Right now, so many of us are stuck.

We're caught between wanting to nourish ourselves and this beautiful

planet, but feeling lost in the noise of modern convenience, chemical

farming and endless mono crops.

The way we grow food today is failing both us and the earth.

We feel it in our bodies and we see it in the land around us.

If you've ever felt the tug of wanting something more, something that's

truly connected to the earth, to community, and to your own wellbeing,

then this episode is for you.

what if there's a different way, a way that not only heals the earth,

but also nourishes our souls.

To today?

I'm thrilled to share a conversation that dives deep into this question.

I'm your host, Nathan Mangar.

Welcome back to We Are.

Already Free, the podcast for those awakening to the

madness of modern society.

Struggling with disconnection from their true selves.

Yearning for more.

Here we go.

Beyond hopelessness, overwhelm, and limiting old patterns, inspiring

you to live authentically, find your tribe, and create a

beautiful life in the here and now.

When you hear We, Are, Already, Free.

What comes up for you?

Acceptance.

A shift in awareness.

Human beings are so powerful.

Everything is love behind it.

Breaking the chains of your own minds, that which remains nature.

Getting outta the matrix, sitting on the treasure and it's already unlocked.

We, Are, Already, Free, you're free.

You are a walking map.

Have always been free.

You are always free.

alreadyfree.me/, We, Are, Already, Free.

I'm joined by Molly Engelhart, a chef, a farmer, and a

regenerative pioneer who has walked a bold path from being a dedicated

owner of a vegan restaurant to embracing regenerative agriculture.

In this episode, Molly shares her journey of rethinking everything she

knew about food, healing her soil, and ultimately healing herself.

We will uncover how regenerative agriculture is so much

more than just a buzzword.

It's a way to build resilience, resilience in our ecosystems

and resilience within ourselves.

We'll talk about the soil microbiome and how it's connected to our

health, and why this shift towards regeneration might just be the most

radical act of hope we can take today.

Listen to learn why integrating animals into farming is key to regenerating the

land, how the health of our soil directly impacts our gut and mental health.

What the challenges are in transitioning from conventional to

regenerative farming and how we can support farmers making that leap.

Why true food sovereignty matters and stick around for a special bonus

chat towards the end where Molly and I dive deep into an incredible

discussion around plant medicines, birth, and the wisdom of nature.

It is not something you want to miss.

I was in tears listening to the story she shared.

It's so profound.

Please do listen to this.

It's right at the end.

It's so good and so unexpected.

And speaking of resilience, if you're ready to start each day

in alignment with energy, you need to create positive change.

Let me invite you to my five day morning practice challenge.

It's designed to transform your mornings in just a few minutes a day, so you

can face whatever challenges arise with clarity, groundedness, and joy.

You can sign up for free through the link in the show notes.

I'd love for you to join us.

So let's dive into it.

Together, let's rethink food.

Let's heal the soil, and let's explore the radical shift that regenerative

living invites us all into.

Here's my inspiring, uplifting, and educational conversation

with Molly Engelhart

I know with your restaurants, you've shifted from veganism to regenerative

agriculture, so including animals.

This is a big thing for so many of us.

For myself, and I'm sure many of my listeners who were like,

veganism will save the world.

If we just be vegan, then everything will be better.

I worked in the vegan industry for years.

I was like, this is the thing.

Why is regenerative agriculture and eating animals such a game changer?

Why is it so important that you would move away from veganism as your business?

I was raised, primarily vegan, but my mom felt like

margarine was plastic, so we ate butter.

and she wasn't that into, she was ahead of the game on not being into seed oils.

And so, you know, we did eat butter and then olive oil, for raw things as

far as cooking when we were growing up.

But I was raised in a primarily vegan household.

And, so I believed that to be what was best.

we even were raised on a farm and we were mostly growing apples.

and then my uncle had a operation where he raised calves for a

dairy farmer down the street.

And then once they were old enough to go to market, so there was.

Cows there a lot.

And we had this orchard and stuff.

But my mom had read a book very, my mom had me young, and she had read

a book about industrial agriculture and just decided she didn't

really wanna participate in that.

And I grew up in that sphere.

So meat never even really occurred like food to me.

I was raised with a very rounded whole food diet.

my mom made her own tofu, made her own Tempe, fermented things.

That was, you know, so I never really missed it.

even the mission statement from my restaurant was like food with nothing

missing, but without animal products.

And so people could have whatever experience they wanted, if they wanted

to eat fried macaroni and cheese bowl that didn't have dairy in it.

I had that for them.

If they wanted a kale and quinoa salad, I had that If you wanted a, you know,

bourbon on the rocks, I had that.

Like, I really wanted everybody.

Grandpa to the kid with the picky kid.

I wanted everybody to have something and that's what I wanted to provide.

And I was very successful at that, very, successful.

And I always asked people what was their vegan kryptonite, what made them cheat?

And then I made the greatest version of that, that I could, that's

kind of how I designed my menu.

And I have a talent for being able to taste something and then I could

go home and make it, and people would be like, how did you do that?

We just ate it last night at a restaurant.

I could taste everything.

And so I was just doing what I love to do.

I love to feed people, I love to express love in that way.

I don't wanna harm animals.

I don't wanna harm anything.

Right?

And so that was very natural to me.

And in 2013 or 14, I watched a Graeme Sait Ted Talk that blew my mind.

He explained about carbon cycling and carbon sequestration

and all of this stuff that

kind of disrupted what I believed about agriculture.

And the main thing that I took away from that talk was that food waste was the

number one cause of methane, not cows.

And I remember thinking, wow, I have these restaurants and I'm just dumping

so much food waste into the landfill.

And at that time, there was no composting in Los Angeles.

And so I decided to get a farm and it took many years, money

saving, blah, blah, blah.

I would try to get customers to buy a farm for me so I could bring my compost, but

realized I was the one I was waiting for.

But I was still in the mindset of, I'm gonna have this farm.

I'm gonna rescue animals, they're gonna regenerate the soil.

Nothing is ever going to die.

I am going to have this beautiful regeneration of the soil, grow

food for my restaurants, take all the waste out of my restaurants

and turn it into beautiful soil.

And this is gonna be amazing.

And I was so inspired about it that my husband just let me

believe that it was possible.

and so we bought this land.

It was fallow, it had been an orange orchard, then took out the orange

trees and just sprayed with Roundup.

And it was just like 0.01% organic matter in the soil.

And I watched very quickly as we were able to regenerate the soil beautifully.

And other things happened.

While I was watching that, I was watching Nature.

Some things that stand out is, well, first we were making all the

compost from the food scraps from the restaurant, and I realized it was

taking a long time to break down and it wasn't the best, highest quality

of compost that I could come up with.

I was getting a lot of tree trimmings and mulch and that was beautiful.

But it needed something to set it off.

So I got a cow from my dad, una, I still have Una And Una was bred already

and Una had a beautiful bull calf.

And I always, my heart sank like, well when the baby was born and it

was a boy, I understood like, what is the boy calf's role in the world?

And I am there breastfeeding my own child.

And Una has a huge udder, like you can go on Instagram and see it's huge.

And so her calf wasn't breastfeeding.

they don't.

breastfeed evenly.

And so they are, you know, you're milking off the quarter that the cow might

not be, and we're milking it off onto the ground because, or we're saving it

and giving it to some farm workers or whatever because dairy causes cancer.

And then I'm sitting there and I'm breastfeeding my child and I'm

watching my older child drink oat milk from Costco in a tetra pack

that's never gonna biodegrade.

And I'm seeing this milk.

I'm milking it onto the ground or milking it in.

And I'm thinking, well, if my breast milk is gold, if my breast milk is the

most profound immune system benefit to a child, and I'm living in a much

cleaner version of where Una's living.

Why is Una's milk not as good or better?

Because she's living in a dirtier version of the world I'm living in.

All the same pathogens and whatever that I've gotta fight against and my

other child's gotta fight against.

She also has to fight against, so why is her breast milk not

more perfect than that Tetrapack?

And it was obvious to me in that moment that it was more perfect and that

I don't, I breastfed my son for two years and some months, and I was done.

I was not gonna continue to breastfeed him, but that that nutrition that

he still craved drinking milk.

And that there was no way that oat milk was not worse for him than cow milk.

And so I started feeding raw milk to my children.

That was like step one.

And I'm still having a vegan restaurant.

I'm still not posting that on Instagram or anything.

And then.

other things happened, where I'm observing nature and I'm doing

things that are against nature, and then I'm seeing the consequences.

I've told this story before, but I let my ducks just have more ducks and more ducks.

And there's all these boy ducks, a lot of Drakes, I got some new female ducks, khaki

Campbells, and they're in the avocado orchard and they're eating the snails.

And I'm so excited the first day that the khaki Campbells are big enough to go out

in the orchard with all the other ducks.

And I let them go.

And I can still remember this morning, the grass is like knee high and

there's snails and they're eating the snails off of the avocado trees and

the sprinklers are going and they're just shivering in the sprinklers.

And I remember going off to work thinking.

I'm doing so good.

this is my regenerative agriculture, and I'm not using anything to kill the snails,

and my ducks are killing the snails.

And because I had so many Drakes, so many male ducks, they had sex

with all those 19 female ducks until they died, killed all 19 of them.

And I was so mad and so sad.

you know, when you're raising baby chicks or ducks, you gotta check their

butt that they don't get blocked.

you're taking care of them every day.

You're cleaning their water, you're cleaning this, and they're the cutest

thing you've ever seen when they're born.

then they go through an ugly phase and then they become these beautiful ducks.

I went through that whole phase with them, and then I bring them out to

their beautiful life that's outside of the swimming tank that, I mean,

this like swimming, kids swimming pond that they were living in.

And their first day they just get killed.

But nature would never have 19 male ducks with 19 female, or whatever

it was, every time the ducks were having babies, it was half and half.

Nature would not have that.

Those male ducks would get pushed out.

A stronger duck would fight them off, and one duck would be with many females

and the other ducks would get pushed out and they'd either find females of

their own or they'll get eaten, but most of them will get eaten or die

But they will not stay with all the female ducks and just breed and breed and

breed them over and over until they die.

That wouldn't happen.

But because of my vegan mentality, I wanted nothing to die on my farm.

So these Drakes were gonna live Well, the consequence of me having that mindset

was that all of my female khaki Campbells were killed that day in a terrible way.

When my husband went out there, they were still humping on them

and they were dead in the grass.

He called me at work and he said,

you're gonna be upset.

I'm just letting you know.

And I called my dad and I was crying.

And my dad had come to a lot of the conclusions that I came

to a couple years earlier.

And so people love to say like, you're a murderer, just like your dad.

But he also had a farm to grow food for his restaurants.

My dad owns Cafe Gratitude, it's a famous vegan restaurant as well.

And he said, that's enough to bring a vegan to her knees.

And I was like, it is enough to bring a vegan to her knees.

And I went home that night and I told my husband do something about those ducks.

And I didn't wanna know about it.

I didn't wanna see about it.

I didn't wanna talk about it.

I didn't want it to be something that anybody ever knew about.

Like I had very publicly said nothing was gonna die on my farm, except for old age.

I was committed to proving that I.

I also wasn't committed to raising animals and having them die by

being raped over and over again.

And people talk about the dairy industry like AI or preg checking is rape.

I don't agree with that that's rape.

But a duck being bred over and over and over by a train of male ducks until

they die does occur like rape to me.

And so I was just heartbroken.

I started to realize that we are not outside of nature.

And just because I say I don't want to eat meat does not mean that I can then

snap my fingers and less death happens.

And then we're buying fertilizer.

In those early years, after two and a half years, we were no fertilizer.

We didn't buy any fertilizer.

But I'm looking at the ingredients on the fertilizer and it's

blood meal, it's bone meal, it's chicken shit, it's feather meal.

So I start to call these omni certified, organic certified, and I'm saying,

where is the blood meal coming from?

Where is the chicken poop coming from?

Where is the feather meal coming from?

It's all coming out of the consolidated feedlot system.

It's all a byproduct of broken agricultural system that we depend

on heavily for our convenience and the cheapness of it.

And I'm thinking all organic food is grown with death, this

system that I wanna be away from.

And every bit of food that I'm serving is being grown with that.

And if it's not being grown with that, it's being grown with petrochemicals.

so I start looking into like veganic farming and, and people love to.

You know, say there's veganic farming, send me websites on it.

And I have seen a few places that had an already established fruit

orchard or an already established vineyard that are doing it and

they're, you know, mulching with hay and mulching with chips and whatever.

So maybe there's a way to do it.

There's a place that collects bat guano or sea guano, but

at scale, what are the inputs?

Like, what are the inputs if it's not petrochemicals?

It's animal products and then people say, well, we're just mulching with hay.

Okay, well where, what's growing the hay?

Where's the hay coming from?

There's all this stuff.

There is some circumstances in some parts of the world where there's a lot

of rainfall and a lot of organic matter that I suppose that you could do it,

but it is not something that we could do at scale across the world, everywhere.

And in Southern California where it only rains three months of the year, was

not one of those places where veganic farming, and then you start looking

what's in vegan fertilizer and it's kelp.

It's we're, it's things we're taking things, there's, there's

cost to taking everything.

Like the fact that there'd be no death in harvesting kelp from the kelp forest.

I don't know.

I don't know what the consequences are, but I don't, I don't think that

we could just say just 'cause in this package, there's no death means

that there was no death associated.

And I started to realize that there is no life without death, but there

is ways to farm to promote more life.

It doesn't mean there's no death.

It means I'm farming for more life and I'm farming for the benefit of

the soil, for the benefit of the animals, for the benefit of humanity.

And then I realized that 25, well there's a new study that even says 59%,

but 25% of life on the planet lives in the top eight inches of top soil.

New studies saying as much as 59% of life on the planet lives in

the top eight inches of top soil.

So you start to think about, we're worried about the whales, we're worried about

the the polar bears as we should be.

I'm not saying we shouldn't take care of whales and polar bears a hundred percent.

But If, 25 to 50% of the life on the planet lives in the top eight inches

of top soil and we are plowing through it over and over and over again every

year, there's dire consequences to that.

And so how big does life have to be for me as a vegan to care about it?

That was the next question I had to question and ask myself, how

big does the life have to be?

Then I learned, you know, I'm on this like journey.

It's crazy.

of that 25% of life in the soil and maybe more now, this new study, 70% of it is

compatible with a healthy gut, healthy soil and healthy gut have a 70% overlap.

So then I'm thinking the God in all of us, creation in all of us is in our gut.

Our gut instinct, follow your gut.

Go with your gut.

Trust your gut.

That's the God in all of us, or the divine, the creator.

We are meant to pick a cabbage out of the ground, rinse it

off, ferment it and eat it.

We are not meant to pick a cabbage out of the ground, dip it in sterilizer, HPP,

and then wrap it in plastic, and then wait to eat it six months or whatever.

That is what we're doing.

And so then I'm thinking, what is in our microbiome?

We're creating this industrial microbiome, and then I start going,

oh, we're pasteurizing all the dairy.

We're not breastfeeding our children.

We're C sectioning our babies.

And then I start to think every problem that we're having.

Mental illness, people going crazy and shooting up schools, people having

all types of skin and hair problems, people not being able to get pregnant.

It all goes back to that we're disconnected, that our gut

is not eating of the soil.

We are not connected to creation.

And then I think I just have to give my life to being connected to creation.

And that's how I got to changing my vegan restaurants, to meat

restaurants, which is not working financially for me, just for the record.

Like we are probably going to have to close them down.

It's not working.

the vegans are terribly upset with me and they think I'm doing it for money.

And it's interesting.

Nobody over opened a restaurant for money and nobody ever farmed just for money.

These are the hardest jobs on the planet.

And I have two of the hardest jobs on the planet and I haven't taken a paycheck

from either of them in several years.

So this idea that I'm doing it just for money,

I'm doing it because I was led to do it.

The person that was raised eating no meat that comes to this conclusion

had to be shown so much evidence to come to this conclusion.

This conclusion does not come easy 'cause I was in a confirmation bias

feedback loop that did not believe this.

Hmm.

Well, I'm sorry to hear the challenges you're facing, because it's the opposite

of what I would like to be seeing based on what you're sharing with me.

But I actually have a story I wanna share that is kind of like, I've got goosebumps.

the episode that came out, well, it'll be a few weeks ago now

when this episode comes out.

It'll be quite a few episodes ago, but I did a solo episode on my experience of

my first time in San Francisco in 2010.

There's a whole long story, but I'll link it in the show so people

can go listen to the full thing.

But the point of telling you now.

Is that I made a point when I went to San Francisco, I only had a hundred

dollars to my name at that time.

I didn't know when I was gonna be getting more money.

It was like a whole thing.

I wasn't meant to be doing any work.

So there was all this stuff going on.

But one of the things I did was I went to Cafe Gratitude in the mission, I

think it was in the Mission District, if I remember this is now 2010.

because I as a raw vegan working in the industry since 2007, it was like one of

the success stories that I'd heard of, and I had heard it must have been your

dad on, the Raw Summit podcast series where he had been interviewed by someone

and they were talking about veganism and raw veganism and why it was so amazing

and, and your dad's or whoever it was, I don't know if it was your dad, but

I it was like the o It was your dad.

Yeah, it was the owner of Cafe Gratitude.

And so I had listened to this a few years before 2008 or so that I'd listened to it.

the interviewer asked him a question.

He said, a lot of people say this lifestyle is expensive.

Expensive to eat well.

And your dad's response, which is just blowing my mind that this

would come full circle right now.

But his response was like, well, you pay now, you pay later, but you always pay.

And he said, either you pay now for the high quality food that's going

to keep you healthy and vibrant and alive, or you pay later for the

cancer, the doctors, the hospitals, the chemo, like all the other things.

or you pay cheap now, but you pay for the poisoned rivers and the

poisoned land and the polluted air.

And I just thought it was, I've told that story so many times when people have,

and it's funny because it stayed with me even as I realized pretty soon, like

around 2010 was when I started being like, there's more to the story and veganism

and raw veganism, isn't it, for me.

and eating meat responsibly, regeneratively makes way more sense

for me personally and all those things.

But that story has stayed true, that when people say to me like,

But it's still true.

It's whether you're eating raw, vegan, organic, and I, I'm the one,

I'm saying that every person has to see what their body responds to.

I have watched people heal themselves from autoimmune diseases and thyroid issues

from bringing meat into their diet, and I have watched people cure themselves

of cancer from going on juice fasts.

So I wanna say that there is value in many different ways to eat.

There's also immense amount of privilege to only be able to eat, "I'm only going

to eat blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

That comes from a place where you have plenty that you can

say, I this food, I don't eat it.

And this food I do and I recognize that, but my father

is a hundred percent correct.

There is a cost to everything.

And so if you buy the corn tortillas at the store that are $2 for 30 or whatever

the cost of those tortillas, or you buy my tortillas that are $8 for 30.

there's a difference.

we grew the corn here on the farm, and that's what you're getting.

And that other one, there's all these other ingredients.

And that cost is not just on your body, but it's all through the system.

The guy who sprayed that corn with Roundup and had to put a suit on the way

they clean it, the chemicals that are involved and all the people that touch

it along the way and then yourself.

And so we don't know what the true cost is.

And so we can't just say, this food is a privilege to eat this healthy

food or this whatever, and this food is what people need to do.

It is a privilege to say, I'm only going to eat this certain kind of food, but

it's also a privilege to eat cheap food that other people are touching chemicals

and getting sick to produce for you.

And that is happening with migrant workers in the United States.

They come here, they work in the fields, and then they go home with sickness, with

cancer, with all of these things, after working in producing our cheap food.

I had a woman that cleaned my house and she was on a team of five

women that picked strawberries.

And of the five women, four of them had had a bout with cancer before 50.

And so you look at that rate and it's because of the fungicides that

they're touching that, that are killing the microbiology in our body.

That microbiology that is of the soil that's in us is what keeps our

skin bag that houses our soul alive.

And so it's perfection.

But when we mess with it and we're touching fungicides every day, we're

killing off part of that microbiology.

And then it becomes imbalanced and it becomes dis-ease.

And so I talk about that a lot and that it's not as simple as just

saying it's a privilege to eat that.

It's also not as simple as saying, "it's not a privilege to eat cheap food."

'cause cheap food is also a privilege.

We have this addiction to convenience and we need to trade our convenience

for resilience, but we're addicted to just the laziness of it.

And so I don't know how to get people to, to change.

I thought the restaurant would, people would be like, oh my god,

convenience and I can have the thing.

And they're literally complaining that my hamburger is $2 more than the

regular hamburger down the street.

And it's like, I'm not even, my food cost is not even in line.

I was trying to introduce it and then hopefully get to the true food costs

and people just don't see the value.

And so I don't know how to get there, but my father is a hundred percent right.

We will pay now or we will pay later.

And I'm 46 years old and I just had my fourth biological child.

I have one adopted son and I believe that I'm still having babies in my mid

forties because whether I was vegan or not vegan, I've always been eating clean.

I've never been eating cheap, shitty food.

And even when we were very broke, me and my brother, we would buy like a case of

organic pasta or a big bag of organic rice and then we would just each day scrounge

together a couple dollars and buy a head of cabbage or whatever and make some kind

of thing out of those two ingredients, even when we were very, very poor because

we did believe in eating more whole foods.

Yeah, I think there's a lot in this around

what, as you said, privilege.

What is privilege really?

And you're speaking to the choices that we all have to make at the end of the day.

And somewhere down the line, some's paying.

and I wanna understand, 'cause you've said something really profound

about the connection, the divine connection that our bodies have

to life and that life has to us.

And I'd like to just for the listener, understand a little more

about regenerative agriculture.

This idea of.

like why is it, what's better about it?

You know, you've talked about building the soil, you've talked about the

microbiome living inside the soil.

So like, what happens?

You moved on to this land and you've done better, you've

created more life on that soil.

I once heard a, I think it might've been Ben Falks possibly who's a

sort of permaculture leader and agriculturalist, and he talks about the

problem with the eco-conscious concept is making less of a bad footprint.

That's the general idea, is like, let's do less bad, like make a smaller footprint.

And he said, well actually, if you think regeneratively,

if you align with regenerative

to.

make a bigger footprint.

And that was such a simple thing and so beautiful.

So what is the bigger footprint and what, what effect does it have on the land

and therefore the food and therefore the people like in that kind of construct?

so regenerative agriculture is really about growing

the soil and then whatever you're growing in the soil is like a byproduct

is like the whatever you're selling, but the real purpose is the soil.

And so these principles are resting the soil, no-till or low till not

disrupting and, and you wanna think about, imagine a coral reef and then that's

like all the microbiology in the soil.

And then imagine that we cut through it with plows every year and then we leave

it fallow for six months of the year.

That microbiology is dying back and dying back, and we're

having less and less of it.

So by leaving the land intact, leaving a ground cover -the mother is modest,

I like to say- is one of the ways to do that, to add more microbiology.

Another way is to integrate animals.

Another way is biodiversity, and permaculture having more

perennials and not just annuals.

with all of these different things, we're creating like this beautiful

black sponge of soil on the top soil.

So then we're sequestering more carbon.

We're growing food that is more healthy for people because it's

more microbiology creates more, um, MPK or the, the nutrients in the

soil become more available to the plants and the plants can uptake it.

And so it's all connected.

And yeah, people say, oh, the footprint for regenerative

agriculture is more space.

You're gonna need to graze more animals, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's not true.

It's, it's literally just a blatant lie.

the math that they're using to get to this number is whatever the existing

stock density is, and then saying, we need this many more, acres.

But if you take all the land for corn and soy that we're growing for

cows, Obviously pigs are separate.

But if you take the corn and soy as being growed for cows and sheeps and goats.

And we, even if we just did one or two rotations a year, integrating

into those systems, we don't even have to stop growing corn and

soy, but we do a cover crop or something in between and we graze it.

There's all this more land.

And so that's the first reason why that's not true.

The second reason why it's not true is because the stock density on regenerative.

We do a high stock density mob grazing where we're moving our cows twice a

day, so they're only on the land for a few hours, and then we move them and we

move them, and we move them, and then the soil recovers very, very quickly.

But the other thing that happens is they're not just browsing and

picking their favorite things.

there's not much choice.

So they're eating whatever's there, so it's evenly getting cut down, and so it

can evenly come back rather than just like the non desirables coming more and more.

And then you eventually have to till it and plant new set,

they're getting everything down.

And so then the desirables can actually come back and be more prolific, but their

saliva, their poop, and their pee is being concentrated in that small area.

So.

Think about right now, a dairy somewhere that has a lagoon filled with manure, and

then they have to figure out how that they can move that onto the fields and they're

spraying it onto the fields, or they have to find, if they don't have enough

fields, they have to find other places to take it or turn it into fertilizer,

But another concept of regenerative agriculture is on farm fertility, where

you're using animals that are on the farm for the fertility, for the crops.

And so it's a system that all works together.

Now, I want your listeners to imagine wherever they live, whatever the

agricultural area it is, for me in California, it will be like driving

on the 10 freeway or the five freeway up towards Northern California.

You just see these fields and fields of kale, cilantro, cabbage, whatever it is.

Or even peaches, but just dead ground underneath it.

A sterile environment with one plant in rows and rows and rows.

Perfect precision rows that a computer laid out.

Well, that environment means that the soil only has whatever

microbiology lives on the kale's root.

There's no habitat, there's no rabbits and squirrels and voles and moles and like

nothing like that living in those fields.

So it's this sterile environment and then we're eating that food

out of that sterile in environment.

But if you imagine my farm or other permaculture and regenerative agriculture

farms, we have corn growing with okra, growing with blueberries, growing.

Like all these things are growing together, in these gardens.

And then we have the cows out in the pasture and they're doing this pass very

quickly Then the grass is growing back up.

But when I walk out into the, right now, we have sorghum, sudan growing

in the, it's summer and on the field.

You can't believe how many different kinds of grasshoppers and dung beetles and

foxes and there's or arboreal foxes and rabbits and all coming out of that field.

Now, if that was a hay field and I was spraying Roundup and growing Bermuda

grass and then combine harvesting it and then feeding it to animals, none of

that life would be getting established.

But because the cows are literally just moving slowly across the field, and then

they go back to the backfield and do that again, and then come back to the orchard

field and then go back to the main field again, this stuff is living in there.

There's so much more life here than when I got here.

And in California, my farm, I only had it for five and a half years.

We brought the soil from a 0.01% organic matter to more than 20% organic matter.

I wanna say that we had a massive amount of food waste coming from the

restaurants that helped us do that.

But we all have a massive amount of food waste going somewhere.

And it could be going back to the farms.

And so it's really about stacking functions.

We're putting in a dairy, but we're also putting in a brewery.

So the brewery will have regenerative organic grain to make beer, and

then, instead of throwing that to the landfill, that's gonna come out

and go right down and feed my dairy cows supplementally to the field.

And so it's all interconnected.

And it all has this like, beautiful way of growing more life.

Does that mean nothing ever dies?

No.

Nature is brutal.

I had a cow just die the other day of some infection and it was intense and

rapid, and I have had neighbor dogs kill a whole herd of sheep at one time.

I have had lions kill multiple sheep before they decide which one they're

gonna pull out of the pen and take.

None of us blame the lion for killing three goats before she takes this one.

That's just her nature.

Well, we are all part of that nature.

And I can say I don't choose to eat meat because I never have, and it's not part

of my food ecosystem that I'm used to.

But I cannot say that I'm causing less death with my diet.

That is the lie.

And so we have to realize we can eat whatever resonates with

our body based on where we live.

But we cannot believe that that choice makes us immune from the death that is

being caused in the agricultural system.

It is literally on all of us to shift the agricultural system to less suffering.

It is all of our responsibility to shift the agricultural system

to less suffering and less abuse.

And by just saying, I'm not going to eat meat.

It literally doesn't do that because we're just creating more and more mono crops.

Everything in the vegan diet is grown in huge fields and

harvested, and there's no life.

There's no integration.

It feels good to say, I'm not eating any flesh.

I'm not a murderer.

It's just not true.

Do I still have a hard time when we send an animal to be harvested?

Yes.

Do I still have a hard time when my husband is harvesting an animal?

Yes.

It's not my nature.

It's not.

It doesn't resonate with me.

But if you don't have a hard time, when you send some animals to

harvest, then you're completely disconnected from what's happening.

It is a sacrifice, but there's so many sacrifices in life.

Those women getting cancer and some of them dying to pick your

strawberries is a sacrifice.

Working jobs that are intimately connected to chemicals is a

sacrifice for our food system.

There is human sacrifice, just like there's animal sacrifice

in the food system, and there is no way to separate ourselves.

So what we have to do is jump in with both feet and say, how can I

create less suffering, more life?

The highest quality of health for the animals and the humans

that I am immediately responsible for or live in community with,

or live in community around.

It's a beautiful invitation and I also hear in what

you've been sharing the challenge of where you yourself have really stepped

up into this space and now are having the challenges around the finances.

for those who are listening and who are inspired and, want to support regenerative

agriculture, what are some practical ways that they can start doing that?

Even if they maybe don't have access to farms or land or don't

own a restaurant, et cetera.

what are some ways they can help to bring more life and more sustainability and

more health to them and those around them.

I hate the word sustainability just because I think

it means to sustain how we are.

So I'm just gonna point that out.

I'm trying to eradicate sustainability as a word in the movement.

I'm not correcting you, but I'm just sharing my view on sustainability.

People ask me this all the time, what can I do?

The consumer dollar is the most powerful.

You vote every day and I vote for shitty stuff every day, and

I vote for good stuff every day.

Like I.

Buy parrot food.

I have parrots.

I buy parrot food on Amazon, gets delivered to the house.

The other day my husband was flying to la he is like, I don't

have any city clothes, honey.

All my clothes, I've poop ball over them and grease.

And I'm like, okay, let me, and I ordered him some jeans on Amazon, right?

Like we all succumb to spending our dollars on things we don't support.

But can we spend the majority of our dollars on things we do support?

Can we, can you find a meat box from a regenerative farm and pay the shipping

and, and whatever that, and the little bit more to the farmer, can we do the

little extra to go to the farmer's market or go to the farm stand to pick

up the eggs, to pick up these things?

That matters.

That is bringing back our resilience and giving up a little bit of our convenience.

And so that's what I think.

And then if anybody has money that they wanna put into something like this,

we're still raising money for this.

So it's a hospitality.

We have a restaurant on the farm, we have a brewery, dairy.

It's all integrated and all together, and we're still raising money.

So if there's someone that's like, I want to support this, you can go

to our website and see that there's a deck at sovereigntyranch.com.

Um, and I'd be happy to have a phone conversation with you about that.

And if this is super far away for you, find someone locally and support

them and make a deal like, Hey, I'm living in a city and I've got this

job and I'm a doctor, or I'm a lawyer and I have to live here, but I really

want the food that you're creating.

How can I support you?

Is there something else I can do besides just buying the food

and support this in happening?

It is the greatest and most important thing of our time.

the way that the current environmental movement is going.

Is all just carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon.

It's just like a carbon scam.

It's not going to make any difference, but it's going to make a lot more people Rich.

Regenerative agriculture is not all over every single channel like

Teslas and windmills and solar panels are because nobody can get

rich from regenerative agriculture.

This is about reconnecting with nature and growing food that grows

healthy people and healthy animals.

And so if you're driving a Tesla and have solar panels on your roof and paid

the upgrade to get your power from the wind, I applaud you that you're trying.

But honestly, my cows are way better for the environment than your Tesla.

And if you think your Tesla is better than cows, I just wanna invite you to

like do some critical thinking, like how could something that's made and

is never gonna biodegrade and never go away somehow be better for the planet

than the greatest technology in taking an unedible thing and making it into

high quality, nutrient dense food that has like every vitamin, every

everything that we need to survive in it?

The cow is the greatest technology on the planet.

It sequesters carbon, it makes food, and it takes areas that we cannot

grow anything for human consumption in and turns it into the highest quality

food, milk, dairy, meat, leather.

And it sequesters carbon.

So start supporting regenerative cattle ranchers.

That is the call of our time, and nobody's gonna get rich off of it, but we can make

a living if the consumers support us.

Yeah, there's a beautiful saying that, speaking of local people.

most of my audience is actually listening from America, Canada, Europe, et cetera.

here in South Africa we have, one of the farmers, his name is actually

Farmer Angus, I think he was in finance or some, gnarly business

stuff in the cities and had his own awakening at some point some years ago.

And has been doing regenerative agriculture for a while.

And on his wall, in huge letters on the outside of the building,

he has a Wendell Berry quote which says, we are all farmers by proxy.

when I read that, it just hit me as like we are all farmers by association.

no matter who you are, no matter how deep in some city, the middle of a city.

You are a part of the farming system.

So which system are you supporting?

The chemical system or the regenerative system?

And those are basically the choices.

And of course, as you've just said so well, Mollie, it's like we're

all compromising, we all buy shit.

But what percentage, what are we prioritizing?

So I love that you've shared that.

And Wendell Berry was one of my awake.

He has a quote about every plate.

There's death on every plate.

And, and that, you know, to be alive is to be in reverence

of what died for you to live.

And can we remember that every time we eat, I'm paraphrasing and

chopping it up and terrible, not as eloquent as he said it, but it is.

he did speak to that.

Yeah.

I would say we have to support the people

that are doing the work.

I'm gonna say one more thing, and this is gonna be controversial.

I lived in a country club of states with a pool and a gated community,

Totally comfortable life and I didn't necessarily wanna give up

that totally comfortable life.

But it's going to take more Mollies.

It's going to take more people that say, and this gentleman you're

talking about that was in finance.

We need more people doing it.

stop waiting for someone else to do it.

the government is not going to save us.

There is nobody coming to save us.

Like when I look at, the sperm count of a man in 2040 is going to be zero.

And I have two son, three sons, but two little sons.

There's nobody coming to save them and take the chemicals outta their food.

It's just up to us to create the new systems.

And it is not easy to live in community.

It is not easy to farm.

It is not easy to do any of those things.

But I was actually talking to someone this morning, I won't say what their name is,

but someone that lived in the city and was working in a job, where he was mostly

on a computer every single day and he struggles from Attention Deficit Disorder.

He was on pharmaceuticals since high school for those, things, and

then through the pandemic and lost his insurance and something, and

started using harder drugs to try to like get whatever that experience

he was getting from the Adderall.

And he's now living on a farm, working full-time on a

farm, making barely any money.

And he's waking up with the sun, not only is he not using the harder drugs

that he was addicted to, But he is not using any of the pharmaceuticals

he's been using since high school.

the suffering that the, I asked how so the suffering, your internal suffering that

had you feel like you needed to do those things, on a scale of like one to 10.

And he was like, it's 90% calmed down.

So this is someone who struggled with depression, struggled with

drugs, struggled with needing drugs from pharmaceuticals

to deal with their A DHD and

their anxiety is now not taking any of those and has far less money, less

security, less all of these things, but his joy and his comfort in his own skin.

Is 90% better according to him.

And so that is a beautiful testament to what we think everybody needs.

We think we need money.

And we do need.

To make this work, I need money.

But there's many community members that are here that are doing a work

trade, that are getting paid a stipend that are whatever those other other

arrangements are, and they don't have the pressure that I have of the money.

And there's a lot of benefits.

So even if you think, I can't go buy a farm.

Of course not many people can't.

But there's many systems where you can go.

There's the WOOFER system.

There's all different ways that you can go and be on a farm and you get

to eat the food and live there and be in the world of it without the

heavy responsibility of the farm.

And on some level, that is a freedom.

even if it seems like no, 'cause I have to live in community.

I have to share and make decision with people.

No, there's actually, talking to this friend this morning, I

realize there's some beautiful freedom in what he's experiencing.

Thank you for offering that, invitation

to people and to all of us.

I know that that's definitely an invitation for me as well.

I have a friend just down the road, a beautiful man, he's a lifelong musician.

He's one of the most skilled, talented musicians I've ever met.

He plays so many instruments.

And some years ago he was watching the world and seeing the way things

were going, and he made a call and he's bought into a farm and

now raises beautiful chickens.

We get our eggs from him, the best eggs ever.

He's got cows coming in, like he's.

And it's hard as fuck.

I mean, he's actually currently gone off to play some professional music

to help to raise funds, which is something not many musicians will say,

I'm gonna go play music to raise money.

Like, usually you have to do something else.

But in his case, as someone who's now getting into farming, as he's

sharing with me, he's like, it's really hard to make any money.

And yet.

It's like the benefits are so many that he's getting outta that, that

are beyond the financial side.

So it makes it worth it.

And everything you've just said is an encouragement to him and to me and to

anyone listening to like, do what we can.

Basically do what we can.

So, yeah.

Thank you for that.

And nobody can do it alone.

And so we all need community.

And all the pieces are important.

We have a meeting every week and we go around and say one thing that we wanna

apologize for, one request, it could be of a specific person or of the community.

And then one thing that we can take responsibility for, moving forward,

shifting it or whatever like that.

And it does take work to be in community.

People get small, no matter how good life is.

People get small and get pissed about little things.

And so you just have to create a space to have that get purged out.

My husband calls it an energy plunger.

He's like, oh, I think we need to have an energy plunger and plunge

out the negative energy that's there.

but it, it's worth it.

Like the work it takes is worth it.

To be honest, we're all gonna be a slave to something.

We all are born into the money slave system, we're mostly slaves

to money and to our governments.

But if we're gonna be a slave to something anyways, you're

gonna be dominated by something.

We might as well do something every day that we love.

And no matter how stressed out I feel, how overwhelmed, how scared

about stuff, I'm never looking at the clock and wanting the day to be over.

I'm always like, oh, it's dark already.

And so I wanna invite people.

No matter what you're doing, if you're looking at the clock in

your day and you're saying, Ugh, two more hours, three more hours.

I never do that in my life.

And that is the win.

No matter how much work, no matter how much stress, no matter how much

tears, blood, sweat, and tears go into all of it, I never do that.

And that is the beauty of living your passion, living a life where

your play and your joy and your work and your family is all integrated.

That is the beauty.

I wanna invite everybody to do something that they love as much as I love

regenerative agriculture, and then I wanna invite everybody to support

regenerative agriculture because it's a pathway forward that makes so much sense.

But there's no oligarchy that can be created out of a stroke of a pen.

And now everybody's gonna make millions on solar panels.

So we, the people have to drive this mission forward.

So I ask you humbly to support myself if you're here in the States.

We have a farm store, we're launching the meat.

we have lamb and pork and beef launching on September 1st.

and then we have vinegar and other products that we make.

Popcorn, tortillas.

Please shop from our store and invest in farmers if you can.

We are always struggling to get the next piece of equipment

we need, or whatever it is.

So please, please support this and please find your life that you love

no matter how hard it is that you still get up and love it every day.

Hmm.

Thank you.

And I, of course, we'll share links to, to you and your, where people

can support you in the show notes.

So please do check that if you're listening and you want to get

involved and it's just a click away.

And as we come to the end, I think you've spoken to it so much in

this, in this conversation, but when you hear We Are Already Free,

what does that bring up for you?

I actually feel a little sad.

Like I feel like that's not my experience.

I want it to be my experience.

And I see all these pathways that different people are changing their status

or pulling, getting to be a, you know, common law and doing this and doing that.

But like in theory, I was born of God and I'm free, but in many ways

I feel very trapped, by the system.

And people will look at my life and say, well, trapped by the system

you're living the, the thing.

And yes, but I gave up my farm in California.

I ran.

From tyranny essentially.

because there was no viable way forward, the county just was

on me about every single thing.

And they wanted, I mean, half a million dollars worth of work on the farm to

bring my codes, my VI code violations.

And I put those in quotation marks because they're municipal codes.

They were never voted on by the people.

they can put a lien against your property.

they told me that if I removed all of my tiny homes that my workers lived

in the farm worker housing and put it on the street, disconnected from

sewer and electricity and water, then they would be unhoused people and

they wouldn't be able to bother them.

So just like, let that sink in.

the same people that are talking about equity and fairness are

saying that I should put people in nons sanitary conditions because

that is not against their rules.

I'm just gonna move their tiny house to the street, and then it's an RV

that an unhoused person is living in.

That's crazy pants.

You cannot live in an RV in Ventura County, but if you are in an RV on the

street and you're an unhoused person, then they can't do anything about it.

but if you're living on a farm, connected to septic, connected to

water, connected to power, being able to drink raw milk and eat fresh avocados

and oranges and eggs from the farm and meat from the farm, that's a problem.

And I asked why and they said, because a child burned in an RV in Ventura County.

Died.

Yeah, people die.

Stop using safety to control us.

So anyways, I say that I, during the pandemic ran from the

tyranny trying to make me safe.

I don't need the government to make me safe.

And so, I want to already be free and I want to envision that.

And I always talk about we're co-creating our future.

So let's not co-create what we don't like.

Let's put our attention on that we are free beings and that

we have to create new systems.

But it's also heartbreaking what the current system has taken away from me.

My restaurants were in a deal for $25 million when the pandemic

hit, and that all fell apart.

And so now they're just closing because I can't make payroll.

So it's hard to feel like we're already free when.

I feel that the government has really taken a lot from

me over the last four years.

Hmm.

Well, thank you Molly.

I appreciate you sharing that so honestly and openly.

I think there's such an important part of this process that we're all

navigating in various ways is grieving.

Is grieving the loss.

And actually one of my first guests is a woman named Emily

Saldaya, free Birth Society.

She is a, create one of the creators of free

Yes, I'm familiar

Yeah.

And she said when I, I think when that this came up, I don't even know if

I asked her the question, 'cause it was one of the very first episodes.

But she said something about it, she's like, your podcast

says we're already free.

She said, we are literally not, we are born into a prison system.

Most people, like all of us to some extent, but tho those especially who

are born into a hospital system in a medicalized way, you literally born into

a prison, you're injected, you're pulled away from your loving care of your mother.

and in my own experience in some of the, transformational journeys I've been on

with plant medicines in these various states, part of that process is coming

to see how much has been lost, how much has been taken, and to mourn that and

grieve that and really just be in that.

So, yeah, I hear you.

I can't imagine what it's like to have put your whole life into

something so precious and then to see it made impossible by an actual

insane system as, Krishnamurti said.

It's no sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society.

It's no sign of being like, you're not healthy if you're well adjusted to our

society as it is, that's not health.

I hear you and I feel you, and I appreciate your reflections and

I appreciate that even with that, knowing that and feeling that and

navigating that, those challenges, like here you are showing up in such

a powerful way for a different way of living and of being in the world.

So thank you.

do you want to hear a plant medicine story or do

you want to end the podcast now?

Let's do a plant medicine story.

You know, my mother is a ayahuasca shaman.

Did you know that she has a church in Maui?

but this is not an Ayahuasca story.

when I was in my early thirties, I just divorced my first husband.

and my dad was doing a ceremony, a land ceremony on his farm in northern

California, with one of the 13 indigenous grandmothers, the Mexican one.

And so it was, mushrooms and I just kind of agreed to do it.

It was a family thing.

he wanted everybody there.

when he purchased the land, the previous owner had killed herself on the property.

he just wanted to check in with the land, ask the forgiveness of the land,

or ask permission to be there and do what he was doing, and ask the energy

to be moved on from that woman's suffering and not to have that carry on.

So.

Everybody came.

I came with my boyfriend at the time and there was a fire and a

ceremony and somewhere early in the ceremony, I got hit by my choice

when I was younger to have abortion.

And I had not, I had an abortion as if it was like a root canal.

I had an abortion, like it was nothing.

My mother had had abortions.

I grew up in a very liberal town, in a liberal world.

It was not a big deal.

I was pregnant by someone I shouldn't be pregnant by, and I just made it go away.

It was that simple.

I never thought about it again.

I just went about my life and I didn't even think I had any sadness.

I didn't think I had any feelings about it.

And I heard this very loud voice with love and compassion, but

very firm ask if I believed I knew better than the divinity of all.

And obviously I can't say I think I know better than the divinity of all of it.

And I said no.

And then it just kept showing fetuses and blood and then this ripple and

ripple and ripple effect and then pulling the fetus out and that

the interconnected of humanity.

And that by pulling one person out, it changes the whole fabric.

And then the fabric of all of humanity changes colors.

And when you're pulling one and pulling and pulling and all these

fetus is getting pulled out and the colors of the humanity changing.

And I'm like, it's like the gnarliest, like, you know, normally

I feel like Ayahuasca has more.

I feel like mushrooms have always been a kind and gentle

medicine, and a laughing medicine.

And let me feel good.

And, and this was, this was not that.

and my uncle, I could see him walking across the field, I assume in real life.

He was walking across the field, and he was going from an old man to a fetus

and back up to an old man and to a fetus and a young man and like this.

And I just, I don't know if I said it out loud or in my head or whatever,

but I said, what do you want from me?

What do you want?

Like, what do you...

and this voice said, I want you to never make that choice again.

Never convince anyone else to make that choice again, and never contribute

financially to that choice being made.

And

I said, okay.

Okay, but I'm not gonna be one of those pro-life people.

I said, I'm not gonna go, I'm not gonna be a pro-life person.

And I never talked to almost anybody about this.

I didn't.

I lived in a world where this is just, it's a woman's rights issue, and

there would be no listening for it.

So I just held this inside and people asked what I got out of the

ceremony and I just said, oh, a lot of, you know, cleaning up stuff

from my past and getting complete.

And I didn't say, I didn't say anything about it.

Years later, my dad comes to me and tells me that he had a ayahuasca

journey with all the abortions he had with my mom, and that like, he had

to be, you know, promise to never, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Almost exactly the same thing.

Never do it again.

And then they wanted him to reverse his vasectomy, even though he was

not gonna continue to have children.

But that it was not the, the vasectomy was not the business.

So.

I go on with my life and my ex-husband is going through a hard time.

His best friend dies.

He comes into the restaurant one night.

We get into an argument in the restaurant.

I'm crying.

I go, I don't, I'm not a drinker.

I go to the back, I'm crying in the pizza station at the restaurant.

And a young cook that's worked for me for a long time goes and gets me a margarita.

I drink the margarita, I drink two margaritas.

I go about with my business.

and that cook says I'm gonna drive you home.

I end up sleeping with this guy.

He's 23 years old, 13 years younger than me, does not speak any English.

I tell him the next morning, do not ever tell anybody this happened.

I'm your boss.

I'm a grownup.

You're 23.

I'm 36.

Never tell anybody this happened ever, ever, ever again.

Two weeks later I'm pregnant and I know that I promised God.

I know.

So I tell a couple of people, they're like, it was a hallucination.

You can't change your whole life 'cause of this.

He doesn't even speak English.

My mom's like deep down the rabbit hole.

She's like, you don't even know who he is.

You don't know.

Like, everybody is like, this is a terrible idea.

And I literally have gone against God when I knew it was against God in my lifetime.

And I know the consequences.

It's never good.

When you don't know, I think you can get away with it.

When you know that something is against, then you cannot get away with it.

And so I go to him and I say, you have to break up with that girl at the

host stand, we have to get married.

And he's like 23.

And he's like, what do you mean, we're gonna get married?

He doesn't speak English.

We're translating through Google Translate.

And.

We get married, this was October something.

We get married on Thanksgiving.

November 28th.

I was pregnant.

Five weeks pregnant in early October.

So anyways, we have the most awkward Christmas.

My family comes to town.

It's just like super awkward.

He doesn't speak English, he moves out of his, wherever he was living, like

comes with two trash bags of stuff and we're now married and our vows were

like, you may think this is crazy, but we're asking our community to not

speak, diminish of us, don't speak negatively, and empower this to work

like literally is what our vows were.

It wasn't like we love each other, whatever.

And I lose the Baby in January

Oh my God.

and so five months in I lose the baby, or four months.

October, November, December, January.

Four months in, I lose the baby and.

Everybody's like, you're free.

You did what God wanted and he freed you.

And I'm like, it can't be that that's what I was supposed to do.

But I'm just like, I'm in the inquiry though.

Like what he, he drinks every night.

He's super young.

Like, this is not what I imagine my life to be.

And we go to do, we, uh, this group, an Indian group comes to the

restaurant and caters this big, like rents out the restaurant and they

ask for us to come out, me and him, the cooks, to come out and to be

acknowledged in front of the group.

And so once they acknowledge us, I asked them, the patriarch and matriarch, it's

their 50th wedding anniversary of this family that's taking up the restaurant.

And I said, what makes you a good couple for 50 years?

what has you still be in love or whatever?

And the woman said, we were an arranged marriage.

So I'm never looking backwards to how he was.

I'm always looking forward to who we can be.

We are building our love and we are building our family and

we are building for tomorrow.

And I never am thinking, I remember when he used to buy me

flowers or anything like that.

It's always, how can we be better next year?

How can we be building more of this in the future?

And someone translated that to my husband and that night he texted me via Google

translator, whatever, and said, maybe that baby arranged our marriage and

maybe we should try to have another baby.

So I got pregnant very quickly and it has not been easy, but it's 11 years

later and we love each other more than almost any of my friends' marriages.

I would say that we have the best marriage.

It is all built.

It is.

He was.

Came from, a tiny village in Mexico.

Culturally, we have nothing in common.

we didn't, we didn't have any foundation of commonality.

We've built everything.

We were different ages.

Commitment to food, ingredients, nothing.

Nothing was the same.

And we've had to build everything and we love each other very much.

Like my husband is brought to tears on a regular basis, acknowledging

who he would be if he had not married me versus who he would be.

And I also recognize that who I would be if I had not married

him was also very different.

During the pandemic.

A teenager shows up at our farm for a volunteer day He's from Guatemala.

He was an unaccompanied minor during the Trump administration.

Reconnected with his parents and essentially very quickly asked if he

could live with us, which is a bold move for a teenager that doesn't,

also, doesn't speak very good English and does not know us at all.

But for whatever reason, my heart felt that we should take him in and his heart.

He saw my YouTube channel and that's why he used $70 to take a taxi to

go to a volunteer day at our farm.

And we adopted him.

he's our child now.

And he's 22.

And the timing puts him about 16 months after my abortion.

So I believe that my child, that I rejected that soul, found their

way back to me because I listened to what was requested of me.

And the family that I have today is because I listened and had

radical faith that God had my back.

That divinity, nature, all of it had my back.

And that if I trust

that it will come back.

And so when we're taking a journey, whether it be ibogaine,

ayahuasca, mushrooms, peyote, I think that we do open up ourselves

chemically to hear the divine.

But that doesn't mean that we can't hear the divine every day when

we connect ourselves to nature.

And so I just wanna invite people to have radical faith in trusting yourself.

And part of why we have such overreaching governments and

they're in every interaction with us, is we don't trust ourselves.

We don't trust God.

We don't trust each other.

So I wanna invite you to, no matter if you're like, I'm always

gonna be pro-choice, that's fine.

I'm not saying what anybody should be, but invite yourself

to trust what you're hearing.

That's all I wanna ask.

That's my plant medicine story.

Wow.

That just brought me to tears of just completely overwhelmed with

the message that you've just shared.

I just, uh, I don't really have anything to, well, I don't

have anything to add to that.

There's nothing to add to that.

That is an incredible story and.

I mean, I, I felt like I went into a psychedelic state when

you were telling that story.

It felt like I was on the outside listening to some, something

that, like someone had written this story that I would like.

What?

No way.

Like that's a cre.

I can't believe you came up with that storyline.

Um, fuck.

Thank you so much.

That really, it's what I needed to hear right now.

And if any anybody's interested, my adopted son has a

Instagram channel called Smar journey.

S Omar's journey with a underscore.

And you can follow his, he loves regenerative agriculture.

He moves the cows every day and he is just so inspired.

Oh, he Googled.

So how he found me is he googled 'can food in the USA make

you sick', and he found Dr.

Mark Hyman.

Dr.

Mark Hyman told him about regenerative agriculture and he reached out to the

biggest little farm, Apricot lane.

they said he wasn't old enough to volunteer.

apparently we didn't have an age group limit.

We probably should of had an age limit for volunteering, but we didn't have one.

And so he literally came that one day and left, and then he came the next weekend

to volunteer and he never left again.

Fuck, Molly, thank you so much.

Thank you for, for bringing that forward.

I'm so glad that I mentioned plant medicine and that you,

you invited that into the space.

I, am gonna so highly recommend that people listen to this

episode when it comes out.

I, I, I wish, I wish that I could like force people sometimes to sit

like some certain episodes when, when we are like, I'm having this chat

and I'm just going, like, everybody I know has to listen to this.

So I, I just hope, I hope people take my recommendation and have

joined us up to this point in this listening 'cause, there's so much

everybody's gonna come to everything when

it's their time and we can't.

I talk about this with Bitcoin.

Like everybody's gonna pay for Bitcoin, whatever.

Is their price they're meant to pay.

I can't force people to think outside of the box and see how Bitcoin can

free us from the money slave system.

I just, can't.

so I've had to surrender that people will come to whatever they come to

at the time that they come to it, and that is the price that they were

meant, or that is the time that they were meant to hear that message.

that's true for me.

Apparently, I have a friend who made a documentary about Bitcoin

when it was like a dollar.

And I didn't look at it.

I didn't watch it.

I didn't, and I was like growing marijuana, had tons of money.

Just fucking going to Vegas and tricking off money.

If I had just spent a hundred dollars on Bitcoin.

But it, it, I didn't, that was not my time.

You know, my, I came into Bitcoin at the, three to $9,000 time and that was

what the price I was meant to hear it at.

You could tell people to read books, you could tell people to look it up.

You could tell people, Bitcoin solves this thing that you're talking about,

but it's literally, you can't force them.

And that's, I'm only say, I'm just bringing that up.

'cause that's my experience about Bitcoin is like your thing about life.

Just want people to listen to this episode.

I was like crazy with that book.

Everything divided by 21 million.

I was trying to get everybody to listen to it and finally I was like, just stop.

I was crazy about it.

Well thank you for the.

If anybody hasn't listened to the

Yeah.

You, you're still recommending it.

I need to listen to the book clearly.

that's a whole topic of conversation, but thank you again, Molly.

I really, honoring your time and your willingness to hop on and be so

enthusiastic and share yourself so openly.

It's been an absolute privilege to have you on We, Are, Already, Free, and yeah.

thank you so much again.

Thank you for being out there and spreading the word

and really encouraging people to.

consider our freedom.

Because the enslavement can only persist if we're not present to it.

Thank you for joining us today on this

journey with Molly Englehardt.

I hope you're walking away with a renewed sense of what's really possible, whether

it's reconnecting with the soil beneath our feet, understanding the delicate

balance of life, or the power of embracing change in both ourselves and the land.

Molly reminded us that regeneration isn't just about the earth, it's also about

our own spirits, our communities, and how we nourish ourselves in every sense.

Please do visit the show notes for the links to Molly's work to her restaurant,

to how you can support her and find local farmers in your area you can support.

And let's make this change together.

It takes the action of all of us as individuals coming together within our

own communities and let's do this thing.

If today's conversation sparked something in you, maybe a desire to dig deeper,

heal more fully, or embrace resilience in your own life, then I have something that

might be just the right next step for you.

Molly spoke beautifully today about the importance of resilience,

both in the way we treat the earth and in how we treat ourselves.

And just like healthy soil provides the foundation for all life.

Creating a strong morning routine can lay the groundwork for a

more empowered, peaceful you.

That's why I'd love to invite you to my five day morning practice challenge.

This challenge is designed to help you kickstart your day

with clarity and intention.

Something that can truly help you thrive in a world that often

pulls us away from ourselves.

Take Adrienne for example.

Who was waking up every day feeling stuck and hopeless.

After joining the challenge, Adrian found a way to transform those heavy mornings

into moments of self-love and acceptance.

Instead of waking up feeling like something was wrong, he now

starts each day with a sense of peace, confidence, and motivation.

As Adrian said, the big difference is how Nathan keeps it simple,

accessible, and very supportive.

This is about helping you feel safe, grounded, and ready

for whatever life brings.

Or like Emma, who found herself struggling with motivation and an overactive mind.

Through the simple, value packed lessons of the challenge, she discovered a way

to regain her spark and get back on track all in just a few minutes each morning.

If you're ready to take that next step to create a life that's more aligned, more

resilient, and more free, then join me in the five day Morning Practice Challenge.

It's completely free, and you can sign up at the link in the show notes.

Let's grow together.

Thanks again for listening.

It's such an honor to be on this journey with you.

I truly love being me with you.

Until next time, let's keep rethinking, keep healing, and

remember, We Are Already Free.