Transcript: Environmentalism Is Dead — Sam Thayer #002

0:00

Humans and technology together will rule the universe and will become God.

Humans will become God.

That's what we want, because we're afraid of death and we're afraid of death because we aren't connected to life.

We want to engineer biology, we want to engineer psychology, we want to engineer human beings, we want to engineer ecosystems now we want to engineer weather.

0:20

And I just feel like human beings are not mature enough to manage any of those things.

The.

Biggest ecological thing facing the world today is not climate change, it's herbicide, and we are completely ignoring that.

Chop wood, carry water before enlightenment.

Chop wood, carry water after enlightenment.

0:35

Because what do you do?

Well, you just got to wake up tomorrow and like, feed yourself.

Yeah, chop wood, carry water, watch birds, Make Love, eat apples.

I mean, life is good enough.

Hey, I'm here with Sam Fair.

Sam, thank you so much for being on the show today.

0:52

Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me on.

It's always fun to talk to you and it's an honor to be in front of your listeners.

Oh, man, it's an honor to have you on the show, and I really sincerely mean that.

I mean, you know, we've known each other for several years now and I've just couldn't say enough good things about you.

1:08

I think if anybody's in the Wild food space, they definitely know your name when it comes to foraging for wild foods, particularly when we're looking at plants.

You've really kind of risen to the top as the country's leading voice and leading expert, and you do it in a way that's pretty demure.

1:30

You're, you're not out there doing the cult of personality thing, which is really rare today.

Most of us are out there trying to, you know, push our name forward and wave our banner.

And you kind of have this really gentle, muted way of putting yourself out there.

And yet I think most people in the space really see you as the leading voice and leading expert, at least in this snapshot of history.

1:50

You know, when it comes to to wild plants, you're the guy.

And it's, it's a pretty amazing thing to get to be around you when you're doing your work.

But that said, I wanted to have you on the show today to kind of like stretch out from that space a little bit because I wanted to get some perspectives from you on some other things.

2:08

So we were together just recently at the Kripalu Center in Western Massachusetts.

I was giving some lectures and then, you know, I kind of did want to check in and see how your workshops went while you were there because I know you were doing some plant walks and stuff like that.

Oh, I thought it was great.

I mean, I, I love the people that came to my workshops and, and I that for me, that's why I keep doing them.

2:29

People ask great questions, which forced me to think and forced me to learn and then put me on new ground.

And I always am learning new plants and learning new ecology.

Like for, for example, I was astounded by the fact that the area we were the entire forest understory for acres and acres was dominated by goutweed, you know, being settled by white people for a couple 100 years less here in Wisconsin.

2:55

We just don't see that.

We don't see goutweed dominating forest ecosystems like that.

And and also I got to meet a few new plants, native and non-native.

So yeah.

Like what?

Well there was a fool's parsley, Athusi synapium, which is looks a fair amount like poison hemlock and I don't actually know how toxic it is.

3:17

There's it's kind of debated as far as its toxicity, but it looks like other carrot family plants that are edible.

And at a first glance, I thought it was the cow parsley, which also is called wild chervil, another non-native that's edible.

And so it was just it was cool to see that plant in person, which I like read about for like 30 years to finally actually encounter it.

3:39

So and it was all over the campus there.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm, I'm curious when you're teaching classes and students are coming in, you've got people who are obviously very established already as foragers, but then I imagine you're getting new people who don't have the same background exposure.

3:56

Because I think, you know, you also are sort of correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's fair to say you, you're sort of in the primitive skills community to a degree as well.

And so I'm assuming you draw somewhat from that world.

You've been to a lot of those kind of, you know, events and such.

Is that fair to say?

4:12

Yeah, I mean, I started out teaching about wild edibles mostly at primitive skills events.

And I mean, and I've done like archery and high tanning and stuff like that my whole life.

And I'm still into that, you know, fire by friction, all all that kind of stuff.

I'm not a good Flint napper, but I'm a I'm a decent stone Mason, you know, but not a Flint napper.

4:33

Not not good.

But so, you know, there's a huge array of people that come and I want to be prepared for the whole gamut from experienced foragers who are just trying to get this like little additional info around the margins and maybe learn a couple new plants to people that are totally new to foraging.

4:51

And they're not even comfortable eating a wild plant until I give them something that tastes good.

And I like to have a small enough group that I can recognize like where people fall in that and I can cater to that.

Like if there's, there was like 26 people in my group, which was about at the upper limit of where I can do that.

5:09

I did have like 4 hours so that I work 6 hours, yeah.

So, so I really could get to know people a little bit better and meet them where they're at.

But you know, it works out with these totally different levels of experience.

And the more experienced people really help the new people feel more comfortable.

5:26

So I actually like having, I don't like a beginner's class at all.

I, I I, I want it to be people of all levels when I'm teaching workshop.

Do you think like historically, you know, like today our modern education system like breaks people out by, you know, beginner, intermediate, advanced.

5:42

And then also when we're young, like according to age group, you know, how important do you think it is to have a mixed class where you have people at advanced levels and people at beginners levels and people of different ages?

Do you think that's really important in learning process?

Well, I do, I mean, the modern education system we're we're trying to do something that used to happen on a personal in the household level between a small number of people.

6:05

Like grandma taught you a few plants and how to cook them like slowly but carefully.

And you know, you would learn this skill from your dad and this skill from your mom.

And we're trying to like kind of industrialize that in in public school settings.

6:21

And so I think people are doing the best that they can, but there's a huge advantage to learning something kind of scatterbrain all over the map, right?

So that's like how we learn language best.

Like it's great to be exposed to a whole bunch of a new language you're learning that you don't understand to see the language in action, be surrounded by some native speakers, but then have someone sit down and say, here are the basics.

6:46

Here's these words, here's some rules of grammar that you don't understand at all because you don't think this way, because you're, you don't speak this language.

And so have that slow down, explain the basics and then push into, you know, like, like, like now you're in the thick of it and now you come back and slow down.

7:03

OK, now you do this intermediate speed and I, I think people learn best that way.

I'm they might take people out and show them 35 plants in a one hour walk sometimes.

And I know they aren't going to remember that.

Of course they can't learn 35 new plants in an hour.

But maybe two years later when they sat down to learn one of those particular plants, the the slow way, the right way, either with a friend or with a book or a book in a friend, they're going to have this some inkling in the depths of their mind that like, wait, I saw this before.

7:36

Oh yeah, I remember that one time I tasted that.

I thought it was good, but I don't even know.

And so they may have an impetus to to concentrate and they may have just like a little inkling of information in the back of their mind that, that that's helping, that's helping them connect that that deeper additional time when they're learning it better.

7:54

So I think that kind of all over the map learning, I do think it's important.

It's bad.

I've never taken the time to really breakdown what my adult learning process is.

I know I have a strategy I've never actually thought about.

Like what are the components of it enough to be able to say like, here's my adult learning strategy.

8:13

But one of the things that I like to do is I'll, I'll kind of get whatever the Idiot's Guide is to the very basics.

And at the same time, I'll listen to, let's say, a podcast with two experts on the topic talking at a very high level that I maybe don't even understand, but I want to hear how they're talking about the topic.

8:30

And then I also want to like learn those real basic fundamentals, you know, those like individual components that you needed to.

And somehow the two of those things like merge together to give me like a greater cloud of knowledge than if I just did one or just did the other.

8:46

So I think that might be a little bit of kind of what you're talking about.

Yeah, well, it's just like how people learn hunting, right?

So like you said, if you grew up in a hunting household, you sit around, you hear the hunting stories, year after year, the same stories or new stories.

And through that you learn what to do, what not to do.

9:01

You learn about take deer behavior.

But before I take my kids hunting, I always say to them, I'm like, Hey, remember this, Be quiet, be alert, be still, be aware, be ready and be safe.

9:17

Like the, the simple stuff, because so often when we mess up in life is because we forgot the simple stuff.

So all those levels, I think all the time is, is a good healthy way to learn.

But I'm not, I'm not knocking, you know, classroom learning is great too, because if you're going to industrialize and teach 32 people at a time, you've got to you just, you know, you got to do it some way.

9:40

I So the other day we were sitting down talking and you were sharing about some insights that you had had.

And I want to share that.

I want you to share that insight because I think it's just, but I want to use it as a learning tool.

9:57

So you were talking about seeing bird migration in in inverse light to how we often are taught it.

And I thought that was a cool insight, but it also was making me think about contemplation on topics because when you look at where a lot of like very powerful information that's changed culture has come from, you know, things that have had major impacts, they often come from like emergent insight, like sudden bursts of ideation about something.

10:30

But to have that, I think you need to have contemplation on something.

And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you were telling me about your insight about bird migration, but then maybe if you could kind of tell me how you arrived there Because I think sometimes people are afraid to or unconditioned, deconditioned to, to real contemplation that leads to fresh insights.

10:57

And like, we're at a time where, boy, fresh insights for people could be really useful.

Well, so one of my things that I have thought for a long time that I often say is it human beings have a cognitive dysfunction in how we think, which is that when we are encounter a piece of information or an idea, the first thing we do is not think to ourselves, how does this idea match with what I observe in the world?

11:26

That's not how we first think about it.

The first thing we think is who said this, who else believes it and what do I think of the people who think this, right.

So we think first socially and it's really hard to push people outside of social thinking about subject matters into actually a, a, a thinking that involves like facts and data and observations that that inform what we think 1st.

11:57

And and I feel like when we have insights, they come from most often outside the people world because people say the same things over and over and over again mostly, right.

So like, for example, this is maybe seem like off the wall, but I had this my whole life.

12:13

I've, you know, heard the song Pop goes the weasel round around the mulray Bush, the monkey chase the weasel, blah, blah, blah.

And pop goes the weasel.

Well, I used to have weasels that lived in my cabin and under my cabin when I had this little log cabin in in the woods and I had a lot of interactions with weasels.

12:28

I mean, tons.

And I discovered that when weasels are alarmed, especially if like you say, you catch a weasel, like you corner one and say it's in the cupboard and you want it outside and so you grab it with gloves, they make a very loud, sharp sound.

It's kind of like, I would say in between a chipmunk and a 22.

12:46

It's kind of like this, you know, and it'll scare the crap out of you.

It's like a rabbit screaming, like you'll drop it, you'll jump back, you know, and it gives them that chance to get away.

And that's obviously the pop in Pop goes the weasel.

And I think what I'm like, I'm a lot like a monkey, right?

Monkey chase the weasel.

I mean, pop goes the weasel.

13:02

I get it.

Like I've been there.

That probably caught, I don't know, at least three weasels in my.

Hands.

Before you know, and I hate to admit I've killed a few weasels with my bare hands because when they're in the house sometimes and they're peeing on the dishes or something that you, you got to, you know, you got to deal with that.

And yet, so I typed in a Google AI the other day, do real weasels pop?

13:21

And the answer is no, real weasels do not pop.

And then it gives me all this information about weasels not popping and how all the hypotheses for where that nursery rhyme comes from.

And it leaves me some YouTube videos that are full of crap, you know, and they're telling me that it has to do with this spinning yarn spinning tool called a weasel.

13:39

And you know what?

You know that that tool may pop, but pop goes the weasel in that song clearly refers to a behavior of weasel that exactly fits what's being described in the song, right.

And I got that information not from a book, because I've never seen it in a book, not from a online, not from a video, not from somebody else.

13:57

I know I got it from a weasel.

I got it from interacting directly with weasels.

And so, and I feel like people need to people need to step outside the human world to come to those intuitions.

We don't do that enough now that we're ever connected.

14:15

It's like I tried to tell my kids to put put the phone down and, and just like observe the real world.

It's slower, but what, what information it gives you is infallible.

It's it's never trying to trick you and it's never selling you something.

Never.

14:30

It's never trying to get you to vote for anybody.

It's nature.

Look at it and it will tell you things and it's hard to get the information out, but when you get it, it's real.

It's there and it's it's unequivocal, unequivocal.

You might interpret it wrong, but that's your fault.

14:47

That's not because there's some trickery going on.

So I feel like that's where at least my more meaningful intuitions come from.

So to get back to your bird migration thing.

I mean, I've been a avid burger my whole life.

And you know, like most burgers, I, I love my, my warblers in the spring.

15:03

And I always thought of like the warblers as, and other insect eating birds as traveling South to the tropical forest for the winter because our winters were just too cold for them.

And I realized through a sort of convoluted set of thoughts one day, like, wait a second, that's totally the opposite.

15:25

These are itinerant birds.

They spent almost their entire life moving and they do go to the tropical forests for a little bit, but mostly they're moving and their entire life revolves around coming to the northern part of North America to take advantage of our spring and early summer.

15:46

So at our latitudes, because we're we're pretty close, that's from like May 15th to July 15th that there's so many insects during that period of time that they like there is nowhere else in the world with that concentration of insects in space and time.

16:06

So those birds can survive anywhere for a while, and they can survive, but there's not the surplus that they need to reproduce.

They come up here for that spring and early summer surplus.

They are not leaving here to flee our winter.

16:22

They don't have to be here at all.

They are coming here to take advantage of this incredible resource that we take for granted because we're swatting mosquitoes and black flies and like, wait a second.

That's why these birds are coming here.

And part of what led me to that was experience I had with you of trying to take you out to catch bullfrogs on August.

16:41

I think it was 10th or 9th.

And I've always known that bullfrogs go into hibernation in August, and I usually catch bullfrogs in May and June.

And I wasn't paying real acute attention to when the adult bullfrogs in northern Wisconsin going to hibernation until about then, we couldn't find a single adult bullfrog.

17:00

And so in the two years since then, it's been right about August 5th.

And it's not related to weather.

And we always want to relate things to weather.

The bullfrogs aren't like it's really cold, they better go hibernate.

No, there's no more insects.

Virtually all the.

It's also not photo, period.

17:17

No, not not in that specific insect insect.

But virtually all of the large aquatic insect hatches are done by early August.

And the bullfrogs like this, this ain't worth it.

The risk reward ratio.

And because they're cold blooded, they can hibernate really easily.

17:34

They can fatten up and they're not in danger of starving like, say a woodchuck, which has to produce its own heat.

And it it's harder for, you know, the the endotherms to, to slow down their metabolism and, and hibernate.

So, but even for things like black bears, I mean, they hibernate in Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia about the same amount of time, maybe just like 2 months less or a month and a half less than they do in northern Wisconsin, right?

17:57

I mean, they're out here now eating deer carcasses.

Even though it's 15° this morning, it's going to be a high of 22 and they're eating deer carcasses and acorns.

They're not going to hibernate until the food runs out.

It's not about the temperature, it's about the food.

That's part of the process that brought me to that conclusion.

18:14

And also, I was thinking about the difference between tropical and temperate soils, which growing up in the north, you're taught to think of the tropics as like a paradise.

And the growing season is longer, but the growing season is much less lush and less productive.

18:31

And that's something that if you go to tropical countries, people see and have trouble processing that.

But you can also just watch, now that there's videos of everything, like just watch a video on gardening in Togo, you know, and look at how poor the soil is and, you know, look at how vegetation grows.

18:48

It's slow, and it is, you know, not very lush.

And that kind of reverberates through everything about tropical economics and tropical ecology.

Plants have trouble getting resources, and they hold them very carefully, and they produce a lot of toxins in their tissues.

19:07

And that's why there are fewer insects, those high biomass.

But that biomass is not as edible to insects.

And so there's not as much food for birds.

And so they're like, hey, dude, this is the time we can go up north and we get lots of bugs and have babies.

So there's the process.

19:23

Yeah, I love that.

I, you know, so I guess there's a couple things I want to draw out of that.

Well, let me first say I went very naively to the tropics a couple times when I was young.

So right around when I was 20 thinking, you know, I wanted to like escape modernity.

I wanted to like go live off the grid and just eat fruits and live naturally and, you know, do yoga in the sun or whatever.

19:41

And I remember going to.

So I tried it in Florida, South Florida.

I tried it in Maui and I remember just being like, oh, it's doesn't work like that down here.

Like you said, the soil is really poor.

And while you can grow horticulturally amazing tropical fruits, the foraging can be pretty poor.

20:01

And you know, I foraged in the Amazon, I foraged in Hawaii, I've foraged in New Zealand, I've foraged in Florida.

The foraging is better up here for the most part, or at least the diversity and the abundance.

Of edible foods during our growing season do seem a lot better up here.

20:18

So that's just an interesting, you know, thing that I learned from like naivety and actually trying it.

But I also want to say how so that was a fail for me and I learned from that and I just think it's interesting that the bullfrog fail that we had led to those insights.

20:34

And I'll and I'll tie that into this when we were talking the other day.

So I'm a I'm an apocalyptic alarmist.

You're kind of the opposite and.

I'm with you more than you might know.

OK.

But you have a great temper to it.

I appreciate that.

So we were a lot of conversation happening right now, of course, about AI.

20:51

That's in the zeitgeist, right?

We're all watching it like sort of, you know, filter into our world.

My feeling is I think it's moving faster than mobile phones.

And I think if when I go back to my first mobile phone, I had no idea what was coming, couldn't imagine what that technology was about to turn into.

21:11

But it took, you know, 20 years or something for it to mature to where it is today.

But I'm watching AI mature more quickly.

And I'm worried that it, the cognitive impacts are going to be far more extreme than they've been with phones.

So I'm really worried about what's going to happen with people.

And one of the first things that I'm seeing, you know, I was really disturbed to read this, this statistic recently that only 1% of Google users click through to any links now because they get the AI insights, there's no reason to go to any websites.

21:40

Now that's got a couple of, a couple problems emerge from that.

One is who's going to create content for websites?

Because if you're not getting any traffic to your website, then you are disincentivized financially to put content on your website.

So that's means that we might be reaching like sort of the functional end of new content being put on the websites, which is kind of a bummer.

22:03

But second to that, well, actually not more important to that is that I'm watching how people get information change really, really fast.

And so my concern is that people are not going to contemplate, observe and contemplate because it's faster to just go get the information even when the information's wrong.

22:24

Because you and I both witnessed over our life, people have no problem holding on to wrong information.

In fact, I mean, in a lot of cases that they almost seem to prefer it.

So I, I was curious to, to hear from you because the perspective that I was hearing from you around the dinner table that night was like, hey, guys, I think you know, this AI, we're in a hype cycle right now.

22:45

Like, OK, it sounds like it's going to be, it's going to have all these, you know, massive ramifications, but I think it's probably going to reach it a crescendo and level out.

So that was sort of what you were saying.

I would love for you to expand on that, share your perspective on it and how you think and feel it's going to affect human cognition because I'm I'm looking for positives and I, I see some but way more outweighed by negatives right now.

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24:16

Well, I don't want to seem like I'm much of A prognosticator about technology, right?

So I mean, who am I to say?

I mean I?

Think well, you can I can I give a little perspective on who you are to say.

I mean, first of all, you have a, a deeper ecological knowledge and connection than 99.9% of, you know, modern people living in the modern lifeway.

24:37

So that's one reason you pump your own water at your house by hand.

I mean, you, you're living with a foot in both worlds and most people are all in to modernity.

So I think you have a perspective, you know, you gather a significant amount of your calories out of wild places from species that you have relationships with.

24:58

I mean, that alone puts you in a pretty unique position to comment on it because you're less touched by it.

So I, I think a lot of us, you know, it's like if somebody's an abusive relationship and you're like, tell me about your husband, you know, versus like you're watching it from the outside, watching that person get beat up and be like, oh, let me tell you about your husband.

25:17

You know, like you, you're less of, you have less Stockholm syndrome to our culture.

So I think that your perspectives matter and are really important.

OK, well I agree with you there, but I still am nervous about prognosticating about the future.

25:34

But it seems like the history of technology is when a technology first comes out, there is a prediction that it's going to have this.

There will be like a rapid increase in its utility and in its functionality, and there's a prediction that that's going to just perpetually increase at that rate.

25:56

But eventually there's a levelling off.

But at the same time, that technology goes somewhere that we didn't imagine it was going to go.

So I feel like, I guess one is maybe it's just rosy thinking, but really rapidly, well, say for example, like like electrification of homes and lighting, right?

26:24

When that came out, it just really rapidly spread like in one human lifetime from like virtually nobody having it to virtually everybody having it.

And but it didn't change a lot then in the next human lifetime.

26:42

And I know that lighting is a is a simple technology, right?

But when you look at firearms, right, So there's been a few major improvements in firearms since they were invented, and then there's been a leveling off, and there hasn't been really huge increases in the functionality of firearms for now, for a human lifetime, right?

27:03

And so those are much simpler technologies and it's maybe easier to predict, but it seems like something like that will happen both with cell phone use and with AI use.

But I don't know where the end point is, and I don't know what the unexpected permutation is going to be.

27:19

I was talking with my kids about this, how today people can't imagine living without a cell phone.

And I remember when I was my son's age, when I was 14, and I was first exposed to the idea of cell phones.

And I first saw people with cell phones and they were, they do giant things.

And I'm like, who needs that?

27:35

Who wants a stupid phone you have to carry all the time?

I don't want people to be able to call me all the time.

I don't want my mom to be able to call me when I'm fishing, you know?

Like, I don't need to talk to my friends when I'm out in the woods.

If they're with me, that's cool, but I don't want to talk to them otherwise, you know?

And like, now, it's an absolute necessity.

27:51

So an absurdity became a necessity.

So what absurdity today will be a necessity in 25 or 30 years?

I don't know.

I was trying to be optimistic, but I'm terrified in the same way that you are.

All right.

All right, good.

We're on the same page.

Yeah, we're.

On the same page.

28:07

I'm terrified.

I was just.

I felt like, I don't know, I, I felt like you were so worried about it that I, I wanted to, like, I wanted to throw a wrench into the machinations of your worry, right?

I was like, I was like, hey, there could be light at the end of the tunnel.

28:23

I mean, I don't know, maybe it's just a train coming, but there could be light at the end of that tunnel, you know?

And so I'm really not disagreeing with you in any fundamental way about that.

I was just kind of tempering it.

I need to do that for myself.

Balancing it out, I appreciate that I often will do the same.

28:39

I guess you know, when we started off talking today, I was asking you about who comes in as new students and, and I'm wondering, so I felt for a long time that the work that we do with wild foods matters more than a lot of other hobbies.

28:57

You know, there's lots of things people can do for hobbies that are really fun and really cool.

You could be a kite surfing or paragliding or you know, any roller skating or like there's all kinds of hobbies a person can have, but this one is the one that people needed to survive since there was people.

29:14

And so it has a unique place.

It's not just like, oh, a hobby I like foraging is my hobby.

It's like much deeper than that.

And it gives people the ability.

I mean, I pray we never need it, but it gives us the ability to restart and reset after calamity.

29:35

If you have this knowledge and it can disaster proof you against famine or collapse of crops or, or any number of things that could happen, it just gives you that firm foundation.

It connects you to ecology.

29:52

I think there's like a fundamental deep loneliness that human beings are going through because they don't know any other species.

And so it's like humans, cats and dogs are pretty lonely world to live in when there's as many species as there are to know.

I'm sure you've seen some of that, that research that was done that showed that, that at the average school, elementary school kid knew more animals from Africa's Savannah than they did from their own environment.

30:15

So, you know, you have all that kind of going on.

And now with what's happening with AI, you see people kind of moving more and more into the digital space and almost like abandoning the natural world, you know, so they're spending all their time in the built environment and now more and more in the digital environment.

And so I'm wondering if there's going to be sort of like an A natural exodus of people who are like divergent in their thinking that are like, oh, wait, no, I need to like go back in the other direction.

30:40

So I'm wondering if you're seeing any of that.

I'm wondering if if you think that it's possible where people are getting too far out on a limb and any of these skills could be necessary, or do you think that for generations to come, this remains like a hobby of ours?

30:57

You know what I mean?

Because it could just be like, it just remains a hobby.

We just keep passing it on to the next generation.

Or it could be like, wow, man.

I mean, you know, you can't buy or sell unless you have a chip in your brain.

So good to know how to get some eats, you know what I mean?

I think it should be both things and, and I think it will be both things.

31:15

I think it will be part of the resistance to control of us.

You know, it's like the book Brave New World.

And if you read that, you know.

Oh yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You know, people.

I, I do think in times and places, people will simply separate themselves from the greater society in order to have some autonomy and freedom.

31:35

And to do that, they will have to have certain skills also.

However, I mean, we provide we as in, as in the government, the corporate media.

I say the, the, the, the, the clergy of GDP, right?

31:51

The people that worship GDP as if that's a measurement of vitality and life and happiness and, and that's all that's good.

GDP has replaced the church from Western European civilization in the Middle Ages.

The church was the everything that society was like built for and moved towards and in unison with and under under the tutelage and control of that was the church right?

32:16

The the the the, the quasi religious state.

And today it's GDP.

GDP is this this like God we worship and for.

People listening just to say it, You're talking about gross domestic.

Product.

Talking about our economy.

The sacred number that that if a politician was to doubt the sacred number, they would never have a political career after that.

32:37

Just like you would have been excommunicated and perhaps, you know, assassinated in the Middle Ages if you doubted the church's validity, right?

And so on this tangent, I'm losing my train of thought a little bit, but the, the, the, the people.

32:52

Pushing you into a new territory here with.

The, the like, so the, the people that control, you know, our thoughts and everything, they don't control us just by giving us things that we need.

They now control us by giving us things that we become addicted to.

33:10

And, and, and maybe it's been that way for a long time.

And there's people that hypothesize that the big part of the origin of agriculture itself was beer, you know, but the, the, what they're doing is they're giving people addictive substances.

33:25

I mean, if you go into a gas station, it's like it's, you're surrounded by addictive substances, you know, sugar, caffeine, nicotine, I mean, it's just, you know, alcohol.

And, and then your people are carrying around these addictive objects, these phones that, that have addictive information because it's, you know, cognitively, psychologically addictive.

33:46

And you can watch that, especially in children, you can just watch them with the addiction.

And you see children and adults too.

But it's really obvious in children because they've learned a little bit less restraint.

They, they, they go through withdrawal symptoms if they are taken away from that addictive, you know, object to that addictive information.

34:08

And I didn't really suspect how powerful.

Like that's maybe a new insight for me, like in the last 8 or 10 years and I'm struggling with how people will get past that addiction.

But just like your addiction to sugar is I think best cured by healthy diet.

34:26

It's not that easy, right?

But if you can cut yourself off of sugar and eat healthy food, I think the psychological addiction that we get and the substance addictions together compounded as like kind of like a they call the military industrial complex.

It's like the physical, psychological, addictive complex that we are fed to keep us in line.

34:45

We can break from that through foraging.

And that's why I think that by being in touch with nature, we can help ourselves think on our own, but also eat on our own and understand what healthy thought feels like and what healthy food feels like and what healthy lifestyle it feels like.

35:10

So I think that besides being this fall back skill in case times get really bad and if we look at human history, times periodically get really bad and those skills really matter.

And of course it's going to happen again and it's happening multiple places in the world right now.

35:29

And but also, I think it's a hobby that we should curate has our birthright and passed down and teach to our children and participate in that.

And, and not in the sense of kids, you need to do this because it's good for you and all that kids, let's do this.

35:45

It's awesome.

It's great, you know, and it has its own addictive element.

It's, you know, forging is the original video game, you know, like, yeah, it's the original video game, you know, all these things, you know, fishing has that same reward, you know, endorphin rush and, and all that, the anticipation and and, you know, I don't know how important it has to be to to provide that function in our psychological and physical lives, but I think it needs to be part of our lives.

36:17

I think we need to think of it not as a fringe thing.

I think we need to think of it as like toothbrushing, right?

It's like a thing.

I mean, I know some people that don't believe in brushing your teeth, but like in general, OK, like hygiene, right?

Like if you're ignoring your hygiene that you know, that's a problem.

36:33

And I, I, I feel like if foraging or some meaningful connection to nature isn't part of your life, you're missing, you're missing some, some psychological hygiene.

And I don't think it's replaceable with any other activity.

Like I think bird watching is great and it's very not tangentially related to foraging, right?

36:52

The desire to watch birds.

It's like, it's like, you know, if I was a cat and there's a window and there's birds outside, I'm going to watch those birds, right?

I mean, humans, we, we watch wildlife because it's part of what we are, you know, and the curiosity is general, whether we're going to eat the thing or not.

We're curious about life and how life unfolds.

37:11

So I, I think that that foraging is, is part of our psychological birthright.

And I, I do think it's hard without connecting nature in this like fundamental ways for us to be psychologically healthy and to be able to think well.

37:30

And we see this in our when people get their information from screens or from each other or from newspapers or books or televisions, whatever it is, instead of directly from nature, then we are prone to being manipulated because, you know, somebody is controlling that information.

37:54

It's given to you and they have a motive.

Nature provides a constant stream of information with no motive.

It's just there for you to pull from it what it can teach you.

And then you can in the clarity of, of the absence of noise.

38:12

Nature's not noise, It's information, right?

In the absence of that noise, you, you can analyze information and come up with insights that are valuable to you.

I mean, you know, that's why Jesus would go up on up and pray for 40 days and 40 nights, right?

38:29

Like, like whatever you want to call it.

I mean, that's, that's, that's communing with the divine.

But it doesn't have to be 40 days and 40 nights.

It could be, you know, 15 minutes in the morning before breakfast or whatever, whatever it is.

I mean, you know.

It's interesting, you know, just because you just said that I I'll bring up the metaphor.

38:47

Something that's fascinated me from very early on is how what the symbol on the back of the phone is for most of us, you know, because it's, it's the apple with the bite taken out of it, right?

So that's the knowledge of good and evil, right?

That's the forbidden fruit.

39:03

Obviously with the bite, if it was just an apple, you'd be like, well, it's just an apple, but it's got the bite taken out.

And that was sort of like the idea that what corrupted mankind was instead of that communion with the divine, it was going after this false teaching.

39:19

And right.

So that's like the sort of biblical metaphor.

And here we are now where we're all addicted to this device that gives us this information.

But it's like often very corrupted information.

It's not that observational information or those insights that come direct, you know, and what's challenging about it.

39:34

So something I've been doing lately as I keep my phone on black and white because I notice that the all those bright light colors when I was a kid I remembered.

Do you remember the toy light bright?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And you could, like, turn off the lights, right?

So if you don't, if you're, you know, a Gen.

39:51

Z kid or something, a millennial, you don't remember this toy.

I mean, it's basically a light box with all these little perforations in it.

And you'd stick a black piece of paper over it that would cover the light.

And then you had these little translucent.

Little posts.

Little Yeah.

I totally forgot about this, but yeah.

40:08

And you'd stick them in and there would be a pre designed pattern on there and you'd put them in and the light would come through those translucencies and it would light up and glow.

Well before the digital age, that kind of color was like looking at fireworks or something or the Aurora.

It just was very enticing.

40:24

But now we have this.

Right by the Etch A Sketch, Yeah.

Right by the exactly I got to erase this thing.

That's still a pretty cool toy actually.

Anyway, my point is now we have that in our pocket and those bright lights.

It's like when you walk into the convenience store full of all the addictive things you were talking about and they're all brightly colored, little juicy, sweet, sugary.

40:45

But it's like all this like hyper stimulating color.

You know when you're looking at your phone and then you look up at the natural world, it's like the natural world can look a little dull at 1st till you re acclimate to it.

And that's what I see so hard for kids is like, it takes a little while to where you start to see nature as bright and exciting when you're used to all of those bright colors, you know?

41:08

So I'm kind of curious your thoughts on that.

Like, you know, you were talking about the 40 days in the wilderness of the 15 minutes of, of gathering insight.

Any thoughts on how to, or maybe on how you manage that or how your kids are managing that, like making that break from because obviously you're having to interact with these technologies.

41:28

You're, you're doing it right now with me.

So have you found challenges in breaking away from it to re acclimating to the natural world?

Like how are you managing that?

It's hard, but one thing I would say is, is nature's the signals are are can be subdued and they can be diffused, right.

41:48

But those bright colors in nature, they are information, important information like a bright red fruit, it's there, it's bright to attract your attention to it.

This might be food, a bright red Caterpillar, a slight bright yellow Caterpillar or a coral snake.

42:04

These are signals that that nature is giving that there's something you need to pay attention to here.

But now if you can give kids a turtle, like you have a screen, right?

Like you give them a real turtle, all of a sudden they forget about that screen for a while, right?

42:22

Because the screen is not nearly as exciting as a turtle, right?

Turtles not addictive in the way that the screen is.

So that doesn't answer all of it, right?

Because that turtle's not going to be there forever.

And eventually they're going to go tired of the turtle.

But for 20 minutes I might the whole world might be the turtle, right?

42:41

Or the bullfrogs or a snake.

I mean, you add fear or excitement.

You know, I find a big bull snake and and or you know, a fox snake and I can show some kids.

I mean, everything disappears that that, you know, they're probably going to pull their phone out and try to take a picture of it.

42:59

But for the most part, you know, it now centered on the real world.

And so part of hooking kids or anyone, I say kids, but other people, adults also into nature and overcoming that addictive power is, is finding those most powerful elements of nature.

43:20

The very things that we're trying to imitate the relationship to.

Like the excitement, like catching a fish for a kid is still super excited if you can get them past the, the boredom of not catching a fish until you catch one or same thing with with hunting or, or whatever.

43:38

So I try to look for those situations where I can show somebody something really exciting that that like right away that they can experience like a fruit or Berry or the hazelnuts smell them.

You can't smell anything on your phone, you know, like like like not now.

43:56

Now taste the sour juice in the husk of that hazelnuts.

Just bite it.

I'll tell you a bite.

The hazelnuts smell it.

Like you'll never forget that smell.

And I'll bite it and the juice comes out.

It's like sour astringent, but lemony juice.

And you're like, I had no idea that hazelnut balls taste it like that.

44:12

I mean, I can just close my eyes at any time and imagine that hazelnut smell, you know?

And I smell that hazelnut husk smell.

And I taste the juice, the husk.

I can taste the nut inside and then RIP it open and crack, crack a few and get kids to taste them.

And it's like magic.

It's a real physical object.

44:29

But yeah, it is a constant battle to pull people away from the addictive thing.

And that's why the addiction is so powerful.

I think we need to call it out by name and call it what it is.

And this technology is so new that we are not used to describing it for what it is.

44:45

Like we know that alcohol is addictive and we've watched it ruin people's lives and we've seen it taken out of its original context, cultural context, and, and now just destroying people's lives because it's cheap.

45:01

And we have not developed a set of like social norms and ideas and teaching points and talking points among ourselves, each other and our children to deal with this digital technology.

You know, there's research coming out that's like, we can't even keep up with it.

45:17

Like by the time I read why I'm supposed to have done with my kids 40 years ago, it's too late.

You know, so it's, it's real, but but nature is also powerfully, I would say addictive, but in a healthy way, in the same way that food is addictive, right?

Like like friendship is addictive.

45:34

Like you have a good friend and then not having a friend in your life all of a sudden feels like you're really missing out on something supposed to be that.

One addictive but non destructive.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Well, OK, I don't.

When we were at when we were at that lecture though, doing our, doing our workshops there at Kripalu, Sefra made a joke about me being real doomy and that she said that, you know, Daniel's message, it's too late to be pessimistic, which I thought was really funny, but I had the risk of being that way.

46:06

I guess I'm just that way.

One thing that's happening is that as these technologies rise concurrently with it, the natural world is being altered very dramatically, very quickly.

So lest somebody who doesn't have experience in the natural world thinks that, you know, there's all this wild, this wild world, and then there's just these pockets of civilization and the rest of that's been left intact.

46:31

Like if it's not built up, it's intact.

Like that's not true, right?

I mean, we've dramatically changed landscapes, moved species, altered distributions, and then added a lot of chemistry to the environment.

And I, so I want to talk about that too, because it's not like us as foragers and hunters, we just step out into some pristine like Eden where it's like still untouched by civilization.

46:55

And then I want to add to that this piece about everybody knows it.

Everybody knows the natural world's in a bad state because we haven't been tending to it and instead we've been exploiting it.

So we've created this myth about, it's almost like a religious myth about our climate, it seems like.

47:20

I feel like five years ago I would have been very hesitant to say that.

I would have spoken much more carefully because, boy, people would just attack you for it.

Now I feel like people are kind of realizing we it's not that the climate isn't changing.

The climate's that the climate's a verb.

47:36

It's always changing.

But this story we have about the climate isn't necessarily the whole story.

Like the problem with our ecology is a lot more of the things we're doing to it.

And I was wondering if you could speak to that because it's like people just think, oh, it's just, it's what I'm exhaling is the problem.

47:56

And it's like, man, that's actually not really the problem.

Well, can I speak to it?

It's like more like, can I shut up?

Right.

Yeah.

OK, let's see, we got we got some time.

So first I want to give you like a like look at human history in a way that distills in a way that not many people have thought about it, right?

48:16

If we look at the long scope of human history, you can say at some point in the past, I don't know how long ago, and it may have never happened with the species Homo sapiens.

Let's say we were living off of natural environments and we were taking natural as an unaffected by humans, right?

48:34

And we were just taking a surplus food out of that system and eating it.

And that's why your numbers were at a low density, right?

And I that may have never been part of our species history, probably wasn't say.

For listeners, you're saying that might have been a another species of Homo before Homo sapiens?

48:52

Yeah, Yeah.

So maybe Homo erectus live that way, or maybe Homo heidelbergensis live that way.

Maybe Neanderthals live that way.

But I I think, you know, people act like that's an outlandish statement.

I'm like, hey, look, Beavers have been around a long time and they they create their own environment.

They raise their own food.

49:08

Essentially, they don't.

They don't farm the way humans farm, but they create their own food environment.

Landscape engineers.

Exactly.

Pocket Gophers do a similar thing.

It's not as well known, but they create the disturbance that promotes the plants that produce roots that are good for pocket Gophers, you know, by their their mounds.

49:26

And so they kind of create their own disturbance.

It creates your own food supply.

So I think human beings are probably have always been that way.

We had fire before we were Homo sapiens.

However, at some point we've grown gradually more organized and systematic and how we manage the landscape.

49:43

So the first big tool for doing that was fire.

Fire in general on many landscapes promotes the production of food.

Now I don't need to get into all the detailed theories about this, but when you add fire to a landscape, fire generally increase the amount of food for human beings on the landscape for a number of reasons.

50:03

Fire keeps the biomass closer to the ground so it's more edible to large herbivores.

That makes more meat for people to eat.

It increases the amount of nuts and small seated herbaceous plants with edible seeds and fire increases the quantity of fruit on the landscape and root vegetables.

50:22

I mean, that's basically the gamut of human foods right there.

All of them are generally benefited by fire.

So people learned a long, long time ago.

Certainly by 30,000 years ago, virtually every hunter gatherer group in the world knew at least some places fire was a way to affect the landscape.

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A fire is like, it kills some plants, but not all plants.

It, you know, you burn a landscape, it favors some plants over others.

52:11

And the next big thing that people figured out or started doing to control the landscape was the plow, right?

Plows, unlike fires, kill everything, right?

So you clear land, you kill all the native vegetation, and then you make sure it all stays dead except for the one or two things you want to plant.

52:26

That's a plow.

And a plow went through.

First it was human operating, then it was pulled by draft animals, then the plow was pulled by machines.

And they each made it more labor efficient and more land could be put under the plow.

And this was a great destructive process.

52:42

So fires changed the ecology of the world, but they made the world.

It was still natural.

It was still vibrant and full of life.

And you could argue that maybe it made the world better, but it made it better for people, right?

52:57

And certain species, other species didn't benefit as much.

But, but, but you know, the plow was different, right, With each step of mechanizing the plow, you know, first the plow was confined to really good soils and really small areas.

And the food was really precious.

It was produced when you added animals.

53:14

You could do bigger areas and, you know, and then when you added, you know, machinery, water, combustion engines, all of a sudden plows can be applied to humongous areas and zip.

There goes the 20% of the Earth's land surface that is the most ecologically productive is gone.

53:29

It is ecologically dead.

It is not much better than a parking lot ecologically, right?

And then we are now coming to this great new that the next revolution in control of the biosphere, the way to kill plants is now chemical, right?

53:48

And some people think I'm exaggerating that, like, but this is just as big as the invention of the plow.

So we can go back to, you know, there were very expensive general herbicides available for a long time.

Like when the Romans defeated Carthage, Sipio spread salt on Carthaginian fields so they couldn't grow crops, right?

54:09

That was an herbicide, but a very expensive one.

And, you know, then we had things like copper sulfate, very expensive, kills everything borate.

You know, things are it's with World War 2 that we come up with cheap, potent herbicides.

54:29

And that was as big of an invention in terms of its impact on world ecology as the invention of agriculture itself.

Can I pause you there and ask this question?

Do you think it's fair to say that the weapons of war were converted into pesticides essentially like these were munitions, right?

54:47

And we're talking about nitrogen, which still can be used to make explosives.

Were were these weapons technologies that we converted to agricultural purposes essentially?

Some of them were, and certainly the capital was repurposed, right?

55:04

So there was this massive investment in chemical producing capital and then that was repurposed for agricultural chemicals.

But even if you know the that the war may have made these things happen a little quicker, but it was going to happen.

You were trending there.

Yeah.

We, we were strongly trending there.

55:20

But as, as happens so often in human history, conflict is a major push toward innovation, right?

So we maybe got there a generation earlier, but now we have, you know, the 24-D and, and, and then glyphosate and all these different chemicals that are usually selective.

55:40

But what they allow us to do that even plows, even mechanically driven plows can do is they allow us to control the vegetation on steep, rugged landscapes where we cannot easily operate machinery and also on landscapes where the biotic production potential is low, right.

56:00

And so we're already seeing this in Europe.

So in Europe, most of the forests of, of Northern Europe or most of Europe in general is actually tree plantations.

It's not forest anymore.

And so the biggest threat to forests in the world today is the replacement of, of forests with tree plantations.

56:21

And this is insidious, right?

So we had like a few years ago, maybe 2020, I forget what's it called?

I think it wrote it down the the, the name of this, this organization.

Oh, Oh yeah.

The World Economic Forum.

They have their Oh yeah.

56:36

Lovely fellas over there I love.

Those, by the way, World Economic Forum forum, like GDP worshippers, as organized as they can be, right.

And so we have people like, you know, they have the, the, the trillion tree initiative, Donald Trump's on board, Emmanuel Macron is on board.

56:53

You know, everyone's on board.

Well, you know what they're doing.

They are cutting down real forests and replacing them with tree plantations, and they are constantly using the rhetoric of carbon sequestration to reduce global warming as part of the excuse for this ecologically egregious act.

57:15

Right.

And I got to actually go in France to these places while they were actively cutting ancient and native Beech forests, mostly Beech, some oak, you know, some Elm, but mostly Beech.

And replacing them with Douglas fir plantations established, you know, you know, in rows and maintained with herbicide, right?

57:39

That is what herbicide is allowing us to do.

So you take rugged landscapes.

So all the nature left in the world, it's either too wet, it's too rugged, or it's too unproductive for agriculture.

So we have the vast boreal forest.

It's it's soil less glacier scraped rock of the Canadian Shield.

57:59

And in northern Europe, you know, we have these vast boreal forests, biggest forests in the world, right?

And then we have the second biggest forest area in the world.

We've got the tropical rainforest we got, we've got the Congo.

We, we have, you know, Borneo and parts of Southeast Asia.

58:15

And then we have the Amazon rainforest, super infertile, You know, people don't realize that that's the least fertile soil in the world.

That's like.

The nutrients are in the forest itself, but not in the soil there, right?

Essentially the soil is a very thin layer and all those nutrients are in the the canopy right?

58:32

Something like.

That, yes, but what's also happened is there that areas, areas around the equator that have not been disturbed by mountain upheaval or glaciers, the soil layers have not mixed.

There's no new rock.

So the soluble minerals have been removed for in most of those places, more than 100 million years of rain has leached the soluble minerals out of the soil.

58:54

So even what is in the system is very very sparse and.

Needs like a catastrophic renewal event.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's what glaciers were.

That is why temperate regions that are glaciated or mountainous regions is where all of the high densities of people in the world are.

59:11

And it's where people are most prosperous because it creates fertile soils.

So anyways, the the tropical rainforests are also, I mean, right now, I guarantee you there's a whole bunch of airplanes flying over the Amazon spraying herbicide down to defoliate.

And then people are, I mean, this is even people can research this.

59:28

This is going on huge scale, but we're not in the Amazon looking at that.

And when we're looking at our smartphones, it's not popping up right.

So, so these massive change in world ecology is happening like under our noses, but we're not even sniffing it, you know, we're, we're not even looking at it.

59:50

So, you know, the Mesquite country in Texas, it used to be that these areas of Texas were Prairie and Mesquite was usually confined to steep ravines and, and, you know, washes and along streams and it was scattered on the uplands.

But fires would burn the prairies of Texas and they would push back the Mesquite.

1:00:07

And it's a natural native plant.

It's a great plant in a lot of ways.

It's great for wildlife, but ranchers don't like it.

And when they remove fire from the landscape and you add the disturbance of cattle droppings and and and and and cattle trampling and grazing the Mesquite.

Most crazy.

1:00:23

And it's been managed instead of through fire, mostly through chainsaw.

But when you cut just Mesquite with a chainsaw, you're just cutting Mesquite.

Now, mesquite's managed with herbicide.

There is roughly 50 to 55,000,000 acres of Mesquite rangeland in Texas.

1:00:39

That is about 1 1/2 times the size of the state of Wisconsin.

It's about 1.7 times the size of the state of Maine.

It's ridiculous, right?

And almost all of that very comfortable saying an area the size of the entire state of Wisconsin or the state of New York or the state of Maine, that much area is being naked airily with herbicide in the state of Texas, let's say just in Texas like as its normal form of management.

1:01:05

When they do this, it doesn't kill this Mesquite, it kills 2/3 to 3/4 of the native flora is obliterated by the sprain.

No one.

'S Are we talking about other pesticides too?

I'm not, I'm actually not sure what pesticides are being used but I've been there on the ground, walk through the sprayed areas, watch the regeneration, regenerating vegetation.

1:01:28

Texas is a big state.

There's a lot of hours you can drive through this.

I mean, there are literally chunks of like 20,000 acres of Mesquite skeletons with non-native invasive, you know, weeds and grasses and some native ones mixed in growing up between those mesquites.

1:01:43

And that's just this is one example, right?

Can I can IA couple things are emerging here for me.

As you say, this one is and this part is like really shocking and insidious.

A lot of the people who are involved in this kind of work consider themselves as environmentalists.

1:02:00

They're doing this work for the environment in their minds, right?

Like I know a lot of a lot of what's happening here with the spraying of roadsides with pesticide is to eliminate invasive species.

They think they're actually doing useful work for native species, right?

1:02:17

So the people perpetrating it think they're doing it for good.

So that's like 1 component.

Second thing I want to say is so many people think that the reason that we're genetically modifying food crops is to make them more productive, when in reality, it's just to make them resistant to the glyphosate that allows us to now instead of spot apply aerial spray it.

1:02:39

And the plants that we're growing, that means that they're resistant.

So that means they can be covered in it, which is not good for us because we're going to eat them.

But also it doesn't, these aren't more productive varieties of plants.

They're just resistant to the poison that we couldn't spray on them before.

1:02:55

So that's like another component.

And then the third part of this I want to say is that this is what's happening while we're all talking about carbon, right?

So we're talking about CO2.

Meanwhile, we're wholesale poisoning our soils and defoliating, denuding our landscape at the same time.

1:03:14

All those things, true.

Absolutely.

And you know, and like, and I'm not saying that human claws cause global warming is not real.

It's real and it's a problem and we need to address it.

And look like I live off grid.

You know, I have a house that I, I built out of logs that I cut and carried on my shoulders on my property.

1:03:36

You know, like locally cut wood.

I heat with wood.

You know, I, I, like I said, I pump my own water.

Like I have tried to live by those values.

I'm, you know, off grid photovoltaic, solar electric, etcetera.

But that's not going to solve this climate issue.

1:03:53

You know, and we can't try to solve the climate issue and ignore the things.

I mean this herbicide thing is a way bigger deal ecologically.

I mean, while we sit and argue about about carbon footprints and about, you know, carbon sequestration and what's the best way to lower our, our, our, our, you know, our carbon footprint and all that.

1:04:19

All of the things that we are worried about global warming doing, we are doing actively with herbicide at a far faster rate than global warming would ever do them.

Like, and each time there's an issue, we're we're talking about that issue, framing it in a way that ignores the ecology and just focuses on the global warming part.

1:04:39

I'll give you 2 examples.

We talk about monarchs disappearing on the Great Plains and, and all the other thousands of insects that are disappearing.

Like as much as the monarchs are declining, there's like, it's not like monarchs are declining way more than other things.

There's tons of plants and animals declining just like monarchs and that is almost 100% caused by herbicide.

1:05:01

And people will talk like like 60% of the discussion of it is like revolves around maybe it's only 40%, but it revolves around global warming.

You know, global warming, global warming is not harming the monarchs.

It's the herbicide.

And you can just compound that over say, you know, like maybe 7000 native species just in North America, right?

1:05:21

And and we're not talking about the herbicide is that problem and.

We'll almost talk about everything else.

I mean, you'll hear it's the cell phone towers, it's the 5G, it's the, you know, everything, but you don't hear.

And I, and the thing about the insects is I've witnessed it in my lifetime.

1:05:39

I witness it because it, it's so simple.

And people who've listened to me for years will have heard this.

But but it used to be if you drove from the North Main woods down to where I live in southern Maine in the summertime, your car would absolutely be caked in dead insects.

And you can do that drive now and there's barely any.

1:05:57

And I mean, I just have watched it year after year, which just less insects.

I mean literally.

Birds and less snakes and less lizards and I mean you almost all these species across the board.

And you know, so other and you know, the environmental movement has a history of doing this right.

1:06:18

So I'll give you an example like in from like 1920 to like, say, 2000, 2010, almost a century there.

There's this focus on deforestation, right?

And let's look here at the United States during that period.

1:06:36

Our amount of forest was dramatically increasing during that period.

And yet we have this Smokey the bear ethic, right?

And Smokey the bear was a tool created by industry and government in lockstep to trick people about forest ecology and trick them into allowing us to manage forest for timber rather than for nature, right?

1:06:58

And so, and, and so we eliminated fire from our forest management and then we create this horrible fire problem that is in the western states all over the country, but especially California, right?

And that is partly due to global warming the the the serious fire problems we've had recently.

1:07:14

But it is mostly caused by this Smokey the bear mentality of managing forests for industry rather than ecologically sound.

And for that century, we were ignoring, we were ignoring all the species, which is roughly 40% of the species in North America, which are fire dependent because virtually all of our forests and all of our prairies are fire dependent or fire was an important part of modulating those ecosystems over time.

1:07:44

While all sorts of plants and animals just disappeared steadily for years in the 30s, forties, 50s, it was like exponential, like each decade there was like, you know, only 40% at the end of the decade what there was in the beginning.

And I, I got to see it even in my lifetime.

I go to southern Wisconsin and the Prairie relics that I visited when I in the 80s and early 90s, they're all gone.

1:08:05

They're, they're buckthorn and brush and forest.

And we were losing our prairies and all of our grasslands and all of our fire dependent communities, even though we scientifically knew we were losing them because the media and industry and government was focused on industrializing our forests.

1:08:25

And so so we lost our forests and our grasslands because of this warped quasi environmental thing that was happening in our heads.

And it's happening now with climate change in that, you know, I used to wonder, I used to see, like when I was a teenager, I used to see like the political right is like the enemy of environmentalism.

1:08:46

And I was like, you know, I was in a birds and snakes and, you know, and, and like I was a nature conservative volunteer when I was 14.

At the age of 17, I became, I got the certification to be a Nature Conservancy spokesperson.

So I could go like a, to a like ADNR meeting and say like as a representative of The Nature Conservancy, I think blah, blah, blah, right.

1:09:04

And like, and, and, and I just, I really love what The Nature Conservancy did.

But you know, I used to 1 I used to think that our enemies were on the political right.

Well, those people just, they admit that they don't give a crap about nature.

Right.

On the left you have this like, I don't know this like he's like pencil pushing office urban people that think that they care about nature but don't know a damn thing about it and don't actually care.

1:09:28

They just think that it's good to sound like they care.

And so those people have they control the rhetoric now so that we just aren't talking about all these other issues.

1:09:43

Environmentalism is dead.

Environmentalism was killed by the left, not the right.

The right never supported it.

I mean, a little bit right, but the right didn't really care about the environment.

And they admitted that the left pretended they cared in in that insidious.

On the right they call it conservation and the interest is really in antlers.

1:10:03

Well, some, yeah, But I mean, there's all.

If you go back like the 50s, you know, there was more legitimate concern, like on the political right.

But by the 80s and 90s it had mostly dissipated, right, so to say within my lifetime.

1:10:20

But but actually, if we talk about the real issues, it's easier to get the political right interested because there are a lot of.

People.

Yeah, I live around them.

They vote for Trump and they are very right leaning.

1:10:37

But if I talk about a bird disappearing, they care because it's concrete and they have birds in their yard, right?

But if I talk about an abstract thing about climate change that they sense, they smell bullshit and it and it and they want to, you know, push it away and they are right in what they smell, right.

1:10:57

And I'm not saying like, and, and a lot of these people, they aren't some of them are really silly and pretending that there's no climate change happening, But most of them it's, it's more complicated view than that.

And The Nature Conservancy, when, when I volunteered for them, we had a very distinct mission of preserving land and managing habitats for rare and declining species, etcetera.

1:11:26

Most of the Nature Conservancy's mission statement now is about climate change, like The Nature Conservancy has been absorbed, subsumed, superseded by Climatism, whatever permutation of environmentalism, whether it's just regular old environmentalism or the deep ecology movement from the 80s and 90s that I felt that I was, you know, part of or, or whether it's, it's conservation, which is like the wise use, but, but use of natural resources.

1:11:53

And I, and I'm, I'm there too, right?

Like I'm all for forestry.

It's the most sustainable industry we have.

We need to do it right.

But we should be cutting our public forests and using getting timber from them because if we don't, we're going to be getting it from tree farms, right?

So I'm there, I'm in the conservation sphere too.

1:12:08

But climatism has just replaced all that.

We don't talk about biodiversity.

We don't talk realistically about any of the environmental issues anymore.

And meanwhile, like climate thing is important.

It's important.

But you know what the biggest ecological thing facing the world today is not climate change.

1:12:27

It's herbicide.

And we are completely ignoring that.

And I've had people just attack me, jump down my throat for saying that, but I'm not getting my information from any talking head anywhere, not from even somebody on a podcast like this.

I'm getting that information from going outside and watching, watching people kill nature with herbicide.

1:12:49

And it's so much faster and so much more drastic and so much more severe than any potential climate change scenario that we're talking about.

And I, and I'm and I'm terrified of what's happening to nature before my eyes.

And I'm terrified that there isn't even an environmental movement to talk about it anymore because climate change has swallowed us.

1:13:12

It does seem too like the what the climate change narrative is going to lead to, from my perspective at least, is climate management.

You know, so you're seeing now the patents are coming out for, you know, geoengineering the atmosphere for experiments in the ionosphere, reflective particles, you know, things like that.

1:13:35

Like there's this, it's going to lead to, oh, we need to now become managers of weather systems, which is like, so you know, like lot not letting any natural processes take place anymore.

You know, I feel like that's kind of the desires to be engineers of everything, right?

1:13:52

Like we want to engineer biology, we want to engineer psychology, we want to engineer human beings, we want to engineer ecosystems now we want to engineer weather.

And I just feel like human beings are not mature enough to manage any of those things.

But.

I I agree, you know, at some point we need to say we're good enough, our Earth is good enough, and we have enough stuff.

1:14:15

Like that's about GDP being sacred, right?

We don't need to raise that number.

We have enough stuff.

Like if I go on a walk with you and you and I go pick some persimmons and eat them, there's no GDP value in that.

1:14:30

But man, wouldn't that be nice?

Wouldn't it be nice to go fishing?

Like, we could just walk down the stream somewhere, catch some brook trout and bring them home and cook them for dinner with some vegetables from the garden, some wild rice that I got last year.

Like, there's no GDP in that, right?

But man, wouldn't that be nice?

I mean, I mean, we need to stop pretending that that GDP is quality of life.

1:14:52

The Earth is good enough, nature is good enough, human beings are good enough and we have enough stuff and let's start acting like let's be responsible for once.

I agree with you 100%.

I mean about what where you, I believe it's going the path that you're talk about going because people don't want to make changes or sacrifices.

1:15:12

Like I have green energy in my house.

I'm off grid solar.

But you know what?

We've achieved what we've achieved mostly because we use 8% of the national average electricity use of a family our size.

Well, guess what?

You don't need solar panels on your roof to cut your electricity use down by 80%.

1:15:29

Anyone can cut their their fossil fuel use, their carbon footprint.

You can cut it by 80% without buying any single piece of technology.

You know, but what we want is we want to buy a Prius and then put solar panels on the roof so that we can advertise who we are, right?

1:15:48

So it's not, it's not about the value, it's about signaling the value we have to the public and saying what group of people we belong to.

We need to grow up and stop doing that.

We need to make responsible decisions regardless of whether or not we get overt social credit for them.

1:16:04

And that's why I think people need to stay in contact with nature, because when you keep putting your hands in nature and you keep eating nature, that that gratitude cycle keeps happening.

And, and, and it keeps causing you to think in a framework of gratitude, in the framework of gratitude makes you ask for less, need less.

1:16:24

It makes you be more satisfied and, and, and more happy and, and yeah.

And, and you know, the other thing is climate change, carbon sequestration, all the this is all being used to support extraordinarily, egregiously anti environmental things.

1:16:45

OK, so I, I, I give the example of replacing, you know, forests, native forests with tree farms and sometimes under the guise that well, yeah, but did Douglas fir grow is more cubic feet of wood per acre or or more, you know, biomass volume of wood per acre, blah, blah, blah.

1:17:03

That's just baloney.

That's just, that's just, it's just messing with numbers, messing with people's heads to to to support something that's good for industry, not good for nature.

But we're seeing that in in all these like even like with solar farms, right?

1:17:18

I mean, are we say as a, as a nature Conservancy person and I look on their website and they have a picture of a gigantic solar farm, right?

I'm like, you put the solar farm, you are displacing cropland or natural land.

If you're displacing cropland, that increases the value of the crops and some other natural land will be displaced somewhere to make up for that crop production.

1:17:41

So whether you put it on cropland or natural ecosystems, by putting out solar farms, you're going to be destroying natural ecosystems.

Now we would need, I don't know what the total is.

I hear different numbers.

Is it one percent, 5%?

Somewhere in that range of the surface area of this country would have to be devoted to solar farms in order to meet our electric needs, right?

1:18:03

It's not happening without massive ecological destruction.

And then invariably herbicide is used except in you know, desert regions, herbicide is used between the panels to control the vegetation.

And so again, climate change is being used as an excuse to destroy nature.

1:18:20

We need solutions to crime, climate change, but they have to consider the actual ecology and nature as if it mattered.

And if if all the decisions are made by, you know, urban office pencil pushers and, and people that are not actively engaged and viscerally connected to nature through direct experience, through eating it, through sleeping in it, through touching it, then the decisions are going to be ill conceived.

1:18:49

Even if those people have the best intentions.

And I do believe that some of those people have the best intentions.

There's an infiltration of people with bad intentions, and the people with bad intentions have an easy time convincing people with good intentions to make dumb ecological decisions in the climate change.

1:19:07

Because they their benchmark is the social world around them which contains a very limited amount of information, whereas nature contains all the information about itself, which is more than human beings can even conceive of.

And there's a lot in those last few sentences you just said there.

1:19:25

We need to keep going back to nature.

Keep.

Touching it.

So we love it and keep observing it.

So we understand what's going on and and that's just the environmental movement is not promoting that.

You know, I to conclude, I, I want to ask you, OK, it might take me a second to frame the question, so bear with me.

1:19:42

And if it's too far out for you, just be like, hey man, that's outside my wheelhouse, but I've never asked.

You I have a wheelhouse.

So, OK, good.

Your pump house.

All right.

When I look at all of this, it it's like watching somebody.

1:20:01

Descend into suicidal ideation.

That's kind of what it looks like watching us culturally, but almost even worse because part of it looks like, you know, Lord of the Rings where it's like Sauron's trying to build himself a body.

So we're it's literally an all seeing eye that knows every thought.

1:20:20

You think everything you buy everywhere you go, it's tracking everything you do.

It's it's got, you know, GPS and gyroscope in it.

It knows all your movements.

It's knows when it's in your pocket, it knows when it's out, it knows notice who all your friends are because it's geolocating itself, right?

We got these devices everywhere.

1:20:35

There's this all seeing eye and we're building its brain and we're building its body for some reason even and it's very anti human.

That's how it looks to me.

Then it looks like we're suiciding ourselves at the genetic level and at the fertility level.

I mean, the sperm counts are tanked, fertility is tanked.

1:20:54

People are are developing a lot of new diseases that are are caused by essentially our poor nutrition and our gluttony.

We are catastrophically destroying our ecosystem, the whole womb that supports us.

1:21:11

When I look at a company like we're talking about glyphosate, so you kind of can't talk about glyphosate without sort of alluding to Monsanto and companies like that.

These corporate bodies, right?

They, they aren't a physical body.

They're a corporate body.

Now, if we went back 300 years and a bunch of people got together in a room, sat in a circle and tried to summon an entity, that would be like sorcery.

1:21:33

But today it's, it's called a board meeting and they summon this corporate corporal.

That means body, right?

So they summon this non physical body that makes decisions that no human could make because they're so anti human and they're so anti ecological, right?

1:21:50

So we have all of these corporate entities that all seem hell bent on destroying the earth itself.

We're destroying ourselves.

And then we're we're bringing in, it's like we're trying at least to bring in artificial beings, silica based beings to replace ourselves.

1:22:08

You know, when you zoom out of it, it's like, wait, what the hell is going on here?

My question is, is do you, when you look at this personally, is this a physical phenomena with emergent properties from all of the hive mind or is this a spiritual problem?

1:22:27

Do you think it's a physical thing?

Do you think this is a spiritual thing or a metaphysical thing?

Or do you think it just, it's purely, is it purely just greed for individuals who want yachts and sex parties?

Or is it like, is there like a, a spiritual component?

1:22:45

Like how do you, how do you reconcile that we're doing this to ourselves because squirrels don't do this and lions don't do this.

And you know, birds don't do like no, no animals doing this to itself except us.

And we're not just doing it to ourselves.

We're doing it to all the species that are here.

1:23:01

And we're doing it in such a scorched earth way that it's almost like we want there to, to never be anything that can live again, right.

If we were to carry this out to its conclusion.

So I feel like that's right in my wheelhouse also like, you know, it's like the elephant in the wheelhouse or I don't know what it's, I feel like I don't, I don't separate the physical and the spiritual realms.

1:23:32

So I think it's both it's physical and spiritual.

I also don't separate the corporate and the individual.

When I say the corporate, I mean like this, this gigantic amalgamation of, of human wills, not in terms of a corporation, but sometimes, you know, collective will takes on its own thing.

1:23:58

And that makes sense.

It takes on, it takes on its own power.

In the same way that our bodies are a collection of cells, each of which is rather powerless, but they together can do things that the individual cells could have never imagined doing if they weren't incorporated into this body.

1:24:14

Right?

Mitochondria probably couldn't have done a heck of a lot if it didn't get in ourselves.

And all of a sudden, you know, that's kind of a cool thought, right?

Well said.

Yeah, but a terrifying thought.

And I don't know where it's going to go.

And I don't want it to go where it seems like it might.

1:24:30

And so is it did people want yachts and sex parties?

And people want that for sure.

There's people that want that.

And some people, you know, their, their view is narrow enough that that's just where they're going.

And then that's what they're pushing towards.

But I don't know what the total body is going to do, but I do, I do feel like human intelligence was a sort of idiosyncratic thing, sort of like Beavers managing their environment the way they do was like, there's not really another animal that does that the way Beavers do, at least.

1:25:06

And sort of like an elephant's trunk.

I mean, there's no other.

I don't, there's no other big animal with a fifth limb, you know.

But our, our unique thing is, is, is this this intellect?

And it was really useful, but it gave us a burden.

And that burden is the fear of our death.

1:25:25

And so this is where in my mind, the physical and the spiritual are connected.

So much of human psychology is spent assuaging our fear of death.

And I want people to know that if you really connect with nature, and maybe it's just me, but it's I don't think it's just me.

1:25:44

I've talked to a lot of people.

Death, fear mostly disappears, like hunter gatherer people mostly were not afraid of death the way the modern people are because they spent their whole life alive and engaged in life.

And people want to be connected to something that's bigger than us, that lasts forever.

1:26:00

It predated us and it will outlast us and we are part of it.

We are part of the big forever.

And you know, if you look at Yuval Harari's book, Homodeus, it's all about and Sapiens, it's all about this idea that human beings are smart.

And now we're going to build something bigger than us that will last forever.

1:26:17

And it will rule the universe with, you know, humans and technology together will rule the universe and will become God.

Humans will become God.

That's what we want.

And that's what we want because we crave.

That's like, that's like the craving for sugar that we keep eating the sugar and it keeps wrecking our our bodies, right?

1:26:33

But we keep eating because it tastes so damn good.

That is like what we are doing spiritually to nature, to to the earth, because we're afraid of death and we're afraid of death because we aren't connected to life.

I think everybody should watch a deer's eyes as it dies for them to eat and come to terms with that so they can understand that they will die just like that one day and it will be OK.

1:27:01

It's OK that that deer died and it's OK that you will die.

And when you dig up a plant, that plant dies.

It's OK.

It's like death is life and life is death.

You cannot have one without the other.

And if we try to have life without death, we will not have life.

1:27:18

And that's what this push towards AI is.

It's to push us towards not having life.

Like if we want to live forever, we won't have life at all.

Life and death must be synonymous.

They must exchange and interchange.

It's yin and Yang, and it is morally wrong because it's physically wrong.

1:27:38

It's physically nonsensical.

So therefore it's morally wrong for us to pursue infinite life.

Like I'm not supposed to live forever.

I'm afraid of death.

Of of course I'm afraid of death.

We're instinctively afraid of death.

But I have a peace with death.

1:27:56

I'm going to die and it's going to be OK.

I'm supposed to.

I mean, think about this.

Human beings, particularly, we are among the set of organisms that is born to die, right?

So if you take certain plants, they actually do not have program to death.

1:28:12

They simply live until a calamity kills.

And it could be disease, it could be a tree falls on them, it could be something digs them up.

But a milkweed plant, a blueberry Bush, a a spring beauty plant, those things live forever until something kills them.

They have no life span, They have no pre programmed lifespan.

1:28:30

So a a spring beauty tuber could be 1750 years old.

It could conceivably be 35,000 years old.

And I bet you somewhere in the Appalachians, in the southern Appalachians, there's a spring beauty plant that's more than 10,000 years old.

They just keep living.

But humans, we're not like that.

1:28:46

We live like 70 to 100 years and then we die.

We're supposed to, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.

We're supposed.

We're not supposed to live forever.

We're meat, we're flesh, We're also spirit, right?

And we're supposed to die.

And if we can accept that, then we can stop wrecking the world in a futile, infantile desire to live forever.

1:29:08

We can grow up and mature, accept our death, and say the world is good enough, I am good enough, nature is good enough, I have enough stuff.

I'm going to try to live well now.

Not longer, not more, not better, but just, well, you know, that's that's how I see it.

1:29:24

And maybe we won't get there.

Maybe that message is not powerful enough to change anything.

I don't know, I guess.

But that's how I spent my life working towards for me and trying to share with people.

And when I write books about foraging, it's a try to share with them this miracle of, of just, yes, living.

1:29:43

Like foraging is living, gathering food is living, Hunting and fishing and gathering, that's living.

But also the psychological miracle of realizing that you're part of this thing that is the most amazing thing ever conceived of.

I mean, nature is the most amazing thing.

1:29:59

And that's good enough for me.

Like I will die and my blood will soak into the soil and I will become plants that deer and will eat and turkeys will eat and insects will eat and frogs will eat those insects.

That's good enough for me.

I don't need fairy tales.

1:30:16

That's good enough for me because I got I got to experience it and I I'll be asleep.

I won't be experiencing it in this consciousness, but I will go on.

I will be that and that's OK.

So that's right.

That's where I stand on that.

I think it's it's all connected.

So interesting how I mean, first I just want to say I really appreciate all that you just shared.

1:30:37

I hope you write about that sometime.

And I it's interesting because you're like, well, then what do we do?

And it's like, chop would carry water.

It's just like so simple, you know, it's like you, it's just like these things we're talking about hunting, foraging, whatever your experience in nature.

It's kind of like chop would carry water.

1:30:53

Before enlightenment, chop would carry water after enlightenment, chop would carry water because it's just like, OK, all that.

And then it's like, what do you do?

Well, you just got to wake up tomorrow and like, feed yourself.

Yeah, Chop would carry water, watch birds, Make Love, eat apples.

1:31:09

I mean, life is good enough.

Yeah.

Wow, Sam, I really appreciate these insights, man.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thanks for kind of going into this unusual territory with me.

I think that.

Thanks for pulling me there.

Yeah.

Well, that's what I'm most interested in.

1:31:25

And it's like I, I just feel like the pragmatic and the existential are like, they have to come together now because the, the situation's getting so dire.

And I, and I feel like I don't want to be like the village crier, like, oh, Sky's falling.

But I kind of do want to be like that because I feel like the sky is falling in a sense.

1:31:43

And it's not the natural sky that's falling.

It's just that people are doing it and we're all contributing and we're all caught up in it.

And I feel like I just got like, I got to say something.

So anyway, I, I, I feel like a lot of this stuff's burning in our hearts and we're not always talking about it together.

1:31:59

And I think it's important that we have these conversations.

So yeah, thanks for going there with me today.

Hey, no problem.

And you know, when I teach foraging, I don't always say these words.

You know, sometimes it comes out, you know, but by bringing people out in nature and giving them that physical connection to the land, into nature, it doesn't need to be words.

1:32:19

They even if people never formulate words, anything like what I said, that happens inside them, the gratitude, peace, that's the two things.

It's, it's acceptance and the peace that comes with acceptance and the gratitude for life, the acceptance of life and the peace and gratitude of life.

1:32:35

And you get that through visceral physical experience of nature and no other way.

It feels almost sacrilegious to do it, but I want to make sure people know about what you do because you're not, I guess.

You're on TikTok now actually, aren't you?

1:32:50

Yeah.

I don't think of you as like a social media.

Video in the last year so.

OK, cool.

So you're yeah, you're, you know, a lot of times I feel like I get done a podcast and people go, oh, Daniel, where can people find you?

And I think like, oh, this is this weird formality we do because everybody knows they can just search for you and find you.

1:33:07

But you're, you're a little bit more like if people want to get into your workshops, it's a little bit like, is this real in person stuff?

Right.

And and you know, you sell your books not through a publisher, but but you know, you self publish and sell your books on your own website, everything.

So I just want to give you the space to talk about that because your books are really incredible.

1:33:25

You know, your series, the Forger's Harvest series, but also the field guide that you did, which is what a magnum opus.

Man, I love that book.

And your in person stuff is just incredible.

So like, you know, how do, how do people get in that funnel to work with you?

Sure.

1:33:41

So my books, I still feel like it's a great way to reach people.

Yeah, books are easy to access.

I mean those.

Books are important to have.

Those are important to have like if somebody building their like seed vault, whatever, even if you're not going to read them right now, you're just like, I need the I need to have the like, you want these books in your all all all four of those books should be in everybody's library in my opinion.

1:34:05

But sorry, go ahead.

And Oh no, that's fine.

That's fine.

The praise makes me feel good.

You know, I won't, but so I so I started my own publishing company, which was the best financial decision I ever made, although it stressed my life out a little bit.

1:34:20

So but the books are pretty easy to access.

Any whatever books to sell you find convenient.

I don't sell them individually on my website anymore.

You can also go to my website forgesharvest.com and I will have my workshops and speaking appearances for the year posted on there.

1:34:38

I'll be doing a few more this year because I built the classroom kitchen building on my property.

It's being built as we speak, so that'll be in service next spring for the first time.

It'll make it a lot more convenient to have classes here, but I do a limited number of in person classes, but I love to meet other foragers and to show people directly physically nature.

1:35:03

I mean, I, I do occasional videos.

I, I keep thinking I'm going to do some YouTube videos or, but I just, there's a lot of alone time in my world.

I don't have someone to film me, right?

And so it gets hard and I and I want to be doing this stuff so that I have something to write about.

1:35:20

Yeah.

Well, you're one of these people who who've had tremendous impact with with sort of minimal input into those systems.

I'm amazed by it because it's very difficult now if you're not on Instagram, YouTube, whatever you want to pick your pick your thing.

1:35:37

But you've you've had an incredible impact.

Yeah.

I think sort of like when you started and then like as your expertise built, those systems weren't as relevant for you.

But man, it's incredible because because everybody out there in the space knows your work.

I mean, when somebody write, it doesn't matter if somebody writes me from China or Argentina and they're like, how do I start foraging?

1:35:57

I recommend your books because I feel like even if I think if you live almost anywhere in the United States, there's plants in your books that are where where people are.

So that's really helpful.

But but essentially what you teach is important, whether it's that sweet of plants or not.

1:36:12

I find that really that the techniques and the ideas and the essays that are in those books, they're useful to everybody who wants to get into the space.

So I think that's really powerful.

And but one thing I like about being with you in person, you, you share on many levels, you share educationally, you share in presence, you share in song, you share in fun.

1:36:36

And those are things that you don't get from videos and everything.

So I really want to encourage people to, to go to one of your in person workshops, because I think if you're in this space, we have a tremendous opportunity and resource and say I'm here and, and, you know, avail yourself of that.

Why can't.

So just got to put that out there.

1:36:51

I I don't say it about everybody, Sam.

I, I really, I really appreciate what you do.

And I think being with you in person is really an important part of that.

So I hope you do more videos and all of that.

But yeah, if people can go work with you, man, I think that's a really big opportunity.

Well, thank you.

1:37:07

I'm honored.

And I'm honored that anyone and for everybody that feels like it's worth spending time with me.

And I'm glad my books have worked for you and other people, because that's the only reason I wrote them.

Yeah, no, they really do.

So, yeah.

1:37:23

So if you're looking to get into the foraging space, particularly get Sam's books.

But cool.

Any final thoughts you have?

Anything you want to share before we go?

Yeah.

Well, in the absence of access to me, just go out in nature.

Like go out, go out.

Yeah.

And thank, thank you all the listeners, viewers.

1:37:42

Thank you Daniel so much for what you do and for bringing me on.

Thank you, Sam.