Adam Haritan from Learn Your Land

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
There we go. All right, Welcome to the crime Pace
A bond he doesn't podcast. I'm stoked for today's guest.
It's Adam Hareton, who does the Learn your Land YouTube channel,
which is a much better quality production than me and
than crime Pace and also covers areas that crime Pace
doesn't normally go, which is eastern North America. All all

(00:23):
facets of ecology are covered in these videos. Stuff about
American chestnuts, how fire suppression causes, you know, explosions, and
tick populations, Morrell mushrooms. It's it's really yeah. I mean
you got a lot of good stuff here.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Man.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
I've been watching your channel for a while, so Adam Hereton,
welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Thanks great to be here. Finally, I mean I've been
following your stuff for a long time, and I would
say that probably the most recurring comment I get on
my videos is you have to do something with Joey.
You got to do something with crime pas. So finally
we're here. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, totally, man. Yeah, I mean I learned so much
watching your videos because, like I said, I mean I
spent I was spending time on the East coast, you know, Pennsylvania,
New York, et cetera. But long before I was in
the plants, like a decade before I got into any
of this stuff, and I was mostly just going through cities,
and this is kind of an area. I always get
people saying, Oh, you should come out east, and I'm like, yeah,

(01:22):
I'll make it there at some point, but I haven't really.
I dipped into Pittsburgh for a little bit last year.
But but yeah, anyway, the the these videos are put
together fucking great. I mean, like you could tell you
spend a lot of time editing and putting them, you know,
organizing them. They're fucking yeah. I love them. I was
watching a bunch yesterday too. The one that really got

(01:44):
me excited was the tick video, and I guess we'll
just talk about that first. We'll just jump right into it.
Explain to everybody, because this what was It was like
a thirty minute video on basically how uh you know
all the facett to the ecosystem, earthworms, fire, you know, predators,

(02:05):
et cetera, have influenced this explosion in ticks, which is
when I think of the East coast, that's fucking terrifying
to me, Like that's what scares me the most. Is
that there's just ticks everywhere. And it's like this in
Chicago too, because the deer population is so big. So
explain to everybody. I guess how how this all started?

(02:25):
Like what is this? What's going on with the tech
population in eastern North America.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
So there's a lot going on with the tech population
in eastern North America. And I can't speak on behalf
of all of eastern North America because although a lot
of my videos are filmed here, it's mostly in the
mid Atlantic northeastern portion of the United States. So I
live in western Pennsylvania, a bit north of Pittsburgh, so
most of my videos are filmed here. But I have
traveled a bit around the East Coast. And when you

(02:54):
talk to people who have been around a bit and
you learn about their back ground or their childhood and
maybe them hunting in the woods or fishing or foraging,
you learn that they didn't really experience the tick abundance
that we're experiencing right now. A lot of people say

(03:14):
that when they were growing up, they didn't see a
single tick, They never got bitten by a tick, they
never heard of lyme disease, they didn't know anybody getting
sick from it, and then all of the sudden, it
seems like people as they got older started hearing more
about ticks and seeing more ticks and pulling ticks off
of them and knowing friends or family members who came
down with the tick born illness, or even they perhaps

(03:36):
came down with the tick born illness. So it seems
like there was something that happened in the past couple
of decades, and nobody is quite sure exactly what happens
or what happened over the past couple of decades to
lead to this explosion. But if you look back at
the history of land use changes in the United States
and how people have treated forests and have treated farms

(03:58):
and have left farms and abandon them and let forest grow,
and then you see what's happening with development and explosion
and all these housing developments near cities away from cities
in a rural areas, and you start putting things together,
and then you start studying a little bit about ecology,
you start to make sense of perhaps what might be

(04:18):
going on, and it seems like fire suppression could be
one of those factors that's driving the explosion in ticks,
and it's not probably the only thing that's going on.
But a lot of people are saying, especially acologists, they're
saying that this is a big factor that's often overlooked,
and a lot of people aren't really talking about it
because they're not quite sure to what extent this is

(04:40):
the factor that's causing it. But if we go back,
perhaps let's say, six hundred to seven hundred years, in
the Eastern United States, I don't think a lot of
people realize, and I didn't for a long time, and
it still kind of boggles my mind to learn that
a lot of eastern North America was burned, and it
was burned pretty frequently. And maybe that surprises a lot

(05:02):
of us because we think of maybe fires occurring in
the West Coast or the Pacific Northwest, but surely not
here in eastern North America because things just seem too
moist or too wet, and we don't have a lot
of fires wildfires here, at least in the Eastern United
States because of something called fire suppression, which was a
big cultural and political and social movement pretty much starting

(05:25):
in the early nineteen hundreds. But before all this, a
lot of fires did occur in the Eastern United States,
and throughout eastern North America, and they weren't just caused
by lightning. And a lot of people think, well, if
there's going to be a fire, it's going to be
caused by lightning. But it seems that a lot of
people were burning forests as well all over eastern North America,
even in some areas that maybe people wouldn't expect, For example,

(05:46):
the Great Smoky Mountains. I don't know if you've ever
been there, but it's a pretty rich music area with
a lot of big trees. There's some old growth left
in there, and it seems like fires might not have
been common there, But if you look at the historical
record around there, there were clear you know, when settlers
came here, they saw big grassy areas, they saw maize fields,
and the reason that these areas were so open was

(06:09):
because of fire set by indigenous human beings. And so
this was a common practice to open up the land
to travel much more easily, to hunt more easily, to
foster the growth of certain berry producing plants, to clear
the land, just to open it up for a lot
of utilitarian purposes. And so this was a common practice.

(06:31):
And then whenever indigenous people started getting pushed more westward,
or being put on reservations, or just being decimated by
European diseases. Interestingly, throughout the seventeen hundreds eighteen hundreds, fires
were actually still common, so it was a common practice
for early European settlers to set fire to the landscape
for pretty much the same reasons, but interestingly, a lot

(06:53):
of these fires were actually more severe. So when we're
talking about indigenous burning practices, in a lot of cases
in eastern North America, these were low to moderate intensity fires.
There were surface fires, they weren't necessarily catastrophic fires, and
they really couldn't be in many cases because if you
set low to modern periodic fires routinely, then you kind

(07:13):
of reduce the fuel load and you don't have a
lot of fuel to climb up into these canopies and
cause these catastrophic fires. And then when Europeans came here,
they kind of started setting fires as well and burning
the landscape. But then something started shifting around the mid
eighteen hundreds into the early nineteen hundreds with new technology,
with the railroads, with the logging crews and the logging

(07:37):
industry that came through, and just massive clearcuts occurring throughout
eastern North America. You had force that were essentially decimated,
but you had a lot of slash as well. You
had a lot of branches, you had a lot of
trunks down, you had a lot of stumps, and these
either caught fire intentionally or unintentionally through sparks for locomotives
going by from the railroad industry, and so you had

(07:58):
these catastrophic fires. Interestingly, this actually favored the reduction of
ticks all these fires, because when you have fires, of course,
it can burn up ticks, but that's not necessarily the
major reason that ticks can see a reduction in populations
if there's fires. But you have open landscapes and ticks
at least in eastern North American, specifically the black leg

(08:21):
at tick, which is probably the most common one here
in the northeast. These ticks don't really like open environments
because if you know anything about ticks, ticks really like moist, humid,
kind of wet conditions. They thrive in these conditions, and
that's why you see a lot of ticks in the spring.
You see them in the fall as well, and sometimes
when it's very very dry and very very sunny and

(08:42):
just very hot, you don't see a lot of ticks
because desiccation is one of the causes, one of the
major causes of their mortality. And so when you have fire,
even low to modern intensity fires, you open up the woodlands.
And even if you have savannahs or open oak woodlands
or savannahs, you still have trees, of course, but you

(09:03):
don't have a lot of leaf litter for ticks to
hide under. You have more wind coming through, you have
more solar intensity coming through, and these all reduced tick populations,
and so this was kind of kept in check until
about the early nineteen hundreds. And then interestingly, even with
the reduction in chestnut trees American chestnut when chestnut blake

(09:23):
came through, that favored the reduction of ticks as well,
because whitefooted mice were reduced, or Eastern chipmunks were reduced
through the decimation of the American chestnut and Eastern chipmunk
and whitefooted mice, these are reservoirs for lime disease, and
ficks really liked these animals. But then things started changing
with fire suppressions. So fire suppression came around early nineteen hundred,

(09:46):
specifically in the nineteen thirties, and then because of this,
people stopped fires. And interestingly, it wasn't necessarily because people
recognized how infrastructure could be damaged, or is maybe it's
not too aesthetically pleasing to see fires burning in the woods.
It was mostly the timber industry. They were worried about
their products. They didn't want their trees being decimated because

(10:10):
they were valuable, and so fire suppression would allow these
trees to grow. So the timber industry was behind a
lot of this, and it stuck, and it sticks even
till this day. Because a lot of people, not necessarily
colleges or foragers, but people who don't necessarily spend a
lot of time in the woods, they'll think that fires
are always a bad thing, and it's not true at all.

(10:31):
But because of fire suppression, a lot of our forests
are regrowing right now, which is a good thing in
many instances. But they're different because there's a process called
mesofication which is taking place, which is the conversion of
these formerly dry, open zero ecosystems with a lot of
oaks and pines into closed canopyed moist, humid maple tulip tree,

(10:55):
black dumb American beech woods, which ticks love because they're moist.
The humid there's a lot of moist leaf litter. It
takes are just thriving right now in these kinds of conditions.
So that's a brief history of all the things that
I kind of talked about in that video. That was
fucking t aout it.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
But that was pretty much. That was so articulate. Seriously, man,
thank you. That was like a I don't know, did
you didn't? You should put a book together at some
point if you haven't already. I didn't check if you have.
But yeah, I'm sorry, I'll get off your jock. But
the fucking diversity is I'm looking through the website right now,
learn your land dot com, which is this is very

(11:34):
nice for interviewing you too, because it's got all the
topics you've done, all the videos. But but yeah, that
was fucking do a book. It do a book sometime, please.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
Okay, but uh, I'll think about it.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
But anyway, Yeah, the thing that when I saw that
video with I think the thing that really I always
connected like burning and texts because you know, out West,
I've spent twenty years living in California, I've still got
some PTSD from certain parts of it. But now I'm
getting PTSD from Texas where I live now. I had
to move here for family. But when I was in California,

(12:05):
you know, burn. It's a Mediterranean climate. In northern California.
Burning is talked about all the time there among the colleges.
It's like, we need to burn all the plants are
so many of the plants are adapted to burning. There
are arctostapflos, the manzanitas, won't they a lot of them
won't germinate without smoke treatment, like you literally to germinate
the seeds. People at the Native Plant Garden were literally

(12:27):
using stubs liquid smoke in a you know, warming it
up with water in a concentration and soaking the seeds
in it for a day or two. So you know
it's and there's cypresses hypericiprus that the cones don't open
unless they get a low burning fire and it melts
the resin between the scales like you know, pint. Some
lot of pine species out there like that too. So

(12:47):
I knew that fire could have a beneficial, you know,
effect on plant life. And it's especially out west if
you don't get those low burning fires you know, ever
so frequently. Then that's when you get those maps of
infernos that turn the sky red for five days, which
is terrifying anyway. But coming out east, I mean, you know,

(13:08):
seeing I was the friend in Alabama a few months
ago and seeing, God, damn, I mean, you've got so
much rain there compared to when you move west that
you just get this explosion of growth every year, even
though the winters can get really cold, and with all
that growth, it's all that biomass. You got to get

(13:29):
rid of it somehow or else you're just gonna have
these forests that are just thickets, especially with invasive species,
like that's what all the forest reserves in Chicago looked
like when I was a little boy growing up. It
was just European buckthorn everywhere. It was fucking horrible. And
they're finally starting to masticate. They haven't burned in some
of the forest preserves because I think some of the

(13:49):
suburbanites are still a little too freaked out by it.
But they'll go masticate, which is better than nothing, But
that doesn't deal with the ticks. But when I watched
that video that you did, and you talk about the
layer of hummus humus I guess right, not the fucking
peda ingredient, but hummus on the ground. It got me thinking,

(14:10):
I'm like, oh, yeah, this whole like micro climate of
humidity that's kept intact by all this duff that's not burning.
That's got to be paradise for the nymphs, for tick nimps.
And so it really got me thinking like, oh, there's
this whole other element that I thought of that I
didn't really think about with that microclimate of humidity that's

(14:32):
removed when you burn, you know. And then also, you know,
for indigenous burning practices, you think, if you don't have
widespread metallurgy, what's the you know, but you need to
prune force so that you can walk through them. What's
the easiest way to do that? Just burn it right
time of year, you know, when it's not going to
blow up, but it's still you're able to get it going.

(14:52):
That's like the most practical easiest way to do that
to clear out the understory. So it's good for hunting
and walking through, et cetera. What about because the video
is about earthworms though, what effect have tell me that angle?
I guess what's the angle of the earthworms for affecting
tape populations.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
Yeah, so earthworms, I mean they're interesting because here where
I live in Pennsylvania, supposedly there are no native earthworms
to the state of Pennsylvania currently, although I think some
researchers just saying, yeah, there's actually a couple, but they're
not that common. But by far, the most common earthworms
that you're going to see are non native earthworms. And

(15:34):
pretty much all the native earthworms in this area were
wiped out by the most recent ice age with the
glaciers coming down. And I mean a lot of people
have good things to say about earthworms, and I'm not
here to say that there's nothing good about earthworms around here,
because a lot of gardeners like them, a lot of
composters really like earthworms, and I'm sure they're doing some
okay things in certain conditions, but for native forest health

(15:57):
in Pennsylvania in the Northeast, in these formerly glaciated areas,
earthworms actually cause significant changes to forest ecology because they
consume the duff layer, they consume that humanus layer, they
consume all that organic material, which is why composters, people
who like the compost food and work on that kind
of stuff. They really like earthworms because of that activity,

(16:20):
but unfortunately that kind of destroys a lot of native
plant populations because a lot of that duff layer, that
like spongy layer. I don't know if you've ever walked
through like a really intact of course you have for
people listening, if you've never walked through a real spongy forest,
maybe an older growth forest, but there's just like so
much not necessarily plant growth, although that can be the case,

(16:43):
but just a lot of leaf litter, a lot of debris,
and you kind of feel like you're just like walking
on a springy material. It's very different than walking in
a very degraded forest that was recently cleared for agriculture
and then left to grow up again into a forest
that's very dense and very hard and very compacted. But

(17:03):
the earthworms consume that leaf layer. And the angle that
I was presenting in the video is, well, isn't that
good then for tick reduction? Because if ticks hang out
in that leaf litter, which they do because remember ticks
don't like to be desiccated, that's probably the number one
cause immortality. And so if they hide in that leaf
litter even in the winter months, they'll stay alive even

(17:25):
with several inches of snow on the ground six inches
twelve inches of snow on the ground. As long as
they're in that leaf layer, it's warmer in there and
they'll survive. And so with earthworms coming in, and they
came in many many centuries ago, well in the areas
that are heavily infested with these earthworms, wouldn't that be
better for tick reduction? And could that be a strategy, meaning,

(17:49):
if there's a force that has just so many ticks,
should we bring earthworms in and let them go and
just let them consume that leaf litter. And I guess
some researchers are looking at this, but I don't think
any ecologist is seriously considering releasing more earthworms into intact
ecosystems as a tick production strategy. There has been research

(18:09):
on it, and it seems like it can work, but
to me, it doesn't seem convincing enough, and I don't
think many people are advocating strictly for the release of earthworms.
There's a populations. Yeah, so that's where I thought, well,
maybe fire, how about fire? Because what else reduces leaf litter?
We're not going to rake the woods. We're not going
out there with our rakes or leaf flowers. That's not

(18:30):
gonna work. Yeah, And so I thought, honestly, I wasn't
seeing this in the research with the earthworms. People would
just talk about earthworms and the research, and I thought, well,
what else reduces leaffltter? Oh? How about fire? So I
was like, well, let's see what fire does. And sure enough,

(18:51):
fire seems to be a much more viable strategy, and
it's got so many other benefits as well, because it'll
help halt this nissification process, which a lot of ecologists
say is not necessarily a good thing, because it seems
like oaks and hickories and chestnuts and pines might be
more valuable and that's a subjective term, but according to ecologist,

(19:13):
might be more valuable to wildlife populations and to humans
as well, compared to red maple and tulip tree and
black gum and all these other miso. Yeah, vibess.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
Pittsburgh gets forty inches of rain a year, man, that's
fucking crazy. And then you go to like, you know, Maryland,
and they get like fifty inches of rain. That's so
much water. That's I mean Chicago, I think is like
at thirty where I live now in the Payote Gardens
of South Texas, we get like twenty two inches of
rain a year, maybe twenty five I don't know. But
it's humid as balls down here. But you know that's

(19:46):
so with that much rainfall, you're going to get so
much biomass. Like so it's great for the plants obviously,
but then after a few years it stops being so great,
and that's when you get those you know, just overcrowded
forests that need to be burned. I mean, that's what
if you had, like I'm not sure you know, if

(20:07):
you what you're living setups like, but if you had
a patch of land with forests, then I mean, would
you you would be what would you do to limit ticks? Obviously,
try to keep deer out to some extent or at
least maybe call them if they get If there's too many,
you could take like little cotton balls with the permethron treatment,
give them to the field mice. Right there, wasn't that

(20:28):
something they were doing for a while. They bring them
to the nest and then it kills any you know,
I'm not sure, how do you how do you dose
a mouth mouse with permethron without killing it? You know,
so it's not toxic for the mouse. I don't know.
But uh, and then burning, Like what what can people do?
I guess too, because that's something I get, you know,
because I'm with the killer lawn stuff. I'm always promoting.

(20:52):
I'm like, I just plant the native plant card and
people are always like, oh, taxs, ticks. I get ticks
and just keep the deer out. And you got to burn,
you know. Jerry Wilhelm, the author of Flora of the
Chicago Region, who lives in fucking suburban Chicago, sets fire
to his yard every years. It's fucking hilarious. He's like this,
He's this badass, like seventy five year old man. You know,

(21:15):
there's maybe seventy I don't know, no offense, Jerry, but
he's out there like burning. He's got like suburban neighbors.
He lives in a cul de sac and you know,
his house at first looks abandoned because it's all these
beautiful prairie plants, but he burns it every year. And anyway,
I'm rambling, but what would what would you recommend for
people to limit ticks if they live in the Music East.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah, it's funny because a lot of times when I
post something about ticks and what to do in forests,
like large scale solutions, a lot of people say, oh,
just get chickens or guinea fowl. It's like, okay, yeah,
that'll work in your backyard. But I don't think it's
going to work in like the Alleghany National Force.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
What do they do to eat?

Speaker 2 (21:54):
Now? How people are going to release solve it with that?

Speaker 1 (21:56):
The chickens are going to eat all the tip really, like,
how do they get some possible they're gonna miss?

Speaker 2 (22:01):
It's actually yeah, to eat all of them for sure.
I mean going back to the benefits of fire, I
think I mentioned in that video that one of the
benefits of restoring fire is that you support certain predators
of ticks like bob boy quail, which drive in fire
dependent ecosystems. So I mean that's the thing where people
get the chickens in the guinea fowl, and I bet

(22:23):
it work. I can't say it doesn't work because a
lot of people say it does work in their backyards.
I just don't think as a large scale solution it
would work. But if I mean, I don't own property.
So I've never done this before. But when I see
woodlots or I explore people's properties and they're asking me, like,
what would you do to this landscape? First I tell
them that this isn't going to be a solution that's

(22:44):
gonna occur in your lifetime. It might take multiple generations
in order for something significant to occur, because you have
to remember, it took a long time for this to happen.
It's not like it just happened in one year. It
would just happened in ten years. There's so many things
that took place in order for the forest to start
looking like this in the east, and so it's something

(23:06):
that's like it might take multiple generations in order for
the biggest benefits to a crew. But I would open
up the woods as much as possible because opening up
increases dryness, it increases solar radiation, and it prevents a
lot of those questing environments for the ticks. And questing

(23:27):
just means whenever the ticks climb up grasses or Japanese
barberry and they're trying to sense for any kind of
animal walking by. But yeah, yeah, I mean you could
see them. Sometimes A lot of people think you can't
see them, but if you look closely enough, you'll see them.
But I would select for more fire dependent or zero

(23:48):
species on a landscape, meaning oaks and hickorys and chestnuts
and pines over maples and tulip trees and beaches and
black gums and other trees like that, because those lead
to a pretty quick closed canopy forest. It leads to
more moist conditions in the forest floor. Those leaves stay
wetter longer, and it's a positive feedback loop where the

(24:11):
longer you let that go, the harder it is to
reverse that. So the sooner you could start I mean
replacing those trees or getting rid of them, or if
you have oaks in your woods and you have maples
as well, I mean, I know a lot of people
don't like to cut trees down because they think every
single tree is valuable, and I get that, But if
you're looking to reduce take populations in your woods, maybe

(24:31):
start cutting down some of those maples and giving those
oaks a chance to live. Because oaks require certain All
species do, but oaks in particular, they're pretty finicky to
get them to grow because they need a lot of light,
not a lot of oaks are super state tolerant. They
need a lot of light, which is why they like fire,
because it reduces competition and it keeps them away and
it opens up the canopy. But sometimes it's not enough,

(24:53):
and you need to get mechanical treatment in there, like
cutting down some species in order to let the oaks thrive.
But once you have oaks and hickory's in there, if
you've ever been in an oak savannah or even an
oak forest dominated by these species, you know that the
canopy is much more open compared to a beach forest
or hemlock forest, or a red maple forest or tulip tree,

(25:16):
because those canopies are so much denser and they just
create those cooler moisture conditions for ticks. But even if
you have a lot of oaks in an area, the
canopy just isn't as dense, and so it dries out
the undergrowth so much more quickly. But I would just
keep in mind that it might not happen in your lifetime,
but you could take the steps and set this process

(25:37):
in motion so that hopefully the next generation will care
enough to keep it going.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
Yeah, and burn if you can, I would say, definitely
burn you guys, don't really you're in you're near Pittsburgh, right,
there's not many. There's a couple prairies there, but as
you go further east, you don't. Prairies aren't really a
thing too much. Prairies and savannahs or what it's mostly
woodlands or what is it?

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah, I mean there's debate whether that tallgrass prairie peninsula
ever came into Pennsylvania. I think the latest Reacher research
said it didn't. But we do have I think you've been.
There's the Jennings Prairie. Yeah, in western Pennsylvania, which is yeah,
it's a prairie remnant, but it's not really dominated by grasses.

(26:20):
It's dominated by forbes, which is why some people say
that it's not a true prairie. But regardless, we do
have some open habitats. I mean, we have barrens in Pennsylvania.
We have serpentine barrens, we have shale barrens. So we
do have open dry fire somewhat taller an ecosystem. So
it's not unheard of to have these kinds of habitats

(26:40):
in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Did you did you? You guys? There's there's timber rattlers
out there, right? Is that Crotalus horridus? What is the
timber rattlesnake? Do you get? Do you get? There's rattlesnakes
are endangered in Pennsylvania, aren't they? They're they're not very common.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
I don't know if they're officially listed as endangered, but
they're definitely not as common as they used to be.
But I mean you could still. I believe I should
check this out. But people still go out and trap rattlesnakes,
like with your I think you're well, you're hunting. I
don't know if it's your hunting license or your fish license.
Meaning I don't think they're so endanger that you can't

(27:16):
go out and trap them.

Speaker 1 (27:17):
Uh yeah, yeah, but I would.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Definitely fact check that before something goes out and does that.
Having said that, there are rattlesnakes around here, I've seen
them certainly not as common as they used to be
because of people. There's just too many people and they
like to hide. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
Oh you get massive sagas out there too, right.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yes, including in the Jennings Prairie.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Oh it was so cute. I love those things. Yeah,
it with the snake hate again. You know, I've been
to Australia, where the snakes aren't nice enough to warn
you when you're close, and they're a lot more aggressive,
you know, the the lapids, the cobra relatives. And I'm
just like, fuck, man, we've got it. We're so spoiled
in North America with these these generally kind and courteous

(27:59):
pit vipers that let us know when we're too close.
I was with my daughter the other day and we
were at this little coastal area near U near Brownsville,
and this thing just rattled at us. I didn't even
see it. It was like six feet away, and I was like, oh,
thank you, thanks for the heads up. We'll just you know,
go around. But uh, yeah, I don't know. I just
I remember seeing something about how there the populations are

(28:22):
declining out there and timber rattles next. I guess they
do blend in very well. They can. If they don't rattle,
you're kind of fucked. But uh, you know, it's all
the more reason not to kill them. And the ones
that rattle let them live. They what do they mostly
do They trap them and just move them, or they
trap them and kill them and use them for the
skin or what?

Speaker 2 (28:42):
No, I think I mean, you should fact check this
because I'm not entirely sure and I'm not going to
look it up while I'm on this call. But I
know people that go out and trap them during there's
a season for them. Like, you can go out and
I think you can keep one, meaning I think you
can kill it. But I would definitely google that or
look online first before anybody goes out and does that.

(29:04):
But you definitely there's regulations for it. You can't just
do it any time of the year.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah, I've never done it. I have no interest in
doing it at all. I just know there's people that
go out and do it in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
Okay, So moving on to there was you recently did
another video too about Parkinson's and golf courses, and I
remember seeing that that coming up in the news, Parkinson's
disease being linked to I presume just all the shit
they spray on golf courses. What's going on here?

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Yeah, I mean there could be a lot going on there.
I mean, there could be a lot of variables. There
was a study that came out earlier this year showing
a link between living within a few miles of a
golf golf course and the risk of developing Parkinson's disease,
and it seems like what the mechanism is is not

(29:59):
necessarily brief in the toxic chemicals, like if you live
nearby and they spray the golf course with all these
chemicals and you're breathing it in, although that could be
the case, but it's infiltrating into the water supply. And
so if you're in an area where you get your
water from a water supply company, whether it's an aquifer,
whether it's a well, whether it's from the river, but

(30:19):
there's also a golf course in the area as well,
the risk seems to be greater for developing Parkinson's disease
compared to if you don't share water supply source with
that golf course. And the risk is even greater if
you live in what's called a vulnerable ground water region,
where the land might be even more porous, meaning there's
probably limestone in the area or kars geology, so that

(30:44):
these chemicals can infiltrate much more quickly into the water
supply or even more mineral based soils as well. But
if you live in an area with maybe a lot
of sandstone or maybe a lot of shale, maybe not
so much. There's definitely no cause that's linked in this study.
It's all causation and association. But I mean to me,

(31:05):
it kind of makes sense. It doesn't seem too alarming.
I think golf courses have been linked or at least
pasticize I should say pasticides have been linked to nerrod
degenerative diseases for many years. And so this is just
like another study that maybe makes a stronger link to
that connection.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, and you think, how you think how absurd it
is to maintain this closely mode turf that you know,
it wouldn't occur anywhere in nature. I guess some you know,
in alpine areas, some sedges and cushion plants can kind
of take that form, but like, no, no grass species
grows to a height of half an inch or an
inch and then stops growing with you know, and doesn't flower.

(31:47):
Grass species all flower of course, So because it's such
an anomaly in nature, it's it's and also because you're
keeping it so closely prune, it's like in a perpetually
stressed state, it's going to take a lot of fluffing
and extra babying and nurturing normally in the form of
chemicals and fertilizers and pesticides to keep this thing alive.

(32:11):
So it makes sense that, you know, as fuck man,
it's it's I see him trying to do golf courses
here in South Texas. It's like in a it's nice.
They all look you know, they look dead even with
all the irrigation because it's one hundred and five degrees
for six months. It's kind of insanity. But but yeah,
it's it's.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (32:28):
I thought that was an interesting link when I saw
that story come up in the news a few months ago.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
So anyway, yeah, I mean it seems like I guess
some people might think, oh, what does it have to
do with nature or ecology, But it's like if you
do study groundwater and geology and you learn how water
flows through the earth before it gets to you, you
could see kind of where the areas are that might
be more vulnerable because if you have a lot of soil,

(32:56):
you have a lot of porous material that kind of
filters out some of the toxins, like I said, sandstone,
maybe then you might not be as high of a
risk as somebody who lives in an area with the
water just rapidly gets into the aquafa super quickly without
going through a stage of being filtered over time.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yeah, I think that's.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
Where like the limestone and the cars comes in.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
It's got everything to do with with with ecology, and
I think it's I don't know, man, it's definitely. I mean,
it's it's in the ecosystem. It's affecting the larger living machine.
You guys don't get. You guys don't get much. I
guess you get some granite out there, you don't get
many many igneous rocks, like whether volcanic or intrusive stuff.

(33:39):
Do you in the Pennsylvania In Pennsylvania, yes, but not
in western Pennsylvania.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
So I mean a lot of geologists make the joke
that it's just sandstone shale coal in western Pennsylvania. But
once you get into like the Ridge and Valley Province
out east, where we've got a lot of metamorphic rock,
then you start getting into some interesting things. You've got
diabase in your Gettysburg as well, which is really interesting
because if you study Gettysburg in the Civil War, it's

(34:07):
intimately linked the geology and a lot of people might
not make that connection, but it really is so we
have all kinds of rock in pensylvand western Pennsylvania, mostly sedimentar.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
You can't say that and just move on. Let's get
into that a little bit. Get Okay, what's the.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
I'm not an expert on it. That's why I moved
on through.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
Okay, all right, Okay, I'll let it go. Sorry, but man,
you're just okay.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
So some of the soldiers would hide behind diabase, like
if you think of Devil's I don't know if you
know anything about Gettysburg, but Gettysburg is basically just massive
farmland and it's open, but there's these massive boulders scattered around.
And these boulders are diabase, which is idaneous rock. And
what's interesting is that, you know, sometimes in warfare, you

(34:47):
would dig down into the earth to find or to
make trenches for yourself to hide from enemies. Well you
couldn't do that in Gettysburg because diabase was right underneath
the soil, like a small layer soil. There's not much
soil there because diabase was so close. Oh, so they
had a hide behind boulders. That was basically it. It's
like the only place you could really hide or in

(35:08):
road cuts created by the railroad that was going through.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah, that's fucking fascinating.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
So a lot of the soldiers just hid behind diabase.
If you search Gettysburg on the internet and you look
at those photos and you see these massive boulders, it's
all just igneous rock diabase.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, which is it's it's like a yeah, it's like
the equivalent of the salt, but you normally get diabased
and like dykes, like intrusions and stuff. They call it
something different in South Africa. What is it called? They
call it? Oh god, I was down there. They were
calling it the dolrite. Yeah, they were like, oh, there's dolaright. Uh.
I can't do the South African accent, but it's it's

(35:45):
super common out there. But yeah, that's wild. Man. The Yeah,
when me and Al came out the Pittsburgh we were
doing shows there last year, there were so many fucking
road cuts I wanted to stop at.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
When we got the Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a fucking great city. Man.
We had an it's really cool. It's old. It's like,
you know, bike friendly, pedestrian friendly in certain parts, which
I like. And then thee Carnegie Museum was fucking dope too.
That's like the geology stuff they have there. The geology
exhibits are amazing.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, And I mean we've got so many road cuts
because they're kind of necessary because there's so many hills
and valleys, and not necessarily because it's mountainous here. I mean,
if you look at the road cuts, everything is pretty
much horizontal throughout western Pennsylvania. But there's just been so
much erosion from the rivers and the streams and the
creeks that over time it kind of looks mountainous in

(36:39):
western Pennsylvania. It's interesting because a lot of people who
hunt will say, oh, I'm going up into the mountains,
and it's like, no, you're not. You're just going up
in the northwestern Pennsylvania. It's actually a plateau geologically speaking,
but it's just been so dissected that it kind of
looks mountainous. But unlike mountains, all the peaks are the
same level. Like if you look if you stand on

(37:00):
top of one ridge in Pennsylvania, just look out across.
It's not like you see all these peaks of different heights.
They're all the same because it was all raised together
and then it was cut by.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
S so it's like Colorado Plateau action, Like the uplift
created this basically big ass mesa that was then relieved
worked on by water. And there were glaciers there too,
weren't there.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
Yeah, northwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Pennsylvania. The cutoff was north
of Pittsburgh. They never made their way down here to Pittsburgh,
but of course it was heavily influenced by glacial activity
in Pittsburgh. Like our rivers used to flow north to
the Erie Basin and after the ancestral Saint Lawrence seaway
and now they all go down to the Gulf of

(37:47):
Mexico pretty.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
Much, which is a result of just massive glacial melt
I assume.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Huh, yeah, just massive glaciers coming down, blocking the north
flowing rivers and then creating these massive glacial lakes that
had nowhere else to go but south. They just kind
of reversed their course.

Speaker 1 (38:07):
Yeah, okay, So next moving on, next topic, I want
to talk to you about two. I saw that I
watched the Passenger pigeon video last night, which is, you know,
it's hard to it's hard to not almost shed a
tear every time you you know, read about this or
think about it. I mean, such a widespread and beautiful
bird species being wiped out, which the last one died

(38:30):
with like nineteen fourteen in a zoo in Ohio or something.
But how did they affect the ecology? I mean these
obviously had a massive effect on the ecology. There was
a huge population. It's kind of unthinkable that humans could,
you know, wipe out a species that was this this abundant.

(38:50):
But what was their effect on the ecology and how
did it change when they were gone?

Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yeah, so passenger pigeons, I mean that's an interesting topic
and a lot of people don't get into the ecology
of them, but it is really really fascinating because when
we study you know, forest change and why forests look
the way they do today and what they might have
looked like. When we think of big forces that have
shaped the landscape, of course we think of you know,

(39:17):
modern human activity like logging and clearing the land for agriculture, burning.
Of course, we think of flooding, we think of wind storms,
we think of ice storms, but we usually don't think
of birds, especially pigeons. So it's like, well, how could
pigeons influence the landscape? Well, when there are literally billions
of them, they really can. And so when passenger pigeons

(39:40):
would get together and roost or migrate, they migrate that far.
But when they did, they would roost sometimes in the
millions or hundreds of millions, and travel together. And of
course we've probably all heard these stories of them darkening
the skies and for days, you know, just looking up
and just seeing these massive flocks of birds traveling. So

(40:00):
of course, when you think about that, and then you
think of what effect they might have in the landscape,
you think, well, maybe they did have a significant effect.
And one of the most significant effects was just breaking
things and destroying what was there in the forest goes
through mechanical action, literally just roosting on these branches and
literally just breaking them, just knocking them off. And also

(40:22):
they're done just covering the ground and killing everything underneath.
And if you walk around some of the woods today
in the northeast, wherever the lantern flies are, you could
see this exitate that they excrete, and it's all black underneath,
and it kills a lot of the vegetation underneath. And
it's not on a big scale whenever you see this stuff,

(40:42):
because it's not like you walk through the woods now
and see, oh my gosh, everything's destroyed because of the
lantern flies. Despite what a lot of the media says,
you just see a lot of black, gooey stuff underneath them.
But I imagine that almost times a million when I think
of passenger pigeons just excreting all this done and literally
the understory, but also breaking things and opening up the canopy.

(41:04):
So this is almost similar. In early accounts would describe
this almost like a tornado coming through that kind of
power and just clearing essentially these areas and opening them up.
And of course a lot of people didn't like that
because they wanted the trees to grow, they wanted to
make money on them. They didn't like all this black
stuff underneath on the ground or this rotting material. But

(41:27):
that's one of the effects that the passenger pigeons would
have to open up the forest. But there's other smaller effects,
maybe not necessarily smaller, but maybe not as easy to prove.
A lot of the collegists say that one reason that
red oak became more dominant in the early nineteen hundreds
and white oak decreased was because passenger pigeons became extinct

(41:49):
and they used to feed on red oak acorns, and
then once the passenger pigeons would when extinct, all these
red oak acorns could grow and grow up in the
bigger trees, and they kind of outcompeted the white oaks
because they grow much more quickly than white oaks. But
fire probably also has something to do with it as well,
But the effects just don't stop at destruction of forests.

(42:11):
It also relates to what tree species might be present today.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
Yeah, it's it's so like a frequent and reliable disturbance event.
And would these would they did they migrate? Did passenger
pigeons migrate or they were they year round or what?

Speaker 2 (42:29):
Yeah, they did, but I don't think it was like
from South America all the way after the United States.
It might have been almost from like one broad city
area to another broad city area, although they weren't like
major cities. Just that's kind of where they would migrate too. Yeah,
not necessarily across large swaths of the continent. Although interestingly,

(42:50):
whenever they want extinct, a lot of people thought they
just went somewhere else. They just all went to a
different continent because they didn't see them anymore and they
didn't fat them that we actually killed them all.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
God, that's crazy.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
They just traveled. They're over in Europe right now, are
they migrated all?

Speaker 1 (43:05):
And it was just hunting. I mean, it was primarily
just over hunting.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
Why it was hunting, it was land use changes, but
it was a lot It was very much tied into
the technology of the time to get food to markets.
So the railroad industry had a lot to do with
it because before the railroad industry, basically what you hunted
how to be sold pretty relatively close to where you were,

(43:32):
and without any way to store like dead carcasses somewhat
long term, you had to sell it pretty quickly. But
with the new technology of refrigeration, refrigerated railroad cars and
the railroads, you could get these pigeons into different markets,
and so people just hunted them to oblivion and ship

(43:53):
them all across the United States. But not all these
birds were actually sold. A lot of them did just
rot because they weren't sold. And it wasn't just hunting
with guns. A lot of it with clubs. A lot
of it was nets as well, just trapping them with nets.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
So it's like it's market hunting. Basically, it's taken more
than you can actually eat so you can sell it.
And it's fucking crazy. I mean, it's such a yeah, man,
it's wild to think about. But the other thing that is,
I mean that that's so cool to think about. And
that's one thing I love about the videos you do
is it's just looking at just ecology as a whole,

(44:28):
just looking at the whole ecosystem as a whole, as
this this kind of living, breathing organism or machine. I
always say machines. Some people don't like it, but it's
your body's a machine, whatever you gets. Just it's just
the terminology some people don't like. But this looking at
this living machine where each species is a different moving

(44:49):
part and seeing how they all are tied together, and
you take one of these moving parts out and the
machine might still function, but you're gonna it's gonna it's
not gonna function as if efficiently, and it kind of
breaks down a little bit. And I mean, obviously seeing
what we've done in the last you know, a couple
of centuries, especially with this anthra percentric landscape, this anthrapericentric, ungrateful,

(45:14):
somewhat entitled ideology that our civilization tends to espouse sometimes
to make an understatement. You see what we've done, you know,
I mean, like I was telling you before we started recording.
I mean, a fucking guy I know in Vermont was
telling me we used to not get ticks up here,
and now we do. It's it's wild and seeing how

(45:36):
just how everything is so connected. I mean, I know
it's such a cliche to say, but everything's so connected,
and you start tinkering with one thing and it has
ripple effects that affect ten other things, some of which
might directly and immediately affect us. You know. The thing
I wanted to talk to talk about before too, was

(45:57):
when we were on a subject to Parkinson's There was
another video you did about every about which and this
is this was tragic because I fucking love papas, but
how papause might be linked to certain neurow degenerative disorders
too because of chemicals in the whole family and a nacy.

(46:19):
And there was another thing I remember reading about a
few months ago. But uh, and my friend Damon Tyer
is always mentioning that too. He's like, yeah, be careful,
just you know, eat it and moderation. What what's going
on there? I mean, research kind of pointed to it,
but again, nothing's a definite or what.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Yeah. So, I mean I did a video I think
it's called Our Our Popause Neurotoxic, and I did it
because I just wanted to look into the question very objectively.
And I like popase. I mean, I live in an
area where papas grow. I like forging pa pause. I
eat pop pause pretty much every year if I do
find them, and it's been a good crop. And I

(47:02):
think somebody came up to me a couple of years
ago at an event and they asked me, what you know,
what are my top like three wild foods, and I
think number one, I think I said popa And she's like, really,
have you heard about you know, their neurotoxicity and like
you still feel comfortable eating them? And I said, yeah,
I mean I've heard that, but I didn't think it
was actually like a.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
Real thing happy to buzz kill you. She's like, hey,
did you hear it isle for you?

Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yeah? Well, I mean you hear things like sasafras you
really want to drink sasafras tea, don't you know it
has that carcinogen in it? And I just thought of
it as something like that and I'm just thinking, well,
I know that papas have been eating for a really
long time in North America, like a really long time,
And I thought, well, how could it be bad for
you then if it's been eating for a long time.

(47:50):
And so I just looked more into it, and then
I started seeing videos put up by people that say, like,
don't eat popas. Here's why, like never eat another papa again.
I thought, Okay, it seems like an extreme take. I
don't think that's necessarily true, but I'll look into it.
And I mean, it seems like the answer to this
is it depends are they neurotoxic? Well, it depends how

(48:10):
many are you eating? Are you eating a lot? Is
this like the main food you're eating all year round?
Are you putting it into every single food that you eat?
Are you preserving it? Are you baking it? Are you
cooking it? Like? How are you treating pop? Pause? Because
it seems like members of that family, So pop pop
belongs to a family called an an Ace, which is
mostly a tropical family, and it seems like there's some

(48:33):
epidemiological research linking in an ac consumption to neurodegenerative diseases,
not specifically or necessarily Parkinson's disease. They call it atypical parkinsonism,
and Parkinson's disease is a kind of parkinson ism, but
their neurodegenerative diseases. And what it seems to be the

(48:54):
case is that there are certain groups of people that
eat a lot of this stuff, not necessarily popause, but
soursop and cherimoia and custard apple. These are all members
of the Papa family, which is Annace, and there's an
elevated risk or incidence of atypical parkinsonism. And this was

(49:15):
discovered I think in the late nineties, and then researchers
started wondering, well, what could the mechanism be here, and
then they isolated a compound known as an nacine, named
after the family Annace, and they found that, oh, yeah,
it is neurotoxic in laboratory studies. So if we have
rats and we give them purified annacine, it shows neurotoxicity.

(49:35):
Even if we have human cultured cells and we doast
these cells with annacine, yeah, there's some neurotoxic effects there.
But it wasn't known whether or not Papa even had
this compound, or whether or not it was in any
kind of like physiologically relevant concentration. But then in the
early twenty tens, yeah, it was found that papa does
contain anna scene and some research even showed that the

(49:58):
levels in popa are so much higher than the levels
found in soursop and these other tropical fruits associated with
these degenerative conditions in certain groups of people. And so
people are worried about this, and they're wondering, well, is
this causing any kind of issues in me if I'm
eating it? And then a case study was published in

(50:19):
twenty twenty showing that a man who ate popas I
think for ten years and eventually died from a neurodegenerative
disease I think they called it super nuclear palsy. And
he didn't know why he was getting sick. His wife
didn't know, but the wife told the doctor, well, he's
been eating poppas for five years, and he continued eating

(50:40):
them for five more years until his death. And so
the paper is titled like super nuclear palsy and pop
pok consumption. So right there they're making the link and saying, yeah,
it might be this, but it might be something else.
In all these studies, I mean, if you look at
all these studies, though they're also saying genetics player role,
that's the side exposure could play. These fruits are heavily

(51:01):
sprayed with pesticides, especially in some of these areas where
these fruits grow, like in the French West Indies, and
there hasn't been any study looking at pop pak consumption
and human beings and making any kind of link to
neurodegenital diseases, so that doesn't exist at all. The thing
about poppas compared to these tropical fruits found elsewhere is

(51:23):
that poppas usually aren't available year round. And I say
usually because I mean if you're going to forge plopause,
you only have about a month to do it. Really,
they don't store well, they don't ship well, they don't
commercialize well. Soursop is available year round in some countries.
Charamoia is as well. In these areas where you're seeing

(51:44):
a lot of neurodegeneration within certain groups of people, people
are consuming herbal teas made of these products as well.
They're not just eating the fruits, and sometimes they're doing
it on a daily basis. I don't know many people
that are consuming pop on a daily basis. I don't
know anybody drinking keys made out of pop pause. But
because papas are becoming more popular, people are trying to

(52:07):
commercialize them more. They're trying to fit them into the
market today through all these value added products. They're trying
to figure out ways how can we extend the shelf life.
And I'm not convinced that's a really good idea. I'm
wondering if this is a fruit that just needs to
be respected, created as digital food when it's fresh season,

(52:30):
and maybe that will resolve any kind of issue associated
with NeuroD the generation. But I don't know because I've
never done research on this myself. I haven't talked to
these researchers. But there is a long history of consumption
of papa in the United States. I don't think too
many people can argue with that. We don't see in
cultures in North America that consume papas any strong link

(52:53):
to nerve the generative, to nerve degenerative diseases. So personally,
I think I ended the video by saying I'm gonna
still eat them. I just.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
Moderation. Yeah, yeah, said what a buzzkill though, damn still
you know, but a lot of those it's a it's
you know, those basil angiosperm families. They got some weird
phyto chemicals in them.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
You know.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
It's one of the magnoliads. It's a order Magnolia alies
and an ac and uh you know, yeah, there's I
guess it's not surprising because there there is some weird
there's some weird chemistry in that hole in all those
four orders Cannialales, pipeer Ales, magnolia Alies, and lore Alies,
the Bay Baytree order. But uh yeah, still what a

(53:37):
drag though, man, I think as long as yeah, don't
drink tea out of it, don't boof it, just once
in a while, eat it when it's you know, when
it's in season. Yeah, that was surprising to me though,
Uh to to learn about that anyway, Yeah, that was
That was a fucking great another great video I saw

(53:58):
of yours. I guess, I mean, I love talking about
all this stuff, but I'm curious too, just about your
personal story. How did you get into all this? How
do you start making videos? What's your background?

Speaker 2 (54:10):
Like? What?

Speaker 1 (54:11):
Yeah, I don't know, I guess did you just learn
for the video stuff you just learn as you go
or what were you, I guess, Yeah, just tell me
how you got into into making this and how learned
your land came to be.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Yeah, I mean that's a good question. Sometimes I don't
even know, because sometimes I wonder, you know, how much
influence did I have on this or how much am
I just being influenced, because sometimes I don't know how
much of control I have over my life. But that's
like an existential, existential thing I'm working through for growing up.
I mean, I wasn't raised like a wild chot or anything.

(54:47):
It's not like I forged a lot or I hunted
or fish or anything. I mean, the more that I
speak to people who know things about nature today, not
like I like to divide people into group, but you
have groups of people that were raised this way, like
their family. They were hunters, they were fishers, they spent
time in the woods, they flipped stones in the creeks,

(55:09):
and they look for salamanders that kind of thing. And
then there are people that just got into this as
an adult. And I'm definitely the latter. I was into sports,
I was into music, I was into playing in bands, academics,
all that stuff growing up. But I think in my
late teens early twenties. I got into nature because I
got into health and nutrition. I didn't feel very good

(55:30):
at the time, and I thought, rather than going to
the doctor, I'm going to try to figure it out
to the best of my ability. And fortunately I started
hanging out with people who knew a thing or two
about health, but they are also interested in forging. So
it's kind of foraging that got me into it, and
I was pretty much just interested in forging for the
health benefits of it. I was looking for medicinal plants

(55:51):
and mushrooms. But soon, you know, I hit that point
where I thought, well, I want to know everything, Like,
I don't care if it's that war medicinal, I just
want to know what it is. And it just became
so it became so fascinating to me, and over time
I realized that there was a limit to just identifying
certain organisms. And you know, I belonged to a lot

(56:11):
of nature clubs and there's a lot of fantastic nature
organizations out there. But two things I think that kind
of limited my education at the time was that a
lot of these organizations just focused on one group of organisms,
whether it's plants, birds, mushrooms, lichens, and that's all they

(56:33):
would talk about. And they just talked about the identification
of it. Maybe they said one or two things about
the ecology, but that was about it. And I thought, yeah,
but I want to know how all these things have connected.
And I don't just want to know about birds. I
don't just want to know about plants. I want to
know why is this plant growing here? And why is
it not growing over there? And does it have anything
to do with geology at all? Or the rocks or

(56:55):
why why are the mountains over in eastern Pennsylvania and
not in western Pennsylvania. Does that have anything to do
with ecology? And I soon realized that I needed to
learn ecology and I needed to learn geology as well,
and that's kind of where I am right now, studying
those things. But yeah, because I love.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
Just curiosity, man, Just fucking curiosity.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
That's so important. Yeah. I mean, it's it's asking questions
and it's being very curious. And I just feel blessed
that I'm curious about this in life, Like I'm not
that curious about cars or airplanes or like the economy.
I mean, those things are fine, and people are into them.
I think it's fantastic but for me, like what really

(57:36):
lights me up is like knowing why the rivers in
Pennsylvania changed course, or what's the fourth River all about
in Pittsburgh, Because in Pittsburgh there's this myth of the
fourth river even though we supposedly only have three around
the point, It's like, well, what's the fourth river and
what does that mean? Like why is that even an issue?

(57:57):
And a lot of it has to do with geology,
and that's why I just had to keep going deeper
and deeper and deeper. But the interesting thing is, you know,
I hang out with geologists and I go to some
geology conferences and they're just into geology. A lot of
them are like everyone, and it's like they don't talk
about ecology. They they just talk about geology and they

(58:18):
love it. And I really appreciate them for that to
them a little bit bounce back and forth between worlds
in order to try to piece it all together, because
that's what I'm interested in seeing, like the whole, not
the individual components. Like I want to see the whole.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
Yeah yeah, you like connecting as well. Yeah, man, you
like connecting the dots and you like you like look,
you like zooming out I always mention that zooming out,
like literally, just if you're looking at like a satellite
image of your backyard and you keep hitting the minus
button and you zoom, zoom zoom, you get further and
further out, and you can suddenly see the whole picture

(58:52):
and start connecting the dots and seeing how everything is connected,
how everything works. I wish more people did that, because
shaking out of that myopia, whether it's just you know,
looking at the human world or whether it's just looking
at this one thing, is so so critical and people
will people will write me and they'll be like, what
book should I get? What book? And I'll say this, yeah,

(59:14):
there's books out there. But really the most important thing
is going into with the right mindset and wondering why
does this do this? Why does like being able to
ask those questions and being curious, like having that hunger
for answers and for information, and being able to think
it's it's the way you think it's not. You don't
just pick up a book and oh, I'm going to

(59:35):
just absorb this by osmosis and and just just memorize it.
That's what American schooling teaches us to do. It's no
it's thinking like why does this do this? And what
effect would this have on this? And what's the cause
that this reason does this? And you know whatever it is.
Or it's like why does nitrogeny enzymes need a low
oxygen environment? What is you know, why is atmospheric nitrogen

(59:59):
inaccessible to plants? You know that kind of thing. Like
that's what I think is really remarkable. And that's what
I love about the videos you do too. They're fucking
all over the place. Man, they're so broad. It's like
such a but it's all shit, that's interesting, and it
all it's all related, you know, as hopes. So yeah,
it is. No, man, it's fucking great. You have a

(01:00:20):
fucking great thing going. It's but it's it's those asking questions,
that's what's so, that's what's so important. So that's that's
cause you've been trying to get into more geology or
you're in a great spot for it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):
Yeah, I mean I remember back in maybe twenty fifteen
to sixteen picking up a few geology books from the library,
like real old books, real old geology books. Even before
like the theory of play tectonics was like wisely accept it,
like we're all geology books, but about like Pittsburgh, and
I remember opening it up and not really understanding most

(01:00:57):
of it, like seeing all these huge words and concepts,
but seeing a couple pictures and like arrows pointing, and
realizing that I just opened something that is going to
have such a profound effect on I'm what I know
about the land or will help me learn something that
nothing else can help me learn. It was almost like

(01:01:18):
opening up sacred text that you're not allowed to read,
but like you get access to it. And I know
it sound so weird to say it, but it just
felt like I was holding something that could tell me
so much in piece all these things together, but it
would take me many, many years to kind of do
all that. And that's what geology books feel like to me.
It feels like if I have a geology book, even

(01:01:39):
if it's like so over my head because I didn't
attend like a geology program in school, it just feels like,
if I can eventually understand this, it's going to make
me feel so much better about what I know about
the land and ecology and everything else. It just feels
so important and it's I don't think it's a surprise
that we call rock like bedrock. You know, I really

(01:01:59):
think it's the bedrock of nature education to understand geology.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
Oh it is one hundred percent man, it's it's the
substrate that all of life, that all terrestrial life depends on.
I mean, and you know marine life as well, from
all the dissolved, weathered bits of rock that end up
in ocean waters. But that, you know, that's what That's
what the geologic timescale and and understanding of taxonomy, like

(01:02:25):
just the phylogenetic tree of life did for me. It
was like, this is the fucking roadmap to everything. This
explains everything. This is amazing. You know, we can prove
it with radiometric dating and DNA bar coding. So yeah,
that's that's fascinating stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
Man.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
When you get into Appalachia, like east of where you are,
it's just a fucking paradise for geology. But it's also
like a giant Rubik's cube, which is huge puzzle on
it is it's I wish I knew.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
Yeah, a lot of geologists say like, oh, you got
to go west to learn geology because like that's all
the exposures are, and they joke that we have geology here.
But it's buried by ten feet of biology. But to me,
that's amazing to have both, to have so much of
both as well. So I don't feel like I need
to go out west to just learn geology, like I

(01:03:16):
think you can do it anywhere. And honestly, that's that's
why I named the thing that I do learn your Land,
because it's about learning where you are, like your backyard,
your city, your town, your region. I love traveling as well,
and I love learning about those areas when I'm there
and before I get there, and a little after as well.
But wherever I am, I want to learn that. Wherever

(01:03:36):
I am, wherever, it's so important.

Speaker 1 (01:03:38):
It's so important. I mean you think about the number
of people that that's what bombs me out is and
people just take things for granted. And and I don't
mean like entitled to take them for granted. I mean
like they just it's just it is what it is.
It's and that's all I don't need. There's no reason
to think any deeper about the ground beneath my feet,
or the plants growing on the side of the road,

(01:03:59):
you know, next to the chain liing fence, or any
of that. There's no need it's just it is what
it is. It's just there. But when you start, i mean,
when you start looking closer, you realize there's a whole
fucking world. There's a whole universe right there underneath your nose.
And again, everything's connected. It all, everything's interacting. And so
it's you know, the plants. The plants are affected by

(01:04:20):
the geology, and then the pollinators and whether it's vertebrates
or insects are affected by the plants, and then you've
got the atmosphere. Everything's interacting. It's all tied together. There's
so much there. I mean, people always say, oh, it's
you know, I remember growing up, especially too in Chicago.
People are always like, oh, yeah, you know, it's the
nature's boring here. We've you know, it's it's you got

(01:04:42):
to go to like Central America or the tropics for
it to get interesting. I'm like, fuck, no, it's not.
It's amazing here. It's just where it's still intact, where
it hasn't been cleared, you know, the tall grass prairies,
the Devonian limestone all that. It's Chicago area that has
amazing ship right there. You know, it's it's just learning
about it being able to access it. That's why what

(01:05:03):
you do is so important. So yeah, man, it's it's
fucking great. Do you use that? Uh you use that
rock step at all? R O C K D.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
I only started a couple months ago actually, but I
don't use it that much. Do you use it?

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
I use it all the time. It's amazing. It's because
it's just like a geologic map. It's essentially a geologic
map for everything. Like I found. I was in New
Mexico and I found these coal deposits like nothing, you know,
nothing uh that high quality coal for human burning, but
it was you know, still lithified uh carbon. It was

(01:05:41):
with trace fossils in it and little you know, bits
of fossils he couldn't really decipher, and it was, Yeah,
it was amazing stuff. And I looked it up and
I found the age and some papers on it, like
it's got links to like papers written on that exposure.
It's yeah, it's it's fucking it's a really helpful app
at least if you want to learn learn about things.

(01:06:03):
It'll get into like what the lithology is, you know,
coal with some shale and then you know the age
is always really cool too. It's like, oh, this is
you know, early early to mid Cretaceous. Well, and then
you can think about, well, what the fuck was going on?
Then you know it's lots of conifer diversity, dinosaurs were
still around. It's yeah, it's it's cool. It's cool stuff.

(01:06:24):
I like it. But I think with you know that
geology being buried beneath ten feet of biology, you know,
you just got to go to the road cuts, and
there's a lot of road cuts between between where you
are and like, say New Jersey. I mean John McPhee
wrote that fucking book, one of the Open Afrigat which
one it was. I know it's an analyst in the
former world, but you know he's like it's him standing

(01:06:46):
at a road cut in New Jersey looking at like
four hundred million year old rock. It's fucking out. You've
read John McPhee.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
Huh, Yeah, I have. I have read all the books
in that series, and interestingly, my brother just gave me
one of them the other day. I read. I read
that one, the New Jersey one in New York. I
think I forget the title that one as well.

Speaker 1 (01:07:08):
Yeah, I haven't. I've read bits and pieces. I can't
sit through the whole thing. I just my my fucking
eighty ds too too bad. But but yeah, it's it's
man that dude has written some very inspiring, wonderful bits
about geology. You did one in California and then Basin
and range. But but anyway, you got time still and

(01:07:31):
we got what's your time on me here? When you
got to dip out?

Speaker 2 (01:07:35):
No, I got time?

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
Okay, cool? All right?

Speaker 2 (01:07:36):
Cool? I mean the interesting thing about geology also, it's,
even though it can be very difficult to learn because
of all the like terminology used, it's so accessible because
it's still like something you can do with your life
as a major in school and as a career that
the culture actually supports this time, meaning it's very difficult

(01:07:57):
to getting to botany. It's difficult to be like am
I cologists and make a lot of money doing it,
but as a geologist, it's like there's actually money in it.
So there's actually a lot of resources available, like a
lot of free PDFs online. There's a lot of books written,
much more than there are books written on plants and
especially mushrooms today. And it's because I think of just

(01:08:19):
all the money tied up in geology with coal, with oil,
with natural gas. I mean, nowadays, it's like not many
people are making a lot of money on plants. They're
certainly not making too much money on mushrooms unless you're
getting into psychedelics. But with geology, it's like it's still
a career path. And because of that, there's so many
materials out there that are easily accessible and free. Like

(01:08:39):
if you just want to learn the geology of your area,
do you just type in your city or your region
like PDF in a in a search bar, you'll come
across all this information and all these maps and detailed information.

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
Yeah, that's true, that's totally true.

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
People ask me, like, what's the good book for geology.
I'm always like, uh, John McFee. And then you know,
if you can get into it and then just get
a fucking geology textbook and don't read it start to finish,
just pick it up wherever and start looking at stuff.
And but again you got to ask questions. You know,
you got to be like looking at the text, you
don't just take it for its word that it's basalt.
Go to the internet and look up like pictures of basalt,

(01:09:16):
how does it form? Whatever? But you know, learning the
three major rock types and then you know the two
two sub designations of igneous rock and all that ship
is just you know, like basic play techtonic, subduction zones,
all that ship it's it's you know, That's That's where
I always tell people to to start. What did you
What did you major in in school? What was your

(01:09:37):
main focus?

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
Well, I started out as a music major, classical piano,
uh jad, guitar, piano. Yeah, well I'm used to a lot.
I don't. I haven't played in many years.

Speaker 1 (01:09:51):
Yeah, but that ship doesn't. That ship doesn't leave you.
Fuck that. I would love to. I would love to
fucking be able to play a piano.

Speaker 2 (01:09:56):
I'm just so piano. Piano is awesome and there's death
only a connection between piano and nature. And I only
made this connection a couple of years ago. But I
encourage people to pick up an instrument and study music.
It's fantastic. And I'm so glad that my dad basically
made all of his sons, including me, study music and

(01:10:16):
push us into the musical field, like to the point
where we went to college for music and you know,
try to make a career out of it. I stopped
that and then I went back to school for Nutrition
at the University of Pittsburgh. And that benefited me because
it allowed me to have access to all these research papers,
and it taught me how to read research objectively as
well and actually get through all the different parts of

(01:10:38):
it and not just read like the headline or the conclusion.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
Yeah, what what do you mean by sanna read research?
Hold that thought really quick? I want to ask to
read research because I think that's important for people to hear.
What do you mean, like to sort through stuff and
not just take it, well, this is the results and
this is the way it is, but actually think about
it and kind of quantify for yourself what's true. What
might be bullshit, not bullshit, but maybe not the best

(01:11:03):
conclusion to arrive at. Is that what you're talking about?
Or what do you mean?

Speaker 2 (01:11:07):
Yeah? Exactly, just that I mean knowing what you're getting into.
Because when you read like a well published scientific article,
it doesn't read like a book, it doesn't read like
an article in a magazine. I mean, there's a strict
formula from how people write papers, right, and sometimes people
just skip over a lot of it. They'll read the

(01:11:27):
abstract or they'll read the conclusion, and I can't say
I've never done such a thing because sometimes in the middle,
you know, it's very dry or very detailed and abstract
for me to understand. But like when you want to
present something like popause are neurotoxic because certain cultures around
the world have neudegenitive diseases. But if you just read

(01:11:48):
the abstract or conclusion, you'll miss what they say there's
probably a genetic component. Yeah, you'll miss where it says, well,
they spray a lot of pesticides on these fruits in
those areas. You might miss that while these people are
drinking lots of teas from these products as well, and
those might be left out of the two book and
parts of the article. So just being familiar with the

(01:12:09):
layout of an article and how to read it in
a search for them as well. Yeah, just critical kind
of what like college toppy.

Speaker 1 (01:12:17):
Yeah, man, that's I think. I started reading papers. I
was working for the railroad and I just couldn't find
enough information on the plants I was interested in, and
it would be like bullshit websites or you know, Wikipedia
would only go so far. And so then I started,
you know, coming across scientific papers, and then then I
learned about sy Hub and that changed everything. It was
like now you could just download them for free. And

(01:12:39):
then I got to the point where like that was
primarily what I was reading was you know, research papers.
So anybody that's my hope, is it like for especially
like people that are into what I do or whatever,
just you know, have no connection to academia, aren't interested
in it, maybe didn't even go to college, just start,
but they're interested in plants and ecology. They start you know,

(01:12:59):
stealing papers on SI hub and reading research papers and whatever.
I think it's really it's really fucking, you know, helpful
in the end. That's just getting into science. And I
think especially the more that our society defunds science, the
more important it is for just lay people to start
getting more into it and learning how to do it

(01:13:20):
and taking the information. You know. Yeah, absolutely sorry, Okay,
if you can remember your thought that you were making
the connection to piano, go back to that. If not,
I apologize.

Speaker 2 (01:13:32):
Yeah. So when I was growing up, I played piano
a lot, and I didn't like it, but I played it.
And I also played other instruments like trumpet and uphonium
and guitar and bass guitar and drums and I could
kind of pick up his instruments pretty quickly, and I
didn't know why, but I just could. And when I

(01:13:52):
got older, I remember older people than me, like professional musicians, saying,
you know what, the hardest instrument to learn is piano.
Really but that makes me feel good because I mean,
I wasn't the best at piano, but I wasn't bad either,
and I guess I was pretty proficient at it. But
what I realized was that it helped me learn all

(01:14:13):
those other instruments pretty quickly. And you can't really say
the same thing all the time for everybody. For something
like the flute, Like if you pick up the flute
and you start on flute, will every other instrument comes
easy to you? Maybe, but probably not as quickly as
if you would had started on piano. There's just something
about piano. It's reading two lines of music at the

(01:14:34):
same time, using both of your hands, using your feet.
You're using a lot of parts of your body, including
your brain when you're playing the piano. So what does
it have to do with nature? Well, when I started
learning plants and mushrooms and learning ecology, and this is
before I actually really appreciated geology, I didn't realize how
important tree identification actually was and learning all the things

(01:14:58):
I can learn about trees, and I realizes that trees
actually made me a better ecologist. It made me a
better plant hunter, it made me a better mushroom hunter,
and it made me see so much about the lay
of the land in ecology, more so than if I
would just head learned insects or just head learned ferns,
or just had learned grasses. I mean, these are all

(01:15:19):
important things, for sure, and I think it's very important
for people to get into the all different components of
nature and see how they're related. But when I started
really paying attention to trees, especially where I live, because
it's a very treed landscape. I mean, if you're living
in an area it was not a lot of trees,
maybe the analogy doesn't apply. But being able to see, Okay,
there's a lot of basswood here, and there's hackberry as well. Well,

(01:15:43):
I'll bet there's limestone in the soil. And because there's
limestone in the soil, I'm probably going to see some
golden seal. I might see some Virginia penny wart, I
might see a lot of calcareous species. I might see
walking fern and so the fertility actually might be higher
in this air. And just knowing that thing, Oh, because
of that, I might find moral mushrooms here because morel

(01:16:05):
mushrooms tend to like lime in your area. Damn Compared
to if I would just learn how to identify moral
mushrooms and just focus on moral mushrooms and just look
for moral mushrooms without ever asking the question why are
they even growing here? And whenever you hunt mushrooms, a
lot of people will say yeah, but then you learn
tree identification, and that's true. But I wouldn't just stop

(01:16:25):
at those two connections, because just learning the trees as well,
and learning a bit about them their ecology, and then
learning how that's tied to geology, it really just opens
up your whole world. It just makes you better naturalist.
And the thing about trees is that they're there all
year round, unlike a mushroom, unlike an in rebaceous plant,
and they're big, they're tall in many cases, so you

(01:16:46):
could just see them all year round. I mean, you
could be driving on the highway, and especially if you
pay attention to phenology, like when things change or when
things appear like the timing of things. And you see
like a hillside turning red be in October, and you
know it's maybe a ridge and you might say, oh,
that's all scarlet oak over there, and then what does

(01:17:06):
that tell you? Well, maybe it's a dryer area. Maybe
there's probably black oak in there as well. Maybe I'll
find an American chest and that I'm not sure. But
you start to make all these connections because you know
how to identify trees, and you paid attention a little
bit to ecology as well, So how piano kind of
makes you a better musician overall. And it's kind of
like that one thing that if you if you learn,

(01:17:27):
it'll really help you and everything else. I think trees
are that way as well, if you live in an
area where forests occur.

Speaker 1 (01:17:33):
Yeah. Yeah, it's the mental exercise to play an instrument,
especially piano. Like the sheet music thing. I used to
know how to read it twenty fucking years ago, it's
I don't anymore. I've I started playing drums and that
was like my that was easy, just bang on shit
and you know, keep it in time. But but the

(01:17:56):
piano thing is, I mean, it's it's great fucking mental
exercise it's it sounds really nice, it's very pleasant, it's calm.
Other people will enjoy it if they can hear it. Yeah,
I want it. I definitely would love to get back
into that. But that's a really cool take on it.
On its connection again, it's just having a it's being versatile,
and it's having knowing, knowing many topics, many aspects of

(01:18:19):
the subject matter to look at, and taking a broader,
zoomed out perspective, so that I mean, you're basically you know,
you're basically a great ecologist. How did you get into
ecology from from foraging? From getting from just initially going
out there and foraging was never something I was really into.
I mean I was into it a little bit at first,

(01:18:40):
and the mushrooms and stuff, but but I guess for me,
it was just being able to, you know, get seeds,
study something, gets seeds, and then grow the shit out
of that and make more of it, plant it around whatever.
But you know a lot of my friends have my
friend Josh and Alabama and other people I follow are into, uh,

(01:19:01):
really into foraging. That was like their gay way to everything.
It gets a lot of people into this stuff, which
I think it's great for how did that lead you
to ecology?

Speaker 2 (01:19:11):
I think it's because I just wanted to know why.
Like the question was always why, not necessarily what, but why.
I mean with identification, it's a lot of what what
is this? Or how? Like how do I process this?
And I don't honestly, I don't even know why. So
like my question in life right now is well, why
am I even into this at all? But what I realized,

(01:19:32):
you know I do. I do ecology outings now, So
I take people out and we spend maybe five or
six hours together as a group, and we talk about
these things. We go around, we learn about connections, we
point things out, we study geology. But I think and
I only started doing these again this year after taking
a couple of years off. But when I started planning

(01:19:52):
for these, I started asking myself, well, what's the point
of this, Like why am I even doing this? What
do I want people to actually learn? Because myself included
like facts don't always stick, like dates of things or
exact numbers or even sometimes the taxonomy of things, like
sometimes I need to refresh my memory.

Speaker 1 (01:20:11):
I do it all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:20:12):
Yeah, yeah, it makes me feel good, But I think
that I always say you know, a successful day for
me would be whenever I lead these events is if
all the participants come away feeling like they actually know
the place better than they knew before coming there, even
if they had been there a hundred times before, and

(01:20:32):
that they feel more connected to it. And I know
it sounds like kind of woo woof.

Speaker 1 (01:20:40):
That's the connection. That's what fills the fucking void in
the soul.

Speaker 2 (01:20:44):
That is. And you know what, we so many naturalists,
including myself, it's like we're so good at categorizing things
and saying this belongs to this genus or this belongs
to this family or this subfamily, and that's what this
thing does. This is its niche. But it's like, yeah,
but what about you as a human, Like where do
you belong? Like do you belong as well to nature?

(01:21:05):
Are you nature? Do you belong to a place or
is everything else outside of you and separate and you're
just the observer, paying attention and learning all of it.
And so when I say connect to a place, I
actually mean, yeah, you are connected to this place as well,
this forest when you're here, Yeah, because you're here physically,
you're paying attention to it, you're touching things. You're smelling things,

(01:21:25):
you're breathing things, you're tasting things, and because you're here,
you are connected as well. And I honestly think one
of the most severe existential crises of our time that's
not often talked about, is that humans don't feel like
they actually belong to a place at the name of
a city or like an alma mater. Absolutely, like I've

(01:21:48):
belonged a college brand. It's like they belong to land.

Speaker 1 (01:21:51):
They belong to a brand or a sports team. Oh,
I like to go to Chick fil A. That's my restaurant.
You know what, I don't even fuck know anything about sports,
but I you know, I'm a fan of this team.
Blah blah blah. We're gonna kick your kick, you know.
But the fucking and that works. That gives people a
little bit of sense of existential fulfillment. But I think

(01:22:11):
I've watched this happen in so many people too. Is
when they when they you know, if they're just they
planted a native plant garden, killed their law and they
got the chance to see a new cool bird come by,
or if they're going out, they went on a hike
and they learned a little bit and it actually stuck
like they got it. You could tell they got a
dopamine release when they learned it. You can see the
excitement in their eyes that that shit affects people. That

(01:22:33):
really changes people, because it does. It's we fucking evolved
on on on earth. We evolved on land. We evolved
having these connections to plants and mushrooms and other living things.
And that's kind of one of the great crimes of
modern civilization. It doesn't need to be like this, but
this is the way it's turned out, is that people
have been disconnected from that. They've lost that, and you

(01:22:57):
can clearly see it and the biological and ecological collapse
that's happening around us. It's people stopped caringly and they
got this disconnected from the land. And so it's that's
why it's so imperative to bring people back to it.
And that's what I think it does for people. It's
you know, it's yeah, what's the point of it is

(01:23:17):
that it fills the void and the soul, and it
really does, and it gives people a sense of belonging
and like, holy shit, a timeline to place themselves on
geologic timescale, how to think, you know, just knowing recent events.
By recent, I mean the last few million years, and
just spatially too, like, oh, this is the landscape I

(01:23:39):
live on, This is the climate that goes with the landscape,
This is the geology that goes with the landscape. These
are the pollinators that go with the landscape, and the
plants that go with the landscape, and et cetera. Man,
it's really it's really good stuff. It's it's so fucking important.
That's cool. You've been doing those so you're like leading forays.
Can people learn about that on the website or what?

Speaker 2 (01:24:00):
Yeah, they're posted on the website learnoland dot com. I
do a couple of year, or at least I started
doing it a couple of year again, But yeah, I
mean that's the point of it. I mean, I do
advertise we're going to learn tree identification, mushroom identification, plant identification.
But there's also ecology, there's also geology. And honestly, it
is my way of helping people connect to a particular place.

(01:24:23):
And I like using that wordplace because honestly, I think
I think the word nature doesn't mean a lot when
you really think about it to people, because it's too big,
it's too broad, too abstract. I I mean I use
the term all the time. I do because a lot
of people kind of understand what when you say nature,
people picture in their minds, Okay, that's what nature is. Interestingly,

(01:24:45):
it's always outside of people. It's never them, which goes
to show that people actually don't feel like they belong
to nature, because if you did, you wouldn't use phrases
like I want to go into nature. I like to
study nature. It's like, well, then study yourself, right, because
aren't you nature? Orways say things like things humans do
aren't natural, It's like, yeah, but were they ever natural?

(01:25:06):
I mean, when let's say the charoite set fire to
the southeastern forest, is that natural or was that not natural?
And if humans do it today, is that natural? Or
is that not natural? And I don't have a good
answer for it. I don't know anybody who really does.
I mean, it just depends on your worldview and what
you believe in what you know. But whenever we say place,
it's much more tangible. There's limits around it, and I

(01:25:30):
think humans thrive with limits. And it sounds so contrary
to what we're told today to be unlimited and be
global and worldly and like think far and wide and
all this stuff. It's like yeah, but for a long time,
it's like we lived in smaller groups. We had kind
of boundaries. I know we were nomadic. I know we

(01:25:50):
migrated as well, but it was much smaller, much more intact.
And I think when you want somebody to connect to nature,
a good place to start is just pick a place
and help them learn that place and connect to that
particular place, because I think humans are place based creatures.
I think we thrive when we feel like we belong
to a place. It's much easier to take care of

(01:26:11):
a place than to take care of nature.

Speaker 1 (01:26:13):
That word natural drives me fucking nutsy. It doesn't mean anything.
I mean they put it on like you know that
we're seeing natural skippy peanut butter, natural scent, you know,
natural scent, and it's like filled with chemicals you know,
produced in a lab. Yeah, it doesn't, you know, it
doesn't it's natural. What what people with this is natural
for this to have. It doesn't mean anything, you know,

(01:26:36):
whereas if you use the word yeah the living world
or involved in this place, or or you know that
there's actually a connection there, it's more it's articulate. Yeah,
but I think that's what Yeah, that's what I try
to do with the killer lawn stuff is because I mean,
I fucking always hated lawns. But you know, once I

(01:26:57):
got into botany and learning native plants, that's when I
really was like, holy shit, this is amazing. Like I've
observed so many different life forms in my front yard
because I planted all the native plants that evolved here
in that those life forms evolved with. And I'm learning
so much just by encountering it because it's all coming
to my yard, because my yard's an oasis and a

(01:27:19):
sea of shitty turf grass and pavement. Yeah. Man, it's
it's fucking great. I can't believe we didn't talk about
American chestnuts yet, Like they were mentioned a little bit,
but this you've done a lot of videos on American chestnuts,
and you know, they were one of the I think

(01:27:40):
what it was, one out of every four trees it's
commonly said, was an American chestnut out east, I mean,
they were fucking everywhere and you could still see stump
sprouts everywhere. I just saw some in Northwest Georgia in April.
Remember seeing them in Pennsylvania, just passing through driving to
New York. Once I got off the interstate to piss
and there was like a little chestnuts sprout. You know,

(01:28:00):
as everyone knows, they were lost or became functionally extinct
because of the introduced blight that had evolved with their
close relative, the Chinese chests.

Speaker 2 (01:28:13):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:28:13):
Two species are estimated to have diverged like nine to
twelve million years ago, and Chinese chestnuts resistant to the blight,
Americans not. But with this, I mean, you did a
video on you know, the how the size was over exaggerated,
which I pretty much wholly agree with. Hold on one second, okay, anyway, sorry,

(01:28:36):
but that dogs were barking at the mailman. So anyway, okay,
so back to but you know you've done quite a
few videos on American chestnuts. What's the status with American
chestnuts where you are right now? I mean, I guess
it's the same and much of the range you just
see stump sprouts. Are there any large ones that you encounter?

(01:28:58):
And yeah, what do you have to say about that?
You know, the current status of the species out there
and whether you're hoping or what you think of possibilities
for reintroduction.

Speaker 2 (01:29:10):
Yeah, so American chestnut. I really like finding the tree,
and I think it probably comes from the fact that,
you know, I started forging mushrooms, like getting into nature
and like finding things that might not be there. And
with trees, it's like, well, trees are usually always there,
you kind of know where they are. But finding an
American chestnut is almost like finding a morele mushroom for me,

(01:29:31):
because when I explore new areas, I'm not quite sure
if I ever see it. Sometimes I'm not looking for it,
but then it appears, and you know, sometimes you find
a decent sized one, and I say decent. It's all
relatively speaking, because I don't think in eastern North America
you'll ever find a mature one today. But I think
elsewhere where it's been planted where the blight isn't found,

(01:29:52):
then you can find some bigger American chestnuts. It's certainly
not incredibly common where I live in western Pennsylvania to
other species, but I know many spots where I can
reliably find them. They're always on the smaller side. Although
up in northwestern Pennsylvania there's an area where there's just

(01:30:13):
hundreds of living American chestnuts, and I didn't measure. The
biggest one I found, but it's not a small tree.
It was of living ones. Yeah, and some of them
are producing fruits. And I don't think too many people
are aware that they're up there, other than foresters and

(01:30:35):
people who manage this area, because there's a campground around
there as well, and I don't think people understand that
when they're camping they're literally under living American chestnut trees.
And they're not saplings either, but they're not massive trees.
I mean, I'm not trying to tell you that these
are like full grown American chestnuts or even considered mature,
but for decent sizes, and I've shown some of them

(01:30:57):
in some of the videos that I've done, so I
am hopeful that given enough time, American chestnut will be okay.
And it's kind of like the thing that I said
with the ticks and fire and well, what can we
do today for a landscape? And there's a lot that
we can do, but I don't think I would be
under the impression that I can do everything today and

(01:31:18):
see the results next year or even in my lifetime.
It's gonna be something that I think over generations, you'll
eventually see the results. Same thing with American chestnut. I'm
not even sure. There's a lot of things that we
can do other than just protect areas where American chestnut
might be growing. Don't log these areas, and then over time,

(01:31:39):
maybe resistance will be a thing with some of the
younger trees because some resistance mature trees are there, they're available.

Speaker 1 (01:31:48):
There is some resistance. Yeah, I'm looking at this video
now finding dozens of American chestnut trees and yeah, that's
a fucking I mean that thing is that's a foot
diameter of breast height. Probably that's a large tree. And
I didn't see this one. You gotta watch this video now,
not now, but you know, when we're when we're through
with the podcast, maybe later today with my kid. That's

(01:32:09):
the nice thing about your videos too, is I can
watch them with my kid. Like my videos. People always
write me like, I love your videos, but I kid
watch them because you curse too much, And I was like,
you know what they're not. They're not insults. Well sometimes
they are, but anyway, you know, I need, I need.
I've thought about maybe doing a kid friendly channel at
some point, which sounds hilarious for me, but and not

(01:32:29):
even bleeping words out, just not using them. You know,
I've I've learned since I retired from the railroad to
not curse anyway. But this is I mean, this is
fucking wild. What's what is going on? Why do they
not have the blight like these these? And I haven't
watched the video yet, but feel free to spoil it
for me. Why do they not have the blight? You
any idea, any guesses what's going on here?

Speaker 2 (01:32:53):
Yeah, I'm not sure. It's a remote it's a rather
remote area, meaning it's not a lot of developments that area,
not a lot of infrastructure. The area was logged for sure.
I mean, I'm not filming in an old growth area.
I'm not entirely sure. I mean, it's kind of at

(01:33:13):
a limit of its range. It's not the extreme limit
of the range, and usually you see differences at extremes
of ranges, and so maybe this is just an example
of that where you still find some available but the
blight is there. I mean, I said I found dozens
of American chestnuts, and I did, and there's also dozens
that have the blight in that particular forest as well.

(01:33:33):
So maybe it's only a matter of time before some
of the bigger ones to come to it. I wouldn't
be surprised if that happens, But just the fact that
it's still holding on after a century of decimation, I
think that's good news. I mean, it's certainly not as
common as it used to be, and it's not reaching
the sizes that it did. But I don't know if
you're familiar with what happened to eastern hemlock thousands of

(01:33:56):
years ago. I mean, it seems like eastern hemlock populations
almost collapsed completely. When ecologists study the pollen record, they
see that eastern hemlock and they make the deduction that
eastern hemlock was nearly wiped off the entire North American continent,
just an extreme drop in the pallen record of eastern hemlock.

(01:34:17):
And this lasted for over two thousand years. Two thousand
years that eastern hemlock was nearly wiped out of the
North American continent, and then it rebounded, it came back.
And so if something could happen like that in the
past that we know of at least once, imagine how
many times that must have happened. And Eastern hemlock came
back as a really dominant significant tree. Now today it

(01:34:38):
has its threats of course, with hemlock wully indelged and
the logging industry in eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds. But
that's just one example of a tree that was almost
wiped out completely for nearly two thousand years it still came.

Speaker 1 (01:34:51):
Back and not know why.

Speaker 2 (01:34:53):
I don't imagine if that might happen with the chestment,
what was it?

Speaker 1 (01:34:56):
Were there any hypotheses why it took it?

Speaker 2 (01:34:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:35:00):
Beating back then?

Speaker 2 (01:35:02):
Yeah, you have to watch the video now, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 1 (01:35:04):
I'll tell you, Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:35:07):
So I mean, of course it's not proven, because I
don't it's very difficult to prove things that happened that
long ago. But they think it was drought, an extensive
period of drought. They looked at insect insect damage. That
was a plausible hypothesis, but they landed on drought a
significant warming drying period, and eastern hemlock doesn't really like that.

(01:35:29):
Eastern hemlock likes cooler moisture conditions. So the significant warming
drying period, which favored oak trees, which favored hickories, which
favored chestnuts, wasn't very good for eastern hemlock. But it's
not to say that this also didn't stress the trees
and lead to an insect outbreak. So maybe because it
was drought stressed, it was also prone to fungal infestation,

(01:35:53):
which is very difficult to prove today because fungi don't
preserve well.

Speaker 1 (01:35:56):
In the fossil record.

Speaker 2 (01:35:59):
Yeah, but yeah, they think it was drought as opposed
to some kind of pathog and outbreak.

Speaker 1 (01:36:05):
Yeah, but it could have been tied to it invasive.

Speaker 2 (01:36:08):
All is to say I'm hopeful about American justice.

Speaker 1 (01:36:11):
I always point out to people too, like on the
topic of invasion biology, and I don't know where you
stand on this, but you know, for me, invasion biology,
I see it. It's very real. It's all over the place,
and it's just a simple concept of you know, the
oceans having kept you know, not just plant species, but
entire ecosystems and continents isolated from each other, and so

(01:36:34):
you know, they you take one piece from one ecosystem
and continent and move it to another one because the
worst invasives always tend to be from other continents. It
makes sense, you know, and they're often very important species
where they're native, but they you know, run rampant when
they don't have any ecological checks and balances. But I
always point out to people, you know, almost every major

(01:36:57):
pathogen or insect past of North American trees, it's causing
massive declines right now in North American forests is from
another continent, you know, and recently arrived from human transport.
And that's that's like the chestnut is like the classic
case of that happening. But what's interesting is you can
see it seems like they're a lot more resilient out west,

(01:37:20):
or they're because you get into more arid places with
arid summers, which to you know, wester North America has,
they can grow, they can grow relatively blight free because
the blight just can't get established there and it needs
those you know, humid, humid, humid, warm temperatures. So and
I've seen some really large ones out west at least

(01:37:42):
that's what that's what I assume, because they seem to
just really take off out west. But then of course
you're limited by having to irrigate them because a lot
of places in West just don't get enough summer range,
so they've either got to be riparian or I remember
seeing like a giant one on the Klamath River in
northern California that was planted by some gold miner from

(01:38:02):
Virginia in like the eighteen fifties. Was fucking huge, very stout,
not that tall, but massive trunk. So I wish someone
would set up like an ex sit to, you know,
grove of them out west so they just to keep
producing seeds. But do you know for that one in
the grove that the video is on and again it's

(01:38:23):
called finding dozens of American chestnut trees on the Learn
Your Land YouTube? Does ACF know about that? Does American
Chestnut Federation? I assume they probably do?

Speaker 2 (01:38:34):
I think I think so. Yeah. I mean it's if
you look online that area. I mean, I think I
can give it. I won't give it away specifically, but
I think one of the ridges around is called Chestnut Ridge.
But there are a couple chestnut ridges in Pennsylvania. But anyway,
it is kind of public knowledge that that area exists

(01:38:56):
because some people lead walks to see the American chestnuts there.
So I think the American Chestnut Foundation doesn't know about it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:04):
Yeah, I wonder if that'd be good to test for
blight resistance genes. You know, it's it's wild. I did
two podcasts on that, one with someone from Sunni State,
University of New York who helped develop that blight resistant,
you know, genetically modified one where they took the gene
from wheat that produces an enzyme that breaks down oxalic acid.

(01:39:28):
And then I did another interview with someone from ACF
that said, oh, there were problems with that, you know,
they were that, you know, problems with what they were
doing and it's not as simple as just this one gene.
But it was really interesting. It really shed light on
the whole subject. It's fucking so tragic what happened out there,
because you know, it was just such a keystone species.

(01:39:50):
And yeah, the fucking fruits are delicious, the seeds are delicious.
Does just you get European and Chinese chestnuts like planted
in agriculture you're out there or like at homesteads in
your area.

Speaker 2 (01:40:05):
Yeah. And what's funny is that anytime I post something
about American chestnut, and usually I'm standing next to not
a massive tree, and I still call them decent sized
trees because for an American chestnut today, they are in
decent size. But I'll always I always, always, always get
emails or comments saying that was a bigger one in
my yard. We've got a massive one in my yard,

(01:40:26):
and I like, okay, let me see it. And it's
always a Chinese chestnut or European chestnut or another chestnut.
It's never the American chestnut. But yeah, we do have
them around here. I have seen them in woods like
wooded ecosystems, but for the most part, they're just planeted
in people's yards. They might be in cemeteries, they might

(01:40:47):
be in planet orchards. If they're in woods, it's because
somebody tried to establish them and then died or abandoned
the land, and then the forest grew up around it.
So you still see them, and they kind of take
on more of the tall, trunk straight look that an
American chestnut would. But one way to tell the difference
is that usually those non native chestnuts have more of

(01:41:07):
what's called an orchard look to them, where they kind
of grow more short and stout like an apple tree
mite compared to just super tall and straight like an
oak miight. But of course if it's growing out in
the open, that changes for American chestnut.

Speaker 1 (01:41:20):
Yeah, what about just leaf texture is there. The American
chestnuts are like a little bit more scabbard, like sandpapery
or what.

Speaker 2 (01:41:29):
So. American chestnuts very smooth and it's thin, thin leaf
and the teeth around the margins they kind of curve
upward towards the tip the apex of the leaf, whereas
the non native chestnuts are typically thicker, they're more leathery,
they're shinier, and they sometimes they have like a scurfy

(01:41:50):
feel to them as well. So that's one way, but
usually I'm looking at the ecosystem like it's one of
the best ways to do it. If you're seeing other
native trees around and you're not seeing a lot of disturbance,
and you're seeing a tree that's probably not massive and
it's not doesn't have that orchard look to it, but

(01:42:10):
it's probably American chestnut. It's usually when you get into
areas where you see planted crab apples or apple trees yea,
or non native oaks thrown in there like a saw
tooth oak, and then you see a chestnut there, it's like,
it's probably not American chestnut.

Speaker 1 (01:42:24):
Yeah, hints that it was a former homestead and that
it was probably planted and the forest just grew up.

Speaker 2 (01:42:29):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But they're fun to find. I mean
I encourage people to look for them. They're not that
hard to find either. It's as you have to know
what you're looking for.

Speaker 1 (01:42:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember, like the ones I saw
in Georgia. They were only three feet tall and they
probably working to get any bigger because it was they
were in the shade. It was there just wasn't enough
light up there. But you know, maybe some disturbance event
or a forest fire or you know, something opens up
the clearing bed storm I could see. You know, if

(01:43:01):
suddenly they're able to get light, they can grow to
whatever height they normally grow to when the blight can
finally hit on you know, because the blight is still
I mean it hits other trees, right, That's why it
persists in the environment, So even without chestnuts, it still
is there.

Speaker 2 (01:43:18):
Yes, what is that? That's my understanding.

Speaker 1 (01:43:21):
It's oaks probably or closely related trees it grows on.

Speaker 2 (01:43:24):
Yeah, I mean it's been a wall since I've looked
into that, but I have heard that oaks also can
like host that fungus. I don't think it's I could
be wrong, but I don't think it seriously affects the oaks.
But maybe I'm wrong in that. Yeah, but yeah, there
are the trees that can also host the fungus.

Speaker 1 (01:43:41):
Okay, you got how you got some time to talk
about the fungui really quick? Well not really quick. I
want to do like twenty minutes, but you know what
I mean, let me know if you got to go
and I can, I can we cut?

Speaker 2 (01:43:54):
I have exactly I have exactly twenty minutes. Twenty minutes.

Speaker 1 (01:43:57):
Good, okay, great, perfect, all right, So let's talk about
you know, medicinal mushrooms. That's like a great that's a
great way to get people interested in going outside. You know,
the foraging aspect, especially with mushrooms is fucking wonderful, especially
because mushrooms are you know, analogous to fruits of a plant.

(01:44:19):
They need to be picked there how they need to
be picked. The spores need to be dispersed. That's how
the fungus reproduces and disperses. What are some of the
what are like the top three medicinal mushrooms in eastern
North America and the ones that you're I guess and
you can list more than three, but the ones that
you're really stoked about that like you're always amped to

(01:44:40):
find that. You know the benefits, you know, you're a
firm believer in name like three or four.

Speaker 2 (01:44:50):
So my relationship with medicinal mushrooms has changed, I would say,
a lot, over the past fifteen years or so. And
I agree with what you said. It's a great way
to get into four and just to spend more time
in a wild place. And I think it's that way,
And I mean there's such like a there's so much
enthusiasm around mushrooms right now, and it's been that way

(01:45:11):
maybe for the past five six seven years, much more
so than when I got into it maybe fifteen years ago.
And I think part of the reason is more and
more people are understanding the benefits of spending time outside
and connecting to wild places and nature. But with hunting animals,
there's a lot of regulations involved, and you got to
learn how to use weapons like firearms. With foraging mushrooms

(01:45:36):
and plants, there's less regulations around it, and so people
literally can just go into the woods like today and
start looking for mushrooms and thinking that you can't do
that with deer. You can't even do that with fish
like you need licenses. These things are heavily regulated. Now.
I understand that mushrooms are regulated in certain areas and
in Pennsylvania and in many states they're regulated to a

(01:45:57):
degree when it comes to commercial foraging. But all this
to say, it's a very easy thing to get into
because the bar is pretty low, like the barrier to entry,
it's not that great, and there are clubs associated with
these that will help you find these organisms. All is
to say, I think this is one of the reasons
why mushrooms are so popular today. And I got into

(01:46:17):
the mushrooms specifically for the medicinal benefits, but over the
years less into making the tinctures and the teas, and
maybe I should get back into that. But I like
eating them. I like eating mushrooms. Not every day, not
even every month. I mean when they're available and I
find a lot, yeah, I mean I'll forge some and
eat them. And so the medicinal mushrooms that also are

(01:46:39):
edible mushrooms, those are the ones that excite me the
most because I think it's it requires less processing initially
as well, and it doesn't take as much time. I
mean with a tank, sure it could take many months
in order for you to see the results of that
so that you could take it, because you just have
to extract it for a significant length of time in
some cases not all of course, both eating. I mean

(01:47:01):
you can come home and just throw that thing in
a pan and cook it and eat it up, and
you'll probably get some of the benefits as well. But
I mean, I like hand of the woods at the
my taki mushroom, yeah, which is one that grows an
association with oak trees. Yeah, yeah, I mean it just
it tastes good, it's needy. You get a lot out
of it. Like if you find one of those, like,
that's a lot of food. If you find one morale mushroom,

(01:47:24):
that's not a lot of food. That's why I like
finding my taki mushroom. It's a good time to be
outside as well.

Speaker 1 (01:47:30):
They're huge. They're mostly in the faller. Can they be whenever?

Speaker 2 (01:47:35):
I would say the seasons typically, and these are the extremes,
but mid August through about mid November, that's like the
two ends of when I've ever found them, But usually
it's September through October. Yeah, and usually don't see it
any other time of the year. At least I've never
seen it any other time of the year. But there's
some good medicinal research on that one as well. There's

(01:47:56):
a compound and is defraction that's in there. It's a
polysach and it seems to have immunosupport of benefits, which
sounds so generic to say, but with immune to support,
you're talking about something that can regulate the immune system
in a dual directional way, either stimulating the immune system
or suppressing inflammation associated with an overactive immune system. Now,

(01:48:20):
how much of that compound do you get when you
eat it? I'm not exactly sure. If you make a
soup out of those mushrooms, maybe you're probably getting a
little more compared to than if you eat it. But
at this point in my life, I've been focusing a
lot more on just diet, not so much medicinal herbs
and medicinal mushrooms, because I've gotten to a place where

(01:48:44):
I feel pretty good with my lifestyle choices. Yea, and
I don't think, at least at this point in my life,
I really need to rely on a lot of that stuff.
What is to say that's where I'll always be? What's
my diet?

Speaker 1 (01:48:54):
Yeah, like by the way, like like just you know,
it's it's always good to hear like friends talk about
what they eat. Mostly it's well, there some friends I
don't want to know what they eat because they have
horrible fucking diets. But but yeah, I mean it's you know,
like like what do you try to limit? What do
you eat a lot of et cetera.

Speaker 2 (01:49:13):
So at this point in my life, it's a lot
of protein, some carbs as well, some fat. But you know,
I did the vegan thing. I did the vegetarian thing
for a while. I tried raw food for a while,
and I lost a lot of weight doing that stuff.
I probably damaged myself doing a lot of stuff as well.
But I found that eating good quality meats that's pretty

(01:49:35):
good for me. So I eat a lot of meat.
I eat a lot of eggs. Yeah, I mean stuff
like that. I do eat carbs as well. I try
not to eat a lot of junk food. I probably
don't eat a lot of it at all anyway. Yeah,
I drink a lot of water, I drink a lot
of tea. I have coffee every day. I move my

(01:49:56):
body every day. I get good quality sleep. But it's
a lot of like the most boring things that you
hear are actually the most beneficial, which is why like
a lot of health YouTube channels and social media, whenever
they counts like the new latest thing, it's like, yeah,
it's probably not as good as just like getting good sleep. Yeah, man,
drinking more water. It's limiting your intake of ultra processed food.

Speaker 1 (01:50:19):
It's in a consumer society. It's always like some big
new thing. You take this thing, it's going to improve everything,
but there's never any focus on just long term like
getting adequate exercise, not eating shit, getting good sleep, you know,
not eating a lot of processed sugary bullshit. There's an
Asian grocery store just to open up near my house,

(01:50:39):
which I'm fucking oh my god. It's you know, it's
like a I was in heaven. When I go to
they've got my talkie like you can get you can
get cultivated head of the woods. It's not it's nowhere
near as big or as tasty as the ones you
can you know when you find one. But uh, they've
got that there. They got like buckwheat noodles, all this
shit that I love. It's fucking great. But but yeah,

(01:51:01):
I think just like eating healthy and cooking and avoiding
a lot of you know, bullshit that's just produced for taste,
you know, like a lot of fast food is especially
it's good. But anyway, okay, So going back to mushrooms though,
what about ray sheet you get? What's the Gandoderma species
that you get out there? And do you you make

(01:51:21):
tea out of it? I mean, what's what's your whole
take on on its benefits and how do you how
do you how do you administer it?

Speaker 2 (01:51:30):
Yeah, so we have we have a couple of Ganoderma species.
I think probably the most popular medicinal one is the
one that grows almost exclusively with hemlocks, which is Ganoderma suge. Yeah,
this is probably the most popular one in this part
of the world. And I used to make a lot
of tinctures out of it, not really teas, because it's
incredibly bitter, and some people are like, just add honey,

(01:51:51):
it'll taste good, Like, yeah, I believe that. I'll just
stick with the tinctures. Some people eat it when it's
really young, like they'll just cut off the outer margins
and eat it and cook it up. I've never done that.
It's been actually probably a couple of years since I've
consumed that one, surprisingly, but there were many, many years
where I would forge it and consume it. These days,
I'm kind of cautious about it in some areas because

(01:52:15):
a lot of our forests are being treated for hamilag
wooly adelged and they're injecting a lot of insecticides into
the forest, and sometimes you don't know where they're doing it.
Sometimes you know exactly where they're doing it. But I
always wonder about people who forge these mushrooms and sell
them if they're disclosing where they're getting them from, and

(01:52:35):
if they should tell people, yeah, I got in this forest.
It's being treated, and I'm ensuring that it's not coming
from a tree that was treated, because not all these
trees live even if they are treated, and that insecticide
just doesn't get absorbed by one particular tree, even though
it's injected at the trunk of a tree. I mean,
it's in the soil, so it's in that immediate vicinity,

(01:52:57):
and I don't know. I mean, if it's strong enough
to kill awful lot of insects, it might do something
to my body. So I'm not interested in consuming that.

Speaker 1 (01:53:04):
In second one, ingesting it. Yeah, it's just a stemic.
I take it it's a systemic insecticide that they probably
some nicotine analog or something.

Speaker 2 (01:53:13):
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure, but that sounds good. It's
not to say that every forest is treated like that,
and I'm sure there are many forests that are clean,
but it's just something that I'm mindful of more today
than I was many years ago, because more of these
trees are being infected and more people are injecting those
insecticides into the tree, and people are forging these mushrooms.

Speaker 1 (01:53:34):
Do they grow? They only grow on hemlocks out there.
Are there any other conifer species that the Ganaderma species
hits or what.

Speaker 2 (01:53:43):
I've never seen Ganaderma suga on another conifer, but I've
seen it on America Beach, I've seen it on yellow birch,
and I think I heard it can grow on red
maple as well.

Speaker 1 (01:53:53):
Oh cool, I'm surprised there's nobody. I wonder if there
is anybody cultivating it, like just growing in mass, like
mushroom farm, the forest understore or something, but with natives,
with the native North American species, not the Asian one,
it'd probably be a good you know, they could ensure
it was organic and everything, they'd probably be a good
market for it. But I love I love racie, man,

(01:54:15):
it's fucking great. I would get them from like the yeah,
the Asian grocery store and make this fall tasting tea.
But it's you could tell it's got a lot of
good shit in there. I mean, the bad taste. This
is probably all the all the beneficial compounds. Whether it's
whether it's placebo or not. I'm fine with that. I
like making raciy tea. When you make tinctures, how do
you do it?

Speaker 2 (01:54:37):
Typically with vodka? I think it's an eighty proof that
I typically use, and yeah, I let it steep in
the alcohol for about minimum six weeks, sometimes longer, and
then I would do a dual extraction, which then you
take that material or you take fresh material. I think
it's controversial, like if there's still any medicinal compounds left

(01:55:00):
in that original material, but then soak that in water
for a couple hours, so you're making the hot water
extraction and then you combine the two and that's what
people typically call it dual extraction.

Speaker 1 (01:55:11):
Oh okay, So you do a six weeks in alcohol
and then and then how long in water?

Speaker 2 (01:55:18):
If you're using hot water, I don't think you need
a lot of time. So you can do that in
a couple hours, and you basically let that reduce in
concentration almost to where it's almost like a syrupy mix.
Because if you add too much water back into the
alcohol tincture, you dilute it too much, Yeah, and you'll
lose the preservative qualities of it. So you want to
get it down pretty low so that you don't dilute

(01:55:39):
your final.

Speaker 1 (01:55:40):
Product, and you keep it on like do you then
put it on like a low heat so that the
water evaporates to a certain concentration.

Speaker 2 (01:55:47):
Yeah, yeah exactly. Yeah, just a low simmer essentially, or
a little below, and just let that go for a
couple hours. But don't forget about it, because if you
forget about it, then you lose it.

Speaker 1 (01:55:56):
All, yeah, and then you have to start again. Yeah,
then you've just got this crusty, burnt paste. So but
I guess the thinking there is that the alcohol bonds
with certain compounds and then the water other things will
just come out in the water that may not have
bonded that the alcohol wasn't.

Speaker 2 (01:56:12):
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, And I mean there's a lot
of people selling the stuff today, and it's been a
while since I've actually looked into the market on the
stuff because people ask me, like, which products do I recommend?
And I don't know because I don't really pay attention
too much these days. There's so many people doing it,
and I'm sure there's a lot of great products. It's
just it's been a while since I've looked into it.

(01:56:35):
But I would just make sure the product you're getting
isn't being harvested from an area it's being treated with
any kind of pathticide or insecticide.

Speaker 1 (01:56:43):
They're always so expensive too. Man, it seems pretty it
seems pretty fun to just go down the wormhole of
trying to learn to do it yourself. What about lions
main do? How common is that in Pennsylvania in the
East coast? The herasium, Yeah, lines means a good one.

Speaker 2 (01:57:01):
I mean, that's another one that I like because not
only is it medicinal, but you can eat it so
it's edible as well, and it's a beautiful mushroom. I mean,
as far as how common it is, honestly, I don't
see it that often at all, so I rarely see
enough to make a tincture out of it. I think
I did it once because I think it tastes really good,
So in any cases, I would rather just eat it

(01:57:23):
than preserve it in a tincture. But yeah, there's a
lot of good research on that one, not research that
I've looked into in a while, so I can't really
quote too many studies on Lion's made right now, but
I mean for mental clarity, for cognitive benefits, that's typically
why people would look into lions made, and it does
seem pretty promising. I mean, there are studies on human beings,

(01:57:45):
like randomized controlled trials, so that's always something good to
look for when you're looking at the medicinal.

Speaker 1 (01:57:51):
Yeah, there's good data on that one's pretty legit. I
mean I taught like my friend Alan, you know Alan
arcke Fella, he was in You did a video with him.
He was. He's always like that, he goes back. If
I'll ask him one time about it, he's like, oh, yeah,
this is medicinal, and then like six months later I'll
ask him the same thing and he's like he says

(01:58:12):
something completely different. He's like it's a placebo blah blah, blah.
I'm like, okay, we fuck whatever. It's yes, that's what
I get for asking that my college just about you know,
medicinal mushrooms whatever. But but I yeah, I mean, I'm
I'm in't all that shit. I think it's pretty fucking Uh,
it's pretty interesting and I can definitely you know, I
had friends that had like a medicinal mushroom company. One

(01:58:33):
of them just gave me like twenty bags of racie
spawn and he kind of neglected and he's like, just
take it man, whatever instead. Yeah, anyway, but well, cool man,
I really appreciate your time. We did two We just
did two hours. You were very patient, and uh yeah,
it's he got a great fucking channel. And where can
people learn about it? You've got to learn your land
dot com and then of course to learn your land

(01:58:54):
YouTube channel and uh what else.

Speaker 2 (01:58:59):
Yeah, I mean that's pretty much. I mean, I'm on
Instagram and Facebook. That's about it. But learn your land
dot com. And I have an email list if people
want to stay in touch, and that's probably the best way.

Speaker 1 (01:59:08):
You got online courses email list. And then what about
the tours that you're doing or just like Foray's like
walks that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:59:16):
Yeah, I mean you could find that on the website.
I think all of them for the rest of the
year fully booked, unless I decided to schedule another one
in November. But at this point, I mean, you can
get on a wait list, or you could just keep
that in mind for next year because I'll probably leave
more next year, or you just reach out to me
and if you think you want to tend one of these,

(01:59:37):
and if enough people reach out, maybe I'll just host
more at the end of this year.

Speaker 1 (01:59:41):
Yeah, how long has learned your land? But you've been
around for what like five or seven years? How long? Exactly?

Speaker 2 (01:59:48):
This is actually the tenth year. Got wow, this is
the tenth year anniversary. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:59:53):
So extensive library. So there's an extensive library covering a
diversity of really interesting topics. Uh, so everybody go check
it out, please, Adam Hareton, thank you so much. And
if I ever, when next time I come through Pittsburgh,
I'm buying you a burrito. We're gonna go out.

Speaker 2 (02:00:09):
Yeah, okay, just make sure make sure there's a lot
of protein in it.

Speaker 1 (02:00:11):
Yeah, I promise, brother. All right, thank you, thank you
so much.

Speaker 2 (02:00:14):
Man.

Speaker 1 (02:00:14):
I love what you're doing.

Speaker 2 (02:00:16):
Yeah, thanks, it's great to thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:00:18):
Have a good one.

Speaker 2 (02:00:18):
Bye bye.

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