Transcript: Environmentalism Is Dead — Sam Thayer #002

0:00

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

Humans will become God.

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

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

0:20

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

The.

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

Chop wood, carry water before enlightenment.

Chop wood, carry water after enlightenment.

0:35

Because what do you do?

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

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

I mean, life is good enough.

Hey, I'm here with Sam Fair.

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

0:52

Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me on.

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

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

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

1:08

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

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

1:30

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

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

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

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

1:50

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

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

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

2:08

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

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

Oh, I thought it was great.

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

2:29

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

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

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

2:55

We just don't see that.

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

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

So yeah.

Like what?

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

3:17

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

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

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

3:39

So and it was all over the campus there.

Yeah, yeah.

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

3:56

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

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

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

Is that fair to say?

4:12

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

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

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

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

4:33

Not not good.

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

4:51

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

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

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

5:09

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

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

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

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

5:26

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

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

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

5:42

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

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

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

6:05

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

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

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

6:21

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

So that's like how we learn language best.

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

6:46

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

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

7:03

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

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

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

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

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

7:36

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

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

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

7:54

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

It's bad.

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

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

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

8:13

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

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

8:30

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

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

8:46

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

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

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

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

9:01

You learn about take deer behavior.

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

9:17

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

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

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

9:40

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

And I want to share that.

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

9:57

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

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

10:30

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

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

10:57

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

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

11:26

That's not how we first think about it.

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

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

11:57

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

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

12:13

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

And pop goes the weasel.

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

12:28

I mean, tons.

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

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

12:46

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

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

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

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

Monkey chase the weasel.

I mean, pop goes the weasel.

13:02

I get it.

Like I've been there.

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

Hands.

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

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

13:21

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

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

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

13:39

And you know what?

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

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

13:57

I know I got it from a weasel.

I got it from interacting directly with weasels.

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

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

14:15

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

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

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

Never.

14:30

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

It's nature.

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

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

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

14:47

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

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

So to get back to your bird migration thing.

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

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

15:03

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

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

15:25

These are itinerant birds.

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

15:46

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

16:06

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

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

They are not leaving here to flee our winter.

16:22

They don't have to be here at all.

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

That's why these birds are coming here.

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

16:41

I think it was 10th or 9th.

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

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

17:00

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

And it's not related to weather.

And we always want to relate things to weather.

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

No, there's no more insects.

Virtually all the.

It's also not photo, period.

17:17

No, not not in that specific insect insect.

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

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

The risk reward ratio.

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

17:34

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

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

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

17:57

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

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

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

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

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

18:14

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

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

18:31

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

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

18:48

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

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

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

19:07

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

But that biomass is not as edible to insects.

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

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

So there's the process.

19:23

Yeah, I love that.

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

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

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

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

19:41

And I remember going to.

So I tried it in Florida, South Florida.

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

Like you said, the soil is really poor.

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

20:01

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

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

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

20:18

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

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

20:34

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

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

You're kind of the opposite and.

I'm with you more than you might know.

OK.

But you have a great temper to it.

I appreciate that.

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

20:51

That's in the zeitgeist, right?

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

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

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

21:11

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

But I'm watching AI mature more quickly.

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

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

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

21:40

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

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

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

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

22:03

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

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

22:24

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

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

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

22:45

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

So that was sort of what you were saying.

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

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24:16

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

So I mean, who am I to say?

I mean I?

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

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

24:37

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

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

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

24:58

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

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

25:17

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

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

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

25:34

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

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

25:56

But eventually there's a levelling off.

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

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

26:24

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

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

26:42

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

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

27:03

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

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

27:19

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

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

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

And I'm like, who needs that?

27:35

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

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

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

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

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

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

27:51

So an absurdity became a necessity.

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

I don't know.

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

All right.

All right, good.

We're on the same page.

Yeah, we're.

On the same page.

28:07

I'm terrified.

I was just.

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

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

28:23

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

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

I was just kind of tempering it.

I need to do that for myself.

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

28:39

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

28:57

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

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

29:14

And so it has a unique place.

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

It's like much deeper than that.

And it gives people the ability.

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

29:35

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

It connects you to ecology.

29:52

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

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

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

30:15

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

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

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

30:40

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

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

30:57

You know what I mean?

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

We just keep passing it on to the next generation.

Or it could be like, wow, man.

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

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

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

31:15

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

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

And if you read that, you know.

Oh yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You know, people.

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

31:35

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

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

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

31:51

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

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

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

32:16

The the the the, the quasi religious state.

And today it's GDP.

GDP is this this like God we worship and for.

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

Product.

Talking about our economy.

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

32:37

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

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

32:52

Pushing you into a new territory here with.

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

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

33:10

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

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

33:25

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

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

33:46

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

And you see children and adults too.

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

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

34:08

And I didn't really suspect how powerful.

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

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

34:26

It's not that easy, right?

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

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

34:45

We can break from that through foraging.

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

35:10

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

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

35:29

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

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

35:45

It's awesome.

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

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

36:17

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

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

It's like a thing.

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

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

36:33

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

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

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

36:52

The desire to watch birds.

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

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

We're curious about life and how life unfolds.

37:11

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

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

37:30

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

37:54

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

Nature provides a constant stream of information with no motive.

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

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

38:12

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

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

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

38:29

Like, like whatever you want to call it.

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

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

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

I mean, you know.

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

38:47

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

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

That's the forbidden fruit.

39:03

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

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

39:19

And right.

So that's like the sort of biblical metaphor.

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

But it's like often very corrupted information.

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

39:34

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

Do you remember the toy light bright?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

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

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

39:51

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

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

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

And then you had these little translucent.

Little posts.

Little Yeah.

I totally forgot about this, but yeah.

40:08

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

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

It just was very enticing.

40:24

But now we have this.

Right by the Etch A Sketch, Yeah.

Right by the exactly I got to erase this thing.

That's still a pretty cool toy actually.

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

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

40:45

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

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

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

41:08

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

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

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

41:28

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

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

Like how are you managing that?

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

41:48

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

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

42:04

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

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

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

42:22

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

Turtles not addictive in the way that the screen is.

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

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

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

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

42:41

Or the bullfrogs or a snake.

I mean, you add fear or excitement.

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

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

42:59

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

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

43:20

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

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

43:38

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

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

43:56

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

Just bite it.

I'll tell you a bite.

The hazelnuts smell it.

Like you'll never forget that smell.

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

It's like sour astringent, but lemony juice.

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

44:12

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

And I smell that hazelnut husk smell.

And I taste the juice, the husk.

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

And it's like magic.

It's a real physical object.

44:29

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

And that's why the addiction is so powerful.

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

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

44:45

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

45:01

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

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

45:17

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

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

Like like friendship is addictive.

45:34

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

One addictive but non destructive.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Well, OK, I don't.

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

46:06

I guess I'm just that way.

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

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

46:31

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

Like that's not true, right?

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

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

46:55

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

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

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

47:20

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

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

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

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

47:36

It's always changing.

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

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

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

47:56

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

Well, can I speak to it?

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

Right.

Yeah.

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

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

48:16

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

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

48:34

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

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

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

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

48:52

Yeah, Yeah.

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

Maybe Neanderthals live that way.

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

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

They raise their own food.

49:08

Essentially, they don't.

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

Landscape engineers.

Exactly.

Pocket Gophers do a similar thing.

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

49:26

And so they kind of create their own disturbance.

It creates your own food supply.

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

We had fire before we were Homo sapiens.

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

49:43

So the first big tool for doing that was fire.

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

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

50:03

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

That makes more meat for people to eat.

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

50:22

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

All of them are generally benefited by fire.

So people learned a long, long time ago.

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

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

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

52:11

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

Plows, unlike fires, kill everything, right?

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

52:26

That's a plow.

And a plow went through.

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

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

And this was a great destructive process.

52:42

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

It was still natural.

It was still vibrant and full of life.

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

52:57

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

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

And the food was really precious.

It was produced when you added animals.

53:14

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

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

53:29

It is ecologically dead.

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

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

53:48

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

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

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

54:09

That was an herbicide, but a very expensive one.

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

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

54:29

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

Can I pause you there and ask this question?

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

54:47

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

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

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

55:04

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

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

You were trending there.

Yeah.

We, we were strongly trending there.

55:20

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

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

55:40

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

56:00

And so we're already seeing this in Europe.

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

It's not forest anymore.

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

56:21

And this is insidious, right?

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

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

Oh, Oh yeah.

The World Economic Forum.

They have their Oh yeah.

56:36

Lovely fellas over there I love.

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

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

56:53

You know, everyone's on board.

Well, you know what they're doing.

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

57:15

Right.

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

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

57:39

That is what herbicide is allowing us to do.

So you take rugged landscapes.

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

So we have the vast boreal forest.

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

57:59

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

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

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

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

58:15

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

That's like.

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

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

58:32

Something like.

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

There's no new rock.

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

58:54

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

Needs like a catastrophic renewal event.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's what glaciers were.

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

59:11

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

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

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

59:28

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

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

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

59:50

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

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

1:00:07

And it's a natural native plant.

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

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

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

Most crazy.

1:00:23

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

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

Now, mesquite's managed with herbicide.

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

1:00:39

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

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

It's ridiculous, right?

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

1:01:05

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

No one.

'S Are we talking about other pesticides too?

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

1:01:28

Texas is a big state.

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

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

1:01:43

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

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

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

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

1:02:00

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

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

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

1:02:17

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

So that's like 1 component.

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

1:02:39

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

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

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

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

1:02:55

So that's like another component.

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

So we're talking about CO2.

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

1:03:14

All those things, true.

Absolutely.

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

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

And look like I live off grid.

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

1:03:36

You know, like locally cut wood.

I heat with wood.

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

Like I have tried to live by those values.

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

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

1:03:53

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

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

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

1:04:19

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

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

1:04:39

I'll give you 2 examples.

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

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

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

1:05:01

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

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

It's the herbicide.

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

1:05:21

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

We'll almost talk about everything else.

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

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

1:05:39

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

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

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

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

1:05:57

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

I mean literally.

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

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

1:06:18

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

There's this focus on deforestation, right?

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

1:06:36

Our amount of forest was dramatically increasing during that period.

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

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

1:06:58

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

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

1:07:14

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

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

1:07:44

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

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

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

1:08:05

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

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

1:08:25

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

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

1:08:46

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

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

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

1:09:04

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

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

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

Right.

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

1:09:28

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

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

1:09:43

Environmentalism is dead.

Environmentalism was killed by the left, not the right.

The right never supported it.

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

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

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

1:10:03

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

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

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

1:10:20

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

People.

Yeah, I live around them.

They vote for Trump and they are very right leaning.

1:10:37

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

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

1:10:57

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

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

1:11:26

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

1:11:53

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

Like I'm all for forestry.

It's the most sustainable industry we have.

We need to do it right.

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

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

1:12:08

But climatism has just replaced all that.

We don't talk about biodiversity.

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

And meanwhile, like climate thing is important.

It's important.

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

1:12:27

It's herbicide.

And we are completely ignoring that.

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

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

1:12:49

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

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

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

1:13:12

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

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

1:13:35

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

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

1:13:52

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

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

But.

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

1:14:15

Like that's about GDP being sacred, right?

We don't need to raise that number.

We have enough stuff.

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

1:14:30

But man, wouldn't that be nice?

Wouldn't it be nice to go fishing?

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

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

But man, wouldn't that be nice?

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

1:14:52

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

I agree with you 100%.

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

1:15:12

Like I have green energy in my house.

I'm off grid solar.

But you know what?

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

Well, guess what?

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

1:15:29

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

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

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

1:15:48

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

We need to grow up and stop doing that.

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

1:16:04

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

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

1:16:24

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

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

1:16:45

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

1:17:03

That's just baloney.

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

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

1:17:18

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

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

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

1:17:41

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

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

I hear different numbers.

Is it one percent, 5%?

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

1:18:03

It's not happening without massive ecological destruction.

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

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

1:18:20

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

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

1:18:49

Even if those people have the best intentions.

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

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

1:19:07

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

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

1:19:25

We need to keep going back to nature.

Keep.

Touching it.

So we love it and keep observing it.

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

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

1:19:42

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

You I have a wheelhouse.

So, OK, good.

Your pump house.

All right.

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

1:20:01

Descend into suicidal ideation.

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

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

1:20:20

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

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

It knows all your movements.

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

We got these devices everywhere.

1:20:35

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

That's how it looks to me.

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

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

1:20:54

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

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

1:21:11

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

These corporate bodies, right?

They, they aren't a physical body.

They're a corporate body.

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

1:21:33

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

That means body, right?

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

1:21:50

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

We're destroying ourselves.

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

1:22:08

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

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

1:22:27

Do you think it's a physical thing?

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

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

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

1:22:45

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

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

And we're not just doing it to ourselves.

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

1:23:01

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

If we were to carry this out to its conclusion.

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

1:23:32

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

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

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

1:23:58

And that makes sense.

It takes on, it takes on its own power.

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

1:24:14

Right?

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

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

Well said.

Yeah, but a terrifying thought.

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

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

1:24:30

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

And people want that for sure.

There's people that want that.

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

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

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

1:25:06

And sort of like an elephant's trunk.

I mean, there's no other.

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

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

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

And that burden is the fear of our death.

1:25:25

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

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

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

1:25:44

I've talked to a lot of people.

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

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

1:26:00

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

We are part of the big forever.

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

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

1:26:17

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

Humans will become God.

That's what we want.

And that's what we want because we crave.

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

1:26:33

But we keep eating because it tastes so damn good.

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

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

1:27:01

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

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

It's OK.

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

You cannot have one without the other.

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

1:27:18

And that's what this push towards AI is.

It's to push us towards not having life.

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

Life and death must be synonymous.

They must exchange and interchange.

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

1:27:38

It's physically nonsensical.

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

Like I'm not supposed to live forever.

I'm afraid of death.

Of of course I'm afraid of death.

We're instinctively afraid of death.

But I have a peace with death.

1:27:56

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

I'm supposed to.

I mean, think about this.

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

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

1:28:12

They simply live until a calamity kills.

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

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

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

1:28:30

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

It could conceivably be 35,000 years old.

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

They just keep living.

But humans, we're not like that.

1:28:46

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

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

We're supposed.

We're not supposed to live forever.

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

And we're supposed to die.

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

1:29:08

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

I'm going to try to live well now.

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

1:29:24

And maybe we won't get there.

Maybe that message is not powerful enough to change anything.

I don't know, I guess.

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

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

1:29:43

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

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

I mean, nature is the most amazing thing.

1:29:59

And that's good enough for me.

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

That's good enough for me.

I don't need fairy tales.

1:30:16

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

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

I will be that and that's OK.

So that's right.

That's where I stand on that.

I think it's it's all connected.

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

1:30:37

I hope you write about that sometime.

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

And it's like, chop would carry water.

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

It's kind of like chop would carry water.

1:30:53

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

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

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

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

1:31:09

I mean, life is good enough.

Yeah.

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

Thank you so much for your time.

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

I think that.

Thanks for pulling me there.

Yeah.

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

1:31:25

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

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

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

1:31:43

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

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

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

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

1:31:59

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

So yeah, thanks for going there with me today.

Hey, no problem.

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

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

1:32:19

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

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

1:32:35

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

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

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

1:32:50

Yeah.

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

Video in the last year so.

OK, cool.

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

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

1:33:07

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

Right.

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

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

1:33:25

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

Man, I love that book.

And your in person stuff is just incredible.

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

Sure.

1:33:41

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

Yeah, books are easy to access.

I mean those.

Books are important to have.

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

1:34:05

But sorry, go ahead.

And Oh no, that's fine.

That's fine.

The praise makes me feel good.

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

1:34:20

So but the books are pretty easy to access.

Any whatever books to sell you find convenient.

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

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

1:34:38

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

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

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

1:35:03

I mean, I, I do occasional videos.

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

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

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

1:35:20

Yeah.

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

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

1:35:37

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

1:35:57

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

So that's really helpful.

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

1:36:12

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

So I think that's really powerful.

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

1:36:36

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

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

Why can't.

So just got to put that out there.

1:36:51

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

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

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

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

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

Well, thank you.

1:37:07

I'm honored.

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

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

Yeah, no, they really do.

So, yeah.

1:37:23

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

But cool.

Any final thoughts you have?

Anything you want to share before we go?

Yeah.

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

Like go out, go out.

Yeah.

And thank, thank you all the listeners, viewers.

1:37:42

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

Thank you, Sam.

Transcript: Birth, Death, and Our Life in Between — Tom Myers #001

0:00

I hear things about fascia as a communication network.

Fascia is the fabric that holds us together.

It looks for all the world like an antenna.

What is it an antenna for?

With 50 years of dealing with this thing, my answer is hunches that it's your intuitive system.

0:18

There's the natural environment, there's the built environment, and now there's like this digital environment and I'm noticing that so few people are adapted anymore to the natural world.

When you're out in the wild, you're really talking about Homo sapiens.

I don't think we're talking about Homo sapiens anymore.

0:34

I think that we have domesticated ourselves along with the chickens and the cats and the dogs and the horses and the cattle.

It's astonishing what we're capable of and what we're really like, and then what we've been kind of convinced that we are.

My guest today is Tom Myers.

0:52

I don't think I'm exaggerating to say he's one of the great minds on the earth today in the realm of bio mechanics and human Physiology, anatomy.

I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time.

I was lamenting recently to some friends and to my wife that sometimes when you've built a mental map that's very rich in data points, it can be a little bit alienating.

1:16

And I've been looking forward to this conversation because Tom, somebody with a big mental map and it's a deep satisfaction to get to have a conversation with somebody like that.

Also, I want to say if you've heard over the last several years about Myofascia, if you're into fitness, exercise, mobility, yoga, whatever it is, if you're into body work and you've heard about fascia because of Tom Myers, he's really brought that work and that idea forward into culture and probably the biggest way that anybody has.

1:49

And it's pretty amazing to see now how many people are teaching under that umbrella.

So, Tom, welcome to the show.

Daniel, it's great to be here.

It's really good to be here.

Like I said, I've been looking forward to this a long time.

I kind of want to just start off by talking a little bit about what your work has been over the years, but I really am interested in seeing what you're interested in today.

2:13

But first, let me just say, being here in your library, there's a lot of books here I know and recognize that are incredible books.

There's a lot more here that I just wish I'd had the time or opportunity to read.

But what a collection this is?

Yeah, this is 50 years of of thinking about the body and how the body, how the human body in particular is.

2:33

And with you in particular, Daniel, I think of us as paired units because I have that feeling for the wild and you're out there doing it.

And my dedication this lifetime.

I'm an urban creature and I think we'll talk about this later.

2:52

Homo domesticus is my the species that needs the most work on the planet.

So I've been working with that Homo domesticus, but with the the wild one in mind, right?

Because it's the wild one that set our genes, both the genes of the food that we eat and the genes of the movement that we do.

3:12

But instead now we have been domesticated like some of the other animals around us.

But it's like the wild variant gives us like a template almost right?

It's kind of.

I always say if you wanted to take care of a domesticated animal, it's helpful to know the wild progenitor, what its needs are, what it eats, how it lives to inform you at least how to raise the.

3:32

That all those people are gone.

Yeah.

All those people who, well, most of the people, maybe you found them.

Maybe you found them out in the people who are surviving.

I had an old woodsman here when I was young.

I hired him to help me with the aquaculture project that we have here and he could survive on tea, Berry and all kinds of things that you probably know about in the woods where I would die.

3:53

Shortly.

But the problem that I've been addressing myself too, is, oh, we have all of these humans living in a world to which they were not adapted.

And I think of you as out there exploring what would happen if we hadn't adapted, even if we were wild humans.

4:15

And that's a really valuable exploration.

And I'm so glad you're doing it because I'm not doing it because I'm running around from city to city.

Here are all these, you know, you'd go back to the 1800s and don't quote me on the figures, but it was something like 95% of the people lived on a farm, right?

4:34

And now 3% of the population takes care of our food needs and the other 97% are pursuing something else in the city.

We're out here in Maine.

I don't know what your life is like where you live, but I, you know, you see what a beautiful place I live in.

4:50

I am governed by my computer, by my phone, by the daily things of a business that I'm still running at 76, and I could give all that up and go back to the wild.

I'm not willing to do that.

I really love the human experiment, in spite of all the numb scullery that is going on right now.

5:12

I love the human experiment and I would like to see it continue.

I do see that our bodies, our minds and our feelings and probably our spirit, I'm not qualified, have all been shrunk in in the last bit of the domestication of human beings.

5:30

And So what are we going to do about that?

How do we fulfill the needs of our children, their genetic needs, and still live in an urban environment?

Because I don't see we can talk about that, but I don't see how everybody rewilds.

Yep.

5:45

Yeah, right.

Not.

Not in this current moment.

Not in this current moment.

Yeah, the situation's gotten so dire.

It's like we can't keep kicking the can down the road.

Unfortunately, I think we've like run out of like run away for kicking the can.

And so it's like we've got to start getting serious about dealing with it.

6:00

There's a lot you said I want to pick apart one of the things I'm.

I wonder what it would be.

I wonder if you've ever had the opportunity to work with indigenous people who still are somewhat close to their lifeway, people who, you know, like there's still some pockets in the world, right?

6:18

South America, New Guinea, off the coast of India, where there is like natural humans, even uncontacted people in some of these places, which is amazing to think about.

But then you're also hearing about them getting phones and Internet and how quickly their lifeways changing.

6:34

And I, I sort of imagine, like if, you know, if we lost all the dogs on the planet, we could go to Gray wolves and tease dogs back out of that genome.

But what happens when all of the natural people are gone?

6:51

It's like, that's just, like you said, lost And like, we won't know what they were even like, what their bodies are even.

Like, do do any of you or any of the therapists you've worked with, have you got to work with people who haven't spent their life in the built environment?

I have literally gotten to work on two or three of those people in my life and I, I don't have enough experience to say, yeah, this is what is the difference between wild humans and tame humans.

7:20

I look at a tribe.

If I think of about a tribe, not everybody in the tribe needed to be a hunter, right?

We needed cooks.

We needed bottle washers.

Well, not bottle cook, you know what I mean?

There's all kinds of roles in the tribe.

So I was born short sighted when I was born in a, in an era where that short sightedness could be corrected in various ways.

7:41

But if I were in a tribal life and I were short sighted, then I would be the firekeeper or something where you don't need long sight, but you wouldn't Take Me Out on the hunt because I couldn't see the quarry.

And so I think that we probably had.

8:00

There isn't a human that was suited to the old environment.

There were lots of different kinds of humans.

And some people in the tribes really needed to have big muscles, but not, you know, sprinters.

Look at your sprinters.

They don't have big muscles.

They have wiry bodies.

So is there somebody in your tribe who's wiry that we can send a message over the mountain to the old village?

8:20

So, you know, I don't think there's one type sure that's adapted to the old life.

I think there were a variety of types that were adapted to the old life.

And we see the remnants of those old types now, but they're all domesticated.

Something I've identified and I talk about in my workshops is I I look at the world, I look at it as the world is having like 3 distinct buckets or the three worlds.

8:43

There's the natural environment, there's the built environment, and now there's like this digital environment and I'm noticing that so few people are adapted anymore to the natural world.

Everybody's well adapted, I shouldn't say well adapted.

Everyone's adapted to the built environment.

8:59

And more and more, especially young people are very adapted to the digital environment.

But it's like the further you go this way, the harder it is.

And I always note how we have all these TV shows about people who are in the wild who have to figure out how to stay alive until they can get rescued back to the built environment.

9:16

Because we are now looking at the the well, because they're never about like them staying there and setting up a sustainable life.

It's always like we're just so we can get rescued, right?

Or something like that.

Because I think there's a deep fear of that because we're, we view our own environment as being like a foreign world, kind of like as if we're astronauts and not from here, you know, And like that's the degree of the domestication.

9:40

But maybe you could speak a little bit to how the built environment has reshaped us or or changed us, or maybe we haven't reshaped and it's all pathology.

I'm kind of curious like how you see from your unique perspective how our bodies are being impacted by the built space versus the natural?

9:58

World good.

I need to build into that just for a SEC.

If we go back to where there wasn't a separation between US and the rest of the natural world, we have to go back about 6,000,000 years really.

And the first thing that we did, and we were discussing this earlier, we might come back to it, is stand up.

10:16

And our psycho biology changed with standing up.

Everybody that had our basic vertebrate structure of a spine and two sets of limbs and a head on the front, you know that basic structure, the line of sight and the line of motion and the line of the spine and the line of the digestive system are all the same, which makes.

10:39

Sense when you said the light like from the beginning of the tube to the end of the tube lined up with that?

Yeah, it gets curly hue in the middle, but but us, we, when we stood up, when we took the hip, which was really flexed.

Here's here's the spine of a cheetah, Here is the horse and here is the femur.

10:56

The knee is right up against the rib cage.

If your knee is right up against the rib cage, you're really flexed.

A horse never comes to this.

Yeah, yeah, You try to take your dog leg like that?

Sure.

The.

Horse will come up like this and then it will come back because it can't stand up on 2 legs.

11:15

When you stand up on 2 legs, you take your nose away from the ground.

Wow.

So the world of smells is no longer the world you live in.

You need to smell fruit.

You need to smell other chimps.

You need to smell what's up there in the thing.

But you are not down on the floor of the forest where look at your dog.

11:34

I went walking with the dog this morning.

You know, had to get the female and you know, all that stuff.

And we don't do that.

And if you put your hand on the bridge of your nose, your hand is covering your frontal lobe, your finger is coming down at the end of between your frontal lobe and your parietal lobe at the suture.

11:55

Your frontal lobe was your nose brain, your Rhine and Cephalon.

OK, so we didn't need so much of A nose brain when we stood up and went up in the trees, which we're pretty sure if you, you know, I don't want to go on evolutionary theory, but.

That's the current story we're telling.

12:11

We see, Yeah, The the best story we're telling is we evolved from the old world monkeys with their collarbones.

We have a collarbone too.

You know, a cheetah doesn't have a collarbone.

And so coming up into there, we already divorced ourselves from the animal world slightly by standing up.

12:31

That happened to monkeys too.

And, and they are somewhat social or somewhat divorced from that, but that's not much of A divorce.

But it really is a change of suddenly your spine is like this, your digestive system is like this, your line of motion is forward.

12:48

So what does that do to your psychobiology?

No self respecting and I'm not This is taking too long to set up.

I'm sorry but no self respecting animal walks into the world with their.

Bears.

All this, their belly, their genitals and their face all up front, right?

13:04

It's the first thing I'm going to hit if I come.

Is your soft underbelly under protective?

So that whole psychology of safety and protection comes in when you expose your soft underbelly to the world, which we do 16 hours a day, right compared.

13:22

So standing up was the first one that changed our psycho biology away from the natural.

The second one came 600,000 years ago and that's fire.

We're the only animal that controls fire, right?

What makes us unique?

We control fire that came in around 600,000 years ago.

13:39

And in archaeology and in fossil hunting, you, you find ashes of fires in human habitation really quickly across the globe.

Fire was such a good idea for humans.

Cooked food.

That's another discussion.

13:55

What I'm thinking about is how did it change our bodies to have fire?

Well, what are you before you have a fire?

You are a monkey sleeping in a cave or under some kind of shelter hoping that the Saber toothed tiger finds somebody else tonight.

But after you have a fire, everybody goes to sleep in complete and utter safety and peace.

14:17

Two people stay up and if the Saber toothed tiger comes on, they pull a branch out of the fire.

Waved the first hand Saber toothed tiger says I'll go in search of something a little easier.

Yeah.

So safety happens when you have fire and then what's the second thing?

What do we do around the fire?

Dance and talk.

14:34

So the whole culture of these things that we're celebrating in those few tribes that are not left who are probably dancing around the fire and maybe they have a machete and maybe they don't, but there's still.

Some tools that might have washed up on the beach right?

Like some boat wreckage.

14:52

That us with fire really standing up is one thing, but us with fire really separates us from the lights that we're doing now are an extension of that control of fire.

OK.

The third one that really affected our bodies and our movement is agriculture.

15:11

Up until 10,000 years ago, you foraged for your food or you haunted for your food as you do.

Yeah.

And that was 10,000 years ago that that started, but was as few as 3000 or 1000 years ago for some people.

Yeah, I often point out when we say Neolithic revolution, it sounds like everybody just got on board.

15:29

But, but I like to point out there's still pockets of resistance.

It's not even a complete revolution.

Yet.

And that wasn't so good in those days.

Yeah, it was.

It was took a long time, but.

And everybody started doing farm work.

And what was that phrase that you were talking before we started of each generation?

15:48

Oh, shifting.

Baseline syndrome.

So once we get into the agricultural era, everybody was born into that shifted base.

Everybody thought, oh, that's how we do it.

But there's a there are whole books that are arguing this, and I'm not going to go on very long about it.

16:04

That wheat enslaved us like rice enslaved us like cotton enslaved us.

And so these products came up out of the agricultural era.

Well, what do you have when you have an agricultural era?

All of a sudden you're not moving around, you're not a nomad anymore.

So if you need soldiers to protect your property and to protect the silence.

16:22

All that grain, yeah.

All that grain you need cats, which was a source of a lot of diseases.

You need cats to get the mice who were eating the rats.

You were eating your grain I've.

Had an oversight about that part about the cats that's interesting because of the rodents.

Because of the rodents.

And so you need soldiers and merchants, service, land owners, that whole caste system there in our class system, the English class system, that's all.

16:46

Around you need slaves too, you know, I mean, I point out because it's very interesting, like with Gobekli tape, that site they say is about 14,000 years old and it's kind of like the oldest site we know.

And the weird thing about is like, oh, it was built by hunter gatherers, but the that's what they think.

17:04

But then the first wheat domestication of wheat was only like 50 miles away.

And I've just like, I'm like kind of feels like they needed to figure out the wheat growing to feed the people that were doing the work, because you kind of can't have people building cities all day when you hunt and gather like you, you everybody needs it's all hands on deck when you hunt and gather.

17:22

So anyway, I just would, I would suggest it's the slave trade which is the biggest it's ever been right now around the world, right?

It's like the largest slave trade there's ever existed right now.

Yeah, there's more people enslaved right now than any other period in human history.

Because of the numbers.

Yeah, there's like about 50 million people or so in in active forms of slavery, whether it's the sex trade or it's the brick making or something, you know, it's like stuff going on all over all different types.

17:48

But this, this trade of humans, I think is somewhat agricultural based because you have all this division of Labor.

I'm not trying to get you off track.

No, you don't want to.

In a hunting gathering society, you don't want to gather a whole bunch of people that you now have to feed.

Yeah, you got to go gather for them too.

Like that's a.

That's a lot of work.

18:03

Keep them in prison.

But once you have grain and you have surplus of food, it starts to make a lot of sense.

You send them out to the fields to do that while you administrate from the top right.

But even those people out in the fields, they are still walking to the fields.

They are doing rhythmic movement most of the days and they do varied movement also.

18:26

That ends when we get to the industrial era and name that one when you will 200 years ago for England and 100 years ago for China, you know, 50 years ago for China, etcetera.

The world is industrializing still, but we went into the industrial era where we make things.

18:44

If you talked about education and the body 150 years ago, all the literature is written in the language of agriculture.

We want to have a nice crop of students and what do we have to feed them and how do we water them to get a nice crop of students.

19:02

That is not the way they talk today.

Students are a product and we need to make sure that they go through the right industrial products processes to come out the right product.

So true.

And so again, it's that same thing.

If the generation is born into the industrial area, you take it as the baseline.

19:19

And the technology always informs, I've noticed like anatomically, I see so many of these books here.

We can see it in these books like Leonardo's, depicting the body as ropes and pulleys 'cause that's the dominant technology of the time.

I often joke about how when I was growing up, the body was a car.

You fed it the fuel to burn the fuel as a car, 'cause we were thinking.

19:37

Now everybody's like the body's like a computer, and we're hearing all about your brains like a supercomputer.

We always seem to relate ourselves rather than relate the external technology to what we're like.

We relate ourselves to the external technology of the.

And your brain is when I was starting, or when Rene Descartes started this idea, the newest machine, the most exciting machine in the world in the 1600s was a vacuum tube.

20:02

You like at the bank when you put that little thing go over to the teller, the that's what he thought when he saw nerves.

So he he realized a signal was being carried up.

Oh, it heats your finger and that travels up a tube.

And it was like a vacuum tube because that was the most complicated technology when I was growing up.

20:21

We had no computers so.

The brain was a telephone system.

And then it became.

A computer set and then it became a dual processor and then it became a what do they call a hologram.

And now I would say in my work, now that I've been doing this 50 years, yes, I know a lot about anatomy, but a body is more like a meme than it is like a machine or even maybe like a plant.

20:47

At least that's what we need to explore now.

The body as a meme, as a pattern, 'cause you are not the stuff that you're made of, you.

The urban myth is you change your body every seven years, change all the molecules in your body every seven years.

21:03

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No, most of it you change much faster than seven years.

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21:18

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21:38

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22:02

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Skin is changing all the time.

You have a all new molecules in your stomach lining every three weeks.

22:18

You have a whole new liver in terms of molecules every six weeks.

That's why when your that's why when your uncle stops drinking, he.

Not in terms of the cells, but in terms of molecules.

Yes, the molecules are changing over because your liver is rapidly turning over, right?

Right.

Wow.

22:34

But there are probably molecules in my Achilles tendon that have been there since I was 12, because your fascia is so inert, it's not vascularized.

It's not vascularized.

So it depends on seepage.

And so those very stable collagen molecules are very stable and they stay there.

22:53

And so those molecules they.

Hold the pattern.

I'll probably die with those molecules from my puberty time and my very very, you know, thoracal, lumbar fascia, ilio, tibial tract, Achilles tendon, those places.

Where the fuck?

Is all this stuff?

So that doesn't, it doesn't need to turn over, right, It's stable, but.

23:13

Wow, what could you I'm sure you're quite good at this at this point, but for listeners who they've they hear the term fascia.

I know they hear it.

Everybody's talking about it.

It must be cool to see.

I mean, my my understanding is you learned from Ida Rolf, but then you took the work to the world in a way that she you know, it's a different time, but but it must be amazing to see the impact.

23:39

I don't know from where you sit if you see it, but I mean I see it everywhere.

Kind in your introduction, I am one of many people who are doing this your.

Your book Anatomy Trains is the book everybody.

When you have the conversation about Myofascia, everybody wants to talk about your book.

It's like the foundational to the to the, it's like the foundational text.

23:58

I think for most of this work today, although there are so many other incredible voices.

I I not to, to downplay that, but yeah, I think what you've taught about tensegrity and about fascia, it's was pretty revolutionary and it, it's it the impact is now visible.

The book was published in 2001.

24:15

It's now 2026 and 25 years.

And impressed with how much this idea has been taken and taken up.

And I think it it speaks to what a wonderful writer I am.

And it also just speaks to this is the time in which holistic things are being seen.

24:35

So the fascia is the fabric that holds us together.

Without it, you would be a big puddle at your feet because all the water would fall.

So fascia is designed to keep your water up.

Well, what about my bones?

Well, your bones, yes.

Are those absolutely the solid thing?

24:52

They're not as solid as people think they are.

And because they're changing all the time, remember when we were just talking about the cells changing over?

Your bones actually change over quite rapidly.

They've got, they're full of blood vessels, so they've got.

So the bones change over fairly rapidly, you think?

That part of our.

Watch that doesn't well.

25:08

Sorry to interrupt you, but do you think that a lot of times people are, they think of a bone and they picture a baked bone that has all of the soft tissue removed so that there's just.

This brittle thing that I found, this is a deer bone.

So people think that's what's in my body.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but if I were to take a living bone, two of them, let's say I took two identical living bones.

25:30

I put one in a bottle of vinegar.

I put one in an oven, right, right.

The one in the vinegar is going to dissolve out all the the appetite, the calcium, the phosphate, and I'm going to be left with this like rubbery tie in a knot thing.

Yeah, let's say not say rubbery, let's say leathery.

25:47

OK, so something.

Soft tissue, like the leather in your belt OK is caught mostly collagen from the skin of a cow.

OK.

Yeah, sure.

And the leather in your bone, you can take that.

If you leave it in a finger with you, you'll be able to tie a knot.

But it is the fascial bone.

26:03

OK.

Your bones inside your body are equally both.

Now it depends on your age as to whether they really are equally, but they are both.

So in a young body you can bend the bone.

Kid falls out a window, bounces, no injury and you're like, that would break me.

26:19

Excuse me.

So so back to it.

I think a lot of times people imagine in their dead bone inside themselves just because they haven't seen, you know, it's really different when you again, hunting is gives you such an insight because you're taking these bones out all the time and you see what they're like and they're they're so alive.

26:37

I'm laughing because I don't hunt the humans I take apart, but I take apart quite a number of.

Humans, yeah, so and you famously more of your work, you famously lead cadaver labs where people get to actually disassemble formerly living humans and see these fascial connections, right.

26:54

And dissection labs, yeah.

The organs, the nerves, everything, but that's all.

So the so to continue from there, something has to hold your blood vessels, your nerves, your organs, and the muscles on your bones has to hold it in place.

So nature developed a biological fabric.

27:10

That biological fabric is present in salmon.

But you know that fish aren't as tough as other me.

So as soon as you walk out onto the land, plants use cellulose as their basis for what they're doing.

27:26

We use collagen because it's pliable and tensilely very strong, but it's mobile.

So we can use collagen as plants, use cellulose as what has been for 500 years thought of as the packing material, the peanuts for your body of just, Oh, well, that's just the stuff that holds that get, you know, cut that away and throw it away so we can see the interesting things.

27:50

And so because we didn't have systems thinking so much in our brain and we were really focused on the nervous system and the circulatory system.

If you look at medicine, modern, what we call modern medicine is almost exclusively focused on the circulatory system.

28:08

They can inject in here, in here, up here, the other end, but they're getting it into your circulatory system.

Food as medicine is another way of changing the chemistry.

So we call it medicine, but it's almost all chemistry. 200 years ago, somebody, Freud, organized a science of what's going on in this set of representations in here.

28:31

And you know, we went through all of this hidden super ego and all the stuff that he did with the bourgeoisie of the Vienna of the 1800s.

And then now we've applied that to a much wider psychology.

We'll leave out his nephew for a night right now.

We'll leave out his nephew, just just at the.

28:47

Moment Thanks for the fluoride add.

The but that's that's come into a science in 200 years.

Medicine is certainly, you know, a very well developed tree of knowledge.

And we have a third one which is should be built around the fascial system that has been instead built around the musculoskeletal system.

29:09

My objection to musculoskeletal system is it leaves the fascia out and that's what's joining the muscle to the skeleton.

But it's doing more than that.

It's surrounding and infusing your brain.

It is got a bag, oops, wrong side.

It's got a bag and very fine fiber going all the way through your liver.

29:28

So your fascia is everywhere.

Yeah.

If I could make everything invisible except your nervous system, you'd see my If I made everything invisible except my own nervous system, the talent I don't have, you would see my body sitting here because there's nerves going right up to the surface.

There'd be lots of them here, and a lot.

29:44

Of your basic shape as nerves.

As nerves, right?

There wouldn't be so many back here, but there's plenty here.

You know, the polyvagal theory or ventral vagus area is a very social area that we have a lot of nerve endings in.

If I could go ZAP and make everything invisible except my circulatory system, you've probably seen that in body worlds, you know, where they inject the latex and you see the exact shape of the body and the capillaries and nobody has done with the musculoskeletal system.

30:13

What we need for that third system, which is the fabric system, the fiber system, If I disappeared everything but that, you'd see my iliotibial band very clearly.

If I was a woman and had breasts, they would be very it would be light and filmy.

30:28

Because you have to have a lot of fluid flowing through breasts.

You don't want a lot of fascia.

In fact, a lot of fascia in breast is a fibrotic condition, and that's what you don't want.

So glands have very little fascia.

The liver doesn't have a lot of fascia in it.

The pancreas.

30:44

You can take a liver and just pull it apart.

A raw liver just it's got very little.

You can tell when you butcher it.

And a raw pancreas is hard to find in in the humans sometimes, of course, depends on what they're doing.

A lot more variation in the diet in the animals that I dissected.

31:02

Then yeah, right.

That's for sure.

That's for.

Sure.

Anyway, the the fascia holds us together and we've certainly thought about the iliotubule band and the plantar fascia and things like that.

But then you get particularized so Oh my God, the bottom of my foot hurts and somebody tells me you have plantar fasciitis.

31:19

So I go and I show the doctor about plantar fasciitis.

But I get much more help for plantar fasciitis almost never by working on the foot.

I will work on the foot so the client knows that I heard them and that I understand and that I.

And it feels good.

And it feels good or it doesn't feel good because I got plantar fasciitis.

31:37

But I'm going to get the problem solved in the lower leg, in the in the deep calf muscles, in the hamstrings or in the suboccipital muscles.

They're all part of the superficial back line and the the kinetic chain that runs up the back of the body.

So these chains are really useful in chronic things because your body distributes strain through the fascia.

32:02

And it's not.

The fascia is not discrete pieces, it's just one.

Like it could be my foot's being affected by something in my occiput because it's one large.

And because as we spoke earlier, we are so sure about the mechanistic description of the body that we are looking for those parts as if they were parts of a Ford F-150.

32:25

Yeah, right, right.

But we're not put together in discrete.

Parts, right?

If the tailpipe is the problem on your Ford F-150, you just replace the tailpipe.

It's not like, oh, maybe it's coming from the wheel, right?

It is a distinct parts.

Although if you've been chasing electrical.

Problems around.

An old car, not, not these days, but they could lead you around the body too, of your car.

32:46

But the the body definitely is this one thing.

And plantar fasciitis is a result in the plantar fascia of strains that have been focused instead of easily distributed.

So we all know we've seen kids or you yourself, you take a bad tumble and somebody says Jesus, and you go, no, I'm fine.

33:10

Because everything just was a tensegrity.

Every, everything went, yeah, so everything moved a little and nothing moved too much.

When one of these breaks, when one of these breaks, when one of these breaks, just any of the units in your body breaks, then this would be a joint and a bone and a ligament.

33:31

I don't know what, but then all of a sudden your physio or your orthopod might be focused on the joint that's broken, but it's part, it's only going to work again in the context of the hole.

And that's less true with acute injury because it's acute and it just happened and it hasn't distributed yet.

33:51

But if you try to use the same techniques on an injury that's been there for 10 years that you're using on somebody who just sprained their ankle, you're not going to have much fun because that's tendency to sprain.

The ankle has distributed to the pelvis and to the chest and takes a while to get it out.

34:08

Now is coming to me for body work.

The only way you can get it out now, you can use yoga, you can use CrossFit, You can use any of those things to move your body and get out of the.

Can you or I'm going to get real personal here.

I'm a train wreck.

I'm a train wreck and I'm at a point where the problem is I love to train right?

34:29

So I've been doing several hours of like steady state type cardio stuff, locomotive stuff, plus strength training plus mobility work throughout my week.

But I know I'm loading dysfunction very often and I've got a major twist running through me because I, I rotationally broke my tib fib in the mountains in a winter day and had to be sort of rescued out walking on a ice axe splint.

34:54

I got a cast.

I didn't do any rehab.

They wanted to do the bolts in my leg.

I said no.

I just pushed the bones back together.

I'm glad I did that.

But I didn't do any physiotherapy.

I was poor.

I didn't know better.

I do.

I wasn't thinking about the future.

You know, I was in my early 20s now, like my wife ran 1/2 marathon the other day.

35:12

I can run a half marathon, but at the end my I'm hurting five Ki got to kind of stick to that zone because my hips just are so imbalanced.

I it over distance.

I accumulate if I do a if I do a heavy squat, I'm just not balanced right.

35:30

So I'll watch other people and it's like, man, I'm so jealous.

I wish I could just do it.

My wife is like structurally.

Perfect.

She grew up doing synchronized swimming, so she developed her whole myofascial system in the water.

You know, so it's like, it's like a perfect system.

35:46

And I'm just all these dysfunctions.

And for years I've gone to different therapists and I always two things happen. 1 is I, I start to doubt whether they have any idea what they're doing.

And the second thing is they always want me to stop training because they want me to like let what they're doing be the major stimuli.

36:07

And then I'm like, man, I'm really fearful at my age of losing what muscle mass I have, what cardiovascular fitness I have.

So now I'm going, I need to get fixed in my, all my methods of trying to fix myself are temporary band aids, right?

So I'm saying all this one, selfishly, but two, I'm guessing a lot of people listening this are like, Oh man, that's I kind of have some of that going on and what do I do?

36:32

I mean, it is like it's extremely uncomfortable at times in my body.

I have other times where I'm OK, but I mean, recurring injuries, you know, recurring the same stuff over and over again.

And it feels almost sometimes like kind of hopeless.

Like I'm like, am I going to die like this?

36:48

And then I talked to somebody like you, I'm like, maybe there's a, what do I do?

Like, where do I even start?

Where's a person start?

Who knows?

Like my wife is like I said, she, you know, not like she never gets injuries, but like she's not any issues like that.

But I know if.

She does get an injury.

Her body is set to remodel that injury to repair that injury.

37:07

Correct.

I look at myself without clothes on in the mirror.

I see I'm all twisted and imbalanced.

Like it's visibly obvious to me that I'm twisted.

So I am sorry for the answer and it's hopeless.

It's because spatial medicine, the you know, the, the medicine of chemistry is pretty well developed.

37:27

You can argue whether they're doing going down the right Rd. on something.

And the language of psychology is pretty developed.

I think that has more to go to.

But the language of our body is very poorly developed.

If you go to an orthopod, you will get a surgical solution.

37:42

If you come to me, you will get a manual therapy solution.

If you go to your little yoga teacher, you'll get a yoga solution.

And we haven't.

We all haven't started talking to each other, and instead we're talking shit about each other really, really bad, right?

There are people for whom CrossFit is the cat's whiskers.

37:59

There are people for whom CrossFit is not the appropriate thing.

So is CrossFit good?

Right for some, but everybody thinks their thing is the solution, which is the challenge.

Which is challenging for everybody thing and that's not true.

We need as as with medicine, not every, you know, Ozempic isn't, I don't need Ozempic.

38:19

So just because it's the new drug on the market, I don't need to take it.

And so you have to judge for yourself.

Now, if you are in this case of you're now in your 40s or your 50s, you have reached the limits.

You've had a couple of injuries, you recovered from them, but the body isn't what it used to be.

38:39

Then looking at yourself in the mirror and taking that kind of inventory is something that we don't do for our children.

Every child should get a standing bending test at 7:00 to see whether they have an incipient scoliosis.

When all those scoliosis scoliosis are discovered is when the kids 13 or 14 and the growth hormone, you know, suddenly the bones growing, you know, they see one sleeve is different from the other or one hem is different from the other.

39:02

And so then they will go in and get a heroic terrible thing where the spine is straightened and a rod put into it.

Now that will be considered barbaric in 50 years.

Yeah, it sounds like Civil War era surgery to me.

Yeah, but it's it's still the.

39:19

That's the way.

Choice, the treatment of choice for bad scoliosis.

But if you took scoliosis at 7:00, we need to have this as an experiment for me to say it with the definitive that I'm saying it right now.

But my strong belief is if we took children at 7:00 and we put them through KQ assessment, we give them an IQ assessment, sooner or later we're going to give them an EQ assessment.

39:43

What's your emotional intelligence?

I don't know about you, but I hire for emotional intelligence.

I can teach you a skill.

I can't teach you this or it's going to take a lot longer to teach you this.

So, but KQ is something you know that you're, I'm pointing to my belly because the dantian is your center of gravity.

40:00

So that's the center of the fascism.

Kinesthetic.

Yeah, KKQ meaning kinesthetic intelligence, emotional intelligence, and intellectual intelligence.

Then you can argue whether the IQ tests are really.

Measured.

I might throw digestive intelligence in there too.

That's a good one.

Yes, yeah, but.

40:16

Anyways, yeah, that's the that's the old matriarchal intelligence, and we see evidence of that in the body all the time.

Excuse me for this little side note.

In front of your organs you have an apron.

Yep, the omentum.

It's called the omentum, and it hangs from your stomach in your large intestine, and it generally hangs down about as far as your pubic bone hunters.

40:34

Call it the caul fat.

The caul fat.

Yeah, that's like in the if you're going to cook with it, you can wrap.

It's fatty so you can wrap meat in it.

And yeah, routinely if somebody's had a surgery, they just cut it off.

Oh my gosh.

And out.

And out, Yeah, you don't need it.

It's like your gallbladder.

40:50

You don't need it really.

Anyway.

When we open up such so sometimes the momentum is gone.

When the momentum is there, it will have migrated to the organ in trouble.

It will be over here on the small intestine or up on the liver or over here on the spleen.

41:08

It's amazing.

It moves and it moves to the organ in trouble because fat is the mother of the body.

So this is a very fatty, as you just pointed out, organ and it goes to the organ in trouble and wraps it in fat cells which are healing cells.

It's your your body is doing its best to maintain the equilibrium.

41:28

It's just we feed it and we live in an environment that doesn't support it.

Back to your problem that I do agree with you as a universal thing.

I am very lucky, I get a lot of body work and I think a lot about these things, so I'm 76 and I feel pretty surprised.

41:46

You look amazing and you move really well and you it's, it's incredible.

Like it shows, you know, like your aging strategy is obviously working.

But I've been lucky, you know, other people are under such stress or, you know, have children in trouble or parents in trouble or finances in trouble or relationships in trouble, that they don't have the leisure to keep themselves this way.

42:06

So I, I feel lucky in that way, but I do think it's really, really possible to keep yourself much more mobile.

I, I'm, I'm 75, I would still call myself middle-aged in terms of not in terms of my face or my skin, but in terms of moving about.

42:24

I I just don't have that much.

You picked your foot up and showed it to the to the camera.

It's not a typical thing that people do in their 70s.

But you have to find a good worker from the outside.

It is very hard to do these things from the inside.

42:41

So far, there are books like Kelly Starrett's or mine or others that you might look at to say, OK, how, how could I look better or how could I train better or what could I?

What am I missing?

But for to unravel the kinds of twists and turns that you're talking about, there is no exercise program.

42:59

For that, and we have, I'm going to interrupt you here, but I feel like I have a tremendous amount of blind spots.

So like I feel like I need somebody who can see it from the outside because from inside it's like if we're talking about my emotional issues, it's like, well, it's very hard for me to pinpoint them all.

I know some of them, but the ones I'm blind to, I don't know because I'm blind to.

43:17

So it's exactly like I'm going.

To interrupt you now, because it's exactly the same thing in the body, you have, let's call them #1 areas.

They're available to me when I wake up in the morning and I can do this right.

But if I fix my arm here, I can actually get a much better range of motion out of my pectoral by doing this call that area that got stretched a #2 area.

43:43

So this is my number one but.

It's not under muscular control, it's range that you.

Have but it has to have an outside force to make it stretch right?

So sorry, Christian, this is how far I can open my legs.

43:59

This is where I'm screwed up as a number one.

Anything from here.

I'm starting to go.

And if if you said that's all in your mind, Tom, if only you could let that go, you too could do the splits like the yoga teachers in your class.

If I did those splits, I would be in the hospital because I would tear my perforating arteries that are going through to my adductor Magnus.

44:20

It's there is this tissue and they're really, it's real and it's real and it gets thicker where you broke your bones.

It's going to involve the muscular tissue.

There will be more fascia scar tissue in where you broke the bones because that tissue was disturbed and then you put it in a cast.

44:40

You didn't have the same experience, so.

Your muscles are different, right?

Like, correct me if I'm wrong here.

Sure.

Some of the tone in a muscle is because individual fibers are firing to keep that tone, right?

If I get more tone, it's because I have more muscles, fibers that are firing at any given time that keep that muscle under tone, right?

45:00

But then I have some psychological control over that.

So if I'm stressed and tense, I might feel like I'm so tight, but actually could let some of that go by just But the connective tissue once it's fixed in place, that isn't under that same kind of innervative control, right?

45:19

So it needs to either be manually stretched or moved.

Yeah, you can use tools, you can use somebody else's hand, you can use a doorknob, right?

Right, right.

Yoga.

But I can't just relax it mentally.

It needs to be remodeled.

You there is nothing you can do to remodel the fascia from your mind.

45:38

Yeah, OK.

Except to let go of tension and that will cause the fascia to remodel over.

Longer stretches of time.

If I do this to you guys, Larry, if I hold my pelvis out in front of my feet, right, I cannot stand here without tension in the back of my legs.

46:00

So I'm exporting that signal to the back of my legs.

It also has something to do with the fact that I was born into the wrong family, so I'm alert all the time.

So it has an emotional thing to it, and we tend to do that exporting to our body with any of the stress that we have.

46:19

It doesn't stay around.

I know you think it's staying around in the mind, but it's being exported down to your body.

Yeah.

So I'm strong and really common, right.

So people take their poor rib cage and they go and they feel weak and they go, no, I'm strong, right?

46:36

Right.

So I've just recruited a whole bunch of muscles here.

And to maintain that thing that I'm really strong, Daniel, I'm really, I am strong.

I have to export tension, export signals from my brain that ends up being tension in the muscles.

The fascia says OK, if you're going to stand with your pelvis way forward and your rib cage rave back, you don't want muscles to do that because you're not using them as muscles.

47:03

You're using them as straps and your body will fibroblasts.

The one that make the fascia will come and lay down more.

Fascia and just like with bones, just like remodels.

So instead of osteoblasts and osteoclasts, fibroblasts and fibroblasts that you know, so if I have tension on there, it'll lay down more fiber.

47:22

So I don't need to hold the tension, it will hold the tension.

And if I start to change that pattern, will osteoclasts come in and remove some of that fiber?

We don't have fibroclasts.

Oh, we don't.

OK.

So just for listeners correcting.

The record.

Here this technology terminology.

47:39

Osteoblasts make bone and osteoclasts eat bone, and they're not the smartest falls in the chandelier.

So they only have this one commandment and the osteoblasts have one commandment.

Thou shalt make bone under the periosteum.

47:57

So maybe I have plantar fasciitis where I tear my fascia.

That's plantar fasciitis.

A lot of people will tell you I got plantar fasciitis right here on the front of my heel, that the plantar fascia becomes the Saran wrap around the bone, the periosteum around the bone.

48:15

It's the same.

We divide it into two different things.

That's one could.

God do us.

God didn't.

It's even through the heel bone, but let's leave that alone for a while.

Now, if this gets pulled off the heel bone, this hand is the heel bone.

My arm is the plantar fascia.

48:30

This hand is the periosteum around the bone.

OK, I tug, tug, tug, tug, tug, tug on the plantar fascia.

I pull the periosteum away from the bone and there are these cells in here, the osteoblast, and they say, oh, God pulled us fill in under the periosteum.

So they fill in under the periosteum and they build.

48:48

A bone spur.

There's nothing painful about a bone spur.

It's your lateral plantar nerve coming in on the side that happens to be under that.

So when that bone grows, you're stepping on a nerve.

We have to solve that problem, but it's not the bone spur.

So OK, I always thought bone osteoclasts laid down bone osteoblasts, I feel like they should be.

49:10

When I hear blast, I think that should be removed.

So osteoblasts, I always thought that they laid down bone wherever there was a piezoelectrical charge from the crystal of the bone being deformed.

That's what I've they.

Will lay down more calcium appetite in the areas where there's compression, and they will lay down more collagen where there are areas of tension because tension goes through your bones too.

49:32

Wow, OK.

Right.

So they're, but the osteoblasts are mainly responsible to responsive to the space under the periosteum.

So your your scapula starts life as a bag and the osteoblasts come in there and fill up the bag until the scapula.

49:50

That's wild.

That's wild.

The long bones are different, but, but some of these bones, osteoclasts, again, not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier.

So they're sent forth also with one commandment of that bone which is not pressurized of that thou mayest eat, but the bone that is pressurized of that thou mayest not eat.

50:12

And so when you load your bones with the training and the exercise that you're doing, which if you came to me and we still haven't gotten to the osteopaths and body workers who could deal with these problems.

But that's really what you have to do is to go into somebody else to look at your number three areas, the areas you don't know at all, right?

50:30

I know my number one areas.

If I have a pain in my #1 areas that's easy to find #2 send me two.

Oh man, that really needs stretching.

That's a number 2.

I don't move the number three areas like like when I was trying to do the splits.

Those are #3 areas.

50:45

I don't.

Know they're like blind spots to your nervous system.

Right.

So it's really hard to know your blind spots because you're looking.

So somebody else, this is still the answer to your question of what do I do at 50 when I've got these nagging things is get to somebody who knows that there are a wonderful chiropractors.

51:02

There are chiropractors who will just knock your bones and tell you to come back next week.

There are osteopaths who have become doctors and will hand you another prescription.

There are osteopaths who really know their business in terms of manipulation, osteopathic manual manipulation, and there are various massage therapists and sports therapists and who have gone and gotten extra knowledge of fascia and muscle and nerve and joint and everything that it's not just fascia that you need to know about, right?

51:31

It's the whole Shamir.

And then then there's people.

OK, I see the problem with this person, but he's already out there in the woods.

Now.

How could I take the style that this man has and add something that would get him towards I'm sorry, I'm looking at you to get that L5 and L4 to come up out of your pelvis a bit now.

51:55

Is that that specific to me what you just said?

Thank you.

Give me something to work with you, I'll.

Show you before me.

But that's that's a thing that's really hard to do for yourself because you, you have spent your lifetime not knowing those places.

Yeah, and that's what I am.

52:10

I'm like one of the hardest.

OK, let me reframe that.

One of the lessons that's hitting me the hardest in my late 40s is how serious the problem of not knowing what you don't know is, you know, when you're young and so full of hubris, like, you don't even care really.

52:27

But now I'm like, I've had this experience so many times where you realize that you didn't know what you didn't know and how, like foolish you feel after where you're like, oh, my goodness, I had no idea how blind I was to all of this.

And now I'm at this place where I'm becoming aware that these things are there, and I know there's a whole bunch of things I don't know and I'm not sure.

52:48

Like yeah, like what do I do?

And people, the problem with the contemporary therapists and even contemporary trainers is that they will listen to their clients and do what the client says.

If the client had the right analysis, they wouldn't have to come to you, they would have solved the problem.

53:04

So I listen to what my clients say and I don't believe a word of it because if they had the right story, they wouldn't need me and they do need me.

So they don't have the right story.

So how can I, what can I add to that story?

Because some of it's right, obviously, but some of it's not getting there.

53:22

So you know the things that you know and you know the things to do, but you don't know the places that you don't know in the, in the this vast territory, which is your body.

I must say I, I just got to put this in here as an apropos of nothing, which is that I've been 50 years in this and I am nowhere as close to the bottom.

53:42

Wow.

My brother is a painter and he's now 85, I think, and he's still painting.

God, I hope I get to the bottom of this before.

And you know, he's not fun too, because it's painting, it's art, it goes everywhere.

My other brother is a musician on the organ and and God, I, I still hope I can get this 82 and it can I get this Bach thing right.

54:04

And I play in kinesthesia, not in visual or auditory.

I play in this in this one.

I'm not a dancer.

I'm a terrible dancer.

I'm a terrible sports person.

I would probably flag if we went out in the woods and I tried to do what you do on a daily basis, but that I have not finished playing in that thing at all.

54:27

I've not gotten to the bottom of it all.

I just go into work.

Most of my work is teaching now.

I'm not practicing.

Earlier in, did you think you were closer to like?

Because when I look at I can.

Like what you're saying when I came out?

I thought I had it all.

It's.

Going to change the world with a wonderful Rolfing thing that I've gotten from Eider.

54:44

Often you start out that way.

It's.

You need to start out that way.

Yeah, doctors start out that way.

You know, you, there's this incredible hubris from a lot of doctors, not all of them coming out of medical school.

I'm sorry, you just had a training.

You haven't started your career yet.

55:03

And how many patients have you had?

And they get a lot, they get a lot in the medical training, but it's also within a, a particular frame that I'm very glad not to have to work in that frame.

And if I were working in emergency medicine, you'd have to work in that frame.

It's time is of the essence, but with these chronic things, we would have the time to, and I wish everybody would undertake this, but right now it's expensive, not paid for by your insurance, etcetera.

55:30

But puberty is a great time to go through your body.

I would love to see Rolfing as I learned it as a puberty, right?

People would go through a series of sessions as part of going into high school or part of 8th grade or something like that.

55:47

That when all those hormones are going on that you even out the body, that you show people their number three places and that that happens sometime around puberty and then.

Could you give us like the haiku version of like what a what Rolfing?

Like what's a complete Rolfing session or or series of sessions?

56:05

Yes, Rolfing is deep body work.

It has a reputation for being way too deep.

That's the one where they scrape your muscles off the bones and make you scream about your mother.

That is, that's a fair enough characterization of what we were doing in the 1970s, but it's not a fair characterization of what we're doing now.

56:22

We're really anatomically cognizant and movement cognizant, and we're trying to have people be able to use their bodies.

We haven't even started talking about this yet, but when you're out in the wild, you're really talking about Homo sapiens.

I don't think we're talking about Homo sapiens anymore.

56:39

I think that we have domesticated ourselves along with the chickens and the cats and the dogs and the horses and the cattle and the goats and the sheep.

We we got all those species that were amenable to to being fed by us and now we're enslaved to them or whatever cats have taken over the world.

57:02

Yeah, they've got the easiest ride of all the domestic animals.

And hospitals.

Anyway, I think that we're dealing with a different species now of Homo domesticus simply, and I don't know enough about genes to know whether the genes have changed.

57:21

I do know that epigenetics have changed substantially.

And a really easy example of that is our jaws are being worn more narrowly than they used to be.

There's the theory that we used to chew much more on unprocessed foods so that you would never have gotten flour that was ground down to what you got.

57:40

Now you'd be chopping your bread.

My dentist and I have a joke that I have the teeth of a hunter gatherer because I've used them as tools.

Because that's the other thing is you, you know, you're working to hide, you're working to stick.

You're constantly using it as a.

As a third hand.

Which we don't do as much of now because we have so many tools.

57:57

But like they'd be, they get used, they get used.

So the jaw gets used, right?

So.

The jaw gets used, but that's one theory and we can go off on how how soft our food is and maybe whether babies should have harder food.

58:12

They're getting plastic things for babies to chew on.

Give me a break.

Just give them a carrot.

Chew on.

Where will they get their BPA though?

I'm sorry I lost the thread, but we were.

Just I think we were talking about, you were talking about how puberty is a great time.

58:31

Oh no.

There's a but there is a second reason that jaws could be narrow, which is when you domesticate an animal, their jaws get narrow.

Look at a bison, look at a cow, jaws narrow.

Look at a wolf.

Look at a dog, look at a lion, look at a domesticated cat.

58:49

We don't have pictures of people back there, but we have those tribes that you were talking about that are just barely met or as yet unmet in the Amazon or or out in Indonesia somewhere.

But so we don't really know what those people are looked like, but we can be pretty sure from the jaws that we saw.

59:12

The guy who wrote Exercise, Daniel Lieberman, his first thing was he went to Harvard and he was an anthropologist.

He said, well, Harvard has a lot of skulls, so I'm going to study skulls.

So he studied skulls and wrote a book called The Evolution of the Head, which if you want to go to sleep, is a really difficult book, but I've gotten a lot from it.

59:30

And what he found was hunter gatherers needed no orthodontists.

Hunter gatherers needed no dentists.

There were a few people with carries.

There were a few people with crooked teeth.

That was a potential, but it wasn't the norm.

59:47

Now almost every American child needs a $10,000 smile 20,000.

Dollar.

They don't in England though for some reason.

They just roll with it.

They just roll with their crooked teeth, but don't think that the cup of tea and the bickies didn't have.

But yeah, but I always think of that as like we we know it's dysfunction, so we correct it, right?

1:00:12

And then it gives, it's like a Band-Aid.

It's like cover up for degenerative processes.

Do you think it's fair to say domestication is a degenerative process or do you feel like it's an evolutionary process?

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I just haven't seen the end of it.

So I don't know whether it's a degenerate.

I think we have lost contact.

1:01:58

I want to be careful of judgement.

I don't have judgement on the modern world, right?

It's not suited to the genes.

We were born with it.

So the problem as I stated, looking at urban person and what is the design capable of, What can we do in an urban environment to bring those closer together?

1:02:20

They probably will not ever actually match.

But we could be.

It would be great if our society was less of a factory farm and more of a zoo, right, 'cause like when you put an animal in the zoo, you try to at least recreate the conditions.

1:02:35

You know, you create little habitats, little waterfalls, plants that they might have a diet that's like their diet in the factory farm.

It's like concrete floor.

You don't care 'cause you're, you only want them for two years or whatever.

You don't want, like the zoo, you want the animal to live as long as possible.

The farm you're like just want to extract maximum product, right?

1:02:53

So you're it's you try to cheapen everything as much as possible and make for efficiency.

And when I look at what we're doing, it's like, hey, we're factory farming ourselves, not creating a zoo for ourselves.

Oh God, I was lamenting the zoo.

You've just taken it one farther.

1:03:10

We have to get ourselves out of the zoo and rewild.

Ourselves, well, I think of a zoo is actually like a pretty friendly environment biologically for the animal.

It's not perfect, but at least there's an attempt to make it seem like the conditions so the animal can be healthy.

And you know, I, I do think some of us are lucky enough to live on more of a like this is much more of a free range human farm out here.

1:03:32

And if I lived in Manhattan, it'd be like, oh, that's like in high intensity, high intensity factory farming of people.

And you're like, what's the product?

Well, it's like all kinds of things, but it's certainly taxation.

It's labor, it's AI.

Yeah, exactly how many, how much cattle do we need now that we have a but.

1:03:50

But anyway, to your point, I, I do agree with you.

Like, I just wonder if it's degenerative because it's like you see these the neoteny that you have in animals that are domesticated, but also things like you're talking about like with a, like a pug, you're like, well, that doesn't seem like it's moving, trending in a good direction.

1:04:07

No.

Hybridized animals, hybridized plants, we've seen a lot of that.

Hybridization in plants works a lot better.

But reducing the genome?

Correct till you get to really and I think what you I guess one of the things that I think about sometimes is the city state used to do this thing where it would would go out and it would pillage the countryside.

1:04:28

It would rape and pillage, which would infuse the city state with genetics from.

And so you would get a reinfusion of strong genetics.

It's like if you raise chickens long enough, sometimes you got to like go get some other varieties and bring them in to like infuse the genetics.

1:04:46

We've kind of, we're kind of like running out of people to do that with, you know?

So like, where does it do we end up looking like grey aliens at the end of this?

You know what I mean?

Like, do we, if we follow this trend line long enough and adapt because the grey alien looks really adapted to the world we're building?

1:05:05

The grey alien looks really adapted to the world.

We're doing OK.

I'll take that.

Right.

Like no, no genitals, no like digestive tract, huge eyes, long touch screen fingers, like everything looks like it's, you know, for the digital and built environment, you know, like and.

1:05:21

Not an efforting environment.

Right.

Not an efforting environment, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So training now is saying well you don't effort enough, so come into the gym and we'll effort you.

Correctly and, and I just, I put out some videos recently saying like, hey guys, we we need to like read and do math and, you know, maintain some of these skills because the industrial revolution replaced your labor with machine labor.

1:05:48

And then like you said, now we have to run on the hamster wheel.

We all have experienced cognitive diminishment from technology tremendously, especially in memory is where I'm.

I'm doing a lot of memory work now because I'm realizing my memory is going away because.

You don't have to and now.

1:06:03

Google changed so much.

It used to be I search, it gives me web pages.

I have to still.

It's like going to the library.

Now I'm asking Google really specific questions and getting answers, and I'm noticing that because the answers are available, I don't really remember everything it's telling me anymore.

1:06:20

No.

And, and I saw that happen with phone numbers and I saw that happen with all kinds of information.

So yeah, in the grey alien, interestingly, you know.

Got this very narrow jaw and a very wide head.

Yeah.

Very neoteny, as you say.

1:06:35

It's we, we.

Yeah, like a big fetus.

We tend to make our aliens like big, big, big.

Big baby.

Wow, I hadn't thought about that.

That is neoteny.

So there's the question of whether we should define this term neoteny for your listeners.

Maybe they're.

1:06:50

I think it's good, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But neoteny is to hold on to young characteristics into the adult face.

So a chimp goes through a period where it looks like a human baby before it gets all the hair to make it look like a chimp.

So we're neotenized chimps.

1:07:07

We get pulled out of the womb at nine months when we really should be in the womb for 16 to 18 months for a full development.

But we're born with our bones unfinished and our brain is going to double in size.

Well, you ask any mother whether she wants to put that brain through the bottom of her body when the brain is double in size.

1:07:27

This is one of the things where the mother one and the baby has to leave after nine months because that's as much head as it's going to get through the bottom of that pelvis.

Sort of between walking and and birthing.

We have this equation.

And so we do a lot of our embryological development.

1:07:44

Outside the body.

And so one of the things that I'm going for now in, in my later career since fascia as you pointed out has pretty well established itself is how we treat our mothers and babies as a very well educated and body working 35 year old person.

1:08:04

My we are getting ready to have our baby and after several miscarriages, etcetera, but finally she was coming and so we were around babies a lot and somebody would hand me a baby and I would go oh that's so cute and look.

For a woman to give.

The baby to tails, I don't know how to.

1:08:21

I don't know about this little thing.

It's all squeal.

So I had the best education money could buy, Harvard.

The rest of it, I didn't know how to hold a baby.

That's how, you know, my education was really lacking right when we took my baby to Bali and she was by that time 29, I think, 30 lbs or 28 lbs or something of just pure fat.

1:08:43

She was wonderful.

She looked like the Michelin.

Yeah, right.

With all of this, I could hand her off to any 4 year old in Bali.

Yep.

Secure that that 4 year old would know exactly how to hold a baby, would not drop it would be very careful and indeed what she passed her off to all kinds of people in Bali, even little kids, because everybody can hold a baby there.

1:09:06

It's a harsh indictment on humanity.

Wow, on on my loving parents who did the very best for me, you know, but but I was isolated.

I didn't have that thing.

And so we should are there basic You talked about my athletes and I think there are basic human skills that we haven't thought we had to put in.

1:09:25

But we do.

Have you seen a dead person?

So many of the people who come to our dissections have never seen a dead person.

Before, yeah, people.

Most people and don't see anyone born or anyone die.

And those are two things that happened in a hospital that are not pathological.

1:09:43

Yeah.

There are two things that happened in the hospital that are not pathological, birth and death.

They are both physiological processes and birth has been medicalized.

You have a condition called pregnancy.

Would you like an abdominal extraction or a vaginal extraction?

Could be an emergency.

Any minute now the so that's a problem that it's that birth has been medicalised and then death also.

1:10:05

You know, I, I went, I had to go into the hospital locally where I was born to find out what time I was born for my astrologer.

But I went and I was looking through the death records and it's back then 1949 natural causes, old age, pneumonia, just the things that take old people out.

1:10:23

But go, go read the death certificate.

Cardio pulmonary failure, Brain failure, Renal failure, hepatic failure.

It's always a failure.

Pathologized.

Yeah, and it's always a failure when somebody dies.

And many of those causes of death were called natural death before it, right?

1:10:41

That's what you're saying.

So you're like, now they're pathologizing it all.

Like you're not supposed to die, but something.

Right.

It's a failure when you die.

So I'm not going to go to a hospital to die because I I have every, every intention that my death is going to be a complete success.

Man, I, I, I had a really unique experience a few years ago.

My wife has a friend of the family.

1:11:01

Basically, I could somebody in a family member almost very close and he outlived everybody around him.

And you know, he was in his late 90s and just, he was starting to be feel like he was a burden on his his daughter and he's in Canada.

1:11:16

So he opted for medical suicide.

I think they call it that means program.

I don't want to make any judgments on that program, but I that he invited us to his death, you know, so I go to this thing and I don't, I don't really know this.

1:11:32

Like I'm new to this family.

So everybody's very close.

And I'm just the sort of like, this is just like observational for me in a weird way, you know, And I had never really watched someone die.

I've watched a lot of animals die, but I had never watched a human being die.

1:11:49

And, you know, they came in, it was a nurse and a doctor, and they had to, like, speak to him real quick, make sure he's under his own.

You know, this is a decision he's making.

There was a series of crazy injections with all kinds of different sized needles.

And one by one, they just deactivated him.

1:12:05

And I watched him die.

And it occurred to me like, I don't know where we come from and where we go, but I think people would wonder about that a lot more if they watched it.

And we would talk about it a lot more if we watched it.

And there's something about taking that away from human view that helps to reduce the world to cogs and wheels and belts and pulleys or, or a completely materialistic worldview because we're not exposed to the fact that people are coming in here from somewhere and people are going back out somewhere.

1:12:40

Does that make sense?

Like like, you know, well, it's just like, is there a portal?

Like how do we, you know what I mean?

There's something really interesting about if you sequester away birth and death, it just, it just takes like, this is the big important stuff.

Yes.

And people have, I think in the materialist society.

1:12:57

And then the Internet thing, there is this sense of living forever.

I have a lot of people out on the West Coast who think if they have the right diet and they do the right exercises, they're going to cheat death.

Oh, good luck brother.

I was going, hey, you ever think about native people who lived here like 400 years ago?

1:13:13

No glyphosate, no, right?

No heavy metals, no perfect diet, perfect exercise, all the sunlight.

They're doing all the things.

They still just died at the end.

Like you.

You think you're in in this toxic soup you're living in with all this dysfunction, you're going to eat your way to immortality.

1:13:31

Like I used to think it too, but it seems really silly now.

It does it I, I see these people trying to balance themselves out with doing everything on the right side that they do on the left side.

And your organs, your livers over here it's heavier.

1:13:48

Your stomach's over here.

It's heavier or lighter depending on whether you ate.

Recently, yeah, right.

It's the the whole thing of you are never going to be in balance.

We this was my youthful stupidity, as you thought you were going to live forever if you ate the right thing.

1:14:06

I thought I was going to achieve postural enlightenment and then nothing would bother me anymore because I would be in a state of Satori and everything would.

That isn't the thing.

The thing is to be able to be resilient when life hits you upside the head because life is going to hit you upside the head.

1:14:24

And if it doesn't, I'm kind of sorry for you because those are the things that build your character and kids character and preach let you know about your relationship in a much deeper way and things like that.

So I don't want to not.

I thought I was going to achieve this place where I wouldn't be buffeted.

1:14:41

And then I realized, no, I just want to be strong and resilient when I'm buffeted so that these models are kind of good thing.

You, you get the twist that happens in life and then oh, the strain comes off and you come back.

And that's what you're talking about, about the 50 year old.

You got a strain and then it didn't come back.

1:14:58

Yeah, I'm stuck in the strain.

So then the question is, what happened to the joints?

What happened to the muscles?

And that's where I find it hard to give one nice piece of advice to everybody with these things and finding somebody good in your time.

I don't care who they are.

Psychologist, acupuncturist, osteopath, body worker, find the person who's really busy in your town and go see them and it doesn't matter what they do and listen to them.

1:15:25

And then if they can't sort your problems out, say, well, who would you see?

Because people who are busy refer and people who are busy usually have a good referral network.

So I go to this acupuncture.

The problem that you lower back it probably not going to yield to acupuncture.

1:15:44

Might but might not.

But she knows a really good osteopath.

Yes.

He's 40 miles away.

You wouldn't have heard about him, but she knows him.

Yeah.

So building, getting a referral network.

You you, you are.

We are not in a place now where there is a place that you can go and get this sorted out for yourself and send a picture of yourself in.

1:16:04

And maybe there will be, you know, you get a 3D scan and it'll go into some AI and it'll come back with a program for you.

We're not there yet.

And so for those of us with deep things in our bodies that we say, OK, I don't want to go into old age with this.

1:16:20

I want to see if I can get this out.

There are some things you, you know, we can't unbreak your tibia and fibula.

Something happened there.

However, we can go in there with a fine tooth comb and comb out the tissue.

And in my own case, because I broke my leg in a similar way.

1:16:37

And when five years later, I showed up at my first roughing and he said, when did you break your leg?

How did you see that?

Of course, I can see that all the time now, but it's you.

You have to go at scar tissue, the same thing.

It's like your kid got gum in their hair.

1:16:54

You're not going to take their hair and a brush.

You can take a little bit of hair and a little brush and you're going to take it out a little bit of time.

When you talk about the fascial gunk that has gunked up around an injury, we're in the same kind of thing.

We're going in there with a short bristle brush and getting the gum out of the hair and hopefully it will be, you know, flowy and, and easily letting fluids through it and yet still resilient enough to to handle the forces.

1:17:19

I want to ask another fashion question, but I just want to leave a pin.

And we were we got talking about birth and death there and I want to make sure we come back there.

I'm wondering where the current science is in fascia stuff.

I saw an article sitting over there.

I believe the title is fascia is able to actively contract and may thereby influence musculoskeletal dynamics.

1:17:41

I hear things about fascia as a communication network.

What do we know?

Like you said, initially it was thought of as like packing peanuts.

I know as a butcher, you're mostly cutting it away unless you're going to, you know, Bray is a cut right where I can, I can turn that stuff into like, soft gelatin and it's like, supremely lovely to eat.

1:18:03

But otherwise, you're always trimming it away.

It goes in the dog food pile, you know, And it, there is a tendency that, you know, they often call it butchery.

Silver skin.

Silver skin.

And you think of it.

Yeah.

You think of it as sort of like, not really useful material.

1:18:18

I definitely don't look at it and think of it as I guess when I don't know what it does outside of it's holding the body together.

I'm curious if we're now, isn't that enough?

Yeah, I'm curious though.

I keep.

Yeah, you're right.

You're right, of course.

1:18:33

But is there more 'cause I keep hearing things, I keep hearing rumblings that it does more, yes.

But yeah, that's a that's pretty good.

That's pretty good.

So I would say a couple of things.

The silver skin that you see under the skin of an animal is also a muscle attachment for every surface muscle that you've never seen in an anatomy book, All your latissimus, your trapezius, your obliques are, your abdominals are all tied into that silver skin.

1:19:03

We take the silver skin off and that's where we start the anatomy book.

Yeah.

So when people see that chart of the red guy standing there, all that's been removed except you, they'll leave it in the like the lumbars, you'll see a little white.

That's underneath.

That's still not oh.

OK, not the silver skin which is the exterior.

1:19:19

OK, OK.

It's called the fascia Profundus because it's.

The first.

So it's a specific type.

OK, understand specific.

Layer and it goes, it's a unitary, it goes all over your body and it's sometimes it kind of melts into the other layers where you, you can't find it, but it's all over the body.

1:19:36

It's a developmental layer and the skin goes on top of that.

So you have the silver skin then well you know, this is 100.

Then you have the fat layer, which is actually 2 layers, one that's more lymphatic and one that's more neurological.

And then you have the skin layers, which is a very thin panicular fascia to which the skin cells are attached.

1:19:56

And I believe, don't quote me, I think you have about 600 layers of skin cells and 202 hundred of them are dead.

So the only part of you and I.

That are looking at each other, that's living is the part that we keep wet.

Yep, right.

Yeah.

1:20:11

The rest of it has about 200 layers of skin and if you hit the road and your skin weeps but doesn't bleed, you went down past the dead skin level.

Into living skin.

Yeah.

So when you say you're exfoliating, you're maybe taking 75 of those 200 layers off.

1:20:29

You still got a whole layer of dead cells on there.

And if you did what they did in Clockwork Orange and hold your eyes open, your eyes would.

You wouldn't see for very long because, right, all the cells on the surface of your eye would.

Die.

Start dying.

Yeah.

Wow, Yeah.

We were going.

But I was wondering, yeah, is there communication, is there hormonal?

1:20:47

Is there anything going on in the fascia that is beyond its structural component?

OK, hormones and fascia are just now being studied because most of the studies are done on men whose hormone picture is so much more constant constant than women.

1:21:03

So now fortunately the research is being is beginning to work on it and we're looking at people who have very soft fascia like ligamentous laxity or Taylor Stanlow.

That's a condition that's that seems to be a genetic condition of the fascia.

1:21:22

But there are all kinds of things that lead to that and we're just getting into that.

So hormones and fascia chemistry in general, your chemistry, blood type and things like that, how it affects the fascia, that's an area of research we're just going into now.

We know hormones affect fascia.

1:21:38

Now, in spite of the title of the article that you just read, fascia doesn't actively contract very much the active contraction in fashion.

I kind of hesitate to say this because then people go out and say fascia contract.

The if you cut a wound, the because the fascia is tensile, the two sides of the wound will spread apart and then they get proud on either side and then over the then it covers over and then over the days you see it being pulled back together.

1:22:06

That's fascia cells reaching out and grabbing onto the fascia, reaching out and grabbing onto the fascia, and within the limits of what cells can do, pulling that fascia back together.

So wound healing is one of the few places that we know that there's active contraction of the fascia.

1:22:24

Dupatrance contracture, where you sometimes see in older women, you see nodules and their fingers are like this.

I can't open the hand.

That is, maybe some of these cells that do this active contraction going crazy in the hand for reasons we don't know.

Happens on the foot too.

1:22:42

But Tasha is really responding to your muscles, but your muscles in gravity, your muscles in physics, but mostly gravity, right?

So to hold myself up here, if you said, Tom, relax, and I really did relax, I couldn't sit in the chair, right?

1:22:58

I need some tonus in my muscles to say that.

Except that our brains put out a lot of extra tension.

So that extra tension, we talked about it earlier.

If I have an arching thing because I'm eager to get in the world, or I'm a little worried about my place in the world, or.

1:23:19

Yeah.

And you do that with your muscles.

Your fascia just essentially says, I'm anthropomorphizing the fascia.

But the fascia essentially says, OK, if you're going to do that with your muscles, then you need straps here, here, here and here.

And then even if you change your muscle patterning, the straps are still there.

1:23:37

Yeah, they will disappear, but they disappear a lot slower than muscles.

Yeah, and that assumes you don't fall back into your pattern all the time, which is very hard to start.

To get out of the pattern.

But if you do stay out of the pattern, you undertake a new training program.

1:23:54

You're doing things that you didn't do.

Your fascia will will remodel according to that training program or couch potato.

It'll remodel to be a couch potato.

It remodels as a couch potato towards the thing which is generally responsive to whatever threat might come or whatever change might come.

1:24:14

And that's a cotton ball impregnated with the Jelly.

In other words, the fibers are going everywhere.

They're like felt they're just going in every direction.

So no matter what force comes on it, it will adapt to that force.

Now imagine that I took that cotton ball and I did this with it.

1:24:31

Yeah, the fibers would all.

Line.

And I would get to a place where it stops.

So try that on your arm right now.

If you put your hand on your arm, you can move 1/4 inch, half an inch in any direction.

You can even move 1/2 an inch away or half an inch in right, any direction, and it's really easy, right?

1:24:49

There's very little resistance.

OK, do it again.

Now move your hand towards your elbows, 5 or 6 centimeters, and feel what's happening to the braid on your wrist.

You're moving it so the cotton is omnidirectional, looking out for everything.

1:25:05

But then you put a tension on it and it says, oh, that's where the force is coming.

I'm going to resist that force to save these tissues because I don't want my skin to tear, right?

So it's weak, weak, weak, weak, weak, strong.

Yeah.

Unlocked, unlocked, unlocked, locked.

1:25:21

So fascia has that ability to be really soft and easy for the movement that I want to do.

And then solidified by muscles, it becomes a strap that can, you know, bench press whatever you can bench press, right?

That we have thought a lot about muscles and joints and nerves.

1:25:44

And it's not that the fascia is more important than these other ones or less important.

It's just part of the equation that we haven't really put in.

So tendons are made out of fascia, ligaments are made out of fascia.

All that white stuff that you see in the aneatomical books is made out of fascia.

And once you do that, you realize, Oh my God, all of our sea cells are living in a sea of fascia.

1:26:06

And so now we get.

To literally every cell is.

Literally every cell except maybe you could say the red blood cells.

There's a debate.

I want to get back to this, but there's a debate in the thing of how much of the water in your body is free and how much of it is tied up in the fascial system.

Because most of our listeners will be thinking of the fascial system as what we've been talking about.

1:26:27

The fibers of collagen, sinewy and white, and you can see it in hunting the silver skin and all of that.

There's another element of it, which is gel.

You also probably seen that gel.

It's slippery.

It's synovial fluid in the joints.

That's the primary thing of that gel.

1:26:43

That gel is a lubricant in the body and it allows for movement and allows for these kinds of changes in the length of the fascia, which happens in yoga, happens when I put my elbow in there.

Now you want it to grow back into the proper shape.

1:27:01

I dropped on my elbow.

I don't know if the camera can see this, but I dropped on my elbow.

I was carrying a cup of coffee and just went and cracked it, but didn't know I'd cracked it because the burst.

There's a Bursa right here.

It was a mess.

It was bloody and all full of fluid.

1:27:18

So by the time I had gotten around this, this extra bit, this heterotrophic bone growth had happened.

So now I have a new tool.

Yeah.

It's going to say that looks like I feel great going.

It looks unsightly for my girlfriend, but how he goes, you know, you can't get through this life without a few Dings.

1:27:34

And I and I just, it was a very interesting thing to watch it go.

And I, you know, here, here's another thing.

Can I make that go away?

Is there somebody who knows how to make that go away?

I don't know how to make that go away.

Can I find somebody?

And at 77, I don't know.

I'll tell you a story.

1:27:50

I broke my, the lateral molluscus on my left knee.

I was chasing my favorite 16 year old down the dock here in Maine.

And she did a face plant.

And in order to avoid putting my foot in the middle of her back, I did a big leap and landed wrong.

1:28:07

And your, your meniscus in here is shaped like a Crescent moon.

And I split off and I was shortly after that.

I was clearly painful and clearly not.

So I, I was giving a class in Norway and a physio said, oh, I've got an ultrasound machine.

1:28:24

We'll go look at it and we could see it split.

So I have the, I have the picture proof that it was split.

And I did all the things that I know as a therapist to heal cartilage.

But I was 69 at the time.

I didn't think that that was ever going to heal at 72.

1:28:40

Three years later, I went through Norway again and the same physiotherapist was there.

I said, can we have a look at it again?

And the thing, it healed.

Wow.

Now, I'm not saying this because I eat the right food.

I eat terrible food.

I eat on the road all the time.

1:28:56

I survive on Starbucks and the rest of the terrible things that are in the airports that I have to go through.

But at least they're cheap.

At least they're cheap.

A piece of chicken.

A spring of broccoli. $75.

Yeah, but the so it's not, it's not because of that, but I think the healing powers that would still be in your discs, that would still be in some of the things that you might think that's really gone beyond the pale.

1:29:26

I think that we have not tested the healing powers of these things.

Maybe it is neoteny, maybe we are retaining those useful characteristics farther and farther.

I don't know.

But I, I also one measure of this would be how long can you have braces on?

1:29:43

They mostly they're doing some adult work with braces now and expanders and things like that because of this narrow jaw thing that we were talking about a while ago.

But the.

I'm watching a kid right now, she's 2 cranks a night.

It looks so painful to me.

1:30:01

Yes, but she needs that space.

She needs the space.

I I feel like my jaw is wide enough, but I didn't have room for my wisdom teeth.

Why would God give you wisdom teeth and then not enough room to put them in?

It's us, it's our diet.

It's something that we're doing to the piece.

1:30:20

I, you know, I had no idea.

I'm sure genetics will be part of the answer to that.

But I think the environment, the zoo or the jungle or the what was your third one?

The digital.

Yeah, no.

The factory farm.

The factory farm, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:30:35

I had not gone as dismal as putting us in a factory farm.

That's really where we are.

That's really where we are.

I thought about it as the human zoo, that we built a zoo and we live in it.

And I think that might be true out here in Maine, where we actually can have a nice zoo with.

1:30:52

Yeah, I think it's yeah.

I mean, if you live high enough too, up up the up the pyramid, you can definitely live in a zoo, right?

There's lots of zoo out there.

It's a whole different world.

But it's hard to live in the wild anymore.

Yeah, well, and there's hard, you know, like as a hunter.

You.

It's so different than it would have been ancestrally because one, there's way less animals, 2, they're way more hip to what people are.

1:31:17

Three, every, you know, quarter mile you're hitting another property boundary.

It's not like you can just range over huge areas and follow herds of animals anymore.

Like you can't.

You're just like private property, private property, private property.

So it's like it's there's not even there to live in anymore.

1:31:35

I mean, you know, it takes a lot of space for a person to live as a true hunter gatherer.

You need to, yeah, it's quite a, quite a big piece of land.

That's why we can't go back to that.

We can't even go back to everybody having their little agricultural plot.

You know, William Penn set up Philadelphia with a long lot so that you could have a house in the front and a full garden.

1:31:54

You know, you still see that now, but the houses have been built all the way down the lot.

So you have all these houses in Philadelphia that are not very wide, but very, very deep because of the way he set it up for gardening for each person to have their individual garden.

But you know, maybe you can do a windowsill garden.

1:32:10

If you have my daughter living in Brooklyn, you could do a windowsill garden.

Or you maybe there's an allotment thing that you can get a piece of in your neighborhood.

It's it's.

Kind.

Of reaching, grasping to get a little bit of.

Yeah, I think, I think it's headed headed towards obviously smaller everything smaller space question for you.

1:32:29

Do you think that everything we've been talking about these changes and then what we see on the horizon, because it's like we're seeing the rollout now finally after quite a long time, but we're seeing the rollout of robotics at a level that's pretty astonishing when you see these robots doing backflips.

1:32:50

And I remember when, you know, you were seeing Boston Dynamics or General Dynamics showing them when they were still wired, but now they're carrying their own power.

So wow, that's a whole new thing.

AI obviously has rolled out in just a couple years and I love when people go, yeah, yeah, but you can tell it's AI.

1:33:06

I'm like, dude, it's the second year you've had it.

Like give it a second.

It's going to be indistinguishable from reality pretty soon.

I think we have nanotechnology, you know, it's like they could, you can have self assembling machines in your body now we have genetic alteration, I guess, or engineering available to us, CRISPR.

1:33:26

So these technologies combined with that shrinking space for that neoteny, that factory farm, I'm wondering if you personally chalk this up to organically unfolding because of like a collective movement towards this, or do you perceive it as a nefarious in in other words, do you do you see that the world is being steered by benevolent, malevolent forces?

1:33:59

Or do you think that these are forces that emerge from within us?

In other words, isn't an emergent property because because it's real easy to look at the world right now and be like, who's in charge of this Darth Vader?

Like, what is this like, where are we?

Why is it so?

Why does it look like it's constantly imprisoning human beings and degrading us?

1:34:17

Is that an emergent property of people, or are there forces at play that are against humanity?

I you're asking me a philosophical question that I feel unqualified to answer, but.

Everybody's unqualified.

1:34:33

For let me have a step at it anyway, because it's fun.

In the old tribal world, you get to these numbers.

What are they, Moore's numbers or something like that?

How many people could live?

Oh yeah, Dunbar's.

Dunbar number, how many people could live on a given thing of land.

1:34:51

As you say, if you're a nomad you or if you're a hunter gatherer, you need a lot of land to support a small group of people.

So they say groups of 30 or maybe up to 150, but then they'd have to split because you couldn't do more than 150 people.

You can't do Rome without agriculture.

1:35:09

And so the people who are looking over the village, the people charged with keeping that, the shaman, the village wise woman, the chief were very much doing what everybody else was doing on a daily basis, right going hunting and gathering.

1:35:25

It was just you put a special hat on him.

And when the when the council was in, then he was the chief and then he had a stick talking stick got passed around.

Well, by the time you get to a king, that crown can kill you.

And so come on the other hand, but it was much more even and they would look out for the kids in the village.

1:35:48

You couldn't be a psychopath without being caught by your tribe in the process of growing up.

Yeah.

Luigi, man Gnoni or whatever his name is, can get through school and nobody picks him up or choose the murderer that you want.

1:36:10

But somehow these folks are getting through our society, which is so industrial now.

People can come up without that mentor that the village would always have.

But we invented another type of person called a corporation, and a psychopath is ideally suited to run this thing called a corporation.

1:36:33

And so we have, instead of selecting psychopaths out of the village society, which would have happened in a tribe or in a small village, take those small villages in England.

You can be Batty, but you couldn't be murderous.

Agatha Christie would come and get you.

1:36:50

You couldn't be.

You couldn't be murderers.

But now we license those people.

We give them big salaries and say maximize our profits and that is not maximizing the well-being of all the people under the care of that corporation.

1:37:06

Whether you think of that corporation is caring for anything or the government that's supposed to be.

It's all so large now.

There is no village.

I just was part of why I want to get back to the birth thing before we finish, because I was just in an event about rebirthing the village, getting birth back into a village context.

1:37:26

Because as we said earlier, if you have birth and you go to a hospital, it's considered a disease, of which there are several ways to get out of that disease, by a knife or by the vagina with a lot of drugs.

But having a natural childbirth you have to fight for.

1:37:42

We were talking about how you have to advocate.

A lot of doctors, my impression is, are uncomfortable with it because they don't do it that often and because they're afraid of how many complications could come up and they've got a golf game scheduled for three hours from now.

Yeah, I don't.

1:37:58

I don't get the third one.

The golf game.

I think that's a trope, but I don't.

We'll remove that one.

Yeah, we'll remove this one.

But you feel that first, too.

Yeah.

But what these are driven by is the insurance.

Companies, yes, agreed.

The outcome of AC section is better now than the outcome of a natural birth.

1:38:18

Yeah, wow.

Because we've upped the skills in doing C sections and we've diminished the skills of doing a natural job.

Forceps aren't bad if you have the skill to use them.

Two French physicians made-up forceps.

1:38:33

They gave courses in how you use them.

It's one to grab the head.

You got to force it.

Yeah, you can reach up inside a horse and pull the foal out.

You can reach up inside a cow and pull the calf out.

Why?

Because the what we are pleased to call the pelvic floor is for them a pelvic side wall, so they don't need a whole bunch of muscle.

1:38:52

We're sitting on it all.

So our.

Pelvis.

Our pelvis had to do this for us to walk.

The pelvic floor had to get really taut.

And then you're going to put a baby through that.

We talked about that the baby has to get out after nine months instead of out of 16.

Or 18 months.

Just because of the size of of that and you know, I all power to it.

1:39:13

I I want healthy babies and healthy mothers.

And if the baby was going to die or the mother was going to die and you need to get in there and do AC section.

OK, what Michel Vodon, the a very prominent obstetrician, he was a surgeon and he went into obstetrics because he heard all the screaming down in the obstetrics ward.

1:39:33

And he went, what is going on here?

And he went over there.

And then without telling his whole story, he ended up running a clinic in which you could have a natural childbirth or a caesarean section.

None of the intervening epidural Tosin, none of that stuff in the beginning, you just had a natural childbirth.

1:39:53

One thing we can talk about another time of of how to set that up.

But the he had a caesarean rate in his clinic of four to 6% a year.

Year on year meaning, what is this meaning that one in 25 women need AC section, but now 50% of the babies that are being born on this planet are being born C-section.

1:40:19

Do you think that the amount that is needed has increased due to pelvic change like structural changes or do you think it's all driven by what we were talking about before, which is I think change is?

Mostly driven by what we were talking about before, which is the need for the medical system, the patriarchy if you will, to control feminine creativity.

1:40:39

That's a big thing.

Get those midwives out of there.

That's.

Arcane Science.

That's arcane witchcraft.

In the 1850s, most, it wasn't great medical care, but most medical care that was given to women was given by women.

Yeah.

It's more recently that we've put men doctors in charge of of women's healthcare, which is pretty crazy, a dubious thing, pretty.

1:41:01

Hard for men to understand women at even a basic level.

So I mean, you know.

Spend a lifetime.

With.

Yeah, exactly.

But the I think to get back to this subject, I think that birth is the lace where the fewest dollars and the fewest amount of because we don't have much time, right, that the most immediate change could be made in parental relations and then the child growing up.

1:41:30

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot one thing on the Caesarean sections, the research has come through, and I just read this recently that because we're doing so many Caesarean sections, some of those Caesarean sections are being done on the women whose pelvis is just too naturally narrow to have a baby.

1:41:47

Guess what?

Their children are too narrow to ever have a baby and their children will be too narrow to ever have a baby.

So yes, we are by our ubiquitous Caesarean sections, preserving genes for narrow pelvis for women, which would not have been preserved without.

1:42:03

Cease.

That's a hard teaching, but it makes sense, yeah.

But it's already showing up, yeah, in the in research.

Let me make sure I understand that these are.

Are you saying that these genes would essentially the the natural?

My understanding is the natural mortality rate for infants is about 50% historically.

1:42:25

That would be argued, yeah.

I don't know.

Or maybe I should say about only about 50% of children would make it to adulthood in the past.

Oh, OK, that's better.

So you'd have a lot of child mortality early in and then of course to get a child just up to where they're like self-sustaining.

1:42:41

It was hard to do, sure, but.

Think of The Pioneers.

They had seven children in hopes that four of them would make it right.

They had 20.

Four of them, and they had, you know.

And the hopes that one would stay behind to take care of them.

Yeah, yeah.

But are you saying that many of these children might not have made it through childbirth and so those genes wouldn't be carried forward?

1:43:00

And now they are, So that's a hard thing to talk about.

It's a hard thing to talk about, but those women would have died in childbirth.

And who wants those women to die in childbirth so they get a caesarean section.

But just understand that's meaning that that.

Creates A downstream effect.

We'll need genetic.

1:43:16

Section as well are there from a myofascial perspective, a structural perspective.

Is there any important value for that squeeze of a natural childbirth as the body's deformed its way and spiraled through the vagina versus pulled out into the open air like that?

1:43:35

Yes, and there are benefits that we don't know about yet.

What happens when you squeeze the brain like that?

I don't know about you.

My baby was born as a conehead.

Yeah, it's pretty common, right?

And because it went down through the birth and the bones are not ossified sutures on our side.

1:43:54

And it's fortunate for the mother that the head can do that at hand.

Within an hour, it'll look like a grapefruit.

And you're wondering how the hell did that get through there?

Because the head really expands in that first hour or two.

My youngest client was an hour old.

He's Conehead was not resolving after an hour.

1:44:12

And I took that.

God, this was such a privilege just thinking about it.

I just had this.

She was on her mother, of course, but I just had this tiny little head in my hand and it was like suggesting through my I didn't have to do anything.

1:44:29

Smell those little heads.

I love it so as a very well educated man who when he was faced with having a baby, had no idea how to handle them, I think that even mothers now are that.

1:44:45

That's me as a dad and lots of dad have lost contact, that infant thing, and we could bring that back because it's a joy.

It's a joy to interact with your and once you know what they're doing, it only takes a few hours.

If I have a few hours, what they're?

1:45:01

Doing.

What do you mean if you know what?

If you know what the baby is doing then you can move with them or they can move with you if you're alert to the signs.

So my baby is now almost 40 and and we were back with the pins on the diapers.

1:45:21

And so I would put my hand on her hip and I would turn her over onto one side and take 1 pin off.

And then I would turn her over on the other side and take the other pin off.

And then do something to clean up the area that needs cleaning up.

And by doing that very gently and rolling her pelvis, within a week I would put my hand on her hip and her eyes would and her head would start to turn the other way.

1:45:47

This is going to make me cry too, because we were doing it together.

Now, what could her contribution be at 4 weeks, four months, Not much, but we were doing it together.

And that made the communication between us so much more rich.

1:46:04

And I'm not doing it too well.

I know sometimes you got to put the groceries away and you just have to sit in that chair.

I get it, but not all the time.

Sometime you can be down there and you watch the baby reach out with one arm and turn this way.

1:46:20

You just put a hand under that foot and all of a sudden they organize themselves to turn over and see the cat or see mom or see whatever they're going to see.

So if you understand how nobody ever taught me how small bodies move, even after I knew how large bodies move, even after I was a body worker, I still didn't I understand small bodies and now I understand small bodies and I can really help fathers a lot.

1:46:41

And mothers come by it more naturally for sure.

But even even that, we're so isolated, we're in such nuclear family if we don't grow up with children all about us, right?

And so that's.

I've got a couple of friends around me who have big families, religious folks, mostly. 5 kids, six kids got it's so unusual today to see this like troop of people and you know, the size of vehicle they need to go anywhere in.

1:47:09

Their judgement?

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

One family was telling me they were at like a Renaissance fair last summer and they brought their kids to the childcare area and they were being made fun of by the childcare workers and they could hear them, you know, talking about how unethical it was for them to have these kids and stuff.

1:47:27

I mean, just the anti humanist sometimes the misanthropy, misanthropy.

I was a real victim of that kind of thinking for a long time.

But but anyway, side note, I've got some friends right now.

They've got 5, She's pregnant with the 6th.

1:47:44

They don't have a midwife, A doula, or they're just doing it at home at this point.

Yeah, she's just, she's just going to call him.

And you know what?

She just won a dead lifting contest the other day.

She's not sure what her due date is, but it's this month she won a dead lifting competition pulling.

I think she did 100 reps of 225 with like the the torpedo belly, you know, So you, you see.

1:48:07

Just like I'm just thinking about that poor kid trying to get through that.

It's astonishing what we're capable of and what we're really like.

And then what we've been kind of convinced that we are like, they just not only do they not see it as an emergency, but they don't even see it as like we need anybody involved.

1:48:24

We've done this so many times.

We just are going to integrate it into our life and, and watching how all the kids take care of each other and they all know, like you said, how to handle babies.

It's reframing being around people like that, sort of reframing how I think about it, you know, because I feel like we really have turned it into something.

1:48:43

Well, the people who are shaming them are out of date because we're having so many fewer babies.

And the good thing about that is that each baby is going to be precious.

I used to say a thing and I was in.

1:48:58

I was jesting.

We'll know our society is getting its bearings back when midwives are paid more than bank presidents because the midwives are guarding a treasure that's more valuable than what the bank president is, right?

We don't.

Reserve debt notes.

1:49:13

Right.

We don't, we don't recognize that in our but we are now going to because fertility rates are going down, hormones are going down all over the world, all over the world.

It's not just us.

And, and then in educated societies, industrial societies, as we have now, having a child is an incredible luxury child, a very expensive thing to have and they keep getting more expensive the older they get.

1:49:43

You ever seen the film Idiocracy, you know, and that theme that like the educated people are not having kids and then the uneducated people are having lots of lots of kids and then the story being the dumbing down that happens as a result of that.

But it is interesting to watch and and also, as you, you no doubt know, it's like if I would have to have with my wife 3 kids in order to add to the population, right.

1:50:07

And I thought, I think people don't realize that it's like, hey, if you only have one kid, you're you're in the removal of so you're.

Reducing big removal thing now and we had to because we were overpopulating like crazy.

We thought it would be maybe education, but it's really education of women and making women more equal in the workplace.

1:50:25

And then children, as I said 100 years ago, were the necessary resources to have you taken care of.

Now, that's not the thing.

A child is just an expensive luxury.

And we we have to make that change now.

While we have the time when only a few children are being born, we are being also being born into an age where they can have Aristotle as a tutor and Louis Pasteur is a chemistry professor, right?

1:50:50

You know, the, the, the, the benefits of education coming down on the Internet are amazing and we, we will focus a whole lot on the children that are left.

If they're doing that kind of education and not just watching videos all day, though, you know, which is it's like the Internet is the greatest tool ever existed and we're using it to like masturbate.

1:51:10

I mean, it's kind of like, I wish it was like we were using it.

Well, I don't feel like we even know what to do with it.

Right, but but I think we will be better with that with kids in education and things like that in future generations.

And, and I find this now in, in America, and I, I'm sorry, I'm going to say this about America and not about Europe, Australia, Japan, China, is that Americans are no longer taught to use their brains in find something out.

1:51:41

So I've got a bunch of students in my classroom up there, and we have winnowed them out because these are the final things after a year's thing.

The ones who want to know the answer.

Here's my book.

The answers are all in here.

1:51:57

Yeah.

The people who want to be engaged in the question.

Yeah.

Are the people we want in the training.

Yeah.

Not the people who want the.

Word question has the word quest right in it.

Yeah, and many people are not interested in the quest.

No, they just want the answer.

Stay in the Shire.

Yeah, well, and.

I just I.

1:52:14

Just have this like memory of I would have an interest, I would go to the library, I would go to the card catalog, I would pull 20 books out.

They'd be all stacked there on the table with a big dictionary.

And I would have to piece together that answer and, and just like it was a lot harder to get from point A to point B in the past.

1:52:34

And now it's very easy.

It's like it's gotten so easy to get information that I just, yeah, it's sort of like how hard it is for people to start exercising when they don't exercise.

It's like, oh, but it hurts.

And watching people have to think sometimes you're like, oh, does it hurt?

Like I worry that that's why I've been encouraging people to have resources like hard resources.

1:52:55

Maybe you don't need them, but it sure is good for your brain to need to solve problems.

Or I was saying recently play chess like something but find some.

These problems solving to mind, we're talking about habits of body and habits of body are very important.

We're talking about birth and you get so many hormonal and ecological things set in your body at birth that that seems to me to be a very fruitful place to put our efforts.

1:53:18

But we the the habits of mind of being able to deal with a world that's unpredictable has not been a big value because the world's been pretty predictable for those of us living in the Western.

World Yeah, those 80s and 90s were pretty nice.

I think my mother had the right idea.

1:53:36

She died in September of 16, about 3 months before Trump was elected.

I think that was about the time to leave.

Yeah, 16 is when I I remember things really changed around 12, but slow.

But by 16 it went crazy and now I can't believe where we are in 26.

1:53:54

Like, it's like the.

It's remarkable.

Very rapid, very, very rapid change.

And I don't want to sit around like an old man saying oh so much better when you're young.

In some ways it wasn't very young.

And in some ways, I, my younger friends of me, oh, well, you grew up in the 50s when it was pure water.

1:54:14

Oh, you grew up in the 50s when the engines were so poor we were breathing harbor carbon?

Rivers were polluted.

There's no organic food.

You couldn't get Walnut Acres peanut butter and Amazon was certainly not available to deliver it to your house in two or three days.

1:54:30

So they were good times in in many ways.

And but we have to redo this thing.

We have to redo this thing not in terms of trying to get back to the 50s or the 60s or the 80s or the 1800s.

We're we're facing a new situation.

And I get these people.

1:54:46

I'm doing yoga.

It was passed down from Patanjali in the 3rd century.

I am doing a martial art.

It was passed down from father to son for 565 years.

Thank you for telling me how irrelevant your practice is.

1:55:03

Yeah, because we're facing a situation nobody's ever faced with it, and I'm not.

I love yoga.

I love Tai chi and all martial arts.

They're all very important.

But those aren't going to solve the.

New problems.

They're agricultural answers to an agricultural problem.

1:55:18

Yeah, agriculturally based answers to the problem.

So I want all the wisdom that I can get to here because some of it will apply to the electronic era, but all our exercise went mechanical when we went into the mechanistic era.

And so now we do a lot of things that are doing your muscles and all that kind of thing.

1:55:39

But as we go into the electronic era, we're going to get electronic exercise.

I think it's going to look really different.

I don't mean electronically enhanced exercise.

That's something different.

We can all get our, you know, download our classes from the Internet.

1:55:55

We can put a ring on that tells us what's going on when we sleep and all of that kind of thing.

But to sense yourself inside and to know when things are off.

You asked me a question a long time ago, which is what do I think the power of the fascial system is?

1:56:10

Does it have a communications aspect?

And yes, it does.

It clearly communicates tension and pressure.

That's its main job is to transfer force.

When the ferns, by which I mean the things that the the parts of the glue, the gooey stuff, which looks like a Fern if you look at it under a microscope, and they line up water molecules in rows like soldiers, the thousands of rows of modern molecules up.

1:56:41

So they organize the water in your body into what Gerald Pollock calls the fourth phase of Water I.

Don't know.

Easy water.

Easy water.

Yeah, structured water.

And so your body is structuring the water.

If your fascia is in a bad state, the ferns curl up.

1:56:59

They get sticky and they're obviously not organizing the water molecules.

The water molecules are just freely going out there.

So you want this stuff to actually be engaged with the water molecules of your body.

Now it looks for all the world like an antenna.

1:57:18

What is it an antenna for?

With 50 years of dealing with this thing, my answer is hunches.

It's your intuitive system.

We think of, oh, I'm having an intuition in my nervous system.

I don't think so.

You might realize it in your nervous system, you might give voice to it in your nervous system, but it was actually coming from your antenna that's tuned to where are the threats in the outside world.

1:57:44

One of the things in anatomy that where this goes is your nervous system is newer than your fascial system, your newest.

Your nervous system is really good at carrying coded signals across your body, signal from here to there, signal from your gut to your head on the vagus nerve.

1:58:05

But before that, before there was a central nervous system and an organized nervous system all over your body, it was your fascia that had channels all over your body.

Let's see new channels that they talk about in acupuncture.

And I think that system was capable of reacting faster than the nervous system.

1:58:24

Wow.

The evidence I'm going to present to this was I was going to show my girlfriend of the time, the petroglyphs in Santa Fe, and you have to walk through fields and desert to get to this petroglyph.

And she was walking in front and she said, are there snakes out here?

1:58:42

I went, no, there are cows out here.

The snakes don't like the cows.

You won't see any snakes, don't worry.

And she said, well, you walk in front anyway.

So I started walking.

It was not like 100 feet later, I almost stepped on 2 mating rattlesnakes.

They were mating.

1:58:58

The guy was not amused at yeah and came up and my partner said you went straight up in the air and then you went backwards and then you came down.

And it happened all very fast, too fast for an image of an unfamiliar terrain with an unfamiliar animal in it to register on my retina, go to the occipital lobe, come back to some basal ganglia or hypothalamus for recognition out through the limbic system, and I end up jumping.

1:59:27

I think that went on my fascial system.

I think there's an ancient thing, but it only does messages like help or danger fire.

It doesn't do things like, oh, can you just move your toes like this for the arpeggio of the Chopin that that has to happen from your nervous system.

1:59:45

But the things are withdrawal or total Organism.

Threat was carried original by the nervous, by the fascial system, and is now being carried with much more nuance by the fascials.

I've had this almost stepped on a rattlesnake.

2:00:02

I felt the the wind of the strike on the hairs of my leg and I I remember so distinctly what you're describing.

I stumbled back way, way before I I was stumbling before I even understood what was happening.

Like it.

It definitely was a primitive response.

2:00:19

The fascial system travels at 720 miles an hour.

Wow, I'm sorry, 520 miles an hour?

This.

Is what we're talking speed of sound?

Yeah, no, it's the speed of sound in water because it's an aqueous medium.

Yeah, it is a sound wave that went through my body and this could be dosed out.

2:00:36

Wow, that's three times faster than your fastest nerves.

Really.

So your fascial system communicates about three times faster than your nervous system, but it's not capable of them all the nuance that you're nervous of course.

And I'm not trying to say, oh, the vaginal system could take over.

2:00:51

From the Yeah, right, right.

Nothing like that.

I'm just saying, oh, it was the tunic that held you in and therefore it got sensors in it to what's going on outside.

Now that tunic is covered by skin.

The silver skin isn't that tunic.

It's covered by skin.

2:01:07

It goes all through you too.

So it's in with the organs.

But I believe we just let that whole system get so untuned in this generational slide that we're doing that that system got so untuned.

Our nervous system is tuned, but it's tuned to very particular things now, as you say on the Internet.

2:01:26

And our chemistry system is now tuned to glyphosate, to P files, to all the things that are coming in from the environment.

There's simply no question that cancers is, I believe, been proven beyond any doubt that cancers, some cancers are environmental, that they have nothing to do with your genes going wrong.

2:01:47

They are just the OR the genes go wrong because of the stimulation from the outside.

When you add 70,000 new chemicals into the environment every year, it's probably some of them are going to not be good.

Yeah, Wow.

So I yeah, so I do believe that there is a really wonderful human potential.

2:02:06

I see wonderful things happening with the young people that I know in the world and their desire to change it.

It often feels to me as if this stone is rolling down the hill and that even if we get really stroppy about it, we're going to have a hard time stopping that.

2:02:23

Rock, I was going to ask you, yeah.

Do you do you see us over the next decades?

It seems like there's a really like you could almost just thread the needle and not have catastrophe.

Or do you think that we that because there's a way of looking at the young people right now and be like, man, these kids are a mess.

2:02:44

But I feel like it's because life is so easy.

Like add some crisis and I think they pull together pretty well.

I've read that the greatest generation night, that World War Two generation, that there was a lot of talk when they were young about what, you know, how dumb these kids were.

They couldn't understand anything, blah, blah, blah.

And then the crisis of the war LED them to be the greatest generation.

2:03:02

And I wonder if this generation is going to inherit the crisis and hardship will generate strong people again.

Or do you think that maybe we thread the needle and somehow we can get through these next years without the.

2:03:18

Because it's just seems like everywhere you look is corruption and collapse.

Like every institution seems to have become not just corrupted, but almost the opposite of what it's supposed to be.

So you get like the regulatory agencies actually just become, they just end up bringing in the thing that they're supposed to be regulating, right?

2:03:35

So it's like you end up with.

That's trapped is.

Right.

Everything just seems to be like the hospitals, they should be taking care of health and what do they do?

They like cut, burn, poison people primarily and like, rather than doing what they should do or, or you know, it was like, oh, cool, we're going to have this like make America healthy again initiative.

2:03:53

It turns into like Monsanto's glyphosate.

You're like, it's the opposite of everything just seems to turn into the opposite of what it's supposed to be.

So it's like beyond corruption.

Do you think that this like something new is going to birth out of this without hardship?

Or do you think we just have to go through the difficult times?

2:04:10

If we are going to go back to the kind of mature, you say the Greatest Generation, and I would have said the grown-ups that it's been harder for my generation to grow up and harder for your generation after that to grow up to by by grow up, I mean mature, mature to real adults.

2:04:29

And some of that was just 1950s trek about, oh, the man should do this and the woman should do that is it's not universal, but some of it really is.

Are you responsible?

Are you responsible for your family?

Are you responsible for your community?

I'm responsible for my family, which is my company family.

2:04:47

Here I am perched in this community.

I depend on other people to plow the roads and to do the things and, and I don't do much with the town itself.

Other people do.

It's it's not my life because I'm under general teacher.

2:05:03

So I'm gone a lot of the time.

And I'm not blaming myself, but I am saying that, oh, being a responsible adult, a lot of people aren't doing that now.

And so if you want those responsible adults, I don't see any other way than the big hardship.

2:05:20

Another depression, another war.

That's what happened in the 30s.

You had a depression and then when the depression got over, it got over because of a war, started the whole industrial thing up again.

We're not going to do that.

We're going to have maybe another war.

We're certainly going to have a time when 9 billion people on the planet are going to have a hard time eating.

2:05:39

I, I don't see avoiding that.

But I'm an old man the the other way of looking at this, and I wish I had more of an answer 'cause this is an idea that I've just been contemplating my young friends and thinking is that there's another neoteny going on.

2:05:57

That the young are going in and joining on a subconscious level on the Internet so that there is a much larger substrate of unconscious.

And we're not aware of that 'cause we're conscious.

We're the conscious generation and we're children of the Greatest Generation who were trying to be conscious, but these kids are building a collective unconscious that we can't see yet and that will sustain them even though they don't have these skills.

2:06:25

Yep.

And they're the skills that we think are necessary, but we don't know the world that's coming, right?

Right.

It's going to be something we don't know, almost by definition.

Sure, like what they have front load adaptations for that we don't perceive yet.

Right.

So what is actually adaptive and what is essentially human and we can't take it away.

2:06:44

If we do take it away, we're no longer human.

Those things are, I do believe those are going to be tested and I believe the kids might be the, that whole generation might be building something that we don't yet understand that will emerge as it matures.

2:07:00

That it's, that it's in the womb now and you can't see it because it's in the womb.

Maybe in some years it will come out.

But that's, that's my hope also, that if humanity is going to transcend this thing.

We're hearing a lot about AI now and AI is going to, you were talking about robotics.

2:07:17

Robots are going to maybe replace all our jobs.

Great.

In the industrial world, you defined yourself by your work.

If you ask an American, what do you do?

They're going to tell you their work.

They're not going to tell you their artistic pursuit or that they go bowling on Tuesday night.

2:07:32

They're going to tell you their work.

And your work is not going to define your value anymore.

It's your engagement.

It's your connections.

I don't know.

I, I think feeling is going to be the thing because the Internet is so far relentlessly audio visual.

2:07:51

I teach a kinesthetic art, how to use your hands on somebody else's body in a very particular way.

I refused during COVID to certify people over the Internet.

You can't do that in an audio visual medium.

I need to feel your hands on my body.

2:08:07

It's a kinesthetic thing.

Now you can imagine some blanket that I could put over my shoulders and somebody in Australia could do this to another blanket and it would happen to me.

You know, they're doing that with surgery now and things like that, so I can imagine it hasn't happened.

Yet it's not there yet.

So right now you want job security, you can become a massage therapy because or, or it's like, oh, somebody, we're human feeling.

2:08:29

Because I think human feeling is going to be the currency of the future because it's going to be the irreducible.

Everything audio, visual is changeable.

And as Harare pointed out to US, money is a story we tell ourselves.

And what happened in the Great Depression is we lost faith in that construct of money and we now have a construct of money that's so far away from even the little pieces of paper that symbolized something that I was willing to take in return for my time because I could take those pieces of paper somewhere else.

2:08:59

That's a story we tell ourselves.

That story might, it might be this lifetime that that story goes out the window.

In which case your work, all that you built up in your life, all the things that were supposed to be the American Dream and the building of middle class life and the result of the Enlightenment from back in the 1700s.

2:09:18

All of that has reached its end.

Now we're we're going into something different.

And I only see you just ask two ways and the the two ways is that something spiritual and that all this inward going is going to build an unconscious or subconscious event that will then grow up.

2:09:35

And I probably won't understand it because I'm of a different generation, but but it will be the next thing that humanity does.

Or if we're in the more pedestrian world where people have to eat and we're not in AI disappearing into the silicone world and carbon based life forms are no longer necessary and all of that kind of thing, then I don't know.

2:09:57

That's the end of history for humans.

Too bad, because I like this experiment and I really liked my fellow humans.

Maybe next time we'll do a little better job.

But whether that's inherent evil in people or just sort of an accident of of how the whole thing unfolded, I have, I have no idea.

2:10:17

What do you think happens?

Do you when you die?

Do you believe in a soul?

Do you think you have a eternal peace?

Do you?

What do you think happens to your consciousness?

Well, for what it's worth, because this is just my belief, I believe consciousness is a material thing and that there's so much of it around this planet and that it's distributed to all the beings that are in some way participating in consciousness.

2:10:42

And you can ask, you know, trees, grass, dirt, I don't know.

But in terms of like.

Biological antennas for a consciousness that's already here, yes.

Yeah, yeah, that's your, Yes, an antenna or radio.

Yeah.

It's kind of a Rupert shell drinking an idea of morphogenetic fields and that kind of thing.

2:11:01

But so I believe when I die that the energetic patterns that I have made will go, will be part of this newest sphere that's around the planet.

Sphere of consciousness.

Sphere of consciousness I have.

I will be delighted if my personhood survives death, but I barely survived a divorce.

2:11:25

Yeah.

A divorce nearly killed me.

I don't expect to survive death, you know, if you go through that, I, I don't know where you are as a psychonaut, but I've been through those experiences with psychoactive medicines that I certainly died and all disassemble.

2:11:45

Right.

Yeah.

Disassembled and and was a symbol thing of consciousness.

And if I go through the bardo or whatever that is and I come out in another body, I will either have forgotten or I will be delighted that that is in fact the case.

But I don't, I don't know that I've done any.

2:12:02

I think people like Jesus or other enlightened folks might build a soul that would survive death to get out.

That's kind of a Gurdjieffian idea, but I don't think that I've done all the work that we.

Survived, so I.

Don't.

I don't expect Tom to show up in any other form other than my vibe.

2:12:21

Got to be part of the universe.

Somehow thanks for what you contributed while you're here for you brother.

Is there anything we haven't talked about that you want to make sure it comes up?

No, I think we got this.

I just I hope that people will take such joy in the body as I've been able because I was certainly care carefully educated by my parents to have neither a body nor emotions.

2:12:48

Feelings are something that other people have was was the way I was brought up and very New England, you know.

Yeah, very New England.

So to I'm still doing the work to get out of that particularly autistic way of being that my parents put in me with all the good intentions in the world and that I absorbed with all good intentions in the world that are now irrelevant and need to be taken out.

2:13:15

So I really hope that people who are tied up in their careers or tied up in the problems that they have will take some joy in their bodies.

And I my own research is that will repay you time again.

2:13:31

Yeah, this investment is a very worthwhile investment.

Well said.

Thank you so much.

It's been great to talk to you man.

Hey, what?

People want to get your stuff?

People want to get a tense egrity model or they want to get your book.

Yeah, yeah, I.

2:13:46

Want to please the kinds of things we're doing.

Thank you. www.anatomytrains.com is where we have all our courses.

We have tons of online stuff because of COVID, we've put things up there.

We are known for our dissections, which we do twice a year in Boulder, Co.

2:14:07

You can see them on TV, which is like looking over the shoulder of somebody who's really good at it, because it's our guy in Boulder who does this.

Or if you come to Boulder, you'll be doing the dissection.

Yourself that.

Warm and have a checkbook.

OK.

You don't have to be a therapist because I think to do some of your work you do need to have some background.

2:14:26

Do I recall that?

Yes, you in order to enter our training program which is my version of Rolfing, which is a program of sessions designed to reconfigure this facial system and particularly to get rid of the things that have accumulated over the years in those #3 areas.

2:14:43

And yes, those there are requirements for people to come into that, although we have in recent years taken in a lot of yoga teachers, Pilates teachers and trainers who don't have a manual therapy license.

They need to settle that with whatever jurisdiction they're working in.

2:14:59

That's not our job.

Our job is to train them.

And what I found is that some of the people who were in movement who don't have any experience with their hands can translate their movement experience into manual therapy very easily, and some cannot.

So we admit those folks, and then if they're not up to it, we say, why don't you go get a little training and massage and then come back and study with us.

2:15:21

But we train physios, osteopaths, chiropractors, massage therapists, acupuncturists, as I say, the movement people who come in.

And then occasionally we get people in who are researchers or I had an animator come in because he wanted to understand movement or to do his animation.

2:15:40

Beneficial.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's been a wonderful journey to do that.

But my people will be upset if I don't say that.

We have an app that we just put out Anatomy Trains for all.

So if you want to see some strange anatomy, like you want to see this bone, you were talking about the fascial bone.

2:15:58

I have a bone where you can just type it out in the bone and things like that.

These are these are all up on the website and we hope people will either come to a course, enjoy our website, or come see us in a dissection.

That's the.

I always tell people that your book should be.

I just think anybody who does anything with the body their, your book should be in their library.

2:16:19

Even if they don't understand it or read it, they just stall.

Yeah, you, you earlier you said something about being good with words.

And I was saying, well, you're good with the pictures too.

You really nailed the balance there because, you know, the reading is somewhat technical, but the, the imagery speaks volumes.

2:16:34

And so I think just to put that plug in, I just think that that's a crucial book.

I, I, it's funny because I grabbed my book off the shelf and I was like, I should get him to sign this.

Then I opened it up and you had already signed it.

And I was like, hey, I did that already.

But I think that's an essential reading for everybody with the body.

So put that plug in there for Anatomy Trains.

2:16:51

Well, we we do have people all over the world.

We have a find a practitioner thing on the site if you want.

To follow, I did want to ask about that because, yeah, people want to work with somebody who's trained under you.

There's a, there's a find a.

Practitioner thing and and sometimes if you e-mail us there's.

Somebody that's not up on the list that we can point you to in terms of finding people who are skilled to do this kind of unraveling.

2:17:13

I wish there were more people skilled in this kind of unraveling.

And I was just recently doing some work with a bunch of people who were very well trained physios and in that orthopedic world, and they just went, we did not get this in school.

2:17:31

We just did not get this kind of point of view.

Because if you're thinking of the body as a car and you're thinking of what part to replace, if you're thinking of the body as a tensegrity structure, it's a set of relationships.

And it's the relationships that are important, not the thing.

2:17:48

That's how, how are you going to deal with the sets of relationships in the body?

And that's, that's what I'm hoping to, you know, I'm working.

I figure I have about 10 years left in me.

I'm trying to build a faculty that will carry this thing on.

All I want to say that you're pretty blessed to have seen so much change from so many people.

2:18:07

The change from their work happens long after they're gone, you know, and get a lot done if you are willing for somebody else.

I think you.

A lot has happened in your lifetime with your work.

And that's pretty cool to get to see because obviously it will become more and more mainstream over time.

2:18:26

That's the direction it's trending in.

I'm glad that you haven't had to struggle an obscurity with this.

It seems like the world's embraced to a degree that is.

Yeah.

It's cool to see.

It is.

It's very interesting.

If you don't mind one more story, They.

I just went this spring to I was invited to a.

2:18:43

Tongue tie conference, We've been talking about how the jaw was getting smaller.

Well, maybe one effect of that is that children are being born with more tongue ties.

Whatever the reason, children, that's where they release that tissue from the frenulum under the tongue is too short for the baby to.

2:19:00

Latch properly on to the mother.

Mastitis, failure to thrive, lots of things fall on from this.

So it's the midwives.

The old midwives of Europe would keep a long fingernail and just if the, if the kid couldn't latch, that's cool.

2:19:17

Give it a little cut.

It's a lot less than circumcision, let me tell you.

And if this is very.

Little blood, it hurts for a few.

Minutes and then the baby you know put the.

Baby right back on the nipple.

So I see the argument for that.

And then of course, it got medicalized.

2:19:32

So then you need a procedure and then it's not going to happen for several weeks because the procedure has to be gone through.

But the procedures are surgical and you know, not somebody's dirty finger it out, go on under your tongue.

But the in this tongue tie conference, we had dentists, orthodontist surgeons, osteopaths, orthopods, physiotherapists, speech therapists, lactation consultants, doulas, midwives and all massage therapists and acupuncture small.

2:20:05

I love gatherings like that where everybody's gathered, but they're all different professions.

They all have different lingo and they all have different Argo and language in there in there things.

And that's a really good opportunity to make people talk together.

2:20:22

You have.

To use the same language, you can't use this term for this.

When these people are over here, you need to be able to talk to each other.

It's the same thing and or you're saying two different things, but it's actually, you're saying the same thing stretch, but it's actually two different things that you're doing and that needs to be distinguished.

2:20:40

We don't have a tree of spatial medicine, the medicine of the fascia of the body moving the way We have a tree for psychological medicine and a great big tree for chemical medicine.

What we have is yoga, CrossFit.

2:20:56

All these things are shooting up like little shoots out of the forest floor.

They have to combine into a tree.

And that's, that's that's what I am grateful to have been able to be able to wrap them all in a fascial sheath and send them down the tube.

Well, I appreciate your time today.

2:21:15

I.

Appreciate the work you do.

Thank you.

Very much.

Great.

This has been very enjoyable, Daniel.

Thank you.