own eyes what the truth actually is.

And people probably don't, some people might not know this about your story. So the restaurants that we're talking about, It's Sage Vegan Bistro. So like, very popular chain of, not chain, but three restaurants in LA. It was four. We closed two during the pandemic, unfortunately. But this is, yeah, I mean, [00:34:00] people think I made this change for the money.

The fucked up thing is, and I'm super authentic, so I'll be authentic. The truth is, I kept the restaurants vegan for a long time because I was scared to make the change. Mm. And until the vegan concept was really struggling post pandemic, then I was willing. But I was, when I just came to this conclusion, it was 2019, and I had a deal for 25 million to sell my four restaurants.

Wow. And so, I said, I'm not going to just fuck up this deal, fuck it up for my investors, fuck it, we'll sell these restaurants. I'll con, I'll continue to salt, consult on the menu for five years. That was the deal. And I'll open a different rest, I'll open a different concept. I'll do a regenerative concept and we'll have my husband be the forefront so I don't mess up because I also didn't want people to pay me 25 million and then I mess up their brand.

So I, we were going to do another concept and my husband was going to be the [00:35:00] face and that was that. Well, we're going through the due diligence of selling the restaurants and the pandemic happened. And so my restaurants went from being worth twenty five to thirty one million dollars was the evaluation, to now I just had to close two restaurants for not being able to make payroll and I'm very close to having to do that with the last two restaurants that we changed from Sage Vegan Bistro to Sage Regenerative Kitchen.

And I had really hoped that LA would come out in force for a change. I mean, as a mother, I want to feed my kids without, food without poison, whole foods, and no seed oils. So a restaurant says, I'm only doing regenerative meat or wild caught meat. I'm only doing certified regenerative raw dairy, and I'm only gonna do no seed oils.

There's a tallow fryer, and there's the algae oil in the other fryer, and that's it. I'm coming there every day. Yeah. Yeah, can you explain the concept again? Like, It's a Like, because there's so many unique [00:36:00] aspects to it. The tallow fryer, the raw dairy, like, you've checked a lot of boxes. So, I believe in whole foods, and not the chain of rest of grocery stores.

Single ingredient foods. I believe in single ingredient foods, and I believe in that the processing of foods should be no more than you could do in your own kitchen. So like, can I make pasta in my own kitchen from a wheat berry? Yeah. And I have, and I Um, so can I, I, so pasta is like as far as processed as I want.

And so that was part of the issue with the vegan movement that was hard for me is we did have some products in the restaurant that didn't align with my values because we didn't ever have any fake meats, but we did have mayonnaise and fake cheese for the pizzas and stuff like that that are mostly seed oils.

So we have no seed oils in the restaurant right now. [00:37:00] We have a tallow fryer and a zero acres fryer. Um, and then we have all whole foods for everything. The, all the dairy is coming from origins, which is a certified regenerative organic. Dairy and they have only like pretty small farms and it's a co op of small farmers And then we have raw milk in California.

There's only two brands of raw milk that's available So it's one of the two California brands of raw milk Available for your coffee for your milkshakes, whatever And then we have all the meat is either from force of nature or Stimple Creek Stimple Creek is a California regenerative producer and He's doing really great work And then, Force of Nature, you guys are familiar with here in Texas, but they're, Stimple Creek actually grows for, or raises for Force of Nature as well, so it's, um, and then we have bison from [00:38:00] Force of Nature, and then we have wild harvested antelope from here in Texas, and wild harvested venison from here in Texas, and then we have wild harvested boar, uh, pepperoni or summer sausage for our pizzas.

So, the level of Integrity that I'm putting into the gradients is really high, but the appetite for it seems to be low and I'm disappointed. I really thought people were going to be so excited. So your sales are down 50 percent since you've made the change. Yes. That's going to be temporary in my opinion.

I fully believe it. Yeah. Well, I hope you guys are right. We just want to applaud you two on everything. Like, actually embodying what it means to be principles driven, truly. And your story is not dissimilar from Taylor and Katie, the founder of Force of Nature and Epic Bar. They literally had Thunderbird vegan based bar.

They were doing Iron Man's. Katie's [00:39:00] arthritis was so bad from following a plant based diet that they said she was gonna be deader in a wheelchair. So they decided to start incorporating animal products, and it completely changed their health. But here they are, they're eating animal products, but they have a vegan based bar.

So they're kind of in this moral dilemma of like, what do we do? Do we keep doing this? Or do we have to just scrap Thunderbird, sell it and start a brand that's really in line with our principles, which is exactly what they did. And it's very similar to you too, where it probably would have been more lucrative to just continue to be pushing the vegan methodology of the restaurant.

But once you saw the truth, you were like, I really have an obligation to create a restaurant that's in line with my beliefs. And I know it's. a lot easier said than done. So, I mean, it's incredible what you're doing. I am always been principle driven. And when I opened Sage, I believed that a plant based diet was best.

I believe that wholeheartedly, that's the truth. Like, I've nev my husband always jokes, he says, Can't we ever just do something that's easy to make money? It doesn't have to be [00:40:00] in alignment with what you think God wants you to do here on the planet. And I'm like, No! Cause he like, would be happy to buy a bodega and sell like, phone cards to Mexico.

He's always like, I know this guy and he has this like, corner store and he sells the phone cards to Mexico and he's making really good money and I'm like, Yeah, and like a ton of chips and weird stuff and he's like, yeah, and he's making and I'm always like no, honey And so, uh, my poor husband is always dragged along on my moral But I just feel like if we're all gonna be a slave to something we're all gonna be a slave to Some version of life we might as well be a slave to something that's making a difference That the ripple effect of you in the world It's important that it's making a difference that you, I want to think that when I pass, [00:41:00] whenever that is, that the ripple effect of me made a difference because I'm here temporary in this body and I'm having this honor of being here and having this physical human experience.

But I want to hope that my contribution is something that That is valuable, and I do believe in right and wrong, and I know that we're in a world where there's a lot of gray and everything's just like kind of shades of gray, but I do believe in right and wrong, and I do believe that once you know something is wrong, if you don't know, you don't know, but once you know, and I knew seed oils were And when I, I mean, I did a bunch of research and when I started my restaurants and using rice bran oil, I was under the impression that rice bran oil had the highest flashpoint, was the best for you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.[00:42:00]

I, I read a bunch of studies that, like you said, I could wipe my ass with them now. But, I was trying, I mean, essentially, I ate the food from my restaurants through all of my pregnancies, like, I believed and wanted the food to be the best that it could be. Yes. And I still want the food to be the best that it could be, but I just, I came to the conclusion that there's no way seed oils is okay for you.

And that inflammation is the cause of all disease, and That we have to manage that inflammation. And I've seen people, and I'm, I, I will be honest, I know this is a meat mafia podcast, but I've seen people heal cancer on an all meat diet, and I've seen them heal it on a raw, whole food, vegan diet. I think that we are all creatures, people, and we [00:43:00] have different blood types, and we have different heritage, and we had different kinds of food in our historical history.

Thank you But we all had some animal foods. There is no, well, I, people keep saying there's this indigenous tribe in Mexico, I mean in, in China that ate, is vegan, but they eat butter, so it's kind of like what I grew up on. They eat butter though? They eat butter. So they're not vegan, they're not really vegan.

No. Yeah. Um, and they, and, and it also says depending on your socioeconomic status, um, you're not Status, you may eat sheep or goats, and it says that everybody eats sheep and goat at a festival every year. So, I still think there's some animal products in their diet, but we've never self selected. And I don't know enough about those people in China to say, but 99.

9 percent of all indigenous people never self selected to not eat meat. [00:44:00] We didn't. Mm. And, so, my oldest son was raised vegetarian until I don't know, whenever I gave him the choice, because I was vegan, but my husband was like, the compromise, my husband was like, no on the vegan thing. So they always had eggs, and then I brought in the raw dairy, because we had the cow, when we got the cow.

And my youngest daughter is being exposed to everything, like tacos de cabeza, tacos de tripa, tacos de lingua. And it's interesting, is she's self selecting. We're exposing her to everything and she's eating everything. Whereas my older kid, it's, he eats a lot of carbohydrates and it's a, it's, and he eats meat.

Pretty much just eats meat and carbohydrates and there's not much else and it's taken more effort. And so I think that if we're given [00:45:00] organ meats and we're given these things at a young age, then we'll self select because our body knows. I haven't eaten meat. I don't relate to it as food. And so I have to like retrain or something to get over whatever my thing is.

I am intelligent enough to know that I don't want to carry that on. And so my infant is, she's just barely a year old, just starting to eat food and is self selecting everything. She's eating liver. She's eating Wow. She ate meat. Haggis the other night. What is that? Haggis is a stomach, my husband harvested a sheep and then you take all the organ meat and he does it with like, his is really, actually it's a Mexican, in English we call it haggis but in Mexico they call it el niño, which is the baby because it's all wrapped up.

But he puts rice in it. Uh, so he puts organ meat and spices [00:46:00] and rice and chili guajillo and cilantro and everything and then you sew it up. Oh wow. And after you've washed everything out and then you cook it and then you kind of eat this kind of like rice and organ meat interior plus the stomach on the outside.

Other people that were on the farm were like, Yeah, I'm cool on haggis. I'm all good on haggis. But, uh, but the baby was eating it. And so I think is that we've lost our, People don't want to eat liver, But my husband, Every time my husband harvests an animal, He eats raw organ meat, right? He eats the balls sometimes, He eats liver sometimes, He eats, But my husband always eats some of the organs.

But he was raised, literally hunting for their food. The village that he grew up in, the road didn't get there till the outside world until 1991. And so [00:47:00] he grew up hunting, his indigenous diet is like pork, wild animals, eggs, turtle eggs, not regular eggs, turtle eggs, dried fish, dried pork, dried beef. No refrigeration, so dried foods.

Wow. It's crazy. I mean, so many other cultures have incorporated these foods for such a long time. Um, even our, I mean, even our own in America, like liver was, liver was definitely a part of the cuisine in the early 1900s. Uh, it just seems to have fallen out. Yeah, I was just watching, what, have you ever seen this guy who has a great food show or the food review show, uh, Sonny?

He has a, it's a huge YouTube channel. Okay. Yeah. But. There was, there's something used is like liver, onion, liver, and, um, in England, liver, onions, and bacon is like a regular thing that people eat. And so he was eating and he was, and they were saying it's going out of style and it's not [00:48:00] selling as much.

And he did a whole show about it. We just watched it the other day and he, and my husband's like, yeah, they put the bacon there so you can take a little liver and a little bacon to cover up the liver taste. And he goes, but yeah, you. He said, only, only in a world where there's so much cheap food would you think you could just throw and throw the, and we were talking about, because he threw all, he harvested a sheep yesterday and he gave the organs to the dogs.

And he said, only in a world where there's so much cheap food, it's crazy for me that I just gave the stuff. But he's like, but I went all through the effort to make El Nid. Yo, which is the haggis and nobody ate it and he's like so I'm not gonna do that for everybody He's like I ate a little bit of everything before I gave it to the dogs.

Yeah, it's almost like there's this food renaissance that's been happening within the last five years where if you talk to butchers, they're exploding with, you know, number one, with people that just want to connect directly with their butcher and order from [00:49:00] them. But also these, uh, the beef trimmings, the organs, they were just giving these things away five years ago, where now it's like, they're, these are prize cuts because people want to buy the trimmings and make their own tallow or buy organs and make their own ancestral blend too.

It really is like this very encouraging thing, which is why we think that I know the sales are down, but I really do think it's just an awareness issue. And once people, and cause there are a lot of regenerative people in Southern California that I think probably just don't know about it. And I think once we get the name out there, are there people out there that think of sage and think, Oh, it's vegan.

Yeah. Never going to go there. And so, psychologically, how can I get woo into the, the people that are like, Oh, Sage is vegan. How can I get people to go like, no, I can get a venison patty melt at Sage with kimchi and sourdough bread with regenerative flour. Just think about that. Like a venison patty melt with origins, regenerative [00:50:00] raw cheese and homemade.

Kimchi made in the restaurant from cabbages from Ventura County and sourdough bread with Oatman's Flats, uh, regenerative flour. I mean, being able to get that sandwich is practically a miracle. Oh my gosh. It's insane. It's incredible. It's very Dai Due esque. Like, have you been at Dai Due? No. In town? No.

It's, uh, by Jesse Griffiths, who's a really well known hunter and everything in the restaurant is, hunted or foraged in Texas. They cook everything in beef tallow. They do, uh, what is an antelope cheeseburger? Antelope cheeseburger. Do they do antelope tartar too? They do. Yeah. But, um, do they use broken arrow?

I don't know. That's where we get our, our Texas. We have an antelope curry and this guy was in the restaurant and he is a hunter and he's like, oh, I ordered the antelope curry and it comes with like curried vegetables, curried antelope, basmati rice. And. Fresh cilantro on top and we stew the [00:51:00] antelope for quite some time in the curry and he goes, this is the best Antelope curry in all of Los Angeles and I said I think it's the only antelope curry probably in all of it Los Angeles because I know I was making a joke, but I mean, yeah, I the antelope curry is Super good.

I had a woman come in. She was pregnant And she lives in the neighborhood and she said, she ordered one, she ate it, and then she ordered another one to go and she said, you want to know something? She was going to take the little bit and then she's like, this is not going to be enough. I'm going to order another one.

And then she said, I'm just so happy I found this. I can tell this is going to be my postpartum like nourishment right here. And so I think that we all have standards around food and then we all go out to eat and we let those standards go. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And what I wanted to provide with Sage, and I hope I still can provide with Sage, Regenerative Kitchen is that you can go [00:52:00] out to eat and keep those same standards that you have at home.

You're not compromising. It's delicious. I mean think about how many people you know say, Oh, I only eat ethical meat. I only eat meat directly from the thing. I only eat nose to tail. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I hear this all the time. And then, well, you only eat that, the three meals you cook at home every week and you eat out all the rest of the time.

And so, I'm saying, let me be your secondary kitchen. Let me be your kitchen. The place, if you live in Pasadena, you live in Echo Park, you live in Glendale, you live in downtown L. A. Let me be your canteen and you can have those same standards. You can eat whole foods, single ingredient foods, at the highest quality.

Uh, regenerative or wild, far, wild harvested meat. That's, we don't have, people are saying, well how come you're not offering fish? Like, we're not, because we're not. I haven't found one that's to my standard and it's not what we're doing. It's not, [00:53:00] is there some fish that's probably fine and does my husband eat fish?

Do we order fish? Yeah. That's not what I'm doing. I want to serve food that is supporting ecosystems and making nature better. That's what I'm doing. Who was like, do you think that your customers who were vegan, like are some of them still showing up and getting some of those? Old products that are old items that you had on the menu.

Yes. Okay, the majority Well right now I think it's so it for the first couple weeks. We were still on the P mix I don't know do people know what a P mix is? It's the sales mix of like what you're it's out of your POS what like percentage of things are things So in our P mix currently We are about 50 50 with vegan items and meat items.

The first couple weeks was like 70 percent vegan items And there's [00:54:00] a little bit of a problem because so few things are being fried in the tallow fryer, and so many things are being fried in the vegan fryer. That we're, like I actually have to change the appetizer menu to have more meat items that are gonna be fried in the tallow fryer, because it's backing up the fryer.

So, and, I'll, But also a lot of times it's a group where one person is vegan and one person is not and so if they're getting the Buffalo cauliflower, they don't want it fried in tallow And I thought you know how many times people came to me and said like, oh, I love your Buffalo cauliflower but if I could get it in tallow, I would just Love it.

And then nobody orders it in tallow. You could get it for 2 more in tallow Nobody orders it in tallow But maybe it's because people are coming with a group and some people are vegan and some people are not We make tallow buffalo cauliflower. On our ranch, we only have one fryer, so we only have tallow, so Sounds incredible.

So good. I would love to try that. We could fund your whole restaurant in la just with Harry and I [00:55:00] showing up every day and just ordering a thousand dollars worth of food. Um, well, but that's what I thought. I thought there would be so many people. And maybe it's just slow to get out. I'm just I'm just worried.

I were six weeks in to the transition and sales are down. And every day people are on Instagram saying just go out of business already. Bitch, that's what these vegans, they they'll tell us to kill ourselves and stuff. They're like they're hardcore evil. Yeah. Have you guys watched the videos of them shutting down the restaurant on Father's Day?

And. Insert into the video. Yeah. Uh, they, on Father's Day, and on other Fridays and Saturday nights, but Father's Day was the most notable financial impact on us, they fully came into the restaurant and cleared the whole restaurant. And, to be clear, because they, uh, said that I said on Fox News that they closed the restaurant down.

[00:56:00] What I'm saying is they cleared the restaurant. No, I did not shut my doors and lock the front door, but every single guest left the restaurant. No way. And I had to send my staff home and they left around six o'clock so we were able to have dinner. I have one friend and she's got four or five kids and at least three of them have special needs.

Two are with autism and one that has Down syndrome and they're all on very specific diets. Um, and she's had a lot of, they were customers when we were all vegan. They've had a lot of luck with like no gluten and certain things for the autistic kids. And, but her husband likes to have a beer and likes to just have some nachos and like a normal meal.

And so they would come often, even when they lived far away. She called me, facetiming, her kids were covering their ears and screaming because they're autistic. [00:57:00] And these people were in the restaurant with sirens, with whistles, with drums. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Screaming and screaming. I'll send you the video, it's crazy.

She sent me a video and was like, I'm so sorry we have to leave, we, and my husband was gonna punch somebody and they just left, but so many people just left the restaurant. So many people didn't come in. It's Father's Day, nobody, nobody wants to deal with that on Father's Day. But here's the thing, this is my question.

I'm not the enemy of the vegans. I'm literally not. And I'm the bridge. I understand how you feel, I was you. And the, it's easy for everybody to say that I just made this decision for the money because that makes sense in people's brains. To think about someone who's never eaten meat, was raised vegetarian, given 13 [00:58:00] years to providing the best vegan food possible to the Los Angeles community, and that person is saying I was presented with so much evidence.

That there is no food without death and that there is no sustainable way to feed the whole world plants. That animals are part of the system. They have to be part of the system. They are part of the system. And just by saying I'm not going to eat meat does not cause less harm. It does not cause less harm.

Saying I'm only going to eat conscious food from systems that are a win for all of us That does cause less harm. It's like I made my ingredients way more expensive supply chains way more expensive Having to pay vendors up front because I can't just get it from cisco and get that 30 I have to get a pallet delivered and store it and buy freezers like nothing about this was easy This was all mission driven all [00:59:00] purpose driven And that's how I make my decisions.

Every day I ask myself, is this about pleasure or purpose? And pleasure can be about ego gratification, feeling good about ourselves, like whatever, or is it about purpose? And that's how I make my decisions. And this is purpose, purpose, purpose. And even if it fails, I'm spreading the message of regenerative agriculture.

And I'm still going to be doing regenerative agriculture. My ranch here, Sovereignty Ranch in Texas, I'm still going to be growing cattle. I'm still going to be serving regenerative food, and I'm still going to be doing my purpose. And if the vegans win and close down my restaurant, what type of sad victory is that?

Because some other restaurants going to be going there, owned by venture capital, selling meat from the consolidated feedlot system and dairy from the consolidated feedlot system. So what is the win? It's not like my restaurant will close and no other restaurant will go in there. [01:00:00] These are prime locations.

Sunset Boulevard, Colorado Boulevard. Yeah, the problem is there, there's legitimately no logic to how they're operating. It's pure emotion. And it's hurt. They're hurt. And I get that they're hurt. They feel like I've betrayed them. They feel like they were part of a church. And that church, one of the leaders of that church, is saying, you know what?

I'm not sure that this is the right church, and I want to pray to this other church because I believe that that's right. Yeah, and the thing is It's because I'm willing to be critically thinking. COVID was, lots of people had experiences during COVID where they were able to see things they couldn't see before.

And this happened to me before COVID. But we cannot be so [01:01:00] tribal. that we can't hear the words coming out of other people's mouths. But that's what it's like. People say, well, the corn and soy that you're feeding your cows are having more crop death than my broccoli. I'm not feeding my cows corn and soy.

My cows are getting grass. Well, the, well, unintentional death is different than intentional death. Is it? Things still dead. If someone killed my child or someone hit them with a car cause they were drinking, would the pain be any different?

No. Death is death. And to be alive is to be consuming other beings constantly, whether we know it or not, whether it's accidental or intentional. So my thing is that we have to be hyper intentional. Am I never [01:02:00] going to eat kale again or broccoli because Um, the, there's not a microbiology diversity in a kale field, no.

The

idea that if a hundred percent of your calories come from, if a hundred percent of your calories come from monocropping, which is what is true about a vegan's diet. And that was the thing, I was trying to grow my own food, and I'm like, well, how about, what am I gonna eat? I can't just eat tomatoes and cucumbers all day long, this is gonna be a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers.

Eggplants. Okay, I don't like eggplants. Onions. Garlic. Okay, what am I going to eat though? What's it going to be like? Yeah, where's the sustenance? Where's the sustenance? Yeah. Yeah. And so, you will get really happy about your chickens laying eggs, your cow milking, and harvesting an animal if you're growing all your own [01:03:00] food.

Mm. Where do you think we are in the state of homesteading and people actually starting to grow their own food? Funny you mentioned that. I, No, I offer a course on October's and in April's at Bar Farm for Homesteading 101 for people that are living in the city. This is not for if you like already are doing it.

This is for you're living in the city and you're toying with the idea and you feel like you want to do it. It's a week long course or you can take a There's a cheaper version where you just stay for the weekend or you can stay through the whole week and do the deep dive. I think it's a res renaissance and I think it needs to be the average farmer is 66 years old and there's like much more that are over 66 than under 66.

I'm a young farmer and I'm 46. So we need people to be on the land and then people always say well if I can't go live [01:04:00] on the land What can I do buy from somebody who's living on the land direct at the price that is it? Costs more than the price that it cost them to produce it. Mm hmm. That's what you can do Yeah, totally that makes a huge difference.

There is no regenerative agriculture industry without regenerative agriculture consumers The consumer is so important. People always say like, well, I'm not going to be a farmer. What could I do? You do a lot. Trade your convenience for resilience. Shake the hand that feeds you and pay a fair price. And do not compare apples to oranges.

Do not say, well, I can get ground beef for 3. 99 a pound, the dollar general. It's not the same thing. Single origin ground beef from one cow is very, very different than ground beef that comes from. [01:05:00] Un be told, Matt, fourteen, fifteen hundred different sets of DNA in one. Yeah. Mm. That's not it. Mm. So, We have to be willing to support the farmers that are doing the right thing.

And that is what I'm doing with Sage. I'm trying to support the farmers that are doing the right thing. And I'm trying to uplift the story of farmers that are doing the right thing. If you see the menu, you can go on the back and there's a QR code to every one of my purveyors, all the information about them.

And so you can be a hundred percent connected. This is the farm that she's doing that. Okay. Let me look them up on the internet. Let me look at their QR code. Let me see if I, so I'm not hiding anything. Where else can you go to a restaurant and see every place that they're getting their ingredients from?

Not many. There's only a handful that I can think of in Austin. And I think it's few and far between to find. Yeah. And they have a, those restaurants have a [01:06:00] cult like following too. Which I think again reinforces the point. I think you're just, I know six weeks has probably felt like an eternity, but it's still such a short time period over the grand scheme of things.

And I really do think that, I think that things are going to be very different the next couple months in a great way. I appreciate that. And I'm trying to make it, you know, I'm trying to make it through. I'm up against it financially. It's just, I'm up against it. You've said so many things that I want to circle back to.

One of them was the, um, was just voting with your dollar. It's like, it's such a fortune cookie bumper sticker type of thing, but it's so true that Truly the only way that anything is going to change is if The consumer abides by their beliefs and they, if they believe that, you know, food should come from these sources that are doing things the right way, that aren't using chemicals, that are like just restoring soil quality, you need to [01:07:00] really contribute and it doesn't need to necessarily be, you know, everything, but um, you know, I think there's just a massive opportunity there.

Every farm tour I do, I say, I'm going to ask you guys to think about where in your life do you trade convenience for resilience? And I'm going to ask that three or four times during the farm tour. And I always talk about convenience, trading our convenience. For resilience and we all do it. I just got parrot food delivered from Amazon because it's 25 pounds for $83 versus $90, 12 pounds at my local pet store, and so that is not as resilient.

The most resilient thing was if I was growing food for my parrots or whatever, right? So I trade, I buy dog food or whatever. In other ways we don't, for example. I [01:08:00] don't feed corn and soy and chicken feed in a bag to our egg laying chickens. I feed meat trimmings from the butcher. Wow. I get barrels and barrels that they would have to pay to get rendered.

And I take it, and I feed it to my chickens. And all the bones are in there, and then I flail mower that. And that. I grind it up, and that turns to bone meal, which is something that we purchase for, uh, fertilizer, right? And blood meal. So, we take, imagine a 55 gallon drum of meat, and is this, is this, Is it saving money?

I don't know. We have to have a refrigerator truck to keep it in. We have to drive to go get it. We got, but, so we dump out a 55 gallon drum of meat trimmings and it has like deer ribs and all different stuff in it. [01:09:00] Cow heads, legs, everything. And we dump it out along a whole row in the orchard. And then we let the chi and then we sprinkle a little bit of layer, no corn, no soy, but a layer feed on top of the meat and then we leave it there for days and the maggots get into it and the chickens just like go crazy for it and they eat it and we get massive amounts of eggs and they eat their free range so they're getting all types of other stuff and then we move the chickens to somewhere else.

My husband comes in there with a flail mower and grinds all those bones up, grinds all that meat trimmings up that's left and then we put a little compost on top of that and then eventually we plant something corn or Zucchinis or whatever into that. So that is so much more resilient than buying bone meal in a bag, buying blood meal in a bag, buying chicken feed in a bag.

We're still buying a little bit of chicken feed in a bag, but I'm majority of my chicken's diet is now [01:10:00] this thing that is a waste product from someone else in my community. So. Net savings, probably it's a net savings, but it's much more effort than a pallet of chicken feed showing up and just dumping out feed every day into feeders.

Mmm, totally. But you see that it's stacking functions and it has all these different ways that we're being resilient. It's, uh, It's a local thing that if there's no supply chain, you know, it's everything is community and local and all of that. So I like to think about this all the time, like where, what's the most resilient option I could do here.

And I still get stuff on Amazon. I'm not saying I don't trade that. None of us are an Island. And community is, like, the most important thing. And we're all in these communities where we don't know anybody. There's somebody in India to helping us with our banking. There's some driver for Amazon. Somebody in a warehouse somewhere.

There's some person you [01:11:00] don't know doing your shopping and Instacarting it to your house. Like, you depend on all these people. But, like, if the shit hits the fan, none of those people those are all transactional relationships. Yes. We need equity. And I don't mean equity. We need equity relationships where you've invested in this person and this person is going to invest in you.

And when we were selling our farm in California, the restaurants were already slowing down. I didn't have that much money. We were moving. I ran out of, I didn't have money to pay both mortgages. I was, it was like a hard time for me. And I knew I had all this money coming when I sold my farm, but all like people came and lent me money.

Paid my mortgage, lent, bought a truck for me that I could pay back once we closed escrow. Those things happen because I have invested in my relationships in my community and they trust me. People who think [01:12:00] like, I don't like to deal with people, I don't like to deal with the politics of relationships. I don't.

We have to. We need community. We cannot survive alone without fiat currency as the, the lubricant. Yeah, if it goes food. I would think having a personal relationship with the person that's growing your food if you can't grow your own food is probably pretty damn good thing to do. Like you think about all the people, you think about someone in New York City that was going to a grocery store when meat wasn't on the shelves, Versus that person in Bluffton, Georgia, that had a relationship with Will Harris at White Oak Pastures who had been buying quarter half whole beefs from him for five years.

It's like, Will took damn good care of a lot of those customers too. Yeah. My cousin buys from the Amish. My cousin lives in Jersey and he buys, um, from the Amish farmers and he does like the, like the back deal. Like, Oh yeah. The milk, the membership [01:13:00] association, they drop it off. In a parking lot. So. Well, through COVID, he was able to go have his membership association and have his relationship and be taken care of.

Um, my farm in California during COVID was gangbusters. And you know what was really disappointing to me? As soon as people were not afraid anymore, my sales for my CSA plummeted. We were doing 500 boxes a week and it went down to 300 a month. Yeah. And so, what that made me realize is I thought all these people were inspired about what we were doing and wanted food with no poisons, with no chemicals.

Like, I, I always joke, like, there's nothing on this food that I wouldn't put in my kid's mouth. And then people say, oh, you put shit on the food. I'm like, yeah, and my kids probably get a little shit in their mouth sometimes, too, on the farm. It looks good for them. But, you know, there's nothing on this food that I wouldn't feed to my children.

And you're getting this box every week. And, and I wrote, [01:14:00] I sent out a survey monkey thing. Like, uh, And said, why did, you know, I noticed that you discontinued your thing. And people said, oh, well, I don't feel as afraid to go to Whole Foods anymore. And I like to eat exactly the food I want and not. So my CSA in California, there was no choosing.

It's what's in season and that's what you're getting and you get to get creative. And, um, People were like, it was good when there was not a lot of stuff in the stores and it was good when I was afraid of the store and it was getting delivered to my house, but I like to eat what I want to eat when I want to eat it.

And that, we live in a society where we, we've completely get to do what we want. It's not like, what is available. Mmm. And my husband gets very, very angry with my children. And my children grew up, like, in this world, right? And they're like, I don't like it. It's too small. My graham cracker's broken. My husband's like, eat some grrrr.

Me and my brothers would fight over a potato chip bag that we found on the ground with little bits [01:15:00] of potato chips in the bottom. And you don't want to eat the graham cracker that's broken. Like, it's a totally different world. But, um, So we didn't do the you can choose because to support the farm, you have to support what's growing at this time of the year or what's easy to grow at this time of the year.

And if you're like, well, it's July and it's 110 out and I don't have any broccoli. Okay. Well, yes, broccoli does not grow in Southern California in July. I'm sorry. Uh, will we have it up, and I mean we have broccoli nine months of the year, we have cauliflower, cabbage, ten months of the year. It wasn't like they never got it.

And then it'll be like, I've had cabbage for this many months, I'm like, yes, it's wintertime, there's a lot of cabbage. So this is the thing that we have to learn, and we would send out recipes and all this stuff, but we have to learn to eat locally, eat resilient, and support our local farmers. Because [01:16:00] our food system is being centralized.

like everything else. Our medical system is centralized. There's only certain approved cancer treatments. Those are the only ways you can legally treat cancer. It's a centralized system. Our education system is centralized and funded by big ag and big pharma and all all these things are centralized. Our food system is 80 percent centralized.

And I say 80 percent because we know that 80 percent of our meat is packed by the big four. And so that means 20 percent of our meat. is packed on independent things. So meat is a example, but vegetables are probably similar. And so we have an opportunity to say, no, it is dangerous. It is a threat to our ability to thrive as a race, to have four companies processing 80 percent of our meat.

It is a threat to our survival to have four companies processing 80 percent of our [01:17:00] meat. It's not safe. The government shut us down because of a germ and told us we weren't safe for two years in California, last time here in Texas. You want to know what's not safe and should be shut down? Four companies packing 80 percent of the animal protein that we're consuming in this country.

It is not safe. If one of those companies has some contamination situation. It can be a supply chain disaster. It can destroy families, restaurants, like all people's lives, all different types of things. We want to say, no, we want to go the other direction. We want to decentralize the food system and everything is decentralized, defy this, defy that, right?

But I'm saying decentralize your food system and specially if you live in a In an agricultural state like Texas or California. But if you live in New York, yeah, it's gonna take more effort. But you're gonna have to drive upstate and go to a [01:18:00] farmer's market. But do it! It's worth it! What could be more important than supporting the people that are growing our food?

Unless we want to eat lab grown meat, bugs, and hydroponic, indoor grown, nutrient void vegetables. Then we want to say, I wanna drive to go buy vegetables that were grown in soil. I don't know. Do people understand the difference between a soil grown food and a and a hydroponic grown food? I don't think so.

Absolutely not. So most of the greens and tomatoes and stuff that we're buying in the grocery store nowadays are grown hydroponically. Many strawberries are now grown hydroponically and we're progressively going to this more eco-friendly in air quotes if anybody's listening, version of farming. The thing is that why [01:19:00] microbiology is so important in the soil is that microbiology is breaking down stuff and then secreting what the plants need to grow.

So there doesn't exist any soil that doesn't have enough nitrogen in it. That's like a lie. That's something we learned in college that's a lie. There's plenty of nitrogen, or even MPK, all three of them, everywhere. It's just, is there enough microbiology to make it available to the plants? But, we've gotten to a world where, both in soil farming and in hydroponic farming, we can just put nitrogen in water, and the plant just drinks it up the way it is, just as nitrates.

Well, a tomato grown in soil that has had the nitrogen broken down through the system of this microbiology and then fed to the plant is a cancer fighting nutrient bomb of deliciousness that [01:20:00] depreciates in value every hour it's away from the vine. So the closer to harvest, when you pick a tomato off the vine, it has tiny little hairs all over the whole thing.

They're tiny, tiny and they disappear. Those are super good for you and you should eat things right off the vine if you can. Like grow your own tomatoes on your backyard. But when we grow a tomato in a hydroponic system, it's just uptaking the nitrates. And so now we have this tomato that's filled with nitrates.

And even if you say, I think that that's the same, when you pick that tomato green and then use gas to ripen it once you're at close to its final destination, it's just not, it's not, it's not the same as a homegrown tomato or a farm grown tomato in soil. But the nutrient density of food is informed by the microbiology in the soil.

Do you guys want to hear something crazy I just learned? [01:21:00] And it's by the. Only because I'm a soil geek kind of person. But I, we did a soil report and then I was talking to a soil expert that is a big person in regenerative agriculture and we were talking about my soil and what we need to do because it's very alkaline here in Texas and there's so much limestone in the soil and how to do it.

And so we were talking about that basically I have low micro risal. activity in the soil we need to make. And I asked like, well what's the best way to do that? And he was saying summer grasses, and I, and so we swore gum and Sudan and all that. I said, well what about corn? Corn's a summer grass. Does corn do that?

And he said it's been bred out of all the new varieties, old varieties, This is absolutely Natural and it was gentlemanly, yeah, so think Not did we not only just genetically modified corn to have its own pass the science and to be able to take roundup to be sprayed on it. We bred out the part of the corn that has the micro risel relationship with the soil that makes the MPK, the nutrients available to the plant [01:22:00] because we want barns to buy fertilizer.

Mmm, how crazy is that crazy? It's so sad. Have you read the Have you read the food baron's report? No, it's I'll send it to you and for anyone listening I'll put in the show notes, but it talks all about the centralization of the food system and then it It also talks about how in the genetics of a lot of the plants and animals that we have, we've just self selected for a handful, and diversity of these plant species has just plummeted, and now we're, we only have a few.

It's exactly what you're saying. And just acting like there's no benefit for those hundreds of other species of corn. And we grow old varieties of corn, and I grow old varieties of watermelons, and we save seeds. I'm I like cra I like crazy I tell people it And they're like, what could I do? Like, what if end of days comes?

I said, you should be saving, buying organic produce and saving all the seeds all the time because you'll show up [01:23:00] at some farm If the shit has hit the fan and there's no more supply chains, you have a whole trunk full of seeds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that'll be valuable Stockpile ammo, guns, and seeds and someone will let you in, I promise

We talk about this all the time about we've There's like seven veg I mean everything is like, there's just broccoli, cauliflower, tomato, eggplant, like it's we're down to like zucchini. We have very few different kinds of foods, and we don't eat different kinds of foods anymore. Carrots, I mean think about the vegetables you eat.

They're like the same. Yeah, totally and I think there's so much value in these different things That's why I brought you guys the persimmons vinegar But I think persimmons is like a highly underrated tree that can grow drought tolerant Can it's super high in sugars? That and so that means tons of calories are available.

You can dry it. It makes a great dried fruit You can make [01:24:00] vinegar out of it and I love in The wintertime tomatoes are not available, but persimmons come ripe in October, November, and then store in the refrigerator through many months. And persimmons, you can actually pick green because, uh, animals would store them and then they would get ripe over the winter.

You can pick them green and the sugars still come into them. Uh, like a peach, you can't pick it green and then the sugars will come into it. But persimmons, you can pick it fairly green and the sugars still come into it. come into it. Um, so it's a very good storable through the winter kind of fruit. And I, so I think it's highly underrated and we just don't do it.

But I make tomato instead of tomato caprese, I do sandwiches or a turkey sandwich or any kind of sandwich with sliced persimmons in the wintertime when that's available and fresh tomatoes are not. It's just hydroponic grossness. That sounds incredible. Well, it reminds me a lot of like, just the, you go to the grocery store, people are [01:25:00] conditioned for the fruits and vegetables to just taste like water.

It's like, because there's no nutrition in there at all. It's just all water. Yeah. And who would want that? No wonder why kids don't want to eat vegetables because they don't taste good. People always tell me, I hate tomatoes. You don't hate tomatoes. You haven't had a good tomato. You've never had a good tomato.

That's what I tell them. There's no way. There's like, and how could you? There's. Thousands and thousands of varieties of tomatoes. Like you just maybe haven't had a variety that you like, but we, and think about even tomatoes in the store. You have Roma, you have those vine ones. I don't know what those are.

Like the hydroponic vine ones that come. And then you have like a big steak tomato and then a couple months the year you have heirloom tomatoes and that's it. Right. That's the, but there's thousands of and cherry tomatoes year round. We have cherry tomatoes. There's thousands of different varieties of tomatoes and we've just, Selected for, mostly what we've selected for is shelf stable [01:26:00] because we want a global food system that where we can grow it here and ship it here.

Avocados, another thing like thousands of varieties of avocados and we all eat Haas avocados. We eat Haas avocados. Because they're the most nutrient dense, because they make the best guacamole, no. Tell you that Fuerte avocados are higher in antioxidants and make better guacamole, for example. Why we all eat Haas avocados is because the Haas avocado is easy to peel, and the peel turns black when it's ripe.

So you don't know it's bad until you've cut it open at home. So the grocery store and the farmer is not taking the loss. That's why. Fuerte is better you said? Fuerte. Fuerte. Um, Fuerte is named Fuerte because it, it, before Haas avocados were, came into the market, this is interesting. Haas avocados was invented by a farmer who, I mean a, not a farmer, by a mailman who used to pick up all the [01:27:00] avocado pits from a Mexican restaurant in California.

And the main cultivar of avocados in California at the time was Fuerte, which means strong because there was a freeze that came in and all other genetics were gone. Wiped out in California except for Fuerte. And so, then everybody grew that one because it was cold tolerant. But it has a thin skin and so it would just be a local thing.

And it's harder to peel. But it doesn't turn brown quickly. So when you make guacamole with a fuerte in the fridge it will stay green for a day and a half two days afterwards, whereas a guacamole, Uh, Haas turns brown fairly quickly because there's less antioxidants in it. But a Haas avocado, so one of his kids told him like, Dad, this one, he was grafting avocados for local farmers as a side job so he would get the seeds and then he would cut branches of the fuerte and graft it onto the seedling because every Haas avocado tree is from the same tree.

Every fuerte is from the same tree. That's how we have this very uniform, uh, system. [01:28:00] His kid said, what are the graphs did it take? And we just let it go. And this is the best avocado we've ever had. And so he ended up getting, selling the patent for that avocado, which is now the Haas avocado. Haas avocado, the main reason that we use it as our primary avocado is its ability to disguise when it's bad.

And as a farmer, I understand why that's valuable. as a restaurant odor. It's a little bit harder because I'm the, I can open an entire case of avocados that are all brown inside. That's crazy. How much better is the guac with the fuerte? It's, it's, it's richer. Richer. Yeah. Hmm. And, I mean, there's so many different kinds of avocados.

That's right. There's, we grow a gem avocado. There's like a large, round avocado, uh, which is like a grandchild of Hass. And it's really wind tolerant, and it's small, but it's a big, big, with a big pit, but it's a big avocado. [01:29:00] I love the reed avocado I've ever had. This is the one with a very thick, thick skin.

Like, you could almost make a bowl out of the skin. I don't think so. And it comes ripe. This is the time of year. Reeds come ripe in July, so, It's like a big, round, green one. Very, very round, so keep an eye. That is really delicious on, and it's high in fat and really delicious, but only available a short season.

Wow. Could you imagine if you knew ten years ago that you would have a regenerative restaurant and be living on a farm in Texas? I cannot. Can you, like, what would you have said to yourself? You gotta get, like, who I was ten years ago. I drove a hybrid. I brought my reusable bags to the store, so I was a good, person.

I drank oat milk in my latte so I was a double good person. And I, I, I mean ten and a half years ago I wasn't even married so I was just like this business owner, feminist, you [01:30:00] know, fully career driven person. But I was apathetic. I was doing all these things I thought were right, but I remember the moment that I heard Graham Sait talk about regenerative agriculture and I remember how much sense it made.

And I remember thinking, Oh, there is something we can do to make a difference. And that was what started this whole path. And Graham Sate is that ripple effect. And so now, he's also who inspired my brother to start Kiss the Ground. Wow. That TED Talk. I mean, I wonder, like, I wanted to have a conference on the farm.

I'm going to put this out here. I want to have a conference on the farm of Anybody and everybody who made a big change in their life after hearing Graham Sait's TED Talk on regenerative agriculture, I bet that there's so many and it would be an awesome conference and we could all meet and tell the story.

[01:31:00] But the bigger story is one man's 15 minute talk, what the ripple effect that could be. Totally. It's so cool thinking about the change that can be made just through one guy regenerative ag. Um, you mentioned Bitcoin earlier. I'm curious how that fits into the whole story. Um, do you, so do you credit a lot of what's happened in the food system with money being corrupted?

Do I, I, I don't know about the food system. I mean, everything is poison. The makeup I put on my face, the shampoo, just to try to not, I have little kids. Just to try to not poison your kids on a daily basis is like impossible. You have to work to not poison them. To not poison them and then you order stuff and you're like, it said it was no fragrance and then it came, it smells like this.

Like, uh, they're endocrine interrupters. And so I credit [01:32:00] greed and lack of integrity for a big portion of what's happening. And then, this, the Federal Reserve just, like, printing money and debasing our work every single day. You work so hard to build something, and then they just print money out of thin air, and then make you pay taxes, like, pay taxes when you buy your food, pay taxes when you Buy your house, pay taxes every year that you own your house, pay taxes on things that your business bought and you paid tax on when you bought them.

But now they're property tax because it's a business and the property of the business is paying property. It's just like on and on and on we're taxed. And then, so they're taking little bits of our money constantly. And then they're just printing money out of thin air. I think that people can't have really strong moral integrity because we're being [01:33:00] enslaved to the money slave system.

How can we have integrity when the entire system is you work really hard, you pay your taxes, and we'll just print as much money as we want? How can we have integrity? I think it's impossible. It distorts our values. And we all have to make decisions in our businesses constantly as the Federal Reserve prints money and debases what we're doing.

We have to give smaller portions or we have to do less quality ingredients or we have to raise prices and none of those feel good to the consumer. And it breaks trust with the consumer. But it's all outside of our hands. The money system in this country. Is so unfair and I would venture to say 90 percent of people do not understand it At least at least I think more [01:34:00] than 90 probably more.

Yeah 90 is a great number but We pay taxes and do you know if you always say my money's paying this my money our tax is not even covering debt the the interest on the debt for the money that's just being printed out of thin air and People say well that can't be possibly true People say like, well, no, 'cause it's a different track.

They print the money and then they sell the bonds, and then they give it to the banks, and then the banks lend the money. It's not a different track. I buy a house, they create a money out of thin air from my mortgage that cash goes to whoever I'm buying the house from, and boom, it's into the system printed out of thin air posy scheme.

Literally, there's a cool crop of ranchers that are accepting Bitcoin, which is really cool. And there's a lot of Bitcoiners that just go get their quarter half whole beef and just pay them through Bitcoin. Just totally [01:35:00] decentralized. I'm down. I'm wanting to be able to take Bitcoin on the ranch. You should.

That would be sweet. You definitely should. There's a, like, they, the Bitcoin community is also very passionate about anti seed oil and like pro meat, um, pro regenerative. So it's, it's an interesting crossover. I think the, the underpinning trait is that people are seeking truth and want that truth to be upheld across all the different areas of society.

I think those who study Bitcoin learn About so many other areas of life and for me, I was studying other areas of life Which led me to Bitcoin, but

I was reading this book Everything divided by 21 million and I was having Awarenesses about all different areas of my life that and it wasn't something in that book specifically that I didn't know or whatever but just reading the book and listening to I was listening while I was driving listening to the book [01:36:00] and The talking about time preference and planning for the future versus planning for now and what is your time preference priority.

I realized so much about my marriage that gave me so much more freedom because I grew up with enough food, even though we were really, really, really poor. My mom prioritized, uh, healthy food. Even though we didn't eat meat, she worked at an organic bakery and my mom's twin sister worked at the food co op in town and My mom would make, like, tempeh, buy organic soybeans and ferment them herself, make fermented tempeh for the family from scratch.

Like, that's, like, the level. And the bakery would give her all this organic flour that got bugs in it, and my mom would put it in the freezer, and sift it out, and then she would make You know, food, whole wheat, whatever, and make food for us. So my mom always prioritized [01:37:00] no poisons in our food, and that was really important to her.

And so, I never had a shortage of food, even though we were really, really poor. We had like, no walls, just insulation, exposed, and food. all closed from the Salvation Army and just super, sometimes we'd eat pancakes multiple nights in a row. I remember that, but I didn't realize it was cause we were getting free flour from the free flour from the bakery and we had bees.

And so we'd have it with honey instead of maple syrup. And now looking at, my dad would just buy butter and he'd melt honey and butter and pour it on top and we'd eat whole wheat pancakes with the honey and butter multiple days in a row. And I remember that. As something that was fun, like my dad would make it so fun.

Like, we're having panners for night. So I never had a not enough food conversation. Even though looking back I can see that there was some, we wouldn't ideally serve our kids pancakes for three nights in a row. But I see that we always had enough food to [01:38:00] eat. There was no competition for food. My husband never had enough food.

Ate kids. In this indigenous village, always competition for food. Always, always, always competition for food. So when he's making decisions right now, today, in our life, he's making decisions for his comfort right now. And I'm making decisions for the future. And that is something that we have to manage for.

Whereas I used to just get mad at him. Like, what, what, what you feel about this right at this moment should have no bearing on what, what, what. I realized that, and I learned that from studying Bitcoin and time preference and when you're in survival versus when you're not in survival, how you can make decisions.

And so that was a long way about the food conversation, but I learned how to be better in my relationship with my husband and how his time preference and how he's making decisions based on not having enough food for most of his life has him make decisions for right now. And because I [01:39:00] always had enough food.

I'm always making decisions down the road. The benefit, though, is he doesn't worry about down the road. I'll say, oh my god, we only have enough money for the next three months in the bank account and we're going to have to, and he'll be like, three months, like, we'll figure something out. Like, what are you, if there's, he'll say, if we have to go sleep in a cage on a, on a cave on a dirt floor, and I have to hunt, Uh, what are those things that have the hard shells?

Armadillos for us to eat, then you'll have to worry about it, but for right now, I think you're fine. You know, so, it's a good balance, but I learned about that from studying Bitcoin, and so it's interesting about how much we can, and I learned about fairness, and we talk so much about equity conversations from top down, and, and, and use it, the government governing fairness.

Yeah. Yeah. And Bitcoin is fairness, taking on shape, form, and experience in [01:40:00] the world. And I wish that I had been more attuned to it at the time that I found out about it because I was a growing pot and had plenty of money and I didn't buy any of it back then and I should have. But, you know, uh, that being said, we all buy Bitcoin at exactly the price that we deserve to buy it at.

Exactly. And so I deserve to buy it between. 9, 000 and 50, 000. I mean, I buy every dip. So, you know, whatever that is. Well, hopefully the ranch may be taking Bitcoin in the future. Ranch definitely taking Bitcoin in the future. I'm really excited about. I'm really excited about the future of Bitcoin. I think that the more that people understand Bitcoin, the less likely Anybody is going to want fiat.

Oh, yeah. People say like, oh, I'm 50 50 [01:41:00] Like I'm like a hundred percent bitcoin and whatever I need immediately right now out of bitcoin Yeah, yeah, like i'm same boat in terms of just hopefulness for the future with bitcoin knowing that We've essentially taken the most corruptible technology That we have which is money and created something.

That's just kind of a system. It's programmed into existence and you can either opt in or opt out. And I would think that if you're intelligent, you would choose to opt into that. Yeah. And I, and I'm also pro gold and silver because if there's an EMP tomorrow, there will be no Bitcoin. And so I think we have to be diversified in all that we do.

I mean, I'm also have $10,000 worth of seeds. I, I like how much of a prepper you are, . Oh, you don't even know. Wait until you come to my house. Well, hopefully this week will be, uh, but yeah. No, [01:42:00] but here's the thing. It doesn't matter. I could prep all day and I can tell you that I have a thousand pounds of salt, um, or whatever, however many bullets or however many whatever I could tell you.

But if my community. is not awakened to wanting to be self reliant and sovereign as well. When the shit hits the fan, I will, there won't be enough bullets and there won't be enough guns to protect all that I've built to be able to survive. Ultimately, we need to create communities that are willing to stand together against whatever's coming.

And that's prepping, that's Bitcoin, that's knowing your neighbor, that's buying from your local farmer. It's all of that seed saving and [01:43:00] you're, you're not, you're only as food secure as your neighbor is.

And I, I've seen some things recently where I've seen some people talking about how rural counties in Texas, if there was a major power outage for an extended period of time, whether it was an EMP or a solar flare or just some other situation that stopped supply chain issues in the cities, rural counties in Texas would be overrun with people coming out to Um, trying to figure out what's going on and that they're not prepared because there's very little crime, there's very little law enforcement.

And so I think about this all the time, like we'd have to deputize people, we'd have to like, so I think we all need to be living in community. It's you can't, it doesn't, it's not just the food, I guess is what I'm saying. We can prep all we want, we can have a huge freezer, we can dry tons of jerky, we can have salt so that we can dry [01:44:00] more meat if you need to.

But if you don't have a community of people to guard the walls. to help grow the food, move the cows. You're just vulnerable. You're vulnerable. Yeah. Community. Conscious community is our greatest asset. Mm hmm. 100%. Well said. Well, we are very appreciative to get to know you and hear you tell your story and just see the impact of all the work that you're doing too.

We're definitely going to link to the restaurant and the ranch in the show notes. So if anyone's listening to this that's either in Southern California, visiting Southern California or has connections there. We gotta send them to a sage regenerative kitchen because that menu sounds amazing. And I really do think once we get the word out there, the business is gonna absolutely flourish.

Thank you. And if you're in Texas, I assume you have some people in Texas? Yes. I follow you. Yes. Yeah. Um, right now our ranch, we have a restaurant on the ranch. We have a health permit, we have a liquor license. Everything, uh, on the ranch, it's only open Saturdays right now from [01:45:00] three. So, Saturdays, um, three to nine.

We're gonna extend the hours but, everything that we serve in the restaurant on the ranch is from the ranch. All the meat, all, 90 percent of the vegetables, um, and even the tortillas we serve this week we're gonna have. Sheep tacos, lamb tacos, and it's gonna be fro the corn, we grew the corn ourselves. So it's green corn tortillas that we grew ourselves.

So we're taking farm to table to the next level. We do a farm tour at 7 p. m. There's swimming and you can paddle, but we can rent paddle boards and kayaks and there's sauna. Um, and so it's an open house and we play chicken shit bingo, which is fun, and we always have an organic margarita, organic sangria, uh, as well, and an organic agua fresca.

And so you can come to that, SovereigntyRanch. com, um, if you're in Texas, and then, yeah, Sage Regen Kitchen in Los Angeles. We're [01:46:00] in San Diego. It's on Sunset Boulevard and we're also, uh, in Pasadena and you can find, uh, us on Instagram at The Kind Sage or Chef Molly or Sovereignty Ranch. I love it. Well, thank you so much.

So good to meet you. Thank you guys for educating people on how to take their health into their own hands. Um, I didn't rail on the pharmaceutical industry, but it's another big upset in my life. So, um, thank you for having the courage to be a stand and be an example for how you don't have to be sick. Um, just because they make money off you doing it.

We'll have to do a pharmaceutical episode for part two. For sure. On the ranch, while we get coffee, milking the raw milk into it. Pajarates, let's do it. I love it. Cool. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you. Appreciate it.

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