Mollie Engelhart

Mollie Engelhart is a chef, restaurateur, and regenerative farmer whose career spans the culinary and agricultural worlds. She co-founded Sage Regenerative Kitchen and previously ran several Los Angeles restaurants, including Sage Vegan Bistro and KindKreme. After years in the plant-based restaurant industry, she shifted her focus to regenerative agriculture, founding Sovereignty Ranch in Texas, where she integrates sustainable farming practices with her food ventures. She is the author of Debunked by Nature, a book exploring lessons from motherhood, farming, and food. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  It's 2015. I'm sitting on the back of a refrigerated box truck at Coachella. I have food trucks and booths everywhere. I have like 30 employees, RVs. Like it's a massive undertaking to serve food at Coachella. And I'm breastfeeding my one-year-old at the back of a refrigerated box truck with the door slightly open so the cold air is coming up my back and cooling me off while I breastfeed my child out of the hubbub for a moment. And my phone just starts going crazy. And it was Cafe Gratitude owners are murderers. They have a slaughterhouse. They have this.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  And then people are tagging me and then people are saying, "Well, I don't know if you know, but Molly's their daughter, the owner of Sage. Her husband is not vegan and she's not an ethical vegan because she allows..." I've seen on Facebook that she made eggs for her husband. Like, I mean, it just was like crazy and tagging and tagging. And Cafe Gratitude, never go to Sage, never go to Cafe Gratitude. And it was somehow I got into it. And what had happened was, so my stepmother got Instagram in 2014 and basically viewed it as a way for her children and her many grandchildren, my stepmom has 15 grandchildren. I don't know how much she had at the time, to see what's going on on the farm.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  So she posted, "Grandpa's eating his first hamburger in 40 years." This was a year earlier. And because she had, I don't know, 50 followers that were all in the family, nobody saw it. And it was not a big deal. And we were like, "Oh, grandpa ate a hamburger." And I actually... Had assumed when then she did that because I was younger and more savvy about social media. I had assumed that her account was private, but I didn't think to ask. But for some reason, somebody dug up this Instagram post of grandpa eating a hamburger. And it said, like, we harvested our first cow, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And told the story that the cow was sick and then

• 2:33Speaker 01

  they were going to put it down. They took the cow to UC Davis and the vet was like, we have to put her down. But cows do have two uses. We have not medicated her at all. Would you like to bring her back to the farm and have her harvested? I know this guy that can do that at the farm. And they decided at the time, yes. And their original thought was we'll give it to the farm workers and the community since they loved this cow and they saved her hide. They made her hide into a rug for their bedroom. And my dad loves his cows, like loves his cows. And so once the meat was in the freezer, he had this thought, I don't eat meat because I don't want to contribute to factory farming. I don't want to contribute to abuse.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  I loved this cow. I snuggled this cow. I put lavender essential oils on this cow to keep the flies off her.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  I feel like this cow would want me to eat her. I feel like she would want her life essence to go into my life essence. Like we had a bond. We loved each other. And so he decided to eat this cow. And it went totally viral and all of a sudden there's reporters posted outside of the gate of the farm. The Huffington Post is writing about it. It's everywhere. People are just completely crazy. And it impacted both of our businesses significantly. I lost 10% in top line sales for almost 18 months after this, and I think that they lost more. And I had people reaching out to me influencers saying, would you like me to help you

• 4:11Speaker 01

  distance yourself from your father? And I was like, no, I actually think that what he did is right. I don't want to be distanced from my father. And so we eventually survived it and I I was still pretty vegan in my mindset at that time, but I understood that regenerative agriculture, I got introduced to that idea in 2013. So I was a couple of years in and had been mulling over how could I become more regenerative with my restaurants? What was that pathway? So we were all kind of watching this. And when I say, oh, I need my father's partners and my team to see what was going to happen because I wanted to get a farm. I wanted to bring all the

• 4:52Speaker 01

  food waste from my restaurants and turn it into soil. So we were all watching and observing and they were protesting, they spit in my brother's face, they did all the stuff. But we survived it in the end.

• 5:10Rick Rubin?

  What's bizarre about it is you provide the service for the community. You have a vegan restaurant. It's popular. It's serving the vegan audience. Your dad chooses to eat a burger. That doesn't impact what the restaurant does, doesn't impact the business model. It doesn't impact the service they're providing to the community. And your father's personal choice is enough for the people who eat at the restaurant to turn on the restaurant.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yes. And that is indicative of a world that we live in where you have to agree with everything someone does, or you have to disagree with everything someone does. And I talk about this a lot, how we have to love people we don't agree with, and we have to agree with people we don't love. And this became so apparent during COVID, where all of a sudden someone would be totally canceled. Everything they provided in the world was all of a sudden erased because they didn't want to get an experimental technology injected into them. And so vegans, I always say, were at the forefront of cancel culture. Like, they loved to cancel somebody. You know, someone couldn't get pregnant, they

• 6:24Speaker 01

  add fish to their diet, they're a traitor, rah rah rah. And so I always had honey in my restaurants because I understood that bees are so important and beekeepers are so important. And if we don't support beekeepers, then there is going to be no vegan diet. And I would get people screaming at me in the restaurant, screaming at the top of their lungs. And I would politely ask them, could you tell me what you're doing for solutions for pollination? Are you keeping bees and letting them keep all of their honey? What is your solution? And I am open to donate money to your solution. As of right now, beekeepers are the custodians of the most important part of the ecosystem that makes almost all of the vegan diet exist.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  So for you to scream at me and say you're not going to eat here because I offer honey in my tea or in a beer flavor, I want you to realize this is not grounded in any kind of actually helping the vegans or the planet or anything. It's grounded in an ideology that has no logic. And people would at me. So I was very aware of how the vegan culture responded. And so I was prepared when I made the transition of my restaurants from vegan to regenerative, which did not go well.

• 7:47Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about when you personally were reborn as a regenerative farmer, coming from being a vegetarian or a vegan.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  I lived in Girdata Hills and I had this, like, a little more than a quarter of an acre, somewhere between a half acre and a quarter acre in this golf course community. And I had all these gardens and the homeowners association was always fighting me for having a fruit tree in your front yard that wasn't approved or whatever. And I loved gardening. I loved growing food. And I got some chickens at that time because, and I never ate eggs because I didn't eat eggs when I was growing up, so I was not part of my diet. But the chicken poop was so good for my garden and so many people in the community eat eggs. So I had chickens. And my brother went to a, like, a climate summit in, I want to say New Zealand, it

• 8:41Speaker 01

  might have been Australia, but I think it was New Zealand. There was a panel of scientists on the stage and he was listening. He came out there for as like a cafe gratitude. They brought leaders from different businesses that they thought were climate friendly businesses. And he's sitting in the audience and there's three or four scientists on the stage and all of them but one say, we're doomed, there's no possibility for a future for humanity on the planet. And there's this guy Graham Sate and Graham Sate paints this picture about carbon and how it's the building blocks of all of life and it's constantly cycling and we're the keystone species and how we have the ability to cycle carbon. And it was presented in such a way that it just sparked a fire in my brother.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  And he comes home just completely over the moon, excited about this concept, regenerative agriculture. This is in 2013 and he sends me Graham Sate's TED Talk and I get completely inspired and realize that I've been doing all the things I think I should be doing, driving a hybrid and have a vegan restaurant and growing my own food in my yard, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But underneath I have a little bit of this like, we're doomed feeling. And I don't think that there's a pathway forward for humanity. But I'm like drinking my latte, oat milk latte and my reusable cup and bringing my things to the bags to the store. But really kind of, if I want to be honest, in a virtue signaling kind of way,

• 10:08Speaker 01

  not in a way that I felt deeply that it was going to make a difference. And when I heard Graham Sate talk, I understood for the first time, no, I actually do think that we can make a difference. I actually think there is hope. And if there's hope, then I'm like, let's get on it, let's do it. And so I decide I need to bring all of the food scraps from my restaurants to a farm and make soil, make humus, make organic soil, organic matter. Now, this is easier said than done because farmland in California is crazy expensive. And I had just gotten married in 2013 to my husband, who was undocumented at the time.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  I did not know that there was a no way to get a bank loan if your husband is undocumented. And every bank would say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we have programs for that. And then we would get to the end and they'd say, oh, no, we can't, you know, we can't. And so it took years for me to find a farm. And I got someone to do owner finance and I get on the land and I'm gonna have a vegan farm. I'm so excited, I'm gonna have this vegan farm. I'm gonna regenerate the soil. I'm gonna keep my vegan integrity intact and I'm gonna have animals, but they're not gonna die. And my husband was generous in letting me believe that that was a realistic idea. So we start the farm and I'm getting all the waste from the restaurants, but it's not really breaking down into great compost.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And so I talked to my dad, he's like, you need a cow. A cow's gonna set off that compost. So my dad gives me Uda, the cow. And Uda shows up, she's already bred. She has a baby shortly after she gets there. We're getting the poop, we're making the compost. This is awesome. And I'm breastfeeding my baby, my second child. And I'm feeling so good about myself, like, look at me, she's more than a year and a half. I'm still breastfeeding. And my older child, my three-year-old, comes down and asks for some milk. I go to the fridge and I see that we have some of Uda's milk that my uncle's been milking off of her two quarters that hang too low for the calf. He's been milking it off by hand. And we have these quart jars and half gallon jars of her milk in the refrigerator.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  And I grab a Tetra pack of oat milk from Costco to give to my son, because I'm vegan. And I'm holding my baby on my boob. And I was just having that whole self-grandizing about how my breast milk is God's perfect food. And I'm looking and I'm thinking, well, if my breast milk is God's perfect food, supporting her immune system in this environment that we live in and has all the perfection of God's creation, why is Uda's milk filled with pus and disgusting and gonna cause cancer? That doesn't make any sense. Why do I believe that? And so I have this realization in that moment that Uda's milk is raw and it's having all the finer immune system benefits

• 13:02Speaker 01

  that my milk is having, even from a dirtier version of the same environment. So I think I should give my son Uda's milk. And he doesn't like it, it's not sweet enough, because our oat milks and almond milks are all sweetened. So I put a tiny bit of maple syrup in it and I give it back to him and he drinks it. And that was the beginning of the crack in the armor. And then I had multiple other things that happened on the farm from buying fertilizer and realizing organic fertilizer is just chicken poop coming out of the consolidated feedlot system, blood meal coming out of the slaughter consolidated feedlot system, this end result, the slaughterhouses, or bone meal, which is coming also out of that system.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  So all of what we call organic fertilizer is attached to so much death. So then I'm starting to wonder, is there vegan food? So first I'm starting to realize like, well, I think that dairy, raw dairy for sure has profound benefits for my family and I'm questioning vegan food as an idea. And we plant a thousand avocado trees at great expense to our family and all of a sudden it goes over 110 degrees with crazy Santa Ana winds and the whole orchard dies. So at great expense to ourselves, we replant all of those trees and then the ground squirrels start taking them out.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  And I'm vegan and I'm scared, but I'm like, get rid of those squirrels. Like somebody needs to do something. And then I'm seeing my husband trapping squirrels and I find a falconer who's going to take the squirrels. And I'm like, yes, nature could give the falcon the squirrels. It's going to be awesome. The first day I dropped like 20 squirrels off and he's like, yeah, I have three falcons and they each eat one or two squirrels a week. And I was like, oh, okay. So we're back to drowning squirrels or shooting squirrels with a 22 or small BB gun. There's no getting around it if we want the avocado trees.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  So then I'm thinking avocado toast is not vegan because every avocado farmer had to protect his trees and then we're trying to keep the bunnies away. So you start to realize that there's death in every bite of food, whether you see it on the plate or not. And that was really around 2018, 2019, that I had that full awakening. That was the beginning of the end of me being indoctrinated in the vegan conversation, which then That cracked the armor for so many other indoctrinations that I had been fed over the years.

• 15:51Rick Rubin?

  Have you eaten red meat since your long vegetarian time?

• 15:55Speaker 01

  I still have not. I'm interested about it, but it doesn't really register as food to me yet. My husband is pressuring. He's Mexican. He eats everything that you can imagine. From the guts to the head, to the cheeks, to the ears, to everything. I do consume bone broth. I do consume raw dairy. I do eat eggs in things. I'm not, I still haven't like gotten into just eggs, like scrambled eggs. I want to, but again, I was raised just eating a totally different diet. And I also want to say, I'm not one of those people that think there's no way to be healthy without animal products. But after having four children from thirty seven to forty five,

• 16:40Speaker 01

  I was definitely drained to some degree. My hair was breaking. My, I had given a lot. I've, I've been breastfeeding for ten years consecutive as of today, still breastfeeding. So I feel like adding the dairy and the bone broth has really helped the vitality of my body. But obviously, I'm not saying you can't be healthy without meat because I was largely healthy and had children late in life. And so, but that could also have nothing to do with my diet and have everything to do with that I've never been vaccinated. I've not been medicated much in my whole life. So it could be that, but I think that eating whole foods in their whole form is a benefit to the body.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  I think a diverse diet is better than a, you know, only eating one thing. But I've seen people cure cancer with a raw vegan diet and I have seen people cure cancer with a paleo or a carnivore only diet. So I'm not of the mindset that I have the truth. I think the truth is that there's a design, that there's a, there's a perfection, there's God's design or spirit or divine intelligence, if you're uncomfortable with that word. But that design is perfect. And so when we eat foods in their whole form, and that also includes if we're going to eat red meat, also eating. The other parts that my husband eats because we tend to only eat the muscle in our culture.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  And I'm not sure that that is the healthiest way to do it. And so I make pills out of the liver and the heart and other organs and even the uterus and the female parts of the cow. And I dehydrate that in the freeze dryer. And then I capsulate it and I eat that. Because I do think that the organs have deep nutrition that my body can utilize.

• 18:35Rick Rubin?

  How did you decide to open the first restaurant?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  The recording studio that I had had SSL board and all this stuff. And literally, just as I was getting off the ground, Pro Tools became very popular. And also downloading music, stealing music became very popular. So those two things in a matter of a short two years went from the budgets, you know better than I know. But the budgets just like crashed into nothing. And everybody could make an album in their closet. And I was paying a house payment on an SSL board, paying for a building. You know, all of these things and had all of this equipment that was largely obsolete, except for some very specific

• 19:23Speaker 01

  kind of producers that were still interested in that sound. And so all of a sudden, my business was kind of wiped out. And I lost the studio eventually. And I then went into doing poetry. And I was on HBO Def Poetry. I toured the country. I opened for The Roots. I opened for Michael Franti. And I did a lot of college tours of doing poetry. And some of my friends from high school called me and said, we're going to grow weed. Do you want to grow weed with us? And I had just sold my house, my big, beautiful house, and I had sold my recording studio.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  And I got very related to that. All these people that were my dear friends in the music industry, like, just disappeared. Like, I say that they're a Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving. I had a Thanksgiving where it was like, the game is battling rap battles on my front porch. And there's like all the who's who of the hip hop industry at my house for Thanksgiving. And the next year, none of those people were in my life anymore. Like, when I had the big, beautiful house and the parties and the recording studio. Well, I would say Jesse Powell and Focus, the producer Focus, are the two people that, Jesse Powell until his death, and then Focus and I are still friends. We text all the time. But mostly, largely, that community that was like my everyday life

• 20:52Speaker 01

  kind of disappeared when I was no longer useful. And I went into doing the poetry, touring the country, lived in a tiny little house instead of this big house. And my friends called and they said, let's grow weed. I started growing weed. I was excellent, excellent, excellent at growing weed. And that business kind of grew very quickly. And then I did what I thought you were supposed to do with Fast Money, which was buy real estate. And then the 2008 collapse happened, and I was upside down on so much real estate. And so, you know, my first making money was in the music industry, and then the music industry crashed. And then my second making money was in marijuana.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  And then the marijuana industry largely crashed because the economy crashed with the 2008. And everybody that had a house that was trying to save their house started growing weed in their garage. And for a little while, I was making money setting up other people's grow rooms. I was like, I did the consulting. And you wouldn't believe, I mean, judges, like state judges, federal judges, everybody was growing weed to save their houses. It was crazy. And people, you know, would hire me to set their spaces up.

• 22:08Rick Rubin?

  I never heard about that before. That's wild. And do you think this was California specific, or this was happening everywhere?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  It was probably California specific because of the loose laws around marijuana and medical. It was a gray area. And so what happened was I was getting $6,000 a pound for indoor OG, and I was getting $3,500 for outdoor OG, let's say. And in a matter of a year, it went down to $1,000 a pound for indoor, and $500 or $300 a pound for outdoor. Well, if you have to pay $160 to $200 to get someone to trim outdoor. So that was my second make money and lose money and crash of my lifetime. And then my brother-in-law went to prison.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  So my first husband's brother went to prison for marijuana. He flew an airplane to Wisconsin. And we lived across the street from each other. I was married to his brother. We were both in the same industry. And so all of a sudden, I got, besides the crash that was happening in the industry, I was very kind of hot. The feds were very much around me because he was in federal prison. And I remember the night that Obama was elected, I can remember Trevor's in jail in Wisconsin, having to drive these crazy routes to get home and get back to, and park and trade, and like go in places and take a different car out the other side to get to my trim house because I'm being watched. So this was like very

• 23:37Speaker 01

  stressful, to be honest. And I wasn't sure that this was like the life that I really, really wanted. And this same two-week period, one of my dear friends who was also growing marijuana had gotten arrested, and then he was gonna have to go to trial. And he had testicular cancer. And he killed himself because he didn't want the chance of having to go to prison with cancer. And he had already had testicular cancer when he was in high school. So he'd already gone through the whole fight, and he wasn't interested in doing the fight again. And I didn't know That he had cancer. He called me and four other people the night before. He talked for exactly one hour to each of us. He must have been timing it. Had a conversation and then he drove himself to Kaiser the next day

• 24:21Speaker 01

  and killed himself on Sunset Boulevard, right outside the morgue to not disrupt anybody. So this two week period was, I was like, I'm not sure I want to grow marijuana anymore. And I put up my brother in law's land, but then it gets seized by the government for sale. We start to way downsize our growing operation because the prices are just, the bottom is falling out of the market. And I kind of consolidate to just my garage in Red Hot Hills, where I've already been arrested once, so I don't really want to be growing there. But I also am like, can't afford all these mortgages. Some are going to take it, some we're trying to sell.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  And so we way consolidate and I'm just, what am I going to do with my life? I was making all this money. I have all this real estate. It's all upside down. I'm like trying to renegotiate some of them, but you can only renegotiate your primary residence. And my best friend, who's an actress, is pregnant and she's realizing I can't be an actress where I might get paid a big chunk of money and I might not have any money and be responsible for a child. This is just not a realistic way to live life. And so she moves in with me and my current husband and we try to decide what can we do with our life? She's having a baby. I don't want to grow pot.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  This is where we grow this whole huge garden where it was actually in some ways, this really beautiful time where I had a lot of free time and there was still money to pay for stuff. But we decided during that time, my dad was doing a raw food challenge with Woody Harrelson and they were seeing how long they could only eat raw food. I think this is before Cafe Gratitude. Maybe it's the beginning of Cafe Gratitude. I can't remember, but I start making raw ice cream all the time and experimenting with raw ice cream recipes, raw vegan ice cream made from largely nuts and coconut. And, and I keep delivering. Bringing them to Woody Harrelson, he's giving me feedback at his house in LA. And then we decide we're gonna start a packaged company.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  This is before Coconut Bliss or any of these like nut blaced ice creams existed. Nowadays, like packaging is different, but back then you needed, I needed like a hundred thousand dollars to do the first run, to buy the packaging and everything. And I just, that was like all I had, and I just couldn't imagine, what if this doesn't work? It's not even a shelf-stable product. What if the freezers go out? So we leave it, we put it to the side and we keep going on with life, try to discover other things. And then I guess what we decide at some point is we should open a ice cream shop. So we can avoid this hundred thousand dollars. I thought I could open up ice cream shop for fifteen thousand dollars. I was wrong, but I thought that. And so I opened an ice cream, a vegan ice cream shop on Kowenga in North Hollywood.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  And people love it, but I realized very quickly that there is no possible way to make a living off of vegan ice cream. It's a very narrow market. There's vegetarians who still eat ice cream, there's vegans, and then there's certain sects of Judaism that don't eat dairy and meat at the same time. So I have like acidic Jews and vegans is my whole market, and like it's not enough of a market. And these two Palestinian guys walk into my ice cream shop one night, and they tell me they're opening a vegan restaurant in Echo Park. And they don't know anything about vegan food, but they have this great chef, they're gonna do it. And they want me to just do the coffee and the ice cream like kiosk at the front of the restaurant

• 27:57Speaker 01

  and have it ultimately be a separate business. But people could either pay me directly for, if they're just coming in to get a smoothie, or they'll pay me at the end of the month for whatever gets paid on the checks in the restaurant. And so I wasn't the original owner of Sage. I just had this kiosk at the front of the restaurant. But I was the only vegan involved. And so these guys.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  I'm grateful for them coming into my life. Like, everything I have is because of that interaction. But as far as like integrity in business with me, they did not have a lot. And integrity with the ingredients even being vegan. They were getting these vegan croissants, which are $2.50 each. And then they were like, we should just get the croissants at Costco. Because like, who knows the difference? And I'm like, you guys are gonna send someone to the hospital? Like, you can't do this. And they didn't take very excellently to a woman telling them what to do. And my idea was like, I should buy it and be their partner. Because then they're gonna respect what I have to say. I didn't quite realize that it was a little different than that. And that was not gonna change anything. So I bought into their business. And they told me I could buy the whole business for $100,000.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  So I said, great, I'm gonna give you $70,000 now. And then, I mean, I didn't say my next harvest, I'm gonna give you 40,000 more. And they, basically, when I gave them the next set of cash, they just changed their mind and said, we're gonna stay partners with you. We're not... And I was like, wait, no, that was not the deal. You would now have all my cash. So I had to get a lawyer. We had to do a contract. And I ended up buying them out. I needed to borrow $130,000 from a relative. And I was naive and kind. And I'd like co-sign the car for them because their credit was bad. All these things that happened. But my husband and all my children and Sage Vegan Bistro

• 29:49Speaker 01

  was a fruit of that relationship. So sometimes, even when a relationship feels painful or disrespectful or not ideal, there's something so beautiful on the other side. And you just have to trust that God has a plan and you can't see all the moving parts. And then, right after that, the chef acted out and was yelling and throwing things. And my current husband, who was not my husband at the time, was a very young, up-and-coming sous chef. And he quit one day because the guy threw a box of soy milk at his head. And I called him and said, if I fire chef, will you come back? And he said, well, what are we gonna do? And I said, I'll be the chef. I'm excellent. I've grown up in the vegan world. Like, I can do this.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  And it's gonna be easier for you to come out of the kitchen. And it's gonna be a totally different menu. And so... We did that. We let him go and we redid the whole menu. And me and him became friends. He was much younger than me and he would go to the farmer's market with me. He was trying to learn English. He realized pretty soon he had to learn some English and it was going to work out. And so that was the origin story of Sage. And so it wasn't like I set out to start a restaurant or even to open a restaurant the same week that my dad was opening a restaurant in Los Angeles. Like that, that's it wasn't at all what I set out to do.

• 31:10Rick Rubin?

  And then over time, how did Sage build? What happened with that first Sage?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  So when I was first still partners with Robert and Tony, they got invited to open a juice bar in this plaza in Culver City. And I went to the meeting with them and they were like, oh, we don't want to do that. And I was like, we should definitely do this. And they were like, well, we don't want to do it. I said, well, let's do it with Sage. And they said, no, no, no, no. This was when we were in the partnership phase. And they said, no. And I said, yes. And so I kept pushing for that, which was part of the divide between us. And so I was super naive. I signed a terrible lease agreement and everything. But again, Culver City was my crown jewel, my most successful restaurant.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  It crushed it for 10 full years. It was an awesome endeavor. And I was right that it was a good idea to do it. And so I opened Sage and I bought out them and I had no money and I just signed the lease agreement. It was like, I'm going to raise the money. I'd never raised money before. But I called everybody I knew. I enrolled them in what I was building, this vegan beer garden. Like vegan restaurants have largely been small, hold the walls. This is going to be a big, beautiful patio with 24 taps of local beer. And I got Woody Harrelson, Jason Mraz to invest. And then once I got them, people, it's funny, people are like, oh, they did it. I'll do it. And so I raised all the money and I'd never built a restaurant. It was just a box, you know, I just got an empty box in a brand new plaza.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  And I built the whole restaurant. So. A lot of learning. And then I went from, after I opened Culver City, I ended up marrying my husband. And then we opened Pasadena and then eventually Agoura Hills. So that is kind of the history of how Sage unfolded. And it was this awesome phenomenon for a lot of years in L.A. And I'm so grateful for all of the support and how it all unfolded.

• 33:12Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the story of Cafe Gratitude.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  So Cafe Gratitude was my father's restaurant. My family was in the garment industry. And my mother, she loved linen. She designed linen clothing for middle aged women. She had a company called Flax. It was very popular and boutiques and Bloomingdale's and all of these things. And my parents were married 23 years. They moved to San Francisco. And in full disclosure, they were escaping an affair that my mother was having. And so that doesn't work. You can't geographically escape. So my father, in his mid 40s, found himself, the business that he had put his life into was his wife's clothing company. And his kids were grown.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  I was 23 and my brother was 21. And all of a sudden, he had this totally opened up life. And my dad got super into Landmark Forum and did a bunch of Landmark. And he said, that's cool, but not everybody's going to go to a seminar and do the work. How can the work exist out in the world? So I think that Cafe Gratitude started out of an S E L P project that he made the game that Cafe Gratitude was based on this game that encouraged people, when they're coming together, to have conversations rooted in something more profound than the weather

• 34:44Speaker 01

  or what they ate for breakfast or what we can kind of go into the mundane. And so he designed the game. And then he had this idea, well, what if the game could be a cafe? And then they opened the first Harrison Street Cafe Gratitude in San Francisco and continued to open many restaurants in San Francisco during that time. And It kind of grew faster than the economics of the restaurant could support. And people were so excited about it and it was so cool. But then I think they over expanded in the San Francisco area, all the way up to San Rafael and all of that.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  And then at that time, some people from LA were up there dealing with some family stuff, kind of at the same time they were considering consolidating. And they decided to partner with my parents, my father and my stepmother, who brought Cafe Gratitude into the world, to bring it to LA.

• 35:47Rick Rubin?

  What made Cafe Gratitude Cafe Gratitude?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  All of it was about affirmations, that your thoughts, speech, belief, actions, and attitudes are constantly expressing as your life. And so if that is true, and my father asserts it's true, and I was raised in that conversation, so I guess that I also have found it to be true as well. And so every time you ordered food, it was, I am nourished, I am abundance, I am whole. And the idea would be that people that wouldn't necessarily go and do affirmations in the mirror, or have that kind of spiritual work be part of their life, would have the opportunity to just have a small piece of it in their everyday of having a lunch. And then there was other things.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  They had the gratitude bowl, which you could pay whatever you wanted. So let's say you felt very abundant, you could pay a hundred dollars for it, and a guy that was homeless could come in and pay 50 cents for it. And so this was also a kind of sharing economy, in a way that people that were feeling abundance could share abundance with people that weren't remembering their abundance, and therefore that could trickle into the world of people remembering that the giving and the receiving are actually the same action.

• 37:04Rick Rubin?

  What was the dietary style of the restaurant?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  It was raw vegan at first. It was very strict raw vegan. And then they added cooked foods at some point to the menu. But it always was vegan and it still is vegan. I think they've closed a lot of them, but there's still several in Los Angeles. And there's also Gracias Madre, which is also my father's creation, kind of an honoring of Latino community that farmed on his farm and lived in the mission area where the first Cafe Gratitude was. And so Gracias Madre, Thank You Mother, is a Mexican version. And it's more in a gratitude prayer with Catholic imagery of the mother and all of that.

• 37:50Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember going to the restaurant when you were younger?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Well, I was not that. I was like 23 and I got braces. And the dentist that I was using was up in San Francisco. So I would fly up there every 60 days to get my braces managed. And so I spent a lot of time up in the restaurant and saw it grow and was really proud of what my father was doing. And so I remember it being such a phenomenon and a totally different phenomenon in San Francisco than it was when it came to LA. It was this completely, like, everybody that would be in the mission in San Francisco. And you could go in and there could be, you know, celebrities and homeless people

• 38:37Speaker 01

  and bikers and people with all types of piercings in their face. There was not a type of person that went to Cafe Gratitude. It was this kind of cultural phenomenon. And when it came to LA, it was very much as the who's who to be seen. It was a very different vibe than the original Cafe Gratitude that was in the mission. The divorce with my parents, in a lot of ways, brought me much closer to my father. I don't think my father was like emotionally vulnerable with me when I was younger. And he was a good father and all of that. But I became this very close friend to my father in the losing my mother and in the processing that and the calling me and talking about it.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  That we created a bond that I would say is...

• 39:27Speaker 01

  To this day, my father calls me several times a week. And he's definitely my best friend and business confidant and everything. So I think that that was the beginning. You know, his divorce from my mother and then remarrying my stepmother and this business and my braces, like all of this fostered this amazing relationship that I have with my father today at forty seven years old. When I think of my father being with my mother for his whole life, that would have been fine too, but my mother was definitely the star of the show and his whole life was in service of her design business, her, everything that she did. And I think that he got to create on his own and his own creativity.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  And I was deeply proud of him for that and deeply proud of him for creating a new marriage that was better than the first. Like, and not that the first was bad. In twenty three years, they raised us, they were extraordinarily parents. So I, I do remember and with a lot of pride for his rebirth after, because some people could have just been like, I'm forty seven years old, I'm divorced and, you know, I gave my whole life to my ex-wife's business and, you know, I got this several million dollars in the divorce settlement and I'm just gonna be done. But that was not what my father did. He went out on the skinny branches and created business. And then that was not even the last business he created, you know?

• 40:55Rick Rubin?

  I can remember going to Cafe Gratitude in San Francisco. I was a vegan at the time. And I remember, let's say the beetroot salad, for example, was called I Am Beautiful. And I remember saying, I'll have the beetroot salad. And the waiter said, I am, I am, and waited for me to say, I am beautiful. And I said, well, I'll have the beetroot salad. And he was very insistent on me saying, I am beautiful, if I wanted to get the food. And I just remember thinking, this is unlike any restaurant experience I've ever had before.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  And then when he delivered it, he said, you are beautiful.

• 41:34Rick Rubin?

  Yes. Do you remember how customers at Cafe Gratitude felt ordering from the menu the first time they came? Do you remember anything about that?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Very uncomfortable, very, very, very uncomfortable. And, you know, they definitely toned it down some for Los Angeles. The Los Angeles version of the restaurants were definitely toned down from the San Francisco version. But also, I mean, so much, there's so many beautiful stories of people coming and having a connecting conversation. Especially when in San Francisco, they used to have the cards from the board game on the table. And so you could ask these deep and profound questions to the people you're having dinner with, which created connection. And, you know, you just come to a table to deliver some food and you'd see that people are, you know, teary eyed and having a connection.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  And the more that we can create that kind of connection in the world, the better. And so I think that it was a brave thing to do in a world where the market wants to make everybody comfortable. We pray to the God of comfort in so many ways and convenience in our culture. I think it was brave to have a restaurant that says, like, we're gonna actually do something. It's gonna make people a little uncomfortable. But we believe that that is making a difference. And so, let's go. And people would say stuff like, I'm from New York and this is ridiculous. And I'd laugh and I'd say, well, everybody that started Cafe Gratitude is also from New York. So your identity from New York doesn't need to hate affirmations.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  But, yeah, it was an interesting thing. And it was interesting to have a competitive business with my parents because you would hear, you know, I would get to hear the upset or people would come to me to tell me and they would get the upset like, oh, I'm never going to Sage again, this happened, or I don't know. And I'm never going to Gratitude again. And so it was interesting to be so close in proximity with them having the five restaurants and me having five restaurants in L.A. It was an interesting dynamic. And people would always come in and say, do you get along with your father? I was like, yeah. Are you guys competitive? Yeah. I mean, my dad, for years, called me every morning and said, what were the numbers? Baby and I'd be like, do you want me to just send you the sales report? And he's like, no, what would the fun of that be?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  And so then I didn't look at the sales report yet and I'd look on my phone and I'd say, oh, Calver City did this and he'd say Venice did this and I'd say Echo Park did this. He'd say Larchmont did this and Pasadena did this and Beverly Hills did this. And so we would go over the numbers and you know, they were way ahead of me in the beginning because they had way more resources than me. And I was like selling eighth subweed to get my first restaurant off the ground. And they had big investors and then I kind of at a certain point surpassed what they were doing. Pre pandemic, I was just like, it was crazy what I was doing. And we were selling the restaurants for a ton of money. And then we got closed for two and a half years. And the bureaucracy stole 15 years of my life, but I'm not going to be a victim. I'm going to trust that it's all in my benefit.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Whatever is happening is in my benefit.

• 44:38Rick Rubin?

  Do you know when your parents became vegan?

• 44:41Speaker 01

  My father was always a pescatarian as far as I can remember my whole childhood. My mother read a book in college about factory farming and it was appalling. And she made a decision that she wasn't going to eat meat ever again. So when she was pregnant with me, she was not eating meat. And I think my father kind of went along with her view of life. But because my father grew up half in Plattsburgh, New York and half in Maine in the summertime. I think that he had an affinity for fish. And so he always kept fish in his diet, but ultimately not in the house. We were vegan at home.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  And then one time my mom was making cookies for us and she ran to the corner store in the country where we lived and at Pips and bought some margarine. And then she got distracted and she had left the margarine with the pilot light getting soft in the oven overnight and it turned to a plastic sheet. And she was just like, this is crazy. We're never eating this again. So we were vegan, except for butter for my whole childhood. Like they did introduce some dairy, I would say around my turning 12 or 13. But I was vegetarian my whole life and my mother is still vegetarian to this day.

• 46:03Rick Rubin?

  Growing up in New York, having parents who were essentially vegetarian, was that a strange upbringing for the culture that you were in?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  So I grew up in Ithaca, New York, so it's super hippie, liberal. So it was strange, but not so strange. My mom is an identical twin, and my mom and my dad married brothers. So I had four parents. When your mom is a twin, you have two moms. And so my mom's twin sister worked at the Food Natural Food Co-op. So I guess I didn't feel like it was that weird because the community that was around us, it was pretty accepted. I went to Waldorf School. There was always a vegetarian option for the lunch stuff at Waldorf School. What was the weirdest was the no sugar. And to be truthful, I haven't been able to raise my kids with no sugar

• 46:55Speaker 01

  because I didn't like going to birthday parties and having to bring like some weird carob cake thing that and everybody else is eating McDonald's cake or whatever. And so I'd say that the weirder thing was the no sugar than the no meat, to be honest.

• 47:16Rick Rubin?

  What was the motivation for your move to Texas?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  So I bought this place in the beginning of 22. And in full disclosure, I believed life would go back to normal. The restaurants would start making money again. And I should buy a place in Texas. And Texas is open, so I should open some restaurants in Texas. And so I thought, I'm going to find someplace close to between Austin and San Antonio and open restaurants. And veganism is still at its infancy in Texas. It's still a new thing. It still has legs. And it's truthfully, veganism is dying in L.A. And people are going to keto and all these other things. And I personally inside was not vegan anymore.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  I was not that inspired about it. But I thought I might as well expand the empire so that I can. Sell it for more when the life goes back to normal and we're doing seven to nine million dollars a store. I obviously did not know that life would never go back to normal, that LA would never be the same, that we retrained humanity to eat at home. We retrained humanity to date on the internet, date by swiping left, swiping right. And by not letting people go out to eat for two and a half years, it made it totally acceptable to Netflix and chill. And so, a huge percentage of dating people stopped going out to eat in the traditional way. And then, many family members didn't go back to work.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  So, we used to have early family dinner and then late date dinner. Well, both early family dinner and late date dinner and lunch, business lunch, were all gutted, even when the pandemic was over, because the culture had changed. And so, because of that, it never went back to normal. And the restaurant industry is not the same. It's not the same at Crosses Madre. It's not the same at Cafe Gratitude. It's not the same at my restaurant. My brother, Kerry, started a restaurant called Highly Likely, and he's found a niche of like, artists and people that don't really conform to these kind of things, and that's been his audience, and he's largely done well. But of all of our family restaurants, from Gratitude, Sage, Crosses Madre, and Highly

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Likely, which are the family of restaurants that my siblings and parents owned, Highly Likely is the only one that has expanded at this time, and the only one that is having quarter-over-quarter growth. And it's, you know, to a very young audience.

• 49:48Rick Rubin?

  Is that a vegan restaurant as well?

• 49:51Speaker 01

  It's not. But lots of non-vegan restaurants are also struggling. I talked to people that have restaurants for 30 years that are burning through their retirement right now and don't know what to do and can't pull the plug because they've had these employees for all this time. And it's, it's really a sad situation in the restaurant industry in Los Angeles. And so... Ultimately, I bought this place thinking that I would open restaurants in Austin and San Antonio. And then I just started to see how bad the sales were and how much we were bleeding during the pandemic. And I thought, well, I can't use any money to do that. I have stores that were making cash flowing so much money, losing a billion plus dollars a year.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  I have 350 employees. I'm firing people, laying people off. So I end up having this farm that I bought in order to service the restaurants I was going to open because the farm had to come first in this model of farm to table.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  So I own this farm in Texas and I own this farm in California. And this county comes out to my property in California. Because I let this homeless family stay in a RV on my property during COVID and remote school. And they didn't have internet. Their kids, there are six kids living in a RV. I get the wife a job, I get the husband a job, and I let them live on my property. And a neighbor reports me for letting someone live in a RV in my property, which then opens up this whole can of worms. And they come onto my property and they say they want everything brought up to code. Like this farm started in 1884. And so millions of dollars, they just, a stroke of a bureaucrat's pen. And the farm is actually doing great.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  It's starting to grow during the pandemic. And I thought, like, this is awesome. People are really interested in farm to table. But once you could go back in Whole Foods and you didn't have to wear a mask and everything, you would be amazed how quick people didn't care about farm to table at all. I was doing 500 boxes during the pandemic of delivering direct to people's houses. So, you know, I actually bought more land during the pandemic. I thought farming is good. People are reinvigorated about this idea of regenerative farming and all of this. And I start to run out of money and I realize I can't keep it all afloat. I gotta sell California farm.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  And I have to sell California farm because I don't feel like there's possibility to make money here. And so I make the hard decision that I have to sell my farms. I start selling, they sell one farm with another. And my farm, which has all the violations, I'm like, dear Lord, please send me a buyer that's gonna pay cash and... They are going to keep my employees and they're going to keep it all in regenerative agriculture. I forgot to ask it not to be a huge pharmaceutical heir. But somebody bought my farm, they kept my employees to this day, and they still have my employees. They kept it regenerative. And yes, they are an heir to a huge pharmaceutical company that made vaccines during the pandemic.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  So, so weird turn of events. And I decided to move to Texas to this land because I thought there was more possibility with less regulations. And I needed a big chunk of money. I had no money. The restaurants were losing money. I didn't know what to do. And I just prayed on my knees. God, please, I'm sorry to ask, but I need you to drop a pile of money on me. And I was crying. I'm looking at my kids. I'm looking at them in the bed. I know there's equity in my farm. I know I have this place in Texas. I just don't know how to get there. And in the middle of the night, my phone, beep. And it's Kanye West. And he's, I had asked him if he wanted to invest in this project that we're doing here. Cause we're, we were raising money.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  We're still raising money to finish this hospitality project here. But he wrote, I'm not investing in anything that's not me right now. And I said, okay, I understand that. I respect that. And then he wrote, so just send me an invoice for consulting. And I was like, for consulting what? He's like, I'm gonna get a farm and you could consult, or you could consult on my Wyoming ranch. And I said, for how much? And he said, the higher amount. And so the tech, I went back to see what my tech said. And my tech said, the minimum investment is 25,000. The maximum is 300,000 because liquor license, I don't want anybody to own more than 10% because it gets complicated when you need to renew stuff with the liquor license. So I wrote 300,000. He said, yeah. And he gave me the guy's information to submit the invoice.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  And I submitted the invoice. And honestly, I was still not a hundred percent positive that he was gonna send me this money. I have a relationship with him that was not, I mean, it's long. We met when I did HBO Def Poetry. We filmed the same day, but it's not close. And we had, we had just seen each other recently when I had sent that text message. But we hadn't seen each other or talked in. Ten or fifteen years before that, like, so I didn't know for sure, but I thought, you know, the Lord works in mysterious ways. And so, two weeks go by and I hadn't received any money. And I was like, well, I guess it's not gonna happen. And my friend said, well, why don't you just text the guy that you sent the invoice to,

• 55:13Speaker 01

  or email him and say, hey, I've never done business with Kanye. How long does it take for him, his check runs to go through? And so, I did that. And the guy called me right back and said, I'm so sorry, we missed your invoice. I'm gonna wire it to you on Friday with, I have another, other wires are going out on Friday. And I sent Kanye a couple of ideas and plans. And I never heard back from him and his phone number changed. And I've never heard from him again. I don't think it's personal, but I, he's busy and doing his life. And so, he gave me this most beautiful gift of giving me the ability to move all that equipment, all my animals, my cows, my pigs, my horses, my greenhouses, my tractors,

• 55:58Speaker 01

  and pick up that farm in California and drop it here in Texas. And I'm forever grateful for that and forever grateful to Divine Intelligence and to Kanye for participating in that way.

• 56:12Rick Rubin?

  Have you always been a person of faith?

• 56:15Speaker 01

  I've always been a spiritual person. My parents raised me in that your thoughts, speech, beliefs, actions, and attitudes are always the divine expressing, and you have to be mindful of that. And I feel like the closer I get to nature, the closer I feel to God. And the more I realize that our ego and our desire for domination has us missing the most precious parts of life. So, I would say that my faith has grown stronger through the years.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  But I think I've always, I've always prayed, I've always been mindful of how God expresses through us and in us.

• 57:05Rick Rubin?

  What have you learned about nature since having a regenerative farm?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  She never lies. And that's like the whole concept of my book is that I just started to, the veganism was the first crack, like there is no veganism. You know, the lion eats the gazelle, but when the lion dies, the grass eats the lion, the microbes feed the fat to the grass, that there is no veganism. That our purpose, and this is gonna sound crazy to most people in my world, and people have been very upset for me for saying it recently, but all mammals, every single one of them prioritize clean water, clean food, and reproduction, and some prioritize shelter. We are very good at shelter and comfort, but we have largely abandoned our water,

• 57:55Speaker 01

  we have abandoned our food, and we have abandoned reproduction. And think about, for me to be here, how many ancestors had to fight, toil in the sun, work so hard to feed their children, to feed themselves, and to live in much harder conditions than anything I will ever experience in my lifetime. And I almost didn't pass that gift on because I was so busy being busy, so concerned about how can I make sure that I am successful, that I get written about,

• 58:37Speaker 01

  that there's a picture of me in a chef's coat with my arms crossed on whatever magazine, that I almost missed the opportunity to be a mother. And I'm just so grateful that I didn't miss that opportunity. And I would say that having children and the way that I ended up having children, and the way God spoke to me and directed me, and that has brought my faith to another level, for sure.

• 59:01Rick Rubin?

  Do you think if it wasn't for COVID, none of this would have happened?

• 59:06Speaker 01

  I don't know about none of it. My coming to being pro-life was, happened in a mushroom journey far before COVID. When I was 30-ish, 30-something, I was still married to my first husband, I think. And I went to a gathering at my dad's farm where he had a aguacate, a grandmother from Mexico. There's 13 indigenous grandmothers that preside over indigenous medicine. And they're kind of the caretakers for indigenous medicine. They meet a couple of times a year and try to save these traditions in a world that maybe doesn't respect them or honor them anymore. So they were doing a mushroom tea gathering at my father's farm.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  I was invited up, I went. And very quickly after drinking the tea, my uncle was walking across the field and he's like a little hunched over. And his body went from being hunched over like an elderly man to a fetus. They didn't do a young boy, they didn't do a young man, and they didn't do an old man. And it kept doing that across the field. And then all of a sudden, I see this whole blanket of threads, like beautiful light threads of light that were wove the entire blanket together. And it was all of life and how it was all intertwined and interconnected perfectly. And then the blanket swept up into the air and under the blanket, there was all these

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  vacuums sucking souls, threads out of the blanket and pulling it, pulling it, pulling it, pulling it, making the blanket not be the same as it was because all these lives were being pulled out of it. And it got really dark and really bad. And I was crying, I didn't know, I said like, "What do you want? What do you want from me?" Like just blood and guts and fetuses and everything. And I had had two abortions in my early twenties and I'd never thought about them again, treated it like a root canal. And the voice said, "Do you believe in divine intelligence?" And I said, "Yes." And the voice said that it wasn't your choice to make. "I can see more than you can see. Your view is limited."

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  And then the voice said, "The mother and the father and the child is the Holy Trinity, the foundation. You must keep that intact." And I was like, I'm not even in touch with this person I had the baby with. Like, I don't know what you want from me. And I got frustrated after a while because it was dark and it seemed like a long time that this was going on. I don't know what you want. And then it got all light and white and like arms of love of like a parent that knows that you've done something wrong. But like total forgiveness, total understanding, total value for seeing you. And the voice said, "Promise to never do it again and never use your words to encourage anybody to do it."

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  And I literally in my head said, "I can do that, but I'm not going to be pro-life." Like literally, like I'm not, I was so liberal, so, so liberal that I said that. I didn't tell anybody about this vision or hallucination. And I went about my life and I opened more restaurants and divorced my husband and I put it out of my mind. I didn't even tell anybody about it until my father had an experience on ayahuasca, where he called me to tell me that he, the voice had told him to reverse his vasectomy and that what he had done was wrong with my mother, having abortions with my mother. And that he had to promise to never use his words. Same words came through the ayahuasca that came through the mushrooms.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  So the first person I told about it was when my dad told me that, I told him. And then years go by, I'm opening Culver City, I'm divorcing my ex-husband, and my ex-husband had a very hard time with his brother being in prison. His best friend died of a drug interaction and he was drunk in the restaurant one night and end up spitting in my face. And I want to say he's a very good man and it was a bad moment for him in his life. And I went to the kitchen crying and a young cook that I was friends with brought me a margarita. I never drink. He said, "Drink this." The Huffington Post is outside waiting to interview me about, "What is it like to be business partners with Woody Harrelson and Jason Braz? And how's this new restaurant going?"

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  And I'm crying behind the pizza oven and... The cook goes and gets me another margarita and I drink it. I pull myself together and go do the interview. My husband's roommate's come and get him and I make it through the night. And that cook then says, well, I'm gonna come and drive you home because I've never seen you drink before. So I don't think that you should drink and drive. One thing leads to another. In a very vulnerable moment, I sleep with him. I then the next morning immediately regret it. Tell him I'm so sorry. I apologize. Please go back to your girlfriend at the host stand and never think of me again. And two weeks later, I'm pregnant and I know what I need to do.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  I literally know that I need to marry this person who doesn't speak English, who's undocumented, who's 13 years younger than me, who has nothing in common with me, nothing. And I promised God, mother, father, child, holy trinity, keep it intact. And it's so hard because I have investors and I have, there's like employees and all this stuff. And I feel shame and embarrassment and I don't even know what to do. But I go to the restaurant, I tell him. And it's interesting is that his father, his father was one of 27 children that was spawned like up and down the coast of Wautoko, Oaxaca, like that.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  And so his father always said to him, you could never leave your child. If you get someone pregnant, you could never leave them. So God working in my favor, years and years before this was ever a thing. He had been indoctrinated every meal, every family meeting, every interaction, you never leave your child. So he agreed that we needed to get married. And we got married two weeks later on Thanksgiving Day. And our vows were something like, this may seem crazy to you guys, but we think it's what's best for our family. And we asked that the community does diminish this. And supports it. And if either one of us comes to you saying it's a hard time,

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  please support us. And we had the community say, I do. And then we said, we commit to be the best parents that we could be and get to know each other and build this family the best we can. Like, I don't know, what are you going to say about this kind of marriage? And we got married and it was super awkward and he got drunk with like all the cooks on one side of the yard and I was sitting on the other side of the yard with my dad and my stepmom on a bench, thinking, what have I done? What is going on here? And awkward December, awkward Christmas, you know, there's this before like Instagram and Twitter where you could just like go into your own world and scroll. So we're trying to find things that we can watch on TV together.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  We're watching animal shows because basically you can follow along with the animal shows. And then we lose the baby in January. So I got pregnant in October, married in November, Christmas, and we lose the baby. And I think, Lord, I have been completely obedient. I don't understand. This level of radical faith and obedience should be rewarded in my small human mind. And most of my friends are basically telling me, like, celebrating, like, you can get out of this, Molly, it's less than six months. You just get it acknowledged. It doesn't exist.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Be done. And we go to this Indian family, huge Indian family, comes to Sage and Culver City. They rent out the whole restaurant for the evening and they do this big vegetarian buffet. And they ask the cooks and the chefs to come out and to be acknowledged. And out of politeness, I'm standing at the front where the couple that's doing their 50th wedding anniversary, that are the matriarch and patriarch of the hundred and something people in the room. I say politely, tell me the secret to 50 years of marriage. And she said, well, we were an arranged marriage. So we've always been building for tomorrow. We're always putting our family,

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  our community and our business at the center of our marriage. And we've built our love inside of that.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Okay, God. So we decided that that baby arranged our marriage, and this is what we were meant to do. We stayed married. And 13 years later, we still are married. We have four children. It's exquisite life. And during COVID, a young man, high school student, showed up at my farm, Osbar, that was an unaccompanied minor that came to redo the night with his family during the Trump administration. He borrowed money and he took Uber to my farm to volunteer during COVID. And he had seen me on YouTube, and he felt like he belonged with our family. He felt like he belonged, that there was some connection between me and him.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  And we ended up taking custody of him, and he lived with us pretty much almost immediately. And I believe that that's the soul that I aborted was brought back to me 20 years later as a gift for my obedience.

• 1:08:55Rick Rubin?

  That's wild. Incredible story.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  But I suspect that if I had sold my businesses and got a huge chunk of money and been able to just do what we wanted to do, there's a part of what my husband brings to the marriage and what masculinity brings to the marriage that I never would have fully appreciated. And I would have felt like it was something that I did that made us our money and that I would have not thought it out loud. It would have been on the underneath. And it would have impacted our ability to be in balance. And I suspect that it would have been harder for us to stay married.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  And I think that whatever we're building here now, we're building it together from the ground up. And we are equal partners, and it wasn't like he came into something that I had already built. And I get to value the masculinity that he...

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Brings in a way that the feminist in me didn't value. And so I don't know what would have happened if COVID didn't happen. I can't say, but I try to believe and understand that there is something that's of value for my children, for my husband, for my marriage, that came out of not getting that windfall. And I've lost everything before, the music industry, the pot industry, and I've always built it back bigger and better. And so I have faith that what I'm doing here on the ranch, people are interested about it. People want to come to natural spaces, want to eat regenerative food, want to stay in a space

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  that is on organic cotton sheets with no wifi and experience hearing the crickets at nighttime. I, I believe that people want that and I believe that I'm bringing value to the community, even if it's not monetized exactly how I wanted it to, yeah.

• 1:11:01Rick Rubin?

  Tell me what it feels like to eat food that you've grown yourself versus something that you buy in a store.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  It's like so much pride and also, and this is crazy because why is this? But way less willingness to waste it. And I don't know why this is, but now I'm very much less willing to waste store bought food. But I remember like growing food for the first and second time as an adult and just all of a sudden realizing like the value of every tomato, the effort that went into every piece of creation of food. And so there's just no other level of pride. And there's a spark of recognition of participating in this world in the way we were meant to do it that feels right.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  And I feel the same way when I look out on cows on pasture or sheep on pasture. There's something, just that crunching sound of the grass and them eating and sitting, laying in the sun and chewing their cud. There's a joy in my body that says like, that is what's meant to be happening. And that joy and pride and.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  I just feel it in all of me and it's the same for a tomato or a butternut squash or a zucchini and I'm so motivated to, okay, I'm gonna make zucchini croquettes, I'm gonna make zucchini bread, I'm gonna, like, we have all this zucchini, let's, how can I use it? I have pumpkin hot sauce that, like, we're almost out of the pumpkin hot sauce from last year and people are like, are you making pumpkin hot sauce again this year? Yes, we have tons of pumpkins, I'll be happy to make pumpkin hot sauce. I'm just inspired as a chef to do more than just throw the pup- after Halloween and we have a Irish festival, there's all these pumpkins that we grew. The old Molly, before I grew the pumpkins, just let them rot or then throw them in the compost. And that's fine, there's

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  no waste in the compost, but there's something beautiful about, we had this huge pumpkin last year and I made 12 cases of hot sauce and 17 quarts of pumpkin soup out of just this one. And I made pumpkin queso, which I highly recommend when pumpkin season comes. But it's interesting, because, you know, we've been struggling in some ways financially since we moved here and getting this project to come off the ground. And I was stressed out earlier in the year and I was, all this money stuff, thinking about different things. And I went into the restaurant and I was canning food that we grew. And then I was thinking, I'm just wasting my time canning food, avoiding what I need to do. And then

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  I had this thought, how crazy. A hundred years ago, like, there was nothing for me to do but can the food that we grew. And now, I'm canning this food, but then I'm thinking I need to make money some way over here to pay the bank and da-da-da-da-da. And that's how the money slave system works, is it gets you in this cog in a wheel where you just have to keep doing something that's literally not necessarily even benefiting your life. Like, saving food for my family, that's what I need to be doing, but somehow I was making myself wrong for that because I wasn't making money, you know what I mean?

• 1:14:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  And so, I think that eating food that you grew has you have so many realizations. I couldn't even tell you all of them. Hundreds of realizations come from the awakeness of eating food that you grew.

• 1:14:23Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the nutrient density of foods.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  So, plants don't know how to make minerals. I don't know if you noticed, they don't make minerals. They only take minerals from the soil. And-

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  There is no soil on the planet that doesn't have enough nutrients or minerals to grow food. There's only soil that's dead to dead, not enough beings alive in that soil to make the nutrients, the minerals, available to the plants. And so, when you have soil that is alive, it has so much more nutrients, so much more minerals. So, when we think about food, often we're just thinking about the macros. But when we're eating food that was grown in healthy soil with this teeming life, a

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  teaspoon of soil that's healthy, has more beings in it than all of the human beings on the planet. There's so much life in this soil. And the design is so perfect. So, the sun, and the air, and the water are up here, and then the plant is drawing all that down, taking the carbon out of the atmosphere, and they're feeding carbohydrates to that microbiology. That microbiology eats the carbohydrates, or eats decomposing matter, and excretes food for the plants, which has all of the minerals that are in the soil, becoming bioavailable for the plants. This is a perfect design.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  We often think about high-tech being a solar panel, and low-tech being your garden. But your garden is so much more high-tech than a solar panel. There's no waste, there's no garbage, there's no enslaved children on the supply chain. Like, it is high-tech. And what it is making is high-tech, high-nutrients, high-god, high-vibration food for you to eat. There's literally light inside the food. There's a guy, Eric Cunner, who grows vegetables. He made a film called Pharmacy of Light. And he's basically showing that the healthier the food, there's more light in the food. We're all made of sunlight. And so, the food that comes from a healthier system has more vitality in every kind of way.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  And then even food that comes from a healthier system loses nutrient density over time. It's dying. And so as it is dying, it's losing, it's letting that stuff go. So the faster we can eat the food from the farm, the better. And the more local we can eat the food, the better. And then the healthier the soil, the more nutrient density. And there's citrus farmers right now showing multiple times more vitamin C in their citrus than there is in the citrus of their neighbor, growing the exact same genetics across the street. It's all about the microbiology making the nutrients available to the plant.

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  And we largely treat our soil like a hydroponic grow, where we're just putting nutrients on it and thinking that the plant can then just take up those nutrients. But that is missing the whole symbiosis of the soil and the microbiology and breaking down those minerals to go into the plant. And then we're all totally deficient of nutrients. And so then we eat too much because our body is still craving something it's not getting.

• 1:17:54Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the difference between living in California and living in Texas.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  People are not as interested in healthy food here, would be my first thing that I noticed. And that, I actually just didn't think grownups drank soda. I lived in LA. I mean, maybe occasionally have a Mexican Coke or whatever, but I didn't see a lot of grownups drinking soda all the time. So I was surprised at like, the grownup consumption of big gulps and like, 44 ounce sodas. But I've also been moved by people's faith. I owned restaurants in LA for 15 years. Maybe one person ever asked me to pray with them. I would say most days, my restaurant is open. Someone is asking to pray with me, telling me they're praying for me, telling me that God told them

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  that this is a food ministry, that this is bigger. Hold on, they gotta download from God. He wants me to hold on. I'm in the right place. You keep doing what you're doing. I heard that. People coming up to me, just grabbing my hands and saying, pray with me. I never had that in Los Angeles. People really lead with their faith here, which is nice and different. Also, we do baby showers on the ranch. And I never thought about this as an idea, but in Los Angeles, if someone's daughter gets pregnant at 18 years old, it's an emergency. It's a disaster. It's something to solve for. And here, it's a blessing. And I'm seeing these young mothers, being extraordinary mothers, buying organic flour

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  and making sourdough bread. And, you know, I have a friend, she's pregnant with her fifth kid and she's 23. She makes all their food from scratch. She orders everything from Azure Standard. She has a garden. Her and her husband built their own house on their parents' property. I have another person that just did their baby shower here. She just had her first baby at 19 years old. They're living in an apartment above the barn on their parents' property. So much support. She had a home birth. She's doing all organic. These are conscious, awake, young ladies having babies, and it's being celebrated by the community. And I never saw that in the 20-something years I lived in LA. It was something to hide or be ashamed of, or try to talk your daughter out of when she got pregnant that young.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  And I was shocked by this, when the first person that was like 18-year-old was like, "Oh, my daughter's pregnant." I was like, "Oh." And they were, "We want to have the baby shower here." I was like, "Wow." I don't remember the last time in Los Angeles I did a baby shower for an 18-year-old. And people might tell me I'm wrong, and they totally celebrated their daughters. But I would say, as a whole, it was not celebrated. I had friends that had their kids get pregnant at that time, and it was either terminated or something to be ashamed of or managed for. And that is not what it's like here at all. And so that was very, very different.

• 1:20:59Rick Rubin?

  What are some of the things you've noticed health-wise since going from vegan to eating some animal foods now?

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  I'm thinner. I lost 40 pounds. I did a raw milk fast for 46 days for Lent, and I did only raw milk and raw yogurt. I had this download that as I was getting into my mid, late 40s, I was having like this middle section that wasn't going away. And I was trying to help a friend that was having trouble after getting vaccinated. And I was learning about the bifida bacteria being wiped out in everybody that got the COVID jabs. And then I started learning about bifida bacteria and how amazing it was and who had the most of it, it's breastfeeding babies.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  And I had this thought, maybe I've killed off a lot of my bifida and I want to reset my gut like a baby. And a baby eats only milk for this extended period of time and then integrates small amounts of food and dirt and the floor and everything else to reset their microbiome. And so I tried to recreate that for myself. And I lost a significant amount of weight. I reset my microbiology. I lost that whole center section of my gut. And I feel, first thing in the morning, when I would just wake up, I would feel a little stiffness in my feet and my hands. By the time I got up and went pee and breastfed the baby, it would go away. But I did notice it.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  And now I'm not having that stiffness, unless I did something where I overextended myself physically the day before. I'm not really having any stiffness and a lot of my brain fog has lifted. And so I attribute that to not just integrating that stuff, but also resetting my microbiology, having my hands in the soil all the time. Because breast milk, which is 90 something percent the same DNA as cow's milk, sets the foundation, it's the plant community for the microbiology to move into. And so by resetting and doing only milk for that long, I reset that space for the To grow into, hopefully, or expand that we're already in there.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  And so I've seen really extraordinary results with that. And I, I love bone broth. I can feel when I drink the bone broth, I can feel a subconscious, yes, more of that, more of that, please. And so I get that my body's asking for it. But I think there's something in nourishing this body that's given so much to make four children this late in life and breastfeed four children this late in life.

• 1:23:38Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the model for your farm.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  We have two hundred and six acres and we live in here a community with my brother and his wife. My brother-in-law, well, he actually just moved to Austin, but the brother-in-law that was in prison, he always joked that he, I divorced his brother, but I didn't divorce him. When he got out of prison, he had to live with me because of the agreements or whatever for, and then he literally just, I just kept him. And but he just got married, so he just moved to Austin. So he was living here. And then we have my husband's brother and cousin that stay 10 months out of the year, helping on the farm with a visa from Mexico. And then we have some other people that live on the farm. And so there's the community, there's about 22 of us that live here.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  And that's a group mix of family and workers and work trade, people that want to be here and learn. And then we have 40 beds of hospitality. So let's say you are like, I want to have a retreat of artists in central Texas that I want us to eat only regenerative food and I'm going to invite my friends. You could come here and we have different spaces. So we have an outdoor stage on the field that has like a 4,000 square foot shade structure. And then we have a yurt, which is just for like 50 people. And then we have a conference room for 250 to 300 people with a stage. And so we do small music festivals, we do yoga retreats. There's something called influencer retreats where a brand brings all their influencers together to make content.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  We do beds work, coming of age work. Church retreats, baby showers, family reunions, weddings, all of that. So we have 40 beds and we have these different venues. And then we have an organic restaurant that's on the farm that only serves protein from the ranch. So if you come and you get a patty melt today at the restaurant, it's from a cow that we knew we raised, we didn't vaccinate, and is on this land the whole time. And I believe that there's a coherency in food that's grown on the land that you are on. And so I believe that there's a ripple effect. If you come here and you eat a burger from here, you have a feeling when you leave that is a remembering of that divine cycle

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  that God has a design. And so that's what we're doing. And we do farm tours. We have pigs, goats, sheep, and cows, dairy and beef.

• 1:26:05Rick Rubin?

  I heard that you call your burger the What's Possible Burger. Is that right?

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. What's Possible, when man and bovine and grass and microbiology all work together, What's Possible is regeneration.

• 1:26:21Rick Rubin?

  And what's in the What's Possible Burger?

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  It's a patty melt. So it's sourdough bread that's 20% ground wheat. So we get the wheat berries and we grind it. And so you're having all the nutrients. And then 80% organic white, because people are still not 100% on the 100% wheat yet. And then we have that bread. And then we make it sourdough, long fermented over a day and a half. And then it has a long fermented kimchi, red onions, and organic grass-fed cheddar, and the burger, and organic mustard. And that is what's on the What's Possible Burger.

• 1:26:57Rick Rubin?

  Tell me more about local food versus food that travels to you. What do you think the benefits of local food are?

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  So I think that there's a large, growing body of evidence that water has memory. There's Veda Austin, there's other scientists that are proving that water has memory. And so food is largely water when it's growing, and we are largely water. And so I believe that our food is being informed by our environment, that the water is remembering what is in the environment and then is informing that food, and that food is then informing your mitochondria and your epigenetics. And so this food that is coherent with your environment, I believe, is turning on the

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  cells that fight cancer and turning off the cells that make cancer, or diabetes, or any of those things. And then, on another note, and I don't know, you know, some people are science believers, and some people are biblical believers, and some people are spiritual. But in the Bible, God picked up some soil, and He blew it, and then He made Adam, and He blew into Adam's nose and made man. And in science, it shows us that the microbiology in a healthy gut, and the microbiology in healthy soil are 73% the same DNA. So whether you're staunchly believing in science, or you're staunchly believing in the Bible,

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  either way, I think it's clear that we are meant to live with the soil and of the soil. So on another level, eating of your local environment that has not been sterilized and packaged and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is replenishing that microbiology that's in your gut. And if you think about our language, how many ways do we say to trust your gut, your gut will instigate, trust with your gut, go with your gut? What if that microbiology, the foundation of all of life, soil, that is a little piece of creation in you, informing you? And that the more distant we get from that microbiology, and the more we get this industrial microbiome that's in our guts, we can't trust our guts. And then we can't trust ourselves, and then we can't trust each other,

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  and then we invite the government to be in every single interaction. What if that reconnecting with healthy soil is so much bigger than just our microbiology and our mental health and all of the things that we know are so important? But what if it's actually reconnecting with the Creator, with that voice inside of us? And so, I want to invite people, wherever you are, to get your hands in soil. Because I think that that disconnect is having us disconnected from the voice that is always giving us our inspiration, our creativity, and guiding us in life. And I believe that that is invaluable and necessary.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  So to me, it's not just a battle of chemical farming. It's a spiritual battle. And I believe that soil is at the foundation of that spiritual battle. And even if you're saying, "No, I don't believe that, it's a scientific battle," then it's a scientific battle worth fighting because the science shows that putting your hands in healthy soil is more effective than any SSRI. And what percentage of adults are on SSRIs in this culture? So many. And so, the science shows us that reconnecting with the soil is important. And I believe that Genesis also asks that of us. And before the Ten Commandments, before anything else, God said to tend to the garden.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  That is what was asked of us, very first thing that was ever spoken into existence, supposedly. He also spoke over the water, arguing my earlier point, that water has memory, that the water was there, and it was black, and He spoke over it, and He divided the water above and below the ferment and all that. But He spoke into the water, water has memory. And so, if water does have memory, or even some believe God consciousness, then what are the ramifications of us constantly poisoning God's consciousness? And so, to me, it's twofold. We have to stop poisoning ourselves, the soil, and the water in order to win the spiritual battle that's at hand.

• 1:31:21Rick Rubin?

  Can you explain how regenerative farming and industrial farming differ?

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  Yes. So we have regenerative farming, we have organic farming, and then we have industrial farming. And organic farming is largely industrial farming and largely degenerative, where we just don't use these certain things. Like, it's like we've said, these chemicals are okay to use and these chemicals are not okay to use. Regenerative farming is an active practice of working with nature to create healthy soil, understanding that healthy soil is the foundation of all of life. And so there's five principles of regenerative agriculture. The first one is context. So farming within the context of where you are. I should not try to grow papayas in Texas. That's not the best crop for here

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  because winters and all of that. The next is armor or cover crops, keeping the ground covered with either a cover crop or mulch or some kind of armor on the ground so that the mother is modest. She does not want to be exposed, but ultimately so that the microbiology can stay alive and have protection. Biodiversity, so a diversity of different kinds of plants, not just having fields of one kind of thing. Also, diversity of crops so that you're not fully dependent on one income stream. And then less chemicals or no chemicals, and then no till or less till. And then the last and most important one to me is the animal integration,

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  where you're using animals to do their herd impact on the ground to recreate what the bison or the antelopes are doing under pressure from predators. They get moved and they stay in these tight pods so that nobody could get them. And therefore, they pee and they poop and they saliva in tight areas. And then that is how the grasslands have been grown for millions and millions of years. So we recreate that with what's called holistic plant grazing, mob grazing. And we move our cattle every single day. We move our sheep every single day. We were moving our goats every day, but they are escape artists and we are having a break on retraining them on a hard fence because we can't get them to stay in the electric fence.

• 1:33:37Rick Rubin?

  Do you follow Joel Salatin's work?

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  I do. So Joel wrote the foreword to my book and I just met him in real life Amazing. For the first time and we were at the Heritage Foundation in DC a couple of weeks ago as they are trying to make soil health be at the foundation of the Conservative Party. I largely don't trust government at all, but if a think tank as big as them wants to bring soil health into the middle of the conversation, I will be there at the front row trying to make that happen. So we were both there as part of the team that was consulting on what is important in this area. I think he's awesome and I actually didn't want him to write the foreword to my book because we're on the same publisher and I thought he might just feel

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  obligated, "Oh, it's her first book. They're asking me. Let me do it." So I said, "No." And then they just sent it to him to read and he reached out and asked me if he could write the foreword. And so I then was like, "Of course you can. I wanted, you know, I want whoever does it to want to do it." It's so weird. This is my first book, but people are like, "Oh, you can't expect people to write a blurb for you. You just have to send them the blurb and ask them to put their name on it." And I was like, "I don't want a blurb from anybody that didn't read the book. That's crazy." And my book is kind of controversial, so everybody that wrote a blurb for my book actually read the book and I didn't write any blurbs for anybody. And someone was like, "Oh, you probably have to just write the foreword for someone too." And I was like, "I think I'll find someone

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  who's inspired enough about what I wrote that they want to participate." So that was awesome and he's just so extraordinary. I write for Epoch Times, which is like a newspaper that, I don't know, I think they think themselves centrist. I think they're probably right-leaning. But I write in the opinion section and just had an article come out called "Free the Enslaved Food System," which was about Joel Salatin and his talk at the Heritage Foundation and how

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  He believes it doesn't cost the government anything to roll back all the regulations and free the entrepreneur. And that if you want to buy milk from your neighbor, or you want to buy charcuterie from your neighbor, or whatever, you should have the right to do that. If someone else doesn't feel safe, they can go to Walmart or HEB. Those things are not going away, the big grocery stores. But why is it that we need the government in every interaction around our food? If farmers are not free to feed the people, something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong in our society.

• 1:36:15Rick Rubin?

  And the book is called Debunked by Nature?

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:20Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the book.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  I'd started out with like, Nature Never Lies, and then we just switched it to that. But I just kept having all these thoughts through COVID about how many little lies I feel like were kind of forced to tell every day, or were asked to tell every day. And it was getting so much louder during COVID. I remember there was this whole thing Latinx, where we were supposed to call all Latin people Latinx because it was non-binary. And my husband looked at me and said, "We're not doing that." And I was like, "We have to. That's like what's happening." And he said, "Absolutely not. That's white supremacy. We're not changing my entire language.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  Every word is gendered. Whatever word you're saying, it's gendered. It's not like in English where you say he or she before. It's like if I am full in Spanish, full for a female is jenna, and full for a male is geno. Every word is gendered." He said, "You can't just put X at the end of Latino and make it the language non-gendered. It doesn't make any sense." And I was explaining this to someone in the restaurant, a girlfriend of mine who is teaching at LAUSD. And she was like, "Oh, I don't know. I don't think you can say that." And I was like, "Well, but my husband is Mexican, and he feels disrespected by it. So I don't think we should be saying it. Have you talked to the parents of the children that you're using this term with? They're largely Catholic from..."

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras. So I believe that they would not be interested in that terminology. And I had employees quit, put on Twitter that I was transphobic. And I was like, I'm just expressing the views of my husband. But this was just like one little like lie that we were asked to tell through COVID. And that six feet distancing is going to make a difference. That wearing a mask when you're standing up, but when you're sitting down, you don't have to. We can't eat at the bar, but you can eat at the table. Like, they just didn't make any sense. And there was all these lies we were supposed to pretend were true. And then if you didn't pretend they were true, which I didn't, because I grew up in a largely unmedicated household.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  We didn't, which largely was a liberal thing, just as far as I remember growing up. I was unvaccinated, unmedicated. I never went to the hospital my whole life until I got an allergic reaction to lice. I got lice at summer camp and I was allergic to the chemicals that they put on my head to kill the lice. And I ended up going to the hospital and having to be intubated. And the doctor was like, you're actually not allergic. It's poison, it's meant to kill something. And so you are more sensitive to the poison. There's no such thing as being allergic to poison. And so when everybody started saying you have to wear a mask, healthy people have to wear a mask. I was like, this is a lie. Everything seemed like a lie. And then I'm spending more time in nature because we don't have to go to the restaurant as much

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  because it's not as busy. And these lies are just seeming louder and louder as I'm comparing them to life on the farm. And I'm blessed that I had my father and my mother and that they were on the same page because I knew people that were totally isolated from their family. And so I didn't feel isolated. A few people moved off the farm because they didn't feel like I was taking it seriously. But ultimately, we lived our life totally normal on the farm. And the world was all really confusing. I started writing down ideas and that's how the book started. And then I ended up getting a couple of people coming out to me when I came out and made my restaurants regenerative, asked if I wanted to write a book.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  And I said, yes, but it's not the book I think that you are thinking of. And so I sent like an outline of seven chapters to the two people that had given me an offer. And Chelsea Green basically said, oh, well, we wouldn't want you to write about transgenderism, abortion, a bunch of the things that were in the book. And Acres, which is largely a farming, this is the first non-farming book they've ever put out, said, we're open to let you write the book however you want to write the book. And so I went with them, which was less money and less support, but I knew that the book I wanted to write was not just an environmentalism book.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  And so I wrote this book and I took 17 concepts from our society, and not all of them are political. Some of them are, you know, breastfeeding or co-sleeping. And I essentially just asserted what nature does with other mammals and how far we've drifted from that. And basically said that nature is telling the truth, and if we want to be truth seekers, which many of us claimed to want to be during COVID, then we should take these constructs, these ideas, and look at them in the construct of the savanna, or the farm, or the woods, and ask ourselves, does this happen in nature?

• 1:41:22Rick Rubin?

  It sounds like you're describing all 60s hippie ideals. Every one of them. Yes or no? Tell me.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  I mean, yes and no. I think the rise of feminism and like abandoning the true value in the male and female also arose in the 60s. And I think that the sexual revolution might have diminished the sanctity of life in some ways. And I largely grew up in a household, I mean, I had an aunt telling me, like, you better have sex with as many guys as you can when you look as hot as you do right now, because, believe me, after you have babies, you're not going to feel as hot. Like, weird things that I would never say to my daughter now. And so I think that all the ideas of the 60s were beautiful. And then, just like veganism was probably beautiful, just like diversity, equity, inclusion

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  was probably beautiful, but they've all been twisted into ideas.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  That caused separation, division, and a forgetting of our divine purpose. And so, many beautiful things came out of the 60s and then were twisted and used for division. And I think that that's also true for the civil rights movement. I think that's true for many different movements. And I think that we live in a world right now where we act like gender is non-binary and race is fixed. And I would argue that both of those are lies. Like, that gender or sex at birth is fixed. And I would argue that race is largely a construct. The way we relate to gender in our current society,

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  race is not real. You can't say what Mexican-Americans believe. You can't say what Black-Americans believe. Like, there's no connection between the amount of melanin in your skin and your heritage of your ancestors and what you believe today, because it's largely cultural. And my husband's a Mexican-American. And I use this example in the book. My friend Junior, he grew up in South LA or East LA and grew up in a very different world than my husband did in a tiny indigenous village in Oaxaca. They are both Mexican-Americans. They see the world very differently. There is no race that makes them a group.

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  And so, I think that this idea is largely used to divide us. Yeah. Because if we remember that we, the people, all of us, there's more of us than any of them, that we can actually drive the car in the direction we want. We have the collective power of the purse. We have the collective power of our mind and our speech and our thoughts and our actions and our attitudes. But if we're arguing with each other about when life begins, about microaggressions, about DEI policies, you know what we're not doing? We're not collectively coming together and saying we're all being poisoned and our reproductive abilities are being taken away from us. We want to argue whether you can kill your baby or not,

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  when I think we should all be arguing for the rights of our future generations to be able to have a baby. And so, I think that many of these ideas that maybe started with pure and good intentions have been twisted into something that has us forget. Our connection to God, to nature, to family, and to what's really important. And so that's the foundation of the book, is a request for us to move back into that world.

• 1:44:56Rick Rubin?

  And just to be clear, would you say that over the years of your life and your family's life, you would be maybe in the 1% most extreme liberal people on the planet?

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  Probably could have looked up in Wikipedia, like, what is a liberal woman in Los Angeles? And a vegan chef, highbred, married to an undocumented man? I was that person. And, I mean, I went to the alternative community school in Ithaca, New York. Ithaca was the first town to outlaw gas stoves. I mean, there's no logic there. We're just gonna burn coal and then use electricity because that's somehow more efficient? I think it's not. But anyways, that's Ithaca. So I grew up in the liberal of the liberal. I went to the liberal of the liberal school. Literally, we had a graffiti room. So if you needed to express your feelings via graffiti, there was a space for that. There was an all-school meeting every day so people could raise their hand

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  and express whatever was going on for them. And I mean, The People's History of Howard Zinn was our history book. And I grew up in a very liberal household. Even though my dad voted for his businesses, he voted Republican mostly.

• 1:46:12Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about government subsidies for farmers. What about it works? What about it doesn't work?

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  Government subsidies for farmers, again, something that started with really good intentions. And now has people stuck in a system where they're growing food that they know is never gonna come to fruition. There's areas of Mississippi that is flooding and flooding over every year, and they still have to put plants in the ground and then apply for crop insurance because it's the only way to survive. There's all of these subsidies for corn and soy, and there's very little motivation to have subsidies for farming that.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  Would shift the way our food system is built. But I do believe right now we're in a special moment in America of a coalition. If the left can just remember that food, healthy food is important to them. And I know it is because I've been in the healthy food space my whole life. And I'm clear that it's important to the left. But it seems like right now they're acting like it's not important to them. But if we could have this coalition of both sides saying this is important. This could be a moment where we could be the soft landing for farmers to make the transition. And if Molly was queen for a day, Molly was a bureaucrat with a pen for a day. The first thing I would do, which is very, very, very controversial.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  I would make SNAP benefits only apply to whole foods and foods that had less than eight ingredients. Now, people will say, that's crazy, there's food deserts. And I would also say that every state should adopt. There's about 10 states that have the double dollars at the farmer's market. So when you spend your SNAP benefits at the farmer's market, you get two for one dollars. So now, what I believe would happen if we made this change in the SNAP program. The subsidies for soda companies, which are 20% of $119 billion, 20% of that. If we did this, food deserts would start to disappear. Farmers markets will pop up in all these neighborhoods.

• 1:48:22Speaker 01

  And the local bodega or the corner store in the tiny town is going to start to have more single ingredient foods, more nutrient dense foods. Because these small town convenience stores largely depend on SNAP benefits. These corner stores in the hood largely depend on these SNAP benefits. So the system would shift if we made this check. And I believe it should go back to farmers. There should be an incentive to spend it direct to farmers. So I am not 100% anti subsidies. I think we need more carrot and less stick. And I think that we need to have policies that are more rounded, like not just solving for one single problem.

• 1:49:06Rick Rubin?

  On the points where if Molly had the pen for a day, who are the people who have the pen now who could make those changes? Do you know?

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that Trump could do an executive order and change what's available in SNAP, but the SNAP is in the farm bill. So ultimately, the farm bill needs to be shifted. And they didn't even pass a farm bill this last time. It got like put off into the future. So Congress, I mean, they're just so inept. They are supposed to be the purse. They never hold the purse strings. Right now, in committee, in both Congress and in the Senate, there is a bill called the Prime Act. It was brought from Massey, and I believe that Ron Paul has introduced it in the Senate. And it's in committee in both houses, not stagnant,

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  not moving. This would allow farmers to process on farm or at local what's called an inspected facility, or a custom facility where it's inspected by the Health Department of the state, but it's not USDA inspected. And so because of that, we have a lot of times where we can't, you know, there isn't a facility nearby. We are lucky that we do have one. But so there's always these locally inspected facilities that people are bringing their deer to, their steer, their 4-H thing. We want to make it. And what Massey's trying to do is that if you have it harvested there, then you could sell it within your state. And so you could sell it to your neighbors. And so it would incentivize farmers to be

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  able to do custom slaughter and then sell it to their neighbors. And then also, the federal rules around chickens are 20,000, you can harvest, I think, 20,000 chickens a year on your property without having to go through the federal chains. But then the states have reduced that to zero, or Texas is 500. So if we could roll back the states to let people process chickens and meat rabbits locally. So the problem is the pen is in a lot of different places. It's on the state level, it's at the federal level, it's in the Congress. But I do think that Trump could likely do a executive order that would shift SNAP. And then the states can look Look at what these other states are doing.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Iowa just passed a waiver. So you will not be able to buy. I think Iowa's is the best one or the bravest one, I would say. So you won't be able to buy anything that has sales tax on it in Iowa with food stamps or SNAP or EBT. So that takes out candy, soda, power drinks or energy drinks, donuts, chips, anything that they deem as junk food that is not essential has a tax on it in Iowa. And they've said anything that's taxed is not in the program. And so I would say, if I was Molly Queen of the bureaucrats for a day, I would go further. But I would say Iowa is going to be the test ground and that other states could follow

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  that. And then California, Massachusetts, New York, Colorado are doing the double dollars at the farmer's market. And so I think states could implement that. And what that happened in Los Angeles is all of a sudden there's South Central has a farmer's market. All of a sudden, the East Side has a bunch of farmer's markets. And my restaurant was in Echo Park and largely a Latino neighborhood. And you will see people lining up to change in their EBT for farmer's bucks so they could get double the produce at the farmer's market. So that program, I think, supports farmers and supports the health of the community. So, and then I would be remiss to not mention what's happening in Oklahoma. Aaron Martin has passed the Food is Medicine Act.

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  And so it's the first state to say that you can use your insurance. Your doctor can write you a prescription. If you have a metabolic condition or a terminal condition, your doctor can write you a prescription for local and organic food and your insurance will pay for it. And the insurance companies are actually totally on board because Aaron Martin did a test in advance of it and with a couple of insurance companies and the outcomes were unbelievable.

• 1:53:22Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your brother's work.

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  My brother is the founder of an organization called Kiss the Ground. He made a film called Kiss the Ground that came out on Netflix and now is on Amazon Prime. And the sequel is now out called Common Ground. And there's a third one coming out called Ground Swell that is looking at the global regenerative movement, not just the American regenerative movement. And he started this nonprofit that started in his garage in Venice that became a large nonprofit. And as nonprofits do, they get brittle. And he left recently because he took a leave from the nonprofit to support RFK, which was

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  approved by the board. And when RFK joined Trump, there was essentially people that are in the very liberal mindset just couldn't be okay with that. And so he has a really great relationship with them. He still works with them, but his politics have shifted to somewhere that they are not. And I think that, again, totally well meaning, I got asked to leave the board for the same reason, for my views. Well, I got asked to sign a paper that would say I would never talk about vaccines, abortion, transgender, or anything else that would be politically divisive. And I said, I've been on like hundreds of podcasts.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  There's no way I could put that back in the can. And so I was asked to step down as well. And I think that they're just protecting themselves. You know what I mean? It's just, it's again, something gets big and then there's something to protect. And so I think they're doing extraordinary work in the world and they are spreading the message of soil. And he gave his all to it and his enthusiasm and he brought it from nothing into something extraordinary. And now he's created 501(c)(4), which is a lobbying organization called American Regeneration that is specifically working towards soil health being at the center of both political parties, that there's going to be swings back.

• 1:55:34Speaker 01

  And forth and how do we have soil health be at the center of the conversation moving forward? And so he's working with Rick Clark, who's an extraordinary regenerative farmer, has 7,000 acres in regenerative organic and Kelly Ryerson, who's been a people lobbyist, essentially just lobbying on the behalf of the people to get her name was like glyphosate girl on her social media. She's just been lobbying against chemical companies on the behalf of the people as an individual for a long time now. So the three of them started American regeneration and they're working alongside of Just the Ground. My brother's still promoting the films and he's launching the educational cut right now of common ground and he's taking that across the country.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  And if anybody has any educational institutions that they want to bring common ground into, he has multiple cuts of the film to try to get the message out as much as possible.

• 1:56:30Rick Rubin?

  What's the best way to find out about local farmers? If you want to get food from local farmers and support local farmers, how do you do that?

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  There's so many maps that different people have online and Regenerate America, the Regenissance and multiple other ones. My friend A.J. Richards has started a company called From the Farm and his byline is shake the hand that feeds you. And he is trying to make a pathway for farmers. So I'm great at making social media, doing things and getting on podcasts and doing all this stuff. But not every farmer has that in them to sell their meat boxes. So he's creating this amazing platform where he's helping you get the boxes and helping you get the dry ice and the cooler, helping you set up your store, taking the photos.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  And then he's doing advertising like on Angel Studios and different places are advertising from the farm. And then we, as the farmers, are getting lower prices on our shipping because it's like we're all one group from the farm. And so there's a benefit in the buying the boxes and the services and all that stuff that needs to send meat. And so A.J.'s doing this great work of trying to move the needle.

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  And so From the Farm is a great place to look it up and see what's around you and what's near you. And I think if you also just go to your local farmer's market, and I think have conversations with people, like if they're doing the right thing, they're going to be super inspired to tell you about it. And people always say, "What else could I do, Molly, besides supporting local farms to support the movement?" And I assert, there's nothing more important than you could do. At the rate that we are losing farms, I want you to see it as an imperative. To be the bestseller of the body that is this earth, you have to support local farmers. We are in an agrarian collapse. And if the

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  consumer, the individual, doesn't wake up from their lulled comfort, they're going to find themselves eating some kind of slop, looking into some kind of weird AI goggles, and be completely disconnected. It is imperative that the farm survives. You, the consumer, have the power of the purse.

• 1:59:17Speaker 02

  Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

• 1:59:32Speaker 03

  What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammatin? Counterculture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamic? Tetragrammatin. Graphic design? Tetragrammatin. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammatin. Obscure film? Tetragrammatin. Beach culture? Tetragrammatin. Esoteric lectures? Tetragrammatin. Off-the-grid living? Tetragrammatin. Alt spirituality? Tetragrammatin. The canon of fine objects? Tetragrammatin. Muscle cars? Tetragrammatin. Ancient wisdom for a new age.

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath, and see where you are drawn.