Daniel (00:01.317)
Hey, I'm here with Sam Thayer. Sam, thank you so much for being on the show today. I appreciate it.
Sam Thayer (00:06.734)
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.
Daniel (00:11.639)
man, it's an honor to have you on the show and I really sincerely mean that. mean, you know, we've known each other for several years now and I've just, I couldn't say enough good things about you. 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. You're not out there doing the cult of personality thing, which is really rare today. Most of us are out there trying to 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.
You know, when it comes to wild plants, you're the guy and 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. 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.
Cause I knew you were doing some plant walks and stuff like that.
Sam Thayer (01:35.006)
I thought it was great. I mean, I love the people that came to my workshops and for me that's why I keep doing them. 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 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 hundred years less here in Wisconsin, we just don't see that. We don't see gutweed dominating forest ecosystems like that. And also I got to meet a few new plants, native and non-native. So that was fun. Well, there was a fool's parsley, Aethusis sinapium, which looks a fair amount like...
Daniel (02:18.678)
yeah, like what?
Sam Thayer (02:27.704)
Poison hemlock, and I don't actually know how toxic it is. It's kind of debated as far as its toxicity, but it looks like other carrot family plants that are edible. And at first glance, I thought it was the cow parsley, which also gets called wild chervil, another non-native that's edible. And so it was just cool to see that plant in person, which I read about for like 30 years to finally actually encounter it. And it was all over the campus there.
Daniel (02:54.553)
Yeah. Yeah, 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. Because I think, you also are sort of, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's fair to say 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
know, events and such, is that fair to say?
Sam Thayer (03:26.134)
Yeah, I 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 that kind of stuff. I'm not a good flint knapper. I'm a decent stone mason, know, but not a flint knapper, not good. so, you know, there's a huge array of people that come and I want to be prepared for the whole gamut from
Daniel (03:42.453)
Yeah.
Okay.
Sam Thayer (03:55.68)
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 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. I did have like four hours so that I, or six hours, yeah. So I really could get to know people a little bit better and meet them where they're at.
Daniel (04:07.374)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Thayer (04:30.14)
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. So I actually like having, I don't like a beginner's class at all. I want it to be people of all levels when I'm teaching workshop.
Daniel (04:47.504)
Do you think historically, like today our modern education system breaks people out by beginner, intermediate, advanced, and then also when we're young, according to age group, how important do you think it is to have a mixed class where you have people at advanced levels and people at beginner's levels and people of different ages? Do you think that's really important in the learning process?
Sam Thayer (05:09.705)
Well,
I do. mean, the modern education system, we're trying to do something that used to happen on a personal, in the household level between a small number of people. Like, grandma taught you a few plants and how to cook them, 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 public school settings. And so I think people are doing the best that they can. But there's a huge advantage to learning something
Daniel (05:17.744)
Hmm.
Sam Thayer (05:40.644)
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. 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 don't speak this language. And so have that slow down, explain the basics.
then push into you know like now you're in the thick of it now you come back and slow down. Okay now you do this intermediate speed and I think people learn best that way. I might take people out and show them 35 plants in a one-hour walk sometimes and I know they aren't gonna remember that. Of course they can't learn 35 new plants in an hour but maybe two years later
when they set down to learn one of those particular plants, the slow way, the right way, either with a friend or with a book or a book and a friend, they're going to have this on inkling in the...
depths of their mind that like, wait, I saw this before. yeah, I remember that one time. I tasted that. I thought it was good, but I don't even know it. And so they may have an impetus to concentrate and they may have just like a little inkling of information in the back of their mind that's helping them connect that deeper additional time when they're learning it better. So I think that kind of all over the map learning, I do think it's important. It's better.
Daniel (06:52.612)
Hmm.
Daniel (07:11.79)
Yeah, I've never taken the time to really break down what my adult learning process is. I know I have a strategy. I've never actually thought about like, are the components of it enough to be able to say like, here's my adult learning strategy. But one of the things that I like to do is 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. 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. So I think that might be a little bit of kind of what you're talking about.
Sam Thayer (08:02.562)
Yeah, well it's just like how people learn hunting, right? So like, 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. You learn about, take dear 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.
Daniel (08:09.072)
Hmm.
Daniel (08:23.12)
Yeah.
Daniel (08:30.596)
you
Sam Thayer (08:30.926)
The simple stuff, because so often when we mess up in life it's because we forgot the simple stuff. So all those levels, I think, all the time is a good, healthy way to learn. But I'm not knocking it. Classroom learning is great too, because if you're going to industrialize and teach 32 people at a time, you've got to do it some way.
Daniel (08:52.4)
Yeah. 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. So you were talking about seeing bird migration 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, know, things that have had major impacts, they often come from like emergent insight, like sudden bursts of ideation about something. 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 real contemplation that leads to fresh insights. And like we're at a time where boy, fresh insights for people could be really useful.
Sam Thayer (10:14.808)
Well, so one of my things that I have thought for a long time that I often say is that human beings have a cognitive dysfunction in how we think, which is that when we encounter a piece of information or an idea, the first thing we do is not think to ourselves, hmm, how does this idea match with what I observe in the world? That's not how we first think about it. The first thing we think is,
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 thinking that involves like facts and data and observations that inform
what we think first 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 have this my whole life. I've heard the song Pop Goes the Weasel, Round and Round the Mulberry Bush, the Monkey Chased the Weasel, 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 the woods. And I had a lot of interactions with weasels. 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 a cupboard and you want it outside and so you grab it with gloves, they make a very loud, sharp sound.
Daniel (11:51.46)
Yeah.
Sam Thayer (11:55.08)
It's kind of like I would say in between a chipmunk and a 22. It's kind of like this You know, 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 and 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 I get it like I've been there. I've probably caught
Daniel (12:14.384)
I've been there.
Sam Thayer (12:18.102)
I don't know, at least three weasels with 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 when they're peeing on the dishes or something, you gotta deal with that. And yet, so I typed in Google AI the other day.
do real weasels pop? 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 leads me to 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. And you know what? You know, 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 online, not from a video, not from somebody else. I know I got it from a weasel. I got it from interacting directly with weasels. so, and I feel like people need to, people need to step outside the human world to come to those intuitions.
And we don't do that enough. Now that we're ever connected, it's like, I try to tell my kids, put the phone down and just like observe the real world. It's slower. But what information it gives you is infallible. It's never trying to trick you. It's never selling you something. Never. 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...
Daniel (13:39.098)
See?
Sam Thayer (13:54.656)
It's unequivocal. You might interpret it wrong, but that's your fault. 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 an avid birder my whole life. And, you know, like most birders, I love my warblers in the spring. 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. These are itinerant birds. They spend 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. So at our latitudes, because we're pretty close, that's from like May 15th to July 15th. There are 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. 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. 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 we're like, wait a second, that's why these birds are coming here. And...
Daniel (15:45.418)
Right, right.
Sam Thayer (15:49.09)
Part of what led me to that was the experience I had with you of trying to take you out to catch bullfrogs on August, 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 go into hibernation until about then. We couldn't find a single adult bullfrog. And so in the two years since then, it's been right about August 5th.
and it's not related to weather. We always want to relate things to weather. The bullfrogs are like, it's really cold, I better go hibernate. No, there's no more insects. Virtually all the aquatic, no, not in that specific instance, But virtually all of the large aquatic insect hatches are done by early August and the bullfrogs are like, this isn't worth it. The risk reward ratio, and because they're cold blooded,
Daniel (16:28.494)
So it's also not photo period.
Daniel (16:33.349)
Hmm.
Sam Thayer (16:46.35)
they can hibernate really easily. They can fatten up and they're not in danger of starving like say a wood chuck which has to produce its own heat and it's harder for the endotherms to slow down their metabolism and hibernate. But even for things like black bears, mean they hibernate in the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia about the same amount of time, maybe just like two months less or a month and a half less than they do in northern Wisconsin. I mean they're out here now eating deer carcasses even though it's 15 degrees this morning.
It's going to be 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. So that's part of the process that brought me to that conclusion. 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.
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 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. 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 and that's why there are fewer insects. There's 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 can get lots of books and have babies. So there's the process.
Daniel (18:32.24)
Yeah.
Daniel (18:36.112)
I love that. guess there's a couple things I want to draw out of that. 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 I wanted to escape modernity. I wanted to go live off the grid and just eat fruits and live naturally and do yoga in the sun or whatever. And I remember going to, so I tried it in Florida, South Florida, tried it in Maui. And I remember just being like, oh, it 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. 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. 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. 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 okay, but you have a great temper to it. I appreciate that.
Sam Thayer (19:56.513)
I'm with you more than you might know.
Sam Thayer (20:01.774)
tried to.
Daniel (20:01.892)
So we were lot of conversation happening right now, of course, about AI that's in the zeitgeist, right? We're all watching it like sort of 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. I couldn't imagine what that technology was about to turn into, but it took 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 the cognitive impacts are gonna be far more extreme than they've been with phones. So I'm really worried about what's gonna happen with people. And one of the first things that I'm seeing, you know, I was really disturbed to read 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. Now that's got a couple of, a couple problems emerge from that. One is,
who's gonna 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 means that we might be reaching like sort of the functional end of new content being put onto websites, which is kind of a bummer. But second to that, well actually not, more important to that is that I'm watching how people get information changed 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, because you and I both witnessed over our life, people have no problem holding onto wrong information. In fact, I mean, in a lot of cases that they almost seem to prefer it. So I was curious to hear from you because the perspective that I was hearing from you around the dinner table that night was,
like, guys, think this AI, we're in a hype cycle right now. Like, okay, it sounds like it's gonna have all these massive ramifications, but I think it's probably gonna reach 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 looking for positives and I see some, but way more outweighed by negatives right now.
Sam Thayer (22:25.996)
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 didn't get a cell phone six years ago.
Daniel (22:32.964)
Well, can I give a little perspective on who you are to say? mean, first of all, you have a deeper ecological knowledge and connection than 99.9 % of modern people living in the modern life way. So that's one reason. You pump your own water at your house by hand. I mean, 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 you gather a significant amount of your calories out of wild places from species that you have relationships with. I mean, that alone puts you in a pretty unique position to comment on it because you're less touched by it. So I think a lot of us, you know, it's like if somebody's in 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, let me tell you about your husband. 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.
Sam Thayer (23:37.998)
Okay, well I agree with you there but I still am nervous about prognosticating about the future. it seems like the history of technology is when a technology first comes out there's 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 but eventually
Daniel (23:45.178)
We all should be.
Sam Thayer (24:07.886)
there's a leveling off, but at the same time that technology goes somewhere that we didn't imagine it was going to go.
Sam Thayer (24:22.912)
I feel like, I guess one is maybe it's just rosy thinking, but really rapidly. Well, say for example, electrification of homes and lighting, right? 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. And I know that lighting 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? And so those are much simpler technologies and it's maybe easier to predict, but...
It seems like something like that happened 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. 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 like these giant things, and I'm like.
Who needs that? 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. 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.
Daniel (25:53.782)
Right. Right. Right.
Daniel (26:16.272)
Okay, all right, all right good we're on the same page.
Sam Thayer (26:16.77)
in the same way that you are. Yeah, we're on the same page. I'm terrified. was just, I felt like, I don't know, I felt like you were so worried about it that I wanted to like, I wanted to throw a wrench into the machinations of your worry, right? I was like, hey, there could be light at the end of tunnel. 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.
Daniel (26:38.37)
Yeah. Yeah.
Sam Thayer (26:46.658)
kind of tempering it, because maybe I need to do that for myself too.
Daniel (26:47.578)
Yeah, balancing it out, I appreciate that. I often will do the same. I guess, you know, when we started off talking today, I was asking you about who comes in as new students. 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. 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 and so it has a unique place it's not just like a hobby like forging is my hobby it's like much deeper than that and it gives people the ability I mean
pray we never need it, but it gives us the ability to restart and reset after calamity 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. 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, a 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 research that was done that showed that the average elementary school kid knew more animals from Africa's savanna than they did from their own environment. So 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. 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 gonna be sort of like a natural exodus of people who are like divergent in their thinking that are like, wait, no, I need to like go back in the other direction. So I'm wondering if you're seeing any of that. I'm wondering if...
Daniel (28:59.96)
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? 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, mean, you 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?
Sam Thayer (29:27.854)
I think it should be both things and I think it will be both things. I think it will be part of the resistance to control of us. You know, it's like the book Brave New World. I know if you read that, you know. know, people, I do think in times and places people will simply separate themselves from the greater society in order to have some autonomy and freedom and to do that they will have to have certain skills. It also, however, I mean,
Daniel (29:39.738)
yeah, yeah.
Sam Thayer (29:57.678)
We, as in the government, the corporate media, I say the clergy of GDP, the people that worship GDP as if that's a measurement of vitality and life and happiness 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.
Daniel (30:07.962)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Thayer (30:25.442)
towards and in unison with and under the tutelage and control of, that was the church, right? The quasi-religious state. And today it's GDP. GDP is this like, God we worship. And...
Daniel (30:40.688)
For people listening, to say it, you're talking about gross domestic product, talking about our economy.
Sam Thayer (30:43.022)
Gross domestic product, like it's the sacred number that if a politician was to doubt the sacred number, they would never have a political career after that. 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 a little bit, but the people, the,
Daniel (31:07.408)
I'm pushing you into a new territory here with this conversation.
Sam Thayer (31:13.364)
Like, so the people that control 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. And maybe it's been that way for a long time. There's people that hypothesize that a big part of the origin of agriculture itself was beer. But the...
What they're doing is they're giving people addictive substances. I mean, if you go into a gas station, it's like, you're surrounded by addictive substances. know, sugar, caffeine, nicotine. I mean, it's just, you alcohol. And then people are carrying around these addictive objects, these phones, that have addictive information because it's...
cognitively, psychologically addictive 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 go through withdrawal symptoms if they are taken away from that addictive object, addictive information and I didn't really suspect
powerful like that's maybe a new insight for me like in the last eight or ten 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 a healthy diet 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. 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.
Daniel (33:21.146)
Yeah.
Sam Thayer (33:23.968)
and what a healthy lifestyle feels like. So I think that besides being this fallback 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. But also I think it's a hobby that we should curate as our birthright.
and pass down and teach to our children and participate in that and not in the sense of kids you need to do this because it's good for you and they're like kids let's do this it's awesome it's great you know and it has its own addictive element it's know forging is the original video game you know like the original video game you know all these things you know fishing has that same reward you know endorphin rush and all that the anticipation
Daniel (34:10.96)
Yeah.
Sam Thayer (34:22.894)
And you know, I don't know how important it has to be to provide that function in our psychological and physical lives, but I think it needs to be part of our lives. I think we need to think of it not as a fringe thing. I think we need to think of it as like tooth brushing. Right? It's like a thing, I mean, know some people that don't believe in brushing teeth, but like in general, okay, like hygiene, right? Like if you're ignoring your hygiene, you know, that's a problem.
I feel like if foraging or some meaningful connection to nature isn't part of your life, you're missing 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? The desire to watch birds. It's like, you know, if I was a cat and there was a window and there's birds outside, I'm gonna watch those birds, right? I mean, humans, we watch wildlife because it's part of what we are, you know?
And the curiosity is general whether we're eat the thing or not. We're curious about life and how life unfolds So I think that that foraging 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 and we see this in
are 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 somebody is controlling that information that'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 the absence of noise, nature is not noise, it's information, right? In the absence of that noise, you can analyze the information and come up with insights that are valuable to you. mean, you know, that's why Jesus would go up and pray for 40 days and 40 nights, right? Like,
Sam Thayer (36:47.916)
like whatever you want to call it. mean, that's communing with the divine. But it doesn't have to be 40 days and 40 nights. It could be 15 minutes in the morning before breakfast or whatever it is. mean, you know.
Daniel (36:56.944)
Yeah.
Daniel (37:01.24)
It's interesting, know, just because you just said that I'll bring up the metaphor. 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, 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, 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, so something I've been doing lately is I keep my phone on black and white because I notice that all those bright light colors,
When I was a kid, remember, do you remember the toy Light Bright? Yeah, and you could like turn off the lights, right? So if you're a Gen Z kid or something, a millennial, you don't remember this toy. I it was 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 pokey posts. Yeah, and you'd stick them in and there would be a pre-
Sam Thayer (38:02.936)
Yeah, yeah.
Sam Thayer (38:23.318)
Yeah, I totally forgot about this, but yeah.
Daniel (38:27.534)
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. But now we have that in our. 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.
Sam Thayer (38:42.498)
That was on the shelf right by the Etch-A-Sketch.
Daniel (38:55.054)
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, 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 first till you reacclimate 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? So I'm kind of curious your thoughts on that. You were talking about the 40 days in the wilderness or the 15 minutes of gathering insight. Any thoughts on how to, or maybe on how you manage that or how your kids are managing that? Making that break from, because obviously you're having to interact with these technologies, 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?
Sam Thayer (39:56.386)
It's hard, but.
One thing I would say is, is nature's, the signals can be subdued and they can be diffused, right? 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 bright yellow caterpillar, or a coral snake. These are signals that nature is giving that there's something you need to pay attention to here. But.
Now, if you can give kids a turtle, right? 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? Because the screen is not nearly as exciting as the turtle, right? The turtle's not addictive in the way that the screen is. So, that doesn't answer all of it, right? Because that turtle's not gonna be there forever and eventually they're gonna go tired of the turtle. But for 20 minutes...
Daniel (40:31.61)
Yeah, yeah.
Sam Thayer (40:56.438)
I might, the whole world might be the turtle, right? Or the bullfrogs. Or a snake. I mean, you add fear or excitement, you know? I find a big bull snake or a fox snake and I can show some kids. I mean, everything disappears. They're probably gonna pull their phone out and try to take a picture of it. But for the most part, it now centered on the real world. And so part of hooking kids
Daniel (41:16.856)
Yeah.
Sam Thayer (41:26.088)
or anyone, say kids, people, adults also, into nature and overcoming that addictive power is finding those most powerful elements of nature, 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 boredom of not catching a fish until you catch one. Or same thing with hunting or whatever.
So I try to look for those situations where I can show somebody something really exciting that's like right away that they can experience like a fruit or berry or hazelnuts smell them you can't smell anything on your phone you know like like like not now now taste the sour juice in the husk of that hazelnuts just bite it I'll tell you bite the hazelnuts smell it like you'll never forget that smell now 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 tastes like that. I 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 of the husk I can taste the nut inside and then rip it open and crack a few and get kids to taste them and it's like magic it's a real physical object 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. 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, now just destroying people's lives because it's cheapened.
Daniel (42:57.488)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Thayer (43:19.214)
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 it's like we can't even keep up with it. Like by the time I read what I'm supposed to have done with my kids 40 years ago, it's too late, you know? So it's real, but nature is also powerfully.
Daniel (43:39.812)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Thayer (43:46.478)
I would say addictive, in a healthy way, in the same way that food is addictive, right? Like friendship is addictive. Like if you have a good friend, then not having a friend in your life all of a sudden feels like you're really messing out on something. It's supposed to be that.
Daniel (43:51.887)
Yeah.
Daniel (43:59.601)
addictive but non destructive. Yeah, well, okay, I don't
Sam Thayer (44:01.381)
Right, right.
Daniel (44:07.524)
When we were at that lecture, doing our workshops there at Kripalu, Sephora 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, she was saying, which I thought was really funny. But at the risk of being that way, 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. 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. I saw 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. 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, 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, it's not that the climate isn't changing, the climate's a verb, 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, it's just, it's what I'm exhaling is the problem. And it's like, man, that's actually not really the problem.
Sam Thayer (46:20.024)
Well, can I speak to it? It's like more like, can I shut up? So first I want to give you like a look at human history in a way that distills in a way that not many people have thought about it. Right? If we look at the long scope of human history, you could 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
Daniel (46:21.904)
Please. Yeah, okay, let's see, got some time.
Sam Thayer (46:50.018)
natural environments and we were taking natural as an unaffected by humans, right? And we were just taking a surplus food out of that system and eating it. And that's why our numbers were at a low density, right? And that may have never been part of our species history. Probably wasn't.
Daniel (47:07.386)
For listeners, you're saying that might have been another species of Homo before Homo sapien?
Sam Thayer (47:12.462)
Yeah, so maybe Homo erectus lived that way or maybe Homo heidelbergensis lived that way maybe Neanderthals lived that way But 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 create their own environment. They raise their own food essentially They don't they don't farm the way humans farm, but they create their own food environment
Daniel (47:34.404)
Landscape Engineers.
Sam Thayer (47:36.066)
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 mounds and so they kind of create their own disturbance that creates their own food supply. So I think human beings 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. So the first big tool for doing that was fire. Now fire in general on many landscapes promotes the production of food. Now don't need to get into all the detailed theories about this, but when you add fire to a landscape, fire generally increases the amount of food for human beings on the landscape for a number of reasons. 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 seeded, herbaceous plants with edible seeds and fire increases the quantity of fruit on the landscape and root vegetables. 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. Now fire is like, it kills some plants but not all plants. You you burn a landscape, it favors some plants over others. And the next big thing that people figured out or started doing to control the landscape was the plow. Plows, unlike fires, kill everything. 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. That's a plow. And the plow went through, first it was human operated, 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. So fires changed the ecology of the world, but they made the world...
Sam Thayer (49:46.126)
It was still natural, was still vibrant and full of life and you could argue that maybe it made the world, quote, better, but it made it better for people, right, and certain species. Other species didn't benefit as much, but, you know, the plow was different, right? With each step of mechanizing the plow,
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, you could do bigger areas and then when you added machinery, internal combustion engines, all of a sudden plows could 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. 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, the next revolution in control of the biosphere, the way to kill plants is now chemical, right? 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, Scipio spread salt on Carthaginian fields so they couldn't grow crops, right? That was an herbicide, but a very expensive one. And you know, then we had things like copper sulfate, very expensive, kills everything, borate, know, things that are... It's with World War II that we come up with cheap potent herbicides.
And that was as big of an invention in terms of its impact on world ecology as the invention of agriculture itself.
Daniel (51:35.546)
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? And we're talking about nitrogen, which still can be used to make explosives. Were these weapons technologies that we converted to agricultural purposes essentially?
Sam Thayer (51:59.598)
Some of them were, and certainly the capital was repurposed, right? So there was this massive investment in chemical producing capital, and then that was repurposed for agricultural chemicals. even if, you know, the war may have made these things happen a little quicker, but it was going to happen anyway. Yeah, we were strongly trending there. But as has happened so often in human history, conflict is a major push toward innovation, right? So we maybe got there a generation earlier, but...
Daniel (52:15.376)
We were trending there.
Sam Thayer (52:28.726)
Now we have, you know, 2,4-D and glyphosate and all these different chemicals that are usually selective. But what they allow us to do that even plows, even mechanically driven plows couldn't 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.
And so we're already seeing this in Europe. Most of the forests of Northern Europe, or most of Europe in general, is actually tree plantations. It's not forest anymore. so the biggest threat to forests in the world today is the replacement of forests with tree plantations. And this is insidious, right? So we had like a few years ago, maybe 2020, I forget what it's called, I think I wrote it down, the...
the name of this organization. yeah, the World Economic Forum. have their one, yeah, yeah, by the way, World Economic Forum, GDP worshipers as organized as they can be, right? And so we have people like, you know, they have the Trillion Tree Initiative. Donald Trump's on board. Emmanuel Macron is on board. You know, everyone's on board. Well, you know what they're doing? They are,
Daniel (53:35.203)
yeah, lovely fellas over there. I love those folks.
Sam Thayer (53:57.4)
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. I got to actually go in France to these places while they were actively cutting ancient native beach forests.
mostly beech, some oak, some elm, but mostly beech, and replacing them with Douglas fir plantations established in rows and maintained with herbicide. 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 forests. It's soil-less.
glacier scraped rock of the Canadian shield and in northern Europe, you know, we have these vast boreal forests, biggest forest in the world, right? And then we have the second biggest forest area in the world. We've got the tropical rainforests. We've got the Congo, we have, you know, Borneo and parts of Southeast Asia. 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 made of small part.
Daniel (55:21.422)
All 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 canopy, right? Something like that.
Sam Thayer (55:31.266)
Yes, but what's also happened is that 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. So even what is in the system is very, very sparse and low.
Daniel (55:57.092)
needs like a catastrophic renewal event.
Sam Thayer (55:59.884)
Yeah, exactly. I 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, and it's where people are most prosperous because it creates fertile soils. So anyways, the tropical rainforests are also, 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, people can research this. 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 these massive change in world ecology is happening like under our noses, but we're not even sniffing it, you know? We're not even looking at it. 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 washes and long streams and it was scattered on the uplands but fires would burn the prairies of Texas and they would push back the mesquite 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 cattle trampling and grazing the mesquite goes crazy and has 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 million acres of mesquite rangeland in Texas. That is about one and a half 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.
the state of New York or the state of Maine. That much area is being nuked eerily with herbicide in the state of Texas. Just in Texas, as its normal form of management. When they do this, it doesn't kill this mesquite, it kills two thirds to three quarters of the native flora is obliterated by the spraying. And no one's talking about it.
Daniel (58:12.9)
What is this glyphosate or are we talking about other pesticides too?
Sam Thayer (58:17.454)
I'm actually not sure what pesticides are being used, but I've been there on the ground, walked through the sprayed areas, watched the regenerating vegetation. 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 weeds and grasses and some native ones mixed in growing up between those mesquites. And this is one example, right?
Daniel (58:44.376)
Can I, a 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. They're doing this work for the environment in their minds, right? Like I know 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? So the people perpetrating it think they're doing it for good. So that's like one component. Second thing I wanna 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 and the plants that were 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 gonna eat them. But also, these aren't more productive varieties of plants. They're just resistant to the poison that we couldn't spray on them before. So that's like another component. And then the third part of this I wanna 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
Sam Thayer (01:00:02.072)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel (01:00:10.042)
defoliating denuding our landscape at the same time. All those things true.
Sam Thayer (01:00:15.374)
Absolutely. you know, and I'm not saying that human 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 built out of logs that I cut and carried on my shoulders on my property, know, like locally cut wood. I heat with wood. You know, like I said, I pump my own water. Like I have tried to live by those
Daniel (01:00:21.68)
Mm-hmm. Sure. Yep.
Sam Thayer (01:00:44.246)
values, know, off-grid photovoltaic, solar electric, etc. But that's not going to solve this climate issue, 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 carbon footprints and about, you know, carbon sequestration and what's the best way to lower
our carbon footprint and all that. 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. And each time there's an issue, we're talking about that issue, framing it in a way that ignores the ecology and just focuses on the global warming part. I'll give you two examples. We talk about monarchs disappearing on the Great Plains.
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. And people will talk like 60 % of the discussion of it is like revolves around, maybe it's only 40%, but it revolves around, you know, global warming.
Daniel (01:02:07.044)
You
Sam Thayer (01:02:10.744)
Global warming is not harming the monarchs. It's the herbicide. And you can just compound that over, say, maybe 7,000 native species just in North America. And we're not talking about the herbicide is that problem. And I had another.
Daniel (01:02:25.232)
We'll almost talk about everything else. 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. the thing about the insects is I've witnessed it in my lifetime. I witness it because it's so simple and people who've listened to me for years will have heard this, but it used to be if you drove from the North Maine 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. And I mean, just have watched it year after year. It's just less insects. I mean, considerably.
Sam Thayer (01:03:01.294)
and less 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 so I'll give you an example like in from like 1920 to like say 2000 2010 almost a century there there was this focus on deforestation
Daniel (01:03:04.292)
Hmm.
Sam Thayer (01:03:31.052)
Right? And let's look here at the United States. During that period, our amount of forest was dramatically increasing during that period. And yet we have this smoky the bear ethic, right? And smoky 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 forests for timber rather than for nature.
Right? 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 serious fire problems we've had recently, 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. While all sorts of plants and animals just disappeared steadily for years in the 30s, 40s, 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 got to see it even in my lifetime. I go to southern Wisconsin and the prairie relics that I visited in the 80s and early 90s, they're all gone. 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. And 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 as like the enemy of environmentalism. And I was like, you know, I was in a birds and snakes and, you know, and like I was a nature conservative volunteer when I was
Sam Thayer (01:05:51.31)
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 like a DNR meeting and say like as a representative of the nature Conservancy I think blah blah blah right and like and and and I just I Really love what the nature Conservancy did but you know I used to one 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. They just think 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. 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 and in that insidious
Daniel (01:06:58.032)
Well, on the right they call it conservation and the interest is really in antlers.
Sam Thayer (01:07:04.588)
Well, some, yeah, but I mean, there's all, if you go back to 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. 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.
Daniel (01:07:31.192)
Now, present, we're talking about.
Sam Thayer (01:07:31.766)
I live, yeah, I live around them. They vote for Trump and they are very right leaning. 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 they want to push it away and they are right in what they smell, right? And I'm not saying like, 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 more complicated view than that. And the Nature Conservancy, when I volunteered for them, we had a very distinct mission of preserving land and managing habitats for rare and declining species, et cetera. Most of the Nature Conservancy's mission statement now is about climate change.
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 part of, or whether it's conservation, which is like the wise use, but use of natural resources. And I'm there too, right?
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 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. 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?
biggest ecological thing facing the world today is not climate change. 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.
Sam Thayer (01:09:50.048)
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'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.
Daniel (01:10:13.616)
It does seem to like the what the climate change narrative is going to lead to from my perspective, at least is climate management. 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. there's this it's going to lead to, we need to now become managers of weather systems.
which is like, it's so, you know, like not letting any natural processes take place anymore. You know, I feel like that's kind of the desire is to be engineers of everything, right? 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.
Sam Thayer (01:11:07.406)
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. 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. But man, wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't it be nice to go fishing? Like we could just walk down to a stream somewhere
catch some brook trout and bring them home and cook them for dinner with some vegetables from the garden and 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, we need to stop pretending that GDP is quality of life. 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 it. 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 talking about going because people don't want to make changes or sacrifices. Like I have green energy in my house, I've 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%. Anyone can cut their fossil fuel use, their carbon footprint, you can cut it by 80%.
without buying any single piece of technology. 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. So 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.
Daniel (01:12:48.772)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sam Thayer (01:13:05.345)
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 gratitude cycle keeps happening and it keeps causing you to think in a framework of gratitude. And the framework of gratitude makes you ask for less, need less, it makes you be more satisfied and more happy. yeah, 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. Okay, so I give the example of replacing, you know, forests, native forests with tree farms and sometimes under the guise that, well yeah but Douglas fir grows more cubic feet of wood per acre or more, you know, biomass volume of wood per acre, blah blah blah. That's just baloney.
that's just messing with numbers, messing with people's heads to support something that's good for industry, not good for nature. But we're seeing that in all these like, even like with solar farms, right? I mean, are we, say as a nature conservancy person, and I look on their website and they have a picture of a gigantic solar farm, right? Like, so you put the solar farm, you are displacing cropland or natural land.
Daniel (01:14:28.748)
So bad.
Sam Thayer (01:14:34.432)
If you're displacing crop land that increases the value of the crops and some other natural land will be displaced somewhere to make up for that crop production. So whether you put it on crop land 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 1%, 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?
It's not happening without massive ecological destruction. And then invariably, herbicide is used, except in 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. We need solutions to climate change, but they have to consider the actual ecology and nature as if it mattered. And if all the decisions are made by urban office pencil pushers,
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 even if those people have the best intentions. And I do believe that some of those people have the best intentions. There is an infiltration of people with bad intentions and the people with bad intentions have an easy time
Daniel (01:15:52.005)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Thayer (01:16:02.156)
convincing people with good intentions to make dumb ecological decisions in name of climate change because 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.
Daniel (01:16:06.309)
Yeah.
Daniel (01:16:22.892)
And there's a lot in those last few sentences you just said there. I think people could take some time unpacking that.
Sam Thayer (01:16:25.762)
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. that's just, environmental movement is not promoting that.
Daniel (01:16:32.58)
Yeah.
Daniel (01:16:36.4)
You know, to conclude, I wanna ask you, okay, it might take me a second to frame the question, so bear with me, 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 about this. Okay, good, all right. Your pump house. All right. When I look at all this, it.
Sam Thayer (01:16:49.166)
I don't have a wheelhouse, so it's OK.
Daniel (01:16:59.48)
It's like watching somebody 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 Lord of the Rings where it's like Sauron's trying to build himself a body. where it's literally an all-seeing eye that knows every thought you think, everything you buy, everywhere you go, it's tracking everything you do. It's got a...
GPS and gyroscope in it. It knows all your movements. It knows when it's in your pocket. It knows when it's out. It knows who all your friends are because it's geolocating itself. We've got these devices everywhere. There's this all-seeing eye. And we're building its brain. And we're building its body for some reason. 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. mean, the sperm counts are tanked. Fertility is tanked.
People are developing a lot of new diseases that are caused by essentially our poor nutrition and our gluttony. We are catastrophically destroying our ecosystem, the whole womb that supports us.
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 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. But today 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? 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 bringing in, it's like we're trying at least to bring in artificial beings, silica-based beings to replace ourselves. know, when you zoom out of it, it's like,
Daniel (01:19:13.838)
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? Do you think this is 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 spiritual component? Like 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 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 and we're doing it in such a scorched earth way that it's almost like we want there to never be anything that can live again.
right, if we were to carry this out to its conclusion.
Sam Thayer (01:20:14.998)
So I feel like that's right in my wheelhouse, but it's 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. 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
Daniel (01:20:20.282)
good.
Sam Thayer (01:20:44.024)
this gigantic amalgamation of human wills, not in terms of a corporation. But sometimes, know, collective will takes on its own thing. And that makes sense. 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, right? Mitochondria probably could have done a heck of a lot if it didn't get into our cells and all of a sudden, know, mitochondria, you know, that's kind of a cool thought, right? But a terrifying thought. And I don't know where it's gonna go and I don't want it to go where it seems like it might. And so, did people want...
Daniel (01:21:20.906)
Yeah, right.
Well said, yeah.
Sam Thayer (01:21:38.51)
Yachts and sex parties and people want that for sure. There's people that want that and some people You know their view is narrow enough that that's just where they're 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 it was like
not really another animal that does that the way beavers do at least. And sort of like an elephant's trunk. mean, there's no other, I don't know, there's no other big animal with a fifth limb, you know? But our unique thing is this intellect. And it was really useful, but it gave us a burden. And that burden is the fear of our death. 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, maybe it's just me, but I don't think it's just me. I've talked to lot of people. That 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. 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, Homo Deus, it's all about, and Sapiens, it's all about this idea that human beings are smart and now we're gonna build something bigger than us that will last forever and it will rule the universe with, 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 the craving for sugar that we keep eating the sugar and it keeps wrecking our bodies, right? But we keep eating it because it tastes so damn good. That is like what we are doing spiritually to nature, 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.
Sam Thayer (01:23:59.744)
and come to terms with that so they can understand that they will die just like that one day and it will be okay. It's okay that that deer died and it's okay that you will die. And when you dig up a plant, that plant dies, it's okay. 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. 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. 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 course I'm afraid of death. We're instinctively afraid of death. But...
I have a peace with death, I'm gonna die. And it's gonna be okay. I'm supposed to. 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 programmed to death. They simply live until a calamity kills them. It could be a disease, it could be a tree falls on them, it could be something digs them up. But a milkweed plant, a blueberry bush, a spring beauty plant.
Those things live forever until something kills them. They have no life span. They have no pre-programmed life span. So a spring beauty tuber could be 1,750 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. 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 to die. 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. 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 gonna try to live well now not longer not more not better, but just well, you know
Daniel (01:25:58.542)
Yeah.
Sam Thayer (01:26:27.694)
That's how I see it. 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 to try to share with them this miracle of just, yes, living. 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. mean, nature is the most amazing thing 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 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. That's good enough for me because I got to experience it and I'll be...
I won't be experiencing it in this consciousness, but I will go on I will be that and that's okay So that's right. That's where I stand on that. I think it's it's all connected
Daniel (01:27:36.305)
It's so interesting how, man, first I just wanna say I really appreciate all that you just shared. I hope you write about that sometime. It's interesting because you're like, well then what do we do? And it's like chop wood, carry water. It's just like so simple. It's just like these things we're talking about, hunting, foraging, whatever your experience in nature. It's kind of like chop wood, carry water. Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Because it's just like, okay, all that.
And then it's like, what do you do? Well, you just gotta wake up tomorrow and like feed yourself. Yeah.
Sam Thayer (01:28:09.292)
Yeah, chop wood, carry water, watch birds, make love, eat apples. mean, life is good enough.
Daniel (01:28:16.728)
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. think that what I'm most interested in, and it's like, I just feel like the pragmatic and the existential are like, they have to come together now because the situation's getting so dire. And I feel like...
Sam Thayer (01:28:26.818)
Thanks for pulling me there.
Sam Thayer (01:28:40.75)
Thank you.
Daniel (01:28:41.988)
I don't want to be like the village crier like, the sky's falling, but I kind of do want to be like that because I feel like the sky is falling in a sense. 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 to say something. So anyway, I feel like a lot of this stuff's burning in our hearts and we're not always talking about it together. And I think it's important that we have these conversations. So yeah, thanks for going there with me today.
Sam Thayer (01:29:08.654)
Hey, no problem. And you know, when I teach foraging, I don't always say these words. Sometimes it comes out, you But by bringing people out in nature and giving them that physical connection to the land and to nature, it doesn't need to be words. Even if people never formulate words, anything like what I said, that happens inside them. The gratitude, the peace, that's the two things. 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. And you get that through visceral physical experience of nature and no other way.
Daniel (01:29:49.909)
It feels almost sacrilegious to do it, but I wanna make sure people know about what you do, because you're not, I guess you're on TikTok now actually, aren't you? But I don't think of you as like a social media guy. Okay, cool. So yeah, you're, you know, a lot of times I feel like I get down to podcasts 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.
Sam Thayer (01:30:00.212)
Yeah, well, I've done maybe three. I've done maybe three videos in the last year, so.
Daniel (01:30:15.512)
search for you and find you, you're a little bit more, like if people wanna get into your workshops, it's a little bit like, this is real in-person stuff, And you sell your books, not through a publisher, but you self-publish and sell your books on your own website and everything. So I just wanna give you the space to talk about that, because your books are really incredible. 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. like, you know, how do people get in that funnel to work with you?
Sam Thayer (01:30:50.424)
Sure, so my books, I still feel like it's a great way to reach people. And the books are easy to access. mean, any online book seller.
Daniel (01:30:55.492)
Yeah, those books are important to have. Those are important to have. if somebody's building their like seed vault, whatever, even if you're not gonna read them right now, you're just like, need to have the, like you want these books in your, all four of those books should be in everybody's library in my opinion. Sorry, go ahead.
Sam Thayer (01:31:15.36)
And no, that's fine, that's fine. The praise makes me feel good, you know. I won't lie. 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. the books are pretty easy to access, whatever books to sell you find convenient. I don't sell them individually on my website anymore. You can also go to my website, foragersharvest.com and I will have my workshops.
Daniel (01:31:18.704)
It's warranted.
Daniel (01:31:37.581)
Okay.
Sam Thayer (01:31:44.244)
and speaking appearances for the year posted on there. 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.
Daniel (01:31:54.603)
yeah? cool.
Sam Thayer (01:32:13.036)
You know, I do occasional videos. I keep thinking I'm going to do some YouTube videos, but I just... There's a lot of alone time in my world. I don't have someone to film me. And so it gets hard. And I want to be doing this stuff so that I have something to write about.
Daniel (01:32:21.732)
Mm-hmm. Right.
Daniel (01:32:29.572)
Yeah, well, you're one of these people who've had tremendous impact 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, pick your thing. But you've had an incredible impact. 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. mean, when somebody writes, it doesn't matter if somebody writes me from China or Argentina and they're like, how do I start foraging? 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 people are. So that's really helpful. But essentially what you teach is important.
whether it's that suite of plants or not. find that really, that 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. But one thing I like about being with you in person, you share on many levels. You share educationally, you share in presence, you share in song, you share in fun, and those are things that you don't get from videos and everything.
I really want to encourage people 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 in Sam here and, you know, avail yourself of that while you can. So just got to put that out there. I don't say that about everybody, Sam. I really, 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.
Sam Thayer (01:34:15.208)
Well thank you. 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.
Daniel (01:34:16.271)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel (01:34:30.081)
Yeah, no, they really do. yeah, so if you're looking to get into the forging space, particularly get Sam's books, but cool. Any final thoughts you have? Anything you want to share before we go?
Sam Thayer (01:34:41.036)
Yeah, well in the absence of access to me, just go out in nature. Like, go out, go out. And thank you all the listeners, viewers. Thank you, Daniel, so much for what you do and for bringing me on.
Daniel (01:34:44.826)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Right on.
Daniel (01:34:54.64)
Thank you, Sam.
Daniel (01:35:00.145)
Okay, ending that session, but uploading you.
Daniel (00:01.317)
Hey, I'm here with Sam Thayer. Sam, thank you so much for being on the show today. I appreciate it.
Sam Thayer (00:06.734)
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.
Daniel (00:11.639)
man, it's an honor to have you on the show and I really sincerely mean that. mean, you know, we've known each other for several years now and I've just, I couldn't say enough good things about you. 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. You're not out there doing the cult of personality thing, which is really rare today. Most of us are out there trying to 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.
You know, when it comes to wild plants, you're the guy and 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. 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.
Cause I knew you were doing some plant walks and stuff like that.
Sam Thayer (01:35.006)
I thought it was great. I mean, I love the people that came to my workshops and for me that's why I keep doing them. 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 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 hundred years less here in Wisconsin, we just don't see that. We don't see gutweed dominating forest ecosystems like that. And also I got to meet a few new plants, native and non-native. So that was fun. Well, there was a fool's parsley, Aethusis sinapium, which looks a fair amount like...
Daniel (02:18.678)
yeah, like what?
Sam Thayer (02:27.704)
Poison hemlock, and I don't actually know how toxic it is. It's kind of debated as far as its toxicity, but it looks like other carrot family plants that are edible. And at first glance, I thought it was the cow parsley, which also gets called wild chervil, another non-native that's edible. And so it was just cool to see that plant in person, which I read about for like 30 years to finally actually encounter it. And it was all over the campus there.
Daniel (02:54.553)
Yeah. Yeah, 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. Because I think, you also are sort of, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's fair to say 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
know, events and such, is that fair to say?
Sam Thayer (03:26.134)
Yeah, I 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 that kind of stuff. I'm not a good flint knapper. I'm a decent stone mason, know, but not a flint knapper, not good. so, you know, there's a huge array of people that come and I want to be prepared for the whole gamut from
Daniel (03:42.453)
Yeah.
Okay.
Sam Thayer (03:55.68)
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 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. I did have like four hours so that I, or six hours, yeah. So I really could get to know people a little bit better and meet them where they're at.
Daniel (04:07.374)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Thayer (04:30.14)
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. So I actually like having, I don't like a beginner's class at all. I want it to be people of all levels when I'm teaching workshop.
Daniel (04:47.504)
Do you think historically, like today our modern education system breaks people out by beginner, intermediate, advanced, and then also when we're young, according to age group, how important do you think it is to have a mixed class where you have people at advanced levels and people at beginner's levels and people of different ages? Do you think that's really important in the learning process?
Sam Thayer (05:09.705)
Well,
I do. mean, the modern education system, we're trying to do something that used to happen on a personal, in the household level between a small number of people. Like, grandma taught you a few plants and how to cook them, 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 public school settings. And so I think people are doing the best that they can. But there's a huge advantage to learning something
Daniel (05:17.744)
Hmm.
Sam Thayer (05:40.644)
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. 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 don't speak this language. And so have that slow down, explain the basics.
then push into you know like now you're in the thick of it now you come back and slow down. Okay now you do this intermediate speed and I think people learn best that way. I might take people out and show them 35 plants in a one-hour walk sometimes and I know they aren't gonna remember that. Of course they can't learn 35 new plants in an hour but maybe two years later
when they set down to learn one of those particular plants, the slow way, the right way, either with a friend or with a book or a book and a friend, they're going to have this on inkling in the...
depths of their mind that like, wait, I saw this before. yeah, I remember that one time. I tasted that. I thought it was good, but I don't even know it. And so they may have an impetus to concentrate and they may have just like a little inkling of information in the back of their mind that's helping them connect that deeper additional time when they're learning it better. So I think that kind of all over the map learning, I do think it's important. It's better.
Daniel (06:52.612)
Hmm.
Daniel (07:11.79)
Yeah, I've never taken the time to really break down what my adult learning process is. I know I have a strategy. I've never actually thought about like, are the components of it enough to be able to say like, here's my adult learning strategy. But one of the things that I like to do is 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. 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. So I think that might be a little bit of kind of what you're talking about.
Sam Thayer (08:02.562)
Yeah, well it's just like how people learn hunting, right? So like, 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. You learn about, take dear 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.
Daniel (08:09.072)
Hmm.
Daniel (08:23.12)
Yeah.
Daniel (08:30.596)
you
Sam Thayer (08:30.926)
The simple stuff, because so often when we mess up in life it's because we forgot the simple stuff. So all those levels, I think, all the time is a good, healthy way to learn. But I'm not knocking it. Classroom learning is great too, because if you're going to industrialize and teach 32 people at a time, you've got to do it some way.
Daniel (08:52.4)
Yeah. 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. So you were talking about seeing bird migration 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, know, things that have had major impacts, they often come from like emergent insight, like sudden bursts of ideation about something. 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 real contemplation that leads to fresh insights. And like we're at a time where boy, fresh insights for people could be really useful.
Sam Thayer (10:14.808)
Well, so one of my things that I have thought for a long time that I often say is that human beings have a cognitive dysfunction in how we think, which is that when we encounter a piece of information or an idea, the first thing we do is not think to ourselves, hmm, how does this idea match with what I observe in the world? That's not how we first think about it. The first thing we think is,
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 thinking that involves like facts and data and observations that inform
what we think first 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 have this my whole life. I've heard the song Pop Goes the Weasel, Round and Round the Mulberry Bush, the Monkey Chased the Weasel, 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 the woods. And I had a lot of interactions with weasels. 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 a cupboard and you want it outside and so you grab it with gloves, they make a very loud, sharp sound.
Daniel (11:51.46)
Yeah.
Sam Thayer (11:55.08)
It's kind of like I would say in between a chipmunk and a 22. It's kind of like this You know, 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 and 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 I get it like I've been there. I've probably caught
Daniel (12:14.384)
I've been there.
Sam Thayer (12:18.102)
I don't know, at least three weasels with 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 when they're peeing on the dishes or something, you gotta deal with that. And yet, so I typed in Google AI the other day.
do real weasels pop? 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 leads me to 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. And you know what? You know, 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 online, not from a video, not from somebody else. I know I got it from a weasel. I got it from interacting directly with weasels. so, and I feel like people need to, people need to step outside the human world to come to those intuitions.
And we don't do that enough. Now that we're ever connected, it's like, I try to tell my kids, put the phone down and just like observe the real world. It's slower. But what information it gives you is infallible. It's never trying to trick you. It's never selling you something. Never. 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...
Daniel (13:39.098)
See?
Sam Thayer (13:54.656)
It's unequivocal. You might interpret it wrong, but that's your fault. 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 an avid birder my whole life. And, you know, like most birders, I love my warblers in the spring. 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. These are itinerant birds. They spend 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. So at our latitudes, because we're pretty close, that's from like May 15th to July 15th. There are 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. 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. 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 we're like, wait a second, that's why these birds are coming here. And...
Daniel (15:45.418)
Right, right.
Sam Thayer (15:49.09)
Part of what led me to that was the experience I had with you of trying to take you out to catch bullfrogs on August, 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 go into hibernation until about then. We couldn't find a single adult bullfrog. And so in the two years since then, it's been right about August 5th.
and it's not related to weather. We always want to relate things to weather. The bullfrogs are like, it's really cold, I better go hibernate. No, there's no more insects. Virtually all the aquatic, no, not in that specific instance, But virtually all of the large aquatic insect hatches are done by early August and the bullfrogs are like, this isn't worth it. The risk reward ratio, and because they're cold blooded,
Daniel (16:28.494)
So it's also not photo period.
Daniel (16:33.349)
Hmm.
Sam Thayer (16:46.35)
they can hibernate really easily. They can fatten up and they're not in danger of starving like say a wood chuck which has to produce its own heat and it's harder for the endotherms to slow down their metabolism and hibernate. But even for things like black bears, mean they hibernate in the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia about the same amount of time, maybe just like two months less or a month and a half less than they do in northern Wisconsin. I mean they're out here now eating deer carcasses even though it's 15 degrees this morning.
It's going to be 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. So that's part of the process that brought me to that conclusion. 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.
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 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. 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 and that's why there are fewer insects. There's 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 can get lots of books and have babies. So there's the process.
Daniel (18:32.24)
Yeah.
Daniel (18:36.112)
I love that. guess there's a couple things I want to draw out of that. 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 I wanted to escape modernity. I wanted to go live off the grid and just eat fruits and live naturally and do yoga in the sun or whatever. And I remember going to, so I tried it in Florida, South Florida, tried it in Maui. And I remember just being like, oh, it 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. 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. 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. 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 okay, but you have a great temper to it. I appreciate that.
Sam Thayer (19:56.513)
I'm with you more than you might know.
Sam Thayer (20:01.774)
tried to.
Daniel (20:01.892)
So we were lot of conversation happening right now, of course, about AI that's in the zeitgeist, right? We're all watching it like sort of 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. I couldn't imagine what that technology was about to turn into, but it took 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 the cognitive impacts are gonna be far more extreme than they've been with phones. So I'm really worried about what's gonna happen with people. And one of the first things that I'm seeing, you know, I was really disturbed to read 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. Now that's got a couple of, a couple problems emerge from that. One is,
who's gonna 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 means that we might be reaching like sort of the functional end of new content being put onto websites, which is kind of a bummer. But second to that, well actually not, more important to that is that I'm watching how people get information changed 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, because you and I both witnessed over our life, people have no problem holding onto wrong information. In fact, I mean, in a lot of cases that they almost seem to prefer it. So I was curious to hear from you because the perspective that I was hearing from you around the dinner table that night was,
like, guys, think this AI, we're in a hype cycle right now. Like, okay, it sounds like it's gonna have all these massive ramifications, but I think it's probably gonna reach 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 looking for positives and I see some, but way more outweighed by negatives right now.
Sam Thayer (22:25.996)
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 didn't get a cell phone six years ago.
Daniel (22:32.964)
Well, can I give a little perspective on who you are to say? mean, first of all, you have a deeper ecological knowledge and connection than 99.9 % of modern people living in the modern life way. So that's one reason. You pump your own water at your house by hand. I mean, 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 you gather a significant amount of your calories out of wild places from species that you have relationships with. I mean, that alone puts you in a pretty unique position to comment on it because you're less touched by it. So I think a lot of us, you know, it's like if somebody's in 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, let me tell you about your husband. 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.
Sam Thayer (23:37.998)
Okay, well I agree with you there but I still am nervous about prognosticating about the future. it seems like the history of technology is when a technology first comes out there's 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 but eventually
Daniel (23:45.178)
We all should be.
Sam Thayer (24:07.886)
there's a leveling off, but at the same time that technology goes somewhere that we didn't imagine it was going to go.
Sam Thayer (24:22.912)
I feel like, I guess one is maybe it's just rosy thinking, but really rapidly. Well, say for example, electrification of homes and lighting, right? 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. And I know that lighting 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? And so those are much simpler technologies and it's maybe easier to predict, but...
It seems like something like that happened 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. 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 like these giant things, and I'm like.
Who needs that? 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. 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.
Daniel (25:53.782)
Right. Right. Right.
Daniel (26:16.272)
Okay, all right, all right good we're on the same page.
Sam Thayer (26:16.77)
in the same way that you are. Yeah, we're on the same page. I'm terrified. was just, I felt like, I don't know, I felt like you were so worried about it that I wanted to like, I wanted to throw a wrench into the machinations of your worry, right? I was like, hey, there could be light at the end of tunnel. 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.
Daniel (26:38.37)
Yeah. Yeah.
Sam Thayer (26:46.658)
kind of tempering it, because maybe I need to do that for myself too.
Daniel (26:47.578)
Yeah, balancing it out, I appreciate that. I often will do the same. I guess, you know, when we started off talking today, I was asking you about who comes in as new students. 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. 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 and so it has a unique place it's not just like a hobby like forging is my hobby it's like much deeper than that and it gives people the ability I mean
pray we never need it, but it gives us the ability to restart and reset after calamity 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. 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, a 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 research that was done that showed that the average elementary school kid knew more animals from Africa's savanna than they did from their own environment. So 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. 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 gonna be sort of like a natural exodus of people who are like divergent in their thinking that are like, wait, no, I need to like go back in the other direction. So I'm wondering if you're seeing any of that. I'm wondering if...
Daniel (28:59.96)
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? 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, mean, you 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?
Sam Thayer (29:27.854)
I think it should be both things and I think it will be both things. I think it will be part of the resistance to control of us. You know, it's like the book Brave New World. I know if you read that, you know. know, people, I do think in times and places people will simply separate themselves from the greater society in order to have some autonomy and freedom and to do that they will have to have certain skills. It also, however, I mean,
Daniel (29:39.738)
yeah, yeah.
Sam Thayer (29:57.678)
We, as in the government, the corporate media, I say the clergy of GDP, the people that worship GDP as if that's a measurement of vitality and life and happiness 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.
Daniel (30:07.962)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Thayer (30:25.442)
towards and in unison with and under the tutelage and control of, that was the church, right? The quasi-religious state. And today it's GDP. GDP is this like, God we worship. And...
Daniel (30:40.688)
For people listening, to say it, you're talking about gross domestic product, talking about our economy.
Sam Thayer (30:43.022)
Gross domestic product, like it's the sacred number that if a politician was to doubt the sacred number, they would never have a political career after that. 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 a little bit, but the people, the,
Daniel (31:07.408)
I'm pushing you into a new territory here with this conversation.
Sam Thayer (31:13.364)
Like, so the people that control 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. And maybe it's been that way for a long time. There's people that hypothesize that a big part of the origin of agriculture itself was beer. But the...
What they're doing is they're giving people addictive substances. I mean, if you go into a gas station, it's like, you're surrounded by addictive substances. know, sugar, caffeine, nicotine. I mean, it's just, you alcohol. And then people are carrying around these addictive objects, these phones, that have addictive information because it's...
cognitively, psychologically addictive 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 go through withdrawal symptoms if they are taken away from that addictive object, addictive information and I didn't really suspect
powerful like that's maybe a new insight for me like in the last eight or ten 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 a healthy diet 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. 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.
Daniel (33:21.146)
Yeah.
Sam Thayer (33:23.968)
and what a healthy lifestyle feels like. So I think that besides being this fallback 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. But also I think it's a hobby that we should curate as our birthright.
and pass down and teach to our children and participate in that and not in the sense of kids you need to do this because it's good for you and they're like kids let's do this it's awesome it's great you know and it has its own addictive element it's know forging is the original video game you know like the original video game you know all these things you know fishing has that same reward you know endorphin rush and all that the anticipation
Daniel (34:10.96)
Yeah.
Sam Thayer (34:22.894)
And you know, I don't know how important it has to be to provide that function in our psychological and physical lives, but I think it needs to be part of our lives. I think we need to think of it not as a fringe thing. I think we need to think of it as like tooth brushing. Right? It's like a thing, I mean, know some people that don't believe in brushing teeth, but like in general, okay, like hygiene, right? Like if you're ignoring your hygiene, you know, that's a problem.
I feel like if foraging or some meaningful connection to nature isn't part of your life, you're missing 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? The desire to watch birds. It's like, you know, if I was a cat and there was a window and there's birds outside, I'm gonna watch those birds, right? I mean, humans, we watch wildlife because it's part of what we are, you know?
And the curiosity is general whether we're eat the thing or not. We're curious about life and how life unfolds So I think that that foraging 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 and we see this in
are 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 somebody is controlling that information that'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 the absence of noise, nature is not noise, it's information, right? In the absence of that noise, you can analyze the information and come up with insights that are valuable to you. mean, you know, that's why Jesus would go up and pray for 40 days and 40 nights, right? Like,
Sam Thayer (36:47.916)
like whatever you want to call it. mean, that's communing with the divine. But it doesn't have to be 40 days and 40 nights. It could be 15 minutes in the morning before breakfast or whatever it is. mean, you know.
Daniel (36:56.944)
Yeah.
Daniel (37:01.24)
It's interesting, know, just because you just said that I'll bring up the metaphor. 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, 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, 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, so something I've been doing lately is I keep my phone on black and white because I notice that all those bright light colors,
When I was a kid, remember, do you remember the toy Light Bright? Yeah, and you could like turn off the lights, right? So if you're a Gen Z kid or something, a millennial, you don't remember this toy. I it was 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 pokey posts. Yeah, and you'd stick them in and there would be a pre-
Sam Thayer (38:02.936)
Yeah, yeah.
Sam Thayer (38:23.318)
Yeah, I totally forgot about this, but yeah.
Daniel (38:27.534)
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. But now we have that in our. 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.
Sam Thayer (38:42.498)
That was on the shelf right by the Etch-A-Sketch.
Daniel (38:55.054)
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, 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 first till you reacclimate 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? So I'm kind of curious your thoughts on that. You were talking about the 40 days in the wilderness or the 15 minutes of gathering insight. Any thoughts on how to, or maybe on how you manage that or how your kids are managing that? Making that break from, because obviously you're having to interact with these technologies, 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?
Sam Thayer (39:56.386)
It's hard, but.
One thing I would say is, is nature's, the signals can be subdued and they can be diffused, right? 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 bright yellow caterpillar, or a coral snake. These are signals that nature is giving that there's something you need to pay attention to here. But.
Now, if you can give kids a turtle, right? 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? Because the screen is not nearly as exciting as the turtle, right? The turtle's not addictive in the way that the screen is. So, that doesn't answer all of it, right? Because that turtle's not gonna be there forever and eventually they're gonna go tired of the turtle. But for 20 minutes...
Daniel (40:31.61)
Yeah, yeah.
Sam Thayer (40:56.438)
I might, the whole world might be the turtle, right? Or the bullfrogs. Or a snake. I mean, you add fear or excitement, you know? I find a big bull snake or a fox snake and I can show some kids. I mean, everything disappears. They're probably gonna pull their phone out and try to take a picture of it. But for the most part, it now centered on the real world. And so part of hooking kids
Daniel (41:16.856)
Yeah.
Sam Thayer (41:26.088)
or anyone, say kids, people, adults also, into nature and overcoming that addictive power is finding those most powerful elements of nature, 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 boredom of not catching a fish until you catch one. Or same thing with hunting or whatever.
So I try to look for those situations where I can show somebody something really exciting that's like right away that they can experience like a fruit or berry or hazelnuts smell them you can't smell anything on your phone you know like like like not now now taste the sour juice in the husk of that hazelnuts just bite it I'll tell you bite the hazelnuts smell it like you'll never forget that smell now 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 tastes like that. I 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 of the husk I can taste the nut inside and then rip it open and crack a few and get kids to taste them and it's like magic it's a real physical object 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. 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, now just destroying people's lives because it's cheapened.
Daniel (42:57.488)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Thayer (43:19.214)
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 it's like we can't even keep up with it. Like by the time I read what I'm supposed to have done with my kids 40 years ago, it's too late, you know? So it's real, but nature is also powerfully.
Daniel (43:39.812)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Thayer (43:46.478)
I would say addictive, in a healthy way, in the same way that food is addictive, right? Like friendship is addictive. Like if you have a good friend, then not having a friend in your life all of a sudden feels like you're really messing out on something. It's supposed to be that.
Daniel (43:51.887)
Yeah.
Daniel (43:59.601)
addictive but non destructive. Yeah, well, okay, I don't
Sam Thayer (44:01.381)
Right, right.
Daniel (44:07.524)
When we were at that lecture, doing our workshops there at Kripalu, Sephora 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, she was saying, which I thought was really funny. But at the risk of being that way, 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. 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. I saw 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. 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, 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, it's not that the climate isn't changing, the climate's a verb, 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, it's just, it's what I'm exhaling is the problem. And it's like, man, that's actually not really the problem.
Sam Thayer (46:20.024)
Well, can I speak to it? It's like more like, can I shut up? So first I want to give you like a look at human history in a way that distills in a way that not many people have thought about it. Right? If we look at the long scope of human history, you could 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
Daniel (46:21.904)
Please. Yeah, okay, let's see, got some time.
Sam Thayer (46:50.018)
natural environments and we were taking natural as an unaffected by humans, right? And we were just taking a surplus food out of that system and eating it. And that's why our numbers were at a low density, right? And that may have never been part of our species history. Probably wasn't.
Daniel (47:07.386)
For listeners, you're saying that might have been another species of Homo before Homo sapien?
Sam Thayer (47:12.462)
Yeah, so maybe Homo erectus lived that way or maybe Homo heidelbergensis lived that way maybe Neanderthals lived that way But 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 create their own environment. They raise their own food essentially They don't they don't farm the way humans farm, but they create their own food environment
Daniel (47:34.404)
Landscape Engineers.
Sam Thayer (47:36.066)
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 mounds and so they kind of create their own disturbance that creates their own food supply. So I think human beings 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. So the first big tool for doing that was fire. Now fire in general on many landscapes promotes the production of food. Now don't need to get into all the detailed theories about this, but when you add fire to a landscape, fire generally increases the amount of food for human beings on the landscape for a number of reasons. 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 seeded, herbaceous plants with edible seeds and fire increases the quantity of fruit on the landscape and root vegetables. 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. Now fire is like, it kills some plants but not all plants. You you burn a landscape, it favors some plants over others. And the next big thing that people figured out or started doing to control the landscape was the plow. Plows, unlike fires, kill everything. 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. That's a plow. And the plow went through, first it was human operated, 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. So fires changed the ecology of the world, but they made the world...
Sam Thayer (49:46.126)
It was still natural, was still vibrant and full of life and you could argue that maybe it made the world, quote, better, but it made it better for people, right, and certain species. Other species didn't benefit as much, but, you know, the plow was different, right? With each step of mechanizing the plow,
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, you could do bigger areas and then when you added machinery, internal combustion engines, all of a sudden plows could 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. 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, the next revolution in control of the biosphere, the way to kill plants is now chemical, right? 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, Scipio spread salt on Carthaginian fields so they couldn't grow crops, right? That was an herbicide, but a very expensive one. And you know, then we had things like copper sulfate, very expensive, kills everything, borate, know, things that are... It's with World War II that we come up with cheap potent herbicides.
And that was as big of an invention in terms of its impact on world ecology as the invention of agriculture itself.
Daniel (51:35.546)
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? And we're talking about nitrogen, which still can be used to make explosives. Were these weapons technologies that we converted to agricultural purposes essentially?
Sam Thayer (51:59.598)
Some of them were, and certainly the capital was repurposed, right? So there was this massive investment in chemical producing capital, and then that was repurposed for agricultural chemicals. even if, you know, the war may have made these things happen a little quicker, but it was going to happen anyway. Yeah, we were strongly trending there. But as has happened so often in human history, conflict is a major push toward innovation, right? So we maybe got there a generation earlier, but...
Daniel (52:15.376)
We were trending there.
Sam Thayer (52:28.726)
Now we have, you know, 2,4-D and glyphosate and all these different chemicals that are usually selective. But what they allow us to do that even plows, even mechanically driven plows couldn't 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.
And so we're already seeing this in Europe. Most of the forests of Northern Europe, or most of Europe in general, is actually tree plantations. It's not forest anymore. so the biggest threat to forests in the world today is the replacement of forests with tree plantations. And this is insidious, right? So we had like a few years ago, maybe 2020, I forget what it's called, I think I wrote it down, the...
the name of this organization. yeah, the World Economic Forum. have their one, yeah, yeah, by the way, World Economic Forum, GDP worshipers as organized as they can be, right? And so we have people like, you know, they have the Trillion Tree Initiative. Donald Trump's on board. Emmanuel Macron is on board. You know, everyone's on board. Well, you know what they're doing? They are,
Daniel (53:35.203)
yeah, lovely fellas over there. I love those folks.
Sam Thayer (53:57.4)
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. I got to actually go in France to these places while they were actively cutting ancient native beach forests.
mostly beech, some oak, some elm, but mostly beech, and replacing them with Douglas fir plantations established in rows and maintained with herbicide. 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 forests. It's soil-less.
glacier scraped rock of the Canadian shield and in northern Europe, you know, we have these vast boreal forests, biggest forest in the world, right? And then we have the second biggest forest area in the world. We've got the tropical rainforests. We've got the Congo, we have, you know, Borneo and parts of Southeast Asia. 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 made of small part.
Daniel (55:21.422)
All 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 canopy, right? Something like that.
Sam Thayer (55:31.266)
Yes, but what's also happened is that 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. So even what is in the system is very, very sparse and low.
Daniel (55:57.092)
needs like a catastrophic renewal event.
Sam Thayer (55:59.884)
Yeah, exactly. I 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, and it's where people are most prosperous because it creates fertile soils. So anyways, the tropical rainforests are also, 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, people can research this. 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 these massive change in world ecology is happening like under our noses, but we're not even sniffing it, you know? We're not even looking at it. 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 washes and long streams and it was scattered on the uplands but fires would burn the prairies of Texas and they would push back the mesquite 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 cattle trampling and grazing the mesquite goes crazy and has 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 million acres of mesquite rangeland in Texas. That is about one and a half 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.
the state of New York or the state of Maine. That much area is being nuked eerily with herbicide in the state of Texas. Just in Texas, as its normal form of management. When they do this, it doesn't kill this mesquite, it kills two thirds to three quarters of the native flora is obliterated by the spraying. And no one's talking about it.
Daniel (58:12.9)
What is this glyphosate or are we talking about other pesticides too?
Sam Thayer (58:17.454)
I'm actually not sure what pesticides are being used, but I've been there on the ground, walked through the sprayed areas, watched the regenerating vegetation. 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 weeds and grasses and some native ones mixed in growing up between those mesquites. And this is one example, right?
Daniel (58:44.376)
Can I, a 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. They're doing this work for the environment in their minds, right? Like I know 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? So the people perpetrating it think they're doing it for good. So that's like one component. Second thing I wanna 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 and the plants that were 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 gonna eat them. But also, these aren't more productive varieties of plants. They're just resistant to the poison that we couldn't spray on them before. So that's like another component. And then the third part of this I wanna 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
Sam Thayer (01:00:02.072)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel (01:00:10.042)
defoliating denuding our landscape at the same time. All those things true.
Sam Thayer (01:00:15.374)
Absolutely. you know, and I'm not saying that human 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 built out of logs that I cut and carried on my shoulders on my property, know, like locally cut wood. I heat with wood. You know, like I said, I pump my own water. Like I have tried to live by those
Daniel (01:00:21.68)
Mm-hmm. Sure. Yep.
Sam Thayer (01:00:44.246)
values, know, off-grid photovoltaic, solar electric, etc. But that's not going to solve this climate issue, 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 carbon footprints and about, you know, carbon sequestration and what's the best way to lower
our carbon footprint and all that. 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. And each time there's an issue, we're talking about that issue, framing it in a way that ignores the ecology and just focuses on the global warming part. I'll give you two examples. We talk about monarchs disappearing on the Great Plains.
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. And people will talk like 60 % of the discussion of it is like revolves around, maybe it's only 40%, but it revolves around, you know, global warming.
Daniel (01:02:07.044)
You
Sam Thayer (01:02:10.744)
Global warming is not harming the monarchs. It's the herbicide. And you can just compound that over, say, maybe 7,000 native species just in North America. And we're not talking about the herbicide is that problem. And I had another.
Daniel (01:02:25.232)
We'll almost talk about everything else. 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. the thing about the insects is I've witnessed it in my lifetime. I witness it because it's so simple and people who've listened to me for years will have heard this, but it used to be if you drove from the North Maine 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. And I mean, just have watched it year after year. It's just less insects. I mean, considerably.
Sam Thayer (01:03:01.294)
and less 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 so I'll give you an example like in from like 1920 to like say 2000 2010 almost a century there there was this focus on deforestation
Daniel (01:03:04.292)
Hmm.
Sam Thayer (01:03:31.052)
Right? And let's look here at the United States. During that period, our amount of forest was dramatically increasing during that period. And yet we have this smoky the bear ethic, right? And smoky 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 forests for timber rather than for nature.
Right? 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 serious fire problems we've had recently, 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. While all sorts of plants and animals just disappeared steadily for years in the 30s, 40s, 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 got to see it even in my lifetime. I go to southern Wisconsin and the prairie relics that I visited in the 80s and early 90s, they're all gone. 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. And 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 as like the enemy of environmentalism. And I was like, you know, I was in a birds and snakes and, you know, and like I was a nature conservative volunteer when I was
Sam Thayer (01:05:51.31)
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 like a DNR meeting and say like as a representative of the nature Conservancy I think blah blah blah right and like and and and I just I Really love what the nature Conservancy did but you know I used to one 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. They just think 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. 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 and in that insidious
Daniel (01:06:58.032)
Well, on the right they call it conservation and the interest is really in antlers.
Sam Thayer (01:07:04.588)
Well, some, yeah, but I mean, there's all, if you go back to 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. 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.
Daniel (01:07:31.192)
Now, present, we're talking about.
Sam Thayer (01:07:31.766)
I live, yeah, I live around them. They vote for Trump and they are very right leaning. 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 they want to push it away and they are right in what they smell, right? And I'm not saying like, 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 more complicated view than that. And the Nature Conservancy, when I volunteered for them, we had a very distinct mission of preserving land and managing habitats for rare and declining species, et cetera. Most of the Nature Conservancy's mission statement now is about climate change.
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 part of, or whether it's conservation, which is like the wise use, but use of natural resources. And I'm there too, right?
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 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. 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?
biggest ecological thing facing the world today is not climate change. 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.
Sam Thayer (01:09:50.048)
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'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.
Daniel (01:10:13.616)
It does seem to like the what the climate change narrative is going to lead to from my perspective, at least is climate management. 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. there's this it's going to lead to, we need to now become managers of weather systems.
which is like, it's so, you know, like not letting any natural processes take place anymore. You know, I feel like that's kind of the desire is to be engineers of everything, right? 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.
Sam Thayer (01:11:07.406)
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. 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. But man, wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't it be nice to go fishing? Like we could just walk down to a stream somewhere
catch some brook trout and bring them home and cook them for dinner with some vegetables from the garden and 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, we need to stop pretending that GDP is quality of life. 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 it. 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 talking about going because people don't want to make changes or sacrifices. Like I have green energy in my house, I've 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%. Anyone can cut their fossil fuel use, their carbon footprint, you can cut it by 80%.
without buying any single piece of technology. 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. So 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.
Daniel (01:12:48.772)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sam Thayer (01:13:05.345)
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 gratitude cycle keeps happening and it keeps causing you to think in a framework of gratitude. And the framework of gratitude makes you ask for less, need less, it makes you be more satisfied and more happy. yeah, 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. Okay, so I give the example of replacing, you know, forests, native forests with tree farms and sometimes under the guise that, well yeah but Douglas fir grows more cubic feet of wood per acre or more, you know, biomass volume of wood per acre, blah blah blah. That's just baloney.
that's just messing with numbers, messing with people's heads to support something that's good for industry, not good for nature. But we're seeing that in all these like, even like with solar farms, right? I mean, are we, say as a nature conservancy person, and I look on their website and they have a picture of a gigantic solar farm, right? Like, so you put the solar farm, you are displacing cropland or natural land.
Daniel (01:14:28.748)
So bad.
Sam Thayer (01:14:34.432)
If you're displacing crop land that increases the value of the crops and some other natural land will be displaced somewhere to make up for that crop production. So whether you put it on crop land 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 1%, 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?
It's not happening without massive ecological destruction. And then invariably, herbicide is used, except in 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. We need solutions to climate change, but they have to consider the actual ecology and nature as if it mattered. And if all the decisions are made by urban office pencil pushers,
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 even if those people have the best intentions. And I do believe that some of those people have the best intentions. There is an infiltration of people with bad intentions and the people with bad intentions have an easy time
Daniel (01:15:52.005)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Thayer (01:16:02.156)
convincing people with good intentions to make dumb ecological decisions in name of climate change because 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.
Daniel (01:16:06.309)
Yeah.
Daniel (01:16:22.892)
And there's a lot in those last few sentences you just said there. I think people could take some time unpacking that.
Sam Thayer (01:16:25.762)
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. that's just, environmental movement is not promoting that.
Daniel (01:16:32.58)
Yeah.
Daniel (01:16:36.4)
You know, to conclude, I wanna ask you, okay, it might take me a second to frame the question, so bear with me, 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 about this. Okay, good, all right. Your pump house. All right. When I look at all this, it.
Sam Thayer (01:16:49.166)
I don't have a wheelhouse, so it's OK.
Daniel (01:16:59.48)
It's like watching somebody 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 Lord of the Rings where it's like Sauron's trying to build himself a body. where it's literally an all-seeing eye that knows every thought you think, everything you buy, everywhere you go, it's tracking everything you do. It's got a...
GPS and gyroscope in it. It knows all your movements. It knows when it's in your pocket. It knows when it's out. It knows who all your friends are because it's geolocating itself. We've got these devices everywhere. There's this all-seeing eye. And we're building its brain. And we're building its body for some reason. 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. mean, the sperm counts are tanked. Fertility is tanked.
People are developing a lot of new diseases that are caused by essentially our poor nutrition and our gluttony. We are catastrophically destroying our ecosystem, the whole womb that supports us.
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 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. But today 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? 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 bringing in, it's like we're trying at least to bring in artificial beings, silica-based beings to replace ourselves. know, when you zoom out of it, it's like,
Daniel (01:19:13.838)
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? Do you think this is 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 spiritual component? Like 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 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 and we're doing it in such a scorched earth way that it's almost like we want there to never be anything that can live again.
right, if we were to carry this out to its conclusion.
Sam Thayer (01:20:14.998)
So I feel like that's right in my wheelhouse, but it's 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. 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
Daniel (01:20:20.282)
good.
Sam Thayer (01:20:44.024)
this gigantic amalgamation of human wills, not in terms of a corporation. But sometimes, know, collective will takes on its own thing. And that makes sense. 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, right? Mitochondria probably could have done a heck of a lot if it didn't get into our cells and all of a sudden, know, mitochondria, you know, that's kind of a cool thought, right? But a terrifying thought. And I don't know where it's gonna go and I don't want it to go where it seems like it might. And so, did people want...
Daniel (01:21:20.906)
Yeah, right.
Well said, yeah.
Sam Thayer (01:21:38.51)
Yachts and sex parties and people want that for sure. There's people that want that and some people You know their view is narrow enough that that's just where they're 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 it was like
not really another animal that does that the way beavers do at least. And sort of like an elephant's trunk. mean, there's no other, I don't know, there's no other big animal with a fifth limb, you know? But our unique thing is this intellect. And it was really useful, but it gave us a burden. And that burden is the fear of our death. 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, maybe it's just me, but I don't think it's just me. I've talked to lot of people. That 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. 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, Homo Deus, it's all about, and Sapiens, it's all about this idea that human beings are smart and now we're gonna build something bigger than us that will last forever and it will rule the universe with, 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 the craving for sugar that we keep eating the sugar and it keeps wrecking our bodies, right? But we keep eating it because it tastes so damn good. That is like what we are doing spiritually to nature, 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.
Sam Thayer (01:23:59.744)
and come to terms with that so they can understand that they will die just like that one day and it will be okay. It's okay that that deer died and it's okay that you will die. And when you dig up a plant, that plant dies, it's okay. 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. 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. 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 course I'm afraid of death. We're instinctively afraid of death. But...
I have a peace with death, I'm gonna die. And it's gonna be okay. I'm supposed to. 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 programmed to death. They simply live until a calamity kills them. It could be a disease, it could be a tree falls on them, it could be something digs them up. But a milkweed plant, a blueberry bush, a spring beauty plant.
Those things live forever until something kills them. They have no life span. They have no pre-programmed life span. So a spring beauty tuber could be 1,750 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. 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 to die. 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. 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 gonna try to live well now not longer not more not better, but just well, you know
Daniel (01:25:58.542)
Yeah.
Sam Thayer (01:26:27.694)
That's how I see it. 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 to try to share with them this miracle of just, yes, living. 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. mean, nature is the most amazing thing 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 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. That's good enough for me because I got to experience it and I'll be...
I won't be experiencing it in this consciousness, but I will go on I will be that and that's okay So that's right. That's where I stand on that. I think it's it's all connected
Daniel (01:27:36.305)
It's so interesting how, man, first I just wanna say I really appreciate all that you just shared. I hope you write about that sometime. It's interesting because you're like, well then what do we do? And it's like chop wood, carry water. It's just like so simple. It's just like these things we're talking about, hunting, foraging, whatever your experience in nature. It's kind of like chop wood, carry water. Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Because it's just like, okay, all that.
And then it's like, what do you do? Well, you just gotta wake up tomorrow and like feed yourself. Yeah.
Sam Thayer (01:28:09.292)
Yeah, chop wood, carry water, watch birds, make love, eat apples. mean, life is good enough.
Daniel (01:28:16.728)
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. think that what I'm most interested in, and it's like, I just feel like the pragmatic and the existential are like, they have to come together now because the situation's getting so dire. And I feel like...
Sam Thayer (01:28:26.818)
Thanks for pulling me there.
Sam Thayer (01:28:40.75)
Thank you.
Daniel (01:28:41.988)
I don't want to be like the village crier like, the sky's falling, but I kind of do want to be like that because I feel like the sky is falling in a sense. 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 to say something. So anyway, I feel like a lot of this stuff's burning in our hearts and we're not always talking about it together. And I think it's important that we have these conversations. So yeah, thanks for going there with me today.
Sam Thayer (01:29:08.654)
Hey, no problem. And you know, when I teach foraging, I don't always say these words. Sometimes it comes out, you But by bringing people out in nature and giving them that physical connection to the land and to nature, it doesn't need to be words. Even if people never formulate words, anything like what I said, that happens inside them. The gratitude, the peace, that's the two things. 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. And you get that through visceral physical experience of nature and no other way.
Daniel (01:29:49.909)
It feels almost sacrilegious to do it, but I wanna make sure people know about what you do, because you're not, I guess you're on TikTok now actually, aren't you? But I don't think of you as like a social media guy. Okay, cool. So yeah, you're, you know, a lot of times I feel like I get down to podcasts 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.
Sam Thayer (01:30:00.212)
Yeah, well, I've done maybe three. I've done maybe three videos in the last year, so.
Daniel (01:30:15.512)
search for you and find you, you're a little bit more, like if people wanna get into your workshops, it's a little bit like, this is real in-person stuff, And you sell your books, not through a publisher, but you self-publish and sell your books on your own website and everything. So I just wanna give you the space to talk about that, because your books are really incredible. 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. like, you know, how do people get in that funnel to work with you?
Sam Thayer (01:30:50.424)
Sure, so my books, I still feel like it's a great way to reach people. And the books are easy to access. mean, any online book seller.
Daniel (01:30:55.492)
Yeah, those books are important to have. Those are important to have. if somebody's building their like seed vault, whatever, even if you're not gonna read them right now, you're just like, need to have the, like you want these books in your, all four of those books should be in everybody's library in my opinion. Sorry, go ahead.
Sam Thayer (01:31:15.36)
And no, that's fine, that's fine. The praise makes me feel good, you know. I won't lie. 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. the books are pretty easy to access, whatever books to sell you find convenient. I don't sell them individually on my website anymore. You can also go to my website, foragersharvest.com and I will have my workshops.
Daniel (01:31:18.704)
It's warranted.
Daniel (01:31:37.581)
Okay.
Sam Thayer (01:31:44.244)
and speaking appearances for the year posted on there. 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.
Daniel (01:31:54.603)
yeah? cool.
Sam Thayer (01:32:13.036)
You know, I do occasional videos. I keep thinking I'm going to do some YouTube videos, but I just... There's a lot of alone time in my world. I don't have someone to film me. And so it gets hard. And I want to be doing this stuff so that I have something to write about.
Daniel (01:32:21.732)
Mm-hmm. Right.
Daniel (01:32:29.572)
Yeah, well, you're one of these people who've had tremendous impact 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, pick your thing. But you've had an incredible impact. 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. mean, when somebody writes, it doesn't matter if somebody writes me from China or Argentina and they're like, how do I start foraging? 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 people are. So that's really helpful. But essentially what you teach is important.
whether it's that suite of plants or not. find that really, that 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. But one thing I like about being with you in person, you share on many levels. You share educationally, you share in presence, you share in song, you share in fun, and those are things that you don't get from videos and everything.
I really want to encourage people 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 in Sam here and, you know, avail yourself of that while you can. So just got to put that out there. I don't say that about everybody, Sam. I really, 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.
Sam Thayer (01:34:15.208)
Well thank you. 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.
Daniel (01:34:16.271)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel (01:34:30.081)
Yeah, no, they really do. yeah, so if you're looking to get into the forging space, particularly get Sam's books, but cool. Any final thoughts you have? Anything you want to share before we go?
Sam Thayer (01:34:41.036)
Yeah, well in the absence of access to me, just go out in nature. Like, go out, go out. And thank you all the listeners, viewers. Thank you, Daniel, so much for what you do and for bringing me on.
Daniel (01:34:44.826)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Right on.
Daniel (01:34:54.64)
Thank you, Sam.