 the distribution question. Have you guys, Sacred Cow, how I see it in the media, but is it educationally distributed, or how is that working for you? I just got my Q2 statement, two grand. Q1 was two grand. I've made a total of $4,000. How do you compete with, because you know, game changers and all of these other vegan films have so much money coming in? It seems like you're doing a great job fighting the good fight, but there's so much money on the other side with the media, and then Joaquin Phoenix has a film coming out. What do we do about all of this? I did meet with Netflix, and for a while it looked like it was going to be a Netflix original, and they were going to actually help produce it, and so we were hopeful they sat on it for way longer than they told me they were going to sit on it, so we were anxiously waiting, and then someone up the flagpole said no way. So that's what happened. Yeah, there's a guy by the name of Jim Greenbaum who made, I think somewhere in the range of about $300 million in the telecom industry, and he works for the Humane Society, and you'll find him on the producers of pretty much every vegan documentary out there. This whole goal is to find whatever niche is currently active, whatever political struggle, societal struggle is going on right now, and then create a film around it. So Joaquin Phoenix has got one on Zoonotic Disease. It'll tell everybody to go vegan. He was involved in C-Spiracy, Cowspiracy with the health, pretty much everyone's out there. So that's the amount of money that's kind of going into influencing people to get into the distribution realm of that, so the money's already there. Right. We just need to find the equal person for the ancestral films and media. Yeah. That is, but... Well, I mean we were really excited to get Nick Offerman on board, and he, you know, contrary to his character on Parks and Rec, he's very intelligent and sensitive and politically active, and thinks there's absolutely nothing progressive about being vegan, although he considers himself progressive. But he didn't have the poll that we needed either to really get us on the Netflix, unfortunately, but we thought for sure once we got him on board that that would really help. We've had a lot of interest from schools, like high school science teachers, and some universities, but it just, you put so much energy into it, and then it's like, I just gotta move on. And it was crowdfunded, so it was people who gave small donations and everything like that, so it didn't set us in the hole to produce the film, and we're entirely grateful for everybody who donated and sponsored it and got the word out there and all of that stuff. It's as opposed to all of these other documentaries that are funded by these things that essentially recycle the same, you know, like we're gonna save the planet through techno utopian ideas. I think it's really reached this point now where, you know, for us it was, we just need to put the information out there. And it's not an inflammatory documentary. I mean, it's not something we we sought to go and, you know, create propagandistic, you know, emotional elements that would hook people in. We just wanted to bring balance to the discussion. At the end? Yeah, they're so great. I felt myself just grinning from ear to ear. I was so happy that the couple started with the leader of conventional farmers, ended up seeing the light. Thank you. For those ones at the end, and actually my assistant Meg is here. Thank you Meg for helping so much on so many things. So she helped, we basically just put a call out, mostly through the Savory Institute Network, so for those of you don't know the Savory Institute, but they actually teach farmers around the world through hubs. So it's information that's custom to that region, how to do regenerative farming. And so almost all of the young farmers at the end are all Savory. From all over? From all over. So they have, they have hubs in Turkey, in, I mean, we had a Maasai farmer in there, all over the place, lots of South America. So it was really nice. They had decisions about what's in the book versus, you know, what you're actually going to put into the film. And I was wondering if, you know, you talk a little bit about, like, because I know it's one thing you talk about the Savory Institute and so on, that sort of reversing the certification, which you kind of went into a bit with the branch in Mexico, but kind of what, how you decided and sort of like, what things, what messages would you like to get out that you couldn't get into the movie? Oh my gosh. Yeah, so I started this project and reached a point where I didn't really know how to move forward because I was doing it all on my own. And I was like, is this a docu series? Because there's so much to tell, right? I could have done a whole 10 series just on nutrition, right? And so that's when I called James like desperate for help. And just to just to how to even construct it. And so we decided that, or he recommended that, that the environmental story be the biggest piece of the film. So in the book, it's nutrition, environment, ethics, like equally. But we just felt for the film, the environmental story was the one we needed to focus on the most. Film is not like the best medium for just information where the book is so information heavy, and it's not like a narrative. We tried initially when we first started filming to actually make it a story about people. So the initial story was actually tracking Sarah Halberg's work in Lafayette, Indiana with reversing type two diabetes with keto. And she was our launching point for health stories, environmental stories. So actually that couple in Indiana, that's who supplies Sarah Halberg with her meat. But we just it got really complicated because the town where she practices Lafayette is really, really poor. And so it just became so clear that there's so much going on with their health stories that had nothing to do with not knowing what to eat, right? There was just so much heavy other things holding them back from achieving great health. So like, everybody in here who, you know, worries about longevity and optimal health, that's a privilege that a lot of people just don't have, period. So anyhow, so James came on and then we started kind of honing in a little bit more on the environmental story. And then we pulled in a writer who watched every single video didn't even know what a room it was. She had to look it up, like in the dictionary. And in one month, she had a script based on all of the interviews, weaving everything in and out, like genius. So she really saved the project, her name's Callie. She works at WGBH in Boston on projects there. And so once we had that, then everything like really clicked into place. So it was really just having that writer help articulate what I was trying to say. But James and I would have made the film if it was just James and I, it would have been like 10 hours long. Because everything's so precious, you don't want to lose anything. There was, yeah, the cutting room floor was insane. But I think we found as we we've been following this for a very long time, we found this real sort of paradigm shift in 2008 with livestock's long shadow, where I think the nutritional and overall long term outcomes for health was really starting to veer away from vilifying red meat for all of that. And so I don't think that a lot of these idealistic or ideological movements really had a good sense of what they were going to do next until that paper came out. And you see this huge pivot to what we're dealing with now. And so for us, we had 90 minutes to, in essence, kind of dispel five documentaries worth of vegan work. Without making it seem reactionary. Trying to be more just cattle and meat can be good. Leverage the film to inspire the younger generation, both those in farming families, who seem to be largely aged out of farming and ranching, because they're just an older subset. So the people who are growing up in those families, but then also new people who might be inspired to take on farming, who aren't growing up in ranching families, and could get excited by the film, the environmental aspect of, hey, I'm going to take charge and I'm going to embrace this, even though I wasn't thinking of before. I think there's a growing movement today already of young people who are environmentalists, they want to work with their hands, they want to be outside and they're becoming farmers and ranchers for sure. That's that's growing. Now you see, you know, schools like Vassar having a sustainable agriculture major, right? So it's very trendy right now. We'll see how many of those actually end up becoming hardworking real farmers that that are doing it. One of the biggest issues to becoming a farmer or ranchers is access to land and capital. So it's just hard, especially now COVID, having made so many people remote. Now the price of suburbia and and more rural areas has really gone up because people don't need to live so close to work anymore. So it's making it even more challenging for access to land and capital. So there are some programs that are set up to help with either land transitions. There's one called land for good that actually works with aging farmers and helps them with the transition process to make sure that that always stays as a farm. So there's there's organizations like that out there now. I started a nonprofit in New York City and we worked for about 10 years, mainly in inner city schools. And when I first started out, nobody was really talking about food. And I've noticed a real sort of transformational change in the way that everybody is talking and wanting transparency and where their food is coming from. And I think people are just documentary really goes into the level which the global south is feeding the global north. I talked to a Malaysian farmer at one of our conferences and the suicide rate there is absolutely insane because everything is extracted from these environments, brought two factories in the global north and then resold as like ultra palatable processed foods to these farmers and farmers communities. And so you can only extract for so long. Palm oil is is one of them that's in 70% of all ultra processed foods. It came about because the trans fat ban, right? So how do you create a fat that's stable at room temperature? Yet you can still cook with it. And it's super cheap because you can grow it with with what's slavery. And so I think that's probably happening in the coconut trade as well. I think people are kind of waking up to that and they're demanding a real change. But meanwhile we have this whole like UN food summit. It's essentially giving carte blanche to these guys to do it under the name of efficiency and sustainability. So you're gonna hear those. Yeah, and you're gonna hear all of those buds words coming out efficiency efficiency. And we're seeing Tyson is gathering up every single like, you know, large confined animal feeding operation. You're gonna see all of these real structural changes all into the name of like, of saving us from ourselves. So that's what the next one's about. See, we're exploring the non uses of animal products. So you mentioned earlier that, where is that, you know, how leather was actually very versatile. A lot of uses. Now you hear a lot of people talking about vegan leather, which is just basically plastic. And it degrades, you know, I see like hard dashboards where they make it out of synthetic stuff and then it, you know, the sun hits it and it's gone in five years and then it evaporate. It's almost as if it gets sticky and then it just sheds into the environment. All these like micro plastics. So I was wondering if there's any, you know, possibly synergy that we can kind of use this as a punch what tap, you know, beyond the just spoke animals or just me. Yeah, definitely. These earrings are from white oak pastures from regenerative leather. They do. Definitely. I'm actually doing a workshop there in October for influencers and health practitioners where it's farm tours and then in the afternoon's like classroom with me. White oak pastures blew my mind when I finally went there. Bluffton, Georgia, it is like the poorest county in Georgia. And what this farmer has done there is incredible. He's built a slaughterhouse. He's does regenerative grazing with all of his cattle. He his office is the old courthouse. The church in town like this town was just empty. The church is the administrative building. He's got a general store and restaurant. I mean, he's created so many jobs like this. There's no success story better than this farm. But we're doing, Meg and I are working on some fiber, regenerative fiber, and and other products to talk about them a lot more in the fall. I saw a image of Greta Thunberg in wool talking about how this is actually a good choice for the environment. That's huge. Because, you know, all the Patagonia fleeces of those are plastic. So I think there's going to be more awareness of, you know, better and worse ways of production. There's a really cool whole company that I'm going to be working with. So yeah, that's great news. Thank you. Yeah. Speaking of Patagonia, have you looked into working with them? They're huge, regenerative food products. Yes, I tried. Oh, I tried everybody. No, I applied for a grant. Yeah, they don't do a lot with beef. They do a lot with bison. Bison have a unique halo over them that cattle don't because they're seen as beautiful and natural where cattle are seen as like evil and devilish when they're practically the same animal, you know, and you can do great grazing with both of them. I mean, bison have their own challenges because they're really hard to handle. They think you can't just load them on a trailer or bring them to a slaughterhouse the same way you can do cattle. They don't they don't like people very much. So they often have to be field harvested. Yeah. Anyhow, but I have not seen Patagonia really get behind beef. I don't even think in Patagonia provisions, there are any beef products. I think it's mostly like salmon and bison and things that seem more eco. Yes, but then they also do sell plastic wool to a lot of it. Yeah. If we just have to watch it again after the trial and is there like a place that we can pay for another viewing? Sure. Yeah. Amazon iTunes. It's on Amazon Prime. Oh, okay. Yep. And I think it's starting to screen on like the voodoo and whatever those other like screening services are. Your screening link is Meg secretly runs the show. Oh, yeah. Nice. Three or four of our reserves large land tracks. We use grazing to keep down invasive grasses, which is a huge problem. In probably throughout the world, but at least in California, it the invasive grasses have a way of kind of like going out with a habitat and species like birds. So on our general headlands coast. Anyway, it's a huge benefit, even though our founder and president is a vegetarian. Yeah, but we understand the importance of that. Yeah. So there's a lot of organizations like that. And in fact, even Senator Wyden's office from Oregon saw the film and I'm working with them on on an initiative to get more regenerative grazing on public land. Unfortunately, most people who are on board with conservation are vegetarian. And so they can get on board with conservation grazing, regenerative grazing. But the fact that I say meat is a healthy food and important is a no go. And so that was actually a huge hurdle for me with funding. So or that I say, you know, if someone can't afford regenerative beef, they should still feed their kids meat. That's absolutely not okay to I'd say 90% of the people I approached for funding for the film. All of them are even the farm in Mexico that's doing all that great work. He sends his cattle to a feedlot to finish. But I couldn't get into that in the film as too complicated to explain. But you can still do amazing grazing. And if it's more economical to the farmer, you can't fault the farmer for selling it to a feedlot. If that's, you know, what he needs to do. Sorry, another question. Just got my mind going here. Some of the biggest conservation groups in the country are country's groups. You're not working with them at all. A lot of those are farmers and a lot of the hunt. Yeah, I was on Steve Ronello's podcast. A lot of the hunter groups though, are wild meat or no meat. It's like, anyone but the out group like, you know, I'll agree with you on all this. But if you don't agree with me on this little thing, then I won't talk to you. So it's it's a challenge. Like the biggest issue that we could probably all agree on even like the animal rights people maybe not, but a little bit closer as if the big industrial farming feedlots were reformed. I mean, I can't imagine when the animal rights people say like, you know, like, don't need any more meat, I'm kind of wondering like, where they're gonna go wandering around the street, they're gonna be like, just grazing in people's back yard. Like what exactly like, can you imagine an ideal world? How that whole system could be transformed? Yeah, I mean, I've been to a bunch of feedlots and they're not all like these awful evil places that are torturing animals and downing cows and all this kind of stuff. Well, if you drive up north and the one on the right like a million, I mean, yeah, appears like there are millions of cows. You can't even imagine that they're treated well, or they're like laying in mud and it just doesn't look humane. So like, how can that bridge be? Yeah, there's there's definitely, I mean, I've served on boards for animal welfare organizations. That's a huge challenge. A bigger challenge is how we raise chicken and pork. It's really disgusting, but we don't see it because we don't see them, you know, they're 100% indoors 100% of their life eating only grain their whole life. Nothing at all regenerative about pork or chicken production on the industrial level and it's less nutritious than red meat. But then there's also major issues with how we farm soy and lots of death and it's not humane and the vegetable industry has major child slavery issues like there's there's problems along everything. But because people see cows and think cows look a lot like dogs, we shouldn't treat cows like that. It's the cows that get the focus but there's awful things that are happening everywhere in every aspect of all food production. So it's it's all a problem. So you mentioned one farm in Mexican that was using regenerative agriculture to produce their cattle and then sending them to a feedlot. Yeah, right. So so even all cattle are grazed on grass. And then they're in America largely finished at feedlots in other countries. Feedlot finished meat is more expensive because you could just keep the cows on grass and it's free, you know, but but because we have all these subsidies and crop insurance programs and everything, it's actually more economical for farmers to do without to do the feedlot system. But even when they're on a feedlot, as I mentioned earlier, they still can be upcycling food we have no use for in our food system, the corn stocks in the ethanol industry, all these other things, they cows can turn that into protein, which is amazing. Right, but even if you're, you know, doing regenerative ag to get them to the feedlot, doing better for those tracks of land, right? Yeah, no, her question was specifically like, how do we deal with the feedlot situation? But there are bigger and smaller feedlots, there's better and worse ways of doing everything. To me, the biggest changer, I think that needs to happen, one of the largest consolidations that saw empty shelves during COVID was food processing. And so these guys, a lot of these farmers are locked into dates where they have to have everything ready, either the pigs or the cows or anything like that. And if they got a foul of the food processors in any way, then that date is either canceled or moved or anything like that. So like one, for the chicken industry, you have to, if you want to start a chicken farm, you have to sign the contract with, say Tyson, to begin with, before you started building anything, build it to their specifications, you buy the feed from them, you buy the chickens from them, antibiotics from them, you take all the risk, you know, you maybe can get insurance for that. Then you sell it back to Tyson at the price that they determine between the other four companies that they're going to pay for chicken. So like a 24 hour KSC bucket of chicken, $24.95, farming is $0.25 of that. And so they can only survive for so long, living off of this like metrics of just increased efficiency and building more and more chickens into a more confined space, you know. But for me, when the rubber hit the road, especially with this was all of these people invading these farmers and saying these guys are monsters because they are hooked into a system that puts them into total penury. They'll lose not only their job, they lose their business, but that's also their family farm. That's their livelihood. And so, you know, I think it's for us, like trying to thread a needle on that and tell all the stories are very difficult, especially processing. It's a big thing, right? Because that became a hyper focus during COVID, right? Everybody was paying attention to that. Yeah, well, back east, there were shops are emptying. We have to finish the official Q&A. Do you guys want to take more questions in the hallway for a few minutes or so the AB team can wrap up here. Yeah, thank you.