00:00:00 Speaker 1: Oh hey, everybody, Episode eighty eight to the Honey Collective. Phil and I are feeling good today, are we? Phil? Friday Friday? Keep behind the curtain. We're recording this on Friday Friday Friday. I'm excited, are you? I don't know, all right, but you should be. I should be. I should to say that I am, Yes, I am. There's a lot of good stuff in episode eight eight, including I took a trip back to Texas to the Hill Country, used to meet with some folks at work at a place called Force of Nature Meets. They make real good, clean food for you, and they do so using regenerative agriculture, good soil, fancy buffalo running around the soil. It's all the circle of life. You'll learn about it coming up in this episode. But before we get into that, Phil and I we're tying up some loose ends talking about the mustache where where there's a lot of controversy about Phil. Segment will address that and and just a lot of a lot of tye and loose ends as we get into the mid November here on the Hunting Collective and now here's the show. I guess I grew up on an older road A pedal to the meadows. I always did what I told until I found out that my brand new closed a game second hand from the rich kids next door. And I grew up fast. I guess I grew up. I mean, there are a thousand things inside of my head I wish I ain't seen, and now I just wanted to a real bad dream or being and like I'm coming apart of the scenes, but thank you, Jack Daniels. Seven. So here in the studio they Phil episode eight eight, still rolling on here in bows Man. Um, you know, I'm a little down and out, Phil. I don't know. Is it the weather. It's kind of gloomy. It's gloomy with today's gloomy. Uh, I'm a little jet lagged. I just went to Texas, Michigan, Texas, and I'm back here. You know, it's Friday. Nobody's in the office, it's everybody's out hunting, and um, it's just a little gloomy. It's just a little gloomy. So they're out there, and listener, Lane, You'll have to excuse me if I sound a little bit melancholy, because that's really what's going on right now. I'm trying to convince Ben to to drink some coffee. No, no, I've never had coffee. You see, that's that's the problem. Right ever in my life did a health thing. No, No, it's just a thing, not like you just never do something. That's what happened. I just never. I just never thought, well, I'll have some coffee, and I just never have have partaken. One time I did have like a latte or something in New Zealand, and I was like strung out for a whole week because if you gave me a five hour energy right now, I would die. Okay, I don't drink Honestly, if you if you had a latte, which is usually like two shots of espresso, and you felt like you were that wired, I'm sure I take it back, you probably shouldn't start drinking coffee, all right. And everybody like we were talking about this when I was at Rome Ranch. I watch you coffee drinkers when you're drinking this this stuff, and it's like, oh, yeah, like the coffee just like smelling. Oh, and then you're drink Oh, it's a weird relationship you have with this liquid. I'd like to meet these people you're I've watched them. I go to the coffee shop, and weirdly watch people drink coffee, just slurp up their coffee, and it's like sexual. Oh yeah, I can't go in the morning without drinking my coffee. Don't don't talk to me until I've had my and there like shirts about it. So anyway, now I'm just not doing it because whatever coffee culture. Coffee culture, okay, lame, lame, um, we gotta get to sho. What should we do? We got some poems, a couple of poems, really two of them, because we praised the last poem. You round the show and you're getting more entries, more poems. I I appreciate that we have the final This is we're ending the conversation about Phil's mustache. That's good. We'll start there. We should start there. We have an email from a guy named thy Sore Hanson, and I like, no, no, he put the finale. He's been listening. He put the phonetics, put the pronunciation under it. Ty sir t y s o R his last name. I think I can get Hanson. Good job, thanks man, um, he says to Ben and Phil Because of Philip and his egregious decision, making I feel like a sailor with no captain, an arrow with no target, a knife with no sharpness because of the engineer. I am lost. You see, I'm a long time listener of the THHC. Since Phil first started tickling our ear drums, I have been a supporter. Mango a marvelous name for a CA nine. How dare you, Benjamin condemn a man for such a wonderful name for the man's best friend. Thank you so much, skippy mcweek stash more like strong mcwoke stash. Wow, let's reopen the voting. Yeah, that's the winner. Since since since it's creation, I've been inspired by the prickly hairs that a dorn fills upper lip. You see, I am I am too unable to produce a mustache to where proudly like Phil. If Callahan's mustache can be prepared to a bore grizz, mine could be compared to a newborn fawn. But Phil's endeavors gave me hope. When he started his journey and was ridiculed for Gary's growth, I said no more. I wanted to support fill from the shadows and girl mustache of my own and wear it proudly. But I've been betrayed. Oh no, not even ten minutes. In episode eighties seven, a bomb was dropped. Phil's mustache was murdered put in the sound effect. Dent't d put that in there? Okay, murdered by the man who birthed it. My disappointment cannot be measured. Philip, middle name Taylor. This is good, this is this is great. My day. Nay, the entire month has been ruined. My hope is after you read this is that you are more aware of your actions. Those actions affect the hearts and emotions of others. Fellow listeners, pray that I will be able to recover from Phil's heinous You know, I had no idea that I was carrying a flame for so many PostScript, Phil, it took me quite a long time to craft this email because of the blinding tears in my eyes in sadness from Louisiana tyser Okay, uh, well, first of all, that's inspiring. How's that inspiring? Oh? I? Like he said, I didn't know my actions would have we cause a ripple effect that that that shook the nation. Apparently this man, this man is he seems heartbroken. I feel bad, you do well? I feel well? Sort of like that thing where you say i'm you don't actually apologize. So I'm saying I'm sorry for my actions. You say I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. Yeah, Like I'm sorry that you're sorry, but I'm not sorry that I shaved my most That that's how I feel. You were pretty clear in the last episode that that that I made the right decision. Yeah, and that you only cared about your family. His opinion, not ours. I still feel that I'm not Tai serves opinion, mostly my opinion. All right, here's a poem. Ready, Okay, Hunting season. I didn't write this, by the way, I'll tell you wrote it later. Hunting season comes by once a year, and with this my summer was spent with archery gear. I flung arows at targets of paper and foam, promised my wife to bear a white tail home. I read everything from Be Honest, Stephen cal I felt like ben Ob could be a pal. I learned to cook for the Meat Eator book. I was ready, able and had the look. The faithful day came and I rose early. I felt like a hunter, solid, honorable, and burly. I jumped in the truck and steered for the land, arrived in the dark, and made my way to the stand. I climbed carefully and sat in my perch. I was fully legit, wearing all the meat Eator merch. As the sun rose, I peacefully looked over the lease and then it hit me. I forgot my release. Mm hmm the end, Peter Oxley, that was good, well done, Yeah, well done. You've got some creative listeners, I really do, and I like to highlight them because it's good. I've run out of things to say, So there show, this is now your show. Wow, Like we got a lot of real sharp listeners here, only I mean creative. Yeah. I like it. I say, keep him, keep him coming, keep him coming. It makes me smile, even in these days when I'm just feeling down, I'm not really sure what to do. This kind of fodder that keeps me going and that brings us to the work. Sharp noticer sharp moment. But this week we had a nomination from our friend Eric Hall. He wrote it, or he wrote and he sent in of a little voicemail and he said this deserves the sharp Moment for not turn So yeah, that's all he said. That's all he said. That's all he said. Not bye, not a fan of the show. Thank you, just hey man, Eric, call you're the best. That was great. You are the best. Everything that you say and do I enjoy. So uh, we will nominate Mark for not being able to start the more, but he can't win the prize. No, that would be that's like nep to him. So we can't give Mark any prizes. He already has the perfect life on the back forty. They're locked in the back forty, can't leave, can't get sick, were filming him, so I mean it's he's got the perfect life. I find. So no, I'm sorry, Eric, we can't do that, but thank you for sending that um and And there's some not sharp moments around the office every week. We just can't give anybody field sharpness, so we gotta keep it to you wonderful listeners. Phil play the jingle, not the sharp moment, so you don't have okay well this week. And another person with a name that I'll probably mess up. His first name is Evan. I got that. His last name is hole Skin. I still like hole Skin. How is it spelled? It's not like I just said it. H O l z G. E n holes holes. You really got to separate that Z and the G holes. So sorry about that, Evan, but you knew that was coming, all right. My work sharp moment took place three years ago. I just started deer hunting at the age of one. The setting takes place in a northern Michigan cabin that belonged to my fiance in the middle of the Manistee National Forest. Now, Evan, do not give away your hotspots here, man, rookie mistake steak. It all began with my fiance's grandfather telling me another one of his spots. These usually involved a vague description of a blind he made from dead trees and branches around thirty years ago. Usually I never found his blinds, but the time this time, he pointed me into a spot that was extremely hard to get to. It involved a fair amount of hiking in a river crossing. I was sure that this would be the home of a giant buck, so I took his advice and set up a tree stand in what I thought to be a prime spot. Fast forward to the end of October. I was on my rut cation and could not wait to finally sit this tree stand for the first time. I was hiking in for an afternoon sit and I got to the river crossing where my plan was to take off my boots, stripped down to my underwear and crossed the river. I was just finishing college and it was too poor to afford waiters. After I got into my undies, I took one step into the river and immediately sunk up into my waist in the muck. I pushed through and got to the other side, but unfortunately my frank and Bean's itself are covered in an nice cold loincloth. After sitting the afternoon hunt commando style and not seeing any deer, it was time to cross the river again. Okay, what's he gonna do? Okay, the first time, yeah, you just had like cold underwear, which how did you not think you were gonna have one underwear? How you didn't play on that part out that's pretty? That's pretty not so you should have packed the back up put it? Yeah? Yeah, this time it was dark. Okay, I stripped down naked. I didn't want to put my cold underwear back on, and I began crossing the river. Unfortunately, I took the wrong path and found myself in mid thigh deep mud along with this mud was some sort of tall grass, the kind of grass it sticks to your skin and makes fine little cuts. Can feel it right now, boy, the simple river crossing had turned into twenty yards of dragging my berries through mud and cut inducing grass. Although I made it through without any major injuries, my scrowed them truly had a work sharp moment. This was the last time I took my fiance's grandfather's advice. The end ouch play the jangle fill not so sharp moment. So you don't have all right, Evan, You and you're scratched up berries are going to get a work sharp field sharpener from our friends at work Sharp. So thank you so much, work Sharp for putting us on. We're having fun putting out your dumb moments, aren't we, Phil. Yes, I've been enjoying it. So that was a mid level dumb. But it included like I seem to be drawn to things that include nudity. Um, we had a abreast. I had some and so that's just me. I have a child's mind, So deal with it. Deal with it. Now. We gotta get to uh the interview portion of the show and what we're gonna do there. There's a lot of things that are wrapped up in the interview you're about to hear, but a few of them, uh, I think probably need a little bit of explanation from my end. So this all goes back Phill. You remember when I went to Berkeley and I interviewed those animal rights specifically Matt Johnson from Direct Action Anywhere, and then also my good friend and UM vegan philosopher Robert C. Jones. So if you haven't listen to those, will take a brief pause and let you go listen to this episodes seventy and seventy one, and we're back. Thanks for listening. Um. What happened during those conversations was enlightening for many reasons, confusing for many reasons. UM, but I think some probably the most talked about episodes of this podcast and in the eight eight that we've done. One thing that came out of that For me, many things came out of it, but one of the things that kind of was at the at the top level of my mind after listening to those and reading all your reaction and kind of having some months now to think it through, it was this idea of factory farming. I mean, I'm a hunter, I and I eat the meat that I kill, and that the notes that I care about my consumption and care about my consumption. I can't just stop at that point. Hunting has driven me to think about gardening and garden and think about owning chickens to get the eggs. Has driven me to do some things that are kind of parallel to my consumption around walking, and that has driven me to think about, like, how do we all consume better as species, even even though though that's a little bit dramatic to say, and how do we consume meat better? Because I just don't believe this the idea of veganism or animal rights that we can stop killing animals and it's gonna be good for all of us, or good even for the animals and for our environment, for our planet. So what's the solution here? I I wonder. I have wondered since that day, and when I went to Berkeley it kind of bubbled some of these ideas up because obviously those folks there are believe in in what I just mentioned and are dimesically opposed kind of what my beliefs are, but in the idea of developing those beliefs and ideas a little bit more we start to wonder fill about our consumption al right, consumption of meat specifically, And so what's a better way to feed everyone? Right? Because you're not a hunter, right, we're gonna get you there. Um, So you guys eat a lot of store bought meat your house about that's true? Would you do you guys eat like grass fed? Do you care? Do you just get whatever you can afford? No judgment, of course. I mean we try to go a couple of steps above kind of the cheap cuts at the grocery store. But um, Honestly, if if you were to ask me, like where it comes from or anything, usually don't usually like look for like at least if it says like organic on the on the label or grass fed, we try to shoot for that, even though organic can that's like a very wishy washy term. You're not gonna find out where it came from exactly. Um, But like beyond that, um no, Like, yeah, we don't do. I do a pretty piss poor job of kind of being Um, but that's not you know, that's normal. Yeah, sure, it's probably common for most of So when I think of like I think of the extremes, these poles, right, where you have somebody that's a venuses. I'm just gonna eat you know, I'm not eating animal products anymore or vegetarian. It's just not gonna eat meat. And then you have somebody like me, He's like, I love me, but I'm gonna go get it and I'm gonna butcher it all myself. And when I pull out of the freezer, I know where the deer lived, where, what it ate, what it You know what muscle group, This is how long it was aged. I know everything about the meat when it comes out. That's that steak is fully informed where I'm concerned. But that if you kind of would remove some of that from the equation. There's millions of people, seven million people in this country, and we gotta feed all of them. How do we better consume meat? Because we know companies like Tyson, JBS, car Gil Smithfield, Perdue, these folks have factory farms and factory problems produced millions of tons of manwer year. They pollute our water agg runoff. There's lots of things man this creates, like dead zones in our water. Pollutes. Our water pollutes are air everywhere from the Chesapeake Bay where I grew up to the Gulf of Mexico. We know these things, we know these things are happening. And then if you listen to vegans, there's a solution, stop consuming meat. Those pollutions will go away. I don't believe that. I believe that large scale agriculture, planting monoculture crops is just as bad for our environment and the folks that you'll hear from in a minute, I think it's worse than large scale animal agriculture. And so here we are with the conundrum that I'd like to try to address, probably in a series of conversation, but definitely in this one with the guys from force and nature. What do we do? We have One solution is dontate any meat. The other solution is eat a bunch of meat and don't know where it comes from. There's got to be something in the middle of that that allows us to care for our environment, get the food that we need for all the people that we have, and make sure well I'll understand the impact. Um, there's's no way all everyone can uh that's not sustainable. But we've gotta figure this all out. So I think that's as connected to me as a hunter and so and he likes to go outside, is anything that I do. And so I want to not only just this podcast, but other podcasts think about this idea and think about it critically, understand what the problem is, and understand the world we can do with it. Um, because if we keep up large scale analizer culture, we're just damning ourselves. Um. If we give it up in a favor of more plant phase diet, we're damning ourselves there too. So we gotta figure figure it out and we gotta be somewhere in the middle. And so that was what brought me to Texas outside of Frederisburg, Texas, to a place called Rome Ranch. But to me, this this is all about how to do better at consumption and it starts with how do we grow it better? How do we do better at butchering it and getting it into people, into people's homes, into the grocery doors, into their homes, and so force the nature is working on that. So get ready to learn about soil fill. You know a lot about soil. Nothing I don't know ship about soil. I know that, but basically said, I know that plants grow out of it, animals eat that, and then I shoot the animals. Well beyond that, I can't say, as I'm an expert in soil biology and the fact that has on ecosystems. But I was able to talk to Taylor, Robbie and Marshall from Force the Nation Meach and learn more about what they do, what they think, and why it's important. So we can listen to that and have a good dialogue. Phil Do you feel like, um, what wouldn't you agree with the idea that meat should be ethically sourced? Right? Well, actually, I mean, like I before I applied for a job at this year company, my wife and I went a little over a month going going meatless, um, just to give it a shot and see if we could do it. Um And not because, uh just because of like the whole um factory farming stuff, and like the impact it has on the environments and the environment and the you know, the cruelty that's sometimes done in those in those establishments, and uh, um just because and I because I didn't even think of like hunting or or you know, finding your own meat as like even like an option and stuff like that, or or anything that the folks at Rome Ranch don nature meets. It's emblematic of everyone. I think a lot of people think that like, well there's factory farms and and like that's it because that's like where a lot of meat comes up, and uh, and that's that. Then that was my mindset when I was like, you know this, this is kind of this kind of sucked up. Well that's what you'll hear it in the pod because I don't want to I want to kind of ruin all of the conversation here, but like in the podcast, I allowed that to happen in episode see when they're like factory farm suck, right, Like, yep, they do, And I was unable to kind of give any more color to that cart of the conversation. Yeah, it sucks, and then we move on. Well there's so much more that to that, And I don't want somebody to be like, trophy hunting sucks and I'm like yep, and we move on. We're gonna have a way larger conversation around that term. Um. Similar with assault rifles within the Second Amendment conversation, Like these terms, they can't be monolithic. I can't just allow something to label something broadly and then walk away from it. So I felt poorly about that fat that part of the conversation. When I was in Berkeley, I felt like I could have had I known more, had I done more research, been able to walk that back a little bit, like, Yeah, factory farming sucks, but hey, here's all the ways farming can be good for the land, can be good for the environment, and can be it for the animals. Um. And so I wanted to pursue that. It's taken me a few months of looking around to find the right folks, but I think the room ranch folks are are perfect for it, because not only are they practicing a different type of agriculture, they are packaging up the meat that is is the is a product and putting it out there for consumers. So, um, they're right in the middle of this conversation. And if you're looking for a solution, I was pretty compelled with what they had to say. And so, Phil, I mean, I think your situation is as normal as could possibly be. It's it's an interesting topic. It's got a lot of like pathways to different areas of conversation. Um. And certainly that you'll listen to this interview and that'll that will come It comes to fruition in some ways. But I think it's a good starting point. It's a good thing to consider, and I hope you enjoy my conversation with Taylor, Robbie and Marshall from Forceination Meats you enjoy, I guess I grew up on and all the row. All right, have you guys ever access to your hunting while you podcast? Before anybody? This is gonna be a first. So we're sitting like I usually, I try to start some of these things by describing where we are. Um, so, I think this will be a pretty interesting one. Tailor, can you take us through. We'll get to who you are in a second, but can you take us through where we are and maybe what we're looking at behind my left shoulder? Yeah, hey, um, okay, So this is the pert Analis River Valley. It's in central Texas. We call it the Hill Country. And uh, we're at Rome Ranch. It's about a thousand acres of regeneratively managed property and we have a multi species ranch here. Yeah, and over my left shoulders some access to here the non native to the country, which we could we could be hunting or podcasting whatever. So if we if we see a big buck, one of us might have to go out there and take care of dispatch it. That's good. Uh, let's go around and interests telling you might as well starts that I've heard from you. Yeah. Hey, I'm Taylor Collins. I'm a land stewart out here at the ranch. My wife Katie and I purchased this property three years ago, and UM, like I said, we manage it holistically and regeneratively. So we're just trying to work in nature's image to heal this place and build habitat for wildlife as well as sequester carbon um infiltrate water, do real amazing things with this property through the use of properly managed bison, turkeys, pigs, chickens, and then all the wildlife that called this place home as well. There are a lot we got to see. We had a tour. We'll gutitar our tour here in a minute, but we'll keep going around. Robbie, UM, Robbie Sandsome. I uh a good fortune to work with Katie and Taylor for for many years and uh most recently, UH get to get to put some bison out here on on Rome Ranch that they generously allow me to run with their much larger herd. And then UH co founder along with them of uh force of nature, which we'll be talking about here a little bit, of course, of course. And you guys have known each other, Taylor and Robbie for how long? High school? I heard even before that middle school? For sure we were we didn't hang out together necessarily, but we always knew each other and respected each other. And um, I got in a lot of trouble and middle school, so Robbie was like, I'm staying away from that guy, and uh, and then we reconnected later in life. You know, we should get into that story because I think it's an important one. Um, what you guys did prior to force the nature kind of what brought you to this point, But then you know, really what brought you together because I think what we're about to talk about, the regener of agriculture and some of the principles and philosophies around it, it gets it gets pretty complicated. Even for me. I was like, as we were talking about during our tour earlier, it took me a minute to pick it up, but as you guys broke it down, I got it. But I think how you got to this point is as interesting as as some of those other pieces that we'll get to So, UM, you guys met in middle school and then the reconnection, I feel like was um around a company called Epic, right, yeah, yeah, correct, tell us about that. Yeah, so we started. UM My wife and I started Epic in two thousand thirteen, and uh, you know, we started Epic at a point in time where she was we're both raw food vegans, and um, that diet and lifestyle wasn't working. And particularly my wife Katie was training for ultra marathons and she had won an iron Man. She won her first iron Man, so she qualified for the World Championship race. And at that point in time, conventional sports science nutrition said, hey, to optimize your health and wellness, you know, you have to consume a diet low and fat, you know, the proteins that our bodies can metabolize or plant based um, you know, like process powders, and then you need syrups to make that stuff taste good. So we were on that path really trying to optimize our own performance and wellness. And uh, my wife was having crazy g I issue US and chronic inflammatory issues and she was told she needed a total knee replacement at the age of twenty and she had exploratory knee surgery. We saw every expert um in Austin, Texas, and you know, it was crazy, like, Okay, you're gonna be on rhumatoid arthritis for the rest of your life. You can't figure out what's going on at twenty and so finally we went to a holistic health practitioner who looked at her diet. First thing he asked was, well, what are you eating. We're like, hey, we're eating clean. We're like raw food vegans. And the guy said, that's your problem right there. What I want you to do is try to, you know, start cooking your vegetables, and I want you to reintroduce high quality, pasture raised, grass fed animal protein back in your diet. And we're pretty extreme with how we're hardwired. And so we made a eighty degree pivot and uh, we cook steak that night, and then the next day, well, we boiled the steak and it was disgusting. Don't ever do that. But it's been so long since we had consumed me we forgot how to cook it. Uh. And then we made bacon the next morning. Now like like oh yeah, this is actually delicious. Uh, And so that changed her life and her trajectory and her symptoms that have been present for over a year went away within days. All of them resolved within weeks. And uh so we're like, well, holy sh it, I forget I failed to mention had a vegan food company too, and so we were like totally bought into that lifestyle and diet made this pivot that brought health and wellness back to her body. And we were putting things together and we're like shocks. So like, if animals in their environments that they were evolutionarily designed to be in consuming the dies they are biologically engineered to eat, can heal our bodies? What can they do for the planet? What can they do for the soil? And so that was a deeper die for us to get into this whole concept of soil health, animal health, human wellness and how it's all interconnected and how it all fundamentally starts at soil. Did you but in becoming vegan, was it you know and essentially a raw food vegan, which is like the extreme version of that died for you? Was it health conscious you mentioned that a little bit or was it just you know, part of the community you were in were like, what drove you to it in the in the beginning because you're pretty young at that point. Yeah, it was it was health conscious at first. And then also there wasn't a lot of access to high quality protein, you know, like in two thousand thirteen and before that, UM, and we didn't want to support an industrialized, commoditized industry where animals are in feed lots, and that was that was the standard at the point in time, like grass fed wasn't readily available, and it wasn't available grabb and go so in a convenient package, and so that was kind of the genesis for us starting EPIC and UM. You know, we were cooking like bacon and steaks and bringing them on bike rides, a hundred mile bike ride, and it was there's nothing better than eating bacon at you know, mile ninety hundred mile bike ride. Challenge you to find something better for your body and spirit. And so we're you know, like, well, we don't have any preconceived limitations of what meat can't and can't do because this is all new to us again, so let's put it in a bar form. And so that's when we launched EPIC and UM. There were other people like us that appreciated the quality and the product and the timing, and so the company just took off and blew up pretty quick. Yeah, I mean it's blown up big time. When you say, was shocking to me how far that company has come in that short of time. Yeah, it's great. There's one Epic products sold every one point four seconds, uh, twenty four hours a day through and in sixty five days a year, which is nuts. And so you at some point when you were building Epic, you called Rob and said, hey, needs some help. Yeah, I'm assuming that's how it went. I mean pretty much. We so we were running this thing and it's a rocket ship, and you know, we're going on gut and and stinct and feel. And as things were getting more serious and this amazing opportunity was unfolding, you know where we could like change, create a new category, change in industry, change how Land is managed well much smarter than us that you guys got to hire someone who's like on top of it, like has skills that you don't. And they're like, you need to hire someone who knows how to like manage money and then can manage a business and manage a team and help grow it. And so we we cold called Robbie and it was like, I'll let you tell this story about that could call, because I think it's it's pretty funny. Yeah, well, I think you talked about me and Taylor. But I think what's interesting is that I grew up in the same neighborhood as Katie as well. Katie is a little younger than Taylor and I but I knew Katie before I knew Taylor and before Taylor knew Katie. UM, so we all had this this this iner mingled uh, this past but like like Taylor said, we all had this mutual respect and appreciation and we had kept in touch through the years, and we've been on a few bike rides and you know, I knew that they were doing this UM clean food company, and we're involved in durance events, so we definitely le um had been uh, you know, keeping up with what each other we're doing. UM But about the time that you know, Epic was still less than a year old, the product had come out and and it was starting to blow up, and all of a sudden, it was it was very clear that things were not only changing quickly, but um uh changing quickly in a way that like Taylor said that there was a need to to bring on more help. I simultaneously was just coming off of leading UM a company that was a super fast grow startup. Right, so number twenty one on the fastest growing companies my first year, number my second year was just it was it was also a rocket ship. And I saw oversaw a ton of stuff. And so because we had been UM, you know, keeping in touch, they knew I had that sort of background and UM. And then because UM professionally and then you know, personally, they knew that we were aligned values wise, which has always been really important for us is that we bring people on, you know, like Marshall, who who folks got to UH and you get to hunt with and who introduced himself earlier to understand what we're doing and the y and the purpose and the passion. And we already had that values alignment. So UM. But I was actually UM on my way to go work in a logistics company. So some large private equity firm was buying up all of these transportation companies that UM, we're actually somewhat tied to oil and gas UM, and I was supposed to come in and UM be the VP over saying that whole roll up and then we were going to flip it and sell it. And it's a lot different than what you're doing right now, a little a little different. Yeah, and uh, you know, this was at the time where Eagleford shild had just been discovered and was taken off and oil was the thing, and we didn't know it was much about fracking as we do today. And in hindsight, tremendously thankful I didn't go down that path and I got to be on this on this journey. But at the time, you know, coming from the background that I did, to the you know, the from the world to go into to a high end business school and they say this is the path, and this is this is the definition of success that you should strive for, and this is these are the rules that you play by. Um, that's what that's why I had. There's like giant access to you're just walking around outside the window actually on our property. Now they're on the property. Might have to take a break. Have we seen any bucks out there? Can you spot those with the scope and see if what's going on over there? Yeah? I love that. I love how elusive they were this morning and we were hunting and then how they're actually showing up podcast and they want to get in on the action. They know they've been around me enough to know. Just taunt this fella, they'll come out there. There's some weird I know, poor listeners, they have to take a nice listen to us. Just looking over, they can all of our draws dragging the floor as we were searching for this all data. They're fine. They would be doing the same thing if they were here, if all the people listening were here, you would be doing the same thing. It's giant access. You're walking around behind my left shoulder. Imagine imagine a beautiful hill country sunset with trees that are the leaves are changing colors. It's the perfect time of day low you know, low son and the sky. It's just beautiful. And there's these It's like golden field covered in delicious tasty animals. String of access to your working themselves out across the field just keeps growing. Anyway, So if we are like, seriously, if we gotta go, we gotta go. I mean, there's no no shame in that game. If we're gonna get out there, yeah, myrtle, and we're gonna get the Myrtle too. I wish Myrtle was here. Um So Taylor Taylor, long story short, Taylor, Um, I was I was supposed to move into Houston, and uh, Taylor kind of reached out and just said, hey, we need help looking for this position. At the time, it was, you know, this company called Thunderbird and it was small, and I thought, okay, well, it's neat that you are doing that. I'm glad that you all are growing. I'll try to connect you with somebody that you know it might be a good fit. I got this other thing going on, you know. I didn't think it would be an opportunity for me, and I don't think that they thought it would be an opportunity either. It was just trying to trying to sort of network, and then our emails as I as I recall it, Taylor, our emails sort of cross paths where once we realized what we were talking about. I was thinking like, oh man, this would be the perfect opportunity. This sounds like a dream come true. It's too bad you know this and this and this, And I think you responded similarly, Man, you'd be a great fit. You know. It's too bad that you're that you're moving and going on. And I actually took off the next day to go to Croatia for my last year raw trip before I finally moved a rooted and moved from Austin. And so I spent the next fourteen days talking on the phone to Katie and Taylor every night at about one or two in the morning my time, it was six or seven at night their time. And by the time I came back, it was two days away from moving to Houston and signed up with Force of Nature or sorry, signed up with Epic at the same Yeah, yeah, so get this. We hired Robbie, were like, all right, you're the new cfo ceoo, go do something important. And then Robbie like the next day's like, hey guys, you're gonna run out of money in two days. Like, Robbie, do your job, bro get us more money. Robbie, it's terrible. We just hired you. We aren't out of money. There was a lot of second guessing decision making at that point, like what the hell did I just I was just about to say from Robbie's potter views, like h my disdrupper of my life joined this company. Now it was it was awesome though. I mean at the you know, I think people that know anything about business, no you you you you invest in people, and it was really clear that that Katie and Taylor are just remarkable humans and they're really special and division and UM was was one that you know, we can all we can all look back on now and say it was truly remarkable. It still is and so I think within two and a half months, we had sold off all of the Vegan energy bar companies so we could focus all of our time on Epic. We had closed around of funding, we had closed a bridge loan to get us to the round of funding since we were running out of money. In two days, we've made our first annual plan and um our team was hyped and ready to go crush it and we did. Yeah, now that company is soaring. I mean, I don't know, I don't know what it's worth or if you want to say what it's worth, but it's worth plenty. It's worth plenty. I think everybody knows. What were you telling me? The stat are like an Epic product is consumed once every it's like one point four seconds. There's one soul. So yeah, part of the crazy part of that journey actually is is we sold Epic two General Mills, right, you've part of those guys before in two thousand and sixteen, and um, you know, we built the brand. We never was that the intention to sell the brand. It was always this brand was developed to drive positive change in agriculture, especially livestock agriculture. But we always knew in the back of our head if we could find a partner that could scale it bigger and better than we could ever ever accomplished independently or in our lifetimes, that that was to be a no brainer. And so you know, we had three different international multinational companies try to acquire Epic one within the first three months of the business, and we walked away from that because it wasn't the partner that aligned with our values. And so yeah, we sold the General Mills and we're still guiding and leading that vision, but doing other things in life like Rome and Force of Nature and so it's all really positive experience. Yeah, I mean to in that short of a time, you know, when I when we started this conversation, I expect you said yo back in two thousand and five when we started this, but I mean, in that short of time, I think it says a lot about you guys and what you believe in. I mean, I think we'll talk a little bit about this ranch and Force of Nature, UM, because I think it leads to a lot of the challenge. He's gonna try to keep this all packaged and on tracks where everybody can kind of stick with it, because there's so much here that not only your lifestyle, like the way you guys think your energy, UM, all of that is to me unique, and I think it's de noted by your success, but also just like what you've created in this landscape here and in the hill country. UM, it's impressive. And then Marshall came along, Old Marshall. Yeah, introduce yourself, Marshall. Yeah. So like UM, I came on with the meat company Force of Nature, UM right before we launched this late summer early fall. Been in the consumer products industry now for better part of a decade, and UM spent all of my life just being extremely interested in agriculture and meat, and through hunting, just really became more and more interested in how I fed my family, where the meat came from, and and that just leads you down the path of thinking about where store bought meat comes from and how those animals are treated and how they're raised. And uh, I got to know some of the guys that the EPIC team over the last couple of years just being in the industry, and UM started to have conversations about what they were doing at EPIC and was super interested and excited about it. But you know, timing just never worked out. And then the conversation shifted over the last couple of months to start talking about force of nature and this this idea to really scale the mission and uh, you know, create this company around regeneral of agriculture, and it was just extremely excited for me and it just kind of married my passions with kind of what I've done professionally. And it's been a dream, opportunity, opportunity so far. I'm extremely excited to see where it where it takes us. Yeah, I mean this thing is UM. I mean it's new, right, it's raw, Like, it's got a lot of your ideas and your and your energies and your philosophies and iologies like implanted in it. Not only the ranch in which we're sitting, but the company that you guys was September you launched it is that right or was it? Sometimes this fall with Force the Nation launched, we did. We did a broader launch in September. We were doing some local UM market testing through the first part of the year, but um, yeah, we took it. We took it to the world in September. Yeah. Well, I guess you know, you guys know who I am, but I should probably kind of take everyone through why I'm here and why I was particularly interested in this conversation. I mean it goes back to everybody hopefully have listened to our Berkeley episodes with Dr Riwerts, C. Jones and Matt Johnson from Direct Action everywhere where I really wanted to just one be challenged by the ideas of folks that were diametrically opposed to to me and my beliefs, kind of get out of my echo chamber and go to the opposite of what it is, my hunting community echo chamber, and see how my ideas would hold up. And in doing that, Um, one of the big criticisms that I received in that and it wasn't you know, people were generally um laudatory about those podcasts. But something that bothered me from it was was something that these vegans and animal rights access tend to do is use factory farming two label an entire industry, and that term in in in those conversations. I just kind of swept away the factory farming label, like, yep, I agree with you, that's terrible, let's move on. UM. I felt that I had an inability to go deeper into that subject with them and challenge them on that idea and kind of say, well, look, yes, factory farming is something we all can disagree with, but this isn't a monolith that's that There's there's so many other types of animal agriculture that need to be discussed, that should be discussed. So that was something that it bothered me, and it bothered me for the last three months. UM. And then when Marshall reached out with an opportunity to talk to you guys about this and I started reading about what you were doing, reading about Regentda agriculture, I was like, man, this could be the thing that I was looking for, um, the solution not to my personal problem I'm not a farmer, but to my more existential problem of like, what is the solution to feeding everyone on this planet and not also destroying it, whether that is large scale um agriculture or large scale factory farming. I think the facts are out there saying that this is destroying our planet. Whether it's clean water, clean air, clean soil, it doesn't really matter. All those things are being degradated through this practice. So I started to look around for for a kind of my own personal solution, and I think that is here and what you guys are doing, um there is people We talked about this earlier during our tour of the ranch. People talk about um trophy. Hunting is this moniker to kind of label all of hunting, right, You'll you'll take that term and you'll you'll broadly brush it over everybody that goes hunting. And now hunting is an ego, bloodthirsty, ego trip um and all farming is factory you know, chicken stuffed into our warehouse and being shoveled around their own ship. We know both of those aren't true. But um, I would say back in like episode seventy and seventy one, I definitely got um let that pass. And that's something that I wanted to for my personal sake, but for everybody who listens to go and explore that a little bit further, and a lot of you wrote in and asked me to do that. So that's why I'm here. So I guess now we know why we're all here. Um Taylor, can you give us just a how do you give us a brief rundown of of Rome Ranch? But can you just give us kind of like this landscape and how this came to you? I mean, obviously, through Epic you really started caring about the health of ecosystems and regenerative nature, like, but how did this place come to your mind? Yeah, So when we sold Epic, we had an opportunity to double down on the mission and put put our money where our mouth is. And so that was for us investing in land and um so we intentionally sought the most highly degraded piece of property we could find, which isn't hard. All farmland in the United States and globally is degraded. And so this particular property that the entire enterprise had collapsed, It had imploded because you know, the way that we think about farming right now, whether you grow plants or you're doing industrialized livestock models, is how do you extract maximum product at the least amount of cost, and so you're just always taking taking as much as you can from the land, and over time you strip your soil of the ability to produce food. And so this place was addicted to chemical inputs. It only grew grass through synthetic chemical fertilizer and was addicted to pesticides and herbicides. So as a monoculture, yeah, we should circle back to that, because when we were walking in one of the fields out here, you said, like this this field, when we took the chemicals away from it, it was barren the soil, it was so degradated by the farming practices I've been going on here for how many decades? Who knows that it is useless without the chemical treatment in these fields too. This is if you consume a plant based diet and you go to the grocery store, that's these fields here that were in that degraded state. Those are the fields that your food has grown on. There's no way to do large scale plant based agriculture in a way that's complementary or enriches ecosystems or nature. Um. You can do it on very small scale, and it's challenging, and you have to have animals as a part of that. But um, this was this was just the conventional agricultural piece of property, and so we thought this is perfect. You know, like we took soil samples and we were less than half a percent of organic matter, which out here it should be somewhere closer to eight percent. UM. It was unprofitable, nothing was growing. You couldn't have livestock out here. So this is the land for us to show that through proper animal management, we can actually make it better, heal it over time. And um, you know, like if you would have asked me when we bought the land, how long would it take to get a hundred bison on your property? I would have thought we were doing good if it took ten years. And we've been able to accomplish that in in little under three years. I think we should set up before we get too deep into this the problem that we face right because there's we talked about, you know, talking to vegans and talking to folks animal rights activists and folks that would say, like, just stop eating meat. You know that there's too many there's too many cows, there's too many factory farms. So we just stopped eating all that we stopped ingesting meat, we stopped slaughtering animals for their flesh. It would solve our problem environmentally, consciously. Whatever. However, you would line those things up so that there's one extreme there, I would imagine that the other extreme kind of lives with Tyson and card Gil and Purdue and what's currently going on, the capitalistic version of the factory farms and killing animals for mass production and drive through stores where chicken comes in a bag with a picture of a chicken on it, which is my favorite thing um in the world. Like, you have those two diametrically pose way to kind of treat consumption. I know that's kind of polar, but on a mass scale, it doesn't seem to me. Like when I walk through the gates here at Rome Ranch, I'm like, Oh, on a mass scale, how do we solve this problem that we have to eat? Our American diets are so trained to process foods, were so trained to having it. Now we're so trained to being disconnected from this we all have to eat. There's three million of us hanging around. What is it that we are going to do to solve this problem that is clearly degradating our land from a from your cultural side and from um farming of animals. So there's like, to me, there's really no solution within those two polar discussions that can be achieved without reckon our planet, which we're currently kind of doing. Yeah, yeah, I was. I was just gonna say, I think it's important because because you reference your your earlier podcast on the on the on the vegan side of the conversation, and I think, you know, yeah, I totally agree. You just presented exactly what I wanted to what I wanted to call out the two extremes, right, I mean, the most the worst example of meat production is challenged, and we need to do better. We have to do better for the future of our planet because it's the right thing to do for the welfare those animals. You know. Where as unhealthy population as we've ever been first time ever, you know, are the next generation is supposed to have share lives in the than than ours. You know, there's all of these signals out there that says we need to be better. The answer is not to stop eating meat, all right, The answer is better meat. And one of the things that I would I would say in response to that is, you know what what you do, and a lot of your listeners do you know, going out and harvesting your own animals that are wild on the terrain, that's that's that's that would be my number one directive to connect with your food, go out and experience nature, gain a new appreciation, you know, all of the things that you get from living that lifestyle. UM. Not to mention the fact that the food that you're going to be nourishing yourself and your family with is you know, the stuff that you were designed for, right UM. And you're playing your role as a as a human omnivore and a predator species native to this planet UM in the ecosystem. Unfortunately, we live in a time when that's you know, not realistic for every person. And that doesn't mean that they have to quit eating meat either, It just means again, better meat. And there are plenty, even though it's a small percentage of the industry, there are plenty of ranches just like Rome Ranch here that are regeneratively focused, multi species, often doing animal and plant based agriculture, all doing it in the image of nature, UM in a way that we can be proud to support. And so I think you know that that is the path that we need to be going down. And I think internationally there are governments and not for profits and regulatory bodies that are are coming to the same conclusion and saying the same things, you know, similar to the conclusions that you've that you've drawn for yourself. And so Taylor, you want to what you were going to talk about as far as the United Nations, Uh view on that? Yeah, I mean the United Nations. There's a Food and Agriculture organization that issued a report a couple of years ago that said, we have sixty harvest left on the planet. So that's sixty years of food production with our current stated degraded soil. So no matter what side of the equation you're if your plant based or animal based, with your diet and your lifestyle choices, we're faced with the same challenges and so we have to do something. Um where global civilization. So what is the global problem if our food production system collapses? It's a big deal internationally, and so one thing that we're figuring out and this is amazing, but it's again looking back and and ranching and making management decisions in nature's images. How can we restore and rebuild? And there's so much we can do, but the animals have to be present on the land because they're the catalyst through our biggest tool. There's no technology that's better than a ruminant animal grazing in nature's image for creating all these positive ecological changes that are nourishing our soils, that are sequestering carbon. I mean, this is like our our greatest tool too. You know, addressing climate change and reversing some of these issues is taking that atmosphere of carbon put it in the soil. Well, you know what acts as the super highway for sequestering atmospheric carbon is thriving grasslands. The only way to have a thriving grassland is have animals present, rumored animals because they co evolve for millions of years. If you remove the animals from the grasslands, grass lands deterior Right. Can you explain ruminant animals? Yeah, the room in is a four compartment stomach, and so it's animals like cattle, bison, sheep, goats, um that we're designed biologically engineered to eat grass and other plants. Good, and we'll get to you know, you guys have some really I think these concepts can kind of be tough to get your arms around, but seeing it in the context of this ranch made it for me personally something that's something I really wanted to learn about and I have in the last day and a half here, Like seeing it in person, being able to see the bison on the landscape in the field, looking at the grass, breaking down the soil, talking about what you're looking for in the soil, comparing the color and the texture and the feeling of this dirt and why that's important. I think is incredibly enlightening, lightning to me, and I'd like to get that across the people. So I think when we talk about regentative agriculture, let me just first say that I think that there is when when I was challenged on a previous podcast about kind of what are the hunters I hang out with believe in? Or what are we're like, what are the core principles of the people that I hang out with. This was in regards to predators, but I think in general we'll talking about balance, like we I think the people that I hang around with an hunt are all about balance and all about ecosystems, and all about the meat, and all about this whole circle of course, the circle of life, like the corny line goes but pe somebody asked me that, and that's that's how I explained it. Of course, there are other hunters out there that don't think like that. That um could be labeled in certain ways, and I think this is the same way. Like when I come and I meet you guys, I feel like here's an example of something that that is that that brings true to me from the outside when I was just reading about it and look can add it and studying what you guys do, and then from the inside when I actually got to see it, it rings true to me. Like the motivations ring true. Um, you guys have lots of money, so you're good. You're not trying to get rich off this. You're trying to change the way the status quo and trying to move things forward. Um. So I would say that, like, that's how it feels like that to me. Like the hunters I hang out with, I think we all kind of have the same ethos. I think it connects to what you do here at Rome Ranch, whether there was hunting here or not, which there is. There's a connection in the ideology, in the way that people think, the way that you guys think so I think when when folks are when you're trying to come at this, that's that's kind of what connected me to this place, why I wanted to come down and check it out. Um, both when we should we should start with the five tenants, right, you guys gave me the five tenants of regenitive agriculture. I think that probably explains it. It's way deeper than these five things. But can you guys, Robbie, can you just run us down with the five five tenants or principles? Sure? And then and then I think I have an example that might help to to pay a picture for for your for your listeners after after we go through the five principles and so they're explained to a few different ways. Um. The first one though is you know, probably my favorite, and that is to limit disturbance of the soil. And so that can be chemical disturbance or mechanical disturbance. Chemical disturbances what we do a lot of and in our agriculture system today, which is spray it with herbicides and fungicides and pesticides and fertilizers and all of these things that are the the ancestors of you know, the the chemical warfare UM organizations that helped us get through a couple of world wars and now help us UM engage in chemical warfare against nature UM. And then the mechanical disturbance part of that is heavy tillage UM, which we do for a lot of reasons, but that absolutely disrupts and kills the soiled biology, which is a fantastically complex but remarkably important UM part of our food system. Yeah, we do a whole podcast just on what's in the soil UM. Well maybe should, but but it's that's an interesting one. But we'll turn through this and get back. We just want to take off the list. We don't want to get deep into each one, right, So so the second principle and and no really and I don't know, I'll say in no particular order, they're all important, but UM, the second one is to armor the soil. So you want to keep any bare dirt is the enemy or bare soil is the enemy. Right, So many bad things happen, and we can get into that UM, but it needs to be covered UM with with with organic matter, right, ideally living plants with roots and green leaves that are you know, doing photosynthesis UM. And then um diversity um so, diversity of plants, diversity of um animal species. You know it's just bio diversity. You want a balanced ecosystem. You were talking about that a second ago. UM. The fourth is living plants, right, so I talked about it and cover, but um living the living root is what connects everything beneath the soil, which is a which is called the rhizo sphere. It's an entire ecosystem that is very alive. UM. Nothing connects that to the sun, but living roots. Now you should see these guys get excited about earthworms. God bless if there was a dung beetle out there, what you guys might do, Like there are shots of whiskey coming out. We got what it's it's to watch. I sorry to interrupted. I just like I get feel the passion for this stuff, Like to watch these guys in this room pick up a chunk of dirt and like finger through it and look at it and talk about it with passion. Earlier when we were standing on the ranch, I just described like the way that I see this stuff is black and white, Right, I see dirt, plants grow out, deer eat plants, I shoot deer, I eat plants. So that's great, um, when you start to understand this type of agriculture and also just this this part of our world which is relatively undiscovered. Like once you start to understand, you can see things in color again, Like the way that these guys see this landscape and they walk around and what they point to and what they're looking for are are totally different than what I would be looking for or what I think most folks would be looking for. So continue sorry, And and the last one is integrated animals, um. And so those would be the five, the five principles of Virginiative agriculture. And I think the tie and to the point I was making earlier about your you know, you know, helping give an illustration for for folks listening, and would be the short film or documentary whatever it is on Yellowstone. I think not everybody's seen it, but probably most of your listeners have where they you know, reintroduce wolves and then you see where once challenging environment and you know that that is a component that restores balance, right, And I think trophic cascade being something that they talk about. You know, when there are no predators, there's more elk. The elk are eating all the grasses, there's less grasses. That's a challenge concept about a concept that Yeah, and and it's in its swing, is right, I mean it's sometimes it's sometimes that happens in different scenarios and different systems and has different results. And you know nature is always trying to restore balance and sometimes those pendulums swing. But I think the key, the key principle there is UM. Everything that is here naturally has a place, is there's a purpose. UM, it has an important role to play and and that and that that includes UM the animals that that we farm for for agriculture and the food that we we grow to nourish ourselves. Right, And I think UM, it's shortsighted to say that the elimination of those those species which play UM, which have the potential to play incredibly important roles in our natural ecosystems that aren't being fulfilled right now is is absolutely taking us down a dangerous path where UM, we think that we can invent new technologies to do what nature is well adept at doing. UM. And we and we we need to be very cautious and in um over inflating our own sense of what we're capable of us, capable of us humans and may be recognizing in a sense of our case of our agriculture that nature got it right. Yeah, and I think there there is a there's interesting concepts all around here, but one of them that I was struck by is kind of like you guys are selling, Um, you can go get a force in nature package of meat, whether it's turkey or bison or we just had uh support for um, some wild pigs for for breakfast here. Um, all those things you're selling, that's package. It's the kind of awesome branding, awesome label, like people can go and buy and consume that. That's kind of like the end of the story at some level, like all these things happen and at the end somebody gets to enjoy this nice meal. In the very beginning, there's a chunk of dirt, right like something. It seemed to me that there there was this like very micro to macro story um or intangible to tangible story at least for the end consumer. So I think we should probably start at the dirt and then eventually we'll get to and that the animals that live on it and help it, and then you guys that kill it package it up, send it out there in the world. I think that's a good way to kind of run through all this and understand it. But the soil part of it is, it's the key. It's like the keystone to all of this, at least it seems to me. You tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me like it's it's the thing that starts the engine here um for a better landscape. Am I right in saying that, Like, you've gotta have soil, Absolutely, And I think something to tie back to those five key principles of soil health that Robbie's just spoke about. I mean, when you think about a plant based diet or plant based agriculture, you are fighting each one of those principles in order to be successful. You're constantly combating nature. You're tilling your soil, you're using chemicals, you're planning monocultures, you have fallow fields for the majority of the year, and you're not incorporating animals, and so that's a big problem. So plant based agriculture and the plant based diet has gotten this crazy pass for decades where it's perceived that it's better for the planet, but it's it's not, I promise you. And today we walked in some of our fields and it was like, hey, Ben, this field you're standing in, this was monoculture road crops for you know, like fifty years. And then we walked over twenty five ft same soil, same rain type, you know, the same climate, and it's like this particular part that you're in has never been tilled, it's never been sprayed, it's never been planted. And it's like Ben, it's like, yeah, I see it, man, this is like way better. And we dug in the soil and you could see it and it smelt better and there was more life and more animals in that area. So it's like, it's crazy to me that people think that's how disconnected people are with agriculture. But there's a big problem with plant based agriculture. Yeah, and it would you if you had to um put those two things up together, right, if you were giving two devils on each shoulder, and it was like, hey, on on one side, factory farming polluting our water, it's killing you know, it's disconnected from our food. The other side is is large scale agriculture. This crazy, these big monocultures to eat ourselves corn and beans and go down the list, right, what you would you rank? How would you rank them? How would you talk about that? Would you say, like the factory firm is way worse or does it rank below a big corn field? Yeah? I think I think the most destructive tools we've ever created as a civilization are probably like the till and then the chemicals used to grow plants um and so I mean, like we can take over grazed fields where animals were mismanaged and it was desertified, and we can get those fields back to a productive state where it's a habitat and it's a questioning carbon and allowing water to infiltrate. We can do that and you know, less than five years, no problem. But if it's a farmed field, I mean, it can take twenty to thirty years, and so it's discouraging. But it's way harder on the land. I mean, there's nothing worse for the environment than growing monocultures of roal crops at an industrial scale, right, And I think that brings us to like the state of our soil. I don't know if you can talk it on a national scale, but I mean you certainly could talk about it on a local scale. And I think, as you said earlier, the reason that you bought this farm is to kind of exemplify it would be analogous to kind of what's happening across this country, especially in Texas and across the Midwest. So, like, what's the soil like here, and what do you want it to be like? And why is it important? Because it's yeah, I mean, it's all we talked about today almost so so one tablespoon of healthy soil, functioning soil should have more living organisms than all humans on the face of the planet since the starting a time. And you know it's the last it's the final frontier. As far as what humans understand and as far as ecosystems, we only understand about one percent of what's actually in healthy soil. So if you look at this property and you say we're less than half a percent organic matter, our entire system is broken. And you can see that too. So like look at us DA data dating back you know a d play years and you know in the last two generations, my grandparents, for every one pound of meat they would consume this generation, I have to consume two pounds get the same vitamins and minerals. The same happens with plants. So for every one orange my grandparents would eat, I have to eat eight to get the same vitamins and minerals, which is crazy. And so it's like where did that go? Did it just disappear? And the fact is that it all starts with the soil. It's the foundation for human health, for plant health, for animal health, and if it's been extracted in mind, then the entire system doesn't work. So a really good example today that we talked about is for every one percent increase in organic matter that you can build in your soil, you're able to capture and hold twenty thou gallons of rainfall per acre. So that's insane if you think about that, because one of the biggest challenges in Texas and a lot of the Southwest, a lot of the world is will go long periods of time without rain, or when we get rain, will get like ten inches of rain in one hour. I mean, it can be crazy. And so the health of your soil um healthy oil acts as a sponge, right, so you can actually capture that crazy ten inches of rain um or if you don't have healthy soil it's can be lost. So when we bought the property something along with healthy soil. Yeah, all the erosion that happens and it all goes downstream. And you know, when we bought the property, we would do these simple infiltration test where you take PDC pipe, get analogy and water bottle and you would measure out what an inch of rainfall would be and you can pour it in this pipe and you time how long it takes for that water to get into the soil. And we had some areas of the property that were like forty five minutes to capture one inch of rain. So, I mean, can you imagine if you have ten inches of rain an hour's Yeah, you're not you're not optimizing and maximizing that. Yeah. I lived at this cunture for for four years and there was like a catastrophic flood pretty much every year that I lived here. I mean, the Pedernalege River would flood almost every year. I mean, we had had some real problems with that. And that's you know, I think when we when we when I look back at that now, like there's a piece of that story I didn't understand. I don't understand why that was happening, and in between those floods we're in a drought. And and like we were talking about, you know, there is if if that if, if that rainfall is effective, and if that soil is healthy, that is hundreds of thousands of gallons of stored water per acre that we've lost to get us through those periods between those rain events. And not not to mention that moisture in the soil actually affects small local climates. You know, you see you know, when you walk through a field of grass in the morning when they're on a change in tepicture day, you see do and moisture on the ground. When you walk through the field of bare dirt, you don't see those things, right, So there's it. Actually, it literally will have an impact on the on the climate and the precipitation in an area. And when you think about those concepts, when you think about how much of this country is monocultural, monoculture, road crop um and and tilled up um throughout the year. We talked about it earlier, just corn alone is ten percent of the land mass of the United States. I think how big the that is on a map, and you're looking even at a global scale, and just imagine ten percent of that being nothing but corn. That is the exact exact embodiment being being farmed in a way, that's the embodiment of all these things that we're talking about. And so that is how agriculture and the scale of agriculture UM has had the impact that it has UM in terms of there being some negative and unintended consequences with how we've um, how we've evolved our agriculture practices, and now that we know better UM, we should be recognizing and learning from and changing those behaviors. And that really starts and stops with the consumer um and creating awareness. And then you know, of course, as soon as the consumer says, hey, we want better and this is what we're looking for, everybody's going to produce it because nobody wants to make something consumer doesn't want. Yeah, that's something we haven't talked about, is how how we got a god here from a large GoGG perspective. I mean, we know kind of how our consumptive habits hopefully you know everybody didn't hear and if you listen those podcasts, we've talked about it enough, Like we know how our consumptive habits with meat have formed and what we've done with them and how the is um itself and vegetarians is a is a modern concept that doesn't really fit with our um. You know, how we've eaten for two million years plus. Um, how do you guys, like what, what's what's your awareness of how we've gotten here as far as agriculture and large gat farms and road crops and monocultures and the commoditization of those things. It's obviously a big one. Yeah, it's I think, you know, there's this illusion in our culture that food should be cheap, but there's no such thing as cheap food because you know, like the price you pay for food at the register, that's not representative of hidden charges and costs on the environment, on human health, on wildlife habitat, on the recharge you know, ability of our aquifers. And so it's the commoditization of food and especially meat. It's blows my mind that consumers don't even bat and eye about paying you know, fifteen dollars for coffee, like a pound of coffee, or like you know, ten dollars for a really fancy chocolate bar that spare trade. But they gasped if meat costs more thund bananas. Yeah, I think, like do we what what part of our society has to change to kind of get us in a situation where the consumer is is thinking this way, Because I mean, I've I'll have a I'll go to McDonald's, I'll have a cheeseburger. If I'm traveling or doing something, I'm not real I feel I feel like I should be eating it behind a dumpster what I'm doing in an alley somewhere, because I don't feel great about it. But that's part of our our mary Like, it's not just our American culture, star our world culture is is and this is ingrained in us now, in our American diets and our consciousness, like fast food is baked in I feel like the rise and veganism is a symptom of a much larger problem. And and to address what you just said, I feel like people have gotten to a point where at least you're acknowledging the shortcomings of what you're doing and the decisions that you're making in the system that you're effectively voting for with the money that you're buying and spending on that fast food cheeseburger. But I think when consumers really start to care and understand where their food comes from, we can get away from this commoditized system that we've gotten ourselves into. And we've gotten there because people have stopped caring and stopped looking looking into it. You know, that's the only way that a lot of this stuff could have grown a scale and happen is that people just don't care to look into it anymore. Because if they knew what was going on, and they knew the impacts that things were truly having on our soil, health, on our personal health, on the welfare the animal, there's no way that people could be okay with it at scale. And this is a conversation that like, I know what some of you are thinking. Some of you were thinking about politics right now, and then please stop thinking about I can read your minds. I know what you're thinking. I know you're thinking about the words like progressive and liberal and all these types of things. Stop thinking about that. This is about It's bigger than that. It's bigger than one side or the other. It's it's it's more about like who we are, how we treat this planet, and what we can do for the future. I have a kid. Everybody's sitting here, um has kids or knows a kid. We're all we're all right there. And so I think it's it's just a little bit bigger than that, because as we move forward, I think I am not thinking of it in that way. These guys again, do you guys care about not only this landscape but the entirety of our of our nation? And it comes through and what you do. So I think you go back to Rome Ranch and the soiled part of the equation, like, what have you guys done thus far? You know, how can you boil down what you've done here to kind of start to save this place, start to turn it around, because it was in pretty poor shape when you got it. And you haven't been here that long, have you? No? Yeah, less than three years? Okay, yep. The first thing we did with our desertified fields, so previously farm fields that were bare soil and zero you know biology and that soil was we put large herds of bison on them. And that sucked for the animals, right, because there's not a lot of nutrition out there. Bare soil is super hot in Texas in the middle of the summer, it could be degrees, which is crazy by the way, because you cook meat to an internal temperature to kill potential path inogens, but you're cooking your soil biology the same way if you don't cover it. And so we put the bison out on this bare field and the field was so compacted because the terminal velocity of rainfalls like twenty miles. So after hard rain events, you get capping on the surface and so rain can't get into the soil. It actually runs off and it's a big disaster. So we needed the bison out there. There were tools, so their hoofs helped break apart that compacted cap soil. Um. They brought in fertility through manure in urine and UM. What we had to do and sure your your listeners, like, how does that work? There's no grass out there for them to eat, and so we had to supplement with hay and UM. So back to this idea of exporting you know, um nutrition and exporting resources that hey, came from another property. Yeah, so we took we imported that fertility from another property and brought it to our field. I mean, it's all carbon that's being passed around, So we brought someone else's above ground carbon in the form of food, fed it to the bison and went through their room, and that manure went onto the ground. Biology was in the manure and it started feeding the biology that was present a little bit, and so it had a habitat to actually breed and grow and then um the bison to other things. They're great pollinators, right, They have like seeds all over their bodies, so they started spreading these seeds. Their hosts started stepping in seeds bison at this point where there the first group was about fifty bison. And why bison We talked about that earlier where why you know, when you buy a property in Texas, not everybody's like, we'll put some bison on it. Um. Why for you guys, were was that important? I mean for us, you know, their their native species. They were in this part of Texas. No one in this part of Texas raises bison, which is crazy because they would have this would have been a part of their annual migratory path. They would been mill ends of bi which is hilarious because we're looking out the back winter there's access to here, yeah, from Asia walking around and we when they're in Buffalo are for into the landscape. Yeah, it makes no sense. So for us, we wanted to see, like, hey, let's bring back North Americas, you know, the national mammal, the largest you know, like mammal to survived the last Ice Age and and see what kind of keystone species effect it had. And so when the bison showed up, there were birds that I had never I've grown up in central Texas and I love birds. I study birds, I watched birds, and there were bird new birds I've never seen in my life. And that was just through the bison's presence, right, which is just amazing. So there's this ecosystem catalyst species that is just present and things happen that we can't fully comprehend and we don't need to understand, like we'll never understand in our lifetime. Well, you should talk about a little bit about like the birds that come with the buffalo and what they do to the like the parasitic at the parasitic level to kind of like change the landscape. Yeah. Right, So so when these you have to imagine these millions of bison that would have migrated Canada all the way into Mexico, through Texas, through almost everywhere in the United states. So when these millions of animals would have moved through, there would have been billions of migratory birds right there, and these birds would have op into all the fresh patties and they would have been picking through, scratching this manure and they're effectively spreading it evenly, adding fertility to more than one spot. But what they're actually doing is they're looking for parasites and other insects and the manure, and so you know, like they'll debug. So these parasites that are present in in the bison, they get passed through the manure, they hatch and they lay eggs and then um, the little offspring will climb up a grass stem and then a neighboring bison will take a bite of that stem, and that pathogen or that parasite can get past the next animal, and then you have problems if that's a continual cycle. Um. And so yeah, the birds would eat out the parasites, so you know, you don't have to use anti parasitic medication if you're able to eliminate that. And that's through manage grazing, and that's through moving your animals as well as having wildlife like birds and for us two chickens and turkeys on the farm can do the same thing. Yeah, And you think, Robbie, like when we're we were talking earlier, you start thinking about how analogous what Tailor just explained is to like biodiversity, And like when you start to when you introduce one species that brings more and then that just starts piling on itself, as opposed to a monoculture that we've been talking about, where there's one thing plant that that doesn't bring more, you know, that doesn't bring other species into pollinated or eat it or whatever. But I think what Tailor subscribe starts to get people to understand a little bit about how this becomes a biodiverse place. Yeah, I mean and and and that's what that's what nature wants. Nature wants that balance and it's constantly seeking it. Right, So whenever we see a freshly tilled field and all of a sudden, you know, quote unquote weeds start popping up, that's nature trying to put living roots back into the soil and put um and and and rebuild the photosynthetic capacity of that land by putting green leaves on it. To do that energy transferred that we talked about and you know, to begin to rebuild what's been damaged at the hand of of us as people UM to to to to perform agriculture. Right. And so I think you know, an example of not just you know, we talked about animals coming in, but even plants, right. We one thing we didn't talk about today was the seed bank UM. And there's a massive seed bank underneath our soils UM. And when we spray until UM we don't allow UM for those seeds to come up. Or when we have heavily capped soil, not only does water not go through, but seeds don't come up either, UM. And so UM when by disrupting that cycle, stopping the spraying, topping the tilling, introducing the animals and you know, again starting to kick over some of the initial dominoes to or order at least remove some of the barriers from from the from nature's pursuit of that cycle and just to sort of get out of its way or to UM accelerated in different ways through management UM, you start to see not only the intended effects UM, but some unintended ones that you know, in a in a positive way. So it's so it's really encouraging UM to see just how quickly, I mean, Taylor mentioned a minute ago how much faster it's happening than we anticipated. Um, although you know there's a long way to go, it's it's incredibly encouraging to see firsthand. And why it's so important that you know, Rome Ranch not just being a working ranch, but being an actual field experiment and educational facility to bring influential UM people out and press and media and folks in our community and really anybody that wants to come learn about this stuff so that they can you know, tell that spread the word and help get the message out to to your point a minute ago about what needs to happen, and it's and it's you know, people need to begin to understand and and and care. And when you mentioned the the you know, the the industrial model and how we got here, and I think it's important to note that I think we should give ourselves a benefit of the doubt and how we got here. I don't think somebody woke up one morning with their you know, just some evil persons that to modify everything. I think, you know, we really genuinely did try to figure out how to get more from less to people. There's progress baked into that whole system. Right, So we're we're a progressive species. So it's not it's this isn't an US versus them conversation. This is a hey, we need to stop and recognize that there's some serious learnings, UM that we have the benefit to um apply and what we do going forward or to deal with the adverse consequences. And so we we we know we can be better. We know why we need to be better. UM, let's get that message out and UM let's be better. Yeah. And I think one of one of the things that I want to make sure we didn't I didn't forget, is that you guys were explaining to me how not only how bison through just there, how they eat and what they do, but even the design of their whole hoofs how that how they dig into the earth and they apply seeds into the into the soil. Like take us through that little element, because I think there's you know a lot of these a lot of conversation on a macro level, but that's like just a really interesting micro thing that a bison is doing. UM, that is very important ecosystem service, very important to the soil that we pretty much you know, extra extrapated from this environment, like we just took it away. So if you go to if you go to college and you study agriculture and you want to be a farmer, in your classes, they're gonna say, hey, to work the soil, to aerate the soil, to plant seeds, you have to have mechanical tools. So these are the soil aerators you can pull behind tractors, and the different implements that cost a lot of money that are mechanical tools to accomplish things that we're trying to reproduce that bison do. Our other large herds of room and animals elk do the same thing. But one of the examples here is a bison hoof is more of a spade shape, and so unlike a cow or a lot of other domesticated animals, it actually chips away at soil. And there's no better tool, no creation or innovation that man has ever made at pressing seeds into the soil at the right depth that's better than a bison hoof. And so one of my favorite ways to spread seeds out here is I just bomb bison with seeds. I just get a handful of seeds, I just throw it out of bison. It's like so low tech, but we'll get stuck in the furn and but eventually they're gonna fall out, and eventually they're gonna step on them, and they're gonna do our job and plane it for us. And and that's the best way. It's like there's so many things happening in their signals, like probably saying like in a square foot of soil anywhere on the planet, there should be about ten to twenty thousand seeds waiting to germinate, which is crazy. So it can be they could be decades old and still alive. Yep. And if you went out to Rome Ranch even today, but three years ago when we first bought it, and you said, I don't want this to be a native tall grass prairie, and you bought all these amazing perennial grasses that used to grow in this area. Three years ago, we did this. Actually, we spent a lot of money on seeds and we threw them out, we planted them in. Zero percent of them germinated. It's because the native soils didn't well, the native seeds naven recognize as this native soil, and so the bison connect as a signal for these plants species and and provide the biology the right stimulus to take what's in that seed bank and have it german eate. And so it's really fun. But every year we see different species emerging, and so like this year you saw today there's Mayor's Tale everywhere. We hadn't seen one of those in three years, and so it's a step. You were talking about wild flowers being a thing that's that's really like marks this landscape. Talk about the little just briefly history of wild flowers and like the fact that there aren't any hanging around here although it's cold, but yeah, when the Germans, when the first Europeans settled this area, there a German culture that came here and uh, they named this community bloomin Thal, which translates the valley of Flowers. And there's no flowers in bloomin Thal today. It just doesn't exist. There's not a single flower. And a lot of the herbicides that we spray out on landscapes, um they're non selective, and so wild flowers are technically in the weed family, and so like if you're going to spray your your fields to maintain monocultures, you're nuking every opportunity for a wildflower to exist, and those are things that feed pollinators and things that create wildlife habitat and serve all different types of functions. And so yeah, one of the coolest things for me was we have a neighbor. She's elderlier names Myrtle, and this past year you can learn so much from Myrtle. She's country wisdom. Myrtle came over here, she's eighties, she's sweet as cool as an old lady. And she was like, oh my god, what is that purple wheat over there? What is that pink wheed over there? What's that yellow wheed over there? And she'd never seen these things before. The myrtle, these are wild flowers, like these should be here. I've never seen one of those is absolutely beautiful, and so I mean, it's it's supposed to be here and just get out of its way. Let those plants be present, and they do things that will never understand. But it's all cascading, and it's an upward cycle. If it's functioning appropriately and you're moving in the right direction, and I think this this, it's it's kind of appropriate to move to the next step. Kind of the process because we're talking about body and these bison are additive to the landscape, right, We're not taking away anything by putting them here. They're not standing in a feedlot somewhere. They're they're roaming for you, you guys, moving from place to place. Talk about what they add, like, what they add the landscape, and what the strategy is to help that happen. I think that's an important point. I mean, so so history. I mean, I think tay Al already talked about a little bit about what they add to the landscape in terms of bison started here. You know, the the fertility that is in the soil that has fed you and and and your parents and your grandparents and everybody that's been on here before us and the first humans that walked over here, um, is largely the fertility that was put into the soil through the these native or natural systems that we've been talking about, and and and bison are actually the largest heard of this megafauna since the last ice age on this planet. Um. And so when when you when you ask what role and what are we doing with the bison, Well, we're trying to replicate and and emulate what would happen in nature if we humans hadn't come and killed off all the predators and fenced in all of the um um all of the land and converted it to row crops and you know, a good chunk of it to concrete, et cetera. Right, And so you know, as you and I were discussing earlier, you know, we can't go back. We're we're it's too late, and we can desire and we can argue it, but the reality is where where we are. And so one of the best things we can do is recognized that we have a massive opportunity with the people and the communities that work the land and influencing um how they work that land and whether it replicates and emulates what is going on in nature, and therefore whether it's part of a virtuous cycle that's solutions based, or whether it's part of a vicious cycle that is causing further deterioration. And so here specifically, you know, working the bison means, like Taylor said, if you're introducing them to a really degraded pasture, that would be really you know, it would be impossible to sustain bison without human management. Um It means putting them onto that land, letting them do the important um animal impact activities that they need to do, making sure they have food and water and minerals because the soils are completed of those as well, and carefully managing them and watching after them, but then quickly moving them off, understanding that you know, if if they're left there too long, it might stress them. Not to mention that they heard of bison would be roaming um you know, pre us disrupting this cycle would be not really spending more than a day or two in any one's spot anyway, they would, you know, unselectively eat everything there. They would urinate and defecate, so provide organic matter and microbiology, biological life into the soil as well as significant amounts of moisture before they moved on, right, And that's how those systems evolved, and they may not come back for many months. And so in a in a holistically planned grazing model where you're rotating based on a strategy um including the size of the animals, the size of the paddock, the condition of the soil, the condition you know, the climate at that time of year, geography, etcetera. You're moving them around in a way where you're maximizing the potential um to realize those symbiotic relationships and nature um. But in a controlled environment in the form of a ranch to in some land, whatever size you might have, whatever resources in terms of people or financial or equipment or whatever you may have to represent that in your context. And and one of the things, like with the planning that Robbie is talking about here, when we think about this place, this ranch is an ecosystem. We're making decisions for the ecosystem. So we do things like every winter we we want to become a nesting habitat for hundreds of thousands of eastern meadow lark birds, which again I'm born and raised in this area. I've never seen a meadow lark in my life growing up. And so how do you do that? Well, you know, our ranch managers make a decision which parts of the property to leave enough above ground forage. We don't graze it to the soil, but we're creating nesting habitats for these birds. We do the same thing for when the deer or having babies, we stay out of their way. Um, we play, we look ahead of you know, desirable birds that we want on the property again that haven't been here in a long time, like quail, and we're trying to create nesting habitats for them. And so we are very meticulous, very thoughtful about where we put the bison in what parts of the year when quails might be actually nesting or hatching and uh. And then we do the same for the bison two when they're going to be going into their rut where they're going to be like, let's put them in a part of the property where they're like peaking in their nutrition and really giving them the best opportunity to have a successful um offspring. And I think it's really important to note here to this, this isn't going backwards. This isn't turning the clock back to an older method of agriculture necessarily, right. It's certainly turning it back to being less intensive and less input based. But um, there there is new science involved. This is um, you know, the latest understanding of biology and our ecosystems and applying those in a way UM that hasn't been done before. Um. And this is also not to be confused with rewilding either, right. I mean again, because we've disrupted the system, the ecosystems so badly to simply rewild but simply just let things rest um would take much much longer than we could possibly fathom because those um, the key players, the keystone species and the balance and the systems that would need to be be and be present at large scale aren't. And so this is again emulating those in UM at the scale of the of the operation and within the context of the operation. So I think it's important because those these concepts are all all confused regularly. Yeah, And I think that's something like as a hunter, right to spend it back to work kind of that I sit and what I think about all the time we hunted this for deer. There's deer everywhere, and so you know, all these efforts you're doing not only enhancing the landscape, enhancing um, you know, putting back and may have heard of buffalo on this landscape, but they're not affecting any like the white tail tear heard at all. We saw that this morning. We saw ten bucks and ten does in the first three hours we were out there. So as a hunter, all the while all the stuff you're talking about is going on the improvement of this landscape here, we are still able to have a hunting experience that's similar to, if not better than any other ranch around here. And then if if anybody listening to this is watching our back forty program, that's what we're struggling with in Michigan, Like how do we do this thing that we know is important, this biodiversity piece of the puzzle, and then also get what we selfish you want and we know that it's selfish is to be able to pursue and kill big bucks and have the experiences that we love. Like that's where we are. Um, I've I hope that's an honest accounting for you guys and for people listening with kind of where we are, where I am as as as a hunter. Yeah, I think the proof I mean for us, Like when we bought the property. One of the first things I did, I went over to my neighbors and introduced myself and said, hey, if you give me the opportunity to manage your land, like I'll create the most beautiful ecosystem on your property. I'm gonna get rid of chemicals, I'm gonna bring wildlife back, I'm gonna cover bare soil. It's gonna be amazing. And everyone's like, you don't know what you're talking about. That's weird, that's not agriculture. I don't know what you're doing over there, but not interested. Beat it, get off my land. And uh it took two years and you could see. These fence line images are just incredible. But literally one of my favorite things to do when when someone comes out to the properties, go to our a fence line where it's like one side his room, rans the next side is conventional management, and you can just stand there for ten minutes and you'll see thousands of birds. On our side, you'll see deer just frolicking in the fields, and on the neighbor's side and there's nothing. It's just nothing, is monocultures, bare soil, it's degraded land. And so once our neighbors started seeing that image, I started to get interested in what we're doing. And you know, they have hunters at least their land too, so it's in their interest to to bring in deer for their properties and for their hunters. And that was like a big exciting part. It wasn't about saving the world, that wasn't about producing nourishing livestock. For then, it is how do I maximize the the value of my land, and well, for me, that means my leases and how do I make my hunters happy? It's being bring animals out to my property. And so that was the genesis for us adopting and getting more land under management here. Yeah, and you guys certainly aren't managing this land as a normal you know. What I'll just say is like a q d M, a type white tail management system that I've seen on many rangs in Texas and throughout the Midwest. I mean, this is not what you're doing. But yet there's a lot of deer here, which answers a question that I've had personally and we've we've asked it on on the back forty a bunch. We talked about this last week on the show. It's like, how do we do it? What can we do? Is there a solution? Is there some version of this out there where if we understand certain principles we can achieve all these things that want and kind of be modern hunters. But also you know, for us HARKing back guys like out a loophole and people that had a bigger conservation ethic, and I think, um, when I came here, I'm like, oh, here it is this is it these guys are doing. It's a you know, thousand acres, but I mean it's being done well. And you know, again we keep talking about nature and balance and and and and all of the relationships that that go on there. How do how do you create a thriving, balanced ecosystem in an area where all of the natural predators by and large have been hunted um either either to extinction within the area or to the point of them, you know, being so so rare and frequent that it's there their existence is marginal at best. Right. Well, I mean then that's where this management comes in. Right. So, you know, I think hunters understand management in the context of of of wildlife management. UM. You know, we're managing an entire ecosystem and right now, the best tool um for bringing predator activity and predator um the role that predator would play in the ecosystem is through is through hunting and doing it in a in a in a conscious carnivore empathetic way, um, like we've done. And then and one of the things I'm really I think is really fantastic that maybe you should tell it better than I should, but bringing first time hunters out and people who haven't had the opportunity to be exposed to these sorts of things, but have an interest in making sure that the people coming out here to hunt aren't just coming out to kill things. They're actually coming out to take part and learn and grow um and be better members of society and on this planet. Yeah, and in another thing to think about, if you're trying to create a sanctuary for wildlife and awesome animals to hunt, you know, we've increased the productivity of our land by in less than a year two, right, And that's not hard to embar soil to start with. But if you can increase the productivity on your your land, you can have more livestock, or you can have more wildlife. And so for us every year where we're opportunistically exchanging bare soil for green growing plants and more biodiversity food that's gonna be available, more resilient and for options. But we're gonna have more animals out here than what our neighbors could hold. We could have a heck of a dove hunt that field. We were just right and like that those things are. That's not by accident that those those doves are not hanging out on that field by accident. I mean there's an equation that gets in there, a plus vehicles, more doves hanging around. Yeah, I mean through regenerative agriculture, what you're doing is essentially creating a year round habitat. And I think one of the pitfalls of a lot of deer hunters in our mindset for the last couple of decades is that we think of habitat in the form of soybeans or corn crop that's just providing nutrition and habitat for those deers for a very short window of the year. So when you're doing this holistic system that works, you know, symbiotically with nature, you're creating habitat for these animals of all types, from deer to birds to everything year round, which in turn is going to bring more a wildlife to your property. And let's not forget what we Let's not lose sight of the fact that we were sharing earlier, and it makes them healthier, healthier animals eating health your diets from healthier soils then becomes healthier food for a healthier person. Yeah. I mean I shot a dough earlier within well within view of those bison on this landscape. I'm like that's pretty cool. It's like, all of this is cool. And then like at the end of the day, right we start with the soil, we start talking about how you can enrich it, how you can bring that to life. What you've done to some extent here, you have many years to go to kind of get it to where you guys wanted to be. Then you introduce native wildlife that helps in in this system, and it helps produce a landscape that you desire. And at the end of the day, when you're ready, you kill one of those buffalo, you cut it up and a lot of times in a very communal fashion, which you guys should talk about a little bit, and then you package it up and it's got really cool branding. It's called Force of Nature Meats. And then someone can go and buy that at a store, at a local butcher's shop or whatever, and so like I'm sure that you would. It's not an infallible process, but damn it's pretty close within like the imperfections of our natural world. Like this process, it's kind of solving as many of the problems as we currently can solve. The way I see it with consumption, with with these natural landscapes, of what what we all want, which I think is balance and health in our ecosystem. So, um, I think talk about like the bison out there, how you kill them and where they end up, because I think that's an interesting part of it. And like maybe, as I said before, we started all this like the endgame here from a consumer standpoint, one of the things that's really important for us out of the ranches connecting consumers to where their food is coming from, so where where it lives and how it dies. And um, so we have events on the ranch, like in a couple of weeks we'll be doing a Thanksgiving turkey harvest where people come and they'll start with their living heritage bird and we're gonna be with them as little or as much as they need and help them with the harvest, the visceration of the defeathering. We also do events like that with field harvest for bison. And so these are just life changing events where you for for many people, it's the first time they've ever seen an animal transition from life to death. And um, it's super emotional. I mean there's not a dry eye there. But it's just an incredible enriching experience where people that have never done anything like that's never butchered an animal, never even seen a dead animal before. They'll pick up a knife and something clicks. It's like biologically, it's like in their DNA somewhere, and it's just triggers, and they pick up a knife and they just start deboning something crazy and they have no fear, and they're just tapping into these deep rooted instincts and they're celebrating that animal's life, and they're working together communally to and having fun. And you can guarantee that none of that animals being wasted, and it's just you're making farming and a lot like hunting. I think, yeah, I think that's how it should be, should be closer to that. I agree. I think I think when when we when we do a field harvest of of a bis in here, the bison are a lot bigger than a than a than a turkey, and so usually we're only taking one animal, and it's a community of people that are going to be cleaning that and and the end of life step is administered by somebody that's very experienced. There's a lot of pressure, but I mean, I think I don't I don't want it to come across as like anybody can come out and just start firing until it goes down, right. I mean, I think it's important to recognize that, UM, how an animal lives is and whether or not it's been allowed and able to fulfill its potential and its role in the ecosystem is critically important. How it dies is critically important both for the UM for the fact that we're we're trying to honor those animals and respect it and and it deserves that. UM. We recognize that as hunters as well. Right, you don't just you don't take risks when you're not the one paying the concept of paying the price for those and dealing with the consequences. And that's no different right when it comes to a turkey harvest where you can you know, it's much more controlled. It's different. But so it's not it's not entirely like hunting in the sense of its sporting, but I think it is like hunting in the sense that, UM, you actually go through an incredibly emotional process and you experience something that is that is deep and encoded in our DNA and our our our our our history as as a species that we've lost touch with. UM. And you go through that journey in a way where you you haven't now have a connection with your feud that you may have never had before. And that experience is profound, and that experience hunters get to have all of the you know, often throughout their life, and I don't think you ever get desensitized to it. Right. My least favorite part of hunting is killing, and I love hunting. Um and UM. I think that recognition. How does that? You know, there's probably some people that hear that and don't understand. They think that's contradictory. But when you when you've been through that process and you've had those um, the blinders pulled off and you go, you go through that journey, and then all of a sudden you realize that this piece of red meat on your plate was was that animal? Then all of a sudden you start to celebrate that animal after its life as much as you did during its life. And I think that is where there's just been this cut off in this disconnection between people. And that's why food in this country goes in the garbage can. That's that's that's the rate of food waste. And these animals should never be treated like that. So sorry. I just wanted to clarify that we're not hunting. No, no, no, no at all. I'll just say, at the end of my life, I want to be field harvested. I want to be with the people I love. I think you're around the right You're around the right people to make that happen for you eating my favorite food, head down, just cozy and then lights out, you know. And that's a disconnect, right, and that's consumers don't recognize that. And that's one of the ideas where animals dying in natural ecosystems it's awful. Man, like the bison three years ago. The weak ones would get eaten alive by packs of wolves, or they would die of sepsis and infections and just long, slow, painful deaths. And so this concept of a field harvest, there's not a more humane way from Austin coming out with a rifle. He's pretty good get compared to the predators on landscape, you know. So I think, I, oh, that's important, and and it it struck me as like when you guys are describing bringing people out to do that, and there's just so many parallels to what you're doing there. And then there's folks right now, you know, assuming they can go out and buy Force and Nation meats. Right now, you can go out and buy bison um that was raising this way, treating this way, and killed in this manner um, which kind of like brings that thing full circle and kind of closes a loop on what you guys are doing here, not only are like And I think that's an important part of this. And where I started when I was trying to understand what you guys are doing, that's where I started. Now that I'm here, I realized that's where I should have ended. But it's there's some profundity and just that idea that that that's the end of it for the consumer. The consumer see some really nice meat, they're gonna go home and enjoy their family. But there's this whole story that that gets there that that hopefully listen to this they can learn, which I think it's as important as anything. You can eat meat. This is the coolest thing for me. You can eat meat that's climate positive. You can eat a pound of Force of Nature beef, and we have empirical scientific data taken by a group called Quantis that shows that that beef you're eating is capturing three and a half pounds of carbon from the atmosphere and putting it in the soil. You just can't do that with anything else in the market. Nothing in the grocery store can do that. And so this is regenerative agriculture is giving consumers the opportunity to participate in this revolution and vote with their purchasing, you know, their dollars for what food system they want to support that aligns with their values. Yeah, and there's there's lots of you know, we talked about this. Rob and I were talking about kind of consumption habits are personal consumption habits. I it's been quite a while since I went and bought red meat at a store, probably, man, I don't know. I would say a decade maybe a little bit, a little bit less than that. Um So, I like, I have a race that from my family's live, from my lives. It's now so normal that it's not even considered. But we don't even think about it. We don't go to that section of the grocery store. And then we started like stair stepping that up, like, oh, well, what about that sliced turkey that's in there? Well, we better I better shoot more turkeys so we can smoke it and slice it up and have it um there, so that there is that that process that gets you to a more thoughtful way to consume. And we know that not everybody can do what I did, or Robbie, you gave yourself, what you like a year challenge to only consume wild game or not go to the grocery store and buy meat. And so we we we can do that. Everybody can has an opportunity to do that. We know that not everyone is going to like it's impossible from a number standpoint, but just from a we just know in our culture it's just not gonna happen. We're too far down the the rabbit. Also, what you guys, I feel are doing at the end of the day is then providing this this really cool, kick ass alternative with an even better story. That's a pretty good I think, And I don't want to be clear because I think part of the part of the challenge with where where we've landed in in our food system is a lack of transparency. So I think a lot of what we're what we're what we're talking to is the potential and the power of a generative agriculture, and um, all of that is a is a accurate but you know you mentioned it a minute ago. I don't want to ever be confused with saying that what we're doing is perfect. It's not perfect, right even are even are the pledge that we we have all of our our sourcing partners agree to says we know we're not perfect, and we know we're not ever going to be, and so we will never achieve a level or a standard that we will be satisfied by, and that you recognize in partnering with us, that we're going to be raising the bar every year, um, and that we know that where we're starting is in a challenged situation. So we can't we can't just flip a switch and go from where where we are broadly in at scale and be perfect. And you and I were talking about that earlier. Right, we can't let perfection be the enemy of progress. But we also can't let um we also can't celebrate excuses and not try. And so you know, none of us, as individuals in this in this room we're listening to this podcast, are perfect. No, no, no company out there is perfect. Force of nature is not perfect. Right, And I don't UM, but but we're going to do everything we can to be transparent about what we're doing and who we're working with and the and the y and the the great UM outcomes that we're that we're that we're promoting and and and producing, and then we're gonna be transparent about where we're not perfect. Right and while our while our ideal is field harvest, that's something that can't UM in today's UM infrastructure and world can't be isn't isn't scalable at this with what we're trying to do. So I don't want, I don't want, you know, just in the name of transparent and whatever we're thinking we're field harvesting um every animal across every species because because we're not, that's something we'd like to get to. But we're absolutely sourcing from ranches just like Rome Ranch that are practicing these UM regenerative um UM protocol in their own context on their land and working with them to get better in varying ways UM and continuing to offer more and more parts of the an al so that we can find more and more ways to support those not only those individual ranches, but the communities that they're a part of because one thing we haven't got to is how challenge those communities are and then ultimately get that really great food um distributed at a scale that doesn't exist today. So um um the mission driven purchasing by folks listening to this podcast and their friends and family and everybody else they have actually can have access to this sort of stuff if they can't harvest it themselves. Yeah, I think that's probably the biggest question coming out of this for anyone, right like how scalable is this? Can this be the solution? And how can this be affordable? But before I think, before you do that, I'll just say, like I may sound like a family right now, it's only because these dudes that are sitting in front of me or a walk in the walk like we just I just saw it, like they're devoted their lives to walk in the walk on this stuff. So um. That's exciting to see people that are that are out there making them making a difference, trying in their best the way that they believe is the right way to do something, but not only doing that, but devoting the selves to the practice, which I think is is what impressed me the most. But I think back to that, like, that's a question to end on. I mean, there's a million questions that come out of this discussion, but I think the main one is, and for me personally, is like can this be Is it scalable? Because that's the issue, right, The issue is scale. Right, If we were just polluting a little bit of the water with a little bit of for like fertilizer and chemicals here and there, just to get by, it'd be fine. But we have these mass We have a mass appetite for processed foods. Are the American diet is is based on these things. And here we are in a position where we are we are really habituated to these that these things. Like I said, it's there's nothing for even the most thoughtful of us to ride up and get a Chick fil a sandwich. And so here we are with a potential solution that needs scale. What the hell do we do? Yeah, I'll start off the the exciting part for me is learning that if we took all existing agricultural land in the United States, UM and we increase the productivity of grazing land by thirty percent, we could eliminate feed lots in factory farming, could be we could make it illegal, it could no longer exist in our civilization. So that's taking existing land improving its productivity by thirty percent. Now we've increased the productivity here by three percent in three years. Now. It's not that hard to do, and so it is scalable. It can feed a growing population because when you do these regenerative practices, you're able to take a given acre of land and and like when we started, there's you know, sevent bare soil, and as you're able to reduce bare soil and growing green growing plants, you can feed more live and so it's just win win win. But it's absolutely scalable. And it's not only scalable. We have to scale it because, like I said, we have sixty harvests left on the planet before this entire food system collapses. Now is the time to turn it around and actually regenerate and store and build and heal for the for the small time farmer. Is it affordable? Is it something that they can enact in a way that you know, would it would fit their pocketbooks and our wallets. It's there's there's actual research out there that shows that it's not only affordable, it actually improves on farm profits. If you think about, you know, diversifying your your offering, all of a sudden you go from maybe one or two revenue streams seasonally too potentially dozens of revenue streams across plant species and animal species. UM. You have lower input costs, you have increased management costs, but all of these things balance out and time and again, when we've seen it, um employed you actually see you know, oftentimes in moments of desperation, this is sort of the hail Mary play, the last shot, and all of a sudden you become a pioneer in your community that begins, you know, other begins, becomes a leader that others, that others follow. So yes, yes, it can be done at small scale. UM. Yes it is scalable. Number one, it's certainly more scalable and plant based agriculture because it can be practiced on a third of the planet that plant based agriculture can't be practiced. UM. But also UM, I haven't seen a UM, a plot of land where allowing nature to fulfill its potential doesn't improve that land. UM. And you know, I just can't see a scenario where where it doesn't it doesn't scale. Now it is going against the grain. Today, we have a highly efficient, highly optimized system geared towards one thing and one thing only UM, and that needs to change. So it's a little more challenging today than it should be. But that system can change, UM, and it's already beginning to change. We've seen it. We've seen it through the center of the grocery store. We've seen it through the perimeter of the grocery store in different you know, commodity items UM. And again it happens at the at the hand of consumers. So UM, consumers begin to recognize that they have the position that they do in terms of dictating what happens UM, and we will see it scale. Do you what are the biggest hurdles you guys have in your company? And this this rigina of agriculture, what's one of the things that keep you up at night? Were in? Yeah, the biggest hurdles for us so far as communicating to consumers UM the true cost of of meat. UM. That's a big hurdle. Again, people want like cheap meat and I want it convenient, but that's just not a reality. Like, if you're gonna do things right, it costs a little bit more money. On the front end. Um. So that's for sure our most challenging marketing hurdle, you know. And the other thing too is we're having to we think of like this plant based community as as false profits. And so they're they're maximizing there at a point in time and history where they're successfully leveraging this campaign against meat and against livestock, um, saying that it's bad for the planet, bad for society, bad for human health, and it's completely backwards. There's nothing truth about, no truth in that. And so we have a very heavily funded competitor. We think of the impossible burghers are competitor. We don't think of other livestock based producers as our competitors. It's it's the false profits or the or the We don't think of other regenerative operations as competitors. We would call them our allies. Um. But when we talked about earlier about you know, our tagline of reclaiming the legacy of meat, that includes you know, reclaiming and redirecting it from those large incumbent players that have taken shortcuts and um fully um, you know, ran us down a path while we had blinders on us consumers that I think we're now waking up to, and um, we need to reclaim the legacy of meat from that because meats under attack, and it's under attack for the position that they got us into, and certainly we need to reclaim it from these new false profits that Taylor was talking about that are um, you know, also being similarly dishonest and deceitful in terms of how they're communicating their their messaging. And I think the challenge for us and doing that is again what Taylor pointed out, you know, the commodification or the commoditization of you know, these sentient animals UM, and the reluctance of large scale um you know, retailers to put those products on the shelf because it comes out of price that they fear that consumers aren't yet willing to pay, so the consumer can never signal that they are willing to pay. And it's sort of you know, we got to get those dominoes to fall. Yeah, I mean we saw it with podcasts right the media game. But no one will ever listen to two hours of dude sitting around talking about animal a your culture. That will never happen. It's ten minutes tweets people will only read like a hunt and whatever characters and and that's been proven through through this and many other programs. That's not true. People want people, and I want this. Like I'm I would call myself a regular dude. I'm just you know, I have a podcast, but I'm I don't do many things that are irregular other than I hunt a lot, and I love my family and I want to eat right and consume right. I'd like to have a garden in my backyard. There's no buffalo back there, but I would like there to be a tomato plan if I can manage it. And then I would like to compost, and then from that, I would like to learn more about having chickens and getting my eggs from egletting chickens, just like any other normal person might try to do. I came to all that from hunting. A lot of people are doing it in the reverse, and we like to celebrate that. So I would just say, on a personal level, like all these things are exceedingly interesting to me. And when I think about consumption and going outside, and I think about this all the time, and people are listening to this obviously think about it all the time. Like these concepts all come together, like hunting bison, you know, soil, and that's something over the last couple of years I've come to realize, you know, I've learned a lot of terms, like ecosystem services as a term people know that I love now because I can I can literally talk about anything I want on this hunting podcast, like snakes ecosystem services, Kyle, it's ecosystem services. So there's like that, And then there's also the transformation of an animal from a dead thing. Two the meat that I love um and being a part of that transformation is enlightening has been enlightening to me, right, So then that's I think a lot a lot of that is symbolizing what you guys do, and regent of agriculture is an important part of that conversation. I really do feel. Is there anything that people can go read or is there someone you could point them to if they want to dive into this practice and learn about it. Yeah, I'd say my my favorite book to start off with is Defending Beef um, So check that out. It's written by a vegetarian named Nicolet Nyman, and it's an incredible book. But it just goes back to meet consumption in America and how livestock can actually be a massive solution for some of our greatest threats of civilization, and especially when we think about ecology, how properly managed livestock can save the planet. And it's just so compelling. It's it's research driven, and it's really exciting to read that. As mediatre I think I would I would say, I mean, there's just so many, so many great books, just pile of them sitting over there. Um, we actually have a or we have a great we have two things when we're working on a sort of resource um library on our web page. So Force of Nature meats dot com because we really want to be able to to to be a content company and be a platform to connect people to concepts that are important to them. There's so many, so many issues that are tie into our agriculture system and how we produce food and and particular food proteins. And I don't know who cares about which thing right, So I don't want to sit here and tell you the whole story and make you listen to it. I want to connect you to what you care about. And so that's how we're looking at Force of Nature as a content creation company and a conduit between people and their values and learning about what they care about so they can make the best best decisions. So check out Force of Nature Meats dot com. Um go to our blog. We have articles broken out by you know, uh topics, whether that be what conservation or whether that be regenerative agriculture or you know, and the and the list goes on, and then we are working on and beginning to work with, you know, getting guests and tributors to come in and share UM content as well. So again we just we just want people to be able to educate themselves and to choose what they want to learn the most about. And part of that resource library will include recommendations on readings and Defending Beef is actually a book we sell in our own on our own online store, so you can buy our meat online, but you can also buy um other stuff if you really want to dive into this and start to educate yourself. And obviously we have a we have an email address, and so without boring everybody with a long list of stuff you can you can email us on our you know, the the info at Force of Nature Meats dot com and we will overwhelm you with ways that you can go inform yourself. Yeah, that's one thing that's also impressive. It's like the ideas and the product or you know, they're not level set, but they're they're all there. Wad bear for everybody, and for guys like that, guys like maybe just grow up putting and it's been on this expiation much like you, Tailor and your wife Katie kind of went on this like dietary expiation and then landed somehow here in this amazing place. Um, that's what I'm doing, you know, I know, Marshall, same thing like when I grew up hunting. It's right like love hunt, but it's led us in these in these down these past you know, where you can find out different things exactly. Yeah. Yeah, So well we better go get that dear me to Myrtle. We should. We can't leave this without talking about Myrtle, because I've never met Myrtle, but she's like to me like the Patriots Saint of described Myrtle to us, having never met her. There's no way she's over four ft tall, but there's no way, like Myrtle has been described to me as this eighty year old Um. What her. Her parents were the first settlers of this of this ranch in this area where Taylor and Katie bought some but not all of the ranch. And so she still lives here. She's eight years old. She doesn't have any teeth, which is fine. Like we've all been there for myrtle myrtle love and like in my picturing, she's very like short. She's probably wearing a shawl um, definitely has a cane. She she's one of those people that hugs everybody she meets. I feel like, um, she's a pretty handy lady, like you guys are telling me that. She's just like probably just like splitting wood out back all day all day. Myrtle country cross van she crossed it from Myrtle Myrtle Myrtles, the patrons sade to Rome Ranch and and may she live on and we're gonna feed her and all her eight year old how many other friends did you have with just want deer meat, you know it's growing, but yeah, now now we're harvesting these management dear for for the elderly in our community. And Myrtles kind of like she's like the broker's broke. She's brokering these deals or she's like, uh, Dolores, I'll take two. Like wait, Dilora, she will get only shot one while she would like to exactly. She's very hungry. She had lots of friends. Ye, all of her friends have like stereotypical names. Yeah, like Beatrice. They're all like they're all in there. So we appreciate it. Shout out to Myrtle, who I've never met, and hopefully maybe maybe I'll never meet her and she'll always be in my mind. Is this the the keeper like it of her own ranch? But well, thank you boys, thanks for having me out. I really appreciate it. Um. Then before we go, I think we we gotta touch on that artifact that Taylor. Yes, yes, we can't go. This is what the hell is this thing? All right? So you'll I'll share some stuff on the Instagram. There you guys can go and see it. Um, Marshall, I were out deer hunting for Myrtle today. We're out collecting some stuff from Myrtle. And there was an old cave up in this cliff face that Marshall and some folks had to explore before. So we went crawling up in there looking for cave paintings. And stuff which we found and on the way back out, I think it probably uske belly crawling through this cave disturb the of the sand soil enough that we unearthed this like toothy, bony claw looking piece of what the fuck No one knows and it's a mystery, like so we gotta go around and say what we think it is. Described Taylor, can you just describe what you're holding in your hand, because this is a big deal right in the THHD at commediator dot com and let me know what you think this thing is. I'll post a picture of it. But it's interesting. So it's it's Ben said two ft but he might have been exaggerating a little bit two inches. But it's a better story. It's it's a better story. But so yeah, the early early poll for me, it looks like a crescent moon. Um part of it is is like ivory colored, and then the second part of it's a little bit more gnarl than oxidized. And uh, I'm saying it's a uh, a black bear tooth, black bear tooth. We looked at black. I said black bear claws because I wanted it to be a white claw for the jokes and such. But uh, it's not like I looked at black bear claws and on line and it just can't be. There's no way, and so I have no I'm stumped. I don't know what it is. A talent possibly, I was thinking like a cutter um from a havelina. Or where we found it makes it even more challenging to dream up what it could possibly be because we found it about fifteen twenty ft up into a cave that you can only crawl in on your hands and knees, and this thing was just buried in the dirt, So you got to imagine one it either was brought there by something else where, it managed to crawl its way up there and was making some kind of life for itself. Could it be like a badger claw? There's some sort of like it's too. It's just it couldn't been going bare tooth to I think tooth or claws of where you gotta start for sure? Was it by possibly the cave painting that was the arrow going down? I mean, was it places right? And then I mean in general, yeah, some more stuff there we should excavate. You should look up. There's a bunch of roaded bones and like raccoon. You know stuff in there, so's there's some story tools. It's cool though, you guys found the coolest thing I've ever seen on the ranch, the room ranch artifacts. That's gonna go in there. So I will post this so you all can vote on it. Um. I don't know there wherever, there's enough of you that we'll figure it out maybe, but um, we'll try to make sure we have some good photos of it so you guys can judge. We'll put it next to something for for scale. Um, I would really like to know what the hell that thing is. Uh, I'm gonna go. I'm just gonna go with claub. I Don'm probably wrong. I just got a text from a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department biologists who just said he thinks it's a black bear. Black bears. So black bears haven't been in Central Texas probably for hundred hundred years, hundred years. But you're not gonna find anything cooler than the unless it's pretty neat, unless it's safer tooth tiger. Right. Um, that's awesome. Well, that's I think that's a notes how cool this place is, not only the country, but what your boys are doing here. So um, hell yeah, thanks for having me out here, Thanks for coming. Yeah, thanks for coming. It's awesome. I guess I that's it. That's all another episode in the books this time number and uh Phil, we're taking THHD on the road. Exciting stuff. Yeah you're not going what Yeah, you have to stay here, man, Yeah, I know. Sorry man, it's the Star Wars thing. Yeah, I thought it. I thought it might be that. So to close out here, I did tell people that we were going to kind of talk about Dr Phil Medicine woman as a segment of the show. I would I would guess, And this is better than I thought that. It's about like fifty five forty five in favor of your top ten list about Star Wars. I thought people would just revolt, which would be shut This whole show will be shut down. Hold on, you're saying that listeners of a of a hunting podcast you're telling specifically a podcast that gets into like the ethics and the nitty gritty of what hunters do. Yeah, they all weren't interested or you didn't think they would be interested in hearing a twelve minute diet tribe about the Star Wars film. So listen. I am I'm connected to my audience, and I felt that maybe they didn't want it, But I wanted you to have your dream. I wanted a young man who didn't think he would ever us to talk about Star Wars on the podcast have his dream dream for Phil. You did it, buddy. We had a possible. A lot of people that were into it, thanks a lot of people that weren't into it. Okay, so next to you're so, you're about to set me up by saying that next next time we do the segment, Yeah, I get to do the Marvel movies. Uh no, I'm not doing that. What. I don't want to even know what that is? Marvel movies? Never mind, I have an act like, I don't know. Are you firing me? No? Uh? Scolding you? Okay, briefly, I can take it. Like I said, it was more in favor than not. That's great. A lot of people wrote in like angry was anger rankings? Oh sure, well I fully expected that. Yeah. I fully didn't expect. I was like, people are gonna be like, somebody didn't review our show. Are passionate? Somebody did review our show on iTunes. I'll let me pull it up here. Did they give you one star because I ranked the last year, so this is the one we got. Episode eight seven is stupid title says it all unbearabled. Shut up about Star Wars. That was so thanks for that, Phil, Wow, well you were I told you that you brought this on on yourself. That's true. You sewed and then you reaped. I reaped all the times, and I doubted you came through that. But that guy didn't like it. Um, But we're we have we have something we gotta do. We got I think we have two competing ideas here, two good ideas, I feel. And by the way, as I was traveling to Texas, I didn't get to review your sound effects that you made for your segment. No badass, Thank you. Well done. We're keeping that good. Um, play that real quick so people can hear it. Sure, Dr Phil, this person needs surgery now, don't worry. I'm on it. My work here is done. Hilarious, hilarious. Big shouts to producer Karin for Yeah she's the nurse season yells at me. It's great, well done. Anyways, we have to you have to write into t at the meeting dot com. We got a thing we're doing now. We have two good options for going forward that doesn't include any kind of movies about fantasies, whatever your whatever you're into. One of them that somebody wrote in, I thought was good that we dr Phil medicine. Woman becomes a segment of you learning to hunt and WHI you chronicle your learnings. I do. I think that's a great idea. I think it's great too, but that we're gonna put that up versus you people right in with their inter hunting community debates like I like crossbows and I like bows, and then you, as a non hunter, help them come to grips with what the answer really is? Okay? And so basically, do you want Phil to discuss his learnings as he had a journey of new hunters or do you want him to really help everybody's debates and and cover up some of that anks we have in the hunting community. So those are both listener thank you the listeners wrote in with that listeners suggestions, I thought they were both wonderful. I think they're good, and I think I mean, I'm just throwing throwing this out there, ah, because I'm not going to be hunting every week, So yeah, I mean, on on times where I have Stepp to report about my hunting experience. That could be the segment on On Off Off weeks. I could do that because that would also be a learning experience for me. It was being a sort of judge about topics that I have that I know nothing about. It would be a lot. It would be a dialogue between us asking listen, it's up to you guys there t HC at the Metator dot Com. It's up to you. So right in t HC it's mediator dot com. Tell us what you think because this is a big decision for the podcast because Phil is gonna get to do this at least once a year, not twice a year, so you never know. Thanks. It's a big for me. It's a big it's it's a big giving something up. This is all the power I have in the world. And so you've taken some away from you, Phil Son of them. Uh So that's it. That's all t C eight eight is done. Hopefully learn something from our boys at Room Ranch. Thank you to them. Thank you to Taylor and Katie uh and Scout they're a little girl. And to Martha and Marshall and everybody and Cody and everybody that hung out with me while I was at room ranch. It was a good time. They're really really good people, um, and they have what I believe is a good mission and something that I want to learn more about. In fact, the ranch manager, Cody, who's a soil nut. Shout out to Cody, sent me the whole list of reading materials about how to learn about soil, and so I got I gotta get off here and get to read so right right in? Tell me what do you think about soil? But more moreover, just Phil, what do you think about No, I think the soil it's more interesting than me. That's a good place to end see him, you know, because I can't go a week without doing rung without drinking in m don't sit and as the boss would stop the grow root feeling like in all on our Barrs shoes all tell me what is it? That actual that actually that actually that actually at actually at actual that actually at actually that actually that actually that actually that actually at actual at actual