The Doyenne of Vegan Cheese: Julie Piatt | Rich Roll Podcast

hey everybody welcome to the podcast my guest today is my wife julie pyatt she's been on the podcast a million times most people know her as a plant-based chef a best-selling cookbook author as a yogi and a healer but today we're going to do something a little bit different sort of my guy ras how i built this take on my wife's life as a serial entrepreneur tracking her trajectory all the way up to her becoming this doyenne of vegan cheese with her plant-based cheese startup shrimpu it's a great conversation you guys are going to really enjoy it lots of stuff we've never talked about before and before we get into it just a reminder hit that subscribe button and that notification bell so you can be alerted every time we post a new video and with that please enjoy my conversation with my wife julie piatt [Music] julie piet how long has it been since we've done a podcast it's been i think six months rich roll has it been that long i think so aren't we in quarantine six months now yeah but did we do one at the beginning of course right at the beginning oh we did i want to say it was maybe like five days in this might be the longest that we've gone without i've missed you a check-in i mean since the beginning of the podcast you being on episode one and on every initial episode we've always done a podcast here and there every couple months or so so this might be the longest interlude but now you have another lover that you're doing your q and a's with with adam yes yes the roll-ons it's amazing it's really really good well it's nice to see you thank you honey we could use this as a as a referendum on our marriage how do you think our marriage is doing right now it's holding up it's definitely yeah we're six months into quarantine it's been an interesting ride it's had its high highs and low lows and everything in between i suppose i think that i um i've had more emotional peaks and valleys with it than you have you seem pretty consistent well um consistent unless i'm on the frequency of our teenage daughters right well that's been the challenge the biggest challenge of this for us and our family really has been trying to help our our our daughters navigate the vicissitudes of what what's being thrown at us yeah or how to how to realize that our daughters don't want our help what's going on in quarantine but it's been really unprecedented and i i think this is a global issue we were teasing last night about um my son was saying if if every parent of a teen could do some documentary footage and it could be called quarantine yeah so uh it's been trying for everyone and i know i'm checking in with our uh pediatrician he's seen levels of anxiety that are unprecedented in our teenage years yeah i mean you know for people that don't know or if you're new to the show uh there's six of us cohabitating right now two older boys uh 25 and 24 tyler and trapper who moved home at the beginning of quarantine from their apartment in in echo park which is kind of in the hollywood area and then our daughters who are 13 and 16 and overall it's been a delight to have everybody at home really precious family time and i always try to keep that in the forefront of my consciousness and my awareness but it's been really hard for uh the girls and also you know just bearing witness to um the difficulties that a lot of our friends and are having with their kids and it's really you know i feel like the emotional mental impact of this on young people is really not fully um addressed in the grand scheme of trying to get through this in a healthy way like yes we don't want to get the virus yes we need to do all the things and be safe and protect our children but there's also a cost to all of this and we're seeing that cost being borne out and it will be interesting to see the long-term implications on this generation this young generation and how this experience impacts decisions that they make and choices that they make later in life yeah definitely and i think it's you know like you said i've been pretty consistent and you know there's many things about quarantine that i actually prefer i prefer being at home with my family and creating meals together and you know having time to reflect and slow down and i think that quarantine provides sort of like an ayurvedic prescriptive healing experience for us and i do really believe overall that many of us if we are the ones that don't choose to exit or leave the body you know for various reasons during this time that we will have gained years onto our life because of the slowing down you know we see these benefits to the planet to the air to the waters and yet you know we have the perspective of having lived a very full life behind us we've experienced many things in our lives and even our sons who are in their 20s um you know it's very hard to imagine how they must feel you know reflecting on what their future is going to be like what's going to be available to them and it's hard for us to really imagine what all these conditions present in the psyche of a teen of a young child and you know just recently one of our daughters she was she's very concerned you know she was basically telling us we needed to move that we were not safe and you know this is a very real emotional state that children are experiencing that we're all experiencing in different ways yeah the mental emotional fallout is very real and you know at least with respect to our 16 year old daughter she's not interested in any prescription coming from us right she's trying to craft her own identity and contradiction to us like she's trying to figure out who she is by pushing the boundaries of um you know kind of our lifestyle parameters and part of that's healthy because that's how she figures out who she is but also it makes it challenging when we're all cohabitating and we're trying to be helpful to her and she's resistant to hearing anything from us that's right well it's healthy for her and very uh challenging for us trying for us but but there are beautiful moments within that journey and and i find the energy going up and down a lot more rapidly like within a week span there's a lot of different colors of experience that i'm having within the family and i think the you know the beauty is being able to go on that journey and just be present in the moment to what's happening so you know sometimes there's a lot of screaming and tears and uh you know bumping up against rub rough edges and then other times slamming yeah there's a lot of sweetness though too and moments that are just stolen um that never would have happened if we weren't sequestered if we weren't quarantined so there are a lot of treasures that are available to us um it's a it's an intense time for sure yeah you know i i vacillate between being totally fine with the whole thing and despairing like i miss the travel i miss being able to you know plan adventures and have things to look forward to on the calendar and when one day just bleeds into the next everything starts to feel a little bit mundane and that's when i get into a funk but you really are able to surf it more gracefully than than i do and i suspect a lot of that has to do with your own spiritual practice and these kind of rituals that you've set up like you get up at three or four in the morning and you do a fire ceremony and then you're out we have an outdoor tub and you're out in the bathtub under the star you do a lot like before anybody else wakes up in the morning you've already lived like an entire day it's true i mean those are um for me i don't know where i would be if i didn't have my deep connection to my faith and the spiritual perspective of what is going on um i don't know how i would feel without that it has been really a treasure of connection to understand that there is a greater plan that um this is a moment of of immense transformation and uh believing and and living in the awareness that we incarnated for this purpose like we all chose to come into a body during this time at this unprecedented moment and what the opportunity is to participate in evolution and also creating a brighter world a higher vibrating experience for humanity for animals for the planet and even beyond this realm so how do you remain grounded in that conviction when you open up your phone and start scrolling through you know the various versions of vitriol and dissonance and discontent and argument that seems to be kind of the touchdown of 2020 especially as we you know near this election and with the fires that we've been dealing like there's so much um upheaval right now across the world and it's easy to say well this is a moment of transformation and this is an opportunity but i just know for myself like exposing myself to too much of that really starts to become disheartening to me yeah but that's true and so there's a lot of it right like unprecedented um darkness being revealed in all areas of our life and what i think this does is it starts to communicate to us that we've been living in illusion we we were maybe thinking that we were living a different life than what we really were living so in my awareness it's sort of like the light goes on and you're seeing everything scurrying around but it was always there it's not like it just is existing now it's sort of like the uh the result of of our collective actions of the aspects of what it means to incarnate in planet earth with with all of its polarity and all of its contrast and so it's sort of revealing the truth of what is and i think the opportunity is to understand that everything is being gaslit every single perspective that is being presented has the potential to have been manipulated and so what do we do with that yeah it's really hard to find your footing yeah how do you how do you you know who can you trust what channel are you going to trust what person are you going to trust and in my spiritual journey of my life it has led me to know that we can only trust our true inner compass which is our own heart and how do we know how to trust our own heart we have to spend time in communion with our own life form our own direct connection to source and for me and for many of us this will come in as a feeling tone in the body so we have to train ourselves to understand that just because somebody writes something or because somebody says something doesn't make it so and we are very um we are very expansive technologies the human being and we have more senses than five senses and so this is giving us an opportunity to really feel into situations and being in touch with your body gives you the connection your supreme intelligence is in your heart not in your mind it's not your intellect it's your feeling and we're going to have to develop this ability to trust what is right for us well that's a practice i mean i think they're you know and that's something that you have you know developed over many years by virtue of the things that you do i feel like most people are pretty disconnected from who they are and they're living their lives reactively and that makes it makes makes them very prone to manipulation and just sort of you know responding to whatever they see in their twitter feed and then adopting that philosophy and regurgitating it without really spending that time to you know reflect on the veracity of it or to develop that sense of interconnectedness with oneself to have the like the acumen to understand whether that is resonating with you you know on a on a fundamental very real way or whether it's just some idea that you picked up in the atmosphere somewhere and decided to repeat right it's true but we have to begin now and so for me these are um what's happening on the planet are things that i've been aware of for many years and i've been the crazy person who you know has this perspective but the gift of this is now we can really start to look at what is so we can really see that in our society there are a lot of forces that are not operating for the benefit of humanity they are not what i would call life affirming um you know agendas or intentions and so um it's about reclaiming our own power understanding just how powerful the human being is who knows itself who actually has a connection to source and this goes back to developing a yoga practice you know starting to sit with yourself going off of twitter you know connecting with nature starting to feel how you could cultivate loving compassion in every situation how could you start to perceive all of life as sacred starting with yourself which is very challenging because we have a lot of judgments about ourselves our bodies um you know i would say the internal dialogue of you know the average human or most humans is one of um you know not kind communication so we're usually telling our body like we wish you weren't like that we wish you were different you know there's a lot of self-judgment and so one of the techniques that you know i use and that i have used and i use with my clients and my spiritual community water tiger is we do mirror work and so you actually sit in the mirror breathing and gazing into your eyes and a lot of stuff comes up when you yeah you engage in that practice talked about that when he was on the podcast that's like a core aspect of his love yourself you know program yeah i think it might be one of the most powerful and one of the ones that is the most confrontational for most people so to actually look at what is is a very powerful practice and technique and in the beginning you may feel all kinds of emotions you know a lot of people cry they see relatives who have been deceased but after a while after you get through the discomfort you can start to really look at yourself in the truth of who you are and start to receive yourself as sacred as something that's divine that is alive for a purpose and that is loved and valued by creation you know infinitely and eternally and so it's it's a it's a powerful powerful means and one i recommend and hopefully everybody listening to this podcast has a mirror and you can go meet yourself in the mirror and what does that practice look like specifically well you uh should be in a private area you know where you can do yourself public bathrooms no um uh you know uh sometimes it's good to do it uh sort of at twilight or where the light is a little bit lower um to actually just sit and you would gaze into the third eye point between the eyes relaxed and breathing connected to your breath and attempt to keep your eyes open you won't be able to your eyes will burn and you'll need to blink them but at least it you know intend to keep the eyes open and soften the gaze in that area and see what comes up for you and so i recommend starting off with maybe five minutes and then maybe increase that to 10 minutes and maybe journal and really observe and reflect on the emotions you know get in touch with how you're feeling about your physical so the first stage is really developing an understanding of what is looping in your mind right like first you have to be able to be objective about what that is before you can start to deconstruct it and and you know construct a new narrative yeah and and also what emotions are you feeling what does that bring up for you you know what are the memories or the feelings or the attitudes or thoughts that come up for you when you sit and really receive yourself and how does that look there's a kernel of zen buddhism to this and by that i mean the idea that the best way for you to be a force of positive good in the world is to reflect inward and focus on developing you know the best version of who you can possibly be right how do you square that with a sense or a call to take a stand on an issue or a feeling that you know this is a moment where we can't be quiet and we need to uh you know exert ourselves or have our voices be heard on some of these issues that culture is grappling with right now so those are two different things right i mean by this practice i'm not suggesting that we all go go to the mirror and all of our problems will be solved and right it's like being in the cave versus being involved no no so i think this is a really amazing opportunity for us to stop doing this human tendency which wants to choose one way so we want to say this or that what i'm going to say is this time is asking us to say yes and both so both so what these practices do this practice of mirror gazing or i would highly recommend a yoga practice for everyone and anyone in any form you can get it the practice of yoga will bring you into communion with the observer that is watching you in your life and it will allow you to um use the asanas the practices and also meditation to be in stillness into this place of neutrality which is neutral loving compassion one thing that's confusing for us is a lot of times when we're a human who is in the doing we reflect on the beingness as being irresponsible or opting out or hiding in the cave or unproductive right or unproductive but what we're saying is that if you can be in neutral loving compassion which i always talk about being the jedi so you're in the jedi so you're merged with your awareness of source but a lot of stuff can be happening from that state of awareness so you can go to a protest in that state of awareness you can express yourself you can stand up and speak out for what you care about but the ground of that is in a great vast anchoring of the nature of life the totality of life and this brings a point that i wanted to bring up that has really been present for me and is present for me in these um alchemical fire ceremonies that i light in the middle of the night and different practices that i engage in and that is the aspect of the mystery of life so we will never know the totality of life of the choices that are made of why certain souls choose different times to exit um you know you just never know you and i are having this this conversation you know i could leave my body after this interview when i'm driving home we don't know no one has the capacity to know that and so for me there's great power in developing a reverence for the mystery of life for understanding that everything is so fragile it's not it's not within my personality's choice to know what the highest outcome is i can't see the vast play from the area of source or the vantage point of consciousness so there is a reverence there's a devotion and there's a giving over to that great mystery of life and in that devotion and that commitment and returning to that communication over and over and over again it provides a connection to something that is miraculous that is beyond the um the solutions that we see in our culture today there's always a wild card there's always the miracle the miraculous and that is what i count on see what i think i do and what i think most humans do is i keep the fear at bay by trusting in structures and um deluding myself into this idea that certain things have a permanence that they actually don't right like that we live in a democracy and this is the way the world works and this is what i do and this is where i fit in and with all of that i feel safe and i can sleep at night and what you're suggesting is to understand and step into a greater awareness of the maya of all of that right like these are all just mental constructs that we fabricate in our minds to make us feel okay but in truth none of them are real they're social contracts at best and what we're seeing right now is a great kind of deconstruction and dismantling that's occurring you know in many different ways all across the globe and that's fomenting a lot of fear because it's challenging people's ideas um around the permanence of things and the fragility of not just our own corporal physical bodies with respect you know vis-a-vis to this virus but the planet's fragility in light of you know how humans have tread on it over the last couple hundred years um and i think that that um puts us all in a delicate headspace that makes us trigger-happy when we open up our twitter feeds right like we're like ready to pounce because we're not even consciously aware of the extent of the kind of fear that is created by that level of um uncertainty the growing awareness around that uncertainty yeah well i mean what we're really avoiding is death right i mean ultimately it all leads back to fear of death that's that's that's where the treasure is right there and so the best thing that we could do is go face our death get clear with that get as close to that as you can imagine you know what that is face it sit with it commune with it and again these structures are really super helpful and also necessary in this life like it wouldn't be okay if we just ignored what was going on and laid on the couch and said well whatever i don't like seeing humanity suffer i want us to suffer less i want there to be more love in the world i'm going to do everything that i can to at least feed the lesser of the evils to try to break the fall as much as i can because i am a modern woman i'm a mother i'm a wife i'm i'm a business owner you know i'm in this world i'm not in a cave on a mountain i'm here i'm here in the culture but what i would say is that i feel that uh on social media in the community and energetically there is an agenda to separate us and tear us apart um i have family members that voted for trump i am not an advocate of him or the energy that he represents um that might get me in trouble on your show i don't know but i'm i have no problem saying that people are gonna come out they're gonna come after me now um but what i will say is that i love these family members and i have to find a way to respect their perspective to meet them in some form of love some form of kindness some form of curiosity um so that i can understand why they had that perspective um we were talking about we knew an individual who became a flat earther and um you know this individual you know we have known him to be a kind and loving and meaningful member of you know of community and so while i don't adhere to that and that seems rather ridiculous to me um why is the response so aggressive and so um uh canceling it's the canceled culture you know whatever you say you know you're afraid to say anything because if you say something then somebody will find some position that then cancels that perspective and what i'm saying as a spiritually devoted person what i know is that life is diverse and there are billions of perspectives not only in our cultures but in the universes in the multiverses and so it's unintelligent to cancel another perspective that is not a life-affirming energy or position or i guess emotion so what i think would be very very healing for us as a culture would be um to be an on wonder and to ask people how did you get to that perspective and what are your life experiences and what what do you fear and what do you love in life and what have you suffered from that you know why did you make that choice yeah i mean i think the the kind of compassionate healthy response to somebody who's offering you know an opinion or a a world view with which you disagree with is to say tell me more right like you know how can i engage that person from a perspective of really genuinely trying to understand not just that idea but what led them to that idea is always a better tactic than attacking but i think to play devil's advocate a little bit because everything feels so fractured right now there is um at least and i'm speaking only for myself but i'm witnessing this more broadly there's this desire to figure out where solid ground is and when somebody is you know out there advocating for something that's so patently and blatantly and obviously counter to the truth the vigorous reaction to that i think comes from a place of you know a desire that we need to like truth matters facts matter and in this world where everybody's screaming at each other like it is important what's real and what isn't and we need to be able to come together and agree on a certain you know idea of realness yeah because otherwise we're lost but so that's my respect this is an argument that we've had and you're like well let's just everybody has their own everybody's right from their own perspective and i'm like okay but you know the earth is not flat and so why are we giving that person as much credence as the person who says no the world is not flying well we're maybe not but you know we shouldn't be doing that but maybe we're just not being unkind or cancelled violent right against that life that individual need not be canceled and eradicated from society but you know perhaps they could be better educated maybe maybe loved into another perspective and it's kind of it's kind of similar how we are with plant-based eating is you know we've created i've created almost 500 recipes in the plant-based world and you know i have a lot of friends that are not plant-based and i don't come at them with judgment or preaching to them or you know showing them pictures of violence um i just be loving and keep cooking amazing foods and keep making amazing you know cheese um so my point is is it's it it's feeling very much like in our culture uh we have different views about different things and there's a lot of very intense things going on right now like we should all be very paying attention right now it is not a a moment to uh go to sleep right but it's also not a time to be reactive and out of balance it's a time to to really cultivate that inner jedi warrior well and then the the danger of that is that we've gone on social media and posted a bunch of things and you know and commented and said all this stuff and then we feel within ourselves that we've done this great you know public service but the question is have you really you know like what is really going on on social media who are we actually really connecting with you know who is agreeing with you do you even know the quality of that life form that is agreeing you that with that thinks you're so amazing and so it's a very um kind of crazy um world that we're in and you and i are are you know products of that and you know i have a community a spiritual community water tiger which i got completely through social media and we do have a subscription community where we go deeper and discuss these kind of things but you know overall um you know i have i'm sure like many like most of us i have very mixed emotions about the whole platform of social media and is it really helping us i kind of feel like i'm like i'm gambling and thinking i'm winning and i'm probably not winning of course not well we both watched the the social dilemma and um you know people that watch or listen to this podcast know that i just did a whole podcast with with adam skolnik where we kind of broke down that movie and shared our perspectives but yeah it's uh it's disturbing and disheartening when you pull back the curtain and you have a better understanding of how these platforms function and operate the extent to which you know we are the product and we are being mined and manipulated to such a vast extent and at the same time both you and i have cultivated and crafted careers that support our family as a result of these platforms so it's not necessarily a black or white thing but it does um you know it is you know that movie has really reshaped the relationship that i want to have with these platforms and you know you've been saying this forever but um i'm more mindful of this now than ever this idea that like when you have an instinct to share something it's like okay why am i doing this for what purpose like what is the what is the greater good or what is the aspiration behind doing this like what is the why behind why you feel compelled to put something up on one of these platforms yeah and i mean i'm you know maybe i need to be a little bit more like you because i'm quite sensitive and you know go into darkness to find my connection in the middle of the night and there's a lot of times i'm supposed to post content i just can't do it like it's not in my body i can't i've tried to get on like a schedule so that i'm consistent you know you i've never done you've been such an amazing consistent but i mean with your podcast yeah but now like i really just i use it to share new episodes of the podcast it's pretty rare that i use it for anything other than that and unless i just feel i wake up and i feel like oh i have something cool that might be helpful that i feel i feel good and i feel like sharing it but i don't feel compelled to just be you know sharing my life all the time on there it's a change i mean you were in the early early days but not now yeah so uh and the other thing is is it's not just that we've built you know a career we have thousands of people that we have had deep meaningful life experiences through so social media for you and me has not been a light thing it's been a very interesting incredible people as a result of it and a lot of the guests that i've gotten on the podcast i've been able to do that because of social media yeah yeah so it's very tricky it's tricky but i you know i think now you know that we have a greater perspective you know it's up to us to choose to use the tool and make sure that we're not being used by the tool so it's well we're being used by it we're definitely being used if you're using it you're being used by it right that's the truth right and that's the disturbing reality mean the level or the extent right but i think the pernicious aspect of it is that when you think you have a healthy relationship with it you're still not fully aware of the extent to which you're being manipulated and used by it and that was the real message of that movie like even if you think like oh all i do is do this or i do you know that's not what's going on here yeah you know it's a much darker reality and the you know i just i know for myself the solution isn't to just you know basically delete all my accounts because this is how we make a living and communicate with the world so how do you do that in a safer and um healthier way yeah i don't know i mean a few months ago i um i hired uh ollie a friend that had come on a plant power italia retreat and he's been creating an online platform for a subscription that wouldn't be even part of squarespace it would be its own sovereign tech you know technical platform and that's not a replacement for social media but it has been in my awareness of the fact that uh there may be a world in not too far off future where we have our content on our own individual platforms well i'm in the process of putting that together as well i mean you have water tiger i've teased this out i haven't talked about it at length but um this fall on an undisclosed date because we're still building it right now i'm going to be launching a subscription service and a big part of it is for that very reason like i want to take these communities not offline but off of these platforms where it's a safer um healthier environment uh for the people who are interested in the things that i care about and that i speak to on the show and beyond to gather and commune um in a way that uh where they're where they're you know they're not being data mined and they're not being manipulated in that way yeah we hope so we we hope we could create that well let's shift gears a little bit we have a little bit of a show-and-tell here if you're watching this on video you can see like all this plant-based cheese here but before we even get into the latest with shrimp i think one thing that gets lost in your story as somebody who's been on this podcast a million times and is always sharing you know deep thoughts and you know these spiritual practices uh is the fact that and you alluded to it a minute ago the fact that you're you're like this serial entrepreneur and always have been like you're a business a powerful business woman like setting aside shrimu which we're going to get into i mean you had you know this garment line for years and years and years like pre-internet where you were doing direct to consumer before it was a thing and you had this robust interior design business like you've had a lot of chapters in your business career that have delivered you to this place to you know create this new venture that you're working on right now so i thought it would be cool to share that side of you a little bit because that i don't know that we've really fully explored that on the podcast yeah cool thanks for that um it's kind of uh interesting to hear you describe me like that thank you so much i received that you're a startup founder i kind of am no i actually you've had multiple startups my bit my my main mission well okay so um rich is going to judge me because i have a business degree from an inferior university i don't know i agree at all but you you went to really good schools i went to arizona state everyone so hey man and i have a i have this degree i actually uh went there because i was frozen after having being raised in alaska so i think i just entered like a certain climate into this computer and it gave me these options and i'm going there yeah dry and hot yeah i was like i'm going to where the sun shines every day um and you know i didn't have good sat scores or anything like that um so anyway i went to arizona state i had never been to arizona and uh within that four-year period i also lived in france for six months which was a phenomenal experience where i learned to speak french fluently and and created a whole community there that was amazing but i came back and graduated from business school with a degree in international marketing um and the crazy thing is is that my mom um so she's from chile and um she uh was from a sort of high society uh part of life there and her father left her mother when she was 16 years old and so she and he was a healer like i was and moved to the south and spent his days out actually as a healer he was very much like me and i never met him but she would always tell me my father would have loved you like we're very alike his name was ernesto so uh so my mom really wanted me to have business nailed um she and my dad ended up um stability yeah then instability in the fact you know she then supported her mom and her sister and she spoke english quite well and she became a secretary um and then that's how she ended up meeting my dad eventually and they moved to the united states he was a texan who was down mapping the jungles he was mapping the jungles of the amazon my mother was engaged to an american engineer and this engineer drowned uh a month before their wedding and my father was his replacement it's a crazy story crazy story like somebody's gotta make a movie about it someday um but he's a bush pilot hunter fisherman from amarillo texas so it's very much a green acres thing like he meets this kind of high society chilean woman and takes her back did they go back to texas first or colorado they went to texas first and like there was a big article about my mom in the paper because she was like the first exotic creature yeah exotic creature that had arrived it was sort of like you know they'd found the dinosaur bones or whatever um yeah then they moved to colorado and she gave birth to five children i'm her youngest and i'm named for her mother and so i'm julie rosado named after julia rosado and your mom had a dress shop for years and years and years in anchorage right is that where you first learned business yeah um so i i went to east anchorage high school [Laughter] and my mom had a dress shop and i was way overdressed um every day of high school because i would just open the boxes up and take like the best looking thing that happened to be there um so i worked with her and i would go on buying trips with her to la and um and she really wanted me to learn business and when i got my high school transcripts i always took like business law or real estate law like take that in high school i didn't have classes like that in high school anchorage high was really amazing you should have seen what was history wow that's quite something so um so when i went i realized from my high school transcripts i had only ever taken one art class and that was like ceramics and drawing when i was in junior high and i i won an award for this very not that amazing thing that i did um and then i didn't pick up an art tool again until i was like 20 in my late 20s i had become so i went to arizona state lived in paris then graduated and my sister was working in the garment business my sister vic in la and i didn't know what i was going to do but i had no intention of going to la and she introduced me to this guy named michael bush and he was a garment sales person and he interviewed me and hired me so i came to la and went right to downtown to l.a martin started working and he taught me how to sell he said this is what you do you show the line and then you you look at the buyer and you say can i have the paper you know it was like you asked them very directly for the papers so i said okay so we had this show and i did exactly what he asked me to do and i handed him like a hundred thousand dollars worth of business and he was like what did you just do and i was like well i just do what you asked me to do and so instantly a salesperson was born and i ended up having this amazing experience in garments um i worked for the notorious allen schwartz who owned abs which are some of the most hilarious and um he's like king of the knockoffs yeah and yeah quite quite an extraordinary eccentric person um but uh you know much uh sexual harassment and things going on during those years like if if that was happening yeah i mean the me too aspect of the world i could have sued so many people i mean i was locked in my showroom at different times not by allen this was a different a different boss but anyway so i ended up becoming the west coast sales manager for shelly siegel who's an amazing um designer lovely lovely human being she's do you remember the actor robbie benson yeah that's her that's his sister so she was quite talented she um designed a line called laundry and shelley used to invite me in to edit her line she wouldn't let anybody else in and so in my late 20s i decided to go back to fashion design school as a professional and i got my fashion design degree in a year and i picked up a pencil and discovered that i had a natural talent for drawing that i never knew and i was so bummed because i felt like i spent all of these years of my life not developing what i'm made to do but in the end it worked out because i had both business and creative i was able to get up to speed creatively you know quit more quickly um so i created my own fashion line and i took it to imagnan and sold it and got on the cover of their christmas catalog and that launched my collection julie pilot collection julie piet collection right and it hung in bridge and i was hanging what does that mean bridge oh it's you know it's lingo for you know being in the garment industry it's basically like it's it's not super cheap but it's not designer it's like a bridge line so it's between and i hung with lines like anna suey mark eisen dk calvin klein which is called ck so i was in this really beautiful section and like everything which is kind of cool that you're asking me about this is when i create something i usually do it pretty luxuriously and so rather than starting with a t-shirt or something that was simple i designed 36-piece jackets with like crystal buttons from austria so when you're making that in la there are like 12 subcontractors that have to touch that jacket before it emerges and so it was a very complex business that i ended up going into um well the hilarious thing i mean first of all it it's worth saying like everyone knows you as like this cookbook author and this person who's created you know all these recipes but you know it's fascinating to hear that the roots of this are in a completely different industry and you've told stories over the years of just how insane the fashion industry is like no other business would function the way that this functions like you would come up with this design and you'd create the pattern and then you take it to these various subcontractors and say this is how i want it this is how you sew it this is how it goes and then they would just return it to you completely different like if you say i want a they just give you z and then they look at you blankly like what are you and you're like this is not what i ordered and they're like well this is what it is oh it's highly complex i mean you can't even do that first of all you're a small manufacturer and so they're selling uh companies that are massive so you have to go in and develop a personal relationship with the subs to somehow convince them to show to sow yourself because you're it's just not worth it it's not worth it yeah so it's all personal and if you leave them i remember the first time like i lied to the buyer at imagine and told her that i was like had full production facilities i'd never produced one thing in my entire life so i had the order which was a good problem to have and they don't pay you ahead of time right like they're like we want this many of this and then it's on you to go and create it yeah it should pay you until way later if at all actually if they pay you if they pay you that's the other thing like they don't even pay you no it's crazy and you know you have to watch it every step of the way i remember being in south central and dropping off my first lot and i was just driving away hoping like i hope this place doesn't start on fire like it's there in the morning and you have to check in with them because you know if they're sewing a thousand blouses and they're sewing the left blouse the left sleeve to the right armhole like that's a big problem so you you have to catch it before so there's a lot there's so much that goes into garment production especially when you're a small person a small manufacturer i learned so much from that experience and i was basically me and one part-time employee who was my pattern maker um it was it was a lot of work that i put in yeah and you were in you were in some of the other stores too not just imag no i was in all the bridge source so i was in fred siegel nordstrom barney's macy's um bergdorf goodman i magnum sax like i was legit but it's a classic example like you have this idea like oh well if you're in all these stores you must be crushing it right and meanwhile you're like dying no it took me six years actually to learn that all the guys all the men that came to work in ferraris were leveraged to the to the hill like they actually didn't have the money to own that ferrari it's because it's all lifestyle presentation yeah it's all like um yeah smoke and mirrors sort of type thing and i mean some people really hit it big but you got to stay in you know go to being and relentless and it never stops like even everything's old the minute you put in the showroom it's old so you have to go right back to the design board and it's this very manic um relentless you know pressure remember to be innovative i remember years and years ago there was a documentary about isaac mizrahi do you remember that documentary i think and that was my introduction to kind of a glimpse behind the scenes of what the fashion industry is really like and what i recall it was so long ago but i i do remember being amazed at how manic it was and like you just can't breathe for a second because you're always the next line and the next line and it always has to be different and different and different and it's incredible that anybody succeeds because it's just a recipe for burnout right and the other thing i think is unique that's unique to this business and correct me if i'm wrong is that in most businesses you can kind of just grow slowly and organically you know just like every year a little bit better a little bit better but in fashion you can take your line to a certain point but you're just going to be starving in manic forever unless you get a massive infusion of capital to then get over the hump and become like a tommy hilfiger right like that doesn't happen by increments it it only happens with like gigantic cash infusion so it's the only way that you can grow it really is it's it's very very treacherous and and and requires more energy more consistent energy and sort of this relentless mania in order to get to that place and the reason that i made a decision to close my company well let's before we even get to that you make this pivot to doing it direct to concern yeah let's talk about that because that's i think that informs the sensibility behind shrimu also like pre-internet you know you just decide i'm gonna i'm gonna circumvent all these stores and i'm just gonna go right to the customer and how do you even do that in in an era when it's all about retail yeah it was so interesting so i just what happened is during okay so i was doing julie pie collection and selling all those stores and then uh priscilla presley came to me which is another part of my history a friend of mine was saying like i hope you're putting this in your book like i almost forget priscilla came to me um through another producer that i knew and she asked me to co-design a line with her for home shopping network and i really like priscilla a lot she's quite a beautiful woman and um i really really enjoyed her and so i was like okay this is a great opportunity you know and i spent six months with her and so we worked together uh diligently for about a six-month period and the contracts were being drawn up and the night before i was supposed to sign the contract i started vomiting and everything in my body was like you cannot do this agree this arrangement and i called her at home and told her that i was unable to sign the um and the reason was the resistance was what the resistance was is that she was this celebrity and i was doing all the work it was basically like i was gonna have to bleed like we just talked about right and she was going to get all the credit and she also had a manager that would brief me on how i should speak to her so like every time i would talk to her he would call me and say don't like don't talk about it like that say it like this and i was young and fiery and it just really made me angry that he would talk to me like that and um i just was like it was more like that thing that i was talking about in the beginning it was in my body like my mind didn't know because who wouldn't want to be partners with priscilla presley and i liked her a lot so my body finally got to this point was like uh uh you cannot do this it's almost like if i had done it it would have made me sick and when i called her to tell her she was just like no no julie like we can work it out we can work it out and i was like i said to her i said i'm an artist like i'm not interested in doing a line that you have your name on i'm like i'm the one that's going to be bleeding that's going to be doing all this work i was like i want to do it for me and so i gave her my line free i said take the line i don't want anything does she end up selling she went on air she went on air she did she went on air once and then that she never did it anymore and i ran into her recently at the humane society well some years ago and i was able to go up and say hi to her i was like do you remember me and she was like yes i remember so it was sweet to see her yeah so how does that then translate into this pivot this like this trunk show thing that you started with okay so if you're in stores um it's a big uh markdown dance so in fact you're paying once you get a once you get your foot in the door and you're sort of in the department then it becomes like if they don't sell enough then they hit you back with what you didn't sell so it's this really deal with the devil like it's never clear it's never fair and you're always at the um like leasing a car or going into the casino like it's all it's stacked against you're paying for shelf space and then you're paying you know it's just it sort of feels like you can not find any way out of it and at the time you know and and still today i had a really strong network of people that i'm connected with and they loved my stuff and so i had this crazy idea i was like what if i call my six best friends in these major cities around the country i'll ask them to bring 50 people to their homes i'll get a model i'll do a size range of muslins and i'll fly in and do a presentation and i'll charge them a hundred percent of the order up front and i'll drop ship it to their offices 12 weeks later what's interesting about that is that it sounds like an idea that would work now but at the time that just was insane nobody was doing that and i'm sure everybody told you nobody's going to pay for that nobody's going to do that yeah i don't even know i mean i i had this beautiful um southern model named nancy green and um i i did this whole presentation that included a video of i love lucy modeling in paris i can't remember exactly what my shtick was but i opened up the evening with these 50 women showing them this video and then talking about you know fashion and uh it worked actually quite well um i sold i had no problem selling in advance 12 weeks in advance um my issue was when i got back from this world tour this this uh how many cities did you get i did like i did like six cities total like i worked so hard and i was pregnant with trapper at the time so i was a pregnant woman basically doing and had a one-year-old at home so um i remember i would come home after working and like take a bath and just have to breathe to get myself back into the energy because i would go out in the evening and do these trunk shows because i had to then i produced the stop the inventory and i had to sell into it and it was just me so it was an extreme amount of effort um what i didn't factor in is that it would take me i had now a thousand orders to process where otherwise you would get like one sheet of order with a bunch of styles right and the other thing i realized is that i lost all of my profit in the extra sizes that nobody bought so like you get the person and they're like you know i want the pant in a 12 in pink and as a designer you're like thinking you're not going to wear that pant in pink you know what i should have said is you're forbidden to wear that pant in pink but i didn't so what happens is you try to produce for everybody and then you lose the the profit is in just those right because unless you're doing it at some level of scale when you're doing one-offs you're never going to get out for money and i did everything from t-shirts to evening gowns and fake fur jackets i would go to lax in my jeep and pick up fake fur from germany and drive it on the roof of my car to the studio like the amount of commitment that it takes to do that it's you have to be young and insane and the reason that i ended up so anyway i did that for about a year and then i burnt out and i read calvin klein's autobiography and donna karen's autobiography and i realized that this was never going to stop that there was it doesn't matter how big you get or how successful it's still like this crazy manic exactly and i was like i can't and i had been picked up by a very reputable accounting firm who was supposed to be guiding me and i had done a big fashion show at the pacific design center and i had over a hundred styles in that show i had by the way i had women from the real estate community that i knew modeling for me i had some professional models but i also brought real people into the show and it was this beautiful night and i remember my father's jaw was on the floor he couldn't believe that i had done all of that one of the times that he was so proud of me but i was pregnant with trapper and i walked out on the runway at the end with tyler in my arms and trapper in my belly and i had just managed this like herculean thing and so after um trapper was born um you know i don't know maybe six months after he was born i made the decision to close the company because i was like i just can't do it and i was heartbroken literally i was i got sick for like four weeks and um i i had left with like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars debt like when the train stops and everything hits the wall and the whole thing it all catches up with you and i was so unseasoned in business that i took that so personally that i couldn't repay some of those things and i would go see my subs and they would say julie it's okay like this is business you're gonna be back like it's fine but it literally was like um really um soul-crushing so when you look back on that do you have any regrets do you ever imagine what it would have been like like let's say somebody did come in and say here's you know i love what you're doing you just need structure and you need help like here's x number of dollars to get you rolling and hire staff and create some infrastructure here yeah i mean i was a prolific designer literally never out of creative ideas and my line is beautiful when i look at photos today it's still beautiful it's not like it was a fad it just wasn't meant to be and i guess the silver lining for me is that when i did close the company and went through like a four-week collapse after that i found yoga and i started practicing yoga even though i was i was still spiritually connected because we were following deepak chopra's seven laws of spiritual success like i had my team and my people we were always inspiring them in that kind of way like a you know altruistic living and you did tony robbins a bunch of times oh yeah i did tony robbins during i did all tony robbins um programs all the mastery financial mastery unleashed the giant within whatever it is i fire walked with him i fire watch with him totally um it was great my partner in those was uh chuck norris's um sidekick on the show his name's is his name clarence i don't remember anyway super fun he was my partner in one of the advanced um you know programs so it was really it was really cool but literally broke my heart after that i built uh i became a house contractor and i built um a home that overlooks all of malibu that's the highest point that was the home that i had with the boy's dad and then after that i built the home that you and i are in now so um and everybody was like oh building isn't that stressful i was like no it's just one house it's not ten thousand sleeves so i had you know the idea that building a house would be simpler than manufacturing a line of clothing way simpler ironic and way way way simpler and and i love it and and uh if anybody gets a chance to do that it's it's a wonderful wonderful experience i i really loved it well i think what's great about those stories that you just shared is that they all inform kind of what you're doing now and people will look at you and say oh now she's the doyan of you know vegan cheese but look what backed it up like there's a whole career decades of you know experience that you garnered you know doing difficult things in the business world and succeeding and failing and trying again so when you look back when you reflect on those experiences you know what did you learn that has informed your approach to you know shrimu and what you're doing now well i mean i think what i've learned is that you know in order to create something that's very powerful the vision has to be very unified like very very true and very very real so i knew when i was creating shrimu um it was sort of had to be this expression of beautiful design highest quality um purest ingredients and really done in the way where it's i consider shreemu to be a beauty brand we we haven't seen it there's more going to be coming cheese is leading but it's really a beauty a beauty brand i'm offering shreemu as an invitation to a beautiful life and that beautiful life comes from uh eating a high vibrational uh not cheese product which i call the next evolution of cheese so i'm not asking us to give up our love of cheese i've just made it better so it's better for our health our bodies it's better for the animals it's better for the planet and it's ultimately better for our children and so um for me uh you know meeting brian ahara who is uh the amazing artist who um did this coding which i have these these tattoos go out with shreemu right shipments um and this coding brian has written backwards and read backwards his entire life and so he developed this branding for me this says devotional offering this is what is within this coding um and it's part of my my label and my brand and and and so i guess for me it's like i had to start at the peak of the artistic expression um knowing that this is a global brand and i have over 40 recipes of cheese where i can tell you anyone that ate them would be you know falling on the floor in ecstasy or being very excited about the flavors but shrimu now is at the top of that and then you know as i go there will be more mass products and you know there's many more aspects of the business in the vision so perhaps i'm overestimating how aware the audience is about what you are doing at the moment probably is worth providing a little bit of background so you uh co-authored a couple cookbooks with me which were really your cookbooks like my name is let's just be honest you know if we're being honest like you in solidarity with my decision to go plant-based and trained for these races you showed up and infused our kitchen with a tremendous amount of creativity to initially to support me but then it became its own creative inspiration for you the result of that is everything that we've co-created together including the plant power whey cookbook the plant power whey italia cookbook which is a nod to the retreats that we do where we take these groups of people to this beautiful agriturismo in tuscany and have a seven-day experience of food and meditation and community and in addition to that you authored another book called this cheese's nuts you became obsessed with trying to figure out how to create plant-based cheese and this was many years ago this wasn't yesterday and you basically went into the kitchen treated it like a lab and set about cracking the code on trying to create like the next evolution the next level of what a plant-based cheese could taste like because at the time there are plenty of brands in the store most of them not so good most of them taste kind of the same relatively bland and you thought there's got to be a better way to do this and over many years and a lot of experimentation you really figured i i have to say like you completely figured it out and you created this book which basically tells people how to do this themselves at home you continue to iterate and learn and experiment and grow and then it got to this place where people were like well i love the book but you know i'm just never gonna do this at home like can you just make cause you would make it and we would bring it to dinner parties or we would share it with friends and people would just flip out like they would just lose their minds they just couldn't believe that there wasn't dairy in this cheese because this isn't just this isn't like american slices of cheese this is like high-end very fine artisanal wheels of cheese that are reminiscent of you know the the the parisian flavors that you're so familiar with whether it's a brie or a camembert or you know those kind of exotic very cheesy iterations of cheese and people would say like just can you just make like i'll buy it like i'm never gonna i'm too busy i'm not gonna make this will you just make it and you were like i'm not gonna do that but then you know it dawned on you at some point i'm interested in what that point was where you just decided okay maybe i can do this and so you set about like creating this line of cheese called srimu which is now a full-fledged startup we're going to get into what's happening currently with it but you've turned it into this really beautiful direct-to-consumer product line yeah so yeah thanks i mean it took first of all i mean i have friends of mine that live in paris half the time lucy and jan uh welters and uh he's a fashion photographer she's a stylist and you know they eat french cheese like as they speak french their kids speak french like they live in paris half the time and they were freaking out over my cheese so they would just be you know inhaling it saying you have to make this you have to make this and you know i i took a long time you know i have to say i had a lot of pain over what i attempted or what i experienced with julie paya collection and i was like i know what production is i'm not at a loss at what that is and i started to sort of meditate on what it would take to launch this food company and quite frankly it's a lot simpler it's a lot more direct and it has a greater capacity to make a global impa impact that will be a legacy for me i mean something that would actually transform people's lives from within their kitchens and i've done that with my cookbooks and you know i know that food is an energy recipes are an energy and i believe that when i infuse these recipes with my love of source connection that this somehow makes it into whoever is eating the food and so with shrimpu the vision was to make a beautiful brand that was crafted in devotion with the best ingredients and was made with the purest intentions so truly truly made for the purpose of uh supporting animals supporting creating more love on the earth supporting our bodies i'm a very i have a very sensitive stomach i can't eat dairy i can't eat a handful of nuts i mean i can eat dairy but i have a stomachache after so to be clear um you know before when i wasn't vegan um but even if i eat a handful of nuts i have a stomachache right away so working with these cheeses and curing them and soaking them and adding the cultures and processing them i never had a stomachache any of the time and i was absolutely stunned at the quality of cheese experience that i've been able to create and the reason i think that i was able to create it is that i literally worked on my own um in a in an experience of exploration and i just went for it and tried things um there were a lot of fails uh before i figured it out but i've really figured it out yeah well a couple things the first thing is there were a lot of people who said well why don't you just go to the farmer's market and set up your booth and like sell it and you're like i'm not doing that like i did you know i did a version of that when i had my fashion line i'm not interested in that i'm only interested in creating something that i can scale and secondarily uh there's this idea when you when you raise the issue of like a plant-based cheese people immediately think fake cheese and their mind turns to all these you know processed chemicals that a lot of these companies use as binders to create the flavor and the texture that people are used to with cheese right and that's like a hurdle that you've had to address and overcome because there is none of that in in what you do i mean there's actually very few ingredients in this product yeah they're very pure this is not a gooey creepy vegan cheese that tastes horrible that you want to gag it's um it's very pure and authentic and i think if i you know what i've learned as a designer you you know you asked what did you learn well i think what we learn as designers or painters or fashion designers or writers is you get to a level of maturity where you understand that less is more in fact it's the simplicity that makes something extraordinary and so if my recipes stand for anything they stand for the ability to be simply showcasing what mother nature provides with some alchemy and design and flair and you know and definitely taste um but it's really in the simplicity of of what is done and trying to preserve um purity in in the product yeah so one of the things that really struck me about this journey that you've been on is that you really took your time like you for months and months and months were in this incubation phase where i would be like are you ever gonna like introduce this to the world but you were very patient like you really wanted to be sure about the name and you know what was the mission statement and how are you going to package these things and what recipes were you going gonna lead with and to me i just thought just make a decision and and start doing this like what are you waiting for now i see in retrospect that paying off because the level of like care and intentionality that you invested in making sure that you were making those decisions correctly for you and what you really want like i guess what i'm saying is you were like i could do it many different ways but i don't want to look back on this five years from now and say why did i do it this way i should have done it this way because and i think i would you know i'm projecting but i would suspect a lot of that was informed by not wanting to end up where you ended up with julie pie collection where you were in this manic thing and not enjoying your life yeah definitely i mean it's not lost on me what production entails and you know the other thing is the amount of waste that is incurred during fashion production and so i had to think and really meditate on this long and hard whether i really wanted to step into this space and i would say the driving factor that really really made the decision for me is the opportunity that i have to make a global impact and i saw how food transforms our lives you know when people are cooking out of our cookbooks we're literally living in their kitchens they're eating the same food and food is is also a ritual it's also a ceremony and so i really truly know that all of the intentions and hopes and dreams and visions that i have for humanity for the earth for the animals are really in these cheeses it's really true for me had i not had that spiritual aspect i would have never done it i don't need to just do a business to feel you know to see my name on a label this is truly a mission for me and you know in my experience because i'm an artist i i needed for my own alignment to start with a product that was at the pinnacle of what i could do so i wanted to create the most extraordinary that i that i could knowing that there will be future sub lines you know the world is vast and there's you know i have a velveeta substitute that will just slay i mean it's amazing so if i can go all the way in the different levels and fully intend to and already have all those recipes proven and tested yeah but you come out of the gate with the highest of the high end it's the it's the tesla model like elon musk first introduces this like lotus you know car that was like i think it was like 250 000 that first car that tesla came out with but the idea was you come out with that and then each iteration you start to work your way down until you get to scale and are able to produce something that's widely affordable but it's that same idea like you set you set the brand tone with the highest caliber version of what you can possibly produce definitely and also just for me as a as a being as an artist i had to do it this way and um the only thing that's different is that unlike tesla i didn't have a financial team on board so basically what i did is i guessed at what the box was going to cost me to produce having never had a production kitchen or a paid workers comp or before we even get to that what was the decision walk me through the decision to make this a direct to consumer product rather than taking it to the supermarkets i think it is informed by my experience of fashion of not wanting to be in a markdown paid shelf space experience 20 middlemen yeah with 20. taking a cut exactly and also um the other thing that i really cherish is the communication with the community so the ability to actually um speak to global issues speak to spiritual issues speak to health issues and have a dialogue you know with this group of people so for me it's about sort of calling all these souls together so that we can collect our energies and then all go out and make a better world create a brighter world so it was really that community aspect the community aspect around food that really informed my decision to go subscription with this product right so you make these top-level decisions you're able to raise like an angel round of funding to get you up on your feet and rolling you get into a commercial kitchen space in downtown los angeles you hire a bunch of people and you're rocking and rolling and you're starting to build your subscription base and make a name for yourself and then boom pandemic yeah so how has how has this experience impacted you as a business person and how you're trying to um you know manage throughout all of this yeah it's been challenging and i'm extremely blessed that we are an essential business because we are a food business and uh also we are um perfectly positioned for home delivery to actually offer this cheese experience into people's individual homes or into their safe community bubbles so as a category i see it as an opportunity of course we experienced shipping failure with ups and fedex with them not guaranteeing shipments at all and then they failed to ship um over three months 20 of our shipments the shipping has just been insane it's been insane trying to figure out how to untie that right and of course uh because i created this you know high-end box that weighs quite a lot and one one thing i did do right is you know i chose the box size and after a lot of research and going back and analyzing the size i really chose the right size like there isn't a different configuration that would have made it cheaper it's all about scale really and also packing products that actually keep can keep the product colder for a longer period of time so during covid we've been shipping literally overnight to make sure that people receive their shipments because it's just been about making sure they receive um so you know going forward we have different packing rating materials that keep the package cold for three to four days so that changes a lot for us but one thing that i want to share is i found out i hired a financial analyst so what i did is i was already in this process before covid hit doing a lot of research meeting with every cert every single expert and you know genius that i know um just getting people's feedbacks on financial decks and on strategies and and these type of things and then covet hit and i hired a financial analyst and we've spent all these months going through every single cent every line item every process um and what we discovered is that i was under charging for my box so for the um sacred altar box i was charging 130 just because i was like well that you know i kind of did it on a paper and was like maybe that maybe that's the price um and what we've discovered looking at the margins and everything else is that that box is actually 174 dollars so um i want to mention that anybody that has a current existing subscription of shrimu and has supported me we are going to grandfather those those rates in for you um as long as you keep your subscription uh current uh but then i moved to i i wanted to offer uh some more products so what i did is i created a four-wheel box and then a three-wheel box and uh you don't get the fresh flavors so um there were there's fresh mozzarella that comes in a jar that's in the baked box in in the big box in water and then there's the smoked almond cheddar which is this not your grandma's cheese ball it's like insanely good but the wheels um you can get in the three the three wheel or the four wheel and so we're very excited we're actually launching with a three and four wheel um the three wheel is 88 and the four wheel is 117 and um um and i've got two new flavors um also that i've so we have a little we have like a show-and-tell should i go around yeah why don't you do that now this mic um if you're not watching it on youtube and you're listening dial up to youtube so you can see the presentation of all these crazy cheeses here but it's not what you would imagine or suspect when you think about plant-based cheese i can tell you that yeah so so what do we have okay so what we have on the board here we have four wheels and we have our bonfire so uh we have this is not your grandma's cheese yeah it's called bonfire it's a smoky almond cheddar absolutely delicious appetizer and you can also put it into tacos it also makes really beautiful little you can form it into little no meat balls and add them to your pasta it's um irresistibly delicious in every way and it's shipped in this beautiful cheesecloth inside a jar then over here we have one of our new flavors it's called dolce vita and this is inspired by gorgonzola dolce and the blue is actually an antioxidant of blueberry which just makes the beautiful pattern this is our creamiest cheese it's made with coconut and cashews and tastes very cheesy not sweet like coconut but it gives it that kind of creaminess then we have our sort of hero of the cheese board which is called birdie it's camembert inspired this is like the french you know truffle infused uh taste of the bistro that we all love as cheese lovers and then we have also spire which is inspired by blue cheese but it's way better than blue cheese and the blue is from spirulina so um the modeling yeah the modeling and each one is done by hand so it's a work of art and we're really really loving the way the cheeses are coming out and then we have this really extraordinary flavor called gold alchemy it's a turmeric black pepper and smoky infused cashew wheel and this is where that extra something the mystery of life has come through the flavors because when i formulated it um i had my flowmasters and a management team come over and i was like you guys have to taste my new flavors and becca took a bite of this and she was just like it's so nostalgic it's so nostalgic and what we determined is that this flavor tastes exactly like ham cheese and mustard it tastes the craziest thing is you'll taste it i can verify this 110 you'll taste it and you'll be like that's delicious what does that taste like like you can't identify it and then when you say that it clicks in and you're like oh my god it taste to me it tastes exactly like ham and cheese with like mayo and a little mustard on white bread like that sandwich that your mom would make you you know when you were in elementary school yeah and like how did that happen i don't really know it's the weirdest thing because it's made with turmeric and cashews yeah it shouldn't taste like that at all the ingredients don't line up and i certainly didn't say oh i'm missing ham you know let's make that but again this is that part of life and creativity of the unseen it's being devoted to the unseen and i fully believe that there are nature elements that are part of this where you could try to copy this like or make it at home it's not going to be the same it's just not going to be and this is sort of like where the sum of the parts are greater than what is in the recipe so i'm really really excited to share that with you guys so i wanted to just show you so this is the existing altar box it's in this beautiful reusable it says shreemu do life which is devotional offerings for life and it's an invitation to a beautiful life and here we have brian's um coating here and then here we have four wheels and then in this one so in the ultra box we have we're going to do um spire dolce vita birdie and gold alchemy so those are the they're static we don't have the capacity to pull one of those out and show people what it looks like when you yeah i can go so this one is spot spire right that's my favorite right so it comes like that um and then you have two jars and this is what the bonfire comes in and the um the cloud nine clouds fresh mozzarella which is quite amazing it's wet and it comes in uh salted waters and it makes a caprese and it makes um a beautiful cream cheese as well so it's quite awesome now this box the insert comes out and you can use this box for all kinds of things for sacred tea as a sacred altar box a lingerie box many things that's what i use it for rich puts so here's the smaller one too yeah so these are the three and four wheel so you see they're these amazing box and this is a very heavy box so these cheeses are legit so you're getting quite um quite an amazing authentic serving so this is four wheel so in the four wheel we're doing uh bertie which is the camembert we're doing uh gold alchemy which is the ham and cheese we're doing a dolce which is the new coconut with blueberry antioxidants and spire and then it's the same box but it has an insert in it and it's just oops it's just a three wheel so here we have gold alchemy we have spire and we have elder and elder is not on this board it's um a lot like brie and it's really good to use in cheesecakes as well and on our website we have quite an array of recipes that you can use these cheeses in and i'm very blessed with my team i have amazing managers uh becca reiff and chloe stein who are both vegan chefs and also aaron o'neal who is also a chef as well and so um and the boys tyler and trapper are working in the kitchen yeah so our sacred makers are now our boys slide back over there harry um well it's really cool um to see this happening um and i know it's just the start but i can't imagine a better time for like your timing is incredible like there could not be a better time for something like this there was just an article in bloomberg i think it was yesterday or the day before and it was a long article about just the ascendancy of the plant-based milk space and the kind of vegan plant-based alternatives to dairy products in general and it had all these graphs and you can just see the skyrocketing you know consumer markets exploding for this kind of thing den own just spent 10 billion dollars in 2017 to buy to buy white wave which is a plant-based company like the business aspect of this is bananas right now and it's been interesting to see the dairy industry kind of like dig its heels in uh resisting you know what is inevitable at this point as people become more and more interested in getting off you know lactose-based products uh and i know you ran into this a little bit just in figuring out your labeling like you can't call it cheese and you know don't use this and you can't say that and you kind of steered completely clear of all of that by coming up with these unique names that are not wed to any kind of food at all but didn't you have like didn't what didn't like the health department came by and got said you can't use this on your label or something no we were in for quite a while they were withholding um our retail permit actually i want to announce that we are going to be going into erwin markets when is that happening it's happening soon i'm just waiting for this custom cheese paper because i need messaging to communicate because these wheels have authentic cheese cultures in them and they will continue to age in your refrigerator and so they may develop traces of a white rind and this is completely safe to eat it's part of the process and that i can communicate to my subscribers but if it's in the store i can't so i have the special messaging that's going on that packaging but we'll be going in all five stores are all air ones in southern california they're all in southern california yeah right now um so we're gonna be going in all those five stores they are air one is sort of the highest standard of of health food market that exists in the country i'm honored to be collaborating with them and i'm hoping for you know a long alliance um to actually introduce people to shrimu of course it's a limited selection in erwan so you can't get everything that you get in our subscription there um so they'll they'll only have three flavors of the wheels for now but um anyway so we did finally get our permit we were able to create the label that i wanted to and actually want to thank um good food institute and bruce for helping with that yeah helping me and being you know just super supportive um and now the thing that i'm a little challenged with is the rates that i'm having to pay for workers comp they are making me categorize as a dairy company and so that's also one of the challenges of of small business which is so crazy like they're like i'm not using any dairy it's those they're speaking out of both sides of their mouth because on the one hand they're like you can't call it cheese you can't say that you can't have a picture of a cow you can't do any of this stuff but you're a dairy company and so you're gonna have to adhere to all these strict requirements that are are really just about you know keeping things safe because there is you know because dairy uh decomposes in a certain way right yeah well it's more it's more treacherous right yeah it's more dangerous there could be things like that right and one of the things that i am very i want to mention is that all of our packaging is recyclable we actually have a f fsc rating on our box which we have a little stamp on the on the bottom and the only thing that is not recyclable is the cheese paper because it's touched the cheese and it gets the oils in it and you can't recycle that so anyway it's an exciting time i am in the sort of mindset of creating my own reality uh and i think this is an opportunity for all of us right now and it ties back into the beginning of our conversation and that is that we have the power to create our own reality during this time and remembering that thoughts are things and what you put your attention on is what you put energy to and so i believe in all of us i believe in humanity humans are innovative we are empathic we are devoted we are capable we are genius everybody has a genius within themselves and so um you know we have to work the work is in creating a different mindset when we have so many factors that are pressing on us we have to do whatever we can to change that lens so that we can be amplifying love and creativity and hope and the new systems and so i want to encourage everybody to rise up and go within and understand that you're needed and you have something of value to share and we need you so um i am embarking right now i'm going out for my first raise my first proper raise um and so we're going to be raising 3.3 million um for a four-year strategy um that's going to take us to do about 24 million and um so i am aligning with my beautiful angel i actually want to give him a shout out steve steve barr what's up steve i have the most beautiful human being who is my angel um he is just an extraordinary light on this planet and i feel so blessed to have him close i also want to give a shout out to chris murphy and save earth and chris blair who also supported me in the early days so now here we go we're going to be really looking for that person or group of people that are really aligned and hopefully strategically aligned because i have the capacity to go wider with this i mean i'm this what we see on this board is just the very beginnings and i'm the artist i'm the founder i'm the creator i will hold the spiritual frequency and i am dedicated with every aspect of my being to making this a global brand and i am you know open for that other team of individuals who have the resources skill set genius um that can collaborate with me to really bring shrimu to the planet spoken like a true startup founder who believes in her mission and her product i love it i'm so proud of you it's super exciting um i know it's gonna be wildly successful and it is great and you have made really wise choices about the people to associate with and you know the two chris's and steve barr i mean they're just they're all like amazing wonderful people so you are guided by uh deft hands thank you so much so if anybody out there if you think you're that person uh is that a hiring call i have a new email address actually just for just for hiring prospects yeah juliepyat shrimu.com send me an email you're gonna get quite a few emails i think i always like it when i give out my email on your show it always turns into something amazing um well that's very cool i'm excited for you and like i said i you know it couldn't be a better time people are pivoting in this direction um and even i i did also want to mention that miyoko you know miyoko's creamery you know goes a friend and she's built this amazing you know uh company in this space and she just fought this battle because she was told by the state of california that she couldn't use the word butter lactose free or cruelty free on any of her product labels uh and there was this whole lawsuit um the state was demanding that she cease using those terms and she was also like a picture of her hugging a cow remember when you had that picture too yeah um and she prevailed so this is i i think it's just indicative you know it's a symbol it's representative of changing times and changing consumer trends as people look to live more cruelty free more sustainably and and obviously healthier definitely and also just you know great respect for her because she is really the pioneer the first person that was creating plant-based cheese and it's because of her that i was able to sell my book and um anyway she's uh she did amazing work for us in this space and we're here to stay um this is only going to get bigger and uh and and the taste is here so yeah so closing words of wisdom for the young aspiring startup founder well it's always a spiritual adventure for me um i don't think there's a separation and i think um understanding that each one of us was created in this complete unique blueprint there's none of us are the same and so if you can really identify what it is that you love what it is that is unique to you that is so unusual or so authentic i would feed that and i would really stay true and understand that cultivating that connection will will prove out will benefit you it might not go exactly the way you think it's going to go but understand that you know a lot and if you cultivate the practices to go within and really find out what you want to dedicate your life to and and why you've taken a body what it is you want to express and share then that will be supported and you will be further along than if you um compromise or go outside of yourself and try to do it like another person does it i think again it comes down to those moments in the middle of the night by the fire in the alchemical right ceremony what time did you wake up this morning three [Laughter] when i came in this morning i could smell the fire so i knew something some kind of witchcraft had gone down it's safe by the way it's right by a huge body of water and there's nothing around it so it's well well kept well thank you for sharing thank you for having me on your show love it i love you i love you i'm excited for what is to come um for everybody out there who is digging on julie and wants to learn more about her universe there's plenty of outlets to do just that to learn about the cheese shreemu.com srimu.com that's where you can uh uh see all the stuff and become a subscriber julie also has a podcast you want to talk about for the life of me yeah yeah and so check in with me there for upcoming podcasts on spiritual perspectives of current events it's usually just me rarely i have a guest on but it's usually just me reflecting on current events or spiritual perspectives of how we can truly live a life divine and if you want to really dive deep into the spiritual universe with her uh check out her community water tiger you do these monthly calls uh and really you really spend a lot of time cultivating that community yeah you can learn about that on your website at juliepiet.com yeah it's very deep and it's uh it's for everyone by the way so don't feel intimidated there is no hierarchy in spiritual spirituality we are all spiritual beings having a human experience um but water tiger i have to say i'm quite proud with my design of that um because it's um it's designed and crafted to give individuals techniques to lead them deeper into the sense of who they are so um it's not about building a tie to me or any any ideology that i have it's about empowering you to be a free being and so those techniques and meditations are ones that i develop um to support you in that connection all right how do you feel i feel pretty good thank you so much you're welcome thank you for sharing uh to be continued at some point in the not too distant future awesome love you babe love you thank you peace plants [Music] namaste so [Music] you

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 29,330

Rating: 4.8296223 out of 5

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition, Julie Piatt, SriMati, SriMu, Plant-based start-ups, Plant-based cheeses, plant-based chef, This Cheese Is Nuts, plant-based cheese, vegan cheese, the best vegan cheese, how to make vegan cheese, what is the best vegan cheese, best plant-based cheese

Id: 0sVw_RQfAeQ

Length: 102min 33sec (6153 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020